by John Irving
“Oh, my God, now we’re really getting somewhere!” Emma announced; she threw back her hair. Jack had a hard-on like he’d never seen before. If the little guy had stood up any taller, he would have cast a shadow all the way to Jack’s belly button—lint and all.
“Jesus, Jack—what are you gonna do with it?”
Jack was at a loss. “Do I have to do something with it?” he asked.
Emma hugged him to her bare breasts; his enlarged penis brushed against her scratchy wool skirt. Jack shifted slightly in the big girl’s embrace, until the little guy was more comfortably touching Emma’s bare thigh. “Oh, Jack,” Emma told the boy, “that’s the sweetest thing to say—you’re just too cute for words. No, of course you don’t have to do anything with it! One day you’ll know what you want to do with it! That’s gonna be some day.”
He touched one of her breasts with his hand; she held his face more tightly there. The next thing was the little guy’s idea, entirely. Emma and Jack were sitting on his bed, hip to hip—they were hugging each other—but his penis had somehow not lost contact with her thigh. And if Jack could feel her thigh, Emma must have been able to feel his penis. He was eight; she was fifteen. When Jack swung one of his legs over her far hip, he found himself lying on top of her with the little guy in her lap—now touching both her thighs.
“Do you know what you’re doing, Jack?” Emma asked. (Of course he didn’t.) Her gum was a mint flavor. Jack could feel her breath on the top of his head. “Maybe the little guy knows,” she said, answering herself. Jack’s arms could not reach around her hips, but he held her there—his right hand touching the lace waistband of her panties, which Emma had spread on top of her skirt. “Show me what the little guy knows, baby cakes.” Her tone of voice indicated that she was teasing him—the baby cakes was an affectionate appellation, but faintly mocking in the way Emma usually said it.
“I don’t know what the little guy knows,” he admitted, just as the little guy and Jack made an astonishing discovery. There was hair between Emma Oastler’s thighs!
The instant the tip of his penis touched this hairy place, Jack thought that Emma was going to kill him. She scissored her legs around his waist and rolled him over onto his back. The little guy was all bunched up in her itchy wool skirt. Emma had some difficulty finding it with her hand, with which Jack feared she might yank it completely off—but she didn’t. She just held his penis a little too roughly.
“What was that?” he asked. He was more afraid of the hair he had felt than he was of the way Emma held him.
“I’m not showing you, honey pie. It would be child molestation.”
“It would be what?”
“It would freak you out,” Emma said. Jack could believe it. He had no desire to see the hairy place. What Jack, or the little guy, strangely wanted was to be there. (Jack was actually afraid of what it might look like.)
“I don’t want to see it,” he said quickly.
Emma relaxed her scissors-hold around his waist; she held his penis a little more gently. “You got a hair thing, all right,” she told him.
“The tea is going to get too strong!” Lottie hollered from the kitchen.
“Then take out the tea bags or the stupid tea ball!” Emma shouted back.
“It’s getting cold, too!” Lottie called to them.
When Emma pulled her panties back on, she turned her back on Jack; conversely, she put on her bra and buttoned up her shirt while she faced him. It was clear that the little guy had touched a private place, but why was there hair there?
“How’s the homework going?” Lottie cried. She was verging on the kind of hysteria that implied to Jack she was reliving the horror of her haywire epidural.
“What kind of life does Lottie have?” Emma asked Jack, but she was looking at his penis. The little guy was returning to normal size before their very eyes. “You gotta watch this guy every second, Jack—it’s like having your own little miracle. Or not-so-little miracle,” Emma added. “Oh, cute! Look! It’s like it’s going away!”
“Maybe it’s sad,” the boy said.
“Remember that line, Jack. One day you can use it.” He couldn’t imagine under what circumstances an admission of his penis’s sadness would be of any possible use. Miss Wurtz knew a lot about lines. Somehow Jack sensed she would disapprove of this one—too improvisational, maybe.
In a week’s time, Emma would bring him one of her divorced mom’s bras—a black one. It was more like half a bra, Jack observed, with hard wire rims under the cups, which were small but surprisingly aggressive-looking. It was what they called a “push-up” bra, Emma explained. (It was about as assertive as a bra could be—or so Jack imagined.) “What’s it want to push your breasts up for?” he asked.
