by John Irving
In fifth grade, Jack recited Anne Bradstreet’s “To My Dear and Loving Husband.” Dressed in Mrs. Adkins’s prim but faded clothes, he managed to convey the hardships of early colonial life and the duties of a Puritan housewife, which Mrs. Bradstreet had so stoically endured.
Jack was also the ravishingly beautiful ghost (the guillotined young woman) in Washington Irving’s gothic story “Adventure of the German Student.” His black dress had been Mrs. Adkins’s nightgown once—possibly at a time when Mr. Adkins had traveled less.
He was the poisoned Beatrice in Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter”; befitting his death in a garden, Jack wore something summery, which Mrs. Adkins remembered wearing to an old friend’s wedding. He was in sixth grade when he did “Sigh No More, Ladies”—that little ditty from Much Ado About Nothing. Shakespeare was a favorite of Mrs. Adkins. Jack wore one of her pleated skirts when he sang “Under the Greenwood Tree” from As You Like It.
He would remember her saying: “Why, that skirt looks so nice on you, Jack. I just might wear it again!”
On his first Drama Night as a boy, it was a mild surprise that—even then—Mrs. Adkins dressed him in her clothes. (Black slacks, a long-sleeved white blouse with a ruffled collar.) Jack did “O Mistress Mine” from Twelfth Night, and Mrs. Adkins scolded him for saying his end line to her—not to the audience:
Youth’s a stuff will not endure.
Indeed not; Mrs. Adkins seemed to sense that this was so. She made Jack sing “Take, Oh, Take Those Lips Away” from Measure for Measure. (His voice had not yet changed, but it was changing.)
By the seventh grade, Jack was getting a little too muscular for Mrs. Adkins’s clothes. But even when Jack was in the eighth grade, no boy at Redding was a better girl. He had pubic hair early, but his facial hair came late and his beard would never be heavy. He missed Emma, and faithfully thought of her when he masturbated. He couldn’t get used to taking showers with boys; Jack didn’t like looking at the other boys’ penises. When he admitted this to Mrs. Adkins, she told him to memorize a poem and say it to himself in the shower.
On those weekends when Mr. Adkins was away, Jack visited Mrs. Adkins in the headmaster’s house, where she would dress him in her clothes—the ones she was not yet ready to donate to Drama Night. An ivory camisole with a built-in shelf bra; a bouclé lace turtleneck; a velour cardigan; a crinkled silk shirt; a satin-trimmed wrap sweater. For a small woman, Mrs. Adkins had big feet—Jack could wear her beaded jade mules.
She never touched him first, nor did she once need to tell him to touch her. While she dressed him—often in the clothes she was wearing at the time, which meant that Mrs. Adkins undressed herself first—she stood so close to him, and she smelled so nice, that he could not resist touching her. The first time he did so, she closed her eyes and held her breath—compelling him to touch her more. It was a seduction quite the opposite of Mrs. Machado’s assertive kind; yet Jack was aware that he had the confidence to touch Mrs. Adkins because Mrs. Machado had shown him how. Mrs. Adkins never asked him how, at thirteen, he knew where to touch her.
Maybe she should have had a daughter, Jack found himself thinking once—when Mrs. Adkins was dressing him in her favorite velvet top. (For fun, she put lemons in the underwire bra—being a small-breasted woman herself.) Jack would learn, much later, that Mrs. Adkins and her husband had had a son and lost him. The boy’s death was an underlying reason for the permanent air of sadness that had first attracted Jack to Mrs. Adkins, although Jack didn’t know this at the time.
“I love you in my clothes,” was all she told him.
Having cast Jack in his seventh-grade year as Mildred Douglas in Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape, Mrs. Adkins loved him so much as Mildred that she perversely cast him the following year as Mildred’s cantankerous aunt. In that, his final year at Redding, when Jack was lying in her arms, Mrs. Adkins liked to test his memory of cue lines in the dark. In the husky voice of the Second Engineer in The Hairy Ape, she said: “ ‘You’ll likely rub against oil and dirt. It can’t be helped.’ ”
Rubbing against her, Jack-as-Mildred replied: “ ‘It doesn’t matter. I have lots of white dresses.’ ” All hers; every dress he wore on Drama Night had once been worn by Mrs. Adkins. How at home he felt in her clothes.
