The rocking chair by the window where the sun streaked in every morning, white-gold and gleaming. The sunlight that, only a week or so before, had made her weep with happiness, remembering that same gold light shining on her and Tom in the morning, waking on their mattress on the floor, feeling drugged with the happy ache of a night of lovemaking. And then to sit in that same light, in her beautiful oak rocking chair, the one that had been her mother’s and her grandmother’s before that, baby suckling contentedly at her breast. It felt like it was almost too much, more happiness than she could bear, she’d written in her field notebook.
Only a month ago that had been, she realized one steaming day in August. But that day she was sick of the rocking chair—that and her bed the only places she’d been for a week, it seemed. Sick of the chair and sick of the sunlight, that same summer light, still yellow-white, but now it seemed a sickly yellow to her. Hot and cloying. How she wished it would rain.
Because it would be an awful day for birds now anyway, she knew. Too hazy, too still. And by then it was after ten; no birds, if there were any near the creek at all, would be stirring by then.
So she would put Scarlet, sated and sleeping soundly, in the bassinet. And she would sit down to type some more of Tom’s notes. And she would fight the urge to cry. Because she was so terribly, miserably, indescribably bored—bored with washing diapers, bored with sitting and nursing, barely able even to read because she couldn’t turn the pages without rousing, and angering, her demanding baby. Bored too with typing Tom’s words about the songs of birds, instead of hearing—and more importantly, for her, seeing—the things themselves.
That kind of boredom, boredom and exhaustion with the whole enterprise of being a wife and a mother and “making a home,” was a hard thing for someone like Addie Kavanagh to admit, in Burnham, Pennsylvania, in the summer of 1968. Even harder to admit than the boredom was this simple fact: She didn’t entirely love motherhood. She wasn’t even sure she loved her husband, at least not in the way that she had only a year before.
Tom saw the change and tried, as best he could, to help. It’s perfectly ordinary, happens to every woman with at least one of her children, typically the first—so his married colleagues in the Hall of Science assured him at their morning coffee break.
“Just the baby blues,” Jack Gaines, a jovial chemist and father of four, told him. “Get her out of the house, take her to dinner. Give the baby her bottle and change a diaper from time to time. She’ll snap out of it soon enough.”
Tom didn’t have the heart to tell him that he and Addie both hated going out to dinner, preferring food they’d cooked themselves. And he’d changed many diapers. And Scarlet had never had a single bottle; what would be the point of that, Addie had said, when her breasts were perfectly adequate, and far better for Scarlet?
But the getting her out of the house part—that made sense to him. And so when he returned home from campus in the late afternoons, Scarlet’s fussiest times, he pulled both mother and baby out of the house for a walk along the creek. He held Scarlet, bouncing her and cooing to her, trying to stop her crying. Addie looked better after these walks, he told himself, as evening came on and she nursed Scarlet on the porch before they went inside for dinner. A bit more color in her cheeks, less sluggishness in her steps.
But, Tom knew, it wasn’t just the “baby blues” for Addie. For Addie it had something to do with the birds, and her work. As the fall deepened, he would urge her to go to her blind early on the weekend mornings. He learned quickly not to ask her how things had gone, what she’d seen or drawn. She refused to show him the few sketches she came back with. More often than not, she came back empty-handed.
Still she persisted in going to the blind, often, in those early years, taking the increasingly independent Scarlet along with her. Eventually she started producing again—workmanlike illustrations, adequate for most of her paying work. But (and of course Tom could see this, though he said nothing; they never spoke of it) completely lacking the energy and focus, the bright life of the plates in the Prosody, say, as well as of her work from the months of her pregnancy.
Meanwhile, his own work had never felt more absorbing. Since publication of the book he was called, from time to time, to provide commentary on issues like habitat loss, waste disposal and the water supply, any noticeable decline in migrating species. And the teaching! It had never been better. In part it was the students, who, he was delighted to find on his return from the sabbatical, had suddenly become angry, committed, vocal; the cultural revolution had, it seemed, reached even the tiny Burnham campus.
