Until I Find You

by John Irving

  But could Jack believe anything his mother had told him? At least the Doc Forest was as Jack had remembered it. (What boy wouldn't recall a clipper ship endangered by a sea serpent?) As for the eyeball on the left cheek of Lindberg's ass, Jack had missed its gay implications the first time--not to mention the pair of pursed lips on the right cheek, like wet lipstick. The fish on Lindberg's forearm was almost exactly as Jack had remembered it--nothing gay intended by it, clearly.

  As for Alice's Rose of Jericho, Jack had never seen the finished tattoo--he'd only heard it discussed as a work-in-progress. It was not a Rose of Jericho, of course. What would a gay man want with a vagina hidden in a rose? There was a rose, all right, but the penis was not what Jack would describe as hidden in the petals of that unruly flower. It was a penis practically bursting out of a rose!

  "What did you call it?" Torsten Lindberg asked.

  Jack had no idea what to call it--a Penis of Jericho, perhaps, but he thought it best to say nothing.

  There was one other, lesser error in Jack's so-called memory of Torsten Lindberg's tattoos. Tattoo Ole's naked lady--she with her oddly upturned eyebrow of pubic hair. Well, she was one of Ole's naked ladies--Jack could see that--but this naked lady had a penis, too.

  "I've seen all your movies--I can't tell you how many times!" Torsten Lindberg told Jack. "I won't embarrass you, Jack, by telling you what my friends are always saying about you. Let's just say they love you as a she-male!"

  At the Grand, Jack woke every morning to the ships' horns--the commuter traffic from the archipelago. One such morning, he went to see Lake Malaren. Like the Kastelsgraven, it wasn't frozen--not in April--but it was possible to imagine where William might have stood to watch his son skating with his mistress with the bad heart, Agneta Nilsson.

  As for Doc Forest's tattoo shop--the atmosphere was friendly and familiar.

  Jack had never seen a photograph of his father. Jack knew only that William was good-looking to women, but that was not the same thing as a physical description. Doc Forest was the first person who actually described Jack's dad. "He had long hair, to his shoulders," Doc said. "He moved like an athlete, but he looked like a rock star--only better dressed."

  Torvald Toren had already cast some doubt on the tattoo William was alleged to have gotten from Doc Forest--a piece by Pachelbel, Alice had said. (She'd suspected it might be something called Hexachordum Apollinis; she'd mentioned either an aria quarta or a toccata.)

  "William played some Pachelbel, of course," Toren had told Jack. "But I never saw your father's tattoos." Mads Lindhardt had told Jack the same thing, not about Pachelbel but about William's tattoos.

  Tattoo artists had seen The Music Man's tattoos--and the women William had slept with, surely. But at least two organists who'd known him well, and had liked him, had never seen his tattoos. Strange that his father didn't show them, Jack thought.

  And since so much of what Alice had told Jack was bullshit, Jack was prepared--when he went to see Doc Forest--for the fact that his dad's Pachelbel tattoo might be bullshit, too.

  There was no bullshit about Doc. He was glad to see Jack again, he said; he'd seen all of Jack's movies, including the ones in which Jack appeared half naked. Doc had been wondering when Jack was going to get a tattoo. It was an honor that Daughter Alice's son had come to Doc Forest for a tattoo, Doc told Jack.

  Jack explained that he'd not come to see Doc for a tattoo.

  Doc had aged well; he was still small and strong, and his sandy hair had not yet gone gray. For a former sailor who'd acquired his first tattoo in Amsterdam from Tattoo Peter, Doc Forest looked terrific.

  Doc would not say an ill word about Alice--those old-timers, the maritimers, stuck together--but he had also liked Jack's dad. Doc had even gone to the Hedvig Eleonora to hear William play.

  "I was wondering if you remember the tattoo you gave him, or perhaps you gave him more than one," Jack said. "A piece of music by Pachelbel, maybe."

  "No music, just words," Doc said. "They might have been words in a song, but not a hymn. Not church music--I can tell you that."

  "Do you remember the words?" Jack asked him.

  Doc Forest's tattoo shop was as neat and trim as Doc. Sailors had to be organized--the good ones, anyway. It didn't take Doc long to find the stencil.

