The Son of a Certain Woman (32 page)

There are many things that, barring apocalypse, will always be taboo: murder, rape, molestation, tyranny and torture. And so on. Of taboos, mine is not the first, much less the last. It is anomalous, not typical, even as taboos go. There’s no point in asking if it’s right or wrong. It happens by the confluence of circumstances, every one of which is unlikely, and that very confluence beggars belief. Just remember, I’m the one who said my mother was a prostitute for sleeping with the man who kept a roof above my head. I am not some sexual iconoclast. My case is just a tad more hopeless than that of the few among us who have truly been in love. My story is not an alibi, not a euphemistic closing argument in defence of breaking what many people call the worst taboo.

Standing on Signal Hill, I found I could look down at the ruins of the old smallpox sanatorium, beyond which the lone and level sea stretched far away. It was easy to imagine that there was no far shore, that all of us had come to the top of the hill as though to the edge of a never-ending universe of water, the origin of all four winds, the realm of Aeolus. Guglielmo Marconi, second only to Ben Franklin among the famed flyers of kites, gave Signal Hill its name when he flew his kite, antenna attached, from the top of the hill, and claimed to hear, in Morse code, the letter
S
sent by wireless telegraph from Clifden, Ireland—supposedly the first transatlantic telegraph transmission. Marconi’s claim was contested by
Thomas Edison, who called him a hoaxster, but Marconi stuck to his story. His credibility was somewhat weakened years later when he became one of Italy’s most decorated pre-war Fascists, honoured by Benito Mussolini agreeing to be the best man at his wedding.

Far down below, I could glimpse the Purity Factory, makers and purveyors for decades of what my mother called “cram,” cheap confections that I loved as much as other children did. In what looked like liquor bottles came alcohol-free, distilled syrup so sweet you had to mix it with four parts water; children added ice cubes to it and strolled about sipping, like grown-ups, from tumblers of what looked like Scotch. There were Purity raisin squares that were more like raisin sandwiches, raisins layered between two goo-soaked slabs of pastry. Red jelly balls—balls of cake with centres of generic jam. Jam-jams and lemon creams. Sweet bread, also called excursion bread, which looked like loaves of hard tack but was not as hard and split into slate-like pieces when you pierced them with a knife. Peppermint knobs that looked like white, pink-striped bumblebees. Candy kisses—peanut butter, rum and butter, butterscotch, coconut, banana. I loved them all.

A silent, blank-faced young man clad in a white T-shirt and blue jeans walked about among us, holding a sign that read:

No one paid him much attention. Nationality. “You speak to me of nationality … and religion.” A net harder for some to fly by than for others. I too could summon up no interest in the cause that he was mourning. Born after confederation with Canada, I had never been what most of these people thought of as a “real
Newfoundlander.” But even for the old Newfoundlanders there had been no pledge of allegiance, no exam such as immigrants have to pass these days, no oath to swear. Canadian citizenship required nothing of them. It was conferred upon them while they slept on March 31, 1949. They went to bed Newfoundlanders and woke up Canadians. It must have been like being baptized without giving your consent. Now they sat in mute bewilderment in front of television sets that brought them news from a foreign country. It would have made little difference to most of them if they were told they were citizens of Patagonia. They couldn’t opt out, couldn’t be conscientious objectors. Not unless they left, exiled themselves and lived their lives in unacknowledged protest of defeat.

Most, but not all, parts of “the bay” were outports situated on the coast. To townies, the bay was a nebulous elsewhere in which they didn’t have much interest. “The bay” had always been, would always be, another country. The unconsolidated “bay,” settlements, strung out like Christmas lights on the perimeter of Newfoundland and so widely scattered that each one knew little more of its nearest neighbours than the names of the fabled places they lived in, places never seen by most that existed as much in rumour as in fact, as real to those who lived elsewhere as London was to me. The real bay was the one you could not get to from St. John’s except by boat—hypothetical boat, for demand for such a thing was non-existent.

