by John Irving
The girls gave no indication of sexual interest in him—they weren’t the slightest bit flirtatious. Most of them couldn’t meet Jack’s eyes when he looked at them, and those who could look at him couldn’t speak. They were just kids, embarrassed and shy. Mrs. Malcolm was crazy to think they needed to be protected from Jack! One of them held out a copy of Emma’s first book for him to sign.
“I wanted Emma to sign it,” she said, “but maybe you wouldn’t mind.” The other girls politely waited their turn.
To the thin, unsteady-looking young woman with one shoe, Maureen Yap said something clearly unkind but incomprehensible. It sounded like, “Did you just have major bridgework?” But Jack knew Maureen; he was sure she’d said, “Don’t you have any homework?”
Before the poor girl struggled to answer The Yap—before she fainted or swooned or tripped, again—Jack took her by her cold, clammy hand and said, “Let’s get out of here. I’ll help you find your missing shoe.”
“Yeah, let’s get outta here,” another of the boarders chimed in. “Let’s go look for Ellie’s shoe.”
“Someone stepped on my heel as I was leaving the chapel,” Ellie said. “I didn’t want to see who it was, so I just forgot about it.”
“I hate it when that happens,” Jack told the young women.
“It’s so rude,” one of them said.
“It sucks,” he said. (It might have been the word sucks that turned Maureen Yap away.)
Jack went with the girls down the corridor, back toward the chapel, looking for the lost loafer; he signed copies of Emma’s books on the way. “I haven’t been with a bunch of boarders since a few girls sneaked me into their residence when I was in school here,” he told them.
“How old were you?” a girl who reminded Jack of Ginny Jarvis asked.
“I guess I was nine or ten,” Jack said.
“And the boarders were how old?” Ellie asked.
“They would have been your age,” Jack told her.
“That’s sick!” Ellie said.
“Nothing happened, did it?” one of the boarders asked Jack.
“No, of course not—I just remember being frightened,” he replied.
“Well, you were a little boy,” one of them pointed out. “Of course you were frightened.”
“Look, there’s my stupid shoe,” Ellie said. The loafer lay kicked aside, against the corridor wall.
“How will you ever make a movie of The Slush-Pile Reader?” one of the young women asked him.
“It’s potentially so gross,” another of the girls said.
“The film won’t be as explicit as the novel,” Jack explained. “The word penis won’t ever be mentioned, for example.”
“What about vagina?” one of the girls asked.
“Not that, either,” he said.
“Why didn’t she just get her vagina fixed?” Ellie asked. Of course Jack knew she meant the Michele Maher character, but his thoughts went entirely to Emma.
“I don’t know,” Jack answered.
“There must have been some psychological reason, Ellie,” one of her fellow boarders said. “I mean it’s not exactly knee surgery, is it?”
The young women, Ellie among them, nodded soberly. They were such sensible girls—children at heart but, in so many other ways, more grown up than Emma at that age, not to mention Ginny Jarvis and Penny Hamilton (or Charlotte Barford, or Wendy Holton). Jack wondered what had been so different or wrong about him that those girls had ever thought it was acceptable to abuse him.
These girls wouldn’t have harmed a little boy. Jack felt, in their company, like a nine- or ten-year-old again—only he felt safe. So safe, and like such a little boy, that he suddenly announced: “I have to pee.” (It was exactly the way a nine- or ten-year-old would have said it.)
The young women were unsurprised; they responded to his announcement in a strictly practical fashion. “Do you remember where the boys’ washroom is?” Ellie asked him.
“There’s still only one,” another of the young women said.
“I’ll show you where it is,” Ellie told Jack, taking his hand. (It was exactly the way she would have taken a nine- or ten-year-old by the hand; for some reason, it broke Jack’s heart.)
It had all been his fault, he thought—the way those older girls in his time at St. Hilda’s had taken such an unnatural interest in him. It must have been something they detected in him. Jack was convinced that he was the unnatural one.
Jack pulled his hand away from Ellie. He didn’t want her or her friends—these incredibly healthy, normal young women—to see him cry. Jack felt he was on the verge of dissolving into tears, but in that unembarrassed way that a nine- or ten-year-old might cry. He was suddenly ashamed of what the real Michele Maher might have called his weirdness.
