Until I Find You

by John Irving

  Well, it wasn't all right--not by a long shot--but Alice just kept tattooing.

  Els took them to the shipping office, which was a confusing place--they needed Els's help in arranging their passage. They would take the train to Rotterdam and sail from there to Montreal, and then make their way back to Toronto.

  "Why Toronto?" Saskia asked Alice. "Canada isn't your country."

  "It is now," Alice said. "I'll never go back to sunny Leith--not for all the whisky in Scotland." She wouldn't say why. (Too many ghosts, maybe.) "Besides, I know just the school for Jack. It's a good school," Jack heard her tell Saskia and Els. His mom leaned over him and whispered in his ear: "And you'll be safe with the girls."

  The idea of himself with the St. Hilda's girls--the older ones, especially--gave Jack the shivers. Once again, and for the last time in Europe, he reached for his mother's hand.

  II

  The Sea of Girls

  8

  Safe Among the Girls

  It was Jack's impression that the older girls at St. Hilda's never liked having boys in their school. Although the boys couldn't stay past grade four, their presence--even the presence of little boys--was seen as a bad influence. According to Emma Oastler: "Especially on the older girls."

  Emma was a menacing girl, and an older one. The grade-six girls were the oldest students in the junior school; they opened and closed the car doors for the little kids at the Rosseter Road entrance. When Jack started kindergarten in the fall of 1970--the first year St. Hilda's admitted boys--Emma was in grade six. He was five; she was twelve. (Some problem at home had caused her to miss a year of school.) On Jack's first day, Emma opened the car door for him--a formative experience.

  Jack was already self-conscious about the car--a black Lincoln Town Car from a limousine service, which Mrs. Wicksteed used for all her driving needs. (Neither Mrs. Wicksteed nor Lottie drove, and Alice never got her driver's license.) The limo driver was a friendly Jamaican--a big man named Peewee, who was nearly as black as the Town Car. He was Mrs. Wicksteed's favorite driver.

  What kid wants to show up for his first day of school in a chauffeured limousine? But Alice had not done badly by yielding to Mrs. Wicksteed's way of doing things. It seemed that the Old Girl was not only paying Jack's tuition at St. Hilda's; she was paying for the limo.

  Because Alice often worked at the Chinaman's tattoo parlor until late at night, Lottie got Jack up for school and gave him breakfast. Mrs. Wicksteed had sufficiently roused herself in time to do the boy's necktie, albeit a little absentmindedly. Lottie laid out his other clothes at bedtime--on school mornings, she also helped him get dressed.

  On those mornings, Jack would go into his mom's semidark room and kiss her good-bye; then Lottie would cross the sidewalk with him to the corner of Spadina and Lowther, where Peewee would be waiting in the Town Car. To her credit, Alice had offered to accompany her son on his first day.

  "Alice," Mrs. Wicksteed said, "if you take Jack to school, you'll make it an occasion for him to cry."

  Mrs. Wicksteed was firmly opposed to creating occasions for Jack to cry. While doing his necktie one morning, she told him: "You will be teased, Jack. Don't make it an occasion to cry. Cry only when you're physically hurt--and in that case, cry as loudly as you can."

  "But what do I do when I get teased?" Jack asked her.

  Mrs. Wicksteed wore a plum-colored dressing gown over a pair of her late husband's barber-pole pajamas. She always did the boy's tie while sitting at the kitchen table, warming her stiff fingers over her first cup of tea. Her white hair was in curlers and her face glistened with avocado oil.

  "Be creative," she advised him.

  "When I get teased?"

  "Be nice," Lottie suggested.

  "Be nice twice," Mrs. Wicksteed said.

  "And the third time?" Jack asked her.

  "Be creative," she said again.

  When the necktie was done, Mrs. Wicksteed kissed him on his forehead and on the bridge of his nose; then Lottie wiped the avocado oil off his face. Lottie would kiss Jack, too--usually in the front hall, before she opened the outside door and led him by the hand to Peewee.

  Lottie's limp, which was almost as disturbingly provocative to Jack as Tattoo Peter's missing leg, was a frequent topic of conversation between Jack and his mother. "Why does Lottie limp?" he must have asked his mom a hundred times.

  "Ask Lottie."

  But when he left for his first day of school, Jack still hadn't summoned the courage to ask his nanny why she limped.

