The Spectator Bird

  “What?” Ruth said. “I don’t understand either.”

  “Tell me,” I said. “When I walked past the Sverdrup cottage there was a girl there, young, quite pretty. I thought she looked a little like Miss Weibull. Who’s she?”

  “Margaret Weibull’s daughter. In the stud book”—her eyes flashed up—“my niece. There are two older children, boys, and another girl, younger, perhaps nine or ten.”

  “And who’s the father of Miss Weibull’s children?”

  “The boys are my father’s.”

  “What did you say?” Ruth said. “Oh, my goodness!”

  “Your father had two sons by his own illegitimate daughter,” I said.

  In a squeezed voice she said, “It was to continue his... experiment.”

  “And where are they?”

  “Odense, working as furniture makers.”

  “You don’t have any contact with them?”

  “No.”

  “Does Eigil?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps.”

  The straightness of her back had unstiffened by degrees. She tightened herself into erectness so forlornly that I said, “This is too painful for you.”

  “No. I want you to know all things.”

  “Well... all right. The two boys are your father’s. Whose are the girls?”

  “My brother’s. Her brother’s.”

  I may have whistled. Ruth was reduced to flabbergasted silence.

  “It is hard for you to understand,” the countess said. “It is hard for me. Do you see, Eigil worshiped our father. Anything he did was right. I don’t know, when the scandal came out, whether it was then he decided to... take over the experiment, take our father’s part and carry the results another generation or two? Does it sound, in a way, logical? Or whether, even before the exposure ...it sounds incredible, his own son, his own daughter... whether he may have encouraged Eigil to carry it on.”

  “Well,” I said, “I guess I don’t understand the state of mind. I never thought of incest as that cold-blooded, Or does Eigil like Miss Weibull?”

  “I don’t know. I honestly don’t know.”

  “Poor Manon!” said Ruth. “She knows all this?”

  “Of course. My father kept all that separate. I suppose only my mother knew. But Eigil, because of what happened to our father, must be an upside-down puritan about it. All the family must accept, everybody must co-operate. I’m surprised he doesn’t make Manon prepare the chamber when he intends to sleep with that woman.”

  “She’s going to have a child very shortly. That’s Eigil’s, I suppose.”

  “Yes.”

  “Does she live in the castle?”

  “Yes. I didn’t know, or I would not have gone, and taken you.”

  “Tell me something else. When I first saw Eigil, he was coming out of the Sverdrup cottage, but you say Miss Weibull doesn’t live there. What would he have been doing there, just looking after a piece of the estate, or something else?”

  She was steady as a rock, but her mouth twisted as she spoke, until she was all but snarling. “Can’t you guess? My brother and my half sister now have a daughter of breeding age, the one you saw. To the in-and-in breeders, the mating of half brother and half sister is the best combination of all. What shouldn’t we be able to expect when a child of that mating is bred back to her father? There is the nine-year-old, too. In no more than seven years, she will be ready. And if this one who is about to be born should be a girl, or if the one who is now sixteen should have a daughter, then there will be still others. When they will be ready, Eigil will be no more than about sixty. There will be many, many scientific results, as well as many heirs to choose among when the legitimate line runs out.”

  She spat it out like a mouthful of acid. Eight feet apart on our gilded Empire chairs, we sat in an embarrassed triangle. All at once Ruth jumped from her chair and threw her arms around the countess, crying, “Oh, Astrid, what a bitter, bitter life!”

  I stopped. Propped in bed, wincing, solemn, shaking her head, Ruth said, “Wasn’t that a terrible story to have to tell! She really did have a bitter life, and it can’t have improved much. Do you suppose, while she’s living in that house her brother gives her, this still goes on? Is that what she and Manon have to talk about when they see each other?”

  I shrugged and closed the notebook. Sitting there with that closed episode in my hands—closed, petrified, written down and put away and carefully disremembered-I had a fatalistic sense of how delusory are the options that seem to open during the course of a life. In an instant, the opportunities that open like the eyelids of someone rousing from coma can close again, and be closed forever. Even if the eyes stay open after death, you can look into them and see not a glimmer of what for an instant was revealed. Close them, weight them with pennies.

