by John Irving
“But you can’t be—not if you’re here,” another of the women said doubtfully. “You just look like him, right?”
“It’s a curse,” Jack told them bitterly. “I can’t help it that I look like him. I hate the bastard.” It was the last line that gave him away; it was one of Billy Rainbow’s lines. In the movie, Jack said it three times—not once referring to the same person.
“It’s him!” one of the women cried.
“I knew you were Jack Burns,” the most pregnant-looking woman told him. “Jack Burns always gives me the creeps, and you gave me the creeps the second I saw you.”
“Well, then—I guess that settles it,” Jack said. He was still lying on his back; he hadn’t moved since he’d noticed them surrounding him.
“What movie are you making here? Who else is in it?” one of them asked.
“There’s no movie,” he told them. “I’m just in town to do a little research.”
One of the pregnant women grunted, as if the very thought of what research Jack Burns might be doing in Helsinki had given her her first contraction. Half the women walked away; now that the mystery was solved, they were no longer interested. But the aerobics instructor and two other women stayed, including the most pregnant-looking woman.
“What kind of research is it?” the aerobics instructor asked him.
“It’s a story that takes place in the past—twenty-eight years ago, to be exact,” Jack told them. “It’s about a church organist who’s addicted to being tattooed, and the woman whose father first tattooed him. They have a child. There’s more than one version of what happened, but things didn’t work out.”
“Are you the organist?” the most pregnant-looking woman asked.
“No, I’m the child—all grown up, twenty-eight years later,” he told them. “I’m trying to find out what really happened between my mother and father.”
The pregnant woman who hadn’t yet spoken said: “What a depressing story! I don’t know why they make movies like that.” She turned and walked away—probably she was going to the women’s locker room. The most pregnant-looking woman waddled after her. Jack was left alone with the aerobics instructor.
“You didn’t say you were doing a little research for a movie, did you?” she asked him.
“No, I didn’t,” he admitted. “This research isn’t for a movie.”
“Maybe you need a guide,” she said. She was at least seven months pregnant, probably eight. Her belly button had popped; like an erect nipple, it poked out against the spandex fabric of her leotard. “I meant to say a date.”
“I’ve never had a pregnant date,” Jack told her.
“I’m not married—I don’t even have a boyfriend,” she explained. “This baby is kind of an experiment.”
“Something you managed all by yourself?” he asked.
“I went to a sperm bank,” she answered. “I had an anonymous sperm donor. I kind of forget the insemination part.”
From flat on his back on the ab machine, Jack made one of those too-hasty decisions that had characterized his sexually active life. Because he’d imagined that he wanted to be with someone who was pregnant, Jack chose to be with the pregnant aerobics instructor at the Motivus gym—this instead of even trying to make a dinner date with Hannele and Ritva, the lesbian couple who were the reason for his coming to Helsinki in the first place.
Jack rationalized that what he might learn from the organist and cellist, who were a couple when his mother and father knew them—and they were still a couple—was in all likelihood something he already knew or could guess. Jack’s mother had somehow misrepresented them to him; they had slept with her, not his dad. Of course there would be other revelations of that kind, but nothing that couldn’t be said over coffee or tea—nothing so complicated that it would require a dinner date to reveal.
Jack decided to go to the Church in the Rock about the time Hannele and Ritva would be finishing their rehearsal. He would suggest that they go somewhere for a little chat; surely that would suffice. Jack thought there was no reason not to spend his last night in Helsinki with a pregnant aerobics instructor. As it would turn out, there was a reason, but Jack was responding to an overriding instinct familiar to far too many men—namely, the desire to be with a certain kind of woman precluded any reasonable examination or in-depth consideration of the aerobics instructor herself, whose name was Marja-Liisa.
They made a date, which was awkward because they had to get a pen and some paper from the reception desk; other people were watching them. Marja-Liisa wrote out her name and cell-phone number for him. She was clearly puzzled by what Jack wrote out for her—Jimmy Stronach, Hotel Torni—until he explained the business of always registering under the name of the character he plays in his next movie.
