Until I Find You

23. Billy Rainbow

Jack was on a press junket in New York. (“Following Miramax’s marching orders,” as Emma put it.) The only thing memorable about this particular interview was not the opening question itself, which he’d been asked a hundred times before, but the sheer clumsiness of how the journalist worded the question—that and the fact that Emma called in the middle of his oft-repeated answer, and it was the last time Jack would hear her voice.

His interviewer, a matronly woman with a baffling accent, was the same journalist, from the Hollywood Foreign Press, who, in a previous press junket, had asked Jack if he was modeling his appearance on that of a young Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now. She was drinking a Diet Coke and smoking a mentholated cigarette, her artificially sweetened breath wafting over him like smoke from a fire in a mint factory.

“Captain Willard has short hair,” Jack had answered her that previous time.

“Cap-ee-tan who?”

“The Martin Sheen character in Apocalypse Now—Captain Willard,” he’d said. “I’m not a hundred percent sure about his rank.”

“I didn’t mean-a hees hair,” the journalist had said.

“I’m not consciously modeling myself on a young Martin Sheen,” Jack had told her. “I’m not trying to kill Marlon Brando, either.”

“You mean-a young Marlon Brando?” the lady from the Hollywood Foreign Press had asked him.

“In the movie you mentioned,” he had explained to her, slowly, “the young Martin Sheen character is sent to kill Marlon Brando—remember? Not a young Marlon Brando, either.”

“Forget eet,” she’d said. “Let’s-a move on.”

This time her question was breathtaking in its awkwardness, but she had at last moved on from Martin Sheen. “Are you a person who-wa, though not a homosexual, psychologically identifies weeth the opposite sex-sa? I mean-a weeth wee-men.”

“Am I a transvestite, do you mean?”

“Yes!”

“No.”

“But-a you are always dressing as a woo-man—or you seem to be theenking about eet, I mean-a dressing as a woo-man, even when-a you are dressed as a man.”

“I’m not thinking about dressing as a woman right now,” Jack told her. “It’s just something I occasionally do in a movie—you know, when I’m acting.”

“Are you writing about eet?”

“About dressing as a woman?”

“Yes!”

“No.”

His cell phone rang. Ordinarily he didn’t answer his phone in the middle of an interview, but Jack could see that the call was from Emma and she’d been depressed lately. Emma was losing the fight with her weight; every morning since he’d been away, Emma called to tell him what she weighed. It was almost lunchtime in New York, but Jack knew that Emma was just getting up in L.A.

He’d told her that he was being interviewed around the clock—Emma knew very well what press junkets were for. In mild exasperation, Jack handed his cell phone to the lady from the Hollywood Foreign Press. “This woman won’t leave me alone,” he said to his interviewer. “Try telling her I’m in the middle of an interview. See how far you get.”

If nothing else, Jack hoped this might interrupt the chain of thought that the journalist from the Hollywood Foreign Press was pursuing. He already knew that his interviewer would have no luck interrupting Emma from her train of thought.

“Hello-a?” the woman who thought he looked like a young Martin Sheen said.

It suddenly sounded like Emma was speaking Italian—of course Jack recognized her spiel. “Pleeze tell-a Jack Burns—eet’s Maria Antonietta Beluzzi on da fon-a!”

“I’m-a sorry. Jack Burns ees in the meedle of an interview,” the lady from the Hollywood Foreign Press said.

“Tell heem I mees-a holding hees pee-nis!” Emma said.

“Eet’s a Ms. Beluzzi,” his interviewer said, handing him back his cell phone. “Eet sounds urgent.”

“So what do you weigh this morning?” Jack asked Emma.

“Two hundred and fucking five!” Emma wailed—loudly enough for the journalist to hear her.

“You have to go on a diet, Emma,” he told her, for what had to be the hundredth time.

Jack Burns was thirty-two in 1997—Emma was thirty-nine. He had a better metabolism than she had, and he’d always watched what he ate. But now that Jack was in his thirties, even he had to be more strict with his diet.

Emma didn’t understand dieting. Her one bottle of red wine a night had become two; she had pasta for lunch. Here she was, pushing forty, and her favorite food was still gorgonzola mashed potatoes. Jack kept telling her: she could spend all day on the ab machine at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills—she could be bench-pressing her own weight—and not work off those kinds of carbs.

Jack could see that the journalist from the Hollywood Foreign Press was writing everything down—including, as he would later read in her interview, the “two hundred and fucking five.” She even spelled Maria Antonietta Beluzzi correctly; naturally, it turned out that the journalist was Italian.

“Emma—” Jack started to say.

“He calls her Emma and brutally tells her to go on a diet,” the lady from the Hollywood Foreign Press would write.

“Fuck you and your diet, Jack,” Emma said sharply on the phone. “I want you to know I’ve taken good care of you in my will.” Then she hung up.

“Your-a girlfriend?” his interviewer asked. “I mean-a one of them.”

“Kind of,” Jack replied.

“Ees Ms. Beluzzi an actress?”

“She’s a voluptuous tobacconist,” he said. Although the journalist didn’t write this down, voluptuous would somehow make it into her interview—but in reference to Emma.

“I suppose-za you have, or have-a had, many girlfriends,” Jack’s interviewer said.

“Nobody serious,” he said, for what had to be the hundredth time—with apologies to Michele Maher.

Jack was tired. He’d had too many interviews, with too many prying and insinuating journalists. But that was no excuse. He shouldn’t have lost control of this interview. He shouldn’t have so recklessly, even deliberately, allowed this lady from the Hollywood Foreign Press to imagine anything she might want to imagine—but he did.

Of course it wasn’t the interview that would bother him; such things aren’t truly damaging, not for long. But that Emma’s last words to Jack were about her will—well, that would hurt him forever.

By the time the interview was published, Emma would be dead—and the Italian journalist from the Hollywood Foreign Press had figured out that he couldn’t have been having a relationship with Maria Antonietta Beluzzi, the big-breasted tobacconist in Fellini’s Amarcord. (Ms. Beluzzi would be old enough to be Jack’s grandmother!)

It had to have been Emma Oastler Jack was talking to, the journalist wrote—he and Emma, who were “just roommates,” were known to be living together—and anyone who’d seen the famous author recently knew at a glance she was overweight, if not that she weighed as much as two hundred and five pounds. (In this context, Jack’s use of the word voluptuous appeared to mock Emma for becoming so fat.)

Besides, the Italian lady concluded, Emma was said to have been depressed that her third novel—after many years, it was still only a work-in-progress—was growing too long.

“How long is it?” all the journalists would ask Jack, after Emma’s death. But by then he had learned, the hard way, to be more careful with the press.

That trip to New York, Jack was staying at The Mark. He had registered in the name of Billy Rainbow—the character he played in the soon-to-be-released film he was promoting at the press junket. He usually registered in hotels in the name of the character he was playing in his most recent, not-yet-released movie. That way, the Jack Burns fans couldn’t find him.

They weren’t all exactly fans. Some of the “chicks with dicks” had taken offense that Jack repeatedly denied he was a transsexual or a transvestite. In almost every interview, Jack said he was a cross-dresser only occasionally—and only in the movies. Real transsexuals and transvestites were offended; they said that Jack was “merely acting.” Well—of course he was!

So Jack was registered at The Mark as Billy Rainbow; the front desk screened all his calls. Jack always told his mom where he was staying—and who he was, this time—and of course Emma knew, and his agent, Bob Bookman, and his lawyer, Alan Hergott. And the publicist for whichever studio was making his most recent movie, in this case Erica Steinberg from Miramax. Naturally, Harvey Weinstein knew, too. If you were making a Miramax movie, Harvey knew where you were staying and under what name.

At the time, Jack was sleeping with the well-known cellist Mimi Lederer, so she knew where he was staying, too. In fact, he was in bed with her—asleep at The Mark—when Emma died.

That night, after dinner, Mimi had brought her cello back to his hotel room; she’d played two solos naked for him. It had been awkward at dinner, because Mimi wouldn’t check her cello. The big instrument, in its case, occupied a third chair at their table; Mimi would look at it from time to time, as if she expected the cello to say something.

Jack didn’t tell Mimi that he’d met another cellist when he was a little boy—Hannele, a music student at Sibelius Academy and one (of two) of his father’s girlfriends in Helsinki. Hannele had shared a tattoo with her friend Ritva. Hannele got the vertical left side of a heart torn in two; it was tattooed on her heart-side breast. And Hannele’s armpits were unshaven—Jack would always remember that.

When Mimi Lederer was playing for Jack in his hotel room at The Mark, it made him shudder to remember how Hannele had sat for her tattoo—like Mimi, maybe like all female cellists, with her legs spread apart. That was when Jack wondered if Hannele had ever played naked for his dad, which again caused him to wonder if he was like William. (The way William was with women, especially.)

Jack would remember what Mimi Lederer played for him that night at The Mark, when Emma was still alive—a cello solo, part of something from a Mozart trio. (Jack had made a point of learning as little as he could about classical music because it reminded him of organ music, or church music, which reminded him of his derelict dad.)

“Divertimento—E Flat Major,” Mimi Lederer whispered to him, before she began to play. Like Hannele, maybe like all female cellists, Mimi was tall with long arms and small breasts. Naturally, Jack wondered if your breasts got in the way when you were playing a cello.

The second piece Mimi played naked for him was part of something from a Beethoven string quartet. “Razumovsky Opus Fifty-Nine,” Mimi murmured to him, “Number One.” Just the names of pieces of classical music made Jack’s teeth ache. Why couldn’t composers think of better titles? But it was wonderful to witness Mimi Lederer’s control of that big instrument she so confidently straddled.

They were still asleep when the phone rang. It was way too early in the morning for it to be Emma—that was Jack’s first thought. Toronto, like New York, was on Eastern time; that was the second idea to pop into his head. He saw it was a little after six in the morning—too early for it to be his mother, either, or so Jack thought.

Erica Steinberg was both too nice and too tactful to call him this early in the morning, and Erica knew that Jack was sleeping with Mimi Lederer—Erica knew everything. Jack thought maybe it was Harvey Weinstein on the phone. He would call you when he wanted to; he’d called Jack early in the morning before. Maybe Jack had said something in one of his interviews that he shouldn’t have said.

Mimi Lederer and Jack had to get up early, anyway—although not quite this early. Jack had another day to go on the press junket, and Mimi was teaching a class at Juilliard; then she had to catch a plane. Mimi was a member of some trio or quartet; they had a concert in Minneapolis, or maybe it was Cleveland. Jack didn’t remember.

“It must be room service,” Mimi said. “It’s probably about your breakfast order. I told you last night, Jack—you should order a normal breakfast.”

Mimi had made an issue of Jack’s breakfast order—his “breakfast manifesto,” she’d called it. The room-service staff at The Mark (as in most New York hotels) was struggling with English as a second language. Jack should have just checked what he wanted for breakfast, Mimi had said; he should not have written a “thesis” on the little card they hung on the door.

But you have to be specific about a soft-boiled egg, Jack had argued—and how complicated is it to understand “nonfat yogurt or no yogurt”?

“It’s Harvey Weinstein,” Jack told Mimi, finally picking up the telephone. “Yes?” he said into the mouthpiece.

“It’s your mother, Mr. Rainbow,” the young man at the front desk said.

In the movie, Billy Rainbow doesn’t have a mother, but Jack said, “Please put her through.” Where is she? he was wondering. (According to Mimi Lederer, he was still half asleep.)

There’d been a tattoo convention in Santa Rosa. Had his mom come to see him in Los Angeles on her way to it, or on her way home from it? She’d been on her way home, Jack dimly recalled—she’d told him all about the convention.

It had been at the Flamingo Hotel, or maybe it was the Pink Flamingo. She’d said something about a blues band—possibly the Wine Drinkin’ Roosters. She’d told Jack everything about everyone who was there.

By his mother’s own admission, it had been a three-day party; tattoo artists party like underage drinkers. Alice was a wreck on her way back from Santa Rosa. How could Jack have forgotten her telling him about Captain Don’s sword-swallowing act? Or Suzy Ming, the contortionist, writhing her way into indelible memory—if not exactly art. (So his mom wasn’t calling from Santa Rosa.)

Paris, perhaps—that would explain the earliness of her call. It was the middle of the day in Paris; maybe Alice had miscalculated the time difference. But hadn’t she come home from Paris, too?

Yes, Jack remembered—she had. She told him she’d met up with Uncle Pauly and Little Vinnie Myers, among other tattoo artists. It hadn’t been a convention, not exactly; it had been about planning a Mondial du Tatouage in Paris. The whole thing had probably been Tin-Tin’s idea; he was the best tattoo artist in Paris, in Alice’s view. Stéphane Chaudesaigues from Avignon would surely have been there, and Filip Leu from Lausanne—maybe even Roonui from Mooréa, French Polynesia.

They’d all stayed at some hotel in the red-light district. “Just down the street from the Moulin Rouge,” Alice had told Jack. Le Tribal Act, a body-piercing group, had provided one memorable evening’s entertainment: they’d hoisted some fairly remarkable household items with their nipples and penises, and other pierced parts.

But this was weeks (maybe months) ago! Jack’s mother was calling from Toronto, where it was as early in the morning as it was in New York. Jack really must have been out of it.

“Oh, Jackie, I’m sorry—I’m so sorry!” his mother cried into the phone.

“Mom, are you in Toronto?”

“Of course I’m in Toronto, dear,” she said, with sudden indignation. “Oh, Jackie—it’s so awful!”

Maybe she’d passed out, drunk or stoned at Daughter Alice. She’d just woken up—after a night of sleeping in the needles, Jack imagined. Or one of her colleagues in the tattoo world had died, one of the old-timers; maybe a maritime man was eternally sleeping in the needles. Her old pal Sailor Jerry, possibly—her friend from Halifax and fellow apprentice to Charlie Snow.

“It makes me sick to have to tell you, dear,” Alice said.

It crossed Jack’s mind that Leslie Oastler had left her—for another woman! “Mom—just tell me what it is, for Christ’s sake.”

“It’s Emma—Emma’s gone, Jack. She’s gone.”

“Gone where, Mom?”

But he knew the second he said it—the telephone suddenly cold against his ear. Jack saw that dazzling-blue glint of the Pacific, the way you see it for the first time—turning off Sunset Boulevard, barreling down Chautauqua. Below you, depending on the time of day, the dead-slow or lightning-fast lanes of the Pacific Coast Highway, sometimes a sea of cars, always a tongue of concrete—the last barrier between you and the fabulous West Coast ocean.

“Gone how?” Jack asked his mother.

He didn’t realize he was sitting up in bed and shivering—not until Mimi Lederer held him from behind, the way she held her cello. She wrapped her long arms around him; her long legs, wide apart, gripped his hips.

“Leslie’s already left for the airport,” Alice went on, as if she hadn’t heard him. “I should have gone with her, but you know Leslie—she wasn’t even crying!”

“Mom—what happened to Emma?”

“Oh, no—not Emma!” Mimi Lederer cried. She was draped over Jack like a shroud; he felt her lips brush the back of his neck.

“Jack—you’re not alone!” his mother said.

“Of course I’m not alone! What happened to Emma, Mom?”

“It looks like you should have been with her, Jack.”

“Mom—”

“Emma was dancing,” Alice began. “She met a boy dancing. Leslie told me the name of the place. Oh, it’s awful! Something like Coconut Squeezer.”

“Teaszer, not Squeezer, Mom—Coconut Teaszer.”

“Emma took the boy home with her,” Alice said.

Jack knew that if Emma had brought some kid from Coconut Teaszer back to their dump on Entrada Drive, she hadn’t died dancing. “What did Emma die of, Mom?”

“Oh, it’s awful!” Alice said again. “They said it was a heart attack, but she was a young woman.”

“Who said? Who’s they?” Jack asked.

“The police—they called here. But how could she have had a heart attack, Jack?”

In Emma’s case, he could imagine it—even at thirty-nine—considering the food, the wine, the weightlifting, and the occasional kid from Coconut Teaszer. But Emma didn’t do drugs. There’d been more kids from Coconut Teaszer lately. (Both Emma and Jack had thought the kids were safer than the bodybuilders.)

“There will probably be an autopsy,” Jack told his mother.

“An autopsy—if it was just a heart attack?” Alice asked.

“You’re not supposed to have a heart attack at thirty-nine, Mom.”

“The boy was … underage,” Alice whispered. “The police won’t release his name.”

“Who cares about his name?” Jack said. There’d been more and more kids who looked underage to him. Poor Emma had died fucking a minor from Coconut Teaszer!

As for the kid himself, Jack could only imagine that it must have been a traumatizing experience. He knew that Emma liked the top position, and that she would have told the boy not to move. (Maybe he’d moved.) If the boy had been a virgin—and Emma would have picked him only if he looked small—what would it have been like to have a two-hundred-and-five-pound woman die on you, your first time?

“The boy called the police,” his mother went on; she was still whispering. “Oh, Jack, was Emma in the habit of—”

“Sometimes,” was all he said.

“You must meet Leslie in Los Angeles, Jack. She shouldn’t have to go through this alone. I know Leslie. She’ll break down, eventually.”

Jack couldn’t imagine it, but he was uncomfortable with the idea of Mrs. Oastler alone in the Entrada Drive house. What kind of stuff would Emma have left lying around? The notion of Leslie discovering Emma’s collection of porn films wasn’t as disturbing as the thought of her reading Emma’s writing—whatever Emma hadn’t finished, or what she didn’t want published. Jack had not seen a word of Emma’s work-in-progress—her third novel, which was reportedly growing too long.

“I’ll leave New York as soon as I can, Mom. If Leslie calls, tell her I’ll be in L.A. before dark.”

He knew that Erica Steinberg was a good soul; Jack assumed she would release him from his interviews at the press junket.

Everyone who knew Jack knew that Emma had been part of his family. As it turned out, Miramax arranged everything for him—including the car to the airport. Erica got him his ticket; she even offered to fly with him. It wasn’t necessary for her to come with him, Jack told her, but he appreciated the offer.

There was another call to Jack’s room at The Mark that morning. Mimi Lederer had been right—room service was confused by his breakfast order. Although he’d stopped shivering, Mimi had gone on holding him as if he were her cello, until the phone rang that second time.

“I don’t give a rat’s ass about the yogurt,” Mimi heard Jack say into the phone. “Any kind of yogurt will do.”

“Are you okay, Jack?” Mimi asked.

“Emma’s dead,” he snapped at her. “I guess I can worry about the fucking yogurt another day.”

“Are you acting?” she asked him. “I mean even now. Are you still acting?”

Jack didn’t know what she meant, but she was covering herself with the bedsheet as if he were a total stranger to her. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

“What’s wrong with you, Jack?”

They were both sitting up in bed, and Jack could see himself in the mirror above the dresser. There was nothing wrong with him, but that was the problem. Jack didn’t look as if his best friend had died; on the contrary, he looked as if nothing had happened to him. His face was a clean slate—“more noir than noir,” The New York Times might have said.

Jack couldn’t stop staring at himself—that was a problem, too. Mimi Lederer said later that she couldn’t stand the sight of him, not at that moment. “You’re not in a movie, Jack,” Mimi started to say, but Jack looked at her as if he really were Billy Rainbow. “Why aren’t you crying?” Mimi Lederer asked him.

Jack couldn’t answer her, and he was good at tears. When his part called for crying, he would usually start when he heard the A.D. say, “Quiet, please.”

“Rolling,” the cameraman would say; Jack’s eyes were already watering away.

“Speed,” said the sound guy—Jack’s face would be bathed in tears.

When the director (even Wild Bill Vanvleck) said, “Action!”—well, Jack could cry on-camera like nobody’s business. His eyes would well with tears just reading a script!

But that morning at The Mark, Jack was as tough-guy noir as he’d ever been—on film or off. He was as deadpan as Emma when she wrote, “Life is a call sheet. You’re supposed to show up when they tell you, but that’s the only rule.”

That was what Jack Burns was doing—he was going to L.A., just to show up. He would probably hold Mrs. Oastler’s hand, because he was supposed to—those were just the rules.

“Jesus, Jack—” Mimi Lederer started to say; then she stopped. Jack realized, as if he’d missed something she’d said, that she was getting dressed. “If you didn’t love Emma, you never loved anyone,” Mimi was saying. “She was the person closest to you, Jack. Can you love anyone? If you didn’t love her, I think not.”

That was the last Jack saw of Mimi Lederer, and he liked Mimi—he really did. But she didn’t like him anymore after that morning at The Mark. Mimi said when she left that she didn’t know who he was. But the scary thing was that Jack didn’t know who he was.

As an actor, he could be anybody. On-screen, the world had seen Jack Burns cry—as a man and as a woman. He’d made his mascara run many times—anything for a movie! Yet Jack couldn’t cry for Emma; he didn’t shed a single tear that morning at The Mark.

It was still pretty early when he left the hotel for the airport. The front-desk clerk was a young man Jack hadn’t seen before—probably the same young man who’d put through Alice’s call. Of course the clerk knew it was the Jack Burns—everyone did. But as Jack was leaving, the clerk called out—his voice full of the utmost sincerity, of the kind that young people express when they genuinely want to please you. “Have a nice day, Mr. Rainbow!”

As it turned out, Jack had been wrong to envision Emma’s death as a heart attack, which typically has some familiar symptoms antecedent to death—like sweating, shortness of breath, light-headedness, and chest pains. But Emma Oastler died of a heart condition called Long QT Syndrome; an inherited disease, it affects the sodium and potassium channels in the heart. (This, in turn, leads to abnormalities in the heart’s electrical system.) Emma died of a sudden arrhythmia—ventricular fi-brillation, her doctor told Jack. Her heart suddenly stopped pumping; Emma died before she was even aware of not feeling well.

With Long QT Syndrome, often sudden death is the first indication of a problem. In sixty percent of patients, a resting EKG would indicate an abnormality, which would alert a doctor to the possibility of the condition. But the other forty percent would have completely normal examinations—unless exercise EKG’s were used. (Emma’s doctor told Jack that Emma had never had one.)

Her doctor went on to tell him that a fatal episode could be triggered by a loud noise, extreme emotion, exertion, or an electrolyte imbalance—which, in turn, could be caused by drinking alcohol or having sex.

The boy from Coconut Teaszer—whose name would never be made public—said that Emma had collapsed on him so spontaneously that he’d thought it was simply the way she liked to have sex, which he was having for the first time. He’d done exactly what Emma had told him to do; he hadn’t moved. (He was probably too afraid to move.) After he’d managed to extricate himself from Emma’s last embrace, the kid called the police.

Given the genetic nature of the syndrome, Emma’s surviving family would eventually be screened for it. Leslie Oastler was the sole survivor, and she showed no signs of the abnormality. Her ex-husband, Emma’s father, had died several years earlier—apparently, in his sleep.

“What a pisser,” as Leslie would put it.

Jack arrived home before he had time to prepare himself for Mrs. Oastler. On the plane, he’d been thinking about Emma—not Leslie. (He’d been considering his lack of emotion, if that was the right word for what he lacked.)

Leslie Oastler was all over Jack, like a storm. “I know Leslie,” Alice had said. “She’ll break down, eventually.” But Mrs. Oastler’s grief was not yet evident—only her anger.

Leslie greeted him at the door. “Where the fuck is Emma’s novel, Jack? I mean the new one.”

“I don’t know where Emma’s novel is, Leslie.”

“Where’s your novel, Jack? Or whatever the fuck it is that you’re supposed to be writing—you don’t even have a computer!”

“I don’t work at home,” he answered. This was not exactly a lie—regarding the writing part of his life, Jack didn’t work anywhere.

“You don’t even have a typewriter!” Mrs. Oastler said. “Do you write in longhand?”

“Yes. I happen to like writing by hand, Leslie.” This wasn’t exactly a lie, either. What writing he did—shopping lists, script notes, autographs—was always in longhand.

Mrs. Oastler had been all through Emma’s computer. She had searched for Emma’s novel under every name she could think of; nothing on Emma’s computer had a name that contained the word novel, or the number three, or the word third. There was nothing resembling a title of a work-in-progress, either.

The boy from Coconut Teaszer must have been very believable, because the police never treated the house on Entrada as a crime scene. And because Emma was a famous author—not that the boy even knew she was a writer—both the police and Emma’s doctor had concluded their business promptly, and without making much of a mess.

Mrs. Oastler, on the other hand, had ransacked the house. Whatever damage had been done by Emma spontaneously dying on top of the kid from Coconut Teaszer was minimal in comparison to Leslie’s frenzied searching, which resembled a drug-induced burglary—drawers and closets flung wide open, clothes strewn about. She’d found a couple of pairs of Jack’s boxers in Emma’s bedroom, and a pair of Emma’s panties and two of her bras under Jack’s bed; she’d found Emma’s cache of porn films, too. “Did you watch them together?” Mrs. Oastler asked.

“Sometimes—for research,” Jack said.

“Bullshit!”

“We should get out of here, Leslie—let me take you to dinner.” Jack was trying to imagine what else Mrs. Oastler might have discovered in her search.

“Were you fucking each other or not?” she asked him.

“Absolutely not,” he told her. “Not once.”

“Why not?” Mrs. Oastler asked. Jack had no good answer to that question; he said nothing. “You slept together but you didn’t do it—is that the way it was, Jack?” He nodded. “Like the script reader and the porn star in Emma’s depressing novel?” Leslie asked.

“Kind of,” was all he could say. Jack didn’t want to give Mrs. Oastler the impression that he was too big for Emma, which would imply they had tried. But Leslie had come to her own conclusions—at least in regard to how Emma had handled her vaginismus. (Top position; young boys she could boss around, usually.)

Jack had been right to ask Emma if her vaginismus had a cause—of course it did, not that Emma could ever have told him. She’d been sexually abused when she was nine or ten—one of her mother’s bad boyfriends had done it. He would be Mrs. Oastler’s last boyfriend. Emma had been so traumatized that she’d missed a year of school. “Some problem at home” was all Jack remembered hearing about it; he’d assumed that this had something to do with Leslie’s divorce.

Mrs. Oastler’s final boyfriend gave new meaning to Emma’s saga of the squeezed child; at twelve, perhaps this had been her first attempt to fictionalize her personal grievances. “Of course there were any number of traumatic visits to doctors’ offices, beginning with Emma’s first gynecological examination,” Leslie told Jack. “And she hated her father—naturally, he was a doctor.”

Jack didn’t know that Emma’s dad had been a doctor. Whenever Emma or her mother mentioned him, the word asshole was dominant. The word doctor, if Jack had ever heard it, had been drummed out of his memory by asshole.

“Let me take you to dinner, Leslie,” Jack repeated. “Let’s go someplace Emma liked.”

“I hate to eat,” Mrs. Oastler reminded him.

“Well, I usually have just a salad,” Jack said. “Let’s go somewhere and have a salad.”

“Which one of you liked the Japanese condoms?” Leslie asked. (She’d even found Jack’s Kimono MicroThins!)

“Those are mine,” he told her. “They have great salads at One Pico.” His old boss—Carlos, from American Pacific—was now working as a waiter there. Jack called and asked Carlos for a table with a view of the ocean and the promenade.

There were a lot of messages on the answering machine, but Mrs. Oastler assured Jack they were not worth listening to—she’d already done so. Condolences from friends—even Wild Bill Vanvleck had called. (The Mad Dutchman hadn’t made a movie in years. Jack had worried that he might be dead.)

The only thing even mildly interesting, Leslie said, was the call from Alan Hergott—informing Jack that he’d been named literary executor in Emma’s will. (Alan was also Emma’s lawyer.) And Bob Bookman, their agent, had called; it was important, Bookman said, that he and Jack meet with Alan to discuss Emma’s will. (Jack had only recently learned—from his last, unpleasant conversation with Emma—that she had a will, and that she’d supposedly taken good care of him in it.)

“I’ll bet she’s left you everything,” Mrs. Oastler remarked, with an encompassing wave of her thin arm—indicating the ransacked ruin of the wretched house on Entrada Drive. “Lucky you.”

While Leslie had a shower and changed her clothes, Jack played the messages on the answering machine at low volume. Both Bob Bookman and Alan Hergott made him think that his role as “literary executor” was a bigger deal than he might be anticipating; their voices had an unexpected urgency, which Mrs. Oastler had missed or chosen to ignore.

Leslie had changed into a sexy backless dress with a halter-type neckline. Only nine years older than Alice, Mrs. Oastler had just turned sixty, but she was so sleek and unwrinkled that she looked ten years younger—and she knew it. Her dark, boyish pixie was dyed to its roots, her small breasts didn’t droop, her small bottom looked firm. Only the veins on the backs of her hands betrayed her, and her hands were never at rest—as if to deny you a lingering look at them.

Leslie announced that Emma’s bedroom had the ambience of a crime scene, and that she wouldn’t sleep there. Jack offered her his bedroom, or the guest room, but Mrs. Oastler told him that she had reserved a room for them at Shutters. After all, they were going to eat at the restaurant there. “We might as well spend the night,” she said.

“We?” he asked her.

“I shouldn’t be left alone,” she told him. “If you slept with Emma and didn’t do it, I guess you can sleep with me and not do it, too, Jack.”

He put her small carry-on bag in the backseat of the Audi and drove her to Shutters. The sun had set, but a faded-pink glow served as a backlight to the Santa Monica Pier; the lights on the Ferris wheel were on. On the promenade below One Pico, people on Rollerblades swept past incessantly. Leslie drank a bottle of red wine with her salad; Jack had about a gallon of iced tea with his.

“I wonder what you’re the literary executor of,” Mrs. Oastler remarked. (Carlos had told him, while she’d gone off to register in the hotel, that Leslie was the best-looking date he’d seen Jack with in a long time.)

“Her novel, maybe,” Jack said.

“In which case, what would you do with it, Jack?”

“Maybe Emma wanted me to decide if it was fit to publish or not,” he replied.

“It doesn’t exist, Jack. There is no third novel. It wasn’t her novel that was growing too long—it was the period of time in which she’d written nothing,” Leslie said.

“Emma told you that?” he asked, because it suddenly sounded true.

Mrs. Oastler shrugged. “Emma never told me anything, Jack. Did she talk to you?”

“Not about her third novel,” he admitted.

“There is no third novel,” Leslie repeated.

It turned out that Mrs. Oastler had called Alan Hergott. Alan said something vague to her: the proceedings were “of a literary nature”; in fact, Emma had specified that her mother be excluded from the process. Even the reading of the will was a private matter, Alan told Mrs. Oastler; only Bob Bookman and Jack were allowed to hear what Emma wanted done with her estate.

“But are you guessing, or do you know there’s no third novel—not even a work-in-progress?” Jack asked Leslie.

“I’m only guessing,” Mrs. Oastler admitted. “With Emma, I was always guessing.”

“Me, too,” he said.

Surprisingly, Mrs. Oastler held his hand. He looked at her pretty face—her bright, dark eyes, her thin-lipped mouth with that seductive smile, her perfectly straight little nose—and wondered how a creature of Emma’s outsize dimensions could ever have come forth from such a lean, taut body.

What Mrs. Oastler said surprised him. “Emma’s death was not your fault, Jack. You were the only person she cared about. She told me once that taking care of you was all that mattered to her.”

“She never told me that,” he admitted. It would have been a good time to cry, but he still couldn’t. And if, in his mother’s estimation, Leslie Oastler would eventually break down, now was apparently not her moment to fall apart, either.

“Let’s get the check,” Leslie said. “I can’t wait to see what sleeping with you and not doing it is like.”

Jack thought they should tell his mother where they were spending the night. Alice would be worried about Leslie—and about Jack, to a lesser degree. What if his mom called the house on Entrada and got only the answering machine? Alice would be calling him on his cell phone all night.

“I’ll call her while you use the bathroom,” Mrs. Oastler said.

He’d forgotten to bring a toothbrush. For a host of historical reasons, Jack was disinclined to use Leslie’s toothbrush, but he took a dab of her toothpaste and smeared it on his teeth with his index finger.

“Please feel free to use my toothbrush, Jack,” Mrs. Oastler said through the closed bathroom door. “In fact, if you have any expectations of kissing me, please do use it.”

He had no expectations of kissing Leslie Oastler—that is, not until she brought it up. Against his better judgment, Jack used her toothbrush to brush his teeth.

When he exited the bathroom, Mrs. Oastler had already undressed. She was naked except for her black bikini-cut panties—a sinister match to the bikini cut of her C-section scar and Alice’s signature Rose of Jericho. Leslie crossed her arms over her small, perfect breasts as she slipped past Jack, into the bathroom, with a modesty that was as unexpected as her kisses a few minutes later.

She was an intimidating kisser, excitable and feral—without once closing her bright, watchful eyes. But Jack had the feeling that everything about her was an experiment, that she was merely conducting a test.

When they’d kissed to the point of exhaustion—either they had to stop or they had to progress to a more serious level of foreplay—Mrs. Oastler calmly asked him: “You did this with Emma, didn’t you? I mean you kissed.”

“Yes, we kissed.”

“Did you touch each other?”

“Sometimes.”

“How?” He took Mrs. Oastler’s breasts in his hands. “Is that all?” she asked.

“That’s the only way I touched Emma,” he told her.

“Where did she touch you, Jack?”

He couldn’t say penis—with all the penis-holding in his life, God knows why. Jack let go of Leslie’s breasts and rolled over, turning his back to her. Mrs. Oastler didn’t hesitate; her thin arm snaked around Jack’s waist, her small hand closing on his penis, which was already hard. “Like that,” was all he said to her.

“Well, that’s not very big,” Leslie said. “I don’t think Emma would have had an involuntary muscle spasm over that. Do you, Jack?”

“Maybe not,” he said.

Mrs. Oastler went on holding him. He tried to will his erection away, but it endured. Leslie Oastler would always have a certain power over him, he was thinking. She had entered his childhood at a vulnerable time, first with her push-up bra—before he even met her—and later by showing him her Rose of Jericho, when Jack was of such a young age that the way she trimmed her pubic hair would become the model of the form for him.

In this way, in increments both measurable and not, our childhood is stolen from us—not always in one momentous event but often in a series of small robberies, which add up to the same loss. For surely Mrs. Oastler was one of the thieves of Jack’s childhood—not that she necessarily meant to hurt him, or that she gave the matter any thought one way or another. Leslie Oastler was simply someone who disliked innocence, or she held innocence in contempt for reasons that weren’t even clear to her.

She’d been disillusioned by her doctor ex-husband, whose great wealth was family money, which both he and Mrs. Oastler took for granted. (Dr. Oastler didn’t make all that money as a doctor—not in Canada.) As a result, Mrs. Oastler had dedicated herself to the task of disillusioning others; and because Leslie met Alice, Jack just happened to fall under Leslie’s spell.

In any case, when Emma had held his penis, his erection always subsided before long—not so with Mrs. Oastler. Jack was sure he had a hard-on that would last as long as she held him, and Leslie gave no indication that she was about to let go. He attempted to distract her with conversation of an inappropriate kind, but this only inspired her to alter her grip—or to alternately stroke and pull his penis in a maddeningly indifferent way.

“I feel that I never thanked you properly,” Jack began. His betrayal of Emma’s strongly expressed wish—namely, that he not thank her mother—made him feel as disloyal to his dear, departed friend as his continuing erection in her mother’s hand.

“Thanked me for what?” Mrs. Oastler asked.

“For buying my clothes—for Redding, and for Exeter. For paying my tuition at both schools. For taking care of us—I mean my mother and me. For all you did for us, after Mrs. Wicksteed—”

“Stop it, Jack.” He would have stopped without her telling him to do so, because her grip on his penis had tightened—painfully. Leslie Oastler pressed her open mouth between his shoulder blades, as if she were preparing to bite him; maybe she was smothering a scream. But all she said was, “Don’t thank me.”

“But why not, Leslie? You’ve been very generous.”

“Me, generous?” Mrs. Oastler asked. He felt her hand relax at last; her fingers lightly traced an imaginary outline of his penis, which had not relaxed at all.

Jack remembered a lull between customers at Daughter Alice, when his mom had said to him—as if it were part of an ongoing conversation, which it wasn’t, and not out of the blue, which it was—“Promise me one thing, Jack. Don’t ever sleep with Leslie.”

“Mom, I would never do such a thing!” he’d declared.

And there was that night at the Sunset Marquis, a small West Hollywood hotel where Jack had been banging a model; she had a private villa on the grounds, not one of those cheap rooms in the main building. A noisy bunch of musicians—rock-’n’-rollers and their groupies—were partying in an adjacent villa, and Jack’s model wanted to crash their party. Jack just needed to crash, but not there—he wanted to go home. To prevent him from leaving, the model flushed his car keys down the toilet.

Jack could have gone to the front desk and asked someone to call him a taxi, but he didn’t want to leave the Audi at the Sunset Marquis overnight; bad things had happened there. Besides, except for her bra, the model had dressed herself in Jack’s clothes and gone off to the musicians’ party. He would have had to leave the hotel wearing her clothes, and they weren’t a good fit. (She was a size six, or something.)

Jack had called Emma, who was writing. He’d begged her to take a taxi and bring him the spare set of keys to the Audi; they were in the kitchen drawer, by the telephone, he was explaining, when she interrupted him. “Promise me one thing, Jack. Just don’t ever sleep with my mother.”

“Emma, I would never do such a thing!”

“I’m not so sure, baby cakes. I know she would.”

“I promise,” he’d told her. “Please come get me.”

The model had gone off with Jack’s wallet, which was in the left-front pocket of his suit pants, so he had to crash the rock-’n’-rollers’ party and find her. He made himself up pretty well—the lipstick, the eye shadow, the works. Her bras were so small that Jack mistook one for a thong, but he managed to stuff each cup with half a tennis ball; he’d cut the ball in two.

The model had “twitches” in her fingers—the result of some deficiency in her diet, probably—and her personal trainer had prescribed squeezing a tennis ball as a remedy. There were tennis balls all over the villa; Jack had used her nail scissors to cut one in half.

He crammed himself into a lime-green camisole with a bare midriff, which unfortunately exposed the line of dark hair that ran from his navel below his waist. But Jack shaved this off with the model’s razor. At the same time, he shaved his legs in her sink—cutting one shin. He stuck a piece of toilet paper on the cut and painted his toenails a blood-red color, which matched his wound.

Jack found a pair of peach-colored panties with a lace waistband, but the leg holes would have cut his circulation off if he hadn’t snipped them with the nail scissors. Naturally, he couldn’t close the zipper on the short navy-blue skirt, but the half-zipped look, which revealed the lace waistband of his panties, more or less went with the overall portrait. He looked very trashy, but so did half the hangers-on and groupies who hung out at the bar at the Sunset Marquis.

In the full-length mirror, Jack saw that he’d painted his nails in too hasty a fashion—it appeared that he’d had a barefoot accident with a lawn mower. The skirt fell off one hip, and he’d torn one side of the camisole, which exposed the tight, twisted back strap of the ivory-colored bra. Jack’s tennis-ball breasts were noticeably smaller than his biceps. He looked like a field-hockey player, maybe three or four months pregnant, just starting to show.

He would have forgone the toenail polish if he could have worn his shoes, but the model had used them to weigh down his suit jacket, which was under about four inches of water in the bathtub.

It was just a musicians’ party—Jack didn’t expect that the dress code would be very severe. He thought it was adequate that he’d used a gob of the model’s extra-body conditioner and then blow-dried his hair. He looked like a slightly pregnant former field-hockey player (now a hooker) who’d been struck by lightning, but compared to the girls who were the usual groupies with the rock-’n’-rollers at the Sunset Marquis, Jack was head and shoulders above the competition.

Except for the model—she was hot. She’d stripped off Jack’s suit pants and the white dress shirt; she was dancing up a storm in his boxers and her bra. The musicians and their entourage were so wasted that Jack could have been Toshiro Mifune in drag, and no one would have noticed him. All but one guy, who appeared to be giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to his harmonica. He stopped playing and stared at Jack—well, at Jack’s tennis ball in two halves, specifically.

“Did you come with her?” he asked Jack, nodding to the dancing model.

“I recognize the boxers and the bra,” Jack said. It was a Jack Burns kind of line—it gave him away.

“You could pass for Jack Burns,” the harmonica player said. “I’m not shitting you.”

“Really?” Jack asked him. “Any idea where the honey in the boxers ditched the rest of her clothes?”

The harmonica player pointed to a couch, where a tall young woman was stretched out; she was asleep or passed out or dead. (Unmindful of the din, whichever the case.) She’d covered herself with Jack’s white dress shirt, which either she or the model had used to blot her lipstick. Jack found his suit pants and took the wallet out of the left-front pocket. There was no point in keeping the pants—not with the suit jacket under water in the model’s bathtub—and he had a hundred white dress shirts. It was the kind of night when you cut your losses and left.

The model was still dancing. “Tell her she can keep the boxers, but I want my bra back,” Jack said to the harmonica player, who was yowling away on his instrument like a runover cat; he barely nodded in Jack’s direction.

There was a bouncer-type who’d not seen Jack come in. The bouncer followed Jack out, into the semidark grounds, where there were other villas—some lit, some not. There was already dew on the grass. “Hey,” the bouncer said. “Someone said you were that weirdo Jack Burns.”

Jack’s face came up to the broad chest of the bouncer’s Hawaiian shirt; he was blocking Jack’s way. Ordinarily Jack would have sidestepped him; he could have easily outrun him to the lineup at the velvet rope out in front of the bar. The bouncer wouldn’t have messed with Jack in a crowd. But Jack’s skirt was so tight that his knees were brushing together when he walked; he couldn’t have run anywhere.

