The Son of a Certain Woman (22 page)

Only a handful of our neighbours were able to make out even bits and pieces of my mother’s “Second Sermon on the Mount Regarding Percy Joyce.” But word of it got around and people were soon pointing at my mother as the root cause for whatever I had done to Francine Dunne. Boys asked what my mother had shouted from the back steps of our house. They said that some of the Brothers whose windows in the Quarters at Brother Rice had
been open had heard what she said but wouldn’t repeat it because it was filth and blasphemy. I denied that my mother had said a single bad word, breaking my promise to her that I would ignore all questions about the sermon.

Boys repeated questions they had heard at home: What kind of woman goes out on her steps late at night to give a speech about
anything
? What kind of woman writes a speech and reads it outdoors in the middle of the night, waking up her neighbours? What was she hoping to prove by talking about her own son like that? Hadn’t she and her son caused enough trouble for Francine Dunne?

The overheard, intelligible fragments of the speech were fuel for the flames of rumours about Penny Joyce. Men were seen coming and going from her house at all hours. She and “that Medina woman” couldn’t get enough of them. They charged the men money for what they did with them. And all of it went on right under the nose of Percy Joyce, so no wonder he had turned out as he had. Why was Brother McHugh allowing a Brother Rice teacher to live in such a house? When was the Archbishop going to wise up and realize that he ought to be using his influence to expel the Joyces from the neighbourhood, not to protect Percy Joyce, whom there was no point being nice to.

Brother McHugh sent word to my mother through Pops that, what with the Francine Dunne matter and her middle-of-the-night obscenity-riddled sermon, the Archbishop was
very
upset and wanted us both to know that he alone could not clear a path through life for me, that my mother and I had to do our part, and unless we did, he would have no choice but to let us fend for ourselves, as we were causing him and therefore the Church, his diocese and congregation much anxiety, distress and embarrassment.

“You were right,” my mother said to Medina. “It was a stupid thing to do.” My mother wrote and mailed to the Archbishop “A Note of Apology” in which she said she had lost her temper because of the lies that were being circulated about me and Francine. The
Archbishop replied to her, indirectly, through McHugh, that he accepted her apology but was “pondering what further measures might be taken to help you and Little Percy.”

I started giving a truthful account of what had happened at Marty’s, gave it umpteen times at school, but no one believed me. My “drink like a king” story was taken to be typical Percy Joyce BS. As Francine and her mother only hinted darkly at their side of the story, I had only the vaguest notion of what I was expected to refute. I wasn’t sure what to do, so I did what I always did in times of uncertainty.

Give me myth or give me death. I said Francine had missed three weeks of school because of the measles, which I didn’t catch from her because one of the few good things about my face was that it was better at warding off germs than normal faces were. I said that at Marty’s Francine and I had ordered a float each, and when the first float came we each thought it was ours and grabbed it at the same time and I wound up spilling it in my lap, which she blamed herself for and that was why she ran home crying. I said that a bully had come to our booth, picked up my float and threatened to dump it on Francine’s head unless I left her alone with him, but I said he should dump it on my head instead, which he did just as I told Francine to run, which she did. But now she felt ashamed because she hadn’t stuck up for me as I did for her though my mother had told her disappointment was a part of life and the sooner she learned that the better. My mother was going to tell the Archbishop that Francine should not be disciplined or transferred to another school after all.

I had long thought it was unfair that
my
mother was the best-looking woman on the Mount. Everyone else’s mother
looked
like a mother: their backsides and bellies had gone slack though they were not yet thirty-five, their faces tired as if they cried most of the
time when they were not in public, as if they knew they couldn’t keep up but had no choice but to go on trying and hoping for an ever-elusive easeful moment, a fret-free interval of restoration from which they would emerge looking as they had when they were first engaged.

I had no idea why my mother didn’t look like them. Medina said my mother looked so nice because she was spared the bother of a husband and had but one child, who, for all the reasons he gave her to fret, was easier to manage than five or six “normal” children. For whatever reason, my mother had her own exemption, as if the Archbishop had decreed, in opposition to God, that to offset her troubles she should keep her looks longer than usual.

