Until I Find You

“Did he see me in Toronto, Mom? Did he get a look at me, when I was a baby—before you drove him away?”

“How dare you!” his mother said. “I never drove him away! I gave him all the looks at you that he could stand! I let him see you—at least from a distance—every time he asked!”

“He asked? What do you mean, ‘from a distance,’ Mom?”

“Well, I would never let him see you alone,” she explained. “He wasn’t allowed to talk to you.”

What wasn’t he getting? Jack wondered. What didn’t add up? Had he been a child on display for his father, perhaps to tempt William to accept Alice’s terms—namely, to live with her? “Let me get this straight,” Jack said to his mother. “You let him see me, but if he wanted further contact with me, he had to marry you.”

“He did marry me, Jack—but only under the condition that we get immediately divorced!”

“I thought it was Mrs. Wicksteed’s idea that I have his name—so I would seem less illegitimate,” Jack said. “I never knew you married him!”

“It was Mrs. Wicksteed’s idea that the only legitimate way for you to have his name would be if he married me and we were then divorced,” his mother told him—as if this were a petty detail of no lasting importance.

“So he must have been around, in Toronto—when we were here—for quite some time,” Jack said.

“Barely long enough to get married and divorced,” Alice said. “And you were still an infant. I knew you wouldn’t remember him.” (She hadn’t wanted Jack to remember William, obviously.)

“But Mrs. Wicksteed was my benefactor, wasn’t she?” Jack asked. “I mean we were her rent-free boarders, weren’t we?”

“Mrs. Wicksteed was the epitome of generosity!” his mother said with indignation—as if he’d been questioning Mrs. Wicksteed’s character and good intentions, which he’d never doubted.

“Who paid for things, Mom?”

“Mrs. Wicksteed, for the most part,” Alice replied frostily. “Your father occasionally helped.”

“He sent money?”

“It was the least he could do!” his mom cried. “I never asked William for a penny—he just sent what he could.”

But the money had to come from somewhere, Jack realized; she must have known where William was, every step of the way.

“Which brings us to Copenhagen,” Jack said. “We weren’t exactly searching for him, were we? You must have already known he was there.”

“You haven’t touched your tea, dear. Is there something wrong with it?”

“Did you take me to Copenhagen to show me to him?” Jack asked her.

“Some people, Jack—men, especially—are of the opinion that all babies look alike, that infants are all the same. But when you were a four-year-old, you were something special—you were a beautiful little boy, Jack.”

He was only beginning to get the picture: she’d used him as bait! “How many times did my dad see me?” Jack asked. “I mean in Copenhagen.” (What Jack really meant, in terms familiar to him from the movie business, was how many times she had offered William the deal.)

“Jackie—” his mother said, stopping herself, as if she detected in her tone of voice something of the way she’d admonished him as a child. When she began afresh, her voice had changed; she sounded frail and pleading, like a woman with breast-cancer cells taking hold of the emotional center of her brain. “Any father would have been proud of what a gorgeous-looking boy you were, Jack. What dad wouldn’t have wanted to see the handsome young man you would become?”

“But you wouldn’t let him,” Jack reminded her.

“I gave him a choice!” she insisted. “You and I were a team, Jackie—don’t you remember? We were a package! He could have chosen us, or nothing. He chose nothing.”

“But how many times did you make him choose?” Jack asked her. “We followed him to Sweden, to Norway, to Finland, to the Netherlands. Mom—you gave up only because Australia was too fucking far!”

He should have watched his language, which may have seemed especially disrespectful to a dying woman— not that his mother had ever tolerated his use of the word fucking.

“You think you’re so smart!” Alice snapped at him. “You don’t know the half of it, Jack. We didn’t follow him. I made your father follow us! He was the one who gave up,” she said—softly but no less bitterly, as if her pride were still hurt more than she could bring herself to say.

Jack knew then that he knew nothing, and that the only questions she would ever answer were direct ones —and he would have to guess which direct questions were the right ones to ask. A hopeless task.

“You should talk to Leslie,” his mother told him. “Leslie likes to talk. Tell her I don’t care what she tells you, Jack.”

“Mom, Leslie wasn’t there.”

He meant in Europe. But his mom wasn’t paying attention; she was pushing buttons on her new CD player, seeking to drown him out with the usual music.

“I want to send your MRI to Maureen Yap,” Jack told her. “She’s an oncologist.”

“Tell Leslie. She’ll arrange it, Jack.” The door to their conversation was closing once again—not that she’d ever opened it an inch more than she had to.

Jack tried one last time. “Maybe I should take a trip,” he said. “I’ll start with Copenhagen, where we began.”

“Why not take Leslie with you, Jack? That’ll keep her out of my hair.”

“I think I’ll go alone,” Jack said.

His mom’s exasperation with the CD player was growing. “Where’s the remote?” he asked her. “You should use the remote, Mom.”

Alice found the remote, pointing it at Jack—then at the CD player—like a gun. “Just do me a favor, Jackie boy,” she said. “If you’re going to go find him, do it after I’m gone.”

The CD player was new, but Bob Dylan was familiar—albeit a lot louder than they expected.

The guilty undertaker sighs,

The lonesome organ grinder cries,

The silver saxophones say I should refuse you.

“Jesus, turn it down!” Jack said, but his mother pushed the wrong button—not the volume. The song started over, at the beginning.

“Go find him after I’m gone,” Alice said, pointing the remote at Jack—not at the stupid CD player.

“I want to know what really happened! I’ve been asking you about the past, Mom. I don’t know enough about him to know if I want to find him!”

“Well, if that’s the trip you want to take, go on and take it,” his mother told him, pointing the remote in the right direction and turning down the volume, though it was still too loud.

The cracked bells and washed-out horns

Blow into my face with scorn,

But it’s not that way,

I wasn’t born to lose you.

Thanks to Bob, they didn’t hear the little tinkle of the bell as the door to the tattoo parlor swung open. It