Until I Find You

by John Irving

  Jack Burns would miss those girls, those so-called older women. Even the ones who had molested him. (Sometimes especially the ones who had molested him!) He would miss Mrs. Machado, too--more than he ever admitted to Emma Oastler.

  Jack even missed the girls who never abused him--among them Sandra Stewart, who had played the bilingual stutterer, the vomiter, the mail-order bride who gets fucked on a dog sled and wanders off and freezes to death in the snow, in a histrionic blizzard! How sick was it that he remembered her?

  He would miss each one, every major and minor character in his sea of girls. Those girls--those women, at the time--had made him strong. They prepared Jack Burns for the terra firma (and not so firma) of the life ahead, including his life with boys and men. After the sea of girls, what pushovers boys were! After Jack's older-women experiences, how easy it would be to deal with men!

  III

  Lucky

  16

  Frost Heaves

  In those hectic last days before Jack left for Maine, his mother devoted herself to sewing name tags on his new clothes. Mrs. Oastler had taken him shopping. There were no school uniforms at Redding, no special colors, but the boys wore jackets and ties, and either khakis or wool-flannel trousers--not jeans. With Leslie Oastler choosing his clothes, Jack would be one of the best-dressed boys at the school.

  Alice should have talked to him; she should have told Jack everything. But in lieu of conversation, she sewed.

  It made no sense to Jack: when he was four, they'd spent the better part of a year searching those North Sea ports for his runaway dad; yet in Jack's five years at St. Hilda's, Alice rarely spoke of William. At ten, Jack was increasingly curious about his father; that William had been demonized made the boy afraid of himself and who he might become. But his mom would not indulge Jack's questions about his dad. Alice was rarely cruel to Jack, but she could be cold, and nothing drew the coldness out of her as predictably as Jack asking her about his father.

  Alice must have closed the door on that conversation a hundred times. "When you're old enough," she would usually say--a door-closing line if the boy had ever heard one.

  He'd once spoken to Mrs. McQuat about it. "Don't complain about a woman who knows how to keep a secret," The Gray Ghost replied.

  Since Emma had a list of grievances against her mother, Jack felt comfortable complaining to Emma about his. "I just want to know what kind of guy he was, for Christ's sake!"

  "Watch your language, baby cakes."

  Emma and Jack had both read the School Philosophy Handbook that Redding sent to new students and their families. So-called proper language was a big deal in the student code. Mr. Ramsey, who'd agreed to take Jack to Maine, had eagerly read the School Philosophy Handbook, too; he'd found the student code "very challenging."

  The day before Jack and Mr. Ramsey left for Maine, Emma and Jack got matching haircuts at a barbershop in Forest Hill Village. Jack's wasn't so bad, although it was shorter than the floppy mops most boys had for haircuts in 1975. But short hair on Emma was arguably a mistake. It wasn't a buzz cut, but it was very much a boy's haircut, which left her neck exposed. While she'd continued to lose weight, Emma's neck had gotten noticeably bigger--all those neck-bridges, three or four times a week, with a flat twenty-five-pound weight on her chest. She had a neck like a linebacker, and her short haircut served to exaggerate one's unfortunate first impression of her, which was that Emma Oastler had no neck at all. From behind, she looked like a man.

  Jack got the first haircut and then stood beside Emma's chair while the barber was cutting her hair. "Your mom's going to kill you for this," Jack told her.

  "How?" Emma asked.

  She had a point--Emma could have snapped Mrs. Oastler like a Popsicle stick. Not even Chenko was tough enough for her, as the Ukrainian would soon discover. After Jack went to Maine, Chenko stepped in as Emma's workout partner. He was in good shape for a man his age, and he had twenty-five or thirty pounds on her--this in addition to his considerable experience as a wrestler. But Jack knew you could get hurt when you were trying too hard not to hurt your opponent; in wrestling, it was not natural to hold back.

  Chenko caught Emma leaning on him; he was in position to hit her with a lateral drop, but he hesitated, afraid he might hurt her. While he was waiting, Emma executed a perfect lateral drop on him. Emma separated Chenko's sternum when she landed on his chest. That was a slow-healing injury, especially for someone in his sixties.

  Emma's only recourse was to work out with Boris and Pavel; at least they were young enough to risk getting hurt.

