5 5I had put together, from half-heard playground conversations, an almost accurate version of what I had once heard Sister Louise refer to as ‘the sex act’. I believed that the man put his pee-swollen bud inside the woman – that is, up her backside, there being, so far as I knew, no other place to put it – then did his pee, the unlikely result of which was that the woman had a baby some time later.
‘He’s free now,’ Aunt Phil had told my mother one day as we were walking home from the cemetery. ‘Free from the marriage bed.’ Though I was fairly sure I knew, I asked Uncle Reginald what Aunt Phil meant by ‘the marriage bed’.
‘The beast with two backs,’ said Uncle Reginald.
‘The what?’ I said.
‘The beast with two backs,’ he said. ‘Older than the dinosaurs. Not yet extinct.’ He seemed surprised when I nodded to indicate that I understood what he meant, but he said nothing.
The beast with two backs. That seemed a good way of putting it. I looked up ‘beast’ in the dictionary. One of the definitions was ‘a human being swayed by animal propensities’.
‘Do you know what you are?’ Uncle Reginald asked me that same day during oralysis.
‘What do you mean?’ I said.
‘You my boy,’ he said, ‘are the future of the family. The only boy that this generation of Ryans has produced. Or will produce, now that your father is gone. There would be no more Ryans if not for you.’
This fact, which had never occurred to me before, made me feel very uneasy. The awfulness of the sex act was one of the few things about which Aunt Phil and I agreed, though she, of course, would have been shocked to know that I had even heard of the sex act, let alone that I shared her opinion of it.
My father and Uncle Reginald were what Aunt Phil called ‘the laymen of the family’. Laymen were as rare among the Ryans as priests were among other families. Aunt Phil talked as if, for a man, marriage was the supreme sacrifice. While becoming a priest did not appeal to me, I could certainly see the advantages of celibacy. Never mind Father Seymour, never mind Father Francis, braving the jungles of South America to bring religion to the natives – it was my father and Uncle Reginald, who had braved the horrors of the marriage bed to keep the family name going, who were the real missionaries of the family.
The Ryans had disapproved of my parents having only two children. I didn’t know if either my mother or my father had ever been taken aside and spoken to about it, but Aunt Phil had often made passing reference to it. Any mention of the attractiveness of my mother’s figure had drawn from Aunt Phil the observation that a figure was all very well, but having children was more important. It was the same if someone remarked at our mother’s ability to hold down a full-time job while raising a family. ‘A family?’ Aunt Phil said. ‘Is that what two children are being called nowadays?’
Still, as much as Aunt Phil believed that child-bearing was one of the sacramental duties of marriage, she always looked at children with a kind of grimace of disgust. I suspected that one of Aunt Phil’s objections to children was that they were visible proof that their parents had had sex, and were therefore an embarrassment to everyone. It was an objection I could well understand, given the nature of that hilarious indignity known as ‘the sex act’. A couple walking down the street with five children were publicly flaunting the fact that they had done it five times. Each innocent little toddler, done up in his sailor suit and knee socks, might as well have been a photograph of his parents doing it, for the way that Aunt Phil looked at him.
No wonder she and Father Seymour had such a fondness for orphans. At least they never appeared in public with their parents. In fact, you could easily pretend that they had no parents – that is, that they had never had them. Young Leonard and the others were not of woman born, it seemed. ‘Aren’t they just divine,’ people said, when they appeared on stage in their green jackets and their buckled shoes. ‘A horde of little divinities’, Uncle Reginald called them. ‘Orphans are the children of God,’ Aunt Phil said, making me wonder just how literally she meant it.
I had once asked her where babies came from. Fumbling for words, she had blurted out, ‘They come from God,’ and then, upon being further pressed, had said that people ‘ordered’ them through their parish priest. She had ever since been forced to stick with this answer, reluctantly repeating it whenever I asked. Finally, she forbade me to ask her any more, so Uncle Reginald had taken it up, asking her, ‘Where do babies come from, Aunt Phil?’ at which Aunt Phil would only glare at him. Uncle Reginald said that everyone had heard of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, the book which had overthrown religion as it was known, but how many had heard of Philomena Ryan’s Origin of Babies, the book which had overthrown science as it was known?
I knew that the ‘sex act’ had to do also with original sin, which my father had told me I should think of as the crime in a game of Clue. ‘If the crime was original sin,’ my father said, ‘the solution would be: “The woman. In the garden. With the apple.”’ The woman, I took this to mean, had – though God only knew how – tempted the man to put his pee-swollen bud into her backside. A crime, it seemed to me, if there ever was one.
