The Spectator Bird (4 page)

If there is a lesson in that pilgrimage into the Gothic, it is a lesson misshapen, leaden, lightless, ugly as a toad in a drain, a real Grendel of a lesson left over from the time of trolls and demons. It leaves me no option but to scratch dead leaves over it as I scratched them over it twenty years ago. That seems the only method that will get us safely from infancy to senility. Was it the Boyg who advised Peer Gynt, “Roundabout, Peer, roundabout?” Or was it the Button Molder? Never mind.

One of the books I read in Denmark was
The Long Journey
, by Johannes V. Jensen, a patriotic chronicle about how the Scandinavians invented everything, first sex, then fire, then tools, then shelter, then agriculture, then bronze and gold, then iron, until the human race, put into gear by all that Nordic ingenuity, could be trusted to go forward on its own. Jensen got a Nobel Prize for his fable of civilization, and he persuaded some people, including some Scandinavian archaeologists. Not me. I like the Scandinavians as well as anybody else, and once went hunting my identity among them, but they didn't invent more than their share, and they are no monsters of goodness. Even now, when they have given up Viking raids and become the world's umpires and ombudsmen, they consort with evil like other folks, and confuse it with good like other folks. I didn't find what I went looking for in Denmark, but I found there was something rotten in that state, as elsewhere, and that the Danes like the rest of the world are attracted to evil, are involved in it, even feel dutiful toward it. If the ghost of Henry James came demanding copy, I could tell him a tale of New World innocence and Old World experience at least as instructive as
Daisy Miller.

Having no traditions myself, I used to have a romantic view of tradition. I thought that time really does sift men's acts, that the good they do lives after them and gradually improves their descendants, and that the ill they do eventually writhes in pain and dies among its worshipers. That was real innocence.
Everything
we do lives after us. The future is not only now, as television assures me, it was also then, and Baal and Loki are as immortal as Jahveh and Baldr.

My mother was a Danish girl, an orphan and a runaway. She emigrated to America, all alone, at sixteen, worked as a hired girl, married a drunken brakeman who begot me and shortly got himself killed by a freight in the Sioux City yards, married again a couple of years later and was soon abandoned. Except for those brief spells of married bliss, she never had a house of her own. She lived, and I with her, in hot (and cold) third-story rooms and back-of-the-kitchen sheds in other people's houses, and she died of a fall down some dark cellar stairs when I was a freshman in college. Everything in the New World that she tied her hopes to, including me, gave way. I spent my childhood and youth being ashamed of her accent, her clumsiness, her squarehead name, her menial jobs. It used to shrivel me to put down, in the space marked MOTHER'S MAIDEN NAME. Ingeborg Heegaard. I never discovered until she was dead that she was a saint, and that realization, with all the self-loathing that came with it, put me into a tailspin that I didn't come out of for two years. Ulcers, nervous breakdowns, all the not so subtle psychosomatic punishments I visited on myself, went on till I learned how to scratch dead leaves over what I didn't want to see.

That was the way it was until my only son, Curtis, who had been nothing but anguish from the time he was breech-born, fell from or let go of his surfboard on the beach at La Jolla. He died an over-age beach bum, evading to the last any obligation to become what his mother and I tried to make or help him be, and like my mother's, his death lay down accusingly at my door. He was my only descendant, as she was my only ancestor, and I failed both. Chop, chop, there went both past and future. At fifty I had my second crisis—it is remarkable how apt bacteria and other agents of the moral sense can be, how readily they infect and afflict us when we need affliction. This time it was the myocarditis. But all the time while I was wondering if my clock would stop, I felt inside me somewhere, adjacent to or below the ailing heart, a hungry, thirsty, empty, sore, haunted sensation of being unfinished, random, and unattached, as if, even if the heart were working perfectly, there was nothing there for it to run.

Marcus Aurelius and all, I have never stopped feeling that way.

