(2005) Until I Find You

by John Irving

  Jack’s eagerness to get a look at Herbert Hoffmann was less professional. Ole had told the boy that Hoffmann had a big bird tattooed on his ass—the entire left cheek of his bum was a peacock with its fan in full-feather display! And Jack’s curiosity about Tattoo Peter had less to do with his reputation as a tattoo artist than the tantalizing fact that he had one leg.

  But if seeing the German’s Herbert Hoffmanns made Alice wish she were in Hamburg, she was further disappointed that she was a whole week in Oslo before she got to tattoo a first-timer—“virgins,” Alice called them. Perhaps no one in Norway was seeking a pilgrim experience—at least not of that kind, or not at the Bristol.

  In their continuing gluttony at breakfast, which stood in flagrant contrast to their near-starvation tactics at lunch and dinner, Jack learned to prefer gravlaks to smoked salmon. The cloudberries, which were offered with repeated zeal to children at every meal, turned out to be quite good; and while it was impossible to avoid the reindeer in one form or another, Jack managed to resist eating the poor creature’s tongue. But despite limiting their lunches and dinners to appetizers and desserts, the cost of their food was greater than the amount Alice was earning. And no one in Oslo wanted to talk to them about William. In Norway, the alleged object of William’s desire (and his subsequent ruin) was a girl too young to be comfortably discussed—even among adults.

  From the front entrance of the Bristol, the view of the Oslo Cathedral is slightly uphill. From that perspective, the first dark morning they saw it, the Domkirke appeared to rise out of the middle of the road at the end of the long street marked by trolley tracks. But they never took the streetcar; the cathedral was within easy walking distance.

  “I’ll bet that’s the one,” Alice said.

  “Why?” Jack asked.

  “I just bet it is.”

  The Domkirke looked important enough to have an old organ with one hundred and two stops. A German-made Walcker, the organ had been rebuilt in 1883 and again in 1930. The exterior dated back to 1720. It had been painted gray in 1950—the original was green—and its grayness enhanced what was monumental and somber about the Walcker’s old baroque façade.

  The Oslo Cathedral was brick, the dome that greenish color of turned copper, and the tower clock was large and imposing. The clock’s face suggested an elevated self-seriousness, beyond Lutheran, as if the building’s purpose lay more in the enshrinement of sacred relics than in the usual business of a house of worship.

  Consistent with this impression was Jack and Alice’s first encounter with the church’s interior. There were no candles; the cathedral was illuminated by electric lights. Huge chandeliers were hung from the ceilings; old-fashioned bracket lamps cast a fake candlelight on the walls. The altar, which unmiraculously combined the Lord’s Last Supper with His Crucifixion, was as festooned with bric-a-brac as an antiques shop. The short, squat staircase leading to the pulpit was ornate, with wooden wreaths painted gold. Overhanging the pulpit, as if the firmament itself were about to fall down, was a floating island of angels—some of them playing harps.

  No one was playing the organ; not a soul was praying in a pew, either. Leaning on her mop as if it were a cane, only a cleaning woman was there to greet them—and she did so warily. As Alice would later explain to Jack, no one even marginally associated with the Domkirke wished to be reminded of William. Jack was a reminder.

  When the cleaning woman saw the boy, she froze. She drew in her breath and stiffened her arms, the mop held in both hands in front of her; it was as if her mop were the Holy Cross, and, clinging to it for protection, she hoped to fend Jack off.

  “Is the organist here?” Alice asked.

  “Which organist?” the cleaning woman cried.

  “How many are there?” Alice replied.

  Scarcely daring to take her eyes off Jack, the cleaning woman told Alice that a Mr. Rolf Karlsen was the organist in the Domkirke. He was “away.” The word away caused Jack to lose his concentration; the church suddenly seemed haunted.

  “Mr. Karlsen is a big man,” the cleaning woman was saying, although it wasn’t clear if big referred to his physical size or his importance—or both.

  No minister of the church was present, either, the cleaning woman went on. By now she was waving her mop like a magic wand, though such was her transfixed gaping at Jack that she was unaware of her efforts. Jack was looking everywhere for her pail, which he couldn’t find. (How can you work a mop without a pail? the boy was wondering.)

