The Son of a Certain Woman (10 page)

“Mom said not to take me outdoors.”

“She meant not to take you too far from home. We’ll only be outdoors for a minute. Then we’ll be indoors again. And we’ll get back long before she does. We can go out just as we are.”

It was April, but there was still some snow here and there and it got quite cold after sunset. He was wearing his lab coat, I a sweater
and a T-shirt. “We don’t need overcoats,” he said. “It’s just across the street.”

I had often wondered what Brother Rice was like and very much wanted to see it. I was five, so it would be nine years before I went there, but it was always
there
when I looked out the window, the very definition for me of the word “school,” a massive block of brick overlooking 44. I decided not to ask Pops what we would say to my mother when she got back. I knew she’d be able to tell just by looking at me and Pops that something had happened and that I would tell her exactly what before she even asked. I didn’t say so to Pops, however, in case he changed his mind.

Pops said Brother Rice was the biggest school in the province. It was the hub school that led the way in everything—sports, scholastics—and was run by the highest-ranking Christian Brother on the island. Pops said that Director McHugh was looked upon as the Christian Brothers’ equivalent of the Archbishop, which my mother said was like being looked upon as the infantryman equivalent of a four-star general.

Pops took me across the street, holding my hand, waving at motorists who honked and pedestrians who waved back. I waved and smiled as well. He led me to the front door of the school, which he unlocked with one of about a dozen keys he carried on a ring that was wound around his thumb. The vestibule was dark until Pops turned on one of the lights and a world that was entirely new to me burst into life. The floor and the stairs that led up to the night-lit lobby were made of gleaming black marble that caused our footsteps to echo in the empty school. Pops took me by the hand. “By day you can’t hear yourself think in here, there’s such a din,” he said. “It’s hard to believe it’s the same place.” We went up the stairs and into the lobby. I gaped at the large glass-encased sports trophies that were everywhere, on free-standing pedestals, on tables against the wall. Pops flipped another light.

“Brother Rice wins just about everything,” he said. “Director
McHugh makes sure of that.” He pointed to a floor-to-ceiling wooden scroll, about half of which was blank. “The honour roll,” he said with some sarcasm, pointing to the names etched into the wood. “From the year the school started up to last year. If your average is between seventy-five and eighty-five you get second class, eighty-five and up first class. Your name will be on this scroll someday, in the first-class list. When you’re old enough to go to high school. You’re probably smart enough to go now, but rules are rules. You’re going to be as smart as your mother.”

He pointed up to a large photograph of a smiling, vestment-laden old man wearing a skullcap. “The Pope. He’s in charge of the Church.”

“I know.”

“Some of the boys call me Pope Pops the First.” I laughed because I thought he wanted me to, but he frowned. “You wouldn’t believe how stupid most of these boys are. The average student is a dunce with a brain the size of a subatomic particle.” He pointed at the honour roll. “Even most of
them
are stupid. Why is it considered necessary for children to want to be something when they grow up?
I
never wanted to be anything.” He sounded as if he was living proof that childhood apathy was no deterrent to success.

“Like everything else, stupidity runs in families. When I see the family resemblance, when I see a boy whose brother or father was my student, I know exactly what to expect. There should be signs in front of houses all over the city: ‘Murphy and Sons—Makers of Idiots since 1823’; ‘Crocker and Sons—Proudly providing St. John’s with yahoos and buffoons since 1882.’ ”

To the right of the scroll, the walls were made of glass. “Principal’s Office,” a sign on the door read, and below that, “Director G.M. McHugh,” followed by a long line of initials, commas and periods. I dimly made out a desk behind the glass.

“Sometimes Director McHugh works late,” Pops murmured. “Even in the summer, but not tonight.”

“Where’s your office?” I asked.

“I guess the chem lab’s my office,” Pops sniffed. “McHugh has the only real office.”

He led me to the right, down a long dark hallway flanked by rows of lockers. About the midpoint of the hallway, there was a gap on the left side. A short flight of stairs led down to a windowless, heavy-looking black door that bore no plate or words.

“That door leads to the tunnel that leads to the Brothers’ Quarters,” Pops said, “where they live and sleep. I see them coming and going by that door, but I’ve never been inside the tunnel. The boys McHugh straps are taken to him through the tunnels.” I had an image of the Brothers living underground in a catacomb-like maze of torchlit cells, a dungeon-dim place from which they emerged each morning to join the throng of boys in the hallway. And another image of a boy being “taken to” McHugh through the tunnels like a condemned prisoner.

