The Spectator Bird

by Wallace Stegner

  Very rough. Thanks to Dramamine, we remain vertical, but barely. Wind forty knots, which according to the Beaufort Scale of Winds on the bulletin board is a fresh gale. Approximately, it plucks the hair from your head. Bad luck at table—only survivors besides ourselves a pair of old Swedes. He has sold his Omaha grocery store and is taking his Minnesota-born wife back so they can live out their golden years in the village near Gøteborg that he last saw in 1905. Oh boy.

  They are awkward and diffident, and would get chummy on the slightest invitation, but I know this kind from childhood—pious, censorious, opposed to smoking drinking cardplaying dancing movies books language thinking. They sit in lace-curtained parlors and tsk-tsk on an indrawn breath, they know every unwanted pregnancy in town sooner than the girl does, they want English teachers in Augustana College fired for assigning A Farewell to Arms, they wrote the Volstead Act. And touching, in an exasperating sort of way.

  Something happens to immigrants (I don’t mean political exiles, who are another breed; I mean immigrants who left the old country they were at home in in order to better themselves in the land of opportunity). The trauma of exile petrifies them. Forever will they love, and the old sod be fair. They bring it all with them, in its 1890 or 1900 version, and they plant it in America without modification and then spend the rest of their lives defending it against change, while in the old country what they knew changes so as to be unrecognizable. I wouldn’t want to be old Bertelson when he finds that in modern Sweden the Lutheran Church has become nothing but a registry of births and deaths, and that the sexual habits of young Swedes make the objectionable goings-on in Omaha lovers’ lanes look like sandbox play.

  And how their hound-dog eyes reproach me, otherwise quite a pleasant man, when I order a bottle of Pouilly-Fumé to go with the fish. I offer some to them, despite Ruth’s eyebrows, and Mrs. Bertelson claps her hand over her glass as she might clap hands over her private parts if offered rape.

  They are curious why worldlings like us should be going to Denmark, and when they learn -from Ruth that we have no business there, but still are intending to stay for several months, and that my mother came from there and that we might look up the village where she was bom, they instantly construe me as an ally. I too am fleeing Gomorrah, looking backward toward the good old ways. It irritates me to see myself in those two cracked distorting mirrors, standing in front of some thatched cottage filled with yearning thoughts and fulfillments.

  Early to bed to read. So rough the bureau drawers keep falling out. I tie them shut with the rubber clothesline some well-wisher gave us for our drip-dry. The sentiments of The Lonely Crowd prove to be, as Huck Finn said of another book, interesting but tough, and I lay it aside to study Danish. Samples of the beauty of that language: en smuk pige, a pretty girl, en blomst, a flower. I make myself half sick practicing glottal stops, which crop up at random in Danish sentences and make everything sound like hiccups, regurgitations, and death rattles.

  March 27:

  Wind fifty-two knots—whole gale. This knife blade of a ship, fast and unstable as a destroyer, wallows and heels and shudders through the enormous seas. The horizon tilts, sinks, rotates, lifts. Wind off the port bow, foredeck emptied and everything lashed down, now and then big waves coming aboard. Dining room nearly empty at breakfast. Don’t know about noon—didn’t go. Dinner ditto. Dramamine, Zwiebach, and yoghurt. Steward urges Rullemops, pickled herrings, as a seasickness cure, and I vomit him out of the cabin. Better now, but Ruth really miserable. Berths keep filling with bureau drawers despite all my rigging.

  March 28, 29, 30:

  There went a lost weekend, and we might lose the whole week. Wind now fifty-four knots, between a whole gale and a storm. Ruth stays in her berth, but I totter out, groggy with Dramamine and misled by that Lutheran conscience I seem to share with the Bertelsons, to try the gym, take a workout, get the blood moving and the gorge nailed down. The Stockholm is like a drunken elephant dancing—down by the bow, over to port, up by the stem, over to starboard, up by the bow. I make my way down to C deck like a marble bouncing down a pinball machine. The weights I work out on are one second as heavy as houses, and the next slack in my hands. I try a sauna and come out fast—too smothery. The masseur slaps his table, but I can’t bear the thought of being mauled. Settle for a swim.

