The Son of a Certain Woman (20 page)

“Why don’t you meet somewhere different this time?” my mother said. “Maybe the problem is that the two of you are too much on display. I’ll try to think of something better, okay?”

“Okay.”

My mother’s idea, which she had Pops relay to McHugh, who relayed it to Mrs. Dunne, was that Francine and I go to Marty’s restaurant on Water Street for ice cream floats.

The next day after school, we walked in silence to Marty’s. I held the door open for her, but she stayed put until I went in first. Lisa, the waitress who served my mother, Medina and me on Sundays was sitting by the cash register behind the counter, smoking a cigarette and chewing gum.

“Well, hello, Percy Joyce,” she said, smiling.

“Hello, Lisa,” I said.

“Who’s this, now?” she said, beaming at Francine in a way that convinced me my mother had called her to tell her we were coming. “Is this your girlfriend?”

I turned to look at Francine, only to find that she had already taken a seat in one of the booths along the wall.

“That’s Francine,” I said. “She goes to Holy Heart.”

“Aha, an older woman.”

I was relieved to see that the entire restaurant was empty. I joined Francine in the booth and sat facing the front window, which was hidden from me by the other side of the booth and by Francine. Marty’s—green booths, wainscotted walls hung with cheap paintings of storm-tossed ships, smiling net-hauling fishermen clad in sou’westers, cheerful-looking Newfoundland dogs with their tongues lolling. But to me the place was the mecca of fine dining. It smelled of deep-frying chips, hot gravy sprinkled with cold brown vinegar, hot fudge brownies buried under Dream Whip and ice cream and chocolate syrup.

Francine sat facing the back of the restaurant. Lisa, who was dressed all in green, put cutlery, two paper place mats and two menus in front of us.

“I just want a plate of chips, please,” Francine said, staring at the place mat on which there was a drawing of a smiling man dressed as a chef, his arms folded,
Marty
written in green above his head.

“Mom gave me enough for two floats each,” I said, but Francine went on staring at the place mat.

“I’ll have a vanilla float with Sprite,” I told Lisa, who was one of the few people who didn’t look away or at my school tie when I looked at her.

Lisa, taking our menus, smiled and winked at me, cracking her gum again—she cracked her gum to punctuate everything she said and did. When she was gone, I said, “You can have more than just chips, you know.”

“Mom said just chips,” Francine said.

“I like ice cream floats,” I said.

Francine stared away from me at the line of empty booths across the aisle, but we were more privately together in the booth than we had ever been before, closer, sitting down in each other’s company for the first time. I looked at her hands. I imagined those lovely fingers doing to Medina whatever my mother’s had to make her squirm the way she had and get so out of breath. I imagined them taking the place of my oversized hands and playing with my dick the way I played with it myself. I put both hands in my pockets and covered my hard-on with my left, pressing it against my lower belly. I stared at the freckled skin between the lapels of her Heart blouse, the hollow of her throat, the V of her chest, the tunic that prevented me, I imagined, from seeing the outline of her bra. Beneath the table, our knees and shoes were little more than a foot apart.

“You could have gravy on your chips,” I said. She flared her nostrils but said nothing.

“Have you ever been to Marty’s before?” I said.

Barely perceptibly, she shook her head.

“We come here almost every Sunday,” I said. “We have Sunday sundaes.”

I glanced under the table as she bent to pull up her socks. Her knees parted slightly. Her tits pressed against the edge of the table. They were bigger than they had seemed, though not nearly as big as my mother’s or even Medina’s.

Give me myth or give me death. I said that Marty owned the restaurant but he didn’t work there because he owned so many things in town that weren’t even named after him that he didn’t have to work anywhere. “He never dresses like the man on the menu,” I said. I said his real name was Martin Barton but he called himself Marty because he didn’t like having two names that rhymed. They didn’t really rhyme, I said, because he was French from France and in French
Barton
was pronounced “Bartawn,” but people in Newfoundland pronounced it like
Martin
, so he didn’t have any choice.

