The Spectator Bird (25 page)

I don't thrive in the presence of unknowns and variables. Extended guessing doesn't intrigue me as it does Ruth. I keep returning, when she gets to speculating, to the little we know. To wit:

Miss Weibull, a member of the (peasant) Sverdrup family, is pregnant. Count Eigil was seen (by me) emerging from the Sverdrup cottage, which is suspiciously well kept, more gussied up than any farm cottage is likely to be. Moreover, Miss Weibull lunched at the castle with the lady of the castle and her guests, a fact which embarrassed Manon and which the countess took as a deliberate affront, but which neither, obviously, could do anything about. The inference is that Eigil, in the old phrase, knocked up Miss Weibull, that he maintains her in the cottage as his mistress, and that at least on occasion, perhaps when he wants to insult his sister, he insists that she be taken into the family.

The countess abhors her brother. Karen Blixen says he is very able, but implies that he is skirt-crazy like his father, and suggests that the countess dislikes him because he is like her father. This in turn suggests that there was some sort of significant relationship between the countess and her father, that she is hostile to, or protective of, or shamed by, his memory. My single afternoon with Eigil persuaded me that, from his amateur archaeology to his scientific estate management to his topspin tennis, he is a man of parts. Also that he is a stiff competitor, as afflicted by
albuer
as any American or German, and could be tough on people (his sister, for instance?) who opposed or crossed him.

Nevertheless he can also be agreeable, and certainly he kept his bond and stayed away from the castle in order to give the countess her visit. So what is the cause of the sisterly detestation? Miss Weibull's interesting condition? Hardly. For one thing, that's only eight months old, at the most, and maybe four months visible, and the detestation has been there, by the countess' own word, for years. Eigil's insistence that Miss Weibull be brought into the castle might be a sound reason for his sister's dislike, but so far as I could see, that was a surprise to her, something new.

Right here there is an unrelated fact with potential significance: that Miss Weibull is no pullet run down casually in the castle yard by the castle rooster. She is a woman of approximately the countess' age. It seems probable that if indeed there is something between her and Eigil—and who could doubt it?—it must have started years ago, perhaps as many years as the countess has detested her brother.

And how about the effect I produced at the table by mentioning the name Sverdrup? Everybody there except Ruth and the little baron reacted as if to hydrogen sulphide. I may even have brought on the old lady's attack, though Ruth tries to assure me that nobody can take any blame for the strokes and heart attacks of a person nearly a hundred years old. Still, how do you read it? Here she comes out tottering, propped up by pride and will to do her matriarch's duty to her granddaughter and her granddaughter's friends, and
pow,
said friend utters the forbidden name, smoke rises, there is a stink of brimstone, beautiful ladies turn into snouted beasts, the plates slither with live eels, the family portraits reel on the walls, and the offending one saves himself only by laying his knife and fork crosswise. The matriarch holds herself together long enough to be helped out, and drops dead.

And what about the Doctor Faustus of genetics? They
hounded
him, Eigil says. For what? For hybridizing rhododendrons and breeding a select line of pointers?

“Well,” Ruth said at breakfast this morning, “why do we go on gnawing on the same old bones? He was a prominent man-a
very
prominent man. Wouldn't there be some way of finding out about him? He must be in the Danish equivalent of Who's Who. Would you need to know more Danish than you do? I should think some librarian at the university could help you dig something up.”

Which makes sense Maybe the embassy could help, too. It's time I checked in there anyway. Tomorrow. Since I've been feeling better (a spell of drier weather, or the effect of Eigil's tennis?) I feel more of an impulse to get out and around.

 

May 30:

Christ, wouldn't you a think I'm old enough to keep my fingers out of the Disposall? I'm not writing a book, or editing a newspaper, or conducting a criminal investigation. Nobody hired me as a private eye, I didn't have to get into this. But here I am just the same, and mainly what I seem to be doing is trying not to believe what I've found out.

