Until I Find You

older girls. “You know what, baby cakes?” Emma was saying. “It might not be the world’s worst idea that you’re going to an all-boys’ school in Maine.”

“Why?”

There was his makeup to remove, and the stage lipstick—not to mention all the blood. The director, Mr. Ramsey, the child Viking, could not stop bouncing on the balls of his feet. “Just when I was beginning to think that Abigail Cooke might be a pinch dated,” he was saying to Miss Wurtz, who’d come (with tears in her eyes) to offer her congratulations.

Emma’s old friends Wendy Holton and Charlotte Barford had come backstage to join them. “If I ever had a period like that, I think I’d die,” Wendy told Jack. Charlotte Barford kept eyeing him as if he were a neglected hors d’oeuvre.

Somehow, despite his considerable size—not to mention his last-minute contribution to the production— Peewee had managed to slip away. In the happy chaos following the successful opening night, Jack allowed his mother’s visible distress to drift to the back of his mind. But if he ever had a conscience at St. Hilda’s, her name was Mrs. McQuat. Not to be outdone by Jack’s success, The Gray Ghost staged a characteristic sudden appearance that took the boy’s breath away. If he’d had any blood left in him, he would have started bleeding afresh. If his throat weren’t raw from screaming, he would have screamed again—only louder.

Jack was going home with Emma. “Our first sleepover, honey pie!” Emma had declared. She’d left the backstage area to go find her mom, who was waiting with Alice. Jack was, albeit briefly, still backstage but miraculously alone. Even his beloved prompter had slipped away, her limp for once unnoticed.

That was when The Gray Ghost appeared at his side—her cold hands taking Jack by both wrists, exactly where they’d been bound together. “Good show, Jack,” Mrs. McQuat breathed on him. “But you have work to do. I don’t mean … onstage,” she whispered.

“What work?” he asked.

“Look after your mother, Jack. You’ll blame yourself … if you don’t.”

“Oh.” (Look after her how? he wanted to ask. Look after her why?) But The Gray Ghost, who was almost always in character, had disappeared.

As he would discover again, later in his life, Jack found that it can be a dark and lonely place backstage— after the audience and the rest of the cast have gone. In no way was Jack Burns a mail-order bride, but that pivotal and blood-soaked performance in Mr. Ramsey’s histrionic production had launched him.

14. Mrs. Machado

Boys, as a rule, did not attend their class reunions at St. Hilda’s. You can’t really have a class reunion if you don’t graduate, and the St. Hilda’s boys left the school at the end of grade four—without ceremony.

Lucinda Fleming was a tireless organizer of her class reunions at St. Hilda’s—Jack’s graduating class, had he been a girl. Maureen Yap, whose married name would remain a mystery, attended the reunions regularly—even in her nonreunion years. The Booth twins were regulars as well; they were always together. But Lucinda’s Christmas letters never mentioned the twins’ identical blanket-sucking sounds. (Jack would wonder if the Booths still made them.)

Caroline French was a no-show at the reunions. If Caroline still thumped her heels on occasion, she was doing it alone. Her adversarial twin, Gordon, was killed in a boating accident—not long after he left St. Hilda’s, when Jack was still in school elsewhere. As Jack would discover, it’s remarkable how you can miss people you barely knew—even those people you never especially liked.

Jack’s last day of school, in the spring of 1975, was marked by the unusual occasion of both Emma Oastler and Mrs. McQuat accompanying him to the Lincoln Town Car, which Peewee had dutifully parked with the motor running at the Rosseter Road entrance. It had been Mrs. Wicksteed’s dying wish that Peewee continue to be Jack’s driver for the duration of the boy’s time at St. Hilda’s.

