by John Irving
There had been concert brochures attached to the earlier pages, but from the time Heather appeared to be twelve or thirteen, there had been no more concerts for William Burns.
Jack recognized the interior of the Central Bar, where—in addition to Heather playing her wooden flute—there were photos of William playing a piano-type instrument, both alone and with his daughter accompanying him on her flute. It was some kind of electric keyboard—a synthesizer, Jack thought it was called—and from the look on William’s and Heather’s faces, Jack doubted they were playing anything classical.
Jack knew why his father appeared to be overdressed in many of the photos—that is, too warmly dressed for the season. (William often felt cold, except when he was skiing.) But even in those summer-vacation snapshots, when William was on a beach in a bathing suit, his tattoos were not very clear or distinguishable from one another. Music, when it’s too small to see in detail, looks like handwriting—especially to someone like Jack, who couldn’t read music.
Jack was ashamed he’d told Claudia that he never wanted children—“not till the day I discover that my dad has been a loving father to a child, or children, he didn’t leave,” was how he’d put it to her.
Well, Jack held the evidence of that in his lap—Heather’s photo album was a record of her love for their dad and William’s love for her. Jack had finished the album, and had composed himself sufficiently to be making his way through the pictures a second time, when Heather came back to her room with the tea. She sat down beside him on the bed.
“There are some places where you removed photos, or they fell out of the album by themselves,” he said to her.
“Old boyfriends. I removed them,” she said.
Jack hadn’t seen anyone who could have been the Irish boyfriend; he got the impression that the boyfriend was clearly less than the love of her life, but he didn’t ask.
He turned to the photos of Heather and William Burns playing their instruments at the Central. “I went there yesterday, to have a look at where you play your flute,” he said.
“I know. A friend saw you. How come you didn’t ask me to go with you?”
“I was looking around Leith, mostly at places I remembered hearing about from my mother,” Jack explained.
He turned to the end pages of the album, where their father was wearing gloves. “What’s wrong with him?” Jack asked. “I mean the mental part, not the arthritis.”
Heather tilted her head; it rested on Jack’s shoulder. He held her hand in one hand, his teacup in the other. The album lay open on his lap, with the man who looked so much like Heather and Jack looking up at them. “I want you to hear the Father Willis in Old St. Paul’s,” Heather said. “I want to play something for you, just to prepare you.”
They went on sitting together; Jack sipped his tea. With her head on his shoulder, it would have been awkward for Heather to sip hers. “Don’t you want to drink your tea?” he asked.
“I want to do exactly what I’m doing,” Heather told him. “I want to never take my head off your shoulder. I want to hug you and kiss you—and beat you with both fists, in your face. I want to tell you every bad thing that ever happened to me—especially those things I wish I could have talked to you about, when they happened. I want to describe every boyfriend you might have saved me from.”
“You can do all of that,” Jack told her.
“I’ll just do this, for now,” she said. “You want everything to happen too fast.”
“What is he obsessive-compulsive about?” Jack asked.
She squeezed his hand and shook her head against his shoulder. She’d had to sell the flat William had lived in—where she’d grown up, in Marchmont. “It’s a big student area, but some lecturers live there, too,” Heather said. It would have been perfect if she could have stayed there, but she’d had to sell the flat and find a less expensive place.
“To pay for the sanatorium?” he asked. Heather nodded her head against him. Most of her things, and all of William’s, were in storage. “Why don’t I buy you a flat of your own?” Jack said.
She took her head off his shoulder and looked at him. “You can’t buy me,” she said. “Well, actually, I suppose you can. But it wouldn’t be right. I don’t want you to do everything for me—just help me with him.”
“I will, but you haven’t told me what to do,” he said.
She sipped her tea. She’d not let go of his hand, which she pulled into her lap and examined more closely. “You have his small hands, but his fingers are longer. You don’t have an organist’s hands,” she said. She held up her fingers to Jack’s, palm to palm; hers were longer. “Every inch of his body is tattooed,” she began, still looking at their hands pressed together. “Even the tops of his feet, even his toes.”
“Even his hands?” Jack asked.
“No, not his hands, not his face or neck, and not his penis,” she said.
“You’ve seen his penis, or did he tell you it wasn’t tattooed?” Jack asked her.
“You’d be surprised how many people have seen Daddy’s penis,” Heather said, smiling. “I’m sure you’ll get to see it, too—it’s bound to happen.”
She had put together a smaller photo album for Jack; it was about the size of a paperback novel, with some of the same photos from the larger album or slightly different angles of those moments in time. The smaller album had no pictures of her mother—only of Heather and William. Jack and Heather sat looking at the pictures, drinking their tea.
“I could learn to ski,” Jack said. “Then we could all ski together.”
“Then you could ski with me, Jack. Daddy’s skiing days are over.”
“He can’t ski anymore?”
