Authors: John Irving
“In parts of Arizona, we do,” Lambrecht replied. “We just don’t have the road signs—or the
heaves,
I guess.”
“
Jesus,
Lambrecht!” Heller cried.
“That’s
three,
Heller,” Coach Clum said. “You’re not having a very good road trip.”
“When does Heller
ever
have a good road trip?” Jack asked. He had no points against him for the month. He knew he could afford one.
To Jack’s surprise, Coach Clum said: “That’s
two
against you, Burns. It is
derogatory
of you to call our attention to Heller’s losing record, but it’s also
dismissive
of Lambrecht’s intelligence to encourage him to imagine that frost heavies exist, that they have eyes and are low to the ground—”
“—and they’re the color of the fucking
road
!” Lambrecht interrupted him.
“That’s a half-point against
you,
Lambrecht,” Coach Clum said.
They were somewhere in Rhode Island, or maybe it was Massachusetts. They were a long way from Maine, Jack knew. How he loved those nights! He turned his flashlight back on and redirected his thoughts to the task of memorizing “Dover Beach”—not a short poem, and one with an overlong first stanza.
“ ‘
The sea is calm tonight,
’ ” Jack read aloud, thinking it magnanimous of him to change the subject.
“Save it for Drama Night, Burns,” Coach Clum said. “Just memorize it to yourself, if you don’t mind.”
He wasn’t a bad guy, Coach Clum, but he never accepted what he presumed was the
vanity
of Jack having his cauliflower ears drained. When Mike Heller called Jack a “sissy” for not wanting to go through the rest of his life with cauliflower ears, Coach Clum not only awarded a point against Heller for
sissy,
which was clearly
derogatory—
the coach made Heller get his next cauliflower ear drained. “Does it hurt, Mike?” Coach Clum asked the heavyweight, standing over him while the fluid from the damaged ear was being extracted in the training room.
“Yeah,” Heller answered. “It hurts.”
“Well, then, the right word for Burns wouldn’t be
sissy,
would it?” the coach asked. “
Vain,
maybe,” Coach Clum said, “but not
sissy.
”
“Okay, Burns is
vain,
then,” Heller said, wincing.
“Right you are, Mike,” Coach Clum said. “But
vain
is a point against you, too.”
One night on the team bus, when Coach Clum and Jack were the only ones awake, Jack had a somewhat philosophical conversation with him. “I want to be an actor,” he told his coach. “I wouldn’t say it was
vain
for an actor not to want cauliflower ears. I would say it was
practical.
”
“Hmm,” Coach Clum said. Maybe he wasn’t really awake, Jack thought. But Coach Clum was just thinking it over. “Let me put it to you this way, Jack,” he said. “
If
it turns out that you’re a movie star, I’ll tell everyone that you were one of the most
practical
wrestlers I ever had the privilege to coach.”
“I see,” Jack said. “And if I don’t make it as an actor—”
“Well,
making it
is the point, isn’t it, Jack? If you don’t turn out to be a movie star, I’ll tell everyone that I never coached a wrestler as
vain
about his ears as Jack Burns.”
“I’ll bet you it turns out being a
practical
decision,” Jack told him.
“What’s that, Jack?”
“I’ll bet you a whole dollar that I make it as an actor,” the boy said.
“Since we’re the only ones awake,” Coach Clum whispered, “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that, Jack.” It was the school philosophy again. As Mr. Ramsey (who had read the handbook more carefully than Jack) could have told him, there was no gambling at Redding. Jack shut his eyes and prayed for sleep, but Coach Clum went on whispering in the dark bus. “Memorize this, Jack,” the coach whispered. “If I had to guess
—guess,
I say, not
bet—
you’re going to end up being a
starter
somewhere.”
“You can count on it,” Jack told him.
That was Redding. To Jack’s surprise, and Emma’s—not to mention how shocked Alice and Mrs. Oastler were—he
loved
the place. It was what such schools are, or can be, to some boys. You travel to what seems, or is, a foreign country; your troubles may travel with you, but nonetheless you fit in. Jack Burns had never fit in before.
17
Michele Maher, and Others
J
ack did not
fit in
at Exeter, where he was admitted on the strength of Redding’s reputation for building character—with the additional support, in the admissions office, of Exeter’s wrestling coach, who knew that Coach Clum’s boys were “grinders.” Jack was a
grinder—
a hard-nosed kid, if little more—and while he was good enough to wrestle on the Exeter team, he was not at all prepared for how difficult a school Phillips Exeter Academy was.
