The Spectator Bird (10 page)

“He's a famous Italian novelist,” Ruth said tightly. She was squeezing a headache between her brows. “Some people, including himself, have mentioned him for the Nobel Prize.”

“Is that so?” Minnie said. “He talks like a writer, don't he? And don't he like the ladies! He never took his eye off his girl friend the whole time. Who's she? She don't sound Eyetalian.”

“Ms. McElvenny is a San Francisco girl who will go far, and undoubtedly has,” I said.

“Joe,” said my weary wife, “you don't know a thing about it.”

The hell I don't. I know Césare.

Now here I sit looking out into the dripping live oak, with somber afternoon fading to gloomy dusk outside, the study chilly because I haven't had the ambition to build a fire in my little Norwegian stove, and my spirits as gloomy as the evening and as chilly as the room. God
damn
that Roman cricket with his non-stop monologue and his pussycat and his
civis
and his
urbs.
He has managed to make me feel ten years older than I was yesterday —out of it, self-exiled, and without the courage of my convictions, without the grace to be content with what I chose.

Tonight, unless Ruth's headache alters the plan, I suppose I will have to read another installment of the journals of Joseph Allston, 1954. I am not sure I like Ruth's prescription any better than I like Césare's, and I find that I resent the assumption both of them make, that I have stopped, and am in need of repair. It irritates me to have people blowing out my gas line and testing my sparkplugs and feeling all over me for loose wires. I suppose Ruth thinks of me as that melancholy Half-Dane in need of comforting and mothering; maybe she also thinks of my life, which is also hers, as a sort of in-house soap opera. But mainly she yearns over me and knows things that I should do to become her old nice funny Joe again.

I can't see that Danish episode as an adventure, or a crisis survived, or a serious quest for anything definable. It was just another happening like today's luncheon, something I got into and got out of. And it reminds me too much of how little life changes: how, without dramatic events or high resolves, without tragedy, without even pathos, a reasonably endowed, reasonably well-intentioned man can walk through the world's great kitchen from end to end and arrive at the back door hungry.

April 7, Havnegade 13:

What am I after? Lost health? Lost content? Misplaced identity? Am I punishing myself? As a form of suicide, Denmark doesn't seem unpleasant, as a health resort it leaves room for improvement Or maybe the Bertelsons were right in thinking me an ally, Maybe I do have this notion that the old country is simpler and better. But also, I knew before we came that it would probably be dull. Would I go back to live in the Middle West that I'm always defending against New York snobbery? Not for money. Yet here we are in Denmark, which you couldn't tell from Indiana at fifty paces, and the puritan in me keeps wanting to rub my nose in it, and every now and then shivers with the exquisite pleasure of the hair shirt.

Whether I'm after simplicity or after punishment, observe the irony of the place we've found to live in. The desk I am writing at is Empire, the drawing room I sit in is Louis Quinze. The steel engravings on the walls, all portraits of wigged gentlemen with swords, are either German barons related to the landlady's family, or Kings of France—Louis the Bald and Charles the Fat or vice versa—also related but by the sinister route. They go with the apartment, rented ancestors.

The whole situation is ridiculous. We have always been private people, but here we are sharing the apartment of an indigent countess, and I didn't even put up a fight. One thing, it's convenient: you can walk to any part of the old city in ten minutes. Another, it's more attractive, by a factor of ten, than anything else we looked at. Another, it's on the water—Havnegade means Harbor Street—and interesting things go on outside our windows. Three stories below, there is the street, then a cobbled quay, then a narrow dead-end canal, then a long warehouse island, then the main canal linking the free port with the south harbor. Seagoing ships whistle for the Knippelsbro, and as the bridge yawns open and a ship slides through, bicycles and cars back up both sides. The ship's funnels move with dignity behind a frieze of chimney pots and disappear beyond the Exchange building, above which twists up the green dragon's-tail spire that the Danes looted from the Swedes in some forgotten war.

The cobbles shine in the wet like pewter, the moving cars shine, the slickered backs of pedestrians and bicyclists shine. Girls in belted raincoats pedal along with their rain-stung faces turned sideward, and boys on bicycles shoot the traffic as if they were canoeists in a rapid.

Nevertheless, we must have been still doped with Dramamine to move in here. The countess retains the front studio-bedroom, we take the drawing room, dining room, and back bedroom. We share the kitchen and the one bath. At my time of life, bathroom lines! Hurry up, Countess, I'm in extremis. And one telephone for the two of us, in her room, naturally.

Are we sorry for her because her husband ran out on her? Do we pity a woman who once had everything and now has to share the little she has left with strangers? Maybe. Though she made her proposition with style. You'd have thought she was suggesting a fascinating social experiment instead of making the best of her humiliation.

Apart from the drawing room, the place is not even well furnished. The kitchen and bathroom primitive by American standards, the bedroom furnished in Early Goodwill. Bed I slept in last night a backbreaker, hollowed out by somebody with a most steatopygous behind. If it was once the bed of the countess' husband, then he must be a man of very peculiar proportions.

There will be more than backaches, I tell Ruth, but she thinks it will work. She and the countess liked each other on sight.
“Isn't
she lovely!” the countess said to me when Ruth was looking out the window with the agent. “I love people to look like that!” She says we will get along fine because we will be nice against one another. She will be nice against us, and she knows we will be nice against her. Well, Barkis is willin'. I have seen harder people to be nice against. The agent told us she was once one of the great beauties of Denmark, and so far as I can see, she still is, at forty or so. A husband who would run away from that should have his head carefully examined. But I don't need a share of her troubles, which seem considerable and a little mysterious, and neither do I want every move we make to be complicated by the feeling that she must be asked along. Nor do I want her around the apartment all the time. I feel too lousy, and she doesn't have a very good silencer.

