Gertrude and Claudius by John Updike Page A

laughed dismissingly: “As soon give a man a spinning wheel,” he had said, “for all the use to be gotten from it!”
    She went on, seeking to match the cautious tone of the man she was with, “He said that Thord had fallen sick, of age and the cruel demands of the birds, and your flock had been yielded up, on your instructions in parting, to a dealer from Nødebo in such precious and precarious fowl.”
    “I did not expect to return soon,” Fengon told her. “I had taken a vow.”
    “What sort of vow?”
    “A vow of renunciation.”
    “What were you renouncing, may I ask?”
    “Who better to ask? I was renouncing the sight of you, the sound of you, the faint but maddening scent of you.”
    She blushed. He had a way of insinuating the unspeakable, yet at her prompting, so she could not fault him. “Surely there was no need,” she did protest. “A man is entitled to lend his sister-in-law attendance, if it is done respectfully.”
    “My thoughts did not exclude respect, but were more than that. They frightened me in their vehemence, their possession of all my waking minutes and then, hideously warped, of my dreams. In my dreams, you were wanton, and I wore a crown. My qualms were perhaps dynastic: I feared that in my love of you and envy of him I might injure my brother.”
    Geruthe stood, partly in alarm, partly to stir herself, in this cold and smoky room, into warmth. “We must not speak of love.”
    “No, we must not. Tell me the fate of poor forlorn Bathsheba, too wild for her lady and too tame for nature.”
    “We took her, Ljot and I, to your field, where I had seen you demonstrate falconry, and set her free.”
    “Free? But what did freedom mean to her? Death in the talons of a bigger, wilder raptor utterly unspoiled by man’s hand.” He had stood, too, so as not to loll in the Queen’s presence.
    “It was not my hand that tamed her,” Geruthe said. “We undid the jesses, and at first she flew low, dipping as if she were trailing a creance that would pull her back at will, and then, feeling no tug, she beat herself toward Heaven, and by lifts and lilts explored the breadth of its corridors, yet kept banking obliquely back to be above us, circling quizzically, as if unwilling to give up a connection she had known. She descended it seemed to take my wrist again, but I threw my gauntlet of padded chamois into the tall grass, where she eyed it in flight, as if thinking to retrieve it; but no, then she swooped away mewing, toward the Forest of Gurre in the direction of Elsinore.”
    “You remember it as if painted on your memory. And did she ever reappear at Elsinore, on your windowsill perhaps?”
    “No, but she haunted my thoughts there, as I realized that she had been dear to me, though her value had been eclipsed by the trouble she caused.”
    “Needing to be fed, you mean.”
    “And to have her messes swept and scoured and her feathers checked for mites and lice, and the general
worry
of her.” Her torso twitched in indignation as if to ring a girdle of bells. “You had burdened me, it seemed, with a representative of yourself, that I dare not neglect, so to keep you alive, whether in the hazards of your travels or in my cherishing memory was unclear.”
    “The living,” allowed Fengon, “make cruel demands.” To his manservant he said softly, “
Parti
,” and only when the dark young man, who moved with a disquietingdocile fluidity that awakened distrust in heavy-footed Danes, had slipped from the chamber did Fengon embrace Geruthe where she stood expectant, indignant and awed by the pit opening up beneath her but afire with the wish to have his lips—curved and cushioned almost like a woman’s, and shaping themselves for the pressure of hers in that dense black beard salted with gray—united with hers, so their breaths would each pollute the other’s, and the moisture they carried behind their teeth would thrust with their tongues into the other’s warm maw. He was solid as a