Until I Find You (18 page)

Saskia shrugged. “I find I forget it, most of the time,” she said.

They watched Jacob Bril scurry down the Sint Annenstraat, as purposefully as a rat. The lone prostitute at the far end of the street was no longer in her doorway; she must have seen Bril coming.

“Jacob Bril is a good reason for me to be off the street before midnight,” Alice said. “I can’t imagine what he’d say if he saw me sitting in a window or heard me singing in a doorway.” She laughed in that brittle way, the kind of laughter Jack recognized as a precursor to her tears.

It was Els or Saskia who said: “There are better reasons than Bril to be off the street before midnight.”

They came out of the Warmoesstraat in the Dam Square and walked into the Krasnapolsky. “What’s fornication?” Jack asked.

“Giving advice,” Alice answered.

“Good advice, mostly,” Saskia said.

“Necessary advice, anyway,” Els added.

“What’s sin?” Jack asked.

“Just about everything,” Alice answered.

“There’s good sin and bad sin,” Els told Jack.

“There
is
?” Saskia said; she looked as confused as Jack was.

“I mean good advice and bad advice,” Els explained. It seemed to Jack that sin was more complicated than fornication.

Entering the hotel room, Alice said: “The thing about sin, Jack, is that some people think it’s very important and other people don’t even believe it exists.”

“What do
you
think about it?” the boy asked. Alice appeared to trip, although Jack saw nothing that she could have tripped on; she just started to fall, but Els caught her.

“Damn heels,” Alice said, but she wasn’t wearing heels.

“Now listen, Jack,” Saskia spoke up. “We’ve got a job to do—making sure your mom wears the right clothes is important. We can’t be distracted by a conversation about something as difficult as sin.”

“We’ll have that conversation later,” Els assured the boy.

“Have it once the singing starts—have it without me,” Alice said, but Els just steered her to the closet.

Saskia was already looking through Alice’s dresser drawers. She held up a bra that would have been much too big for her but not nearly big enough for Els. Saskia said something in Dutch, which made Els laugh. “You’re going to be disappointed in my clothes,” Alice told the prostitutes.

The way Jack remembered it, his mom tried on every article of clothing in her closet. Alice was always very modest around Jack. He never saw his mother naked or half naked, and for an hour or more in the Krasnapolsky was the first time he saw so much of her in a bra and panties; even then, Alice clasped the sides of her breasts with her upper arms and elbows, and crossed her hands on her chest to cover herself. Jack actually saw more of Saskia and Els than he did of his mother, because the two women surrounded her as they dressed and undressed her—they were full of advice.

Finally a dress was chosen; it struck Jack as pretty but plain. The dress was like his mom
—she
was pretty but plain, at least in comparison to how the women looked and dressed in the red-light district. It was a sleeveless black dress with a high neckline; it fit her closely, but it wasn’t too tight.

Alice didn’t own a pair of genuine high heels, but the heels she chose for the occasion were medium-high—or they were high for her—and she put on her pearl necklace. It had belonged to her mother; her father gave it to her on the day she left Scotland for Nova Scotia. Alice thought they were cultured pearls, but she didn’t really know. The necklace meant a lot to her, no matter what kind of pearls they were.

“Won’t I be cold in a sleeveless dress?” Alice asked Saskia and Els. The women found a fitted black cardigan in the closet.

“That sweater is too small for me,” Alice complained. “I can’t button it up.”

“You don’t need to button it,” Els told her. “It’s just to keep your arms warm.”

“You should leave the sweater open and hug your arms around yourself,” Saskia said, showing her how to do it. “If you look like you’re a little cold, that’s sexy.”

“I don’t want to look sexy,” Alice replied.

“What’s sexy?” Jack asked.

“If you look sexy, the men think you can give them good advice,” Els explained. The two prostitutes were fussing over Alice’s hair, and there was still the matter of lipstick to resolve—and makeup.

“I don’t want lipstick, I don’t want makeup,” Alice told them, but they wouldn’t listen to her.

“Believe me, you want lipstick,” Els told her.

“Something dark,” Saskia said. “And eye shadow.”

“I
hate
eye shadow!” Alice cried.

“You don’t want William looking in your eyes and really seeing you, do you?” Els asked her. “I mean, supposing for a moment that he actually shows up.” That quieted Alice; she let the women make her up.

