Until I Find You

William was the organist at South Leith Parish Church; Alice was a choirgirl there.

For an Edinburgh boy with upper-class pretensions and a good education—William Burns had gone to Heriot’s before studying music at the University of Edinburgh—a first job playing the organ in lower-class Leith might have struck him as slumming. But Jack’s dad liked to joke that the Church of Scotland paid better than the Scottish Episcopal Church. While William was an Episcopalian, he liked it just fine at the South Leith Parish, where it was said that eleven thousand souls were buried in the graveyard, although there were not more than three hundred gravestones.

Gravestones for the poor were not permitted. But at night, Jack’s mom told him, people brought the ashes of loved ones and scattered them through the fence of the graveyard. The thought of so many souls blowing around in the dark gave the boy nightmares, but that church—if only because of its graveyard—was a popular place, and Alice believed she had died and gone to Heaven when she started singing for William there.

In South Leith Parish Church, the choir and the organ were behind the congregation. There were not more than twenty seats for the choir—the women in front, the men in back. For the duration of the sermon, William made a point of asking Alice to lean forward in the front row, so that he could see all of her. She wore a blue robe—“blue- jay blue,” she told Jack—and a white collar. Jack’s mom fell in love with his dad that April of 1964, when he first came to play the organ.

“We were singing the hymns of the Resurrection,” was how Alice put it, “and there were crocuses and daffodils in the graveyard.” (Doubtless all those ashes that were secretly scattered there benefited the flowers.)

Alice took the young organist, who was also her choirmaster, to meet her father. Her dad’s tattoo parlor was called Persevere, which is the motto of the Port of Leith. It was William’s first look at a tattoo shop, which was on either Mandelson Street or Jane Street. In those days, Jack’s mom explained, there was a rail bridge across Leith Walk, joining Mandelson to Jane, but Jack could never remember on which street she said the tattoo parlor was. He just knew that they lived there, in the shop, under the rumble of the trains.

His mother called this “sleeping in the needles”—a phrase from between the wars. “Sleeping in the needles” meant that, when times were tough, you slept in the tattoo parlor—you had nowhere else to live. But it was also what was said, on occasion, when a tattoo artist died—as Alice’s father had—in the shop. Thus, by both definitions of the phrase, her dad had always slept in the needles.

Alice’s mother had died in childbirth, and her father—whom Jack never met—had raised her in the tattoo world. In Jack’s eyes, his mom was unique among tattoo artists because she’d never been tattooed. Her dad had told her that she shouldn’t get a tattoo until she was old enough to understand a few essential things about herself; he must have meant those things that would never change.

“Like when I’m in my sixties or seventies,” Jack’s mom used to say to him, when she was still in her twenties. “You should get your first tattoo after I’m dead,” she told him, which was her way of saying that he shouldn’t even think about getting tattooed.

Alice’s dad took an instant dislike to William Burns, who got his first tattoo the day the two men met. The tattoo gripped his right thigh, where William could read it when he was sitting on the toilet —the opening notes to an Easter hymn he’d been rehearsing with Alice, the words to which began, “Christ the Lord is risen today.” Without the words, you’d have to read music, and be sitting very close to Jack’s father—perhaps on an adjacent toilet—to recognize the hymn.

But then and there, upon giving the talented young organist his first tattoo, Alice’s dad told her that William would surely become an “ink addict,” a “collector”—meaning he was one of those guys who would never stop with the first tattoo, or with the first twenty tattoos. He would go on getting tattooed, until his body was a sheet of music and every inch of his skin was covered by a note—a dire prediction but one that failed to warn Alice away. The tattoo-crazy organist had already stolen her heart.

But Jack Burns had heard most of this story by the time he was four. What came as a surprise, when his mother announced their upcoming European trip, was what she told him next: “If we don’t find your father by this time next year, when you’ll be starting school, we’ll forget all about him and get on with our lives.”