There's no mistake in identification, that's sure. The girl at the humanities section of the university library was prompt, efficient, and imaginative. I sat at a table in the reference room and she piled things at my elbow a foot high: A history of Denmark. A history of science. The Danish equivalent of Who's Who. A picture book of Danish castles and manor houses. The roll of the nobility, equivalent to Burke's Peerage, what the English call the stud book. With my pencil and notebook I sat there for an hour, dictionary open, taking down facts.

Landgreve Aage Karl Ridding, 1874-1938, etc., etc., was the son of Greve Frederik Erik R., q.v., and Grevinde Charlotte Heddinge, daughter of Gr. Nis Heddinge, q.v. Married Anna Marie Krarup, a cousin, daughter of Baron Axel Krarup of Spøttrup, q.v. Children Eigil Johan, 1912-, and Hannah Astrid, 1914-. Since the 12th century the family seat of the Røddings has been at Ørebyslot, Lolland, q.v.

Which see. In the picture book on castles, Ørebyslot occupied six pages in romantic soft focus: the castle itself, its stepped gables and ivy lifting beyond the wrought-iron gates; views of the ballroom, the great hall, the dining room, one of the drawing rooms; views of the English park, complete with peacocks, and said to be superior to anything in Denmark except perhaps the park at Knuthenborg; a picture of a stag with a great rack of horns, another of a spotted fawn curled up among ferns; two views of the extensive botanical gardens developed by Landgreve Aage Rødding, famous throughout the world for his studies in genetics. The castle, park, and gardens, which during the early years of the twentieth century were the scene of brilliant social gatherings as well as the center of much important scientific work, have been closed to the public since Landgreve Pødding's death in 1938. The estate is presently owned by his son, Landgreve Eigil Rødding.

Nothing wrong with any of that, except that it made me wonder why the countess has never told us anything about her father. Obviously he was as distinguished as Eigil says he was. If I were halfway educated, I would have known his name the way I'd know the name of Pasteur and Madame Curie. He was obviously the sort of scientific national hero that Niels Bohr is now, the sort the Danes honor by giving him the Carlsberg Castle to live in. Along with King Canute, Hamlet, Søren Kierkegaard, Hans Christian Andersen, and Bohr, he is Denmark's contribution to the world mind. He came a little early to get into the nucleic acid and RNA and DNA and all that business that they're so excited about now, but he was into fruit flies very early, and he seems to have seen the possibilities of molecular biology when it was no bigger than a man's hand. Nevertheless, according to the history of science that gave him two full pages, it is as an extender and perfecter of Mendel, and as a contributor to the pragmatic sciences of hybridization and stock breeding, that he is best known.

In the 1920s, Ørebyslot was evidently a great laboratory where theoretical biology and experiments in breeding and hybridization went on simultaneously. A lot of the brilliance the countess remembers from her girlhood was a result of the double distinction of her father as a scientist and a great nobleman. Even the merely frivolous and sporting aspects of life at the castle, the royal hunts, the kennels, the cultivated wild coverts full of cultivated tame game, had that quality of double excellence.

But they hounded him. For what? Not a hint in my source books.

I got the reference librarian to bring me files of Berlingske Tidende from the beginning of 1938 up to September 23, when Rødding died, and started through them backward, beginning with the day after his death. His obituary was there all right. And right away a surprise. Rødding had shot himself, off in the woods of his estate at Ellebacken, near Helsingør. They hounded him to his death, then. But no indication in the newspaper story, so far as I could read it, about why he had shot himself—just the usual newspaper-story details. Body found by a farmer. Résumé of Count Pødding's career as a scientist. Details about the funeral and interment—funeral private, interment at Ellebacken rather than at the family seat of Ørebyslot. (No explanation of that, either.) List of survivors, only two: Greve Eigil Johan Rødding and Grevinde Hannah Astrid Wredel-Krarup. Astrid's mother, it appeared, was already dead.

There was not much point in the riffling through browning pages that I set out to do. Without an index I was simply lost, and since my Danish was lame and slow I wouldn't have found anything anyway unless the name Rødding had jumped out at me from a headline. After a half hour of it I left the library and went outside and took a cab over to the American Embassy on Østerbrogade.

Instead of going in to see Mr. Burchfield, the Public Affairs Officer who was said to be well informed about things Danish, I should have come straight home to Havnegade 13 and buried my nose in a book.

