Until I Find You (78 page)

Jack whispered to Leslie: “Who else could the
you
in
Until I find you
be?”

“The love of her life, possibly. That certain someone who would heal the heart your dad broke. Obviously she never found him. It’s certainly not
me
!” Mrs. Oastler declared, as Jack’s mom called out to them again.

“
Fucking
is better than talking!” Alice yelled.

“You mean it’s a nonspecific
you
?” Jack asked Leslie.

“For Christ’s sake, Jack. It’s not me, and
maybe
it’s not William—that’s all I’m saying.”

“I want to go home!” Alice called to them.

“For Christ’s sake, Alice—you
are
home!” Mrs. Oastler called back.

Jack lay there having his penis held, his thoughts entirely on the
you
in
Until I find you.
(As if there were
anyone
who could have healed his mother’s heart—as if she could
conceivably
have met the man, or woman, who had a snowball’s chance in hell of healing her!)

“Miss Wurtz!” Leslie whispered, so suddenly that Jack’s penis jumped in her hand. “He wrote to Miss Wurtz! Caroline had some kind of correspondence with your dad.”

“The Wurtz?” Jack whispered.

“Miss Wurtz herself told me,” Leslie whispered back. “I don’t think your mom ever knew about it.”

Something blocked the light from the bathroom, where the door was ajar—a sudden appearance of the kind The Gray Ghost was once the master of, as if Mrs. McQuat, who had tried to save him, were reaching out to Jack again. Or maybe Mrs. Machado, or
her
ghost, was coming to get him! But it was his mother, naked; she was as close to entering the next world as any ghost.

“I want to go home,” Alice whispered. “If you insist on whispering, I’m going to whisper, too,” she said, climbing into Emma’s bed.

Strangely it was her heart-side breast that looked ravaged—not the breast where she’d had the lumpectomy. Her broken-heart tattoo was the blue-black of a bruise, the
you
in cursive as meaningless as what was written on the toe tag of a total stranger in a morgue.

Mrs. Oastler and Jack hugged Alice between them. “Please take me home,” his mother kept whispering.

“You
are
home,” Leslie told her—kissing her neck, her shoulder, her face. “Or do you mean Edinburgh, Alice?”

“No,
home,
” Alice said, more fiercely. “You know where I mean, Jack.”

“Where do you mean, Mom?” (Jack knew where she meant; he just wanted to see if she could say it.)

“I mean the needles, dear,” his mother said. “It’s time to take me to my needles.” Not surprisingly, that’s what Daughter Alice meant by going home.

26

A Faithless Boy

J
ack’s mother died peacefully in her sleep, much as Maureen Yap had predicted. For five days and nights, she slept and woke up and fell back to sleep on the sofa bed at Daughter Alice. Leslie and Jack took turns staying with her. They had discovered that Alice was less abusive to them if they weren’t together, and the sofa bed wasn’t big enough for three people.

On the fifth night, it was Leslie’s turn. Alice woke up and asked Mrs. Oastler to let her hear a little Bob Dylan. Leslie was aware of the police complaints; she turned up the volume only slightly. “Is that loud enough, Alice?” she asked.

There was no answer. Mrs. Oastler at first assumed that Alice had fallen back to sleep; it was only when Leslie got into bed beside her that she realized Alice had stopped breathing. (It would turn out that a blood vessel in her brain had hemorrhaged, eaten away by the cancer.)

Jack was in bed with Bonnie Hamilton, in Bonnie’s house, when the phone rang. He sensed that his mother was sleeping in the needles before Bonnie answered the phone. “I’ll tell him,” he heard Bonnie say, while he was still trying to orient himself in the darkened bedroom. (He didn’t want to get out of bed and stumble into the wheelchair.) “I’ll tell him that, too.”

“Alice died in her sleep—she just stopped breathing,” Mrs. Oastler had announced straightaway. “I think Jack and I should stay with her till morning. I don’t want them to take her away in the dark.”

Alice had talked to Leslie and Jack about the kind of memorial service she wanted. She’d been uncharacteristically specific. “It should be on a Saturday evening. If you run out of booze, the beer store and the liquor store will still be open.”

