by John Irving
But Mrs. Oastler and Jack’s mom had never been to Redding. Had Coach Clum sent those wrestling pictures to William? There were Exeter wrestling photographs, too; maybe Coach Hudson and Coach Shapiro had also been messengers.
Jack heard the door to the corridor close softly. When he looked at his father on the hospital bed, William’s eyes were open and he was smiling. Jack had no idea how long his father had been watching him. Jack had barely glanced at one of the dozen or more bulletin boards; he’d seen only a fraction of the photographs, but enough to know that his dad had surrounded himself with images of Jack’s childhood and his school years. (It explained something about Heather’s anger toward Jack—namely, that Jack’s past was more of a visual presence in their father’s confined quarters than hers.)
“I was afraid you’d forgotten me,” his dad said. It was one of Billy Rainbow’s lines. Jack had always liked that line, and his father delivered it perfectly.
Jack made a feeble gesture to all the photographs. “I was afraid you’d forgotten me!” he blurted out—in his own voice, not Billy Rainbow’s.
“My dear boy,” his dad said; he patted the bed and Jack sat beside him. “You don’t have children of your own; when you do, you’ll understand that it’s impossible to forget them!”
Jack only now noticed his father’s gloves. They must have been women’s gloves—close-fitting and of such thin material that William could turn the pages of his book as well as if he were bare-handed. The gloves were a light tan, almost skin-colored.
“My hands are so ugly,” Jack’s father whispered. “They got old before the rest of me.”
“Let me see them,” Jack said.
William winced once or twice, pulling the gloves off his fingers, but he wouldn’t allow Jack to help him. He put his hands in his son’s hands; Jack could feel his father trembling a little, as if he were cold. (The room now felt hot to Jack.) The gnarling of his dad’s knuckles was so extreme that Jack doubted his father could slide a ring on or off his fingers—William wore no rings. And the bony bumps, Heberden’s nodes, which had formed on the far-knuckle joints, disfigured his father’s hands more than Jack had anticipated.
“The rest of me is okay, Jack,” his dad said. He held one hand on his heart. “Except here, on occasion.” He put the index finger of his other hand to his temple, as if he were pointing a gun at his head. “And in here,” he added, giving Jack a mischievous little smile. “How about you?”
“I’m okay,” Jack told him.
It was like looking at himself on a hospital bed, in clothes he would never wear—as if Jack had fallen asleep one night when he was thirty-eight, and had woken up the next day when he was sixty-four.
William Burns was thin in the way that many musicians were. With his long hair and the small-boned, feminine prettiness of his face, he looked more like a rock musician than an organist—more like a lead singer (or one of those skinny, androgynous men with an electric guitar) than “a keyboard man,” as Heather had called him.
“Are we really going to the Kronenhalle?” Jack’s father asked.
“Yes. What’s so special about it?” Jack asked him.
“They have real art on the walls—Picasso, and people like that. James Joyce had his own table there. And the food’s good,” William said. “We’re not going with Dr. Horvath, I hope. I like Klaus, but he eats like a farmer!”
“We’re going with Dr. von Rohr and Dr. Krauer-Poppe,” Jack told him.
“Oh, what joy,” William said, as he had before—sarcastically. “They’re two of the best-looking shrinks you’ll ever see—I’ll give them that—but a little of Ruth goes a long way, and Anna-Elisabeth never takes me anywhere without bringing some medication along.”
Jack was struggling against the feeling that his sister had warned him he would have: his father seemed almost normal to him, or not half as eccentric as he’d expected. William certainly wasn’t as wound up as Professor Ritter, or as obstreperous as Dr. Horvath—nor was he a third as intense as Dr. Berger, or Dr. von Rohr, or Dr. Krauer-Poppe. In fact, among the team attending to William Burns, only Dr. Huber had struck Jack as normal—and she was an internist, not a psychiatrist. (A pragmatist, Heather had called her.)
“You have so many photographs,” Jack said to his dad. “Of me, I mean.”
“Well, yes—of course!” William cried. “You should have a look at them. You never knew that some of them were being taken, I’m sure!”
