Birds of America

by Mary McCarthy

  The admiral, known as “Reb” for rebel—his sobriquet at Annapolis—had a hammock and a telescope on his back porch, from which he viewed the stars. He knew the coast well—the many islands, islets, points, coves, harbors, inlets, salt marshes—and the shore and sea birds. He was a student of the hurricanes that came this way in the fall. Before he had had his heart attack, two years back, he had been vociferous at town meetings. Now he puttered about, smoking his pipe, doing crewelwork, helping his wife with her Gift Shop, slyly drinking snorts of whiskey, and making horrible curries. What pleased Peter in the admiral was that he resembled the element he had lived in—salty, shifty, protean, like the Old Man of the Sea. He was the only All-Year-Rounder whose former occupation you could guess after a short conversation. He had a small, mean mouth, a hoarse sea bird’s voice, and was reputed to be violent when drinking.

  The admiral boasted of being unwelcome at the beach club, which had only let him in, he said, because it was “traditional” to accept naval officers. The word tradition was often heard at Rocky Port cocktail parties, usually on the lips of a woman with blue hair or a fat man in Polynesian shorts. The village was protecting its traditions, Peter was repeatedly told, as though Rocky Port were a sanctuary of banded birds threatened with extirpation. He wondered what had been handed down to these people that they thought they were safeguarding—besides money. There was nothing distinctive about Rocky Port’s institutions or way of life, unless it was the frequency of gift shops selling “gourmet” foods, outsize pepper mills, “amusing” aprons and chef’s costumes, bar equipment, and frozen croissants, “just like in France.” “Taking in each other’s washing,” the admiral declared. Probably they deserved credit for maintaining their houses and keeping the streets swept. The fact remained that Rocky Port was a museum and, like all museums, Peter’s mother said, best when it was all-but-empty and you could hear your footfalls echo. They should never have come back in season.

  Still, there was one traditional event, everyone told them, that capped the summer and was unique to Rocky Port; you would not see anything like it at Watch Hill or Weekapaug or Saunderstown. This was the annual celebration of the Battle of Rocky Port, where the British had been defeated in the War of 1812. It was a two-day affair in which the whole community participated, man, woman, and child—a typical old-time New England jamboree. Normally, Peter would have gone to his father in mid-August, but his departure was postponed for the sake of this celebration, which the babbo, as an educator, could hardly deny him. It began the fifteenth of August with an Historic Houses and Gardens tour, under Garden Club auspices, that drew crowds from as far away as Providence. Next morning, there was a parade, led by the Portuguese Holy Ghost Club, which had a brass band; that afternoon, there was a fair on the village green for the benefit of the town churches and charities, with games, ponies, a cake sale, rummage, a sale of second-hand books, and stands of vegetables, flowers, and fruits.

  This was the sort of event his mother rose to. If the locals had had any sense, Peter thought, they would have put her on the program committee. She would have been happy to tell fortunes, look up old martial airs and arrange them for the band, contribute a button collection—cutting them off her own clothes, if necessary; she would have organized a needlework contest, made pinwheels, donated jars of pickles and jelly, helped sew costumes, put Peter to work painting mints with vegetable colors. It was a disappointment that she was only asked to bake a cake for the cake sale to benefit the Free Library. “Can’t I make a pot of beans for one of the other charities? And a freezer of ice cream?” she said to Mrs. Curtis, who had come to sign her up for the cake. “I’d love to, wouldn’t I, Peter?”

  “I know you would,” said Mrs. Curtis, patting his mother’s hand. “But it won’t be necessary, my dear.” The ice-cream concession, she explained, was given to a commercial company—the same people who handled the sale of Coca-Cola and hot dogs. “I don’t understand,” said Peter’s mother. “You can still use some home-made ice cream. Peach, I thought. And baked beans have become a sort of novelty. What are the other women making?” Mrs. Curtis looked sidewise at Peter; some bad news, he surmised, was going to be broken to his mother. “It’s like this, Rosamund. The company won’t sell hot dogs and ice cream for us unless they have the exclusive concession. Doesn’t pay them unless they handle all the refreshments. Our charities farm out the stands to them on a percentage basis.” “You mean that’s all? Commercial ice cream and hot dogs?”

