Until I Find You (33 page)

“For a boy in your
. . . situation,
Jack . . . maybe a little
. . . independence
is the best thing.”

“A little what?”

“Talk to your mother, Jack.”

But having tried to open that door without success, he talked to Emma Oastler instead. Emma was giving him a tour of her mother’s mansion in Forest Hill. They were checking out the guest bedrooms—the guest “wing,” as Mrs. Oastler called it. There were three bedrooms, each with its own bathroom; it was a
wing,
all right. “Honestly,” Emma was saying, “I can’t understand why you and your mom don’t just move in
here.
I think it’s stupid to send you away.”

“Away where?”

“Talk to your mom. It’s her idea. She thinks you and I are a bad combination. She doesn’t want you going through puberty in the same house with me.”

“Going through what?”

“It’s not like we’d have to sleep in the same bedroom,” Emma said, pushing him down on the biggest of the guest-room beds. “Your mom and mine have the prevailing St. Hilda’s mentality. Girls get to see boys until the boys are
nine-year-olds—
then the boys disappear!”

“Disappear
where
?”

Emma was engaged in one of her periodic checks on the progress of his penis, which seemed to render her melancholic. She’d pulled down his pants and underwear and was lying with her heavy head on his bare thigh. “I have a new theory,” Emma said, as if she were speaking exclusively to the little guy. “Maybe you
are
old enough. Maybe it’s
me
who’s not old enough—I mean I’m not old enough for
you.
”

“Disappear
where
?” Jack asked her again. “Where am I being sent away?”

“It’s an all-boys’ school in Maine, baby cakes. I hear it’s kind of
remote.
”

“Kind of what?”

“Possibly the little guy likes even older women than I first supposed,” Emma was saying. His penis lay still and small in the palm of her hand. Jack was being sent to
Maine,
but the little guy didn’t care. “I’ve talked to a couple of girls in grade thirteen, and one in grade twelve. They know everything about penises,” Emma went on. “Maybe they can help.”

“Help what?”

“The problem is that they’re
boarders.
We can’t get you into their residence unless you’re a girl, honey pie.”

Jack should have seen it coming. How hard was it for him to be a girl? He was pretty enough, as Mrs. Oastler had observed—and in his many onstage performances at St. Hilda’s, he’d been a woman more often than he’d been a man.

Much against Miss Wurtz’s wishes, he’d recently been cast as a woman in the senior-school production of
A Mail-Order Bride in the Northwest Territories—
a nineteenth-century melodrama that The Wurtz despised. Jack was the pathetic child bride. Because of the play’s subject matter—it was annually performed for the senior school
exclusively—
he’d needed his mother’s permission to accept the part. Alice, in her fashion, had acquiesced. She’d never read the play. Not growing up in Canada, Alice hadn’t been subjected to
A Mail-Order Bride in the Northwest Territories
in her girlhood—as almost every Canadian woman of Alice’s generation had. (As almost every Canadian girl of Emma’s generation would be.)

In those days—at St. Hilda’s, especially—the senior girls were fed a steady diet of Canadian literature. Miss Wurtz was outraged that many novels of international stature—the classics, which she adored—were popularly replaced by Can Lit, as it was called. Canada had many wonderful writers, Miss Wurtz declared—on those occasions when she was not raving about the so-called classics. (Robertson Davies, Alice Munro, and Margaret Atwood were her favorites.) Years later, as if she were still arguing with Jack about
A Mail-Order Bride in the Northwest Territories,
Miss Wurtz would write him and tell him to read Alice Munro’s “A Wilderness Station”—a terrific story about a mail-order bride. The Wurtz didn’t want Jack to assume that the
subject matter
of mail-order brides had prejudiced her against the annual senior-school play.

Abigail Cooke, the playwright, who’d been an unhappily married woman in the Northwest Territories, was certainly not among Canada’s better writers. (She was no Alice Munro.) That Abigail Cooke’s
A Mail-Order Bride in the Northwest Territories
was required reading in the senior school at St. Hilda’s was, in Miss Wurtz’s view, “an abomination”; that the play was performed every year was, in her well-enunciated words, “a theatrical travesty.” The play was published by a small, obscure press that specialized in scholastic books. (Miss Wurtz, with uncharacteristic vulgarity, once referred to the Canadian publisher as Beaver Penis Press; she immediately apologized to Jack for the word
penis.
) The play, Miss Wurtz assured Jack, was beneath his talents as an actor; it was nothing short of an invitation to humiliate himself before an audience of older girls.

