John Irving - Until I Find You

Lottie was Lottie. As much as she had mattered to him once—maybe most of all when he’d been in those North Sea ports and had missed her—now that he was older, Lottie didn’t hold him chest-to-chest to compare their beating hearts. At his age, that was a game Jack preferred to play with Emma. (As Emma put it: “You can tell that the most interesting part of Lottie’s life is over.”)

And Mrs. Wicksteed was old and growing older; when she warmed her increasingly uncooperative fingers over her tea, her fingers would dip in and out of the tea, with which she occasionally sprinkled Jack’s shirt and tie. She’d become an expert at doing a necktie during the years of her late husband’s arthritis. “Now I have his affliction, Jack,” Mrs. Wicksteed told the boy. “I ask you. Does that seem fair?”

The fairness question was one that had occurred to Jack in other areas. “It’s not fair that I should turn out to be like my father,” he said frankly to Mrs. McQuat. (He was in a phase of being slightly less than frank with Emma on this subject.) “Do you think it’s fair?” Jack asked The Gray Ghost. He could see she’d really been a combat nurse—notwithstanding what truth, or lack thereof, resided in the story of her having one lung because she’d been gassed. “Do you think I’m going to turn out like him, Mrs. McQuat?”

“Let’s take a walk, Jack.”

He could tell they were headed for the chapel. “Am I being punished?” he asked.

“Not at all! We’re just going where we can think.”

They sat together in one of the foremost pews, facing in the right direction. It was a minor distraction that a grade-three boy was kneeling in the center aisle with his back turned on God. Although The Gray Ghost had positioned him there—however long ago—she seemed surprised to see him in the aisle, but she quickly ignored him.

“ If you turn out to be like your father, Jack, don’t blame your father.”

“Why not?”

“Barring acts of God, you’re only a victim if you choose to be one,” The Gray Ghost said. From the look of the frightened third grader kneeling in the center aisle, he clearly thought that Mrs. McQuat was describing him.

Thank goodness Jack never asked Emma Oastler his next question, which he addressed to Mrs. McQuat in the chapel. “Is it an act of God if you have sex on your mind every minute?”

“Mercy!” The Gray Ghost said, taking her eyes from the altar to look at him. “Are you serious?”

“Every minute,” he repeated. “It’s all I dream about, too.”

“Jack, have you talked to your mother about this?” Mrs. McQuat asked.

“She’ll just say I’m not old enough to talk about it.”

“But it seems that you are old enough to be thinking and dreaming about little else!”

“Maybe it will be better in an all-boys’ school,” Jack said. He knew that an all-boys’ school was his mother’s next plan for him. Just up the road from St. Hilda’s—within easy walking distance, in fact—was Upper Canada College. (The UCC boys were always sniffing around the older of the St. Hilda’s girls.) And it was no surprise that Mrs. Wicksteed “knew someone” at Upper Canada College, or that Jack would have good recommendations from his teachers at St. Hilda’s—at least academically. He’d already been to UCC for an interview. Coming from the gray-and-maroon standard at St. Hilda’s, he thought there was entirely too much blue in the school colors at Upper Canada—their regimental-striped ties were navy blue and white. If you played a varsity sport, the first-team ties (as they were called) were a solid-blue-knit variety—navy blue with square bottoms. Alice had found it ominous that the jocks were singled out and idolized in this fashion. In Jack’s interview, his mother freely offered that her son was not athletic.

“How do you know?” Jack asked her. (He’d never had the opportunity to try !)

“Trust me, Jack. You’re not.” But he trusted his mother less and less.

“Which all-boys’ school are you thinking of?” The Gray Ghost asked him.

“Upper Canada College, my mom says.”

“I’ll have a word with your mother, Jack. Those UCC boys will eat you alive.”

Given his respect for Mrs. McQuat, this was not an encouraging concept. Jack expressed his concern to Emma. “Eat me alive why ? Eat me how ?”

“It’s hard to imagine that you’re a jock, Jack.”

“So?”

“So they’ll eat you alive, so what? The sport of life is gonna be your sport, baby cakes.”

“The sport of—”

“Shut up and kiss me, honey pie,” Emma said. They were scrunched down in the backseat of the Town Car again. It was a fairly recent development that Emma could give Jack a boner in a matter of seconds—or not, depending on the little guy’s unpredictable response. Emma was in grade ten, sixteen going on thirty or forty, and—to her considerable rage—she had newly acquired braces. Jack was a little afraid of kissing her. “Not like that !” Emma instructed him. “Am I a baby bird? Are you feeding me some kind of worm ?”

“It’s my tongue,” he told her.

“I know what it is, Jack. I’m addressing the more important subject of how it feels. ”

“It feels like a worm ?”

“Like you’re trying to choke me.”

She cradled his head in her lap and looked down at him with impatient affection. Every year, Emma got bigger and stronger. At the same time, Jack felt he was barely growing. But he had a boner, and Emma always knew when he had one. “That little guy is like a coming attraction, honey pie.”

“A what?”

“At the movies, a coming attraction—”

“Oh.”

“You’re soon to be all over the place, Jack. That’s what I’m saying.”

“This girl is just jerking your wire, mon,” Peewee said.

“Just shut up and drive, mon, ” Emma said to Peewee. He was, as Jack was, in her thrall.

Jack would wonder, after his mom had returned the push-up bra to Mrs. Oastler, what possibly could have transpired between the two mothers that had led to him being left alone with Emma again . And Jack and Emma were alone a lot; they were even alone, for an hour or more at a time, in Emma’s house. Whether Emma’s mom was at home or not, they were left alone there—no Lottie banging around in the kitchen below them, screaming some nonsense about tea.

The Oastler house in Forest Hill was a three-story mansion bequeathed to Mrs. Oastler by her ex-husband; the alimony settlement had made Emma and her mother rich. Women who scored big in their divorces were treated with immeasurable scorn in the Toronto tabloids, but Mrs. Oastler would have said it was as good a way to get rich as any.

Emma’s mom was a small, compact woman—as her push-up bra would suggest. As Emma’s mustache would imply, her mother was surprisingly hairy—at least for a woman, and a small woman at that. Emma’s mom would have had a more discernible mustache than her daughter, but (according to Emma) Mrs. Oastler frequently had her upper lip waxed. She would not have been rash to consider waxing her arms as well, but the only other visible preventative measure taken against her hairiness was that she had her sleek black hair cut as short as a boy’s in an elfish pixie. Despite her prettiness, which was petite in nature, Jack thought that Mrs. Oastler looked a little like a man.

“Yes, but an attractive one,” Alice said to her son. She thought that Emma’s mother was “very good-looking,” and that it was a pity Emma “took after” her father.

Jack never met Emma’s dad. After every winter break from St. Hilda’s, Emma returned to school with a tan. Her father had taken her to the West Indies, or Mexico; that was virtually the only time they spent together. Emma also spent a month of every summer at a cottage in Georgian Bay, but most of that time she was in the care of a nanny or a housekeeper—her dad came to the cottage only on weekends. Emma never spoke of him.