CHAPTER Three
Einar’s father was a failed cereal farmer, an expelled member of the Society for Cultivating the Heath. The first night he ever left his mother’s farmhouse in Bluetooth was when he rode up to Skagen, the fingertip of Denmark, to fetch his bride from a shop that sewed fishing nets. He slept in a bay-inn with a seaweed roof and woke at dawn to marry. The second and last night away from Bluetooth he returned to Skagen with his wife’s body and baby Einar wrapped in a plaid blanket. Because the ground around Skagen was too hard with hoarfrost for gravedigging, they wrapped Einar’s mother in a fishing net picked clean of gills and laid her like an anchor into the icy sea. The week before, a gray wave had washed the bay-inn with the seawood roof into the Kattegat, and so this time Einar’s father slept in the net shop, among the rusted hook-needles and the cord and the faint smell of primrose for which Einar’s mother was known.
His father was tall and weak, a victim of delicate bones. He walked with a knotwood staff, holding on to furniture. When Einar was little, his father was bedridden with maladies the doctor simply called rare. During the day Einar would sneak into his father’s room while he was asleep. Einar would find foam collected on his father’s lips, bubbled with breath. Einar would tiptoe forward, reaching to touch his father’s golden curls. Einar had always wanted hair like that, so thick a silver comb could sit in it as prettily as tinsel on a Christmas tree. But even more lovely than his hair was his illness, the mysterious malady that bled away his energy and caused his egg-shaped eyes to turn milky and soft, his fingers yellow and frail. Einar found his father beautiful—a man lost in a useless, wheezing, slightly rank shell of a body. A man confounded by a body that no longer worked for him.
On some days Einar would climb into the small beechwood bed and slip beneath the eiderdown. His grandmother had patched the holes in the comforter with tiny pellets of peppermint gum, and now the bed smelled fresh and green. Einar would lie with his head sunk into the pillow, and little Edvard II would curl between him and his father, his white tail flicking against the bedclothes. The dog would groan and sigh, and then sneeze. Einar would do the same. He did this because he knew how much his father loved Edvard, and Einar wanted his father to love him just the same.
Einar would rest there and feel the weak heat from his father’s bones, his ribs showing through his nightshirt. The green veins in his throat would pulse with exhaustion. Einar would take his father’s hand and hold it until his grandmother, her body small and rectangular, would come to the door and shoo Einar away. “You’ll only make him worse,” she’d say, too busy with the fields and the neighbors calling with sympathy to tend to Einar.
Yet despite his admiration, Einar also resented his father, sometimes cursing him as Einar dug in the bog, his spade cutting through the peat. On the table next to his father’s sickbed was an oval daguerreotype of Einar’s mother, her hair twisted into a wreath around her head, her eyes silvery. Whenever Einar picked it up, his father would take it away and say, “You’re disturbing her.” Opposite the bed was the pickled-ash wardrobe where her clothes waited, exactly as she’d left them the day she gave birth to Einar. A drawer of felt skirts with pebbles sewn into the hem to hold them against the wind; a drawer of wool underclothes, gray as sky; on hangers a few gabardine dresses with muttonchop sleeves; her wedding dress, now yellow, packed in tissue that would break apart at the touch. There was a drawstring bag that rattled with amber beads and a black cameo pin and a small diamond set in prongs.
Every now and then, in a burst of health, his father would leave the farmhouse. One day when he returned from an hour of chat at the neighbor’s kitchen table, he found Einar, small at age seven, in the drawers, the amber beads twisted around his throat, a yellow deck-scarf on his head like long, beautiful hair.
His father’s face turned red, and his eyes seemed to sink into his skull. Einar could hear the angry rattle of his father’s breath in his throat. “You can’t do that!” his father said. “Little boys can’t do that!” And little Einar replied, “But why not?”
His father died when Einar was fourteen. The gravediggers charged an extra ten kroner to shovel out a hole long enough to hold his coffin. In the churchyard his grandmother, who had now buried all her children, gave Einar a small notebook with a pewter cover. “Write your private thoughts in it,” she instructed, her face as flat and round as a saucer; that flat face showed her relief that her queer, unproductive son had at last moved on. The notebook was the size of a playing card, with a lapis lazuli pencil held to the spine by ostrich-leather loops. She had plucked it from a sleeping Prussian soldier when the German Confederation occupied Jutland during the War of 1864. “Took his notebook and then shot him,” she sometimes said, churning her cheese.
