by John Irving
“I blame the delay on Pam Hoover,” Jack thought she said, as she nervously spilled her wine.
He sipped some tepid sparkling water and considered what Maureen might have meant. All the women at Emma’s memorial service—the ones Jack recognized and the many he did not—had looked better in their school uniforms. But maybe Jack had looked better then, too. “I must have misheard you, Maureen,” he replied, bringing tears to her eyes.
“I came all the way from Vancouver,” Maureen Yap repeated. “I’m staying at the Four Seasons, under my maiden name.”
Jack was staying at the Four Seasons, too—a source of some friction between him and his mom. Jack wasn’t sure what Leslie Oastler thought of his defection to a hotel. Maybe Mrs. Oastler, if not his mom, understood why he wouldn’t have wanted to spend the night in Emma’s bed, or even in what had been Jack’s designated bedroom, where Emma had more than once held him in her arms—where Mrs. Machado had taken such indelible advantage of him.
That they each had a room at the Four Seasons did not mean Jack was doomed to sleep with Maureen Yap. She would never find him, he was thinking; he was registered under a new name. Because the Billy Rainbow film had already been released, Jack was Jimmy Stronach now. As he’d newly invented the porn star’s name, and not even Bob Bookman or Alan Hergott had read his many revisions of Emma’s script, truly no one knew who Jack Burns was.
Those women who came to the St. Hilda’s chapel had come to see him—Jack Burns, the movie star. He failed to recognize the majority of them, but they were mostly in their thirties and forties. If they hadn’t known Jack as a little boy, they’d probably seen him around the school—and without a doubt they had seen his films. Their husbands (if they had husbands) weren’t with them; their children occasionally were. To be sure, the women wore black or navy blue, but their attire struck Jack as more suitable for a dinner party than a funeral. Maybe this was underscored by Emma’s memorial service being held at the cocktail hour on a Sunday evening.
And the fourth of Jack’s classmates to attend the service had not entered St. Hilda’s in kindergarten. Lucinda Fleming had been a new student when he’d first met her in grade one; she’d never experienced Emma’s sleepy-time tales. Lucinda, and what Miss Wong once referred to as her “silent rage,” had never been intimate with Emma Oastler.
What had urged Lucinda to include Jack on her Christmas-letter list? What had made her such a tireless organizer of the class reunions at St. Hilda’s, despite everyone remembering her violent overreaction to being kissed? (Her biting herself so badly that she required stitches, her lying in a puddle of her pee on the third-grade floor!)
If Lucinda Fleming had known how Emma hated Christmas letters and the people who wrote them, she wouldn’t have come to pay her last respects. If she’d had any idea of the contempt Emma felt for the repeated announcements of childbearing, which caused Emma to denounce Lucinda’s Christmas letters as “breeding statistics”—well, Lucinda Fleming (had she known Emma at all) wouldn’t have been moved to pray for Emma’s soul.
But it was Jack’s soul Lucinda and the others were after—and while he might have been a movie star in those women’s eyes, he instantly lost the essential contact with his audience of one in their company. In the St. Hilda’s chapel, where even Jesus was depicted as surrounded by women—saints maybe, but women definitely—he didn’t feel like Jack Burns, the actor. He felt like Jack Burns, the little boy—lost again in a sea of girls. No matter that they were grown women now. In reentering their world, Jack had returned to his childhood and its fears—and, like a child, he felt as frightened and as unsure of himself as he’d ever been.
How could Jack “say a little something” about Emma to this audience of older women—among them, those grown-up girls and older women who had formed him? How could he feel at ease in this holy place—where, even as a little boy, he had turned his back on God?
Jack gripped the pulpit in both hands, but he couldn’t speak; the words wouldn’t come. The congregation waited for him; the chapel was as still as Emma’s heart.
It’s awful how your mind can trick you when you’re scared, Jack thought. Among those women’s faces, all of them looking up at him, Jack could have sworn he saw Mrs. Stackpole—the long-dead dishwasher from his Exeter days. If he’d dared to search among their faces, he might have come upon Mrs. Adkins, so long ago immersed in the Nezinscot—or Claudia, who had threatened to haunt him, or Leah Rosen, dead in Chile, or even Emma herself, who no doubt would have been disappointed in Jack for failing to say what he’d come to say.
