(2005) Until I Find You

by John Irving

  “Let’s start with Halifax,” Jack continued. “Did he leave Halifax before you got there? If he was still there when you arrived, he must have wanted to see me be born.”

  “He was still there when I arrived,” Alice admitted, with her back turned to Jack. “I wouldn’t let him see you be born.”

  “So he wasn’t exactly running away from you,” Jack said.

  “Did Leslie tell you about my mood changes?” his mom asked. “They’re not always logical, or what you would expect.”

  “I’m guessing it’s bullshit that I was a Cesarean birth,” Jack told her. “The scar from your C-section wasn’t why you wouldn’t let me see you naked. There was something else you didn’t want me to see. Isn’t that right?”

  “Leslie showed you the photographs—that bitch!” Alice said. “You weren’t supposed to see them until after I was gone!”

  “Why show me at all?” he asked.

  “I was beautiful once!” his mother cried. (She meant her breasts, when she was younger—he’d meant her tattoo.)

  “I’ve been thinking about it—I mean your tattoo,” Jack told her. “I’ll bet it’s a Tattoo Ole, from Copenhagen. You had it almost from the start.”

  “Well, of course it’s a Tattoo Ole, Jack. Ole preferred only outlining, and I wasn’t about to shade myself.”

  “I suppose you wouldn’t let the Ladies’ Man shade you,” he said.

  “I wouldn’t let Lars touch me, Jack—not even shading. I wouldn’t have shown Ladies’ Man Madsen my breasts!”

  “We’re getting ahead of ourselves, Mom. Let’s talk about Toronto before we talk about Copenhagen. When we got to Toronto, had my dad already left?”

  “He got a girl at St. Hilda’s in trouble, Jack—he had another girlfriend at the school, and for all I know an affair with one or more of the teachers, too!”

  “Mom, I know about the girls.”

  “He was with other women in Halifax!” she blurted out.

  “Mom, you told me. I know he left you. But I never knew he wanted to see me.”

  “I couldn’t stop him from seeing you, could I?” she asked. “When you were out in public, I couldn’t prevent him from getting a look at you. But if he wasn’t going to be with me, why should I have let him be with you?”

  “So that I would have a father?”

  “Who knows what sort of father he would have been, Jack? With a man like that, you can never be sure.”

  “Did he see me in Toronto, Mom? Did he get a look at me, when I was a baby—before you drove him away?”

  “How dare you!” his mother said. “I never drove him away! I gave him all the looks at you that he could stand! I let him see you—at least from a distance—every time he asked!”

  “He asked? What do you mean, ‘from a distance,’ Mom?”

  “Well, I would never let him see you alone,” she explained. “He wasn’t allowed to talk to you.”

  What wasn’t he getting? Jack wondered. What didn’t add up? Had he been a child on display for his father, perhaps to tempt William to accept Alice’s terms—namely, to live with her? “Let me get this straight,” Jack said to his mother. “You let him see me, but if he wanted further contact with me, he had to marry you.”

  “He did marry me, Jack—but only under the condition that we get immediately divorced!”

  “I thought it was Mrs. Wicksteed’s idea that I have his name—so I would seem less illegitimate,” Jack said. “I never knew you married him!”

  “It was Mrs. Wicksteed’s idea that the only legitimate way for you to have his name would be if he married me and we were then divorced,” his mother told him—as if this were a petty detail of no lasting importance.

  “So he must have been around, in Toronto—when we were here—for quite some time,” Jack said.

  “Barely long enough to get married and divorced,” Alice said. “And you were still an infant. I knew you wouldn’t remember him.” (She hadn’t wanted Jack to remember William, obviously.)

  “But Mrs. Wicksteed was my benefactor, wasn’t she?” Jack asked. “I mean we were her rent-free boarders, weren’t we?”

  “Mrs. Wicksteed was the epitome of generosity!” his mother said with indignation—as if he’d been questioning Mrs. Wicksteed’s character and good intentions, which he’d never doubted.

  “Who paid for things, Mom?”

  “Mrs. Wicksteed, for the most part,” Alice replied frostily. “Your father occasionally helped.”

  “He sent money?”

