The Spectator Bird (19 page)

“I think I'll lie down for a while,” Ruth said. She never looked less happy.

“Yes!” the countess said. She was frantic to get us out of her hair. “A little nap, you will feel better. And
you
take a walk, and make no worries. Eh? We will talk later. I will come to your room after I have seen Manon.”

Smiling to grin my bark off, she put her arm around reluctant Ruth, who went along as if up gallows hill. She was trying to send me some signal, but her machinery was so shorted out I could not tell what she was trying to say. There I was, alone with the little baron, who had been taking this all in, more interested than his training would quite let him be. I winked at him, took a
krone
out of my pocket, showed it to him, snapped my fingers, and opened my empty hand.

A half-suspicious, wavering smile. He reached out and opened my other hand, and while he was looking for the coin there, I took it out of his ear. He fished among his pocketful of English and came up with a word. “Again!” Or maybe it was
igen.
Related languages have these happy correspondences.

So I disappeared a few more kroner for him and finally showed him how it was done. When I left for my walk he was standing in the middle of that regal dining room trying to snap a coin up the sleeve of his Eton jacket.

The castle's drive is a good mile long, absolutely straight, nearly level along the crest of the ridge, and bordered all the way by flowering lindens. They filled the air with sweetness and dropped sticky liquor onto the gravel and now and then onto me. It began to drizzle before I had gone a hundred yards. The view down the slope to the right, through the English park with its big spaced oaks and bursts of rhododendron and lawns that ran down to the very edge of the sea, was dim and romantic.

I saw it, or tried to see it, with my mother's eyes. She had lived at the end of this lane, and undoubtedly walked along it sometimes, and stood back respectfully when the great folks from the castle passed. And dreamed, maybe. And had friends to whom she talked about what she'd like to do and be, and what she'd like to see. Miss Weibull's mother, one of the Sverdrups. And then one day she had gone down to the little harbor almost corked by its green island, and taken the ferry to Copenhagen, and like a bewildered animal crowded aboard an immigrant boat, and voyaged to America. There was something that made the women of the castle tighten their mouths and straighten their backs, and my mother was somehow part of it. And in I come, into this Old World shenanigan, like Miss Connie Coincidence herself. Incredible, the countess said. I guess. But not by any means intelligible.

The upper side of the drive is all one big planting of pines, with lines of shelter trees between the rows—a future forest as neat as a vegetable garden. Straight ahead of me the spire of a stone church rose above the trees, and short of the church, set in a green meadow at the end of the pine planting, was the cottage.

It was an absolutely standard Danish farm cottage, stuccoed, with a red tile roof and eyebrow dormers, but it looked exceptionally tidied up. A neat fence enclosed a small neat yard, with flower beds inside the fence and a snowball bush in bloom on each side of the doorway. The barn behind the cottage stood open, two goats were tethered among the dandelions at the side, red cattle were grazing at the far end of the meadow. It didn't look like the hardship and poverty one was driven to flee from; it looked like a postcard. Wet by the fine rain, the meadow was so green it hurt the eyes.

Not knowing what to expect, I had visualized nothing, and though I looked the place over most curiously, there was no pang of recognition. I had no impulse to go in the gate and knock on the door. What would I have said? “I'd like to see Ingeborg Heegaard's room, please, the one she slept in sixty years ago?” Ridiculous. And yet my mother's name was still known in that house. Why would Miss Weibull remember the name of a friend of her mother's who had left the country before Miss Weibull was born?

I was walking slowly, rubbernecking. Just as I passed the gate, the cottage door opened and a girl appeared in it. A wench, a buxom one, Aphrodite in stocking feet, still yawning from her nap, her hands reaching back up under her blouse to fasten her undone brassiere. Staring at me, curious and bold, she finished hooking herself together and settled herself into her harness with a wriggle. She reminded me of Miss Weibull—and why not? This was the Sverdrup house, they were probably related.

I touched my beret to the blowzy hoyden in the doorway.
“God dag.”

