John Irving - Until I Find You

Jack should have seen it coming. How hard was it for him to be a girl? He was pretty enough, as Mrs. Oastler had observed—and in his many onstage performances at St. Hilda’s, he’d been a woman more often than he’d been a man.

Much against Miss Wurtz’s wishes, he’d recently been cast as a woman in the senior-school production of A Mail-Order Bride in the Northwest Territories— a nineteenth-century melodrama that The Wurtz despised. Jack was the pathetic child bride. Because of the play’s subject matter—it was annually performed for the senior school exclusively— he’d needed his mother’s permission to accept the part. Alice, in her fashion, had acquiesced. She’d never read the play. Not growing up in Canada, Alice hadn’t been subjected to A Mail-Order Bride in the Northwest Territories in her girlhood—as almost every Canadian woman of Alice’s generation had. (As almost every Canadian girl of Emma’s generation would be.)

In those days—at St. Hilda’s, especially—the senior girls were fed a steady diet of Canadian literature. Miss Wurtz was outraged that many novels of international stature—the classics, which she adored—were popularly replaced by Can Lit, as it was called. Canada had many wonderful writers, Miss Wurtz declared—on those occasions when she was not raving about the so-called classics. (Robertson Davies, Alice Munro, and Margaret Atwood were her favorites.) Years later, as if she were still arguing with Jack about A Mail-Order Bride in the Northwest Territories, Miss Wurtz would write him and tell him to read Alice Munro’s “A Wilderness Station”—a terrific story about a mail-order bride. The Wurtz didn’t want Jack to assume that the subject matter of mail-order brides had prejudiced her against the annual senior-school play.

Abigail Cooke, the playwright, who’d been an unhappily married woman in the Northwest Territories, was certainly not among Canada’s better writers. (She was no Alice Munro.) That Abigail Cooke’s A Mail-Order Bride in the Northwest Territories was required reading in the senior school at St. Hilda’s was, in Miss Wurtz’s view, “an abomination”; that the play was performed every year was, in her well-enunciated words, “a theatrical travesty.” The play was published by a small, obscure press that specialized in scholastic books. (Miss Wurtz, with uncharacteristic vulgarity, once referred to the Canadian publisher as Beaver Penis Press; she immediately apologized to Jack for the word penis. ) The play, Miss Wurtz assured Jack, was beneath his talents as an actor; it was nothing short of an invitation to humiliate himself before an audience of older girls.

Much to Jack’s relief, The Gray Ghost offered him her grain-of-salt perspective. It was a dreadful play, Mrs. McQuat agreed—“the fantasies of an amateur writer and certifiable hysteric.” In 1882, Abigail Cooke had murdered her allegedly abusive husband and then shot herself; her play, which was discovered in her attic, was published posthumously in the 1950s. There were those St. Hilda’s Old Girls, Mrs. Wicksteed among them, who thought of the author as a feminist ahead of her time.

Mrs. McQuat advised Jack that the only interesting role was the one he’d been offered—the mail-order bride. The Gray Ghost believed it was an opportunity for Jack to express himself “more freely,” by which Mrs. McQuat meant that Miss Wurtz would not be the director. In the senior school, the maven of the dramatic arts—and the only other male teacher at St. Hilda’s besides Mr. Malcolm—was the mercurial Mr. Ramsey. He was what in those days they called “a confirmed bachelor.” Only five feet, two inches tall, with a spade-shaped blond beard and long blond hair—like a child Viking—Mr. Ramsey was head and shoulders shorter than many of the girls in the senior school, and (in some cases) ten or fifteen pounds lighter. His voice was as high-pitched as a girl’s, and his enthusiasm on the girls’ behalf was both shrill and a model of constancy. Mr. Ramsey was an unrestrained advocate of young women, and the older girls at St. Hilda’s loved him.

In an all-boys’ environment, or even in a coeducational school, Mr. Ramsey would have been taunted and mistreated; that he was obviously a homosexual was of no concern at St. Hilda’s. If a student had been so crude as to call him a “fairy” or a “fag,” or any of the common pejoratives boys use to bully other boys, the senior-school girls would have beaten the culprit to a pulp—and rightly so.

Notwithstanding Mr. Ramsey’s embarrassing fondness for A Mail-Order Bride in the Northwest Territories, he was a refreshing presence for Jack—his first truly creative (as opposed to restraining) director.

“Is it the Jack Burns? We don’t deserve to be this lucky!” Mr. Ramsey cried, with open arms, at the first rehearsal. “ Look at him!” Mr. Ramsey commanded the older girls, who had been looking at Jack for some time; they didn’t need Mr. Ramsey’s encouragement. “Is this not a child bride born to break our hearts? Is this not the precious innocence and flawless beauty that, in darker days, led so many a mail-order bride to her brutal fate?”

Jack was familiar with “fate”—he’d already played Tess. A Mail-Order Bride in the Northwest Territories was hardly a tale of the same literary magnitude; yet the heroine of the play was, as Mr. Ramsey correctly observed, a reliable heartbreaker for an audience of pubescent (and often hysterical) girls.

In the rugged Northwest Territories, where men are men and women are scarce, a pioneer community of fur trappers and ice fishermen sends a sizable amount of money, “for traveling expenses,” to a mail-order service called Brides Back East. The poor brides are chosen from among unadoptable orphans in Quebec; many of them don’t speak English. Some of the girls, at the time they set out for the Northwest Territories to meet their mail-order husbands, are pre pubescent. The play is set in the 1860s; it’s a long, hard trip from Quebec to the Northwest Territories. It is presumed that most of the girls will be old enough for marriage, or more than old enough, by the time they arrive. Besides, the fur trappers and ice fishermen aren’t asking for older girls. The play’s principal fur trapper, Jack’s future husband, Mr. Halliday, says, in sending for his mail-order bride: “I want a wife on the younger side. You got that?”

In the play, four young girls make their way west in the company of a cruel chaperone, Madame Auber, who sells one of the girls to a blacksmith in Manitoba and another to a cattle rancher in Alberta. Both of these unfortunate brides speak only French. Madame Auber, though French herself, has nothing but contempt for them. Of the two girls who make it to the Northwest Territories, one, Sarah, a bilingual stutterer, loses her virginity to her mail-order husband on a dog sled; thereafter, she wanders off in the snow and freezes to death in a blizzard.

Jack plays the other one who makes it, Darlin’ Jenny, who successfully prays for the delay of her first period—her “menses,” as they are called throughout the play. She is aware that when she starts bleeding, she’ll be old enough to be Mr. Halliday’s bride—at least in Halliday’s crude opinion. Thus, aided only by prayer, Jenny wills herself not to start. It was this plot point that required Alice’s permission for her son to accept the role and necessitated Jack’s perplexing visit to the nurse’s office, where the school nurse, the young Miss Bell, informed him of “the facts of life”—but only the facts that pertained to girls, menstruation foremost among them.

Having seen his first two vaginas in a single day, Jack was not surprised to learn that such a complicated place of business was given to periodic bleeding, but imagine the consternation this caused him when he mistakenly thought that this was the long-awaited event Emma Oastler expected to find evidence of in his bedsheets. To Jack’s knowledge, his penis had not yet “squirted”; it alarmed him to imagine that Emma had meant he would squirt blood.