Authors: John Irving
“I’m never going to marry Jack,” Claudia told The Gray Ghost. “I’m not marrying anybody who doesn’t want to have children.”
“Mercy!” Mrs. McQuat exclaimed. “Why . . . wouldn’t you want to have
. . . children . . .
Jack?”
“You know,” he answered.
“He says it’s all about his father,” Claudia told her.
“You’re not
. . . still worrying . . .
you’ll turn out like him . . . are you, Jack?” The Gray Ghost asked.
“It’s a reasonable suspicion,” he said.
“Nonsense!” Mrs. McQuat cried. “Do you know . . . what
I
think?” she asked Claudia, patting her hand. “I think it’s just an excuse . . . not to marry
anybody
!”
“That’s what I think, too,” Claudia said.
Jack felt like Jesus in the stained glass; everywhere he went in Toronto, women were ganging up on him. He must have looked like he wanted to leave, because The Gray Ghost took hold of his wrist in that not-uncertain way of hers.
“You aren’t leaving without seeing . . . Miss
Wurtz . . .
are you?” she asked him. “Mercy, she’ll be
. . . crushed
if she learns you were here . . . and you didn’t see her!”
“Oh.”
“You should take Caroline . . . to the film festival, Jack,” Mrs. McQuat went on. “She’s too
timid
to go to the movies . . . by herself.”
The Gray Ghost was always the voice of Jack’s conscience. Later he would be ashamed that he never told her how much she meant to him, or even what a good teacher she was.
Mrs. McQuat would
die
in the St. Hilda’s chapel—after having disciplined one of Miss Wurtz’s misbehaving third graders, whom she’d faced away from the altar with his back turned to God. Mrs. McQuat dropped dead in the center aisle, a passageway she had made her own, with her back turned to God and with only God’s eyes and those of the third grader who was being punished to see her fall. (That poor kid—talk about a
formative
experience!)
Miss Wurtz must have come running as soon as she heard
—crying
all the way.
Jack didn’t go to The Gray Ghost’s funeral. He learned she had died only
after
the funeral, when his mother told him something about Mrs. McQuat that he was surprised he hadn’t guessed. She was no
Mrs.
anybody; no one had ever married her. Like Miss Wurtz, she was a
Miss
McQuat—for life. But something in her combat-nurse nature refused to acknowledge that she was unmarried, which in those days obdurately implied you were unloved.
Jack used to wonder why The Gray Ghost had trusted his mom with this secret. They weren’t friends. Then he remembered Mrs. McQuat telling him not to complain about a woman who knew how to keep a secret—meaning Alice. (Meaning herself as well.)
It was only a mild shock to discover that The Gray Ghost had been a Miss instead of a Mrs. In retrospect, Jack wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that Mrs. McQuat—as she preferred to be called—had been a
man.
Alice and Mrs. Oastler attended The Gray Ghost’s funeral, which was in the St. Hilda’s chapel. Being a St. Hilda’s Old Girl, Leslie was informed of all the school news. As for Alice, she told Jack she went out of “nostalgia,” which he would remember thinking at the time was an uncharacteristic word for her to use—not to mention an uncharacteristic feeling for her to have.
Alice was vague about who else was in attendance. “Caroline, of course.” She didn’t mean Caroline French—she meant Miss Wurtz. The
other
Caroline didn’t attend, and Jack knew that her twin, Gordon, was absent. (Gordon was dead—the aforementioned boating accident had precluded his attendance.)
Jack asked his mother if she’d been aware of blanket-sucking sounds, or moaning, during the funeral; by his mom’s puzzled response, he knew that the Booth twins and Jimmy Bacon had skipped the event, or they’d been out of town.
Lucinda Fleming, with or without her mysterious rage, made no reference to The Gray Ghost’s passing in her annual Christmas letter; if Lucinda had gone to the funeral, Jack was sure she would have told everyone about it. And he knew Roland Simpson wasn’t there—Roland was already in jail.
The faculty who were in attendance are easily imagined. Miss Wong, mourning in broken bits and pieces, as if the hurricane she was born in showed itself only in squalls—or only at funerals. Mr. Malcolm, guiding his wife in her wheelchair; the poor man was forever trying to steer Wheelchair Jane around the looming obstacles of her madness. Mr. Ramsey, too restless to sit in a pew, would have been bouncing on the balls of his feet at the back of the chapel. And Miss Wurtz—my goodness, how she must have cried!
