The Son of a Certain Woman (30 page)

“Paynelope—” Pops said. He moved a step toward her, but I rushed to her, put my arm around her neck and laid my head sideways on hers.

“I didn’t mean what I said,” I cried, and it was true. But I also noticed how nice it was to bury my face in the soft scent of her hair and to feel her shoulders and her back, as they rose and fell, warm beneath my arm.

I stayed up after Pops went to bed and sat at the kitchen table while my mother told Medina that McHugh wanted Uncle Paddy to think I was beyond help, that we both were a pair of conniving,
unbalanced cranks, nuisances whom he should divest himself of before we started making real trouble for him.

“Something’s up, Pen. Something more than that. I’m scared to death about what McHugh said to Percy. The part about things not adding up. I can’t imagine McHugh saying that. I can imagine him thinking it but not saying it, especially to Percy. I wonder if he ever saw the two of us.”

My mother said that all they’d ever done outside her bedroom they had done at night, with the lights down low or even off, and even then they’d only done little more than sit beside each other and almost always remembered to close the drapes and curtains. I wondered how many times McHugh had seen her with no clothes on when she was alone by day in the house, walking from her bedroom to the bathroom or vice versa, her hair up in a towel as she waited for the tub to fill with water. I envied McHugh his peeping perch from which, through even the most basic of telescopes, he could see my mother as close up as if he were watching her through the window from our side of the street.

Medina rubbed her stomach and winced as if she might be sick. My mother put her hand on her arm. “He was just fishing,” my mother said. “Hoping Percy would let something slip. All the suspicions in the world are useless unless they’re backed up by proof.”

“That might be true in court, Pen, but it’s not true on the Mount.”

“He suspects what he wants to be true, which is that I give it away to any man who asks. If I knew when McHugh was watching, I’d let some stranger in and do him on the kitchen floor. That would erase any suspicions good old McHugh might have.”

“Oh yes,” Medina said. “You know the old saying: When in doubt, fuck the milkman in the kitchen.”

T
HAT
January, after coming back from Mass one Sunday, Pops announced that McHugh had told him that, unless my mother and I started going to Mass, Pops would have to find another place to live. If he refused to do that, he would have to find himself another job. Pops told my mother that McHugh had said he had never liked the fact that his vice-principal boarded in a house whose landlady was a lapsed Catholic who didn’t go to church and who hadn’t had her son baptized in
any
Christian faith. Now, given all the “trouble and upset” she and I had caused, the Archbishop shared his belief that what he called my mother’s “indifference” to religion might be transformed into true faith by regular attendance at Mass, and ultimately by the resumption of the sacraments.

“No,” my mother said. “Out of the question. Tell McHugh to tell Uncle Paddy I said no. I said no to his henchmen priests years ago and I’m saying no now.”

The following Sunday morning, as Pops dressed for Mass, the rest of us sat around the breakfast table. Every so often Pops poked his head out of his room and urged my mother to change her mind.

“If only for the boy’s sake, Paynelope,” he said.

“It was
because
of what McHugh did to the Coffin boy that Percy was beaten senseless. And you want us to go to Mass at his chapel?”

“What am I supposed to tell McHugh when I show up for Mass alone?”

“Tell him whatever you want,” my mother said.

“Why haven’t
you
told him something? You’ve had all week to speak your mind. He’s just across the road. You can reach him by phone any time you want.”

“Tell him that Percy and I are sick,” my mother said. “Tell him Medina’s looking after Percy because I’m too sick.”

“McHugh doesn’t give a damn about Medina.”

“The feeling is mutual, believe me.” Medina turned her back on him.

“And what about next week?” Pops asked my mother. “What do I tell him then?”

“All right, all right, we’ll go to Mass next week,” she said. “But
this
week I’m making a point.”

“What point?”

“I don’t know, Pops. Just go to Mass.”

We sat at the table, mostly in silence, until Pops came back about an hour later.

“No harm’s been done,” Pops said. “McHugh told me to tell you and Percy that he hopes you’ll feel better soon and that he’ll see you at Mass next week.”

“How did he look when you told him we were sick?” my mother asked.

