Until I Find You

by John Irving

  "Jack Burns," Mr. Ramsey intoned, "if you ever feel like running away from this place, think twice. The environment into which you escape might be more hostile than the school itself, and quite clearly the citizens have weapons."

  "I would be shot down like a blind dog. Is that what you mean?" the boy asked.

  "Well said, Jack Burns!" Mr. Ramsey cried. "A most prescient view of the situation, and spoken like a leading man!"

  Jack bore scant resemblance to a leading man when he said a tearful good-bye to Mr. Ramsey in the corridor of his dormitory. Mr. Ramsey wept as he bid the boy adieu.

  Jack's roommate was a pale, long-haired Jewish kid from the Boston area, Noah Rosen, who was kind enough to distract Jack from the urge to weep by expressing his considerable indignation that their room had no door. Only a curtain gave them some measure of privacy from passersby in the hall. Jack instantly shook Noah's hand and expressed his indignation about the curtain, too. They were engaged in the overpolite exercise of offering each other the choice of the desk with a window view, or the best bed, which was obviously the one farther from the curtain and the traffic in the corridor, when the curtain was flung open (without warning) and into their room stepped an aggressive-looking older boy--a seventh or eighth grader, Jack assumed--and this rude fellow asked, in a loud voice, a question of such offensiveness and hostility that Jack almost abandoned Mrs. Wicksteed's be-nice-twice philosophy. "Which of you faggots has the little fag for a father?"

  "His name is Tom Abbott," Noah told Jack. "I met him in the washroom half an hour ago, and he called me a 'kike.' "

  "Hi, Tom," Jack said, holding out his hand. "My name's Jack Burns. I'm from Toronto." That was being nice once, Jack was thinking, but he foresaw that the math could get confusing in a hurry. (Even when he was an adult, numbers would be his undoing.)

  "Was that little fag with the blond beard your father?" Tom Abbott asked Jack.

  "Actually, no. He's a friend of the family," Jack replied. "He's a former teacher of mine, my drama coach--a great guy." Jack turned to Noah and said: "Please help me keep count. I've been nice twice. That's it for nice." He walked past Tom Abbott, pushing open the curtain on his way into the hall.

  "What did you say, faggot?" Abbott asked; he followed Jack into the corridor. "You think someone out here is going to help you?"

  "I don't want any help," Jack told him. "Just an audience."

  There was a kid who looked like another fifth grader; he was sitting on a steamer trunk in the hall. His roommate stood in the doorway to their room, holding the curtain open. "Hi, I'm Jack Burns--from Toronto," he told them. "There's probably going to be a fight, if you're interested." Jack kept his back turned to Tom Abbott, calling to a couple of boys down the hall. "Talk about derogatory! How about calling someone a 'kike'? How about 'faggot'? Doesn't that sound derogatory to you?"

  Jack felt a hand on his shoulder; he knew it wasn't Noah's. When someone touched you from behind, there was usually a way they expected you to turn. Chenko had told Jack to turn the opposite way--it caught your opponent a little flat-footed. Jack turned the opposite way and stepped chest-to-chest with Tom Abbott, the top of Jack's head not quite touching Abbott's chin. Tom Abbott had four or five inches and about thirty or forty pounds on Jack, but Abbott was no wrestler; he leaned into Jack with all his weight.

  Jack caught him with an arm-drag and Abbott dropped down on all fours; Jack drove Abbott's head to his knee and locked up the cross-face cradle. Tom Abbott wasn't a third as strong as Emma Oastler; at best, he was only two thirds as strong as Mrs. Machado. It was as tight a cradle as Jack had ever had on anyone before. Tom Abbott's nose was flat against his knee; he was breathing like he had a sinus problem. That was when Jack heard someone say, "That's a halfway decent cross-face cradle."

  "What's wrong with it?" Jack asked. He couldn't see who'd spoken, but it had been an older boy's voice.

  "I could show you how to make it tighter," the older boy told Jack. The surrounding faces of the kids seemed like fifth-grade faces. Jack had the feeling that the older boy was standing directly behind his head. Jack knew that Tom Abbott couldn't talk--Abbott could barely breathe. Jack just kept cranking the cradle as hard as he could; he waited. "You can let him up now," the boy with the older-sounding voice said.

  "You shouldn't call people faggots or kikes," Jack said. "It's derogatory."