  “And cakes to take home. That’s the way it is.” Mrs. Curtis turned to Peter. “I was afraid she was going to take it hard. It’s kind of a shock at first. Why, I remember the time when we used to have potato salads and chicken pot-pies and clam pies. Rice salad, lobster salad, macaroni salad. Yes, and baked beans and home-made ice cream. Peppermint was a great seller. Boston brown bread. Oatmeal bread. Date bread. Always a lot of baked goods. You can get women to bake when they won’t do anything else. Point of pride with them. Sex, I’ve always thought. Getting a rise out of the batter.”

  “How long has this been going on?” Peter’s mother interrupted. “Well, it’s quite some time now. Seems to me the Red Cross started it, with the store hot dogs. Somebody had a relative with Howard Johnson’s, it might have been. They came in with their stoves and their frankfurters and rolls and then they cleaned up after themselves. Saved a lot of trouble. The other organizations caught on—the Visiting Nurse and the Community Fund. Pretty soon we were all doing it. Sort of a trend. In the old days, people rushed around the first thing after the parade to get that one’s chicken pie or the other one’s lobster salad. Then when you ran out, the ones who came late were sore. Felt they’d been cheated. Old Mrs. Drysdale, up in the big house, used to send down a pot of bouillabaisse every year, made by her French chef. Always caused bad blood. This way, it’s more democratic. The Catholic Church was the last to fall into line. They had their own refreshment stand up till ’63. Oh, let me tell you, the priest cracked the whip over those women! A real Simon Legree, that one was. Preached against Adlai because he was a divorced man. And they followed him like sheep. It was ‘Mrs. Rodriguez, you’ll make your Parker House rolls,’ and ‘Mrs. Santos, you’ll make your Southern fried chicken’—no excuses accepted. But the Church couldn’t hold out forever, with the tide running the other way. Pope John, you know.”

  Peter and his mother eyed each other sadly. She cleared her throat. “What kind of cake should I make, Ellen?” “Whatever your heart desires, dear. Chocolate’s always safe. My husband used to like a marble cake. I guess I don’t have to tell you not to use a mix.” His mother brightened. “Is that a rule? How nice!” “We have the Catholics to thank for it,” Mrs. Curtis said. “ ‘Nix on Mixes,’ Father Cassidy—that’s the new one—told the women, right from the pulpit. Threatened them with the confessional. Those priests like to eat.” “Are the Papists running the fair?” Peter wanted to know. “If they won’t use mixes,” said Mrs. Curtis, “we’ve got to keep in line with them. We don’t want them to sell their cakes ahead of ours, do we?”

  “Why just cakes?” said Peter. “Why not pies? You ought to diversify.” “A good pie is hard to make,” said Mrs. Curtis. “They say it’s a lost art.” “You can’t even buy pastry flour in the grocery store,” put in Peter’s mother. “Can’t you?” said Mrs. Curtis absently. “Well, times change. There’s talk every year of cutting out the cake sale, as more trouble than it’s worth. A lot would give the money and more not to have the oven on in this hot weather. But the majority clings to it. We get people coming every year just for the cake sale. It’s traditional.”

  “ ‘Let them eat cake,’ ” said Peter. He tried to imagine the contented masses on the village green. “What games do they have?” “Well, we used to have archery. Broad jump. Potato races. Weight-lifting. But now it’s pretty standardized. Mostly throwing rings over the necks of Coca-Cola bottles at ten cents a throw. You win one of those dolls. That’s all a concession too. The men come from the outs
ide and give us a cut of what they make. Times past, there was one that brought a shooting-gallery, with ducks. But it comes to the same thing if you just throw rings at bottles.”

  When Mrs. Curtis had gone, Peter’s mother said that the fair sounded rather commercialized. Perhaps they had better not expect too much of it. He was too old to ride a pony and if he wanted a hot dog he could go to the diner. She did hope he would enjoy the parade and the Historic Houses and Gardens tour. Or would he rather skip the whole thing and go, as originally planned, to his father on the Cape?

  The offer went to his heart. He could not accept it. If he walked out on Rocky Port now, he would be walking out on her and her foundering values. Even if his presence embarrassed her, he had to go down with the ship.

