by John Irving
“I thought you were smarter than that,” Alice said.
Jack very slowly, and even more carefully, said that he understood his mom had tattooed Mrs. Oastler—it sounded like a Rose of Jericho from Emma’s description, he unconvincingly explained—but the tattoo was in such a private place that Emma’s mom wouldn’t show it to him.
“I’m surprised she didn’t show you,” Alice said.
“I don’t need to see another Rose of Jericho,” Jack went on. (Even to himself, he sounded too cavalier.) “What’s so special about hers?”
“Just the place, Jack—it’s in a special place.”
“Oh.” He must have moved his eyes away from hers. His mom was such a good liar, she was tough to lie to.
“Not every woman shaves her pubic hair in quite that way,” his mother said.
“Her what?”
“The hair is called pubic hair, Jack.”
“Oh.”
“You don’t have any yet, but you will.”
“Do you shave your pubic hair that way?” Jack asked his mom.
“That’s not your business, young man,” she told him, but he could see she was crying. He didn’t say anything. “Leslie—Mrs. Oastler, to you—is a very . . . independent woman,” Alice started to say, as if she were beginning to read out loud from a long book. “She’s been through a divorce, a bad time, but she’s very . . . rich. She’s determined to seize control of everything that happens to her. She’s a very . . . forceful woman.”
“She’s kind of small—smaller than Emma, anyway,” Jack interjected. (He had no idea what his mother was struggling to say.)
“You want to be careful around Mrs. Oastler, Jack.”
“I’m pretty careful around Emma,” he ventured.
“Yes, you should be careful around Emma, too,” Alice said, “but you want to be more careful around Emma’s mom.”
“Okay.”
“It’s all right that she showed you,” his mother said. “I’m sure you didn’t ask to see it.”
“Emma asked her to show me,” he said.
“Now tell me about your lip.”
Jack was learning that adults were better at concealing things than kids were, and he was increasingly aware that his mom knew a lot she wasn’t telling him. Mrs. Wicksteed’s health, for example: Jack knew she had arthritis because he could see it for himself, and because Mrs. Wicksteed had told him. But no one told him she had cancer, not until the day she didn’t get up in time to do his tie—and then Lottie told him, not his mother. (Maybe his mom had been too busy; it might have been the same week she’d been tattooing Mrs. Oastler.)
Suddenly there was no one in the house who knew how to do a necktie, except Mrs. Wicksteed, who was dying! “Is she dying of arthritis?” Jack asked Lottie.
“No, dear. She has cancer.”
“Oh.” So that was why Lottie prayed every night for the Lord to keep Mrs. Wicksteed alive a little longer.
Peewee did Jack’s tie that morning. He was a limo driver; he did his own tie every morning. He tied Jack’s in a very matter-of-fact fashion, not making half the fuss that Mrs. Wicksteed had—even before her arthritis. “Mrs. Wicksteed is dying, Peewee.”
“That’s too bad, mon. What’s the lady with the limp going to do then?” So that was why Lottie prayed to be permitted to die in Toronto. Everyone, including Peewee, knew that Lottie didn’t want to go back to Prince Edward Island.
Maybe everyone had a Rose of Jericho hidden somewhere, Jack thought. Perhaps it wasn’t always the kind of tattoo you could see, but another kind—like a free tattoo. No less a mark for life, just one not visible on the skin.
13
Not Your Usual Mail-Order Bride
Out of concern for Mrs. Wicksteed, Jack asked Miss Wurtz if he could be excused from Jane Eyre rehearsals the rest of that week; after all, he’d played Rochester before. (He could do the part blind, so to speak.) But Connie-Turnbull-as-Jane had been replaced with Caroline French. Jack had never embraced a girl his own height. Caroline’s hair got in his mouth, which he found disagreeable. In the throes of that passionate moment when Jack-as-Rochester tells Caroline-as-Jane that she must think him an “irreligious dog,” Caroline nervously thumped her heels. Backstage, Jack could imagine her dim-witted twin, Gordon, thumping his heels, too. And when Caroline-as-Jane first took Jack-as-Rochester’s hand and mashed it to her lips, Jack was overcome with revulsion—both Caroline’s hand and her mouth were sticky.
