by John Irving
Jack was asked if this was a domestic dispute. Did he know the girl? “I haven’t had any contact with her since she was a four-year-old!” he shouted.
Well, that meant he did know her, didn’t it? Jack was asked. (He should have seen that coming.) “Look, she thinks I’m the reason her mother and father got divorced. She and her mother are obsessed with me. Her father hates me!”
“You know the whole family?” he was asked.
When Jack gave his address, he got a quick “Wait a minute” in response. A squad car had already been dispatched. Naturally, there’d been an earlier call—Lucy’s mother. The first caller had said something about a rape-in-progress.
“That’s not true!” Jack shouted.
“The toilet keeps flushing!” Lucy called from the bedroom. “Forget the cops. You better call a plumber!”
Jack hung up the phone and stomped back through his bedroom to the bathroom. Lucy had put her clothes in the water-tank part of the toilet. (They were soaked; Jack put them in the bathtub.) The rod that held the ball was bent out of shape; that was why the toilet kept flushing. At least he knew what to do about that.
When Jack went back into the bedroom, Lucy was writhing all around on his bed; the bedcovers were completely untucked, and one of the pillows had been flung on the floor. The bed looked as if he’d just had sex with several eighteen-year-olds—all of them gymnasts.
“This is nothing but a big nuisance,” he told the little bitch. “Believe me, you’re not going to think this is so funny when they check you for bodily fluids.”
“I’m just so sick of hearing how you fucked up my entire family!” the girl shouted.
Jack walked out of the bedroom, closing the door behind him. He went outside and stood leaning against his Audi in the driveway. He was still waiting for the police to arrive when he noticed the photographer, an overfamiliar paparazzo—best known for his photos of a young actress barfing in a swimming pool at a wedding in Westwood. Jack saw the paparazzo looking at him through the long telephoto lens from the far side of the street.
When the cops came, Jack was glad that one of the two was a female officer. Jack told her where Lucy was, and the policewoman went into the house to find her while he told his story to the other officer.
“Are you sure she’s eighteen?” the policeman interrupted Jack once; otherwise, he just listened. The paparazzo had crossed the street and was photographing them from the foot of Jack’s driveway.
“She can’t wear her own clothes—they’re all wet,” Jack was explaining to the officer, just before Lucy ran naked out the front door and threw her arms around Jack’s neck. The policeman tried to shield her from the photographer.
The female officer came out of the house carrying a bath towel. She tried to wrap the towel around Lucy, but Lucy kept wriggling out of the towel. It took both officers to disengage the girl from around Jack’s neck. Jack just stood there, doing his best not to touch Lucy, while the paparazzo kept snapping away. If the photographer had taken one step up the driveway, Jack might have broken all the fingers on the guy’s hands—one finger at a time, even with the police officers there.
“I suppose stuff like this happens to you on a regular basis,” the male cop was saying to Jack.
“Whatever he’s been telling you, I’ll bet it’s true,” the female officer told her partner. “If this girl were my daughter, I’d be tempted to drown her in a toilet.”
She was a tall, lean black woman with a despairing expression that was accented by a scar; the scar had dug a groove through one of her eyebrows. Her partner was a husky white guy with a crew cut and pale-blue eyes; his eyes were as calm and unblinking as Lucy’s.
“Be sure to check her for evidence of bodily fluids,” Jack told the officers, “in case I’m lying.”
The black woman smiled. “Don’t you get in trouble, too,” she told him. “Behave yourself.”
“We’d like to have a look inside your house, just to corroborate a few things,” the husky policeman said.
“Sure,” Jack told him.
It was a long day. Jack kept looking out the window. He was hoping the paparazzo would come onto his property, but the photographer maintained his vigil at the foot of the driveway. After the police took Lucy away—Jack insisted on giving Lucy the bath towel—the photographer went away, too.