Bluetooth was named for one of Denmark’s first kings. No one really knew when it was founded, or where its people came from, although there were myths about the Greenland settlers giving up on that rocky land and releasing their sheep to graze here. It was not much more than a village surrounded by bogs. Everything in Bluetooth was always wet: feet, dogs, and, sometimes in the spring, carpets and the walls of halls. There was a plank walkway that crossed the spongy ground leading to the main road and then the grain fields beyond. Every year the walkway would sink the length of a girl’s arm, and in May, when the hoarfrost would melt to bits no bigger than fish scales, the men of Bluetooth would rehammer the warping planks into the few yellow heaps of solid ground.
As a boy Einar had a friend named Hans who lived on the edge of the village in a brick villa that had the town’s first telephone. One day, before they were close friends, Hans charged Einar an øre to pick up the receiver. He heard nothing, only the staticky hollow silence. “If there were anyone to call, you know I’d let you,” Hans said, throwing his arm around Einar’s shoulder and rocking him gently.
Hans’s father was a baron. His mother, whose gray hair was twisted tightly, spoke to him only in French. Hans had freckles on the lower half of his face and was, like Einar, smaller than most other boys. But unlike Einar, Hans had a voice that was fast and raspy, that of a good, always excited boy who spoke with equal enthusiasm and confidence to his best friend, his Corsican governess, and the red-nosed deacon. He was the type of boy who at night would fall asleep instantly, exhausted and happy, suddenly quieter than the bog. Einar knew this because whenever he slept at the villa, he would lie awake till dawn, too excited ever to seal his eyes.
Hans was two years older than Einar, but that didn’t seem to matter. At fourteen, Hans was small for his age yet taller than Einar. With his head handsomely larger in proportion to his body, Hans seemed, when Einar was twelve, more like an adult than any other boy he knew. Hans understood the grown-ups who ran the world: he knew they didn’t appreciate their inconsistencies being called out. “No, no—say nothing,” he’d advise when Einar’s father, nearly always bemoaning his bedridden state, would throw back the eiderdown and fly to the teapot whenever Mrs. Bohr or Mrs. Lange stopped by for gossip. Or Hans would suggest—the way he did, with his fingers pressed together into a small finlike paddle—not to tell Einar’s father that he wanted to be a painter. “You’ll change your mind again and again. Why worry him now?” Hans would say, his pressed-together fingers touching Einar’s arm, causing the little black hairs to stand alert, their bases pimpled and hard. Because Hans knew so much, Einar thought certainly he must be right. “Dreams shouldn’t be shared,” Hans told Einar one day when teaching him to climb the ancient oak that grew on the edge of the bog. Its roots wrapped mysteriously around a boulder so white and speckled with mica that you couldn’t look directly at it on a sunny day. “I want to run away to Paris, but I’m not going to tell anyone about it. I’m going to keep it to myself. One day I’ll be gone. That’s when people will know,” Hans said, swinging upside down from a branch, his shirt creeping down to expose the hairs sprouting in the bowl of his sternum. Were he to let loose and fall, he’d neatly slip away into the open bubbling mud.
But Hans never disappeared into the bog. By the time Einar was thirteen, he and Hans had become best friends. This surprised Einar, who expected nothing less than scorn from a boy like Hans. Yet instead Hans would ask Einar to play tennis on the rye-grass court marked out with powdered sugar next to the villa. When he discovered Einar couldn’t swing a racquet with any precision, Hans instructed Einar on the rules of umpiring, claiming it was more important anyway. One afternoon Hans and one of his brothers—there were four in all—decided, in an effort to rankle their mother, to play tennis naked. Einar sat in a sweater on a li chened rock, a pink paper parasol set up by Hans protecting him from the sun. Einar tried to call the match objectively, although he felt unprepared to do anything but help Hans win. And so Einar sat on the rock calling the points—“Forty-love for Hans . . . An ace for Hans”—as Hans and his brother glided over the rye grass chasing the ball, their cheerfully pink penises flopping around like schnauzer tails, causing Einar to heat up under the parasol until Hans’s match point. Then the three boys tow eled off, and Hans’s bare warm arm fell across Einar’s back.
