John Irving - Until I Find You

“Jack Burns!” Mr. Ramsey cried, choking back a sob.

Miss Wurtz had covered her face with a white handkerchief, as if she were less than stoically facing a firing squad.

Caroline French, usually a no-show at the class reunions, was a no-show at Emma’s memorial service as well. Jack was sorry to miss the sound of her heel-thumping, as Caroline must have missed the once-resonant heel-thumps of her deceased twin, Gordon—gone to a boater’s watery grave. Dire moaning from Jimmy Bacon would have fit right in at Emma’s service, but Jimmy was also absent. Fortunately, the Booth twins didn’t disappoint Jack—Heather and Patsy with their identical blanket-sucking sounds, which were now intermingled with the congregation’s spontaneous grieving.

A wail escaped Wendy Horton, who pressed her temples with her fists of stone. A bellow broke forth from Charlotte Barford; she clutched her breasts with bones in them, as if her hammering heart could not otherwise be contained.

They all would have wept themselves silly, if Jack hadn’t said something; they would still be weeping, if he hadn’t thought of something to say. “Let us pray,” Jack said, as if he’d known all along what he was doing. (They were in a church—they were supposed to pray!)

“You’ve had a bad day, and you’re very tired,” Emma had intoned, in his kindergarten class. But this didn’t sound like an appropriate prayer. “For three of you,” Emma always said, before concluding her squeezed-child saga, “your bad day just got worse.” But this lacked closure, and the tone was threatening—not at all prayerlike in the usual, uplifting sort of way.

And so Jack Burns said the only prayer he could remember at that moment. It was the one he and his mother had stopped saying together; it usually made him sad to think about it, because it signified everything he and his mom didn’t say to each other, but it had the virtue of being short.

The heads bowed before him were quite a sight, although he’d not spotted Chenko in the row directly behind his mother until Chenko bowed his head. There on his bald pate was the familiar Ukrainian tattoo—a snarling wolf, which (no matter how many times Jack had seen it) was always unnerving.

“The day Thou gavest, Lord, is ended,” Jack said to the only face looking back at him—the wolf’s. “Thank You for it.” Now what? he wondered, but Jack was saved by the organist, whom he never saw. (He or she was behind Jack.) The organist knew how and when to fill a silence, and—at St. Hilda’s—with what to fill it. The hymn that came crashing down upon them was one they knew by heart. Even those castaway boys who’d left the school and its morning chapel at the end of grade four—they’d not forgotten it. Certainly all the Old Girls, of whatever age, had committed these quatrains to memory; they doubtless murmured their beloved William Blake in their sleep.

And what about the teenage boarders standing restlessly in the rear of the chapel, where Mr. Ramsey became their instant choirmaster? What about those young women yearning for a life out of their school uniforms, but fearful of what that life might be—as girls of that blossoming age are? Boy, could they ever belt out that hymn! They’d sung it every week, or twice a week, in their seemingly interminable time at St. Hilda’s.

The tune of “Jerusalem”—Hymn 157, a dog-eared page in the St. Hilda’s hymnals—resounded triumphantly in every Old Girl’s heart. They were William Blake’s words, set to song—that odd belief that Jesus came to England, where Blake imagined a spiritual Israel.

“ And did those feet in ancient time/Walk upon England’s mountains green? ” the congregation sang.

Jack came down the altar stairs, where he was momentarily accosted by Wheelchair Jane; wailing like a banshee, she blocked the center aisle. But Mr. Malcolm never hesitated; he darted into the aisle and wheeled his startled wife a hundred and eighty degrees around, propelling her wheelchair ahead of him. Jack followed the Malcolms up the aisle—pausing only a second for Mrs. Oastler, Emma’s grieving mother, to take his arm and allow him to escort her. Chenko, perhaps the only member of the congregation who wasn’t singing—Ukrainian wrestlers weren’t familiar with William Blake—was still weeping when Alice ushered him up the aisle beside her. (Chenko hobbled on his cane.) Pew by pew, from front to back, the congregation followed them.

“ Bring me my bow of burning gold!/Bring me my arrows of desire!/Bring me my spear! O clouds unfold!/Bring me my chariot of fire, ” sang the multitude.

Even Penny Hamilton’s little girls were singing. (Of course they were—they were probably students at St. Hilda’s!)

As Jack neared the rear entrance to the chapel, one of the seventeen- or eighteen-year-olds—a pale-skinned, blue-eyed blonde, as thin as a model—appeared to swoon or faint or trip into her fellow boarders’ arms. From the look of her, this might have been more the result of a starvation diet than her near-enough-to-touch proximity to Jack Burns, a movie star—not that Jack hadn’t seen girls her age swoon or faint or trip in his presence before. Or it might have been the overstimulating effect of the soaring hymn.

The falling-down girl distracted Jack from the more immediate object of his desire. Bonnie Hamilton had not only managed to slip into a pew at the back of the chapel without his seeing her limp to her seat. She’d likewise managed to slip away—ahead of the recessional hymn and the wheelchair-bound Mrs. Malcolm, who still led their lamenting retreat. How had Bonnie escaped Jack’s notice? (With a limp like hers, maybe she knew instinctively when to leave.)

Out into the corridor, marching to the Great Hall, the girls’ and women’s voices bore them along; as they retreated from the chapel, the organ grew less reverberant, but the closing couplet of the hymn’s final quatrain roared in their midst loud and strong.

“ Till we have built Jerusalem/In England’s green and pleasant land, ” sang the throng.

“I gotta hand it to you, Jack,” Leslie Oastler whispered in his ear—the word gotta very much the way her daughter would have said it. “There’s not a dry eye, or a dry pair of panties, in the house.”

Jack wasn’t sure that wakes were a good idea. Possibly the fault lay in the concept of mixing mourning with wine and cheese. Or mixing women with wine and cheese—maybe the mourning had nothing to do with it.

Lucinda Fleming was the first to inform him that the St. Hilda’s reunion cocktail parties were held in the gym, not in the Great Hall, which was not great enough to contain the Old Girls who’d come to pay their last respects to Emma—or to gawk at, or hit on, Jack Burns.

Most of the women wore high heels, of one kind or another. They’d seen Jack only when he was a little boy or on the big screen; they were unprepared for how short he was. Those women who (in their heels) were taller than Jack were inclined to remove their shoes. Hence they stood seductively before him, either barefoot or in their stocking feet—their high heels in one hand, the plastic cup of white wine in the other, which left no hand free to handle the toothpicks with the little cubes of cheese.

From Hollywood parties, which some actors view as auditions, Jack was in the habit of eating and drinking nothing. He didn’t want all manner of disgusting things to get stuck between his teeth; he didn’t want his breath to smell like piss. (To a nondrinker, white wine on the breath smells like gasoline—or some other unburned fuel—and the Old Girls at Emma’s wake were breathing up a firestorm.)

There were especially desperate-looking women in their late thirties or early forties. More than a few of them were divorced; their children were spending the weekend with their fathers, or so Jack was repeatedly told. These women were shamelessly aggressive, or at least inappropriately aggressive for a wake.