“My mom has small boobs,” Emma said. “She’s trying to make more out of them.” But the bra was curious for another reason: it smelled strongly of perfume, and only slightly less powerfully of sweat. Emma had snitched it from the laundry—it wasn’t clean. “But that’s better, isn’t it?” she asked.
“Why?”
“Because you can smell her!” Emma declared.
“But I don’t know your mom. Why would I want to smell her?”
“Just try it, baby cakes. You never know what the little guy might like.” Boy, was that the truth! (Too bad it would take years for Jack to find that out.)
It would be a while, too, before someone told him that the Chinaman’s tattoo shop on the northwest corner of Dundas and Jarvis was never open late at night. The basement tattoo parlor, which you entered from the sidewalk on Dundas, usually closed in the late afternoon. Jack would forget who told him. Maybe it was some old ink addict, a collector, in one of those tattoo shops on Queen Street—around the time his mom opened her own shop there.
Queen Street in the seventies would never have supported the likes of Daughter Alice—it was a greasers’ hangout, full of anti-hippie, whisky-drinking, white-T-shirt people. Whoever told Jack was possibly one of them, but it sounded true. The Chinaman’s unnamed shop was closed at night, or maybe it stayed open a little longer on Friday and Saturday evenings—though never past eight or nine.
So where was she—out late, almost every night, in Jack’s years at St. Hilda’s? He hadn’t a clue. It was only with hindsight, which is never to be wholly trusted, that Jack concluded his mother might have been trying to break her possessive attachment to her son. As he grew older, he looked more and more like his dad; maybe the more Jack resembled William, the more Alice sought to distance herself from the boy.
That Emma Oastler brought him her mother’s push-up bra may have had something to do with it. It was inevitable that Alice would find it. Jack slept with the stupid bra every night—he even took it into his mom’s bed on those nights he slept with her. And it was one of those nights when she threw a leg over Jack and woke him up. This night, something woke her up, too. The mystery bra was mashed between them; Alice must have felt the hard wire rims under the cups. She sat up in bed and turned on the light.
“What’s this, Jack?” she asked, holding up the stinking bra. The way she looked at her son—well, he would never forget it. It was as if she’d discovered Emma’s mother in the bed between them; it was as if she’d caught Jack in flagrante delicto, the little guy in intimate contact with that hairy, private place.
“It’s a push-up bra,” he explained.
“I know what it is—I mean whose.” Alice sniffed the bra and made a face. She pulled back the covers and stared at the little guy, who was protruding, at attention, from the boy’s pajamas. “Start talking, Jack.”
“It belongs to Emma Oastler’s mom—Emma stole it and gave it to me. I don’t know why.”
“I know why,” Alice said. Jack started to cry. His mom’s visible disgust was withering; the little guy was looking withered, too.
“Stop sniveling—don’t snivel,” Alice said. He needed to blow his nose. His mom handed him the bra, but Jack hesitated. “Go on—blow!” she ordered. �
��I’m going to wash it before I give it back to her, anyway.”
“Oh.”
“You can start anytime, Jack. The whole story. What games are you playing with Emma? You better begin there.”
He told her everything—well, maybe not everything. Possibly not the part about Emma baring her breasts; probably not every time Emma asked to have a look at the little guy; certainly not the part about his penis making actual contact with Emma’s hairy, private place. But his mother must have had a pretty good idea of what was going on. “She’s fifteen, Jack—you’re eight. I’ll have a little talk with Mrs. Oastler.”
“Is Emma going to get in trouble?”
“I sincerely hope so,” Alice said.
“Am I in trouble?” he asked.
What a look she gave him! Jack hadn’t known what she meant when she’d said they were “becoming like strangers.” Now he knew. His mom looked at him as if he were a stranger. “You’re going to be in trouble soon enough,” was all she said.
11
His Father Inside Him
Compared to the drama unfolding between Jack and Emma, and what lay ahead between Alice and Mrs. Oastler, the inability of Miss Wurtz to manage her grade-three classroom was minor; yet there was drama there as well, however improvisational.