That Noah Rosen was also admitted to Exeter (Noah
deserved
to be) was Jack’s salvation. Coach Hudson, the Exeter wrestling coach, further intervened on Jack’s behalf: the coach arranged for Noah to be Jack’s roommate, and Noah helped Jack with his homework. Jack’s memorization skills notwithstanding, Exeter was so academically demanding, so intellectually rigorous, that his abilities at mere mimicry just couldn’t keep up. The memorization helped him, both as a wrestler and as an actor-to-be, but Noah Rosen kept him in school.
Jack rewarded Noah by sleeping with his older sister, who was a college student at Radcliffe at the time. Jack had met Leah Rosen at one of the Thanksgivings he spent with Noah and his family in Cambridge. Leah was four years older than Noah and Jack; she was at Andover while they were at Redding, and she entered Radcliffe when they began at Exeter. She was not especially pretty, but she had wonderful hair and a Gibson girl’s bosom—and she was attractive to Jack in what was becoming a familiar, older-woman way.
Noah was his best friend; a nonathlete, he was nevertheless closer to Jack than any of Jack’s wrestler friends. When Leah dropped out of Radcliffe for a semester—not just to have an abortion but to worry obsessively about it—Noah didn’t know Jack was the father.
After he’d stopped sleeping with Leah and was having an affair with a married woman who worked as a dishwasher in the academy kitchen—Mrs. Stackpole was a short, stout woman with several mercifully faded tattoos—Jack learned from Noah that Leah was depressed and seeing a psychiatrist. Jack still didn’t tell him.
Unlike at Redding, where everyone had a work-job, the only work-jobs at Exeter were done by the scholarship students. Noah was a scholarship kid at Exeter. Once, when Noah was sick, Jack took his work-job in the school dining hall; he collected the used trays from the cafeteria and carried them into the kitchen, which is how and when he came to know Mrs. Stackpole.
He visited Mrs. Stackpole midmornings, between classes, in her small, shabby house near the gasworks. Jack came and went in a hurry, because Mrs. Stackpole’s husband worked in the gasworks and always ate his lunch at home. The lunch, a leftover from the previous evening’s supper, was warming in the oven while Mrs. Stackpole spread a towel on the living-room couch and she and Jack engaged in a combative kind of lovemaking—reminiscent of the boy’s initiation to sex with Mrs. Machado. The dishwasher’s heavy breathing was accompanied by a whistling sound, which Jack first thought was coming from the husband’s mystery lunch; perhaps it was about to explode in the oven. But Mrs. Stackpole suffered from a deviated nasal septum, the result of a broken nose her husband had given her. (Possibly because of an unsavory lunchtime experience—Mrs. Stackpole never explained the circumstances to Jack.)
He couldn’t imagine that she’d ever been attractive, nor could he have articulated why he was attracted to her (in part) for that reason—her glum, expressionless face, the downturned corners of her sullen mouth, her oily skin, the bad tattoos, and what she referred to as the “love handles” girdling her thick waist—but the dishwasher was passionate about certain sexual positions, wherein Mrs. Adkins had merely sighed or taken some evident pains to endure. Among these was Mrs. Stackpole’s preference for the top position, which allowed her to look down on Jack while she mounted and rode him.
“You’re too good-lookin’ for a guy,” she told him once, during one such rough ride.
The husband’s lunch sent forth an odor of cauliflower, caraway seeds, and smoked sausage—maybe kielbasa. Something too powerful to be contained in the oven, anyway. Strong stuff—like Mrs. Stackpole herself, Jack was thinking.
“I wonder,” Jack said to Noah once, in their senior year at Exeter, “if older women can look at younger boys and know the ones who are attracted to them—even if no one else is.”
“Why would you wonder about that?” Noah asked.
Jack then told him almost everything—about Mrs. Machado, too. But somewhere, maybe from his mother, he’d learned to be selective about telling the truth. He
didn’t
tell Noah that he’d slept with Leah, or even about Mrs. Adkins. (Jack knew that Noah loved his sister, and Noah had been awfully fond of Mrs. Adkins.)
