AFTER the first day of school in the winter of grade nine, I went down to the parking lot at Holy Heart, just down Bonaventure from St. Bon’s, where the yellow buses for various parts of the near-bay—essentially any place that was not St. John’s but within driving distance of it—lined up in vertical and horizontal rows, the smoke from their idling exhaust pipes rising straight up in the air on the coldest days.
Having given up hope of ever achieving credibility among the townies, I was desperately seeking out new territory and possible friends. For the new boys and girls who came to Holy Heart and Brother Rice by bus because there were no high schools where they lived, I was still something of a novelty—just the sort of exotic one would expect to find in a place so big that it must have one of everything. Many of the bay crowd had been raised to think of St. John’s as a place that was laughably full of itself. They made it clear they were only going to school in St. John’s because they had to, and planned to have no more to do with the city or their new schools or the townies than they had to.
To them, I was the measure of how short St. John’s fell of being the great place the townies liked to think it was—a place of boys with purple faces, swollen, misshapen lips, hands and feet too big for the arms and legs they were attached to. If that was what a cursory glance turned up when they arrived, the place was not worth investigation.
But for me, they were a sub-faction who kept to themselves and didn’t know my full history and with whom I might therefore be able to make a “fresh start” of the sort I had thought I might make when I began school.
I wandered in and out among the buses, conspicuous because of my face and because of being an incongruous townie whose blazer identified him as being from St. Bon’s, which even the bay crowd knew was not a high school.
“What do you want, Jam-Jaws?” a boy in a Rice blazer asked me, rolling down a window of one of the buses.
“My mother works in Holy Heart,” I said.
“His mother is a nun,” the boy said to the others. “You’re what she got for getting knocked up.”
Boys and girls crowded his side of the bus, looking out the windows at me.
“Some ugly mug on you?” a girl said, making it sound like a question. I nodded as if she had not insulted me but had merely said what no one knew better than I did was a truth I no longer cared about.
“Yeah,” I said, nodding and looking about as if my face had long since ceased to be uppermost in the minds of anyone who knew me. “Where does this bus go? How come it doesn’t say on the buses where they go?”
“Portugal Cove,” the girl said, adding, “What’s your name?”
A girl who didn’t know my name. I hoped there were many.
“Is your mother a teacher?”
“No.”
“Then what does she do at Holy Heart?”
“Oh. She’s the secretary in the principal’s office.”
“There are two secretaries in Sister Celestine’s office, and they’re both older than my grandmother,” the girl said.
“I meant my mother used to work here. I used to come up here and wait for her to get out of school.”
“So what are you here for now? What are you standing out there in the cold between the buses for? Looking for a girlfriend, I suppose. Good luck!”
Some of the boys and girls got off the bus and crowded around me. I said I had a girlfriend but she went to Holy Cross, an all-boys school on Patrick Street. She was the only girl who went there, the only girl in the history of Newfoundland who’d ever gone to an all-boys school. Her father taught there, he made her go there so that he could keep his eye on her, her name was Tina. I saw it in one girl’s eyes, the hesitation, the uncertainty, for me a near moment of being, in the best sense, exceptional. It soon vanished, as it always did. “You’re full of shit,” she said, but at least she was laughing as she got back on the bus and drew her window closed. I saw her huddle with some other girls and point at me through the window.
The next day, I walked among the maze of buses, happy, even under such circumstances, to be the centre of attention. Though the drivers ordered them not to, the children got off the buses, surrounding me, grinning, their hands in their coat pockets. I told them about Sister Mary Aggie and the Mass cards of Saint Drogo, the Patron Saint of Unattractive People, all of which they took to be more lies, but I didn’t care. “Tell us another one, Percy,” they shouted. I told them my father was a missionary doctor in Africa and that on one of his rare visits home he had passed on to me a fever that he had contracted from a Nigerian tribe. “My father has a face like mine,” I said.
Word of what I was telling the bus children somehow got back to my mother. “You should try to find friends you don’t have to impress by lying to them, Perse,” she said.
“Or,” Pops said, “he could comb the woods in search of ostrich eggs.”
I could tell by the look on my mother’s face that she knew Pops was right. But I was, for a while, something the bay boys and girls looked forward to, a highlight of their day. By that time, the townies had long since dispersed to their homes, or their after-school hangouts, places where they could smoke without being seen from any of the Seven Schools. The buses parked in exactly the same formation every afternoon, each bus in exactly the same place—the Goulds, Petty Harbour, Kelligrews, Portugal Cove, Torbay, Kilbride—and when they departed for all those places that I’d never set eyes on, the traffic on Bonaventure stopped by a traffic cop at 3:45 every afternoon to make way for the caravan of buses, I’d be left there in the empty parking lot, waving to the children in the rear of the bus to Kelligrews, which always pulled out last.
When the traffic cop told me to stand clear of the buses, I posted myself just up Bonaventure from Holy Heart, where I redundantly guided the buses on their way, waving my hands and arms exactly as the policeman did, ignoring him when he told me to go home.
“Have you been to Torbay, Percy?” a red-haired boy named Sully asked me through the open rear window of the Torbay bus one afternoon.
“No.”
“You should come with us.”
“How will I get home?”
“You can come back with us tomorrow morning.”
“But what about tonight?”
“We’ll all sleep on the bus tonight. We’ll leave the engine on so it won’t be too cold, but you might have to snuggle up with a girl if she needs someone to keep her warm. It’ll be like camping out. We do it all the time. Cyril, he’s the driver. He doesn’t mind, just ask him.”
I knew it was a ruse, but merely because I liked the sound of camping out with the Torbay boys and snuggling up with a warmth-seeking girl, I went to the open bus door and asked Cyril, a short, white-T-shirt-wearing man with rheumy eyes who reeked of rum, if he would take me to Torbay and let me spend the night in his bus with the other children.
Cyril turned round and roared, “Stop telling him lies or you’ll all be walking to Torbay.” He turned to me. “Go on now. You should have better sense.”
But the next day, when Cyril was stretching his legs and having a smoke, the same boy, Sully, opened his window and said that I should get on the bus while Cyril wasn’t looking and they would smuggle me to Torbay.
“You have to ask your mother, I suppose,” he said.
I shook my head.
“Then get on the bus before Cyril turns around.”
As I scrambled on board and ran down the middle aisle to where the boy was sitting, mine the only blue blazer amidst rows of maroons and dark blue tunics, the whole bus fell silent. I sat beside Sully, who told me to crouch down behind the seat in front of him. Just as I was doing so, I heard a girl up front say, “Cyril, Percy Joyce is on the bus.”
“See ya, Percy,” Sully said, laughing, as I stood up and ran back to the front of the bus, where Cyril grabbed me by the collar and addressed the back of my head as he held me in front of the open door: “Don’t you ever sneak on board this bus again, you ugly little frigger,” he said. He let me go and I tumbled out.
“Cyril the Squirrel,” I yelled up at him.
“What?”
I ran down the bus steps, out of the parking lot and onto Bonaventure before I slowed to a walk.
Every day after school, I made my way from St. Bon’s to the parking lot of Holy Heart, a mere few hundred feet, and spoke to Sully. I told him I had Mass cards that I’d had to send away to the Vatican for, and I recounted the story of Saint Drogo, the Patron Saint of Unattractive People, as Sister Mary Aggie had told it to me. I said he was made a saint because he hid himself away for life lest his ugliness not only terrify people but test their belief in a God who could create such a Hellish-looking beast. Sully asked if he could see the cards and I told him I would bring them from home and show them to him the next day. The next day, and the one after that, I told him I’d forgotten the cards. I was certain that whatever I passed in through that bus window I would never see again. He said he bet I was lying about the Saint Drogo cards. “I have three of them,” I said, “but they’re pasted to my wall. They might tear if I try to take them off.”
“I bet you haven’t even got one,” he said. “I bet you a dollar.”
In an effort to divert him, I told him I also had on the wall of my bedroom a “dirty” picture of a woman showing everything. He said he bet I was lying. I shook my head. I didn’t mind losing “Francine.” I was, as my mother said, no less “priapically preoccupied,” but I had grown bored with Francine from having used her for inspiration so many times. I would have liked to replace her with a picture of my mother, just as naked and as wantonly disposed. I asked her to get Medina to take that kind of picture of her so she could give it to me. A pity picture, a compromise—a picture she would never see me use, never be embarrassed by, for I wouldn’t tape it on the wall beside the Mass cards of Saint Drogo but would keep it hidden somewhere in my room.
“And where would I get that picture developed?” she said. “Not that I’d give it to you anyway.”
That night, I heard her say to Medina: “I think I’ve lost all sense of just how far from normal he’s become.”
I untaped Francine’s picture from the wall above my bed, folded it in half once so as not to spoil it with too many creases, and snuck it out of the house inside my school shirt. At St. Bon’s, I spent the entire school day with Francine partly tucked inside my pants and partly hidden by my shirt, taking care to avoid contact with anyone who might audibly crumple the paper and discover I was hiding something. I had to restrict my own movements lest I cause the paper to crackle and give away my secret.
