(2005) Until I Find You

by John Irving

  En route to Stockholm—in advance of his second arrival—Jack also tried to imagine what deceptions and outright deceits his mother had created for him there. In Copenhagen, it was not the littlest soldier who had saved Jack—and his rescuer had been his mother’s victim. Now he wondered if he had been saved by a Swedish accountant in Stockholm, or not. And who had been his mother’s victim (or victims) there?

  So much of what you think you remember is a lie, the stuff of postcards. The snow untrampled and unspoiled; the Christmas candles in the windows of the houses, where the damage to the children is unseen and unheard. Or what Jack thought he remembered of the Hedvig Eleonora Church—the one with the golden altar in Stockholm, where his memory of meeting Torvald Torén, the young Swedish organist, was (Jack was sure) not exactly as it seemed.

  Torén was real; Jack recognized him when they met again. But William hadn’t slept with a single choirgirl—much less with three! Alice had invented Ulrika, Astrid, and Vendela; no wonder Jack had no memory of meeting them. In Stockholm, Jack’s dad had been more celibate than a Catholic priest—well, almost.

  The Hedvig Eleonora was Lutheran, and Torvald Torén had much enjoyed having William Burns as an apprentice; William was older than Torén and had actually taught the younger organist a few pieces to play. Not for long: Alice had wasted little time in poisoning the congregation against William, whom she portrayed as a runaway husband and father.

  “What little I could manage to say in church every Sunday,” Torvald Torén told Jack, “could never overturn that image of you and your mom at the Grand. It was a very visible place for her to be soliciting, which she was, and it was no life for a young boy like you—to be on display, as you were. Whether there, at the Grand, or skating on Lake Mälaren with your father’s mistress—you were on display, Jack.”

  “What?” Jack said. Surely Torén couldn’t have meant Torsten Lindberg’s wife! (Agneta Nilsson, as Jack remembered her—because she preferred to use her maiden name.)

  Torvald Torén shook his head. “I think you better talk to Torsten Lindberg, Jack,” the organist said. Jack had been planning to do so. He just happened to talk to Torén first; after all, it was easy to find him in the Hedvig Eleonora. It wasn’t hard to find Lindberg, either—he still ate breakfast every day at the Grand.

  Naturally, Agneta Nilsson, Jack’s skating coach, had never been married to Torsten Lindberg. (Lindberg, Jack would soon discover, was gay; he always had been.) Agneta Nilsson had taught choral music at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm, where William was her favorite student. In his sorrow at the death of Niels Ringhof—not to mention the end of his engagement to Karin Ringhof, with whom William had been very much in love—William found comfort in the older woman’s arms.

  If Jack’s father wanted to see his son in Stockholm—that is, in addition to watching the boy stuff his face at breakfast—Alice insisted that William watch Jack skate on Lake Mälaren with Agneta Nilsson, William’s mistress.

  “I have the room and the equipment, if you have the time,” Jack had committed to memory—in English and in Swedish. (“Jag har rum och utrustning, om ni har tid.”)

  What a dance Alice had put them through—both Jack and his dad. “It was all done to torture them—I mean your father and poor Agneta,” Torsten Lindberg told Jack, when Jack met him for breakfast at the Grand. “And I’m sure your mother knew that Agneta Nilsson had a bad heart. It was probably your father who told her—innocently, without a doubt.”

  “Agneta died?” Jack asked.

  “She’s dead, yes. I mean she died eventually, Jack. It wasn’t overly dramatic—that is, it didn’t happen on the ice. I’m not even suggesting that all the skating hastened her death.”

  “And the manager at the Grand?” Jack inquired.

  “What about him?” Lindberg said.

  “Was he extorting my mother?” Jack asked.

  “Not the word I would use. Surely she seduced him—and she was the one who made their affair so public,” Torsten Lindberg informed Jack. “To disgrace your father, I suppose, but there was never any discernible logic that motivated Alice.”

  Torsten Lindberg was so obviously gay, but (at four) how would Jack have known? The accountant was no less thin than Jack remembered, his appetite no less voracious. Jack himself was eating a little more than usual for breakfast. This was not out of any fondness for the memory of eating there with his mom—on display, as he could now see—but because Jack was conscious of needing to put on a little weight for what he hoped would be his role as the failed screenwriter and successful porn star in The Slush-Pile Reader.

