by John Irving
In the play, the most impressive hulk among the grade-thirteen girls, Virginia Jarvis, was cast as Jack’s mail-order husband, Mr. Halliday. Ginny Jarvis looked like a fur trapper. She was both big and womanly—in the manner of Emma Oastler and Charlotte Barford, but Ginny was older. She had a more developed mustache on her upper lip than Emma had, and Mrs. Oastler’s push-up bra could never have contained her. Prior to Jack’s first rehearsal, Emma informed him that Ginny Jarvis was one of the two grade-thirteen girls who knew everything about penises; the other one was Ginny’s best friend, Penny Hamilton, who was cast as the evil chaperone, Madame Auber. (Penny had lived for a time in Montreal and did a killer French accent, of the kind everyone in Toronto found very funny.)
As for the grade-twelve girl who, according to Emma, also knew everything about penises—the third boarder—that was Penny’s younger sister, Bonnie. Penny Hamilton was a good-looking girl, and she knew it. Bonnie Hamilton had been in an automobile accident; innumerable surgeries had failed to correct her limp. (It was worse than Lottie’s.) Something permanently twisted in her pelvis caused Bonnie Hamilton to lead with her left foot while dragging her right leg behind her, like a sack. Jack did not find her limp unattractive, but Bonnie did.
Bonnie Hamilton wasn’t in A Mail-Order Bride in the Northwest Territories; she refused to be in any plays, because of her limp. But Jack thought Bonnie was more beautiful than Penny. During rehearsals for A Mail-Order Bride in the Northwest Territories, he saw Bonnie only when she was sitting down. She was the prompter. In a folding metal chair, with the script open in her lap, Bonnie held a pencil ready to make note of the errors. Naturally, she didn’t limp when she was sitting down.
In the first rehearsal, when Ginny-Jarvis-as-Mr.-Halliday asked Jack-as-Darlin’-Jenny if she’d “started bleedin’ yet,” the sheer coarseness of the moment evoked an awkward, embarrassed silence from the rest of the cast. “I know, I know—it’s an unforgivable question, but that’s the point,” Mr. Ramsey said.
Jack answered in character; he already knew his lines. Bonnie Hamilton didn’t need to prompt him. “What do you mean?” Jenny screams at Halliday. “Why should I be bleedin’?” But Jenny knows exactly what Halliday means.
Halliday grows impatient. He can’t believe how long it’s taking for his child bride to become a woman. One evening, when Jack-as-Jenny is singing a nostalgic song on a porch swing, Ginny-as-Halliday assaults her. Clever girl that she is, Jenny has stolen Madame Auber’s pistol—a prop Mr. Ramsey borrowed from the Upper Canada College boys’ track team. It was a starting gun that fired blanks. At the end of Act Two, Jack-as-Jenny shoots Ginny-as-Halliday with the starting gun. He-as-she fires two very loud blanks into her-as-his chest, and Ginny Jarvis—a star on the St. Hilda’s field-hockey team—falls on the stage with an athletic thud.
Act Three is Jenny’s trial for Halliday’s murder. Her defense is that she was only a child when she was forced to marry the fur trapper, and that she is still a virgin. The “miracle”—namely, that Jenny hasn’t yet begun her menses—is disputed by the prosecution. Jenny refuses to be examined by the community’s only doctor, because he’s a man. The few women in the community—only two women are on the jury—are tolerant of her refusal. (They despise the male doctor.)
Jenny’s fate appears to be in the hands of a female physician who has been summoned from Yellowknife. But before the lady doctor arrives, Jenny is saved by another miracle of her own making—once again, the power of prayer. While testifying about shooting Mr. Halliday, Jenny suddenly stands, screams, and begins to bleed. A prop more creative than the UCC track team’s starting gun is employed for the bleeding. Jack wears a plastic bag filled with water and red food coloring under his dress. His wrists are bound together at his waist. When he stands, he clutches his lower abdomen as if in pain—bursting the bag of colored water, which soaks his dress and hands blood-red.
Darlin’ Jenny’s piercing scream indicates to the jury that this must be her first period. She has been telling the truth. She is innocent. Trial over! But Jack was able to practice bursting the plastic bag—at the time, filled with just water—only once before the first performance. He thought that more practice might have helped.
