In Hovering Flight

by Joyce Hinnefeld

  “He was conceived right there along the Lehigh River, for Christ’s sake,” she hissed. “Right there in the shadow of those monstrous Bethlehem Steel smokestacks.”

  They were seated on the back deck, looking out over the steep, rocky slope between the house and the beach below. In the distance they could make out the orange sweatshirt and long, blowing hair of Scarlet, who’d stayed behind on the beach after their walk that afternoon. Breathless from their climb up the path to the house, Tom and Addie had discovered Cora’s letter under a rock on the deck, left there by a neighbor who had gone to the post office to pick up mail. Watching Addie’s face as she read it, Tom had feared something far more dire and gone inside to fix her a drink.

  “Addie,” he said now, reaching over to take her hand. “Addie, don’t.”

  But she wouldn’t be quieted. She rose and started pacing the length of the deck, taking quick, angry sips from her drink as she spoke. “And then from there to probably the most toxin-filled state in the whole country. Maybe things will be better at the shore, but I sincerely doubt it. How likely is that, really, when you consider everything that gets dumped into Delaware Bay?”

  “Addie.” He stood now too, and reached for her arm to stop her pacing. He was growing exasperated, and he couldn’t stop himself from saying, “If it was a product of their environment somehow—and you know I’m convinced it’s a genetic disorder, not something that could have been prevented—but if it was, as you insist, somehow connected with where they were living, where they live now hardly matters. The damage is done.”

  She stared at him then, and when he saw the fury in her eyes he wished, yet again, that he could learn to keep to himself these explanations that so incensed her. She slammed her drink down, spilling it, and turned toward the door.

  “Addie, please. You know it doesn’t help to—”

  And then, suddenly, she was crying. She stopped in front of the door and lowered her head, her shoulders shaking as she sobbed. He went to her, and she buried her face in his shoulder.

  Because yes, of course, she knew it didn’t help, all her raving. It didn’t help, and it had, in fact, hurt her relationship with Cora, this anger, this rage about possible causes of Richard’s illness. For years now their contact had been sporadic, even a bit formal; since she’d become involved with the Bucks County Mothers for the Earth ten years before, both Cora and Lou had, she knew, found it hard to endure her angry rants, her clear disapproval of everything from where they lived to what they allowed their children to eat.

  In this stunning place on the heels of a solid month of gratifying work, she could see that more clearly now. And she could see how much she missed her old friends, particularly Cora.

  “I don’t know how to begin to respond to this,” she finally said, wiping her nose and holding up Cora’s letter. “What can I possibly say?”

  “Why don’t you call and say you’re happy to hear about their move, and that we’d like to stop to see them on our way home from Maine?” he said. He wiped the tears from her cheeks, then kissed them both. “We could stop by the lighthouse at Cape May too,” he said. “For old times’ sake.”

  She tried to smile. “Just please don’t start talking about sabbaticals again,” she said. “Imagine what a wasteland Cape May must be by now, with all the damned tourists, all that development along the coast. It will be completely different, you know—overrun with all those Gore-Tex-clad birders, none of them with any idea of what it was like there twenty years ago—”

  “Addie,” he said again, his voice quiet and tired. Also warning her.

  She swallowed whatever it was she was on the verge of saying next, took a breath and looked out at the sea. “I’ll be careful,” she said then, quietly. “I’ll call her now and ask if we can stop through. I won’t say anything else.”

  When Addie went inside, Tom sat down again. Surely that had been the right suggestion, he hoped. Better for her to see Cora in person; she’d be less likely to go off on one of her harangues then.

  He watched as Scarlet turned and began climbing the rocky, winding path. How much easier would her own imminent high school years be? he wondered. No one like Richard to deal with, but they were not, he knew, the easiest parents. Or so he feared. And yet she never seemed to mind the way they lived; she loved traveling as much as they did, and Nisky Creek and her neighborhood friends still seemed to fill her days and satisfy her. But how much longer would she travel contentedly with them, laugh with them, climb into their bed in the morning to read the comics?