  After breakfast, when Jack felt like throwing up, he asked Lindberg if he could see the accountant’s Rose of Jericho. Jack thought there were some things in this world he could rely on—a few constants. Jack knew what his mom’s Rose of Jericho looked like—surely he could count on that.

  “My what?” Torsten Lindberg asked.

  “Let’s start with your fish,” Jack said. “On your forearm, if I’m not mistaken, you have a Japanese tattoo of a fish.”

  “Oh, my fish out of water. Yes!” Lindberg cried. “My tattoos, you mean. Yes, of course!”

  They went to Jack’s room at the Grand. It was chiefly his mom’s Rose of Jericho that Jack wanted to see. He wanted to look at Lindberg’s Doc Forest, too. The clipper ship, a three-masted type, with a sea serpent cresting under its bow—that sailing ship on Torsten Lindberg’s chest, the Doc Forest tattoo that Alice had said was better than the HOMEWARD BOUND vessel on the breastbone of the late Charlie Snow.

  But could Jack believe anything his mother had told him? At least the Doc Forest was as Jack had remembered it. (What boy wouldn’t recall a clipper ship endangered by a sea serpent?) As for the eyeball on the left cheek of Lindberg’s ass, Jack had missed its gay implications the first time—not to mention the pair of pursed lips on the right cheek, like wet lipstick. The fish on Lindberg’s forearm was almost exactly as Jack had remembered it—nothing gay intended by it, clearly.

  As for Alice’s Rose of Jericho, Jack had never seen the finished tattoo—he’d only heard it discussed as a work-in-progress. It was not a Rose of Jericho, of course. What would a gay man want with a vagina hidden in a rose? There was a rose, all right, but the penis was not what Jack would describe as hidden in the petals of that unruly flower. It was a penis practically bursting out of a rose!

  “What did you call it?” Torsten Lindberg asked.

  Jack had no idea what to call it—a Penis of Jericho, perhaps, but he thought it best to say nothing.

  There was one other, lesser error in Jack’s so-called memory of Torsten Lindberg’s tattoos. Tattoo Ole’s naked lady—she with her oddly upturned eyebrow of pubic hair. Well, she was one of Ole’s naked ladies—Jack could see that—but this naked lady had a penis, too.

  “I’ve seen all your movies—I can’t tell you how many times!” Torsten Lindberg told Jack. “I won’t embarrass you, Jack, by telling you what my friends are always saying about you. Let’s just say they love you as a she-male!”

  At the Grand, Jack woke every morning to the ships’ horns—the commuter traffic from the archipelago. One such morning, he went to see Lake Mälaren. Like the Kastelsgraven, it wasn’t frozen—not in April—but it was possible to imagine where William might have stood to watch his son skating with his mistress with the bad heart, Agneta Nilsson.

  As for Doc Forest’s tattoo shop—the atmosphere was friendly and familiar.

  Jack had never seen a photograph of his father. Jack knew only that William was good-looking to women, but that was not the same thing as a physical description. Doc Forest was the first person who actually described Jack’s dad. “He had long hair, to his shoulders,” Doc said. “He moved like an athlete, but he looked like a rock star—only better dressed.”

  Torvald Torén had already cast some doubt on the tattoo William was alleged to have gotten from Doc Forest—a piece by Pachelbel, Alice had said. (She’d suspected it mi
ght be something called Hexachordum Apollinis; she’d mentioned either an aria quarta or a toccata.)

  “William played some Pachelbel, of course,” Torén had told Jack. “But I never saw your father’s tattoos.” Mads Lindhardt had told Jack the same thing, not about Pachelbel but about William’s tattoos.

  Tattoo artists had seen The Music Man’s tattoos—and the women William had slept with, surely. But at least two organists who’d known him well, and had liked him, had never seen his tattoos. Strange that his father didn’t show them, Jack thought.

  And since so much of what Alice had told Jack was bullshit, Jack was prepared—when he went to see Doc Forest—for the fact that his dad’s Pachelbel tattoo might be bullshit, too.

  There was no bullshit about Doc. He was glad to see Jack again, he said; he’d seen all of Jack’s movies, including the ones in which Jack appeared half naked. Doc had been wondering when Jack was going to get a tattoo. It was an honor that Daughter Alice’s son had come to Doc Forest for a tattoo, Doc told Jack.

