"How do I look?" Alice asked.
"You look smashing!" Saskia said. (There were always a lot of Englishmen in the red-light district. Saskia probably thought t
hat "smashing" sounded good in English.)
"Forget a crowd--you're going to draw a mob," Els told Alice, but Alice didn't necessarily like the sound of that.
"How do you think I look, Jackie?" she asked.
"You look very beautiful," he told her, "but not really like my mom." This seemed to alarm her.
"You look like Alice to me," Saskia said reassuringly.
"Sure you do," Els told her. "All we did to her, Jack, was make her more of a secret."
"What's the secret?" Alice asked.
"Els means we had to hide you a little," Saskia said.
"What we hid was the mom in her, Jack," Els added.
"Because that's just for you to see," Saskia said, rumpling the boy's hair.
"I'll be fine," Alice announced. She turned away from the mirror and didn't look back.
The red-light district in Amsterdam is smaller than many tourists realize. It is such a warren of tiny streets--at peak hours, densely populated--that first-time visitors get lost in the maze and imagine that the prostitutes in their windows and doorways go on forever. In truth, you could stroll from one end of the district to the other--from the Damstraat to the Zeedijk--in under ten minutes. From the area of the Old Church to Saskia's room on the Bloedstraat, or Els's room on the Stoofsteeg, was less than a five-minute walk.
On a Saturday afternoon, word of a new girl in a window or a doorway spread quickly. A woman who didn't look like a prostitute, singing what sounded like a hymn, was dividing her time between a doorway on the Stoofsteeg and one on the Bloedstraat. The story raced through the red-light district like a fire. Before nightfall, the older women working on the Oudekerksplein had linked arms and come to hear for themselves how Daughter Alice could sing. Anja came with Annelies and Naughty Nanda; Katja came with Angry Anouk and Mistress Mies. Around suppertime, Roos the Redhead showed up with Old Jolanda. The aging prostitutes said nothing and didn't stay long. They had expected Alice to make a fool of herself, but when a pretty woman has a pretty voice, she rarely looks or sounds like a fool.
To those men prowling the streets, Alice's singing might have seemed as beguiling a come-on as the jingling bracelets on Saskia's burned arm; yet Alice rejected all comers. She was a woman occupying a prostitute's doorway, or sitting in a prostitute's window, but she just shook her head to every potential client who expressed an interest in her; she occasionally needed to interrupt her hymn and more firmly say no. Once, when she was using Els's room, Alice had to tell a particularly persistent gentleman that she was waiting for her boyfriend and did not want to miss him by being busy with a customer when he showed up. (Saskia supplied a Dutch translation and the man finally went away.) And when she was using Saskia's room, Alice was heckled by a bunch of young men. She must have turned down one of the boys, or all of them, and in response to being spurned, they had gathered around her doorway and were loudly singing a song of their own.
Alice went inside Saskia's room and closed the door; she sat in the window, still singing the words to "Breathe on Me, Breath of God," although no one could hear her. Els told the boys to move on; all but one of them were still arguing with her when Nico Oudejans suddenly appeared in the Bloedstraat. When the boys didn't walk away fast enough, Nico shouted at them and they began to run. The one boy who hadn't argued with Els was running backward--he simply couldn't take his eyes off Alice.
Nico smiled at Jack, who waved to his mom in the window. She just went on singing. "I'll keep checking on her, Jack--and on you, too," the policeman said.
It would have been easier to invite the men inside the room; their disappointment in being denied advice ran the gamut from utter incomprehension to anger. Some would simply look embarrassed and skulk away--others were baffled or belligerent. Alice just kept singing; she wouldn't even stop long enough to eat a ham-and-cheese croissant, which Saskia and Jack brought her. And not long after dark, Tattoo Theo paid her a visit. He had stuffed a basket with a bottle of wine and some fruit and cheese, but Alice wouldn't accept it. She gave Rademaker a hug and a kiss; then she waved Els and Jack over to her doorway and gave them the basket. Naturally, they took the food and wine to Saskia, who was always starving.
Robbie de Wit showed up, too. He looked heartbroken at the sight of Alice singing soundlessly in Saskia's window. Robbie had brought her a couple of marijuana cigarettes, which Alice accepted; when she left the window for the doorway, she would light one of the joints and take a hit from it while she went on singing.
It would be years before Jack made the connection--namely, that it was one of those nights Bob Dylan could have written a terrific song about.
Around ten o'clock that night, when the red-light district was very crowded, Els and Saskia and Jack accompanied Alice on the short walk from Saskia's room on the Bloedstraat to Els's room on the Stoofsteeg. Els was carrying Jack. The boy was half asleep, with his head on her shoulder. Alice didn't sing when she was changing rooms. "Do you think William's ever going to show up?" she asked.
"I never thought he was going to show up," Saskia said.
"You should call it a night, Alice," Els told her. She unlocked the door to her room, and Alice took up her usual position in the doorway. She was about to start the hymn again when she saw Femke coming toward her on the Stoofsteeg.
"You're not singing," Femke said.
"He's not coming, is he?" Alice asked her.
Both Saskia and Els started in on Femke--they were furious and let her know it. Jack woke up, but he had no idea what they were saying. It was all in Dutch. Femke didn't back down to them, not a bit. Els and Saskia kept after her. Jack thought Els was going to throw Femke down on the cobblestone street, but they stopped shouting when Alice began to sing. Jack had never heard her do "Breathe on Me, Breath of God" any better. Femke looked undone by her voice. Possibly Femke said, "I didn't think you'd actually do it." Alice just kept singing--if anything, a little louder. But Jack was so out of it, for all he knew, Femke might have said, "I didn't think he'd actually accept it."
As Jack understood things, his father was playing a piano on a cruise ship--or someone was. The piano seemed to surprise Alice, but most organists learn how to play piano first--certainly William had. Maybe the surprise was that William wanted to sail to Australia and get tattooed by Cindy Ray.
Alice had switched hymns, but she was nonetheless continuing to sing--heedless of such a small thing as punctuation, or the fact that William might already have been on his way to Australia. "The King of love my Shepherd is," she sang. (She just kept repeating that line.)
Did William hope that Australia would be too far away for Alice and Jack to follow him there? Jack was falling asleep on Els's big, soft bosom. Alice had switched hymns again and showed no sign of stopping. "Sweet Sacrament divine," she sang repeatedly. The purity of Alice's voice followed Femke down the street. By the time Femke left the Stoofsteeg, Alice had switched back to "Breathe on Me, Breath of God" and Jack woke up.