  "What's with the lady's limp, mon?" Peewee asked him in the limo.

  "I don't know. Why don't you ask her, Peewee?"

  "You ask her, mon--you're the gentleman of the house. I'm just the driver."

  Jack Burns later thought he'd be able to see the intersection of Pickthall and Hutchings Hill Road from his grave--the way Peewee slowed the Town Car to a crawl, the way the older girls skeptically took for granted the arrival of another rich kid in another limo. It was a warm September morning; Jack was again aware of the girls' untucked middy blouses, loosely gathered at their throats by those gray-and-maroon regimental-striped ties. (In two years, they would all be wearing button-down collars with the top button unbuttoned.) But he would remember best the rebellious posture of their hips.

  The girls never stood still--sometimes with their arms around another girl, sometimes with all their weight on one foot while they tapped the other. Sitting down, they bounced one leg on one knee--the crossed leg constantly in motion. The extreme shortness of their gray pleated skirts drew Jack's attention to their legs and the surprising heaviness of their upper thighs. The girls picked at their fingers, at their nails, at their rings; they scratched their eyebrows and their hair. They looked under their nails, as if for secrets--they seemed to have many secrets. Among friends, there were hand signals and subtle evidence of other sign language.

  At the Rosseter Road entrance, where Peewee stopped the Town Car, the grade-six girls struck Jack as particularly secretive yet unrestrained. At eleven or twelve, girls think they look awful. They have ceased being children, at least in their estimation, but they have not yet developed into the young women they will become. At that age, there are great differences among them: some have begun to look and move like young women, others have boys' bodies and move as if they were shy young men.

  Not Emma Oastler, who was twelve going on eighteen. When she opened the car door for Jack, he mistook the faintest trace of a mustache on her upper lip for perspiration. The hair on her strong, tanned arms had turned blond in the summer sun, and her thick, dark-brown braid fell over her shoulder and framed one side of her almost-pretty face. The weight of her braid, which reached to her navel, served to separate and define her budding breasts. Maybe a quarter of the grade-six girls had noticeable breasts.

  When Jack got out of the limo and stood next to Emma, he came up to her waist. "Don't trip on your necktie, honey pie," Emma said. The boy's tie hung down to his knees, but until Emma warned him, he hadn't considered the danger of tripping on it. And Jack's gray Bermuda shorts, which he'd outgrown, were too short to be "proper"--or so Mrs. Wicksteed had observed. (Unlike the girls, the boys wore short socks.)

  Emma roughly lifted Jack's chin in her hand. "Let's have a look at those eyelashes, baby cakes--oh, my God!" she exclaimed.

  "What?"

  "I see trouble ahead," Emma Oastler said. Searching her face, Jack saw trouble ahead, too. He also realized his earlier mistake--the mustache. Up close, there was no way you could confuse the soft-looking fuzz on Emma's upper lip with beads of perspiration. At five, Jack didn't know that young women were sensitive about having mustaches. It looked like a neat thing to have; naturally, he wanted to touch it.

  If your first day of school, like your first tattoo, is a pilgrim experience--well, here was Jack's. And touching Emma Oastler's mustache would certainly prove to be character-forming. "What's your name?" Emma asked, bending closer.

  "Jack."

 
; "Jack what?"

  For an agonizing moment, her furbearing lip made him forget his last name. But more than her mustache made him hesitate. He had been christened Jack Stronach. His father had abandoned him, without marrying his mother; Alice saw no reason for either of them to bear William's name. But Mrs. Wicksteed disagreed. While Alice made a point of not being Mrs. Burns, Mrs. Wicksteed believed that no child should suffer from illegitimacy; at her instigation, Jack's name was legally changed, making him "legitimate" in name only. Furthermore, Mrs. Wicksteed was an assimilationist; in the Old Girl's view, a Jack Burns would be more easily assimilated into Canadian culture than a Jack Stronach. No doubt she thought she was doing the boy a favor.

  But Jack's hesitation to tell Emma Oastler his last name had attracted the attention of a teacher--the one they called The Gray Ghost. Mrs. McQuat was a spectral presence. She'd mastered the art of the sudden appearance; no one ever saw her coming. In her previous life, she may have been a dead person. What else could explain the chill that accompanied her? Even her breath was cold.

  "What have we here?" Mrs. McQuat asked.

