The Son of a Certain Woman (2 page)

I know you’re wondering if a certain other part of me was oversized. It wasn’t, but that didn’t stop people from assuming that it was, or speculating, or gossiping about it, and of course it didn’t stop me, once I reached a certain age, from
claiming
it was oversized.

My large hands looked as though they were stained with blood, front and back, and flopped about—or so it seemed to me—on the ends of my wrists like empty gloves attached by a string lest I lose them. Hairless hands the size of a grown man’s, a butcher’s begrimed and exfoliated by his profession, they might as well have been grafted onto me. They barely fit into the pockets of my slacks and my blazer, and when I withdrew them, my pockets turned almost completely inside out. I always looked as if I were wearing shoes or boots that were far too big for me, boots handed down from a father or much older brother because my parents couldn’t afford to buy me ones that fit. Hands and feet like fins I had, except there was no webbing between the fingers and the toes. My red feet made it look as if I’d stood for far too long in ankle-deep, scalding water. I had a swollen lower lip of the sort associated with a lack of intelligence and that made me speak as if there was still some freezing left from a trip to the dentist’s. What did the people of St. John’s see when they looked at me? A slobbering, jabbering aberration, I suppose, whose mind, character and personality must likewise be aberrant, altered for the worse by whatever “something” had marred me from the moment of my conception, some God-willed conflux of mishaps in my makeup, in the chaos that attended my creation.

That my mother named me before the good news has always made me feel a little as though I bear someone else’s name, that of
the poor infant who “lived” for just a few weeks and whose “death” was not mourned but celebrated. Sometimes, perverse though it seems, I’ve found myself feeling sorry, even guilty, about that other, helpless Percy whom I supplanted, Percy the First, whose reign was brief, illusory.

My mother told me she had chosen the name “Percy” before I was born. “Percy” in case of a boy. “I named you after the poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley,” she said. “You came this close to going through life named Bysshe.”

So I missed total catastrophe by a genetic whisker—and wound up with a “watered down” catastrophe. Despite countless reassurances, I worried that this “whisker” in my makeup would wither or be worn away and the real version of the syndrome would be activated. I told my mother I had heard someone say “there’s a first time for everything.”

“It’s just an expression, Perse,” she said. “There isn’t a first time for everything. Most things have never happened and never will.”

“But what if it happens?”

“It can’t happen. It won’t happen. It has never happened and it never will.”

During the first two weeks I’d spent in hospital after I was born, my mother believed that she would never take me home, that I would never speak, that I would be blind, and that my other senses would be almost as badly compromised. She believed that she would visit me in a home as often as she could stand to for however long I had on earth.

And the prospect of all this hit her, she said, just seven months after my father had lit out for what he must have thought was greener grass.

My mother still wore her engagement ring. “Call me Miss Havisham,” she often said, though at the time I didn’t know what she meant.
My father ran off when my mother was two months pregnant, making me the bastard child of Penny Joyce. Born out of wedlock, though my parents were engaged. My mother changed her last name, which had been Murphy, to Joyce. It was wrongly assumed she did this because, even though her fiancé Jim Joyce had left her, she still loved him and wanted their child to bear his name. “I like to wear the engagement ring,” she said. “It has a discouraging effect on men, those who know me and those who’d like to.”

The boys at school said it was because my parents couldn’t “wait” for marriage that I was born beet-faced. Some said that it was because my
mother
couldn’t wait, a woman who wouldn’t take no for an answer from her fiancé. They had planned to marry on the one-year anniversary of their engagement. Although it was the general opinion that making your fiancée pregnant would not be held against you in the long run, it being so common, the widely repeated version of the story was that Jim Joyce had run off out of shame for what he’d done. But the most widely held belief was that there must be something more to the story, that perhaps I was not Jim Joyce’s son, which he would have been certain of if he and my mother had never “done it” or had done it at a time that did not jive with that of her pregnancy. My mother, if not exactly regarded with suspicion, was the subject of many wink-and-nudge jokes and much skeptical speculation. The truth is that Jim Joyce is, or was—he might be long gone—my father. There will be no surprise revelations to the contrary.

The eternally engaged Penelope Joyce, a fiancée forever.