Jack got up from the bed and looked at the bulletin boards, his father following him in his socks—as closely and silently as Jack’s shadow.
There were more wrestling photos—too many, Jack thought. Who could have taken them all? There were as many as ten of the same match! This was true of one of his matches at Redding and two at Exeter. Jack wasn’t aware that he’d had such a devoted admirer at either school. Of course Jack knew that his father had paid the tuition, both at Exeter and at Redding; perhaps William had felt entitled to ask someone to take pictures of Jack wrestling, but who?
Jack felt his father’s arms around his chest, under his own arms; the long, knobby fingers of William’s small hands were interlocked on his son’s heart. Jack felt his father kiss the back of his head. “My dear boy!” his dad said. “It was so hard to imagine my son as a wrestler! I simply had to see it for myself.”
“You saw me wrestle?”
“I promised your mother that I wouldn’t make contact with you. I didn’t say I’d never see you!” he cried. “Your wrestling matches were public; even if she’d known, and she didn’t, she couldn’t have kept me away!”
“You took some of these photographs?” Jack asked him.
“Some of them, of course! Coach Clum was a nice man, if not a very gifted photographer, and Coach Hudson and Coach Shapiro—what wonderful people! Your friend Herman Castro is a great kid! You should keep in touch with Herman. I mean, more than you do, Jack. But I took many of the wrestling pictures myself. Yes, I did!” William seemed suddenly irritated that Jack looked so stunned. “Well, I wasn’t going to go all that way and not take a few pictures!” his father said, with a measure of indignation in his voice. “What a pain in the ass it is, to go to Maine—and it’s not a whole lot easier to get to New Hampshire.”
Jack was thinking that Heather had just been born when he was first wrestling at Redding; William might have traveled to Maine when Barbara was pregnant, or when Heather was an infant. And when William had come to New Hampshire, when Jack was wrestling at Exeter, Heather would have been a little girl—too young to remember those times when her father was away. But had those wrestling trips been difficult for Barbara? Jack wondered. First she’d had cancer; then she was killed by a taxi, and there’d been no more trips.
On one of William’s bulletin boards, there was a snapshot of Jack at Hama Sushi—the way he was smiling at the camera, only Emma could have taken the photograph. And another of Jack with Emma in his lap; he remembered Emma taking that one. They were in their first apartment, their half of that rat-eaten duplex in Venice. There was also a photo of Jack dressed for his waiter’s job at American Pacific; only Emma could have taken that one, too.
“Emma sent you these?” Jack asked his father.
“I know that Emma could be difficult, at times,” his dad replied, “but she was a good friend to you, Jack—loyal and true. I never met her in person—we just talked on the telephone from time to time. Look here!” his dad suddenly cried, pulling Jack to another bulletin board. “Your friend Claudia sent me pictures, too!”
There they were, Claudia and Jack—that summer they did Shakespeare in the Berkshires. He’d wanted to be Romeo but had played Tybalt instead. And there were photos from the theater in Connecticut where both Claudia and Jack were women in that Lorca play—The House of Bernarda Alba. (No pictures of the food-poisoning episode, thankfully.)
“Did you ever meet Claudia?” Jack asked his dad.
“Only on the telephone, alas,” William said. “A nice girl, very s
erious. But she wanted babies, didn’t she?”
“Yes, she did,” Jack said.
“You meet some people at the wrong time, don’t you?” his dad asked. “I met your mother at the wrong time—the wrong time for her and for me, as it turned out.”
“She had no right to keep you away from me!” Jack said angrily.
“Don’t be such an American!” his father said. “You Americans believe you have so many rights! I met a young woman and told her I would love her forever, but I didn’t. In fact, I didn’t love her very long at all. To tell you the truth, I changed my mind in a hurry about her—but not before I had changed her life! If you change someone’s life, Jack, what rights should you have? Didn’t your mom have a right to be angry?”
His father seemed as sane as anyone Jack had ever met. Why is my dad here? Jack kept thinking, although Heather had warned him against thinking any such thing.
