by John Irving
Jack might have heard his mother say, “I don’t suppose you know where he’s gone.”
“He didn’t tell us,” Hannele may have answered, between whistles.
“He’s got you and Jack hounding him,” Jack distinctly heard Ritva tell his mom. “I guess that’s enough.”
“He said ‘hounding,’ did he?” Alice asked.
“I said it,” Ritva told her.
“We say it all the time,” Hannele said.
“Wouldn’t you agree that Jack is his responsibility?” Alice asked them.
They both agreed that Jack was his father’s responsibility, but this was one of those Helsinki conversations that the boy at best half heard in his sleep. Jack woke once and saw Ritva’s pretty face smiling down at him; from her expression, he knew she must have been imagining his dad in the unformed features of Jack’s face. (Even today, Jack occasionally saw that pretty face in his dreams—or when he was falling asleep.)
He never did get to see Ritva’s plump breasts—or learn if her armpits were unshaven, like Hannele’s. When he woke again, Hannele’s sleeping face was on the pillow beside him; she was wearing the cotton turtleneck but not the ski sweater. She must have fallen asleep while she was waiting for Alice to be finished with Ritva’s half-a-heart tattoo. Jack could hear the tattoo machine, but his mother blocked the boy’s view of Ritva’s breasts and armpits. Over his mom’s shoulder, Jack could see only Ritva’s face; her eyes were tightly closed and she was grimacing in pain.
Hannele’s sleeping face was very close to Jack’s. Her lips were parted; her breath, which had lost the fruity scent of her chewing gum, was faintly bad. Her hair gave off a sweet-and-sour smell—like hot chocolate when it’s stood around too long and turned bitter in the cup. Jack still wanted to kiss her. He inched his face nearer hers, holding his breath.
“Go to sleep, Jack,” his mom said. Her back was to him; he had no idea how she knew he was awake.
Hannele’s eyes opened wide; she stared at Jack. “You have eyelashes to die for,” she said. “Isn’t that what you say in English?” Hannele asked Alice. “ ‘To die for’?”
“Sometimes,” Alice said.
Ritva choked back a sob.
Under the covers, Hannele’s long fingers lifted Jack’s pajama top and tickled his stomach. (Even today, he sometimes felt those fingers in his dreams—or when he was falling asleep.)
The knock on the hotel-room door was abrupt and loud; it woke Jack from a dream. The room was dark. His mother, snoring beside him, hadn’t stirred. The boy recognized her snore. He knew it was her hand, not Hannele’s, on his hip.
“Someone’s at the door, Mom,” Jack whispered, but she didn’t hear him.
The knock came again, louder than before.
Occasionally the clientele at the American Bar got restless, waiting for Alice to return to the bar. Some drunk who wanted a tattoo would come to the room and pound on the door. Alice always sent the drunks away.
Jack sat up in bed and said in a shrill voice: “Too late for a tattoo!”
“I don’t want a tattoo!” a man’s angry voice shouted from the hall.
Jack had not seen his mother so startled since the night of the littlest soldier. She sat bolt-upright in bed and clutched Jack to her. “What do you want?” she cried.
“You want to know about The Music Man, don’t you?” the man’s voice answered. “Well, I tattooed him. I know all about him.”
“Sami Salo?” Alice asked.
“Let’s make a deal,” Salo said. “First you open the door.”
“Just a minute, Mr. Salo.”
Alice got out of bed and covered her nightgown with a robe. She took out her flash, her best work, and spread it over the bed. Jack, in his pajamas, lay adrift in the maritime world—a child on a bed of hearts and flowers, ships in full sail, and half-naked girls in grass skirts. The four-year-old lay amid snakes and anchors, among Sailor’s Graves and Roses of Jericho, and his mom’s version of Man’s Ruin. There was her Key to My Heart and her Naked Lady (from the back side) with Butterfly Wings—the latter emerging from a tulip.
The boy lay among her flash as if he’d just awakened from a tattoo dream. When Alice opened the door to Sami Salo, she stepped aside and let him walk past her into her world. He was a scratcher, as Alice had guessed; she knew he could never avert his eyes from her superior work.
“The deal is . . .” Salo started to say; then he stopped. He scarcely glanced at Jack—the flash had seized his attention completely.