Jack tried to look beyond their faces, focusing on no one—except maybe Mr. Ramsey, who was always so encouraging. But Mr. Ramsey had disappeared from sight. Actually he’d been swallowed up in the sea of late arrivals—young girls, students at St. Hilda’s, who all wore their school uniforms, as if this special Sunday-evening service were just another day at school.
In Jack’s state of mind, he mistook the girls for ghosts, but they were boarders—the only St. Hilda’s students on campus on a Sunday. They must have mustered the courage to come to the chapel en masse from their residence. They hadn’t been invited, although they were the age—seventeen or eighteen—of Emma Oastler’s most adoring fans. (Young women had been Emma’s biggest readers.)
It was a shock to see them there, standing at the rear of the chapel in their universal postures of sullenness and exultation and prettiness and slouching disarray—as Jack had seen them at the age of four, when he first felt compelled to hold his mother’s hand. The girls made him remember his fear of their bare legs—with their kneesocks pushed down to their ankles, as if to reveal their interior unrest. The cant of their hips, their untucked shirts, their unbuttoned buttons, their bitten lips and willfully unattended hair—well, there they were, these unnamed girls, some of them carrying well-worn paperbacks of Emma’s first or second novel, all of them signifying to Jack the gestures of an emerging sexuality he had so skillfully imitated as an actor. (Even as a man!)
They took Jack’s breath away, but they brought him back to the task at hand. He found his voice, though it was weak—barely above a whisper—and he spoke as if only to them, those young-girl boarders. They were probably in grades twelve and thirteen.
“I remember,” Jack began, “how she held my . . . hand.”
Without Mrs. Oastler’s sigh of relief, he wouldn’t have known she’d been holding her breath. A spontaneous shudder shook Miss Wong’s shoulders; her knees unclenched, her legs lolled apart.
“Emma Oastler looked after me,” Jack continued. “I didn’t have a father,” he told them—not that they didn’t already know that! “But Emma was my protector.”
The word protector animated Maureen Yap like a jolt of electricity; her hands flew up from her lap, her palms held open and apart like the pages of a prayer book or a hymnal. (Jack half expected her to sing.) Lucinda Fleming curled her lower lip and seized it between her teeth. There was a sound like the binding of a new book breaking—Wendy Fists-of-Stone Holton cracking her knuckles against her flat chest.
Then Jack’s tears came, unplanned—he wasn’t acting. Without making a noise, he just started to cry—he couldn’t stop. He’d had more to say, but what was the point? Wasn’t this the performance they’d all been hoping for? JACK BURNS BREAKS DOWN, OR WAS IT AN ACT? one of the tabloids would say. But it wasn’t an act.
Those heartbreaking young girls (the abandoned boarders with their collected loneliness) were what released him—the way they just stood there without once standing still. They shook their hair, they shrugged their shoulders—they stood first on one leg, then the other. They cocked a hip here, an elbow there. They scratched their bare knees and looked under their nails, the tips of their tongues touching their upper lips or the corners of their open mouths—as if Jack Burns were in a movie on a giant screen and they watched him from the dark, safe and unseen.
Jack simply stopped talking and let his tears fall, not at first knowing that this wou
ld have an unleashing effect on the assembled congregation. He never meant to make them cry, but that was the unavoidable result.
Mrs. Malcolm rocked uncontrollably back and forth in her wheelchair, as if a third accident—either crippling or blinding, or both—had befallen her. It must have been something Mr. Malcolm, in his grief, was powerless to ward away. Alice’s face, ageless when bathed in tears, was tilted up to Jack. He could read her lips. (“I’m so sorry, Jackie!”)
“Jack Burns!” Mr. Ramsey cried, choking back a sob.
Miss Wurtz had covered her face with a white handkerchief, as if she were less than stoically facing a firing squad.
Caroline French, usually a no-show at the class reunions, was a no-show at Emma’s memorial service as well. Jack was sorry to miss the sound of her heel-thumping, as Caroline must have missed the once-resonant heel-thumps of her deceased twin, Gordon—gone to a boater’s watery grave. Dire moaning from Jimmy Bacon would have fit right in at Emma’s service, but Jimmy was also absent. Fortunately, the Booth twins didn’t disappoint Jack—Heather and Patsy with their identical blanket-sucking sounds, which were now intermingled with the congregation’s spontaneous grieving.
