by John Irving
“What have we here?” Mrs. McQuat asked.
“Jack somebody,” Emma Oastler replied. “He forgot the rest of his name.”
“I’m sure you can inspire him to remember it, Emma,” Mrs. McQuat said.
Although The Gray Ghost was not Asian, her eyes were forcibly slanted by how tightly her hair had been pulled back and knotted into a steel-gray bun. Her thin lips looked sealed in contrast to Emma’s, which were usually parted. Emma’s mouth was as open as a flower, and on her upper lip, her mustache was as fine as powder—like a dusting of pollen on a petal.
Jack tried to hold back his hand, his right index finger in particular. As quickly as Mrs. McQuat had appeared, she’d disappeared—or else Jack had closed his eyes, in an effort to stop himself from touching Emma’s mustache, and he’d missed The Gray Ghost’s departure.
“Think, Jack.” Emma Oastler’s breath was as warm as Mrs. McQuat’s was cold. “Your full name—you can do it.”
“Jack Burns,” the boy managed to whisper.
Was it his name or his finger that surprised her? Maybe both. The simultaneity of saying his name at the exact same moment he ran his index finger over her downy upper lip was completely unplanned. The incredible softness of her lip made him whisper: “What’s your name?”
She seized his index finger and bent it backward. He fell to his knees and cried out in pain. The Gray Ghost made another of her signature sudden appearances. “I said inspire him, Emma—not hurt him,” Mrs. McQuat admonished.
“Emma what?” Jack asked the big girl, who was breaking his finger.
“Emma Oastler,” she said, giving his finger an extra twist before she let it go. “And don’t you forget it.”
Forgetting Emma or her name would be impossible. Even the pain she caused him seemed natural—as if Jack had been born to serve her, or she’d been born to lead him. Mrs. McQuat may have recognized this in Jack’s pained expression. He would realize only later that The Gray Ghost had undoubtedly been at St. Hilda’s when Jack’s father was sleeping with a girl in grade eleven and impregnating a girl in grade thirteen. Why else would she have asked, “Aren’t you William Burns’s boy?”
That rekindled Emma Oastler’s interest in Jack’s eyelashes, in a hurry. “Then you’re the tattoo lady’s kid!” Emma exclaimed.
“Yes,” Jack said. (And to think he had worried that no one would know him!)
Another teacher was closely observing the new arrivals, and Jack recognized her perfect voice as if he’d heard it every night in his dreams—Miss Caroline Wurtz, who had cured his mother of her Scottish accent. Not only did she excel in enunciation and diction, but the pitch of her voice would have been recognizable anywhere—especially in Jack’s dreams. In Edmonton, where she was from, Miss Wurtz would have been considered beautiful—without qualification. In a more international city, like Toronto, her fragile prettiness was the perishable kind. (More likely, she may have suffered some disappointment in her personal life—an illusory love, or an encounter that had passed too quickly.)
“Please give my regards to your mom, Jack,” Miss Wurtz said.
“Yes, thank you—I will,” the boy replied.
“The tattoo lady has a limo?” Emma asked.
“That is Mrs. Wicksteed’s car and driver, Emma,” Miss Wurtz said.
Once again, The Gray Ghost was gone—Mrs. McQuat had simply disappeared. Jack was aware of Emma’s guiding hand on his shoulder, and of his jaw brushing her hip. She bent over him and whispered in his ear; what she said was not for Miss Wurtz to hear: “It must be nice for your mom and you, baby cakes.” Jack thought she meant the Lincoln Town Car or Peewee, but Mrs. Wicksteed’s patronage of “the tattoo lady” and her bastard son was a story that had gained admittance to St. Hilda’s before Jack entered kindergarten. Emma Oastler was referring to Mrs. Wicksteed’s broader role as their patroness. The boy also misunderstood what Emma said next: “Way to go, Jack. Not everyone is lucky enough to be a rent-free boarder.”
“Thank you,” Jack replied, reaching for her hand. He was happy to have made a friend on his first day of school. Since Mrs. Wicksteed’s divorced daughter had also referred to Jack and his mom as rent-free boarders, Jack wondered if Emma’s mom might be divorced. Maybe women in that situation were particularly sympathetic to a good Old Girl like Mrs. Wicksteed taking Jack and Alice under her wing.
