The Son of a Certain Woman (21 page)

But the names didn’t help me and the rumours grew.

Francine was confined to bed, completely done in by the five or six hours she had spent with me, profoundly exhausted from the strain of gamely sticking to a task that all her friends had been telling her was hopeless. Francine had endured, in stoic silence, for as long as she could, my filthy language, the filthy suggestions I made to her, the filthy names I called her when she did not co-operate. Francine was bed-bound because of the toll I had taken on her, because of what she could not bring herself to talk about—the darkly hinted-at event at Marty’s.

“Jesus, Percy, what did you do to the poor girl?” the boys asked.

“I didn’t do anything.”

“What did you make her do to you? Did you talk her into a blow job or something? Did you force her into one?”

“Yes,” my mother said when I told her what was being said at school. “A blow job. That must have been it.” Francine had been prostrate for weeks because the Joyce boy had fooled her into blowing him. My mother said it was a classic case of fellatio exhaustion, from which some young women had been known never to recover.

Francine was in a state. Everything reminded her of Percy. Someone saying “Howley and Bonaventure” set her off. She had no appetite. She couldn’t sleep. She’d had, still had, only a sketchy knowledge of the facts of life. She knew half of this and half of that and none of
that
at all. As for a boy’s thing, no one had ever told her that anything but pee came out of it. “God only knows how things work on Planet Dunne,” my mother said.

Three weeks to the day after she had fled from Marty’s, Francine returned to school. When school let out at St. Bon’s, I walked homeward, down Bonaventure, past Holy Heart, and saw Francine out front in the parking lot, surrounded by other girls from Heart, many of them older than her, some looking protective, seemingly shielding her even as they plied her with questions. I saw instantly that membership in this circle of Francine’s was much prized and that, though the circle would shrink with time, Francine had gained a degree of popularity that she would never lose and that, contrary to what we had been led to believe, she had never had at Mercy. She
looked
as if she had had a breakdown. She was even paler than before, sunken-eyed, had lost weight. On average, it had taken Francine three days to recover from each hour she had spent with me. She looked genuinely convalescent. She probably was, having been so sickly and high-strung to begin with, but she was clearly enjoying herself now, her books pressed as always against her tunic, her long hair brushed back and bunned by what looked like two criss-crossed pencils, but she was chatting,
chatting
, as animatedly as I’d hoped she would with me.

One of the girls on the fringe of the circle looked my way. “There he is,” she said. “It’s Percy Joyce.” For an instant I thought that, en masse, Francine-led, they would come running after me. “Leave Francine alone,” one of the older Heart girls shouted, as if she had caught me doing whatever she imagined I had already done with Francine. “Filthy pervert,” another girl shouted. I glanced at Francine, who glared at me as if she was reliving all that I had done to her. “Stop looking at her, Freak Face,” a tall, skinny girl yelled, then stooped to the parking lot pavement, picked up a piece of asphalt and flung it my way. It landed far short of me, but many of the other girls followed her example and picked up and threw anything they could find. Francine watched them for a while, then gingerly put down her books, picked up a stone and threw it, at which the Heart girls applauded and cheered.

I ran home down the hill.

“What are they saying you
did
?” my mother said. “Someone must have said something to them.”

My mother phoned Mrs. Dunne, who wouldn’t let her speak to Francine, who, she said, had “already suffered enough.”

“Yes,” my mother said, “because you are too stupid to know she takes after you, that she too is a febrile, simpering
twit
.”

Versions of “what happened at Marty’s” and elsewhere were many and various and fast-evolving. I had peed myself. I had dumped an ice cream float into my lap to disguise the fact that I had peed myself. I had squirmed under the table and shoved my ugly face between her thighs. I had smeared ice cream or “something” on her legs. Francine had run home from Marty’s with specks of “something” in her hair and on her tunic. I had put “something” in my float, which I tricked her into drinking from. I was endlessly inventive in my vileness. Lisa had locked me in the bathroom and phoned the police, but my mother and Medina, mysteriously alerted that I needed help, had got there before them and forcibly removed me.

“How did Francine even know you were
in
the bathroom?” my mother said. She phoned Lisa, who told her that one of the kitchen staff had seen her hustle me into the bathroom and later told her he suspected I had done something more to upset Francine than spill a float onto my lap. Lisa, who had seen the aftermath of my accident, assured him that she believed me, but the man had since been spreading stories that Lisa guessed had made their way to Holy Heart, where they were further embellished.