Much to Jack’s relief, The Gray Ghost offered him her grain-of-salt perspective. It
was
a dreadful play, Mrs. McQuat agreed—“the fantasies of an amateur writer and certifiable hysteric.” In 1882, Abigail Cooke had murdered her allegedly abusive husband and then shot herself; her play, which was discovered in her attic, was published posthumously in the 1950s. There were those St. Hilda’s Old Girls, Mrs. Wicksteed among them, who thought of the author as a feminist ahead of her time.

Mrs. McQuat advised Jack that the only interesting role was the one he’d been offered—the mail-order bride. The Gray Ghost believed it was an opportunity for Jack to express himself “more freely,” by which Mrs. McQuat meant that Miss Wurtz would
not
be the director. In the senior school, the maven of the dramatic arts—and the only other male teacher at St. Hilda’s besides Mr. Malcolm—was the mercurial Mr. Ramsey. He was what in those days they called “a confirmed bachelor.” Only five feet, two inches tall, with a spade-shaped blond beard and long blond hair—like a child Viking—Mr. Ramsey was head and shoulders shorter than many of the girls in the senior school, and (in some cases) ten or fifteen pounds lighter. His voice was as high-pitched as a girl’s, and his enthusiasm on the girls’ behalf was both shrill and a model of constancy. Mr. Ramsey was an unrestrained advocate of young women, and the older girls at St. Hilda’s loved him.

In an all-boys’ environment, or even in a coeducational school, Mr. Ramsey would have been taunted and mistreated; that he was obviously a homosexual was of no concern at St. Hilda’s. If a student had been so crude as to call him a “fairy” or a “fag,” or any of the common pejoratives boys use to bully other boys, the senior-school girls would have beaten the culprit to a pulp—and rightly so.

Notwithstanding Mr. Ramsey’s embarrassing fondness for
A Mail-Order Bride in the Northwest Territories,
he was a refreshing presence for Jack—his first truly creative (as opposed to restraining) director.

“Is it
the
Jack Burns? We don’t deserve to be
this
lucky!” Mr. Ramsey cried, with open arms, at the first rehearsal. “
Look
at him!” Mr. Ramsey commanded the older girls, who had been looking at Jack for some time; they didn’t need Mr. Ramsey’s encouragement. “Is this not a child bride
born
to break our hearts? Is this not the precious innocence and flawless beauty that, in darker days, led so
many
a mail-order bride to her brutal fate?”

Jack was familiar with “fate”—he’d already played Tess.
A Mail-Order Bride in the Northwest Territories
was hardly a tale of the same literary magnitude; yet the heroine of the play was, as Mr. Ramsey correctly observed, a reliable heartbreaker for an audience of pubescent (and often hysterical) girls.

In the rugged Northwest Territories, where men are men and women are scarce, a pioneer community of fur trappers and ice fishermen sends a sizable amount of money, “for traveling expenses,” to a mail-order service called Brides Back East. The poor brides are chosen from among unadoptable orphans in Quebec; many of them don’t speak English. Some of the girls, at the time they set out for the Northwest Territories to meet their mail-order husbands, are
pre
pubescent. The play is set in the 1860s; it’s a long, hard trip from Quebec to the Northwest Territories. It is presumed that most of the girls will be old enough for marriage, or more than old enough, by the time they arrive. Besides, the fur trappers and ice fishermen aren’t asking for older girls. The play’s principal fur trapper, Jack’s future husband, Mr. Halliday, says, in sending for his mail-order bride: “I want a wife on the younger side. You got that?”

In the play, four young girls make their way west in the company of a cruel chaperone, Madame Auber, who sells one of the girls to a blacksmith in Manitoba and another to a cattle rancher in Alberta. Both of these unfortunate brides speak only French. Madame Auber, though French herself, has nothing but contempt for them. Of the two girls who make it to the Northwest Territories, one, Sarah, a bilingual stutterer, loses her virginity to her mail-order husband on a dog sled; thereafter, she wanders off in the snow and freezes to death in a blizzard.

Jack plays the other one who makes it, Darlin’ Jenny, who successfully prays for the delay of her first period—her “menses,” as they are called throughout the play. She is aware that when she starts bleeding, she’ll be old enough to be Mr. Halliday’s bride—at least in Halliday’s crude opinion. Thus, aided only by prayer, Jenny wills herself not to start. It was this plot point that required Alice’s permission for her son to accept the role and necessitated Jack’s perplexing visit to the nurse’s office, where the school nurse, the young Miss Bell, informed him of “the facts of life”—but only the facts that pertained to
girls,
menstruation foremost among them.