After school I went down to the Holy Heart parking lot, slipped Francine out between two buttons on my shirt and handed it in through the back window of the Torbay bus to Sully. Sully, his arms out the window, unfolded the picture.
“Her name is Vivian,” I said. “You can keep her if you want to, but I won the bet, so you owe me a dollar.”
“Holy fuck,” Sully said under his breath as other boys tried to grab the picture from his hands. “You can see more than everything in this picture, Percy. Where did you get it?”
“From a Playboy magazine,” I said. “Pops has a subscription.”
Sully shook his head. “I’ve seen Playboy magazines,” he said. “They don’t look like this.”
Francine is sullied now, I thought. Sullied by Sully.
“My mother gave it to me,” I said, knowing that he would be much less convinced by the truth than by a lie.
“Yeah, right,” he said. “Thanks a lot, Percy.” He raised his window as he was set upon by other boys and even some girls. I heard shrieks and squeals from inside the bus and shouts from Cyril the Squirrel. I really didn’t mind that it was the last I would see of Vivian and smiled up at Sully, who winked at me.
Among the bus children, knowledge of female anatomy exponentially increased for a few days until Sully was caught with Vivian, strapped by McHugh and suspended for a week. I was apprised of this by one of the boys on the Torbay bus.
“Sully told McHugh he got the picture from you. McHugh called your mother. This might be a good time for you to run away.”
I knew McHugh wouldn’t strap me, but another “snapping” seemed all too likely. I wasn’t sure what he had told my mother or exactly what Sully had told him, but I put off going home for as long as I could, wandering down every street that intersected with the Curve of Bonaventure. It was after five when I turned up at 44. My mother was still at the Helm, squinting at the page she was typing through a pall of cigarette smoke.
“Well, if it isn’t the pornographer of Bonaventure Avenue,” she said.
“You’re the pornographer of Bonaventure Avenue,” I said peevishly. “You gave me the picture.”
“And I told you never to take it from the house or to school or to mention it to anyone.”
“Yeah, well, I’m sorry,” I said, “but how was I supposed to know that Sully would show Vivian to everyone? I thought he would just keep her for himself like I did. Sully said he would give me a dollar, but he didn’t.”
“McHugh said your friend Sully told him that, according to you, I gave you the picture.”
“Sully didn’t believe me.”
“McHugh believed Sully. Or at least he did after I confessed. I thought admitting to giving you the picture might make you seem less delinquent.”
“This is all so tawdry and disgusting,” Pops said from the sunroom. “I told you that you shouldn’t have provided Percy with pornography.”
“You may have been right, Pops. McHugh asked me why I would incite my son on to acts of lewd behaviour.”
“A good question,” Pops said.
My mother said she told McHugh she thought it was better that I get a piece of paper into trouble than some orphan girl from Belvedere. He said that such pictures only incited boys to seek out the real thing. He said that pornography was known to lead to rape, which in my case would be even more likely because, with girls finding me repulsive, I might someday be driven to take by force what other men got through marriage.
“You have no idea how much harm you and Percy may have done,” Pops said. “You especially. You act recklessly, Paynelope. You speak too provocatively.”
“Taking a reasonable tone with unreasonable people can be very wearisome. It’s the heretics against the lunatics. And I’m aware that, historically, the lunatics are way out in front.”
Sully showed me the scabs and red welts on his hands. “You should have seen them a week ago,” he said. “They got infected and swelled up like tomatoes.”
“Did it hurt?”
“Did it hurt?” Sully laughed. “Never been strapped?”
I shook my head. I was glad he didn’t know why I’d never been strapped.
Word of Vivian was soon rampant on the Mount, Percy’s paper girlfriend, given to him by his mother, his paper girlfriend whom he had jilted for a dollar he would never get, like father like son, but at least Jim Joyce had made off with the family car in spite of being such a fool as to dump a woman like my mother. The boys of Brother Rice called out to my mother as they were leaving school: “Come out, Miss Cunny Penny. James Bond is here to see you.”
The boys chanted: “Come out, come out, Penelope, And spread your Black Mick legs for me.”
The grown-ups in the houses across from the school—the Conways and the Macnamaras—parents with whom my mother had not exchanged more than a word or two in years, chased the boys away, shouting at them to shut their filthy mouths, then glared at me as I watched them from the front window, as if I was somehow responsible, after which they closed their curtains.
When we next left the house, the corpulent Mrs. Conway came out and accosted my mother. “What kind of woman would give that kind of picture to a child?”
“The kind who didn’t want him knocking up some tart from Holy Heart.”
“You’ve corrupted those boys.”
“Yes, I remember well what angels they used to be. For instance, here’s a little ditty that I remember from my pre-pornographer days, composed and beautifully delivered by your son Danny:
“How much is that Mommy in the window,
The one who’s a great piece of tail?
How much is that Mommy in the window?
I do hope that Mommy’s for sale.”
“Apparently,” Pops said, repeating the words of McHugh, who had found out from the monitors what I was up to, “he told them a few days ago that his father was an African missionary and that they adopted him as their leader or witch doctor or something.”
“Ah. Like Lord Jim,” my mother said. “I think I read that book to Perse. Lord Jim. A white man named Jim, running away from his past, winds up as the leader of a tribe in Africa. The tribe calls him Lord Jim. He becomes almost like a god to them. He sacrifices himself in the end, gives up his life.”
Give me myth or give me death. It was painfully fun to incite so many people to such antic jubilation no matter by what means or at what cost to me. I elaborated, amended my story about Jim Joyce going to Africa. “The tribe calls my father Lord Jim,” I told Sully. “He’s almost like a god to them.” It wasn’t long before word of my latest grandiose story spread through the bus crowd, by whom it was endlessly altered. “Cannibals in Africa think Percy’s father is Jesus Christ.”
“In Africa, they think Percy’s father is God the Father, so Percy calls himself the Son of God. He says his second name is Jesus. Percy Jesus Joyce.”
“Percy says he’s Jesus Christ.”
“Are you the son of God, Percy?”
I had about a year of Sunday masses under my belt. I was well prepared. I grinned and nodded.
“So this is the Second Coming of Christ?” Again I grinned and nodded.
Then why hadn’t I descended in clouds of glory from the sky? I retreated a step and said I was His brother. They insisted Christ had no brothers and sisters. I said He did but that most of them stayed home in Heaven to keep God the Father company because Jesus and the Holy Ghost were on the road a lot. They insisted again—no brothers or sisters—so I again told them I was Christ.
I said God the Father was my father and the Holy Ghost was His brother, making him my uncle.
That means your mother is the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Right.
What do God the Father and the Holy Ghost look like?
I shrugged.
You don’t know what they look like?
Yes, I do.
Come on, Percy, you’re one-third of the Holy Trinity, so you should know what the other two-thirds look like.
I shrugged.
How come you can’t heal your own face?
I don’t want to.
You like it the way it is?
I nodded.
Hear that? Percy likes his face the way it is.
You’re supposed to have long hair and a beard, Percy. You’re supposed to wear nothing but a bed sheet and a pair of sandals, even in the winter. Do your feet get cold?
No. Because they’re so big.
You have to be crucified when you grow up.
I know.
Are you afraid?
No.
Hear that? Percy’s not afraid of being crucified.
Good. We need a cross, a hammer, three nails, two thieves and a crown of thorns.
It seemed to me that this was less harmful than telling lies that people were unlikely to believe. These were blatant, outright lies that no one but a fool would tell. It was fine with me if my new role was the fool, for it was better than having no role at all.
“It’s a sin to talk like that,” a short brunette named Daphne said. “It’s a sin for you and it’s a sin for him. Leave him alone. Tell him to go home. Tell him to go away. I’m telling your teachers.”
“You should bless us,” the children chanted before she could utter another syllable. “You should bless us, Percy.” So I did, with the thumb and the index and middle fingers of one hand, I blessed a bus as it began to pull away, blessed it as I had seen Father Bill bless the tabernacle.
“Cure me, cure me, Percy,” the boys and girls on another bus said. “Heal me, heal me.” I kept making the sign of the cross.
Day after day, I took my act to other buses with more or less the same result. I bought a roll of lemon drops and gave Communion to anyone on the Torbay bus who, while Cyril was having a cigarette or sipping from a bottle of what he said was Coke, closed their eyes and stuck out their tongue.
“The Body of Christ,” I said, as I had so often heard Father Bill say on Sunday mornings in the chapel of the school across the street. I married pairs of boys and girls who sat together. I walked down the aisle, saying over and over, “I now pronounce you man and wife.”
The children on all the outport buses got to know me and came to expect me and look forward to my appearance in the parking lot each afternoon. I felt euphoric. I sat all day in class, mentally rehearsing my performances. In the library I excitedly made notes like a priest preparing a sermon.
Nancy has a great big wart that she wants you to heal. I healed it.
There’s a crowd of lepers on the Petty Harbour bus, Percy. Go heal them. I healed them.