  In the barbershop mirror, examining their matching haircuts, Jack could see in advance that St. Hilda's had been crazy to admit Emma as a boarder. She had the wrong attitude for it, not to mention her hulking shoulders and her seventeen-inch neck.

  "An inch for every year of your age," Chenko had told her.

  It would come as no surprise to Jack that Emma lasted only a year as a boarder at St. Hilda's. He was a little surprised she lasted that long. To the school's great relief, and with Mrs. Oastler's reluctant consent, Emma moved back home and finished grades twelve and thirteen as a day student. She would take over what had been the guest wing, moving into Alice's old bedroom, which was across the hall from Jack's room--not that he would get to use his room to any significant degree in the upcoming years.

  Alice, of course, abandoned all pretense and moved into Leslie Oastler's bedroom. (According to Emma, this happened within a week of Jack's departure for Maine.) Emma's choice to occupy the guest wing was motivated less by her desire to sleep as far away from them as she could than by her irritation that neither her mom nor Jack's ever talked about their relationship. But talking about things was not Alice's style, and Mrs. Oastler had closed the door on too many conversations with Emma to realistically expect her daughter to allow her to open that door again. Alice had closed the door on too many conversations with Jack, too. When she was ready to talk, whenever that might be, Jack had already decided he wouldn't listen.

  In Maine, he heard more from Emma than from his mother--including the news about Mrs. Machado. She'd been arrested in Sir Winston Churchill Park for sexually soliciting a minor, a ten-year-old boy. It turned out that her own children had not grown up and moved "away"; at ages eleven and fifteen, they lived in another part of Toronto with their father, who'd happily remarried. There was a restraining order against Mrs. Machado, who'd molested her fifteen-year-old son when he was ten.

  Of course there'd been no assaults against Mrs. Machado by her ex-husband, no need for her to change the locks on her apartment door. Quite possibly, the M. in M. Machado didn't mean Mrs.--at least not anymore. And whoever she was, her reasons for wanting to learn how to kickbox and wrestle would forever remain unclear.

  Alice made no mention to Jack of this news, although she probably knew about it. Emma said it was in all the newspapers, "with pictures and everything." Maybe Alice never imagined that Mrs. Machado might have molested Jack. More likely, she didn't want to think about it--or she felt secure in the fiction that, had anything been wrong, Jack would have told her.

  As Emma said, sarcastically: "Yeah, like if anything had been wrong with her, she would have told you!"

  Jack was not as faithful a correspondent to The Gray Ghost as she was to him. Mrs. McQuat was a wise woman, but Emma was Jack's principal advice-giver now. How strange that the boy's earlier misunderstanding of prostitutes as advice-givers was not that far off the mark. Emma was no prostitute, but sex and advice-giving were seemingly interchangeable to her.

  Jack would also be intermittent in his correspondence with Miss Wurtz. It was more than his mail-order-bride role that linked him to Mr. Ramsey. The boy's first trip to Maine, in Mr. Ramsey's company, was so formative an experience that Mr. Ramsey replaced The Wurtz as Jack's mentor in that all-important area of the dramatic arts.

  Jack didn't stop dreaming of Miss Wurtz, underwear and all, but he had come to a crossroads in his life, where listening to Mr. Ra
msey took center stage and made more sense--this despite the fact that there was often more theatricality than meaning in what Mr. Ramsey had to say. (As an actor, Jack would be a hypocrite to love Mr. Ramsey any the less for that.)

  As their plane touched down in Portland, Mr. Ramsey clasped Jack's hands in his. "Jack Burns!" he cried, so loudly and suddenly that the boy thought the plane was crashing. "For better or worse, you are in Maine!" Jack looked anxiously at the swiftly passing tarmac. "Just remember, Jack--no school with a motto like Redding's can be all bad. Let me hear you say it!"

  "Say what?"

  "Your school motto!"

  Jack had already forgotten it. Unlike Mr. Ramsey, the boy had spotted a militant heartiness in Redding's School Philosophy Handbook. The word character was repeated in every imaginable context. "Decency is the norm," the handbook had declared. Maybe that was the motto.

  " 'Decency is the norm'?" Jack asked Mr. Ramsey.