Although I had never seen any female completely naked, I had seen two females half naked, my mother from the waist up and Mary from the waist down. I had seen my mother one night, a few months before my father died, quite by accident. Thinking I had heard someone crying, I had gotten out of bed and was headed down the hallway when I realized that the sound was coming, not from Mary’s room, as I had suspected, but from my parents’, the door of which was slightly open. At first, all I saw was that, sitting up in bed, my mother was holding my father, rocking him gently back and forth. My father, crying in my mother’s arms.
Then I noticed that the top of her nightgown was open, and that he was at her breast, his mouth moving slowly. There was a kind of forlorn pleading in the tenderness with which she held him, as well as in his crying. What a strange sight it was, my father sniffling, suckling, doing both at exactly the same time, his hands folded at his waist as if no part of him must touch her but his mouth. When he pulled away and rolled over on his side, my mother, too, rolled over on her side, but, for an instant, both her breasts, her soft, pink-nippled breasts, had been revealed to me.
I had gotten a look at Mary by the time-honoured method of peeking through the keyhole at her on one of the rare occasions when she forgot to hang a towel on the doorknob while undressing. This, too, had been but a few months ago. My first reaction had been a fit of giggles, for I presumed the hair between her legs, which looked like a beard, was some absurdity peculiar to females. Wasn’t it just like a girl to have a big ball of fur between her legs?
Though it meant confessing to peeping at Mary, I couldn’t resist bringing it up the next time we were having dinner. ‘Mary, Mary, bum so hairy, how do you make it grow?’ I said, which sent Mary running to her room. My mother had brought me back to earth by assuring me that, ‘Men have hair there, too.’
One half of my mother, one half of Mary, made up the sum total of my knowledge of female anatomy. Now, a few months after I had first seen them, and always on those nights when I had seen my father’s ghost, a woman consisting of these two halves sewn together began appearing in my dreams. Half Mom, half Mary – ‘Momary’, I called her. She was thirty-five years old above the waist and twelve years old below it. I remember the weird disproportion of the halves, my mother’s big-breasted torso waddling about on Mary’s skinny legs. Even worse was the fast that the two halves were joined by a dotted line like the one Uncle Reginald had drawn around Sister Louise. No matter how hard I tried, I could not imagine Momary without that dotted line, the paraline, let alone dream her without it.
Top-heavy, sewn together, her stitching plainly visible, as well as with what I still thought of as a beard between her legs, Momary pursued me through my nightmares, asking only for a kiss, but blinking her eyes in a kind of mock rapture which suggested she might want much more. Each time, the nightmare ended, not with a kiss, but with sudden darkness, or rather the sensation of being accelerated through total darkness, moving at some impossible velocity through space so empty that even my own body was invisible.
One morning, I woke from the Momary dream to find myself in mid-pee. My underwear was soaked and I only just managed to stop before I stained the sheets. I ran to the bathroom, my bud so hard I had to pee while standing on the bathtub. When I was finished, I took my underwear and threw it in the laundry. About a week later, it happened again. I dreamed that, in fleeing from Momary, I ran headlong into darkness so absolute, so silent that I doubted my existence, then woke up to find myself in mid-pee. Once again, I put a pair of pee-stained drawers in the laundry.
To explain why Aunt Phil did what she did with my underwear, I have to tell first what Mary and my mother did with hers. Mary had recently disappointed Aunt Phil by developing breasts. ‘Twelve years old,’ Aunt Phil said, shaking her head and looking at my mother as if to say, ‘What kind of woman would allow her daughter to have breasts at age twelve?’ No-one was more embarrassed by it all than Mary, though she pretended not to be. Rather than avoiding all mention of the topic, as she might have been expected to do, she went out of her way to mention it, to be mature about it, mortifying Aunt Phil and my mother in the process. Then, one afternoon, while Aunt Phil was out, Mary, who, for the past month, had been assuring everyone that breasts were not something to make jokes about or be ashamed of, came up from the basement wearing Aunt Phil’s bra outside her sweater, the cups of the bra stuffed, as Mary put it, with ‘most’ of that week’s laundry. ‘Look what I found,’ she said. ‘Aunt Phil left the laundry door unlocked.’
It might have been that all the awkwardness and embarrassment that Mary had been storing up for weeks were in that bra, as if her breasts had become so absurdly oversized that she would have no choice but be embarrassed by them. My mother shrieked with laughter when she saw her, causing Mary to laugh even harder and strut around the kitchen with her chest thrust out. Her face was beet red with a kind of mortified hilarity which increased the more my mother laughed at her. There they were, the legendary bras which Aunt Phil would not even hang on the clothesline for fear of people seeing them.
Then my mother ran down to the basement and came back with another of Aunt Phil’s bras, the cups of which, as she discovered, fit quite nicely on her head, looking like a bathing cap, or like one of those caps pilots wore in the Second World War, all the more so when she fastened the straps beneath her chin. My mother walked about the kitchen as if she was modelling the latest thing in aviation hats, turning her head this way and that. Soon, all three of us were in the giggles.
