Until I Find You

"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 Jack had looked at him, William had looked away.

And there'd been a bitterness in William's voice that made Jack look at him again--most notably when the young father had said to his son, "Maybe some other time."

"Come with me, my little actor," Alice had whispered in Jack's ear, and Jack's dad closed his eyes--William didn't want to see his son go.