“Is that you, honey pie?” he heard Emma say. The bouncer stepped aside and let him pass. “Just look at you—you’re half unzipped!” Emma said to Jack. She threw her big arm around his hip, pulling him to her. She kissed Jack on the mouth, smearing his lipstick. “What happened to your shoes, baby cakes?” she asked.

“Under water,” Jack explained.

“They better not have been your Manolo Blahniks, you bad girl,” Emma said, putting her big hand on Jack’s ass.

“Dykes!” the bouncer called after them.

“I’ve got a dildo that would make you cry like a little baby!” Emma yelled at the bouncer, who looked suddenly pale in the bad light.

A tall, floppy guy, like a scarecrow, had fallen on the velvet rope in front of the bar; he was draped over it like a coat over a clothesline.

“I think it’s illegal to drive barefoot in California,” Emma was telling Jack.

“I promise I won’t sleep with your mother,” he whispered to her.

Jack was almost asleep, with his penis still stiff in Mrs. Oastler’s hand, when Leslie spoke to him. “I had to promise your mom I wouldn’t sleep with you, Jack. Of course, we’re not really sleeping together—not the way Alice meant—are we?”

“Of course not,” Jack told her.

One of Mrs. Oastler’s fingernails nicked the tip of his penis, and he flinched against her. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I haven’t played with anyone’s penis in quite some time.”

“It’s okay,” he said.

“You gotta talk to your mom, Jack,” Leslie said, the way Emma might have said it.

“Why’s that?” he asked.

“Talk to her while there’s still time, Jack.”

“Still time for what?”

“Emma and I didn’t talk enough,” Mrs. Oastler said. “Now we’re out of time.”

“Talk to my mom about what?”

“You must have questions, Jack.”

“She never answered them!” he told her.

“Well, maybe now’s the time,” Mrs. Oastler said. “Ask her again.”

“Do you know something I don’t, Leslie?”

“Definitely,” she said. “But I’m not telling you. Ask your mom.”

Outside, someone was screaming—probably in the parking lot near the hotel, but at Shutters on the Beach you could hear someone screaming all the way from the Santa Monica Pier. Perhaps it was the screaming that did it, but Jack’s erection finally subsided.

“Oh, cute!” Mrs. Oastler said. (She was making a considerable effort to bring his penis back to life.) “It’s like it’s going away!”

“Maybe it’s sad,” he suggested.

“Remember that line, Jack,” Emma had told him. “You can use it.” And to think he hadn’t been able to imagine under what circumstances an admission of your penis’s sadness would be of any possible use!

But the word sad affected Leslie Oastler in a way Jack wouldn’t have predicted. She let go of his penis and rolled over, turning her back to him. He didn’t know she was crying until he felt the bed tremble; she was crying without making a sound. Jack guessed that this was the eventually his mother had meant when she’d said that Leslie would break down, but—even in the act of falling apart—Mrs. Oastler was contained. Her small body shook, her face was wet with tears, her breasts were cool to his touch, but she never said a word.

When Jack woke up, he could hear Mrs. Oastler in the shower; room service had come and gone, unbeknownst to him. The pot of coffee, which was all that Leslie had ordered, was lukewarm. She’d already packed her small suitcase, and had laid flat (at the foot of the bed) the clothes she would wear on the plane—a black pantsuit, her bikini-cut panties, the little push-up bra. On her pillow, Mrs. Oastler had left a surprise for Jack: that photograph of Emma, naked, the one he’d kept. Leslie must have found it in the Entrada house; she wanted him to know she’d seen it.

The photo regarded Jack critically—Emma at seventeen, when Jack was ten and heading off to Redding. She had never been fitter. There was evidence of a matburn on one of her cheeks; probably Chenko, or one of the Minskies, had given it to her.

When Leslie Oastler came out of the bathroom, she was wearing a Shutters bathrobe and her hair was still wet. “Cute picture, huh?” Mrs. Oastler asked.

“Charlotte Barford took it,” he said.

“Then she probably took more than one—didn’t she, Jack?”

“An ex-girlfriend made me throw them away,” he told her.

“She probably thought you threw all of them away, Jack.”

“Right,” he said.

“A famous guy like you shouldn’t have pictures like that lying around,” Mrs. Oastler told him. “But I’m not going to throw it away for you. I’m not likely to throw any photographs of Emma away—not now.”

“No, of course not,” he said.

Jack went and stood naked at the window, overlooking the parking lot; there was a partial view of the dead, motionless Ferris wheel, which resembled the skeleton of a dinosaur in the bleached-gray light. Santa Monica wasn’t an early-morning town.

Mrs. Oastler came and stood behind him, holding his penis in both her hands; he had a hard-on in a matter of seconds. It seemed like such a betrayal of Emma—all of it. That was when Jack began to cry. He could tell that Leslie was naked because she was rubbing herself against his bare back. If she’d wanted to make love, he would have; that was probably why he was crying. The promises he’d made to Emma and his mother meant nothing.

“Poor Jack,” Leslie Oastler said sarcastically. She let him go and dressed herself; her hair was so short, she could dry it easily with a towel. “You’re going to have a busy day, I’m sure,” she told him, “doing whatever literary executors do.” Jack could have cried all day, but not in front of her. He stopped. He found his clothes and started to get dressed, putting Emma’s photo in his right-front pocket. “Your mother will no doubt call you before I’m back in Toronto,” Mrs. Oastler was telling him. “She’ll want to know all about our night together—how we didn’t sleep together, and all of that.”

“I know what to say,” he told her.

“Just be sure you talk to her, Jack. Ask her everything, while there’s still time.”

Jack finished dressing without saying anything. He went into the bathroom and shut the door. He tried to do something about his hair; he washed his face. He was grateful to Mrs. Oastler for leaving him her tube of toothpaste, if not her toothbrush, which he presumed she’d packed. He smeared a dab of toothpaste on his teeth with his index finger and rinsed his mouth in the sink. Jack heard the hotel-room door close before he was finished in the bathroom; when he came back out into the room, Leslie was gone.

He had some trouble leaving Shutters. Mrs. Oastler had paid the bill, but the paparazzi were waiting for him. Thankfully, they’d missed Mrs. Oastler. Someone had spotted Jack Burns having dinner with a good-looking older woman at One Pico; someone had figured out that they’d spent the night at Shutters.

“Who was the woman, Jack?” one of the photographers kept asking.

There were a few more paparazzi waiting for him at Entrada Drive, but that was to be expected. Jack wondered why they hadn’t been there the night before; they could have followed him and Leslie to Shutters. He stripped Emma’s bed and put her linens and towels in the washing machine; he straightened up the place a little. His mom called before he’d managed to make himself any breakfast. He told her that Leslie was already on the plane, and that they’d had a comforting night together.

“Comforting? You didn’t sleep with her—did you, Jack?”

“Of course not!” he said with indignation.

“Well, Leslie can be a little lawless,” Alice said.

Jack could only imagine how Mrs. Oastler might have reacted to that. He would have guessed that, in their relationship, his mom was the more lawless of the two. But he didn’t say anything. Jack knew he was supposed to talk to his mother, but he didn’t know what to say.

“Leslie said I should talk to you, Mom. She said I should ask you everything, while there’s still time.”

“Goodness, what a morbid night you two must have had!” Alice said.

“Mom, talk to me.”

“We are talking, dear.”

She was being coy. Jack simply turned against her. There was a time when he’d tried to ask her everything, and she’d wanted no part of it. Now he didn’t want to give her the opportunity to unburden herself. What did Jack care about any of it now—what did it matter? When he was a kid, when it would have mattered, she was silent. Jack was the one who was silent now.

“If there’s anything you want to ask me, dear, ask away!” his mother said.

“Are you faithful to Leslie?” he asked. “Isn’t she more faithful to you than you are to her?” That wasn’t what Jack really cared about—he was just testing his mother’s willingness to give him a straight answer.

“Jackie—what a question!”

“What kind of guy was my dad? Was he a good guy or a bad one?”

“Jack, I think you should come home to Toronto for a few days—so we can talk.”

“We are talking, Mom.”

“You’re just being argumentative, dear.”

“Please tell Leslie that I tried to talk to you,” Jack said.

“You didn’t sleep with her, really?” his mom asked.

Jack almost regretted that he hadn’t really slept with Leslie Oastler, but all he said was: “No, Mom, I did not.”

After that, their conversation (such as it was) slipped away. When Jack told his mother that he’d thanked Mrs. Oastler for all she’d done for him—for them, he meant—his mom responded with her usual “That’s nice, dear.”

He also should have said that Leslie was funny about his thanking her, but he didn’t.

Jack was on the cordless phone, looking out the window at a TV crew in his driveway. They were filming the exterior of the Entrada Drive house, which really pissed Jack off. He was distracted and didn’t understand what his mom was saying about some tattoo convention in Woodstock, New York.

Out of the blue, Jack asked her: “Do you remember when I was at Redding? One year, you were going to come see me in Maine, but something happened and you couldn’t come. I was at Redding for four years, but you never came to see me.”

“Well, that’s quite some story—why I didn’t come to Redding. Of course I remember! I’ll have to tell you that story sometime, Jack. It’s a good one.”

Somehow this didn’t strike him as what Mrs. Oastler meant by talking to his mother. They were talking in circles. Jack had lived with Emma for ten years; now Emma was gone, and he and his mom couldn’t talk to each other. They never had. It was pretty clear that she didn’t want to tell him anything, ever.

Alice wanted to know what was entailed in being a literary executor—not that Jack knew. “I guess I’ll find out what’s involved,” was all he could say.

Jack was surprised to see that there was only one message on the answering machine, which he played while his mom was still on the phone. It was Mildred (“Milly”) Ascheim, the porn producer, calling with her condolences. Her voice was so much like Myra’s that, for a moment, Jack thought that Myra was summoning him from the grave. “Dear Jack Burns,” Milly Ascheim said, as if she were dictating a letter to him. “I’m sorry you’ve lost your friend.”

She didn’t leave her number or say her name, but she must have known that he knew the Ascheim sisters spoke with one voice. He was touched that she’d called, but once again he was distracted from what his mom was saying—something about Mrs. Oastler, again.

“Jack, are you alone?”

“Yes, I’m alone, Mom.”

“I heard a woman’s voice.”

“It was someone on television,” he lied.

“I asked you if Leslie kept her clothes on, Jack.”

“Well, I think I would have noticed if she’d taken them off,” he told her.

“Actor,” Alice said.

“Mom, I gotta go.” (It was the way Emma would have said gotta, they both noticed.)

“Good-bye, Billy Rainbow,” his mother said, hanging up the phone.

24. The Button Trick

A St. Hilda’s Old Girl, like Leslie Oastler, would often choose to have her funeral or memorial service in the school’s chapel, where the Old Girls had both fond and traumatizing memories of their younger days, many of which had not been spent in the contaminating presence of boys—except for those little boys, who were neither a threat nor a temptation to the much more grown-up girls. (Except for Jack Burns.)

It’s unlikely that Emma would have chosen the chapel at St. Hilda’s for her memorial service, but she had left her mother no instructions regarding how she wanted to be “remembered.” That Mrs. Oastler chose the St. Hilda’s chapel was only natural. After all, it was in Leslie’s neighborhood and she had already chosen it for her own service.

Alice called Jack to convey Leslie’s request: Mrs. Oastler wanted him to “say a little something” at Emma’s service. “You’re so good with words, dear,” Jack’s mother said. “And for how many years now have you been writing something?”

Well, how could he refuse? Besides, Jack’s mom and Mrs. Oastler had no idea how the myth of his writing something, which Emma had so presciently set in motion, was now a reality.

In her will, Emma had indeed left him everything. (“Lucky you,” Leslie had remarked—little knowing just how lucky he would soon be.) Jack was Emma’s “literary executor” in more ways than one—the exact terms of which would never be known to anyone other than Bob Bookman, Alan Hergott, and Jack Burns himself—for if ever a will were ironclad, that would aptly describe how Emma had set him up.

Upon her death, the film rights to The Slush-Pile Reader, which Emma had so entangled with the kind of approvals never granted to writers—cast approval, director approval, final cut—were passed unencumbered to Jack. He could make the movie of her novel as he saw fit, provided that he wrote the script. What only Bob Bookman, Alan Hergott, and Jack knew was that Emma had already written a rudimentary adaptation of The Slush-Pile Reader—her screenplay was a rough first draft. There were also her notes, addressed to Jack—suggestions as to what he might want to change or add or delete. And there were gaps in the story, some substantial, where it fell to him to fill in the blanks. Or, as Emma put it: “Write your own dialogue, baby cakes.” She had intended, all along, that Jack would play the porn star in the film.

Were he to reject this flagrant plagiarism—should Jack not accept the falsehood that he was the sole screenwriter of The Slush-Pile Reader—the movie could not be made until a requisite number of years had passed (under existing copyright law) and Emma’s novel had at last entered the public domain.

As for Emma’s third novel, Mrs. Oastler had been right—it did not exist. But Emma hadn’t suffered from writer’s block; she’d simply been busy adapting The Slush-Pile Reader as a screenplay by Jack Burns.

He learned from Bob Bookman—whose other clients included directors and writers, not actors—how Emma had persuaded Bob to accept Jack as a client. In her words: “Jack Burns is a writer, not an actor; he just doesn’t know it yet.”

The royalties from Emma’s backlist—the paperback sales of The Slush-Pile Reader and Normal and Nice—were also left to Jack. This would more than compensate him for his time spent “finishing” Emma’s screenplay. In short, Emma had made Jack declare himself a writer to the media while she was alive; in death, she had given him the opportunity to become one.

Both the unfinished draft of the screenplay for The Slush-Pile Reader and Emma’s notes to Jack had been removed from her computer. She hadn’t saved any copies on disk, and she’d deleted the files from her hard drive. The only printed copy, which Alan Hergott kept safely in his office—where he and Bob Bookman explained to Jack the terms of Emma’s will—needed to be transcribed into Jack’s handwriting. From interviews he’d given, most of them bullshit, everyone knew that Jack Burns wrote in longhand; even Leslie Oastler knew that he didn’t own a computer or a typewriter, and that he allegedly liked to write by hand.

Bob and Alan thought that Jack should do the copying into longhand as soon as possible. He could take all the time he needed to “revise.”

“But should I really do this?” Jack asked them. “I mean—is it right?”

“It’s what Emma wanted, Jack, but you don’t have to do it,” Alan said.

“Yeah, it’s entirely your decision,” Bookman told him. “But it’s a pretty good script.”

Jack would read it and concur; if Emma had taken charge of him in life, he saw no reason to resist her efforts to control him from the grave.

That Mrs. Oastler wanted Jack to “say a little something” in remembrance of Emma in the chapel at St. Hilda’s, where Mrs. McQuat had first warned him of the dangers of turning his back on God, seemed appropriate to the kind of writer he’d become.

The public impression—namely, that Emma Oastler had suffered from a writer’s block of several years’ duration and had, as a result, become grossly overweight—was further fueled by the report of that Italian journalist from the Hollywood Foreign Press. According to Jack’s interviewer, Emma’s allegedly platonic but live-in relationship with the actor Jack Burns showed signs of recent strain; yet the bestselling author had been extremely generous to him in her will. It had been known, for years, that Jack was “a closet writer”—as Emma’s obituary notice in Entertainment Weekly would say. Now he was said to be “developing” a screenplay of The Slush-Pile Reader. (Emma, “mysteriously,” had not wanted her novel to be made into a movie while she was alive.)

What guilt Jack might have had—that is, in accepting Emma’s gift to him as rightfully his—was overshadowed by the certainty that, even if he were to tell the truth, the truth was not what Emma had wanted. She had wanted to get The Slush-Pile Reader made as a movie—more or less as she’d written it. But with her name on the script, the film, as she wrote it, would never have been made. Jack Burns, Emma knew, was a movie star; with his name on the screenplay, he could control it.

Thus, at one of the better addresses he knew—in the Beverly Hills offices of Bloom, Hergott, Diemer and Cook, LLP, Attorneys-at-Law—Jack Burns transcribed Emma’s rough draft of The Slush-Pile Reader into his handwriting, and faithfully copied her notes as well. With the first small change he made, which was not even as big an alteration as the choice of a different word—Jack used the contraction “didn’t” where Emma had written “did not”—he discovered how it was possible for a would-be writer to take at least partial possession of a real writer’s work. (And with subsequent changes, deletions, additions, his sense of rightful ownership—though false—only grew.)

This should not have surprised him. After all, Jack was in the movie business; he had seen how scripts were changed, and by how many amateur hands these alterations were wrought. In another draft or two, the screenplay of The Slush-Pile Reader would feel—even to Jack—as if he’d written it. But the structure of the script and its prevailing tone of voice were entirely Emma’s. As an actor, Jack knew how to imitate her voice.

Not all art is imitation, but imitating was what Jack Burns did best. With a little direction—in Emma’s case, she gave him quite a lot—writing (that is, rewriting) the script of The Slush-Pile Reader was just another acting job. Jack did his job well.

The decision to make Michele Maher (the character) the movie’s voice-over was Emma’s. The idea to make the penultimate sentence of the novel the opening line of voice-over in the film was Jack’s. (“There are worse relationships in L.A.”) We see Michele, the script reader, in bed with the porn star—just holding his penis, we presume, under the covers. It’s all very tastefully done. The story of how they meet (when she reads the porn star’s atrocious screenplay) is a flashback. Naturally, we never see his (that is, Jack’s) penis.

Jack took a similar liberty with the novel’s first sentence, which had always been his favorite; he made it the end line of Michele’s voice-over, where he thought it had more weight. (“Either there are no coincidences in this town, or everything in this town is a coincidence.”) It was too good a line to waste on the opening credits.

For the most part, Jack followed Emma’s instructions. The Michele Maher character remains an angel of hope to talentless screenwriters; she is conscience-stricken by the awful scripts she reads, an impossible optimist in the cynical world of screenplay development.

Emma recommended that Jack give the porn star, Miguel Santiago, a more Anglo-sounding name. (“You don’t look Hispanic, honey pie.”) Jack decided on James Stronach. The last name would make his mom happy, and James was a natural for “Jimmy”—the unhappy actor’s porn name in Bored Housewives (one through four), Keep It Up, Inc., and countless other adult films, for which Jimmy is famous.

James (“Jimmy”) Stronach’s homage to James Stewart is an essential aspect of his character; Jack-Burns-as-James-Stronach memorizing Jimmy Stewart’s lines in The Shopworn Angel and It’s a Wonderful Life would be among Jack’s most sympathetic moments in the movie.

Jack didn’t look like a bodybuilder before they filmed The Slush-Pile Reader, but he had time to change his diet and step up the weightlifting. In truth, he would never look like a bodybuilder; he just had to look like he belonged at the male end of the weight rack in the free-weights section of the gym. (His tattoos, in the movie, would be fakes.)

Emma had taken some of her best lines from the novel and given them to Michele Maher as voice-over. “I lived within breathing distance of a sushi Dumpster in Venice”—that kind of thing. She’d left Jack a note about dropping the mutual-masturbation scene. “There’s already too much masturbation, or implied masturbation, for a movie.”

Emma was right to go easy on the masturbation—although The Slush-Pile Reader would release, as a film, in the same year that another masturbation movie, American Beauty, cleaned up at the Academy Awards. (Miss Wurtz, who was dismayed at Anthony Hopkins’s winning an Oscar for Best Actor for eating people, would be silent on the subject of Kevin Spacey’s winning an Academy Award for beating off in a shower.)

And Jack decided to cut Michele Maher’s misadventure with the Swedish power lifter, Per the Destroyer. (Per too closely resembled the bodybuilder at Gold’s who had beaten Emma up.) Instead Jack added a scene with James Stronach scouting the locker room at World Gym for bodybuilders with small schlongs. James makes a mistake. Someone he introduces to Michele isn’t as small as James thinks. Michele gets hurt.

“He was bigger than you thought,” is all Michele says in the movie. (The words schlong and penis are never used.)

“Couldn’t you tell him it hurt? Didn’t you ask him to stop?” Jack-as-James asks her.

“I asked, but he wouldn’t stop,” Michele tells him.

Naturally, Jack-as-James gets the guy back at the gym. (Jack added that scene, too.) The not-so-small schlong asks James to spot for him when he’s bench-pressing three hundred pounds; it’s too good an opportunity to pass up.

“I’ve got it!” James tells him, as if Jack-as-James could possibly hold three hundred pounds; he drops the barbell on the big schlong’s chest, breaking his clavicle.

Emma herself cut the line about Michele’s assessment of the small schlongs she sleeps with as “a muted pleasure”—and there’s no frontal nudity, no actual porn-film parts. For the most part, we see the porn stars between takes or going through the motions of their private lives. (The horny men in motel rooms with the television light flickering on their riveted faces—well, those are the implied masturbation scenes that Emma referred to in her notes.) The film would still pull an R rating.

When James and Michele are holding each other, not talking, at the end of the picture—“just breathing in the sushi perfume of the Dumpster,” as Michele’s voice-over puts it—Jack thought he’d been as true to Emma’s novel and the rough draft of her screenplay as he could have been.

Jack did not incorporate Emma’s feelings that the reason screenwriters lost control of their scripts was that they caved to the money, as he’d heard Emma say a hundred times. It was Emma’s triumph—in her novel, if not in real life—that the Michele Maher character was a whole lot more sympathetic to screenwriters than Emma was.

The film itself became a kind of tribute to the unread screenplay, the unmade movie. And both Emma and Jack were careful to be kind to porn stars; to that end, Jack would insist that Hank Long have a part. James (“Jimmy”) Stronach needed a buddy, didn’t he? Besides, Jack had used Hank Long’s unnaturally high voice as the model for his stutter in the movie. (The stutter was Emma’s idea—to make it clear why James’s only career choice is in so-called adult films.)

Muffy, that special kind of vampire, had retired by the time they made The Slush-Pile Reader, but Jack was instrumental in casting her as the single-mom porn star—a woman with a couple of uncontainable children, both hyperactive boys. Muffy organizes barbecue lunches on the weekends; the male porn stars, like Hank and Jack-as-James, handle the outdoor grill and play catch with Muffy’s kids.

Emma advised Jack to involve Mildred Ascheim in the picture, too—if only in an advisory role. Not even Bob Bookman or Alan Hergott knew why. Milly (and Hank, and Muffy) had seen Jack’s small schlong. For Jack to be cast as a porn star could have given rise to some ugly rumors, but not if the industry’s only professional witnesses were part of the movie.

What hadn’t Emma Oastler done for Jack Burns? How hard could it be to “say a little something” in memoriam at the St. Hilda’s chapel? Surely he owed Emma that much.

In the front pew, in a side-aisle seat, Miss Wong sat as still as a hard-boiled egg. She’d positioned herself directly beneath the pulpit, where Jack spoke, and had drawn her knees tightly together—as if the alleged weirdness of Jack’s Hollywood reputation might spontaneously force her legs apart.

It must have been Emma who’d first called her Miss Bahamas. Why else would Miss Wong have come? Possibly Emma’s fictional depictions of extreme yet acceptable dysfunction had eased Miss Wong’s disappointment with her life. To have been born in a hurricane, only to find herself becalmed at an all-girls’ school—well, one can imagine how this might have left her feeling let down.

Was an Old Girl’s death always commemorated by the attendance of the existing faculty at St. Hilda’s? Jack didn’t remember such a turnout in remembrance of Mrs. Wicksteed, but she had been old. And Miss Wong was not the only front-pew attendant among the faculty. Mr. Malcolm, who’d also ensconced himself there, had planted the unseeing Mrs. Malcolm in the center aisle. Mr. Malcolm sat beside his deranged wife with his hand on the armrest of her wheelchair, lest she be moved by Jack’s words to charge the altar or go after his mother and Mrs. Oastler, who were seated directly across the aisle from the Malcolms.

In a side-aisle seat, at some distance from the pulpit, Miss Caroline Wurtz appraised Jack’s performance from her audience-of-one perspective.

The chapel was not quite full. There were a few bare spots in the side-aisle pews, and plenty of standing room in the vicinity of the rear entrance, where Mr. Ramsey paced and bounced on the balls of his feet—as if his grief for Emma, whom he’d barely known, had left him too agitated to sit down.

Had Emma been a more popular girl than Jack had first supposed? Of course Wendy Fists-of-Stone Holton had a center-aisle seat in a pew near the front. A gaunt woman with a washed-out complexion and fly-away, silver-blond hair, Wendy had been recently divorced from an ear, nose, and throat doctor who’d declared himself gay upon the accusation that he’d impregnated his nurse. (Wendy had spoken to Jack before Emma’s service; she said it would be nice to have a coffee, “or something,” if he had the time.)

In the pew behind Miss Wong sat the very personification of a hurricane preparing to consume the Bahamas—all two-hundred-plus pounds of Charlotte Breasts-with-Bones-in-Them Barford, Emma’s Canadian publisher. Charlotte had offered Jack her editorial assistance, purely for the privilege of reading whatever it was he was alleged to be writing—a novel or a memoir, perhaps titled A Penis at St. Hilda’s. (Or so Charlotte might have dreamed.) Before the service, she’d hinted to Jack that it must have been “a bitch” to interrupt his other writing to write an adaptation of The Slush-Pile Reader.

“Indeed,” he’d managed to say—his voice, like Hank Long’s, unnaturally high. In the company of grown women among whom Jack remembered being a little boy, he was again a child.

The Hamilton sisters were there; notably, they were not sitting together. Penny, between whose eyes he had once ejaculated, watched him with the innocent eagerness of a soccer mom—sperm the farthest thing from her mind, not to mention her forehead. She’d brought her children, two terribly well-behaved and well-dressed little girls; her husband, Penny told Jack, was having “an all-boys’ weekend away.” (Golf, Jack imagined. He didn’t ask.)

As for Penny’s sister, Bonnie, who was in grade twelve when Jack was in grade four, she’d managed to enter the chapel without his seeing her limp to her pew—assuming that Bonnie still limped. Her proximity to the rear entrance, where Mr. Ramsey continued to make a moving target of himself, suggested to Jack that Bonnie’s pelvis was irreparably twisted; her dead right leg would forever trail behind her while she lurched forward on her leading left foot.

The eight years between them seemed of no consequence now. She’d never married, Jack’s mother had told him. Bonnie Hamilton was the most sought-after real estate agent in Toronto, Mrs. Oastler had said. “With that limp,” Leslie had added, “it must hold things up to have her show you a property with lots of stairs.”

Ever the prompter, Bonnie sat in the back and moved her lips before Jack spoke—as if she already knew what he was supposed to say about Emma, as if he’d actually written something and Bonnie had miraculously read and memorized it before he began to speak. She was forty, but the fatalistic tug Jack had felt when he was nine (and Bonnie seventeen) was pulling them together still. As he’d tried to tell Emma, but had managed to tell only Mrs. McQuat, Bonnie Hamilton was an older woman who, when she looked at him, couldn’t look away.

For a moment, Jack thought that all the older women of his childhood were there.

Connie Turnbull, who’d run up to Mrs. Oastler and Alice and Jack—this was immediately after Connie had parked her car, with a big dog in it—had clearly been practicing her lines from Miss Wurtz’s long-ago dramatization of Jane Eyre. “ ‘It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity,’ ” Connie said, breathlessly—holding Jack’s shoulders and assessing him, as if she were measuring him for a coffin or a suit.

“ ‘Dread remorse when you are tempted to err,’ ” Jack began; then, sensing how deeply Connie Turnbull was dissatisfied with tranquillity, he stopped.

Jack had come up to her breasts when they’d last engaged in this dialogue—when he’d played a grade-three Rochester to her grade-six Jane. Now, in her two-inch heels, Connie was only a forehead taller than Jack was. “ ‘You think me, I daresay, an irreligious dog,’ ” he started to say.

On cue, Connie took his hand and kissed it. Her lips were parted, and she made the usual contact with her teeth and tongue—only this time there was no applause. Alice and Mrs. Oastler looked on, aghast; they clearly didn’t know their Jane Eyre. What must they have thought? That Jack had arranged an assignation with Connie Turnbull after Emma’s memorial service; possibly that he’d slept with Connie the night before?

“Nice job, Jack,” Connie whispered in his ear—her hair faintly redolent of dog-breath, which at a glance he could see was fogging up the windows of her parked car.

Thank goodness Ginny Jarvis wasn’t there. It was as if the gun he’d shot her with—onstage, in A Mail-Order Bride in the Northwest Territories—hadn’t been firing blanks. But Jack was unprepared for those other Old Girls who’d come to honor Emma. Or had they? Many of them were unknown to him.

“It’s you, baby cakes,” he could imagine Emma saying in her husky whisper. “The old broads are here to get a look at you.” Maybe so. How else to explain the presence of Jack’s classmates? There were four of them, all girls.

The Booth twins, Heather and Patsy, whose identical blanket-sucking sounds had been born in the terrors of Emma Oastler’s sleepy-time stories, when they were in kindergarten together and Emma was in grade six—they couldn’t have come out of respect for their old tormentor. Likewise Maureen Yap, whose married name would forever elude Jack; Maureen must have remembered how Emma had abused her.

As alert as an endangered squirrel, Maureen had chosen a center-aisle seat in the back of the chapel, lest she should feel the sudden need to flee—from some reference Jack might make to the bat-cave exhibit in the Royal Ontario Museum, perchance, not to mention his reminding her of Emma’s divorced-dad story. (“He has just passed out from too much sex.”)

It was Maureen Yap who’d asked Emma: “What is too much sex?”

“Nothing you’ll ever have,” Emma had answered her dismissively.

After Emma’s service, at what Mrs. Oastler would describe as “a kind of wake,” which was held in the Great Hall, Maureen Yap approached Jack. A strand of her hair had strayed to a corner of her mouth, where there also lingered a remnant of cheese. Little cubes of cheddar, skewered on toothpicks, were the only food served—and these were washed down by white wine, which Alice said was warm, or by sparkling water, which Jack would have described as “room temperature at best.”

Whether it was the speck of cheese or the strand of hair—or her miserable conviction that Emma’s prophecy, which denied Maureen Yap the possibility of ever having too much sex, was incontrovertibly true—Maureen was difficult to understand.

“I blame the delay on Pam Hoover,” Jack thought she said, as she nervously spilled her wine.

He sipped some tepid sparkling water and considered what Maureen might have meant. All the women at Emma’s memorial service—the ones Jack recognized and the many he did not—had looked better in their school uniforms. But maybe Jack had looked better then, too. “I must have misheard you, Maureen,” he replied, bringing tears to her eyes.

“I came all the way from Vancouver,” Maureen Yap repeated. “I’m staying at the Four Seasons, under my maiden name.”

Jack was staying at the Four Seasons, too—a source of some friction between him and his mom. Jack wasn’t sure what Leslie Oastler thought of his defection to a hotel. Maybe Mrs. Oastler, if not his mom, understood why he wouldn’t have wanted to spend the night in Emma’s bed, or even in what had been Jack’s designated bedroom, where Emma had more than once held him in her arms—where Mrs. Machado had taken such indelible advantage of him.

That they each had a room at the Four Seasons did not mean Jack was doomed to sleep with Maureen Yap. She would never find him, he was thinking; he was registered under a new name. Because the Billy Rainbow film had already been released, Jack was Jimmy Stronach now. As he’d newly invented the porn star’s name, and not even Bob Bookman or Alan Hergott had read his many revisions of Emma’s script, truly no one knew who Jack Burns was.

Those women who came to the St. Hilda’s chapel had come to see him—Jack Burns, the movie star. He failed to recognize the majority of them, but they were mostly in their thirties and forties. If they hadn’t known Jack as a little boy, they’d probably seen him around the school—and without a doubt they had seen his films. Their husbands (if they had husbands) weren’t with them; their children occasionally were. To be sure, the women wore black or navy blue, but their attire struck Jack as more suitable for a dinner party than a funeral. Maybe this was underscored by Emma’s memorial service being held at the cocktail hour on a Sunday evening.

And the fourth of Jack’s classmates to attend the service had not entered St. Hilda’s in kindergarten. Lucinda Fleming had been a new student when he’d first met her in grade one; she’d never experienced Emma’s sleepy-time tales. Lucinda, and what Miss Wong once referred to as her “silent rage,” had never been intimate with Emma Oastler.

What had urged Lucinda to include Jack on her Christmas-letter list? What had made her such a tireless organizer of the class reunions at St. Hilda’s, despite everyone remembering her violent overreaction to being kissed? (Her biting herself so badly that she required stitches, her lying in a puddle of her pee on the third-grade floor!)

If Lucinda Fleming had known how Emma hated Christmas letters and the people who wrote them, she wouldn’t have come to pay her last respects. If she’d had any idea of the contempt Emma felt for the repeated announcements of childbearing, which caused Emma to denounce Lucinda’s Christmas letters as “breeding statistics”—well, Lucinda Fleming (had she known Emma at all) wouldn’t have been moved to pray for Emma’s soul.

But it was Jack’s soul Lucinda and the others were after—and while he might have been a movie star in those women’s eyes, he instantly lost the essential contact with his audience of one in their company. In the St. Hilda’s chapel, where even Jesus was depicted as surrounded by women—saints maybe, but women definitely—he didn’t feel like Jack Burns, the actor. He felt like Jack Burns, the little boy—lost again in a sea of girls. No matter that they were grown women now. In reentering their world, Jack had returned to his childhood and its fears—and, like a child, he felt as frightened and as unsure of himself as he’d ever been.

How could Jack “say a little something” about Emma to this audience of older women—among them, those grown-up girls and older women who had formed him? How could he feel at ease in this holy place—where, even as a little boy, he had turned his back on God?

Jack gripped the pulpit in both hands, but he couldn’t speak; the words wouldn’t come. The congregation waited for him; the chapel was as still as Emma’s heart.

It’s awful how your mind can trick you when you’re scared, Jack thought. Among those women’s faces, all of them looking up at him, Jack could have sworn he saw Mrs. Stackpole—the long-dead dishwasher from his Exeter days. If he’d dared to search among their faces, he might have come upon Mrs. Adkins, so long ago immersed in the Nezinscot—or Claudia, who had threatened to haunt him, or Leah Rosen, dead in Chile, or even Emma herself, who no doubt would have been disappointed in Jack for failing to say what he’d come to say.

Jack tried to look beyond their faces, focusing on no one—except maybe Mr. Ramsey, who was always so encouraging. But Mr. Ramsey had disappeared from sight. Actually he’d been swallowed up in the sea of late arrivals—young girls, students at St. Hilda’s, who all wore their school uniforms, as if this special Sunday-evening service were just another day at school.

In Jack’s state of mind, he mistook the girls for ghosts, but they were boarders—the only St. Hilda’s students on campus on a Sunday. They must have mustered the courage to come to the chapel en masse from their residence. They hadn’t been invited, although they were the age—seventeen or eighteen—of Emma Oastler’s most adoring fans. (Young women had been Emma’s biggest readers.)

It was a shock to see them there, standing at the rear of the chapel in their universal postures of sullenness and exultation and prettiness and slouching disarray—as Jack had seen them at the age of four, when he first felt compelled to hold his mother’s hand. The girls made him remember his fear of their bare legs—with their kneesocks pushed down to their ankles, as if to reveal their interior unrest. The cant of their hips, their untucked shirts, their unbuttoned buttons, their bitten lips and willfully unattended hair—well, there they were, these unnamed girls, some of them carrying well-worn paperbacks of Emma’s first or second novel, all of them signifying to Jack the gestures of an emerging sexuality he had so skillfully imitated as an actor. (Even as a man!)

They took Jack’s breath away, but they brought him back to the task at hand. He found his voice, though it was weak—barely above a whisper—and he spoke as if only to them, those young-girl boarders. They were probably in grades twelve and thirteen.

“I remember,” Jack began, “how she held my … hand.”

Without Mrs. Oastler’s sigh of relief, he wouldn’t have known she’d been holding her breath. A spontaneous shudder shook Miss Wong’s shoulders; her knees unclenched, her legs lolled apart.

“Emma Oastler looked after me,” Jack continued. “I didn’t have a father,” he told them—not that they didn’t already know that! “But Emma was my protector.”

The word protector animated Maureen Yap like a jolt of electricity; her hands flew up from her lap, her palms held open and apart like the pages of a prayer book or a hymnal. (Jack half expected her to sing.) Lucinda Fleming curled her lower lip and seized it between her teeth. There was a sound like the binding of a new book breaking—Wendy Fists-of-Stone Holton cracking her knuckles against her flat chest.

Then Jack’s tears came, unplanned—he wasn’t acting. Without making a noise, he just started to cry—he couldn’t stop. He’d had more to say, but what was the point? Wasn’t this the performance they’d all been hoping for? JACK BURNS BREAKS DOWN, OR WAS IT AN ACT? one of the tabloids would say. But it wasn’t an act.

Those heartbreaking young girls (the abandoned boarders with their collected loneliness) were what released him—the way they just stood there without once standing still. They shook their hair, they shrugged their shoulders—they stood first on one leg, then the other. They cocked a hip here, an elbow there. They scratched their bare knees and looked under their nails, the tips of their tongues touching their upper lips or the corners of their open mouths—as if Jack Burns were in a movie on a giant screen and they watched him from the dark, safe and unseen.

Jack simply stopped talking and let his tears fall, not at first knowing that this would have an unleashing effect on the assembled congregation. He never meant to make them cry, but that was the unavoidable result.

Mrs. Malcolm rocked uncontrollably back and forth in her wheelchair, as if a third accident—either crippling or blinding, or both—had befallen her. It must have been something Mr. Malcolm, in his grief, was powerless to ward away. Alice’s face, ageless when bathed in tears, was tilted up to Jack. He could read her lips. (“I’m so sorry, Jackie!”)

“Jack Burns!” Mr. Ramsey cried, choking back a sob.

Miss Wurtz had covered her face with a white handkerchief, as if she were less than stoically facing a firing squad.

Caroline French, usually a no-show at the class reunions, was a no-show at Emma’s memorial service as well. Jack was sorry to miss the sound of her heel-thumping, as Caroline must have missed the once-resonant heel-thumps of her deceased twin, Gordon—gone to a boater’s watery grave. Dire moaning from Jimmy Bacon would have fit right in at Emma’s service, but Jimmy was also absent. Fortunately, the Booth twins didn’t disappoint Jack—Heather and Patsy with their identical blanket-sucking sounds, which were now intermingled with the congregation’s spontaneous grieving.

A wail escaped Wendy Horton, who pressed her temples with her fists of stone. A bellow broke forth from Charlotte Barford; she clutched her breasts with bones in them, as if her hammering heart could not otherwise be contained.

They all would have wept themselves silly, if Jack hadn’t said something; they would still be weeping, if he hadn’t thought of something to say. “Let us pray,” Jack said, as if he’d known all along what he was doing. (They were in a church—they were supposed to pray!)

“You’ve had a bad day, and you’re very tired,” Emma had intoned, in his kindergarten class. But this didn’t sound like an appropriate prayer. “For three of you,” Emma always said, before concluding her squeezed-child saga, “your bad day just got worse.” But this lacked closure, and the tone was threatening—not at all prayerlike in the usual, uplifting sort of way.

And so Jack Burns said the only prayer he could remember at that moment. It was the one he and his mother had stopped saying together; it usually made him sad to think about it, because it signified everything he and his mom didn’t say to each other, but it had the virtue of being short.

The heads bowed before him were quite a sight, although he’d not spotted Chenko in the row directly behind his mother until Chenko bowed his head. There on his bald pate was the familiar Ukrainian tattoo—a snarling wolf, which (no matter how many times Jack had seen it) was always unnerving.

“The day Thou gavest, Lord, is ended,” Jack said to the only face looking back at him—the wolf’s. “Thank You for it.” Now what? he wondered, but Jack was saved by the organist, whom he never saw. (He or she was behind Jack.) The organist knew how and when to fill a silence, and—at St. Hilda’s—with what to fill it. The hymn that came crashing down upon them was one they knew by heart. Even those castaway boys who’d left the school and its morning chapel at the end of grade four—they’d not forgotten it. Certainly all the Old Girls, of whatever age, had committed these quatrains to memory; they doubtless murmured their beloved William Blake in their sleep.

And what about the teenage boarders standing restlessly in the rear of the chapel, where Mr. Ramsey became their instant choirmaster? What about those young women yearning for a life out of their school uniforms, but fearful of what that life might be—as girls of that blossoming age are? Boy, could they ever belt out that hymn! They’d sung it every week, or twice a week, in their seemingly interminable time at St. Hilda’s.

The tune of “Jerusalem”—Hymn 157, a dog-eared page in the St. Hilda’s hymnals—resounded triumphantly in every Old Girl’s heart. They were William Blake’s words, set to song—that odd belief that Jesus came to England, where Blake imagined a spiritual Israel.

“And did those feet in ancient time/Walk upon England’s mountains green?” the congregation sang.

Jack came down the altar stairs, where he was momentarily accosted by Wheelchair Jane; wailing like a banshee, she blocked the center aisle. But Mr. Malcolm never hesitated; he darted into the aisle and wheeled his startled wife a hundred and eighty degrees around, propelling her wheelchair ahead of him. Jack followed the Malcolms up the aisle—pausing only a second for Mrs. Oastler, Emma’s grieving mother, to take his arm and allow him to escort her. Chenko, perhaps the only member of the congregation who wasn’t singing—Ukrainian wrestlers weren’t familiar with William Blake—was still weeping when Alice ushered him up the aisle beside her. (Chenko hobbled on his cane.) Pew by pew, from front to back, the congregation followed them.