Lucinda Fleming, whom Jack couldn’t see over, sat at the desk in front of his. She would routinely and deliberately whip his face with her huge ponytail, which hung halfway down her back and was as thick as a broom. In exasperation, Jack would respond by grabbing it with both his hands and pulling it. He could barely manage to pin the back of her head to the top of his desk. Jack found he could restrain her there by pressing his chin against her forehead, but it hurt. Nothing appeared to hurt Lucinda, except her alleged proclivity to hurt herself, which Jack was beginning to doubt. Maybe Lucinda had despised playing Dimmesdale to Jack-as-Hester, or she hated being a head taller than he was; possibly she believed that by whipping Jack with her ponytail, she could make him grow.
Caroline Wurtz never saw Lucinda lash out at Jack with her broom of hair. Miss Wurtz only became aware of the situation after he’d pinned Lucinda’s head to his desk. “Please, Jack,” Miss Wurtz would say. “Don’t disappoint me.”
In his dreams, when The Wurtz would say “Don’t disappoint me,” her tone of voice was deeply seductive. Not so in the grade-three classroom. In reality, disappointing Miss Wurtz was a bad idea—she did not handle it well. Yet the grade-three children often disappointed her deliberately. They resented what a well-organized tyrant she was in her other capacity, as their drama teacher; that she couldn’t maintain order in the classroom was a weakness they exploited.
Gordon French once released his pet hamster into his hostile twin’s hair. From Caroline’s reaction, one might have guessed that the hamster was rabid and bit her. But all the stupid hamster did was race around and around her head, as if it were running on its incessant wheel. Miss Wurtz, perhaps fearful that the hamster would be harmed, began to cry. Crying was the last resort of her disappointment, and she resorted to it with tiresome frequency. “Oh, I never thought I’d be this disappointed!” she would wail. “Oh, my feelings are hurt more than I can say!” But when Miss Wurtz began to cry, the kids stopped paying attention to what she said. They were concentrating on what they knew would happen next, for which there was no preparing themselves. The Gray Ghost’s sudden appearances, even when they were anticipated, were always startling.
There was only one door to the grade-three classroom, and despite her reputedly supernatural powers, Mrs. McQuat could not pass through walls; yet even though the children saw the doorknob turning, they could not protect themselves from the shock. Sometimes the door would swing open, but no one would be there. They would hear The Gray Ghost’s labored breathing from the hall, while Jimmy Bacon moaned and the two sets of twins sounded their predictable alarms. At other times, Mrs. McQuat seemed to leap inside the classroom before the doorknob so much as twitched. Only Roland Simpson, the class’s future criminal, purposely closed his eyes. (Roland liked being startled.)
According to Mrs. Wicksteed, The Gray Ghost had lost a lung in the war. What war and which lung were unknown to Jack. Mrs. McQuat had been a combat nurse, and she’d been gassed. Hence her labored breathing; The Gray Ghost was always out of breath. Gassed where and with what were also a mystery to Jack.
The third graders could have written Mrs. McQuat’s dialogue for her. Upon her unpreventable sudden appearance, The Gray Ghost would address the class as if she were a character in a dramatization Caroline Wurtz had scripted. In her cold-as-the-grave, out-of-breath voice, Mrs. McQuat would ask: “Which of you . . . made Miss Wurtz . . . cry?”
Without hesitation, the children identified the guilty party. They would betray anyone when asked that terrifying question. At that moment, they had no friends, no loyalties. Because here is the dark heart of what they believed: if Mrs. McQuat had been gassed and lost a lung, wasn’t it possible that she had died? Who could say for certain that she wasn’t a ghost? Her skin, her hair, her clothes—gray on gray on gray. And why were her hands so cold? Why did no one ever see her arrive at school, or leave? Why was she always so suddenly there?
Jack would long remember The Gray Ghost asking Gordon French: “You put . . . a what . . . in your sister’s . . . hair?”
Gordon answered: “Just a hamster, a friendly one!”
“It felt like a small dog, Gordon,” Caroline said. Gordon knew the drill. He stood like a soldier in the aisle beside his desk, immobilized by his foreknowledge of what he was about to endure.
“I hope . . . you didn’t . . . hurt the hamster . . . Caroline,” Mrs. McQuat said, granting Gordon brief reprieve.
“It’s no fun having one in your hair,” Caroline replied.
“Where is the hamster?” Miss Wurtz suddenly cried. (That her first name was also Caroline was confusing.)
