Until I Find You

by John Irving

  "That would be a laundress, dear," his mom said.

  "I thought the word for the place was a launderette, not a laundrette," Jack said.

  "God, you're picky," Claudia told him.

  "Talk about a 'disrespectful tone of voice'!" he said.

  And Jack was less than thrilled to see Desert Hearts, which even Leslie Oastler described as a lesbian love story--she'd been dying to see it. (Alice visibly less so.) The film drew a crowd of women holding hands. Claudia, who wouldn't hold Jack's penis at any film they attended with Alice and Mrs. Oastler, wouldn't even hold his hand at Desert Hearts. It was as if Claudia were contemplating her own trip to Reno, without him; maybe Claudia imagined discovering herself with Helen Shaver, or something.

  All Jack said was: "The characters are a little sketchy." This was enough to turn all three women against him: he was homophobic; he was threatened by lesbians. "I like Helen Shaver," he kept saying, but this didn't save him.

  The festival marked the beginning of an Asian boom, some guy hitting on Claudia told her at a screening party. Jack thought it was cool to say nothing; he just kept his hand on Claudia's ass, in a clearly nonplatonic way. When Claudia went to the women's room, Jack gave the Asian-boom asshole his Toshiro Mifune scowl. The guy slunk away.

  Alice and Leslie lit into Jack about being "too possessive." They loved Claudia, they told him. No woman likes to be touched in public--not to the degree that Jack touched Claudia, they said. (This advice from the couple who'd held hands and played footsie during Jack's ground-breaking performance in A Mail-Order Bride in the Northwest Territories!)

  Jack had had it with going to the movies and the parties with his mother and Mrs. Oastler. That night, in bed, he complained to Claudia about it. They were staying in Emma's room. ("The bed's bigger--as you know, dear," his mom had reminded him.)

  Claudia thought that Alice and Leslie were a cute couple. "It's obvious that they adore you," Claudia said. Perhaps Jack lacked the perspective to see this.

  He decided to take Claudia to St. Hilda's--not only so she could see his old school, which had been so formative of his older-woman thing, but also to meet his favorite teachers. What a mistake! All the girls looked preternaturally young. (Of course they did--Claudia and Jack were twenty-year-olds!)

  Jack took Claudia first to meet Mr. Malcolm, who always left school in a hurry--wheeling Mrs. Malcolm in her wheelchair ahead of him. Wheelchair Jane, who couldn't see Claudia, reached out and touched Claudia's hips, her waist, even her breasts. (A blind woman's audacity is like no other's, maybe.) "Following in his father's footsteps, isn't he?" she asked her husband.

  Jack was still trying to explain this reference to Claudia when they encountered Mr. Ramsey emerging from the boys' washroom. "Jack Burns!" he cried, zipping up his fly. "Patron saint of mail-order brides!" This reference, Jack realized, would take somewhat longer to explain. Claudia seemed unnerved by her close proximity to a man so small who never stopped bouncing on the balls of his feet.

  Mr. Ramsey insisted on bringing them to his after-school drama rehearsal of the day; the senior-school girls were doing The Diary of Anne Frank, which Jack knew brought bitter memories to Claudia. In junior high school, she had auditioned for the part of the doomed girl, but she had already looked too old. (Her boobs were too big--even then.)

  Mr. Ramsey presented Jack to the girls as the best male St. Hilda's actor in memory--despite the fact that his reputation rested on his female roles. Claudia was introduced as Jack's actress friend. "They're here for the film festival!" Mr. Ramsey exclaimed, which led the star-struck girls to imagine that Claudia and Jack were promoting a new movie. Mr. Ramsey made it seem as if they were up-and-coming names in the industry.

  Jack was reminded of his irritation with Claudia for refusing to let him pass her off as a famous Russian film star of the not-English-speaking variety. Her courage was not of the improvisational kind--without lines, she was lost. And not only did she always seem older than she was; she was also inclined to lie about her age. "I'm in my early thirties, and that's all I want to say about it," she would say. It was a good line, but it was bullshit--by ten years, and counting.

  The St. Hilda's girls looked forlorn. Jack Burns was very much an object of their keenest desire, but he was with this voluptuous woman who made them feel sexually retarded. To make matters worse, Mr. Ramsey wanted Claudia and Jack to perform something. (Jack had written him that he and Claudia had been in plays together.)