“The first thing you’ll think when you see him is that there’s nothing wrong with him—that he’s just a little eccentric, or something,” his sister said. She took off her glasses and put her face so close to Jack’s that their noses touched. “Without my glasses, I have to be this close to you to see you clearly,” Heather said. She pulled slowly back from him, but only about six or eight inches. “I lose you about here,” she said, putting her glasses back on. “Well, when you meet him, he’ll make you believe that you could take him to Los Angeles—where you would have a great time together. You’ll think I’m cruel or stupid for sending him away, but he needs to be taken care of and they know how to do it. Don’t think you can take care of him. If I can’t take care of him—and I can’t—you can’t take care of him, either. You may not think so at first, but he’s where he belongs.”
“Okay,” Jack said. He took her glasses off and put his face close to hers, their noses touching. “Keep looking at me,” he told her. “I believe you.”
“I’ve seen close-ups of you half my life,” she said, smiling.
“I can’t look at you enough, Heather.”
She ran her hand through her hair, wiping her lips with the back of her other hand. Jack recognized the gesture. It was the way he’d removed his wig and wiped the mauve lip gloss off his lips with the back of his ski glove in My Last Hitchhiker. In a near-perfect imitation of Jack’s voice, Heather said: “You probably thought I was a girl, right?”
“That’s pretty good,” he told her, looking into her brown eyes.
“This isn’t a very safe place to stop,” Heather said, just the way he’d said it in My Last Hitchhiker. “I’m sorry for the trouble, but I catch more rides as a girl,” she went on. “I try not to buy my own dinner,” Heather said, with a shrug; she had Jack’s shrug down pat, too.
“How about Melody in The Tour Guide?” he asked her.
Heather cleared her throat. “It’s a good job to lose,” she said perfectly.
“How about Johnny-as-a-hooker in Normal and Nice?” (No girl can get that right, Jack was thinking.)
“There’s something you should know,” his sister said, in that hooker’s husky voice. “Lester Billings has checked out. I’m afraid he’s really left his room a mess.”
“Put you
r glasses back on,” Jack told her, getting up from the bed. He went to her closet and opened the door. Jack picked out a salmon-pink camisole and held it up by the hanger, against his chest.
“Boy, I’ll bet this looks great on you,” Heather said, just the way Jack-as-a-thief had said it to Jessica Lee.
He hung up the camisole in her closet, and they went into the kitchen and washed and dried their teacups and put them away in the cupboard. To someone like Jack, the five-roommates idea was unthinkable.
“It must be like living on a ship,” he said to Heather.
“I’m moving out soon,” she told him, laughing.
They walked back the way they had come, through the Meadows. Jack carried the small photo album in one hand, although Heather had volunteered to carry it in her backpack.
Just before they got to George Square, they saw an old man with snow-white hair playing a guitar and whistling. He was always there, every day, Heather told Jack—even in the winter. The old man was often there at eight o’clock in the morning and would stay the whole day.
“Is he crazy?” Jack asked her.
“Crazy is a relative word,” his sister said.
She talked about playing squash, which she seemed to take very seriously. (The music department had a squash team, and she was one of the better players on it.) She also spoke of “a plague of urban seagulls.”
“Urban seagulls?” Jack said.
“They’re all over Edinburgh—they attacked one man so badly, he had to go to hospital!” Heather told him.
They came along South Bridge to where it intersected with the Royal Mile. Jack was not aware that he had looked the wrong way, but as they started to cross the street, Heather took his hand and spoke sharply to him: “Look right, Jack. I don’t want to lose you.”
“I don’t want to lose you,” he told her.
“I mean crossing the street,” she said.
Jack doubted that he could have found Old St. Paul’s without a map and some detailed directions. The church was built into a steep hill between the Royal Mile and Jeffrey Street, where the main entrance was. There was a side entrance off Carruber’s Close, a narrow alley—and an even narrower alley called North Gray’s Close, where there was no entrance to the church.
Jack began to tell Heather the story his mom had told him. One night, shortly before midnight, William was playing the organ in Old St. Paul’s—a so-called organ marathon, a twenty-four-hour concert, with a different organist playing every hour or half hour—and their dad’s playing had roused a drunk sleeping in one of the narrow alleys alongside the church. The foul-mouthed down-and-out had complained about the sound of the organ.
That was as far as Jack got before Heather said: “I know the story. The drunk said something like ‘that fucking racket—that fucking bloody fuck of a fucking organ making a sound that would wake the fucking dead.’ Isn’t that the story?”
“Yes, something like that,” Jack said.
“I’ll play that piece for you,” Heather told him. “You can’t hear much outside the walls of this church. Either the story is exaggerated, or that drunk was asleep in a pew. Not even Boellmann’s Toccata could wake a drunk in Carruber’s or North Gray’s Close.”
While the side door to Old St. Paul’s, on Carruber’s Close, was locked, the front entrance on Jeffrey Street was open. The church was empty, but the oil lamps by the altar were lit. They were always lit, Heather told Jack—even when she played the organ very late at night. “It’s a bit spooky here at night,” she confessed. “But you have to practice playing in the dark.”
“Why?” he asked her.
“Lots of interesting things begin in darkness,” his sister told him. “The Easter vigil service, for example. You can learn to play in the dark, provided you’ve memorized the music.”