Jack and Mrs. Oastler had humored her; they’d agreed to a Saturday evening, although the concept of running out of booze at
any
event originating in the St. Hilda’s chapel was unimaginable. Alice wasn’t an Old Girl. Maybe a few of the Old Girls would show up, but they would be Leslie’s old friends and they weren’t big drinkers. The novelty of seeing Jack Burns (so soon after seeing him at Emma’s memorial service) would surely have worn off. Out of a genuine fondness for Jack, there’d be a smattering of St. Hilda’s faculty. No doubt some of the same boarders would attend, but those girls weren’t drinkers, either. Compared to how it was at the service for Emma, Mrs. Oastler and Jack assumed that the chapel would be virtually empty.

“The
wake
part should be in the gym, not in the Great Hall,” Alice had instructed them. “And nobody should say anything—no prayers,
just
singing.”

“Hymns?” Leslie had asked.

“It should be an evensong service,” Jack’s mother, the former choirgirl, had said. “Leslie, you should let Caroline Wurtz arrange it. You don’t know anything about church music, and Jack doesn’t even
like
music.”

“I like Bob Dylan, Mom.”

“Let’s save Bob for the
wake
part,” Mrs. Oastler had suggested, in disbelief.

Leslie and Jack completely missed it. The part about running out of booze should have forewarned them—not to mention that Alice had asked them to inform “just a few” of her old friends.

Jack called Jerry Swallow—Sailor Jerry, from Alice’s Halifax days, although Jerry had moved to New Glasgow, Nova Scotia. A woman, maybe Jerry’s wife, answered the phone. Jack asked her to please tell Jerry that Daughter Alice had died. To his surprise, the woman asked him where and when there was going to be a service. Jack gave her the details over the phone—little suspecting that Sailor Jerry, and all the rest of them, would show up.

Jack didn’t call Tattoo Ole or Tattoo Peter—they were both dead. Tattoo Theo wasn’t on Alice’s list; probably he had also died.

Doc Forest was the second tattoo artist Jack called. Doc was still in Stockholm. Jack recalled Doc’s forearms (like Popeye’s) and his neatly trimmed mustache and sideburns—his bright, twinkling eyes. Jack remembered what Doc had said to him, too—when Jack and his mom were leaving Sweden. “Come back and see me when you’re older. Maybe then you’ll want a tattoo.”

Doc regretted that he couldn’t come such a distance for Alice’s service, but he said he would pass along the sad news. Jack thought it must have been simply a courtesy on Doc’s part—to even mention undertaking such a journey. Doc had last seen Alice at a tattoo convention at the Meadowlands, in New Jersey. “She was a maritime girl,” the former sailor told Jack, his voice breaking—or maybe it was the long-distance connection.

Jack next called Hanky Panky—the tattoo name for Henk Schiffmacher—at the House of Pain in Amsterdam. Schiffmacher had written several books, the famous
1000 Tattoos
among them; many of the illustrations in that book were collected at the Tattoo Museum in the red-light district. Alice had believed that Hanky Panky was one of the best tattoo artists in the world; she’d met him at any number of tattoo conventions, and she’d stayed with him and his wife in Amsterdam. Henk Schiffmacher was sorry he couldn’t come all the way to Canada on such short notice. “But I’ll pass the word,” he said. “I’m sure that a lot of the guys will show up.”

It was only later—actually, on the night before Alice’s memorial service at St. Hilda’s—that Leslie informed Jack that she’d called a
different
threesome of tattoo artists. Alice had given Leslie another list; this one also had “just a few” names to call.

“Who were they?” Jack asked Mrs. Oastler.

“Jesus, Jack—I can’t possibly remember their names. You know what their names are like.”

“Did you call Philadelphia Eddie?” Jack asked. (Make that
Crazy
Philadelphia Eddie.) “Or maybe Mao of Madrid, or Bugs of London—”

“There were three guys,” Leslie informed him. “They were all in the United States. They all said they’d pass the word.”

“Maybe Little Vinnie Myers?” he suggested. Or Uncle Pauly, Jack imagined—or Armadillo Red. He’d never met them, but he knew their names.

“Well, they won’t come, anyway,” Mrs. Oastler said, but she didn’t sound so sure.

“What’s the matter, Leslie?”

Mrs. Oastler was remembering what one of them had asked her, when she’d given the guy the bad news. “Where’s the party?” the tattoo artist had inquired.

“He said ‘
party
’?” Jack asked Leslie.

“Isn’t that all they
do,
Jack? At least that’s my impression. All they
do
is party!”