Except when he was wrestling, Jack took few trips away from Redding. Since Toronto was so far, he would generally spend American Thanksgiving in Boston—actually in nearby Cambridge—with his roommate, Noah. Jack went back to Toronto for Christmas, and for the misnomered spring break, which was in March or April—when it was barely more springlike in Toronto than it was in Maine. (It was never spring in Maine.)
But as a wrestler, he got to see a lot of New England. Coach Clum once took the team as far as New York State, to a tournament where even Loomis lost. It was the only time Jack saw Loomis lose, although Loomis—in addition to losing his parents and older sister—had other losses ahead. He would be expelled from Blair Academy for getting a referee’s underage daughter pregnant. Loomis gave up an opportunity for a college wrestling scholarship because of it. He became a Navy SEAL instead. He was stabbed to death somewhere in the Philippines, while on a perilous undercover mission, perhaps, or drunk and rowdy in a bar—in either case, his killer was reputed to be a transvestite prostitute.
But Loomis was the model Jack aspired to on the Redding wrestling team. Jack was never as good a wrestler as Loomis was, although in Jack’s last two years at Redding, he managed to win more matches than he lost.
If someone had been taking his picture on Drama Night, Jack would have known it, but he wouldn’t have known if someone was watching or taking pictures when he was wrestling—he wouldn’t have heard the click of the camera shutter or the noise of the crowd. When Jack was wrestling, he even lost sight of his audience of one. In a wrestling match, either you take command of your opponent or you lose; you wrestle in an empty space, to an audience of none. And after Loomis left Redding, Jack was the team leader—for the first time, he had responsibilities.
He was the leader on the team bus, too. His teammates were either asleep and farting—or doing their homework with flashlights and farting. (They were instructed to create a minimum of distractions for the bus driver.)
Sometimes Jack would tell stories on the way back to Redding. He told the one about the littlest soldier saving him from the Kastelsgraven, and the one about putting the bandage on Ingrid Moe’s breast after his mom tattooed her there. He told the one about Saskia’s bracelets, including how horribly one of her customers had burned her—but not the one about his mom breaking her pearl necklace in her efforts to be an advice-giver to that young boy in Amsterdam. And nothing about Mrs. Machado, of course.
Jack bragged that his “stepsister,” Emma, could beat anyone on the Redding wrestling team, with the exception of Loomis, who at that time hadn’t yet been kicked out of Blair. (Everyone at Redding, except Noah and Mrs. Adkins, thought that Jack’s mother was a famous tattoo artist who lived with a guy named Mr. Oastler, who was Emma’s dad.)
Possibly Jack told these stories because he missed not only Emma but also his mother and Mrs. Oastler—even Mrs. Machado, or at least her roughness, which was nowhere to be found in the gentler persuasions of Mrs. Adkins. Maybe he missed Mrs. Machado’s crudeness, too.
Jack also told the story of his greatest onstage triumph to date, which was his role in A Mail-Order Bride in the Northwest Territories. This was a dangerous story to tell on the team bus. Coach Clum objected to the word menstruation; once when Jack used it, the coach put down a half-point against the boy.
In his eighth-grade year, when Jack was co-captain of the wrestling team, they had a lightweight named Lambrecht—a new sixth grader from Arizona. He had grown up in the desert and had never seen snow before, let alone a road sign saying FROST HEAVES.
He must have had some difficulty reading in the dark, and the road signs out the window of the moving bus went by very fast at night, because Lambrecht asked, o
f no one in particular: “What’s a frost heavy?” His question hung there in the semidark bus; the sleepers and nonstop farters never stirred. Jack was memorizing Matthew Arnold at that moment. He turned off his flashlight and waited to see if anyone would answer Lambrecht. “We don’t have frost heavies in Arizona,” Lambrecht continued.
“Frost heavies are hard to see at night,” Jack told Lambrecht. “They’re so low to the ground that the headlights don’t reflect in their eyes, and they’re the color of the road.”
“But what are they?” Lambrecht asked.
Those bus rides were pure improv! “Look, just don’t go out of your dorm at night, Lambrecht—not at this time of year. Frost heavies are nocturnal.”
