by John Irving
“Yes, it was pretty good advice, I think,” Alice replied.
“The best advice he’ll ever get,” Saskia said.
“At least for free,” Els added. The three women laughed again.
“You’ll have to take this damn thing to a jeweler,” Saskia said, handing Alice the damaged necklace and a bunch of unstrung pearls. Alice put the loose pearls and the necklace in her purse.
Saskia and Els volunteered to walk them back to the Krasnapolsky, but Alice proposed a slight detour. She wanted to walk by the Oudekerksplein, just to show those old prostitutes she was still standing. “It’s too late—most of them will have stopped working,” Els told her.
“It’s worth doing,” Saskia said. “Even if only one woman is working, the others will hear about it.”
It must have been two or three in the morning. They had just come off the Oudekennissteeg when the music hit them; it was even louder on the bridge across the old canal. That organ in the Oude Kerk was a holy monster. “Bach?” Jack asked his mother.
“It’s Bach, all right,” Alice said, “but it’s not your father.”
“How do you know?” Els asked. “Femke is such a bitch. You should at least have a look and see.”
“It’s Bach’s Fantasy in G Major,” Alice said. “It’s popular at weddings.” Weddings were not exactly William’s cup of tea, apparently, but Saskia and Els insisted on having a look at the organist.
Alice wanted to walk around the Oudekerksplein before going inside the Old Church, so they did. Only one prostitute was standing in her doorway, listening to the music. She was one of the younger ones—Margriet. “You’re up late, Jackie,” Margriet said.
“We’re all up late,” Els told her.
They went into the Oude Kerk. Two of the older prostitutes were sitting in a pew, and one of them, Naughty Nanda, appeared to be asleep; the other one, Angry Anouk, wouldn’t look at Alice.
They went to the staircase at the back of the great congregation hall, but only Saskia and Els and Jack started up the narrow stairs. Alice waited for them at the bottom of the staircase. “He’s in Australia, or sailing to it,” she said stubbornly. “Just imagine all the ladies he’ll get to meet on a cruise ship!”
The faint, innocent smell of baby powder preceded their view of Frans Donker, the junior organist. The sudden appearance of Saskia and Els startled the boy genius—he stopped playing. Then Donker saw Jack standing between the two prostitutes.
“Oh, I suppose you thought it was your father,” Frans said to Jack.
“Not really,” Saskia said.
“Don’t talk—just keep playing,” Els told him. The child prodigy had returned to the Bach before they reached the bottom of the stairs.
“It’s that Donker kid, right?” Alice asked. They all nodded. “He plays like an organ-tuner,” Alice said.
Bach’s Fantasy in G Major followed them past the Trompettersteeg, where several of the younger prostitutes were still selling themselves. They were nearly to the end of the Sint Annenstraat when they finally outdistanced the music.
“You’re not going to Australia, are you?” Els may have asked Alice.
“No. Australia is too long and hard a trip for Jack,” Alice might have answered.
“It’s too long and hard a trip for anybody, Alice,” Saskia said.
“I suppose so,” was all Alice said. Her speech was uncharacteristically slurred, and her expression—from the moment Jack had awakened to the women’s whispers on the Bloedstraat—was unfamiliarly dreamy and carefree. Jack would later assume that this had to do with how many joints she’d smoked, because—until Amsterdam—his mother and marijuana were not on close terms. But they were on close terms that Saturday night and Sunday morning.
Saskia and Els walked them back to their hotel—not because the two prostitutes thought the red-light district was unsafe, even at that hour, but because they didn’t want Alice to run into Jacob Bril. They knew Bril was also staying at the Krasnapolsky.
After the women hugged and kissed Jack and Alice good night, Jack and his mom got ready for bed. It was the first time Jack remembered her using the bathroom ahead of him. Something amused her in there, because she started laughing.
“What’s so funny?”
“I think I left my underwear in Els’s room!”