  As she rounded a curve below the overhanging deck where he sat, Tom lost sight of his daughter for a moment. He held his breath, seized, suddenly, with something like panic.

  Then there she was, climbing the last steps up to the deck—her wild, windswept hair, her wind-chapped face and open brown eyes, like her mother’s, like his own.

  “Cormorants can’t hold a candle to great blue herons,” she said, plopping down in a chair, then pulling off her sand-filled sneakers and emptying them, one by one, over the deck’s railing. “They are downright boring to watch, if you ask me.”

  “Boring?”he gasped in mock horror. “You find cormorants boring?”

  Such happiness was what Tom thought then, reaching over to pull playfully on his daughter’s tangled hair. Such beauty and such happiness. How in God’s name might he make it last?

  twelve

  THE VISIT TO CIDER COVE surprised all of them. Cora and Karl and the boys were happy in their new home, and happy to share its old, sloping-floored rooms, where Addie, Tom, and Scarlet slept soundly on old mattresses piled on the floor. They ended up staying for a week.

  Each day of their visit Tom pushed away thoughts of all the work facing him back in Burnham before classes began, in a matter of days. How could he drag his laughing, suntanned daughter away from this bliss? And something powerful was happening with Addie too, it was clear. She was peaceful, quiet, seemingly content, but her mind was working too—he could see it—as she walked along the beach or sat on the screened porch with Cora in the evenings, drinking wine, sometimes talking, sometimes only listening to the sounds of the sea.

  Finally they drove home to Pennsylvania, the night before Scarlet had to return to school—lacking, as usual, the required notebooks and binders, the shoes and uniform for gym, and so on; for a week Addie or Tom wrote vaguely apologetic notes, asking that their daughter be excused from gym class, and Scarlet spent those periods contentedly reading in the cafeteria.

  Neither parent could be bothered, that first week, to shop for school supplies—at least not for ones that they could see their daughter neither wanted nor needed. Tom was wrapped up in meetings and the first days of classes. And every day after their return, from early morning until dusk, Addie was holed up in her Art Building studio, painting.

  The work she produced that fall was different and, in Tom’s opinion, far more powerful than the paintings she’d done in Maine, with their circuslike colors, their expressions of exaggerated, distinctly human emotions projected onto birds. Cartoonish, he might have said, though he understood—theoretically, if not in his mind or heart—the power these paintings would hold for many viewers.

  The paintings after their week in Cider Cove were disturbing in a far more immediate, and visceral, way, and at times weirdly comic. Some were realistic, like the one of a robin below the cavity nest inside a purple martin’s house, unable to walk on its deformed feet. Others, though realistic in execution, had elements of the surreal: a female scarlet tanager feeding her young, not via her beak, but from a nipple rising from a small, round breast in the middle of her yellow front.

  She’d taken to carrying her twenty-year-old course notes from his Biology of the Birds class to the studio with her. Tom asked, once, to see that notebook; it was, as he’d expected, a scattershot affair, like her field notes, where she’d reveled in flouting the conventions he’d presented to the class. Not so personal as her field notes, but every bit as eccentric, t
he notebook was filled with rough sketches (often of him), along with trenchant observations of her classmates and plans for her next painting, or for the weekend. And occasionally, a fact or a remark from one of his lectures that had, apparently, struck her for some reason. Now, more than fifteen years later, she’d gone back to this notebook, highlighting certain of those facts and observations:

  Alfred Russell Wallace grew disillusioned with the tenets of organic evolution late in life; he later became a spiritualist. One thing he objected to was forced vaccinations, especially for the poor.

  Photographs always have distorted colors—which is why artists’ renderings are better.

  Brood parasites (e.g., cowbirds) do not build their own nests. Phoebes are “acceptors.”

  There are two types of false nests: (1) cock or dummy, and (2) refuge.