“But what do frost heavies do?” Lambrecht asked. He was getting agitated, in the peculiar way that lightweights express their agitation—his voice was pretty shrill under normal circumstances. That must have been what prompted Mike Heller, the team’s heavyweight, to put an end to Jack’s game. Heller was a humorless soul. He was a grumpy guy with too much baby fat to be a legitimate heavyweight; he never won a match, at least not one Jack saw.
“For Christ’s sake, Lambrecht, can’t you read?” Heller asked. “The sign says frost heaves, not frost heavies. You know heaves, like heaves in the road? Fucking potholes, you moron!”
“That’s one and a half points against you, Mike—correction, make that two,” Coach Clum said. (He was never really asleep.) “A half-point for Christ, a half-point for fucking, and one full point for moron, which you truly are, Lambrecht—but moron is a derogatory word, if I ever heard one.”
“Damn!” Heller said.
“Make that two and a half,” Coach Clum said.
“So frost heaves are just bumps in the road?” Lambrecht asked.
“I’m surprised you don’t have frost in Arizona,” Jack said.
“In parts of Arizona, we do,” Lambrecht replied. “We just don’t have the road signs—or the heaves, I guess.”
“Jesus, Lambrecht!” Heller cried.
“That’s three, Heller,” Coach Clum said. “You’re not having a very good road trip.”
“When does Heller ever have a good road trip?” Jack asked. He had no points against him for the month. He knew he could afford one.
To Jack’s surprise, Coach Clum said: “That’s two against you, Burns. It is derogatory of you to call our attention to Heller’s losing record, but it’s also dismissive of Lambrecht’s intelligence to encourage him to imagine that frost heavies exist, that they have eyes and are low to the ground—”
“—and they’re the color of the fucking road!” Lambrecht interrupted him.
“That’s a half-point against you, Lambrecht,” Coach Clum said.
They were somewhere in Rhode Island, or maybe it was Massachusetts. They were a long way from Maine, Jack knew. How he loved those nights! He turned his flashlight back on and redirected his thoughts to the task of memorizing “Dover Beach”—not a short poem, and one with an overlong first stanza.
“ ‘The sea is calm tonight,’ ” Jack read aloud, thinking it magnanimous of him to change the subject.
“Save it for Drama Night, Burns,” Coach Clum said. “Just memorize it to yourself, if you don’t mind.”
He wasn’t a bad guy, Coach Clum, but he never accepted what he presumed was the vanity of Jack having his cauliflower ears drained. When Mike Heller called Jack a “sissy” for not wanting to go through the rest of his life with cauliflower ears, Coach Clum not only awarded a point against Heller for sissy, which was clearly derogatory—the coach made Heller get his next cauliflower ear drained. “Does it hurt, Mike?” Coach Clum asked the heavyweight, standing over him while the fluid from the damaged ear was being extracted in the training room.
“Yeah,” Heller answered. “It hurts.”
“Well, then, the right word for Burns wouldn’t be sissy, would it?” the coach asked. “Vain, maybe,” Coach Clum said, “but not sissy.”
“Okay, Burns is vain, then,” Heller said, wincing.
“Right you are, Mike,” Coach Clum said. “But vain is a point against you, too.”
One night on the team bus, when Coach Clum and Jack were the only ones awake, Jack had a somewhat philosophical conversation with him. “I want to be an actor,” he told his coach. “I wouldn’t say it was vain for an actor not to want cauliflower ears. I would say it was practical.”
“Hmm,” Coach Clum said. Maybe he wasn’t really awake, Jack thought. But Coach Clum was just thinking it over. “Let me put it to you this way, Jack,” he said. “If it turns out that you’re a movie star, I’ll tell everyone that you were one of the most practical wrestlers I ever had the privilege to coach.”
“I see,” Jack said. “And if I don’t make it as an actor—”
“Well, making it is the point, isn’t it, Jack? If you don’t turn out to be a movie star, I’ll tell everyone that I never coached a wrestler as vain about his ears as Jack Burns.”
“I’ll bet you it turns out being a practical decision,” Jack told him.
“What’s that, Jack?”
“I’ll bet you a whole dollar that I make it as an actor,” the boy said.
“Since we’re the only ones awake,” Coach Clum whispered, “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that, Jack.” It was the school philosophy again. As Mr. Ramsey (who had read the handbook more carefully than Jack) could have told him, there was no gambling at Redding. Jack shut his eyes and prayed for sleep, but Coach Clum went on whispering in the dark bus. “Memorize this, Jack,” the coach whispered. “If I had to guess—guess, I say, not bet—you’re going to end up being a starter somewhere.”
