John Irving - Until I Find You

As he would discover again, later in his life, Jack found that it can be a dark and lonely place backstage—after the audience and the rest of the cast have gone. In no way was Jack Burns a mail-order bride, but that pivotal and blood-soaked performance in Mr. Ramsey’s histrionic production had launched him.

Boys, as a rule, did not attend their class reunions at St. Hilda’s. You can’t really have a class reunion if you don’t graduate, and the St. Hilda’s boys left the school at the end of grade four—without ceremony.

Lucinda Fleming was a tireless organizer of her class reunions at St. Hilda’s—Jack’s graduating class, had he been a girl. Maureen Yap, whose married name would remain a mystery, attended the reunions regularly—even in her nonreunion years. The Booth twins were regulars as well; they were always together. But Lucinda’s Christmas letters never mentioned the twins’ identical blanket-sucking sounds. (Jack would wonder if the Booths still made them.)

Caroline French was a no-show at the reunions. If Caroline still thumped her heels on occasion, she was doing it alone. Her adversarial twin, Gordon, was killed in a boating accident—not long after he left St. Hilda’s, when Jack was still in school elsewhere. As Jack would discover, it’s remarkable how you can miss people you barely knew—even those people you never especially liked.

Jack’s last day of school, in the spring of 1975, was marked by the unusual occasion of both Emma Oastler and Mrs. McQuat accompanying him to the Lincoln Town Car, which Peewee had dutifully parked with the motor running at the Rosseter Road entrance. It had been Mrs. Wicksteed’s dying wish that Peewee continue to be Jack’s driver for the duration of the boy’s time at St. Hilda’s.

Emma and Jack slipped into the backseat of the Town Car as if their lives were not about to change. Peewee was in tears. His life was about to change—actually, upon Mrs. Wicksteed’s death, and Lottie’s abrupt departure for Prince Edward Island, it already had. The Gray Ghost leaned in the open window, her cool hand brushing Jack’s cheek like a touch of winter in the burgeoning spring. “You may … write to me, Jack,” Mrs. McQuat said. “In fact, I … recommend that you do so.”

“Yes, Mrs. McQuat,” the boy said. Peewee was still sobbing when the Town Car pulled away.

“You better write to me, too, baby cakes,” Emma was saying.

“You just watch your ass, mon,” Peewee blubbered. “You better grow eyes in the back of your head, just to keep watching your ass!”

Jack sat in the backseat, not talking—much as he had on the way to and from Mrs. Wicksteed’s funeral. All the while, his mother kept saying that the summer ahead would be “no vacation.” She said she was dedicating herself to the task of getting Jack ready to go away to school. “You have to learn how to deal with boys, Jack.”

Alice, whose estimation of her son’s lack of athletic prowess was exaggerated but largely true, sought the services of four men she had tattooed to instruct Jack in the manly art of self-defense. What form of self-defense he chose was up to him, his mom said.

Three of the tattooed men were Russians—one from Ukraine and two from Belarus. They were wrestlers. The fourth man was a Thai kickboxer, an ex-champion—the former Mr. Bangkok, whose fighting name was Krung. Mr. Bangkok and the wrestler from Ukraine—his name was Shevchenko, but Alice called him “Chenko”—were both older men, and bald. Krung had chevron-shaped blades tattooed on both cheeks, and Chenko had a snarling wolf tattooed on his bald pate. (When Chenko bowed to an opponent, there was the unfriendly wolf.)

“A Ukrainian tattoo, I guess,” Alice told Jack, with evident distaste. Krung’s facial blades were “a Thai thing,” Alice said. Both men had broken hearts tattooed on their chests. Daughter Alice’s work—no one had to tell Jack that.

The grungy old gym on Bathurst Street was marginally more frequented by kickboxers than by wrestlers. Blacks and Asians were the principal clientele, but there were a few Portuguese and Italians. The two boys from Belarus were young taxi drivers who’d been born in Minsk—“Minskies,” Chenko called them. Boris Ginkevich and Pavel Markevich were sparsely tattooed, but they were serious wrestlers and Chenko was their coach and trainer.

Boris and Pavel had tattoos where some wrestlers like them—high on the back between the shoulder blades, so that they are visible above a wrestler’s singlet. Boris had the Chinese character for luck, which Jack recognized as one of his mom’s newer tattoos. Pavel had a tattoo of a surgical instrument (a tenaculum) between his shoulder blades—a slender, sharp-pointed hook with a handle. As Pavel explained to Jack, a tenaculum was mainly used for grasping and holding arteries.

The walls of the old gym were brightened by some of Daughter Alice’s and the Chinaman’s flash—one of the few places in Toronto where the Chinaman’s tattoo parlor was advertised. Even the weight-training mirrors were outlined with Alice’s broken hearts, and her Man’s Ruin was on display in the men’s locker room, but the gym’s decor was dominated by Chinese characters and symbols. Jack recognized the character for longevity, and the five bats signifying the so-called five fortunes. And there was the Chinaman’s signature scepter, the short sword symbolizing “everything as you wish.”

Jack had told his mom that it was his favorite of the Chinaman’s tattoos—she said, “Forget about it.” The boy also liked the finger-shaped citron known as Buddha’s Hand, which either Alice or the Chinaman had tattooed on Krung’s thigh.

In the old gym, too, there were the Chinese characters for deer and the lucky number six—and the peony symbol, and a Chinese vase, and the carp leaping over the dragon’s gate. The so-called dragon’s gate is a waterfall, and the carp leaps upstream, over the waterfall; by so doing, it becomes a dragon. This was a full-back tattoo—it took days, sometimes weeks. Alice said that some people with full-back tattoos felt cold, but Tattoo Ole had argued with her on this point. Ole claimed that only people with full -body tattoos felt cold, and not all of them did. (According to Alice, most full-bodies felt cold.)

There was also a moon goddess in the Bathurst Street gym, and the so-called queen mother of the west—in Taoist legend, she has the power to confer immortality. And the Chinese character for double happiness, which Alice refused to tattoo on anyone; it was synonymous with marriage, which she no longer believed in.

The old gym itself had once been a rug store. The large display windows, which faced the Bathurst Street sidewalk, attracted the more curious of passersby. In the neighborhood, the former Mr. Bangkok’s kickboxing classes were famous. Krung, despite the chevrons emblazoned on his cheeks and the Buddha’s Hand on one thigh, was a popular teacher. There were kickboxing classes for all levels. Jack was enrolled in a beginner class, of course; given the boy’s age and size, his only feasible sparring partners were women.

His mother had put him in Mr. Bangkok’s able hands (more to the point, his able feet ) so that Jack might learn to defend himself from bullies, which boys of a certain age—especially in an all-boys’ school—are reputed to be. But Jack once more found himself in a situation where his most dangerous adversaries were older women. When the boy asked a Jamaican lady with a big bottom if she was acquainted with his friend Peewee, she said: “You keep your peewee to yourself, mon.” Jack was relieved that she was too big to be his sparring partner.