The castle’s drive is a good mile long, absolutely straight, nearly level along the crest of the ridge, and bordered all the way by flowering lindens. They filled the air with sweetness and dropped sticky liquor onto the gravel and now and then onto me. It began to drizzle before I had gone a hundred yards. The view down the slope to the right, through the English park with its big spaced oaks and bursts of rhododendron and lawns that ran down to the very edge of the sea, was dim and romantic.
I saw it, or tried to see it, with my mother’s eyes. She had lived at the end of this lane, and undoubtedly walked along it sometimes, and stood back respectfully when the great folks from the castle passed. And dreamed, maybe. And had friends to whom she talked about what she’d like to do and be, and what she’d like to see. Miss Weibull’s mother, one of the Sverdrups. And then one day she had gone down to the little harbor almost corked by its green island, and taken the ferry to Copenhagen, and like a bewildered animal crowded aboard an immigrant boat, and voyaged to America. There was something that made the women of the castle tighten their mouths and straighten their backs, and my mother was somehow part of it. And in I come, into this Old World shenanigan, like Miss Connie Coincidence herself. Incredible, the countess said. I guess. But not by any means intelligible.
The upper side of the drive is all one big planting of pines, with lines of shelter trees between the rows—a future forest as neat as a vegetable garden. Straight ahead of me the spire of a stone church rose above the trees, and short of the church, set in a green meadow at the end of the pine planting, was the cottage.
It was an absolutely standard Danish farm cottage, stuccoed, with a red tile roof and eyebrow dormers, but it looked exceptionally tidied up. A neat fence enclosed a small neat yard, with flower beds inside the fence and a snowball bush in bloom on each side of the doorway. The barn behind the cottage stood open, two goats were tethered among the dandelions at the side, red cattle were grazing at the far end of the meadow. It didn’t look like the hardship and poverty one was driven to flee from; it looked like a postcard. Wet by the fine rain, the meadow was so green it hurt the eyes.
Not knowing what to expect, I had visualized nothing, and though I looked the place over most curiously, there was no pang of recognition. I had no impulse to go in the gate and knock on the door. What would I have said? “I’d like to see Ingeborg Heegaard’s room, please, the one she slept in sixty years ago?” Ridiculous. And yet my mother’s name was still known in that house. Why would Miss Weibull remember the name of a friend of her mother’s who had left the country before Miss Weibull was born?
I was walking slowly, rubbernecking. Just as I passed the gate, the cottage door opened and a girl appeared in it. A wench, a buxom one, Aphrodite in stocking feet, still yawning from her nap, her hands reaching back up under her blouse to fasten her undone brassiere. Staring at me, curious and bold, she finished hooking herself together and settled herself into her harness with a wriggle. She reminded me of Miss Weibull—and why not? This was the Sverdrup house, they were probably related.
I touched my beret to the blowzy hoyden in the doorway. “God dag.”
Already in the midst of another yawn, she tried to cut it off with her hand, and produced a smothered laugh. “God dag.” Bubbling with her silly laugh—at what? something about my American clothes? the beret I wore against the drizzle? the mere fact that I was a stranger?—she watched me pass by. That was my visit to my mother’s childhood place, that was the pilgrimage to the source. Not worth the price of admission.
When the drive turned down toward the village, I followed the path that kept on through a green hollow and up the church hill. The church was very old. Its doors of built-up planks were grayed and weathered, the grain so raised that it half effaced the carving. Inside the vestibule, hardly bigger than the hall of an ordinary house, was an enormous poor box made from a section of the trunk of an oak. It was four feet across, hooped around with five or six bands of heavy iron, and fitted with an iron lid. Through the lid on each side came an iron hoop as thick as my finger, and in each hoop was a hand-wrought padlock the size of a good-sized lobster. The coin slot was three inches long and a quarter inch wide, suitable for the coppers of giants.
The thing looked as if it had been made to withstand Viking raiders—too heavy to lift, too strong to smash with battle-axes. As I stood inspecting it, a wispy young man in a black robe and an Elizabethan ruff came into the vestibule from the church. He stopped, surprised: a Danish clergyman who finds anybody in his church these days is bound to be surprised. He spoke to me and I replied. Then there seemed nothing more to say. After a questioning moment he went softly through the door and outside.
In a spirit of scientific research I fished out of my pocket the krone I had been snapping up my sleeve for the little baron and dropped it into the slot of the poor box. It fell with a dry sound on wood. No giant coppers in there, nothing at all in there, evidently. I wondered how often they took off the manhole cover to collect the loot. I imagined the thin young clergyman in his ruff coming out with foot-long keys on an iron ring, unlocking the massive padlocks one after the other, prying up the ponderous lid, and reaching in to scrape up a button, a couple of Tuborg caps, and—with a shout of triumph—my single krone.
At least the poor box, armored like Fort Knox, made poverty authentic and tangible, as the Sverdrup cottage did not. It made more plausible the flight of my mother, at an age no greater than that of the wench who now perhaps slept in her room. It said something about meagerness and lack of generosity and feudal limitation, it radiated suspicion in the very act of soliciting alms.