Meanwhile, backstage, after the dress rehearsal, Emma Oastler, Penny and Bonnie Hamilton, and Ginny Jarvis stealthily dressed Jack in a school uniform they had scrounged from one of the bigger grade-six girls—a short gray skirt and knee-highs. Since Jack already had makeup on—a little rouge, some stage lipstick, which showed redder than it was in the footlights—it was only necessary to adjust the wig he wore as Darlin’ Jenny. Flanked by Penny Hamilton and Emma, with Ginny Jarvis leading the way and Bonnie Hamilton (accompanied, as always, by her limp) taking a rearguard position, Jack-as-a-girl marched straightaway to the older girls’ residence. In the after-school hours, their entrance from the second floor of the junior school was unobserved.
The Hamilton sisters shared a room. Ginny Jarvis occupied the room across the hall from them. There were no locks on the residence doors, but the matron was not inclined to check on the girls until after supper—when they had to be accounted for and were supposed to be studying. Jack was invited to lie down on a bed. He must have looked anxious, because Emma bent over him and whispered in his ear: “Don’t worry, honey pie, I won’t let anyone touch you.” But Jack was in the presence of girls who were older than Emma; he was frightened.
“Which one of us do you like looking at the best, Jack?” Ginny Jarvis asked. By the indifferent way she raised the question, Ginny seemed resigned to the fact that she wouldn’t be the boy’s first choice. Penny Hamilton was staring at him with an intimidating self-confidence. Bonnie Hamilton wouldn’t look at him; she stood at some distance from the bed, her left foot forward.
“I think Bonnie is beautiful,” Jack said.
“You see?” Ginny asked the assembled girls. “There’s no predicting what turns on men or boys.” Jack could tell he’d made Penny angry by not choosing her, which under the circumstances made him more anxious than before. “Get closer to him, Bonnie,” Ginny directed. “Let him see more of you.”
Bonnie lurched forward, left foot first. Jack was afraid she was going to fall on him, but she dropped to her knees beside him—catching her balance with both hands on his chest. She still wouldn’t look at him. She knelt next to him, putting her hands on her thighs and staring at her lap; ever the prompter, it was as if she were waiting for someone to flub a line. Jack was suddenly shy about looking at her, because Bonnie wouldn’t look at him. He could feel Ginny Jarvis lift his skirt and pull down his underpants. At least he assumed it was Ginny—Penny Hamilton seemed too peeved with him to take an interest. No one touched him. “It’s little, all right,” Penny said, when Ginny had exposed him.
“We’ll see about that,” Ginny replied.
“What’s happening?” Jack asked Emma.
“Nothing, baby cakes. Don’t you worry.”
“Less than nothing,” Penny Hamilton said.
“He’s frightened. This isn’t right,” Bonnie Hamilton said. “He’s too young—he’s just a kid!” She leaned over Jack. When Bonnie looked at him, it was in the same way that she scrutinized the text in her capacity as prompter—as if his face were the only true map of the unfolding story and Bonnie Hamilton was the absolute authority on what he might be feeling.
Bonnie’s limp compelled Jack to look at her and imagine her accident. It was his first understanding that physical attraction, even sexual desire, was stimulated by more than the perfection of a body or the beauty of a face. He was drawn to Bonnie’s past, to everything traumatic that had happened to her before he met her. Her crippling accident drew Jack to her. This was worse than what Emma had correctly identified as his older-woman thing. He was attracted to how Bonnie had been damaged; that she’d been hurt made her more desirable. The thought was so troubling to Jack that he began to cry.
“I’ve had it with penises,” Ginny Jarvis was saying.
&nbs
p; “Maybe it’s asleep or something,” Penny Hamilton suggested.
“Don’t let them frighten you, Jack,” Bonnie Hamilton said.
It surprised him that she was the one who looked stricken with fear, as if she were a prisoner in the passenger seat and saw the fast-approaching collision seconds before the driver could react to it. Bonnie pinched her lower lip with her teeth and stared at Jack as if she were transfixed—as if he were the upcoming accident and, even though she saw him coming, she couldn’t turn away. “What’s wrong?” he asked her. “What do you see?” Bonnie’s eyes welled up with tears.
“Don’t cry on the kid, Bonnie—you’re the one who’s frightening him,” Penny Hamilton said.
“Something’s working,” Ginny Jarvis observed. “Maybe it’s the crying.”
“Keep crying. See if I care,” Penny told her sister.
