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.
Medina said she didn’t mind the boys as much as the men. “Frig off,” she shouted that evening at a man who said that, judging by the look of me, my mother had never been laid properly. “He botched that job,” the man said. “I said frig off,” Medina shouted. He was standing in the doorway of a house across the street, wearing an undershirt, his pants tightly buckled beneath the bulge of his belly. “I wasn’t talking to you, ugly duckie,” he said. “I bet your you-know-what looks like that youngster’s face. I’d rather eat a plate of chips.”
“Leave him alone or I’ll come over there and smack your face.”
“You’ll have to forgive her,” my mother intervened. “She’s not used to meeting men whose daughters double as their sisters.” The man laughed, threw his cigarette butt on the sidewalk and went inside.
“You talk to them the way they talk to you,” Medina said.
“No, I don’t.”
“You do.”
“It was the politest way I could think of to call him a motherfucker. He did say ‘you-know-what’ instead of what he might have said. I thought one euphemism deserved another.”
“You shouldn’t talk like you do in front of Perse.”
“Things will be even worse for him if I shield him from what’s coming.”
“I could have used a bit of shielding. So could you.”
“It’s not the same. I beat them at their own game. That’s why they laugh and go away. It’s more effective than ‘frig off.’ ”
“I’ll stick with ‘frig off.’ ”
We went past the corner beer bars with their ever-open doors, but in spite of that, they were too dark to see a thing inside. Accordion music blasted out into the streets, the siren call to patrons who couldn’t stand to stay at home. We walked through Rabbit Town, past the haphazardly built houses of the very poor, each with a single concrete block to serve as its front steps. There were no front yards, just sidewalk-overlooking windows with closed sheer curtains that allowed both privacy and light. I caught glimpses of tiny front rooms unlit but for television screens that flickered in the early evening gloom. We went to Jackman’s Grocery Store, on the windows of which prices were scrawled in whitewash. Rabbits hung upside down like talismans in the doorway. My mother bought from Mrs. Jackman three squares of chocolate and vanilla fudge sprinkled with coconut, pure sugar blocks that I bolted down while my mother looked at me and grimaced even as she smiled.
We walked through the richer neighbourhoods where grand, many-storeyed wooden houses blocked most of what little light was left. We didn’t go by Medina’s neighbourhood, which she said was “crawling with saucy crackies” who would descend upon someone of my “unique features”—a phrase she borrowed from my mother—like wild dogs. They were brought up outdoors, she said, and knew a hundred ways to steal a nickel. “You don’t want to see my room,” she said, though I protested that I did. “It’s just a room, a table, a hot plate, a bed. A few other things. St. John’s is full of rooms just like it, so I’m not ashamed of it.” My mother winked at me and I fought back the urge to scrutinize Medina to see if she looked ashamed.
Always, as we turned a corner, a gale blowing uphill from the harbour hit us full in the face, smelling of the sea, of the bilge from foreign ships, of everything that lay between the water’s edge and us: grass, birchbark, deep-fried chips, cigarette smoke, chimney smoke, beer, tar, pitch, asphalt, creosote, the exhaust of cars and trucks, the impossible-to-isolate, indefinable something that was the smell of the wind itself. The wind blew through the upper levels of the largest trees, which shimmered and crackled ceaselessly. Subdued into silence by the onset of night and by the bite of a new chill that betokened fog, we headed home.
“The old, sad city of St. John’s,” my mother called it when we were back home and sitting around the kitchen, saying that it looked sad and its history was sad. She said it looked as though it had been under water or under ice for centuries, the sea or glacier having just recently withdrawn, leaving everything in a state of rust, the paint peeling, the wood rotting, the stunted trees sagging windward, the green metal street signs wind-warped, bent, corkscrewed, the buildings stained with salt, the pavement potholed beyond repair, the earth cracked and strewn with streams that ever-widened or overflowed with the least bit of rain. My mother read Poe’s “The City in the Sea” to me, a poem about a city that, although it didn’t look like St. John’s, made me think of it, for it felt the same, gloomily submerged in time itself, slumping under the weight of its own history.
My mother called St. John’s a lot of things. She called it The City of Percy. A City Upon a Hill, which she said was from the Biblical parable of Salt and Light. She called it The City Without Pity and The Glorified Town. The City of Chaotic Traffic because of the number of purposeless one-way streets, dead ends, sharp turns, all-but-vertical cul-de-sacs, intersections that were remnants of streetcar lines that criss-crossed in ways so random they could keep you going in a circle or a square for minutes with no clue from a road sign as to how you might escape. The City of Salt. The City of Wind, The Anemopolis. The City of Aeolus Who Was the God of Wind. The City of Water. The City of Eros and Erosion. The City of Aphrodite. The City of Fog. The City of Fire. The City of Winter. The City of Ice. The City on the Eastern Edge, the Fringe, the Rim. The Little City. The City of Fish. The City of Well-Attended Churches and Overflowing Bars. The City of Big Boys and Girls Heading Home in a Hurry with Grease-Stained Brown Paper Bags. The City of Eccentrics. The City of the Sane, the Half Cracked and the Unmistakably Demented. The City of the Open-Hearted, the Broken-Hearted, the Half-Hearted. The City of Gossip and Unimpeachable Discretion. The City of Piety and Blasphemy. The City of Night and Day. The City of Abstinence and Revelry. The City That Thrice Went Up in Smoke. The City of Milkmen, Meat Men, Cod-Tongue-Hawking, Bucket-Lugging Boys from the Battery and Brow. The City of Shut-ins. Of Homesick Sailors and Too Many Men. The City of Hilarity. The City of Storm-Scorning, Weather-Oblivious, Bar-Bound Pedestrians. The City of Unwarranted Optimism and Entirely Justified Despair.
