“Probably a good thing,” Tom laughed one evening as they drank their pints beside the fire in a pub in Ambleside, “considering how cold and wet these boggy English trails are.”
“And how crowded with sturdy English walkers,” Addie agreed, taking a long, thirsty sip from her glass.
And so they settled into a routine of working together: mornings in the field, observing and drawing; afternoons at desk and easel; occasional evenings spent looking over each other’s work, making pointed but gentle suggestions. They eased comfortably into a collaboration that, Tom blithely assumed, would continue for the rest of their lives.
By August, when they returned to Burnham, Tom had mailed the manuscript that would become A Prosody of Birds to an editor recommended by a colleague, and Addie was refining the paintings for the plates that would accompany it. A month later, they received three significant phone calls in the space of a week. The first was from Tom’s brother, telling him that their mother had died. The second was from the university press that wished to publish Tom’s book. And the third was from the college physician, informing them that yes, Addie was indeed pregnant.
16 May 1965
Sunday
Rising Valley, Burnham, Bucks Co., PA (convergence of Kleine/Little and Nisky Creeks, site of an abandoned fishing cottage, 1 mi. from the Burnham College campus)
Time: 5–8 P.M. (I can’t be military about this anymore.)
Observers: Addie Sturmer, and everywhere, the scent, the sound—the ghost of Tom Kavanagh
Habitat: Creek bank. Smooth rocks and rich green moss that is delightfully slippery. Ice-cold water. Something in the air that’s making me feel drunk.
Weather: Temp. 75 degrees F, or so; a red sunset back there, behind the ridge
23% cloud cover, I’d say; a bit more than yesterday, when the valley was awash in something golden that I find I can’t describe, or paint
Remarks: I keep thinking about the fact that you are married. It’s difficult to concentrate on this drawing, which isn’t going anywhere.
SPECIES LIST
Wood Thrush, Hylocichla mustelina (which is like music too) 1. Ours. He was here again; I heard him and found him the moment I arrived.
Number of species: 1; Number of Individuals: 1; Time: 3 hrs.
Comments: All the same, married or not, I would kiss you again. And again. Water splashing at our feet, smell of someone’s wood fire burning. Wood thrush trilling overhead. Your hand at my back, steadying me on the slick rocks, then at my waist, turning me to face you.
16 May—I can’t give you the owl caricature because I need what’s on the back of it. It’s a sketch I did, immediately after class that day, of your face. It’s only for me, and I’ll keep it forever. I never want to forget the way you looked to me that day.
I haven’t yet told you that I draw you almost as obsessively as I draw the sandpiper, and now the wood thrush.
Now I’ve told you.
Now I have to find a way to draw your mouth—now that I know its taste. And also the feeling of your smooth jaw below my hand.
Will I kiss you again? I can still hear the wood thrush, now. But already I’m afraid of forgetting how it felt when I nearly fell and you reached for me and I lowered my field glasses and there was your face, your mouth, reaching for mine—the thing I’ve longed for since the day you walked into the classroom with that ridiculous stuffed owl.
eight
THE BURR OF CERTAIN birds’ songs—as in blurred, as in a kind of simultaneous whistle and hum: Addie heard it, truly heard it, for the first time when she was pregnant. Especially in the early and then the late months, in the fall and then the spring, during the blurry—burry—bookends of her pregnancy. And never more so than in the song of the scarlet tanager—“robinlike but hoarse,” in Peterson’s words, “like a robin with a sore throat.”
Or, in the words of F. Schuyler Matthews, “a lazy drowsy, dozy buzz,” depicted on his musical staffs as a series of trilled notes—as if a trill could in any way capture it, said Tom, who wrote of the guttural something or other one hears, or imagines hearing, in an Anglo-Saxon poem.
Eight months pregnant and checking proofs for A Prosody of Birds, Addie said nothing, though she found this inaccurate; “lazy drowsy, dozy” came closer, but still failed to capture how she felt, which was how the scarlet tanager sounded: woozy yet alert, all soft and full and rounded at the edges, all readiness and peace.
And at home with inaccuracy, for a change. After all, she knew her accompanying plate was not quite right either—the particular orange-red of the breeding male still so elusive to her, still not quite there.