“Bring me my bow of burning gold!/Bring me my arrows of desire!/Bring me my spear! O clouds unfold!/Bring me my chariot of fire,” sang the multitude.

Even Penny Hamilton’s little girls were singing. (Of course they were—they were probably students at St. Hilda’s!)

As Jack neared the rear entrance to the chapel, one of the seventeen- or eighteen-year-olds—a pale-skinned, blue-eyed blonde, as thin as a model—appeared to swoon or faint or trip into her fellow boarders’ arms. From the look of her, this might have been more the result of a starvation diet than her near-enough-to-touch proximity to Jack Burns, a movie star—not that Jack hadn’t seen girls her age swoon or faint or trip in his presence before. Or it might have been the overstimulating effect of the soaring hymn.

The falling-down girl distracted Jack from the more immediate object of his desire. Bonnie Hamilton had not only managed to slip into a pew at the back of the chapel without his seeing her limp to her seat. She’d likewise managed to slip away—ahead of the recessional hymn and the wheelchair-bound Mrs. Malcolm, who still led their lamenting retreat. How had Bonnie escaped Jack’s notice? (With a limp like hers, maybe she knew instinctively when to leave.)

Out into the corridor, marching to the Great Hall, the girls’ and women’s voices bore them along; as they retreated from the chapel, the organ grew less reverberant, but the closing couplet of the hymn’s final quatrain roared in their midst loud and strong.

“Till we have built Jerusalem/In England’s green and pleasant land,” sang the throng.

“I gotta hand it to you, Jack,” Leslie Oastler whispered in his ear—the word gotta very much the way her daughter would have said it. “There’s not a dry eye, or a dry pair of panties, in the house.”

Jack wasn’t sure that wakes were a good idea. Possibly the fault lay in the concept of mixing mourning with wine and cheese. Or mixing women with wine and cheese—maybe the mourning had nothing to do with it.

Lucinda Fleming was the first to inform him that the St. Hilda’s reunion cocktail parties were held in the gym, not in the Great Hall, which was not great enough to contain the Old Girls who’d come to pay their last respects to Emma—or to gawk at, or hit on, Jack Burns.

Most of the women wore high heels, of one kind or another. They’d seen Jack only when he was a little boy or on the big screen; they were unprepared for how short he was. Those women who (in their heels) were taller than Jack were inclined to remove their shoes. Hence they stood seductively before him, either barefoot or in their stocking feet—their high heels in one hand, the plastic cup of white wine in the other, which left no hand free to handle the toothpicks with the little cubes of cheese.

From Hollywood parties, which some actors view as auditions, Jack was in the habit of eating and drinking nothing. He didn’t want all manner of disgusting things to get stuck between his teeth; he didn’t want his breath to smell like piss. (To a nondrinker, white wine on the breath smells like gasoline—or some other unburned fuel—and the Old Girls at Emma’s wake were breathing up a firestorm.)

There were especially desperate-looking women in their late thirties or early forties. More than a few of them were divorced; their children were spending the weekend with their fathers, or so Jack was repeatedly told. These women were shamelessly aggressive, or at least inappropriately aggressive for a wake.

Connie Turnbull, whom Jack-as-Rochester once had taken in his arms while declaring, “ ‘Never, never was anything at once so frail and so indomitable,’ ” contradicted her Eyre-like impression by whispering in Jack’s ear that she was “entirely domitable.”

Miss Wurtz, whom Jack had not seen since he and Claudia had escorted her to the Toronto film festival more than a decade before, had dramatically covered her head with a black scarf—very nearly a veil. She resembled a twelfth-century pilgrim from an order of flagellants. She was thinner than ever, and her perishable beauty had not altogether disappeared but was diminished by an aura of supernatural persecution—as if she suffered from stigmata, or another form of unexplained bleeding.

“I shan’t leave you alone, Jack,” The Wurtz whispered, in the same ear that Connie Turnbull had whispered in. “No doubt you’ve met your share of loose women in California, but some of these Old Girls have a boundless capacity for looseness, which only women who are unaccustomed to being loose can have.”

“Mercy,” he said. There was only one Old Girl who, whether or not she stood on the threshold of looseness, interested him—Bonnie Hamilton. But despite her identifying limp, she appeared to have slipped away.

As for the teenage boarders, Mrs. Malcolm had herded them together with her wheelchair; she’d driven the cowed girls to a far corner of the Great Hall, where Mr. Malcolm was attempting to rescue them from his demented wife. Wheelchair Jane, Jack could only imagine, was intent on keeping these young women safe from him. In Mrs. Malcolm’s mind, or what was left of it, Jack Burns was the evil reincarnation of his father; in her view, Jack had returned to St. Hilda’s for the sole and lewd purpose of deflowering these girls, whose sexual awakening could be discerned in the dishevelment of their school uniforms.

Jack noticed that the young woman who’d fainted or swooned, or just tripped, had lost one of her shoes. She walked in circles, off-balance, scuffing her remaining loafer. Jack purposely made his way to these students; they were the only ones who’d brought copies of Emma’s novel, probably for him to sign.

The girls gave no indication of sexual interest in him—they weren’t the slightest bit flirtatious. Most of them couldn’t meet Jack’s eyes when he looked at them, and those who could look at him couldn’t speak. They were just kids, embarrassed and shy. Mrs. Malcolm was crazy to think they needed to be protected from Jack! One of them held out a copy of Emma’s first book for him to sign.

“I wanted Emma to sign it,” she said, “but maybe you wouldn’t mind.” The other girls politely waited their turn.

To the thin, unsteady-looking young woman with one shoe, Maureen Yap said something clearly unkind but incomprehensible. It sounded like, “Did you just have major bridgework?” But Jack knew Maureen; he was sure she’d said, “Don’t you have any homework?”

Before the poor girl struggled to answer The Yap—before she fainted or swooned or tripped, again—Jack took her by her cold, clammy hand and said, “Let’s get out of here. I’ll help you find your missing shoe.”

“Yeah, let’s get outta here,” another of the boarders chimed in. “Let’s go look for Ellie’s shoe.”

“Someone stepped on my heel as I was leaving the chapel,” Ellie said. “I didn’t want to see who it was, so I just forgot about it.”

“I hate it when that happens,” Jack told the young women.

“It’s so rude,” one of them said.

“It sucks,” he said. (It might have been the word sucks that turned Maureen Yap away.)

Jack went with the girls down the corridor, back toward the chapel, looking for the lost loafer; he signed copies of Emma’s books on the way. “I haven’t been with a bunch of boarders since a few girls sneaked me into their residence when I was in school here,” he told them.

“How old were you?” a girl who reminded Jack of Ginny Jarvis asked.

“I guess I was nine or ten,” Jack said.

“And the boarders were how old?” Ellie asked.

“They would have been your age,” Jack told her.

“That’s sick!” Ellie said.

“Nothing happened, did it?” one of the boarders asked Jack.

“No, of course not—I just remember being frightened,” he replied.

“Well, you were a little boy,” one of them pointed out. “Of course you were frightened.”

“Look, there’s my stupid shoe,” Ellie said. The loafer lay kicked aside, against the corridor wall.

“How will you ever make a movie of The Slush-Pile Reader?” one of the young women asked him.

“It’s potentially so gross,” another of the girls said.

“The film won’t be as explicit as the novel,” Jack explained. “The word penis won’t ever be mentioned, for example.”

“What about vagina?” one of the girls asked.

“Not that, either,” he said.

“Why didn’t she just get her vagina fixed?” Ellie asked. Of course Jack knew she meant the Michele Maher character, but his thoughts went entirely to Emma.

“I don’t know,” Jack answered.

“There must have been some psychological reason, Ellie,” one of her fellow boarders said. “I mean it’s not exactly knee surgery, is it?”

The young women, Ellie among them, nodded soberly. They were such sensible girls—children at heart but, in so many other ways, more grown up than Emma at that age, not to mention Ginny Jarvis and Penny Hamilton (or Charlotte Barford, or Wendy Holton). Jack wondered what had been so different or wrong about him that those girls had ever thought it was acceptable to abuse him.

These girls wouldn’t have harmed a little boy. Jack felt, in their company, like a nine- or ten-year-old again—only he felt safe. So safe, and like such a little boy, that he suddenly announced: “I have to pee.” (It was exactly the way a nine- or ten-year-old would have said it.)

The young women were unsurprised; they responded to his announcement in a strictly practical fashion. “Do you remember where the boys’ washroom is?” Ellie asked him.

“There’s still only one,” another of the young women said.

“I’ll show you where it is,” Ellie told Jack, taking his hand. (It was exactly the way she would have taken a nine- or ten-year-old by the hand; for some reason, it broke Jack’s heart.)

It had all been his fault, he thought—the way those older girls in his time at St. Hilda’s had taken such an unnatural interest in him. It must have been something they detected in him. Jack was convinced that he was the unnatural one.

Jack pulled his hand away from Ellie. He didn’t want her or her friends—these incredibly healthy, normal young women—to see him cry. Jack felt he was on the verge of dissolving into tears, but in that unembarrassed way that a nine- or ten-year-old might cry. He was suddenly ashamed of what the real Michele Maher might have called his weirdness.

“I can certainly find the boys’ washroom by myself,” Jack told them—laughing about it, but in an actorly way. “I believe I could find that washroom from the darkness of my grave,” he added, which made it sound like his journey to the boys’ washroom was a heroic voyage—meant to be undertaken alone, and in full acceptance of such perils as one might encounter along the way.

Jack was soon lost in an unfamiliar corridor; perhaps the old school had been repainted, he was thinking. The stairwells were the likely haunts of ghosts, he believed—Mrs. McQuat, his departed conscience; or even Emma, disappointed by the brevity of his prayer. The voices of the boarders no longer accompanied him on his journey; Jack wasn’t followed, or so he thought.

Ahead of him, not far from a bend in the corridor, was the dining hall—all closed up and dark. Did a figure, old and stooped, emerge from the shadows there? It was an elderly woman, no one Jack recognized but surely not a ghost; she looked too solidly built for a spirit. A cleaning woman, from the look of her, he thought. But why would a cleaning woman be working at St. Hilda’s on a Sunday, and where were her mop and pail?

“Jack, my dahleen—my leetle one!” Mrs. Machado cried.

To see her, to know it was really her, had the effect on Jack of her high-groin kick of so many years ago. He couldn’t move or speak—he couldn’t breathe.

He’d recognized that Leslie Oastler had a certain power over him, and always would have. But in all his efforts, conscious and unconscious, to diminish his memories of Mrs. Machado, Jack had underestimated her implacable authority over him. He’d never defeated her—only Emma had.

Gone was her waist—what little she’d ever had of one. Mrs. Machado’s low-slung breasts protruded from the midriff of her untucked blouse with the over-obviousness of an amateur shoplifter’s stolen goods. But what she’d stolen from Jack was more obvious; Mrs. Machado had robbed him of the ability to say no to her. (Or to anyone else!)

“This is a frightened little boy!” Bonnie Hamilton had told her sister and Ginny Jarvis, when those older girls were trying to get Jack’s penis to respond.

In Mrs. Machado’s company, Jack was still a frightened little boy. She circled him in the corridor as if she were setting up her customary single-leg attack; she underhooked his left arm, the thick fingers of her left hand closing tightly around his right wrist. Jack knew the takedown she appeared to be looking for, but he couldn’t overcome his inertia; he made no move to defend himself.

Mrs. Machado pressed her forehead against his chest. The top of her head—entangled with gray, wiry hair—touched his throat. Jack was surprised by how short she was, but of course he’d been shorter when they last did this dance together—with Chenko repeating his familiar litany, like a call to prayer. “Hand-control! Circle, circle! Don’t lean on her, Jackie!”

It wasn’t wrestling that Mrs. Machado had in mind. With her insistent grip on Jack’s right wrist, she guided his hand under her blouse; with her broad nose, Mrs. Machado nudged his necktie out of her way and unbuttoned the second button of his shirt with her teeth. Jack thought he detected the smell of anchovies in her hair. It was the contact his right hand made with her sagging breasts, which was quickly followed by the feeling of her tongue on his chest, that filled him with revulsion and gave him the strength to push her away.

Until that moment, he’d never believed in so-called recovered memory—namely, that various acts of abuse or molestation from one’s childhood are mercifully erased, only to return with a vengeance, vividly, many years down the road. As Jack recoiled from Mrs. Machado in the semidark Sunday corridor of his old school, he remembered the button trick. How she had unbuttoned and unzipped him with her teeth—and all the other clever things she’d managed to do with her mouth, which he’d blanked from his memory.

“Don’t be cruel, Meester Penis,” Mrs. Machado whispered, as Jack retreated from her. She was shuffling after him, in her laceless running shoes, when she suddenly halted. It wasn’t Jack’s feeble resistance that had stopped her. Her gaze had shifted. She was peering around him, or behind him—and the second he turned to look where she was looking, Mrs. Machado was gone.

She must have been in her late sixties or early seventies. How could she have been that agile, that quick on her feet? Or was the bend in the corridor closer to them than Jack had thought? It was more probable, of course, that Mrs. Machado had never been there at all.

In any case, Jack hadn’t heard the wheelchair behind him; the wheels on that smooth linoleum floor didn’t make a sound. (He was, after all, on haunted ground.) “Jack,” the woman in the wheelchair said, “you look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

He’d expected to be confronted by Mrs. Malcolm—ever the protector of those girls, whose violation, she imagined, Jack sought. But the woman in the wheelchair was an attractive, forty-year-old real estate agent in a black pantsuit.

Bonnie Hamilton had managed to park her wheelchair in some out-of-sight place, near the back of the chapel, and limp to and from her pew unseen. She’d been successful in the real estate business, she would tell Jack later, because she always left her wheelchair at the front entrance and limped with her clients from room to room—even, as Leslie Oastler had cruelly suggested, up and down stairs. “My clients must feel sorry for me,” Bonnie would joke. “Nobody wants to disappoint a cripple—to add insult to injury, as they say.”

But at public events, or whenever there was a crowd, Bonnie Hamilton was also successful at keeping her limp to herself; she had a knack for sneaking in and out of her wheelchair without anyone seeing her. In the wheelchair, she looked elegant; she was as beautiful to Jack as she’d been when they were students together.

Jack was still speechless from his encounter with Mrs. Machado, real or not—and how grotesquely he now recalled the lost details of everything Mrs. Machado had done to him. It was too much for him, on top of all that—to be rescued by Bonnie Hamilton, who’d tried her hardest to protect him from her sister and Ginny Jarvis when he’d been nine or ten.

Jack dropped to his knees and burst into tears. Bonnie, wheeling closer, pulled him headfirst into her lap. Bonnie must have thought that she had made him cry; it must have been Jack’s memory of being coerced to ejaculate on her sister’s forehead that was traumatizing him still! (That terrible loss of his innocence in the big girls’ residence when he’d been a frightened little boy—this in addition to his losing Emma, no doubt, had undone him.)

“Jack, I think about what an awful thing we did to you—every day of my life, I think of you!” Bonnie cried. Jack tried to shake his head in her lap, but Bonnie probably thought he was attempting to get away from her; she held him tighter.

“No, no—don’t be afraid!” she urged him. “I’m not surprised it makes you cry to look at me, or that you dress up as a woman or do other weird things. After what we did to you, why wouldn’t you be weird? Of course you’re weird!” Bonnie cried.

She’s completely crazy, Jack thought, struggling to breathe; she gripped his hair with both hands, squeezing his face between her thighs. Bonnie Hamilton felt very strong; she clearly worked out a lot. But you can’t wrestle a woman in a wheelchair; Jack just let her hold him as hard as she wanted to.

Bending over him, Bonnie whispered in his ear: “We can put it all to rest, Jack. I’ve talked to a psychiatrist about the best way to get over it. We can just move on.”

She didn’t hear him ask, “How?” in her lap; Jack’s voice was muffled between her thighs. Her fingers, combing through his hair, stroked the back of his neck.

“Normal sex, Jack—that’s the best way to get over an upsetting experience,” Bonnie Hamilton told him.

How Jack wished Emma had been alive to hear this! Wouldn’t she have gotten a kick out of the very idea of normal sex?

Wasn’t it destiny, after all? Hadn’t Bonnie and Jack once looked at each other and been unable to look away? And that had been when he was in fourth grade and she in twelfth!

Besides, he was Jack Burns. Wasn’t he supposed to sleep with everybody? Just how would it have made Bonnie Hamilton feel if he hadn’t slept with her, a cripple?

Still, it gave Jack pause—she was definitely nuts. Bonnie must have seen the reservation on his face when she finally released his head from her lap. Her confidence wavered; she became unbearably shy. “Don’t feel that I’m forcing you, Jack. You poor boy!” she cried. “You’ve been forced enough!”

She backed her wheelchair away from him; it was a disturbing image. Jack had the idea that they were rewinding a film; they were returning in time. At any second, Mrs. Machado would reappear; he could sense her coming around the bend in the corridor, reemerging from the shadows.

Under the circumstances, Jack chose to leave with Bonnie.

All night, at the Four Seasons, Bonnie Hamilton never once limped for Jack. She didn’t limp when she was lying down. Once, when she got out of bed to use the bathroom—and again, when she got dressed in the morning—she asked him to look away.

Jack never fell asleep. He was too afraid of the nightmares Mrs. Machado might give him. In the dark, when he felt the first nightmare approaching—even though he was wide awake—Jack asked Bonnie if she’d seen the short, stout woman he’d been talking to in the corridor. Jack’s body might have blocked Bonnie’s view; down low in her wheelchair, she’d had the impression that he was talking to himself. “I thought maybe you were acting,” she said.

This didn’t prove that Mrs. Machado was a ghost, or that he’d only imagined her. There was a hair on Jack’s necktie; he saw it when he undressed for bed. (More gray and wiry than a hair belonging to Bonnie Hamilton or Jack, and no one else had put her head on his chest.) And then there was the second button of his shirt: it was already unbuttoned when Jack undressed that night. This made him shiver.

Naturally, the button trick was the source of the nightmares Jack feared would beset him—not because of the trick itself, which for so many years he’d happily forgotten, but because of what it led to. All those other games Mrs. Machado had played!

It was compassionate of Bonnie Hamilton to stay awake with him. Of course she thought of their night together as therapy, and maybe it was. For that night, if not all the others that followed it, Bonnie held the button trick at bay.

25. Daughter Alice Goes Home

Alice and Leslie Oastler were perturbed with Jack for leaving Emma’s wake at St. Hilda’s without saying good-bye. A tough bunch of Old Girls—actually, Mrs. Oastler’s former classmates at the school—had invited Leslie and Alice out to dinner. Jack was expected to join them, or at least not run off with a woman in a wheelchair. (Given Jack’s older-woman reputation, his mother and Mrs. Oastler first thought that he’d absconded with Wheelchair Jane!)

No doubt the description of Jack’s emotional departure with Bonnie Hamilton was exaggerated by several eyewitnesses—that lip-biter Lucinda Fleming among them. Lucinda, probably in a silent rage, had observed Peewee folding Bonnie’s wheelchair and stowing it in the trunk of the limo. And while Alice and Leslie Oastler were wondering out loud what on earth Mrs. Malcolm and Jack had done with poor Mr. Malcolm, Penny Hamilton had a hissy fit in front of her own children—those darling little girls. “I knew it!” Penny cried, clawing at her pretty hair. “Jack Burns is fucking my crippled sister—that slut!”

Miss Wurtz, who’d managed to shed an uplifting light on Tess of the d’Urbervilles, now put a positive spin on Penny Hamilton’s announcement. “Thank goodness that’s been clarified!” Caroline told Alice and Mrs. Oastler.

“Jack Burns!” Mr. Ramsey was overheard murmuring, in faithful appreciation.

The Old Girls, to a one, were stunned silent. Only the boarders, those irrepressible seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds, continued to carry on a conversation, which they conducted in a kind of shorthand—comprehensible only to them.

The Wurtz, in her ongoing effort to cheer up Alice and Mrs. Oastler, said: “Well, it would have been more predictable, but not nearly as much fun, if Jack had left as a woman instead of with one.”

Jack checked out of the hotel pretty early the next morning—if not as early as Bonnie Hamilton, who had a seven o’clock appointment in Rosedale. They told him at the front desk that there’d been about fifty calls for Jack Burns, and no small number of increasingly irritable requests for Billy Rainbow, but no one had known to ask for Jimmy Stronach. He and Bonnie hadn’t been disturbed.

Jack took a taxi to Forest Hill. He fully expected that his mother would still be asleep and that Mrs. Oastler would have been up for hours. Leslie surely would have made some coffee. He wasn’t wrong about the coffee.

Mrs. Oastler told him that his mom had left the house before seven—an unheard-of hour for Alice to be up, much less dressed and going anywhere. (No one wanted a tattoo the first thing in the morning.)

Leslie looked as if she’d just got up. She was wearing one of Emma’s old T-shirts, which fit her like a baggy dress; evidently she’d slept in it. The T-shirt almost touched her knees, the sleeves falling below her elbows. Jack followed her into the kitchen, where the coffee smelled fresh. There were no dishes in the sink, and not a crumb on the kitchen table; it didn’t look as if Alice had eaten any breakfast.

Mrs. Oastler sat down at the neat table, her hands trembling a little as she drank her coffee. Jack poured himself a cup and sat down beside her.

“I had a bet with your mom, Jack. I said you were gonna get gang-banged by that bunch of boarders. Alice thought you were gonna go home with that overenthusiastic woman with the big dog. Nobody bet on the crip.”

“Where did Mom go, Leslie?”

“Another MRI,” Mrs. Oastler said. “Imaging, they call it.”

“Imaging for what?”

“Come on, Jack. Have you talked to her lately? I don’t get the impression that you’ve talked at all.”

“I’ve tried,” he told her. “She won’t say anything to me.”

“You haven’t asked her the right questions, Jack.”

There was a white envelope on the kitchen table; it stood perfectly straight, propped between the salt and pepper shakers, as innocent-seeming as an invitation to a wedding. If it were something Alice had left for Jack, it would have had his name in big letters on it—it would have had her drawing of a monstrous heart, bursting with motherly love for him, or some other over-the-top illustration of undying affection. But the envelope was unmarked and unsealed.

“Has my mom been sick, Leslie?”

“Envelope? What envelope? I don’t see an envelope,” Mrs. Oastler said, looking right at it.

“What’s in the envelope?” he asked.

“Nothing you’re supposed to see, Jack. Surely nothing I would ever show you.”

Jack opened the envelope, which of course was what Leslie wanted him to do, and placed the four photographs face-up on the clean kitchen table—as if they were playing cards in a game of solitaire with formidably different rules.

The photos were slightly varying views of a young woman’s torso, from her pretty navel to her shoulders. She was naked; her breasts, which were fully formed, didn’t droop. Her breasts and the smoothness of her skin were what indicated her youthfulness to Jack, but he was drawn above all to her tattoo. It was a good one, of what his mom would have called the old school. It was a traditional maritime heart—torn vertically in two, all in tattoo-blue. The tattoo was all outline, no shading. The heart was tattooed on the upper, outer quadrant of the left breast, where it touched both the breast and the heart side of the rib cage. It was exactly where, in Alice’s opinion, a tattoo of a damaged heart could best be hidden—and binding this broken heart together, like a bandage, were the words Until I find you. The words were in cursive on a scroll.

The tattoo was good enough to be his mother’s work, but Jack knew Daughter Alice’s handwriting by heart; the writing wasn’t hers. More traditional—instead of the Until I find you—was the actual name of the lover who’d left you or deceived you, or otherwise broken your heart.

Jack could easily imagine he was looking at a Tattoo Ole or a Doc Forest or a Tattoo Peter—or possibly Sailor Jerry’s work, from Halifax, long ago. The photos looked old enough. But Jack should have been thinking about the young woman, not her tattoo.

“You’re looking at the wrong breast, Jack,” Leslie Oastler said. “I don’t know why Alice bothered to keep that tattoo a secret from you all these years. The tattoo isn’t what’s gonna kill her.”

That was when Jack realized he was looking at pictures of his mother’s breasts—in which case, the photographs must have been taken about twenty years ago. Contrary to her unique reputation as a tattoo artist, not to mention what she’d told him, his mom had been tattooed—probably when William broke her heart, or shortly thereafter; certainly when Jack had still been a child, or even before he’d been born.

Alice’s insistence on hiding her tattoo from Jack was something he’d mistaken for modesty, which had never made the greatest sense alongside the opposite impression he had of her. It wasn’t modesty—not wanting Jack to take a bath with her, never allowing him to see her naked. (And this had nothing to do with the alleged scar from her C-section.) It was the tattoo that Alice hadn’t wanted Jack to see—and not only because she was tattooed, which contradicted her claim to originality among tattoo artists. Mainly it was the tattoo itself that she’d needed to conceal. Because the you in Until I find you must have been his missing father—it was William she’d kept a secret, from the start! And to mark herself for life because of him belied the indifference she pretended to—abandoning her search for William and refusing to talk to Jack about him.

The two-inch scar on the upper, outer quadrant of Alice’s right, untattooed breast was a thin, surgical line with no visible stitch-marks.

“She had the lumpectomy when she was thirty-one,” Mrs. Oastler informed Jack. “You were twelve—in grade seven, if I remember correctly.”

“I was at Redding,” he remembered out loud. “It was when Mom said she was going to come see me, but she didn’t.”

“She had radiation, Jack—and the chemotherapy was repeated every four weeks, for six cycles. The chemo made her sick for a few days every month—you know, vomiting—and of course she lost her hair. She didn’t want you to see her bald, or with a wig. You can’t see the scar in her right armpit in the photographs; it’s hard enough to see if you’re looking right at it. Lymph-node removal—rather standard procedure,” Leslie explained.

“Did a mammogram detect it, or did she feel the lump?” Jack asked.

“I felt it,” Mrs. Oastler said. “It was fairly firm, actually hard to the touch.”

“Has the cancer come back, Leslie?”

“A recurrence in the other breast is very common,” Mrs. Oastler said, “but it hasn’t come back in her breast. It could have spread to her lungs, or to her liver, but it’s gone to her brain. Not the worst place it could show up—bones are awful.”

“What do they do for brain cancer?” he asked.

“It’s not really brain cancer, Jack. The breast cancer has metastasized in her brain—those are breast-cancer cells. When breast cancer goes somewhere else, I guess there’s not much they can do about it.”

“So Mom has a tumor in her brain?” Jack asked.

“A ‘space-occupying lesion,’ I think they call it—but, yeah, it’s a tumor to you and me,” Leslie said with a shrug. “Any intervention would be futile, they say. Even chemo would be merely palliative, to relieve symptoms—it isn’t a cure. There ain’t a cure,” she added—the curious ain’t (like Leslie’s use of gonna and oughta) being a grieving mother’s conscious or unconscious effort to evoke her late daughter’s persistent but bestselling abuse of the language.

Mrs. Oastler picked up the photographs and put them in a kitchen drawer. It was where the manuals to the appliances were kept, but it was full of other junk; it was where Emma and Jack, as kids, had searched for Scotch tape or thumbtacks or paper clips or rubber bands.

The photos of her breasts had been Alice’s idea; she wanted Leslie to show them to Jack, but not until after she was dead.

“What are the symptoms, Leslie?”

“Despite the anti-seizure medication, she may have a few more seizures. She’s had one, anyway—I saw it. I felt the lump, I saw the seizure. There’s not much I miss,” Mrs. Oastler added.

“Is it like a convulsion, or a stroke?” he asked.

“I suppose so,” Leslie answered, shrugging again. “I’ve also noticed vague changes in her moods, even in her personality.”

“Leslie, Mom’s moods change all the time—her personality has always been vague!”

“She’s different, Jack. You’ll see. Especially if you can get her to talk to you.”

Jack called a taxi to take him to Queen Street. He thought he’d go wait for his mom to show up at Daughter Alice. Mrs. Oastler put her arms around Jack and hugged him with her head against his chest. “She’s gonna go quickly, Jack. They say it’ll be pretty painless, but she’s gonna go fast.” Jack stood in the kitchen with his arms around Leslie, hugging her back. She wasn’t hitting on him; she just wanted him to hold her. “You oughta talk to Maureen Yap, Jack. She kept calling you all night, from the Four Seasons.”

“I don’t think Maureen wants to talk to me,” he told Mrs. Oastler.

“I said you oughta talk to her, Jack. Maureen Yap is a doctor. She’s a fucking oncologist.”

“Oh.”

In the lobby of the Four Seasons, the front-desk clerks were surprised to see Jack Burns checking in. He’d planned to spend a couple of days in New York before flying back to L.A., but when he registered—again, as Jimmy Stronach—Jack told them that he would be staying in Toronto indefinitely, meaning until further notice. He also asked them, feigning indifference, if Maureen Yap had checked out. (In fact, Dr. Yap had just called room service and ordered her breakfast.)

They gave him back his old room. Because he’d forgotten to take the DO NOT DISTURB sign off the door, and the hotel maids hadn’t been informed that he’d checked out, it was almost as if he’d never left the hotel—and never been to Forest Hill and back—except for the news that his mother was dying.

It crossed Jack’s mind to call Maureen. “This is room service, Dr. Yap,” he might say. “Would you like to have Jack Burns with your breakfast?”

Jack could only imagine Maureen saying, “Yes, please,” but he didn’t feel like joking around. When Maureen had told him she was staying at the hotel under her maiden name, she hadn’t been kidding.

Jack took a quick shower and put on the hotel bathrobe and the stupid white slippers, as if he were on his way to or from the swimming pool. He knew Maureen Yap’s room number; his fans at the front desk had told him, although they weren’t supposed to. After all, he was Jack Burns; if he’d called the front desk and asked them to send him a pepperoni pizza with two hookers, they’d have had the pizza and the prostitutes at his door in about forty-five minutes.

The movies had taught Jack the power of presenting himself without words, and the little peephole in Maureen Yap’s hotel-room door offered Maureen an unexpected close-up of her favorite actor. Her breakfast had arrived only moments before—now here was Jack Burns in a bathrobe!

“I blame the delay on Pam Hoover,” Maureen mumbled again as she let Jack in. She was wearing her hotel robe, too—sans the stupid white slippers. (Jack kicked his off at the door.)

“You came all the way from Vancouver for what?” he asked, untying her robe.

“To have too much sex with you,” Maureen Yap said, untying his. Never mind that it sounded like “To shave my legs for you”; Jack knew what she meant.

She was a tiny woman: the cavity of her pelvis couldn’t have been bigger than a thirteen-year-old girl’s. The skin on her breasts had the transparency of a child’s—a faint bluish tone, as if her veins, although unseen, lent their color to her skin. Jack could touch the fingers of his hands together when he encircled her thigh.

“My femur is smaller than your humerus,” Maureen told him; there’s no describing what that sounded like, but he somehow managed to understand her.

Maureen’s husband and son called her in her hotel room at 9:45 A.M.—6:45 in Vancouver, where the father was getting the little boy up for school. Maureen covered one of Jack’s ears with her cupped palm—pressing his head, and his other ear, into her flat tummy. He could still hear her endearments to her husband, who was also a doctor, and her young son—not that Jack could follow word-for-word what she told them. Maureen was in tears; Jack could feel the taut muscles in her lower abdomen.

It was the sadness of Emma’s memorial service, she told her family—it still made her cry to think about it. Jack heard Pam Hoover’s name again—there was mention, he thought, of how Pam seemed “shaken” and was “lately insane.” Only after the phone call would Jack figure out that Maureen Yap had said she was “taking a later plane to Vancouver.”

It was also after the phone call when Jack reminded Maureen that, from their bed in the Four Seasons, they were very close to the bat-cave exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum, which prompted Maureen to show him her fruit-bat and vampire-bat imitations. Naturally, this led them to enact Emma’s squeezed-child saga—all three endings.

“There is no way to have too much sex with you,” The Yap told him later, when he was having some difficulty peeing in her bathroom. He heard this, of course, as: “It is no fair I bathe all bare for you,” or something like that.

“My mother has cancer,” Jack called from the bathroom. (Not too loudly; the door was open.) “She’s dying.”

“Come back to bed,” Maureen said distinctly. Once they’d moved on to medical matters, he had no trouble understanding her. Dr. Yap spoke very clearly.

What would happen to his mother’s brain? Jack wanted to know. It must have sounded to Maureen like a child’s question, because she held him in her arms, with his head against her breasts, and talked to him as if he were a child. “It probably won’t be as bad for her as it will be for you, Jack,” she began, “depending on where in her brain the tumor is. You should send me the MRI.”

“Okay,” Jack said. He noticed he was crying.

“If it’s in her visual cortex, she’ll go blind. If it’s in the speech cortex—well, you get the picture. If the cancer eats through a blood vessel, she will hemorrhage and die without ever knowing or feeling what has happened to her. Or, as her brain swells, she will simply slip away.”

“Will she be in a coma?” he asked.

“She could be, Jack. She could die peacefully in a coma—she could simply stop breathing. But along the way, she might think she was someone else. She might have hallucinations—she might smell strange, nonexistent smells. Truly anything is possible. She will go fairly quickly and painlessly, but she may not know who she is when she goes. The hard part for you, Jack, is that you may not know who she is, either.”

The hard part for Jack, as he would tell Maureen, was that he’d never known who his mother was. The description of her ultimate death seemed almost familiar.

“Do you mind if I call you Dr. Yap?” Jack asked Maureen, when they were saying good-bye.

“Not if you call me incessantly,” she said.

He wouldn’t, of course; Maureen knew that. When Jack sent her his mom’s MRI, he already had a pretty good idea of where the tumor was—the so-called space-occupying lesion. Alice knew, too. Dr. Yap’s interpretation of the MRI would merely confirm the prognosis. The tumor was in the limbic system—the emotional center of the brain.

“Well, isn’t that fucking great!” Leslie Oastler would say. “I suppose that Alice will think the whole thing is terribly funny, or she’ll be laughing one minute and crying the next—an emotional yo-yo, either telling grossly inappropriate jokes or drowning in some inexpressible sorrow!”

Of course, from Jack’s point of view, his mom had always been that way; that a malignant tumor now occupied the emotional center of her brain seemed unremarkable, even normal.

“If it’s gone this far, Jack,” Maureen Yap had forewarned him, “I’m sure that your mother has already come to terms with dying. Just imagine how much she’s thought about it. She even decided, somewhere along the line, not to tell you. That means to me that she’s thought about it a lot—enough to have the peace of mind to keep it to herself. It’s Mrs. Oastler who can’t come to terms with it. And you—you won’t have time to come to terms with it until she’s gone. It’ll happen that fast, Jack.”

“She’s only fifty-one!” he’d cried against her thirteen-year-old’s breasts, her child-size body.

“Cancer likes you when you’re young, Jack,” Maureen had told him. “Even cancer slows down when you’re old.”

There was no slowing down Alice’s cancer; it would run away with her in a hurry, befitting a disease that had a twenty-year head start. Later that same morning—after he’d said good-bye to Dr. Yap—Jack got himself down to Queen Street and once more entered the tattoo world of Daughter Alice, where he and his mother had a little talk. (A little dance would more accurately describe it.)

“Do you still take your tea with honey, dear?” his mom asked him, when he walked into the shop. “I just made a fresh pot.”

“No honey, Mom. We have to talk.”

“My, aren’t we serious this morning!” his mother said. “I suppose Leslie spilled the beans in her dramatic fashion. You’d think she was the one who’s dying—she’s so angry about it!”

Jack didn’t say anything; he just let her talk, knowing she might clam up at any moment. “Of course Leslie has a right to be angry,” Alice went on. “After all, I’m leaving her—and I promised her I never would. She let me go to all those tattoo conventions, where there’s a lot of fooling around. But I always came back.”

“I guess you’re leaving me, too,” Jack said. “When were you planning to tell me?”

“The only person I ever wanted to agonize over me was your father, Jack, and he simply refused. He didn’t want me—even knowing that, if he rejected me, I would never let him be with you.”

Perhaps it was being with Maureen Yap that made Jack wonder if he’d misheard what his mother had said, but he could tell by the way she suddenly gave his cup of tea her complete attention that she might have said a little more than she’d meant to say.

“He wanted to be with me?” Jack asked her.

“I’m the one who’s dying, dear. Don’t you think you should ask me about me?”

He watched her put a heaping teaspoon of honey in his tea; her hands, like Mrs. Oastler’s at the kitchen table, were shaking slightly as she stirred the spoon in the cup.

Jack knew that he’d not misheard her. She’d clearly said that William didn’t want her—even knowing that, if he rejected her, she would never let him be with Jack. When his mom handed him his cup of tea—looking, for all the world, as if she were still the wronged party—Jack imagined there would be no stopping him this time, no turning him away.

“If my dad wanted to be with me,” Jack persisted, “why did he flee from us? I mean everywhere we went. In city after city, why had he always left before we arrived?”

“The cancer is in my brain—I suppose you know,” his mother replied. “I wouldn’t be surprised if my memory is affected, dear.”

“Let’s start with Halifax,” Jack continued. “Did he leave Halifax before you got there? If he was still there when you arrived, he must have wanted to see me be born.”

“He was still there when I arrived,” Alice admitted, with her back turned to Jack. “I wouldn’t let him see you be born.”

“So he wasn’t exactly running away from you,” Jack said.

“Did Leslie tell you about my mood changes?” his mom asked. “They’re not always logical, or what you would expect.”

“I’m guessing it’s bullshit that I was a Cesarean birth,” Jack told her. “The scar from your C-section wasn’t why you wouldn’t let me see you naked. There was something else you didn’t want me to see. Isn’t that right?”

“Leslie showed you the photographs—that bitch!” Alice said. “You weren’t supposed to see them until after I was gone!”

“Why show me at all?” he asked.

“I was beautiful once!” his mother cried. (She meant her breasts, when she was younger—he’d meant her tattoo.)

“I’ve been thinking about it—I mean your tattoo,” Jack told her. “I’ll bet it’s a Tattoo Ole, from Copenhagen. You had it almost from the start.”

“Well, of course it’s a Tattoo Ole, Jack. Ole preferred only outlining, and I wasn’t about to shade myself.”

“I suppose you wouldn’t let the Ladies’ Man shade you,” he said.

“I wouldn’t let Lars touch me, Jack—not even shading. I wouldn’t have shown Ladies’ Man Madsen my breasts!”

“We’re getting ahead of ourselves, Mom. Let’s talk about Toronto before we talk about Copenhagen. When we got to Toronto, had my dad already left?”

“He got a girl at St. Hilda’s in trouble, Jack—he had another girlfriend at the school, and for all I know an affair with one or more of the teachers, too!”

“Mom, I know about the girls.”

“He was with other women in Halifax!” she blurted out.

“Mom, you told me. I know he left you. But I never knew he wanted to see me.”

“I couldn’t stop him from seeing you, could I?” she asked. “When you were out in public, I couldn’t prevent him from getting a look at you. But if he wasn’t going to be with me, why should I have let him be with you?”

“So that I would have a father?”

“Who knows what sort of father he would have been, Jack? With a man like that, you can never be sure.”

“Did he see me in Toronto, Mom? Did he get a look at me, when I was a baby—before you drove him away?”

“How dare you!” his mother said. “I never drove him away! I gave him all the looks at you that he could stand! I let him see you—at least from a distance—every time he asked!”

“He asked? What do you mean, ‘from a distance,’ Mom?”

“Well, I would never let him see you alone,” she explained. “He wasn’t allowed to talk to you.”

What wasn’t he getting? Jack wondered. What didn’t add up? Had he been a child on display for his father, perhaps to tempt William to accept Alice’s terms—namely, to live with her? “Let me get this straight,” Jack said to his mother. “You let him see me, but if he wanted further contact with me, he had to marry you.”

“He did marry me, Jack—but only under the condition that we get immediately divorced!”

“I thought it was Mrs. Wicksteed’s idea that I have his name—so I would seem less illegitimate,” Jack said. “I never knew you married him!”

“It was Mrs. Wicksteed’s idea that the only legitimate way for you to have his name would be if he married me and we were then divorced,” his mother told him—as if this were a petty detail of no lasting importance.

“So he must have been around, in Toronto—when we were here—for quite some time,” Jack said.

“Barely long enough to get married and divorced,” Alice said. “And you were still an infant. I knew you wouldn’t remember him.” (She hadn’t wanted Jack to remember William, obviously.)

“But Mrs. Wicksteed was my benefactor, wasn’t she?” Jack asked. “I mean we were her rent-free boarders, weren’t we?”

“Mrs. Wicksteed was the epitome of generosity!” his mother said with indignation—as if he’d been questioning Mrs. Wicksteed’s character and good intentions, which he’d never doubted.

“Who paid for things, Mom?”

“Mrs. Wicksteed, for the most part,” Alice replied frostily. “Your father occasionally helped.”

“He sent money?”

“It was the least he could do!” his mom cried. “I never asked William for a penny—he just sent what he could.”

But the money had to come from somewhere, Jack realized; she must have known where William was, every step of the way.

“Which brings us to Copenhagen,” Jack said. “We weren’t exactly searching for him, were we? You must have already known he was there.”

“You haven’t touched your tea, dear. Is there something wrong with it?”

“Did you take me to Copenhagen to show me to him?” Jack asked her.

“Some people, Jack—men, especially—are of the opinion that all babies look alike, that infants are all the same. But when you were a four-year-old, you were something special—you were a beautiful little boy, Jack.”

He was only beginning to get the picture: she’d used him as bait! “How many times did my dad see me?” Jack asked. “I mean in Copenhagen.” (What Jack really meant, in terms familiar to him from the movie business, was how many times she had offered William the deal.)

