Authors: John Irving
“I’ll be right there,” Jack told her. “Better lock up the boarders.”
“Your mother has cursed us, Jack—this is just the beginning,” Leslie said, still holding her head in her hands.
Caroline and Jack had already had a little talk about Miss Wurtz’s correspondence with William. His dad had taken a particular interest in Jack’s artistic or creative training. “Your
development,
” as The Wurtz had put it.
“When I was at St. Hilda’s?” Jack asked.
“Indeed, Jack—when you were in the earliest stages of your
dramatic
education.”
“Your dramatizations, you mean—”
“Beginning with, but by no means exclusively, your remarkable success in
female
roles,” Miss Wurtz informed him. “I thought that William would be especially pleased with how you and I, in conversation, arrived at the idea that
he—
your father—was your own special audience of one. If you remember—”
“How could I forget?” Jack asked her.
“But he was
not
pleased,” Caroline told Jack, gravely. “Your father strenuously objected, in fact.”
“He objected to being my audience of one?”
“To the very
idea
of an audience of one, Jack. William was opposed to the concept aesthetically.”
“Why?” Jack asked. He’d noticed that she’d now said the name
William
twice.
Caroline sighed. (No more perishable beauty ever existed.) “Well,” she said, “I think his theory more aptly applies to
organs.
”
“Why
organs
?”
“Your father insisted that you should be taught to play your heart out, Jack. As for your audience—if only in your mind’s eye—they were all the wretched, down-on-their-luck and hard-of-hearing souls in the hindmost pews of the church, and
beyond.
”
“Beyond
what
?”
“He meant even the drunks, sleeping it off in the streets and alleys outside the church. That’s what William said.”
He meant even the prostitutes within hearing of the Oude Kerk, Jack was thinking; indeed, his dad must have meant that Jack should be reaching
vastly
more than an audience of one. (That is, if he was any good.)
“I think I get it,” Jack told Caroline.
“I wouldn’t call it a
correspondence,
Jack. We exchanged, at most, two or three letters. I wouldn’t want you to think that I still hear from him.”
“But he taught at the school—however briefly—when you were teaching there, too,” Jack reminded her. “You
knew
him, didn’t you, Caroline?”
Jack and Miss Wurtz were in a coffee shop on the corner of Lonsdale and Spadina. It was the weekend after Alice had died. Caroline was dressed, as he’d never seen her, in blue jeans and a man’s flannel shirt; Jack didn’t think she was wearing a bra. Nevertheless, she was absolutely stunning for a woman in her fifties—she was radiant, even
glowing.
Those high cheekbones, her fine jaw cut like crystal, the peachlike blush to her skin—Miss Wurtz was a knockout. She sighed again and ran her long fingers through her wavy hair, which was now completely gray but still lustrous; her hair had the sheen of slate in sunlight.
“Yes, Jack—if you must know—I
knew
him,” Caroline said. Staring down at the coffee in her cup, she added softly: “William gave me some of my favorite clothes. He had an eye for women’s clothes. They may be a bit old-fashioned by today’s standards, but they’re still my favorites, Jack.”
Naturally, Emma had spotted the clothes. Caroline saw that Jack couldn’t speak; she reached across the small café table and touched his face. “He was not just my lover—he was my
only
lover,” Miss Wurtz told him. “Well, it didn’t
last,
” she said, almost cheerfully. “Too many other women wanted William—women
and
girls,” Caroline added, laughing. Jack was surprised that she sounded more amused than bothered by the thought—maybe because it was so long after the fact. “Your father was far more committed to his music than to our fair sex, Jack,” she went on. “And if you ever heard him
play,
” Miss Wurtz whispered, taking Jack’s hands in hers. “Well, it suffices to say—no wonder he was more engaged by his music than by
us
!”
No wonder Jack had dressed The Wurtz in mail-order underwear in his dreams! Who could resist the temptation to give her clothes? His father hadn’t resisted her!
Jack swallowed his coffee with unusual difficulty. “Did my mom know?” he asked Caroline.
“Your mother knew that William liked the way I
spoke.
That’s all she knew,” Miss Wurtz told him. “William must have said something to Alice about my voice—my diction, my enunciation. He used to tell me,
admiringly,
that I didn’t have an accent.”