“Learn not to fear contrasts in the same field of color. They are hard, but they occur, and are consequently to be reckoned with.” So wrote Louis Agassiz Fuertes to his protégé George Miksch Sutton, in a letter included in a book by Fuertes’s daughter that Addie would read years later. She’d struggled mightily, day in and day out, through the year of her “research assistantship,” to hone that kind of precision, that accuracy in degrees of color, in nuance. She’d longed for someone to guide her toward it, a mentor or teacher who could show her the way. But she was too timid to send anything to Clive Behrend, and Tom seemed, genuinely, to adore anything she painted or drew.
But now, back from their six months abroad, filled again with the English, and now too the Irish, countryside, so pleasantly full, blurry and full, with the birds and their songs and her love for Tom and, now, the baby that she carried, precision and accuracy seemed, somehow, beside the point. It was the burring she was after.
Which was there, too, in the brown mud, the richly rotting leaves along the creek’s edge and the loose, fragrant trails through the woods. And also in a kind of smudged quality to the air and sky—gray and filmy and dreamy—throughout the fall and again in the spring, the seasons before and after the crisp clarity of winter. Winter, when she got practical and filled the larder and shaped a cozy nursery in the alcove of the bedroom she shared with Tom. Winter, when the cold and bright and cloudless days—a hawk’s view of branch and sky—took her away from painting and into obsessive reading of books that Tom, her emergent ecologist of a husband, was recommending: Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac and, most importantly, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.
But in the fall and spring, when the songbirds did in fact return (she’d begun, genuinely, to fear they wouldn’t, so powerfully had her January reading of Silent Spring affected her), she settled into the burring, the gentleness of the smudged edges, and produced what certain devotees of her work (her daughter among this opinionated group) would eventually consider her finest work. Those paintings of the gentle, softened strokes, the strange sense of an echo of flight still there in the bird’s wing. The paintings that came well before the later, harsher work, but were also worlds away from her earlier concerns with accuracy, with precise contrasts in the same field of color.
Still, though, the seeds of her later, angrier work could be found in the sharp-eyed reading she was doing that winter, during her busily focused middle trimester. What, for instance, might have caused that recurring haziness, that poetic, but probably somehow faintly poisoned, smudging of the air? In the crispness of January, February, early March, she wondered and worried. But by May, as the birds sang, as she grew big as a mountain herself, paintbrush poised on the ridge of her belly, she forgot her worries for a while.
Of course by the time her labor commenced Addie had known, for quite some time, that her child would be named for a bird—specifically for the bird that somehow embodied her feelings during the fall of 1967 and the spring of 1968: Scarlet if she was a girl, Tanager if a boy.
“Surely lucky you were a girl,” Tom would say years later—though in fact Scarlet had always fancied the name Tanager Kavanagh. Unlike the more practical Tom, who, after the chaos of his own large, mostly unhappy family, had never really imagined himself with a child of his own. Who, like most fathers of his generation, left most decisions having t
o do with childbearing and raising to his young wife, and who swallowed his fears and worries when, on the heels of her wintertime reading, Addie announced that she would have her child at home, assisted by an illegal midwife.
Her confidence was deceiving. Because she had her fears and worries too, and, like Tom, struggled to imagine herself as an actual parent. She was, after all, still so young, and she felt, in many ways, like a child herself. But things happened, and she was aware of a funny kind of longing that she hadn’t felt before. There was Cora, for instance.
The fall before their travels to Cape May and then to Britain, on their way back to Burnham from Hawk Mountain, Addie and Tom had stopped to visit Cora and Karl and their placid, three-month-old baby boy in Bethlehem. Never before had a baby had such an effect on Addie. She’d held him through the entire visit, and there had been something about his wide, trusting eyes that overwhelmed her. She’d cried during the whole hour’s drive back to Burnham, and she’d been completely incapable of explaining why.
And then, the following May, was the strange exchange she’d had with Miss Smallwood. “Have children,” she said to Addie, unaccountably and out of nowhere, there in the vestibule of her row house where they stood, pulling off Wellingtons and layers of sweaters, scarves, jackets. Tom was still outside, looking for a place to park the car.
