In Hovering Flight

by Joyce Hinnefeld

  But even as she thinks this, she knows it isn’t fair. Who could have guessed that Lou, of all people, would feel something like guilt, and a sense of loss, over a miscarriage that happened over thirty years ago? She loved Ted then, and she probably still does. All she really wanted was what Cora had with Karl, and Addie had with Tom.

  But then why in God’s name choose someone like Ted? Scarlet thinks of asking her. But she doesn’t; she knows she’s no authority here. How rational is anyone’s choice of whom to love?

  “No,” Scarlet says. “We didn’t get to that yet. Waiting for you, I guess.” She smiles at her father, still so handsome, even with his graying hair and a chin that’s begun to sag a bit, and now two days’ growth of beard. He clearly hasn’t slept at all.

  “No?” He lifts his eyebrows in mock surprise. Then, “How do you feel, Scarlet?” he asks as he spreads jam on a muffin. He takes a bite, then starts to rub her back. “Did you sleep a bit at least? You should get some rest, you know.”

  Lou looks at the two of them sharply then, curiously. Probably, Scarlet thinks, she’s already figured it out. And then she remembers something Addie said to her last night: “The whole world adores a mother-to-be. Go ahead and milk it.” She takes a deep breath, closes her eyes, and leans back into her father’s strong, gentle hands.

  “Thanks,” she says. “That feels wonderful.”

  She’ll pee in a minute, she decides. For now she’ll sit here quietly and let her father soothe her, keeping at least a few of her own secrets, for at least a little while.

  eleven

  ADDIE HAD ALWAYS BEEN MOODY, prone to bouts of sadness, even as a child. Maybe that was it, she sometimes thought; maybe she was depressed. Maybe she had something called “depression.” Always, of course, said a certain way—slowly, dolefully, eyes cast down and mouth in a tight line. I have de-PRESH-on.

  If she had the slightest faith in Western medicine, pharmacology, or the entire field of psychology, perhaps she might have sought such a diagnosis. Then they could have dosed her or shocked her or done something else to ensure, once and for all, that she never again drew or painted anything of any value whatsoever. So long as she felt, if not cheerful, at least contented, complacent, unbothered. Optimistic.

  You think too much, her mother used to say to her, when she was a mopey child. Also, later, You read too much. Or, You’re off in the woods by yourself all day—no wonder you’re sad! Why don’t you spend more time with some friends?

  And so she had. She’d gone off with friends, danced and smoked and gotten drunk, fooled around with boys. At college she’d found herself a steady boyfriend, and she’d allowed him to fondle her, and she’d done the same for him; they’d always stopped short of intercourse, though, as she’d been urged, in all quarters, to do. Her boyfriend would have been shocked (if delighted) if she’d allowed things to go that far; certainly that would have removed her from the category of marriage-worthy girls.

  It hadn’t felt like that much of a hardship, forgoing the final act of sex. She didn’t especially mind the kissing and the fondling, sometimes she even enjoyed it—but mostly she did it to keep her boyfriend happy. She was happiest, though, when she was with Cora and Lou. Laughing endlessly, baking a cake at midnight and eating the entire thing, arguing about whether God existed (Cora, the science major, said of course not, Addie said she wasn’t sure, and Lou feigned shock at both responses—though Addie always suspected the shock was real).

  Then came England, Miss Smallwood to steer her, the rush of all those discoveries. And then Tom. And then she discovered what they clearly hadn’t wanted her—or any girl—to know about sex. Dangerous to discover it could feel like that—that in fact there were deep, impossible-to-describe pleasures available for her as well. Dangerous, that is, in the hands of someone less careful, less solicitous, than Tom. How had she known, implicitly, without question, from that first day in his class, how fully she could trust him?

  Maybe it was what he’d recognized about her, immediately: her longing. It was for him, for his body, certainly; no doubt about that. The first time they’d made love, on the floor of the untouched, nearly rotting cottage, he’d worried he might hurt her. But she hadn’t felt a moment’s pain, only something that made her feel like singing, like laughing, bubbling over with it, with the impossible delight of his rough cheeks beneath her hands and lips, his tight, wiry body clasping hers, the way he searched and searched until he found her.