The boys of Bonaventure lusted after my mother. A boy with the unlikely name of Squire Coffin would grab his crotch and say to me: “Give my love to Miss Juice.” Some, to my mystification, called her Miss Joy Juice, some simply Miss Joyce, “Miss” being the most important part, invoking older but still young, a single mother, forbidden, illicit, not widowed but without a man, without one through no choice of hers and therefore surely craving what she hadn’t had in years. Some simply seemed to savour her first name, shouting it as they went past our house: “Penelopeee.” “Elope with me, Penelope.”
I saw my mother pause at her typewriter to listen to them, to the primal ritual of school-day afternoons below the Mount, the bellowing of the boys who could see our house from the windows of their classroom, the house of the beautiful, lonely Miss Joyce who was longing for it from the sort of boy who in her youth had pleasured her as her long-absent husband never could. My mother would laugh even as Pops, the chemistry teacher, clad in his white lab coat, shouted at the boys from the steps, telling them to shut their mouths, shaking his fist.
My aunt Medina couldn’t afford bus fare, so she walked everywhere. She had a full-body yellow oilskin that she’d bought second-hand from the Canadian Coast Guard. It was too big for her, so she was able to wear underneath it a parka that she had bought at the Goodwill. She had a pair of black workboots that laced tightly up her shins. In rain, snow, wind, cold, she would arrive at our house after her mile walk from her room like a crew member who had just stepped off a stormbound ship in the harbour, her yellow raincoat glistening with water or coated on the windward side with melting snow, wearing a black watch cap inside her hood, and leather-palmed mittens.
Once she was out of her oilskin and parka, Medina was bone-dry. In the coldest weather she would come in with her hands tucked into her armpits, stamping her feet, which she said felt as if they were being stuck with pins and needles. “I’m cold to the very core,” she’d say. “There’s a ball of ice in my belly that only a beer can melt.”
She’d spend the next half-hour defrosting by the stove, sipping on her beer, or rather Pops’ beer, which she took from the fridge without asking, while the smell of her mittens drying on the radiator spread throughout the house.
“I thought I would perish this time, Pen, I really did,” she’d say.
She smoked Matinée cigarettes; the top of the yellow package always protruded from the side pocket of her hospital uniform or the pocket of whatever blouse she was wearing, because she didn’t have a purse, didn’t want one, never saw the need for one, eschewed one. She believed she was looked at, the rare times she’d carried one, as if she’d stolen it, though her coat pockets were always crammed with chewing gum, Kleenex, lipstick—her only form of makeup—as well as bills and coins and gloves. “Some women, like Pen, look good with a purse,” she said. “Some, like me, don’t. I don’t like accessories, I like necessities.” She was quoting my mother, who had said she liked to feel she could get by no matter what her world was reduced to.
One day, I strayed away from the front yard just as a snowstorm was about to start. By the time I crested Bonaventure, I couldn’t see a thing, so I turned back.
As I was heading down Bonaventure to our house at 44, the wind blew the breath down my throat and I wondered if I should run. Then I saw Medina coming toward me, barely visible in the storm, all her clothing flattened at the front and flapping and wagging behind her in the wind, one hand on her hood as, head down, she struggled up the slope, her face turned to avoid the sting of slantwise-driven snow. When she drew near me, she was as frantic-looking as if I had been missing in the storm for hours. It strikes me now how alone and vulnerable she looked, as if her being out in such weather was due to some emergency that she could find no one else to help her with. A woman on her own when the balance of the city was indoors and the outdoors looked deserted but for that yellow raincoat. “PERCY!” she shouted, her voice just audible above the wind and sifting snow. When she reached me, she shielded my face with her hand and hugged me to her with her free arm. When we got to 44 and stood in the shelter of the porch, she put her hands on my shoulders and kissed me several times, kissed me on the forehead, on the cheeks and once right on the lips. “You’re a real little bugger,” she said, “you know that? A real little bugger.” For my mother and her to stamp me with kisses until I coyly protested became our game.
That night, lying in bed, I overheard my mother and Medina playing cards and drinking beer in the kitchen. The more they drank, the louder they spoke.
“I’ve seen children at the hospital who don’t have any kind of syndrome who make Percy look like Rock Hudson,” Medina said. My mother said she couldn’t help but wonder what adulthood held in store for me. “Not to mention young adulthood. Jesus.”
“Any girl or woman would be lucky to get him,” Medina said. “He’s a good boy. He’s smarter than all the other boys. The day will come when they’ll wish they hadn’t been so mean to him.”
But she eventually reached the point of making my mother laugh away her troubles by predicting that her very worst fears would be realized. It wasn’t long before my mother joined in. “Future-wise,” Medina said, “his best bet is to get his hermit’s licence.”
“Or he’ll have to be a Christian Brother or a priest,” my mother said. “In which case he’ll be known as Cleric the Red.”
“Whatever that means,” Medina said.
I laughed along with them and hoped that, in their tipsy condition, they didn’t abruptly switch tone as they sometimes did. “If he grew a beard thick enough, you might not even see the stain on his face,” Medina stage-whispered.
“Oh Christ,” my mother said, again sounding sad, “maybe he could learn to type like me and never have to leave the house.” But then they began to enumerate television and movie roles for which my facial stain would not disqualify me: Helmet-Wearing Deep Sea Diver; Coal-Dust-Covered Miner; Masked Surgeon; Bandaged Burn Victim; Mummy; Hooded Ku Klux Klansman.
I got up and went out to the kitchen, passing Pops, who was drinking beer in the sunroom. He gave me a little wave and I waved back.
“Hope we didn’t wake you up, Perse,” Medina said.
