by John Irving
“I wouldn’t have let him tattoo me,” Bimbo said. “Not even the shading.”
“My mom tattooed him,” Jack told Bimbo. A blushing-red heart, as Jack recalled; where the heart was torn in two, the jagged edges of the tear left a bare band of skin, wide enough for a name. There’d been some dispute about it, but Jack’s mom had given Lars her signature on the white skin between the pieces of his torn heart—her very own Daughter Alice.
Jack began to describe the tattoo to Bimbo, but Bimbo cut him off. “I know the tattoo,” the old maritimer said. “I covered up the Daughter Alice part.”
So what were the things Alice did that were hard to love? Clearly Fish Man Madsen knew something about them; it seemed that the Ladies’ Man had stopped loving Alice for some pretty good reason.
Bimbo said, “Tattoo Ole told me, ‘If Jack comes back, tell him not to be too angry.’ ”
Jack thanked Bimbo for telling him this; Bimbo was also nice enough to interrupt his tattoo-in-progress to draw Jack a little map. Where they were on Nyhavn wasn’t far from the Fiskehuset Højbro—the fish shop where Lars Madsen worked, at Højbro Plads 19. There was a statue of Bishop Absalon in the square, which was close to the Christiansborg Slot—the castle now occupied by the Danish Parliament. (Bishop Absalon was the founder of Copenhagen.) Jack could actually see the old castle from the fish market, Bimbo told him. According to Bimbo, the area was quite a popular meeting place nowadays—cafés and restaurants all around.
Jack almost forgot to show Bimbo the photographs, but he remembered as he was leaving. “Have a look at these,” Jack said, handing Bimbo the two photos. “Does the tattoo look familiar?”
“I would know Tattoo Ole’s work anywhere,” Bimbo said, handing the photos back. “Ole told me he tattooed your mom.” That was all the verification Jack needed.
Almost everything about the little shop seemed unchanged; even the radio was playing, if not the same radio. But that wasn’t the way Bimbo saw things. As Jack was reaching for the door, Bimbo said: “It’s all different now. In the late sixties and early seventies, you could recognize everyone’s work. Your work was a kind of a signature. But not anymore; there are too many scratchers.” Jack nodded. (He’d heard his mom say this—all the maritime tattooers said it.) “Twenty years ago,” Bimbo said, “we had two ships a day in here. Now there’s one a day,” he said, as if that defined absolutely everything that was different.
“Thank you again,” Jack told him.
It was a wet, windy afternoon. The restaurants on Nyhavn were already cooking. Jack could still distinguish the smells: the rabbit, the leg of deer, the wild duck, the roasted turbot, the grilled salmon, even the delicate veal. He could smell the stewed fruit in the sauces for the game, and those strong Danish cheeses. But he couldn’t identify the restaurant where Ole and the Ladies’ Man had taken him and his mom for their farewell dinner in Copenhagen. There’d been an open fireplace, and Jack thought he’d had the rabbit.
A place called Cap Horn at Nyhavn 21 looked vaguely familiar, but Jack didn’t go inside. He wasn’t hungry, and he couldn’t wait to find Fish Man Madsen. Like Bimbo—even more than Bimbo, Jack imagined—the Ladies’ Man was sure to be expecting him. And if Lars Madsen had covered up the Daughter Alice on his broken heart, he knew something Jack didn’t know, and it must have hurt him.
Ladies’ Man Madsen was still blond and blue-eyed; he had the same gap-toothed smile and busted nose, too. Jack was happy to see that Lars had lost the pathetic facial hair and had put on a little weight. The Fish Man was pushing fifty, but he looked younger. It seemed that the fish business had agreed with him, despite his earlier apprehensions—as if Alice’s rejection had served Lars better than he’d expected, and his failure in the tattoo world had somehow preserved his innocence.
The Ladies’ Man was married now; he and his wife had three kids. “You remember Elise?” he asked Jack, sheepishly.
“I remember covering up her name,” Jack said.
Elise was the name he’d covered up on Lars’s right ankle; she had formerly been attached to a chain-link fence, which Jack had mangled with his signature sprig of holly. (The result had called to mind a destroyed Christmas decoration—“anti-Christmas propaganda,” Ole had called it.)
“Well, she came back, Jack,” Ladies’ Man Madsen said, smiling. “You couldn’t cover Elise up for good.”
