by John Updike
“They have been much together, and I am sometimes included.”
“Dearest Ophelia, I fancy it is the other way around, that Hamlet, seeking your company, has found Laertes included perforce.”
“In truth, they have a boisterous fondness for one another, and much in common. They have both accustomed themselves to wider horizons, and chafe at our backward and insular ways.”
“I think, though you becomingly disclaim it, that you are being courted, and I am glad.”
“Glad, madame?”
“Why not, my child? ’Tis natural for you, and overdue for him.”
“My brother and my father both warn me, much more than once, against the dangers that beset virginity, and admonish me to know my price and guard my honor, which is theirs.”
Gertrude smiled and leaned forward toward the maiden, as if to feel on her face the radiated warmth of youth. “But you—you find it hard to value so-called honor so highly? It seems to us a man’s abstraction, for which they choose to preen and die, but which would debar us from the illuminations of love.”
She was not sure, for a space of silence, if she had been understood, but then Ophelia let go her held-breath erectitude, in the comfortless triangular chair, and confessed limpidly, “Prince Hamlet does sometimes press me very hard. He makes me giddy with his words, and is antic enough to sound mad. The next instant, we laugh together, and I cease to be bewildered.”
“He bewilders you?”
Ophelia blushed, lowering her gaze, and Gertrude was glad to see such proof of responsive blood. Had she been favored with a daughter, she would have loved her; she would have given her a guiding hand in the storms of feeling to which her sex was prone, and drawn her to her with no such struggle as a squirming son provides. Her mothering of Hamlet had been, Gertrude could not but feel, a failure, yet through this prospective wife she could touch him yet.
“At times,” Ophelia explained, “his compliments seem a mockery; they claim too much of me. He quotes poetry, and even writes some.”
“Claudius, too, resorts to verse,” Gertrude dared disclose. “Men have a nature more divided than ours. They go from muck to mountaintop in their minds, and take no middle ground. To justify the demands of their bodies they must exalt the object of those demands into a goddess, an unlikely sublime, or else treat her as a piece of muck. My son is imaginative, and from boyhood has been enthralled by the theatrical. If he plays the lover to the hilt, it does not mean he plays falsely.”
“So I have reasoned with myself. Hamlet has been my study since I was merely a set of eyes mounted on knobby stems. I was not yet ten when he turned twenty-one. He seemed to me, as to all observers, the epitome of a prince—exquisite in his dress, impeccable in form and command of language, an easy nobility in him to his fingertips. But now, in his pursuit of me, he will slip from good-natured flamboyance into near-disgust, as if a horror overtakes him in his wooing that turns his courteous effusions curt, and off he stalks without a God-be-wi’-ye. He is obscurely ornate and crudely frank in successive utterances, and makes no secret that he thinks my father lately a dotard, and ever a self-server.”
“What does he say of his uncle, my husband?”
“He keeps his opinion from me, madame.”
Gertrude doubted this—the rejoinder came too quickly—but pursued her main interest. How far had their wooing progressed? She scarcely recognized in Ophelia’s dazzled portrait her aloof and sullen son, who to her eye had always had a bit of his father’s sallow puffiness. But it was proper to love’s success that Ophelia be half blind. “You say he seems to mock you?”
“Amid many shows of tenderness and customary protestation.”
Gertrude did not like the sound of “shows of tenderness.” Had Ophelia already yielded that which could not be bartered back? Had she had the womanly wit to set her lover some trials, enhancing her worth in his eyes? Or in her heated innocence had she given him her body’s ultimate pledge? There was something about this fey beauty in her gossamer dress that smelled not quite right, a touch polluted. She took Ophelia’s hand from the girl’s lap, where it had been flipping in undeclared disquiet. Gertrude was surprised at how moist the hand was, with a clammy damp.
“My child,” she blurted, “enjoy your young years, they ebb soon enough. Follow your heart and head both, if you can. If my son and his lofty ties and his vagrant moods give you more confusion than pleasure, do not persist with him to please either your father or your queen.”
“Oh, Papa is very definite that I must set a good value on myself; and yet I think the match would work to his advantage.”
