The Son of a Certain Woman (51 page)

I told her that I
had
found someone, that it was just my luck that that someone was my mother. I told her I would want her no matter what I looked like, no matter if I was normal and it was
Penny
Joyce who looked the way I did. Though I shouldn’t have told her I would want her no matter what she looked like, because I didn’t know if it was true.

She was barely listening, though. She kept talking. She couldn’t stand the thought of me having to endure a life of that sort of loneliness, or of being barred arbitrarily from beauty. There were details that would have to be worked out. Logistics. Precautions. She hoped she wasn’t giving in to me simply out of guilt for the fact that, however unintentionally and unavoidably, she had made me as I was, issued me from her body with a warrant of scorn plastered like a WANTED poster on my head. She hoped that by giving in to my seduction, she wouldn’t harm me in some way, psychologically damage me or spoil me for any woman who, in the future,
might
, however big the “might” might be, want me just the way I was, a woman who, to my eye, was as beautiful or more beautiful than her. She couldn’t tell the future. It might turn out that I would be the first man to break things off with her. It might turn out that our affair would go on to the limits of life or the onset of any of an infinite number of circumstances that no one could foresee.

She said there was a certain symmetry to it. The ménage à quatre at 44 would soon be complete. She knew that my life so far had been nothing to write home about. I hadn’t had much, and not all that I’d missed was owing to my “unusual” appearance. There were an infinite number of unforeseeable things that could deprive two people of each other. She might be wrong about Jim Joyce. It had only been fifteen years. He might return at any time and demand I go with him. People changed their minds, or had a change of heart, for reasons they could not explain. And lives could randomly diverge. Given what went on at 44, given my circumstances and hers and Medina’s and those of “poor hapless Pops,” we were even more susceptible than most to hazard and happenstance. But if we were somehow parted without her having given me the one thing I had ever asked her for, the one thing no one else could or would give, because she didn’t understand why it meant so much to me, she’d have a lifetime of regrets; if, at the end of her life, she had still withheld from me, out of propriety of the
sort she had always flouted, even scorned, she would have regrets that would break her heart. She believed, foolishly, in defiance of the odds, that someday I would join my heart to another’s the way hers was joined to Medina’s. But she knew I didn’t believe it. Most people took it for granted as their birthright that they would find a person who was meant by Fate for them, but most people were wrong about most things.

She breathed out with a kind of gasp and the candle flame flickered.

“What we’ve talked about tonight we’ll never need to talk about again, will we?”

“No.”

“Good. I’m sleeping in the bottom bunk tonight.”

“Good.”

She blew out the candle.

I stayed awake for the balance of the night, but she fell asleep almost instantly. I listened to her breathe and drew in all I could of her perfume. I looked at Saint Drogo in the hope that he would keep at bay my curiosity about what, if anything, my mother was wearing besides that shirt. There might be nothing more between us than a few buttons that I could easily undo without even waking her. Maybe she was waiting for me to simply
take
what I wanted—climb down the ladder of my bunk bed and get on top of her while she pretended to be so surprised it would be too late by the time she put up a token protest or a struggle. She had
shown
herself to me. Now she had told me that, soon, she would
give
herself to me. She was sleeping in the bottom bunk wearing next to nothing.
What we’ve talked about tonight we’ll never need to talk about again, will we?
Which one of us had she been trying to convince? I turned away from Saint Drogo and peered over the edge of my bunk. In the darkness, I could barely make her out. She had pulled the blankets right up to her chin and was lying on her side, facing away from the wall. I couldn’t tell if her eyes were open, if she
was looking at me. But she seemed more childlike than otherwise, huddled beneath the blankets as if they were all she had to keep the world at bay.

It was strange to think of it, the three of us feeding off her beauty, each of us taking our turn when the other two were unaware. If she didn’t tell Medina, ours would be the secret affair,
our
affair, unknown to others, unmocked and unbegrudged by others, the only
truly
illicit affair of 44. I wondered if, once we began, I would become envious of Pops and Medina, so much more envious than I had ever been that I couldn’t stand it. I had worn her down as surely as McHugh and Pops had worn her down, as surely as Uncle Paddy had.

M
Y
mother pinned on me or hung around my neck all the holy medals, “talismans” she called them, that she and Medina could find, most of them left over from my mother’s school days and not worn since, medals of Saint Anne, scapular medals, the dog tag–like pair of Confirmation medals she had worn but once in her life when she was twelve and had never known the meaning of.

“He can’t wear those,” Medina said. “He hasn’t been confirmed.”

“I’ll put them inside his clothes then,” my mother replied. “You never know. They might help in some way. We’re fighting fire with fire.”

She fixed light blue Blessed Virgin Mary ribbons to the sleeves of my blazer and red Sacred Heart ribbons to my lapels, prompting Pops to protest that I was not a Christmas tree and Medina to observe that Pops was not my father.

My hair had been shaven the day before to brush-cut length—the
stain on my scalp showed through far more than usual. McHugh was not able to find what he called “willing and suitable” godparents for me in time for my baptism but said that, sometime in the near future, he would find two people and they would be installed by Father Bill in a private ceremony at the chapel.

McHugh decided that, to make sure we were on time and I was presentable no matter what the weather, a car would be sent to 44 to take the four of us to the Basilica. Two hours before the service was to begin, a black limousine drew up outside 44. It was driven by a deacon, one of the newfangled married kind, though he was dressed in black and said not a word from the time he opened the car doors to let us in to the time he opened them to let us out. Pops sat in front with him and wondered aloud why Medina was willing to ride in this car but not in any others.

“It’s an experiment to see if I can keep from getting sick,” Medina said.

