Until I Find You (73 page)

The falling-down girl distracted Jack from the more immediate object of his desire. Bonnie Hamilton had not only managed to slip into a pew at the back of the chapel without his seeing her limp to her seat. She’d likewise managed to slip away—ahead of the recessional hymn and the wheelchair-bound Mrs. Malcolm, who still led their lamenting retreat. How had Bonnie escaped Jack’s notice? (With a limp like hers, maybe she knew instinctively when to leave.)

Out into the corridor, marching to the Great Hall, the girls’ and women’s voices bore them along; as they retreated from the chapel, the organ grew less reverberant, but the closing couplet of the hymn’s final quatrain roared in their midst loud and strong.

“
Till we have built Jerusalem/In England’s green and pleasant land,
” sang the throng.

“I gotta hand it to you, Jack,” Leslie Oastler whispered in his ear—the word
gotta
very much the way her daughter would have said it. “There’s not a dry eye, or a dry pair of panties, in the house.”

Jack wasn’t sure that wakes were a good idea. Possibly the fault lay in the concept of mixing mourning with wine and cheese. Or mixing
women
with wine and cheese—maybe the mourning had nothing to do with it.

Lucinda Fleming was the first to inform him that the St. Hilda’s reunion cocktail parties were held in the gym, not in the Great Hall, which was not great enough to contain the Old Girls who’d come to pay their last respects to Emma—or to gawk at, or hit on, Jack Burns.

Most of the women wore high heels, of one kind or another. They’d seen Jack only when he was a little boy or on the big screen; they were unprepared for how short he was. Those women who (in their heels) were taller than Jack were inclined to remove their shoes. Hence they stood seductively before him, either barefoot or in their stocking feet—their high heels in one hand, the plastic cup of white wine in the other, which left no hand free to handle the toothpicks with the little cubes of cheese.

From Hollywood parties, which some actors view as auditions, Jack was in the habit of eating and drinking nothing. He didn’t want all manner of disgusting things to get stuck between his teeth; he didn’t want his breath to smell like piss. (To a nondrinker, white wine on the breath smells like gasoline—or some other unburned fuel—and the Old Girls at Emma’s wake were breathing up a firestorm.)

There were especially desperate-looking women in their late thirties or early forties. More than a few of them were divorced; their children were spending the weekend with their fathers, or so Jack was repeatedly told. These women were shamelessly aggressive, or at least inappropriately aggressive for a
wake.

Connie Turnbull, whom Jack-as-Rochester once had taken in his arms while declaring, “ ‘Never, never was anything at once so frail and so indomitable,’ ” contradicted her Eyre-like impression by whispering in Jack’s ear that she was “
entirely
domitable.”

Miss Wurtz, whom Jack had not seen since he and Claudia had escorted her to the Toronto film festival more than a decade before, had dramatically covered her head with a black scarf—very nearly a veil. She resembled a twelfth-century pilgrim from an order of flagellants. She was thinner than ever, and her perishable beauty had not altogether disappeared but was diminished by an aura of supernatural persecution—as if she suffered from stigmata, or another form of unexplained bleeding.

“I shan’t leave you alone, Jack,” The Wurtz whispered, in the same ear that Connie Turnbull had whispered in. “No doubt you’ve met your share of loose women in California, but some of these Old Girls have a boundless capacity for looseness, which only women who are unaccustomed to being loose can have.”

“Mercy,” he said. There was only one Old Girl who, whether or not she stood on the threshold of looseness, interested him—Bonnie Hamilton. But despite her identifying limp, she appeared to have slipped away.

As for the teenage boarders, Mrs. Malcolm had herded them together with her wheelchair; she’d driven the cowed girls to a far corner of the Great Hall, where Mr. Malcolm was attempting to rescue them from his demented wife. Wheelchair Jane, Jack could only imagine, was intent on keeping these young women safe from him. In Mrs. Malcolm’s mind, or what was left of it, Jack Burns was the evil reincarnation of his father; in her view, Jack had returned to St. Hilda’s for the sole and lewd purpose of deflowering these girls, whose sexual awakening could be discerned in the dishevelment of their school uniforms.

Jack noticed that the young woman who’d fainted or swooned, or just tripped, had lost one of her shoes. She walked in circles, off-balance, scuffing her remaining loafer. Jack purposely made his way to these students; they were the only ones who’d brought copies of Emma’s novel, probably for him to sign.

