The Son of a Certain Woman (47 page)

He looked over his shoulder as a car went by. I ducked so he wouldn’t see me at the little window. When I looked again, he was not on the steps. The doors of Brother Rice were closed and no lights were on inside the school. I went back to my bedroom and watched from the window, hoping to see him leave the school,
cross Bonaventure and come back home to 44. What a relief it would be to see him retrace his steps, hear him at the front door then scuffing through the house, kicking books aside as he always did on the way to his room.

But there was no sign of him. I watched for perhaps fifteen minutes. I decided to go across the street myself and try to get into the school. For the sake of appearances, so as not to look absurdly conspicuous, I put on a jacket over my pyjamas and exchanged my slippers for a pair of boots. I crept from my room to the front door, all the while watching the door of my mother’s room, listening for the sound of her getting up or lighting a cigarette. I opened the inner door of the vestibule, closed it behind me, opened the outer door. There was not even the faintest glow of morning in the sky. Seeing no traffic the entire length of Bonaventure, I left the front yard and began to run across the street. The lights of a car that was far exceeding the speed limit appeared on the Curve of Bonaventure. I jumped onto the traffic island just in time to avoid the car, which didn’t brake, though someone in it, a young man, stared blankly at me.

I watched the car until it dipped below the hill, then resumed my way across the street, running faster when I reached the walkway that led up to the lobby steps of Brother Rice. I tried the door. It swung open easily and I stepped inside. I was sweating and out of breath, and had to wait awhile until I was certain that the school was silent. There was a faint smell of cleaning liquid, but the marble floors were dry, so I assumed that the cleaners had long since left. I climbed the inner steps. The glass front wall of McHugh’s office was dark, though I could dimly make out the shapes of filing shelves and furniture inside.

There was just a small window criss-crossed with wire in the door of the lab, but I faintly saw the dim glow of a single ceiling lamp inside. I pulled on the handle, and when the door didn’t open I thought it must be locked. Then I pushed and the door opened
inward quite easily, barely making a sound. As the door swung to the right, I noted that the lab looked exactly as it had when Pops first took me there ten years ago.

At the desk, in his lab coat, the coat and his face eerily white in contrast to the all but unlit lab, was Pops. Spread out on the desk in front of him were a small brown bottle made of glass that bore a skull and crossbones on the label, the black rubber stopper of the bottle, a beaker half full of what might have been milk, a tiny lab spoon. There was also a piece of paper with two pens laid on it as if to keep it in place. Pops sat there in the dark lab, his hands in the pockets of his coat, thumbs outside, hooked on the pockets.

My mind raced, imagining what must have happened, Pops unlocking the door of the chemistry lab, closing it behind him and, without turning on the lights, making up his concoction, drinking it, sitting down at his desk on the dais, the blackboard behind him, the empty lab barely visible in front of him. How long had he sat there, overlooking the unmanned stations of the lab, goaded by my words into such a state of mind, picturing the scene I had described, the woman he thought of as
his
Penelope, his and no one else’s, not even Jim Joyce’s, in bed with Medina,
Medina
, the very person whom, above all others, he loathed, his unrelenting tormentor and detractor whom he had hoped, however foolishly, that he and Penelope were secretly in league against? How long had he sat there, wondering how it had come about that he had been undone by the words of a mere boy who knew what
he
had been too stupid, too self-absorbed, to surmise, the
real
secret of 44, the fact that he and not Medina was the butt of the ongoing joke of the house? If not for me, he might forever have persisted in his ignorance, might never have guessed the sort of cuckold the three of us knew him to be.

“Pops,” I said, shaking his shoulder, praying that what I was witnessing for the first time was someone passed out drunk from drinking, praying for that even though his eyes were partway open, motionless, seemingly covered with glassy film, and only appeared
to be looking at me. I ran my fingers through his hair, something I had never done before. It was sticky and smelled of lotion.

“Pops,” I whispered, and began to cry.

I took the beaker and the spoon, dumped the contents of the beaker into the nearest lab sink, rinsed out the beaker and put it on a shelf with rows of others. I washed the spoon under the tap and put it in the nearest drawer. I stoppered the bottle. What to do with it I had no idea, until, looking around, I saw a small security safe high atop the cupboards to the left of Pops. Its door was open and inside it were dozens of other small glass bottles, green, brown, black. I found a chair and, standing on it, was just able to replace the bottle in the safe. I closed the door of the safe and, as I had seen someone do on TV, turned the numbered dial several times until it clicked. I replaced the chair, washed my hands, was about to take the pens and piece of paper from the desk when Pops grabbed one of my wrists. I gasped as if I’d fallen into ice-cold water. “I didn’t do it, Percy,” he said. “I thought about it, but I didn’t do it. Afraid to, I suppose.” He let go of my wrist.

I was so relieved, I wrapped my arms around his neck and hugged him. He gently pushed me back, to give himself room to stand, I thought, but he stayed in the chair.

“I put everything away,” I said.

“Did you wash your hands?” he said. “There was enough in that glass to put me ten times under.”

“I washed them,” I said. “I was careful.”

“Good boy. Good Little Percy Joyce.”

“Let’s go home, Pops,” I said. “McHugh might find us here.”

“McHugh is asleep, if he ever sleeps. It’s three in the morning.”

“It’s almost four,” I said. “Let’s go home before Mom notices we’re gone.”