  As I step into the pool’s shallow end the ship begins its long shuddering lean to port, and the pool goes away: I pursue it down the slippery tiles. It stops, pasted against the far wall. The ship begins to roll back, returning water floods my feet and ankles, my calves. I crouch, ready to launch into a breast stroke, and hang on, here it comes! When the tidal wave has passed, I pick myself up out of the corner and get out of there. In all that place of dampness and shining tile, amid the machinery of physical fitness installed to make travelers happy, not a living creature except the lonely masseur and me.

  March 31:

  Today we should be debarking the Bertelsons at Gøteborg. God knows where we are—I doubt that the captain does—but we’re a long way from Gøteborg. As for the Bertelsons’ dream, that has been postponed to a better world. This is how:

  The wind went down some today, and some of the groundhogs came out, including our other table mates: a cheerful Dane from Fyn, an apple and cherry grower who has been in Florida helping his brother with an orange grove, and a silent Norwegian who ate everything on the menu from Rullemops to mints. Both he and the Dane drank beer and akvavit with their dinner, scandalizing the Bertelsons. But the Bertelsons weren’t driven away. Quelled, scared, out of their known place, they seemed to want to hang onto Ruth and me for safety. They even tagged along to the lounge, where dancing was announced, and watched us at the devil’s work.

  The devil’s work was never so difficult. Try dancing on a hip-roofed barn in an earthquake. We slid into the chairs on every roll, and crosshatched our way uphill again, and were tilted forward and slid into the opposite chairs. The piano was bolted down, but the bench was not, and the piano player kept alternately sliding clear under his keyboard and then out beyond arm’s reach. We could not have kept it up more than a few minutes at best, but the best didn’t occur. On one of the Stockholm’s salmon leaps through the sea there was a wrench and rumble, the pianist yelped and fell sideways out of the way, and the piano slid ponderously down the deck and broke the leg of the silent Norwegian, belching and dozing among the wallflowers.

  By the time we had the piano cornered and tied down, and a couple of stewards had come running with a stretcher and slipped and slid and teetered the Norwegian off to the infirmary, I became aware that Bertelson too was down, vomiting on the deck, with his wife trying to hold him back from sliding into his mess. So they carried him off too. The word a half hour later was that he had had a coronary, and was dead.

  Oh, his poor wife! Ruth said when I told her. Yes. Oh, his poor wife. Oh, his poor dream. Oh, his poor fifty years of dull work with its deferred reward. Oh, his poor dim dependable unimaginative not very attractive life that was supposed to mature like a Treasury bill. Ah, Bertelson! Ah, humanity!

  As I write this, Ruth is asleep, and whimpering with some sad dream. The bureau drawers come slowly out, stretching the rubber clothesline that holds them, and then, as the roll eases and starts the other way, are shot back into place like sluggish cross-bow bolts. The wind is up again, as rough as it has been at any time on this miserable crossing. Nothing for me to do but lie and listen, not too confidently, to my heart, and be chased from side to side by things I don’t want to think of but can’t shut out. At least when I was seasick there wasn’t that. They say you are never seasick in battle. The corollary is that you never battle when seasick. But who can stay seasick all the time?

  April 1:

  Bertelson just missed dying on April Fool’s Day. With unseemly haste, urged by some consideration or other (no refrigeration ?) the ship got rid of him before the day of fools was more than barely begun. They must have been sewing him into his sack before he was col
d.

  I had fallen asleep, finally, about three. Some time later I awoke with the panicked conviction that something was wrong. The ship’s motion was different. She was not plunging forward with her straining roll, but wallowing with a horrible helplessness. I could not hear the engines, nor could I, when I stepped out of the berth, feel them in the floor. My watch said ten past five. At any minute I expected bells, shouts, cries of “To the lifeboats,” and I almost shook Ruth awake to start her dressing. But first I decided to look outside.

