by John Irving
“Then shut it off!” Emma hollered downstairs. “Jeez,” Emma said again, to Jack, “you better keep an eye on that thing, and tell me when it squirts.”
“When I pee?”
“You’re gonna know when it’s not pee, Jack.”
“Oh.”
“The point is, tell me everything,” Emma said. She took his penis in her hand. He was anxious, remembering how she’d bent his index finger. “Don’t tell your mom—you’ll just freak her out. And don’t tell Lottie—you’ll make her limp worse.”
“Why does Lottie limp?” Jack asked. Emma Oastler was such an authority, he assumed she would know. Alas, she did.
“She had an epidural go haywire,” Emma explained. “The baby died anyway. It was a real bad deal.”
So you could get a limp from a childbirth that went awry! Naturally, Jack thought an epidural was a part of the body, a female part. In the manner in which he’d assumed his mom’s C-section referred to an area of the hospital in Halifax where Jack was born, so he believed that Lottie had lost her epidural in childbirth. Jack must have imagined that an epidural was somehow crucial to the female anatomy; possibly it prevented limps. Years later, when he couldn’t find epidural in the index of Gray’s Anatomy, Jack would be reminded of his C-section mistake. (That his mother had never had a Cesarean would be an even bigger discovery.)
“Tea’s brewing!” Lottie called to Jack and Emma from the kitchen. Only when he was older would it occur to him that Lottie knew Emma was a menacing girl.
“Have a wet dream for me, little guy,” Emma said to Jack’s penis. She was such a good friend; she gently helped his penis find its proper place, back inside his pants, and she was especially careful how she zipped up his fly.
“Do penises have dreams?” Jack asked.
“Just remember to tell me when your little guy has one,” Emma said.
10
His Audience of One
Jack’s grade-two teacher, Mr. Malcolm—at that time, one of only two male teachers at St. Hilda’s—was inseparable from his wife, whom he daily brought to school for dire reasons. She was blind and wheelchair-bound, and it seemed to soothe her to hear Mr. Malcolm speak. He was an excellent teacher, patient and kind. Everyone liked Mr. Malcolm, but the entire grade-two class felt sorry for him; his blind and wheelchair-bound wife was a horror. In a school where so many of the older girls were outwardly cruel and inwardly self-destructive, which was not infrequently blamed on their parents’ tumultuous divorces, the grade-two kids prayed, every day, that Mr. Malcolm would divorce his wife. Had he murdered her, the class would have forgiven him; if he’d killed her in front of them, they might have applauded.
But Mr. Malcolm was ever the peacemaker, and his shaving choices were ahead of their time. Growing bald, he had shaved his head—not all that common in the early 1970s—and, even less common, he preferred varying lengths of stubble to an actual beard or to being clean-shaven. Back then it was a credit to St. Hilda’s that they accepted Mr. Malcolm’s shaved head and his stubbled face; not unlike the grade-two children, the administrators of the school had decided not to cause Mr. Malcolm any further harm. The blind wife in the wheelchair made everyone take pity on him.
In the grade-two classroom, the children worked diligently to please him. Mr. Malcolm never had to discipline them; they disciplined themselves. They would do nothing to upset him. Life had already been unfair enough to Mr. Malcolm.
Emma Oastler’s assessment of the tragedy was colored by her own intimacy with human cruelty, but in her view of the Malcolms as a couple, Emma was probably not wrong. Mrs. Malcolm, whose name was Jane, fell off a roof at a church picnic. She was high school age at the time, a pretty and popular girl—suddenly paralyzed from the waist down. According to Emma, Mr. Malcolm had been a somewhat younger admirer of Jane’s. He fell in love with her when she was paralyzed, chiefly because she was more available.
“He must have been the kind of uncool guy she would never have dated before the accident,” Emma said. “But after she fell off the roof, Wheelchair Jane didn’t have a lotta choices.” Yet if Mr. Malcolm was her choice, even if he was her only choice, Jane Malcolm couldn’t have been luckier.
The blindness was another story; that happened to her later, when she’d been married for many years. Jane Malcolm suffered from early-onset macular degeneration. As Mr. Malcolm explained to the grade-two class, his wife had lost her central vision. She could see light, she could make out movement, and she still had some peripheral vision. At the extreme periphery, however, Mrs. Malcolm experienced a loss of color, too.
The loss of her mind was another matter; there was nothing Mr. Malcolm could say to protect the kids, or himself, from that. Thus periphery and peripheral were the so-called vocabulary challenges for opening day in grade two—every day, there would be two more. As for crazed or delusional or paranoid, they were never words on the grade-two vocabulary list. But Wheelchair Jane was all those things; she’d been pushed past the edge of reason.
When Mrs. Malcolm would grind her teeth, or suddenly crash her wheelchair into Patsy Booth’s desk, head-on, Jack often looked at Lucinda Fleming—half expecting that Jane Malcolm’s visible rage might trigger a silent-rage episode in Lucinda. It was insanity to assault the Booth twins separately. Whenever Mrs. Malcolm attacked Patsy’s desk in her wheelchair, Patsy’s twin, Heather, also screamed.
On occasion, Mrs. Malcolm would snap her head from side to side as if to rid herself of her peripheral vision. Maybe she thought total blindness would be preferable. And when one of the second graders would raise a hand in response to one of Mr. Malcolm’s questions, blind Jane would assume a head-on-her-knees position in her wheelchair—as if a man wielding a knife had appeared in front of her and she’d ducked to prevent him from slashing her throat. These dramatic moments of Mrs. Malcolm becoming unhinged made grade two a most attentive class; while the children listened carefully to Mr. Malcolm’s every word, they kept their eyes firmly fixed on her.
