by John Irving
“You had to have a few irons in the fire,” Andreas Breivik said. He meant that you had to be making plans way ahead of yourself. Where was the next organist you wanted to study with? What church? Which organ? In this world, you were both an apprentice and a teacher; as an apprentice, you also needed to go where you’d have students. (Not too many, but enough to pay the rent.)
This was the way it worked: when William was still playing the organ at the Citadel Church in Denmark, he was already thinking about Sweden—about apprenticing himself to Torvald Torén, about playing the organ at the Hedvig Eleonora in Stockholm—and all the while he was in Stockholm, William was planning to come (eventually) to Oslo, where he could study with Rolf Karlsen and play the organ at the Domkirke.
What Alice did, starting in Copenhagen, was to find out which irons in the fire were the hottest—what city was the next in line for William. Jack and his mom would go there, and Alice would establish herself; she would set up shop and wait for William to arrive. Then, systematically, Alice would set out to destroy the relationships William valued most. First of all, those friends he might have made in the church—possibly even the organist who was his mentor. But Alice more often chose easier targets; in the case of Oslo, she chose William’s two best students, Andreas Breivik and Ingrid Moe.
Contrary to what Jack had believed for twenty-eight years, his dad hadn’t seduced Ingrid Moe. She was sixteen at the time, and engaged to be married to young Andreas Breivik. They’d been childhood sweethearts; they even played the same instruments, first the piano and then the organ. And William prized them as students—not only because they were talented and hardworking, but also because they were in love. (Having been in love with Karin Ringhof, William Burns had a high regard for young musicians in love.)
“Your father was more than a terrific organist and a great teacher,” Andreas Breivik told Jack. “In Oslo, the story of what had happened to him in Copenhagen preceded him. He was already a tragic figure.”
“So my mother seduced you?” Jack asked him.
His once delicate, now slightly puffy features hardened. “I had known only Ingrid,” Breivik said. “A young man who’s had only one girlfriend is vulnerable to an older woman—perhaps especially to a woman with a reputation. Your mother put it to me rather bluntly: she said—she was teasing me, of course—‘Andreas, you’re really just another kind of virgin, aren’t you?’ ”
“Where did you tattoo him?” Jack remembered asking his mom.
“Where he’ll never forget it,” she’d whispered to Jack, smiling at Andreas. (Possibly the sternum, Jack had imagined; that would explain why the young man had trembled at her touch.)
“Just keep it covered for a day,” Jack had said to Breivik, as the young organ student was leaving; it looked like it hurt him to walk. “It will feel like a sunburn,” Jack had told him. “Better put some moisturizer on it.”
But Andreas didn’t know anything. After the organ student had gone, Alice had sobbed, “If he’d known anything, he would have told me.”
She’d meant that Andreas Breivik didn’t know what irons William had in the fire; the boy had no idea where William was thinking of going next. But Ingrid Moe knew, and Alice wasted little time in letting Ingrid know that she’d slept with the girl’s fiancé. Ingrid had never felt so betrayed. Her speech impediment isolated her; she’d always been shy about meeting people. Ingrid couldn’t forgive Andreas for being unfaithful to her. It didn’t help that Alice wouldn’t leave the girl alone.
Jack remembered that Sunday when his mom took the shirt cardboard to church—how she’d stood in the center aisle at the end of the service, with the shirt cardboard saying INGRID MOE held to her chest. Jack had thought Rolf Karlsen must have been playing the organ that Sunday, because everyone said Karlsen was such a big deal and the organ sounded especially good.
But the organist that Sunday had been William Burns. It was the one time his father had played the organ for Jack, but—not unlike how the boy had met his dad in the restaurant at the Hotel Bristol—Jack didn’t know it, and neither did William.
“I’m sorry he hurt you,” Alice had said to Ingrid Moe, when the girl had come to the hotel for her broken-heart tattoo. But the he had been Andreas Breivik, who’d slept with Jack’s mother—not, as Jack had thought, his father, who had never slept with Ingrid Moe.
