Authors: John Irving
While Mr. Malcolm ran to the nurse’s office, to fetch either the nurse or (for more minor injuries) a first-aid kit, Mrs. Malcolm would be left in the kids’ tentative care. Someone held the wheelchair from behind so she couldn’t careen out of control; the rest of the class stood petrified around her, just out of her reach. They were instructed to not let her get out of the wheelchair, although it’s doubtful that seven-year-olds could have stopped her. Fortunately, she never tried to escape; she flailed about, crying out the children’s names, which she’d memorized in the first week of school.
“Maureen Yap!” Mrs. Malcolm would holler.
“Here, ma’am!” Maureen would holler back, and Mrs. Malcolm would turn her blind eyes in The Yap’s direction.
“Jimmy Bacon!” Mrs. Malcolm would scream.
Jimmy would moan. There was nothing wrong with Wheelchair Jane’s hearing; she looked without seeing in Jimmy’s direction upon hearing him moan.
“Jack Burns!” she shouted one day.
“I’m right here, Mrs. Malcolm,” Jack said. Even in grade two, his diction and enunciation were far in advance of his years.
“Your father was well spoken, too,” Mrs. Malcolm announced. “Your father is evil,” she added. “Don’t let Satan put a curse on you to be like him.”
“No, Mrs. Malcolm, I won’t.” Jack may have answered her with the utmost confidence, but within the mostly all-girls’ world of St. Hilda’s, it was clear to him that he was fighting overwhelming odds. The Big Bet, which Emma Oastler spoke of with a reverence usually reserved for her favorite novels and movies, heavily favored the suspected potency of William’s genes. If womanizing could be passed from father to son, it most certainly would be passed to Jack. In the eyes of almost everyone at St. Hilda’s, even in what amounted to the severely
limited
peripheral vision of Mrs. Malcolm, Jack Burns was his father’s son—or about to be.
“You can’t blame anyone for being interested, Jack,” Emma said philosophically. “It’s exciting stuff—to see how you’ll turn out.” Clearly Mrs. Malcolm had taken a genetic interest in how Jack would turn out, too.
But the worst thing about Jane Malcolm was how she behaved when her husband returned to the grade-two classroom—with either the school nurse or the first-aid kit. “Here I am—I’m back, Jane!” he always announced.
“Did you hear that, children?” Mrs. Malcolm would begin. “He’s come back! He’s never gone for long and he always comes back!”
“Please, Jane,” Mr. Malcolm would say.
“Mr. Malcolm
likes
taking care of me,” Wheelchair Jane told the class. “He does
everything
for me—all the things I can’t do myself.”
“Now, now, Jane, please,” Mr. Malcolm would say, but she wouldn’t let him take her skinned knuckles in his hands. Slowly, at first, but with ever-quickening strikes, she slapped his face.
“Mr. Malcolm
loves
doing everything for me!” she cried. “He feeds me, he dresses me, he
washes
me—”
“Jane, darling—” Mr. Malcolm tried to say.
“He
wipes
me!” Mrs. Malcolm screamed; that was always the end of it, before she resorted to whimpers and moans.
Jimmy Bacon would commence to moan with her, which was soon followed by the remarkable blanket-sucking sounds that the Booth twins were capable of making—even without blankets. Heel-thumping from the French twins never lagged far behind. And Jack would steal a look at Lucinda Fleming, who was usually looking at him. Her serene smile betrayed nothing of the mysterious rage inside her.
Do you wanna see it?
her smile seemed to say.
Well, I’m gonna show you,
her smile promised
—but not yet.
It was a not-yet world Jack lived in, from kindergarten through grade two. Pitying Mr. Malcolm was an education in itself. But more memorably, and more lastingly, Jack’s education was as much in Emma Oastler’s hands as it was in Mr. Malcolm’s.
On rainy days, or whenever it was snowing, Emma slid into the backseat of the Lincoln Town Car and instructed Peewee as follows: “Just drive us around, Peewee. No peeking in the backseat. Keep your eyes on the road.”
“That okay with you, mon?” Peewee always asked Jack.
“Yes, that would be fine, Peewee. Thank you for asking,” the boy replied.
“You’re the boss, miss,” Peewee would say.