“McHugh says Percy has ordained himself,” Pops said. “He said he pretends to say the Mass on the Torbay bus every afternoon. McHugh says there’s nothing he can do because the buses are off limits to him and all the other teachers on the Mount. The bus drivers are supposed to keep order but all they do is drive the buses and ignore the children, whom Percy has goaded into calling him all kinds of things: Percy of the Parking Lot, Saint Percival the Merciful.”
“Percy, why can’t you stop telling lies?” my mother said.
I shrugged. “They’re not really lies. They’re just jokes.”
“You’re making a joke of yourself,” she said. “Making up stupid lies to impress children who aren’t half as smart as you.”
Still, I couldn’t stay away from the buses. I told the children I’d written a letter to the Pope, Pope Paul VI, and included with it a picture of myself, which had prompted the Pope to write me back to tell me that my stained face was part of God’s plan and that one day the purpose of it would be revealed to me. I said he joked that I should take heart from the very fact that someone with a nose the size of his had been so successful. I said we were now writing each other about once a month and plans were being put in place for me to visit him one day and for him to be the first Pope to visit Newfoundland, where, if he had time, he would have dinner with the Joyces.
“Percy is pen pals with the Pope,” Sully announced loudly. “What do you and the Pope say in your letters?” I said it was mostly small talk because the Pope’s English wasn’t very good. I said my name in Italian was Percifico and his was Paolo, though I never called him that.
McHugh called my mother again and complained I was an even more compulsive liar than I had shown myself to be by my mistreatment of Francine. Now, however, I was lying almost exclusively about things related to the Catholic Church, which would not be countenanced.
My mother and McHugh had a conversation by phone that my mother recounted like this:
“His Grace still wonders if Percy might not benefit from professional help.”
“No. You know, His Grace seems to do more than his share of wondering, especially in front of you. Or is it really you who does the wondering? Is it part of your job to wonder for His Grace?”
“I can assure you that when I say I am quoting His Grace, I am quoting His Grace.”
“Quoting what he says in reaction to what you say, which, for all he knows, may not be entirely true.”
“You’re accusing me of lying?”
“It’s quite a life you’ve made for yourself, isn’t it, Brother McHugh? You never have to worry about getting the old pink slip some Friday afternoon. You’ve never in your life had to support yourself and you never will. Let alone support yourself and a child. You’ve never been faced with having to do something about as pleasant as swallowing thumbtacks to keep your child from going hungry. I’d like to see you in the winter on a picket line, shouting ‘scabs’ at replacement priests and nuns and Brothers and singing, ‘We don’t mind a bit of snow, But Uncle Paddy’s got to go,’ while you tried to keep warm around a barrel of burning picket signs.”
“You think I have it easy.”
“I think that, if not for confession, the only thing between you and damnation would be a coma that lasted from cradle to grave.”
“You believe in confession?”
“There was a time when a woman would have been burnt at the stake for having a baby with a face like Percy’s, and the baby would have had its brains dashed out on the ground. And the Church would have presided over the proceedings. Did you enjoy the Classics Illustrated version of the Spanish Inquisition as much as I did when you were growing up? Maybe you’re just suffering from a bad case of historical nostalgia, Brother Those-Must-Have-Been-the-Days McHugh.”
Pops said, “McHugh says it’s the same in all the schools, all the grades. Anarchy. They’re all repeating Percy stories, Percy lies, Percy Joyce tall tales, all making fun of the Bible and Catholicism.”
I stood in the parking lot, in front of the fleet of buses, extended my arms and shouted, “Gentlemen, start your buses.” I was overjoyed that the drivers, even Cyril, now played along for a while, starting their buses at more or less the same time, grinning at me, cocking their heads in amusement at each other. I knew that I was playing the very sort of role my mother feared I would end up playing. But I felt that I wasn’t really playing it, just pretending to, doing a kind of send-up of it: the poor disfigured boy who had found a place for himself in the hearts of at least some of the students on the Mount, cheerful in spite of an allotment at birth that would have embittered most, the irrepressible, inspiring Percy Joyce, who believed that there was goodness at the core of every heart.
“Bless the bus, Percy, bless the bus,” the children chanted. “Bless the brakes, bless the steering wheel, bless the tires. Perform a miracle. Make Cyril sober.” One moment I was Christ, the next I was a priest, the next I was the Pope, the next I was Saint John the Baptist.
The Torbay children cheered, laughed, shouted. “Bless the other buses, Percy, bless the other buses.” I went from bus to bus as the children on each of the buses took up and modified the chant. “Bless us, bless the bus, bless us, bless the bus.”
I found a discarded tin can, filled it with ditchwater and, dipping a stick into the water, blessed the buses as I remembered Father Bill doing when he blessed our house. I made my way among the buses, blessing each of them, shaking water from the stick with a snap of my wrist, gaped at and for this sometimes rebuked by the drivers, in spite of whom I carried on. “Dear God,” I said, “banish the Evil One from the tires of this bus, and from the brakes and from the steering wheel as well. Dear Lord, don’t let this bus break down before it gets to Kelligrews. Banish the Evil One from the driver of this bus and from the boys of Brother Rice and the girls of Holy Heart, and save them from the agonies of Hell.”
“Bless us, bless the bus.” I became so caught up in their chanting exhortations I hardly knew what I was doing. I did and said whatever came to mind.
One of the boys shouted, “Go out on the street and bless the fleet, go out on the street and bless the fleet.”
Soon everyone was chanting it.
When there was a pause in the traffic, I went out to the icy middle of Bonaventure to the spot where the traffic cop stood each afternoon. He had yet to arrive, so I faced the parking lot, the fleet of buses, the red facade of Holy Heart behind them, raised my sceptre-like stick, benedictory fashion, and began repeatedly to bless the fleet, flinging drops of water from the stick, which set the children on the buses and those still standing in the parking lot to cheering. Several drivers who were standing about in front of the buses, smoking, yelled at me. I dimly heard, “Get off the street before you’re killed by a car.”
“I baptize you all,” I shouted. “I baptize you all. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.”
Behind me I heard a woman shout from what sounded like the distance of the sidewalk, “You stop doing that, that’s a sin for you, Percy Joyce.”
I put aside the can and stick, clasped my hands, fell to my knees, then bent over and kissed the ground as if thereby to confer sacredness upon it as I had seen the Pope do on TV when arriving by plane in a foreign country. I wound up with a lump of road salt in my mouth and spat it out, and continued to spit to rid myself of the acrid taste. The motorists seemed to think I was spitting out of contempt for the Pope whom I had just imitated; they honked their horns and shouted in protest. I stood.
“Hey, get off the road,” a man said, stepping partway out of his gleaming green car, one foot inside, one on the street. Jubilant at the sound of the cheering, chanting children, I blessed him and gave him silent absolution, then genuflected in the middle of Bonaventure as if Holy Heart were a giant tabernacle. Suddenly I felt as much as saw that some boys had joined me in the space between the cars. I turned around. They knelt behind me on the pavement like some grade school congregation, blessing themselves, clasping their hands and bowing their heads. I had moved them to imitate me, to choose me, Percy Joyce.
“You little bastards,” the man said, but he stood behind the open door of his green car as if thereby to shield himself from us or to make possible a quick escape. “Stop it,” he yelled. He wore a fur hat and a long black overcoat. He was as red-faced as if he had spent his entire life protesting the very kind of blasphemy that he was witnessing. Behind me, the boys stood and snowballs sailed past me as they threw them at him and at the cars, the snowballs spattering across windshields, hoods and hood ornaments, grilles and blinking headlights.
As I stood on the double white line in the middle of the street—the traffic on either side of me stalled, my newly acquired followers behind me, chanting my name—I looked up at the sky and held out my arms as if to embrace the end-of-time Rapture brought on by me, by my blasphemies and exhortations. From the corner of my eye I glimpsed one of the bus drivers start to run toward me. I managed to lower my arms before he slammed into me with the fervour and force of a man determined to head off the very conflagration I was trying to invoke. Slipping and skidding on the icy street, I got up, made for the far sidewalk, and started sprinting and sliding down Bonaventure on my clown’s feet to the renewed cheers of the children on the buses, some of whom blew the bus horns and noisily opened and closed the doors. I looked behind to see if anyone was chasing me and saw that the driver had slipped on the sidewalk and fallen down, arms out in front of him as he lay with his face pressed to the pavement. He slowly rose and limped back up the hill. Gasping for breath, I walked slowly down Bonaventure, wondering how long it would be before a phone call was made from Holy Heart to Brother Rice, and another from Brother Rice to 44. The faster the better, it seemed to me, for I couldn’t wait for everyone to learn of the mass subversion I had engineered, winning over to my side dozens, perhaps hundreds of children of whose lives I had made myself the focal point, the centre of attention, the object, it might even be, of their friendship and their loyalty.
I had not even made it from the porch to the front room when my mother came out and threw her arms around me.