“The mass of boys lead lives of quiet masturbation.” My mother, amending Thoreau. When my mother wore blouses that barely buttoned over her bra, I could sometimes see her belly and her bra—a bit of what Medina had seen, and something, I assumed, of what Pops saw and touched from time to time. I couldn’t help
trying
to see them. “Percy, stop staring at your mother’s tits,” Medina growled at me one day. “It’s just,” I said, “that her blouse doesn’t fit right.” Medina tipped back her head, waiting to laugh until she locked eyes with my mother, who also laughed.

“Six hundred budding young women on top of the Mount,” my mother said. “And six hundred boys with growing concerns. And yours, Percy, seem to be growing much faster than most.”

The irony that a woman who looked like my mother had birthed a child who looked like me was not lost on anyone, especially in the wake of Francine and the Second Sermon. I saw people glare at my mother as if her looks had come at the expense of mine, because of some negligence of hers, some moment when, unmindful of me, she was gazing at her own reflection. I think some people saw my looks as a balance or corrective to hers, a demonstration that, in the grand scheme of things, God did not play favourites, even if Uncle Paddy did. We again, as when I was a preschooler, became
known on the Mount as Beauty and the Beast; my mother, in the ruthless symmetry of fairy tales and myths, had been brought down to earth by the child she bore, by the husband who left her.

Still, long before I had seen her and Medina writhing on her bed, locked fiercely in their horizontal dance, I had started sneaking peeks up my mother’s skirt and down her blouse. At the little furrow of her cleavage that was visible, the back splits in the hems of her skirts. I had watched her putting on lipstick then rubbing her lips together to smooth it all over. When she changed into a housecoat or bathrobe late in the evening, I had hoped her loosely knotted belts would come undone and wondered if I could deftly help them do so without getting caught.

Now I was caught up in a stupefying lust that nothing I had known before came close to; the Mercy, Heart or Presentation girls had not, all together, summoned up such lechery as my mother, in part because she was so constantly nearby and seemingly
available
. I found myself regarding Pops and Medina with jealousy: I was the only one in the house who didn’t get to fuck my mother.

I imagined Penny Joyce dressed like a girl from Holy Heart, lying bored and lonely in her uniform on her bed two doors away, smiling as I crept into the room, arching her back as I pushed her tunic up around her waist, her feet flat on the bed as she accommodated me by splaying her sleek Black Mick legs, lifting her bum just a bit to allow me to pull down her pants.… Perhaps I wanted, not to have what I didn’t have, but to be what I wasn’t and could never be, and which my mother was by nothing more than an accident of birth. If I couldn’t be, then maybe I could be
with
that, joined to it, a moving, breathing, panting part of it, even if only once, if only for a matter of minutes or seconds. In my world, in my circumscribed universe, she was the utmost of what I was denied.

“You might get a pity fuck, if you’re really lucky, Percy,” a boy from Brother Rice called Moyles said to me one day when, as a shortcut up the hill, I took the rutted path the smokers of Brother Rice took when they left school each afternoon. His maroon blazer, his white shirt, his grey slacks stretched to near bursting. Stately, plump, mischief-making Moyles. He had fashioned a career for himself, planting information and calamitous suggestions in the minds of the boys and girls from the junior schools.

Moyles. The idea that at first seemed so absurd came from him. He was one of those schoolboys who really did know about the adult world, who seemed never to have been a boy like other boys—a know-it-all who, as unlikely as it seemed, knew it all. He had a sly, appraising grin that made me squirm with even more than my usual self-consciousness. “Yeah, pity fuck, if you’re really lucky, Percy. Or, when you can afford it, you can get a whore. It’ll cost
you a lot more than it would cost someone with a normal face, so you better start saving up. Some normal women like to do it with freaks, so you might get lucky there too. Maybe. But no girl will ever
like
you—some girls might feel sorry for you, but not
that
sorry. A whore—well, you’d have to do it from behind so she couldn’t see your face. It’s called doggy style when you do it from behind. You might go your whole life and never get laid. You might still be a virgin when you die. You should ask your mother for a pity fuck, Percy. That’s your best bet. She might say yes. Maybe not now, but when you’re a bit older. I’d take a pity fuck from Penny Joyce.”