Jack just watched the transformation. His mother’s face looked more chiseled, her mouth bolder; most foreign of all was the darkness shrouding her eyes, which made her look as if someone close to her had died and she was keeping the death from Jack. Overall, his mom looked a lot older.

“How do I look?” Alice asked.

“You look smashing!” Saskia said. (There were always a lot of Englishmen in the red-light district. Saskia probably thought that “smashing” sounded good in English.)

“Forget a crowd—you’re going to draw a
mob,
” Els told Alice, but Alice didn’t necessarily like the sound of that.

“How do
you
think I look, Jackie?” she asked.

“You look very beautiful,” he told her, “but not really like my mom.” This seemed to alarm her.

“You look like Alice to me,” Saskia said reassuringly.

“Sure you do,” Els told her. “All we did to her, Jack, was make her more of a secret.”

“What’s the secret?” Alice asked.

“Els means we had to hide you a little,” Saskia said.

“What we hid was the
mom
in her, Jack,” Els added.

“Because that’s just for
you
to see,” Saskia said, rumpling the boy’s hair.

“I’ll be fine,” Alice announced. She turned away from the mirror and didn’t look back.

The red-light district in Amsterdam is smaller than many tourists realize. It is such a warren of tiny streets—at peak hours, densely populated—that first-time visitors get lost in the maze and imagine that the prostitutes in their windows and doorways go on forever. In truth, you could stroll from one end of the district to the other—from the Damstraat to the Zeedijk—in under ten minutes. From the area of the Old Church to Saskia’s room on the Bloedstraat, or Els’s room on the Stoofsteeg, was less than a five-minute walk.

On a Saturday afternoon, word of a new girl in a window or a doorway spread quickly. A woman who didn’t look like a prostitute, singing what sounded like a hymn, was dividing her time between a doorway on the Stoofsteeg and one on the Bloedstraat. The story raced through the red-light district like a fire. Before nightfall, the older women working on the Oudekerksplein had linked arms and come to hear for themselves how Daughter Alice could sing. Anja came with Annelies and Naughty Nanda; Katja came with Angry Anouk and Mistress Mies. Around suppertime, Roos the Redhead showed up with Old Jolanda. The aging prostitutes said nothing and didn’t stay long. They had expected Alice to make a fool of herself, but when a pretty woman has a pretty voice, she rarely looks or sounds like a fool.

To those men prowling the streets, Alice’s singing might have seemed as beguiling a come-on as the jingling bracelets on Saskia’s burned arm; yet Alice rejected all comers. She was a woman occupying a prostitute’s doorway, or sitting in a prostitute’s window, but she just shook her head to every potential client who expressed an interest in her; she occasionally needed to interrupt her hymn and more firmly say no. Once, when she was using Els’s room, Alice had to tell a particularly persistent gentleman that she was waiting for her boyfriend and did not want to miss him by being busy with a customer when he showed up. (Saskia supplied a Dutch translation and the man finally went away.) And when she was using Saskia’s room, Alice was heckled by a bunch of young men. She must have turned down one of the boys, or all of them, and in response to being spurned, they had gathered around her doorway and were loudly singing a song of their own.

Alice went inside Saskia’s room and closed the door; she sat in the window, still singing the words to “Breathe on Me, Breath of God,” although no one could hear her. Els told the boys to move on; all but one of them were still arguing with her when Nico Oudejans suddenly appeared in the Bloedstraat. When the boys didn’t walk away fast enough, Nico shouted at them and they began to run. The one boy who hadn’t argued with Els was running backward—he simply couldn’t take his eyes off Alice.

Nico smiled at Jack, who waved to his mom in the window. She just went on singing. “I’ll keep checking on her, Jack—and on you, too,” the policeman said.

It would have been easier to invite the men inside the room; their disappointment in being denied advice ran the gamut from utter incomprehension to anger. Some would simply look embarrassed and skulk away—others were baffled or belligerent. Alice just kept singing; she wouldn’t even stop long enough to eat a ham-and-cheese croissant, which Saskia and Jack brought her. And not long after dark, Tattoo Theo paid her a visit. He had stuffed a basket with a bottle of wine and some fruit and cheese, but Alice wouldn’t accept it. She gave Rademaker a hug and a kiss; then she waved Els and Jack over to her doorway and gave them the basket. Naturally, they took the food and wine to Saskia, who was always starving.