“I can certainly find the boys’ washroom by myself,” Jack told them—laughing about it, but in an actorly way. “I believe I could find that washroom from the darkness of my grave,” he added, which made it sound like his journey to the boys’ washroom was a heroic voyage—meant to be undertaken alone, and in full acceptance of such perils as one might encounter along the way.
Jack was soon lost in an unfamiliar corridor; perhaps the old school had been repainted, he was thinking. The stairwells were the likely haunts of ghosts, he believed—Mrs. McQuat, his departed conscience; or even Emma, disappointed by the brevity of his prayer. The voices of the boarders no longer accompanied him on his journey; Jack wasn’t followed, or so he thought.
Ahead of him, not far from a bend in the corridor, was the dining hall—all closed up and dark. Did a figure, old and stooped, emerge from the shadows there? It was an elderly woman, no one Jack recognized but surely not a ghost; she looked too solidly built for a spirit. A cleaning woman, from the look of her, he thought. But why would a cleaning woman be working at St. Hilda’s on a Sunday, and where were her mop and pail?
“Jack, my dahleen—my leetle one!” Mrs. Machado cried.
To see her, to know it was really her, had the effect on Jack of her high-groin kick of so many years ago. He couldn’t move or speak—he couldn’t breathe.
He’d recognized that Leslie Oastler had a certain power over him, and always would have. But in all his efforts, conscious and unconscious, to diminish his memories of Mrs. Machado, Jack had underestimated her implacable authority over him. He’d never defeated her—only Emma had.
Gone was her waist—what little she’d ever had of one. Mrs. Machado’s low-slung breasts protruded from the midriff of her untucked blouse with the over-obviousness of an amateur shoplifter’s stolen goods. But what she’d stolen from Jack was more obvious; Mrs. Machado had robbed him of the ability to say no to her. (Or to anyone else!)
“This is a frightened little boy!” Bonnie Hamilton had told her sister and Ginny Jarvis, when those older girls were trying to get Jack’s penis to respond.
In Mrs. Machado’s company, Jack was still a frightened little boy. She circled him in the corridor as if she were setting up her customary single-leg attack; she underhooked his left arm, the thick fingers of her left hand closing tightly around his right wrist. Jack knew the takedown she appeared to be looking for, but he couldn’t overcome his inertia; he made no move to defend himself.
Mrs. Machado pressed her forehead against his chest. The top of her head—entangled with gray, wiry hair—touched his throat. Jack was surprised by how short she was, but of course he’d been shorter when they last did this dance together—with Chenko repeating his familiar litany, like a call to prayer. “Hand-control! Circle, circle! Don’t lean on her, Jackie!”
It wasn’t wrestling that Mrs. Machado had in mind. With her insistent grip on Jack’s right wrist, she guided his hand under her blouse; with her broad nose, Mrs. Machado nudged his necktie out of her way and unbuttoned the second button of his shirt with her teeth. Jack thought he detected the smell of anchovies in her hair. It was the contact his right hand made with her sagging breasts, which was quickly followed
by the feeling of her tongue on his chest, that filled him with revulsion and gave him the strength to push her away.
Until that moment, he’d never believed in so-called recovered memory—namely, that various acts of abuse or molestation from one’s childhood are mercifully erased, only to return with a vengeance, vividly, many years down the road. As Jack recoiled from Mrs. Machado in the semidark Sunday corridor of his old school, he remembered the button trick. How she had unbuttoned and unzipped him with her teeth—and all the other clever things she’d managed to do with her mouth, which he’d blanked from his memory.
“Don’t be cruel, Meester Penis,” Mrs. Machado whispered, as Jack retreated from her. She was shuffling after him, in her laceless running shoes, when she suddenly halted. It wasn’t Jack’s feeble resistance that had stopped her. Her gaze had shifted. She was peering around him, or behind him—and the second he turned to look where she was looking, Mrs. Machado was gone.
She must have been in her late sixties or early seventies. How could she have been that agile, that quick on her feet? Or was the bend in the corridor closer to them than Jack had thought? It was more probable, of course, that Mrs. Machado had never been there at all.
