by John Irving
Alice was vague about who else was in attendance. “Caroline, of course.” She didn’t mean Caroline French—she meant Miss Wurtz. The other Caroline didn’t attend, and Jack knew that her twin, Gordon, was absent. (Gordon was dead—the aforementioned boating accident had precluded his attendance.)
Jack asked his mother if she’d been aware of blanket-sucking sounds, or moaning, during the funeral; by his mom’s puzzled response, he knew that the Booth twins and Jimmy Bacon had skipped the event, or they’d been out of town.
Lucinda Fleming, with or without her mysterious rage, made no reference to The Gray Ghost’s passing in her annual Christmas letter; if Lucinda had gone to the funeral, Jack was sure she would have told everyone about it. And he knew Roland Simpson wasn’t there—Roland was already in jail.
The faculty who were in attendance are easily imagined. Miss Wong, mourning in broken bits and pieces, as if the hurricane she was born in showed itself only in squalls—or only at funerals. Mr. Malcolm, guiding his wife in her wheelchair; the poor man was forever trying to steer Wheelchair Jane around the looming obstacles of her madness. Mr. Ramsey, too restless to sit in a pew, would have been bouncing on the balls of his feet at the back of the chapel. And Miss Wurtz—my goodness, how she must have cried!
“Caroline was overcome,” Alice told Jack.
He could see Miss Wurtz overcome as clearly as if she were still leaning over his incorrect math and he were still breathing her in. (In Jack’s dreams, The Wurtz’s mail-order bra and panties were always properly in place—no matter how overcome she was.)
Yet how could Miss Wurtz have gone on being the St. Hilda’s grade-three teacher? How could she have managed her classroom without The Gray Ghost there to bail her out?
It was Leslie Oastler who told Jack that, upon Mrs. McQuat’s death, Miss Wurtz became a better teacher; finally, Miss Wurtz had to learn how. But at The Gray Ghost’s funeral, there was no stopping The Wurtz. She cried and cried without hope of rescue. Miss Wurtz must have cried until all her tears were gone, and then—one breakthrough day in her grade-three classroom—she never cried again.
Jack thought Caroline Wurtz must still be saying in her nightly prayers, “God bless you, Mrs. McQuat.”
As Jack occasionally remembered to say in his, although not as often—and never as fervently—as he used to say, without cease, “Michele Maher, Michele Maher, Michele Maher.”
19
Claudia, Who Would Haunt Him
Jack would never entirely forgive The Gray Ghost for suggesting that he and Claudia take Miss Wurtz to the film festival in Toronto in the fall of 1985. The Wurtz was in her forties at the time—not that much older than Alice in years, but noticeably older in appearance and stamina. Possibly she had always been too thin, too fragile, but now what was most Wurtz-like about her was a gauntness Jack associated with illness. Miss Wurtz was still beautiful in her damaged way, but she not only looked a little unhealthy; she seemed ashamed of something, although Jack couldn’t imagine what she had ever done to be ashamed of. Perhaps there’d been a long-ago scandal—something so fleeting that it was barely remembered by others, although the memory of it was alive and throbbing in The Wurtz.
Her appearance seemed contrary to her restrained, even abstemious character, because what Caroline Wurtz most resembled was an actress of a bygone era—a once-famous woman who’d become overlooked. At least this was the impression Caroline made at the film festival, where Claudia and Jack took her to the premiere of Paul Schrader’s Mishima. “Remind me who Mishima is,” Miss Wurtz said as they approached the theater.
The ever-persistent photographers, who often snapped pictures of Claudia—because Claudia was such a babe and the photographers had convinced themselves that she must be someone—turned their attention to Miss Wurtz instead. She was overdressed for the film-festival crowd, like a woman who found herself at a rock concert when she’d thought she was going to an opera. Jack was wearing black jeans and a black linen jacket with a white T-shirt. (“An L.A. look,” in Claudia’s estimation, though she’d never been to Los Angeles.)
The younger photographers, especially, assumed that Caroline Wurtz was someone—possibly someone who’d made her last movie before any of them had been born. “You’d have thought she was Joan Crawford,” Claudia said later. Claudia was poured into a shimmery dress with spaghetti straps, but she was a good sport about the photographers being all over The Wurtz.
