"Did you hear that, children?" Mrs. Malcolm would begin. "He's come back! He's never gone for long and he always comes back!"
"Please, Jane," Mr. Malcolm would say.
"Mr. Malcolm likes taking care of me," Wheelchair Jane told the class. "He does everything for me--all the things I can't do myself."
"Now, now, Jane, please," Mr. Malcolm would say, but she wouldn't let him take her skinned knuckles in his hands. Slowly, at first, but with ever-quickening strikes, she slapped his face.
"Mr. Malcolm loves doing everything for me!" she cried. "He feeds me, he dresses me, he washes me--"
"Jane, darling--" Mr. Malcolm tried to say.
"He wipes me!" Mrs. Malcolm screamed; that was always the end of it, before she resorted to whimpers and moans.
Jimmy Bacon would commence to moan with her, which was soon followed by the remarkable blanket-sucking sounds that the Booth twins were capable of making--even without blankets. Heel-thumping from the French twins never lagged far behind. And Jack would steal a look at Lucinda Fleming, who was usually looking at him. Her serene smile betrayed nothing of the mysterious rage inside her. Do you wanna see it? her smile seemed to say. Well, I'm gonna show you, her smile promised--but not yet.
It was a not-yet world Jack lived in, from kindergarten through grade two. Pitying Mr. Malcolm was an education in itself. But more memorably, and more lastingly, Jack's education was as much in Emma Oastler's hands as it was in Mr. Malcolm's.
On rainy days, or whenever it was snowing, Emma slid into the backseat of the Lincoln Town Car and instructed Peewee as follows: "Just drive us around, Peewee. No peeking in the backseat. Keep your eyes on the road."
"That okay with you, mon?" Peewee always asked Jack.
"Yes, that would be fine, Peewee. Thank you for asking," the boy replied.
"You're the boss, miss," Peewee would say.
Scrunched down low in the backseat, Jack and Emma chewed gum nonstop--their breath minty or fruity, depending on the flavor. Emma would let Jack undo her braid, but she would never let him weave it back together. With her braid undone, Emma had enough hair for both of them to hide their faces under its spell. "If you get your gum stuck in my hair, honey pie, I'm gonna kill you," she often said--but once, when Jack was laughing about something, Emma suddenly sounded like his mother. "Don't laugh when you're chewing gum--you could choke."
There was the puzzling moment when they checked on her training bra, as Emma disparagingly called it. From what Jack could tell, the instructions the bra had given to her breasts were already working. At least her breasts were getting bigger. Wasn't that the point?
Speaking of growing, his penis had made no discernible progress. "How's the little guy?" Emma would invariably ask, and Jack would dutifully show her. "What are you thinking about, little guy?" Emma asked his penis once.
If penises could dream, Jack didn't know why he was surprised to hear that they could think as well, but the little guy had demonstrated no trace of a thought process--not yet.
After grade two, Jack's sightings of Mr. Malcolm were limited mainly to the boys' washroom, where the teacher occasionally went to weep. But Jack most frequently caught Mr. Malcolm in the act of examining his facial stubble--as if the shadow of his beard-in-progress or his mustache-in-the-making were his principal (maybe his only) vanity.
Sightings of Mrs. Malcolm were also rare. Usually not more than twice a day, one of the girls' washrooms would be posted with an OUT OF ORDER sign, which meant that Mr. Malcolm was attending to Wheelchair Jane. The girls were instructed to respect their privacy.
Once Jack heard the unmistakable sound of Mrs. Malcolm slapping her husband in the washroom. The boy tried to hurry in the hall, to outrun the sound, but he could never outdistance Mr. Malcolm's pathetic "Now, now, Jane," which was quickly followed by his "Jane, darling--" upon which some commonplace clamor in the corridor drowned out the repeated melodrama. (Several grade-six girls were passing; naturally, they sounded like several dozen.)
In Jack's remaining two years at St. Hilda's, there were many times when he missed Mr. Malcolm, but he did not miss being a witness to the grade-two teacher's perpetual abuse. From then on, when Jack saw people in wheelchairs, he felt no less pity for them--no less than before he met Mrs. Malcolm. Jack just felt more pity for the people attending to them.
The little guy and Jack were eight years old when they started grade three. Even before his penis demonstrated its capacity for having dreams and ideas entirely of its own devising, the little guy and Jack had begun to live parallel (if not altogether separate) lives.
That Miss Caroline Wurtz had a "perishable" beauty was enhanced by her being petite. Certainly she was smaller than any of the grade-three mothers. And Miss Wurtz wore a perfume that encouraged the grade-three boys to invent problems with their math. Miss Wurtz would correct a boy's math by leaning over his desk, where he could inhale her perfume while taking a closer and most desirable look at the fetching birthmark on her right collarbone and the small, fishhook-shaped scar on the same side of her throat.
Both the birthmark and the scar seemed to inflame themselves whenever Miss Wurtz was upset. In the ultraviolet light of the bat-cave exhibit, Jack vividly remembered her scar; it was pulsating like a neon strobe. How she got it was in the category of Jack's imagination close to Tattoo Peter's missing leg and Lottie's limp, although the latter subject was further complicated by the boy's mistaken assumption that an epidural was a vital part of the female anatomy.
That Charlotte Bronte was Miss Wurtz's favorite writer, and Jane Eyre her bible, was known to everyone in the junior school; an annual dramatization of the novel was their principal cultural contribution to the middle and senior grades. The older girls might have been more capable of acting out such ambitious material--not only Jane's indomitable spirit but also Rochester's blindness and religious transformation--yet Miss Wurtz had claimed Jane Eyre as junior-school property, and in both grades three and four, Jack was awarded the role of Rochester.
What other boy in the junior school could have memorized the lines? "Dread remorse when you are tempted to err, Miss Eyre: remorse is the poison of life." Jack delivered that line as if he knew what it meant.
In grade three, the first year Jack played Rochester, the grade-six girl who played Jane was Connie Turnbull. Her brooding, rejected presence made her a good choice for an orphan. When she said, " 'It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity,' " you believed her. (Connie Turnbull would never be a tranquil soul.)
Of course it was ludicrous when it was necessary for Jack-as-Rochester to take Connie-as-Jane in his arms and cry: " 'Never, never was anything at once so frail and so indomitable.' " He only came up to her, and everyone else's, breasts. " 'I could bend her with my finger and thumb!' " Jack cried, to the accompanying laughter and disbelief of the audience.
Connie Turnbull looked at him, as if to say: "Just try it, penis breath!" But it wasn't only his memorization skills and his diction and enunciation that made Jack so captivating as an actor. Miss Wurtz had taught him to take command of the stage.
"How?" he asked her.