The Son of a Certain Woman (48 page)

“Really?”

“God knows why, but yes, I think he does.”

McHugh took out of the inside upper pocket of his jacket what looked like a tightly rolled-up leather belt. He held it straight out in front of him and, grasping the open end with his thumb and forefinger, let it unravel until it hung, swaying at arm’s length like a snake that he had expertly captured.

“Do you know what this is?” he asked.

“No.” But I did know. It was narrow and longer but thicker than a belt, half an inch thick perhaps. He folded it once in half so that it no longer swayed in front of him. He raised it above his head and, snapping it like a whip, brought it down on the table with such force that the nearest ashtray jumped and wobbled about until he stopped it with his hand.

“This is the Strop,” he said. “Its edges are like those of the many straight razors that have been sharpened on it. A barber gave it to me. I only use it on the boys who misbehave the most. The hard cases, the ones who otherwise would never learn. Half a dozen strops will cut your hands to pieces. The last boy I stropped was Stevie Coffin. He deserved it, didn’t he?”

I was so terrified, I couldn’t speak.

“He never did come back to school.”

Nothing had ever scared me more than the sight of that strop. I pushed back my chair and ran to the door that opened on the vestibule. I turned the knob and thrust my shoulder against the door, but it didn’t open.

“You have to know how to open it,” McHugh said. “You don’t need much strength, but it takes a certain knack. You’ll never manage it with those monkey hands of yours.”

I ran the length of the room to the door by which McHugh came and went. It too would not open. I hammered on it with my fist and shouted, “Help, please, open the door.”

“Calm
down
, Joyce,” McHugh said. I turned around and looked
at him. There was no sign of the Strop. He patted his breast pocket. “I just wanted you to see it. I just wanted you to know what it would be like for you if not for Uncle Paddy. I’m sure you won’t tell anyone I called him that, will you?”

“No, Brother.”

“Actually, tell anyone you like. They won’t believe you. Now sit down.”

I went back to my chair but didn’t sit down.

“Fine,” he said. “Stand. Stand on your head if you like. Either way, that face of yours will look the same.” He began slowly to make his way around the table, touching the back of each chair as he passed it. He moved clockwise, so I started moving clockwise too.

“You don’t have to run away from me, Joyce. You’ll never see the Strop again, I promise.”

“I’ll stop if you stop,” I said. He stopped directly across the table from me.

“I know what you know,” he said. He put on his close-mouthed, gum-chewing smile as if all such previous smiles had been leading up to this one. “Crimes against the Order of Creation. Crimes of the sort for which Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed have been taking place for years across the street from where I live, across the street from where the Christian Brothers of the Mount live and eat and sleep and pray, where the children of the Mount go to school.”

“No, Brother.”

“Yes, Brother. Your mother and your aunt by blood.”

“I don’t know what you mean.” Could Pops have broken his word after all? Pops who thought of me as his son?

“There must be a reckoning when the proper Order of Creation is disturbed. THERE MUST.”

He shouted so loudly that I closed my eyes and opened them just in time to see him complete a lunging crawl across the table. He grabbed me with one hand by the collars of my blazer and my shirt and, as he climbed down from the table, removed the Strop
from his jacket with his other hand, let it unravel, then folded it in half against his leg. One hand fisting my collars, he raised the Strop high above his shoulder.

“Hands,” he roared.

I held out my hands and started to cry.

“You’re not the Coffin boy, are you?” he said. “You’re not that tough.”

I shook my head.

“Tell me,” he rasped, his face so close to mine I smelled the fruity gum that he was chewing. “Tell me what Penelope and Medina do when others on the Mount are sound asleep.”

“I don’t know,” I sobbed.

“Íf you tell me what they do, Uncle Paddy will see to it that they do you no more harm. You will have the best of everything.”

I shook my head.

“Close your eyes,” he said.

I shut them as tightly as I could and waited for the first blow of the Strop, but he loosened his grip on my collars.

“Open your eyes,” he said.

I opened them to find that once again the Strop was gone. He put the thumb and index finger of his free hand into his mouth, took hold of his gum and withdrew it. He tore it in half, pressed one half into my left palm and the other into my right.

