(2005) Until I Find You

by John Irving

  Mr. Ramsey interrupted Jack’s scrutiny of the audience from backstage—it was time for him to tie the blood bag around the boy’s waist, and for Jack to put his trial dress on. Maybe Jack was supposed to resemble Joan of Arc, although (despite getting his first period onstage) he would fare better than poor Joan. The dress was a sackcloth sheath, as beige as a potato. The blood, Mr. Ramsey assured him, would be most vivid against such a neutral background. The clamminess of the plastic bag, which flopped against Jack’s bare abdomen, was at first disconcerting under the dress. While it wasn’t a very big bag, Mr. Ramsey worried that it might make Jack-as-Jenny look pregnant. Mr. Ramsey loosened the knot at the top of the bag to release any excess air. This may have precipitated the slow leak, which Jack didn’t notice until he sat down in the witness box to give his testimony. He thought he was sweating. But the trickle down one leg was blood, or water with red food coloring—not sweat. Given Jack’s near-death ejaculation, he first feared that his penis was bleeding. When he realized that the bag of colored water was leaking, he wondered if there would be sufficient blood left in the bag for the all-important bursting scene.

  After the performance, Mr. Ramsey would praise what he called Jack’s “preparation” for the standing, screaming, bleeding extravaganza—the way the boy squirmed in the witness chair as if, unbeknownst to him, his first period was already starting. But it was!

  Jenny faltered in her testimony, a hesitation Mr. Ramsey later termed “brilliant”—but one that caused the faithful prompter, Bonnie Hamilton, to look up from her lap and regard Jack-as-Jenny with the utmost concern. (Jack could read his as-yet-unspoken lines on her lips.) He could see that the audience was growing anxious; he hoped that no one in the audience could see the trickle of blood. But Peewee saw it. The poor man was not a regular theatergoer; he’d come out of fondness for Jack. Peewee knew nothing of props—the gun had taken him totally by surprise. And now he saw that Jack was bleeding—the strain of the moment, or something hemorrhoidal, or a stab wound inflicted by one of the older girls backstage? Jack was only a couple of lines away from his big moment when Peewee rose from his seat and pointed at the boy. “Jack, you are bleeding, mon!” he cried.

  It was everything The Wurtz feared—it was improv. Jack spontaneously decided to edit his remaining testimony, which made Bonnie Hamilton gasp. But he was already bleeding. Wasn’t the blood, and his reaction to it, his best witness? Jack jumped to his feet and struck the leaking bag of colored water with both fists. The bag had lost more blood than he’d realized; it was not full enough to burst easily. Darlin’ Jenny struck herself in the lower abdomen again and again. The last time, she hit herself a little too hard; Jack-as-Jenny doubled over at the force of the blow. The bag burst with the sound of a tendon snapping, the blood exploding under the potato-colored dress.

  “Jack, you are making it worse, mon!” Peewee cried.

  But Jack was at that moment in his performance when his audience of one took over completely. He screamed and screamed. He raised his bound wrists above his head, his hands dripping blood; the blood dripped on his face. What was meant to represent a first and long-withheld period suddenly looked like a terminal hemorrhage. Someone on the jury (one of the two women) was supposed to say that this clearly had to be Jenny’s first experience with menstruation, but Jack-as-Jenny didn’t hear the line. The audience couldn’t have heard it, either. Even Bonnie, the prompter, had stopped prompting. Jack was wailing like a banshee.

  He was being sent away, to Maine! He had managed to ejaculate not only because he was drawn to Bonnie Hamilton’s pain, but also because of his enduring infatuation with Emma Oastler’s mustache—and holding his breath while kissing Emma had almost killed him! Mrs. Wicksteed lay dying. Lottie was taking the boat back to Prince Edward Island. Jack’s world was changing, once again. He couldn’t stop screaming. Jack-as-Jenny bled enough for a young woman having her first five periods!

  Miss Wurtz had on her enraptured face an expression of stunned enlightenment; in her literary snobbery, she’d underestimated both Jack’s improvisational powers and the theatrical potential of A Mail-Order Bride in the Northwest Territories. The entire cast was frozen. Backstage, Sandra Stewart vomited again. (Ginny Jarvis, now the murdered Mr. Halliday, said this was all Jack’s doing.)

  Emma had stopped chewing her gum with her mouth open. Even Mrs. Oastler seemed impressed by all the blood and screaming. Mrs. Peewee was clutching her hat as if she were strangling the parrot. Jack barely noticed that Peewee had rushed onstage to attend to him. He just went on screaming and bleeding. Jack was only distracted from his audience of one when he looked at his mother.

