Authors: John Irving
Jack Burns avoided what was called “the quad,” even in the spring, when the cherry trees were in bloom. The ground-floor rooms for music practice faced the courtyard; you could overhear the piano lessons from the quad. Jack occasionally imagined that his dad was still teaching someone in one of those rooms. He hated to hear that music.
And the white, round chandeliers in the dining room reminded him of blank globes—of the earth strangely countryless, without discernible borders, not even indications of land and sea. Like the world where his father had gone missing; William Burns might as well have come from outer space.
Jack looked carefully for evidence of Lucinda Fleming’s silent rage for the longest time, never seeing it. He wondered if he would recognize the symptoms—if he’d had a rage of his own here or there, but had somehow not known what it was. Who were the authorities on rage? (Not Miss Wong, who’d clearly managed to lose contact with the hurricane inside her.)
Jack wasn’t used to seeing so little of his mother; he left for school before she got up and was asleep before she came home. As for rage, what Alice had of it might have been expressed in the pain-inflicting needles with which she marked for life so many people—mainly men.
Mrs. Wicksteed, who did Jack’s necktie so patiently but absentmindedly, stuck to her be-nice-twice philosophy without ever imparting to the boy what he should do if he were pressed to be nice a third time. That he was instructed to
be creative
struck Jack as a nonspecific form of advice; no silent rage, or rage of any kind, was in evidence there. And Lottie, despite having lost a child, had left what amounted to her rage on Prince Edward Island—or so she implied to Jack.
“I’m not an angry person anymore, Jack,” Lottie said, when he asked her what she knew about rage in general—and the silent kind, in particular. “The best thing I can tell you is not to give in to it,” Lottie said.
Jack would later imagine that Lottie was one of those women, neither young nor old, whose sexuality had been fleeting; only small traces of her remaining desire were visible, in the way you might catch her looking at herself in profile in a mirror. Glimpses of Lottie’s former attractiveness were apparent to Jack only in her most unguarded moments—when he had a nightmare and roused her from a sound sleep, or when she woke him up for school in the morning before she’d taken the time to attend to herself.
Short of asking Lucinda Fleming to talk to him about her silent rage, which would have been far too simple and straightforward a solution for any six-year-old boy to conceive of, Jack worked up his courage and asked Emma Oastler instead. (If Emma wasn’t an authority on rage, who was?) But Jack was afraid of Emma; her cohorts struck him as somewhat safer places to start. That was why he worked up his courage to ask Emma by asking Wendy Holton and Charlotte Barford first. He began with Wendy, only because she was the smaller of the two.
The junior school got a half-hour head start for lunch. How fitting that it was under the blank globes of the dining-hall chandeliers, those unmarked worlds, where Jack spoke to Wendy. How well (and for how long!) he would remember her haunted eyes, her chewed lips, her unbrushed, dirty-blond hair—not forgetting her scraped knees, as hard as fists of stone.
“
What
rage was that, Jack?”
“Silent.”
“What about it, you little creep?”
“Well, what
is
it, exactly—what is silent rage?” he asked.
“You’re not eating the mystery meat, are you?” Wendy asked, viewing his plate with disapproval.
“No, I would never eat that,” Jack answered. He separated the gray meat from the beige potatoes with his fork.
“You wanna see a little
rage,
Jack?”
“Yes, I guess so,” he replied cautiously—never taking his eyes off her. Wendy had an unsettling habit of cracking her knuckles by pressing them into her underdeveloped breasts.
“You wanna meet me in the washroom?” Wendy asked.
“The
girls’
washroom?”
“I’m not getting caught with you in the
boys’
washroom, you dork.” Jack wanted to think it over, but it was hard to think clearly with Wendy standing over him at his table. The word
dork
itself unsettled him; it seemed so out of place at a mostly all-girls’ school.
“Forgive me for intruding, but aren’t you having any lunch, Wendy?” Miss Wong asked.
“I’d rather die,” Wendy told her.
“Well, I’m certainly sorry to hear that!” Miss Wong said.
“You wanna follow me, or are you
chicken
?” Wendy whispered in Jack’s ear. He could feel one of her hard, bruised knees against his ribs.
