Until I Find You

“He’s supposed to,” Jack told her.

“I must tell you, Jack,” Professor Ritter said, “William says that line the exact same way you say it!”

“Your father has made quite a study of you,” Dr. Berger told him.

“You should prepare yourself, Jack—William knows more about you than you may think,” Dr. von Rohr said. (Dr. Horvath had stopped massaging Jack’s neck, but Dr. von Rohr had put her arm around Jack’s shoulders in a comradely way.)

“Yes, Heather told me—he’s memorized all my lines,” Jack said.

“I didn’t mean only your movies, Jack,” Dr. von Rohr cautioned him.

“I think that’s enough preparation, Ruth,” Dr. Berger stated.

“Ja, der Musiker!” Dr. Horvath shouted to Jack. (“Yes, the musician!”) “It’s time for you to meet the musician!”

39. The Musician

There was a serenity to the private section of the Sanatorium Kilchberg, which Jack may have underappreciated on his first visit. (He was not in a serene state of mind.) The building itself, which was white stucco with shutters the same gray-blue color as the lake, looked more like a small hotel than a hospital. His father’s third-floor, corner rooms—overlooking the rooftops of Kilchberg—faced the eastern shore of Lake Zurich. The Alps rose in the hazy distance to the south of the lake.

The hospital bed where Jack’s father lay reading was cranked to a semireclined position. The bed and the fact that there were no carpets on the noiseless, rubberized floors were the only indications that this private suite was part of an institution—and that the man reading on the bed was in need of care. While the windows were open, and a warm breeze blew off the lake, William was dressed as if it were a brisk fall day—a thick flannel shirt over a white T-shirt, corduroy trousers, and white athletic socks. (If Jack had been dressed that way, he would have been sweating—although it instantly made him feel cold to look at his father.)

The bedroom, which opened into another room—with a couch, and a card table with a couple of straight- backed chairs—was not cluttered with furniture or mementoes. Jack saw only photographs—massive bulletin boards crammed with overlapping snapshots. There were also movie posters hung on the peach-colored walls of both rooms. They were posters of Jack Burns’s movies; at a glance, Jack thought that his dad had framed and hung all of them. Jack could see that the surrounding bookshelves displayed a more balanced collection of CDs and DVDs and videocassettes and actual books than he’d seen in his sister’s office, or in her bedroom.

The team of doctors, together with Professor Ritter and Jack, had entered his father’s attractive but modest quarters in the utmost silence. Jack first thought that his dad didn’t know they were there. (William had not looked up from his book.) But—as indicated by the door from the corridor, which had been ajar—living in a psychiatric clinic had made Jack’s father familiar with intrusions. William was accustomed to doctors and nurses who didn’t necessarily knock.

Jack’s dad was aware of their presence in his bedroom; he had deliberately not looked up from his book. Jack understood that his father was making a point about privacy. William Burns did indeed love the Sanatorium Kilchberg, as the hearty Dr. Horvath had maintained, but that didn’t mean he loved everything about it.

“Don’t tell me—let me guess,” Jack’s father said, staring stubbornly into his book. “You’ve had a meeting; remarkably, you’ve come to a decision. Oh, what joy—you’ve sent a committee to tell me your most interesting thoughts!” (William was still refusing to look at them—his copper bracelets glowing in the dull late-afternoon light.)

William Burns had spoken with no discernible accent, as if those years in foreign cities and their churches had replaced whatever was once Scottish about him. He certainly didn’t sound American, but he didn’t sound British, either. It was a European English, spoken in Stockholm and Stuttgart, in Helsinki and Hamburg. It was the unaccented English of hymns, of all voices put to music—from the Citadel Church, the Kastelskirken in Frederikshavn, to the Oude Kerk in Amsterdam.

As for William’s sarcasm, Jack realized that his sister, Heather, might not have inherited hers from her German mother, as he’d first thought.

“Don’t be childish, William,” Dr. von Rohr said.

“You have a special visitor, William,” Dr. Berger said.

Jack’s father froze; he wasn’t reading, but he wouldn’t look up from his book.

“Your son, Jack, has come all this way to take you out to dinner!” Professor Ritter cried.

“To the Kronenhalle!” Dr. Horvath thundered.

William closed the book and his eyes; it was as if he could see or imagine his son better with his eyes shut. Jack couldn’t look at him that way; he looked instead at the photographs on the nearest bulletin board, waiting for his father to open his eyes or speak.

“We’ll leave you two alone,” Professor Ritter said reluctantly.

Jack had expected to see photographs of himself—chiefly the ones snipped from movie magazines, all the film premieres, the red-carpet crap, and the Academy Awards. But not the personal snapshots, of which there were many. (There were more of Jack than of Heather!)

There he was in one of Miss Wurtz’s many dramatizations at St. Hilda’s. Naturally, he recognized himself as a mail-order bride—that pivotal and blood-soaked performance in Mr. Ramsey’s histrionic production. Miss Wurtz and Mr. Ramsey must have taken the pictures. (Jack was pretty sure it was Caroline who had sent his dad the photographs.)

But that didn’t explain the photos of Jack with Emma—though Lottie must have taken the ones in Mrs. Wicksteed’s kitchen, there were more pictures of Jack with Emma in Mrs. Oastler’s house—or the ones of Jack with Chenko in the Bathurst Street gym, or the ones of Jack wrestling at Redding! Had Leslie Oastler sent William photographs? Had Jack’s mother relented, if only a little?

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.