The girls gave no indication of sexual interest in him—they weren’t the slightest bit flirtatious. Most of them couldn’t meet Jack’s eyes when he looked at them, and those who could look at him couldn’t speak. They were just
kids,
embarrassed and shy. Mrs. Malcolm was crazy to think they needed to be protected from Jack! One of them held out a copy of Emma’s first book for him to sign.

“I wanted Emma to sign it,” she said, “but maybe you wouldn’t mind.” The other girls politely waited their turn.

To the thin, unsteady-looking young woman with one shoe, Maureen Yap said something clearly unkind but incomprehensible. It sounded like, “Did you just have major bridgework?” But Jack knew Maureen; he was sure she’d said, “Don’t you have any homework?”

Before the poor girl struggled to answer The Yap—before she fainted or swooned or tripped, again—Jack took her by her cold, clammy hand and said, “Let’s get out of here. I’ll help you find your missing shoe.”

“Yeah, let’s get outta here,” another of the boarders chimed in. “Let’s go look for Ellie’s shoe.”

“Someone stepped on my heel as I was leaving the chapel,” Ellie said. “I didn’t want to see who it was, so I just forgot about it.”

“I hate it when that happens,” Jack told the young women.

“It’s so rude,” one of them said.

“It
sucks,
” he said. (It might have been the word
sucks
that turned Maureen Yap away.)

Jack went with the girls down the corridor, back toward the chapel, looking for the lost loafer; he signed copies of Emma’s books on the way. “I haven’t been with a bunch of
boarders
since a few girls sneaked me into their residence when I was in school here,” he told them.

“How old were you?” a girl who reminded Jack of Ginny Jarvis asked.

“I guess I was nine or ten,” Jack said.

“And the boarders were
how
old?” Ellie asked.

“They would have been your age,” Jack told her.

“That’s
sick
!” Ellie said.

“Nothing happened, did it?” one of the boarders asked Jack.

“No, of course not—I just remember being frightened,” he replied.

“Well, you were a little boy,” one of them pointed out. “Of course you were frightened.”

“Look, there’s my stupid shoe,” Ellie said. The loafer lay kicked aside, against the corridor wall.

“How will you ever make a movie of
The Slush-Pile Reader
?” one of the young women asked him.

“It’s potentially so
gross,
” another of the girls said.

“The film won’t be as explicit as the novel,” Jack explained. “The word
penis
won’t ever be mentioned, for example.”

“What about
vagina
?” one of the girls asked.

“Not that, either,” he said.

“Why didn’t she just get her vagina
fixed
?” Ellie asked. Of course Jack knew she meant the Michele Maher character, but his thoughts went entirely to Emma.

“I don’t know,” Jack answered.

“There must have been some
psychological
reason, Ellie,” one of her fellow boarders said. “I mean it’s not exactly knee surgery, is it?”

The young women, Ellie among them, nodded soberly. They were such sensible girls—children at heart but, in so many other ways, more grown up than Emma at that age, not to mention Ginny Jarvis and Penny Hamilton (or Charlotte Barford, or Wendy Holton). Jack wondered what had been so different or wrong about him that those girls had ever thought it was acceptable to abuse him.

These
girls wouldn’t have harmed a little boy. Jack felt, in their company, like a nine- or ten-year-old again—only he felt safe. So safe, and like
such
a little boy, that he suddenly announced: “I have to pee.” (It was exactly the way a nine- or ten-year-old would have said it.)

The young women were unsurprised; they responded to his announcement in a strictly practical fashion. “Do you remember where the boys’ washroom is?” Ellie asked him.

“There’s still only one,” another of the young women said.

“I’ll show you where it is,” Ellie told Jack, taking his hand. (It was exactly the way she would have taken a nine- or ten-year-old by the hand; for some reason, it broke Jack’s heart.)

It had all been
his
fault, he thought—the way those older girls in his time at St. Hilda’s had taken such an unnatural interest in him. It must have been something they detected in him. Jack was convinced that he was the unnatural one.

Jack pulled his hand away from Ellie. He didn’t want her or her friends—these incredibly healthy,
normal
young women—to see him cry. Jack felt he was on the verge of dissolving into tears, but in that unembarrassed way that a nine- or ten-year-old might cry. He was suddenly ashamed of what the
real
Michele Maher might have called his weirdness.

