The Divine Ryans, page 5
One morning, I woke from the Momary dream to find myself in mid-pee. My underwear was soaked and I only just managed to stop before I stained the sheets. I ran to the bathroom, my bud so hard I had to pee while standing on the bathtub. When I was finished, I took my underwear and threw it in the laundry. About a week later, it happened again. I dreamed that, in fleeing from Momary, I ran headlong into darkness so absolute, so silent that I doubted my existence, then woke up to find myself in mid-pee. Once again, I put a pair of pee-stained drawers in the laundry.
To explain why Aunt Phil did what she did with my underwear, I have to tell first what Mary and my mother did with hers. Mary had recently disappointed Aunt Phil by developing breasts. ‘Twelve years old,’ Aunt Phil said, shaking her head and looking at my mother as if to say, ‘What kind of woman would allow her daughter to have breasts at age twelve?’ No-one was more embarrassed by it all than Mary, though she pretended not to be. Rather than avoiding all mention of the topic, as she might have been expected to do, she went out of her way to mention it, to be mature about it, mortifying Aunt Phil and my mother in the process. Then, one afternoon, while Aunt Phil was out, Mary, who, for the past month, had been assuring everyone that breasts were not something to make jokes about or be ashamed of, came up from the basement wearing Aunt Phil’s bra outside her sweater, the cups of the bra stuffed, as Mary put it, with ‘most’ of that week’s laundry. ‘Look what I found,’ she said. ‘Aunt Phil left the laundry door unlocked.’
It might have been that all the awkwardness and embarrassment that Mary had been storing up for weeks were in that bra, as if her breasts had become so absurdly oversized that she would have no choice but be embarrassed by them. My mother shrieked with laughter when she saw her, causing Mary to laugh even harder and strut around the kitchen with her chest thrust out. Her face was beet red with a kind of mortified hilarity which increased the more my mother laughed at her. There they were, the legendary bras which Aunt Phil would not even hang on the clothesline for fear of people seeing them.
Then my mother ran down to the basement and came back with another of Aunt Phil’s bras, the cups of which, as she discovered, fit quite nicely on her head, looking like a bathing cap, or like one of those caps pilots wore in the Second World War, all the more so when she fastened the straps beneath her chin. My mother walked about the kitchen as if she was modelling the latest thing in aviation hats, turning her head this way and that. Soon, all three of us were in the giggles.
Then, she ran downstairs again and, seconds later, came back up, still wearing Aunt Phil’s bra, but also wearing – it hardly seemed possible – Father Seymour’s underwear, ‘the sacred shorts’ as Uncle Reginald called them, which Father Seymour delivered to Aunt Phil cloak-and-dagger fashion every Friday. The rest of his laundry was done by the sisters at the convent, but the shorts were withheld. And here was my mother, wearing them on her head, wearing them over Aunt Phil’s bra, the cups of which, doubled on her head, looked like a skullcap. She might have been some court jester, some fool figure, for, with the skullcap bra, and the shorts, the legs of which hung drooping down like tassels, the only thing missing was a set of bells.
By this time, tears were streaming down our faces – had it gone on much longer, all three of us might have fallen to the floor. But just when all the hilarity was at its height, Aunt Phil came through the door.
At first, it was only the riot of fun that she objected to, the noise that we were making. ‘My God,’ she said, taking off her bandanna, ‘I leave the house for half an hour—’ And then she noticed them, her bras. Her sister-in-law was wearing one of them on her head, her niece was wearing the other one outside her sweater, while her nine-year-old nephew was watching them. It must have looked to her like some sort of pagan ritual was underway, some dance in celebration of the breasts.
For some reason, perhaps because her mind would simply not admit the possibility that my mother was wearing them on her head, it took her a little longer to notice, or perhaps to recognize, Father Seymour’s shorts. She stared at my mother’s head as if she could not, for the life of her, make out what she was wearing. My mother stood there, the legs of Father Seymour’s shorts half drooping over so that now they looked like horns. Even with Aunt Phil looking at them in such total disbelief, Mary and my mother could not stop laughing. In fact, her being there made them laugh that much harder. ‘I’m going to leave this room for five minutes,’ Aunt Phil said. ‘I trust that when I come back, there will be no-one in it.’
