The Son of a Certain Woman (19 page)

“Mom says you’re supposed to walk home with me.” She was sullen-faced, shaking her head as she spoke as if she were repeating to a friend some instruction that even coming from her mother seemed ridiculous.

“Hello,” I said, “I’m Percy Joyce.” She didn’t reply. “And you’re Francine Dunne,” I declared before she could follow Abigail’s example and say she had mistaken me for Paul Newman. “It’s nice to meet you.” She looked about as though, unable to see me, she couldn’t account for the voice she could hear. I felt panicked. I didn’t know what to say next. I began my “give me myth or give me death” routine. I asked Francine if she had ever met the Archbishop. When she didn’t answer, I said my mother had known him since before he became a priest, back when he was one of the best clarinet players
in the country. I said he played a lot of other instruments and my mother had taken music lessons from him when she was six. I said that back then he had a show-business name, Chester Walker, so a lot of people didn’t know how he started out. I said he still played the clarinet but only when he was by himself, at night in his room in the Basilica. Sometimes, I said, if you walked past the Basilica after dark, you could hear the clarinet music coming through the highest windows. It wasn’t a sin for archbishops to play musical instruments, I said, but the Vatican discouraged it because it gave people the idea that archbishops would rather be musicians and have their own orchestras and admire men like Benny Goodman more than God. “I’m sure your mother knows the Archbishop pretty well,” I said. “I don’t think he would have called her if he didn’t know her.”

The driver of a car going by blew his horn and waved at us. Francine sighed and began to walk, fast. I asked her if she’d ever been strapped. She gripped her books tighter. I said I had never been strapped and never would be unless the Archbishop was replaced. I thought of my mother’s and Medina’s tits. I wondered if Francine’s tits were bigger than they seemed because they were squashed flat by her books. I told myself that, had she not been holding the books, I would have tried to hold her hand, but I knew I didn’t dare. I knew she’d pull it away before I even had time to see what it felt like. Her hands were not full of scrapes and cat scratches and chafed and chapped like those of other girls. They were pale, delicate-looking, small hands with thin, slender fingers.

“Nice boyfriend, Francine,” a small girl shouted. “But I think his pants should be on the upper half.”

Francine’s shoulders rose and fell with a sigh of exasperation.

“Shut up,” I shouted.

“Don’t
start
anything,” Francine said under her breath, her lips as tightly closed as any ventriloquist’s.

“Leave them alone, Gloria,” another older girl shouted. In the silence that followed, I realized that Francine’s mission was common knowledge, that the girls of Heart had been charged by someone, probably Sister Celestine, to let Francine do the bidding of His Grace without interference. I noticed, on the periphery of the clutch of girls from Heart, boys from St. Bon’s watching in silence, boys who at the sight of a girl tolerating my near presence, a girl, in fact,
talking
to me would normally have sent up a series of whoops and howls that would have brought the other students of the Mount running from all directions. Clearly, word of Francine’s mission had gone out among all the schools, word that, at the behest of His Grace, who would not look kindly on any form of defiance of his wishes, Francine and Percy Joyce would either be left alone or be joined by others who, guided by Francine’s example, would take a sincere interest in getting to know me.

“I’m going home,” Francine muttered. “You’re supposed to walk home with me.” Her face was blotched red and white with embarrassment, as was her throat, an archipelago of what might have been the remnants of a stain like mine. Her pale blue eyes blurred with tears. I saw her fighting against the strain of the sort of mass scrutiny I had long ago become accustomed to. I fell in beside her as she began to walk down Howley Avenue. We were not followed. It was October, sunny but chilly, and fallen leaves clattered past us on the street when the wind came up.

“Do you want to go to Collins’s store?” I said. “I have enough for two Popsicles.” She said nothing. And neither of us said a word more as she led me in and out among a maze of streets until she stopped in front of a large, white, green-trimmed house on Barnes Road, the front door of which came open to reveal a woman wearing a full-length sunflowered smock. She raised her hand, smiled and shouted, “Hello, Percy, you must be Percy.” Her eyes went wide and darted from me to Francine. Soon her face was as flushed as her daughter’s.

