by John Irving
“Hannele, the slut was his mother—no matter what you say about her,” Ritva said.
“If somebody dumps you, you move on,” Hannele told Jack. “Your mom made a feature-length film out of it!”
“Hannele!” Ritva said. “We’ve seen all your movies, Jack. We can’t imagine how you turned out so normal!”
Jack didn’t feel normal. He couldn’t stop thinking about the waitress with the fat arms—Minna, Sami Salo’s daughter. How her arms had jiggled; how she’d been a friend of his father’s!
So Jack’s mother had undermined even that—a comfort relationship. Hannele doubted that his dad and Minna had ever had sex; Ritva thought they probably had. But what did it matter? Alice had convinced Sami Salo that his unlucky daughter could expect nothing but betrayal and heartbreak from William Burns. Sami couldn’t wait for Alice and Jack to go to Amsterdam, where William would be bound to follow.
It was true that Sami Salo was a scratcher; even so, he wasn’t losing that much business to Daughter Alice. As Hannele and Ritva explained to Jack, his mom tattooed mostly students at the Hotel Torni; even well-to-do students weren’t inclined to spend their money on tattoos. Most of the sailors still went to Sami; at that time, sailors spent more money on tattoos than students did.
Jack also learned that Kari Vaara traveled—Vaara was always giving concerts abroad. William was what amounted to the principal organist at the Johanneksen kirkko, where he loved the church and the organ. He loved his students at Sibelius Academy, too—Ritva and Hannele being two of the better ones.
William would have no students in Amsterdam, where his duties at the Oude Kerk were so demanding that he had no time for teaching, too. “You mean the organ-tuning?” Jack asked Hannele and Ritva.
“The what?”
Jack explained what he’d been told: namely, that his dad’s only real job in Amsterdam was tuning the organ in the Oude Kerk, which was indeed vast, as Kari Vaara had described it, but the organ was always out of tune.
“William couldn’t tune a guitar, much less an organ!” Ritva cried.
“He only agreed to play the organ at the Oude Kerk if the church hired an additional organ-tuner,” Hannele told Jack.
“There was already someone who tuned the organ before every concert, but—at your dad’s insistence—the new organ-tuner came almost every day,” Ritva said.
“It was every night,” Hannele corrected her.
That’s when Jack knew who the additional organ-tuner had been—the dough-faced youngster who, Alice had said, was a “child prodigy.” The young genius who’d put baby powder on the seat of his pants so that he could more easily slide on the organ bench, which was also vast—Frans Donker, who’d played for Jack and his mom, and whatever whores were on hand, one night when he, the “child prodigy,” was supposed to be tuning the organ.
“They say that in the Oude Kerk, one plays to both tourists and prostitutes!” Kari Vaara had told Alice and Jack. Vaara was very proud of William, Hannele and Ritva said. Vaara had called William his best student ever.
Yet Alice had wanted Jack to see his father as a mere organ-tuner; she had purposely discredited William in his son’s eyes.
“Something happened in Amsterdam,” Jack said to Hannele and Ritva. “My dad stopped following us—something must have happened.”
Hannele was shaking her head again, the blond curls holding fast to her head. “The lawyer made a deal with your mother, Jack,” Ritva said. “It was a hard deal, but someone had to stop her.”
“It was no deal for William!” Hannele said angrily.
“It was the best deal for Jack, Hannele,” Ritva said.
“I don’t remember any lawyer,” Jack told them. “What lawyer?”
“Femke somebody. I don’t remember her last name,” Hannele said. “She was some super divorce lawyer—she’d been through some big-deal divorce herself.”
Well, it was almost funny that Jack had thought Femke was a prostitute; there’d been some preposterous story about her becoming a prostitute to embarrass her ex-husband. (Femke was rich, as Jack recalled, yet she’d become a whore!) What wouldn’t you believe when you were four, and your mom was the manager of your so-called memories?
“Begin with the cop, Jack,” Ritva said. “There was a cop—he was your dad’s best friend.”
“He got you out of there—he was your best friend, too, Jack,” Hannele said.
