"Actually," Alice began again, "I was looking for a young organist, a foreigner named William Burns."
The cleaning woman closed her eyes as if in prayer, or with the hopeless conviction that her mop might turn into an actual crucifix and save her. She solemnly raised the mop and pointed it at Jack.
"That's his son!" the cleaning woman cried. "You'd have to be blind not to recognize those eyelashes."
It was the first time anyone had said Jack looked like his father. Jack's mother stared at him as if she were aware of the resemblance for the first time; she seemed suddenly no less alarmed than the cleaning woman.
"And you, poor wretch, must be his wife!" the cleaning woman told Alice.
"I once wanted to be," Alice answered. She held out her hand to the cleaning woman and said: "I'm Alice Stronach and this is my son, Jack."
The cleaning woman first wiped her hand on her hip, then gave Alice a firm handshake. Jack knew how firm it was because he saw his mom wince.
"I'm Else-Marie Lothe," the woman said. "God bless you, Jack," she said to the boy. Remembering the clerk at the front desk of the Bristol, Jack didn't shake her outstretched hand.
Else-Marie would not discuss the details of what had happened, except to say that the entire congregation couldn't put "the episode" behind them. Alice and her son should just go home, the cleaning woman told them.
"Who was the girl this time?" Alice asked.
"Ingrid Moe is not a girl--she's just a child!" Else-Marie cried.
"Not around Jack," Alice said.
The cleaning woman cupped Jack's ears in her dry, strong hands and said something he couldn't hear; nor could he hear his mother's response, but there was no "poor wretch" in Else-Marie's final remark to Alice. "No one will talk to you!" Else-Marie called after them, as they were leaving the Domkirke, her words echoing in the empty cathedral.
"The girl will--I mean the child," Alice said. "I'll talk to Ingrid Moe!"
But it was Jack's impression that, when they came a second time to the Oslo Cathedral, they were shunned. The cleaning woman wasn't there. A man on a stepladder was replacing burned-out lightbulbs in the bracket lamps mounted on the walls. He was too well dressed to be a janitor. (An especially conscientious parishioner, perhaps--the church's self-appointed fussbudget.) And whoever he was, it was clear that he knew who Jack and Alice were--he wasn't talking.
"Do you know William Burns, the Scotsman?" Alice asked, but the man just walked away. "Ingrid Moe! Do you know her?" Alice called after him. Although the lightbulb man kept walking, Jack had seen him flinch. (And there was that overfamiliar sound of the camera shutter again--when Jack was holding his mother's hand in front of the Domkirke. Someone took their picture as they were about to return to the Bristol.)
Finally, on a Saturday morning, an unseen organist was playing. Jack reached for his mother's hand, and she led the boy to the organ. He would wonder, only later, how she knew the way.
The organist sat one floor above the nave; to reach the organ, you needed to climb a set of stairs in the back of the cathedral. The organist was so intent on his playing that he didn't see Jack and Alice until they were standing right beside him.
"Mr. Rolf Karlsen?" Alice's voice doubted itself. The young man on the organ bench was a teenager--in no way could he have been Rolf Karlsen.
"No," the teenager said. He'd instantly stopped playing. "I'm just a student."
"You play very well," Alice told him. She let go of Jack's hand and sat down on the bench beside the student.
He looked a little like Ladies' Man Lars--blond and blue-eyed and delicate, but younger and untattooed. No one had broken his nose, which was as small as a girl's, and he was without Lars's misbegotten goatee. His hands had frozen on the organ stops; Alice reached for his nearer hand and pulled it into her lap.
"Look at me," she whispered. (He couldn't.) "Then listen," she said, and began her story. "I used to know a young man like you; his name was William Burns. This is his son," she said, with a nod in Jack's direction. "Look at him." (He wouldn't.)
"I'm not supposed to talk to you!" the student blurted out.
With her free hand, Alice touched his face, and he turned to her. A son sees his mother in a certain way; especially when he was a child, Jack Burns thought his mom was so beautiful that she was hard to look at when she put her face close to his. Jack understood why the young organist shut his eyes.
"If you won't talk to me, I'll talk to Ingrid Moe," Alice told him, but Jack had shut his eyes--in sympathy with the student, perhaps--and whenever the boy's eyes were closed, he didn't hear very well. There were too many distracting things happening in the dark.
"Ingrid has a speech impediment," the student was saying. "She doesn't like to talk."
"Not a choirgirl, I guess," Alice said. Both Jack and the young man opened their eyes.
"No, certainly not," the teenager answered. "She's an organ student, like me."
"What's your name?" Alice asked.