  Passerines (e.g., robins) have to be raised in cup nests—or their feet will be deformed.

  The ancient Egyptians considered birds winged souls.

  The hormones that cause milk letdown in the crops of birds are similar to those that cause letdown in human mammary ducts.

  Birds: male by default. Mammals: female by default.

  Waves of migration are triggered by changes in the weather in the eastern U.S.

  Genetically, birds like plovers know where to go and how to get there, even though the young travel separately from their parents.

  When, in the early spring, Addie was gathering the work she would include in a show at a gallery in New Hope, whose owner—another former student of Tom’s—was in love with her new paintings, Tom suggested she use relevant passages from her notebook as accompanying captions. He was worried, of course, that the many levels of her work would be lost on most viewers, and worried too about negative reactions setting Addie back. Wouldn’t it enrich the experience of seeing her work, he asked, for its viewers to know about the effect on passerines of being raised in false nests? Or that milk letdown in a bird’s internal crop is triggered, like the letdown of human milk, hormonally?

  She smiled indulgently at his suggestion, then kissed him. “I’ll think about it, Dr. Kavanagh,” she said, patting his cheek. She was more affectionate, in the weeks leading up to her show, than she’d been in months, maybe years.

  In the end, she’d opted for simple titles instead. The painting of the robin with deformed feet she called False Refuge, the one of the scarlet tanager with a human breast Female by Default.

  Reactions to her show were mixed. A reviewer from the Allentown newspaper called the Florida series “goofy.” But the show was also reviewed (several pages into the Saturday “regional” section) in the Philadelphia Inquirer, whose critic called the work “troubling and powerful” and “suffused with the environmentalist passions that inform the artist’s work in her husband’s quirky, but seminal, 1969 book A Prosody of Birds.”

  Another far-flung fan, apparently; it angered Tom to see Addie’s work subsumed like this and, on top of that, credit for the book given only to him (though this had been common enough through the years). But to his surprise, she was delighted. “What matters,” she said, “is that he gets it.”

  Yes, he thought, it’s good that he and others get it, and yes, these are important things that no doubt need to be said. But what, Tom sometimes wanted to ask her, about their songs? Have you completely forgotten about these creatures’ beautiful music? And how we used to love to hear it, together?

  Obviously you can’t paint a bird’s call. Some, though, were so doleful, so filled with sorrow—the very thing she might have painted. Tom wondered if he might persuade her to try. Those sad songs—of the mourning dove, of course, but also, to his ear, of the hermit thrush, the eastern wood-pewee, and particularly, that year, the long-eared owl; that was what he kept hearing, waking and sleeping, throughout the summer and fall of 1983, in the months after Addie’s show in New Hope.

  They talked, once again, of another sabbatical; they’d spend this one in a rented house in Cider Cove, they said, at the Cape May lighthouse and other birding sites in the early mornings and at dusk, spending time with Cora’s family in the afternoons and evenings. There were sales of a few paintings, there was talk of other shows, a gallery in Philadelphia had expressed some interest. Through it all, she kept on painting.

  Then one day a small notice appeared in the local newspaper. Bert Schafer had purchased three hundred acres of land, mixed woods and farmland, two and a half miles south of Burnham College, on the rolling hills winding west from the Delaware River; his plan was to build a high-end housing development there—large “country estates,” each with a few acres of land, marketed as the perfect escape for Philadelphia suburbanites whose towns were growing too crowded and for New Jerseyans exhausted by their state’s high taxes.

  Tom knew that parcel of land well; it was in those woods, during the last two summers, that he and other area birders had spotted a pair of rare long-eared owls. He immediately set to work on a letter to the editor, and called up some of the local Audubon Society members to do the same—all the while wondering how long he’d be able to keep the news from Addie, who had been too busy, of late, to read the local paper.

  Maybe he should have just told her right away. But he wanted to protect her somehow, protect her recent productivity, and her happiness; protect her from her ragtag band of activist friends. And he couldn’t think of birds, even these remarkable owls, the way she did—as scapegoats, sacrificial victims, symbols of human folly and excess.

