The Son of a Certain Woman (44 page)

Sometimes he walked about the room as he asked his extra questions, the catechism clasped behind his back. He said I was not to follow him with my eyes or turn in my chair but was simply to face straight ahead as if he were still sitting at the table. Over a period of such days, he interspersed seemingly insignificant questions about the middle and third names of Pops, Medina and Jim Joyce. A couple of times I asked him why he was asking extra questions, but he ignored me.

Soon, he began to randomly alternate the two kinds of questions, no longer getting up to walk around but still not lowering the catechism, as if even the answers to the extra questions were
written in the book. One day, “What are the Seven Chief Spiritual Works of Mercy?” was followed by “Who would you say is your mother’s best friend?” I responded Catechumen fashion to the second question, repeating the question in my answer. “I would say that my mother’s best friend is Medina Joyce.”

“It’s disrespectful to the catechism and therefore to the Church to answer
my
questions like that,” McHugh said.

“I’m sorry, Brother.”

“And who is Medina Joyce’s best friend?”

“My mother, Brother.”

“Who would you say was Medina Joyce’s second-best friend?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Vice-Principal MacDougal?”

“Maybe.”

“You and I know that they are far from friends.”

“I guess they don’t like each other all that much.”

“How did your mother meet Medina Joyce?”

“I don’t know.”

“She met her before she met your father?”

“I think so.”

“So your mother met your father through Medina?”

“I think so.”

“Your mother and Medina, the two Miss Joyces, remained friends in spite of what your father, Medina’s brother, did?”

“Yes. Medina is nice.”

“And yet she seems to have no other friends. Does she?”

“I think she does. At St. Clare’s, where she works.”

“But when she isn’t working, she spends most of her time at your mother’s house. Vice-Principal MacDougal told me so. How many hours a week would you say she spends at your mother’s house?”

“I’m not sure. She doesn’t like it where she lives, but that’s all she can afford. She only gets twenty hours of work a week. My mother gives her money sometimes.”

“She gives Medina money that Mr. MacDougal gives
her
?”

“Sometimes. I don’t know how much.”

“Do you think she could afford a better place to live if she did not spend so much money on alcohol and cigarettes?”

“I don’t know.”

“Smoking and drinking are unseemly habits for a woman. Mr. MacDougal tells me that your mother drinks and smokes a lot. Is that true?”

“She doesn’t drink as much as him, but he doesn’t smoke. Except a pipe sometimes.”

“So you like Miss Medina Joyce? Your aunt by blood. Your common-law aunt.”

“Yes.”

“Why does she spend so much time at your mother’s house?”

“They like to play cards.”

“Cards, yes. Another bad habit. Well, I expect you’ll see much less of her after Vice-Principal MacDougal marries your mother. Is that right?”

“I suppose so.”

“I will see to it that Vice-Principal MacDougal will not be so foolish as to tolerate the frequent presence in his house of an ignoramus who exploits and despises him.”

The part of the catechizing that concerned Medina spanned two days. On the second day, McHugh brought with him to the Basilica, along with the usual four books, a small cardboard box from which he removed a pair of black binoculars. He placed them on the table in front of me.

“Do you know what those are?” he said. I nodded. “I like to look at the city through them from the window of my room. Have you ever looked through a pair of binoculars?”

“No.”

“Give it a try.”

I picked them up. They were much heavier than they looked,
thick and made of metal. I raised them to my eyes. Everything looked blurred until McHugh adjusted a little wheel on the top. The room came into focus, everything eerily enlarged. I was able to read the writing beneath the portrait of the Pope. McHugh snatched the binoculars away from me and again laid them on the table.

“One night, it must have been a year ago, I couldn’t sleep. I got up and looked out the window as I often do. And I happened to see, to faintly make out, someone standing in the little patch of woods behind your house. It was winter. The trees were bare. A cold night. I couldn’t make out who it was until I looked through these binoculars. It was your aunt, Miss Joyce. She was simply standing there among the trees, her hands in the pockets of her yellow coat, staring at your house. She stood there for perhaps ten minutes. Then she went inside and the last of the lights in the house went off. I realized that she’d been waiting for something, a signal of some kind perhaps. Why was she out there on such a night? What was she waiting for?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’ve since seen her come and go from the house at all hours of the night. Sometimes she waits outside. Sometimes she goes inside the moment she arrives. She always approaches the house from the back, in the dark, like some sort of thief.”

