‘Jennie’s Boy’ turns out a raw memoir of childhood illness
It’s not enough for Wayne Johnston’s seven-year-old self, the central figure in Jennie’s Boy, to have trouble keeping food down and to sleep, and to be undernourished with bad teeth. He has a lot to contend with from interactions with family. Soon in this memoir of personal illness and family sickness is this passage on praying with his parents and brothers after supper: “There was something so sad and solemn about saying the rosary in the failing light of evening, the interruption into my life of an awareness of something nebulous but terrifying, limiting, ultimate, something that would prevail over all else no matter what I did.” Powerless against health deficiencies, Johnston is meant to be cowed further by the invisible presence of something large, frightening, and unbeatable that is beyond articulation.
The Catholicism in this book comes mainly from the maternal grandmother Lucy, mother of Jennie, who she’s imbued with suspicion about doctors, science, and the world in general. These strong, superbly drawn female characters are remarkable for how they care for their families during hard times in the middle of the 1960s, but remarkable for every wrong reason. Lucy tries to teach Johnston Catholic superstitions while Jennie’s socially conscious nature and harmful pride, which believes thievery is better than accepting welfare, prevents her fourth son from receiving medical attention.
At one point Jennie “looked at me as if to say, ‘Will you ever stop making things worse?’” When on another bender, Art, his father, tells a barroom that Johnston is “more trouble than the other three [siblings] combined.’” Craig, one of those three (all brothers), who loves giving Wayne a hard time, tells him he “had two mothers, but he and Ken and Brian had none because of how much time Jennie and Lucy spent with me.” In one of her less acerbic judgements, Lucy says that it’s “been touch-and-go with you since you fizzled out when you were one.’”
In writing this record of sordid family behaviour and his understandable passivity that can only occasionally erupt in misbehaviour, Johnston gets revenge for maltreatment, such as looks his mother gives him “as if she was stymied as to how she’d ever get used to having me around.” Jennie shows her son an old report card where a teacher has said that “she does not possess much in the way of natural intelligence. She is a troublemaker and a terrible influence on others.” Since the teacher links Jennie’s behaviour to her shortness a reader might regard this as mean. I’d view his comments as typical of Catholic teachers I had and, more to the point, that repeating it allows Johnston the pleasure of revealing the depths of his mother’s cruelty. His weaknesses made her look bad to their community and were a poor reflection on what kind of mother she was.
There is nothing sugar-coated here about Johnston’s mother or grandmother, his self-pitying father enabled by his family, and that rotten brother Craig. (Early on I hoped for the impossible, a scene where the parents, Craig, and Lucy would be trapped in a burning home with no escape possible.) However, the language is mostly temperate in this narrative of six months or so when Johnston was ill for reasons doctors never fully diagnose and while his family has to move as they hide their faults and poverty. Due to how he goes out of his way to not judge, as an adult, the actions he keenly felt as a child, this might seem a light book. However, it links to his earlier memoir about his father and grandfather, Baltimore’s Mansions (1999), by showing his mother’s side of the family. I recall at the launch of that book in St. John’s how Johnston seemed nervous with family members in the audience. Perhaps most of the family portrayed in Jennie’s Boy are securely dead as I can’t imagine it would make easy reading if those people were present.
Written By: