John Irving - Until I Find You

Poor Astrid, Ulrika, and Vendela—Jack later wished he could have met them. He remembered meeting Torvald Torén; even to Jack, Torén seemed young. Twenty-four is young, and Torén was a slight man with quick movements and lively eyes. Jack had the feeling that his mom was as utterly disarmed by Torén as she was by his devastating news of the three choirgirls. And unlike many organists Jack would meet, Torvald Torén was well dressed. The boy was struck by the businesslike efficiency of Torén’s black briefcase, too.

Given his youth, his alert presence, his bright future—he was teaching the organ to a few carefully selected students—Alice may have seen in Torén all the promise that William had once embodied. Jack thought at the time that it might have been hard for his mom to say good-bye to Torvald Torén. As Jack and Alice were leaving the Hedvig Eleonora, the boy saw his mother turning to look at that golden altar—and out in the snow, in what struck them both as Stockholm’s perpetual darkness, Alice kept glancing over her shoulder at the lighted dome of the church. But Jack had heard very little of Alice’s conversation with Torén; the church itself and the young organist’s appearance had completely captured the four-year-old’s attention.

Here they had yet to find Doc Forest, and William was already underground! But Alice believed that William was incapable of passing through a port without being tattooed, and somewhere in Stockholm there was at least one good tattoo artist. Just possibly, Doc Forest might know where William had gone. If only to distract himself from the pain, a man getting a complicated tattoo is inclined to talk.

In the meantime, while they were trying to find Doc Forest, Alice was spending a fair amount of money. They were staying at the Grand, which was the best hotel in Stockholm. Their room faced the Old Town and the water, with a view of the wharf where the boats to and from the archipelago docked. Jack would remember posing with one of those ships as if he were the captain, just stepping ashore. He knew the hotel was expensive because his mom said so on a postcard she sent to Mrs. Wicksteed, which she read out loud to him. But Alice had a plan.

The Grand was near the opera and the theater—people met there for drinks and dinner. Local businessmen had breakfast and lunch there, too. And the lobby of the Grand was both bigger and less gloomy than the lobby of the D’Angleterre. Jack lived in that lobby as if the hotel were his castle and he was the Grand’s little prince.

Alice’s plan was simple, but for a while it worked. Jack and Alice had few dressy clothes, and they wore them day and night; their laundry bill was expensive, too. Looking most unlike the solicitors they were, they ate a huge breakfast every morning. The buffet was included with the price of their room; it was their only complete meal of the day. While they gorged themselves, they would try to spot the tattoo-seekers among the well-heeled people eating breakfast.

They skipped lunch. Few people at the Grand ate lunch alone, and Alice knew that the decision to get a tattoo was a solitary one. (You didn’t make a commitment to be marked for life in the company of colleagues or friends; in most cases, they tried to talk you out of it.)

In the early evening, Jack stayed alone in the hotel room, snacking on cold cuts and fruit, while his mom checked out the potential tattoo clients at the bar. Later at night, after Jack had gone to bed, Alice would order the least expensive appetizer in the dining room. At the Grand, apparently, many hotel guests ate their dinners alone—“traveling businessmen,” in Alice’s estimation.

Her approach to a potential client was always the same. “Do you have a tattoo?” (She’d even mastered this in Swedish: “ Har ni någon tatuering? ”)

If the answer was yes, she would ask: “Is it a Doc Forest?” But no one had heard of him, and the answer to the first question was usually no.

When a potential client said he or she didn’t have a tattoo, Alice asked the next question—in English first, in Swedish if she had to. “Would you like one?” ( “Skulle ni vilja ha en?” )

Most people said no, but some would say maybe. Maybe was good enough for Alice—all she ever needed was her pretty foot in the door.

When Jack couldn’t sleep, he recited this dialogue; it worked better for him than thinking about Lottie or counting sheep. Maybe what made Jack Burns an actor was that he never forgot these lines.

“I have the room and the equipment, if you have the time.” ( “Jag har rum och utrustning, om ni har tid.” )

“How long does it take?” ( “Hur lång tid tar det?” )

“That depends.” ( “Det beror på.” )

“How much does it cost?” ( “Vad kostar det?” )

“That depends, too.” ( “Det beror också på.” )

Jack would wonder one day at the line “I have the room and the equipment, if you have the time.” Were those traveling businessmen, whom Alice solicited alone, ever confused by her intentions? The one lady who said she wanted a tattoo wanted nothing of the kind. Not only was she surprised to find a four-year-old in Alice’s hotel room; she wanted him to leave.

Alice refused to send Jack away. The lady, who was neither young nor pretty, seemed greatly offended. She spoke English very well—in fact, she may have been English—and she was the likeliest source of the hotel manager discovering that Alice was giving tattoos in her hotel room.

The tattoo machines, the pigments, the power pack, the foot switch, the little paper cups, the alcohol and witch hazel and glycerine, the Vaseline and paper towels—there was such a lot of stuff! Yet everything was put away, completely out of sight, when the maid came. As underground as tattooing was in Stockholm, Alice knew that the Grand would not have been happy to discover she was earning an income at that enterprise there.

Though he later suspected that the trouble with the hotel manager probably came from the English-speaking lesbian, at the time, Jack wasn’t aware of the negotiations that transpired between his mother and the manager. He simply observed that his mom’s attitude toward the Grand abruptly changed. She began to say things like, “If I don’t get a lead on Doc Forest today, we’re out of here tomorrow”—although they continued to stay. And Jack often woke at night to find her absent. He was too young to tell the time, but it seemed to him that it was very late at night for anyone to be having dinner in the dining room. So where was Alice on those nights? Was she giving a free tattoo to the hotel manager?

They were lucky to meet the accountant. Jack would soon wonder if, in every town, his mother needed to meet someone in order for them to be saved. It was a little anticlimactic to be rescued by an accountant, especially after encountering such a hero as the littlest soldier. Naturally, not knowing he was an accountant, Jack and his mom spotted him in the Grand at breakfast.

Torsten Lindberg was his name, and he was so thin that he seemed in need of more than a meal. But breakfast was a huge event for him, as it was for Jack and Alice. They’d noticed him not because he looked like a potential tattoo client, but because he had heaped on his plate a platter-size serving of herring—Jack and Alice hated herring—and Lindberg was making his way through the fishy mound with remarkable relish. With no thought of asking this tall, lugubrious-looking man if he had a tattoo or wanted one, Jack and his mother watched him eat, spellbound by his appetite. They couldn’t help but wonder if the breakfast buffet at the Grand was his only complete meal of the day, too. At least in his appetite, if not in his taste for herring, he seemed a kindred soul.