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Michael Dahlie

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Sparrow Hal l

Alice Stockten inherited her family’s hunting lodge from her father when she was sixteen, after he died in a boating acci-dent near Seal Harbor, Maine. The lodge was called Sparrow

Hall, and it had fourteen bedrooms, each of which was occupied by one of our group, after we left our families and embarked on an adventure that many, I suppose, would consider entirely foolish given how young we were.

It started one evening at dinner, before the fireplace in Sparrow Hall’s mahogany-paneled dining room, not long after Alice had inherited the lodge. Henry Price had given a short reading from Fichte’s The Vocation of Man, and after he took his seat, a girl among us (Abigail Stewart) stood up and described a dream she’d had the night before, in which we were living in a large wooden house, on a distant rocky coast, with seven babies that we were all raising together.

It was a moving description, but only later that night, when we were gathered before another fire, now in Sparrow Hall’s so-called Zeitver-treibhalle, another among us, Elizabeth Holloway, suggested that perhaps we ought to regard Abigail’s dream as something more than a nighttime fantasy, and that it might be a great thing if each of us seven women bore a child at the same time and we all raised them as a single family. By the end of the night, after hours of lounging before the fire and snacking on blue-berries, salted plums, and milk cake, we decided that we would, in fact, see that Abigail Stewart’s dream was realized. We all declared emancipation the next week and subsequently left our schools, and soon we were liv-ing together in Sparrow Hall, enjoying our new freedom with even more enthusiasm than any of us had expected.

It took some time for the girls among us to become pregnant, although not more than four months. During this period, however, a tragic event occurred and dampened our spirits quite a bit. One of our group, John Sommerville, died in his grandfather’s sawmill as he was straddling a joist, trying to fix a dis-abled tyre-motor. He reached forward, thinking a cable that he was gripping would hold his weight, but the cable had rusted where it was joined to the ceil-ing, and John tumbled over, falling nearly forty feet before breaking his neck on the cement below.

We were all pregnant by the day of John’s funeral, and since that day we have always regarded him as one of the seven fathers of our children.

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The Midwife

W ere a sociologist or anthropologist to have examined our lives, he would have determined that we lived in a state that was entirely communal, and by the time we were all

pregnant, it was completely possible that each of the seven males among us was a father—just as it was possible (although unlikely) that one was a father seven times. We decided that we would hold on to this mystery and would never try to uncover the origins of our children, and we young women even promised that we would regard each of the children as our own after we had given birth.

But our communal life was far from self-sufficient, and by the end of the first month of our pregnancies, we concluded that we needed a midwife. After careful research, we contacted a woman from Leominster, Ontario, who had written several books on raising children within large groups of people. The question was how to pay her to come and stay with us.

At this time, one of us, William Kellerman, left Sparrow Hall to visit his parents in northern Michigan, where his family owned and managed nearly forty thousand acres of profitable timberland, as well as a string of now nearly depleted iron mines. William’s father did nothing but supervise his busi-nesses, and his mother did nothing but drink, and during his five-day stay, William packed up nearly four hundred thousand dollars’ worth of antiques, all collected by his now-dead great-grandmother, a Boston socialite who had faced up to her wealthy solitude in the American provinces by touring the capitals of Eastern Europe and buying works of decorative art. We quickly sold much of what William sent us and offered the midwife from Canada eighty thousand dollars to come stay with us during our pregnancies.

The midwife, named Helen, stayed with us for the next two months, during which time she not only supervised our health but also taught us all that she could of her craft. We were eager to learn what we could, and, since there was talk of having more children after the ones we were bear-ing came to term, we paid great attention to what she said. Helen, how-ever, was driven by a strange and generalized kind of mania, and she fell

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in love with another of our members, a boy named James Casterton. And after he refused her advances, made repeatedly over the course of three weeks, she at last became so enraged that she stabbed him to death with a Stevenson British Grenadiers bayonet (attached to a Kremling .32 gauge

rifle), which she found hanging on a wall in Sparrow Hall. She fled immediately after-wards, and during the next two days we discussed with great seriousness (and with great sorrow) how to proceed, not wanting to involve outside authorities. But near the end of the second day of our deliberations, Helen’s body was discovered while one of

us, Antonia Geneseo, was bathing just four feet from the shore of Sparrow Lake. When we pulled Helen’s body from the water we noticed with some horror that her hands were clutching a large bronze figurine (one from the collection of William’s great-grandmother), which she had tied to her neck in order to weigh herself down.