Scrunched down low in the backseat, Jack and Emma chewed gum nonstop—their breath minty or fruity, depending on the flavor. Emma would let Jack undo her braid, but she would never let him weave it back together. With her braid undone, Emma had enough hair for both of them to hide their faces under its spell. “If you get your gum stuck in my hair, honey pie, I’m gonna kill you,” she often said—but once, when Jack was laughing about something, Emma suddenly sounded like his mother. “Don’t laugh when you’re chewing gum—you could choke.”
There was the puzzling moment when they checked on her
training
bra, as Emma disparagingly called it. From what Jack could tell, the instructions the bra had given to her breasts were already working. At least her breasts were getting bigger. Wasn’t that the point?
Speaking of growing, his penis had made no discernible progress. “How’s the little guy?” Emma would invariably ask, and Jack would dutifully show her. “What are you thinking about, little guy?” Emma asked his penis once.
If penises could dream, Jack didn’t know why he was surprised to hear that they could think as well, but the little guy had demonstrated no trace of a thought process
—not yet.
After grade two, Jack’s sightings of Mr. Malcolm were limited mainly to the boys’ washroom, where the teacher occasionally went to weep. But Jack most frequently caught Mr. Malcolm in the act of examining his facial stubble—as if the shadow of his beard-in-progress or his mustache-in-the-making were his principal (maybe his only) vanity.
Sightings of Mrs. Malcolm were also rare. Usually not more than twice a day, one of the girls’ washrooms would be posted with an
OUT OF ORDER
sign, which meant that Mr. Malcolm was attending to Wheelchair Jane. The girls were instructed to respect their privacy.
Once Jack heard the unmistakable sound of Mrs. Malcolm slapping her husband in the washroom. The boy tried to hurry in the hall, to outrun the sound, but he could never outdistance Mr. Malcolm’s pathetic “Now, now, Jane,” which was quickly followed by his “Jane, darling—” upon which some commonplace clamor in the corridor drowned out the repeated melodrama. (Several grade-six girls were passing; naturally, they sounded like several
dozen.
)
In Jack’s remaining two years at St. Hilda’s, there were many times when he missed Mr. Malcolm, but he did not miss being a witness to the grade-two teacher’s perpetual abuse. From then on, when Jack saw people in wheelchairs, he felt no less pity for them—no less than before he met Mrs. Malcolm. Jack just felt
more
pity for the people attending to them.
The little guy and Jack were eight years old when they started grade three. Even before his penis demonstrated its capacity for having dreams and ideas entirely of its own devising, the little guy and Jack had begun to live parallel (if not altogether separate) lives.
That Miss Caroline Wurtz had a “perishable” beauty was enhanced by her being petite. Certainly she was smaller than any of the grade-three mothers. And Miss Wurtz wore a perfume that encouraged the grade-three boys to invent problems with their math. Miss Wurtz would correct a boy’s math by leaning over his desk, where he could inhale her perfume while taking a closer and most desirable look at the fetching birthmark on her right collarbone and the small, fishhook-shaped scar on the same side of her throat.
Both the birthmark and the scar seemed to inflame themselves whenever Miss Wurtz was upset. In the ultraviolet light of the bat-cave exhibit, Jack vividly remembered her scar; it was pulsating like a neon strobe. How she got it was in the category of Jack’s imagination close to Tattoo Peter’s missing leg and Lottie’s limp, although the latter subject was further complicated by the boy’s mistaken assumption that an epidural was a vital part of the female anatomy.
That Charlotte Brontë was Miss Wurtz’s favorite writer, and
Jane Eyre
her bible, was known to everyone in the junior school; an annual dramatization of the novel was their principal cultural contribution to the middle and senior grades. The older girls might have been more capable of acting out such ambitious material—not only Jane’s indomitable spirit but also Rochester’s blindness and religious transformation—yet Miss Wurtz had claimed
Jane Eyre
as junior-school property, and in both grades three and four, Jack was awarded the role of Rochester.
What other boy in the junior school could have memorized the lines? “Dread remorse when you are tempted to err, Miss Eyre: remorse is the poison of life.” Jack delivered that line as if he knew what it meant.
In grade three, the first year Jack played Rochester, the grade
-six
girl who played Jane was Connie Turnbull. Her brooding, rejected presence made her a good choice for an orphan. When she said, “ ‘It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity,’ ” you believed her. (Connie Turnbull would never be a tranquil soul.)
