by John Irving
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 Bronte 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 b
een 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."
Jack Burns took from Miss Wurtz a lifelong lesson: life was not a stage; life was improv. Miss Wurtz had no tolerance for improvisation; the children learned their lines, speaking them exactly as they were written. That Jack was born with superior memorization skills was a considerable advantage in the theater; that Miss Wurtz encouraged Jack to imagine his audience of one was a gift both she and his missing father gave him. But Jack was as attentive a student of Miss Wurtz's failure in the classroom as he was of her instructions for success onstage. It was evident to him that one could not succeed as a player in life without developing improvisational skills. Yes, you needed to know your lines. But on some occasions, you also had to be able to make your lines up. For what she could teach him, but primarily for what she had failed to master herself, Miss Wurtz captured Jack's attention; not surprisingly, she would live in his memory (and remain a part of his life) longer than any of the third-grade girls.
Jack often dreamed of kissing Caroline Wurtz, at which moments she was never dressed as a schoolteacher. In his dreams, Miss Wurtz wore the kind of old-fashioned underwear Jack had first seen in Lottie's mail-order catalogs. For reasons that were disturbingly unclear to him, this type of underwear was advertised for teens and unmarried women. (Why women wore a different kind of underwear after they were married was, and would remain, a mystery to Jack.)
As for Miss Wurtz's real attire, in the classroom, she occasionally wore a cream-colored blouse you could almost see through, but--because it was cold in the grade-three room--she more often dressed in sweaters, which fit her well. Jack's mother said they were cashmere sweaters, which meant that Miss Wurtz was buying her clothes with something more than a St. Hilda's faculty salary.
"The Wurtz has gotta have a boyfriend," Emma said. "A rich one, or at least one with good taste--that would be my guess."
Jack had repeatedly denied Emma's accusation that Connie Turnbull gave him a boner every time she French-kissed his hand--or that when he-as-Rochester took Connie-as-Jane in his arms, with his head buried in her breasts, there was any response from the little guy. It hadn't yet occurred to Emma that Jack had a hard-on every minute he spent in close proximity to Caroline Wurtz, whether or not he was in her actual company or she were in various stages of undress in his dreams.
As for The Wurtz, as Emma called her, having a rich boyfriend or one with good taste--or even an ex-boyfriend--Jack didn't want such a character to exist, lest he invade the boy's dreams of Miss Wurtz in her mail-order corsets and girdles and bras.
Jack didn't dream about the grade-three girls at all, not even Lucinda Fleming, who'd managed--for more than two years--to keep her silent rage well hidden. And if, in his dreams, Miss Wurtz had the faintest trace of a mustache on her extremely narrow upper lip--well, that was Emma Oastler's doing. He couldn't control his attraction to Emma's upper lip, especially in his dreams. More and more, when the little guy came alive, he did so not at Jack's bidding but independently.
"Any news, Jack?" Emma would whisper in the backseat of the limo, as Peewee drove them around and around Forest Hill.
"Not yet," Jack answered. (He had guessed, correctly, that this was the safest thing to say.)
At night, after Lottie had put him to bed, Jack often went into his mother's room and climbed into her bed and fell asleep there. Given their different schedules, his mom was almost never there. She would come home and crawl into bed long after he'd fallen asleep. Sometimes, in her half-sleep, she would throw one of her legs over Jack, which always woke him up. There was the smell of cigarette smoke and pot in her hair, and the gasoline-like tang of white wine on her breath. Occasionally they would both be awake and lie whispering in the semidarkness. Jack didn't know why they whispered; it wasn't because Lottie or Mrs. Wicksteed could hear them.
"How are you, Jack?"
"I'm fine. How are you?"
"We're becoming like strangers," Alice whispered one time. Jack was disappointed that his mother hadn't seen him act, and he said so. "Oh, I've seen you act!" Alice said.
Jack meant in Jane Eyre, or in Miss Wurtz's other exercises in dramatization. While The Wurtz loved the stage, she preferred adapting novels. It would occur to Jack only later that, by choosing to dramatize novels, Miss Wurtz controlled every aspect of every performance. There was no playwright to give the children the wrong directions. Miss Wurtz adapted her favorite novels for the theater her way. If, as actors, they were instructed to take command of the stage, The Wurtz was absolutely in charge of every action they undertook--of every word they uttered.
Later Jack would realize what wonderful things Miss Wurtz left out of her adaptations. She was in charge of censorship as well. When The Wurtz adapted Tess of the d'Urbervilles, she made much more of the "Maiden" chapter than she made of "Maiden No More." More disturbing, she cast Jack as Tess.
"Nobody blamed Tess as she blamed herself," the dramatization began. (Miss Wurtz, with her perfect diction and enunciation, was a big fan of voice-over.) Jack was, without a doubt, a good choice to play "a mere vessel of emotion untinctured by experience."
