by John Irving
“Well, Jack, I’m sure your shame is even greater than your fear of the California Penal Code,” Dr. García would later tell him. “But in our past, don’t many of us have someone who could destroy us with a letter or a phone call?”
“You don’t have someone like that, do you, Dr. García?”
“I’m not the patient, Jack. I don’t have to answer that kind of question. Let’s just say, we all have to learn to live with something.”
It was August 2003. Jack’s house on Entrada Drive was still for sale, but he felt that Claudia’s ghost had moved in to stay; it was as if she were living with him. Wherever else he might go, before or after that wretched house was sold, Jack had no doubt that Claudia’s ghost would come with him.
Krung, the Thai kickboxer from that long-ago gym on Bathurst Street, had told him once: “Gym rats always gotta find a new ship, Jackie.” Well, Jack was a gym rat who would soon have to find a new ship, but now he was a gym rat with a ghost.
Jack found that you don’t sleep well when you’re living with a ghost. He had meaningless but disturbing dreams, from which he would awaken with the conviction that his hand was touching Emma’s tattoo. (That perfect vagina, the not-a-Rose-of-Jericho, which his mom had tattooed on Emma’s right hip—just below the panty line.)
Jack took his real estate agent’s advice and moved out; this allowed her to empty the house of all the old and ugly furniture, most of which Emma had acquired for their first apartment in Venice, as well as the rugs and Jack’s gym equipment; the floors were sanded and the walls were painted white. The house became a clean and spare-looking dump, at least—and Jack moved into a modest set of rooms at the Oceana in Santa Monica.
It was a third-floor suite with four rooms, including a kitchen, overlooking the courtyard and the swimming pool. He could have chosen a view of Ocean Avenue, but the Oceana was a moderately priced residential hotel that appealed to families; Jack liked the sound of the children playing in the pool. Some of the families were Asian or European; Jack liked listening to the foreign languages, too. He accepted the transience of staying there, because Jack Burns was transient—impermanent, almost ceasing to exist.
He kept next to nothing from Entrada Drive. He gave three quarters of his clothes to Goodwill and his Oscar to his lawyer for safekeeping.
Jack kept his most recent Audi, of course. The gym at the Oceana was a joke, but there were two gyms in Venice that he liked—and, from the Oceana, Jack was even closer to Dr. García’s office on Montana Avenue than he’d been on Entrada Drive.
Jack registered at the Oceana as Harry Mocco; as usual, the few important people in his life knew where to find him. Somehow it seemed fitting (to a man in limbo) that Jack would hear from Leslie Oastler shortly after his move. Mrs. Oastler called because she hadn’t heard from him in a while—which was all right with her, she added quickly. And just fine with Dolores, no doubt.
Dolores had made such a fuss about the ongoing presence of Jack’s clothes that Mrs. Oastler had donated them to St. Hilda’s, where Mr. Ramsey had happily accepted the clothes as costumes for the school’s dramatic productions. Mr. Ramsey and Miss Wurtz had called to thank Leslie for the unusual gift. (“We never have enough men’s clothes for the dramatizations,” Caroline had explained.)
Jack’s former bedroom, Mrs. Oastler told him, had been converted to a studio for Dolores. (Leslie’s blonde must have been a poet or a painter—some kind of artist, surely—but Jack didn’t ask.) As for Emma’s old bedroom, it was now the official guest room. The wallpaper was different—“more feminine,” Leslie said. The furniture and curtains were “more feminine,” too. All this was Dolores’s doing, Jack guessed, but again he didn’t ask.
“When you’re back in town, you’ll probably prefer to stay in a hotel,” Mrs. Oastler said.
“Probably,” Jack replied. He couldn’t tell why she had called.
“Any new news from or about your dad, Jack?” Leslie asked.
“No. But I’m not looking for him,” Jack explained.
“I wonder why not,” Leslie said. “He would be a man in his sixties, wouldn’t he? Things happen to men at that age. You might lose him before you find him, if you know what I mean.”
“He might die, you mean?”
“He might be dead already,” Mrs. Oastler said. “You were so curious about him. What happened to your curiosity, Jack?” (This was what Dr. García was always asking him.)
