by John Irving
"I love you in my clothes," was all she told him.
Having cast Jack in his seventh-grade year as Mildred Douglas in Eugene O'Neill's The Hairy Ape, Mrs. Adkins loved him so much as Mildred that she perversely cast him the following year as Mildred's cantankerous aunt. In that, his final year at Redding, when Jack was lying in her arms, Mrs. Adkins liked to test his memory of cue lines in the dark. In the husky voice of the Second Engineer in The Hairy Ape, she said: " 'You'll likely rub against oil and dirt. It can't be helped.' "
Rubbing against her, Jack-as-Mildred replied: " 'It doesn't matter. I have lots of white dresses.' " All hers; every dress he wore on Drama Night had once been worn by Mrs. Adkins. How at home he felt in her clothes.
Except when he was wrestling, Jack took few trips away from Redding. Since Toronto was so far, he would generally spend American Thanksgiving in Boston--actually in nearby Cambridge--with his roommate, Noah. Jack went back to Toronto for Christmas, and for the misnomered spring break, which was in March or April--when it was barely more springlike in Toronto than it was in Maine. (It was never spring in Maine.)
But as a wrestler, he got to see a lot of New England. Coach Clum once took the team as far as New York State, to a tournament where even Loomis lost. It was the only time Jack saw Loomis lose, although Loomis--in addition to losing his parents and older sister--had other losses ahead. He would be expelled from Blair Academy for getting a referee's underage daughter pregnant. Loomis gave up an opportunity for a college wrestling scholarship because of it. He became a Navy SEAL instead. He was stabbed to death somewhere in the Philippines, while on a perilous undercover mission, perhaps, or drunk and rowdy in a bar--in either case, his killer was reputed to be a transvestite prostitute.
But Loomis was the model Jack aspired to on the Redding wrestling team. Jack was never as good a wrestler as Loomis was, although in Jack's last two years at Redding, he managed to win more matches than he lost.
If someone had been taking his picture on Drama Night, Jack would have known it, but he wouldn't have known if someone was watching or taking pictures when he was wrestling--he wouldn't have heard the click of the camera shutter or the noise of the crowd. When Jack was wrestling, he even lost sight of his audience of one. In a wrestling match, either you take command of your opponent or you lose; you wrestle in an empty space, to an audience of none. And after Loomis left Redding, Jack was the team leader--for the first time, he had responsibilities.
He was the leader on the team bus, too. His teammates were either asleep and farting--or doing their homework with flashlights and farting. (They were instructed to create a minimum of distractions for the bus driver.)
Sometimes Jack would tell stories on the way back to Redding. He told the one about the littlest soldier saving him from the Kastelsgraven, and the one about putting the bandage on Ingrid Moe's breast after his mom tattooed her there. He told the one about Saskia's bracelets, including how horribly one of her customers had burned her--but not the one about his mom breaking her pearl necklace in her efforts to be an advice-giver to that young boy in Amsterdam. And nothing about Mrs. Machado, of course.
Jack bragged that his "stepsister," Emma, could beat anyone on the Redding wrestling team, with the exception of Loomis, who at that time hadn't yet been kicked out of Blair. (Everyone at Redding, except Noah and Mrs. Adkins, thought that Jack's mother was a famous tattoo artist who lived with a guy named Mr. Oastler, who was Emma's dad.)
Possibly Jack told these stories because he missed not only Emma but also his mother and Mrs. Oastler--even Mrs. Machado, or at least her roughness, which was nowhere to be found in the gentler persuasions of Mrs. Adkins. Maybe he missed Mrs. Machado's crudeness, too.
Jack also told the story of his greatest onstage triumph to date, which was his role in A Mail-Order Bride in the Northwest Territories. This was a dangerous story to tell on the team bus. Coach Clum objected to the word menstruation; once when Jack used it, the coach put down a half-point against the boy.
In his eighth-grade year, when Jack was co-captain of the wrestling team, they had a lightweight named Lambrecht--a new sixth grader from Arizona. He had grown up in the desert and had never seen snow before, let alone a road sign saying FROST HEAVES.
He must have had some difficulty reading in the dark, and the road signs out the window of the moving bus went by very fast at night, because Lambrecht asked, of no one in particular: "What's a frost heavy?" His question hung there in the semidark bus; the sleepers and nonstop farters never stirred. Jack was memorizing Matthew Arnold at that moment. He turned off his flashlight and waited to see if anyone would answer Lambrecht. "We don't have frost heavies in Arizona," Lambrecht continued.
"Frost heavies are hard to see at night," Jack told Lambrecht. "They're so low to the ground that the headlights don't reflect in their eyes, and they're the color of the road."
"But what are they?" Lambrecht asked.
Those bus rides were pure improv! "Look, just don't go out of your dorm at night, Lambrecht--not at this time of year. Frost heavies are nocturnal."
"But what do frost heavies do?" Lambrecht asked. He was getting agitated, in the peculiar way that lightweights express their agitation--his voice was pretty shrill under normal circumstances. That must have been what prompted Mike Heller, the team's heavyweight, to put an end to Jack's game. Heller was a humorless soul. He was a grumpy guy with too much baby fat to be a legitimate heavyweight; he never won a match, at least not one Jack saw.
"For Christ's sake, Lambrecht, can't you read?" Heller asked. "The sign says frost heaves, not frost heavies. You know heaves, like heaves in the road? Fucking potholes, you moron!"
"That's one and a half points against you, Mike--correction, make that two," Coach Clum said. (He was never really asleep.) "A half-point for Christ, a half-point for fucking, and one full point for moron, which you truly are, Lambrecht--but moron is a derogatory word, if I ever heard one."
"Damn!" Heller said.
"Make that two and a half," Coach Clum said.
"So frost heaves are just bumps in the road?" Lambrecht asked.
"I'm surprised you don't have frost in Arizona," Jack said.
"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 tra
ining 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
Jack 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.