The Spectator Bird (20 page)

Wrong response. He said, “That's no problem. How big is your foot?” and stuck his foot down beside mine. “Looks about right. Come along.”

“No,” I said. “Thanks very much, but I haven't played in months. I'm all out of shape.”

He had already started to drag me off. Now he stopped. “Well,” he said, “of course it's up to you. You know your capacities better than I do.”

That did it. If I were in shape, if I hadn't been sick ... oh, the hell with caution. Come death, come dishonor, I wanted to put Von Stroheim down. At once my hesitation transformed itself into an ambush. Shedding crocodile tears, smiling in self-depreciation—one may smile, and smile, and be a villain; at least I'm sure it may be so in Denmark—I said, “It's only that I don't know if I could give you a game. But if you're willing to take a chance...”

“Better a slow game than none at all,” says this Eigil Rødding.

I hadn't had a racket in my hand since last summer, I hadn't played in even a club tournament in six or seven years. But if I couldn't summon up enough of what used to be there to make Eigil work for his exercise, I would eat three fuzzy new Slazenger tennis balls.

So fifteen minutes after he intercepted me at his castle gate, I was warming up with him on a damp clay court near the stables, and thinking,
Mistake, mistake!
I felt old and stiff, the balls were heavy, the racket unfamiliar and too big in the handle. There was no whip in my shots, the opposite base line looked fifty yards away. There I sat with my little paws on my chest, waiting to be run over.

Because he was no dub. I suspect he was used to beating anybody in Denmark except maybe Torben Ulrik. He hit his forehand with a lot of juice on it, and it came off the damp clay whizzing. When I sent a floater over to his backhand, he wound up and exploded on it, a real old Western-grip broken-arm backhand of a kind I hadn't seen since Wilmer Allison and Johnny Van Ryn were winning the national doubles. It went down the line like a rocket and bruised the fence.

I kept scrambling, knocking them back off the rim and the handle or not getting them back at all. Eigil liked to score off you, he shot for the lines and corners even when warming up. I did get a little warm chasing balls. But little by little something began to come back, I hit a few forehands that felt right, I found that I could at least chip my backhand and control it. And when I went up to try a volley or two, and old Eigil threw me up a lob, I hit that one exactly where I wanted to—into the corner, where Eigil could chase it for a change.

There was no point in delaying it I was already getting winded. “Any time,” I said.

He stopped in mid-court and spun his racket.

“Rough,” I said.

He bent and looked. “Smooth. I'll serve. Want any particular side?”

“This is fine.”

He tried a couple of serves, and I got a look at them. Twist, with a sharp kick to the backhand. A juicehead all the way. So I moved to the left and a little back to give myself room, and he aced me with a sliced one into the forehand corner. In the odd court I moved up, thinking I'd try taking it on the rise, and he gave me one high on the backhand that I couldn't handle.

I lost the game at love, won only one point on my own service, and lost the third game, also at love. Time for the Seventh Cav. alry to come riding down the Little Big Horn.

Both his forehand and his backhand were hot as a firecracker, but it seemed to me he had to hit them close to his body, it seemed to me that, like a lot of topspin players, he might not be able to
reach.
So I served wide to his forehand and came up, and sure enough, high weak return, easy lay-away volley. I tried the same thing in the odd court, and same result. Right then I began to think I could take him if I didn't burst a blood vessel with all that running. If I stayed back, his ground strokes would murder me. But he was used to hitting them deep; I didn't think he could consistently put them at my
feet as I came
up, and if he didn't get them at my feet they came over high, begging to be swatted. And I must say that when he fed me one of those shoulder-high returns, it
was
a pleasure to see him strain and lunge, or go smoking off in the wrong direction when he anticipated wrong.

I wasn't able to break him back, and he took the first set 6-3. By the time I stepped up to the line to serve the first game of the second set I had a blister forming at the base of my thumb, I was soaked with sweat, and my feet in Eigil's too big sneakers were red hot. But I was damned well going to take him, and I did. We went with service through the fifth game, and then I broke him with a net cord shot and a sliced backhand down the line—God, I loved myself. Then all I had to do was hold service and I had him, 6-4.

