The Son of a Certain Woman (6 page)

“It’s to mark your page,” my mother said, tugging gently on the ribbon. “It’s a book of poetry. A lot of the books are poetry anthologies. Or the collected works of one poet. Tennyson, for instance. This one is an anthology of nineteenth-century English poetry. I never liked poetry when I was in school, but I do now.”

“Poetry? Like Valentine’s cards?”

“More like … Shakespeare.”

“Oh, Shakespeare. At work there’s no better way to start an argument than to mention Shakespeare. Pen, you’d be better off getting a good night’s sleep than staying up till dawn reading books.”

“Some people go to university for ten years or more after they finish high school,” my mother said.

“Yeah, doctors. I see them every day. They don’t see me.”

“Not just doctors,” my mother said. “Professors who teach and write books about the books they read.”

Medina sniffed. “Jesus, if you start writing books
about
books.…”

“She’s merely trying to better herself,” Pops spoke up again from the sunroom.

“Who will she be better than when she’s finished?”

“She’s got a good head start on you.”

“I never see you reading books, Pops,” Medina said. “What are you trying to do, worsen yourself?”

“I’ve had my fill of books.”

“So you’ve bettered yourself to the hilt, is that it?” Medina quipped. “You could read another thousand books and still show no improvement.”

“The time comes when one gives up on books.”

“I’ve often wondered what one does when the time comes.”

“You haven’t forgotten the books you read, Pops,” my mother said. “You even quote them from time to time. And you almost always get my allusions.” She smiled at him. Medina’s colour rose and I watched her eyes dart back and forth between Pops and my mother.

“He gets your what?” Medina asked.

“Allusions,” Pops said. “Literary allusions.”

“What the fuck are they supposed to be?”

“Remarks about particular books,” my mother offered. “The characters in particular books. Lines from poems.”

“It’s true,” Pops said. “I do get you, don’t I, Paynelope?”

“You
get
her?”

“I get her meaning.”

“Well, I get her too, Pops. A lot.”

“You’re secretly erudite?”

“I’m secretly something, Pops. You can be sure of that.”

“You’re the Abbott to my Costello. And I’m the Abbott to Paynelope’s Costello.”

“I’ve heard of Abbott and Costello.”

“Would you like to know who’s on first, what’s on second—”

“What the fuck are you—”

“Ceasefire!” my mother yelled.

“See. She doesn’t even understand TV,” Pops protested.

“I watch it when I’m here,” Medina said. “I haven’t got a TV. Don’t want one.”

“That’s it,” my mother fumed. “Enough, enough,
enough
.”

The three of them were silent for a while. I wondered if it would help if I said something.

“So what happens when you run out of books, Pen?” Medina asked. “Do you get a Girl Guide’s medal or something?”

“There are more books in the world than anyone has time to
read. In university they keep track of what you read and write and give out what are called degrees. You can get a bachelor’s degree, a master’s degree or a PhD.”

“Pops, you’re a bachelor.” Medina grinned at him. “Whoever taught you how to be one must have really known their stuff.”

“I spent one year at university,” Pops said. “That’s all you needed back then to be a high school teacher. Brother Rice’s principal, Brother McHugh, has a master’s degree in theology.”

“Religion,” my mother said to Medina.

“Oh my,” Medina said, “a master of religion, what does that mean now? He must have spent a long time bettering himself. What’s he better at than other people? My great-uncle was a master mariner. Never went to school in his life. All he could do was sail a ship across an ocean of ice without getting himself or other people drowned. But who would you rather have around in a storm at sea, a master mariner or a master of religion?”

“You’re not a master of anything,” Pops said.

“I’m better than you at talking. I can
talk
the arse off you.”

“Whereas I must confess that, often though I’ve wished that I had seen the last of it, I could not with the help of ten men remove your arse from this house by
any
method, least of all talking, even though I pay for the beer you drink.” Pops went to his bedroom and closed the door.

Medina sighed. “I don’t suppose you’ll ever give up on books, Pen.”

“No. But I could teach you to read. You’re so smart. You’d learn quickly.”

“So you keep saying. I’m not good enough the way I am, that’s what you think. I don’t want to know how to read and write. That’s what
I
keep saying.” She started to cry. She leaned her head on my mother’s shoulder. “Would you rather have a friend you could talk about books with?”