  “It was the least he could do!” his mom cried. “I never asked William for a penny—he just sent what he could.”

  But the money had to come from somewhere, Jack realized; she must have known where William was, every step of the way.

  “Which brings us to Copenhagen,” Jack said. “We weren’t exactly searching for him, were we? You must have already known he was there.”

  “You haven’t touched your tea, dear. Is there something wrong with it?”

  “Did you take me to Copenhagen to show me to him?” Jack asked her.

  “Some people, Jack—men, especially—are of the opinion that all babies look alike, that infants are all the same. But when you were a four-year-old, you were something special—you were a beautiful little boy, Jack.”

  He was only beginning to get the picture: she’d used him as bait! “How many times did my dad see me?” Jack asked. “I mean in Copenhagen.” (What Jack really meant, in terms familiar to him from the movie business, was how many times she had offered William the deal.)

  “Jackie—” his mother said, stopping herself, as if she detected in her tone of voice something of the way she’d admonished him as a child. When she began afresh, her voice had changed; she sounded frail and pleading, like a woman with breast-cancer cells taking hold of the emotional center of her brain. “Any father would have been proud of what a gorgeous-looking boy you were, Jack. What dad wouldn’t have wanted to see the handsome young man you would become?”

  “But you wouldn’t let him,” Jack reminded her.

  “I gave him a choice!” she insisted. “You and I were a team, Jackie—don’t you remember? We were a package! He could have chosen us, or nothing. He chose nothing.”

  “But how many times did you make him choose?” Jack asked her. “We followed him to Sweden, to Norway, to Finland, to the Netherlands. Mom—you gave up only because Australia was too fucking far!”

  He should have watched his language, which may have seemed especially disrespectful to a dying woman—not that his mother had ever tolerated his use of the word fucking.

  “You think you’re so smart!” Alice snapped at him. “You don’t know the half of it, Jack. We didn’t follow him. I made your father follow us! He was the one who gave up,” she said—softly but no less bitterly, as if her pride were still hurt more than she could bring herself to say.

  Jack knew then that he knew nothing, and that the only questions she would ever answer were direct ones—and he would have to guess which direct questions were the right ones to ask. A hopeless task.

  “You should talk to Leslie,” his mother told him. “Leslie likes to talk. Tell her I don’t care what she tells you, Jack.”

  “Mom, Leslie wasn’t there.”

  He meant in Europe. But his mom wasn’t paying attention; she was pushing buttons on her new CD player, seeking to drown him out with the usual music.

  “I want to send your MRI to Maureen Yap,” Jack told her. “She’s an oncologist.”

  “Tell Leslie. She’ll arrange it, Jack.” The door to their conversation was closing once again—not that she’d ever opened it an inch more than she had to.

  Jack tried one last time. “Maybe I should take a trip,” he said. “I’ll start with Copenhagen, where we began.”

  “Why not take Leslie with you, Jack? That’ll keep her out of my hair.”

  “I think I’ll go alone,” Jack said.

  His mom’s exasperation with the CD player was growi
ng. “Where’s the remote?” he asked her. “You should use the remote, Mom.”

  Alice found the remote, pointing it at Jack—then at the CD player—like a gun. “Just do me a favor, Jackie boy,” she said. “If you’re going to go find him, do it after I’m gone.”

  The CD player was new, but Bob Dylan was familiar—albeit a lot louder than they expected.

  The guilty undertaker sighs,

  The lonesome organ grinder cries,

  The silver saxophones say I should refuse you.

  “Jesus, turn it down!” Jack said, but his mother pushed the wrong button—not the volume. The song started over, at the beginning.

  “Go find him after I’m gone,” Alice said, pointing the remote at Jack—not at the stupid CD player.

  “I want to know what really happened! I’ve been asking you about the past, Mom. I don’t know enough about him to know if I want to find him!”

  “Well, if that’s the trip you want to take, go on and take it,” his mother told him, pointing the remote in the right direction and turning down the volume, though it was still too loud.

  The cracked bells and washed-out horns

  Blow into my face with scorn,

  But it’s not that way,

  I wasn’t born to lose you.

