But what could anyone do? This time Scarlet stayed out of the way. This time she didn’t want her tears to force her mother back into the multiple agonies, for her, of chemotherapy. For most of the fall she hid out in her apartment in New York, tending to other things there. Eight months ago—even two months ago—she never would have dreamed that she’d be in Cider Cove the morning after Addie’s death, longing for her, physically longing for her, as if she were a child again. Eight months ago, before a series of unexpected events, Scarlet had told herself it was Addie’s decision, no one else’s.
What is it, when someone says no to all her doctors have to offer? Some pinpointable stage in the process of dying? Angry self-destructive-ness? Resigned despondency? Peaceful acceptance?
Probably a bit of all those things, Addie had told Scarlet and Tom two weeks ago, clearly uninterested in pursuing the question further. And then she’d laid out her instructions for what she ardently hoped they would do with her body when she died—making it clear, when she’d finished, that she didn’t wish to talk about her death any longer.
So now they are left to decide for themselves what to make of it all. For people like Dustin, Scarlet imagines, it’s easy: Addie’s death was a suicide, yes—a deeply principled one. Martyrdom, actually, in the eyes of Dustin and Addie’s other followers. It’s easy for them to see her death this way, Scarlet thinks, because, of course, she isn’t their mother. Which, at this moment, she desperately wishes these scattered children of the art world and the environmental movement would remember.
The sound of Dustin’s sawing—now a steady whine—has become grating. Scarlet desperately needs a cup of coffee.
“Doesn’t he have a mother of his own?” she asks, her voice cracking.
Cora just looks at her, saying nothing. Waiting. There are more tears, Scarlet can see, at the corners of her eyes.
She has always waited like this for Scarlet.
And as always, in the warm light of Cora’s gaze, Scarlet begins—rapidly—to melt.
“I’m pregnant,” she says.
“I wondered,” Cora answers.
And then Lou opens the screen door and pulls a chair up to join them.
seven
HAD HE EXPECTED HAPPINESS? Success? Both?
Though not given to long bouts of introspection or nostalgia, sometimes Tom would try to answer such questions. Or he would try to conjure the feeling he’d had, that first spring, as he sat in his Burnham office late into the night, avoiding going home, reading his students’ field notebooks. He saved Addie’s, “the artist’s,” for last, teasing himself with it, at first simply curious but, by the middle of May, almost unbearably eager for what he would find there.
It was difficult to say which excited him more: her glorious drawings or her forthright prose. When he thought back to those years, it seemed to him that this was the moment, the precise moment when he began to see the possibility of happiness. And to long for it.
Before that he’d felt happy, certainly. But his happiness, as a boy, and then as a student at university, then in an American graduate program, had always been tinged with other feelings. A hunger to know more. A kind of desperate striving.
And when he recalled these feelings of his youth, it wasn’t his mother he thought of, or Polly, or anyone else in his family; instead he saw the youthful face of his teacher Sister Catherine. Sister Catherine, who, he realized later, had made him into the teacher he’d become by that spring when he met Addie—a teacher who looked for hungry students like he himself had been, and happily gave them what they needed.
Though he’d let go of much about his childhood in Ireland when he left in 1955, he would never forget the early mornings. The long, quiet walks to school along the rutted lane, more a path than any kind of road really, that led from his family’s crumbling old farmhouse into Falcarragh.
He’d leave even earlier than he needed to, purely for the pleasure of hearing the rousing chorus in the trees above his head and then, as the lane wound its way from the sheltered valley to the edge of the hill above the sea, for the view—not just of wisps of morning clouds above a gradually receding tide, not of the quiet waves rolling slowly in from the protected cove. What he watched for, and the thing that left him breathless, every morning, were the seabirds. Soaring and diving, floating regally, perched magnificently alongside the tidepools.
He couldn’t have named a single one. Nor could he have named any of the glorious singers above his head in the scattered trees between his home and the sea, or the family of gray-brown and black-spotted ones with the flash of white under their wings whose nest he discovered, one morning when he was ten, in a shrub abutting the stone wall outside his school.
He’d been scaling the wall at a safe distance to watch them furtively each morning for a week when, one day, as he strained to see what the mother bird was dropping into her babies’ mouths, he felt something tapping at his leg.
It was a pair of field glasses. In the hands of a nun, whom he recognized immediately as the young and mysterious Sister Catherine—not yet his teacher, though she would be the following year. Instinctively he jumped down from the wall and prepared to apologize, ready for a scolding, and as he did the mother bird flew from the nest as another bird in a nearby tree—the father, Sister Catherine explained later—gave a loud, grating call, not musical in the least, and not designed to be, she explained; it was instead meant to discourage intruders like the two of them.
“What a wonder you’ve not heard it before,” she said to him that morning. “That’s a tribute to your stealth! You’re a good observer of birds, I know,” she added. “I’ve been watching you these last few days.” Again she held out the field glasses to him. “That’s why I’ve brought you these. They’ll make the task much easier.”
He took them from her then, tentatively, his hands shaking. But he had no idea what to do with them.
