by John Irving
He was cast as Adam in Miss Wurtz’s cloying rendition of Adam Bede. THEY KISS EACH OTHER WITH A DEEP JOY, the stage directions read. Overlooking the disastrous results of the Lucinda Fleming kiss, which afforded no joy of any kind, Jack devoted himself to the task. Given that The Wurtz had cast Heather Booth as Dinah, the kiss was indeed a daunting one. Not only did Heather make her disturbing blanket-sucking sounds when he kissed her, but her twin, Patsy, made identical sucking sounds backstage.
Miss Wurtz had cast Patsy as Hetty, the woman who betrays Adam. And what a god-awful misinterpretation of Adam Bede it turned out to be! Jack-as-Adam eventually marries the identical twin of the woman who cheats on him! (George Eliot must have rolled around in her grave over such a liberty as that!)
And The Wurtz was overfond of the passage at the end of Chapter 54. Following her own inclinations, as ever, Miss Wurtz gave the passage to Jack as dialogue, even though it is actually George Eliot’s narration. Looking into Heather Booth’s love-struck eyes as he delivered his weighty lines didn’t help. “ ‘What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined for life—to strengthen each other in all labour, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting?’ ” Jack-as-Adam asked Heather-as-Dinah, while she persisted in making barely audible sucking sounds in the back of her throat—as if his kiss had made her ill and she were readying herself to vomit.
“Jack,” Mrs. McQuat said, when she saw his performance, “you must take everything Miss Wurtz says with a grain of salt.”
“A what?”
“It’s an expression—‘with a grain of salt’ means not to take someone or something too seriously.”
“Oh.”
“I wouldn’t agree that there is no greater thing for two so-called human souls than to be joined for life. Frankly, I can’t think of a comparable horror.”
Jack would conclude that Mrs. McQuat was unhappily married—or else, if her husband had died and she was a widow who still called herself Mrs., The Gray Ghost and the late Mr. McQuat had not enjoyed many silent unspeakable memories at the moment of their last parting.
Naturally, he took no end of shit from Emma Oastler for kissing Heather Booth WITH A DEEP JOY in front of the older girls. “Did you use your tongue?” Emma asked him. “It looked like you French-kissed her.”
“Used my tongue how?”
“We’ll get to that, honey pie—the homework is piling up. All the math you’re doing is causing you to fall behind.”
“Behind in what?”
“It sounded like you were gagging her, you dork.”
But the Booth twins had made those terrible blanket-sucking sounds since kindergarten—Emma should have remembered that. (Emma’s sleepy-time stories were the probable origin of the twins making those awful sounds!)
“Just wait till you get to Middlemarch, Jack,” The Gray Ghost consoled him. “It’s not only a better novel than Adam Bede; Miss Wurtz has not yet found a way to trivialize it.”
Thus, in grade four, did he encounter in Mrs. McQuat a necessary dose of perspective. He would regret that she wasn’t his mentor for his remaining years in school, but Jack was indeed fortunate to have her as his teacher in his last year at St. Hilda’s.
Perspective is hard to come by. Caroline Wurtz was one of those readers who ransacked a novel for extractable truths, moral lessons, and pithy witticisms—with little concern for the wreck of the novel she left in her wake. Without The Gray Ghost’s prescription of a grain of salt, who knows for how long Jack might have misled himself into thinking that he’d actually read Jane Eyre or Tess of the d’Urbervilles—or The Scarlet Letter, Anna Karenina, Sense and Sensibility, Adam Bede, and Middlemarch. By grade four, he had not read these wonderful books—he’d only acted in Miss Wurtz’s purposeful plundering of them.
Of course Jack was familiar with the bulletin boards at St. Hilda’s, where praise of women was rampant; there among the usual announcements was some humorless observation of Emerson’s. (“A sufficient measure of civilization is the influence of good women.”) And before Jack was cast as Dorothea in Miss Wurtz’s dramatization of Middlemarch, he had seen George Eliot quoted among a variety of bulletin-board announcements. At the time, of course, Jack thought George Eliot was a man. Possibly a man-hating one, at least on the evidence of a most popular bulletin-board assertion of Mr. Eliot’s—or so Jack believed. (“A man’s mind—what there is of it—has always the advantage of being masculine—as the smallest birch-tree is of a higher kind than the most soaring palm—and even his ignorance is of a sounder quality.”) What does that mean? he used to wonder.