“Jackie—” his mother said, stopping herself, as if she detected in her tone of voice something of the way she’d admonished him as a child. When she began afresh, her voice had changed; she sounded frail and pleading, like a woman with breast-cancer cells taking hold of the emotional center of her brain. “Any father would have been proud of what a gorgeous-looking boy you were, Jack. What dad wouldn’t have wanted to see the handsome young man you would become?”

“But you wouldn’t let him,” Jack reminded her.

“I gave him a choice!” she insisted. “You and I were a team, Jackie—don’t you remember? We were a package! He could have chosen us, or nothing. He chose nothing.”

“But how many times did you make him choose?” Jack asked her. “We followed him to Sweden, to Norway, to Finland, to the Netherlands. Mom—you gave up only because Australia was too fucking far!”

He should have watched his language, which may have seemed especially disrespectful to a dying woman—not that his mother had ever tolerated his use of the word fucking.

“You think you’re so smart!” Alice snapped at him. “You don’t know the half of it, Jack. We didn’t follow him. I made your father follow us! He was the one who gave up,” she said—softly but no less bitterly, as if her pride were still hurt more than she could bring herself to say.

Jack knew then that he knew nothing, and that the only questions she would ever answer were direct ones—and he would have to guess which direct questions were the right ones to ask. A hopeless task.

“You should talk to Leslie,” his mother told him. “Leslie likes to talk. Tell her I don’t care what she tells you, Jack.”

“Mom, Leslie wasn’t there.”

He meant in Europe. But his mom wasn’t paying attention; she was pushing buttons on her new CD player, seeking to drown him out with the usual music.

“I want to send your MRI to Maureen Yap,” Jack told her. “She’s an oncologist.”

“Tell Leslie. She’ll arrange it, Jack.” The door to their conversation was closing once again—not that she’d ever opened it an inch more than she had to.

Jack tried one last time. “Maybe I should take a trip,” he said. “I’ll start with Copenhagen, where we began.”

“Why not take Leslie with you, Jack? That’ll keep her out of my hair.”

“I think I’ll go alone,” Jack said.

His mom’s exasperation with the CD player was growing. “Where’s the remote?” he asked her. “You should use the remote, Mom.”

Alice found the remote, pointing it at Jack—then at the CD player—like a gun. “Just do me a favor, Jackie boy,” she said. “If you’re going to go find him, do it after I’m gone.”

The CD player was new, but Bob Dylan was familiar—albeit a lot louder than they expected.

The guilty undertaker sighs,

The lonesome organ grinder cries,

The silver saxophones say I should refuse you.

“Jesus, turn it down!” Jack said, but his mother pushed the wrong button—not the volume. The song started over, at the beginning.

“Go find him after I’m gone,” Alice said, pointing the remote at Jack—not at the stupid CD player.

“I want to know what really happened! I’ve been asking you about the past, Mom. I don’t know enough about him to know if I want to find him!”

“Well, if that’s the trip you want to take, go on and take it,” his mother told him, pointing the remote in the right direction and turning down the volume, though it was still too loud.

The cracked bells and washed-out horns

Blow into my face with scorn,

But it’s not that way,

I wasn’t born to lose you.

Thanks to Bob, they didn’t hear the little tinkle of the bell as the door to the tattoo parlor swung open. It was warm and stuffy in the shop, but even after he closed the door, the gray-faced man in the doorway kept shivering; he had white shoulder-length hair, like an old hippie. There was a rising sun sewn on his jeans jacket, just above his heart, and he wore a red bandanna around his throat—Richard Harris as a cowboy, or perhaps an over-the-hill rodeo rider.

“Would you like a cup of tea?” Alice asked him.

The man was still too cold to talk, but he nodded. He wore tight black jeans and black-and-purple cowboy boots with a diamondback-rattlesnake pattern; he walked stiff-legged to the couch, which Jack knew was a sofa bed. (His mom occasionally slept there, Mrs. Oastler had told him—probably when Alice and Leslie had been quarreling.) The old cowboy sat down on the couch, as gingerly as you might imagine him settling himself on a bronco.

“I want you, I want you,/I want you so bad,” Bob Dylan was wailing. “Honey, I want you.”

“You’re a full-body, aren’t you?” Alice asked the cowboy, who was still shivering.

“Almost,” he told her. You couldn’t see a tattoo on him—only a relentless chill.

The cowboy was at least a decade older than William Burns would be, Jack thought; yet Jack felt an instant pang, as if his dad were shivering with cold. The old hippie, whose hands were shaking, was having trouble removing one of his cowboy boots. Jack knelt down and helped him get the boot off; the boot was so tight, the cowboy’s sock came off with it. His bare foot was startlingly white. Descending below the pant leg of his jeans, the skull of a long-horned steer completely covered the cowboy’s ankle; the fire-breathing flames from the skeleton’s open mouth licked the top of his unmarked foot.

The cowboy made no effort to remove his other boot. (Jack surmised that the other foot was tattooed, like all the rest of him.)

“I got one thing left that’s clean,” the cowboy hippie said to Alice. “You’re lookin’ at it.”

“Your hands and face are clean,” Alice told the cowboy.

“I gotta keep my hands and face clean, lady, if I wanna find any interestin’ work.”

As Jack had done so often in the past, he just slipped away. He poured his cup of tea down the sink, edging his way to the door.

“I’ll see you at home, Mom,” he said softly. Jack was pretty sure that their little talk was over; he was enough of a fool to think their dance was done.

“Lie down—let’s make you comfortable,” Alice told the cowboy, not looking at Jack. The old hippie stretched out on the couch, where Alice covered him with a blanket.

Bob was moaning his way through the refrain again; it’s a relentless song, over which Jack could nonetheless hear the cowboy’s teeth chattering.

I want you, I want you,

I want you so bad,

Honey, I want you.

“Take Leslie with you, dear,” his mother said, as Jack was going out the door; she was still not looking at him, preferring to fuss over the old cowboy. The door was closing when Alice called after her son: “It doesn’t matter anymore, Jack. I don’t even care if you sleep with her!”

Jack carried his mom’s little morsel of anticipation and horror with him as he walked along the south side of Queen Street until he caught a cab heading east, bringing him back to the Four Seasons. There was a small flurry of excitement among Jack’s fans at the front desk when he checked out of the hotel for the second time that day. Jack didn’t like chaos; it bothered him that he must have appeared disorganized, even directionless, but he had a plan.

He would move into the guest wing in what he had once thought of as Mrs. Oastler’s “mansion” in Forest Hill. Jack would sleep in Emma’s bedroom, of which—of the bed, in particular—he had mostly fond memories. Jack would move Emma’s desk, which was a big one, into what had been his bedroom, where Mrs. Machado had molested him; that room, charged as it was with the loss of Jack’s innocence, would become his office. Add his dying mother and Leslie Oastler to the package, as Alice might have put it, and he had chosen a terrific climate for completing his (or Emma’s) adaptation of The Slush-Pile Reader.

The screenplay, and Emma’s notes, had already been transcribed in Jack’s handwriting. He’d brought the script with him—to work on. All he needed was a little more writing paper and some extra pens. As it would turn out—and this was no surprise, given what a veteran shopper she was—Leslie rushed right out and got the writing supplies for him. (She even bought him a new lamp for Emma’s desk.)

Leslie was grateful to Jack for not leaving her alone with his mother, especially with Alice’s changes of mood and personality.

At first, it gave Jack pause that he was alone with Mrs. Oastler for the duration of the workday. He had some anxiety that she would throw herself at him in a state of undress. After all, his mother had not only given Jack permission to sleep with Leslie—she also repeatedly encouraged Leslie to sleep with Jack. (When Mrs. Oastler was doing the dishes after dinner, for example—when Jack was listening to music in the living room, while his mom was stretched out on the couch.)

“Leslie, why don’t you sleep with Jack tonight?” Alice would call out to the kitchen.

“Mom, for Christ’s sake—”

“No, thank you, Alice!” Mrs. Oastler would call into the living room.

“You should try it—you might like it,” Alice told them over supper one night. “You don’t snore, do you, Jack? He won’t keep you awake, Leslie—well, not like I do, anyway. He won’t keep you awake all night, I mean.”

“Please stop, Alice,” Leslie said.

“How much longer do you realistically expect me to sleep with you?” Alice snapped at Mrs. Oastler. “You won’t sleep with me when I’m in a coma, I hope!”

“Mom, Leslie and I don’t want to sleep together,” Jack said.

“Yes, you do, dear,” his mother said. “Don’t you want to sleep with Jack, Leslie? Well, of course you do!” she said cheerfully, before Mrs. Oastler could respond one way or another.

Jack could only imagine what a dysfunctional stew Emma would have made of their threesome—a relationship as challenging as that of a too-small slush-pile reader and a too-big porn-star screenwriter! Jack was indeed living, as he had hoped, in the perfect atmosphere in which to finish his (or Emma’s) screenplay.

The script itself was becoming an intense marriage of plagiarism and rightful ownership; a partnership of wily commerce with those near-blinding shafts of light in which familiar but nonetheless amazing dust motes float. (“These ordinary but well-illuminated things are what we remember best about a good film,” Emma had said.)

Perhaps because Jack was devoted to the task of making Emma’s best book into a movie, but also because he and Mrs. Oastler were both victims of his mother’s escalating abuse, Jack lost his fear of Leslie throwing herself at him in a state of undress. For the most part, she left him alone.

When he would venture downstairs into the kitchen, either to make himself a cup of tea or to eat an apple or a banana, Mrs. Oastler would often be sitting at the kitchen table—as if Alice had only recently left the house or was, at any minute, expected to return. Then, in the briefest possible conversation, Mrs. Oastler would convey to Jack some new detail or missing information she remembered about his father.

Mrs. Oastler struck Jack as exhausted most of the time. Her memory of what Alice had concealed from Jack about his dad returned to her unexpectedly and at unplanned moments, which made Jack extremely jumpy in her company—largely because he never knew what secret she might suddenly divulge. Sadly, this had the effect on Leslie of making her appear as if she had slept with Jack, which Alice never failed to notice.

“You slept with him, Leslie, didn’t you?” his mom would regularly ask, upon coming home from Daughter Alice.

“No, I did not,” Mrs. Oastler would say, still sitting—as if she had taken root—at the kitchen table.

“Well, you look as if you did,” Alice would tell her. “You look as if someone’s been banging your brains out, Leslie.”

It was too easy to say that this was the tumor talking—too convenient to call Alice’s outrageous behavior the cancer’s fault. But even her language was changing. Not her diction or enunciation, which were the unstumbling examples of Miss Wurtz’s determined eradication of Alice’s Scottish accent, but Alice was increasingly vulgar-tongued—as Emma had always been, as Leslie could be, as Alice unwaveringly criticized Jack for being. (“Since California,” as his mother put it.)

But Jack’s work went on. He even showed a draft of the screenplay to Mrs. Oastler; she’d said she was dying to read it. To Jack’s surprise, Leslie was much moved by the script; she found it extremely faithful to the novel. She even took the time to compose a list of the things that were different from what they’d been in the book. These weren’t offered as criticisms—Mrs. Oastler merely wanted Jack to appreciate that she’d noticed. Among the many differences, of course, were those things Emma herself had changed—or else she’d suggested that Jack change them. And some of the changes were entirely his.

“But you like it?” he asked Leslie.

“I love it, Jack,” she said, with tears in her eyes.

Jack Burns was a first-time writer; he’d never encountered literary approval. Something in his relationship with Mrs. Oastler changed because of it. They were united by more than his mother’s dying; they were joined by Emma’s giving him the opportunity to make a movie of The Slush-Pile Reader, and by his bringing Leslie into the process.

They were brought together, too, by Alice’s refusal to talk to Jack about his dad—and the consequent burden of what Mrs. Oastler knew of that subject, which she was now under pressure to tell Jack. Worst—but, in the long run, maybe this was best—Leslie Oastler and Jack were drawn to each other by Alice’s relentless and incomprehensible efforts to virtually force them to sleep together, which both Leslie and Jack were determined not to do, at least not while Alice was alive and she so thoroughly and insensitively wanted them to do it. (And of course what made this last part so difficult was that Alice, even in her madness, was right about one thing: increasingly, Leslie and Jack did want to sleep together.)

Alice was inarguably crazy, but how much of her craziness was the result of the breast-cancer cells in her brain—or was, more simply, her undying anger at William Burns—Mrs. Oastler and Jack would never know.

There was the night Jack discovered his mother naked and asleep in Emma’s bed—in his bed, under the new circumstances—and when he woke her, she told him she was staying where she was so that he could sleep with Leslie. Jack went to bed in his old bedroom (his new office) that night, in the bed where Mrs. Machado had so roughly educated him.

This episode was not repeated, but there were other episodes. The police called Mrs. Oastler one day to say that Daughter Alice was “evidently closed”—meaning all the lights were off and the venetian blinds were shut. Yet, inside the shop, Bob Dylan was singing up a storm—even passersby, on the Queen Street sidewalk, were complaining. This was how Leslie and Jack learned that Alice now routinely closed the tattoo parlor almost as soon as she’d opened it; she took an all-day nap on the sofa bed. Lately there were sounds in her brain that kept her awake at night, Alice explained to them. (According to Mrs. Oastler, Alice was either wide awake or snoring.)

“What sounds, Alice?” Leslie asked her.

“Nothing I can understand,” Alice answered. “Voices, maybe—not yours, not Jack’s. No one I want to listen to.” (Hence Bob, at high volume; thus the complaints.)

“If there’s a bend in the road to your dying, Alice, you may have gone around it,” Mrs. Oastler told her.

“Suddenly she’s a writer!” Alice cried, hitting Jack’s shoulder but pointing derisively at Leslie. “Here I am, living with a pair of writers!”

Jack saw in his mind’s eye what he’d tried to overlook when he’d found his mother naked and snoring in his (formerly Emma’s) bed: the slackness of her breasts in sleep, and how the tattoo of her broken heart had shifted slightly from its perfect placement on her younger left breast and the heart side of her rib cage. It was now a lopsided broken-heart tattoo, as if there’d been something irreparably wrong with Daughter Alice’s heart before William Burns had broken it. Even in her sleep, there were still faint creases where the underwire of her bra had marked both breasts, and in the light cast from the bathroom—the door was ajar—the scar from Alice’s lumpectomy shone an unnatural white, as did the scar in that same-side armpit, where the lymph node had been removed. (Jack had never seen that scar before.)

“If you’d only just fuck each other!” his mother shouted one night, making a fist and pounding the kitchen table, which made Jack and Mrs. Oastler jump. “If you fucked each other all day, I’ll bet you two writers wouldn’t be so poetic!”

Although the screenplay kept getting better, Jack rarely felt he was poetic. It was no surprise, but it hurt nonetheless, that his mother refused to read the script. (“I’ll be dead by the time you make the movie, dear,” she’d told him.)

If there were a poetic presence in the house in his mother’s final days, Jack would have said that it was Leslie, who appeared early one afternoon in the doorway of his makeshift office—an unprecedented interruption. She was naked. By her reddened skin, in the area of her Rose of Jericho, he saw that she’d been scratching at her tattoo. She was sobbing.

“I regret ever getting this tattoo,” she said. Her appearance did not have that unmistakable aura of seduction.

“I’m sorry, Leslie.”

“Life forces enough final decisions on us,” Mrs. Oastler continued. “We should have the sense to avoid as many of the unnecessary ones as we can.”

Jack just sat at Emma’s old desk while Mrs. Oastler turned away from him and went down the hall. “Can I use that, Leslie?” he called after her. (He was missing some essential voice-over for the Michele Maher character, and there it was.) “What you just said—can I use it?”

“Sure,” Mrs. Oastler said, so softly that Jack almost didn’t hear her.

When they eventually signed Lucia Delvecchio for the Michele Maher role, Lucia would say it was the voice-over that made her want the part—that and the fact that she knew she’d have to lose twenty pounds to play Michele. Miramax would put that voice-over on the movie poster, and in all the ads for the film: “Life forces enough final decisions on us. We should have the sense to avoid as many of the unnecessary ones as we can.”

“Bingo!” Jack shouted down the hall, after Mrs. Oastler. But she’d gone into her bedroom and had uncharacteristically closed the door.

There was also the night when Leslie came to his bedroom, where Jack was sleeping—but there was scarcely an aura of seduction about this visit, either. By now, the remembered bits of information—the lost details of his missing father—were waking Mrs. Oastler at all hours of the night. This happened as regularly as Alice’s alternating sleeplessness and snoring would wake Mrs. Oastler, or the more violent occurrences when Alice would beat Leslie’s back with her fists—this for no better reason than that Alice had woken up and discovered that Leslie had turned her back on her, which was apparently forbidden in their relationship.

Neither Alice nor Mrs. Oastler could remember when this rule had been established, or even if it had ever been observed, but this didn’t deter Alice from attacking Leslie, who was at least grateful that Alice didn’t insist on Bob Dylan blaring through the house all night—not the way Bob belted it out all day at Daughter Alice, or so the police duly reported.

“When I start to go, Jack—you take me there,” his mom had told him. He knew she meant her tattoo shop. “When I start to go, I’m sleeping in the needles—nowhere else, dear.”

It was in this largely sleepless context that Mrs. Oastler crawled into Jack’s bed one night; she took hold of his penis so suddenly, but without any indication of seeking more intimate contact, that he at first thought Emma’s ghost had grabbed him. (After all, it was Emma’s bed.)

“I’m here to talk, Jack,” Leslie said. “I don’t care if your mother thinks we’re fucking. I’m just here to tell you something.”

“Go ahead,” he said.

She’d already told him that his father had paid the lion’s share of Jack’s tuition at St. Hilda’s; it was Mrs. Wicksteed who had only, to use his mother’s words, “occasionally helped.” And the clothes he’d believed Mrs. Oastler had bought for him, both for Redding and for Exeter—not to mention the tuition at both schools? “I was just the shopper,” Leslie had told him. “The money came from William.”

“Even for college—those years in Durham?” he’d asked her.

“Even your first couple of years in L.A.,” she’d said. “He didn’t stop sending money until you were famous, Jack.”

“And what about Daughter Alice? I mean the tattoo parlor, Leslie.”

“William bought her the fucking shop.”

This was a portrait of a very different dad from the one Jack had imagined—when last heard of, playing the piano on a cruise ship to Australia, on his way to be tattooed by the famous Cindy Ray! Not so, maybe. Mrs. Oastler remembered Alice saying that William had never gone to Australia. Leslie had further surprised Jack by telling him she was sure his father was still in Amsterdam when Jack and his mother left. “I think he watched you leave,” Mrs. Oastler had said.

Thus, when Leslie slipped into his bed and took hold of his penis—this was almost, in his half-sleep, like old times—Jack was eager to learn which new tidbit of information about his father might have surfaced in Mrs. Oastler’s fitful sleep. “It’s about her tattoo—I mean the you in Until I find you,” Leslie whispered in his ear. “It’s not necessarily William.”

“What?” he whispered back.

“Think about it, Jack. She wasn’t looking for him—she’d already found him! It’s not like William was lost or something.”

“Where is he now?” Jack asked her.

“I have no idea where he is now. Alice doesn’t know, either.”

“Stop whispering!” Alice cried; she was calling from Mrs. Oastler’s bedroom, down the hall, although her voice was so loud that she could have been in Emma’s bed with Leslie and Jack. “Talking is better than whispering!” his mother shouted.

Jack whispered to Leslie: “Who else could the you in Until I find you be?”

“The love of her life, possibly. That certain someone who would heal the heart your dad broke. Obviously she never found him. It’s certainly not me!” Mrs. Oastler declared, as Jack’s mom called out to them again.

“Fucking is better than talking!” Alice yelled.

“You mean it’s a nonspecific you?” Jack asked Leslie.

“For Christ’s sake, Jack. It’s not me, and maybe it’s not William—that’s all I’m saying.”

“I want to go home!” Alice called to them.

“For Christ’s sake, Alice—you are home!” Mrs. Oastler called back.

Jack lay there having his penis held, his thoughts entirely on the you in Until I find you. (As if there were anyone who could have healed his mother’s heart—as if she could conceivably have met the man, or woman, who had a snowball’s chance in hell of healing her!)

“Miss Wurtz!” Leslie whispered, so suddenly that Jack’s penis jumped in her hand. “He wrote to Miss Wurtz! Caroline had some kind of correspondence with your dad.”

“The Wurtz?” Jack whispered.

“Miss Wurtz herself told me,” Leslie whispered back. “I don’t think your mom ever knew about it.”

Something blocked the light from the bathroom, where the door was ajar—a sudden appearance of the kind The Gray Ghost was once the master of, as if Mrs. McQuat, who had tried to save him, were reaching out to Jack again. Or maybe Mrs. Machado, or her ghost, was coming to get him! But it was his mother, naked; she was as close to entering the next world as any ghost.

“I want to go home,” Alice whispered. “If you insist on whispering, I’m going to whisper, too,” she said, climbing into Emma’s bed.

Strangely it was her heart-side breast that looked ravaged—not the breast where she’d had the lumpectomy. Her broken-heart tattoo was the blue-black of a bruise, the you in cursive as meaningless as what was written on the toe tag of a total stranger in a morgue.

Mrs. Oastler and Jack hugged Alice between them. “Please take me home,” his mother kept whispering.

“You are home,” Leslie told her—kissing her neck, her shoulder, her face. “Or do you mean Edinburgh, Alice?”

“No, home,” Alice said, more fiercely. “You know where I mean, Jack.”

“Where do you mean, Mom?” (Jack knew where she meant; he just wanted to see if she could say it.)

“I mean the needles, dear,” his mother said. “It’s time to take me to my needles.” Not surprisingly, that’s what Daughter Alice meant by going home.

26. A Faithless Boy

Jack’s mother died peacefully in her sleep, much as Maureen Yap had predicted. For five days and nights, she slept and woke up and fell back to sleep on the sofa bed at Daughter Alice. Leslie and Jack took turns staying with her. They had discovered that Alice was less abusive to them if they weren’t together, and the sofa bed wasn’t big enough for three people.

On the fifth night, it was Leslie’s turn. Alice woke up and asked Mrs. Oastler to let her hear a little Bob Dylan. Leslie was aware of the police complaints; she turned up the volume only slightly. “Is that loud enough, Alice?” she asked.

There was no answer. Mrs. Oastler at first assumed that Alice had fallen back to sleep; it was only when Leslie got into bed beside her that she realized Alice had stopped breathing. (It would turn out that a blood vessel in her brain had hemorrhaged, eaten away by the cancer.)

Jack was in bed with Bonnie Hamilton, in Bonnie’s house, when the phone rang. He sensed that his mother was sleeping in the needles before Bonnie answered the phone. “I’ll tell him,” he heard Bonnie say, while he was still trying to orient himself in the darkened bedroom. (He didn’t want to get out of bed and stumble into the wheelchair.) “I’ll tell him that, too.”

“Alice died in her sleep—she just stopped breathing,” Mrs. Oastler had announced straightaway. “I think Jack and I should stay with her till morning. I don’t want them to take her away in the dark.”

Alice had talked to Leslie and Jack about the kind of memorial service she wanted. She’d been uncharacteristically specific. “It should be on a Saturday evening. If you run out of booze, the beer store and the liquor store will still be open.”

Jack and Mrs. Oastler had humored her; they’d agreed to a Saturday evening, although the concept of running out of booze at any event originating in the St. Hilda’s chapel was unimaginable. Alice wasn’t an Old Girl. Maybe a few of the Old Girls would show up, but they would be Leslie’s old friends and they weren’t big drinkers. The novelty of seeing Jack Burns (so soon after seeing him at Emma’s memorial service) would surely have worn off. Out of a genuine fondness for Jack, there’d be a smattering of St. Hilda’s faculty. No doubt some of the same boarders would attend, but those girls weren’t drinkers, either. Compared to how it was at the service for Emma, Mrs. Oastler and Jack assumed that the chapel would be virtually empty.

“The wake part should be in the gym, not in the Great Hall,” Alice had instructed them. “And nobody should say anything—no prayers, just singing.”

“Hymns?” Leslie had asked.

“It should be an evensong service,” Jack’s mother, the former choirgirl, had said. “Leslie, you should let Caroline Wurtz arrange it. You don’t know anything about church music, and Jack doesn’t even like music.”

“I like Bob Dylan, Mom.”

“Let’s save Bob for the wake part,” Mrs. Oastler had suggested, in disbelief.

Leslie and Jack completely missed it. The part about running out of booze should have forewarned them—not to mention that Alice had asked them to inform “just a few” of her old friends.

Jack called Jerry Swallow—Sailor Jerry, from Alice’s Halifax days, although Jerry had moved to New Glasgow, Nova Scotia. A woman, maybe Jerry’s wife, answered the phone. Jack asked her to please tell Jerry that Daughter Alice had died. To his surprise, the woman asked him where and when there was going to be a service. Jack gave her the details over the phone—little suspecting that Sailor Jerry, and all the rest of them, would show up.

Jack didn’t call Tattoo Ole or Tattoo Peter—they were both dead. Tattoo Theo wasn’t on Alice’s list; probably he had also died.

Doc Forest was the second tattoo artist Jack called. Doc was still in Stockholm. Jack recalled Doc’s forearms (like Popeye’s) and his neatly trimmed mustache and sideburns—his bright, twinkling eyes. Jack remembered what Doc had said to him, too—when Jack and his mom were leaving Sweden. “Come back and see me when you’re older. Maybe then you’ll want a tattoo.”

Doc regretted that he couldn’t come such a distance for Alice’s service, but he said he would pass along the sad news. Jack thought it must have been simply a courtesy on Doc’s part—to even mention undertaking such a journey. Doc had last seen Alice at a tattoo convention at the Meadowlands, in New Jersey. “She was a maritime girl,” the former sailor told Jack, his voice breaking—or maybe it was the long-distance connection.

Jack next called Hanky Panky—the tattoo name for Henk Schiffmacher—at the House of Pain in Amsterdam. Schiffmacher had written several books, the famous 1000 Tattoos among them; many of the illustrations in that book were collected at the Tattoo Museum in the red-light district. Alice had believed that Hanky Panky was one of the best tattoo artists in the world; she’d met him at any number of tattoo conventions, and she’d stayed with him and his wife in Amsterdam. Henk Schiffmacher was sorry he couldn’t come all the way to Canada on such short notice. “But I’ll pass the word,” he said. “I’m sure that a lot of the guys will show up.”

It was only later—actually, on the night before Alice’s memorial service at St. Hilda’s—that Leslie informed Jack that she’d called a different threesome of tattoo artists. Alice had given Leslie another list; this one also had “just a few” names to call.

“Who were they?” Jack asked Mrs. Oastler.

“Jesus, Jack—I can’t possibly remember their names. You know what their names are like.”

“Did you call Philadelphia Eddie?” Jack asked. (Make that Crazy Philadelphia Eddie.) “Or maybe Mao of Madrid, or Bugs of London—”

“There were three guys,” Leslie informed him. “They were all in the United States. They all said they’d pass the word.”

“Maybe Little Vinnie Myers?” he suggested. Or Uncle Pauly, Jack imagined—or Armadillo Red. He’d never met them, but he knew their names.

“Well, they won’t come, anyway,” Mrs. Oastler said, but she didn’t sound so sure.

“What’s the matter, Leslie?”

Mrs. Oastler was remembering what one of them had asked her, when she’d given the guy the bad news. “Where’s the party?” the tattoo artist had inquired.

“He said ‘party’?” Jack asked Leslie.

“Isn’t that all they do, Jack? At least that’s my impression. All they do is party!”

This gave them both a bad night’s sleep. About 2:00 A.M. Mrs. Oastler got into Emma’s bed with Jack, but she wasn’t interested in holding his penis.

“What if they all come?” Leslie whispered, as if Alice were still alive or somehow capable of overhearing them. “What will we do?”

“We’ll have a party,” he told Mrs. Oastler, only half believing that it might be true.

In the morning, while Leslie was making coffee, Jack answered the phone in the kitchen. It was Bruce Smuck, a Toronto tattoo artist and a good friend of Alice’s; she’d liked his work and had been something of a mentor to him. He’d already called Leslie and offered his condolences; now he was calling to ask what he could bring.

“Oh, just bring yourself, Bruce,” Jack answered cluelessly. “We’ll be glad to see you.”

“Was that Bruce Smuck again?” Mrs. Oastler asked, after Jack hung up the phone.

“He wanted to know if he could bring something,” Jack said, the gravity of Bruce’s offer slowly sinking in.

“Bring what?” Leslie asked.

Bruce must have meant booze, Jack thought. Bruce was a nice guy—he was just offering to help out. Obviously Bruce expected a mob!

Jack called Peewee on his cell phone and increased the original liquor-store order from a case each of white and red wine to three cases of white and five cases of red. (From what Alice had told Leslie, the majority of tattoo artists were red-wine types.)

“Tell Peewee to go to the beer store, too,” Mrs. Oastler said. “The bikers drink a lot of beer. Better fill the fucking limo with beer—just in case.” Leslie was sitting at the kitchen table with her head in her hands, inhaling the steam from her coffee cup; she looked like someone who’d recently quit smoking and desperately wanted a cigarette.

Jack poured himself a cup of coffee, but the phone rang before he could take his first sip. “Uh-oh,” Mrs. Oastler said.

It was a Saturday morning—Alice’s evensong service was scheduled for five-thirty that afternoon—but Caroline Wurtz was calling on her cell phone from the St. Hilda’s chapel, where she and the organist and the boarders’ choir were already practicing. When Jack answered the phone, he could hear the organ and the choir better than he could hear Caroline.

“Jack, a quandary has presented itself—in clerical form,” Miss Wurtz whispered. She sounded as if she were in Emma’s bed with him—as Jack had so often dreamed—and his mother was within hearing distance, down the hall.

“What quandary is that?” Jack whispered back.

“The Reverend Parker—our chaplain, Jack—wishes to lead the congregation in the Apostles’ Creed.”

“Mom requested no prayers, Caroline.”

“I know,” she whispered. “I told him.”

“Maybe I should tell him,” Jack said. He’d met the Reverend Parker only once. Parker was a young twit who’d felt excluded from Emma’s memorial service; hence he was inserting himself in Alice’s.

“I think I can negotiate with him, Jack,” Miss Wurtz whispered. In the background, the organ was fainter now—the girlish voices from the boarders’ choir were less and less distinct. The Wurtz must have been retreating from the chapel with her cell phone; Jack could hear the squeak of her shoes on the linoleum in the hall.

“What might be the terms of your negotiation?” he asked.

“Let him lead the congregation through the Twenty-third Psalm, since he evidently wants to lead us through something,” Caroline said more loudly.

“Mom said nobody should say anything. Aren’t psalms like prayers?”

“The Reverend Parker is the chaplain, Jack.”

“I like the Twenty-third Psalm better than the Apostles’ Creed,” Jack conceded.

“There appears to be another small quandary,” Miss Wurtz went on. Jack couldn’t hear the organ or the choir at all. Caroline must have walked all the way down the hall to the main entrance, yet he was having trouble hearing her again; this time, it wasn’t the organ or the boarders’ choir that was causing the interference. “Goodness!” The Wurtz exclaimed over the throttling engines, a near-deafening sound. (Another quandary had presented itself—this one, Jack guessed, was not small.)

“What is it?” he asked, although he already knew. At the tattoo conventions, his mother used to tell him, the bikers always arrived early; perhaps they wanted to be sure they had a good place to park.

“My word, it’s a motorcycle gang!” Caroline cried, loudly enough for Mrs. Oastler to hear her. “What on earth is a motorcycle gang doing at an all-girls’ school?”

“I’ll be right there,” Jack told her. “Better lock up the boarders.”

“Your mother has cursed us, Jack—this is just the beginning,” Leslie said, still holding her head in her hands.

Caroline and Jack had already had a little talk about Miss Wurtz’s correspondence with William. His dad had taken a particular interest in Jack’s artistic or creative training. “Your development,” as The Wurtz had put it.

“When I was at St. Hilda’s?” Jack asked.

“Indeed, Jack—when you were in the earliest stages of your dramatic education.”

“Your dramatizations, you mean—”

“Beginning with, but by no means exclusively, your remarkable success in female roles,” Miss Wurtz informed him. “I thought that William would be especially pleased with how you and I, in conversation, arrived at the idea that he—your father—was your own special audience of one. If you remember—”

“How could I forget?” Jack asked her.

“But he was not pleased,” Caroline told Jack, gravely. “Your father strenuously objected, in fact.”

“He objected to being my audience of one?”

“To the very idea of an audience of one, Jack. William was opposed to the concept aesthetically.”

“Why?” Jack asked. He’d noticed that she’d now said the name William twice.

Caroline sighed. (No more perishable beauty ever existed.) “Well,” she said, “I think his theory more aptly applies to organs.”

“Why organs?”

“Your father insisted that you should be taught to play your heart out, Jack. As for your audience—if only in your mind’s eye—they were all the wretched, down-on-their-luck and hard-of-hearing souls in the hindmost pews of the church, and beyond.”

“Beyond what?”

“He meant even the drunks, sleeping it off in the streets and alleys outside the church. That’s what William said.”

He meant even the prostitutes within hearing of the Oude Kerk, Jack was thinking; indeed, his dad must have meant that Jack should be reaching vastly more than an audience of one. (That is, if he was any good.)

“I think I get it,” Jack told Caroline.

“I wouldn’t call it a correspondence, Jack. We exchanged, at most, two or three letters. I wouldn’t want you to think that I still hear from him.”

“But he taught at the school—however briefly—when you were teaching there, too,” Jack reminded her. “You knew him, didn’t you, Caroline?”

Jack and Miss Wurtz were in a coffee shop on the corner of Lonsdale and Spadina. It was the weekend after Alice had died. Caroline was dressed, as he’d never seen her, in blue jeans and a man’s flannel shirt; Jack didn’t think she was wearing a bra. Nevertheless, she was absolutely stunning for a woman in her fifties—she was radiant, even glowing. Those high cheekbones, her fine jaw cut like crystal, the peachlike blush to her skin—Miss Wurtz was a knockout. She sighed again and ran her long fingers through her wavy hair, which was now completely gray but still lustrous; her hair had the sheen of slate in sunlight.

“Yes, Jack—if you must know—I knew him,” Caroline said. Staring down at the coffee in her cup, she added softly: “William gave me some of my favorite clothes. He had an eye for women’s clothes. They may be a bit old-fashioned by today’s standards, but they’re still my favorites, Jack.”

Naturally, Emma had spotted the clothes. Caroline saw that Jack couldn’t speak; she reached across the small café table and touched his face. “He was not just my lover—he was my only lover,” Miss Wurtz told him. “Well, it didn’t last,” she said, almost cheerfully. “Too many other women wanted William—women and girls,” Caroline added, laughing. Jack was surprised that she sounded more amused than bothered by the thought—maybe because it was so long after the fact. “Your father was far more committed to his music than to our fair sex, Jack,” she went on. “And if you ever heard him play,” Miss Wurtz whispered, taking Jack’s hands in hers. “Well, it suffices to say—no wonder he was more engaged by his music than by us!”

No wonder Jack had dressed The Wurtz in mail-order underwear in his dreams! Who could resist the temptation to give her clothes? His father hadn’t resisted her!

Jack swallowed his coffee with unusual difficulty. “Did my mom know?” he asked Caroline.

“Your mother knew that William liked the way I spoke. That’s all she knew,” Miss Wurtz told him. “William must have said something to Alice about my voice—my diction, my enunciation. He used to tell me, admiringly, that I didn’t have an accent.”

“So it was Mom’s idea—to have you teach her how to talk?” Jack asked. “I thought it was Mrs. Wicksteed who wanted her to lose the Scottish accent.”

“Goodness, no!” Caroline said, with a laugh. “Mrs. Wicksteed was such an old-school Canadian—she loved a Scottish accent!”

“But you must have known about the girls—I mean the boarders, Caroline.”

“Oh, who didn’t know about those silly girls!” Miss Wurtz exclaimed. “You know boarders, Jack. If they could get pregnant all by themselves, they’d probably try it.”

“But he left you, too, didn’t he?” Jack asked her. “You don’t sound as if you hate him.”

“I never expected him to stay, Jack. Of course I don’t hate him! William was one of those pleasures every woman wants to have, at least once in her lifetime. With all due respect to Alice, Jack, you have to be deluded to imagine you might keep a man like that. Especially at his age at that time—he was so young!”

Jack looked at Caroline Wurtz with everything he had lost visibly written on his face—the way he must have looked when his mother said, “Who knows what sort of father he would have been, Jack? With a man like that,” Alice had said, with disgust, “you can never be sure.” But Miss Wurtz had used the exact same phrase—a man like that—with enduring affection!

“If you’d been my mother,” he told Caroline, “I would have had a father. At least I would have occasionally seen him.”

“I haven’t heard a word from him, or about him, in years,” Miss Wurtz told Jack. “But that doesn’t mean you can’t find him.”

“He may be dead, Caroline. Mom is.”

The Wurtz leaned across the café table and grabbed hold of Jack’s left ear; it was as if she were Mrs. McQuat and he still in grade three, about to be taken to the chapel by The Gray Ghost.

“You faithless boy!” she said. “If William were dead, my heart would have stopped! The day he dies, my breasts will shrivel to the size of raisins in my sleep—or I’ll turn into linoleum or something!”

Linoleum? Jack wondered. (The poor woman had been at St. Hilda’s too long.) His ear, which she still held, was throbbing. Suddenly Miss Wurtz let him go; she laughed at herself like a young girl. “Well, don’t I sound like a brainless boarder!” Caroline exclaimed. “You faithless boy,” she said to Jack again—this time fondly. “Go find him!”

“Tell me the context, baby cakes,” Emma used to say. “Everything comes with a context.”

That Saturday in March—it was 1998, and March in Toronto is not reliable motorcycle weather—Jack walked to the circular driveway at the corner of Pickthall and Hutchings Hill Road, where he had once stood holding his mother’s hand in a sea of girls.

The motorcycles, their engines off, were parked in a row—with something less than military precision. The day was overcast, there was a raw chill in the air, and the gas tanks of the motorcycles were beaded and glistening in the descending mist—a fine drizzle. In that weather, Jack didn’t take the time to count them, but there were about thirty motorcycles—their license plates indicating how far some of their riders had traveled.

North Dakota Dan had driven all the way from Bismarck; he’d hooked up with Lucky Pierre at Twin Cities Tattoo in Minneapolis, and they rode together down to Madison, Wisconsin, where Badger Schultz and his wife, Little Chicken Wing, were waiting. They’d picked up the Fronhofer brothers at Windy City Tattoo in Chicago, and rode together into Michigan; they hit snow in Kalamazoo and Battle Creek, but they still made it to East Lansing in time to have a party with Flipper Volkmann at Spartan Tattoo. The next morning, they rode with Flipper to Ann Arbor, where Wolverine Wally joined them. They had some understandable difficulty clearing Canadian customs, but they picked up the 401 in Windsor and rode through the rain to Kitchener and Guelph, where they met a couple of Ontario tattoo artists Jack had never heard of. (He still couldn’t remember their names.)

There were riders heading north from Louisville, Kentucky, and three cities in Ohio, too. Joe Ink from Tiger Skin Tattoo in Cincinnati, and the Skretkowicz sisters from Columbus—one of whom was the ex-wife of Flattop Tom, who joined up with the sisters in Cleveland.

The contingent from Pennsylvania, too numerous to name, included notables in the tattoo world from Pittsburgh, Harrisburg, Allentown, and Scranton—and Night-Shift Mike, from Sailors’ Friend Tattoo, rode the long way north from Norfolk, Virginia. There were motorcycles in the circular St. Hilda’s driveway with license plates from Maryland and Massachusetts and New York and New Jersey, too.

From the voices raised in song—one could hear them booming from the chapel, the male voices seeming to challenge the organ and overwhelming the boarders’ choir—Jack knew that Miss Wurtz hadn’t been idle. She’d ushered the bikers inside and made them comfortable at the rehearsal. Hot coffee would soon be available in the gym, Miss Wurtz had told them, which wasn’t quite true—not soon, anyway.

“But how many of you know ‘God Save the Queen’?” The Wurtz had asked them. To the bikers’ uncomprehending silence, Caroline had said: “Well, I thought so! It seems you could benefit from a little practice.”

By the time Jack got to St. Hilda’s, she had them singing. Most of the tattoo artists didn’t know which queen they were singing to save—but it was for Daughter Alice, which is why they’d come, and the sound of their voices seemed to warm them. They stood dripping in their wet leathers; the smell of the road, oil and exhaust, mixed with the smell of their well-worn gear, their wind-blown beards, their helmet-matted hair. Thrilled, the boarders’ choir faced them from the safety of the altar. The girls’ voices sounded like those of children among the bikers, who were mostly men.

The organist, a pretty young woman who was as new to St. Hilda’s as the twit chaplain, was making mistakes; even Jack could tell she was nervous, and that her errors were increasing with each new mistake she made.

“Calm down, Eleanor,” Miss Wurtz told her, “or I’ll have to take over, and I haven’t played an organ in years.”

While Eleanor took a short breather, Jack introduced himself to his mom’s friends. “The good-lookin’ Jack Burns,” he heard Night-Shift Mike say, appraising him.

“Daughter Alice’s little boy,” one of the Skretkowicz sisters said.

“I’m the other Skretkowicz,” the other sister told Jack. “The one who was never married to Flattop Tom, or to anybody else,” she whispered in Jack’s ear, biting his earlobe.

“Your mom sure was proud of you,” Badger Schultz said. His wife, Little Chicken Wing, was already dissolved in tears—and it wasn’t even noon. They had hours to go before Alice’s memorial service.