  “Actually,” Alice began again, “I was looking for a young organist, a foreigner named William Burns.”

  The cleaning woman closed her eyes as if in prayer, or with the hopeless conviction that her mop might turn into an actual crucifix and save her. She solemnly raised the mop and pointed it at Jack.

  “That’s his son!” the cleaning woman cried. “You’d have to be blind not to recognize those eyelashes.”

  It was the first time anyone had said Jack looked like his father. Jack’s mother stared at him as if she were aware of the resemblance for the first time; she seemed suddenly no less alarmed than the cleaning woman.

  “And you, poor wretch, must be his wife!” the cleaning woman told Alice.

  “I once wanted to be,” Alice answered. She held out her hand to the cleaning woman and said: “I’m Alice Stronach and this is my son, Jack.”

  The cleaning woman first wiped her hand on her hip, then gave Alice a firm handshake. Jack knew how firm it was because he saw his mom wince.

  “I’m Else-Marie Lothe,” the woman said. “God bless you, Jack,” she said to the boy. Remembering the clerk at the front desk of the Bristol, Jack didn’t shake her outstretched hand.

  Else-Marie would not discuss the details of what had happened, except to say that the entire congregation couldn’t put “the episode” behind them. Alice and her son should just go home, the cleaning woman told them.

  “Who was the girl this time?” Alice asked.

  “Ingrid Moe is not a girl—she’s just a child!” Else-Marie cried.

  “Not around Jack,” Alice said.

  The cleaning woman cupped Jack’s ears in her dry, strong hands and said something he couldn’t hear; nor could he hear his mother’s response, but there was no “poor wretch” in Else-Marie’s final remark to Alice. “No one will talk to you!” Else-Marie called after them, as they were leaving the Domkirke, her words echoing in the empty cathedral.

  “The girl will—I mean the child,” Alice said. “I’ll talk to Ingrid Moe!”

  But it was Jack’s impression that, when they came a second time to the Oslo Cathedral, they were shunned. The cleaning woman wasn’t there. A man on a stepladder was replacing burned-out lightbulbs in the bracket lamps mounted on the walls. He was too well dressed to be a janitor. (An especially conscientious parishioner, perhaps—the church’s self-appointed fussbudget.) And whoever he was, it was clear that he knew who Jack and Alice were—he wasn’t talking.

  “Do you know William Burns, the Scotsman?” Alice asked, but the man just walked away. “Ingrid Moe! Do you know her?” Alice called after him. Although the lightbulb man kept walking, Jack had seen him flinch. (And there was that overfamiliar sound of the camera shutter again—when Jack was holding his mother’s hand in front of the Domkirke. Someone took their picture as they were about to return to the Bristol.)

  Finally, on a Saturday morning, an unseen organist was playing. Jack reached for his mother’s hand, and she led the boy to the organ. He would wonder, only later, how she knew the way.

  The organist sat one floor above the nave; to reach the organ, you needed to climb a set of stairs in the back of the cathedral. The organist was so intent on his playing that he didn’t see Jack and Alice until they were standing right beside him.

  “Mr. Rolf Karlsen?” Alice’s voice doubted itself. The young man on the organ bench was a teenager—in no way could he have been Rolf Karlsen.

  “No,” the teenager said. He’d instantly stopped pla
ying. “I’m just a student.”

  “You play very well,” Alice told him. She let go of Jack’s hand and sat down on the bench beside the student.

  He looked a little like Ladies’ Man Lars—blond and blue-eyed and delicate, but younger and untattooed. No one had broken his nose, which was as small as a girl’s, and he was without Lars’s misbegotten goatee. His hands had frozen on the organ stops; Alice reached for his nearer hand and pulled it into her lap.

  “Look at me,” she whispered. (He couldn’t.) “Then listen,” she said, and began her story. “I used to know a young man like you; his name was William Burns. This is his son,” she said, with a nod in Jack’s direction. “Look at him.” (He wouldn’t.)

  “I’m not supposed to talk to you!” the student blurted out.