  It had not been an easy time for Alice lately. She had recently caught Jack under the covers trying to sneak a look at the scar from her C-section. In the semidarkness of her bedroom, Jack couldn’t see it. He explained that he was curious as to whether she had a bikini cut, like Leslie Oastler, or if her incision had been the vertical kind.

  “It’s private, Jack—it’s not your business!” his mom cried. But why had she been so upset about it?

  In the front row at the St. Hilda’s theater, maybe Alice was remembering that awkward moment—or the passing of Mrs. Wicksteed, or losing Lottie. (Or the future—moving in with Mrs. Oastler, among other things.)

  Even as he went on screaming and bleeding onstage, Jack realized that his mom, like Peewee, was not much of a theatergoer. She may have thought she’d seen him “act” before, but this was nothing she’d been prepared for. Her mouth was as open as Emma’s, her hands were fists pressed against her temples, her knees were clamped as tightly together as if she were the one who was hemorrhaging. And because Jack was screaming, he couldn’t hear her crying. He saw the tears flow down her cheeks. She cried and cried, without restraint; she was hysterical. Jack saw Leslie Oastler trying to comfort her. Emma had stopped looking at Jack and was staring at Alice instead.

  “I’m all right,” Jack said to Peewee, who had picked him up and was shouting for a doctor. “It’s a play, Peewee!”

  “Mon, you have bled enough for both of us!” Peewee said; but Jack was transfixed by his mother.

  “Oh, Jackie, Jackie!” she was crying. “I’m sorry, Jack—I’m so sorry!”

  “I’m okay, Mom,” he tried to tell her, but she didn’t hear him. There was now the applause to contend with—it had swelled to a standing ovation. (Even The Wurtz was applauding.) The entire cast was onstage with Peewee and Jack. It was time for their bows, but Peewee wouldn’t put Jack down.

  “It’s just water with red food coloring, Peewee,” Jack whispered in the big man’s ear. “It was a prop. I’m not bleeding.”

  “Shit, mon,” Peewee said, “what am I supposed to do with you then?”

  “Try bowing,” the boy told him. Still holding Jack-as-Jenny in his arms, Peewee bowed.

  On Monday, Mr. Ramsey would inquire if he could ask Peewee to be there for the remaining performances, but it was not an experience Peewee wanted to repeat. (Years later, Peewee told Jack that he never got over it.)

  Jack saw that The Gray Ghost had magically materialized at his mother’s side. Faithful combat nurse that she was, Mrs. McQuat was doing her best to calm Alice down, but not even The Gray Ghost was effective. Alice’s sobs were lost in the uproar, but Jack could still see her stricken face. He could read her lips—his name, over and over again, and she kept repeating that she was sorry.

  Jack had meant to ask her if they were to become Mrs. Oastler’s rent-free boarders—and, on the subject of “free,” had his mom given Emma’s mom a free tattoo? But seeing his mom so dissolved by his performance as Darlin’ Jenny, Jack knew better than to ask. Without fully understanding his mother’s relationship with Leslie Oastler, he guessed that nothing in this world (nothing that mattered) was ever free.

  Despite the applause, Jack would have begun to scream again—had not the curtain come down and he found himself backstage, still in Peewee’s arms. Peewee had only momentarily viewed the fall
ing curtain as another unscripted calamity. Once the sea of girls had surrounded them, Peewee calmed himself and congratulated Jack on his performance. He finally put the boy down.

  “Jack Burns!” Mr. Ramsey was calling. “Every mail-order bride in the world is in your debt!” Jack saw that Mr. Ramsey had a camera; he was taking a picture of Jack-as-Jenny.

  “You can shoot me anytime, Jack,” Ginny Jarvis said too loudly in his ear.

  Penny Hamilton, who overheard her—and whose unfortunate forehead had been in the way of his near-death ejaculation—said: “Yeah, Jack, the odds are that you’re not shooting blanks.”

  “What?”

  “Leave him alone,” Emma Oastler said. She’d managed to make her way backstage and had thrown a protective arm around him.

  Also backstage was the haunted face that would stalk Jack’s future. Bonnie Hamilton was looking at him from a distance, as if her heart couldn’t bear coming any closer. She had stopped prompting, but he could still read her trembling lips.