  Yes, they inspired poetry, music, art. Yes, their singing could still, all these years later, make him as giddy, as shivery with delight as he’d been as a boy of twelve. But they were, in the end, birds. Members of the class Aves. Subject to, even victims of, human meddling, of course. But continually, and successfully, evolving in response to that meddling, and to countless other influences, affected by causes both proximate and ultimate. He’d seen the terms scratched in Addie’s nearly illegible handwriting in her notebook from his course—these not, unfortunately, circled more recently in red: Two kinds of causes in biology: proximate (mechanical causes, like weather) and ultimate (unrelenting pressures placed on populations over time).

  How could he see all animal life—mammals called humans included—otherwise? he’d asked Addie many times. How could he not perceive his beloved birds as evolving rationally, responding as each species must to human and other interventions? Of course he was concerned about habitat loss, about global climate change and disruptions in migration, about increasingly toxic water and air—about a planet that, to its own peril, was rapidly snuffing out the diversity of life it would need to survive. Hadn’t he written about these very things?

  But humans are only one species, after all—one species early in its evolutionary history. And “nature,” “the natural world”—terms he was learning to hate, their increasingly careless and cavalier use setting his teeth on edge—is anything but balanced and kind. Nature is a death machine, a cauldron of brutal extremes that, in the largest sense, only a handful of hardy individuals have ever managed to survive.

  And yet they do, miraculously, survive. Look at them! Look at all the remarkable species of birds that have made it this far (consider too that their early ancestors may have been dinosaurs). Despite untold millennia of fierce predators before humans even appeared on the scene. Despite the damming of rivers, the clear-cutting of forests, the polluting of waterways, the reckless spraying of pesticides. The spill of so much human clutter in the middle of their natural homes.

  Addie did, of course, learn of Bert Schafer’s plans for the land to the south of them, home of the presumably breeding pair of long-eared owls, only a few weeks after Tom did. Though the Bucks County Mothers of the Earth were long gone by the early ’80s, Addie had since allied herself with a loosely affiliated group of environmentalists, fringy types from Philadelphia and surrounding areas who’d grown impatient with the quieter efforts of their local Audubon Society or Sierra Club chapters. It was the self-appoin
ted leader of this small, rather disorganized group—a twenty-one-year-old UC–Santa Cruz dropout who was living with his parents in suburban Levittown—who called to tell Addie about Bert Schafer’s purchase of the farmland south of Burnham College.

  On hearing this news, Addie started by reading everything about Schafer’s plans that she could get her hands on. She laughed at the pointlessness of the letters written by Tom and his fellow birders. She neglected to respond to messages from the gallery owner in Philadelphia, who eventually stopped calling. And once again, she stopped painting. By September she was living in a tent on Bert Schafer’s newly acquired land.

  There were five of them that time. At first they camped in the woods, and for over a week no one noticed they were there. They never left their campsite. In the evenings Tom brought them food. Scarlet came with him the first couple times, but on the third night she declined when he asked if she wanted to come along.

  “It’s just too weird,” she said.

  “Yes, it is,” he answered as he packed sandwiches and apples, then lifted the car keys from the hook by the door.

  He was relieved when, arriving at the sad little cluster of tents that evening, he learned that the group’s meals were now being delivered by a teenager named Brian Kent, son of one of the now scattered members of the former commune near New Hope. He’d shown up on the third day of their squat and announced that he wanted to help out. When she’d learned that he was only sixteen, Addie had argued against allowing him to camp with them. Instead, each morning when he appeared at their campsite in the woods, they gave him money to go buy them food.

  It was clear to Tom, and, he was sure, to Addie, that there was something wrong with Brian. His eyes, on the rare occasions when they met anyone else’s, had the same glassy, faraway look as Richard’s. But there was something angrier, something more desperate, about Brian Kent.