John Irving - Until I Find You

McSwiney had an eye for the periphery. Following the disaster, Bird comments in passing, many Halifax prostitutes moved to Toronto or Montreal—“to return later when conditions had improved.” As for those prostitutes who never left town, “business was brisk.”

Perhaps it was from this small mention of the life of prostitutes in Halifax that Doug McSwiney invented his peripheral story. At some Water Street location (this is given scant mention in Bird’s book), a prostitute watches a customer—“a merchant seaman”—leaving her door and going off in the direction of the waterfront. It’s early morning; the Mont Blanc is about to explode.

In McSwiney’s screenplay, this prostitute (or someone based on her) breathes in the cold morning air a little too long. The blast rips the whore’s clothes off, detaches her wig, and hurls her into the air—revealing to the audience that the prostitute, now naked and burning, is a man ! Jack Burns, of course—who else?

While devastation reigns, the amnesiac transvestite prostitute is taken to a hospital. Pitiful sights abound. As Bird writes: “Two hundred children, the matron and every other member of the staff, died under the fallen roof and walls of the Protestant Orphanage on Campbell Road. Those who were not killed outright were slowly burned to death.”

Yet the audience is supposed to feel sympathy for Jack’s character, an amnesiac transvestite prostitute? Despite the many burned women and children in the hospital, an attractive nurse feels especially sympathetic toward Jack’s character. The historical background of the film, which is given short shrift, is intercut with the amnesia victim’s slow recovery and the evolving love affair with his nurse.

The transvestite prostitute can’t remember who he is—not to mention what he was doing naked, flying, and burning in the air above Water Street at a little after 9:00 A.M. on that fateful Thursday. When he is well enough to leave the hospital, the nurse takes him home with her.

There then comes the inevitable scene in which the amnesia victim recovers his memory. (Knowing Jack Burns, you can see this coming.) The nurse has gone off to work at the hospital, and Jack’s character wakes up in her bedroom. He spots one of her uniforms on a chair—her clothes from the day before. He puts them on, and when he sees himself in the mirror—well, you can imagine. Flashbacks galore! Unseemly behavior in female attire!

Thus the audience is treated to a second version of the Halifax Explosion. We get to see the disastrous life of a transvestite prostitute, leading up to that other disaster—the real one. As Bird observes: “In this moment of agony a greater number had been killed or injured in Halifax than ever were to be in any single air raid on London during the whole of World War II.” But what was Doug McSwiney thinking ?

Jack hated those movie meetings where he went in knowing that he detested the script, but he liked the director and the idea behind the film. He knew he would be perceived as the interfering movie star who was trying to distort the material to better serve himself. Or in this case—in Doug McSwiney’s eyes, without a doubt—the Academy Award–winning screenwriter (talk about beginner’s luck!) who was trying to tell a writer of McSwiney’s vastly greater experience how to write.

Aside from Halifax being his birthplace, Jack was beginning to wonder why he had come—this being well before he touched down in Nova Scotia, where he had last landed in utero thirty-six years before. Maybe this would set back his therapy, as Dr. García had warned.

Jack checked into The Prince George; he made a dinner reservation at a nearby restaurant called the Press Gang. The restaurant was virtually across the street from the corner of Prince and Barrington, where William Burns had once played the organ in St. Paul’s. Close by, on Argyle and Prince, was the St. Paul’s Parish House, where the Anglicans had put up Jack’s pregnant mother; it might even have been the building where Jack was born, no C-section required.

St. Paul’s was built with white wooden clapboards and shingles in 1750. In memory of the Halifax Explosion, the church had preserved an unfrosted second-story window—a broken window, facing Argyle Street. When the Mont Blanc exploded, a hole had been blown in the window in the shape of a human head. The face in profile, especially the nose and chin, reminded Jack of his mother’s.

The organ in St. Paul’s had been erected in memory of an organist who’d died in 1920. The organ pipes were blue and white, and there was a second commemoration of another organist.

TO THE GLORY OF GOD

AND IN GRATEFUL MEMORY

OF NATALIE LITTLER

1898–1963

ORGANIST 1935–62

They must have needed a new organist in ’62. There was no commemoration of William Burns, who Jack hoped was still among the living. He’d come to Halifax to play the organ in St. Paul’s in 1964. (God knows how long William had stayed; there was no mention of his ever being there.)

Jack went outside the church and stood in the Old Burying Ground on Barrington Street, looking in the direction of Halifax Harbor. He was wondering what would have happened if he and his mother had stayed in Halifax—if they might have been happy there.

Jack knew that what was called “the explosion window” in St. Paul’s Church—that perfectly preserved head, in profile, which memorialized the 1917 disaster—was better material for a movie about the Halifax Explosion than that piece-of-crap screenplay Doug McSwiney had written. Jack was embarrassed to have come all this way for a meeting about a film he knew would never be made—not with Jack Burns as the amnesiac transvestite prostitute, anyway.

Furthermore, Jack didn’t ever want to meet Doug McSwiney. He decided he should just tell Cornelia Lebrun how he felt about the project, and leave it at that. (Jack knew there were a lot of movie meetings that could be avoided if people just told one another how they felt before they met.)

Jack knew that Cornelia Lebrun was staying at The Prince George, too, but he’d learned from Emma that it was better to express yourself in writing— especially if you’re pissed off about something. Before dinner, Jack had just enough time to go back to the hotel and write out what he should have told the French director in a simple phone call from Los Angeles.

He had a personal interest in spending a little time in Halifax, Jack explained to her, but he would not be associated with a film about the Halifax Explosion that trivialized the disaster. Jack wrote that he was attracted to the character of Le Medec, and wanted to know more about him. Jack pointed out to Cornelia Lebrun that his physique was suitable for the role of Le Medec, and that the sea captain’s reported moodiness and truculence were well within Jack’s range as an actor. (He mentioned his gift for accents, too.)

Another good role, among the real people involved in the historical disaster, was that of Frank Mackey, the pilot who didn’t speak French. And there was a third role of interest to any actor—that of C. J. Burchell, the counsel for the Norwegian shipping company. At that time, Burchell was the best-known maritime lawyer on the Eastern Seaboard. Representing the Imo ’s owners, Burchell was—in Bird’s words—“capable of the most ruthless court-room tactics.” Given the judge’s bias in favor of the Imo, and how local opinion was stacked against the Mont Blanc (and the French), Burchell must have been further encouraged “to attack and browbeat witnesses.”

What need was there for a fictional story? Jack asked Cornelia Lebrun in his letter. With almost two thousand people killed and nine thousand injured—with nearly two hundred blinded— who cared about an amnesiac transvestite prostitute who gets burned a little and loses his (or her) clothes and his memory and his wig ? Jack told the French director that McSwiney’s screenplay, in a word, sucked. (Dr. García would have cautioned Jack against this particular interjection, and—as things turned out—she would have been right. But that’s what he wrote in the heat of the moment.)