We buried James on a bluff in the midst of a small stand of poplar trees that overlooked Sparrow Lake, and, after some discussion (and with hon-est reverence), we rowed Helen’s body to the middle of the lake. It was still attached to the bronze figurine, although we secured it with a heavy chain to give it more weight, and after a few moments of silence, we slid her body overboard, honoring what were, after all, her final wishes.

.

The Mant lewright

All of us played musical instruments, and while James had been the most gifted and played the violin, I was next in line (I’m sure this is what most of us would have said), and, since I played

the viola, after James’s death I began playing at the highest registers in our evening concerts.

She at last became so enraged that she stabbed him to death with a Stevenson British Grenadiers bayonet.

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123The Children of Strømsund

We played every evening on Sparrow Hall’s south lawn, in a rose garden tended by Angela Smith and Christopher Henryson—the son of the chief horticulturalist of the Portland Botanical Gardens—and that summer we worked through several pieces by Haydn and Schumann. I missed some of our musical events, however, because I was still close with my family, with my father, and I used to drive Sparrow Hall’s ancient Packard to the city once a week to visit him, especially since I was now pregnant and it seemed important for him to see me.

My father was a mantlewright at the shipyards in Portland, and he raised me alone after my mother died from a sudden pancreatitis. He loved me very much, but hardly noticed that I had left home, and when I returned to see him every week, we ate elaborate dinners together and he told me the various stories he always told me about the other men he worked with at the shipyard. And when he went to bed, I returned to Sparrow Hall once I was sure he was asleep, driving the Packard from the city back to our house.

One night, however, this routine led to something of a tragedy. My father was a fanatical preserver and canner of food, and after dinner one evening, in early August, I returned to Sparrow Hall with several jars of various jams and preserves, including a jar of mincemeat made from veal sweetbreads, a thing my father loved.

I went to bed soon afterwards, but people were still awake when I went upstairs, and three of the boys, Henry Price, William Kellerman, and Law-rence Barnes, were recounting the story of how they had felled a large elm that was dead and had rotted and was in danger of falling on the house. They were exhausted but still quite awake, and, apparently, after I had gone to bed, they made themselves an enormous dinner, which included the sweetbread mincemeat spread on halves of fresh semolina biscuits made by Alice and Paulette.

The sweetbreads, however, had become contaminated (almost certainly during their storage in my father’s dusty and cluttered pantry) and by the next morning Henry, William, and Lawrence were lost to a deep and ter-rifying fever.

We called a doctor who had at one time been the pediatrician of Henry Price, but by the time he arrived, the boys had crept very close to death. It was botulism (“maybe”) the doctor said, although he couldn’t be sure, and he said that they needed formal and well-trained care at the hospital imme-diately. By the time we had gathered everyone together, however, and the

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doctor had even laid out a blanket on the back seat of his own car, the boys had died, leaving us, obviously, with little to do other than thank the doc-tor (through all our tears) and commence with preparations for their burial.

Needless to say, the rest of the summer passed differently, and as a way to honor our lost comrades, we abandoned Haydn and Schumann and instead spent every evening in the rose garden playing works by Schubert (Lawrence’s favorite composer, in fact). They never quite matched up to what we had played earlier. We were now lacking a French horn, an oboe, and a flute. Still, we all played with great emotion, which seemed to make up for the instruments of our now three missing friends.

Strømsund

Johannes Bakken grew up in Århus and spent his summers on an ancient estate on the Jutland Peninsula called Strømsund, over-looking the coastline near Torsminde, and he frequently talked at

Sparrow Hall about the strange similarities of the landscape to that of Maine’s, adding that he was determined that we would all, one day, visit his home together. We knew many of his stories by heart—he told them often—although by the sixth month of our pregnancies, something hap-pened to change Johannes’s relationship with his home quite a bit.

Johannes’s entire family (all but him, that is) had gathered in Copenha-gen to see his cousin make her debut in the Royal Ballet. The performance was a great success and was written up in papers from Paris to Vienna, although this was in part because of the tragedy that followed later that evening. All thirty-eight members of Johannes’s family (besides Johannes, of course) gathered at a restaurant called Ledun, a place famous for its caviar and its champagne list. The family stayed long into the night, eating with great excitement and drinking over forty bottles of champagne from the houses of Tascher De Brunier and Kleffenmeyer, and, late in the eve-ning, with a kind of drunken enthusiasm, they ordered ten isles de flotant,

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another famous offering from Ledun. It was now late, however, and one of the staff (who had been working since five that morning) fell asleep in an adjacent room, knocking over a gilt Saubenhatt candelabra as he drifted off and, subsequently, starting a sudden and fast-moving fire. From the description of the two waiters that survived the blaze, it had been raging for several minutes before anyone was aware of it, and the Bakken family was well into their isles de flotant when it became clear that they were in grave danger. None of the family survived, and, via a short telegram sent from the family’s lawyer in Århus, Johannes discovered that he was left in the world without a single relation (except for the seven children that would soon be born) and now the master of an enormous fortune.

