Authors: John Irving
Gordon French once released his pet hamster into his hostile twin’s hair. From Caroline’s reaction, one might have guessed that the hamster was rabid and bit her. But all the stupid hamster did was race around and around her head, as if it were running on its incessant wheel. Miss Wurtz, perhaps fearful that the hamster would be harmed, began to cry. Crying was the last resort of her disappointment, and she resorted to it with tiresome frequency. “Oh, I never thought I’d be
this
disappointed!” she would wail. “Oh, my feelings are hurt more than I can
say
!” But when Miss Wurtz began to cry, the kids stopped paying attention to what she said. They were concentrating on what they knew would happen next, for which there was no preparing themselves. The Gray Ghost’s sudden appearances, even when they were anticipated, were always startling.
There was only one door to the grade-three classroom, and despite her reputedly supernatural powers, Mrs. McQuat could not pass through walls; yet even though the children saw the doorknob turning, they could not protect themselves from the shock. Sometimes the door would swing open, but no one would be there. They would hear The Gray Ghost’s labored breathing from the hall, while Jimmy Bacon moaned and the two sets of twins sounded their predictable alarms. At other times, Mrs. McQuat seemed to leap inside the classroom before the doorknob so much as
twitched.
Only Roland Simpson, the class’s future criminal, purposely closed his eyes. (Roland
liked
being startled.)
According to Mrs. Wicksteed, The Gray Ghost had lost a lung in the war.
What
war and
which
lung were unknown to Jack. Mrs. McQuat had been a combat nurse, and she’d been gassed. Hence her labored breathing; The Gray Ghost was always out of breath. Gassed
where
and with
what
were also a mystery to Jack.
The third graders could have written Mrs. McQuat’s dialogue for her. Upon her unpreventable sudden appearance, The Gray Ghost would address the class as if she were a character in a dramatization Caroline Wurtz had scripted. In her cold-as-the-grave, out-of-breath voice, Mrs. McQuat would ask: “Which of you . . . made Miss Wurtz
. . . cry
?”
Without hesitation, the children identified the guilty party. They would betray
anyone
when asked that terrifying question. At that moment, they had no friends, no loyalties. Because here is the dark heart of what they believed: if Mrs. McQuat had been gassed and lost a lung, wasn’t it possible that she had
died
? Who could say for certain that she
wasn’t
a ghost? Her skin, her hair, her clothes—gray on gray on gray. And why were her hands so cold? Why did no one ever see her arrive at school, or leave? Why was she always so suddenly
there
?
Jack would long remember The Gray Ghost asking Gordon French: “You put . . . a
what . . .
in your sister’s . . . hair?”
Gordon answered: “Just a hamster, a
friendly
one!”
“It felt like a small dog, Gordon,” Caroline said. Gordon knew the drill. He stood like a soldier in the aisle beside his desk, immobilized by his foreknowledge of what he was about to endure.
“I hope . . . you didn’t
. . . hurt
the hamster . . . Caroline,” Mrs. McQuat said, granting Gordon brief reprieve.
“It’s no fun having one in your hair,” Caroline replied.
“Where
is
the hamster?” Miss Wurtz suddenly cried. (That her first name was also Caroline was confusing.)
“Please
find . . .
the hamster . . . Caroline,” The Gray Ghost said. But before Caroline French could begin to look, Miss Wurtz dropped to all fours and crawled under Caroline’s desk. “Not
you . . .
dear,” Mrs. McQuat said reprovingly. All the children had joined Miss Wurtz on the floor.
“What’s its name, Gordon?” Maureen Yap asked.
The Gray Ghost was not letting Gordon off so easily. “You’ll come with me . . . Gordon,” Mrs. McQuat said. “Pray your hamster isn’t lost . . . for it will
surely die,
if it’s lost.”
The kids watched Gordon leave the classroom with The Gray Ghost. Everyone knew that Mrs. McQuat was taking Gordon to the chapel. Often it was empty. But even if one of the choirs was practicing, she took the offending child to the chapel and left him or her there. The child had to kneel on the stone floor in the center aisle next to one of the middle rows of pews and face backward, away from the altar. “You have . . . turned your back on God,” The Gray Ghost would tell the child. “You better hope . . . He isn’t looking.”
As Gordon would recount, it was a bad feeling to have turned his back on God and not know if He was looking. After a few minutes, Gordon felt sure that someone was behind him—in the vicinity of the altar or the pulpit. Perhaps one of the four women attending to Jesus—saints, now ghosts themselves—had stepped out of the stained glass and was about to touch him with her icy hand.