“Not exactly the perfect time for
that
experiment,” Pops said, looking worriedly at me as I sat between my mother and Medina.

“Don’t get accustomed to going to church in this style, Perse,” my mother said. “There’ll only ever be one Big Do at the Big B.”

People were already entering the basilica parking lot through what was known as St. John’s Arch, a small Roman archway. We were met there by a trim, white-haired, anxious-seeming priest I didn’t recognize. He introduced himself to us as Father Hamlyn, “one of the pastoral assistants to His Grace.” Scurrying ahead, he had us follow him to a side door by the main entrance. It led to a waiting room where he left us and told us not to budge until he came back. The room was ringed with dark green leather sofas. A massive, expansive coffee table stood on an oval rug in the middle of the room. The walls, the same colour as the sofas, were cluttered with drawings and photographs of the various stages of construction of the Basilica.

“How did we end up here, Pen?” Medina whispered, suddenly starting to cry.

“Everything’s fine,” my mother said. “It’s just a necessary bit of fraternizing with the enemy. But the walls may have ears and eyes, so be careful. How are you doing, Perse? Nervous?” I nodded. I could hear my stomach rumbling, in part from hunger because, having fasted for Holy Communion, I’d had nothing to eat since midnight—almost fourteen hours ago—and in part from dread of what I knew was waiting for me.

“There’s no need to think of anyone as the enemy,” Pops said to me. “Being baptized will do you no harm even if you decide someday that you don’t believe in it.”

“Baptism can’t be annulled, can it?” my mother asked, looking at me as though at an expert in such matters.

I shrugged.

“Excommunication is the only way, I think,” Pops said.

I realized, when I heard the tramping of footsteps overhead, that we were just beneath the main floor. Judging by the sheer number of footsteps, the students were filing in to fill the pews of the Basilica. I had never heard such a prolonged silence from so many students of the Mount. I would have liked to see them, solemn-faced, not even whispering as, watched over by the Brothers and the nuns, guided by them to various parts of the Basilica, they shuffled along self-consciously in the echoing vault of the great cathedral that I had yet to see.

“It sounds like the whole city was invited,” Medina said, as if the size of the congregation held some sinister implications for the three of us.

“There aren’t going to be many parishioners,” my mother said. “Just some of the more prominent ones, bigwigs who couldn’t stand to be excluded from something called the Big Do at the Big B. I saw a television van out front.”

Under the scrutiny of so many skeptical students, who would surely not be fooled by a display of piety from anyone, under the gaze of McHugh and Sister Celestine, under the glare of television
lights and the all-recording eye of the camera, how would I get away with it? As if I had posed the question out loud, my mother said, “We wouldn’t have got this far if they could read our minds.”

Pops looked about to object, but my mother raised her finger to him. “No more stepfatherly advice from you,” she said. “For your money and your ring, you get me once a month. You do not get a say in how Percy should be raised.”

“The walls have eyes and ears, remember?” Pops said.

The sound of footsteps from above abated gradually, giving way to sporadic, nervous coughs that rang out in the silence of the church like rifle shots.

“The balconies must be full,” my mother said, just as the pipe organ started up, music blaring from it at such a volume that everything in the room began to shake.

“It’s like an earthquake,” Medina said, plugging her ears with her fingers. A choir that sounded as if it numbered in the hundreds began to sing “Come, Holy Ghost, Creator Blest.”

Father Hamlyn returned with warm, just-printed programmes for the three of us. “Let’s go over this,” he said. “It’s short and sweet. A lot is left out because we didn’t want to confuse Percy.” He looked at me and rattled the one-page programme. “Follow this to the letter,” he said. “But otherwise, just listen to what the grown-ups tell you to do.”

I took my one-sheet programme but as he went over it, I tuned out his voice. My mother, Medina and Pops appeared to be listening. Medina was staring at the programme as if she could read it.

Father Hamlyn left.

I wondered how many girls were waiting silently for me to arrive, watching to see what door I would emerge from; Percy Joyce with his port wine-stained face and swollen lips and oversized hands and feet that would disgust them just as much no matter how nicely he might be dressed or how recently his hair had been cut or how scrubbed and polished the rest of him might look. The girls
of Mercy and Presentation and Belvedere and Holy Heart, especially Francine, would all be watching. The Big B could hold three thousand as long as the fire marshal wasn’t one of them. I thought of the girls from the bay on all the buses I had blessed, of Vivian in flagrante on the wall beside the leering Saint Drogo, Patron Saint of Unattractive People. Whenever I’d dreamed of doing it with a girl, I’d thought of doing it from behind so she wouldn’t see my face. I thought now of doing it that way with Francine—Francine willing and wanton and glad beyond words to have been chosen by His Grace to be my friend, Francine making noises like the ones Medina had made because she so liked what my mother’s hands and mouth were doing.

So then I thought of doing it that way with my mother.

To my horror, the front of my slacks bulged with a hard-on. What if I came, or even just leaked enough to make a wet spot on the outside of my slacks? I tried not to think of girls or women, especially my mother, I tried not to think at all, but that didn’t work. My hard-on grew bigger. I felt it pulsing in my pants. I nudged my mother and pointed at my slacks. “Oh, sweet Jesus,” she said. “It’s because of you,” I whispered, “because of what you said last night.” “Do you have to pee?” she whispered back. I shook my head. Medina and Pops stared. Medina covered her hand with her mouth and Pops looked mortified.

“Can’t you make it go away?” my mother asked.

I shook my head.

“Why not?” she said, enlarging her eyes as a warning that I should not allude again, even in a whisper, to last night.