As Dorothea, “with all her eagerness to know the truths of life,” Jack radiated (under Miss Wurtz’s direction) “very childlike ideas about marriage.” No kidding—he was a child!
“ ‘Pride helps us,’ ” Jack-as-Dorothea prattled, “ ‘and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts—not to hurt others.’ ” (Once again, this was not written as Dorothea’s dialogue, or anyone else’s, in the novel.)
To Miss Wurtz’s assessment of his talents onstage—namely, that there were no boundaries to his “possibilities” as an actor—Mrs. McQuat countered with her own little scrap of truthfulness she had found in the pages of Middlemarch. “ ‘In fact, the world is full of hopeful analogies and handsome dubious eggs called possibilities,’ ” The Gray Ghost whispered.
“George Eliot?” Jack asked. “Middlemarch?”
“You bet,” Mrs. McQuat replied. “There’s more in that book than dramatic homilies, Jack.”
To Miss Wurtz’s prediction that he would one day be a great actor—if, and only if, he dedicated himself to a precision of character of the demanding kind The Wurtz so rigorously taught—The Gray Ghost offered another undramatized observation from Middlemarch. “ ‘Among all forms of mistake, prophecy is the most gratuitous.’ ”
“The most what?”
“What I’m saying, Jack, is that you must play a more active role in your future than Miss Wurtz.”
“Oh.”
“Don’t you see what’s wrong with The Wurtz, baby cakes?” Emma Oastler asked.
“What’s wrong with her?”
“Obviously The Wurtz is unfulfilled, Jack,” Emma said. “I must have been wrong about her having a boyfriend. Maybe someone in her family bought her nice clothes. You don’t imagine she has a sex life, or ever had one, do you?” Only in his dreams, Jack hoped. He had to admit, if not to Emma, that it was confusing—namely, how much he was learning from Miss Wurtz, which stood in contrast to how obviously flawed she was.
Like Caroline Wurtz roaming randomly in a novel, Jack searched the St. Hilda’s bulletin boards for gems of uplifting advice; unlike Miss Wurtz at large in a novel, he found little that was useful there. Kahlil Gibran was a favorite of the older girls in those years. Jack brought one of Gibran’s baffling recommendations to The Gray Ghost for a translation.
Let there be spaces in your togetherness,
And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.
“What does that mean?” Jack asked Mrs. McQuat.
“Poppycock, hogwash, bunk,” The Gray Ghost said.
“What?”
“It doesn’t mean anything at all, Jack.”
“Oh.” Mrs. McQuat had taken the quotation from him. He watched her crumple it in her cold hand. “Shouldn’t I put it back on the bulletin board?” he asked.
“Let’s see if Mr. Gibran can find his way back to the bulletin board all by himself,” The Gray Ghost said.
Jack trusted her. He dared to ask her things he was afraid to ask anyone else. There were a growing number of things he wouldn’t ask his mother; her distancing herself from him was a warning, but of what Jack wasn’t sure. He had tired of the when-you’re-old-enough answer, no matter what the reason for her aloofness.
Lottie was Lottie. As much as she h
ad mattered to him once—maybe most of all when he’d been in those North Sea ports and had missed her—now that he was older, Lottie didn’t hold him chest-to-chest to compare their beating hearts. At his age, that was a game Jack preferred to play with Emma. (As Emma put it: “You can tell that the most interesting part of Lottie’s life is over.”)
And Mrs. Wicksteed was old and growing older; when she warmed her increasingly uncooperative fingers over her tea, her fingers would dip in and out of the tea, with which she occasionally sprinkled Jack’s shirt and tie. She’d become an expert at doing a necktie during the years of her late husband’s arthritis. “Now I have his affliction, Jack,” Mrs. Wicksteed told the boy. “I ask you. Does that seem fair?”
The fairness question was one that had occurred to Jack in other areas. “It’s not fair that I should turn out to be like my father,” he said frankly to Mrs. McQuat. (He was in a phase of being slightly less than frank with Emma on this subject.) “Do you think it’s fair?” Jack asked The Gray Ghost. He could see she’d really been a combat nurse—notwithstanding what truth, or lack thereof, resided in the story of her having one lung because she’d been gassed. “Do you think I’m going to turn out like him, Mrs. McQuat?”