  Against Jack's better judgment, he let Claudia persuade him to sing a Kit Kat Girl number. "Mein Herr" was Claudia's choice, not Jack's; it was a little raunchy for St. Hilda's, he told her later. (In retrospect, in the context of the play the girls were rehearsing, the insensitivity of Claudia and Jack singing a song from that sleazy Nazi nightclub in Berlin took Jack's breath away.) And to make "Mein Herr" more confounding, they both sang it as if they were Sally Bowles, causing Claudia finally to realize how much Jack had wanted her part.

  When they finished the lascivious song, Mr. Ramsey was a virtual pogo stick of enthusiasm. The poor girls swooned, or died of envy and embarrassment. Claudia said that she and Jack should let them all get back to The Diary of Anne Frank.

  But Mr. Ramsey was pained to let them go. He wanted to know what they thought of the festival and the films they had seen. "Have you seen the Godard? Hail Mary or something," Mr. Ramsey said. "The Pope has condemned it!"

  "Jack has condemned it without seeing it," Claudia said. "He hates Godard." Jack tried to look friendlier than Toshiro Mifune, if only for the sake of the mortified girls.

  The young girl cast as Anne Frank was pushed forward to meet them. Claudia seemed fixated on her flat chest. Jack observed that the poor girl was terrified of them, as if they represented a blatant contradiction of Anne Frank's most memorable observation, which Claudia knew by heart and recited (without a hint of sarcasm) on the spot. " 'It's really a wonder that I haven't dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.' "

  "Marvelous!" Mr. Ramsey cried. "A trifle deadpan for Anne, perhaps, but marvelous!"

  "We have to go," Claudia told him, mercifully.

  The girls were all looking at Jack as if Claudia had been holding his penis in front of them. Claudia was looking at Jack as if not even Godard's Hail Mary could be as excruciatingly boring as this journey through time on his old stomping grounds.

  Jack was actually tempted to see the Godard film, because the Catholics were up in arms about it and had threatened to protest the Toronto screening. But Claudia didn't like Godard any better than he did. (Hail Mary was an update of Christ's birth, this time to a virgin gas-station attendant and her cabdriver boyfriend.)

  It was in this disturbed frame of mind--Claudia hating Jack for bringing her to his old school, Jack wishing that he had not come (or that he'd come alone)--that the sudden appearance of The Gray Ghost startled Claudia and Jack, just as Jack was about to show Claudia the chapel. Claudia made such an immediate impression on Mrs. McQuat that Jack's former fourth-grade teacher ushered them both up the center aisle and into the foremost pew, where she insisted they sit down; at least she didn't make them kneel.

  Claudia was not religious and later told Jack she was offended by the stained-glass images of "those servile women attending to Jesus." Mrs. McQuat held Claudia's hand and Jack's; she asked them in a low whisper when they were going to be married. That Claudia and Jack were still students was a point lost on The Gray Ghost, who'd heard a rumor spreading like a forest fire through the girls at St. Hilda's--namely, that Jack Burns had been seen at the film festival in the company of an American movie star, apparently Claudia. He'd brought her to St. Hilda's to show her the chapel. The rumor was that Jack wanted to be married in the chapel of his old school, where he'd had such a formative experience.

  "We haven't really made any plans," Jack said, not knowing how else to answer Mrs. Mc
Quat's question.

  "I'm never going to marry Jack," Claudia told The Gray Ghost. "I'm not marrying anybody who doesn't want to have children."

  "Mercy!" Mrs. McQuat exclaimed. "Why . . . wouldn't you want to have . . . children . . . Jack?"

  "You know," he answered.

  "He says it's all about his father," Claudia told her.

  "You're not . . . still worrying . . . you'll turn out like him . . . are you, Jack?" The Gray Ghost asked.

  "It's a reasonable suspicion," he said.

  "Nonsense!" Mrs. McQuat cried. "Do you know . . . what I think?" she asked Claudia, patting her hand. "I think it's just an excuse . . . not to marry anybody!"

  "That's what I think, too," Claudia said.

  Jack felt like Jesus in the stained glass; everywhere he went in Toronto, women were ganging up on him. He must have looked like he wanted to leave, because The Gray Ghost took hold of his wrist in that not-uncertain way of hers.

  "You aren't leaving without seeing . . . Miss Wurtz . . . are you?" she asked him. "Mercy, she'll be . . . crushed if she learns you were here . . . and you didn't see her!"

