The Spectator Bird (17 page)

“All you need is one pretty girl to speak to you, or one boy to act respectful, and you melt.”

“Was she pretty? In that getup, who could tell? But okay, you're absolutely right. I'm a pushover. Just let them beware of undermining my self-esteem, that's all. Now how about heading home? I'm cold, and my toe joints are killing me.”

“Ah, poor lamb, I've walked you too far.” She took my arm, perhaps remembering the way the girl had swung on the elbow of her boy friend. “But don't you like this? Don't you like walking down here where something is going on and there's more to see than leaves to be swept up or wood to be cut? I wish you'd talk to a class, if they ask you again. I might even try to audit something, if they'd let me.”

“The innocence of age,” I said. “If you were black, sure. Since you're female, fine. If you were blind, deaf, crippled, absolutely. But if you're old, you're up against discrimination that doesn't even know it's discrimination. You'd just better stay out of it.”

“Oh pooh. At least I don't go around with a chip on my shoulder.”

“Speaking of which,” I said, “did you ever
see
anybody put a chip on his shoulder and dare somebody else to knock it off? Where do we get clichés like that?
Tom Sawyer
or some place, I suppose. Maybe once, down in some Mississippi woodyard, somebody made his dare like that, and forever after we have no way to express challenge but that stupid metaphor.”

“Please,” she said. “Not another tirade about what's wrong with the world. Can't we just finish our walk in peace, and enjoy it, and maybe come down again? Will you? With or without a chip on your shoulder?”

“Sure, why not? So long as we stay away from that plaza.”

“All right, let's do it,” she said. She was being bright and chatty and unchallenging, and she hung onto my arm. “What's in tonight's installment of the journal?”

“I don't know. I guess the ancestral castle of Øreby.”

“Is it ... unhappy? Will it bother you? Because if it does, we don't have to do it.”

“I don't mind.”

“Good. Don't you sort of like having it ahead of us? Something to look forward to in the evenings?”

“If that's the way you want it, that's the way I like it.”

“Just so it doesn't depress you and make you gloomy. You scare me when you get the way you were last night, lashing out at everything, including yourself. You know you don't believe everything you said.”

I was not so sure of that as she was, but I wasn't in a mood to be contrary. “Put it down to historical queasiness,” I said. “I always did get a little seasick riding backwards.”

Seasick or not, we were at it again after dinner, summing up a day or a life.

May 21, Øbrebyslot, Lolland:

As she usually is when I get around to communing with my Geist, Ruth is asleep, this time in a canopied four-poster, a real
lit
du
roi,
the duplicate of the one I am in. The room is enormous—two rooms, actually, two of about twenty in this wing—with casement windows through which come stray tree- and cloud-interrupted streaks of moonlight and a smell of lilacs and lindens. As the trees outside move in a night wind, the moonlight sneaks across the room and touches Ruth's bed, and then scoots back to the windows as if afraid it might have awakened her. Fat chance. As for me, I hunch here under a dinky forty-watt bulb (why are Europeans, even in castles, so scared of adequate lighting?) with no more likelihood of sleeping than of understanding what's been going on.

What was going on at lunch, for example? The countess promised to explain later, but we haven't seen her since. And what aborted dinner—the, old lady's illness, as advertised, or something else? And who is Miss Weibull? Most of all, why did I, fifty years old, out of shape, out of practice, just recovering from a long spell of illness, accept the challenge of the werewolf who runs this place, and try to beat his brains out on the tennis court? He comes on me like Sir Kay the Seneschal coming on the Connecticut Yankee, and says to me, “Fair Sir, will ye just?” and instead of saying, “What are you giving me? Get along back to your circus or I'll report you,” I take him on. My hand is blistered, the skin is peeled off the bottoms of my feet, and I am already so stiff that if I tried to get out of bed I would break in two. I deserve a coronary, as Ruth did not fail to point out while we were eating the dinner that Room Service brought up.

But I have made my pilgrimage to my mother's cottage. It was as meaningless as I knew it would be. The cultural vitamin deficiency is not appeased by nibbling the clay and plaster of the old home. The cultural amputee is still trying to scratch the itch in the missing limb.

Well, set it down.

We got here about eleven. The castle, to Ruth's mild disappointment, is not Gothic, with turrets, but Dutch Renaissance, with stepped gables. Wicked brother, as promised, not at home. Greeted by his wife, Manon—tall, skinny, strained, all angles, with a sweet puckered face that looks as if she is always trying to remind herself not to forget something, and little black dots of eyes like a Laurencin drawing.

In the vast front hall, tinkling with the sound of a fountain around which Thorwaldsen-type nymphs clustered, in the presence of a brawny maid and a couple of Chinese jars that probably concealed elves, dwarves, or the forty thieves, she and the countess fell into each other's arms. The maid picked up our bags and led Ruth and me up the stairs, while the countess called after us, “Oh, come straight down, as soon as you have finished your washings! Gerda will unpack you. I must show you this castle where I grew up!”

All pleasure for her, apparently. No bad associations, only delight at being back home in the grandeur to which she has grown unaccustomed to being accustomed. We did come straight down, after Ruth had made a quick inspection of our ducal suite, and were shown the castle, thus:

Drawing rooms, three, each grander than the last, all ornate and gilded, French as to furniture and Beauvais as to tapestries, these last bearing the usual representations of stag hunts, successful, and Arcadian picnics, topless.

Music room: square Bechstein, celestina inlaid with mother-of-pearl, gilt velvet-seated chairs, exhausted cello case prostrate on a banquette.

