by John Irving
“It depends on whether or not you want children, Jack,” Claudia said.
Jack let go of her breasts and rolled over, turning his back to her in the bed. Claudia rolled toward him, wrapping her arm around his waist and once more holding his penis.
“We don’t graduate from college for another two years,” Jack pointed out to her.
“I don’t mean I want children now, Jack.”
He’d already told Claudia that he never wanted children. “Not till the day I discover that my dad has been a loving father to a child, or children, he didn’t leave.” That was how Jack had put it to her.
Was it any wonder Claudia held herself back from him?
Yet they had fun together—in summer stock, especially. The previous summer, they’d done Romeo and Juliet in a playhouse in the Berkshires. The older, veteran actors got all the main parts. Claudia was Juliet’s understudy. The dull, flat-chested robot they cast as Juliet never missed a night’s performance—not even a matinee. Jack had wanted to be Romeo—or, failing that, Mercutio—but because he’d been a wrestler and looked confrontational, they made him Tybalt, that cocky asshole.
Claudia was always taking their picture; maybe she thought that if there were sufficient photographic evidence of them as a couple, they might stay together. She had a camera with a delayed-shutter mechanism; she would set the timer and then run to get in the photo. (The obsessive picture-taking sometimes made Jack wonder if Claudia just might have mistaken him for the love of her life.)
After their visit to Emma, Claudia and Jack did a García Lorca play—The House of Bernarda Alba—at a summer playhouse in Connecticut. The setting was Spain, 1936. Claudia and Jack both played women. Jack had eaten some bad clams and was food-poisoned for one evening performance. There was no intermission. The director, who was also a woman, told him to “suck it up and wear a longer skirt.” His understudy had a yeast infection, and the director was more sympathetic to her ailment than she was to Jack’s. (There were nine women in the cast, plus Jack.)
He had terrible stomach cramps and diarrhea. In the grip of an alarmingly explosive episode, he flinched so violently that one of his falsies slipped out of his bra; he managed to trap it against his ribs with his elbow. Claudia later told him that he looked as if he were mocking the moment of the playwright’s assassination in the Spanish Civil War; Jack was thankful García Lorca was not alive to suffer through his performance.
“What a learning experience!” Mr. Ramsey responded, when Jack wrote him about the long night of the bad clams.
Miss Wurtz would have been proud of him; never had he concentrated with such pinpoint accuracy on his audience of one. He could almost see his father in the audience. (It was the perfect play for William, Jack was thinking—all women!)
Claudia and Jack were both understudies that summer in Cabaret, their first musical. He was the understudy to the Emcee, a Brit who told Jack pointedly on opening night not to get his hopes up; he’d never been sick a day in his life. Jack’s heart wasn’t in the Emcee role, anyway. He would have been a better Sally Bowles than the woman who was cast as Sally—even better than Claudia, who was her understudy.
But it would have been too aggressive a moment in their relationship—had Jack auditioned for the Sally Bowles character and beaten out Claudia for the part. They spent a month singing “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” and “Maybe This Time” to each other—in the privacy of their boudoir, where all understudies shine.
But he and Claudia were cast as Kit Kat Girls in Cabaret, so they got to strut their stuff to an audience. Given the scant costume, not to mention the period—Berlin, 1929–30—Jack was a somewhat transparent transvestite, but the audience loved him. Claudia said she was jealous because he looked hotter than she did.
“You better be careful, Jack,” Claudia warned him. It was the summer they were both twenty. “If you get any better in drag, no one’s going to cast you as a guy anymore.” (Under the circumstances, Jack thought it was better not to tell her how badly he had wanted the Sally Bowles part.)
How well he would remember that summer in Connecticut. When Sally Bowles and the Kit Kat Girls sang “Don’t Tell Mama” and “Mein Herr,” Jack was looking right at the audience; he saw their faces. They were staring at him, the transvestite Kit Kat Girl—not at Sally. They couldn’t take their eyes off him. Every man in that audience made his skin crawl.
Both Claudia and Jack were good enough students to skip a few classes in order to attend the film festival in Toronto that September. Their teachers permitted them to write about the movies they saw, in place of the work they would miss—Jack’s first and last adventure in film criticism, except at small dinner parties.
