Because clearly, now, everyone was happier. No one more so than he.
And, from all appearances, Addie as well. Addie, who grew glowingly suntanned that summer, her long hair, lightened by the sun, in a long braid down her back by day and, at night, sweeping over her bare shoulders, glowing in the light of a single candle by the mattress they shared on the floor of the fisherman’s cottage. Who cheerfully cooked their dinners on the rattling old stove he’d installed in the cottage’s rough kitchen. Who eagerly typed his daily notes and tidied up his complex, and nearly unreadable, diagrams of the songs of pine warblers and wood thrushes and vireos. And who had, at last, what seemed to her boundless time and boundless space—and, with that, boundless energy—to watch, and to draw, and to paint.
She seemed impervious to what others might say about her. The stares and snickers of other students (all except her fellow “loons” from Biology of the Birds, who followed the lead of Cora and Lou, and whose unflagging loyalty to their teacher Tom Kavanagh led them to simply take the affair in stride). The shocked indignation of her parents when they learned of her plans for the year following graduation—and who suspected something, immediately, when they met Tom Kavanagh at Addie’s graduation. To all these reactions—vexed, jealous, titillated, appalled—Addie only stared back silently, blankly, eyes wide open and unblinking, seeming to feel no particular need to explain, certainly none to apologize.
It was Tom’s first view of her flinty resolve—her ability simply to not see any objections or disapproval that struck her as ungrounded, even absurd—when she was convinced she was right and others were wrong. As, more often than not, she was. Convinced, that is.
By the beginning of the winter term, in January of 1966, Tom and Polly’s marriage was officially annulled, and Addie and Tom had begun, quietly, to plan a small wedding in May and then his official move, following graduation, into the cottage. Then one day in March, he was called to a meeting with his old friend the dean.
This meeting was surprisingly awkward, far more so than those discussions, in Tom’s pretenure days, following a student’s or parent’s complaint, of Tom’s impassioned teaching of the theories of evolution. On those occasions they’d been able to close the door and chuckle together over the need to “tone down” scientific fact when, say, a potential future donor to the college had had his or her religious convictions threatened.
“If they’re so certain they know the truth, why does it even bother them?” Tom would always ask, genuinely puzzled. Certainly he’d known plenty of people—starting, as a child, with Sister Catherine, and then as a student in Belfast—whose religious beliefs hardly needed such careful coddling.
“I know, I know,” his friend the physicist would answer, closing his eyes and nodding. “Only maybe tone it down a bit for a lecture or two, might you? And then it will all blow over, as it always does.”
Then they would spend the rest of their meeting discussing their research, or the plight of the college’s basketball team.
But this meeting, in the early spring of 1966, was clearly different. Instead of getting right to the point, the dean, who seemed unusually nervous, made idle small talk, which had never been his wont, before closing his door portentously, then sitting at his desk and staring out the window for a moment.
“Well,” Tom said at last, uncharacteristically nervous himself by now, “what is it this time, Dan? I’m not even teaching zoology right now—can’t be complaints about Darwin, can it?” He laughed hollowly.
The dean looked back at him for a moment, then stared at a letter on his desk.
“No, Tom, no,” he said, his voice hoarse. He cleared his throat and looked up. “I’ve been asked to speak to you about your intentions . . .”
“My intentions?”
“With regard to the Sturmer girl.”
“The ‘Sturmer girl’?” Hearing her referred to in this way—like a problem student, or like a specimen, he thought—made him bristle. “Her name is Addie Sturmer, Dan. And I assure you, my ‘intentions,’ as you put it, are decent ones.”
It did disgust him, and, truthfully, humiliate him as well, to be asked such a question. And yet part of him felt for his old friend—clearly so ill at ease with the situation, forced into discussing something so private, no doubt by a president and board of trustees who’d gotten wind of certain rumors.
“Dan,” he said, “my marriage to Polly was annulled only a month ago. Now that the way’s cleared, I do plan to marry Addie, soon.”
