John Irving - Until I Find You

Jack thought Caroline Wurtz must still be saying in her nightly prayers, “God bless you, Mrs. McQuat.”

As Jack occasionally remembered to say in his, although not as often—and never as fervently—as he used to say, without cease, “Michele Maher, Michele Maher, Michele Maher.”

Jack would never entirely forgive The Gray Ghost for suggesting that he and Claudia take Miss Wurtz to the film festival in Toronto in the fall of 1985. The Wurtz was in her forties at the time—not that much older than Alice in years, but noticeably older in appearance and stamina. Possibly she had always been too thin, too fragile, but now what was most Wurtz- like about her was a gauntness Jack associated with illness. Miss Wurtz was still beautiful in her damaged way, but she not only looked a little unhealthy; she seemed ashamed of something, although Jack couldn’t imagine what she had ever done to be ashamed of. Perhaps there’d been a long-ago scandal—something so fleeting that it was barely remembered by others, although the memory of it was alive and throbbing in The Wurtz.

Her appearance seemed contrary to her restrained, even abstemious character, because what Caroline Wurtz most resembled was an actress of a bygone era—a once-famous woman who’d become overlooked. At least this was the impression Caroline made at the film festival, where Claudia and Jack took her to the premiere of Paul Schrader’s Mishima. “Remind me who Mishima is,” Miss Wurtz said as they approached the theater.

The ever-persistent photographers, who often snapped pictures of Claudia—because Claudia was such a babe and the photographers had convinced themselves that she must be someone— turned their attention to Miss Wurtz instead. She was overdressed for the film-festival crowd, like a woman who found herself at a rock concert when she’d thought she was going to an opera. Jack was wearing black jeans and a black linen jacket with a white T-shirt. (“An L.A. look,” in Claudia’s estimation, though she’d never been to Los Angeles.)

The younger photographers, especially, assumed that Caroline Wurtz was someone— possibly someone who’d made her last movie before any of them had been born. “You’d have thought she was Joan Crawford,” Claudia said later. Claudia was poured into a shimmery dress with spaghetti straps, but she was a good sport about the photographers being all over The Wurtz.

“Goodness,” Miss Wurtz whispered, “they must think you’re already famous, Jack.” It was sweet how she believed the fuss was about him. “I’m completely convinced you soon will be,” The Wurtz added, squeezing his hand. “And you, too, dear,” she said to Claudia, who squeezed her hand back.

“I thought she was dead !” an older man said. Jack didn’t catch the name of the actress from yesteryear for whom Miss Wurtz had been mistaken.

“Is Mishima a dancer?” Caroline asked.

“No, a writer—” Jack started to say, but Claudia cut him off.

“He was a writer,” Claudia corrected him.

And an actor, a director, and a militarist nutcase, which Jack didn’t have time to say. They were swept inside the theater, where they were ushered to the reserved seats—all because of the prevailing conviction that Caroline Wurtz was not a third-grade teacher but a movie star.

Jack heard the word “European,” probably in reference to Miss Wurtz’s dress, which was a pale-peach color and might have fit her once—perhaps in Edmonton. Now it appeared that The Wurtz was diminished by the dress, which would have been more suitable for a prom than a premiere. The dress was something Mrs. Adkins might have donated for Drama Night at Redding, yet it had a gauzy quality, like underwear, which reminded Jack of the mail-order lingerie he had dressed Miss Wurtz in—if only in his imagination.

“Mishima is Japanese,” Jack was trying to explain.

“He was— ” Claudia interjected.

“He’s no longer Japanese?” Caroline asked.

They couldn’t answer her before the movie began—a stylish piece of work, wherein the scenes from Mishima’s life (shot in black and white) were intercut with color dramatizations of his fictional work. Jack had never cared much about Mishima as a writer, but he liked him as a lunatic; his ritualistic suicide, in 1970, was the film’s dramatic conclusion.

Throughout the movie, Miss Wurtz held Jack’s hand; this gave him a hard-on, which Claudia noticed. Claudia would not hold his penis, or venture anywhere near his lap; she sat with her arms folded on her considerable bosom, and never flinched at Mishima’s self-disemboweling, which caused Caroline to dig her nails into Jack’s wrist. In the flickering light from the movie screen, he regarded the small, fishhook-shaped scar on her throat, above her fetching birthmark. In her preternatural thinness, Miss Wurtz had a visible pulse in her throat—an actual heartbeat in close proximity to her scar. This was a pounding that could only be quieted by a kiss, Jack thought—not that he would have dared to kiss The Wurtz, not even if Claudia hadn’t been there.

“Goodness!” Caroline exclaimed as they were leaving the theater. (She was as breathless as Mrs. McQuat, as desirable as Mrs. Adkins.) “That was certainly … ambitious !”

It was about four o’clock in the afternoon when they exited into the mob of Catholic protesters who’d come to the wrong theater. The protesters were there on their knees, chanting to an endless “Hail Mary” that repeated itself over a ghetto blaster. Jack knew in an instant that the kneeling Catholics thought they were emerging from a screening of Godard’s Hail Mary; the Catholics had come to protest Mishima by mistake.

Not only was Miss Wurtz unprepared for the spectacle; she didn’t understand that the protests were in error. “Naturally, the suicide has upset them—I’m not surprised,” she told Claudia and Jack. “I once knew why Catholics make such a fuss about suicide, but I’ve forgotten. They were all in a knot about Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter, as I remember. But I think they got themselves all worked up over The Power and the Glory and The End of the Affair, too.”

Claudia and Jack just looked at each other. What was the point of even mentioning the Godard film to Caroline?

A TV journalist wanted to interview her, which Miss Wurtz seemed to think was perfectly normal. “What do you think of all this?” the journalist asked Jack’s former grade-three teacher. “The film, the controversy—”

“I thought the film was quite a … drama, ” The Wurtz declared. “It was overlong and at times hard to grasp, and not always as satisfying as it was engaging. The cinematography was beautiful, and the music—well, whether one likes it or not, it was sweeping. ”

This was more than the journalist had bargained for; he was clearly more interested in the kneeling Catholics and the ceaseless “Hail Mary” on the ghetto blaster than he was in the Mishima movie. “But the controversy— ” he started to say, trying to steer Miss Wurtz to the fracas of the moment (as journalists do).

“Oh, who cares about that?” Caroline said dismissively. “If the Catholics want to flagellate themselves over a suicide, let them! I remember when they had a hissy fit about fish on Fridays!”

It would be on the six o’clock news. Alice and Leslie Oastler were watching television, and there was Miss Wurtz holding forth in her pale-peach dress—Claudia and Jack on either side of her. It was almost as much fun as passing Claudia off as a Russian film star, and Caroline was thoroughly enjoying herself, though she wasn’t in on the joke.