  "Let him up," the older boy said. Jack let Tom Abbott go and got to his feet. "What are you doing in a fifth-grade dorm, Tom?"

  Jack had a look at the older boy who was talking. Jack didn't yet know that the boy was the proctor on their floor, but it was evident he was a wrestler. He was no taller than five-eight or five-nine; by his build, he was in Emma's weight class or a little heavier. And while his cauliflower ears were mere trifles in comparison to Chenko's--they weren't even as bad as Pavel's or Boris's--you could tell he was proud of them.

  Tom Abbott still wasn't talking. He seemed resigned to his fate--namely, that the proctor was going to show Jack how he might improve his cross-face cradle. "You want to see tighter?" the proctor asked Jack.

  "Yes, please," Jack said.

  The proctor put Tom Abbott in another cross-face cradle. He stuck one of his knees in Abbott's ribs, which had the effect of driving Tom's hips in a diagonally opposed direction from his head and neck. "Not only tighter but more uncomfortable," the proctor explained.

  His name was Loomis--everyone called him by his last name. He was an eighth grader from Pennsylvania, and he'd been wrestling for ten years. Loomis had some kind of learning disability; he'd repeated both second and fourth grade. He was only a couple of years younger than Emma.

  Jack didn't know that Redding had a wrestling team, but it made perfect sense at a school where character counted--where effort was regarded as more reliable than talent.

  In Redding's point system, you lost a point for every derogatory or dismissive thing you said to another boy, and, like a profane word, every act of unkindness cost you as well. For example, Tom Abbott had three points against him--one for calling Noah a kike, another for calling Jack and Noah faggots, and a third for picking a fight with Jack. ("He touched me first," Jack told Loomis, who seemed unsurprised.)

  Tom Abbott had another point against him for being an upperclassman in a fifth-grade dorm. You needed permission from the proctor on the floor to visit with a younger kid. You had a limit of four points against you per month. More than four and you were expelled--this was nonnegotiable. Tom Abbott had four points against him on the first day of school; he wouldn't last at Redding past the second week.

  It was hard to come to Redding as an older boy. Abbott was a transfer student from another school. Kids admitted in grade five had a better chance of making it through grade eight. Loomis was a four-year boy, like most of the surviving eighth graders.

  If you did the work--both your homework and your work-job, because everyone had a work-job at Redding--you were okay. And you had to treat the other kids respectfully; you had to be nice from the start, a tougher philosophy than being nice twice. Mrs. Wicksteed would have respected Redding.

  Swearing was a half-point against you, a half-point for every word. For example, it was better to say "Fuck!" or "Shit!" than "Fucking shit!" (Emma would not have done well at Redding.)

  They were not all boys with "problems," but they were all boys who were not welcome to live at home. Loomis's parents and older sister had been killed in an automobile accident; his grandparents had wanted him out of their house before the puberty business started.

  "Fair enough," Loomis always said. That could have been a motto at Redding, too, though it wasn't as resonant as Labor omnia vincit.

  In the wrestling room, Jack discovered another motto; it was printed on the ceiling, where you could read it only if you were being pinned.

  NO WHINING

  The academic expectations of the school were fairly modest; the homework was less demanding than it was repetitious. A lot of memorization, which was okay
with Jack. A duck-under, an arm-drag, an ankle-pick, an outside single-leg--as Chenko had taught the boy, these things were essentially undemanding, but they required repetition. Jack felt right at home at Redding.

  And neither Miss Wurtz nor Mr. Ramsey would have questioned the value of memorization. At Redding, nothing was inspired--everything was a drill. Smart boys, not that there were many, lay low; hard work was all that mattered. The more you had to overcome, the better your efforts were appreciated.

  The headmaster, whose main role at the school was fund-raising, was away a lot. His wife reported his whereabouts to the boys at Morning Meeting. "Mr. Adkins, bless his heart, is in Cleveland," she would say. "We have a few successful alumni there, and Mr. Adkins has already met a needy boy or two."

  So they were "needy"--they didn't mind. "Redding's first purpose," Mr. Adkins told them, on one of the rare occasions when he was home, "is to prepare you for a better school than Redding."

  Once Redding showed the boys how to work hard, the thinking was, another school, a better one, would educate them. Jack learned that the least utilitarian thing about Redding was those bars on the dormitory windows. No one wanted to run away from the school--they just longed to be in a better one.

