Until I Find You (119 page)

Dr. Horvath, the hearty Austrian and deputy medical director who often jogged with William, had told his patient to expect “a special visitor.” Since it was too soon for more visiting time with his daughter, William was probably expecting someone from the world of music—a musician from out of town, a fellow organist making a guest appearance at a concert or playing in a church in Zurich. (Such distinguished visitors occasionally came to Kilchberg to pay William Burns their respects.)

Jack had asked the concierge at the Storchen to recommend a restaurant within walking distance of the hotel. William would be allowed to have dinner with his son, although Professor Ritter or one (or more) of the doctors at the clinic would accompany him.

“Better make the reservation for three or four people,” Heather had told Jack. “They won’t want you to take him away from the sanatorium alone. And believe me, Jack, you wouldn’t
want
to do that—not the first time, anyway.”

The concierge—a laconic man with a hoe-shaped scar on his forehead, probably from hitting a car’s windshield with his head—had booked a table for four at the Kronenhalle. It was an excellent restaurant and a pleasant walk, the concierge had assured Jack. “And because you’re Jack Burns, I actually managed to get you a table—even on such short notice.”

Jack went outside the hotel and watched the swans and ducks swimming in the Limmat. He checked the time on his watch against the clock towers of the two most imposing churches he could see from the Weinplatz, where he could also see a taxi stand. It was only a ten- or fifteen-minute drive to Kilchberg from the Storchen, and he didn’t want to be early
or
late.

Jack felt guilty about how much he had blamed his mother for everything. If she’d been alive and Jack were waiting to meet
her
for the first time, he believed he would have felt as nervous and excited about that as he felt about meeting his dad. It suddenly seemed ridiculous that he couldn’t forgive her; in fact, Jack missed her. He wished he could call her, but what would he have said?

It was Miss Wurtz who was waiting to hear from him; it was Caroline Jack
should
have called. But all he could think about was talking to his mother.

“Hi, Mom—it’s me,” he wanted to tell her. “I’m not doing this to hurt you, but I’m on my way to meet my dad—after all these years! Got any advice?”

Jack took a taxi out of town, along the shore of Lake Zurich—a nice drive, the road passing close to the lake the whole way. A theater festival had set up tents along the waterfront. It was sunny and warm, but the air was dry—mountain air, not nearly as humid as it had been in Edinburgh. There were these sudden, dramatic moments when Jack could see the Alps beyond the lake. Everything was clean, almost sparkling. (Even the taxi.)

Kilchberg was a community of about seven thousand. Because of all the sailboats on the lake—and the stately homes, many with gardens—the town somewhat resembled a resort. Jack’s taxi driver told him that the right shore of the lake was slightly more prosperous. “Europeans prefer to face west,” he said. Kilchberg, on the left shore of Lake Zurich, faced east.

But Jack thought Kilchberg was charming. There was even a small vineyard, or at least what looked like a working farm, and the sanatorium was high on a hill overlooking the lake, with a spectacular view of Zurich to the north; to the south were the Alps.

“Most of the patients take the bus from the Bürkliplatz—there’s a sanatorium stop in Kilchberg,” his taxi driver told him. “I mean the patients who are free to come and go,” he added—looking warily at Jack in the rearview mirror, as if he were certain that Jack had
escaped.
“You might want to consider taking the bus next time—the number
one-sixty-one
bus, if you can remember that.”

The driver was Middle Eastern, or possibly Turkish. (He’d mentioned “Europeans” with evident distaste.) His English was much better than his German, which was as clumsy and halting as Jack’s. When they’d first tried to speak German together, Jack’s driver had quickly switched to English instead. Jack wondered why he’d been mistaken for a patient at the clinic; the taxi driver was not much of a moviegoer, maybe.

Not so the preternaturally thin young woman in running shoes and a jogging suit who greeted Jack in what he thought was the main entrance to the hospital part of the clinic. There was a waiting room and a reception desk, where the young woman was pacing back and forth when Jack came in. A fitness expert, he assumed—perhaps she was the nurse in charge of physical therapy, or a kind of personal trainer to the patients.
She should put on a little weight,
Jack was thinking;
one can take the athletic-looking thing too far.

