John Irving: Until I Find You

Tattoo Ole closely examined Jack’s cover-up of Kirsten—the one entwined with hearts and thorns—and announced that Herbert Hoffmann in Hamburg could not have done better. (Despite this accolade, Lars Madsen kept bleeding.)

Alice’s method of covering up letters consisted of leaves and berries. Out of every letter, she told Jack, you could construct a leaf or a berry—or an occasional flower petal. Some letters had more round parts than others; you could make a berry out of anything that was round. The letters with angles instead of round parts made better leaves than berries. A flower petal could be either pointed or round.

Kirsten yielded more leaves than berries, and one unlikely flower petal. Together with the untouched hearts and thorns, this left Lars’s left ankle wreathed with a confused bouquet; it looked as if many small animals had been butchered, their hearts scattered in an unruly garden.

Jack had higher hopes for covering up Elise, but those black links of chain made a startling background to any combination of leaves and berries—besides, an E is not easily converted to anything remotely resembling vegetation.

The four-year-old had chosen a sprig of holly for his second effort on human skin. The sharp, pointed leaves and the bright-red berries struck him as ideal for a name as short as Elise; yet the result called to mind a destroyed Christmas decoration that someone had mockingly affixed to a chain-link fence.

Nevertheless, Tattoo Ole’s only comment was that the legendary Les Skuse in Bristol would have been envious of Jack’s needlework. This was high praise, indeed. Only Ole making some remark about Aberdeen Bill sitting up in his grave to take notice could have been more flattering, but Ole knew Alice was sensitive to references that placed her dad in his grave.

She’d not been there to scatter his ashes through the fence guarding the graveyard at South Leith Parish Church, although her father had arranged for a fisherman to scatter his ashes in the North Sea instead. And Ole only once mentioned the sad fact that Aberdeen Bill had drunk himself to death, which every tattoo artist in the North Sea knew.

Was it his daughter’s disgrace—her running off to Halifax, to have her wee one out of wedlock—that drove him to drink? Or had Aberdeen Bill always been a drinker? Given the weekend when everything went wrong in Aberdeen, maybe his daughter’s departure had merely exacerbated the problem.

Daughter Alice never spoke of it. Tattoo Ole never brought the subject up again, either. Jack Burns grew up with hearsay and gossip, and the boy got a good dose of both at Nyhavn 17.

In typical four-year-old fashion, Jack had left to his mother the cleaning up and bandaging of the Ladies’ Man’s ankles. A tattoo usually heals itself. You keep it covered for a few hours, then wash it with some nonperfumed soap. You never soak it; you should use a moisturizer. Ole told Jack that a new tattoo felt like a sunburn.

While the four-year-old’s cover-ups may have failed in the aesthetic sense, the names of those two girlfriends were successfully concealed. That Ladies’ Man Madsen had encircled his ankles with a shrub of what looked like body parts—worse, with what Tattoo Ole called “anti-Christmas propaganda”—was another matter.

Poor Lars. While Ole had nicknamed him “Ladies’ Man,” the opposite seemed true. Jack never saw him with a girl or heard him speak of one. Naturally, the boy never met Kirsten or Elise—only their names, which he covered in ink and blood.

Like any four-year-old, Jack Burns didn’t pay close attention to adult conversations. The boy’s understanding of linear time might have been on a level with an eleven-year-old’s, but what he understood of his father’s story came from those private little talks he’d had with his mother—not what he managed to overhear of Alice’s dialogue with other grown-ups. In those conversations, Jack drifted in and out; he didn’t listen like an eleven-year-old at all.

Even Ladies’ Man Lars remembered meeting William Burns, although Tattoo Ole had done the needlework and there was no shading of the musical notes. William’s tattoos were all in black; there was only outlining, apparently.

“Everything about him was all in black,” as Ole put it.

What Jack might have made of this was that his father wore all-black clothes— that is, if the boy registered the remark at all. (Given Ole’s fondness for Daughter Alice, the blackness might have been a reference to William’s unfaithful heart. )

As for Ole’s nickname for Jack’s dad, the boy had correctly overheard the tattooer call him “The Music Man.”

Ole had transferred some Christmas music by Bach to William’s right shoulder, where the tattoo lay unfurled like a piece ripped from a flag. Either Bach’s Weihnachtsoratorium or his Kanonische Veränderungen über das Weihnachtslied, Alice guessed; she knew many of the pieces the young organist liked to play. And in the area of William’s kidneys, an especially painful place to be tattooed, Ole had reproduced a rather lengthy and complicated phrase by Handel.

“More Christmas music,” Ole said dismissively. Alice wondered if it came from the Christmas section in the Messiah.

Tattoo Ole was critical of two of William’s previous tattoos—not Aberdeen Bill’s work, of course. (Ole much admired the Easter hymn on The Music Man’s right thigh.) And there was what appeared to be a fragment of another hymn, which wrapped his left calf like a sock missing its foot. This one had words as well as music, and Ladies’ Man Madsen had been so struck by the tattoo that he even remembered the words. They are sung throughout the Anglican Communion: “Breathe on me, breath of God.”

Alice knew the rest. It sounded more like a chant than a hymn, but she called it a hymn, which she said was simply a prayer put to music. (She had sung it to Jack; she’d even practiced it with William.) By both Ole’s and Lars’s high esteem of the breath-of-God tattoo, Alice surmised this would have been Charlie Snow’s or Sailor Jerry’s work; her old friends had spared her the details of the tattoos they’d given William in Halifax.

Lars was less critical of The Music Man’s two bad tattoos than Tattoo Ole was, but the Ladies’ Man agreed that the needlework was not impressive. There was more music on William’s left hip, but the tattooer had not anticipated how the bending of William’s waist would scrunch some of the notes together.

On the slim evidence of this description, Alice decided he’d been to see Beachcomber Bill in Toronto—although she later admitted that the Chinaman was also capable of such a miscalculation. The second mistake, where some notes were lost from view because they curled around the underarm side of William’s right biceps, could have been committed by either of those men.

From Tattoo Ole and Ladies’ Man Madsen, Jack and his mom had a pretty good idea of The Music Man’s body-in-progress. He was an ink addict, all right—a collector, as Aberdeen Bill had predicted.

“But what about his music?” Alice asked.

“What about it?” Tattoo Ole replied.

“He must be playing the organ somewhere,” Alice said. “I assume he has a job.”

Jack Burns remembered the silence with a fair amount of accuracy, if not the conversation that followed. For one thing, it was never what you would call quiet in Tattoo Ole’s shop. The radio was always tuned to a popular-music station. And at the moment Jack’s mom raised the issue of his dad’s whereabouts, which (even at four) Jack recognized as the centermost issue of her life, there were three tattoo machines in operation.