The Son of a Certain Woman (43 page)

Or nearby at least.

She would say that now, almost fifteen years later, she was repentant because she knew that it was all part of God’s plan for her and her son, which was itself a tiny but inscrutably crucial part of His all-inclusive, universal plan by which all the atrocities of history would not only be redeemed but be seen as necessary. The parents of murdered children would see that, according to the plan, the murder of their children made perfect sense, there being no other way that an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving God could think of to bring about the eternal harmony and happiness of others.

I thought of
my
confession. It would be strange enough going into the confessional with an entire church full of students watching me, timing my confession, the whole Basilica so silent on my birthday they would, I fancied, be able to hear my every word or at least gauge the severity and complexity of my sins by the length of time I was holed up in the wall space, by the length of time it took me to finally spill my guts after all these years. It would be stranger still to be watched by all those students as I made my way to the altar rail to say my penance—which they would also time, and for the same reason.

My mother said that in the confessional I should just assume the tone of my famous apology, repeat it word for word, and throw in some other disclosures that my confessor was already familiar with, such as my Vivian period, my Peeping Percy phase, my Francine phase, my bus-blessing, Pope-imitating phase, my ongoing “give me myth or give me death” campaign. “Pile it on,” she said. “There’s nothing Catholics like more than a reformed sinner—the worse the sinner, the greater the reformation.”

McHugh reminded me that Catholicism was not a buffet from which you could pick and choose what you wanted to believe
and ignore the rest. It was a prix fixe menu that allowed for no substitutes. This was especially true of the Catholic doctrine that he would teach me. He said I would also have to memorize, in preparation for my confession, not the condensed and simplified version of the Baltimore Catechism that my schoolmates had studied in grade two, but the much longer and complex version that was prescribed for those who made their First Communion as young adults.

“His Grace has allowed me the use of a room in the Basilica of St. John the Baptist. This is a special privilege as there is no more appropriate place for a boy about to be baptized to study the catechism than a basilica named after the first and greatest of all Baptists. It is a privilege for which, one day, you will thank His Grace personally, even if your gratitude is insincere.”

One afternoon when Pops was attending a teachers’ meeting, I returned home from school and found my mother and Medina kissing on the couch in the living room— kissing, not even with their arms around each other, but also not just pressing their lips together—rather having a slow, deep kiss that they didn’t pull out of when I walked into the room. I stayed silent but I had a curious feeling that they had wanted me to “catch” them, that they may have seen me coming down the hill and up the driveway. After about a minute, during which I watched, rapt, from the doorway, noting every movement of their mouths, I disguised my hard-on by sitting down. They pulled apart.

“I was just kissing the bride,” Medina said.

My mother said, “Guess what, Perse? Medina’s changed her mind. She’s going to be my maid of honour after all. I’ve already phoned McHugh and given him the good news.”

“I’m sure he’s doing cartwheels,” Medina said.

“How come you changed your mind, Medina?” I asked.

Because she’d be jealous, she admitted, not only of Pops but of whoever was my mother’s maid of honour, and she wouldn’t be able to stand spending the wedding day alone in her room or wandering the streets in some other part of town. “I’m not going to enjoy it, but I think I’d like it even less if I wasn’t there.”

“I’m so glad,” my mother said. “It won’t be as hard to pretend when everyone I’m pretending for is there.” I was surprised to see tears on her cheeks.

Medina said we shouldn’t be surprised if, when Father Bill said, “You may kiss the bride,” she got to my mother before Pops did. “I feel sick when I think of Pops lifting that veil and planting one right on your lips.”

“Well, it will be the first and last time he ever kisses me on the lips. There has been no real kissing during ‘visiting hours’ and there never will be. That’s always been a stipulation, as you know.”

Medina said she would be bawling from the outset and she couldn’t guarantee that her tears would seem like tears of joy.

“I might start bawling myself,” my mother added.

