If Addie and Tom, together, were Scarlet’s first great love, Peter was her second. His imagination matched—actually probably surpassed—her own, and when Addie abandoned her second Nisky Creek blind for a better, more secluded one a half mile from their cluster of ramshackle houses, that crayon-bedecked tree house became Peter and Scarlet’s stage. A turreted castle on some occasions, a cave of secrets on others. And, some years later, when both were immersed in Tolkien, Middle Earth.
Earlier, though, it was often simply their “house”—complete with doll/child (always only one), stove and cookery, desk and easel: their own households in miniature. Once, when they were nine, they kissed, as they’d seen their parents do often enough, then decided rather quickly that it wasn’t worth the sticky discomfort. Actually, Scarlet had liked it more than Peter had. But she would never have admitted this to him.
When Scarlet was twelve, and preparing to enter junior high school, Peter left for boarding school in New England. There he eventually discovered, or perhaps admitted, that he was gay. In those junior high years, distracted and busy with schoolwork, the volleyball team, the school chorus, Scarlet felt privileged, and cool beyond words, when Peter came home on long breaks from boarding school and regaled her with stories about his various boyfriends, his fling with his drama teacher. She smoked her first clove cigarette (and very nearly threw up that morning’s buckwheat pancakes) on a frigid walk along the towpath between the river and canal, one Christmas vacation when she and Peter were thirteen.
But she also knew by then that Peter was lost to her. And the following summer, Scarlet would move on to her next great loves—Cora and her family, and the Jersey shore. She and her parents spent a week with Cora, Karl, and their sons Richard and Bobby at the end of that summer, in 1982. The next summer they spent another two weeks in Cider Cove, theoretically to help Cora and Karl work on their drafty old house. Though in truth Scarlet spent most of her time biking or at the beach with the boys, and each morning and evening Tom and Addie disappeared, spending hours watching birds from various vantage points along the Delaware Bay. They traveled back regularly, for weekend visits, through the rest of that summer.
Because Addie had rediscovered cormorants and ospreys, common eiders and American bitterns, the birds she’d begun drawing sixteen years earlier, when she and Tom had spent a part of that year’s leave in Cape May. Coastal birds, and a new style of painting, and too her dear friend Cora, who was struggling with her son’s growing isolation and sadness. All of these were important discoveries for Addie, considering that her work had begun to grow stale in recent years, and she was bored and searching and, increasingly, unhappy—hints of a kind of restlessness that, Tom thought, he recognized, and dreaded.
Add to that their fifteen-year-old daughter (yes, childhood is easy; it’s adolescence that leads to bitter, raging memoirs)—who had hated the first year of high school with a passion. By that age Scarlet had begun to show signs of becoming a darkly sullen teenager of a kind that was common enough in Delaware Valley High, the regional high school to which Burnham youth were bused, along with an odd conglomeration of farm kids, transient youths living in the river towns, and the children of owners of gleaming new homes in the earliest of those Bucks County housing developments Addie hated so much. Delaware Valley High was known, in those days, for its high number of teenaged suicide attempts. Hence Peter’s parents’ decision to accept his grandmother’s offer to pay for boarding school. Something Tom and Addie never could have afforded, and something they would have scoffed at (in fact did scoff at, behind closed doors at night) even if they could have.
“School is school, wherever you are,” Addie would say. “You don’t really learn anything of substance until college anyway. Before that it’s all just navigating the social maelstrom, wherever you are.” A sentiment that, even if he didn’t share it (certainly his own experience in Sister Catherine’s classroom gave such an idea the lie), seemed to please Tom.
And so Scarlet was fifteen, and angry. At her parents, at her peers, at the narrow world she found herself in—made more narrow, and more confined, by that ribbon of unused canal, hemming in the last remaining wild river in the United States. Despite the books and artwork, the rugs and quilts and homey smells, the fire in the woodstove, the music at night—itself less frequent now, as Addie, and therefore Tom, rarely seemed interested in it anymore. Despite those things, or maybe because of them. Who can possibly understand the mind of an adolescent?
