Until I Find You (3 page)

Thus Jack Burns was born in Halifax, under the care of churchgoers at the
other
St. Paul’s. As his mother remembered them—for the most part, fondly—they demonstrated considerable sympathy for a wayward choirgirl from the Church of Scotland, and they expressed the utmost contempt for the licentious organist who was one of their own. Scottish Episcopalians and Canadian Anglicans were cut from the same religious cloth. Apparently, it was because of those Anglicans at St. Paul’s in Halifax that William did not long remain in hiding in Toronto.

“The church was onto him,” as Alice put it.

In the meantime, after Jack was born in Nova Scotia, his mother went to work for Charlie Snow. Charlie was an Englishman who’d been a sailor in the British Merchant Navy in World War One; he was reputed to have jumped ship in Montreal, where Freddie Baldwin, who was also from England and had fought in the Boer War, taught him how to tattoo.

Both Freddie Baldwin and Charlie Snow had known the Great Omi. People paid to see the Great Omi’s tattooed face; he used to come to Halifax with a circus. When he walked around town, he wore a ski mask. “No one got a free look,” Jack’s mom told him. (This amounted to more nightmare material for the boy; Jack couldn’t stop himself from imagining the terrible tattoos on the Great Omi’s face.)

From Charlie Snow, Alice learned to rinse the tattoo machines with ethyl alcohol; she cleaned the tubes with pipe cleaners, which she’d soaked in the alcohol, and every night she boiled the tubes and needles in a steamer. “The kind meant for cooking clams and lobsters,” Alice said.

Charlie Snow made his own bandages out of linen. “There wasn’t much hepatitis then,” Alice explained.

She told Jack that Freddie Baldwin had given Charlie Snow his most impressive tattoo. Over Charlie’s heart, Sitting Bull sat facing General Custer, who stared straight ahead, unseeing, on the far right of Charlie’s chest. Dead-center on Charlie Snow’s breastbone was a full-sailed ship; a banner, unfurled from Charlie’s clavicle, said
HOMEWARD BOUND.

Charlie Snow wouldn’t get home to his final resting place until 1969, when he was eighty. (He died of a bleeding ulcer.) Alice learned a lot from Charlie Snow, but she learned how to do a Japanese carp from Jerry Swallow, whose tattoo name was Sailor Jerry; he’d become Charlie Snow’s apprentice in 1962. Alice liked to say that she and Jerry Swallow “apprenticed together” with Charlie Snow, but of course she’d already been apprenticed to her father at Persevere in the Port of Leith.

Long before she’d docked in Halifax, Jack’s mother knew how to tattoo.

Jack Burns had no memory of his birthplace; until he was four, Toronto was the only town he knew. He was still an infant when his mom caught wind of his father and what he was up to in Toronto, and they followed him there from Halifax. But Jack’s dad had left town ahead of them, which was getting to be a familiar story. By the time the boy could comprehend his father’s absence, William was rumored to be back in Europe, having crossed the Atlantic once again.

For much of his young life, Jack would wonder if the story of his dad’s exploits in Toronto was what first led his mom to St. Hilda’s. Unthinkably, the school had hired William Burns to train the senior choir, which was composed of girls in grades nine through thirteen. William also gave private lessons in piano and organ; these were almost exclusively for the older girls. One can only imagine what Jack, as a teenager, would think of his father’s adventures at an all-girls’ school! (William’s noticeable contribution to the girls’ musical education led St. Hilda’s to make him the principal organist at the daily chapel services as well.)

Not surprisingly, William’s success at St. Hilda’s was short-lived. Although a girl in grade eleven—one of his piano students—was the first to succumb to his charms, it was a grade-thirteen girl whom he got pregnant. He later drove the girl to Buffalo for an illegal abortion. By the time Alice got to town with her illegitimate child in tow, William had fled, and Jack and his mother were once more welcomed by churchgoers.

St. Hilda’s was an Anglican school; the school’s chapel, where many of the St. Hilda’s graduates were later married, was a Toronto bastion of the Anglican Church of Canada. The few scholarships to the school that existed in the 1960s were funded by the Old Girls’ Association, a powerful alumnae organization. Children of the clergy were generally helped first; other decisions regarding who got financial aid were arbitrary. In addition to the Anglicans and the school faculty and administration, the Old Girls quickly heard of Alice and her condition. (Jack, of course, was the condition.) Thus, when Alice told Jack that she was arranging his admittance as one of the few new boys at St. Hilda’s, he assumed that his mom had the Old Girls’ help.

