by John Irving
In the living room, which faced the street, there was an old fireplace, and the original stucco work was intact. The piano faced a wall of photographs—family pictures, for the most part. The biggest of the three bedrooms, which was Ingrid’s, also faced the street—not the park.
“I think the park is rather lonely at night,” she told Jack, “and besides, my children wanted views of the park from their bedrooms. There have been no difficult decisions in this apartment.” She had an interesting way of speaking—that is, in addition to her speech impediment.
The thick braid that had hung to her waist was gone; her hair was slightly shorter than shoulder-length now, but still blond with only hints of silver in it. She wore jeans, and what may have been her favorite among her son’s left-behind shirts—a man’s flannel shirt, untucked, like Miss Wurtz had once worn.
“I wore this for you, because it’s so American,” Ingrid said, plucking at the shirt with her long fingers. “I never dress up or wear any makeup in this apartment.” (Another not-difficult decision, Jack imagined.) “If I dressed up and wore makeup, it might make my pupils nervous.”
Jack said that he thought he’d met one of her pupils, and that he’d probably made him nervous—without meaning to. “An English boy, about twelve or thirteen?” Jack asked.
She nodded and smiled. Many of her students were from diplomats’ families; the parents wanted their children to be occupied with cultural things. “To keep them from being at loose ends,” Ingrid said. “Not a bad reason for playing the piano.”
Jack asked her if she would play for him, but she shook her head. The apartment wasn’t soundproofed, she explained. In the old building, her neighbors could hear the piano through the walls. She stopped playing after five in the afternoon, and the first of her students never came to the apartment before nine—more often ten—in the morning.
She and Jack sat in the kitchen, where Ingrid made some tea. Her cheeks were a little sunken in, but she was still beautiful; nothing of what had been baby-faced about her remained, and her long limbs and broad hips had always given her a womanly appearance. She was more handsome than pretty, befitting the mother of two grown children—the children’s photos were all over the apartment, not just on the wall behind the piano.
Jack had spotted a nice-looking man with the children, when the kids were younger; he was a sailor in some of the pictures, a skier in others. The children’s father, Ingrid’s ex-husband, Jack assumed; the man looked nice in the way Emma had once defined the word, meaning that he looked normal. Everything about Ingrid seemed normal, too—in the best sense of the word.
“I shouldn’t have said I was glad your mother was dead. That’s an awful thing to say about a mother to her son!” she exclaimed. “I’m sorry.”
“No, don’t be sorry,” Jack said. “I understand.”
“I hated her twice,” Ingrid told him. “For what she did to me, for seducing Andreas—of course I hated her for that. But when I had children of my own—when they were the age you were when I met you—I hated your mother all over again. I hated her for what she did to you. First I hated her as a woman, then as a mother. No woman can have children and continue to think of herself first, but she did. Alice wasn’t thinking of you—of you not having a father. She was thinking only about herself.”
Jack couldn’t say anything; everything Ingrid said sounded true. He couldn’t argue with her, but he also couldn’t agree with her—not with any authority. What did Jack Burns know about having children, and how having children changed you? He finally said: “You have a third reason to hate her—for your tattoo. I remember that it wasn’t what you asked for.”
Ingrid laughed; her laughter was more natural-sounding than the way she had cried on the telephone. She was moving gracefully around the kitchen—opening the refrigerator, putting food on the table. Jack realized that she’d prepared a cold supper—gravlaks with a mustard sauce, a potato salad with cucumber and dill, and slices of very dark rye bread.
“Well, it was just a tattoo—it wasn’t life-changing,” she was saying. “But I was proud of myself for telling her what I wanted. I knew she would hate the idea. ‘A whole heart, a perfectly unbroken one,’ I told her. ‘A heart my babies will one day love to touch,’ I said. ‘There’s not a thing the matter with my heart,’ I told your mother. ‘Maybe just make it a little smaller than average,’ I told her, ‘because my breast is a little smaller than average, too.’ I thought I was so brave to tell her this, when all the while my heart was broken. Andreas and your mother had broken it, but I wasn’t going to let her know that.”
