Read Online The Son of a Certain Woman by Wayne Johnston - Free Book Online

fleeting year when they were
required
to gaze upon her every day, required to complete with Penny Joyce a wholly legitimate, respectably justified transaction that did not constitute any sort of breach of their soon-to-be-set-in-stone vows of chastity. They came and went, like a succession of rejected suitors. Day after day, year after year, the drove of drones sent out from the hive of the Big B came to 44, cookie-cut deacons who never aged, as if the same forever-to-be-on-the-verge-of-ordination acolytes were doomed to an eternity of bearing gifts to the soul-destroying sorceress of 44.
    They slept in a rear annex to the Basilica Residence, a kind of dormitory where, it’s easy to imagine, they were all simultaneously kept awake by the image of my mother framed by the doorway of the porch at 44, dressed in a belted bathrobe that, though it showed less of her than her skirts and blouses did, was—they were certain
—all
that she wore, easy to imagine my mother as the common goad of their desire as they lay there on their bunks on their backs, trying to resist doing what they would have to admit to having done at their next confession.
Dear Lord, keep the Evil One away, and keep my hand away from his Minion in my underwear, the little serpent that is modelled after him, the part of my very body which Thou made in his image and attached to me and which I am forbidden to use except to pee
.
    “One of those basilica boys is coming down the hill,” Medina would say as she stood at the window, keeping watch for them. She said they looked as if their parents had talked them into being priests, or their teachers had, or
someone
. She hated to think what they’d let themselves be driven to ten years from now.Some of them had declared as early as grade seven that they had heard the call of the priesthood. They either believed that to be a priest was to be heroic in the way that other boys believed that to be one of the few good men of the Marines was to be heroic, or else it was the opposite and they knew even as early as twelve years old that they’d never make it in the outside world. Medina said she was sick of the sight of them on the doorstep, gaping at my mother as if they’d never seen a woman who was not a nun before. They were acne-ridden youngsters who thought it was a mortal sin to obey their bodies, who wished they didn’t
have
bodies even as they jerked off in their beds at night and wondered, as they would until they died or did it with a boy, what they were missing.
    I thought Medina said these things because she was jealous of my mother’s beauty. I didn’t yet know that it was the worshippers of Penny Joyce that she was jealous of, which is to say just about every man who ever set eyes on my mother, not to mention a good many women. “Bedroom eyes,” Medina remarked. “They look at you like you’re wearing nothing but a watch.”
    Why, she asked my mother once, did she ask the basilica boys to come in when she knew they’d say no? Why did she lead them on and flirt with them? My mother said she never led them on or flirted with them. Medina said that if answering the door in your bathrobe wasn’t flirting, there was no such thing. My mother said that one of the perks of working at home was working in your bathrobe. Why did she have to smile at them the way she did? My mother said she didn’t even know she was smiling, but she guessed that was just her way of being polite, friendly, nice, whatever. Medina said she liked to lead boys and men on, whether they were seminarians, priests, single, engaged, married, my mother didn’t care. And then Medina’s voice rose unhappily though I didn’t understand why. Why, she said, didn’t she take that stupid engagement ring off and put hermoney where her come-hither mouth was? Men didn’t just get it into their heads that she was asking for it, so why didn’t she just say yes to one she liked and get on with it and finish what she’d started with Jim