Birds of America

by Mary McCarthy

  All children, he guessed, were natural misers and sorcerers; the progeny of his new friends, the Bonfantes, were impressed and delighted by his dish-gardens when he invited them to tea in his apartment. He promised to start them some in their kitchen window from bits of carrots and the eyes of potatoes, and he entrusted them with a sprouting garlic clove, with instructions to keep it in their clothes-closet and gradually bring it out to the light; in the spring, it would have little white bell-like flowers—he did not see why garlic, though not specifically mentioned in How to Care etc., should not act like any other bulb. They wanted to know whether this was American, like the jack-o’-lantern he had made them at Halloween, and Peter said it was. He was the first live American boy Irène and Gianni had ever seen, and they asked him many questions, such as: was it true that Americans ate with their feet on the table? Their conception of America was a blend of Wild West and asphalt jungle, and they listened with doubtful wonder to the stories Peter told of white wooden houses, ponds, waterfalls, skating, clamming, ice-cream freezers, blueberries, corn-on-the-cob—one of his mother’s rules for telling stories to children, which she had learned as a child from her father, was always to put in something good to eat.

  If he was going to keep up his strength, he felt he had to keep in close touch with his other mother, Nature, while abroad, and, overcoming his shyness, he had asked the young woman at the Embassy in charge of student exchanges whether there was anything like a bird-watching group in Paris. To his surprise, when he returned she had the answer typed out on a sheet of paper: he could join a group called Les Jeunes Ornithologistes de France, which met alternate Sundays for field trips during the fall and winter at a Métro or railroad station. Last Sunday at 10:00 A.M., Peter had been on hand with his field glasses and the Guide des oiseaux de l’Europe at the meeting-place—a Métro station near the park of les Buttes-Chaumont, which was a part of Paris strange to him, beyond the Gare du Nord. He waited, studying the subway riders as they mounted the stone steps and trying to decide, from their markings and plumage, whether they could be young ornithologists. He was on the verge of speaking to a youth in a red hunter’s cap who was hanging about the entrance too until he bethought himself of flashing the bird book, spy-wise, as a signal—no reaction. When the group finally appeared, of course they were unmistakable because of their field glasses and hiking boots. Peter was disappointed that there were only five, all males; and all but one quite old; he had been hoping for a Papagena among them, but few girls, even at home, cared about watching birds.

  Nevertheless, he had enjoyed the morning, in the gray northern light of the park, which consisted mainly of steep bare rocks, the buttes it was named for, and was traversed by a cindery railroad track. Not a good place to see birds, he would have thought, except sparrows. It was a sparse, scrubby working-class park without amenities—only a little artificial lake, drained for the winter, and a non-functioning artificial waterfall. Yet he had ten new birds listed in his notebook when he boarded the Métro for home—one uncommon. It was his first experience of going on a bird walk with a group, and he recognized that compared with these briskly striding, sharp-eyed Frenchmen, he was no ornithologist. He was always the last to descry a feathered friend, even an easy one like the rouge-gorge, the American robin’s plump red-breasted little cousin. He kept losing his place in the bird book while trying to correlate the picture with the description; when he actually identified a bird—a tit, for instance—he could not find it in the index, where it was listed, naturally, under Mésanges. If he got his field glasses focused on a pic épeiche, or woodpecker, in flight, the group would be closing in on an accenteur mouchet, or hedge sparrow, lurking in a thicket. All this bore out the babbo’s theory that Peter did not have the makings of a real naturalist—he only liked Nature, which was not the same thing.

  He tried to follow the ornithologistes’ talk. Today’s expedition, he gleaned, was not to look at birds for fun, the way he conceived it, but to verify a scientific suspicion. They were agreeing that a park like les Buttes-Chaumont, on the edge of industrial Paris, had turned into a first-rate bird station. Migrating birds were stopping off more and more in the city as the city spread; they were seeing certain birds this morning that had not been sighted in Paris in fifty years. The idea gave Peter a ray of hope: one of the side-benefits of megalopolis would be that if you lived long enough you could see flocks of evening grosbeaks in the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center. Every cloud had a silver lining. As the old haunts of birds were transformed into sinister housing developments, linked by murderous highways, the city would become an aviary.