“Percy, what have you been doing?” she said. “My God, you’re drenched in sweat, you’re as hot as an oven.” She felt my forehead, then put her face close to mine and looked straight into my eyes as if to spy out there the answer to her question. Out of breath but still exhilarated, I pushed past her into the house, where Pops was pacing about the front room.
“I’ve been getting calls from both Brother McHugh and Father Bill from the Basilica,” he shouted at me. “You strayed onto public property. You caused a traffic jam on Bonaventure. No one seems to know what you thought you were up to. Word of what you did is all over the Mount!”
“You’ll be all over the Mount if you raise your voice to him again,” my mother said. “Perse, Perse, they said you were standing in the middle of the street with all the traffic around you. You could’ve been hit by a car standing there in the street like that.”
“They always stop the traffic around that time to let the buses out.” I was still out of breath. “You should have seen me, Mom, you should have seen me. You should have seen all the other kids. They were cheering like I scored the winning goal.”
“Father Bill—” Pops began, but my mother interrupted, “I’ll handle this, Pops.” She turned to me. “What really happened?”
“The boys and girls on the Torbay bus dared me to cure them, so I did.”
“What do you mean ‘cure them’—cure them of what?”
“Not really cure them. I just did this.” I made the benedictory sign of the cross. “Then the ones on the other buses dared me, so I cured them too, one bus at a time. And then they dared me to go out onto the street and cure all the buses at the same time. Like blessing the sealing fleet, a boy said. So I did it. Lots of times. As many times as I could before one of the bus drivers came running after me and tackled me. But he didn’t hurt me.”
“That’s it?”
“Yes, but you should have seen me, Mom. Everyone was shouting out my name and all the girls were watching me and—”
“I’ve never seen McHugh worked up like this. People have complained to the Basilica, to His Grace, to the principal of Holy Heart. People are saying Percy’s out of his mind,” Pops said.
“That’s enough, Pops. But Perse, you could have been hurt, hit by a car.”
“That’s not the point,” Pops shouted. “The two of you shouldn’t be pissing off McHugh no matter how unlikeable you think he is. I wouldn’t care about upsetting him or His Grace or Father Bill if I didn’t have to care, but I do. And so do you and Percy.”
My mother waved her hand dismissively. “It was just a joke. A joke that got a bit out of hand. When I was in school, I wouldn’t part with a candy unless someone let me put it on their tongue. Percy is only fourteen years old.”
Pops was pacing back and forth, his hands shoved into the pockets of his lab coat. “It wasn’t just a joke. It got everyone worked up and made them laugh. They were laughing at you, don’t you understand, Percy? Will you never understand? They were making fun of you. The joke was on you.”
“No it wasn’t,” I said bitterly. “The joke was on Uncle Paddy and McHugh.”
I stormed off to my room, lay in the upper bunk and hit Saint Drogo in the face, over and over, pounding the wall with my fist. Stupid, ugly, fucking saint. They didn’t make him a saint until long after he was dead. What good did that do him?
The next day, as I walked up the Curve of Bonaventure toward St. Bon’s, boys genuflected in front of me and blessed themselves. Others asked if I would let them touch the hem of my blazer. Girls trailed after me, saying, “Bless me, Percy, for I have sinned.” Making a megaphone of his hands, a grade eleven boy from Brother Rice announced that Percy Joyce would be hearing confessions in the bathroom of a bus from three to five that afternoon. I would walk on water at three, turn water into wine at three-fifteen, calm the ocean at three-thirty, be crucified at four o’clock and rise from the dead at four-fifteen. I clasped my fists and shook them in triumph above my head. Triumph, mock triumph—what was the difference when the only alternative was to be ignored?
A fury-faced middle-aged woman with jet-black dyed hair and eyebrows came out of one of the largest houses on Bonaventure, still in her slippers. She grabbed me by the arm and said, “You see what you’ve done, you sinful, selfish little brute. You’ve got them all at it now. A lot of good boys and girls all saying God knows what. And you had us fooled. We thought you were a good boy. A smack across that face of yours is what you need! A good smack across the face from your mother like the one she gave to someone else’s boy. Maybe she needs one too. Your face and those hands and feet are your excuse for everything, you saucy little crackie. You bless one more bus, kiss one more piece of pavement, make fun of the Holy Father one more time, and I’ll send you home to Penny Joyce without a tooth left in your head. It might be an improvement.”
I slapped her in the face hard, as hard as I could. I left the white marks of my oversized fingers on her cold red face. Her eyes went wide and she put one hand up to her cheek as if to gauge how much damage I had done. “You hit me,” she said, staring at me with astonishment. I expected her to hit me back. I wouldn’t have ducked, I wouldn’t have run. I knew that I had crossed a line that children never cross. I wanted to be punished for it right away because I knew that, the longer my punishment was deferred, the worse it would be. But she turned slowly around and began to cry. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t— I’m sorry.” She quickly made her way back to her house and went inside.
“McHugh said you hit Mrs. Madden,” my mother said. “You hit her so hard you made her cry.”
“You hit that boy from Brother Rice! Mrs. Madden said that if she knocked out all my teeth, it might improve my face. And she said that what you need is a good slap in the face like the one you gave O’Keefe.”
“In that case, you should have hit her harder than you did.” She took me in her arms and began to hug me, but in spite of the scent of perfume on her neck, I pulled away, pushed her aside, my hands on her hips.
In my room, I lay down on the upper bunk. I wished I hadn’t given “Francine” to Sully, from whom she had been confiscated by McHugh, who, I fancied, now had her on his wall above his lonely bed. All I had now was a square on the wall that was less faded than the wall around it, the place that Francine had occupied for years.
Pops said that McHugh wanted to pay us a visit, to come to the house and talk things over with everyone present.
“Everyone?” my mother said. “You can tell McHugh what I told you: You are not one of us. He is not one of us. Us is, we are, Percy and me and Medina, so even if I was inclined to let McHugh inside the house, I’d send you away until after he was gone. I might even send you to your room. Second, McHugh will never set foot inside this house again. It’s bad enough that he did it once without my permission. It’s bad enough that he can see this house from where he lives or whatever he calls what he does after school. It’s bad enough knowing that he is always just across the street without having him over to counsel us about our lives, to advise me in front of Percy, and Percy in front of me. Pops, here is something that will never happen: I will never serve McHugh a cup of tea, never ask him, ‘Milk or sugar?’ I will never put out a tray of biscuits for him, sit on the edge of my seat and wait for him to speak while my hands are folded primly in my lap. I will never watch him cross the street as he makes his way to 44, never open the door and stand back to welcome him inside. McHugh, in his all-black uniform and his clerical collar, will never see the inside of this house again unless he breaks the goddamn door down.”
“He said he would be here at seven-thirty,” Pops said.
My mother took Pops by the elbow and guided him toward the front door. “Go over there now,” she said. “Don’t phone him. Go over there. I don’t care what you tell him, but if you have to, tell him I will call the police if he turns up on my doorstep. Or tell him that he and I can have a nice inconspicuous chat on the sidewalk in front of Brother Rice. I’ll keep grabbing his hand and I’m fairly certain he’ll keep pulling it away. I don’t think it will set the neighbours to talking at all, do you?”
More than anything, she said, McHugh wanted to be seen crossing the street to our house. In fact, he would probably go back and forth half a dozen times just to make sure he was seen, make sure that it spread through the neighbourhood that Director McHugh was at last taking unprecedented measures to deal with the Joyces.
From the front window, I watched Pops, who had donned his lab coat, cross the street, all but running.
“Get away from the window, Perse,” my mother said. “Let’s not give McHugh reason to think he has us worried.”
I reluctantly moved away from the window. A few minutes later, Pops returned, holding in his hand a sheet of paper that bore the official stamp of the Basilica.
“It’s for Percy.” Pops held it out to me. “It’s from the Archbishop.”
“I’ll read it,” my mother said. She did so in silence and then out loud:
My dear Percy:
I hope this note finds you in good health. It has been a joy for me to keep in touch with you all these years, to track your progress through school and to do whatever little bit I can to help you. As of late, however, I have been receiving reports about you that have caused me great concern. I have come to fear for your spiritual well-being. I once preached a sermon on your behalf and I have exempted you from corporal punishment throughout your years in school. I still believe that I was right to do so. But, my dear Percy, I feel that some gesture of atonement from you would be appropriate, some acknowledgement of, and contrition for, your recent misbehaviours. As to what this gesture should be, I leave it to your mother, in consultation with Brother McHugh, to decide, though I have, as you will hear, made some suggestions. Please understand that my affection for you has not lessened. I pray for you daily, as I trust you do for me.
Yours in Christ,
P.J. Scanlon, Archbishop of St. John’s.
Pops handed her another piece of paper, this one unadorned with a stamp or letterhead of any kind. She read it out loud.
