If only those canny Quakers had reached their grasp just a little farther north, Tom liked to say. It was true that in the 1930s, the first time the school had nearly folded, a group of Quaker businessmen from Philadelphia had considered rescuing Burnham College, reopening it as a kind of Haverford North, but in the end, they’d decided against it. That time Burnham’s savior had been a wealthy and eccentric alumnus, for whom both the library and the student center were named after he paid for the building of both at the end of the Second World War.
This time, apparently, the self-appointed savior was to be Bert Schafer. He wasn’t an alum, but by the mid-1980s, with all the money he was making as a real estate developer, his tax situation demanded that he find some form of philanthropy, and soon. Preferring, he said, to keep his money “close to home,” he went looking for a place in Bucks County—someplace where they would name things for you. By then another developer, some carpetbagger from Philadelphia named Driscoll (Schafer made much of the fact that he was a local Bucks County boy who’d grown up on a farm near Doylestown), had already beaten him to the county’s two major hospitals, one of which now had a wing named for Driscoll’s parents, the other a wing named for his wife. So Bert Schafer turned his attention to quiet little Burnham College. And in the fall of 1988, on the dreary November day when Addie learned that she had not one but two malignant tumors, the college ceremoniously dedicated the new Walter Schafer Gymnasium, named for its proud donor’s grandfather.
But of course there was more to Bert Schafer’s interest in Burnham College than plans for a few buildings bearing the family name. The one thing the college did have, thanks to several generous German farmers a century before, was land—acres and acres of meadows and second-growth woodlands, on rolling hills and along the banks of the two rushing creeks, all of it surrounding the village center and the heart of the campus, with its several intact colonial buildings, dating back to the time of the Revolutionary War. All of it quite lovely. And, with new access to a major east-west interstate just twelve miles north, below Easton, all of it increasingly valuable, and very desirable, to a developer like Bert Schafer.
The squatting and the arrests, Addie realized finally, had accomplished little or nothing in the end. In fact, even before the Burnham Estates fires, Bert Schafer had used the protests to his own advantage. “It’s a free country,” he’d been quoted as saying in an article in the local paper, following the squatters’ second arrest in 1984, before construction of the new homes had even begun. “I respect these people’s right to express their views. And I am truly sorry that those two owls might have to find a new place to live. But I wish these folks could understand that it’s to everyone’s economic advantage for our county to grow in this way.”
Never mind that the day before he had driven his monstrously large pickup truck right to the edge of their tents, stepped out long enough to call them a few obscene names, then warned them that if a single one of them got anywhere near his contractor’s equipment when it arrived later that day, he’d have their asses in jail faster than they could climb one of those goddamn trees they were so fucking in love with.
Addie enjoyed quoting him to Tom and other friends at Burnham. But unfortunately, no one from the local paper had come to interview her.
Schafer followed through on his threats, arranging for their arrest that afternoon, even though none of them, and none of their gear, was anywhere near the access road the contractor’s workers used to drive in their trucks and cranes and bulldozers. They had deliberately set up camp inside a patch of woods on the border of the farmland Schafer had purchased, a woods that the farmer who’d sold him the land had, so far, refused to include as part of the sale.
But that farmer was now in a nursing home in Harrisburg, where, according to Bert Schafer, his two sons were “trying to get him to see reason” (to the tune of another twenty thousand dollars). The sheriff wasn’t interested in splitting hairs. “Either way it’s private property,” he said as he steered Addie and her comrades into his and his deputy’s cars, “and that means you’re trespassing.”
One rainy day the next June, Brian Kent helped Addie and Bob the engineer pitch their tents, brazenly, in the middle of the already pesticide-drenched lawn in front of the shell of one of the new model homes. They camped there, in the rain, for a week, during which there was no sign of the builders. Ten days later, when the sun finally returned, they were back in the county jail. This time the only coverage they got in the local paper was three lines in the daily log of arrests.
When three of the completed model homes burned to the ground, Bert Schafer achieved not only a public relations coup but a hefty insurance settlement as well. Two months later Brian Kent was in jail. Addie never heard from him again.
The winter that followed left her certain, at forty-two, that she didn’t have long to do something, finally, that might make a difference, maybe even, somehow, make amends. For what, she wasn’t able to say exactly. Something to do with Richard’s sad life and death, Cora’s silent suffering, Brian Kent’s aimless unhappiness. Even, perhaps, her own cancer scare. Her strange distance from Tom and Scarlet, from her own work as an artist. She needed, somehow, to find a way to atone for all of that, and more, it seemed. Why it was her responsibility to do so, she certainly couldn’t have said.
There was also that horrible exchange she’d had with Cora, the day after Christmas, in Cider Cove. All winter she dwelled on it, replaying everything that had been said, and, true to form, she read everything she could get her hands on, to help her understand what Cora had told her.
