John Irving - Until I Find You

On occasion, Mrs. Malcolm would snap her head from side to side as if to rid herself of her peripheral vision. Maybe she thought total blindness would be preferable. And when one of the second graders would raise a hand in response to one of Mr. Malcolm’s questions, blind Jane would assume a head-on-her-knees position in her wheelchair—as if a man wielding a knife had appeared in front of her and she’d ducked to prevent him from slashing her throat. These dramatic moments of Mrs. Malcolm becoming unhinged made grade two a most attentive class; while the children listened carefully to Mr. Malcolm’s every word, they kept their eyes firmly fixed on her.

For not more than three or four seconds, not more than twice a week, the tired-looking Mr. Malcolm would be at a loss for words; thereupon, Wheelchair Jane would start her journey of repeated collisions. She sailed forth up an aisle—the wheelchair glancing off the kids’ desks as she rushed past, skinning her knuckles.

While Mr. Malcolm ran to the nurse’s office, to fetch either the nurse or (for more minor injuries) a first-aid kit, Mrs. Malcolm would be left in the kids’ tentative care. Someone held the wheelchair from behind so she couldn’t careen out of control; the rest of the class stood petrified around her, just out of her reach. They were instructed to not let her get out of the wheelchair, although it’s doubtful that seven-year-olds could have stopped her. Fortunately, she never tried to escape; she flailed about, crying out the children’s names, which she’d memorized in the first week of school.

“Maureen Yap!” Mrs. Malcolm would holler.

“Here, ma’am!” Maureen would holler back, and Mrs. Malcolm would turn her blind eyes in The Yap’s direction.

“Jimmy Bacon!” Mrs. Malcolm would scream.

Jimmy would moan. There was nothing wrong with Wheelchair Jane’s hearing; she looked without seeing in Jimmy’s direction upon hearing him moan.

“Jack Burns!” she shouted one day.

“I’m right here, Mrs. Malcolm,” Jack said. Even in grade two, his diction and enunciation were far in advance of his years.

“Your father was well spoken, too,” Mrs. Malcolm announced. “Your father is evil,” she added. “Don’t let Satan put a curse on you to be like him.”

“No, Mrs. Malcolm, I won’t.” Jack may have answered her with the utmost confidence, but within the mostly all-girls’ world of St. Hilda’s, it was clear to him that he was fighting overwhelming odds. The Big Bet, which Emma Oastler spoke of with a reverence usually reserved for her favorite novels and movies, heavily favored the suspected potency of William’s genes. If womanizing could be passed from father to son, it most certainly would be passed to Jack. In the eyes of almost everyone at St. Hilda’s, even in what amounted to the severely limited peripheral vision of Mrs. Malcolm, Jack Burns was his father’s son—or about to be.

“You can’t blame anyone for being interested, Jack,” Emma said philosophically. “It’s exciting stuff—to see how you’ll turn out.” Clearly Mrs. Malcolm had taken a genetic interest in how Jack would turn out, too.

But the worst thing about Jane Malcolm was how she behaved when her husband returned to the grade-two classroom—with either the school nurse or the first-aid kit. “Here I am—I’m back, Jane!” he always announced.

“Did you hear that, children?” Mrs. Malcolm would begin. “He’s come back! He’s never gone for long and he always comes back!”

“Please, Jane,” Mr. Malcolm would say.

“Mr. Malcolm likes taking care of me,” Wheelchair Jane told the class. “He does everything for me—all the things I can’t do myself.”

“Now, now, Jane, please,” Mr. Malcolm would say, but she wouldn’t let him take her skinned knuckles in his hands. Slowly, at first, but with ever-quickening strikes, she slapped his face.

“Mr. Malcolm loves doing everything for me!” she cried. “He feeds me, he dresses me, he washes me—”

“Jane, darling—” Mr. Malcolm tried to say.

“He wipes me!” Mrs. Malcolm screamed; that was always the end of it, before she resorted to whimpers and moans.

Jimmy Bacon would commence to moan with her, which was soon followed by the remarkable blanket-sucking sounds that the Booth twins were capable of making—even without blankets. Heel-thumping from the French twins never lagged far behind. And Jack would steal a look at Lucinda Fleming, who was usually looking at him. Her serene smile betrayed nothing of the mysterious rage inside her. Do you wanna see it? her smile seemed to say. Well, I’m gonna show you, her smile promised —but not yet.

It was a not-yet world Jack lived in, from kindergarten through grade two. Pitying Mr. Malcolm was an education in itself. But more memorably, and more lastingly, Jack’s education was as much in Emma Oastler’s hands as it was in Mr. Malcolm’s.

On rainy days, or whenever it was snowing, Emma slid into the backseat of the Lincoln Town Car and instructed Peewee as follows: “Just drive us around, Peewee. No peeking in the backseat. Keep your eyes on the road.”

“That okay with you, mon?” Peewee always asked Jack.

“Yes, that would be fine, Peewee. Thank you for asking,” the boy replied.

“You’re the boss, miss,” Peewee would say.

Scrunched down low in the backseat, Jack and Emma chewed gum nonstop—their breath minty or fruity, depending on the flavor. Emma would let Jack undo her braid, but she would never let him weave it back together. With her braid undone, Emma had enough hair for both of them to hide their faces under its spell. “If you get your gum stuck in my hair, honey pie, I’m gonna kill you,” she often said—but once, when Jack was laughing about something, Emma suddenly sounded like his mother. “Don’t laugh when you’re chewing gum—you could choke.”

There was the puzzling moment when they checked on her training bra, as Emma disparagingly called it. From what Jack could tell, the instructions the bra had given to her breasts were already working. At least her breasts were getting bigger. Wasn’t that the point?

Speaking of growing, his penis had made no discernible progress. “How’s the little guy?” Emma would invariably ask, and Jack would dutifully show her. “What are you thinking about, little guy?” Emma asked his penis once.

If penises could dream, Jack didn’t know why he was surprised to hear that they could think as well, but the little guy had demonstrated no trace of a thought process —not yet.

After grade two, Jack’s sightings of Mr. Malcolm were limited mainly to the boys’ washroom, where the teacher occasionally went to weep. But Jack most frequently caught Mr. Malcolm in the act of examining his facial stubble—as if the shadow of his beard-in-progress or his mustache-in-the-making were his principal (maybe his only) vanity.

Sightings of Mrs. Malcolm were also rare. Usually not more than twice a day, one of the girls’ washrooms would be posted with an OUT OF ORDER sign, which meant that Mr. Malcolm was attending to Wheelchair Jane. The girls were instructed to respect their privacy.

Once Jack heard the unmistakable sound of Mrs. Malcolm slapping her husband in the washroom. The boy tried to hurry in the hall, to outrun the sound, but he could never outdistance Mr. Malcolm’s pathetic “Now, now, Jane,” which was quickly followed by his “Jane, darling—” upon which some commonplace clamor in the corridor drowned out the repeated melodrama. (Several grade-six girls were passing; naturally, they sounded like several dozen. )

In Jack’s remaining two years at St. Hilda’s, there were many times when he missed Mr. Malcolm, but he did not miss being a witness to the grade-two teacher’s perpetual abuse. From then on, when Jack saw people in wheelchairs, he felt no less pity for them—no less than before he met Mrs. Malcolm. Jack just felt more pity for the people attending to them.