by John Irving
"What kid?"
"That poor little boy," Lars said.
"Stop," Jack said. "What little boy?"
Ladies' Man Lars looked very distressed. "Ole said this would happen!" he blurted out.
"What would happen?"
"This--you finding me!" Madsen said. "Okay, okay. Let's begin with that, Jack. How hard was it to find me?"
"Not very," Jack told him.
"It's not hard to find anybody, Jack--let's begin with that. Your mom was never looking for your dad. She'd already found him before she came here. Do you get that?"
"Yes, I get that," Jack said. "It was never about finding him, right?"
"That's right--you've got that right," the Ladies' Man said. "Okay, okay," he repeated. Jack realized that the Fish Man had been dreading this moment for almost thirty years! "Okay, okay. Here we go, Jack."
Because William thought that the news might finally persuade Alice to leave him alone--not to mention that he hoped Alice would allow him at least occasional visits with his son--Jack's father wrote to Alice in Toronto and told her that he was engaged to be married. The lucky girl was the daughter of the commandant at Kastellet, the Frederikshavn Citadel, where William Burns was apprenticed to the organist, Anker Rasmussen, in the Kastelskirken.
Jack thought he remembered the Ladies' Man telling him and his mom that William was involved with a military man's young wife, but William Burns had actually been engaged to a military man's daughter. There was no young wife; if Jack had heard of one, it was his mother who'd told him about her, not Lars. Alice had brought Jack to Copenhagen to prevent the marriage from ever taking place.
Hans Henrik Ringhof was the commandant's name. He was a lieutenant colonel. He loved William like a son, Lars Madsen told Jack. Lieutenant Colonel Ringhof had a young son, Niels, who was twelve going on thirteen. Niels's older sister, Karin--William's fiancee--doted on Niels. William was teaching Niels to play the organ; Niels was quite a gifted pianist. Karin was an accomplished organist; her late mother had been a musician. Lieutenant Colonel Ringhof had lost his wife in a car crash. The family had been returning to Copenhagen from a summer holiday in Bornholm when the accident happened.
They were a wonderful family, William wrote to Alice--he felt he was marrying all of them. Once Jack had started school, his father hoped that Jack's mother would allow the boy to spend part of his Christmas vacation in Copenhagen; William thought that Jack would find the atmosphere of the Frederikshavn Citadel stimulating at that time of year. There were Christmas concerts, and what boy wouldn't be excited to spend time in a fortification with all the soldiers?
"But your mother had her own agenda," Ladies' Man Madsen told Jack.
Soon Lieutenant Colonel Ringhof and his daughter were exposed to various sightings of Alice--and the same long-distance sightings of Jack that his mom had permitted his dad in Toronto. Nothing had changed in Alice. "She had a keep-me-or-lose-Jack mentality," as the Ladies' Man put it.
In Copenhagen, Alice added a new rule to the conditions she imposed on William: if he wanted to get a look at his son, William had to bring his fiancee with him. She had to see Jack, too. Naturally, it was Alice who wanted to get a look at Karin Ringhof, but Karin complied; she loved William and shared his hope that Alice would one day permit the boy to spend time with his father.
Additionally, Lars told Jack, Alice tried to seduce the only men in William's life who mattered to him. Anker Rasmussen, the organist, was justifiably appalled by her behavior--Rasmussen refused to see her. Lieutenant Colonel Ringhof, the widower who loved William almost as much as he loved his own little boy, was also appalled. Lieutenant Colonel Ringhof tried to reason with Alice, to no avail; he most certainly didn't sleep with her.
"The situation was at a standoff," Ladies' Man Madsen informed Jack. "Then you fell in the Kastelsgraven--the damn moat!"
"But what did that have to do with it?" Jack asked.
"Because the commandant sent little Niels to rescue you!" Lars told Jack. It was Niels Ringhof, not the littlest soldier, who'd saved him! "Until then," the Ladies' Man continued, "everyone had done a good job keeping your mom away from Niels. She barely knew he existed. I know that Niels knew nothing about her. But that was how she met him, Jack. Your mom must have said something to the boy; she must have thanked him for saving you, I suppose."
That had been Jack's idea--that his mom should offer his rescuer a free tattoo, not that a tattoo was what she offered Niels.
"She seduced the kid?" Jack asked Ladies' Man Madsen.
