"Oh." Mrs. McQuat had taken the quotation from him. He watched her crumple it in her cold hand. "Shouldn't I put it back on the bulletin board?" he asked.
"Let's see if Mr. Gibran can find his way back to the bulletin board all by himself," The Gray Ghost said.
Jack trusted her. He dared to ask her things he was afraid to ask anyone else. There were a growing number of things he wouldn't ask his mother; her distancing herself from him was a warning, but of what Jack wasn't sure. He had tired of the when-you're-old-enough answer, no matter what the reason for her aloofness.
Lottie was Lottie. As much as she had mattered to him once--maybe most of all when he'd been in those North Sea ports and had missed her--now that he was older, Lottie didn't hold him chest-to-chest to compare their beating hearts. At his age, that was a game Jack preferred to play with Emma. (As Emma put it: "You can tell that the most interesting part of Lottie's life is over.")
And Mrs. Wicksteed was old and growing older; when she warmed her increasingly uncooperative fingers over her tea, her fingers would dip in and out of the tea, with which she occasionally sprinkled Jack's shirt and tie. She'd become an expert at doing a necktie during the years of her late husband's arthritis. "Now I have his affliction, Jack," Mrs. Wicksteed told the boy. "I ask you. Does that seem fair?"
The fairness question was one that had occurred to Jack in other areas. "It's not fair that I should turn out to be like my father," he said frankly to Mrs. McQuat. (He was in a phase of being slightly less than frank with Emma on this subject.) "Do you think it's fair?" Jack asked The Gray Ghost. He could see she'd really been a combat nurse--notwithstanding what truth, or lack thereof, resided in the story of her having one lung because she'd been gassed. "Do you think I'm going to turn out like him, Mrs. McQuat?"
"Let's take a walk, Jack."
He could tell they were headed for the chapel. "Am I being punished?" he asked.
"Not at all! We're just going where we can think."
They sat together in one of the foremost pews, facing in the right direction. It was a minor distraction that a grade-three boy was kneeling in the center aisle with his back turned on God. Although The Gray Ghost had positioned him there--however long ago--she seemed surprised to see him in the aisle, but she quickly ignored him.
"If you turn out to be like your father, Jack, don't blame your father."
"Why not?"
"Barring acts of God, you're only a victim if you choose to be one," The Gray Ghost said. From the look of the frightened third grader kneeling in the center aisle, he clearly thought that Mrs. McQuat was describing him.
Thank goodness Jack never asked Emma Oastler his next question, which he addressed to Mrs. McQuat in the chapel. "Is it an act of God if you have sex on your mind every minute?"
"Mercy!" The Gray Ghost said, taking her eyes from the altar to look at him. "Are you serious?"
"Every minute," he repeated. "It's all I dream about, too."
"Jack, have you talked to your mother about this?" Mrs. McQuat asked.
"She'll just say I'm not old enough to talk about it."
"But it seems that you are old enough to be thinking and dreaming about little else!"
"Maybe it will be better in an all-boys' school," Jack said. He knew that an all-boys' school was his mother's next plan for him. Just up the road from St. Hilda's--within easy walking distance, in fact--was Upper Canada College. (The UCC boys were always sniffing around the older of the St. Hilda's girls.) And it was no surprise that Mrs. Wicksteed "knew someone" at Upper Canada College, or that Jack would have good recommendations from his teachers at St. Hilda's--at least academically. He'd already been to UCC for an interview. Coming from the gray-and-maroon standard at St. Hilda's, he thought there was entirely too much blue in the school colors at Upper Canada--their regimental-striped ties were navy blue and white. If you played a varsity sport, the first-team ties (as they were called) were a solid-blue-knit variety--navy blue with square bottoms. Alice had found it ominous that the jocks were singled out and idolized in this fashion. In Jack's interview, his mother freely offered that her son was not athletic.
"How do you know?" Jack asked her. (He'd never had the opportunity to try!)
"Trust me, Jack. You're not." But he trusted his mother less and less.
"Which all-boys' school are you thinking of?" The Gray Ghost asked him.
"Upper Canada College, my mom says."
"I'll have a word with
your mother, Jack. Those UCC boys will eat you alive."
Given his respect for Mrs. McQuat, this was not an encouraging concept. Jack expressed his concern to Emma. "Eat me alive why? Eat me how?"
"It's hard to imagine that you're a jock, Jack."
"So?"
"So they'll eat you alive, so what? The sport of life is gonna be your sport, baby cakes."