Until I Find You (6 page)

Alice expressed surprise that William would seek a position as an assistant to an organist younger than he was. Anker Rasmussen took a different view: William was clever and talented enough to be a good organist; now was the time for him to travel, to play on different organs, to pick up what he could learn or steal from other organists. In Rasmussen’s opinion, it was not just the trouble with women that kept motivating William to move on.

Jack’s mother told him that she was disconcerted by Anker Rasmussen’s theories; she had fallen in love with William Burns because of how he played the organ, yet she’d not considered that the instrument itself had seduced him. Did William restlessly need to be around a bigger and better organ, or at least a different one? Was it in the tradition of the way a young girl can love horses? (No doubt it further disconcerted Alice to realize that William might have liked trading mentors as much as he liked trading women.)

Jack assumed they would be leaving for Stockholm right away, but his mother had other ideas. Through the Christmas holiday, there was much money to be made at Tattoo Ole’s. If a tattoo artist as good as Doc Forest was working out of his home in Stockholm, tattooing was barely legal there. Alice decided that it wouldn’t be easy for her to make money in Stockholm; she thought she should take advantage of the holiday season at Tattoo Ole’s before she and Jack continued their journey.

At Nyhavn 17, they said a prolonged good-bye. Jack didn’t remember posing for a photograph there, on the street in front of Tattoo Ole’s, but the sound of the camera shutter was overfamiliar to him. Obviously someone was snapping pictures.

Alice was so popular with the clients, many of them sailors on Christmas leave, that she worked until late at night. Ladies’ Man Madsen was less in demand. He often walked Jack to the D’Angleterre while Alice tattooed on.

Lars would sit on the bed in Jack’s room while the boy brushed his teeth; then the Ladies’ Man would tell Jack a story until Jack fell asleep. Madsen’s stories never kept Jack awake for long. They were self-pitying tales of Lars himself as a child. (Mostly misadventures with fish, which struck Jack as easily avoidable; yet these catastrophes were of immeasurable importance to Lars.)

While the boy slept in the narrower of the chambermaids’ rooms, which was divided from his mother’s bedroom by a bathroom with two sliding doors, Ladies’ Man Madsen read magazines on the toilet. Jack sometimes woke and saw Lars’s silhouette through the frosted glass of the bathroom door. Often he fell asleep on the toilet with his head on his knees, and Alice would have to wake him up when she came home.

At his request, Alice gave Lars a tattoo. He wanted a broken heart above his own heart, which he claimed was broken, too. Alice gave him a blushing-red heart, torn in half horizontally; the jagged edges of the tear left a bare band of skin, wide enough for a name, but both Alice and Tattoo Ole urged Ladies’ Man Madsen against a name. The ripped-apart heart, all by itself, was evidence enough of his pain.

Lars, however, wanted Alice’s name. She refused. “Your heart’s not broken because of
me,
” she declared, but maybe it was.

“What I meant,” said Ladies’ Man Madsen, summoning an unexpected dignity, “was that I wanted your
tattoo
name.”

“Ah—a
signature
tattoo!” cried Tattoo Ole.

“Well, okay—that’s different,” Alice told Lars.

On the very white skin between the pieces of his torn heart, she needled her name in cursive.

Daughter Alice

For his thoughtful care of Jack, Alice was grateful to the Ladies’ Man. “There’s no charge,” she told him, as she bandaged his broken heart.

Jack didn’t know what gift his mom might have made to Ole. Perhaps there was no gift for Ole—not even Alice’s coveted Rose of Jericho, which Tattoo Ole much admired.

Their last night in Copenhagen, Ole closed the shop early and took them to dinner at a fancy restaurant on Nyhavn. There was an open fireplace and Jack had the rabbit.

“Jack, how can you eat Peter Cottontail?” his mom asked.

“Let him enjoy it,” Lars told her.

“You know what, Jack?” Tattoo Ole said. “That can’t be Peter Cottontail, because Danish rabbits don’t wear clothes.”

“They just get tattooed!” cried Ladies’ Man Madsen.

When no one was looking, Jack scrutinized the rabbit for tattoos but didn’t find any. The boy went on eating, but he must not have had enough Christmas beer.