“Goodness,” Miss Wurtz whispered, “they must think you’re already famous, Jack.” It was sweet how she believed the fuss was about him. “I’m completely convinced you soon will be,” The Wurtz added, squeezing his hand. “And you, too, dear,” she said to Claudia, who squeezed her hand back.
“I thought she was dead!” an older man said. Jack didn’t catch the name of the actress from yesteryear for whom Miss Wurtz had been mistaken.
“Is Mishima a dancer?” Caroline asked.
“No, a writer—” Jack started to say, but Claudia cut him off.
“He was a writer,” Claudia corrected him.
And an actor, a director, and a militarist nutcase, which Jack didn’t have time to say. They were swept inside the theater, where they were ushered to the reserved seats—all because of the prevailing conviction that Caroline Wurtz was not a third-grade teacher but a movie star.
Jack heard the word “European,” probably in reference to Miss Wurtz’s dress, which was a pale-peach color and might have fit her once—perhaps in Edmonton. Now it appeared that The Wurtz was diminished by the dress, which would have been more suitable for a prom than a premiere. The dress was something Mrs. Adkins might have donated for Drama Night at Redding, yet it had a gauzy quality, like underwear, which reminded Jack of the mail-order lingerie he had dressed Miss Wurtz in—if only in his imagination.
“Mishima is Japanese,” Jack was trying to explain.
“He was—” Claudia interjected.
“He’s no longer Japanese?” Caroline asked.
They couldn’t answer her before the movie began—a stylish piece of work, wherein the scenes from Mishima’s life (shot in black and white) were intercut with color dramatizations of his fictional work. Jack had never cared much about Mishima as a writer, but he liked him as a lunatic; his ritualistic suicide, in 1970, was the film’s dramatic conclusion.
Throughout the movie, Miss Wurtz held Jack’s hand; this gave him a hard-on, which Claudia noticed. Claudia would not hold his penis, or venture anywhere near his lap; she sat with her arms folded on her considerable bosom, and never flinched at Mishima’s self-disemboweling, which caused Caroline to dig her nails into Jack’s wrist. In the flickering light from the movie screen, he regarded the small, fishhook-shaped scar on her throat, above her fetching birthmark. In her preternatural thinness, Miss Wurtz had a visible pulse in her throat—an actual heartbeat in close proximity to her scar. This was a pounding that could only be quieted by a kiss, Jack thought—not that he would have dared to kiss The Wurtz, not even if Claudia hadn’t been there.
“Goodness!” Caroline exclaimed as they were leaving the theater. (She was as breathless as Mrs. McQuat, as desirable as Mrs. Adkins.) “That was certainly . . . ambitious!”
It was about four o’clock in the afternoon when they exited into the mob of Catholic protesters who’d come to the wrong theater. The protesters were there on their knees, chanting to an endless “Hail Mary” that repeated itself over a ghetto blaster. Jack knew in an instant that the kneeling Catholics thought they were emerging from a screening of Godard’s Hail Mary; the Catholics had come to protest Mishima by mistake.
Not only was Miss Wurtz unprepared for the spectacle; she didn’t understand that the protests were in error. “Naturally, the suicide has upset them—I’m not surprised,” she told Claudia and Jack. “I once knew why Catholics make such a fuss about suicide, but I’ve forgotten. They were all in a knot about Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter, as I remember. But I think they got themselves all worked up over
The Power and the Glory and The End of the Affair, too.”
Claudia and Jack just looked at each other. What was the point of even mentioning the Godard film to Caroline?
A TV journalist wanted to interview her, which Miss Wurtz seemed to think was perfectly normal. “What do you think of all this?” the journalist asked Jack’s former grade-three teacher. “The film, the controversy—”
“I thought the film was quite a . . . drama,” The Wurtz declared. “It was overlong and at times hard to grasp, and not always as satisfying as it was engaging. The cinematography was beautiful, and the music—well, whether one likes it or not, it was sweeping.”
This was more than the journalist had bargained for; he was clearly more interested in the kneeling Catholics and the ceaseless “Hail Mary” on the ghetto blaster than he was in the Mishima movie. “But the controversy—” he started to say, trying to steer Miss Wurtz to the fracas of the moment (as journalists do).
“Oh, who cares about that?” Caroline said dismissively. “If the Catholics want to flagellate themselves over a suicide, let them! I remember when they had a hissy fit about fish on Fridays!”