I shook my head and sat at the table with them. I sat up late with them. They played Crazy Eights, Cribbage and Auction Forty-fives. They drank brown stubbies of Dominion Ale, poured it into glasses that, when you bought them, were filled with peanut butter, “bonus” glasses on the sides of which were hearts, diamonds, clubs and spades. (Pops always drank his straight from the bottle, saying that he wouldn’t stoop to drinking “peanut butter beer.”)
My eyes watering from cigarette smoke, I stared at the enormous green glass ashtray that had six grooves for holding cigarettes. It was filled with ashes, stabbed with lipstick-smudged cigarette butts, some of them still smouldering, smoke rising in columns as if from a pincushion that would soon ignite.
“He came out for the food, like always, not for the conversation, right Perse?” my mother said. I nodded.
We—mostly Medina and I—made our way through a bag of salt-encrusted pretzel sticks and a bag of potato chips. “Your mother’s watching her figure,” Medina teased.
“You wouldn’t think I’d need to with so many other people watching it,” my mother said, winking at Medina.
“See if Pops is gone to bed, Perse,” my mother said. I got up from the table and peeked into the sunroom. Pops’ chair was empty, surrounded by what looked to be a dozen beer bottles. I ventured out to the living room, where I saw that the door of Pops’ room was closed and the light was off. I went back to the kitchen.
“He’s gone to bed,” I said.
“Good,” my mother said. “Your turn now.”
“I haven’t had anything to drink. I’m thirsty.”
My mother quickly made up some Freshie, adding water to a pouch of powder that she poured into a jug. I drank it all, guzzled it greedily.
“Now, off to bed,” my mother said.
I needed no further urging. I reached out my hands to her to signal that I wanted her to carry me to bed. I was almost asleep by the time we got to my room. I heard Medina giggling and my mother telling her to stop.
“The men are asleep,” Medina said.
“Thank Christ,” my mother said.
My mother and Medina were sleeping with each other on the sly as often as they could. A woman in love with her brother’s fiancée, a woman in love with her fiancé’s sister—you wouldn’t want that to be common knowledge now let alone back then, back there, in the late fifties. I didn’t find out about my mother and Medina until I was in grade four at St. Bon’s School, not long after I also found out that, in exchange for help with the mortgage, my mother, with Medina’s knowledge but not her approval, was sleeping on the sly with the obscurely named Pops, the chemistry teacher who taught in the school across the street and rented a room in our house. He didn’t know about Medina and my mother, and didn’t know that Medina knew about him and my mother. It was not a good time or place for anyone to be known to be sleeping with anyone they weren’t at least engaged to. A woman caught with a woman or known to be in love with one would likely be sent to jail or deemed to be insane and committed until she was “cured.” For certain I’d have been taken away from my mother.
In St. John’s, there was, as my mother put it, no separation between Church and Fate. We lived in a neighbourhood known as the Mount, which I’d be willing to bet was the most intensely and exclusively Catholic neighbourhood in North America. St. John’s consisted of a patchwork of neighbourhoods, each neighbourhood at war with all the others for reasons either long forgotten or non-existent unless they had to do with religious denominations, of which there seemed to be no end, each one with its own school board, bus fleet, churches and schools, even the Salvation Army, which was known as The Lowest Common Denomination.
Catholicism Central. It was a kind of smaller-scale Vatican City. There were seven Christian Brothers-and-nuns-run schools within a stone’s throw of each other: St. Pat’s and St. Bon’s, rival junior all-boys schools run by the CBs, as the Irish Christian Brothers were called; Brother Rice, an all-boys high school run by CBs; Holy Heart of Mary, an all-girls high school run by some Mercy but mostly Presentation nuns; the Mercy Convent girls’ school on Barnes Road; the Presentation Convent girls’ school; and Belvedere, an all-girls, junior school–aged orphanage that was also run by nuns.
These were known as The Seven Schools of the Mount.
There were also, at various elevations on the Mount, convents, rectories, dormitories for the CBs, Catholic graveyards, monasteries and the Basilica, the largest cathedral east of Montreal, home of the Archbishop.
If you started from our house and climbed Bonaventure toward the Basilica atop the Mount, there were four schools on the right: Brother Rice, where I would eventually go to high school, Belvedere, Holy Heart and St. Pat’s. St. Bon’s, which would be my junior school, was on the left, directly across the street from St. Pat’s. Past St. Bon’s, Bonaventure sloped down the other side of the Mount and became Garrison Hill. The Basilica was on your immediate left, the Mercy Convent School just slightly to the left of that, and the Presentation Convent School was on the right, the two convent schools flanking the Basilica. The Seven Schools and the Basilica formed an imperfect ring, of which the Basilica was the city-and-sea-facing centre jewel, the Big B on a Calvary-like peak, its Roman wings protectively outspread. The whole structure seemed situated and built so as best to repel some Protestant invasion force that would have had to scale the ramparts of the city just to reach the outskirts of its Catholic castle.
There were ascetic, severe-looking Jesuits and nuns, and “normal” priests swishing about in their stark black frocks. There were brown-robed and hooded Capuchin monks who always ventured out in pairs, as if thereby to make themselves look less odd.
Deacons, final-year seminarians who served as assistants to the Archbishop and the basilica priests, were everywhere, pale, intense, zealous-looking young men for whom the Basilica was their first posting in the outside world, soon-to-be priests, champing at the bit as the day of their ordination by a bishop fast approached and for whom every sighting of Penny Joyce must have been a torment. They each had a prominent Adam’s apple that bobbed all the more, going up and down like an air-blown bingo ball, as they looked at her.
School blazers of various colours were everywhere. There were maroon blazers, green blazers, blue blazers, grey blazers, and tunics of just as many colours, though the blouse and legs of every girl were white.
