In Hovering Flight

by Joyce Hinnefeld

  On weekends I traveled all over Britain with the Birders’ Club. I have drawn since I was a child—nothing special, pictures of my family, the animals on my father’s farm, some friends in high school and here at Burnham. I never took it very seriously and never studied at all, beyond my high school art classes and Drawing I here at Burnham, when I was a freshman. There wasn’t room in my schedule for any more art classes (up until last semester, I planned to be an English teacher).

  But I started carrying around a sketch pad when I went places with the Oxbridge Birders, and eventually Miss Smallwood introduced me to Clive Behrend (Do you know him? His illustrations are quite well-known in Great Britain), who let me sit and sketch with him in his hide in the woods outside Oxford and encouraged me to start painting. With no training! He just let me loose in his studio one day.

  I knew by December that I had to take as many art classes as I could when I got back to Burnham. So I abandoned student teaching last semester and signed up for four.

  My parents still don’t know this, exactly. I’ve told them I’m going to graduate and be an art teacher instead, and they believe me, poor souls.

  Of course I’m going to graduate, instead, prepared to do nothing at all in the “real” world. A girl, no less. A girl who discovered birds, and painting, far too late, if you believe all the stories. A girl who’s going to graduate in a month and, probably, have to look for a job as a secretary in Scranton.

  But do you know what? I don’t care. Because I’ve found something that matters to me, for the first time. And I’ll work as hard as I have to to get this right. I think I’m burning up with the same thing Audubon was burning with. I feel like him somehow, like some kind of out-of-place mongrel from Pennsylvania who almost faints when she’s near a living bird.

  He achieved his first real success after a trip to England, you know.

  That sounds vain, I realize. All I really mean to say is that I have to find a way to show what I see, and how I feel, when I look at a bird. It’s all I care about now.

  Which is why I’m in this class. And which brings me to a problem. I need to find a way to have time with these birds. With the class there’s too much movement, too much hurrying on to the next bird, too much rushing to make a longer species list. There is no way for me to draw like this, and drawing, then painting, is the only way for me to get this out of my system, if you understand what I mean.

  I’ve never had to share the experience with so many people. Even with Miss Smallwood and her group, I was never in a hurry to keep finding more. I’m concerned about whether this is going to work for me. (They shot and stuffed them for a reason, I almost want to say. But of course I don’t mean that.)

  Yes, I’ll be out on my own as often as I can. But now I have to confess my worry about this: How will I find them? I’m able to wait very patiently. But I struggle so to recognize their songs! This is what I most need help with. I think I have a tin ear; I wonder if I can really learn.

  I know “personal asides have no real place in a scientific field note-book”—unless they pertain to the field of study, in this case our “quest to know these marvelous creatures.” I hope the things I’ve written here seem to you to pertain. Either way, I guess I needed to tell you all this.

  The thing I most want from this class (you did ask us to write about this) is the ability to hear a bird’s song and know it instantly, as you do.

  Already I’ve forgotten the song of the wood thrush. On Monday, when we heard it during class, I thought it was the most glorious sound I’d ever heard. Now I’d give anything to recall it, but it’s gone.

  two

  TYPICALLY, MORE WOMEN THAN men were enrolled in Biology of the Birds, which was thought to be a function of Tom Kavanagh’s allure; it was affectionately known, among the students, as “Birds and Chicks.” For all its appeal, though, the handsome Irish instructor and the strange blend of science, music, and poetry he was famous for bringing to this unusual class also scared many students away. There was the poetry, for one thing; “What does this have to do with biology?” science majors had been known to ask. And there was also Tom Kavanagh’s fervent insistence on the tenets of evolutionary theory, as notorious among the more religious and conservative students at Burnham as the required five A.M. field excursions, every weekday for the entire five weeks of the term.

  Cora and Lou had signed up for the course as well. Cora, a biology major, had been saving the course for her final term at Burnham. Lou, always the curious flirt, had different reasons; throughout her four years at Burnham she’d admired Tom Kavanagh from a distance—his wiry, muscular skill on the basketball court at intramural games, his accomplished fiddle playing with a group of local musicians. And now she wanted a closer look.