“I’ve been seeing a psychiatrist,” he half explained.
“I’m glad you’re seeing somebody!” Leslie exclaimed. “But you used to be able to do more than one thing at a time.”
“What Mrs. Oastler may mean, Jack,” Dr. García would soon tell him, “is that seeing a psychiatrist is not something you necessarily do in lieu of having a little natural curiosity.”
But Jack was guilty of an indefensible crime. He’d not only had sex with a fifteen-year-old girl—he had acquiesced to it. He carried an awful secret, and—provided Claudia’s daughter let him—Jack would bear its burden to his grave. Shame had robbed him of his curiosity. When you’re ashamed, you don’t feel inclined to undertake another adventure—at least not right away.
The thank-you letter from Claudia and her husband (whom Jack would forever imagine as a bearded, betrayed king) came with family photographs—among them one of Sally as a little girl and one of Claudia when she was noticeably thinner. There was also a photo of the husband and father of four when he was clean-shaven; Jack could understand why the king had grown a beard.
“Should you ever be inclined to return to the theater,” Claudia wrote, “just say the word!” A month or six weeks in Vermont in midsummer, a stage so small it would seem his very own, his pick of the play and the part. Under the circumstances, Jack was both touched and repelled by the offer.
“We’re all so grateful to you, Jack,” Claudia went on.
“And we’re so proud of Sally for having the temerity to approach you!” Claudia’s husband (Sally’s father) wrote.
Jack would write back to Claudia and her husband that he was glad to have helped, in what modest way he could. But he lacked Sally’s temerity; Jack wrote that he no longer had the nerve to stand alone on a stage. “The out-of-context moments of filmmaking, which I’ve grown used to, allow the actor room to hide.” (Whatever that meant!) But Jack would think of their little theater often, he wrote—and every summer he would regret the missed opportunity of an idyllic month or six weeks in Vermont. (In truth, he would rather die!)
Jack felt Claudia’s ghost watching over him; she was all smiles when he mailed that letter.
Immediately following this insincere correspondence, Jack experienced contact of another kind. There was nothing insincere about Caroline Wurtz’s phone call, which woke him early one August morning from his umpteenth dream of touching Emma’s vagina tattoo. A family from Düsseldorf, with whom he’d been testing the limits of his Exeter German, were already up and swimming in the Oceana pool.
“Jack Burns, as Mr. Ramsey might say,” Miss Wurtz began. “Rise and shine!” The Wurtz, of course, had no idea of what a shameful thing Jack had done. (That he would rise, and go on rising, seemed likely; that he might ever shine again seemed unthinkable.)
“How nice to hear your voice, Caroline,” he told her truthfully.
“You sound awful,” Miss Wurtz said. “Don’t pretend I didn’t wake you. But I have news worth waking you for, Jack.”
“You’ve heard from him?” Jack asked, wide awake if not exactly shining.
“I’ve heard of him, not from him. You have a sister, Jack!”
Biologically speaking, if his father had remarried—as it appeared that William had—it was conceivable that Jack had a half sister, which was indeed news to him and Miss Wurtz.
Her name was Heather Burns, and she was a junior lecturer on the Faculty of Music at the University of Edinburgh, where (some years earlier) she’d also completed her undergraduate studies in the Department of Music. Heather was
a pianist and an organist, and she played a wooden flute. She’d done her Ph.D. in Belfast.
“On Brahms,” Caroline informed him. “Something about Brahms and the nineteenth century.”
“My dad is back in Edinburgh?” he asked The Wurtz.
“William isn’t well, Jack—he’s in a sanatorium. He was playing the organ again at Old St. Paul’s, and teaching in Edinburgh, but he has osteoarthritis. His arthritic hands have put an end to his playing, at least professionally.”
“He’s in a sanatorium for arthritis?” Jack asked her.
“No, no—it’s a mental place,” Miss Wurtz said.
“He’s in an insane asylum, Caroline?”
“Heather says it’s very nice. William loves it there. It’s just that it’s very expensive,” Miss Wurtz said.
“My sister was calling for money?” Jack asked.
“She was calling for you, Jack. She wanted to know how to reach you. I told her I would call you. As you know, I give your phone number to no one—although in this case I was tempted. Yes, Heather needs money—to keep William happy and safe in the sanatorium.”