  “You see?” Jack whispered in Emma’s ear. “You see how Bonnie’s looking at me—that’s what I mean.”

  But in the clamor of the moment, Emma didn’t hear him—or else she was too preoccupied, fending off the older girls. “You know what, baby cakes?” Emma was saying. “It might not be the world’s worst idea that you’re going to an all-boys’ school in Maine.”

  “Why?”

  There was his makeup to remove, and the stage lipstick—not to mention all the blood. The director, Mr. Ramsey, the child Viking, could not stop bouncing on the balls of his feet. “Just when I was beginning to think that Abigail Cooke might be a pinch dated,” he was saying to Miss Wurtz, who’d come (with tears in her eyes) to offer her congratulations.

  Emma’s old friends Wendy Holton and Charlotte Barford had come backstage to join them. “If I ever had a period like that, I think I’d die,” Wendy told Jack. Charlotte Barford kept eyeing him as if he were a neglected hors d’oeuvre.

  Somehow, despite his considerable size—not to mention his last-minute contribution to the production—Peewee had managed to slip away. In the happy chaos following the successful opening night, Jack allowed his mother’s visible distress to drift to the back of his mind. But if he ever had a conscience at St. Hilda’s, her name was Mrs. McQuat. Not to be outdone by Jack’s success, The Gray Ghost staged a characteristic sudden appearance that took the boy’s breath away. If he’d had any blood left in him, he would have started bleeding afresh. If his throat weren’t raw from screaming, he would have screamed again—only louder.

  Jack was going home with Emma. “Our first sleepover, honey pie!” Emma had declared. She’d left the backstage area to go find her mom, who was waiting with Alice. Jack was, albeit briefly, still backstage but miraculously alone. Even his beloved prompter had slipped away, her limp for once unnoticed.

  That was when The Gray Ghost appeared at his side—her cold hands taking Jack by both wrists, exactly where they’d been bound together. “Good show, Jack,” Mrs. McQuat breathed on him. “But you have work to do. I don’t mean . . . onstage,” she whispered.

  “What work?” he asked.

  “Look after your mother, Jack. You’ll blame yourself . . . if you don’t.”

  “Oh.” (Look after her how? he wanted to ask. Look after her why?) But The Gray Ghost, who was almost always in character, had disappeared.

  As he would discover again, later in his life, Jack found that it can be a dark and lonely place backstage—after the audience and the rest of the cast have gone. In no way was Jack Burns a mail-order bride, but that pivotal and blood-soaked performance in Mr. Ramsey’s histrionic production had launched him.

  14

  Mrs. Machado

  Boys, as a rule, did not attend their class reunions at St. Hilda’s. You can’t really have a class reunion if you don’t graduate, and the St. Hilda’s boys left the school at the end of grade four—without ceremony.

  Lucinda Fleming was a tireless organizer of her class reunions at St. Hilda’s—Jack’s graduating class, had he been a girl. Maureen Yap, whose married name would remain a mystery, attended the reunions regularly—even in her nonreunion years. The Booth twins were regulars as well; they were always together. But Lucinda’s Christmas letters never mentioned the twins’ identical blanket-sucking sounds. (Jack would wonder if the Booths still made them.)

  Caroline French was a no-show at the reunions. If Caroline still thumped her heels on occasion, she was doing it alone. Her adversarial twin, Gordon, was killed in a boating accident—not long after he left St. Hilda’s, when Jack was still in school elsewhere. As Jack would discover, it’s remarkable how you can miss people you barely knew—even those people you never especially liked.

  Jack’s last day of school, in the spring of 1975, was marked by the unusual occasion of both Emma Oastler and Mrs. McQuat accompanying him to the Lincoln Town Car, which Peewee had dutifully parked with the motor running at the Rosseter Road entrance. It had been Mrs. Wicksteed’s dying wish that Peewee continue to be Jack’s driver for the duration of the boy’s time at St. Hilda’s.

  Emma and Jack slipped into the backseat of the Town Car as if their lives were not about to change. Peewee was in tears. His life was about to change—actually, upon Mrs. Wicksteed’s death, and Lottie’s abrupt departure for Prince Edward Island, it already had. The Gray Ghost leaned in the open window, her cool hand brushing Jack’s cheek like a touch of winter in the burgeoning spring. “You may . . . write to me, Jack,” Mrs. McQuat said. “In fact, I . . . recommend that you do so.”

  “Yes, Mrs. McQuat,” the boy said. Peewee was still sobbing when the Town Car pulled away.