Caroline clapped her hands. “We’re still rehearsing—we’re rehearsing until I say, ‘Stop!’ ” Miss Wurtz called from the altar area. Eleanor, the organist, seemed almost composed.

“I didn’t know you could play the organ, Caroline,” Eleanor said—more audibly than she’d meant to, because Jack and the bikers had suddenly stopped talking.

Glancing in Jack’s direction, Miss Wurtz blushed. “Well, I had a few memorable lessons,” she said.

God save our gracious Queen,

Long live our noble Queen,

God save the Queen!

Send her victorious,

Happy and glorious,

Long to reign over us;

God save the Queen!

Under The Wurtz’s direction, they sang and sang. The pure, girlish voices of the boarders’ choir were no match for the beer-hall gusto of the bikers, who—as they recovered from the damp chill of the March roads—shed their leathers. Their tattoos rivaled the colors of Jesus and his surrounding saints on the chapel’s stained glass.

Jack slipped away. He knew that Miss Wurtz could dramatize anything; by the time of the blessed event, Caroline would have polished to perfection both the boarders’ and the bikers’ choir. As Jack was leaving, the tattoo artists were listening reverentially to the girls, who were singing “Lord of the Dance.”

I danced in the morning

When the world was begun,

And I danced in the moon

And the stars and the sun,

And I came down from heaven

And I danced on the earth,

At Bethlehem

I had my birth.

Out in the circular driveway, two more riders had arrived; they were parking their motorcycles alongside the others. Slick Eddie Esposito from The Blue Bulldog in New Haven, Connecticut, and Bad Bill Letters from Black Bear Season Tattoo in Brunswick, Maine. Their creased leathers were streaked with rain and they looked stiff with cold, but they recognized Jack Burns and smiled warmly. Jack shook their icy hands.

He’d thrown on some old clothes at Mrs. Oastler’s—jeans, running shoes, a waterproof parka that had been Emma’s and was way too big for him. “I’m just going home to change my clothes for the service,” Jack told the newly arrived bikers. They seemed mystified by the girls’ voices coming from the chapel. “The others are inside, practicing.”

“Practicing what?” Bad Bill asked. It must have been the third or fourth refrain to “Lord of the Dance”; Miss Wurtz had obviously decided to bring the bikers into the chorus. The men’s big voices reached them out in the rain.

Dance, then, wherever you may be,

I am the Lord of the Dance, said he,

And I’ll lead you all, wherever you may be,

And I’ll lead you all in the Dance, said he.

“Come on, Bill—let’s go sing with ’em,” Slick Eddie said.

“Are you comin’ back as a girl?” Bad Bill asked Jack.

“Not today,” Jack told him.

They were going inside the building when Jack heard Slick Eddie say: “You’re an asshole, Bill.”

“Of course I’m an asshole!” Bad Bill said.

Jack went back to Mrs. Oastler’s house and stretched out in a hot bath. Leslie came into the bathroom in her black bikini-cut underwear; she put the lid down on the toilet and sat there, not looking at him. “How many of them are there?” she asked.

“About thirty motorcycles, maybe forty riders,” he told her.

“Most of the tattoo artists your mother knew weren’t bikers, Jack. The bikers are just the tip of the iceberg.”

“I know,” Jack said. “We better call Peewee.”

“We better call the police,” Mrs. Oastler replied. “They can’t all sleep at St. Hilda’s—not even in the gym.”

“Some of them could sleep here,” he suggested.

“Your mother intended to do this, Jack. Maybe if we had slept with each other, she would have spared us this final indignity.”

“I don’t know,” Jack said. “I get the feeling that Mom couldn’t have kept them away.”

Peewee called later that afternoon. “I should be driving a van, not a limo, mon—there’s no room for more booze in the limo, Jack.”

“Better make two trips,” Jack told him.

“This is the third trip, mon! If you and Mrs. Oastler don’t get your asses to that chapel, you won’t have any place to sit!” Peewee was a born alarmist. Jack knew that Miss Wurtz was in charge; he trusted Caroline to save him and Leslie a couple of seats.

The Wurtz did better than that. She stationed Stinky Monkey, like an usher in the aisle, to guard the pew. Bad to the Bones was there, too—and Sister Bear and Dragon Moon. They were all there—everyone Jack had imagined, and more.

A group came from Italy. Luca Brusa (from Switzerland) wouldn’t have missed it, he told Jack. Heaven & Hell came from Germany, Manu and Tin-Tin from France. The Las Vegas Pricks were there, and Hollywood’s Purple Panther.

They crammed the pews, the aisles—even the corridor, halfway to the gym. A small, frightened-looking gathering of Old Girls—Mrs. Oastler’s trembling former classmates—were huddled in two front pews on a side aisle, where Ed Hardy, Bill Funk, and Rusty Savage appeared to have appointed themselves as the Old Girls’ bodyguards. At least they weren’t letting their fellow tattoo artists anywhere near these older women, who were (like the schoolgirls they’d been long ago) holding hands.

Miss Wurtz had marshaled her two choirs—the boarders and the bikers—to take their positions on either side of the aisle, where these disparate groups faced the largely baffled congregation. The tattoo artists who hadn’t arrived early could make no sense of “God Save the Queen.”

“Who’s the Queen?” a broad-shouldered man in a bright yellow sports jacket asked Jack. He had so much gel in his hair, which stood straight up, that the top of his head resembled a shark’s dorsal fin. Both the bright yellow jacket and the hair were familiar to Jack from the tattoo magazines he’d seen—Crazy Philadelphia Eddie; there could be no doubt.

The Reverend Parker arrived late. “There was no place to park!” the chaplain peevishly complained, before he had a closer look at the congregation—the tie-dyed tank tops, the tattooed arms, the open collars of the Hawaiian shirts, the exposed chests, also tattooed. Real snakes and mythological serpents regarded the chaplain coldly; in the reptilian tattoos, there were creatures that the Garden of Eden and the Reverend Parker had never seen. There were many depictions of Christ’s bleeding heart, bound in thorns—lacking the usual Anglican reserve. There were many skeletons—some breathing fire, others speaking obscenities.

In the blaze of all this tattooed flesh, The Wurtz had outdone herself with “Lord of the Dance.” The boarders, whom Leslie described as “a choir of not-quite virgins,” sang all five verses—the bikers joining them for the five refrains. The wrecked blond boarder who’d lost her shoe at Emma’s memorial service sang the fourth stanza solo, and a beautiful soloist she was; though they’d rehearsed this together several times already, she had the bikers in tears.

I danced on a Friday

When the sky turned black—

It’s hard to dance

With the devil on your back.

They buried my body

And they thought I’d gone,

But I am the Dance,

And I still go on.

When it was time for the chaplain to read the Twenty-third Psalm, it was warm in the chapel and some of the heavily tattooed types had taken off their shirts. They weren’t all tattoo artists—there were many of Alice’s clients present. Her signature work was everywhere; Jack recognized more than a few Daughter Alices.

He also noticed that Mrs. Oastler was crying. She slumped against him in the pew, her small body shaking. That was how Alice’s colleagues knew who she was. “I’ve got a sweetie in Toronto,” Alice had told more than one of them. (As in: “No, thanks—not tonight. I’ve got a sweetie in Toronto.”)

“The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want,” the Reverend Parker began anxiously. He was thoroughly rattled by the time he got to “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will feel no evil—”

“ ‘… fear,’ not feel, ‘no evil—’ ” Miss Wurtz corrected him.

“… fear no evil,” the chaplain stumbled ahead. “For Thou art with me; Thy rod and Thy staff, they comfort me.”

“Your what?” someone in the congregation said—a woman’s voice. (Jack didn’t see who said it, but he would bet it was one of the Skret-kowicz sisters.) This was followed by general laughter; one of the Old Girls among Mrs. Oastler’s former classmates was in hysterics.

That was when Leslie lost it. “No praying, no saying anything!” Mrs. Oastler shouted to the chaplain. “Alice wanted just singing!”

“Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies—” the Reverend Parker mumbled; then he stopped. He saw the presence of his enemies, all around him.

“Just singing, pal,” Bad Bill Letters said.

“Yeah—sing or shut up,” one of the Fronhofer brothers said.

“Sing or shut up!” Flattop Tom repeated.

“Sing or shut up!” the congregation shouted.

Eleanor, the organist, was frozen. Caroline sat down on the organ bench beside her. “If you’ve forgotten how to play ‘Jerusalem,’ Eleanor,” Miss Wurtz said, “the good Lord may forgive you, but I won’t.” Eleanor, bless her timid heart, lurched forward; she attacked the keyboard. The organ was a little louder than expected, but the boarders’ and the bikers’ choir gave it their best.

And did those feet in ancient time

Walk upon England’s mountains green?

And was the holy Lamb of God on England’s pleasant pastures seen?

As they went up the aisle, Mrs. Oastler was swept into the arms of Crazy Philadelphia Eddie; she was overcome with emotion and didn’t, or couldn’t, resist him. All of Alice’s friends had heard of Leslie and wanted to hug her. “It’s Alice’s sweetie,” people were whispering.

“Why do they know me?” Leslie asked Jack.

“Mom must have told them about you,” Jack said.

“She did?” asked Mrs. Oastler, who was in tears. They were all in tears—all the tattoo artists, all of Daughter Alice’s clients, and her friends. (It was a sentimental business, tattooing—as Leslie was only now discovering.)

They were marching up the hall to the gym by the time the boarders and the bikers hit their full stride in the fourth verse; even Eleanor, with Miss Wurtz’s encouragement, had kept up.

I will not cease from mental fight,

Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,

Till we have built Jerusalem

In England’s green and pleasant land.

A bathtub-size bucket of ice, full of cold beer, awaited them in the gym; wine corks were popping. Huge slabs of roast beef and platters of sausages weighed down the picnic tables—not the usual cheese-speared-on-toothpicks fare.

“Who ordered all this food?” Jack asked Leslie.

“I did, Jack. Peewee had to make a few more trips.”

Wolverine Wally and Flipper Volkmann were having a heated argument. “A Michigan matter,” Badger Schultz was saying diplomatically, as he forced himself between them. Badger’s wife, Little Chicken Wing, had taken Mrs. Oastler’s arm. Joe Ink, from Tiger Skin Tattoo in Cincinnati, placed his hand on Leslie’s shoulder—the tattoo on the back of his hand was an ace of spades overlapping an ace of hearts.

“If you’re ever in Norfolk,” Night-Shift Mike was saying to Mrs. Oastler, “I’ll show you the town like you wouldn’t believe!”

“They loved her!” Leslie said breathlessly to Jack. “Invite them to stay, Jack,” she added. (Slick Eddie Esposito was showing her the Man’s Ruin on his belly; it was Daughter Alice’s work.)

“Invite all of them?” Jack asked Mrs. Oastler. “To stay with us?”

“Of course with us!” Leslie told him. “Where else can they stay?”

Maybe not the Skretkowicz sisters, Jack thought—maybe not both of them, anyway. Why not just the one who hadn’t been married to Flattop Tom? But he realized you couldn’t control a tattoo artists’ party; you had to go with the flow, as Alice’s generation would say.

Miss Wurtz was in fine form, praising the bikers’ first-time performance. Ever the nondrinker, Jack watched over the boarders like a sheep dog. But everyone was extremely well behaved, the dispute between Flipper Volkmann and Wolverine Wally notwithstanding—and not even that Michigan matter had resulted in a fight.

It was a mild surprise that Mrs. Oastler’s former classmates appeared to be having a good time, too. The Old Girls had not seen so much skin on display in a great while—if ever. The St. Hilda’s gym was hopping; there was nonstop Bob Dylan on the CD player.

From his mother’s description of Jerry Swallow as a traditionalist, Jack should have recognized him. A pretty woman wearing a nurse’s cap was tattooed on one of his biceps; it’s hard to be more of a traditionalist than that. The writing on Sailor Jerry’s shirt was in Japanese, as was the tattoo on his right forearm. “A Kazuo Oguri,” he told Jack proudly. So Jerry Swallow had come all the way from New Glasgow, Nova Scotia—not to mention that he’d made over a hundred phone calls.

“Old-timers keep in touch, Jackie.”

Jack thanked him for coming such a long way. “Life is a long way, young Mr. Burns,” Sailor Jerry said. “Nova Scotia isn’t all that far.”

Later in the evening, when Jack thought he’d introduced himself to everyone—the boarders’ choir keeping him company like his not-quite-virgin guards—he spotted a recognizable presence at the far end of the gym. Bob Dylan’s “Rainy Day Women # 12 & 35” was booming from the CD player when Jack edged his way toward the shy, stoned figure weaving to the music under the basketball net. His dreamy countenance, the gray wisp of whiskers on his chin—as if, even in his late forties or early fifties, his beard still hadn’t begun to grow—and something self-deprecating in his eyes, which were perpetually downcast, all reminded Jack of someone whose confidence in his own meager talent had never been high. (Not now, and not when he’d been Tattoo Theo’s young apprentice on the Zeedijk.)

“Not another broken heart,” Alice had told Robbie de Wit, when she’d said good-bye. “I’ve had enough of hearts, torn in two or otherwise.” Hence Robbie had settled for Alice’s signature on his right upper arm—the slightly faded Daughter Alice that Robbie revealed as Jack approached him.

“Still listening to der Zimmerman, Jackie?” Robbie said.

Bob’s refrain wailed around them.

But I would not feel so all alone,

Everybody must get stoned.

“Still listening to den Zimmerman, Robbie.”

“I’m really not in the same league with these guys,” Robbie de Wit told Jack, gesturing unsteadily toward the rest of the gym. “It didn’t work out for me in Amsterdam.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Jack told him.

“I’m in Rotterdam now. Got my own shop, but I’m still an apprentice—if you know what I mean. I’m doing okay,” he said, his head bobbing. The receding hairline had fooled Jack at first—as had the egg-shaped forehead and the deep crow’s-feet at the corners of Robbie’s pale, watery eyes.

“What happened in Amsterdam, Robbie? What happened to Mom? What made her leave?”

“Oh, Jackie—don’t go there. Let dying dogs die.” (Robbie meant “Let sleeping dogs lie,” but Jack understood him.)

“I remember the night she was a prostitute. At least she acted like one,” Jack said to him. “Saskia and Els looked after me. You brought Mom a little something to smoke, I think.”

“Don’t, Jackie,” Robbie said. “Let it go.”

“My dad didn’t go to Australia, did he?” Jack asked Robbie de Wit. “He was in Amsterdam the whole time, wasn’t he?”

“Your father had a following, Jackie. Your mom couldn’t help herself.”

“Help herself how?” Jack asked.

Robbie tripped forward, almost falling; he offered Jack the faded Daughter Alice on his upper right arm as if he were daring Jack to punch him on his mom’s tattoo. “I won’t betray her, Jack,” Robbie said. “Don’t ask me.”

“I apologize, Robbie.” Jack was ashamed of himself for being even a little aggressive with him.

Robbie put his hand on the back of Jack’s neck; bowing, off-balance, he touched his egg-shaped forehead to the tip of Jack’s nose. “Your mom loved you, Jackie. She just didn’t love anybody, not even you, like she loved William.”

The Old Girls, not counting Leslie Oastler, had gone home. The single ones—especially those Old Girls who were divorced, and proud of it—took some of the tattoo artists with them. Mr. Ramsey, bidding Jack his usual adieu—“Jack Burns!”—had taken a tattoo artist home with him, too. (Night-Shift Mike from Sailors’ Friend Tattoo in Norfolk, Virginia. Mike was indeed a friend of sailors!)

Even Miss Wong, at last in touch with the hurricane she was born in, danced up a storm—most memorably losing control of herself on the gym floor, jitterbugging with both Fronhofer brothers to “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again.” (Miss Wong went home with the better-looking brother.)

Remarkably, the Malcolms stayed late—Mrs. Malcolm being unusually cheered by the presence of Marvin “Mekong Delta” Jones from Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Marvin had lost both legs, and part of his nose, in the Vietnam War; he’d parked his wheelchair alongside Mrs. Malcolm’s and had entertained both her and Mr. Malcolm with his hilarious stories, perhaps apocryphal, of trying to get laid when he was wheelchair-bound and had half a nose. (“Not everyone is sympathetic,” one story began; he had Wheelchair Jane in stitches.)

Miss Wurtz, who went home at a proper hour—needless to say, The Wurtz went home alone—brought the house down by singing along with Bob. Her renditions of “All I Really Want to Do” and “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” were haunting. Flattop Tom told Jack there was nobody like her in Cleveland; North Dakota Dan said there was no one like Miss Wurtz in Bismarck, either. (How, Jack wondered, had Edmonton been so blessed?)

The Oastler mansion was a motel that night, the motorcycles stationed like sentinels on the lawn—some of them lurking close to the house, as if they were intruders seeking access through a window.

Lucky Pierre passed out on the living-room couch, where he was covered by so many of the bikers’ leathers that no one knew where he was in the morning—that is, until Joe Ink sat on him.

Flipper Volkmann and Wolverine Wally had to be separated—that old Michigan matter again. They put Flipper to bed in Jack’s former bedroom and made the Wolverine spend the night in the kitchen, where the less-good-looking of the Fronhofer brothers watched over him—the one who hadn’t gone home with Miss Wong and the hurricane she carried inside her.

Bad Bill Letters and Slick Eddie Esposito slept head-to-toe on the dining-room table, where their conversation about Night-Shift Mike, the sailors’ friend, was overheard throughout the house. “You’d have to have your eyes in your asshole, Bill, to not know Night-Shift was a fag,” Slick Eddie said.

“Eddie, if you had your eyes in your asshole, you’d be the first to know Night-Shift was a fag,” Bad Bill told him.

“You’re an asshole, Bill,” Slick Eddie said.

“Of course I’m an asshole!” Bad Bill replied. “Tell me somethin’ I don’t know.” But Slick Eddie was fast asleep; he was already snoring. “Sweet dreams, assholes!” Bad Bill cried, as if he were addressing everyone in the house.

“Sweet dreams, assholes!” Badger Schultz and his wife, Little Chicken Wing, called from the laundry room, where they were sleeping on the floor on an antique quilt.

“Great party, huh?” Jack whispered to the Skretkowicz sister he was sleeping with in Emma’s bed.

“Yeah, your mom woulda loved it!” Ms. Skretkowicz said. She was, alas, the one who’d been married to Flattop Tom. She also had a fabulous octopus tattooed on her ass; it completely covered both cheeks. “Flattop Tom’s work,” she admitted a little sadly. “Not to take nothin’ away from the octopus.”

Down the hall, Leslie was in bed with the other Skretkowicz sister. “She was a real sweetie,” Mrs. Oastler would tell Jack later. It was no surprise to Leslie that the other Skretkowicz sister had never been married—not to Flattop Tom or to anybody else. (Her biting Jack’s earlobe had been insincere.)

Jack was awake for a long time, not only because of the tender ministrations of the former Mrs. Flattop Tom. Emma used to say that Jack’s more than occasional sleeplessness was the plight of a nondrinker in a world of drinkers. (Jack doubted this.) It is fair to say that what the heterosexual Skretkowicz sister could do with the octopus on her ass would keep anyone awake for a long time, but Jack had more on his mind than that interesting octopus.

He regretted, again, his bad behavior with Robbie de Wit, who had come all the way from Rotterdam out of his love for Alice. Understandably, Robbie would never betray her—to use his word for it. If Jack wanted to know those things his mom had kept from him, or how she’d distorted his dad’s story in her telling of the tale, Jack needed to do his own homework—to make his own discoveries.

Jack needed to take that trip he’d threatened to take when his mother was still alive. Not to find William, as Miss Wurtz had urged him—at least not yet. Not that trip, but the trip Jack had taken with his mom when he was four.

Allegedly, when Jack was three, his capacity for consecutive memory was comparable to that of a nine-year-old. At four, his retention of detail and understanding of linear time were equal to an eleven-year-old’s—or so he’d been told. But what if that wasn’t true? What if he’d actually been a normal little boy? A four-year-old whose memory was as easy to manipulate as that of any four-year-old, a four-year-old like any other, whose retention of detail and understanding of linear time were completely unreliable.

That was why Jack was wide awake. He suddenly knew it was a joke for him to even imagine he could remember what had happened to him in those North Sea ports when he was four, almost thirty years ago! That was the trip Jack needed to take—alone, or certainly not with Leslie Oastler. It was not only a trip he’d already taken; it was possibly a trip he’d largely imagined, or it had been under his mother’s management and she’d imagined it for him.

It was not the time to look for his father; it was the time to discover if William was worth looking for.

They’d gone to Copenhagen first. His mother hadn’t manipulated that; at least Jack knew where their trip had started, and where he would soon be returning. “Copenhagen,” he said aloud—not meaning to. As unlikely as this may seem, Jack had forgotten about the Skretkowicz sister, whose strong thigh gripped his waist.

She’d kicked the covers off; maybe the word Copenhagen had triggered something, because her hips were moving. Long-distance motorcyclists have a certain authority in their hips—in the case of Jack’s Skretkowicz sister, even in her sleep. A green, somewhat startled-looking sea horse was tattooed on her forearm, which was flung across Jack’s chest. The sea horse stared unblinkingly into the flickering light from the weather channel on Emma’s small TV, which was on mute. The Skretkowicz sisters had a long ride ahead of them in the morning; the former Mrs. Flattop Tom had wanted to know the forecast for Ohio.

There was a storm story on the weather channel. Palm trees were snapped in half, docks had been swept away in high seas, a small boat was smashed on some rocks, breakers were pounding—all without a sound. The blue-green light from the television illuminated the tattoo on Ms. Skretkowicz’s hip; the light threw into relief the barbed dorsal spines near the base of a stingray’s whiplike tail.

Yes, Jack observed, there was a stingray tattooed on his Skretkowicz sister’s undulating hip. The tentacles of the octopus (on her ass) appeared to be reaching for the ray, as if the tattoo artist’s body were a map of the ocean’s floor.

Jack had to arch his back to reach for the remote, which he still couldn’t quite reach; it was not the response to her hips that his biker friend had expected. “Don’t go,” she whispered hoarsely, still half asleep. “Where are you going?”

“Copenhagen,” Jack repeated.

“Is it raining there?” she asked him groggily.

It would be April before he could get there, Jack was thinking; there was a good chance it would be raining. “Probably,” he answered.

“Don’t go,” she whispered again, as if she were falling back to sleep—or at least she wanted to.

“I have to go,” he told her.

“Who’s in Copenhagen?” his Skretkowicz sister asked. Jack could tell she was wide awake now. “What’s her name?” she said, her biker’s thigh gripping him tighter.

It was a he, not a she, who primarily interested Jack. Since Jack didn’t know his name, it would be hard to find him. But there could be little doubt who Jack was thinking of—the littlest soldier who saved him. Not to diminish the importance of Ladies’ Man Madsen; it’s just that Lars would be easier to find. At least Jack knew his name.

27. The Commandant’s Daughter; Her Little Brother

Jack slipped away from Toronto without telling Miss Wurtz his plans; he never even said good-bye. He was afraid that Caroline would be disappointed in his decision not to go looking for his father straightaway.

He took only his winter clothes with him; Jack thought they’d be suitable for April in the North Sea. His Toronto clothes, Mrs. Oastler called them. Leslie had helped him pack. After all, she’d shopped for Jack’s clothes—she’d even paid for most of them, during the winter Alice was dying—and Mrs. Oastler had her own opinions regarding how he should dress in those European ports of call.

“I hope you know, Jack—you don’t wear the same clothes to a tattoo parlor that you would wear in a church, and vice versa.”

He left Leslie with the responsibility of sending his screenplay of The Slush-Pile Reader to Bob Bookman at C.A.A. in Beverly Hills. In the long Canadian winter, Leslie had become Jack’s partner in the project; a couple of times, he’d come close to telling her that Emma had left him more than her notes for a screenplay. But that wouldn’t have been faithful to what Emma had wanted.

In the months he’d spent with his mom in Toronto, Jack’s mail had been forwarded from California. Like her late daughter, Mrs. Oastler invariably read Jack’s mail before giving it to him. She didn’t give all his mail to him, either; she was more censorial than Emma. The fan mail from female admirers was not worthy of Jack’s interest, Mrs. Oastler said. She refused to show him the photographs of his she-male tormentors, too.

It must have been February when Jack asked Leslie: “Didn’t I get any Christmas cards this year?”

“Yeah, you got a ton of Christmas cards,” Mrs. Oastler answered. “I threw them away.”

“You don’t like Christmas cards, Leslie?”

“Who needs them, Jack? You’re a busy guy.”

Somehow the letter from Michele Maher escaped the censor in Mrs. Oastler and made it into Jack’s hands, although it was a month or more after Leslie had first read Michele’s letter. “This one’s interesting,” Mrs. Oastler said. “Some doctor in Massachusetts with the name of Emma’s character.”

Jack must have looked stricken, or overeager to see the letter, because Leslie didn’t immediately hand it over. “Someone you know?” she asked him.

“Someone I knew,” he corrected her, holding out his hand. Mrs. Oastler looked the letter over—more carefully than she had the first time. “Emma knew that I knew her,” Jack explained. “Emma knew she was using a real person’s name.”

“Sort of an inside joke—is that what you’re saying, Jack?” She still wouldn’t give him the letter.

“Sort of,” he said.

“Would you like me to read it to you?” Leslie asked. Jack was still holding out his hand. “ ‘Dear Jack—’ ” Mrs. Oastler began, promptly interrupting herself. “Well, even your fans address you as ‘Jack’—you can see why I never guessed that she actually knew you.”

“Perfectly understandable,” Jack said, his voice remaining calm.

“Dr. Maher—she’s a dermatologist, of all things—goes on,” Leslie continued. “ ‘I know you were close to Emma Oastler, and I’ve read that you’re adapting her novel, The Slush-Pile Reader, as a film. Good luck with the screenplay, and your other projects. That novel is one of my favorites, not only because of the main character’s name. With my best wishes, and congratulations on your considerable success as an actor.’ Well, that’s it,” Mrs. Oastler said with a sigh. “It’s a typed letter—probably someone else typed it. She just signed her name, ‘Michele.’ It’s her office letterhead—some sort of doctors’ office building at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts. On second thought, it’s not that interesting a letter; there’s nothing personal in it, really. No one reading this would dream that she ever knew you.”

Leslie held the letter at arm’s length in her hand—not quite as if it were dirty laundry, but something potentially worse, something she sensed Jack wanted. “May I see the letter, please?” he asked her.

“It’s not the sort of letter one has to answer, Jack.”

“Give me the fucking letter, Leslie!”

“I guess it wasn’t a funny inside joke—Emma using Michele Maher’s name,” Mrs. Oastler said. She made him reach and take the letter from her hand.

The stationery was off-white, almost cream-colored—high quality. The sky-blue letterhead was printed in a large, clear font—Letter Gothic. Nothing personal about it, as Leslie had observed. “With my best wishes” didn’t exactly convey a lot of warmth or affection.

“Now that I think of it, it’s more of a note than a letter,” Mrs. Oastler was saying, while Jack searched Michele’s scrawled, almost illegible signature for some clue of her true feelings for him. “Personally, I don’t like to touch anything a dermatologist has touched,” Leslie went on. “But her letter’s been around here so long—you don’t suppose it could still be contaminated, do you?”

“No, I don’t suppose so,” Jack said.

That letter was coming to the North Sea with him; Jack would read it every day. He believed he would keep that distant, uncommitted, even loveless letter forever—knowing that it might be the only contact he would ever have with Michele Maher.

Jack couldn’t get a direct flight to Copenhagen. He had an early-morning KLM connection out of Amsterdam, following an early-evening departure from Toronto. When it was time for him to go to the airport, Mrs. Oastler was taking a bath. Jack thought he might leave her a note on the kitchen table, but Leslie had other ideas.

“Don’t you dare slip away without kissing me good-bye, Jack!” he heard her call from her bath. She always left the door to her bathroom open—usually the door to her bedroom, too.

They’d been alone together in the house for more than a week, after the bikers had left. But there’d been no nighttime visits, not a single trip down the hall. Not only had there been no penis-holding; there’d been no nakedness or near-nakedness in each other’s company, either. Maybe Alice had wanted Leslie and Jack to sleep together a little too much. Despite the spell of attraction that existed between them, Jack believed that he and Mrs. Oastler were still resisting his mother; perhaps, he thought, the Skretkowicz sisters had broken the spell.

Anyway, a good-bye kiss was clearly in order. Jack dutifully traipsed upstairs. He tried not to notice the black bikini-cut underwear tossed on Mrs. Oastler’s unmade bed. In the bathtub, Leslie’s watchful, feral face was all that was visible above the suds of bubble bath. Under the circumstances, Jack imagined, this might turn out to be a fairly innocent good-bye kiss.

“You’re not getting away from me, Jack,” Mrs. Oastler said. “Emma and Alice have left me. You’re not going to leave me, too, are you?”

“No, I won’t leave you,” he answered as neutrally as possible. She puckered up her small mouth and closed her dark eyes.

Jack knelt beside the bathtub and kissed her very lightly on the lips. Her eyes snapped open, her tongue slipping into his mouth. Leslie grabbed his wrist with her soapy hand and pulled his hand into the bathwater, soaking the sleeve of his shirt. If Jack had to guess where his fingers touched her underwater, he would say he made contact with Mrs. Oastler’s Rose of Jericho before he could pull his hand away.

The kiss lingered a little longer. After all they’d been through, Jack didn’t want to hurt her feelings. He tried not to let Leslie sense his impatience with her, but he was irritated that he would have to change his shirt.

Mrs. Oastler had never had the greatest esteem for Jack as an actor; probably because she’d known him as a child, she could always read his face. “Come on, Jack. I may not be Michele Maher, but it wasn’t that bad a kiss, was it?”

“I have to change my shirt,” Jack said, hoping she wouldn’t notice his erection. Keeping his back turned to her, as he went out the open bathroom door, he added: “No, it wasn’t bad at all.”

“Just remember!” Leslie called after him. “It was what your mom wanted!”

Jack Burns carried that thought to Copenhagen; it felt heavier than his suitcase of winter clothes. He checked into the Hotel D’Angleterre—this time not the chambermaids’ quarters but a room overlooking the statue in the square. Both the statue and the arch that stood over it were smaller than he remembered them, but Nyhavn was familiar—the boats slapping on the choppy water of the gray canal, the wind blowing off the Baltic. As for what he’d told his Skretkowicz sister, Jack had guessed right: it was raining.

When he unpacked, he found the photos of his mother’s tattooed breast. Mrs. Oastler had carefully placed them on top of his clothes; she’d kept two for herself and had given him two, which seemed fair. Jack was happy to have them—not only for the purpose of verification. His mom had lied to him about so many things; maybe her Until I find you wasn’t a Tattoo Ole, although Jack was pretty sure it was.

The tattoo parlor at Nyhavn 17 was still called Tattoo Ole. Some of the flash on the walls was Ole’s, and the little shop still smelled of smoke and apples, alcohol and witch hazel; some of the pigments had special odors, too, although Jack couldn’t identify them.

Bimbo was the man in charge; he’d come in 1975 and had trained with Tattoo Ole. Bimbo was short and powerfully built; he wore a navy watch cap. His flash was a lot like Ole’s. A maritime man—an old-timer, Sailor Jerry would have said. Like Ole, Bimbo would never have called himself a tattoo artist. He was a tattooist or a tattooer of the old school, a man after Daughter Alice’s heart.

Bimbo was working on a broken heart when Jack walked in. Nothing really changes, Jack was thinking. Bimbo didn’t look up from his tattoo-in-progress. “Jack Burns,” he said, as if he’d been expecting him; it wasn’t the enthusiastic way Mr. Ramsey said Jack’s name, but it wasn’t unfriendly, either. “When I heard your mom died, I kind of figured you’d be coming,” Bimbo said.

The boy getting the broken heart looked frightened. On his reddened chest, you could see his actual heart beating. The zigzag crack across his tattooed heart was horizontal; the wounded organ lay on a single rose, a real beauty. It was a very good tattoo. There was a banner unfurled across the bottom half of the heart—just a banner with no name on it. If the boy was smart, he would wait and add the name when he met someone who could heal him.

“Why did you think I’d be coming?” Jack asked Bimbo.

“Ole always said you’d be coming, with lots of questions,” Bimbo explained. “Ole said you were pumped full of more misinformation than most magazines and newspapers, and that’s saying something.” Jack was beginning to guess that this was true. “Ole said, ‘If that kid turns out to be crazy, I won’t be surprised!’ But you look like you turned out okay.”

“I guess you didn’t know my mother,” Jack said.

“I never met the lady—that’s true,” Bimbo answered, choosing his words very carefully.

“Or my dad?” Jack asked.

“Everybody loved your dad, but I never met him, either.”

That everybody loved his father came as something of a surprise to Jack. “I don’t mean that nobody loved your mom,” Bimbo added. “She just did some things that were hard to love.”

“What things?” Jack asked him.

Bimbo exhaled softly—so did the boy getting the broken-heart tattoo. The boy’s lips were dry and parted; he was gritting his teeth. “Well, you should talk to someone who really knew her,” Bimbo told Jack. “I just know what I heard.”

“Ole had another apprentice—at the same time my mom worked here,” Jack said.

“Sure—I know him,” Bimbo said.

“ ‘Ladies’ Man,’ Ole called him. We also called him ‘Ladies’ Man Lars’ or ‘Ladies’ Man Madsen,’ ” Jack said.

“You mean the Fish Man,” Bimbo corrected him. “He’s no Ladies’ Man anymore. He’s in the fish business—not that there’s anything wrong with that.”

Jack remembered that the Madsen family’s fish business was not an enterprise the Ladies’ Man longed to join. Jack recalled how Lars had rinsed his hair with fresh-squeezed lemon juice.

Kirsten had been the tattoo on Ladies’ Man Madsen’s left ankle, the one entwined with hearts and thorns; in Jack’s cover-up, he’d left Lars’s left ankle with a confused bouquet. (It looked as if many small animals had been butchered, their hearts scattered in an unruly garden—a shrub of body parts.)

“So Lars went back to the fish business?” Jack asked.

“I wouldn’t have let him tattoo me,” Bimbo said. “Not even the shading.”

“My mom tattooed him,” Jack told Bimbo. A blushing-red heart, as Jack recalled; where the heart was torn in two, the jagged edges of the tear left a bare band of skin, wide enough for a name. There’d been some dispute about it, but Jack’s mom had given Lars her signature on the white skin between the pieces of his torn heart—her very own Daughter Alice.

Jack began to describe the tattoo to Bimbo, but Bimbo cut him off. “I know the tattoo,” the old maritimer said. “I covered up the Daughter Alice part.”

So what were the things Alice did that were hard to love? Clearly Fish Man Madsen knew something about them; it seemed that the Ladies’ Man had stopped loving Alice for some pretty good reason.

Bimbo said, “Tattoo Ole told me, ‘If Jack comes back, tell him not to be too angry.’ ”

Jack thanked Bimbo for telling him this; Bimbo was also nice enough to interrupt his tattoo-in-progress to draw Jack a little map. Where they were on Nyhavn wasn’t far from the Fiskehuset Højbro—the fish shop where Lars Madsen worked, at Højbro Plads 19. There was a statue of Bishop Absalon in the square, which was close to the Christiansborg Slot—the castle now occupied by the Danish Parliament. (Bishop Absalon was the founder of Copenhagen.) Jack could actually see the old castle from the fish market, Bimbo told him. According to Bimbo, the area was quite a popular meeting place nowadays—cafés and restaurants all around.

Jack almost forgot to show Bimbo the photographs, but he remembered as he was leaving. “Have a look at these,” Jack said, handing Bimbo the two photos. “Does the tattoo look familiar?”

“I would know Tattoo Ole’s work anywhere,” Bimbo said, handing the photos back. “Ole told me he tattooed your mom.” That was all the verification Jack needed.

Almost everything about the little shop seemed unchanged; even the radio was playing, if not the same radio. But that wasn’t the way Bimbo saw things. As Jack was reaching for the door, Bimbo said: “It’s all different now. In the late sixties and early seventies, you could recognize everyone’s work. Your work was a kind of a signature. But not anymore; there are too many scratchers.” Jack nodded. (He’d heard his mom say this—all the maritime tattooers said it.) “Twenty years ago,” Bimbo said, “we had two ships a day in here. Now there’s one a day,” he said, as if that defined absolutely everything that was different.

“Thank you again,” Jack told him.

It was a wet, windy afternoon. The restaurants on Nyhavn were already cooking. Jack could still distinguish the smells: the rabbit, the leg of deer, the wild duck, the roasted turbot, the grilled salmon, even the delicate veal. He could smell the stewed fruit in the sauces for the game, and those strong Danish cheeses. But he couldn’t identify the restaurant where Ole and the Ladies’ Man had taken him and his mom for their farewell dinner in Copenhagen. There’d been an open fireplace, and Jack thought he’d had the rabbit.

A place called Cap Horn at Nyhavn 21 looked vaguely familiar, but Jack didn’t go inside. He wasn’t hungry, and he couldn’t wait to find Fish Man Madsen. Like Bimbo—even more than Bimbo, Jack imagined—the Ladies’ Man was sure to be expecting him. And if Lars Madsen had covered up the Daughter Alice on his broken heart, he knew something Jack didn’t know, and it must have hurt him.

Ladies’ Man Madsen was still blond and blue-eyed; he had the same gap-toothed smile and busted nose, too. Jack was happy to see that Lars had lost the pathetic facial hair and had put on a little weight. The Fish Man was pushing fifty, but he looked younger. It seemed that the fish business had agreed with him, despite his earlier apprehensions—as if Alice’s rejection had served Lars better than he’d expected, and his failure in the tattoo world had somehow preserved his innocence.

The Ladies’ Man was married now; he and his wife had three kids. “You remember Elise?” he asked Jack, sheepishly.

“I remember covering up her name,” Jack said.

Elise was the name he’d covered up on Lars’s right ankle; she had formerly been attached to a chain-link fence, which Jack had mangled with his signature sprig of holly. (The result had called to mind a destroyed Christmas decoration—“anti-Christmas propaganda,” Ole had called it.)

“Well, she came back, Jack,” Ladies’ Man Madsen said, smiling. “You couldn’t cover Elise up for good.”

Although the rain had stopped, it was still too damp and windy to sit outside at the sidewalk tables, but the view across the wet cobblestones—the gray castle, now the Parliament building—was just fine from the fish shop.

“Sometimes you were my babysitter,” Jack began.

“I thought she was working late, Jack. I didn’t know she was seeing the kid—I swear.”

“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 fiancée—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 fiancée 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 Ewerlöf. 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 Ewerlöf 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 Ewerlöf 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.) Ewerlöf 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 Ewerlöf’s Christmas favorites, Mads Lindhardt told Jack, were a few of William’s favorites, too. Bach’s Weihnachtsoratorium and his Kanonische Veränderungen über das Weihnachtslied, which Jack already knew his dad liked to play; also Messiaen’s La nativité 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 Ewerlöf 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 Torén, the young Swedish organist, was (Jack was sure) not exactly as it seemed.

Torén 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 Torén had much enjoyed having William Burns as an apprentice; William was older than Torén 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 Torén 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 Mälaren with your father’s mistress—you were on display, Jack.”

“What?” Jack said. Surely Torén couldn’t have meant Torsten Lindberg’s wife! (Agneta Nilsson, as Jack remembered her—because she preferred to use her maiden name.)

Torvald Torén 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 Torén 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 Mälaren 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.”)

What 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.

But could Jack believe anything his mother had told him? At least the Doc Forest was as Jack had remembered it. (What boy wouldn’t recall a clipper ship endangered by a sea serpent?) As for the eyeball on the left cheek of Lindberg’s ass, Jack had missed its gay implications the first time—not to mention the pair of pursed lips on the right cheek, like wet lipstick. The fish on Lindberg’s forearm was almost exactly as Jack had remembered it—nothing gay intended by it, clearly.

As for Alice’s Rose of Jericho, Jack had never seen the finished tattoo—he’d only heard it discussed as a work-in-progress. It was not a Rose of Jericho, of course. What would a gay man want with a vagina hidden in a rose? There was a rose, all right, but the penis was not what Jack would describe as hidden in the petals of that unruly flower. It was a penis practically bursting out of a rose!

“What did you call it?” Torsten Lindberg asked.

Jack had no idea what to call it—a Penis of Jericho, perhaps, but he thought it best to say nothing.

There was one other, lesser error in Jack’s so-called memory of Torsten Lindberg’s tattoos. Tattoo Ole’s naked lady—she with her oddly upturned eyebrow of pubic hair. Well, she was one of Ole’s naked ladies—Jack could see that—but this naked lady had a penis, too.

“I’ve seen all your movies—I can’t tell you how many times!” Torsten Lindberg told Jack. “I won’t embarrass you, Jack, by telling you what my friends are always saying about you. Let’s just say they love you as a she-male!”

At the Grand, Jack woke every morning to the ships’ horns—the commuter traffic from the archipelago. One such morning, he went to see Lake Mälaren. Like the Kastelsgraven, it wasn’t frozen—not in April—but it was possible to imagine where William might have stood to watch his son skating with his mistress with the bad heart, Agneta Nilsson.

As for Doc Forest’s tattoo shop—the atmosphere was friendly and familiar.

Jack had never seen a photograph of his father. Jack knew only that William was good-looking to women, but that was not the same thing as a physical description. Doc Forest was the first person who actually described Jack’s dad. “He had long hair, to his shoulders,” Doc said. “He moved like an athlete, but he looked like a rock star—only better dressed.”