  "Jack somebody," Emma Oastler replied. "He forgot the rest of his name."

  "I'm sure you can inspire him to remember it, Emma," Mrs. McQuat said.

  Although The Gray Ghost was not Asian, her eyes were forcibly slanted by how tightly her hair had been pulled back and knotted into a steel-gray bun. Her thin lips looked sealed in contrast to Emma's, which were usually parted. Emma's mouth was as open as a flower, and on her upper lip, her mustache was as fine as powder--like a dusting of pollen on a petal.

  Jack tried to hold back his hand, his right index finger in particular. As quickly as Mrs. McQuat had appeared, she'd disappeared--or else Jack had closed his eyes, in an effort to stop himself from touching Emma's mustache, and he'd missed The Gray Ghost's departure.

  "Think, Jack." Emma Oastler's breath was as warm as Mrs. McQuat's was cold. "Your full name--you can do it."

  "Jack Burns," the boy managed to whisper.

  Was it his name or his finger that surprised her? Maybe both. The simultaneity of saying his name at the exact same moment he ran his index finger over her downy upper lip was completely unplanned. The incredible softness of her lip made him whisper: "What's your name?"

  She seized his index finger and bent it backward. He fell to his knees and cried out in pain. The Gray Ghost made another of her signature sudden appearances. "I said inspire him, Emma--not hurt him," Mrs. McQuat admonished.

  "Emma what?" Jack asked the big girl, who was breaking his finger.

  "Emma Oastler," she said, giving his finger an extra twist before she let it go. "And don't you forget it."

  Forgetting Emma or her name would be impossible. Even the pain she caused him seemed natural--as if Jack had been born to serve her, or she'd been born to lead him. Mrs. McQuat may have recognized this in Jack's pained expression. He would realize only later that The Gray Ghost had undoubtedly been at St. Hilda's when Jack's father was sleeping with a girl in grade eleven and impregnating a girl in grade thirteen. Why else would she have asked, "Aren't you William Burns's boy?"

  That rekindled Emma Oastler's interest in Jack's eyelashes, in a hurry. "Then you're the tattoo lady's kid!" Emma exclaimed.

  "Yes," Jack said. (And to think he had worried that no one would know him!)

  Another teacher was closely observing the new arrivals, and Jack recognized her perfect voice as if he'd heard it every night in his dreams--Miss Caroline Wurtz, who had cured his mother of her Scottish accent. Not only did she excel in enunciation and diction, but the pitch of her voice would have been recognizable anywhere--especially in Jack's dreams. In Edmonton, where she was from, Miss Wurtz would have been considered beautiful--without qualification. In a more international city, like Toronto, her fragile prettiness was the perishable kind. (More likely, she may have suffered some disappointment in her personal life--an illusory love, or an encounter that had passed too quickly.)

  "Please give my regards to your mom, Jack," Miss Wurtz said.

  "Yes, thank you--I will," the boy replied.

  "The tattoo lady has a limo?" Emma asked.

  "That is Mrs. Wicksteed's car and driver, Emma," Miss Wurtz said.

  Once again, The Gray Ghost was gone--Mrs. McQuat had simply disappeared. Jack was aware of Emma's guiding hand on his shoulder, and of his jaw brushing her hip. She bent over him and whispered in his ear; what she said was not for Miss Wurtz to hear: "It must be nice for your mom and you, baby cakes." Jack thought she meant the Lincoln Town Car or Peewee, but Mrs. Wicksteed's patronage of "the tattoo lady" and her bastard son was a story that had gained admittance to St. Hilda's before Jack entered kindergarten. Emma Oastler was referring to Mrs. Wicksteed's broader role as their patroness. The boy also misunderstood what Emma said next: "Way to go, Jack. Not everyone is lucky enough to be a rent-free boarder."

  "Thank you," Jack replied, reaching for her hand. He was happy to have made a friend on his first day of school. Since Mrs. Wicksteed's divorced daughter had also referred to Jack and his mom as rent-free boarders, Jack wondered if Emma's mom might be divorced. Maybe women in that situation were particularly sympathetic to a good Old Girl like Mrs. Wicksteed taking Jack and Alice under her wing.

  "Is your mother divorced?" Jack asked Emma Oastler. Unfortunately, Emma's mother had been bitterly divorced for several years, and at least one consequence of her divorce had been so spectacularly ugly that she would permanently think of herself as Mrs. Oastler. For Emma, the subject was still as sore as a boil.

