by John Irving
"You were the first woman I ever saw with unshaven armpits," he told Hannele. The astonishing hair in Hannele's armpits had been a darker blond than the hair on her head, although Jack didn't mention this detail--nor the birthmark over Hannele's navel, like a crumpled top hat the color of a wine stain, the shape of Florida.
Hannele laughed. "Most people remember my birthmark, not my armpits, Jack."
"I remember the birthmark, too," he told her.
Ritva was enduringly short and plump, with long hair and a pretty face. She still dressed all in black, like a drama student. "I remember how you fell asleep, Jack--how hard you were trying not to!" Ritva told him.
He explained that he'd thought, at the time, they had come for their half-a-heart tattoos because they'd both slept with his father.
"With William?" Hannele cried, spilling her tea. Ritva could not stop laughing.
They were the kind of gay women who were so comfortable with each other that they could flirt unselfconsciously with him, or with other young men, because they were confident that they wouldn't be misunderstood.
"I suppose I shouldn't be surprised," Hannele said. "William told us that your mom was capable of telling you anything, Jack. Ritva and I underestimated how far she would go."
Hannele explained that her relationship with Ritva was new and still uncommitted when Jack's mother had first hit on them; the young music students had even discussed sleeping with Alice as a kind of test of their relationship.
"It was 1970, Jack," Ritva said, "and Hannele and I were young enough to imagine that you could treat any relationship as an experiment."
William had warned them about Alice; he'd told Hannele and Ritva her history. Yet the girls had imagined that if they both were "unfaithful" with Jack's mother, they wouldn't hurt each other.
"It hurt us more than we expected," Hannele told Jack. "We decided to hurt your mother back. The tattoo we shared was a symbol of how we had hurt each other--a reminder to not be unfaithful to each other again, a reminder of what sleeping with your mom had cost us. And we let her know that we were brave enough to sleep with anybody--even with William."
"Of course we wouldn't have slept with William, Jack--not that your father would have slept with either of us," Ritva said. "But your mom was extremely sensitive about anyone your dad might sleep with, and it wasn't hard to convince her that Hannele and I were lawless."
"We even flirted with you, Jack--just to piss her off," Hannele said.
"Yes, I remember that part," Jack told them.
Their half-a-heart tattoos had been torn apart vertically; both women were tattooed on their heart-side breasts.
"You have eyelashes to die for, Jack," Hannele had told him. Under the covers, her long fingers had lifted his pajama top and stroked his stomach. When she was sleeping beside him, he'd almost kissed her.
"Go to sleep, Jack," his mom had told him.
"Tell me about the 'Sweet dreams' part," Jack asked Hannele and Ritva in their beautiful apartment. It was growing dark outside; the lights shone through the dome of the Church in the Rock like a fire burning windows in an eggshell. (Jack remembered that he'd thought "Sweet dreams" was something his dad probably said to all of his girlfriends.)
"He's not four anymore," Ritva said to Hannele, who was shaking her head. "Go on, tell him."
"It's what your mom whispered in our ears before she kissed us down there," Hannele said, averting her eyes from Jack's.
"Oh."
Ritva had said, "Sweet dreams," to Jack, before she'd kissed him good night. "Isn't that what you say in English?" she'd asked Alice. "Sweet dreams."
"Sometimes," Alice had said, and Hannele's brave whistling had stopped for a second--as if the pain of the shading needles on her heart-side breast and that side of her rib cage had suddenly become unbearable. But Jack had been sure it was the "Sweet dreams" that had hurt her, not the tattoo. (Talk about a not-around-Jack subject!)
Jack told Hannele and Ritva about his mother's surprisingly long-lasting relationship with Leslie Oastler--not that Alice hadn't probably had other, lesser relationships in the same period of time, but her relationship with another woman was the only one that had endured. Were Hannele and Ritva surprised at that? he asked.
The two women looked at each other and shrugged. "There wasn't anything your mom wouldn't do, Jack," Ritva said, "not if she could have an effect--almost any effect--on your dad."
"After William, I don't think Alice cared who she slept with," Hannele told him. "Man, woman, or boy."
