John Irving: Until I Find You

William didn’t want to waste Old St. Paul’s fabled reverberation time by selecting a quiet piece. To the degree that Jack could understand his mom’s story, his father was playing to be heard; he’d chosen Boellmann’s Toccata, which Alice called “rousing and noisy.”

Outside the church, a narrow alley ran alongside Old St. Paul’s. Huddled against the wall of the church, seeking shelter from the rain, was one of Edinburgh’s down-and-outs—in all likelihood a local drunk. He had either passed out in the alley or intentionally bedded down there; he may have slept there most nights. But not even a drunk can sleep through Boellmann’s Toccata—not even outside the church, apparently.

Alice enjoyed acting out how the drunken down-and-out had presented himself. “Would you stop that fucking racket? How the fuck can I be expected to get a good night’s fucking sleep with that fucking bloody fuck of a fucking organ making a sound that would wake the fucking dead?”

It seemed to Alice that the drunk should have been struck dead for using such language in a church, but before God could take any action against the down-and-out, William resumed playing—with a vengeance. He played so loudly that everyone ran out of Old St. Paul’s, including Alice. The organist with the midnight slot stood in the rain with her. Jack’s mom told Jack that the foul-mouthed man was nowhere in sight. “He was probably searching for a resting place beyond the reach of Boellmann’s Toccata!”

Despite such a reverberating performance, William Burns was disappointed by the organ. Built in 1888, the Father Willis would have been more highly valued if it were still in its original condition. Alas, in William’s estimation, the organ had been “much fiddled with”; by the time he got to try it, it had been restored and electrified, a process typical of the anti-Victorianism of the 1960s.

Not that Alice could possibly have cared about the organ. More devastating to her: when William left his job as the organist at South Leith Parish Church to play the Father Willis at Old St. Paul’s, there was no hope of her following him to be a choirgirl there. In those days, there was an all-male choir at Old St. Paul’s—and from the congregation, Alice could see only William’s back.

How she envied that choir! There was not only a procession, wherein the choir followed the cross, but the choir sat at the front of the church—in view of everyone—not at the back, unseen, as in Leith. Jack’s mother was particularly miserable when she discovered that she wasn’t the only choirgirl who’d fallen in love with Jack’s father, but she was the only one who was pregnant.

As the new assistant organist at Old St. Paul’s, William Burns was answerable to the senior organist and the priest; that William had knocked up a tattoo artist’s daughter from Leith was a matter that his ambitious parents and the Scottish Episcopal Church didn’t take lightly. Whose decision it was—“to whisk him away to Nova Scotia,” as Jack’s mom put it—would forever remain unclear to Jack, but both the church and William’s parents probably had had a hand in it.

The counterpart of Old St. Paul’s in Halifax, the Anglican Church of Canada, was simply called St. Paul’s. They did not have a Father Willis. The church with the best organ in Halifax was the First Baptist Church on Oxford Street. William Burns must have been told to make up his mind in a hurry. There’s no other explanation for why he chose the denomination over the organ—the music, not the church, was what mattered to him. But the organist at St. Paul’s in Halifax was retiring; the timing was providential.

The swath that William was alleged to have cut in Halifax in all likelihood included a choirgirl or two. (There was also talk of an older woman.) He wore out his welcome with the Anglicans in a hurry; according to Jack’s mother, his father wouldn’t have lasted a day longer with the Baptists.

William’s parents reportedly told Alice that they never sent him money or hid his whereabouts from her. The first claim is conceivably true—William’s parents had little money. But it was harder for Alice to believe that they didn’t conspire to hide him from her. And when William was forced to flee Halifax—not long before Alice’s arrival there—he must have needed money. He’d been tattooed again, as Alice discovered when she first went looking for him—at Charlie Snow’s tattoo shop in Halifax, where the power for the electric machines was supplied by car batteries. And it would be a while before William found a job, and more quickly lost it, in Toronto.

Alice never blamed Old St. Paul’s for whatever role the church may have played in arranging William’s passage to Nova Scotia. It was the parishioners of Old St. Paul’s—and surprisingly not her congregation in South Leith—who took up a collection to send Alice to Halifax to find him.

Furthermore, the Anglican Church of Canada looked after her in Halifax, and they did an honest job of it. But first they put her up in the St. Paul’s Parish House, at the corner of Argyle and Prince streets, to await her delivery day. By this time, she was not only pregnant; she was “showing.”

Jack Burns was alleged to have been a difficult birth. “A C-section,” his mom told him around the time of their arrival in the first of those North Sea ports. At four, the boy took this to mean that he was born in the C-section of a hospital in Halifax—a part of the hospital designated for difficult births. It was a little later—probably during, not after, their European travels—that Jack learned what a birth by Cesarean section meant. Only then was it explained to the boy that this was why it was not proper for him to take a bath with his mother, or to see her naked. Alice told Jack that she didn’t want him to see the scar from her C-section.

Thus Jack Burns was born in Halifax, under the care of churchgoers at the other St. Paul’s. As his mother remembered them—for the most part, fondly—they demonstrated considerable sympathy for a wayward choirgirl from the Church of Scotland, and they expressed the utmost contempt for the licentious organist who was one of their own. Scottish Episcopalians and Canadian Anglicans were cut from the same religious cloth. Apparently, it was because of those Anglicans at St. Paul’s in Halifax that William did not long remain in hiding in Toronto.

“The church was onto him,” as Alice put it.

In the meantime, after Jack was born in Nova Scotia, his mother went to work for Charlie Snow. Charlie was an Englishman who’d been a sailor in the British Merchant Navy in World War One; he was reputed to have jumped ship in Montreal, where Freddie Baldwin, who was also from England and had fought in the Boer War, taught him how to tattoo.

Both Freddie Baldwin and Charlie Snow had known the Great Omi. People paid to see the Great Omi’s tattooed face; he used to come to Halifax with a circus. When he walked around town, he wore a ski mask. “No one got a free look,” Jack’s mom told him. (This amounted to more nightmare material for the boy; Jack couldn’t stop himself from imagining the terrible tattoos on the Great Omi’s face.)

From Charlie Snow, Alice learned to rinse the tattoo machines with ethyl alcohol; she cleaned the tubes with pipe cleaners, which she’d soaked in the alcohol, and every night she boiled the tubes and needles in a steamer. “The kind meant for cooking clams and lobsters,” Alice said.

Charlie Snow made his own bandages out of linen. “There wasn’t much hepatitis then,” Alice explained.

She told Jack that Freddie Baldwin had given Charlie Snow his most impressive tattoo. Over Charlie’s heart, Sitting Bull sat facing General Custer, who stared straight ahead, unseeing, on the far right of Charlie’s chest. Dead-center on Charlie Snow’s breastbone was a full-sailed ship; a banner, unfurled from Charlie’s clavicle, said HOMEWARD BOUND.