Until I Find You

by John Irving

  "My goodness," Alice whispered to her son in the semidarkness. (She could tell he was sore just by touching him.) When she turned on the light, she said: "What are those Puritans doing to you, Jack? Are you wearing the letter A, or are they hitting you with it?"

  His mother wouldn't come see him throw himself under a train in Miss Wurtz's rendition of Anna Karenina, either. ("I'll ask Caroline to take more pictures, Jack.") There was no end to the wronged women in Caroline Wurtz's instructive repertoire. And how brilliant was The Wurtz's choice of Emma Oastler for the role of Count Vronsky? Emma even had the requisite mustache for the part!

  After school--in Jack's room, or just hanging out in the backseat of the Town Car while Peewee stole a look at Emma's legs--Emma controlled their topics of conversation, as before. Jack could not take command of that stage, where he and Emma were engaged in an improvisational performance of the kind he needed to learn vastly more about.

  "This is perfect, Jack--we're having a love affair!"

  "We are?"

  "Onstage, I mean."

  "But what are we having here?" he asked--meaning the backseat of the Town Car, where he lay pinned, with one of Emma's heavy legs thrown over him, much in the impulsive, half-asleep manner that his mom occasionally threw a leg over him; or on the bed in his room, where Emma told Lottie she was helping Jack with his homework and not to bother them.

  "He's fallen behind, Lottie. I can help him catch up, if I can just get him to listen to me."

  How could he not listen to her? In the first place, she simply overpowered him on the backseat or on his bed. And she knew he couldn't resist her mustache; she would brush her silky upper lip against him. She ran her mustache over the back of his hand while she imitated Connie Turnbull's French kiss, which she did a better job of than Connie; or against his cheek, or even (after she'd untucked his shirt) over his bare belly, pausing to give special consideration to his navel. "Do you ever wash this thing, Jack? It's got lint in it, you know."

  It was all prelude--whether she was pretending she was Count Vronsky and Jack was Anna, or whether she was herself, Emma Oastler, who would never be a minor character, not in Jack's life. Everything led up to the "end line," as Miss Wurtz was fond of saying. "Hit your end line so that your audience of one remembers it, Jack. Say your end line so that no one can forget it, okay?"

  "How's the little guy doing? What's he up to, Jack?" Emma always got around to asking.

  It was a crucial time--they were in rehearsals for Anna Karenina but had not yet been subjected to Miss Wurtz's plans for Sense and Sensibility. Emma and Jack were doing "homework" on his bed. Lottie could be heard banging around below them in the kitchen. To Emma's question regarding what his penis was up to, Jack answered as he often did: "Not much."

  "Let's have a look, baby cakes." He showed her. He heard such sorrow in Emma's sigh, or maybe he'd been thinking too much about Anna and the train. He didn't want to go on disappointing Emma forever.

  "Sometimes it dreams," Jack began.

  "Dreams what? Who's in the dreams, Jack?"

  "You are," he answered. (This seemed safer to admit than the Miss Wurtz part.)

  "What am I doing in the dreams, Jack?"

  "It's mainly your mustache," he admitted.

  "You little pervert, you squirrel dink, Jack--"

  "And Miss Wurtz is wearing just her underwear," he blurted out.

  "I'm with The Wurtz? Jesus, Jack!"

  "It's more like Miss Wurtz is alone, with your mustache," Jack confessed. "And the underwear."

  "Whose underwear?" Emma asked.

  He sneaked along the upstairs hall to Lottie's room and brought Emma the latest edition of Lottie's mail-order catalog. "You dork, Jack--I wouldn't be caught dead in this stuff. I'll show you some underwear!"

  He had seen her previous training bra--her present bra was only a little bigger. But when Emma removed the bra, there was a more noticeable shape and substance to her breasts than before; and when she took her panties off and held them against the pleats of her skirt, the lace that rimmed the waistband was a new experience for Jack and the little guy.

  "It moved," Emma said.

  "What moved?"

  "You know what, Jack." They both looked at the little guy, who was not as little as before. Emma leaned over his penis. "Miss Wurtz," she said. "Shut your eyes, Jack." Of course he did as he was told. "Caroline Wurtz," Emma whispered to his penis. "I'm gonna bring you some real underwear, little guy." Even with his eyes closed, Jack knew that the little guy liked this idea.

  "I think we're finally getting somewhere, Jack."

  "Can I undo your braid, Emma?"

  "Now?"

  "Yes." She allowed him to do this, never taking her eyes from his penis. Her hair fell all around his hips; he felt it touch his thighs. "It's working, baby cakes," Emma reported. "You had the right idea."

  "Kettle's boiling!" Lottie called from the kitchen.

  "Let me be sure I understand you," Emma said, ignoring Lottie. "It's basically The Wurtz with my mustache and Lottie's underwear."

  "Not Lottie's--it's the underwear from her catalog." (The thought of Miss Wurtz in Lottie's underwear was unappealing.)

  "Whose hair?" Emma asked.

