The Spectator Bird

  “It’s like death,” the countess said. “Or resignation, hopeless resignation. Do you know that poem of Goethe’s that we were all made to memorize? Über allen Gipfeln?”

  “Yes. Say it.”

  “Perhaps I can’t remember after all.” She hesitated, and her face turned toward me, still and almost featureless in the twilight, with its glint of eyes. She laughed as if embarrassed. “If I had not seen you go through the beechwoods a second time, I would not dare speak poetry to you in such a place. You are not to laugh.”

  “I won’t laugh.”

  She cleared her throat like a child reciting. “Hør Du, nu.”

  “You Du me.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I do. If I didn’t I could not speak this sad poem to you. It is a poem made all of whispers.”

  She said it in whispers.

  Über allen Gipfeln

  Ist Ruh.

  In allen Wipfeln

  Spürest Du

  Kaum einen Hauch.

  Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde.

  Warte nur, balde

  Ruhest Du auch.

  I felt her shiver. “I do not like Midsummer Night,” she said. “For many people it is a time of celebration and happiness, the freedom of summer. For me it is always sad. It makes me feel that I am dead but have not yet left the body, and do not want to leave, but cling to it whimpering and crying. Tonight is the worst. Do you know why I could not sleep?”

  “Why?” I was still holding her by the arm.

  “Because you are soon leaving. The only dear friends I have had for many years.”

  “I’m glad you don’t want us to go.”

  “How could I? I was dead, and you taught me what it would be to be alive again. I understand why you must go, but it makes me very sad.”

  “Must we go?” I said. “Why must we?”

  “Because you have obligations,” she said promptly. “You have work to do.”

  “What obligations? What work? I could give all that up tomorrow.”

  She started moving again down the grassy track along the shore. “You are not the kind who shirks things,” she said, as if she knew. Her left hand came over and pulled at my fingers around her arm until I let go. I must have been gripping her painfully hard.

  We passed out from under the trees crowding close to the shore, and there was more light, a wider sky. The obscure became the faintly visible. Dry rushes crackled underfoot, and the low edge of the sky was scratched with bending lines of tules. The path ended at a narrow dock that jutted out into the water. As I followed her out onto the old felty planks, the colorless moon reappeared doubled, pale in the sky, pale in the black water. At the end of the dock a rowboat sat absolutely motionless on its shadow.

  For the first time since she had come out her cottage door I saw her eyes clearly, the glint of the moon in them as she stooped to fumble for the boat’s painter, tied to the dock post. She squatted there, looking up at me. “Can you row, or shall I?”

  “I’ll row. Where are we going?”

  “I want to pay a little visit. Will you mind coming?”

  “Of course not. But visit who, at this hour?”

  She didn’t reply. Pulling on the rope, I felt that the boat was half full of water. It took some straining to haul it onto the dock and tip it. The wooden knockings, the dark sound of pouring, went back into the stillness as if into blotting paper.

  When I had the boat back in the water I stood to help the countess down, hoping to re-establish the tingle of touching flesh, but she used my arm as impersonally as she would have used a groom’s.

  She shot the flashlight beam past me, moved it around to get her bearings, and then gave me directions from the stern, steering by some dark landmark. I was clumsy at the oars, which seemed to have been whittled out of tree limbs. The boat was water-logged, the left oar kept slipping out of its worn notch so that we lurched in zigzags where the adolescent in me would have liked to skim that old hulk across the pond like a skipping stone. Concentrating, I held the lame oar to its job, carefully dipping it into the moon’s reflection, carefully pulling, carefully swinging it back over its skitter of pale drops until it bit again into the moon.

  “We are close,” the countess said. “Slowly, it is hard to see exactly.” The light shot past me, probed a moment, and went out. “A little on the right oar,” she said. “Now pull, both, hard!”

  The prow grounded in mud. Before I could ship the oars or stand up, she had squeezed tippily past me and jumped ashore. The boat surged another two feet up the bank as she hauled on the painter. I stepped ashore into mud to my shoe tops and followed her up a brambly bank onto the level.

  Her light darted ahead across a clearing overgrown with high grass and vines. “Come.” Her hand groped and found mine. Touch again: her hand was cold and smooth. In the middle of the clearing she stopped, holding the light at her feet Quickly she crouched and brushed the grass away from a square stone as she might have brushed hair back from a face. I read the inscription : Landgreve Aage Rødding, 1874-1938.

  “This is where he is buried,” the countess said. “This is where he came to shoot himself.”

  “Was that before or after your mother?”

  “After.”

  “Was he insane, you think?”

  “Perhaps. Not at the end.”

  “You’ve had hard things to bear.”

  “Ah!” As if my sympathy bothered her, she tried to pull her hand away from mine. I held on, and after a tug or two she let it lie quiet.

  “And still have,” I said. “What are you going to do? How will you live? Will you have to rent the apartment again?”

  “I will hate it, after you, but I have no other thing to do. My designs pay me too little.”

  I asked the question that had not been far out of my mind since the day her quisling delivered her at the door after her stay at Ørebyslot. “What about your husband?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know? It’s none of my business, but surely you’re not going to take him back.”