“Yes, I remember him,” Jack said. He was a nice guy, Nico Oudejans. Nico’s eyes were a robin’s-egg blue, and high on one cheekbone he had a small scar shaped like the letter L. “Naturally, I thought he was my mother’s friend,” Jack told Hannele and Ritva. “And I thought Femke was a prostitute!”
They were sitting on the leather couch in the living room, with the darkness now fallen over the glowing dome of the Church in the Rock. The two women flanked Jack on the couch; they put their arms around him.
“Jack, your mother was a prostitute. Femke was just a lawyer,” Hannele said.
“My mom was a prostitute for just one night!” Jack blurted out. “She took only one customer—a young boy. She said he was a virgin.”
The two women went on hugging him. “Jack, no one’s a prostitute for just one night,” Ritva said.
“There’s no such thing as a prostitute who takes only one customer, Jack,” Hannele told Jack. “Not to mention one virgin!”
“We should all have dinner tonight!” Ritva cried suddenly.
“Unless Jack has a date,” Hannele said, teasing him. “I refuse to share Jack with a date.” Jack just sat on the leather couch, staring at the darkness out the window.
“From the look of him, he’s got a date,” Ritva said.
“Yes, he’s got a date. I can see it in his eyes,” Hannele said.
“I’m sorry,” Jack told them. He just didn’t know how sorry—not yet.
The aerobics instructor was thirty-one weeks pregnant and expecting her second child.
“Same anonymous sperm donor?” Jack asked as nonchalantly as the circumstances permitted. They were both naked and in bed, in his hotel room at the Torni, and Marja-Liisa was pressing Jack’s face against her big belly so that he could feel how a thirty-one-week-old fetus moved around in there.
“No, my husband died,” she explained. “We were planning to have a second child, but it took me almost three years to get up the nerve to have the second one alone.”
“Do you have a boy or a girl?”
“A four-year-old boy.”
In the context of Jack’s return trip to the North Sea, almost everything about a four-year-old boy was interesting to him; however, he sensed that this wasn’t the time and place to tell Marja-Liisa how sorry he was to miss meeting her son. (Jack was leaving for Amsterdam very early in the morning.)
She said a friend was with the four-year-old, giving the boy his supper and putting him to bed. Marja-Liisa warned Jack that she couldn’t stay late. It was unusual for her to stay out past her son’s bedtime, and she was always back home, in her own bed, when the boy woke up in the morning.
The athleticism of the thirty-one-week-old fetus was a marvel to Jack—less so, the lovemaking of the aerobics instructor. He’d never been in bed with a pregnant woman; Jack had no idea what to expect. He probably shouldn’t have been concerned by how active Marja-Liisa was—that is, for a woman in her condition. (After all, he’d watched her lead the leaping women in the aerobics class, and Jack knew that most of the uncomfortable-looking positions he’d seen in the Schwangere Girls magazine could not have been faked.)
Jack realized only later what he had wanted, which was not to have sex with her but just to hold her while he fell asleep. All he really desired was his hand on her big belly, his hand imagining that there were two people he loved—not just a woman but also the child she was about to have. It had been a great way to fall asleep.
The knock on the door was quiet at first, then more insistent. It was not a Sami Salo kind of knocking, but one Jack was able
to incorporate into his dream—in the dream, Jack was a father.
“Marja-Liisa, are you there?” said a man’s voice in the hall. Then he must have asked the same question in Finnish.
The pregnant aerobics instructor had gone. Jack woke up alone in the bed; he went into the bathroom and wrapped a towel around his waist. There was a Hotel Torni envelope stuck to the mirror with a dab of his toothpaste. It was a clever way for her to have left him a note. He realized now that he must have been talking in his sleep.
My name is Marja-Liisa, not Michele. Who’s Michele?
Jack crumpled up the envelope and threw it in the bathroom wastebasket. Clutching the towel around his waist, he went to see who was at the door. Jack had a bad feeling that he already knew who it was. “Marja-Liisa—I know you’re there,” the man was saying, only a little more loudly.
Until Jack opened the door, he didn’t know that the man had brought the four-year-old with him. But what else could the poor guy have done? If you were a responsible father, you didn’t leave a four-year-old alone.
