Gertrude and Claudius (20 page)

“Sleep, husband,” she said softly.

“The day will not let go. Old Rosencrantz was telling me that young Fortinbras must be crushed and the Norwegian threat put to rest for good. These venerable
nobles still live in a dream of heroic violence, of crushing and burning and final solutions. At the same time they grow fat on their share of the commerce that international peace brings.”

“Hamlet used to say just that.” She had spoken too quickly in her drowsiness, uttering a poisoned name. Her betrayed husband, his envied brother. She hurried on: “Polonius thinks you’re a marvellous king already.”

“He has personal reasons to believe and hope so. His good opinion has been already bought.”

By what?
Gertrude sleepily wondered. “He told me—a group of us, actually, gathered around—that you’ll take us back to the days of King Canute. Not the saint, the original one.”

“The one who couldn’t stop the tide from coming in.”

There was a dark sardonic undertow to his tone that tugged her awry. However bright the wedding torches, you marry a man’s shadow side, too. She explained, “The one who conquered all England and Norway.”

“And who, if I recall my history, made a pilgrimage to Rome to repent his many sins.”

“Is that what you want to do?” she asked shyly. The idea of such a harsh pilgrimage seemed remote, cozy as she was. In bed with Claudius she felt as she had when a girl, on a freezing winter night, laid in her cot in a tumble of furs, that tingled and tickled and were tucked tight around her, so her body revelled in a warmth stolen from these other creatures. Marlgar, huddled in a hooded cloak, would sit a while silently with her, and the stars through her paneless window would shine as bright as
icicle tips glinting in the morning sun. She wondered if, the way they had begun in sin, her husband saw her as tainted. The brothers shared this somber Jutland religious streak, that refused to accept the world at face value, as a pure miracle daily renewed.

“Not yet,” Claudius said. “Not until Denmark is in perfect order. And I will take you with me, to see holy Rome and those other sun-soaked congeries beyond the Alps.”

He turned his back, and seemed minded at last to sleep, now that he had stirred her up. She resented it. He was making her into Marlgar, awake while he drifted off. She said, “I saw you talking to Hamlet.”

“Yes. He was amiable enough. My rusty phrases of German amused him. I don’t understand why you are afraid of him.”

“I do not think you can charm him.”

“Why not, my love?”

“He is too charmed by himself. He has no need for you or me.”

“This is your own son you are speaking of.”

“I am his mother, yes. I know him. He is cold. You are not, Claudius. You are warm, like me. You crave action. You want to live, to seize the day. To my son, everything is mockery, a show. He is the only man in his universe. If there are other people with feelings, then that just makes the show more lively, he might concede. Even I, who love him as a mother cannot help doing, from that moment when they place the cause of your pain in your arms, this newborn wailing and whimpering in memory
of your joint ordeal—even me he views disdainfully, as evidence of his natural origins, and proof that his father succumbed to concupiscence.”

Claudius’s voice became sharp: “Yet in my dispassionate estimation he appears witty, large-minded and many-sided, remarkably alert to everything around him, engaging to those worthy of being engaged, excellently educated in all a gentleman’s arts, and handsome, most women would surely agree, though the new beard makes perhaps a hostile impression, concealing more than it enhances.”

Gertrude said gropingly, “Hamlet
wants
to feel, I believe, and to be an actor on a stage outside his teeming head, but cannot as yet. In Wittenberg, where the mass are frivolous students, jesting in the foyer of real affairs, his lack—even madness of a sort, the madness of detachment—is not revealed; he should be a student forever. Here, amid earnest interests, he is challenged, and turns all to words and scorn. My hope is that love will lend him the right gravity. The fair Ophelia could not be bettered in her sweetness, her delicacy of apprehension. Your brother thought her too frail to serve his line, but she grows womanly, and Hamlet’s interest grows apace.”

“Very well,” Claudius said, sated with wifely wisdom, and quite ready now to let this grand day go. “But your analysis brings with it another reason why he must not escape to Wittenberg. True attachment must build on increments, as you and I well remember.”

She broke the silence his own had pointedly suggested. “My lord?”

“Yes, my queen? It is late. A king needs to greet the sun as an equal.”

“Do you feel guilty?”

She felt his body stiffen, his breathing skip a breath. “Guilty concerning what?”

