Until I Find You

“My mom’s?”

“I think you can touch her heart anytime, Jack.”

Whose heart could old Rochester touch, anyway? Wasn’t it Jane who touched one’s heart? But that wasn’t what Miss Wurtz meant. She meant who would want to watch Jack but remain unseen; who was the likeliest stranger in the audience, whose interest was only in Jack? Who wanted to be impressed by Jack while sparing himself the boy’s scrutiny?

Jack’s audience of one was his father, of course. From the moment he imagined William, Jack could command every inch of the stage; he was on-camera for the rest of his life. Jack would learn later that an actor’s job was not complicated, but it had two parts. Whoever you were, you made the audience love you; then you broke their hearts.

Once Jack could imagine his father in the shadows of every audience, he could perform anything. “Think about it, Jack,” Miss Wurtz urged him. “Just one heart. Whose is it?”

“My dad’s?”

“What a good place to begin!” she told the boy, both her birthmark and her scar inflaming themselves. “Let’s see how that works.” It worked, all right—even in the case of Jack’s miniature Rochester to Connie Turnbull’s bigger, stronger Jane. It worked from the start.

When Rochester says, “Jane! You think me, I daresay, an irreligious dog—” well, Jack had them all. It was ridiculous, but he had Connie Turnbull, too. When she took his hand and kissed it, her lips were parted; she made contact with her teeth and her tongue.

“Nice job, Jack,” she whispered in his ear. Connie continued to hold his hand for the duration of the applause. He could feel Emma Oastler hating Connie Turnbull; from the unseen audience, Emma’s jealousy swept onstage like a draft.

But what Jack liked best about the Rochester role was the opportunity to be blind. Doubtless he was drawing on the collision-course lunacy of Mrs. Malcolm, but playing blind afforded Jack another opportunity. When he tripped and fell in rehearsals, it was Miss Wurtz who rushed to his aid. (Her ministrations to his injuries, which were entirely feigned, were why he tripped and fell.)

His penis’s first thoughtful reaction was not to Connie Turnbull French-kissing his hand—God, no. The little guy’s first idea of his own was clearly in response to Miss Caroline Wurtz. The older- woman thing, which had begun in Oslo with Ingrid Moe, would haunt Jack Burns all his life.

Miss Wurtz’s hands were not much bigger than a grade-three girl’s, and when she comforted a child— sometimes, when she just spoke to him or her—she would rest one of her hands on the child’s shoulder, where he or she could feel her fingers tremble as lightly as the movements of a small, agitated bird. It was as if her hand, or all of Miss Wurtz, were about to take flight. Not one of the grade-three children would have been surprised if, one day, Miss Wurtz had simply flown away. She was that delicate; she was as fragile as a woman made of feathers. (Hence “perishable,” in another sense.)

But Miss Wurtz could not manage the grade-three classroom. The kids were no more badly behaved than other third graders, although Roland Simpson would later, as a teenager, spend time in a reform school and ultimately wind up in jail. And Jimmy Bacon’s penchant for moaning was only a small part of his wretchedness— Jimmy was no joy to be with on a regular basis. He once dressed as a ghost for the grade-three Halloween party and wore nothing, not even underwear, under a bedsheet with holes cut out of it for his eyes. Jimmy was so badly frightened by one of The Gray Ghost’s sudden appearances—Mrs. McQuat was the grade-four teacher—that he pooed in his sheet.

But Miss Wurtz was so delicate that she might not have been able to manage a kindergarten, or her own children. Did her strength emerge only onstage? Alice’s theory about Miss Wurtz was intuitive but unkind. “Caroline looks like she never got over somebody. Poor thing.”