Dear Miss Joyce:
My superiors and I think that, in light of recent events, it would be wise for you, Percy and me to meet at my office at Brother Rice as soon as possible. I hope that you and Percy can come at five-thirty tomorrow—Vice-Principal MacDougal tells me that you believe your house to be too untidy at that time of day for you to receive me as a visitor. I appreciate your concern, though I have no doubt that it is unfounded and that you are an exemplary housekeeper. But if you feel you’d be more comfortable in my office, that too is acceptable. I must insist that my vice-principal be present at our meeting, as he is always present at meetings regarding matters of importance, not only to this school but to others on the Mount. I would not oppose the presence at the meeting of your sister-in-law, the other Miss Joyce, if you would like to have her there. If five-thirty is not convenient, please indicate a suitable time. I will do my utmost to accommodate what I am sure is your busy schedule.
Yours in Christ,
Director G.M. McHugh
My mother thrust the second letter back at Pops. “Tell him that Percy and I will meet him in his office at five-thirty. You will meet us there—don’t come home before the meeting, and after the meeting don’t leave the school until half an hour after we do. Do whatever you like with that letter, but get it out of this house.”
She asked Medina if she would go with us to the meeting, for moral support. “Jesus.” Medina sighed. “All right.”
“I don’t understand why everyone is so upset.”
“McHugh says that just to hear someone claiming he can perform miracles or to see him pretending to perform them makes some people doubt that miracles ever happened,” Pops said.
“I’ve never witnessed a miracle.” She blew smoke in Pops’ direction. “It’s easy to claim that someone walked on water two thousand years ago. It’s not as if you can dare them to try it again.”
“The stain doesn’t help,” Medina said. “Some people are superstitious about that stain. They pretend to feel sorry for Percy, and I guess they do, but deep down … I don’t know … they don’t want to get too close to someone God might have it in for.”
When I got home from school the next day, my mother told me not to change out of my St. Bon’s uniform. She told me to sit and watch television until it was time for our meeting with McHugh. I watched her at the Helm from the living room. She stopped typing for long periods of time, nervously smoking one cigarette after another. She was wearing her newest blouse, a plain but tight-fitting dark blue one, and a tight black skirt and black pumps. She looked relieved when, still wearing her green hospital uniform, Medina arrived.
“Didn’t have time to change,” Medina said. “I guess it’s time to face the music.” She sounded even more nervous than my mother looked.
“I guess so,” my mother said. She looked at me and faintly smiled. “I thought girls would be his biggest problem. I guess I can’t be blamed for not preparing for the day my son would claim that he was God.”
In McHugh’s office, the walls were festooned with diplomas, certificates of merit, awards, depictions of the Sacred Heart and the Blessed Virgin, small but ornate and finely detailed crucifixes like the ones in his suite.
I was surprised to see Sister Celestine, the long-reigning principal of Holy Heart, Sister C as she was called, sitting beside McHugh behind his desk, the two of them in high-backed leather chairs. Medina, my mother and I sat opposite them on wooden chairs, and Pops sat at the window, half on the sill, half on the radiator, awkwardly posed. He wore his lab coat, the strap of his safety goggles dangling from one pocket. I noted—and it seemed strange—that the only person there not wearing a uniform of some kind was my mother.
Sister C sat rigidly upright, her hourglass-shaped headdress rising high above her head. McHugh said Sister C was there because the “foment” I had caused had taken place on the grounds, the parking lot, of her school, and involved many of her students. Sister C wore black glasses, from behind the thick lenses of which she stared coldly at me. She spoke slowly, deliberately, giving an air of impenetrable composure. I wondered if, years ago, Mary Aggie had been imitating Sister C when she spoke as if she was unfazed even by the fact of her mortality and imminent entrance into Purgatory.
“I remember you.” Sister C turned to Medina, who was so startled she all but jumped from her chair. “You were in my grade three class. I remember all my students, everything they said and did and didn’t do. Yes.”
Instead of answering as I was sure she would, Medina blushed and examined one of her hands as if she had never noticed the shape of it before.
“I remember you too.” Sister C faced my mother. “The smart one. Smart but lazy. Full of backtalk even after you were strapped. So long ago.”
“I remember you too, Sister,” my mother said. “Less fondly, I’m sorry to say, than you remember me.”
“Still the same,” Sister C said, sighing as if she had known when my mother was a child that she would never change. She closed her eyes as she spoke, as if reciting from memory. “Both of you. Yes. But God has seen to it that you got what you deserve.” She looked at me as if to say, “You’re what they deserved.”
“I’m glad to see they’ve modernized the Mercy habit,” my mother said.
“Are you aware I am now Mother Superior at the Mercy Convent?”
“No, but that explains the air of superiority. Mother Superior. That’s quite an accomplishment for a woman who has never had a child. Are you aware that I am now Mother Hysteria at 44 Bonaventure Avenue? Give my regards to Mothers Inferior, Mediocre and Deplorable.”
“The one beside you isn’t saying much,” Sister C said, again closing her eyes, faintly smiling. “She learned what was what long ago. We wouldn’t be hearing a peep from you either if you’d been dealt with in the same way that I dealt with her. Oh no, not a peep.”
“But here I am, a Peeping Mom.”
I watched in surprise as Medina raised a hand to wipe a tear from her eye, but her hand shook so badly she let it drop into her lap.
“What’s wrong, Medina?” I asked. My voice broke, I was so nervous.
“Medina’s fine,” my mother said. “It’s a classic case of protégé and tormentor meeting up after years apart.”
“Be careful, Penelope. It’s never too late for comeuppance.” Sister C smiled.
“Or to somehow lose your living daylights. A woman your age could easily misplace them.”
“Miss Joyce,” McHugh said, “perhaps someday you’ll put your clever words to better use.”
“That tongue of hers,” Sister Celestine said, her tone gentle, “will never be of better use until someone removes it from her head and feeds it to a dog.”
McHugh turned to me suddenly, as if he felt the conversation was derailing and he needed to regain control, and asked if I understood why we were meeting. Before I could answer, Sister C leaned forward. “An air of disrespect, irreverence, even near insurrection is sweeping the Mount. The students are flouting all that they’ve been taught, at home, at school, in church. They are making jokes about the teachings of the Church. Percy Joyce, do you think your troubles are more important than those of others? Do you think you’ve been overburdened, singled out for persecution? It would be a mistake for you to assume that, because of His Grace, you can do what you like and get away with it. You are as God created you. One day you will stand alone before God, without an alibi, without excuses, without someone like your mother to plead your case. All alone, yes.” She nodded, smiled, as if picturing the moment of my reckoning.
“Well said,” my mother exclaimed. “It really is a shame that someone so given to nurturing has no children of her own.”
McHugh, persevering, asked me again if I understood why we were meeting. I nodded, but he said, “Tell us why, Percy.”
“I made up some stories. Just for a joke.”
“What stories?”
“Just for a joke?” Sister C interrupted incredulously. I nodded. She turned and faced McHugh. “His backside would be the colour of his face if he were one of mine.” She said it matter-of-factly, as if for her to lose her temper was simply not possible.
“But he is not one of yours,” my mother said. “Nor is he one of Brother McHugh’s. He is one of mine. He is my only one. My only child. By your own free choices and to the great detriment of the human gene pool, neither of you has a child.”
“Such insolence.” Sister C coldly faced McHugh, her voice when she spoke still eerily serene. “Why are you permitting this? I can see now why this wicked boy acts up the way he does.”
McHugh addressed my mother. “None of the students on the Mount will ever forget what he’s done. When he blessed the buses, they cheered him on as if he was an athlete. Sister Celestine tells me she has never seen students in such a frenzy. When they witness the flouting of the one thing that, as we tell them daily, will sustain them through their lives, the Truth as it was shown to us by the One True God, their impulse—their common but unnatural impulse—is to rebel, run wild. They saw that the least among them blasphemed but was not struck down, not punished in any way. The heavens did not open in protest. So? The contagion of Satan, whose greatest sin was Pride, spread through them like a plague. Satan knows he is foredoomed and will lose the war, yet he has his little victories. The frenzy of which Sister Celestine spoke is something I have seen before, children running en masse to their destruction like the Swine of Gadarene. It is something that must be put down or disorder will prevail.”
“You have found your voice at last, Brother McHugh,” Sister Celestine said, eyes closed. “You have found your voice at last, praise be to Our Heavenly Father.” She looked at my mother and faintly smiled.
“I believe none of this would have happened if Percy had had a proper religious upbringing and family guidance,” McHugh said. “If he had been baptized and raised as a Catholic. If he were taking the sacraments, going to confession and Communion, none of this would have happened.”
“That’s right,” my mother said. “Baptism would have washed the stain right off his face.”
Sister C turned her thick lenses on my mother. “That’s how the Devil talks, Penelope. In mockery of God Himself. Ironic riddles. Irony is the trademark of the Devil.” She slowly crossed herself.
“Not to mention the foundation of most of the world’s great literature,” my mother said. “Hence the famous expression: Shakespeare’s hands are the Devil’s workshop.”
McHugh smiled as though at a failed attempt at wit.
