“You’re lucky to have her.”
“Of course,” said the professor.
“That was lovely of you, those statements you made on TV. But you must be sure to use a comb, your hair was standing straight up.”
“It was windy.”
“But why didn’t you go inside the house?”
“Agnes phoned and forbade me from letting anyone in. If she hadn’t been on Gräsö visiting her sister she would have come here and organized the world press.”
He was rewarded with another laugh. He felt a need to keep his daughter in a good mood, perhaps as apology for not telling the whole truth about the telephone call at dawn.
“But it was beautifully expressed, that part that you weren’t alone.”
I was alone, he thought.
“Do you wonder what Mother would have said?”
That was a question that the professor found no reason to speculate about.
“Do you ever miss her?”
“No.”
Perhaps he ought to have said something beautiful here too, even if it wasn’t true? He knew that his daughter was of two minds about her mother.
“Do you suppose they’re excited here at work?” she continued, apparently unperturbed by her father’s abrupt responses. “Angerman called from Milan to congratulate, but I think he was mostly thinking about the company, because he said something to the effect that it was good I kept my maiden name, that it could benefit us in contact with customers, especially in the U.S. He invited me to go along to Boston next week.”
“Pill-rollers,” said the professor.
“If they were even that,” said Birgitta with a sigh.
Under normal circumstances he would have asked what she meant, but he was bothered by his daughter’s unnecessary talk about Dagmar.
He had not thought about Dagmar at all, not even on a day like this one. During the night’s review of the family tree she did not even show up in his thoughts. She was as if erased; never before had he experienced that so clearly.
“I’m not going to invite any of her relatives,” he said unexpectedly vehemently.
“But Daddy! Not even Dorothy?”
He knew that his daughter kept in contact with Dorothy Wilkins, widow of Dagmar’s brother Henrik, whom he despised but never commented on. He was convinced that Dorothy maintained contact with his daughter solely to keep herself informed about the Ohler clan, primarily the patriarch himself. Now as before he chose to pass over her with silence.
Birgitta sighed.
“She’s old,” she said.
“She stays alive just to get to see me die,” he mumbled. “There is something vulture-like about her.”
“That’s not true!” his daughter countered. “You can be generous now.”
I’ll never invite her, he thought, increasingly embittered, and he realized that he had to end the conversation before it got out of hand completely.
Dorothy was otherwise the one who had followed him the longest of all, from his student days in the 1940s. She was the daughter of one of his father’s friends from youth, who’d come from England to Uppsala in May of 1945, right after the war ended. Perhaps her father had the idea of marrying off his daughter to the young and promising Bertram. The project had failed because no interest ever arose-from him in any event.
Dorothy went back to England but returned later and was introduced to Dagmar’s brother. They took a liking to each other and she and Henrik got married after only a few months.
Early a widow and childless she had visited all the family gatherings in the Ohler house as long as Dagmar was alive but after that more and more seldom. Now it must have been ten years since she last visited the house.
Should he let her return now? Never! Not even a Nobel Prize and a large portion of generosity could get him to change his attitude.
“No, now I have to rest a little,” he said, an argument his daughter could not oppose, as she often insisted that he ought to take it easier. “I’m going to meet some journalists this afternoon. I have arranged it so there is only one meeting with the press today.”
“Do you want me to come over?”
“That’s not at all necessary. I have Agnes. She’s as good as three people. Besides, the meetings will take place at the hospital. I wanted it that way.”
When they ended the conversation he thought about whether he had been too brusque toward his daughter. She meant so well and was actually the only one, besides Agnes, who seriously cared about how he was doing. His sons showed a formal interest, called now and then and questioned him about the “situation,” perhaps told some piece of news from work or family life, that was all. They never discussed any scientific questions or asked for advice. They probably considered his knowhow antiquated. No filial affection was ever expressed by either Abraham or Carl, not even indirectly. Bertram was not surprised, and not particularly distressed. It had always been that way in the Ohler family.
He himself had never been molly-coddled by his parents, even though he was their only child. On the contrary. His father, Carl, prescribed corporal punishment, and his mother, Lydia, carried it out, when it was considered necessary to shape Bertram into a respectable son and citizen. “Respectable” was one of his father’s favorite words; “proper” another.
Bertram was not bitter about this after the fact. Those were the times. They didn’t know better. When he became a father himself other upbringing methods had replaced corporal punishment. For that reason he had never hit his children.
The sun was shining in through the windows that faced southeast and revealed that the study belonged to an old man. The piles of books and folders, the old kind in a depressing dirty shade of brown that cluttered up a few side tables, had something tragically forgotten about them. The glass of the bookcases was not smeared even by the handles, no one had consulted any medical works for a long time. Only the flies marched back and forth across the frosted glass leaving their tracks.
A stuffed, shabby kite hawk-a gift from his colleagues at the clinic on his sixtieth birthday-hung its head tiredly and its eyes had lost their former luster. Only after many years did he understand the slightly malicious gibe in giving him that particular kind of bird, but he let it sit there on its perch above the liquor cabinet, which these days contained only a lonely bottle of port wine and an almost empty bottle of cognac.
Should he have his old friend Hjalmar take a look at the kite? Then he remembered that he had seen the obituary. The taxidermist was gone. There was a time when they used to meet and discuss specimens.
He decided to draw the curtains but instead went around the desk, sat down on a neglected visitor’s chair-God knows by whom, or when, it was last used-and observed the room from a different perspective. He studied the bird, which did not look any more spry from that direction.
A Nobel Prize winner’s study, where during an entire professional career he had honed his theories, despaired and suddenly become optimistic, wandered around, slapped his palm on the desk in a moment of brilliant clear-sightedness, or touched his head when he realized a chain of thought had broken.
He could imagine it that way. He visualized the study, the whole house, as a future museum. He would always be there, if not physically then at least through the objects, in the way they were arranged. The ingenuity, originality, and industry would shine, but in gentle colors. An Ohler did not need to shout. It was enough to point to all the branches on the framed, glass-covered family tree that his father Carl had made in the forties: thought, governing, the Word, in the form of members of Parliament, officials, and ministers; natural science, the systemization the pharmacists and doctors were responsible for-a Julius von Ohler was helpful to Linnaeus; the prosperity and improvement of agriculture were the noblemen’s contribution-a Gustaf von Ohler was particularly active in the development of Swedish plant cultivation. And to defend this construction there were the warrior Ohlers who fought at Narva as well as in Copenhagen and in the Finnish archipelago.