  "Oh."

  "You should take Caroline . . . to the film festival, Jack," Mrs. McQuat went on. "She's too timid to go to the movies . . . by herself."

  The Gray Ghost was always the voice of Jack's conscience. Later he would be ashamed that he never told her how much she meant to him, or even what a good teacher she was.

  Mrs. McQuat would die in the St. Hilda's chapel--after having disciplined one of Miss Wurtz's misbehaving third graders, whom she'd faced away from the altar with his back turned to God. Mrs. McQuat dropped dead in the center aisle, a passageway she had made her own, with her back turned to God and with only God's eyes and those of the third grader who was being punished to see her fall. (That poor kid--talk about a formative experience!)

  Miss Wurtz must have come running as soon as she heard--crying all the way.

  Jack didn't go to The Gray Ghost's funeral. He learned she had died only after the funeral, when his mother told him something about Mrs. McQuat that he was surprised he hadn't guessed. She was no Mrs. anybody; no one had ever married her. Like Miss Wurtz, she was a Miss McQuat--for life. But something in her combat-nurse nature refused to acknowledge that she was unmarried, which in those days obdurately implied you were unloved.

  Jack used to wonder why The Gray Ghost had trusted his mom with this secret. They weren't friends. Then he remembered Mrs. McQuat telling him not to complain about a woman who knew how to keep a secret--meaning Alice. (Meaning herself as well.)

  It was only a mild shock to discover that The Gray Ghost had been a Miss instead of a Mrs. In retrospect, Jack wouldn't have been surprised to learn that Mrs. McQuat--as she preferred to be called--had been a man.

  Alice and Mrs. Oastler attended The Gray Ghost's funeral, which was in the St. Hilda's chapel. Being a St. Hilda's Old Girl, Leslie was informed of all the school news. As for Alice, she told Jack she went out of "nostalgia," which he would remember thinking at the time was an uncharacteristic word for her to use--not to mention an uncharacteristic feeling for her to have.

  Alice was vague about who else was in attendance. "Caroline, of course." She didn't mean Caroline French--she meant Miss Wurtz. The other Caroline didn't attend, and Jack knew that her twin, Gordon, was absent. (Gordon was dead--the aforementioned boating accident had precluded his attendance.)

  Jack asked his mother if she'd been aware of blanket-sucking sounds, or moaning, during the funeral; by his mom's puzzled response, he knew that the Booth twins and Jimmy Bacon had skipped the event, or they'd been out of town.

  Lucinda Fleming, with or without her mysterious rage, made no reference to The Gray Ghost's passing in her annual Christmas letter; if Lucinda had gone to the funeral, Jack was sure she would have told everyone about it. And he knew Roland Simpson wasn't there--Roland was already in jail.

  The faculty who were in attendance are easily imagined. Miss Wong, mourning in broken bits and pieces, as if the hurricane she was born in showed itself only in squalls--or only at funerals. Mr. Malcolm, guiding his wife in her wheelchair; the poor man was forever trying to steer Wheelchair Jane around the looming obstacles of her madness. Mr. Ramsey, too restless to sit in a pew, would have been bouncing on the balls of his feet at the back of the chapel. And Miss Wurtz--my goodness, how she must have cried!

  "Caroline was overcome," Alice told Jack.

  He could see Miss Wurtz overcome as clearly as if she were still leaning over his incorrect math and he were still breathing her in. (In Jack's dreams, The Wurtz's mail-order bra and panties were always properly in place--no matter how overcome she was.)

  Yet how could Miss Wurtz have gone on being the St. Hilda's grade-three teacher? How could she have managed her classroom without The Gray Ghost there to bail her out?

  It was Leslie Oastler who told Jack that, upon Mrs. McQuat's death, Miss Wurtz became a better teacher; finally, Miss Wurtz had to learn how. But at The Gray Ghost's funeral, there was no stopping The Wurtz. She cried and cried without hope of rescue. Miss Wurtz must have cried until all her tears were gone, and then--one breakthrough day in her grade-three classroom--she never cried again.

  Jack thought Caroline Wurtz must still be saying in her nightly prayers, "God bless you, Mrs. McQuat."

  As Jack occasionally remembered to say in his, although not as often--and never as fervently--as he used to say, without cease, "Michele Maher, Michele Maher, Michele Maher."