“Why, what else?—guilty concerning our, our coming together while … Hamlet was my husband.”

Claudius snorted and hugged tighter his accumulating nugget of fatigue, making their featherbed emphatically heave. “The old Norse rule is, what you cannot hold is not yours. I took from him a property he didn’t know he owned—territory he had never plowed. You were a virgin to unbridled love.”

And, though she felt this as not entirely true, it was true enough to rest on, and they fell asleep in unison.

The Queen, some weeks after her wedding, summoned Ophelia to visit her in her closet, once King Roderick’s new oriel room. The daughter of Polonius and his mourned Magrit had become in her eighteen years a luminous beauty, shy yet lithe, her skin pale and flawless, her waist willowy, her bosom high, her hips wide enough to declare her a vessel of nurture. She wore a blue mantle, a chaplet of gold braid, and a flowing gauzy gown almost indecent in its transparency. She carried herself with her chest lifted as if by a sharp, startled gasp, conveying an expectancy touchingly mingled with something wary and fragile. Gertrude looked upon her seeking her own young self, and saw that Ophelia’s cheeks lacked a shade of rosiness and that her hair, brushed back from a glossy brow more ideally high than Gertrude’s had ever been, was a bit thin and lacking in body; it did not spring
up from her temples but lay docilely flat, held in place by the braided gold cord. Her face in profile was as cleanly stamped as a coin, yet frontally showed a certain vagueness, a tendency to direct her wide blue eyes a little off to the side. Her teeth, Gertrude noted not without envy, were perfect pearls, perfectly spaced. They were given an almost infantile roundness by her low, palely pink gums, and tilted very slightly inward, so her smile imparted a glimmering impression of coyness, with even something light-heartedly wanton about it.

Gertrude waved her toward the same bare-bottomed, three-legged chair that Polonius had occupied in their sessions of counsel. “My dear,” she began. “How fares it with you? We women are so few at Elsinore, we owe each other the comfort of a tête-à-tête.”

“Your Majesty flatters me. I feel still a child in this court, though attentions that lately come my way would call me out from my hiding corner.” The girl had a lovely upper lip, turned both inward and outward like a plucked rose petal, slightly crumpled by its infusion of sweet plumpness, and it was fetching, Gertrude thought, the way it rested tentatively closed on the lower, leaving an open triangle through which her teeth dimly gleamed. Her nostrils were exquisitely narrow—Gertrude had always thought her own a little broad, her nose a trifle mannish and blunt.

“As women, we would not wish never to receive attentions, yet they can be alarming when they come.”

“Indeed, exactly, Your Majesty.” If Ophelia’s character had a flaw, it was an excess of docility with yet, as in a child, an implicit defiance and secrecy. Her eyes, far from
Gertrude’s gray-green, which could in passion darken like the Sund, reflected blank heavens in their pale blue.

“You need not call me ‘Majesty,’ nor can you quite call me ‘Mother,’ though I would like to serve you, in the absence of a mother, with kindness and advice. I, too, had a mother early dead, leaving me to make my way in a world of stone and men’s clamor.”

“Your Majesty has already shown me much kindness. As long as I can remember, you have been kind, and paid me notice, when few did.”

“My kindness now takes on a closer quality. I believe the attentions you speak of have been coming from my son.”

Ophelia’s cloudless eyes widened but did not surrender that unsettling off-centeredness, as if focused on things invisible. What had King Hamlet irascibly said?
Her brain holds a crack.
“Some of them,” she conceded, unsatisfactorily. “With Hamlet and Laertes both being home since your—since you and the new king—”

“Married, yes.”

“They have been much together, and I am sometimes included.”

“Dearest Ophelia, I fancy it is the other way around, that Hamlet, seeking
your
company, has found Laertes included perforce.”

“In truth, they have a boisterous fondness for one another, and much in common. They have both accustomed themselves to wider horizons, and chafe at our backward and insular ways.”

“I think, though you becomingly disclaim it, that you are being courted, and I am glad.”

“Glad, madame?”

“Why not, my child? ’Tis natural for you, and overdue for him.”

“My brother and my father both warn me, much more than once, against the dangers that beset virginity, and admonish me to know my price and guard my honor, which is theirs.”