“You don’t seem content, Brother McHugh,” my mother said. “Being a Christian Brother must be like being a male nurse. Answering to priests who are less than half your age—acne-ridden boys who can forgive your sins and give you whatever penance they wish. Most Catholic parents pray they’ll have a boy, but if they have one, they don’t go on to pray: ‘Dear Lord, please endow my son with wisdom and guide him through his studies so that he may honour You and us by growing up to be a Christian Brother. May he one day teach grade eleven, live all his life in a single room and be a good sport about it.’ No, it’s a priest they pray for. To parents who wanted a priest, a Christian Brother would be a kind of consolation prize. A consolation priest. Honourable mention in the clerical sweepstakes.
“And what about you, Sister? The Brides of Christ are the charladies of the Church. Who are the celebrated women of the Church? A handful of horribly martyred saints, most of them virgins up to the day that they were raped. And the Blessed Virgin Mary.”
“Mocking the Blessed Virgin,” Sister Celestine said as placidly as if she were identifying a species of bird. She pointed at me. “No wonder you look like something that slithered out of Hell itself. You need to have the demon beaten out of you. Yes. All the meetings in the world won’t make any difference to the likes of him and these two.”
“Brother McHugh mentioned Pride,” my mother said. “Whenever I think of Pride, I think of the getup priests say Mass in, preening like gold-laméd peacocks.”
“God’s generosity is infinite.” Sister Celestine bowed her coif. “But his patience is not.”
“That makes him imperfect.”
“No wonder that boy has the mark of the Beast,” Sister Celestine said, regarding me as if Satan himself could not disturb her equanimity.
Medina suddenly stood up. “Leave my nephew alone,” she hissed, “or so help me God, I will break that beak you call a nose.” She shook her fist at the nun, and I saw her face was smeared with tears. “You used to strap me all the time. But do you remember the day you told me to stay behind in the classroom for doing something wrong? Because I do. I don’t even remember what it was, but you locked the door of the classroom and you beat me black and blue with a yardstick. I was eight years old. Eight. You hit me like you were chopping down a tree and you kept hitting me after I fell down. If I hadn’t covered my face with my arms, you would have knocked my teeth down my throat. I don’t know how you didn’t break my arms. And all the while you screamed like I was a fire you were trying to put out.” My mother put her hand on Medina’s arm, but Medina shook it off. “A grown woman of God does that to a helpless little girl? That’s why I dropped out. I was afraid to go back. I told my mother I would run away if she sent me back to school. But I’m not a helpless little girl anymore, Sister C. You get out of here now or so help me God, I’ll jump across this desk and stuff your sacred rosary down your throat and use your teeth to make a new one. Go. Now. Get the fuck out, you sadistic cunt.”
Sister C looked blank-faced at McHugh, who looked away. She slowly rose. Boots faintly scuffing, she eased past the desk. “Little Medina,” she said softly. “You’ll be nothing but the little girl you once were when you stand before the Lord on Judgment Day and wish you’d heeded me. But it will be too late.” She coasted past me out of McHugh’s office, her headdress held high. Except for the sound of her shoes, she seemed to glide out, easing the door closed behind her. We listened to the measured, unhurried receding of her footsteps.
Medina sat down. “Bitch,” she whispered, her hands shaking even as they lay there in her lap.
“Sister Celestine is … very devout,” McHugh said. “And now, no doubt—in spite of how she seems—very upset. She is not accustomed to the sort of words you used.”
“Quite right,” my mother said. “A lifetime of celibacy has such a mellowing effect on people. Even if she’d been dressed like me, no one who witnessed that display of inner peace would doubt she was anything but a nun. And certainly Percy looks unfazed, as I would expect any wicked beast with an indwelling demon to be.”
“Thank Christ she’s gone,” Medina said, exhaling as if she’d been waiting to breathe since she walked into the room and saw Sister C beside McHugh.
“You are mocking a clerical order of the Church and you are mocking me, a servant of God, a teacher and a servant of the poor,” McHugh said, but he didn’t sound upset and he wasn’t looking at Medina but at my mother. “You’re trying to provoke me, Miss Joyce. It won’t work. Driving Sister Celestine away is one thing, but driving me away is something else. Percy’s aunt would be well advised not to misjudge me.” He paused and smiled gently at us all. “Let’s get back to the matter at hand. His Grace requires some sort of gesture of contrition from Percy. He says that such a gesture is absolutely necessary if you wish to maintain your present … arrangement.”
“If Pops goes on boarding with us, Pops loses his job. Or Pops moves out and keeps his job. Either way, I lose the room and board he pays me for, is that it?”
“I don’t believe that’s all he pays you for, unless he’s been misleading me. I’d tell you to find another tenant, but I’m aware of just how much you … rely on my vice-principal. And how much he relies on you. His Grace is aware of these things as well.”
I glanced at Pops, who was twisting the strap of his safety goggles round his finger, his face as pale as I had ever seen it. I looked at my mother, who was trying in vain to seem unperturbed.
“Do you”—she managed—“have an actual recommendation of some sort to make?”
“I do,” McHugh said. “I would like Percy to apologize.”
My mother shrugged and looked at me. “Say you’re sorry,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” I said. I realized I was fighting back the urge to cry.
McHugh laughed. He said I couldn’t discharge my debt by apologizing only to him. I must apologize to everyone. Every student in every school. Every nun and priest, every Brother and teacher and staff member in each of the Seven Schools. I must apologize in person to His Grace.
“And how is he supposed to do all that?” my mother said.
“Not in print,” McHugh said. “A printed apology that appeared in, say, the Monitor would end up blowing around the neighbourhood, plastered to telephone poles, the door of your house, Miss Joyce, even those of your neighbours. Percy, because of his delicate nature, his usual passivity, would probably come home with copies of such an apology taped to the back of his blazer or stuck in his hair.”
“What, then?” my mother said.
“Via the public address systems, Percy would read an apology written by me, with counsel from His Grace, to the students, clerics, teachers and staff of every school.”
“No,” my mother said. “I’ll do it. Put the words in my mouth, not his. Everyone thinks I’m more to blame than him anyway. Perhaps I am. I’ll read the apology. I’ll testify before the Committee on Un-Basilican Activities. I’ll name names.”
McHugh smiled and shook his head. “Percy must apologize. His Grace was very insistent about that. I need your decision as soon as possible. We can’t have this situation getting worse.”
“Or blowing over and being forgotten.”
“An apology is not nearly as severe a punishment as any other student would receive. This is how we’ll proceed. We’ll record Percy reading the apology and play it over the public address system in the schools. He could read it into a tape recorder, right here in this office, in front of no one but his mother and me.”
“Can you not see the absurdity of this? You want to treat my son like some sort of prisoner of war who, unless he wants to be shot, has to say over the radio that the cause he was fighting for is evil and therefore doomed to fail.”
“It’s your exaggerations that are absurd. Students at Brother Rice and other schools on the Mount have apologized to the entire student body in their own words in person during assembly in the gym. The point of having someone apologize in front of his peers is to teach them the value of contrition and humility. What I’m proposing would be much easier for Percy.”
“Percy doesn’t even belong to the Church he supposedly sinned against.”
“He enjoys, and therefore has abused, the protection of the Church.”
My mother sighed. “What do you think, Percy? You read into a tape recorder and get it over with?”
I shook my head.
“That wouldn’t quite be getting it over with,” McHugh said. “Percy would have to sit among his classmates as the tape was played. Just once. Just his own classmates. Not all of St. Bon’s School or all of the other schools.”
“You’re negotiating,” my mother said. “You’re negotiating the terms of my son’s surrender.”
“There is another option. Percy need not apologize. You and he could agree that he be baptized and make his first confession and take his First Communion. That would more than make up for what he’s done. When it comes to religion, conversion is the most profound and sincere form of apology.”
“He’s not going to become a Catholic just to satisfy your notion of revenge, are you, Percy?”
I shook my head again.
“We’ll think about the apology,” my mother said.
“Get back to me very soon, Miss Joyce,” McHugh said.
Pops remained behind with McHugh as the three of us left his office and the school and crossed Bonaventure to 44.
“Pops,” my mother said when he got home—he had just opened the door and was still standing in the doorway of the porch—“why did you tell McHugh about our arrangement?”
We were sitting around the kitchen table. From across the room, Pops looked sheepishly at her, at me and then at Medina.
“They know, Pops,” my mother said, rolling her eyes. “They’ve known for some time.”
“Why did you tell them?” Pops said, gesturing at Medina and me.
“I didn’t. They figured it out for themselves. Just like everyone else on the Mount seems to have done.”
“Well, so did McHugh,” Pops said. “He guessed it. Or he heard the rumours in the neighbourhood. Everyone guesses, assumes. Or something, I don’t know. He caught me by surprise.”
“Did he really?” my mother asked. “Are you sure that, deep down, you weren’t just dying to tell him, to brag to him that you were banging Penny Joyce no matter what the consequences of such a boast might be?”
Pops shook his head. “No, no, it was nothing like that.”
My mother tongued her front teeth, her lips pursed. “You might have told us Sister C would be there.”
