Until I Find You

by John Irving

  "Dad--"

  " 'Pop'!" his father corrected him.

  "Let's just have a normal conversation, Pop."

  "Would that be the sex-with-prostitutes or the Hugo conversation?" William asked. Dr. Krauer-Poppe opened her purse with a snap. "Okay, I'll stop. I'm sorry, Anna-Elisabeth," Jack's dad said.

  "I was looking for a tissue, William. I have something in my eye," Dr. Krauer-Poppe said. "I wasn't even thinking about your medication; not yet." She opened a small compact--it held a tiny mirror, no doubt, although Jack's father couldn't see it--and dabbed at the corner of her eye with a tissue.

  "Perhaps we could talk about the time we all woke up at two in the morning and watched Jack win the Oscar!" Dr. von Rohr said, taking William's gloved hand. He looked at her hand holding his as if she were a leper.

  "You mean Emma's Oscar, Ruth?" William asked her. "That screenplay had Emma written all over it. Didn't it, Jack?"

  Jack didn't respond; he just watched Dr. von Rohr let go of his father's hand. "When the food comes, William, I'll help you take those gloves off," she told him. "It's better not to eat with them."

  "Ich muss bald pinkeln," Jack's dad announced. ("I have to pee soon.")

  "I'll take him," Jack told the two doctors.

  "I think I should come with you," Dr. von Rohr said.

  "Nein," William told her. "We're boys. We're going to the boys' room."

  "Just behave yourself, William," Dr. Krauer-Poppe warned him. Jack's dad stuck his tongue out at her as he stood up from the table.

  "If you're not back in a few minutes, I'll come check on you," Dr. von Rohr said, touching Jack's hand.

  "Jack, your father cried when you won the Oscar--he cried and he cheered," Dr. Krauer-Poppe said. "He was so proud of you--he is so proud of you."

  "I just meant that Emma must have helped him," William said; he was indignant.

  "You cried and cheered, William--we all did," Dr. von Rohr replied.

  It slowly registered with Jack, when he was walking with his father to the men's room--that if they'd watched Jack Burns at the Academy Awards in 2000, his father had been in the Sanatorium Kilchberg for more than three years. No one, not even Heather, had told Jack how long William had been there.

  "Of course Emma helped me, Pop," Jack admitted. "She helped me a lot."

  "I didn't mean I wasn't proud of you, Jack. Of course I'm proud of you!"

  "I know you are, Pop."

  In the men's room, Jack tried to block his father's view of the mirror, but William planted himself in front of the sink, not the urinal. They did a little dance. William tried to look over Jack's shoulder at the mirror; when Jack stood on his toes to block his dad's view, William ducked his head and peered around his son. They danced from side to side. It was impossible to prevent William from seeing himself in the mirror.

  If mirrors were triggers, they didn't affect Jack's father in quite the same way as the word skin had. This time, he didn't try to take off his clothes. But with every glimpse he caught of himself, his expression changed.

  "Do you see that man?" Jack's dad asked, when he saw himself. It was as if a third man were in the men's room with them. "Things have happened to him," his father said. "Some terrible things."

  Jack gave up trying to shield his dad and looked in the mirror, too. The third man's face kept changing. Jack saw his father as William might have looked when he first caught sight of Jack as an infant, before the boy's mother had whisked him away--a kind of expectancy giving way to wonder on William's suddenly boyish-looking face. Jack saw what his father must have seen in a mirror that day in Copenhagen, when they pulled Niels Ringhof's body from the Kastelsgraven--or when William learned that Alice had slept with the boy, and then abandoned him.

  His dad was slumping in Jack's arms, as if William wanted to kneel on the men's room floor--the way he'd dropped to his knees at the waterfront in Rotterdam, when Els had to carry him to Femke's car. Or when the policeman had brought Heather home--and the cop told William the story of how they'd mistaken Barbara, his dead wife, for a German tourist who looked the wrong way crossing the street at Charlotte Square.

  "That man's body is a map," William said, pointing at the slumping man in the mirror. "Should we look at the map together, Jack?"

  "Maybe later, Pop. Not now."

  "Nicht jetzt," his father agreed.

  "You said you had to pee, Pop," Jack reminded him.

  "Oh," Jack's father said, stepping away from his son. "I think I have."