Johannes spent the next several days wandering the grounds of Sparrow Hall in great despair, but four days after the telegram arrived, he entered the dining room, where the rest of us were just sitting down to a dinner of tripe stew made with roasted apples, and said that he’d had something of a vision. He was not a superstitious boy, nor did he put much stock even in the vision-ary dreams of our members, but he was sure that we were all meant to travel together to Strømsund and establish our family there. He even pointed out that Abigail’s first dream was, quite specifically, about us all living on a dis-tant shore, and that staying at Sparrow Hall would somehow jeopardize the very center of the thing that we had all been working toward. We discussed this with great fervor as we ate our stew and afterwards before the fire in the Zeitvertreibhalle, and by morning we had decided that indeed we would make the journey to Strømsund to raise our children there.

The Journey to Denmark

Antonia Geneseo was unique among us in that she was not a legal citizen. And certain incidents in her life before she joined us at Sparrow Hall (she assured us, but without detail) would pre-

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vent her from ever becoming one. Thus the matter of obtaining a proper passport for her was out of the question. We hatched several plans to obtain a false set of identity papers for her, but we finally decided that it was simply too risky. We did, however, arrive at another idea which not

only solved the problem of a passport but also added something of a romantic edge to what, after all, was already an adven-ture: we decided to spend the remainder of William Kellerman’s money to buy a sailboat that could take us to Denmark.

Certainly a sailboat provided quite a few problems of its own, especially since we were all now well pregnant and could crew a large sailing vessel only with great difficulty. But because of the matter of refueling and the problems of customs and

docking laws, Paulette (who was by any measure a world-class sailor) con-vinced us that sailing was the only sensible path to our new lives, and that she could safely captain a crew of two boys and seven pregnant women across the Atlantic.

The boat we bought was called The Sornay, for reasons the broker couldn’t properly explain, and it was sold to us fully furnished and outfitted because, as the broker said, the sale had to be quick. Paulette negotiated with him in a closed office for nearly an hour, following a five-hour inspection no less, and when she came out of his office she said she’d gotten us a won-derful bargain. She did add, however, that the salesman had many troubling questions about what exactly so many young pregnant women were going to do with it.

We set out two nights later, bringing with us very little besides food, water, and our clothes, because Johannes assured us we could get every-thing we needed in Torsminde. The boat itself was also well equipped, and among the many things aboard there was a small bookcase that included a copy of Strindberg’s Master Olaf. Given the fact that we would be at sea for some time, we decided (or one of us, Christopher Henryson, insisted) that we should rehearse and then perform this play to pass the time.

We quickly set about assigning roles and learning our lines, swapping the book as we went, and practicing our parts as the boat moved through the water. Sadly, however, we never managed to complete our plans for

He broke the water just behind where the book

had fallen, but whether he reached it or not remains a mystery, because we never

saw Christopher or the edition of Master Olaf again.

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Master Olaf. One night we were all on deck, and one of us, Alice Stock-ten, was reading aloud from the play and giving her opinions about how a certain scene ought to be performed. But the seas were rough, and as she turned toward a light to see a line more clearly, a wave crashed against the bow and sent her tumbling forward. She managed to grab a railing to prevent herself from falling into the ocean, but as she did so the copy of the play fell from her hand and into the wave that had knocked her over.

It was, of course, just a copy, just one of thousands in print in the world, and we had our whole lives ahead of us to return to Strindberg. But at this point Christopher Henryson was so consumed with our project that he dove into the ocean to retrieve the book. He broke the water just behind where the book had fallen, but whether he reached it or not remains a mystery, because we never saw Christopher or the edition of Master Olaf again. All that night we circled the water where Christopher had entered, all led by Paulette, who was a magnificent captain under the circum-stances. But by the time dawn broke, now in an ocean that had grown, over the hours, frighteningly calm, there was still no sign of Christopher, or anything else, for miles and miles.

