Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey

by Kathleen Rooney

  “Thank you for breakfast,” I say as she makes for the door. “Thank you for everything.”

  The coffee and eggs go down delectably, and I look around my furnished room, humble in the pearly light.

  Almost none of what remains in the space is mine, and none of it would I desire to own, save perhaps the dresser: bird’s-eye maple and nicer than any other item Mrs. Sullivan had scrounged up. Its drawers held the belongings of unknown lodgers preceding me and will hold those of my successors with the same impartiality. Atop the tiny swirls disrupting the smooth lines of the grain rests the last memento that I’ve allowed myself to keep, the only one that I’m taking with me: Marguerite’s calling card.

  She gave it to me the day we met, almost a decade ago, in that halcyon time before the war when people still used them. “Marguerite Babcock” in elegant script on card stock the pale beige of a Communion wafer.

  Early summer up the Hudson Valley. A garden party at Bayard’s parents’ mansion in Kinderhook, in honor of his engagement to Marguerite’s sister, Elsie. The flora and fauna were doing their best Garden of Eden impression: butterflies in the lilacs and stone fruits forming on the trees. Family and friends in weekend frocks and togs, looking as hand-tinted as a picture postcard. Yet in these outlandishly serene surroundings, I recognized in Marguerite the same watchful distance that I’d cultivated myself—a kind of superimposition, as if she were in the scene but not of it.

  When Elsie and Bayard introduced us and I took her extended hand in mine, I thought of my Williams College physical-science class: atoms bonding to form a molecule.

  “Would you care to go for a stroll around the grounds?” I asked, unafraid that Bayard or any of the other attendees would fear impropriety, as we’d remain in view of the group no matter how far we walked. Not to mention that, honestly, both he and Elsie would have been happy if Marguerite and I had turned out to be a love match. Both had worried in my presence about how unusual and solitary Marguerite was for a woman, how inexplicably devoted to her career.

  She was not a beauty, Bayard had warned me, like Elsie, a veritable Gibson Girl, with hourglass figure and corona of hair. As if I cared. No, he cautioned, Marguerite had a soft chin, weak eyes, thin arms, a flat figure.

  But there, in the supersaturated green of the garden, Marguerite looked lovely: kindred, sympathetic to the likes of me.

  “Somehow I don’t think you’re one of those mashers who’ll paw my knee on a bench as soon as we’re around the bend,” she said, a smile not quite visible at the corners of her thin lips.

  Disarmed by her forthrightness, I could only laugh and confirm reports of my confirmed bachelorhood.

  And I felt, as we walked, unaccountably that I could tell her anything, a sensation that I hadn’t had since Annie died. Because of that first day with Marguerite, I will forever associate the scent of dogwood blossoms with pungent candor.

  We paused at a gazebo to gaze back at the party. Men and women in pairs, celebrating the practice of pairing. “Do you ever wish that you could be like everyone else?” I asked, pulling a white flower from a branch. “That it could be easier?”

  “No,” she said, taking the flower and tucking it into the band of her hat. With the incisiveness that I would soon learn made her such a good advertising woman and would make her such a good friend, she added, “I like being the way I am. Don’t you?”

  No one before had ever asked me directly. I had never, in such terms, posed the question to myself.

  “I do,” I said, and realized I meant it.

  “There are plenty of people who do things the normal way,” she said, nodding at the patio of guests. “What’s the harm in not? Besides, motherhood seems like less than a bargain for the ladies.”

  As if to illustrate her point, one of the children on the patio dropped a chocolate ice cream down the front of her dress. Her mother rushed over to scold and comfort.

  “I look forward to being the outré aunt to Elsie and Bayard’s children,” she said. “And I know they plan to make you a godfather. We’ll likely be seeing more of each other.”

  “I’d like that very much,” I said. “In fact, I’d prefer to see you again before they have time to reproduce themselves.”

  “That can be arranged,” she said, smiling without reservation and handing me her card. “Find me when we’re back in the city.”