“I should have, I might have—but I didn’t. And then, you see, you’re left with nothing.” She waved her hand toward the warm interior of the front parlor—which, with its book-lined walls and Persian rugs and marble-edged fireplace, hardly looked like nothing to Addie.
She was so taken aback by this unexpected, offhand advice (they’d just been talking, as best she could recall, about the struggles of John James Audubon’s wife, Lucy, left behind in Louisiana with their two sons while Audubon journeyed abroad for three years) that she could think of nothing to say. And she stood there, speechless, boot dangling from her hand, as Miss Smallwood gave her a sad smile, then threw her coat at a hook and darted toward the kitchen, calling, “I’ll start the tea, then.”
She said nothing about it to Tom. But a month later, on the beach near Falcarragh, where he stood silent, tears filling his eyes, after their visit with his ill and senile mother, she took his hand and said, “Maybe we could have a baby.” How she knew this was the right time to say such a thing was a mystery to her. But there the words were. “Maybe . . . a baby.” He looked at her then, for a very long time, and then nodded. A month later he finished his manuscript, sitting at a desk in the British Museum. And the next day, as they set sail for home, Addie suspected, rightly, that her misery was not due to seasickness alone.
And so by the summer of 1968, everything was different. Tom was back to teaching, with more passion than ever—buoyed by his new book, his new role as a father, an ecological awareness refined by his months in Britain, his fury over the ongoing agony of the war in Southeast Asia. And Addie—the brazen young woman of two years before, the one who’d stared blankly back into the many disapproving faces on the Burnham campus—suddenly Addie, the new mother, was beloved and respected in all quarters. It started with being noticeably pregnant. When she walked on the Burnham campus that spring semester, to return books to the library or, on sunny days, to meet Tom for lunch in the garden outside the Hall of Science, everyone—even sour old Mrs. Hodges from the college bookstore, who, Addie was convinced, had hated her since her days as a student, counting out her last bit of change for a new paintbrush or sketchbook—smiled and greeted her warmly.
It would never cease to amaze her, the power of motherhood to transform a woman in the eyes of others. Later she would learn how tenuous a mother’s hold on that brittle respect could be. For now, though, she was the darling not only of the Burnham College administration, but also of her own parents, who would eventually settle into the role of in-laws to a college professor only fifteen years younger than they were, as well as grandparents to a brown-eyed girl with perpetually tangled reddish-brown hair, a wild little thing who was, in their opinion, allowed to roam far too freely along the banks of that menacing creek but whom, nonetheless, they doted on.
Back from England and settled comfortably into the cottage with Tom, Addie was drawing and painting better than ever, and with the publication of A Prosody of Birds had come additional—paying—work as an illustrator. Suddenly she was a working artist, a professional in her own right. Though of course she was distracted from that work, for a time, when Scarlet was born. Sitting in the morning sunlight, nursing the weeks-old Scarlet, she could lose herself for hours, alternately dozing and slipping in and out of a reverie triggered by, of all things, her infant daughter’s smell.
She knew Tom’s smell—the mix of soap, sweat, and wood smoke—and loved it, on his clothing, on her own skin. But the smell of her child was more powerful than that, more real to her than the scent or the feel of her own skin. What, exactly, does one’s own newborn child smell like, there at the level of her still forming flesh, below the creams and powder, below the fresh, wind-dried diaper smell? Bread, maybe—warm bread. The yeasty scent of breast milk on her tongue. The fur at the nape of a kitten’s neck. Adam or Eve before the fall.
If ever she’d needed proof confirming her husband’s preoccupations as a teacher (“We ourselves are mammals, after all; never forget this when someone tries to persuade you that you were magically ‘created’ out of dust,” she could still hear him intoning)—which she hadn’t—here, in the form of this screaming little mammal tugging at her breast, it was.
She was exhilarated by the flood of her love for Scarlet. Exhilarated by it, and exhausted by it too; she spent the first weeks at home with her new baby—assisted first by her mother and then, off and on, by Lou and by Cora—in a fog of happy exhaustion, nursing her baby, staring at her with the eyes of a lover, laughing with her friends and even with her mother.