“I can certainly find the boys’ washroom by myself,” Jack told them—laughing about it, but in an
actorly
way. “I believe I could find that washroom from the darkness of my grave,” he added, which made it sound like his journey to the boys’ washroom was a heroic voyage—meant to be undertaken alone, and in full acceptance of such perils as one might encounter along the way.

Jack was soon lost in an unfamiliar corridor; perhaps the old school had been repainted, he was thinking. The stairwells were the likely haunts of ghosts, he believed—Mrs. McQuat, his departed conscience; or even Emma, disappointed by the brevity of his prayer. The voices of the boarders no longer accompanied him on his journey; Jack wasn’t followed, or so he thought.

Ahead of him, not far from a bend in the corridor, was the dining hall—all closed up and dark. Did a figure, old and stooped, emerge from the shadows there? It was an elderly woman, no one Jack recognized but surely not a ghost; she looked too solidly built for a spirit. A cleaning woman, from the look of her, he thought. But why would a cleaning woman be working at St. Hilda’s on a Sunday, and where were her mop and pail?

“Jack, my
dahleen—
my
leetle
one!” Mrs. Machado cried.

To see her, to know it was really her, had the effect on Jack of her high-groin kick of so many years ago. He couldn’t move or speak—he couldn’t
breathe.

He’d recognized that Leslie Oastler had a certain power over him, and always would have. But in all his efforts, conscious and unconscious, to diminish his memories of Mrs. Machado, Jack had underestimated her implacable authority over him. He’d never defeated her—only Emma had.

Gone was her waist—what little she’d ever had of one. Mrs. Machado’s low-slung breasts protruded from the midriff of her untucked blouse with the over-obviousness of an amateur shoplifter’s stolen goods. But what she’d stolen from Jack was more obvious; Mrs. Machado had robbed him of the ability to say no to her. (Or to anyone else!)

“This is a frightened little boy!” Bonnie Hamilton had told her sister and Ginny Jarvis, when those older girls were trying to get Jack’s penis to respond.

In Mrs. Machado’s company, Jack was still a frightened little boy. She circled him in the corridor as if she were setting up her customary single-leg attack; she underhooked his left arm, the thick fingers of her left hand closing tightly around his right wrist. Jack knew the takedown she appeared to be looking for, but he couldn’t overcome his inertia; he made no move to defend himself.

Mrs. Machado pressed her forehead against his chest. The top of her head—entangled with gray, wiry hair—touched his throat. Jack was surprised by how short she was, but of course he’d been shorter when they last did this dance together—with Chenko repeating his familiar litany, like a call to prayer. “
Hand-
control! Circle, circle! Don’t
lean
on her, Jackie!”

It wasn’t wrestling that Mrs. Machado had in mind. With her insistent grip on Jack’s right wrist, she guided his hand under her blouse; with her broad nose, Mrs. Machado nudged his necktie out of her way and unbuttoned the second button of his shirt with her teeth. Jack thought he detected the smell of anchovies in her hair. It was the contact his right hand made with her sagging breasts, which was quickly followed by the feeling of her tongue on his chest, that filled him with revulsion and gave him the strength to push her away.

Until that moment, he’d never believed in so-called recovered memory—namely, that various acts of abuse or molestation from one’s childhood are mercifully erased, only to return with a vengeance,
vividly,
many years down the road. As Jack recoiled from Mrs. Machado in the semidark Sunday corridor of his old school, he remembered the button trick. How she had unbuttoned and unzipped him with her teeth—and all the other clever things she’d managed to do with her mouth, which he’d blanked from his memory.

“Don’t be cruel, Meester Penis,” Mrs. Machado whispered, as Jack retreated from her. She was shuffling after him, in her laceless running shoes, when she suddenly halted. It wasn’t Jack’s feeble resistance that had stopped her. Her gaze had shifted. She was peering around him, or behind him—and the second he turned to look where she was looking, Mrs. Machado was gone.

She must have been in her late sixties or early seventies. How could she have been that agile, that quick on her feet? Or was the bend in the corridor closer to them than Jack had thought? It was more probable, of course, that Mrs. Machado had never been there at all.