Simple Courage by Frank Delaney

Author:Frank Delaney
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781588365316
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2006-06-26T16:00:00+00:00

25.

THE REPORTERS FOUND AGNES CARLSEN EARLY IN THE SAGA. They called her “a slim, tense little woman” who was “waiting tensely for news of the man on the slanting ship.” She and the two girls had no protection from inquiries, because they continued to answer the phone in case Carlsen himself, with his ham radio ingenuity, called from the ship. However, things got to be too much, they all felt, when a French reporter telephoned and asked Sonia what they ate for breakfast and whether “the family dog was missing the captain.”

After a few days, they left their house in Woodbridge. Hans Isbrandtsen had them driven away, which lifted the siege of cars and cameramen on Alwat Street. According to the press reports, they had gone to “a secret destination.” Karen recollects, “My sister and I first went out to our friends’, Edith and Herman Hansen’s house, in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, to avoid the reporters. Unfortunately, they found us there. [The Hansens] were distant cousins of ours.” According to Sonia, their mother went to another friend in Metuchen.

After this, the Carlsens next went, according to Jakob Isbrandtsen, to the Margaret Hotel in Brooklyn—but were discovered too. H.I. finally brought them to his house and then, by means of a connecting passageway not visible to the public, they moved in with Isbrandtsen’s sister, who lived next door to him. There they stayed, undetected.

Until the early 1990s, Agnes continued to live in Woodbridge, where Carlsen had taken her some years earlier, when he had been advised by her doctors that she needed “a small house with a garden.” In the later reaches of her life, when she was almost eighty years old, she moved to Rochester Hills, Michigan, where her daughters, now Mrs. Fedak and Mrs. Mueller, lived within easy reach.

Agnes Sorensen, born in the middle of a family of nine children (all of whom she outlived), met Kurt Carlsen, one of five, in the west of Denmark. In the rural norm of the day, she ended her education when she finished primary school, in her early teens. Trained as a gymnast, she competed for her country against the other Scandinavian nations.

She then got a job as a governess and formal-dining-room maid for a prosperous meat-packing tycoon and his wife. They owned a house on the “Danish Riviera”—the country’s resort strip, a twenty-mile slice of Zealand’s coast north from Elsinore. Kurt had begun his merchant marine studies nearby, and a neighboring mansion owner had asked the sharp young naval student to keep an eye on his yacht.

The meat packer’s wife saw this winning and confident boy from Bagsvaerd village. She thought he already showed signs of remarkable character, and she embarked on a little matchmaking.

One day, while they were watching the yachts anchored just offshore, she drew Agnes’s attention to “that boy” as he handled some load or other, and told her to go and help him. Agnes, obedient to the letter, rowed out to the yacht. They had different dialects—with

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.