  Addie had her own reasons for taking the class. She had been longing to take it since the previous fall, her full-scholarship semester abroad in Great Britain, a time when she was to have been awash in Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth. And when she had, instead, immersed herself in Turner landscapes and the works of John James Audubon.

  How could she have known that she would feel so at home, so comfortable in her own skin, maybe for the first time—in her icy room in Oxford, on the gray streets of London, tramping along sodden paths in the Lake District or through fields of grazing sheep in the Cotswolds? And discovering, remarkably, that she had a real talent for drawing and for painting.

  Back in Pennsylvania in December, she’d told her parents nothing about her change in plans. She’d also said nothing to her college boyfriend, though she’d known since October that she would break up with him at the first opportunity when she returned to campus. Still, she did worry at times that she’d be foolish to give him up. They had talked, vaguely, of marriage after graduation. And what would she do now, with no teaching degree to back her up?

  “Work as a waitress and live in Greenwich Village and meet fabulous, sexy artists like Willem de Kooning,” Lou—who was an art major herself, and from a wealthy family from Philadelphia—said when the three friends were together again in January. “Get a job as a secretary in Philadelphia and take night classes in art until you have enough credits to become an art teacher” was Cora’s alternative. They were still the only ones who knew of Addie’s plans. While she was abroad she had longed for them as if they were lovers, her beloved roommates, the only people who understood her.

  At home, in her parents’ house over the Christmas holidays, there’d been no one who could understand. She’d returned from Britain thinner than she’d been in years, no longer setting and teasing her dark-blond hair. Her mother watched her worriedly, urging more food on her at every meal. But Addie could barely touch the eggs, the fried potatoes, all the foods of her childhood. She only sipped some coffee and nibbled at a piece of her mother’s homemade bread. She also found it nearly impossible to draw. Each day she bundled herself in a rag wool sweater and tattered tweed coat, both purchased for pennies in a tiny secondhand shop in London, then pulled on her mud-splattered Wellingtons. These had left a layer of dust and grime at the bottom of her suitcase, where it remained because it was English dirt and she could not bear to part with it. And each day, though she feared it would be no different from any other since her return, she took along her sketchbook and a pencil.

  At the frozen pond down a country road from her parents’ house, away from the smells of mud and manure and her mother’s daily baking, away from her childhood bedroom and, in the barn, the mournful, cheated-looking eyes of the cows—only at the frozen pond could she catch a glimmer of what she’d felt on the banks of Grasmere or walking in the shadow of Westminster Cathedral, notebook in hand, sketching furiously. But not the rippling lake and not a flying buttress; what she drew, obsessively, religiously, with the devotion of a pilgrim, were the ruffled wings of a magpie, the dusty breast of a wood pigeon. Creatures that seemed to be moving through their lives as randomly and fitfully as she.

  By March, Addie was drawing and painting furiously again
. And Cora and Lou had adjusted to the changes in their friend, who, on her return from England, wore black tights and flats with wool jumpers and let her hair grow long and straight. Now, instead of tending to her hair and nails and baking cookies for her boyfriend on the weekend, Addie took the train into New York City with Lou as often as she could afford it. They would start at the Metropolitan Museum or the Museum of Modern Art, eat sandwiches in Central Park while Addie sketched and Lou chatted with strangers, and step reverently into one of the galleries on 57th Street. Then, flush with the confidence that art always gave them, they’d ride the subway downtown to drink wine and smoke cigarettes at the Cedar Tavern or Max’s Kansas City, eyes scanning the crowd in search of famous artists.

  Once, lingering longer than they’d intended, hoping to sight, say, de Kooning or Robert Motherwell, they missed the last bus back to Doylestown and walked the streets of Manhattan until dawn, drunk for the first half of the night, sober and staring, entranced, for the second. When they returned at midday to the dorm suite they shared with Cora, she made them coffee in their illegal percolator. Lou went to bed and slept until her first class on Monday morning. Addie locked herself into her tiny studio in the crumbling old Art Department building, where she spent her time obsessively painting the pigeons she’d seen on the steps of the New York Public Library, finally sleeping for a few hours on the sofa in the student lounge.