The advice-giving business had clearly distracted her—and by the time Jack finished brushing his teeth, Alice had fallen asleep. Jack turned out the lights in the bedroom and left the bathroom light on, with the door ajar—their version of a night-light. He thought it was the first time his mother had fallen asleep before him. He got into bed beside her, but even asleep, his mom was still singing. Jack was thankful it wasn’t a hymn. And maybe the marijuana had resurrected Alice’s Scottish accent, which, in the future, Jack could detect only when she was drunk or stoned.
As for the song, Jack had no way of knowing if it was an authentic folk ballad—something his mother had remembered from her girlhood—or, more likely, a ditty of her own imagination that, in her sleep, she’d put to music. (Why not? She’d been singing for half a day and night.)
Here is the song Alice sang in her sleep.
Oh, I’ll never be a kittie
or a cookie
or a tail.
The one place worse than
Dock Place
is the Port o’ Leith jail.
No, I’ll never be a kittie,
of one true thing I’m sure—
I won’t end up on Dock Place
and I’ll never be a hure.
Hure rhymed with sure, of course. Jack thought it might be a nursery song, which—even in her sleep—his mother meant to sing for him.
Jack said their nightly prayer—as he always did, with his eyes closed. He spoke a little louder than usual, because his mother was asleep and he had to pray for both of them. “The day Thou gavest, Lord, is ended. Thank You for it.”
They slept until noon Sunday, when he asked her: “What’s a hure?”
“Was it something I said in my sleep?” she said.
“Yes. You were singing.”
“A hure is like a prostitute—an advice-giver, Jackie.”
“How can a person be a kittie or a cookie or a tail?” Jack asked.
“They’re all words for an advice-giver, Jack.”
“Oh.”
They were walking hand-in-hand through the red-light district to Tattoo Peter’s when the boy asked: “Where’s Dock Place?”
“Dock Place is nowhere I’ll ever be,” was all she would tell him.
“How did Tattoo Peter lose his leg?” Jack asked for the hundredth time.
“I told you—you’ll have to ask him.”
“Maybe on a bicycle,” the boy said.
It was midafternoon in the district; most of the women were already offering advice. All of them greeted Jack and Alice by name—even those older prostitutes in the area of the Old Church. Alice made a point of walking around the Oudekerksplein; they passed every window and doorway, at a pace half the speed of Jacob Bril’s. Not a soul hummed “Breathe on Me, Breath of God” to them.
They went to the St. Olofssteeg to say good-bye to Tattoo Peter. “Alice, you’re welcome to come work with me anytime,” the one-legged man told her. “Keep both your legs, Jack,” Peter said. “You’ll find it easier to get around that way.”
Then they walked up the Zeedijk to say good-bye to Tattoo Theo and Robbie de Wit. Robbie wanted Alice to tattoo him. “Not another broken heart,” she said. “I’ve had enough of hearts, torn in two or otherwise.” Robbie settled for her signature on his right upper arm.
Daughter Alice
Rademaker was so impressed by her letter-perfect script that he requested one, too. Tattoo Theo got his tattoo on his left forearm, which he said he’d kept bare for something special. The lettering ran from the bend at Rademaker’s elbow to the face of his wristwatch, so that every time he looked to see what time it was, he would be reminded of Daughter Alice.
“What do you say, Jack?” Tattoo Theo asked. “Shall we listen again to der Zimmerman?” (He wasn’t German; he didn’t know der from den. Not that Jack knew German, either—not yet.)
Jack picked out a Bob Dylan album and put it on. Robbie de Wit was soon singing along, but it wasn’t Alice’s favorite song. She just went on tattooing, leaving the singing to Robbie and Bob.
“When your rooster crows at the break of dawn,” Bob and Robbie sang. “Look out your window and I’ll be gone.” At this point, Alice was starting the A in Alice. “You’re the reason I’m trav’lin’ on,” Bob and Robbie crooned. “Don’t think twice, it’s all right.”
Well, it wasn’t all right—not by a long shot—but Alice just kept tattooing.
Els took them to the shipping office, which was a confusing place—they needed Els’s help in arranging their passage. They would take the train to Rotterdam and sail from there to Montreal, and then make their way back to Toronto.
“Why Toronto?” Saskia asked Alice. “Canada isn’t your country.”
