The Danish Girl (6 page)

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:

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.

Lame Carlisle, whose leg had always ached in the Danish chill, was preparing to enter Stanford; it was the first time she became jealous of him—the fact that he was allowed to hobble across the sandy courtyard to class under the clear blank Palo Alto sun while she would have to sit in the sunroom with a sketchbook in her lap.

She started wearing a painter’s smock, and in the front pocket she kept Einar’s note. She sat in the sunroom and wrote him letters, although it was difficult to think of anything she wanted to report to him. She didn’t want to tell him that she hadn’t painted since she left Denmark. She didn’t want to write about the weather; that was something her mother would do. Instead she wrote letters about what she would do when she returned to Copenhagen: re-enroll in the Royal Academy; try to arrange a little exhibit of her paintings at Den Frie Udstilling; convince Einar to escort her to her nineteenth birthday party. During her first month in California she would walk to the post office on Colorado Street to mail the letters. “Could be slow,” the clerk would say through the brass slats in the window. And Greta would reply, “Don’t tell me the Germans have now also ruined the mail!”

She couldn’t live like this, she told one of the Japanese maids, Akiko, a girl with a runny nose. The maid bowed and brought Greta a camellia floating in a silver bowl. Something is going to have to change, Greta told herself as she burned up with anger, although she was mad at no one in particular, except the Kaiser. There she was, the freest girl in Copenhagen, if not the whole world, and now that dirty German had just about ruined her life! An exile—that’s what she’d become. Banished to California, where the rosebushes grew to ten feet and the coyotes in the canyon cried at night. She could hardly believe that she had become the type of girl who looked forward to nothing more in the day than when the mail arrived, a bundle of envelopes, none of them from Einar.

She cabled her father, begging for his permission to return to Denmark. “The sea lanes are no longer safe,” was his answer. She demanded that her mother let her go up to Stanford with Carlisle, but her mother said the only schools appropriate for Greta were the Seven Sisters back in the snowy East.

“I feel like I’m being crushed,” she told her mother.

“Don’t be so dramatic,” Mrs. Waud replied, busy managing the re-seeding of the winter lawns and the poppy beds.

One day Akiko tapped delicately on Greta’s door and, with her head bowed, brought Greta a pamphlet. “I am sorry,” Akiko said. Then she rushed out, her getas clacking. The pamphlet announced the next meeting of the Pasadena Arts & Crafts Society. Greta thought about the society’s amateurs with their Paris-style palettes and threw away the pamphlet. She turned to her sketch pad but could think of nothing to draw.

A week later, Akiko returned to her door. She handed Greta a second pamphlet. “I am sorry,” Akiko said, her hand covering her mouth. “But I think you like.”

It was only after Akiko delivered a third pamphlet that Greta decided to attend a meeting. The society owned a bungalow above Pasadena in the foothills. The previous week, a mountain lion, as yellow as a sunflower, had pounced down from the scrub pine at the end of the road and snatched a neighbor’s baby. The society’s members could talk of nothing else. The agenda was abandoned, and there was a discussion of a mural depicting the scene. “It’ll be called
Lion Descending
!” someone said. “Why not a mosaic?” another member proposed. The society was made up mostly of women, but there were a few men, many of whom wore felt berets. As the meeting moved closer to agreeing upon a collective painting to be presented to the city library on New Year’s Day, Greta slipped to the back of the room. She had been right.

“You’re not volunteering?” a man said.

It was Teddy Cross, with his white forehead and long neck that tilted to the left. Teddy Cross, who suggested they leave the meeting and visit his ceramics studio on Colorado Street where his kiln burned walnut logs night and day; whose right ankle was meaty with muscle from pumping the foot pedal of his potter’s wheel. Teddy Cross, who would become Greta’s husband as a result of the Christmas debutante ball at the Valley Hunt Club; who, before the end of the Great War, would die beneath Greta’s gaze.