John Irving - Until I Find You

“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 sense of replacement for losing his son.

But it was not to be. Barbara Steiner was homesick for Germany. In her view, Edinburgh was not a great city for classical music; there was a lot of music, but much of it was mediocre. The climate was damp and dreary. Barbara believed that the weather exacerbated her chronic bronchitis; she half joked that she had become a singer with a permanent cough, but the cough was persistent and more serious than she knew.

What Heather, Jack’s sister, imparted to Miss Wurtz—in one phone call—was a portrait of her mother as a complainer. According to Barbara, Scottish men (excluding William) were unattractive and dressed badly; the women were even less attractive and didn’t know how to dress at all. Whisky was a curse, not only for the drunkenness it caused (William didn’t drink); it also killed the taste buds and made the Scots incapable of recognizing how bad their food was. Kilts, like lederhosen, should be worn only by children—or so Barbara believed. (William wouldn’t have been caught dead in a kilt.) In the summer, when the weather finally improved, there were too many tourists—especially Americans. Barbara was allergic to wool; no tartan would ever please her.

Her mother, Heather told Miss Wurtz, found one child such an overwhelming burden that she resisted William’s wishes to have one or two more. Barbara was not a natural mother, yet she reduced her teaching duties (by half) in order to spend more time with Heather, although time spent with an infant was torture to her.

Barbara Steiner was a child of divorced parents; she had such a dread of separation and divorce that she periodically suspected William of planning to divorce her. He wasn’t; in fact, William was (in Heather’s words) “slavishly devoted” to his griping wife. He held himself accountable for her unhappiness, for taking her away from her beloved homeland; he offered to move back to Germany, but Barbara believed that such a move would make her husband so unhappy that he would be driven to divorce her all the more quickly.

Before Barbara Steiner’s parents had separated, she had cherished the family ski holidays they would take—every winter and spring—to the Swiss and Austrian Alps. After the divorce, the ski trips, which Barbara took alone with her mother, or alone with her father, became a form of enforced exercise—athletic stoicism and silent dinners, where one or the other of her parents drank too much wine. Yet the names of these ski resorts in Austria and Switzerland were reverentially repeated to Heather by her unhappy mother; it was as if they were saints’ names, and Barbara had converted to Catholicism.

St. Anton, Klosters, Lech, Wengen, Zermatt, St. Christoph. When they’d lived in Germany, Barbara Steiner had actually taught William Burns how to ski—albeit badly. (Jack had trouble envisioning his dad, a tattooed organist, on skis.) But the Swiss and Austrian Alps were a long way from Scotland.

“We’ll take you skiing when you’re old enough, ” Heather’s mom had told her.

One can imagine how The Wurtz’s account of this had echoes of Alice’s litany to Jack.

But the so-called chronic bronchitis turned out to be lung cancer, which Barbara believed she had “caught” (like the flu) in Edinburgh. “I wouldn’t be surprised if lung cancer originated in Scotland,” she half joked between coughs. It was the death of her singing, but not of her.

Heather was too young at the time to remember anything positive about her mother’s recovery from the cancer. Heather recalled nothing about the radiation, Caroline told Jack—and only “the vomiting part” and “the wig part” of her mother’s chemotherapy. Heather would have been five, Miss Wurtz speculated. The child could barely remember the first ski trip of her life, to Klosters—except that her mother, Barbara, had been depressed because she was too tired to ski.