“Your father is fall of years. He has had his advantages. Yours belong to you. Men,” Gertrude said, abandoning all strategy in a gush of sisterly feeling, “men are beautiful enemies we are set down among. Without female compliance, the world would not get on, and yet they distrust our compliance, seeing in it the seeds of disorder, of random paternity. If we have been compliant with one man, they reason, we may be also with another. The wish to be agreeable we take in with our mothers’ milk, alas.” Gertrude felt her face warming but fought to keep a cool mien, knowing she was revealing more of herself than any woman but a mother should, and that only to her daughter.
Ophelia, however, was obsessed by her own condition and exclaimed, “Oh, I would want no one but Hamlet! I could never love another as I do him! If he deserted me, I would seek refuge in the convent, where life blows not so fierce.”
“Deserted” seemed strong, if they were chaste. But, to be realistic, if Hamlet had indeed taken a bigger bite of this morsel than was proper, then he might be the more deeply hooked. Though the interview was giving her a qualm or two as to Ophelia’s soundness, the Queen still believed that Hamlet should be married—marriage was the quickest way out of his sterile egotism, and a curtailment of the freedom of whim and motion that Claudius found menacing in his nephew. Marriage ties us to the established order. She released the shapely limp hand, with its delicate blue-green veins on the backs and wrists. “You do love Hamlet so?”
“With my life, Your Majesty, even when he is edgy with me, and prates of female fickleness.”
Gertrude stiffened. “Is that what he prates of?”
“Yes, and our susceptibility to lust.”
“As I say, our susceptibilities are the saving of them, and sometimes they even remember to be grateful.”
“Hamlet can be infinitely tender, as if I might break.”
“Oh? When is this?”
Ophelia’s rose-petal upper lip lifted in thought. She lowered her lids on her eyes’ bland sky and then opened them to say, “All of the time, when we are together, but for when he is thinking of some unnamed other, or of our sex in general. He hates the species, he says, but loves the individual.”
“Too much German philosophy,” Gertrude diagnosed. “It curdles every simplicity.” Who could not love this guileless beauty, she asked herself, and be sane? “You have drawn closer to my son,” she told Ophelia, “than I have been since I carried him below my heart.”
“Trust me to cherish that closeness, and to do him no harm.”
Gertrude heard a bit of complacency in this ready reply. “My fear does not run for him, my dear, but for you. Treat him as your instinct directs, but only to the point where you do not violate your instinct of self-protection. You and he have long lives to spend. It is good to love, good enough to stretch its stages out and hold its climax in long anticipation. For men, love is part of their ruthless quest for beauty; for us, it is more gently a matter of self-knowledge. It discovers us from within. Lest you think me a cynic on the topic of men, remember that I am myself a bride, and would not exchange my happiness for all the promises of Heaven.”
“To be as gracious and wise as you, madame, is all I would wish for myself. If ever I can call you ‘Mother,’ I will do so with all my heart.”
“And I will hear it with the same,” said the Queen, laughing at her own tears as the two women perfumed the
closet with the stir of their embrace.
Polonius encountered the Queen in the pillared lobby, with its checkerboard tesselations echoed from the floor to the painted wall-border up against the ceiling. “My daughter was much comforted and cheered by her interview with you.”
“She is an angel. Would that I had had a daughter, what ardent consultations we would have had! But it does not speak well of my son’s attention if she stands in much need of comfort and cheer from others.”
“She is young, far younger than he, and—”
“She is younger than he by little more than I was junior to the late king.”
“And you found him callous and neglectful, as you confessed to me more often than I wished to hear.”
“Was it so often? I strove to keep my dissatisfactions to myself. And surely they were not as severe as your summary adjectives suggest. He was busy with kingship, and I was perhaps conceited.” She did wish the old man would cease alluding to her stale confidences and to their past collusions. Once in his debt, one remained there.
“Young and tender, my daughter is, as I was saying,” said Polonius, “and he presumes upon his princeliness and melancholy to show his brusque, erratic humors too nakedly, jibing back and forth, so to speak, with too indelicate a hand on the tiller, for a maiden reared in the breathless hush of chastity. Laertes, yes, as befits a growing man, was not kept uncontaminate from the tavern and its adjuncts, the house of sale and the gambling den, my man Reynaldo keeping watch that his bruises did not become wounds.”
