Until I Find You (114 page)

The driver’s false teeth were too loose. His name was Rory, and his teeth clicked when he talked.

Jack wanted to see St. Thomas’s, where Alice had sung in the choir—innocently,
before
she met William in South Leith Parish Church. St. Thomas’s no longer existed, but Rory, who’d been born in Leith, remembered its location and knew what it had become. For more than twenty years, St. Thomas’s had been a Sikh temple. The view of what was once Leith Hospital, which had so depressed Alice that she’d left St. Thomas’s for another church, was depressing still. The former hospital, Rory told Jack, was only an outpatient clinic now. The unused parts looked neglected and broken; half the ground-floor windows were smashed.

Jack knew what Dr. García would have said if she’d been with him and Rory at that moment. “If St. Thomas’s is gone, if an entire church can let go of the past, why can’t you let go, too, Jack?”

South Leith Parish Church, where Alice first sang for William, made a more complex impression on Jack. The high walls along Constitution Street, which were meant to keep people out of the popular graveyard, stood in juxtaposition to a toppled gravestone. It read:
HERE LYE THE REMAINS OF ROBERT CALDCLEUGH.
The date, which was hard to read, was 1482. Among the gravestones, Jack saw that the most recent burial was in 1972.

Jack wouldn’t have wanted to be buried there. If you were lying in that graveyard, facing south, you would be looking at an ugly seventeen-story high-rise for the rest of your death.

As for that area of Leith Walk where a rail bridge once joined Mandelson Street to Jane Street—Aberdeen Bill’s tattoo parlor, Persevere, had been situated under the rumble of the trains—there was little or no evidence of the “old tenements” Alice had described to Jack. (In her childhood, these were mostly small shops with flats above them, “meeting the minimum standards of comfort and safety”—or so she’d said.) But only the railway arches remained, and these were used as car garages; a Volkswagen repair place was prominent among them.

The apartments were newer here than the shabby late-nineteenth-century buildings along much of Leith Walk—not the “old tenements” Alice had deplored, but sheltered housing for the elderly. Built in the late seventies—according to Rory, “for widows and widowers.”

Jack couldn’t find the cinema house, which his mom had maintained was “within a stone’s throw of Persevere.” But Rory remembered where the local cinema had been—it was now a bingo parlor called The Mecca.

Elsewhere on Leith Walk, there were convenience stores, which Rory called “corner shops.” While Leith Walk appeared largely residential, there were pubs, and places serving carry-out food, and the ever-present video stores. Young people seemed to live here, many Asians among them.

Alice had once spoken of her excitement upon first seeing the Leith Central Station, when she was a child, but the former station was now the Central Bar, where Jack’s sister played her wooden flute. Rory said that strippers had performed there as recently as the late seventies or early eighties. It was midafternoon when Jack looked inside the Central; there were no strippers. The jukebox was playing Frank Sinatra’s “My Way.” Smoke blurred the tiled walls and the long mirrors and half concealed the high Victorian ceiling, which was heavily patterned.

At the intersection of Constitution Street and Bernard Street, there was a bank on the corner and what looked like a shipping agency. Jack and Rory crossed a bridge over the Water of Leith and ran into Dock Place. Jack remembered the song his mom sang, if only when she was drunk or stoned—the song he’d first heard her sing in Amsterdam. It was his mom’s mantra, he’d thought at the time—to never be a whore.

Oh, I’ll never be a kittie

or a cookie

or a tail.

The one place worse than

Dock Place

is the Port o’ Leith jail.

No, I’ll never be a kittie,

of one true thing I’m sure—

I won’t end up on Dock Place

and I’ll never be a hure.

Jack’s Scottish accent needed practice, but he sang the song to Rory, who said he’d never heard it before. As for Dock Place, it didn’t look like such a bad place to end up—not to Jack, not anymore. (The “hures,” if they’d ever been there, had moved on.)

Rory drove Jack back to the Balmoral, where he had a late-afternoon nap. He slept for only two or three hours, but it was enough to shake the jet lag. After dinner at the hotel, he walked out on Princes Street and asked the doorman to recommend a good pub in Leith. Jack didn’t want to drink, but he felt like sipping a beer in the unnameable atmosphere of his mother’s birthplace. (Maybe he was pretending to be his grandfather Aberdeen Bill.)

