John Irving - Until I Find You

Jack often dreamed of kissing Caroline Wurtz, at which moments she was never dressed as a schoolteacher. In his dreams, Miss Wurtz wore the kind of old-fashioned underwear Jack had first seen in Lottie’s mail-order catalogs. For reasons that were disturbingly unclear to him, this type of underwear was advertised for teens and unmarried women. (Why women wore a different kind of underwear after they were married was, and would remain, a mystery to Jack.)

As for Miss Wurtz’s real attire, in the classroom, she occasionally wore a cream-colored blouse you could almost see through, but—because it was cold in the grade-three room—she more often dressed in sweaters, which fit her well. Jack’s mother said they were cashmere sweaters, which meant that Miss Wurtz was buying her clothes with something more than a St. Hilda’s faculty salary.

“The Wurtz has gotta have a boyfriend,” Emma said. “A rich one, or at least one with good taste—that would be my guess.”

Jack had repeatedly denied Emma’s accusation that Connie Turnbull gave him a boner every time she French-kissed his hand—or that when he-as-Rochester took Connie-as-Jane in his arms, with his head buried in her breasts, there was any response from the little guy. It hadn’t yet occurred to Emma that Jack had a hard-on every minute he spent in close proximity to Caroline Wurtz, whether or not he was in her actual company or she were in various stages of undress in his dreams.

As for The Wurtz, as Emma called her, having a rich boyfriend or one with good taste—or even an ex- boyfriend—Jack didn’t want such a character to exist, lest he invade the boy’s dreams of Miss Wurtz in her mail-order corsets and girdles and bras.

Jack didn’t dream about the grade-three girls at all, not even Lucinda Fleming, who’d managed—for more than two years—to keep her silent rage well hidden. And if, in his dreams, Miss Wurtz had the faintest trace of a mustache on her extremely narrow upper lip—well, that was Emma Oastler’s doing. He couldn’t control his attraction to Emma’s upper lip, especially in his dreams. More and more, when the little guy came alive, he did so not at Jack’s bidding but independently.

“Any news, Jack?” Emma would whisper in the backseat of the limo, as Peewee drove them around and around Forest Hill.

“Not yet,” Jack answered. (He had guessed, correctly, that this was the safest thing to say.)

At night, after Lottie had put him to bed, Jack often went into his mother’s room and climbed into her bed and fell asleep there. Given their different schedules, his mom was almost never there. She would come home and crawl into bed long after he’d fallen asleep. Sometimes, in her half-sleep, she would throw one of her legs over Jack, which always woke him up. There was the smell of cigarette smoke and pot in her hair, and the gasoline-like tang of white wine on her breath. Occasionally they would both be awake and lie whispering in the semidarkness. Jack didn’t know why they whispered; it wasn’t because Lottie or Mrs. Wicksteed could hear them.

“How are you, Jack?”

“I’m fine. How are you ?”

“We’re becoming like strangers,” Alice whispered one time. Jack was disappointed that his mother hadn’t seen him act, and he said so. “Oh, I’ve seen you act!” Alice said.

Jack meant in Jane Eyre, or in Miss Wurtz’s other exercises in dramatization. While The Wurtz loved the stage, she preferred adapting novels. It would occur to Jack only later that, by choosing to dramatize novels, Miss Wurtz controlled every aspect of every performance. There was no playwright to give the children the wrong directions. Miss Wurtz adapted her favorite novels for the theater her way. If, as actors, they were instructed to take command of the stage, The Wurtz was absolutely in charge of every action they undertook—of every word they uttered.

Later Jack would realize what wonderful things Miss Wurtz left out of her adaptations. She was in charge of censorship as well. When The Wurtz adapted Tess of the d’Urbervilles, she made much more of the “Maiden” chapter than she made of “Maiden No More.” More disturbing, she cast Jack as Tess.

“Nobody blamed Tess as she blamed herself,” the dramatization began. (Miss Wurtz, with her perfect diction and enunciation, was a big fan of voice-over.) Jack was, without a doubt, a good choice to play “a mere vessel of emotion untinctured by experience.”

But even in a dress—a white gown, no less—and even as a milkmaid, the boy could take command of the stage. “ ‘Phases of her childhood lurked in her aspect still,’ ” Miss Wurtz read to the audience, while Angel Clare failed to ask Jack-as-Tess to dance. What a wimp Angel was! Jimmy Bacon, that miserable moaner who pooed in a sheet, was the perfect choice to play him.

“ ‘… for all her bouncing handsome womanliness,’ ” Miss Wurtz fatalistically intoned, “ ‘you could sometimes see her twelfth year in her cheeks, or her ninth sparkle from her eyes; and even her fifth would flit over the curves of her mouth now and then.’ ”

All the while, Jack-as-Tess had nothing to do. He stood onstage, radiating sexless innocence. He was prouder of his role as Rochester, but even as Tess, he had his moments—sexless innocence not least, if not best, among them. What Tess says to d’Urberville, for example (d’Urberville, that pig, was played by the thuggish Charlotte Barford, whom The Wurtz wisely borrowed from the middle school): “ ‘Did it never strike your mind that what every woman says some women may feel?’ ” (Charlotte Barford looked as if she-as-he had thoroughly enjoyed seducing him-as-her.)

When Jack buried his dead baby in the churchyard, he could hear the older girls in the audience—they were already crying. And the tale of Tess’s undoing had only begun! Jack spoke Hardy’s narration as if it were dialogue over the baby’s grave. “ ‘… in that shabby corner of God’s allotment where He lets the nettles grow,’ ” Jack began, while the older girls in the audience imagined that this could be their predicament, which Miss Wurtz, if not Thomas Hardy, had cleverly intended, “ ‘… and where all unbaptized infants, notorious drunkards, suicides, and others of the conjecturally damned are laid,’ ” Jack-as-Tess carried on, stimulated by the weeping older girls. (No fan of improvisation, Miss Wurtz had not permitted Jack to skip the “conjecturally,” though he’d repeatedly flubbed the word in rehearsals.)

When Jack said, “ ‘But you would not dance with me,’ ” to that wimp Jimmy-Bacon-as-Angel-Clare, the hearts of the older girls in the audience were wrenched anew. “ ‘O, I hope that is of no ill-omen for us now!’ ” Jack-as-Tess told Jimmy-as-Angel, while the girls wept afresh—because, with Hardy, what wasn’t an ill omen? The girls knew Tess was doomed, as unalterably as Miss Wurtz wanted them to know it.

That was The Wurtz’s message to the girls. Be careful! Anyone can get pregnant! Every man who isn’t a wimp, like Jimmy-Bacon-as-Angel, is a pig, like Charlotte-Barford-as-d’Urberville. And Jack-Burns-as-Tess got Miss Wurtz’s message across. Caroline Wurtz’s junior-school dramatizations amounted to moral instructions to the middle- and senior-school girls.

Jack was in grade three. A dramatization of Tess of the d’Urbervilles was incomprehensible to him. But the message of the story wasn’t for Jack. At St. Hilda’s, the most important messages were delivered to the older girls. Jack was just an actor. Miss Wurtz knew he could handle the lines, even if he didn’t understand them. And in case a total idiot (among the older girls) might have missed the point, all the dramatizations were of novels wherein women were put to the test.