The Spectator Bird (26 page)

 

From the bed Ruth said, “Did you really think you...”

“What?” But I knew what she meant.

“Never mind. Go on.”

“Wouldn't you rather have some Thurber or something, instead of listening to me tear a passion to tatters?”

“Of course not. Please.”

“I guess I was pretty upset.”

“Who wouldn't have been?”

“I get more upset, too. Are you ready?”

“Yes.”

 

Incest. That's a rough word. I don't know whether it's a sin, a crime, a sickness, or a biological taboo. But I am aware of a puritan disgust, I react like Mrs. Bertelson. I ask myself if this is any worse than the mistakes, especially the sexual mistakes, that we all make. It was a sort of love affair, I suppose. She has strong feelings, and her father was the greatest man she knew. They weren't Jukeses or Kallikaks, they were superior products of selective breeding from a nearly pure strain, people of beauty and intelligence. What if they were father and daughter? Is there some species wisdom that forbids such matings? Is it the threat of doubled flaws and weaknesses in the children? Maybe that's all folklore. Anyway they certainly wouldn't have had any intention of having children, so why not? Love is love, I try to tell myself. She is a generous and affectionate woman, and her father was a great man.

I can't help it, I wish to God it wasn't true.

Ruth is down at Illums Bolighus, looking at Hans Wegner and Finn Juhl chairs, supported by a vision of refurnishing a couple of rooms at home. “At least let's get that out of this trip,” she says, implying that so far we haven't got much. Bennyway I'm feeling better, I could tell her. Only I'm not.

The afternoon is drizzling, the cobbles of the quay shine with their pewterish gleam, the traffic pours across the Knippelsbro. The Skagen produce boat is back, moored to the end of the dead-end canal, and the poodle is running up and down the deck past his sign, Hunden Bider. I am getting sick of that view. I am about ready to go home, or go south to das Land wo die Zitronen blumen. I watch a car pass, spraying water across the cobbles, and reflect that we are as free as anybody on earth. Four weeks remain of my self-granted leave of absence. We could pack up tomorrow and go anywhere.

A blue Volkswagen pulls up at the edge of the quay. A man gets out, hunched into his raincoat and with his plastic-covered hat pulled down, and runs around to open the opposite door. An umbrella emerges, opening as it comes, with a woman under it. I would recognize that straight carriage in the biggest crowd. The man turns his face, and I recognize him too. The quisling. Pull back from the window, get into the bedroom in case she brings him in and thinks she should introduce him. I don't want to see her, much less him. How did he get into this?

We'd better leave, and fast. We don't belong in this Gothic romance. Complicated and incredible, the countess said when I blew up the luncheon with the forbidden name. I believe it. I suppose I should give thanks that it diverted me when I needed diversion, and send it back like the unintelligible and unpublishable manuscript it is. If we move out, the ex-husband can have his oriole's nest back, and there they'll be all snug, scandal shacked up with disgrace, everything solved.

That idea depresses me as much as anything in this whole depressing day.

 

June 1 :

I must get it down, before I forget any of it, or start inventing.

She knocked about five. We had a warm reunion, on my part false, and a drink. We never did get any dinner, only a glass of milk and some King Christian IX cheese, with caraway seeds in it. She had come to keep her promise, as I had been sure she would, but first we went through the rituals, the questions, the condolences. When those ran down she faced us and fixed her mouth, leaned and set her glass on a table, straightened again and folded her hands in her lap. Her eyes slid over to me; she was obviously wondering why I was so stiff and ill at ease. She herself showed the effects of a bad week, but her eyes were clear and incredibly candid. Every time I caught her glance I wondered how she could do it. No pretense, no nervousness. To one who didn't know, she would have been utterly persuasive. “So, now,” she said. “I promised to explain you all things.”

“You don't have to explain anything to us,” Ruth said. “We were just awkward strangers in the wrong place at the wrong time. We just made it more difficult. I'm sorry.”