When Jack left the gym and returned to the Torni, he went first to that porn shop where he’d seen the unlikely but alluring Schwangere Girls in the window. He took the magazine back to his hotel room—just to look at the pictures, which were both disturbing and arousing.
When Jack left the hotel for the Church in the Rock, he threw the disgusting magazine away—not in his hotel room but in a wastebasket in the hall opposite the elevator. Not that you can really throw pictures like those away—not for years, maybe not ever. What those pregnant women were doing in those photographs would abide with Jack Burns in his grave—or in Hell, where, according to Ingrid, you were deaf but you could see everyone you ever knowingly hurt. You just couldn’t hear what they were saying about you.
Since that afternoon in Helsinki, Jack could imagine what Hell might be like for him. For eternity, he would watch those pregnant women having uncomfortable-looking sex. They would be talking about him, but he couldn’t hear them. For eternity, Jack could only guess what they were saying.
To Jack, the dome of Temppeliaukio Church looked like a giant overturned wok. The rocks, which covered all but the dome, had a pagan simplicity; it was as if the dome were a living egg, emerging from the crater of a meteor. The apartment buildings surrounding the Church in the Rock had an austere sameness about them. (Middle-class housing from the 1930s.)
There were more rocks inside the church. The organist sat in view of those people on the left side of the congregation. The empty, rounded benches—for the choir—occupied a center-stage position. Choirs were important here. The copper organ pipes were very modern-looking against the darker and lighter woods. The pulpit was surrounded by stone; Jack thought it looked like a drinking fountain.
In the early afternoon, he sat and listened to Hannele and Ritva—Ritva in profile to him, on the organ bench, Hannele facing him with her legs wide apart, straddling her cello. A small audience quietly came and went while the two women practiced. Jack could tell that Hannele had recognized him as soon as he sat down; she must have been expecting him, because she merely smiled and nodded in his direction. Ritva turned once to look at Jack; she smiled and nodded, too. (The lady he’d spoken to at Sibelius Academy must have forewarned Hannele and Ritva that Jack Burns was looking for them.)
It wasn’t all church music—at least not the usual church music. As a former Canadian, Jack recognized Leonard Cohen’s “If It Be Your Will”—not that he was used to hearing it played on organ and cello. As an American, Jack also recognized Van Morrison’s “Whenever God Shines His Light on Me.” Hannele and Ritva were very good; even Jack could tell that their playing together had become second nature. Of course he was predisposed to like them. Jack gave them a lot of credit in advance, just for surviving whatever assault his mom might have made on them as a couple.
Jack also listened to them rehearse two traditional pieces—“Come, Sing the Praise of Jesus” and “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel.” The latter was an Advent hymn, and both hymns were better known in Scotland than in Finland, Hannele and Ritva told Jack later. But the hymns, they said, had been particular favorites of his father’s.
“William taught us those two,” Ritva said. “We don’t care that it isn’t the month
before Christmas.”
They were having tea in Hannele and Ritva’s surprisingly beautiful and spacious apartment in one of those gray, somber buildings encircling the Church in the Rock. Hannele and Ritva had combined two apartments overlooking the dome of Temppeliaukio Church. Like the church, their apartment was very modern-looking—sparsely furnished, with nothing but steel-framed, black-and-white photographs on the walls. The two women, now in their late forties, were good-humored and very friendly. Naturally, they were not as physically intimidating as they’d seemed to Jack at four.
“You were the first woman I ever saw with unshaven armpits,” he told Hannele. The astonishing hair in Hannele’s armpits had been a darker blond than the hair on her head, although Jack didn’t mention this detail—nor the birthmark over Hannele’s navel, like a crumpled top hat the color of a wine stain, the shape of Florida.
Hannele laughed. “Most people remember my birthmark, not my armpits, Jack.”
“I remember the birthmark, too,” he told her.
Ritva was enduringly short and plump, with long hair and a pretty face. She still dressed all in black, like a drama student. “I remember how you fell asleep, Jack—how hard you were trying not to!” Ritva told him.