In fact, Alice and Jack had already been lucky; they’d found lodgings in the home of an Old Girl from St. Hilda’s. Mrs. Wicksteed was a warhorse for the alumnae association. Inexplicably, upon her husband’s death, she’d also become a champion of unwed mothers. She not only battled on their behalf—she even took them in.

Mrs. Wicksteed was a widow long past grieving; she lived virtually alone in a stately but not too imposing house at the corner of Spadina and Lowther, where Jack and his mom were given rooms. They were not big and there were only two of them, with a shared bath, but they were pretty and clean with high ceilings.

The Old Girl’s housekeeper, whose name was Lottie, was a former Prince Edward Islander with a limp. Lottie became the boy’s nanny while Alice sought the only work she knew.

In the 1960s, Toronto was hardly a tattoo mecca of North America. Alice’s apprenticeship to her dad in Persevere—and her secondary education in Halifax, with Charlie Snow and Sailor Jerry—had overqualified her for Toronto’s tattoo parlors. She was way better than Beachcomber Bill, who (for reasons unknown to Jack) didn’t offer her a job, and she was also better than the man they called the Chinaman, who did. His real name was Paul Harper and he didn’t look Chinese, but he knew that Alice was the best tattoo artist in Toronto in 1965; he hired her without a moment’s hesitation.

The Chinaman’s shop was on the northwest corner of Dundas and Jarvis. Near the old Warwick Hotel, there was a Victorian house with steps leading down to a basement door. The tattoo parlor was in the basement, and you entered it directly from the sidewalk on Dundas; the curtains on the basement windows were always drawn.

As a child, Jack Burns occasionally remembered to include Paul Harper in his prayers. The so-called Chinaman helped Alice launch her career in what would be the city of her choice, even if it would never be Jack’s.

But it’s no good being beholden to some people; indebtedness can come with a price. While the Chinaman never made Alice feel obligated to him, Mrs. Wicksteed was another matter. That she meant well was unquestioned, but to say, as her divorced daughter did, that Jack and Alice were her “rent-free boarders” would be a misuse of “rent-free.”

Mrs. Wicksteed rashly decided that Alice’s Scottish accent was a lowering mark upon her social station—more permanently damaging than her exotic, if unsavory, involvement with the tattoo arts. As Jack understood things, it was Mrs. Wicksteed’s belief that his mom’s burr was both a violation of English—that is, as Mrs. Wicksteed spoke it—and a curse that would condemn “poor Alice” to a station lower than Leith for all eternity.

As an Old Girl with deep pockets and an abiding devotion to St. Hilda’s, Mrs. Wicksteed hired a young English teacher there, a Miss Caroline Wurtz, who was expected to change Alice’s offensive accent. Miss Wurtz, in Mrs. Wicksteed’s view, not only excelled in enunciation and diction; it seemed she also lacked an interfering imagination that might have found Alice’s burr likable. Or possibly Miss Wurtz more deeply disapproved of Alice—the accent, in her view, being the
least
offensive thing about the young tattoo artist.

Caroline Wurtz was from Germany, via Edmonton; she was an excellent teacher. She could have cured anyone of a foreign accent—she attacked the very word
foreign
with a confident air. And whatever the source of her seeming disapproval of Alice, Miss Wurtz clearly doted on Jack. She could not take her eyes off the boy; sometimes, when she looked at him, she seemed to be reading his future in the contours of his face.

As for Alice, her attachment to Scotland had eluded her; she submitted to Caroline’s enunciation and diction as if there were nothing in her own language she held dear. Her father’s death—after her arrival in Halifax, but before Jack was born—and William’s rejection had made Alice no match for Miss Wurtz.

Thus, in addition to losing her virtue on one side of the Atlantic, Alice lost her Scottish accent on the other.

“It was not a lot to lose,” she would one day confide to Jack. (The boy assumed that his mother meant the accent.) Alice seemed to bear neither Miss Wurtz nor Mrs. Wicksteed a grudge. Jack’s mom wasn’t a well-educated woman, but she was nonetheless well spoken. Mrs. Wicksteed was most kind to her, and to Jack.

As for Lottie, with her limp, the boy loved her. She always held his hand, often taking it before he could reach for hers. And when Lottie hugged him, Jack felt it was as much for her own sake as it was to make him feel loved.

“Hold your breath and I’ll hold mine,” she would tell the boy. When they did so, they could feel their hearts beating chest-to-chest. “You must be alive,” Lottie always said.

“You must be alive, too, Lottie,” the boy replied, gasping for breath.

