John Irving - Until I Find You

The Gray Ghost was not letting Gordon off so easily. “You’ll come with me … Gordon,” Mrs. McQuat said. “Pray your hamster isn’t lost … for it will surely die, if it’s lost.”

The kids watched Gordon leave the classroom with The Gray Ghost. Everyone knew that Mrs. McQuat was taking Gordon to the chapel. Often it was empty. But even if one of the choirs was practicing, she took the offending child to the chapel and left him or her there. The child had to kneel on the stone floor in the center aisle next to one of the middle rows of pews and face backward, away from the altar. “You have … turned your back on God,” The Gray Ghost would tell the child. “You better hope … He isn’t looking.”

As Gordon would recount, it was a bad feeling to have turned his back on God and not know if He was looking. After a few minutes, Gordon felt sure that someone was behind him—in the vicinity of the altar or the pulpit. Perhaps one of the four women attending to Jesus—saints, now ghosts themselves—had stepped out of the stained glass and was about to touch him with her icy hand.

The grade-three class was interrupted in this fashion so frequently that they often couldn’t remember who’d been banished to the chapel and had turned his or her back on God. Mrs. McQuat never brought you back from the chapel—she just took you there. (Roland Simpson virtually lived in the chapel with his back turned to God.) Time would pass, and someone—often The Yap—would ask: “Miss Wurtz, shouldn’t someone check to see if Gordon is all right in the chapel?”

“Oh, my goodness!” Miss Wurtz would cry. “How could I have forgotten!” And someone would be sent to release Gordon (or Roland) from the certifiably lonely terror of kneeling in the chapel backward. It felt wrong to be looking the wrong way in church, like you were really asking for trouble.

But the third graders were well prepared for fourth grade; Mrs. McQuat, of course, was the teacher for grade four. The only fourth graders who were ever in need of being disciplined in the chapel were new students who’d not had the pleasure of witnessing The Wurtz’s emotional meltdowns. The Gray Ghost had no trouble managing her classroom; it was Miss Wurtz’s class that repeatedly called upon Mrs. McQuat’s ghostly skills.

The third graders continued to get in trouble, and they often ended up in the chapel facing backward, because—despite their fear of The Gray Ghost—there was something irresistible about how The Wurtz fell apart. The kids both loved the way she cried and hated her for it, because—even in grade three—they understood that it was Miss Wurtz’s weakness that brought Mrs. McQuat’s punishment upon them. (Miss Wurtz’s weakness was not infrequently on display in Jack’s dreams of her in Mrs. Oastler’s push-up bra—which were not thwarted by Alice returning the bra to Mrs. Oastler.)

Gratefully, Jack never dreamed about The Gray Ghost. In his young mind, this gave further credibility to the theory that Mrs. McQuat was dead. She was, however, very much alive in the grade-three classroom, where her sudden appearances became as commonplace as The Wurtz bursting into tears. Hence, when Jimmy Bacon exposed himself to Maureen Yap—when he raised his ghost-sheet to demonstrate that, indeed, he wore no underwear beneath his Halloween costume—Miss Wurtz’s feelings were again hurt more than she could say. (She bitterly expressed how she never thought she’d be so completely disappointed.) And when The Gray Ghost left Jimmy in the chapel facing the wrong way, Jimmy pooed in his bedsheet like the frightened ghost he was. If Mrs. McQuat’s sudden appearance had started Jimmy pooing, his overwhelming conviction that Jesus had disappeared from the stained glass above the altar finished the job.

“A poor costume choice, Jimmy,” was all The Wurtz would say about the beshitted sheet.

No matter how many times Lucinda Fleming provoked Jack with her ponytail and he pinned her head to the top of his desk, it was never that dispute between them that reduced Caroline Wurtz to tears. In all their fights, Lucinda and Jack stopped short of causing Miss Wurtz’s sobs. They may have been foolish enough to imagine that they would be spared The Gray Ghost’s sudden appearance.

But Lucinda was led by her ear to the chapel over another issue: she erased the answers on Roland Simpson’s math test while Roland was turning his back on God in the chapel. (All the other kids were surprised that Lucinda had bothered; in all probability, the answers on Roland’s math test were wrong.)

Mrs. McQuat took Jack to the chapel only once, but memorably. He drove Miss Wurtz to tears not by grabbing Lucinda Fleming’s ponytail and pinning her head to his desk, but by kissing her. It was Miss Wurtz Jack imagined kissing, of course, but he kissed Lucinda Fleming on the back of her neck instead.

Only one person could have prompted him to do such a repugnant thing—Emma Oastler. Emma was angry at Jack for “ratting” on her to his mother, although the return of Mrs. Oastler’s bra hardly amounted to a day of reckoning for Emma. Emma’s mom was unmoved by Alice’s assertion that Emma had “molested” Jack. In Mrs. Oastler’s opinion, it was not possible for a woman or a girl to molest a man or a boy; whatever games Emma had played with Jack, he’d probably liked them, Mrs. Oastler maintained. But Emma was disciplined in some minor fashion. She was “grounded,” she told Jack; she was to come directly home from school for a month.

“No more cuddling in the backseat, baby cakes. No more making the little guy stand at attention.”

“It’s only for a month,” Jack reminded her.

“I don’t suppose there’s anyone in grade three who turns you on,” Emma inquired. “I mean besides The Wurtz.”

Jack made the mistake of complaining about Lucinda Fleming—how she tortured him with her ponytail, but he was always the one who got in trouble. In her present mood, Emma probably liked the idea of getting Jack in trouble.

“Lucinda wants you to kiss her, Jack.”

“She does ?”

“She doesn’t know it, but she does.”

“She’s bigger than I am,” he pointed out.

“Just kiss Lucinda, Jack—it’ll make her your slave.”

“I don’t want a slave !”

“You don’t know it, but you do,” Emma told him. “Just imagine you’re kissing The Wurtz.”

The discovery, that same week, of Gordon’s dead hamster in the chalk box should have forewarned Jack. Talk about an ill omen! But he didn’t heed it. If, for what seemed the longest time, he didn’t dare to kiss Lucinda Fleming, he also couldn’t dispel the idea of doing it. Sitting behind her, watching her swish her whip of a ponytail back and forth—well, suffice it to say her neck was often exposed. And one day, when Miss Wurtz was writing the new vocabulary words on the blackboard, Jack stood on tiptoe and leaned across his desk and—lifting her ponytail—kissed Lucinda Fleming on the back of her neck.

There was no response from the little guy—another ill omen, this one not lost on Jack. And what bullshit it was—that the children were ever told to be on their guard for Lucinda’s so-called silent rage. There was nothing silent about it! Lucinda never made a sound when Jack pulled her ponytail or pinned her head to the top of his desk, but when he kissed her, you would have thought she’d been bitten by the avenging ghost of Gordon’s dead hamster. (Not even in Jack’s wildest dreams had Miss Wurtz, in a variety of bras and restraining devices, once responded to his kisses with half of Lucinda’s demented energy.)