  The wrestling coach, Mr. Clum, had come to Maine from Colorado. He'd wrestled somewhere in the Big Ten, but he made a point of telling the team that he'd never been a starter. "For four years, I was a backup to someone better," Coach Clum said. "Every year it was a different guy, but he was always better."

  Inferiority was their advantage; that they believed they were inferior, in combination with their zeal for hard work, made them formidably tenacious boys.

  Coach Clum designed a wrestling schedule that purposely overmatched them. Redding's wrestling team never had a winning season, but the boys were unafraid to lose--and when they won an occasional match, they were elated. Jack found out only later, when he was at a better school, that everyone hated to wrestle Redding. Redding boys relished taking a pounding--they were often beaten but rarely pinned--and, boy, were they nice.

  "When you lose, tell your opponent how good he is," Loomis instructed the younger boys on the team. "When you win, tell him you're sorry--say you've been in his situation, even if you haven't."

  They were competing against a school in Bath, Maine, when Jack won his first match. He was wrestling a strong but clumsy kid who'd never seen a cross-face cradle before. Jack was making the cradle tighter, the way Loomis had shown him, when the kid from Bath bit him. He sank his teeth into Jack's forearm, drawing blood. Jack could see the boy's face; there was no malevolence or awareness of wrongful conduct in the Bath wrestler's eyes, only fear. Possibly the kid from Bath was afraid of losing, especially of being pinned--more likely, he was terrified of being hurt. He was fighting for his life, the way a captured animal would fight.

  Jack let him go. The bite-wound was obvious--wrestlers from both teams solemnly had a look at it--and the kid from Bath was disqualified for unsportsmanlike behavior, which amounted to the same number of points for Redding that Jack would have won for a fall.

  "I'm sorry," Jack told the biter. "I've been in your situation." The kid from Bath looked humiliated, inconsolable.

  Loomis was shaking his head. "What?" Jack asked him.

  "You don't say you've been in his situation to a biter, Jack."

  So there were rules to be learned at Redding; learning the rules was what made Jack feel at home there.

  Mrs. Adkins, a virtual widow to her husband's fund-raising trips on behalf of the school, taught English and served as casting director for the school's weekly Drama Night. She was a severely depressed woman in her fifties--an unhappy-looking, washed-out blonde. Her pallor was gold-going-gray, a fair-turning-to-slate complexion. Her clothes seemed a size too large for her, as if she suffered from a disease that was shrinking her.

  Her gift for casting was a profoundly restless or roving one--causing her to visit, unannounced, classes in all manner of subjects. Mrs. Adkins would just walk into the classroom and pace among the students, while the class continued in as undistracted a fashion as possible.

  "Pretend I'm not here," she would say to the fifth graders. (Mrs. Adkins assumed that the older boys already knew to ignore her.)

  There might be a note in your school mailbox after her appearance in your class:

  See me.--Mrs. A.

  In Jack's fifth-and sixth-grade years, he was usually cast as a woman. He was by far the prettiest of the boys at Redding, and--from the glowing recommendations of Miss Wurtz and Mr. Ramsey--Mrs. Adkins knew he had female acting credentials.

  By the time Jack was in seventh and eighth grade, and he was more than occasionally picked for a male role, Mrs. Adkins had dispensed with leaving notes in his mailbox. Her touch on his shoulder was, he knew, a see-me touch.

  Yes, Jack slept with her--but not until his eighth-grade year, when he was thirteen going on fourteen and the deprivations of a single-sex school had made him nostalgic for his earlier life as a sexually molested child. By then, Mrs. Adkins had given him three-plus years of the best speaking parts, and he was old enough to be attracted to her permanent air of sadness.

  "There will be no points against you for this," she told Jack the first time. But he foresaw that, after Redding, the world might hold him accountable to another system for keeping score. Jack Burns would hold Mrs. Adkins as a point against him.

  The Nezinscot River ran through Redding, and most of the year one would have to make a considerable (even a ludicrous) effort to drown in it. But some years after Jack left Redding, Mrs. Adkins managed to drown herself in the Nezinscot. It would have happened in the spring--in such measure as there was a spring in Maine.