Lisa brought Francine’s chips and my float to the table. A vanilla float—I’d had many of them at Marty’s—was made with two scoops of vanilla ice cream and came with a side bottle of Sprite; you added as much Sprite as you liked when you liked. The ice cream came in a metal hourglass-shaped goblet that was lined with a cone of paper. The top scoop of ice cream was stabbed with a long narrow spoon and a cardboard straw.

“There you go,” Lisa said. “Francine can share her chips with you and here’s a straw, Francine, so you can have a taste of Percy’s float.” She winked at me again and cracked her gum before she went away.

I poured most of the Sprite into the goblet and watched the scoops of ice cream rise up to the top. I sucked on the straw and my mouth filled with creamy Sprite so cold I gasped and lost my breath. I heard Lisa laugh.

“Excuse me,” I said. “Do you want some, Francine?” I’d never called her by name before. She gave no sign of having heard me.

There were ketchup, malt vinegar, salt and pepper on the table, but Francine put nothing on her chips. “They look good,” I said.

She picked up a chip with her fingers, bit it in half and dropped the other half on her plate. Her small mouth barely moved as she chewed. She pushed away her plate of chips.

“I have to go home,” she said as though to someone sitting beside her.

“I’ll finish this float really fast then,” I said.

I looked at the goblet; the paper cone inside it was about half full. I picked up the goblet with one hand and with the other removed the paper cone, holding it by the rim. “I’m going to drink like a king,” I said, and began to pour the creamy Sprite from the paper cone into the goblet.

In all my visits to Marty’s I had never noticed that there was nothing at the bottom of a goblet but a hole that the paper cone fit into. The float flowed straight out of the goblet and streamed onto my lap, instantly soaking through my slacks and underwear and onto my hard-on and my balls. Some of the cream spattered onto the table and from there onto the front of Francine’s tunic. There was even some on her face and in her hair.

I gasped from the shock of the cold and from embarrassment, unable to say a word.

“WHAT DID YOU DO?” Francine cried. “YOU GOT CREAM ALL OVER ME.” She bolted from the booth, dodging Lisa, who was headed for our table. I tried to run past Lisa in pursuit of Francine, but she grabbed me by the collar of my blazer.

“You’re not going out there looking like
that
,” she said. I looked outside. Francine was halfway up the hill to Duckworth Street, not running but, because of the steep slope, striding as fast as she could, legs splayed as wide as a cross-country skier’s, arms pumping.

Lisa stared at my crotch, so I stared too. “I didn’t know there was no bottom in it,” I said.

No colour registers moisture more clearly than grey. I looked as if I had both come in and pissed my pants. There was a mess of still-white creamy foam over and around my zipper.

Now I was glad Lisa had stopped me. The slope on the far side of Duckworth was even steeper. I would have had to do what Francine was doing now, run and walk, run and walk, through neighbourhoods I didn’t know, my hands and feet flopping all over the place. I would have been jeered at by boys and girls, and by who knows who else, people who though I’d never met them and didn’t know their names knew
my
name because they knew
of
me, of my stupid platypus face, and hands and feet as oversized as those of any walrus.

“I’m going to phone your mother and tell her to come down here with some other clothes for you, all right?” Lisa said. I nodded. “You wait in the men’s bathroom. Go into one of the stalls and lock the door. Don’t take anything off until your mother gets here, all right?” I nodded again and fought back the urge to cry.

I did as she said. I stood in a locked stall in the men’s room at Marty’s, my thighs sticking together, Sprite and ice cream crusting on my slacks, inside and out, on my underwear, inside my underwear on pubic hair that, at the best of times, looked like the cheapest, most inexpert and wispy of toupées. I hoped that no one else would come into the bathroom while I was there. I thought again of the bottomless goblet, pictured myself pouring the float into it and announcing with such gleeful aplomb that I planned to drink like a king.

Francine’s mother phoned mine and suggested that we all keep the “accident in the restaurant” to ourselves. She and Francine would tell no one, not even McHugh, and she said she hoped Pops would not say a word about it to him or anyone else. My mother assured her that no one at 44 would say a word to anyone, and added that Lisa the waitress had already told her that she would
keep it a secret. My mother seemed as relieved as I was and made Pops swear he would not breathe a word to McHugh.

“You’ll be
very
sorry if you break that promise, Pops,” she said. “
Very
sorry. Understand?” Pops nodded and blushed as if there were
many
mortifying secrets about him that no one knew but him and my mother.