  “I don’t think so. No, of course not, I will not. And yet, you know, he is so miserable, an outcast.”

  “Doesn’t he deserve to be?”

  “Deserving your punishment does not make you less miserable.”

  “But think what it would do to you!”

  Her face, which she had turned away, turned back. “I said you were not one to shirk,” she said. “Would you tell me to shirk?”

  “But, my God, you don’t owe him any dutyl You don’t owe anybody any duty except yourself. They’ve all lost any claim on you, your husband and all the rest of them. Why haven’t any of them helped you during all the years you’ve been in trouble?”

  I could feel her resistance, or reluctance, in her fingers. There I stood holding her cold hand, running my thumb over the smooth knuckles as if I had rights in her skin, and yet feeling how remote she was, lost in some medieval curse or spell, hypnotized by duty or obedience or noblesse oblige or whatever it was. I smelled the faint mildewed odor of her sweater, and it made me angry that she should have to wear such things, worn out, left over.

  All at once I couldn’t stand any more. I couldn’t stand to see her go back into the moldy cellar of her life, I couldn’t stand to have her at once so warm and so cold, so sympathetic and so without initiative or hope. I dropped her hand, I took her by both shoulders, I brought her face close to mine. Her eyes had no more light in them than her pale skin.

  “Listen!” I said. “Listen! You don’t deserve any more punishment. You’ve paid your debt, ten times over. You can’t stay here, scratching out just enough for yoghurt and cheese. You can’t go on sharing the only things you have left with strangers. You shouldn’t have to take in lodgers! You can’t let it all settle back on you, it’ll smother you. You can’t let that man work on you. He made his bed, let him lie in it. You’re coming with us, you understand that? I can make a job for you, or find you one somewhere else if
you’d rather. There aren’t ten people in New York with your capacity in German, French, English, the Scandinavian languages, art, the whole business. You don’t have to grind out wallpaper designs for Illums. You can be an illustrator, or a translator, or an agent, or anything you want You can’t stay here and mold. You’re too special.”

  Utterly unresponsive, she hung in my hands. I turned her so that the moon, almost blurred out in the ground mist, would fall on her face and in her eyes. Her face was pale and sad, her eyes without brightness, her body without elasticity or response, without even resistance.

  “Do you think I have not dreamed of such a thing?” she said. “It is not so easy as it was for your mother, even. It must be very wonderful to have the freedom of the poor.”

  “You think you’re not poor enough?”

  “Not free enough.”

  “Why not? I’ll pay your fare. I’ll get you a work permit Well be your sponsors. You can live with us.”

  She twisted and then faced me again, ten inches away. “You say ‘we,’ ” she said. “You say ‘us.’ Have you talked about this with Ruth?”

  “I don’t have to. She’s very fond of you, she hates as much as I do to see you trapped here.”

  “I think she is fond of me,” the countess said. “As for me, I love her, she is generous and warm. She is my dear friend, and she is your wife, and she wants to get you away from here and away from me, and she is right.”

  “Astrid ...”

  “You have said my name, finally. I wondered if you ever would.”

  “Astrid, Astrid, Astrid,” I said. “I’ll say it ten thousand times a day, in penance or prayer or praise or however you want it. But you can’t stay here. I can’t go away and leave you here!”

  “Oh, my dear Joseph,” she said. She put up her face, and I kissed it. Her hands came up around my neck. For a second or two we were molded, fused, vulcanized together. Then she was pushing at my chest, wanting away.

  I didn’t try to hold her. I couldn’t look at her. I turned and looked instead at the spread of still water. My eyes were hot. Blinking, grinding my teeth, I concentrated on the lake, the dim rushes, the dreary almost-light. Day had sneaked up on us. I could see the tangled grass, the running blackberry vines. If anything had been watching our ridiculous, scalding, hopeless embrace in that suicide’s clearing, it had withdrawn into the woods.

  Without looking back, giving her the same chance I needed myself, I went down to the boat and pulled it around until I had it pointed out. Then I did look back. She stood where I had left her. I think she had been watching me all the time I had my back to her. In the imperceptibly lightening grayness of dawn she looked as forlorn as a beggar woman.

  “We should go,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  I stooped and pulled the stem of the boat farther up on the shelving mud so that she could get in without sinking in the slime. As I turned again, I caught her just straightening from the curtsy she had dropped toward her father’s gravestone.

  I said nothing. She came down to the water and I helped her in and rowed her across to the dock, which reached toward us out of the rushes like charcoal lines in a Japanese drawing. Walking back to the cottage, we hardly spoke. In the shadow under the cypresses, gray now instead of black, and filled with a sad visibility, we looked at one another. We did not touch.

  “You first,” she said.

  I went across the drenched grass to the door. There I stopped. Obscure under the dark spiral trees, she watched me. I opened the door to go in. At the last second, as the door was closing, I saw her put her hands to her head and bend over from the waist in a wild, abandoned movement as purely physical as if she were vomiting.

  She straightened, and I closed the door.

