"We're all so grateful to you, Jack," Claudia went on.
"And we're so proud of Sally for having the temerity to approach you!" Claudia's husband (Sally's father) wrote.
Jack would write back to Claudia and her husband that he was glad to have helped, in what modest way he could. But he lacked Sally's temerity; Jack wrote that he no longer had the nerve to stand alone on a stage. "The out-of-context moments of filmmaking, which I've grown used to, allow the actor room to hide." (Whatever that meant!) But Jack would think of their little theater often, he wrote--and every summer he would regret the missed opportunity of an idyllic month or six weeks in Vermont. (In truth, he would rather die!)
Jack felt Claudia's ghost watching over him; she was all smiles when he mailed that letter.
Immediately following this insincere correspondence, Jack experienced contact of another kind. There was nothing insincere about Caroline Wurtz's phone call, which woke him early one August morning from his umpteenth dream of touching Emma's vagina tattoo. A family from Dusseldorf, with whom he'd been testing the limits of his Exeter German, were already up and swimming in the Oceana pool.
"Jack Burns, as Mr. Ramsey might say," Miss Wurtz began. "Rise and shine!" The Wurtz, of course, had no idea of what a shameful thing Jack had done. (That he would rise, and go on rising, seemed likely; that he might ever shine again seemed unthinkable.)
"How nice to hear your voice, Caroline," he told her truthfully.
"You sound awful," Miss Wurtz said. "Don't pretend I didn't wake you. But I have news worth waking you for, Jack."
"You've heard from him?" Jack asked, wide awake if not exactly shining.
"I've heard of him, not from him. You have a sister, Jack!"
Biologically speaking, if his father had remarried--as it appeared that William had--it was conceivable that Jack had a half sister, which was indeed news to him and Miss Wurtz.
Her name was Heather Burns, and she was a junior lecturer on the Faculty of Music at the University of Edinburgh, where (some years earlier) she'd also completed her undergraduate studies in the Department of Music. Heather was a pianist and an organist, and she played a wooden flute. She'd done her Ph.D. in Belfast.
"On Brahms," Caroline informed him. "Something about Brahms and the nineteenth century."
"My dad is back in Edinburgh?" he asked The Wurtz.
"William isn't well, Jack--he's in a sanatorium. He was playing the organ again at Old St. Paul's, and teaching in Edinburgh, but he has osteoarthritis. His arthritic hands have put an end to his playing, at least professionally."
"He's in a sanatorium for arthritis?" Jack asked her.
"No, no--it's a mental place," Miss Wurtz said.
"He's in an insane asylum, Caroline?"
"Heather says it's very nice. William loves it there. It's just that it's very expensive," Miss Wurtz said.
"My sister was calling for money?" Jack asked.
"She was calling for you, Jack. She wanted to know how to reach you. I told her I would call you. As you know, I give your phone number to no one--although in this case I was tempted. Yes, Heather needs money--to keep William happy and safe in the sanatorium."
Jack's sister was twenty-eight. A junior lecturer at the University of Edinburgh didn't make enough money to afford to have children, The Wurtz explained. Heather couldn't be expected to pay for William's confinement.
"Heather is married?" Jack asked Miss Wurtz.
"Certainly not!"
"You mentioned children, Caroline."
"I was being hypothetical--about the poor girl's meager salary," Mi
ss Wurtz elaborated. "Heather has a boyfriend. He's Irish. But she's not going to marry him. Heather merely said that her income didn't permit her to even think about starting a family, and that she needs your help with William."
I have a sister! Jack was thinking; that she needed his help (that anyone needed him) was the most wonderful news!
Better still, Jack's sister loved their father. According to Miss Wurtz, Heather adored William. But she'd not had an easy time of it; nor had he. After talking with Jack's sister, The Wurtz had quite a story to tell.
If not surpassing or even equaling his feelings for the commandant's daughter, the next love of William Burns's life was a young woman he'd met and married in Germany. Barbara Steiner was a singer; she introduced William to Schubert's songs. The singing of German lieder, accompanied by the pianoforte--"the ancestor of the modern piano," as Miss Wurtz described it to Jack--was new and exciting to William. It was no minor art to him, nor was Barbara Steiner a passing infatuation; they performed and taught together.