“Is your mother divorced?” Jack asked Emma Oastler. Unfortunately, Emma’s mother had been bitterly divorced for several years, and at least one consequence of her divorce had been so spectacularly ugly that she would permanently think of herself as Mrs. Oastler. For Emma, the subject was still as sore as a boil.
In what Jack misinterpreted as a gesture of intimacy and unspoken understanding, Emma squeezed his hand. He was sure she didn’t mean to hurt him, although her grip was as fierce as the handshake of the front-desk clerk at the Hotel Bristol in Oslo. “Are you Norwegian?” he asked her, but Emma was breathing too hard to hear him. Either in her concerted effort to crush his hand or because she was struggling to control her loathing of what a man-hating monster her mother had become in the aftermath of her divorce, Emma’s newly acquired chest was heaving. A tear, which Jack first mistook for a rivulet of sweat, had run down her cheek and now clung to her mustache—like a droplet of dew on new moss. Jack’s misgivings about attending St. Hilda’s momentarily evaporated. What a splendid idea it was to have the grade-six girls serve as guides to the younger children in the junior school!
On the stone stairs leading to the basement entrance, he stumbled, but Emma not only held him up; she hoisted him to her hip and carried him into his first day of school. Jack threw his arms around her in a flood of gratitude and affection; she returned his embrace so ferociously that he feared he might suffocate against her warm throat. They say that apparitions appear to those who are near fainting, which would explain why Jack first mistook The Gray Ghost for an apparition. There was Mrs. McQuat again—just as Emma Oastler was about to break his back or asphyxiate him with her twelve-year-old bosom.
“Let him go, Emma,” The Gray Ghost said. Jack’s shirt was untucked and hung almost to his bare knees, though it didn’t dangle as low as his tie. He was slightly dizzy and gasping for breath. “Help him tuck in his shirt, Emma,” The Gray Ghost said. As soon as she spoke, she was gone—returned to her world of the spirits.
Kneeling, Emma was Jack’s height. His gray Bermuda shorts were not only too short; they were too tight. Emma had to undo the top button and unzip the boy’s fly in order to tuck in his shirt. Under his shorts, her hands cupped and squeezed his buttocks as she whispered in his ear: “Nice tushy, Jack.”
Jack had caught his breath sufficiently to pay her a compliment in kind. “Nice mustache,” he said—thus cementing their friendship for his remaining years at St. Hilda’s, and beyond. Jack thought it must be a good school, as his mom had said, and here—in his first, exciting meeting with Emma Oastler—was probable evidence (at least to Jack) that he would be safe with the girls.
“Oh, Jack,” Emma whispered in his ear—her incredibly soft upper lip brushing his neck. “We’re gonna have such a good time together.”
The arched doorways in the junior-school corridor made Jack Burns think of Heaven. (If there were a passageway to Heaven, Jack used to think, surely it would have arches like that.) And the black-and-gray triangles on the linoleum floors made him feel that school and the grown-up life after it was a game to be played—maybe a game he hadn’t yet been exposed to, but a game nonetheless.
Another game was the miniature, broken-window view of the playground from the second-floor washroom—it was the only boys’ washroom at St. Hilda’s. The frosted-glass windowpanes were small and framed in black-iron squares. One of the panes was broken; it remained unrepaired through Jack’s fourth-grade year. And the low urinals in the boys’ washroom were not quite low enough when he was in kindergarten. He needed to stand on tiptoe and aim high.
There were the infrequent but intim
idating appearances in that second-floor hallway of those older girls who were boarders; one could gain access to their residence through the junior school. Only girls in grade seven and up were admitted to residency, and there were no more than one hundred boarders out of the five hundred girls in the middle and senior school. (St. Hilda’s was a city school—most of the students lived at home.)
The older girls who were boarders struck Jack as much older. Their detectable sullenness wasn’t limited to the daughters of diplomats or the other foreign students, nor was their gloom regional in nature—the cousins who were called “the Nova Scotia sluts” were as depressed as the girl from British Columbia whom Emma Oastler called “the B.C. bitch.” The boarders had about them a noticeable air of being banished. The boarders’ choir made the most mournful music in the school.