“How soon?” the dean asked, and Tom was shocked by his curtness.
“Well, presumably later in the spring. She’ll need time, of course, to prepare her parents, that sort of thing. Surely you understand?”
But he didn’t, Tom realized suddenly. It was the first time he realized how few of his friends and colleagues did, or could, understand. Was it so peculiar to have fallen in love twice? Because yes, he knew he had loved Polly, once—though he now knew that to have been a youthful love, immature, more a product of his and Polly’s shared desire to leave Ireland and discover something new. Of course he knew that Addie was the age he’d been then, but already, at the tender age of twenty-one, Addie seemed to him to have a maturity, a depth really, that somehow transcended age. Certainly, he felt, she was worlds away from the tender, unformed boy he’d been at twenty-one. How could he have known, when he met Polly at the age of nineteen, fresh from the countryside and as ripe for sexual awakening as any rural altar boy, that so much still lay ahead? First would come his timid, country-boy acceptance of his pairing with a taxonomist as his adviser at Cornell (where he finished his dissertation, a dry-as-dust taxonomy of the birds of New York state, in record time). He’d been unable, back then, to admit that he longed to work with other, younger faculty members at Cornell—early pioneers in the recording of birdsongs. It wasn’t until he was at Burnham, holding an academic position of his own, earning a bona fide American salary, that he’d been able, at last, to delve into what would become his life’s work, on songbirds and their music, as well as their tenuous survival.
Then, eight years later, would come the unexpected, delirious discovery of this delicate yet steely bird herself, Addie Sturmer the artist, brash and fitful and timid and hesitant and gifted beyond words, a child of ten in the woods of Pennsylvania the year he crossed the Atlantic with his bride, drawing with Clive Behrend in a rustic hide on the outskirts of Oxford as his marriage began its slow dissolve.
How could he have known? What could he possibly have done differently? And how could he possibly change anything now—now that real joy was there, within his reach, the delight of work that he loved and that he knew would last and then, on the heels of this, a kind of romantic passion he’d never even imagined, so different from what he’d felt for Polly? A kind that made him ache, and not only sexually—though his physical longing for Addie had been keen, almost shocking really, after he’d read her first field journal. But also an ache of, what exactly, protectiveness? All right, a kind of fatherly protectiveness, perhaps.
But that wasn’t all of it, by any stretch. Because he felt awed by her as well. Genuinely awed. By her raw talent, her true lack of concern for convention, for others’ expectations of her.
Over the years he’d had a number of students who shared his deep, almost visceral, love of birds; watching them in the field, he could see it. A few had gone on to do graduate work in zoology—one even landing at Cornell and, to Tom’s surprise, choosing to do taxonomic work because, she said, she so loved the music of the birds’ Latin names.
But Addie was different; accompanying her in the field those first months, his counts were always low—because he couldn’t take his eyes off her. Perched on a low branch, drawing furiously and silently, with rapt attention, she was so immersed in what she was doing that she wouldn’t notice him, standing maybe twenty yards away, with his field glasses poised—and focused on her. Noting her identifying characteristics: the soft curves of her brow and cheekbone. Her ful
l, wet lips, which she licked slowly as she drew. Downy hair on the nape of her neck, a glittering trail of sweat snaking down her breastbone, breasts rising and falling with her steady breath, muscled legs gripping the branch below her.
At times, that first May, he had moments of doubting that her interest had much, if anything, to do with him; it was the birds she was after, he feared. Was there an openness to him, an interest in him, in those lines of her field narratives, he would ask himself—or was he just a foolish, deluded older man, unhappy in his marriage, mistaking her passion for birds and art for some sort of feeling for him? But then the way she looked at him, that Saturday morning in the field, the two of them alone . . . surely, he thought, he wasn’t imagining it.