And Pops of Brother Rice went about among their black and brown frocks in his conspicuous white lab coat like some obscure official of the Church. The Vatican Chemist, my mother called him.
When I was on the way, my father went away. It was hard not to see this as cause and effect. Jim Joyce. We’d never set eyes on each other, so he didn’t know what I looked like, maybe didn’t know about my having False Someone Syndrome, but still.
“Why did he go away?” I said. I was not in school yet or even worried about what going to school would be like.
“Don’t know,” my mother said, cracking her spearmint gum. “Forgot to tell me, I guess. He was very forgetful. All he took from me was the car and a hundred dollars, which was every cent I had. If he could have towed the house away, he would have.”
There were no photographs of him in the house, which made me suspect that Jim Joyce had been disfigured too, that I’d inherited my disfigurement from him, but my mother assured me that Jim Joyce had left me with nothing.
She was already living at 44 Bonaventure when Jim Joyce ran off, having inherited from her mother, the second of her parents to die, the house and a mortgage that was larger than the purchase price because her mother was in arrears in payments. The plan had been for Jim Joyce to move in with her after they were married. When he ran off, my mother expected she would lose the house and likely would have if not for Pops, who answered her Room Available ad in the Telegram.
Our house was the only bungalow on Bonaventure. The other houses were two-storey or three-storey Victorian mansions: Bonaventure was one of the more affluent streets in the city, not much affected by the fire of 1892 that burned most of the city to the ground. On the north side of the street, however, none of the mansions remained. Schools, churches, graveyards, all Catholic, had replaced the burnt-out hulks. As a result, the value and prestige of the south side had declined. Bonaventure was, literally and figuratively, over the hill, past its heyday, and located on the far side of the Mount that was crowned by the Basilica.
Our house had gone up after a derelict mansion on the same site was torn down in the early fifties, and was not nearly as large as the house that it succeeded. On much of our lot, at the sides and back of the house, trees had grown up, incongruous urban patches of deciduous forest that, except in winter, blocked our view of our immediate neighbours and vice versa. There being little more than two sidewalks and a street separating our front yard and the city’s largest school, Brother Rice High School, with its red brick, fortress-like facade, the undeveloped part of our property was all but worthless. Our house was snugly hemmed in by bamboo-thin poplar and birch trees, our front walkway forever buried in leaves, some newly fallen, some so old they crumbled beneath our feet into dust that blew away. Our leaf-strewn concrete walkway led up to a likewise leaf-strewn veranda that was unfurnished and never used. The house was three-toned; the vertical siding that flanked the windows was dark green while the horizontal clapboard beneath them was a rusty red, and the cement foundation was painted with white lime in a vain attempt to discourage cracks. It was, as my mother said, a Plain Jane of a house, unremarkable and easy to overlook.
Our furnishings looked like the temporary, make-do ones of a family that had arrived far in advance of its belongings. Though cramped, the adjoining living room and dining room seemed all but empty as so much of the shag-carpeted floor was left exposed. There was a compact, rickety dining-room table that was never used for dining, a faded brown corduroy sofa and matching chair in the living room, and a faux leather recliner in the gabled outcrop that was called the sunroom. The kitchen, my mother said, was a “chrome-linoleum-Formica masterpiece” with a waist-high fridge and flat-topped stove complete with removable dampers, and Gyproc cupboards. “Home sweet home,” my mother would say wryly as she surveyed the rooms. But I think that, even had she been able to afford it, she would not have changed a thing, perhaps because she was as incongruous-looking in the house as our house was on the street. Almost any surroundings would have set my mother off to best advantage, but these made her look, as Pops once said, quoting Ezra Pound, “like a petal on a wet black bough.”
There were two bedrooms on the east side of the house, mine and my mother’s. Pops’ bedroom was on the west side, an afterthought of an extension that jutted out from the house like an extra porch and lay directly opposite the sunroom.
Medina had a very low-paying, part-time job as an orderly at the Catholic hospital, St. Clare’s. Pops would often say, “Medina, why are you wearing that bedpan expression?” Medina would tell him that one of these days he would wind up as a patient at St. Clare’s and then what would he do, confined to a hospital bed with no one to protect him from her?
Pops was from St. Anthony, but he seemed to have no contact with anyone there or elsewhere on the island. He had inexplicably inconsistent quirks of pronunciation that Medina put down to his being from such a remote outport as St. Anthony. “There is no outport that remote,” my mother said. “He must have been the only one who lived there, because no one else on earth sounds like that.”
Pops always called my mother Penelope, but he pronounced Pen like Pay. Paynelope. He had long ago taught biology at Brother Rice and in one class had famously pronounced vagina with a hard g, a short i and the stress on the first syllable: vagana, like wagon with an a stuck on the end. He said he couldn’t help the way that he pronounced some words—he said them as he’d been taught to say them. “Who teaches anyone how to pronounce vagina?” my mother said.
“At the dawn of time the sky was red, Percy,” he told me. “A bad omen. That’s why things have been fouled up ever since.”
He had a kind of teaching manifesto that he would sometimes recite: “I will consider neither my time nor theirs to have been wasted if, as they look back over their years at Brother Rice, my students are unable to recall me teaching them anything but that death is not only inevitable but could come at any moment. And I should be doubly gratified if they were able also to recall the motto with which I strove to prepare them for the future: Don’t bother starting today something you might not live to see the end of tomorrow.”
“Did you ever think that you might not be entirely suited to teaching, Pops?” my mother said. “If you had written Das Kapital, the course of world history would be very different: ‘Workers of the world, disband. Any way you look at it, we all die in the end.’ ”
The pocket of his lab coat read “Mr. MacDougal.” From a distance, it looked like “Dr. MacDougal.” He walked with his hands in the pockets of his lab coat, thumbs out in a way that seemed doctorly. All that was needed to complete his “look” was a stethoscope, which the strap of his safety goggles protruding from his lab coat pocket were often mistaken for by those who didn’t know him.
