“I just meant that Emma must have helped him,” William said; he was indignant.
“You cried and cheered, William—we all did,” Dr. von Rohr replied.
It slowly registered with Jack, when he was walking with his father to the men’s room—that if they’d watched Jack Burns at the Academy Awards in 2000, his father had been in the Sanatorium Kilchberg for more than three years. No one, not even Heather, had told Jack how long William had been there.
“Of course Emma helped me, Pop,” Jack admitted. “She helped me a lot.”
“I didn’t mean I wasn’t proud of you, Jack. Of course I’m proud of you!”
“I know you are, Pop.”
In the men’s room, Jack tried to block his father’s view of the mirror, but William planted himself in front of the sink, not the urinal. They did a little dance. William tried to look over Jack’s shoulder at the mirror; when Jack stood on his toes to block his dad’s view, William ducked his head and peered around his son. They danced from side to side. It was impossible to prevent William from seeing himself in the mirror.
If mirrors were triggers, they didn’t affect Jack’s father in quite the same way as the word skin had. This time, he didn’t try to take off his clothes. But with every glimpse he caught of himself, his expression changed.
“Do you see that man?” Jack’s dad asked, when he saw himself. It was as if a third man were in the men’s room with them. “Things have happened to him,” his father said. “Some terrible things.”
Jack gave up trying to shield his dad and looked in the mirror, too. The third man’s face kept changing. Jack saw his father as William might have looked when he first caught sight of Jack as an infant, before the boy’s mother had whisked him away—a kind of expectancy giving way to wonder on William’s suddenly boyish-looking face. Jack saw what his father must have seen in a mirror that day in Copenhagen, when they pulled Niels Ringhof’s body from the Kastelsgraven—or when William learned that Alice had slept with the boy, and then abandoned him.
His dad was slumping in Jack’s arms, as if William wanted to kneel on the men’s room floor—the way he’d dropped to his knees at the waterfront in Rotterdam, when Els had to carry him to Femke’s car. Or when the policeman had brought Heather home—and the cop told William the story of how they’d mistaken Barbara, his dead wife, for a German tourist who looked the wrong way crossing the street at Charlotte Square.
“That man’s body is a map,” William said, pointing at the slumping man in the mirror. “Should we look at the map together, Jack?”
“Maybe later, Pop. Not now.”
“Nicht jetzt,” his father agreed.
“You said you had to pee, Pop,” Jack reminded him.
“Oh,” Jack’s father said, stepping away from his son. “I think I have.”
They both looked at his pants. William was wearing khaki trousers with the same pleats and sharply pressed pant legs that Professor Ritter favored, but William’s were stained dark; his feet were standing in a puddle of urine on the floor.
“I hate it when this happens,” his dad said. Jack didn’t know what to do. “Don’t worry, Jack. Dr. von Rohr will be coming to the rescue. What did you think her overnight bag was really for?” William turned abruptly away from the mirror—as if the third man in the mirror had insulted him, or made him feel ashamed.
Seemingly part of his father’s daily schedule, there came a head-of-department knock on the men’s room door. “Herein!” William called. (“Come in!”)
Dr. von Rohr’s long arm reached into the men’s room; she was offering Jack her oversize handbag without showing them her face. “Danke,” Jack said, taking the bag from her hand.
“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.”