The black-and-white photographs on the walls of the apartment were mostly of Hannele and Ritva--many concert photographs among them. There was one of Ritva on the organ bench in the Johanneksen kirkko, where Jack had gone with his mother--this had been following a heavy snowfall, he remembered. Flanking Ritva on the organ bench were her two teachers--Kari Vaara, the organist with the wild-looking hair, and a handsome, thin-lipped young man whose long hair fell to his shoulders, framing a face as delicate as a girl's.
"My father?" Jack asked Ritva, pointing to the picture. William looked almost the same as he had that night in the restaurant of the Hotel Bristol.
"Yes, of course," Ritva told Jack. "You haven't seen his picture before?"
"What are you thinking, Ritva?" Hannele asked. "Do you imagine Alice kept a photo album for Jack?"
What Jack was unprepared for was how young his father looked. In 1970, in Helsinki, William Burns would have been thirty-one--a couple of years younger than Jack was now. (It is strange to see, for the first time, a photograph of your father when he is younger than you are.) Jack was also unprepared for the resemblance; William looked almost exactly like Jack.
Of course William seemed small beside Ritva and Kari Vaara. William was a small but strong-looking man, not slight but somehow feminine in his features, and with an organist's long-fingered hands. (Jack had his mom's small hands and short, square fingers.)
William was wearing a long-sleeved white dress shirt, open at the throat--the organ pipes of the Walcker from Wurttemberg rising above him. Jack asked Hannele and Ritva about his father's tattoos.
"Never saw them," Hannele said. Ritva agreed; she'd never seen them, either.
In the bedroom, Jack saw black-and-white photographs of Hannele's and Ritva's tattoos--just their naked torsos, the hearts cut in half on their left breasts. At least the tattoos were as he'd remembered them, but Hannele had shaved her armpit hair; her hands, folded flat above her navel, hid her birthmark from the photographer.
It was a mild surprise to see that they had other tattoos. There was some music on Hannele's hip, and more music--it looked like the same music--on Ritva's buttocks. Like the photos of their shared heart, these were close-ups--only partial views. But they were such different body types, Jack had no difficulty telling Hannele and Ritva apart.
"What's the music?" he asked them.
"We played it earlier--before you came to the church," Ritva said. "It's another piece William taught us, a hymn he used to play in Old St. Paul's."
" 'Sweet Sacrament Divine,' " Hannele told Jack. She began to hum it. "We only know the music, not the words, but it's a hymn."
It sounded familiar; perhaps he'd heard it, or had even sung it, at St. Hilda's. Jack knew he'd heard his mom sing it in Amsterdam, in the red-light district. If it was something his dad used to play at Old St. Paul's, it was probably Anglican or Scottish Episcopal.
The old scratcher's name almost didn't come up, but Hannele--pointing to the black-and-white photo of the tattoo on her hip--just happened to say it. "It's not bad for a Sami Salo."
Jack told Hannele and Ritva the story of the scary night at the Hotel Torni, when Sami Salo had banged on the door--not to mention how Sami's noticeably younger wife, that tough-talking waitress at Salve, had told Alice she was putting Sami out of business.
Hannele was shaking her head again--her short, curly blond hair not moving. "Sami's wife was long gone before you and your mom came to town, Jack," R
itva said. "That waitress at Salve was Sami's daughter."
"Her name was Minna," Hannele told him. "She was William's friend, one of your dad's older women. I always thought it was a peculiar relationship, but Minna had gone through some hard times--like your dad. She had a child out of wedlock, and the child died as an infant--some upper-respiratory ailment."
"Your father wasn't looking for a girlfriend, Jack. He was probably still in love with the Dane," Ritva said. "Minna was just a comfort to him. I think that's all he thought he was good for, to be a comfort to someone. You know, it's that old Christian idea--you find someone down on their luck and you help them."
Certainly Agneta Nilsson, who'd taught William choral music in Stockholm--and Jack how to skate on Lake Malaren--was an older woman. Maybe Agneta had been down on her luck, too; after all, she'd had a bad heart.
"Look, we're musicians, Jack. Your dad was first and foremost a musician," Hannele said. "I'm not claiming an artist's license for how I live--William wasn't, either. But what sort of license was your mom taking? There wasn't anything she didn't feel entitled to!"