“What did you say?” Jack asked her. It wasn’t the speech impediment; he was pretty sure he had understood her. “You didn’t ask for a broken heart, Ingrid?”
“Ask? Who would want one?” she exclaimed. “I asked your mother for the kind of heart I had before she fucked Andreas!” Ingrid was lighting a candle; she’d already arranged the place settings. She hadn’t turned a light on in the kitchen, preferring the dusk and the view of the Stensparken. “And the bitch gave me a broken heart!” Ingrid said. “As ugly a heart as one could imagine. Well, you put the bandage on it, Jack. You remember.”
“I remember it the other way around,” he told her. She was pouring herself a glass of wine. (Somehow she knew Jack didn’t drink; she told him later that she’d read about his being a teetotaler in an interview.) “I remember you asking for a heart ripped in two, and my mom gave you a good one.”
“She gave me a good one, all right,” Ingrid said. She stood next to Jack’s chair and unbuttoned the flannel shirt; she wasn’t wearing a bra. (He thought of Miss Wurtz in a shirt like that, without a bra—unbuttoning her shirt for his father.)
Even at dusk, in the dim candlelight, the tattoo of Ingrid Amundsen’s torn heart looked like a fresh wound—the jagged tear cut the heart diagonally in two. The blood-red edges of the tear were darker than the shading of the heart, and more sharply defined than the outline. Jack had not seen his mother do an uglier tattoo, but Ingrid seemed accepting of it.
“Well, guess what?” she said, buttoning her shirt back up. “My babies loved it! They loved to touch it! And I came to realize that your mother had given me the heart I had—not the heart I used to have. How much more cruel it would have been to walk around wearing the heart I used to have. Not that Alice was consciously doing me a favor.” She sat down at the table and served him. “Bon appétit, Jack,” she said. “When I see you in the movies, I think of how proud you must make your father—and how it must have hurt your mother to see you.”
“Hurt her? How?” he asked.
“Because she finally had to share you,” Ingrid said. “She never knew how to share you, Jack.”
The food was very good, and Jack was hungry; it seemed strange that there wasn’t any music, but music is never background music to musicians.
“Your father was very religious,” Ingrid told him when he was helping her do the dishes. “It’s hard to play church music in a church and not be, although I wasn’t. I became more religious when I went back to playing the piano—that is, not in a church.”
“How was he very religious?” Jack asked.
“When Andreas and your mother hurt me, William told me something. He said, ‘Find someone; devote yourself to that person; have a child, or children; praise God.’ Not that it ever worked out that way for me! But that’s what William told me; that’s what he believed in. Well, I got the children, and I praise God. That’s been good enough.”
“So you’re religious, too?” he asked.
“Yes—but not like your father, Jack.”
“Tell me more about the religious part,” he said.
“Take your mother, for example,” Ingrid said a little impatiently. “Your father forgave her. I didn’t.”
“He forgave her?”
“He fought back once, but it backfired. I don’t think he fought back again,” she told him. It was as if her speech impediment had almost gone away, or he’
d forgotten it; she was such a healthy person, Jack was thinking.
She’d gone into the living room and had come back to the kitchen with a photograph. “A pretty young woman, don’t you think?” she asked, showing him the picture. Jack recognized the beautiful girl in the photograph; it was the woman William had brought with him to the restaurant in the Hotel Bristol.
“I asked her if she had a tattoo,” Jack said.
“That was what backfired,” Ingrid told him. “Your dad didn’t expect you would speak to them. He felt awful.”
“Who was the girl?” Jack asked.
“My sister, an actress,” Ingrid said. “She’s not a movie star, like you—but in Norway she’s a little bit famous, in the theater. I convinced your father to take her with him. I thought it would serve your mother right. Alice was always telling him how and when he could get a look at you. In Copenhagen, and in Stockholm, she even told him who to have with him!”
“Yes, I know,” Jack said.