  Thanks to Bob, they didn’t hear the little tinkle of the bell as the door to the tattoo parlor swung open. It was warm and stuffy in the shop, but even after he closed the door, the gray-faced man in the doorway kept shivering; he had white shoulder-length hair, like an old hippie. There was a rising sun sewn on his jeans jacket, just above his heart, and he wore a red bandanna around his throat—Richard Harris as a cowboy, or perhaps an over-the-hill rodeo rider.

  “Would you like a cup of tea?” Alice asked him.

  The man was still too cold to talk, but he nodded. He wore tight black jeans and black-and-purple cowboy boots with a diamondback-rattlesnake pattern; he walked stiff-legged to the couch, which Jack knew was a sofa bed. (His mom occasionally slept there, Mrs. Oastler had told him—probably when Alice and Leslie had been quarreling.) The old cowboy sat down on the couch, as gingerly as you might imagine him settling himself on a bronco.

  “I want you, I want you,/I want you so bad,” Bob Dylan was wailing. “Honey, I want you.”

  “You’re a full-body, aren’t you?” Alice asked the cowboy, who was still shivering.

  “Almost,” he told her. You couldn’t see a tattoo on him—only a relentless chill.

  The cowboy was at least a decade older than William Burns would be, Jack thought; yet Jack felt an instant pang, as if his dad were shivering with cold. The old hippie, whose hands were shaking, was having trouble removing one of his cowboy boots. Jack knelt down and helped him get the boot off; the boot was so tight, the cowboy’s sock came off with it. His bare foot was startlingly white. Descending below the pant leg of his jeans, the skull of a long-horned steer completely covered the cowboy’s ankle; the fire-breathing flames from the skeleton’s open mouth licked the top of his unmarked foot.

  The cowboy made no effort to remove his other boot. (Jack surmised that the other foot was tattooed, like all the rest of him.)

  “I got one thing left that’s clean,” the cowboy hippie said to Alice. “You’re lookin’ at it.”

  “Your hands and face are clean,” Alice told the cowboy.

  “I gotta keep my hands and face clean, lady, if I wanna find any interestin’ work.”

  As Jack had done so often in the past, he just slipped away. He poured his cup of tea down the sink, edging his way to the door.

  “I’ll see you at home, Mom,” he said softly. Jack was pretty sure that their little talk was over; he was enough of a fool to think their dance was done.

  “Lie down—let’s make you comfortable,” Alice told the cowboy, not looking at Jack. The old hippie stretched out on the couch, where Alice covered him with a blanket.

  Bob was moaning his way through the refrain again; it’s a relentless song, over which Jack could nonetheless hear the cowboy’s teeth chattering.

  I want you, I want you,

  I want you so bad,

  Honey, I want you.

  “Take Leslie with you, dear,” his mother said, as Jack was going out the door; she was still not looking at him, preferring to fuss over the old cowboy. The door was closing when Alice called after her son: “It doesn’t matter anymore, Jack. I don’t even care if you sleep with her!”

  Jack carried his mom’s little morsel of anticipation and horror with him as he walked along the south side of Queen Street until he caught a cab heading east, bringing him back to the Four Seasons. There was a small flurry of excitement among Jack’s fans at the front desk when he checked out of the hotel for the second time that day. Jack didn’t like chaos; it bothered him that he must have appeared disorganized, even directionless, but he had a plan.

  He would move into the guest wing in what he had once thought of as Mrs. Oastler’s “mansion” in Forest Hill. Jack would sleep in Emma’s bedroom, of which—of the bed, in particular—he had mostly fond memories. Jack would move Emma’s desk, which was a big one, into what had been his bedroom, where Mrs. Machado had molested him; that room, charged as it was with the loss of Jack’s innocence, would become his office. Add his dying mother and Leslie Oastler to the package, as Alice might have put it, and he had chosen a terrific climate for completing his (or Emma’s) adaptation of The Slush-Pile Reader.

  The screenplay, and Emma’s notes, had already been transcribed in Jack’s handwriting. He’d brought the script with him—to work on. All he needed was a little more writing paper and some extra pens. As it would turn out—and this was no surprise, given what a veteran shopper she was—Leslie rushed right out and got the writing supplies for him. (She even bought him a new lamp for Emma’s desk.)