It wasn’t only because Mrs. Wicksteed was dying that he wanted to miss a week of rehearsals; Miss Wurtz was reduced to tears all that week. Jack’s mom told him that Mrs. Wicksteed had helped Miss Wurtz out of a “tight spot” before. Whether the so-called tight spot had been the source of The Wurtz’s tastefully expensive clothes—the boyfriend Emma no longer believed in—Jack never learned. He was permitted to miss rehearsals. Caroline French was forced to imagine him in her sticky embrace.
His availability was of little use to Mrs. Wicksteed, who was hospitalized and enduring a battery of tests. Lottie assured Jack that he didn’t want to see the old lady that way. Jack’s mother, though she told him almost nothing of what she was feeling, was noticeably distraught. If, upon Mrs. Wicksteed’s death, Lottie would soon be on a boat back to Prince Edward Island, Alice confided to Jack in the semidarkness of her bedroom that they would be out on the street. Jack inquired if, in lieu of the street, there might be room for them in the Chinaman’s tattoo parlor. “We’re not sleeping in the needles again,” was all his mother would say.
Was their enemy Mrs. Wicksteed’s divorced daughter? She had never cared for their status as her mother’s rent-free boarders. But wasn’t she alleged to be Mrs. Oastler’s friend? Hadn’t she and Leslie Oastler attended St. Hilda’s together? Now that Leslie and Alice were friends, Jack suggested that maybe Mrs. Oastler would speak to Mrs. Wicksteed’s daughter on their behalf. All Alice said was that Mrs. Wicksteed’s daughter and Leslie Oastler weren’t the best of friends anymore.
It was only natural that Jack turned to The Gray Ghost for guidance in this troubling time, but Mrs. McQuat knew something she wasn’t telling him. Her strongest recommendation was that they pray together in the chapel, which meant only that they prayed together more. And when he asked The Gray Ghost if she’d been successful in persuading his mother that he would be “eaten alive” by those boys at Upper Canada College, Mrs. McQuat’s answer was out of character. It was not like a former combat nurse to be evasive. “Maybe UCC . . . wouldn’t have been . . . so bad, Jack.”
What did the “wouldn’t have been” mean? “Excuse me, Mrs. McQuat—” Jack started to say.
“You’re a bit . . . young to be a boarder . . . Jack . . . but there are schools—mostly in the States—where boarding is . . . the norm.”
“The what?”
They were in the second pew, to the left of the center aisle—the altar bathed in a golden light, the stained-glass saints administering to Jesus. What a lucky guy, to have four women fussing over him! Mrs. McQuat put her cold hand on Jack’s far shoulder and pulled him against her. She put her dry lips to his temple and gave him the faintest trace of a kiss. (“She gives him a paper kiss,” Jack would read in a screenplay, years later, and remember this moment in the chapel.)
“For a boy in your . . . situation, Jack . . . maybe a little . . . independence is the best thing.”
“A little what?”
“Talk to your mother, Jack.”
But having tried to open that door without success, he talked to Emma Oastler instead. Emma was giving him a tour of her mother’s mansion in Forest Hill. They were checking out the guest bedrooms—the guest “wing,” as Mrs. Oastler called it. There were three bedrooms, each with its own bathroom; it was a wing, all right. “Honestly,” Emma was saying, “I can’t understand why you and your mom don’t just move in here. I think it’s stupid to send you away.”
“Away where?”
“Talk to your mom. It’s her idea. She thinks you and
I are a bad combination. She doesn’t want you going through puberty in the same house with me.”
“Going through what?”
“It’s not like we’d have to sleep in the same bedroom,” Emma said, pushing him down on the biggest of the guest-room beds. “Your mom and mine have the prevailing St. Hilda’s mentality. Girls get to see boys until the boys are nine-year-olds—then the boys disappear!”
“Disappear where?”
Emma was engaged in one of her periodic checks on the progress of his penis, which seemed to render her melancholic. She’d pulled down his pants and underwear and was lying with her heavy head on his bare thigh. “I have a new theory,” Emma said, as if she were speaking exclusively to the little guy. “Maybe you are old enough. Maybe it’s me who’s not old enough—I mean I’m not old enough for you.”
“Disappear where?” Jack asked her again. “Where am I being sent away?”
“It’s an all-boys’ school in Maine, baby cakes. I hear it’s kind of remote.”
“Kind of what?”