  But it was more than that physical longing, and he’d known that, and it was he, Tom, who’d told her this: Go back into the woods by yourself. And you’ll find it there, again. And for a while she had found it again, that thing, whatever it was, that she’d felt in the woods when she was younger. Something hard to name—maybe wonder? Almost a kind of ecstasy? No, too loaded a word—too pious and yet too sexual, both at the same time.

  But then, it was like God, wasn’t it? And also in a way very much like sex? The way she’d felt, as a child of ten or twelve, alone in the woods. Almost trembling, breathless, unaware of herself or of time—seated on a rotting log, smelling wet leaves, feeling the damp air, hearing the silence.

  Wonder was better, probably.

  When had it stopped?

  When she’d had Scarlet?

  “It’s because nothing is as miraculous as that, and nothing ever will be,” Cora said.

  But Lou, of course, rolled her eyes. “It’s because once you have a child you’re never again free to think about yourself, and no one will ever let you forget it. Which means it’s never again possible to lose yourself. No matter how many yoga classes or meditation retreats you go to. Take my word for it.”

  Cora didn’t disagree. “It’s true you aren’t free to lose yourself then, ever,” she said. “You’re needed too much, too fiercely, and you never forget that.” Poor Cora, who, for so long, blamed herself.

  But to say she had somehow lost wonder, lost the ability to lose her-self—in the woods, in her work—after Scarlet’s birth felt wrong, too easy an explanation, too much the language of women’s magazines, which she hated. Look at Scarlet, after all. She was her own person already, by the age of four—fiercely independent, but also careful, smart. Interested in things. She’d never worried about Scarlet. Her experience of motherhood was worlds away from Cora’s, and from Lou’s.

  So was it Tom, then? Killing wonder with science? Burying her work beneath his? For a while she worried that she’d never find her way back to work of her own that was satisfying if she stayed with Tom, oppressed by his work, his needs, his various demands. Hadn’t people immediately started referring to A Prosody of Birds as Tom’s book—even though her name was right there on the cover alongside his, and even though Tom repeatedly told people that the plates of her paintings were by far the best thing about the book?

  So was Tom—silent, patient Tom—still somehow, despite all his outward signs of support, to blame for her loss of wonder, and of love of her own work? Sometimes she thought, maybe so. It felt good to be able to blame him, sometimes. Otherwise she might have to think about other things, other possible reasons why she could hardly bear to face a blank canvas, or even a sketch pad.

  But of course it also felt faintly ridiculous. All he wanted, he told her over and over, was for her to be delighted, again, by the birds.

  She was still delighted by the birds at times. Awash in a familiar, comforting warmth when she heard the call of a Carolina wren or a red-eyed vireo and knew it immediately. As instinctively, now, as Tom would. And capable of a different sort of warmth, even a grateful smile, when she heard her first wood thrush in the spring.

  But the thing was, the moment she heard it, before she was able to savor, fully, that pleasant hum of knowing, there came another kind of knowing, a voice that hit her like a crashing, freezing wave. That bird’s breeding grounds are being decimated, even as you stand here listening. Before long it won’t have these second-growth trees, this makeshift habitat, to roost in either.

&
nbsp; And so really, why draw, or paint, the thing at all? Some kind of memento mori for all those stupidly cheerful, binoculars-wearing, American “backyard birders”? Those ponchoed men and women racing each other to the longest life list?

  “Addie, you’re taking this too far,” Tom said when she tried once to explain to him what happened to her, more often than not, when she went to her blind to sketch. “All of them, Addie—Carson, Leopold, Edward Abbey—you need to put them all aside now. Read something else, look at it differently. Remember, it’s quite possible, even probable, that the damage done through the history of human habitation—if you think of that, say, as half a day instead of several billion years—it’s quite likely that that level of damage could be completely turned around in another half day. We’ve no way of knowing! Why automatically assume the worst?”

  “That’s the kind of thinking that gave us Agent Orange and arsenic in our drinking water,” was her quiet, clipped answer. Tom left the room then, and slammed the door behind him; he was heading for his office, she knew, at eight o’clock on a Friday night. Scarlet was next door at Peter’s. And suddenly Addie hated being so alone.