  By the last week of April, when classes ended for a one-week recess, Cora and Lou had grown accustomed to the new Addie; her English adviser, Dr. Curtis, had abandoned his efforts to persuade her to complete her teaching certification requirements; her boyfriend was a thing of the past; and the dean had granted her request to fulfill the science requirement by taking Biology of the Birds. At a small school like Burnham, radical changes in a student like Addie Sturmer were duly noted, and administrators eyed the budding artist nervously, happy to hurry her along to graduation.

  She spent the April recess with Lou and Cora and Cora’s boyfriend Karl, a studious engineering major, at Lou’s family farm, riding horses, eating exotic “gourmet” dinners, and drawing constantly. Then, early on the third morning of May, the three young women walked up a sloping path through the damp patch of woods that separated the campus dormitories from the academic buildings. Slowly, each lost in her own thoughts, they approached the stately Hall of Science, a second home to Cora, foreign territory to Lou and Addie, for Tom Kavanagh’s eight A.M. lecture.

  As they walked through the edge of the woods to the building’s side entrance, a bird chirruped in a towering oak above their heads. Its flutelike song was barely noticed by Lou, who, despite being barely awake after a night spent drinking wine along the river, had arranged her long dark hair in an artful chignon and whose slow, willowy walk was noted appreciatively by every sleepy-eyed male they passed. But Cora—newly engaged and deeply in love—thrilled at the sound of the bird’s song, which she heard as a splendid echo of her own happiness on this crisp and sunny morning.

  For Addie, who’d been wondering, at that moment, what in the world she was doing, this bird’s song was a revelation. She paused, gazing up into the tangle of branches, hoping for a rustle of wing. She did not yet know that thrilling sound as the song of the wood thrush; for her, at that moment, it was nothing less than the voice of all her unnamed longing.

  three

  TOM KAVANAGH STARED AT the expectant faces that greeted him as he entered the room; this was the most alert they would be, he knew, for the next five weeks. It was a large group for Biology of the Birds: twenty brave souls. He wondered how many would fade away by the second or third morning’s field excursion. Over half were majors, and most of these he knew; in a small program like Burnham’s, he was sure to have had them in Zoology at least, maybe even back in the introductory course for majors. There was Cora Davis, a lovely girl, smart and reliable, cheerfully attractive; he gladly returned her ready smile, and it was then that he noticed the two next to her.

  One, who could only be described as dark and sultry, with her long legs languidly crossed beneath her desk, was giving him a frankly suggestive look: expectant in a different way. It was a look he’d come to recognize, even expect, and, in past semesters, to deflect good-humoredly. Though now he wondered, momentarily, what might happen if he didn’t smile back like a tolerant friend of their older brother’s (he was, after all, only a dozen years older than most of them) but instead stared back with equal, or greater, interest. Why don’t you meet me in my office after class to discuss this further?

  Certainly it had begun to cross his mind, with things the way they were at home, Polly so restless and bitter, always furious at him, chafing at the role of “faculty wife,” longing for a city, for a chance to pursue her singing with real seriousness.

  “And what work would there be for an unemployed ornithologist in New York City?” he’d asked her last fall, gently at first, trying, but as always failing, to soothe her.

  And then, after a few more glasses of wine, she’d begun to harp, there was no other word for it, her angry voice growing louder, filling the room. “There’s nothing for me here. You don’t care for me at all. And where is your illustrious career, stuck here in the sticks in Pennsylvania, teaching and tending to your little students all the time . . . what are you doing that’s so valuable, you haven’t written a word since your dissertation, there’s no sign you ever will. . . .”

  “So now I’m to sacrifice this job as well?” he had snapped back, unable to contain his fury. “Forget about my work here and follow you to New York, is that it? And what do you suppose we’ll live on then—your coins from busking in subway stations? Or did I miss it when they called from the Metropolitan Opera to offer you a role?”