It would be on the six o’clock news. Alice and Leslie Oastler were watching television, and there was Miss Wurtz holding forth in her pale-peach dress—Claudia and Jack on either side of her. It was almost as much fun as passing Claudia off as a Russian film star, and Caroline was thoroughly enjoying herself, though she wasn’t in on the joke.
The moviegoers, meaning the Mishima crowd, were in no mood to be greeted by kneeling Catholics and “Hail Mary”—not with Mishima’s disembowelment fresh on their minds. (Nor would Mishima have been amused, Jack thought; at least when he was disemboweling himself, he looked like a pretty serious guy.)
Claudia and Jack took Miss Wurtz to a party. They had no trouble crashing parties; the bouncers wouldn’t have kept Claudia out of a men’s room, if she’d wanted to go into one. Claudia said they got into parties because Jack looked like a movie star, but Claudia was the reason. With Miss Wurtz in tow, it was clear they got in because of her. In fact, they were leaving one such party when a young man approached Caroline in a fawning fashion; he’d snatched a flower from a vase on the bar and pressed it into her hand. “I love your work!” he told her, disappearing into the crowd.
“I freely admit I don’t remember him at all,” Miss Wurtz told Jack. “I can’t be expected to recognize every grade-three boy I ever taught,” she said to Claudia. “They were not all as memorable as Jack!”
Claudia and Jack were quite certain that the young man had not been referring to Caroline’s teaching career. But how to explain all this to The Wurtz—well, why would Claudia or Jack have bothered?
In the lineup of limos outside a restaurant, Jack recognized an old friend among the drivers. “Peewee!” he cried.
The big Jamaican got out of his limo and embraced Jack on the sidewalk, lifting him off his feet. That was when the Hail Mary protesters must have assumed that Jack was the cabdriver boyfriend in the Godard film—the Joseph character—which made Claudia, in their demented eyes, the pregnant gas-station attendant who was an updated version of the Virgin Mary. (God knows who they thought Miss Wurtz was.)
“Jack Burns, you are already a star, mon!” Peewee exclaimed, hugging him so hard that he couldn’t breathe.
The Catholics, crawling around on their knees, were an unsettling experience for Claudia, and Caroline was fed up with their zealotry. “Oh, why don’t you go home and read his books!” Miss Wurtz told one of the kneelers. She was a young woman whose face was streaked with grime and tears. Jack could see her thinking: Christ was a writer?
The other Catholics kept repeating the infuriating “Hail Mary.”
“Quick, get in the car, Jack!” Peewee said. He was already holding the door open for Claudia and Caroline.
“It’s Mrs. Wicksteed’s driver, dear—don’t be alarmed,” Miss Wurtz told Claudia. (As if Mrs. Wicksteed were still in need of a driver!) But Claudia was having her legs held, at the thighs, by a kneeling Catholic. “Let her go, you craven imbecile,” Caroline told the Catholic. “Don’t you get it? He killed himself because he wanted his life to merge with his art.”
Miss Wurtz meant Mishima, of course, but the Catholic who reluctantly released Claudia thought that Caroline was talking about Christ. He was an indignant-looking man—bald, middle-aged—in a long-sleeved white dress shirt of a thin see-through material, with a pen that had leaked in his breast pocket. He looked like a deranged income-tax auditor.
Peewee managed to get Claudia into the car, but Miss Wurtz was facing down the mob of kneelers. “The man was Japanese and he wanted to off himself,” she told them in a huff. “Just get over it!”
To a one, the Catholics looked as if no number of repetitions of “Hail Mary” could redeem such a slur on the unfortunate Christ as this. Jesus was Japanese?
Jack put an arm around Caroline’s slender waist as if she were his dance partner. “Miss Wurtz, they’re all insane,” he whispered in her ear. “Get in the car.”
“My goodness—you’ve become so worldly, Jack,” she told him, stooping to get into the backseat of the limo. Claudia caught her by the hand and pulled her inside; Peewee shoved Jack inside after her, closing the door.
One of the protesters had wrapped her arms around Peewee’s knees, but when he began to walk with her, dragging her to the driver’s-side door of the limo, she thought better of it and let him go. Jack had no idea which actual movie star had Peewee for a limo driver that evening—Peewee claimed that he couldn’t remember—but Peewee drove Miss Wurtz home first, then Claudia and Jack.