Jack Burns took from Miss Wurtz a lifelong lesson: life was not a stage; life was improv. Miss Wurtz had no tolerance for improvisation; the children learned their lines, speaking them exactly as they were written. That Jack was born with superior memorization skills was a considerable advantage in the theater; that Miss Wurtz encouraged Jack to imagine his audience of one was a gift both she and his missing father gave him. But Jack was as attentive a student of Miss Wurtz’s failure in the classroom as he was of her instructions for success onstage. It was evident to him that one could not succeed as a player in life without developing improvisational skills. Yes, you needed to know your lines. But on some occasions, you also had to be able to make your lines up. For what she could teach him, but primarily for what she had failed to master herself, Miss Wurtz captured Jack’s attention; not surprisingly, she would live in his memory (and remain a part of his life) longer than any of the third-grade girls.

Jack often dreamed of kissing Caroline Wurtz, at which moments she was never dressed as a schoolteacher. In his dreams, Miss Wurtz wore the kind of old-fashioned underwear Jack had first seen in Lottie’s mail-order catalogs. For reasons that were disturbingly unclear to him, this type of underwear was advertised for teens and unmarried women. (Why women wore a different kind of underwear after they were married was, and would remain, a mystery to Jack.)

As for Miss Wurtz’s real attire, in the classroom, she occasionally wore a cream-colored blouse you could almost see through, but—because it was cold in the grade-three room—she more often dressed in sweaters, which fit her well. Jack’s mother said they were cashmere sweaters, which meant that Miss Wurtz was buying her clothes with something more than a St. Hilda’s faculty salary.

“The Wurtz has gotta have a boyfriend,” Emma said. “A rich one, or at least one with good taste—that would be my guess.”

Jack had repeatedly denied Emma’s accusation that Connie Turnbull gave him a boner every time she French-kissed his hand—or that when he-as-Rochester took Connie-as-Jane in his arms, with his head buried in her breasts, there was any response from the little guy. It hadn’t yet occurred to Emma that Jack had a hard-on every minute he spent in close proximity to Caroline Wurtz, whether or not he was in her actual company or she were in various stages of undress in his dreams.

As for The Wurtz, as Emma called her, having a rich boyfriend or one with good taste—or even an ex-boyfriend—Jack didn’t want such a character to exist, lest he invade the boy’s dreams of Miss Wurtz in her mail-order corsets and girdles and bras.

Jack didn’t dream about the grade-three girls at all, not even Lucinda Fleming, who’d managed—for more than two years—to keep her silent rage well hidden. And if, in his dreams, Miss Wurtz had the faintest trace of a mustache on her extremely narrow upper lip—well, that was Emma Oastler’s doing. He couldn’t control his attraction to Emma’s upper lip, especially in his dreams. More and more, when the little guy came alive, he did so not at Jack’s bidding but independently.

“Any news, Jack?” Emma would whisper in the backseat of the limo, as Peewee drove them around and around Forest Hill.

“Not yet,” Jack answered. (He had guessed, correctly, that this was the safest thing to say.)

At night, after Lottie had put him to bed, Jack often went into his mother’s room and climbed into her bed and fell asleep there. Given their different schedules, his mom was almost never there. She would come home and crawl into bed long after he’d fallen asleep. Sometimes, in her half-sleep, she would throw one of her legs over Jack, which always woke him up. There was the smell of cigarette smoke and pot in her hair, and the gasoline-like tang of white wine on her breath. Occasionally they would both be awake and lie whispering in the semidarkness. Jack didn’t know why they whispered; it wasn’t because Lottie or Mrs. Wicksteed could hear them.

“How are you, Jack?”

“I’m fine. How are you?”

“We’re becoming like strangers,” Alice whispered one time. Jack was disappointed that his mother hadn’t seen him act, and he said so. “Oh, I’ve seen you act!” Alice said.

Jack meant in Jane Eyre, or in Miss Wurtz’s other exercises in dramatization. While The Wurtz loved the stage, she preferred adapting novels. It would occur to Jack only later that, by choosing to dramatize novels, Miss Wurtz controlled every aspect of every performance. There was no playwright to give the children the wrong directions. Miss Wurtz adapted her favorite novels for the theater her way. If, as actors, they were instructed to take command of the stage, The Wurtz was absolutely in charge of every action they undertook—of every word they uttered.