John Irving - Until I Find You

“My father?” Jack asked Ritva, pointing to the picture. William looked almost the same as he had that night in the restaurant of the Hotel Bristol.

“Yes, of course,” Ritva told Jack. “You haven’t seen his picture before?”

“What are you thinking, Ritva?” Hannele asked. “Do you imagine Alice kept a photo album for Jack?”

What Jack was unprepared for was how young his father looked. In 1970, in Helsinki, William Burns would have been thirty-one—a couple of years younger than Jack was now. (It is strange to see, for the first time, a photograph of your father when he is younger than you are.) Jack was also unprepared for the resemblance; William looked almost exactly like Jack.

Of course William seemed small beside Ritva and Kari Vaara. William was a small but strong-looking man, not slight but somehow feminine in his features, and with an organist’s long-fingered hands. (Jack had his mom’s small hands and short, square fingers.)

William was wearing a long-sleeved white dress shirt, open at the throat—the organ pipes of the Walcker from Württemberg rising above him. Jack asked Hannele and Ritva about his father’s tattoos.

“Never saw them,” Hannele said. Ritva agreed; she’d never seen them, either.

In the bedroom, Jack saw black-and-white photographs of Hannele’s and Ritva’s tattoos—just their naked torsos, the hearts cut in half on their left breasts. At least the tattoos were as he’d remembered them, but Hannele had shaved her armpit hair; her hands, folded flat above her navel, hid her birthmark from the photographer.

It was a mild surprise to see that they had other tattoos. There was some music on Hannele’s hip, and more music—it looked like the same music—on Ritva’s buttocks. Like the photos of their shared heart, these were close-ups—only partial views. But they were such different body types, Jack had no difficulty telling Hannele and Ritva apart.

“What’s the music?” he asked them.

“We played it earlier—before you came to the church,” Ritva said. “It’s another piece William taught us, a hymn he used to play in Old St. Paul’s.”

“ ‘Sweet Sacrament Divine,’ ” Hannele told Jack. She began to hum it. “We only know the music, not the words, but it’s a hymn.”

It sounded familiar; perhaps he’d heard it, or had even sung it, at St. Hilda’s. Jack knew he’d heard his mom sing it in Amsterdam, in the red-light district. If it was something his dad used to play at Old St. Paul’s, it was probably Anglican or Scottish Episcopal.

The old scratcher’s name almost didn’t come up, but Hannele—pointing to the black-and-white photo of the tattoo on her hip—just happened to say it. “It’s not bad for a Sami Salo.”

Jack told Hannele and Ritva the story of the scary night at the Hotel Torni, when Sami Salo had banged on the door—not to mention how Sami’s noticeably younger wife, that tough-talking waitress at Salve, had told Alice she was putting Sami out of business.

Hannele was shaking her head again—her short, curly blond hair not moving. “Sami’s wife was long gone before you and your mom came to town, Jack,” Ritva said. “That waitress at Salve was Sami’s daughter. ”

“Her name was Minna,” Hannele told him. “She was William’s friend, one of your dad’s older women. I always thought it was a peculiar relationship, but Minna had gone through some hard times—like your dad. She had a child out of wedlock, and the child died as an infant—some upper-respiratory ailment.”

“Your father wasn’t looking for a girlfriend, Jack. He was probably still in love with the Dane,” Ritva said. “Minna was just a comfort to him. I think that’s all he thought he was good for, to be a comfort to someone. You know, it’s that old Christian idea—you find someone down on their luck and you help them.”

Certainly Agneta Nilsson, who’d taught William choral music in Stockholm—and Jack how to skate on Lake Mälaren—was an older woman. Maybe Agneta had been down on her luck, too; after all, she’d had a bad heart.

“Look, we’re musicians, Jack. Your dad was first and foremost a musician, ” Hannele said. “I’m not claiming an artist’s license for how I live—William wasn’t, either. But what sort of license was your mom taking? There wasn’t anything she didn’t feel entitled to!”

“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.