“I didn’t know about Sister C. Look, Paynelope, what am I supposed to do? On the one hand he’s my boss. On the other—”
“There is no other hand, Pops. Not another word.”
Pops crossed the floor to his room and slammed the door.
I begged my mother again and again to go back and ask McHugh to let me “write” a letter of apology for the Monitor rather than read one into a microphone, even once.
“I’m with Percy,” Medina declared. “Even if I could read, I’d be so nervous I’d choke up or something.”
I was suddenly terrified of the idea of “choking up,” even of crying while hundreds of students listened to me sob and struggle to find my voice. And what if I couldn’t make it through the apology? I suspected that McHugh would make me try another day, and another, over and over until I managed it. I pictured students in classrooms all over the Mount listening to my disembodied voice the way they did to the principal’s, my voice louder than ever before, its every tremor magnified. I pictured the kids cracking up at the sound of Little Percy Joyce’s voice making a public announcement, Percy Joyce’s eerily magnified voice emanating from the metal box above the classroom door. And who knew what McHugh would write for me—what an exercise in self-humiliation the apology itself might be? Who knew what he would make me admit to? Perhaps things that I had neither said nor done. I thought that an apology in the Monitor was far preferable, especially given that almost no one read the Monitor anyway.
But my mother said McHugh was right, that every student in the neighbourhood would be going round with a copy of my apology in their pocket, that copies of it would be blowing around the neighbourhood for months, years, there, always there, on the ground, everywhere I looked. She sent Pops back to McHugh, telling him to return with a copy of the apology. Pops came back with a single sheet of paper. It bore the title, centred over the text, “The Apology of Percy Joyce.” My mother said it seemed that McHugh and His Grace meant it to be as famous and influential a recantation as Galileo’s. She read it, shook her head, rolled her eyes and sighed, “I suppose it could be worse.”
So as not to disrupt classes on the Mount, my apology would be played over the PA systems of the seven Mount schools more or less simultaneously just before school let out, after which Brother Hogan would escort me from my homeroom down the hill to 44.
The next afternoon, Pops returned from Brother Rice with a large reel-to-reel tape recorder in the use of which, he said, the head of the audiovisual department at Brother Rice had instructed him at length. My mother briefly glanced at it, then went on typing. Medina came over just after five and shook her head when she saw the machine resting on the table at the opposite end of the Helm from my mother and her typewriter.
We all stared at it as if we couldn’t account for its presence in the house.
“Brother McHugh says that he will read a recorded introduction to Percy’s apology,” Pops said. “He’s recording it tonight at the school.”
I thought of Brother McHugh and I simultaneously engaged in the same strange task, he on one side of Bonaventure, me on the other.
“I suppose it’s not much comfort to you,” my mother said to me, “that, during the Inquisition, people who pissed off the Church would have much preferred your punishment to the one they got.”
“Very funny. You wouldn’t be making jokes if you had to apologize into a tape recorder.”
“What is it with McHugh and punishment anyway?” my mother asked. “He must have been a delightful, pet-torturing tot. I can just see him practising on walnuts with a thumbscrew. Experimenting on himself with the rack he got for Christmas.”
“Paynelope.”
My mother said all I deserved was a good talking- to from no one else but her—a talking- to which, because of the apology, had been cancelled. She said that, as there was no knowing how long it would take to get the apology right, we should have dinner first.
While we were eating my mother’s macaroni and cheese—usually one of my favourites, but I could barely force down a few bites—Medina said she had never witnessed a more “foolish” situation than the one we were in.
“In what sense are you in it?” Pops said. “What about me? If Percy doesn’t do this, I either have to move out or lose my job.”
“Why would moving out be such a big deal for a ladies’ man like you, Pops?” Medina replied, winking at me. My mother shot her a look.
“Well, it’s just that I’m used to it here,” Pops said, his face and neck blotched red from embarrassment. “I’ve always found it difficult to adjust to new situations. And this location is very convenient, being so close to Brother Rice.”
“Jesus, Pops,” my mother said. “We all know why you live here. Even Percy. Why are you still pretending?”
“I really wouldn’t want to leave you and Percy in the lurch,” Pops said. “What other boarder would pay half as much as I do?”
“Why do you pay soooo much?” Medina said, her grin lapsing quickly into a frown.
“Has kindness become a crime?” Pops said.
“Oh no,” Medina said, “not if you’re saving someone from the lurch. There’s no worse place to be left than in the lurch. You’re a saint for keeping them out of it out of the goodness of your heart. I’d rather be left in St. Anthony, where you were born, than in the lurch.”
“Really,” Pops said. “How would you get there? It’s a long walk.”
“It’s time for you to make your insincere apology, Perse,” my mother said. “You can read it with your fingers crossed behind your back. You can make faces at the tape recorder. Just say the words.”
“We wouldn’t need Pops if you made more money,” I said. “You’re really smart and you’re a dropout. I’ll still be smart if I drop out.”
“It’s not about how smart you are. It’s about a piece of paper that certifies how smart you are, even if you’re not. People are very impressed by documents that bear the official seal of someone or something. They will believe a lie if someone certifies it as the truth. In fact, the lie becomes the truth. The village idiot is certified as the village sage, and a sage is born. When so certified, right becomes wrong and good becomes evil. It’s too late for me to get a certifying piece of paper, but it’s not too late for you. All you have to do is read what’s on that piece of paper. We know that none of it is true. I bet a lot of other people do as well. I’ll help you with it. All you have to do is speak close to the machine, okay?”
I nodded.
“We’ll do the dishes later,” my mother told Medina. “I don’t know how long this will take and I don’t want to keep Percy up too late.”
We sat at the Helm, me opposite my mother’s typewriter, my mother on my left, Pops on my right, Medina sitting beside my mother, arms folded, lips pressed tightly together as if she were staging some kind of silent protest. Pops put the printed apology on the table in front of me.
“While Percy’s reading, no one else should make a sound,” he said. He told me not to touch the piece of paper.
He pressed the record and play buttons on the tape recorder and nodded at me. My mother put her hand on my shoulder. I was startled when the reels began to move and the tape from one wound around the other with a faint whirring noise. Until then, I suppose, I believed that I wouldn’t have to go through with it, that McHugh would relent or my mother would think of an alternative that he would agree to.
Everyone looked solemnly at the tape recorder when it started making noise. It was as though they had coaxed me into going through with some medical test and only now, as they were face to face with the device that would perform the test, did they realize what they had talked me into. And there, to complete the picture, was Pops, looking every bit the doctor in his lab coat, his stethoscope-like goggles poking from one pocket. I felt as though I would now be somehow attached to the machine, hooked up to it, and it would perform its task exactly as it had many times before, and that Pops, to whom it was all routine, would have no more regard for me than the tape recorder did. As if he was reading my mind, he said to my mother, “I’m going to record his voice, not extract his bone marrow.” But he might as well have said “vital signs” instead of “voice,” as if the machine’s purpose was to help them find out what was wrong with me, to coerce apologies from misbehaving children. My apology. I would soon be without my apology. I fancied it was something like the spleen. An apology that Pops would transport in the machine across the street to Brother Rice, where McHugh would regard it like a body part of mine that had been lopped off—a trophy he would keep forever on display in his office, a chastening reminder to all boys that their apologies could be removed.
“Perse looks as white as a ghost,” Medina said.
“Are you all right, sweetheart?” My mother put her hand on my forehead. “Damp. You’re sweating. You’re not feeling sick, are you, sweetheart?”
“Not really,” I said.
“Well, don’t throw up on McHugh’s machine,” Pops cautioned. But I couldn’t stop the train of thought that had started in my head. Apology. Biology. You must biologize. Boys dissecting formaldehyde-preserved apologies that boys before them had offered up to science.
“Even your face looks pale,” my mother said. But I didn’t want to think of my face. I tried not to think of anything.
“I may not be a nurse, but I know what someone who’s about to be sick looks like,” Medina said. “You should get him to the bathroom, Pen.”
But I shook my head, convinced that, if I were to stand, I would get sick. I thought of Medina’s dislike of cars as I looked at the two spools of tape spinning slowly in opposite directions.
“Can you turn the machine off, Pops?” I said. He jabbed at the stop button with such speed and force he must have thought that every fraction of a second counted. My mother went to the kitchen and brought back a glass of water, which I pretended to sip. I felt a little better now that I was no longer mesmerized by the spinning tapes that had reminded me of the close-up of relentless train wheels I had seen on TV the night before. When I nodded at him, Pops hit record and play.
“To His Grace, the Archbishop of St. John’s,” I read, my voice so high-pitched from nervousness it came out as barely more than a squeak. Pops hit stop.
“Don’t worry,” Pops said, “you can do it in bits and pieces. The head of the AV department will clean it up later with McHugh.”
Pops hit record and play, I read the phrase again and Pops hit stop again.
“He’s never going to sound like a grown man reading the nightly news,” my mother said.
“I just want to make sure that his voice is as clear as it can be,” Pops said. “I want to make sure it’s intelligible. We wouldn’t want Percy to have to do it all over again tomorrow night.”