Then, she ran downstairs again and, seconds later, came back up, still wearing Aunt Phil’s bra, but also wearing – it hardly seemed possible – Father Seymour’s underwear, ‘the sacred shorts’ as Uncle Reginald called them, which Father Seymour delivered to Aunt Phil cloak-and-dagger fashion every Friday. The rest of his laundry was done by the sisters at the convent, but the shorts were withheld. And here was my mother, wearing them on her head, wearing them over Aunt Phil’s bra, the cups of which, doubled on her head, looked like a skullcap. She might have been some court jester, some fool figure, for, with the skullcap bra, and the shorts, the legs of which hung drooping down like tassels, the only thing missing was a set of bells.
By this time, tears were streaming down our faces – had it gone on much longer, all three of us might have fallen to the floor. But just when all the hilarity was at its height, Aunt Phil came through the door.
At first, it was only the riot of fun that she objected to, the noise that we were making. ‘My God,’ she said, taking off her bandanna, ‘I leave the house for half an hour—’ And then she noticed them, her bras. Her sister-in-law was wearing one of them on her head, her niece was wearing the other one outside her sweater, while her nine-year-old nephew was watching them. It must have looked to her like some sort of pagan ritual was underway, some dance in celebration of the breasts.
For some reason, perhaps because her mind would simply not admit the possibility that my mother was wearing them on her head, it took her a little longer to notice, or perhaps to recognize, Father Seymour’s shorts. She stared at my mother’s head as if she could not, for the life of her, make out what she was wearing. My mother stood there, the legs of Father Seymour’s shorts half drooping over so that now they looked like horns. Even with Aunt Phil looking at them in such total disbelief, Mary and my mother could not stop laughing. In fact, her being there made them laugh that much harder. ‘I’m going to leave this room for five minutes,’ Aunt Phil said. ‘I trust that when I come back, there will be no-one in it.’
It was hardly surprising, after all of this, which happened just before my second pee-dream, that I came home a few days after that dream to find that Aunt Phil had pinned my pee-stained underwear to the bulletin board in the kitchen. Because my drawers were otherwise lily white, the pee stain was all too evident. It might have been my little boy’s soul that was hanging there, ‘pristine except for piss stains’, as Uncle Reginald said later. Below the underwear was a note which read: ‘I will not wash such filth’.
No sooner had I spotted my drawers than Aunt Phil took them down and threw them in the garbage. Worst of all was that no-one said a word about it. Even Mary was too ashamed of me to gloat about the sight of my soiled underwear, hung on the board for all to see. The victory in the laundry had been undone. Aunt Phil had gotten her revenge. She had not only humiliated us, she had made us the instrument of our own humiliation. For a while, my mother and Mary blamed me as much as they did Aunt Phil, and no wonder, for they had had the worst of it; they had had to sit about the house while my underwear was on display in the kitchen. And no sooner had I arrived home than Aunt Phil had taken it down. I had been spared all but a momentary glimpse of it.
It was brilliant revenge, I had to give her that. Divide and conquer. And revenge, she must have calculated, that would keep us in line from now on, since it could well be repeated, my bladder being what it was. I had a picture of this scene being repeated ad infinitum, or, worse yet, the threat of its being repeated held over all our heads ad infinitum. The drawers wars. In which I had not fired a shot, but which we had started, so anything Aunt Phil did would seem justified. I couldn’t help thinking that the sanctity of the laundry basket had been violated, first by us and now by her. It now seemed to me that anything found in the laundry basket, just like anything said in confession, should be kept strictly confidential, but it was too late for such pious thoughts. What if I peed again? As I well might, since I was almost certain to see my father again, and therefore to dream of Momary again.
I lay awake all that night thinking about it. What could I do? Any plan involving Mary or my mother would not be acceptable. I wanted to convince not only Aunt Phil, but the others as well, that I was not a bedwetter. I kept picturing Aunt Phil throwing my underwear in the garbage, and then it came to me. I would buy my own. I would throw my soiled underwear away and buy my own. I would need to buy one, at most two pairs of underwear a week. I had better start doing it right away, before my mother thought of doing the same thing for me. She was certain to replace the ones Aunt Phil had thrown away, and that might give her the idea. The thought of my mother having to buy me new underwear every week was enough to make me put aside such quibbles as where I would buy them, how I would raise the money (it was hard just scraping together enough for my oralysis), and how I would keep my secret from the others.
