But then, none of the five people sleeping in those tents—with the possible exception of Addie—would have been considered “normal” in most circles. There was Bob, the angry and disaffected, and clearly lonely, retired engineer from Bethlehem Steel; when Addie had learned about his recent lung-cancer diagnosis, she’d nodded knowingly, and Tom had chosen to keep quiet about Bob’s multiple-pack-a-day smoking habit. There were Kate and Nicholas, the Penn undergraduates with oddly shaved heads and assorted piercings and tattoos (“It’s called punk, Dad,” Scarlet had said), camping out until classes started in a week.
And then there was Kyle, the new, self-appointed organizer of this local group. He was dreadlocked and rather loutish, usually stoned, and—it became immediately apparent—annoying to everyone in the group, who seemed to look more to Addie for leadership and encouragement. So she became the group’s de facto leader, through their series of small, makeshift squatters’ camps on Schafer’s newest piece of leveled, clear-cut land. The first happened that fall of 1983, when Addie learned of Schafer’s purchase of the land. The second came the following year, when Schafer’s bulldozers and backhoes arrived, and the whole slash-and-burn process of turning a farm into a newly seeded “model community” got under way.
When they arrived to pitch their tents yet again, at the end of the summer of 1985—Addie, Bob, and a new handful of cohorts, including an elderly Quaker couple from Bethlehem—it was Addie who was doing the organizing. A number of the new houses on Schafer’s land, now called Burnham Estates, were nearly completed (though none were yet occupied), and Kyle was back in California.
And so he missed the conflagration. Two days after Addie and the group were once again arrested and released on bail, three of the newly built homes were set on fire. Perhaps if Kyle had still been in Levittown, things would have been different. Perhaps it would have been his door the police knocked on at five A.M. the day after the fire, instead of Addie and Tom’s. Perhaps it would have been Kyle, not Addie, who, only an hour before the police arrived, had urged Brian Kent to drive south and not stop until he’d crossed at least two state lines.
Perhaps, but probably not. Surely only Addie would have made it her mission to protect poor, lonely, dangerous Brian Kent. Addie—sweet, young, charmingly innocent Addie Sturmer Kavanagh. Tom’s sweet Adeline.
Tom had imagined their lives so differently. Of course it had been pointed out to him, many times, that it was naive, at best, to imagine that Addie could remain content with the roles of secretary and transcriber, and occasional illustrator, of his work. But he’d never seen her this way. As he’d said in the Acknowledgments in A Prosody of Birds, he considered her his partner and his peer, her sharply attuned observations in the field every bit as crucial as anything he might eventually record.
That was how he’d pictured it: a collaboration. The two of them, and when Scarlet came along the three of them, driven by their own Zugunruhe, following their own migratory path up and down the eastern seaboard and then, with the start of each academic year, coming home to roost in their Nisky Creek cottage.
That was what all the trips—to Florida, the Eastern Shore, Cape Cod, Maine, even one summer as far north as the noisy breeding grounds of the Canadian Boreal Forest—had been about. The same with the talk of further sabbaticals. All of them his idea, and each trip or imagined sabbatical usually in response to one of Addie’s low periods, to a time when, for some reason, she’d stopped drawing and painting. All his way of trying, again and again, to re-create what had been, for him, their magical year, their purest and simplest period of shared work, in England and Ireland, before Scarlet was born.
Was he wrong, then, to attribute the changes in Addie, and the loss of that magic—as well as Addie’s growing, and (to his mind) increasingly irrational, fears about environmental damage—to Scarlet’s birth? To motherhood somehow?
The bond between Addie and Scarlet stunned him at times—its rawness, its complexity. Of course breasts are objects of fascination, for all of us, he often told his students; their power, for mammals, is profound. Yet he’d never truly understood this until he’d watched his own daughter suckling at Addie’s breast. Scarlet clung adoringly to Addie, who nursed her daughter completely instinctively—without, from all appearances, a moment’s hesitation or resentment—until the day Scarlet turned three and announced she would be giving up her “Addie milk” now, in favor of the cups and spoons and such of adulthood. Then suddenly she was, it seemed, a little adult.