  "Well, of course it is!" he replied impatiently. "But that's not the motto. Jack Burns, with your remarkable capacity for memory, I'm surprised at you!"

  Jack could recall the bit in the handbook about "interacting" with his fellow students. "Eschew the d-words!" the handbook had advised. While he remembered this unusual command, he had enough sense to know it wasn't the school motto--though it might have sufficed. They were instructed not to treat their schoolmates in a dismissive or derogatory manner. And at the heart of the student code was a "character contract" signed by every student, saying that self-respect was impossible without an abiding respect for others. Jack had signed his name, but this didn't sound like motto material to him.

  "A hint, Jack. It's in Latin." As if that helped!

  The air was clear, but still summery, in Portland--not as bracing as Jack had expected Maine to be, though it soon would be. The airport was as rudimentary as the tarmac.

  "Labor omnia vincit!" Mr. Ramsey called to a couple of passing pilots. They clearly thought he was insane. "You haven't heard a motto until you've heard Jack Burns say it," he told a surprised stewardess, an attractive woman in her thirties.

  "Labor omnia vincit," Jack said, with authority--putting more emphasis on the vincit.

  "Tell her what it means, Jack," Mr. Ramsey said, but the stewardess ignored him; she had eyes only for Jack. Here he was in a foreign country--in Maine, of all places--and while he couldn't remember his new school's motto or what it meant, he could read the mind of a flight attendant. She was recognizably older-woman material to Jack. All the boy did was smile at her, but he knew everything she was thinking.

  "It's a good thing he's not traveling as an unaccompanied minor," the stewardess told Mr. Ramsey, never taking her eyes off Jack.

  "This is Jack Burns," Mr. Ramsey said to her. "He's got the memory of an elephant, but not today."

  "Labor omnia vincit," Jack repeated, trying to remember the correct translation.

  "Work--" Mr. Ramsey started to say, but Jack cut him off. The translation had come back to him.

  "Work conquers all things," the ten-year-old told the flight attendant.

  "Silly me--I thought it was love that conquered everything," she said.

  "No, it's work," Jack told her firmly.

  The stewardess sighed, ruffling the boy's hair. She kept looking at Jack, but she spoke to Mr. Ramsey. "I'll bet you can't count the hearts he's going to break," she said.

  It was still light as they drove north-northwest to Redding in the rental car; they'd left the ocean behind them in Portland. After Lewiston, there wasn't a lot to see. West Minot was not memorable, nor were East Sumner and West Sumner--although the absence of a Sumner proper got Mr. Ramsey's attention. "Maine is not a state at the forefront of intelligently naming towns--or so it would seem, Jack."

  The surrounding wilderness in the approaching sunset was more than a little tinged with desolation. Earlier Mr. Ramsey had led Jack into a rousing conversation on the possible application of Mrs. Wicksteed's be-nice-twice philosophy to those hostile students the boy might encounter at Redding, but not now. The forlorn landscape prompted even as ebullient a fellow as Mr. Ramsey to speak of the unmentionable. "Jack, I am tempted to say this looks like mail-order-bride territory." Jack's heart sank. Mr. Ramsey tried to change the subject. "I would guess--wouldn't you, Jack--that most of the students at Redding are boarders?"

  "I guess so," the boy said.

  Redding was a private (or so-called independent) school, grades five through eight. While Mrs. Oastler could afford Jack's tuition--"without batting an eye," as Alice had said--the towns and no-towns, the less-than-villages they drove through, suggested to Mr. Ramsey and Jack that few local families could afford to send their boys to Redding. The school did offer scholarships, though not more than fifteen or twenty percent of the students received any kind of financial aid. Redding was not generously endowed.

  Mr. Ramsey also shared with Jack his between-the-lines interpretation of Redding's School Philosophy Handbook; he shrewdly noted the defensiveness or oversensitivity of the handbook's opening sentence: "First of all, not all students who attend Redding have problems."

  Naturally, this suggested to Mr. Ramsey that most or many of the students attending Redding did have problems, and he speculated out loud to Jack about what these problems might be. "They come from troubled families, I suppose, or they've been thrown out of other schools."

  "For what?" Jack asked.

  "Let's just say there aren't a lot of boarding schools, even in New England, that admit students as young as fifth graders as boarders. But I suspect that a boy like Jack Burns will flourish at such a place!" Mr. Ramsey declared.