As I was lying there in bed, the same questions kept posing themselves to me, over and over. How had it come about that my family’s happiness depended on my having clean underwear? Did underwear play so large a part in the lives of other people? All of this trouble because of my bud, my ‘alarm cock’, Uncle Reginald might have called it, if I had had the nerve to tell him why it kept going off, why it kept waking me up. I doubted that even Uncle Reginald would believe that my alarm cock went off to save me from the darkness that Momary chased me into once a week.
A few days later, after first seeing my father and later being awakened from yet another Momary dream by my alarm cock, to find myself in mid-pee, I took my allowance, which I had been saving since the kitchen episode, and went to the only Woolworth’s within walking distance to buy my first pair of underwear. I will never forget the way the woman behind the counter looked at me. What kind of nine-year-old buys his own underwear? she was wondering. The kind who lives with Aunt Phil, I should have told her. Luckily, my mother bought only the standard Stanfield’s whites, so I didn’t have to go to any great lengths to find a matching pair.
As bad as that first time was, the second time, one week later, was much worse. The saleswoman had been so struck by a nine-year-old buying his own underwear that she remembered me, and smiled at me when I put the Stanfield’s on the counter. I thought about telling her they were a present for my brother, but that would be hard to swallow, especially by the tenth week. Another brother, another birthday, another pair of Stanfield’s whites, size small. Keeping the family in underwear and only nine years old. Probably not even wearing any himself, poor thing, going without for his brother’s sake. I took the underwear and ran, wishing there was another Woolworth’s within walking distance of our house.
Thinking of that beard between Momary’s legs, of which I was getting an ever closer view every night, got me to wondering why, despite my young age, the little sac between my legs was so weirdly wrinkled. At our next oralysis, I asked Uncle Reginald about it. He told me it was wrinkled because it was thousands of years old, being the only part of the human body which was passed down through generations, God giving to each newborn baby a ‘used Methuselah’, shrunken, of course, to make it fit. ‘Methuselah’, Uncle Reginald called it, the hairless, wrinkled sage between my legs. Though I did not believe his story, the thought of owning a used Methuselah fascinated me. I couldn’t help wondering who had my father’s, or Adam’s for that matter. Imagine, going about with the very first Methuselah between your legs.
‘The wisest of the wise,’ said Uncle Reginald. ‘The oracle of oracles. The centre of the world.’
‘My Methuselah is the centre of the world?’ I said. He nodded.
‘The centre of your world,’ he said. There was even an invocation to Methuselah, he said, to be spoken while looking at him, that is, while looking at his reflection in a mirror held between your legs. ‘Oh Methuselah,’ said Uncle Reginald, ‘oh Great Hairless One, Great Wrinkled One, oh Oracle of Oracles, oh Prune of Prunes, oh Wisest of the Wise, I command you, tell me all.’
‘He won’t answer me,’ I said, rolling my eyes, but Uncle Reginald assured me that he would. Just for the fun of it, I began to make mock consultations with Methuselah whenever I took a bath. Sitting up on the edge of the tub, holding one of my mother’s compact mirrors between my legs, I had Methuselah answer me, in a deep, god-like voice. ‘What is your question?’ said Methuselah, when I recited Uncle Reginald’s invocation.
‘Will the Habs win the Stanley Cup this year?’ I asked him.
‘Yes,’ said Methuselah.
‘Will Beliveau be MVP?’ I said.
‘Yes,’ said Methuselah. How strange he looked, my wizened, reincarnated Methuselah, how out of place between my backside and my bud, as if he had been some afterthought of creation, made in a panic and hastily attached at the last minute. Perhaps it was because he couldn’t stand the sight of them that God had decided not to make any more Methuselahs than he absolutely had to, and to have mankind keep covered those he had made. It might have been no more than God’s disgust with Adam’s Methuselah that got our first parents kicked out of Eden.
I decided my Methuselah had once been Virgil’s, my father’s favourite writer, which made him at least two hundred years old. Between how many pairs of legs had he been stuck since then? I wondered. Who would have thought it, the accumulated wisdom of the ages in that little pouch between my legs? One day, while I was having a bath, I decided to ask him a real question. Sitting on the edge of the tub, I put the mirror between my legs and looked at him – with his many folds and pink wrinkles, he looked like a brain of some sort, a brain that stored the future instead of the past, foreknowledge instead of memory. ‘Oh Methuselah,’ I said, ‘oh Great Hairless One, Great Wrinkled One, oh Oracle of Oracles, oh Prune of Prunes, oh Wisest of the Wise, tell me all.’
‘What is your question?’ said Methuselah.
‘When will I see my father’s ghost again?’ I said.
‘Soon,’ said Methuselah.
‘When?’ I said.
Methuselah, his pink wrinkles making him look like some aged child, said nothing.
‘What does my father want?’ I said. ‘Why does he always have a puck?’
Methuselah, Great Hairless One, Great Wrinkled One, was silent.