“She’s not a thief. She has trouble sleeping where she lives. It’s noisy. When it’s really bad, she comes over to our house and sleeps on the chesterfield.”

“But why would she wait outside like that?”

“I’m not sure. Maybe she’s making sure that we’re all the way asleep so that she doesn’t wake us up when she comes in.”

“She doesn’t call first to tell your mother she’s coming, to ask if it’s all right?”

“Medina doesn’t have her own phone. There’s a phone in her boarding house, but it’s almost always broken.”

“She
does
have her own phone. Mr. MacDougal told me so.”

“It
was
broken for a while. She must have got it fixed.”

“So she just comes over and walks right in, sometimes after all of you have gone to bed and are sound asleep?”

I nodded.

“She doesn’t need a key?”

“Mom never locks the house, not even when everyone goes out.”

“It was odd, the sight of her behind your mother’s house, staring. I can’t see the back door of your house, not even with binoculars, so I don’t know if your mother let her in or she let herself in. What do you think?”

“I don’t know.”

“You think Miss Joyce somehow knows, somehow guesses when it would be best to come inside so as not to wake anyone?”

“Maybe.”

“Is she sometimes on the sofa when you wake up in the morning?”

“No. She gets up before me and helps my mother make breakfast.”

“You’re lying.”

“No, I’m not.”

“I spoke to Vice-Principal MacDougal about this matter just this afternoon. He never mentioned that Miss Joyce sometimes spends the night at your mother’s house. He said he had no idea why Miss Joyce comes and goes the way that I described. He went home and asked your mother about it and came back to my office just before I left to come here. He said she told him Miss Joyce has absolute freedom of the house. She told my vice-principal that he retires early, is a heavy sleeper and always gets up late, so it’s no wonder he doesn’t know about Miss Joyce’s visits. She said Miss Joyce feels lonely where she lives, especially at night, a place where she has no family and where most people are merely passing through and so hardly even talk to one another. So she comes over to your mother’s house because it’s the closest thing to a real home that she has.”

“Oh,” I said. “I thought she couldn’t sleep because it’s too noisy where she lives.”

“But now you think your mother’s right?”

I nodded.

He stared at me, smiling, chewing his gum at the front of his mouth. “Oh what a tangled web we weave,” he said.

When I got home, my mother was at the Helm but not typing. She put her finger to her lips and motioned with her eyes toward Pops’ sunroom, where he sat drinking beer. She looked frightened, and seemed on edge, drifting into episodes of self-absorption while we played Scrabble. She seemed especially nervous after Medina arrived. They smoked a pack of cigarettes between them before Pops at last left the sunroom and went to bed. The three of us sat at the kitchen table.

“I didn’t have time to warn you,” my mother whispered, reaching for my hand. “I knew if I went to the Basilica to get you for some made-up reason that McHugh would be even more suspicious. What did he say and what did you tell him? And keep your voice down.” As I recounted my session with McHugh, Medina kept shaking her head and saying “sweet Jesus” under her breath. “It’s fine,” my mother said when I was finished.

“Fine?” Medina said. “He’s been watching me for a year through his
binoculars
and you think everything is fine? Your story and Perse’s don’t match and you think everything is fine?”

“They almost match. It’s plausible that Perse wouldn’t have the reason for your visits quite clear in his head.” She took me in her arms and hugged me hard. “You did good, Perse. Better than I did, I think.” She let me go and turned to Medina. “McHugh doesn’t know anything, so he can’t
prove
anything. I keep telling you that. Let him have his suspicions. Soon enough it won’t matter what he thinks.”

“Well, you’ll be the one who’s safely married within the Church. To McHugh, I’ll still just be a Crazy Lizzie.”

“He won’t dare cause trouble for you once Pops and I are married—he won’t want to do anything that might bring to light the truth about Percy Joyce’s reformed mother and humiliate Uncle Paddy.”

“Jesus, Pen, I hope you’re right.”