“Caroline was
overcome,
” Alice told Jack.
He could see Miss Wurtz
overcome
as clearly as if she were still leaning over his incorrect math and he were still breathing her in. (In Jack’s dreams, The Wurtz’s mail-order bra and panties were always properly in place—no matter how
overcome
she was.)
Yet how could Miss Wurtz have gone on being the St. Hilda’s grade-three teacher? How could she have managed her classroom without The Gray Ghost there to bail her out?
It was Leslie Oastler who told Jack that, upon Mrs. McQuat’s death, Miss Wurtz became a
better
teacher; finally, Miss Wurtz had to learn
how.
But at The Gray Ghost’s funeral, there was no stopping The Wurtz. She cried and cried without hope of rescue. Miss Wurtz must have cried until all her tears were gone, and then—one breakthrough day in her grade-three classroom—she never cried again.
Jack thought Caroline Wurtz must still be saying in her nightly prayers, “God bless you, Mrs. McQuat.”
As Jack occasionally remembered to say in his, although not as often—and never as fervently—as he used to say, without cease, “Michele Maher, Michele Maher, Michele Maher.”
19
Claudia, Who Would Haunt Him
J
ack would never entirely forgive The Gray Ghost for suggesting that he and Claudia take Miss Wurtz to the film festival in Toronto in the fall of 1985. The Wurtz was in her forties at the time—not that much older than Alice in years, but noticeably older in appearance and stamina. Possibly she had always been too thin, too fragile, but now what was most
Wurtz-
like about her was a gauntness Jack associated with illness. Miss Wurtz was still beautiful in her damaged way, but she not only looked a little unhealthy; she seemed ashamed of something, although Jack couldn’t imagine what she had ever done to be ashamed of. Perhaps there’d been a long-ago scandal—something so fleeting that it was barely remembered by others, although the memory of it was alive and throbbing in The Wurtz.
Her appearance seemed contrary to her restrained, even abstemious character, because what Caroline Wurtz most resembled was an actress of a bygone era—a once-famous woman who’d become overlooked. At least this was the impression Caroline made at the film festival, where Claudia and Jack took her to the premiere of Paul Schrader’s
Mishima.
“Remind me who Mishima is,” Miss Wurtz said as they approached the theater.
The ever-persistent photographers, who often snapped pictures of Claudia—because Claudia was such a babe and the photographers had convinced themselves that she must be
someone—
turned their attention to Miss Wurtz instead. She was overdressed for the film-festival crowd, like a woman who found herself at a rock concert when she’d thought she was going to an opera. Jack was wearing black jeans and a black linen jacket with a white T-shirt. (“An L.A. look,” in Claudia’s estimation, though she’d never been to Los Angeles.)
The younger photographers, especially, assumed that Caroline Wurtz was
someone—
possibly someone who’d made her last movie before any of them had been born. “You’d have thought she was Joan Crawford,” Claudia said later. Claudia was poured into a shimmery dress with spaghetti straps, but she was a good sport about the photographers being all over The Wurtz.
“Goodness,” Miss Wurtz whispered, “they must think you’re already famous, Jack.” It was sweet how she believed the fuss was about
him.
“I’m completely convinced you soon will be,” The Wurtz added, squeezing his hand. “And you, too, dear,” she said to Claudia, who squeezed her hand back.
“I thought she was
dead
!” an older man said. Jack didn’t catch the name of the actress from yesteryear for whom Miss Wurtz had been mistaken.
“Is Mishima a dancer?” Caroline asked.
“No, a writer—” Jack started to say, but Claudia cut him off.
“He
was
a writer,” Claudia corrected him.
And an actor, a director, and a militarist
nutcase,
which Jack didn’t have time to say. They were swept inside the theater, where they were ushered to the reserved seats—all because of the prevailing conviction that Caroline Wurtz was not a third-grade teacher but a movie star.
Jack heard the word “European,” probably in reference to Miss Wurtz’s dress, which was a pale-peach color and might have fit her once—perhaps in Edmonton. Now it appeared that The Wurtz was diminished by the dress, which would have been more suitable for a prom than a premiere. The dress was something Mrs. Adkins might have donated for Drama Night at Redding, yet it had a gauzy quality, like underwear, which reminded Jack of the mail-order lingerie he had dressed Miss Wurtz in—if only in his imagination.