"She sure did, Jack. She got to him, somehow."
Niels Ringhof's clothes had almost fit Jack, but not the soldier's uniform; Niels had obviously borrowed or stolen it. Maybe that was how Alice had got him in and out of the citadel--she'd dressed him like a soldier. And that night she'd sent him back from the D'Angleterre, he must have walked home alone!
"He was how old? Did you say twelve?" Jack asked Lars.
"Maybe twelve going on thirteen, Jack. I'd say thirteen, tops."
Their last night in Copenhagen, Tattoo Ole and Lars had taken Jack and his mom to a fancy restaurant on Nyhavn. But William had picked up the tab. That would have been William's last sighting of his son in Copenhagen--his and Karin's last sighting, because Jack's mom insisted that his father bring Karin to the restaurant, too. ("To see us off," Alice had told William.)
"They were there, in the restaurant?" Jack asked Lars.
"At a table on the same side of the fireplace," the Ladies' Man answered. "You may remember the restaurant, Jack. You had the rabbit."
But Alice had not told Niels Ringhof that she was leaving; the twelve-or thirteen-year-old was crushed. Until Jack and his mom left Copenhagen, Karin Ringhof and her father, the commandant, had no idea that the boy had been seeing Alice--not to mention the depth of the child's infatuation with her. William had no idea, either.
"What happened to the kid?" Jack asked. It had started to rain again, which was not a good sign.
"Niels shot himself," Madsen said. "It was a barracks, after all--a military compound. There were lots of guns around. The kid either died of the gunshot wound or drowned in the Kastelsgraven. They found his body in the moat, about where you broke through the ice. He died where he saved you, Jack."
The moat, the Kastelsgraven, looked more like a pond or a small lake. In April, without the ice, the water had a greenish-gray color. Jack didn't think it looked deep enough to drown in, but it might have sufficed when he was four. And Niels Ringhof was only twelve or thirteen, and he'd just shot himself; clearly the Kastelsgraven had been deep enough for Niels.
If there'd been ice on the moat, Jack would have tested it again--this time hoping no one would save him. The wooden rampart, on which the soldiers' boots had made such a racket--putting even the ducks to flight--now looked like a toy road.
Of course Jack knew it hadn't been Anker Rasmussen, the organist, who'd come running with Alice. In all likelihood, there had never been a soldier-organist, a military musician, at the Kastelskirken. The man in uniform would have been the commandant, Lieutenant Colonel Ringhof; he'd sent for his young son, who was sick in bed, because the commandant knew that the ice would hold Niels but not a soldier.
That Jack still had that nightmare, when he dreamed of death, at last made sense to him on that April morning in Copenhagen. It was still raining, but what did it matter? In Jack's mind, he had already drowned. When he awoke, as he did every time, to a lasting cold, Jack now knew where the cold came from--from the moat, from the Kastelsgraven, where he always met those centuries of Europe's dead soldiers. The little hero who saved him stood out among them--most notably not for the disproportionate size of his penis, which Jack had probably exaggerated in his most unreliable memory, but for the stoic quality of his frozen salute.
Jack had correctly remembered the salute; it was not a real soldier's salute, but a young boy imitating a soldier. Not the littlest soldier in Jack's imagination, but Niels Ringhof, a twelve-year-old going on
thirteen--a thirteen-year-old, tops--who'd been sexually abused by Jack's mother. (As surely as Mrs. Machado had molested Jack!)
He'd made an appointment to see the organist at the Kastelskirken, the Citadel Church. That view of the commandant's house from the church square was familiar to Jack; he remembered being carried from the Kastelsgraven to the commandant's house, where he was dressed in Niels Ringhof's clothes. (His off-duty clothes, Alice had called them. She'd been a gifted liar.)
The organist at the Citadel Church was Lasse Ewerlof. A Swedish-sounding name--maybe he was Swedish. At the age of fourteen, he'd studied the sitar, the violin, and the piano; he'd started the organ relatively late, when he was nineteen or twenty. Jack was disappointed that Ewerlof couldn't keep their appointment--he'd been called out of Copenhagen rather suddenly, to play the organ at an old friend's funeral--but he'd been kind enough to ask the backup organist at the Kastelskirken to meet with Jack instead.