  “I promise,” I said.

  I stack the dishes on the tray, and put the letters in my suitcase, and figure that I might as well be on my way.

  I place my key on the bedspread and leave the door unlocked. I imagine Mrs. Sullivan keeps a spare key, but I’ve never asked, and I can’t now, and I don’t want to oblige her to break it down or pay for a locksmith. Grateful not to run into any of my fellow lodgers on the stairs, I depart without saying anything further to anybody.

  Rain taps the awnings and slicks the pavement, but I’m going to walk. Heading to lower Manhattan, I imagine it will be almost as though I’m going to work, though it’s a Saturday.

  The Toloa departs for Cuba from Pier 16, where all the United Fruit steamships dock. I’ve walked by countless times on breaks from my law office, admiring the blinding sun on the spotless hulls and its reflections on the tan faces of the sailors. United Fruit paints all its reefers pure white—to ward off the banana-spoiling solar heat—and each ship looms from its berth like a New England church, promising cool relief, conveyance to the next world.

  The letter I’ve written to Bayard feels heaviest in my suitcase: “Just a note to say good-bye. I’m a misfit by nature and by training, and there’s an end of it.”

  My one-way ticket sits in my breast pocket, a lucky charm.

  CHAPTER 3

  CHER AMI

  The desire to be something other than what one is is a cruel affliction, and I am finally cured.

  I no longer wish that I could be a human. But when I was young, growing up in the Cotswolds, humans seemed to me the most admirable creatures.

  This was because the first human I knew was John. He was an exceptional man of the kind whom I had the good fortune to meet several times over the course of my relatively short life. By that I mean: this fellow was mad for pigeons.

  Here in the Smithsonian, I’ve gathered that our reputation as a species is not as sterling as it used to be. I overhear snide comments about “rats with wings.” Although I’m no fan of rats—no one who served in the trenches is—I hesitate to take offense at ignorant remarks like these. Rats, too, have stronger character and more admirable habits than humans tend to credit.

  In life I preened. I kept clean. We pigeons carry disease no more readily than any other being. When I hear patrons outside my glass case say hateful things, I wish I could remind them of our intertwined history.

  “It’s in their Bible,” I’ve said to Sergeant Stubby—often enough that he’s probably weary of hearing it, although being a dog he’s too kind to say as much. “Noah sent a raven to find dry land, but the raven failed him and didn’t return. Then he sent a dove, who did come back after finding only water. When Noah sent the dove out again, she found dry earth, and instead of staying put she returned to the Ark with an olive branch. As dogs are loyal, pigeons are trustworthy.”

  John understood that about us, and more. He got as much from caring for us as we got from his care. With us in the dovecote off the barn, he felt safe in a feather-lined pocket of time. He loved all the earthbound animals on Wright Farm, too, the ducks and the sheep and the horses and especially the dogs. But though he fed them tidbits and taught them to shake with their paws, he preferred the rugged claws and craggy feet of us pigeons, the rootlike way we tendriled our toes around his finger perch.

  I was born into a family of achievers. Monogamous like all pigeons and quick to breed, my parents had been together for four years by the time I arrived in 1916 and had raised many babies, always two at once, as
was the clockwork case with my twin sister and me.

  Our father, Big Tom, kept our two eggs warm for eighteen days, never missing a turn. Our mother, Lady Jane, did the same for eighteen nights. Dad was handsome, a red cock with copper feathers, famous throughout our county for his record race times. Mum was a silvery hen with black-and-white checkered wings, elegant and regal as her name suggested, known for her ability to traverse prodigious distances without getting tired.

  Farmer and Mrs. Wright granted John full authority over bestowing our names. He wasn’t what you’d call an educated man, but as an autodidact who read in the evenings when his chores were complete, he took the responsibility seriously. Sometimes he aspired to timeless simplicity, hence my older siblings Twilight and Dawn. Others he went literary, hence my brother Thomas Hardy, or theatrical, hence my sister Sarah Bernhardt. He christened us, too, according to personality traits, hence our friend Sweet Sam, or in line with some aspiration he had for us: racing homers all. John was avid in competition, and therefore a bird born a few weeks before my sister and me he called Fast Time.