But even in a dress--a white gown, no less--and even as a milkmaid, the boy could take command of the stage. " 'Phases of her childhood lurked in her aspect still,' " Miss Wurtz read to the audience, while Angel Clare failed to ask Jack-as-Tess to dance. What a wimp Angel was! Jimmy Bacon, that miserable moaner who pooed in a sheet, was the perfect choice to play him.
" '. . . for all her bouncing handsome womanliness,' " Miss Wurtz fatalistically intoned, " 'you could sometimes see her twelfth year in her cheeks, or her ninth sparkle from her eyes; and even her fifth would flit over the curves of her mouth now and then.' "
All the while, Jack-as-Tess had nothing to do. He stood onstage, radiating sexless innocence. He was prouder of his role as Rochester, but even as Tess, he had his moments--sexless innocence not least, if not best, among them. What Tess says to d'Urberville, for example (d'Urberville, that pig, was played by the thuggish Charlotte Barford, whom The Wurtz wisely borrowed from the middle school): " 'Did it never strike your mind that what every woman says some women may feel?' " (Charlotte Barford looked as if she-as-he had thoroughly enjoyed seducing him-as-her.)
When Jack buried his dead baby in the churchyard, he could hear the older girls in the audience--they were already crying. And the tale of Tess's undoing had only begun! Jack spoke Hardy's narration as if it were dialogue over the baby's grave. " '. . . in that shabby corner of God's allotment where He lets the nettles grow,' " Jack began, while the older girls in the audience imagined that this could be their predicament, which Miss Wurtz, if not Thomas Hardy, had cleverly intended, " '. . . and where all unbaptized infants, notorious drunkards, suicides, and others of the conjecturally damned are laid,' " Jack-as-Tess carried on, stimulated by the weeping older girls. (No fan of improvisation, Miss Wurtz had not permitted Jack to skip the "conjecturally," though he'd repeatedly flubbed the word in rehearsals.)
When Jack said, " 'But you would not dance with me,' " to that wimp Jimmy-Bacon-as-Angel-Clare, the hearts of the older girls in the audience were wrenched anew. " 'O, I hope that is of no ill-omen for us now!' " Jack-as-Tess told Jimmy-as-Angel, while the girls wept afresh--because, with Hardy, what wasn't an ill omen? The girls knew Tess was doomed, as unalterably as Miss Wurtz wanted them to know it.
That was The Wurtz's message to the girls. Be careful! Anyone can get pregnant! Every man who isn't a wimp, like Jimmy-Bacon-as-Angel, is a pig, like Charlotte-Barford-as-d'Urberville. And Jack-Burns-as-Tess got Miss Wurtz's message across. Caroline Wurtz's junior-school dramatizations amounted to moral instructions to the middle-and senior-school girls.
Jack was in grade three. A dramatization of Tess of the d'Urbervilles was incomprehensible to him. But the message of the story wasn't for Jack. At St. Hilda's, t
he most important messages were delivered to the older girls. Jack was just an actor. Miss Wurtz knew he could handle the lines, even if he didn't understand them. And in case a total idiot (among the older girls) might have missed the point, all the dramatizations were of novels wherein women were put to the test.
When Jack played Hester Prynne in The Wurtz's adaptation of The Scarlet Letter, he couldn't persuade his mom to come see him as an eight-year-old adulteress with the letter A on his-as-her chest. "I hate that story," Alice whispered to her son in the semidarkness of her bedroom. "It's so unfair. I'll ask Caroline to take some pictures. I'll look at photographs, Jack, but I don't want to see that story dramatized."
Miss Wurtz shrewdly recognized in Wendy Holton's preternaturally thin, cruel body--in her unyielding knees, her fists-of-stone hardness--a perfect likeness to the obsessed and vengeful Roger Chillingworth. Once again, in casting, The Wurtz robbed the middle school of one of Jack's former tormentors.
The Reverend Dimmesdale was lamentably miscast, although in choosing Lucinda Fleming, who was a head taller than Jack was in grade three, Miss Wurtz might have been hoping that Lucinda's silent rage would select a pivotal moment of Dimmesdale's guilt in which to erupt onstage and frighten the bejesus out of them all. Perhaps when Dimmesdale cries to Hester: "May God forgive us both! We are not, Hester, the worst sinners in the world. There is one worse than even the polluted priest!" That might have worked, had Lucinda Fleming simply lost it at that moment--had she begun to bash her head against the footlights or made some woeful, demented effort to strangle herself in the stage curtains.
But Lucinda kept her rage to herself. She may have been as tortured as the Reverend Dimmesdale, but she seemed to be saving her long-anticipated explosion for an offstage moment. Jack was convinced it was something she was saving just for him. But being onstage with Lucinda-as-Dimmesdale was better than being backstage with Wendy-as-Chillingworth, because--once she was out of Miss Wurtz's sight--Wendy held Jack personally responsible for her being cast as Chillingworth in the first place. (Admittedly, it was a thankless part.) Therefore, The Scarlet Letter was a bruising production for Jack. Wendy punched him or kneed him in the ribs whenever she could get away with it.