Suddenly they were all hungry for his courses, hungry for his recitations from Yeats and the English Romantics, but also for his lectures on Darwin and Haeckel. As the months, then the years, passed and the war dragged on, it delighted him to drive Addie, Scarlet, and a van full of students to antiwar rallies and marches in Philadelphia and, on occasion, Washington.
Suddenly, it seemed, even the Burnham administrators, including the new president, had come to share the views of Tom and many of his colleagues on the misguided war, even to tolerate the students’ angry voices. It was the dawn of a new decade, and the concerns for the planet that he and Addie had voiced in the Prosody seemed to be catching on with the public at large. (Who knew, in the giddy spring of 1971, that even Earth Day would eventually become an occasion for corporate sloganeering?)
It was at one of the Philadelphia marches, when Scarlet was three, that Addie discovered the Bucks County Mothers for the Earth (or “Bucks Mamas,” as they called themselves). And for a number of years, busy as she was, first with petitions and letter-writing, then with teach-ins and sit-ins and more, Addie seemed barely to notice, and certainly not to mind, how seldom she made it into the field to observe and sketch. An hour or two of work in the mornings, mainly just revisiting older pieces or working from one of the countless sketches in the notebooks piled below her work table—this was enough to generate some income. And then the rest of her day was free for more pressing tasks.
First was the shopping mall slated to be built on a swath of woods and uncultivated farmland outside Doylestown, an area that was a known breeding ground for an increasingly rare butterfly called the regal fritillary. Later it seemed almost quaint to think of Addie and her fellow Bucks Mamas, gathered around someone’s kitchen table to write their indignant letters, or squeezed into some state legislator’s tiny local office to present their list of concerns. Many, like Addie, would be dressed in cotton skirts and hand-knit sweaters, long braids down their backs—some with nursing babies tucked in slings, others with grubby, ragamuffin kids like Scarlet trailing in their wake. Others were tidily dressed suburban homemakers with equally tidy children, carting everyone in their boat-sized station wagons. All of them, it seemed, had read Silent Spring; all were worried about contaminated water, about cancer, about their children’s futures.
They lost the battle over the shopping mall, of course. But by then Addie’s appetite was whetted. And she’d learned some lessons from that sad failure. Forget the letters and the polite visits to legislators’ offices was one; she’d seen the patronizing contempt behind the fat, self-satisfied state senator’s fake smile, his smug “You ladies are doing the most important work of all, after all.” Eventually Addie and a few of the other Bucks Mamas broke away from the larger group and joined up with another loosely affiliated group of local activists—a few graduate students from Penn, a handful of back-to-the-landers who were living on a minicommune near New Hope, a disgruntled former engineer at Bethlehem Steel. And eventually a quiet, secretive, and disturbed high school student from Riegelsville named Brian Kent.
It was better, Tom told himself, to see Addie passionately engaged in something once again. No question about it. Of course he missed the days when she’d seemed just as enthusiastic about the work that, for a while at least, they’d shared. The trips they’d taken together, their time in the field, with Scarlet riding along in her backpack.
/> Still, better to see her busy and happy again, though the group she was now involved with grew daily more provocative in its actions. Setting up camp and squatting on land that was slated for development. Seeking arrest. By this time, Scarlet was eight, nine, ten—old enough to be bothered by a mother who routinely went to jail. At times Tom felt he could barely remember the younger Addie, the eager artist, there at her easel by the woodstove.
24 May 1965
Monday
Sunday Woods—back to where we started
Time: 5:30–8 A.M.
Observers: The Surviving Loons + Tom Kavanagh first; then Addie S. off on her own, in her makeshift blind at the convergence of Little and Nisky Creeks
Habitat: Trees
Weather: Beautiful; there is no time like mid-May—nothing compares.
Oh—and 16.65% cloud cover.
