The Son of a Certain Woman (42 page)

“His Grace will administer all three of the sacraments on the same day to Percy in the Basilica. Father Bill is going to hear
your
confession, Miss Joyce. You will have to go to Confession and Communion before you can be married. The Church, you see, has some stipulations of its own. You will be required to take these sacraments seriously, to make a full and sincere confession before you take Holy Communion. You must confess to what the Church deems to be a sin, not just to what
you
deem to be one. I believe it’s been quite some time since you went to Confession, hasn’t it?”

“I stopped going just after Percy was born. Don’t assume cause and effect.”

“By the way, His Grace wishes that Percy’s Baptism, Confession and Communion be witnessed by as many students of the Mount as possible. And bishops and priests from all over the island will attend and take part—not for Percy, of course, but as I said, for the usual celebration of the Basilica. For reasons that elude me, Percy has for years been a favourite of His Grace, and his long-delayed induction into the Church is, His Grace believes, an important event for all of us. But His Grace does not want to dilute the momentousness of Percy’s big day by combining it with yours. Otherwise, you’d have been married in the Basilica immediately before Percy was baptized.”

“Pops—” my mother said, but McHugh interrupted her.

“That is also one of the things I wish to discuss. I’m hoping that, once you are married, you won’t go on using the students’
nickname for Mr. MacDougal. It seems—disrespectful, frivolous, even demeaning. Mr. MacDougal shares the Christian name of one of the great Doctors of the Church, a name that your son has decided to take as his baptismal name—”

“Pops is Pops,” my mother said. “He has been for a very long time. He is not
Jerome
. Not to us.”

“You’ll think about it?”

“Only when I’m in need of a good giggle.”

“Then there is the question of children.”

“There is no question. We won’t be having any.”

“None?”

“I
have
a child.”

“You had him outside of wedlock.”

“He will soon be inside wedlock. Soon, all three of us will be wedlocked.”

“Mr. MacDougal has no children. Nor, he tells me, will he have any say in how Percy is raised.”

“What did you do, Pops, give him a written list of my stipulations?”

“Is your concern that another child of yours might be born with a disfigurement like Percy’s?”

“It never crossed my mind.”

“In the eyes of God, Percy is beautiful.”

“As he is in mine.”

“I have a gift for you, Miss Joyce.” McHugh held out to my mother a small but thick black book. “This is a new copy of Saint Joseph’s Daily Missal.” He opened it near the beginning. “You see, it says ‘This missal belongs to …’ I’ve written in your marriage name, Penelope MacDougal.” He closed the book and again held it out to my mother, who grabbed it from him as if she meant to throw it aside.

“Thank you,” she said. “I’ve always wanted one of these.”

“Saint Joseph is the Patron Saint of the Universal Church.”

My mother held the missal in one hand at her side.

“How can you be certain that you won’t have another child, Miss Joyce? Need I remind you that any unnatural form of prevention is deemed by the Church to be a sin?”

“I think it’s time the three of us went home,” my mother said.

McHugh, now pacing faster back and forth in front of the altar rail, said, “Just a couple more points. For Percy’s sake, I’ll use the euphemism which Mr. MacDougal tells me you used: separate rooms and ‘visiting hours.’ ”

My mother laughed, not mirthfully.

“Is there anyone in your home at the moment?” McHugh said.

“Medina is there,” my mother said.

“Is it Medina night again so soon?”

“What do you mean by that?”

“She seems to visit quite a lot. Mr. MacDougal tells me it’s hard for him to hold your attention while she’s there. Would you mind if Percy went home so that we could speak more freely?”

My mother sighed. “Go home, Perse. Tell Medina we’ll be there soon.”

As I rose, Brother McHugh stopped pacing and again took my large hand, this time holding on when I tried to pull away. “I will be instructing you in religion—”

“Don’t tell me, let me guess,” my mother said. “His Grace agreed to that while the two of you were relaxing in the steam room.”

“—and in your preparation for your baptism and the other sacraments. There is much for you to learn in a short amount of time.”

I said, “Yes, Brother,” and he released my hand. I walked quickly to the chapel door and hurried across the road to 44, where, by the time I’d given Medina a full account of the meeting, she was unable to keep still. She went to the front window and looked across the street at Brother Rice. “He said that, Perse?” she said. “He said ‘Medina night’?”

