by John Irving
5
Failure in Finland
They took the long trip back to Stockholm, the way they had come—then sailed from Stockholm to Helsinki, an overnight voyage through the Gulf of Finland. It was so cold that the salt spray froze on Jack’s face if he stood outside for more than a minute. Undaunted by the weather, some Finns and Swedes were drinking and singing songs on the icy deck until midnight. Alice observed that they were also throwing up—with best results to the leeward side of the ship. In the morning, Jack saw some Finns and Swedes who had suffered the misfortune of throwing up to the windward side of the vessel.
Alice found out from the drunks, many of them young people, that the hotel in Helsinki best suited to a tattoo artist’s circumstances was the Hotel Torni, where the so-called American Bar was a hangout for well-off students. One of the Finns or Swedes on deck referred to it as the place where you went to meet brave girls. “Brave girls” were right up Daughter Alice’s alley, since she took “brave” to mean that the girls (and the boys who wanted to meet them) would be open to being tattooed.
The hotel itself had seen better days. Because the old iron-grate elevator was “temporarily” out of service and they were on the fourth floor, Jack and Alice became well acquainted with the stairs, which they climbed holding hands. They had a room without a bath or a toilet. There was a sink, although they were advised not to drink the water, and a view of what appeared to be a secondary school. Jack sat on the window seat and looked with longing at the pupils; they seemed to have many friends.
The bath and the WC, which Jack and his mother shared with some other guests on the floor, were a fair hike down the twisting hall. The hotel had a hundred rooms; one day, when Jack was bored, he made his mom count them with him. Fewer than half had their own bathrooms.
Yet Alice had been right to choose the Torni. From the beginning of their stay, she did a brisk business among the clientele at the American Bar. While only a few of the girls Jack saw were beautiful—and he had no experience with whether or not they were brave—many of them, as well as even more of the boys, were courageous about being tattooed. But in the tattoo business, drunks are bleeders; in Helsinki, Jack saw his mother go through a lot of paper towels.
In a week’s time, Alice was earning almost as much money as she’d made at Tattoo Ole’s in the Christmas season. Jack often fell asleep to the sound of the tattoo machine. Once again you could say they were sleeping in the needles.
At the restaurant called Salve, Jack and Alice took an opinionated waitress’s advice—they ordered the poached Arctic char instead of the fried whitefish or the freshwater pike-perch. For a first course, they politely tried the reindeer tongue, largely because it was an increasing burden to avoid it; to Jack’s surprise, the tongue was not rubbery and tasted good. And for dessert, he had the cloudberries. They were a dark-gold color, and the slight sourness of the fruit contrasted nicely with vanilla ice cream.
Jack’s mom waited until he’d finished his dessert before she asked the waitress if she knew where to get a tattoo. It was not the answer Alice expected.
“I hear there’s a woman at the Hotel Torni,” the waitress began. “She’s a guest at the hotel, a foreigner—a good-looking woman, but a sad one.”
“Sad?” Alice asked. She seemed surprised. Jack couldn’t look at her; even he knew she was sad.
“That’s what I hear,” the waitress replied. “She’s got a little boy with her, just like you,” she added, looking at Jack.
“I see,” Alice said.
“She hangs out at the American Bar, but she does the tattooing in her hotel room—sometimes while the kid’s asleep,” the waitress went on.
“That’s very interesting,” Alice said. “But I was looking for someone else, another tattoo artist—probably a man.”
“Well, there’s Sami Salo, but the woman at the Torni is better.”
“Tell me about Sami Salo,” Alice said.
The waitress sighed. She was a short, stout woman whose clothes were too tight; her feet appeared to hurt her. She squinted whenever she took a step, and her fat arms jiggled, but she wasn’t much older than Jack’s mother. Under her apron, she kept a dish towel with which she commenced to wipe the table down.
“Listen, dearie,” the waitress told Alice in a low voice. “You don’t want to bother Sami. He already knows where to find you.”