Although the rain had stopped, it was still too damp and windy to sit outside at the sidewalk tables, but the view across the wet cobblestones—the gray castle, now the Parliament building—was just fine from the fish shop.
“Sometimes you were my babysitter,” Jack began.
“I thought she was working late, Jack. I didn’t know she was seeing the kid—I swear.”
“What kid?”
“That poor little boy,” Lars said.
“Stop,” Jack said. “What little boy?”
Ladies’ Man Lars looked very distressed. “Ole said this would happen!” he blurted out.
“What would happen?”
“This—you finding me!” Madsen said. “Okay, okay. Let’s begin with that, Jack. How hard was it to find me?”
“Not very,” Jack told him.
“It’s not hard to find anybody, Jack—let’s begin with that. Your mom was never looking for your dad. She’d already found him before she came here. Do you get that?”
“Yes, I get that,” Jack said. “It was never about finding him, right?”
“That’s right—you’ve got that right,” the Ladies’ Man said. “Okay, okay,” he repeated. Jack realized that the Fish Man had been dreading this moment for almost thirty years! “Okay, okay. Here we go, Jack.”
Because William thought that the news might finally persuade Alice to leave him alone—not to mention that he hoped Alice would allow him at least occasional visits with his son—Jack’s father wrote to Alice in Toronto and told her that he was engaged to be married. The lucky girl was the daughter of the commandant at Kastellet, the Frederikshavn Citadel, where William Burns was apprenticed to the organist, Anker Rasmussen, in the Kastelskirken.
Jack thought he remembered the Ladies’ Man telling him and his mom that William was involved with a military man’s young wife, but William Burns had actually been engaged to a military man’s daughter. There was no young wife; if Jack had heard of one, it was his mother who’d told him about her, not Lars. Alice had brought Jack to Copenhagen to prevent the marriage from ever taking place.
Hans Henrik Ringhof was the commandant’s name. He was a lieutenant colonel. He loved William like a son, Lars Madsen told Jack. Lieutenant Colonel Ringhof had a young son, Niels, who was twelve going on thirteen. Niels’s older sister, Karin—William’s fiancée—doted on Niels. William was teaching Niels to play the organ; Niels was quite a gifted pianist. Karin was an accomplished organist; her late mother had been a musician. Lieutenant Colonel Ringhof had lost his wife in a car crash. The family had been returning to Copenhagen from a summer holiday in Bornholm when the accident happened.
They were a wonderful family, William wrote to Alice—he felt he was marrying all of them. Once Jack had started school, his father hoped that Jack’s mother would allow the boy to spend part of his Christmas vacation in Copenhagen; William thought that Jack would find the atmosphere of the Frederikshavn Citadel stimulating at that time of year. There were Christmas concerts, and what boy wouldn’t be excited to spend time in a fortification with all the soldiers?
“But your mother had her own agenda,” Ladies’ Man Madsen told Jack.
Soon Lieutenant Colonel Ringhof and his daughter were exposed to various sightings of Alice—and the same long-distance sightings of Jack that his mom had permitted his dad in Toronto. Nothing had changed in Alice. “She had a keep-me-or-lose-Jack mentality,” as the Ladies’ Man put it.
In Copenhagen, Alice added a new rule to the conditions she imposed on William: if he wanted to get a look at his son, William had to bring his fiancée with him. She had to see
Jack, too. Naturally, it was Alice who wanted to get a look at Karin Ringhof, but Karin complied; she loved William and shared his hope that Alice would one day permit the boy to spend time with his father.
Additionally, Lars told Jack, Alice tried to seduce the only men in William’s life who mattered to him. Anker Rasmussen, the organist, was justifiably appalled by her behavior—Rasmussen refused to see her. Lieutenant Colonel Ringhof, the widower who loved William almost as much as he loved his own little boy, was also appalled. Lieutenant Colonel Ringhof tried to reason with Alice, to no avail; he most certainly didn’t sleep with her.
“The situation was at a standoff,” Ladies’ Man Madsen informed Jack. “Then you fell in the Kastelsgraven—the damn moat!”
“But what did that have to do with it?” Jack asked.
