The Son of a Certain Woman (5 page)

“I live from paycheque to paycheque,” Pops said to Medina. “I’m not able to put a cent away. I don’t mind doing anything I can for Paynelope, I pay her far more than she asks me to. I do it for her and Percy, but why am I paying for you?”

“You don’t give me money, Penny does.”

“Which I give to Paynelope. Which means that I’m giving it to you.”

“I’m not stealing it from you, Pops. Penny can do what she likes with her money. If you don’t want me getting any, give her less than she asks for.”

“I don’t want to.”

“The point is that you
could
.”

“You’re nothing but a freeloader. I don’t care how you try to make it seem, that’s what you are.”

“And what are you, Pops? Remind me why you’re giving Penny extra money. Oh, I remember. Because you have a crush on her.”

When Medina was around, my mother had a way of laughing that made
me
laugh even if I didn’t get the joke. She opened her mouth so wide you could see her back teeth, but no sound came at first. She’d look around, open-mouthed, until she locked eyes with Medina and then she’d tip her head back even farther and let loose a high-pitched shriek. Pops hated it when Medina made my mother laugh.

The one thing that Pops and Medina didn’t fight about was God. My mother, Pops and Medina were all agnostics who had been born Catholic. Our house, my mother said, was “secretly a nest of agnostics.” Medina went to church but said she wouldn’t have anything to do with it if she didn’t work at a Catholic hospital and have to keep up appearances to keep her job. Pops said he wouldn’t go except that it was required of everyone who taught at Brother Rice. Even though he dismissed the Bible as “a book of fairy tales,” Pops went to Mass in the Catholic chapel at Brother Rice. Pops was vice-principal of Brother Rice, a position he achieved by an automatic line of ascendancy. A Christian Brother always held the position of principal at Brother Rice, and the longest-serving male lay teacher always held the position of vice-principal, a purely titular one because, were the principal to resign or be removed, another Christian Brother would take his place.

In the first few months after I was born, my mother stopped taking the sacraments but still went to church, partly to keep
Medina company, and partly in the hope of mollifying the priests. While I stood at her knee with my hands held in hers, she told me in gleeful detail of the exhortations to have me baptized that often took place in the church doorway as she was leaving Mass with me in her arms. In front of others who paused to listen and those who, passing by, pretended not to listen, my mother was berated by a succession of priests in a succession of churches for being everything from irresponsible to “a wicked woman” for withholding baptism from me. “You are yourself baptized and therefore saved, yet you spitefully refuse to allow your disfigured little child entrance into the Church of God.”

“He’s not disfigured.”

Sometimes they objected to my mother being single.

“Engagement is not a sacrament,” a priest said to her after I was born. “You’re free to marry.”

“Or not to marry.”

“Don’t you want what’s best for Percy?”

“The two of us are looked upon as damaged goods. The men who come sniffing around aren’t looking for marriage.”

“I don’t think everyone regards you as damaged goods. There
are
men—”

“Yes, I’m sure there are, but I don’t share your opinion that any husband is better than none at all.”

“I was thinking of someone in particular—”

“A widower from the Holy Name Society?”

“As a matter of fact, yes. A good man. You should resume the sacraments.”

My mother grew so weary of these weekly chastisements that she stopped going to church altogether. Eventually the priests stopped coming to 44. I knew early in life that Penelope Joyce was more or less universally regarded as a lost cause.

Pops tried to cheer me up by enumerating people from history and literature who had overcome disfigurements and physical limitations to accomplish great things. My mother told Pops she doubted that telling me my stain was “nothing” next to the disfigurements of others—real or fictional—would do me any good. She said that surely there were greater things I could aspire to than not being Quasimodo.

