The Spectator Bird (5 page)

“And us.”

“Us? Yes, naturally.”

“Please? I think it might be good for us.”

“Oh, hell,” I said. “Here, the reason I dug it out, we got this today.”

I scaled the postcard over onto the bed and she read it, taking a long time. She turned it over and studied the picture of Bregninge and then turned it back and read it again. “Oh dear,” she said after about five minutes. “It makes you want to cry.”

I said nothing.

“She was such a
nice
woman,” Ruth said. “I liked her. I liked her as well as anybody I ever knew.”

“I know. Or at least I thought so.”

“I haven't thought about her for a long time.”

“No.”

“Why didn't you give me the card before?”

“I don't know. I just wanted to, sort of, look it up.”

You can live with someone a long time and not have more than a few moments as exposed and intimate as that one. Ruth's face was full of questions, but I couldn't see any hardening or accusation there. Pleading, rather. She said softly and hesitantly, “Would it be ... painful to read it?”

What could I say? Only that okay, sure, I'd walk out in the open without any clothes on, if that was what she wanted. And no, of course it wouldn't be painful. Why should it be? I flipped open the first notebook. “It probably won't make either of us particularly happy,” I said. “It wasn't a very happy time. You want all that business about the
Stockholm,
too? That's where it starts.”

“You took notes on that ghastly voyage?”

“Ghastly detail by ghastly detail. I lost my faith in God's justice when that ship ran into the Andrea Doria and it was the Andrea Doria that sank.”

“What year was that?”

“When the Stockholm rammed the Andrea
Doria?”

“No. When we went to Denmark?”

“Nineteen fifty-four.” The odd tension and nakedness of the moment had passed. We were both being casual. “You want to hear this?”

“I'll be quiet. I was just getting oriented.”

She laid aside her book, folded her hands around Catarrh and pulled him up against her, snuggled her back into the pillows, and looked expectant, like a child who has got her way and extracted one more bedtime story. She overdid it, on purpose, I suppose, and had to laugh. After a second, so did I. The woman is,shrewd.

The soft, heavy wind slammed against the house. I heard hard rain at the windows. Nothing could have been snugger, or more secure, or more transitory.

“Getting oriented?” I said. “Aren't we all.”

S.S. Stockholm, one day out, March 26:

It just struck me that if we hadn't taken off on this trip we would tonight be attending Robert Frost's eightieth birthday party, complete with personalities and tensions. Glad to be leaving all that behind for a while. Full of resolutions: look after myself, for a change. Get my health back. Forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience, etc. Settle some things. Read, absorb, learn, think. Sounds silly but probably isn't. Above all, relax. Learn to sleep again. Quit being such a puritan, file the point off the prick of conscience, quit crying mea culpa, quit beating the breast, quit pitying myself. Accept. The past is past, I can't do a thing about it. The future is none of my business. As Mr. Jefferson said, the world belongs to the living.

Very rough. Thanks to Dramamine, we remain vertical, but barely. Wind forty knots, which according to the Beaufort Scale of Winds on the bulletin board is a fresh gale. Approximately, it plucks the hair from your head. Bad luck at table—only survivors besides ourselves a pair of old Swedes. He has sold his Omaha grocery store and is taking his Minnesota-born wife back so they can live out their golden years in the village near Gøteborg that he last saw in 1905. Oh boy.

They are awkward and diffident, and would get chummy on the slightest invitation, but I know this kind from childhood—pious, censorious, opposed to smoking drinking cardplaying dancing movies books language thinking. They sit in lace-curtained parlors and tsk-tsk on an indrawn breath, they know every unwanted pregnancy in town sooner than the girl does, they want English teachers in Augustana College fired for assigning A
Farewell
to Arms, they wrote the Volstead Act. And touching, in an exasperating sort of way.

