With a grandiose gesture to the green-and-gold instrument, which positively shimmered, Breivik said: “We have the funeral of King Olav the Fifth to thank for this. January 1991—I’ll never forget it. The old Jørgensen was such a disgrace. The Prime Minister himself insisted that money be raised for a new organ.”
“I see,” Jack said.
Andreas Breivik had studied choral music in Stuttgart; he’d furthered his organ studies in London. (This hardly mattered to Jack, but he nodded politely; Breivik’s education, not to mention his mastery of English, meant a great deal to Breivik.)
“I’ve seen your films, of course—very entertaining! But you don’t seem to have followed in your father’s musical footsteps, so to speak.”
“No—no musical footsteps,” Jack said. “I took after my mother, it seems.”
“Are you tattooed?” Breivik asked.
“No. Are you?”
“Good Lord, no!” Andreas Breivik said. “Your dad was a talented musician, a generous teacher, an engaging man. But his tattoos were his own business. We didn’t discuss them. I never saw them.”
“Mr. Breivik, please tell me what happened. I don’t understand what happened.”
Jack remembered the cleaning woman in the church—how horrified she’d been to see him and his mom. He recalled what little he’d understood of his mom’s seduction of Andreas Breivik, and how Ingrid Moe had come to her for a tattoo—how Ingrid had wanted a broken heart and Alice had given the girl a whole one. But why had Alice insisted on talking to Ingrid Moe in the first place, and what information about Jack’s father could either Ingrid or Andreas possibly have given Jack’s mom? His dad hadn’t run away; Alice hadn’t been trying to find William. What was there about William that Alice didn’t already know?
Andreas Breivik was less pompous in relating this story; he wasn’t proud of it, nor was it an easy story for him to tell. But the pattern, which Jack had failed to grasp till now, was really rather simple.
Everywhere Jack and his mom went, after Copenhagen, they arrived ahead of his dad. Alice not only expected William to follow them—she knew how much William wanted to see his son—but Alice also knew ahead of time where William would be inclined to travel next. You didn’t just choose a church and an organ, Breivik told Jack; these appointments took time to arrange. There was always an experienced organist with whom a relatively inexperienced organist wanted to study next, and the church where that mentor played had its own hierarchical way of choosing apprentices.
No organist wanted more than a few students, and only the most gifted students were chosen. With an organ, because of how many notes there were to play, sight reading was mandatory. Students with very narrow tastes, or those who disliked certain core composers, were generally discouraged; most younger students were irritating, because they liked to practice only loud or flashy music.
“You had to have a few irons in the fire,” Andreas Breivik said. He meant that you had to be making plans way ahead of yourself. Where was the next organist you wanted to study with? What church? Which organ? In this world, you were both an apprentice and a teacher; as an apprentice, you also needed to go where you’d have students. (Not too many, but enough to pay the rent.)
This was the way it worked: when William was still playing the organ at the Citadel Church in Denmark, he was already thinking about Sweden—about apprenticing himself to Torvald Torén, about playing the organ at the Hedvig Eleonora in Stockholm—and all the while he was in Stockholm, William was planning to come (eventually) to Oslo, where he could study with Rolf Karlsen and play the organ at the Domkirke.
What Alice did, starting in Copenhagen, was to find out which irons in the fire were the hottest—what city was the next in line for William. Jack and his mom would go there, and Alice would establish herself; she would set up shop and wait for William to arrive. Then, systematically, Alice would set out to destroy the relationships William valued most. First of all, those friends he might have made in the church—possibly even the organist who was his mentor. But Alice more often chose easier targets; in the case of Oslo, she chose William’s two best students, Andreas Breivik and Ingrid Moe.
Contrary to what Jack had believed for twenty-eight years, his dad hadn’t seduced Ingrid Moe. She was sixteen at the time, and engaged to be married to young Andreas Breivik. They’d been childhood sweethearts; they even played the same instruments, first the piano and then the organ. And William prized them as students—not only because they were talented and hardworking, but also because they were in love. (Having been in love with Karin Ringhof, William Burns had a high regard for young musicians in love.)
“Your father was more than a terrific organist and a great teacher,” Andreas Breivik told Jack. “In Oslo, the story of what had happened to him in Copenhagen preceded him. He was already a tragic figure.”
“So my mother seduced you?” Jack asked him.
His once delicate, now slightly puffy features hardened. “I had known only Ingrid,” Breivik said. “A young man who’s had only one girlfriend is vulnerable to an older woman—perhaps especially to a woman with a reputation. Your mother put it to me rather bluntly: she said—she was teasing me, of course—‘Andreas, you’re really just another kind of virgin, aren’t you?’ ”
“Where did you tattoo him?” Jack remembered asking his mom.
“Where he’ll never forget it,” she’d whispered to Jack, smiling at Andreas. (Possibly the sternum, Jack had imagined; that would explain why the young man had trembled at her touch.)
“Just keep it covered for a day,” Jack had said to Breivik, as the young organ student was leaving; it looked like it hurt him to walk. “It will feel like a sunburn,” Jack had told him. “Better put some moisturizer on it.”
But Andreas didn’t know anything. After the organ student had gone, Alice had sobbed, “If he’d known anything, he would have told me.”
She’d meant that Andreas Breivik didn’t know what irons William had in the fire; the boy had no idea where William was thinking of going next. But Ingrid Moe knew, and Alice wasted little time in letting Ingrid know that she’d slept with the girl’s fiancé. Ingrid had never felt so betrayed. Her speech impediment isolated her; she’d always been shy about meeting people. Ingrid couldn’t forgive Andreas for being unfaithful to her. It didn’t help that Alice wouldn’t leave the girl alone.
Jack remembered that Sunday when his mom took the shirt cardboard to church—how she’d stood in the center aisle at the end of the service, with the shirt cardboard saying INGRID MOE held to her chest. Jack had thought Rolf Karlsen must have been playing the organ that Sunday, because everyone said Karlsen was such a big deal and the organ sounded especially good.
But the organist that Sunday had been William Burns. It was the one time his father had played the organ for Jack, but—not unlike how the boy had met his dad in the restaurant at the Hotel Bristol—Jack didn’t know it, and neither did William.
“I’m sorry he hurt you,” Alice had said to Ingrid Moe, when the girl had come to the hotel for her broken-heart tattoo. But the he had been Andreas Breivik, who’d slept with Jack’s mother—not, as Jack had thought, his father, who had never slept with Ingrid Moe.
Jack remembered how Ingrid’s exquisite prettiness was marred by what an obvious strain it was for her to speak. Not that he’d understood her very well; for all these years, Jack had thought of her speech impediment as an agony connected with kissing. (When he’d imagined his father kissing the girl, Jack had felt ashamed.)