My mother said she wondered if Francine, being Francine, was at this point even sure of what happened.

The boys on the Mount began to address me as “Joyce.” “What did you do to Francine, Joyce?” they asked, a hint of admiration in their voices. “Come on, Joyce, tell us what you did.” The suggestion seemed to be that whatever I had done had proceeded inevitably from my “nature,” which could be read from, and was inscrutably bound up with, my appearance. The essential Percy Joyce, for so long foreshadowed by and proceeding from the same dark place as his birthmark and extremities, had finally surfaced and the first hapless victim of that surfacing was Francine Dunne, the most vulnerable target one could imagine for an imposition of any kind, offered up to me by her mother and mine, by her mother who, for naïveté, credulity, lack of assertiveness and dread of authority figures, may have been Francine’s only rival.

Through it all, I watched the girls of Heart and Mercy and Presentation from afar, their school books pressed against the bosoms of their dark blue tunics, all wearing pleated skirts, their bare, pink-with-cold legs showing between their school socks and their skirts, the girls, in a gale of wind, trying to control both their skirts and their hair. The latter blew every which way as they turned their heads about, trying to keep it out of their eyes and their mouths, to which wet strands of it clung.

But the principal of Mercy called Brother McHugh, who told Pops I had got into the habit of “creeping” around Mercy Convent
School, “peeping” at them from behind parked cars, the impossibility of my ever finding a girlfriend driving me to acts of depravity that had all of Mercy terrified. Given that, among the girls of Mercy, my mother said, the nickname for the entire student body of St. Bon’s was “the St. Bon’s Hard-ons,” it wouldn’t have mattered if any of this was true—but it wasn’t. She looked at me. “It
isn’t
true, is it, Percy?”

“
No
,” I said. “Not all of it. All I ever do with girls is look at them.”

The older girls from Heart tried to convince the younger ones that if they kissed me they would catch what I had and wake up the morning after to find that their faces looked like mine. They dared the girls who said they didn’t believe it to kiss me and find out, and those girls said they would rather kiss a nun’s bare arse than Percy Joyce’s lips.

“You’re supposed to have your dick circumcised, Percy, not your face.” And so I was called Dick Facy.

“I dare you to stick your tongue in his mouth,” a tall, heavy-set blond girl said, and the others grimaced and groaned with revulsion. She whispered to the others and they squealed. “Dick Facy,” the girl said, “show us your dick and we’ll give you a quarter.”

“For a quarter,” I said, surprising myself and her, “I’ll only show you a quarter of my dick.” The girls squealed again, their hands over their faces.

That’s how close I came to doing something that would have marked me as a fool forever, a boy presumed by parents to be at least half demented, incapable of resisting lewdly exposing himself, so that he’d have to be watched and their children warned from associating with him or ever going near him.

B
ROTHER
McHugh, yet again using Pops as his go-between, suggested that my mother have a “very serious talk” with me. McHugh said he had been fielding calls for days from parents demanding that I be kept away from their daughters even if I had to be expelled.

“He has no intention of expelling Percy,” Pops said. “He just wants you both to know how upset the other parents are.”

“
They’re
upset?”

Brother McHugh said she shouldn’t expect the Archbishop to preach a sermon in defence of Percy every time I misbehaved. My mother yelled that I’d done
nothing
, that I hadn’t
misbehaved
. She wanted to phone McHugh, but Pops said he was in the Brothers’ Quarters and couldn’t be reached.

“Girls banding together for safety,” my mother growled one afternoon, pacing the kitchen in her pumps, throwing up her arms, setting her tits into a mesmerizing wobble. “Daughters all over the
Mount in flight from Percy Joyce. I can see it now. Parents keeping watch at every window. The sun is soon to set. Penny Joyce can barely hold back Percy, whom she nightly lets loose upon the Mount. Not even boys are safe when Percy is aprowl. Who knows whose milkshake may this time be despoiled? Who knows from what hedge Percy’s hands may be outthrust, what girl’s legs he may slide his hands up even as she stands talking to her friends?”

When my mother announced she was going to deliver her own Sermon on the Mount, Medina said, “For Christ’s sake, Pen, don’t do anything stupid. Don’t bring us all down because of Francine Dunne.” Pops was not there. He was at the East End Club, drinking beer. My mother went to her room for about an hour and came out holding several handwritten pages. Long after dark she went out onto the back step. Medina and I, standing in the open doorway behind her, watched and listened as she raised her voice to a declamatory shout, Medina shaking her head in anxious disbelief.