When they stepped onto the rocks to cross the creek and she slipped, midway across, he stopped breathing as he reached to steady her and felt, he was sure of it, her leaning all her weight there against him. And then she turned and lowered her glasses, and looked at him, and then he knew for sure, and his hands held her waist, and he kissed her, and he could have been a boy again, a hungry boy. Waiting, until the course’s end, to make love to her, reading her now completely open field notebook entries—it was all pure agony, and pure bliss. On their first night together, a fresh sheet spread over the mattress he’d carried down to the cottage, she told him she’d never had intercourse, and for a moment he panicked, and nearly fled.
And then she laughed, that silvery wrenlike laugh of hers that never changed. “I was always told I should ‘save myself,’” she said, “and I could never understand why.” She reached for his face with both her hands. “Now I see what I was saving myself for.” After that night he’d never stopped thinking of her beautiful, small body—open to him, reaching for him—as the most miraculous of gifts. Later, in the heat of summer, sweating already in the early-morning hours, he would train his field glasses on her again. When she put her pencil down and turned to see him watching her, she smiled, then lifted her T-shirt over her head, unfastened and lowered her bra, and turned to face him, beckoning him to join her as she continued, unzipping her cut-off blue jeans.
They rarely left the woods, that first summer and on into the fall, without making love. In the grass or the leaves, in whatever spot they could find that was free of nettles and poison ivy. They didn’t want or need a blanket; it felt to Tom, every time, as if they were flying, floating above the earth, their bones as light as air. After, he would find himself humming. Adeline, sweet Adeline. His wood thrush, his airborne beauty.
She was a bird, to him. There was no other way to describe it. But imagine trying that metaphor on the dean. She is a bird, Dan. A delicate, dewy warbler on its first trip down from the wilds of Canada. And my love for her? It is my own soaring, alongside her, weaving wildly with her in tireless flight.
Does this make things any clearer?
Of course he couldn’t, and wouldn’t, reach for such lyricism with Dan. Though they had, on several occasions, discussed the poems of William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens. And though, Tom was convinced, scientists could grasp metaphor far more readily than many a nonscientist. It was scientists, in Tom’s estimation, who were the last great Romantics, the only real optimists left in a world driven increasingly by fear and doubt and cynicism, all of which had been laid, astoundingly, at the feet of the likes of Charles Darwin.
“These are troubled times, Tom,” he heard the dean say then. “We’re a nation at war, and our students are facing so many uncertainties. . . .”
Yes! he wanted to scream. Yes—precisely. That’s precisely it, and now I can tell them, and tell them honestly, there are things of value, even here, even in a world crazed with fear and driven by greed and staring at the possibility of ecological disaster. . . .
“The president is worried, and he’s getting all kinds of pressure, from all sides, you can imagine, worries about student unrest, that sort of thing. There are concerns about what some members of the faculty—and you in particular, Tom—are doing, in and out of the classroom, to stir the students up.”
Here the dean cleared his throat yet again—a sign, Tom had always believed, of the dean’s discomfort with this aspect of his job. “There are concerns too,” he continued, “about collapsing moral standards. . . . Maybe you can see where I’m leading here. . . .”
But where in God’s name was he leading? “Collapsing moral standards”? All these disembodied “There are concerns.”. . . Tom hated language like this, the blank, faceless double-talk of bureaucracies, academic or governmental or otherwise. The sad thing was, he felt that despite his dutiful mouthing of the words, his old friend Dan could surely see as well as he could the dangers of keeping silent, of not “stirring the students up.”
He knew what he wanted to say; it was quite simple really. It was the same thing he’d been trying, each semester in recent years, to convey to his students. Even here—even in the midst of all these terrors—there can be this: the opportunity to teach and learn. To do work that you love. And there can be true passion—true, unadorned love and passion between two people.
Surely he could say this to Dan, he thought, to his friend of seven years now, someone who understood him, who valued his work and shared, in so many ways, his view of the world.
Before he could begin, Dan spoke again. “And so what we’d like to propose is that you take a sabbatical next year—a year’s leave, partially paid, of course, even though you haven’t yet gone through the official channels. You know, get away from Burnham for a year, let things blow over a bit. Why don’t you set something up at Cornell, take Addie to Ithaca with you—after you’re safely married?”