Jack was surprised that both police officers never once appeared to doubt his story, but the female officer had cautioned him about the photos of Alice’s breasts and her tattoo on the refrigerator. When Jack explained the history of the photographs, the policewoman said: “That doesn’t matter. If there’s ever any trouble here, you don’t want pictures like those on your fridge.”
He showed her the photo of Emma naked at seventeen—the one under the paperweight on his desk. “Ditto?” he asked her.
“You’re learning,” the female officer said. “I sense that you have real potential.”
After everyone had gone, Jack found Lucy’s thong in his bathtub; it was so small that the police must have missed it. He put it in the trash, together with the four photos of his mom and the old one of Emma.
If he hadn’t been leaving for Halifax in the morning, Jack might have been more careful about the trash. It would make sense to him later—how the magazine that bought the paparazzo’s photographs had sent someone to the house on Entrada Drive to sort through Jack’s trash. It made sense that the magazine would talk to Lucy, too—and that she would dismiss the incident as a “prank.”
All Jack said, when the magazine later asked him for a comment—allegedly for a follow-up story—was that the police had behaved properly. First of all, they’d believed Jack. Wasn’t Lucy the one they’d taken away? “You figure it out,” Jack said to the woman from the magazine, who called herself a “diligent fact-checker.” (He meant that the police hadn’t taken him away, had they?)
But Jack knew nothing about any of this when he left in the morning for Halifax. Given all the things that had happened to him—the bad choices he’d made, those years he would regret—the Lucy episode struck him as a virtual nonevent. He didn’t even call Dr. García and tell her about it. (Let her wait; let her hear about it in chronological order, Jack thought.)
But sometimes even a nonevent will be registered in the public consciousness. Jack had done nothing to Lucy—except try to look after her, when she was four. But in a scandal-mongering movie magazine, complete with photos, the girl’s irritating “prank” would carry with it a whiff of something truly scandalous; it would appear as if Jack Burns had gotten away with something.
This would be hard to say to Dr. García, when the time came, but—although it didn’t yet exist—a trap had been set for Jack. Lucy wasn’t the trap, but she was a contributing factor to a trap that waited in his future. That nice female officer had tried to tell him. Jack had thrown away the photographs, but the photos hadn’t been all she was warning him about.
“If there’s ever any trouble here—” Wasn’t that how she’d put it?
34
Halifax
Jack called Michele Maher’s office on his cell phone en route to the airport. It was very early in the morning in L.A., but Dr. Maher’s nurse answered the phone in the doctor’s Cambridge office; it was three hours later in Massachusetts. The nurse was a friendly soul named Amanda, who informed him that Dr. Maher was with a patient.
Jack told Amanda who he was and where he was going. He said he’d gone to school with Michele—that was as far as he got with their history.
“I know all about it,” Amanda said. “Everyone in the office wanted to kill her for not going to the Oscars with you.”
“Oh.”
“Are you going to have lunch with her?” Amanda asked. Jack guessed that everyone in the office knew about the letter Michele had written him; possibly Amanda had typed it.
Jack explained that he was hoping to see Dr. Maher on his return trip from Halifax. He’d booked a stopover in Boston. If Michele was free for dinn
er that night, or lunch the next day—that was as far as he got.
“So now it’s dinner!” Amanda said eagerly. “Maybe lunch and dinner. Maybe breakfast!”
Jack told Amanda that he would call later in the week from Halifax—just to be sure Dr. Maher had the time to see him.
“You should stay at the Charles Hotel in Cambridge. You can walk to the hospital and our office. I can reserve a room for you, if you want,” Amanda told him. “The hotel has a gym and a pool, and everything.”
“Thank you, Amanda,” he said. “That would be very nice—if Dr. Maher has the time to see me.”
“What’s with the Dr. Maher?” Amanda exclaimed.
