John Irving: Until I Find You

Charlie Snow wouldn’t get home to his final resting place until 1969, when he was eighty. (He died of a bleeding ulcer.) Alice learned a lot from Charlie Snow, but she learned how to do a Japanese carp from Jerry Swallow, whose tattoo name was Sailor Jerry; he’d become Charlie Snow’s apprentice in 1962. Alice liked to say that she and Jerry Swallow “apprenticed together” with Charlie Snow, but of course she’d already been apprenticed to her father at Persevere in the Port of Leith.

Long before she’d docked in Halifax, Jack’s mother knew how to tattoo.

Jack Burns had no memory of his birthplace; until he was four, Toronto was the only town he knew. He was still an infant when his mom caught wind of his father and what he was up to in Toronto, and they followed him there from Halifax. But Jack’s dad had left town ahead of them, which was getting to be a familiar story. By the time the boy could comprehend his father’s absence, William was rumored to be back in Europe, having crossed the Atlantic once again.

For much of his young life, Jack would wonder if the story of his dad’s exploits in Toronto was what first led his mom to St. Hilda’s. Unthinkably, the school had hired William Burns to train the senior choir, which was composed of girls in grades nine through thirteen. William also gave private lessons in piano and organ; these were almost exclusively for the older girls. One can only imagine what Jack, as a teenager, would think of his father’s adventures at an all-girls’ school! (William’s noticeable contribution to the girls’ musical education led St. Hilda’s to make him the principal organist at the daily chapel services as well.)

Not surprisingly, William’s success at St. Hilda’s was short-lived. Although a girl in grade eleven—one of his piano students—was the first to succumb to his charms, it was a grade-thirteen girl whom he got pregnant. He later drove the girl to Buffalo for an illegal abortion. By the time Alice got to town with her illegitimate child in tow, William had fled, and Jack and his mother were once more welcomed by churchgoers.

St. Hilda’s was an Anglican school; the school’s chapel, where many of the St. Hilda’s graduates were later married, was a Toronto bastion of the Anglican Church of Canada. The few scholarships to the school that existed in the 1960s were funded by the Old Girls’ Association, a powerful alumnae organization. Children of the clergy were generally helped first; other decisions regarding who got financial aid were arbitrary. In addition to the Anglicans and the school faculty and administration, the Old Girls quickly heard of Alice and her condition. (Jack, of course, was the condition.) Thus, when Alice told Jack that she was arranging his admittance as one of the few new boys at St. Hilda’s, he assumed that his mom had the Old Girls’ help.

In fact, Alice and Jack had already been lucky; they’d found lodgings in the home of an Old Girl from St. Hilda’s. Mrs. Wicksteed was a warhorse for the alumnae association. Inexplicably, upon her husband’s death, she’d also become a champion of unwed mothers. She not only battled on their behalf—she even took them in.

Mrs. Wicksteed was a widow long past grieving; she lived virtually alone in a stately but not too imposing house at the corner of Spadina and Lowther, where Jack and his mom were given rooms. They were not big and there were only two of them, with a shared bath, but they were pretty and clean with high ceilings.

The Old Girl’s housekeeper, whose name was Lottie, was a former Prince Edward Islander with a limp. Lottie became the boy’s nanny while Alice sought the only work she knew.

In the 1960s, Toronto was hardly a tattoo mecca of North America. Alice’s apprenticeship to her dad in Persevere—and her secondary education in Halifax, with Charlie Snow and Sailor Jerry—had overqualified her for Toronto’s tattoo parlors. She was way better than Beachcomber Bill, who (for reasons unknown to Jack) didn’t offer her a job, and she was also better than the man they called the Chinaman, who did. His real name was Paul Harper and he didn’t look Chinese, but he knew that Alice was the best tattoo artist in Toronto in 1965; he hired her without a moment’s hesitation.

The Chinaman’s shop was on the northwest corner of Dundas and Jarvis. Near the old Warwick Hotel, there was a Victorian house with steps leading down to a basement door. The tattoo parlor was in the basement, and you entered it directly from the sidewalk on Dundas; the curtains on the basement windows were always drawn.

As a child, Jack Burns occasionally remembered to include Paul Harper in his prayers. The so-called Chinaman helped Alice launch her career in what would be the city of her choice, even if it would never be Jack’s.

But it’s no good being beholden to some people; indebtedness can come with a price. While the Chinaman never made Alice feel obligated to him, Mrs. Wicksteed was another matter. That she meant well was unquestioned, but to say, as her divorced daughter did, that Jack and Alice were her “rent-free boarders” would be a misuse of “rent-free.”

Mrs. Wicksteed rashly decided that Alice’s Scottish accent was a lowering mark upon her social station—more permanently damaging than her exotic, if unsavory, involvement with the tattoo arts. As Jack understood things, it was Mrs. Wicksteed’s belief that his mom’s burr was both a violation of English—that is, as Mrs. Wicksteed spoke it—and a curse that would condemn “poor Alice” to a station lower than Leith for all eternity.

As an Old Girl with deep pockets and an abiding devotion to St. Hilda’s, Mrs. Wicksteed hired a young English teacher there, a Miss Caroline Wurtz, who was expected to change Alice’s offensive accent. Miss Wurtz, in Mrs. Wicksteed’s view, not only excelled in enunciation and diction; it seemed she also lacked an interfering imagination that might have found Alice’s burr likable. Or possibly Miss Wurtz more deeply disapproved of Alice—the accent, in her view, being the least offensive thing about the young tattoo artist.

Caroline Wurtz was from Germany, via Edmonton; she was an excellent teacher. She could have cured anyone of a foreign accent—she attacked the very word foreign with a confident air. And whatever the source of her seeming disapproval of Alice, Miss Wurtz clearly doted on Jack. She could not take her eyes off the boy; sometimes, when she looked at him, she seemed to be reading his future in the contours of his face.

As for Alice, her attachment to Scotland had eluded her; she submitted to Caroline’s enunciation and diction as if there were nothing in her own language she held dear. Her father’s death—after her arrival in Halifax, but before Jack was born—and William’s rejection had made Alice no match for Miss Wurtz.

Thus, in addition to losing her virtue on one side of the Atlantic, Alice lost her Scottish accent on the other.

“It was not a lot to lose,” she would one day confide to Jack. (The boy assumed that his mother meant the accent.) Alice seemed to bear neither Miss Wurtz nor Mrs. Wicksteed a grudge. Jack’s mom wasn’t a well-educated woman, but she was nonetheless well spoken. Mrs. Wicksteed was most kind to her, and to Jack.

As for Lottie, with her limp, the boy loved her. She always held his hand, often taking it before he could reach for hers. And when Lottie hugged him, Jack felt it was as much for her own sake as it was to make him feel loved.

“Hold your breath and I’ll hold mine,” she would tell the boy. When they did so, they could feel their hearts beating chest-to-chest. “You must be alive,” Lottie always said.

“You must be alive, too, Lottie,” the boy replied, gasping for breath.

Jack would later learn that Lottie had left Prince Edward Island in much the same condition as his mother had been when she sailed for Halifax—only Lottie’s child was stillborn upon her arrival in Toronto, where Mrs. Wicksteed and the network of St. Hilda’s Old Girls had been most kind to her. Whether you called them Anglicans or Episcopalians, or worshipers in the Church of England, those Old Girls were a network. Considering that Jack and his mom were waifs in the New World, they were fortunate to be in the Old Girls’ care.