John Irving - Until I Find You

“She shouldn’t have blamed you, either!” Jack cried.

“ De mortuis nihil nisi bonum. How’s your Latin, Jack?” (William clearly knew that Jack’s Latin wasn’t strong.) “Speak nothing but good of the dead.”

“That’s a tough one,” Jack said.

“If you don’t forgive her, Jack, you’ll never have a worthwhile relationship with a woman in your life. Or have you had a worthwhile relationship that I’m unaware of? Dr. García doesn’t count! Emma almost doesn’t count.” (He even knew about Dr. García!)

Jack hadn’t noticed when his father had started to shiver, but William was shivering now. He paced back and forth, from the bedroom to the sitting room—and into the bedroom again, with his arms hugging his chest.

“Are you cold, Pop?” Jack asked him. He didn’t know where the “Pop” came from. (Not Billy Rainbow, thankfully—not this time.)

“What did you call me?” his dad asked.

“ ‘Pop.’ ”

“I love that!” William cried. “It’s so American ! Heather calls me ‘Dad’ or ‘Daddy’—you can’t call me that, too. It’s perfect that you call me ‘Pop’!”

“Okay, Pop.” Jack was thinking that his father might let him off the hook about his mom, but no such luck.

“It’s time to close the windows—it’s that time of the evening,” William was saying, his teeth chattering. Jack helped him close the windows. Although the sun hadn’t set, the lake was a darker color than before; only a few sailboats still dotted the water. His father was shaking so violently that Jack put his arms around him.

“If you can’t forgive your mother, Jack, you’ll never be free of her. It’s for your own sake, you know—for your soul. When you forgive someone who’s hurt you, it’s like escaping your skin— you’re that free, outside yourself, where you can see everything.” William suddenly stopped shivering. Jack stepped a little away from him, so that he could see him better; William’s mischievous little smile was back, once more transforming him. “Uh-oh,” Jack’s father said. “Did I say skin ? I didn’t say skin, did I?”

“Yes, you did,” Jack told him.

“Uh-oh,” his dad said again. He was beginning to unbutton his flannel shirt, but he unbuttoned it only halfway before pulling the shirt off—over his head.

“What’s wrong, Pop?”

“Oh, it’s nothing,” William said impatiently; he was busy taking off his socks. “ ‘Skin’ is one of those triggers. I’m surprised they didn’t tell you. They can’t give me antidepressants and expect me to remember all the stupid triggers !”

On the tops of both feet, where it is painful to be tattooed, were Jack’s name and Heather’s —Jack on his father’s right foot, Heather on his left. (Since Jack couldn’t read music, he didn’t know what the notes were, but their names had been put to music.)

By now, Jack’s father had taken off his T-shirt and his corduroy trousers, too. In a pair of striped boxer shorts, which were too big for him—and which Jack could not imagine his father buying on one of the shopping trips with Waltraut Bleibel—his dad appeared to have the body of a former bantamweight. At most, William weighed one-thirty or one-thirty-five—Jack’s old weight class. The tattoos covered his father’s sinewy body with the patina of wet newspaper.

Doc Forest’s tattoo stood out against all the music as vividly as a burn. The words, which were not as near to his heart as William would have liked them, marked the left side of his rib cage like a whiplash.

The commandant’s daughter; her little brother

“It’s not the tattoos, my dear boy,” Jack’s father said, standing naked before him—the shocking white of William’s hands and face and neck and penis being the only parts of him that weren’t an almost uniform blue-black, some of which had faded to gray. “It’s everything I truly heard and felt—it’s everything I ever loved ! It’s not the tattoos that marked me.” For a small man, he had overlong arms—like a gibbon.

“Perhaps you should put your clothes on, Pop—so we can go out to dinner.”

Jack saw that messy music, a wrinkled scrap of a page on his dad’s left hip, where Jack’s mom was once convinced that Beachcomber Bill had marked him—the tattoo that had failed in the planning phase, according to Tattoo Ole. Jack got only a glimpse of those notes that curled around the underarm side of his father’s right biceps; most of that tattoo was lost from view, either the Chinaman’s mistake or the Beachcomber’s. And that fragment of a hymn on his left calf—the “Breathe on me, breath of God,” both the words and the music—was every bit as good as Tattoo Ole had said. (It had to be Charlie Snow’s work, or Sailor Jerry’s.)

As for his dad’s favorite Easter hymn, “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today,” it was upside down to Jack—but when his father sat on the toilet, William could read the music. Since this tattoo was strictly notes, without the words, Jack knew it was “Christ the Lord” only because of where it was, and it was upside down—and of course Jack remembered that Aberdeen Bill had given it to William. As Heather had told Jack, this long-ago tattoo had been overlapped by a newer one, Walther’s “Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme”—the top two staffs beginning where the alleluia chorus to “Christ the Lord” should have been.

His father was leaping up and down like a monkey on the bed; with a remote, which William held in one hand, he had lowered the hospital bed to a flat position. It was hard to get a definitive look at all his tattoos—for example, to ascertain exactly which lengthy and complicated phrase by Handel was in the area of William’s kidneys. Jack knew only that Tattoo Ole had done that one. (“More Christmas music,” Ole had said dismissively.) But Jack got a good enough look to guess that this was the soprano aria (“For Unto Us a Child Is Born”) from Handel’s Messiah— and, in that case, Widor’s Toccata was right next to it.

All but lost in an ocean of music, Herbert Hoffmann’s disappearing ship was even more difficult to see because of William’s monkey business on the bed. And there, on his father’s right shoulder, Jack recognized another Tattoo Ole—it lay unfurled like a piece ripped from a flag. It was more Bach, but not the Christmas music Jack’s mother had thought it was—neither Bach’s Weihnachtsoratorium nor his Kanonische Veränderungen über das Weihnachtslied. It was tough to see his dad’s shoulder clearly, with all the bouncing up and down, but Jack’s Exeter German was getting better by the minute—“Der Tag, der ist so freudenreich.”

Jack also caught Pachelbel’s name, if not the particular piece of music, and—in a crescent shape on his father’s coccyx—Theo Rademaker’s cramped fragment, “Wir glauben all’ an einen Gott.” (The composer was Samuel Scheidt.)

Bach’s “Jesu, meine Freude” (“Jesus, My Joy”), which Tattoo Peter had given Jack’s dad in Amsterdam, was indeed missing part of the word Largo— as his sister had said. The Balbastre tattoo (“Joseph est bien marié”), which was newer and only slightly overlapped the Bach, was not by a tattoo artist Jack could identify.

Jack’s French, which was nonexistent, gave him fits with Dupré’s Trois préludes et fugues pour orgue— not to mention Messiaen’s “Dieu parmi nous,” which followed the Roman numeral IX.

Did that mean “God is among us”? Jack was wondering.

“I have a son!” his father was shouting, as he bounced up and down on the bed. “Thank you, God—I have a son!”