The doorman recommended two places; they were both on Constitution Street, very near each other. Jack took a taxi and asked the driver to wait—he was sure he wouldn’t be long. The Port o’ Leith, where he went first, was small and crowded; it was a very mixed bar. There were the obvious regulars—locals, old standbys—and sailors off the docks, and young students having their first glass. (The legal age was eighteen, which appeared to Jack to mean sixteen.)

The ceiling was a mosaic of flags; on the walls, there were ribbons from sailors’ hats and life preservers from ships. There was a
KEEP LEITH
sign on the mirror. The barmaid explained to Jack that this was a political issue—in response to an unpopular plan to rename Leith “North Edinburgh.”

Jack declined the offered bar snacks—something called “pork scratchings” among them—and sipped a Scottish oatmeal stout.

Farther down Constitution Street was a cavernous Victorian pub called Nobles Bar; it was as empty as The Port o’ Leith had been crowded, but even with the mob from The Port o’ Leith, Nobles would have seemed empty by comparison. There were no women in the bar, and fewer than half a dozen unfortunate-looking men—squinty eyes, pasty complexions, noses of all sorts. Jack deliberated between ordering a Newcastle Brown Ale and something called Black Douglas; it didn’t really matter, since he knew he would finish neither. Jack Burns couldn’t remember the last time he’d been in a bar and no one had recognized him; now, on the same night, he’d been in
two.

Back at the Balmoral, Jack had a mineral water at the bar, where they were playing Bob Dylan’s “Lay, Lady, Lay.” The old song, which he’d once liked, took Jack by surprise. He’d been saying good-bye to his mother, never suspecting that nothing in Edinburgh, the city of her birth, would resurrect her—not the way Bob Dylan could bring her back to him every time.

“Are you here for the Festival, Mr. Burns?” the bartender asked.

“Actually, my mother was born here,” he told the man. “I just spent a little time in her old neighborhood, in Leith. And my sister lives here. I’m meeting her tomorrow.” Jack
didn’t
say, “For the first time!”

He had arranged to meet Heather the next morning in a coffee shop called Elephants and Bagels on Nicolson Square. This was less than a ten-minute walk from his hotel, and very near her office at the university. The music department offices and practice rooms were in Alison House on Nicolson Square.

Jack walked along North Bridge, over the train yards for British Rail. He passed the big glass building on Nicolson Street, the Festival Theatre, and turned right into Nicolson Square. He was early, as usual. In Elephants and Bagels, Jack sat at a table near the door and ordered a mug of coffee. An advertisement for the coffee shop said:
THE BEST HANGOVER CURE IN EDINBURGH.

The walls were painted a bright yellow. There were plants in the windows, and a glass case filled with elephant figurines—carved stone, painted wood, ceramic, and porcelain elephants. A large, round support column was covered with children’s drawings—birds, trees,
more
elephants. The coffee shop had the educational yet whimsical atmosphere of a kindergarten classroom.

When Heather came in the shop, Jack didn’t at first see how she resembled him. She had short blond hair, like her German mother, but her brown eyes and sharp facial features were Jack’s, or William’s, and she was both lean and compact—as small and fit as a jockey. Her tortoiseshell eyeglasses were almond-shaped; she was as nearsighted as her mother had been, she explained, but she refused to wear contacts. She hated the feeling of something in her eyes. She was waiting to be a little older before trying the new laser surgery. (She told Jack all this before she sat down.)

They had shaken hands, not kissed. She ordered tea, not coffee. “You look just like him,” she said. “I mean you look less like Jack Burns than I thought you would, and more like our dad.”

“I can’t wait to see him,” he told her.

“You
have
to wait,” she said.

“It’s just an expression,” Jack explained. They were both nervous.

She talked about her five roommates. She was moving out soon, with one other girl. Two of her flatmates directed a nonsmoking clinic; they were vegans who believed that everything with a spiky shape attracted bad energy. Heather had started a small cactus garden in the kitchen area, but this had to go—“too many spikes.” The vegans had also beseeched the landlord to remove the weather vane from the top of the apartment building.
My sister is living with lunatics!
Jack was thinking.

Jack explained that he was selling his house in Santa Monica, but that he had no idea where he wanted to live.

