"I have a son, but I may never see him again," William told Barbara, from the beginning.
Jack Burns was an emotional and psychological presence in her childhood, Heather told Miss Wurtz--even before Jack became a movie star and his dad began to watch him obsessively on the big screen, and on videotape and DVD. (According to The Wurtz, William had Jack's dialogue--in all the movies--"down pat.")
William Burns and Barbara Steiner had lived in Munich, in Cologne, in Stuttgart; they were together in Germany for about five years. When Barbara was pregnant with Heather, William was offered an opportunity to return "home" to Edinburgh; he seized it. Heather was born in Scotland, where both her parents taught in the Department of Music at the University of Edinburgh before her.
William was once again playing the Father Willis at Old St. Paul's--not that the organ hadn't been altered and enlarged since he'd last played it. Given the church's fabled reverberation time, this hardly mattered; it was Old St. Paul's Scottish Episcopal Church, which William loved, and Edinburgh was his city.
Miss Wurtz, bless her heart, too quickly jumped to the conclusion that William's life had come full circle. Wasn't it wonderful that, for all his wanderlust and the upheavals of his younger days, William Burns had at last "settled down"? He'd found the right woman; their daughter would give Jack's father some measure of peace, a sense of replacement for losing his son.
But it was not to be. Barbara Steiner was homesick for Germany. In her view, Edinburgh was not a great city for classical music; there was a lot of music, but much of it was mediocre. The climate was damp and dreary. Barbara believed that the weather exacerbated her chronic bronchitis; she half joked that she had become a singer with a permanent cough, but the cough was persistent and more serious than she knew.
What Heather, Jack's sister, imparted to Miss Wurtz--in one phone call--was a portrait of her mother as a complainer. According to Barbara, Scottish men (excluding William) were unattractive and dressed badly; the women were even less attractive and didn't know how to dress at all. Whisky was a curse, not only for the drunkenness it caused (William didn't drink); it also killed the taste buds and made the Scots incapable of recognizing how bad their food was. Kilts, like lederhosen, should be worn only by children--or so Barbara believed. (William wouldn't have been caught dead in a kilt.) In the summer, when the weather finally improved, there were too many tourists--especially Americans. Barbara was allergic to wool; no tartan would ever please her.
Her mother, Heather told Miss Wurtz, found one child such an overwhelming burden that she resisted William's wishes to have one or two more. Barbara was not a natural mother, yet she reduced her teaching duties (by half) in order to spend more time with Heather, although time spent with an infant was torture to her.
Barbara Steiner was a child of divorced parents; she had such a dread of separation and divorce that she periodically suspected William of planning to divorce her. He wasn't; in fact, William was (in Heather's words) "slavishly devoted" to his griping wife. He held himself accountable for her unhappiness, for taking her away from her beloved homeland; he offered to move back to Germany, but Barbara believed that such a move would make her husband so unhappy that he would be driven to divorce her all the more quickly.
Before Barbara Steiner's parents had separated, she had cherished the family ski holidays they would take--every winter and spring--to the Swiss and Austrian Alps. After the divorce, the ski trips, which Barbara took alone with her mother, or alone with her father, became a form of enforced exercise--athletic stoicism and silent dinners, where one or the other of her parents drank too much wine. Yet the names of these ski resorts in Austria and Switzerland were reverentially repeated to Heather by her unhappy mother; it was as if they were saints' names, and Barbara had converted to Catholicism.
St. Anton, Klosters, Lech, Wengen, Zermatt, St. Christoph. When they'd lived in Germany, Barbara Steiner had actually taught William Burns how to ski--albeit badly. (Jack had trouble envisioning his dad, a tattooed organist, on skis.) But the Swiss and Austrian Alps were a long way from Scotland.
"We'll take you skiing when you're old enough," Heather's mom had told her.
One can imagine how The Wurtz's account of this had echoes of Alice's litany to Jack.
But the so-called chronic bronchitis turned out to be lung cancer, which Barbara believed she had "caught" (like the flu) in Edinburgh. "I wouldn't be surprised if lung cancer originated in Scotland," she half joked between coughs. It was the death of her singing, but not of her.
Heather was too young at the time to remember anything positive about her mother's recovery from the cancer. Heather recalled nothing about the radiation, Caroline told Jack--and only "the vomiting part" and "the wig part" of her mother's chemotherapy. Heather would have been five, Miss Wurtz speculated. The child could barely remember the first ski trip of her life, to Klosters--except that her mother, Barbara, had been depressed because she was too tired to ski.
Jack suggested to Caroline that, when Heather was five, her memory of anything was unreliable. Miss Wurtz countered this argument; although she was only five at the time, his sister's most enduring memory of her mother had prevailed. Barbara Steiner had hated how the Scots drove on the wrong side of the road. She cited the numerous deaths of foreign tourists in Edinburgh every summer. (They stepped off the curb, looking left instead of right.)
"If the cancer doesn't come back and kill me," Barbara used to say to William, and to their five-year-old daughter, "I swear I shall be struck down by a car going the wrong way on the street." She was.
She stepped off the curb, where it was written--as plain as day--LOOK RIGHT. She looked left instead, although she'd lived in Edinburgh for almost six years, and a taxi killed her.
"I believe Heather said it was in the vicinity of Charlotte Square," Miss Wurtz informed Jack. "A children's book author was reading at some sort of writers' festival. Her mother had taken Heather to the reading, which was in a tent. When they were leaving, and about to cross the street, Heather reached for her mother's hand. Heather looked the right way and saw the taxi coming; her mother looked the wrong way and stepped off the curb. The taxi killed Barbara instantly. Heather remembers that her fingers only slightly grazed her mother's hand."
Whether Jack's sister had freely divulged these painful details to Miss Wurtz, or whether Caroline had coaxed the details out of her, Jack didn't know. He knew only that The Wurtz was a tireless believer in dramatizing important information--hence the detail that Barbara Steiner's wig flew off on impact was conveyed to Jack, and the fact that Heather and her mom (at her mother's insistence) spoke only German when they were alone together.
That Jack's five-year-old sister was crying for her dead mother in German confused the witnesses to the accident. (There were many parents with children among the witnesses; they'd also attended the reading by the children's book author at the writers' festival.) The police reconstructed the accident incorrectly: a German tourist had bee
n struck down by a car in the unexpected lane; the astonishingly bald woman was carrying no identification, and her five-year-old daughter, who was hysterical, spoke only German.
Actually, Barbara had been carrying a purse. It must have been flung far away from her when the taxi hit her--lost forever, like the wig. Heather, when she calmed down, told a policeman, in English, that she wanted to go "home"; she took the cop by the hand and showed him the way. Heather had walked everywhere in Edinburgh with her mother and father; no one in the family (including Heather, when she grew up) drove a car.
Thus William Burns became a single parent to a five-year-old girl. "Knowing William," Miss Wurtz said, "he would have held himself accountable for the death of the poor child's mother, too."
"Did Heather say that?" Jack asked.
"Of course she didn't say it, Jack! But I know William. He forgave your mother for everything, but he never forgave himself."
"And now he's crazy?" Jack asked.
"You should talk to your sister, Jack. You should meet Heather before it's too late."
But did Heather want to meet him? he inquired of The Wurtz. (Jack wondered if he should send his sister a check first.)
"You have to call her and talk to her yourself," Miss Wurtz said. "I'm sure you have some things in common."