Right now she and Ruth are out getting acquainted with the neighborhood greengrocers and bakers and butchers. I ducked, partly because I'm not feeling too well but also because I'm holding back from getting too chummy. Like this morning, when I went out to get tickets for Friday night's opera. What do I do? I buy three. What does the countess do? After a moment of surprise, almost of consternation, she accepts with pleasure. I have to learn to keep impulses like that under control.

Now here they come down the quay under their umbrellas, each with a bulging string shopping bag. Jabber jabber jabber. A woman's tongue, said the first American writer of any consequence, is the only edged tool that grows keener with constant use. Their wet umbrellas lean together, their bags bump, they are so blinded by talk that they stumble on the paving stones. For Ruth's sake I'm glad. I made no preparations for Denmark; I intend to look up no writers or publishers, even for social reasons. She can't have any great expectation of fun. A friend will help.

Ruth is small, the countess five nine or ten, with a vivid face and fine clear skin. She would be statuesque except that she is so animated. An almost feverish eagerness possesses her in conversation, she lights up even before you say anything. Everything is so funny, or so wonderful, or so nice. Maybe the strain of speaking English, in which she is fluent but not always correct, keeps her hyped up. Whatever it is, she couldn't be more cordial if we had just come ashore on the desert island from which she had been sending up hopeless smoke signals for ten years.

I have a good look at her from up here. She wears a kerchief on her head, but her heavy, smooth, dull gold hair is uncovered in front and gathered behind in a bun that looks as if it might weigh a kilo. Something in the way she moves. Is it breeding, or do they train them? American women who have what is called “bearing” look as if they'd learned it in model school and need a mirror for its constant reassurance. This one, in her tweed suit and sensible walking shoes and utilitarian raincoat, throws it away and still has it.

But sometimes as earthy as the stableman's daughter, and sometimes she mocks herself. When the agent mentioned the
havnefart,
the harbor tour that periodically comes up the canal, the English implications of the word struck her and she giggled. And when we were sitting talking, later, she noticed Ruth's shoes and cried out, “Oh, those tiny American feet!” and in frank envy stuck out her own number eights for contrast. She has a smile that would melt glass.

I watch them lean from the quay to inspect the plucked chickens held up by the man in the produce boat from Skagen moored at the dead end of the canal. They take one, then a slab of cheese, then six eggs that the Skagen man wraps individually in newspaper. The countess opens her purse. Ruth will not let her pay. Good.

Rain dimples the still canal. The cobbles shine, the deck of the Skagen boat is dark wet. Up and down it from bow to stem and back again runs a splendid black poodle, intensely interested in the life four feet from him on the quay. A sign hung from the rail amidships says
Hunden Bider—the
dog bites. Ruth, of course, animal lover and non-reader of Danish, reaches a hand across to pat him and is confronted by a raging mouthful of fangs. Hurt, she falls back, the countess volubly explaining. Really she is a handsome woman, and a true Dane: her cheeks glow in the rain like shined apples. They pass out of sight below me. In three minutes they will be at the door.

But I will bet that shortly we will have tea and then a drink together. Even money they will take that chicken into the kitchen and make a shared dinner of it. It's too wet and raw to go out, and can you see us letting her take her tray into her room, while we revel in the dining room over a
poulet rôti
and a bottle of Niersteiner
natur
? And tomorrow, in spite of my feeble efforts not to fraternize too much, this woman who spent her youth adorning royal balls and being ogled in theater boxes will share the second-row balcony with her new American friends, while thousands cheer.

I am just enough of an American democrat to get a kick out of the idea. Who dat tall extinguished-lookin' genman wid de testicle on his right eye, urinatin' up an down de aisle wid de countess?

 

Later:

As a prophet, I bat a thousand. We've had a gay dinner. The countess is good company, a giggler, full of stories, and when she dresses up in something besides her tweed suit she could be a princess in a fairy tale by the brothers Grimm. She is related to every castle in Denmark and most of those in Sweden and North Germany. Her family's estate is on Lolland, but she has spent a lot of time at Waldemarslot on the little island of Taasinge, and at a relative's
herregaard
on Fyn, near Odense. She used to see a lot of the royal family because her father was
Hofjaegermester,
master of the hunt, and an important business of his Lolland castle was growing hares, pheasants, grouse, chukars, and deer for the King's fall hunting parties. Another relative is Karen Blixen, who writes under the name of Isak Dinesen and who is the one person in Denmark I would like, out of sheer admiration, to meet. The countess says she will arrange it Fraternizing like mad, we plan a lot of expeditions together as soon as our Rover arrives from England. See a lot of castles.

I gather that this leftover aristocracy has about lost its function and has been losing its lands for decades. They all marry their cousins for lack of anybody else suitable. Men mainly drunks, the countess suggests, and the women all witches. She herself has powers. Several times she has had second sight. She has a gift for quieting unruly or maddened horses, and once, while visiting relatives near Kassel, in Germany, she cured a boy of warts.

I learn from her how to
skaal
the lady on my left; until she has been
skaal
'ed she is not supposed to touch her wine. Look the lady deep in the eyes, hold the glass at the third vest button, raise it and drink, still holding her eyes, and then, still holding them, lower to the third vest button. It is an astonishingly intimate ritual. It taught me that I practically never look anybody that steadily in the eyes, especially a good-looking, amused, and amusing woman.