“She’s my mother.”

“Tell her it’s her fault your hands and feet are so weird. It probably is. Fifty-fifty chance, and she can’t prove it’s not her fault.”

I shook my head and smirked to show him I knew what he was up to. But I thought of the words “you might go your whole life and never get laid. You might still be a virgin when you die.” It scared me to think about it. And I thought about it a lot.

“Jesus,” my mother said. “What’s a pity fuck?” We were alone in the living room, my mother trying to read a book, me pretending to watch TV.

“It’s when someone does it with you because they feel sorry for you because you haven’t got anyone to do it with and never will. Moyles said my only hope of getting laid was if you gave me a pity fuck.”

“God Almighty,” my mother said. “Is there anything those boys don’t think of? Not only is incest against the law, Perse, it’s
good
that it’s against the law.”

“I wouldn’t mind a pity fuck from someone else, a girl from Mercy or Presentation maybe.”

“Whoa there. After the job that Francine Dunne has done on your reputation, you should stay as far away from girls as you can
for a while. For God’s sake, do
not
ask one of them for a pity fuck. You might wind up in reform school. And pity, by the way, is not a form of contraception. The girl could still get pregnant.”

I nodded. “If I had ten minutes to live and had never been laid, would you give me a pity fuck?”

“I’m your mother, Percy.”

“Well, who else would take that much pity on me? Would Medina?”

“No, she wouldn’t.”

“There’s a girl at Mercy who gives blow jobs for money.”

“Pity fucks and Mercy blow jobs,” my mother said. “What next?”

“She blows a lot of boys. But Moyles said she’d only blow me for five hundred dollars. But he said that in a pitch-dark room I could suck her tits for fifty bucks. I wish we were rich.”

“What’s this girl’s name?”

“I saw her once, but I don’t know her name. She’s fat and short. I wouldn’t really want to do it with her. Moyles said I come from a long line of sheep shaggers. He said sheep were my best bet.”

“I think you encourage these boys.”

“I don’t. What about a pity kiss? We could start with that. I mean a real kiss. Not one on the cheek, but a long one on the lips. I’ve never had a real kiss and I’m already twelve years old.”

“
No
. You are
only
twelve years old. No pity
anythings
. You don’t need pity and you know it. From now on you’ll be lucky if you get a hug. Why are you talking as if you have a week to live? You haven’t decided to hurt yourself or something, have you?”

“No. Forget about the pity kiss. I don’t want anything. I changed my mind.”

“Good. Because you’re not
getting
anything from me, now or twenty-five years from now.”

“You’ll be an old hag in twenty-five years,” I said. “I wouldn’t want a pity fuck from an old hag.”

I was instantly sorry that I’d said it.

“First a whore and now a hag,” my mother said. “I’m coming up in the world.”

I protested that I was sorry. And then I reminded her that, in the Beauty and the Beast fairy tale, the Beast becomes a handsome priest when Beauty kisses him.

“The Beast gets Beauty. But I suppose that’s only in fairy tales.”

“It’s not only in fairy tales,” my mother said. “But mothers don’t sleep with their sons in fairy tales. They do it by accident in Greek tragedies.” She told me the story of Oedipus, who unwittingly married and slept with his mother, Jocasta. When they found out what they’d done, Jocasta hanged herself and Oedipus stabbed his eyes out with a pair of golden needles.

“Not exactly a happy ending. Not that it would matter if there was a happy ending—it still wouldn’t change my mind.”

“I bet I’ll never have sex with a girl. Or a woman.”

“Most boys your age, or even close to your age, have never had sex.”

“I’m not talking about now, I’m talking about
ever
. Other boys will have sex
some
day, but I’ll never have it.”

“You
will
, Percy.”

“Moyles said not to worry, someday I’d meet a nice blind girl and we’d settle down, me, her, her guide dog and her cane.”

“Prick.”

“Will you promise that if no one else will, you will, you know … I mean a long time from now.”