by John Irving
At the intersection of Constitution Street and Bernard Street, there was a bank 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.”
Jack declined the offered bar snacks—something called “pork scratchings” among them—and sipped a Scottish oatmeal stout.
Farther down Constitution Street was a cavernous Victorian pub called Nobles Bar; it was as empty as The Port o’ Leith had been crowded, but even with the mob from The Port o’ Leith, Nobles would have seemed empty by comparison. There were no women in the bar, and fewer than half a dozen unfortunate-looking men—squinty eyes, pasty complexions, noses of all sorts. Jack deliberated between ordering a Newcastle Brown Ale and something called Black Douglas; it didn’t really matter, since he knew he would finish neither. Jack Burns couldn’t remember the last time he’d been in a bar and no one had recognized him; now, on the same night, he’d been in two.
Back at the Balmoral, Jack had a mineral water at the bar, where they were playing Bob Dylan’s “Lay, Lady, Lay.” The old song, which he’d once liked, took Jack by surprise. He’d been saying good-bye to his mother, never suspecting that nothing in Edinburgh, the city of her birth, would resurrect her—not the way Bob Dylan could bring her back to him every time.
“Are you here for the Festival, Mr. Burns?” the bartender asked.
“Actually, my mother was born here,” he told the man. “I just spent a little time in her old neighborhood, in Leith. And my sister lives here. I’m meeting her tomorrow.” Jack didn’t say, “For the first time!”
He had arranged to meet Heather the next morning in a coffee shop called Elephants and Bagels on Nicolson Square. This was less than a ten-minute walk from his hotel, and very near her office at the university. The music department offices and practice rooms were in Alison House on Nicolson Square.
Jack walked along North Bridge, over the train yards for British Rail. He passed the big glass building on Nicolson Street, the Festival Theatre, and turned right into Nicolson Square. He was early, as usual. In Elephants and Bagels, Jack sat at a table near the door and ordered a mug of coffee. An advertisement for the coffee shop said: THE BEST HANGOVER CURE IN EDINBURGH.
The walls were painted a bright yellow. There were plants in the windows, and a glass case filled with elephant figurines—carved stone, painted wood, ceramic, and porcelain elephants. A large, round support column was covered with children’s drawings—birds, trees, more elephants. The coffee shop had the educational yet whimsical atmosphere of a kindergarten classroom.
When Heather came in the shop, Jack didn’t at first see how she resembled him. She had short blond hair, like her German mother, but her brown eyes and sharp facial features were Jack’s, or William’s, and she was both lean and compact—as small and fit as a jockey. Her tortoiseshell eyeglasses were almond-shaped; she was as nearsighted as her mother had been, she explained, but she refused to wear contacts. She hated the feeling of something in her eyes. She was waiting to be a little older before trying the new laser surgery. (She told Jack all this before she sat down.)
They had shaken hands, not kissed. She ordered tea, not coffee. “You look just like him,” she said. “I mean you look less like Jack Burns than I thought you would, and more like our dad.”
“I can’t wait to see him,” he told her.
“You have to wait,” she said.
“It’s just an expression,” Jack explained. They were both nervous.
She talked about her five roommates. She was moving out soon, with one other girl. Two of her flatmates directed a nonsmoking clinic; they were vegans who believed that everything with a spiky shape attracted bad energy. Heather had started a small cactus garden in the kitchen area, but this had to go—“too many spikes.” The vegans had also beseeched the landlord to remove the weather vane from the top of the apartment building. My sister is living with lunatics! Jack was thinking.
Jack explained that he was selling his house in Santa Monica, but that he had no idea where he wanted to live.
Heather knew he was registered at the Balmoral as Harry Mocco; she wondered why. Jack wanted to know what she taught at the university. (She taught five courses—historical and theoretical music classes, mostly to beginners, and keyboard skills.)
“Our department is all old men!” Heather said good-naturedly.
Jack thought that his sister was a pretty girl with glasses; she had an air of academic aloofness or detachment about her. She wore little or no makeup, but an attractive linen skirt with a fitted T-shirt and sensible-looking walking shoes.
Jack asked to see where she worked and where she lived. Heather moved her fingers all the while they were walking, as if she were unconsciously playing a piano or an organ.
The music practice rooms in the basement of Alison House were like prison cells. They were small cubicles, poorly ventilated; the walls were a dirty, pea-soup green, and the floors were a hideous orange linoleum. The lighting, which was adequate, was of a fluorescent variety that Heather said was bad for your sanity.
Jack thought that the word sanity might lead them into a conversation about their dad, but Jack and Heather were experiencing the equivalent of a first date. (They needed to get through an unbearable amount of trivia before the more serious subjects could emerge.)