  4

  From our front walk to where the drive turns down the hill is two hundred feet. Thirteen round trips make just about a mile. Many times, especially in winter when it is too muddy to walk across country, Ruth and I have carried the carcass up and down that thirteen-lap course before going to bed. It is rather like walking the deck of a ship, for the hilltop is level and high and exposed to the stars. It is one of those places where the condition of being human is inescapably sad. The lights along the dark hills are scattered and without confidence, conurbia down in the valley is only a glow on the sky. The hazed moonlight is deceptive, there are somber pools of shadow under the oaks. From up on that chilly platform you can look back down your life and see it like a Kafka road dwindling out across the Siberian waste. You can raise your head and look into the infinite spaces whose eternal silence terrified Pascal.

  My absurd tears were dry after a lap or two, but I did not feel like going back in. I didn’t know what I would say to Ruth, or how I would act. The performance I had just put on had left me alarmed about my own unacknowledged possibilities. If the truth were told, and I suppose it had better be, I wanted to be alone for a while with that possibility I had renounced, or been made to renounce, twenty years before and carried around with me like a cyst ever since.

  What was it? Did I feel cheated? Did I look back and feel that I had given up my chance for what they call fulfillment? Did I count the mountain peaks of my life and find every one a knoll? Was I that fellow whose mother loved him, but she died; whose son had been a tragedy to both his parents and himself; whose wife up to the age of twenty had been a nice girl and since the age of twenty a nice woman? Whose profession was something he did not choose, but fell into, and which he practiced with intelligence but without joy? Had I gone through my adult life glancing desperately sidelong in hope of diversion, rescue, transfiguration?

  That is the way the modern temper would read me. Babbitt, the man who in all his life never did one thing he really wanted to. One of those Blake was scornful of, who controlled their passions because their passions are feeble enough to be controlled. One of those Genteel Tradition characters whose whole pale ethos is subsumed in an act of renunciation. One who would grasp the handle but not the blade. Milquetoast. Homo castratus.

  I could imagine how the Danish adventures of Joseph Allston would be written up by Césare Rulli, or by any of the machismo brigade, or by the Pleasure Principle seminar, or by any of those romantics, male and female, who live by the twitch, whose emotional shutter speed is set to catch the moment of orgasm, whose vision of the highest reach of human conduct is expressed by the consenting adult.

  Well, the hell with it, I do not choose to be a consenting adult, not just to be in fashion. I have no impulse to join those the Buddha describes, those who strain always after fulfillment and in fulfillment strive to feel desire. It has seemed to me that my commitments are often more important than my impulses or my pleasures, and that even when my pleasures or desires are the principal issue, there are choices to be made between better and worse, bad and better, good and good.

  Then why cry over it, twenty years later? Because in every choice there is a component, maybe a big component, of pain.

  I would hate to have a recording of that conversation I held with myself, lurching up and down the moonlit drive. It would sound like the lecture of a scared graduate assistant, taking over the philosophy class in the professor’s absence. The walking did me more good than the thinking, even though my toe joints had me wincing, and my hips felt as if I had jumped off a ten-foot wall.

  There are two big live oaks along that two-hundred-foot stretch, one in the corner above the turn and the other where the drive widens into the parking area. Between them is open meadow in which, last fall, I sowed two hundred daffodils by throwing the bulbs broadcast and digging them in where they fell. Every time I turned at the top of the hill and started back toward the house, I was looking across them toward the moon. There was not enough light for them to show yellow; their bowing heads gleamed palest silver-gilt above the pale grass. When I came back, moving out of the shadow of the oak, individual blossoms grew luminous, like big exhausted fireflies.

  I kept on walking, lap after lap, leaving m
y shadow behind me as I turned at one end, finding it still with me when I turned at the other. My feet hurt me so that I hobbled, on my head fell dew as insubstantial and chilly as moonlight. I must have been on at least my fortieth lap when, turning at the far end, I heard heels on the asphalt back by the house, and saw Ruth’s shadow coming toward me as if through silvery, settling dust.

  When we were fifty feet apart, she stopped. I came on. “Hi, darling,” I said, as casually as I could.

  We met at the edge of the live oak’s shadow. In a voice that had difficulty being loud enough, she said, “You’ll get all cold.”

  “I’ve got a sweater and jacket on.”

  “But your head!”

  “I haven’t got arthritis in my head. At least I don’t think so.”

  A jet coming in from Hawaii winked over the ridge beyond Woodside. Down on the county road some hot shot in a sports car vroom-ed his engine through three gears and howled off into the muffling canyon. Ruth said, “I thought maybe I’d better... I didn’t know where you were.”

  “Just walking. Want to?”

  I thought there was gratitude in the way she took my arm. We walked in to the edge of the patio and turned and came out again. Orion was coming to meet us, then he was entangled in the oak, then as we came into the open again he was free. The daffodils in the meadow were touched with pale nocturnal gold.

  “I’m sorry,” Ruth said.

  “I’m the one to be sorry.”

  “I brought it on. I was determined to force it out of you. I don’t know why.”

  “You wanted the pebble out of the shoe.”

  “I suppose.” We walked twenty steps in silence. “No, I know why I did it,” she said. “Why I could never quite forget it. It was my vanity. My goodness, after all this time! I could see it happening, there at the end, and I knew I couldn’t compete with her.”