Sami Salo was a haggard-looking older man with a gaunt, soul-searching expression; he wore a navy-blue watch cap pulled down over his ears and a peacoat of the same color. He was sweating from wearing his winter clothes on his walk up four flights of stairs, and his breathing was ragged. He didn’t speak; he simply stared at Alice’s best work.
Salo’s favorite might have been a toss-up between Alice’s Rose of Jericho and her Key to My Heart—the key held horizontally against the naked lady’s breasts, the keyhole you-know-where. (The tattoo was unique among Alice’s naked ladies in that the lady was not seen from the back side.)
To judge him by his defeated expression, Sami Salo was his own version of Man’s Ruin. “The deal is . . .” Alice prompted him.
Salo removed his watch cap as if he were about to bow his head in prayer. He unbuttoned his peacoat, too, but he just stood there. He wore a dirty-white sweater under the peacoat; the faded-gray fingers of a skeleton’s hand reached above the crew neck of the sweater, as if holding Salo by the throat. It was as bad an idea as any tattoo Alice had ever seen—or so Jack concluded from his mother’s expression. It was a blessing that the rest of the skeleton was covered by the sweater.
Jack and Alice didn’t see any of Sami Salo’s other tattoos—nor was Salo in a mood to converse.
“The deal is,” he began again, “I tell you about The Music Man and you leave town. I don’t care where you go.”
“I’m sorry your business is suffering,” Alice told him.
He accepted her apology with a nod. Jack was embarrassed for the poor man; the boy buried his head under the pillows. “I’m sorry if my wife spoke rudely to you at the restaurant,” Salo may have said. “She doesn’t much like having to work nights.”
His wife would have been the opinionated waitress at Salve, Jack guessed. With his head under the pillows, the four-year-old found that the adult world seemed a nicer place. Even Jack could tell that Mr. Salo was a lot older than his overworked wife, who looked young enough to be his daughter.
Their apologies stated, there was little more that Alice and Sami Salo needed to say to each other.
“Amsterdam,” the scratcher said. “When I inked a bit of Bach on his backside, he said he was going to Amsterdam.”
“Jack and I will leave Helsinki as soon as we can arrange our travel,” Alice told him.
“You’re a talented lady,” Jack heard Salo say; he sounded as if he was already in the hall.
“Thank you, Mr. Salo,” Alice replied, closing the door.
At least Amsterdam was a town on their itinerary. Jack couldn’t wait to see Tattoo Peter, and his one leg.
“We mustn’t forget St. John’s Church, Jack,” his mother said. Jack had thought they were on their way to the shipping office, but he was wrong. “That was where your father played. We should at least see it.”
They were close to the sea. It had snowed overnight; the branches of the trees drooped with the heavy seaside snow.
“Johanneksen kirkko,” Alice told the taxi driver. (She even knew how to pronounce the name of the church in Finnish!)
St. John’s was huge—a red-brick Gothic edifice with two towers, the twin spires shining a pale green in the sunlight. The wooden pews were a dark blond that reminded Jack of the hair in Hannele’s armpits. The church bells heralded their arrival. According to Alice, the three bells played the first three notes of Handel’s Te Deum.
“C sharp, E, F sharp,” the former choirgirl whispered.<
br />
The round altarpiece featured a tall, thin painting—the conversion of Paul on his way to Damascus. The organ was a Walcker from Württemberg, built in 1891. It had been restored in 1956 and had seventy-four registers. Jack knew that registers were the same as stops; he didn’t know if the number of registers made a difference in how loud an organ was, or how rich it sounded. (Since William Burns had been demonized in Jack’s eyes, the boy didn’t have a consuming interest in his father’s instrument.)
In Helsinki, on such a sunny day, the light through the stained glass sparkled on the pipes, as if the organ—even without an organist—was about to burst into sound all by itself. But the organist was there to greet them. Alice must have made an appointment to see him. His name was Kari Vaara, and he was a hearty man with wild-looking hair; he appeared to have, seconds ago, stuck his head out the window of a speeding train. His actions were marked by the nervous habit of clasping his hands together, as if he were about to make a life-altering confession or fall to his knees—the suddenly shattered witness to a miracle.
“Your father is a very talented musician,” Vaara said almost worshipfully to Jack, who was speechless; the boy wasn’t used to hearing his dad praised. “But talent must be nurtured, or it withers.” His voice sounded like the lower registers of an organ.