And there could be such a coolness between them, or so it seemed to Tom—hours spent together in the same room, not speaking, barely acknowledging one another. It wasn’t really coolness, Addie told him; to call it that was to misunderstand what went on between them, and the way Scarlet understood, from an early age, her mother’s need for peace, for at least a taste of solitude each day. What is that if not coolness? he’d sometimes thought of asking, but never did.
He preferred noisier times with Scarlet—hiding and chasing, singing along with Pete Seeger records, splashing each other in the creek. Nothing thrilled him in quite the same way as his daughter’s bubbling laughter.
And yet, after a day of quiet at home with Addie, then an hour or two of loud, laughing roughhousing with him before dinner and bed—after all that, always, it was her mother’s arms she sought, Addie’s gentle soothing that eased her toward sleep. Even long after she’d given up her mother’s breast. For years, until, at around age thirteen, she suddenly preferred him. And eventually, a year or so after that, neither of them.
“What is it you feel for her?” he asked Addie sometimes, late at night in their bed. “What is it you feel for me, now?” He couldn’t ignore his sense that something had changed.
“You want me to name it so you can measure it somehow, quantify it,” she answered him once. “Measure it and compare it to some standard you have for the species or something.”
“No, no, that’s not it. I only want to understand. Are you different now somehow, are we different than we were when I first knew you? Are our lives fuller or less full, or somehow both?”
“Yes and no and yes and no, and what difference does it make anyway?” was her answer. Other nights, when he tried to raise such questions, she simply kissed him, turned off her light, and turned her back to him.
And what difference did it make? But of course what he really wanted to understand was their sexual life together, its rises and falls, its odd turns. At times, still, five, ten, twenty years after they’d met, she was as avid a lover as she’d been that first spring and summer. At other times—and not necessarily her sad times, or the times when her work was going nowhere; it was never as predictable as that—her indifference left him baffled and cold.
It seemed to him that in all the years he’d known her, his longing for her had never abated in the least. Pregnant, she was a revelation to him, and he cradled her belly between them like the sacred, delicate egg it was. Sad and distant, she was a lost girl that he longed to comfort; happily drawing and painting, she was the passionate young woman he’d first fallen for.
When she withdrew from him, he didn’t know where to turn. “Maybe another child?” a friend suggested when he hinted at his frustration once, when Scarlet was twelve. But that wasn’t the answer, he knew; they had, it seemed, an unspoken agreement about that. He feared he couldn’t love another child as fully as he loved Scarlet, and when people asked Addie if they didn’t want to provide Scarlet with a brother or sister (and it was shocking, really, how free people felt to ask such a thing), she always answered, “One is the only responsible choice in a world on the brink, like ours.”
Surely it was this—this bottomless despair at the plight of the earth—that took her away from him, and from her work, Tom always concluded. Not Scarlet, not motherhood. Though later, after Scarlet’s decision to spend her final year of high school in Cider Cove, he’d assumed there was, then, this other thing behind Addie’s sadness and anger. A sense that her daughter, at
only seventeen, was lost to her now. But he’d never suggested such a thing to Addie.
That was the dreadful autumn in 1985, when Addie was hiding out in the apartment above Lou’s Washington garage. A fugitive of sorts, fleeing the Pennsylvania state authorities, as absurd as that was—as absurd, and strange, and miserable as that whole time was. The obscenely lavish meals with Lou and Ted, the drinking, the ugliness between them, and Addie’s own drinking and arguing; she had never been farther away from him than she was on those weekends when he visited her in Washington. Lou seemed to treat the whole thing as a lark, maybe because it clearly angered and unnerved her husband. And Addie, so clearly innocent but stubbornly silent, refused, every time he spoke to her, to listen to reason. The more he tried (“You can’t save this boy, Addie—and you can’t keep protecting him at the expense of your own family” he told her, over and over), the colder she grew.
