Until I Find You

Later Jack would realize what wonderful things Miss Wurtz left out of her adaptations. She was in charge of censorship as well. When The Wurtz adapted Tess of the d’Urbervilles, she made much more of the “Maiden” chapter than she made of “Maiden No More.” More disturbing, she cast Jack as Tess.

“Nobody blamed Tess as she blamed herself,” the dramatization began. (Miss Wurtz, with her perfect diction and enunciation, was a big fan of voice-over.) Jack was, without a doubt, a good choice to play “a mere vessel of emotion untinctured by experience.”

But even in a dress—a white gown, no less—and even as a milkmaid, the boy could take command of the stage. “ ‘Phases of her childhood lurked in her aspect still,’ ” Miss Wurtz read to the audience, while Angel Clare failed to ask Jack-as-Tess to dance. What a wimp Angel was! Jimmy Bacon, that miserable moaner who pooed in a sheet, was the perfect choice to play him.

“ ‘… for all her bouncing handsome womanliness,’ ” Miss Wurtz fatalistically intoned, “ ‘you could sometimes see her twelfth year in her cheeks, or her ninth sparkle from her eyes; and even her fifth would flit over the curves of her mouth now and then.’ ”

All the while, Jack-as-Tess had nothing to do. He stood onstage, radiating sexless innocence. He was prouder of his role as Rochester, but even as Tess, he had his moments—sexless innocence not least, if not best, among them. What Tess says to d’Urberville, for example (d’Urberville, that pig, was played by the thuggish Charlotte Barford, whom The Wurtz wisely borrowed from the middle school): “ ‘Did it never strike your mind that what every woman says some women may feel?’ ” (Charlotte Barford looked as if she-as-he had thoroughly enjoyed seducing him-as-her.)

When Jack buried his dead baby in the churchyard, he could hear the older girls in the audience—they were already crying. And the tale of Tess’s undoing had only begun! Jack spoke Hardy’s narration as if it were dialogue over the baby’s grave. “ ‘… in that shabby corner of God’s allotment where He lets the nettles grow,’ ” Jack began, while the older girls in the audience imagined that this could be their predicament, which Miss Wurtz, if not Thomas Hardy, had cleverly intended, “ ‘… and where all unbaptized infants, notorious drunkards, suicides, and others of the conjecturally damned are laid,’ ” Jack-as-Tess carried on, stimulated by the weeping older girls. (No fan of improvisation, Miss Wurtz had not permitted Jack to skip the “conjecturally,” though he’d repeatedly flubbed the word in rehearsals.)

When Jack said, “ ‘But you would not dance with me,’ ” to that wimp Jimmy-Bacon-as-Angel-Clare, the hearts of the older girls in the audience were wrenched anew. “ ‘O, I hope that is of no ill-omen for us now!’ ” Jack-as-Tess told Jimmy-as-Angel, while the girls wept afresh—because, with Hardy, what wasn’t an ill omen? The girls knew Tess was doomed, as unalterably as Miss Wurtz wanted them to know it.

That was The Wurtz’s message to the girls. Be careful! Anyone can get pregnant! Every man who isn’t a wimp, like Jimmy-Bacon-as-Angel, is a pig, like Charlotte-Barford-as-d’Urberville. And Jack-Burns-as-Tess got Miss Wurtz’s message across. Caroline Wurtz’s junior-school dramatizations amounted to moral instructions to the middle- and senior-school girls.

Jack was in grade three. A dramatization of Tess of the d’Urbervilles was incomprehensible to him. But the message of the story wasn’t for Jack. At St. Hilda’s, the most important messages were delivered to the older girls. Jack was just an actor. Miss Wurtz knew he could handle the lines, even if he didn’t understand them. And in case a total idiot (among the older girls) might have missed the point, all the dramatizations were of novels wherein women were put to the test.

When Jack played Hester Prynne in The Wurtz’s adaptation of The Scarlet Letter, he couldn’t persuade his mom to come see him as an eight-year-old adulteress with the letter A on his-as-her chest. “I hate that story,” Alice whispered to her son in the semidarkness of her bedroom. “It’s so unfair. I’ll ask Caroline to take some pictures. I’ll look at photographs, Jack, but I don’t want to see that story dramatized.”