“Hello, Mrs. Dunne,” I said. “Yes, I’m Percy.” Without a word, Francine hurried up the walkway and, upon reaching the steps, broke into a run, making it necessary for her mother to step aside to let her through.

“All right, then, Percy,” Mrs. Dunne said. “See you tomorrow.”

I told my mother of my first meeting with Francine, the wordless walk to her house, the uncharacteristic silence and reticent tolerance of the other students.

“It’s a good start,” my mother said. “Francine and her mother thought it would be better if the two of you got acquainted on your own instead of in a schoolyard surrounded by a lot of other boys and girls.” Her source for this information was Pops, who had heard it from McHugh. She told me not to worry—a little awkwardness was normal on the occasion of a first meeting, especially an arranged one.

“Everyone knows what’s going on,” I said, sighing.

“That doesn’t mean it won’t work.” She said His Grace had asked McHugh to spread the word among the homeroom teachers of the Mount. The boys of my homeroom had been told during religion class, which I had spent, as usual, in the library. I told my mother I didn’t think Francine would ever speak to me except to warn me against doing anything that would draw attention to us.

“Well, give her a chance,” my mother said. “And don’t forget, it’s not just up to her to speak to you, you have to speak to her.”

“It was your first date ever, Percy,” Pops said. “The hard part’s over. You’re on your way.”

“It wasn’t a
date
,” my mother said. “We’re all supposed to be very clear about that.” I knew I wasn’t the stuff that girls’ dreams were made of, not even Francine’s; I was two years younger than her and uglier than sin. As for her, she was from that group of girls whose sullen normalcy and plainness seemed self-generated, as if they somehow suppressed whatever allure they might have had out of
sheer antipathy to the notion or purpose of attractiveness. And yet I found her enormously attractive. Beautiful.

“So you’ll meet her at the same place at the same time tomorrow?” my mother asked. I nodded.

Looking as I did, and attending an all-boys school, I had had almost no contact with girls. Except for that brief encounter with Abigail and now Francine, I had never spoken to one except when mythmaking or in reply to teasing. I had never stood near one except when, for her, it was unavoidable, and only then for seconds.

Now here, on Day Two of our détente, was Francine, voluntarily allowing me to occupy her personal space, throwing a few words my way without the intention of being overheard and gaining a laugh at my expense. While it was true that she could not bring herself to look me in the eye, or even to look at any part of me, it did seem she was doing more than merely tolerating me. I was able to smell her hair, even if it smelled of nothing but shampoo. I was able to smell
her
, her scent that, like my mother’s and Medina’s, was so nice it defied description. I was able to really
see
her face, her young girl’s ineffably feminine complexion, those pale blue eyes of hers, the meeting of her red hair and her forehead, the pout of her small, narrow mouth, the shallow groove beneath her nose that rose to the midpoint of her upper lip, the perfect little furrows in her lips, the swell of her breasts beneath her books, her wind-flattened skirt, the hollow at its middle and the outline of her legs, her lower legs and the freckles that began just above her high-pulled socks, her creased, faintly smudged brass-buckle shoes. Francine.

Francine and I met again at Howley and Bonaventure, watched by many students who pretended not to be watching and said nothing to us.

“Mom says I’m supposed to talk to you today.” Francine looked
again as if she was on the verge of tears, wincing with the effort of the task she’d been assigned. She stared wistfully off into the distance with the expression of someone determined not to reveal how badly her feelings had been hurt. “Mom says it doesn’t take long enough to walk home to have a proper conversation. So we should just sit down somewhere and talk. There’s a bench by the bus stop on Military Road.”

Without another word, she set off down Bonaventure toward St. Bon’s, her books clasped to her chest, her head down. I ran and caught up with her.

She stopped abruptly, turned toward me, her face suggesting that an outburst of anger was imminent—but she bit her lower lip, faced forward and resumed her determined march. Again I had to run to catch up with her, my large feet loudly slapping on the sidewalk. Mortified, hobbled, I reached out and grabbed her right arm to make her turn around. As she turned, all but one of her books spilled onto the sidewalk.