  “That poor woman,” Ruth said, comfortably and yet cautiously too, with a sidelong look at me as she reached to adjust her heating pad. I shut off the heat lamp and left Catarrh cooling in my lap. “Is it late?” Ruth said. “Even if it is, let’s finish it tonight. Is there much more?”

  “There isn’t any more. That’s it.”

  Now she sat up. “What do you mean, there isn’t any more? It can’t end there!”

  “It does, though.”

  “But...”

  I opened the notebook to the last scribbled page and held it up for her to see. “Nothing but some jottings-some flight times, some telephone numbers, something in Danish—Den Hvide Flip, what’s that mean? The White Collar? A store, I guess. And that’s all.”

  She was sitting straight up, really distracted. “But that’s such an anticlimax! You must have gone on with it. Are you sure there isn’t another notebook somewhere?”

  “Only the three. This one’s got half its pages left. We went home pretty soon after this.”

  “Oh no,” Ruth said. “What’s the date of that last entry? June? June first? We stayed nearly another month. remember, we got home just a day or two before the Fourth of July. There was lots more. We took her to Roskilde to see her friend in that nunnery for unmarried noblewomen, and there was that performance of Hamlet at Kronborg Castle, and we spent a weekend at Ellebacken, right toward the end. There was a whole flurry of things, we were with her all the time.”

  “I guess I stopped writing when we’d found out all her secrets.”

  “But you’ve left out everything we were reading for!”

  “So?” I shook the notebook by its rings to show her there was nothing more in it.

  Quite a long silence while she watched me from the bed. Finally she said, “Of course, I see, you wouldn’t have put that down.”

  “Put what down?”

  “What we were finally going to talk out.”

  “What if there wasn’t anything to put down?”

  “Wasn’t there?”

  “Meaning you think there was.”

  “Meaning nothing. Oh, Joe, we’re too old just to clam up and get mad! I was never sure, that’s all. Up to the time when she told us about her father, I thought it was just friendly. Nice. Then afterward I didn’t know. You got more and more interested in her. You’re not very good at hiding things. You were interested in her.”

  “Sure I was interested in her. So were you.”

  “Not the way you were. How could I be? I couldn’t help seeing. All those last few weeks, when we were together all the time. That night up at Ellebacken, Midsummer Night, after we’d stayed up late to watch the fires, I woke up about three in the morning and you were gone. I went to her room, and so was she.”

  “I couldn’t sleep. I went for a walk.”

  “With her.”

  “No, by myself. And ran into her.”

  There are times when, if you look into the eyes of another per. son, and there is an emotional charge going between you, even the steadiest look seems to break up into pulses and quivers, as if innumerable tiny lines of force were dispersing in all directions from the focused beam. We looked at each ot
her that way, and she waited, not believing me.

  “She hadn’t been able to sleep either,” I said. “We took a walk along the edge of the beechwoods, and when we came to the lake we got into an old rowboat and rowed out to the island where her father is buried. She showed me his grave. Then we walked back to the cottage.”

  “And that’s all?”

  What happened to me then is incredible. This is 1974, the age of infidelity, when casual coupling and wife swapping and therapeutic prostitution are accepted forms of violence as normal as mugging and murder, when practices that in my youth would have outraged a two-dollar whore are apparently standard in every middle-class bedroom and are explicated, with diagrams, in manuals sold in college bookstores, and celebrated, with whinnyings and slobberings, in every novel you pick up. These days people hesitate for a marriage license no longer than dogs in a vacant lot, and marriage vows, those quaint anachronisms, are about as binding as blue laws from the Code of Hammurabi. These are times when Count Rødding’s little experiments in human genetics would strike people as repulsive only because they unduly enlarged the population just when inbreeding was bringing it under control. Moreover, I am almost seventy, all passion spent, nearly as bald as a cue ball, rheumatic and irritable and unsatisfied with myself, a comic Pantaloon. And guilty of nothing but being tempted—guilty of it once, twenty years ago, and never since. Whatever Ruth has had to forgive in me, it hasn’t been women. So what do I do? What, that is, does the insecure adolescent in me do? He stands up so suddenly that old Catarrh is dumped onto the rug. In the phrase that is as old-fashioned as the guilts and emotions that shake his hands and roughen his voice and blur his eyes, he goes all to pieces.