That night, very late, he had a nightmare. He woke up naked and shivering. He had just fallen through the ice and drowned in the Kastelsgraven. More terrible, Jack was joined in death, at the bottom of the moat, by centuries of soldiers who had drowned there before him. The cold water had perfectly preserved them. Illogically, the littlest soldier was among the dead.

As always, the light in the bathroom had been left on—as a night-light for Jack. He slid open the two doors of frosted glass and entered his mother’s bedroom. Whenever he had a bad dream, he was permitted to crawl into bed with her.

But someone had beaten him to it! At the foot of his mom’s bed, which was as narrow as his own, he saw her upturned toes protruding from the bedcovers. Between her feet, Jack saw the soles of two more feet—these toes were pointed down.

At first, for no comprehensible reason, the boy believed it was Ladies’ Man Madsen. But closer inspection of the stranger’s bare feet revealed to Jack two
un-
tattooed ankles. Also, the feet between his mother’s feet were too small to belong to Lars. They were even smaller than his mom’s—they were almost as small as Jack’s!

In the light from the bathroom, something else caught the boy’s eye. On the chair, where his mother often put her clothes, was a soldier’s uniform, which Jack thought was about his size. However, when he put the uniform on, it was bigger than he’d estimated. He had to roll up the cuffs of the pants and cinch the belt in its last notch, and the shoulders of the shirt and jacket were much too broad. The epaulets touched his upper arms—the sleeves entirely covered his hands.

If he’d had to guess, Jack would have said that the littlest soldier’s uniform was at least a size larger than his civilian clothes—the ones Jack had borrowed to wear following his misadventure in the moat. (The soldier’s
off-duty
clothes, his mom had called them.)

Undaunted by this clothing mystery, which seemed of no consequence at the time, Jack was determined to stand at attention at his mother’s bedside. When she and the littlest soldier woke up, Jack would salute them—as soldiers do. (Given the costume and the boy’s intentions, his mom would later refer to this episode as Jack’s first acting job.) But while he was standing there, at attention, he realized they were not asleep. The gentle movement of the bed had at first escaped his notice. Although his mother’s eyes were closed, she was awake; her lips were parted, her breathing was rapid and shallow, and the muscles of her neck were straining.

All that could be seen of the littlest soldier was his feet. He must have been lying with his head between Alice’s breasts, which were under the covers; he was probably recovering from a nightmare, or so Jack deduced. (That would explain the quivering of the bed.) Besides, Jack knew it was a night for bad dreams, having just had one himself; it seemed perfectly obvious to the boy that the soldier had suffered one, too, and had therefore climbed into bed with his mom. Jack no doubt still thought of the soldier as a fellow child.

Suddenly the littlest soldier’s nightmare returned with a vengeance. He violently kicked the covers off—Jack saw his bare bum in the bathroom light—and Alice must have squeezed him too hard, because he whimpered and groaned. That was when her eyes opened and Jack’s mom saw him standing there—another little soldier, this one at attention. Alice didn’t recognize her son at first; it must have been the uniform.

Her scream was a shock to Jack, as it was to the littlest soldier. When he saw the four-year-old in uniform, he screamed, too. (He sounded like a little boy again!) And Jack was suddenly so afraid of the mutual nightmare they must have been having that he, too, began screaming. He also peed in his pants—actually, in the littlest soldier’s pants.

“Jackie!” his mother cried, when she caught her breath.

“I dreamed I drowned in the moat,” Jack began. “Dead soldiers, from the past, were with me.
You
were there, too,” he told the littlest soldier.

The soldier didn’t look so little now. Jack was astonished at the size of his penis; it was half as long as the bayonet on the rifle he’d used to rescue Jack, and it was thrust forward, at an upward angle, in the manner of a bayonet, too.

“You better go,” Alice told the littlest soldier.

True to his calling, he took orders well; he marched straightaway into the bathroom, without a word of protest, and when he’d done his business there, he came back to Alice’s bedroom to fetch his clothes. Jack had taken off the soldier’s uniform, folded it neatly on the chair, and crawled into bed with his mom.

Together they watched the littlest soldier dress himself. Jack was embarrassed about pissing in his rescuer’s pants, and he could tell the exact moment when the little hero discovered what had happened. An expression of uncertainty and distress was on his face—not unlike the anxiety and discomfort Jack had seen there when the brave lad was inching across the thinly frozen moat in his long underwear.