  What was to stop him? he thought as he stared at the brazen girl next to Cora. Then he glanced at the one sitting on the brazen girl’s other side. Long blond hair falling into her eyes and boiled-wool sweater slipping from her shoulder: bohemian clothes, but they didn’t seem to fit her somehow. She was decidedly not looking at him but at an open notebook in front of her. From time to time she raised her eyes, carelessly brushing strands of her hair out of her way, and looked pointedly at the stuffed and mounted great horned owl he had placed on the desk in front of him. She was drawing it, and even from this distance he could see that the likeness was strong.

  She saw him watching her then, and momentarily returned his gaze. Her own look was inscrutable. She was pretty, but there was something pained in her expression that might have prevented most people from noticing. She blinked once and returned to her drawing.

  Not since his days as a teaching assistant had he felt flustered and distracted at the front of a classroom. For years now he’d felt completely at home standing before a room full of students—as confident in the work he did there as when he was in the field. But for just that moment, when she blinked as if he were distracting her from something much more urgent, she had unnerved him somehow. He looked down at his notes and gathered his thoughts; then he turned and wrote two things on the chalkboard:

  Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. (Ernst Haeckel)

  and

  Sluggards! Spread the wings of your mind to the sky, and rise from the earth.

  Strive not to catch but to become birds! (Petrarch)

  “Here,” he said when he had returned the chalk to the tray and turned to face the class, carefully avoiding the occasional gaze of the girl in the front and to his left, “are the two poles between which this class will string its tenuous wire. I am an ornithologist, and also a musician, and a lover of poetry. No study of these illustrious creatures called ‘the birds,’” and here, as always, he began pacing the room, warming up, gathering momentum, “these marvelous creatures with their hollow bones . . . did you know their bones are hollow?” He had deliberately walked to the right side of the room, pausing there in front of the desk of a nonmajor, who stopped scribbling notes long enough to shake her head.

  “It’s true! Hollow bone
s. Imagine what this means. Strength and lightness. Flight and surety. They hover too magnificently between the practical and the whimsical, the rational and the exquisitely nonsensical, for any student of their physiology and habitat and history to dare to linger too long at either pole, the strictly ‘scientific’ or the purely ‘poetic.’

  “And further,” he went on, walking back to the chalkboard and pointing, “though Haeckel’s theory of recapitulation is largely discredited now, evolutionary theory, my friends, decidedly is not, as our objects of study, of close observation, even, yes, of our desire,” and he risked a fleeting glance at the two girls next to Cora Davis, sensing somehow that this last claim would reach both of them, “as these fascinating creatures make abundantly clear.” Here he paused, as he always did at this point in introducing the course, suddenly standing still and lowering his voice. Pens and pencils stopped, as they always did, and waiting eyes all turned to him.

  “Understand this,” he said then, in a near-whisper; he would not disappoint them in their eagerness for the drama of this moment. “If you harbor any childish and ill-founded notions, which, one would hope, you surely will not, after even one year of a college education, about the ‘evils’ of the study of evolution, you do not belong in this class. Such an attitude will be a terrible detriment to you here. Every bit as problematic as an inability to rise at dawn to join the birds in their morning rousing and singing.”

  He paused then, trembling, as he always was by now. Even now, even ten years after leaving Ireland in 1955, in love with the music and the countryside but sore with the strain of suppressing his excitement over all he had learned—about the natural world, about the lives of the creatures he had watched, listened to, and cherished since his lonely childhood—even now he felt it. A tremendous rush of excitement, and maybe a trace of fear, when he laid it before his students so boldly: “The world is more ancient than a strict reading of the book of Genesis will allow; there is undeniable proof of this. Birds are, in all likelihood, evolved from prehistoric creatures, some of which did not even fly. They are soaring, melodic evidence, undeniable, all around us, impossible to ignore, of natural selection. Please take note: I embrace the music and poetry they inspire, but I will quell the slightest effort to twist their near-mystical beauty into religious dogma.”