Robbie de Wit showed up, too. He looked heartbroken at the sight of Alice singing soundlessly in Saskia’s window. Robbie had brought her a couple of marijuana cigarettes, which Alice accepted; when she left the window for the doorway, she would light one of the joints and take a hit from it while she went on singing.

It would be years before Jack made the connection—namely, that it was one of those nights Bob Dylan could have written a terrific song about.

Around ten o’clock that night, when the red-light district was very crowded, Els and Saskia and Jack accompanied Alice on the short walk from Saskia’s room on the Bloedstraat to Els’s room on the Stoofsteeg. Els was carrying Jack. The boy was half asleep, with his head on her shoulder. Alice didn’t sing when she was changing rooms. “Do you think William’s ever going to show up?” she asked.

“I
never
thought he was going to show up,” Saskia said.

“You should call it a night, Alice,” Els told her. She unlocked the door to her room, and Alice took up her usual position in the doorway. She was about to start the hymn again when she saw Femke coming toward her on the Stoofsteeg.

“You’re not singing,” Femke said.

“He’s not coming, is he?” Alice asked her.

Both Saskia and Els started in on Femke—they were furious and let her know it. Jack woke up, but he had no idea what they were saying. It was all in Dutch. Femke didn’t back down to them, not a bit. Els and Saskia kept after her. Jack thought Els was going to throw Femke down on the cobblestone street, but they stopped shouting when Alice began to sing. Jack had never heard her do “Breathe on Me, Breath of God” any better. Femke looked undone by her voice. Possibly Femke said, “I didn’t think you’d actually
do
it.” Alice just kept singing—if anything, a little louder. But Jack was so out of it, for all he knew, Femke might have said, “I didn’t think he’d actually
accept
it.”

As Jack understood things, his father was playing a piano on a cruise ship—or
someone
was. The piano seemed to surprise Alice, but most organists learn how to play piano first—certainly William had. Maybe the surprise was that William wanted to sail to Australia and get tattooed by Cindy Ray.

Alice had switched hymns, but she was nonetheless continuing to sing—heedless of such a small thing as punctuation, or the fact that William might already have been on his way to Australia. “
The King of love my Shepherd is,
” she sang. (She just kept repeating that line.)

Did William hope that Australia would be too far away for Alice and Jack to follow him there? Jack was falling asleep on Els’s big, soft bosom. Alice had switched hymns again and showed no sign of stopping. “
Sweet Sacrament divine,
” she sang repeatedly. The purity of Alice’s voice followed Femke down the street. By the time Femke left the Stoofsteeg, Alice had switched back to “Breathe on Me, Breath of God” and Jack woke up.

“You can stop now, Alice,” Saskia said, but Alice wouldn’t stop.

“Where’s Australia?” Jack asked Els. (He just knew that Australia wasn’t on their itinerary.)

“Don’t worry, Jack—you’re not going anywhere near Australia,” Saskia said.

“It’s on the other side of the
world,
” Els told him. The boy felt better thinking that his dad might be on the other side of the world; yet this wouldn’t prevent Jack from imagining that his father was somehow watching him from a crowd.

“Come on, Alice—it’s time to stop,” Saskia said.

“
The King of love my Shepherd is,
” Alice started up again, a little tonelessly.

They’d been so interested in watching Femke’s departure that they hadn’t noticed Jacob Bril’s arrival. It wasn’t even midnight, but there was Bril on the Stoofsteeg, and he wasn’t walking. He stood paralyzed in a religious rage. “That’s a hymn you’re singing—that’s a
prayer
!” Bril yelled at Alice.

She looked right at him and went ahead with “Sweet Sacrament Divine.” (In her state of mind, maybe three hymns—or just their titles—were all she could remember.)

“Blasphemy!” Bril shouted. “Sacrilege!”

Saskia said something in Dutch to him; it didn’t sound especially religious. Els stepped up to Bril and shoved him; he dropped to one knee but kept himself from falling with the heel of one hand on the cobblestones. When he straightened up, Els shoved him again. He managed to stay on his feet, but he bounced off the side of the building. “Not around Jack,” Els told him calmly. She stepped forward to shove him again, but Bril backed away from her.