“It is the pity of a woman’s education,” Gertrude observed, “that it comes all at once, as she is plunged from maiden virtue into married virtue. She is expected to go in a night from total innocence to total knowing.”
The old man, deaf to her points, was becoming overwrought. “Virtue is all of a woman’s worth,” he said. “Virtue is what she takes to market. The Prince toys with her, and I must tug her back. Their private intercourse shall be curtailed, until his tenders of affection have a more solid ring. She needs a remission from Hamlet’s haughty, caustic presence.”
“Tug her back, and Ophelia may be yours to keep.”
“Do not so slight her—a lessening of her attendance will fan his fickle flame to the requisite steadiness. Ophelia is Magrit in all the freshness that repeated stillbirths stole from her, and add to that a preternatural grace she must have learned from the flowers of the wood. Have you ever heard her sing?”
“At fêtes and winter entertainments, since she was a child. A true voice, but slight, and cracked when she pushes it too high.”
“A sublime voice, and indeed there must be no pushing. My queen, have no fear for the match we both desire. A little enforced withdrawal will but give the Prince opportunity to reflect upon my daughter’s worth.”
Gertrude impatiently heard in all this the doddering Lord Chamberlain’s faith that human affairs could all be managed, manipulated with cogs and ratchets like millwheels and clocks, by a clever enough puppeteer. Her own sense was of tides, natural and supernatural, to which wisdom submits, seeking victory in surrender. The young lovers should be, she felt, left alone in desire’s grip, to be lifted by it above the maze constructed by their elders. But in these opinions she knew Polonius and Claudius both would call her sentimental and irrational, yielding up all initiative to God, like a benighted peasant woman or infidel Muhammadan.
The old counsellor leaned closer still to her side, to confide, “In my view and that of others, he has suffered in never having been denied a whim or desire. He grew up without discipline, madame.”
He meant her little Hamlet. Her long-dormant love for her son was being roused in self-defense. It was her privilege, not the old man’s, to doubt her mothering. She responded, “He needed little, it seemed to us. His wits and tongue were quicker than his father’s and mine, and anticipated every corrective thought of ours. When the King took him in hand, I lost touch, and could only admire from a respectful distance.”
“The King was stern and commanding; he loomed to the boy like a god, in armor, on horseback. Yorick was the closest to a human father young Hamlet had, but was a drunken rascal, and could act as mentor in nothing but antics and folly.”
“You sound as if you do not like your hoped-for son-in-law.”
“He does not like me.”
“Liking is not easy for him. He perceives too many sides of a person at once. But the King has generous hopes for him, and a budding fondness. He believes he can WOO Hamlet to adhere to the court, thus making our government unassailable.”
“Any government will be assailed, my lady, in this treacherous broken-up land, with its mulch of old feuds and slaughters. Yet if any man can keep order, it is Claudius. Already, I owe him my life.”
“Your life?” How odd of old men still to value their lives, which the rest of the world can see to be stump-ends, tatters useful not even as a pen wiper.
“I meant, Your Majesty, my position, my status, my life being so bound up with the Lord Chamberlain’s accustomed dignities. But trust me, the King has done well by us both, in ways not necessarily apparent, when brave behavior was required.”
She was puzzled. There seemed to be a secret. The lobby floor was tilting its alternating squares and threatening to open beneath her feet, while Polonius’s prattle was trying to close the hole it had clumsily opened. “Ah,” he rambled on, “we’ve come a long ways together, Your Highness. Remember the bright cold day I skied twelve leagues of fresh drifts to bear official witness that your bridal sheets were blood-stained? They were, I saw they were. You did not let royal honor down, before or since.” He was thinking of his daughter, her virginity, preserved or surrendered.
“Bleeding,” said Gertrude, “surely is among the lesser of a woman’s accomplishments.”
“Not in certain contexts, it is not. Blood rules the world, beneath all the courtesies. Or the lack of it, when a royal heir is hoped for. But enough; I’m rattling into immodesty.” He adjusted his tall green sugarloaf hat, which sat more loosely on his head as his lank tallow-yellow hair thinned and the pumpkin-shell thickness of fat withered on his skull. We begin small, wax great, and shrivel, she thought. The world discounts us before we discount ourselves. “I merely meant to warn you, milady,” Polonius rattled on, “that, when you hear I’ve asked Ophelia to play the miser regarding her private presence with the lord Hamlet, it’s for the ultimate good of the conjugal hopes we share.”