He explained that he’d thought, at the time, they had come for their half-a-heart tattoos because they’d both slept with his father.
“With William?” Hannele cried, spilling her tea. Ritva could not stop laughing.
They were the kind of gay women who were so comfortable with each other that they could flirt unselfconsciously with him, or with other young men, because they were confident that they wouldn’t be misunderstood.
“I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised,” Hannele said. “William told us that your mom was capable of telling you anything, Jack. Ritva and I underestimated how far she would go.”
Hannele explained that her relationship with Ritva was new and still uncommitted when Jack’s mother had first hit on them; the young music students had even discussed sleeping with Alice as a kind of test of their relationship.
“It was 1970, Jack,” Ritva said, “and Hannele and I were young enough to imagine that you could treat any relationship as an experiment.”
William had warned them about Alice; he’d told Hannele and Ritva her history. Yet the girls had imagined that if they both were “unfaithful” with Jack’s mother, they wouldn’t hurt each other.
“It hurt us more than we expected,” Hannele told Jack. “We decided to hurt your mother back. The tattoo we shared was a symbol of how we had hurt each other—a reminder to not be unfaithful to each other again, a reminder of what sleeping with your mom had cost us. And we let her know that we were brave enough to sleep with anybody—even with William.”
“Of course we wouldn’t have slept with William, Jack—not that your father would have slept with either of us,” Ritva said. “But your mom was extremely sensitive about anyone your dad might sleep with, and it wasn’t hard to convince her that Hannele and I were lawless.”
“We even flirted with you, Jack—just to piss her off,” Hannele said.
“Yes, I remember that part,” Jack told them.
Their half-a-heart tattoos had been torn apart vertically; both women were tattooed on their heart-side breasts.
“You have eyelashes to die for, Jack,” Hannele had told him. Under the covers, her long fingers had lifted his pajama top and stroked his stomach. When she was sleeping beside him, he’d almost kissed her.
“Go to sleep, Jack,” his mom had told him.
“Tell me about the ‘Sweet dreams’ part,” Jack asked Hannele and Ritva in their beautiful apartment. It was growing dark outside; the lights shone through the dome of the Church in the Rock like a fire burning windows in an eggshell. (Jack remembered that he’d thought “Sweet dreams” was something his dad probably said to all of his girlfriends.)
“He’s not four anymore,” Ritva said to Hannele, who was shaking her head. “Go on, tell him.”
“It’s what your mom whispered in our ears before she kissed us down there,” Hannele said, averting her eyes from Jack’s.
“Oh.”
Ritva had said, “Sweet dreams,” to Jack, before she’d kissed him good night. “Isn’t that what you say in English?” she’d asked Alice. “Sweet dreams.”
“Sometimes,” Alice had said, and Hannele’s brave whistling had stopped for a second—as if the pain of the shading needles on her heart-side breast and that side of her rib cage had suddenly become unbearable. But Jack had been sure it was the “Sweet dreams” that had hurt her, not the tattoo. (Talk about a not-around-Jack subject!)
Jack told Hannele and Ritva about his mother’s surprisingly long-lasting relationship with Leslie Oastler—not that Alice hadn’t probably had other, lesser relationships in the same period of time, but her relationship with another woman was the only one that had endured. Were Hannele and Ritva surprised at that? he asked.
The two women looked at each other and shrugged. “There wasn’t anything your mom wouldn’t do, Jack,” Ritva said, “not if she could have an effect—almost any effect—on your dad.”
“After William, I don’t think Alice cared who she slept with,” Hannele told him. “Man, woman, or boy.”
The black-and-white photographs on the walls of the apartment were mostly of Hannele and Ritva—many concert photographs among them. There was one of Ritva on the organ bench in the Johanneksen kirkko, where Jack had gone with his mother—this had been following a heavy snowfall, he remembered. Flanking Ritva on the organ bench were her two teachers—Kari Vaara, the organist with the wild-looking hair, and a handsome, thin-lipped young man whose long hair fell to his shoulders, framing a face as delicate as a girl’s.
