John Irving - Until I Find You

The tattoo was good enough to be his mother’s work, but Jack knew Daughter Alice’s handwriting by heart; the writing wasn’t hers. More traditional—instead of the Until I find you— was the actual name of the lover who’d left you or deceived you, or otherwise broken your heart.

Jack could easily imagine he was looking at a Tattoo Ole or a Doc Forest or a Tattoo Peter—or possibly Sailor Jerry’s work, from Halifax, long ago. The photos looked old enough. But Jack should have been thinking about the young woman, not her tattoo.

“You’re looking at the wrong breast, Jack,” Leslie Oastler said. “I don’t know why Alice bothered to keep that tattoo a secret from you all these years. The tattoo isn’t what’s gonna kill her.”

That was when Jack realized he was looking at pictures of his mother’s breasts—in which case, the photographs must have been taken about twenty years ago. Contrary to her unique reputation as a tattoo artist, not to mention what she’d told him, his mom had been tattooed—probably when William broke her heart, or shortly thereafter; certainly when Jack had still been a child, or even before he’d been born.

Alice’s insistence on hiding her tattoo from Jack was something he’d mistaken for modesty, which had never made the greatest sense alongside the opposite impression he had of her. It wasn’t modesty—not wanting Jack to take a bath with her, never allowing him to see her naked. (And this had nothing to do with the alleged scar from her C-section.) It was the tattoo that Alice hadn’t wanted Jack to see—and not only because she was tattooed, which contradicted her claim to originality among tattoo artists. Mainly it was the tattoo itself that she’d needed to conceal. Because the you in Until I find you must have been his missing father—it was William she’d kept a secret, from the start! And to mark herself for life because of him belied the indifference she pretended to—abandoning her search for William and refusing to talk to Jack about him.

The two-inch scar on the upper, outer quadrant of Alice’s right, untattooed breast was a thin, surgical line with no visible stitch-marks.

“She had the lumpectomy when she was thirty-one,” Mrs. Oastler informed Jack. “You were twelve—in grade seven, if I remember correctly.”

“I was at Redding,” he remembered out loud. “It was when Mom said she was going to come see me, but she didn’t.”

“She had radiation, Jack—and the chemotherapy was repeated every four weeks, for six cycles. The chemo made her sick for a few days every month—you know, vomiting— and of course she lost her hair. She didn’t want you to see her bald, or with a wig. You can’t see the scar in her right armpit in the photographs; it’s hard enough to see if you’re looking right at it. Lymph-node removal—rather standard procedure,” Leslie explained.

“Did a mammogram detect it, or did she feel the lump?” Jack asked.

“ I felt it,” Mrs. Oastler said. “It was fairly firm, actually hard to the touch.”

“Has the cancer come back, Leslie?”

“A recurrence in the other breast is very common,” Mrs. Oastler said, “but it hasn’t come back in her breast. It could have spread to her lungs, or to her liver, but it’s gone to her brain. Not the worst place it could show up —bones are awful.”

“What do they do for brain cancer?” he asked.

“It’s not really brain cancer, Jack. The breast cancer has metastasized in her brain—those are breast-cancer cells. When breast cancer goes somewhere else, I guess there’s not much they can do about it.”

“So Mom has a tumor in her brain?” Jack asked.

“A ‘space-occupying lesion,’ I think they call it—but, yeah, it’s a tumor to you and me,” Leslie said with a shrug. “Any intervention would be futile, they say. Even chemo would be merely palliative, to relieve symptoms—it isn’t a cure. There ain’t a cure,” she added—the curious ain’t (like Leslie’s use of gonna and oughta ) being a grieving mother’s conscious or unconscious effort to evoke her late daughter’s persistent but bestselling abuse of the language.

Mrs. Oastler picked up the photographs and put them in a kitchen drawer. It was where the manuals to the appliances were kept, but it was full of other junk; it was where Emma and Jack, as kids, had searched for Scotch tape or thumbtacks or paper clips or rubber bands.

The photos of her breasts had been Alice’s idea; she wanted Leslie to show them to Jack, but not until after she was dead.

“What are the symptoms, Leslie?”

“Despite the anti-seizure medication, she may have a few more seizures. She’s had one, anyway—I saw it. I felt the lump, I saw the seizure. There’s not much I miss,” Mrs. Oastler added.

“Is it like a convulsion, or a stroke?” he asked.

“I suppose so,” Leslie answered, shrugging again. “I’ve also noticed vague changes in her moods, even in her personality.”

“Leslie, Mom’s moods change all the time—her personality has always been vague !”

“She’s different, Jack. You’ll see. Especially if you can get her to talk to you.”

Jack called a taxi to take him to Queen Street. He thought he’d go wait for his mom to show up at Daughter Alice. Mrs. Oastler put her arms around Jack and hugged him with her head against his chest. “She’s gonna go quickly, Jack. They say it’ll be pretty painless, but she’s gonna go fast.” Jack stood in the kitchen with his arms around Leslie, hugging her back. She wasn’t hitting on him; she just wanted him to hold her. “You oughta talk to Maureen Yap, Jack. She kept calling you all night, from the Four Seasons.”

“I don’t think Maureen wants to talk to me,” he told Mrs. Oastler.

“I said you oughta talk to her, Jack. Maureen Yap is a doctor. She’s a fucking oncologist.”

“Oh.”

In the lobby of the Four Seasons, the front-desk clerks were surprised to see Jack Burns checking in. He’d planned to spend a couple of days in New York before flying back to L.A., but when he registered—again, as Jimmy Stronach—Jack told them that he would be staying in Toronto indefinitely, meaning until further notice. He also asked them, feigning indifference, if Maureen Yap had checked out. (In fact, Dr. Yap had just called room service and ordered her breakfast.)

They gave him back his old room. Because he’d forgotten to take the DO NOT DISTURB sign off the door, and the hotel maids hadn’t been informed that he’d checked out, it was almost as if he’d never left the hotel—and never been to Forest Hill and back—except for the news that his mother was dying.

It crossed Jack’s mind to call Maureen. “This is room service, Dr. Yap,” he might say. “Would you like to have Jack Burns with your breakfast?”

Jack could only imagine Maureen saying, “Yes, please,” but he didn’t feel like joking around. When Maureen had told him she was staying at the hotel under her maiden name, she hadn’t been kidding.

Jack took a quick shower and put on the hotel bathrobe and the stupid white slippers, as if he were on his way to or from the swimming pool. He knew Maureen Yap’s room number; his fans at the front desk had told him, although they weren’t supposed to. After all, he was Jack Burns; if he’d called the front desk and asked them to send him a pepperoni pizza with two hookers, they’d have had the pizza and the prostitutes at his door in about forty-five minutes.

The movies had taught Jack the power of presenting himself without words, and the little peephole in Maureen Yap’s hotel-room door offered Maureen an unexpected close-up of her favorite actor. Her breakfast had arrived only moments before—now here was Jack Burns in a bathrobe!