The Son of a Certain Woman (15 page)

What if Pops made my mother pregnant?
Pregnant
. I had never said the word out loud and had only rarely heard it said. To me the word called up an incongruously swollen belly attached to a normal-sized woman. Unconcealable. Undisguisable. More conspicuously there than anything on earth. I thought of my mother’s belly, my
mother
, her body spoiled, looking like that because of Pops. My mother would have a part-Pops baby. A child of Pops would be my half-brother or half-sister. Unless Pops and my mother got married, he’d get fired. Unless they lied and said the baby wasn’t his, Pops would be my father. Maybe Pops was too old to make her pregnant. I pictured all of us walking with the baby carriage along the sidewalk, people crowding round to see if the baby’s face and hands and feet looked like mine. If they did, everyone would know that my FSS was my mother’s fault, not Jim Joyce’s.
I
would know.

I was not to tell Medina. So Medina didn’t know.

I waited an hour after I heard Medina come into the house, then went out to the kitchen where they were playing cards.

“Jesus, Perse,” Medina said. “Your eyes look like two pissholes in the snow. Been crying?”

My mother smiled when Medina winked at her. That wink—Medina
knew
. Medina had always known.

I looked at my mother, whose face gave evidence that she’d been
crying too. I was about to object that she had lied to me, but she spoke first. “Yes, Percy, Medina knows. She’s more on your side than on mine. That’s because she’s not a whore like me.”

“I’m not really on your side, Perse,” Medina said. “Mothers have done worse to keep their boys in jelly beans.”

“I changed my mind and said she wasn’t a whore.”

“I think you only pardoned me for being one.”

Medina sniffed. “Your mother thinks she leads him on, but I think Pops-a-Doodle-do is blackmailing her. He’s not quite the dork we all like to think he is.”

“I hate him,” I said. I turned to my mother. “I’ll bring back the dime every day.”

“A dime a day won’t keep Pops away,” Medina said.

“I hate Pops.”

“Hamlet to my Gertrude.”

“Penny,” Medina sniffed. “You’re the only one here who knows what that means.”

“Pardon my education.”

Medina sniffed again.

“Did Jim Joyce go away because of Pops?” I asked.

Medina laughed and smacked the table with her hand so hard the big green ashtray jumped. “That’s a good one.”

“The two of them never met,” my mother said. “This is my fault. Talk about an Oedipus complex.”

Medina waved her hand. “I already told you, Pen, you’re hanging out with the wrong crowd for that kind of material.”

“Well then, I’ll have to find a new crowd, won’t I?”

“Like Pops? I bet Pops understands your every word. Is that how you two talk? After, I mean. I can see you lying side by side, Pops puffing on his pipe, you blowing smoke at the ceiling. I guess you don’t talk a lot about Jim Joyce—”

“That’s enough, Medina. Off to bed, Percy,” my mother said.

“I’ll be good,” Medina said. “Really, I will.”

“
Bed
for you, Perse.

“He could make you have a baby,” I shouted.

“No one can
make
me have a baby.”

“He’s right, though,” Medina said. “No matter how careful you are, you
could
get pregnant.”

“I won’t have a baby.”

“Is Pops too old?” I asked.

“I doubt it. Men are never too old.”

“They
think
they’re never too old,” Medina said.

“I really didn’t set out to use him. The very first time—well, I just asked him afterward for a top-up to meet the mortgage payment. I said I was looking for a loan, nothing else, but he insisted. He gave me the money. I thought that would be it—but it wasn’t. Neither of us wanted it to be. New habits are easy to acquire. It’s the kind of thing that would never work if you set out with a plan.”

“Pops MacDougal.” Medina shook her head in apparent disbelief.

“Don’t
you
start. He doesn’t just give me a little extra every month. We couldn’t afford nearly as nice a place without Pops. I’m not sure we could afford
any
place. Pops carries all three of us. Some of the money I give you comes from him.”

“I never
ask
for money.” Medina sounded hurt.

“Well, I’m sorry, sweetheart, but it’s true. He has full-time, better-paying work than you and me combined. We work part-time and we never know from week to week how many hours we’ll get. I’m not proud of what I’m doing, but I’m not ashamed of it either. It’s a fair arrangement as far as I’m concerned. I’m not just talking about ‘visiting hours.’ You may not have noticed, but Pops is head over heels for me. By boarding here and paying so much money, he gets to be around me almost all the time. That’s mostly what he’s paying for, the company of someone he loves.”