Jack didn’t bother to tell Amanda to reserve a room for him at the Charles under a different name, although not only Michele but everyone in the office would know that Jack Burns was in town and where he was staying. As interested as Jack was in the Halifax Explosion, or the idea of making a movie in his birthplace, he was by no means committed to the role of the amnesiac transvestite prostitute in Doug McSwiney’s screenplay; in fact, the more Jack thought about the issues he had with McSwiney’s script, the less he felt like registering in any hotel as an amnesiac transvestite prostitute. (At the hotel in Halifax, he’d made the reservation in his own name.)
Jack thanked Amanda for her friendliness and help and gave her the phone number of his hotel in Halifax, and his cell-phone number—just in case Michele wanted to call him.
Jack had sufficient airplane reading for the trip, beginning with Doug McSwiney’s screenplay, which he read two more times. Called The Halifax Explosion, McSwiney’s script was purportedly based on Michael J. Bird’s The Town That Died—a chronicle of the Halifax disaster first published in 1967. Bird’s book, which was by far the best of Jack’s airplane reading, had been rendered a disservice.
On December 6, 1917, two ships collided in the Narrows—a mile-long channel, only five hundred yards wide, that connects Bedford Basin with Halifax Harbor and the open sea. A French freighter, the Mont Blanc, was bound for Bordeaux, loaded with munitions for the war effort. A Norwegian vessel, the Imo, had arrived in Halifax from Rotterdam and was sailing to New York. The Mont Blanc’s cargo included more than two thousand tons of picric acid and two hundred tons of TNT.
Upon impact, the Mont Blanc caught fire; less than an hour later, the ship’s lethal cargo blew up. People were watching the burning ship from almost everywhere in town; they didn’t know they were about to be blown up, too. Almost two thousand people were killed, nine thousand injured, and two hundred blinded.
The explosion leveled the North End of the city, which Bird describes as “a wilderness, a vast burning scrap yard.” Hundreds of children were killed. There was incalculable damage to other ships in the harbor, and to the piers and dockyards and the Naval College—in addition to the Wellington Barracks and the Dartmouth side of the Narrows, where the captain and crew of the Mont Blanc had swum ashore.
Jack thought that the character of the French captain, Aimé Le Medec, was the most challenging for an actor. Bird describes him as “not more than 5 feet 4 inches in height but well built, with a neatly trimmed black beard to add authority to his somewhat youthful face.” A contemporary of Le Medec called the captain “a likeable but moody man, at times inclined to be truculent,” and “a competent, rather than a brilliant, sailor.”
Jack Burns wasn’t that short, but—as an actor—even Le Medec’s physique appealed to him, and Jack was good at accents.
In the inquiry following the disaster, much was made of the fact that the Mont Blanc’s pilot, Frank Mackey, didn’t speak French. Le Medec, who spoke English, was disinclined to speak the language because he didn’t like it when people misunderstood him. Mackey and Le Medec had communicated with hand signals.
Jack liked everything he read about this “truculent” French captain. In Jack’s view, that was the role he should have been offered. (And the screenplay should have stuck to the facts, which were interesting enough without creating fictional characters to coexist with the historical figures.)
The Canadian authorities in Halifax found Captain Le Medec and his pilot, Frank Mackey, responsible for the collision in the Narrows. The Supreme Court of Canada later found that both ships were to blame—they were equally liable. But Le Medec and his crew were French; in the eyes of many English-speaking Canadians, not just Nova Scotians, the French were to blame for everything.
The French director Cornelia Lebrun took the view that Le Medec deserved only half the blame. (The French government would take no action against Le Medec, who didn’t retire from the sea until 1931—whereafter he was made a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur.) But this didn’t explain Madame Lebrun’s attachment to Doug McSwiney’s script, in which Le Medec is a minor character and the Halifax Explosion itself is given merely a supporting role.
McSwiney had an eye for the periphery. Following the disaster, Bird comments in passing, many Halifax prostitutes moved to Toronto or Montreal—“to return later when conditions had improved.” As for those prostitutes who never left town, “business was brisk.”