Hans had a paper-and-balsa kite, brought back from Berlin by the baroness. It was shaped like a submarine, and Hans loved to set it sailing up into the sky. He’d lie in the lucerne grass and watch the kite floating above the bog, the spool of string clamped between his knees. “The Kaiser has a kite just like this one,” he ’d say, blades of grass between his lips. He tried to teach Einar to get it aloft, but Einar was never capable of finding the right current of air. Over and over the rice-paper kite would rush up in a column of breeze and then crash to the ground; and each time Einar would watch Hans wince as the kite returned to earth. The boys would rush over to the kite, which would be lying upside down. Einar would say, “I don’t know what happened, Hans. I’m so sorry, Hans.” Hans would pick up the kite and shake off the dandelions and say, “Good as new.” But Einar could never learn to fly the kite; and so one day, when the boys were sprawled on their backs in the lucerne grass, Hans said, “Here. You steer.” He set the spool of string between Einar’s knees and then resettled himself in the field. Einar could feel the foxholes beneath him. Each time the kite pulled on the string the spool would rotate, and Einar’s back would arch up. “That’s right,” Hans said. “Guide her with your knees.” And Einar got more and more used to the spinning spool, and the kite dipping and rising with the wrens. The boys were laughing, their noses burning in the sun. Hans was tickling Einar’s stomach with a reed. His face was so close to Hans’s that he could feel, through the grass, his breath. Einar wanted to lie so close to Hans that their knees would touch, and at that moment Hans seemed open to anything at all. Einar scooted toward his best friend, and the only strip of cloud in the sky peeled itself away, and the sun fell on the boys’ faces. And just then, as Einar moved his bony knee toward Hans’s, an angry gust of wind yanked on the kite, and the spool lifted from the clamp of Einar’s knees. The boys watched the submarine of the kite sail above the elm trees, rising at first, but then crashing into the black center of the bog, which swallowed it as if it were as heavy as a stone.
“Hans,” Einar said.
“It’s okay,” Hans said, his voice a stunned whisper. “Just don’t tell my mother.”
The summer before Einar’s father died, Hans and Einar were playing in Einar’s grandmother’s sphagnum fields, the mud swishing through their boots. It was warm, and they had been in the fields most of the morning, and suddenly Hans touched Einar’s wrist and said, “Einar, dear, what’s for dinner?” It was about noon, and Hans knew no one was in the farmhouse except Einar’s father, who was asleep upright in his bed.
Hans had begun to grow by then. He was fifteen, and his body was filling out to match the size of his head. A fin of an Adam’s apple had appeared in his throat, and he was now much taller than Einar, who at thirteen still hadn’t budged in height. Hans nudged Einar toward the farmhouse. In the kitchen Hans sat at the head of the table and tucked a napkin into his collar. Einar had never before cooked a meal, and he stood blankly at the stove. Hans quietly said, “Light a fire. Boil some water. Drop in a few stone potatoes and a mutton joint.” Then, more vaguely, his gravelly voice suddenly smooth: “Einar. Let’s pretend.”
Hans found Einar’s grandmother’s apron with the cottongrass strings hanging limply next to the stovepipe. He brought it to Einar and cautiously tied it around his waist. Hans touched the nape of Einar’s neck, as if there were a panel of hair he needed to lift aside. “You never played this game?” Hans whispered, his voice hot and creamy on Einar’s ear, his fingers with their gnawed-down nails on Einar’s neck. Hans pulled the apron tighter until Einar had to lift his ribs with an astonished, grateful breath, his lungs filling just as Einar’s father padded into the kitchen, his eyes wide and his mouth puckered into a large O.
Einar felt the apron drop to his feet.
“Leave the boy alone!” His father’s walking stick was raised at Hans.
