John Irving - Until I Find You

Had Emma been a more popular girl than Jack had first supposed? Of course Wendy Fists-of-Stone Holton had a center-aisle seat in a pew near the front. A gaunt woman with a washed-out complexion and fly-away, silver-blond hair, Wendy had been recently divorced from an ear, nose, and throat doctor who’d declared himself gay upon the accusation that he’d impregnated his nurse. (Wendy had spoken to Jack before Emma’s service; she said it would be nice to have a coffee, “or something,” if he had the time.)

In the pew behind Miss Wong sat the very personification of a hurricane preparing to consume the Bahamas—all two-hundred-plus pounds of Charlotte Breasts-with -Bones- in-Them Barford, Emma’s Canadian publisher. Charlotte had offered Jack her editorial assistance, purely for the privilege of reading whatever it was he was alleged to be writing—a novel or a memoir, perhaps titled A Penis at St. Hilda’s. (Or so Charlotte might have dreamed.) Before the service, she’d hinted to Jack that it must have been “a bitch” to interrupt his other writing to write an adaptation of The Slush-Pile Reader.

“Indeed,” he’d managed to say—his voice, like Hank Long’s, unnaturally high. In the company of grown women among whom Jack remembered being a little boy, he was again a child.

The Hamilton sisters were there; notably, they were not sitting together. Penny, between whose eyes he had once ejaculated, watched him with the innocent eagerness of a soccer mom—sperm the farthest thing from her mind, not to mention her forehead. She’d brought her children, two terribly well-behaved and well-dressed little girls; her husband, Penny told Jack, was having “an all-boys’ weekend away.” (Golf, Jack imagined. He didn’t ask.)

As for Penny’s sister, Bonnie, who was in grade twelve when Jack was in grade four, she’d managed to enter the chapel without his seeing her limp to her pew—assuming that Bonnie still limped. Her proximity to the rear entrance, where Mr. Ramsey continued to make a moving target of himself, suggested to Jack that Bonnie’s pelvis was irreparably twisted; her dead right leg would forever trail behind her while she lurched forward on her leading left foot.

The eight years between them seemed of no consequence now. She’d never married, Jack’s mother had told him. Bonnie Hamilton was the most sought-after real estate agent in Toronto, Mrs. Oastler had said. “With that limp,” Leslie had added, “it must hold things up to have her show you a property with lots of stairs. ”

Ever the prompter, Bonnie sat in the back and moved her lips before Jack spoke—as if she already knew what he was supposed to say about Emma, as if he’d actually written something and Bonnie had miraculously read and memorized it before he began to speak. She was forty, but the fatalistic tug Jack had felt when he was nine (and Bonnie seventeen) was pulling them together still. As he’d tried to tell Emma, but had managed to tell only Mrs. McQuat, Bonnie Hamilton was an older woman who, when she looked at him, couldn’t look away.

For a moment, Jack thought that all the older women of his childhood were there.

Connie Turnbull, who’d run up to Mrs. Oastler and Alice and Jack—this was immediately after Connie had parked her car, with a big dog in it—had clearly been practicing her lines from Miss Wurtz’s long-ago dramatization of Jane Eyre. “ ‘It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity,’ ” Connie said, breathlessly—holding Jack’s shoulders and assessing him, as if she were measuring him for a coffin or a suit.

“ ‘Dread remorse when you are tempted to err,’ ” Jack began; then, sensing how deeply Connie Turnbull was dissatisfied with tranquillity, he stopped.

Jack had come up to her breasts when they’d last engaged in this dialogue—when he’d played a grade-three Rochester to her grade-six Jane. Now, in her two-inch heels, Connie was only a forehead taller than Jack was. “ ‘You think me, I daresay, an irreligious dog,’ ” he started to say.

On cue, Connie took his hand and kissed it. Her lips were parted, and she made the usual contact with her teeth and tongue—only this time there was no applause. Alice and Mrs. Oastler looked on, aghast; they clearly didn’t know their Jane Eyre. What must they have thought? That Jack had arranged an assignation with Connie Turnbull after Emma’s memorial service; possibly that he’d slept with Connie the night before ?

“Nice job, Jack,” Connie whispered in his ear—her hair faintly redolent of dog-breath, which at a glance he could see was fogging up the windows of her parked car.

Thank goodness Ginny Jarvis wasn’t there. It was as if the gun he’d shot her with—onstage, in A Mail-Order Bride in the Northwest Territories— hadn’t been firing blanks. But Jack was unprepared for those other Old Girls who’d come to honor Emma. Or had they? Many of them were unknown to him.

“It’s you, baby cakes,” he could imagine Emma saying in her husky whisper. “The old broads are here to get a look at you. ” Maybe so. How else to explain the presence of Jack’s classmates? There were four of them, all girls.

The Booth twins, Heather and Patsy, whose identical blanket-sucking sounds had been born in the terrors of Emma Oastler’s sleepy-time stories, when they were in kindergarten together and Emma was in grade six —they couldn’t have come out of respect for their old tormentor. Likewise Maureen Yap, whose married name would forever elude Jack; Maureen must have remembered how Emma had abused her.

As alert as an endangered squirrel, Maureen had chosen a center-aisle seat in the back of the chapel, lest she should feel the sudden need to flee—from some reference Jack might make to the bat-cave exhibit in the Royal Ontario Museum, perchance, not to mention his reminding her of Emma’s divorced-dad story. (“He has just passed out from too much sex.”)

It was Maureen Yap who’d asked Emma: “What is too much sex?”

“Nothing you’ll ever have,” Emma had answered her dismissively.

After Emma’s service, at what Mrs. Oastler would describe as “a kind of wake,” which was held in the Great Hall, Maureen Yap approached Jack. A strand of her hair had strayed to a corner of her mouth, where there also lingered a remnant of cheese. Little cubes of cheddar, skewered on toothpicks, were the only food served—and these were washed down by white wine, which Alice said was warm, or by sparkling water, which Jack would have described as “room temperature at best.”

Whether it was the speck of cheese or the strand of hair—or her miserable conviction that Emma’s prophecy, which denied Maureen Yap the possibility of ever having too much sex, was incontrovertibly true—Maureen was difficult to understand.

“I blame the delay on Pam Hoover,” Jack thought she said, as she nervously spilled her wine.

He sipped some tepid sparkling water and considered what Maureen might have meant. All the women at Emma’s memorial service—the ones Jack recognized and the many he did not—had looked better in their school uniforms. But maybe Jack had looked better then, too. “I must have misheard you, Maureen,” he replied, bringing tears to her eyes.

“I came all the way from Vancouver,” Maureen Yap repeated. “I’m staying at the Four Seasons, under my maiden name.”

Jack was staying at the Four Seasons, too—a source of some friction between him and his mom. Jack wasn’t sure what Leslie Oastler thought of his defection to a hotel. Maybe Mrs. Oastler, if not his mom, understood why he wouldn’t have wanted to spend the night in Emma’s bed, or even in what had been Jack’s designated bedroom, where Emma had more than once held him in her arms—where Mrs. Machado had taken such indelible advantage of him.