by John Irving
"You must tell me how William is when you find him," Miss Wurtz said. "Meanwhile, be thankful you have a sister."
"I have a sister," Jack repeated.
That was the message he would leave on the answering machine in Dr. Garcia's office, because it was too early in the morning to make an appointment to see her. Merely discovering that he had a sister was in the category of what Dr. Garcia called "incomplete information"--by which she meant that Jack's news didn't merit calling her at home.
Jack called his sister, Heather Burns, instead. It was only 7:00 A.M. in Santa Monica--10:00 A.M. in Toronto, where Miss Wurtz had been calling from. But it was already midafternoon in Edinburgh. There was music playing when Heather answered the phone--voices and an organ, maybe trumpets.
"Give me a moment," his sister said, turning down the volume on the CD player.
"It's Jack Burns, your brother," he told her.
"It's Heather--your half sister, actually," she said. "But I feel I know you. It was almost as if I grew up with you. 'If your brother knew you, he would love you,' Daddy said every night, when he put me to bed. And there was always this refrain: 'I have a son!' he would shout. 'I have a son and a daughter!' Daddy would say. It could be tiresome, but I got the point."
"I wish I'd grown up with you," Jack told her.
"You don't know that yet," she said. Her voice was crisp and even, with less of a Scottish accent than he'd expected. (There was some Irish in her accent, Jack thought--the effect of those years in Belfast, perhaps, or the Irish boyfriend.) Above all, she sounded very practical.
"I want to meet you," he told her.
"You don't know that, either, Jack Burns," Heather said. "I'm not comfortable asking you for money, but I need it. Our father needs it, I should say--not that he knows he needs it."
"He took care of me; I'll take care of him," Jack told her.
"Don't act with me, Mr. Movie Star," Heather said. "Say only what you mean."
"I mean it," he told her.
"Then you better come meet me. Let's see how that goes," she said.
"I should have been there, when you had your first date," Jack told his sister. "I could have warned you about the guy."
"Don't go there, as Billy Rainbow would say," Heather said. "I could have warned you about some of your dates, too."
"No doubt about it," he told her. It was another Billy Rainbow line. (That character never said anything that hadn't been said a million times before, but Billy said the most mundane things sincerely.)
"You sound just like him," Heather said. "Like Billy Rainbow, I mean."
"But I'm not like him--I'm really someone else," Jack said, hoping it was true. His sister made no response. Jack could hear the music playing; it sounded like a hymn. "I have a sister," he said. (It seemed to go with the hymn.)
"Yes, you do, Jack Burns. You have a father, too. But I'll tell you how it is," his sister said. "You have to go through me to get to him. Not for all your money, Mr. Movie Star, do you see him without seeing me first--not for all the money in the world!"
"You can trust me, Heather."
"You have to go through me to get to him," she said again. "I have to trust you with him."
"I swear to God--you can trust me," he told her.
"You swear to God? Are you religious, Jack Burns?"
"No, not really," Jack admitted.
"Well, he is. You better prepare yourself for that, too," his sister said.
"Are you religious, Heather?"
"Not so religious that I can ever forgive your mother," she told him. "Not that religious. But he is."
After Barbara Steiner's death, William Burns and his daughter really learned to ski. They went only once a year, for a week or ten days, to one of those sacred-sounding places; they eventually added Davos and Pontresina to the list. Skiing, like music--like everything they did together--became a ritual. (According to Jack's sister, she and her father became halfway-decent skiers.)
Heather told Jack that she'd started practicing the piano a year after her mother died, when she was six years old. William Burns encouraged his daughter to practice for five hours a day, alone. As a teenager, Heather took up the wooden flute. "The flute is more sociable," she explained to Jack; that there was a lot of Irish music for the flute led her to do her doctorate in Belfast.
The Irish boyfriend was still in Ireland. Heather held out little hope for the future of any long-distance relationship. But they'd played together in a band in Belfast, and they'd traveled together--a trip to Portugal the previous Easter. ("I like him, in small doses," was all Heather would say about him.)