Sightings of the girls in residency were unusual in the junior school, but once, in his grade-three year, Jack was emerging from the boys’ washroom (still zipping up his fly), when he saw a couple of grade-thirteen girls striding toward him—a flash of nail polish, kneesocks rolled down to their ankles, shapely legs, wide hips, full breasts. Jack panicked. In his haste, his penis got snagged in his zipper. Naturally, he screamed.
“Sweet Jesus, it’s a boy!” one of the big girls said.
“I’ll say it is, and he’s caught his miserable thing in his zipper,” the other replied.
“When do they start playing with their things?” the first girl asked. “Stop screaming!” she said sharply to Jack. “You haven’t cut it off, have you?”
“Let me do that,” the second girl said, kneeling beside Jack. “I have a little brother—I know how to handle this.”
“You have to handle it?” the first girl asked. She knelt beside Jack, too.
“Let me see it—get your hands off the thing!” the girl with the little brother told Jack.
“It hurts!” Jack cried.
“You’ve just pinched some skin—it’s not even bleeding.” The girl was at least seventeen or eighteen—maybe nineteen.
“When does it get big?” the first girl asked.
“It doesn’t feel like getting big when it’s stuck in a zipper, Meredith.”
“It gets big when it feels like it?” Meredith asked.
The grade-thirteen girl held Jack’s penis in her hand; with the thumb and index finger of her other hand, she gently tugged at his zipper.
“Ow!”
“Well, what do you want me to do?” the girl who’d come to his assistance asked. “Wait for you to grow up?”
“You’ve got lady-killer eyelashes,” Meredith told Jack. “When you’re old enough, you’re going to get your penis stuck in all kinds of places.”
“Ow!”
“Now it’s bleeding,” the second girl said. Jack was unstuck, but she went on holding his penis in her hand.
“What are you doing, Amanda?” Meredith asked.
“Just watch,” Amanda said. She didn’t mean for Jack to watch. Without looking, he could feel his penis getting big—or at least a little bigger.
“What’s your name?” Meredith asked him.
“Jack.”
“Feeling better, eh, Jack?” Amanda asked.
“Sweet Jesus, look at that thing!” Meredith said.
“That’s nothing,” Amanda said. “You can get bigger than that, can’t you, Jack?” He was as big as he’d ever been before. He was afraid that if he got any bigger, he would burst.
“It’s beginning to hurt again,” he said.
“That’s a different kind of pain, Jack.” Amanda gave him a friendly squeeze before she let him go.
“Better not catch that whopper in your zipper, Jack,” Meredith warned him. She stood up and ruffled his hair.
“Maybe you’ll dream about us, Jack,” Amanda said.
The cut on Jack’s penis healed in a couple of days, but those dreams didn’t go away.
Miss Sinclair, Jack’s kindergarten teacher, echoed Alice’s conviction that Jack would be safe with the girls. This illusion was further advanced by the participation of the grade-six girls in the kindergartners’ nap time. Emma Oastler was a volunteer, along with two other grade-six girls—Emma’s good friends Charlotte Barford and Wendy Holton. They were Miss Sinclair’s nap-time helpers. These older girls were supposed to assist five-year-olds in falling asleep; that they kept the kindergartners awake was closer to the truth.
Miss Sinclair was distinguished in Jack’s memory for her habit of condemning him to nap with three grade-six girls. What he remembered best about Miss Sinclair was her absence.
The naps began with what Emma Oastler called “a sleepy-time story.” Emma was always the storyteller, an early indication of her future calling. While Wendy and Charlotte circulated among the children, making sure that their rubber mats were comfortably rolled out, their blankets snugly wrapped around them, and their shoes off, Emma began her story in the semidark room.
“You’ve had a bad day, and you’re very tired,” Emma’s stories always began. For stories intended to induce sleep, they had the opposite effect—the kindergartners were too terrified to nap. In an oft-repeated classic among Emma Oastler’s nap-time tales, Miss Sinclair lost the entire kindergarten class in the bat-cave exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum. In reality, Jack’s first school trip to the Royal Ontario Museum was led by his grade-three teacher, Miss Caroline Wurtz.