“So it was
Mom’s
idea—to have you teach her how to
talk
?” Jack asked. “I thought it was Mrs. Wicksteed who wanted her to lose the Scottish accent.”
“Goodness, no!” Caroline said, with a laugh. “Mrs. Wicksteed was such an old-school Canadian—she
loved
a Scottish accent!”
“But you must have known about the girls—I mean the boarders, Caroline.”
“Oh, who
didn’t
know about those silly girls!” Miss Wurtz exclaimed. “You know boarders, Jack. If they could get pregnant all by themselves, they’d probably try it.”
“But he left you, too, didn’t he?” Jack asked her. “You don’t sound as if you hate him.”
“I never expected him to stay, Jack. Of course I don’t
hate
him! William was one of those pleasures every woman wants to have, at least once in her lifetime. With all due respect to Alice, Jack, you have to be deluded to imagine you might
keep
a man like that. Especially at his age at that time—he was so young!”
Jack looked at Caroline Wurtz with everything he had lost visibly written on his face—the way he must have looked when his mother said, “Who knows what sort of father he would have been, Jack? With a man like that,” Alice had said, with disgust, “you can never be sure.” But Miss Wurtz had used the exact same phrase
—a man like that—
with enduring affection!
“If
you’d
been my mother,” he told Caroline, “I would have had a father. At least I would have occasionally
seen
him.”
“I haven’t heard a word from him, or about him, in years,” Miss Wurtz told Jack. “But that doesn’t mean you can’t find him.”
“He may be dead, Caroline.
Mom
is.”
The Wurtz leaned across the café table and grabbed hold of Jack’s left ear; it was as if she were Mrs. McQuat and he still in grade three, about to be taken to the chapel by The Gray Ghost.
“You faithless boy!” she said. “If William were dead, my heart would have
stopped
! The day he dies, my breasts will shrivel to the size of
raisins
in my sleep—or I’ll turn into
linoleum
or something!”
Linoleum?
Jack wondered. (The poor woman had been at St. Hilda’s too long.) His ear, which she still held, was throbbing. Suddenly Miss Wurtz let him go; she laughed at herself like a young girl. “Well, don’t I sound like a brainless
boarder
!” Caroline exclaimed. “You faithless boy,” she said to Jack again—this time fondly. “Go find him!”
“Tell me the context, baby cakes,” Emma used to say. “Everything comes with a context.”
That Saturday in March—it was 1998, and March in Toronto is not reliable motorcycle weather—Jack walked to the circular driveway at the corner of Pickthall and Hutchings Hill Road, where he had once stood holding his mother’s hand in a sea of girls.
The motorcycles, their engines off, were parked in a row—with something less than military precision. The day was overcast, there was a raw chill in the air, and the gas tanks of the motorcycles were beaded and glistening in the descending mist—a fine drizzle. In that weather, Jack didn’t take the time to count them, but there were about thirty motorcycles—their license plates indicating how far some of their riders had traveled.
North Dakota Dan had driven all the way from Bismarck; he’d hooked up with Lucky Pierre at Twin Cities Tattoo in Minneapolis, and they rode together down to Madison, Wisconsin, where Badger Schultz and his wife, Little Chicken Wing, were waiting. They’d picked up the Fronhofer brothers at Windy City Tattoo in Chicago, and rode together into Michigan; they hit snow in Kalamazoo and Battle Creek, but they still made it to East Lansing in time to have a party with Flipper Volkmann at Spartan Tattoo. The next morning, they rode with Flipper to Ann Arbor, where Wolverine Wally joined them. They had some understandable difficulty clearing Canadian customs, but they picked up the 401 in Windsor and rode through the rain to Kitchener and Guelph, where they met a couple of Ontario tattoo artists Jack had never heard of. (He still couldn’t remember their names.)
There were riders heading north from Louisville, Kentucky, and three cities in Ohio, too. Joe Ink from Tiger Skin Tattoo in Cincinnati, and the Skretkowicz sisters from Columbus—one of whom was the ex-wife of Flattop Tom, who joined up with the sisters in Cleveland.
The contingent from Pennsylvania, too numerous to name, included notables in the tattoo world from Pittsburgh, Harrisburg, Allentown, and Scranton—and Night-Shift Mike, from Sailors’ Friend Tattoo, rode the long way north from Norfolk, Virginia. There were motorcycles in the circular St. Hilda’s driveway with license plates from Maryland and Massachusetts and New York and New Jersey, too.