  "Yours, I think. It's long hair, anyway."

  "Good," Emma said. He couldn't see her; her hair, now undone, completely hid her face. "We seem to be zeroing in on a few priorities."

  "Zeroing in on what?"

  "Clearly you have a hair thing, honey pie. And the usual older-woman thing."

  "Oh." (Nothing about his older-woman thing, not to mention his mustache-and-braid fixation, felt the least bit usual to Jack.)

  "Oh, my God, now we're really getting somewhere!" Emma announced; she threw back her hair. Jack had a hard-on like he'd never seen before. If the little guy had stood up any taller, he would have cast a shadow all the way to Jack's belly button--lint and all.

  "Jesus, Jack--what are you gonna do with it?"

  Jack was at a loss. "Do I have to do something with it?" he asked.

  Emma hugged him to her bare breasts; his enlarged penis brushed against her scratchy wool skirt. Jack shifted slightly in the big girl's embrace, until the little guy was more comfortably touching Emma's bare thigh. "Oh, Jack," Emma told the boy, "that's the sweetest thing to say--you're just too cute for words. No, of course you don't have to do anything with it! One day you'll know what you want to do with it! That's gonna be some day."

  He touched one of her breasts with his hand; she held his face more tightly there. The next thing was the little guy's idea, entirely. Emma and Jack were sitting on his bed, hip to hip--they were hugging each other--but his penis had somehow not lost contact with her thigh. And if Jack could feel her thigh, Emma must have been able to feel his penis. He was eight; she was fifteen. When Jack swung one of his legs over her far hip, he found himself lying on top of her with the little guy in her lap--now touching both her thighs.

  "Do you know what you're doing, Jack?" Emma asked. (Of course he didn't.) Her gum was a mint flavor. Jack could feel her breath on the top of his head. "Maybe the little guy knows," she said, answering herself. Jack's arms could not reach around her hips, but he held her there--his right hand touching the lace waistband of her panties, which Emma had spread on top of her skirt. "Show me what the little guy knows, baby cakes." Her tone of voice indicated that she was teasing him--the baby cakes was an affectionate appellation, but faintly mocking in the way Emma usually said it.

  "I don't know what the little guy knows," he admitted, just as the little guy and Jack made an astonishing discovery. There was hair between Emma Oastler's thighs!

  The instant the tip of his penis touched this hairy place, Jack thought that Emma was going to kill him. She scissored her legs around his waist and rolled him over onto his back. The little guy was all bunched up in her itchy wool skirt. Emma had some difficulty finding it with her hand, with which Jack feared she might yank it completely off--but she didn't. She just
held his penis a little too roughly.

  "What was that?" he asked. He was more afraid of the hair he had felt than he was of the way Emma held him.

  "I'm not showing you, honey pie. It would be child molestation."

  "It would be what?"

  "It would freak you out," Emma said. Jack could believe it. He had no desire to see the hairy place. What Jack, or the little guy, strangely wanted was to be there. (Jack was actually afraid of what it might look like.)

  "I don't want to see it," he said quickly.

  Emma relaxed her scissors-hold around his waist; she held his penis a little more gently. "You got a hair thing, all right," she told him.

  "The tea is going to get too strong!" Lottie hollered from the kitchen.

  "Then take out the tea bags or the stupid tea ball!" Emma shouted back.

  "It's getting cold, too!" Lottie called to them.

  When Emma pulled her panties back on, she turned her back on Jack; conversely, she put on her bra and buttoned up her shirt while she faced him. It was clear that the little guy had touched a private place, but why was there hair there?

  "How's the homework going?" Lottie cried. She was verging on the kind of hysteria that implied to Jack she was reliving the horror of her haywire epidural.

  "What kind of life does Lottie have?" Emma asked Jack, but she was looking at his penis. The little guy was returning to normal size before their very eyes. "You gotta watch this guy every second, Jack--it's like having your own little miracle. Or not-so-little miracle," Emma added. "Oh, cute! Look! It's like it's going away!"

  "Maybe it's sad," the boy said.

  "Remember that line, Jack. One day you can use it." He couldn't imagine under what circumstances an admission of his penis's sadness would be of any possible use. Miss Wurtz knew a lot about lines. Somehow Jack sensed she would disapprove of this one--too improvisational, maybe.

  In a week's time, Emma would bring him one of her divorced mom's bras--a black one. It was more like half a bra, Jack observed, with hard wire rims under the cups, which were small but surprisingly aggressive-looking. It was what they called a "push-up" bra, Emma explained. (It was about as assertive as a bra could be--or so Jack imagined.) "What's it want to push your breasts up for?" he asked.

  "My mom has small boobs," Emma said. "She's trying to make more out of them." But the bra was curious for another reason: it smelled strongly of perfume, and only slightly less powerfully of sweat. Emma had snitched it from the laundry--it wasn't clean. "But that's better, isn't it?" she asked.

  "Why?"

  "Because you can smell her!" Emma declared.

  "But I don't know your mom. Why would I want to smell her?"