Why this was such a shock was that, from Jack’s earliest awareness that his father was missing—worse, that he had “absconded”—Jack and his mother had done a fair amount of looking for William Burns, and Jack had assumed they always would. The idea that they could “forget all about him” was more foreign to the boy than the proposed journey to northern Europe; nor had Jack known that, in his mom’s opinion, his starting school was of such importance.

She’d not finished school herself. Alice had long felt inferior to William’s university education. William’s parents were both elementary-school teachers who gave private piano lessons to children on the side, but they had a high regard for artistic tutelage of a more professional kind. In their estimation, it was beneath their son to play the organ at South Leith Parish Church—and not only because of the class friction that existed in those days between Edinburgh and Leith. (There were differences between the Scottish Episcopal Church and the Church of Scotland, too.)

Alice’s father was not a churchgoer of any kind. He’d sent Alice to church and choir practice to give her a life outside the tattoo parlor, never imagining that she would meet her ruin in the church and at choir practice—or that she would bring her unscrupulous seducer to the shop to be tattooed!

It was William’s parents who insisted that, although he was the principal organist for the South Leith Parish, he accept an offer to be the assistant organist at Old St. Paul’s. What mattered to them was that Old St. Paul’s was Scottish Episcopal—and it was in Edinburgh, not in Leith.

What captivated William was the organ. He’d started piano lessons at six and had not touched an organ before he was nine, but at seven or eight he began to stick bits of paper above the piano keys—imagining they were organ stops. He’d already begun to dream about playing the organ, and the organ he dreamed about was the Father Willis at Old St. Paul’s.

If, in his parents’ opinion, to be the assistant organist at Old St. Paul’s was more prestigious than being the principal organist at South Leith Parish Church, William just wanted to get his hands on the Father Willis. In Old St. Paul’s, Jack’s mother told him, the acoustics were a contributing factor to the organ’s fame. The boy would later wonder if she meant that almost any organ would have sounded good there, because of the reverberation time— that is, the time it takes for a sound to diminish by sixty decibels—being better than the organ.

Alice remembered attending what she called “an organ marathon” at Old St. Paul’s. Such an event must have been for fund-raising purposes—a twenty-four-hour organ concert, with a different organist performing every hour or half hour. Who played when was, of course, a hierarchical arrangement; the best musicians performed when they were most likely to be heard, the others at the more unsociable hours. Young William Burns got to play before midnight—if only a half hour before.

The church was half empty, or emptier. Jack’s mother was the most enthralled member of the audience. The slightly inferior organist whose turn was next would also have been in attendance—the player-in-waiting who had the midnight slot.

William didn’t want to waste Old St. Paul’s fabled reverberation time by selecting a quiet piece. To the degree that Jack could understand his mom’s story, his father was playing to be heard; he’d chosen Boellmann’s Toccata, which Alice called “rousing and noisy.”

Outside the church, a narrow alley ran alongside Old St. Paul’s. Huddled against the wall of the church, seeking shelter from the rain, was one of Edinburgh’s down-and-outs—in all likelihood a local drunk. He had either passed out in the alley or intentionally bedded down there; he may have slept there most nights. But not even a drunk can sleep through Boellmann’s Toccata—not even outside the church, apparently.

Alice enjoyed acting out how the drunken down-and-out had presented himself. “Would you stop that fucking racket? How the fuck can I be expected to get a good night’s fucking sleep with that fucking bloody fuck of a fucking organ making a sound that would wake the fucking dead?”

It seemed to Alice that the drunk should have been struck dead for using such language in a church, but before God could take any action against the down-and-out, William resumed playing—with a vengeance. He played so loudly that everyone ran out of Old St. Paul’s, including Alice. The organist with the midnight slot stood in the rain with her. Jack’s mom told Jack that the foul-mouthed man was nowhere in sight. “He was probably searching for a resting place beyond the reach of Boellmann’s Toccata!”