  John’s only son was fighting in the Great War when my sister and I hatched, and so he named me Cher Ami, thinking of his boy in France—and thinking me, mistakenly, a boy; else I’d be Chère Amie. Unsure how to feel about this error, I was annoyed at being misperceived, but mostly I was reminded that sex is a much bigger to-do for humans than it is for us pigeons. Unlike a lot of birds, whose males and females look like different species—peek at a peacock next to a peahen—it’s not something we pigeons tend to fret about until humans insist.

  My sister received the appellation Miss America to express his wish, shared by many of his countrymen, that that nation across the pond would join in the bloodshed and end the attrition.

  During those first few days in the snug, soft loft, John saw to it that Big Tom and Lady Jane had every comfort they required to raise Miss America and me. The two of them kept the two of us warm with their bodies’ downy expanses and took turns feeding us pigeon milk: our mother by night and our father by day.

  The fact that birds can produce milk surprises most humans and their mammalian cousins, who assume themselves to hold a monopoly on lactation. I should clarify that pigeon milk, rather more solid than liquid, is secreted by our crops, the elastic pouches below our throats where we store our meals. By contrast to the glands that give mammals their name—and that serve as a sign of sexual difference from which, I gather, many complications follow—the crops of both mother and father pigeon produce milk, and both parents equally share the task of feeding.

  I should note, too, that most birds do not produce crop milk. Doing so is one of the defining characteristics of pigeons and doves—one of several, I have often thought, that place us in a peculiar middle ground between the avian kingdom and that of our furry, suckling friends.

  Six days after my sister and I broke through the shells of our eggs, pure white and not much bigger than those of a robin, we opened our eyes to see our parents and our flock of dovecote-mates. These were not the plump, strutting park pigeons who coo through public squares and splash in fountains; no, John bred his racing homers to be slender and wiry, alert and faster than some of the express trains we’d see speeding through the countryside during our practice flights.

  With his leathery hands and raspy voice, John devoted himself to the notion that the mental attitude of us, his birds, was the key that would unlock our promise in both racing and showing. He handled each of us each day and spoke to us constantly, his theory being that a creature will have no fear of accustomed things.

  “In the showroom,” he said, paraphrasing a book he’d been reading, “the pigeon meets coops handling, the judge’s stick, and crowds for the first time. A frightened bird loses poise and type and does not show well.”

  He spoke of the showroom most in relation to my sister. Miss America was red, with wings in a lacy, cream-colored stencil, and she possessed the dainty mien of a ballerina. “I am a very original type,” she told me, echoing John’s refrain and tilting her head to show her profile like a queen on a coin.

  I, on the other hand, was the spitting image of my mother, Lady Jane, said John, though she was silvery and I was blue. “Don’t feel jealous of your sister, Cher Ami.” I hadn’t been, but I appreciated his concern for my state of mind. “Blue’s the most common color of domestic pigeons, because blue is the color of your wild ancestor, Columba livia, the rock dove.”

  I bobbed my head in assent, and he laughed and stroked my slate-blue back.

  “I been told that that Latin translates loosely as ‘a leaden-colored bird that bobs its head,’” he said, “and you are shaping up to be a textbook picture of racing perfection.”

  He went about putting out our oats and hemp, our dried peas and lentils, keeping up his running conversation. John fed us twice a day, not throwing the food in, as he did for the chickens, but sitting in our pen and allowing us to peck from his hand, then filling the pans and cups as well, rarely scattering the grains on the floor, being a tidy man. He changed our water for drinking and bathing, then swept the floors and checked our nests. He liked to experiment with nesting materials, and while we usually had hay, he’d leave us longleaf pine needles, oat straw and wheat straw, alfalfa and twigs, and even excelsior, sawdust, and burlap bags.