Her favorite days were those when Lou and Cora arrived to visit, Lou driving over from her mother’s home in Philadelphia, Cora from the graduate school apartment she, Karl, and year-old Richard were living in in Bethlehem. Lou filled the hours with outrageous stories about her increasingly odd and reclusive parents and the usual sagas of her various love affairs, stepping outside every hour or so to walk along the creek and smoke a cigarette; there was something sadder about Lou, Addie thought, watching her from the window while Scarlet slept and Cora tried to interest silent, staring Richard in playing with a set of giant blocks.
After graduating from Burnham, Lou had gone to California with Mr. Premed—or Ted, as they all knew him now—who was, in fact, trying out medical school at that point and who was, to everyone’s continued amazement, still her boyfriend. Each of them continued to have other lovers—a feature of their relationship that, unfortunately, Lou would tire of well before Ted did. Specifically in 1979, when their first child, Elizabeth, was born, and Ted was now Mr. Political Science and in his third year of “polishing” his dissertation, still supported by his not-so-happily long-suffering wife, who thought perhaps a baby might speed him along toward the job market. Which, happily, Elizabeth did, and Mr. Political Science became, in the next several years, Mr. Aggressive Academic Climber, and, before long, an assistant dean at Georgetown.
Addie and Cora would have predicted none of that during those late-spring days in 1968, there along Nisky Creek, tending to the two babies, reminiscing about their rambles through the hills surrounding them only three years before, when they had been giddy girls in Tom’s Biology of the Birds class. The quiet now, while Lou walked along the creek, was nice. But—and this had always been true, Addie realized, watching her friend from the window—as soon as Lou left a room, she missed her.
“Lou seems more thoughtful somehow,” Addie said to Cora. But Cora only laughed when Addie wondered, aloud, whether Lou might not want to have a baby too.
Cora seemed happy, caring for Richard while Karl struggled to complete his graduate degree in electrical engineering and worked two jobs to support his new
family. What she didn’t tell Addie was that sometimes, in the first years after Richard’s birth, she lay awake at night, worrying about her young son’s peculiar placidity, his lack of responsiveness. But in the morning she busied herself with washing diapers and cooking a hot lunch for Karl to eat on the run, and so her days went, and before long Karl had finished his degree and landed a job in southern New Jersey, and then she was pregnant again. Not until Robert’s birth, the following spring, when they were settled into their first little house, in Toms River, when the differences between their two sons, along with Richard’s habits—the rocking and humming, the strange periods of withdrawal, and, most disturbing, the banging of his fists against doors, walls, his own head—became impossible to ignore did they decide to seek advice from a specialist in Philadelphia. Who said it was clearly autism and that, unfortunately, there was little they could do.
But now, on this warm and lovely June day in 1968, what Addie knew was that her baby was healthy, she loved her husband and her life with him, and her dearest friends were with her. There was also a war to worry about, of course, and a draft; there were reckless uses of pesticides, industrial toxins filling the air, and careless destruction of animal habitats right in their own backyard; there were brutal seizures of land and homes and plans to build a useless, and environmentally devastating, dam less than a hundred miles upriver from them. But somehow, during those first weeks of Scarlet’s life, all that knowledge, all that painful awareness, faded away each time Addie looked into her newborn daughter’s eyes, or watched as Tom held her and sang to her, or sat down to reminisce, and laugh, with her old friends.
But then Lou went back to California, and Cora came less frequently, busy, by the summer’s end, with caring for her own ailing mother. And Tom went back to regular hours in his office and to teaching summer courses, because of course they’d need the extra money now. And for several weeks, every time Addie got Scarlet dressed to take her out to the blind, hoping to do even an hour of drawing in the morning, something would happen. An explosion in the diaper and only one clean one left, which meant she’d have to wash more immediately. Gas pains or a prickly rash or a bad dream or something—who knew what went on in that tiny head?—that roused Scarlet from sleep inside the sling Addie had so carefully nestled her in to carry her out to the blind. Then she’d wail, inconsolably, refusing to be comforted until Addie finally extracted her from the sling and sat down, yet again, in the rocking chair by the south-facing window to nurse her.
In Hovering Flight Page 8