My mother, because she said this sort of thing in public and was seen arriving home laden with library books, was looked upon as a know-it-all, which is to say someone who not only put on airs by conspicuously pretending to know it all but also—never mind the contradiction
—did
know it all. Educated men were held in high esteem if their education was put to some practical, money-making, family-supportive use, whereas educated women, especially ones who looked like my mother, were said not to know their place and were not to be associated with by those who did. No amount of reading books or pretending to read them could make up for being an unmarried mother or being rewarded for promiscuity by having a child who looked like me, as if the sacrament of marriage would have healed me in her womb. “It doesn’t matter how many books I read,” my mother told me. “You’ll still be seen as a bastard and an eyesore and I’ll still be a woman whose big tits predetermined her to be a slut.”

As you may have deduced by now, my mother was an autodidact. Though a grade ten dropout, she could probably have overseen the studies of graduate students in half a dozen disciplines.

Second-hand books, library books, hardcover, paperback and pocket editions lay haphazardly scattered on almost every flat surface—floors, tables, countertops, chairs, even beds. Our house looked as if whatever else went on in 44 was incidental to the reading of books. There were books whose covers had been scorched by cigarettes, mementoes of near-miss house fires, books stained with the bottoms of cups and beer bottles, smeared with ashes,
sweat-stained with handprints, fingerprints. It looked as if we were not so much readers as we were hoarders of books. Pops and Medina nudged them aside to make room for their ashtrays, beer bottles, dinner plates and elbows as if the books were nuisances to which they were trying to adapt for my mother’s sake, for she was the only one who read them. (Pops said that he had once been a “great reader” but no longer had the “inclination” for it.) She owed a fortune in library fines, but no one else ever asked to borrow the kinds of books she liked, so the librarians forever deferred payment. I went with her to the Gosling Library on Duckworth Street where the librarians always smiled at me, so I may have been another reason that they more or less let her keep her books indefinitely.

Pops won her over to what she called the “look-what-Percy’s-peers-have-accomplished” strategy of consoling me for my face and hands and feet. She helped me bone up on the freaks of life and literature—Helen Keller, the Elephant Man, countless circus sideshow geeks, the “long-conked” Cyrano de Bergerac who, she told me years later, tried to fuck women to ecstasy with the very nose that prevented him from going down on them. As if she had not chastised Pops for doing so, she invoked the hunchbacked, bell-ringing Quasimodo of Notre-Dame, as well as the limping, lisping, far-too-slowly-dying Tiny Tim Cratchit, and Shakespeare’s misshapen murderer of twin princelings, Richard III. And Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, who, at the end of the book, lit out for some Arctic place that sounded much like Newfoundland.

“Books, books and more books,” Pops said as he surveyed the house. “A teacher dismayed at the sight of books,” my mother said, looking at Medina, hoping to coax a laugh from her, but it never worked, for Medina, who couldn’t read or write, regarded my mother’s books much as Pops did—as other people would a rival lover. My mother said she placed as many of the books face up as she could because it made them easier to find. Pops complained of the treacherously cluttered floors, books that slid beneath your
feet on the once-white shag carpet, and offered to buy her some bookshelves, but my mother declined. She would go about at bedtime in her bathrobe, which she held together at the throat and at the waist as, bent over, she peered to make out the titles, often picking up more books than she could hold in one hand, her robe falling open as she did so, revealing cleavage and brown thighs. I think she kept Medina and Pops at bay with books, kept them from her bed with this conspicuous show of book browsing, which as good as said she planned to read straight through the night. She said she was doing little more than what other people did with church prayer books, merely “following along,” but Pops said it seemed she meant to “follow along” from start to finish every book ever written.

My mother read late at night in bed, sitting up, chain-smoking Rothmans. When my door was open, I could hear her striking matches, exhaling cigarette smoke with a kind of sigh, turning the pages of the book that lay open on her lap. I’d fall asleep and, waking up hours later, would hear the same sounds, only by now they’d be punctuated with a cough.

I hopscotched from book to book, trying to see if I could cross a room without touching the floor. I always did it in bare feet, which stuck better to the books than shoes or slippers.

Medina, who had dropped out of school halfway through third grade, glanced at me when the subject of her illiteracy came up. I could see that she felt especially ashamed in front of me. During her two and a half years in school, she had only gone to school about sixty days. “I spent most of my time at home taking care of my sick parents and Jim Joyce,” she said.