“What should we do, Pen?” Medina said when, crying and still shaking with fright, I told them what had happened at catechism, what McHugh had said and done. She paced, arms folded, puffing rapidly on a cigarette, unmindful of the ashes that fell from it onto her sweater and the floor.

My mother, sitting at the kitchen table, said she wasn’t sure. What if McHugh took me from her? she wondered. She had all my life been reckless and indiscreet—“If discretion is a virtue,
Percy, your mother
is
a whore.” She had thereby inspired so many rumours about everyone at 44 that there was no telling what sort of trumped-up charge McHugh might convince Uncle Paddy to quietly convey to those members of his congregation who had the power to do his bidding without discovery and with impunity. If I was taken from her, if she and Medina were cast out and vilified for life, and Pops was fired and left without hope of ever again earning a salary, all four of us would be destroyed.

“Jesus, you’re the one who’s been telling us not to panic,” Medina said.

“I’m still doing that,” my mother protested. “I’m just thinking out loud, letting off steam. McHugh is
trying
to panic us. I bet he hoped that, when Perse told us what happened today, we’d run. But if he had anything more he could try to flush us out with, he wouldn’t have held it back. Not with the wedding so close.” But she didn’t look or sound entirely sure of herself. She stared off into space as if trying to anticipate McHugh’s next move, or as if, in spite of what she’d said, she was spellbound by some vision of catastrophe.

“Paynelope, His Grace has generously suggested that the diocese pay for a modest reception.”

“Suggested?”

“McHugh said ‘stipulated.’ ”

“Has a honeymoon been arranged, Pops? How many other of
my
stipulations have you and McHugh vetoed without my knowledge? Not unless I’m kidnapped will I join you on a honeymoon. If the airplane or cruise tickets have already been bought, I hope that you and McHugh will have a wonderful time.”

“It’s just a reception,” Pops said. “A modest, harmless party. Where’s the problem in that?”

“The problem is you keep on tricking us,” Medina said.

“Us?” Pops was furious. “At first, you didn’t even want to be there.”

“I told you, Pops,” my mother said, “she’s a member of the family.”

“A member of the family who said she was boycotting the wedding and will therefore not be attending the reception.”

“Yes, she will,” my mother said.

“Believe me,” Medina said, “if it wasn’t for Pen, I would tell you to shove all your invitations up your arse.”

“You’re jealous. You’ll be losing your partner in spinsterhood to me.”

“He’s exactly right,” Medina said. “I’m jealous of Pen because she landed you, because you chose her instead of me. I’ve longed for you all these years, Pops. Loved you secretly, hopelessly. Wished that engagement ring of yours was meant for me. Every moment with you was a torment. But it would seem that Penny has won you with her wiles and good looks and you have let yourself be blinded to the more important things I have to offer. Oh Pops, don’t you see? It’s still not too late to change your mind. Choose me, Pops, choose me. Even if you don’t, I will come by as often as possible just to be near you.”

This monologue was delivered in a deadpan monotone, Medina looking at neither Pops nor my mother yet speaking coldly to the latter, telling her in a kind of code, right in front of Pops, how hurt and confused she was. My mother didn’t laugh. Pops gave Medina a dismissive wave, went to his room and closed the door.

“What next, Pen?” Medina whispered, tears in her eyes. “Which of the stipulations will be the next to go? Separate beds? Once-a-month visits? No children? Bit by bit you’re giving them what they want, Uncle Paddy, McHugh and Pops.”

My mother shook her head. “No more,” she said. “This is all they get. This is where I draw the line, I promise.”

Later, when my mother went out to the grocery store with Medina, Pops called me to the sunroom. He sat in his chair, looking morose. He said he’d been thinking—thinking that, someday
soon, after they were married, he would tell my mother that he had guessed the truth about her and Medina. He would leave me out of it and convince her he would never tell McHugh. Everyone on the Mount assumed that, once they were married, there would be an empty bed, an extra room, at 44, now that he was sleeping with Penelope. So why not make things simple, spare everyone in the house the humiliation of sneaking around and pretending to look the other way and feigning ignorance—such a sad charade that would be. He would suggest to my mother that Medina move in with us, ostensibly to occupy the “empty” room but really to occupy the empty space in one half of my mother’s bed, the bed that my mother would leave, once a month, to come to
his
room and
his
bed. Time would tell if Medina could endure a succession of once-a-month nights alone in my mother’s bed, knowing where my mother was, with whom and for what reason.