Remarks: Species lists are, as I’ve told you, for madmen—as silly as a stuffed great horned owl. (As I mentioned early on, I only need to pass!) But I do hope you like my drawings. The wood thrush is getting closer, don’t you think? Others less so, I know.
Comments: I drew a scarlet tanager for an hour and a half. There is something I can’t quite get about this bird—and it’s so much more than the color. “Some mysteries remain.”
24 May—Of course there have been important women. Thank you for making me aware of this. I went to Hawk Mountain on field trips as a child. How is it that no one told me about Rosalie Edge or Irma Broun?
Yes, I’d enjoy visiting either Hawk Mountain or Audubon’s home at Mill Grove. But to be honest, I’d rather you joined me at the cottage this weekend, if you’re sure you now feel free to do so.
I’m sorry I can’t seem to say I’m sorry that Polly has decided to move to New York with her voice teacher.
No, I’m not. I’m not sorry at all.
I have a camp stove. We could have franks and beans and wine. Why not?
And yes, both Cora and Lou know. But they’re sworn to secrecy, and they are completely trustworthy. Maybe you noticed, early on, that Lou abandoned the challenge of you to turn her sights on Mr. Premed? I’d said nothing to her, but as I told you, she’s a sharp observer; she watches more closely than anyone realizes. Too bad Princess I Hate These Bugs was so slow on the uptake. But I can’t say I miss her much.
Though I haven’t spent much time with the Surviving Loons for the past week or so, I’ll miss this class when it ends (for more than the obvious reasons), as I know you will. Who’d have guessed that Mr. Premed would show so much skill and enthusiasm—or that Lou would have stuck with him for these three weeks?
Whatever you decide about the weekend is fine. I’ll be happy to listen for owls or watch for hawks or work further on my sweet wood thrush—whatever we do. Knowing that I’ll be with you, that things are quiet for you at home now, imagining a summer in the field and at work on the cottage—it’s all made me more content than I’ve felt in months. Since England really.
And I’m painting better than ever, I think. I have lots to show you when you come by the studio tomorrow.
nine
AT SOME POINT, ADDIE’S attention shifted to dead birds.
There were lots of them. More than most people realized. Some slammed into windows. Others, their bodies wrecked by pesticides, by contaminated water, by insect-borne disease, simply fell from the sky one day, dead.
Eventually she couldn’t stop seeing them, everywhere. They populated her dreams, the way living birds—soaring, singing, mating, migrating—had fluttered there behind her eyelids, waking or sleeping, when she was younger.
But not for a while. For a while, she remained happy—focused and happy. Scarlet had not one but two happy, contented parents: happily and contentedly doing their work each day. Rising readily, eager to get to it all. And at the end of the day, sleeping the sleep of those who’ve earned their rest.
Were they distracted by their young child, by worries about money, by the demands of distant family members, by their friends’ joys and sorrows? Of course. But consider the difference between happy parents who have distractions, and some of the other kinds. Then perhaps Scarlet’s reluctance to write a memoir will make more sense. Yes, her parents were colorful. But maybe, she thought, she wasn’t angry enough, at least not now. Shouldn’t a young writer recalling colorful parents like Addie and Tom be angry?
It was true that Scarlet wished Addie had been willing to try the traditional treatments again. It was true that she found her mother’s choosing to fight a local developer (even from the grave) instead of her own disease a bit ridiculous, and also selfish, in Addie’s peculiar way. It was true that Scarlet had had her doubts, as she grew older, about the strength of her parents’ bond. It was true that, as her mother’s work changed dramatically, Scarlet began to question its value—troubled, as she was, by the rage that seemed to fuel it and by what seemed to her its too unsubtle agenda, longing instead for the gentler strokes, the comforting realism of the paintings from her childhood. And it was true that she’d felt lonely at times, baffled by her mother’s anger.