“We know about Amsterdam,” Alice interjected. She appeared fearful that Kari Vaara was about to reveal a terrible truth—something in the not-around-Jack category.
“Not just Amsterdam,” the organist intoned. Jack looked at the Walcker organ, half expecting it to issue a refrain. “He’s going to play in the Oude Kerk.”
The reverence with which Vaara spoke was wasted on Jack, but his mom was glad to know the church’s name.
“The organ there is special, I suppose,” Alice said.
Kari Vaara took a deep breath, as if he were once more preparing to stick his head out the window of that speeding train. “The organ in the Oude Kerk is vast,” he said.
Jack must have scuffed his feet or cleared his throat, because Vaara again turned his attention to him. “I told your father that big is not necessarily best, but he is a young man who must see for himself.”
“Yes, he has always had to see everything for himself,” Alice chimed in.
“Not always a bad thing,” Vaara offered.
“Not always a good thing,” Alice countered.
Kari Vaara leaned over Jack. The boy could smell the soap on the organist’s clasped hands. “Perhaps you have talent for the organ,” Vaara said. He unclasped his hands and spread his arms wide, as if to embrace the Walcker. “Would you like to play?”
“Over my dead body,” Alice said, taking Jack’s hand.
They went up the aisle and out of the Johanneksen kirkko. The sunlight was shimmering on the newfallen snow. “Mrs. Burns!” Vaara called after them. (Had she told him she was Mrs. Burns?) “They say that in the Oude Kerk, one plays to both tourists and prostitutes!”
“Not around Jack,” Alice said, over her shoulder. Their taxi driver was waiting; the shipping office was their next stop.
“I mean only that the church is in the red-light district,” Vaara explained.
Alice stumbled slightly, but she regained her balance and squeezed Jack’s hand.
There was mention of traveling by ship from Helsinki to Hamburg, and then taking the train from Hamburg to Amsterdam. But that was the long way to go, and perhaps Alice was afraid she might stay in Hamburg; her desire to meet and work with Herbert Hoffmann was that strong. (Maybe they wouldn’t have gone back to Canada; Jack might never have attended St. Hilda’s, and all the rest.) She’d sent Hoffmann so many postcards that Jack had memorized the address—8 Hamburger Berg. If they had sailed to Hamburg—if they’d seen St. Pauli and the Reeperbahn, and Herbert Hoffmann’s Tätowierstube at 8 Hamburger Berg—they might have stayed.
But they found passage on a freighter from Helsinki to Rotterdam. (In those days, freighters frequently had passenger accommodations.) Then they took the train from Rotterdam to Amsterdam, a short trip. Jack remembered that train ride. It was raining; some of the fields were flooded. It was still winter, but there wasn’t any snow. Out the window of the train, it looked as if spring would never come. Alice rested her forehead against the pane.
“Isn’t the glass cold?” Jack asked.
“It feels good,” she replied. “Maybe I have a fever.”
Jack felt her forehead—she didn’t feel too warm to him. She shut her eyes and nodded off. Across the aisle, a businessman-type kept glancing at Alice. Jack stared at the man until he looked away. Even at four, the boy could stare anybody down.
Jack was excited about Tattoo Peter’s one leg, and he must have been trying to imagine the size of the vast organ in the Oude Kerk. But a question of a different kind popped into his head.
“Mom?” he whispered. He had to speak a little louder to wake her from her sleep. “Mom?”
“Yes, my little actor,” she whispered back; she hadn’t opened her eyes.
“What is the red-light district?”
Alice gazed without seeing out the window of the rushing train. When she shut her eyes again, the businessman across the aisle sneaked another look at her. “Well,” Alice said, with her eyes still closed, “I guess we’re going to find out.”
6
God’s Holy Noise
After Amsterdam, Alice was a different woman—one whose small measure of self-confidence and sense of moral worth had been all but obliterated. Jack must have noticed that his mother had changed—not that he would have known why.
On the Zeedijk, the northeastern-most street of the red-light district, there was a tattoo parlor called De Rode Draak—The Red Dragon. The tattoo artist in that shop, Theo Rademaker, was called Tattoo Theo. The nickname mocked Rademaker because, in Amsterdam, he was forever in the shadow of Tattoo Peter.