He was so common and conspicuous a sight crossing Bonaventure at exactly the same time every morning in his white lab coat that passersby said, “Morning, Pops,” and motorists honked their horns, in a partly fond, partly ironic way. Pops would answer with a perfunctory nod of his head and hurry up the steps of Brother Rice, his lips drawn in a tight line as if to humbly emphasize the importance of the work that awaited him, like some celebrity who is concerned that too effusive an acknowledgement of adulation will end with him being swarmed by fans.
In spite of his daily six-pack or so of beer, Pops was quite thin. He didn’t eat much, seemed not to relish food or prefer one meal over another. My mother said he ate little more than was necessary to maintain a heartbeat. He spent a great deal of time grooming himself; the extension to the house that contained his room also contained a small bathroom for his exclusive use. He had a barber’s kit, which he used to cut his own hair and trim his narrow, Hitleresque moustache. He shaved himself with a straight razor. His hair was as thick as the bristles of the thickest brush and he trimmed it daily with electric clippers. Though he was in his early forties, he didn’t have so much as a thin patch, let alone a bald spot. He had the slender, dapper look of a dancer. He sometimes left the door of his room open and I saw him polishing his shoes with a cloth as vigorously as any sailor ever buffed his boots. He would have been the very picture of coiffed and sartorial splendour if not for The Coat of Many Colours. He had but one of them, and in spite of the efforts of my mother and a host of drycleaners, it bore a trace of every chemical that had ever stained it. “What would be the point of having more than one coat?” he said. “They’d all look alike in no time.”
I watched his comings and goings, knowing that it wouldn’t be long before I was going to the sort of place where he worked. I formed my notions about a “school” from things he said. I watched him drink beer and listened to him ramble on. My mother said his “people” either were deceased or had long ago fallen out of touch. He sat in an armchair in the little sunroom that faced away from Brother Rice, the street, the traffic, the rest of the house, the world. It overlooked the backyard and the house behind us. He drank and drank and seemed to stare at his reflection in the window.
“I live from paycheque to paycheque,” Pops said to Medina. “I’m not able to put a cent away. I don’t mind doing anything I can for Paynelope, I pay her far more than she asks me to. I do it for her and Percy, but why am I paying for you?”
“You don’t give me money, Penny does.”
“Which I give to Paynelope. Which means that I’m giving it to you.”
“I’m not stealing it from you, Pops. Penny can do what she likes with her money. If you don’t want me getting any, give her less than she asks for.”
“I don’t want to.”
“The point is that you could.”
“You’re nothing but a freeloader. I don’t care how you try to make it seem, that’s what you are.”
“And what are you, Pops? Remind me why you’re giving Penny extra money. Oh, I remember. Because you have a crush on her.”
When Medina was around, my mother had a way of laughing that made me laugh even if I didn’t get the joke. She opened her mouth so wide you could see her back teeth, but no sound came at first. She’d look around, open-mouthed, until she locked eyes with Medina and then she’d tip her head back even farther and let loose a high-pitched shriek. Pops hated it when Medina made my mother laugh.
The one thing that Pops and Medina didn’t fight about was God. My mother, Pops and Medina were all agnostics who had been born Catholic. Our house, my mother said, was “secretly a nest of agnostics.” Medina went to church but said she wouldn’t have anything to do with it if she didn’t work at a Catholic hospital and have to keep up appearances to keep her job. Pops said he wouldn’t go except that it was required of everyone who taught at Brother Rice. Even though he dismissed the Bible as “a book of fairy tales,” Pops went to Mass in the Catholic chapel at Brother Rice. Pops was vice-principal of Brother Rice, a position he achieved by an automatic line of ascendancy. A Christian Brother always held the position of principal at Brother Rice, and the longest-serving male lay teacher always held the position of vice-principal, a purely titular one because, were the principal to resign or be removed, another Christian Brother would take his place.
In the first few months after I was born, my mother stopped taking the sacraments but still went to church, partly to keep Medina company, and partly in the hope of mollifying the priests. While I stood at her knee with my hands held in hers, she told me in gleeful detail of the exhortations to have me baptized that often took place in the church doorway as she was leaving Mass with me in her arms. In front of others who paused to listen and those who, passing by, pretended not to listen, my mother was berated by a succession of priests in a succession of churches for being everything from irresponsible to “a wicked woman” for withholding baptism from me. “You are yourself baptized and therefore saved, yet you spitefully refuse to allow your disfigured little child entrance into the Church of God.”
“He’s not disfigured.”
Sometimes they objected to my mother being single.
“Engagement is not a sacrament,” a priest said to her after I was born. “You’re free to marry.”
“Or not to marry.”
“Don’t you want what’s best for Percy?”
“The two of us are looked upon as damaged goods. The men who come sniffing around aren’t looking for marriage.”
“I don’t think everyone regards you as damaged goods. There are men—”
“Yes, I’m sure there are, but I don’t share your opinion that any husband is better than none at all.”
“I was thinking of someone in particular—”
“A widower from the Holy Name Society?”
“As a matter of fact, yes. A good man. You should resume the sacraments.”
My mother grew so weary of these weekly chastisements that she stopped going to church altogether. Eventually the priests stopped coming to 44. I knew early in life that Penelope Joyce was more or less universally regarded as a lost cause.
Pops tried to cheer me up by enumerating people from history and literature who had overcome disfigurements and physical limitations to accomplish great things. My mother told Pops she doubted that telling me my stain was “nothing” next to the disfigurements of others—real or fictional—would do me any good. She said that surely there were greater things I could aspire to than not being Quasimodo.
