John Irving - Until I Find You

Jack could recall the bit in the handbook about “interacting” with his fellow students. “Eschew the d- words!” the handbook had advised. While he remembered this unusual command, he had enough sense to know it wasn’t the school motto—though it might have sufficed. They were instructed not to treat their schoolmates in a d ismissive or d erogatory manner. And at the heart of the student code was a “character contract” signed by every student, saying that self-respect was impossible without an abiding respect for others. Jack had signed his name, but this didn’t sound like motto material to him.

“A hint, Jack. It’s in Latin. ” As if that helped!

The air was clear, but still summery, in Portland—not as bracing as Jack had expected Maine to be, though it soon would be. The airport was as rudimentary as the tarmac.

“Labor omnia vincit!” Mr. Ramsey called to a couple of passing pilots. They clearly thought he was insane. “You haven’t heard a motto until you’ve heard Jack Burns say it,” he told a surprised stewardess, an attractive woman in her thirties.

“ Labor omnia vincit, ” Jack said, with authority—putting more emphasis on the vincit.

“Tell her what it means, Jack,” Mr. Ramsey said, but the stewardess ignored him; she had eyes only for Jack. Here he was in a foreign country—in Maine, of all places—and while he couldn’t remember his new school’s motto or what it meant, he could read the mind of a flight attendant. She was recognizably older-woman material to Jack. All the boy did was smile at her, but he knew everything she was thinking.

“It’s a good thing he’s not traveling as an unaccompanied minor,” the stewardess told Mr. Ramsey, never taking her eyes off Jack.

“This is Jack Burns,” Mr. Ramsey said to her. “He’s got the memory of an elephant, but not today.”

“ Labor omnia vincit, ” Jack repeated, trying to remember the correct translation.

“Work—” Mr. Ramsey started to say, but Jack cut him off. The translation had come back to him.

“Work conquers all things,” the ten-year-old told the flight attendant.

“Silly me—I thought it was love that conquered everything,” she said.

“No, it’s work, ” Jack told her firmly.

The stewardess sighed, ruffling the boy’s hair. She kept looking at Jack, but she spoke to Mr. Ramsey. “I’ll bet you can’t count the hearts he’s going to break,” she said.

It was still light as they drove north-northwest to Redding in the rental car; they’d left the ocean behind them in Portland. After Lewiston, there wasn’t a lot to see. West Minot was not memorable, nor were East Sumner and West Sumner—although the absence of a Sumner proper got Mr. Ramsey’s attention. “Maine is not a state at the forefront of intelligently naming towns—or so it would seem, Jack.”

The surrounding wilderness in the approaching sunset was more than a little tinged with desolation. Earlier Mr. Ramsey had led Jack into a rousing conversation on the possible application of Mrs. Wicksteed’s be-nice-twice philosophy to those hostile students the boy might encounter at Redding, but not now. The forlorn landscape prompted even as ebullient a fellow as Mr. Ramsey to speak of the unmentionable. “Jack, I am tempted to say this looks like mail-order-bride territory.” Jack’s heart sank. Mr. Ramsey tried to change the subject. “I would guess—wouldn’t you, Jack—that most of the students at Redding are boarders?”

“I guess so,” the boy said.

Redding was a private (or so-called independent) school, grades five through eight. While Mrs. Oastler could afford Jack’s tuition—“without batting an eye,” as Alice had said—the towns and no-towns, the less-than-villages they drove through, suggested to Mr. Ramsey and Jack that few local families could afford to send their boys to Redding. The school did offer scholarships, though not more than fifteen or twenty percent of the students received any kind of financial aid. Redding was not generously endowed.

Mr. Ramsey also shared with Jack his between-the-lines interpretation of Redding’s School Philosophy Handbook; he shrewdly noted the defensiveness or oversensitivity of the handbook’s opening sentence: “First of all, not all students who attend Redding have problems.”

Naturally, this suggested to Mr. Ramsey that most or many of the students attending Redding did have problems, and he speculated out loud to Jack about what these problems might be. “They come from troubled families, I suppose, or they’ve been thrown out of other schools.”

“For what?” Jack asked.

“Let’s just say there aren’t a lot of boarding schools, even in New England, that admit students as young as fifth graders as boarders. But I suspect that a boy like Jack Burns will flourish at such a place!” Mr. Ramsey declared.

“Flourish at what?”

“Let’s just say that this is a school that values attitude over aptitude, Jack. I believe it will be to your advantage that you have both.” Jack Burns had more attitude than aptitude, and Mr. Ramsey knew it—but the good man pressed ahead. His enthusiasm on Jack’s behalf knew only one speed and direction: fast-forward. “And it strikes me that so-called character-based education might be pursued with fewer distractions at a single-sex institution—I mean fewer distractions for a handsome lad like Jack Burns!”

“You mean no girls.”

“Precisely, Jack. Don’t even think about girls. Your objective is to be a hero among your fellow young men—or, failing that, at least look like a hero.”

“Why be a hero?” Jack asked.

“At an all-boys’ school, Jack, there are heroes and there are foot soldiers. It’s happier to be one of the heroes.”

Emma had been right: Mr. Ramsey had some difficulty seeing over the steering wheel. He was as short as Mrs. Machado, and twenty pounds lighter. That he’d made himself a hero at an all-girls’ school did not hide from Jack the likelihood that Mr. Ramsey had played the role of foot soldier in an earlier life. His neatly trimmed, spade-shaped beard was the size of a child’s sandbox shovel; his little feet, in what Jack guessed were size-six loafers, could barely reach the brake and accelerator pedals. “Where will you spend the night?” Jack asked. The thought of Mr. Ramsey driving back to Portland—alone, in the dark—made the boy afraid for him. But Mr. Ramsey was a brave soul; his only fears were for Jack.

“If there’s trouble, Jack, gather a crowd. If there’s more than one bully, go after the toughest one first. Just be sure you do it publicly.”

“Why publicly?”

“If he’s killing you, maybe someone in the crowd will stop him.”

“Oh.”

“Never be afraid to take a beating, Jack. At the very least, it’s an acting opportunity.”

“I see.”

Thus they drove through southwestern Maine. The loneliness of the place was heart-stopping. When they were almost at the school, Mr. Ramsey pulled into a gas station. Jack was relieved to imagine him driving back to Portland with a full tank. It was the sort of rural gas station that sold groceries—mostly chips and soda, cigarettes and beer. A blind dog was panting near the cash register, behind which a hefty woman sat on a stool. Even sitting down, she was taller than Mr. Ramsey. Being a wrestler had made Jack an expert at guessing people’s weight. This woman weighed over two hundred pounds.

“For better or worse, we’re on our way to Redding,” Mr. Ramsey informed her.

“I could have told you that,” the big woman said.

“We don’t look like we’re from Maine, eh?” Mr. Ramsey guessed. The woman didn’t smile.