“Possibly the little guy likes even older women than I first supposed,” Emma was saying. His penis lay still and small in the palm of her hand. Jack was being sent to Maine, but the little guy didn’t care. “I’ve talked to a couple of girls in grade thirteen, and one in grade twelve. They know everything about penises,” Emma went on. “Maybe they can help.”
“Help what?”
“The problem is that they’re boarders. We can’t get you into their residence unless you’re a girl, honey pie.”
Jack should have seen it coming. How hard was it for him to be a girl? He was pretty enough, as Mrs. Oastler had observed—and in his many onstage performances at St. Hilda’s, he’d been a woman more often than he’d been a man.
Much against Miss Wurtz’s wishes, he’d recently been cast as a woman in the senior-school production of A Mail-Order Bride in the Northwest Territories—a nineteenth-century melodrama that The Wurtz despised. Jack was the pathetic child bride. Because of the play’s subject matter—it was annually performed for the senior school exclusively—he’d needed his mother’s permission to accept the part. Alice, in her fashion, had acquiesced. She’d never read the play. Not growing up in Canada, Alice hadn’t been subjected to A Mail-Order Bride in the Northwest Territories in her girlhood—as almost every Canadian woman of Alice’s generation had. (As almost every Canadian girl of Emma’s generation would be.)
In those days—at St. Hilda’s, especially—the senior girls were fed a steady diet of Canadian literature. Miss Wurtz was outraged that many novels of international stature—the classics, which she adored—were popularly replaced by Can Lit, as it was called. Canada had many wonderful writers, Miss Wurtz declared—on those occasions when she was not raving about the so-called classics. (Robertson Davies, Alice Munro, and Margaret Atwood were her favorites.) Years later, as if she were still arguing with Jack about A Mail-Order Bride in the Northwest Territories, Miss Wurtz would write him and tell him to read Alice Munro’s “A Wilderness Station”—a terrific story about a mail-order bride. The Wurtz didn’t want Jack to assume that the subject matter of mail-order brides had prejudiced her against the annual senior-school play.
Abigail Cooke, the playwright, who’d been an unhappily married woman in the Northwest Territories, was certainly not among Canada’s better writers. (She was no Alice Munro.) That Abigail Cooke’s A Mail-Order Bride in the Northwest Territories was required reading in the senior school at St. Hilda’s was, in Miss Wurtz’s view, “an abomination”; that the play was performed every year was, in her well-enunciated words, “a theatrical travesty.” The play was published by a small, obscure press that specialized in scholastic books. (Miss Wurtz, with uncharacteristic vulgarity, once referred to the Canadian publisher as Beaver Penis Press; she immediately apologized to Jack for the word penis.) The play, Miss Wurtz assured Jack, was beneath his talents as an actor; it was nothing short of an invitation to humiliate himself before an audience of older girls.
Much to Jack’s relief, The Gray Ghost offered him her grain-of-salt perspective. It was a dreadful play, Mrs. McQuat agreed—“the fantasies of an amateur writer and certifiable hysteric.” In 1882, Abigail Cooke had murdered her allegedly abusive husband and then shot herself; her play, which was discovered in her attic, was published posthumously in the 1950s. There were those St. Hilda’s Old Girls, Mrs. Wicksteed among them, who thought of the author as a feminist ahead of her time.
Mrs. McQuat advised Jack that the only interesting role was the one he’d been offered—the mail-order bride. The Gray Ghost believed it was an opportunity for Jack to express himself “more freely,” by which Mrs. McQuat meant that Miss Wurtz would not be the director. In the senior school, the maven of the dramatic arts—and the only other male teacher at St. Hilda’s besides Mr. Malcolm—was the mercurial Mr. Ramsey. He was what in those days they called “a confirmed bachelor.” Only five feet, two inches tall, with a spade-shaped blond beard and long blond hair—like a child Viking—Mr. Ramsey was head and shoulders shorter than many of the girls in the senior school, and (in some cases) ten or fifteen pounds lighter. His voice was as high-pitched as a girl’s, and his enthusiasm on the girls’ behalf was both shrill and a model of constancy. Mr. Ramsey was an unrestrained advocate of young women, and the older girls at St. Hilda’s loved him.