Something happens to immigrants (I don't mean political exiles, who are another breed; I mean immigrants who left the old country they were at home in in order to better themselves in the land of opportunity). The trauma of exile petrifies them. Forever will they love, and the old sod be fair. They bring it all with them, in its 1890 or 1900 version, and they plant it in America without modification and then spend the rest of their lives defending it against change, while in the old country what they knew changes so as to be unrecognizable. I wouldn't want to be old Bertelson when he finds that in modern Sweden the Lutheran Church has become nothing but a registry of births and deaths, and that the sexual habits of young Swedes make the objectionable goings-on in Omaha lovers' lanes look like sandbox play.

And how their hound-dog eyes reproach me, otherwise quite a pleasant man, when I order a bottle of Pouilly-Fumé to go with the fish. I offer some to them, despite Ruth's eyebrows, and Mrs. Bertelson claps her hand over her glass as she might clap hands over her private parts if offered rape.

They are curious why worldlings like us should be going to Denmark, and when they learn -from Ruth that we have no business there, but still are intending to stay for several months, and that my mother came from there and that we might look up the village where she was bom, they instantly construe me as an ally. I too am fleeing Gomorrah, looking backward toward the good old ways. It irritates me to see myself in those two cracked distorting mirrors, standing in front of some thatched cottage filled with yearning thoughts and fulfillments.

Early to bed to read. So rough the bureau drawers keep falling out. I tie them shut with the rubber clothesline some well-wisher gave us for our drip-dry. The sentiments of The Lonely Crowd prove to be, as Huck Finn said of another book, interesting but tough, and I lay it aside to study Danish. Samples of the beauty of that language: en smuk
pige,
a pretty girl, en blomst, a flower. I make myself half sick practicing glottal stops, which crop up at random in Danish sentences and make everything sound like hiccups, regurgitations, and death rattles.

 

March 27:

Wind fifty-two knots—whole gale. This knife blade of a ship, fast and unstable as a destroyer, wallows and heels and shudders through the enormous seas. The horizon tilts, sinks, rotates, lifts. Wind off the port bow, foredeck emptied and everything lashed down, now and then big waves coming aboard. Dining room nearly empty at breakfast. Don't know about noon—didn't go. Dinner ditto. Dramamine, Zwiebach, and yoghurt. Steward urges Rullemops, pickled herrings, as a seasickness cure, and I vomit him out of the cabin. Better now, but Ruth really miserable. Berths keep filling with bureau drawers despite all my rigging.

 

March 28, 29, 30:

There went a lost weekend, and we might lose the whole week. Wind now fifty-four knots, between a whole gale and a storm. Ruth stays in her berth, but I totter out, groggy with Dramamine and misled by that Lutheran conscience I seem to share with the Bertelsons, to try the gym, take a workout, get the blood moving and the gorge nailed down. The Stockholm is like a drunken elephant dancing—down by the bow, over to port, up by the stem, over to starboard, up by the bow. I make my way down to C deck like a marble bouncing down a pinball machine. The weights I work out on are one second as heavy as houses, and the next slack in my hands. I try a sauna and come out fast—too smothery. The masseur slaps his table, but I can't bear the thought of being mauled. Settle for a swim.

As I step into the pool's shallow end the ship begins its long shuddering lean to port, and the pool goes away: I pursue it down the slippery tiles. It stops, pasted against the far wall. The ship begins to roll back, returning water floods my feet and ankles, my calves. I crouch, ready to launch into a breast stroke, and hang on, here it comes! When the tidal wave has passed, I pick myself up out of the corner and get out of there. In all that place of dampness and shining tile, amid the machinery of physical fitness installed to make travelers happy, not a living creature except the lonely masseur and me.

 

March 31:

Today we should be debarking the Bertelsons at Gøteborg. God knows where we are—I doubt that the captain does—but we're a long way from Gøteborg. As for the Bertelsons' dream, that has been postponed to a better world. This is how:

The wind went down some today, and some of the groundhogs came out, including our other table mates: a cheerful Dane from Fyn, an apple and cherry grower who has been in Florida helping his brother with an orange grove, and a silent Norwegian who ate everything on the menu from Rullemops to mints. Both he and the Dane drank beer and
akvavit
with their dinner, scandalizing the Bertelsons. But the Bertelsons weren't driven away. Quelled, scared, out of their known place, they seemed to want to hang onto Ruth and me for safety. They even tagged along to the lounge, where dancing was announced, and watched us at the devil's work.