  "Flourish at what?"

  "Let's just say that this is a school that values attitude over aptitude, Jack. I believe it will be to your advantage that you have both." Jack Burns had more attitude than aptitude, and Mr. Ramsey knew it--but the good man pressed ahead. His enthusiasm on Jack's behalf knew only one speed and direction: fast-forward. "And it strikes me that so-called character-based education might be pursued with fewer distractions at a single-sex institution--I mean fewer distractions for a handsome lad like Jack Burns!"

  "You mean no girls."

  "Precisely, Jack. Don't even think about girls. Your objective is to be a hero among your fellow young men--or, failing that, at least look like a hero."

  "Why be a hero?" Jack asked.

  "At an all-boys' school, Jack, there are heroes and there are foot soldiers. It's happier to be one of the heroes."

  Emma had been right: Mr. Ramsey had some difficulty seeing over the steering wheel. He was as short as Mrs. Machado, and twenty pounds lighter. That he'd made himself a hero at an all-girls' school did not hide from Jack the likelihood that Mr. Ramsey had played the role of foot soldier in an earlier life. His neatly trimmed, spade-shaped beard was the size of a child's sandbox shovel; his little feet, in what Jack guessed were size-six loafers, could barely reach the brake and accelerator pedals. "Where will you spend the night?" Jack asked. The thought of Mr. Ramsey driving back to Portland--alone, in the dark--made the boy afraid for him. But Mr. Ramsey was a brave soul; his only fears were for Jack.

  "If there's trouble, Jack, gather a crowd. If there's more than one bully, go after the toughest one first. Just be sure you do it publicly."

  "Why publicly?"

  "If he's killing you, maybe someone in the crowd will stop him."

  "Oh."

  "Never be afraid to take a beating, Jack. At the very least, it's an acting opportunity."

  "I see."

  Thus they drove through southwestern Maine. The loneliness of the place was heart-stopping. When they were almost at the school, Mr. Ramsey pulled into a gas station. Jack was relieved to imagine him driving back to Portland with a full tank. It was the sort of rural gas station that sold groceries--mostly chips and soda, cigarettes and beer. A blind dog was panting near the cash register, behind which a hefty woman sat on a stool. Even sitting down, she was taller than Mr. Ramsey. Being a wrestler had
made Jack an expert at guessing people's weight. This woman weighed over two hundred pounds.

  "For better or worse, we're on our way to Redding," Mr. Ramsey informed her.

  "I could have told you that," the big woman said.

  "We don't look like we're from Maine, eh?" Mr. Ramsey guessed. The woman didn't smile.

  "Seems a shame to send a boy away to school before he's even shaving," she said, nodding in Jack's direction.

  "Well," Mr. Ramsey replied, "there are many difficult circumstances that families find themselves in these days. There's not always a choice."

  "There's always a choice," the woman said stubbornly. She reached under the cash register and brought out a handgun, which she placed on the counter. "For example," she continued, "I could blow my brains out, hoping someone would find the dog in the morning--not that anyone would take care of a blind dog. It might be better to shoot the dog first, then blow my brains out. What I'm saying is, it's never not complicated--but there's always a choice."

  "I see," Mr. Ramsey said.

  The big woman saw Jack looking at the gun; she put it away under the cash register. "It's kind of early tonight to shoot anyone," she said, winking at the boy.

  "Thank you for the gas," Mr. Ramsey said. Back in the car, he remarked: "I forgot that everyone is armed in this country. It would be cheaper and safer if they all took sleeping pills, but I suppose you need a prescription for sleeping pills."

  "You don't need a prescription for a gun?" Jack asked.

  "Apparently not, Jack, but what seems worse to me is that owning a gun must to some degree encourage you to use it--even if only to shoot a blind dog!"

  "The poor dog," Jack pointed out.

  "Listen to me," Mr. Ramsey said, just as the Redding campus rose out of the river mist--the red-brick buildings suggesting the austerity and correctional purpose of a prison, which Jack thought it might have been before it became a school. Redding actually had once been Maine's largest mental asylum, a state facility that had lost its funding to the war effort in the forties. (That there were still bars on the dormitory windows was what gave the place the appearance of a penitentiary.)