  I found myself in the bedroom door, really shaking. I could hardly talk. “No,” I managed to say. “That isn’t all. I kissed her. Once. If that’s what you’ve been wanting to talk out, now we’ve done it!”

  In the hall I clawed a coat off a hanger. As I opened the door the night air was cold in my face. The night was still and misty, the moon was nearly straight overhead, with a pearly ring around it. I walked up and down the drive gritting my teeth, with tears in my eyes—Marcus Aurelius Allston, the spectator bird, having the feathers beaten off him in a game from which he had thought he was protected by the grandfather clause. That other night, Midsummer Night twenty years before, filled his mind as moonlight filled the hilltop where he walked.

  3

  I shut the door softly on the interior darkness and the close smell of mold and disuse. It was lighter outside than in. It had not been actually dark all night long. The dusk was gray and faintly luminous, swimming with things half seen and things illusory. I reached out and touched the whitewashed wall, raised my head to look at the crisscross of half timbering disappearing under the shadow of the thatch, looked down and moved my feet and saw the dark crushed tracks I left in the grass. But at a little distance there was no such certainty; everything was marbled and deceptive. The celebrated light nights of Denmark are for hallucination and witchcraft, not for plain seeing.

  Where the drive turned in, the cypresses were black, distinct in shape but blurred in outline. While I stared at them trying to focus them into clarity they melted into the gray of the beechwoods beyond the road. From horizon to zenith the sky was almost too pale for stars. Off in the west a humpbacked moon lay stranded, colorless as a jellyfish. The air, utterly still, carried a fragrance of wood smoke mixed with the sweetness of mown grass that rose from the lawn.

  Walking softly, I went around the cottage to the grassy terrace from which we had watched the celebration at midnight. The big fire that had leaped from the beach below had burned down to a red core, and off on the Swedish coast opposite, north and south of the overtaken lights of Hälsingborg, other coals glowed dully. Not a sound. No cheep of a wakeful bird, no stir in the ivy or thatch, no slightest sigh of moving air. The yelling of the pagan rites of midnight, when hundreds of Danes and Swedes drunk on beer and summer and love had thrown their witch effigies onto the flames and sent the malignant spirits howling back to their home in the Harz, might never have been. Successful exorcism. The countess had made us listen, where we sat on blankets on the grass. She said you could hear the rushing in the air.

  “Aren’t you afraid?” I said. “You claim to be a witch.”

  “Yes, I am afraid,” she said, “but not of burning. I am not witch enough. They do not burn you for curing warts.”

  In the dusk I could not read her expression, but it seemed to me there was something like self-contempt in her voice, and it troubled me.

  Now, two hours later, I stood in the wet grass, sleepless, restless, obscurely distressed, caught between a day that would not properly die and one that was not ready to be born. The whole world, and I with it, hung at the very peak of summer, holding its breath before starting down. I shivered, more with the sense of something ending than with chill. It was a time for departures. Our own was only a week away, and I didn’t want to go. Ruth did. Now that I was feeling better, she said, there was no reason to stay. But I understood, and was resentful. More than once, as she went about making the arrangements and reservations, I had wanted to shout at her, Don’t push me!

  I was full of cobwebs, sad with the late hour, depressed. I needed to walk it off. So I went soft-footed around the cottage again, and out across the lawn to the gate between the cypresses. There I stopped to look back at the cottage on its dark lawn-medieval and picturesque, historical and false, survival not only of the ancient northern village culture but of a time when Astrid Rødding was a rich titled girl who could afford to play peasant, and whose father indulged her with a crofter’s house to play in.

  While I was looking, the door opened quickly and closed again, and she stood on the doorstone.