“It is now,” Alice said. “I’ll never go back to sunny Leith—not for all the whisky in Scotland.” She wouldn’t say why. (Too many ghosts, maybe.) “Besides, I know just the school for Jack. It’s a good school,” Jack heard her tell Saskia and Els. His mom leaned over him and whispered in his ear: “And you’ll be safe with the girls.”
The idea of himself with the St. Hilda’s girls—the older ones, especially—gave Jack the shivers. Once again, and for the last time in Europe, he reached for his mother’s hand.
II
The Sea of Girls
8
Safe Among the Girls
It was Jack’s impression that the older girls at St. Hilda’s never liked having boys in their school. Although the boys couldn’t stay past grade four, their presence—even the presence of little boys—was seen as a bad influence. According to Emma Oastler: “Especially on the older girls.”
Emma was a menacing girl, and an older one. The grade-six girls were the oldest students in the junior school; they opened and closed the car doors for the little kids at the Rosseter Road entrance. When Jack started kindergarten in the fall of 1970—the first year St. Hilda’s admitted boys—Emma was in grade six. He was five; she was twelve. (Some problem at home had caused her to miss a year of school.) On Jack’s first day, Emma opened the car door for him—a formative experience.
Jack was already self-conscious about the car—a black Lincoln Town Car from a limousine service, which Mrs. Wicksteed used for all her driving needs. (Neither Mrs. Wicksteed nor Lottie drove, and Alice never got her driver’s license.) The limo driver was a friendly Jamaican—a big man named Peewee, who was nearly as black as the Town Car. He was Mrs. Wicksteed’s favorite driver.
What kid wants to show up for his first day of school in a chauffeured limousine? But Alice had not done badly by yielding to Mrs. Wicksteed’s way of doing things. It seemed that the Old Girl was not only paying Jack’s tuition at St. Hilda’s; she was paying for the limo.
Because Alice often worked at the Chinaman’s tattoo parlor until late at night, Lottie got Jack up for school and gave him breakfast. Mrs. Wicksteed had sufficiently roused herself in time to do the boy’s necktie, albeit a little absentmindedly. Lottie laid out his other clothes at bedtime—on school mornings, she also helped him get dressed.
On those mornings, Jack would go into his mom’s semidark room and kiss her good-bye; then Lottie would cross the sidewalk with him to the corner of Spadina and Lowther, where Peewee would be waiting in the Town Car. To her credit, Alice had offered to accompany her son on his first day.
“Alice,” Mrs. Wicksteed said, “if you take Jack to school, you’ll make it an occasion for him to cry.”
Mrs. Wicksteed was firmly opposed to creating occasions for Jack to cry. While doing his necktie one morning, she told him: “You will be teased, Jack. Don’t make it an occasion to cry. Cry only when you’re physically hurt—and in that case, cry as loudly as you can.”
“But what do I do when I get teased?” Jack asked her.
Mrs. Wicksteed wore a plum-colored dressing gown over a pair of her late husband’s barber-pole pajamas. She always did the boy’s tie while sitting at the kitchen table, warming her stiff fingers over her first cup of tea. Her white hair was in curlers and her face glistened with avocado oil.
“Be creative,” she advised him.
“When I get teased?”
“Be nice,” Lottie suggested.
“Be nice twice,” Mrs. Wicksteed said.
“And the third time?” Jack asked her.
“Be creative,” she said again.
When the necktie was done, Mrs. Wicksteed kissed him on his forehead and on the bridge of his nose; then Lottie wiped the avocado oil off his face. Lottie would kiss Jack, too—usually in the front hall, before she opened the outside door and led him by the hand to Peewee.
Lottie’s limp, which was almost as disturbingly provocative to Jack as Tattoo Peter’s missing leg, was a frequent topic of conversation between Jack and his mother. “Why does Lottie limp?” he must have asked his mom a hundred times.
“Ask Lottie.”
But when he left for his first day of school, Jack still hadn’t summoned the courage to ask his nanny why she limped.
“What’s with the lady’s limp, mon?” Peewee asked him in the limo.
“I don’t know. Why don’t you ask her, Peewee?”
“You ask her, mon—you’re the gentleman of the house. I’m just the driver.”