Tom was stunned. He struggled to put a brake on his thoughts—still wrangling with the task of describing his love for Addie, his conviction about his work—and to absorb, fully, what the dean had just told him.
Slowly the last words took hold. A year’s leave. Time away from Burnham. He knew what this was: a quiet reprimand disguised as a gift, maybe even a kind of bribe, with the built-in assumption that he would return, the following year, “rested,” revived by a year of research. And quieter.
Most people in his position would, Tom knew, seize this opportunity eagerly. Most people would be grateful. Perhaps he should have been too. But that wasn’t how he felt. Cheated was more like it. Robbed. Robbed of an opportunity, yes, an opportunity, in a world growing madder by the day, to show his students another way to live. A way of following one’s passions, not suppressing them.
Addie, on the other hand, was ecstatic when she heard the news.
“We can go to England!” she said. “You can take me to Ireland to meet your family!”
But, Tom said, his work was on American songbirds—specifically songbirds that migrated through their own region of southeastern Pennsylvania. And even supposing he eventually hoped to expand that work to include other regions of the United States, what, for God’s sake, would he do in England and Ireland?
“Write,” was Addie’s answer. “Finish the thing.” Indeed, as Addie reminded him, he did have far more notes than he needed, already, for a book. But he’d been hesitant to start, fearing he lacked the one thing—the one perfect example, the one perfect moment in the field—that could somehow bring all his ideas together.
It was Addie, in fact, who made Tom Kavanagh’s one and only book happen at all. “It’s time to take the next step, don’t you think?” she asked him gently that afternoon after his meeting with the dean. He’d stepped quietly into the front room of the cottage and found her sitting by the woodstove, painting, her back to him. She hadn’t heard him come in, and for a while he stood and watched her, the way she stood suddenly, peering at the canvas, her face inches from the image, then sat back down on her stool and made the slightest adjustment with the tiny brush she held. She was painting a trio of black-capped chickadees, playfully swinging from several branches of a crab-apple tree. They were so lifelike he felt he could hear them—dee-dee-dee-dee—and he thought, t
hen, What matters is this, this quiet, invaluable work. Though he hated to do it, he cleared his throat, to interrupt her, and tell her his news.
“We’ll work on it together,” she said. “It will be easier to do it somewhere else, don’t you think? Without all the distractions you have here? And in the meantime I can work on new species—birds I’ll never get the chance to draw here.”
At that moment he knew that whatever happened in the following year, or the years after that, he had made one perfectly right decision: to be with her. And like Tom’s other certainties—the importance of work that one loves, the redemptive powers of music and poetry, the unquestionable clarity of evolutionary theory—he remained unflagging in this as well, in his love for Addie Kavanagh, “the Sturmer girl,” despite countless trials, for the rest of her life.
They spent the early fall in the house known as Schaumboch’s, at Hawk Mountain, the well-known preserve fifty miles west of Burnham. Tom had visited Hawk Mountain as soon as he’d arrived in Pennsylvania to begin his job at Burnham, armed with a letter of introduction from his adviser. Since then he’d been taking some of his better students there every fall, spending hours perched on the Kitattiny Ridge, glasses poised, counting the migrating red-tailed, sharp-shinned, and Cooper’s hawks, and the occasional, thrilling peregrine falcon.
Later that fall, Tom and Addie lived for two months in a cottage at Cape May, at the very tip of New Jersey, where Addie drew her first osprey and pelicans, and tried her hand at the double-crested cormorant. Then, in early 1967, they sailed to England, where they revisited Addie’s old haunts, then made their way to Donegal to see Tom’s ailing mother.
Wherever they went, they spent mornings in the outdoors, looking for birds. Gradually, as they both became more absorbed in the work they were doing—watching birds, drawing and writing, refining and revising, and, increasingly that year, reading harrowing research about the decline of more and more species—they found themselves able to be together in the field without tearing off their clothes and searching for a soft, hidden, nettle-free spot.
In Hovering Flight Page 7