The Son of a Certain Woman (45 page)

She read aloud the catechism entry concerning the sixth commandment, Thou shalt not commit adultery. “It covers a lot more than adultery,” she said thoughtfully. “It says that ‘even unacted upon, lust summons up the corruption of men, brings everlasting death and damnation on their souls, causes them to risk the laws of Heaven and the pains of Hell, begets in their souls a distaste for holy things, gives them a perverted conscience, a hatred for God
and possibly leads to a complete loss of their faith.’ Well, I notice when I turn men’s heads, so it seems to me that if I summon up the corruption of the nature of men, I should notice that as well. I don’t
feel
as if, by wearing short skirts, I bring everlasting death and damnation on the souls of men, do you, Medina? It certainly puts choosing what to wear in a whole new light. From now on I won’t say, ‘Is this a nice blouse?’ I’ll say, ‘Will this blouse cause men to risk the loss of Heaven and the pains of Hell?’ I’ll tell shopkeepers I’m looking for clothes that come with a guarantee that they won’t do that. If I wear my hair up, will it beget in the soul of the man next door a distaste for holy things, a perverted conscience, a hatred for God, and possibly lead to a complete loss of his faith?” She paused. “I doubt it’s healthy for a man to regard his wife as one of the main causes of the downfall of humankind. What a wedding night the bride would have.”

Medina got up from the table and threw her cigarette into the sink and turned on the tap. She stood on her toes and peered out through the kitchen curtains at Brother Rice.

“I’m sure McHugh has a crush on you,” Medina said. “I can see it in his eyes when he looks at you.”

“I am a woman in love with another woman, and I sleep with my male boarder because he pays me to and is better read than most, and I do this because, having been abandoned by my fiancé when I was pregnant, I can’t find a more reliable way to support myself, not to mention my son—so pardon me if it takes me more time than it would take the average person to get used to the notion that a neighbouring member of the clergy might be in love with me.”

McHugh had me recite the Confiteor: “I confess that I have sinned exceedingly.…”

“God knows all things, even our most secret thoughts, words and actions. Do you believe that, Percy Joyce?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Do you believe that there is nothing in the world more perfect than man because he is made to the image and likeness of God?”

“Yes.”

“Are you lying?”

“No, Brother.”

“Why did Jim Joyce go away?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes you do.”

“I don’t.”

“Your mother must know.”

“She says she doesn’t.”

“The other Miss Joyce?”

“She says she doesn’t know.”

“They must miss him.”

“They don’t talk about him very much.”

“You must remind them of him.”

“Maybe if I looked like him, I would. But I don’t look like anyone. Anyone could be my father. It might not even be Jim Joyce.”

“Is your mother unsure of who your father is?”

“I just meant that I don’t remind anyone of anyone.”

“You’re unprecedented, unique, one of a kind.”

“I suppose.”

“Thousands of people in the world have wine stains on their faces. You’re not unique”

“How do you know?”

“I looked it up. Do you think your mother keeps secrets from you?”

“No.”

“So you know everything she knows.”

“She knows more than me. But that’s not the same as secrets. Can I go to the bathroom? I have to pee.”

“Not yet. Listen to me. His Grace says he will never give up on either you or your mother. That means I must never give up, even
though I know that neither of you is worth a second thought. If you drop out of school, if you drop out of the Church, if Vice-Principal MacDougal no longer lives with you or works at Brother Rice, we will still not give up, because His Grace believes that God has charged him with the mission of saving Penelope and Percy Joyce. That His Grace singled you out as special cases long ago is common knowledge. You are both, for better or worse, very conspicuous. There may be no one left on the Mount but him who believes you’re worth the bother. But he thinks he must not be seen as having failed you or, by extension, the rest of the Mount, whom he long ago directed to look out for you as Christ Himself, in words and deeds, directed His disciples to look out for the least among them. His Grace believes that a congregation’s faith could be diminished if its Church-appointed leader were made to look like a failure or a fool.”

I sat up straight in my chair and stared at the brass buttons on the cuffs of my blazer. The whole room, McHugh included, was reflected in them. I was both thirsty and bursting to pee but didn’t dare complain to McHugh whose ever-growing candour I was growing frightened of provoking into an outright accusation against my mother and Medina.

