The heads bowed before him were quite a sight, although he’d not spotted Chenko in the row directly behind his mother until Chenko bowed his head. There on his bald pate was the familiar Ukrainian tattoo—a snarling wolf, which (no matter how many times Jack had seen it) was always unnerving.
“The day Thou gavest, Lord, is ended,” Jack said to the only face looking back at him—the wolf’s. “Thank You for it.” Now what? he wondered, but Jack was saved by the organist, whom he never saw. (He or she was behind Jack.) The organist knew how and when to fill a silence, and—at St. Hilda’s—with what to fill it. The hymn that came crashing down upon them was one they knew by heart. Even those castaway boys who’d left the school and its morning chapel at the end of grade four—they’d not forgotten it. Certainly all the Old Girls, of whatever age, had committed these quatrains to memory; they doubtless murmured their beloved William Blake in their sleep.
And what about the teenage boarders standing restlessly in the rear of the chapel, where Mr. Ramsey became their instant choirmaster? What about those young women yearning for a life out of their school uniforms, but fearful of what that life might be—as girls of that blossoming age are? Boy, could they ever belt out that hymn! They’d sung it every week, or twice a week, in their seemingly interminable time at St. Hilda’s.
The tune of “Jerusalem”—Hymn 157, a dog-eared page in the St. Hilda’s hymnals—resounded triumphantly in every Old Girl’s heart. They were William Blake’s words, set to song—that odd belief that Jesus came to England, where Blake imagined a spiritual Israel.
“And did those feet in ancient time/Walk upon England’s mountains green?” the congregation sang.
Jack came down the altar stairs, where he was momentarily accosted by Wheelchair Jane; wailing like a banshee, she blocked the center aisle. But Mr. Malcolm never hesitated; he darted into the aisle and wheeled his startled wife a hundred and eighty degrees around, propelling her wheelchair ahead of him. Jack followed the Malcolms up the aisle—pausing only a second for Mrs. Oastler, Emma’s grieving mother, to take his arm and allow him to escort her. Chenko, perhaps the only member of the congregation who wasn’t singing—Ukrainian wrestlers weren’t familiar with William Blake—was still weeping when Alice ushered him up the aisle beside her. (Chenko hobbled on his cane.) Pew by pew, from front to back, the congregation followed them.
“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 their 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.