“Let’s take a walk, Jack.”
He could tell they were headed for the chapel. “Am I being punished?” he asked.
“Not at all! We’re just going where we can think.”
They sat together in one of the foremost pews, facing in the right direction. It was a minor distraction that a grade-three boy was kneeling in the center aisle with his back turned on God. Although The Gray Ghost had positioned him there—however long ago—she seemed surprised to see him in the aisle, but she quickly ignored him.
“If you turn out to be like your father, Jack, don’t blame your father.”
“Why not?”
“Barring acts of God, you’re only a victim if you choose to be one,” The Gray Ghost said. From the look of the frightened third grader kneeling in the center aisle, he clearly thought that Mrs. McQuat was describing him.
Thank goodness Jack never asked Emma Oastler his next question, which he addressed to Mrs. McQuat in the chapel. “Is it an act of God if you have sex on your mind every minute?”
“Mercy!” The Gray Ghost said, taking her eyes from the altar to look at him. “Are you serious?”
“Every minute,” he repeated. “It’s all I dream about, too.”
“Jack, have you talked to your mother about this?” Mrs. McQuat asked.
“She’ll just say I’m not old enough to talk about it.”
“But it seems that you are old enough to be thinking and dreaming about little else!”
“Maybe it will be better in an all-boys’ school,” Jack said. He knew that an all-boys’ school was his mother’s next plan for him. Just up the road from St. Hilda’s—within easy walking distance, in fact—was Upper Canada College. (The UCC boys were always sniffing around the older of the St. Hilda’s girls.) And it was no surprise that Mrs. Wicksteed “knew someone” at Upper Canada College, or that Jack would have good recommendations from his teachers at St. Hilda’s—at least academically. He’d already been to UCC for an interview. Coming from the gray-and-maroon standard at St. Hilda’s, he thought there was entirely too much blue in the school colors at Upper Canada—their regimental-striped ties were navy blue and white. If you played a varsity sport, the first-team ties (as they were called) were a solid-blue-knit variety—navy blue with square bottoms. Alice had found it ominous that the jocks were singled out and idolized in this fashion. In Jack’s interview, his mother freely offered that her son was not athletic.
“How do you know?” Jack asked her. (He’d never had the opportunity to try!)
“Trust me, Jack. You’re not.” But he trusted his mother less and less.
“Which all-boys’ school are you thinking of?” The Gray Ghost asked him.
“Upper Canada College, my mom says.”
“I’ll have a word with your mother, Jack. Those UCC boys will eat you alive.”
Given his respect for Mrs. McQuat, this was not an encouraging concept. Jack expressed his concern to Emma. “Eat me alive why? Eat me how?”
“It’s hard to imagine that you’re a jock, Jack.”
“So?”
“So they’ll eat you alive, so what? The sport of life is gonna be your sport, baby cakes.”
“The sport of—”
“Shut up and kiss me, honey pie,” Emma said. They were scrunched down in the backseat of the Town Car again. It was a fairly recent development that Emma could give Jack a boner in a matter of seconds—or not, depending on the little guy’s unpredictable response. Emma was in grade ten, sixteen going on thirty or forty, and—to her considerable rage—she had newly acquired braces. Jack was a little afraid of kissing her. “Not like that!” Emma instructed him. “Am I a baby bird? Are you feeding me some kind of worm?”
“It’s my tongue,” he told her.
“I know what it is, Jack. I’m addressing the more important subject of how it feels.”
“It feels like a worm?”
“Like you’re trying to choke me.”
She cradled his head in her lap and looked down at him with impatient affection. Every year, Emma got bigger and stronger. At the same time, Jack felt he was barely growing. But he had a boner, and Emma always knew when he had one. “That little guy is like a coming attraction, honey pie.”
“A what?”
“At the movies, a coming attraction—”
“Oh.”
“You’re soon to be all over the place, Jack. That’s what I’m saying.”
“This girl is just jerking your wire, mon,” Peewee said.
“Just shut up and drive, mon,” Emma said to Peewee. He was, as Jack was, in her thrall.