I looked down at the place from which The Attempt was often made. St. John’s was the starting point, or finishing point, for world record–seeking crossers of the Atlantic. There was a monument somewhere down there to Alcock and Brown, who had taken off from Lester’s Field in their Vickers Vimy bomber and crash-landed safely in a bog in Clifden, Ireland, becoming the first aviators to survive a non-stop transatlantic aircraft flight. There was no monument to the man from Minnesota who tried to water-ski from St. John’s to Clifden, only to die of hypothermia less than a mile
from the Narrows when the boat that was towing him broke down. An endless variety of unlikely mariners made The Attempt in unlikely vessels. A man in a one-man submarine was given a rousing send-off to what proved to be the bottom of the ocean, for no trace of him or his craft was ever found. The Attempt was unsuccessfully made by hot-air balloonists, most of whom were kept from freezing to death by their hydrogen-heating flame propellant, which immolated one man in mid-air. He fell, flaming, Icarus-like, into the ocean, thankfully out of range of spectators, his unmanned balloon travelling for seventy miles before ditching on the deck of a cruise ship bound for Greenland. Rowboats, canoes, kayaks, leg-powered bicycle kites, near-weightless gliders and a host of mini dirigibles all failed in The Attempt.

The City of Percy Joyce.

The City of Percy.

I am Percy Joyce, lord of all that I survey. I felt like shouting it out loud. How quickly word would spread that I’d been seen and heard asserting my identity. Anyone who knew me would have been more amused than surprised to hear me claiming suzerainty over all I gazed upon. Percy Joyce, King of Kings. Look, ye Mighty, on my works and despair. Still, I thought, better not to swell the legend in case my compos mentis was ever called into question, as, under certain circumstances, it might one day be.

This is my city, awarded to me by my mother, Penelope, as a birthday present. This is my day and my city, mine and John the Baptist’s.

This is my city, as is whatever can be seen from any part of it: the harbour, buffered from the sea by the south-side hill known as the Brow; the city on the north side of the hill with its almost fully blooming, house-camouflaging trees; the Basilica atop the Mount in the centre of the ridge; the towering Confederation Building to the east, topping yet another hill, affrontingly, undeniably there for every citizen of anti-Canada St. John’s to see.

Omphalos
. It is the Greek word for navel, belly button. The centre of the universe, the site of the Delphic Oracle that spoke in fateful riddles. My omphalos was surrounded by a stain, my belly button like the bull’s eye of a target.

A
FTER
the first day of school in the winter of grade nine, I went down to the parking lot at Holy Heart, just down Bonaventure from St. Bon’s, where the yellow buses for various parts of the near-bay—essentially any place that was not St. John’s but within driving distance of it—lined up in vertical and horizontal rows, the smoke from their idling exhaust pipes rising straight up in the air on the coldest days.

Having given up hope of ever achieving credibility among the townies, I was desperately seeking out new territory and possible friends. For the new boys and girls who came to Holy Heart and Brother Rice by bus because there were no high schools where they lived, I was still something of a novelty—just the sort of exotic one would expect to find in a place so big that it must have one of everything. Many of the bay crowd had been raised to think of St. John’s as a place that was laughably full of itself. They made it clear they were only going to school in St. John’s because
they had to, and planned to have no more to do with the city or their new schools or the townies than they had to.

To them, I was the measure of how short St. John’s fell of being the great place the townies liked to think it was—a place of boys with purple faces, swollen, misshapen lips, hands and feet too big for the arms and legs they were attached to. If that was what a cursory glance turned up when they arrived, the place was not worth investigation.

But for me, they were a sub-faction who kept to themselves and didn’t know my full history and with whom I might therefore be able to make a “fresh start” of the sort I had thought I might make when I began school.

I wandered in and out among the buses, conspicuous because of my face and because of being an incongruous townie whose blazer identified him as being from St. Bon’s, which even the bay crowd knew was not a high school.

“What do
you
want, Jam-Jaws?” a boy in a Rice blazer asked me, rolling down a window of one of the buses.

“My mother works in Holy Heart,” I said.

“His mother is a nun,” the boy said to the others. “You’re what she got for getting knocked up.”

Boys and girls crowded his side of the bus, looking out the windows at me.