Jack would later learn that Lottie had left Prince Edward Island in much the same condition as his mother had been when she sailed for Halifax—only Lottie’s child was stillborn upon her arrival in Toronto, where Mrs. Wicksteed and the network of St. Hilda’s Old Girls had been most kind to her. Whether you called them Anglicans or Episcopalians, or worshipers in the Church of England, those Old Girls
were
a network. Considering that Jack and his mom were waifs in the New World, they were fortunate to be in the Old Girls’ care.

2

Saved by the Littlest Soldier

B
ecause Stronach is an Aberdeenshire name, Alice’s dad, Bill Stronach, was known in the tattoo world as Aberdeen Bill—notwithstanding that he’d been born in Leith and had little to do with Aberdeen. According to Alice, who was his only child, Bill Stronach spent a drunken weekend in Aberdeen—one of those weekends when everything went wrong—and as a result, he was Aberdeen Bill for the rest of his life. As a younger man, before Alice was born, Aberdeen Bill had traveled with circuses. He’d tattooed the circus people in their tents at night, usually by the light of an oil lamp. He’d learned to make his best black ink from the soot on oil lamps, which he mixed with molasses.

In the fall of 1969, before Jack and his mom left for Europe, Alice wrote letters to the tattoo artists she had heard of in those cities she and her son would be visiting. She said she’d learned her trade at Persevere in the Port of Leith; that she was Aberdeen Bill’s daughter would suffice. There wasn’t a tattooer worth his needles in those North Sea ports who hadn’t heard of Aberdeen Bill.

Jack and Alice went to Copenhagen first. Ole Hansen was in the shop at Nyhavn 17; he’d received Alice’s letter and had been expecting her. Like Aberdeen Bill, Tattoo Ole was a sailor’s tattooer—a maritime man. (He would never have called himself a tattoo artist; he preferred to say he was a tattooist or a tattooer.) And like Aberdeen Bill, Tattoo Ole was a man of many hearts and mermaids, serpents and ships, flags and flowers, butterflies and naked ladies.

It was Tattoo Ole—then a young man, in his early forties—who gave Alice her tattoo name. She and Jack walked into Ole’s shop on Nyhavn, with the boats slapping on the choppy water of the gray canal—a late-November wind was blowing off the Baltic. Ole looked up from a tattoo-in-progress: a naked lady on the broad back of a half-naked man.

“You must be Daughter Alice,” Tattoo Ole said. Thus Alice had a name for herself before she had her own tattoo parlor.

Tattoo Ole hired her on the spot. For the first week, Ole did all the outlining and assigned her the shading; by the second week, he was letting her do her own outlining.

All that seemed to matter at Tattoo Ole’s was that Ole Hansen was a maritime man and Daughter Alice fit in. After all, she’d grown up practicing on her father; she’d poked her first tattoos by hand, before her dad had shown her how to use the electric machine.

From Persevere, her father’s shop in Leith, Alice was familiar with the acetate stencils that Tattoo Ole used. She could do a broken heart or a heart torn in two, or a bleeding heart in thorns and roses. She did a scary skull and crossbones and a fire-breathing dragon; she could do a killer version of Christ on the Cross and an exquisite Virgin Mary, with a green tear on her cheek, and some sort of goddess who was captured in the act of decapitating a snake with a sword. She did ships at sea, anchors of all kinds, and a mermaid sitting sidesaddle on a dolphin. Alice also did her own naked ladies, refusing to copy any of Ole’s stencils.

Tattoo Ole’s naked ladies had an element that bothered her. The slim vestige of pubic hair on his women was arched like an upside-down eyebrow, like a smile with a vertical line slashed through it. There was often more evidence of hair in the ladies’ armpits. But the only criticism Alice would make to Ole’s face was that she preferred her naked ladies “from the back side.”

Ole’s other apprentice, Lars Madsen, who was called Ladies’ Man Lars or Ladies’ Man Madsen, was a semiconfident young man who told Alice he liked his naked ladies any way he could get them. “From the front side
and
the back side,” he said.

Alice would generally respond, if at all, by saying: “Not around Jack.”

The boy liked Ladies’ Man Lars. Jack’s mom had almost never taken him to the Chinaman’s shop in Toronto. Although Jack knew a lot about her skills and training as a tattoo artist, his mother had never been keen for him to see her work. But there was no Lottie to look after the boy in Copenhagen, and until Tattoo Ole found them two rooms with a bath in the chambermaids’ quarters of the Hotel D’Angleterre, Jack and his mom slept in the tattoo parlor at Nyhavn 17.