It was hardly surprising, after all of this, which happened just before my second pee-dream, that I came home a few days after that dream to find that Aunt Phil had pinned my pee-stained underwear to the bulletin board in the kitchen. Because my drawers were otherwise lily white, the pee stain was all too evident. It might have been my little boy’s soul that was hanging there, ‘pristine except for piss stains’, as Uncle Reginald said later. Below the underwear was a note which read: ‘I will not wash such filth’.
No sooner had I spotted my drawers than Aunt Phil took them down and threw them in the garbage. Worst of all was that no-one said a word about it. Even Mary was too ashamed of me to gloat about the sight of my soiled underwear, hung on the board for all to see. The victory in the laundry had been undone. Aunt Phil had gotten her revenge. She had not only humiliated us, she had made us the instrument of our own humiliation. For a while, my mother and Mary blamed me as much as they did Aunt Phil, and no wonder, for they had had the worst of it; they had had to sit about the house while my underwear was on display in the kitchen. And no sooner had I arrived home than Aunt Phil had taken it down. I had been spared all but a momentary glimpse of it.
It was brilliant revenge, I had to give her that. Divide and conquer. And revenge, she must have calculated, that would keep us in line from now on, since it could well be repeated, my bladder being what it was. I had a picture of this scene being repeated ad infinitum, or, worse yet, the threat of its being repeated held over all our heads ad infinitum. The drawers wars. In which I had not fired a shot, but which we had started, so anything Aunt Phil did would seem justified. I couldn’t help thinking that the sanctity of the laundry basket had been violated, first by us and now by her. It now seemed to me that anything found in the laundry basket, just like anything said in confession, should be kept strictly confidential, but it was too late for such pious thoughts. What if I peed again? As I well might, since I was almost certain to see my father again, and therefore to dream of Momary again.
I lay awake all that night thinking about it. What could I do? Any plan involving Mary or my mother would not be acceptable. I wanted to convince not only Aunt Phil, but the others as well, that I was not a bedwetter. I kept picturing Aunt Phil throwing my underwear in the garbage, and then it came to me. I would buy my own. I would throw my soiled underwear away and buy my own. I would need to buy one, at most two pairs of underwear a week. I had better start doing it right away, before my mother thought of doing the same thing for me. She was certain to replace the ones Aunt Phil had thrown away, and that might give her the idea. The thought of my mother having to buy me new underwear every week was enough to make me put aside such quibbles as where I would buy them, how I would raise the money (it was hard just scraping together enough for my oralysis), and how I would keep my secret from the others.
As I was lying there in bed, the same questions kept posing themselves to me, over and over. How had it come about that my family’s happiness depended on my having clean underwear? Did underwear play so large a part in the lives of other people? All of this trouble because of my bud, my ‘alarm cock’, Uncle Reginald might have called it, if I had had the nerve to tell him why it kept going off, why it kept waking me up. I doubted that even Uncle Reginald would believe that my alarm cock went off to save me from the darkness that Momary chased me into once a week.
A few days later, after first seeing my father and later being awakened from yet another Momary dream by my alarm cock, to find myself in mid-pee, I took my allowance, which I had been saving since the kitchen episode, and went to the only Woolworth’s within walking distance to buy my first pair of underwear. I will never forget the way the woman behind the counter looked at me. What kind of nine-year-old buys his own underwear? she was wondering. The kind who lives with Aunt Phil, I should have told her. Luckily, my mother bought only the standard Stanfield’s whites, so I didn’t have to go to any great lengths to find a matching pair.
As bad as that first time was, the second time, one week later, was much worse. The saleswoman had been so struck by a nine-year-old buying his own underwear that she remembered me, and smiled at me when I put the Stanfield’s on the counter. I thought about telling her they were a present for my brother, but that would be hard to swallow, especially by the tenth week. Another brother, another birthday, another pair of Stanfield’s whites, size small. Keeping the family in underwear and only nine years old. Probably not even wearing any himself, poor thing, going without for his brother’s sake. I took the underwear and ran, wishing there was another Woolworth’s within walking distance of our house.