  19

  Claudia, Who Would Haunt Him

  Jack would never entirely forgive The Gray Ghost for suggesting that he and Claudia take Miss Wurtz to the film festival in Toronto in the fall of 1985. The Wurtz was in her forties at the time--not that much older than Alice in years, but noticeably older in appearance and stamina. Possibly she had always been too thin, too fragile, but now what was most Wurtz-like about her was a gauntness Jack associated with illness. Miss Wurtz was still beautiful in her damaged way, but she not only looked a little unhealthy; she seemed ashamed of something, although Jack couldn't imagine what she had ever done to be ashamed of. Perhaps there'd been a long-ago scandal--something so fleeting that it was barely remembered by others, although the memory of it was alive and throbbing in The Wurtz.

  Her appearance seemed contrary to her restrained, even abstemious character, because what Caroline Wurtz most resembled was an actress of a bygone era--a once-famous woman who'd become overlooked. At least this was the impression Caroline made at the film festival, where Claudia and Jack took her to the premiere of Paul Schrader's Mishima. "Remind me who Mishima is," Miss Wurtz said as they approached the theater.

  The ever-persistent photographers, who often snapped pictures of Claudia--because Claudia was such a babe and the photographers had convinced themselves that she must be someone--turned their attention to Miss Wurtz instead. She was overdressed for the film-festival crowd, like a woman who found herself at a rock concert when she'd thought she was going to an opera. Jack was wearing black jeans and a black linen jacket with a white T-shirt. ("An L.A. look," in Claudia's estimation, though she'd never been to Los Angeles.)

  The younger photographers, especially, assumed that Caroline Wurtz was someone--possibly someone who'd made her last movie before any of them had been born. "You'd have thought she was Joan Crawford," Claudia said later. Claudia was poured into a shimmery dress with spaghetti straps, but she was a good sport about the photographers being all over The Wurtz.

  "Goodness," Miss Wurtz whispered, "they must think you're already famous, Jack." It was sweet how she believed the fuss was about him. "I'm completely convinced you soon will be," The Wurtz added, squeezing his hand. "And you, too, dear," she said to Claudia, who squeezed her hand back.

  "I thought she was dead!" an older man said. Jack didn't catch the name of the actress from yesteryear for whom Miss Wurtz had been mistaken.

  "Is Mishima a dancer?" Caroline asked.

  "No, a writer--"
Jack started to say, but Claudia cut him off.

  "He was a writer," Claudia corrected him.

  And an actor, a director, and a militarist nutcase, which Jack didn't have time to say. They were swept inside the theater, where they were ushered to the reserved seats--all because of the prevailing conviction that Caroline Wurtz was not a third-grade teacher but a movie star.

  Jack heard the word "European," probably in reference to Miss Wurtz's dress, which was a pale-peach color and might have fit her once--perhaps in Edmonton. Now it appeared that The Wurtz was diminished by the dress, which would have been more suitable for a prom than a premiere. The dress was something Mrs. Adkins might have donated for Drama Night at Redding, yet it had a gauzy quality, like underwear, which reminded Jack of the mail-order lingerie he had dressed Miss Wurtz in--if only in his imagination.

  "Mishima is Japanese," Jack was trying to explain.

  "He was--" Claudia interjected.

  "He's no longer Japanese?" Caroline asked.

  They couldn't answer her before the movie began--a stylish piece of work, wherein the scenes from Mishima's life (shot in black and white) were intercut with color dramatizations of his fictional work. Jack had never cared much about Mishima as a writer, but he liked him as a lunatic; his ritualistic suicide, in 1970, was the film's dramatic conclusion.

  Throughout the movie, Miss Wurtz held Jack's hand; this gave him a hard-on, which Claudia noticed. Claudia would not hold his penis, or venture anywhere near his lap; she sat with her arms folded on her considerable bosom, and never flinched at Mishima's self-disemboweling, which caused Caroline to dig her nails into Jack's wrist. In the flickering light from the movie screen, he regarded the small, fishhook-shaped scar on her throat, above her fetching birthmark. In her preternatural thinness, Miss Wurtz had a visible pulse in her throat--an actual heartbeat in close proximity to her scar. This was a pounding that could only be quieted by a kiss, Jack thought--not that he would have dared to kiss The Wurtz, not even if Claudia hadn't been there.