Emma and Jack slipped into the backseat of the Town Car as if their lives were not about to change. Peewee was in tears. His life was about to change—actually, upon Mrs. Wicksteed’s death, and Lottie’s abrupt departure for Prince Edward Island, it already had. The Gray Ghost leaned in the open window, her cool hand brushing Jack’s cheek like a touch of winter in the burgeoning spring. “You may … write to me, Jack,” Mrs. McQuat said. “In fact, I … recommend that you do so.”

“Yes, Mrs. McQuat,” the boy said. Peewee was still sobbing when the Town Car pulled away.

“You better write to me, too, baby cakes,” Emma was saying.

“You just watch your ass, mon,” Peewee blubbered. “You better grow eyes in the back of your head, just to keep watching your ass!”

Jack sat in the backseat, not talking—much as he had on the way to and from Mrs. Wicksteed’s funeral. All the while, his mother kept saying that the summer ahead would be “no vacation.” She said she was dedicating herself to the task of getting Jack ready to go away to school. “You have to learn how to deal with boys, Jack.”

Alice, whose estimation of her son’s lack of athletic prowess was exaggerated but largely true, sought the services of four men she had tattooed to instruct Jack in the manly art of self-defense. What form of self-defense he chose was up to him, his mom said.

Three of the tattooed men were Russians—one from Ukraine and two from Belarus. They were wrestlers. The fourth man was a Thai kickboxer, an ex-champion—the former Mr. Bangkok, whose fighting name was Krung. Mr. Bangkok and the wrestler from Ukraine—his name was Shevchenko, but Alice called him “Chenko”—were both older men, and bald. Krung had chevron-shaped blades tattooed on both cheeks, and Chenko had a snarling wolf tattooed on his bald pate. (When Chenko bowed to an opponent, there was the unfriendly wolf.)

“A Ukrainian tattoo, I guess,” Alice told Jack, with evident distaste. Krung’s facial blades were “a Thai thing,” Alice said. Both men had broken hearts tattooed on their chests. Daughter Alice’s work—no one had to tell Jack that.

The grungy old gym on Bathurst Street was marginally more frequented by kickboxers than by wrestlers. Blacks and Asians were the principal clientele, but there were a few Portuguese and Italians. The two boys from Belarus were young taxi drivers who’d been born in Minsk—“Minskies,” Chenko called them. Boris Ginkevich and Pavel Markevich were sparsely tattooed, but they were serious wrestlers and Chenko was their coach and trainer.

Boris and Pavel had tattoos where some wrestlers like them—high on the back between the shoulder blades, so that they are visible above a wrestler’s singlet. Boris had the Chinese character for luck, which Jack recognized as one of his mom’s newer tattoos. Pavel had a tattoo of a surgical instrument (a tenaculum) between his shoulder blades—a slender, sharp-pointed hook with a handle. As Pavel explained to Jack, a tenaculum was mainly used for grasping and holding arteries.

The walls of the old gym were brightened by some of Daughter Alice’s and the Chinaman’s flash—one of the few places in Toronto where the Chinaman’s tattoo parlor was advertised. Even the weight-training mirrors were outlined with Alice’s broken hearts, and her Man’s Ruin was on display in the men’s locker room, but the gym’s decor was dominated by Chinese characters and symbols. Jack recognized the character for longevity, and the five bats signifying the so-called five fortunes. And there was the Chinaman’s signature scepter, the short sword symbolizing “everything as you wish.”

Jack had told his mom that it was his favorite of the Chinaman’s tattoos—she said, “Forget about it.” The boy also liked the finger-shaped citron known as Buddha’s Hand, which either Alice or the Chinaman had tattooed on Krung’s thigh.

In the old gym, too, there were the Chinese characters for deer and the lucky number six—and the peony symbol, and a Chinese vase, and the carp leaping over the dragon’s gate. The so-called dragon’s gate is a waterfall, and the carp leaps upstream, over the waterfall; by so doing, it becomes a dragon. This was a full-back tattoo—it took days, sometimes weeks. Alice said that some people with full-back tattoos felt cold, but Tattoo Ole had argued