Pops said they had rooms with a toilet and sink but no bath or shower. There was a shared shower like the one used by students after gym class. The Christian Brothers took vows of poverty and chastity. They could drink and smoke but only in their quarters; most did both, though it was said that Director McHugh, who had a suite of rooms and his own shower, did neither.

A beer truck filled to the brim pulled up to the back of the Brothers’ Quarters every Friday afternoon at four and was empty when it left. “No one begrudges them a beer and a smoke,” Pops said. “It’s not as if they have much else. I suppose I live much like they do, even to the point of having just a room to myself which is within feet of the school where I teach.”

He showed me the cafeteria. “The Brothers call it the Mess Hall. I call it the Trough. The boys snuffle through their lunches like a herd of swine.”

We went to the gym. As he turned on each light, there was a thudding sound and then a loud buzzing that echoed from wall to
wall. “Basketball, volleyball,” he muttered, surveying the gym from the doorway. “I never heard of them when I was growing up. I still don’t know what the rules are. Don’t want to know. All we had to skate on was a frozen pond.”

He showed me the little library, the tiny music room. He saved the chem lab, which was just outside the gym, for last. He unlocked the door, which had one narrow rectangular window criss-crossed with wire. When he switched the lights on, we faced a raised dais with a desk and chair on top of it, books, papers and pens scattered about the desk.

“My throne, you might say. It can be Percy’s throne for now. Sit in the chair.” A makeshift set of wooden steps led up to the level of the desk. I climbed up, sat in the chair and looked out across horizontally arranged rows of countertops and sinks.

“Lab stations,” he said. “Each one has a gas valve. The last thing I do every day is make sure that all of them have been turned off. So I sit up there and preside over the boys as they conduct experiments that I assign. Everyone, including me, wears safety goggles. Someone always blows something up. The boys also call me Mr. Clean because I dress in this white lab coat. I believe some irony is intended, because my coat is never clean—there are stains which will never come out. But attributing irony to that tribe of trilobites may be giving them too much credit. I see it all from where you’re sitting, Percy, row upon row of nose-picking, cretinous, never-to-evolve baboons, and here and there among them a star—a star because the number of letters in some of the words he says exceeds four and because he doesn’t always join in when the other boys light up wind from their behinds with Bunsen burners.” Pops’ room at home, which I caught only occasional glimpses of through his partly open door, was full of chemistry “props,” likely one of everything that was in his lab: a petri dish for growing what he called “baketerial cultures,” a Bunsen burner, a broken microscope, a beaker, a pipette, a large brown bottle stoppered with a cork.

He fell silent and put his hands in the pockets of his lab coat, his thumbs outside. “Does your mother ever mention me, Percy?” He dropped his chin onto his chest as if he had fallen asleep.

“What do you mean?”

“Has she ever said, I don’t know, something nice or something bad about me when I wasn’t around?”

“Sometimes. But she’s just joking with Medina. They joke about everyone. They joke about me.”

“Yes, I know—I’m sure it’s all in fun, but your mother, she never mentions me to you, when the other one is not around I mean?”

“I guess so. I’m not sure.”

“So—she’s never taken you aside to tell you something about me?”

“Like a secret?”

“Something like one, I suppose. You tell me. What does she say?”

“She never tells me secrets.”

“That’s why they’re secrets, I suppose.”

“I suppose.”

“Does she ever speak about Medina when I’m not around?”

“Not really.”

“They’re as thick as thieves, the two of them. If you ever hear anything that sounds like a secret, let me know. We’re the men of the house. We have to stick together, right?”

“I suppose.”

“All right. Well, never mind. Don’t tell them I asked you any questions. Okay?
That
can be our secret.”

“Okay.”

“Here”—Pops reached into the desk drawer and took out a pair of safety goggles—“put these on.” He helped me, adjusting the back strap until it was tight. Then he put on his own. “You’re goggle-eyed. Look at your reflection in the window.” I looked like a snorkeller who had lost his breathing tube. “You look funny too,” I said, and we both laughed.

