The Spectator Bird

  “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.”

  “A Rheum of One’s Own.”

  “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?”

  2

  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?

  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 w
hat 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?)