“If Jack is frightened, we should stop,” Emma said.
“I think Bonnie’s frightened,” Penny said with a laugh.
“If Bonnie is frightened, we should stop,” Jack said—not that he was aware of what they had started. Bonnie Hamilton looked terrified to him. He felt increasingly afraid of whatever was frightening her.
“This is a frightened little boy!” Bonnie Hamilton cried.
“I’m here, baby cakes,” Emma said. She leaned over Jack and kissed him on the mouth. He wouldn’t remember if she used her tongue; his fixation was with her upper lip. It must have been her mustache that made Jack hold his breath.
“Keep kissing him, Emma,” Ginny Jarvis said.
“Something’s definitely happening,” Penny Hamilton more closely observed.
It wasn’t that he couldn’t breathe; he’d simply stopped. He saw a multitude of streaming stars, the speckled glow of northern lights—the aurora borealis, that radiant emission beloved by all Canadians. “Better let him breathe, Emma,” he heard Bonnie Hamilton say.
“Whoa! Look out!” Ginny Jarvis cried. His ejaculation caught Penny Hamilton as she was taking a closer look—too close, as it turned out. (And to think that no one had touched him!)
“You got her smack between the eyes, honey pie,” Emma told him later. “I’m so proud of you! I felt responsible that you were afraid. Never again are those girls getting anywhere near you, Jack. I’m taking better care of you from now on.”
At the time, Bonnie Hamilton’s eyes were locked onto Jack’s; she couldn’t stop staring at the boy. “What do you see?” she asked him. “Jack, what is it?”
“You’re the most beautiful of all the girls,” he told her, still gasping for breath.
“He’s delirious—he doesn’t know what he’s saying,” Emma said cruelly, but Bonnie didn’t seem to hear her; she just went on looking at Jack. Her sister, Penny, was furiously wiping her forehead with a wad of tissues. Naturally, Jack asked to see the blood.
“The what, baby cakes?”
“He must think he’s Darlin’ Jenny!” Ginny Jarvis said. “Boys are truly sick.”
Emma Oastler took him by the hand. They left the older girls’ residence—traipsing through the junior school the way they’d come. They went to the theater, where Jack dressed in his own clothes backstage. He wanted to practice bursting the blood bag, but Mr. Ramsey had gone home for the day.
Jack and Emma found Peewee sleeping in the Town Car. They went to the house on the corner of Lowther and Spadina, because Lottie was spending most of her time at the hospital, where she said Mrs. Wicksteed was “at death’s door,” and Alice was either at the Chinaman’s or with Mrs. Oastler. Jack was touched that Emma had stood up for him, and that she’d promised to keep the older girls away from him, but for how much longer? Wasn’t he being sent to Maine for his fifth-grade year? (Who would keep the older boys away?)
Also troubling was Emma’s discovery that she, upon entering grade eleven, would become a boarder. Why? Jack wondered. Emma lived at home. She could walk to school! “My mom doesn’t want me around,” was all Emma would say. She was even more sullen than usual at the prospect of being a boarder.
They were in Jack’s bedroom, where Emma was examining the little guy. “No signs of wear and tear,” she said. “I don’t suppose you remember what you were thinking.” Jack could barely remember not breathing, but he was wondering—after his near-death ejaculation—if Mrs. Wicksteed would see that radiant emission of northern lights when she passed away. He was also struggling to articulate to Emma exactly what had attracted him to Bonnie Hamilton—not just the limp but her overall aura of damage, of having been hurt. Jack couldn’t quite express it, nor could he convey to Emma how Bonnie had looked at him—how he’d recognized that she was smitten, although Bonnie herself might not have known it.
Jack even tried to talk about it with The Gray Ghost—without letting on to her that he’d had a near-death ejaculation in the older girls’ residence, of course. “This was one of the older girls?” Mrs. McQuat asked. “And she looked at you how?”
“Like she couldn’t look away, like she couldn’t help herself,” he said.
“Tell me who this was, Jack.”
“Bonnie Hamilton.”
“She’s in grade twelve!”
“I told you she was older.”
“Jack, when an older girl looks at you like that, you just look away.”
“What if I can’t look away or help myself, either?”
“Mercy!” Mrs. McQuat exclaimed. Thinking she was changing the subject, she asked: “How’s it going with the mail-order-bride business?”
“The blood is the tricky part,” he said.