On the other hand, Scarlet couldn’t think of a single time when Addie had directed any of that anger at her. Instead she had learned, from both Addie and Tom, that when you’re angry, or despairing, or lonely, what you really need to do is keep working, always working—whatever your work might be: painting, scanning birdsongs, camping out and getting arrested and lying to the police to protect someone who can’t protect himself. When Scarlet declared to her parents that she had decided her work would be the writing of poems, Tom and Addie, unlike the parents of a number of her friends, were pleased. She hadn’t expected this from Addie.
“I know no poet is ever going to save the world,” she said to Addie, shyly, after reading them a few of her poems on a visit to Burnham when she was a graduate student. She was sitting on the floor, leaning her head back and onto Addie’s lap, where she sat on the sofa behind her. Tom had risen to add a log to the fire in the woodstove.
“Well, no one’s going to manage to do that, I’m afraid,” Addie said as she fiddled with her daughter’s newly shorn hair. Scarlet could see Tom’s shoulders slump when she said it; it wasn’t the answer he’d hoped Addie would give her, Scarlet knew, and yet it didn’t upset her at all. She doesn’t mind, was all Scarlet thought; I said I couldn’t save the world, and Addie doesn’t mind.
“You’ve got as good a chance of saving it as some lunatic painter like your mother,” Addie went on, then tugged playfully on Scarlet’s hair. Tom’s smile, when he sat down next to Addie and reached to pull her toward him, looked worn. But something about that moment made Scarlet feel irrationally happy. As happy as she’d been as a child.
Because in truth Scarlet’s childhood had been quite happy. A comfortable home—a cottage still, really, even with Tom and Addie’s many improvements and additions through the years—filled with books and art (Addie’s right alongside Scarlet’s own childish efforts), warm rugs and quilts, the smells of wood smoke and the bread Tom baked on Sundays and various and sundry happy, muddy dogs they took in over the years. And at night, the sounds of Nisky Creek, of crickets, frogs, owls, and lullabies—Addie, despite her so-called tin ear, singing in a breathy, reedy voice while she washed the dinner dishes, Tom playing his fiddle, pausing now and then for sips from a glass of scotch, his one indulgence.
Scarlet would doze on the rug by the woodstove, a book open before her, half dreaming along to “The Seal’s Lullaby”—Kipling’s words set to a tune of Tom’s own devising. “Now hush thee my baby, the night is behind us/And black are the waters that sparkled so green. . . .” Tom and Addie sang it together, and as Scarlet drifted in and out of sleep the creek outside their door turned into the sea, black and sheltering, and she into not a seal but a cormorant, warm in the nest of her mother’s arms, floating there, flushed with warmth despite the cold surrounding them. Smelling smoke and yeast and her mother’s own smell—dusting of talc, faint trace of sweat on her pullover, tu
rpentine on her fingers—buoyed by her parents’ apparent happiness, by the sad, sweet tunes her father played, everything as safe and sure as Eden.
The creek was always there, clear and full in spring, often just a trickle by fall. Banked, at spots, with cool, soft sand, full of smoothly rounded stones and endless tadpoles and minnows and crawfish for catching, lazy catfish in shaded pools and belching frogs on the low branches of a giant elm on the bank.
During the day, when Tom went off to teach, Addie was distracted by her own work. And so Scarlet quickly learned to rely on her own imagination, creating elaborate stories that featured her. Addie let her loose with crayons she could use anywhere, including the walls and floor of her blind and, on occasion, the house.
Scarlet felt wrapped in a safe cocoon of k-selected nurturing; she ate well, she slept well, and eventually she discovered playmates there along the creek—the children of her father’s colleagues, her fellow tree climbers, bike riders, waders and stone skippers and crawfish catchers. Words and music and pictures and a boundless out-of-doors. And, when she was eight, the arrival of Peter Gleason, an only child like Scarlet and her soulmate-to-be, son of Tom’s colleague Richard, from the Burnham English Department.
In Hovering Flight Page 9