Authors: John Irving
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.”