John Irving - Until I Find You

Alice must have closed the door on that conversation a hundred times. “When you’re old enough,” she would usually say—a door-closing line if the boy had ever heard one.

He’d once spoken to Mrs. McQuat about it. “Don’t complain about a woman who knows how to keep a secret,” The Gray Ghost replied.

Since Emma had a list of grievances against her mother, Jack felt comfortable complaining to Emma about his. “I just want to know what kind of guy he was, for Christ’s sake!”

“Watch your language, baby cakes.”

Emma and Jack had both read the School Philosophy Handbook that Redding sent to new students and their families. So-called proper language was a big deal in the student code. Mr. Ramsey, who’d agreed to take Jack to Maine, had eagerly read the School Philosophy Handbook, too; he’d found the student code “very challenging.”

The day before Jack and Mr. Ramsey left for Maine, Emma and Jack got matching haircuts at a barbershop in Forest Hill Village. Jack’s wasn’t so bad, although it was shorter than the floppy mops most boys had for haircuts in 1975. But short hair on Emma was arguably a mistake. It wasn’t a buzz cut, but it was very much a boy’s haircut, which left her neck exposed. While she’d continued to lose weight, Emma’s neck had gotten noticeably bigger—all those neck-bridges, three or four times a week, with a flat twenty-five-pound weight on her chest. She had a neck like a linebacker, and her short haircut served to exaggerate one’s unfortunate first impression of her, which was that Emma Oastler had no neck at all. From behind, she looked like a man.

Jack got the first haircut and then stood beside Emma’s chair while the barber was cutting her hair. “Your mom’s going to kill you for this,” Jack told her.

“ How? ” Emma asked.

She had a point—Emma could have snapped Mrs. Oastler like a Popsicle stick. Not even Chenko was tough enough for her, as the Ukrainian would soon discover. After Jack went to Maine, Chenko stepped in as Emma’s workout partner. He was in good shape for a man his age, and he had twenty-five or thirty pounds on her—this in addition to his considerable experience as a wrestler. But Jack knew you could get hurt when you were trying too hard not to hurt your opponent; in wrestling, it was not natural to hold back.

Chenko caught Emma leaning on him; he was in position to hit her with a lateral drop, but he hesitated, afraid he might hurt her. While he was waiting, Emma executed a perfect lateral drop on him. Emma separated Chenko’s sternum when she landed on his chest. That was a slow-healing injury, especially for someone in his sixties.

Emma’s only recourse was to work out with Boris and Pavel; at least they were young enough to risk getting hurt.

In the barbershop mirror, examining their matching haircuts, Jack could see in advance that St. Hilda’s had been crazy to admit Emma as a boarder. She had the wrong attitude for it, not to mention her hulking shoulders and her seventeen-inch neck.

“An inch for every year of your age,” Chenko had told her.

It would come as no surprise to Jack that Emma lasted only a year as a boarder at St. Hilda’s. He was a little surprised she lasted that long. To the school’s great relief, and with Mrs. Oastler’s reluctant consent, Emma moved back home and finished grades twelve and thirteen as a day student. She would take over what had been the guest wing, moving into Alice’s old bedroom, which was across the hall from Jack’s room—not that he would get to use his room to any significant degree in the upcoming years.

Alice, of course, abandoned all pretense and moved into Leslie Oastler’s bedroom. (According to Emma, this happened within a week of Jack’s departure for Maine.) Emma’s choice to occupy the guest wing was motivated less by her desire to sleep as far away from them as she could than by her irritation that neither her mom nor Jack’s ever talked about their relationship. But talking about things was not Alice’s style, and Mrs. Oastler had closed the door on too many conversations with Emma to realistically expect her daughter to allow her to open that door again. Alice had closed the door on too many conversations with Jack, too. When she was ready to talk, whenever that might be, Jack had already decided he wouldn’t listen.

In Maine, he heard more from Emma than from his mother—including the news about Mrs. Machado. She’d been arrested in Sir Winston Churchill Park for sexually soliciting a minor, a ten-year-old boy. It turned out that her own children had not grown up and moved “away”; at ages eleven and fifteen, they lived in another part of Toronto with their father, who’d happily remarried. There was a restraining order against Mrs. Machado, who’d molested her fifteen-year-old son when he was ten.

Of course there’d been no assaults against Mrs. Machado by her ex-husband, no need for her to change the locks on her apartment door. Quite possibly, the M. in M. Machado didn’t mean Mrs.— at least not anymore. And whoever she was, her reasons for wanting to learn how to kickbox and wrestle would forever remain unclear.

Alice made no mention to Jack of this news, although she probably knew about it. Emma said it was in all the newspapers, “with pictures and everything.” Maybe Alice never imagined that Mrs. Machado might have molested Jack. More likely, she didn’t want to think about it—or she felt secure in the fiction that, had anything been wrong, Jack would have told her.

As Emma said, sarcastically: “Yeah, like if anything had been wrong with her, she would have told you !”

Jack was not as faithful a correspondent to The Gray Ghost as she was to him. Mrs. McQuat was a wise woman, but Emma was Jack’s principal advice-giver now. How strange that the boy’s earlier misunderstanding of prostitutes as advice-givers was not that far off the mark. Emma was no prostitute, but sex and advice-giving were seemingly interchangeable to her.

Jack would also be intermittent in his correspondence with Miss Wurtz. It was more than his mail-order-bride role that linked him to Mr. Ramsey. The boy’s first trip to Maine, in Mr. Ramsey’s company, was so formative an experience that Mr. Ramsey replaced The Wurtz as Jack’s mentor in that all-important area of the dramatic arts.

Jack didn’t stop dreaming of Miss Wurtz, underwear and all, but he had come to a crossroads in his life, where listening to Mr. Ramsey took center stage and made more sense—this despite the fact that there was often more theatricality than meaning in what Mr. Ramsey had to say. (As an actor, Jack would be a hypocrite to love Mr. Ramsey any the less for that.)

As their plane touched down in Portland, Mr. Ramsey clasped Jack’s hands in his. “Jack Burns!” he cried, so loudly and suddenly that the boy thought the plane was crashing. “For better or worse, you are in Maine !” Jack looked anxiously at the swiftly passing tarmac. “Just remember, Jack—no school with a motto like Redding’s can be all bad. Let me hear you say it!”

“Say what?”

“Your school motto!”

Jack had already forgotten it. Unlike Mr. Ramsey, the boy had spotted a militant heartiness in Redding’s School Philosophy Handbook. The word character was repeated in every imaginable context. “Decency is the norm,” the handbook had declared. Maybe that was the motto.

“ ‘Decency is the norm’?” Jack asked Mr. Ramsey.

“Well, of course it is!” he replied impatiently. “But that’s not the motto. Jack Burns, with your remarkable capacity for memory, I’m surprised at you!”