By age fifteen Scarlet had begun to feel, and high school had certainly served to magnify the feeling, that in fact there was something pretty weird about her parents. Her parents, who never went to church. Who both had work that so engrossed them that they did it all the time, even on weekends. Who drove a rusted, thirdhand station wagon when they had to, but preferred getting around on their old, equally rusty bicycles. Who showed no signs of planning to move to a split-level in one of the new developments (as many of their peers at Burnham had begun to do), one with modern conveniences like, say, a television, anytime soon. Who—at least in Addie’s case—would, from all appearances, eventually prefer seeing a house like that burn to the ground to living in one.
By 1983, Ronald Reagan was president, and Scarlet was fifteen and living with parents like Addie and Tom while attending high school with a lot of kids who lived in those split-levels with televisions (and dishwashers and manicured lawns and at least two—new—cars per family). And while, deep down, she was contemptuous of all that excess, all that “bilge and ruin” (to quote from a poem she wrote later) even then, still she was young. Young and lonely now that Peter was gone, and increasingly embarrassed by a mother who was growing ever more restless, whose despair over rampant development and environmental losses—from the fritillary butterfly of Scarlet’s early childhood to the pesticideladen groundwater and the lost woodlands of recent years—was leading her to keep company with an odd assortment of punks, aging hippies, and other outcasts. For a while Scarlet clung to Tom, her laughing, singing father, who, at least on the surface that she saw, seemed mind-bogglingly oblivious to everything save his work, and his family.
Though perhaps he wasn’t so oblivious. Because it was his idea to keep returning to Cider Cove, renting the little house before the official summer season began, and then staying for long weekends with Cora and Karl and their sons. Cider Cove, where, it seemed, they could all breathe again, after those particularly cold and gray Burnham winters. Cider Cove, and the shore, and bike rides and swimming and long, noisy dinners with Cora and Karl, Bobby and Richard.
At first they’d had to work a bit to adjust to Richard’s peculiar habits, the way he’d suddenly shift from avid talk and voluble laughter to a brooding, distracted silence. Or at least Addie and Scarlet had to work at it; Tom had a natural way of being with Richard from the beginning—listening, with what seemed to be genuine pleasure, to Richard’s obsessive prattling about baseball scores and batting averages, the guitarist Django Reinhardt, the possible evolutionary link between dinosaurs and contemporary birds. At other times he and Richard worked together in silence for hours, constructing surprisingly realistic, and often quite beautiful, models of birds’ nests.
Tom kept a number of these in his office at Burnham, where they were less likely to upset Addie. The oriole’s nest, that delicate, swinging pendulum woven from plant fiber and hair, made Scarlet cry every time she saw it. She could still see Richard’s face as he held it up for everyone to view one evening at dinner, swinging it slowly back and forth and following it with his eyes, a look of rapture on his face.
“They must build it this way so the wind can rock it back and forth like this, to soothe the babies,” he said as he watched the nest. “Like the cradle in the treetop.”
Everyone smiled, enjoying that thought, and also Richard’s obvious pleasure. No one said anything about how “Rock-a-Bye Baby” ends.
Bobby had the same natural ease with his brother. They were like all young teenaged brothers
everywhere, Scarlet supposed—wrestling playfully in the sand, arguing over possible interpretations of Pink Floyd lyrics, jabbing each other at sighting a pretty girl in a bikini on the beach. After years of steering his brother away from other children’s taunts, Bobby had developed a steely, protective edge that almost seemed to dare kids who didn’t know Richard—the local kids at first, then tourists on the beach or at the arcade—to taunt his brother now. Maybe because of that protective edge, in Cider Cove it seemed that no one ever did.
Cora was calm and natural with Richard too, a loving mother with her teenaged son; both she and Karl worked tirelessly to make Richard’s life as normal as possible. But maybe because Scarlet learned to watch Cora and Richard through Addie’s eyes, she always felt she could see the pain and fear around the edges of Cora’s playful hugs and jokes, her exasperated reminders to both her sons about hanging their wet towels outside or putting their bikes away in the garage.