In any case, Jack hadn’t heard the wheelchair behind him; the wheels on that smooth linoleum floor didn’t make a sound. (He was, after all, on haunted ground.) “Jack,” the woman in the wheelchair said, “you look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
He’d expected to be confronted by Mrs. Malcolm—ever the protector of those girls, whose violation, she imagined, Jack sought. But the woman in the wheelchair was an attractive, forty-year-old real estate agent in a black pantsuit.
Bonnie Hamilton had managed to park her wheelchair in some out-of-sight place, near the back of the chapel, and limp to and from her pew unseen. She’d been successful in the real estate business, she would tell Jack later, because she always left her wheelchair at the front entrance and limped with her clients from room to room—even, as Leslie Oastler had cruelly suggested, up and down stairs. “My clients must feel sorry for me,” Bonnie would joke. “Nobody wants to disappoint a cripple—to add insult to injury, as they say.”
But at public events, or whenever there was a crowd, Bonnie Hamilton was also successful at keeping her limp to herself; she had a knack for sneaking in and out of her wheelchair without anyone seeing her. In the wheelchair, she looked elegant; she was as beautiful to Jack as she’d been when they were students together.
Jack was still speechless from his encounter with Mrs. Machado, real or not—and how grotesquely he now recalled the lost details of everything Mrs. Machado had done to him. It was too much for him, on top of all that—to be rescued by Bonnie Hamilton, who’d tried her hardest to protect him from her sister and Ginny Jarvis when he’d been nine or ten.
Jack dropped to his knees and burst into tears. Bonnie, wheeling closer, pulled him headfirst into her lap. Bonnie must have thought that she had made him cry; it must have been Jack’s memory of being coerced to ejaculate on her sister’s forehead that was traumatizing him still! (That terrible loss of his innocence in the big girls’ residence when he’d been a frightened little boy—this in addition to his losing Emma, no doubt, had undone him.)
“Jack, I think about what an awful thing we did to you—every day of my life, I think of you!” Bonnie cried. Jack tried to shake his head in her lap, but Bonnie probably thought he was attempting to get away from her; she held him tighter.
“No, no—don’t be afraid!” she urged him. “I’m not surprised it makes you cry to look at me, or that you dress up as a woman or do other weird things. After what we did to you, why wouldn’t you be weird? Of course you’re weird!” Bonnie cried.
She’s completely crazy, Jack thought, struggling to breathe; she gripped his hair with both hands, squeezing his face between her thighs. Bonnie Hamilton felt very strong; she clearly worked out a lot. But you can’t wrestle a woman in a wheelchair; Jack just let her hold him as hard as she wanted to.
Bending over him, Bonnie whispered in his ear: “We can put it all to rest, Jack. I’ve talked to a psychiatrist about the best way to get over it. We can just move on.”
She didn’t hear him ask, “How?” in her lap; Jack’s voice was muffled between her thighs. Her fingers, combing through his hair, stroked the back of his neck.
“Normal sex, Jack—that’s the best way to get over an upsetting experience,” Bonnie Hamilton told him.
How Jack wished Emma had been alive to hear this! Wouldn’t she have gotten a kick out of the very idea of normal sex?
Wasn’t it destiny, after all? Hadn’t Bonnie and Jack once looked at each other and been unable to look away? And that had been when he was in fourth grade and she in twelfth!
Besides, he was Jack Burns. Wasn’t he supposed to sleep with everybody? Just how would it have made Bonnie Hamilton feel if he hadn’t slept with her, a cripple?
Still, it gave Jack pause—she was definitely nuts. Bonnie must have seen the reservation on his face when she finally released his head from her lap. Her confidence wavered; she became unbearably shy. “Don’t feel that I’m forcing you, Jack. You poor boy!” she cried. “You’ve been forced enough!”
She backed her wheelchair away from him; it was a disturbing image. Jack had the idea that they were rewinding a film; they were returning in time. At any second, Mrs. Machado would reappear; he could sense her coming around the bend in the corridor, reemerging from the shadows.
Under the circumstances, Jack chose to leave with Bonnie.
All night, at the Four Seasons, Bonnie Hamilton never once limped for Jack. She didn’t limp when she was lying down. Once, when she got out of bed to use the bathroom—and again, when she got dressed in the morning—she asked him to look away.