Jack had never known where The Wurtz lived, but he was unsurprised when Peewee stopped the limo at a large house on Russell Hill Road, which was within walking distance of St. Hilda’s. Jack was somewhat surprised when Miss Wurtz asked Peewee to drive around to the back entrance, where an outside staircase led to her small, rented apartment.
Where had the money for Caroline’s once-fashionable clothes come from? If it had been family money from Edmonton, it must have been spent. Had she ever had a suitor, or a secret lover with good taste? If there’d ever been a well-to-do ex-boyfriend—or more improbably, an ex-husband—he was long gone, clearly.
Miss Wurtz would not let Jack accompany her up the stairs to her modest rooms. Possibly she did not think it proper to bring a young man to her apartment; yet she allowed Claudia to go with her. Jack sat in the limo with Peewee and watched them turn on some lights.
Later, when Jack pressed Claudia to describe The Wurtz’s apartment, Claudia became irritated. “I didn’t snoop around,” she said. “She’s an older woman—she has too much stuff, things she should have thrown away. Out-of-date magazines, junk like that.”
“A TV?”
“I didn’t see one, but I wasn’t looking.”
“Photographs? Any pictures of men?”
“Jesus, Jack! Have you got the hots for her, or something?” Claudia asked.
They lay in Emma’s bed—bereft of the stuffed animals, which either Emma or Mrs. Oastler had disposed of. Jack couldn’t remember a single one of them—nor could he dispel from his memory that Emma had taught him how to masturbate as he lay in her arms in the very same bed.
Given Claudia’s bitchy mood, Jack decided to spare her that detail.
The parties and intrigues of the film festival notwithstanding, Claudia and Jack spent the lion’s share of their time in Toronto at Daughter Alice—at least Claudia did. Jack frequently escaped the tattoo parlor, preferring the clientele in the nearby Salvation Army store to many of his mother’s devotees.
Aberdeen Bill had been a maritime man—like Charlie Snow and Sailor Jerry, like Tattoo Ole and Tattoo Peter and Doc Forest. They were Alice’s mentors. But the tattoo world had changed; while Daughter Alice still did the occasional Man’s Ruin, or the broken heart that sustains a sailor for long months at sea, a new vulgarity exhibited itself on the skin of young men seeking to be
marked for life.
Gone was the romance of those North Sea ports—and the steady sound of his mom’s tattoo machine, which had lulled Jack to sleep as a child. Gone were those brave girls in the Hotel Torni: Ritva, whose breasts he never saw, and Hannele’s unshaven armpits and her striking birthmark—that crumpled top hat over her navel, the color of a wine stain, the shape of Florida.
Jack had once been so bold as to march up to anyone and ask: “Do you have a tattoo?” In the restaurant of the Hotel Bristol, he’d told that beautiful girl: “I have the room and the equipment, if you have the time.” (And to think it was his idea for his mom to offer the littlest soldier a free tattoo!)
In his sleep, Jack heard the vast organ in the Oude Kerk playing to the prostitutes at night; even awake, if he shut his eyes, he could feel the thick, waxed rope and the smooth, wooden handrail on the other side of the old church’s twisting stairs.
But (especially in Claudia’s company) the tattoo culture on display at Daughter Alice made Jack ashamed of his mother’s “art”; and many of her customers, the seeming lowlifes of Queen Street, filled him with foreboding. The old maritime tattoos, the sentiments of sailors collecting souvenirs on their bodies, had been replaced by tasteless displays of hostility and violence and evil. The skinheads with their biker insignia—skulls spurting blood, flames licking the corners of the skeletons’ eye sockets.
There were naked, writhing women who would have made Tattoo Ole blush; even Ladies’ Man Madsen might have looked away. (More than an inverted eyebrow indicated their pubic hair.) And there was all the tribal memorabilia. Claudia was fascinated by some pimply kid from Kitchener, Ontario, getting a full moko—the Maori facial tattoo. On her hip, which she proudly bared for Claudia, the kid’s emaciated girlfriend had a koru—those spirals like the head of a fern.
Jack took Claudia aside and said to her: “Generally speaking, attractive people don’t get tattooed.” But this wasn’t strictly true; Jack was speaking too generally. His dislike of the scene at Daughter Alice caused him to overstate his case.