Alice seemed surprised again; maybe she hadn’t realized that the waitress knew she was the tattoo artist at the Hotel Torni. But they hadn’t been hard to figure out. In Helsinki, who else fit the description of a young woman and a little kid who spoke American-sounding English?
“I want to meet Sami Salo,” Alice said to the waitress. “I want to ask him if he’s tattooed someone I know.”
“Sami Salo doesn’t want to meet you,” the waitress told her. “You’re putting him out of business, and he’s not happy about it. That’s what I hear.”
“I’m impressed by all you manage to hear,” Alice said.
The waitress turned her gruff attention to Jack. “You look tired,” she told him. “Are you getting enough sleep? Is all the tattooing keeping you awake?”
Jack’s mom stood up from the table and held out her hand to her son. The restaurant was noisy and crowded; Finns can be loud when they eat and drink. The boy didn’t quite catch what his mother told the waitress. He could only guess it was something along the lines of “Thank you for your concern”; or more likely, “If you want to stop by the Torni some evening, I’ll be happy to tattoo you where it really hurts.” Alice might also have given the waitress a message for Sami Salo; that the waitress and Sami were friends was pretty obvious, even to Jack.
They didn’t go to Salve again. They ate at the Torni and called the American Bar their home.
But what about the church? Jack would wonder, as he was falling asleep. Why weren’t they asking someone about the particular organ his father might be playing in Helsinki? Where were the destroyed young women who’d had the bad luck to meet William here? And what about Sibelius?
Jack wondered if his mom was growing tired of looking for his dad—or, worse, if she was suddenly afraid of finding him. Maybe it had occurred to her how awful it would be to finally confront William, only to have him walk away with a shrug. Surely William must have known they were looking for him. Church music and tattooing were both small worlds. What if William decided to confront them? What would they have to say for themselves? Did they actually want him to stop running and live with them? Live with them where?
Helsinki is a hard place to be afflicted with self-doubts. Alice appeared to be unsure of herself. She would not get up at night to go to the bathroom without waking Jack and forcing him to walk down the hall with her; she wouldn’t let him leave the hotel room by himself, either. (Some nights Jack peed in the sink.) And those evenings when she roamed the American Bar, soliciting clients, Jack often watched her from the crow’s-nest perspective of the iron-grate elevator, which was frozen in seemingly permanent disrepair on the floor above the bar.
Whenever a prospective client decided to get a tattoo, Alice would look up at the out-of-service elevator and nod her head to Jack, who was suspended in it like a boy in a birdcage.
Jack would watch Alice lead the client to the stairs. Then he exited the elevator and ran up the stairs to the fourth floor ahead of them. He was usually waiting by the door to their room when his mother brought the tattoo customer down the hall.
“Why—fancy seeing you, Jack!” his mom would always say. “Is it a tattoo you’ve come for?”
“No, thank you,” Jack would always reply. “I’m too young to be tattooed. I’m just an observer.”
It may have been a silly ritual, but it was their routine and they stuck to it. The client recognized that they were a team.
By their third week in Helsinki, Jack had forgotten all about Sibelius. Two young women (brave-looking girls) approached Alice in the American Bar. They asked her about a tattoo—one they wanted t
o share. In the elevator, one floor above them, Jack couldn’t really hear what they were saying.
“You can’t share a tattoo,” he thought his mother said.
“Sure we can,” the tall one replied.
Maybe the short one said, “We shared you-know-what together. Sharing a tattoo can’t be that bad.”
From the broken elevator, Jack saw his mom shake her head—not her usual signal. He’d seen her say no to young men who were too drunk to be tattooed, or to two or more men; she wouldn’t take more than one man at a time to their room. These two women, Tall and Short, were different; they made Alice seem awkward. Jack thought that his mother might already know them.
Alice abruptly turned and walked away. But the brave girls followed her; they kept talking to her, too. Jack got out of the elevator when he saw his mom start up the stairs. Tall and Short came up the stairs behind her.
“We’re not too young, are we?” the tall one was asking.
Alice shook her head again; she just kept walking up the stairs with the two young women following her.
