John Irving - Until I Find You

His name was Loomis—everyone called him by his last name. He was an eighth grader from Pennsylvania, and he’d been wrestling for ten years. Loomis had some kind of learning disability; he’d repeated both second and fourth grade. He was only a couple of years younger than Emma.

Jack didn’t know that Redding had a wrestling team, but it made perfect sense at a school where character counted—where effort was regarded as more reliable than talent.

In Redding’s point system, you lost a point for every derogatory or dismissive thing you said to another boy, and, like a profane word, every act of unkindness cost you as well. For example, Tom Abbott had three points against him—one for calling Noah a kike, another for calling Jack and Noah faggots, and a third for picking a fight with Jack. (“He touched me first,” Jack told Loomis, who seemed unsurprised.)

Tom Abbott had another point against him for being an upperclassman in a fifth-grade dorm. You needed permission from the proctor on the floor to visit with a younger kid. You had a limit of four points against you per month. More than four and you were expelled—this was nonnegotiable. Tom Abbott had four points against him on the first day of school; he wouldn’t last at Redding past the second week.

It was hard to come to Redding as an older boy. Abbott was a transfer student from another school. Kids admitted in grade five had a better chance of making it through grade eight. Loomis was a four-year boy, like most of the surviving eighth graders.

If you did the work—both your homework and your work-job, because everyone had a work-job at Redding—you were okay. And you had to treat the other kids respectfully; you had to be nice from the start, a tougher philosophy than being nice twice. Mrs. Wicksteed would have respected Redding.

Swearing was a half-point against you, a half-point for every word. For example, it was better to say “Fuck!” or “Shit!” than “Fucking shit!” (Emma would not have done well at Redding.)

They were not all boys with “problems,” but they were all boys who were not welcome to live at home. Loomis’s parents and older sister had been killed in an automobile accident; his grandparents had wanted him out of their house before the puberty business started.

“Fair enough,” Loomis always said. That could have been a motto at Redding, too, though it wasn’t as resonant as Labor omnia vincit.

In the wrestling room, Jack discovered another motto; it was printed on the ceiling, where you could read it only if you were being pinned.

NO WHINING

The academic expectations of the school were fairly modest; the homework was less demanding than it was repetitious. A lot of memorization, which was okay with Jack. A duck-under, an arm-drag, an ankle-pick, an outside single-leg—as Chenko had taught the boy, these things were essentially undemanding, but they required repetition. Jack felt right at home at Redding.

And neither Miss Wurtz nor Mr. Ramsey would have questioned the value of memorization. At Redding, nothing was inspired—everything was a drill. Smart boys, not that there were many, lay low; hard work was all that mattered. The more you had to overcome, the better your efforts were appreciated.

The headmaster, whose main role at the school was fund-raising, was away a lot. His wife reported his whereabouts to the boys at Morning Meeting. “Mr. Adkins, bless his heart, is in Cleveland,” she would say. “We have a few successful alumni there, and Mr. Adkins has already met a needy boy or two.”

So they were “needy”—they didn’t mind. “Redding’s first purpose,” Mr. Adkins told them, on one of the rare occasions when he was home, “is to prepare you for a better school than Redding.”

Once Redding showed the boys how to work hard, the thinking was, another school, a better one, would educate them. Jack learned that the least utilitarian thing about Redding was those bars on the dormitory windows. No one wanted to run away from the school—they just longed to be in a better one.

The wrestling coach, Mr. Clum, had come to Maine from Colorado. He’d wrestled somewhere in the Big Ten, but he made a point of telling the team that he’d never been a starter. “For four years, I was a backup to someone better,” Coach Clum said. “Every year it was a different guy, but he was always better.”

Inferiority was their advantage; that they believed they were inferior, in combination with their zeal for hard work, made them formidably tenacious boys.

Coach Clum designed a wrestling schedule that purposely overmatched them. Redding’s wrestling team never had a winning season, but the boys were unafraid to lose—and when they won an occasional match, they were elated. Jack found out only later, when he was at a better school, that everyone hated to wrestle Redding. Redding boys relished taking a pounding—they were often beaten but rarely pinned—and, boy, were they nice.

“When you lose, tell your opponent how good he is,” Loomis instructed the younger boys on the team. “When you win, tell him you’re sorry—say you’ve been in his situation, even if you haven’t.”

They were competing against a school in Bath, Maine, when Jack won his first match. He was wrestling a strong but clumsy kid who’d never seen a cross-face cradle before. Jack was making the cradle tighter, the way Loomis had shown him, when the kid from Bath bit him. He sank his teeth into Jack’s forearm, drawing blood. Jack could see the boy’s face; there was no malevolence or awareness of wrongful conduct in the Bath wrestler’s eyes, only fear. Possibly the kid from Bath was afraid of losing, especially of being pinned—more likely, he was terrified of being hurt. He was fighting for his life, the way a captured animal would fight.

Jack let him go. The bite-wound was obvious—wrestlers from both teams solemnly had a look at it—and the kid from Bath was disqualified for unsportsmanlike behavior, which amounted to the same number of points for Redding that Jack would have won for a fall.

“I’m sorry,” Jack told the biter. “I’ve been in your situation.” The kid from Bath looked humiliated, inconsolable.

Loomis was shaking his head. “What?” Jack asked him.

“You don’t say you’ve been in his situation to a biter, Jack.”

So there were rules to be learned at Redding; learning the rules was what made Jack feel at home there.

Mrs. Adkins, a virtual widow to her husband’s fund-raising trips on behalf of the school, taught English and served as casting director for the school’s weekly Drama Night. She was a severely depressed woman in her fifties—an unhappy-looking, washed-out blonde. Her pallor was gold-going-gray, a fair-turning-to-slate complexion. Her clothes seemed a size too large for her, as if she suffered from a disease that was shrinking her.

Her gift for casting was a profoundly restless or roving one—causing her to visit, unannounced, classes in all manner of subjects. Mrs. Adkins would just walk into the classroom and pace among the students, while the class continued in as undistracted a fashion as possible.

“Pretend I’m not here,” she would say to the fifth graders. (Mrs. Adkins assumed that the older boys already knew to ignore her.)

There might be a note in your school mailbox after her appearance in your class:

See me.—Mrs. A.

In Jack’s fifth- and sixth-grade years, he was usually cast as a woman. He was by far the prettiest of the boys at Redding, and—from the glowing recommendations of Miss Wurtz and Mr. Ramsey—Mrs. Adkins knew he had female acting credentials.

By the time Jack was in seventh and eighth grade, and he was more than occasionally picked for a male role, Mrs. Adkins had dispensed with leaving notes in his mailbox. Her touch on his shoulder was, he knew, a see-me touch.