Torvald Torén had already cast some doubt on the tattoo William was alleged to have gotten from Doc Forest—a piece by Pachelbel, Alice had said. (She’d suspected it might be something called Hexachordum Apollinis; she’d mentioned either an aria quarta or a toccata.)

“William played some Pachelbel, of course,” Torén had told Jack. “But I never saw your father’s tattoos.” Mads Lindhardt had told Jack the same thing, not about Pachelbel but about William’s tattoos.

Tattoo artists had seen The Music Man’s tattoos—and the women William had slept with, surely. But at least two organists who’d known him well, and had liked him, had never seen his tattoos. Strange that his father didn’t show them, Jack thought.

And since so much of what Alice had told Jack was bullshit, Jack was prepared—when he went to see Doc Forest—for the fact that his dad’s Pachelbel tattoo might be bullshit, too.

There was no bullshit about Doc. He was glad to see Jack again, he said; he’d seen all of Jack’s movies, including the ones in which Jack appeared half naked. Doc had been wondering when Jack was going to get a tattoo. It was an honor that Daughter Alice’s son had come to Doc Forest for a tattoo, Doc told Jack.

Jack explained that he’d not come to see Doc for a tattoo.

Doc had aged well; he was still small and strong, and his sandy hair had not yet gone gray. For a former sailor who’d acquired his first tattoo in Amsterdam from Tattoo Peter, Doc Forest looked terrific.

Doc would not say an ill word about Alice—those old-timers, the maritimers, stuck together—but he had also liked Jack’s dad. Doc had even gone to the Hedvig Eleonora to hear William play.

“I was wondering if you remember the tattoo you gave him, or perhaps you gave him more than one,” Jack said. “A piece of music by Pachelbel, maybe.”

“No music, just words,” Doc said. “They might have been words in a song, but not a hymn. Not church music—I can tell you that.”

“Do you remember the words?” Jack asked him.

Doc Forest’s tattoo shop was as neat and trim as Doc. Sailors had to be organized—the good ones, anyway. It didn’t take Doc long to find the stencil.

“Your dad was very particular about his tattoos,” Doc Forest said. “He wouldn’t let me write on his skin. He said he wanted to see my handwriting on a stencil first. He certainly was particular about the punctuation!”

Doc Forest’s cursive was uniform and clear. The tattoo artists Jack had known all had excellent handwriting. The stencil was a little dusty, but Jack had no trouble reading the words and the particular punctuation.

The commandant’s daughter; her little brother

“My first one of those,” Doc said, pointing to the semicolon.

“It’s not a song. It’s more like a story,” Jack told him.

“Well, your dad sure liked it. The tattoo, I mean,” Doc said.

“How do you know?” Jack asked.

“He cried and cried,” Doc Forest said.

With a tattoo, Jack remembered his mother saying, sometimes that’s how you knew when you got it right.

28. The Wrong Tattoo

A child’s memory is not only inaccurate—it’s not reliably linear, either. Jack not only “remembered” things that had never happened; he was also wrong about the order of events, including at least one thing that had actually taken place. When Jack and his mom had gone downstairs for dinner in the Hotel Bristol, it wasn’t their first night in Oslo—it was their last.

A young couple did come into the restaurant, just as Jack remembered. He’d thought it was the first time he saw how his mother looked when she encountered a couple in love. The young man was athletic-looking with long hair to his shoulders; he looked like a rock star, only he was better dressed. In fact, he looked exactly as Doc Forest had described William Burns—and his wife or girlfriend couldn’t take her eyes or her hands off him. (Jack even remembered the young woman’s breasts.)

Jack also recalled how he’d said to his mom that she should give the couple her sales pitch about getting a tattoo. “No,” she’d whispered, “not them. I can’t.”

Jack had boldly taken matters into his own small hands. He’d walked right up to that beautiful girl and said the lines he still said in his bed, to help him sleep. “Do you have a tattoo?”

Well, that young man was Jack’s father, of course—not that Jack knew it. Alice was offering William a last look at Jack before she and Jack left for Helsinki. (Jack didn’t know who the girl was; not yet.) No one—certainly not Alice, least of all William—had expected Jack to approach the young couple, not to mention speak to them.

What was the matter with the guy? Jack had wondered. The handsome, long-haired young man looked almost as if it pained him to see Jack; William had regarded Jack as if he’d never seen a child before. But whenever Jack had looked at him, William had looked away.

And there’d been a bitterness in William’s voice that made Jack look at him again—most notably when the young father had said to his son, “Maybe some other time.”

“Come with me, my little actor,” Alice had whispered in Jack’s ear, and Jack’s dad closed his eyes—William didn’t want to see his son go.

It was after he’d checked into the Bristol in April of 1998—Jack was eating dinner alone in that quiet, old restaurant—when he realized he’d actually seen his father in that gloomy room.

“Maybe some other time,” William had said; then Jack had reached for his mother’s hand, and she’d taken the boy away.

William would have other sightings of Jack—in Helsinki and in Amsterdam, no doubt—but this might have been Jack’s first and last look at his dad, and Jack had not known who William was!

But who was the young woman, and why had William brought her? Were they really in love? William must have known he was going to see his son; Jack’s father just hadn’t expected the boy to speak. William wasn’t prepared for that—neither was Alice. Obviously, Jack had surprised them both.

It unnerved Jack to think he’d correctly remembered the meeting, but that he’d been wrong about when it happened; this made Jack not trust the seeming chronology of things. If he’d met his own father—not knowing that William was his father—on Jack and his mom’s last night in Oslo instead of their first, when had his mother encountered Andreas Breivik? When had she offered Andreas a free tattoo? And when had Jack and Alice met the beautiful young girl with the speech impediment, Ingrid Moe?

Jack recognized the Oslo Cathedral when the taxi dropped him at the front entrance to the Bristol—the dome that greenish color of turned copper, the clock tower large and imposing. He decided he would go there in the morning and speak with the organist; that the organist would turn out to be Andreas Breivik was not the only surprise in store for Jack.

There was a new organ now—not the German-made Walcker, which Jack remembered had a hundred and two stops. (Even the organ that replaced the Walcker had been replaced.) The new one was special in its own way; Andreas Breivik told Jack all about it. If Breivik had been sixteen or seventeen when Alice seduced him—or gave him an invisible tattoo, as Alice might have put it—he was not a day over forty-five when he spoke with Jack in the Domkirke. But Andreas Breivik had made something of a maestro of himself, and his success had made him pompous.

His blond, blue-eyed good looks had not endured. A man with delicate features had to be careful. Breivik’s face was slightly puffy; perhaps he drank. He gave Jack a virtual lecture on the subject of the cathedral’s new organ, which had been completed only a month before Jack’s arrival in Oslo—by a Finn living in Norway. (Jack couldn’t have cared less about the organ, or the Finn.)

With a grandiose gesture to the green-and-gold instrument, which positively shimmered, Breivik said: “We have the funeral of King Olav the Fifth to thank for this. January 1991—I’ll never forget it. The old Jørgensen was such a disgrace. The Prime Minister himself insisted that money be raised for a new organ.”

“I see,” Jack said.

Andreas Breivik had studied choral music in Stuttgart; he’d furthered his organ studies in London. (This hardly mattered to Jack, but he nodded politely; Breivik’s education, not to mention his mastery of English, meant a great deal to Breivik.)

“I’ve seen your films, of course—very entertaining! But you don’t seem to have followed in your father’s musical footsteps, so to speak.”

“No—no musical footsteps,” Jack said. “I took after my mother, it seems.”

“Are you tattooed?” Breivik asked.

“No. Are you?”

“Good Lord, no!” Andreas Breivik said. “Your dad was a talented musician, a generous teacher, an engaging man. But his tattoos were his own business. We didn’t discuss them. I never saw them.”

“Mr. Breivik, please tell me what happened. I don’t understand what happened.”

Jack remembered the cleaning woman in the church—how horrified she’d been to see him and his mom. He recalled what little he’d understood of his mom’s seduction of Andreas Breivik, and how Ingrid Moe had come to her for a tattoo—how Ingrid had wanted a broken heart and Alice had given the girl a whole one. But why had Alice insisted on talking to Ingrid Moe in the first place, and what information about Jack’s father could either Ingrid or Andreas possibly have given Jack’s mom? His dad hadn’t run away; Alice hadn’t been trying to find William. What was there about William that Alice didn’t already know?

Andreas Breivik was less pompous in relating this story; he wasn’t proud of it, nor was it an easy story for him to tell. But the pattern, which Jack had failed to grasp till now, was really rather simple.

Everywhere Jack and his mom went, after Copenhagen, they arrived ahead of his dad. Alice not only expected William to follow them—she knew how much William wanted to see his son—but Alice also knew ahead of time where William would be inclined to travel next. You didn’t just choose a church and an organ, Breivik told Jack; these appointments took time to arrange. There was always an experienced organist with whom a relatively inexperienced organist wanted to study next, and the church where that mentor played had its own hierarchical way of choosing apprentices.

No organist wanted more than a few students, and only the most gifted students were chosen. With an organ, because of how many notes there were to play, sight reading was mandatory. Students with very narrow tastes, or those who disliked certain core composers, were generally discouraged; most younger students were irritating, because they liked to practice only loud or flashy music.

“You had to have a few irons in the fire,” Andreas Breivik said. He meant that you had to be making plans way ahead of yourself. Where was the next organist you wanted to study with? What church? Which organ? In this world, you were both an apprentice and a teacher; as an apprentice, you also needed to go where you’d have students. (Not too many, but enough to pay the rent.)

This was the way it worked: when William was still playing the organ at the Citadel Church in Denmark, he was already thinking about Sweden—about apprenticing himself to Torvald Torén, about playing the organ at the Hedvig Eleonora in Stockholm—and all the while he was in Stockholm, William was planning to come (eventually) to Oslo, where he could study with Rolf Karlsen and play the organ at the Domkirke.

What Alice did, starting in Copenhagen, was to find out which irons in the fire were the hottest—what city was the next in line for William. Jack and his mom would go there, and Alice would establish herself; she would set up shop and wait for William to arrive. Then, systematically, Alice would set out to destroy the relationships William valued most. First of all, those friends he might have made in the church—possibly even the organist who was his mentor. But Alice more often chose easier targets; in the case of Oslo, she chose William’s two best students, Andreas Breivik and Ingrid Moe.

Contrary to what Jack had believed for twenty-eight years, his dad hadn’t seduced Ingrid Moe. She was sixteen at the time, and engaged to be married to young Andreas Breivik. They’d been childhood sweethearts; they even played the same instruments, first the piano and then the organ. And William prized them as students—not only because they were talented and hardworking, but also because they were in love. (Having been in love with Karin Ringhof, William Burns had a high regard for young musicians in love.)

“Your father was more than a terrific organist and a great teacher,” Andreas Breivik told Jack. “In Oslo, the story of what had happened to him in Copenhagen preceded him. He was already a tragic figure.”

“So my mother seduced you?” Jack asked him.

His once delicate, now slightly puffy features hardened. “I had known only Ingrid,” Breivik said. “A young man who’s had only one girlfriend is vulnerable to an older woman—perhaps especially to a woman with a reputation. Your mother put it to me rather bluntly: she said—she was teasing me, of course—‘Andreas, you’re really just another kind of virgin, aren’t you?’ ”

“Where did you tattoo him?” Jack remembered asking his mom.

“Where he’ll never forget it,” she’d whispered to Jack, smiling at Andreas. (Possibly the sternum, Jack had imagined; that would explain why the young man had trembled at her touch.)

“Just keep it covered for a day,” Jack had said to Breivik, as the young organ student was leaving; it looked like it hurt him to walk. “It will feel like a sunburn,” Jack had told him. “Better put some moisturizer on it.”

But Andreas didn’t know anything. After the organ student had gone, Alice had sobbed, “If he’d known anything, he would have told me.”

She’d meant that Andreas Breivik didn’t know what irons William had in the fire; the boy had no idea where William was thinking of going next. But Ingrid Moe knew, and Alice wasted little time in letting Ingrid know that she’d slept with the girl’s fiancé. Ingrid had never felt so betrayed. Her speech impediment isolated her; she’d always been shy about meeting people. Ingrid couldn’t forgive Andreas for being unfaithful to her. It didn’t help that Alice wouldn’t leave the girl alone.

Jack remembered that Sunday when his mom took the shirt cardboard to church—how she’d stood in the center aisle at the end of the service, with the shirt cardboard saying INGRID MOE held to her chest. Jack had thought Rolf Karlsen must have been playing the organ that Sunday, because everyone said Karlsen was such a big deal and the organ sounded especially good.

But the organist that Sunday had been William Burns. It was the one time his father had played the organ for Jack, but—not unlike how the boy had met his dad in the restaurant at the Hotel Bristol—Jack didn’t know it, and neither did William.

“I’m sorry he hurt you,” Alice had said to Ingrid Moe, when the girl had come to the hotel for her broken-heart tattoo. But the he had been Andreas Breivik, who’d slept with Jack’s mother—not, as Jack had thought, his father, who had never slept with Ingrid Moe.

Jack remembered how Ingrid’s exquisite prettiness was marred by what an obvious strain it was for her to speak. Not that he’d understood her very well; for all these years, Jack had thought of her speech impediment as an agony connected with kissing. (When he’d imagined his father kissing the girl, Jack had felt ashamed.)

“I won’t do his name,” Alice had told Ingrid.

“I don’t want his name,” the girl had answered—clenching her teeth together when she talked, as if she were afraid or unable to show her tongue. She’d wanted just a heart, ripped in two.

Then Alice had given her a whole heart instead—a perfectly unbroken one, as Jack recalled.

“You didn’t give me what I wanted!” Ingrid Moe had blurted out.

“I gave you what you have, a perfect heart—a small one,” Alice had told her.

“I’m not telling you anything,” the girl had said.

She’d told Jack instead—“Sibelius,” she’d said. Not the composer but the name of a music college in Helsinki, where William’s next best students would come from. (New students were part of what Andreas Breivik meant by irons in the fire.)

“Ingrid quit the organ,” Andreas told Jack. “She went back to the piano, without much success. I stayed with the organ. I kept growing, as you have to,” he said, with no small amount of pride. “Ingrid’s marriage didn’t have much success, either.”

Jack didn’t like him; Breivik seemed smug, even a little cruel. “What about your marriage?” Jack asked him. “Or didn’t you get married?”

Andreas shrugged. “I became an organist,” he said, as if that were all that mattered. “I’m grateful to your mother, if you really want to know. She saved me from getting married at a time when I was far too young to be married, anyway. I would have had a time-consuming personal life, when what I needed was to be completely focused on my music. As for Ingrid, in all likelihood, she would have chosen a personal life over a career—whether she married me or someone else. And I don’t think her personal life would have worked out any better, or differently, if she’d been married to me. With Ingrid, things just wouldn’t have worked out—they just didn’t.”

Like some other successful people Jack had known, Andreas Breivik had all the answers. The more Breivik said, the more Jack wanted to talk with Ingrid Moe. “There’s one other thing,” Jack said. “I remember a cleaning woman in the church—an older woman, well-spoken, imperious—”

“That’s impossible,” Breivik said. “Cleaning women aren’t well-spoken. Are you telling me this one spoke English?”

“Yes, she did,” Jack replied. “Her English was quite good.”

“She couldn’t have been a cleaning woman,” Andreas said with irritation. “I don’t suppose you remember her name.”

“She had a mop—she leaned on it, she pointed with it, she waved it around,” Jack went on. “Her name was Else-Marie Lothe.”

Breivik laughed scornfully. “That was Ingrid’s mother! I’ll say she was imperious! You got that right. But Else-Marie wasn’t that well-spoken; her English was only okay.”

“Her last name was Lothe. She had a mop,” Jack repeated.

“She was divorced from Ingrid’s father. She’d remarried,” Andreas said. “She had a cane, not a mop. She broke her ankle getting off the streetcar right in front of the cathedral. She caught her shoe in the trolley tracks. The ankle never healed properly—hence the cane.”

“She had dry hands, like a cleaning woman,” Jack mentioned lamely.

“She was a potter—the artistic type. Potters have dry hands,” Breivik said.

Needless to say, Else-Marie Lothe had hated Alice; she’d ended up hating Andreas Breivik, too. (Jack could easily see how that could happen.)

Jack asked Breivik for Ingrid Moe’s married name and her address.

“It’s so unnecessary for you to see her,” Andreas said. “You won’t find her any easier to understand this time.” But, after some complaining, Breivik gave Jack her name and address.

Under the circumstances, it turned out that Andreas Breivik knew more about Ingrid Moe than Jack would have thought. Her name was Ingrid Amundsen now. “After her divorce,” Breivik said, “she moved into a third-floor apartment on Theresesgate—on the left side of the street, looking north. You can walk from there to the center of Oslo in twenty-five minutes.” Breivik said this with the dispassion of a man who had timed the aforementioned walk, more than once. “The blue tram line goes by,” Andreas continued, as slowly as if he were waiting for the tram. “Since the new Rikshospitalet was built, there are three different lines passing. The noise might have bothered Ingrid to begin with, but she probably doesn’t hear it any longer.”

Ingrid Amundsen was a piano teacher; she gave private lessons in her apartment.

“Theresesgate is quite a nice street,” Andreas said, closing his eyes, as if he could walk the street in his sleep—of course he had. “Down at the south end, toward Bislett Stadium, which is only a five-minute walk from Ingrid’s, there are a few cafés, a decent bookstore—even an antiquarian bookstore—and the usual 7-Eleven. Closer to Ingrid, on her side of the street, is a large grocery store called Rimi. There’s a nice vegetable store next to the Stensgate tram stop, too. It’s run by immigrants—Turkish, I think. You can buy some imported specialties—marinated olives, some cheeses. It’s all very modest, but nice.” Breivik’s voice trailed away.

“You’ve never been inside her apartment?” Jack asked him.

Breivik shook his head sadly. “It’s an old building, four stories, built around 1875. It’s a bit shabby, I suppose. Knowing Ingrid, she probably would have kept the original wooden floors. She would have done some of the renovating herself. I’m sure her children would have helped her.”

“How old are her children?” Jack asked.

“The daughter is the older one,” Breivik told Jack. “She’s living with a guy she met in university, but they don’t have children. She lives in an area called Sofienberg. It’s a very popular and hip place for young people to live. The daughter can get on a tram in Trondheimsveien and be at her mother’s in about twenty minutes; by bicycle, it would take her ten or fifteen. I imagine, if she had children, she’d want to move out of central Oslo—maybe Holmlia, an affordable area, where there are still almost as many Norwegians as there are immigrants.”

“And Ingrid has a son?” Jack asked.

“The boy is studying at the university in Bergen,” Andreas Breivik said. “He visits his mother only during vacations.”

Jack liked Breivik a little better after this conversation. Jack nearly told Andreas that he would come see him after he visited with Ingrid—and that he would describe the interior of her apartment to him so that the organist could imagine the interior part of Ingrid’s life as obsessively as he’d imagined the rest of it. But that would have been cruel. Andreas was probably unaware of what an investigation he’d made of his former girlfriend.

Ingrid Moe had been sixteen when Jack had covered the tattoo on her heart-side breast with a piece of gauze with Vaseline on it. He remembered that he’d had some difficulty getting the adhesive tape to stick to her skin, because she was still sweating from the pain.

“Have you done this before?” Ingrid had asked.

“Sure,” Jack had lied.

“No, you haven’t,” she’d said. “Not on a breast.”

When he’d held the gauze against her skin, Jack could feel the heat of her tattoo—her hot heart burning his hand through the bandage.

Like Andreas Breivik, Ingrid Amundsen would be about forty-five now.

“What a waste!” Andreas cried out suddenly, startling Jack. “She had such long fingers—perfect for playing the organ. The piano,” Breivik said contemptuously. “What a waste!”

Jack remembered her long arms and long fingers. He remembered her thick blond braid, too—how it hung down her perfectly straight back, reaching almost to the base of her spine. And her small breasts—especially the left one, which Jack had touched with the tattoo bandage.

When Ingrid Moe (now Amundsen) spoke, she curled back her lips and bared her clenched teeth; the muscles of her neck were tensed, thrusting her lower jaw forward, as if she were about to spit. It was tragic, he’d thought, that such a beautiful girl could be so instantly transformed—that the not-so-simple act of speaking could make her ugly.

Jack was a little afraid of seeing her again. “That girl is a heart-stopper,” his mother had said twenty-eight years before.

“You have your father’s eyes, his mouth,” Ingrid had whispered to Jack, but her speech impediment had made a mess of her whisper. (She’d said “mouth” in such a way that the mangled word had rhymed with “roof.”) And Jack had thought he would faint when she kissed him. When her lips opened, her teeth had clicked against his; he remembered wondering if her speech impediment was contagious.

Was there a problem with her tongue? Of course there might have been nothing the matter with Ingrid’s tongue. Jack had not asked Andreas Breivik about the source of Ingrid’s speech impediment; naturally, he had no intention of asking Ingrid.

When Jack called her, from the Bristol, he was afraid she wouldn’t see him. Why would she want to be reminded of what had happened? But it was stupid to try to deceive her, and Jack didn’t do a very good job of it. (“Some actor you are!” Emma would have told him.)

When Ingrid Amundsen answered the phone, Jack was completely flustered that she said something in Norwegian. Well, what else would the poor woman speak in Norway?

“Hello? I’m an American who finds himself in Oslo for an indefinite period of time!” Jack blurted out, as if there were worse things the matter with him than a speech impediment. “I want to keep up my piano lessons.”

“Jack Burns,” Ingrid said; the way she spoke, Jack could hardly recognize his own name. “When you speak the way I do,” she continued, “you listen very closely to other people’s voices. I would know your voice anywhere, Jack Burns. About the only thing I have in common with people who can talk normally is that I’ve seen all your movies.”

“Oh,” Jack said, as if he were four years old.

“And if you play the piano, Jack, you probably play better than I do. I doubt I can teach you anything.”

“I don’t play the piano,” he confessed. “My mother’s dead and I don’t know my father. I wanted to talk with you about him.”

Jack could hear her crying; it wasn’t pretty. She couldn’t even cry normally. “I’m glad your mother’s dead!” she said. “I think I’ll have a party! I would love to talk to you about your father, Jack. Please come talk with me, and we’ll have a little party.”

He remembered watching her walk away from him—down the long, carpeted hall of the Bristol. She’d been sixteen going on thirty, as he recalled. From behind, she didn’t look like a child; she’d walked away from him like a woman. And what a voice—that voice had always been sixteen going on forty-five.

Although it was raining, Jack stood for fifteen minutes outside her building on the Theresesgate—fortunately, under an umbrella. The taxi had brought him sooner than he’d expected. Ingrid had invited him at five in the afternoon, which was when her last piano student of the day would be leaving. Jack looked up from his watch and saw a boy about twelve or thirteen coming out of Ingrid’s building. He looked like a piano student, Jack thought—a little dreamy, a little delicate, a little like it wasn’t entirely his idea to be doing this.

“Excuse me,” Jack said to the boy. “Do you play the piano?” The kid was terrified; he looked as if he were sizing up which way to run. “Forgive me for being curious,” Jack said, hoping to sound reassuring. “I just thought you looked very musical. Anyway, if you are a piano player, keep doing it. Never stop! I can’t tell you how much I regret that I stopped.”

“Bugger off!” the boy said, walking backward away from him. To Jack’s surprise, the boy had an English accent. “You look like that creep Jack Burns. Just bugger off!”

Jack watched him run; the boy went in the direction of the Stensgate tram stop. Jack imagined that the piano student was about the age of Niels Ringhof when Niels had slept with Jack’s mother. He rang the buzzer for AMUNDSEN—no first name, no initial.

It was a third-floor walk-up, but even a snob like Andreas Breivik might have enjoyed the view. The kitchen and the two smaller bedrooms overlooked the Stensparken—a clean-looking park situated on a hill. At the south end of the park, Ingrid pointed out the Fagerborg Kirke—the church where she went every Sunday. On Sunday mornings, she told Jack, you could hear the church bells in the whole area.

“The organist at the Fagerborg Church isn’t in the same league as your father or Andreas Breivik,” Ingrid said, “but he’s more than good enough for a simple piano teacher like me.”

She’d learned to conceal her mouth with her long fingers when she spoke, or to always speak when her face was turned slightly away. The constant movement of her long arms, as if she were conducting music only she could hear, was very graceful; she was a head taller than Jack, even in her white athletic socks. (She made him take off his shoes at the door.)

Breivik had been right about the floors—she’d saved the original wood. Her son had helped her remove the old layers of lacquer. The kitchen was the best room in the apartment; it had been remodeled in the early nineties. “With cupboards and all the rest from IKEA—nothing fancy,” Ingrid said. It was a blue-and-white kitchen with a wooden workbench, and a kitchen table with three chairs around it; there was no dining room.

In the living room, which faced the street, there was an old fireplace, and the original stucco work was intact. The piano faced a wall of photographs—family pictures, for the most part. The biggest of the three bedrooms, which was Ingrid’s, also faced the street—not the park.

“I think the park is rather lonely at night,” she told Jack, “and besides, my children wanted views of the park from their bedrooms. There have been no difficult decisions in this apartment.” She had an interesting way of speaking—that is, in addition to her speech impediment.

The thick braid that had hung to her waist was gone; her hair was slightly shorter than shoulder-length now, but still blond with only hints of silver in it. She wore jeans, and what may have been her favorite among her son’s left-behind shirts—a man’s flannel shirt, untucked, like Miss Wurtz had once worn.

“I wore this for you, because it’s so American,” Ingrid said, plucking at the shirt with her long fingers. “I never dress up or wear any makeup in this apartment.” (Another not-difficult decision, Jack imagined.) “If I dressed up and wore makeup, it might make my pupils nervous.”

Jack said that he thought he’d met one of her pupils, and that he’d probably made him nervous—without meaning to. “An English boy, about twelve or thirteen?” Jack asked.

She nodded and smiled. Many of her students were from diplomats’ families; the parents wanted their children to be occupied with cultural things. “To keep them from being at loose ends,” Ingrid said. “Not a bad reason for playing the piano.”

Jack asked her if she would play for him, but she shook her head. The apartment wasn’t soundproofed, she explained. In the old building, her neighbors could hear the piano through the walls. She stopped playing after five in the afternoon, and the first of her students never came to the apartment before nine—more often ten—in the morning.

She and Jack sat in the kitchen, where Ingrid made some tea. Her cheeks were a little sunken in, but she was still beautiful; nothing of what had been baby-faced about her remained, and her long limbs and broad hips had always given her a womanly appearance. She was more handsome than pretty, befitting the mother of two grown children—the children’s photos were all over the apartment, not just on the wall behind the piano.

Jack had spotted a nice-looking man with the children, when the kids were younger; he was a sailor in some of the pictures, a skier in others. The children’s father, Ingrid’s ex-husband, Jack assumed; the man looked nice in the way Emma had once defined the word, meaning that he looked normal. Everything about Ingrid seemed normal, too—in the best sense of the word.

“I shouldn’t have said I was glad your mother was dead. That’s an awful thing to say about a mother to her son!” she exclaimed. “I’m sorry.”

“No, don’t be sorry,” Jack said. “I understand.”

“I hated her twice,” Ingrid told him. “For what she did to me, for seducing Andreas—of course I hated her for that. But when I had children of my own—when they were the age you were when I met you—I hated your mother all over again. I hated her for what she did to you. First I hated her as a woman, then as a mother. No woman can have children and continue to think of herself first, but she did. Alice wasn’t thinking of you—of you not having a father. She was thinking only about herself.”

Jack couldn’t say anything; everything Ingrid said sounded true. He couldn’t argue with her, but he also couldn’t agree with her—not with any authority. What did Jack Burns know about having children, and how having children changed you? He finally said: “You have a third reason to hate her—for your tattoo. I remember that it wasn’t what you asked for.”

Ingrid laughed; her laughter was more natural-sounding than the way she had cried on the telephone. She was moving gracefully around the kitchen—opening the refrigerator, putting food on the table. Jack realized that she’d prepared a cold supper—gravlaks with a mustard sauce, a potato salad with cucumber and dill, and slices of very dark rye bread.

“Well, it was just a tattoo—it wasn’t life-changing,” she was saying. “But I was proud of myself for telling her what I wanted. I knew she would hate the idea. ‘A whole heart, a perfectly unbroken one,’ I told her. ‘A heart my babies will one day love to touch,’ I said. ‘There’s not a thing the matter with my heart,’ I told your mother. ‘Maybe just make it a little smaller than average,’ I told her, ‘because my breast is a little smaller than average, too.’ I thought I was so brave to tell her this, when all the while my heart was broken. Andreas and your mother had broken it, but I wasn’t going to let her know that.”

“What did you say?” Jack asked her. It wasn’t the speech impediment; he was pretty sure he had understood her. “You didn’t ask for a broken heart, Ingrid?”

“Ask? Who would want one?” she exclaimed. “I asked your mother for the kind of heart I had before she fucked Andreas!” Ingrid was lighting a candle; she’d already arranged the place settings. She hadn’t turned a light on in the kitchen, preferring the dusk and the view of the Stensparken. “And the bitch gave me a broken heart!” Ingrid said. “As ugly a heart as one could imagine. Well, you put the bandage on it, Jack. You remember.”

“I remember it the other way around,” he told her. She was pouring herself a glass of wine. (Somehow she knew Jack didn’t drink; she told him later that she’d read about his being a teetotaler in an interview.) “I remember you asking for a heart ripped in two, and my mom gave you a good one.”

“She gave me a good one, all right,” Ingrid said. She stood next to Jack’s chair and unbuttoned the flannel shirt; she wasn’t wearing a bra. (He thought of Miss Wurtz in a shirt like that, without a bra—unbuttoning her shirt for his father.)

Even at dusk, in the dim candlelight, the tattoo of Ingrid Amundsen’s torn heart looked like a fresh wound—the jagged tear cut the heart diagonally in two. The blood-red edges of the tear were darker than the shading of the heart, and more sharply defined than the outline. Jack had not seen his mother do an uglier tattoo, but Ingrid seemed accepting of it.

“Well, guess what?” she said, buttoning her shirt back up. “My babies loved it! They loved to touch it! And I came to realize that your mother had given me the heart I had—not the heart I used to have. How much more cruel it would have been to walk around wearing the heart I used to have. Not that Alice was consciously doing me a favor.” She sat down at the table and served him. “Bon appétit, Jack,” she said. “When I see you in the movies, I think of how proud you must make your father—and how it must have hurt your mother to see you.”

“Hurt her? How?” he asked.

“Because she finally had to share you,” Ingrid said. “She never knew how to share you, Jack.”

The food was very good, and Jack was hungry; it seemed strange that there wasn’t any music, but music is never background music to musicians.

“Your father was very religious,” Ingrid told him when he was helping her do the dishes. “It’s hard to play church music in a church and not be, although I wasn’t. I became more religious when I went back to playing the piano—that is, not in a church.”

“How was he very religious?” Jack asked.

“When Andreas and your mother hurt me, William told me something. He said, ‘Find someone; devote yourself to that person; have a child, or children; praise God.’ Not that it ever worked out that way for me! But that’s what William told me; that’s what he believed in. Well, I got the children, and I praise God. That’s been good enough.”

“So you’re religious, too?” he asked.

“Yes—but not like your father, Jack.”

“Tell me more about the religious part,” he said.

“Take your mother, for example,” Ingrid said a little impatiently. “Your father forgave her. I didn’t.”

“He forgave her?”

“He fought back once, but it backfired. I don’t think he fought back again,” she told him. It was as if her speech impediment had almost gone away, or he’d forgotten it; she was such a healthy person, Jack was thinking.

She’d gone into the living room and had come back to the kitchen with a photograph. “A pretty young woman, don’t you think?” she asked, showing him the picture. Jack recognized the beautiful girl in the photograph; it was the woman William had brought with him to the restaurant in the Hotel Bristol.

“I asked her if she had a tattoo,” Jack said.

“That was what backfired,” Ingrid told him. “Your dad didn’t expect you would speak to them. He felt awful.”

“Who was the girl?” Jack asked.

“My sister, an actress,” Ingrid said. “She’s not a movie star, like you—but in Norway she’s a little bit famous, in the theater. I convinced your father to take her with him. I thought it would serve your mother right. Alice was always telling him how and when he could get a look at you. In Copenhagen, and in Stockholm, she even told him who to have with him!”

“Yes, I know,” Jack said.

“So I told him to take my sister, the actress, and I told my sister to fall all over him. I said to them both, ‘Make the bitch think you’re in love with each other. Make her think that all the lies she tells Jack have come true!’ But then you went up to them, and they didn’t know what to do. Naturally, your mom fell apart, and she took you away again. She was always taking you away.”

“Yes,” he said.

“Your father told me: ‘Maybe forgiveness would have worked better, Ingrid.’ But I told him that nothing would work with Alice. Nothing worked—did it, Jack?”

“No, nothing worked,” he answered.

“Your father said: ‘God wants us to forgive each other, Ingrid.’ That’s all I know about the religious part, Jack.”

It was dark outside—the lonely time of night in the Stensparken—and the candle on the kitchen table was the only light in the darkening apartment. “Look how dark it is, Jack Burns,” Ingrid whispered, bending down to touch his ear with her clenched teeth. “You’re still a little boy to me. I can’t let you go home in the dark.”

Even with her speech impediment, she made it sound as if this were another not-difficult decision in her fabulous apartment, where there’d been no difficult decisions—not ever.

Kissing Ingrid Amundsen was almost normal; there was an unnatural sound she made when she swallowed, when she was kissing him, but it wasn’t unpleasant. Jack held his mom’s ripped-heart tattoo on Ingrid’s small left breast—exactly where her babies had been delighted to touch her.

Ingrid had no breasts to speak of, and the blue veins in her forearms stood out against the gold of her skin—just as he’d remembered. Another blue vein, which began at her throat, ran down between her small breasts; that vein seemed to have a pulse in it, as if an animal lived under her skin. Maybe the animal affected her speech. At least he’d remembered her veins correctly.

“I used to think about which of us was the more damaged, but we’re all right, aren’t we?” Ingrid asked him; her poor voice sounded awful at that moment.

“Yes, I think so,” Jack said, but he didn’t really feel that he was all right—and he couldn’t tell about Ingrid. She had the aura of an accepted sadness about her. Jack hated to think of her meeting people for the first time, and what that did to her. He was even angry at her son, who’d gone off to the university in Bergen. Couldn’t the kid have stayed in Oslo and seen more of his mother?

Yet Ingrid’s life, her seeming wholeness, impressed Jack as more likable than whatever life Andreas Breivik was living. Breivik’s opinion—namely, that Ingrid had not had much success at anything—struck Jack as arrogant and wrong. But Andreas had known her better than Jack did. She was such a beautiful yet flawed woman; it hadn’t been hard for Jack’s mom to make the boy believe that Ingrid and William had been lovers. (Who wouldn’t have been her lover?)

“It couldn’t have been as bad for your father anywhere as it was in Copenhagen,” Ingrid told Jack, “but I don’t think that the problems with your mother ever got better. Not in Helsinki, anyway. Alice was perfectly awful to him there. But she didn’t achieve her desired effect. I think your mom started running out of steam in Helsinki, Jack.” (That had always been Jack’s impression.)

“What happened in Helsinki?” he asked her.

“I don’t know everything, Jack. I just know that Alice tried to break up a lesbian couple, but she couldn’t manage it. They both slept with her—and had a good time, or not—but they went right on being a couple!”

“Who were they?” Jack asked.

“Music students—your dad’s two best, like Andreas and me. Only one of them was an organist; the other one was a cellist.”

“Ritva and Hannele were gay?” Jack asked.

“Their names sound familiar,” Ingrid said. “The point is, Jack—your mother, once again, didn’t get what she wanted. But neither did your father.”

“You stayed in touch with him?” Jack asked.

“Till he left for Amsterdam,” Ingrid told him. “Whatever happened there, he didn’t write me about it. I lost touch with him when he left Helsinki.”

The kissing had become more interesting; it was principally her speech that was damaged. There was something detectably but indefinably strange about her mouth—if not actual damage, a kind of involuntary tremor that felt like damage. Jack didn’t know what it was, but it was very arousing.

It seemed the wrong time to ask her, but the thought had occurred to Jack—when she implied she’d had some limited correspondence with his father, if only when William was in Finland. Jack just had to ask her: “Was there anything romantic between you and my dad, Ingrid?”

“What a thing to ask me—you naughty boy!” she said, laughing. “He was a lovely man, but he wasn’t my type. For one thing, he was too short.”

“Shorter than I am?” Jack asked.

“A little shorter, maybe—not much. Of course I was never with him when I was lying down!” she added, laughing again. Ingrid grabbed Jack’s penis, which in his experience implied an impatience with the particular conversation—whatever it was.

“So I’m not your type, either?” he asked.

She kept laughing; it was the most natural sound she was capable of making. (Except, perhaps, on the piano.) “I have other reasons for wanting to sleep with you, Jack,” was all she told him.

“What other reasons, Ingrid?”

“When you’ve made love to me again and again, I’ll tell you,” she said. “I’ll tell you later—I promise.” There was an urgency about her speech impediment now, something more than impatience. He began by kissing her broken-heart tattoo, which seemed to make her happy.

In the morning, Jack woke her by kissing the tattoo again; it looked as if it were still bleeding. She smiled before she opened her eyes. “Yes, keep doing that,” Ingrid said, with her eyes still closed. He kept kissing her wounded-heart tattoo. “If you keep doing that, I’ll tell you what I believe about Hell.” Her eyes were wide open now—Hell being an eye-opening subject. He kept kissing her, of course.

“If you hurt people, if you know you’re hurting them, you go to Hell,” Ingrid said. “In Hell you have to watch the people you hurt, the ones who are still alive. If two people you hurt ever get together, you have to watch everything they do very closely. But you can’t hear them. Everyone in Hell is deaf. You just have to watch the people you hurt without knowing what they’re talking about. Of course, Hell being Hell, you think they’re talking about you—it’s all you ever imagine, while you’re just watching and watching. Kiss me everywhere, Jack—not just the tattoo.” He kissed her everywhere; they made love again. “What a bad night’s sleep your mother’s had, Jack,” Ingrid said. “She’s been up all night, just watching.”

Jack had fallen back to sleep when he heard the piano. There was the smell of coffee in the apartment. He got out of bed and went into the living room, where Ingrid was sitting naked at the piano, playing softly. “Nice way to wake up, isn’t it?” she asked, with her back turned to him.

“Yes, it is,” he told her.

“We both have to get dressed, and you have to go,” she said. “My first pupil is coming.”

“Okay,” Jack said, turning to go back to her bedroom.

“But come kiss me first,” she said, “while the bitch is watching.”

There was a lot Jack didn’t know about religion. His dad, apparently, was a forgiver. Ingrid Moe (now Amundsen) wasn’t; she hadn’t forgiven Andreas Breivik or Alice. As Jack kissed Ingrid on her damaged mouth, he was thinking that he wasn’t much of a forgiver, either.

In Hell, where his mother was watching, Alice might have regretted giving Ingrid the wrong tattoo—or so Jack Burns was also thinking.

29. The Truth

Jack never saw what the rest of Finland looked like. It was dark all the way from the airport into Helsinki. Although it was April, it was almost snowing; one or two degrees colder, and the rain would have turned to snow.

He checked into the Hotel Torni, marveling at the large, round room on the first floor, which served the hotel as a lobby. Jack remembered it as the American Bar—a hangout for the young and wild, some brave girls among them. The old iron-grate elevator, which had been “temporarily out of service” for the duration of Jack’s time in the Torni with his mom, was now working.

But although the American Bar was gone, the Torni was still a hangout for young people. On the ground floor was an Irish pub called O’Malley’s; shamrocks all over the place, Guinness on draft. It was an unwise choice for the Jack Burnses of this world—it was packed with more moviegoers than Coconut Teaszer. But Jack wasn’t hungry, and he’d slept on the plane. He didn’t feel like eating or going to sleep.

A not-bad band of Irish folksingers was playing to the pubcrowd—a fiddler, a guitarist, and a lead singer who said he loved Yeats. He’d left Ireland for Finland fifteen years ago.

Jack talked to the band members between sets. The young Finns in the pub were shy about speaking to Jack, although they did their share of staring. When the Irish folksingers went back to work, a couple of Finnish girls started talking to Jack. They didn’t seem all that brave; in fact, they were very tentative. He couldn’t tell what they expected, or what they wanted to happen. First one of them began to flirt with him; then she stopped flirting and the other one started.

“You can’t dance to this music,” the one who’d stopped flirting remarked.

“You look like you don’t need music to dance,” the one who’d started flirting said to Jack.

“That’s right,” he told her.

“I suppose you think I was suggesting something,” she said.

Jack wasn’t about to mess up his memory of Ingrid Moe by sleeping with either of the Finns, or with both of them. He thought he was hungry enough to eat a little something. But when he said good night to the Finnish girls, one of them remarked: “I guess we’re not what you’re looking for.”

“Actually,” Jack told them, “I’m looking for a couple of lesbians.” What a waste of a good end line—in O’Malley’s Irish pub in Helsinki, of all places!

He went to the lobby of the Torni and asked the concierge if there was still a restaurant called Salve. “It used to be popular with sailors,” Jack said.

“Not anymore,” the concierge told him. “And I’m not sure it’s the right place for Jack Burns to walk into. It’s a local place.” (Given the moviegoing crowd in O’Malley’s Irish pub, Jack was glad he’d registered at the Torni as Jimmy Stronach.)