Enough. Quit with honor. I had been running on the sides of my feet for ten games. I went straight to the grass at the side of the court and sat down and took off one shoe and sock. A big flap of skin was peeled off the ball of the foot, with red meat exposed underneath. “What is it?” Eigil was saying, smacking the top of the net with his racket. “We can't stop now, a set apiece!”

“I'll have to default,” I said, and held up my scalped foot. You never saw such disappointment. He was raging with it, like a high school quarterback whose coach won't send him in in the last
two
minutes to pull out the game. Of course he had won, since I couldn't continue. But the score was dead even, and he had had to run his tongue out. I was willing to settle for that. I flopped on my back on the lawn, tasting brass, my lungs burning, my heart pounding, and my feet on fire—and if the truth were told, thankful to my feet for getting me out of more.

Eigil took two towels off the net post, yanked one around his neck, and came over and dropped one to me. Oddly, his disappointment was over. He was elated, exhilarated by combat, full of chivalry and sportsmanship. His face was red and happy. “You know, you're too modest by half,” he said, panting. “You really
are
a tennis player.”

“Was,” I said. I felt like dying.

“You're amazing for your age. Were you ever ranked?”

“Long time ago. Never higher than the third ten.”

“But in the United States, that's
tremendous.
I used to follow these things in the Spalding Tennis Annual. Who were the number one people in your years?”

“Tilden?” I said. “Johnny Doeg? Ellsworth Vines? Riggs? Don Budge?”

“Did you ever play them?”

I mopped my face and neck and flopped my head to look at him. He sat on the grass, towel around his neck, eager and enthusiastic, an admirer. In a minute he would ask for my autograph. Instead of being upset that I had split with him, he apparently had this fantasy of having held his own against an American inter-nationalist with a houseful of cups.

“Played some of ‘em,” I said. “Never beat any of 'em.” But I didn't have the heart to deflate him completely. “After college I only played in tournaments for a few years. In my senior year my partner and I won the national intercollegiate doubles, that was why I was ranked.”

“Yes, doubles!” old Eigil says. “I could tell you're a splendid doubles player. The way you punch a volley, the way you hit your overhead. I need to play more with people who play your game, serve and volley. Why don't you stay a month and we'll play every day.”

I think he meant it. I was almost sorry to remind him that we were leaving in the morning, and that even if we weren‘t, I wouldn't be able to play on those feet for at least week. There we sat, pouring sweat and rehashing shots, a couple of locker-room jocks. I have to admit that I've always enjoyed the company of jocks more than that of the literary intellectuals and hyperthyroid geniuses among whom, unhappy one, I earned my living. Also, I hadn't had any company but that of women since we landed in Denmark, more than six weeks ago. I found myself half liking the bugger. Quite plainly he was delighted with me.

After we showered he found me some Band-Aids to patch my feet. Then nothing would do but I must see the estate. I said that my wife, whom I had left at two o'clock, would wonder what had happened to me. Promptly he called the castle and told somebody that Mr. Allston would be in around seven.

My feelings were mixed. My mind's eye kept wandering to the bottle of scotch in my suitcase—I knew that Ruth would expect to hold a note-comparing session over it before dinner. Instead, here I was hobnobbing with the hobgoblin. I wondered where
he
would go for dinner, since we were pre-empting his castle. Lonely service in the library, with smoking jacket, brandy, and cigar? A tray in the kitchen? To the stable to eat with the horses? To Bregninge Inn for
Koldt bord
and beer? A good old-fashioned Dracula picnic in some local graveyard?

It seemed to me he was being pretty good-natured in the face of his sister's non-fraternization policy.
I
enjoyed talking to him. He had been around—England, where he was educated, and Italy, some, and France and Germany a good deal, and the United States once, with an agricultural mission. He remembered Decorah, Iowa, for some reason. He knew a lot of people and had read books and knew what went on. I had to admit that once he got past his impulse to throw me out as a trespasser he had been good company.

See the estate? All right, why not? He said it was the most scientifically run estate in Denmark, perhaps in the world. The very compulsiveness of his brag made me curious. And I supposed that he was the one who had got Miss Weibull pregnant, but who she was, and what she was doing in the castle, and why the countess was so implacable against him for what was, in emancipated Denmark, surely no mortal sin—those were things a man might find out.