“Some ugly mug on you?” a girl said, making it sound like a question. I nodded as if she had not insulted me but had merely said what no one knew better than I did was a truth I no longer cared about.

“Yeah,” I said, nodding and looking about as if my face had long since ceased to be uppermost in the minds of anyone who knew me. “Where does this bus go? How come it doesn’t say on the buses where they go?”

“Portugal Cove,” the girl said, adding, “What’s your name?”

A girl who didn’t know my name. I hoped there were many.

“Percy Joyce,” I said.

“Is your mother a teacher?”

“No.”

“Then what does she do at Holy Heart?”

“Oh. She’s the secretary in the principal’s office.”

“There are two secretaries in Sister Celestine’s office, and they’re both older than my grandmother,” the girl said.

“I meant my mother used to work here. I used to come up here and wait for her to get out of school.”

“So what are you here for now? What are you standing out there in the cold between the buses for? Looking for a girlfriend, I suppose. Good luck!”

Some of the boys and girls got off the bus and crowded around me. I said I had a girlfriend but she went to Holy Cross, an all-boys school on Patrick Street. She was the only girl who went there, the only girl in the history of Newfoundland who’d ever gone to an all-boys school. Her father taught there, he made her go there so that he could keep his eye on her, her name was Tina. I saw it in one girl’s eyes, the hesitation, the uncertainty, for me a near moment of being, in the best sense, exceptional. It soon vanished, as it always did. “You’re full of shit,” she said, but at least she was laughing as she got back on the bus and drew her window closed. I saw her huddle with some other girls and point at me through the window.

The next day, I walked among the maze of buses, happy, even under such circumstances, to be the centre of attention. Though the drivers ordered them not to, the children got off the buses, surrounding me, grinning, their hands in their coat pockets. I told them about Sister Mary Aggie and the Mass cards of Saint Drogo, the Patron Saint of Unattractive People, all of which they took to be more lies, but I didn’t care. “Tell us another one, Percy,” they shouted. I told them my father was a missionary doctor in Africa and that on one of his rare visits home he had passed on to me a
fever that he had contracted from a Nigerian tribe. “My father has a face like mine,” I said.

Word of what I was telling the bus children somehow got back to my mother. “You should try to find friends you don’t have to impress by lying to them, Perse,” she said.

“Or,” Pops said, “he could comb the woods in search of ostrich eggs.”

I could tell by the look on my mother’s face that she knew Pops was right. But I was, for a while, something the bay boys and girls looked forward to, a highlight of their day. By that time, the townies had long since dispersed to their homes, or their after-school hangouts, places where they could smoke without being seen from any of the Seven Schools. The buses parked in exactly the same formation every afternoon, each bus in exactly the same place—the Goulds, Petty Harbour, Kelligrews, Portugal Cove, Torbay, Kilbride—and when they departed for all those places that I’d never set eyes on, the traffic on Bonaventure stopped by a traffic cop at 3:45 every afternoon to make way for the caravan of buses, I’d be left there in the empty parking lot, waving to the children in the rear of the bus to Kelligrews, which always pulled out last.

When the traffic cop told me to stand clear of the buses, I posted myself just up Bonaventure from Holy Heart, where I redundantly guided the buses on their way, waving my hands and arms exactly as the policeman did, ignoring him when he told me to go home.

“Have you been to Torbay, Percy?” a red-haired boy named Sully asked me through the open rear window of the Torbay bus one afternoon.

“No.”

“You should come with us.”

“How will I get home?”

“You can come back with us tomorrow morning.”

“But what about tonight?”

“We’ll all sleep on the bus tonight. We’ll leave the engine on so it won’t be too cold, but you might have to snuggle up with a girl if she needs someone to keep her warm. It’ll be like camping out. We do it all the time. Cyril, he’s the driver. He doesn’t mind, just ask him.”

I knew it was a ruse, but merely because I liked the sound of camping out with the Torbay boys and snuggling up with a warmth-seeking girl, I went to the open bus door and asked Cyril, a short, white-T-shirt-wearing man with rheumy eyes who reeked of rum, if he would take me to Torbay and let me spend the night in his bus with the other children.