The Spectator Bird

The dateline of the next journal installment is May 29, and Joe and Ruth are back in Copenhagen. Astrid’s grandmother died shortly after her episode, and Joe and Ruth cut short their visit and left the castle early the next morning. Joe ruminates on the mysteries of that day: the Sverdrups, the pregnant Miss Weibull, and Astrid’s loathing of her brother. Joe suspects that Weibull is Eigil’s mistress and that she normally lives in the Sverdrup cottage, except when Eigil gives her the run of the castle to spoil his sister’s visits. However, this does not explain the falling-out between sister and brother, nor why Joe’s mention of the name “Sverdrup” at lunch had such a chilling effect. (Joe even wonders if his faux pas might have killed the old countess.) Eigil’s claim that his father was “hounded” seems part of the puzzle, and clearly there must have been more to his “experiments” since it is hard to imagine people objecting to the development of new hybrids of rhododendrons and other plants. That night in their Copenhagen flat, Ruth suggests that the old count’s activities are probably part of the public record: Perhaps a librarian or embassy official could fill in the blanks.

The next day, Joe visits the library and learns that Ørebyslot castle, once the seat of lively social gatherings as well as important scientific research, has been closed to the public ever since the 1938 death of Astrid and Eigil’s father, Landgreve Rødding. According to Joe’s research, Rødding was a renowned biologist who expanded on Gregor Mendel’s work, perfecting the sciences of hybridization and stock breeding. Reading further, Joe learns that Rødding’s death was a suicide; his obituaries, however, make no mention of a scandal or other cause. Finally, Joe goes to the American Embassy and mentions Rødding’s name to a public affairs officer, who replies, “Oh sure. The biologist. The one who was sleeping with his daughter” (172). Joe questions the officer further and learns that one of Rødding’s servants caught him in the act and reported him. When the scandal broke, Rødding never even bothered to deny it. He sent his daughter away but then brought her back. Finally, he shot himself. Deeply shaken, Joe remembers that the old count had only one daughter: Astrid. He wonders whether this was why she was shunned at the opera, or why she was forced to marry her cousin.

The day before, Joe and Ruth received a message from Astrid saying that she would be back in Copenhagen in two days and would then tell them the full story of her brother and the Sverdrups. Joe has mixed feelings about this. He grapples with the concept of incest and its morality. He wonders whether it is a crime at all, or just an excess of familial love. Nevertheless, the thought of what Astrid did revolts him, and he finds he no longer trusts her. He even wonders if she lied to them about her husband being a “quisling.” All the same, he finds himself yearning to rescue her. He daydreams of taking her back to the United States and sponsoring her citizenship, perhaps even giving her Curtis’s old room in their house. Then, catching sight of Astrid on the quay with her husband, his gorge rises again. He longs to leave Copenhagen, thinking, “We don’t belong in this Gothic romance” (176).

When Astrid arrives at the cottage, she declares her willingness to tell Joe and Ruth, whom she considers close friends, the full story of her family’s complicated past. However, they are reluctant to hear it, thinking she will give them a whitewashed account of her relationship with her father. As she begins, both Joe and Ruth lie to her, saying they know nothing about the old count’s reputation in Denmark.

Astrid begins by saying that both her parents died by suicide because of a public scandal. Her father was obsessed with genetics, partly because of the high incidence of infertility in his family due to excessive inbreeding. As a result, he took a very “objective” view of polygamy, which he saw simply as a way to enrich the family gene pool, no different from stock breeding. He put his theories into action by coercing peasant women into sex. With his detailed records on the family trees and genetic makeup of Lolland’s families, he chose the most advantageous “mates.” One was a Sverdrup woman named Helga: the mother of Miss Weibull.

Joe is astounded, and much relieved, to learn Miss Weibull, not Astrid, was the daughter seduced by Rødding. This was Rødding’s ultimate attempt to apply Mendelian genetics to human breeding, both to replenish his family’s bloodline and to make a unique contribution to science. The public was scandalized by the revelations of his sexual “experiments” and by the “stud books” he kept on his adulterous, incestuous unions and their offspring. Astrid further reveals that the woman Joe saw at the Sverdrup cottage is the daughter of her brother Eigil by Miss Weibull (his own half-sister) and that he is currently sleeping with her to carry on the grand schemes of his father, whose memory he worships. She adds that Eigil has every intention of continuing his incestuous breeding with his granddaughters.