For not more than three or four seconds, not more than twice a week, the tired-looking Mr. Malcolm would be at a loss for words; thereupon, Wheelchair Jane would start her journey of repeated collisions. She sailed forth up an aisle—the wheelchair glancing off the kids’ desks as she rushed past, skinning her knuckles.
While Mr. Malcolm ran to the nurse’s office, to fetch either the nurse or (for more minor injuries) a first-aid kit, Mrs. Malcolm would be left in the kids’ tentative care. Someone held the wheelchair from behind so she couldn’t careen out of control; the rest of the class stood petrified around her, just out of her reach. They were instructed to not let her get out of the wheelchair, although it’s doubtful that seven-year-olds could have stopped her. Fortunately, she never tried to escape; she flailed about, crying out the children’s names, which she’d memorized in the first week of school.
“Maureen Yap!” Mrs. Malcolm would holler.
“Here, ma’am!” Maureen would holler back, and Mrs. Malcolm would turn her blind eyes in The Yap’s direction.
“Jimmy Bacon!” Mrs. Malcolm would scream.
Jimmy would moan. There was nothing wrong with Wheelchair Jane’s hearing; she looked without seeing in Jimmy’s direction upon hearing him moan.
“Jack Burns!” she shouted one day.
“I’m right here, Mrs. Malcolm,” Jack said. Even in grade two, his diction and enunciation were far in advance of his years.
“Your father was well spoken, too,” Mrs. Malcolm announced. “Your father is evil,” she added. “Don’t let Satan put a curse on you to be like him.”
“No, Mrs. Malcolm, I won’t.” Jack may have answered her with the utmost confidence, but within the mostly all-girls’ world of St. Hilda’s, it was clear to him that he was fighting overwhelming odds. The Big Bet, which Emma Oastler spoke of with a reverence usually reserved for her favorite novels and movies, heavily favored the suspected potency of William’s genes. If womanizing could be passed from father to son, it most certainly
would be passed to Jack. In the eyes of almost everyone at St. Hilda’s, even in what amounted to the severely limited peripheral vision of Mrs. Malcolm, Jack Burns was his father’s son—or about to be.
“You can’t blame anyone for being interested, Jack,” Emma said philosophically. “It’s exciting stuff—to see how you’ll turn out.” Clearly Mrs. Malcolm had taken a genetic interest in how Jack would turn out, too.
But the worst thing about Jane Malcolm was how she behaved when her husband returned to the grade-two classroom—with either the school nurse or the first-aid kit. “Here I am—I’m back, Jane!” he always announced.
“Did you hear that, children?” Mrs. Malcolm would begin. “He’s come back! He’s never gone for long and he always comes back!”
“Please, Jane,” Mr. Malcolm would say.
“Mr. Malcolm likes taking care of me,” Wheelchair Jane told the class. “He does everything for me—all the things I can’t do myself.”
“Now, now, Jane, please,” Mr. Malcolm would say, but she wouldn’t let him take her skinned knuckles in his hands. Slowly, at first, but with ever-quickening strikes, she slapped his face.
“Mr. Malcolm loves doing everything for me!” she cried. “He feeds me, he dresses me, he washes me—”
“Jane, darling—” Mr. Malcolm tried to say.
“He wipes me!” Mrs. Malcolm screamed; that was always the end of it, before she resorted to whimpers and moans.
Jimmy Bacon would commence to moan with her, which was soon followed by the remarkable blanket-sucking sounds that the Booth twins were capable of making—even without blankets. Heel-thumping from the French twins never lagged far behind. And Jack would steal a look at Lucinda Fleming, who was usually looking at him. Her serene smile betrayed nothing of the mysterious rage inside her. Do you wanna see it? her smile seemed to say. Well, I’m gonna show you, her smile promised—but not yet.
It was a not-yet world Jack lived in, from kindergarten through grade two. Pitying Mr. Malcolm was an education in itself. But more memorably, and more lastingly, Jack’s education was as much in Emma Oastler’s hands as it was in Mr. Malcolm’s.
On rainy days, or whenever it was snowing, Emma slid into the backseat of the Lincoln Town Car and instructed Peewee as follows: “Just drive us around, Peewee. No peeking in the backseat. Keep your eyes on the road.”
“That okay with you, mon?” Peewee always asked Jack.
“Yes, that would be fine, Peewee. Thank you for asking,” the boy replied.
“You’re the boss, miss,” Peewee would say.
Scrunched down low in the backseat, Jack and Emma chewed gum nonstop—their breath minty or fruity, depending on the flavor. Emma would let Jack undo her braid, but she would never let him weave it back together. With her braid undone, Emma had enough hair for both of them to hide their faces under its spell. “If you get your gum stuck in my hair, honey pie, I’m gonna kill you,” she often said—but once, when Jack was laughing about something, Emma suddenly sounded like his mother. “Don’t laugh when you’re chewing gum—you could choke.”
There was the puzzling moment when they checked on her training bra, as Emma disparagingly called it. From what Jack could tell, the instructions the bra had given to her breasts were already working. At least her breasts were getting bigger. Wasn’t that the point?
Speaking of growing, his penis had made no discernible progress. “How’s the little guy?” Emma would invariably ask, and Jack would dutifully show her. “What are you thinking about, little guy?” Emma asked his penis once.
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 Brontë 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 Wu
rtz 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.)