  At that distance she was only a shape. It was her way of moving that told me who it was. From under the cypresses I watched her, and it seemed to me that a hundred feet away she might hear the beating of my heart. I thought she bent her head, listening as I had listened. I thought she looked up at the sky. Then she was coming toward me across the grass.

  To prevent her running into me in the dusk and being frightened, I stepped out into the open and said, “God morgen.”

  “Oh! Who is it?”

  She stopped, and true to my nature when my emotions are involved, I played the horse’s ass. The buried adolescent in me, as uncertain as the dusk I stood in. I dropped my voice to sepulchral depths and said, “Jeg er en hekse. Jeg har mistet min vej. Kan De siger mig vejen til Harz?”

  “Mr. Allston, is it you?”

  “Who else?” I said, already disgusted with myself. My heart was still pounding. She wore a kerchief on her smooth head, and a sweater like a shawl around her shoulders. She looked like an illustration from a folk tale, some shawled human creature caught east of the sun and west of the moon.

  “You startled me,” she said with a laugh.

  “I’m sorry.”

  She moved close. I could smell the faintly musty smell of her sweater, stored a long time without airing in the unused cottage. “Couldn’t you sleep either?”

  “No.”

  “It is never a good night for sleeping, Midsummer Night. Things are abroad.”

  “Like us.”

  “Yes, like us. Where were you going?”

  “I don’t know. Just for a walk.”

  “Is Ruth asleep?”

  “Yes. She doesn’t lie awake the way some people do.”

  A pause. Her face lifted to look at me, a shadow face with only the faint flash of eyes. “There is a path around the lake,” she said. “That is where I was going.”

  “May I come along?”

  “I would like that, if ...”

  I knew she was thinking of Ruth. So was I.

  Across the road she darted her flashlight ahead until it found a path between the beechwoods and a field where hay had been piled on racks to dry. “Do you need the light?” she said. “Can you see? Shall I leave it on?”


  “Let’s do without it.”

  The shapes of hay, vaguely luminescent, enlarged by the diffused shadows thrown by the moon, watched us as we passed between them and the woods. “It’s like a field of schmoos,” I said. Then I had to explain what schmoos were. She said they belonged in Scandinavian folklore along with trolls and dwarves and other shapeless shapes of mist and darkness. Her mood was somber, she walked beside me withdrawn into herself.

  When she stumbled, I took her by the arm above the elbow.

  Touch. Her arm was both firm and soft. Having taken hold of it, I did not let go. I couldn’t have felt that contact more if her arm had been the handle of a funhouse shock machine. In one tingling flash she was less tall, more feminine, more accessible. I remembered the time when she had shed her tweed uniform and frolicked like a suddenly physical Valkyrie in the sound. The things that had maintained formality between us—my poor-boy’s sense of her title and caste, the awkwardness of her family history, the defensive playfulness, the too bright smile—were all forgotten. Walking her down that dark path was like dancing, the sort of dancing that was orthodox when I was young, the kind the modern young have deprived themselves of, the kind that authorizes, to music, a physical contact otherwise taboo. It was as if she had taken down her hair. Without a word spoken we groped along the dark edge of the woods, as different from the two people who had just paused as ozone is different from oxygen.

  After a little distance she said, “Do you remember the day when you turned your car and drove us back through the young beechwood, the day we went to Karen Blixen?”

  “Yes.”

  “I think it was that day when I began to know you.”

  I had her by the arm, I felt the blood pulsing in her elbow.

  The path curved away from the woods along a fence, where it was lighter, and then back again through the woods along what seemed to be a cart road. “This was once all my father’s, and then mine,” she said. “They took it away, all but my little cottage, when Erik was tried.”

  “You told us. It’s too bad.”

  Ahead, the darkness of overhanging trees lightened as if we were coming to a clearing. There was a mossy smell. The countess stopped, holding me back, and shot her flashlight ahead and down. It gleamed off dark water, a tarn straight out of Poe. When she shut off the light again, the water still lay there, darkly burnished, reflecting no stars. It graded so gradually off from the land that I might have walked right into it We stood listening. Not a sound.