There was no question in Jack’s mind that the young man with the dark-blond hair was Marja-Liisa’s husband—not her dead husband, either. (Nor did the young man look like an anonymous sperm donor.) Any doubts Jack might have had were dispelled by the boy; the four-year-old had his dad’s dark-blond hair, but the child’s oval face and almond-shaped eyes were exactly like his mother’s.
“I knew it,” Marja-Liisa’s husband said. “You’re Jack Burns. Marja-Liisa said she saw you at the gym.”
“She’s not here,” Jack told him.
The unhappy husband looked past Jack into the disheveled room. The little boy wanted his dad to pick him up; the child was wearing slipper-socks with reindeer on them, and a ski parka over his pajamas. Jack stepped back into the room and the father carried his son inside. The pillows and bedcovers were all in a heap; the young husband stared at the bed as if he could discern the imprint of his pregnant wife’s body on the rumpled sheets.
Marja-Liisa had told her husband that she had a late-night aerobics class at the gym, but he found her gym bag in her closet after he’d put the four-year-old to bed; he had been tidying up the apartment and went to her closet to put some article of her clothing away, and there was the gym bag.
The young man showed Jack the piece of paper he’d found in the bag—Jimmy Stronach, Hotel Torni—but he’d guessed all along that Jimmy Stronach was Jack Burns.
“She kept telling me, ‘There’s a movie star in the gym, and I look like a whale!’ You’re not even her favorite movie star, but I suppose that doesn’t matter,” her husband said.
The four-year-old wanted to get down; his father looked distressed to see the boy climb onto the bed and burrow under the mound of pillows.
“She didn’t want a second child,” Marja-Liisa’s husband told Jack. “The pregnancy was an accident, but she blames me for it because I wanted to have more children.”
The four-year-old was sleepy-looking, but he had found a way to amuse himself with the feather quilt and all the pillows; the little boy moved in circles on all fours, like an animal trying to bury itself. Jack assumed that the child didn’t speak English, and therefore couldn’t understand them—not that the boy would have paid any closer attention to his dad and Jack if they’d been speaking in Finnish.
He’s only four, Jack kept thinking. Jack hoped that the child wouldn’t remember this adventure—being woken up and taken to a hotel in the middle of the night in his pajamas. Or perhaps the boy would remember no more than what he was told about this night, and why would his parents ever talk about it to him? (Maybe only if the night became a turning point in his family’s history, which Jack hoped it wouldn’t.)
“She’s probably gone home, or she was on her way home and you just passed each other,” Jack told Marja-Liisa’s husband, who was looking more and more distraught. The four-year-old was completely hidden from view, under all the pillows and bedcovers. In a muffled voice, the little boy asked his father something.
“He wants to use the bathroom,” the husband told Jack.
“Sure,” Jack said.
There was more Finnish—both the language and the barrier of the bedcovers making the exchange incomprehensible. Jack could see that Marja-Liisa’s husband didn’t want to touch the bed, so Jack helped the little boy get untangled from the feather quilt and all the pillows.
The four-year-old left the bathroom door open while he was peeing; the boy was also talking to himself and singing. Thus Jack must have followed his mother through those North Sea ports, peeing with the bathroom doors open, talking to himself and singing, remembering next to nothing—or only what his mom told him had happened, what she wanted him to remember.
“I’m sorry,” Jack said to the unhappy husband and father. Jack wasn’t going to make it worse for the poor man by telling him that his wife had told Jack her husband was dead, or that she was pregnant this time with the help of an anonymous sperm donor.
“Who is Jimmy Stronach?” the young man asked Jack.
Jack explained that it was the name of a character in the movie he hoped to make next; he didn’t mention the porn-star part, or that he was not just an actor in this movie but also the screenwriter.
The little boy came out of the bathroom; Jack hadn’t heard the toilet flush, and the four-year-old was disturbed about something. It appeared he had peed in the left-inside pocket of his ski parka. His father said some reassuring-sounding things to him in Finnish. (“Oh, we all pee in our parka pockets from time to time!” Jack imagined.)
