by John Irving
“But you like it?” he asked Leslie.
“I love it, Jack,” she said, with tears in her eyes.
Jack Burns was a first-time writer; he’d never encountered literary approval. Something in his relationship with Mrs. Oastler changed because of it. They were united by more than his mother’s dying; they were joined by Emma’s giving him the opportunity to make a movie of The Slush-Pile Reader, and by his bringing Leslie into the process.
They were brought together, too, by Alice’s refusal to talk to Jack about his dad—and the consequent burden of what Mrs. Oastler knew of that subject, which she was now under pressure to tell Jack. Worst—but, in the long run, maybe this was best—Leslie Oastler and Jack were drawn to each other by Alice’s relentless and incomprehensible efforts to virtually force them to sleep together, which both Leslie and Jack were determined not to do, at least not while Alice was alive and she so thoroughly and insensitively wanted them to do it. (And of course what made this last part so difficult was that Alice, even in her madness, was right about one thing: increasingly, Leslie and Jack did want to sleep together.)
Alice was inarguably crazy, but how much of her craziness was the result of the breast-cancer cells in her brain—or was, more simply, her undying anger at William Burns—Mrs. Oastler and Jack would never know.
There was the night Jack discovered his mother naked and asleep in Emma’s bed—in his bed, under the new circumstances—and when he woke her, she told him she was staying where she was so that he could sleep with Leslie. Jack went to bed in his old bedroom (his new office) that night, in the bed where Mrs. Machado had so roughly educated him.
This episode was not repeated, but there were other episodes. The police called Mrs. Oastler one day to say that Daughter Alice was “evidently closed”—meaning all the lights were off and the venetian blinds were shut. Yet, inside the shop, Bob Dylan was singing up a storm—even passersby, on the Queen Street sidewalk, were complaining. This was how Leslie and Jack learned that Alice now routinely closed the tattoo parlor almost as soon as she’d opened it; she took an all-day nap on the sofa bed. Lately there were sounds in her brain that kept her awake at night, Alice explained to them. (According to Mrs. Oastler, Alice was either wide awake or snoring.)
“What sounds, Alice?” Leslie asked her.
“Nothing I can understand,” Alice answered. “Voices, maybe—not yours, not Jack’s. No one I want to listen to.” (Hence Bob, at high volume; thus the complaints.)
“If there’s a bend in the road to your dying, Alice, you may have gone around it,” Mrs. Oastler told her.
“Suddenly she’s a writer!” Alice cried, hitting Jack’s shoulder but pointing derisively at Leslie. “Here I am, living with a pair of writers!”
Jack saw in his mind’s eye what he’d tried to overlook when he’d found his mother naked and snoring in his (formerly Emma’s) bed: the slackness of her breasts in sleep, and how the tattoo of her broken heart had shifted slightly from its perfect placement on her younger left breast and the heart side of her rib cage. It was now a lopsided broken-heart tattoo, as if there’d been something irreparably wrong with Daughter Alice’s heart before William Burns had broken it. Even in her sleep, there were still faint creases where the underwire of her bra had marked both breasts, and in the light cast from the bathroom—the door was ajar—the scar from Alice’s lumpectomy shone an unnatural white, as did the scar in that same-side armpit, where the lymph node had been removed. (Jack had never seen that scar before.)
“If you’d only just fuck each other!” his mother shouted one night, making a fist and pounding the kitchen table, which made Jack and Mrs. Oastler jump. “If you fucked each other all day, I’ll bet you two writers wouldn’t be so poetic!”
Although the screenplay kept getting better, Jack rarely felt he was poetic. It was no surprise, but it hurt nonetheless, that his mother refused to read the script. (“I’ll be dead by the time you make the movie, dear,” she’d told him.)
If there were a poetic presence in the house in his mother’s final days, Jack would have said that it was Leslie, who appeared early one afternoon in the doorway of his makeshift office—an unprecedented interruption. She was naked. By her reddened skin, in the area of her Rose of Jericho, he saw that she’d been scratching at her tattoo. She was sobbing.
“I regret ever getting this tattoo,” she said. Her appearance did not have that unmistakable aura of seduction.
“I’m sorry, Leslie.”
“Life forces enough final decisions on us,” Mrs. Oastler continued. “We should have the sense to avoid as many of the unnecessary ones as we can.”
