The Son of a Certain Woman (24 page)

My mother looked tiny, almost childlike, making the wheel seem comically oversized. I wasn’t sure if she could see over it or was looking through it at the windshield.

“Cars behind us are blowing their horns.”

“Too bad. The goddamned clutch is supposed to make some kind of shape, the shape of a letter of the alphabet I think, but I can’t remember which one.”

We drove haltingly up Bonaventure, past St. Bon’s and St. Pat’s, the two schools opposing each other in a kind of eternal standoff that made me fancy one of them was Protestant. We went past the Basilica on our left, its vast parking lot empty but for a looming statue of the Blessed Virgin. My mother said she thought the steep slope of Garrison Hill was best avoided, so I didn’t get to see if Sister Mary Aggie was back in her room, the luridly flashing Sacred Heart once again hanging in the window. Instead, we went left onto Military Road, followed it past what my mother said was the Colonial Building—it was fronted by a colonnade of
concrete pillars—to Cavendish Square, where I got my first look at the Newfoundland Hotel, an old but elegant-looking brown brick structure in which, my mother said, some of the guests were permanent. We turned left onto the east end of Duckworth Street and, leaving the city proper, started up Signal Hill, where my mother once again had problems with the clutch, jerking it from side to side, forward and back, as if she were trying to wrench it free of the car altogether. The rear of the car bounced and there was a gunshot-like blast of exhaust, after which the car at last began to climb until it reached the edge of a billowing wall of fog that instantly blocked out the sun.

“Perse, I’m afraid this picnic won’t be any picnic,” my mother said.

Medina was standing against a rock by the side of the road, bundled up in winter clothes though my mother and I were dressed for the fall-like spring in heavy sweaters. It was especially windy on top of Signal Hill where the cliff overlooked the open sea on less foggy days—but even halfway up I felt the wind gust against the car. Medina was smoking a cigarette, puffing on it without removing it from her mouth, both hands in the pockets of her parka, the hood of which was partway down, as was the zipper. My mother waved to her and Medina smiled briefly, waved back, then looked away from us, away from the road. She looked as if she was trying to make it seem perfectly normal for a woman to be alone, with no car in sight, smoking a cigarette while leaning against a rock in thick fog halfway up Signal Hill, as if it was well-known as a place where people went on foot to reflect. One of her feet was raised, the sole of her boot against the rock, as if she were posing for a photograph.

My mother parked the car on the edge of the road and told me to roll down my window. “Get in,” she shouted, but Medina shook her head.

“There’s some shelter from the wind over there.” Medina pointed back to a rise of rock.

“Wait,” my mother called, but Medina was already walking away from us.

We spread a blanket on the ground and had to weigh it down with rocks at the corners to keep it from blowing away. The three of us knelt on the blanket because the ground was cold and damp. We sat back on our heels. Medina looked around.

“Nice place for a murder,” she said.

We couldn’t see the road, presumably couldn’t be seen from the road. The fog was so thick it felt more like mist. Dew gathered in our hair and trickled down our faces like beads of sweat. I smelled the ocean and heard it rumble in and out through the caves of shale that I knew lay beneath us, channels that went deep inside the hill, which sounded hollow. We were able to see only about fifteen feet in any direction. It felt as though we were three actors on a stage, hemmed in by fake fog, about to speak our lines, unable to make out anything but each other, the set and the few props we’d been provided with.

We ate in silence and then my mother said, “We brought you here to tell you something, Percy.”

“Something bad?”

“No. Something important, though.”

Medina stood and, lighting a cigarette, resumed her one-legged pose against the lichen-covered wall of rock.

My mother took my hand in hers.

“I love Medina,” she said.

“So do I,” I said.

“I mean I’m
in
love with her,” my mother said. I looked at Medina, who wiped a tear from one eye with the back of her hand. Her face was red, but not just from the cold. She looked away from us at the same spot as before.

“I know, I saw you in your bed,” I said.

My mother dropped my hand. “What?”

“The night I found the Vat Rat stuck in the sump pump hole.”

“Merciful God,” Medina said. She turned sideways to face the road.