The lecture room in Alison House was more pleasant than the practice rooms. The large windows let in lots of natural light, although the view was a limited one—of an old stone building. There were two pianos and a small organ in the room, but when Jack asked Heather to play something for him, she just shook her head and directed him to a narrow, twisting staircase, which led to her office. Jack got the feeling that she wanted him to go ahead of her, up the stairs.
“Can we talk about him?” he asked her. “Maybe we could begin with the arthritis, if that’s an easy part to talk about.”
She stared at the blue carpet on her office floor, her fingers seemingly searching for the right keys on a keyboard only she could see; she
plucked at her skirt. The cream-colored walls had a spackled, unsmooth finish. There were two desks—the larger one with a computer on it, the smaller with a German dictionary. The stereo equipment was probably worth more than everything else in the office, including the small piano; there were more CDs than books on the bookshelves, and a bulletin board with a sepia photograph of Brahms tacked to it. There was also a postcard pinned to the bulletin board—a color photo of a very old-looking pianoforte, the kind of thing you’d find in a museum of musical history. A friend might have sent her the postcard—her Irish boyfriend, perhaps—or maybe William had sent it to her, if William was capable of sending a postcard.
“I want to get to know you a little at a time,” Heather said, still staring at the rug. She had Jack’s thin lips; her upper lip was a small, straight line.
“It’s a tight space, but nice,” Jack said, meaning her office.
“I don’t need more space—I need more time,” she told him. “The summer is good—no teaching, and I can get a lot of research done. In the school year, Easter is about the only time I have to do my writing.”
Jack nodded, glancing at the photo of Brahms—as if Brahms had understood what Heather meant. (Jack hadn’t a clue.)
Heather turned out the lights in her office. “You go first,” she said, before they started down the stairs. Maybe she found it easier to talk when he couldn’t look at her. “Daddy hides his hands, or he wears gloves, because of the deformities. The disfiguration of osteoarthritic joints is quite noticeable—not just a gnarling of the knuckles but actual bumps. They’re called Heberden’s nodes.”
“Where are the bumps?” Jack asked, descending the stairs ahead of her.
“At the far knuckles of his fingers—that junction between the middle bone of the finger and the little bone at the tip. But his hands don’t look as deformed as he imagines they do; it’s mainly how his hands hurt when he plays.”
“Can’t he stop playing?” Jack asked.
“He goes completely insane if he doesn’t play,” Heather said. “Of course he also wears gloves because he feels cold.”
“Some people with full-body tattoos feel cold,” Jack told her.
“No kidding,” his sister said. (He assumed that she got the sarcasm from her German mother.)
They walked through a parking lot, past more university buildings, down Charles Street to George Square. Heather was a fast walker; even when they were side by side, she wouldn’t look at Jack when she talked. “The arthritis has affected his playing for more than fifteen years,” she said. “The disease involves degeneration of cartilage and what they call hypertrophy—overgrowth of the bones of the joint. For a pianist or an organist, there’s a wear-and-tear factor. The pain of osteoarthritis is increased by activity, relieved by rest. The more he plays, the more it hurts. But the pain makes him feel warm.” She smiled at this. “He likes that about it.”
“There must be medication for it,” Jack said.
“He’s tried all the nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs—they upset his stomach. He’s like you—he doesn’t eat. You don’t eat, do you?”
“He’s thin, you mean?”
“To put it mildly,” Heather said. They had passed some tents for the Festival and were walking through the Meadows—a large park, the paths lined with cherry trees. A woman with a tennis racquet was hitting a ball for her dog to fetch.
“Where are we going?” Jack asked his sister.
“You said you wanted to see where I lived.”
They passed Bruntsfield Links, a small golf course where a young man (without a golf ball) was practicing his swing; the fields, Heather told Jack matter-of-factly, had been an open mass grave during the plague.
“Daddy takes glucosamine sulfate, a supplement—it comes mixed with chondroitin, which is shark cartilage. He thinks this helps,” she said, in a way that implied she didn’t believe it did anything at all. “And he puts his hands in melted paraffin, which he mixes with olive oil. The hot wax dries on his hands. He makes quite a mess when he picks the wax off, but he seems to enjoy doing that. It fits right in with his obsessive-compulsive disorder.”
“His what?”
“We’re not talking about the mental part, not yet,” his sister told him. “He puts his hands in ice water, too—for as long as he can stand it. This is a bit masochistic for someone who feels cold most of the time, but the hot wax and the ice water work—at least they give him some temporary relief.”