Jack Burns later thought he’d be able to see the intersection of Pickthall and Hutchings Hill Road from his grave—the way Peewee slowed the Town Car to a crawl, the way the older girls skeptically took for granted the arrival of another rich kid in another limo. It was a warm September morning; Jack was again aware of the girls’ untucked middy blouses, loosely gathered at their throats by those gray-and-maroon regimental-striped ties. (In two years, they would all be wearing button-down collars with the top button unbuttoned.) But he would remember best the rebellious posture of their hips.
The girls never stood still—sometimes with their arms around another girl, sometimes with all their weight on one foot while they tapped the other. Sitting down, they bounced one leg on one knee—the crossed leg constantly in motion. The extreme shortness of their gray pleated skirts drew Jack’s attention to their legs and the surprising heaviness of their upper thighs. The girls picked at their fingers, at their nails, at their rings; they scratched their eyebrows and their hair. They looked under their nails, as if for secrets—they seemed to have many secrets. Among friends, there were hand signals and subtle evidence of other sign language.
At the Rosseter Road entrance, where Peewee stopped the Town Car, the grade-six girls struck Jack as particularly secretive yet unrestrained. At eleven or twelve, girls think they look awful. They have ceased being children, at least in their estimation, but they have not yet developed into the young women they will become. At that age, there are great differences among them: some have begun to look and move like young women, others have boys’ bodies and move as if they were shy young men.
Not Emma Oastler, who was twelve going on eighteen. When she opened the car door for Jack, he mistook the faintest trace of a mustache on her upper lip for perspiration. The hair on her strong, tanned arms had turned blond in the summer sun, and her thick, dark-brown braid fell over her shoulder and framed one side of her almost-pretty face. The weight of her braid, which reached to her navel, served to separate and define her budding breasts. Maybe a quarter of the grade-six girls had noticeable breasts.
When Jack got out of the limo and stood next to Emma, he came up to her waist. “Don’t trip on your necktie, honey pie,” Emma said. The boy’s tie hung down to his knees, but until Emma warned him, he hadn’t considered the danger of tripping on it. And Jack’s gray Bermuda shorts, which he’d outgrown, were too short to be “proper”—or so Mrs. Wicksteed had observed. (Unl
ike the girls, the boys wore short socks.)
Emma roughly lifted Jack’s chin in her hand. “Let’s have a look at those eyelashes, baby cakes—oh, my God!” she exclaimed.
“What?”
“I see trouble ahead,” Emma Oastler said. Searching her face, Jack saw trouble ahead, too. He also realized his earlier mistake—the mustache. Up close, there was no way you could confuse the soft-looking fuzz on Emma’s upper lip with beads of perspiration. At five, Jack didn’t know that young women were sensitive about having mustaches. It looked like a neat thing to have; naturally, he wanted to touch it.
If your first day of school, like your first tattoo, is a pilgrim experience—well, here was Jack’s. And touching Emma Oastler’s mustache would certainly prove to be character-forming. “What’s your name?” Emma asked, bending closer.
“Jack.”
“Jack what?”
For an agonizing moment, her furbearing lip made him forget his last name. But more than her mustache made him hesitate. He had been christened Jack Stronach. His father had abandoned him, without marrying his mother; Alice saw no reason for either of them to bear William’s name. But Mrs. Wicksteed disagreed. While Alice made a point of not being Mrs. Burns, Mrs. Wicksteed believed that no child should suffer from illegitimacy; at her instigation, Jack’s name was legally changed, making him “legitimate” in name only. Furthermore, Mrs. Wicksteed was an assimilationist; in the Old Girl’s view, a Jack Burns would be more easily assimilated into Canadian culture than a Jack Stronach. No doubt she thought she was doing the boy a favor.
But Jack’s hesitation to tell Emma Oastler his last name had attracted the attention of a teacher—the one they called The Gray Ghost. Mrs. McQuat was a spectral presence. She’d mastered the art of the sudden appearance; no one ever saw her coming. In her previous life, she may have been a dead person. What else could explain the chill that accompanied her? Even her breath was cold.