Rødding? he said. Oh sure. The biologist. The one who was caught sleeping with his daughter.

At first I thought he was joking. No, I didn't. But I wanted to, and I pretended to, for right at the cold center of my receptive processes was the obituary article I had just got through reading, with its note about survivors. Only two, Greve Eigil Johan and Grevinde Hannah Astrid. I managed to say, in effect, Oh, come on, this wasn't any Jukes or Kallikak, this was one of the greatest men in Denmark.

That was just the point. That was what made the scandal so juicy. There was no question about it, apparently. Somebody peached, some servant as Mr. Burchfield remembers, and Count Rødding never denied it. Must have been insane-had to be-but no other sign of it than this taste for his daughter. Somebody from Very High Up was supposed to have gone to him and told him he had to send the girl away, and he did, for a while. But some time later—six months, a year—it was discovered that he had brought her back.

He really liked her, says this PAO with a grin.

How did it end? He wasn't sure. The whole thing was hushed up, naturally, and what got into the scandal sheets was obviously jazzed up. But it is the PAO's impression that Rødding closed his castle, shut the place off to scientists and all the social business that used to go on there. Naturally the court no longer went there for its fall hunt But not too long after the scandal got out, Rødding went up to some place he owned near Helsingør and shot himself. That sort of proved it Nobody the PAO had ever talked to doubted that the gossip was true.

Maybe he killed himself because it wasn't true, I said. Maybe a man like that would be destroyed by that sort of gossip.

Well, maybe. The PAO had never really investigated—just heard talk. Still, it was noticeable that the Danes never played up Rødding as one of their big stars. The castle was apparently still closed to the public, everything just crashed to a stop.

Well, that too, I said. If you were the son of a man driven by gossip to kill himself, wouldn't you close the castle?

Then I realized I was getting too defensive about the Røddings, and drawing the curiosity of the PAO. I changed the subject and pretty soon said I was pleased to have met him, and would see him again probably, and shook his hand and got away.

Now tomorrow, according to the postcard we received yesterday, the countess will be back. She will have it on her mind to “explain us” what happened at lunch. (And just incidentally, could it have been this scandal in 1938 that interrupted her education and kept her from going to England to perfect her English? Did her father never get around to pushing her into that sea? Did he keep her at home for other reasons? Was it the scandal that led her to accept the harelipped cousin for a husband?)

Also, what kind of story will she cook up for us? Who wants to sit and listen to some fable about Miss Weibull? I can just imagine it. There she will sit, a Lorelei in sensible tweeds, a highly bred female who is subject to the giggles and who says she lives not in the head but below the belt and feels better than most people think. Was that naïveté and imperfect knowledge of the language, or an inadvertent self-revelation? How can I listen to her lie? I have liked her too well.

I don't want the truth, either, if what the PAO told me is the truth. Should I say to her, Did you sleep with your father? And was it some sort of drunken or insane rape you couldn't help or was it, as the PAO suggests, something that lasted for a long time —years, maybe? And do you hate your brother because he's vile, as you say, or because he knows too much? (On the other hand, Manon must know as much, and the old countess too. How come they don't despise you, or you them? What's that, female solidarity? But why didn't any of them rescue you when you were struggling to stay afloat after your husband left you?)

Shall we believe your story about being the wronged wife of a traitor, or was that a lie too? And did your husband leave you for another woman, or did he finally find himself unable to bear the long unyielding disgrace of being married to you? Shall we remember that evening at the opera house and ask ourselves if there was something besides hatred of treason on the minds behind the eyes that watched you?

It makes me sick. Ruth and I have spoken more than once about how much grace, stoicism, and humor she brings to the effort to make a life for herself without help from anyone. I have wondered if we might be her sponsors and help her emigrate to America, where she could get out from under this cloud. I have had fantasies of her spending weekends in Yorktown Heights, or perhaps living permanently in the guest apartment I would fix up out of Curtis' room. Yes, Doctor, I have played with a daydream in which she fills with affection and loyalty a place left empty and sore by my failure with my son.