“No, sweetheart,” my mother said, tenderly stroking her cheek and smiling reassuringly at me.

“I can’t put things into words like you. Or even Pops.”

“It’s not always bad to be lost for words. Besides, you have your own way with them.”

“Oh fuck, look at me and look at you—”

“Don’t you think Medina’s pretty, Perse?” My mother raised her eyebrows at me.

“She’s really pretty,” I said quickly.

And she was, in a way I see now but didn’t then. I haven’t done her justice yet. She had large brown eyes and the kind of ski-jump nose that these days some women pay plastic surgeons for; frank, lively, smart eyes that made her seem ever-vigilant, never at ease. She was big-boned but not fat, each of the features of her face and her body slightly out of proportion with the others, so that whatever she wore never suited more than part of her. A sweater that fit at the shoulders was too long at the hem. A skirt that was tight and flat at the front sagged in wrinkles at the back. It was as if her body had been well designed but badly made. Her chin moved from centre to left, centre to left, when she was nervous or upset. On a man such a chin would have been dismissed as weak, as pointing to some profound lack of assertiveness, self-confidence. But it made her seem endearingly genuine, incapable of swagger or feigned poise. By not trying to create an impression, she created a sweet one. She was exactly what, at first glance, she seemed to be.

“She should be paying you for all you do for her,” Pops said when he came out of his room after the front door had banged shut behind Medina. “She takes advantage of you. You should charge her admission every time she comes to visit. Does she ever bring her own beer or thank me when she’s drinking one of mine? She treats the house as if it’s hers. I’ve never seen such disgraceful ingratitude. And you’re her only friend—”

“She’s
my
only friend,” my mother said.

“You have Percy, a family, a purpose, structure—”

“Medina’s part of all that, part of my family.”

“Well, I’d like to think that I’m your friend. Haven’t I been your friend?”

“You’ve been good to us, to Percy and me,” my mother said. “But there’s no need to put a label on your place in this household. You’re Pops. Our Pops. No one else has one.”

Pops smiled at her and then at me. I wondered what it meant, that smile.

I was at least blessed with a
mind
like my mother’s. “Hey, Perse,” she said, “shouldn’t you be solving something? A math problem? Differential calculus? Einstein’s beef with quantum physics?”

“I’m not as smart as you.”

“You will be. You’ll be smarter. Imagine how pleased your teachers would be if you could speak Latin by the time you start school next year.”

Not yet five, I was reading at the grade five level, had memorized the multiplication tables into the highest double digits, was adept at long division of numbers up to ten digits, could identify every country in the world on a map Pops brought home from Brother Rice that showed nothing but borders. I wasn’t especially interested in any of it, but Pops said that eventually my mind would find its focus. “Maybe not,” my mother said. “He might be like me, a jack of all things and a genius of none.”

“He’s his mother’s boy,” Pops said. “He’s smarter than anyone else his age I’ve come across. But he’ll have to progress through school like everybody else. Skipping grades isn’t allowed.”

“He’ll be bored.”

“It can’t be helped.”

Pops said that Brother Rice’s principal, Brother McHugh—who already seemed to be planning my future because, Pops said, he often spoke of me to him—guessed that I would, like my mother, turn out to be not a true genius but merely someone who could
easily absorb the work of others. Like her, I would never discover, deduce, figure out, invent anything wholly new. Pops informed us that Brother McHugh—or Director McHugh, as he always called him—said that at best I would be a receptacle for knowledge but not a finder of new knowledge. That he foresaw me as a parrot, a perfect register, a regurgitator of facts, an ever-expanding encyclopedia, a data repository, a potential quiz show prodigy, a human archive who would barely have enough sense to come in from the rain. He told Pops that he attributed my precocious knowledge to my having so much time to study, there being little else a boy like me could do. What else, he said, but precociousness would you expect from a friendless freak holed up in his house, whose hands and feet prevented him from playing any sport or game that required the least bit of athleticism?

“Who the fuck is this McHugh?” my mother said. Who the fuck indeed—but it’s too soon to bring him out.