From the voices raised in song—one could hear them booming from the chapel, the
male
voices seeming to challenge the organ and overwhelming the boarders’ choir—Jack knew that Miss Wurtz hadn’t been idle. She’d ushered the bikers inside and made them comfortable at the rehearsal. Hot coffee would soon be available in the gym, Miss Wurtz had told them, which wasn’t quite true—not
soon,
anyway.
“But how many of you know ‘God Save the Queen’?” The Wurtz had asked them. To the bikers’ uncomprehending silence, Caroline had said: “Well, I
thought
so! It seems you could benefit from a little
practice.
”
By the time Jack got to St. Hilda’s, she had them singing. Most of the tattoo artists didn’t know which queen they were singing to save—but it was for Daughter Alice, which is why they’d come, and the sound of their voices seemed to warm them. They stood dripping in their wet leathers; the smell of the road, oil and exhaust, mixed with the smell of their well-worn gear, their wind-blown beards, their helmet-matted hair. Thrilled, the boarders’ choir faced them from the safety of the altar. The girls’ voices sounded like those of children among the bikers, who were mostly men.
The organist, a pretty young woman who was as new to St. Hilda’s as the twit chaplain, was making mistakes; even Jack could tell she was nervous, and that her errors were increasing with each new mistake she made.
“Calm down, Eleanor,” Miss Wurtz told her, “or I’ll have to take over, and I haven’t played an organ in
years.
”
While Eleanor took a short breather, Jack introduced himself to his mom’s friends. “The good-lookin’ Jack Burns,” he heard Night-Shift Mike say, appraising him.
“Daughter Alice’s little boy,” one of the Skretkowicz sisters said.
“I’m the other Skretkowicz,” the other sister told Jack. “The one who was never married to Flattop Tom, or to anybody else,” she whispered in Jack’s ear, biting his earlobe.
“Your mom sure was proud of you,” Badger Schultz said. His wife, Little Chicken Wing, was already dissolved in tears—and it wasn’t even noon. They had hours to go before Alice’s memorial service.
Caroline clapped her hands. “We’re still rehearsing—we’re rehearsing until I say, ‘Stop!’ ” Miss Wurtz called from the altar area. Eleanor, the organist, seemed almost composed.
“I didn’t know you could play the organ, Caroline,” Eleanor said—more audibly than she’d meant to, because Jack and the bikers had suddenly stopped talking.
Glancing in Jack’s direction, Miss Wurtz blushed. “Well, I had a few memorable
lessons,
” she said.
God save our gracious Queen,
Long live our noble Queen,
God save the Queen!
Send her victorious,
Happy and glorious,
Long to reign over us;
God save the Queen!
Under The Wurtz’s direction, they sang and sang. The pure, girlish voices of the boarders’ choir were no match for the beer-hall gusto of the bikers, who—as they recovered from the damp chill of the March roads—shed their leathers. Their tattoos rivaled the colors of Jesus and his surrounding saints on the chapel’s stained glass.
Jack slipped away. He knew that Miss Wurtz could
dramatize
anything; by the time of the blessed event, Caroline would have polished to perfection both the boarders’
and
the bikers’ choir. As Jack was leaving, the tattoo artists were listening reverentially to the girls, who were singing “Lord of the Dance.”
I danced in the morning
When the world was begun,
And I danced in the moon
And the stars and the sun,
And I came down from heaven
And I danced on the earth,
At Bethlehem
I had my birth.
Out in the circular driveway, two more riders had arrived; they were parking their motorcycles alongside the others. Slick Eddie Esposito from The Blue Bulldog in New Haven, Connecticut, and Bad Bill Letters from Black Bear Season Tattoo in Brunswick, Maine. Their creased leathers were streaked with rain and they looked stiff with cold, but they recognized Jack Burns and smiled warmly. Jack shook their icy hands.
He’d thrown on some old clothes at Mrs. Oastler’s—jeans, running shoes, a waterproof parka that had been Emma’s and was way too big for him. “I’m just going home to change my clothes for the service,” Jack told the newly arrived bikers. They seemed mystified by the girls’ voices coming from the chapel. “The others are inside, practicing.”