Until I Find You

Emma’s movie. But in the drone of the Dutchman’s voice, his actual words were lost. Jack saw Wild Bill sitting drunk in the street, shouting to his girlfriend: “Well, I didn’t know!” And later, as they made their way through the red-light district, Jack could still hear Vanvleck calling, “Good night, my dears!”

Well, they had a job to do—Richard, Wild Bill, and Jack—and they did it. Later that afternoon, when Jack got back to the Four Seasons, he found Miss Wurtz in the living room of their suite playing the piano. Jack sat on the couch for a while and just listened.

The Wurtz began to talk to him, but—at the same time—she kept playing. “I want to thank you, Jack—I had the best time! It was quite a night for an old lady!”

Jack’s neck was stiff and his toes hurt—something he’d done in the gym, he was thinking.

“But I must enlighten you, Jack,” Miss Wurtz went on. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but not even a night like last night is as special to me as every night I spent with your father. If I never got to go to the Oscars, I would still have had William in my life—that’s all that matters.”

And that was when Jack knew why his neck was stiff and his toes hurt. In those few hours of that early Monday morning, following the Academy Awards—when he actually got to sleep—Jack knew what he’d been dreaming. He was standing on the deck of that ship, leaving Rotterdam, and he was straining to see over the rail. Jack was standing on his toes and stretching his neck; for the few hours he slept, Jack must have maintained this uncomfortable position. No matter how hard he tried, of course, he couldn’t see the shore.

Jack Burns may not have been a big believer in so-called recovered memory, but here is what Jack remembered, listening to Miss Wurtz play the piano, and he was sure it really happened—he knew it was true.

“Lift me up!” Jack had said to his mother on the deck of that ship. The docks were still in sight, but Jack couldn’t see them. “Lift me up!” he’d begged his mom. “I want to see!” But she wouldn’t do it.

“You’ve seen enough, Jack,” his mom had said. She took his hand. “We’re going below deck now,” she’d told him.

“Lift me up! I want to see!” Jack had demanded.

But Alice was in no mood to be bossed around. “You’ve seen enough of Holland to last you a lifetime, Jackie boy,” she’d said.

Under the circumstances, Jack had seen enough of Canada to last him a lifetime, too. Because the next country Jack saw was Canada, where his mother took him—where he would never see his dad.

33. Signs of Trouble

It had been Mrs. Machado’s fondest hope, or so she’d said, that Mister Penis would never be taken advantage of. But by whom? By willful girls and venal women? Dr. Garcia told Jack that many women who sexually molest children believe that they are protecting them—that what the rest of us might call abuse is for these women a form of mothering.

Dr. Garcia further speculated that Mrs. Machado must have observed a certain absence of the mothering instinct in Alice. “Women like Mrs. Machado know which boys are vulnerable,” Jack’s psychiatrist said. “It helps, of course, if you know the boy’s mother—if you see what’s missing.”

“Principiis obsta!” Mr. Ramsey had once warned him. “Beware the beginnings!”

If Jack had mother and father issues, one wonders what to make of Lucy. She was four, almost five, that early fall evening in 1987, when Jack discovered her in the backseat of her parents’ silver Audi—his first and last night as a parking valet at Stan’s in Venice.

When he saw Lucy again, in the waiting room of Dr. Garcia’s office in Santa Monica, it was more than a year after he’d won the Oscar—April or May 2001. Lucy would have been eighteen. Jack didn’t recognize her, but she recognized him; everyone did. (A pretty girl—someone’s nanny, Jack had assumed.)

He’d long ago learned to expect and tolerate the stares of girls Lucy’s age, but Lucy’s eyes were riveted to his face, his hands, his every glance and movement. Her keen interest in him went far beyond overt flirtation or the groupie thing. Jack almost asked the receptionist if he could wait in another room. He didn’t know if there were other rooms—that is, other than a bathroom and a closet—but Lucy’s wanton obsession with him was distressing.

Then the problem appeared to go away; they overlapped only that one time in Dr. Garcia’s waiting room. Jack completely forgot about the girl.

The reason Jack would remember the year and the season of his first reunion with Lucy, which (at the time) he didn’t know was a reunion, is that he was getting ready for a trip to Halifax—his first trip there since he’d crossed the Atlantic and landed in Nova Scotia in his mother’s womb. Dr. Garcia had warned him against returning to his birthplace, which she viewed as a possible setback to his therapy. But Jack had other business in Halifax.

A not-very-good Canadian novelist and screenwriter, Doug McSwiney, and a venerable French director, Cornelia Lebrun, wanted him to play the lead in a movie about the Halifax Explosion in 1917. They probably couldn’t get adequate financing for the film without a movie star attached, and—given the off-center nature of McSwiney’s screenplay—not just any movie star would do. Because of the cross-dressing inclination of the main character, the movie star had to be Jack Burns.

The character Jack would play, a transvestite prostitute, loses his (or her) memory in the explosion, when all his clothes are blown off and he suffers second-degree burns over his entire body; then he falls in love with his nurse. At first, Jack’s character doesn’t remember that he’s a transvestite prostitute, but it wouldn’t be a movie if his memory didn’t return.

Jack had some issues with the screenplay, but he’d always been interested in the Halifax Explosion—and in seeing the city of his birth. It appealed to him to work with Cornelia Lebrun as a director, too. She was by far the more accomplished element in this collaboration, and when she proposed a meeting in Halifax—where she was working with McSwiney, urging him to improve his tortured script—Jack seized the opportunity to see his birthplace. He would also have a chance to put in his two cents regarding Doug McSwiney’s trivialization of the Halifax disaster.

After Jack had won the Oscar, he’d said no to an uncountable number of offers. Many of these were suggested adaptations. He’d read a lot of novels, looking for a possible adaptation that appealed to him. But ever since Jack had been telling the story of his life to Dr. Garcia, the idea of writing any screenplay paled.

Jack Burns was back in the acting business, at least for the time being—or so he told Bob Bookman. But after the Oscar, Jack had been inclined to be picky about the acting opportunities, too. The thought of making a movie in Halifax, however, intrigued him. Who knows what so-called recovered memories he might unlock there? (Infant dreams and premonitions mainly, Jack imagined.)

That was his state of mind in June 2001, when he drove to Santa Monica for his appointment with Dr. Garcia. It was a warm day; when he parked the Audi, he left all the windows open.

Jack had a number of reasons to be feeling positive. Three years after the fact, he had described his return trip to all but one of the North Sea ports of call—and Jack had discovered that he could tell Dr. Garcia what had happened while managing to hold himself together. (In a few instances, Dr. Garcia had looked in danger of losing it.)

Furthermore, Jack was looking forward to his trip to Halifax—no small part of the reason being that his going there was against Dr. Garcia’s wishes. And last but not least, Jack had just heard from Michele Maher. This was all the more remarkable because he had not heard from her for well over a year—not even so much as a postcard congratulating him for the Academy Award.

Jack had concluded, of course, that the sort-of boyfriend had taken stronger possession of her; that the boyfriend had forbidden her to communicate with Jack Burns had also crossed Jack’s mind. Now came her long, most informative—if not overaffectionate—letter. Naturally, Jack showed Michele’s letter to Dr. Garcia, but the doctor wasn’t pleased.

In Jack’s acceptance speech at the Academy Awards, his thanking Michele Maher for staying up late to watch him had backfired. It had prompted a heated discussion with her sort-of