“You’re the one who insists on these visits, Tom,” she said, “dragging Scarlet down here from Cider Cove, where she’s so much happier.” It was maddening to him, this refusal, on Addie’s part, to acknowledge what it meant, and how it felt, to see Scarlet choose Cora’s home over that of her own parents.
“You should just stay home and tend to your work,” she said. “Both you and Scarlet would be better off not coming here at all. Let me just wait this out here. Let me just stay here quietly until the whole thing blows over.”
“Blows over?” He couldn’t stay calm and rational when she said things like that. “Addie, you’re on the verge of being charged with arson here. This isn’t going to simply ‘blow over.’ ”
And yet, almost six painful weeks later, that was essentially what happened, when Brian Kent returned to Bucks County. This time he made several mistakes. He chose an occupied (though vacant at the time he lit the trail of gasoline) home in an established development instead of one of the homes in Schafer’s new development. And he set a fire without someone like Addie to run to.
When Tom learned of Brian Kent’s arrest and his confession to setting the Burnham Estates fires as well, he immediately canceled his classes and drove to Washington to deliver the news to Addie in person. It was the middle of the afternoon when he arrived, and he found Addie reading in the apartment; no one was home at Lou and Ted’s house.
Tom knew Addie would be more concerned about Brian’s well-being than relieved to be free, finally, to return to her home. But he couldn’t hide his own relief and happiness. Nor could he suppress the visceral longing for his wife that he’d felt through the entire three-hour drive. His mistake was taking her in his arms and kissing her, fully revealing his desire to her, before saying, “It’s over, Addie. Brian Kent’s confessed.”
She stared at him blankly, as if she couldn’t understand his words.
“He set another fire. When they arrested him, he confessed to the Burnham Estates fires as well. You can come home now, Addie. It’s over.”
He’d never seen her look so distraught, and then so thoroughly disgusted—absolutely rigid in his embrace.
“Addie, they’ll try him as a minor. Surely he’ll get some help now, the help he clearly needs.”
With that she tore free and ran out the door. She didn’t return for hours.
Lou was back within the hour. Seeing his car, she came up to the apartment to see what he was doing there. And something in him broke. She saw it in his eyes immediately; she’d been looking for that response from him for years, she told him, really since taking his course twenty years before.
She took his hand and led him downstairs to the greenhouse, “the most private place in this whole compound,” she quipped—“no one’s ever in here but me.” They spoke very little; there wasn’t much to say really. What choice do they give us, these impossible spouses of ours? Or maybe, They must both want this to happen, on some level, don’t you think?
Her body was still remarkable, and he chose not to think about how she’d kept it that way—long-legged and strong as she wrapped herself around him, full-breasted and hot everywhere he touched her, almost too rough for comfort when she took him in her mouth. Not at all like Addie, he realized, and at that thought he pulled her to the blanket she’d tossed on the floor, and he entered her quickly and came almost immediately, suddenly eager for it to end, there amid the potted geraniums and leggy, overgrown petunias.
Convenient that she’d only just moved those pots indoors, at the first threat of a frost, she said, after he rolled off her. They made a nice little bower of sorts, didn’t they? And then she rose and left him there.
Through the years he’d wondered, on occasion, what might have happened if, back in May 1965, he’d taken the clear and ready offer there in front of him, asked the willowy, dark-haired and dark-eyed Lou—seated there next to the mysterious girl he called “the artist”—to see him after class. Impossible to imagine such a choice, of course. And when, through the years—after one of those drunken dinners in Washington, and once earlier, when they’d all visited Cider Cove together—she’d made it clear to him that the offer still stood, it had been equally clear to him (even in the midst of feeling undeniably flattered) that her interest now had more to do with her rage at Ted than with any real awareness of Tom or who he was.
