“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.
“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.