Jack remembered how Ingrid’s exquisite prettiness was marred by what an obvious strain it was for her to speak. Not that he’d understood her very well; for all these years, Jack had thought of her speech impediment as an agony connected with kissing. (When he’d imagined his father kissing the girl, Jack had felt ashamed.)
“I won’t do his name,” Alice had told Ingrid.
“I don’t want his name,” the girl had answered—clenching her teeth together when she talked, as if she were afraid or unable to show her tongue. She’d wanted just a heart, ripped in two.
Then Alice had given her a whole heart instead—a perfectly unbroken one, as Jack recalled.
“You didn’t give me what I wanted!” Ingrid Moe had blurted out.
“I gave you what you have, a perfect heart—a small one,” Alice had told her.
“I’m not telling you anything,” the girl had said.
She’d told Jack instead—“Sibelius,” she’d said. Not the composer but the name of a music college in Helsinki, where William’s next best students would come from. (New students were part of what Andreas Breivik meant by irons in the fire.)
“Ingrid quit the organ,” Andreas told Jack. “She went back to the piano, without much success. I stayed with the organ. I kept growing, as you have to,” he said, with no small amount of pride. “Ingrid’s marriage didn’t have much success, either.”
Jack didn’t like him; Breivik seemed smug, even a little cruel. “What about your marriage?” Jack asked him. “Or didn’t you get married?”
Andreas shrugged. “I became an organist,” he said, as if that were all that mattered. “I’m grateful to your mother, if you really want to know. She saved me from getting married at a time when I was far too young to be married, anyway. I would have had a time-consuming personal life, when what I needed was to be completely focused on my music. As for Ingrid, in all likelihood, she would have chosen a personal life over a career—whether she married me or someone else. And I don’t think her personal life would have worked out any better, or differently, if she’d been married to me. With Ingrid, things just wouldn’t have worked out—they just didn’t.”
Like some other successful people Jack had known, Andreas Breivik had all the answers. The more Breivik said, the more Jack wanted to talk with Ingrid Moe. “There’s one other thing,” Jack said. “I remember a cleaning woman in the church—an older woman, well-spoken, imperious—”
“That’s impossible,” Breivik said. “Cleaning women aren’t well-spoken. Are you telling me this one spoke English?”
“Yes, she did,” Jack replied. “Her English was quite good.”
“She couldn’t have been a cleaning woman,” Andreas said with irritation. “I don’t suppose you remember her name.”
“She had a mop—she leaned on it, she pointed with it, she waved it around,” Jack went on. “Her name was Else-Marie Lothe.”
Breivik laughed scornfully. “That was Ingrid’s mother! I’ll say she was imperious! You got that right. But Else-Marie wasn’t that well-spoken; her English was only okay.”
“Her last name was Lothe. She had a mop,” Jack repeated.
“She was divorced from Ingrid’s father. She’d remarried,” Andreas said. “She had a cane, not a mop. She broke her ankle getting off the streetcar right in front of the cathedral. She caught her shoe in the trolley tracks. The ankle never healed properly—hence the cane.”
“She had dry hands, like a cleaning woman,” Jack mentioned lamely.
“She was a potter—the artistic type. Potters have dry hands,” Breivik said.
Needless to say, Else-Marie Lothe ha
d hated Alice; she’d ended up hating Andreas Breivik, too. (Jack could easily see how that could happen.)
Jack asked Breivik for Ingrid Moe’s married name and her address.
“It’s so unnecessary for you to see her,” Andreas said. “You won’t find her any easier to understand this time.” But, after some complaining, Breivik gave Jack her name and address.
Under the circumstances, it turned out that Andreas Breivik knew more about Ingrid Moe than Jack would have thought. Her name was Ingrid Amundsen now. “After her divorce,” Breivik said, “she moved into a third-floor apartment on Theresesgate—on the left side of the street, looking north. You can walk from there to the center of Oslo in twenty-five minutes.” Breivik said this with the dispassion of a man who had timed the aforementioned walk, more than once. “The blue tram line goes by,” Andreas continued, as slowly as if he were waiting for the tram. “Since the new Rikshospitalet was built, there are three different lines passing. The noise might have bothered Ingrid to begin with, but she probably doesn’t hear it any longer.”