Addie only laughed when he mentioned it once, casually remarking on Lou’s unabashed come-ons. “That’s just Lou,” she said. “Sometime you should just take her up on it—end the mystery for both of you once and for all.”
He couldn’t tell if she meant it. But now, maybe as enraged, finally, as Lou (certainly tired, certainly more tired and confused about his relationship with Addie than he’d ever been), he’d done it. It was surprising how little guilt he felt, how few Catholic demons seemed to rise to haunt him afterward. On the other hand, he hoped he might never see Lou again.
Later they showered—separately—and Tom refused Lou’s offer of dinner, choosing instead to wait alone for Addie in the apartment. When she finally returned, well after dark, and walked into the room where Tom sat reading, she looked at him briefly before beginning to pack her suitcase. He was certain she knew.
“I’m sorry,” she said, holding her hastily packed bag and staring at the floor as she stood by the door. “I needed to clear my head. I just kept walking, and I lost track of time.” Without saying anything, he took her bag, then steered her out of the apartment and into their car.
She’d noticed immediately: he’d had a shower. Instantly she’d known why. And she’d known that she’d driven him to it. Reading too much, thinking too much, trying to say to someone, anyone: Please notice this! Already our groundwater is tainted, laced now not only with arsenic but with countless other toxins, all leaching down from another Schafer construction site. And when those houses are occupied, it will be far worse. Every time it rains, pesticides from those two- and three-acre, weed-free lawns will seep down to Nisky Creek, to the river, and make their way into Delaware Bay. Then everyone will wonder why so many people have cancer, and why the doctors can’t just do something about it. Because God forbid we have to look at anything we might be doing to ourselves.
But a lot of good she’d done. Brian Kent was in jail, her daughter couldn’t bear to live with her, she was slowly but surely driving her husband away. What had she thought would happen, really? For a month and a half it had simply felt good to be quiet. To hide and be quiet and hope that she might at least be able to protect one person.
Well, that was only part of it, of course. There was also the fact that she knew she was seriously ill. She’d known since the first week she’d been at Lou’s, when she’d first noticed the lump. Since then it seemed to have grown, or at least that was how it felt to her, when she made herself feel it again, each morning when she woke up. She’d told no one. It confused her, baffled her really, when she tried to think about what to do next. She couldn’t quite believe this was happening to her. As long as she stayed at Lou’s, she thought, she could pretend it wasn’t. Except in the morning, when she made her
self feel it.
She hadn’t a clue what she was going to do now.
Riding next to Tom on the drive back to Burnham, she looked out the windshield at the clear, brilliant sky—the stars sparkling, she suddenly recalled, as they had the night before Scarlet was born. It was after midnight that night when, her contractions still mild and widely spaced, she’d walked with Tom, up the quiet dirt road to the campus, then over the paths between the buildings, looking at the stars, listening for owls. The students had left for the summer the day before, and everything was perfectly silent, perfectly still.
She’d been exquisitely happy then. And she’d known so little. Hence the happiness, of course. What was she supposed to do with everything she’d learned since? With what she knew, for certain, now?
They said nothing to each other through nearly the entire drive home. But at the turn-off for the river road, ten miles from Burnham, she turned to him.
“I’ve found a lump in my breast, Tom,” she said. “Much as I hate to, I suppose I’m going to have to see a doctor. What do people say about that new guy who comes to the campus health center now?”
Pity me, she heard, behind her carefully casual words. Pity me, take care of me. Never mind how I might have hurt you. She hated the sound of her own voice.
By the time they reached the cabin on Haupt Bridge Road, he was crying uncontrollably.
30 May 1965
Sunday
Fisherman’s cottage on Haupt Bridge Road, Burnham, PA (Near the convergence of Little and Nisky Creeks, 1 mi. from campus, where Addie Sturmer and Tom Kavanagh first made love, on a lumpy old mattress below a nearly full moon while a screech owl circled overhead.
With sweet abandon.
In Hovering Flight Page 15