“She is your daughter to command,” Gertrude said, hoping to conclude an uncomfortable interview. “I pray the ban will function as your calculations have persuaded you.” All this thought given in the world to breeding, as if we are nothing but livestock, became tedious as well as unseemly. If the Prince’s affection had mettle, he would kick through whatever fences were set up. She felt a kinship with her son, which she could not communicate, as his amorous will was tested. Poor boy, born like herself into the fine-grinding mill of Elsinore.
She roamed through the castle as if she were after a lifetime leaving it, mourning the little deserted solar where she had played with her three cloth dolls under the nodding care of Marlgar, and gazing toward the green-gray breadth of the Sund, flecked with ice and whitecaps, through a window to which she had so often lifted her stinging eyes from the embroidery frame or the shining vellum of a romance, a tale of Lancelot and Guinevere or of Tristan and Isolde, tales and chansons of adulterous but somehow sacred and undying loves.
When had she last worked on her embroidery? The piece on her frame, an altar cloth for the chapel, remained unchanged from the days before the King’s death. Its background was executed in gold thread and underside couching; it showed, from a sketch in Gertrude’s own hand, Mary of Magdala kneeling before the risen Christ. Wavy long hair carried out in parallel chain-stitches of alternating brown and black concealed her body but for a pink knee worked in satin-stitch, and her downcast pale profile with lowered lid, and one hand lifted as if to ward off the blessing gesture of the whit
e-robed Lord. His outline had been pounced onto the linen from the design on pricked parchment and awaited its working in colored thread. Her mind in these months had been much with her lover and her husband, and she had trouble concentrating on yet a third man, though He was the ultimate Man. She had made a beginning on His feet, each toe outlined in slightly coarse stem stitch. When young she had taken pride in her split stitching, the needle piercing the thread itself, again and again, but years ago the point began to blur, and her vision needed more and more rest within the dull-colored distances toward Skåne. Now she wondered if she would ever again be settled in her soul enough to sit with her embroidery and untrembling hands while recorders played and her ladies-in-waiting gossipped in pattering snippets.
Gertrude roamed the perspectives of the castle, its arched arcades and spiral stairs, its slant-silled windows oddly placed where no one could look out of them, the pungent garderobes corbelled out above the moat, the chapel that seemed to her so much less impressively employed now than in the half-pagan days of King Roderick, the great hall that had held her two marriage feasts, its high beams hung with faded, rotting pennants captured in battle or given in tribute, its walls bearing quartered shields garish with the insignia of all Denmark’s provinces, islands, and cathedral seats. Though Claudius was well into his second month of kingship, and asserted his authority in nightly banquet and daily audience, in uproarious celebration and well-weighed proclamation, Elsinore throughout all its stony maze, from its lowest dungeons to its highest paved battlement, still belonged in her sense of it to King Hamlet.
She thought of him, since her marriage to another, more and not less, as she would have expected, now that the crime of adultery and the fever of duplicity were alike receded, buried within her consecrated bridal status. Perhaps her son was right in his silent reproaches—his pointed absence from court events, his castigating costume of mourning’s black. It had been too soon, though her suitor had marshalled invincible arguments; some matter had been left unfinished, unsounded. She kept expecting to see her former husband, as she often had done a mere season ago, in the turnings of a passageway, emerging from his low door with a puffy face from his nap in the orchard, or stamping into the courtyard in full armor from some combative exercise, fairly snorting like his lathered horse in the exhilaration of his own still-powerful body. And he had had less worldly exercises, too, for she would meet him returning down the long gallery to the chapel, where he had been seeking God’s collusion in the rule of Denmark. Claudius, she noticed, rarely availed himself of such holy conference; he never made confession and when the bread and chalice came his way during Mass appeared to cringe, as if being constrained to sip poison, though unable to shirk, in the witness of those watching, the priest’s pale hands nudging forward the cup and wafer, the wafer round like the white-glazed window above the altar.