“Yes,” I said.

“He
must
know, Perse, he must. Why else would he say ‘Medina night’? I’m here almost
every
night.”

My mother and Pops arrived, Pops trailing behind her. My mother, Saint Joseph’s Daily Missal in one hand, kicked off her shoes, slamming them against the wall, and tossed her bandana on the floor.

“Paynelope,” Pops said.

“Shut up,” my mother said. She crossed the front room into the kitchen and smacked the missal on the table so hard that some of Medina’s beer spilled and foamed.

“Percy should go to his room,” Pops said.

“I decide when Percy should go to his room.” My mother sat down at the kitchen table and lit a cigarette. “McHugh objected to all my conditions of marriage, my stipulations as he somehow knew I call them, including the matter of how many times a month Pops should be allowed to
fuck
me.”

“
Paynelope
,” Pops said. “Percy—”

“Is none of your fucking business and has many times heard and said the word ‘fuck’ before.”

“What happened, Pen?” Medina said.

“I was lectured in a
chapel
against the use of contraception and the obligation of all married couples to contribute to the continuance of the human species.”

“I’m going out,” Pops informed my mother. “I hope you’ll have cooled down by the time I return, which may not be for a while.” She said nothing and he slammed the front door behind him.

“More children McHugh said I should have,” my mother fumed. She said she asked him if it was a rule of the Church that every woman had to have at least one child who was not a bastard.

“But Pen—
‘Medina
night.’ Perse told me.”

“Pops doesn’t know. I can tell. I’m less sure of McHugh. But once Pops and I are married, what could he do? They’d rather burn down the Vatican than annul a marriage. I think we’ll be all right if we’re careful.”

“I don’t know,” Medina said. “All I know is that, if someone has to go, that someone will be me.”

My mother took her hand, kissed her lightly on the lips and tugged on a curl of her hair.

It was possible, McHugh had told my mother, who told Medina the next day, that there would be some radio, television and newspaper coverage of my baptism.

Medina said it sounded as if they were planning a “big do” at the Basilica. She began to refer to it as “the Big Do at the Big B.” “Whereas the marriage of Pops and Pen,” she said, “won’t even make Wedding of the Week.”

My mother pointed out that she would be making her first confession in fourteen, almost fifteen years, but I would only have to summarize the past eight years, seven being the age when, according to the Church, the capacity for guilt kicked in. In everyone. No exceptions. There was neither precocity nor backwardness where guilt was concerned. There were no delayed children who didn’t give a damn till they were eight. Seven was the age of guilt. You were ushered into it while dressed to the nines, your hair newly cut, ribbons pinned to you, proud parents bawling because they were so happy to witness you become suddenly and keenly aware of your innate malevolence and the evil that you harboured in your soul.

When you turned seven, a lot of things that had never bothered your conscience began to bother it a lot. Thanks to your catechism instruction, you became aware that Satan is forever slyly at work in your mind, tempting you to perform such nefarious acts as withholding jelly beans from your friends or even misleading them about how many jelly beans you have. Formerly able to greedily relish your jelly beans in secret, you are now kept from doing so by consciousness of guilt, despite the many rationalizations for
hoarding candy that the Evil One supplies you with. You think of the eons of immolation in Purgatory that your jelly bean dishonesty will get you if you leave it unconfessed. You hold out for as long as you can until, giving in to the Evil One’s exhortation that you gobble all your jelly beans at once, you are overwhelmed by guilt and a desire to return to the state of wholesome innocence you once inhabited, and you confess to a priest that your jelly bean assets are greater than you have led others to believe. You are forgiven, assigned penance and told to go and sin no more by a priest who is as certain that you
will
sin again as he is that your enjoyment of jelly beans will never be the same.

And so it goes, my mother said. Satan shouts down or impersonates the voice of God and soon you cannot lift a finger, move a muscle, think a thought or say a word except at the behest of the indwelling, near-omnipotent demon whose existence, until a few days ago, you had somehow overlooked. At least, my mother said, I had had seven more years of lightheartedly breaking the commandments than she’d had, but I would soon be all too aware of how much coveting I did in the course of a day, of the impossibility of drawing an uncovetous breath.