Pops merely frowned when my mother told him Medina would be her maid of honour. “It’s your choice, Paynelope,” he said. He announced that the grade eleven history teacher at Brother Rice, a colleague of many years, had agreed to be his best man. “I really hardly know him,” Pops said. “McHugh asked him for me. And McHugh said he would do his best to find godparents for Percy.”

“If a good confession is humble, sincere and entire, that means there hasn’t been one yet,” my mother told us.

Nevertheless, she made her fourteen-years-delayed confession to Father Bill in the chapel confessional at Brother Rice. She said she paraphrased for Father Bill the Archbishop’s Parable of Penny Joyce, which Father Bill listened to wordlessly and seemed disappointed by, judging by the tone of his voice as he assigned
her penance. She described how Father Bill sat sideways to the wire mesh window to the other side of which her face was all but pressed, so that her lips were hardly more than an inch from his ear. She said that confession was like whispering to someone through a screen door in the darkness, asking the man on the other side to make you pure of heart and white of soul, even though you both knew that he couldn’t.

“Have you ever been in the Basilica?” I asked her.

She said that she hadn’t. She said that most rich Catholics, or those who wanted to be mistaken for rich, went to Mass at the Basilica, for the same reason that they shopped at the most expensive stores: to be seen by their rich fellows, to attend the highest-quality Mass that could be found in Newfoundland, Mass that did your soul more good than Mass at a mere church. At the Basilica, people believed, the sacraments counted for more. Better to confess to a bishop than to some hack priest who would botch the forgiveness of your sins and send you away in worse shape than you were before. Better to be baptized in the Basilica than in some church whose baptisms came without a warranty and might wear off at the worst possible time. Better to be married at the Basilica than at some discount church where grace of inferior quality was doled out like food at a homeless shelter.

W
HEN
McHugh heard that I had never been inside the main part of the Basilica, he told me not to go in there before the day of my baptism. The first sight of the Basilica might help put even me in the proper state of awe and wonder to receive the sacraments.

I had to study the answers to four hundred and twenty-one questions, as well as many prayers, hymns and the entire Mass. In the catechism for older students and adults, the official, unabridged Baltimore Catechism, there were fourteen hundred questions and answers, most of them much longer than in the abridged version. McHugh reluctantly decided there was not enough time for me to study the longest version. There were, however, among the four hundred and twenty-one questions in
my
catechism, Fifty Primary Questions that I would have to answer word for word on an exam because, he said, every one of the words was exactly the right word, chosen by the anonymous author of the catechism in 1885. As with
the Ten Commandments, no other words, no synonyms or summaries would do, because the slightest departure of nuance or connotation could lead the student of the catechism into sin. There were no grey areas between right and wrong. The Truth was the Truth. The questions and answers in the Baltimore Catechism were channelled through the Infallible Pope by the Holy Spirit. They could not be argued with, qualified, modified or otherwise altered in any way or any context.

I always arrived first, “promptly at 3:45,” as McHugh instructed me. He arrived promptly at 3:50. On McHugh’s instructions, I entered the Basilica by one of the rear doors that opened onto a large, circular stone vestibule rung round with Roman arches, each arch leading to a windowless door, each door numbered.

Our study room, number six of six, seemed to be a conference room. There was a long, wide, gleaming wooden table with chairs on either side but none at the head or the end. The walls were lined with shelves containing ancient-looking leather-bound books, their titles inscribed in Latin on their spines, books that I fancied contained, volume by volume, the Ultimate Catechism, the Summa Cum Laude of catechisms, millions, perhaps billions of ever-proliferating questions and answers that gave rise to other questions and answers ad infinitum, the whole thing not omitting a single footnote of Church doctrine or the most scrupulously fine of fine distinctions.

There were many holy pictures on the walls above the books. The one above the door by which I entered was a photograph of the Archbishop. Above the door at the opposite end of the room, by which McHugh entered, was a photograph of the Pope. Encircling the room were other photographs or portraits of other popes and Newfoundland archbishops, almost all of them in profile, as if to face the viewer directly would have been profane. Like the doors, the room was windowless, lit solely by lamps, for there were no overhead lights. The room always gave me the impression that,
outside, it would have been dark no matter what the time of day or year, so dark, so “late” that I ought to have been home hours ago.