“So I told him to take my sister, the actress, and I told my sister to fall all over him. I said to them both, ‘Make the bitch think you’re in love with each other. Make her think that all the lies she tells Jack have come true!’ But then you went up to them, and they didn’t know what to do. Naturally, your mom fell apart, and she took you away again. She was always taking you away.”
“Yes,” he said.
“Your father told me: ‘Maybe forgiveness would have worked better, Ingrid.’ But I told him that nothing would work with Alice. Nothing worked—did it, Jack?”
“No, nothing worked,” he answered.
“Your father said: ‘God wants us to forgive each other, Ingrid.’ That’s all I know about the religious part, Jack.”
It was dark outside—the lonely time of night in the Stensparken—and the candle on the kitchen table was the only light in the darkening apartment. “Look how dark it is, Jack Burns,” Ingrid whispered, bending down to touch his ear with her clenched teeth. “You’re still a little boy to me. I can’t let you go home in the dark.”
Even with her speech impediment, she made it sound as if this were another not-difficult decision in her fabulous apartment, where there’d been no difficult decisions—not ever.
Kissing Ingrid Amundsen was almost normal; there was an unnatural sound she made when she swallowed, when she was kissing him, but it wasn’t unpleasant. Jack held his mom’s ripped-heart tattoo on Ingrid’s small left breast—exactly where her babies had been delighted to touch her.
Ingrid had no breasts to speak of, and the blue veins in her forearms stood out against the gold of her skin—just as he’d remembered. Another blue vein, which began at her throat, ran down between her small breasts; that vein seemed to have a pulse in it, as if an animal lived under her skin. Maybe the animal affected her speech. At least he’d remembered her veins correctly.
“I used to think about which of us was the more damaged, but we’re all right, aren’t we?” Ingrid asked him; her poor voice sounded awful at that moment.
“Yes, I think so,” Jack said, but he didn’t really feel that he was all right—and he couldn’t tell about Ingrid. She had the aura of an accepted sadness about her. Jack hated to think of her meeting people for the first time, and what that did to her. He was even angry at her son, who’d gone off to the university in Bergen. Couldn’t the kid have stayed in Oslo and seen more of his mother?
Yet Ingrid’s life, her seeming wholeness, impressed Jack as more likable than whatever life Andreas Breivik was living. Breivik’s opinion—namely, that Ingrid had not had much success at anything—struck Jack as arrogant and wrong. But Andreas had known her better than Jack did. She was such a beautiful yet flawed woman; it hadn’t been hard for Jack’s mom to make the boy believe that Ingrid and William had been lovers. (Who wouldn’t have been her lover?)
“It couldn’t have been as bad for your father anywhere as it was in Copenhagen,” Ingrid told Jack, “but I don’t think that the problems with your mother ever got better. Not in Helsinki, anyway. Alice was perfectly awful to him there. But she didn’t achieve her desired effect. I think your mom started running out of steam in Helsinki, Jack.” (That had always been Jack’s impression.)
“What happened in Helsinki?” he asked her.
“I don’t know everything, Jack. I just know that Alice tried to break up a lesbian couple, but she couldn’t manage it. They both slept with her—and had a good time, or not—but they went right on being a couple!”
“Who were they?” Jack asked.
“Music students—your dad’s two best, like Andreas and me. Only one of them was an organist; the other one was a cellist.”
“Ritva and Hannele were gay?” Jack asked.
“Their names sound familiar,” Ingrid said. “The point is, Jack—your mother, once again, didn’t get what she wanted. But neither did your father.”
“You stayed in touch with him?” Jack asked.
“Till he left for Amsterdam,” Ingrid told him. “Whatever happened there, he didn’t write me about it. I lost touch with him when he left Helsinki.”
The kissing had become more interesting; it was principally her speech that was damaged. There was something detectably but indefinably strange about her mouth—if not actual damage, a kind of involuntary tremor that felt like damage. Jack didn’t know what it was, but it was very arousing.
It seemed the wrong time to ask her, but the thought had occurred to Jack—when she implied she’d had some limited correspondence with his father, if only when William was in Finland. Jack just had to ask her: “Was there anything romantic between you and my dad, Ingrid?”