The door slammed, and the kitchen became shadowy and small. Einar could hear Hans’s boots squish through the mud, heading toward the bog. Einar could hear the wheeze of his father’s breath and then the flat punch of his fist landing on Einar’s cheek. Then, across the bog and the tadpole pools, over the sphagnum field, trailing into the afternoon, came Hans’s voice in a little song:There once was an old man who lived on a bog And his pretty little son, and their lazy little dog
CHAPTER Four
Greta spent her eighteenth birthday on the Princess Dagmar, sulking at its rail. She hadn’t returned to California since the summer of the butcher-wagon incident. The thought of the whitewashed brick house on the hill, with its view of the eagle-nested Arroyo Seco, the thought of the San Gabriel Mountains purpling at sunset, filled her with regret. She knew her mother would want her to take up with the daughters of her friends—with Henrietta, whose family owned the oceanside oil fields down in El Segundo; with Margaret, whose family owned the newspaper; with Dottie Anne, whose family owned the largest ranch in California, a parcel of land south of Los Angeles not much smaller than all of Denmark. Greta’s parents expected her to proceed as if she were one of them, as if she’d never left, as if she should become the young California woman she was born to be: smart, schooled, horse-trained, and silent. There was the Christmas debutante ball at the Valley Hunt Club, where the girls would descend the staircase in white organdy dresses, albino poinsettia leaves pinned to their hair. “How appropriate that we’d return to Pasadena in time for your coming out,” Greta’s mother clucked nearly every day on the Princess Dagmar on the return voyage. “Thank God for the Germans!”
Greta’s room in the house on the hill had an arched window that overlooked the rear lawn and the roses, their petals fringed brown in the autumn heat. Despite the good light, the room was too small to paint in. After only two days she felt cramped, as if the house, with its three floors of bedrooms and the Japanese maids whose geta sandals clacked up and down the back staircase, were choking her imagination. “Mother, I just have to return to Denmark right away—tomorrow, even! It ’s too confining for me here,” she complained. “Maybe it’s fine for you and Carlisle, but I feel as if I can’t get anything done. I feel as if I’ve forgotten how to paint.”
“But, Greta, dear, that’s impossible,” said her mother, who was busy converting the stable into a garage. “How could California cramp anyone? And compared to little Denmark!” Greta agreed that it didn’t make sense, but this was how she felt.
Her father sent over a statistical survey of Denmark published by the Royal Scientific Control Societies. Greta spent a week with it, studying its charts with both self-pity and longing: last year there were 1,467,000 pigs in Denmark, and 726,000 sheep. The total number of hens: 12,000,000. She would read the figures and then turn her head to the arched window. She memorized them, certain she would need them shortly, although for what, she couldn’t say. Again she’d try her mother: “Can’t I go back? I don’t give a hoot about the Germans!”
Lonely, Greta would walk down to the Arroyo Seco, along the dry riverbed where the killdeer birds hunted for water. The arroyo was burned out in autumn, the sage grass and the mustard shrubs, the desert lavender and the stink lilies all brown brittle bones of plants; the toyon, the coffeeberry, the elderberry, the lemonade sumac all dry in the branch. The air in California was so parched that Greta’s skin was cracking; as she walked along the sandy riverbed she could nearly feel the inner panel of her nose crack and bleed. A gopher hurried in front of her, sensing a hawk circling above. The oak leaves shook crisply in a breeze. She thought about the narrow streets of Copenhagen, where slouching buildings hung to the curb like an old man afraid to step into traffic. She thought about Einar Wegener, who seemed as vague as a dream.
In Copenhagen, everyone had known her but no one ever expected anything from her; she was more exotic than the black-haired laundresses who had wandered across the earth from Canton and now worked in the little shops on Istedgade. In Copenhagen she was given respect no matter how she behaved, the same way the Danes tolerated the dozens of eccentric countesses who needlepointed in their mossy manors. In California, she was once again Miss Greta Waud, twin sister of Carlisle, orange heiress. Eyes continually turned her way. There were fewer than ten men in Los Angeles County suitable for her to marry. There was an Italianate house on the other side of the Arroyo Seco everyone knew she would move into. Its nurseries and screened play-rooms she would fill with children. “There’s no need to wait now,” her mother said the first week back. “Let’s not forget you’ve turned eighteen.” And of course no one had forgotten about the butcher wagon. There was a different boy on the delivery route, but whenever the truck rattled up the drive a brief moment of embarrassment would fall over the whitewashed house.
The Danish Girl Page 4