  With her free hand, Alice touched his face, and he turned to her. A son sees his mother in a certain way; especially when he was a child, Jack Burns thought his mom was so beautiful that she was hard to look at when she put her face close to his. Jack understood why the young organist shut his eyes.

  “If you won’t talk to me, I’ll talk to Ingrid Moe,” Alice told him, but Jack had shut his eyes—in sympathy with the student, perhaps—and whenever the boy’s eyes were closed, he didn’t hear very well. There were too many distracting things happening in the dark.

  “Ingrid has a speech impediment,” the student was saying. “She doesn’t like to talk.”

  “Not a choirgirl, I guess,” Alice said. Both Jack and the young man opened their eyes.

  “No, certainly not,” the teenager answered. “She’s an organ student, like me.”

  “What’s your name?” Alice asked.

  “Andreas Breivik,” the young man said.

  “Do you have a tattoo, Andreas?” He appeared too stunned by the question to answer her; it was not a question he’d expected. “Do you want one?” Alice whispered to him. “It doesn’t hurt, and—if you talk to me—I’ll give you one for free.”

  One Sunday morning, before church, Jack sat in the breakfast room at the Bristol, stuffing his face even more than usual. His mom had told him that if he stayed in the breakfast room while she gave Andreas his free tattoo, Jack could eat as much as he wanted. (She wouldn’t be there to stop him.) He’d been back to the buffet table twice before he began to doubt the wisdom of his second serving of sausages, and by then it was too late; the sausages were running right through him.

  Although his mother had instructed him to wait for her in the breakfast room—she would join him for breakfast when she had finished with Andreas, she’d said—it was clear to Jack that he was in immediate need of a toilet. There must have been a men’s room on the ground floor of the Bristol, but the boy didn’t know where it was; rather than risk not finding it in time, he ran upstairs and along the carpeted hall to their hotel room, where he pounded on the door for his mother to let him in.

  “Just a minute!” she kept calling.

  “It’s the sausages!” Jack cried. He was bent over double when Alice finally opened the door.

  Jack raced into the bathroom and closed the door behind him, so quickly that he hardly noticed the unmade bed or his mom’s bare feet—or that Andreas Breivik was zipping up his jeans. The student’s shirt was untucked and unbuttoned, but Jack hadn’t spotted the tattoo. Andreas’s face looked puffy, as if he’d been rubbing it—especially in the area of his lips.

  Maybe he’d been crying, Jack thought. “It doesn’t hurt,” Alice had promised, but Jack knew it did. (Some tattoos more than others, depending on where you were tattooed and the pigments that were used—certain colors were more toxic to the skin.)

  When Jack came out of the bathroom, both his mother and Andreas were fully dressed and the bed was made. The tattoo machines, the paper towels, the Vaseline, the pigments, the alcohol, the witch hazel, the glycerine, the power pack, the foot switch—even the little paper cups—had all been put away. In fact, Jack didn’t remember seeing any of that stuff when he raced through the bedroom on his way to the bathroom.

  “Did it hurt?” Jack asked Andreas.

  Either the young organ student hadn’t heard the boy or he was in a state of shock, recovering from the pain of his first tattoo; he stared at Jack, dumbfounded. Alice smiled at her son and rumpled his hair. “It didn’t hurt, did it?” she asked Andreas.

  “No!” he cried, too loudly. Probably he was in denial. Not another Rose of Jericho on the rib cage, Jack guessed; there hadn’t been time. Something small in the kidney area, maybe.

  “Where did you tattoo him?” Jack asked his mom.

  “Where he’ll never forget it,” she whispered, smiling at Andreas. Possibly the sternum, Jack imagined; that would explain why the teenager trembled at Alice’s touch. She was pushing him, albeit gently, toward the door; it looked as though it hurt him to walk.

  “Just keep it covered for a day,” Jack told Andreas. “It will feel like a sunburn. Better put some moisturizer on it.”

  Andreas Breivik stood stupefied in the hall, as if even these simple instructions were bewildering. Alice waved good-bye to him as she closed the door.

  By the way Jack’s mother sat down on the bed, Jack knew she was tired. She lay back, with her hands behind her head, and began to laugh in a way her son recognized; it was the kind of laughter that quickly turned to tears, for no apparent reason. When she started to cry, Jack asked her—as he often did—what was the matter.