“What a thing to ask me—you naughty boy!” she said, laughing. “He was a lovely man, but he wasn’t my type. For one thing, he was too short.”
“Shorter than I am?” Jack asked.
“A little shorter, maybe—not much. Of course I was never with him when I was lying down!” she added, laughing again. Ingrid grabbed Jack’s penis, which in his experience implied an impatience with the particular conversation—whatever it was.
“So I’m not your type, either?” he asked.
She kept laughing; it was the most natural sound she was capable of making. (Except, perhaps, on the piano.) “I have other reasons for wanting to sleep with you, Jack,” was all she told him.
“What other reasons, Ingrid?”
“When you’ve made love to me again and again, I’ll tell you,” she said. “I’ll tell you later—I promise.” There was an urgency about her speech impediment now, something more than impatience. He began by kissing her broken-heart tattoo, which seemed to make her happy.
In the morning, Jack woke her by kissing the tattoo again; it looked as if it were still bleeding. She smiled before she opened her eyes. “Yes, keep doing that,” Ingrid said, with her eyes still closed. He kept kissing her wounded-heart tattoo. “If you keep doing that, I’ll tell you what I believe about Hell.” Her eyes were wide open now—Hell being an eye-opening subject. He kept kissing her, of course.
“If you hurt people, if you know you’re hurting them, you go to Hell,” Ingrid said. “In Hell you have to watch the people you hurt, the ones who are still alive. If two people you hurt ever get together, you have to watch everything they do very closely. But you can’t hear them. Everyone in Hell is deaf. You just have to watch the people you hurt without knowing what they’re talking about. Of course, Hell being Hell, you think they’re talking about you—it’s all you ever imagine, while you’re just watching and watching. Kiss me everywhere, Jack—not just the tattoo.” He kissed her everywhere; they made love again. “What a bad night’s sleep your mother’s had, Jack,” Ingrid said. “She’s been up all night, just watching.”
Jack had fallen back to sleep when he heard the piano. There was the smell of coffee in the apartment. He got out of bed and went into the living room, where Ingrid was sitting naked at the piano, playing softly. “Nice way to wake up, isn’t it?” she asked, with her back tur
ned to him.
“Yes, it is,” he told her.
“We both have to get dressed, and you have to go,” she said. “My first pupil is coming.”
“Okay,” Jack said, turning to go back to her bedroom.
“But come kiss me first,” she said, “while the bitch is watching.”
There was a lot Jack didn’t know about religion. His dad, apparently, was a forgiver. Ingrid Moe (now Amundsen) wasn’t; she hadn’t forgiven Andreas Breivik or Alice. As Jack kissed Ingrid on her damaged mouth, he was thinking that he wasn’t much of a forgiver, either.
In Hell, where his mother was watching, Alice might have regretted giving Ingrid the wrong tattoo—or so Jack Burns was also thinking.
29
The Truth
Jack never saw what the rest of Finland looked like. It was dark all the way from the airport into Helsinki. Although it was April, it was almost snowing; one or two degrees colder, and the rain would have turned to snow.
He checked into the Hotel Torni, marveling at the large, round room on the first floor, which served the hotel as a lobby. Jack remembered it as the American Bar—a hangout for the young and wild, some brave girls among them. The old iron-grate elevator, which had been “temporarily out of service” for the duration of Jack’s time in the Torni with his mom, was now working.
But although the American Bar was gone, the Torni was still a hangout for young people. On the ground floor was an Irish pub called O’Malley’s; shamrocks all over the place, Guinness on draft. It was an unwise choice for the Jack Burnses of this world—it was packed with more moviegoers than Coconut Teaszer. But Jack wasn’t hungry, and he’d slept on the plane. He didn’t feel like eating or going to sleep.
A not-bad band of Irish folksingers was playing to the pubcrowd—a fiddler, a guitarist, and a lead singer who said he loved Yeats. He’d left Ireland for Finland fifteen years ago.
