Until I Find You Read Free

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!”
    Despite such a reverberating performance, William Burns was disappointed by the organ. Built in 1888, the Father Willis would have been more highly valued if it were still in its original condition. Alas, in William’s estimation, the organ had been “much fiddled with”; by the time he got to try it, it had been restored and electrified, a process typical of the anti-Victorianism of the 1960s.
    Not that Alice could possibly have cared about the organ. More devastating to her: when William left his job as the organist at South Leith Parish Church to play the Father Willis at Old St. Paul’s, there was no hope of her following him to be a choirgirl there. In those days, there was an all-male choir at Old St. Paul’s—and from the congregation, Alice could see only William’s back.
    How she envied that choir! There was not only a procession, wherein the choir followed the cross, but the choir sat at the front of the church—in view of everyone—not at the back, unseen, as in Leith. Jack’s mother was particularly miserable when she discovered that she wasn’t the only choirgirl who’d fallen in love with Jack’s father, but she was the only one who was pregnant.
    As the new assistant organist at Old St. Paul’s, William Burns was answerable to the senior organist and the priest; that William had knocked up a tattoo artist’s daughter from Leith was a matter that his ambitious parents and the Scottish Episcopal Church didn’t take lightly. Whose decision it was—“to whisk him away to Nova Scotia,” as Jack’s mom put it—would forever remain unclear to Jack, but both the church and William’s parents probably had had a hand in it.
    The counterpart of Old St. Paul’s in Halifax, the Anglican Church of Canada, was simply called St. Paul’s. They did not have a Father Willis. The church with the best organ in Halifax was the First Baptist Church on Oxford Street. William Burns must have been told to make up his mind in a hurry. There’s no other explanation for why he chose the denomination over the organ—the music, not the church, was what mattered to him. But the organist at St. Paul’s in Halifax was retiring; the timing was providential.
    The swath that William was alleged to have cut in Halifax in all likelihood included a choirgirl or two. (There was also talk of an older woman.) He wore out his welcome with the Anglicans in a hurry; according to Jack’s mother, his father wouldn’t have lasted a day longer with the Baptists.
    William’s parents reportedly told Alice that they never sent him money or hid his whereabouts from her. The first claim is conceivably true—William’s parents had little money. But it was harder for Alice to believe that they didn’t conspire to hide him from her. And when William was forced to flee Halifax—not long before Alice’s arrival there—he must have needed money. He’d been tattooed again, as Alice discovered when she first went looking for him—at Charlie Snow’s tattoo shop in Halifax, where the power for the electric machines was supplied by car batteries. And it would be a while before William found a job, and more quickly lost it, in Toronto.
    Alice never blamed Old St. Paul’s for whatever role the church may have played in arranging William’s passage to Nova Scotia. It was the parishioners of Old St. Paul’s—and surprisingly not her congregation in South Leith—who took up a collection to send Alice to Halifax to find him.
    Furthermore, the Anglican Church of Canada looked after her in Halifax, and they did an honest job of it. But