There were photographs of Jack as a Kit Kat Girl, the summer both he and Claudia wanted to be Sally Bowles in Cabaret, and a bunch of pictures from the summer of ’86, when Jack had met Bruno Litkins, the gay heron, who’d cast him as a transvestite Esmeralda in The Hunchback of Notre Dame—thus sending Jack down a questionable career slope, but one he had survived with his heterosexual orientation mostly intact.
“You were good as a girl,” his dad was telling him, “but—quite understandably, as your father—I preferred seeing you in male roles.”
There were pictures of Jack with his mother and Leslie Oastler, and one of him and his mom in Daughter Alice. Had Mrs. Oastler or a tattoo client taken that photograph?
“Emma thought I should see what her mother looked like,” his dad explained, “because she worried about what hold her mother might have on you. I don’t mean a wrestling hold!”
“Did Mrs. Oastler send you photographs, too?” Jack asked. “Did you ever talk to her on the telephone?”
“I got the feeling that Leslie sent me pictures or called me only when she was angry at your mother,” Jack’s father explained.
“Probably when Mom was unfaithful to her,” Jack said.
“I never inquired about your mother, Jack. I only asked about you.”
There was a photograph of Jack with Miss Wurtz that time he and Claudia took her to the Toronto film festival. Miss Wurtz looked radiant, in her former-film-star attire. Claudia must have taken the picture, but there was no mistaking the way The Wurtz was smiling seductively at the camera; Caroline clearly knew that either she or Claudia would be sending the photo to William.
And there was one of Jack and Claudia, which Miss Wurtz had to have taken. Jack couldn’t remember if it was the night before the Mishima misunderstanding or the night after it. They’d successfully crashed a private party, because the bouncers had mistaken Miss Wurtz for a celebrity. In the snapshot, Claudia is looking fondly at Jack, but his eyes are elsewhere; he’s not looking at her or the camera. (Knowing Jack, he was scanning the party to see if he could spot Sonia Braga.)
“How did you find me, dear boy?” his dad asked.
“Heather found me. She called Miss Wurtz. Caroline always knows where to find me.”
“Dear Caroline,” William said, as if he’d been meaning to write her a letter. “Talk about meeting someone at the wrong time!”
“I was just in Edinburgh with Heather,” Jack told him.
“She’s a bossy little thing, isn’t she?” his dad asked.
“I love her,” Jack said.
“So do I, dear boy—so do I!”
There were more photos of Jack with Emma—for so much of his life, Emma had been there. In the Bar Marmont, around the pool at the Skybar at the Mondrian Hotel on Sunset Boulevard, and in one of those private villas on the grounds of the Sunset Marquis in West Hollywood. There were shots of Jack holding the steering wheel of his Audi, of one Audi after another. (He knew now that Emma had snapped all of these, but he’d never paid much attention to anyone taking his picture, because it was always happening.)
There were photographs of Heather and her mother, too—some were duplicates of those photos Heather had shown Jack—and there were more skiing pictures, but most surprising was the number of times that Alice appeared in the photographs of Jack. (He wondered why his father hadn’t cut her out of the pictures; Jack would have.) And some of these photos were from Jack’s first trip to those North Sea ports, when he’d been four and was still inclined to hold his mother’s hand.
There they were on the Nyhavn, in front of Tattoo Ole’s; either Ladies’ Man Madsen or Ole himself had to have taken the picture. And in Stockholm, posing by a ship from the archipelago—it was docked at the Grand. Had Torsten Lindberg taken that one? Jack would never forget that he’d met his father, but he hadn’t known it, in the restaurant of the Hotel Bristol—in Oslo, where William had never slept with Ingrid Moe. But who had taken the photograph of Jack holding his mom’s hand in front of the Domkirke, the Oslo Cathedral?
From his grave, Jack would not fail to recognize the American Bar in what was now the lobby of the Hotel Torni, but which of those lesbian music students in Helsinki had snapped that shot of Jack and his mom going up the stairs? (They were always climbing the stairs, because the elevator was never working, and they were always—as they were in the snapshot—holding hands.)
Why hadn’t William Burns removed every trace of Jack’s mother from his sight?
