The Spectator Bird (24 page)

“Thanks for that machine,” I said. “I'll be king of the compost heap.”

Casually waving, they drove off as if that red machine did not mean any of what we all knew it meant, as if we were just parting after a drink or a game of badminton.

The shredder sat on its trailer. Temptation or obligation? I looked in the gas tank: full. I read the instructions that Tom had taped to the hopper. Nothing complicated. So I lifted the tongue and steered the trailer to the other edge of the drive and
over the
bank into the sunken area sheltered by woods, where I have a bed of herbs and things that will stand partial shade, and where I do my woodcutting.

On the second
yank
of the lanyard, she started. I threw into the hopper some leaves and twigs, and they flew out the blower as coarse dust. A little rain, a little time, the intervention of some sow bugs and earthworms, some enzymes and soil bacteria, and they would be back to the stuff out of which we are all made and to which we all return. God the Father, God the Son, and God the Compost Shredder.

Down there it was sheltered from the wind, and the sun had warmth in it. I got the wheelbarrow and some clippers and pruned the pyracantha bushes that deer had gnawed and broken, and threw the prunings into the shredder and watched them blow onto the heap. I got a little too interested in what I
was doing,
and the noise of the engine kept me from hearing the car on the hill. Ruth drove in and caught me before I could duck into the house: old Rheumatics himself, too achy to talk to the geriatric ward, out working in the yard without hat or gloves.

“I don't know!” she said, looking as if she might cry. “You complain about your joints and then you go and do exactly what you shouldn't. Sometimes I get
hopeless.”

“Why get upset?” I said. “What are we saving me for?”

“That's all right for you to say. You don't have to deal with yourself when you get achy and crabby.
I
have to.”

“I'll come in if I get to hurting.”

“Oh yes! Yes! You mean you'll stay out till you start hurting!”

“Well, the Jacuzzi made me feel a lot better,” I said, not without cunning. “Then I took a good infrared treatment...”

“You did? Without anybody telling you?”

“All by myself. I was taking it when Tom and Edith came over with the shredder.”

“Why did they bring that over here?”

“They're giving it to us.”

“They're what? Oh.” I could see comprehension darken in her eyes. Her scolding tapered off in a sound she could only have learned in Denmark, that half exclamation, half sigh on an indrawn breath that I remembered from kitchens of my youth where Norwegian and Danish and Swedish hired girls gathered for coffee and gossip. Standing by a Nandina bush whose new leaves were mixed red and green, whose berries were scarlet, and whose flowers were spread cones of white, she stared down at me. “Oh, Joe.”

“Exactly. It sort of brings it home.”

“Did they say anything?”

“No. Just they weren't going to be using it and thought I might. I sort of had the feeling I should try it out before tomorrow, so I could tell him.”

“I suppose. Oh, that's sad. How did he look?”

“Bad. Waxy. Tottery.”

“She?”

“Imperturbable, as usual.”

“I wish I'd been here. Maybe I should call her.”

“You'll see them tomorrow.”

“That's right. Well, damn, I guess I'd better get us some lunch. Can you bring in the groceries?”

“Sure.”

I was down below her, with one foot up on the low wall. With a heave ho, I jacked myself up to her level. You could have heard the adhesions crack clear over at LoPresti's. Ruth's startled eyes flew to mine. “My goodness, was that
you?”

“In person,” I said, hobbling.

“Are you hurt?”

“No, of course not.”

But she continued to look scared, as if the sound of my snapping joints had suddenly revealed my mortal danger. Dead stick sounds. And she had been thinking about Tom. I could read her scared mind: Oh, my darling, what if it were
youl

Getting old is like standing in a long, slow line. You wake up out of the shuffle and torpor only at those moments when the line moves you one step closer to the window.

 

That evening we were in our customary places in the bedroom, Ruth in bed, I in my chair, like a couple of Plantagenets on upholstered tombs. We were watching television, but she could not have been very attentive, because right across the grain of some upstairs-downstairs crisis she said, “I hate the thought of Ben's dinner tomorrow.”

“I don't think you need to worry. Tom and Edith are completely on top of it.”

“I hope so. Will it be big, you think?”

“I don't think we were ever at anything small at Ben's.”

“Do me a favor?”

“Like what?”

“Like making a special effort to see Tom isn't left out? He has so much trouble talking, people might avoid him. It'd be awful if he got stuck off in some corner. Even if we aren't supposed to say so, this is his party.”

“I'll keep an eye on him.”

“You do the talking. Don't make him do it Just be yourself.”

“Strange prescription. Who else might I be?”

“You know what I mean. You can be very thoughtful when you try. Do you want to watch that? Why don't we turn it off.”

I turned it off.

“Edith too,” Ruth said.
“Show
her some attention. Make her laugh.”

“The way I'm going to make your shut-ins laugh when I tell them about the contemporary novel.”

“You're good at making people laugh.”

She smiled and blinked, beguiling and encouraging me to be better than my opinion of myself. She looks upon me as a potential superstar who for numerous reasons has never got it all together, as they say on sports broadcasts, but will one day break out in a rash of base hits and runs driven in.

“I'll get her behind the pantry door,” I said. “You'll hear lewd noises like the offstage cackling in
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Which incidentally is about as realistic as the rest of modern literature's commentary on sex. Who
cackles
while he humps his hostess, for God's sake? Sex is the most fun you can have
without
laughing.”

“All right, if you say so.”