Jack would wonder, after his mom had returned the push-up bra to Mrs. Oastler, what possibly could have transpired between the two mothers that had led to him being left alone with Emma again. And Jack and Emma were alone a lot; they were even alone, for an hour or more at a time, in Emma’s house. Whether Emma’s mom was at home or not, they were left alone there—no Lottie banging around in the kitchen below them, screaming some nonsense about tea.
The Oastler house in Forest Hill was a three-story mansion bequeathed to Mrs. Oastler by her ex-husband; the alimony settlement had made Emma and her mother rich. Women who scored big in their divorces were treated with immeasurable scorn in the Toronto tabloids, but Mrs. Oastler would have said it was as good a way to get rich as any.
Emma’s mom was a small, compact woman—as her push-up bra would suggest. As Emma’s mustache would imply, her mother was surprisingly hairy—at least for a woman, and a small woman at that. Emma’s mom would have had a more discernible mustache than her daughter, but (according to Emma) Mrs. Oastler frequently had her upper lip waxed. She would not have been rash to consider waxing her arms as well, but the only other visible preventative measure taken against her hairiness was that she had her sleek black hair cut as short as a boy’s in an elfish pixie. Despite her prettiness, which was petite in nature, Jack thought that Mrs. Oastler looked a little like a man.
“Yes, but an attractive one,” Alice said to her son. She thought that Emma’s mother was “very good-looking,” and that it was a pity Emma “took after” her father.
Jack never met Emma’s dad. After every winter break from St. Hilda’s, Emma returned to school with a tan. Her father had taken her to the West Indies, or Mexico; that was virtually the only time they spent together. Emma also spent a month of every summer at a cottage in Georgian Bay, but most of that time she was in the care of a nanny or a housekeeper—her dad came to the cottage only on weekends. Emma never spoke of him.
That Mrs. Oastler thought Emma was too young to have her mustache waxed was a source of contention between mother and daughter. “It’s hardly noticeable,” Emma’s mom would tell her. “Besides, at your age, what does it matter?” And there w
ere other issues between them, as one might expect of a divorced woman raising a “difficult” only child—a sixteen-year-old daughter who was physically bigger and stronger than her mother, and still growing.
Mrs. Oastler also thought that Emma was too young to have a tattoo—an intolerable hypocrisy, in Emma’s opinion, because her mom had recently been tattooed by Daughter Alice. This was news to Jack, but so was almost everything Emma told him. “What’s her tattoo? A tattoo where?” he asked.
Well, what a surprise! Emma’s mom had been tattooed to conceal a scar. “She had a Cesarean,” Emma said. That old business again, Jack thought. “It’s a scar from her C-section,” Emma told him. And to think he’d once believed this was the ward for difficult births in a hospital in Halifax! “She had a bikini cut,” Emma explained.
“A what?”
“A horizontal incision, not the vertical kind.”
“I still don’t get it,” Jack said.
This necessitated a trip to Mrs. Oastler’s bedroom. (Emma’s mother was out.) There Emma showed Jack a pair of her mom’s panties—black bikini briefs, no doubt a fetching match to the push-up bra. Mrs. Oastler’s scar was called a bikini cut because the incision was below the panty line of the briefs.
“Oh. And what’s the tattoo?”
“A stupid rose.”
Jack thought not. He was pretty sure he knew what kind of rose it was, in which case it would have been too big to be completely concealed under the panty line of Mrs. Oastler’s bikini briefs. “A Rose of Jericho?” he asked Emma.
It was, for once, her turn to be uninformed. “A Rose of what?”
This was not the easiest thing for a nine-year-old to explain. Jack made a fist. “It’s about this big, maybe a little bigger,” he began.
“Yes, it is,” Emma said. “Go on, Jack.”
“It’s a flower with the petals of another flower hidden inside it.”
“What other flower?”
There were so many words he’d heard and remembered—not that he understood them. Labia was one, vagina another—they were like flowers, weren’t they? And the other flower hidden in a Rose of Jericho was like the petals, or the labia, a woman had—a vagina concealed in a rose. Jack couldn’t imagine what a mess he made of this explanation to Emma, but of course Emma knew what he was trying to say.