Of course it was ludicrous when it was necessary for Jack-as-Rochester to take Connie-as-Jane in his arms and cry: “ ‘Never, never was anything at once so frail and so indomitable.’ ” He only came up to her, and everyone else’s, breasts. “ ‘I could bend her with my finger and thumb!’ ” Jack cried, to the accompanying laughter and disbelief of the audience.
Connie Turnbull looked at him, as if to say: “Just try it, penis breath!” But it wasn’t only his memorization skills and his diction and enunciation that made Jack so captivating as an actor. Miss Wurtz had taught him to take command of the stage.
“
How?
” he asked her.
“You have an audience of one, Jack,” Miss Wurtz told the boy. “Your job is to touch one heart.”
“Whose?”
“Whose heart do you want it to be?” Miss Wurtz asked.
“My mom’s?”
“I think you can touch her heart anytime, Jack.”
Whose heart could old Rochester touch, anyway? Wasn’t it
Jane
who touched one’s heart? But that wasn’t what Miss Wurtz meant. She meant who would want to watch Jack but remain unseen; who was the likeliest stranger in the audience, whose interest was
only
in Jack? Who wanted to be impressed by Jack while sparing himself the boy’s scrutiny?
Jack’s audience of one was his
father,
of course. From the moment he imagined William, Jack could command every inch of the stage; he was on-camera for the rest of his life. Jack would learn later that an actor’s job was not complicated, but it had two parts. Whoever you were, you made the audience love you; then you broke their hearts.
Once Jack could imagine his father in the shadows of every audience, he could perform anything. “Think about it, Jack,” Miss Wurtz urged him. “Just one heart. Whose is it?”
“My dad’s?”
“What a good place to begin!” she told the boy, both her birthmark and her scar
inflaming
themselves. “Let’s see how that works.” It worked, all right—even in the case of Jack’s miniature Rochester to Connie Turnbull’s bigger, stronger Jane. It worked from the start.
When Rochester says, “Jane! You think me, I daresay, an irreligious dog—” well, Jack had them all. It was ridiculous, but he had Connie Turnbull, too. When she took his hand and kissed it, her lips were parted; she made contact with her teeth and her tongue.
“Nice job, Jack,” she whispered in his ear. Connie continued to hold his hand for the duration of the applause. He could feel Emma Oastler hating Connie Turnbull; from the unseen audience, Emma’s jealousy swept onstage like a draft.
But what Jack liked best about the Rochester role was the opportunity to be blind. Doubtless he was drawing on the collision-course lunacy of Mrs. Malcolm, but playing blind afforded Jack another opportunity. When he tripped and fell in rehearsals, it was Miss Wurtz who rushed to his aid. (Her ministrations to his injuries, which were entirely feigned, were
why
he tripped and fell.)
His penis’s first
thoughtful
reaction was not to Connie Turnbull French-kissing his hand—God, no. The little guy’s first idea of his own was clearly in response to Miss Caroline Wurtz. The older-woman thing, which had begun in Oslo with Ingrid Moe, would haunt Jack Burns all his life.
Miss Wurtz’s hands were not much bigger than a grade-three girl’s, and when she comforted a child—sometimes, when she just spoke to him or her—she would rest one of her hands on the child’s shoulder, where he or she could feel her fingers tremble as lightly as the movements of a small, agitated bird. It was as if her hand, or all of Miss Wurtz, were about to take flight. Not one of the grade-three children would have been surprised if, one day, Miss Wurtz had simply flown away. She was that delicate; she was as fragile as a woman made of
feathers.
(Hence “perishable,” in another sense.)
But Miss Wurtz could not manage the grade-three classroom. The kids were no more badly behaved than other third graders, although Roland Simpson would later, as a teenager, spend time in a reform school and ultimately wind up in jail. And Jimmy Bacon’s penchant for moaning was only a small part of his wretchedness—Jimmy was no joy to be with on a regular basis. He once dressed as a ghost for the grade-three Halloween party and wore
nothing,
not even underwear, under a bedsheet with holes cut out of it for his eyes. Jimmy was so badly frightened by one of The Gray Ghost’s sudden appearances—Mrs. McQuat was the grade-four teacher—that he
pooed
in his sheet.
But Miss Wurtz was so delicate that she might not have been able to manage a kindergarten, or her own children. Did her strength emerge only onstage? Alice’s theory about Miss Wurtz was intuitive but unkind. “Caroline looks like she never got over somebody. Poor thing.”