Until I Find You

“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 Malaren. 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 Toren 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,” Toren 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