Jack’s sister was twenty-eight. A junior lecturer at the University of Edinburgh didn’t make enough money to afford to have children, The Wurtz explained. Heather couldn’t be expected to pay for William’s confinement.
“Heather is married?” Jack asked Miss Wurtz.
“Certainly not!”
“You mentioned children, Caroline.”
“I was being hypothetical—about the poor girl’s meager salary,” Miss Wurtz elaborated. “Heather has a boyfriend. He’s Irish. But she’s not going to marry him. Heather merely said that her income didn’t permit her to even think about starting a family, and that she needs your help with William.”
I have a sister! Jack was thinking; that she needed his help (that anyone needed him) was the most wonderful news!
Better still, Jack’s sister loved their father. According to Miss Wurtz, Heather adored William. But she’d not had an easy time of it; nor had he. After talking with Jack’s sister, The Wurtz had quite a story to tell.
If not surpassing or even equaling his feelings for the commandant’s daughter, the next love of William Burns’s life was a young woman he’d met and married in Germany. Barbara Steiner was a singer; she introduced William to Schubert’s songs. The singing of German lieder, accompanied by the pianoforte—“the ancestor of the modern piano,” as Miss Wurtz described it to Jack—was new and exciting to William. It was no minor art to him, nor was Barbara Steiner a passing infatuation; they performed and taught together.
“I have a son, but I may never see him again,” William told Barbara, from the beginning.
Jack Burns was an emotional and psychological presence in her childhood, Heather told Miss Wurtz—even before Jack became a movie star and his dad began to watch him obsessively on the big screen, and on videotape and DVD. (According to The Wurtz, William had Jack’s dialogue—in all the movies—“down pat.”)
William Burns and Barbara Steiner had lived in Munich, in Cologne, in Stuttgart; they were together in Germany for about five years. When Barbara was pregnant with Heather, William was offered an opportunity to return “home” to Edinburgh; he seized it. Heather was born in Scotland, where both her parents taught in the Department of Music at the University of Edinburgh before her.
William was once again playing the Father Willis at Old St. Paul’s—not that the organ hadn’t been altered and enlarged since he’d last played it. Given the church’s fabled reverberation time, this hardly mattered; it was Old St. Paul’s Scottish Episcopal Church, which William loved, and Edinburgh was his city.
Miss Wurtz, bless her heart, too quickly jumped to the conclusion that William’s life had come full circle. Wasn’t it wonderful that, for all his wanderlust and the upheavals of his younger days, William Burns had at last “settled down”? He’d found the right woman; their daughter would give Jack’s father some measure of peace, a sense of replacement for losing his son.
But it was not to be. Barbara Steiner was homesick for Germany. In her view, Edinburgh was not a great city for classical music; there was a lot of music, but much of it was mediocre. The climate was damp and dreary. Barbara believed that the weather exacerbated her chronic bronchitis; she half joked that she had become a singer with a permanent cough, but the cough was persistent and more serious than she knew.
What Heather, Jack’s sister, imparted to Miss Wurtz—in one phone call—was a portrait of her mother as a complainer. According to Barbara, Scottish men (excluding William) were unattractive and dressed badly; the women were even less attractive and didn’t know how to dress at all. Whisky was a curse, not only for the drunkenness it caused (William didn’t drink); it also killed the taste buds and made the Scots incapable of recognizing how bad their food was. Kilts, like lederhosen, should be worn only by children—or so Barbara believed. (William wouldn’t have been caught dead in a kilt.) In the summer, when the weather finally improved, there were too many tourists—especially Americans. Barbara was allergic to wool; no tartan would ever please her.
Her mother, Heather told Miss Wurtz, found one child such an overwhelming burden that she resisted William’s wishes to have one or two more. Barbara was not a natural mother, yet she reduced her teaching duties (by half) in order to spend more time with Heather, although time spent with an infant was torture to her.
Barbara Steiner was a child of divorced parents; she had such a dread of separation and divorce that she periodically suspected William of planning to divorce her. He wasn’t; in fact, William was (in Heather’s words) “slavishly devoted” to his griping wife. He held himself accountable for her unhappiness, for taking her away from her beloved homeland; he offered to move back to Germany, but Barbara believed that such a move would make her husband so unhappy that he would be driven to divorce her all the more quickly.