Thinking of that beard between Momary’s legs, of which I was getting an ever closer view every night, got me to wondering why, despite my young age, the little sac between my legs was so weirdly wrinkled. At our next oralysis, I asked Uncle Reginald about it. He told me it was wrinkled because it was thousands of years old, being the only part of the human body which was passed down through generations, God giving to each newborn baby a ‘used Methuselah’, shrunken, of course, to make it fit. ‘Methuselah’, Uncle Reginald called it, the hairless, wrinkled sage between my legs. Though I did not believe his story, the thought of owning a used Methuselah fascinated me. I couldn’t help wondering who had my father’s, or Adam’s for that matter. Imagine, going about with the very first Methuselah between your legs.
‘The wisest of the wise,’ said Uncle Reginald. ‘The oracle of oracles. The centre of the world.’
‘My Methuselah is the centre of the world?’ I said. He nodded.
‘The centre of your world,’ he said. There was even an invocation to Methuselah, he said, to be spoken while looking at him, that is, while looking at his reflection in a mirror held between your legs. ‘Oh Methuselah,’ said Uncle Reginald, ‘oh Great Hairless One, Great Wrinkled One, oh Oracle of Oracles, oh Prune of Prunes, oh Wisest of the Wise, I command you, tell me all.’
‘He won’t answer me,’ I said, rolling my eyes, but Uncle Reginald assured me that he would. Just for the fun of it, I began to make mock consultations with Methuselah whenever I took a bath. Sitting up on the edge of the tub, holding one of my mother’s compact mirrors between my legs, I had Methuselah answer me, in a deep, god-like voice. ‘What is your question?’ said Methuselah, when I recited Uncle Reginald’s invocation.
‘Will the Habs win the Stanley Cup this year?’ I asked him.
‘Yes,’ said Methuselah.
‘Will Beliveau be MVP?’ I said.
‘Yes,’ said Methuselah. How strange he looked, my wizened, reincarnated Methuselah, how out of place between my backside and my bud, as if he had been some afterthought of creation, made in a panic and hastily attached at the last minute. Perhaps it was because he couldn’t stand the sight of them that God had decided not to make any more Methuselahs than he absolutely had to, and to have mankind keep covered those he had made. It might have been no more than God’s disgust with Adam’s Methuselah that got our first parents kicked out of Eden.
I decided my Methuselah had once been Virgil’s, my father’s favourite writer, which made him at least two hundred years old. Between how many pairs of legs had he been stuck since then? I wondered. Who would have thought it, the accumulated wisdom of the ages in that little pouch between my legs? One day, while I was having a bath, I decided to ask him a real question. Sitting on the edge of the tub, I put the mirror between my legs and looked at him – with his many folds and pink wrinkles, he looked like a brain of some sort, a brain that stored the future instead of the past, foreknowledge instead of memory. ‘Oh Methuselah,’ I said, ‘oh Great Hairless One, Great Wrinkled One, oh Oracle of Oracles, oh Prune of Prunes, oh Wisest of the Wise, tell me all.’
‘What is your question?’ said Methuselah.
‘When will I see my father’s ghost again?’ I said.
‘Soon,’ said Methuselah.
‘When?’ I said.
Methuselah, his pink wrinkles making him look like some aged child, said nothing.
‘What does my father want?’ I said. ‘Why does he always have a puck?’
Methuselah, Great Hairless One, Great Wrinkled One, was silent.
6
Not long before my first confession, my father had taken me aside and told me there was no point in my trying to keep secrets from the priest. A secret was just an unforgiven sin, he said, and besides, while I might fool the priest, I could never fool God, who knew even my most secret thoughts. I had seen the machine room at The Daily Chronicle, he said. Well, there was one just like that in heaven, except much bigger. There were thousands, millions of machines in it, just like the ones that automatically typed out the wire-service stories at The Daily Chronicle, the stories you saw in the paper with headings like Paris (AP), London (CP). On heaven’s teletype, he said, my heading was St John’s (DD). The entire record of my mind was being transcribed by some teletype machine in heaven. As soon as God saw the heading, St John’s (DD), he knew that what followed would be the secret thoughts of Draper Doyle.