Jack never fell asleep. He was too afraid of the nightmares Mrs. Machado might give him. In the dark, when he felt the first nightmare approaching—even though he was wide awake—Jack asked Bonnie if she’d seen the short, stout woman he’d been talking to in the corridor. Jack’s body might have blocked Bonnie’s view; down low in her wheelchair, she’d had the impression that he was talking to himself. “I thought maybe you were acting,” she said.
This didn’t prove that Mrs. Machado was a ghost, or that he’d only imagined her. There was a hair on Jack’s necktie; he saw it when he undressed for bed. (More gray and wiry than a hair belonging to Bonnie Hamilton or Jack, and no one else had put her head on his chest.) And then there was the second button of his shirt: it was already unbuttoned when Jack undressed that night. This made him shiver.
Naturally, the button trick was the source of the nightmares Jack feared would beset him—not because of the trick itself, which for so many years he’d happily forgotten, but because of what it led to. All those other games Mrs. Machado had played!
It was compassionate of Bonnie Hamilton to stay awake with him. Of course she thought of their night together as therapy, and maybe it was. For that night, if not all the others that followed it, Bonnie held the button trick at bay.
25
Daughter Alice Goes Home
Alice and Leslie Oastler were perturbed with Jack for leaving Emma’s wake at St. Hilda’s without saying good-bye. A tough bunch of Old Girls—actually, Mrs. Oastler’s former classmates at the school—had invited Leslie and Alice out to dinner. Jack was expected to join them, or at least not run off with a woman in a wheelchair. (Given Jack’s older-woman reputation, his mother and Mrs. Oastler first thought that he’d absconded with Wheelchair Jane!)
No doubt the description of Jack’s emotional departure with Bonnie Hamilton was exaggerated by several eyewitnesses—that lip-biter Lucinda Fleming among them. Lucinda, probably in a silent rage, had observed Peewee folding Bonnie’s wheelchair and stowing it in the trunk of the limo. And while Alice and Leslie Oastler were wondering out loud what on earth Mrs. Malcolm and Jack had done with poor Mr. Malcolm, Penny Hamilton had a hissy fit in front of her own children—those darling
little girls. “I knew it!” Penny cried, clawing at her pretty hair. “Jack Burns is fucking my crippled sister—that slut!”
Miss Wurtz, who’d managed to shed an uplifting light on Tess of the d’Urbervilles, now put a positive spin on Penny Hamilton’s announcement. “Thank goodness that’s been clarified!” Caroline told Alice and Mrs. Oastler.
“Jack Burns!” Mr. Ramsey was overheard murmuring, in faithful appreciation.
The Old Girls, to a one, were stunned silent. Only the boarders, those irrepressible seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds, continued to carry on a conversation, which they conducted in a kind of shorthand—comprehensible only to them.
The Wurtz, in her ongoing effort to cheer up Alice and Mrs. Oastler, said: “Well, it would have been more predictable, but not nearly as much fun, if Jack had left as a woman instead of with one.”
Jack checked out of the hotel pretty early the next morning—if not as early as Bonnie Hamilton, who had a seven o’clock appointment in Rosedale. They told him at the front desk that there’d been about fifty calls for Jack Burns, and no small number of increasingly irritable requests for Billy Rainbow, but no one had known to ask for Jimmy Stronach. He and Bonnie hadn’t been disturbed.
Jack took a taxi to Forest Hill. He fully expected that his mother would still be asleep and that Mrs. Oastler would have been up for hours. Leslie surely would have made some coffee. He wasn’t wrong about the coffee.
Mrs. Oastler told him that his mom had left the house before seven—an unheard-of hour for Alice to be up, much less dressed and going anywhere. (No one wanted a tattoo the first thing in the morning.)
Leslie looked as if she’d just got up. She was wearing one of Emma’s old T-shirts, which fit her like a baggy dress; evidently she’d slept in it. The T-shirt almost touched her knees, the sleeves falling below her elbows. Jack followed her into the kitchen, where the coffee smelled fresh. There were no dishes in the sink, and not a crumb on the kitchen table; it didn’t look as if Alice had eaten any breakfast.