Jack went up to his room and changed into what Leslie Oastler called his “tattoo-parlor clothes”—jeans and a black turtleneck. Mrs. Oastler had also packed Emma’s bomber jacket; the sleeves were way too long on Jack, but he loved it.

It still felt cold enough to snow when he walked into Salve—an old-fashioned restaurant, the kind of place where you got fairly ordinary but home-cooked meals. If, as he’d once imagined, Helsinki was a tough town in which to be afflicted with self-doubts, Jack could see what the concierge had meant about a movie star showing up at Salve. Surely some of the locals were moviegoers; maybe they just hadn’t liked Jack Burns’s movies.

The waitresses were as he’d remembered them—hard-worked and fairly long-of-tooth. Jack was thinking about the tough waitress who’d been married to Sami Salo, the scratcher; she would have fit right in twenty-eight years later. She’d been tough enough to call Alice “dearie,” Jack recalled—although he wondered if the bad feelings between them had really been about his mom putting Sami out of business.

Jack remembered Mrs. Sami Salo, if that’s who she was, as a short, stout woman whose clothes were too tight. She’d squinted whenever she took a step, as though her feet hurt her; her fat arms had jiggled.

He was trying not to look at anybody too closely—certainly not to meet anyone’s eye—when the waitress came up to his table, which needed wiping. She used a wet dishcloth. Jack tried not to look too hard at her, either. She was as thin as Mrs. Sami Salo had been fat, or maybe only Mrs. Salo’s arms had been fat. He couldn’t remember. The thin waitress had hunched shoulders and a coarse complexion, but there was a kind of tired prettiness in her long face and catlike eyes; when she stood facing Jack at his table, she cocked one hip to the side as if her legs were tired, too.

“I hope you’re meeting someone,” she said. “You didn’t come here alone, did you?”

“Isn’t it all right to come here alone?” he asked.

“It’s not all right for you to come here alone,” she told him. “It might be safer for you to come here as a girl.”

“I was hoping you could tell me where to get a tattoo,” Jack said. “This used to be the place to ask.”

“I’m the one to ask,” the waitress said. “Seriously—if you aren’t meeting someone here, you better be sure you leave with someone.”

“What about the tattoo?” he asked.

“Movie stars shouldn’t get tattooed,” she told him. “It ruins you for the nude scenes.”

“There’s makeup for that,” Jack said.

“You probably shouldn’t get tattooed alone, either,” the waitress said. “Are you here making a movie?”

“Actually, I’m looking for a couple of lesbians. But I’ll start with where to get a tattoo,” he told her. She smiled for the first time; she was missing an eyetooth, which was probably why she was disinclined to smile.

“If you’re alone, I’ll go home with you,” the waitress said. “You can’t do much with a couple of lesbians.” She could tell he was thinking about it—another close-up opportunity. But Jack was suddenly tired, and he wanted to hold on to the memory of Ingrid Moe a little longer. “I’m not really old enough to be your mother,” the waitress added. “I just look it.”

“It’s not that. I’m just too tired,” he told her. “I’ve been traveling.”

“If you end up here, you’ve been traveling, all right,” she said.

“I’ll have the Arctic char, please,” Jack said.

“What are you drinking?”

“I don’t drink,” he told her.

“I’ll bring you a beer,” the waitress said. “You can just pretend you’re drinking it.”

She was wise to do that, because the locals kept toasting him—all through his dinner. The toasts were somehow sinister, even hostile—more challenging than friendly. Jack would raise his beer glass and pretend to swallow. They didn’t seem to notice that his glass stayed full, or they didn’t care. If there were Jack Burns fans in Finland, they had a way of masking their affection.

Jack didn’t go home with the waitress. She was nice about it. She made him wait at the table while she called him a taxi. Only when the cab was parked outside would she release him; she even walked him to the door, holding his arm the whole way.

“My name is Marianne. There are much more difficult names in Finland,” she said.

“I’ll bet there are, Marianne.”

She gave him a black-and-white business card; it was a little scary. The place was called The Duck’s Tattoo. There was an excellent drawing of Donald Duck, but he was smoking a blunt—a cigar filled with marijuana. His eyes were fried and he looked raving mad. Someone had wrapped a snake around the reefer-smoking duck, more in the manner of a straitjacket than a shawl.

There was a phone number written on the back of the business card. “That’s my number,” Marianne told Jack. “I’ve got a couple of tattoos I could show you, if you’re ever not too tired.”

“Thank you, Marianne.”

“The tattooist you want to see is Diego,” she said.

“Not a Finnish name, I guess.”

“Diego’s Italian, but he was born in Finland,” Marianne said. “He’s been in business here for fifteen years.”

The Duck’s Tattoo was on Kalevankatu—about a ten-minute walk from the Torni, the concierge said the next morning. The concierge also sent Jack to a gym near the hotel, Kuntokeskus Motivus. (“Call it Motivus for short,” the concierge had recommended.) It was clean, with lots of free weights, but Jack was distracted during his workout by a pregnancy-aerobics class. The bouncing women were doing dangerous-looking things.

On his way to The Duck’s Tattoo, Jack passed a porn shop. One of the magazines in the window was a German one called Schwangere Girls. All the women were pregnant; more bouncing women doing dangerous-looking things. Pregnancy seemed to have made itself the unwanted theme of Jack’s day.

Helsinki struck him as a warren of construction sites. He found himself in a part of the city that had been built by the Russians a hundred years before. The Duck’s Tattoo was opposite the former Russian Army Hospital. It had been a sailors’ neighborhood, with lots of sailors’ pubs and restaurants—like Salve used to be—but the neighborhood was growing trendier by the day, Diego later told Jack.

Diego was a small man with friendly eyes and a goatee; his forearms were completely covered with tattoos. One was a rather formal portrait of a woman, almost like a photograph. Another was an entirely less formal-looking woman, who was naked; in fact, she was naked with a duck. Diego had other tattoos, but the naked woman with the duck was the one Jack would remember best.

He liked Diego, who’d never met Daughter Alice but had heard of her. Diego had three children and was not a regular participant at the tattoo conventions. He’d studied with Verber in Berlin; he’d worked in Cape Town, South Africa. He was planning a trip to Thailand to get a handmade tattoo by a monk in a monastery. “A chest tattoo,” he called it. He was inclined to “big works,” Diego said—both getting them and doing them. He’d recently copied a whole movie poster onto someone’s back.

Diego had two apprentices working with him. One of them was a muscleman in camouflage pants and a black Jack Daniel’s T-shirt. The other was a blond woman named Taru. Evidently Taru did the piercing; she had a silver stud in her tongue. There was another guy in The Duck’s Tattoo—a friend of Diego’s named Nipa, who told Jack a fairly involved story about accidentally dropping a paperback novel in a toilet. It was his favorite novel, Nipa said, and he was trying to figure out a way to dry it.

Jack talked to Diego about the relationship between sailors and tattooing. Diego had his first boat when he was just fourteen. The flash in The Duck’s Tattoo was impressive: Indian chiefs, dragons, skulls, birds, Harley engines, and many cartoon characters, like The Joker—and ducks, of course, lots of edgy ducks.

Diego admitted he wasn’t much of a moviegoer—he mentioned his three children again—but Taru, the piercer, and the muscleman in the Jack Daniel’s T-shirt had seen all of Jack’s films. (Nipa told Jack he was more of a book person than a movie person, as one might surmise from the toilet accident.)

“I don’t suppose you ever tattooed an organist named William Burns,” Jack said to Diego. “Tattoo artists call him The Music Man. I guess most of his tattoos are music. He might be a full-body.”

“Might be!” Diego said, laughing. “I never tattooed him—I never met the guy—but from what I hear, The Music Man hasn’t got a whole lot of skin left!”

When Jack got back to his room at the Hotel Torni, he tried to write a letter to Michele Maher. As a dermatologist, maybe she would know why some people with full-body tattoos felt cold. It was a strange way to start a letter to someone he’d not written or spoken to for fifteen years, and quite possibly the full-body people only thought they felt cold. What if the part about feeling cold was all in their minds and had nothing to do with their skin?

Tattoo artists themselves didn’t agree about the full-body types; Alice had believed that most full-bodies felt cold, but some of the tattooists Jack met at his mom’s memorial service told him that many full-bodies felt normal.

“The ones who feel cold were either cold or crazy to begin with,” North Dakota Dan had said.

But how else could Jack begin a letter to Michele Maher after fifteen years of silence?

Dear Michele,

Here I am in Helsinki, looking for a couple of lesbians. What’s up with you?

How was that for too weird? Jack crumpled up the piece of stationery. Perhaps a more general beginning would be better.

Dear Michele,

Guess what? My mother died. It turns out she lied to me about my father—maybe about a lot of other things. I’m in Europe, where I once believed my dad had slept with just about everyone he met, but it turns out that my mom was the one who was sleeping with everybody—among them a twelve- or thirteen-year-old boy and a couple of lesbians.

Interesting, huh? The things you think you know!

Jack crumpled up another page. He was beginning to believe that the only way he could communicate with Michele Maher was if he developed a skin problem. But wait! Hadn’t she written to him to wish him luck on his adaptation of The Slush-Pile Reader? Michele was an Emma Oastler fan! Perhaps a more literary approach would impress her.

Dear Michele,

Thank you for your letter. Yes, I was close to Emma Oastler, although we never actually had sex. Emma just held my penis. And of course, as with any adaptation, I have had to take some liberties with her novel. The name of the porn star, for example—I don’t exactly look like a Miguel Santiago, do I? And please don’t think there will be any actual porn-film footage in The Slush-Pile Reader; it won’t be that kind of movie. The pornography will be sort of implied. Besides, I have what I’m told is a rather small (or smallish) penis.

Jack couldn’t write a letter to Michele Maher. He was too weird for Michele, or for anyone else who wasn’t desperately lonely or crazy or a kid or grief-stricken (or otherwise depressed) or cheating on her husband or tattooed (with an octopus on her ass) or an old lady!

Besides, he had used up what pathetically little stationery the Hotel Torni provided for guests. Jack blamed the day on the agitation the pregnancy-aerobics class had caused him—not to mention the added stress of seeing Schwangere Girls. He was even tempted to go buy the magazine, but what he really wanted—and this truly disturbed him—was to have sex with a nice pregnant woman. (Like a wife, Jack was thinking; like someone who was going to have his baby; like Michele Maher, he kept hoping.)

More realistically, because he wasn’t hungry or too tired, Jack could try his luck with whomever he might pick up downstairs—in O’Malley’s—or he could call the waitress at Salve. But by the time Marianne got off work, Jack probably would be too tired. And the very idea of looking for a brave girl in O’Malley’s Irish pub was humiliating.

There was still some daylight left in the sky when Jack called Sibelius Academy, the music college, and asked if there was anyone who might be able to tell him the whereabouts of two of their graduates in the early 1970s. The matter was complicated. Not only did it take the college a little time to connect him with someone who spoke English; Jack didn’t even know the last names of the graduates. (Talk about taking a stab in the dark!)

“I know it sounds crazy,” Jack said, “but Hannele was a cellist and Ritva was an organist, and I think they were a couple.”

“A couple?” the woman who spoke English said on the phone. She had the doubting tone of voice of a knowledgeable bookseller who’s convinced that the title of the book you’re asking for is not the correct one.

“Yes, I mean a lesbian couple,” he said.

The woman sighed. “I suppose you’re a journalist,” she said. Her tone of voice was worse than doubting now; she couldn’t have made journalist sound any nastier if she’d said rapist.

“No, I’m Jack Burns—the actor,” he told her. “I believe these women were students of my father, William Burns—the organist. I met them when I was a child. They also knew my mother.”

“Well, well,” the woman said. “Am I truly speaking with the Jack Burns—I mean really?”

“Yes, really.”

“Well, well,” she said again. “Hannele and Ritva aren’t as famous as you are, Mr. Burns, but they’re rather famous in Finland.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really,” the woman said. “It would be hard for them to hide in Helsinki. Practically anyone could tell you where to find them.” Jack waited while the woman sighed again; she was taking the time to choose her next words very carefully. “It’s an awful temptation, Jack Burns, but I’ll refrain from asking you what you’re wearing.”

Later Jack called room service and ordered something to eat; he also called the front desk and requested more Hotel Torni stationery. He resisted both the faint impulse to explore O’Malley’s and the slightly stronger desire to call Marianne the waitress and ask to see her tattoos.

The next morning he got up early again and went to the Motivus gym.

He wasn’t at all sure how to approach Hannele and Ritva. The un-pronounceable church where the two musicians practiced every midday was called Temppeliaukion kirkko. The Church in the Rock, as it was also called, was more famous in Helsinki than Hannele and Ritva. It was underground, buried under a dome of rock—an ultramodern design, presumably done for the acoustics. There were numerous concerts there—these in addition to the Sunday services, which were Lutheran. (“Very Lutheran,” the woman from Sibelius Academy had told Jack—whatever that meant.)

Ritva was the regular organist at the principal Sunday service, but Hannele often accompanied her. Jack had inquired if much music had been written for organ and cello—he certainly hadn’t heard any—but the woman from Sibelius Academy said that Ritva and Hannele were famous for being “improvisational.” They were a most improvisational couple, Jack had already imagined. Indeed, if they’d both slept with Alice—yet they’d managed to stay a couple, as Ingrid Moe had told Jack—Hannele and Ritva were no strangers to successful experimentation.

Even their rehearsals were famous. People often went to the Church in the Rock during their lunch break just to hear Hannele and Ritva practice. Jack imagined that it wouldn’t be easy to speak with them in such an atmosphere; in those surroundings, Hannele and Ritva and Jack were too well known to be afforded any privacy. Maybe he should just show up at the church in the early afternoon and invite them to dinner.

Jack was finishing his workout on the ab machine in the gym when his thoughts were interrupted. About half a dozen sweaty women from the pregnancy-aerobics class had surrounded him; Jack guessed that their workout, their dangerous-looking bouncing, was over. Given his Michele Maher state of mind—not to mention his disturbing memories of the Schwangere Girls magazine—these pregnant women were an intimidating presence.

“Hi,” he said, from flat on his back.

“Hi,” the aerobics instructor replied. She was a dark-haired young woman with an arresting oval face and almond-shaped eyes. Because her back had been turned to him during the aerobics class, Jack hadn’t noticed that she was pregnant, too; he’d watched her lead the leaping women from behind.

“You look like Jack Burns, that actor,” the most pregnant-looking of the women said. Jack wouldn’t have been surprised to learn, later, that these were her last words before going into labor.

“But you can’t be—not if you’re here,” another of the women said doubtfully. “You just look like him, right?”

“It’s a curse,” Jack told them bitterly. “I can’t help it that I look like him. I hate the bastard.” It was the last line that gave him away; it was one of Billy Rainbow’s lines. In the movie, Jack said it three times—not once referring to the same person.

“It’s him!” one of the women cried.

“I knew you were Jack Burns,” the most pregnant-looking woman told him. “Jack Burns always gives me the creeps, and you gave me the creeps the second I saw you.”

“Well, then—I guess that settles it,” Jack said. He was still lying on his back; he hadn’t moved since he’d noticed them surrounding him.

“What movie are you making here? Who else is in it?” one of them asked.

“There’s no movie,” he told them. “I’m just in town to do a little research.”

One of the pregnant women grunted, as if the very thought of what research Jack Burns might be doing in Helsinki had given her her first contraction. Half the women walked away; now that the mystery was solved, they were no longer interested. But the aerobics instructor and two other women stayed, including the most pregnant-looking woman.

“What kind of research is it?” the aerobics instructor asked him.

“It’s a story that takes place in the past—twenty-eight years ago, to be exact,” Jack told them. “It’s about a church organist who’s addicted to being tattooed, and the woman whose father first tattooed him. They have a child. There’s more than one version of what happened, but things didn’t work out.”

“Are you the organist?” the most pregnant-looking woman asked.

“No, I’m the child—all grown up, twenty-eight years later,” he told them. “I’m trying to find out what really happened between my mother and father.”

The pregnant woman who hadn’t yet spoken said: “What a depressing story! I don’t know why they make movies like that.” She turned and walked away—probably she was going to the women’s locker room. The most pregnant-looking woman waddled after her. Jack was left alone with the aerobics instructor.

“You didn’t say you were doing a little research for a movie, did you?” she asked him.

“No, I didn’t,” he admitted. “This research isn’t for a movie.”

“Maybe you need a guide,” she said. She was at least seven months pregnant, probably eight. Her belly button had popped; like an erect nipple, it poked out against the spandex fabric of her leotard. “I meant to say a date.”

“I’ve never had a pregnant date,” Jack told her.

“I’m not married—I don’t even have a boyfriend,” she explained. “This baby is kind of an experiment.”

“Something you managed all by yourself?” he asked.

“I went to a sperm bank,” she answered. “I had an anonymous sperm donor. I kind of forget the insemination part.”

From flat on his back on the ab machine, Jack made one of those too-hasty decisions that had characterized his sexually active life. Because he’d imagined that he wanted to be with someone who was pregnant, Jack chose to be with the pregnant aerobics instructor at the Motivus gym—this instead of even trying to make a dinner date with Hannele and Ritva, the lesbian couple who were the reason for his coming to Helsinki in the first place.

Jack rationalized that what he might learn from the organist and cellist, who were a couple when his mother and father knew them—and they were still a couple—was in all likelihood something he already knew or could guess. Jack’s mother had somehow misrepresented them to him; they had slept with her, not his dad. Of course there would be other revelations of that kind, but nothing that couldn’t be said over coffee or tea—nothing so complicated that it would require a dinner date to reveal.

Jack decided to go to the Church in the Rock about the time Hannele and Ritva would be finishing their rehearsal. He would suggest that they go somewhere for a little chat; surely that would suffice. Jack thought there was no reason not to spend his last night in Helsinki with a pregnant aerobics instructor. As it would turn out, there was a reason, but Jack was responding to an overriding instinct familiar to far too many men—namely, the desire to be with a certain kind of woman precluded any reasonable examination or in-depth consideration of the aerobics instructor herself, whose name was Marja-Liisa.

They made a date, which was awkward because they had to get a pen and some paper from the reception desk; other people were watching them. Marja-Liisa wrote out her name and cell-phone number for him. She was clearly puzzled by what Jack wrote out for her—Jimmy Stronach, Hotel Torni—until he explained the business of always registering under the name of the character he plays in his next movie.

When Jack left the gym and returned to the Torni, he went first to that porn shop where he’d seen the unlikely but alluring Schwangere Girls in the window. He took the magazine back to his hotel room—just to look at the pictures, which were both disturbing and arousing.

When Jack left the hotel for the Church in the Rock, he threw the disgusting magazine away—not in his hotel room but in a wastebasket in the hall opposite the elevator. Not that you can really throw pictures like those away—not for years, maybe not ever. What those pregnant women were doing in those photographs would abide with Jack Burns in his grave—or in Hell, where, according to Ingrid, you were deaf but you could see everyone you ever knowingly hurt. You just couldn’t hear what they were saying about you.

Since that afternoon in Helsinki, Jack could imagine what Hell might be like for him. For eternity, he would watch those pregnant women having uncomfortable-looking sex. They would be talking about him, but he couldn’t hear them. For eternity, Jack could only guess what they were saying.

To Jack, the dome of Temppeliaukio Church looked like a giant overturned wok. The rocks, which covered all but the dome, had a pagan simplicity; it was as if the dome were a living egg, emerging from the crater of a meteor. The apartment buildings surrounding the Church in the Rock had an austere sameness about them. (Middle-class housing from the 1930s.)

There were more rocks inside the church. The organist sat in view of those people on the left side of the congregation. The empty, rounded benches—for the choir—occupied a center-stage position. Choirs were important here. The copper organ pipes were very modern-looking against the darker and lighter woods. The pulpit was surrounded by stone; Jack thought it looked like a drinking fountain.

In the early afternoon, he sat and listened to Hannele and Ritva—Ritva in profile to him, on the organ bench, Hannele facing him with her legs wide apart, straddling her cello. A small audience quietly came and went while the two women practiced. Jack could tell that Hannele had recognized him as soon as he sat down; she must have been expecting him, because she merely smiled and nodded in his direction. Ritva turned once to look at Jack; she smiled and nodded, too. (The lady he’d spoken to at Sibelius Academy must have forewarned Hannele and Ritva that Jack Burns was looking for them.)

It wasn’t all church music—at least not the usual church music. As a former Canadian, Jack recognized Leonard Cohen’s “If It Be Your Will”—not that he was used to hearing it played on organ and cello. As an American, Jack also recognized Van Morrison’s “Whenever God Shines His Light on Me.” Hannele and Ritva were very good; even Jack could tell that their playing together had become second nature. Of course he was predisposed to like them. Jack gave them a lot of credit in advance, just for surviving whatever assault his mom might have made on them as a couple.

Jack also listened to them rehearse two traditional pieces—“Come, Sing the Praise of Jesus” and “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel.” The latter was an Advent hymn, and both hymns were better known in Scotland than in Finland, Hannele and Ritva told Jack later. But the hymns, they said, had been particular favorites of his father’s.

“William taught us those two,” Ritva said. “We don’t care that it isn’t the month before Christmas.”

They were having tea in Hannele and Ritva’s surprisingly beautiful and spacious apartment in one of those gray, somber buildings encircling the Church in the Rock. Hannele and Ritva had combined two apartments overlooking the dome of Temppeliaukio Church. Like the church, their apartment was very modern-looking—sparsely furnished, with nothing but steel-framed, black-and-white photographs on the walls. The two women, now in their late forties, were good-humored and very friendly. Naturally, they were not as physically intimidating as they’d seemed to Jack at four.

“You were the first woman I ever saw with unshaven armpits,” he told Hannele. The astonishing hair in Hannele’s armpits had been a darker blond than the hair on her head, although Jack didn’t mention this detail—nor the birthmark over Hannele’s navel, like a crumpled top hat the color of a wine stain, the shape of Florida.

Hannele laughed. “Most people remember my birthmark, not my armpits, Jack.”

“I remember the birthmark, too,” he told her.

Ritva was enduringly short and plump, with long hair and a pretty face. She still dressed all in black, like a drama student. “I remember how you fell asleep, Jack—how hard you were trying not to!” Ritva told him.

He explained that he’d thought, at the time, they had come for their half-a-heart tattoos because they’d both slept with his father.

“With William?” Hannele cried, spilling her tea. Ritva could not stop laughing.

They were the kind of gay women who were so comfortable with each other that they could flirt unselfconsciously with him, or with other young men, because they were confident that they wouldn’t be misunderstood.

“I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised,” Hannele said. “William told us that your mom was capable of telling you anything, Jack. Ritva and I underestimated how far she would go.”

Hannele explained that her relationship with Ritva was new and still uncommitted when Jack’s mother had first hit on them; the young music students had even discussed sleeping with Alice as a kind of test of their relationship.

“It was 1970, Jack,” Ritva said, “and Hannele and I were young enough to imagine that you could treat any relationship as an experiment.”

William had warned them about Alice; he’d told Hannele and Ritva her history. Yet the girls had imagined that if they both were “unfaithful” with Jack’s mother, they wouldn’t hurt each other.

“It hurt us more than we expected,” Hannele told Jack. “We decided to hurt your mother back. The tattoo we shared was a symbol of how we had hurt each other—a reminder to not be unfaithful to each other again, a reminder of what sleeping with your mom had cost us. And we let her know that we were brave enough to sleep with anybody—even with William.”

“Of course we wouldn’t have slept with William, Jack—not that your father would have slept with either of us,” Ritva said. “But your mom was extremely sensitive about anyone your dad might sleep with, and it wasn’t hard to convince her that Hannele and I were lawless.”

“We even flirted with you, Jack—just to piss her off,” Hannele said.

“Yes, I remember that part,” Jack told them.

Their half-a-heart tattoos had been torn apart vertically; both women were tattooed on their heart-side breasts.

“You have eyelashes to die for, Jack,” Hannele had told him. Under the covers, her long fingers had lifted his pajama top and stroked his stomach. When she was sleeping beside him, he’d almost kissed her.

“Go to sleep, Jack,” his mom had told him.

“Tell me about the ‘Sweet dreams’ part,” Jack asked Hannele and Ritva in their beautiful apartment. It was growing dark outside; the lights shone through the dome of the Church in the Rock like a fire burning windows in an eggshell. (Jack remembered that he’d thought “Sweet dreams” was something his dad probably said to all of his girlfriends.)

“He’s not four anymore,” Ritva said to Hannele, who was shaking her head. “Go on, tell him.”

“It’s what your mom whispered in our ears before she kissed us down there,” Hannele said, averting her eyes from Jack’s.

“Oh.”

Ritva had said, “Sweet dreams,” to Jack, before she’d kissed him good night. “Isn’t that what you say in English?” she’d asked Alice. “Sweet dreams.”

“Sometimes,” Alice had said, and Hannele’s brave whistling had stopped for a second—as if the pain of the shading needles on her heart-side breast and that side of her rib cage had suddenly become unbearable. But Jack had been sure it was the “Sweet dreams” that had hurt her, not the tattoo. (Talk about a not-around-Jack subject!)

Jack told Hannele and Ritva about his mother’s surprisingly long-lasting relationship with Leslie Oastler—not that Alice hadn’t probably had other, lesser relationships in the same period of time, but her relationship with another woman was the only one that had endured. Were Hannele and Ritva surprised at that? he asked.

The two women looked at each other and shrugged. “There wasn’t anything your mom wouldn’t do, Jack,” Ritva said, “not if she could have an effect—almost any effect—on your dad.”

“After William, I don’t think Alice cared who she slept with,” Hannele told him. “Man, woman, or boy.”

The black-and-white photographs on the walls of the apartment were mostly of Hannele and Ritva—many concert photographs among them. There was one of Ritva on the organ bench in the Johanneksen kirkko, where Jack had gone with his mother—this had been following a heavy snowfall, he remembered. Flanking Ritva on the organ bench were her two teachers—Kari Vaara, the organist with the wild-looking hair, and a handsome, thin-lipped young man whose long hair fell to his shoulders, framing a face as delicate as a girl’s.

“My father?” Jack asked Ritva, pointing to the picture. William looked almost the same as he had that night in the restaurant of the Hotel Bristol.

“Yes, of course,” Ritva told Jack. “You haven’t seen his picture before?”

“What are you thinking, Ritva?” Hannele asked. “Do you imagine Alice kept a photo album for Jack?”

What Jack was unprepared for was how young his father looked. In 1970, in Helsinki, William Burns would have been thirty-one—a couple of years younger than Jack was now. (It is strange to see, for the first time, a photograph of your father when he is younger than you are.) Jack was also unprepared for the resemblance; William looked almost exactly like Jack.

Of course William seemed small beside Ritva and Kari Vaara. William was a small but strong-looking man, not slight but somehow feminine in his features, and with an organist’s long-fingered hands. (Jack had his mom’s small hands and short, square fingers.)

William was wearing a long-sleeved white dress shirt, open at the throat—the organ pipes of the Walcker from Württemberg rising above him. Jack asked Hannele and Ritva about his father’s tattoos.

“Never saw them,” Hannele said. Ritva agreed; she’d never seen them, either.

In the bedroom, Jack saw black-and-white photographs of Hannele’s and Ritva’s tattoos—just their naked torsos, the hearts cut in half on their left breasts. At least the tattoos were as he’d remembered them, but Hannele had shaved her armpit hair; her hands, folded flat above her navel, hid her birthmark from the photographer.

It was a mild surprise to see that they had other tattoos. There was some music on Hannele’s hip, and more music—it looked like the same music—on Ritva’s buttocks. Like the photos of their shared heart, these were close-ups—only partial views. But they were such different body types, Jack had no difficulty telling Hannele and Ritva apart.

“What’s the music?” he asked them.

“We played it earlier—before you came to the church,” Ritva said. “It’s another piece William taught us, a hymn he used to play in Old St. Paul’s.”

“ ‘Sweet Sacrament Divine,’ ” Hannele told Jack. She began to hum it. “We only know the music, not the words, but it’s a hymn.”

It sounded familiar; perhaps he’d heard it, or had even sung it, at St. Hilda’s. Jack knew he’d heard his mom sing it in Amsterdam, in the red-light district. If it was something his dad used to play at Old St. Paul’s, it was probably Anglican or Scottish Episcopal.

The old scratcher’s name almost didn’t come up, but Hannele—pointing to the black-and-white photo of the tattoo on her hip—just happened to say it. “It’s not bad for a Sami Salo.”

Jack told Hannele and Ritva the story of the scary night at the Hotel Torni, when Sami Salo had banged on the door—not to mention how Sami’s noticeably younger wife, that tough-talking waitress at Salve, had told Alice she was putting Sami out of business.

Hannele was shaking her head again—her short, curly blond hair not moving. “Sami’s wife was long gone before you and your mom came to town, Jack,” Ritva said. “That waitress at Salve was Sami’s daughter.”

“Her name was Minna,” Hannele told him. “She was William’s friend, one of your dad’s older women. I always thought it was a peculiar relationship, but Minna had gone through some hard times—like your dad. She had a child out of wedlock, and the child died as an infant—some upper-respiratory ailment.”

“Your father wasn’t looking for a girlfriend, Jack. He was probably still in love with the Dane,” Ritva said. “Minna was just a comfort to him. I think that’s all he thought he was good for, to be a comfort to someone. You know, it’s that old Christian idea—you find someone down on their luck and you help them.”

Certainly Agneta Nilsson, who’d taught William choral music in Stockholm—and Jack how to skate on Lake Mälaren—was an older woman. Maybe Agneta had been down on her luck, too; after all, she’d had a bad heart.

“Look, we’re musicians, Jack. Your dad was first and foremost a musician,” Hannele said. “I’m not claiming an artist’s license for how I live—William wasn’t, either. But what sort of license was your mom taking? There wasn’t anything she didn’t feel entitled to!”

“Hannele, the slut was his mother—no matter what you say about her,” Ritva said.

“If somebody dumps you, you move on,” Hannele told Jack. “Your mom made a feature-length film out of it!”

“Hannele!” Ritva said. “We’ve seen all your movies, Jack. We can’t imagine how you turned out so normal!”

Jack didn’t feel normal. He couldn’t stop thinking about the waitress with the fat arms—Minna, Sami Salo’s daughter. How her arms had jiggled; how she’d been a friend of his father’s!

So Jack’s mother had undermined even that—a comfort relationship. Hannele doubted that his dad and Minna had ever had sex; Ritva thought they probably had. But what did it matter? Alice had convinced Sami Salo that his unlucky daughter could expect nothing but betrayal and heartbreak from William Burns. Sami couldn’t wait for Alice and Jack to go to Amsterdam, where William would be bound to follow.

It was true that Sami Salo was a scratcher; even so, he wasn’t losing that much business to Daughter Alice. As Hannele and Ritva explained to Jack, his mom tattooed mostly students at the Hotel Torni; even well-to-do students weren’t inclined to spend their money on tattoos. Most of the sailors still went to Sami; at that time, sailors spent more money on tattoos than students did.

Jack also learned that Kari Vaara traveled—Vaara was always giving concerts abroad. William was what amounted to the principal organist at the Johanneksen kirkko, where he loved the church and the organ. He loved his students at Sibelius Academy, too—Ritva and Hannele being two of the better ones.

William would have no students in Amsterdam, where his duties at the Oude Kerk were so demanding that he had no time for teaching, too. “You mean the organ-tuning?” Jack asked Hannele and Ritva.

“The what?”

Jack explained what he’d been told: namely, that his dad’s only real job in Amsterdam was tuning the organ in the Oude Kerk, which was indeed vast, as Kari Vaara had described it, but the organ was always out of tune.

“William couldn’t tune a guitar, much less an organ!” Ritva cried.

“He only agreed to play the organ at the Oude Kerk if the church hired an additional organ-tuner,” Hannele told Jack.

“There was already someone who tuned the organ before every concert, but—at your dad’s insistence—the new organ-tuner came almost every day,” Ritva said.

“It was every night,” Hannele corrected her.

That’s when Jack knew who the additional organ-tuner had been—the dough-faced youngster who, Alice had said, was a “child prodigy.” The young genius who’d put baby powder on the seat of his pants so that he could more easily slide on the organ bench, which was also vast—Frans Donker, who’d played for Jack and his mom, and whatever whores were on hand, one night when he, the “child prodigy,” was supposed to be tuning the organ.

“They say that in the Oude Kerk, one plays to both tourists and prostitutes!” Kari Vaara had told Alice and Jack. Vaara was very proud of William, Hannele and Ritva said. Vaara had called William his best student ever.

Yet Alice had wanted Jack to see his father as a mere organ-tuner; she had purposely discredited William in his son’s eyes.

“Something happened in Amsterdam,” Jack said to Hannele and Ritva. “My dad stopped following us—something must have happened.”

Hannele was shaking her head again, the blond curls holding fast to her head. “The lawyer made a deal with your mother, Jack,” Ritva said. “It was a hard deal, but someone had to stop her.”

“It was no deal for William!” Hannele said angrily.

“It was the best deal for Jack, Hannele,” Ritva said.

“I don’t remember any lawyer,” Jack told them. “What lawyer?”

“Femke somebody. I don’t remember her last name,” Hannele said. “She was some super divorce lawyer—she’d been through some big-deal divorce herself.”

Well, it was almost funny that Jack had thought Femke was a prostitute; there’d been some preposterous story about her becoming a prostitute to embarrass her ex-husband. (Femke was rich, as Jack recalled, yet she’d become a whore!) What wouldn’t you believe when you were four, and your mom was the manager of your so-called memories?

“Begin with the cop, Jack,” Ritva said. “There was a cop—he was your dad’s best friend.”

“He got you out of there—he was your best friend, too, Jack,” Hannele said.

“Yes, I remember him,” Jack said. He was a nice guy, Nico Oudejans. Nico’s eyes were a robin’s-egg blue, and high on one cheekbone he had a small scar shaped like the letter L. “Naturally, I thought he was my mother’s friend,” Jack told Hannele and Ritva. “And I thought Femke was a prostitute!”

They were sitting on the leather couch in the living room, with the darkness now fallen over the glowing dome of the Church in the Rock. The two women flanked Jack on the couch; they put their arms around him.

“Jack, your mother was a prostitute. Femke was just a lawyer,” Hannele said.

“My mom was a prostitute for just one night!” Jack blurted out. “She took only one customer—a young boy. She said he was a virgin.”

The two women went on hugging him. “Jack, no one’s a prostitute for just one night,” Ritva said.

“There’s no such thing as a prostitute who takes only one customer, Jack,” Hannele told Jack. “Not to mention one virgin!”

“We should all have dinner tonight!” Ritva cried suddenly.

“Unless Jack has a date,” Hannele said, teasing him. “I refuse to share Jack with a date.” Jack just sat on the leather couch, staring at the darkness out the window.

“From the look of him, he’s got a date,” Ritva said.

“Yes, he’s got a date. I can see it in his eyes,” Hannele said.

“I’m sorry,” Jack told them. He just didn’t know how sorry—not yet.

The aerobics instructor was thirty-one weeks pregnant and expecting her second child.

“Same anonymous sperm donor?” Jack asked as nonchalantly as the circumstances permitted. They were both naked and in bed, in his hotel room at the Torni, and Marja-Liisa was pressing Jack’s face against her big belly so that he could feel how a thirty-one-week-old fetus moved around in there.

“No, my husband died,” she explained. “We were planning to have a second child, but it took me almost three years to get up the nerve to have the second one alone.”

“Do you have a boy or a girl?”

“A four-year-old boy.”

In the context of Jack’s return trip to the North Sea, almost everything about a four-year-old boy was interesting to him; however, he sensed that this wasn’t the time and place to tell Marja-Liisa how sorry he was to miss meeting her son. (Jack was leaving for Amsterdam very early in the morning.)

She said a friend was with the four-year-old, giving the boy his supper and putting him to bed. Marja-Liisa warned Jack that she couldn’t stay late. It was unusual for her to stay out past her son’s bedtime, and she was always back home, in her own bed, when the boy woke up in the morning.

The athleticism of the thirty-one-week-old fetus was a marvel to Jack—less so, the lovemaking of the aerobics instructor. He’d never been in bed with a pregnant woman; Jack had no idea what to expect. He probably shouldn’t have been concerned by how active Marja-Liisa was—that is, for a woman in her condition. (After all, he’d watched her lead the leaping women in the aerobics class, and Jack knew that most of the uncomfortable-looking positions he’d seen in the Schwangere Girls magazine could not have been faked.)

Jack realized only later what he had wanted, which was not to have sex with her but just to hold her while he fell asleep. All he really desired was his hand on her big belly, his hand imagining that there were two people he loved—not just a woman but also the child she was about to have. It had been a great way to fall asleep.

The knock on the door was quiet at first, then more insistent. It was not a Sami Salo kind of knocking, but one Jack was able to incorporate into his dream—in the dream, Jack was a father.

“Marja-Liisa, are you there?” said a man’s voice in the hall. Then he must have asked the same question in Finnish.

The pregnant aerobics instructor had gone. Jack woke up alone in the bed; he went into the bathroom and wrapped a towel around his waist. There was a Hotel Torni envelope stuck to the mirror with a dab of his toothpaste. It was a clever way for her to have left him a note. He realized now that he must have been talking in his sleep.

My name is Marja-Liisa, not Michele. Who’s Michele?

Jack crumpled up the envelope and threw it in the bathroom wastebasket. Clutching the towel around his waist, he went to see who was at the door. Jack had a bad feeling that he already knew who it was. “Marja-Liisa—I know you’re there,” the man was saying, only a little more loudly.

Until Jack opened the door, he didn’t know that the man had brought the four-year-old with him. But what else could the poor guy have done? If you were a responsible father, you didn’t leave a four-year-old alone.

There was no question in Jack’s mind that the young man with the dark-blond hair was Marja-Liisa’s husband—not her dead husband, either. (Nor did the young man look like an anonymous sperm donor.) Any doubts Jack might have had were dispelled by the boy; the four-year-old had his dad’s dark-blond hair, but the child’s oval face and almond-shaped eyes were exactly like his mother’s.

“I knew it,” Marja-Liisa’s husband said. “You’re Jack Burns. Marja-Liisa said she saw you at the gym.”

“She’s not here,” Jack told him.

The unhappy husband looked past Jack into the disheveled room. The little boy wanted his dad to pick him up; the child was wearing slipper-socks with reindeer on them, and a ski parka over his pajamas. Jack stepped back into the room and the father carried his son inside. The pillows and bedcovers were all in a heap; the young husband stared at the bed as if he could discern the imprint of his pregnant wife’s body on the rumpled sheets.

Marja-Liisa had told her husband that she had a late-night aerobics class at the gym, but he found her gym bag in her closet after he’d put the four-year-old to bed; he had been tidying up the apartment and went to her closet to put some article of her clothing away, and there was the gym bag.

The young man showed Jack the piece of paper he’d found in the bag—Jimmy Stronach, Hotel Torni—but he’d guessed all along that Jimmy Stronach was Jack Burns.

“She kept telling me, ‘There’s a movie star in the gym, and I look like a whale!’ You’re not even her favorite movie star, but I suppose that doesn’t matter,” her husband said.

The four-year-old wanted to get down; his father looked distressed to see the boy climb onto the bed and burrow under the mound of pillows.

“She didn’t want a second child,” Marja-Liisa’s husband told Jack. “The pregnancy was an accident, but she blames me for it because I wanted to have more children.”

The four-year-old was sleepy-looking, but he had found a way to amuse himself with the feather quilt and all the pillows; the little boy moved in circles on all fours, like an animal trying to bury itself. Jack assumed that the child didn’t speak English, and therefore couldn’t understand them—not that the boy would have paid any closer attention to his dad and Jack if they’d been speaking in Finnish.

He’s only four, Jack kept thinking. Jack hoped that the child wouldn’t remember this adventure—being woken up and taken to a hotel in the middle of the night in his pajamas. Or perhaps the boy would remember no more than what he was told about this night, and why would his parents ever talk about it to him? (Maybe only if the night became a turning point in his family’s history, which Jack hoped it wouldn’t.)

“She’s probably gone home, or she was on her way home and you just passed each other,” Jack told Marja-Liisa’s husband, who was looking more and more distraught. The four-year-old was completely hidden from view, under all the pillows and bedcovers. In a muffled voice, the little boy asked his father something.

“He wants to use the bathroom,” the husband told Jack.

“Sure,” Jack said.

There was more Finnish—both the language and the barrier of the bedcovers making the exchange incomprehensible. Jack could see that Marja-Liisa’s husband didn’t want to touch the bed, so Jack helped the little boy get untangled from the feather quilt and all the pillows.

The four-year-old left the bathroom door open while he was peeing; the boy was also talking to himself and singing. Thus Jack must have followed his mother through those North Sea ports, peeing with the bathroom doors open, talking to himself and singing, remembering next to nothing—or only what his mom told him had happened, what she wanted him to remember.

“I’m sorry,” Jack said to the unhappy husband and father. Jack wasn’t going to make it worse for the poor man by telling him that his wife had told Jack her husband was dead, or that she was pregnant this time with the help of an anonymous sperm donor.

“Who is Jimmy Stronach?” the young man asked Jack.

Jack explained that it was the name of a character in the movie he hoped to make next; he didn’t mention the porn-star part, or that he was not just an actor in this movie but also the screenwriter.

The little boy came out of the bathroom; Jack hadn’t heard the toilet flush, and the four-year-old was disturbed about something. It appeared he had peed in the left-inside pocket of his ski parka. His father said some reassuring-sounding things to him in Finnish. (“Oh, we all pee in our parka pockets from time to time!” Jack imagined.)