“Like he always looks, Paynelope. He smiled. He knows you’re just trying to save face.” Pops said the Archbishop merely wanted my mother and me to
attend
Mass. She didn’t have to take the
sacraments yet and I didn’t have to be baptized. The Archbishop said he believed that merely attending Mass would have a salutary effect on me, who he feared might otherwise lose my way for good.

The next Sunday, all four of us went to Mass.

Medina had breakfast with us before Mass, telling Pops that since, like her, he was going to Communion “just for show,” he didn’t need to fast, but Pops said that, as always, he would wait until after Mass to eat.

“He’s probably afraid,” my mother said, “that McHugh will smell bacon on his breath.”

My mother and Medina wore nylon bandanas, my mother complaining that she hadn’t worn one since she was last in church and wondering why women had to cover their heads. She’d known women who forgot or lost their head coverings to lay napkins or even paper tissues on their heads. If the Church had its way, women would wear their hats to bed even if they wore nothing else.

“Modesty insists,” Pops said, adding that he didn’t know why men had to go bareheaded in church but he didn’t really care since he never wore a hat even in the coldest months of winter.

“We look about thirty years older with these things on, Medina,” my mother complained, looking at herself in the hallway mirror. “Heaven forbid that any man should be distracted by an immodest head of hair while he’s trying to concentrate on the death by crucifixion of someone who, two thousand years ago, got Himself into trouble on purpose by telling everyone He met that He was God.” Medina laughed.

“I’m not even sure I know how or when to genuflect,” my mother mused.

“You do it when you cross in front of the tabernacle,” Medina said, “and when you first arrive at your pew and when you last leave it. And you’ll remember how, don’t worry, although that skirt might be a bit too tight for genuflecting.”

My mother smoothed her skirt down the front and on her hips as though trying to stretch it. “I’ll just do a little dip. I think that’s all I ever did.”

“Should I show Perse how to genuflect?” Medina asked,

“No. I don’t want him blessing himself and genuflecting just to be polite.”

Only the Brothers, and the lay teachers of Brother Rice and other Christian Brothers schools on the Mount who wished to, attended Sunday Mass at the chapel. There were not many lay teachers on the Mount and only a small percentage of those went with their spouses and their children to the chapel instead of to the Basilica or one of the lesser churches, so the congregation in the chapel consisted almost exclusively of Brothers clad in black from head to toe but for the white collars at their throats. It was as if they wore not the colour of their religious order but that of their religion itself, the colour of mourning and bereavement, as if they belonged to a local, exclusively male ascetic cult whose leader, ostensibly the presiding priest, was in fact Brother McHugh, who joined them in grieving for the death of Christ and the lives they had renounced.

My mother said the chapel looked like a coven of warlocks. It
was
strange-looking, the near-homogeneous blackness of the chapel. It was even true that, as Medina observed, most of the Brothers had dark hair, as well as heavy five o’clock shadow complexions, as if the cult was so ascetic that even razor blades were in short supply, the Brothers taking turns with them until they were too blunt to shave the fuzz from a peach. “A band of hirsute brutes,” my mother called them, noting that even the youngest had hairy wrists and hands. They made for a strange sight from behind, that line of kneeling, black-clad Brothers, in the pews and at the altar rail, the soles of their shoes showing as they otherwise never did, the only part of what they wore that was less than spotlessly clean. “They must have their names sewn into their uniforms,” Medina said. “Do they always wear nothing but black?” My mother said that,
among themselves, they dressed more or less normally. “That’s good,” Medina said. “I hate to think of them all wandering about at bedtime in black pyjamas.”

Instead of the priest, it was Brother McHugh who at the door bade everyone welcome and goodbye, calling them by name: “Brother Riggs, Brother Hogan, Brother Cull, Mr. and Mrs. Macnamara.”

Pops began to introduce us to “Director McHugh,” but Brother McHugh ignored him. “Miss Joyce,” he said, taking my mother’s hand in both of his, patting the back of hers as he looked her in the eye so intensely that she turned away. I had never known my mother unable to meet someone’s gaze.

“Nice to meet you, Brother McHugh,” she said.

“What a momentous occasion,” McHugh said. “Percy a guest in God’s house for the first time in his life, you returning to it after so long an absence. It’s been, what, thirteen years? Something of a sabbatical. Why don’t we call it that?”