  Leslie was grateful to Jack for not leaving her alone with his mother, especially with Alice’s changes of mood and personality.

  At first, it gave Jack pause that he was alone with Mrs. Oastler for the duration of the workday. He had some anxiety that she would throw herself at him in a state of undress. After all, his mother had not only given Jack permission to sleep with Leslie—she also repeatedly encouraged Leslie to sleep with Jack. (When Mrs. Oastler was doing the dishes after dinner, for example—when Jack was listening to music in the living room, while his mom was stretched out on the couch.)

  “Leslie, why don’t you sleep with Jack tonight?” Alice would call out to the kitchen.

  “Mom, for Christ’s sake—”

  “No, thank you, Alice!” Mrs. Oastler would call into the living room.

  “You should try it—you might like it,” Alice told them over supper one night. “You don’t snore, do you, Jack? He won’t keep you awake, Leslie—well, not like I do, anyway. He won’t keep you awake all night, I mean.”

  “Please stop, Alice,” Leslie said.

  “How much longer do you realistically expect me to sleep with you?” Alice snapped at Mrs. Oastler. “You won’t sleep with me when I’m in a coma, I hope!”

  “Mom, Leslie and I don’t want to sleep together,” Jack said.

  “Yes, you do, dear,” his mother said. “Don’t you want to sleep with Jack, Leslie? Well, of course you do!” she said cheerfully, before Mrs. Oastler could respond one way or another.

  Jack could only imagine what a dysfunctional stew Emma would have made of their threesome—a relationship as challenging as that of a too-small slush-pile reader and a too-big porn-star screenwriter! Jack was indeed living, as he had hoped, in the perfect atmosphere in which to finish his (or Emma’s) screenplay.

  The script itself was becoming an intense marriage of plagiarism and rightful ownership; a partnership of wily commerce with those near-blinding shafts of light in which familiar but nonetheless amazing dust motes float. (“These ordinary but well-illuminated things are what we remember best about a good film,” Emma had said.)

  Perhaps because Jack was devoted to the t
ask of making Emma’s best book into a movie, but also because he and Mrs. Oastler were both victims of his mother’s escalating abuse, Jack lost his fear of Leslie throwing herself at him in a state of undress. For the most part, she left him alone.

  When he would venture downstairs into the kitchen, either to make himself a cup of tea or to eat an apple or a banana, Mrs. Oastler would often be sitting at the kitchen table—as if Alice had only recently left the house or was, at any minute, expected to return. Then, in the briefest possible conversation, Mrs. Oastler would convey to Jack some new detail or missing information she remembered about his father.

  Mrs. Oastler struck Jack as exhausted most of the time. Her memory of what Alice had concealed from Jack about his dad returned to her unexpectedly and at unplanned moments, which made Jack extremely jumpy in her company—largely because he never knew what secret she might suddenly divulge. Sadly, this had the effect on Leslie of making her appear as if she had slept with Jack, which Alice never failed to notice.

  “You slept with him, Leslie, didn’t you?” his mom would regularly ask, upon coming home from Daughter Alice.

  “No, I did not,” Mrs. Oastler would say, still sitting—as if she had taken root—at the kitchen table.

  “Well, you look as if you did,” Alice would tell her. “You look as if someone’s been banging your brains out, Leslie.”

  It was too easy to say that this was the tumor talking—too convenient to call Alice’s outrageous behavior the cancer’s fault. But even her language was changing. Not her diction or enunciation, which were the unstumbling examples of Miss Wurtz’s determined eradication of Alice’s Scottish accent, but Alice was increasingly vulgar-tongued—as Emma had always been, as Leslie could be, as Alice unwaveringly criticized Jack for being. (“Since California,” as his mother put it.)

  But Jack’s work went on. He even showed a draft of the screenplay to Mrs. Oastler; she’d said she was dying to read it. To Jack’s surprise, Leslie was much moved by the script; she found it extremely faithful to the novel. She even took the time to compose a list of the things that were different from what they’d been in the book. These weren’t offered as criticisms—Mrs. Oastler merely wanted Jack to appreciate that she’d noticed. Among the many differences, of course, were those things Emma herself had changed—or else she’d suggested that Jack change them. And some of the changes were entirely his.