  "Your dad was very particular about his tattoos," Doc Forest said. "He wouldn't let me write on his skin. He said he wanted to see my handwriting on a stencil first. He certainly was particular about the punctuation!"

  Doc Forest's cursive was uniform and clear. The tattoo artists Jack had known all had excellent handwriting. The stencil was a little dusty, but Jack had no trouble reading the words and the particular punctuation.

  The commandant's daughter; her little brother

  "My first one of those," Doc said, pointing to the semicolon.

  "It's not a song. It's more like a story," Jack told him.

  "Well, your dad sure liked it. The tattoo, I mean," Doc said.

  "How do you know?" Jack asked.

  "He cried and cried," Doc Forest said.

  With a tattoo, Jack remembered his mother saying, sometimes that's how you knew when you got it right.

  28

  The Wrong Tattoo

  A child's memory is not only inaccurate--it's not reliably linear, either. Jack not only "remembered" things that had never happened; he was also wrong about the order of events, including at least one thing that had actually taken place. When Jack and his mom had gone downstairs for dinner in the Hotel Bristol, it wasn't their first night in Oslo--it was their last.

  A young couple did come into the restaurant, just as Jack remembered. He'd thought it was the first time he saw how his mother looked when she encountered a couple in love. The young man was athletic-looking with long hair to his shoulders; he looked like a rock star, only he was better dressed. In fact, he looked exactly as Doc Forest had described William Burns--and his wife or girlfriend couldn't take her eyes or her hands off him. (Jack even remembered the young woman's breasts.)

  Jack also recalled how he'd said to his mom that she should give the couple her sales pitch about getting a tattoo. "No," she'd whispered, "not them. I can't."

  Jack had boldly taken matters into his own small hands. He'd walked right up to that beautiful girl and said the lines he still said in his bed, to help him sleep. "Do you have a tattoo?"

  Well, that young man was Jack's father, of course--not that Jack knew it. Alice was offering William a last look at Jack before she and Jack left for Helsinki. (Jack didn't know who the girl was; not yet.) No one--certainly not Alice, least of all William--had expected Jack to approach the young couple, not to mention speak to them.

  What was the matter with the guy? Jack had wondered. The handsome, long-haired young man looked almost as if it pained him to see Jack; William had regarded Jack as if he'd never seen a child before. But whenever Jack had looked at him, William had looked away.

  And there'd been a bitterness in William's voice that made Jack look at him again--most notably when the young father had said to his son, "Maybe some other time."

  "Come with me, my little actor," Alice had whispered in Jack's ear, and Jack's dad closed his eyes--William didn't want to see his son go.

  It was after he'd checked into the Bristol in April of 1998--Jack was eating dinner alone in that quiet, old restaurant--when he realized he'd actually seen his father in that gloomy room.

  "Maybe some other time," William had said; then Jack had reached for his mother's hand, and she'd taken the boy away.

  William would have other sightings of Jack--in Helsinki and in Amsterdam, no doubt--but this might have been Jack's first and last look at his dad, and Jack had not known who William was!

  But who was the young woman, and why had William brought her? Were they really in love? William must have known he was going to see his son; Jack's father just hadn't expected the boy to speak. William wasn't prepared for that--neither was Alice. Obviously, Jack had s
urprised them both.

  It unnerved Jack to think he'd correctly remembered the meeting, but that he'd been wrong about when it happened; this made Jack not trust the seeming chronology of things. If he'd met his own father--not knowing that William was his father--on Jack and his mom's last night in Oslo instead of their first, when had his mother encountered Andreas Breivik? When had she offered Andreas a free tattoo? And when had Jack and Alice met the beautiful young girl with the speech impediment, Ingrid Moe?

  Jack recognized the Oslo Cathedral when the taxi dropped him at the front entrance to the Bristol--the dome that greenish color of turned copper, the clock tower large and imposing. He decided he would go there in the morning and speak with the organist; that the organist would turn out to be Andreas Breivik was not the only surprise in store for Jack.