The grade-three class was interrupted in this fashion so frequently that they often couldn’t remember who’d been banished to the chapel and had turned his or her back on God. Mrs. McQuat never brought you back from the chapel—she just took you there. (Roland Simpson virtually
lived
in the chapel with his back turned to God.) Time would pass, and someone—often The Yap—would ask: “Miss Wurtz, shouldn’t someone check to see if Gordon is all right in the chapel?”
“Oh, my goodness!” Miss Wurtz would cry. “How
could
I have forgotten!” And someone would be sent to release Gordon (or Roland) from the certifiably lonely terror of kneeling in the chapel backward. It felt wrong to be looking the wrong way in church, like you were really asking for trouble.
But the third graders were well prepared for fourth grade; Mrs. McQuat, of course, was the teacher for grade four. The only fourth graders who were ever in need of being disciplined in the chapel were
new
students who’d not had the pleasure of witnessing The Wurtz’s emotional meltdowns. The Gray Ghost had no trouble managing
her
classroom; it was Miss Wurtz’s class that repeatedly called upon Mrs. McQuat’s ghostly skills.
The third graders continued to get in trouble, and they often ended up in the chapel facing backward, because—despite their fear of The Gray Ghost—there was something
irresistible
about how The Wurtz fell apart. The kids both loved the way she cried and hated her for it, because—even in grade three—they understood that it was Miss Wurtz’s weakness that brought Mrs. McQuat’s punishment upon them. (Miss Wurtz’s
weakness
was not infrequently on display in Jack’s dreams of her in Mrs. Oastler’s push-up bra—which were not thwarted by Alice returning the bra to Mrs. Oastler.)
Gratefully, Jack never dreamed about The Gray Ghost. In his young mind, this gave further credibility to the theory that Mrs. McQuat was dead. She was, however, very much alive in the grade-three classroom, where her sudden appearances became as commonplace as The Wurtz bursting into tears. Hence, when Jimmy Bacon exposed himself to Maureen Yap—when he raised his ghost-sheet to demonstrate that, indeed, he wore no underwear beneath his Halloween costume—Miss Wurtz’s feelings were again hurt more than she could
say.
(She bitterly expressed how she never thought she’d be so
completely
disappointed.) And when The Gray Ghost left Jimmy in the chapel facing the wrong way, Jimmy pooed in his bedsheet like the frightened ghost he was. If Mrs. McQuat’s sudden appearance had started Jimmy pooing, his overwhelming conviction that Jesus had
disappeared
from the stained glass above the altar finished the job.
“A poor costume choice, Jimmy,” was all The Wurtz would say about the beshitted sheet.
No matter how many times Lucinda Fleming provoked Jack with her ponytail and he pinned her head to the top of his desk, it was never
that
dispute between them that reduced Caroline Wurtz to tears. In all their fights, Lucinda and Jack stopped short of causing Miss Wurtz’s sobs. They may have been foolish enough to imagine that they would be spared The Gray Ghost’s sudden appearance.
But Lucinda was led by her ear to the chapel over
another
issue: she erased the answers on Roland Simpson’s math test while Roland was turning his back on God in the chapel. (All the other kids were surprised that Lucinda had bothered; in all probability, the answers on Roland’s math test were wrong.)
Mrs. McQuat took Jack to the chapel only once, but memorably. He drove Miss Wurtz to tears
not
by grabbing Lucinda Fleming’s ponytail and pinning her head to his desk, but by kissing her. It was Miss Wurtz Jack
imagined
kissing, of course, but he kissed Lucinda Fleming on the back of her neck instead.
Only one person could have prompted him to do such a repugnant thing—Emma Oastler. Emma was angry at Jack for “ratting” on her to his mother, although the return of Mrs. Oastler’s bra hardly amounted to a day of reckoning for Emma. Emma’s mom was unmoved by Alice’s assertion that Emma had “molested” Jack. In Mrs. Oastler’s opinion, it was not possible for a woman or a girl to molest a man or a boy; whatever games Emma had played with Jack, he’d probably liked them, Mrs. Oastler maintained. But Emma was disciplined in some minor fashion. She was “grounded,” she told Jack; she was to come directly home from school for a month.
“No more cuddling in the backseat, baby cakes. No more making the little guy stand at attention.”
“It’s only for a month,” Jack reminded her.