At this point, Joe tells Ruth that there is no more journal to read. He did not record the events of the final month of their trip. Ruth is dismayed and a little suspicious: She feels that Joe has left out the most important part of the story. She suggests, over his halfhearted denials, that he was infatuated with Astrid. She recalls that one night, during their stay in Ellebacken, she woke around three o’clock to find both him and Astrid gone. Joe explains that he was unable to sleep, so he went for a walk by the lake, where he ran into Astrid. The two of them took an old rowboat to the small island where Rødding was buried and then returned to the cottage. Ruth asks, “And that’s all?” (186).

Joe’s extreme reaction to this simple question flabbergasts both of them. He flies to “pieces,” even though his transgression of once feeling “tempted” by Astrid, he thinks, is minor, especially by the licentious standards of the new decade. Shaking, he confesses to Ruth that he once kissed Astrid. He then lunges outside into the cold night.

Joe reveals what happened between him and Astrid in Ellebacken 20 years ago. Setting out for a walk that night, he feels despondent because, unlike Ruth, he does not want to leave Denmark. By coincidence, he meets Astrid, who also could not sleep, and the two of them follow a path that skirts the lake. When she stumbles, Joe takes her arm; a “tingling” passes through him, and he does not let go. He feels as if they are “dancing.” Not pulling away, Astrid mentions the time when he made that U-turn in the car to pass again through the archway of beechwoods, saying that she first began to “know” him that day. She recites a romantic poem by Goethe and confesses that the reason she could not sleep was because he and Ruth, her “only dear friends […] for many years” (193), will soon be leaving. She says that she was “dead” before they came into her life. Joe protests that they could easily stay, but Astrid insists that Joe is not the type to “shirk” things.

They come to a dock, and Astrid asks him to accompany her to the small island where her father shot himself so she can visit his grave. On the island, she vacillates about whether she will take back her husband, saying she still feels a sense of “duty” to him. This exasperates Joe, who reminds her how badly Erik and the rest of her family have treated her. Suddenly, he demands that she leave Denmark and move to America with him. He and Ruth can easily find her a job, he says, or even support her themselves. Astrid refuses, implying that Ruth is clearly worried about their mutual attraction and wants to get him “away” from her. Overcome with emotion, Joe kisses her. Astrid returns the kiss but then pushes him away. On the walk back to the cottage, she appears “forlorn.” Stealing a last glimpse of her as they part, he sees her double over in a paroxysm of grief.

Back in the present, minutes after his quarrel with Ruth, Joe tearfully marches up and down his steep driveway in the cold. He asks himself whether he truly harbors remorse over the “possibilities” he let slip away in his career and love life. He thinks again of Césare Rulli, wondering what he would make of his cautious, dutiful “renunciation” of Astrid and of the “fulfillment” she might have given him. He finally concludes that—as Astrid suggested—his “commitments are often more important than [his] impulses or [his] pleasures” (199), and that an occasional regret is an inevitable part of human life. In any case, no choice is ever free of the possibility of pain.

On his 40th “lap” of the driveway, Ruth joins him, and they finally have their long-deferred talk about Astrid and the threat she posed to their marriage. Ruth apologizes for “forcing” Joe into revealing his true feelings about her. She then confesses her decades-long guilt for coming between him and Astrid, whom she calls “remarkable.” Joe disregards such thoughts, saying that he was indeed “smitten” with the countess but that he made his choice and has seldom regretted it. He adds that he has rarely thought about Astrid since; if, on the other hand, he had left Ruth for her, he would have regretted it forever. They share a passionate kiss.

Looking back on his life and choices, Joe remembers a metaphor attributed to the Dark Ages philosopher the Venerable Bede about the brevity and mystery of life: A bird darts into a lighted feast hall, flies the length of the room, and then vanishes once more into the night. Joe reflects:

[I]t can be everything […] to have found a fellow bird with whom you can sit among the rafters while the drinking and boasting and reciting go on below […] who will patch your bruises and straighten your ruffled feathers and mourn over your hurts when you accidentally fly into something you can’t handle (203).

Nostalgically, Joe and Ruth climb their terrace to look for a lunar rainbow, a rare phenomenon that they sighted once before, after a long-ago party. They do not see one.