“There’s blood this year, actual blood?”
“It’s red food coloring with water—it’s just a prop.”
“A prop! I think I like blood better when I have to imagine it. Maybe I should have a word with Mr. Ramsey.” But if The Gray Ghost ever had a word with Mr. Ramsey, nothing of their conversation was reflected in the premiere performance of A Mail-Order Bride in the Northwest Territories. On Saturday night, the St. Hilda’s theater was packed. To Jack’s surprise, not only was The Wurtz in attendance, but The Gray Ghost sat in the front row beside her. Maybe Mrs. McQuat believed that her encouraging presence would serve to mitigate Miss Wurtz’s scathing condemnation of the play.
More surprising still, and also occupying front-row seats, Alice had come with Mrs. Oastler and Emma. (Lottie, Jack knew, was maintaining her vigil at Mrs. Wicksteed’s deathbed—otherwise Lottie would have been at the theater, too.) And most surprising of all, Peewee was there! He must have overheard Emma and Jack talking about the play in the backseat of the Town Car. A strikingly beautiful black woman was with him. Peewee had a wife or girlfriend! Whoever she was, Peewee’s date seemed stunningly overdressed among the divorced moms and dads who were the usual audience for a senior-school play at St. Hilda’s. Mrs. Peewee wore a flowery dress with a plunging neckline; from Jack’s backstage perspective, her hat resembled a stuffed parrot.
It was a most impressive audience, especially by the junior-school standards Jack was familiar with from Miss Wurtz’s dramatizations. But some of the cast suffered from stage fright. Penny-Hamilton-as-Madame-Auber, whose French accent was such a hit with Torontonians, had a fit getting into her evil-chaperone costume. (In retrospect, Jack would like to think that Penny was distracted from the task of dressing herself by her memory of his jism nailing her in the forehead.)
Sandra Stewart, a grade-nine girl who was small for her age, played Sarah, the bilingual stutterer—who ended up freezing to death after losing her virginity on a dog sled. Sandra threw up backstage, which prompted Mr. Ramsey to say: “It’s just butterflies.”
Ginny-Jarvis-as-Mr.-Halliday, sweating in her fur-trapper costume, said: “That looks like worse than butterflies.” (Naturally, Jack thought that Mr. Ramsey and Ginny were referring to the contents of Sandra’s vomit.)
For the first two acts of the play, Jack kept stealing looks at Bonnie Hamilton, whose eyes not once met his. Jack caught only a few backstage glimpses of the audi
ence. Peewee seemed to be enjoying himself. Mrs. Peewee had removed the stuffed parrot from her head. The Wurtz spent much of the evening scowling and muttering to Mrs. McQuat. The Gray Ghost was in character, unreadable most of the time. Mrs. Oastler looked bored—she had no doubt seen better theater in her sophisticated life. Emma fidgeted in her seat; she’d been to most of the rehearsals and was interested only in what would happen with the blood.
When Jack-as-Darlin’-Jenny shot Ginny-as-Halliday twice with the starting gun, Peewee jumped to his feet and pumped both fists in the air. (Miss Wurtz, knowing the shots were coming, had covered her ears.) Alice, who hadn’t read the play and had only the dimmest idea of its heavy-handed subject, looked growingly appalled. When the gun went off, she flinched as if she’d been shot.
The curtain fell at the end of Act Two; the houselights came up and revealed more of the audience. But from backstage, Jack’s attention lingered on the first row. Peewee was still excited about the shooting. Emma was chewing gum. Miss Wurtz appeared to be delivering a lengthy critique of the play, and no doubt the entire subject of menstruation, to a taciturn Mrs. McQuat. Alice and Mrs. Oastler were holding hands.
Why were they holding hands? Jack wondered. He knew that this was fairly common among Dutch women and other Europeans, but he’d not seen any Canadian women holding hands—some of the girls at St. Hilda’s excluded. Young women or girls occasionally held hands, but not women the age of Alice and Leslie Oastler. Furthermore, Emma’s mom had kicked off her shoes. With one bare foot, smaller than Emma’s, she was stroking Alice’s bare calf. Jack looked uncomprehendingly upon this curious behavior. He had not yet made the leap, which Emma would make before him, regarding why his mother and Mrs. Oastler wanted to live alone in such a big house; that Emma and Jack were a “bad combination” was only part of the reason.
