"Bring me my bow of burning gold!/Bring me my arrows of desire!/Bring me my spear! O clouds unfold!/Bring me my chariot of fire," sang the multitude.
Even Penny Hamilton's little girls were singing. (Of course they were--they were probably students at St. Hilda's!)
As Jack neared the rear entrance to the chapel, one of the seventeen-or eighteen-year-olds--a pale-skinned, blue-eyed blonde, as thin as a model--appeared to swoon or faint or trip into her fellow boarders' arms. From the look of her, this might have been more the result of a starvation diet than her near-enough-to-touch proximity to Jack Burns, a movie star--not that Jack hadn't seen girls her age swoon or faint or trip in his presence before. Or it might have been the overstimulating effect of the soaring hymn.
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 th
eir 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.