“I bet Brother McHugh is finished recording his introduction,” I said, looking out through the window and up, across the street to the lights of Brother Rice high above us. I felt that I was reading to the Archbishop while standing right in front of him, reading the words he “wrote,” the ones McHugh rewrote for him, and which he would therefore want me to get just right. I tried not to think of the pictures of him in St. Bon’s in which, despite the shepherd’s staff he held and the pointy, funny-looking mitre on his head, he looked so severe.
“Pretend that you’re just reading to the three of us,” my mother said.
I next read the opening phrase almost buoyantly, as if I were introducing His Grace the Archbishop of St. John’s to an adoring crowd on the day of his triumphant installation. Pops hit stop again.
“You’re not directing a movie here, Pops,” my mother said. “Percy, don’t worry about what it sounds like or even what the words mean. Just read it like you were reading the back of a cereal box. Read it through no matter what you think your voice sounds like. If you’re not sure how to say a word, I’ll tell you, then you say it and keep going.”
“Don’t go too fast,” Pops said.
“And you keep your hands off the tape recorder,” my mother told him. “He’s had all the coaching from you he’s going to get. He’s not trying to boost the spirits of his people after some dreadful setback in the war. He’s just a boy who’s having words put in his mouth by a man he met once and hopefully will never meet again.”
My mother hit record and play and I began to read in what seemed to be a monotone. I got to the phrase “I do hereby humbly apologize” and felt suddenly that I was guilty of far more than anyone, even Brother McHugh, suspected, far more than I was apologizing for, a life of transgression that forever set me apart from the rest of humankind. I burst into tears. My shirt and hair were soaked with sweat. My mother hugged me from behind, her arms around my chest, and kissed my cheek. I was too upset to derive any tittilation from the feel of her breasts crushed against my back. The transgressions that had set me apart and would set me apart forever seemed huge and far greater than what I was being asked to apologize for but didn’t feel the least bit apologetic about. So what that I had claimed to be the Son of God and a pen pal of the Pope. So what that I had brought to school a pornographic photograph acquired for me by my mother. I hadn’t changed the colour of the face of Baby Jesus in the missal in the chapel with a red Magic Marker as some boy, inspired by my claim to be Christ, was said to have done. It wouldn’t have bothered me if some other boy had claimed to be the nephew of the Holy Ghost or denied that God the Father had a beard, or claimed that his father worked with the lepers of Nigeria.
“Hello, everyone, this is Percy Joyce … I am a grade nine student at St. Bonaventure College on Bonaventure Avenue in St. John’s. In the vicinity of Holy Heart High School I recently did and said some things that I should not have done and said. Many of you witnessed my inappropriate behaviour. Many of you heard about it from your fellow students … I claimed to be a worker of miracles, but I am just an ordinary boy with ordinary problems of my own. I pretended I could cure the sick. I made an even more grandiose claim that I think it would be best not to repeat even by way of apologizing for it … I made a mockery of the sacraments, which can be administered only by an ordained priest of God. I mocked our Holy Father. I made certain claims about my mother and father that were false … I assaulted Mrs. Madden. I made fun of humble Saint Joseph. Jesus, Mary and Joseph exemplify the proper relations that should exist between husband and wife, and parents and children. We should often ask them to sanctify our families by their example and intercession … I should not have pretended that I could confer upon myself the power to preserve others from harm by granting them my blessing. Although I bear the mark of my Creator, that mark has not endowed me with special powers or capacities … I mocked the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, which is the central dogma of the Church. In the unity of the Godhead there are three persons, God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. They are co-eternal and co-equal but truly distinct from one another. I confess to having done all these things … I am heartily sorry for having done them. I have made this apology of my own free will by way of asking forgiveness from anyone who, because of my behaviour, may have been troubled, offended or upset, and in the hope of returning the Seven Schools of the Mount to the state of studious quietude in which learning and the love of God may flourish. Again, I do hereby humbly apologize and solemnly vow never to repeat the transgressions to which I have confessed.”
It seemed to me, as I made the recording, that there was no one else within miles. As if I had lugged the recorder to some remote, silent place on Signal Hill and shamefully apologized, unheard by anyone or anything but my machine, had gone to some long-ago-designated official place of apology where, in solitude, many others, some of them famous, had humbled themselves before technology and God.
“It doesn’t sound very contrite,” Pops said after hitting stop. “He could at least sound sorry even if he’s not.”
“He’s not going to sob his way through it,” my mother said. “That would make him a hypocrite, and hypocrisy the subject of next week’s apology. No wailing, no gnashing of teeth. You have enough there that McHugh and his minions can patch together any way they want.”
“All right,” Pops said. “McHugh is waiting for me in his office. He plans to broadcast the apology tomorrow afternoon if possible.”
My mother sighed and shook her head. “Well,” she said, “don’t keep the Grand Inquisitor waiting.”
Pops picked up the tape recorder and, holding it in front of him as if it might otherwise explode, hurried from the house.
“There you go, Perse,” my mother said. “That part’s done. By this time tomorrow, all this silliness will be behind you.”
I was relieved when, about fifteen minutes later, Pops came back without the tape recorder.
“McHugh says that it will need a great deal of work,” he said. “He said that he and the AV people might be at it half the night.”
“How did he seem when he listened to it?” my mother said.
“Obviously not pleased,” Pops said.
“I don’t suppose he let you hear his introduction.”
“I didn’t ask to hear it. He didn’t offer. Maybe he hasn’t recorded it yet.”
Pops told me about the Protestant archbishop Thomas Cranmer who, trying to avoid execution, recanted his Protestantism, then later recanted his recantation when he discovered that the Catholic Church meant to burn him at the stake no matter what he said or did. “You can recant your recantation all you like when you’re at home,” Pops said, “but don’t do it out there. Remember Cranmer.”
“Cranmer. Wonderful example, Pops,” my mother said. “From now on, let’s keep to a minimum the analogies to Percy’s life that end with people being burned alive.”
“Physician, heal thyself,” Pops said.
My mother smiled at that and nodded a subtle touché.
“Well, you should at least talk to him about how to comport himself after his apology,” Pops said.
“Come straight home with Brother Hogan,” my mother said later when Pops had gone to his room. “Don’t say a word to any of those children on the buses, especially that boy Sully from Torbay. Forget about the dollar that he owes you—you’ll never see it. If anyone tries to goad you into making the kind of jokes you made before, just ignore them. No more stories, not even about Jim Joyce. If you’ve given him a new identity, keep it to yourself. I don’t want it getting back to me that you’re saying now he’s the captain of a submarine so top secret it never surfaces or something. God, if people knew what you could have told those children, all this would seem pretty pale by comparison.”
I lay awake that night thinking of McHugh at work on my apology across the street. Perhaps he was finished and watching 44 from the window of his suite. I wondered what he was thinking at that second, if he wondered if I’d been able to get to sleep or had even gone to bed yet, much of the house still being lit. I imagined him on the eighth floor of the Quarters looking down at the now-curtained windows of 44, watching for any sign of movement, any sign that Pops might be in my mother’s room or she might be in Pops’. I was sure he wondered what it was like to sleep with Penny Joyce and, in spite of himself, envied Pops. He probably found it as hard to believe as any of the boys that Pops had landed her or that Pops could do justice to a body such as hers.
I fell asleep at some point and woke about three-thirty to the sound of footsteps and muted whispers in the hall. I recognized the footsteps as my mother’s. She was heading back to her bedroom. I faintly heard the back screen door being eased open then shut with a click. Medina had been in my mother’s room. It was the first time I had ever heard her re-arrival or departure. Now that she was gone, my mother was free to pad less quietly back to bed in her slippers. It seemed strange that she had invited Medina over on a night when she must have known I would sleep lightly, if at all, unless she wanted company on a night when she knew she would sleep lightly, if at all. I thought of getting up and going to her room and asking her if she would come to mine and lie in the lower bunk for a while, perhaps until one of us fell asleep or even until morning. But she hadn’t slept at all yet. I felt jealous of Medina. I had no idea what it felt like to a woman when she came, and I wondered if it was possible for any boy or man to feel that way. I looked at the faded square of wall above my bed, and at the pictures of Saint Drogo that flanked Sister Mary Aggie’s prayer for unattractive people.
I could rationalize my lust for my mother this way: Throughout adolescence and young manhood and beyond, every heterosexual male not only harbours the desire, at some point in his life, to sleep with a truly beautiful, sensual, fuck-loving woman, but believes that he will, that it is not yet, not ever, too late, no matter how old he is. It is, of course, a delusion in most cases, but a sustaining one. To abandon all hope, however delusional, is impossible. It seemed to me, at fourteen, that the only truly beautiful woman I would ever have the faintest hope of sleeping with was my mother. It was as simple as that. I was not goaded by any sort of neurosis or incest fetish to pursue her. She wasn’t just my best bet, she was my only bet.
But I know that it was not for these reasons that I pursued my mother. I pursued her because I was in love with her, body and soul.