“You must be Jack,” the short one said, looking up the stairs at the boy. It seemed to Jack that she even knew where to look for him. “We’re both music students,” the short one told him. “I’m studying church music, both choral and the organ.”
Alice stopped on the staircase as if she were out of breath. The two girls caught up to her on the half-landing between the first and second floors. Jack stood waiting for his mom on the second-floor landing, looking down at the three of them.
“Hello, Jack,” the tall girl said to the boy. “I play the cello.”
She wasn’t as tall as Ingrid Moe—nor as breathtakingly beautiful—but she had the same long hands. Her curly blond hair was cut as short as a boy’s, and over a cotton turtleneck she wore a grungy ski sweater with a small herd of faded reindeer on it.
The other girl, the short one, was plump with a pretty face and long, dark hair that fell to her breasts. She wore a short black skirt with black tights, knee-high black boots, and a black V-neck sweater that was too big for her. The sweater was very soft-looking and had no reindeer on it.
“Music students,” Alice repeated.
“At Sibelius Academy, Jack,” the tall young woman said. “Did you ever hear of it?” The boy didn’t answer her; he kept looking at his mother.
“Sibelius . . .” Alice said—in a way that implied the name hurt her throat.
The short, plump girl with the pretty face looked up the stairs and smiled at Jack. “You’re definitely Jack,” she said.
The tall one came up the stairs two at a time. She knelt at Jack’s feet and framed his face in her long hands, which were slightly sticky. “Look at you, Jack,” she said; her breath smelled like chewing gum, a fruit flavor. “You’re a dead ringer for your dad.”
Jack’s mother came up the stairs with the short girl beside her. “Take your hands off him,” Alice told the tall girl, who stood up and backed away from the boy.
“Sorry, Jack,” the tall girl said.
“What do you want?” Alice asked the music students.
“We told you—a tattoo,” the short girl answered.
“We also wanted to see what Jack looked like,” the tall young woman confessed.
“I hope you don’t mind, Jack,” the short one said.
But Jack was four. How is it possible that he remembered, with any accuracy, what Tall and Short truly said? Isn’t it more likely that, for days—for weeks, even months—after he met these girls, he would ask his mother the meaning of that conversation on the stairs in the Hotel Torni, and his mom would tell him what she wanted him to hear? It might not be Tall’s and Short’s actual words that he “remembered,” but Alice’s unalterable interpretation of William abandoning them.
There would be times when Jack Burns felt he was still on those stairs—not only because the elevator was more than temporarily out of service, but also because Jack would spend years trying to discern the difference between his mother’s version of his father and who his father really was.
Jack did remember this: when his mom started up the stairs again, he had not let go of her hand. The music students kept pace with them, all the way to their floor. Jack could tell that his mother was agitated because she stopped at the door to their room and fumbled around in her purse for the key. She’d forgotten that Jack had it—that was part of their routine.
“Here,” he said, handing the key to her.
“You could have lost it,” she told him. Jack didn’t know what to say; he’d not seen her so distracted.
“Look, we just wanted to meet Jack,” the tall young woman went on.
“The idea for the tattoo came later,” the short one said.
Alice let them into the room. Again it seemed to Jack that his mom already knew them. Inside the room, Alice turned on all the lights. The tall girl knelt at Jack’s feet once more. She might have wanted to take his face in her hands again, but she restrained herself—she just looked at him.
“When you get older, Jack,” she said, “you’re going to know a lot of girls.”
“Why?” the boy asked.
“Be careful what you tell him,” Alice said.
The short girl with the pretty face and long hair knelt at Jack’s feet, too.
“We’re sorry,” the two girls said, in chorus. Jack couldn’t tell if they were speaking to him or to his mom.
Alice sat down on the bed and sighed. “Tell me about this tattoo you want to share,” she said, staring at a neutral zone between the two young women—purposely not looking at either one of them. Alice must have sensed an aura of wantonness about these brave girls, and she knew Jack was affected by them.