“Sabbaticals are every seventh year,” my mother said. “But call it what you like, this is where my rehabilitation stops. I’m here as a spectator, not a guest. The same is true of Percy. By the way, no confession or Communion for me.”

“Well. We’ll take things one at a time.” He turned to Medina. “
Miss
Joyce,” he said, slightly stressing “Miss” as if to differentiate Medina from my mother for memory’s sake, but also, it seemed, to emphasize that her singleness was different from my mother’s, hers being no one’s fault but her own.

“Percy Joyce,” he said, “the last male of the Joyce clan.” He was so clearly invoking my missing father that my mother couldn’t help herself.

“The last but for one,” she said, pursing her lips in a half smile. “You’re pretending to forget my prodigal fiancé, a.k.a. Jim Joyce. Call me naive, but I still set a place for him at dinner.”

Brother McHugh smiled at me in that wise, all-understanding way I had seen other Brothers smile at children, as if to say that
he lived already in the Heaven that the rest of us were only hoping for and therefore knew how laughably insignificant our earthly tribulations would seem to us from there. My earthly tribulations. But there was something else about that smile that didn’t so much betray his insincerity as invite you to apprehend it and so also to see that the near perfection of his mask was the measure of what lay behind it, the measure of the power of the man you were dealing with. It was this, I think, this glimpse that one was meant to get of the real “Director,” that made people look away.

“The Joyce family is welcome in my chapel, witnesses to the sacraments of the Mass. Perhaps someday you will be more than mere witnesses.”

He squeezed my shoulder, turning upon me an unblinking gaze. He seemed to think he had not impressed himself upon someone sufficiently to address them until they had looked away. “Don’t think you’re fooling me, because you’re not,” those eyes seemed to say at first, but it was more personal than that, something like, “Don’t think you’re forgiven for having betrayed my generosity just because you’ve come to Mass. Don’t think you can’t be snapped again.”

McHugh’s look made me feel guilty, made me feel not only that I had done something wrong but that I had wronged
him
, made him lose face in front of others in a way so blatant it must one day be addressed. “The Brothers at St. Bon’s have told me a great deal about you, Percy.” He smiled at me as if we had just met for the first time. “They say you have a gift for learning but have difficulty making friends, blending in.”

“They want him to be gifted
and
blend in?” my mother said. “I don’t think that’s possible.”

“A gifted person should not exalt himself above others,” Brother McHugh replied. “After all, his gift comes not from himself but from God.”

“Well, Percy is really not much of an exalter. I hardly ever catch him exalting anymore.”

“There’s no need to speak like that to Brother McHugh, Paynelope.”

“Don’t worry, Vice-Principal MacDougal, I’ve faced bigger challenges than Miss Joyce before.”

My mother put her hand on my back. “Come on, Percy.” She turned one last time to McHugh. “Don’t you think that a God who gets the credit should also get the blame?” I knew she was speaking of my face, but I didn’t mind.

As we found and slid into a pew, I watched Brother McHugh. His demeanour was one of exaggerated piety and gentleness. He moved about very slowly, his hands joined palm to palm in front of himself, nodding slightly, deferentially, whenever he caught someone’s eye. His chapel voice was low but sonorous, intelligible from a distance, a voice that somehow matched the early morning sunshine that obliquely slanted through the stained glass windows and the hushed sounds of congregants who, somehow both bored and expectant, made their way to their usual numbered stations in the pews.

Brother McHugh’s demeanour may have been deferential, but the other Brothers deferred to him as he walked about, making way for him, groups of them parting to let him pass slowly among them. He was not the tallest or largest of the Brothers or the most fit and solid-looking of them; that prize went to a square-shouldered and square-jawed Brother with thick, black-framed glasses that magnified his eyes. He had the most prominent and volatile Adam’s apple I had ever seen. I half expected it to pop out of his mouth. McHugh looked effeminate by comparison, forever brushing back his white hair with one hand, shaking his head slightly from side to side as if to rid his face of some imaginary fly, a little wattle of fat quivering beneath his chin. A small wooden crucifix hung from a black belt around his waist, but he was otherwise unadorned.