  They both looked at his pants. William was wearing khaki trousers with the same pleats and sharply pressed pant legs that Professor Ritter favored, but William's were stained dark; his feet were standing in a puddle of urine on the floor.

  "I hate it when this happens," his dad said. Jack didn't know what to do. "Don't worry, Jack. Dr. von Rohr will be coming to the rescue. What did you think her overnight bag was really for?" William turned abruptly away from the mirror--as if the third man in the mirror had insulted him, or made him feel ashamed.

  Seemingly part of his father's daily schedule, there came a head-of-department knock on the men's room door. "Herein!" William called. ("Come in!")

  Dr. von Rohr's long arm reached into the men's room; she was offering Jack her oversize handbag without showing them her face. "Danke," Jack said, taking the bag from her hand.

  "It's different when he sees himself in the mirror without his clothes," she warned Jack, letting the door close.

  Jack undressed his father and wiped his body down with paper towels, which he soaked in warm water; then he dried his dad off with more paper towels. William was as accepting of this treatment as a well-behaved child.

  Jack was able to guide him out of sight of the mirror. But when William was standing there, naked--while Jack searched for the change of clothes in Dr. von Rohr's big bag--a well-dressed gentleman entered the men's room, and he and Jack's father exchanged stares. To the gentleman, who looked like a middle-aged banker, Jack's dad was a naked, tattooed man. To William Burns, if Jack could read his father's indignant expression, the well-dressed banker was an intruder; moreover, he was intruding on a tender father-and-son moment. Furthermore, to the gentleman, William Burns was a naked, tattooed man with gloves on--and there was no telling what the gentleman might have made of the copper bracelets.

  The banker gave Jack an overfamiliar, I-know-who-you-are look. (He had come to pee, but he'd walked into some twisted movie!)

  "Er ist harmlos," Jack said to the man, remembering what Nurse Bleibel had told poor Pamela. ("He's harmless.")

  The banker clearly doubted this. Jack's dad had filled his lungs and proceeded to puff out his chest like a rooster; he made two fists and held out his gloved hands.

  Jack reached back for his Exeter German, hoping for the best. "Keine Angst. Er ist mein Vater," he told the banker. ("Don't be afraid. He's my father.") And this was the hard part: "Ich passe auf ihn auf." ("I'm looking after him.") The banker retreated, not believing a word of it.

  Then the man was gone--the only actual third man to have momentarily shared the men's room with Jack and his dad--and Jack dressed his father, trying to remember how efficiently and gently Dr. Horvath had dressed William in the clinic.

  It seemed to soothe his dad to explain musical notes to Jack; William must have known that his son knew nothing about music. "Quarter notes are colored in, with stems," his father told him. "Eighth notes are also colored in, with either flags or beams joining two or more together. Sixteenth notes are colored in, and they have a double beam joining them together."

  "What about half notes?" Jack asked.

  "Half notes, which are white-faced--well, in my case, you could say flesh-colored," his dad said; he abruptly stopped.

  Flesh: they'd both heard it. But was it a trigger? (As unstoppable as skin, maybe, Dr. Horvath might have said.)

  "Half notes, which are white-faced," Jack prompted his father, to make him move on. "White-faced and what?"

  "White-fac
ed with stems," Jack's dad replied, haltingly--flesh perhaps flickering in the half-light, half-dark of his mind, where all the triggers lay half asleep or half awake. "Whole notes are white-faced and have no stems."

  "Stop! Hold everything," Jack suddenly said, pointing to his father's right side. "What's that one?"

  The tattoo was neither words nor music; it more closely resembled a wound in William's side. Worse, at the edges of the gash, there was a blood-red rim--like a ring of blood. (As for the blood, Jack should have known, but he'd been only four at the time.)

  "That is where Our Lord was wounded," Jack's father told him. "They put the nails in His hands," he said, holding his black-gloved hands together, as if in prayer, "and in His feet, and here--in His side," William said, touching the tattoo on the right side of his rib cage. "One of the soldiers pierced His side with a spear."

  "Who did the tattoo?" Jack asked his dad. Some scratcher, Jack expected him to say, but Jack should have known.

  "There was a time, Jack, when every religious person in Amsterdam was at least tempted to be tattooed by a man named Jacob Bril. Maybe you were too young to remember him."

  "No, I remember Bril," Jack said, touching the blood-edged gash in his dad's side--then drawing his father's shirt over the wound.