Miss Wurtz was the teacher Jack would remember most fondly, and not only for her fragile beauty; she was an important mentor for him in his early mastery of stage presence, another area in which she excelled. Miss Wurtz was a maven in the dramatic arts; in the innumerable school plays in which Jack performed at St. Hilda’s, she was usually his director. However, her talents as a classroom teacher were lacking in comparison to her theatrical gifts; control of the grade-three class eluded her. Offstage, out of the fixed glare of the footlights—either in her undisciplined classroom or in the marginally more lawless outside world—Miss Caroline Wurtz was an easily confused creature, bereft of confidence and without an iota of managerial skill.
On school trips, Miss Wurtz could have been a star in one of Emma Oastler’s sleepy-time stories—she was that inept. When she lost control of herself in the bat-cave exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum, most of the grade-three kids were already suffering from total recall of Emma’s classic horror tale. (That they were then eight-year-olds, not five-year-olds, hardly mattered; the real-life circumstances were frighteningly familiar to the former kindergartners who’d first heard of the bat cave from Emma’s fiction.)
When the announcement on the museum loudspeaker informed them that some of the mammal displays were experiencing a temporary loss of electrical power, the children knew this was only the first chapter. “Don’t panic,” the voice on the loudspeaker said, while Miss Wurtz dissolved into sobs. “The power will be restored in no time.” The ultraviolet lights in the bat habitat were still on; in fact, they were the only lights that were on, which was exactly the case in Emma’s story.
In Emma’s version, inexplicably, the defenseless children had no recourse but to crawl into the bat cave and sleep with the bats. Emma advised them to be aware of a crucial difference between the alleged “sucking habits” of the vampire bat and those of the giant fruit bat. The kids had to keep their eyes tightly closed at all times, or the ultraviolet light would somehow blind them; and while they slept, or only pretended to sleep, the children were told to pay close attention to the exact location of the hot, moist breath they would certainly feel before long.
If they felt the breath against their throats, that indicated the vampire; the kids were instructed to swat the bat away and protect their throats with both hands. (In Emma’s own words: “Just go nuts.”) If, however, the aforementioned hot, moist breath was detected in the area of their navels—well, that was the area of interest of the despicable giant fruit bat. It would heat the children’s stomachs with its breath before licking the salt out of their belly buttons with its ra
spy tongue; while this sensation might be unpleasant, the children’s injuries would be slight. In the case of a fruit bat, the kids were to lie still. In the first place, the giant fruit bat was too big to swat away—and, according to Emma, fruit bats only became truly dangerous when they were startled.
“But what would a startled fruit bat do?” Jack remembered Jimmy Bacon asking.
“Better not tell him, Emma,” Charlotte Barford said.
The conclusion to Emma’s tale of the kindergartners’ abandonment in the bat habitat was nerve-wracking. When you consider that most of the children were too frightened to fall asleep, they surely knew that Emma Oastler and Wendy Holton and Charlotte Barford were breathing on them—not the bats. Nevertheless, the kids responded as instructed. The kindergartners having their navels breathed on kept still. In the many retellings of the tale, Jack learned to distinguish the not-so-subtle differences between Charlotte’s and Wendy’s and Emma’s tongues. Their tongues were not raspy; indeed, discounting future nightmares, the children’s injuries were slight. And they responded with appropriate zeal to the neck-breathing tactics of the vampire bat—in short, the kids went nuts, covering their throats and screaming while they swatted away.
“Time to wake up, Jack,” Emma (or Charlotte or Wendy) always said. But he never went to sleep.
Charlotte Barford was a big girl, a grade-six virtual woman in the mold of Emma Oastler. Wendy Holton, on the other hand, was a feral-looking waif. If you overlooked the evidence of puberty-related troubles in the dark circles under Wendy’s eyes—and her swollen, bitten lips—she could have passed for nine. Her smaller size and childlike physique didn’t diminish Wendy’s navel-licking capacity; her fruit-bat imitation was more aggressive than Emma’s, more invasive than Charlotte’s. (In keeping with her melon-size knees, Charlotte Barford’s tongue was too broad and thick to fit in Jack’s navel—even the tip.)
Did Miss Sinclair ever return to her kindergarten class and find the children refreshed from their naps? Did she mistake how alert they looked for their being well rested? The kids were relieved, of course, and no doubt looked it; that they’d survived another of Emma Oastler’s sleepy-time tales, both the not-falling-asleep part and the always creative manner in which they were woken up, gave them thankful expressions.