As a junior lecturer, she made PS22,000 a year. In Belfast, she'd paid PS380 a month for a two-bedroom flat; in Edinburgh, she paid PS300 for a single room in an apartment she shared with five roommates. However, Heather's one-year contract had been extended; she would get a raise and be making PS23,000 next year. For the time being, Heather liked Edinburgh and her job; if she stayed another five or six years, and if she was successful in getting published, she'd be doing well enough to start a family. But Heather doubted she would stay in Scotland. (All she would tell Jack was that she had "other plans.")
Her last year in Belfast, she'd played the organ in a church. One of her senior colleagues at the University of Edinburgh, John Kitchen, had been the organist at Old St. Paul's since 1988, when William Burns's arthritis had forced him to retire as principal organist. For almost fifteen years, William had continued to play the organ at Old St. Paul's--officially, he'd been John Kitchen's assistant. Heather was the backup organist to John Kitchen at Old St. Paul's now. Kitchen had long been their father's friend, Heather told Jack. (He was "like an uncle" to her, she said.)
She played Irish music on her wooden flute one night a week at the Central Bar, a pub at the bottom of Leith Walk. "I'll show you the Central when you're here," Heather told him.
"I want to know everything about you," Jack said.
"You don't know that yet," his sister reminded him.
Jack parked the Audi at the curb on Montana Avenue; he was waiting for Elizabeth, Dr. Garcia's receptionist, to arrive and unlock the office. Elizabeth would be the first to play Jack's I-have-a-sister message. Jack would give her time to play all the messages on the answering machine before he asked her if he could be Dr. Garcia's first appointment.
Jack never waited in the waiting room anymore. He waited in his car for his therapy sessions with Dr. Garcia. When it was Jack's turn, Elizabeth would call him on his cell phone; then Jack would put some money in the parking meter and go inside. His presence in the waiting room made the young mothers--and, occasionally, their friends or nannies--"borderline hysterical," Dr. Garcia had said.
Jack was listening to an Emmylou Harris CD, his fingers keeping time on the steering wheel to "Tougher than the Rest," when Elizabeth came into view on the sidewalk. She shook her key ring at him, but Jack couldn't hear the keys jingle--not over Emmylou.
"I'll show you tougher than the rest," Elizabeth said, letting him into the office. She was a tall, hawk-faced woman in her fifties; her gunmetal gray hair was always in a ponytail. There was something of Mrs. McQuat's severity in the tensed muscles of her neck.
"I left a message on Dr. Garcia's machine," Jack said.
"I heard it. Nice message. I always access the messages from my car," she explained. "I suppose you want the first appointment."
"I would appreciate it, Elizabeth."
He sat in Dr. Garcia's office, not in the waiting room, while Elizabeth made a pot of coffee. Jack had never been alone in that office; he took the time to look more closely at the family photographs, noting that Dr. Garcia was much younger in the photos than he'd first assumed. If those children were hers, they were grown now--probably with children of their own.
"How old is Dr. Garcia?" he asked Elizabeth, when she brought him a cup of coffee.
"Sixty-one," Elizabeth said.
Jack was amazed. Dr. Garcia looked much younger. "And the gent
leman in the pictures?" he asked Elizabeth. "Is he her husband or her father?"
"He was her husband," Elizabeth said. "He's been dead for almost twenty years--he died before I met her."
Perhaps this explained the older-looking man's spectral presence in the photographs; he was a spirit who haunted the family, no longer a participant.
"She didn't remarry?" Jack asked.
"No. She lives with one of her daughters, and her daughter's family. Dr. Garcia has too many grandchildren to count."
It turned out that Elizabeth had been Dr. Garcia's patient before becoming the doctor's receptionist. Elizabeth had been divorced; she was a former alcoholic who'd lost custody of her only child, a little boy. When she stopped drinking and got a job, the boy--who was then a teenager--chose to come live with her. Elizabeth credited Dr. Garcia with saving her life.
Jack sat alone with his coffee in Dr. Garcia's office; he felt inconsequential in the company of her family, who were frozen in time. It was instructive to Jack that his therapist had chosen to decorate her office with those photographs of herself and her children that predated her husband's death, as if she needed to be reminded that self-pity was not allowed. (Feeling sorry for yourself was not part of the healing process, or so Dr. Garcia told her patients.)