Perhaps it was from this small mention of the life of prostitutes in Halifax that Doug McSwiney invented his peripheral story. At some Water Street location (this is given scant mention in Bird’s book), a prostitute watches a customer—“a merchant seaman”—leaving her door and going off in the direction of the waterfront. It’s early morning; the Mont Blanc is about to explode.
In McSwiney’s screenplay, this prostitute (or someone based on her) breathes in the cold morning air a little too long. The blast rips the whore’s clothes off, detaches her wig, and hurls her into the air—revealing to the audience that the prostitute, now naked and burning, is a man! Jack Burns, of course—who else?
While devastation reigns, the amnesiac transvestite prostitute is taken to a hospital. Pitiful sights abound. As Bird writes: “Two hundred children, the matron and every other member of the staff, died under the fallen roof and walls of the Protestant Orphanage on Campbell Road. Those who were not killed outright were slowly burned to death.”
Yet the audience is supposed to feel sympathy for Jack’s character, an amnesiac transvestite prostitute? Despite the many burned women and children in the hospital, an attractive nurse feels especially sympathetic toward Jack’s character. The historical background of the film, which is given short shrift, is intercut with the amnesia victim’s slow recovery and the evolving love affair with his nurse.
The transvestite prostitute can’t remember who he is—not to mention what he was doing naked, flying, and burning in the air above Water Street at a little after 9:00 A.M. on that fateful Thursday. When he is well enough to leave the hospital, the nurse takes him home with her.
There then comes the inevitable scene in which the amnesia victim recovers his memory. (Knowing Jack Burns, you can see this coming.) The nurse has gone off to work at the hospital, and Jack’s character wakes up in her bedroom. He spots one of her uniforms on a chair—her clothes from the day before. He puts them on, and when he sees himself in the mirror—well, you can imagine. Flashbacks galore! Unseemly behavior in female attire!
Thus the audience is treated to a second version of the Halifax Explosion. We get to see the disastrous life of a transvestite prostitute, leading up to that other disaster—the real one. As Bird observes: “In this moment of agony a greater number had been killed or injured in Halifax than ever were to be in any single air raid on London during the whole of World War II.” But what was Doug McSwiney thinking?
Jack hated those movie meetings where he went in knowing that he detested the script, but he liked the director and the idea behind the film. He knew he would be perceived as the interfering movie star who was trying to distort the material to better serve himself. Or in this case—in Doug McSwiney’s eyes, without a doubt—the Academy Award–winning screenwriter (talk about beginner’s luck!) who was trying to tell a writer of McSwiney’s vastly greater experience how to write
.
Aside from Halifax being his birthplace, Jack was beginning to wonder why he had come—this being well before he touched down in Nova Scotia, where he had last landed in utero thirty-six years before. Maybe this would set back his therapy, as Dr. García had warned.
Jack checked into The Prince George; he made a dinner reservation at a nearby restaurant called the Press Gang. The restaurant was virtually across the street from the corner of Prince and Barrington, where William Burns had once played the organ in St. Paul’s. Close by, on Argyle and Prince, was the St. Paul’s Parish House, where the Anglicans had put up Jack’s pregnant mother; it might even have been the building where Jack was born, no C-section required.
St. Paul’s was built with white wooden clapboards and shingles in 1750. In memory of the Halifax Explosion, the church had preserved an unfrosted second-story window—a broken window, facing Argyle Street. When the Mont Blanc exploded, a hole had been blown in the window in the shape of a human head. The face in profile, especially the nose and chin, reminded Jack of his mother’s.
The organ in St. Paul’s had been erected in memory of an organist who’d died in 1920. The organ pipes were blue and white, and there was a second commemoration of another organist.
TO THE GLORY OF GOD
AND IN GRATEFUL MEMORY
OF NATALIE LITTLER
1898–1963
ORGANIST 1935–62
They must have needed a new organist in ’62. There was no commemoration of William Burns, who Jack hoped was still among the living. He’d come to Halifax to play the organ in St. Paul’s in 1964. (God knows how long William had stayed; there was no mention of his ever being there.)