From the nave of the church, looking toward the high altar, the organ pipes stood nearly as tall as the stained-glass windows. The church was not vast, but dark and contained. One had no sense of the season outside, and—except for the muted light that made its way through the stained-glass windows and portals—no real sense of day or night, either.
Heather saw Jack looking at the Latin inscription on the altar. As Mr. Ramsey had observed, Jack struggled with Latin.
VENITE
EXULTEMUS
DOMINO
“ ‘Come let us praise the Lord,’ ” his sister said.
“Oh, right,” he said.
“You’ll get used to it,” she told him.
Heather crossed herself at the altar and took off her backpack. Jack sat on one end of the bench beside her.
“I’ll play something softer for you later,” Heather said, “but Boellmann’s Toccata isn’t supposed to be quiet. And when you hear him play it, it’ll be louder. A different church,” she said softly, shaking her head.
Jack wasn’t prepared for the way her hands pounced on the keyboard, transforming her. It was the loudest, most strident piece of music he’d ever heard inside a church. As the new chords marched forth, the old chords kept reverberating; the organ bench trembled under them. It was the soundtrack to a vampire movie—a Gothic chase scene.
“Jesus!” Jack said, forgetting he was in a church.
“That’s the idea,” Heather said; she had stopped playing, but Old St. Paul’s was still reverberating. “Now go outside and tell me if you can hear it.” She began the Boellmann again; it made his heart race to hear it.
Jack went out the Jeffrey Street door to the church and walked up North Gray’s Close, toward the Royal Mile. The alley was dirty and smelled of urine and beer; there were broken pieces of glass where bottles had been smashed against the church, and empty cigarette packages and chewing-gum wrappers were littered everywhere. Halfway up the alley, Jack pressed his ear to the stone wall of the church; he could barely hear the Boellmann, just enough to follow the tune.
On the Royal Mile, you couldn’t hear the organ at all—probably because of the traffic, or the other street sounds—and in Carruber’s Close, either a restaurant’s air conditioner or a kitchen’s exhaust fan made too much noise in the alley for the toccata to be followable. The organ was a distant, intermittent murmur. But when Jack went back inside Old St. Paul’s, the sound of the Father Willis was deafening. His sister was really putting herself into it.
As Heather said, the story about the drunk had been exaggerated—or the down-and-out must have been sleeping in a pew when the Boellmann came crashing down on him. The more important part of the story, Heather decided, was that William Burns had played the toccata so loudly that everyone inside the church—including Alice and the organist who was waiting his turn to play—had been forced to flee from the nave and stand outside in the rain.
“It was one of Daddy’s bipolar moments,” Jack’s sister said. “I think that’s what the story is really about. He drove your mother out in the rain, so to speak—didn’t he?”
“He’s bipolar?” Jack asked.
“No, he’s obsessive-compulsive,” Heather said, “but he has his bipolar moments. Don’t you, Jack?”
“I suppose so,” he said.
Heather was playing more softly now—she had moved on from the Boellmann. “This is from an aria in Handel’s Solomon,” she said, as softly as she was playing.
“Do you have bipolar moments, too?” Jack asked her.
“The desire to never leave your side, the desire to never see you again,” his sister said. “The desire to see your face asleep on the pillow beside my face, and to see your eyes open in the morning when I lie next to you—just watching you, waiting for you to wake up. I’m not talking about sex.”
“I know,” he told her.
“The desire to live with you, to never be separated from you again,” Heather went on.
“I get it,” he said.
“The constant wish that I never knew of your existence, and that our father had never said a word to me about my having a brother—this in tandem with the desire to never see another J
ack Burns movie, and that every scene in every film you were ever in, which I have committed to memory, would vanish from my mind as if those movies had never been made.”
She had not stopped playing, but her pace had quickened. The organ’s volume was increasing, too; Heather was almost shouting to be heard over the reverberations.
“We just need to spend more time together,” Jack told her.
She brought both hands down on the keyboard, which made a harsh, discordant sound. She slid toward her brother on the organ bench and threw her arms around his neck, hugging him to her.
“If you see him once, you have to keep seeing him, Jack. You can’t suddenly appear in his life and then go away again. He loves you,” Heather said. “If you love him back, I’ll love you, too. If you can’t bear to be with him, I’ll despise you forever.”
“That’s pretty clear,” he told her.
She pushed herself away from him so violently that Jack thought she was going to hit him. “If you’re not Billy Rainbow, don’t give me his lines,” she snapped.
“Okay,” he said, holding his arms out to her. When she let him take her in his arms, he kissed her cheek.
“No, not like that—that’s not how you kiss your sister,” Heather said. “You should kiss me on the lips, but not the way you kiss a girl—not with your lips parted. Like this,” she said, kissing him—her dry lips brushing Jack’s, their lips tightly closed.
Who would have thought that Jack Burns could ever love kissing someone as chastely as that? But he was thirty-eight and had never kissed a sister.
They spent the night together in Jack’s suite at the Balmoral. They ordered dinner from room service and watched a bad movie on television. In the backpack, Heather had brought her toothbrush and an extra-large T-shirt, which she wore as a nightgown, and a change of clothes for the morning. They would be getting up early, she’d warned Jack.