  The hall was brightly lighted, totally empty. Rows of closed doors. In robe and. slippers I went up the companionway and into the lounge. It too blazed with light, it too was empty. The broken chairs had been taken away and the piano was once more bolted down, but not a soul, not a sound except the creaking of woodwork as the room warped and tilted to the heavy, helpless wallowing of the ship.

  I went to the doors and looked out across the starboard rail. The ship’s lights shone on the lifting, gray, foam-streaked side of a wave. I watched it rise and rise until it was high above the rail, and I felt the ship shrink and slide from it I looked deep inside it, deeper than I wanted to look, and then it fell off somewhere, and the ship rolled so that I grabbed the doorframe, and the light spread out over the hissing crests of farther waves, an appalling turmoil of water, an uncreated waste without order or end or purpose, heaving and yelling through the dark that the ship’s little brightness only made more total. And rain falling onto it, slashing at the glassy sides, while the wind blew a stiff spray flat off the crests. Whoever would know the age of the earth, Conrad says somewhere, should look upon the sea in storm. The age or disposition of the earth, he should have said.

  Then out of the corner of my eye I saw the glint of moving oilskins out on the foredeck. A cluster of figures huddled out there, hanging onto each other or to the davits of a lifeboat, intent on something at their center. They hulked like conspirators, bent away from wind and rain, and in my scared condition I had the wild idea they were planning like a lot of Lord Jims to abandon ship and let all the pilgrims perish. For a minute or two they leaned and clung together. Then they fell back into a ragged line, two of them bent and lifted, and there went Bertelson down the plank and into that appalling sea.

  There is no word for how instant his obliteration was. The second after they stooped, he was not. With hardly a pause the oilskinned figures started in, and I saw that two of them were supporting a third who sagged and staggered. Mrs. Bertelson. Why they let her watch that, God knows. Maybe, in her piety and wretchedness, she had insisted on seeing her husband go to God.

  I fled ahead of them down the companionway and up to our own safe door. As I took hold of the knob I felt or heard the renewed throb of the engines, and by the time I was back in my berth the Stockholm was beginning once more to drive her nose into the seas.

  So fast, so total an erasure. Spurlos verloren. And now this afternoon, with their raging efficiency or whatever it is, they’ve already got his wife out on the foredeck, wrapped in rugs and shot full of sedatives. The wind has dropped again, but not far, and the sea even in daylight is nothing she should be contemplating. There she sits, staring with dumb, drugged suffering at the North Atlantic. And a strange thing: now that she is stricken, people avoid her more than they did when she was only cowlike and uninteresting. Me too. Ruth sat by her for an hour and tried to talk to her, but I couldn’t. What would I have said? I thought her husband foolish and bigoted and dull, and now that he is dead it would be hypocrisy to pretend differently.

  I would like to be able to suffer fools more gladly. I am too likely to be contemptuous of people when their minds don’t work at least as fast as mine. Curtis too, Curtis too. Maybe, whenever I am tempted to be snobbish, I can make myself remember the chaos and old night that Bertelson vanished into. Not even the most foolish and bigoted member of Lutheran Christendom deserves to be wiped out like that.

  Also I can’t forget that it was in the ocean—another and pleasanter ocean than this one, but part of the same element-that Curtis was knocked from or let go of his surfboard, and his last breath was water.

  Agents, like publishers, get to be instant readers—they could carry the gospel of Evelyn Wood through the world. Hamlet in twelve minutes, Tolstoi in twenty. My eye, ranging down the page, saw something coming that I didn’t want to get into—some of the breast beating and the Why, why, why, where did I begin to do it wrong, how did I manage to destroy the one person, besides Ruth, to whom I wished only to be kind and loving? I would have given him a kidney if he had needed it, they could have transplanted my heart. So I became his schoolmaster and his jailer and his judge.

