John Irving - Until I Find You

“It’s different when he sees himself in the mirror without his clothes,” she warned Jack, letting the door close.

Jack undressed his father and wiped his body down with paper towels, which he soaked in warm water; then he dried his dad off with more paper towels. William was as accepting of this treatment as a well-behaved child.

Jack was able to guide him out of sight of the mirror. But when William was standing there, naked—while Jack searched for the change of clothes in Dr. von Rohr’s big bag—a well-dressed gentleman entered the men’s room, and he and Jack’s father exchanged stares. To the gentleman, who looked like a middle-aged banker, Jack’s dad was a naked, tattooed man. To William Burns, if Jack could read his father’s indignant expression, the well-dressed banker was an intruder; moreover, he was intruding on a tender father-and-son moment. Furthermore, to the gentleman, William Burns was a naked, tattooed man with gloves on—and there was no telling what the gentleman might have made of the copper bracelets.

The banker gave Jack an overfamiliar, I-know-who-you-are look. (He had come to pee, but he’d walked into some twisted movie !)

“ Er ist harmlos, ” Jack said to the man, remembering what Nurse Bleibel had told poor Pamela. (“He’s harmless.”)

The banker clearly doubted this. Jack’s dad had filled his lungs and proceeded to puff out his chest like a rooster; he made two fists and held out his gloved hands.

Jack reached back for his Exeter German, hoping for the best. “ Keine Angst. Er ist mein Vater, ” he told the banker. (“Don’t be afraid. He’s my father.”) And this was the hard part: “ Ich passe auf ihn auf. ” (“I’m looking after him.”) The banker retreated, not believing a word of it.

Then the man was gone—the only actual third man to have momentarily shared the men’s room with Jack and his dad—and Jack dressed his father, trying to remember how efficiently and gently Dr. Horvath had dressed William in the clinic.

It seemed to soothe his dad to explain musical notes to Jack; William must have known that his son knew nothing about music. “Quarter notes are colored in, with stems,” his father told him. “Eighth notes are also colored in, with either flags or beams joining two or more together. Sixteenth notes are colored in, and they have a double beam joining them together.”

“What about half notes?” Jack asked.

“Half notes, which are white-faced—well, in my case, you could say flesh- colored,” his dad said; he abruptly stopped.

Flesh: they’d both heard it. But was it a trigger? (As unstoppable as skin, maybe, Dr. Horvath might have said.)

“Half notes, which are white-faced,” Jack prompted his father, to make him move on. “White-faced and what ?”

“White-faced with stems, ” Jack’s dad replied, haltingly —flesh perhaps flickering in the half-light, half-dark of his mind, where all the triggers lay half asleep or half awake. “Whole notes are white-faced and have no stems.”

“Stop! Hold everything,” Jack suddenly said, pointing to his father’s right side. “What’s that one?”

The tattoo was neither words nor music; it more closely resembled a wound in William’s side. Worse, at the edges of the gash, there was a blood-red rim—like a ring of blood. (As for the blood, Jack should have known, but he’d been only four at the time.)

“That is where Our Lord was wounded,” Jack’s father told him. “They put the nails in His hands,” he said, holding his black-gloved hands together, as if in prayer, “and in His feet, and here— in His side,” William said, touching the tattoo on the right side of his rib cage. “One of the soldiers pierced His side with a spear.”

“Who did the tattoo?” Jack asked his dad. Some scratcher, Jack expected him to say, but Jack should have known.

“There was a time, Jack, when every religious person in Amsterdam was at least tempted to be tattooed by a man named Jacob Bril. Maybe you were too young to remember him.”

“No, I remember Bril,” Jack said, touching the blood-edged gash in his dad’s side—then drawing his father’s shirt over the wound.

It was a great restaurant, the Kronenhalle. Jack had been foolish to order only a salad, but he ate two thirds of his father’s Wiener schnitzel. William Burns was a finicky eater.

“At least Jack brought his appetite to dinner, William,” Dr. Krauer-Poppe scolded him, but both William and Jack were in a fairly upbeat mood.

They had weathered the word flesh, which turned out to be in the stoppable category of triggers—not in the skin category—and while Jack had seen a third man’s sorrow on his father’s face, he knew that they had also escaped the men’s room without confronting the worst of what mirrors could do to his dad. It was different when William was naked in front of one, or so Dr. von Rohr had said. Jack guessed that was das ganze Pulver— all the ammunition, which Dr. Horvath had spoken of. Jack would get to see it one day, and that day would come soon enough. Tonight in the Kronenhalle, Jack was quite content to wait.

They talked briefly about the younger nurses at the Sanatorium Kilchberg. How they virtually stood in line, or took turns, to shave his dad every morning; how William was such a flirt.

“You don’t shave yourself?” Jack asked him.

“ You try it, without a mirror,” his father said. “You should try it with the younger nurses, too, Jack.”

“If you don’t behave yourself, William, I’m going to put Waltraut in charge of shaving you,” Dr. von Rohr told him.

“Just so you don’t put Hugo in charge of it, Ruth,” Jack’s dad said.

That was how William managed to steer their conversation back to Hugo, and the sex-with-prostitutes subject. Dr. von Rohr, in her head-of-department way, was smart enough to see it coming, but she couldn’t prevent it.

“It is chiefly Hugo whom these lovely ladies object to, Jack,” his dad began, “not the prostitutes.” (Sighing from Dr. von Rohr, of course; the head-in-her-hands thing from Dr. Krauer-Poppe.)

“You said prostitutes— plural. You see more than one?” Jack asked his father.

“Not at the same time,” William said with that mischievous little smile of his. (Fork-twirling, spoon-spinning, knife-tapping from Dr. von Rohr’s part of the table—and Dr. Krauer-Poppe had something in her eye again.)

“I’m just curious to know, Pop, if you see the same two or three women—I mean one at a time—or a different prostitute each visit.”

“I have my favorites,” his father said. “There are three or four ladies I keep going back to.”

“You’re faithful in your fashion—is that what you mean, William?” Dr. Krauer-Poppe asked. “Isn’t there a song that goes like that?” (She’d had more red wine than Dr. von Rohr.) “Or have I got the translation all upfucked ?”

“All fucked up, Anna-Elisabeth,” Dr. von Rohr corrected her.

“And it’s safe ?” Jack asked his father.

“I don’t have sex with them, if that’s what you mean,” William answered, with that now-familiar tone of indignation in his voice.

“I know. I meant is it safe in every way?” Jack asked. “The place, for example. Is it dangerous?”

“I have Hugo with me!” his dad cried. “I don’t mean in the same room with me, of course.”

“Of course,” Jack said.

The silverware, which Dr. von Rohr had set in motion, came crashing down.