The Spectator Bird (18 page)

“I wrote this journal that very night, didn't I? Wouldn't you say I'm aware that something is wrong?”

“After
I warned you. Anyway, you didn't know
what
was wrong.”

“Don't tell me you did.”

“I think so. Part of it, anyway.”

“I think you found out just the way I did, and
when
I did.”

“Well, do we have to quarrel about it?”

“No. So why did you start quarreling?”

“I?
You
started it.”

I counted ten, then ten more. She saw me doing it, and was furious. Finally I said, “Listen, if there's anything more ridiculous than two people seventy years old ...”

“Speak for yourself!”

“... or nearly seventy, bickering about who knew what twenty years ago, then it can only be the same two old fools bickering about who started the bicker.”

“All right, but ...”

“No buts. Peace, perturbèd spirit.”

“Oh, I hate that condescending phrase!”

“Condescending?” I said. “Who said it? Prince Hamlet to his father's ghost?”

“Oh, go on and read. And I hope you get through that luncheon pretty soon. There were more important things happening than that luncheon.”

“I read what it says in the book,” I said. “What it says in the book is what seemed important to me at the time. If you don't like it, write your own diary.”

“I wish I had. Then there might be a way of checking on yours.”

 

We were still standing, waiting. I kept expecting Manon to tell us to sit down, but she didn't. Beside me this mysterious Miss Weibull stood flat-footedly, breathing hard. She had that faked composure, but she didn't have the look of the quality. Governess who had got in trouble? But governess to whom? There were no children around except Bertil, who was only a visitor. But not family either. One of Count Eigil's peasant girls? You didn't bring those into the castle, or at least I assumed you didn't. Those could be left in the hayloft with their dresses up around their necks.

The countess hated her being there, Manon was resigned to her being there, and Miss Weibull was damned well going to be there whether they liked it or not. The most obvious thing about all of it was that all three seemed to believe they were concealing what was perfectly obvious. Also, the more I looked at Miss Weibull . the more I saw that she was pretty old to be in the condition she was in. She had to be around forty, about the countess' age.

Like people at a funeral before the preacher enters, we waited, and smiled, and said nothing, and were desperately bright. The bowls of lilacs spaced down the table filled the room with their scent. Now, I grew up among lilacs, I am a lilac lover, and group silences that go on too long make me nervous. So I said to Miss Weibull, most politely, “Aren't the lilacs marvelous?”

“Jeg taler ikke Engelsk,”
said Miss Weibull.

Put on my mettle, I sniffed deeply and appreciatively, rolled my eyes, looked pointedly at the lilacs, sniffed again, and placed a hand over my heart. I searched my mind in vain for the Danish word for lilacs, and had to fall back on something less precise.
“Smukke Blomster,”
I said. I suppose I felt an obligation to make her feel at home.

Most curiously she looked at me. I have been looked at that way by cows watching me climb through a barbed wire fence. “Ah, oui,” she said. Across the table, as if on signal, the countess and Manon straightened their backs. Ruth was about to start her semaphore again, but what had I done? Praised the lilacs.

Then their three pairs of eyes turned sideward, and I looked where they were looking. Here came Grandmamá on a servant's arm.

She was so old she would have had to be dated by carbon 14. Conforming to the rule that old ladies should give up primary colors and return to the pastels of babyhood, she wore a dusty-pink jersey dress that hung on her like a sweater on a gate. She was thin and brittle. Veins and tendons stood out on the backs of her blotchy hands. Below the sagging jersey dress, which came to mid-calf, her stockings drooped on unpadded bone. The skin had shrunk on her skull, which looked no bigger than a monkey's, and the shrinkage had all gathered into wrinkles. Her face was a spiderweb with eyes.

As we might have watched George Arliss making an entrance, we watched her slide and shuffle toward us. Her eyes were fixed straight ahead on something miles away, disdaining to look for the obstacles her feet felt for. For all her decrepitude she was fiercely erect, and I had one of those little thrills of sensation that sometimes come with martial music. Pride, she had. If the servant had withdrawn his arm, she would have fallen on her back, not on her face. She looked like one of those Milles ghosts, running on her heels toward eternity.