Once Scarlet walked into the kitchen just as Richard was extracting himself from his mother’s embrace. “Mom, I’m all right,” he said softly, then hurried out of the room. Before Scarlet could hurry out of the kitchen as well, Cora turned to face her. In the split second before she put on her well-tuned smile, Scarlet was certain she saw her swallow a sob.
Soon, though Addie and Scarlet might not have been as comfortable with Richard as Tom and Bobby seemed to be, they were all used to his mood swings and his various obsessions, and the majority of their time spent with Cora and her family in those early years was sun-filled and happy and raucous. Those times at Cider Cove saved Addie and Tom and Scarlet, at least for a while. From one of several serious crises Addie experienced as an artist. From Scarlet’s adolescent purgatory.
That first visit late in the summer of 1982 stayed with them into the beginning of the cold months that followed; they had their suntans and sun-streaked hair to remind them, memories of evening picnics on the beach, Addie’s new paintings in the works, Tom’s revived interest in shorebirds and the coastal migration. And during the next two summers they would return as often as they could—spending weeks at a time in Cider Cove, practically living at Cora and Karl’s.
But by the summer of 1983, when he was seventeen, Richard had already begun to show signs of the trouble ahead. His periods of silence and withdrawal grew longer, and only Tom and Bobby were able, occasionally, to pull him out of the house, for a bike ride or a look at some of the feeding birds in the nearby marsh at dusk. And in the year that followed, Addie grew restless again. Tom seemed less oblivious now, but also uncertain. What could anyone do?
By the next summer, when the kids Richard had known in high school were busily preparing for college and he was working in the copy room at his father’s office, with no clear prospects for going elsewhere, he rarely joined the two families for meals. Scarlet’s clearest memory of him, that summer, was of passing him in the upstairs hallway in the evening—this sullen, unshaven young man who, only two years before, had been laughingly riding the waves or careening on the old bicycle in front of hers—trying to at least say hello, while he slouched along, hugging the wall and staring at his feet, refusing to meet her eyes.
Years later, Cora sometimes wondered whether Richard’s diagnosis should have been Asperger Syndrome; he was clearly intelligent, and self-sufficient in many ways, a talented artist and guitarist and, for a time and under Tom’s influence, obsessively interested in birds. But surely As-perger’s along with significant depression, Cora’s friends thought, or maybe bipolar disorder. He was always an isolated child, a loner whose family did everything they could to include him, in games, bike rides, romps on the beach, trips. But as he grew older it became harder and harder to persuade him to leave the house, eventually even his room, for days at a time. His retreat into himself, and into whatever terrors his mind must have held, grew more and more complete.
Back then, from the age of four, when Cora and Karl had taken him to see the specialist in Philadelphia, he’d simply been called autistic. Everyone said the family had coped remarkably well with the burden of having a child like Richard, that they’d handled it all as well as could be expected. Cora’s way of coping with the situation was primarily, it seemed, to opt not to talk about it.
Addie, on the other hand, could not be silenced—except in Cora’s presence, where, remarkably for her, she eventually learned to keep her bitter ravings to herself. Long before the 1990s, when incidents of autism increased dramatically and a number of people began to raise questions about thimerosol, the mercury compound in which children’s vaccines were suspended, Addie got her hands on an obscure article about a quiet little study done in Europe. Mercury poisoning, she started insisting to anyone who would listen (and at that point, not many would). Contaminated fish. Dental amalgams, residue from burning coal, fluorescent lightbulbs, over-the-counter antiseptics. And even more to the point, endless rounds of childhood immunizations suspended in the stuff, absurd amounts of a lethal metal pumped right into an infant’s bloodstream. All the evidence was there. And was anyone bothering to do anything about it? Of course not. What was the grief of a devastated mother here and there next to the power of those particular industries, to the American hunger for canned tuna fish and delusions of health and well-being?
