by John Irving
That was Jack's first school trip at St. Hilda's. Like much of his junior-school experience, it would have seemed slight without the necessary preparations for the journey ahead, which had been provided for him in kindergarten by Emma Oastler--the nap-time storyteller who had appointed herself his personal girl guide.
Oh, what a lucky boy Jack was! Safe among the girls, without a doubt.
9
Not Old Enough
When Jack started grade one, Emma Oastler and her companions had moved on to the middle school--they were in grade seven. Less fearsome girls became the grade-six guides of the junior school; Jack wouldn't remember them. Sometimes a whole school day, but rarely two in a row, would pass without his seeing Emma, who fiercely promised him that she would always keep in touch. And Jack's occasional sightings of Wendy Holton and Charlotte Barford were usually from a safe distance. (Fists-of-Stone Holton, as he still thought of Wendy. Breasts-with-Bones-in-Them Barford, as he would forever remember Charlotte and her melon-size knees.)
Miss Wong, Jack's grade-one teacher, had been born in the Bahamas during a hurricane. Nothing noticeably like a tropical storm had remained alive in her, although her habit of apologizing for everything might have begun with the hurricane. She would never acknowledge by name the particular storm she had been born in, which might have led the grade-one children to suspect that the hurricane still flickered somewhere in her subconscious. No trace of a storm animated her listless body or gave the slightest urgency to her voice. "I am sorry to inform you, children, that the foremost difference between kindergarten and grade one is that we don't nap," Miss Wong announced on opening day.
Naturally, her apology was greeted by collective sighs of relief, and some spontaneous expressions of gratitude--heel-thumping from the French twins, identical blanket-sucking sounds from the Booth girls, heartfelt moaning from Jimmy Bacon. That the grade-one response to her no-nap announcement did not inspire a storm of curiosity from "Miss Bahamas," as the children called Miss Wong behind her back, was further indication of the lifelessness of their new teacher.
During junior-school chapel service, which was held once a week in lieu of the daily assembly in the Great Hall, Maureen Yap whispered to Jack: "Don't you kind of miss Emma Oastler and her sleepy-time stories?" There was an instant lump in Jack's throat; he could neither sing nor make conversation with The Yap, as the kids called Maureen. "I know how you feel," The Yap went on. "But what was the worst of it? What do you miss most?"
"All of it," Jack managed to reply.
"We all miss it, Jack," Caroline French said.
"We all miss all of it," her irritating twin, Gordon, corrected her.
"Shove it, Gordon," Caroline said.
"I kind of miss the moaning," Jimmy Bacon admitted. The Booth girls, though blanketless, made their identical blanket-sucking sounds.
Did the grade-one children crave stories of divorced dads, passed out from too much sex? Did they long to be defenseless, yet again, in the bat-cave exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum? Did they miss the single-mom stories, or the overlarge and oversexed boyfriends and girlfriends? Or was it Emma Oastler they missed? Emma and her friends on the verge of puberty, or in puberty's throes--Wendy Fists-of-Stone Holton and Charlotte Breasts-with-Bones-in-Them Barford.
There was a new girl in grade one, Lucinda Fleming. She was afflicted with what Miss Wong called "silent rage," which took the form of the girl physically hurting herself. When Miss Wong introduced Lucinda's affliction to the class, she spoke of her as if she weren't there.
"We must keep an eye on Lucinda," Miss Wong told the class. Lucinda calmly received their stares. "If you see her with a sharp or dangerous-looking object, you should not hesitate to speak to me. If she looks as if she is trying to go off by herself somewhere--well, that could be dangerous for her, too. Forgive me if I'm wrong, but isn't that what we should do, Lucinda?" Miss Wong asked the silent girl.
"It's okay with me," Lucinda said, smiling serenely. She was tall and thin with pale-blue eyes and a habit of rubbing a strand of her ghostly, white-blond hair against her teeth--as if her hair were dental floss. She wore it in a massive ponytail.
Caroline French inquired if this habit was harmful to Lucinda's hair or teeth. Caroline's point was that teeth-and-hair rubbing was probably an early indication of the silent rage, a precursor to more troubling behavior.
"I'm sorry to disagree, but I don't think so, Caroline," Miss Wong replied. "You're not trying to hurt yourself with your hair or your teeth, are you, Lucinda?" Miss Wong asked.
"Not now," Lucinda mumbled. She had a strand of hair in her mouth when she spoke.
"It doesn't look dangerous to me," Maureen Yap said. (The Yap occasionally sucked her hair.)
"Yeah, but it's gross," said Heather Booth.
Patsy, Heather's identical twin, said, "Yeah."
Jack thought it was probably a good thing that Lucinda Fleming was a new girl and had not attended kindergarten at St. Hilda's. Who knows how Emma Oastler might have affected Lucinda's proclivity to silent rage? Between mouthfuls of hair, Lucinda told Jack that her mother had been impregnated by an alien; she said her father was from outer space. Although he was only six, Jack surmised that Lucinda's mom was divorced. Emma Oastler's saga of the squeezed child, no matter which ending, would have given Lucinda Fleming a rage to top all her rages.
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 safe
r 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?"