"What little I could manage to say in church every Sunday," Torvald Toren 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 Malaren with your father's mistress--you were on display, Jack."

"What?" Jack said. Surely Toren couldn't have meant Torsten Lindberg's wife! (Agneta Nilsson, as Jack remembered her--because she preferred to use her maiden name.)

Torvald Toren 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 Toren 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 Malaren 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.")

Wh

at 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 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.)

Tags: John Irving Fiction
Source: readsnovelonline.net