"Hannele, the slut was his mother--no matter what you say about her," Ritva said.
"If somebody dumps you, you move on," Hannele told Jack. "Your mom made a feature-length film out of it!"
"Hannele!" Ritva said. "We've seen all your movies, Jack. We can't imagine how you turned out so normal!"
Jack didn't feel normal. He couldn't stop thinking about the waitress with the fat arms--Minna, Sami Salo's daughter. How her arms had jiggled; how she'd been a friend of his father's!
So Jack's mother had undermined even that--a comfort relationship. Hannele doubted that his dad and Minna had ever had sex; Ritva thought they probably had. But what did it matter? Alice had convinced Sami Salo that his unlucky daughter could expect nothing but betrayal and heartbreak from William Burns. Sami couldn't wait for Alice and Jack to go to Amsterdam, where William would be bound to follow.
It was true that Sami Salo was a scratcher; even so, he wasn't losing that much business to Daughter Alice. As Hannele and Ritva explained to Jack, his mom tattooed mostly students at the Hotel Torni; even well-to-do students weren't inclined to spend their money on tattoos. Most of the sailors still went to Sami; at that time, sailors spent more money on tattoos than students did.
Jack also learned that Kari Vaara traveled--Vaara was always giving concerts abroad. William was what amounted to the principal organist at the Johanneksen kirkko, where he loved the church and the organ. He loved his students at Sibelius Academy, too--Ritva and Hannele being two of the better ones.
William would have no students in Amsterdam, where his duties at the Oude Kerk were so demanding that he had no time for teaching, too. "You mean the organ-tuning?" Jack asked Hannele and Ritva.
"The what?"
Jack explained what he'd been told: namely, that his dad's only real job in Amsterdam was tuning the organ in the Oude Kerk, which was indeed vast, as Kari Vaara had described it, but the organ was always out of tune.
"William couldn't tune a guitar, much less an organ!" Ritva cried.
"He only agreed to play the organ at the Oude Kerk if the church hired an additional organ-tuner," Hannele told Jack.
"There was already someone who tuned the organ before every concert, but--at your dad's insistence--the new organ-tuner came almost every day," Ritva said.
"It was every night," Hannele corrected her.
That's when Jack knew who the additional organ-tuner had been--the dough-faced youngster who, Alice had said, was a "child prodigy." The young genius who'd put baby powder on the seat of his pants so that he could more easily slide on the organ bench, which was also vast--Frans Donker, who'd played for Jack and his mom, and whatever whores were on hand, one night when he, the "child prodigy," was supposed to be tuning the organ.
"They say that in the Oude Kerk, one plays to both tourists and prostitutes!" Kari Vaara had told Alice and Jack. Vaara was very proud of William, Hannele and Ritva said. Vaara had called William his best student ever.
Yet Alice had wanted Jack to see his father as a mere organ-tuner; she had purposely discredited William in his son's eyes.
"Something happened in Amsterdam," Jack said to Hannele and Ritva. "My dad stopped following us--something must have happened."
Hannele was shaking her head again, the blond curls holding fast to her head. "The lawyer made a deal with your mother, Jack," Ritva said. "It was a hard deal, but someone had to stop her."
"It was no deal for William!" Hannele said angrily.
"It was the best deal for Jack, Hannele," Ritva said.
"I don't remember any lawyer," Jack told them. "What lawyer?"
"Femke somebody. I don't remember her last name," Hannele said. "She was some super divorce lawyer--she'd been through some big-deal divorce herself."
Well, it was almost funny that Jack had thought Femke was a prostitute; there'd been some preposterous story about her becoming a prostitute to embarrass her ex-husband. (Femke was rich, as Jack recalled, yet she'd become a whore!) What wouldn't you believe when you were four, and your mom was the manager of your so-called memories?
"Begin with the cop, Jack," Ritva said. "There was a cop--he was your dad's best friend."
"He got you out of there--he was your best friend, too, Jack," Hannele said.
"Yes, I remember him," Jack said. He was a nice guy, Nico Oudejans. Nico's eyes were a robin's-egg blue, and high on one cheekbone he had a small scar shaped like the letter L. "Naturally, I thought he was my mother's friend," Jack told Hannele and Ritva. "And I thought Femke was a prostitute!"
