John Irving - Until I Find You

Miss Wurtz had cast Patsy as Hetty, the woman who betrays Adam. And what a god-awful misinterpretation of Adam Bede it turned out to be! Jack-as-Adam eventually marries the identical twin of the woman who cheats on him! (George Eliot must have rolled around in her grave over such a liberty as that!)

And The Wurtz was overfond of the passage at the end of Chapter 54. Following her own inclinations, as ever, Miss Wurtz gave the passage to Jack as dialogue, even though it is actually George Eliot’s narration. Looking into Heather Booth’s love-struck eyes as he delivered his weighty lines didn’t help. “ ‘What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined for life—to strengthen each other in all labour, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting?’ ” Jack-as-Adam asked Heather-as-Dinah, while she persisted in making barely audible sucking sounds in the back of her throat—as if his kiss had made her ill and she were readying herself to vomit.

“Jack,” Mrs. McQuat said, when she saw his performance, “you must take everything Miss Wurtz says with a grain of salt.”

“A what?”

“It’s an expression—‘with a grain of salt’ means not to take someone or something too seriously.”

“Oh.”

“I wouldn’t agree that there is no greater thing for two so-called human souls than to be joined for life. Frankly, I can’t think of a comparable horror.”

Jack would conclude that Mrs. McQuat was unhappily married—or else, if her husband had died and she was a widow who still called herself Mrs., The Gray Ghost and the late Mr. McQuat had not enjoyed many silent unspeakable memories at the moment of their last parting.

Naturally, he took no end of shit from Emma Oastler for kissing Heather Booth WITH A DEEP JOY in front of the older girls. “Did you use your tongue?” Emma asked him. “It looked like you French-kissed her.”

“Used my tongue how ?”

“We’ll get to that, honey pie—the homework is piling up. All the math you’re doing is causing you to fall behind.”

“Behind in what?”

“It sounded like you were gagging her, you dork.”

But the Booth twins had made those terrible blanket-sucking sounds since kindergarten—Emma should have remembered that. (Emma’s sleepy-time stories were the probable origin of the twins making those awful sounds!)

“Just wait till you get to Middlemarch, Jack,” The Gray Ghost consoled him. “It’s not only a better novel than Adam Bede; Miss Wurtz has not yet found a way to trivialize it.”

Thus, in grade four, did he encounter in Mrs. McQuat a necessary dose of perspective. He would regret that she wasn’t his mentor for his remaining years in school, but Jack was indeed fortunate to have her as his teacher in his last year at St. Hilda’s.

Perspective is hard to come by. Caroline Wurtz was one of those readers who ransacked a novel for extractable truths, moral lessons, and pithy witticisms—with little concern for the wreck of the novel she left in her wake. Without The Gray Ghost’s prescription of a grain of salt, who knows for how long Jack might have misled himself into thinking that he’d actually read Jane Eyre or Tess of the d’Urbervilles— or The Scarlet Letter, Anna Karenina, Sense and Sensibility, Adam Bede, and Middlemarch. By grade four, he had not read these wonderful books—he’d only acted in Miss Wurtz’s purposeful plundering of them.

Of course Jack was familiar with the bulletin boards at St. Hilda’s, where praise of women was rampant; there among the usual announcements was some humorless observation of Emerson’s. (“A sufficient measure of civilization is the influence of good women.”) And before Jack was cast as Dorothea in Miss Wurtz’s dramatization of Middlemarch, he had seen George Eliot quoted among a variety of bulletin-board announcements. At the time, of course, Jack thought George Eliot was a man. Possibly a man-hating one, at least on the evidence of a most popular bulletin-board assertion of Mr. Eliot’s—or so Jack believed. (“A man’s mind—what there is of it—has always the advantage of being masculine—as the smallest birch-tree is of a higher kind than the most soaring palm—and even his ignorance is of a sounder quality.”) What does that mean? he used to wonder.

As Dorothea, “with all her eagerness to know the truths of life,” Jack radiated (under Miss Wurtz’s direction) “very childlike ideas about marriage.” No kidding—he was a child!

“ ‘Pride helps us,’ ” Jack-as-Dorothea prattled, “ ‘and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts—not to hurt others.’ ” (Once again, this was not written as Dorothea’s dialogue, or anyone else’s, in the novel.)

To Miss Wurtz’s assessment of his talents onstage—namely, that there were no boundaries to his “possibilities” as an actor—Mrs. McQuat countered with her own little scrap of truthfulness she had found in the pages of Middlemarch. “ ‘In fact, the world is full of hopeful analogies and handsome dubious eggs called possibilities,’ ” The Gray Ghost whispered.

“George Eliot?” Jack asked. “ Middlemarch ?”

“You bet,” Mrs. McQuat replied. “There’s more in that book than dramatic homilies, Jack.”

To Miss Wurtz’s prediction that he would one day be a great actor—if, and only if, he dedicated himself to a precision of character of the demanding kind The Wurtz so rigorously taught—The Gray Ghost offered another un dramatized observation from Middlemarch. “ ‘Among all forms of mistake, prophecy is the most gratuitous.’ ”

“The most what?”

“What I’m saying, Jack, is that you must play a more active role in your future than Miss Wurtz.”

“Oh.”

“Don’t you see what’s wrong with The Wurtz, baby cakes?” Emma Oastler asked.

“What’s wrong with her?”

“Obviously The Wurtz is unfulfilled, Jack,” Emma said. “I must have been wrong about her having a boyfriend. Maybe someone in her family bought her nice clothes. You don’t imagine she has a sex life, or ever had one, do you?” Only in his dreams, Jack hoped. He had to admit, if not to Emma, that it was confusing—namely, how much he was learning from Miss Wurtz, which stood in contrast to how obviously flawed she was.

Like Caroline Wurtz roaming randomly in a novel, Jack searched the St. Hilda’s bulletin boards for gems of uplifting advice; unlike Miss Wurtz at large in a novel, he found little that was useful there. Kahlil Gibran was a favorite of the older girls in those years. Jack brought one of Gibran’s baffling recommendations to The Gray Ghost for a translation.

Let there be spaces in your togetherness,

And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.

“What does that mean?” Jack asked Mrs. McQuat.

“Poppycock, hogwash, bunk,” The Gray Ghost said.

“What?”

“It doesn’t mean anything at all, Jack.”

“Oh.” Mrs. McQuat had taken the quotation from him. He watched her crumple it in her cold hand. “Shouldn’t I put it back on the bulletin board?” he asked.

“Let’s see if Mr. Gibran can find his way back to the bulletin board all by himself,” The Gray Ghost said.

Jack trusted her. He dared to ask her things he was afraid to ask anyone else. There were a growing number of things he wouldn’t ask his mother; her distancing herself from him was a warning, but of what Jack wasn’t sure. He had tired of the when-you’re-old-enough answer, no matter what the reason for her aloofness.