T
HE
teeny-weeny wedding at the teeny-weeny church, as Medina called the Brother Rice chapel, went ahead as planned. All things considered, Medina said, it would be just as appropriate if
Pops
wore white. He could, she said, wear his lab coat, which at least was off-white. Perhaps, she said, he might even wear his safety goggles, for she had never seen him with them on.

Because it was considered bad luck for the bride and groom to see each other on their wedding day before they were married, Pops got up very early on Saturday morning and went across the street to Brother Rice, where he stayed in McHugh’s office by himself until he was joined there in the afternoon by the best man, Mr. Linnegar, and later by me. I brought him his newly bought suit, black with blue pinstripes, his new white shirt and gleaming black shoes, and his boutonniere. But I spent most of the day at 44 with my mother and Medina. Medina, who had been picking at
Pops for days, sat in silence at the kitchen table, morosely nursing a beer and a cigarette. She had teased Pops for not having a bachelor party and lamented that I had lost Vivian, whom I could otherwise have lent him for the night before the wedding. “One last night of freedom, Pops,” she said. “One last night without the old ball and chain. Everything’s about to change—no more notches on your bedpost. No more breaking hearts. The word is out among the single women of St. John’s: Pops is off the market.” Pops said that if Medina ever got engaged, the Vatican would send to St. John’s a team of miracle authenticators.

Brother McHugh had offered to walk my mother down the aisle, but she had declined, saying that I was quite able to give her away.

Pops insisted on hiring a limousine to drive my mother from 44 to Brother Rice, a distance of about a hundred feet. He said it would be “unseemly” for her to dash across Bonaventure in her wedding dress. The dress was tight-fitting, showing as much cleavage as the Church would allow when she was engaged to Jim Joyce, not that the rules had since been relaxed. It trailed slightly on the ground behind her, covering her white high heels. It had a veil, which she wore pinned to the back of her hair. Pops’ colour had risen to scarlet every time she mentioned the dress. He imagined her, thus attired, standing on the traffic island, waiting for a break in the cars. “A bride should go to and depart from her wedding in style,” he said. The limousine would wait outside during the wedding and reception to carry all of us back to 44. Pops and I would make only the return journey in the car, as I would have to be at Brother Rice long before my mother.

When my mother and Medina entered the chapel by the rear doors, I was there to meet them. They were laughing about the absurdly brief journey my mother had just made by limousine from 44, and about Medina, who, refusing to get in the car, had
walked across the street and arrived at Brother Rice before my mother did. Although Pops had asked her not to drink any beer before the wedding, my mother smelled of it as much as Medina did. “How else could I get through this?” she whispered, looking guiltily at me.

My mother and I waited, holding hands beneath the little organ loft at the back of the chapel, until the Wedding March began to play, my mother’s face fully veiled, as I wished mine was. Medina, wearing her best clothes, a green blouse, brown skirt and brown high heels, held a bouquet of flowers in her hands onto which tears pattered like drops of rain.

“I’m getting married, Perse,” my mother said under her breath. “Can you believe it?”

“You’re not really getting married,” Medina whispered.

“I know,” my mother whispered back. “Thirty seconds in a limousine didn’t make me fall in love with Pops.”

The congregation consisted exclusively of the Mount’s nuns, Brothers, lay faculty and spouses. The only students were the altar boys from Brother Rice. I walked my mother down the aisle as if she really was “mine” to give to Pops, unable to resist getting caught up in the moment, even as I realized that I was as much a part of the farce as anyone from 44. The McHugh-appointed best man did little more than stand beside Pops during the ceremony. Medina had to watch as Pops raised my mother’s veil and kissed her on the lips. My mother said “I do” after she and Medina shed what I think were mistaken by many as tears of joy during the exchange of vows and rings. My mother, in her fourteen-year-old, never-before-worn wedding dress, made sure her bouquet landed nowhere near Medina. No one even bothered to pretend to try to catch it. Then we moved on to the small, alcohol-free reception in the gym, at which tea and biscuits were to be served.