“What did you see?” my mother said, her face and neck now as red as Medina’s.

“You and Medina in your bed. You were both on top of the blankets and making funny noises, especially Medina. The door was open a bit. I didn’t push it open. I didn’t even touch it.” My eyes filled with tears that didn’t quite spill out. “I never told anyone,” I said, “I promise.” My mother took me in her arms and kissed me on the head.

“Medina’s crying,” I said. I’d noticed her shoulders shaking.

“I know she’s crying,” my mother said. “And we thought we were the ones with the secret.” She let me go and tried to smile. “We figured you’d guess what was up sooner or later. Or discover us by accident just the way you did. We know when Pops is down for the count—he never gets up again once he goes to bed. But you—no offence, Perse, but you’re kind of unpredictable. So we thought it would be better if we told you and explained to you why you must never say a word to anyone, ever, about us, rather than leave it to chance. No offence again, and no pun intended, but you’ve got very loose lips. And besides, I think it’s right that you should know. I don’t like keeping secrets from you.”

She said that, when she was pregnant, she told Jim Joyce about her love for Medina because she knew what he would do and she wanted him to do it. She wanted him to disappear. She wanted him gone. She knew he would never tell another soul because he’d be too ashamed to tell and too worried that no one would believe him but instead would think he was just spreading lies about a woman he didn’t want to marry even though she was pregnant, or who wanted nothing more to do with him because he cheated on her or beat her up. What had he done, people would wonder, to make her reject him?

“I wanted a baby,” my mother said. “I didn’t want
him
. I wanted a baby very much. Don’t look so surprised. Just because I prefer
women to men doesn’t mean I don’t want to be a mother. And lucky for you, or else you wouldn’t exist.”

She had used him, used Jim Joyce. She knew that, she said, and wasn’t proud of it. She might even have destroyed him, she didn’t know. She was so young and so very much in love with someone else. A woman. Medina. She hadn’t known what else to do. She hoped that, wherever he was, he had put the past behind him.

“You didn’t have to get engaged to him,” I objected. “You didn’t have to tell him you like girls.”

She said that if she hadn’t done both, he wouldn’t have run away. She partly got engaged to him, him in particular, so that she’d have a safe reason to spend time with Medina, her almost sister-in-law, if he didn’t leave St. John’s. She didn’t want him having anything to do with the three of us, her, me and Medina. He’d have known I was his son—he wasn’t the smartest person in the world, but he could count and he knew, or at least was as certain as any man could be, that she’d been with no one else. But she couldn’t have him interfering in our lives. Imagine, she said, looking beseechingly at me, how things would be now for Medina if Jim Joyce were still around: she’d have to spend time with him or conspicuously go out of her way to avoid him.

So my mother did one thing more than ask him to marry her and then tell him she liked girls: she told him which girl she liked. She and Medina planned it together, told him together. It was very hard for both of them—nowhere near as hard as it was for Jim Joyce probably, but hard. And terrifying—he was the only person they’d ever told, and they couldn’t help imagining what was in store for them if Jim Joyce acted out of character and did his best to convince others that they were what they told him they were, two women in love, one of them his sister, one his fiancée. They’d wind up in the Mental for longer than Sister Mary Aggie had ever been confined, perhaps for ever, or they’d be arrested and sent to some special prison on the Mainland where
women like them were sent to be “cured” by means that were not very pleasant—and I would have had no one to care for me but Jim Joyce, from whom I would almost certainly have been taken because of my “specialness” and put in some home unless he beat the authorities to it and, before fleeing the province, left me on the doorstep of people whose job it was to be the custodians of ill-fated children.

“But you tricked him. That’s why he went away. You
made
him go away. You made him feel so bad he went away. But you’ve always
blamed
him for going away.”

“I’ve just been keeping up a false front. People expect me to be bitter and to blame him for leaving me, pregnant and engaged. So I do.”

“I bet he still feels bad.”

“Maybe.”

“He might have told on you.”

“Yes. No. I don’t know. No one would have believed him. He knocked me up, after all. He wasn’t in love with me and he wasn’t close with Medina. His own
sister
doesn’t miss him. I doubt that he misses her.”