My mother, because she said this sort of thing in public and was seen arriving home laden with library books, was looked upon as a know-it-all, which is to say someone who not only put on airs by conspicuously pretending to know it all but also—never mind the contradiction—did know it all. Educated men were held in high esteem if their education was put to some practical, money-making, family-supportive use, whereas educated women, especially ones who looked like my mother, were said not to know their place and were not to be associated with by those who did. No amount of reading books or pretending to read them could make up for being an unmarried mother or being rewarded for promiscuity by having a child who looked like me, as if the sacrament of marriage would have healed me in her womb. “It doesn’t matter how many books I read,” my mother told me. “You’ll still be seen as a bastard and an eyesore and I’ll still be a woman whose big tits predetermined her to be a slut.”
As you may have deduced by now, my mother was an autodidact. Though a grade ten dropout, she could probably have overseen the studies of graduate students in half a dozen disciplines.
Second-hand books, library books, hardcover, paperback and pocket editions lay haphazardly scattered on almost every flat surface—floors, tables, countertops, chairs, even beds. Our house looked as if whatever else went on in 44 was incidental to the reading of books. There were books whose covers had been scorched by cigarettes, mementoes of near-miss house fires, books stained with the bottoms of cups and beer bottles, smeared with ashes, sweat-stained with handprints, fingerprints. It looked as if we were not so much readers as we were hoarders of books. Pops and Medina nudged them aside to make room for their ashtrays, beer bottles, dinner plates and elbows as if the books were nuisances to which they were trying to adapt for my mother’s sake, for she was the only one who read them. (Pops said that he had once been a “great reader” but no longer had the “inclination” for it.) She owed a fortune in library fines, but no one else ever asked to borrow the kinds of books she liked, so the librarians forever deferred payment. I went with her to the Gosling Library on Duckworth Street where the librarians always smiled at me, so I may have been another reason that they more or less let her keep her books indefinitely.
Pops won her over to what she called the “look-what-Percy’s-peers-have-accomplished” strategy of consoling me for my face and hands and feet. She helped me bone up on the freaks of life and literature—Helen Keller, the Elephant Man, countless circus sideshow geeks, the “long-conked” Cyrano de Bergerac who, she told me years later, tried to fuck women to ecstasy with the very nose that prevented him from going down on them. As if she had not chastised Pops for doing so, she invoked the hunchbacked, bell-ringing Quasimodo of Notre-Dame, as well as the limping, lisping, far-too-slowly-dying Tiny Tim Cratchit, and Shakespeare’s misshapen murderer of twin princelings, Richard III. And Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, who, at the end of the book, lit out for some Arctic place that sounded much like Newfoundland.
“Books, books and more books,” Pops said as he surveyed the house. “A teacher dismayed at the sight of books,” my mother said, looking at Medina, hoping to coax a laugh from her, but it never worked, for Medina, who couldn’t read or write, regarded my mother’s books much as Pops did—as other people would a rival lover. My mother said she placed as many of the books face up as she could because it made them easier to find. Pops complained of the treacherously cluttered floors, books that slid beneath your feet on the once-white shag carpet, and offered to buy her some bookshelves, but my mother declined. She would go about at bedtime in her bathrobe, which she held together at the throat and at the waist as, bent over, she peered to make out the titles, often picking up more books than she could hold in one hand, her robe falling open as she did so, revealing cleavage and brown thighs. I think she kept Medina and Pops at bay with books, kept them from her bed with this conspicuous show of book browsing, which as good as said she planned to read straight through the night. She said she was doing little more than what other people did with church prayer books, merely “following along,” but Pops said it seemed she meant to “follow along” from start to finish every book ever written.
My mother read late at night in bed, sitting up, chain-smoking Rothmans. When my door was open, I could hear her striking matches, exhaling cigarette smoke with a kind of sigh, turning the pages of the book that lay open on her lap. I’d fall asleep and, waking up hours later, would hear the same sounds, only by now they’d be punctuated with a cough.
I hopscotched from book to book, trying to see if I could cross a room without touching the floor. I always did it in bare feet, which stuck better to the books than shoes or slippers.
Medina, who had dropped out of school halfway through third grade, glanced at me when the subject of her illiteracy came up. I could see that she felt especially ashamed in front of me. During her two and a half years in school, she had only gone to school about sixty days. “I spent most of my time at home taking care of my sick parents and Jim Joyce,” she said.
“An urbane threesome, to be sure,” Pops muttered.
I tried to imagine what it would be like, living in a place where I could speak the language, my language, but couldn’t read a word of it. Words were everywhere. Simple things, like street signs, shop windows, phone books, might as well have been written in Chinese. Medina had managed to master playing cards because they consisted of pictures and numbers. She had “picked up” rudimentary arithmetic so she could get by with groceries, denominations of bills and coins. Pops said she often didn’t know before opening the can what she was having for dinner because stores were forever altering the pictureless labels. “You don’t know what you’re having for dinner until Penny puts it in front of you,” Medina retorted. My mother functioned as a kind of telephone operator for Medina, who would call her to ask her to look up numbers she didn’t want to ask the operator for lest she be asked to spell someone’s name or that of a street. Also, Medina often came by with her mail so that my mother could sort through it for her, write answers when they were needed, fill out various official forms and applications, address envelopes. She brought her pill bottles so my mother could read the labels for her. “Penny knows more about me than I do,” she often said.
“The world is anxiously awaiting her biography of you,” Pops quipped.
My mother practically read the newspaper to Medina, the obits, the classifieds, advertisements—she clipped coupons. She scanned the entire paper every day to see if there was something in it that might be of interest or value to Medina. She was her personal interpreter, her tour guide through the foreign country of the printed word.