It was a warm, windy day, but the way Heather walked—with her head down, her arms swinging, and her shoulders rolling forward—you would have thought that they were marching into a gale.
“All the years I was growing up, Daddy told me every day that he loved you as much as he loved me,” Heather said, still not looking at Jack. “Because he never got to be with you, he said that every minute he was with me, he loved me twice as much. He said he had to love me enough for two people.”
Her fingers were playing on an imaginary keyboard of air; there was no way for Jack to follow the music in his sister’s head. “Naturally, I hated you,” Heather said. “If he had to love me enough for two people, because of how much he missed you, I interpreted this to mean that he loved you more. But that’s what kids do, isn’t it?” She stopped suddenly, looking at Jack. Without waiting for an answer, she said: “We’re here—my street, my building.” She folded her arms across her small breasts, as if they’d been arguing.
“You don’t still hate me, do you?” he asked her.
“That’s a work-in-progress, Jack.”
The street was busy—lots of small shops, a fair amount of traffic. Her apartment building was five or six stories tall—a wrought-iron fence surrounding it, a bright-red door. There were tiled walls in the foyer, a wood-and-iron banister, a stone staircase.
“You go first,” Heather said, pointing up the stairs.
Jack wondered if she was superstitious about stairs. He went up three flights before he turned to look at her. “Keep going,” she told him. “No woman in her right mind would want Jack Burns watching her go up or down stairs. I would be so self-conscious, I would probably trip and fall.”
“Why?” he asked her.
“I would be wondering how I compare to all the beautiful women you’ve seen—from behind and otherwise,” Heather said.
“Is the elevator broken?” Jack asked.
“There’s no lift,” she said. “It’s a fifth-floor walk-up. Lots of high ceilings in Edinburgh—high ceilings mean long flights of stairs.”
The colors in the hallway were warm but basic—mauve, cream, mahogany. The flat itself had the high ceilings Heather had mentioned, and brightly painted walls; the living room was red, the kitchen yellow. The only indication of the five roommates was the two stoves and two refrigerators in the kitchen. Everything was clean and neat—as it would have to be, to make living with five roommates tolerable. Jack didn’t ask how many bathrooms were in the flat. (There couldn’t have been enough for five roommates.)
Heather’s room—with a desk and a lot of bookshelves and a queen-size bed—had mulberry-colored walls and giant windows overlooking Bruntsfield Gardens. The books were mostly fiction, and—as at her office at the university—there were more CDs than books, and some serious-looking stereo equipment. There was a VCR and a DVD player, and a television facing the bed. Jack saw some of his films among the DVDs and videotapes on her bedside table.
“I watch you when I can’t fall asleep,” his sister said. “Sometimes without the sound.”
“Because of the roommates?” he asked.
She shrugged. “It doesn’t matter to them if the sound is on or off,” she said. “It’s because I know all your lines by heart, and sometimes I feel like saying them.”
There was nowhere to sit—only the one desk chair or the bed. It was basically a dormitory room, only larger and prettier.
“You can sit on the bed,” Heather said. “I’ll make some tea.”
On her desk wa
s a framed photograph of a young-looking William Burns playing the organ with Heather-as-a-little-girl in his lap. When Jack sat down on the bed, Heather handed him a leather photo album. “The pictures are reasonably self-explanatory,” she said, leaving him alone in her room.
She was kind to have left him alone; she must have known he’d not seen many photographs of their father and would prefer seeing so much of him, so suddenly, by himself.
The album was chronological. Barbara Steiner was small and blond, but fuller in the face than her daughter—not nearly as pretty. Heather’s good looks came from William. He had kept his long hair—Miss Wurtz would have been pleased—and he got thinner as he grew older. There were many more pictures of him with Heather—as a little girl, and as a teenager—than there were of Heather with her mother, or of William Burns with Barbara Steiner. Of course it was Heather’s album, and she must have selected which photos to put in it.
She seemed to be most fond of the photographs from those father-and-daughter ski trips; postcards from Wengen and Lech and Zermatt were intermingled with photos of Heather and William on skis. (A cold sport for someone who was inclined to feel cold, Jack thought, but William Burns looked comfortable in ski clothes—or else he was so happy to be skiing with his daughter that the feeling warmed him.)
There was nothing complaining about Heather’s mother’s expressions in any of the photographs, nor could you tell that she’d once had a wonderful singing voice. There was something overposed about her—especially in the photos when she was wearing a wig—and then she simply disappeared without a trace. Jack turned a page in the album and Barbara Steiner was gone. He knew exactly when he had passed the moment of her death; all the photographs from that point forward were of Heather and her dad, just the two of them, or one or the other alone.