She had a Gallic complexion, was said to be descended from the Black Irish, the children supposedly born from the mingling of those who survived the sinking of the Spanish Armada with Irish women who took them in after the British blew their fleet to smithereens, Spaniards who crawled, swam, thrashed and washed ashore on the east coast of Ireland and were hidden by the English-loathing Irish. There was not a single authenticated
instance of this having happened and therefore no recorded instances of Black Irish emigrating to the New World, but about one in ten Newfoundlanders was Latin-looking for no other even half-convincing reason that anyone could name. My mother was one of the ten percent, or rather one of the five percent of exotic, hot-blooded, passionate, reputedly fuck-loving women.

The Catholic Black Irish were known as Black Micks to Protestants, and even to those who lived on the Mount. I was not a Black Mick. Jim Joyce wasn’t one. Genetically speaking, having a Black Mick mother didn’t make you more likely to be a Black Mick than anyone else. That portion of me that was not port wine coloured did not bear the complexion of someone long tanned by the sun. It bore the complexion of someone who, like most Newfoundlanders, was long deprived of sunlight. My hair was not as slick and black as my mother’s, nor my eyes as dark as hers. Many people on the Mount who didn’t know, or pretended not to know, what Black Irish meant took it to mean that blacks from Africa perched somewhere, somehow, in the family tree, that my mother was “coloured,” that her being coloured had something to do with my being miscoloured; how much mixing of races could there be before the result was a calamity like Percy Joyce? Priests, nuns and other missionaries were dying in Africa in an effort to convert the pagans of that continent to Christianity, and here at home were the Joyces, unconverted blacks or coloureds of
some
kind, my mother a recalcitrant, non-churchgoing maverick and me an unbaptized, non-denominational renegade, walking therefore the high wire above the abyss of damnation, liable to fall at any time yet allowed to go on working without the net that others (including my mother) had—the safety net of baptism by which the fallen are caught far short of Hell.

The thing about rumours, half-truths, misconceptions, is that people believe them all, so it doesn’t matter if one contradicts the other—you are credited and blamed as if all of them are true.
I was black. I was a Mick. I was a Black Mick whose face just happened to be purple. I was a Catholic because my mother was one—the whole “not being baptized” thing was just a technicality. But my mother was a lapsed Catholic, which was worse than being non-Catholic. There was hope for non-Catholics—they might someday be converted—whereas someone who had been shown the truth and had turned away from it, well, that was what rebel angels such as Satan and Lucifer had done. My mother was looked down on by some for being a Black Mick, a sexual animal, a descendant of the same people as the Spanish fishermen who, smoking their foul-smelling cigarettes, prowled the St. John’s waterfront in search of whores. She was lusted after by most men for having that little bit of Spanish blood that supposedly made her such a fire-fuck.

I often compared myself to my mother.

The facial stain extended from my scalp to within about an inch of my Adam’s apple, which made it look as if every other inch of my torso must be thus discoloured, even though I have no other stains on it except a small one that has my belly button at the centre. My mother was relieved that I had no stains on my backside or on what she said might be considered the worst possible place. I sometimes complained of the unfairness of the stain on my face, which could just as easily have been discreetly located on the soles of my feet or in my armpits, but my mother reminded me of how close I had come to a life in which the location of my stain would have been the least of my problems.

And my mother? My mother was five-eight, big-breasted, wide-hipped, bust and waist in perfect proportion, full-lipped, high-cheekboned, the Sophia Loren of the Mount. I can only faintly remember a time when my ardour for her was not at least equal to the most Penny Joyce–pining, Black Irish cunt–coveting, balls-aching adolescent on the Mount, the name for the hill on which St. John’s is built. And forget Freud. If Mrs. Clancy next
door had been my mother, I wouldn’t have, couldn’t have, thought of her in
that way
.

“I’d be happy to trade my looks for yours,” Medina said to my mother.

“Would you be happy to trade your looks for mine?” I asked my mother.

“Sure I would, squirt,” she said, and kissed me on top of the head.

“You’re afraid to kiss my cheek,” I said. And suddenly she was stamping my face all over with kisses as if it were a well-travelled passport. Kiss, kiss, kiss, kiss.

Medina, my aunt, Jim Joyce’s sister, had a kind of Betty Boop look: short, tightly curled black hair, round, dark, lashy eyes. She was more attractive than she gave herself credit for—tall, large-boned, with long, lanky legs that were a touch too thick just below her bum.