It was around this time that Addie’s focus as an artist began to shift, from living pelicans, bitterns, and the like to dead birds. Any kind—song-birds, raptors, shorebirds. All that mattered to her was that they were dead—specifically, dead because of what she termed “human interference.” And, with an irony that wasn’t lost on her or any of those around her, she became, for a time, a regular customer of Richard Schantz, the busiest and best taxidermist in upper Bucks County. Conveniently, Tom had kept the state license allowing him to add newly dead and newly stuffed specimens to the small Burnham collection to keep it up-to-date. A superfluous gesture, he’d always thought; his predecessor had built the yearly renewal of the license into the department budget, and Tom had never bothered to change this. He’d never imagined that it would come in handy one day, for Addie.
Eventually she decided that using Schantz’s services was cheating somehow, and she began gutting and stuffing the dead birds that people began depositing at her back steps—pigeons, blue jays, hawks, countless finches and robins, and once, yes, a great horned owl—on her own.
And eventually, when Scarlet could no longer stand it—the piles of dead birds, the constant phone calls and urgent meetings with the loosely affiliated group of conservationists and activists with whom Addie was now associating, the increasingly outlandish “interventions,” as they called them, that certain members of the group had begun to stage—she asked if she might stay, for the entire summer when she was seventeen, with Cora and her family in Cider Cove.
In June she took her last eleventh grade exam, packed up the old Volvo her father had bought from a neighbor, and drove to Cider Cove. She worked, throughout that summer, as a maid at a hotel in Cape May. And in August, she decided not to return to Burnham.
There were elements, from those years, that were missing from the most widely accepted version of Addie’s life. Most of her small but loyal cadre of fans assumed, for instance, that she had begun working on the dead-bird assemblages at the time of her first bout with cancer. But in fact, she’d been gathering carcasses for a couple years by then.
And most seemed to see her early years of more visible environmental activism as connected with the “transitional years,” as one fan called them (in the newsletter devoted to Addie that he published for a few months after her NEA grant was revoked)—the time she spent at the shore in the mid-1980s, the period of rediscovering those species from her stay at Cape May during Tom’s sabbatical years before, the newfound freedom of a coastal environment, coupled with her growing distress over the many risks to tidal habitats along the mid-Atlantic. And so on.
Here their timing was a little more accurate, but their reasons were wrong. There were some missing links, things th
ey had no way of knowing. Things like Richard’s rapid decline. Like her daughter’s decision to leave home, essentially for good, before she’d finished high school. Like a lost boy named Brian Kent from Riegelsville, a town a few miles from her home in Burnham, child of a bitter divorce with a penchant for starting, and watching, fires, who decided to align himself with Addie and her band of Bucks County activists—and who (fortunately for him, unfortunately for Addie) reminded her, somehow, of poor, lost Richard.
Years later, even Cora and Lou would seem to have missed something crucial about their friend. Both assumed that Addie would want to be cremated, her ashes cast into the ocean, or perhaps along the banks of Nisky Creek.
“The shore really was her salvation,” Lou said through her tears the day before Addie died, when she, Cora, Scarlet, and Tom all found themselves at the beach, gazing out at the sea. She was recalling a visit earlier in the spring, when Addie had still been a bit stronger, and when she, Lou, and Cora had taken a slow, careful walk on the deserted beach.
“She was radiant that day,” Lou said. “Wasn’t she, Cora?”
Cora nodded, a little absently, it seemed to Scarlet, saying nothing through her tears.
“She looked like a girl again, Tom,” Lou went on. “Like when we all first knew her.” And then she impulsively grabbed Scarlet’s hand. “And when you first knew her too, Scarlet! Lord! Remember, Cora? Remember what a glowing new mother she was? She even made me think maybe I wanted to have kids, though God knows I wasn’t really ready at twenty-two, or whatever the hell she was.”
“Twenty-four,” Tom said softly, to no one in particular. Only Scarlet heard him.
Lou blew her nose into the tissue Cora handed her and went on, “Of course this is where she should rest, where we should scatter her ashes. Here, in the sand, in the tidepools, with the shorebirds.”
In Hovering Flight Page 10