Already in the midst of another yawn, she tried to cut it off with her hand, and produced a smothered laugh.
“God dag.”
Bubbling with her silly laugh—at what? something about my American clothes? the beret I wore against the drizzle? the mere fact that I was a stranger?—she watched me pass by. That was my visit to my mother's childhood place, that was the pilgrimage to the source. Not worth the price of admission.

When the drive turned down toward the village, I followed the path that kept on through a green hollow and up the church hill. The church was very old. Its doors of built-up planks were grayed and weathered, the grain so raised that it half effaced the carving. Inside the vestibule, hardly bigger than the hall of an ordinary house, was an enormous poor box made from a section of the trunk of an oak. It was four feet across, hooped around with five or six bands of heavy iron, and fitted with an iron lid. Through the lid on each side came an iron hoop as thick as my finger, and in each hoop was a hand-wrought padlock the size of a good-sized lobster. The coin slot was three inches long and a quarter inch wide, suitable for the coppers of giants.

The thing looked as if it had been made to withstand Viking raiders—too heavy to lift, too strong to smash with battle-axes. As I stood inspecting it, a wispy young man in a black robe and an Elizabethan ruff came into the vestibule from the church. He stopped, surprised: a Danish clergyman who finds anybody in his church these days is bound to be surprised. He spoke to me and I replied. Then there seemed nothing more to say. After a questioning moment he went softly through the door and outside.

In a spirit of scientific research I fished out of my pocket the krone I had been snapping up my sleeve for the little baron and dropped it into the slot of the poor box. It fell with a dry sound on wood. No giant coppers in there, nothing at all in there, evidently. I wondered how often they took off the manhole cover to collect the loot. I imagined the thin young clergyman in his ruff coming out with foot-long keys on an iron ring, unlocking the massive padlocks one after the other, prying up the ponderous lid, and reaching in to scrape up a button, a couple of Tuborg caps, and—with a shout of triumph—my single
krone.

At least the poor box, armored like Fort Knox, made poverty authentic and tangible, as the Sverdrup cottage did not. It made more plausible the flight of my mother, at an age no greater than that of the wench who now perhaps slept in her room. It said something about meagerness and lack of generosity and feudal limitation, it radiated suspicion in the very act of soliciting alms.

Inside, though, the church said something entirely different. It was small, clean, painted white, the prototype of dozens of little Lutheran churches I have seen in the Middle West except that it was built of stone and that the altar under its grayish lace was more high church. But what took my eye was the ships' models hanging on wires from the ceiling. There must have been a dozen of them, three-masters, trawlers, even one white passenger ship with rows of portholes. Each had a card tacked to it, detailing the shipwreck from which its grateful maker had been saved. Here was none of the mean charity expressed by the poor box. Each one of these lovely things was a prayer of thanksgiving. I was reminded of Karen Blixen's remark that Denmark was full of retired sea captains growing roses. Maybe poor old Bertelson, headed for the Swedish village of his childhood, had something after all. Whatever it was to me (nothing), this placid island in its landlocked sea was for the makers of these models the ultimate safe place.

Ambiguous church, speaking simultaneously of deprivation and sanctuary. Its antiphonal voices may well have come from different periods, different ages even, the place seemed so old. As I went around reading the cards on the hanging models, I came to a little bare cell to the right of the front door, with a long horizontal slit in the wall facing the altar, and a little door that opened to the outside. This was the medieval leper chapel, where the afflicted and dying could hear and see the mass without offending the sight of their families and friends. I make a practice of trying to imagine myself into human situations, but when I tried to imagine myself into that ten-by-twelve cell with other noseless, fingerless, suppurating sufferers, and to ponder what consolation I might get from crowding to a crack in the wall to hear somebody in a starched ruff preach God's mercy, I found myself wanting to be out in the air.

So out of the church and down the hill and up again to the linden lane. At its end, a mile away, the ivied front and stepped gables of the castle sat like a barricade—absolute destination, utter terminus, total power. No ambiguity there.