Gertrude smiled and leaned forward toward the maiden, as if to feel on her face the radiated warmth of youth. “But you—you find it hard to value so-called honor so highly? It seems to us a man’s abstraction, for which they choose to preen and die, but which would debar us from the illuminations of love.”

She was not sure, for a space of silence, if she had been understood, but then Ophelia let go her held-breath erectitude, in the comfortless triangular chair, and confessed limpidly, “Prince Hamlet does sometimes press me very hard. He makes me giddy with his words, and is antic enough to sound mad. The next instant, we laugh together, and I cease to be bewildered.”

“He bewilders you?”

Ophelia blushed, lowering her gaze, and Gertrude was glad to see such proof of responsive blood. Had she been favored with a daughter, she would have loved her; she would have given her a guiding hand in the storms of feeling to which her sex was prone, and drawn her to her with no such struggle as a squirming son provides. Her mothering of Hamlet had been, Gertrude could not but feel, a failure, yet through this prospective wife she could touch him yet.

“At times,” Ophelia explained, “his compliments seem a mockery; they claim too much of me. He quotes poetry, and even writes some.”

“Claudius, too, resorts to verse,” Gertrude dared disclose. “Men have a nature more divided than ours. They go from muck to mountaintop in their minds, and take no middle ground. To justify the demands of their bodies they must exalt the object of those demands into a goddess, an unlikely sublime, or else treat her as a piece of muck. My son is imaginative, and from boyhood has been enthralled by the theatrical. If he plays the lover to the hilt, it does not mean he plays falsely.”

“So I have reasoned with myself. Hamlet has been my study since I was merely a set of eyes mounted on knobby stems. I was not yet ten when he turned twenty-one. He seemed to me, as to all observers, the epitome of a prince—exquisite in his dress, impeccable in form and command of language, an easy nobility in him to his fingertips. But now, in his pursuit of me, he will slip from good-natured flamboyance into near-disgust, as if a horror overtakes him in his wooing that turns his courteous effusions curt, and off he stalks without a God-be-wi’-ye. He is obscurely ornate and crudely frank in successive utterances, and makes no secret that he thinks my father lately a dotard, and ever a self-server.”

“What does he say of his uncle, my husband?”

“He keeps his opinion from me, madame.”

Gertrude doubted this—the rejoinder came too quickly—but pursued her main interest. How far had their wooing progressed? She scarcely recognized in
Ophelia’s dazzled portrait her aloof and sullen son, who to her eye had always had a bit of his father’s sallow puffiness. But it was proper to love’s success that Ophelia be half blind. “You say he seems to mock you?”

“Amid many shows of tenderness and customary protestation.”

Gertrude did not like the sound of “shows of tenderness.” Had Ophelia already yielded that which could not be bartered back? Had she had the womanly wit to set her lover some trials, enhancing her worth in his eyes? Or in her heated innocence had she given him her body’s ultimate pledge? There was something about this fey beauty in her gossamer dress that smelled not quite right, a touch polluted. She took Ophelia’s hand from the girl’s lap, where it had been flipping in undeclared disquiet. Gertrude was surprised at how moist the hand was, with a clammy damp.

“My child,” she blurted, “enjoy your young years, they ebb soon enough. Follow your heart and head both, if you can. If my son and his lofty ties and his vagrant moods give you more confusion than pleasure, do not persist with him to please either your father or your queen.”

“Oh, Papa is very definite that I must set a good value on myself; and yet I think the match would work to his advantage.”

“Your father is fall of years. He has had his advantages. Yours belong to you. Men,” Gertrude said, abandoning all strategy in a gush of sisterly feeling, “men are beautiful enemies we are set down among. Without female compliance, the world would not get on, and yet they distrust our compliance, seeing in it the seeds of disorder,
of random paternity. If we have been compliant with one man, they reason, we may be also with another. The wish to be agreeable we take in with our mothers’ milk, alas.” Gertrude felt her face warming but fought to keep a cool mien, knowing she was revealing more of herself than any woman but a mother should, and that only to her daughter.

Ophelia, however, was obsessed by her own condition and exclaimed, “Oh, I would want no one but Hamlet! I could never love another as I do him! If he deserted me, I would seek refuge in the convent, where life blows not so fierce.”