Next he took out what he called “a model of a molecule,” balls of various colours connected by wooden pegs. “This is a good one,” he said, “magnesium tetra dioxide.” He handed it to me. “You can keep it,” he said. “There are no labs in junior school, but you’ll take chemistry when you get to grade ten. Probably from me.” I thought of it, being taught chemistry at school by Pops who boarded with us. “Do you like the molecule?” he asked. “Yes, thanks.” But I wasn’t sure what to do with it. “You can make different shapes with it,” he said. “Different molecules. The sticks are the bonds that hold the atoms together. A bundle of atoms makes up a molecule. Atoms and molecules are too small for us to see. But they are what we are made of, nothing else.”

“Medina said that invisible atoms are going for sixty cents a bundle at the grocery store.”

“Ignorance. Blissful ignorance. And this from a woman who works in a hospital surrounded by science. Her knowledge of science, her notion of how things work, is on a par with that of some raw-meat-eating savage from the paleolithic age. We are millions of molecules, Percy. That’s all we are. One person”—he pointed at me—“gets a big mind. Another, like Medina, gets a small mind. You deserve no credit. She deserves no blame. We are what matter made us, and that cannot be planned or changed. Atoms don’t bind because they love each other or even because they hate each other. Or even because of animal attraction. They bind because of inanimate attraction. Like magnets. Medina, being single and having no chance of ever being otherwise, is a non-binding entity. Subatomic. Sub everything. You know—”

The lab door opened and in walked Director McHugh. I had never seen him before, but I had no doubt that it was him. Had he been wearing a wide-brimmed black hat, he could easily have been mistaken, in spite of his frock, for a priest. He had the deliberate, authoritative air of one, of a man who could say Mass, administer the sacraments, forgive sins or withhold forgiveness,
marry people, perform last rites. But a Christian Brother, even
the
Christian Brother, could do none of these. He could only teach and preside over other Brothers, other teachers. Yet he had the air of someone accustomed to having his arrival received with silence, someone whose entrance interrupted conversation and commanded the attention of all who were in the room. He wore a pin identifying him as Director G.M. McHugh. His hair was longer than that of any of the other Brothers, thick and white. It made him look younger than his eyes and his complexion told me he must be.

I laid the model molecule on the desk.

“Director McHugh!” Pops gasped, extending his arms to me and hastily lifting me down from the dais, removing my safety goggles then his own, and standing me square in front of McHugh, whom I expected to crouch down to my height or put his hands on my shoulders as other grown-ups did.

“I didn’t see you in your office,” Pops said, “or I would have stopped by. I was just showing Percy where I work.” He was so nervous he all but swallowed the last half of the sentence.

“No harm done,” McHugh said, leaving me to wonder if, when we arrived, he
had
been in his office, in the dark, looking out at us, knowing we could not see him.

“He’ll be a pupil here one day.” He spoke in a sonorous, modulated voice.

“Yes, that’s right,” Pops said. “I thought we could spare one of our model molecules, so I gave him one. It’s right there on the desk—as a souvenir—”

“A memento,” McHugh said, “to remind him of the day when he’ll return.”

“Exactly,” Pops said. “Percy, this is Director McHugh.”

“Hello, Brother,” I said, uncertain if I should have said “director.” I looked up at him. He said nothing. Slowly, very slowly chewing gum with his front teeth, his pursed lips moving slightly as if he
was contemplating some difficult decision, he faintly, appraisingly, smiled. Gum, I would learn in time, was his only “vice.”

“So this is the little Joyce boy who won’t be starting school until he’s six,” he said, putting his index finger under my chin and raising my face, which he examined at length, his eyes moving slowly about as if he was memorizing my every feature. My heart thumped and I felt myself deeply flushing from head to toe, stained and unstained parts alike. My arms at my sides, I was barely able to resist turning my face away. I suspected that I had last been as closely scrutinized by a doctor as an infant. I felt that my self-consciousness was for the first time being entirely discounted, as if Brother McHugh had a purpose for thus examining me that overrode any considerations of embarrassment or privacy. He might well have
been
a doctor who was judging how well the face on which he had recently operated was healing, staring at me as if he had just removed a set of bandages. “Hmm,” he said, lowering his hand but looking me straight in the eye. His eyes were blue, as blue as the sky on a cold winter’s day. “Little Percy, Little Percy. It’s not all that bad, is it, Vice-Principal MacDougal, not as bad as His Grace thinks it is and Little Percy and his mother
like
to think it is. And his hands and his feet, they don’t seem so oversized to me. Lobster-coloured hands. Not the worst fate in the world.”