“Stop!” she said, in English—pointing to him. (There was no one else in the entranceway or the waiting room; there was no one behind the reception desk, either.) Jack stopped.

A nurse appeared, emerging hurriedly from a corridor. “Pamela,
er ist harmlos,
” the nurse said.

“Of course he’s harmless—he’s not real,” Pamela said. “The medication is working. You don’t have to worry about that. I
know
he’s harmless—I
know
he’s not real.”

She sounded American, yet the nurse had spoken to her in German and she’d understood the nurse. Maybe the thin young woman had been a patient in the clinic for a long time—long enough to learn German, Jack speculated.

“
Es tut mir leid,
” the nurse said to Jack, leading the young American woman away. (“I’m sorry,” she said.)

“You should speak English to him,” Pamela said. “If he were real, he would speak English—like in his movies.”

“I have an appointment with Professor Ritter!” Jack called after the nurse.

“
Ich bin gleich wieder da!
” the nurse called back to him. (“I’m coming right back!”)

They had disappeared down the corridor, but Jack could still hear the too-thin patient—her voice rising. It registered as a kind of insanity on his part that he’d mistaken her for someone who worked at the place.

“They don’t usually
say
anything,” Pamela was telling the nurse. “Normally they just
appear—
they don’t talk, too. God, maybe the medication
isn’t
working!”

“
Das macht nichts,
” the nurse told her, gently. (“It doesn’t matter,” she said.)

Jack Burns was a movie star in a psychiatric clinic; not surprisingly, the first patient who saw him thought he was a talking hallucination. (Not a bad definition for an actor, Dr. García might have said.)

When the nurse came back, she was shaking her head and talking to herself—almost inaudibly and in German. Were it not for her uniform, and if he hadn’t seen her before, Jack would have believed that her self-absorbed muttering marked
her
as a patient. She was a short woman in her fifties, stout and brusque with curly gray hair—a former blonde, Jack guessed.

“It’s funny that the first person
you,
of all people, should meet here is our
only
American,” the nurse said. “Bleibel,” she added, vigorously shaking Jack’s hand.

“Excuse me?”

“Waltraut Bleibel—I’m telling you my
name
!”

“Oh. Jack Burns.”

“I know. Professor Ritter is expecting you. We’ve
all
been expecting you, except for poor Pamela.”

They went outside the building and walked across a patio; there was a sculpture garden and a shallow pond with lily pads. (
Nothing anyone can drown in,
Jack was thinking.) Most of the buildings had big windows, some of them with those black silhouettes of birds painted on the glass. “Our anti-bird birds,” Nurse Bleibel said, with a wave of her hand. “You must have them in America.”

“I guess I went to the wrong building,” Jack told her.

“A women’s ward wouldn’t be
my
first choice for you,” Nurse Bleibel said.

The grounds were beautifully maintained. There were a dozen or more people walking on the paths; others sat on benches, facing the lake. (No one
looked
insane.) There must have been a hundred sailboats on the lake.

“I take William shopping for clothes, on occasion,” the nurse informed Jack. “I’ve never known a man who likes shopping for clothes as much as your father does. When he has to try things on, he can be difficult. Mirrors are a challenge
—triggers,
Dr. von Rohr would call them. But William is very well behaved with me. No fooling around, generally speaking.”

They went into what appeared to be an office building, although there were cooking smells; maybe a cafeteria, or the clinic’s dining hall, was in the building. Jack followed the nurse upstairs, noting that she took two steps at a time; for a short woman in a skirt, this required robust determination. (He could easily imagine his dad not being inclined to
fool around
with Waltraut Bleibel.)

They found Professor Ritter in a conference room; he was sitting all alone, at the head of a long table, making notes on a pad of paper. He jumped to his feet when Nurse Bleibel brought Jack into the room. A wiry man with a strong handshake, he looked a little like David Niven, but he wasn’t dressed for tennis. His pleated khaki trousers had sharply pressed pant legs; his tan loafers looked newly shined; he wore a dark-green short-sleeved shirt.

“Ah, you found us!” the professor cried.

“
Er hat zuerst
Pamela
gefunden,
” Nurse Bleibel said. (“He found Pamela first,” she told him.)