  I was not going to read all that to Ruth. Maybe I will go back and read it over, maybe I will read it many times, and maybe in tears, but I wasn’t going to dump it on her. With only the most momentary hesitation, I flipped that page and turned it under, and when I glanced up briefly I saw that she understood exactly what I had done.

  I went on reading, though what followed wasn’t much more cheerful than what I had censored.

  Once in college, trying to determine some optical truth or other, we taped distorting spectacles on a laboratory chicken and threw her some feed. At first she would cock her head, take aim, and miss a grain of corn by as much as an inch, but after a while she learned how to correct for the astigmatism we had imposed on her, and once she got the hang of it she was as accurate as ever with either eye.

  Well, right now, while Ruth sleeps and I do not, and this queasy ship carries us through the undiminished seas, I feel like a grain of corn, with the Great Chicken of the Universe standing over me taking aim. I don’t know whether she has binocular vision or not, she may be blind in both eyes for all I know. But she is not going to miss me when she pecks. I have made a point of not believing in distorting spectacles. Any hen worth a dollar can recover from them in a few hours. Bertelson probably thought he had her whammied with his sixty-five years of piety, and look what happened to him.

  Moral: You can’t trust optics, but you can depend on appetite.

  Again I looked across at Ruth. She made a rueful, sympathetic smile, and her eyes were shiny. She obviously wanted to pat me and kiss me better. “Poor lamb,” she said. “You were so miserable, and fighting yourself so. I guess I was so miserable myself on that voyage I didn’t realize how bad it was for you.”

  Often I submit to her sympathy. I depend on it, in fact. But right then I chose to be flippant. “Despite all my efforts,” I said. “I wore my bruised spirit in my buttonhole, and took frequent whiffs, and turned up my eyes, and you never noticed.”

  “But you didn’t. You didn’t let on to me. You kept it to yourself.”

  “And why not?” I said. “That’s the beauty of a journal. That’s where you meet the really sympathetic audience.”

  She understood that, too, and it annoyed her. She pulled Catarrh down from under her chin a little too impatiently, and had to disengage his claws from her dressing gown. “Why do you have to jeer?” she said. “Whenever you give away your feelings the least little bit, you have to jeer and cover up.”

  Trapped in my own role, I said, not very originally, “Beneath this harsh exterior beats a heart of stone.”

  She stared at me as if she couldn’t believe me, and the longer she looked at me the more irritated she became. She is not a hard woman to exasperate, especially when I shy away from being comforted or mothered. “Sometimes I think you should take your own advice,” she said.

  “What advice?”

  “To suffer fools more glady. Beginning with yourself.”

  Having said that, she obviously found herself furious. She startled herself, I think, with her own vehemence. I might easily have said something that would have wounded and frustrated her even more. After forty-five years we can still, if we let ourselves, bristle and bump one another around like a pair of stiff-legged dogs. Fortunately I played it light, for the fact was that I really hadn’t intended to hurt her feelings
. So I shrugged. “Maybe so.”

  She had no reason to go on, but as the injured party she had to have the last word. “I wish I understood you. You drive me wild, you really do. For a change we’re doing something together, sort of reliving something, something as sad as it could possibly be, and important to us both, and you brought it all back so clearly, and I was interested, and touched, and then you have to start mugging and hoofing, and spoil it.”

  The telephone rang, and since Ruth was encumbered with the cat, I reached across to the bed table and answered it.

  “Hello, Joe?”

  Ben Alexander. On the telephone his voice is even wheezier, breezier, and louder than it is face to face.

  “Present.” “Been thinking. Why wait for lunch? I want to have Tom and Edith up to dinner Friday. Can you and Ruth come?”

  “Why, I guess so. Let me speak to the foreman.” I put my hand over the mouthpiece and said to Ruth, “Ben wants us for dinner with the Pattersons Friday. Can we go?”

  She checked the calendar and found nothing but a hair appointment “Do you want to?”

  “Do you?”

  “Sure, I guess so. Why not? But you’ve been so funny lately about going out.”

  “I’m always ready for Ben’s house, especially as long as he makes that Cabernet.”