  Jack explained that he’d not come to see Doc for a tattoo.

  Doc had aged well; he was still small and strong, and his sandy hair had not yet gone gray. For a former sailor who’d acquired his first tattoo in Amsterdam from Tattoo Peter, Doc Forest looked terrific.

  Doc would not say an ill word about Alice—those old-timers, the maritimers, stuck together—but he had also liked Jack’s dad. Doc had even gone to the Hedvig Eleonora to hear William play.

  “I was wondering if you remember the tattoo you gave him, or perhaps you gave him more than one,” Jack said. “A piece of music by Pachelbel, maybe.”

  “No music, just words,” Doc said. “They might have been words in a song, but not a hymn. Not church music—I can tell you that.”

  “Do you remember the words?” Jack asked him.

  Doc Forest’s tattoo shop was as neat and trim as Doc. Sailors had to be organized—the good ones, anyway. It didn’t take Doc long to find the stencil.

  “Your dad was very particular about his tattoos,” Doc Forest said. “He wouldn’t let me write on his skin. He said he wanted to see my handwriting on a stencil first. He certainly was particular about the punctuation!”

  Doc Forest’s cursive was uniform and clear. The tattoo artists Jack had known all had excellent handwriting. The stencil was a little dusty, but Jack had no trouble reading the words and the particular punctuation.

  The commandant’s daughter; her little brother

  “My first one of those,” Doc said, pointing to the semicolon.

  “It’s not a song. It’s more like a story,” Jack told him.

  “Well, your dad sure liked it. The tattoo, I mean,” Doc said.

  “How do you know?” Jack asked.

  “He cried and cried,” Doc Forest said.

  With a tattoo, Jack remembered his mother saying, sometimes that’s how you knew when you got it right.

  28

  The Wrong Tattoo

  A child’s memory is not only inaccurate—it’s not reliably linear, either. Jack not only “remembered” things that had never happened; he was also wrong about the order of events, including at least one thing that had actually taken place. When Jack and his mom had gone downstairs for dinner in the Hotel Bristol, it wasn’t their first night in Oslo—it was their last.

  A young couple did come into the restaurant, just as Jack remembered. He’d thought it was the first time he saw how his mother looked when she encountered a couple in love. The young man was athletic-looking with long hair to his shoulders; he looked like a rock star, only he was better dressed. In fact, he looked exactly as Doc Forest had described William Burns—and his wife or girlfriend couldn’t take her eyes or her hands off him. (Jack even remembered the young woman’s breasts.)

  Jack also recalled how he’d said to his mom that she should give the couple her sales pitch about getting a tattoo. “No,” she’d whispered, “not them. I can’t.”

  Jack had boldly taken matters into his own small hands. He’d walked right up to that beautiful girl and said the lines he still said in his bed, to help him sleep. “Do you have a tattoo?”

  Well, that young man was Jack’s father, of course—not that Jack knew it. Alice was offering William a last look at Jack before she and Jack left for Helsinki. (Jack didn’t know who the girl was; not yet.) No one—certainly not Alice, least of all William—had expected Jack to approach the young couple, not to mention speak to them.

  What was the matter with the guy? Jack had wondered. The handsome, long-haired young man looked almost as if it pained him to see Jack; William had regarded Jack as if he’d never seen a child before. But whenever Jack had looked at him, William had looked away.

  And there’d been a bitterness in William’s voice that made Jack look at him again—most notably when the young father had said to his son, “Maybe some other time.”

  “Come with me, my little actor,” Alice had whispered in Jack’s ear, and Jack’s dad closed his eyes—William didn’t want to see his son go.

  It was after he’d checked into the Bristol in April of 1998—Jack was eating dinner alone in that quiet, old restaurant—when he realized he’d actually seen his father in that gloomy room.

  “Maybe some other time,” William had said; then Jack had reached for his mother’s hand, and she’d taken the boy away.

  William would have other sightings of Jack—in Helsinki and in Amsterdam, no doubt—but this might have been Jack’s first and last look at his dad, and Jack had not known who William was!