“But you don’t love him,” Medina said. It sounded almost like a question.

“I like him. And I don’t
tell
him that I love him. He knows exactly how things stand and he’s happy with it.”

“What will happen if he goes somewhere else to live?” I said.

“I don’t think he ever will.”

“When do you do it with Pops?” I asked.

My mother rolled her eyes and stabbed out her cigarette in the ashtray. “Never you mind, Perse. Never mind when or where. I told you, not often. Just often enough. Which is too often, believe me. But that’s all I’m telling you.”

Medina suddenly pushed back her chair and went over to the kitchen sink, her back to us, head hung down, shoulders shaking with what I thought was silent laughter. She turned and stood there with one arm across her belly, supporting the other arm. I saw that tears streamed down her cheeks.

“What’s wrong, Medina?” I couldn’t help feeling I had made her cry.

“Nothing, Perse.” She was staring through her tears at my mother. “Pops,” she said with as much disgust as if he was standing right in front of her. “Of all the people you have to—to take in off the street.”

“He bought the beer that’s in your glass,” my mother said.

“Fuck off,” Medina snapped. I’d never heard her say that to my mother. I looked at my mother in astonishment. Her lips were pressed tightly together as if she was suppressing the urge to reply in kind to Medina.

“It’s only a few times,” I offered. Medina burst out in bitter laughter.

“Perse,” my mother said, “this is not the kind of conversation you should be having with your mother and your aunt.”

“A few times. Really? Really, Perse?
That’s
what you think Pops settles for?” Medina cried. “Tell him how often ‘a few’ is, Pen.” She glared at my mother, who glared back without flinching.

“Enough to mollify him. And don’t you dare ask me what that means! Perse, this whore hunt is over.”

Medina put her hand over her mouth, but this time she
really
laughed. Imitating the deep-timbre monotone Pops had once used on the occasion of giving my mother a sweater for Christmas, she said, “What do you think of it, Paynelope? I wrapped it myself. I can bring it back if it’s not your size.”

My mother astonished me by letting loose a conspiratorial guffaw.

“I can bring it back if you don’t like the colour,” Medina continued, her voice becoming softer. “I can bring it back if it doesn’t suit your taste. I must say, Paynelope, you have the ripest-looking pair of tits I’ve ever seen.”

My mother threw back her head and laughed until her back teeth showed. I looked back and forth between them, wondering if the argument they were getting over was the first real one they’d ever had and if they’d think of me as the cause of it.

“Does he wear his safety glasses, Pen? Where does he put his pipe? Or should I say pipette. I’ll bet he says ‘Paynelope’ a lot. I must say, Paynelope, your vagana has never looked more becoming.”

“There’s that look again,” my mother said, tapping my forehead with her finger. “Do
not
look at me like that, Percy. Do not judge me, little sanctimony man. I told you, the whore hunt is over.”

I turned and ran to my room. I climbed into the upper bunk. I felt sorry for Pops and I wasn’t sure why—perhaps it was because Medina had laughed the way she had, at my mother but mostly at Pops.
That’s what you think Pops settles for?
I should have felt sorry for her, for her
having
to do such things. But I also—and this is what surprised me—felt envious of Pops, for whom she undid the belt of her bathrobe, as I now realized I’d long hoped she might somehow do by accident, or even on purpose, in front of
me
. My Black Mick mother letting Pops touch what Medina had called her ripe-looking tits, letting him slide his hands the long length of her legs and revel in the smoothness of her thighs. I looked at the Mass cards of Saint Drogo. I was only nine but I knew she’d
done it with him because that was all that stood between me and a place like Barter’s Hill, a belly grumbling with hunger, the finger-breaking “strops” of Gus McHugh, persecution at the hands of the rabble of the Seven Schools. But I knew that to do it with me was proscribed, forbidden, unthinkable. It had to be. Boys didn’t do it with their moms, not even boys like me with moms like mine. I knew I should have been disgusted by the idea—by the idea of her doing it with
anyone
. But I wasn’t, and I wondered why. I wasn’t at the very bottom of the list of those even hypothetically eligible for a piece of Penny pie—I wasn’t even on the list. I cared that I wasn’t. I hated it that I wasn’t. It seemed that my brain was as warped and stained as my body. Perhaps my FSS proceeded from, was the physical manifestation of, a festering, miscoloured, misshapen brain. Perhaps I was becoming Percy the First after all, the terminally ill, mute freak of freaks the doctors had mistaken me for.