  "Just try it, baby cakes. You never know what the little guy might like." Boy, was that the truth! (Too bad it would take years for Jack to find that out.)

  It would be a while, too, before someone told him that the Chinaman's tattoo shop on the northwest corner of Dundas and Jarvis was never open late at night. The basement tattoo parlor, which you entered from the sidewalk on Dundas, usually closed in the late afternoon. Jack would forget who told him. Maybe it was some old ink addict, a collector, in one of those tattoo shops on Queen Street--around the time his mom opened her own shop there.

  Queen Street in the seventies would never have supported the likes of Daughter Alice--it was a greasers' hangout, full of anti-hippie, whisky-drinking, white-T-shirt people. Whoever told Jack was possibly one of them, but it sounded true. The Chinaman's unnamed shop was closed at night, or maybe it stayed open a little longer on Friday and Saturday evenings--though never past eight or nine.

  So where was she--out late, almost every night, in Jack's years at St. Hilda's? He hadn't a clue. It was only with hindsight, which is never to be wholly trusted, that Jack concluded his mother might have been trying to break her possessive attachment to her son. As he grew older, he looked more and more like his dad; maybe the more Jack resembled William, the more Alice sought to distance herself from the boy.

  That Emma Oastler brought him her mother's push-up bra may have had something to do with it. It was inevitable that Alice would find it. Jack slept with the stupid bra every night--he even took it into his mom's bed on those nights he slept with her. And it was one of those nights when she threw a leg over Jack and woke him up. This night, something woke her up, too. The mystery bra was mashed between them; Alice must have felt the hard wire rims under the cups. She sat up in bed and turned on the light.

  "What's this, Jack?" she asked, holding up the stinking bra. The way she looked at her son--well, he would never forget it. It was as if she'd discovered Emma's mother in the bed between them; it was as if she'd caught Jack in flagrante delicto, the little guy in intimate contact with that hairy, private place.

  "It's a push-up bra," he explained.

  "I know what it is--I mean whose." Alice sniffed the bra and made a face. She pulled back the covers and stared at the little guy, who was protruding, at attention, from the boy's pajamas. "Start talking, Jack."

  "It belongs to Emma Oastler's mom--Emma stole it and gave it to me. I don't know why."

  "I know why," Alice said. Jack started to cry. His mom's visible disgust was withering; the little guy was looking withered, too.

  "Stop sniveling--don't snivel," Alice said. He needed to blow his nose. His mom handed him the bra, but Jack hesitated. "Go on--blow!" she ordered. "I'm going to wash it before I give it back to her, anyway."

  "Oh."

  "You can start anytime, Jack. The whole story. What games are you playing with Emma? You better begin there."

  He told her everything--well, maybe not everything. Possibly not the part about Emma baring her breasts; probably not every time Emma asked to have a look at the little guy; certainly not the part about his penis making actual contact with Emma's hairy, private place. But his mother must have had a pretty good idea of what was going on. "She's fifteen, Jack--you're eight. I'll have a little talk with Mrs. Oastler."

  "Is Emma going to get in trouble?"

  "I sincerely hope so," Alice said.

  "Am I in trouble?" he asked.

  What a look she gave him! Jack hadn't known what she meant when she'd said they were "becoming like strangers." Now he knew. His mom looked at him as if he were a stranger. "You're going to be in trouble soon enough," was all she said.

  11

  His Father Inside Him

  Compared to the drama unfolding between Jack and Emma, and what lay ahead between Alice and Mrs. Oastler, the inability of Miss Wurtz to manage her grade-three classroom was minor; yet there was drama there as well, however improvisational.

  Lucinda Fleming, whom Jack couldn't see over, sat at the desk in front of his. She would routinely and deliberately whip his face with her huge ponytail, which hung halfway down her back and was as thick as a broom. In exasperation, Jack would respond by grabbing it with both his hands and pulling it. He could barely manage to pin the back of her head to the top of his desk. Jack found he could restrain her there by pressing his chin against her forehead, but it hurt. Nothing appeared to hurt Lucinda, except her alleged proclivity to hurt herself, which Jack was beginning to doubt. Maybe Lucinda had despised playing Dimmesdale to Jack-as-Hester, or she hated being a head taller than he was; possibly she believed that by whipping Jack with her ponytail, she could make him grow.

  Caroline Wurtz never saw Lucinda lash out at Jack with her broom of hair. Miss Wurtz only became aware of the situation after he'd pinned Lucinda's head to his desk. "Please, Jack," Miss Wurtz would say. "Don't disappoint me."

  In his dreams, when The Wurtz would say "Don't disappoint me," her tone of voice was deeply seductive. Not so in the grade-three classroom. In reality, disappointing Miss Wurtz was a bad idea--she did not handle it well. Yet the grade-three children often disappointed her deliberately. They resented what a well-organized tyrant she was in her other capacity, as their drama teacher; that she couldn't maintain order in the classroom was a weakness they expl
oited.

  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?