Considering that she has been devoured with curiosity all week, it was a generous thing to say. But the countess didn't take the offer. She sat with her hands in her lap, looking her age, as why shouldn't she?

“I am sorry too that you had to be there. For my grandmother, I am glad she could finally die. She was too proud to do anything but wait for her time. Others could shorten it, not she.”

Her clear eyes came my way, and I couldn't meet them. She had no right to her look of cleansed and purified resignation.

“It is so fantastic you should have come here and found me,” she said. “Karen knew-you remember, when she heard your mother was bom in Bregninge? She is truly a witch. I can tame horses and cure warts, but she knows things.” Helplessly, with a plausible and engaging confusion, she spread her hands. “Where shall I begin?”

Ruth looked at me. I had told her nothing of what I had heard at the embassy, and all I could think right then was what a goodly outside falsehood hath. When it was clear I wasn't going to say anything, Ruth said hesitantly, “You were ... I guess it all started when Joe mentioned the people who brought his mother up.”

“Yes.” For a second or two she sat looking down at her quiet hands, folded in her lap. “Well, I must start far back, before I was born. My father. He was a very great scientist. We have never talked about him. Have you not heard of him? Aage Rødding? No?” When we shook our heads, she made a wry face. “That seems strange. I would have thought ... But why should you? He was a very great scientist, but he made a terrible mistake. Not the way people said, not for any vulgar sordid reasons. To him it must have seemed perfectly logical. He was always as cool and ... how do you say it? Objectionable?”

“Objective?” Ruth suggested.

“Objective, yes. Finding out the secrets of life was his obsession, and Øreby and the family were so to say his instruments. It wasn't that he pursued peasant girls, as Karen said. He and my mother were—I think-a loving pair.”

“You've never mentioned your mother, either,” Ruth said.

“She died,” the countess said. “She killed herself. So did he. Both of them, because he made that mistake. But I wonder, I don't know, I think he never understood it as a mistake. He thought people didn't understand. He thought he might discover things that could be discovered in no other way. That was what Karen meant about Doctor Faustus.”

“How old were you when this happened? When they died?”

“Oh, I don't know,” the countess said. “Twenty-three? Twenty-four ? I had been married about two yearss.”

I made a mental note. He must have married her off, then, before the thing came out in the open. Perhaps, if he had sent her away and then brought her back again, as the PAO said, he tried to cover things over with that phony, arranged marriage. And they must have gone right on.

“Both of them,” Ruth said sympathetically. “That was hard. That's terrible.”

I couldn't keep still, though I had sworn I would. “Eigil says they hounded him,” I said.

She twisted her head sharply to look at me full face. “Eigil? Have you talked to Eigil?”

“I spent the afternoon with him. We played tennis, and he showed me around.”

“At Øreby?”

“Yes.”

“He never mentioned it,” she said, and stared at me as if I might be dangerous. From her point of view, and considering what she was trying to explain without giving the truth away, I undoubtedly was. “But then you know ...”

“Nothing,” I said. “Only that he's proud of your father, and defensive about him.” I felt that my face was wearing an expression of bitterness and blame. I couldn't look at her, so quiet and resigned and acceptant and plausible, without thinking that if both her parents had committed suicide over this she had to have a pretty flexible conscience to go on living with herself.

The countess understood the feeling of my look, if not its meaning. The blood that came into her throat and temples might have been the emblem of any of a dozen emotions, but it looked to me like resentment. “If only he had not been quite so sympathetic,” she said, and stiffened her back. That gesture is part of her inheritance and training, the same stiffness I had noted in the old lady, her grandmother, and in Manon, and even in the little baron when he muffled his coin-snap on the steps. When in doubt or trouble, when pushed into a corner, when caught in a lie, stiffen the back.