Rademaker’s second-rate reputation didn’t discourage William Burns, who’d had Tattoo Theo etch a cramped fragment from Samuel Scheidt, “We All Believe in One God,” in a crescent shape on his coccyx. The music was partially obscured by the words, “Wir glauben all’ an einen Gott”—it was William’s first tattoo in Amsterdam.
He was later tattooed by Tattoo Peter, who told him Tattoo Theo’s work was amateurish and gave The Music Man a Bach tat-too—“Jesu, meine Freude” (“Jesus, My Joy”). Tattoo Peter wouldn’t say where—only that the music and the words were, in this case, not at war with each other.
His real name was Peter de Haan, and he was arguably the most famous tattoo artist of his day. Tattoo Peter’s lost leg was one of the more tantalizing mysteries of Jack’s childhood; it was a gift to the boy’s imagination that his mom refused to tell him how it happened. What chiefly impressed Alice was that Peter de Haan had tattooed Herbert Hoffmann, and the two men were friends.
Tattoo Peter’s shop was in the basement of a house on the St. Olofssteeg—thus William was tattooed twice in the red-light district. William Burns was a man who was meant to be musically marked for life, Tattoo Peter said, but Alice would be marked for life because of him.
The basement shop on the St. Olofssteeg was very warm. Peter frequently took off his shirt when he tattooed a client; he told Alice that it gave the customer confidence in him as a tattoo artist. Jack understood this to mean that the client couldn’t help but admire Tattoo Peter’s own tattoos.
“In that case,” Alice told Peter, “I’ll keep my shirt on.” What Jack made of this was perfectly logical: since his mom didn’t have any tattoos of her own, the customer might lose confidence in her altogether.
Peter de Haan was a fair-skinned, bell-shaped man with a pleasant, clean-shaven face and lustrous, slicked-back hair. He usually wore dark trousers and sat with his one leg facing the entrance to the tattoo parlor—the stump of his missing leg half hidden on a wooden bench or stool. He sat with his back very straight; he maintained excellent posture sitting down. But Jack never saw him stand.
Did he use crutche
s or two canes; or, like a pirate, did he strap on a peg leg? Did he come and go in a wheelchair? Jack didn’t know—he never saw Peter come or go.
Jack would one day hear that Peter’s son was his apprentice, but Jack remembered seeing only one other apprentice at Tattoo Peter’s besides his mom. He was a scary man named Jacob Bril. (Possibly Bril made such an impression on Jack that he simply forgot Peter’s son.)
Jacob Bril had his own tattoo parlor in Rotterdam; he closed it on the weekends and came to Amsterdam, where he worked at Tattoo Peter’s from noon to midnight every Saturday. His faithful clientele would line up to see him; every fan of Bril’s was a dedicated Christian.
Jacob Bril was small and wiry—an austere skeleton of a man—and he gave only religious tattoos, of which his favorite was the Ascension. On Bril’s bony back was a depiction of Christ departing this world in the company of angels. In Bril’s version, Heaven was a dark and cloudy place, but his angels had splendid wings.
For the chest, Jacob Bril recommended Christ’s Agony—Our Savior’s head bleeding in His crown of thorns. Christ’s hands and feet and side were also bleeding; according to Bril, the blood was essential. On his own chest, in addition to Our Savior’s bloody head, Jacob Bril had a sacred text—the Lord’s Prayer. On his upper arms and forearms were a Virgin Mary, a Christ Child, and two Mary Magdalenes—one with a halo, one without. He’d saved his stomach for that most frightening figure of Lazarus leaving the grave. (Alice liked to say that the Lazarus tattoo was responsible for Bril’s indigestion.)
It was reasonable to hope that the two Mary Magdalenes might predispose Bril to forgiveness—especially in regard to those working women in their windows and doorways in the red-light district. But Bril made his disapproval of the prostitutes plain. From where he got off the train, at the Central Station, Jacob Bril could have walked to Tattoo Peter’s on the St. Olofssteeg without once passing a prostitute; in fact, the most direct route from the train station to the tattoo parlor did not go through the district. But Bril stayed in a hotel on the Dam Square, the Krasnapolsky. (In those days, the Krasnapolsky was considered quite a fancy hotel; it was certainly too fancy for Bril.) And whether leaving or returning to the Krasnapolsky, Bril made a point of walking every street of the red-light district—both to and from Tattoo Peter’s.