The servant was careful and slow. The old lady's shuffling foot reached the edge of the Chinese rug and felt, inched, slid up over it. Then as she brought the rear foot up over the edge to meet the front one, she brought her eyes down from whatever horizon they were fixed on, and took us all in in one look. It may have been intended as a greeting; it felt as peremptory as a bullwhip.

Manon and the countess jumped to help the servant get her into the chair at the head of the table. Supported by six hands, she teetered and sank, and went the last four inches with a bump. She clenched her claws on the chair arms while the servant lifted chair and all into place. Only then, her difficult entrance accomplished, she turned her cheek up to the countess, who bent and kissed it. There was a flurry of bird sounds, much pressing of hands. When the countess left her and came around—widely around—Miss Weibull to place herself on my other side, her eyes were wet.

Manon stood with her hand on the old lady's shoulder. Solicitous and gentle, she bent and said, “Grandmamá, here are Astrid's friends, Mr. and Mrs. Allston.”

The old red-rimmed eyes touched Ruth and then me, a glance surprisingly steady, though her whole head shook. She crossed an arm across her breast and laid a hand on Manon's, still on her shoulder. I liked that gesture, as I liked the tears in the countess' eyes. Aristocracy humanized. Three affectionate women. “You are very welcome here,” the old lady said in English.

Across the table the little baron, with perfect timing, pulled out Manon's chair. She came, he nudged her into place and turned to Ruth. As for me, I was torn between the countess and Miss Weibull, and had to elect Miss Weibull as being on my right and
enceinte
at that. When I got her bulk shoved up to the table against the resisting pile of the rug, the countess had seated herself. She gave me a blank, pleasant, annoyed smile as I edged in between them.

It did not begin as the liveliest luncheon I ever attended. Manon was quiet, the countess nearly mute. Ruth tried, in English, to catechize the little baron. The old lady dabbled and picked at her food, Miss Weibull ate heartily for two. There was fruit soup, then a great salad of the shrimps they dip up from among the sea grass in these brackish estuaries, then a mousse and that universal Danish addiction, marzipan cookies. And, praise God, wine. As soon as I properly could, I
skaal'
ed
the
lady on my left and got her to melt a little. Then I went on and
skaal
'ed all the rest of the ladies in turn. I didn't know whether I was supposed to or not, but there was no one else to do it—the little baron didn't even have a wineglass—and I thought we could all use a drink. It was a strange sensation holding the eyes of the old countess, like peering through the cobwebbed window of an abandoned house and meeting the eyes of something alive looking out. I also gazed into the eyes of Miss Weibull, as enigmatic and impenetrable as marbles.

Ruth remarked on how humiliating it was for Americans, but how pleasant, to travel in a country where it seemed everyone spoke English. (And who was it who had refused to try to learn Danish?) Manon repeated something Astrid's father used to say—that if a Dane fell into the sea and washed up to the south, he would have to know German; if he washed up to the west, English or French; if to the north or east, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, or Russian. So every Dane was compelled to prepare for the day when he fell into the sea.

The countess, coming out of her sulks, claimed that if Mr. Allston fell into the sea he would come up speaking anything he needed to, and Manon said ah, but that was because he was really a Dane, and to the old lady she explained that Mr. Allston's mother had been born in Bregninge, wasn't that interesting?

The old lady's head wobbled back on its scrawny stem. “Here?”

“Here in Bregninge, yes.”

“What family? Are we related?”

“Oh no,” I said. “She worked on one of the farms.”

“One of our peasants?”

In that room, the word “peasants” had a nasty arrogant sound, and I wasn't exactly taken with the “our,” either.

“Yes,” I said.

But they were too polite to expose their prejudices even if they had them, as perhaps they didn't. The old lady looked at me with interest out of her wrinkles, and quavered, “Where is she now? What was her name? Have you come to visit your relatives?”

