by John Irving
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 been 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 thoro
ughly 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, the 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.
“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. B
ut 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.)