My mother found books for me at the Gosling Library, classic English novels mostly, books by Defoe, Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontës, Sir Walter Scott. She read them aloud to me. She read to me a biography of Toulouse-Lautrec, a dwarf of a man the book told us, that was enlivened for me by the artist’s addiction to the services of prostitutes. “It’s so stupid,” my mother said as she pressed
Ivanhoe
upon me. “You really should wind up in some sort of class for gifted children. But what can we do? There are no such classes in Newfoundland. There wouldn’t be much point in you graduating from high school at the age of ten, anyway.” But I was glad. It was a prospect I dreaded, being pushed even further from the centre of normalcy—both gifted
and
disfigured, a student body of one.

I’d say that, all in all, it’s to my credit that I didn’t turn out to be an arsonist.

A
RCHBISHOP
P.J. Scanlon, Patrick James Scanlon, was known to many on the Mount as “Uncle Paddy.” The Archbishop’s limousine was called the Paddy Wagon. It went up Bonaventure at exactly four o’clock every afternoon, bound for the Basilica—coming from where I didn’t know, though every afternoon I knelt on the old sofa beneath our front room window to watch it pass.

I was under the Archbishop’s protection—under Uncle Paddy’s wing, people said, as if he had assigned me a bodyguard or let me live in the Basilica. But the only thing he did publicly for me was preach a sermon when I was four. He said in his sermon that he hoped it would not get back to him that anyone had been teasing or mistreating me. He said, “Hereby I say unto you, inasmuch as you have done it to one of these the least of my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” He was quoting Christ’s words as recorded by Matthew in the Gospels, but he was taken
to mean that anyone who interfered with Percy Joyce interfered with
him
.

“Percy is a special boy born on a special day, June 24, the feast day of Saint John the Baptist, after whom the Basilica is named, to whom it is dedicated and by whom it is blessed and watched over, and the day that the site of this city, which bears his name, was discovered by John Cabot in 1497.”

He said that for anyone June 24 was an “auspicious” day on which to be born, but especially for a person from St. John’s.

Many pointed out that, as there were 365 days in the year and about sixty thousand people in the city, it was likely that about 150 people of St. John’s had been born on June 24, so what made Little Percy so unique? His face, his hands, his feet? If those were the price of a Sermon on the Mount, I was welcome to all the sermons and blessings the Archbishop wanted to bestow upon me.

The sermon earned my mother and me a lot of resentment. People didn’t think it was right that the Archbishop should remove me from the daily school of hard knocks just because of my disfigurements, or be so obvious about playing favourites. There were several other unfortunates among the children of the Mount: a boy confined to a wheelchair because of polio, an epileptic girl, a boy with Down’s syndrome, a boy who had to gimp about with his legs spread-eagled by a pair of hip-high plaster casts connected at the ankles by a metal rod.

My mother was not on hand to hear the sermon, but Medina was. Medina, who told my mother that the Archbishop had several times referred to me in his sermon as The Little Joyce Boy, one word away from The Little Drummer Boy. The Archbishop’s sermon, Medina said, was not about me, Perse, per se. He merely used me as an example of the kind of person Christ was speaking of when he exhorted his listeners to treat even the supposedly lowest of the low no differently than they treated Him, for the low were
of
Him,
part
of Him, as deserving of respect and kindness as
His other children. But the Archbishop did, Medina said, spend a lot of time talking about me, me whom he said he had glimpsed one day from the back seat of his limousine as he was passing 44 and I was sitting on the steps on my mother’s lap. “The poor little lad,” the Archbishop called me, saying that he had a brother who now lived on the Mainland who had been born with a cleft palate and so he knew all too well what was waiting for me, unless everyone pulled together to prevent it.

Soon after seeing me, he directed his assistants to find out everything they could about me and my family. In his sermon, he portrayed my mother as someone who had turned away from God and the Church because she wrongly believed that God, by allowing her fiancé to abandon her when she was pregnant, and by disfiguring her child when it was in her womb, had turned away from her. But he predicted, even seemed to prophesy, that Penelope Joyce, the Prodigal Daughter, would one day return to her Father, and with her would bring Percy, whom he knew was not baptized and whose eternal soul was therefore imperilled with every passing moment. “The sooner their return comes to pass, the better,” he said, as if he was instructing the congregation to hurry near the day of our salvation.