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

when she was nervous or upset. On a man such a chin would have been dismissed as weak, as pointing to some profound lack of assertiveness, self-confidence. But it made her seem endearingly genuine, incapable of swagger or feigned poise. By not trying to create an impression, she created a sweet one. She was exactly what, at first glance, she seemed to be.
    “She should be paying you for all you do for her,” Pops said when he came out of his room after the front door had banged shut behind Medina. “She takes advantage of you. You should charge her admission every time she comes to visit. Does she ever bring her own beer or thank me when she’s drinking one of mine? She treats the house as if it’s hers. I’ve never seen such disgraceful ingratitude. And you’re her only friend—”
    “She’s
my
only friend,” my mother said.
    “You have Percy, a family, a purpose, structure—”
    “Medina’s part of all that, part of my family.”
    “Well, I’d like to think that I’m your friend. Haven’t I been your friend?”
    “You’ve been good to us, to Percy and me,” my mother said. “But there’s no need to put a label on your place in this household. You’re Pops. Our Pops. No one else has one.”
    Pops smiled at her and then at me. I wondered what it meant, that smile.
    I was at least blessed with a
mind
like my mother’s. “Hey, Perse,” she said, “shouldn’t you be solving something? A math problem? Differential calculus? Einstein’s beef with quantum physics?”
    “I’m not as smart as you.”
    “You will be. You’ll be smarter. Imagine how pleased your teachers would be if you could speak Latin by the time you start school next year.”
    Not yet five, I was reading at the grade five level, had memorized the multiplication tables into the highest double digits, was adept at long division of numbers up to ten digits, could identify every country in the world on a map Pops brought home from Brother Rice that showed nothing but borders. I wasn’t especially interested in any of it, but Pops said that eventually my mind would find its focus. “Maybe not,” my mother said. “He might be like me, a jack of all things and a genius of none.”
    “He’s his mother’s boy,” Pops said. “He’s smarter than anyone else his age I’ve come across. But he’ll have to progress through school like everybody else. Skipping grades isn’t allowed.”
    “He’ll be bored.”
    “It can’t be helped.”
    Pops said that Brother Rice’s principal, Brother McHugh—who already seemed to be planning my future because, Pops said, he often spoke of me to him—guessed that I would, like my mother, turn out to be not a true genius but merely someone who couldeasily absorb the work of others. Like her, I would never discover, deduce, figure out, invent anything wholly new. Pops informed us that Brother McHugh—or Director McHugh, as he always called him—said that at best I would be a receptacle for knowledge but not a finder of new knowledge. That he foresaw me as a parrot, a perfect register, a regurgitator of facts, an ever-expanding encyclopedia, a data repository, a potential quiz show prodigy, a human archive who would barely have enough sense to come in from the rain. He told Pops that he attributed my precocious knowledge to my having so much time to study, there being little else a boy like me could do. What else, he said, but precociousness would you expect from a friendless freak holed up in his house, whose hands and feet prevented him from playing any sport or game that required the least bit of athleticism?
    “Who the fuck is this McHugh?” my mother said. Who the fuck indeed—but it’s too soon to bring him out.
    My mother found books for me at the Gosling Library, classic English novels mostly, books by Defoe, Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontës, Sir Walter Scott. She read them aloud to me. She read to me a biography of Toulouse-Lautrec, a dwarf of a man the book told us, that was