John Irving - Until I Find You

“We’ll have a party, ” he told Mrs. Oastler, only half believing that it might be true.

In the morning, while Leslie was making coffee, Jack answered the phone in the kitchen. It was Bruce Smuck, a Toronto tattoo artist and a good friend of Alice’s; she’d liked his work and had been something of a mentor to him. He’d already called Leslie and offered his condolences; now he was calling to ask what he could bring.

“Oh, just bring yourself, Bruce,” Jack answered cluelessly. “We’ll be glad to see you.”

“Was that Bruce Smuck again?” Mrs. Oastler asked, after Jack hung up the phone.

“He wanted to know if he could bring something,” Jack said, the gravity of Bruce’s offer slowly sinking in.

“Bring what ?” Leslie asked.

Bruce must have meant booze, Jack thought. Bruce was a nice guy—he was just offering to help out. Obviously Bruce expected a mob !

Jack called Peewee on his cell phone and increased the original liquor-store order from a case each of white and red wine to three cases of white and five cases of red. (From what Alice had told Leslie, the majority of tattoo artists were red-wine types.)

“Tell Peewee to go to the beer store, too,” Mrs. Oastler said. “The bikers drink a lot of beer. Better fill the fucking limo with beer—just in case.” Leslie was sitting at the kitchen table with her head in her hands, inhaling the steam from her coffee cup; she looked like someone who’d recently quit smoking and desperately wanted a cigarette.

Jack poured himself a cup of coffee, but the phone rang before he could take his first sip. “Uh-oh,” Mrs. Oastler said.

It was a Saturday morning—Alice’s evensong service was scheduled for five-thirty that afternoon—but Caroline Wurtz was calling on her cell phone from the St. Hilda’s chapel, where she and the organist and the boarders’ choir were already practicing. When Jack answered the phone, he could hear the organ and the choir better than he could hear Caroline.

“Jack, a quandary has presented itself—in clerical form,” Miss Wurtz whispered. She sounded as if she were in Emma’s bed with him—as Jack had so often dreamed—and his mother was within hearing distance, down the hall.

“What quandary is that?” Jack whispered back.

“The Reverend Parker—our chaplain, Jack—wishes to lead the congregation in the Apostles’ Creed.”

“Mom requested no prayers, Caroline.”

“I know,” she whispered. “I told him.”

“Maybe I should tell him,” Jack said. He’d met the Reverend Parker only once. Parker was a young twit who’d felt excluded from Emma’s memorial service; hence he was inserting himself in Alice’s.

“I think I can negotiate with him, Jack,” Miss Wurtz whispered. In the background, the organ was fainter now—the girlish voices from the boarders’ choir were less and less distinct. The Wurtz must have been retreating from the chapel with her cell phone; Jack could hear the squeak of her shoes on the linoleum in the hall.

“What might be the terms of your negotiation ?” he asked.

“Let him lead the congregation through the Twenty-third Psalm, since he evidently wants to lead us through something, ” Caroline said more loudly.

“Mom said nobody should say anything. Aren’t psalms like prayers?”

“The Reverend Parker is the chaplain, Jack.”

“I like the Twenty-third Psalm better than the Apostles’ Creed,” Jack conceded.

“There appears to be another small quandary,” Miss Wurtz went on. Jack couldn’t hear the organ or the choir at all. Caroline must have walked all the way down the hall to the main entrance, yet he was having trouble hearing her again; this time, it wasn’t the organ or the boarders’ choir that was causing the interference. “Goodness!” The Wurtz exclaimed over the throttling engines, a near-deafening sound. ( Another quandary had presented itself—this one, Jack guessed, was not small.)

“What is it?” he asked, although he already knew. At the tattoo conventions, his mother used to tell him, the bikers always arrived early; perhaps they wanted to be sure they had a good place to park.

“My word, it’s a motorcycle gang !” Caroline cried, loudly enough for Mrs. Oastler to hear her. “What on earth is a motorcycle gang doing at an all-girls’ school?”

“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.”