“Because the commandant sent little Niels to rescue you!” Lars told Jack. It was Niels Ringhof, not the littlest soldier, who’d saved him! “Until then,” the Ladies’ Man continued, “everyone had done a good job keeping your mom away from Niels. She barely knew he existed. I know that Niels knew nothing about her. But that was how she met him, Jack. Your mom must have said something to the boy; she must have thanked him for saving you, I suppose.”
That had been Jack’s idea—that his mom should offer his rescuer a free tattoo, not that a tattoo was what she offered Niels.
“She seduced the kid?” Jack asked Ladies’ Man Madsen.
“She sure did, Jack. She got to him, somehow.”
Niels Ringhof’s clothes had almost fit Jack, but not the soldier’s uniform; Niels had obviously borrowed or stolen it. Maybe that was how Alice had got him in and out of the citadel—she’d dressed him like a soldier. And that night she’d sent him back from the D’Angleterre, he must have walked home alone!
“He was how old? Did you say twelve?” Jack asked Lars.
“Maybe twelve going on thirteen, Jack. I’d say thirteen, tops.”
Their last night in Copenhagen, Tattoo Ole and Lars had taken Jack and his mom to a fancy restaurant on Nyhavn. But William had picked up the tab. That would have been William’s last sighting of his son in Copenhagen—his and Karin’s last sighting, because Jack’s mom insisted that his father bring Karin to the restaurant, too. (“To see us off,” Alice had told William.)
“They were there, in the restaurant?” Jack asked Lars.
“At a table on the same side of the fireplace,” the Ladies’ Man answered. “You may remember the restaurant, Jack. You had the rabbit.”
But Alice had not told Niels Ringhof that she was leaving; the twelve- or thirteen-year-old was crushed. Until Jack and his mom left Copenhagen, Karin Ringhof and her father, the commandant, had no idea that the boy had been seeing Alice—not to mention the depth of the child’s infatuation with her. William had no idea, either.
“What happened to the kid?” Jack asked. It had started to rain again, which was not a good sign.
“Niels shot himself,” Madsen said. “It was a barracks, after all—a military compound. There were lots of guns around. The kid either died of the gunshot wound or drowned in the Kastelsgraven. They found his body in the moat, about where you broke through the ice. He died where he saved you, Jack.”
The moat, the Kastelsgraven, looked more like a pond or a small lake. In April, without the ice, the water had a greenish-gray color. Jack didn’t think it looked deep enough to drown in, but it might have sufficed when he was four. And Niels Ringhof was only twelve or thirteen, and he’d just shot himself; clearly the Kastelsgraven had been deep enough for Niels.
If there’d been ice on the moat, Jack would have tested it again—this time hoping no one would save him. The wooden rampart, on which the soldiers’ boots had made such a racket—putting even the ducks to flight—now looked like a toy road.
Of course Jack knew it hadn’t been Anker Rasmussen, the organist, who’d come running with Alice. In all likelihood, there had never been a soldier-organist, a military musician, at the Kastelskirken. The man in uniform would have been the commandant, Lieutenant Colonel Ringhof; he’d sent for his young son, who was sick in bed, because the commandant knew that the ice would hold Niels but not a soldier.
That Jack still had that nightmare, when he dreamed of death, at last made sense to him on that April morning in Copenhagen. It was still raining, but what did it matter? In Jack’s mind, he had already drowned. When he awoke, as he did every time, to a lasting cold, Jack now knew where the cold came from—from the moat, from the Kastelsgraven, where he always met those centuries of Europe’s dead soldiers. The little hero who saved him stood out among them—most notably not for the disproportionate size of his penis, which Jack had probably exaggerated in his most unreliable memory, but for the stoic quality of his frozen salute.
Jack had correctly remembered the salute; it was not a real soldier’s salute, but a young boy imitating a soldier. Not the littlest soldier in Jack’s imagination, but Niels Ringhof, a twelve-year-old going on thirteen—a thirteen-year-old, tops—who’d been sexually abused by Jack’s mother. (As surely as Mrs. Machado had molested Jack!)
He’d made an appointment to see the organist at the Kastelskirken, the Citadel Church. That view of the commandant’s house from the church square was familiar to Jack; he remembered being carried from the Kastelsgraven to the commandant’s house, where he was dressed in Niels Ringhof’s clothes. (His off-duty clothes, Alice had called them. She’d been a gifted liar.)