The Sverdrup cottage, as I passed it, showed no sign of life, but when I was a couple of hundred yards down the drive, I heard a door close and looked back to see a man come out the gate and turn my way. I went on, not hurrying. The drizzle had stopped, there were ragged clouds dispersing out over the sea beyond the reaches of vivid lawn. The lane steamed.

The man behind me was walking faster than I was: I could hear his gritting steps on the gravel. Then just inside the iron gates, where the drive looped to circle before the doorway and enclose a medallion of impeccable lawn, I glanced back again, and he motioned with his arm and called to me.
“Du!”

I stopped, and he came up—hard eye, hard mouth, bushy sandy eyebrows. Younger than I, vigorous mid-forties, probably, in a corduroy jacket and jodhpurs and an Ascot tie. He looked me up and down. His contemptuous
“Du!”
and his arrogant air annoyed me, so I looked
him
up and down, too. Even without the resemblance —something about the eyes and the shape of the head—it would have been clear who he was. The wicked brother. I had seen him before plenty of times, without the feudal trappings—a muscular bulldozer, a pusher-around.

“Hvad
behøver
Du?”

Some way to greet a guest. “I don't
behøver
anything,” I said. “I was taking a walk.”

At once he tossed his head back and laughed. In English he said, “Of course, of course. You're the one with Astrid.” Not “Sorry, we have to be careful of trespassers,” not, “Oh yes, glad to see you, I'm Eigil Rødding.” Just, “Of course, you're the one with Astrid.”

I was ready to tell him I was not “the one” with anybody, and suggest where he could put his castle, and go to pack our bags. On top of the disturbing conclusion of lunch, his greeting about used up my eagerness to be entertained by the nobility. But my irritation, which I did not hide, amused him. Well, well, his look said. Feisty, eh? Eat me alive, will you? He had a thick neck inside his Ascot scarf, and his thighs and calves bulged his jodhpurs. His eyes had come from some other gene than the one from which the Countess got hers. His were yellow.

“So,” he said, with his hands in his pockets, “American, are you? How are you enjoying Denmark?”

“Charming country,” I said.

“Been here before?”

“No.”

“You and your wife are living with Astrid.”

“Yes.”

“That must be cosy.”

“We've become very
good
friends.”

It seemed he withheld comment With his hands shoved down in his pockets and his shoulders pushed high, he watched the flight of some starlings off the gable and eventually turned his yellow eyes back on me. His accent he had learned in England. I don't suppose he had had to learn there the upper-class manner which is never unintentionally rude. He jerked his head toward the castle. “The ladies taking good care of you?”

“They've been very hospitable.”

He understood me; he grinned like a wolf. “I was unable to greet you.”

“Yes,” I said. “We understood you weren't at home.”

That made him laugh out loud. “I was instructed not to be.”

Since he was obviously a man who had never taken instruction in his life, especially not from his women, there seemed nothing for me to say. Teetering in his jodhpur boots, clenching his hands inside his pockets, rolling his corduroy shoulders, he appeared at once abstracted and impatient, itchy with the need to be doing something. He looked me over again, this time without hostility.

“What do you do?”

I told him I was a literary agent.

“Really? That's interesting.” (His tone said it was not.) “Where?”

I didn't ask him where he thought anybody
would
be a literary agent. I only said mildly that it was a tribe found only in mid-town Manhattan.

Out of a clear sky he “said, ”I don't suppose you play tennis.”

Fair Sir, will ye just? I had to smile, it was so knight-errant of him. “Why would you suppose that?” I said.

Another appraisal of my parts and my pallor, and he said bluntly, “You don't look like a tennis player. Are you?”

“I guess I don't know what tennis players look like,” I said. “I used to play some.”

“How about a game now?”

“This minute?”

“Why not? It isn't going to rain any more. There aren't many tennis players on this island, I have to pick up a game when I can find it.”

And what if the selected opponent doesn't want to serve your lordship's convenience? “I didn't bring a racket or any clothes,” I said.