Sitting in the bedroom under three hundred watts of contemporary illumination, I found myself reading about the afternoon when Astrid's brother, Count Eigil Rødding, showed me his museum. Everything in it had been found on his estate. Dig anywhere on that island, and below the picnic plastics of the present you ran into the age of iron, and below that the age of bronze, and below that the age of polished stone, and below that the age of chipped stone, and still below that the age of antler and bone. All of it, straight down from the fourth millennium B.C., was undiluted Danish.

That impressed me, deracinated as I was. I suppose that an Indian on an Ohio mound might have the sense that down under him his own ancestors went in layers, generation below generation, all of them as native as the corn. But all other sorts of Americans, even those whose families have been on this continent for many generations, seem to me deprived, hanging around the national parks that enclose other people's archaeology, or else, like me, tourists in a private graveyard hunting hopefully for their own names.

All those sword blades rusted to brown pizzles, all those drinking skulls and bowls, all those horn spoons and homed helmets, all those bronze axes and stone spearheads and antler flensing tools, were nothing to me but curios. I wanted to own a past the way Rødding owned his. Though I was watchful with Astrid's brother, I envied him at least as much as I was suspicious of him. He had a lot of things I didn't especially covet and one I coveted very much: he belonged to something.

His prize exhibit was under a big bell jar on a table in the middle of the room. When it was first dug up, and the air hit it, it had begun to crumble, and Rødding had rushed it to Copenhagen to get the museum there to put it under glass. Deteriorated or not, it was recognizably human. It lay curled on its side with its knees drawn up, a small, shrunken man with a bent nose and high cheekbones. An odd, cocky, Robin Hood sort of leather hat was on its head. Rawhide cords bound its hands and feet, a rawhide strangling-cord was twisted into the neck under the ear. Its eyes were closed. On its mouth was what must have been the grimace it made when the cord was tightened, but it looked like a whimsical, knowing smile.

While we were looking at it and talking about it, Rødding for a joke claimed it as his ancestor. I looked at him—he figures as the Prince Orgulus, or Dragon Error, or maybe the windmill, of this romance—and damned if he didn't look like it, with the same little smirking smile. Shrink him and dry him out, and he could have been the relative that he claimed to be. Maybe, in fact, he was. That was what a real past could do for you.

Just about then I had an idea. I got up, avoiding Ruth's questioning look, and went out into the wind and down to the study. In the third album I looked through, I found it—a snapshot Ruth had taken of Karen Blixen sitting under a tree in her garden at Rungstedlund. Under her old garden hat her face was bird-sharp, leather-skinned. She was tiny, shrunken, her eyes as alive as snakes: as surely a witch as any old woman in one of her tales. In her hand she was holding a rune stone she had dug up only a few minutes before we arrived, and on her face was a look of glee, a smugness of secret knowledge, as if the murky world she visited every night on her broomstick had just sent her, in the cryptic markings on the stone, a daylight message that only she and her wizard and warlock friends could read. Sure enough, she looked like Rødding, and even more like that mummy of his. The same smile.

Which should not surprise me. Karen Blixen was a baroness, and related to Astrid and Astrid's brother. From all I ever saw of the Danish nobility, they are all cousins; they have been marrying one another for so long they look as much alike as so many Airedales. Still, it was a little spooky to have that lovely, subtle Danish writer looking back at me out of the snapshot with the same knowing, Old World smile that I had seen twenty years before on the face of a Bronze Age mummy from a peat bog.

I closed the study and went back. There was a big wind up. The live oak sawed and groaned, and the light fastened to its trunk glared up into threshing shadows. Petals from the wild plums in the woods below blew across the lighted dome of the tree. Going up the path was like being pounded from behind by pillows, and the wind tried to take the door away from me as I opened it. I came inside in a flurry of wind, fine rain, and plum blossoms. Ruth lowered her book to her lap and looked at me and laughed. Then she just sat there watching me like Little Red Riding Hood's grandmother-white hair, spectacles, Groucho Marx eyebrows, amused house-detective eyes.

“Where'd you go?”

