Chak chak chak chak, sang a magpie. B-flat. But Helle wasn’t ready to hear in its song the first hints of Fuglespil; nor was she ready to hear in the huphuphup of the soldier bird intimations of approaching war. Inger had recently had a baby, Anders was dying, Helle was in love—her sensibilities were attuned to the nuances of the human drama, which, after all, has its roots in our animal nature. She sat watching her horse chew grass, taking note of the way its lips turned from pink to green; of the way the foam collected within the trough of gum tissue at the base of its long yellow teeth; of the bright green fly lodged, possibly dead, in the corner of its white, indifferent eye. By paying close attention to one thing you could avoid the sight of another—of Maeve’s horse retreating down the hillside, the light glinting off its upturned shoes and its spiraling brown tail, an image of operatic, disturbing proportion.
According to Helle, everything about Maeve was operatic and disturbing. Her presence in their shared apartment, for example: Maeve wasn’t sloppy, but she had a decorative impulse which led her to drape tasseled, sequined shawls and bead necklaces over the tops of mirrors, to hang the walls with reproductions of pre-Raphaelite paintings, the dreamy expressions on the faces of all those Guineveres and Galahads in sharp contrast to the solemn faces of her relatives looking out from their frames on top of the piano. Daisy had given Helle her upright, since the estate in Mariager was already equipped with a Bechstein, which, she pointed out dryly, neither she nor Propp knew how to play. For a while, until one day Helle swept the entire surface clean in a fit of irritation, a big silver loving cup—one of Maeve’s many awards for prowess in the steeplechase—also sat on top of the piano, filled with sprays of desiccated wildflowers, their seed pods releasing a continual shower of fluff across the keys. Dead flora was everywhere, Maeve’s favorite season being autumn. No matter if a spring breeze blew outdoors; leaves would be falling inside, where Maeve’s two cats would pounce on them, as if to exercise such skills as might prove useful in catching live prey, although the apartment was overrun with mice.
In addition to the cats, Maeve—modeling herself, most likely, on the eccentric Croatian soprano Ilma di Murska, whose dinner companion was said to be a giant Newfoundland dog, and who traveled with an entourage of apes and parrots—had a tendency to introduce more exotic animals into the household, such as Siamese fighting fish, iguanas, snakes, a capuchin monkey, and in one particularly ill-advised moment, a baby wolverine. Unlike the cats, none of these pets lasted for very long, Maeve either forgetting to feed them, as in the case of the fish, or simply losing interest and giving them away. After the wolverine bit her, she fed it poison and carried it off in a suitcase to one of the taxidermists on the Nyhavn, who made it the centerpiece of his window display, its sleek head caught in the act of lunging back, snarling, over its shoulder. For a while, Helle said, no excursion was complete without a side trip to the taxidermist’s shop. Look at those teeth! Maeve would exclaim, one hand pressed to the glass, the other to the place on her thigh where she’d been bitten. Then her pupils would dilate until her eyes were as black and luminous, as profoundly witless as the two glass beads set in the wolverine’s eye sockets, and it was as if she couldn’t get home, couldn’t fall onto the bed, couldn’t pull Helle down quickly enough beside her.
Those mad caresses, the humid landscape of another person’s skin, the moment when your mind—still filled with thoughts but suddenly lacking the mechanism which makes thought possible—is funneled out of its place in your head to leap around like common muscle and nerve between your legs! Having held herself aloof from her body for so many years, Helle confessed that its awakening to sex left her both ecstatic and terrified. Or as Sappho wrote in the first of her poems which Helle set to music: “Virginity, virginity, when you leave me/ where do you go?/ I am gone and never come back to you./ I never return.”
