Gone Boy

How does a young man simply disappear off the face of the earth?

I MET IVON Owen—I.M. Owen, as he went by in the publishing world—when we both found ourselves working at Financial Times in Toronto in the late 1980s. Ivon was at the tail end of a notable career in the literary world, having been a co-founder of the Tamarack Review, a book reviewer, translator, and principal editor for many years at Oxford University Press. He was a gentle soul with a keen eye, erudite and self-effacing. His job at Financial Times was to scrutinize final pages before they went to press, searching for errors or ambiguities that everyone else had missed.

If you had put Ivon in a lineup with ten other men and and were told, “One of these fathers suffered a great tragedy,” your eye would have been drawn to him. There was a haunted grief in his way of being—of walking, of speaking, of holding his pipe, and especially of smiling.

I knew why. I’d gone to school with Ivon’s son, Ken, first at Brown School in Toronto and then at University of Toronto Schools (UTS), a private (then) boys-only school known for academic achievement. Ken was a sweet, nerdy kid who got top marks effortlessly and preferred intellectual pursuits to my pastimes of playing hockey, hooky, and snooker at Brock’s Billiards.

After UTS, Ken distinguished himself in English literature at the University of Toronto before being awarded a Commonwealth Scholarship to do graduate work at the University of York in North Yorkshire. I, too, ended up studying English at the University of Toronto, then enrolling in graduate school. Working on my M.A., I’d sometimes bump into an old schoolmate and we’d catch up on who was doing what. One day, over beer at the Bull and the Bear, I brought up Ken’s name. My friend gave me a strange look.

“Didn’t you hear?”

“Hear what?”

“Ken disappeared. A couple of years ago. He’s gone. Nobody knows what happened.”

THE OWEN FAMILY had been meant to meet up in London for Christmas. Ken would take the train down from York. They were to gather at an appointed hour in Trafalgar Square. Ken never showed up, and—despite years of police work, private investigation, and Ivon’s many trips to England and beyond— he has not been seen or heard from since. Gone without a trace.

Ken Owen was to meet his family by the lions in Trafalgar Square in London.

Rumours fill any factual vacuum, and they started right after his disappearance. Ken had got seriously into drugs and gone off the deep end. He’d been living with a girl in York and come to regret moving in with her. She made him claustrophobic—vanishing was his way of freeing himself. He was in India. In Manchester. He’d been spotted in Italy. In downtown Toronto. He’d suffered a head injury and had amnesia. He’d been seen on the beach in Torremolinos.

When I told Ivon that I’d gone to school with Ken, he invited me to the family’s old, lived-in, empty-feeling house on Balmoral Avenue. We had interests in common and discussed many things besides Ken. Our conversations grew into a weekly get-together, and became more focused on his lost son. Sometimes Ken’s younger brother, Gerald, joined us. As the afternoon faded and the livingroom grew dim, we ended up sitting in near darkness.

After half a dozen of these afternoons, I told Ivon I was wondering about doing a book on Ken. Ivon said he was not opposed to the idea. We spent several more afternoons before he let drop something that quickened my pulse. Upstairs, in a cardboard box, Ivon had saved not only every one of Ken’s letters from England, but carbon copies of every letter he had mailed to Ken.

Had there been any signs, I asked, any possible clues, in the letters? If there were, Ivon said, he hadn’t noticed them, and he’d read them many times. When I asked how much correspondence he had, Ivon said, “I don’t know exactly, but quite a lot.”

To me, those letters were gold. Would he be willing to shate them with me? If we went ahead with the book, he said, he would certainly do so. But he would give me his blessing on one condition: both Gerald and Ken’s mother had to do likewise.

AS OFTEN HAPPENS in the case of a child’s sudden death, Ken’s parents divorced not long after his disappearance. Ken’s mother had remarried and moved to New York. Patricia Owen was now Patricia Irwin. My partner at the time was a therapist, and I asked her why divorce in the wake of tragedy was common. She mentioned blame and guilt, different ways of handling grief, inability to communicate about the loss, constant reminders in the partner’s genes, the abrupt surfacing of other issues in the marriage.

Ivon passed along Patricia’s number. I imagined that he might have tipped her off, but my call to her apparently came out of the blue. When I explained that I hoped to do a book about Ken’s disappearance, she seemed taken aback, perhaps even alarmed. She said she wasn’t sure it was a good idea. I told her I was going to be in New York in a couple of weeks (a fib, until it wasn’t) and asked if we might meet in person.

We had lunch at a place near her home in Manhattan and spent several hours in conversation. My hope was that, in finding old police reports and people who’d known Ken in England, I might turn up useful information. Wasn’t the chance of finding something—perhaps even something conclusive—worth revisiting the dreadful experience? At the end of lunch she said she’d think it over and let me know the following week.

SOME WOUNDS heal and others you must incorporate. Gerald was fine with the idea of my doing a book and said he’d help me as best he could. He’d accepted his brother’s disappearance and gone on to a good life, becoming a lawyer, writer, translator, and eventually a husband and father, an editor at the National Post, an editorialist at the Globe and Mail. Eighteen years had passed since Ken’s disappearance and Gerald, also with a brilliant intellect, could talk about him without triggering the great sadness that attends irreplaceable loss.

Ivon, by contrast, wore his pain and sadness as inevitably as the trenchcoat he wore to the Financial Times each week. Something in him had been reduced to embers and ash. He knew nothing more definitive than he did the day Ken failed to turn up in Trafalgar Square. All his years of searching for answers had been for naught. I was a writer, eager to resume the search. Ken’s letters were there in an open box. Ivon’s pain was his pain, book or no book.

Ken had been attending the University of York in North Yorkshire on a Commonwealth Scholarship.

THE MOMENT I heard Patricia’s voice a week after our lunch—”It’s Patricia Irwin in New York”— I knew. Perhaps I’d even known at our meeting. It seemed that Ken belonged to an earlier time in her life—Ivon, Ken, Gerald, Balmoral Avenue. She’d taken her pain, put it in a box, duct-taped the box shut, shipped it to New York, and stored it in the basement. I was asking her to bring the box back upstairs, slice it open, and confront the grief all over again. She wouldn’t. Couldn’t.

The next time I sat down with Ivon, I told him that Patricia had nixed the book idea. The cache of correspondence would remain safely upstairs on Balmoral Avenue.

“I’m not surprised,” he said, fiddling with his pipe. “I imagine you must be disappointed.”

“I am a bit, yes. For my own selfish reasons.”

“Frankly, “ he said, in the old, empty, lived-in house, “I’m rather relieved.”