  She knew that old houses did not greatly interest him, that he disliked crowds and would probably feel self-conscious standing in line to view flower-arrangements done by Garden Club ladies, although he liked her flowers and botany and had giant plants crawling around his college room. But he knew how much she was looking forward to the garden tour, having been deprived of a garden herself this summer. The yard in back of their house was all flagged, with no place for flower beds—only for garden furniture and a “service area” containing garbage cans. Less maintenance, the landlady stated, and it made a nice setting for cocktails. All summer his mother had been picking wild flowers for their parlor in the woods and marshes, and Peter could understand her enthusiasm at the prospect of seeing what she called “real” flowers growing in beds and borders. Remembering the acres of armor and miles of mummies she had traversed with him when he was little, he made a resolution not to be bored; it was no good resolving not to act bored, as he had learned in Italy.

  Those old New England gardens could be marvelous, she told him, especially in seaports. You discovered rare plants and shrubs that ships’ captains had brought home from the Orient. Flowers that were in Shakespeare and Keats and that must have traveled from England in the form of roots, slips, bulbs, and cuttings, with the early settlers. Old-fashioned roses. White double narcissus and poppies that bloomed every year on Memorial Day. Spice-bush, lemon lilies, a kind of Persian lilac that smelled of Necco Wafers. A plant called Beauty Bush and one called Sensitive Plant that winced when you touched it. Old ladies’ flowers like heliotrope and verbena and pinks. Hollyhocks, self-seeded, against white picket fences. A great deal of honeysuckle, privet, and box. Sundials, arbors, trellises, an occasional gazebo. Dogs’ gravestones. It was a pity that the tour was so late in the season; most of the perennials, except phlox, would be finished. But the annuals ought to be particularly brilliant. Something in the sea air or light brought out the colors of zinnias and pale lemon African marigolds. She only hoped there would not be too many dahlias.

  On the morning of the great day, she was up early, wearing a pink linen dress. She told Peter to put on his seersucker suit and shine his shoes. At nine, the sky clouded over. A few drops of rain fell. The mailman reassured her. “Radio says fair. Paper says fair. That rain don’t mean a thing. It’s just the weather.” At eleven, in fact, it stopped raining. His mother put on a large straw hat, and they took their places in line, outside the first house on the tour. Their landlady, who was an officer of the Garden Club, was selling tickets. “I’m going to speak,” whispered Peter’s mother. “Lovely day, after all, Mrs. Hills,” she said pleasantly. The landlady sold them two tickets, which would also entitle them to tea later in the day. “Did you lock up after you?” she said curtly, making change. “I never lock up,” said Peter’s mother. “Well, I’m warning you. Strangers in town.” “But a stranger is just someone you don’t know, Mrs. Hills,” his mother said, in a friendly tone. “And don’t want to,” retorted the landlady, handing her a program. “You get another element these days. Riffraff from the towns. Only come to rubberneck. Never known what it is to own beautiful things and take care of them.” “My son can go home and lock up, if you’re really concerned,” said his mother, who was evidently determined not to spoil the day by a dispute.

  When he returned, his mother was studying the program, printed in red and blue type on thick white paper and decorated with an American flag rippling in the breeze. “A Stroll into the Past” was the title. Peter counted the stars in the flag; there were sixteen, which he supposed was historically justified—his father would know. On the back of the program was a little map of the village; each “open” house had a number. Peter scrutinized it. In their old neighborhood, he noted some small letters: a, b, and c. “Portugee gardens,” he heard Mrs. Hills explain to a pair of out-of-towners. “Houses aren’t shown.” She pointed to the bottom of the program, where there was a section headed “Gardens Open.” They belonged to a Mr. Antone Silvia, a Mrs. Rose Santos, and a Mrs. Mary Lacerda.