The devil's work was never so difficult. Try dancing on a hip-roofed barn in an earthquake. We slid into the chairs on every roll, and crosshatched our way uphill again, and were tilted forward and slid into the opposite chairs. The piano was bolted down, but the bench was not, and the piano player kept alternately sliding clear under his keyboard and then out beyond arm's reach. We could not have kept it up more than a few minutes at best, but the best didn't occur. On one of the
Stockholm's
salmon leaps through the sea there was a wrench and rumble, the pianist yelped and fell sideways out of the way, and the piano slid ponderously down the deck and broke the leg of the silent Norwegian, belching and dozing among the wallflowers.

By the time we had the piano cornered and tied down, and a couple of stewards had come running with a stretcher and slipped and slid and teetered the Norwegian off to the infirmary, I became aware that Bertelson too was down, vomiting on the deck, with his wife trying to hold him back from sliding into his mess. So they carried him off too. The word a half hour later was that he had had a coronary, and was dead.

Oh, his poor wife! Ruth said when I told her. Yes. Oh, his poor wife. Oh, his poor dream. Oh, his poor fifty years of dull work with its deferred reward. Oh, his poor dim dependable unimaginative not very attractive life that was supposed to mature like a Treasury bill. Ah, Bertelson! Ah, humanity!

As I write this, Ruth is asleep, and whimpering with some sad dream. The bureau drawers come slowly out, stretching the rubber clothesline that holds them, and then, as the roll eases and starts the other way, are shot back into place like sluggish cross-bow bolts. The wind is up again, as rough as it has been at any time on this miserable crossing. Nothing for me to do but lie and listen, not too confidently, to my heart, and be chased from side to side by things I don't want to think of but can't shut out. At least when I was seasick there wasn't that. They say you are never seasick in battle. The corollary is that you never battle when seasick. But who can stay seasick all the time?

 

April 1:

Bertelson just missed dying on April Fool's Day. With unseemly haste, urged by some consideration or other (no refrigeration ?) the ship got rid of him before the day of fools was more than barely begun. They must have been sewing him into his sack before he was cold.

I had fallen asleep, finally, about three. Some time later I awoke with the panicked conviction that something was wrong. The ship's motion was different. She was not plunging forward with her straining roll, but wallowing with a horrible helplessness. I could not hear the engines, nor could I, when I stepped out of the berth, feel them in the floor. My watch said ten past five. At any minute I expected bells, shouts, cries of “To the lifeboats,” and I almost shook Ruth awake to start her dressing. But first I decided to look outside.

The hall was brightly lighted, totally empty. Rows of closed doors. In robe and. slippers I went up the companionway and into the lounge. It too blazed with light, it too was empty. The broken chairs had been taken away and the piano was once more bolted down, but not a soul, not a sound except the creaking of woodwork as the room warped and tilted to the heavy, helpless wallowing of the ship.

I went to the doors and looked out across the starboard rail. The ship's lights shone on the lifting, gray, foam-streaked side of a wave. I watched it rise and rise until it was high above the rail, and I felt the ship shrink and slide from it I looked deep inside it, deeper than I wanted to look, and then it fell off somewhere, and the ship rolled so that I grabbed the doorframe, and the light spread out over the hissing crests of farther waves, an appalling turmoil of water, an uncreated waste without order or end or purpose, heaving and yelling through the dark that the ship's little brightness only made more total. And rain falling onto it, slashing at the glassy sides, while the wind blew a stiff spray flat off the crests. Whoever would know the age of the earth, Conrad says somewhere, should look upon the sea in storm. The age or disposition of the earth, he should have said.