On the hilltop, meanwhile, Helle fell sound asleep; the sun set; her horse vanished. The pools of shadow at the feet of the shrubs grew into towers, and then the towers grew taller and thinner until they were so tall and thin that they were no longer towers but masts, all of them pointed toward the city, the direction in which Maeve had steered her horse an hour earlier, and from which she was at last riding back. Look at you, she said in a voice dark with reprobation—you’re covered with ants. Helle rolled over, looked up. Donkey Man, she thought, as the curb chain’s jingling and the crickets’ single held note became higher and higher pitched, the sound of the tips of the shadow masts and shrouds squealing against one another. Climb on, Maeve said impatiently, and then before Helle knew what was happening they’d taken off at a gallop, the rocklike sheath of Maeve’s ribcage expanding and contracting within Helle’s desperate grip; everything else, including Helle herself, seemed to have turned to wind, a furious blur without source or motive. Things flew by, or they flew by things—it was impossible to tell the difference. Midway down the hill they came upon Helle’s horse, busily eating the bush in which its reins had gotten tangled. Thank God he didn’t snap his cannon bone, Maeve said, reining in her horse so Helle could stumble off.
It hardly mattered if you and your lover were of the same gender; she might just as well have been a member of a different species, so impossible was it to develop anything resembling a sense of common purpose with another human being. Thus you might find yourself, at the end of a disappointing day, jealous of a fourteen-year-old stable boy. In the limited glow of a lantern Helle watched his face bending toward her sweetheart’s over a cracked hoof. The boy was holding the tin out of which Maeve was scooping a black paste; he was whispering tenderly into the horse’s ear as Maeve painted the paste on. Maeve would never look at her, Helle knew, the way she looked at him. In fact, after her audacious masquerade, there was almost nothing Helle could do to hold Maeve’s attention. It was cool in the stable; flecks of straw and horsehair sifted through the lantern light. The boy offered Maeve a bottle of beer, which she accepted nonchalantly; then they leaned back together against a post, their bodies touching along the length of their arms, their thighs, discussing the virtues of the various horses. He’ll make a good eventer, Maeve said, pointing toward the opposite stall. Nice conformation. But the boy wasn’t so sure. He thought he’d seen signs of unsoundness, and Bobby could already cover an oxer without even trying. What were they talking about? Helle stood off to one side, stroking the nose of a gray horse whose face reminded her of Dancer’s. The skin was so soft, the little whiskers so delicate and vulnerable, that it took her completely by surprise when the horse grabbed her index finger in its teeth and bore down hard. The truth is, there are endless worlds, all different, radiating outward from the millions of inhabitants of this planet, and in each of these worlds it is possible, if you’re not careful, to lose a part of yourself. As Maeve reminded Helle later, she was lucky to escape with nothing more than a bruised knuckle.
III
HELLE HAD OCCASION to recall this incident when she returned to Krageslund the following December, ostensibly to watch her father die. She hadn’t wanted to go, but Maeve pointed out that this would justify the claim of some of her critics that seawater ran in her veins—strong-willed Maeve, who insisted on accompanying her; treacherous Maeve, whose reasons for doing so probably had more to do with curiosity than concern. Similarly, it was Maeve who talked Rundgren into lending them his car; and when they finally got to Krageslund, it was Maeve who pushed Helle through the front door. How strange to discover that the house had been decorated for Christmas! A huge fir tree filled the entry hall, its boughs weighed down with candles in molded tin holders, with Ida’s blown-glass, hand-painted ornaments shaped like pine cones, trumpets, and drums. The staircase was looped with swags of balsam tied in place with red satin bows. On the oak table where Helle had been accustomed to seeing her father’s black bag, his gloves, and his newspapers, a wooden crèche had been set up; far off, at the other end of the table, stood the Three Wise Men and their attendant camels. Every morning this group moved a little close
r to the manger, Helle said, as if to provide her with a means of measuring the length of her stay, or to chart the progress of her father’s own mysterious journey.