Live with it, the photos said. Don't forget, but forgive the past.
In her daughter's house, where Dr. Garcia lived as a grandmother--a somewhat stern one, Jack imagined--there were probably newer photographs. (Of her children as grown-ups, of her countless grandchildren--possibly of family pets.) But in her place of business, where she counseled those who felt terminally sorry for themselves, Dr. Garcia had assembled an austere reminder of her earlier joy and abiding sorrow. She'd once told Elizabeth that she'd always known, when she married an older man, that her husband would predecease her. "I just never guessed by how many years!" she'd said, with a laugh.
"With a laugh?" Jack asked Elizabeth. "Did Dr. Garcia really laugh when she said that?"
"That's the trick, isn't it?" Elizabeth said.
Here was another loose arrangement that would never have been tolerated in Vienna or New York, where Elizabeth's candor to Jack would have been considered unprofessional--where, Jack suspected, Dr. Garcia's insistence on chronological order as therapy probably would have been considered "unprofessional," too. But it was working, wasn't it?
There was a prescription pad on Dr. Garcia's desk. Jack thought about what he wanted to say to her, and if it would fit on one page of the prescription paper. He decided he could make it fit, if he kept his handwriting small.
Dear Dr. Garcia,
I'm going to Edinburgh to meet my sister--maybe my father, too! I'll put it all in chronological order for you, when I get back.
I'm sorry about your husband.
Jack
Then he went into the waiting room, where a nanny was reading a children's book to a four-or five-year-old. (In a world of loose arrangements, Jack had learned not to question why the young mothers didn't just leave their kids at home with their nannies.) The nanny looked up at Jack when he came out of Dr. Garcia's office, but the child didn't bother to look. On a small couch, one of the young mothers lay curled in a fetal position with her back to the waiting room. Jack couldn't hear her crying, but her shoulders were shaking.
"I left Dr. Garcia a note--it's on her desk," he told Elizabeth.
"Is there anything else you want me to tell her? I mean in addition to the note," Elizabeth said.
"Tell her I don't need to see her today," he said. "Tell her I looked happy."
"Well, that's a stretch. How about I say 'happier than usual'?" Elizabeth suggested.
"That's okay," he said.
"Be safe, Jack. Don't go crazy, or anything like that."
37
Edinburgh
Jack was thirty-eight; his sister, Heather, was twenty-eight. How do you meet someone you should have known most of your life? In Jack's case, he stalled. He arrived in Edinburgh a day before he'd told Heather he was coming. He had his mother's business to attend to. It was his father who had brought Jack and Heather together. Jack wanted to keep Heather separate from his mom's history in Edinburgh.
The hotel doorman at the Balmoral, a strapping young man in a kilt, was the first to ask Jack if he was in town for "the Festival"--a question he would repeatedly be asked.
Jack had a corner suite overlooking Princes Street. (He had a view of a chaotic-looking trampoline park.) Princes Street was clogged with pedestrian traffic: people carrying shopping bags, tourists folding and unfolding maps. With the concierge's assistance, Jack hired a car and driver to take him to Leith--Alice's old turf. It was less crowded there--not everybody's favorite part of town, apparently.
The driver's false teeth were too loose. His name was Rory, and his teeth clicked when he talked.
Jack wanted to see St. Thomas's, where Alice had sung in the choir--innocently, before she met William in South Leith Parish Church. St. Thomas's no longer existed, but Rory, who'd been born in Leith, remembered its location and knew what it had become. For more than twenty years, St. Thomas's had been a Sikh temple. The view of what was once Leith Hospital, which had so depressed Alice that she'd left St. Thomas's for another church, was depressing still. The former hospital, Rory told Jack, was only an outpatient clinic now. The unused parts looked neglected and broken; half the ground-floor windows were smashed.
Jack knew what Dr. Garcia would have said if she'd been with him and Rory at that moment. "If St. Thomas's is gone, if an entire church can let go of the past, why can't you let go, too, Jack?"