  But who was the young woman, and why had William brought her? Were they really in love? William must have known he was going to see his son; Jack’s father just hadn’t expected the boy to speak. William wasn’t prepared for that—neither was Alice. Obviously, Jack had surprised them both.

  It unnerved Jack to think he’d correctly remembered the meeting, but that he’d been wrong about when it happened; this made Jack not trust the seeming chronology of things. If he’d met his own father—not knowing that William was his father—on Jack and his mom’s last night in Oslo instead of their first, when had his mother encountered Andreas Breivik? When had she offered Andreas a free tattoo? And when had Jack and Alice met the beautiful young girl with the speech impediment, Ingrid Moe?

  Jack recognized the Oslo Cathedral when the taxi dropped him at the front entrance to the Bristol—the dome that greenish color of turned copper, the clock tower large and imposing. He decided he would go there in the morning and speak with the organist; that the organist would turn out to be Andreas Breivik was not the only surprise in store for Jack.

  There was a new organ now—not the German-made Walcker, which Jack remembered had a hundred and two stops. (Even the organ that replaced the Walcker had been replaced.) The new one was special in its own way; Andreas Breivik told Jack all about it. If Breivik had been sixteen or seventeen when Alice seduced him—or gave him an invisible tattoo, as Alice might have put it—he was not a day over forty-five when he spoke with Jack in the Domkirke. But Andreas Breivik had made something of a maestro of himself, and his success had made him pompous.

  His blond, blue-eyed good looks had not endured. A man with delicate features had to be careful. Breivik’s face was slightly puffy; perhaps he drank. He gave Jack a virtual lecture on the subject of the cathedral’s new organ, which had been completed only a month before Jack’s arrival in Oslo—by a Finn living in Norway. (Jack couldn’t have cared less about the organ, or the Finn.)

  With a grandiose gesture to the green-and-gold instrument, which positively shimmered, Breivik said: “We have the funeral of King Olav the Fifth to thank for this. January 1991—I’ll never forget it. The old Jørgensen was such a disgrace. The Prime Minister himself insisted that money be raised for a new organ.”

  “I see,” Jack said.

  Andreas Breivik had studied choral music in Stuttgart; he’d furthered his organ studies in London. (This hardly mattered to Jack, but he nodded politely
; Breivik’s education, not to mention his mastery of English, meant a great deal to Breivik.)

  “I’ve seen your films, of course—very entertaining! But you don’t seem to have followed in your father’s musical footsteps, so to speak.”

  “No—no musical footsteps,” Jack said. “I took after my mother, it seems.”

  “Are you tattooed?” Breivik asked.

  “No. Are you?”

  “Good Lord, no!” Andreas Breivik said. “Your dad was a talented musician, a generous teacher, an engaging man. But his tattoos were his own business. We didn’t discuss them. I never saw them.”

  “Mr. Breivik, please tell me what happened. I don’t understand what happened.”

  Jack remembered the cleaning woman in the church—how horrified she’d been to see him and his mom. He recalled what little he’d understood of his mom’s seduction of Andreas Breivik, and how Ingrid Moe had come to her for a tattoo—how Ingrid had wanted a broken heart and Alice had given the girl a whole one. But why had Alice insisted on talking to Ingrid Moe in the first place, and what information about Jack’s father could either Ingrid or Andreas possibly have given Jack’s mom? His dad hadn’t run away; Alice hadn’t been trying to find William. What was there about William that Alice didn’t already know?

  Andreas Breivik was less pompous in relating this story; he wasn’t proud of it, nor was it an easy story for him to tell. But the pattern, which Jack had failed to grasp till now, was really rather simple.

  Everywhere Jack and his mom went, after Copenhagen, they arrived ahead of his dad. Alice not only expected William to follow them—she knew how much William wanted to see his son—but Alice also knew ahead of time where William would be inclined to travel next. You didn’t just choose a church and an organ, Breivik told Jack; these appointments took time to arrange. There was always an experienced organist with whom a relatively inexperienced organist wanted to study next, and the church where that mentor played had its own hierarchical way of choosing apprentices.

  No organist wanted more than a few students, and only the most gifted students were chosen. With an organ, because of how many notes there were to play, sight reading was mandatory. Students with very narrow tastes, or those who disliked certain core composers, were generally discouraged; most younger students were irritating, because they liked to practice only loud or flashy music.