Helle had come prepared to detest Gunhild, and consequently found herself unsettled by both the grave expression on her stepmother’s face and the gratitude with which she accepted Maeve’s embrace. Every hint of her former voluptuousness was gone, and her yellow hair was mixed with gray. Anders was asleep, she explained, going on to say that for a week he’d hardly been able to sleep and that, when awake, he set her impossible tasks, the most recent of which was to exhume Ida’s body. “He wants her in bed with him,” Gunhild said, adversity having extracted every trace of coyness from her voice, leaving it as flat as the rest of her. The decorations, it turned out, had also been Anders’s idea, based on his theory that Death might be fooled by festive camouflage. For instance, Niels was out looking for boxwood at this very minute, just as he’d spent most of yesterday looking for mistletoe. Helle figured that from where she stood, the number of steps required to reach the sickbed was probably equal to the number that would carry her to Rundgren’s car. But she didn’t know how to drive—nor did she ever learn, firm in her belief that most inanimate objects were possessed of antic and malicious urges—and it was clear that Maeve had no intention of leaving. Maeve told Gunhild to get some rest, to let her take over, and didn’t even bat an eye when Gunhild stopped for a moment on her way up the stairs to explain where they could find the clean diapers. “He soils himself,” Gunhild said, and then was gone.
They spent a week at Krageslund, during which Helle was forced to witness the gradual transformation of Maeve into the perfect version of what she herself was supposed to be. Indeed, since Anders remained confused about identity, it was only a matter of time before he became convinced that Maeve was the real daughter, Helle the interloper. Walking down the hallway, she would hear, through the open door of the examining room where her father sat propped up behind the bars of a large criblike bed, the sound of playful conversation. “What small hands you have!” she heard him say on one such occasion, getting the wolf’s part wrong. “Small but hardy.” Maeve was rubbing her father’s feet, something Helle couldn’t bring herself to do. “From milking,” Maeve explained, and then went on to tell a long story involving a pair of kidskin gloves and the mayor’s second wife. Since all of Maeve’s stories were drawn from personal experience, Anders’s tendency to laugh with her over them, as if in recollection of a shared past, was enraging. How could this be happening? Helle knew that the pleasure Maeve took in Anders’s company wasn’t counterfeit and, moreover, that her relationship to her own father, who’d died when she was just twenty, had been unusually close. Besides, Helle would never have wanted to trade places with her.
Envy and relief, a horrible combination. Mealtimes were particularly difficult. Niels developed a crush on Maeve, like every adolescent boy with whom she came into contact; they would sit at the kitchen table, bumping elbows and making faces. “Oatmeal’s the best,” Maeve announced over breakfast the morning after their arrival, “though you’ve got to mix it with something stringy. Do you have any celery?” Years later, Helle would try to locate hints of her half-brother’s parentage in Maren’s placid good looks, but they shared only a long upper lip, and Niels was, at seventeen, a blocky, unattractive youth with a slightly dished-out face, reddish hair, and freckles. Helle watched, amazed, as Maeve worked her charms: one minute she was filling her mouth with food, and the next she was opening it wide in order to demonstrate the rules for “Repulsion,” a game she’d learned at boarding school. Later she would engage Gunhild in a discussion of the best way to remove bloodstains from linen. For Maeve managed to charm Gunhild as well. They walked around together, arms linked, whispering. They gave each other manicures. At night, when all the clocks struck nine, they kissed each other on the cheek like sisters before heading for bed.
Of course Maeve spent her nights with Helle. Was it true, as Helle claimed, that the attraction was primarily physical, or was this merely another one of her strange attempts to provoke my own jealousy? Why else would she encourage me to imagine the two of them lying there on her childhood bed, Maeve trying to see whether it was possible to circle Helle’s waist—a waist evidently as slender and taut as Maeve’s was plump—with her hands, her fingers avidly stroking and adjusting, describing points and arcs, as all the while Helle tried to push her away? For didn’t I agree, Helle asked slyly, that no one, least of all a self-indulgent lover, had the right to make circles at night after a day spent creating triangles? Maeve and Niels and Helle. Maeve and Gunhild and Helle. Maeve and Anders and Helle. Even old age, Helle insisted, that great plot thickener, hadn’t been able to thicken her waist, although she had to admit that it was no longer so finely articulated as it had been back then, back in the days when Maeve compared it to the pedestal of a communion chalice, to the neck of a hookah. Slowly, slowly she would lift Helle’s gown. Every night a little more of the moon would be visible in the top pane of the window, just as every night invisible hands, an invisible tongue, would adjust the increasing pitch of her desire. What Maeve wanted, Helle said, was to make her moan out loud. Whereas I suspect that what Helle wanted, telling me this, was to create the ultimate triangle: Maeve and Frances and Helle.