  “Andreas didn’t know anything,” Alice sobbed. When she got control of herself, she added: “If he’d known anything, he would have told me.”

  They would be late for church if Alice paused now for breakfast; besides, she said, Jack had eaten enough breakfast for both of them.

  Whenever they had their laundry done at the Bristol, it was returned with shirt cardboards; their clothes were folded among the shirt cardboards like sandwiches. Jack watched his mom take one of these stiff white pieces of cardboard and write on it in capital letters with the kind of felt-tipped pen she used to mark her tubes of pigment. The black lettering read: INGRID MOE.

  Alice put the shirt cardboard under her coat and they walked uphill to the Domkirke. The Sunday service had already begun when they arrived. The organ was playing; the choir was singing the opening hymn. If there’d been a procession, they’d missed it. Jack was thinking that the great (or at least big) Rolf Karlsen must have been playing the organ, because the organ sounded especially good.

  The church was nearly full; they sat in the back pew on the center aisle. The minister who gave the sermon was the lightbulb man. He must have said something about Jack and Alice, because in the middle of his sermon a few anxious faces turned their way with expressions that were both pained and kind.

  There was nothing for Jack to do but stare at the ceiling of the cathedral, where he saw a painting that frightened him. A dead man was stepping out of a grave. Jack was sure that Jesus was holding the dead man’s hand, but that made the boy no less afraid of the walking corpse.

  Suddenly the minister pointed to the ceiling and read aloud from the Bible in Norwegian. It was strangely comforting to Jack that the parishioners were all staring at the frightening painting with him. (It would be years before Jack understood the illustration or saw the English translation, which was of that moment in John 11, verses 43 and 44, when Jesus brings Lazarus back to life.)

  Now when He said these things, He cried with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come forth!”

  And he who had died came out bound hand and foot with graveclothes, and his face was wrapped with a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Loose him, and let him go.”

  When the minister cried, “Lazarus,” Jack jumped. Lazarus and Jesus were the only words he’d understood, but at least he knew the dead man’s name; this was strangely comforting, too.

  When the service was over, Alice stood in the center aisle beside their pew with the shirt cardboard held to her chest. Upon leaving the church, everyone had to walk by her and the sign saying INGRID MOE. A boy abou
t Jack’s age was the acolyte; he led the congregation out, carrying the cross. He passed Alice in the aisle, his eyes cast down. The minister, whom Jack thought of as the lightbulb man, was the last to come up the aisle; normally, he was the first to follow the acolyte, but he had purposely lingered behind.

  He stopped beside Alice with a sigh. The lightbulb man’s voice was gentle when he spoke. “Please go home, Mrs. Burns,” the minister said.

  If she’d noticed the Mrs. Burns, Alice made no attempt to correct him; maybe, on his part, it was not a misunderstanding but another kindness.

  The minister put his hand on her wrist, and, shaking his head, said: “God bless you and your son.” Then he left.

  Jack concluded that, since even the cleaning lady had blessed him, they were big on God-bless-yous in Norway. Certainly Lazarus, leaving his grave, seemed predisposed to offer a blessing.

  Back at the Bristol, Alice sipped her soup. (That was their lunch—just the soup.) But if Alice had lost her enthusiasm for spotting future tattoo clients, Jack thought he saw one. A young girl stared at them from the entrance to the dining room; she had a child’s face on an overlong body, and she refused to let the maître d’ show her to a table. Jack doubted that his mother would tattoo her. Alice had her rules. You had to be a certain age, and this baby-faced girl looked too young to be tattooed.

  The instant Alice saw her, she knew it was Ingrid Moe. Alice told the waiter to bring another chair to the table, where the tall, awkward-looking girl reluctantly joined them. She sat on the edge of her chair with her hands on the table, as if the silverware were organ stops and she were preparing to play; her arms and fingers were absurdly long for her age.

  “I’m sorry he hurt you. I’m sorry for you that you ever met him,” Alice told the young girl. (Jack assumed his mom meant his dad. Who else could she have meant?)