Possibly Jack Burns had been a more aware four-year-old than Marja-Liisa’s little boy, but Jack doubted it.
The little boy wanted his father to pick him up again, which his dad did; the child snuggled his face against his father’s neck and closed his eyes, as if he were going to fall asleep right there. It was late; no doubt the boy could have fallen asleep almost anywhere.
Jack opened the hotel-room door for them—hoping the husband wouldn’t give one last look at the landscape of the abused bed, but of course the betrayed man did.
As they were leaving, the husband said to Jack: “I guess Jimmy Stronach is the bad guy in this movie.” Then they went down the hall, with the little boy singing a song in Finnish.
Jack went into the bathroom and flushed the toilet, noting that the four-year-old had peed all over the toilet seat; like a lot of four-year-olds, he’d not lifted the seat before he peed. Jack kept telling himself that if Marja-Liisa’s son was a normal four-year-old, and he certainly had behaved normally, the boy would never remember this awful night—not a moment of it.
Jack had to look everywhere for the piece of paper with Marja-Liisa’s name and cell-phone number on it. When he managed to find it, he called the number. Jack thought he should forewarn her that her husband and small son had paid him a visit. When Marja-Liisa answered the phone, she was at home and already knew that her husband and child were missing; she sounded frantic.
Jack told her that her husband had been visibly distressed but extremely well behaved. Jack also told her that her little boy had looked sleepy, but that the child had seemed to understand none of it.
“I wish you’d told me the truth,” Jack said.
“The truth!” she cried. “What do you know about the truth?”
It was dark all the way from the Hotel Torni to the airport, which was some distance from Helsinki. It was very early in the morning, but it looked like the middle of the night; naturally, it was raining. A little after dawn, when the plane took off, Jack could see patches of what looked like snow in the woods.
He was thinking that there was nothing more he wanted to know; he’d already learned too much about what had happened. No more truth, Jack kept thinking—he’d had enough truth for a lifetime. He didn’t really want to go to Amsterdam, but that’s where the plane was going.
30
The Deal
Jack’s second time in Amsterdam, he stayed at the Gra
nd—a good hotel on the Oudezijds Voorburgwal, about a two-minute walk from the red-light district. The rain had followed him from Finland. He walked through the district in the late-morning drizzle; the tourists appeared to be discouraged by the rain.
The blatancy of the prostitutes—in their underwear, in their windows and doorways—made their business plain. Yet, despite the obviousness of the undressed women, the four-year-old whom Jack had recently met in Helsinki could have been persuaded that the women were advice-givers. (As Jack himself had been persuaded.)
No one was singing a hymn or chanting a prayer; not one of the women had the appearance of a first-timer, or of someone who planned on being a prostitute for only one day.
The women would beckon to Jack, and smile, but if their smiles weren’t instantly returned—if he just kept walking or wouldn’t meet their gaze—they quickly looked away. He heard his name a few times, only once as a question. “Jack Burns?” one of the prostitutes asked, as he passed by. He didn’t turn his head or otherwise respond. Usually the Jack Burns seemed to be part of a declarative sentence, but one he couldn’t understand—in Dutch, or in some other language that wasn’t English. (Not many of the women were Dutch.)
Jack walked as far north as the Zeedijk, just to see for himself that Tattoo Theo’s old shop, De Rode Draak—the departed Red Dragon—was indeed gone. He easily found the small St. Olofssteeg, but Tattoo Peter’s basement shop had moved many years ago to the Nieuwebrugsteeg, a nearby street. Jack saw the new tattoo parlor, but he didn’t go in. When he asked one of the prostitutes what she knew about the shop, she said that someone named Eddie was in charge—Tattoo Peter’s second son, Jack thought she said.
“Oh, you mean Eddie Funk,” someone else would later tell Jack, suggesting that the Eddie in the new shop wasn’t actually related to Tattoo Peter. But what did it matter? Whoever Eddie was, he couldn’t help Jack.
Tattoo Peter—Eddie’s father or not—had died on St. Patrick’s Day, 1984. Or so Jack had read in an old tattoo magazine when he and Leslie Oastler were cleaning out Daughter Alice in Toronto.
