John Irving - Until I Find You

When they turned onto the Warmoesstraat, the policeman put his hand on Jack’s shoulder and steered him to the right—almost as if Nico didn’t trust Jack to remember where the police station was. “Were you coming to see me, Jack?”

“Yes, I was,” Jack said.

“So your mom’s dead?” Nico asked.

Jack assumed that Nico had read about Alice’s death; because she was Jack Burns’s mother, her death had been reported in most of the movie magazines. But Nico Oudejans didn’t read those magazines. The policeman had just guessed that Jack wouldn’t have come back to Amsterdam if Alice were still alive.

“Why?” Jack asked him.

“I’ll bet your mom would have talked you out of coming,” Nico said. “She sure would have tried.”

They went into the Warmoesstraat station and climbed the stairs to a bare, virtually empty office on the second floor. There was just a table and three or four chairs, and Jack sat across the table from the policeman; it was as if Jack were going to be questioned about a crime. Jack thought it was funny that Nico left the office door open, as if they couldn’t possibly have had anything private to discuss. Jack got the feeling that every cop in the building not only knew in advance everything he might ask Nico Oudejans—they had all the answers, too.

Maybe because he was with a cop, Jack just started talking. He told Nico everything. (As if all the deceits and deceptions of Jack’s childhood were his crime, not his mother’s; as if what he’d only recently learned was a story Jack had somehow concealed from himself.)

Jack didn’t even pause, or interrupt himself, when another policeman came into the office and put some money on the table in front of Nico; after that cop left, a second and a third policeman came in and did the same thing. Maybe five or six cops did this—some in uniform, others in plainclothes like Nico—before Jack even got to the Amsterdam part of the story.

When Jack finally got to the Amsterdam part, he was pretty worked up. While Jack had talked, Nico had hand-rolled a few cigarettes. He had some dark-looking tobacco in a pouch, and he went on carefully rolling the cigarettes as if he were alone. Jack had the impression that putting a cigarette together mattered more to Nico than smoking it. But now Nico stopped making cigarettes. There were not more than three or four cigarettes on the table; the policeman hadn’t lit one yet.

“I thought Mom did it for only one night,” Jack said. “I thought there was just one kid, probably a virgin. He broke her pearl necklace.”

“Nobody does it for only one night, Jack. When I told her to stop, or I’d have her deported, she just kept doing it. With Alice, they were always virgins. At least they told her they were virgins, or they looked like virgins.”

“But why’d she do it?” Jack asked. “She had a job, didn’t she? She was making money at Tattoo Peter’s and at Tattoo Theo’s.”

Alice had two pretty good jobs, in fact, and William was giving her money for Jack’s expenses—this in addition to whatever Mrs. Wicksteed was sending her. Alice didn’t need money. However, the one way she hadn’t tried to make William come back to her was that she hadn’t exposed Jack to any risk; she hadn’t yet done something to herself that a child of his age shouldn’t see. But if she was a prostitute, Alice reasoned, and if Jack was exposed to that— well, how would it be for a boy growing up to remember his mother as a whore?

“ ‘What if Jack remembers that this is what you did to me?’ she asked your dad,” Nico Oudejans told Jack. “ ‘Since you like prostitutes so much that you play for them, William,’ your mother said, ‘what if Jack remembers how I became a whore because you stopped playing for me?’ ”

Nico told Jack that William played the organ for the prostitutes for strictly religious reasons. “He was a fanatical Christian, but the good kind of fanatic,” Nico explained. William had insisted that there be an organ service for the prostitutes—at that early hour of the morning when many of them stopped working. William wanted them to know that the Oude Kerk was theirs at that time, and that he was playing for them. He wanted them to come to the Old Church and be soothed by the music; he wanted them to pray. (William wanted them to stop being prostitutes, of course, but the music was the only way he ever proselytized to them.)

Not everyone at the Oude Kerk was in favor of William’s playing the organ for the prostitutes, but he silenced most of his critics by citing the zeal of St. Ignatius Loyola. William Burns said that he’d encountered a greater evil in Amsterdam than St. Ignatius had met on the streets of Rome. Ignatius had raised money among rich people; he’d founded an asylum for fallen women. It was in Rome where the saint announced that he would sacrifice his life if he could prevent the sins of a single prostitute on a single night.

“Naturally, some of the higher-ups at the Old Church expressed their doubts—after all, Loyola was a Catholic, ” Nico Oudejans told Jack. “Among Protestants, your dad was sounding a little too close to Rome for comfort. But William said, ‘Look, I’m not trying to prevent the sins of a single prostitute’—although, in his own way, he was. ‘I’m just trying to make these women feel a little better. And if some of them hear Our Lord’s noise in the music, what’s the harm in that?’ ”

“ ‘Our Lord’s noise ’?” Jack asked.

“That’s what William called it, Jack. He used to say that, if you could hear God’s noise in the organ, you were at heart a believer.”

“Did it work?” Jack asked. “Were any prostitutes converted ?”

“He made believers out of some of those women,” Nico said, “but I don’t think any of them stopped working as prostitutes—at least not until long after your mother started. Some of the prostitutes didn’t like your dad—they thought he was yet another Christian do-gooder who disapproved of them. William had just found an odd way in which to disapprove! But more of the ladies hated your mother. They wouldn’t let their own children anywhere near the red-light district, but your mom dragged you through it every day and night—just to drive your dad crazy.”

“You told her you’d have her deported ?” Jack asked. Another policeman came into the office and put more Dutch guilders on the table.

“Prostitutes who weren’t Dutch citizens used to get deported all the time,” Nico said. “But your dad didn’t want her deported. He didn’t want to lose you, Jack. At the same time, he couldn’t bear to see you in this environment.”

Jack asked about Frans Donker, the organ-tuner. Nico said that Donker had imitated, or had tried to imitate, everything William did. Donker had spent half his time trying to play the organ instead of tuning it. “And when your dad needed a good night’s sleep—when he was too tired to play for the ladies in the Oudekerksplein—Frans played for them. I think Frans Donker was a little simple; maybe someone had dropped him on his head when he was a baby,” the policeman speculated. “But your dad treated Donker like a helpless pet. William indulged Donker, he pitied him, he was always charitable to him. Not that Donker deserved it—that boy didn’t know what he was about.”

“He put baby powder on his ass,” Jack remembered out loud.

“Donker even imitated your dad’s tattoos, but badly,” Nico said. “Then he took a really stupid job—something only Donker would dream of doing—and we never saw him again in the district.”

“I think I know what Donker did,” Jack told the policeman. “He took a job on a cruise ship, playing the piano. He sailed to Australia, to be tattooed by Cindy Ray.”