“I’m sorry I hit you, Percy. But everything is ruined. One way or the other, I have lost her. I almost wish the two of them could still go to jail for this. But they don’t put them in jail anymore. They
pretend to think they’re only sick and put them in the Mental. Not even that, I’ll bet. But they’ll take you from your mother, and her days of working for Uncle Paddy or anyone else will be over. She’ll end up begging on the streets, her and the other one. Maybe, wherever you go, you’ll be better off without them. Small wonder your father went away. Where would the two of you be if not for me? I can’t believe it. She was almost married to a man once. She had a child by him. Isn’t that her true nature? That other one must have seduced her. But I can’t help thinking of what you said, that your mother must have felt like throwing up every night after she left my room. The very thought of me must have disgusted her. The other one is jealous of me, always has been, I see that. And now I am jealous of her. You know, Percy, I carried that ring box around with me, carried it in the pockets of my lab coat, turned it about in my fingers while I was teaching class. I have gone home when I knew there would be no one there but your mother, and three times, as I watched her at her typewriter, interrupted her and took out the ring. Once burned, twice shy, I thought, but she’ll come around. My Paynelope will come around. But the truth is that I have for fourteen years been little more than a piece of human camouflage, an alibi, a decoy for the two of them. As you have been in a way, Percy. I don’t know what I shall do about this. Something must be done, of course, this sort of thing going on right under my nose. I had hopes. But I’m just the punchline to a joke about the Joyce women. The worst imaginable kind of cuckold, the deluded fool who doted on a woman who was thought to be holding out hope that her husband would come back, doted on her, waiting for the day she removed the engagement ring, the signal that she’d be receptive if I proposed again.”

“Everything will be the same if we don’t say a word,” I said. “Almost everything.”

“Will it, Percy?” His eyes brimming over with tears, he made a washing motion of his face with his hands—something I had
done as a child, fancying that, when I took my hands away, my face would be like that of other boys, clean, healed, wholly normal.

“It
will
. The wedding will go ahead—”

“But I’ll always
know
. Medina will always be there, always in the same bed as your mother. It will drive me mad.”

“Medina always knew about you and Mom. It didn’t drive
her
mad.”

“It nearly did. Something nearly did.”

“Shhh. You should let them think they still have a secret,” I said. “But we’ll be the ones with the secret from now on. You and me.”

“You and me?”

I nodded.

“Turning the tables?”

“Right.”

“Would you put up with such humiliation just to be near someone you love? Would you still love them even though you knew they loved someone else and thought you didn’t know?”

“Yes,” I said, “I would. I wouldn’t mind having visiting hours with a girl from Holy Heart. As long as she liked me. Even if she loved someone else. Even if she thought she was tricking me.”

“Even if she was using you for money in a farce of a marriage?”

I shrugged. “Mom likes you,” I said. “It’s better than a pity fuck. I might not even get a pity fuck from anyone. Ever.”

Pops smiled at me. “No one has ever recommended a course of action to me on the grounds that it’s better than a pity fuck.” He pushed back his chair and stood up slowly, as if it pained him. His hands on his hips, head hung down, he exhaled deeply and cleared his throat. “So. We’ll keep our promises, is that it? You won’t tell and I won’t tell. We’ll never say a word.”

I nodded.

He looked at me as if my marred face was somehow the measure of his anguish. “It’s better than destroying you and your mother. We’ll all be destroyed unless the wedding goes ahead.”

Together, we hurriedly left the lab and, seeing no one in the hallway or the lobby, went outside. We stopped at each possible place of discovery, made sure no one saw us, crossed Bonaventure, which this time was truly deserted, let ourselves into the house and snuck back to our rooms.

M
Y
heart sank when McHugh told my mother by phone that an extra review of the material we had covered in the catechism, one in addition to the final exam that would take place after she and Pops were married, would be necessary. There were, he said, some catechism questions that we had neglected to review. McHugh proposed that he and I meet in the room at the Basilica the next day after school.

When McHugh arrived about twenty minutes late and without his various catechisms, I assumed he meant to quiz me from memory. He sat opposite me at the table as always. But he already seemed as agitated as he had been by the end of our recent sessions. His elbows on the arms of his chair, he made a cage with his fingers over which he looked at me, lightly tapping his fingertips together, chewing his gum.

“What is Hell?”

“Hell is a state to which the wicked are condemned, and in
which they are deprived of the sight of God for all eternity, and are in dreadful torment. The damned will suffer in both mind and body. The body will be tortured in all its members and senses.”

“Why can there be only one true religion?”

“There can be only one true religion because a thing cannot be false and true at the same time, and therefore all religions that contradict the teachings of the One True Church must teach falsehood. If all religions in which men seek to serve God are equally good and true, Christ would not have disturbed the Jewish religion and the Apostles would not have condemned the heretics.”

“Very good. You haven’t forgotten.”

“No, Brother.”

“It’s wonderful that your mother and Vice-Principal MacDougal are getting married, isn’t it?” I nodded and he looked about, as though in search of others who would more fervently agree with him.

“She likes Pops a lot,” I said.

McHugh stood abruptly and began to walk around the table with his hands behind his back. “Well, I should hope so,” McHugh said. “They are about to be married. I should hope that she
likes
him a lot. I should hope her feelings for him match his for her.” It was the first time he had not objected to my use of the name Pops. “
Like
is too weak a word for how
he
feels about her. A wife should do more than merely
like
her husband, don’t you think?”

“I suppose,” I said.

He made a full circuit of the room in silence, stopping just behind his chair, facing me. He folded his arms.

“How do
you
feel about Mr. MacDougal?”

“He’s nice.”

“He would be a very lonely man if not for you and your mother. And me. I have known him since long before he met your mother. I don’t know what would have become of him by now if not for her and me. And you. He speaks of you as if you are his son. I think he wishes you were.”