“His Grace believes that the other students will learn a lot from the example that you set and that your mother sets.”

Brother McHugh had told Brother Hogan to bring me to Hogan’s little office, which was hardly more than a closet, though I remembered it as the place from which McHugh had dragged me the day that he snapped me in the tunnel, and I wondered in fright if another snapping might be imminent. But it turned out that he really did just want to speak to me. He sat sideways to the desk as before, legs crossed, affecting disdain for his modest surroundings.

“The Archbishop says your life stories are like parables. Your mother, as a younger woman, suffered great disappointment and betrayal, humiliation—in part because of her own premarital wrongdoing. Her fiancé left her when she was with child. Her child was born with a disfigurement that she foresaw would cause
him and her great distress, the scorn of those who, never having truly suffered, would not understand the wounds that their cruelty inflicted. Your mother became bitter and turned away from God and from the Church. For fourteen years. Only by the humility and innocence of the very child who seemed to be at the root of her unhappiness did she come to realize her mistake, a realization that brought her back to God and the Church, by whose grace she was rewarded with the restoration of the very thing that years ago she had lost—a loving husband.

“And you, Percy Joyce, your story, His Grace believes, is equally inspiring. A child is not only born out of wedlock to a mother who, because of trials that were devised to test her faith, has lost her way in the world, has become cynical, hardened and blind to the wonder of Creation, but he is born disfigured. He is encouraged by his mother to see only what is bad in others, but in spite of this, in spite of the persecution that he suffers because of his disfigurement and his shyness and his shame, he grows up to be a gentle, loving and forgiving child. With the help of wise, God-guided men of faith, he comes to see that, for him and his mother, the one and only path to true and full salvation is through the Church. The mark that hides your face is the outward sign of your inner gift, of the working within you of the Holy Spirit.

“These are the two stories that His Grace believes will be told the day you are baptized and the day your mother is married. In each of these stories, a new and more glorious chapter will begin. That is what His Grace believes. It is not what I believe. I am not so easily fooled. I know snake oil when I smell it. Your mother rubs herself all over with it.”

At home, my mother fretted about making her first confession in so many years. “ ‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. I’ve had amnesia since breakfast.’ Do you think that might work?”

Pops said he didn’t think Father Bill or His Grace would let either one of us get away with a perfunctory, itemized confession.

“Confessions aren’t
supposed
to sound like inventories,” Pops added, heading to the sunroom.

“McHugh has told me to be open, sincere and entire. Or something like that. If I’m all those things with Father Bill, the odds of the wedding going ahead would not be good. The odds of the poor man’s life going ahead would not be good.”

“Your odds wouldn’t be so good either.” Medina glanced toward Pops, who had settled in his chair in the sunroom. “What you say in confession is supposed to be a secret between you and the priest. But I’ve seen priests drag people out of that box and beat the daylights out of them.”

My mother decided her best bet was to more or less recite the Archbishop’s parable. She would confess that being dumped while pregnant and engaged had made her bitter, her bitterness had caused her to turn her back on the Church, as had her child’s disfigurement. She would paint a portrait of a jaded, jilted woman who, for my entire life, had sought solace for the loss of Jim Joyce in the bottom of a beer glass.

She said she expected a lecture on the sinfulness of, and consequent troubles that derived from, premarital sex. She would say that she constantly complained about the unfairness of her lot, her man-deficient existence, her miserable Jim-less, Joyce-less, joyless, empty life. She begrudged other women their husbands, wondered aloud why fate had sought her out but spared them. What had she done to deserve her manlessness? What had those other women done to deserve their lifelong man-mates? She had grown weary of asking God such questions and getting no reply. But she would also tell her confessor that she had emerged from the darkness of despair to discover that living in her house, almost since Jim Joyce had left, was the remedy for her misery—a man who surpassed in manliness the man who had rejected her and her child. And so she was about to begin her man-renewed, revived-by-man life, never more to stray from the Church, never more to be unmanned, never
again to live in a husbandless house without a Church-sanctioned husband in the marriage bed beside her.