“Maybe he misses me.”

“If he misses anyone, he misses you.”

“He wouldn’t if he ever met me. If he ever saw me.”

I started crying, not bothering to hide or wipe away the tears that streamed down my cheeks. “I bet he isn’t very happy now. I bet he hates you and Medina. And he’d hate me too.”

“People have moved on from far worse.”

“You don’t feel sorry for what you did, do you?” I clambered to my ungainly feet and turned my back to her.

She said she did feel sorry but she’d lose no sleep if she had to do it again. If you couldn’t control certain circumstances, you had to find a way to deal with them. If people knew about Medina and her, we’d have no friends, no allies, and I’d certainly have no one
looking out for me, let alone someone on a par with Uncle Paddy. Everyone would be against us. She wanted a child and knew of only one way of having one that she and Medina could bear to live with. And even so, she was taking a big risk with the lives of all four of us, five if you included Pops.

I turned in time to see Medina, eyes red and swollen, walking back to the blanket, a fresh cigarette between her fingers. Medina knelt and sat on her heels beside my mother. I wiped my own eyes but stayed put. I asked my mother if she liked doing it with Pops and she asked me if I thought
I
would like to do it with Pops. I asked Medina if she would do it with a man if she had to and she said that a man would only do it with
her
if he had to. She said that, where men were concerned, she was still a virgin.

“Girls who do it with girls are lizzies,” I shouted at them. I’d known for years, but it felt, now that they were confiding in me, as if I had just discovered that my mother and my aunt were lizzies. “Lizzies are crazy. The Mental is full of Crazy Lizzies.”

“I’m sure they could find room for two more. Officially, the powers that be may have just decided lizzies aren’t criminals anymore but it’s not the long arm of the law we have to worry about, it’s the long arm of Uncle Paddy—at a word from him, we could
all
be locked up in one place or another. Anyway, people would find a way to get us into the Mental—things don’t just change overnight because of some law that almost everyone in this city and this country disapproves of. So please, please keep this to yourself,” my mother said. “We decided we could trust you. You’re almost thirteen. We thought you should know the truth. We love you.”

“I won’t tell on you. Who’d believe a fucking retard like Percy Joyce?”

“
Perse
,” my mother cried. Medina stood up and started toward me, arms outstretched. I backed up and she stopped.

“Maybe I’ll just run off like your
brother
did,” I taunted her. “You made your own
brother
run away. You were jealous of your
own
brother
. You still are.” I turned my back on them, stumbling to the nearest rock and sat down, staring away into the fog as if I wanted to be left there, wanted my mother and Medina to go home and forget they’d ever heard of me.

“Get used to it, Perse,” my mother said, gently raising her voice. “I like girls. Men just don’t float my boat. No offence. They don’t float my boat, or turn my crank, and they’re not my cup of tea.”

Now, bawling from sheer spite, I cried at her that I bet that, if she’d liked boys, if Jim Joyce had floated her boat, I might have been a normal baby, because women who didn’t like men had babies who were all fucked up.

She said she knew of other girl-loving women whose babies were not fucked up, not that she thought of me as being fucked up.

“I had boyfriends, Perse. Before Jim Joyce. They did it
to
me, but they didn’t do it
for
me, that’s all. I thought that would change when I got older. I’m not sorry it didn’t. And I’m not going to apologize to you for being what you call a Crazy Lizzie. I lost a whole fleet of boats before I found out what was sinking them.”

“That’s a pretty picture,” Medina muttered.

I began to feel foolish staring off into the fog. I went back to the blanket and sat down. “Some night,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper, “Pops is going to catch you. You
think
he won’t, but he will.”

“We’re careful. I phone Medina after Pops has gone to bed. Then Medina comes over. Late. About once a week. Sometimes she’s at our house, she goes home, I call her, she comes back, and later she goes home again.”

“The things we do for love,” Medina said. “Not to mention the things we do for the mortgage.”

“The mortgage is why I do it,” my mother said. “And just once a month. I always go to his room. He’s never been in my bed. We don’t kiss on the lips.”