Lasse Ewerlof knew that Jack was interested in hearing a little Christmas music--just to imagine what he might have heard at those Christmas concerts his dad had thought would be stimulating to the boy. (The concerts he'd never heard.) Ewerlof had left Jack a list of his Christmas organ favorites, which his backup--an older man, who told Jack he was semiretired because he suffered from arthritis in his hands--volunteered to play.
"But will it hurt your hands?" Jack asked him. The backup organist's name was Mads Lindhardt; he'd been a student of Anker Rasmussen's and had known Jack's father.
"Not if I don't play for too long," Lindhardt said. "Besides, I would consider it an honor to play for William Burns's boy. William was very special. Naturally, I was jealous of him when I first heard him play, because your father was always better than I was. Most unfair, because he's younger!"
Jack was unprepared to meet someone at Kastellet who'd actually known his dad--much less thought of William as "special." Jack couldn't respond; all he could do was listen to Mads Lindhardt play the organ. Jack could scarcely tell there was anything the matter with Lindhardt's hands.
They were alone in the Kastelskirken, except for a couple of cleaning women who were mopping the stone floor of the church; the women might have thought it strange to hear Christmas music on a rainy April morning, but the music didn't appear to interfere with their work.
Among Lasse Ewerlof's Christmas favorites, Mads Lindhardt told Jack, were a few of William's favorites, too. Bach's Weihnachtsoratorium and his Kanonische Veranderungen uber das Weihnachtslied, which Jack already knew his dad liked to play; also Messiaen's La nativite du Seigneur and Charpentier's Messe de minuit, which were new to Jack.
Jack realized, listening to Mads Lindhardt, that William would have (many times) imagined playing the organ for his son. But this had been forbidden, lost among the other things Alice had not permitted.
"It's Christmas music, Mr. Burns," Mads Lindhardt was saying gently; only then did Jack notice that the organist had stopped playing. "It's supposed to make you happy." But Jack was crying. "That boy, Niels, was the darling of the citadel," Mads said. "And your father was the darling of the entire Ringhof family--that was why it was such a tragedy. No one blamed your dad for what happened to Niels. But Karin had adored her little brother; understandably, she simply could not look at your father in the same way again. Even the commandant was sympathetic, but he was destroyed; for him, it was like losing two sons."
"Where are they now?" Jack asked.
Lieutenant Colonel Ringhof had retired. He was an old man, living in Frederiksberg--a place quite close to Copenhagen, where many retired people went. Karin, the commandant's daughter, had never married; she'd also moved away. She taught music in Odense, at a branch of the Royal Danish Conservatory.
The only mystery remaining to the Copenhagen story was why William had followed Alice and Jack to Stockholm. Jack understood that it would have been painful--even impossible--for his father to stay at the Frederikshavn Citadel, but why did William follow them when Alice had caused him such a devastating loss?
"To see you," Mads Lindhardt told Jack. "How else was he going to get a look at you, Jack?"
"She was crazy, wasn't she?" Jack asked. "My mother was a madwoman!"
"Here is something Lasse Ewerlof taught me," Mads Lindhardt said. " 'Most organists become organists because they meet another organist.' " Lindhardt could see that Jack wasn't getting his point. "Many women become crazy because they can't get over the first man they fall in love with, Jack. What's so hard to understand about that?"
Jack thanked Mads Lindhardt for his time, and for the Christmas concert. Leaving Kastellet, Jack regretted that he had not seen a single soldier; maybe they didn't march around in the rain. Leaving the Frederikshavn Citadel--as angry and saddened as Jack now knew his father must have felt when he left that fortification--Jack tried to imagine his dad's state of mind as he had followed Alice and Jack to Stockholm.
En route to Stockholm--in advance of his second arrival--Jack also tried to imagine what deceptions and outright deceits his mother had created for him there. In Copenhagen, it was not the littlest soldier who had saved Jack--and his rescuer had been his mother's victim. Now he wondered if he had been saved by a Swedish accountant in Stockholm, or not. And who had been his mother's victim (or victims) there?
So much of what you think you remember is a lie, the stuff of postcards. The snow untrampled and unspoiled; the Christmas candles in the windows of the houses, where the damage to the children is unseen and unheard. Or what Jack thought he remembered of the Hedvig Eleonora Church--the one with the golden altar in Stockholm, where his memory of meeting Torvald Toren, the young Swedish organist, was (Jack was sure) not exactly as it seemed.
