John Irving - Until I Find You

From the front entrance of the Bristol, the view of the Oslo Cathedral is slightly uphill. From that perspective, the first dark morning they saw it, the Domkirke appeared to rise out of the middle of the road at the end of the long street marked by trolley tracks. But they never took the streetcar; the cathedral was within easy walking distance.

“I’ll bet that’s the one,” Alice said.

“Why?” Jack asked.

“I just bet it is.”

The Domkirke looked important enough to have an old organ with one hundred and two stops. A German-made Walcker, the organ had been rebuilt in 1883 and again in 1930. The exterior dated back to 1720. It had been painted gray in 1950—the original was green—and its grayness enhanced what was monumental and somber about the Walcker’s old baroque façade.

The Oslo Cathedral was brick, the dome that greenish color of turned copper, and the tower clock was large and imposing. The clock’s face suggested an elevated self-seriousness, beyond Lutheran, as if the building’s purpose lay more in the enshrinement of sacred relics than in the usual business of a house of worship.

Consistent with this impression was Jack and Alice’s first encounter with the church’s interior. There were no candles; the cathedral was illuminated by electric lights. Huge chandeliers were hung from the ceilings; old-fashioned bracket lamps cast a fake candlelight on the walls. The altar, which unmiraculously combined the Lord’s Last Supper with His Crucifixion, was as festooned with bric-a-brac as an antiques shop. The short, squat staircase leading to the pulpit was ornate, with wooden wreaths painted gold. Overhanging the pulpit, as if the firmament itself were about to fall down, was a floating island of angels—some of them playing harps.

No one was playing the organ; not a soul was praying in a pew, either. Leaning on her mop as if it were a cane, only a cleaning woman was there to greet them—and she did so warily. As Alice would later explain to Jack, no one even marginally associated with the Domkirke wished to be reminded of William. Jack was a reminder.

When the cleaning woman saw the boy, she froze. She drew in her breath and stiffened her arms, the mop held in both hands in front of her; it was as if her mop were the Holy Cross, and, clinging to it for protection, she hoped to fend Jack off.

“Is the organist here?” Alice asked.

“ Which organist?” the cleaning woman cried.

“How many are there?” Alice replied.

Scarcely daring to take her eyes off Jack, the cleaning woman told Alice that a Mr. Rolf Karlsen was the organist in the Domkirke. He was “away.” The word away caused Jack to lose his concentration; the church suddenly seemed haunted.

“Mr. Karlsen is a big man,” the cleaning woman was saying, although it wasn’t clear if big referred to his physical size or his importance—or both.

No minister of the church was present, either, the cleaning woman went on. By now she was waving her mop like a magic wand, though such was her transfixed gaping at Jack that she was unaware of her efforts. Jack was looking everywhere for her pail, which he couldn’t find. ( How can you work a mop without a pail? the boy was wondering.)

“Actually,” Alice began again, “I was looking for a young organist, a foreigner named William Burns.”

The cleaning woman closed her eyes as if in prayer, or with the hopeless conviction that her mop might turn into an actual crucifix and save her. She solemnly raised the mop and pointed it at Jack.

“That’s his son!” the cleaning woman cried. “You’d have to be blind not to recognize those eyelashes.”

It was the first time anyone had said Jack looked like his father. Jack’s mother stared at him as if she were aware of the resemblance for the first time; she seemed suddenly no less alarmed than the cleaning woman.

“And you, poor wretch, must be his wife!” the cleaning woman told Alice.

“I once wanted to be,” Alice answered. She held out her hand to the cleaning woman and said: “I’m Alice Stronach and this is my son, Jack.”

The cleaning woman first wiped her hand on her hip, then gave Alice a firm handshake. Jack knew how firm it was because he saw his mom wince.

“I’m Else-Marie Lothe,” the woman said. “God bless you, Jack,” she said to the boy. Remembering the clerk at the front desk of the Bristol, Jack didn’t shake her outstretched hand.

Else-Marie would not discuss the details of what had happened, except to say that the entire congregation couldn’t put “the episode” behind them. Alice and her son should just go home, the cleaning woman told them.

“Who was the girl this time?” Alice asked.

“Ingrid Moe is not a girl—she’s just a child !” Else-Marie cried.

“Not around Jack,” Alice said.

The cleaning woman cupped Jack’s ears in her dry, strong hands and said something he couldn’t hear; nor could he hear his mother’s response, but there was no “poor wretch” in Else-Marie’s final remark to Alice. “No one will talk to you!” Else-Marie called after them, as they were leaving the Domkirke, her words echoing in the empty cathedral.

“The girl will—I mean the child, ” Alice said. “I’ll talk to Ingrid Moe!”

But it was Jack’s impression that, when they came a second time to the Oslo Cathedral, they were shunned. The cleaning woman wasn’t there. A man on a stepladder was replacing burned-out lightbulbs in the bracket lamps mounted on the walls. He was too well dressed to be a janitor. (An especially conscientious parishioner, perhaps—the church’s self-appointed fussbudget.) And whoever he was, it was clear that he knew who Jack and Alice were—he wasn’t talking.

“Do you know William Burns, the Scotsman?” Alice asked, but the man just walked away. “Ingrid Moe! Do you know her ?” Alice called after him. Although the lightbulb man kept walking, Jack had seen him flinch. (And there was that overfamiliar sound of the camera shutter again—when Jack was holding his mother’s hand in front of the Domkirke. Someone took their picture as they were about to return to the Bristol.)

Finally, on a Saturday morning, an unseen organist was playing. Jack reached for his mother’s hand, and she led the boy to the organ. He would wonder, only later, how she knew the way.

The organist sat one floor above the nave; to reach the organ, you needed to climb a set of stairs in the back of the cathedral. The organist was so intent on his playing that he didn’t see Jack and Alice until they were standing right beside him.

“Mr. Rolf Karlsen?” Alice’s voice doubted itself. The young man on the organ bench was a teenager—in no way could he have been Rolf Karlsen.

“No,” the teenager said. He’d instantly stopped playing. “I’m just a student.”

“You play very well,” Alice told him. She let go of Jack’s hand and sat down on the bench beside the student.

He looked a little like Ladies’ Man Lars—blond and blue-eyed and delicate, but younger and untattooed. No one had broken his nose, which was as small as a girl’s, and he was without Lars’s misbegotten goatee. His hands had frozen on the organ stops; Alice reached for his nearer hand and pulled it into her lap.

“Look at me,” she whispered. (He couldn’t.) “Then listen,” she said, and began her story. “I used to know a young man like you; his name was William Burns. This is his son,” she said, with a nod in Jack’s direction. “Look at him.” (He wouldn’t.)

“I’m not supposed to talk to you!” the student blurted out.

With her free hand, Alice touched his face, and he turned to her. A son sees his mother in a certain way; especially when he was a child, Jack Burns thought his mom was so beautiful that she was hard to look at when she put her face close to his. Jack understood why the young organist shut his eyes.