Inside, though, the church said something entirely different. It was small, clean, painted white, the prototype of dozens of little Lutheran churches I have seen in the Middle West except that it was built of stone and that the altar under its grayish lace was more high church. But what took my eye was the ships’ models hanging on wires from the ceiling. There must have been a dozen of them, three-masters, trawlers, even one white passenger ship with rows of portholes. Each had a card tacked to it, detailing the shipwreck from which its grateful maker had been saved. Here was none of the mean charity expressed by the poor box. Each one of these lovely things was a prayer of thanksgiving. I was reminded of Karen Blixen’s remark that Denmark was full of retired sea captains growing roses. Maybe poor old Bertelson, headed for the Swedish village of his childhood, had something after all. Whatever it was to me (nothing), this placid island in its landlocked sea was for the makers of these models the ultimate safe place.
Ambiguous church, speaking simultaneously of deprivation and sanctuary. Its antiphonal voices may well have come from different periods, different ages even, the place seemed so old. As I went around reading the cards on the hanging models, I came to a little bare cell to the right of the front door, with a long horizontal slit in the wall facing the altar, and a little door that opened to the outside. This was the medieval leper chapel, where the afflicted and dying could hear and see the mass without offending the sight of their families and friends. I make a practice of trying to imagine myself into human situations, but when I tried to imagine myself into that ten-by-twelve cell with other noseless, fingerless, suppurating sufferers, and to ponder what consolation I might get from crowding to a crack in the wall to hear somebody in a starched ruff preach God’s mercy, I found myself wanting to be out in the air.
So out of the church and down the hill and up again to the linden lane. At its end, a mile away, the ivied front and stepped gables of the castle sat like a barricade—absolute destination, utter terminus, total power. No ambiguity there.
The Sverdrup cottage, as I passed it, showed no sign of life, but when I was a couple of hundred yards down the drive, I heard a door close and looked back to see a man come out the gate and turn my way. I went on, not hurrying. The drizzle had stopped, there were ragged clouds dispersing out over the sea beyond the reaches of vivid lawn. The lane steamed.
The man behin
d me was walking faster than I was: I could hear his gritting steps on the gravel. Then just inside the iron gates, where the drive looped to circle before the doorway and enclose a medallion of impeccable lawn, I glanced back again, and he motioned with his arm and called to me. “Du!”
I stopped, and he came up—hard eye, hard mouth, bushy sandy eyebrows. Younger than I, vigorous mid-forties, probably, in a corduroy jacket and jodhpurs and an Ascot tie. He looked me up and down. His contemptuous “Du!” and his arrogant air annoyed me, so I looked him up and down, too. Even without the resemblance —something about the eyes and the shape of the head—it would have been clear who he was. The wicked brother. I had seen him before plenty of times, without the feudal trappings—a muscular bulldozer, a pusher-around.
“Hvad behøver Du?”
Some way to greet a guest. “I don’t behøver anything,” I said. “I was taking a walk.”
At once he tossed his head back and laughed. In English he said, “Of course, of course. You’re the one with Astrid.” Not “Sorry, we have to be careful of trespassers,” not, “Oh yes, glad to see you, I’m Eigil Rødding.” Just, “Of course, you’re the one with Astrid.”
I was ready to tell him I was not “the one” with anybody, and suggest where he could put his castle, and go to pack our bags. On top of the disturbing conclusion of lunch, his greeting about used up my eagerness to be entertained by the nobility. But my irritation, which I did not hide, amused him. Well, well, his look said. Feisty, eh? Eat me alive, will you? He had a thick neck inside his Ascot scarf, and his thighs and calves bulged his jodhpurs. His eyes had come from some other gene than the one from which the Countess got hers. His were yellow.
“So,” he said, with his hands in his pockets, “American, are you? How are you enjoying Denmark?”
“Charming country,” I said.
“Been here before?”
“No.”
“You and your wife are living with Astrid.”
“Yes.”
“That must be cosy.”
“We’ve become very good friends.”
It seemed he withheld comment With his hands shoved down in his pockets and his shoulders pushed high, he watched the flight of some starlings off the gable and eventually turned his yellow eyes back on me. His accent he had learned in England. I don’t suppose he had had to learn there the upper-class manner which is never unintentionally rude. He jerked his head toward the castle. “The ladies taking good care of you?”
“They’ve been very hospitable.”
He understood me; he grinned like a wolf. “I was unable to greet you.”
“Yes,” I said. “We understood you weren’t at home.”
That made him laugh out loud. “I was instructed not to be.”
Since he was obviously a man who had never taken instruction in his life, especially not from his women, there seemed nothing for me to say. Teetering in his jodhpur boots, clenching his hands inside his pockets, rolling his corduroy shoulders, he appeared at once abstracted and impatient, itchy with the need to be doing something. He looked me over again, this time without hostility.
“What do you do?”
I told him I was a literary agent.
“Really? That’s interesting.” (His tone said it was not.) “Where?”
I didn’t ask him where he thought anybody would be a literary agent. I only said mildly that it was a tribe found only in mid-town Manhattan.
Out of a clear sky he “said, ”I don’t suppose you play tennis.”
Fair Sir, will ye just? I had to smile, it was so knight-errant of him. “Why would you suppose that?” I said.
Another appraisal of my parts and my pallor, and he said bluntly, “You don’t look like a tennis player. Are you?”
“I guess I don’t know what tennis players look like,” I said. “I used to play some.”
“How about a game now?”
“This minute?”
“Why not? It isn’t going to rain any more. There aren’t many tennis players on this island, I have to pick up a game when I can find it.”
And what if the selected opponent doesn’t want to serve your lordship’s convenience? “I didn’t bring a racket or any clothes,” I said.
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 sta
yed 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.”