Jack was staring so intently at the pictures from Amsterdam that he hadn’t noticed how close to him his father was standing, or that William was staring intently at his son. There was a photograph of Jack with his mother and Tattoo Theo, and another of Jack with Tattoo Peter—the great Peter de Haan, with his left leg missing below the knee. Tattoo Peter had the same slicked-back hair that Jack remembered, but in the photo he seemed more blond; Tattoo Peter had the same Woody the Woodpecker tattoo on his right biceps, too.
“Tattoo Peter was only fifteen when he stepped on that mine,” William was saying, but Jack had moved on. He was looking at himself as a four-year-old, walking with his mom in the red-light district. Cameras were not welcome there; the prostitutes didn’t want their pictures taken. Yet someone—Els or Saskia, probably—must have had a camera. Alice was smiling at the photographer as if nothing were the matter, as if nothing had ever been the matter.
“How dare you look at your mother like that?” his father asked him sharply.
“What?”
“My dear boy! She’s been dead how many years? And you still haven’t forgiven her! How dare you not forgive her? Did she blame you?”
“She shouldn’t have blamed you, either!” Jack cried.
“De mortuis nihil nisi bonum. How’s your Latin, Jack?” (William clearly knew that Jack’s Latin wasn’t strong.) “Speak nothing but good of the dead.”
“That’s a tough one,” Jack said.
“If you don’t forgive her, Jack, you’ll never have a worthwhile relationship with a woman in your life. Or have you had a worthwhile relationship that I’m unaware of? Dr. García doesn’t count! Emma almost doesn’t count.” (He even knew about Dr. García!)
Jack hadn’t noticed when his father had started to shiver, but William was shivering now. He paced back and forth, from the bedroom to the sitting room—and into the bedroom again, with his arms hugging his chest.
“Are you cold, Pop?” Jack asked him. He didn’t know where the “Pop” came from. (Not Billy Rainbow, thankfully—not this time.)
“What did you call me?” his dad asked.
“ ‘Pop.’ ”
“I love that!” William cried. “It’s so American! Heather calls me ‘Dad’ or ‘Daddy’—you can’t call me that, too. It’s perfect that you call me ‘Pop’!”
“Okay, Pop.” Jack was thinking that his father might let him off the hook about his mom, but no such luck.
“It’s time to close the windows—it’s that time of the evening,” William was saying, his teeth chattering. Jack helped him close the windows. Although the sun hadn’t
set, the lake was a darker color than before; only a few sailboats still dotted the water. His father was shaking so violently that Jack put his arms around him.
“If you can’t forgive your mother, Jack, you’ll never be free of her. It’s for your own sake, you know—for your soul. When you forgive someone who’s hurt you, it’s like escaping your skin—you’re that free, outside yourself, where you can see everything.” William suddenly stopped shivering. Jack stepped a little away from him, so that he could see him better; William’s mischievous little smile was back, once more transforming him. “Uh-oh,” Jack’s father said. “Did I say skin? I didn’t say skin, did I?”
“Yes, you did,” Jack told him.
“Uh-oh,” his dad said again. He was beginning to unbutton his flannel shirt, but he unbuttoned it only halfway before pulling the shirt off—over his head.
“What’s wrong, Pop?”
“Oh, it’s nothing,” William said impatiently; he was busy taking off his socks. “ ‘Skin’ is one of those triggers. I’m surprised they didn’t tell you. They can’t give me antidepressants and expect me to remember all the stupid triggers!”
On the tops of both feet, where it is painful to be tattooed, were Jack’s name and Heather’s—Jack on his father’s right foot, Heather on his left. (Since Jack couldn’t read music, he didn’t know what the notes were, but their names had been put to music.)
By now, Jack’s father had taken off his T-shirt and his corduroy trousers, too. In a pair of striped boxer shorts, which were too big for him—and which Jack could not imagine his father buying on one of the shopping trips with Waltraut Bleibel—his dad appeared to have the body of a former bantamweight. At most, William weighed one-thirty or one-thirty-five—Jack’s old weight class. The tattoos covered his father’s sinewy body with the patina of wet newspaper.
Doc Forest’s tattoo stood out against all the music as vividly as a burn. The words, which were not as near to his heart as William would have liked them, marked the left side of his rib cage like a whiplash.