For a while, I believed this, and dared not keep even my most embarrassing sins from the priest. I imagined God in some celestial machine room, reading my most secret thoughts the minute I thought them, receiving urgent bulletins from the mind of his St John’s correspondent, Draper Doyle. For all I knew, God was reading my mind aloud on some television newscast in heaven. The CBC. The Celestial Broadcasting Corporation. And now, the CBC news. With God. This just in: A reading from the mind of Draper Doyle. Or my secret thoughts were appearing on the front page of heaven’s equivalent of The Daily Chronicle. Imagine the readership. Imagine what an ad would cost.
As time went on, I had become more tickled by this notion than frightened by it, a fact my father somehow sensed, for he soon abandoned it in favour of another. I had been born, he said, with the black mark of original sin on my soul, which was otherwise pure white. It was the kind of black mark the puck leaves on the boards. Each time I sinned, another black mark was made. What I had to watch out for, he said, was that my soul did not go black before my time on earth ran out. For if it did, if it became what he called ‘puck black’, so black that no amount of time in the fires of purgatory could cleanse it, I would have to go to hell. The only thing that would keep my soul from going black before my time on earth ran out was confession. If, throughout my life, I made honest confessions, my soul would go to purgatory, he said, from which, when the cleansing process was complete, it would rise to heaven, with the souls of all those people whose sins had been forgiven. I imagined a host of white pucks, floating up like ash from purgatory.
Even this notion, however, had not been enough to keep me forever honest in confession. In fact, by the time my father died, I was well advanced in the art of insincere confession. I had found that the best way to avoid blurting out the details of some real and possibly mortal sin was to compile, before going to confession, a list of imaginary sins, the rule of thumb for which was ‘venial and vague’. My list always looked something like this.
My ‘sinventory’, Uncle Reginald called it, when I showed it to him one day. It included only those kinds of venial sins that I knew grownups could imagine me committing – violations, in other words, of what Uncle Reginald called ‘the junior ten commandments’, most of which had to do with hygiene and obedience.
By the time Aunt Phil and Sister Louise intervened that November, I could compile a convincing sinventory in a matter of minutes. It turned out that displaying my stained underwear on the bulletin board in the kitchen was not revenge enough for Aunt Phil – perhaps she thought the real culprits, Mary and my mother, had gotten off scot-free. Though it was quite clearly Aunt Phil’s idea, it was Sister Louise who suggested that from now on my mother, Mary and I go to Father Seymour for confession. Sister Louise and Aunt Phil were already doing so, but the rest of us had been going to the parish priest. Going to Father Seymour, Sister Louise said, might help us get over our father’s death more quickly – she was only sorry she hadn’t thought of it before.
‘It’s been seven months now,’ Sister Louise said, ‘and, if anything, the three of you seem worse than ever.’ She looked pointedly at me when she said ‘the three of you’, then gave my mother a conspiratorial wink, as if to say that it was really only me that needed help, but that it might be hard to convince me to go to Father Seymour unless she and Mary did so, too. Once again, I looked to my mother to put a quick stop to what was clearly a bad idea. She seemed about to speak when Aunt Phil broke in.
‘I think it’s a wonderful idea, Sister,’ Aunt Phil said, as if, because we were living in her house, the final decision was more hers than ours. She got up and, before anyone realized what she was doing, phoned Father Seymour. ‘Would it be all right if Linda and the children went to you for confession from now on?’ She said, as if this was some special favour that our mother had been too shy to ask of him herself.
Aunt Phil soon after announced that, from now on, we would all go together to confession, the way another family might have gone for haircuts. We went once a week, on Wednesday, which became known as ‘Confession Wednesday’.
‘If sin was hair,’ said Uncle Reginald, who went to neither mass nor confession, ‘you’d all be bald.’
