John Irving - Until I Find You

There was a prescription pad on Dr. García’s desk. Jack thought about what he wanted to say to her, and if it would fit on one page of the prescription paper. He decided he could make it fit, if he kept his handwriting small.

Dear Dr. García,

I’m going to Edinburgh to meet my sister—maybe my father, too! I’ll put it all in chronological order for you, when I get back.

I’m sorry about your husband.

Jack

Then he went into the waiting room, where a nanny was reading a children’s book to a four- or five-year-old. (In a world of loose arrangements, Jack had learned not to question why the young mothers didn’t just leave their kids at home with their nannies.) The nanny looked up at Jack when he came out of Dr. García’s office, but the child didn’t bother to look. On a small couch, one of the young mothers lay curled in a fetal position with her back to the waiting room. Jack couldn’t hear her crying, but her shoulders were shaking.

“I left Dr. García a note—it’s on her desk,” he told Elizabeth.

“Is there anything else you want me to tell her? I mean in addition to the note,” Elizabeth said.

“Tell her I don’t need to see her today,” he said. “Tell her I looked happy.”

“Well, that’s a stretch. How about I say ‘happier than usual’?” Elizabeth suggested.

“That’s okay,” he said.

“Be safe, Jack. Don’t go crazy, or anything like that.”

Jack was thirty-eight; his sister, Heather, was twenty-eight. How do you meet someone you should have known most of your life? In Jack’s case, he stalled. He arrived in Edinburgh a day before he’d told Heather he was coming. He had his mother’s business to attend to. It was his father who had brought Jack and Heather together. Jack wanted to keep Heather separate from his mom’s history in Edinburgh.

The hotel doorman at the Balmoral, a strapping young man in a kilt, was the first to ask Jack if he was in town for “the Festival”—a question he would repeatedly be asked.

Jack had a corner suite overlooking Princes Street. (He had a view of a chaotic-looking trampoline park.) Princes Street was clogged with pedestrian traffic: people carrying shopping bags, tourists folding and unfolding maps. With the concierge’s assistance, Jack hired a car and driver to take him to Leith—Alice’s old turf. It was less crowded there—not everybody’s favorite part of town, apparently.

The driver’s false teeth were too loose. His name was Rory, and his teeth clicked when he talked.

Jack wanted to see St. Thomas’s, where Alice had sung in the choir—innocently, before she met William in South Leith Parish Church. St. Thomas’s no longer existed, but Rory, who’d been born in Leith, remembered its location and knew what it had become. For more than twenty years, St. Thomas’s had been a Sikh temple. The view of what was once Leith Hospital, which had so depressed Alice that she’d left St. Thomas’s for another church, was depressing still. The former hospital, Rory told Jack, was only an outpatient clinic now. The unused parts looked neglected and broken; half the ground-floor windows were smashed.

Jack knew what Dr. García would have said if she’d been with him and Rory at that moment. “If St. Thomas’s is gone, if an entire church can let go of the past, why can’t you let go, too, Jack?”

South Leith Parish Church, where Alice first sang for William, made a more complex impression on Jack. The high walls along Constitution Street, which were meant to keep people out of the popular graveyard, stood in juxtaposition to a toppled gravestone. It read: HERE LYE THE REMAINS OF ROBERT CALDCLEUGH. The date, which was hard to read, was 1482. Among the gravestones, Jack saw that the most recent burial was in 1972.

Jack wouldn’t have wanted to be buried there. If you were lying in that graveyard, facing south, you would be looking at an ugly seventeen-story high-rise for the rest of your death.

As for that area of Leith Walk where a rail bridge once joined Mandelson Street to Jane Street—Aberdeen Bill’s tattoo parlor, Persevere, had been situated under the rumble of the trains—there was little or no evidence of the “old tenements” Alice had described to Jack. (In her childhood, these were mostly small shops with flats above them, “meeting the minimum standards of comfort and safety”—or so she’d said.) But only the railway arches remained, and these were used as car garages; a Volkswagen repair place was prominent among them.

The apartments were newer here than the shabby late-nineteenth-century buildings along much of Leith Walk—not the “old tenements” Alice had deplored, but sheltered housing for the elderly. Built in the late seventies—according to Rory, “for widows and widowers.”

Jack couldn’t find the cinema house, which his mom had maintained was “within a stone’s throw of Persevere.” But Rory remembered where the local cinema had been—it was now a bingo parlor called The Mecca.

Elsewhere on Leith Walk, there were convenience stores, which Rory called “corner shops.” While Leith Walk appeared largely residential, there were pubs, and places serving carry-out food, and the ever-present video stores. Young people seemed to live here, many Asians among them.

Alice had once spoken of her excitement upon first seeing the Leith Central Station, when she was a child, but the former station was now the Central Bar, where Jack’s sister played her wooden flute. Rory said that strippers had performed there as recently as the late seventies or early eighties. It was midafternoon when Jack looked inside the Central; there were no strippers. The jukebox was playing Frank Sinatra’s “My Way.” Smoke blurred the tiled walls and the long mirrors and half concealed the high Victorian ceiling, which was heavily patterned.

At the intersection of Constitution Street and Bernard Street, there was a bank on the corner and what looked like a shipping agency. Jack and Rory crossed a bridge over the Water of Leith and ran into Dock Place. Jack remembered the song his mom sang, if only when she was drunk or stoned—the song he’d first heard her sing in Amsterdam. It was his mom’s mantra, he’d thought at the time—to never be a whore.

Oh, I’ll never be a kittie

or a cookie

or a tail.

The one place worse than

Dock Place

is the Port o’ Leith jail.

No, I’ll never be a kittie,

of one true thing I’m sure—

I won’t end up on Dock Place

and I’ll never be a hure.

Jack’s Scottish accent needed practice, but he sang the song to Rory, who said he’d never heard it before. As for Dock Place, it didn’t look like such a bad place to end up—not to Jack, not anymore. (The “hures,” if they’d ever been there, had moved on.)

Rory drove Jack back to the Balmoral, where he had a late-afternoon nap. He slept for only two or three hours, but it was enough to shake the jet lag. After dinner at the hotel, he walked out on Princes Street and asked the doorman to recommend a good pub in Leith. Jack didn’t want to drink, but he felt like sipping a beer in the unnameable atmosphere of his mother’s birthplace. (Maybe he was pretending to be his grandfather Aberdeen Bill.)

The doorman recommended two places; they were both on Constitution Street, very near each other. Jack took a taxi and asked the driver to wait—he was sure he wouldn’t be long. The Port o’ Leith, where he went first, was small and crowded; it was a very mixed bar. There were the obvious regulars—locals, old standbys—and sailors off the docks, and young students having their first glass. (The legal age was eighteen, which appeared to Jack to mean sixteen.)