“My father?” Jack asked Ritva, pointing to the picture. William looked almost the same as he had that night in the restaurant of the Hotel Bristol.
“Yes, of course,” Ritva told Jack. “You haven’t seen his picture before?”
“What are you thinking, Ritva?” Hannele asked. “Do you imagine Alice kept a photo album for Jack?”
What Jack was unprepared for was how young his father looked. In 1970, in Helsinki, William Burns would have been thirty-one—a couple of years younger than Jack was now. (It is strange to see, for the first time, a photograph of your father when he is younger than you are.) Jack was also unprepared for the resemblance; William looked almost exactly like Jack.
Of course William seemed small beside Ritva and Kari Vaara. William was a small but strong-looking man, not slight but somehow feminine in his features, and with an organist’s long-fingered hands. (Jack had his mom’s small hands and short, square fingers.)
William was wearing a long-sleeved white dress shirt, open at the throat—the organ pipes of the Walcker from Württemberg rising above him. Jack asked Hannele and Ritva about his father’s tattoos.
“Never saw them,” Hannele said. Ritva agreed; she’d never seen them, either.
In the bedroom, Jack saw black-and-white photographs of Hannele’s and Ritva’s tattoos—just their naked torsos, the hearts cut in half on their left breasts. At least the tattoos were as he’d remembered them, but Hannele had shaved her armpit hair; her hands, folded flat above her navel, hid her birthmark from the photographer.
It was a mild surprise to see that they had other tattoos. There was some music on Hannele’s hip, and more music—it looked like the same music—on Ritva’s buttocks. Like the photos of their shared heart, these were close-ups—only partial views. But they were such different body types, Jack had no difficulty telling Hannele and Ritva apart.
“What’s the music?” he asked them.
“We played it earlier—before you came to the church,” Ritva said. “It’s another piece William taught us, a hymn he used to play in Old St. Paul’s.”
“ ‘Sweet Sacrament Divine,’ ” Hannele told Jack. She began to hum it. “We only know the music, not the words, but it’s a hymn.”
It soun
ded familiar; perhaps he’d heard it, or had even sung it, at St. Hilda’s. Jack knew he’d heard his mom sing it in Amsterdam, in the red-light district. If it was something his dad used to play at Old St. Paul’s, it was probably Anglican or Scottish Episcopal.
The old scratcher’s name almost didn’t come up, but Hannele—pointing to the black-and-white photo of the tattoo on her hip—just happened to say it. “It’s not bad for a Sami Salo.”
Jack told Hannele and Ritva the story of the scary night at the Hotel Torni, when Sami Salo had banged on the door—not to mention how Sami’s noticeably younger wife, that tough-talking waitress at Salve, had told Alice she was putting Sami out of business.
Hannele was shaking her head again—her short, curly blond hair not moving. “Sami’s wife was long gone before you and your mom came to town, Jack,” Ritva said. “That waitress at Salve was Sami’s daughter.”
“Her name was Minna,” Hannele told him. “She was William’s friend, one of your dad’s older women. I always thought it was a peculiar relationship, but Minna had gone through some hard times—like your dad. She had a child out of wedlock, and the child died as an infant—some upper-respiratory ailment.”
“Your father wasn’t looking for a girlfriend, Jack. He was probably still in love with the Dane,” Ritva said. “Minna was just a comfort to him. I think that’s all he thought he was good for, to be a comfort to someone. You know, it’s that old Christian idea—you find someone down on their luck and you help them.”
Certainly Agneta Nilsson, who’d taught William choral music in Stockholm—and Jack how to skate on Lake Mälaren—was an older woman. Maybe Agneta had been down on her luck, too; after all, she’d had a bad heart.
“Look, we’re musicians, Jack. Your dad was first and foremost a musician,” Hannele said. “I’m not claiming an artist’s license for how I live—William wasn’t, either. But what sort of license was your mom taking? There wasn’t anything she didn’t feel entitled to!”
