John Irving - Until I Find You

“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 father explained.

“Probably when Mom was unfaithful to her,” Jack said.

“I never inquired about your mother, Jack. I only asked about you.”

There was a photograph of Jack with Miss Wurtz that time he and Claudia took her to the Toronto film festival. Miss Wurtz looked radiant, in her former-film-star attire. Claudia must have taken the picture, but there was no mistaking the way The Wurtz was smiling seductively at the camera; Caroline clearly knew that either she or Claudia would be sending the photo to William.

And there was one of Jack and Claudia, which Miss Wurtz had to have taken. Jack couldn’t remember if it was the night before the Mishima misunderstanding or the night after it. They’d successfully crashed a private party, because the bouncers had mistaken Miss Wurtz for a celebrity. In the snapshot, Claudia is looking fondly at Jack, but his eyes are elsewhere; he’s not looking at her or the camera. (Knowing Jack, he was scanning the party to see if he could spot Sonia Braga.)

“How did you find me, dear boy?” his dad asked.

“ Heather found me. She called Miss Wurtz. Caroline always knows where to find me.”

“Dear Caroline,” William said, as if he’d been meaning to write her a letter. “Talk about meeting someone at the wrong time!”

“I was just in Edinburgh with Heather,” Jack told him.

“She’s a bossy little thing, isn’t she?” his dad asked.

“I love her,” Jack said.

“So do I, dear boy—so do I!”

There were more photos of Jack with Emma—for so much of his life, Emma had been there. In the Bar Marmont, around the pool at the Skybar at the Mondrian Hotel on Sunset Boulevard, and in one of those private villas on the grounds of the Sunset Marquis in West Hollywood. There were shots of Jack holding the steering wheel of his Audi, of one Audi after another. (He knew now that Emma had snapped all of these, but he’d never paid much attention to anyone taking his picture, because it was always happening.)

There were photographs of Heather and her mother, too—some were duplicates of those photos Heather had shown Jack—and there were more skiing pictures, but most surprising was the number of times that Alice appeared in the photographs of Jack. (He wondered why his father hadn’t cut her out of the pictures; Jack would have.) And some of these photos were from Jack’s first trip to those North Sea ports, when he’d been four and was still inclined to hold his mother’s hand.

There they were on the Nyhavn, in front of Tattoo Ole’s; either Ladies’ Man Madsen or Ole himself had to have taken the picture. And in Stockholm, posing by a ship from the archipelago—it was docked at the Grand. Had Torsten Lindberg taken that one? Jack would never forget that he’d met his father, but he hadn’t known it, in the restaurant of the Hotel Bristol—in Oslo, where William had never slept with Ingrid Moe. But who had taken the photograph of Jack holding his mom’s hand in front of the Domkirke, the Oslo Cathedral?

From his grave, Jack would not fail to recognize the American Bar in what was now the lobby of the Hotel Torni, but which of those lesbian music students in Helsinki had snapped that shot of Jack and his mom going up the stairs? (They were always climbing the stairs, because the elevator was never working, and they were always—as they were in the snapshot—holding hands.)

Why hadn’t William Burns removed every trace of Jack’s mother from his sight?

Jack was staring so intently at the pictures from Amsterdam that he hadn’t noticed how close to him his father was standing, or that William was staring intently at his son. There was a photograph of Jack with his mother and Tattoo Theo, and another of Jack with Tattoo Peter—the great Peter de Haan, with his left leg missing below the knee. Tattoo Peter had the same slicked-back hair that Jack remembered, but in the photo he seemed more blond; Tattoo Peter had the same Woody the Woodpecker tattoo on his right biceps, too.

“Tattoo Peter was only fifteen when he stepped on that mine,” William was saying, but Jack had moved on. He was looking at himself as a four-year-old, walking with his mom in the red-light district. Cameras were not welcome there; the prostitutes didn’t want their pictures taken. Yet someone—Els or Saskia, probably—must have had a camera. Alice was smiling at the photographer as if nothing were the matter, as if nothing had ever been the matter.

“How dare you look at your mother like that?” his father asked him sharply.

“What?”

“My dear boy! She’s been dead how many years? And you still haven’t forgiven her! How dare you not forgive her? Did she blame you ?”