Until I Find You by John Irving Page B

lobby was overcrowded with foreign sportswriters and skating fans. The world championships in speed skating were due to take place at Bislett Stadium in the center of Oslo in mid-February, but the journalists and fans had arrived early. Jack was sorry they were leaving; he’d been hoping to see the skaters.
    That February, the temperature in Oslo was eight degrees below average. The cold weather meant fast ice, the front-desk clerk said. Jack asked his mom if speed skaters skated in the dark, or were there lights at Bislett Stadium? She didn’t know.
    He didn’t ask his mother what Helsinki would be like, because he was afraid she might say, “Darker.” In the pale midday light, their hotel room again had an amber hue, but without the golden glow of Ingrid Moe’s skin, Oslo seemed plunged in an eternal darkness.
    In his dreams, Jack still saw that girl’s inflamed ribs and the throbbing heart on the side of her breast. When he’d held the gauze against her skin, he could feel the heat of her tattoo; her hot heart had burned his hand through the bandage.
    When Jack and Alice made their way down the carpeted hall where he’d watched Ingrid Moe walk away—like a woman—the boy was thinking that their search for his father was also a dream, only it was neverending.
    One day or night, they would walk into a restaurant—a popular place called Salve, where the sailors in Helsinki went—and they would meet a waitress who’d already met William Burns. She would tell them what she’d told him—namely, where to go to be tattooed—but by the time they went there, William would have acquired another piece of music on his skin. According to Jack’s mother, his father also would have seduced some woman or girl he’d first met in a church—and no amount of sacred music could persuade a single member of that church’s congregation to help Jack and Alice find him.
    Once again William would have vanished, the way the greatest music from the best organ in the most magnificent cathedral can drown out any choir and displace all other human sounds—even laughter, even grief, even sorrow of the kind Jack heard his mother give in to when she believed he was fast asleep.
    “Good-bye, Oslo,” Jack whispered in the hall, where he believed that Ingrid Moe had walked away with a whole heart—not one ripped in two.
    His mom bent down and kissed the back of his neck. “Hello, Helsinki!” she whispered in his ear.
    Once again, Jack reached for her hand. It was the one thing he knew how to do. As it would turn out, it was about the only thing he really knew.

5
    Failure in Finland
    T hey took the long trip back to Stockholm, the way they had come—then sailed from Stockholm to Helsinki, an overnight voyage through the Gulf of Finland. It was so cold that the salt spray froze on Jack’s face if he stood outside for more than a minute. Undaunted by the weather, some Finns and Swedes were drinking and singing songs on the icy deck until midnight. Alice observed that they were also throwing up—with best results to the leeward side of the ship. In the morning, Jack saw some Finns and Swedes who had suffered the misfortune of throwing up to the windward side of the vessel.
    Alice found out from the drunks, many of them young people, that the hotel in Helsinki best suited to a tattoo artist’s circumstances was the Hotel Torni, where the so-called American Bar was a hangout for well-off students. One of the Finns or Swedes on deck referred to it as the place where you went to meet brave girls. “Brave girls” were right up Daughter Alice’s alley, since she took “brave” to mean that the girls (and the boys who wanted to meet them) would be open to being tattooed.
    The hotel itself had seen better days. Because the old iron-grate elevator was “temporarily” out of service and they were on the fourth floor, Jack and Alice became well acquainted with the stairs, which they climbed holding hands. They had a room without a bath or