  At noon, the bird men had gone home to their Sunday dinners, and with them—a strange fact—the interesting birds vanished too, which seemed to show that Nature, like any performer, was dependent on her audience. Huddled in his sheepskin-lined jacket, Peter sat on a bench, eating a sandwich he had made—a cynosure for common sparrows. With his Swiss pocket-knife he providently cut some moss to take back to the Bonfante children as a nest for their sprouting garlic clove; he had been worried about finding them some suitable organic material that would hold moisture without becoming waterlogged. On the whole, he felt content. In his wallet was a receipt for a year’s dues—ten francs—that he had forked out at his own insistence to the group’s bald-headed leader, which would entitle him to receive regular notices of field trips and slide lectures. Because it was already late November, they had not wanted to accept Peter’s money. He could be their guest, they said, for the last two field trips of the year; Sunday after next, they were meeting at the Gare Montparnasse, to go to Trappes and study some waterfowl on the ponds. He could join, if he was still interested, in January, after the holidays. But Peter had persisted.

  After they had gone, he took out the receipt and looked at it. It was dated January, 1965—next year. So he had been their guest after all. The rush of warmth to his heart made him realize that this was about the first time he had had occasion to feel grateful to a French person. In fact, the ornithologistes seemed to belong to a different race from the French he had been running up against on his daily beat. They had been helping him out all morning, silently indicating birds to him, finding him the right page in his book, supplying the English name of a bird when they knew it, pausing for him to catch up if he fell behind—Peter on his solitary bird walks had been in the habit of stationing himself in ambush and waiting, whereas these men strode ahead purposefully, as though on a military patrol. They acted as a unit, rapidly collating their data; there was no disagreement as to what they saw—as though no possibility of confusion could exist—and nobody tried to see more birds quicker than the next man, which had been Peter’s tendency when in company with the fair Rosamund, who, he feared, had sometimes let him see birds ahead of her, thus admitting a competition between them.

  Munching a Golden apple, he had a glimpse of a great International of peaceful naturalists, to whom technological change was only interesting insofar as it affected the habits of another species. Being a Sunday ornithologist could put you at one with the universe, since whatever happened was bound to produce data, and any data were bound, by definition, to be interesting to a specialist. The sight of all those “winter visitors” from the finch and thrush families here in Paris had greatly excited the old ornithologistes, as well as the young kid with them, but seeing crows or nothing would have excited them too. If science were still a matter of observing and classifying ancient orders of beings—some of them, like the woodpeckers, already observed by Aristotle—he would like science, Peter thought. Maybe he might have “found himself” if he had been born in old Linnaeus’ time, alas, everything seemed bent on demonstrating that he had come into the world too late. He remembered Hans telling some inoffensive botanist at the Thanksgiving feast that the descriptive sciences belonged to the age of the curio cabinet taxonomy, useful in its day, had no place in the curriculum of a modern university, where biology and genetics were acting on Nature, like modern physics and chemis
try, disturbing its inmost processes, forcing it to answer questions, smashing its resistance. Suiting the action to the word, Hans had banged thunderously on the dinner table, upsetting the gravy and spilling several glasses of Napa Valley wine.

  Peter, aged circa thirteen, had not wholly followed the dispute; he had thought taxonomy was taxidermy and supposed that Hans was inveighing against cabinets of stuffed birds and animals. But he had understood his stepfather’s general drift and felt a quivering sympathy for mute, innocent matter, pummeled and interrogated by Hans and his fellow-scientists, whom he pictured as a sort of Gestapo. His resentment of physics had immediately embraced biology, not to mention genetics and every “improved” seed strain developed by an Iowa hybridist from some monstrous mutant. He wondered what the plant world had looked like before all this unnatural marrying and crossing had begun—doubtless better, though his mother possibly had a point when she said that experiment ought to have halted with the invention of the hybrid tea rose; up to then, she approved. She was always trying to draw the line, her personal high-water mark, across the history of achievement and avoid being a total reactionary: in the home, she said, a good place to stop would have been with the flush toilet and the vacuum cleaner. In front of Peter, she did not add Tampax, but he had heard her say it to her sister.