  It was a great restaurant, the Kronenhalle. Jack had been foolish to order only a salad, but he ate two thirds of his father's Wiener schnitzel. William Burns was a finicky eater.

  "At least Jack brought his appetite to dinner, William," Dr. Krauer-Poppe scolded him, but both William and Jack were in a fairly upbeat mood.

  They had weathered the word flesh, which turned out to be in the stoppable category of triggers--not in the skin category--and while Jack had seen a third man's sorrow on his father's face, he knew that they had also escaped the men's room without confronting the worst of what mirrors could do to his dad. It was different when William was naked in front of one, or so Dr. von Rohr had said. Jack guessed that was das ganze Pulver--all the ammunition, which Dr. Horvath had spoken of. Jack would get to see it one day, and that day would come soon enough. Tonight in the Kronenhalle, Jack was quite content to wait.

  They talked briefly about the younger nurses at the Sanatorium Kilchberg. How they virtually stood in line, or took turns, to shave his dad every morning; how William was such a flirt.

  "You don't shave yourself?" Jack asked him.

  "You try it, without a mirror," his father said. "You should try it with the younger nurses, too, Jack."

  "If you don't behave yourself, William, I'm going to put Waltraut in charge of shaving you," Dr. von Rohr told him.

  "Just so you don't put Hugo in charge of it, Ruth," Jack's dad said.

  That was how William managed to steer their conversation back to Hugo, and the sex-with-prostitutes subject. Dr. von Rohr, in her head-of-department way, was smart enough to see it coming, but she couldn't prevent it.

  "It is chiefly Hugo whom these lovely ladies object to, Jack," his dad began, "not the prostitutes." (Sighing from Dr. von Rohr, of course; the head-in-her-hands thing from Dr. Krauer-Poppe.)

  "You said prostitutes--plural. You see more than one?" Jack asked his father.

  "Not at the same time," William said with that mischievous little smile of his. (Fork-twirling, spoon-spinning, knife-tapping from Dr. von Rohr's part of the table--and Dr. Krauer-Poppe had something in her eye again.)

  "I'm just curious to know, Pop, if you see the same two or three women--I mean one at a time--or a different prostitute each visit."

  "I have my favorites," his father said. "There are three or four ladies I keep going back to."

  "You're faithful in your fashion--is that what you mean, William?" Dr. Krauer-Poppe asked. "Isn't there a song that goes like that?" (She'd had more red wine than Dr. von Rohr.) "Or have I got the translation all upfucked?"

  "All fucked up, Anna-Elisabeth," Dr. von Rohr corrected her.

  "And it's safe?" Jack asked his father.

  "I don't have sex with them, if that's what you mean," William answered, with that now-familiar tone of indignation in his voice.

  "I know. I meant is it safe in every way?" Jack asked. "The place, for example. Is it dangerous?"

  "I have Hugo with me!" his dad cried. "I don't mean in the same room with me, of course."

  "Of course," Jack said.

  The silverware, which Dr. von Rohr had set in motion, came crashing down.

  "Wait till you meet Hugo," Dr. Krauer-Poppe told Jack. "Your father is safe with Hugo."

  "Then what is it you object to about him?" Jack asked both doctors.

  "Wait till you meet him," was all Dr. von Rohr would say.

  "Don't pity me, Jack," his dad said. "Don't think of me as resigning myself to masturbation with a prostitute. It isn't an act of resignation."

  "I guess I don't understand what it is," Jack admitted.

  They all saw William's right hand reaching for his heart again; once more the fingers of his black-gloved hand inched their way toward that tattoo with the semicolon in it. (He had, with Dr. von Rohr's assistance, removed the gloves to eat. But now that he'd finished his meal, the gloves were back on.)

  "I have had women in my life that I wanted to have--if not for as long as I wish I'd had them," William began sadly. "I couldn't do that again. I can't go through losing someone else."

  The doctors and Jack knew everything about the tattoo William Burns had for Karin Ringhof, and where it was. But Jack didn't know if his father had a tattoo for Barbara, his German wife--or where it was, if he had it. Maybe that one was in the music; Jack would ask Heather about it.

  "I get it, Pop. I understand," Jack told him.

  He wondered if William ever touched his rib cage on the other side, where Jacob Bril had pierced him and made him bleed. Jack wanted to know if that tattoo was ever as tender or sensitive to his father's touch as the tattoo of the commandant's daughter and her little brother. He hoped not. Of all his dad's tattoos, Jacob Bril's rendition of Christ's blood was the only one with any color.