Afterwards Maeve would put on the tortoiseshell glasses she used for reading, pull the standing lamp closer and reposition the tilt of its shade, then page through one of Gunhild’s magazines. The lamp, Helle noticed, was new, and the formerly pale blue walls had been papered over with a rain of stemless dark blossoms; but otherwise the room appeared unchanged. To the right of the window, beckoning from the front seam of the wing chair’s blue-and-white-striped cushion, was the same white feather she’d noticed the night she packed her bag to leave home forever; opposite the bed, the mirror over the dresser continued to add weight to your torso while removing it from your head. Her books, likewise, remained as she’d left them on the shelves: dove-gray Ovid between glove-leather Donne and water-stained Hawthorne; upside-down Stendhal next to sea-green, tilted Homer. When she opened the drawer of the bedside table she found two stemless tufts of cotton grass shuttling, rodentlike, around the bottom of it.
Meanwhile, Maeve would fill her in on the reasons behind the declining popularity of the Charleston, or the latest antics of John Christmas Møller, the Conservative party’s boyish new leader. Damp in the walls, obviously not a problem at Krageslund, could be controlled by the application of verdigris. She introduced this particular piece of information the night after Inger and Hans had joined them for supper, accompanied by their infant son, Hans the Younger, his tiny head nestled like an apple within the soft folds of an eider bunting. The house Maeve had grown up in, she told Helle, had been as subject to decay as Krageslund obviously was not. Look at that floor! Perfectly flat. Where she grew up, you could put a marble down in the vestibule and it would roll from room to room. Furthermore, on its way through the parlor it was bound to pass a dead body surrounded by keening women, since that was the way it worked in a large family—people were always dropping off like flies. Would it interest Helle to know that Krageslund was nothing like what Maeve had expected? Listening to Helle, a person came away with the impression that she’d grown up in the castle of Otranto. You might think she’d grown up among monsters, whereas clearly Gunhild was a courageous woman, Niels was a fine boy, and Anders—well, Anders was a lamb. Good people, all of them.
But how could Maeve Merrow, a genuinely evil woman, recognize goodness? What I had to remember, Helle said, was that although she herself knew that her father wasn’t a lamb, she also knew the extent to which her own character was defective, and that among its many defects was the need to keep her defects hidden. Maybe this would explain why if, as the saying goes, the shoe fit, Maeve wanted to make Helle wear it. Or maybe Maeve realized all along that the shoe didn’t fit, and her real purpose was to make Helle cram her foot into an undersized shoe, an act which would requi
re lopping off toes or the back of a heel—an act which would, in other words, draw blood.
Which was just another way of saying that Maeve, not unlike Inger, seemed driven by a love of justice. An ultimately misleading similarity that Helle had noticed during supper, when Maeve had supported Inger in a discussion of the government’s latest regulations on farm production. It was the little farms, Inger had said, that would be hurt the most. Wasn’t that right, Sugarpie? She was cradling the baby in one arm, while with the other she took a roll from the basket, set it on the tabletop, and then, by way of demonstration, pounded it flat with her fist. Inger’s method, Helle had observed, was to address all of her comments to the baby, a strategy no doubt developed in response to her husband’s habit of referring to her in the third person. Moder, Hans called her. Mother. What Mother failed to understand, he’d explained, was the larger economic picture, in which poultry and cheese were placed in the foreground in an attempt to adapt to the needs of the foreign market. Helle saw an austere seventeenth-century landscape, its distant watermill and delicate shade trees dominated by giant chickens and wheels of Havarti. How about cement? she asked, in bored recollection of Daisy, but Hans didn’t have a chance to reply, because suddenly Maeve was lifting the squashed roll and waving it in his face. People like Hans made her so mad, she said. While they were talking about the foreign market, people were going hungry. Who cared if King George liked coq au vin? Why satisfy the needs of royalty at the expense of the people? Why talk about economics when there was a dream of common greatness waiting to be fulfilled?
The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf Page 26