Ingrid Amundsen was a piano teacher; she gave private lessons in her apartment.
“Theresesgate is quite a nice street,” Andreas said, closing his eyes, as if he could walk the street in his sleep—of course he had. “Down at the south end, toward Bislett Stadium, which is only a five-minute walk from Ingrid’s, there are a few cafés, a decent bookstore—even an antiquarian bookstore—and the usual 7-Eleven. Closer to Ingrid, on her side of the street, is a large grocery store called Rimi. There’s a nice vegetable store next to the Stensgate tram stop, too. It’s run by immigrants—Turkish, I think. You can buy some imported specialties—marinated olives, some cheeses. It’s all very modest, but nice.” Breivik’s voice trailed away.
“You’ve never been inside her apartment?” Jack asked him.
Breivik shook his head sadly. “It’s an old building, four stories, built around 1875. It’s a bit shabby, I suppose. Knowing Ingrid, she probably would have kept the original wooden floors. She would have done some of the renovating herself. I’m sure her children would have helped her.”
“How old are her children?” Jack asked.
“The daughter is the older one,” Breivik told Jack. “She’s living with a guy she met in university, but they don’t have children. She lives in an area called Sofienberg. It’s a very popular and hip place for young people to live. The daughter can get on a tram in Trondheimsveien and be at her mother’s in about twenty minutes; by bicycle, it would take her ten or fifteen. I imagine, if she had children, she’d want to move out of central Oslo—maybe Holmlia, an affordable area, where there are still almost as many Norwegians as there are immigrants.”
“And Ingrid has a son?” Jack asked.
“The boy is studying at the university in Bergen,” Andreas Breivik said. “He visits his mother only during vacations.”
Jack liked Breivik a little better after this conversation. Jack nearly told Andreas that he would come see him after he visited with Ingrid—and that he would describe the interior of her apartment to him so that the organist could imagine the interior part of Ingrid’s life as obsessively as he’d imagined the rest of it. But that would have been cruel. Andreas was probably unaware of what an investigation he’d made of his former girlfriend.
Ingrid Moe had been sixteen when Jack had covered the tattoo on her heart-side breast with a piece of gauze with Vaseline on it. He remembered that he’d had some difficulty getting the adhesive tape to stick to her skin, because she was still sweating from the pain.
“Have you done this before?” Ingrid had asked.
“Sure,” Jack had lied.
“No, you haven’t,” she’d said. “Not on a breast.”
When he’d held the gauze against her skin, Jack could feel the heat of her tattoo—her hot heart burning his hand through the bandage.
Like Andreas Breivik, Ingrid Amundsen would be about forty-five now.
“What a waste!” Andreas cried out suddenly, startling Jack. “She had such long fingers—perfect for playing the organ. The piano,” Breivik said contemptuously. “What a waste!”
Jack remembered her long arms and long fingers. He remembered her thick blond braid, too—how it hung down her perfectly straight back, reaching almost to the base of her spine. And her small breasts—especially the left one, which Jack had touched with the tattoo bandage.
When Ingrid Moe (now Amundsen) spoke, she curled back her lips and bared her clenched teeth; the muscles of her neck were tensed, thrusting her lower jaw forward, as if she were about to spit. It was tragic, he’d thought, that such a beautiful girl could be so instantly transformed—that the not-so-simple act of speaking could make her ugly.
Jack was a little afraid of seeing her again. “That girl is a heart-stopper,” his mother had said twenty-eight years before.
“You have your father’s eyes, his mouth,” Ingrid had whispered to Jack, but her speech impediment had made a mess of her whisper. (She’d said “mouth” in such a way that the mangled word had rhymed with “roof.”) And Jack had thought he would faint when she kissed him. When her lips opened, her teeth had clicked against his; he remembered wondering if her speech impediment was contagious.
Was there a problem with her tongue? Of course there might have been nothing the matter with Ingrid’s tongue. Jack had not asked Andreas Breivik about the source of Ingrid’s speech impediment; naturally, he had no intention of asking Ingrid.