She lay there looking fond and friendly and, if the truth were told, very appetizing. “Just be your old funny self.”

“Maybe my old funny self will get suppressed. You know how it is at Ben's. You tell yourself you and your woodwind friends are going to get together with the flutes tonight—haven't seen the flutes for ages—but when Ben's baton comes down, you come
in.
If he says dominoes, it'll be dominoes. If he says, ‘Lets go out in the pasture and stir up the llamas,' we'll all become herdsmen of Andean cameloids. Remember last time, when I swore I was finally going to corner the Russian princess and satisfy our curiosity-what relation is she to Czar Nicholas, is she Romanoff or Golitsyn, did Rasputin dandle her on his knee, has she got hemophilia (don't tell me, I know she can't have), how did she escape being murdered with the rest of the royal family? Remember? I was determined. So Ben declares after dinner that we'll now play literary charades, and the only contact I have with the princess all evening is to sit at her feet and try to guess what book of Virginia Woolf's she's suggesting by coughing and sneezing and blowing her nose.”

“You seem to have Virginia Woolf on the brain.”

“As a matter of fact, it was a damn good charade.”

“I suppose you have to tell me.”

“You're cute. Why don't you get the infrared lamp and let it cook your poor joints while you read me some more diary?”

“You'd rather listen to that diary than watch
Upstairs Downstairs?”

“Oh, muchl”

“You're going dead against the Nielsen ratings.”

“I don't care. Will you?”

“Okay.”

I got the lamp and set it up. No sooner had its red glow
bloomed on the chair than old Catarrh, a heat-seeking missile if there ever was one, hopped off the bed and curled up where I wanted to sit down. I moved him enough to let me into the chair and then set him on my lap and set the notebook on him.

“This is nice,” Ruth said. “Don't you love it in this bedroom? I do. It's so
comfy.
Especially when you'll read to me.”

“‘Comfy' is the word,” I said. “Or scrumptious. Where do women get their vocabulary?”

But she was already sobered up from the six-year-old act “It makes me feel guilty. I wonder what those two are saying to one another right now?”

“Those two?”

“Edith and Tom. Can they
talk
about it, do you think?”

“Wouldn't you want to talk about it, if it was happening to you? You'd have to talk about it. You don't think she's trying to kid him he'll get well, and pretend she doesn't know?”

“I don't suppose. Yes, I would want to talk about it, but I wonder if I could do it. Just to sit cold-bloodedly talking over the details. Ugh!”

“Well, we don't have to for a while.”

“No. We're lucky, we really are.”

“I always thought I was.”

“See?” she said. “You can be really nice.”

“Given provocation.” Catarrh came struggling up and out from under the notebook, and I put the lid on and crammed him under again. I looked at Ruth to see if she was ready for me to begin, but she had a further remark to make.

“Does it seem strange to you?” she said. “Do you have the feeling it's a story about someone else, not us?”

“It is,” I said. “It's a story about the countess. There are no stories about us-about me, at least. Everything that happens to me happens offstage, everything is reported by messenger. When I die, I'll have to read about it in the papers, because not even that will really have
happened
to me.”

“What do you mean?” She was staring. As usual when she is baffled by something I say, she was ready to be hurt, as if there might be in it some hidden criticism of her.

“Nothing,” I said. “I just don't exactly feel I'm the master of my fate and the captain of my soul. Are you ready?”

Havnegade 13, May 29:

“Bennyway,” Ruth said this morning (she has these residual infantilisms, or Midwestemisms, or foreshortenings, or whatever they are, in her speech, another of her favorites is
jissec),
“bennyway, at least you're
feeling
better.” That is her way of consoling herself for unslaked curiosity and the brevity of her castle experience. We never did plan to stay more than the one night, but the way it worked out, we had to insist on getting out of there the first thing after breakfast, when our inclination was to hang around like a couple of village kids at a bathhouse knothole.

I felt sorry for the countess. She was sad about her grandmother, and distressed that our holiday was spoiled, and unwilling to seem to hustle us away, but obviously very willing to see us remove ourselves
from the area of family crisis.
Manon developed a tic: she winked us out of the castle and into the Rover. Eigil we did not see, nor Miss Weibull. Nor the old countess, since she was dead. The little baron, rising to his duty as man of the house, came out with Manon and the countess and gravely shook our hands and wished us
farvel
and
god rejse.

He also gave evidence of subversion. Just as I was sliding behind the wheel, so stiff I could hardly keep from groaning, he caught my eye with a little secret grin, and moved his hand to show me the
krone
between his thumb and finger. I nodded, he stretched his arm and snapped, and the coin tinkled on the step behind him, a miss. Manon, winking, turned to see what had made the noise. The little baron never blinked, never turned to see where his krone had fallen. There's a lot to be said for noblesse oblige. He stood in line with the others and waved.

Nothing visible at the Sverdrup cottage as we
drove
by. I slowed and pointed it out to Ruth, who gave me a queer little sympathetic grimace. We drove on by it: the deserted postcard.

So now for a week we have been speculating, and we know exactly what we knew before, and can draw only the same inferences from our information. We even have new questions. For instance, why has the countess stayed down at Ørebyslot for a full week? It doesn't take a week to bury an old lady, even allowing time for the clans to gather. She will have had to fraternize with Eigil, for it doesn't seem likely he would stay out of sight all this time just to accommodate his unfriendly sister. Have they made it up? Has the death of the old lady maybe given the countess an inheritance that will ease her situation?