  Ornithology, he now concluded, must be one of the few descriptive sciences extant. You simply watched birds and did not try to change them biologically. At least he had never heard of anybody crossing a nightingale with a parrot. Birds in nature were left to themselves, apart from human interference. The most you might do was band them or coax them to show themselves, with birdhouses and trick devices like the hummingbird feeder. He had had one in Berkeley and he now asked himself whether even that decoy had not trespassed a limit; feeding a hummingbird from a tube containing two parts water and one part sugar was possibly habit-forming. What he liked about birds and animals, moths and stars, was precisely their remoteness from himself, their independence and solitariness. He loathed the satellite hanging like a suspended baseball in the night-time sky—il pallone américaino, the Italians in Perugia used to call it, when he was at the school for Stranieri. The satellite was a foreigner too, butting in on the celestial landscape. Furthermore, it had a boring orbit, like American tourists abroad, while the real stars and planets turned and wheeled in the patterns men had named after gods, animals, and utensils.

  Plants were different. People had been “cultivating” them, like acquaintances, from earliest times, feeding them and caring for them in gardens, so that they had become attached to the human family, as though they were pets or livestock. His present stepfather had copied out a sentence for his mother last summer from a book he had been reading in Siena on Byzantine aesthetics: “Mortal man was put into the world to be the husband-man of immortal plants.” That summed up the relation quite well, Peter reflected this morning, as he gave his dependent plant its airing: he had been allotted the duty of caring for the Fatshedera, which, barring accidents, should outlive him—so far as he knew, only annuals and biennials in the plant world died a “natural” death.

  His mother might say he had no business to try to keep a plant in his apartment. Certainly the Fatshedera would have been happier in nature, wherever it basically came from—the Far East, he supposed. But he could not set it free, for it would die if he abandoned it. He was responsible for it, though no Plant Welfare League would intervene if he were to neglect it. Besides, it was making a miniscule contribution to the air of Paris. He had read an article in the Figaro on air pollution (some doctor had taken a rat from the laboratory and exposed it on the roof of the Opera House; it was dead in twenty-five minutes), which said that Parisians could help by growing plants on their balconies and window ledges: by inhaling carbon dioxide and exhaling oxygen, they acted as cleansers. Whenever Peter took his tall Fatshedera walking, he felt there was an exchange of benefits; in return for the light it received, it purified the atmosphere like a filter. He did not mind the centaurish figure he cut—half-man, half-vegetable—as he strolled along, the plant overtopping his head; often when he performed an action, he noticed, he lost his fear of visibility; he disappeared into the gest.

  He examined a printer’s window on the rue de Tournon Printing, as a trade, attracted him; bookbinding too—there was a bookbinder he liked to watch working on the rue de Condé. He had been thinking a lot lately about what he would do with himself when he was through with college and the Army. He was sure he did not want to become an academic, though that was where his language major was leading him—straight into teaching, unless he took the State Department exams for the foreign service. He would have liked to have been a consul in Persia a hundred years ago, studying the native flora and fauna and Oriental religions and writing long reports home on the shah’s court intrigues, but he could not see himself in a modern office building issuing visas, promoting U.S. foreign policy and the interests of Standard Oil, and rotating back in two years to Washington for reassignment—in the old days you were consul for twenty years or for life. His ideal career choice would be an occupation that kept him outdoors, like archaeologist or forester or explorer, yet everything in his background was pushing him to be some sort of scribe, if not a pharisee. His father said these were daydreams and not vocational drives: if Peter were serious about wanting to spend his life in the open air, he would have enrolled in a School of Forestry or worked as a logger one summer or dug up Etruscan remains … The babbo, Peter had to admit, was a shrewder prophet than his mother, who fondly saw him in a tropical helmet or excavating the skeleton of some Mycenaean warrior when she did not see him arguing before the Supreme Court