Jack’s mistake was that Noah simply told the truth; he wasn’t at all selective about it. Noah told Leah that Jack had an unusual older-woman thing; he told his sister about the dishwasher and about Mrs. Machado, too.
At Exeter, where his fellow students were absorbing all manner of requisite information—at the highest level of learning—Jack chiefly learned how one can fuck up a friendship by telling the truth selectively, which of course amounts to
not
telling it. It was Leah, not Jack, who told Noah that she’d been pregnant with Jack’s child; she told her brother about the abortion, too. So when Leah dropped out of Radcliffe again—this time, for good—Jack knew he thoroughly deserved to lose Noah Rosen as a friend.
Jack had spent what felt like a lifetime in childhood, but his adolescence passed as quickly and unclearly as those road signs out the window of his wrestling team’s bus. Jack Burns had no better understanding of women, or what might constitute correct behavior with them, than poor Lambrecht did of frost heaves—or that it was sorrow and boredom that drove Mrs. Adkins and Mrs. Stackpole
and
Leah Rosen to sleep with Jack, when they knew he was nothing but a horny boy.
When Jack graduated from Exeter in the spring of 1983, Noah Rosen wouldn’t shake his hand. For years, Jack couldn’t bear to think of him. In essence, Jack had obliterated Noah from his life—at a time when Noah was the warmest presence in it.
Both of Noah’s parents were academics, theorists in early-childhood education. From their appearance, and that of their Cambridge household—not to mention Noah’s scholarship to Exeter, and Leah had gone to Andover
and
Radcliffe on scholarships—Jack guessed that there was little money to be made in early-childhood education. (A pity, because it was inarguably very
formative
to Jack.)
The Rosens had a high regard for education at every level; it must have devastated them that Leah left Radcliffe. She went to Madison, Wisconsin, and got into some trouble there. It wasn’t drug trouble; it was something political—the wrong bunch of friends, Noah implied. “There was a succession of bad boyfriends,” Noah told Jack, “beginning with you.”
Leah Rosen ended up dead, in Chile. That’s all Jack knew. At least there wasn’t any water involved—not the absurd Nezinscot, the so-called river that claimed Mrs. Adkins.
Jack hadn’t
meant
these people any harm! Not Mrs. Stackpole, either; her body was found in the Exeter River, below the falls. Above the falls, the river was freshwater and not very deep. Below the falls, the water was brackish—the lower river was tidal—and Mrs. Stackpole was discovered in the salt water, in the mudflats at low tide. The water had receded enough for a golfer to spot the body, or maybe it was a rower on the Exeter crew. Distracted by his impending graduation, Jack couldn’t remember. In either case, the academy’s former dishwasher was unrecognizable; she’d been underwater too long.
She’d been strangled, the town newspaper said, and then dumped in the river—she hadn’t drowned. Had Mrs. Stackpole told her husband about Jack? Had her husband somehow found out? Was there someone else she was seeing, in addition to Jack? As so often happened in New Hampshire, everyone suspected the husband who worked in the gasworks and came home for lunch. But he was never charged.
Nor was Jack charged, except by Noah Rosen—and not even Noah accused Jack of the actual murder. “Let’s just say you probably
contributed
to it,” Noah said.
He might have said worse, had Leah died in Chile before Mrs. Stackpole was found in the Exeter River. But Leah was still in Madison, Wisconsin, though no doubt she was already in a Chile frame of mind.
In those years away at school, Jack extended the distance between his mother and himself—a process Alice had initiated when Jack was still at St. Hilda’s. But what little he saw of Emma was always elevating, and their fondness for each other grew. He was too young—and too inclined to think of women as novelties—to acknowledge that he adored Emma.
Only Emma understood why, for four years at Exeter, which was a coed school, Jack never really had a girlfriend. Emma knew he liked older women; the Exeter girls were just girls. When Jack was in grade nine, when he was fourteen going on fifteen, some of the Exeter seniors, who were seventeen or eighteen, attracted him, but he was no longer a pretty little boy. He was a gawky young teenager; in his first two years at Exeter, the older teenage girls ignored him.
Naturally, Jack saw something of Emma in those years—and not only over school vacations or for parts of every summer. Upon her graduation from St. Hilda’s, Emma had gone to McGill in Montreal, which Mrs. Oastler, who was a fiercely loyal Torontonian, considered an un-Toronto (or an anti-Toronto) thing to do.