John Irving - Until I Find You

Anneke livened up a little, most noticeably when she observed how the prostitutes in their windows and doorways recognized Jack Burns as frequently as they recognized her. As an attractive anchorwoman, she was a famous fixture on Dutch television—but no more famous than Jack was. And not only was Jack a movie star; he had the added advantage of Nico Oudejans telling all the whores in the district to be on the lookout for him.

“You cocktease, Jack!” one of the transvestite prostitutes called out; she was Brazilian, probably. (Those chicks with dicks were out to get him.) This captured Anneke’s attention, but Wild Bill had downed a couple of bottles of red wine; he didn’t notice. The Mad Dutchman was lecturing Richard nonstop.

Suddenly Jack was irritated by it. Vanvleck was showing off the red-light district as if he’d invented it, as if he’d hired all the girls himself. Poor Richard was fighting off his jet lag and the overwhelming seediness of the place. By all counts, it had been a forgettable night for Anneke.

Well, Jack thought —I’ll show them something they’ll all remember! “This is nothing,” Jack announced as they circled the Oudekerksplein. He began to lead them across the Warmoesstraat, out of the red-light district. “You haven’t seen anything until you’ve seen Els.”

“ Els? ” Vanvleck said.

“Where are we going?” Richard asked. (They were walking away from the hotel; that was all he knew.)

“Els is the oldest working prostitute in Amsterdam,” Jack told them. “She’s an old friend.”

“She is ?” Wild Bill said, stumbling along.

Jack led them across the Damrak. It was now late at night. He was sure that Els would have gone to bed. Petra, her colleague who was only sixty-one, might be sitting in the second-floor window. Or maybe Petra would have gone home and gone to bed, too. In either case, Jack would wake up Els—just to show Wild Bill and Richard and Anneke that he had a history in Amsterdam that ran a little deeper than a Dutch TV series.

When they came into the narrow Sint Jacobsstraat, Wild Bill was staggering. The street could seem a little menacing at night. Jack saw Richard look over his shoulder a couple of times, and Anneke took Jack’s arm and walked close beside him.

To Jack’s surprise, Els—not Petra—was in the window. (“Some drunk woke me up shouting,” she would tell Jack later. “Petra had gone home, and I felt like staying up. Call it my intuition, Jackie.”)

When Jack spotted her, he started waving. “Els is in her seventies,” he said to Wild Bill, who was staring up at Els in her red-lit window as if he had seen one of Hell’s own avenging spirits—a harpy from the netherworld, an infernal Fury.

“She’s how old?” Richard asked.

“Think of your grandmother,” Jack told him.

“Jackie!” Els shouted, blowing kisses. “My little boy has come back again !” she once more announced to the Sint Jacobsstraat.

Jack blew kisses to her; he waved and waved. That was when he lost it—when Els started waving back to him.

It is impossible that Jack could have “remembered” his mother lifting him above the ship’s rail as they sailed from the dock in Rotterdam; impossible that he actually recalled waving to Els, twenty-eight years before, or that (when Jack was four) he truly saw his father fall to the ground with both hands holding his broken heart.

“Don’t cry, Jackie—don’t cry!” Els called to him from her second-floor window, but Jack had dropped to his knees on the Sint Jacobsstraat. He was still waving good-bye, and Els kept waving back to him.

Richard and Wild Bill were struggling to get Jack to his feet, but Wild Bill was drunk. Richard, in addition to his jet lag, had been knocking back the red wine, too.

“You’re her little boy ?” Richard was asking, but Jack was waving good-bye to his dad and couldn’t answer; Jack’s heart was in his throat.

“You actually know this lady?” Wild Bill asked, losing his balance and sitting down in the street. Richard was holding Jack under one arm, but he let go. Jack just lay in the street beside Wild Bill; Jack was still waving.

“Jackie, Jackie—your mother loved you!” Els was calling. “As best she could!”

It was Wild Bill’s pretty anchorwoman who finally helped Jack to his feet; she’d laid off the red wine, Jack had noticed. “For God’s sake, stop waving to that old hooker!” Anneke said. “Stop encouraging her!”

“She was my nanny !” Jack blubbered.

“She was his what ?” Wild Bill asked Richard.

“His babysitter,” Richard explained.

“ Marvelous! ” Wild Bill exclaimed.

“Oh, shut up, Bill! Can’t you see he’s crying?” Anneke asked The Mad Dutchman.

“Jack, why are you crying?” Wild Bill asked.

“She looked after me while my mother was working,” Jack told them.

“Working where? Working here ?” Richard asked.

“My mom worked in a window, in one of those doorways—back there,” Jack said, pointing in the general direction of the red-light district. “My mother was a prostitute,” he told them.

“I thought his mom was a tattoo artist!” Wild Bill said to Richard.

“She was a tattoo artist, too,” Jack said. “She wasn’t a prostitute for very long, but she was one.”

Jack began to wave good-bye to Els again, but Anneke wrapped her arms around him; she pinned his arms to his sides. “For God’s sake, stop !” the anchorwoman said.

“Come back and see me before I die, Jackie!” Els was calling.

Wild Bill was still sitting in the street. He had begun to wave good-bye to Els, too, but Anneke kicked him. “What a great idea, Bill!” she said. “You give a tour of the red-light district to a guy whose mom was a whore!”

“Well, I didn’t know!” Wild Bill shouted. Richard helped him to his feet; Anneke removed a candy-bar wrapper from Vanvleck’s long, gray ponytail.

They were walking away from Els in her window, toward the red-light district; that was the most direct way back to the Grand. Richard, who was walking beside Jack, put his arm around him. “Are you all right, Jack?” Richard asked.

“I’ll be fine,” Jack told him.

But Richard was sober enough to be worried about Jack, and they were fast becoming friends. “When you get back to L.A., I know someone you could see,” Richard said.

“Do you mean a psychiatrist?” Jack asked.

“Dr. García knows actors,” Richard said. “You wouldn’t be her first movie star.”

The waving good-bye had stopped, but Jack could still see Els lifting his dad off the pavement and carrying him like a child to Femke’s Mercedes. (In all probability, Alice had put Jack down on the deck and the boy could no longer see over the ship’s rail.) The damp night air blew into Jack’s face, like ocean air—like the air blowing all the way from Rotterdam to Montreal, which was where the ship was heading.

Jack heard the women and girls in their windows and doorways calling out his name, but he just kept walking. “Brilliant!” Jack heard Richard say once, for no apparent reason.

Anneke was holding Jack’s arm again—this time as if to shield him from the greetings of the prostitutes. “When you get back to the hotel, just go straight to bed and try to forget about it,” Anneke whispered to him.

“Good night, my dears!” Wild Bill was calling to the red-light women.

Jack would forever feel the movement of the ship pulling out of the harbor—the deck rolling under his four-year-old feet, Rotterdam receding. How he wanted to see his father’s Herbert Hoffmann—the tattoo William got in Hamburg, if he got one. A sailing ship seen from the stern; the ship would be pulling away from shore. Hoffmann’s Sailor’s Grave or his Last Port—a tattoo like that was what William would have wanted. Jack felt pretty sure about it. That was when Jack knew he would have to find him.