“She died years
ago
,” I told her. “Both of her parents died of smallpox when she was an infant. I never heard her mention any other relatives. Her name was Ingeborg Heegaard.”

I became aware that Miss Weibull had turned her head and stopped chewing and was watching me with interest. Why? She spoke ikke
Engelsk
and couldn't have understood anything I said. But she spoke some French, evidently, which was interesting. She must have fallen in the sea only once. I found myself giving her a token smile in passing, while I paid attention to the old lady, who was sorting through the drawers of her mind and not finding what she was looking for.

“No,” she said, “I remember no one by that name.”

“I'm sure the family had run out,” I said. “She was brought up by some people named Sverdrup.”

It was as if I had broken wind. For a split second—
et øjeblik
as they say in Denmark—the table froze. At least the old lady and Manon did, and I had the strong impression that the countess did, though I was turned away from her. Miss Weibull was
very
interested.

A moment only, and then people were breathing again, the table was casual, my faux pas was ignored out of existence, had never happened. Whatever it was. “Yes,” the old lady was saying as if the conversation had never broken down, “it must be fascinating to visit where she came from. It must be very different from America. And your father, who was he?”

I suppose I was feeling bruised and aggrieved and bewildered. Somewhat sullenly, I said that he was a brakeman on the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul, and got a stiff look from Ruth.

Manon motioned the servant, who brought around fingerbowls with sprays of lilac in them. The old lady paddled and dabbled and touched her puckered lips with her napkin, Manon laid her napkin on the table. Signals went around among those people in a way that Ruth should study, and before I knew we had ended our conversation the servant was at the back of the old lady's chair and Manon was there helping to hoist her to her feet. Stiff between their lifting hands, and looking like death, she said to me, “We must talk again. It has been ... very pleasant. Now I must ask that you excuse me. I tire easily these days. Please make yourselves entirely at home. I am happy to have you here.”

They started her out, and I turned just in time to run into another of those speaking looks that the countess was directing at Manon, who was looking back over her shoulder as she moved. At once the countess smiled, and Manon smiled. Manon said, “Perhaps Mr. and Mrs. Allston will want to rest. Or to walk. Perhaps they will lend you to me for an hour.”

Of course, we said. As you wish. Don't worry about us.

Miss Weibull was planted where I had landed her as we rose. It is hard to tell about pregnant women, their bloat makes it impossible to see them as they really are, but I thought she might once have been a quite splendid animal, and there was no doubt at all about her interest in me. She laid a finger upright against her pursed lips and said through it, “Ingeborg Heegaard....
De? Elle était ...
?”

“My mother. Min moder. Yes.”

Miss Weibull wagged her head, her pondering finger still at her lips. Her eyes grew wide and round, the way eyes do when their owners are about to go
boo
at children.
“Hun var min moders veninde!”
she said with an air of great conviction, and some sort of triumph, and maybe a dash of malice, and glanced sidelong at the countess as if she might say more. But she didn't. She turned, smiling her sly smile, and steered her belly out of the room. That left Ruth, the countess, the little baron, and me.

“What in God's name,” I said.

The countess was upset “It is complicated. It is incredible. I will explain you sometimes. Later.”

“What does
veninde
mean—friend?”

“Yes.”

“And who is Miss Weibull?”

“Her mother was a Sverdrup.”

“That reminds me of the Arab proverb: Ask a mule who his father was, and he'll always say, ‘My mother was a horse.' ”

“Joe,” Ruth said.

The countess was really upset. “Can you wait? Pleass? I will explain all things. Later.”

“I wonder if we
should
wait,” I said. “I don't want to be rude, but it seems I already have been. I've said something unforgivable. Shouldn't we just leave?”

“No, pleass!” She put her hand on my arm and shook me. “You must not feel so! It is only ... Pleass, you must not think of leaving, Manon and Grandmamá would be miserable. I too. Listen! You wanted to see your mother's house. If it was the Sverdrup cottage, I can tell you. It is at the end of the entrance drive, the very end, before you go down the hill on the church path. You should see the church too, it is old and quite good. Perhaps both of you?”