“You can count on it,” Jack told him.
That was Redding. To Jack’s surprise, and Emma’s—not to mention how shocked Alice and Mrs. Oastler were—he loved the place. It was what such schools are, or can be, to some boys. You travel to what seems, or is, a foreign country; your troubles may travel with you, but nonetheless you fit in. Jack Burns had never fit in before.
17
Michele Maher, and Others
Jack did not fit in at Exeter, where he was admitted on the strength of Redding’s reputation for building character—with the additional support, in the admissions office, of Exeter’s wrestling coach, who knew that Coach Clum’s boys were “grinders.” Jack was a grinder—a hard-nosed kid, if little more—and while he was good enough to wrestle on the Exeter team, he was not at all prepared for how difficult a school Phillips Exeter Academy was.
That Noah Rosen was also admitted to Exeter (Noah deserved to be) was Jack’s salvation. Coach Hudson, the Exeter wrestling coach, further intervened on Jack’s behalf: the coach arranged for Noah to be Jack’s roommate, and Noah helped Jack with his homework. Jack’s memorization skills notwithstanding, Exeter was so academically demanding, so intellectually rigorous, that his abilities at mere mimicry just couldn’t keep up. The memorization helped him, both as a wrestler and as an actor-to-be, but Noah Rosen kept him in school.
Jack rewarded Noah by sleeping with his older sister, who was a college student at Radcliffe at the time. Jack had met Leah Rosen at one of the Thanksgivings he spent with Noah and his family in Cambridge. Leah was four years older than Noah and Jack; she was at Andover while they were at Redding, and she entered Radcliffe when they began at Exeter. She was not especially pretty, but she had wonderful hair and a Gibson girl’s bosom—and she was attractive to Jack in what was becoming a familiar, older-woman way.
Noah was his best friend; a nonathlete, he was nevertheless closer to Jack than any of Jack’s wrestler friends. When Leah dropped out of Radcliffe for a semester—not just to have an abortion but to worry obsessively about it—Noah didn’t know Jack was the father.
After he’d stopped sleeping with Leah and was having an affair with a married woman who worked as a dishwasher in the academy kitchen—Mrs. Stackpole was a short, stout woman with several mercifully faded tattoos—Jack learned from Noah that Leah was
depressed and seeing a psychiatrist. Jack still didn’t tell him.
Unlike at Redding, where everyone had a work-job, the only work-jobs at Exeter were done by the scholarship students. Noah was a scholarship kid at Exeter. Once, when Noah was sick, Jack took his work-job in the school dining hall; he collected the used trays from the cafeteria and carried them into the kitchen, which is how and when he came to know Mrs. Stackpole.
He visited Mrs. Stackpole midmornings, between classes, in her small, shabby house near the gasworks. Jack came and went in a hurry, because Mrs. Stackpole’s husband worked in the gasworks and always ate his lunch at home. The lunch, a leftover from the previous evening’s supper, was warming in the oven while Mrs. Stackpole spread a towel on the living-room couch and she and Jack engaged in a combative kind of lovemaking—reminiscent of the boy’s initiation to sex with Mrs. Machado. The dishwasher’s heavy breathing was accompanied by a whistling sound, which Jack first thought was coming from the husband’s mystery lunch; perhaps it was about to explode in the oven. But Mrs. Stackpole suffered from a deviated nasal septum, the result of a broken nose her husband had given her. (Possibly because of an unsavory lunchtime experience—Mrs. Stackpole never explained the circumstances to Jack.)
He couldn’t imagine that she’d ever been attractive, nor could he have articulated why he was attracted to her (in part) for that reason—her glum, expressionless face, the downturned corners of her sullen mouth, her oily skin, the bad tattoos, and what she referred to as the “love handles” girdling her thick waist—but the dishwasher was passionate about certain sexual positions, wherein Mrs. Adkins had merely sighed or taken some evident pains to endure. Among these was Mrs. Stackpole’s preference for the top position, which allowed her to look down on Jack while she mounted and rode him.
“You’re too good-lookin’ for a guy,” she told him once, during one such rough ride.