I was glad Pops would be away for a while, knowing I would have been even less able than usual to suppress a blush or sit still or look at him, or answer anything he said to me without my voice breaking, or even without crying, which would have been impossible to explain though I would try to and thereby further arouse his suspicions.

Days later, I scrutinized Pops, convinced there must be something about him that I’d missed.
It’s not as if he ever makes the first move
. I couldn’t imagine her making that
first
first move, let alone imagine Pops’ reaction to it. She had known he would be agreeable if she made the first move. She would have had to cajole him through his surprise and nervousness and whatever moral qualms he had or felt obliged to pretend he had. It took more nerve, however, more gumption than I’d thought he had to
let
himself be led to bed by his luscious landlady—and to keep it secret from me for so long. I looked at Pops, sitting in the sunroom in his lab coat in his
window-facing chair. I supposed it had been no great feat for my mother to hide their arrangement from me, given how comically repelled by him she and Medina seemed to be. But still—maybe there was more to him than I’d realized, Pops with his scrubbing-brush moustache, his ubiquitous, ever-stained lab coat and his safety goggles that dangled from his neck, making him look like the official inspector of something, one who stuck stubbornly to an odd way of pronouncing certain words. Maybe Pops was not the sum of such parts but had a secret life, carried secretly within him lest it be mocked into non-existence the hope of being loved by my mother, the one woman—it might well be—whom he’d ever done
it
with. I wondered, with a measure of dread, if this secret hope might not be as doomed as my mother made it seem, if she would one day tire of the secrecy and marry Pops. Perhaps, when she decided to rent a room to a boarder, she already had in mind some such arrangement as the one she had with Pops. Perhaps her farsightedness had had to do with me, because she expected to have me on her hands forever—not that she would have thought of it that way—saw that I lacked the fortitude to prosper in spite of it. My mind was a swarm of conjecture and confusion. Anything, everything, nothing seemed possible now.

S
OME
noise had woken me. But it must have abruptly stopped since I heard nothing. I listened, thinking that, though the door and windows were closed and though a cement block that no rat could burrow through lay on the heating duct, there might be a Vat Rat in the room. Then I heard the sound again. It was definitely coming from outside the room, from the basement maybe.

We lived around the corner from a beer brewery, a smoking, steaming factory that, when the wind was easterly, sent our way the overwhelming, sickeningly sweet smell of barley malt. And the brewery—and therefore the neighbourhood—had what my mother called a “permanently temporary” problem, a perpetual “outbreak” of rats. She was quoting the brewery, which had been saying since it opened that it would “soon have a handle on the outbreak.” My mother predicted they would sooner have a handle on the outbreak of children in China.

The brewery had announced in an ad they took out each spring in the paper that the especially wet spring had softened and eroded the ground around the brewery, exposing pipes and valves, so more rats than usual were making their way in and out of the brewery, hops-and-barley-bloated rats, demented from chronic alcohol consumption, craving more and more of what one day might cause their very stomachs to explode. They were said to have made their way into some houses, gnawed through the very walls, through the paste and glue of Gyproc, while residents of the Mount stood guard around their children’s beds with axes and shovels upraised, or lay awake in
their
beds all night, listening for the grimly patient, never-pausing Vat Rats drunkenly incising through the walls.

“They like the beer.” Pops shrugged, as if he had in a few words explained something that confounded everyone else in the neighbourhood. My mother said that Pops believed if there was a logical explanation for something, its noteworthiness, dangerousness, even its very existence, was undone.

The attics, basements, crawlspaces of the Mount were set with the largest rat traps that could be found, bought or made. I took as gospel the rumours of rats so fast they stole cheese straight from the traps, rats so smart they knew how to trigger the traps without getting caught. There was a story of a rat so big and strong that it had scuttled backward into a hole in a wall while dragging a large trap that was clamped around its neck. Boys said the rats were bringing back the Black Plague. They pretended my face was evidence of this.