When Jack called her, from the Bristol, he was afraid she wouldn’t see him. Why would she want to be reminded of what had happened? But it was stupid to try to deceive her, and Jack didn’t do a very good job of it. (“Some actor you are!” Emma would have told him.)
When Ingrid Amundsen answered the phone, Jack was completely flustered that she said something in Norwegian. Well, what else would the poor woman speak in Norway?
“Hello? I’m an American who finds himself in Oslo for an indefinite period of time!” Jack blurted out, as if there were worse things the matter with him than a speech impediment. “I want to keep up my piano lessons.”
“Jack Burns,” Ingrid said; the way she spoke, Jack could hardly recognize his own name. “When you speak the way I do,” she continued, “you listen very closely to other people’s voices. I would know your voice anywhere, Jack Burns. About the only thing I have in common with people who can talk normally is that I’ve seen all your movies.”
“Oh,” Jack said, as if he were four years old.
“And if you play the piano, Jack, you probably play better than I do. I doubt I can teach you anything.”
“I don’t play the piano,” he confessed. “My mother’s dead and I don’t know my father. I wanted to talk with you about him.”
Jack could hear her crying; it wasn’t pretty. She couldn’t even cry normally. “I’m glad your mother’s dead!” she said. “I think I’ll have a party! I would love to talk to you about your father, Jack. Please come talk with me, and we’ll have a little party.”
He remembered watching her walk away from him—down the long, carpeted hall of the Bristol. She’d been sixteen going on thirty, as he recalled. From behind, she didn’t look like a child; she’d walked away from him like a woman. And what a voice—that voice had always been sixteen going on forty-five.
Although it was raining, Jack stood for fifteen minutes outside her building on the Theresesgate—fortunately, under an umbrella. The taxi had brought him sooner than he’d expected. Ingrid had invited him at five in the afternoon, which was when her last piano student of the day would be leaving. Jack looked up from his watch and saw a boy about twelve or thirteen coming out of Ingrid’s building. He looked like a piano student, Jack thought—a little dreamy, a little delicate, a little like it wasn’t entirely his idea to be doing this.
“Excuse me,” Jack said to the boy. “Do you play the piano?” The kid was terrified; he looked as if he were sizing up which way to run. “Forgive me for being curious,” Jack sa
id, hoping to sound reassuring. “I just thought you looked very musical. Anyway, if you are a piano player, keep doing it. Never stop! I can’t tell you how much I regret that I stopped.”
“Bugger off!” the boy said, walking backward away from him. To Jack’s surprise, the boy had an English accent. “You look like that creep Jack Burns. Just bugger off!”
Jack watched him run; the boy went in the direction of the Stensgate tram stop. Jack imagined that the piano student was about the age of Niels Ringhof when Niels had slept with Jack’s mother. He rang the buzzer for AMUNDSEN—no first name, no initial.
It was a third-floor walk-up, but even a snob like Andreas Breivik might have enjoyed the view. The kitchen and the two smaller bedrooms overlooked the Stensparken—a clean-looking park situated on a hill. At the south end of the park, Ingrid pointed out the Fagerborg Kirke—the church where she went every Sunday. On Sunday mornings, she told Jack, you could hear the church bells in the whole area.
“The organist at the Fagerborg Church isn’t in the same league as your father or Andreas Breivik,” Ingrid said, “but he’s more than good enough for a simple piano teacher like me.”
She’d learned to conceal her mouth with her long fingers when she spoke, or to always speak when her face was turned slightly away. The constant movement of her long arms, as if she were conducting music only she could hear, was very graceful; she was a head taller than Jack, even in her white athletic socks. (She made him take off his shoes at the door.)
Breivik had been right about the floors—she’d saved the original wood. Her son had helped her remove the old layers of lacquer. The kitchen was the best room in the apartment; it had been remodeled in the early nineties. “With cupboards and all the rest from IKEA—nothing fancy,” Ingrid said. It was a blue-and-white kitchen with a wooden workbench, and a kitchen table with three chairs around it; there was no dining room.