When he took Claudia to Daughter Alice to meet his mother for the first time, Jack was questioning Claudia’s claim that she had seen Raul Julia coming out of a men’s room at the Park Plaza. Alice immediately took Claudia’s side. Jack knew that film festivals were full of such real or imagined sightings, but he wanted his mom and Claudia to like each other; he held his tongue.
Alice was tattooing a small scorpion on a young woman’s abdomen. The scorpion’s narrow, segmented tail was curled up over its back. The venomous stinger, at the tip of the tail, was directly under the girl’s navel; the arachnid’s pincers were poised above her pubic hair. The young woman was obviously disturbed—she would be a handful under the best of circumstances, Jack thought, although he held his tongue about that, too. He could see that Claudia was enthralled with the atmosphere of the tattoo parlor; he didn’t want to be the voice of disbelief, about either the Raul Julia sighting or the forbidding location of the scorpion tattoo.
The film festival was good for Daughter Alice’s business. Alice told them she’d been tattooing a guy who was a die-hard moviegoer when she saw Glenn Close walk by on the Queen Street sidewalk. Jack seriously doubted it. He didn’t think Queen and Palmerston was a Glenn Close part of town, but all he said was: “I’m surprised Glenn didn’t stop in for a Rose of Jericho.”
Claudia, who was instantly fond of Alice—as Emma had said she would be—was angry at Jack for what she called his disrespectful tone of voice. This created some tension between Claudia and Jack, and they had different reactions to My Beautiful Laundrette, which Alice and Mrs. Oastler and Claudia loved. Jack didn’t hate the film. All he said was: “I was expecting the laundrette to be a beautiful woman.”
“That would be a laundress, dear,” his mom said.
“I thought the word for the place was a launderette, not a laundrette,” Jack said.
“God, you’re picky,” Claudia told him.
“Talk about a ‘disrespectful tone of voice’!” he said.
And Jack was less than thrilled to see Desert Hearts, which even Leslie Oastler described as a lesbian love story—she’d been dying to see it. (Alice visibly less so.) The film drew a crowd of women holding hands. Claudia, who wouldn’t hold Jack’s penis at any film they attended with Alice and Mrs. Oastler, wouldn’t even hold his hand at Desert Hearts. It was as if Claudia were contemplating her own trip to Reno, without him; maybe Claudia imagined discovering herself with Helen Shaver, or something.
All Jack said was: “The characters are a little sketchy.” This was enough to turn all three women against him: he was homophobic; he was threatened by lesbians. “I like Helen Shaver,” he kept saying, but this didn’t save him.
The festival marked the beginning of an Asian boom, some guy hitting on Claudia told her at a screening party. Jack thought it was cool to say nothing; he just kept his hand on Claudia’s ass, in a clearly nonplatonic way. When Claudia went to the women’s room, Jack gave the Asian-boom asshole his Toshiro Mifune scowl. The guy slunk away.
Alice and Leslie lit into Jack about being “too possessive.” They loved Claudia, they told him. No woman likes to be touched in public—not to the degree that Jack touched Claudia, they said. (This advice from the couple who’d held hands and played footsie during Jack’s ground-breaking performance i
n A Mail-Order Bride in the Northwest Territories!)
Jack had had it with going to the movies and the parties with his mother and Mrs. Oastler. That night, in bed, he complained to Claudia about it. They were staying in Emma’s room. (“The bed’s bigger—as you know, dear,” his mom had reminded him.)
Claudia thought that Alice and Leslie were a cute couple. “It’s obvious that they adore you,” Claudia said. Perhaps Jack lacked the perspective to see this.
He decided to take Claudia to St. Hilda’s—not only so she could see his old school, which had been so formative of his older-woman thing, but also to meet his favorite teachers. What a mistake! All the girls looked preternaturally young. (Of course they did—Claudia and Jack were twenty-year-olds!)
Jack took Claudia first to meet Mr. Malcolm, who always left school in a hurry—wheeling Mrs. Malcolm in her wheelchair ahead of him. Wheelchair Jane, who couldn’t see Claudia, reached out and touched Claudia’s hips, her waist, even her breasts. (A blind woman’s audacity is like no other’s, maybe.) “Following in his father’s footsteps, isn’t he?” she asked her husband.
