John Irving - Until I Find You

Achild’s memory is not only inaccurate—it’s not reliably linear, either. Jack not only “remembered” things that had never happened; he was also wrong about the order of events, including at least one thing that had actually taken place. When Jack and his mom had gone downstairs for dinner in the Hotel Bristol, it wasn’t their first night in Oslo—it was their last.

A young couple did come into the restaurant, just as Jack remembered. He’d thought it was the first time he saw how his mother looked when she encountered a couple in love. The young man was athletic-looking with long hair to his shoulders; he looked like a rock star, only he was better dressed. In fact, he looked exactly as Doc Forest had described William Burns—and his wife or girlfriend couldn’t take her eyes or her hands off him. (Jack even remembered the young woman’s breasts.)

Jack also recalled how he’d said to his mom that she should give the couple her sales pitch about getting a tattoo. “No,” she’d whispered, “not them. I can’t.”

Jack had boldly taken matters into his own small hands. He’d walked right up to that beautiful girl and said the lines he still said in his bed, to help him sleep. “Do you have a tattoo?”

Well, that young man was Jack’s father, of course—not that Jack knew it. Alice was offering William a last look at Jack before she and Jack left for Helsinki. (Jack didn’t know who the girl was; not yet.) No one—certainly not Alice, least of all William—had expected Jack to approach the young couple, not to mention speak to them.

What was the matter with the guy? Jack had wondered. The handsome, long-haired young man looked almost as if it pained him to see Jack; William had regarded Jack as if he’d never seen a child before. But whenever Jack had looked at him, William had looked away.

And there’d been a bitterness in William’s voice that made Jack look at him again—most notably when the young father had said to his son, “Maybe some other time.”

“Come with me, my little actor,” Alice had whispered in Jack’s ear, and Jack’s dad closed his eyes—William didn’t want to see his son go.

It was after he’d checked into the Bristol in April of 1998—Jack was eating dinner alone in that quiet, old restaurant—when he realized he’d actually seen his father in that gloomy room.

“Maybe some other time,” William had said; then Jack had reached for his mother’s hand, and she’d taken the boy away.

William would have other sightings of Jack—in Helsinki and in Amsterdam, no doubt—but this might have been Jack’s first and last look at his dad, and Jack had not known who William was!

But who was the young woman, and why had William brought her? Were they really in love? William must have known he was going to see his son; Jack’s father just hadn’t expected the boy to speak. William wasn’t prepared for that—neither was Alice. Obviously, Jack had surprised them both.

It unnerved Jack to think he’d correctly remembered the meeting, but that he’d been wrong about when it happened; this made Jack not trust the seeming chronology of things. If he’d met his own father—not knowing that William was his father—on Jack and his mom’s last night in Oslo instead of their first, when had his mother encountered Andreas Breivik? When had she offered Andreas a free tattoo? And when had Jack and Alice met the beautiful young girl with the speech impediment, Ingrid Moe?

Jack recognized the Oslo Cathedral when the taxi dropped him at the front entrance to the Bristol—the dome that greenish color of turned copper, the clock tower large and imposing. He decided he would go there in the morning and speak with the organist; that the organist would turn out to be Andreas Breivik was not the only surprise in store for Jack.

There was a new organ now—not the German-made Walcker, which Jack remembered had a hundred and two stops. (Even the organ that replaced the Walcker had been replaced.) The new one was special in its own way; Andreas Breivik told Jack all about it. If Breivik had been sixteen or seventeen when Alice seduced him—or gave him an invisible tattoo, as Alice might have put it—he was not a day over forty-five when he spoke with Jack in the Domkirke. But Andreas Breivik had made something of a maestro of himself, and his success had made him pompous.

His blond, blue-eyed good looks had not endured. A man with delicate features had to be careful. Breivik’s face was slightly puffy; perhaps he drank. He gave Jack a virtual lecture on the subject of the cathedral’s new organ, which had been completed only a month before Jack’s arrival in Oslo—by a Finn living in Norway. (Jack couldn’t have cared less about the organ, or the Finn.)

With a grandiose gesture to the green-and-gold instrument, which positively shimmered, Breivik said: “We have the funeral of King Olav the Fifth to thank for this. January 1991—I’ll never forget it. The old Jørgensen was such a disgrace. The Prime Minister himself insisted that money be raised for a new organ.”

“I see,” Jack said.

Andreas Breivik had studied choral music in Stuttgart; he’d furthered his organ studies in London. (This hardly mattered to Jack, but he nodded politely; Breivik’s education, not to mention his mastery of English, meant a great deal to Breivik.)

“I’ve seen your films, of course—very entertaining! But you don’t seem to have followed in your father’s musical footsteps, so to speak.”

“No—no musical footsteps,” Jack said. “I took after my mother, it seems.”

“Are you tattooed?” Breivik asked.

“No. Are you?”

“Good Lord, no!” Andreas Breivik said. “Your dad was a talented musician, a generous teacher, an engaging man. But his tattoos were his own business. We didn’t discuss them. I never saw them.”

“Mr. Breivik, please tell me what happened. I don’t understand what happened. ”

Jack remembered the cleaning woman in the church—how horrified she’d been to see him and his mom. He recalled what little he’d understood of his mom’s seduction of Andreas Breivik, and how Ingrid Moe had come to her for a tattoo—how Ingrid had wanted a broken heart and Alice had given the girl a whole one. But why had Alice insisted on talking to Ingrid Moe in the first place, and what information about Jack’s father could either Ingrid or Andreas possibly have given Jack’s mom? His dad hadn’t run away; Alice hadn’t been trying to find William. What was there about William that Alice didn’t already know?

Andreas Breivik was less pompous in relating this story; he wasn’t proud of it, nor was it an easy story for him to tell. But the pattern, which Jack had failed to grasp till now, was really rather simple.

Everywhere Jack and his mom went, after Copenhagen, they arrived ahead of his dad. Alice not only expected William to follow them—she knew how much William wanted to see his son—but Alice also knew ahead of time where William would be inclined to travel next. You didn’t just choose a church and an organ, Breivik told Jack; these appointments took time to arrange. There was always an experienced organist with whom a relatively in experienced organist wanted to study next, and the church where that mentor played had its own hierarchical way of choosing apprentices.

No organist wanted more than a few students, and only the most gifted students were chosen. With an organ, because of how many notes there were to play, sight reading was mandatory. Students with very narrow tastes, or those who disliked certain core composers, were generally discouraged; most younger students were irritating, because they liked to practice only loud or flashy music.