“Poor Pamela,” Professor Ritter replied.

“
Das macht nichts.
Pamela just thinks it’s her medication again,” the nurse said as she was leaving.

“
Merci vielmal,
Waltraut!” Prof. Ritter called after her—a bilingual “Many thanks!” in French and Swiss German.

“
Bitte, bitte,
” Nurse Bleibel said, waving her hand as she had at the anti-bird birds on the big windows.

“Waltraut has a brother, Hugo, who takes your father to town—on occasion,” Professor Ritter told Jack. “But Hugo doesn’t take William shopping for
clothes.
Waltraut does a better job of that.”

“She mentioned something about mirrors,” Jack said. “She called them
triggers,
or she said one of the doctors did.”

“Ah, yes—we’ll get to that!” Professor Ritter said. He was a man used to running a meeting. He was friendly but precise; he left no doubt about who was in charge.

When the others filed into the conference room, Jack wondered where they’d been waiting. On what signal, which he hadn’t detected, had they been summoned forth? They even seemed to know where to sit—as if there were place cards on the bare table, where they put their almost identical pads of paper. They’d come prepared; they looked positively
poised
to take notes. But first Jack had to endure the obligatory handshakes—which, in each case, went on a shake or two too long. And each doctor, as if their meeting had been rehearsed, had a characteristic little something to say.

“
Grüss Gott!
” Dr. Horvath, the hearty Austrian, cried—pumping Jack’s hand up and down.

“Your on-screen persona may precede you, Mr. Burns,” Dr. Berger (the neurologist and fact man) said, “but when I look at you, I see a young William first of all!”

“On the other hand,” Dr. von Rohr said, in her head-of-department way, “should we presume that we know Jack Burns because of our familiarity with William? I’m just asking.”

Dr. Huber had a look at her pager while shaking Jack’s hand. “I’m just an internist,” she was telling him. “You know, a
normal
doctor.” Then her pager beeped and she dropped Jack’s hand as suddenly as she might have if he had died. She went to the telephone in the room, which was just inside the door. “Huber
hier,
” she said into the phone. There was a pause before she added: “
Ja, aber nicht jetzt.
” (“Yes, but not now.”)

Jack was sure that he recognized Dr. Anna-Elisabeth Krauer-Poppe—the fashion model who protected her clothes in a long, starched, hospital-white lab coat. She looked knowingly into his eyes, as if trying to discern what medication he was on—or what she thought he
should
be taking. “You have your father’s good hair,” she observed, “if not—I
hope
not—his obsessions.”

“I’m not tattooed,” Jack told her, shaking her hand.

“There are other ways to be marked for life,” Dr. on-the-other-hand von Rohr remarked.

“Not all obsessions are unhealthy, Ruth,” Dr. Huber, the internist, said. “It would appear that Mr. Burns adheres to his father’s diet. Don’t we all approve of how William watches his weight?”

“His
narcissism,
do you mean?” Dr. von Rohr asked, in her head-of-department way.

“Are
you
seeing a psychiatrist, Mr. Burns?” Dr. Berger, the fact man, asked. “Or can we rule that out?”

“Actually, I
have
been seeing someone,” Jack told them.

“Ah, well . . .” Professor Ritter said.

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of!” the deputy medical director, Dr. Horvath, shouted.

“I don’t suppose you have any indication of osteoarthritis,” Dr. Huber said. “You’re too young,” she added. “Mind you, I’m not saying that William’s arthritic hands are anything
you
need to worry about. You don’t play the piano or the organ, do you?”

“No. And I don’t have any symptoms of arthritis,” Jack said.

“Any
medications
we should know about?” Dr. Krauer-Poppe asked. “I don’t mean for arthritis.”

“No, nothing,” he told her. She looked somewhat surprised, or disappointed—Jack couldn’t be sure.

“Now, now!” Professor Ritter called out, clapping his hands. “We should let Jack ask
us
some questions!”

The doctors cheerfully tolerated Professor Ritter, Jack could tell. The professor was head of the clinic, after all—and he doubtless bore lots of responsibilities of a public-relations kind, which the doctors probably wanted nothing to do with.