  His vocational aptitudes were an old bone of contention between his parents. To his mother, every schoolboy “interest”—especially when she did not share it—was proof of a wonderful talent to be fostered for ornithology, ichthyology, entomology, astronomy; she let him bring home a series of chameleons from the circus to roam about the premises, in case he might be gifted for herpetology. To his father, who disliked meeting eels, escapees from Peter’s leaky aquarium, on his way downstairs to breakfast, all these hobbies were only an excuse for squandering money; he had vetoed the idea of an aviary, to be constructed in his back yard on the Cape as a summer project for Peter—if the boy cared about ornithology, he pointed out, he would have been dissecting the dead birds he found during school vacations, instead of giving them funerals.

  In Paris, Peter had been dreaming of becoming a binder or a printer, though these trades not only kept you indoors but were probably worse for your health than teaching in a classroom, where at least you were on your feet all day in front of a blackboard. He would have enjoyed operating a clandestine press in the Maquis and showering the country with broadsides and leaflets, but there was no Resistance any more except in uncongenial places like the Vietnamese mangrove swamps, and in the U.S. you could not become a printer unless you had an uncle or a father who belonged to the printers’ union.

  He turned right into the rue de Vaugirard, passed the Senate, and decided against going into the Luxembourg Garden today. Instead, he headed toward the rue de Rennes, where there was a café frequented by some Swedish girls who went to the Alliance Française. As he approached, he heard strange noises—the sound of rhythmic chanting, mixed with honking—coming from the rue de Rennes. He hurried on. At the corner he saw what he took at first to be a parade and he wondered whether today could be a national holiday that he had failed to hear about. All along the wide street, householders were lined upon their balconies, some with brooms and dusters, watching a procession of young people marching abreast and chanting; they were carrying broad streamers and placards with slogans written on them that he could not make out. The traffic on the street had stopped; buses and cars were blowing their horns. Simultaneously with Peter’s arrival, a police car appeared at the intersection, and some gendarmes descended in a body, wearing dark-blue capes that swirled as they moved, giving the sc
ene a festive look. Peter realized that he was witnessing a demonstration, such as he had read about in history.

  More gendarmes were running up the rue de Rennes, rounding the corner by the municipal pawnshop and blowing their whistles. Ahead of them came a second wave of marchers, shouting and singing. Moving to the curb, Peter made out what was written on one of the billowing streamers. He felt slightly let down. It was only a student demonstration for better housing at the Cité Universitaire. The police were trying to break it up. He could hear them growling at the demonstrators, who laughed and jeered back. Behind Peter, in the glass-enclosed terrace of the corner café, people were standing on chairs to get a better view. At the far end of the street, near the Montparnasse station, he could see still more police, alighting from a Black Maria, and he grasped the strategy: they were trying to hem the students in.

  The crowd on the sidewalk was augmenting; those behind were beginning to shove. A very tall blond boy in a turtlenecked sweater and tight gray thin jacket edged in next to him on the curb; Peter was starting to be concerned for the safety of his plant. “C’est beau, hein?” said the boy, surveying the spectacle. The police had moved in on the marchers, in salients, swinging their capes. Mentally, Peter compared this airy ballet to the behavior of the police at home, hitting out with nightsticks; for the first time, he approved thoroughly of the French. They had made an art of it, he decided, as he watched a line of students break and scatter as the graceful capes descended. In these fall maneuvers between youth and authority, the forces were evenly matched, the students having the advantage of numbers and the police, like matadors, that of dexterity. If he had had two free hands, he would have applauded. He slightly lowered his plant, so as not to obstruct the view for those in his rear.