Seven Infants

T he births came quickly, once we arrived at Strømsund, and everything we learned from the midwife was useful. We deliv-ered all seven babies within a period of five weeks, and there

was only one complication—a breach birth that took some time to com-plete. But Paulette remembered how the midwife had taught us to turn the baby, and Alice, who was the mother of the breach, delivered quickly enough, given the circumstances.

And by the first day of winter we were all with our babies, roaming the grounds of Strømsund with the infants slung on our backs, perhaps

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as happy as we’d ever been. We’d purchased more copies of Master Olaf and completed our work with that, and Johannes went to Torsminde and bought musical instruments to replace the ones we’d left behind. Every evening we finished our day talking and playing music together in Strøm-sund’s main reception room, called the Glasværelse or, as Johannes trans-lated (somewhat floridly), the Crystal Room. The Crystal Room was so named because it featured a series of carved glass panels which depicted Gustavus Adolphus leading the charge at the battle of Trelleborg—the piece was, in fact, titled Conquest at Trelleborg. The heavy glass panels were carved by the great Dutch artisan Roger Haand, and each of the eight pan-els stood nine feet high and four feet wide and were set away from the wall, arranged at angles to one another for support. Aside from being one of the most remarkable works of art in an enormous house that was filled with remarkable objects, the panels also played a part in one final and unex-pected change in the life of our new family.

We were in the Crystal Room one evening listening to Angela play a series of newly-composed nocturnes on the room’s piano, an ancient ninety-seven-key Bösendorfer. Johannes had spent the day tuning the piano, and as he was listening to Angela play, he noticed that a rosewood slat had somehow come loose on the bottom, perhaps from when he had been working on it that afternoon. He quickly crawled beneath the piano with the intention of inspecting and possibly fixing the thin panel, when he bumped against a leg, causing it to shift from its base. It was a very strange moment, since it suddenly became clear to all of us, in that instant, with that bump, that this enormous piano was about to fall to the ground. But, to our great relief, Johannes too became quickly aware of his precari-ous situation, and just an instant before the piano collapsed—and it col-lapsed all at once, like a shattering vase, not like a foundering ship—he leaped forward, emerging from the booming crash of rosewood and piano wire entirely unscathed. But in Johannes’s haste, as he dashed forward (and because he turned back to see what had happened to his beloved Bösendorfer), he did not slow himself when he should have. Instead, eyes cast away, he charged forward, right into the center of Haand’s glass sculpture. He knocked the central panel from its stand, sending the two alongside it (and then the remaining five besides those) crashing violently to the ground, leaving poor Johannes beneath a glittering pile of rubble.

We all rushed forward to help him, but much the same way that the piano had fallen in a single instant, it was clear that Johannes had been

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killed in that split second, a large plane of carved glass (the plumed helmet, in fact, of a Swedish cavalry officer) having crushed and broken open his neck, leaving Johannes neither conscious nor breathing. In the madness of that moment, we still tried to revive him, and despite the fact that he was very clearly dead, we screamed his name over and over as Alice tilted his head to initiate a sort of resuscitation technique she knew. But Alice even-tually stopped, as did we all, because, at last, it was entirely evident that Johannes had been lost to us and there was no hope of bringing him back.

We buried Johannes in a grave we dug ourselves, two days later, on the property at Strømsund, in spite of warnings from the authorities that such a thing was not permitted. And following his burial, which lasted for over an hour because we hired a fairly orthodox Lutheran minister to perform the ceremony, we returned to the house to eat a traditional Danish funeral feast consisting of rabbits cooked with apples and lingonberries, a cold asparagus soup, and a salad of rhubarb and onions. We decided not to eat in the Crystal Room, where we had then been taking most of our meals, and ate, rather, in the formal dining room, which also had a name, although none of us was able to remember it now that Johannes was gone. It was a somber dinner—we had, at this point, lost seven of our original group—and that night we promised ourselves we would do what we could to pre-serve our family exactly as it now stood. But the fact was, now that half of the original group was gone (and although we would not know this for many years) the struggles of the adventure that we had begun over a year earlier really did come to an end on that night. In the years that followed, as our children grew and even built their own lives at Strømsund, there wasn’t a single day that we didn’t think of all that had happened over that year, and all the friends that we had lost. But not a day went by—not one, in the many years to come—that we were not also grateful that the course of our lives had brought us to the rocky shore that Abigail Stewart had first dreamed of that night in Sparrow Hall, when we were just starting out, as a family, just seven boys and seven girls, building our lives together.

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