John Irving - Until I Find You

Yes, Jack slept with her—but not until his eighth-grade year, when he was thirteen going on fourteen and the deprivations of a single-sex school had made him nostalgic for his earlier life as a sexually molested child. By then, Mrs. Adkins had given him three-plus years of the best speaking parts, and he was old enough to be attracted to her permanent air of sadness.

“There will be no points against you for this,” she told Jack the first time. But he foresaw that, after Redding, the world might hold him accountable to another system for keeping score. Jack Burns would hold Mrs. Adkins as a point against him.

The Nezinscot River ran through Redding, and most of the year one would have to make a considerable (even a ludicrous ) effort to drown in it. But some years after Jack left Redding, Mrs. Adkins managed to drown herself in the Nezinscot. It would have happened in the spring—in such measure as there was a spring in Maine.

There was a glimmer of Miss Wurtz’s perishable beauty about Mrs. Adkins; in her capacity as casting director for Drama Night, there was also something of The Wurtz’s eccentricity for dramatization about her. The boys did not do entire plays or dramatizations of novels at Redding; the rehearsals would have taken too much time away from the nuts-and-bolts business of what was at heart a no-nonsense school. But almost as an echo of the school’s mantra to memorization, Mrs. Adkins desired to make thespians of them all.

They were costumed in character, and Mrs. Adkins supervised their makeup. The women’s clothes, Jack gradually discovered, were Mrs. Adkins’s castaways—or the unexciting donations of the almost uniformly dowdy faculty wives. (Mrs. Adkins was one of only two female teachers at the school.)

The weekly Drama Night at Redding consisted of speeches and skits, excerpts from short stories or plays, recitations of poems—often only parts of poems—and such challenging feats of memorization as could be found in the monologues of inspired statesmen.

In fifth grade, Jack recited Anne Bradstreet’s “To My Dear and Loving Husband.” Dressed in Mrs. Adkins’s prim but faded clothes, he managed to convey the hardships of early colonial life and the duties of a Puritan housewife, which Mrs. Bradstreet had so stoically endured.

Jack was also the ravishingly beautiful ghost (the guillotined young woman) in Washington Irving’s gothic story “Adventure of the German Student.” His black dress had been Mrs. Adkins’s nightgown once—possibly at a time when Mr. Adkins had traveled less.

He was the poisoned Beatrice in Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter”; befitting his death in a garden, Jack wore something summery, which Mrs. Adkins remembered wearing to an old friend’s wedding. He was in sixth grade when he did “Sigh No More, Ladies”—that little ditty from Much Ado About Nothing. Shakespeare was a favorite of Mrs. Adkins. Jack wore one of her pleated skirts when he sang “Under the Greenwood Tree” from As You Like It.

He would remember her saying: “Why, that skirt looks so nice on you, Jack. I just might wear it again!”

On his first Drama Night as a boy, it was a mild surprise that—even then—Mrs. Adkins dressed him in her clothes. (Black slacks, a long-sleeved white blouse with a ruffled collar.) Jack did “O Mistress Mine” from Twelfth Night, and Mrs. Adkins scolded him for saying his end line to her— not to the audience:

Youth’s a stuff will not endure.

Indeed not; Mrs. Adkins seemed to sense that this was so. She made Jack sing “Take, Oh, Take Those Lips Away” from Measure for Measure. (His voice had not yet changed, but it was changing.)

By the seventh grade, Jack was getting a little too muscular for Mrs. Adkins’s clothes. But even when Jack was in the eighth grade, no boy at Redding was a better girl. He had pubic hair early, but his facial hair came late and his beard would never be heavy. He missed Emma, and faithfully thought of her when he masturbated. He couldn’t get used to taking showers with boys; Jack didn’t like looking at the other boys’ penises. When he admitted this to Mrs. Adkins, she told him to memorize a poem and say it to himself in the shower.

On those weekends when Mr. Adkins was away, Jack visited Mrs. Adkins in the headmaster’s house, where she would dress him in her clothes—the ones she was not yet ready to donate to Drama Night. An ivory camisole with a built-in shelf bra; a bouclé lace turtleneck; a velour cardigan; a crinkled silk shirt; a satin-trimmed wrap sweater. For a small woman, Mrs. Adkins had big feet—Jack could wear her beaded jade mules.

She never touched him first, nor did she once need to tell him to touch her. While she dressed him—often in the clothes she was wearing at the time, which meant that Mrs. Adkins undressed herself first—she stood so close to him, and she smelled so nice, that he could not resist touching her. The first time he did so, she closed her eyes and held her breath—compelling him to touch her more. It was a seduction quite the opposite of Mrs. Machado’s assertive kind; yet Jack was aware that he had the confidence to touch Mrs. Adkins because Mrs. Machado had shown him how. Mrs. Adkins never asked him how, at thirteen, he knew where to touch her.

Maybe she should have had a daughter, Jack found himself thinking once—when Mrs. Adkins was dressing him in her favorite velvet top. (For fun, she put lemons in the underwire bra—being a small-breasted woman herself.) Jack would learn, much later, that Mrs. Adkins and her husband had had a son and lost him. The boy’s death was an underlying reason for the permanent air of sadness that had first attracted Jack to Mrs. Adkins, although Jack didn’t know this at the time.

“I love you in my clothes,” was all she told him.

Having cast Jack in his seventh-grade year as Mildred Douglas in Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape, Mrs. Adkins loved him so much as Mildred that she perversely cast him the following year as Mildred’s cantankerous aunt. In that, his final year at Redding, when Jack was lying in her arms, Mrs. Adkins liked to test his memory of cue lines in the dark. In the husky voice of the Second Engineer in The Hairy Ape, she said: “ ‘You’ll likely rub against oil and dirt. It can’t be helped.’ ”

Rubbing against her, Jack-as-Mildred replied: “ ‘It doesn’t matter. I have lots of white dresses.’ ” All hers; every dress he wore on Drama Night had once been worn by Mrs. Adkins. How at home he felt in her clothes.

Except when he was wrestling, Jack took few trips away from Redding. Since Toronto was so far, he would generally spend American Thanksgiving in Boston—actually in nearby Cambridge—with his roommate, Noah. Jack went back to Toronto for Christmas, and for the misnomered spring break, which was in March or April—when it was barely more springlike in Toronto than it was in Maine. (It was never spring in Maine.)

But as a wrestler, he got to see a lot of New England. Coach Clum once took the team as far as New York State, to a tournament where even Loomis lost. It was the only time Jack saw Loomis lose, although Loomis—in addition to losing his parents and older sister—had other losses ahead. He would be expelled from Blair Academy for getting a referee’s underage daughter pregnant. Loomis gave up an opportunity for a college wrestling scholarship because of it. He became a Navy SEAL instead. He was stabbed to death somewhere in the Philippines, while on a perilous undercover mission, perhaps, or drunk and rowdy in a bar—in either case, his killer was reputed to be a transvestite prostitute.

But Loomis was the model Jack aspired to on the Redding wrestling team. Jack was never as good a wrestler as Loomis was, although in Jack’s last two years at Redding, he managed to win more matches than he lost.