John Irving - Until I Find You

The little guy and Jack were eight years old when they started grade three. Even before his penis demonstrated its capacity for having dreams and ideas entirely of its own devising, the little guy and Jack had begun to live parallel (if not altogether separate) lives.

That Miss Caroline Wurtz had a “perishable” beauty was enhanced by her being petite. Certainly she was smaller than any of the grade-three mothers. And Miss Wurtz wore a perfume that encouraged the grade-three boys to invent problems with their math. Miss Wurtz would correct a boy’s math by leaning over his desk, where he could inhale her perfume while taking a closer and most desirable look at the fetching birthmark on her right collarbone and the small, fishhook-shaped scar on the same side of her throat.

Both the birthmark and the scar seemed to inflame themselves whenever Miss Wurtz was upset. In the ultraviolet light of the bat-cave exhibit, Jack vividly remembered her scar; it was pulsating like a neon strobe. How she got it was in the category of Jack’s imagination close to Tattoo Peter’s missing leg and Lottie’s limp, although the latter subject was further complicated by the boy’s mistaken assumption that an epidural was a vital part of the female anatomy.

That Charlotte Brontë was Miss Wurtz’s favorite writer, and Jane Eyre her bible, was known to everyone in the junior school; an annual dramatization of the novel was their principal cultural contribution to the middle and senior grades. The older girls might have been more capable of acting out such ambitious material—not only Jane’s indomitable spirit but also Rochester’s blindness and religious transformation—yet Miss Wurtz had claimed Jane Eyre as junior-school property, and in both grades three and four, Jack was awarded the role of Rochester.

What other boy in the junior school could have memorized the lines? “Dread remorse when you are tempted to err, Miss Eyre: remorse is the poison of life.” Jack delivered that line as if he knew what it meant.

In grade three, the first year Jack played Rochester, the grade -six girl who played Jane was Connie Turnbull. Her brooding, rejected presence made her a good choice for an orphan. When she said, “ ‘It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity,’ ” you believed her. (Connie Turnbull would never be a tranquil soul.)

Of course it was ludicrous when it was necessary for Jack-as-Rochester to take Connie-as-Jane in his arms and cry: “ ‘Never, never was anything at once so frail and so indomitable.’ ” He only came up to her, and everyone else’s, breasts. “ ‘I could bend her with my finger and thumb!’ ” Jack cried, to the accompanying laughter and disbelief of the audience.

Connie Turnbull looked at him, as if to say: “Just try it, penis breath!” But it wasn’t only his memorization skills and his diction and enunciation that made Jack so captivating as an actor. Miss Wurtz had taught him to take command of the stage.

“ How? ” he asked her.

“You have an audience of one, Jack,” Miss Wurtz told the boy. “Your job is to touch one heart.”

“Whose?”

“Whose heart do you want it to be?” Miss Wurtz asked.

“My mom’s?”

“I think you can touch her heart anytime, Jack.”

Whose heart could old Rochester touch, anyway? Wasn’t it Jane who touched one’s heart? But that wasn’t what Miss Wurtz meant. She meant who would want to watch Jack but remain unseen; who was the likeliest stranger in the audience, whose interest was only in Jack? Who wanted to be impressed by Jack while sparing himself the boy’s scrutiny?

Jack’s audience of one was his father, of course. From the moment he imagined William, Jack could command every inch of the stage; he was on-camera for the rest of his life. Jack would learn later that an actor’s job was not complicated, but it had two parts. Whoever you were, you made the audience love you; then you broke their hearts.

Once Jack could imagine his father in the shadows of every audience, he could perform anything. “Think about it, Jack,” Miss Wurtz urged him. “Just one heart. Whose is it?”

“My dad’s?”

“What a good place to begin!” she told the boy, both her birthmark and her scar inflaming themselves. “Let’s see how that works.” It worked, all right—even in the case of Jack’s miniature Rochester to Connie Turnbull’s bigger, stronger Jane. It worked from the start.

When Rochester says, “Jane! You think me, I daresay, an irreligious dog—” well, Jack had them all. It was ridiculous, but he had Connie Turnbull, too. When she took his hand and kissed it, her lips were parted; she made contact with her teeth and her tongue.

“Nice job, Jack,” she whispered in his ear. Connie continued to hold his hand for the duration of the applause. He could feel Emma Oastler hating Connie Turnbull; from the unseen audience, Emma’s jealousy swept onstage like a draft.

But what Jack liked best about the Rochester role was the opportunity to be blind. Doubtless he was drawing on the collision-course lunacy of Mrs. Malcolm, but playing blind afforded Jack another opportunity. When he tripped and fell in rehearsals, it was Miss Wurtz who rushed to his aid. (Her ministrations to his injuries, which were entirely feigned, were why he tripped and fell.)

His penis’s first thoughtful reaction was not to Connie Turnbull French-kissing his hand—God, no. The little guy’s first idea of his own was clearly in response to Miss Caroline Wurtz. The older-woman thing, which had begun in Oslo with Ingrid Moe, would haunt Jack Burns all his life.

Miss Wurtz’s hands were not much bigger than a grade-three girl’s, and when she comforted a child—sometimes, when she just spoke to him or her—she would rest one of her hands on the child’s shoulder, where he or she could feel her fingers tremble as lightly as the movements of a small, agitated bird. It was as if her hand, or all of Miss Wurtz, were about to take flight. Not one of the grade-three children would have been surprised if, one day, Miss Wurtz had simply flown away. She was that delicate; she was as fragile as a woman made of feathers. (Hence “perishable,” in another sense.)

But Miss Wurtz could not manage the grade-three classroom. The kids were no more badly behaved than other third graders, although Roland Simpson would later, as a teenager, spend time in a reform school and ultimately wind up in jail. And Jimmy Bacon’s penchant for moaning was only a small part of his wretchedness—Jimmy was no joy to be with on a regular basis. He once dressed as a ghost for the grade-three Halloween party and wore nothing, not even underwear, under a bedsheet with holes cut out of it for his eyes. Jimmy was so badly frightened by one of The Gray Ghost’s sudden appearances—Mrs. McQuat was the grade-four teacher—that he pooed in his sheet.

But Miss Wurtz was so delicate that she might not have been able to manage a kindergarten, or her own children. Did her strength emerge only onstage? Alice’s theory about Miss Wurtz was intuitive but unkind. “Caroline looks like she never got over somebody. Poor thing.”

Jack Burns took from Miss Wurtz a lifelong lesson: life was not a stage; life was improv. Miss Wurtz had no tolerance for improvisation; the children learned their lines, speaking them exactly as they were written. That Jack was born with superior memorization skills was a considerable advantage in the theater; that Miss Wurtz encouraged Jack to imagine his audience of one was a gift both she and his missing father gave him. But Jack was as attentive a student of Miss Wurtz’s failure in the classroom as he was of her instructions for success onstage. It was evident to him that one could not succeed as a player in life without developing improvisational skills. Yes, you needed to know your lines. But on some occasions, you also had to be able to make your lines up. For what she could teach him, but primarily for what she had failed to master herself, Miss Wurtz captured Jack’s attention; not surprisingly, she would live in his memory (and remain a part of his life) longer than any of the third-grade girls.