  He and his mother began the tour with “a typical sea-captain’s house of an early time.” Two hostesses were directing traffic through the small, rather dark rooms. Visitors dressed in their best clothes jostled each other to stare at highboys, lowboys, duck-footed tables, carpets, china cabinets, silver, pewter, ancestral portraits, faded family photographs, keepsakes, which were exciting more curiosity than the flower-arrangements tagged with red and blue ribbons and the architectural features described in the program. “Please don’t touch!” a voice rapped out from time to time, as someone fingered the china or looked for the hallmark on the silver. Peter was surprised by the number of middle-aged men in the throng. It was hot, and there was a strong smell of furniture polish, overlaying a slight moldy smell of old upholstery. Someone had forgotten to take down the Christmas mistletoe in the parlor doorway. “Tacky,” was his mother’s verdict. While she lined up to look at the flower-arrangements, he tried to take an interest in the books on the library shelves. The most recent acquisitions he could find were Winston Churchill’s war memoirs and Peyton Place. His mother beckoned. “Let’s go.” In the garden, there was less congestion. They looked around. “Has there been a drought or something?” Peter wondered aloud. The only evidence of gardening he noted was a compost heap. “Ssh!” said his mother, peering at the program. “Come, let’s find ‘Aunt Mary Chase’s roses.’ It says here they were planted during the Civil War.” They followed a flagged walk that led, past some bushes, to a “service area.” They retraced their steps. His mother asked someone. “There!” A spindly rose with two faded blooms was leaning against a trellis. She swallowed her disappointment. “What a shame it’s so late in the season! Those old varieties of roses never do much after June. It looks as if these people”—she glanced again at the program—“had rather let their garden go. But in spring it must be lovely, don’t you think so, Peter? Look, they had peonies and lilies of the valley. And that must be iris.” “Where?” said Peter. She indicated some yellow foliage. “They ought to separate them,” she said absently. “Those are violets,” she went on, tapping a leaf with her foot. “Probably just ordinary wood violets. Oh, see the quinces!”

  “Come on, Mother.” He led the way out. They tried “a fine example of a prosperous shipowner’s dwelling.” Peter found Winston Churchill’s war memoirs, The Carpetbaggers, and the bound files of the National Geographic. “But there aren’t any flowers!” his mother whispered, in the garden. She exaggerated, but not greatly. It was the same all along the line. Here and there, shrubs and hardy perennials were still gamely blooming, survivors of another era, like Longfellow’s Poems, which they discovered propping up a small-paned window. Hydrangeas, phlox, funkia, yucca—his mother named them off. Lilac bushes, indestructible, stood in the dooryards, surrounded by suckers. You could infer from latticework where a rose arbor had been and make out designs faintly traced by a decimated box. Raised oblongs in the arid lawns, like graves, testified to former flower beds. “That must have been a strawberry patch!” his mother cried, pointing. She found some old yellow roses. But there was hardly an annual or a biennial to be seen, except in the yards of the Portuguese section, where zinnias and dahlias were growing in uncontrolled a
bundance, like the children of the poor. Elsewhere, as Peter commented, old Mother Nature seemed to have taken the pill.

  His own mother kept apologizing. “I’m sorry, Peter.” “Why? It’s not your fault” She cheered up slightly in Gardens a, b, and c, which were attached to two-story frame tenement dwellings. Mr. Antone Silvia had potted red geraniums and white ruffled petunias and transplanted ferns from the woods. Mrs. Santos had scattered seeds of every kind broadcast: cockscombs, zinnias, kitchen herbs, dahlias, cosmos, calendulas, marigolds, asters—a riot, remarked Peter, of bloom. Mrs. Lacerda had roses and dahlias. “The darling Portuguese!” they heard a young woman in tight turquoise pants exclaim to her companion in Mr. Silvia’s small neat grassy plot. “They have a green thumb but no taste. Don’t you love them? Red, white, and green—you can see Tony thinking out his colors. I always make a pilgrimage to Mrs. Lacerda’s funny garden, and she brings me a rose in her hot little hand. It was such a clever idea to have them in the Garden Club. We were afraid they’d notice the difference between their gardens and ours. Not at all, my dear. Totally unaware of it.”

  Peter’s mother’s laugh made the young woman jump. “Take it easy, Mother.” She had already drawn attention to them by a display of mirth back in one of the houses when he suggested that maybe the reason they did not see more flowers growing was that they had all been picked for the flower-arrangements. She seemed to want people to listen while she gaily read aloud from the program: “An arrangement of flowers and/or foliage in an old tea-caddy or canister.” “A doorstep arrangement of wild flowers and/or foliage in a stoneware container.” “An arrangement of roadside material featuring one or more seashells.” He did not see what was so funny, and neither did the rest of the auditory. “Well, come and look, Peter.” Then the light broke.