“You made me drop my
books
,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” I protested. “I always leave my books in school. I was just going to ask you to slow down.” As she crouched, with one leg bent more than the other, to pick up her books, I saw, for a second, her bare legs entire, and the pale blue, eye-colour-matching V of her underwear. On one of her inner thighs there was a light sprinkle of freckles. I dared not remove my large hands from my pockets to help her. She gathered the books together, wiping dust from their covers.

“The
corners
are bent,” she said as she stood up. “They’re
spoiled
.”

“I’m sorry. I just wanted you to stop walking so fast. I can’t keep up. My stupid feet don’t work very well.”

“Don’t you touch me again,” she said, and began to walk at her previous pace.

“Can I still walk home with you?” I called. She said nothing, but I ran and caught up with her.

“Do you have any hobbies?” she said, seeming to wipe away a tear.

“What?” I said, my tone that of someone refuting an accusation.

“Hobbies.
Hobbies
. Mom said you might have some hobbies.”

I had to say
something
to dispel the excruciating awkwardness. “I’ll tell you when we get to the bench,” I said. We walked in silence past St. Bon’s, where a few boys and girls were hanging about, posted like sentinels but affecting a lack of interest in us. The bench was almost directly in front of the Basilica, just past the bus stop. An elderly man and two elderly women were sitting on it. The man’s legs were crossed, his arm over the back of the bench in a way that made it clear he and the two women knew each other and weren’t waiting for the bus.

“There’s nowhere to sit,” Francine said. It might have been a panicked complaint about the utter lack of shelter from lethal objects that were falling from the sky, or a protest against her mother who was supposed to have somehow reserved the bench for us. A tear rolled down her cheek, so I told her I’d been collecting stamps since I was seven. I tried not to think of how lonely and bored you would have to be to collect stamps. I felt as if the Archbishop was watching us from one of the upper windows of the Basilica.

So I said I had hundreds of stamps, some of which my mother had given me, some I had sent away for, some I had seen advertised in comic books. I had a Newfoundland stamp that was over a hundred years old and though it was worth a lot of money, I would never sell it. I told Francine that if not for the invention of the envelope by a girl of about her age back in the time of Rome, there’d be no such things as stamps or letters or the post office. I told her that a man in Russia had collected about six hundred kinds of envelopes and that was the most so far. I said I also collected coins and that coins were invented because they didn’t blow away or get worn out the way paper money did. I said I had a lot of Newfoundland coins, mostly Catholic ones. I told her that I
was painstakingly constructing a model ship inside a bottle, the SS
Terra Nova
, the tiny pieces of which I had spent a month painting with toothpicks. I said as much about hobbies as I knew or could make up on short notice.

Francine looked as though she was greatly distressed by the detailed account I had just given her of the burning to the ground of her ancestral home.

“I’m going now,” she said.

I walked with Francine to her house, where her mother was waiting at the front door again. She hurried up the walkway and the steps as before, shoulders swaying, and all but knocked her mother over as she went inside. Mrs. Dunne waved and said, “Hello, Percy.” She looked every bit as fretful and anxious as the day before. I waved back and said hello and then hurried away. But I couldn’t help but fib to my mother and Pops that Francine and I had talked about the books we were reading in school. My mother asked if Francine had introduced me to any of her friends. I said no. “Too bad,” my mother said. “You two could use some reinforcements. Someone chattier than her and less inclined than you to be a bullshit artist.”

“She started
crying
,” I said. “I only talked about hobbies because her mother told her to ask me if I had any.”

“Crying?” my mother said. “Jesus. Her mother must have been afraid to say no to the Archbishop. Mrs. Dunne should have more sense, but you’re not making it any easier for Francine. Maybe I should call it off. Do you think I should?”

“Give it a bit more time,” Pops said from the sunroom. “Some girls are just shy.”

My mother raised her eyebrows at me. “Well, what do you think?”

What I thought was that for Francine and me to break “it” off now after meeting only twice would confirm, reinforce, the already impenetrable view of me on the Mount as a comical freak who
would never fit in even with the lifelong help of Uncle Paddy. So I nodded yes.