“An urbane threesome, to be sure,” Pops muttered.

I tried to imagine what it would be like, living in a place where I could speak the language,
my
language, but couldn’t read a word of it. Words were everywhere. Simple things, like street signs, shop windows, phone books, might as well have been written in Chinese.
Medina had managed to master playing cards because they consisted of pictures and numbers. She had “picked up” rudimentary arithmetic so she could get by with groceries, denominations of bills and coins. Pops said she often didn’t know before opening the can what she was having for dinner because stores were forever altering the pictureless labels. “You don’t know what you’re having for dinner until Penny puts it in front of you,” Medina retorted. My mother functioned as a kind of telephone operator for Medina, who would call her to ask her to look up numbers she didn’t want to ask the operator for lest she be asked to spell someone’s name or that of a street. Also, Medina often came by with her mail so that my mother could sort through it for her, write answers when they were needed, fill out various official forms and applications, address envelopes. She brought her pill bottles so my mother could read the labels for her. “Penny knows more about me than I do,” she often said.

“The world is anxiously awaiting her biography of you,” Pops quipped.

My mother practically read the newspaper to Medina, the obits, the classifieds, advertisements—she clipped coupons. She scanned the entire paper every day to see if there was something in it that might be of interest or value to Medina. She was her personal interpreter, her tour guide through the foreign country of the printed word.

But one evening, Medina told me that not being able to read didn’t mean she wasn’t smart. “If the two of us were in China,” she said, “I’d be leading you around by the hand.” She claimed to have learned to get by using tricks that Pops and my mother knew nothing about. “I might come in handy someday when you’re in real trouble, Pops.”

“You’re right, Medina.” Pops was sitting, beer in hand, his back to the kitchen as usual. “Better to be illiterate than ill-prepared for a sudden relocation to China.”

“Whatever you say, Pops.”

“There’s no excuse in this day and age for not knowing how to read and write,” Pops said.

“What excuse is there in this day and age for not knowing how to wash your underwear?” my mother asked. “For not knowing how to iron your clothes without setting them on fire? For not knowing how many slices of bread it takes to make a sandwich? You’re a man, Pops. It’s a permanent disability that half the world is born with.”

“I was once as frequent a patron of the Gosling Library as you, Paynelope.”

“Like patron
saint
?” Medina said.

“No,” my mother corrected her, “not like patron saint. It has a different meaning. It means someone who frequents a particular place.”

“Patron. I’m not calling anyone a
patron
,” Medina said. “No one says the
patron
is always right. They line up like customers, just like at Woolworth’s. That old buzzard who works there checks them out like customers. So Pen, did you wake up one morning with the urge to be a patron of the Gosling Library? It would be a lot more fun to be a patron of the East End Club. Jesus. Eight books a week.”

“Tomes,” my mother said. “That’s what big books are called.”

“It must be nice to know what things that people never talk about are called,” Medina countered. “What are small books called?”

“There’s not really one word for them. Slim volumes, I suppose.”

“Slim volumes. Hmmm. What good do you think reading all these books will do you? I never hear anyone who works at the hospital saying, ‘Oh my, Medina, it’s been a long day. I can’t wait to get home to my tome.’ Or, ‘What are you doing this weekend, Mary?’ ‘Well, my dear, there’s a slim volume with my name on it just waiting for me on the kitchen table.’ At work they never stop going on about it, the Gosling this, the Gosling that. It’s crazy on Fridays, everybody trying to get off early before the lineup at the Gosling
starts. In the morning all you can hear is people talking about how they polished off too many tomes and what time they got to bed. Some of them can’t get through a day without a straightener, a few pages of a slim volume on the sly. You pick the hardest-looking books, Pen. Your books really look like
books
.” She picked up a large, thick, black book from the floor. “You could kill someone with a book this heavy. Look, it’s got a ribbon like a prayer book.”