Before Barbara Steiner’s parents had separated, she had cherished the family ski holidays they would take—every winter and spring—to the Swiss and Austrian Alps. After the divorce, the ski trips, which Barbara took alone with her mother, or alone with her father, became a form of enforced exercise—athletic stoicism and silent dinners, where one or the other of her parents drank too much wine. Yet the names of these ski resorts in Austria and Switzerland were reverentially repeated to Heather by her unhappy mother; it was as if they were saints’ names, and Barbara had converted to Catholicism.
St. Anton, Klosters, Lech, Wengen, Zermatt, St. Christoph. When they’d lived in Germany, Barbara Steiner had actually taught William Burns how to ski—albeit badly. (Jack had trouble envisioning his dad, a tattooed organist, on skis.) But the Swiss and Austrian Alps were a long way from Scotland.
“We’ll take you skiing when you’re old enough,” Heather’s mom had told her.
One can imagine how The Wurtz’s account of this had echoes of Alice’s litany to Jack.
But the so-called chronic bronchitis turned out to be lung cancer, which Barbara believed she had “caught” (like the flu) in Edinburgh. “I wouldn’t be surprised if lung cancer originated in Scotland,” she half joked between coughs. It was the death of her singing, but not of her.
Heather was too young at the time to remember anything positive about her mother’s recovery from the cancer. Heather recalled nothing about the radiation, Caroline told Jack—and only “the vomiting part” and “the wig part” of her mother’s chemotherapy. Heather would have been five, Miss Wurtz speculated. The child could barely remember the first ski trip of her life, to Klosters—except that her mother, Barbara, had been depressed because she was too tired to ski.
Jack suggested to Caroline that, when Heather was five, her memory of anything was unreliable. Miss Wurtz countered this argument; although she was only five at the time, his sister’s most enduring memory of her mother had prevailed. Barbara Steiner had hated how the Scots drove on the wrong side of the road. She cited the numerous deaths of foreign tourist
s in Edinburgh every summer. (They stepped off the curb, looking left instead of right.)
“If the cancer doesn’t come back and kill me,” Barbara used to say to William, and to their five-year-old daughter, “I swear I shall be struck down by a car going the wrong way on the street.” She was.
She stepped off the curb, where it was written—as plain as day—LOOK RIGHT. She looked left instead, although she’d lived in Edinburgh for almost six years, and a taxi killed her.
“I believe Heather said it was in the vicinity of Charlotte Square,” Miss Wurtz informed Jack. “A children’s book author was reading at some sort of writers’ festival. Her mother had taken Heather to the reading, which was in a tent. When they were leaving, and about to cross the street, Heather reached for her mother’s hand. Heather looked the right way and saw the taxi coming; her mother looked the wrong way and stepped off the curb. The taxi killed Barbara instantly. Heather remembers that her fingers only slightly grazed her mother’s hand.”
Whether Jack’s sister had freely divulged these painful details to Miss Wurtz, or whether Caroline had coaxed the details out of her, Jack didn’t know. He knew only that The Wurtz was a tireless believer in dramatizing important information—hence the detail that Barbara Steiner’s wig flew off on impact was conveyed to Jack, and the fact that Heather and her mom (at her mother’s insistence) spoke only German when they were alone together.
That Jack’s five-year-old sister was crying for her dead mother in German confused the witnesses to the accident. (There were many parents with children among the witnesses; they’d also attended the reading by the children’s book author at the writers’ festival.) The police reconstructed the accident incorrectly: a German tourist had been struck down by a car in the unexpected lane; the astonishingly bald woman was carrying no identification, and her five-year-old daughter, who was hysterical, spoke only German.
Actually, Barbara had been carrying a purse. It must have been flung far away from her when the taxi hit her—lost forever, like the wig. Heather, when she calmed down, told a policeman, in English, that she wanted to go “home”; she took the cop by the hand and showed him the way. Heather had walked everywhere in Edinburgh with her mother and father; no one in the family (including Heather, when she grew up) drove a car.