She laughed, kindly, and held them to her own eyes to show him. It took a while, but finally he got the nest in focus. And when he did, and he saw the open, crying beaks, the long, awkward necks, he found he wanted to cry.
He pulled the glasses from his eyes and swallowed hard to stop the tears from coming. Sister Catherine had been watching him closely, and now she took his hand and led him to a bench by the gate in the wall, and there she pulled another surprise from the folds of her habit: a small, well-used field guide.
She showed him how to look for the bird he’d been watching. She’d known all along, he realized later, that it was a mistle thrush. But she let him believe he’d made the discovery on his own. And that was his beginning.
“You may keep both the glasses and the guide,” she’d said, “as long as you care for them, as I believe you will. And for as long as you remain interested in observing the birds.”
He had them both, still. The glasses remained his favorites, and eventually Addie stopped rolling her eyes and laughing at his preferring them to the many lighter, and far more powerful, pairs of binoculars he acquired through the years.
As his teacher for the next two years, and then as his friend after that, it was Sister Catherine who helped to foster his talent in math and science. It was this gift, she helped him see, that could buy his freedom, as a scholarship student at Queen’s University, from the lives of his older brothers and sisters—gifted musicians, all of them, but all trapped in the lives of farm laborers and factory workers, in the north of Ireland.
He met Polly while he was at Queen’s, when both of them joined a small group of musicians who played regularly at a pub popular with students and young office girls, like Polly. She was a “fiery Irish redhead,” in the words of his adviser at Cornell, where, newly married, they arrived in the fall of 1955 for Tom to begin his graduate work.
When he told her this, Polly rolled her eyes at the stereotype, then turned away, flushed, and, he knew, pleased to be seen this way. For she was a fiery redhead, a stunning girl, and a beautiful singer. And in no way suited to be the wif
e of a scientist, particularly an ornithologist, “forever stuck in the woods,” as she put it, adding, “I may as well have stayed in Belfast then,” when one of her dark moods set in. Though these were less frequent in Ithaca, where she began singing with another group and quickly gathered a local following.
It was for Polly that he made what, in his younger days, he saw as a deciding sacrifice in his career—opting for a job at tiny, nondescript Burnham College in southeastern Pennsylvania, instead of the far more prestigious research position he’d been offered at the University of Illinois. What would there possibly be for her in the middle of the country, in an unknown place called Champaign, Illinois? Polly had asked, incredulous to think that finally, after five years in tiny Ithaca, he would even consider turning down a job in reasonable proximity to cities like Philadelphia and New York.
His adviser only shook his head, mumbling something about Tom’s fiery redhead and how at least he’d be happy in the bedroom.
Which he was, for a time. Their first two years in Burnham were, in fact, relatively calm. Polly found a voice teacher in Philadelphia who persuaded her that, with proper training (which meant several sessions per week with him), she had a future as an opera singer. And Tom realized rather quickly (perhaps, he sometimes admitted to himself, he’d always known this) that a job at a small school like Burnham would allow him to do the two things he most loved: teach, and pursue his own idiosyncratic study of the music of birds—work that he knew, from his experience at Cornell, would never have been considered serious or scholarly enough to earn him a long-term career at a school like Illinois.
And so, slowly but surely, his work—as a teacher and, in the eyes of traditional ornithologists, a renegade researcher—became all-consuming.
And he developed a pronounced distaste for opera, and for New York City, both of which he’d rather enjoyed, when he and Polly were younger and newly arrived in the U.S.
And Polly began to drink more heavily, as the months and then the years passed, and then her first teacher left Philadelphia for New York, and her “career” as a classical singer failed to blossom—stymied, she was sure, by Tom’s refusal even to consider renting an apartment in New York, where, she said, she might live during the week and he could join her on weekends. How, he asked repeatedly, could he possibly pursue his research, much less finish his book, without time on the weekends and semester breaks, time away from the demanding work of his teaching, to be in the field?
Her parting shot, after she’d packed a larger bag than usual for the drive down to Philadelphia that day, had stunned him. “You aren’t even man enough to give me a child,” she hissed at him, eyes flashing, tangled curls tumbling about her face.
He stared at her, at her beautiful body in her skirt and tight red sweater, her perfect skin, flushed now with anger. And for one confused moment he felt a powerful wave of longing for her. “I’d no idea you even wanted a child,” he might have said; she had always seemed far too consumed by her singing to consider starting a family.
What he said, instead, was “And you’re not fit to be anyone’s mother.” He said it softly, his voice an angry snarl, to her back as she walked out the door. He never knew whether she’d heard him or not.
And so, ironically, he found himself, by his third year there at little Burnham College, increasingly delighted by his work. And routinely alone in the bedroom.
Until the spring of 1965—a spring ushered in by torrential rains and violent winds, then followed by two and half weeks, in early May, of brisk, crystal-clear mornings and the richest round of songbird migration he had yet witnessed in the northeastern United States. Punctuated, each morning, by the song of wood thrushes high overhead, nesting in at least three of the college’s majestic old trees. And by the arrival of Addie Sturmer in his life—rushing in like that spring’s near-to-flooding Nisky Creek, or like the dizzying swoop of a tree swallow, bringing with her a future filled with more happiness, and success, and sorrow, than he had ever imagined his life would hold.