  There was a new organ now--not the German-made Walcker, which Jack remembered had a hundred and two stops. (Even the organ that replaced the Walcker had been replaced.) The new one was special in its own way; Andreas Breivik told Jack all about it. If Breivik had been sixteen or seventeen when Alice seduced him--or gave him an invisible tattoo, as Alice might have put it--he was not a day over forty-five when he spoke with Jack in the Domkirke. But Andreas Breivik had made something of a maestro of himself, and his success had made him pompous.

  His blond, blue-eyed good looks had not endured. A man with delicate features had to be careful. Breivik's face was slightly puffy; perhaps he drank. He gave Jack a virtual lecture on the subject of the cathedral's new organ, which had been completed only a month before Jack's arrival in Oslo--by a Finn living in Norway. (Jack couldn't have cared less about the organ, or the Finn.)

  With a grandiose gesture to the green-and-gold instrument, which positively shimmered, Breivik said: "We have the funeral of King Olav the Fifth to thank for this. January 1991--I'll never forget it. The old Jorgensen was such a disgrace. The Prime Minister himself insisted that money be raised for a new organ."

  "I see," Jack said.

  Andreas Breivik had studied choral music in Stuttgart; he'd furthered his organ studies in London. (This hardly mattered to Jack, but he nodded politely; Breivik's education, not to mention his mastery of English, meant a great deal to Breivik.)

  "I've seen your films, of course--very entertaining! But you don't seem to have followed in your father's musical footsteps, so to speak."

  "No--no musical footsteps," Jack said. "I took after my mother, it seems."

  "Are you tattooed?" Breivik asked.

  "No. Are you?"

  "Good Lord, no!" Andreas Breivik said. "Your dad was a talented musician, a generous teacher, an engaging man. But his tattoos were his own business. We didn't discuss them. I never saw them."

  "Mr. Breivik, please tell me what happened. I don't understand what happened."

  Jack remembered the cleaning woman in the church--how horrified she'd been to see him and his mom. He recalled what little he'd understood of his mom's seduction of Andreas Breivik, and how Ingrid Moe had come to her for a tattoo--how Ingrid had wanted a broken heart and Alice had given the girl a whole one. But why had Alice insisted on talking to Ingrid Moe in the first place, and what information about Jack's father could either Ingrid or Andreas possibly have given Jack's mom? His dad hadn't run away; Alice hadn't been trying to find William. What was there about William that Alice didn't already know?

  Andreas Breivik was less pompous in relating this story; he wasn't proud of it, nor was it an easy story for him to tell. But the pattern, which Jack had failed to grasp till now, was really rather simple.

  Everywhere Jack and his mom went, after Copenhagen, they arrived ahead of his dad. Alice not only expected William to follow them--she knew how much William wanted to see his son--but Alice also knew ahead of time where William would be inclined to travel next. You didn't just choose a church and an organ, Breivik told Jack; these appointments took time to arrange. There was always an experienced organist with whom a relatively inexperienced organist wanted to study next, and the church where that mentor played had its own hierarchical way of choosing apprentices.

  No organist wanted more than a few students, and only the most gifted students were chosen. With an organ, because of how many notes there were to play, sight reading was mandatory. Students with very narrow tastes, or those who disliked certain core composers, were generally discouraged; most younger students were irritating, because they liked to practice only loud or flashy music.

  "You had to have a few irons in the fire," Andreas Breivik said. He meant that you had to be making plans way ahead of yourself. Where was the next organist you wanted to study with? What church? Which organ? In this world, you were both an apprentice and a teacher; as an apprentice, you also needed to go where you'd have students. (Not too many, but enough to pay the rent.)

  This was the way it worked: when William was still playing the organ at the Citadel Church in Denmark, he was already thinking about Sweden--about apprenticing himself to Torvald Toren, about playing the organ at the Hedvig Eleonora in Stockholm--and all the while he was in Stockholm, William was planning to come (eventually) to Oslo, where he could study with Rolf Karlsen and play the organ at the Domkirke.

  What Alice did, starting in Copenhagen, was to find out which irons in the fire were the hottest--what city was the next in line for William. Jack and his mom would go there, and Alice would establish herself; she would set up shop and wait for William to arrive. Then, systematically, Alice would set out to destroy the relationships William valued most. First of all, those friends he might have made in the church--possibly even the organist who was his mentor. But Alice more often chose easier targets; in the case of Oslo, she chose William's two best students, Andreas Breivik and Ingrid Moe.