“Mishima is Japanese,” Jack was trying to explain.
“He
was—
” Claudia interjected.
“He’s no longer Japanese?” Caroline asked.
They couldn’t answer her before the movie began—a stylish piece of work, wherein the scenes from Mishima’s life (shot in black and white) were intercut with color dramatizations of his fictional work. Jack had never cared much about Mishima as a writer, but he liked him as a lunatic; his ritualistic suicide, in 1970, was the film’s dramatic conclusion.
Throughout the movie, Miss Wurtz held Jack’s hand; this gave him a hard-on, which Claudia noticed. Claudia would not hold his penis, or venture anywhere near his lap; she sat with her arms folded on her considerable bosom, and never flinched at Mishima’s self-disemboweling, which caused Caroline to dig her nails into Jack’s wrist. In the flickering light from the movie screen, he regarded the small, fishhook-shaped scar on her throat, above her fetching birthmark. In her preternatural thinness, Miss Wurtz had a visible pulse in her throat—an actual heartbeat in close proximity to her scar. This was a pounding that could only be quieted by a kiss, Jack thought—not that he would have dared to kiss The Wurtz, not even if Claudia hadn’t been there.
“Goodness!” Caroline exclaimed as they were leaving the theater. (She was as breathless as Mrs. McQuat, as desirable as Mrs. Adkins.) “That was certainly
. . . ambitious
!”
It was about four o’clock in the afternoon when they exited into the mob of Catholic protesters who’d come to the wrong theater. The protesters were there on their knees, chanting to an endless “Hail Mary” that repeated itself over a ghetto blaster. Jack knew in an instant that the kneeling Catholics thought they were emerging from a screening of Godard’s
Hail Mary;
the Catholics had come to protest
Mishima
by mistake.
Not only was Miss Wurtz unprepared for the spectacle; she didn’t understand that the protests were in error. “Naturally, the suicide has upset them—I’m not surprised,” she told Claudia and Jack. “I once knew why Catholics make such a fuss about suicide, but I’ve forgotten. They were all in a knot about Graham Greene’s
The Heart of the Matter,
as I remember. But I think they got themselves all worked up over
The Power and the Glory
and
The End of the Affair,
too.”
Claudia and Jack just looked at each other. What was the point of even mentioning the Godard film to Caroline?
A TV journalist wanted to interview her, which Miss Wurtz seemed to think was perfectly normal. “What do you think of all this?” the journalist asked Jack’s former grade-three teacher. “The film, the controversy—”
“I thought the film was quite a
. . . drama,
” The Wurtz declared. “It was overlong and at times hard to grasp, and not always as
satisfying
as it was
engaging.
The cinematography was beautiful, and the music—well, whether one likes it or not, it was
sweeping.
”
This was more than the journalist had bargained for; he was clearly more interested in the kneeling Catholics and the ceaseless “Hail Mary” on the ghetto blaster than he was in the
Mishima
movie. “But the
controversy—
” he started to say, trying to steer Miss Wurtz to the fracas of the moment (as journalists do).
“Oh, who cares about that?” Caroline said dismissively. “If the Catholics want to flagellate themselves over a suicide, let them! I remember when they had a hissy fit about fish on Fridays!”
It would be on the six o’clock news. Alice and Leslie Oastler were watching television, and there was Miss Wurtz holding forth in her pale-peach dress—Claudia and Jack on either side of her. It was almost as much fun as passing Claudia off as a Russian film star, and Caroline was thoroughly enjoying herself, though she wasn’t in on the joke.
The moviegoers, meaning the
Mishima
crowd, were in no mood to be greeted by kneeling Catholics and “Hail Mary”—not with Mishima’s disembowelment fresh on their minds. (Nor would Mishima have been amused, Jack thought; at least when he was disemboweling himself, he looked like a pretty serious guy.)
Claudia and Jack took Miss Wurtz to a party. They had no trouble crashing parties; the bouncers wouldn’t have kept Claudia out of a men’s room, if she’d wanted to go into one. Claudia said they got into parties because Jack looked like a movie star, but Claudia was the reason. With Miss Wurtz in tow, it was clear they got in because of
her.
In fact, they were leaving one such party when a young man approached Caroline in a fawning fashion; he’d snatched a flower from a vase on the bar and pressed it into her hand. “I love your work!” he told her, disappearing into the crowd.