Jack sat alone with his coffee in Dr. Garcia's office; he felt inconsequential in the company of her family, who were frozen in time. It was instructive to Jack that his therapist had chosen to decorate her office with those photographs of herself and her children that predated her husband's death, as if she needed to be reminded that self-pity was not allowed. (Feeling sorry for yourself was not part of the healing process, or so Dr. Garcia told her patients.)
Live with it, the photos said. Don't forget, but forgive the past.
In her daughter's house, where Dr. Garcia lived as a grandmother--a somewhat stern one, Jack imagined--there were probably newer photographs. (Of her children as grown-ups, of her countless grandchildren--possibly of family pets.) But in her place of business, where she counseled those who felt terminally sorry for themselves, Dr. Garcia had assembled an austere reminder of her earlier joy and abiding sorrow. She'd once told Elizabeth that she'd always known, when she married an older man, that her husband would predecease her. "I just never guessed by how many years!" she'd said, with a laugh.
"With a laugh?" Jack asked Elizabeth. "Did Dr. Garcia really laugh when she said that?"
"That's the trick, isn't it?" Elizabeth said.
Here was another loose arrangement that would never have been tolerated in Vienna or New York, where Elizabeth's candor to Jack would have been considered unprofessional--where, Jack suspected, Dr. Garcia's insistence on chronological order as therapy probably would have been considered "unprofessional," too. But it was working, wasn't it?
There was a prescription pad on Dr. Garcia's desk. Jack thought about what he wanted to say to her, and if it would fit on one page of the prescription paper. He decided he could make it fit, if he kept his handwriting small.
Dear Dr. Garcia,
I'm going to Edinburgh to meet my sister--maybe my father, too! I'll put it all in chronological order for you, when I get back.
I'm sorry about your husband.
Jack
Then he went into the waiting room, where a nanny was reading a children's book to a four-or five-year-old. (In a world of loose arrangements, Jack had learned not to question why the young mothers didn't just leave their kids at home with their nannies.) The nanny looked up at Jack when he came out of Dr. Garcia's office, but the child didn't bother to look. On a small couch, one of the young mothers lay curled in a fetal position with her back to the waiting room. Jack couldn't hear her crying, but her shoulders were shaking.
"I left Dr. Garcia a note--it's on her desk," he told Elizabeth.
"Is there anything else you want me to tell her? I mean in addition to the note," Elizabeth said.
"Tell her I don't need to see her today," he said. "Tell her I looked happy."
"Well, that's a stretch. How about I say 'happier than usual'?" Elizabeth suggested.
"That's okay," he said.
"Be safe, Jack. Don't go crazy, or anything like that."
37
Edinburgh
Jack was thirty-eight; his sister, Heather, was twenty-eight. How do you meet someone you should have known most of your life? In Jack's case, he stalled. He arrived in Edinburgh a day before he'd told Heather he was coming. He had his mother's business to attend to. It was his father who had brought Jack and Heather together. Jack wanted to keep Heather separate from his mom's history in Edinburgh.
The hotel doorman at the Balmoral, a strapping young man in a kilt, was the first to ask Jack if he was in town for "the Festival"--a question he would repeatedly be asked.
Jack had a corner suite overlooking Princes Street. (He had a view of a chaotic-looking trampoline park.) Princes Street was clogged with pedestrian traffic: people carrying shopping bags, tourists folding and unfolding maps. With the concierge's assistance, Jack hired a car and driver to take him to Leith--Alice's old turf. It was less crowded there--not everybody's favorite part of town, apparently.
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. Garcia 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."