Certainly more than he ever expected when, on a cold and damp April morning, he woke early to find that Polly had, once again, failed to return the night before from her so-called lesson with her new teacher in Philadelphia—another young man with his sights set on New York. And when, striking a match to light the stove and boil water for his single cup of tea, he admitted to himself, at last, that his marriage was over.
Addie’s innocence, combined with a passion that matched, or maybe even exceeded, his own, took his breath away. She had been invited to work in the studio of Clive Behrend! She had no idea what that meant, asking him, in her field journal, if he’d heard of him, of one of the finest bird artists of their day.
Also the illustrator of the first guidebook he himself had owned, the delicate little book from the ’20s that had belonged, originally, to Sister Catherine. Later, in secret, she’d also given him a copy of a zoology text from her days at university in England: his first look at Darwin, his first inkling of a wider world. A world she had left behind, she said, without regrets, for her own very private reasons—but one that he should be aware of, and consider finding for himself.
He’d corresponded with Sister Catherine faithfully through the years, and on that first return trip to Ireland with Addie, the year after they married, he visited her in Falcarragh. She was even approving, he thought he could see it, of his new bride (if so, she was certainly the only one in Ireland who was approving of his having one annulled marriage and now a second—and Protestant—wife). If Sister Catherine disapproved, she’d shown no sign of it; instead she was kind and warm, and admiring of Addie’s drawings from their weeks in the Lake District, and then along the coast of Donegal.
They made pilgrimages to the homes of both their mentors on that trip. Miss Smallwood still doted on Addie, but her response to him was cooler, to say the least; a tiny, sharp-beaked woman swathed in wool and tweed, she eyed him with obvious mistrust as the three of them tramped through muddy farm fields and scrambled over stiles at the edges of pastures outside Oxford. Once, as they paused for a drink of water alongside a wood, Tom ventured on in search of a warbler he was certain he’d heard, despite Miss Smallwood’s protesting that it was “highly unlikely” at that hour. Peering through his glasses, he heard her ask, rather churlishly, he thought, “And what will there be for you in this little Pennsylvania town, Adeline?”
A rustle of leaf and wing then, and his warbler was gone. Addie only laughed and said she was lucky to have work she could do anywhere, “anywhere there are birds,” which meant pretty much anyplace at all, didn’t it? Emerging from the woods, Tom saw the bemused look on her former teacher’s face, even though she said nothing, and when he mentioned it to Addie later, she only laughed again.
“Well, I’d sooner be an ornithologist’s wife who gets to work at my pictures, whether anyone ever sees them or not,” she’d said, trailing off then, too kind and too fond of her former teacher, he assumed, to conclude with what she surely was thinking, “than a lonely old maid like her.”
But then, perhaps only he was thinking this. Years later he would wonder about it, about the warning tone in Margaret Smallwood’s question (and might she have raised other doubts and questions, in later letters and private conversations?). And he would remember one other thing then too: the pang he’d felt—in the midst of the flush of elation, the shaky thrill he’d felt when reading Addie’s field notebook that first spring—when she wrote fondly and longingly about New York City, and about drawing in Central Park.
Would every woman in his life feel this tug, this longing for the city, for a life that would pull her away from Burnham, from the work to be done there, from him?
Even his daughter, for Christ’s sake, he’d think years later, laughing to himself. Because of course Scarlet wouldn’t stay in Burnham. Though he wished, sometimes, that they could have kept her with them there forever, forever a cheerful, busy child of five or eight, even her quieter, more serious self of twelv
e or thirteen—the three of them still happily ensconced in their warm little cottage in the woods.
Was it his own happiness, or his own success, that he was thinking of, then, back in the early summer of 1965? When—despite the shocked faces and murmured doubts of colleagues and friends—he secured a small grant from a conservation society in Philadelphia and “hired” Addie as his research assistant, for his ongoing project of delineating, and scanning, the songs of migrating warblers.
Everyone at Burnham knew, of course, that Polly had moved out of the little house she and Tom had shared on the campus’s “faculty row,” a street of small bungalows behind the gymnasium. They knew, as well, that much of Tom’s grant had actually gone toward the purchase and restoration of the old fisherman’s cottage on Haupt Bridge Road, where his so-called research assistant was staying and where, after she graduated, Tom himself was clearly spending most nights.
So there was a bit of a scandal, in the style of a small liberal arts college that, while filled with as much gossip and envy and mean-spirited-ness as any other self-enclosed community, tried hard to present a face of open-minded tolerance. Somehow Tom—who, conveniently, had been awarded tenure the year before—didn’t mind; when asked about Polly, he calmly explained that she had left him for her voice teacher, and for the life in New York City that she had craved since they’d both arrived in America twelve years before. If the precise order of various events—Polly’s deep dissatisfaction and her eventual departure, his falling, unmistakably, in love with a student nearly fifteen years younger than he—was blurry in the minds of others in the community, even in his own mind, what did that matter really?
In Hovering Flight Page 6