"She had an epidural go haywire," Emma explained. "The baby died anyway. It was a real bad deal."
So you could get a limp from a childbirth that went awry! Naturally, Jack thought an epidural was a part of the body, a female part. In the manner in which he'd assumed his mom's C-section referred to an area of the h
ospital in Halifax where Jack was born, so he believed that Lottie had lost her epidural in childbirth. Jack must have imagined that an epidural was somehow crucial to the female anatomy; possibly it prevented limps. Years later, when he couldn't find epidural in the index of Gray's Anatomy, Jack would be reminded of his C-section mistake. (That his mother had never had a Cesarean would be an even bigger discovery.)
"Tea's brewing!" Lottie called to Jack and Emma from the kitchen. Only when he was older would it occur to him that Lottie knew Emma was a menacing girl.
"Have a wet dream for me, little guy," Emma said to Jack's penis. She was such a good friend; she gently helped his penis find its proper place, back inside his pants, and she was especially careful how she zipped up his fly.
"Do penises have dreams?" Jack asked.
"Just remember to tell me when your little guy has one," Emma said.
10
His Audience of One
Jack's grade-two teacher, Mr. Malcolm--at that time, one of only two male teachers at St. Hilda's--was inseparable from his wife, whom he daily brought to school for dire reasons. She was blind and wheelchair-bound, and it seemed to soothe her to hear Mr. Malcolm speak. He was an excellent teacher, patient and kind. Everyone liked Mr. Malcolm, but the entire grade-two class felt sorry for him; his blind and wheelchair-bound wife was a horror. In a school where so many of the older girls were outwardly cruel and inwardly self-destructive, which was not infrequently blamed on their parents' tumultuous divorces, the grade-two kids prayed, every day, that Mr. Malcolm would divorce his wife. Had he murdered her, the class would have forgiven him; if he'd killed her in front of them, they might have applauded.
But Mr. Malcolm was ever the peacemaker, and his shaving choices were ahead of their time. Growing bald, he had shaved his head--not all that common in the early 1970s--and, even less common, he preferred varying lengths of stubble to an actual beard or to being clean-shaven. Back then it was a credit to St. Hilda's that they accepted Mr. Malcolm's shaved head and his stubbled face; not unlike the grade-two children, the administrators of the school had decided not to cause Mr. Malcolm any further harm. The blind wife in the wheelchair made everyone take pity on him.
In the grade-two classroom, the children worked diligently to please him. Mr. Malcolm never had to discipline them; they disciplined themselves. They would do nothing to upset him. Life had already been unfair enough to Mr. Malcolm.
Emma Oastler's assessment of the tragedy was colored by her own intimacy with human cruelty, but in her view of the Malcolms as a couple, Emma was probably not wrong. Mrs. Malcolm, whose name was Jane, fell off a roof at a church picnic. She was high school age at the time, a pretty and popular girl--suddenly paralyzed from the waist down. According to Emma, Mr. Malcolm had been a somewhat younger admirer of Jane's. He fell in love with her when she was paralyzed, chiefly because she was more available.
"He must have been the kind of uncool guy she would never have dated before the accident," Emma said. "But after she fell off the roof, Wheelchair Jane didn't have a lotta choices." Yet if Mr. Malcolm was her choice, even if he was her only choice, Jane Malcolm couldn't have been luckier.
The blindness was another story; that happened to her later, when she'd been married for many years. Jane Malcolm suffered from early-onset macular degeneration. As Mr. Malcolm explained to the grade-two class, his wife had lost her central vision. She could see light, she could make out movement, and she still had some peripheral vision. At the extreme periphery, however, Mrs. Malcolm experienced a loss of color, too.
The loss of her mind was another matter; there was nothing Mr. Malcolm could say to protect the kids, or himself, from that. Thus periphery and peripheral were the so-called vocabulary challenges for opening day in grade two--every day, there would be two more. As for crazed or delusional or paranoid, they were never words on the grade-two vocabulary list. But Wheelchair Jane was all those things; she'd been pushed past the edge of reason.
When Mrs. Malcolm would grind her teeth, or suddenly crash her wheelchair into Patsy Booth's desk, head-on, Jack often looked at Lucinda Fleming--half expecting that Jane Malcolm's visible rage might trigger a silent-rage episode in Lucinda. It was insanity to assault the Booth twins separately. Whenever Mrs. Malcolm attacked Patsy's desk in her wheelchair, Patsy's twin, Heather, also screamed.
On occasion, Mrs. Malcolm would snap her head from side to side as if to rid herself of her peripheral vision. Maybe she thought total blindness would be preferable. And when one of the second graders would raise a hand in response to one of Mr. Malcolm's questions, blind Jane would assume a head-on-her-knees position in her wheelchair--as if a man wielding a knife had appeared in front of her and she'd ducked to prevent him from slashing her throat. These dramatic moments of Mrs. Malcolm becoming unhinged made grade two a most attentive class; while the children listened carefully to Mr. Malcolm's every word, they kept their eyes firmly fixed on her.
For not more than three or four seconds, not more than twice a week, the tired-looking Mr. Malcolm would be at a loss for words; thereupon, Wheelchair Jane would start her journey of repeated collisions. She sailed forth up an aisle--the wheelchair glancing off the kids' desks as she rushed past, skinning her knuckles.
While Mr. Malcolm ran to the nurse's office, to fetch either the nurse or (for more minor injuries) a first-aid kit, Mrs. Malcolm would be left in the kids' tentative care. Someone held the wheelchair from behind so she couldn't careen out of control; the rest of the class stood petrified around her, just out of her reach. They were instructed to not let her get out of the wheelchair, although it's doubtful that seven-year-olds could have stopped her. Fortunately, she never tried to escape; she flailed about, crying out the children's names, which she'd memorized in the first week of school.
"Maureen Yap!" Mrs. Malcolm would holler.
"Here, ma'am!" Maureen would holler back, and Mrs. Malcolm would turn her blind eyes in The Yap's direction.
"Jimmy Bacon!" Mrs. Malcolm would scream.
Jimmy would moan. There was nothing wrong with Wheelchair Jane's hearing; she looked without seeing in Jimmy's direction upon hearing him moan.
"Jack Burns!" she shouted one day.
"I'm right here, Mrs. Malcolm," Jack said. Even in grade two, his diction and enunciation were far in advance of his years.
"Your father was well spoken, too," Mrs. Malcolm announced. "Your father is evil," she added. "Don't let Satan put a curse on you to be like him."
"No, Mrs. Malcolm, I won't." Jack may have answered her with the utmost confidence, but within the mostly all-girls' world of St. Hilda's, it was clear to him that he was fighting overwhelming odds. The Big Bet, which Emma Oastler spoke of with a reverence usually reserved for her favorite novels and movies, heavily favored the suspected potency of William's genes. If womanizing could be passed from father to son, it most certainly would be passed to Jack. In the eyes of almost everyone at St. Hilda's, even in what amounted to the severely limited peripheral vision of Mrs. Malcolm, Jack Burns was his father's son--or about to be.
"You can't blame anyone for being interested, Jack," Emma said philosophically. "It's exciting stuff--to see how you'll turn out." Clearly Mrs. Malcolm had taken a genetic interest in how Jack would turn out, too.
But the worst thing about Jane Malcolm was how she behaved when her husband returned to the grade-two classroom--with either the school nurse or the first-aid kit. "Here I am--I'm back, Jane!" he always announced.