“Please find . . . the hamster . . . Caroline,” The Gray Ghost said. But before Caroline French could begin to look, Miss Wurtz dropped to all fours and crawled under Caroline’s desk. “Not you . . . dear,” Mrs. McQuat said reprovingly. All the children had joined Miss Wurtz on the floor.
“What’s its name, Gordon?” Maureen Yap asked.
The Gray Ghost was not letting Gordon off so easily. “You’ll come with me . . . Gordon,” Mrs. McQuat said. “Pray your hamster isn’t lost . . . for it will surely die, if it’s lost.”
The kids watched Gordon leave the classroom with The Gray Ghost. Everyone knew that Mrs. McQuat was taking Gordon to the chapel. Often it was empty. But even if one of the choirs was practicing, she took the offending child to the chapel and left him or her there. The child had to kneel on the stone floor in the center aisle next to one of the middle rows of pews and face backward, away from the altar. “You have . . . turned your back on God,” The Gray Ghost would tell the child. “You better hope . . . He isn’t looking.”
As Gordon would recount, it was a bad feeling to have turned his back on God and not know if He was looking. After a few minutes, Gordon felt sure that someone was behind him—in the vicinity of the altar or the pulpit. Perhaps one of the four women attending to Jesus—saints, now ghosts themselves—had stepped out of the stained glass and was about to touch him with her icy hand.
The grade-three class was interrupted in this fashion so frequently that they often couldn’t remember who’d been banished to the chapel and had turned his or her back on God. Mrs. McQuat never brought you back from the chapel—she just took you there. (Roland Simpson virtually lived in the chapel with his back turned to God.) Time would pass, and someone—often The Yap—would ask: “Miss Wurtz, shouldn’t someone check to see if Gordon is all right in the chapel?”
“Oh, my goodness!” Miss Wurtz would cry. “How could I have forgotten!” And someone would be sent to release Gordon (or Roland) from the certifiably lonely terror of kneeling in the chapel backward. It felt wrong to be looking the wrong way in church, like you were really a
sking for trouble.
But the third graders were well prepared for fourth grade; Mrs. McQuat, of course, was the teacher for grade four. The only fourth graders who were ever in need of being disciplined in the chapel were new students who’d not had the pleasure of witnessing The Wurtz’s emotional meltdowns. The Gray Ghost had no trouble managing her classroom; it was Miss Wurtz’s class that repeatedly called upon Mrs. McQuat’s ghostly skills.
The third graders continued to get in trouble, and they often ended up in the chapel facing backward, because—despite their fear of The Gray Ghost—there was something irresistible about how The Wurtz fell apart. The kids both loved the way she cried and hated her for it, because—even in grade three—they understood that it was Miss Wurtz’s weakness that brought Mrs. McQuat’s punishment upon them. (Miss Wurtz’s weakness was not infrequently on display in Jack’s dreams of her in Mrs. Oastler’s push-up bra—which were not thwarted by Alice returning the bra to Mrs. Oastler.)
Gratefully, Jack never dreamed about The Gray Ghost. In his young mind, this gave further credibility to the theory that Mrs. McQuat was dead. She was, however, very much alive in the grade-three classroom, where her sudden appearances became as commonplace as The Wurtz bursting into tears. Hence, when Jimmy Bacon exposed himself to Maureen Yap—when he raised his ghost-sheet to demonstrate that, indeed, he wore no underwear beneath his Halloween costume—Miss Wurtz’s feelings were again hurt more than she could say. (She bitterly expressed how she never thought she’d be so completely disappointed.) And when The Gray Ghost left Jimmy in the chapel facing the wrong way, Jimmy pooed in his bedsheet like the frightened ghost he was. If Mrs. McQuat’s sudden appearance had started Jimmy pooing, his overwhelming conviction that Jesus had disappeared from the stained glass above the altar finished the job.
“A poor costume choice, Jimmy,” was all The Wurtz would say about the beshitted sheet.
No matter how many times Lucinda Fleming provoked Jack with her ponytail and he pinned her head to the top of his desk, it was never that dispute between them that reduced Caroline Wurtz to tears. In all their fights, Lucinda and Jack stopped short of causing Miss Wurtz’s sobs. They may have been foolish enough to imagine that they would be spared The Gray Ghost’s sudden appearance.