The organist at the Citadel Church was Lasse Ewerlöf. A Swedish-sounding name—maybe he was Swedish. At the age of fourteen, he’d studied the sitar, the violin, and the piano; he’d started the organ relatively late, when he was nineteen or twenty. Jack was disappointed that Ewerlöf couldn’t keep their appointment—he’d been called out of Copenhagen rather suddenly, to play the organ at an old friend’s funeral—but he’d been kind enough to ask the backup organist at the Kastelskirken to meet with Jack instead.
Lasse Ewerlöf knew that Jack was interested in hearing a little Christmas music—just to imagine what he might have heard at those Christmas concerts his dad had thought would be stimulating to the boy. (The concerts he’d never heard.) Ewerlöf had left Jack a list of his Christmas organ favorites, which his backup—an older man, who told Jack he was semiretired because he suffered from arthritis in his hands—volunteered to play.
“But will it hurt your hands?” Jack asked him. The backup organist’s name was Mads Lindhardt; he’d been a student of Anker Rasmussen’s and had known Jack’s father.
“Not if I don’t play for too long,” Lindhardt said. “Besides, I would consider it an honor to play for William Burns’s boy. William was very special. Naturally, I was jealous of him when I first heard him play, because your father was always better than I was. Most unfair, because he’s younger!”
Jack was unprepared to meet someone at Kastellet who’d actually known his dad—much less thought of William as “special.” Jack couldn’t respond; all he could do was listen to Mads Lindhardt play the organ. Jack could scarcely tell there was anything the matter with Lindhardt’s hands.
They were alone in the Kastelskirken, except for a couple of cleaning women who were mopping the stone floor of the church; the women might have thought it strange to hear Christmas music on a rainy April morning, but the music didn’t appear to interfere with their work.
Among Lasse Ewerlöf’s Christmas favorites, Mads Lindhardt told Jack, were a few of William’s favorites, too. Bach’s Weihnachtsoratorium and his Kanonische Veränderungen über das Weihnachtslied, which Jack already knew his dad liked to play; also Messiaen’s La nativité du Seigneur and Charpentier’s Messe de minuit, which were new to Jack.
Jack realized, listening to Mads Lindhardt, that William would have (many times) imagined playing the organ for his son. But this had been forbidden, lost among the other things Alice had not permitted.
“It’s Christmas music, Mr. Burns,” Mads Lindhardt was saying gently; only then did Jack notice t
hat the organist had stopped playing. “It’s supposed to make you happy.” But Jack was crying. “That boy, Niels, was the darling of the citadel,” Mads said. “And your father was the darling of the entire Ringhof family—that was why it was such a tragedy. No one blamed your dad for what happened to Niels. But Karin had adored her little brother; understandably, she simply could not look at your father in the same way again. Even the commandant was sympathetic, but he was destroyed; for him, it was like losing two sons.”
“Where are they now?” Jack asked.
Lieutenant Colonel Ringhof had retired. He was an old man, living in Frederiksberg—a place quite close to Copenhagen, where many retired people went. Karin, the commandant’s daughter, had never married; she’d also moved away. She taught music in Odense, at a branch of the Royal Danish Conservatory.
The only mystery remaining to the Copenhagen story was why William had followed Alice and Jack to Stockholm. Jack understood that it would have been painful—even impossible—for his father to stay at the Frederikshavn Citadel, but why did William follow them when Alice had caused him such a devastating loss?
“To see you,” Mads Lindhardt told Jack. “How else was he going to get a look at you, Jack?”
“She was crazy, wasn’t she?” Jack asked. “My mother was a madwoman!”
“Here is something Lasse Ewerlöf taught me,” Mads Lindhardt said. “ ‘Most organists become organists because they meet another organist.’ ” Lindhardt could see that Jack wasn’t getting his point. “Many women become crazy because they can’t get over the first man they fall in love with, Jack. What’s so hard to understand about that?”
Jack thanked Mads Lindhardt for his time, and for the Christmas concert. Leaving Kastellet, Jack regretted that he had not seen a single soldier; maybe they didn’t march around in the rain. Leaving the Frederikshavn Citadel—as angry and saddened as Jack now knew his father must have felt when he left that fortification—Jack tried to imagine his dad’s state of mind as he had followed Alice and Jack to Stockholm.