Jack just sat at Emma’s old desk while Mrs. Oastler turned away from him and went down the hall. “Can I use that, Leslie?” he called after her. (He was missing some essential voice-over for the Michele Maher character, and there it was.) “What you just said—can I use it?”
“Sure,” Mrs. Oastler said, so softly that Jack almost didn’t hear her.
When they eventually signed Lucia Delvecchio for the Michele Maher role, Lucia would say it was the voice-over that made her want the part—that and the fact that she knew she’d have to lose twenty pounds to play Michele. Miramax would put that voice-over on the movie poster, and in all the ads for the film: “Life forces enough final decisions on us. We should have the sense to avoid as many of the unnecessary ones as we can.”
“Bingo!” Jack shouted down the hall, after Mrs. Oastler. But she’d gone into her bedroom and had uncharacteristically closed the door.
There was also the night when Leslie came to his bedroom, where Jack was sleeping—but there was scarcely an aura of seduction about this visit, either. By now, the remembered bits of information—the lost details of his missing father—were waking Mrs. Oastler at all hours of the night. This happened as regularly as Alice’s alternating sleeplessness and snoring would wake Mrs. Oastler, or the more violent occurrences when Alice would beat Leslie’s back with her fists—this for no better reason than that Alice had woken up and discovered that Leslie had turned her back on her, which was apparently forbidden in their relationship.
Neither Alice nor Mrs. Oastler could remember when this rule had been established, or even if it had ever been observed, but this didn’t deter Alice from attacking Leslie, who was at least grateful that Alice didn’t insist on Bob Dylan blaring through the house all night—not the way Bob belted it out all day at Daughter Alice, or so the police duly reported.
“When I start to go, Jack—you take me there,” his mom had told him. He knew she meant her tattoo shop. “When I start to go, I’m sleeping in the needles—nowhere else, dear.”
It was in this largely sleepless context that Mrs. Oastler crawled into Jack’s bed one night; she took hold of his penis so suddenly, but without any indication of seeking more intimate contact, that he at first thought Emma’s ghost had grabbed him. (After all, it was Emma’s bed.)
“I’m here to talk, Jack,” Leslie said. “I don’t care if your mother thinks we’re fucking. I’m just here to tell you something.”
“Go ahead,” he said.
She’d already told him that his father had paid the lion’s share of Jack’s tuition at St. Hilda’s; it was Mrs. Wicksteed who had only, to use his mother’s words, “occasionally helped.” And the clothes he’d believed Mrs. Oastler had bought for him, both for Redding and for Exeter—not to mention the tuition at both schools? “I was just the shopper,” Leslie had told him. “The money came from William.”
“Even for college—those years in Durham?” he’d asked her.
“Even your first couple of years in L.A.,” she’d said. “He didn’t stop sending money until you were famous, Jack.”
“And what about Daughter Alice? I mean the tattoo parlor, Leslie.”
“William bought her the fucking shop.”
This was a portrait of a very different dad from the one Jack had imagined—when last heard of, playing the piano on a cruise ship to Austral
ia, on his way to be tattooed by the famous Cindy Ray! Not so, maybe. Mrs. Oastler remembered Alice saying that William had never gone to Australia. Leslie had further surprised Jack by telling him she was sure his father was still in Amsterdam when Jack and his mother left. “I think he watched you leave,” Mrs. Oastler had said.
Thus, when Leslie slipped into his bed and took hold of his penis—this was almost, in his half-sleep, like old times—Jack was eager to learn which new tidbit of information about his father might have surfaced in Mrs. Oastler’s fitful sleep. “It’s about her tattoo—I mean the you in Until I find you,” Leslie whispered in his ear. “It’s not necessarily William.”
“What?” he whispered back.
“Think about it, Jack. She wasn’t looking for him—she’d already found him! It’s not like William was lost or something.”
“Where is he now?” Jack asked her.
“I have no idea where he is now. Alice doesn’t know, either.”
“Stop whispering!” Alice cried; she was calling from Mrs. Oastler’s bedroom, down the hall, although her voice was so loud that she could have been in Emma’s bed with Leslie and Jack. “Talking is better than whispering!” his mother shouted.
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
Jack’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 ha
ve 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.”