McHugh and I sat at the centre of the table on opposite sides. Every chair had a corresponding large glass ashtray, green notebook and gleaming silver pen. I always half expected the balance of a catechism committee, a delegation of Church sages hand-picked by Uncle Paddy, to pour into the room and occupy the empty chairs.

McHugh quizzed me each afternoon from a catechism that he held in his hands, never leaning it on the table, as if he believed that, even from that distance, I would be able to read the answers.

He always brought with him four versions of the catechism, the smallest a mere paperback chapbook for seven-year-olds, the next biggest a slim hardbound copy of my catechism. And two larger catechisms, the one with fourteen hundred questions and answers, and the fourth, which was an annotated version of it that was exclusively for the use of teachers. He never consulted the other three books, but the four of them sometimes lay side by side on the table like a symbol of the duration of a lifetime, from boyhood to adolescence to young manhood to middle and old age.

McHugh announced that he was the Catechist, the person whose responsibility it was before God to instruct and prepare me for baptism, penance and Communion by the use of the catechism. I was the Catechumen, the person being instructed and prepared. Catechist and Catechumen, we sat face to face each day like devil’s advocate and would-be saint, doing battle in the manner prescribed by the Church.

We began each day this way:

“What is the full name of this book?”

“The full name of the book is the Baltimore Catechism.”

“What am I?”

“You are the Catechist.”

“What are you?”

“I am the Catechumen.”

“Let us begin.”

And so we began: “We cannot fully understand how the three Divine Persons are one and the same God because this is a mystery. What is a mystery, Percy?”

“A mystery is a truth which we cannot fully understand.”

“What gender is the Holy Ghost?”

“He is without gender.”

“Then why do you refer to the Holy Ghost as ‘he’?”

“I’m sorry, Brother.
The Holy Ghost
is without gender.”

“Why are there no images of God the Father in Catholic churches?”

“There are none because He has never shown Himself to us.”

“Does the corruption of our nature remain in us after original sin has been forgiven?”

“It does. It remains in us until we enter into Heaven, throughout our lives and our time in Purgatory.”

“What should be done with bad and immodest books and newspapers?”

“Bad and immodest books and newspapers should be destroyed.”

What are the six reasons for Holy Communion?

What are the five qualities of proper prayer?

What is the difference between the particular judgment and the general judgment?

What are the seven sayings of Jesus on the Cross?

What are the twelve fruits of the Holy Ghost?

Every now and then he lowered the catechism, closed it on the desk and placed his hands on it, one on top of the other. This was a signal that we were taking a break of sorts—that is, that he was now about to ask questions of a different kind, questions mostly having to do with 44 Bonaventure and its occupants, which he asked in the same imperious, challenging tone as the catechism questions. He stood beneath and looked up at the round white clock on the wall as he spoke, as if the clock, whose second hand was the only
moving thing in the room, somehow helped him find the right words, words by which to pose me the “extra” questions that would be, like the words of the questions and answers of the catechism, and the words of the Bible, the exact, right words, without the faintest hint of an inappropriate nuance or connotation, infallible questions in search of infallible answers.

After staring at the clock for several minutes, he would move on to a portrait of one of the popes, a photograph of one of the archbishops, and so on. In this manner he would make his way completely around the room, as if he were performing the Stations of the Cross, sometimes seeming to examine the walls themselves in the hope of being instructed by them as to what questions he should put to me.

The first “extra” question he ever asked was, “What are your mother’s middle names?” I didn’t know. He frowned as if he believed I was lying. He wrote something in his notebook. “Her second name is Anne,” he said. “She is named after Saint Anne, the mother of the Blessed Virgin Mary. She herself may not know whom she is named after or why. Her confirmation name is Elizabeth who was the mother of John the Baptist. When I told His Grace her confirmation name, he seemed to take it as further proof that you were born on the feast day of John the Baptist for a purpose. I told him it might merely be a coincidence but he has his mind made up.”