  "It's time for us to be going along, William," Dr. Krauer-Poppe told him gently. "What are you going to play for us tomorrow--for Jack and me, and Dr. Horvath?"

  It was a good trick, and Jack's father seemed to be unaware of it. His right hand drifted away from the area of his heart and the upper-left side of his rib cage. He spread the fingers of his black-gloved hands on the white tablecloth--his feet shuffling under his chair, as if he were familiarizing himself with the foot pedals. You could see it in his eyes--there was a keyboard in his mind. There was an organ the size of the Oude Kerk in his heart; when Jack's dad shut his eyes, he could almost hear it.

  "You don't expect me to hum it for you, do you, Anna-Elisabeth?" William asked Dr. Krauer-Poppe. She hadn't fooled him, after all. In fact, she held her breath--as Jack and Dr. von Rohr did--because they all knew that hum was a possible trigger. As Dr. Berger had warned Jack, his father hated humming. (Although maybe it was the humming itself and not the word he hated.)

  "Why not wait and surprise them in the morning, William?" Dr. von Rohr suggested. "I'm just asking."

  "Why not?" Jack's dad said; he was looking tired.

  "I have a little something to make you drowsy in the car," Dr. Krauer-Poppe told William.

  Jack's dad was shaking his head; he was already drowsy. "I'm not going to be happy to say good-bye to Jack," William said testily. "I've said good-bye to you before--too many times, dear boy. I've said good-bye to you here," his father said, the gloved hand touching his heart again, "and here," he said, pointing to his eyes, "and in here!" William was weeping now, holding his index finger to his temple.

  "You're going to see me in the morning, Pop." Jack held his father's face in his hands. "You're going to see me again and again," Jack promised him. "I intend to keep coming here. Heather and I are buying a house in Zurich."

  William instantly stopped crying and said: "You must be crazy! It's one of the most expensive cities in the world!
Ask Ruth, ask Anna-Elisabeth! Tell him!" he shouted at the women. "I don't want my children to bankrupt themselves," he moaned, wrapping both arms around his chest and hugging himself as if he were cold.

  "Sehr bald wird ihm kalt werden," Dr. von Rohr said to her colleague. ("Very soon he'll feel cold.")

  "Mir ist nicht immer kalt," Jack's father argued. ("I don't always feel cold.")

  Dr. Krauer-Poppe had stood up and put her hand on William's shoulder; he sat shaking in his chair. "Open up, William," she said. "If you take this, you won't feel cold--you'll just feel sleepy."

  Jack's father turned his head and stuck his tongue out at her. (Jack realized that he might have misunderstood when his dad had done this before.) Dr. Krauer-Poppe put a pill on the tip of William's tongue; she raised the water glass to his lips and he swallowed.

  "I'll just see if Hugo has the car here. He was supposed to," Dr. von Rohr said, leaving the table.

  "Professor Ritter has a home in one of those overpriced monstrosities across the lake from the sanatorium," Jack's father started up again, as soon as he'd swallowed the pill Dr. Krauer-Poppe had given him. "It's in Zollikon or Kusnacht--one of those precious places."

  "It's in Kusnacht, William--it's very beautiful," Dr. Krauer-Poppe assured Jack. "That side of the lake gets more sun."

  "My taxi driver told me," Jack said.

  "But do you know what it costs?" Jack's father asked him. "Four million Swiss francs, and for what? A house of three hundred or four hundred square meters, and you pay more than three million dollars? That's crazy!"

  "The house has a view of the lake; it has a garden, too," Dr. Krauer-Poppe explained. "The garden must be a thousand square meters, William."

  "It's still crazy," Jack's dad said stubbornly; at least he wasn't shivering. Dr. Krauer-Poppe stood behind William's chair, massaging his shoulders. She was just waiting for the pill to kick in.

  "William, Jack could buy a small house in town--something not that expensive," Dr. Krauer-Poppe said. "I'm sure he doesn't care if he can see the lake."

  "Everything in Zurich is expensive!" Jack's father declared.

  "William, you go shopping for clothes and prostitutes. What else do you go shopping for in Zurich?" Dr. Krauer-Poppe asked him.

  "You see what I'm up against, Jack? It's like being married!" his dad told him. William saw that Dr. von Rohr was back. "To both of them!"