Her glance slid away, our little angry confrontation broke off. Abruptly businesslike, she said, “Well ! Shall I tell you all things? I feel you are my good friends, I want you to know. Though I confess it was so nice for a while, knowing someone who did not know. The beginning is since many yearss, perhaps even before the beginning of this century. My father was interested in genetics, all kinds, but especially human, and that was hardest to study. He kept elaborate records of our family—genealogies, with all the cousin marriages and accounts of what every individual was like, how tall, their weight, their eye and hair color, who was mad or exceptional in any way, their fertility, everything he could find out. Infertility interested him very much, because in inbred families such as ours infertility becomes more and more common. I, for instance, am childless. So is Manon, who is another cousin. So is Karen. So are many of us.”

“Your brother too,” Ruth said.

“No,” said the countess, with a flash of eyes. “Not my brother. I will get to him. My father corresponded with people all over the world—anthropologists who had studied primitive tribes, also the Mormons in Utah. He wanted to know about the effects of inbreeding and the effects of polygamy. Many Danes were converted to Mormonism and went to the United States in the bad times after the Bismarck war. As I understand it, polygamy was forbidden by the time my father began inquiring, but there were many who remembered it or had lived with it, and the Mormon Church kept records as good as my father's own. He could study families in great detail through several generations. He thought of polygamy among human beings as like ordinary stock breeding, you know-one bull to a flock of females. He had herd books and stud books on all his animals, and those were the models for what he tried to do with people. That is only part of it, of course. All things related to genetics fascinated him. Among our own family what he had most to observe was inbreeding, those cousin marriages.”

Her voice was unanimated and toneless, her eyes had none of the brilliance they had when she was talking happily, or laughing at some joke. They were dully clear, earnest, and sad. It was hard to think of her as lying, or at least hiding part of what she pretended to tell.

“Also he knew of certain illegitimacies,” she said. “From times to times men of our family had got peasant girls in trouble—there really was something like the droit de seigneur, and Rødding blood is in the veins of many Lolland families. These families my father kept records on. He was trying to trace certain traits, dominant or recessive. It seems he wanted very much to know what the kind of breeding called in-and-in breeding would produce in humans—what it had produced in ours, really, and if what had happened would correspond to what happens in animals. I don't think he expected his results to shake the world. I think he was testing Mendel with human subjects, and I think he was worried about the increasing barrenness in our family. Maybe he expected that our line would run so thin that an outbred line would have to replace it—we would have to go outside the aristocracy if we wanted heirs. I say only what I have thought, not what I know for certain. I think he wanted to take a human line that he knew well -ours-and breed it to another, not closely related strain, as a cattle breeder would breed out from an inbred line.”

She looked at us, each in turn, rather grimly. She wanted no ambiguity. “He used himself,” she said. “That way there could be no objections, he thought He would make this quiet, controlled experiment and keep very close records. He chose one of the Sverdrup girls, Helga. Her family had always been close to the castle, as gamekeepers and bailiffs, the women as maids. At least twice, girls of the family had been made pregnant by Røddings. They were peasants, but they were all strong, handsome, prolific people, and though they were cousins of a kind, their line had not been bred thin. Somehow my father bought Helga Sverdrup, or made her believe she would be serving science.”

“Min moders veninde?”
I said.

She is so responsive that even in her humiliation, even while protecting herself, she had to smile. “Yes.”

“You think Karen Blixen was right about why my mother emigrated?”

“I think my father must have paid her passage. How could she, a poor girl of sixteen? I think she was in the way. He would have had to be careful. Some time later Helga Sverdrup's parents also emigrated, with their other children. This is all before I am being born.”

By that time, possibilities were beginning to pop up in my mind like mushrooms, and not all poisonous, either. “What happened?” I said. “Did they have children? Who's Miss Weibull?”

“My half sister,” the countess said. “My father's daughter by Helga Sverdrup.”

It was like putting a quarter in the slot machine and seeing the wheels spin and stop with the inevitability and rightness of the last judgment: bar-bar-bar. I sat there feeling all my congealed puritan disgust and poisoned confidence pour out of me in a jackpot of relief. Ruth was saying incredulously,
“Your half sister?”