Until I Find You

“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 serious. 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