John Irving - Until I Find You

“But will it hurt your hands?” Jack asked him. The backup organist’s name was Mads Lindhardt; he’d been a student of Anker Rasmussen’s and had known Jack’s father.

“Not if I don’t play for too long,” Lindhardt said. “Besides, I would consider it an honor to play for William Burns’s boy. William was very special. Naturally, I was jealous of him when I first heard him play, because your father was always better than I was. Most unfair, because he’s younger !”

Jack was unprepared to meet someone at Kastellet who’d actually known his dad—much less thought of William as “special.” Jack couldn’t respond; all he could do was listen to Mads Lindhardt play the organ. Jack could scarcely tell there was anything the matter with Lindhardt’s hands.

They were alone in the Kastelskirken, except for a couple of cleaning women who were mopping the stone floor of the church; the women might have thought it strange to hear Christmas music on a rainy April morning, but the music didn’t appear to interfere with their work.

Among Lasse Ewerlöf’s Christmas favorites, Mads Lindhardt told Jack, were a few of William’s favorites, too. Bach’s Weihnachtsoratorium and his Kanonische Veränderungen über das Weihnachtslied, which Jack already knew his dad liked to play; also Messiaen’s La nativité du Seigneur and Charpentier’s Messe de minuit, which were new to Jack.

Jack realized, listening to Mads Lindhardt, that William would have ( many times ) imagined playing the organ for his son. But this had been forbidden, lost among the other things Alice had not permitted.

“It’s Christmas music, Mr. Burns,” Mads Lindhardt was saying gently; only then did Jack notice that the organist had stopped playing. “It’s supposed to make you happy. ” But Jack was crying. “That boy, Niels, was the darling of the citadel,” Mads said. “And your father was the darling of the entire Ringhof family—that was why it was such a tragedy. No one blamed your dad for what happened to Niels. But Karin had adored her little brother; understandably, she simply could not look at your father in the same way again. Even the commandant was sympathetic, but he was destroyed; for him, it was like losing two sons.”

“Where are they now?” Jack asked.

Lieutenant Colonel Ringhof had retired. He was an old man, living in Frederiksberg—a place quite close to Copenhagen, where many retired people went. Karin, the commandant’s daughter, had never married; she’d also moved away. She taught music in Odense, at a branch of the Royal Danish Conservatory.

The only mystery remaining to the Copenhagen story was why William had followed Alice and Jack to Stockholm. Jack understood that it would have been painful—even impossible—for his father to stay at the Frederikshavn Citadel, but why did William follow them when Alice had caused him such a devastating loss?

“To see you, ” Mads Lindhardt told Jack. “How else was he going to get a look at you, Jack?”

“She was crazy, wasn’t she?” Jack asked. “My mother was a madwoman !”

“Here is something Lasse Ewerlöf taught me,” Mads Lindhardt said. “ ‘Most organists become organists because they meet another organist.’ ” Lindhardt could see that Jack wasn’t getting his point. “Many women become crazy because they can’t get over the first man they fall in love with, Jack. What’s so hard to understand about that?”

Jack thanked Mads Lindhardt for his time, and for the Christmas concert. Leaving Kastellet, Jack regretted that he had not seen a single soldier; maybe they didn’t march around in the rain. Leaving the Frederikshavn Citadel—as angry and saddened as Jack now knew his father must have felt when he left that fortification—Jack tried to imagine his dad’s state of mind as he had followed Alice and Jack to Stockholm.

En route to Stockholm—in advance of his second arrival—Jack also tried to imagine what deceptions and outright deceits his mother had created for him there. In Copenhagen, it was not the littlest soldier who had saved Jack—and his rescuer had been his mother’s victim. Now he wondered if he had been saved by a Swedish accountant in Stockholm, or not. And who had been his mother’s victim (or victims) there ?

So much of what you think you remember is a lie, the stuff of postcards. The snow untrampled and unspoiled; the Christmas candles in the windows of the houses, where the damage to the children is unseen and unheard. Or what Jack thought he remembered of the Hedvig Eleonora Church—the one with the golden altar in Stockholm, where his memory of meeting Torvald Torén, the young Swedish organist, was (Jack was sure) not exactly as it seemed.

Torén was real; Jack recognized him when they met again. But William hadn’t slept with a single choirgirl—much less with three ! Alice had invented Ulrika, Astrid, and Vendela; no wonder Jack had no memory of meeting them. In Stockholm, Jack’s dad had been more celibate than a Catholic priest—well, almost.

The Hedvig Eleonora was Lutheran, and Torvald Torén had much enjoyed having William Burns as an apprentice; William was older than Torén and had actually taught the younger organist a few pieces to play. Not for long: Alice had wasted little time in poisoning the congregation against William, whom she portrayed as a runaway husband and father.

“What little I could manage to say in church every Sunday,” Torvald Torén told Jack, “could never overturn that image of you and your mom at the Grand. It was a very visible place for her to be soliciting, which she was, and it was no life for a young boy like you—to be on display, as you were. Whether there, at the Grand, or skating on Lake Mälaren with your father’s mistress—you were on display, Jack.”

“What?” Jack said. Surely Torén couldn’t have meant Torsten Lindberg’s wife ! (Agneta Nilsson, as Jack remembered her—because she preferred to use her maiden name.)

Torvald Torén shook his head. “I think you better talk to Torsten Lindberg, Jack,” the organist said. Jack had been planning to do so. He just happened to talk to Torén first; after all, it was easy to find him in the Hedvig Eleonora. It wasn’t hard to find Lindberg, either—he still ate breakfast every day at the Grand.

Naturally, Agneta Nilsson, Jack’s skating coach, had never been married to Torsten Lindberg. (Lindberg, Jack would soon discover, was gay; he always had been.) Agneta Nilsson had taught choral music at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm, where William was her favorite student. In his sorrow at the death of Niels Ringhof—not to mention the end of his engagement to Karin Ringhof, with whom William had been very much in love—William found comfort in the older woman’s arms.

If Jack’s father wanted to see his son in Stockholm—that is, in addition to watching the boy stuff his face at breakfast—Alice insisted that William watch Jack skate on Lake Mälaren with Agneta Nilsson, William’s mistress.

“I have the room and the equipment, if you have the time,” Jack had committed to memory—in English and in Swedish. ( “Jag har rum och utrustning, om ni har tid.” )

What a dance Alice had put them through—both Jack and his dad. “It was all done to torture them—I mean your father and poor Agneta,” Torsten Lindberg told Jack, when Jack met him for breakfast at the Grand. “And I’m sure your mother knew that Agneta Nilsson had a bad heart. It was probably your father who told her—innocently, without a doubt.”

“Agneta died ?” Jack asked.