Okay, let's go. How would you say that in Danish? Having fallen into this particular sea, I found myself without the linguistic wherewithal. Without a Danish word I climbed into the Volkswagen parked outside the stables, and we toured the farm.

It isn't a farm, it's an economy. In an hour and a half of whizzing around an area about the size of Delaware, he showed me wheat fields, beet fields, truck gardens, three different varieties of hybrid com he's experimenting with, and a battery of greenhouses. Also pine plantings, cherry orchards, apple orchards, game coverts, and pastures. Also pigpens, cow stables, henhouses, pheasant and grouse hatcheries, and kennels full of German short-haired pointers and English setters. Also a sawmill, smokehome, dairy, cheese factory, and refrigerated fruit warehouse. There are two other villages besides Bregninge on the estate, and he owns the port and all its facilities; for all I know, he may have a private merchant fleet. And he is no raw material producer only. Everything he grows, he processes, except the cherries, which are shipped to Amager to be made into Cherry Heering, and the sugar beets, which go, I think he said, to Kiel.

I heard a good deal about confiscatory taxes and a government that lay in wait until a landowner died and then came down on the heirs. I gathered that things had shrunk sharply when his father died in the 1930s. But he had a bit left. At the hour we went around, there was hardly a working soul in sight. He had everything mechanized, even automated. The peasants who used to work on the place must all be up in Copenhagen on welfare (my mother got out just in time).

Crops grow by blueprint. The pigs come off the belt line within a pound of their bacon weight While the milking machines relieve them of their day's production, the cows can contemplate on the stanchions by their heads the charts that reveal their intake in grain and ensilage and their output in milk and butterfat. No contented cows there. Stakhanovized cows. No tickee, no laundly. Any cow that doesn't keep up her statistics is schnitzel.

Everything clean, nothing smelly, nothing wasted. The straw that most Danish farmers burn in their fields, Eigil bales and uses for fuel to heat his greenhouses, which produce the year round. Now I know where those hard little tomatoes come from, and those incessant cucumbers. He is proud of the hay-burning furnace, which he designed himself.

“You've got a lot to be proud of,” I said, and meant it. “You and your father. I understand he was called the Doctor Faustus of genetics.”

His shoulder bumped mine, he twisted around in the cramped seat. “Where did you hear that?”

“Karen Blixen, I think.”

“Oh, you've met
her.”

“Last week.”

“Better her than some others,” Eigil said sourly. “At least she's intelligent.”

“She said he was a very talented man.”

“Was he not,” Eigil said, looking straight ahead down the lane. “And they hounded him as if he were the Antichrist. He was the greatest man in Denmark, a century ahead of his time. Do you believe that?”

Without half trying, he seemed to have worked himself into a rage. I said mildly that I knew nothing about his father, or next to nothing, but had no reason to think he wasn't exactly what Eigil said he was. Nevertheless, as an unsuccessful father myself, I almost resented so much filial loyalty. Would Curtis have defended me if someone had questioned my intelligence or integrity? I doubted it But then I wasn't the Doctor Faustus of anything, either.

“All those rhododendrons you saw in the park are his hybrids,” Eigil said. “Half the roses—did you get taken into the rose garden out beyond the ballroom terrace? Those pointers in the kennels are desired all over the world-that's the finest strain anywhere. We grow and ship two varieties of apples he developed. So it goes, all over the estate. He
made
things, new things. He improved what he found. People talk about Mendel. My father looked through windows that Mendel didn't even know were there.”

We were rolling softly along a dirt road between scrub woods and a pasture fenced with woven wire. From the woods, pheasants and grouse and what I took to be chukars watched us without flying. The pasture on the other side was humped with dozens of feeding hares as big as dogs. Everything was as Eigil said—nature improved, cultivated as carefully as his bacon hogs and pine plantings. Even the scrub woods were carefully
cultivated
scrub woods, the perfect game covert. And then as we rolled slowly and he talked about his father, with his eyes straight ahead and his jaw bunched up, he stepped suddenly on the brake. A buck, or stag I suppose they would call him, had just stepped out onto the bank of a ditch a hundred yards ahead.