The Spectator Bird

Sorting through his mail, Joe is ambushed by the “unexpected” in the shape of a postcard from a long-ago acquaintance in Denmark, a woman named Astrid. Her brief message sums up how much her life has changed since her “friends”—presumably Joe and Ruth—last saw her: Her husband has had a stroke and needs constant care, and she has had to sell everything, including her beloved cottage, and move her husband into a house that “Eigil” gave her. The “castle,” she writes, “is as you saw it, no better” (16), but her reduced circumstances leave her no choice. One consolation is living in the “beautiful” place where she grew up; another is her artwork, which she successfully sells in Copenhagen. The postcard’s photo shows a picturesque village by the sea with a small green island in the distance. Joe recognizes the scene; it is the Danish town of Bregninge, where his mother grew up. He remembers it well: the villages, harbor, forests, fields, and the huge castle that looms over them all. Astrid, a friend from 20 years ago, would now be 60 years old.

Entering the house, Joe digs out a journal he kept during his and Ruth’s trip to Denmark 20 years earlier. He went there hunting for his roots, but it proved an excursion into the “Gothic” that did not yield what he was looking for but rather something “rotten” (an allusion to Hamlet). Astrid was a “maiden in distress” who was ultimately eaten by the “dragon” (19).

Joe’s antecedents are largely a mystery to him. His mother was a Danish immigrant who traveled alone to America at 16, married a brakeman who died young in a train accident, and then herself died in a fall when Joe was a freshman in college. While she lived he was ashamed of her—her accent, her broken English, her clumsiness, her poverty. Only after her death did he realize that she was a “saint”—a realization that led to years of bitter self-recrimination.

Joe’s son Curtis also met an untimely end, another source of guilt for his father. A “beach-bum” with whom Joe fought constantly, Curtis drowned in his twenties after falling off his surfboard—or perhaps letting go. As a result, Joe has long felt cut off from both past and future, afflicted with an ever-gnawing sense of weightlessness and impermanence as well as a restless self-loathing for not having valued his two blood relatives while they were alive. His diagnosis of heart disease at age 50 exacerbated all of these regrets. Joe envies both Indigenous Americans and Europeans for their homelands and age-old pedigrees. He feels “random,” like a native of nothing and nowhere. The writings of stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius offer little solace against this visceral feeling of deracination, aimlessness, and despair.

The postcard from Denmark reopens some of these wounds and inspires Joe to dig out the journal of his Danish trip. Ruth notices the change in him as he reviews these writings and is surprised to hear what they are: At the time, she was unaware that he was keeping a journal. The trip to Denmark in 1954 was to be “therapy” for the death of their son, and she takes slight umbrage that he kept this written attempt at therapy to himself. Their conversation hints that the Danish trip created other issues between them, some still unresolved. To explain himself, Joe shows her the postcard from Astrid while downplaying the significance of the journal, which he says is nothing more than a rote record of events, all sodden with “self-pity.” Nevertheless, Ruth urges him to read it aloud to her, saying it might be “good” for them, and he bends to her wishes.

Joe’s journal begins on March 26, 1954, the second day of the trip, aboard the cruise ship the SS Stockholm. Their fellow passengers include the Bertelsons, an elderly Swedish couple who are returning to the husband’s birthplace to live out their golden years. Joe reflects, not without some schadenfreude, on their probable dismay when they find out that the country has not remained as straitlaced as themselves.

The seas are rough throughout the voyage, and Mr. Bertelson dies suddenly of a heart attack during a particularly storm-tossed day. Joe’s journal remarks on the cruel twist of fate that extinguished Mr. Bertelson just when he was about to reap the rewards of 50 years of dull labor far from home. Late that night, Joe witnesses his burial at sea, an “erasure” in the howling maw of an elemental fury that disturbs him, partly because of his memories of his son’s drowning. The next day, he candidly records his contemptuous thoughts about the “foolish” Mr. Bertelson and his “cowlike” wife, who, with her husband’s death, has now lost her whole world. For the rest of the ocean crossing, he makes no attempt to talk to or comfort her, which he says would be “hypocrisy.”

Seeking to spare Ruth, Joe skips over a painful passage of his journal that deals with his guilt over Curtis’s death. She notices that he has left something out but does not press the issue. She does, however, lose patience with him for shying away from the intimacy of this rare moment of sharing via his glib jokes and mocking asides, noting that his emotional elusiveness is incomprehensible to her. Joe skips ahead to his entries for April 3 and 4 and reads aloud about their arrival in Sweden and then Copenhagen. In their hotel, Joe eats herring, and at once feels the beginnings of a sense of belonging: “It is a form of instant naturalization. I am very glad to be here” (39).

Back in 1974, the telephone rings. It is Anne McElvenny, a State Department functionary, who talks Joe into hosting Césare Rulli, a famous Italian novelist whom Joe once represented, for lunch the next day. Rulli, a “dynamo” known for his salacious books, has been visiting San Francisco and would like to pass the afternoon with someone he knows before flying back east in the evening. Ruth, who shares Ben Alexander’s belief that Joe spends too much of his retirement “evading” others, is excited by the idea of the visit.