But one evening, Medina told me that not being able to read didn’t mean she wasn’t smart. “If the two of us were in China,” she said, “I’d be leading you around by the hand.” She claimed to have learned to get by using tricks that Pops and my mother knew nothing about. “I might come in handy someday when you’re in real trouble, Pops.”
“You’re right, Medina.” Pops was sitting, beer in hand, his back to the kitchen as usual. “Better to be illiterate than ill-prepared for a sudden relocation to China.”
“There’s no excuse in this day and age for not knowing how to read and write,” Pops said.
“What excuse is there in this day and age for not knowing how to wash your underwear?” my mother asked. “For not knowing how to iron your clothes without setting them on fire? For not knowing how many slices of bread it takes to make a sandwich? You’re a man, Pops. It’s a permanent disability that half the world is born with.”
“I was once as frequent a patron of the Gosling Library as you, Paynelope.”
“Like patron saint?” Medina said.
“No,” my mother corrected her, “not like patron saint. It has a different meaning. It means someone who frequents a particular place.”
“Patron. I’m not calling anyone a patron,” Medina said. “No one says the patron is always right. They line up like customers, just like at Woolworth’s. That old buzzard who works there checks them out like customers. So Pen, did you wake up one morning with the urge to be a patron of the Gosling Library? It would be a lot more fun to be a patron of the East End Club. Jesus. Eight books a week.”
“Tomes,” my mother said. “That’s what big books are called.”
“It must be nice to know what things that people never talk about are called,” Medina countered. “What are small books called?”
“There’s not really one word for them. Slim volumes, I suppose.”
“Slim volumes. Hmmm. What good do you think reading all these books will do you? I never hear anyone who works at the hospital saying, ‘Oh my, Medina, it’s been a long day. I can’t wait to get home to my tome.’ Or, ‘What are you doing this weekend, Mary?’ ‘Well, my dear, there’s a slim volume with my name on it just waiting for me on the kitchen table.’ At work they never stop going on about it, the Gosling this, the Gosling that. It’s crazy on Fridays, everybody trying to get off early before the lineup at the Gosling starts. In the morning all you can hear is people talking about how they polished off too many tomes and what time they got to bed. Some of them can’t get through a day without a straightener, a few pages of a slim volume on the sly. You pick the hardest-looking books, Pen. Your books really look like books.” She picked up a large, thick, black book from the floor. “You could kill someone with a book this heavy. Look, it’s got a ribbon like a prayer book.”
“It’s to mark your page,” my mother said, tugging gently on the ribbon. “It’s a book of poetry. A lot of the books are poetry anthologies. Or the collected works of one poet. Tennyson, for instance. This one is an anthology of nineteenth-century English poetry. I never liked poetry when I was in school, but I do now.”
“Poetry? Like Valentine’s cards?”
“More like … Shakespeare.”
“Oh, Shakespeare. At work there’s no better way to start an argument than to mention Shakespeare. Pen, you’d be better off getting a good night’s sleep than staying up till dawn reading books.”
“Some people go to university for ten years or more after they finish high school,” my mother said.
“Yeah, doctors. I see them every day. They don’t see me.”
“Not just doctors,” my mother said. “Professors who teach and write books about the books they read.”
Medina sniffed. “Jesus, if you start writing books about books.…”
“She’s merely trying to better herself,” Pops spoke up again from the sunroom.
“Who will she be better than when she’s finished?”
“She’s got a good head start on you.”
“I never see you reading books, Pops,” Medina said. “What are you trying to do, worsen yourself?”
“I’ve had my fill of books.”
“So you’ve bettered yourself to the hilt, is that it?” Medina quipped. “You could read another thousand books and still show no improvement.”
“The time comes when one gives up on books.”
“I’ve often wondered what one does when the time comes.”
“You haven’t forgotten the books you read, Pops,” my mother said. “You even quote them from time to time. And you almost always get my allusions.” She smiled at him. Medina’s colour rose and I watched her eyes dart back and forth between Pops and my mother.
“He gets your what?” Medina asked.
“Allusions,” Pops said. “Literary allusions.”
“What the fuck are they supposed to be?”
“Remarks about particular books,” my mother offered. “The characters in particular books. Lines from poems.”
“It’s true,” Pops said. “I do get you, don’t I, Paynelope?”
“You get her?”
“I get her meaning.”
“Well, I get her too, Pops. A lot.”
“You’re secretly erudite?”
“I’m secretly something, Pops. You can be sure of that.”
“You’re the Abbott to my Costello. And I’m the Abbott to Paynelope’s Costello.”
“I’ve heard of Abbott and Costello.”
“Would you like to know who’s on first, what’s on second—”
“What the fuck are you—”
“Ceasefire!” my mother yelled.
“See. She doesn’t even understand TV,” Pops protested.
“I watch it when I’m here,” Medina said. “I haven’t got a TV. Don’t want one.”
“That’s it,” my mother fumed. “Enough, enough, enough.”
The three of them were silent for a while. I wondered if it would help if I said something.
“So what happens when you run out of books, Pen?” Medina asked. “Do you get a Girl Guide’s medal or something?”
“There are more books in the world than anyone has time to read. In university they keep track of what you read and write and give out what are called degrees. You can get a bachelor’s degree, a master’s degree or a PhD.”
“Pops, you’re a bachelor.” Medina grinned at him. “Whoever taught you how to be one must have really known their stuff.”
“I spent one year at university,” Pops said. “That’s all you needed back then to be a high school teacher. Brother Rice’s principal, Brother McHugh, has a master’s degree in theology.”
“Religion,” my mother said to Medina.
