Until I Find You

Caroline and Jack had already had a little talk about Miss Wurtz’s correspondence with William. His dad had taken a particular interest in Jack’s artistic or creative training. “Your development,” as The Wurtz had put it.

“When I was at St. Hilda’s?” Jack asked.

“Indeed, Jack—when you were in the earliest stages of your dramatic education.”

“Your dramatizations, you mean—”

“Beginning with, but by no means exclusively, your remarkable success in female roles,” Miss Wurtz informed him. “I thought that William would be especially pleased with how you and I, in conversation, arrived at the idea that he—your father—was your own special audience of one. If you remember—”

“How could I forget?” Jack asked her.

“But he was not pleased,” Caroline told Jack, gravely. “Your father strenuously objected, in fact.”

“He objected to being my audience of one?”

“To the very idea of an audience of one, Jack. William was opposed to the concept aesthetically.”

“Why?” Jack asked. He’d noticed that she’d now said the name William twice.

Caroline sighed. (No more perishable beauty ever existed.) “Well,” she said, “I think his theory more aptly applies to organs.”

“Why organs?”

“Your father insisted that you should be taught to play your heart out, Jack. As for your audience—if only in your mind’s eye—they were all the wretched, down-on-their-luck and hard-of-hearing souls in the hindmost pews of the church, and beyond.”

“Beyond what?”

“He meant even the drunks, sleeping it off in the streets and alleys outside the church. That’s what William said.”

He meant even the prostitutes within hearing of the Oude Kerk, Jack was thinking; indeed, his dad must have meant that Jack should be reaching vastly more than an audience of one. (That is, if he was any good.)

“I think I get it,” Jack told Caroline.

“I wouldn’t call it a correspondence, Jack. We exchanged, at most, two or three letters. I wouldn’t want you to think that I still hear from him.”

“But he taught at the school—however briefly—when you were teaching there, too,” Jack reminded her. “You knew him, didn’t you, Caroline?”

Jack and Miss Wurtz were in a coffee shop on the corner of Lonsdale and Spadina. It was the weekend after Alice had died. Caroline was dressed, as he’d never seen her, in blue jeans and a man’s flannel shirt; Jack didn’t think she was wearing a bra. Nevertheless, she was absolutely stunning for a woman in her fifties—she was radiant, even glowing. Those high cheekbones, her fine jaw cut like crystal, the peachlike blush to her skin—Miss Wurtz was a knockout. She sighed again and ran her long fingers through her wavy hair, which was now completely gray but still lustrous; her hair had the sheen of slate in sunlight.

“Yes, Jack—if you must know—I knew him,” Caroline said. Staring down at the coffee in her cup, she added softly: “William gave me some of my favorite clothes. He had an eye for women’s clothes. They may be a bit old-fashioned by today’s standards, but they’re still my favorites, Jack.”

Naturally, Emma had spotted the clothes. Caroline saw that Jack couldn’t speak; she reached across the small cafe table and touched his face. “He was not just my lover—he was my only lover,” Miss Wurtz told him. “Well, it didn’t last,” she said, almost cheerfully. “Too many other women wanted William—women and girls,” Caroline added, laughing. Jack was surprised that she sounded more amused than bothered by the thought—maybe because it was so long after the fact. “Your father was far more committed to his music than to our fair sex, Jack,” she went on. “And if you ever heard him play,” Miss Wurtz whispered, taking Jack’s hands in hers. “Well, it suffices to say—no wonder he was more engaged by his music than by us!”

No wonder Jack had dressed The Wurtz in mail-order underwear in his dreams! Who could resist the temptation to give her clothes? His father hadn’t resisted her!

Jack swallowed his coffee with unusual difficulty. “Did my mom know?” he asked Caroline.

“Your mother knew that William liked the way I spoke. That’s all she knew,” Miss Wurtz told him. “William must have said something to Alice about my voice—my diction, my enunciation. He used to tell me, admiringly, that I didn’t have an accent.”

“So it was Mom’s idea—to have you teach her how to talk?” Jack asked. “I thought it was Mrs. Wicksteed who wanted her to lose the Scottish accent.”

“Goodness, no!” Caroline said, with a laugh. “Mrs. Wicksteed was such an old-school Canadian—she loved a Scottish accent!”

“But you must have known about the girls—I mean the boarders, Caroline.”

“Oh, who didn’t know about those silly girls!” Miss Wurtz exclaimed. “You know boarders, Jack. If they could get pregnant all by themselves, they’d probably try it.”

“But he left you, too, didn’t he?” Jack asked her. “You don’t sound as if you hate him.”

“I never expected him to stay, Jack. Of course I don’t hate him! William was one of those pleasures every woman wants to have, at least once in her lifetime. With all due respect to Alice, Jack, you have to be deluded to imagine you might keep a man like that. Especially at his age at that time—he was so young!”

Jack looked at Caroline Wurtz with everything he had lost visibly written on his face—the way he must have looked when his mother said, “Who knows what sort of father he would have been, Jack? With a man like that,” Alice had said, with disgust, “you can never be sure.” But Miss Wurtz had used the exact same phrase—a man like that—with enduring affection!

“If you’d been my mother,” he told Caroline, “I would have had a father. At least I would have occasionally seen him.”

“I haven’t heard a word from him, or about him, in years,” Miss Wurtz told Jack. “But that doesn’t mean you can’t find him.”

“He may be dead, Caroline. Mom is.”

The Wurtz leaned across the cafe table and grabbed hold of Jack’s left ear; it was as if she were Mrs. McQuat and he still in grade three, about to be taken to the chapel by The Gray Ghost.

“You faithless boy!” she said. “If William were dead, my heart would have stopped! The day he dies, my breasts will shrivel to the size of raisins in my sleep—or I’ll turn into linoleum or something!”

Linoleum? Jack wondered. (The poor woman had been at St. Hilda’s too long.) His ear, which she still held, was throbbing. Suddenly Miss Wurtz let him go; she laughed at herself like a young girl. “Well, don’t I sound like a brainless boarder!” Caroline exclaimed. “You faithless boy,” she said to Jack again—this time fondly. “Go find him!”

“Tell me the context, baby cakes,” Emma used to say. “Everything comes with a context.”

That Saturday in March—it was 1998, and March in Toronto is not reliable motorcycle weather—Jack walked to the circular driveway at the corner of Pickthall and Hutchings Hill Road, where he had once stood holding his mother’s hand in a sea of girls.

The motorcycles, their engines off, were parked in a row—with something less than military precision. The day was overcast, there was a raw chill in the air, and the gas tanks of the motorcycles were beaded and glistening in the descending mist—a fine drizzle. In that weather, Jack didn’t take the time to count them, but there were about thirty motorcycles—their license plates indicating how far some of their riders had traveled.