by John Irving
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?"
"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. Garcia doesn't count! Emma almost doesn't count." (He even knew about Dr. Garcia!)
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 hi
s 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 Veranderungen uber 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 marie"), 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 Dupre's Trois preludes 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!"
"Dad, don't hurt yourself."
" 'Pop,' " his father corrected him.
"Better be careful, Pop."
You can give yourself a headache trying to decipher the tattoos on a naked man who's leaping up and down on a bed. Jack was trying to identify the Bach tattoo Sami Salo was alleged to have given William on his backside--and the notes that Trond Halvorsen (the scratcher) gave him in Oslo, where Halvorsen also gave William an infection--but Jack was making himself dizzy with the effort.
"Do you know what toccata means, Jack?"
"No, Pop."
"It means touch, basically--almost a hammered kind of touch," his father explained; he wasn't even out of breath. Jack saw no evidence that Dr. Horvath had been right about the psychological benefits of the Sanatorium Kilchberg's jogging program, but the aerobic benefits were obvious.
Stanley's Trumpet Tune in D, which marked William's chest in the area of his right lung, seemed to make a visual proclamation. (Didn't you need good lungs to play the trumpet?) And there was that fabulous Alain quotation, in French and English, on his dad's bare ass--not that William was standing still enough for Jack to be able to read it.
"Pop, maybe you should get dressed for dinner."
"If I stop, I'll get a chill, dear boy. I don't want to feel cold!" his father shouted.
For Professor Ritter and the doctors--they were listening outside, in the corridor--this must have been a familiar enough utterance to give them a signal. There was a loud, rapid knocking on the door--Dr. Horvath, probably.
"Perhaps we should come in, William!" Professor Ritter called; it wasn't really a question.
"Vielleicht!" Jack's father shouted. ("Perhaps!")
William bounded off the bed; he put his hands on the rubberized floor and bent over, facing Jack while he lifted his bare bottom to the opening door. When Professor Ritter and the doctors entered, William was mooning them.
Reason has reached its limit. Only belief keeps rising.
"I must say, William--this is a little disappointing," Professor Ritter said.
"Only a little?" Jack's father asked; he'd straightened up and had turned to face them
, naked.
"William, this is not what you should wear to the Kronenhalle!" Dr. Horvath admonished him.
"I won't have dinner with a naked man--at least not in public," Dr. von Rohr announced, but Jack could see that she instantly regretted her choice of words. "Es tut mir leid," she added. ("I'm sorry," she said to Jack's father.) The other doctors and Professor Ritter all looked at her with dismay. "I said I was sorry!" she told them in her head-of-department way.
"I think I heard the word naked," William said to his son, smiling. "Talk about triggers!"
"I said I was sorry, William," Dr. von Rohr told him.
"Oh, it's nothing," Jack's father said irritably. But Jack saw the first sign that his dad felt cold again--a single tremor. "It's just that I've told you I'm not naked. You know that's not how I feel!"
"We know, William," Dr. Berger said. "You've told us."
"But Jack hasn't heard this," Professor Ritter joined in.
Dr. von Rohr sighed; if she'd been holding a pencil in her long fingers, she would have twirled it. "These tattoos are your father's real clothes, Jack," Dr. von Rohr said. She put her hands on William's shoulders--running her hands down the length of his arms, which she then held at the wrists. "He feels cold because so many of his favorite composers have died. Most of them are dead, in fact. Aren't they, William?"
"Cold as the grave," Jack's father said, nodding his head; he was shivering.
"And what is here, and here, and here, and everywhere?" Dr. von Rohr asked, pointing to William's tattoos repeatedly. "Nothing but praise for the Lord--hymns of praise--and prayers of lamentation. With you, everything is either adulation or mourning. You thank God, William, but you mourn almost everyone or everything else. How am I doing so far?" she asked him. Jack could tell that she had calmed his father down, but nothing could stop the shivering. (Dr. Horvath was trying, rubbing William's shoulders while attempting to pull a T-shirt over his shaking head--more or less at the same time.)
"You're doing a very good job," Jack's father told Dr. von Rohr sincerely. He was too cold for sarcasm; his teeth were chattering again.
"Your body is not naked, William. It is gloriously covered with hymns of jubilation, and with the passion of an abiding love of God--but also an abiding loss," Dr. von Rohr continued.