Toren was real; Jack recognized him when they met again. But William hadn't slept with a single choirgirl--much less with three! Alice had invented Ulrika, Astrid, and Vendela; no wonder Jack had no memory of meeting them. In Stockholm, Jack's dad had been more celibate than a Catholic priest--well, almost.
The Hedvig Eleonora was Lutheran, and Torvald Toren had much enjoyed having William Burns as an apprentice; William was older than Toren and had actually taught the younger organist a few pieces to play. Not for long: Alice had wasted little time in poisoning the congregation against William, whom she portrayed as a runaway husband and father.
"What little I could manage to say in church every Sunday," Torvald Toren told Jack, "could never overturn that image of you and your mom at the Grand. It was a very visible place for her to be soliciting, which she was, and it was no life for a young boy like you--to be on display, as you were. Whether there, at the Grand, or skating on Lake Malaren with your father's mistress--you were on display, Jack."
"What?" Jack said. Surely Toren couldn't have meant Torsten Lindberg's wife! (Agneta Nilsson, as Jack remembered her--because she preferred to use her maiden name.)
Torvald Toren shook his head. "I think you better talk to Torsten Lindberg, Jack," the organist said. Jack had been planning to do so. He just happened to talk to Toren first; after all, it was easy to find him in the Hedvig Eleonora. It wasn't hard to find Lindberg, either--he still ate breakfast every day at the Grand.
Naturally, Agneta Nilsson, Jack's skating coach, had never been married to Torsten Lindberg. (Lindberg, Jack would soon discover, was gay; he always had been.) Agneta Nilsson had taught choral music at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm, where William was her favorite student. In his sorrow at the death of Niels Ringhof--not to mention the end of his engagement to Karin Ringhof, with whom William had been very much in love--William found comfort in the older woman's arms.
If Jack's father wanted to see his son in Stockholm--that is, in addition to watching the boy stuff his face at breakfast--Alice insisted that William watch Jack skate on Lake Malaren with Agneta Nilsson, William's mistress.
"I have the room and the equipment, if you have the time," Jack had committed to memory--in English and in Swedish. ("Jag har rum och utrustning, om ni har tid.")
Wh
at a dance Alice had put them through--both Jack and his dad. "It was all done to torture them--I mean your father and poor Agneta," Torsten Lindberg told Jack, when Jack met him for breakfast at the Grand. "And I'm sure your mother knew that Agneta Nilsson had a bad heart. It was probably your father who told her--innocently, without a doubt."
"Agneta died?" Jack asked.
"She's dead, yes. I mean she died eventually, Jack. It wasn't overly dramatic--that is, it didn't happen on the ice. I'm not even suggesting that all the skating hastened her death."
"And the manager at the Grand?" Jack inquired.
"What about him?" Lindberg said.
"Was he extorting my mother?" Jack asked.
"Not the word I would use. Surely she seduced him--and she was the one who made their affair so public," Torsten Lindberg informed Jack. "To disgrace your father, I suppose, but there was never any discernible logic that motivated Alice."
Torsten Lindberg was so obviously gay, but (at four) how would Jack have known? The accountant was no less thin than Jack remembered, his appetite no less voracious. Jack himself was eating a little more than usual for breakfast. This was not out of any fondness for the memory of eating there with his mom--on display, as he could now see--but because Jack was conscious of needing to put on a little weight for what he hoped would be his role as the failed screenwriter and successful porn star in The Slush-Pile Reader.
After breakfast, when Jack felt like throwing up, he asked Lindberg if he could see the accountant's Rose of Jericho. Jack thought there were some things in this world he could rely on--a few constants. Jack knew what his mom's Rose of Jericho looked like--surely he could count on that.
"My what?" Torsten Lindberg asked.
"Let's start with your fish," Jack said. "On your forearm, if I'm not mistaken, you have a Japanese tattoo of a fish."
"Oh, my fish out of water. Yes!" Lindberg cried. "My tattoos, you mean. Yes, of course!"
They went to Jack's room at the Grand. It was chiefly his mom's Rose of Jericho that Jack wanted to see. He wanted to look at Lindberg's Doc Forest, too. The clipper ship, a three-masted type, with a sea serpent cresting under its bow--that sailing ship on Torsten Lindberg's chest, the Doc Forest tattoo that Alice had said was better than the HOMEWARD BOUND vessel on the breastbone of the late Charlie Snow.