“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.
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.