  Contrary to what Jack had believed for twenty-eight years, his dad hadn't seduced Ingrid Moe. She was sixteen at the time, and engaged to be married to young Andreas Breivik. They'd been childhood sweethearts; they even played the same instruments, first the piano and then the organ. And William prized them as students--not only because they were talented and hardworking, but also because they were in love. (Having been in love with Karin Ringhof, William Burns had a high regard for young musicians in love.)

  "Your father was more than a terrific organist and a great teacher," Andreas Breivik told Jack. "In Oslo, the story of what had happened to him in Copenhagen preceded him. He was already a tragic figure."

  "So my mother seduced you?" Jack asked him.

  His once delicate, now slightly puffy features hardened. "I had known only Ingrid," Breivik said. "A young man who's had only one girlfriend is vulnerable to an older woman--perhaps especially to a woman with a reputation. Your mother put it to me rather bluntly: she said--she was teasing me, of course--'Andreas, you're really just another kind of virgin, aren't you?' "

  "Where did you tattoo him?" Jack remembered asking his mom.

  "Where he'll never forget it," she'd whispered to Jack, smiling at Andreas. (Possibly the sternum, Jack had imagined; that would explain why the young man had trembled at her touch.)

  "Just keep it covered for a day," Jack had said to Breivik, as the young organ student was leaving; it looked like it hurt him to walk. "It will feel like a sunburn," Jack had told him. "Better put some moisturizer on it."

  But Andreas didn't know anything. After the organ student had gone, Alice had sobbed, "If he'd known anything, he would have told me."

  She'd meant that Andreas Breivik didn't know what irons William had in the fire; the boy had no idea where William was thinking of going next. But Ingrid Moe knew, and Alice wasted little time in letting Ingrid know that she'd slept with the girl's fiance. Ingrid had never felt so betrayed. Her speech impediment isolated her; she'd always been shy about meeting people. Ingrid couldn't forgive Andreas for being unfaithful to her. It didn't help that Alice wouldn't leave the girl alone.

  Jack remembered that Sunday when his mom took the shirt cardboard to church--how she'd stood in the center aisl
e at the end of the service, with the shirt cardboard saying INGRID MOE held to her chest. Jack had thought Rolf Karlsen must have been playing the organ that Sunday, because everyone said Karlsen was such a big deal and the organ sounded especially good.

  But the organist that Sunday had been William Burns. It was the one time his father had played the organ for Jack, but--not unlike how the boy had met his dad in the restaurant at the Hotel Bristol--Jack didn't know it, and neither did William.

  "I'm sorry he hurt you," Alice had said to Ingrid Moe, when the girl had come to the hotel for her broken-heart tattoo. But the he had been Andreas Breivik, who'd slept with Jack's mother--not, as Jack had thought, his father, who had never slept with Ingrid Moe.

  Jack remembered how Ingrid's exquisite prettiness was marred by what an obvious strain it was for her to speak. Not that he'd understood her very well; for all these years, Jack had thought of her speech impediment as an agony connected with kissing. (When he'd imagined his father kissing the girl, Jack had felt ashamed.)

  "I won't do his name," Alice had told Ingrid.

  "I don't want his name," the girl had answered--clenching her teeth together when she talked, as if she were afraid or unable to show her tongue. She'd wanted just a heart, ripped in two.

  Then Alice had given her a whole heart instead--a perfectly unbroken one, as Jack recalled.

  "You didn't give me what I wanted!" Ingrid Moe had blurted out.

  "I gave you what you have, a perfect heart--a small one," Alice had told her.

  "I'm not telling you anything," the girl had said.

  She'd told Jack instead--"Sibelius," she'd said. Not the composer but the name of a music college in Helsinki, where William's next best students would come from. (New students were part of what Andreas Breivik meant by irons in the fire.)

  "Ingrid quit the organ," Andreas told Jack. "She went back to the piano, without much success. I stayed with the organ. I kept growing, as you have to," he said, with no small amount of pride. "Ingrid's marriage didn't have much success, either."