  You think too much. You read too much.

  That time, when Scarlet was twelve, they took a trip over the spring break, to the Everglades and the Florida Keys.

  They’d forgotten, it seemed, about the shorebirds. It revived all of them, watching ibises and egrets in the marshes and tidepools, anhingas rising over the mangroves. When they returned to Burnham, Scarlet raced over to show Peter her new collection of shells and sea glass. Tom, tanned and rested, gathered his notes for another five-week offering of Biology of the Birds.

  And Addie set herself up in an empty studio in the Burnham Art Building, two doors down from the studio she’d used as a student, thinking it might do her good to get out of the house, and away from the creek, for this next attempt at new work. She got going on an Audubon-inspired painting of an anhinga, and each day she climbed the hill to the campus, sketchbooks and a sandwich in a pack on her back. All morning she worked, day after day, sipping at a water bottle, struggling over and over with the neck, which looked, she felt, like something in a Road Runner cartoon. All morning she tried to capture the hazy Florida light that somehow both brightened and dulled the sheen of the male’s wing, struggling to hold on to the smell of salt and fish, to tend only to that particular remembered smell, fighting to hold it there above the encroaching ones of dust, and mildew, and memory, there in that tiny room that reeked of her past, of a self she could barely recall, one she no longer trusted but longed for all the same.

  In the end it took her five months to paint that anhinga, a problem she couldn’t solve until one hot July night, the night before her departure, with Tom and Scarlet, for the coast of Maine. They’d been invited to spend a month there, in the home of a former student and his wife, who was an avid bird-watcher and a passionate admirer of A Prosody of Birds.

  She couldn’t recall the particulars of the dream, only the oppressive feeling it left her with, as if someone were sitting on her chest and covering her mouth, suffocating her. That, and its colors—lurid pinks, greens, oranges, all there in a kind of particle-soaked light, fluorescent or neon, maybe. They were, she knew immediately when she woke, the colors of Florida—of the roadside motels, T-shirt and fast-food stands, makeshift shops selling guns and fireworks. And the suffocating feeling: She recognized that too. It was the feeling she’d had, first paddling in a canoe alongside impossibly tangled mangrove roots, next on a rocky inlet off Big Pine Key at dawn, each time Tom had suggested they plan another sabbatical, this time in Florida.

  They couldn’t afford to spend another year, or even a semester, in England after all, especially—and this was understood, if unspoken—as no funded research opportunities were likely to be forthcoming for Tom, who’d been immersed, again, in his teaching and note-taking in the field, and who hadn’t published a thing since the Prosody. Neither of them had thought, or spoken, much about another sabbatical; Addie hardly felt her work could justify that long a trip, away from home, from her illustrating income and her local activism. And Tom was Tom—happy and content to go on teaching, piling up more notes, to what end he could not have said.

  So it surprised her when he proposed the idea, not once but twice, each time, of course, in the midst of a particularly satisfying time in the field. But each time he suggested a longer stay in Florida, and she pictured them setting up house in some tiny hamlet in the Everglades or, worse, someplace like Key West, all she could see were those same flashes of neon, those overly bright, falsely cheerful colors.

  “I don’t think so, Tom,” she said the second time. “I just can’t see it somehow.” And he only shrugged, willing enough to let it go; every suggestion of time away from Burnham was more for her sake than for his, after all.

  But if she couldn’t see a year in Florida, what she could see, waking from her dream on the verge of dawn that morning in July, were those colors, there in her painting of the anhinga. Of course; there it was, the thing the painting needed, handed to her in the middle of the night when she’d finally stopped struggling. She dressed in the still shadows of their bedroom at the back of the cabin and scrambled up the hill to the Art Building. She’d planned to leave the painting behind, hoping a month away might somehow free her from the thing, free her either to finish it at last and move on or just to let it go. Now she packed it carefully, and throughout the endless drive—around New York City, up through Boston, staying the night with an old graduate school friend of Tom’s in Woods Hole on Cape Cod, then inching, it seemed, along the ragged coast of Maine—she could hardly stand the wait.