Jack was still trying to explain this reference to Claudia when they encountered Mr. Ramsey emerging from the boys’ washroom. “Jack Burns!” he cried, zipping up his fly. “Patron saint of mail-order brides!” This reference, Jack realized, would take somewhat longer to explain. Claudia seemed unnerved by her close proximity to a man so small who never stopped bouncing on the balls of his feet.
Mr. Ramsey insisted on bringing them to his after-school drama rehearsal of the day; the senior-school girls were doing The Diary of Anne Frank, which Jack knew brought bitter memories to Claudia. In junior high school, she had auditioned for the part of the doomed girl, but she had already looked too old. (Her boobs were too big—even then.)
Mr. Ramsey presented Jack to the girls as the best male St. Hilda’s actor in memory—despite the fact that his reputation rested on his female roles. Claudia was introduced as Jack’s actress friend. “They’re here for the film festival!” Mr. Ramsey exclaimed, which led the star-struck girls to imagine that Claudia and Jack were promoting a new movie. Mr. Ramsey made it seem as if they were up-and-coming names in the industry.
Jack was reminded of his irritation with Claudia for refusing to let him pass her off as a famous Russian film star of the not-English-speaking variety. Her courage was not of the improvisational kind—without lines, she was lost. And not only did she always seem older than she was; she was also inclined to lie about her age. “I’m in my early thirties, and that’s all I want to say about it,” she would say. It was a good line, but it was bullshit—by ten years, and counting.
The St. Hilda’s girls looked forlorn. Jack Burns was very much an object of their keenest desire, but he was with this voluptuous woman who made them feel sexually retarded. To make matters worse, Mr. Ramsey wanted Claudia and Jack to perform something. (Jack had written him that he and Claudia had been in plays together.)
Against Jack’s better judgment, he let Claudia persuade him to sing a Kit Kat Girl number. “Mein Herr” was Claudia’s choice, not Jack’s; it was a little raunchy for St. Hilda’s, he told her later. (In retrospect, in the context of the play the girls were rehearsing, the insensitivity of Claudia and Jack singing a song from that sleazy Nazi nightclub in Berlin took Jack’s breath away.) And to make “Mein Herr” more confounding, they both sang it as if they were Sally Bowles, causing Claudia finally to realize how much Jack had wanted her part.
When they finished the lascivious song, Mr. Ramsey was a virtual pogo stick of enthusiasm. The poor girls swooned, or died of envy and embarrassment. Claudia said that she and Jack should let them all get back to The Diary of Anne Frank.
But Mr. Ramsey was pained to let them go. He wanted to know what they thought of the festival and the films they had seen. “Have you seen the Godard? Hail Mary or something,” Mr. Ramsey said. “The Pope has condemned it!”
“Jack has condemned it without seeing it,” Claudia said. “He hates Godard.” Jack tried to look friendlier than Toshiro Mifune, if only for the sake of the mortified girls.
The young girl cast as Anne Frank was pushed forward to meet them. Claudia seemed fixated on her flat chest. Jack observed that the poor girl was terrified of them, as if they represented a blatant contradiction of Anne Frank’s most memorable observation, which Claudia knew by heart and recited (without a hint of sarcasm) on the spot. “ ‘It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.’ ”
“Marvelous!” Mr. Ramsey cried. “A trifle deadpan for Anne, perhaps, but marvelous!”
“We have to go,” Claudia told him, mercifully.
The girls were all looking at Jack as if Claudia had been holding his penis in front of them. Claudia was looking at Jack as if not even Godard’s Hail Mary could be as excruciatingly boring as this journey through time on his old stomping grounds.
Jack was actually tempted to see the Godard film, because the Catholics were up in arms about it and had threatened to protest the Toronto screening. But Claudia didn’t like Godard any better than he did. (Hail Mary was an update of Christ’s birth, this time to a virgin gas-station attendant and her cabdriver boyfriend.)