South Leith Parish Church, where Alice first sang for William, made a more complex impression on Jack. The high walls along Constitution Street, which were meant to keep people out of the popular graveyard, stood in juxtaposition to a toppled gravestone. It read: HERE LYE THE REMAINS OF ROBERT CALDCLEUGH. The date, which was hard to read, was 1482. Among the gravestones, Jack saw that the most recent burial was in 1972.
Jack wouldn't have wanted to be buried there. If you were lying in that graveyard, facing south, you would be looking at an ugly seventeen-story high-rise for the rest of your death.
As for that area of Leith Walk where a rail bridge once joined Mandelson Street to Jane Street--Aberdeen Bill's tattoo parlor, Persevere, had been situated under the rumble of the trains--there was little or no evidence of the "old tenements" Alice had described to Jack. (In her childhood, these were mostly small shops with flats above them, "meeting the minimum standards of comfort and safety"--or so she'd said.) But only the railway arches remained, and these were used as car garages; a Volkswagen repair place was prominent among them.
The apartments were newer here than the shabby late-nineteenth-century buildings along much of Leith Walk--not the "old tenements" Alice had deplored, but sheltered housing for the elderly. Built in the late seventies--according to Rory, "for widows and widowers."
Jack couldn't find the cinema house, which his mom had maintained was "within a stone's throw of Persevere." But Rory remembered where the local cinema had been--it was now a bingo parlor called The Mecca.
Elsewhere on Leith Walk, there were convenience stores, which Rory called "corner shops." While Leith Walk appeared largely residential, there were pubs, and places serving carry-out food, and the ever-present video stores. Young people seemed to live here, many Asians among them.
Alice had once spoken of her excitement upon first seeing the Leith Central Station, when she was a child, but the former station was now the Central Bar, where Jack's sister played her wooden flute. Rory said that strippers had performed there as recently as the late seventies or early eighties. It was midafternoon when Jack looked inside the Central; there were no strippers. The jukebox was playing Frank Sinatra's "My Way." Smoke blurred the tiled walls and the long mirrors and half concealed the high Victorian ceiling, which was heavily patterned.
At the intersection of Constitution Street and Bernard Street, there was a ban
k on the corner and what looked like a shipping agency. Jack and Rory crossed a bridge over the Water of Leith and ran into Dock Place. Jack remembered the song his mom sang, if only when she was drunk or stoned--the song he'd first heard her sing in Amsterdam. It was his mom's mantra, he'd thought at the time--to never be a whore.
Oh, I'll never be a kittie
or a cookie
or a tail.
The one place worse than
Dock Place
is the Port o' Leith jail.
No, I'll never be a kittie,
of one true thing I'm sure--
I won't end up on Dock Place
and I'll never be a hure.
Jack's Scottish accent needed practice, but he sang the song to Rory, who said he'd never heard it before. As for Dock Place, it didn't look like such a bad place to end up--not to Jack, not anymore. (The "hures," if they'd ever been there, had moved on.)
Rory drove Jack back to the Balmoral, where he had a late-afternoon nap. He slept for only two or three hours, but it was enough to shake the jet lag. After dinner at the hotel, he walked out on Princes Street and asked the doorman to recommend a good pub in Leith. Jack didn't want to drink, but he felt like sipping a beer in the unnameable atmosphere of his mother's birthplace. (Maybe he was pretending to be his grandfather Aberdeen Bill.)
The doorman recommended two places; they were both on Constitution Street, very near each other. Jack took a taxi and asked the driver to wait--he was sure he wouldn't be long. The Port o' Leith, where he went first, was small and crowded; it was a very mixed bar. There were the obvious regulars--locals, old standbys--and sailors off the docks, and young students having their first glass. (The legal age was eighteen, which appeared to Jack to mean sixteen.)
The ceiling was a mosaic of flags; on the walls, there were ribbons from sailors' hats and life preservers from ships. There was a KEEP LEITH sign on the mirror. The barmaid explained to Jack that this was a political issue--in response to an unpopular plan to rename Leith "North Edinburgh."
