Until I Find You

In a week’s time, Emma would bring him one of her divorced mom’s bras—a black one. It was more like half a bra, Jack observed, with hard wire rims under the cups, which were small but surprisingly aggressive-looking. It was what they called a “push-up” bra, Emma explained. (It was about as assertive as a bra could be—or so Jack imagined.) “What’s it want to push your breasts up for?” he asked.

“My mom has small boobs,” Emma said. “She’s trying to make more out of them.” But the bra was curious for another reason: it smelled strongly of perfume, and only slightly less powerfully of sweat. Emma had snitched it from the laundry—it wasn’t clean. “But that’s better, isn’t it?” she asked.

“Why?”

“Because you can smell her!” Emma declared.

“But I don’t know your mom. Why would I want to smell her?”

“Just try it, baby cakes. You never know what the little guy might like.” Boy, was that the truth! (Too bad it would take years for Jack to find that out.)

It would be a while, too, before someone told him that the Chinaman’s tattoo shop on the northwest corner of Dundas and Jarvis was never open late at night. The basement tattoo parlor, which you entered from the sidewalk on Dundas, usually closed in the late afternoon. Jack would forget who told him. Maybe it was some old ink addict, a collector, in one of those tattoo shops on Queen Street—around the time his mom opened her own shop there.

Queen Street in the seventies would never have supported the likes of Daughter Alice—it was a greasers’ hangout, full of anti-hippie, whisky-drinking, white-T-shirt people. Whoever told Jack was possibly one of them, but it sounded true. The Chinaman’s unnamed shop was closed at night, or maybe it stayed open a little longer on Friday and Saturday evenings—though never past eight or nine.

So where was she—out late, almost every night, in Jack’s years at St. Hilda’s? He hadn’t a clue. It was only with hindsight, which is never to be wholly trusted, that Jack concluded his mother might have been trying to break her possessive attachment to her son. As he grew older, he looked more and more like his dad; maybe the more Jack resembled William, the more Alice sought to distance herself from the boy.

That Emma Oastler brought him her mother’s push-up bra may have had something to do with it. It was inevitable that Alice would find it. Jack slept with the stupid bra every night—he even took it into his mom’s bed on those nights he slept with her. And it was one of those nights when she threw a leg over Jack and woke him up. This night, something woke her up, too. The mystery bra was mashed between them; Alice must have felt the hard wire rims under the cups. She sat up in bed and turned on the light.

“What’s this, Jack?” she asked, holding up the stinking bra. The way she looked at her son—well, he would never forget it. It was as if she’d discovered Emma’s mother in the bed between them; it was as if she’d caught Jack in flagrante delicto, the little guy in intimate contact with that hairy, private place.

“It’s a push-up bra,” he explained.

“I know what it is—I mean whose.” Alice sniffed the bra and made a face. She pulled back the covers and stared at the little guy, who was protruding, at attention, from the boy’s pajamas. “Start talking, Jack.”

“It belongs to Emma Oastler’s mom—Emma stole it and gave it to me. I don’t know why.”

“I know why,” Alice said. Jack started to cry. His mom’s visible disgust was withering; the little guy was looking withered, too.

“Stop sniveling—don’t snivel,” Alice said. He needed to blow his nose. His mom handed him the bra, but Jack hesitated. “Go on—blow!” she ordered. “I’m going to wash it before I give it back to her, anyway.”

“Oh.”

“You can start anytime, Jack. The whole story. What games are you playing with Emma? You better begin there.”

He told her everything—well, maybe not everything. Possibly not the part about Emma baring her breasts; probably not every time Emma asked to have a look at the little guy; certainly not the part about his penis making actual contact with Emma’s hairy, private place. But his mother must have had a pretty good idea of what was going on. “She’s fifteen, Jack—you’re eight. I’ll have a little talk with Mrs. Oastler.”

“Is Emma going to get in trouble?”

“I sincerely hope so,” Alice said.

“Am I in trouble?” he asked.

What a look she gave him! Jack hadn’t known what she meant when she’d said they were “becoming like strangers.” Now he knew. His mom looked at him as if he were a stranger. “You’re going to be in trouble soon enough,” was all she said.

11. His Father Inside Him

Compared to the drama unfolding between Jack and Emma, and what lay ahead between Alice and Mrs. Oastler, the inability of Miss Wurtz to manage her grade-three classroom was minor; yet there was drama there as well, however improvisational.

Lucinda Fleming, whom Jack couldn’t see over, sat at the desk in front of his. She would routinely and deliberately whip his face with her huge ponytail, which hung halfway down her back and was as thick as a broom. In exasperation, Jack would respond by grabbing it with both his hands and pulling it. He could barely manage to pin the back of her head to the top of his desk. Jack found he could restrain her there by pressing his chin against her forehead, but it hurt. Nothing appeared to hurt Lucinda, except her alleged proclivity to hurt herself, which Jack was beginning to doubt. Maybe Lucinda had despised playing Dimmesdale to Jack-as-Hester, or she hated being a head taller than he was; possibly she believed that by whipping Jack with her ponytail, she could make him grow.

Caroline Wurtz never saw Lucinda lash out at Jack with her broom of hair. Miss Wurtz only became aware of the situation after he’d pinned Lucinda’s head to his desk. “Please, Jack,” Miss Wurtz would say. “Don’t disappoint me.”

In his dreams, when The Wurtz would say “Don’t disappoint me,” her tone of voice was deeply seductive. Not so in the grade-three classroom. In reality, disappointing Miss Wurtz was a bad idea— she did not handle it well. Yet the grade-three children often disappointed her deliberately. They resented what a well-organized tyrant she was in her other capacity, as their drama teacher; that she couldn’t maintain order in the classroom was a weakness they exploited.

Gordon French once released his pet hamster into his hostile twin’s hair. From Caroline’s reaction, one might have guessed that the hamster was rabid and bit her. But all the stupid hamster did was race around and around her head, as if it were running on its incessant wheel. Miss Wurtz, perhaps fearful that the hamster would be harmed, began to cry. Crying was the last resort of her disappointment, and she resorted to it with tiresome frequency. “Oh, I never thought I’d be this disappointed!” she would wail. “Oh, my feelings are hurt more than I can say!” But when Miss Wurtz began to cry, the kids stopped paying attention to what she said. They were concentrating on what they knew would happen next, for which there was no preparing themselves. The Gray Ghost’s sudden appearances, even when they were anticipated, were always startling.

There was only one door to the grade-three classroom, and despite her reputedly supernatural powers, Mrs. McQuat could not pass through walls; yet even though the children saw the doorknob turning, they could not protect themselves from the shock. Sometimes the door would swing open, but no one would be there. They would hear The Gray Ghost’s labored breathing from the hall, while Jimmy Bacon moaned and the two sets of twins sounded their predictable alarms. At other times, Mrs. McQuat seemed to leap inside the classroom before the doorknob so much as twitched. Only Roland Simpson, the class’s future criminal, purposely closed his eyes. (Roland liked being startled.)

According to Mrs. Wicksteed, The Gray Ghost had lost a lung in the war. What war