But after all, he was a soldier; he gave Jack a glance of vast understanding and grudging respect, as if the boy’s peeing in his pants struck him as appropriate to the situation. And before he left, the littlest soldier gave Jack and his mother what Jack had intended to give them: a proper salute.

Despite having seen him stark naked, Jack hadn’t noticed a tattoo—not even a bandage. The boy thought about it, in lieu of falling back to sleep—which would, in all probability, return him to his nightmare about drowning in the Kastelsgraven.

He asked his mom his troubling question. “Did you give him a free tattoo? I didn’t see one.”

“I . . . certainly
did
give him one,” she replied, with some hesitation. “You just missed it.”

“What was it?” Jack asked.

“It was . . . a little soldier,” she answered, with more hesitation. “It was even littler than him.”

Having seen his half-a-bayonet of a penis, Jack had revised his impression of how
little
the soldier was, but all he said to his mother was: “Where did you put it?”

“On one of his ankles—the left one,” she said.

The boy thought that the bathroom light must have been playing tricks on him, because he’d looked closely at the soldier’s ankles and hadn’t seen a tattoo there. He assumed that he’d just missed it, as his mom had said.

Jack fell asleep in her arms, as he often did after nightmares—and not at all in such an uncomfortable-looking position as the one the littlest soldier had taken up with her.

That was Copenhagen, which Jack Burns wouldn’t visit again for almost thirty years. But he would never forget Tattoo Ole and Ladies’ Man Madsen, and their kindness to his mom and him. Or the frozen moat—the Kastelsgraven, which almost claimed him. Or the littlest soldier, who saved him—and by so doing, saved his mother, too.

In reality, Jack understood little of what had happened there. Although he didn’t know it, a pattern had begun. At the time, he had lots to learn, especially in those areas his mom kept largely to herself—not only the meaning of a free tattoo but all the other things as well.

And when he had that nightmare about drowning in the moat, it was always the same. He had already drowned. There was no more struggle, only a lasting cold. In eternity, Jack was joined by centuries of Europe’s dead soldiers. The little hero who’d saved him stood out among them—not for the disproportionate size of his penis but for the stoic quality of his frozen salute.

3

Rescued by a Swedish Accountant

O
ne day, when Jack was older, he would ask his mother why his father hadn’t gone to England—why they’d not looked for him there. After all, England has its share of women and organs—and a long-established history of tattooing as well.

Alice simply said that William was Scots enough to hate the English. He would never have gone to England for a woman, let alone for an organ—not even for a tattoo. But William Burns wasn’t quite Scots enough to have kept the Callum, was he?

From Copenhagen, Alice and Jack took the ferry across the sound to Malmö and then the train to Stockholm. In Sweden, in January, the hours of daylight are few. It was the New Year, 1970. It seemed that William had gone underground not long after his arrival, and Doc Forest wouldn’t open his first tattoo parlor for two years. Doc was almost as hard to find as William Burns.

Alice and Jack went first to the Hedvig Eleonora Church. The building was a glowing dome of gold, surrounded by tombstones in the snow; the altar and the altar rail were also gold. The organ façade was a greenish gold, and the pews were painted a gray-green color—a faint, silvery tint, not as dark as moss. The glass in the paired, symmetrical windows of the rotunda was uncolored, as somber as the winter light.

The Hedvig Eleonora was the most beautiful church Jack had ever seen. It was Lutheran, with a fine choir tradition. This time, William had made the fond acquaintance of three choirgirls before the first learned of the third. Although it was the second choirgirl, Ulrika, who exposed him, surely the other two, Astrid and Vendela, were just as upset. Until then, William had been doing rather well—assisting Torvald Torén on the organ at the Hedvig Eleonora, and studying composition at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm.

Poor Astrid, Ulrika, and Vendela—Jack later wished he could have met them. He remembered meeting Torvald Torén; even to Jack, Torén seemed young. Twenty-four
is
young, and Torén was a slight man with quick movements and lively eyes. Jack had the feeling that his mom was as utterly disarmed by Torén as she was by his devastating news of the three choirgirls. And unlike many organists Jack would meet, Torvald Torén was well dressed. The boy was struck by the businesslike efficiency of Torén’s black briefcase, too.