Until I Find You

“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. Garcia 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. Garcia 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 Dusseldorf, 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