  It was the first—and only—thing she unpacked; she left the rest to Tom and Scarlet. And that evening, much to Tom’s chagrin and embarrassment, she declined to go to dinner with his former student and his wife, their great fan, who’d driven up from Boston to welcome them. “I’ll meet her another time,” she insisted, oblivious to Tom’s discomfort with going alone. “I can’t stop working now.”

  Twenty-four hours after they arrived, it was, she knew, finished. The changes were, at least superficially, fairly simple ones. Behind the anhinga, which was caught in a sudden, jerking rise into flight, was a pinkish-purple background, cloudlike and billowing: a poison sky. And in the bird’s eye—and how she managed to paint this so accurately, Addie could never explain; it had just poured from her brush somehow—was a look, an unmistakable look, of cold terror. Something beyond panic; what one critic would eventually, to Addie’s infinite satisfaction, call “a clear awareness of impending, and grisly, death.”

  She painted happily, ecstatically, for the entire month. She drew on all her old sketches, from Florida and other trips, from her Nisky Creek blind. In each painting—of a red-tailed hawk, a rough-winged swallow, a brown pelican—there was something, whether that same look in the eye or an unnaturally bent wing, feathers somehow gone lackluster and coarse, that hinted at imminent violence, imminent pain. Yet there was nothing in the painting to attribute the pain and suffering to. Nothing except a garish, neon-saturated background that spoke of something in the air, more pervasive than smoke, a cloud of it surrounding the helpless bird.

  Addie’s exuberance that month pleased Tom and Scarlet, of course. But it unnerved them a bit as well. What to do with a happy wife and mother like this—singing while she cooked their dinner, tackling and splashing her husband and daughter on their daily walks along the beach at sunset? Here she was again, suddenly: the Addie of Scarlet’s earliest memories, and of Tom’s fondest ones. Better not to question it, they decided, both of them knowing they’d be wise to hoard the happy moments while they could.

  It was Tom’s idea to visit Cora and her family in New Jersey on the way back to Burnham. A few days before they were to depart, a letter from Cora had arrived, forwarded to them in Maine from the Burnham post office. She and Karl and the boys were moving in a week, Cora said (she’d written the letter at the end of
July), to a town on the New Jersey shore called Cider Cove. She described it as a quiet old fishing town only a few miles from Cape May that had somehow (maybe because it lacked a boardwalk) managed to escape the taffy stands and ski-ball shops that filled the beachfront streets of most of its neighbors.

  They were moving there, Cora wrote, for the boys. Even though it meant a hard commute for Karl, and a house that was going to require a lot of work. Childhood teasing was one thing, she said, but junior high school had been absolutely brutal for Richard. And now that he was almost fifteen, even adults in their comfortable, affluent suburb—at the shopping mall or the swim club, at school events, in restaurants—were less than subtle about their discomfort, and distaste, at sharing space with someone like Richard. It was one thing to be a cute, freckled boy who twirled his hair or flapped his arms and spun in circles obsessively, who never looked anyone in the eye and yet, at the same time, had a habit of standing uncomfortably close to people he hadn’t even met. But for a tall, gangly young man with facial hair and, suddenly, a deepening voice to do such things—well, that was different. Decidedly different. They hoped things might be better, Cora wrote, in a low-key, blue-collar town like Cider Cove, especially in the quiet, off-season months of the school year.

  It had been hard on Bobby too, of course, she said. In fact the move was actually Bobby’s idea. “Won’t you mind giving up the swim team and the mall and your friends at school?” they’d asked him. His answer had been a terse “What friends?”

  Though she felt terrible about not responding to Cora until nearly a month after she’d written, it was good, Addie knew, that Cora’s letter had taken so long to reach her. She certainly wouldn’t have been able to work with such energy if she’d gotten it earlier. It made her immeasurably sad and then, as was usually the case with things that made her sad, immeasurably angry. How could disorders like Richard’s still be happening? she raved to Tom, after showing him the letter. Was anyone looking into this, into the obvious links with toxins from burning coal, for instance—didn’t Tom remember that research she’d found, when was it, maybe back when Richard had been diagnosed?