John Irving - Until I Find You

Connie Turnbull, whom Jack-as-Rochester once had taken in his arms while declaring, “ ‘Never, never was anything at once so frail and so indomitable,’ ” contradicted her Eyre-like impression by whispering in Jack’s ear that she was “ entirely domitable.”

Miss Wurtz, whom Jack had not seen since he and Claudia had escorted her to the Toronto film festival more than a decade before, had dramatically covered her head with a black scarf—very nearly a veil. She resembled a twelfth-century pilgrim from an order of flagellants. She was thinner than ever, and her perishable beauty had not altogether disappeared but was diminished by an aura of supernatural persecution—as if she suffered from stigmata, or another form of unexplained bleeding.

“I shan’t leave you alone, Jack,” The Wurtz whispered, in the same ear that Connie Turnbull had whispered in. “No doubt you’ve met your share of loose women in California, but some of these Old Girls have a boundless capacity for looseness, which only women who are unaccustomed to being loose can have.”

“Mercy,” he said. There was only one Old Girl who, whether or not she stood on the threshold of looseness, interested him—Bonnie Hamilton. But despite her identifying limp, she appeared to have slipped away.

As for the teenage boarders, Mrs. Malcolm had herded them together with her wheelchair; she’d driven the cowed girls to a far corner of the Great Hall, where Mr. Malcolm was attempting to rescue them from his demented wife. Wheelchair Jane, Jack could only imagine, was intent on keeping these young women safe from him. In Mrs. Malcolm’s mind, or what was left of it, Jack Burns was the evil reincarnation of his father; in her view, Jack had returned to St. Hilda’s for the sole and lewd purpose of deflowering these girls, whose sexual awakening could be discerned in the dishevelment of their school uniforms.

Jack noticed that the young woman who’d fainted or swooned, or just tripped, had lost one of her shoes. She walked in circles, off-balance, scuffing her remaining loafer. Jack purposely made his way to these students; they were the only ones who’d brought copies of Emma’s novel, probably for him to sign.

The girls gave no indication of sexual interest in him—they weren’t the slightest bit flirtatious. Most of them couldn’t meet Jack’s eyes when he looked at them, and those who could look at him couldn’t speak. They were just kids, embarrassed and shy. Mrs. Malcolm was crazy to think they needed to be protected from Jack! One of them held out a copy of Emma’s first book for him to sign.

“I wanted Emma to sign it,” she said, “but maybe you wouldn’t mind.” The other girls politely waited their turn.

To the thin, unsteady-looking young woman with one shoe, Maureen Yap said something clearly unkind but incomprehensible. It sounded like, “Did you just have major bridgework?” But Jack knew Maureen; he was sure she’d said, “Don’t you have any homework?”

Before the poor girl struggled to answer The Yap—before she fainted or swooned or tripped, again—Jack took her by her cold, clammy hand and said, “Let’s get out of here. I’ll help you find your missing shoe.”

“Yeah, let’s get outta here,” another of the boarders chimed in. “Let’s go look for Ellie’s shoe.”

“Someone stepped on my heel as I was leaving the chapel,” Ellie said. “I didn’t want to see who it was, so I just forgot about it.”

“I hate it when that happens,” Jack told the young women.

“It’s so rude,” one of them said.

“It sucks, ” he said. (It might have been the word sucks that turned Maureen Yap away.)

Jack went with the girls down the corridor, back toward the chapel, looking for the lost loafer; he signed copies of Emma’s books on the way. “I haven’t been with a bunch of boarders since a few girls sneaked me into their residence when I was in school here,” he told them.

“How old were you?” a girl who reminded Jack of Ginny Jarvis asked.

“I guess I was nine or ten,” Jack said.

“And the boarders were how old?” Ellie asked.

“They would have been your age,” Jack told her.

“That’s sick !” Ellie said.

“Nothing happened, did it?” one of the boarders asked Jack.

“No, of course not—I just remember being frightened,” he replied.

“Well, you were a little boy,” one of them pointed out. “Of course you were frightened.”

“Look, there’s my stupid shoe,” Ellie said. The loafer lay kicked aside, against the corridor wall.

“How will you ever make a movie of The Slush-Pile Reader ?” one of the young women asked him.

“It’s potentially so gross, ” another of the girls said.

“The film won’t be as explicit as the novel,” Jack explained. “The word penis won’t ever be mentioned, for example.”

“What about vagina ?” one of the girls asked.

“Not that, either,” he said.

“Why didn’t she just get her vagina fixed ?” Ellie asked. Of course Jack knew she meant the Michele Maher character, but his thoughts went entirely to Emma.

“I don’t know,” Jack answered.

“There must have been some psychological reason, Ellie,” one of her fellow boarders said. “I mean it’s not exactly knee surgery, is it?”

The young women, Ellie among them, nodded soberly. They were such sensible girls—children at heart but, in so many other ways, more grown up than Emma at that age, not to mention Ginny Jarvis and Penny Hamilton (or Charlotte Barford, or Wendy Holton). Jack wondered what had been so different or wrong about him that those girls had ever thought it was acceptable to abuse him.

These girls wouldn’t have harmed a little boy. Jack felt, in their company, like a nine- or ten-year-old again—only he felt safe. So safe, and like such a little boy, that he suddenly announced: “I have to pee.” (It was exactly the way a nine- or ten-year-old would have said it.)

The young women were unsurprised; they responded to his announcement in a strictly practical fashion. “Do you remember where the boys’ washroom is?” Ellie asked him.

“There’s still only one,” another of the young women said.

“I’ll show you where it is,” Ellie told Jack, taking his hand. (It was exactly the way she would have taken a nine- or ten-year-old by the hand; for some reason, it broke Jack’s heart.)

It had all been his fault, he thought—the way those older girls in his time at St. Hilda’s had taken such an unnatural interest in him. It must have been something they detected in him. Jack was convinced that he was the unnatural one.

Jack pulled his hand away from Ellie. He didn’t want her or her friends—these incredibly healthy, normal young women—to see him cry. Jack felt he was on the verge of dissolving into tears, but in that unembarrassed way that a nine- or ten-year-old might cry. He was suddenly ashamed of what the real Michele Maher might have called his weirdness.

“I can certainly find the boys’ washroom by myself,” Jack told them—laughing about it, but in an actorly way. “I believe I could find that washroom from the darkness of my grave,” he added, which made it sound like his journey to the boys’ washroom was a heroic voyage—meant to be undertaken alone, and in full acceptance of such perils as one might encounter along the way.

Jack was soon lost in an unfamiliar corridor; perhaps the old school had been repainted, he was thinking. The stairwells were the likely haunts of ghosts, he believed—Mrs. McQuat, his departed conscience; or even Emma, disappointed by the brevity of his prayer. The voices of the boarders no longer accompanied him on his journey; Jack wasn’t followed, or so he thought.