Later, my mother came into my room and folded her arms on my bunk. She said she would take my place at catechism if she could and she hated the thought of my being interrogated by McHugh. She said she wasn’t sure to what degree Uncle Paddy shared McHugh’s suspicions, and she’d wondered to what degree my catechism was being directed by Uncle Paddy. “It’s only a few more days,” she said. “We’ll be home free once I’m married and you’ve been baptized. After the Big Do at the Big B, there’ll be no turning back for them. Do you think you can hang in there for a few more days?”

“I think so, Mom.”

That night, I drifted in and out of sleep, lucidly, continuously dreaming that McHugh was standing atop the long table in the Basilica, strolling its length with his hands in his pockets, his black boots clumping on the wood, while every chair at the table was occupied by a Christian Brother, all of whom were smoking, chewing gum and taking notes.

I woke once to hear voices in the hallway, my mother’s and Medina’s. Medina urgently: “I wish the three of us could just go away.” “Where? How?” my mother said. “I’m just wishing, Pen. I’m not saying we should.” I wondered if she was really wishing that I wasn’t in the picture. Maybe then the two of them could have run away. But wherever they went, they would have to live much as they did now, in some acceptable, fictional arrangement. Nevertheless, I felt that I was a major complication, a nuisance who crimped what little space they might otherwise have had.

I spent the next day at St. Bon’s fretting over the looming catechism with McHugh, knowing that, at the end of it, I would be so tired that, by the time I got to 44, I would want to go straight to bed without having had a bite to eat.

I was now required to sit in on religion class with the other boys. I sat side on in my desk, legs crossed, arms folded across my chest, looking appraisingly at elderly Brother Trask as he recited from his notes a highly condensed and simplified form of Saint Thomas Aquinas’s ontological proof of God’s existence, having to do with the Prime Unmoved Mover who was God. My mother had read a book about this very proof and had spoken enough about it that I thought I might be able to cause some mischief.

So I raised my hand and said that an all-powerful know-it-all wouldn’t need to write or read a book. Maybe God only thought He was all-powerful but found out the hard way that He wasn’t. Maybe there used to be someone in charge of everything but now, for some reason, there wasn’t. Maybe God had abdicated. How would we know? “The Bible,” was always the answer Brother Trask gave. So I asked him why, if the Bible held all the answers, the Church had commissioned Saint Thomas Aquinas to prove the existence of God. Why were we taught that proof? Wasn’t faith alone enough? God might not know it all, I said, He might just know a lot, the most. He might know more than everyone else but not everything. Maybe He was just doing the best He could.

“No,” Brother Trask said, “God knows infinitely more than the smartest person who ever lived. And His Plan is perfect.”

“But there can’t be an infinite amount of knowledge if only God is infinite.”

“You’re showing off. That’s called sophistry.”

It was a small consolation but I could tell that Brother Trask was intimidated by me, and all the more by my appearance, as if my being disfigured had conferred upon me some of the seven-foot
Aquinas’s genius, as if I were his descendant, slowly slobbering my objections to his own pedestrian misreading of the Proof.

“The world might be like a game God gave Himself for Christmas that He doesn’t play with anymore. We might be stored away in the basement of the universe with a bunch of other games He got bored with. If you know everything and can do everything, it must be hard to entertain yourself, hard to set goals and think of challenges. It must be impossible.”

“Nothing is impossible for God. The Word of God is in the Bible. You’re giving offence, Percy.”

“But God is perfect. You’d think the last thing on His mind would be critical appraisals.”

It was mean of me to speak that way to Brother Trask, but it was hard not to vent a little when I knew that a session with McHugh was imminent, McHugh to whom Brother Trask would report every word I said.

At home, my mother thumbed through my catechism.

“You never hear about Mary being kept up all night because God won’t stop bawling no matter what she tries. You never hear about her burping Baby Jesus or changing his diaper. Did Mary suckle God? Do you lactate if the Holy Ghost makes you pregnant? When did Jesus first realize that he was God? Did he start out with a sneaking suspicion that just kept growing on him, or did he not have a clue until Mary broke it to him at a certain age? It would have been like me trying to convince Perse that he was Santa Claus.”