Mrs. Dunne said she thought we should make up some excuse that McHugh could relay to the Archbishop about why Francine and I would have no further meetings.

“An excuse that we can all use when we have to,” my mother said. “Mrs. Dunne says she’s worried about Francine and hopes that her daughter won’t be rewarded for her kindness with ingratitude.”

“Her kindness?” Medina said. “You’d think the girl was a martyr. I’d be worried about Francine if I was Mrs. Dunne. She met up with Percy three times and barely said two dozen words.”

“It seems her mother had no better sense than to force her into it,” my mother said. “Try to imagine a girl less suited to lead by example than Francine. On the other hand, I went along with the whole thing in the first place.”

It was decided that our excuse should be that Francine, being involved in so many extracurricular school activities and spending so much time at her schoolwork in order to maintain her high grades in a new school, simply didn’t have the time and energy to add to her responsibilities. Given how weary and distressed Francine had appeared since she began to “look out for me,” Mrs. Dunne said, the excuse would be believed.

I stuck to the agreed-upon excuse for my “breakup” with Francine. At first it was not openly challenged at St. Bon’s, but girls from Holy Heart accused me on the way home of having “tried something” with her. They said they had heard from their parents what “really happened.”

Then the boys started in. “Heard you got some from Francine,” the boys from Brother Rice shouted. “Percy frenched Francine,”
they chanted, and the girls answered with a chorus of disgust and sounds of mock retching. “His tongue can’t be any worse than his face,” a boy yelled, further inciting the girls, who shouted back that they doubted poor Percy-frenched Francine would agree with them. Gloria announced: “One of Francine’s brothers wants to be a priest at the Basilica, but Percy told Francine that, unless she put out, the Dunne family would never get anywhere because he’d make sure they wound up in Uncle Paddy’s bad books.” This, or some version of it, became the story: I had tried to blackmail Francine by threatening to get her and her mother into trouble with the Archbishop

Seeming to lend credence to the accusations was the fact that, day after day, Francine did not show up for school. Girls began saying that she had suffered some sort of breakdown because of something I had done when she wouldn’t let me kiss her and “do things” to her. After Francine’s fourth consecutive day of absence from school, my mother phoned Mrs. Dunne, who told her that Francine had a bad cold but would soon be back to school. But a week and a half went by with no sign of Francine.

Then word went round that, on the last day she spent with me, Francine had been spotted, red-faced and streaming tears, running up Garrison Hill, sometimes falling in her panic to get home after some sort of “trouble” involving me at Marty’s. Francine had run from the restaurant and I had been prevented from leaving it until my mother came to get me.

“I’m going to phone that woman again,” my mother declared, but Pops warned her against making accusations she couldn’t prove. He said he had heard from Brother McHugh that the Archbishop was “distressed” about all the stories that were going around about me.

“He probably
heard
about them from McHugh,” my mother said.

She phoned Mrs. Dunne and had a conversation with her that left her seething. Mrs. Dunne had told her that Francine was in
“a very fragile state,” that she was under the care of a doctor who said it might be weeks or even months before she was back to normal. In a lisping imitation of Mrs. Dunne, my mother said, “Now I’m not saying that Percy
did
anything. But Francine doesn’t like to talk about what really happened in the restaurant. She never had any problems before she made friends with Percy, that’s all I’m saying.”

My mother, arms folded over her white blouse, stormed around the house in her high heels. “Stupid, selfish woman. Blaming Percy for
her
mistake. If that daughter of hers is that delicate, she should never have put her forward in the first place. She uses her shrinking violet of a daughter to make points with the Archbishop and then she blames Percy when fragile Francine falls apart.”

Pops came home the next day after school to announce that McHugh had relayed to him the Archbishop’s suggestion that I might benefit from a few sessions with the clerical counsellor at the Basilica.

“Fragile Francine might benefit,” my mother fumed, “but it would take more than a few sessions. Frail Francine. Yet-to-be-finger-fucked Francine. Faint Francine.
Feverish
Francine. Francine the Fanciful. Too-tight-to-fart Francine. Francine the Frosty.”