Ballroom: a basketball court overhung with crystal chandeliers, french doors all down one side reflecting their slant light across the parquetry and showing us reaches of lawn and roses outside.

Conservatory (orangerie?): a jungle of steamy plants from which a Rousseau tiger might have looked out—might
be
looking out now that everybody but me is asleep.

Billiard room: two tables. Around the room trophies of the chase—stuffed pheasants and grouse, a rhino head, a cape buffalo head, a long row of stag heads labeled as to year and slayer. Some of these the King's and the King's father's. Lion and leopard skins on the floor, a narwhal horn spiraling up like some sort of rocket from an onyx launching pad.

Now the library, famous for works on horticulture and game management, here probably still called venery—everything from medieval herbals and bestiaries to contemporary learned journals in four languages. It seemed to me that these books made both Manon and the countess nervous; they stood back, politely giving me, the visiting book man, plenty of time to examine and admire, but showing a transparent willingness to pass on. Having no expertise in either horticulture or game management, and seeing them hover there trying not to hurry me, I put back the volume whose binding I had been admiring, and said, “These are impressive, but over my head. I've got other imperatives.” Oh, what? they said. So I plucked from the shelf a Goethe in German and read them the last line of Faust: “Das
Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan.”
Manon managed to take that piece of japery as a compliment to her, and the countess gave me a snickering look that said Mr. Allston was
sehr kavalier,
and Ruth gave me another sort of look, asking me in effect who I thought I was, Little Lord Fauntleroy?

Whom we met as soon as we started out of the library—a pale, pretty, solemn little Swedish baron of about ten, a nephew of Manon's, on his way in to read Duns Scotus or something else light. He wore blue serge short pants and an Eton collar and jacket, and he was the quietest, politest, most watchful little boy I ever saw in my life. I asked him if he spoke English and he squeaked,
“Lillebit.”

Ruthie was enjoying the tour, and the ladies chattered, and I came along on my leash. Through a quickly opened door we were given a glimpse of a great pantry, with a board where lights went on to indicate what room was calling, and a receding warren of subsocial rooms and kitchens and such—the only rooms, I supposed, that my mother might ever have seen, if she had seen those. Then we tiptoed respectfully into the dining room, a hollow cave with satiny sideboards, heavy silver, a table forty feet long with three great bowls of lilacs spaced along it, and walls covered with the usual wigged ancestors and muddy Danish landscapes. I was tempted to ask why the Dutch should have produced a regiment of great painters, while their close relatives up the North Sea coast, with the same blood, weather, light, sky, and architecture, never produced a one. But since the countess is herself a sort of artist, I admired the silver instead.

The countess was happily recalling dinners in this room with a thousand candles and four wines, times when the King had come down to hunt. Then, she said to me, you would have seen some
skaal'
ing! Privately I thought the room too grand to have any fun in, and much too big for the present party. The table was set only at one end—seven places.

The countess noted the number, too. “Who is coming?” she asked Manon.

“Grandmamá. She shouldn't, but she wants to see you and to greet your friends. And of course Bertil.”

The countess' eyes were on the seventh plate; then they came up and met Manon's. That was a speaking look if I ever heard one, though I didn't understand the words. The countess' mouth tightened till she was white around the lips. Manon lifted a thin sweatered shoulder. The butler came in and announced lunch.

There was little masculine company to distribute, just Little Lord Fauntleroy and me. We waited. After several minutes a woman, not especially young but very pregnant, came carrying her great belly before her from one of the parlors. She had a broad, healthy-looking face and a way of smiling slyly to herself. I thought she was faking a composure she didn't quite possess.

Manon thrust out her lips into a nervous pucker and blinked her round eyes. In Danish she said to the woman, “You remember Astrid.”

The woman gave what can only be called a scornful snort. In that room, in that context, it was an extraordinary response.

“Naturligvis”
she said.
“Velkommen.”
Her eyes touched the eyes of the countess for just an instant. A complex expression passed across her face and was covered over by the careful sly smile.

“God dag,”
the countess said—oh, icy.

“And these are Astrid's friends, Mr. and Mrs. Allston.”

“God dag,”
the woman said. And we said.

“Miss Weibull,” Manon said.

I had an immediate semaphore from Ruth, which said, with flapping red flags, DO NOT SAY ANYTHING! DO NOT, REPEAT DO NOT, ASK HER WHO HER HUSBAND IS OR WHAT HE DOES. DO NOT SAY ANYTHING BEYOND ROUTINE POLITENESS. TAKE CARE. BE ALERT. SHUT UP.

She assumes that I have all the acuteness of a mongoloid, and so she stands on tiptoe and wigwags wildly enough to catch the attention of everyone within a half mile, and unless I give her back a signal as obvious as her own, she believes I have not only missed the original situation that set her to signaling but have somehow overlooked the fact that she is now up on the table flapping her arms.

In this case I carefully did not look at her. I smiled at the countess, who was stony, with an angry flush around her eyes, and at Manon, skinny and nervous and maintaining her sweet vague expression. Then I finally did look across at Ruth and widen my eyes slightly so she could relax. With her help, I managed not to say to this Miss Weibull, HOW COME YOU'RE A MISS, BUT EIGHT MONTHS ALONG? OLD DANISH CUSTOM, EH? HA-HA.

 

Ruth said fiercely from the bed, “Just remember the times when I've saved you from making a fool of yourself! And some of the times when I haven't succeeded!”

“You overreacted,” I said. “You generally do, because you take it for granted I can't see what's under my nose. You started this truth party, now hold still and see yourself as others see you.”

“Unless I'd warned you, you'd never have known anything was wrong.”