  “You and Miss America are squabs no longer,” he said, making sure our feed troughs were clean. “You’re a couple of squeakers, going on youngsters. Soon it’ll be time to start our training.”

  * * *

  • • •

  The day I first flew home was the day I knew the meaning of true purpose.

  John carried us to a spot he’d chosen about a mile from our dovecote, nestled in the rolling green hills outside Chipping Norton. A “liberation point,” he called it, using the parlance of pigeon racers: a term that refers to our liberation from the basket in which he’d transported us.

  My own feelings about the term—and liberty in general—are complicated.

  On the one hand, the feeling of emerging from enclosure, of launching away from the inert ground, of negotiating with the air’s invisible thickness to resist and exploit the tug of gravity, amounts to an ecstatic release that I pity terrestrial beings for never knowing. Humans, fond of lists and categories, regard themselves as possessing five senses; pigeons have at least seven, some of which language does not name. Those that we share with you—sight, smell, touch—are so refined in us as to be barely analogous to yours. But the senses of pigeons are truly awakened only when we are in flight: from a thousand feet up, our side-set eyes take in the full vastness of the landscape along with its finest detail, our nostrils sort and source a panoply of odors, our feathers parse intricate patterns of breeze and gust, and still other perceptions map our position precisely above the turning earth. I do not remember my sightless escape from my eggshell; therefore I think of that first flight home—bursting skyward into an overwhelming wealth of sensation—as my true birth.

  But I do not think of it as a point of liberation. Because while it was the moment when I first became aware of my extraordinary capabilities for navigation and travel, my awakening was accompanied not by an impulse to wander and explore but by an intense and all-consuming drive to return to the Wright Farm dovecote by the best possible route. Do not think that this homeward drive of ours is fearful, lit by a desire to retreat to the safety of confinement. Rather, we seize upon these pathways with the same ruthless zeal shown by lions as they pounce upon gazelles. Our need to fly home pushes through all other concerns—including self-preservation, thus our usefulness on the battlefield. It’s braided into the fibers of our muscles and the barbules of our feathers. It gives us our purpose, and therefore our power.

  It does not, however, make us free.

  Although John released Miss America and me simultaneously on that first flight, I outpaced my sister—rocketing high, noting my positio
n relative to sun and hills, decoding from the chaos of wind the familiar smells of the Wrights’ sheep and our own excrement-bedecked dovecote—and I beat her back to the loft, where I bragged to my parents with no small amount of conceit.

  “I don’t even know where Miss America is!” I said, flapping with excess energy, more exalted than tired. “I left her so far behind.”

  “You’re a speedy one, as your father and I suspected you’d be, Cher Ami,” said Mum, giving me a kiss on the top of my head. “Now, drink some water—not too much—and wait for your sister. The time has come for us to tell you something.”

  When Miss America returned, happy and panting, Dad and Mum took us out to the flypen, beneath the blue sky and the shining sun. John, who liked to smoke his pipe strolling home over the meadows, would take a while to make it back and confirm our arrival.

  “Now, listen, you two,” our mother began. “It’s time you understood something about birds and humans. We pigeons of John’s are fortunate. We are his companions, and he has for us grand plans. But born on any other farm, you could just as easily have ended up meat.”

  Miss America and I cocked our heads, less horrified than perplexed.

  “Nowadays it’s mostly chickens, and sometimes ducks and geese,” our father said, “but humans once ate all sorts of birds. Did you see the waterfowl in the pond as you were flying?”

  Miss America and I nodded. Our parents must have delivered a version of this speech to our siblings, too, careful and rehearsed.

  “Those were their food once,” he said. “Swan and stork, crane and heron, peacock and bustard. But pigeons, particularly squab”—and here he gestured at the Wrights’ milk cow, velvety and limpid, munching grass in her pasture—“were thought to be the most delicious. Veal from the clouds.”

  Next to me Miss America quivered. Humans ate lots of other animals, too, I knew, but it didn’t seem real to me, the idea of being harmed by a human. It wouldn’t until I got to the war.