"The Wurtz?" Jack whispered.

"Miss Wurtz herself told me," Leslie whispered back. "I don't think your mom ever knew about it."

Something blocked the light from the bathroom, where the door was ajar--a sudden appearance of the kind The Gray Ghost was once the master of, as if Mrs. McQuat, who had tried to save him, were reaching out to Jack again. Or maybe Mrs. Machado, or her ghost, was coming to get him! But it was his mother, naked; she was as close to entering the next world as any ghost.

"I want to go home," Alice whispered. "If you insist on whispering, I'm going to whisper, too," she said, climbing into Emma's bed.

Strangely it was her heart-side breast that looked ravaged--not the breast where she'd had the lumpectomy. Her broken-heart tattoo was the blue-black of a bruise, the you in cursive as meaningless as what was written on the toe tag of a total stranger in a morgue.

Mrs. Oastler and Jack hugged Alice between them. "Please take me home," his mother kept whispering.

"You are home," Leslie told her--kissing her neck, her shoulder, her face. "Or do you mean Edinburgh, Alice?"

"No, home," Alice said, more fiercely. "You know where I mean, Jack."

"Where do you mean, Mom?" (Jack knew where she meant; he just wanted to see if she could say it.)

"I mean the needles, dear," his mother said. "It's time to take me to my needles." Not surprisingly, that's what Daughter Alice meant by going home.

26

A Faithless Boy

Jack's mother died peacefully in her sleep, much as Maureen Yap had predicted. For five days and nights, she slept and woke up and fell back to sleep on the sofa bed at Daughter Alice. Leslie and Jack took turns staying with her. They had discovered that Alice was less abusive to them if they weren't together, and the sofa bed wasn't big enough for three people.

On the fifth night, it was Leslie's turn. Alice woke up and asked Mrs. Oastler to let her hear a little Bob Dylan. Leslie was aware of the police complaints; she turned up the volume only slightly. "Is that loud enough, Alice?" she asked.

There was no answer. Mrs. Oastler at first assumed that Alice had fallen back to sleep; it was only when Leslie got into bed beside her that she realized Alice had stopped breathing. (It would turn out that a blood vessel in her brain had hemorrhaged, eaten away by the cancer.)

Jack was in bed with Bonnie Hamilton, in Bonnie's house, when the phone rang. He sensed that his mother was sleeping in the needles before Bonnie answered the phone. "I'll tell him," he heard Bonnie say, while he was still trying to orient himself in the darkened bedroom. (He didn't want to get out of bed and stumble into the wheelchair.) "I'll tell him that, too."

"Alice died in her sleep--she just stopped breathing," Mrs. Oastler had announced straightaway. "I think Jack and I should stay with her till morning. I don't want them to take her away in the dark."

Alice had talked to Leslie and Jack about the kind of memorial service she wanted. She'd been uncharacteristically specific. "It should be on a Saturday evening. If you run out of booze, the beer store and the liquor store will still be open."

Jack and Mrs. Oastler had humored her; they'd agreed to a Saturday evening, although the concept of running out of booze at any event originating in the St. Hilda's chapel was unimaginable. Alice wasn't an Old Girl. Maybe a few of the Old Girls would show up, but they would be Leslie's old friends and they weren't big drinkers. The novelty of seeing Jack Burns (so soon after seeing him at Emma's memorial service) would surely have worn off. Out of a genuine fondness for Jack, there'd be a smattering of St. Hilda's faculty. No doubt some of the same boarders would attend, but those girls weren't drinkers, either. Compared to how it was at the service for Emma, Mrs. Oastler and Jack assumed that the chapel would be virtually empty.

"The wake part should be in the gym, not in the Great Hall," Alice had instructed them. "And nobody should say anything--no prayers, just singing."

"Hymns?" Leslie had asked.

"It should be an evensong service," Jack's mother, the former choirgirl, had said. "Leslie, you should let Caroline Wurtz arrange it. You don't know anything about church music, and Jack doesn't even like music."

"I like Bob Dylan, Mom."

"Let's save Bob for the wake part," Mrs. Oastler had suggested, in disbelief.

Leslie and Jack completely missed it. The part about running out of booze should have forewarned them--not to mention that Alice had asked them to inform "just a few" of her old friends.

Jack called Jerry Swallow--Sailor Jerry, from Alice's Halifax days, although Jerry had moved to New Glasgow, Nova Scotia. A woman, maybe Jerry's wife, answered the phone. Jack asked her to please tell Jerry that Daughter Alice had died. To his surprise, the woman asked him where and when there was going to be a service. Jack gave her the details over the phone--little suspecting that Sailor Jerry, and all the rest of them, would show up.

Jack didn't call Tattoo Ole or Tattoo Peter--they were both dead. Tattoo Theo wasn't on Alice's list; probably he had also died.

Doc Forest was the second tattoo artist Jack called. Doc was still in Stockholm. Jack recalled Doc's forearms (like Popeye's) and his neatly trimmed mustache and sideburns--his bright, twinkling eyes. Jack remembered what Doc had said to him, too--when Jack and his mom were leaving Sweden. "Come back and see me when you're older. Maybe then you'll want a tattoo."

Doc regretted that he couldn't come such a distance for Alice's service, but he said he would pass along the sad news. Jack thought it must have been simply a courtesy on Doc's part--to even mention undertaking such a journey. Doc had last seen Alice at a tattoo convention at the Meadowlands, in New Jersey. "She was a maritime girl," the former sailor told Jack, his voice breaking--or maybe it was the long-distance connection.

Jack next called Hanky Panky--the tattoo name for Henk Schiffmacher--at the House of Pain in Amsterdam. Schiffmacher had written several books, the famous 1000 Tattoos among them; many of the illustrations in that book were collected at the Tattoo Museum in the red-light district. Alice had believed that Hanky Panky was one of the best tattoo artists in the world; she'd met him at any number of tattoo conventions, and she'd stayed with him and his wife in Amsterdam. Henk Schiffmacher was sorry he couldn't come all the way to Canada on such short notice. "But I'll pass the word," he said. "I'm sure that a lot of the guys will show up."

Tags: John Irving Fiction
Source: readsnovelonline.net