Heather knew he was registered at the Balmoral as Harry Mocco; she wondered why. Jack wanted to know what she taught at the university. (She taught five courses—historical and theoretical music classes, mostly to beginners, and keyboard skills.)

“Our department is all old men!” Heather said good-naturedly.

Jack thought that his sister was a pretty girl with glasses; she had an air of academic aloofness or detachment about her. She wore little or no makeup, but an attractive linen skirt with a fitted T-shirt and sensible-looking walking shoes.

Jack asked to see where she worked and where she lived. Heather moved her fingers all the while they were walking, as if she were unconsciously playing a piano or an organ.

The music practice rooms in the basement of Alison House were like prison cells. They were small cubicles, poorly ventilated; the walls were a dirty, pea-soup green, and the floors were a hideous orange linoleum. The lighting, which was adequate, was of a fluorescent variety that Heather said was bad for your sanity.

Jack thought that the word
sanity
might lead them into a conversation about their dad, but Jack and Heather were experiencing the equivalent of a first date. (They needed to get through an unbearable amount of trivia before the more serious subjects could emerge.)

The lecture room in Alison House was more pleasant than the practice rooms. The large windows let in lots of natural light, although the view was a limited one—of an old stone building. There were two pianos and a small organ in the room, but when Jack asked Heather to play something for him, she just shook her head and directed him to a narrow, twisting staircase, which led to her office. Jack got the feeling that she wanted him to go ahead of her, up the stairs.

“Can we talk about him?” he asked her. “Maybe we could begin with the arthritis, if that’s an easy part to talk about.”

She stared at the blue carpet on her office floor, her fingers seemingly searching for the right keys on a keyboard only she could see; she plucked at her skirt. The cream-colored walls had a spackled, unsmooth finish. There were two desks—the larger one with a computer on it, the smaller with a German dictionary. The stereo equipment was probably worth more than everything else in the office, including the small piano; there were more CDs than books on the bookshelves, and a bulletin board with a sepia photograph of Brahms tacked to it. There was also a postcard pinned to the bulletin board—a color photo of a very old-looking pianoforte, the kind of thing you’d find in a museum of musical history. A friend might have sent her the postcard—her Irish boyfriend, perhaps—or maybe William had sent it to her, if William was capable of sending a postcard.

“I want to get to know you a little at a time,” Heather said, still staring at the rug. She had Jack’s thin lips; her upper lip was a small, straight line.

“It’s a tight space, but nice,” Jack said, meaning her office.

“I don’t need more space—I need more time,” she told him. “The summer is good—no teaching, and I can get a lot of research done. In the school year, Easter is about the only time I have to do my writing.”

Jack nodded, glancing at the photo of Brahms—as if Brahms had understood what Heather meant. (Jack hadn’t a clue.)

Heather turned out the lights in her office. “You go first,” she said, before they started down the stairs. Maybe she found it easier to talk when he couldn’t look at her. “Daddy hides his hands, or he wears gloves, because of the deformities. The disfiguration of osteoarthritic joints is quite noticeable—not just a gnarling of the knuckles but actual bumps. They’re called Heberden’s nodes.”

“Where are the bumps?” Jack asked, descending the stairs ahead of her.

“At the far knuckles of his fingers—that junction between the middle bone of the finger and the little bone at the tip. But his hands don’t look as deformed as he imagines they do; it’s mainly how his hands hurt when he plays.”

“Can’t he stop playing?” Jack asked.

“He goes completely insane if he doesn’t play,” Heather said. “Of course he also wears gloves because he feels cold.”

“Some people with full-body tattoos feel cold,” Jack told her.

“No kidding,” his sister said. (He assumed that she got the sarcasm from her German mother.)

They walked through a parking lot, past more university buildings, down Charles Street to George Square. Heather was a fast walker; even when they were side by side, she wouldn’t look at Jack when she talked. “The arthritis has affected his playing for more than fifteen years,” she said. “The disease involves degeneration of cartilage and what they call hypertrophy—overgrowth of the bones of the joint. For a pianist or an organist, there’s a wear-and-tear factor. The pain of osteoarthritis is increased by activity, relieved by rest. The more he plays, the more it hurts. But the pain makes him feel warm.” She smiled at this. “He likes that about it.”