The postcard was of one of Amsterdam’s narrow canals; of course you couldn’t see the prostitutes in their windows or doorways in the picture. “Jack sends his love to Lottie,” Alice wrote. Jack wouldn’t remember if there was more to the message. He drew a smiling face next to Lottie’s name; there was just enough room beside the face for him to write the initial J.
“Lottie will know who it is,” his mom assured him.
Off to Toronto went the postcard with Jack’s happy face.
But what about that little boy whose capacity for consecutive memory, when he was three, was comparable to that of a nine-year-old? What had happened to Jack’s retention of detail and understanding of linear time, which, when he was four, were equal to an eleven-year-old’s?
Not in Amsterdam, where Jack imagined he had lived with his mother for a couple of months before they ever set foot in the Oude Kerk and heard that vast organ. In reality, of course, Alice wouldn’t have waited a week to go there.
The Oude Kerk, the Old Church in the center of the red-light district, was probably consecrated in 1306 by the Bishop of Utrecht and is the oldest building in Amsterdam. The church survived two great fires—the first in 1421, the second in 1452—and the altars were badly damaged in the iconoclastic fury of 1566. In 1578, when Amsterdam officially became a Protestant city, the Oude Kerk was stripped of its Roman Catholic decoration and renovated to suit the Protestant religious service. The pulpit dates from 1643, the choir screen from 1681. Rembrandt’s first wife is buried in the Old Church, and there are five tombs in commemoration of seventeenth-century Dutch sea heroes.
The organ, which Kari Vaara correctly called vast, is also old. It was built by Christian Vater of Hamburg, Germany, in 1726. It took Vater two years to build the huge and beautiful instrument of forty-three stops, which went immediately out of tune the moment more than one register was pulled. The organ’s failure was also vast—for eleven years, it was out of tune. Finally, a man named Müller was assigned the task of dismantling the Vater organ to investigate the problem. It took him five years to fix it.
Even so, the organ in the Oude Kerk continued to be out of tune most of the time; it is tuned before every concert because of the temperature in the old building—the Oude Kerk cannot be heated properly.
It was cold in the Old Church that day, and Jack and his mom sat on the organ bench with the junior organist—a dough-faced kid who was too young to shave. He was a child prodigy, apparently. Alice said she was told all about the youngster’s talent by the senior organist, Jacob Venderbos, who’d been too busy to see her. (Venderbos also played the organ at the Westerkerk in Amsterdam, and at churches in Haarlem and Delft.) Alice got to talk to his fifteen-year-old apprentice instead.
The young genius’s name was Frans Donker, and he was as afraid of Alice as any boy that age could be. Like Andreas Breivik, he couldn’t look at her when he talked. As near as Jack could tell, what his mother learned from the frightened child prodigy was that Kari Vaara had been wrong to think that his father had been hired to play the organ in the Oude Kerk—he’d been hired only to keep it in tune. For this ongoing and demanding service, William was permitted to practice on the vast instrument. It was indeed a special organ, Frans Donker told Jack and Alice—“both great and difficult”—and William not only kept it in better tune than anyone could remember; his practice sessions were both famous and infamous. (By now Jack was distracted by the smell of baby powder and thoroughly confused.)
“I have the greatest respect for William—as an organist,” young Donker was saying.
“I thought he was just an organ-tuner now,” Alice replied.
Frans Donker let her remark pass. He solemnly explained that, from early morning through the evening, the Oude Kerk was a most active church. In addition to the religious services and choir rehearsals, various cultural events, which were open to the public, were scheduled at night—not only concerts and recitals, but also lectures and poetry readings. It simply wouldn’t do to have someone tuning an organ during the Old Church’s lengthy working hours.
“So when did he do it?” Alice asked.
“Well …” Young Donker hesitated. Maybe he said, “William wouldn’t start the tuning until after midnight. Most nights, he wouldn’t begin his practice sessions until two or three in the morning.”
“So he was playing to an empty church?” Alice asked.
“Well …” Frans Donker hesitated again. Jack was completely bored, his mind elsewhere, but he thought he heard Donker say: “The Oude Kerk is a very big church, a very reverberant building. The reverberation time is five seconds.” The child prodigy glanced at Jack and explained: “That’s the time it takes for the echo of what you play to come back to you.”
“Oh,” the boy said; he was falling asleep.
Young Donker couldn’t stop explaining. “Your father’s favorite Bach toccatas were written with the effect of a big space in mind. Space enlarges music—”
“Forget the music,” Alice interrupted him. “Was he playing to an empty church?”
“Well …”
If what followed was hard for Alice to understand, it was way over a four-year-old’s head. If the reverberation time within the Oude Kerk was five seconds, how long did it take for the echo of the organ in Bach’s most dramatic works—his D Minor Toccata, for example—to reach the prostitutes in their rooms on the Oudekerksplein, the horseshoe-shaped street that surrounded the Old Church? (Six or seven seconds, maybe? Or did the whores hear it in five seconds, too?)
Outside the church, the organ would have been muted, but at two or three in the morning, when the action in the red-light district was winding down, the cold winter air would have carried the sound well beyond the Oudekerksplein. The women working in the narrowest, nastiest alley—in the nearby Trompettersteeg—would have had no trouble hearing William Burns playing his beloved Handel or his favorite Bach. Even across the canal, on the far side of the Oudezijds Voorburgwal, the prostitutes still standing in their doorways would have heard him.
“At that time of night, many of the older prostitutes are ready to go home—they stop working,” Frans Donker managed to say, with trepidation—as if this part of his story might be in not-around-Jack territory. (Donker didn’t know that Jack believed prostitutes were simply tireless advice-givers, trying to teach the most pathetic of men what they needed to learn about women.)
There were many older prostitutes working in the red-light district in those days—some in their sixties—and a lot of them worked in the ground-floor rooms surrounding the Old Church. The older women in the district might have been more easily moved by church music than their younger counterparts, although Donker admitted that a few of the younger prostitutes became overnight fans of Bach and Handel.
“You mean the prostitutes came to hear him play?” Alice asked.
Frans fidgeted on the organ bench; he slid to one side, then the other, on the smooth leather seat. (There’s that baby-powder smell again, Jack was thinking.)
Years later, the smell of baby powder would remind Jack of the prostitutes; he could almost see the tired women taking their makeup off and hanging the costumes of their profession in their small closets. They didn’t wear high heels or short skirts when they went home—or when they came to work in the morning or afternoon. Their street clothes were blue jeans or old slacks; their boots or heavy shoes had no heels to speak of, and they usually wore an unflattering but warm-looking coat and a wool hat. They didn’t look like prostitutes, except that it was two or three in the morning and what other sort of woman would be out at that time by herself?