It was in this disturbed frame of mind—Claudia hating Jack for bringing her to his old school, Jack wishing that he had not come (or that he’d come alone)—that the sudden appearance of The Gray Ghost startled Claudia and Jack, just as Jack was about to show Claudia the chapel. Claudia made such an immediate impression on Mrs. McQuat that Jack’s former fourth-grade teacher ushered them both up the center aisle and into the foremost pew, where she insisted they sit down; at least she didn’t make them kneel.
Claudia was not religious and later told Jack she was offended by the stained-glass images of “those servile women attending to Jesus.” Mrs. McQuat held Claudia’s hand and Jack’s; she asked them in a low whisper when they were going to be married. That Claudia and Jack were still students was a point lost on The Gray Ghost, who’d heard a rumor spreading like a forest fire through the girls at St. Hilda’s—namely, that Jack Burns had been seen at the film festival in the company of an American movie star, apparently Claudia. He’d brought her to St. Hilda’s to show her the chapel. The rumor was that Jack wanted to be married in the chapel of his old school, where he’d had such a formative experience.
“We haven’t really made any plans,” Jack said, not knowing how else to answer Mrs. McQuat’s question.
“I’m never going to marry Jack,” Claudia told The Gray Ghost. “I’m not marrying anybody who doesn’t want to have children.”
“Mercy!” Mrs. McQuat exclaimed. “Why . . . wouldn’t you want to have . . . children . . . Jack?”
“You know,” he answered.
“He says it’s all about his father,” Claudia told her.
“You’re not . . . still worrying . . . you’ll turn out like him . . . are you, Jack?” The Gray Ghost asked.
“It’s a reasonable suspicion,” he said.
“Nonsense!” Mrs. McQuat cried. “Do you know . . . what I think?” she asked Claudia, patting her hand. “I think it’s just an excuse . . . not to marry anybody!”
“That’s what I think, too,” Claudia said.
Jack felt like Jesus in the stained glass; everywhere he went in Toronto, women were ganging up on him. He must have looked like he wanted to leave, because The Gray Ghost took hold of his wrist in that not-uncertain way of hers.
“You aren’t leaving without seeing . . . Miss Wurtz . . . are you?” she asked him. “Mercy, she’ll be . . . crushed if she learns you were here . . . and you didn’t see her!”
“Oh.”
“You should take Caroline . . . to the film festival, Jack,” Mrs. McQuat went on. “She’s too timid to go to the movies . . . by herself.”
The Gray Ghost was al
ways the voice of Jack’s conscience. Later he would be ashamed that he never told her how much she meant to him, or even what a good teacher she was.
Mrs. McQuat would die in the St. Hilda’s chapel—after having disciplined one of Miss Wurtz’s misbehaving third graders, whom she’d faced away from the altar with his back turned to God. Mrs. McQuat dropped dead in the center aisle, a passageway she had made her own, with her back turned to God and with only God’s eyes and those of the third grader who was being punished to see her fall. (That poor kid—talk about a formative experience!)
Miss Wurtz must have come running as soon as she heard—crying all the way.
Jack didn’t go to The Gray Ghost’s funeral. He learned she had died only after the funeral, when his mother told him something about Mrs. McQuat that he was surprised he hadn’t guessed. She was no Mrs. anybody; no one had ever married her. Like Miss Wurtz, she was a Miss McQuat—for life. But something in her combat-nurse nature refused to acknowledge that she was unmarried, which in those days obdurately implied you were unloved.
Jack used to wonder why The Gray Ghost had trusted his mom with this secret. They weren’t friends. Then he remembered Mrs. McQuat telling him not to complain about a woman who knew how to keep a secret—meaning Alice. (Meaning herself as well.)
It was only a mild shock to discover that The Gray Ghost had been a Miss instead of a Mrs. In retrospect, Jack wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that Mrs. McQuat—as she preferred to be called—had been a man.
Alice and Mrs. Oastler attended The Gray Ghost’s funeral, which was in the St. Hilda’s chapel. Being a St. Hilda’s Old Girl, Leslie was informed of all the school news. As for Alice, she told Jack she went out of “nostalgia,” which he would remember thinking at the time was an uncharacteristic word for her to use—not to mention an uncharacteristic feeling for her to have.