“How many kinds of sin are there?” McHugh demanded.

“The number of kinds of sin is ten. First there is Original Sin, which we are all guilty of because our first parents, Adam and Eve, were guilty of it. A person born of a person with an impure spirit has himself an impure spirit at the instant of his conception. Therefore, all the people who ever were or ever will be born, except the Blessed Virgin Mary, bear on their souls the sins committed by the pair in which all the people of the world have their origin and from whom they are descended and related to by blood—Adam and Eve. Next, there is actual sin, of which there are two kinds—mortal and venial. The seven mortal sins are called the seven capital sins and sometimes the Seven Deadly Sins. The number of
lesser, or venial, sins is infinite, but all of them together are less grave than a single mortal sin. Can I please go to the bathroom?”

My mother had other worries besides being discovered: She said she hoped I was holding up well against McHugh’s relentless catechizing and I would not come home one day a broken, indoctrinated boy, convinced of my utter corruption and terrified that I would die before a priest could pour a cup of water on my head and thereby pardon me for an ancient crime attributed to two people universally known to have never existed—the crime of having sex and thereby creating a child.

“At least women like Medina and me don’t
add
to the amount of original sin in the world,” my mother said as I sat with them at the table. She pointed out that the history of the world would have been very brief if the first two humans God created had been women, lesbians or not. After their expulsion from Eden, there would have been a very brief, uneventful historical period followed by the quiet extinction of the human race and the non-invention of religion.

“Original sin. You inherit it by being born. You didn’t conceive yourself, or give birth to yourself but, because it began with sex, every birth there ever was needs a fall guy, so it’s you. We’re born with more guilt coursing through our veins than blood. The second sin is your first breath, and so it goes. You detox in confession every month or so, only to come out and get hooked on guilt again.”

She pored over a copy of the fourteen-hundred-question catechism that she’d borrowed from the library.

“You think you have it tough, Perse, but it could be worse. There are subcategories within subcategories, answers with the ring of divine authority to the most bizarre hypothetical questions: If you suffer amnesia and forget to confess a mortal sin, do you go to Hell? No. But if your memory comes back, you must not only
confess the mortal sin but reconfess every sin you’ve committed since you inadvertently forgot the mortal sin, no matter how long your amnesia lasts, or else you do go to Hell.”

She leafed slowly through the pages of the catechism, hardly aware, it seemed, of the cigarette between her fingers.

“How they love numbers—I suppose because they’re exact, precise. They seem to forbid debate. What are the six of these, the seven of that? And they’re very big on the whole pecking-order thing. I mean, they rank everything and everyone. There are separate hierarchies for the living, the dead, the angels and the saints—but the Holy Mother is the One and Only. The Blessed Virgin Mary. Born of a woman but without the taint of original sin. She was given a get-out-of-guilt-free card, and a get-out-of-life-alive card—she never died, just went straight up into Heaven in the pink of health. There is a pontiff but no nuntiff. Nuns have no upward mobility. Why not have a women’s Vatican led by an über-nun elected by her peers on the advice of the Holy Ghost, a Most Holy Nun whose every utterance is true and through whom God speaks like the greatest of ventriloquists? How about some arch nuns, a College of Cardinelles?”

“Just what we need,” Medina said, sipping on her beer, “more nuns.”

“Listen to this: Saint Thomas Aquinas is a Dr. Angelicus, Saint Anselm a Dr. Magnificus, Saint John of the Cross a Dr. Mysticus. Men must not be as angelic, magnificent or mystical as they used to be. Not a woman to be found among the eternal host of angels, who, though supposed to be genderless, all bear the names of men—Michael, Gabriel, Raphael and that nameless guy who wrestled all night with Jacob. In pictures, they all have lots of muscles and long hair—I swear they look like beatnik bodybuilders.”

I was glad to see a smile on Medina’s haggard-looking face. My mother smiled back at her and caressed her cheek with the back of her hand. She pursed her lips in a kiss that she blew at me.