Having seen his first two vaginas in a single day, Jack was not surprised to learn that such a complicated place of business was given to periodic bleeding, but imagine the consternation this caused him when he mistakenly thought that
this
was the long-awaited event Emma Oastler expected to find evidence of in his bedsheets. To Jack’s knowledge, his penis had not yet “squirted”; it alarmed him to imagine that Emma had meant he would squirt
blood.

Jack’s confusion understandably upset the school nurse. Miss Bell had talked to many girls about their first periods; while she was awkward in discussing menstruation with a nine-year-old boy, she was at least prepared to do so. But the area of male nocturnal emissions was way off Miss Bell’s map. She was aghast that Jack could confuse a wet dream with menstrual bleeding, but she was at a loss to explain the difference to him. “In all probability, Jack, you won’t even know the first time you ejaculate in your sleep.”

“The first time I
what
?”

Miss Bell was young and earnest. Jack left the school nurse’s office knowing more than he needed to know about menstruation. As for the specter of his first wet dream, he was in terror. A nocturnal emission sounded like something one might encounter at the bat-cave exhibit in the Royal Ontario Museum. If, in all probability—as Miss Bell had said—Jack wouldn’t even
know
the first time he ejaculated in his sleep, this meant to the boy that he might bleed to death without ever waking up!

In the play, the most impressive hulk among the grade-thirteen girls, Virginia Jarvis, was cast as Jack’s mail-order husband, Mr. Halliday. Ginny Jarvis looked like a fur trapper. She was both big and womanly—in the manner of Emma Oastler and Charlotte Barford, but Ginny was older. She had a more developed mustache on her upper lip than Emma had, and Mrs. Oastler’s push-up bra could never have contained her. Prior to Jack’s first rehearsal, Emma informed him that Ginny Jarvis was one of the two grade-thirteen girls who knew everything about penises; the other one was Ginny’s best friend, Penny Hamilton, who was cast as the evil chaperone, Madame Auber. (Penny had lived for a time in Montreal and did a killer French accent, of the kind everyone in Toronto found very funny.)

As for the grade-twelve girl who, according to Emma, also knew everything about penises—the third boarder—that was Penny’s younger sister, Bonnie. Penny Hamilton was a good-looking girl, and she knew it. Bonnie Hamilton had been in an automobile accident; innumerable surgeries had failed to correct her limp. (It was worse than Lottie’s.) Something permanently twisted in her pelvis caused Bonnie Hamilton to lead with her left foot while dragging her right leg behind her, like a sack. Jack did not find her limp unattractive, but Bonnie did.

Bonnie Hamilton wasn’t in
A Mail-Order Bride in the Northwest Territories;
she refused to be in any plays, because of her limp. But Jack thought Bonnie was more beautiful than Penny. During rehearsals for
A Mail-Order Bride in the Northwest Territories,
he saw Bonnie only when she was sitting down. She was the prompter. In a folding metal chair, with the script open in her lap, Bonnie held a pencil ready to make note of the errors. Naturally, she didn’t limp when she was sitting down.

In the first rehearsal, when Ginny-Jarvis-as-Mr.-Halliday asked Jack-as-Darlin’-Jenny if she’d “started
bleedin’
yet,” the sheer coarseness of the moment evoked an awkward, embarrassed silence from the rest of the cast. “I know, I know—it’s an
unforgivable
question, but that’s the point,” Mr. Ramsey said.

Jack answered in character; he already knew his lines. Bonnie Hamilton didn’t need to prompt
him.
“What do you
mean
?” Jenny screams at Halliday. “Why should I be
bleedin’
?” But Jenny knows exactly what Halliday means.

Halliday grows impatient. He can’t believe how long it’s taking for his child bride to become a woman. One evening, when Jack-as-Jenny is singing a nostalgic song on a porch swing, Ginny-as-Halliday assaults her. Clever girl that she is, Jenny has stolen Madame Auber’s pistol—a prop Mr. Ramsey borrowed from the Upper Canada College boys’ track team. It was a starting gun that fired blanks. At the end of Act Two, Jack-as-Jenny shoots Ginny-as-Halliday with the starting gun. He-as-she fires two very loud blanks into her-as-his chest, and Ginny Jarvis—a star on the St. Hilda’s field-hockey team—falls on the stage with an athletic thud.