“Okay,” he answered.
Officially, Jack needed Miss Wong’s permission to leave the dining hall, but Miss Wong was typically in an overapologetic mood (having blamed herself for attempting to force lunch on Wendy Holton, when Wendy would
rather die
). “Miss Wong—” he started to say.
“Yes, of
course,
Jack,” she blurted out. “I’m
so sorry
if I’ve made you feel self-conscious, or that I may have delayed your leaving the table for whatever obvious good reason you have for leaving.
Heavens!
Don’t let me hold you up another
second
!”
“I’ll be right back,” was all he managed to say.
“I’m sure you will be, Jack,” Miss Wong said. Perhaps the faint hurricane inside her had been overcome by her contrition.
In the girls’ washroom nearest the dining hall, Wendy Holton took Jack into a stall and stood him on the toilet seat. She just grabbed him in the armpits and lifted him up. Standing on the toilet seat, he was eye-to-eye with her; so he wouldn’t slip, Wendy held him by the hips.
“You want to feel rage,
inner
rage, Jack?”
“I said
silent,
silent rage.”
“Same difference, penis breath,” Wendy said.
Now there was a concept that would stay with Jack Burns for many years
—penis breath
! What a deeply disturbing concept it was.
“Feel
this,
” Wendy said. She took his hands and placed them on her breasts—on her
no
breasts, to be more precise.
“Feel
what
?” he asked.
“Don’t be a dork, Jack—you know what they are.”
“This is
rage
?” the boy asked. By no stretch of his imagination could he have called what his small hands held
breasts.
“I’m the only girl in grade seven who
doesn’t
have them!” Wendy exclaimed, in a smoldering fury. Well, this was rage without a doubt.
“Oh.”
“That’s all you can say?” she asked.
“I’m sorry,” Jack quickly said. (How to apologize was all he had learned from Miss Wong.)
“Jack, you’re just not
old enough,
” Wendy declared. She left him standing precariously on the toilet seat. “When I knock on the door from the hall three times, you’ll know it’s safe to come out,” she told him. “
Rage,
” Wendy said, almost as an afterthought.
“
Silent
rage,” Jack repeated, for clarity’s sake. He saw that he should approach Charlotte Barford a little differently on this subject. But
how
?
When Wendy knocked on the washroom door three times, Jack exited into the hall. Miss Caroline Wurtz looked surprised to see him; there was no one else in the corridor. “Jack Burns,” Miss Wurtz said perfectly, as always. “It disappoints me to see you using the girls’ washroom.” Jack was disappointed, too, and said so, which seemed to instill in Miss Wurtz the spirit of forgiveness; she liked it when you said you understood how she felt, but her recovery from being
disappointed
was not always so swift.
Jack had higher expectations for what he might learn from Charlotte Barford. Charlotte at least
had
breasts, he’d observed. Whatever the source of
her
rage, it was not an underdeveloped bosom. Unfortunately, he hadn’t fully prepared how he wanted to approach Charlotte Barford before Charlotte approached
him.
Once a week, after lunch, Jack sang in the primary choir. They performed mostly in those special services—Canadian Thanksgiving, Christmas, Remembrance Day. They did a bang-up
Gaudeamus
at Easter.
Come, ye faithful, raise the strain
Of triumphant gladness!
Jack avoided all eye contact with the organist. He’d already met a lifetime of organists; even though the organist at St. Hilda’s was a woman, she still reminded him of his talented dad.
The day Jack ran into Charlotte Barford in the corridor, he was humming either “Fairest Lord Jesus” or “Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee”—similar adorations. Jack was passing the same girls’ washroom where Wendy Holton had forced him to feel her
no
breasts while imagining her rage—he would remember that washroom to his dying day—when Charlotte Barford opened the washroom door. With her hands still wet and smelling of disinfectant from that awful liquid soap, Charlotte pulled him back into the washroom.
“
What
rage, Jack?” she asked, pinning him to a sink with one of her big, bare knees. There it was, in the pit of his stomach—a so-called breast with
bones
in it!
“The silent, inner kind—rage that doesn’t go away,” Jack guessed.