Possibly Jack Burns had been a more aware four-year-old than Marja-Liisa’s little boy, but Jack doubted it.

The little boy wanted his father to pick him up again, which his dad did; the child snuggled his face against his father’s neck and closed his eyes, as if he were going to fall asleep right there. It was late; no doubt the boy could have fallen asleep almost anywhere.

Jack opened the hotel-room door for them—hoping the husband wouldn’t give one last look at the landscape of the abused bed, but of course the betrayed man did.

As they were leaving, the husband said to Jack: “I guess Jimmy Stronach is the bad guy in this movie.” Then they went down the hall, with the little boy singing a song in Finnish.

Jack went into the bathroom and flushed the toilet, noting that the four-year-old had peed all over the toilet seat; like a lot of four-year-olds, he’d not lifted the seat before he peed. Jack kept telling himself that if Marja-Liisa’s son was a normal four-year-old, and he certainly had behaved normally, the boy would never remember this awful night—not a moment of it.

Jack had to look everywhere for the piece of paper with Marja-Liisa’s name and cell-phone number on it. When he managed to find it, he called the number. Jack thought he should forewarn her that her husband and small son had paid him a visit. When Marja-Liisa answered the phone, she was at home and already knew that her husband and child were missing; she sounded frantic.

Jack told her that her husband had been visibly distressed but extremely well behaved. Jack also told her that her little boy had looked sleepy, but that the child had seemed to understand none of it.

“I wish you’d told me the truth,” Jack said.

“The truth!” she cried. “What do you know about the truth?”

It was dark all the way from the Hotel Torni to the airport, which was some distance from Helsinki. It was very early in the morning, but it looked like the middle of the night; naturally, it was raining. A little after dawn, when the plane took off, Jack could see patches of what looked like snow in the woods.

He was thinking that there was nothing more he wanted to know; he’d already learned too much about what had happened. No more truth, Jack kept thinking—he’d had enough truth for a lifetime. He didn’t really want to go to Amsterdam, but that’s where the plane was going.

30. The Deal

Jack’s second time in Amsterdam, he stayed at the Grand—a good hotel on the Oudezijds Voorburgwal, about a two-minute walk from the red-light district. The rain had followed him from Finland. He walked through the district in the late-morning drizzle; the tourists appeared to be discouraged by the rain.

The blatancy of the prostitutes—in their underwear, in their windows and doorways—made their business plain. Yet, despite the obviousness of the undressed women, the four-year-old whom Jack had recently met in Helsinki could have been persuaded that the women were advice-givers. (As Jack himself had been persuaded.)

No one was singing a hymn or chanting a prayer; not one of the women had the appearance of a first-timer, or of someone who planned on being a prostitute for only one day.

The women would beckon to Jack, and smile, but if their smiles weren’t instantly returned—if he just kept walking or wouldn’t meet their gaze—they quickly looked away. He heard his name a few times, only once as a question. “Jack Burns?” one of the prostitutes asked, as he passed by. He didn’t turn his head or otherwise respond. Usually the Jack Burns seemed to be part of a declarative sentence, but one he couldn’t understand—in Dutch, or in some other language that wasn’t English. (Not many of the women were Dutch.)

Jack walked as far north as the Zeedijk, just to see for himself that Tattoo Theo’s old shop, De Rode Draak—the departed Red Dragon—was indeed gone. He easily found the small St. Olofssteeg, but Tattoo Peter’s basement shop had moved many years ago to the Nieuwebrugsteeg, a nearby street. Jack saw the new tattoo parlor, but he didn’t go in. When he asked one of the prostitutes what she knew about the shop, she said that someone named Eddie was in charge—Tattoo Peter’s second son, Jack thought she said.

“Oh, you mean Eddie Funk,” someone else would later tell Jack, suggesting that the Eddie in the new shop wasn’t actually related to Tattoo Peter. But what did it matter? Whoever Eddie was, he couldn’t help Jack.

Tattoo Peter—Eddie’s father or not—had died on St. Patrick’s Day, 1984. Or so Jack had read in an old tattoo magazine when he and Leslie Oastler were cleaning out Daughter Alice in Toronto.

“Listen to this,” he remembered saying to Mrs. Oastler. “Tattoo Peter was born in Denmark. I never knew he was a Dane! He actually worked for Tattoo Ole before moving to Amsterdam.”

“So what?” Leslie had said.

“I never knew any of this!” Jack had cried. “He drove a Mercedes-Benz? I never saw it! He walked with a cane—I never saw the cane! I never saw him walk! His wife was French, a Parisian singer? People compared her to Edith Piaf!”

“I think Alice told me he stepped on a mine,” Mrs. Oastler had said. “That’s how he lost his leg.”

“But she never told me!” he’d shouted.

“She never told you fuck-all, Jack,” he remembered Leslie saying.

Jack walked around the Oude Kerk in the falling rain, but he didn’t go inside. He didn’t know why he was procrastinating. The kindergarten next to the Old Church looked fairly new. There were more prostitutes than he remembered on the Oudekerksplein, but the kindergarten children hadn’t been there when Jack and his mom had traipsed through the district.

Jack had no difficulty finding the police station on the Warmoesstraat, but he didn’t go inside the station, either. He wasn’t ready to talk to Nico Oudejans, assuming Nico was still a policeman and Jack could find him.

Jack walked on the Warmoesstraat in the direction of the Dam Square, pausing at the corner of the Sint Annenstraat—exactly where he and his mom and Saskia and Els had encountered Jacob Bril, who had the Lord’s Prayer tattooed on his chest. There was a tattoo of Lazarus leaving his grave on Bril’s stomach. There were some things you didn’t forget, no matter how young you were when you saw them.

“In the Lord’s eyes, you are the company you keep!” Jacob Bril had told Alice.

“What would you know about the Lord’s eyes?” Els had asked him. Or so Jack remembered—if any of it was true!

The Tattoo Museum on the Oudezijds Achterburgwal—maybe a minute’s walk from Jack’s hotel—was a warm and cozy place with more paraphernalia and memorabilia from the tattoo world than Jack had seen in any other tattoo parlor. He met Henk Schiffmacher at noon, when the museum opened, and Henk showed him around. Henk’s tattoo shop was also there—Hanky Panky’s House of Pain, as it was called. Whoever Eddie was, in the new Tattoo Peter, Henk Schiffmacher was the Tattoo Peter of his day; everyone in the ink-and-pain business knew Hanky Panky.

Henk was a big, heavy guy with a biker’s beard and long hair. A female death’s head, with what looked like a single breast on her forehead, was breathing fire on his left biceps. A spool of film was unwinding on his right forearm. Of course Hanky Panky had other tattoos; his body was a road map of his travels. But Jack would remember these two best.

He watched Henk give a Japanese guy an irezumi of a cockroach on his neck. (Irezumi means tattoo in Japanese.) Hanky Panky had traveled everywhere: Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, Bangkok, Sumatra, Nepal, Samoa.

While Henk tattooed the cockroach on the Japanese guy’s neck, Jack listened to Johnny Cash sing “Rock of Ages” on the CD player. A good tattoo shop was a whole universe, he’d heard his mother say. “A place where every desire is forgiven,” Henk Schiffmacher said. Why, then, couldn’t Jack’s mom forgive his dad? And how had William managed to forgive Alice, or had he? (Jack thought that he couldn’t forgive her.)

“Is a guy named Nico Oudejans still a cop in the district?” Jack asked Hanky Panky.

“Nico? He’s still the best cop in the district,” Henk said. “Nico’s a frigging brigadier.”

On Jacob Bril’s bony back was his favorite tattoo, the Ascension—Christ departing this world in the company of angels. As Jack walked through the red-light district to the Warmoesstraat police station, he remembered Bril’s version of Heaven as a dark and cloudy place. It had stopped raining, but the cobblestones were greasy underfoot and the sky—like Jacob Bril’s Heaven—remained dark and cloudy.

Jack Burns heard his name a few more times. Wherever they were from, some of the women in the windows and doorways were movie-goers—or they had been moviegoers in a previous life.

Jack crossed the bridge over the canal by the Old Church and came upon the small, foul-smelling pissoir—a one-man urinal—where he remembered peeing as a child. It had been dark; his mom had stood outside the barrier while he peed. She kept telling him to hurry up. She probably didn’t want to be seen standing alone in the area of the Oude-kerksplein at night. Jack could hear drunken young men singing as he peed; they must have been singing in English or he wouldn’t have remembered some of the words in their song.

They were English football fans, his mother would tell him later. “They’re the worst,” she’d said. There’d been a football game, which the English team had either lost or won; it seemed to make no difference, in regard to how their fans behaved in the red-light district. They were “filthy louts,” Jack remembered Saskia saying; filthy louts wasn’t in his mom’s vocabulary.

Jack walked around the Oude Kerk once more, on the side where the new kindergarten shared the street with the whores. Someone was following him; a man had fallen into step behind him at the corner of the Stoofsteeg, almost as soon as Jack had left the Tattoo Museum and the House of Pain. When Jack slowed down, the man slowed down, too—and when Jack sped up, the man picked up his pace again.

A fan, Jack thought. He hated it when they followed him. If they came up and said, “Hi, I like your movies,” and then shook his hand, and went on their way—well, that was fine. But the followers really irritated Jack; they were usually women.

Not this one. He was a tough-looking guy with a dirty-blond beard, wearing running shoes and a windbreaker; his hands were shoved into the pockets of the windbreaker as he walked, his shoulders thrust forward as if it were still raining or he was cold. A guy in his fifties, maybe—late forties, anyway. The man didn’t make the slightest effort to pretend he wasn’t following Jack; it was as if he were daring Jack to turn around and face him.

Jack doubted that the bastard would have the balls to follow him into the police station, so he just kept walking.

Jack was one small street away from the Warmoesstraat when a brown-skinned prostitute stepped out of her doorway in her underwear and high heels; she almost touched him. “Hey, Jack—I’ve seen you in the movies,” she said. She had a Spanish-sounding accent; she might have been Dominican or Colombian.

When she saw the man who was trailing Jack, she immediately put up her hands as if the man were pointing a gun at her; she quickly stepped back inside her doorway. That was when Jack knew that the man following him was a cop. Clearly the Dominican or Colombian woman knew who the cop was; she didn’t want any trouble with him.

Jack stopped walking and turned to face the policeman, whose eyes were still a robin’s-egg blue, and high on one cheekbone was the small, identifying scar like the letter L. The beard had fooled Jack. When the cop had been in his late twenties or early thirties, when Jack had first met him, Nico Oudejans didn’t have a beard. Jack had always thought that Nico was a nice guy; he’d been very nice to Jack when the boy was four. Now, in his fifties, Nico looked just plain tough.

“I’ve been expecting you, Jack. For a few years now, I’ve had my eye out for you. I keep telling the ladies,” Nico said, with a nod to the Dominican or Colombian prostitute, who was smiling in her doorway, “ ‘One day Jack Burns, the actor, will show up. Give me a call when you see him,’ I keep telling them. Well,” Nico said, shaking Jack’s hand, “I got half a dozen calls today. I knew at least one of the ladies had to be right.”

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.”

“Yes, that’s it!” Nico Oudejans cried. “What a memory you have, Jack! That’s a detail even a cop like me had forgotten.”

Jack also remembered the dark-brown woman from Suriname; she was one of the first prostitutes to speak to him. He’d been surprised that she knew his name. She’d been in a window on either the Korsjespoortsteeg or the Bergstraat—not in the red-light district but in that same general area where Jack and his mom had met Femke. (And he’d thought that Femke was an unusual prostitute, when in fact she was a lawyer!)

The Surinamese prostitute had given him a chocolate the color of her skin. “I’ve been saving this for you, Jack,” she’d said. And he’d believed, for years, that she must have been one of his dad’s girlfriends—one of the prostitutes who’d taken William home with her, and had slept with him, as Jack’s mother had led the boy to believe. But that wasn’t true.

Jack’s father had not had sex with a prostitute in Amsterdam; William had only played the organ for them, a sound both huge and holy, which had compelled them to just listen. As for some of them—those who’d managed to hear the Lord’s noise in the music—William may have saved them from the sins of a single night, albeit later in their lives, when a few of them did stop being prostitutes.

“I called your dad the Protestant Loyola, which seemed to please him,” Nico Oudejans told Jack.

Nico also told Jack that the Surinamese prostitute was one of William’s earliest converts to Christianity; she’d heard God’s noise in the organ and had become an overnight believer.

Jack had lost count of how many policemen had come into the office and put their guilders on the table in front of Nico, but when another cop had come and gone, Jack asked Nico if he had won a bet on a game or a horse.

“I won a bet on you, Jack,” the policeman said. “I bet every cop in District Two that one day, before I retired, Jack Burns would walk into the Warmoesstraat station, and we’d have this little talk about his mom and dad.”

The next evening, Wednesday, Jack went with Nico to the Oude Kerk to hear Willem Vogel, the organist, rehearse. Vogel had officially retired from teaching and conducting, but he still wrote music for organ and choir—a CD of his compositions had recently been released—and he still played in the Oude Kerk, the long service on Sunday and the Wednesday-evening rehearsal. Willem Vogel was in his late seventies but looked younger. He had long, hairless hands and was wearing a sweater with sagging elbows; in the unheated church, a wool scarf was tied around his neck.

Jack had correctly remembered the narrow, brick-lined stairs leading to the organist’s hidden chamber above the congregation. The wooden handrail was on one side as you climbed; a waxed rope, the color of burned caramel, was on the other. There was a bare, bright, unshaded lightbulb behind the leather-covered organ bench; it cast the perfect, shadowless light upon the yellowed pages of the music. Vogel’s well-worn shoes made a soft tapping on the foot pedals; his long fingers made an even softer clicking on the keys.

Jack could hear only the drone of the choir, in the distant background, when the organ was soft or not playing. When Vogel played hard, you could barely hear the accompanying voices from the organ chamber. At a moment when the choir sang without him, Vogel opened a small piece of hard candy—neatly putting the paper wrapper in his pocket before popping the candy in his mouth.

The names printed on the stops (the registers) were meaningless to Jack. It was a world beyond him.

BAARPIJP

8 VOET

OCTAAF

4 VOET

NACHTHOORN

2 VOET

TREMULANT POSITIEF

Jack struggled to hear the Lord’s noise in the music. But even when Vogel played the Sanctus and the Agnus Dei, the Lord wasn’t speaking to Jack.

Willem Vogel had never met Jack’s dad. Once, in 1970, Vogel had been out to dinner rather late with some friends; one of the friends suggested that they go to the Oude Kerk and listen to William Burns’s concert for the fallen ladies, but Vogel was tired and declined the invitation. “I regret I never heard him play,” the organist told Jack. “Some say he was marvelous; others say that William Burns was too much of an entertainer to be taken seriously as a musician.”

The next morning, Jack went with Nico Oudejans to a café where they were meeting Saskia for coffee. Saskia had stopped being a prostitute more than ten years before; her retirement hadn’t improved her disposition, Nico forewarned Jack. She’d gone to a school for beauticians and had learned how to cut hair, maybe also how to do makeup and manicures; she worked in a beauty shop on the Rokin—a wide, busy street with many medium-expensive shops.

Saskia hadn’t wanted Nico and Jack to come to the beauty shop. Given her former line of work, even a friendly visit from the police was unwelcome. And Saskia feared that—in a beauty shop, of all places—the ladies would make too much of a fuss over her knowing Jack Burns.

When Jack saw her coming, he thought she’d had more than a career change. She’d had a whole makeover. Gone was the winking armload of bracelets, hiding her burn scar. In her fifties now, she was still thin, but the gauntness had left her face. There wasn’t a trace of the come-on of her former profession about her. Saskia’s hair was cut as short as a boy’s. Over a white turtleneck, she wore what looked like a man’s tweed jacket. Her baggy jeans were unflattering; her ankle-high boots, with a low heel, gave her a mannish walk.

Jack got to his feet and kissed her, but Saskia was a little cool to him—not unfriendly but not warm, either. She was only marginally friendlier to Nico. She was carrying a Yorkshire terrier in her oversize handbag. The dog and Nico appeared to be old friends; the Yorkie hopped out of Saskia’s handbag and sat contentedly in Nico’s lap while the waiter took Saskia’s order.

Jack half expected her to order a ham-and-cheese croissant, but she asked for a coffee instead. He wasn’t surprised that she’d had her teeth fixed. Why wouldn’t a new mouth have been included in her makeover?

“I know why you’re here, Jack, and it doesn’t interest me,” Saskia began. “I don’t go along with it.” Jack didn’t say anything. “Everyone took your dad’s side. But I hate men, and I liked your mom. Besides, I wasn’t working in the district to take time out to go to church and listen to him play his bleeding-heart organ.”

“I remember bringing you ham-and-cheese croissants,” Jack told her. (He was trying to calm her down, because she sounded angry.)

“Your father hung out there—that was where your mother let him see you, when she was buying a bloody ham-and-cheese croissant. I think I would die on the spot if I ever ate another one.”

“You and Els took turns being my babysitter?” Jack asked her.

“Your mom helped Els and me pay the rent on our rooms,” she answered. “Alice paid part of Els’s rent and part of mine. The three of us shared two rooms. It made sense, businesswise.”

“And Mom admitted only virgins?” he asked.

“Some of those boys had been with half the ladies in the district! It only mattered to Alice that they looked like virgins,” Saskia said.

“Did she honestly believe that my dad would get back together with her, just to stop her from being a prostitute?”

“She believed that your dad would do almost anything to protect you—to give you the life he thought you should have, which wasn’t a life in the red-light district,” Saskia said. “It was the fuckhead lawyer who worked out a way to make your mother stop being a prostitute.”

“You didn’t like the lawyer?” Jack asked. He remembered how Saskia and Els had screamed at Femke; how he’d thought that Els and Femke had come close to having a physical fight.

“Femke was as much of an asshole do-gooder as your fucking father, Jack. On the one hand, she was this outspoken advocate for prostitutes’ rights; on the other hand, she wanted us all to go back to school or learn another profession!”

“What was the deal that she offered Mom?”

“Femke told your mother to get off the street and take you back to Canada. Your dad wouldn’t follow you this time, Femke promised. If your mom would put you in a good school—if she kept you in school—your dad would pay for everything. But your mother was tough; she told Femke that your father had to promise he would never seek even partial custody of you. And he had to promise that he wouldn’t look you up, not even when you were older—not even if Alice was dead.”

“But why would my dad promise that?”

“He opted to keep you safe, Jack—even if it meant he could never make contact with you,” Nico Oudejans said.

“If your mom couldn’t have your dad, then he couldn’t have you,” Saskia said. “It was that simple. Listen, Jack—your mother would have slashed her throat and bled to death in front of you, just to teach your fucking father a lesson.”

“What lesson was that?” Jack cried. “That he should never have left her?”

“Listen, Jack,” Saskia said again. “I admired your mom because she put a price tag on his leaving her—a high one. Most women can never be paid enough for the terrible things men do to them.”

“But what terrible thing did he do to her?” Jack asked Saskia. “He just left her! He didn’t abandon me; he gave her money for my education, and for my other expenses—”

“You can’t get a woman pregnant and then change your mind about her and not have it cost you, Jack,” Saskia said. “Just ask your father.”

Nico hadn’t said anything since telling Jack that his dad had opted to keep him safe. Saskia, like Alice, had clearly chosen revenge over reason.

“Do you cut men’s hair, too?” Jack asked her. “Or just women’s?” (He was trying to calm himself down a little.)

Saskia smiled. She’d finished her coffee. She made a kissing sound with her lips, and the Yorkshire terrier sprang out of Nico’s lap and into her arms. She put the tiny dog back in her handbag and stood up from the table. “Just women’s,” she told Jack, still smiling. “But now that you’re all grown up, Jackie boy, if you ever want someone to cut your balls off, just ask me.”

“I guess she didn’t learn the castration part in beauty school,” Nico Oudejans said, after they’d watched Saskia walk away. She didn’t once turn to wave; she just kept going.

“What about Els?” Jack asked Nico. “I suppose you know what’s happened to her, too.”

“Fortunately for you,” Nico said, “Els has a somewhat sweeter disposition.”

“She’s not cutting hair?” Jack asked.

“You’ll see,” the policeman said. “Everyone has a history, Jack.”

Nico led Jack past the Damrak, away from the red-light district. They wound their way through streams of shoppers—across the Nieuwendijk to the tiny Sint Jacobsstraat, where Els occupied a second-floor apartment. Her window with the red light was a little uncommon for a prostitute’s window, not solely for being outside the district but because her room was above street-level. Yet when Jack considered that Els had taken an overview of her life in prostitution—she’d grown up on a farm and took an overview of life on a farm as well—he thought that Els in her window above the street was where she belonged.

During the day, she greeted passersby with boisterous affection, but Nico told Jack that Els was more judgmental at night; if you were a drunk or a drug addict pissing in the street, she would turn her police-issue flashlight on you and loudly condemn your bad manners. On the Sint Jacobsstraat, Els was still a prostitute, but she was also a self-appointed sheriff. Drugs had changed the red-light district and driven her out of it; alcohol and drugs had killed her only children. (Two young men—they’d both died in their twenties.)

Jack had been wrong to think that Els was about his mother’s age, or only a little older. Even from street-level, looking up at her, he could tell she was a woman in her seventies; when Jack had been a four-year-old, Els would have been in her forties.

“Jackie!” Els called, blowing him kisses. “My little boy has come back!” she announced to the Sint Jacobsstraat. “Jackie, Jackie—come give your old nanny a hug! You, too, Nico. You can give me a hug, if you want to.”

They went up the staircase to her apartment. The window-room was only a small part of the place, which was spotlessly clean—the smell of all the rooms dominated by the coffee grinder in the kitchen. Els had a housekeeper, a much younger woman named Marieke, who immediately began grinding beans for coffee. As a former farm girl, Els hated cleaning chores, but she knew the importance of a tidy house. She shared the prostitute duties with another “girl,” she explained to Jack; the women took turns using the window-room, although Petra, the other prostitute, didn’t live in the apartment.

“Petra’s the young one, I’m the old one!” Els exclaimed happily. (Jack didn’t meet Petra, but Nico told him she was sixty-one.)

Els, who claimed to be “about seventy-five,” said that most of her regular customers were morning visitors. “They take naps in the afternoon, and they’re too old to go out at night.” The only customers who visited her at night were the ones off the street—that is, if they happened to be passing by when Els was sitting in her upstairs window. For the most part, she let Petra sit in the window. “At night, I’m usually asleep,” Els admitted, giving Jack’s forearm a squeeze. “Or I go to the movies—especially if it’s one of your movies, Jackie!”

Els had always been a big woman with an impressive bust. Her bosom preceded her with the authority of a great ship’s prow; her hips rolled when she walked. She was massive but not fat, although Jack noticed how her forearms and the backs of her upper arms sagged—and she walked with a slight limp. She had a bad heart, she claimed—“and perhaps an embolism in the brain.” Els pointed ominously to her head; she still wore a platinum-blond wig.

“Every day, Jackie,” she said, kissing his cheek, “I take so many pills, I lose count!”

Els had landlord problems, too, she wanted Nico to know; maybe the police could do something about the building’s new owner. “Like shoot him,” she told Nico, with a smile, kissing him on the cheek—then kissing Jack again. There’d been a rent dispute and a tax issue; the new landlord was a prick, in her opinion.

Els was a longstanding spokesperson for the prostitutes’ union; she regularly spoke to high school students about the lives of prostitutes. The students, many of them only sixteen, had questions for her about first-time sex. Years ago, she’d had a husband; she’d been married for three years before her husband found out she was a whore.

She had a bruise on her face. Nico asked her if she was getting over a black eye—perhaps something one of her off-the-street customers had given her.

“No, no,” she said. “My customers wouldn’t dare hit me.” Els had gotten into a fistfight at a café on the Nes, just off the Dam Square. She’d run into a former prostitute who wouldn’t speak to her. “Some holier-than-thou cunt,” she said. “You should see her face, Nico.”

Jack thought that the holier-than-thou subject might make a good starting point for a conversation about his father. Els had not only known him; unbeknownst to Alice, Els had often gone to the Oude Kerk in the wee hours of the morning to hear William play the organ. Jack gathered that Els had not heard any racket from the Lord—just the music. To his surprise, Els told Jack that she had taken him to the Old Church one night.

“I thought that even if you didn’t remember hearing William play, some part of you might absorb the sound,” she said. “But I had to carry you there—you were asleep the whole way—and you never woke up or took your head off my breast the entire time. You slept through a two-hour concert, Jackie. You never heard a note! I don’t know what you could possibly remember of any of it.”

“Not much,” he admitted.

Jack knew how hidden the organist’s chamber in the Oude Kerk was. He knew that his father would never have seen him sleeping on the big prostitute’s bosom—which was probably just as well, knowing his dad’s opinion of what Nico had called “this environment.”

Because Saskia and Alice were more popular—because they had more customers, Els informed Jack—Els was Jack’s babysitter (what she called his “nanny”) most of the time.

“And I was stronger than your mom or Saskia, so I got to carry you!” she exclaimed. She had lugged him from bed to bed. “I used to think you were like one of us—one of the prostitutes,” she told Jack. “Because you never went to bed just once; because I was always taking you out of one bed and tucking you into another!”

“I remember that you and Femke almost came to blows,” he said.

“I could have killed her. I should have killed her, Jackie!” Els cried. “But Femke was the deal-maker, and something had to be done. It’s just that it was a bad deal—that’s what made me so mad. Lawyers don’t care about what’s fair. What’s a good deal to a lawyer is any deal that both parties will agree to.”

“Something had to be done, Els—as you say,” Nico said.

“Fuck you, Nico,” Els told him. “Just drink your coffee.”

It was good coffee; Marieke had made them some cookies, too.

“Did my dad see me leave Amsterdam?” Jack asked Els.

“He saw you leave Rotterdam, Jackie. He watched the ship sail out of the harbor. Femke had brought him to the docks; she’d driven him to Rotterdam in her car. Saskia would have none of it. She accompanied your mom and me and you to the train station in Amsterdam, but that was as much drama as she would tolerate. That was Saskia’s word for the good-bye business—drama, she called it.”

“So you took the train to Rotterdam with us?”

“I went with you to the docks. I got you both on board, Jackie. Your mom wasn’t in much better shape than your dad. It seemed to be just dawning on her that she wouldn’t see William after that day, although the deal was what she said she wanted.”

“You saw my dad at the docks?”

“Fucking Femke wouldn’t get out of the car, but your dad did,” Els said. “He just cried and cried; he fell apart. He lay down on the ground. I had to pick him up off the pavement; I had to carry him back to the fuckhead lawyer’s Mercedes.”

“Did Tattoo Peter really have a Mercedes?” Jack asked her.

“Femke had a better one, Jackie,” Els said. “She drove William back to Amsterdam in her Mercedes. I took the train from Rotterdam. In my mind’s eye, I kept seeing you wave from the ship. You thought you were waving to me—I was waving back, of course—but it was your father you were really waving good-bye to. Some deal, huh, Nico?” she asked the policeman sharply.

“Something had to be done, Els,” he said again.

“Fuck you, Nico,” the old prostitute once more told him.

When Jack got back to the Grand, two faxes were waiting for him; it didn’t help that he read them in the wrong order. He began with a surprising suggestion from Richard Gladstein, a movie producer. Bob Bookman had sent Gladstein the script for The Slush-Pile Reader.

Dear Jack,

Stay where you are, in Amsterdam! What do you say we have a meeting with William Vanvleck? I know you’ve worked with Wild Bill before. It strikes me that The Slush-Pile Reader is a kind of remake, maybe right up The Remake Monster’s alley. Think about it: the story is a remade porn film but not a porn film, right? We wouldn’t show anything pornographic, but the very idea of James “Jimmy” Stronach’s relationship with Michele Maher is a little pornographic, isn’t it? (He’s too big, she’s too small. Brilliant!) We should discuss. But first tell me your thoughts on The Mad Dutchman. As it happens, he’s in Amsterdam and you’re in Amsterdam. If you like the idea of Vanvleck as a director, I could meet you there.

Richard

Everything became clearer when Jack read the second fax, which he should have read first. It was from Bob Bookman at C.A.A.

Dear Jack,

Richard Gladstein loved your script of The Slush-Pile Reader. He wants to discuss possible directors with you. Richard has the crazy—maybe not so crazy—idea of using Wild Bill Vanvleck. Call me. Call Richard.

Bob

Jack was so excited that he called Richard Gladstein at home, waking him up. (It was very early in the morning in L.A.)

Wild Bill Vanvleck was in his late sixties, maybe his early seventies. He’d moved back to Amsterdam from Beverly Hills. No one in Hollywood had asked him to direct a picture for a couple of years. The Remake Monster had sold his ugly mansion on Loma Vista Drive. Something had gone wrong with his whippets. Jack remembered the skinny little dogs running free in the mansion, slipping and falling on the hardwood floors.

Something bad had happened to Wild Bill’s chef and gardener, the Surinamese couple. Someone had drowned in Vanvleck’s swimming pool, Richard Gladstein told Jack; Richard couldn’t remember if it was the child-size woman from Suriname or her miniature husband. (Possibly the drowning victim had been one of the whippets!)

So The Mad Dutchman was back in Amsterdam, where he was living with a much younger woman. Vanvleck had a hit series on Dutch TV; from Richard Gladstein’s description, Wild Bill had remade Miami Vice in Amsterdam’s red-light district.

Richard talked about the difficulty of bringing Miramax around to the idea of hiring William Vanvleck to direct The Slush-Pile Reader—that is, assuming Richard and Jack had a good meeting with The Mad Dutchman. But the idea, Gladstein and Jack agreed, had possibilities. (Bob Bookman had already overnighted Jack’s screenplay to Wild Bill.)

Richard and Jack also talked about the idea of Lucia Delvecchio in the Michele Maher role. “She’d have to lose about twenty pounds,” Jack told Richard.

“She’d love to!” Gladstein said. There was little doubt of that, Jack thought. There were a lot of women in Hollywood who wanted to lose twenty pounds—they just needed a reason.

The more he thought about Wild Bill Vanvleck, the better Jack liked the idea. What had always been wrong with The Remake Monster’s material was the material itself—namely, Wild Bill’s screenplays. Not only how he’d ripped them off from other, better material, but how he went too far; he always pushed the parody past reasonable limits. If you’re irreverent about everything, the audience is left with nothing or no one to like. Conversely, there was sympathy in Emma’s story—both for the too-small slush-pile reader and for the porn star and bad screenwriter with the big penis. Vanvleck had never directed a sympathetic script before.

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?”

Femke looked out the window at the slowly passing traffic on the Singel. “Your little face on the ship’s deck was the only smiling face I saw, Jack. Your mother had to hold you up, so you could see over the rail. You were waving to that giant whore. The way your dad dropped to the ground, I thought he’d had a heart attack. I thought I’d be taking a body back to Amsterdam—in all likelihood, in the backseat of my Mercedes. The big prostitute picked him up and carried him to my car; she carried him as easily as she used to carry you! Mind you, I still thought your dad was dead. I didn’t want William in the front seat, but that’s where the huge whore put him. I could see then that he was alive, but barely. ‘What have I done? How could I? What am I, Femke?’ your father asked me. ‘You’re a flaming Christian, William. You forgive too much,’ I told him. But the deal was done, and your dad was the only man on earth who would stick to his side of a bargain like that. From the look of you, Jack, your mom stuck to her side of the bargain, too—sort of.”

At that moment, Jack hated them both—his mother and his father. In his mom’s case, the reasons were pretty obvious. In his dad’s case, Jack suddenly saw him as a quitter. William Burns had given up on his son! Jack was furious. Femke, a retired lawyer but a good one, could see the fury on Jack’s face.

“Oh, get over it. Don’t be a baby!” she told him. “What’s a grown man in good health doing wallowing around in the past? Just move on, Jack. Get married, try being a good husband—and be a good father to your children. With any luck, you’ll see how hard it is. Stop judging them—I mean William and your mother!”

From the way her two grown sons fussed over her, Jack could tell that they adored her. Femke once more looked out the window; there was something final about the way she turned her face in profile to Jack, as if their meeting were over and she had nothing more to say. Nico Oudejans had asked her to see Jack, and she probably had a fair amount of respect for Nico—more than she had for Jack. She’d done her duty, her face in profile said; Femke wasn’t freely going to offer Jack more information.

“If I could just ask you if you know what happened to him—starting with where he went,” Jack said to her. “I assume he didn’t stay in Am-sterdam.”

“Of course William didn’t stay,” she said. “Not when he could imagine you on every street corner—not when your mother’s image was engraved in the lewd posture of every prostitute, in every gaudy window and dirty doorway in the district!”

Jack didn’t say anything. By their imploring glances and gestures, Femke’s sons were urging him to be patient. If he just waited the old woman out, Jack would get what he’d come for—or so Femke’s sons seemed to be saying.

“Hamburg,” Femke said. “What organist doesn’t want to play in one of those German churches—maybe even somewhere Bach himself once played? It was inevitable that William would go to Germany, but there was something special about Hamburg. I can’t remember now. He said he wanted to get his hands on a Herbert Hoffmann—a famous organ, probably.”

Jack took some small pleasure in correcting her; she was that kind of woman. “A famous tattooist, not an organ,” he told Femke.

“I never saw your dad’s tattoos, thank God,” Femke said dismissively. “I just liked to listen to him play.”

Jack thanked Femke and her sons for taking the time to see him. He took a passing look at the prostitutes in their windows and doorways on the Bergstraat and the Korsjespoortsteeg before he walked back to the Grand, this time avoiding the red-light district. Jack was glad he had the videocassette of Wild Bill Vanvleck’s homicide series to look at, because he didn’t feel like leaving the hotel.

There was more than one episode from the television series on the videocassette. Jack’s favorite one was about a former member of the homicide team, an older man who goes back to police school at fifty-three. His name is Christiaan Winter, and he’s just been divorced. He’s estranged from his only child—a daughter in university—and he’s taking a training course for policemen on new methods of dealing with domestic violence. The police used to be too lenient with the perpetrators; now they arrested them.

Of course the dialogue was all in Dutch; Jack had to guess what they were saying. But it was a character-driven story—Jack knew Christiaan Winter from an earlier episode, when the policeman’s marriage was deteriorating. In the episode about domestic violence, Winter becomes obsessed with how much of it children see. The statistics all point to the fact that children of wife-beaters end up beating their wives, and children who are beaten become child-beaters.

The social message wasn’t new to Jack, but Vanvleck had connected it to the cop’s personal life. While Winter never beat his wife, the verbal abuse—Winter’s and his wife’s—no doubt damaged the daughter. One of the first cases of domestic violence that Christiaan Winter becomes involved in ends in a homicide—his old business. In the end, he is reunited with his former team.

Vanvleck’s homicide series was more in the vein of understated realism than anything on American television; there was less visible violence, and the sexual content was more frank. Nor did happy endings find their unlikely way into any of the episodes—Christiaan Winter is not reunited with his family. The best he can manage is a civil conversation with his daughter in a coffeehouse, where he is introduced to her new boyfriend. We can tell that the veteran policeman doesn’t care for the boyfriend, but he keeps his thoughts to himself. In the last shot, after his daughter gives him a kiss on the cheek, Winter realizes that the boyfriend has left some money on the table for the coffee.

This was noir warm, which was Wild Bill at his best—at least this is what Jack said to Nico Oudejans when Nico called and asked Jack his opinion of Vanvleck’s series. Nico liked the series, too. Nico didn’t ask Jack how the meeting with Femke had gone. Nico knew Femke; as a good cop, he knew every detail of Daughter Alice’s story, too. Jack told Nico about Herbert Hoffmann being a tattoo artist, not an organ. Naturally, Nico asked if Jack was going to Hamburg.

He wasn’t. Jack knew actors may be more highly skilled at lying than other people, but they are no more adept at lying to themselves—and even actors should know better than to lie to cops.

“What more do I need to know?” Jack asked Nico, who didn’t answer him. The policeman just kept looking at Jack’s eyes—then at his hands, then at his eyes again. Jack began to speak more rapidly; to Nico, Jack’s thoughts were more run-on than consecutive, but the cop didn’t question him.

Jack said that he hoped, for his father’s sake, that William had another family. Jack wouldn’t invade his father’s privacy; after all, William hadn’t invaded Jack’s. Besides, Jack knew that Herbert Hoffmann had retired. Alice had revered Hoffmann, but Jack would leave Herbert Hoffmann in peace, too. So what if Hoffmann had almost surely met William Burns?

“Now that you’re getting close, maybe you’re afraid to find him, Jack,” Nico said.

It was Jack’s turn not to say anything; he just tried to look unafraid.

“Maybe you’re afraid that you’ll cause your father pain, or that he won’t want to see you,” the policeman said.

“Don’t you mean that I’ll cause him more pain?” Jack asked.

“Now that you’re getting close, maybe you don’t want to get any closer—that’s all I’m saying, Jack.”

“Maybe,” Jack said. He didn’t feel like much of an actor anymore. Jack Burns was a boy who’d never known his father, a boy whose father had been kept from him; maybe what Jack was really afraid of was losing his missing father as an excuse. That’s what Claudia would have told him, but Nico said nothing more.

If William had wanted a Herbert Hoffmann, Jack thought he knew which kind. He imagined it was one of Hoffmann’s sailing ships—often seen sailing out of port, or in the open sea on a long voyage. Sometimes there was a dark lighthouse and the ship was headed for rocks. Herbert Hoffmann’s Sailor’s Grave was among his most famous; there were his Last Port and his Letzte Reise or Last Trip, too. In most cases, Hoffmann’s ships were sailing into danger or unknown adventures; the feeling the tattoos gave you was one of farewell, although Herbert Hoffmann had done his share of homeward-bound tattoos as well.

A Homeward Bound would not have been his father’s choice, Jack was thinking. On the ship that had carried Jack away from his dad, Jack sensed there would have been more of a Sailor’s Grave or a farewell feeling—at least from William’s point of view. A ship leaving harbor conveys an uncertain future.

Or else William Burns had stuck to music on his skin. Jack could imagine that, too.

There was a nonstop flight from Los Angeles to Amsterdam—a little more than ten hours in the air. Richard Gladstein was going to be tired. He would leave L.A. at 4:10 in the afternoon and land in Amsterdam at 11:40 in the morning, the next day. Jack assumed that Richard would want to take a nap before they met Vanvleck for dinner that evening.

For two days, Jack didn’t leave his hotel room except to go to the gym on the Rokin. He lived on room service; he wrote pages and pages to Michele Maher. He came up with nothing he would send to her, but the stationery at the Grand was both more plentiful and more attractive than that at the Hotel Torni.

Jack did manage to come up with a clever way of asking Michele Maher the full-body tattoo question—that is, dermatologically speaking.

Dear Michele,

As a dermatologist, can you think of any reason why a person with a full-body tattoo might feel cold?

Please return the stamped, self-addressed postcard—checking the appropriate box.

Yours,

Jack

On a postcard of the Oudezijds Voorburgwal canal, he gave Michele the following options.

o No.

o Yes. Let’s talk about it!

Love,

Michele

Of course he didn’t send that letter or the postcard. For one thing, he didn’t have a U.S. stamp for the return delivery; for another, the “Love, Michele” was taking a lot for granted after fifteen years.

His second day alone, Jack almost went to see Els again in her apartment on the Sint Jacobsstraat. He didn’t want to sleep with a prostitute in her seventies—he just liked Els.

Mainly Jack would lie awake at night—imagining his little face on the ship’s deck, where his mother had lifted him above the rail. Jack was just smiling, and waving to beat the band, while the damage was being done around him—especially to his dad.

In Hamburg, maybe William had met someone; that might have helped him to forget Jack, if he’d ever managed to forget his son. After all, he’d had a correspondence with Miss Wurtz when Jack was attending St. Hilda’s. It wasn’t as if William had stopped thinking about Jack, cold.

When Richard arrived, he went straight to bed and Jack went back to the gym. Jack was eating more carbs and had changed his weightlifting routine; he’d managed to put on a few pounds, but Jack was still no Jimmy Stronach. (Not that there was anything he could have done to acquire Jimmy’s penis.)

In the gym on the Rokin, possibly in a failing effort to drown out the awful music in the weight room, Jack tried singing that ditty his mother had sung only when she was drunk or stoned—the one that seemed to resurrect her Scottish accent.

Oh, I’ll never be a kittie

or a cookie

or a tail.

The one place worse than

Dock Place

is the Port o’ Leith jail.

No, I’ll never be a kittie,

of one true thing I’m sure—

I won’t end up on Dock Place

and I’ll never be a hure.

How funny that it had once been Alice’s mantra to never be a whore.

Jack thought of their nightly prayer, which—when he was a child—they usually said together. He remembered one night in Amsterdam when she fell asleep before he did, and he said the prayer by himself. Jack had spoken a little louder than usual, because he had to pray for the two of them. “The day Thou gavest, Lord, is ended. Thank You for it.” (Of course that had probably happened more than once.)

Jack took a footbridge across the canal on his way back to the Grand. He stood on the bridge and watched a sightseeing boat drift by. In the stern, a small boy sat looking up at the footbridge—his face pressed to the glass. Jack waved, but the boy didn’t wave back.

It was already dark when Jack walked with Richard Gladstein to the Herengracht, to a restaurant called Zuid Zeeland, where they were meeting William Vanvleck. Jack was in no mood for the meeting. He kept thinking about the other William—the one he would have loved but was afraid to meet.