  There was a glimmer of Miss Wurtz's perishable beauty about Mrs. Adkins; in her capacity as casting director for Drama Night, there was also something of The Wurtz's eccentricity for dramatization about her. The boys did not do entire plays or dramatizations of novels at Redding; the rehearsals would have taken too much time away from the nuts-and-bolts business of what was at heart a no-nonsense school. But almost as an echo of the school's mantra to memorization, Mrs. Adkins desired to make thespians of them all.

  They were costumed in character, and Mrs. Adkins supervised their makeup. The women's clothes, Jack gradually discovered, were Mrs. Adkins's castaways--or the unexciting donations of the almost uniformly dowdy faculty wives. (Mrs. Adkins was one of only two female teachers at the school.)

  The weekly Drama Night at Redding consisted of speeches and skits, excerpts from short stories or plays, recitations of poems--often only parts of poems--and such challenging feats of memorization as could be found in the monologues of inspired statesmen.

  In fifth grade, Jack recited Anne Bradstreet's "To My Dear and Loving Husband." Dressed in Mrs. Adkins's prim but faded clothes, he managed to convey the hardships of early colonial life and the duties of a Puritan housewife, which Mrs. Bradstreet had so stoically endured.

  Jack was also the ravishingly beautiful ghost (the guillotined young woman) in Washington Irving's gothic story "Adventure of the German Student." His black dress had been Mrs. Adkins's nightgown once--possibly at a time when Mr. Adkins had traveled less.

  He was the poisoned Beatrice in Hawthorne's "Rappaccini's Daughter"; befitting his death in a garden, Jack wore something summery, which Mrs. Adkins remembered wearing to an old friend's wedding. He was in sixth grade when he did "Sigh No More, Ladies"--that little ditty from Much Ado About Nothing. Shakespeare was a favorite of Mrs. Adkins. Jack wore one of her pleated skirts when he sang "Under the Greenwood Tree" from As You Like It.

  He would remember her saying: "Why, that skirt looks so nice on you, Jack. I just might wear it again!"

  On his first Drama Night as a boy, it was a mild surprise that--even then--Mrs. Adkins dressed him in her clothes. (Black slacks, a long-sleeved white blouse with a ruffled collar.) Jack did "O Mistress Mine" from Twelfth Night, and Mrs. Adkins scolded him for saying his end lin
e to her--not to the audience:

  Youth's a stuff will not endure.

  Indeed not; Mrs. Adkins seemed to sense that this was so. She made Jack sing "Take, Oh, Take Those Lips Away" from Measure for Measure. (His voice had not yet changed, but it was changing.)

  By the seventh grade, Jack was getting a little too muscular for Mrs. Adkins's clothes. But even when Jack was in the eighth grade, no boy at Redding was a better girl. He had pubic hair early, but his facial hair came late and his beard would never be heavy. He missed Emma, and faithfully thought of her when he masturbated. He couldn't get used to taking showers with boys; Jack didn't like looking at the other boys' penises. When he admitted this to Mrs. Adkins, she told him to memorize a poem and say it to himself in the shower.

  On those weekends when Mr. Adkins was away, Jack visited Mrs. Adkins in the headmaster's house, where she would dress him in her clothes--the ones she was not yet ready to donate to Drama Night. An ivory camisole with a built-in shelf bra; a boucle lace turtleneck; a velour cardigan; a crinkled silk shirt; a satin-trimmed wrap sweater. For a small woman, Mrs. Adkins had big feet--Jack could wear her beaded jade mules.

  She never touched him first, nor did she once need to tell him to touch her. While she dressed him--often in the clothes she was wearing at the time, which meant that Mrs. Adkins undressed herself first--she stood so close to him, and she smelled so nice, that he could not resist touching her. The first time he did so, she closed her eyes and held her breath--compelling him to touch her more. It was a seduction quite the opposite of Mrs. Machado's assertive kind; yet Jack was aware that he had the confidence to touch Mrs. Adkins because Mrs. Machado had shown him how. Mrs. Adkins never asked him how, at thirteen, he knew where to touch her.

  Maybe she should have had a daughter, Jack found himself thinking once--when Mrs. Adkins was dressing him in her favorite velvet top. (For fun, she put lemons in the underwire bra--being a small-breasted woman herself.) Jack would learn, much later, that Mrs. Adkins and her husband had had a son and lost him. The boy's death was an underlying reason for the permanent air of sadness that had first attracted Jack to Mrs. Adkins, although Jack didn't know this at the time.