“It’s what you don’t know, what people won’t tell you, what you have to wait to find out for yourself,” Charlotte said, driving her knee a little deeper. “All the stuff that makes you angry, Jack.”
“But I don’t know if I
am
angry,” the boy said.
“Sure you are,” Charlotte said. “Your dad is a total
doink.
He’s made you and your mom virtual
charity cases.
Everyone’s betting on you, Jack.”
“On
me
? What’s the bet?”
“That you’re gonna be a
womanizer,
like your father.”
“What’s a
womanizer
?” Jack asked.
“You’ll know soon enough, squirrel dink,” she said. “By the way, you’re not touching
my
breasts,” Charlotte whispered. Biting his earlobe, she added: “Not yet.”
Jack knew the exit routine. He waited in the washroom until Charlotte knocked three times on the door from the hall. He was surprised, this time, that Miss Wurtz wasn’t passing by in the corridor at that very moment—there was only Charlotte Barford, walking away. Her hips had the same involuntary roll to them that he remembered of Ingrid Moe’s full-stride departure from the Hotel Bristol, although Charlotte’s skirt was much too short for Oslo in the winter.
There was a lot he didn’t know—not just what a
womanizer
was, but what were
charity cases
? And now, in addition to
penis breath
and
doink,
there was
squirrel dink
to ponder.
Jack could not imagine that this was “proper” material for his next necktie-tying conversation with Mrs. Wicksteed—not in her early-morning curlers and avocado oil, fortified only by her first cup of tea—nor did these issues strike the boy as suitable to raise with Lottie. Her earlier hardships, her undiscussed limp and the life she’d left behind on Prince Edward Island, did not predispose Lottie to stressful dialogue of any kind. And of course he knew what his mother’s response would be. “We’ll discuss this when you’re old enough,” his mom was fond of saying. Certain subjects were in the same category as getting your first tattoo, for which (according to Alice) you also had to be
old enough.
Well, Jack knew someone who was old enough. When he was adrift in grade one, under the apologetic supervision of the weatherless Miss Wong, Emma Oastler was in grade seven, thirteen going on twenty-one. No topics were off-limits for conversation with Emma. There was only the problem of how pissed-off she was. (Jack knew Emma would be furious with him for speaking to Wendy and Charlotte first.)
Don’t misunderstand the outlaw corridors and washroom thuggery—namely, the older girls’ behavior
outside
the classroom. St. Hilda’s was a good school, and an especially rigorous one—academically. Perhaps the demands of the classroom created an urgency to act up among the older girls; they needed to express themselves in opposition to the correct diction and letter-perfect enunciation, of which Miss Wurtz was not the only champion among the generally excellent faculty at the school. The girls needed a language of their own—corridor-speak, or washroom grammar. That was why there was a lot of “Lemme-see” stuff—all the “I’m gonna, dontcha-wanna, gimme-that-thing
-now
” crap—which was the way the older girls talked among themselves, or to Jack. If they ever spoke in this fashion in their respective classrooms, the faculty—not only Miss Wurtz—would have instantly reprimanded them.
Not so Peewee, Mrs. Wicksteed’s Jamaican driver. Peewee was in no position to criticize how Emma Oastler spoke to Jack in the backseat of the Lincoln Town Car. To begin with, both Peewee and Jack were surprised the first time Emma slid into the backseat. It was a cold, rainy afternoon. Emma lived in Forest Hill; she usually walked to and from school. After school—in both her middle- and her senior-school years—Emma normally hung out in a restaurant and coffee shop at the corner of Spadina and Lonsdale with a bunch of her older-girl friends. Not this day, and it wasn’t the cold or the rain.
“You need help with your homework, Jack,” Emma announced. (The boy was in grade one. He wouldn’t have much homework before grade two, and he wouldn’t really need help with it before grades three and four.)
“Where are we taking the girl, mon?” Peewee asked Jack.
“Take me home with him,” Emma told the driver. “We’ve got a
shitload
of work to do—haven’t we, Jack?”
“She sounds like she’s the boss, mon,” Peewee said. Jack couldn’t argue with that. Emma had slumped down in the backseat, pulling him down beside her.