A wail escaped Wendy Horton, who pressed her temples with her fists of stone. A bellow broke forth from Charlotte Barford; she clutched her breasts with bones in them, as if her hammering heart could not otherwise be contained.
They all would have wept themselves silly, if Jack hadn’t said something; they would still be weeping, if he hadn’t thought of something to say. “Let us pray,” Jack said, as if he’d known all along what he was doing. (They were in a church—they were supposed to pray!)
“You’ve had a bad day, and you’re very tired,” Emma had intoned, in his kindergarten class. But this didn’t sound like an appropriate prayer. “For three of you,” Emma always said, before concluding her squeezed-child saga, “your bad day just got worse.” But this lacked closure, and the tone was threatening—not at all prayerlike in the usual, uplifting sort of way.
And so Jack Burns said the only prayer he could remember at that moment. It was the one he and his mother had stopped saying together; it usually made him sad to think about it, because it signified everything he and his mom didn’t say to each other, but it had the virtue of being short.
The heads bowed before him were quite a sight, although he’d not spotted Chenko in the row directly behind his mother until Chenko bowed his head. There on his bald pate was the familiar Ukrainian tattoo—a snarling wolf, which (no matter how many times Jack had seen it) was always unnerving.
“The day Thou gavest, Lord, is ended,” Jack said to the only face looking back at him—the wolf’s. “Thank You for it.” Now what? he wondered, but Jack was saved by the organist, whom he never saw. (He or she was behind Jack.) The organist knew how and when to fill a silence, and—at St. Hilda’s—with what to fill it. The hymn that came crashing down upon them was one they knew by heart. Even those castaway boys who’d left the school and its morning chapel at the end of grade four—they’d not forgotten it. Certainly all the Old Girls, of whatever age, had committed these quatrains to memory; they doubtless murmured their beloved William Blake in their sleep.
And what about the teenage boarders standing restlessly in the rear of the chapel, where Mr. Ramsey became their instant choirmaster? What about those young women yearning for a life out of their school uniforms, but fearful of what that life might be—as girls of that blossoming age are? Boy, could they ever belt out that hymn! They’d sung it every week, or twice a week, in their seemingly interminable time at St. Hilda’s.
The tune of “Jerusalem”—Hymn 157, a dog-eared page in the St. Hilda’s hymnals—resounded triumphantly in every Old Girl’s heart. They were William Blake’s words, set to song—that odd belief that Jesus came to England, where Blake imagined a spiritual Israel.
“And did those feet in ancient time/Walk upon England’s mountains green?” the congregation sang.
Jack came down the altar stairs, where he was momentarily accosted by Wheelchair Jane; wailing like a banshee, she blocked the center aisle. But Mr. Malcolm never hesitated; he darted into the aisle and wheeled his startled wife a hundred and eighty degrees around, propelling her wheelchair ahead of him. Jack followed the Malcolms up the aisle—pausing only a second for Mrs. Oastler, Emma’s grieving mother, to take his arm and allow him to escort her. Chenko, perhaps the only member of the congregation who wasn’t singing—Ukrainian wrestlers weren’t familiar with William Blake—was still weeping when Alice ushered him up the aisle beside her. (Chenko hobbled on his cane.) Pew by pew, from front to back, the congregation followed them.
“Bring me my bow of burning gold!/Bring me my arrows of desire!/Bring me my spear! O clouds unfold!/Bring me my chariot of fire,” sang the multitude.
Even Penny Hamilton’s little girls were singing. (Of course they were—they were probably students at St. Hilda’s!)
As Jack neared the rear entrance to the chapel, one of the seventeen- or eighteen-year-olds—a pale-skinned, blue-eyed blonde, as thin as a model—appeared to swoon or faint or trip into her fellow boarders’ arms. From the look of her, this might have been more the result of a starvation diet than her near-enough-to-touch proximity to Jack Burns, a movie star—not that Jack hadn’t seen girls her age swoon or faint or trip in his presence before. Or it might have been the overstimulating effect of the soaring hymn.
