John Irving - Until I Find You

It was Jack’s impression that the older girls at St. Hilda’s never liked having boys in their school. Although the boys couldn’t stay past grade four, their presence—even the presence of little boys—was seen as a bad influence. According to Emma Oastler: “Especially on the older girls.”

Emma was a menacing girl, and an older one. The grade-six girls were the oldest students in the junior school; they opened and closed the car doors for the little kids at the Rosseter Road entrance. When Jack started kindergarten in the fall of 1970—the first year St. Hilda’s admitted boys—Emma was in grade six. He was five; she was twelve. (Some problem at home had caused her to miss a year of school.) On Jack’s first day, Emma opened the car door for him—a formative experience.

Jack was already self-conscious about the car—a black Lincoln Town Car from a limousine service, which Mrs. Wicksteed used for all her driving needs. (Neither Mrs. Wicksteed nor Lottie drove, and Alice never got her driver’s license.) The limo driver was a friendly Jamaican—a big man named Peewee, who was nearly as black as the Town Car. He was Mrs. Wicksteed’s favorite driver.

What kid wants to show up for his first day of school in a chauffeured limousine? But Alice had not done badly by yielding to Mrs. Wicksteed’s way of doing things. It seemed that the Old Girl was not only paying Jack’s tuition at St. Hilda’s; she was paying for the limo.

Because Alice often worked at the Chinaman’s tattoo parlor until late at night, Lottie got Jack up for school and gave him breakfast. Mrs. Wicksteed had sufficiently roused herself in time to do the boy’s necktie, albeit a little absentmindedly. Lottie laid out his other clothes at bedtime—on school mornings, she also helped him get dressed.

On those mornings, Jack would go into his mom’s semidark room and kiss her good-bye; then Lottie would cross the sidewalk with him to the corner of Spadina and Lowther, where Peewee would be waiting in the Town Car. To her credit, Alice had offered to accompany her son on his first day.

“Alice,” Mrs. Wicksteed said, “if you take Jack to school, you’ll make it an occasion for him to cry.”

Mrs. Wicksteed was firmly opposed to creating occasions for Jack to cry. While doing his necktie one morning, she told him: “You will be teased, Jack. Don’t make it an occasion to cry. Cry only when you’re physically hurt—and in that case, cry as loudly as you can.”

“But what do I do when I get teased?” Jack asked her.

Mrs. Wicksteed wore a plum-colored dressing gown over a pair of her late husband’s barber-pole pajamas. She always did the boy’s tie while sitting at the kitchen table, warming her stiff fingers over her first cup of tea. Her white hair was in curlers and her face glistened with avocado oil.

“Be creative,” she advised him.

“When I get teased?”

“Be nice,” Lottie suggested.

“Be nice twice, ” Mrs. Wicksteed said.

“And the third time?” Jack asked her.

“Be creative,” she said again.

When the necktie was done, Mrs. Wicksteed kissed him on his forehead and on the bridge of his nose; then Lottie wiped the avocado oil off his face. Lottie would kiss Jack, too—usually in the front hall, before she opened the outside door and led him by the hand to Peewee.

Lottie’s limp, which was almost as disturbingly provocative to Jack as Tattoo Peter’s missing leg, was a frequent topic of conversation between Jack and his mother. “Why does Lottie limp?” he must have asked his mom a hundred times.

“Ask Lottie.”

But when he left for his first day of school, Jack still hadn’t summoned the courage to ask his nanny why she limped.

“What’s with the lady’s limp, mon?” Peewee asked him in the limo.

“I don’t know. Why don’t you ask her, Peewee?”

“ You ask her, mon—you’re the gentleman of the house. I’m just the driver. ”

Jack Burns later thought he’d be able to see the intersection of Pickthall and Hutchings Hill Road from his grave—the way Peewee slowed the Town Car to a crawl, the way the older girls skeptically took for granted the arrival of another rich kid in another limo. It was a warm September morning; Jack was again aware of the girls’ untucked middy blouses, loosely gathered at their throats by those gray-and-maroon regimental-striped ties. (In two years, they would all be wearing button-down collars with the top button unbuttoned.) But he would remember best the rebellious posture of their hips.

The girls never stood still—sometimes with their arms around another girl, sometimes with all their weight on one foot while they tapped the other. Sitting down, they bounced one leg on one knee—the crossed leg constantly in motion. The extreme shortness of their gray pleated skirts drew Jack’s attention to their legs and the surprising heaviness of their upper thighs. The girls picked at their fingers, at their nails, at their rings; they scratched their eyebrows and their hair. They looked under their nails, as if for secrets—they seemed to have many secrets. Among friends, there were hand signals and subtle evidence of other sign language.

At the Rosseter Road entrance, where Peewee stopped the Town Car, the grade-six girls struck Jack as particularly secretive yet unrestrained. At eleven or twelve, girls think they look awful. They have ceased being children, at least in their estimation, but they have not yet developed into the young women they will become. At that age, there are great differences among them: some have begun to look and move like young women, others have boys’ bodies and move as if they were shy young men.

Not Emma Oastler, who was twelve going on eighteen. When she opened the car door for Jack, he mistook the faintest trace of a mustache on her upper lip for perspiration. The hair on her strong, tanned arms had turned blond in the summer sun, and her thick, dark-brown braid fell over her shoulder and framed one side of her almost-pretty face. The weight of her braid, which reached to her navel, served to separate and define her budding breasts. Maybe a quarter of the grade-six girls had noticeable breasts.

When Jack got out of the limo and stood next to Emma, he came up to her waist. “Don’t trip on your necktie, honey pie,” Emma said. The boy’s tie hung down to his knees, but until Emma warned him, he hadn’t considered the danger of tripping on it. And Jack’s gray Bermuda shorts, which he’d outgrown, were too short to be “proper”—or so Mrs. Wicksteed had observed. (Unlike the girls, the boys wore short socks.)

Emma roughly lifted Jack’s chin in her hand. “Let’s have a look at those eyelashes, baby cakes—oh, my God!” she exclaimed.

“What?”

“I see trouble ahead,” Emma Oastler said. Searching her face, Jack saw trouble ahead, too. He also realized his earlier mistake—the mustache. Up close, there was no way you could confuse the soft-looking fuzz on Emma’s upper lip with beads of perspiration. At five, Jack didn’t know that young women were sensitive about having mustaches. It looked like a neat thing to have; naturally, he wanted to touch it.

If your first day of school, like your first tattoo, is a pilgrim experience—well, here was Jack’s. And touching Emma Oastler’s mustache would certainly prove to be character-forming. “What’s your name?” Emma asked, bending closer.

“Jack.”

“Jack what?”

For an agonizing moment, her furbearing lip made him forget his last name. But more than her mustache made him hesitate. He had been christened Jack Stronach. His father had abandoned him, without marrying his mother; Alice saw no reason for either of them to bear William’s name. But Mrs. Wicksteed disagreed. While Alice made a point of not being Mrs. Burns, Mrs. Wicksteed believed that no child should suffer from illegitimacy; at her instigation, Jack’s name was legally changed, making him “legitimate” in name only. Furthermore, Mrs. Wicksteed was an assimilationist; in the Old Girl’s view, a Jack Burns would be more easily assimilated into Canadian culture than a Jack Stronach. No doubt she thought she was doing the boy a favor.