The tattoo Tall and Short wanted to share was another variation of a broken heart—this one torn apart vertically. The left side would be tattooed on the heart-side breast of the tall young woman; the right side would go on the heart-side breast of the short one. Not a very original idea, but even Jack was learning that there was little originality in the instinct to be tattooed. Not only were broken hearts fairly common; the ways to depict them were limited, and the part of the body where a depiction of a broken heart belonged was self-evident.
In those days, a tattoo was still a souvenir—a keepsake to mark a journey, the love of your life, a heartbreak, a port of call. The body was like a photo album; the tattoos themselves didn’t have to be good photographs. Indeed, they may not have been very artistic or aesthetically pleasing, but they weren’t ugly—not intentionally. And the old tattoos were always sentimental; you didn’t mark yourself for life if you weren’t sentimental.
How could tattoos be original, when what they signified was something ordinary? Your feelings for your mother; the lover who left you; the first time you went to sea. But these were mostly maritime tattoos—clearly sailors were sentimental souls.
So were these music students, Tall and Short. They may have been vulgar, but Alice didn’t seem to hate them—and they were old enough to be tattooed. Even to Jack, they were noticeably older than Ingrid Moe.
The tall one’s name was Hannele; under her faded-reindeer sweater and the cotton turtleneck, she wasn’t wearing a bra. Despite Jack’s precocious interest in breasts, what struck him most about Hannele was that her armpits were unshaven. She was a broad-shouldered young woman with breasts not much bigger than Ingrid Moe’s, and the astonishing hair in her armpits was a darker blond than the hair on her head. Over her navel, like a crumpled top hat the color of a wine stain, was a birthmark the shape of Florida.
When Alice began with the Jonesy roundback, Hannele pursed her lips and whistled. Jack had trouble following the tune over the sound of the tattoo machine. Hannele had placed herself on the window seat, with her legs spread wide apart. It was a most unladylike position, but Hannele was wearing blue jeans and she was, after all, a cellist; no doubt she sat that way when she played.
Years later, when a naked woman played the cello for Jack, he would
remember Hannele and wonder if she’d ever performed naked for William. Jack would again feel ashamed that he might have such a moment in common with his dad. He would understand what must have attracted William to Hannele. She was a brave girl, without question; she went right on whistling, even when Alice’s outline of her half-a-heart touched her rib cage.
While Alice was shading Hannele’s broken heart with the Rodgers, Jack sat on the big bed with the short, plump girl. Her name was Ritva; she had bigger breasts than Hannele, and Jack was trying to stay awake until it was Ritva’s turn to get her half-a-heart.
He must have looked sleepy because his mom said: “Why don’t you brush your teeth, Jack, and get into your pajamas.”
The boy got up and brushed his teeth in the sink, where he was repeatedly told not to drink the water. Alice kept a pitcher of drinking water on the washstand, and Jack was instructed to rinse his mouth out with the drinking water after he brushed his teeth.
He put on his pajamas while hiding behind the open door to the wardrobe closet, so that neither Ritva nor Hannele would see him naked. Then he got back on the bed beside Ritva, who pulled the bedcovers down. Jack lay still, with his head on the pillow, while Ritva tucked him in. There was only the sound of the tattoo machine and Hannele’s faint but brave whistling.
“Sweet dreams, Jack,” Ritva said; she kissed him good night. “Isn’t that what you say in English?” she asked Alice. “ ‘Sweet dreams’?”
“Sometimes,” Alice said. Jack noticed the truculence in her voice; it seemed unfamiliar to him.
Maybe “sweet dreams” was a phrase William used. It could have been something he’d said to Alice and Ritva and Hannele—because Hannele’s brave whistling stopped for a second, as if the pain of the shading needles on her left breast and that side of her rib cage had suddenly become unbearable. Jack guessed it was the “sweet dreams” that had hurt her, not the tattoo.
The boy was fighting sleep; involuntarily, his eyes would close and he would reach out his hand and feel Ritva’s soft sweater and the fingers of her warm hand closing around his smaller fingers.
