John Irving - Until I Find You

“Marvelous!” Mr. Ramsey cried. “A trifle deadpan for Anne, perhaps, but marvelous!”

“We have to go,” Claudia told him, mercifully.

The girls were all looking at Jack as if Claudia had been holding his penis in front of them. Claudia was looking at Jack as if not even Godard’s Hail Mary could be as excruciatingly boring as this journey through time on his old stomping grounds.

Jack was actually tempted to see the Godard film, because the Catholics were up in arms about it and had threatened to protest the Toronto screening. But Claudia didn’t like Godard any better than he did. ( Hail Mary was an update of Christ’s birth, this time to a virgin gas-station attendant and her cabdriver boyfriend.)

It was in this disturbed frame of mind—Claudia hating Jack for bringing her to his old school, Jack wishing that he had not come (or that he’d come alone)—that the sudden appearance of The Gray Ghost startled Claudia and Jack, just as Jack was about to show Claudia the chapel. Claudia made such an immediate impression on Mrs. McQuat that Jack’s former fourth-grade teacher ushered them both up the center aisle and into the foremost pew, where she insisted they sit down; at least she didn’t make them kneel.

Claudia was not religious and later told Jack she was offended by the stained-glass images of “those servile women attending to Jesus.” Mrs. McQuat held Claudia’s hand and Jack’s; she asked them in a low whisper when they were going to be married. That Claudia and Jack were still students was a point lost on The Gray Ghost, who’d heard a rumor spreading like a forest fire through the girls at St. Hilda’s—namely, that Jack Burns had been seen at the film festival in the company of an American movie star, apparently Claudia. He’d brought her to St. Hilda’s to show her the chapel. The rumor was that Jack wanted to be married in the chapel of his old school, where he’d had such a formative experience.

“We haven’t really made any plans,” Jack said, not knowing how else to answer Mrs. McQuat’s question.

“I’m never going to marry Jack,” Claudia told The Gray Ghost. “I’m not marrying anybody who doesn’t want to have children.”

“Mercy!” Mrs. McQuat exclaimed. “Why … wouldn’t you want to have … children … Jack?”

“You know,” he answered.

“He says it’s all about his father,” Claudia told her.

“You’re not … still worrying … you’ll turn out like him … are you, Jack?” The Gray Ghost asked.

“It’s a reasonable suspicion,” he said.

“Nonsense!” Mrs. McQuat cried. “Do you know … what I think?” she asked Claudia, patting her hand. “I think it’s just an excuse … not to marry anybody !”

“That’s what I think, too,” Claudia said.

Jack felt like Jesus in the stained glass; everywhere he went in Toronto, women were ganging up on him. He must have looked like he wanted to leave, because The Gray Ghost took hold of his wrist in that not-uncertain way of hers.

“You aren’t leaving without seeing … Miss Wurtz … are you?” she asked him. “Mercy, she’ll be … crushed if she learns you were here … and you didn’t see her!”

“Oh.”

“You should take Caroline … to the film festival, Jack,” Mrs. McQuat went on. “She’s too timid to go to the movies … by herself.”

The Gray Ghost was always the voice of Jack’s conscience. Later he would be ashamed that he never told her how much she meant to him, or even what a good teacher she was.

Mrs. McQuat would die in the St. Hilda’s chapel—after having disciplined one of Miss Wurtz’s misbehaving third graders, whom she’d faced away from the altar with his back turned to God. Mrs. McQuat dropped dead in the center aisle, a passageway she had made her own, with her back turned to God and with only God’s eyes and those of the third grader who was being punished to see her fall. (That poor kid—talk about a formative experience!)

Miss Wurtz must have come running as soon as she heard —crying all the way.

Jack didn’t go to The Gray Ghost’s funeral. He learned she had died only after the funeral, when his mother told him something about Mrs. McQuat that he was surprised he hadn’t guessed. She was no Mrs. anybody; no one had ever married her. Like Miss Wurtz, she was a Miss McQuat—for life. But something in her combat-nurse nature refused to acknowledge that she was unmarried, which in those days obdurately implied you were unloved.

Jack used to wonder why The Gray Ghost had trusted his mom with this secret. They weren’t friends. Then he remembered Mrs. McQuat telling him not to complain about a woman who knew how to keep a secret—meaning Alice. (Meaning herself as well.)

It was only a mild shock to discover that The Gray Ghost had been a Miss instead of a Mrs. In retrospect, Jack wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that Mrs. McQuat—as she preferred to be called—had been a man.

Alice and Mrs. Oastler attended The Gray Ghost’s funeral, which was in the St. Hilda’s chapel. Being a St. Hilda’s Old Girl, Leslie was informed of all the school news. As for Alice, she told Jack she went out of “nostalgia,” which he would remember thinking at the time was an uncharacteristic word for her to use—not to mention an uncharacteristic feeling for her to have.

Alice was vague about who else was in attendance. “Caroline, of course.” She didn’t mean Caroline French—she meant Miss Wurtz. The other Caroline didn’t attend, and Jack knew that her twin, Gordon, was absent. (Gordon was dead—the aforementioned boating accident had precluded his attendance.)

Jack asked his mother if she’d been aware of blanket-sucking sounds, or moaning, during the funeral; by his mom’s puzzled response, he knew that the Booth twins and Jimmy Bacon had skipped the event, or they’d been out of town.

Lucinda Fleming, with or without her mysterious rage, made no reference to The Gray Ghost’s passing in her annual Christmas letter; if Lucinda had gone to the funeral, Jack was sure she would have told everyone about it. And he knew Roland Simpson wasn’t there—Roland was already in jail.

The faculty who were in attendance are easily imagined. Miss Wong, mourning in broken bits and pieces, as if the hurricane she was born in showed itself only in squalls—or only at funerals. Mr. Malcolm, guiding his wife in her wheelchair; the poor man was forever trying to steer Wheelchair Jane around the looming obstacles of her madness. Mr. Ramsey, too restless to sit in a pew, would have been bouncing on the balls of his feet at the back of the chapel. And Miss Wurtz—my goodness, how she must have cried!

“Caroline was overcome, ” Alice told Jack.

He could see Miss Wurtz overcome as clearly as if she were still leaning over his incorrect math and he were still breathing her in. (In Jack’s dreams, The Wurtz’s mail-order bra and panties were always properly in place—no matter how overcome she was.)

Yet how could Miss Wurtz have gone on being the St. Hilda’s grade-three teacher? How could she have managed her classroom without The Gray Ghost there to bail her out?

It was Leslie Oastler who told Jack that, upon Mrs. McQuat’s death, Miss Wurtz became a better teacher; finally, Miss Wurtz had to learn how. But at The Gray Ghost’s funeral, there was no stopping The Wurtz. She cried and cried without hope of rescue. Miss Wurtz must have cried until all her tears were gone, and then—one breakthrough day in her grade-three classroom—she never cried again.