They were sitting on the leather couch in the living room, with the darkness now fallen over the glowing dome of the Church in the Rock. The two women flanked Jack on the couch; they put their arms around him.
"Jack, your mother was a prostitute. Femke was just a lawyer," Hannele said.
"My mom was a prostitute for just one night!" Jack blurted out. "She took only one customer--a young boy. She said he was a virgin."
The two women went on hugging him. "Jack, no one's a prostitute for just one night," Ritva said.
"There's no such thing as a prostitute who takes only one customer, Jack," Hannele told Jack. "Not to mention one virgin!"
"We should all have dinner tonight!" Ritva cried suddenly.
"Unless Jack has a date," Hannele said, teasing him. "I refuse to share Jack with a date." Jack just sat on the leather couch, staring at the darkness out the window.
"From the look of him, he's got a date," Ritva said.
"Yes, he's got a date. I can see it in his eyes," Hannele said.
"I'm sorry," Jack told them. He just didn't know how sorry--not yet.
The aerobics instructor was thirty-one weeks pregnant and expecting her second child.
"Same anonymous sperm donor?" Jack asked as nonchalantly as the circumstances permitted. They were both naked and in bed, in his hotel room at the Torni, and Marja-Liisa was pressing Jack's face against her big belly so that he could feel how a thirty-one-week-old fetus moved around in there.
"No, my husband died," she explained. "We were planning to have a second child, but it took me almost three years to get up the nerve to have the second one alone."
"Do you have a boy or a girl?"
"A four-year-old boy."
In the context of Jack's return trip to the North Sea, almost everything about a four-year-old boy was interesting to him; however, he sensed that this wasn't the time and place to tell Marja-Liisa how sorry he was to miss meeting her son. (Jack was leaving for Amsterdam very early in the morning.)
She said a friend was with the four-year-old, giving the boy his supper and putting him to bed. Marja-Liisa warned Jack that she couldn't stay late. It was unusual for her to stay out past her son's bedtime, and she was always back home, in her own bed, when the boy woke up in the morning.
The athleticism of the thirty-one-week-old fetus was a marvel to Jack--less so, the
lovemaking of the aerobics instructor. He'd never been in bed with a pregnant woman; Jack had no idea what to expect. He probably shouldn't have been concerned by how active Marja-Liisa was--that is, for a woman in her condition. (After all, he'd watched her lead the leaping women in the aerobics class, and Jack knew that most of the uncomfortable-looking positions he'd seen in the Schwangere Girls magazine could not have been faked.)
Jack realized only later what he had wanted, which was not to have sex with her but just to hold her while he fell asleep. All he really desired was his hand on her big belly, his hand imagining that there were two people he loved--not just a woman but also the child she was about to have. It had been a great way to fall asleep.
The knock on the door was quiet at first, then more insistent. It was not a Sami Salo kind of knocking, but one Jack was able to incorporate into his dream--in the dream, Jack was a father.
"Marja-Liisa, are you there?" said a man's voice in the hall. Then he must have asked the same question in Finnish.
The pregnant aerobics instructor had gone. Jack woke up alone in the bed; he went into the bathroom and wrapped a towel around his waist. There was a Hotel Torni envelope stuck to the mirror with a dab of his toothpaste. It was a clever way for her to have left him a note. He realized now that he must have been talking in his sleep.
My name is Marja-Liisa, not Michele. Who's Michele?
Jack crumpled up the envelope and threw it in the bathroom wastebasket. Clutching the towel around his waist, he went to see who was at the door. Jack had a bad feeling that he already knew who it was. "Marja-Liisa--I know you're there," the man was saying, only a little more loudly.
Until Jack opened the door, he didn't know that the man had brought the four-year-old with him. But what else could the poor guy have done? If you were a responsible father, you didn't leave a four-year-old alone.
There was no question in Jack's mind that the young man with the dark-blond hair was Marja-Liisa's husband--not her dead husband, either. (Nor did the young man look like an anonymous sperm donor.) Any doubts Jack might have had were dispelled by the boy; the four-year-old had his dad's dark-blond hair, but the child's oval face and almond-shaped eyes were exactly like his mother's.