I was first known throughout the neighbourhood as the Joyce Baby, a euphemism that stood both for my stain and for my father being “on the lam”—the expression used until it was clear he wasn’t coming back. When I was old enough to walk with my mother about the neighbourhood, I became known as the Joyce boy. My mother said people made too big a deal of my birthmark. She said they probably thought that if Helen Keller had been given the added burden of my limbs and face, she’d never have amounted to anything. Some thought that physically manifested within me were the qualities of the sort of man who would desert his pregnant fiancée—and so I would forever be a reminder to the world, as well as to my mother and myself, of his inexplicable offence—though my mother also thought that people believed she was somehow to blame.

I
WAS
born on June 24, which was known as St. John’s Day after the city, which itself was named after Saint John the Baptist because the site of it was supposedly discovered on June 24, 1497, the feast day of the Baptist. My mother often said that St. John’s was “my city.” On my fourth birthday, my mother, Medina and I went out for an evening walk in my city; at my mother’s insistence, Pops, our boarder and a chemistry teacher at Brother Rice High School across the street from our house, never went anywhere with us. It was a familiar sight, my mother and her not-quite sister-in-law walking about the neighbourhood, my mother and the woman who was regarded as the last vestige of her delinquent husband—and between them, holding their hands, me. On this evening, filled to near bursting with birthday cake, I plodded along, wishing that a tour of “my city” wasn’t one of my birthday presents.

The eyes of every man we passed were on my mother. Motorists
honked their horns, hastily rolled down their windows to whistle or shout something about her, or me, that they would not have dared say to her face.

“Nothing like a nice inconspicuous walk around St. John’s,” my mother said.

“You’d be less conspicuous if you tied down or covered up those tits of yours,” Medina said. “I swear that the colder it is, the less you wear.”

Between those who ogled my mother and those who gaped at me, almost no one, driving or on foot, passed us without some acknowledgement. Many of them guessed her name because she was with me. “Percy Joyce’s mother” was known of even by those who had never set eyes on either one of us. She was known to be an eye-popping voluptuary, so when people saw my face and realized that I was “Percy Joyce,” they knew the name of the better-looking of the two women who held my hands, knew it was “Penny and Percy” they had sighted, Beauty and the Beast, and they acted accordingly.

“They see you two, but they don’t see me,” Medina said one evening. “I might as well be invisible.”

“I wish I was invisible,” I said.

“Don’t mind me,” Medina said. “I’m just jealous of your mother.”

We walked through narrow stone alleyways and down long sets of stairs in our descent from the Mount. On every landing there was at least one open doorway leading to a bar, sometimes two or three. These narrow passages reeked of beer and cigarette smoke, and the hubbub from within was sometimes such that it sounded to me as if a mass argument was taking place among the patrons. An old man in a sod cap came out, looked at me, said, “Oh, sweet Jesus, I gotta stay off the London Dock,” laughed loudly, and hurried back inside.

“Toothless fucker,” my mother shouted. “Next time I’ll shove a pool ball down your throat.”

“Nice bangers, Penny. How’s your mash?” “How’s your shrimp dick, Dick?” “I’d love a clam sandwich.” “Your wife is famous for hers.”

A group of boys on the other side of the street—they seemed to be not altogether unfriendly—called out to me, “HEY PERCY,” almost in unison, as one would at the sight of the sort of city mascot my mother feared I would become. Being but four years old, I had no better sense than to say hello and wave—which the boys found hilarious. “What’s
your
name?” I said, more or less to all the boys. It seemed odd that people I’d never seen before knew my name, but I was tickled by it. They laughed, but none of them offered up a name, as if asking strangers to reveal their names was something that Little Percy Joyce was famous for. A middle-aged woman on their side of the street told the boys to leave me alone, at which they laughed yet again and protested that all they’d done was say hello. “Oh, they’re not doing any harm,” my mother said to the woman, who gave her a look of rebuke, shook her fist at the boys and said: “That poor little fella is just as much God’s child as any of you. The Good Lord made him as he is so you crowd should leave him alone.” This, my mother later told Medina, who’d remained silent throughout the exchange, was about the last thing you wanted anyone to do in your son’s defence, to loudly proclaim in public that the Good Lord had made him what he was, that all appearances and opinions to the contrary, he was as much “a child of God” as anyone. What did it say about someone that you felt you had to remind people he was a child of God? “You’d think he had scuttled onto the street on seven arms and legs,” my mother said, and Medina laughed.