John Irving - Until I Find You

Jack wished he could ask Emma what she thought of the idea, but he didn’t think that his working with Wild Bill Vanvleck as a director would necessarily make Emma roll over in her grave.

Jack went back out in the rain. He passed the Casa Rosso, where they showed porn films and had live-sex shows—more advice-giving, Jack had once believed. He wasn’t tempted to see a show, not even as research for The Slush-Pile Reader.

He walked once more to the Warmoesstraat police station, but Nico was out working in the red-light district. A couple of young cops, both in uniform, told Jack that they thought William Vanvleck’s TV series about homicide policemen was reasonably authentic. Wild Bill had spent time in the Warmoesstraat station; he’d gone out in the district with real cops on the beat. It was a favorable sign that real policemen actually liked a TV series about cops.

Jack worked out at a gym on the Rokin. It was a good gym, but the music was too loud and relentless; it made him feel he was rushing, though he was taking his time. His appointment with Femke, which Nico had arranged, wasn’t until four o’clock that afternoon. He was in no hurry. When Jack returned to the Grand from the gym, Nico Oudejans had left a package at the reception desk—a videocassette of Vanvleck’s homicide series.

Jack showered and shaved, put on some decent clothes, and went out again. The address of Marinus and Jacob Poortvliet’s law firm was on the Singel. Femke, their mother, was retired. Jack saw at once how easy it had been for his mom to confuse him into thinking that Femke occupied a prostitute’s room on the Bergstraat. The Poortvliets’ law office was roughly halfway between the Bergstraat and the Korsjespoortsteeg—virtually around the corner from those streets where the more upscale prostitutes were in business.

Some small details about the office were familiar; both the cars on the Singel and the pedestrians on the sidewalk were visible from the leather reading chair and the big leather couch. On the walls of the office, a few of the landscapes were also familiar. Jack even remembered the rug, an Oriental.

Femke was late; Jack talked with her sons. Conservatively dressed gentlemen in their fifties, they’d been university students in 1970. But even people of their generation remembered the controversial organist, William Burns, who’d played for the prostitutes in the Oude Kerk in the early-morning hours. University students had made the organ concerts in the Old Church a favorite among their late-night outings.

“Some of us considered your father an activist, a social reformer. After all, he expressed a profound sympathy for the prostitutes’ plight,” Marinus told Jack.

“Others took a view that was common among some of the prostitutes—I’m referring to those women who were not in William’s audience at the Old Church. William was a Holy Roller in their eyes; converting the prostitutes meant nothing less than steering them away from prostitution,” Jacob explained.

“But he played great,” Marinus said. “No matter what you thought of William, he was a terrific organist.”

The Poortvliets had a family-law practice; they not only took divorce and child-custody cases, but they also settled inheritance disputes and were engaged in estate planning. What had made William Burns’s case difficult was that he was still a citizen of Scotland, although he had a visa that permitted him to work in Holland for a limited period of time. Alice, who was a Canadian citizen, had no such visa—but in the case of foreigners who were apprenticed to Dutch tattoo artists, the police allowed them several months to earn a tax-free living. After that, they were pressured to leave or pay Dutch taxes.

There could be no child-custody case in the Dutch courts, because Jack’s mom and dad weren’t Dutch citizens. As outrageously as his mother was exposing Jack to her new life as a prostitute, his father had no means to claim custody of the boy. Alice, however, could be made to leave the country—chiefly on the grounds that, as a prostitute, she had repeatedly engaged in sex with underage boys. And she was a magnet for more widespread condemnation within the prostitute community. (As if the hymn-singing and prayer-chanting in her window and doorway weren’t inflammatory enough, Alice had dragged her four-year-old through the district.)

“You were carried, day and night, in the arms of that giantess among the whores,” Marinus Poortvliet told Jack.

“Half the time you were asleep, or as inert as groceries, ” his brother, Jacob, said.

“The prostitutes called you ‘the whole week’s shopping,’ because in that woman’s arms you looked like a bag of groceries that could feed a family for a week,” Marinus explained.

“So Dutch law had the means to deport my mom, but not to gain custody of me for my dad,” Jack said, just to be sure. The two sons nodded.

That was when Femke arrived, and Jack once again felt intimidated by her—not because she was a fearsome and different kind of prostitute, but because she struck him as a great initiator. (No matter what experience you thought you’d had, Femke could initiate you into something you’d never known or even imagined.)

“When I look at you in your movies,” she said to Jack, without bothering to say hello, “I see someone as pretty and talented as your father, but not half so open—so utterly unguarded. You’re very much guarded, aren’t you, Jack Burns?” she asked, seating herself in the leather reading chair. And Jack had once thought she’d taken up that position in her sidewalk window to attract customers off the street!

“Thank you for seeing me,” Jack said to her.

“Very much guarded, isn’t he?” she asked her sons, not expecting so much as a nod or a shake of the head from either of them. It wasn’t a real question; Femke had already decided upon the answer.

At seventy-eight, only a couple of years older than Els, Femke was still shapely without being fat. Her elegance of dress, which she had seemingly been born with, made it abundantly clear to Jack that only an idiot (or a four-year-old) could ever have mistaken her for a whore. Her skin was as unwrinkled as the skin of a well-cared-for woman in her fifties; her hair, which was her own, was a pure snow-white.

“If only you’d been Dutch, I would have got your dad custody of you in a heartbeat, Jack. I would have happily sent your mother back to Canada childless, ” Femke said. “The problem was, your father forgave her. He would forgive her anything, if she just promised to do the right thing by you.”

“Meaning good schools, a safe neighborhood, and some vestige of stability?” Jack asked.

“Those aren’t bad things, are they?” Femke said. “You seem to be both educated and alive. I daresay, in the direction your mom was headed, that wouldn’t have happened here. Besides, she was at least beginning to accept that William would never come back to her—that began to happen in Helsinki. But that William would accept the pain of losing all contact with you —if Alice would just take you back to Canada and look after you, as a mother should—well, what a surprise that was! To your mother and to me. We didn’t expect him to agree to it! But we’d both underestimated what a good Christian William was.” Femke did not say Christian in an approving way. “I was just the negotiator, Jack. I wanted to drive a harder bargain for your dad. But what can you do when the warring parties agree ? Is a deal not a deal?”

“You drove him to the docks, in Rotterdam?” Jack asked her. “They both went along with it, right till the end?”