“I don’t suppose there’s anyone in grade three who turns you on,” Emma inquired. “I mean
besides
The Wurtz.”
Jack made the mistake of complaining about Lucinda Fleming—how she tortured him with her ponytail, but he was always the one who got in trouble. In her present mood, Emma probably liked the idea of getting Jack in trouble.
“Lucinda wants you to kiss her, Jack.”
“She
does
?”
“She doesn’t know it, but she does.”
“She’s bigger than I am,” he pointed out.
“Just kiss Lucinda, Jack—it’ll make her your slave.”
“I don’t want a
slave
!”
“You don’t know it, but you do,” Emma told him. “Just imagine you’re kissing The Wurtz.”
The discovery, that same week, of Gordon’s dead hamster in the chalk box should have forewarned Jack. Talk about an ill omen! But he didn’t heed it. If, for what seemed the longest time, he
didn’t
dare to kiss Lucinda Fleming, he also couldn’t dispel the idea of doing it. Sitting behind her, watching her swish her whip of a ponytail back and forth—well, suffice it to say her neck was often exposed. And one day, when Miss Wurtz was writing the new vocabulary words on the blackboard, Jack stood on tiptoe and leaned across his desk and—lifting her ponytail—kissed Lucinda Fleming on the back of her neck.
There was no response from the little guy—another ill omen, this one not lost on Jack. And what bullshit it was—that the children were ever told to be on their guard for Lucinda’s so-called silent rage. There was nothing
silent
about it! Lucinda never made a sound when Jack pulled her ponytail or pinned her head to the top of his desk, but when he kissed her, you would have thought she’d been bitten by the avenging ghost of Gordon’s dead hamster. (Not even in Jack’s wildest dreams had Miss Wurtz, in a variety of bras and restraining devices, once responded to his kisses with
half
of Lucinda’s demented energy.)
Lucinda Fleming screamed until she was red in the face. She lay in the aisle beside her desk and kicked her legs and flailed her arms and thrashed her head
and
ponytail back and forth, as if she were being devoured by rats. This was a challenge well beyond The Wurtz’s limited capacity. She must have thought that Lucinda was warming up for a suicide attempt. “Oh, Lucinda, who has
disappointed
you so?” Miss Wurtz cried—or some such idiotic utterance, because The Wurtz always said something amazingly inappropriate. Maybe the kids couldn’t resist misbehaving just to see what she would say.
In crafting dramatizations from her beloved novels, Miss Wurtz had an ear for the best lines—many of which she robbed for her own voice-over. In introducing Jack-as-Elinor in
Sense and Sensibility,
she set him-as-her up perfectly. (Jack was the reasonable sister.) Miss Wurtz said of Elinor, in voice-over: “ ‘She had an excellent heart; her disposition was affectionate, and her feelings were strong; but she knew how to govern them: it was a knowledge which her mother had yet to learn, and which one of her sisters had resolved never to be taught.’ ”
Alas, in Jack’s grade-four year, Miss Wurtz would cast him as the immoderate sister, Marianne, whom he detested. It was the meddlesome mother, Mrs. Dashwood, whom he wanted to play, but Miss Wurtz, who conveniently overlooked the fact that she’d cast Jack as blind Rochester, maiden-no-more Tess,
A-
on-her-breast Hester,
and
under-the-train Anna, said that he didn’t look
old enough
to be a woman who’d had three daughters.
Though Miss Wurtz seemed at a loss about what to say when something spontaneously just
happened,
she always spoke with authority, her diction and enunciation perfect, even if what she said revealed a total misunderstanding of the situation. This the children found very confusing.
Hence, when Lucinda Fleming suddenly went stiff as a board and began to bang the back of her head on the floor, Miss Wurtz asked the class: “Which of you thoughtless children has caused Lucinda such anguish and pain?”
“
What?
” Maureen Yap asked.
“Lucinda is
peeing
!” Caroline French observed.
Indeed, Lucinda lay in a spreading puddle—her skirt stained a darker gray. In a doomed effort to keep time with the floor-thumping of Lucinda’s head, the French twins began the all-too-recognizable patter of their heels; they were not unlike the rhythm section of a band in need of practice. The anticipated blanket-sucking sounds of the Booth twins were ominously replaced by their identical imitations of
gagging.
They were more like blanket
-strangulation
sounds; yet, as accompaniment to the spectacle of Lucinda Fleming methodically banging her head in a pool of her own urine, the sounds were more suitable than anything Miss Wurtz had to say.