John Irving - Until I Find You

“I want to see the fucking Rose of Jericho,” Emma said. “I want Jack to see it, too.”

Without a word, Mrs. Oastler, who wore a tight-fitting pair of black jeans with a silver belt, untucked her long-sleeved cotton turtleneck, which was also black. She unbuckled the belt and wriggled the jeans over her slim hips. Jack could see only the top half of the Rose of Jericho above the panty line of her black bikini briefs. She hooked her thumbs under the waistband of her panties, but before she slid them down, she said: “ This, Jack, would be in the category of needlessly upsetting your mom—maybe even worse than kissing a sixteen-year-old, if you know what I mean.”

“Oh,” he said, as she pulled her bikini briefs down.

There it was. ( Not the Rose of Jericho. Jack didn’t need to waste a second of his time looking at another one. His mom was a pro; he assumed that Daughter Alice’s Rose of Jericho was the same every time.) While Emma saw, with a gasp, the unmistakable other flower within the rose, Jack took a long, careful look at the real thing—his second sighting of an actual vagina in one day. Emma’s pubic hair was as unruly as she was, but Mrs. Oastler’s pubes were neatly trimmed. And if Jack ever doubted Emma’s authority—that he had an older-woman thing, as she put it—he didn’t doubt it now. If Emma’s vagina had left the little guy largely unimpressed, what was Jack to make of the quantum leap the little guy made in response to Emma’s mom? “That’s disgusting !” Emma said. (She meant the tattoo.)

“It’s a Rose of Jericho, like any other,” Jack insisted. “My mom does a good one.”

While he went on staring at her vagina, Mrs. Oastler rumpled his hair and said: “You bet she does, Jack—you bet she does.”

Emma suddenly hit him so hard that he took a short flight across the bathroom tiles and landed in the vicinity of the laundry hamper. Jack instinctively put a finger to his lower lip, to be sure he wasn’t bleeding again. “You weren’t looking at the tattoo, baby cakes.”

“Boys will be boys, Emma,” Mrs. Oastler told her daughter. “Be nice to Jack. Please don’t make him bleed again.”

Emma yanked him to his feet by grabbing hold of her mom’s skimpy T-shirt. In one of the bathroom’s many mirrors, Jack caught a glimpse of Mrs. Oastler pulling up her bikini briefs and wriggling her hips back into her jeans. “What’s the little guy think of my mom’s Rose of Jericho?” Emma asked Jack in her vaguely threatening way.

Mrs. Oastler, of course, didn’t realize that Emma was referring to Jack’s penis. She probably assumed that her daughter was being disparaging about the boy’s smaller size. “Don’t bully him, Emma,” Mrs. Oastler said. “It’s unbecoming.”

As Jack was leaving, he found it confusing that both Emma and her mom kissed him good-bye—Mrs. Oastler on his cheek, Emma on his undamaged upper lip. In the category of unnecessarily upsetting his mother, Jack was determined he would make no mention of his confusion to her—nor would he tell her about the rest of his eventful day at the Oastler mansion in Forest Hill.

Jack went to bed that night in Mrs. Oastler’s black T-shirt, although Lottie said she liked him better in his own pajamas. Lottie wrapped an ice cube in a washcloth and held it to his lower lip while she said her prayers over him. “May the Lord protect you, Jack, and may He keep you from harming others,” Lottie always began. Jack thought the latter was a ridiculous concern. Why would he ever harm others? “May the Lord keep Mrs. Wicksteed alive a little longer,” Lottie went on. “May I please be permitted to die in Toronto, and never go back to Prince Edward Island.”

“Amen,” Jack usually tried to say at this point, hoping that would be the end of it.

But Lottie wasn’t finished. “Please, Lord, deliver Alice from her inclinations—”

“Her what?”

“You know what, Jack—her tendencies,” Lottie told him. “Her choice of friends.”

“Oh.”

“May God keep your mother from hurting herself, not to put too fine a point on it,” Lottie continued. “And may the Lord bless the ground you walk on, Jack Burns, so that you are ever mindful of temptation. May you become the very model of what a man should be, Jack—not what most men are.”

“Amen,” he said again.

“That’s for me to say and for you to say after me,” Lottie always told him.

“Oh, right.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Wicksteed,” Lottie whispered, at the end—almost as if Mrs. Wicksteed were God and Lottie had been addressing Her from the beginning. “Amen.”

“Amen.”

She took the ice cube in the washcloth away from his lip, which was numb. But Jack was wide awake, and as soon as Lottie left, he went to his mother’s room and got into her bed, where he eventually fell asleep. (Jack had many vivid memories of his two-vagina day; it was impossible to fall asleep right away.)

It was his mom’s leg across his body that woke him; it was the T-shirt that woke her. Alice turned on the light to have a better look. “Why are you wearing Leslie’s shirt, Jack? Is Emma stealing her mom’s T-shirts now?”

So Mrs. Oastler was “Leslie”—another mild surprise. Even the T-shirt was more familiar to his mom than Jack had thought. He carefully explained that Mrs. Oastler had given him her T-shirt to wear because his clothes were all bloody—they’d been sent off to the dry cleaner’s—and any shirt of Emma’s would have been too big. Jack showed his mom his puffy lower lip, where he had poked himself with a staple he’d tried to undo with his teeth.

“I thought you were smarter than that,” Alice said.

Jack very slowly, and even more carefully, said that he understood his mom had tattooed Mrs. Oastler—it sounded like a Rose of Jericho from Emma’s description, he unconvincingly explained—but the tattoo was in such a private place that Emma’s mom wouldn’t show it to him.

“I’m surprised she didn’t show you,” Alice said.

“I don’t need to see another Rose of Jericho,” Jack went on. (Even to himself, he sounded too cavalier.) “What’s so special about hers?”

“Just the place, Jack—it’s in a special place.”

“Oh.” He must have moved his eyes away from hers. His mom was such a good liar, she was tough to lie to.

“Not every woman shaves her pubic hair in quite that way,” his mother said.

“Her what?”

“The hair is called pubic hair, Jack.”

“Oh.”

“You don’t have any yet, but you will.”

“Do you shave your pubic hair that way?” Jack asked his mom.

“That’s not your business, young man,” she told him, but he could see she was crying. He didn’t say anything. “ Leslie— Mrs. Oastler, to you—is a very … independent woman,” Alice started to say, as if she were beginning to read out loud from a long book. “She’s been through a divorce, a bad time, but she’s very … rich. She’s determined to seize control of everything that happens to her. She’s a very … forceful woman.”

“She’s kind of small—smaller than Emma, anyway,” Jack interjected. (He had no idea what his mother was struggling to say.)

“You want to be careful around Mrs. Oastler, Jack.”

“I’m pretty careful around Emma, ” he ventured.

“Yes, you should be careful around Emma, too,” Alice said, “but you want to be more careful around Emma’s mom.”

“Okay.”

“It’s all right that she showed you,” his mother said. “I’m sure you didn’t ask to see it.”

“Emma asked her to show me,” he said.

“Now tell me about your lip.”