The falling-down girl distracted Jack from the more immediate object of his desire. Bonnie Hamilton had not only managed to slip into a pew at the back of the chapel without his seeing her limp to her seat. She’d likewise managed to slip away—ahead of the recessional hymn and the wheelchair-bound Mrs. Malcolm, who still led their lamenting retreat. How had Bonnie escaped Jack’s notice? (With a limp like hers, maybe she knew instinctively when to leave.)
Out into the corridor, marching to the Great Hall, the girls’ and women’s voices bore them along; as they retreated from the chapel, the organ grew less reverberant, but the closing couplet of the hymn’s final quatrain roared in their midst loud and strong.
“Till we have built Jerusalem/In England’s green and pleasant land,” sang the throng.
“I gotta hand it to you, Jack,” Leslie Oastler whispered in his ear—the word gotta very much the way her daughter would have said it. “There’s not a dry eye, or a dry pair of panties, in the house.”
Jack wasn’t sure that wakes were a good idea. Possibly the fault lay in the concept of mixing mourning with wine and cheese. Or mixing women with wine and cheese—maybe the mourning had nothing to do with it.
Lucinda Fleming was the first to inform him that the St. Hilda’s reunion cocktail parties were held in the gym, not in the Great Hall, which was not great enough to contain the Old Girls who’d come to pay their last respects to Emma—or to gawk at, or hit on, Jack Burns.
Most of the women wore high heels, of one kind or another. They’d seen Jack only when he was a little boy or on the big screen; they were unprepared for how short he was. Those women who (in their heels) were taller than Jack were inclined to remove their shoes. Hence they stood seductively before him, either barefoot or in their stocking feet—their high heels in one hand, the plastic cup of white wine in the other, which left no hand free to handle the toothpicks with the little cubes of cheese.
From Hollywood parties, which some actors view as auditions, Jack was in the habit of eating and drinking nothing. He didn’t want all manner of disgusting things to get stuck between his teeth; he didn’t want his breath to smell like piss. (To a nondrinker, white wine on the breath smells like gasoline—or some other unburned fuel—and the Old Girls at Emma’s wake were breathing up a firestorm.)
There were especially desperate-looking women in their late thirties or early forties. More than a few of them were divorced; their children were spending the weekend with their fathers, or so Jack was repeatedly told. These women were shamelessly aggressive, or at least inappropriately
aggressive for a wake.
Connie Turnbull, whom Jack-as-Rochester once had taken in his arms while declaring, “ ‘Never, never was anything at once so frail and so indomitable,’ ” contradicted her Eyre-like impression by whispering in Jack’s ear that she was “entirely domitable.”
Miss Wurtz, whom Jack had not seen since he and Claudia had escorted her to the Toronto film festival more than a decade before, had dramatically covered her head with a black scarf—very nearly a veil. She resembled a twelfth-century pilgrim from an order of flagellants. She was thinner than ever, and her perishable beauty had not altogether disappeared but was diminished by an aura of supernatural persecution—as if she suffered from stigmata, or another form of unexplained bleeding.
“I shan’t leave you alone, Jack,” The Wurtz whispered, in the same ear that Connie Turnbull had whispered in. “No doubt you’ve met your share of loose women in California, but some of these Old Girls have a boundless capacity for looseness, which only women who are unaccustomed to being loose can have.”
“Mercy,” he said. There was only one Old Girl who, whether or not she stood on the threshold of looseness, interested him—Bonnie Hamilton. But despite her identifying limp, she appeared to have slipped away.
As for the teenage boarders, Mrs. Malcolm had herded them together with her wheelchair; she’d driven the cowed girls to a far corner of the Great Hall, where Mr. Malcolm was attempting to rescue them from his demented wife. Wheelchair Jane, Jack could only imagine, was intent on keeping these young women safe from him. In Mrs. Malcolm’s mind, or what was left of it, Jack Burns was the evil reincarnation of his father; in her view, Jack had returned to St. Hilda’s for the sole and lewd purpose of deflowering these girls, whose sexual awakening could be discerned in the dishevelment of their school uniforms.
Jack noticed that the young woman who’d fainted or swooned, or just tripped, had lost one of her shoes. She walked in circles, off-balance, scuffing her remaining loafer. Jack purposely made his way to these students; they were the only ones who’d brought copies of Emma’s novel, probably for him to sign.