Miss Wurtz shrewdly recognized in Wendy Holton’s preternaturally thin, cruel body—in her unyielding knees, her fists-of-stone hardness—a perfect likeness to the obsessed and vengeful Roger Chillingworth. Once again, in casting, The Wurtz robbed the middle school of one of Jack’s former tormentors.

The Reverend Dimmesdale was lamentably miscast, although in choosing Lucinda Fleming, who was a head taller than Jack was in grade three, Miss Wurtz might have been hoping that Lucinda’s silent rage would select a pivotal moment of Dimmesdale’s guilt in which to erupt onstage and frighten the bejesus out of them all. Perhaps when Dimmesdale cries to Hester: “May God forgive us both! We are not, Hester, the worst sinners in the world. There is one worse than even the polluted priest!” That might have worked, had Lucinda Fleming simply lost it at that moment—had she begun to bash her head against the footlights or made some woeful, demented effort to strangle herself in the stage curtains.

But Lucinda kept her rage to herself. She may have been as tortured as the Reverend Dimmesdale, but she seemed to be saving her long-anticipated explosion for an offstage moment. Jack was convinced it was something she was saving just for him. But being onstage with Lucinda-as-Dimmesdale was better than being backstage with Wendy-as-Chillingworth, because—once she was out of Miss Wurtz’s sight—Wendy held Jack personally responsible for her being cast as Chillingworth in the first place. (Admittedly, it was a thankless part.) Therefore, The Scarlet Letter was a bruising production for Jack. Wendy punched him or kneed him in the ribs whenever she could get away with it.

“My goodness,” Alice whispered to her son in the semidarkness. (She could tell he was sore just by touching him.) When she turned on the light, she said: “What are those Puritans doing to you, Jack? Are you wearing the letter A, or are they hitting you with it?”

His mother wouldn’t come see him throw himself under a train in Miss Wurtz’s rendition of Anna Karenina, either. (“I’ll ask Caroline to take more pictures, Jack.”) There was no end to the wronged women in Caroline Wurtz’s instructive repertoire. And how brilliant was The Wurtz’s choice of Emma Oastler for the role of Count Vronsky? Emma even had the requisite mustache for the part!

After school—in Jack’s room, or just hanging out in the backseat of the Town Car while Peewee stole a look at Emma’s legs—Emma controlled their topics of conversation, as before. Jack could not take command of that stage, where he and Emma were engaged in an improvisational performance of the kind he needed to learn vastly more about.

“This is perfect, Jack—we’re having a love affair!”

“We are?”

“Onstage, I mean.”

“But what are we having here?” he asked—meaning the backseat of the Town Car, where he lay pinned, with one of Emma’s heavy legs thrown over him, much in the impulsive, half-asleep manner that his mom occasionally threw a leg over him; or on the bed in his room, where Emma told Lottie she was helping Jack with his homework and not to bother them.

“He’s fallen behind, Lottie. I can help him catch up, if I can just get him to listen to me.”

How could he not listen to her? In the first place, she simply overpowered him on the backseat or on his bed. And she knew he couldn’t resist her mustache; she would brush her silky upper lip against him. She ran her mustache over the back of his hand while she imitated Connie Turnbull’s French kiss, which she did a better job of than Connie; or against his cheek, or even (after she’d untucked his shirt) over his bare belly, pausing to give special consideration to his navel. “Do you ever wash this thing, Jack? It’s got lint in it, you know.”

It was all prelude—whether she was pretending she was Count Vronsky and Jack was Anna, or whether she was herself, Emma Oastler, who would never be a minor character, not in Jack’s life. Everything led up to the “end line,” as Miss Wurtz was fond of saying. “Hit your end line so that your audience of one remembers it, Jack. Say your end line so that no one can forget it, okay?”

“How’s the little guy doing? What’s he up to, Jack?” Emma always got around to asking.

It was a crucial time—they were in rehearsals for Anna Karenina but had not yet been subjected to Miss Wurtz’s plans for Sense and Sensibility. Emma and Jack were doing “homework” on his bed. Lottie could be heard banging around below them in the kitchen. To Emma’s question