This gave them both a bad night’s sleep. About 2:00
A.M.
Mrs. Oastler got into Emma’s bed with Jack, but she wasn’t interested in holding his penis.

“What if they
all
come?” Leslie whispered, as if Alice were still alive or somehow capable of overhearing them. “What will we
do
?”

“We’ll have a
party,
” he told Mrs. Oastler, only half believing that it might be true.

In the morning, while Leslie was making coffee, Jack answered the phone in the kitchen. It was Bruce Smuck, a Toronto tattoo artist and a good friend of Alice’s; she’d liked his work and had been something of a mentor to him. He’d already called Leslie and offered his condolences; now he was calling to ask what he could bring.

“Oh, just bring yourself, Bruce,” Jack answered cluelessly. “We’ll be glad to see you.”

“Was that Bruce Smuck again?” Mrs. Oastler asked, after Jack hung up the phone.

“He wanted to know if he could
bring
something,” Jack said, the gravity of Bruce’s offer slowly sinking in.

“Bring
what
?” Leslie asked.

Bruce must have meant
booze,
Jack thought. Bruce was a nice guy—he was just offering to help out. Obviously Bruce expected a
mob
!

Jack called Peewee on his cell phone and increased the original liquor-store order from a case each of white and red wine to three cases of white and
five
cases of red. (From what Alice had told Leslie, the majority of tattoo artists were red-wine types.)

“Tell Peewee to go to the beer store, too,” Mrs. Oastler said. “The bikers drink a lot of beer. Better fill the fucking limo with beer—just in case.” Leslie was sitting at the kitchen table with her head in her hands, inhaling the steam from her coffee cup; she looked like someone who’d recently quit smoking and desperately wanted a cigarette.

Jack poured himself a cup of coffee, but the phone rang before he could take his first sip. “Uh-oh,” Mrs. Oastler said.

It was a Saturday morning—Alice’s evensong service was scheduled for five-thirty that afternoon—but Caroline Wurtz was calling on her cell phone from the St. Hilda’s chapel, where she and the organist and the boarders’ choir were already practicing. When Jack answered the phone, he could hear the organ and the choir better than he could hear Caroline.

“Jack, a
quandary
has presented itself—in
clerical
form,” Miss Wurtz whispered. She sounded as if she were in Emma’s bed with him—as Jack had so often dreamed—and his mother was within hearing distance, down the hall.

“What
quandary
is that?” Jack whispered back.

“The Reverend Parker—our chaplain, Jack—wishes to lead the congregation in the Apostles’ Creed.”

“Mom requested no prayers, Caroline.”

“I know,” she whispered. “I told him.”

“Maybe
I
should tell him,” Jack said. He’d met the Reverend Parker only once. Parker was a young twit who’d felt excluded from Emma’s memorial service; hence he was inserting himself in Alice’s.

“I think I can
negotiate
with him, Jack,” Miss Wurtz whispered. In the background, the organ was fainter now—the girlish voices from the boarders’ choir were less and less distinct. The Wurtz must have been retreating from the chapel with her cell phone; Jack could hear the squeak of her shoes on the linoleum in the hall.

“What might be the terms of your
negotiation
?” he asked.

“Let him lead the congregation through the Twenty-third Psalm, since he evidently wants to lead us through
something,
” Caroline said more loudly.

“Mom said nobody should say
anything.
Aren’t psalms like prayers?”

“The Reverend Parker is the chaplain, Jack.”

“I like the Twenty-third Psalm better than the Apostles’ Creed,” Jack conceded.

“There appears to be
another
small quandary,” Miss Wurtz went on. Jack couldn’t hear the organ or the choir at all. Caroline must have walked all the way down the hall to the main entrance, yet he was having trouble hearing her again; this time, it wasn’t the organ or the boarders’ choir that was causing the interference. “Goodness!” The Wurtz exclaimed over the throttling engines, a near-deafening sound. (
Another
quandary had presented itself—this one, Jack guessed, was not small.)

“What is it?” he asked, although he already knew. At the tattoo conventions, his mother used to tell him, the bikers always arrived early; perhaps they wanted to be sure they had a good place to park.

“My word, it’s a
motorcycle gang
!” Caroline cried, loudly enough for Mrs. Oastler to hear her. “What on earth is a motorcycle gang doing at an all-girls’ school?”