  In what Jack misinterpreted as a gesture of intimacy and unspoken understanding, Emma squeezed his hand. He was sure she didn't mean to hurt him, although her grip was as fierce as the handshake of the front-desk clerk at the Hotel Bristol in Oslo. "Are you Norwegian?" he asked her, but Emma was breathing too hard to hear him. Either in her concerted effort to crush his hand or because she was struggling to control her loathing of what a man-hating monster her mother had become in the aftermath of her divorce, Emma's newly acquired chest was heaving. A tear, which Jack first mistook for a rivulet of sweat, had run down her cheek and now clung to her mustache--like a droplet of dew on new moss. Jack's misgivings about attending St. Hilda's momentarily evaporated. What a splendid idea it was to have the grade-six girls serve as guides to the younger children in the junior school!

  On the stone stairs leading to the basement entrance, he stumbled, but Emma not only held him up; she hoisted him to her hip and carried him into his first day of school. Jack threw his arms around her in a flood of gratitude and affection; she returned his embrace so ferociously that he feared he might suffocate against her warm throat. They say that apparitions appear to those who are near fainting, which would explain why Jack first mistook The Gray Ghost for an apparition. There was Mrs. McQuat again--just as Emma Oastler was about to break his back or asphyxiate him with her twelve-year-old bosom.

  "Let him go, Emma," The Gray Ghost said. Jack's shirt was untucked and hung almost to his bare knees, though it didn't dangle as low as his tie. He was slightly dizzy and gasping for breath. "Help him tuck in his shirt, Emma," The Gray Ghost said. As soon as she spoke, she was gone--returned to her world of the spirits.

  Kneeling, Emma was Jack's height. His gray Bermuda shorts were not only too short; they were too tight. Emma had to undo the top button and unzip the boy's fly in order to tuck in his shirt. Under his shorts, her hands cupped and squeezed his buttocks as she whispered in his ear: "Nice tushy, Jack."

  Jack had caught his breath sufficiently to pay her a compliment in kind. "Nice mustache," he said--thus cementing their friendship for his remaining years at St. Hilda's, and beyond. Jack thought it must be a good school, as his mom had said, and here--in his first, exciting meeting with Emma Oastler--was probable evidence (at least to Jack) that he would be safe with the girls.

  "Oh, Jack," Emma whispered in his ear--her incredibly soft upper lip brushing his neck. "We're gonna have such a good ti
me together."

  The arched doorways in the junior-school corridor made Jack Burns think of Heaven. (If there were a passageway to Heaven, Jack used to think, surely it would have arches like that.) And the black-and-gray triangles on the linoleum floors made him feel that school and the grown-up life after it was a game to be played--maybe a game he hadn't yet been exposed to, but a game nonetheless.

  Another game was the miniature, broken-window view of the playground from the second-floor washroom--it was the only boys' washroom at St. Hilda's. The frosted-glass windowpanes were small and framed in black-iron squares. One of the panes was broken; it remained unrepaired through Jack's fourth-grade year. And the low urinals in the boys' washroom were not quite low enough when he was in kindergarten. He needed to stand on tiptoe and aim high.

  There were the infrequent but intimidating appearances in that second-floor hallway of those older girls who were boarders; one could gain access to their residence through the junior school. Only girls in grade seven and up were admitted to residency, and there were no more than one hundred boarders out of the five hundred girls in the middle and senior school. (St. Hilda's was a city school--most of the students lived at home.)

  The older girls who were boarders struck Jack as much older. Their detectable sullenness wasn't limited to the daughters of diplomats or the other foreign students, nor was their gloom regional in nature--the cousins who were called "the Nova Scotia sluts" were as depressed as the girl from British Columbia whom Emma Oastler called "the B.C. bitch." The boarders had about them a noticeable air of being banished. The boarders' choir made the most mournful music in the school.

  Sightings of the girls in residency were unusual in the junior school, but once, in his grade-three year, Jack was emerging from the boys' washroom (still zipping up his fly), when he saw a couple of grade-thirteen girls striding toward him--a flash of nail polish, kneesocks rolled down to their ankles, shapely legs, wide hips, full breasts. Jack panicked. In his haste, his penis got snagged in his zipper. Naturally, he screamed.