“Oh my,” Medina said, “a master of religion, what does that mean now? He must have spent a long time bettering himself. What’s he better at than other people? My great-uncle was a master mariner. Never went to school in his life. All he could do was sail a ship across an ocean of ice without getting himself or other people drowned. But who would you rather have around in a storm at sea, a master mariner or a master of religion?”
“You’re not a master of anything,” Pops said.
“I’m better than you at talking. I can talk the arse off you.”
“Whereas I must confess that, often though I’ve wished that I had seen the last of it, I could not with the help of ten men remove your arse from this house by any method, least of all talking, even though I pay for the beer you drink.” Pops went to his bedroom and closed the door.
Medina sighed. “I don’t suppose you’ll ever give up on books, Pen.”
“No. But I could teach you to read. You’re so smart. You’d learn quickly.”
“So you keep saying. I’m not good enough the way I am, that’s what you think. I don’t want to know how to read and write. That’s what I keep saying.” She started to cry. She leaned her head on my mother’s shoulder. “Would you rather have a friend you could talk about books with?”
“No, sweetheart,” my mother said, tenderly stroking her cheek and smiling reassuringly at me.
“I can’t put things into words like you. Or even Pops.”
“It’s not always bad to be lost for words. Besides, you have your own way with them.”
“Oh fuck, look at me and look at you—”
“Don’t you think Medina’s pretty, Perse?” My mother raised her eyebrows at me.
“She’s really pretty,” I said quickly.
And she was, in a way I see now but didn’t then. I haven’t done her justice yet. She had large brown eyes and the kind of ski-jump nose that these days some women pay plastic surgeons for; frank, lively, smart eyes that made her seem ever-vigilant, never at ease. She was big-boned but not fat, each of the features of her face and her body slightly out of proportion with the others, so that whatever she wore never suited more than part of her. A sweater that fit at the shoulders was too long at the hem. A skirt that was tight and flat at the front sagged in wrinkles at the back. It was as if her body had been well designed but badly made. Her chin moved from centre to left, centre to left, when she was nervous or upset. On a man such a chin would have been dismissed as weak, as pointing to some profound lack of assertiveness, self-confidence. But it made her seem endearingly genuine, incapable of swagger or feigned poise. By not trying to create an impression, she created a sweet one. She was exactly what, at first glance, she seemed to be.
“She should be paying you for all you do for her,” Pops said when he came out of his room after the front door had banged shut behind Medina. “She takes advantage of you. You should charge her admission every time she comes to visit. Does she ever bring her own beer or thank me when she’s drinking one of mine? She treats the house as if it’s hers. I’ve never seen such disgraceful ingratitude. And you’re her only friend—”
“She’s my only friend,” my mother said.
“You have Percy, a family, a purpose, structure—”
“Medina’s part of all that, part of my family.”
“Well, I’d like to think that I’m your friend. Haven’t I been your friend?”
“You’ve been good to us, to Percy and me,” my mother said. “But there’s no need to put a label on your place in this household. You’re Pops. Our Pops. No one else has one.”
Pops smiled at her and then at me. I wondered what it meant, that smile.
I was at least blessed with a mind like my mother’s. “Hey, Perse,” she said, “shouldn’t you be solving something? A math problem? Differential calculus? Einstein’s beef with quantum physics?”
“I’m not as smart as you.”
“You will be. You’ll be smarter. Imagine how pleased your teachers would be if you could speak Latin by the time you start school next year.”
Not yet five, I was reading at the grade five level, had memorized the multiplication tables into the highest double digits, was adept at long division of numbers up to ten digits, could identify every country in the world on a map Pops brought home from Brother Rice that showed nothing but borders. I wasn’t especially interested in any of it, but Pops said that eventually my mind would find its focus. “Maybe not,” my mother said. “He might be like me, a jack of all things and a genius of none.”
“He’s his mother’s boy,” Pops said. “He’s smarter than anyone else his age I’ve come across. But he’ll have to progress through school like everybody else. Skipping grades isn’t allowed.”
“He’ll be bored.”
“It can’t be helped.”
Pops said that Brother Rice’s principal, Brother McHugh—who already seemed to be planning my future because, Pops said, he often spoke of me to him—guessed that I would, like my mother, turn out to be not a true genius but merely someone who could easily absorb the work of others. Like her, I would never discover, deduce, figure out, invent anything wholly new. Pops informed us that Brother McHugh—or Director McHugh, as he always called him—said that at best I would be a receptacle for knowledge but not a finder of new knowledge. That he foresaw me as a parrot, a perfect register, a regurgitator of facts, an ever-expanding encyclopedia, a data repository, a potential quiz show prodigy, a human archive who would barely have enough sense to come in from the rain. He told Pops that he attributed my precocious knowledge to my having so much time to study, there being little else a boy like me could do. What else, he said, but precociousness would you expect from a friendless freak holed up in his house, whose hands and feet prevented him from playing any sport or game that required the least bit of athleticism?
“Who the fuck is this McHugh?” my mother said. Who the fuck indeed—but it’s too soon to bring him out.
My mother found books for me at the Gosling Library, classic English novels mostly, books by Defoe, Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontës, Sir Walter Scott. She read them aloud to me. She read to me a biography of Toulouse-Lautrec, a dwarf of a man the book told us, that was enlivened for me by the artist’s addiction to the services of prostitutes. “It’s so stupid,” my mother said as she pressed Ivanhoe upon me. “You really should wind up in some sort of class for gifted children. But what can we do? There are no such classes in Newfoundland. There wouldn’t be much point in you graduating from high school at the age of ten, anyway.” But I was glad. It was a prospect I dreaded, being pushed even further from the centre of normalcy—both gifted and disfigured, a student body of one.
I’d say that, all in all, it’s to my credit that I didn’t turn out to be an arsonist.