In an all-boys’ environment, or even in a coeducational school, Mr. Ramsey would have been taunted and mistreated; that he was obviously a homosexual was of no concern at St. Hilda’s. If a student had been so crude as to call him a “fairy” or a “fag,” or any of the common pejoratives boys use to bully other boys, the senior-school girls would have beaten the culprit to a pulp—and rightly so.
Notwithstanding Mr. Ramsey’s embarrassing fondness for A Mail-Order Bride in the Northwest Territories, he was a refreshing presence for Jack—his first truly creative (as opposed to restraining) director.
“Is it the Jack Burns? We don’t deserve to be this lucky!” Mr. Ramsey cried, with open arms, at the first rehearsal. “Look at him!” Mr. Ramsey commanded the older girls, who had been looking at Jack for some time; they didn’t need Mr. Ramsey’s encouragement. “Is this not a child bride born to break our hearts? Is this not the precious innocence and flawless beauty that, in darker days, led so many a mail-order bride to her brutal fate?”
Jack was familiar with “fate”—he’d already played Tess. A Mail-Order Bride in the Northwest Territories was hardly a tale of the same literary magnitude; yet the heroine of the play was, as Mr. Ramsey correctly observed, a reliable heartbreaker for an audience of pubescent (and often hysterical) girls.
In the rugged Northwest Territories, where men are men and women are scarce, a pioneer community of fur trappers and ice fishermen sends a sizable amount of money, “for traveling expenses,” to a mail-order service called Brides Back East. The poor brides are chosen from among unadoptable orphans in Quebec; many of them don’t speak English. Some of the girls, at the time they set out for the Northwest Territories to meet their mail-order husbands, are prepubescent. The play is set in the 1860s; it’s a long, hard trip from Quebec to the Northwest Territories. It is presumed that most of the girls will be old enough for marriage, or more than old enough, by the time they arrive. Besides, the fur trappers and ice fishermen aren’t asking for older girls. The play’s principal fur trapper, Jack’s future husband, Mr. Halliday, says, in sending for his mail-order bride: “I want a wife on the younger side. You got that?”
In the play, four young girls make their way west in the company of a cruel chaperone, Madame Auber, who sells one of the girls to a blacksmith in Manitoba and another to a cattle rancher in Alberta. Both of these unfortunate brides speak only French. Madame Auber, though French herself, has nothing but contempt for them. Of the two girls who make it to the Northwest Territories, one, Sarah, a bilingual stutterer, loses her virginity to her mail-order husband on a dog sled; thereafter, she wanders off in the snow and freeze
s to death in a blizzard.
Jack plays the other one who makes it, Darlin’ Jenny, who successfully prays for the delay of her first period—her “menses,” as they are called throughout the play. She is aware that when she starts bleeding, she’ll be old enough to be Mr. Halliday’s bride—at least in Halliday’s crude opinion. Thus, aided only by prayer, Jenny wills herself not to start. It was this plot point that required Alice’s permission for her son to accept the role and necessitated Jack’s perplexing visit to the nurse’s office, where the school nurse, the young Miss Bell, informed him of “the facts of life”—but only the facts that pertained to girls, menstruation foremost among them.
Having seen his first two vaginas in a single day, Jack was not surprised to learn that such a complicated place of business was given to periodic bleeding, but imagine the consternation this caused him when he mistakenly thought that this was the long-awaited event Emma Oastler expected to find evidence of in his bedsheets. To Jack’s knowledge, his penis had not yet “squirted”; it alarmed him to imagine that Emma had meant he would squirt blood.
Jack’s confusion understandably upset the school nurse. Miss Bell had talked to many girls about their first periods; while she was awkward in discussing menstruation with a nine-year-old boy, she was at least prepared to do so. But the area of male nocturnal emissions was way off Miss Bell’s map. She was aghast that Jack could confuse a wet dream with menstrual bleeding, but she was at a loss to explain the difference to him. “In all probability, Jack, you won’t even know the first time you ejaculate in your sleep.”
“The first time I what?”
Miss Bell was young and earnest. Jack left the school nurse’s office knowing more than he needed to know about menstruation. As for the specter of his first wet dream, he was in terror. A nocturnal emission sounded like something one might encounter at the bat-cave exhibit in the Royal Ontario Museum. If, in all probability—as Miss Bell had said—Jack wouldn’t even know the first time he ejaculated in his sleep, this meant to the boy that he might bleed to death without ever waking up!