“Down to the study.”

“What for?”

“Look something up.”

“Sounds as if the storm's finally coming in.”

“Big wind. Not much rain yet.”

A moment's silence, the widening smile. “You going to read some more now?”

“I thought I might. Why?”

‘ “Then you'd better wipe the flowers off your glasses.”

I removed my glasses and wiped the plum blossoms off and settled back down in the chair. She kept watching me.

“What is this you're reading so interestedly?”

I was already wishing I'd left the notebooks in the study, where I could have read them in the morning in privacy. I didn't suppose there was anything in them that couldn't be read to Ruth, because I am not a confider, even in myself. Nevertheless, ever since that postcard had showed up in the mail, I had had a half-irritable sense of wanting to be alone with what it revived.

“Papers,” I said.

“What papers?”

“What papers? What papers are there? The only papers, the files, the evidence. Allston was here.”

“It doesn't look like letters.”

“You know why?” I said. “Because it isn't. It's a notebook-
three
notebooks.”

“Notebooks about what?”

“It's a journal. Diary.”

“Whose? Where'd you get it?”

“Mine. I got it out of a cardboard carton.”

“I mean who wrote it?”

I settled deeper and found my place and became absorbed. “I did.”

But she wasn't letting me get away with that. When her curiosity is up she can read your genetic code with the naked eye. “Come on,” she said. “You don't keep a journal.”

“I did this time.”

“When?”

“Denmark.”

I was getting a little exasperated at the quizzing.
“Ja,”
I said. “Det er
ret.
What's wrong with keeping a journal in Denmark?”

She was still, and I went back to reading. But of course I didn't. I could feel her over there ruminative, abstracted, and unsatisfied, and when I cast a look across, there she was, propped against the pillows, her book lowered onto her stomach, one arm restraining old Catarrh, her eyes on me and her face wearing the impenetrable expression that means she is thinking, estimating, remembering, uncovering discrepancies, drawing conclusions. She made a little embarrassed sort of smile and blinked her eyes. “Read it to me?” she said.

She caught me by surprise. Normally she isn't much interested in all these papers she keeps me working at. So long as I disappear after breakfast, she can feel that she has done her duty and propped me up so that I can hold my own against deterioration. But of course she would be interested in any diary I kept in Denmark, and of course, for related reasons, I was not eager to read it to her, at least not until I had gone through it myself.

“It isn't anything,” I said. “You know—blah-blah. Up this morning betimes, and to the barber. Shave, thirty-five cents, newspaper, ten cents, miscellaneous, twenty-five cents.”

She said in her soft Bryn Mawr whisper, “I was watching you while you read it.”

“What?” I had heard her all right, but I have been trying for forty years to make her speak loud enough to be heard.

“I was watching you while you read it,” she said in exactly the same voice.

I abandoned that line. “Don't be misled by my gales of laughter.”

“It
matters
to you,” she said; and then, in a tone almost accusatory, “You never told me you were keeping a journal then.”

Which was true. Secret sin, furtive navel-picking. And unfair, I had to admit, even in the beginning. After all, Curtis was her son as well as mine, but it was my therapy that Danish trip was supposed to serve. The way I must have thought of it, she came along to look after me. And then that irruption of the irrational, that reversion into adolescence. We had never talked about it, we had only dropped it. Regret and guilt are selfish and secret emotions.

“It was a mistake,” I said. “It isn't my kind of caper. It embarrasses me.”

The look she was bending on me from the bed was troubled and troubling, steady, undisguised by any of the games we play. She wasn't sparring, or joking, or half joking. “Joe,” she said, “why not aloud? Why not together?”

Very uncomfortably I said, “It really isn't anything. It's mostly just what we did abroad. Our trip to the Paris of the North. Danish castles from Kronborg to Knuthenborg. There's nothing else in it except some self-pity and some foolishness that I regret And anyway, it's long gone now.”

“Astrid and all that business?”

“Yes, some of that, I guess. I haven't read it clear through.”