“As far as I can tell,” she said, pushing aside the catechism, “God Himself is guilty of the Seven Deadly Sins. The Wrath of God: no explanation necessary. Pride: He created millions of angels to praise Him in song for all eternity. Envy: nothing raised His wrath more than the worshipping of other gods. Sloth: everything is effortless for Him. Gluttony: hard to make a case for that against a God who, being all-powerful, requires neither food nor drink. But He didn’t have a worry in the world before He made, well, the
world
, so He must be a glutton for punishment. Greed: He created us so He could share Himself with us, an act, we are told, of immense generosity. And if you have boundless self-replenishing wealth, no overhead, no upkeep, no mortgage, no payroll and no dependants, how generous can you be? Lust: the sole taint of Paradise and ever since the driving force of humankind. But He made everything, including everything in Paradise, so He must have come up with lust so that Adam and Eve could come down with it.”

Medina and I laughed as my mother continued her avalanche of forbidden fruit. She stared off into space, composing on the fly:

“When it comes to women, the Church pretty much puts all its eggs into one basket: the eggless Blessed Virgin Mary.

“So imagine that the most famous of all virgins was a man. The Blessed Virgin Gary, the only man to have ever made a woman pregnant while maintaining his virginity. The Angel Gabriel appears to Gary and tells him that even though he long ago vowed to give himself to no one but the Church, his wife will soon be made pregnant during a middle-of-the-night visit from the Holy Ghost. Imagine that Gary’s story is as widely believed at first as Mary’s must have been. His wife, Josephine, gives birth to a baby girl—Jessica. The Holy Trinity would then be God the Father, God the Daughter and God the Holy Ghost. At thirty-three, Jessica Christ, after choosing twelve women as Apostles, will be crucified and ascend into Heaven to redeem the sins of humankind. So now everything is changed. There are no early Church
Fathers, only early Church Mothers. Only women can be popes—and therefore, at any one time, the only infallible person on the planet is a woman known as Mama Pope Trish. Pope Ramona. Pope Donna the Twenty-third. Only women can be priests and forgive men’s sins. Or withhold forgiveness from men. Only women get to listen to the confessions of lust-drunk adolescent boys. Men receive penance and Communion exclusively from women, cannot marry without the permission and blessing of a woman. Only men must cover their heads in church, and they must sit and listen while women preach at them in church for the immodest way they dress. A way is invented to determine if a man is a virgin. There is no longer a way to prove that a woman is a virgin. Our Lord of the Immaculate Conception.”

“If McHugh is watching from his suite through binoculars,” Medina said, “I hope he can’t read lips. He might be wondering what we’re all laughing at.”

“Let him wonder,” my mother said. “So let’s see, what’s left? How about the sacraments:

“Baptism: The Sacrament That Almost No One Remembers. (I don’t think you’ll ever forget yours, Perse.)

“Confession: The Sacrament of Perfunctory Duplicity and Repentance for Fictitious Misdemeanours.

“Communion: The Sacrament of Looking as Humbly Holy as an Athiest Like Pops. (He calls himself an agnostic but he’s an atheist.)

“Confirmation: The Sacrament That No One Understands the Purpose of.

“Holy Orders: The Sacrament That Has Nothing to Do with Women.

“Matrimony: The Sacrament That Precedes Priest-Approved Sex.

“Last Rites: The Sacrament That No One Remembers. Excluding false alarms of course.

“The Seven Deadly Sins should be called the Seven Sinful Hobbies.

“Fourteen hundred catechism questions and only Ten Commandments. Ten is a far better number to conjure with than fourteen hundred. If Moses had come down from Mount Sinai with Fourteen Hundred Catechism Questions, who would have taken him seriously? He would have needed two hundred and eighty stone tablets and who knows how many times he would have had to go up and down that mountain while the Hebrews were losing patience with him at the bottom.”

“You better be right about there being no Hell, Pen,” Medina said.

“I’ll risk it. I’m so tired of this whole Mary-meek-and-mild thing. Mary Queen of Peace. Mary Queen of the World. Mary ever-patient, always in a good mood. She must have had her bad days just like everybody else. Why not name a school the Vicious Virgin Mary? Mary of the Monthly Cramps. Mary Who Could Be a Real Bitch. Mary Fit to Be Tied. Mary Bored Out of Her Mind. Mary Fed Up to Here. Mary Without a Smoke or a Beer in the House. And the orders of nuns should have very different names: the Sisters of Eternal Aggravation, the Sisters of Celestial Assault.