John Irving - Until I Find You

“Okay, that settles it,” Professor Ritter said uncertainly.

“Anyone but Hugo, I guess,” Dr. Krauer-Poppe, who had recovered herself, said philosophically. “Ruth and I will go with them, then.”

“I can’t tell you how I’m looking forward to it, Anna-Elisabeth,” Dr. von Rohr said.

“I think I’d like to go home and get ready for dinner,” Dr. Krauer-Poppe announced to Professor Ritter.

“Of course!” the professor said. They all watched Dr. Krauer-Poppe leave the room. She was so beautifully dressed; not even her lab coat looked out of place.

“I can’t wait to see what Anna-Elisabeth will wear tonight,” Dr. von Rohr said, after her colleague had gone. “She’s going home to get dressed, and I don’t mean to change her lab coat!”

“She had a date with her husband tonight,” Dr. Berger told everyone. “She’s probably going home to break her date, in a nice way.”

Jack felt sorry that he’d caused Dr. Krauer-Poppe to change her plans. (Dr. von Rohr, on the other hand, seemed pleased to have changed hers.)

“Don’t worry!” Dr. Horvath told Jack, pounding his shoulder. “Whatever else happens tonight, you’re going to the Kronenhalle !”

“I just want to see my father. That’s why I came,” Jack reminded them.

“We just want to prepare you for seeing him,” Dr. Berger stated.

Dr. Horvath had stopped pounding Jack’s shoulder, but he was massaging the back of Jack’s neck with his big, strong hand. “I have a favor to ask you, if you’ll indulge me,” the Austrian said.

“Of course. What is it?” Jack asked him.

“If you could say something—I mean the way Billy Rainbow says it. I know you can do it!” Dr. Horvath urged him.

“No doubt about it,” Jack-as-Billy said. (After the episode in the Edinburgh airport, he was relieved he could still act. )

“ Wunderschön! ” Dr. Horvath cried. (“Beautiful!”)

“How embarrassing, Klaus,” Dr. von Rohr said. “I hope you’ll forgive me,” she said to Jack, “but Billy Rainbow gives me the creeps.”

“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!”

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.)