  “You better write to me, too, baby cakes,” Emma was saying.

  “You just watch your ass, mon,” Peewee blubbered. “You better grow eyes in the back of your head, just to keep watching your ass!”

  Jack sat in the backseat, not talking—much as he had on the way to and from Mrs. Wicksteed’s funeral. All the while, his mother kept saying that the summer ahead would be “no vacation.” She said she was dedicating herself to the task of getting Jack ready to go away to school. “You have to learn how to deal with boys, Jack.”

  Alice, whose estimation of her son’s lack of athletic prowess was exaggerated but largely true, sought the services of four men she had tattooed to instruct Jack in the manly art of self-defense. What form of self-defense he chose was up to him, his mom said.

  Three of the tattooed men were Russians—one from Ukraine and two from Belarus. They were wrestlers. The fourth man was a Thai kickboxer, an ex-champion—the former Mr. Bangkok, whose fighting name was Krung. Mr. Bangkok and the wrestler from Ukraine—his name was Shevchenko, but Alice called him “Chenko”—were both older men, and bald. Krung had chevron-shaped blades tattooed on both cheeks, and Chenko had a snarling wolf tattooed on his bald pate. (When Chenko bowed to an opponent, there was the unfriendly wolf.)

  “A Ukrainian tattoo, I guess,” Alice told Jack, with evident distaste. Krung’s facial blades were “a Thai thing,” Alice said. Both men had broken hearts tattooed on their chests. Daughter Alice’s work—no one had to tell Jack that.

  The grungy old gym on Bathurst Street was marginally more frequented by kickboxers than by wrestlers. Blacks and Asians were the principal clientele, but there were a few Portuguese and Italians. The two boys from Belarus were young taxi drivers who’d been born in Minsk—“Minskies,” Chenko called them. Boris Ginkevich and Pavel Markevich were sparsely tattooed, but they were serious wrestlers and Chenko was their coach and trainer.

  Boris and Pavel had tattoos where some wrestlers like them—high on the back between the shoulder blades, so that they are visible above a wrestler’s singlet. Boris had the Chinese character for luck, which Jack recognized as one of his mom’s newer tattoos. Pavel had a tattoo of a surgical instrument (a tenaculum) between his shoulder blades—a slender, sharp-pointed hook with a handle. As Pavel explained to Jack, a tenaculum was ma
inly used for grasping and holding arteries.

  The walls of the old gym were brightened by some of Daughter Alice’s and the Chinaman’s flash—one of the few places in Toronto where the Chinaman’s tattoo parlor was advertised. Even the weight-training mirrors were outlined with Alice’s broken hearts, and her Man’s Ruin was on display in the men’s locker room, but the gym’s decor was dominated by Chinese characters and symbols. Jack recognized the character for longevity, and the five bats signifying the so-called five fortunes. And there was the Chinaman’s signature scepter, the short sword symbolizing “everything as you wish.”

  Jack had told his mom that it was his favorite of the Chinaman’s tattoos—she said, “Forget about it.” The boy also liked the finger-shaped citron known as Buddha’s Hand, which either Alice or the Chinaman had tattooed on Krung’s thigh.

  In the old gym, too, there were the Chinese characters for deer and the lucky number six—and the peony symbol, and a Chinese vase, and the carp leaping over the dragon’s gate. The so-called dragon’s gate is a waterfall, and the carp leaps upstream, over the waterfall; by so doing, it becomes a dragon. This was a full-back tattoo—it took days, sometimes weeks. Alice said that some people with full-back tattoos felt cold, but Tattoo Ole had argued with her on this point. Ole claimed that only people with full-body tattoos felt cold, and not all of them did. (According to Alice, most full-bodies felt cold.)

  There was also a moon goddess in the Bathurst Street gym, and the so-called queen mother of the west—in Taoist legend, she has the power to confer immortality. And the Chinese character for double happiness, which Alice refused to tattoo on anyone; it was synonymous with marriage, which she no longer believed in.

  The old gym itself had once been a rug store. The large display windows, which faced the Bathurst Street sidewalk, attracted the more curious of passersby. In the neighborhood, the former Mr. Bangkok’s kickboxing classes were famous. Krung, despite the chevrons emblazoned on his cheeks and the Buddha’s Hand on one thigh, was a popular teacher. There were kickboxing classes for all levels. Jack was enrolled in a beginner class, of course; given the boy’s age and size, his only feasible sparring partners were women.