“I can’t begin to tell you what it’s like,” Cora had said, “the way you keep on blaming yourself, the way other people let you know, sometimes subtly and sometimes not, that this whole thing has to be your fault.” She laughed bitterly, then covered her eyes with her hands. “As if you needed anyone to add to all the blame you’ve already heaped on yourself,” she said. “Over and over I asked myself, why didn’t I recognize it earlier, why didn’t I somehow protect Richard, why didn’t I somehow manage to love him more?”
While she talked, Karl busied himself with building up the fire, refilling everyone’s drink, going outside for more wood, whatever he could come up with to take him away from the conversation.
Tom could see the fury building up inside his wife, who rushed to Cora’s side, embracing her. “How could you possibly have loved him more? You did everything for him. Why listen to all that ridiculous nonsense that passes itself off as science—as if all the horrors of this world could be explained by the so-called discipline of psychology!”
“Like that fool Bettelheim,” Karl said then, drawn into the conversation despite himself. “Tell them about that ridiculous book.”
Cora wiped her eyes. “A woman at our church recommended it to me,” she said. “The Empty Fortress, it’s called. It’s about autism. He says the mothers of autistic children are like the SS guards in Nazi concentration camps—that cold and brutal—and that’s why their children have become the way they are.”
Karl rose again to poke at the already blazing fire.
Tom looked at Addie and realized there’d be no containing her now. Her face was flushed, and tears filled her eyes. He knew it was pointless, but he tried to keep talking, hoping she might have the sense to just leave the room.
“Seems odd that someone who thought children needed to hear the grisliest fairy tales, all that blood and gore and such, would come down so hard on mothers,” he said.
That, it turned out, had been exactly the wrong tack.
“Of course he’s going to blame the mothers,” Addie snapped, her voice dripping with contempt. “They all do that, always.” She shook her head then, disbelievingly. “Jesus Christ! Nazi SS officers. At least he had the courage to say what all those goddamned fools really think. They never look at where and how their patients live, what they’re exposed to on any given day, the garbage they’re fed and the particles they’re breathing in at schoo
l, the radioactive waste they’re routinely exposed to, the absurdly contaminated water they’re drinking.”
“Or the genetic packages they’ve inherited,” Tom said quietly, though by now it was clear no one was listening to him.
Addie didn’t even look at him. She went on, ticking off a list of evils on her fingers, “Coal residue from industries like the steel industry. Contaminants in the water. Lead and arsenic and mercury in products children are exposed to every day.”
“Stop it, Addie.” It was Cora saying it this time, barely audibly. Not Tom.
But Addie was too caught up in her list-making to hear her. “Paint. Gasoline. Seafood. Dental fillings, antiseptics, thermometers, blood-pressure gauges. Fluorescent lightbulbs.”
“I said stop it!” Cora rose from the sofa and walked briskly across the living room, toward the door to the kitchen.
She stopped, but didn’t turn around, when Addie called after her, “Cora, wait—listen! Don’t you see how all these things beyond your control were at the root of Richard’s problems? Not you, for God’s sake, not something you did or didn’t do.”
Slowly Cora turned to face her, her hands balled into fists, her eyes closed below her furrowed brow. “And don’t you see,” she said, slowly, her voice rasping and choked. “Don’t you see that every time you do this, launching into all your research and statistics, regaling me with your litany of all the poisons my sons were exposed to every day of their lives—every single time you do this you blame me too, Addie? Maybe more than anyone, you blame me—for living where we lived, for feeding my family what I fed them. For letting them drink the water. Jesus, for taking my children’s temperatures, for letting them be vaccinated!”
She stopped then, walking over and lowering herself into a chair beside the fire. “I know you mean well,” she said. “But I don’t think I can listen to this anymore. I simply don’t want to hear it.”
Tom had never seen his wife—his hotheaded, righteously angry, impetuous Addie—look so stricken. For quite a while she only stared ahead of her, first at Cora, then, it seemed, into the fire.
When she finally spoke, her voice was so soft and broken that Tom wondered if Cora could even hear her. “I don’t blame you, Cora. I don’t.” And then they were all silent, for how long no one could say. And this was how Scarlet and Bobby, returning from their trip to the mall, found them.
They didn’t speak of it again. But clearly that exchange had changed Addie somehow. Later, back in Burnham, when she returned The Empty Fortress to the college library, she complained bitterly to her friend Candace, the head librarian, about Bettelheim’s treatment of mothers.
“Well,” Candace said, “no surprises there. Who doesn’t blame everything on their mom?” Then she led Addie to the art stacks, a section of the library Addie had known intimately back in her days as a student but that she hadn’t spent any time in, really, for years now. There Candace pulled The Diary and Letters of Kaethe Kollwitz off the shelf. “Here’s a healthy antidote to all that mother-bashing,” she said.
Addie raced through the book that evening, and at the college bookstore the next day she asked Mrs. Hodges to order two copies. When they arrived, she sent one to Cora—secretly hoping that Scarlet might take a look at the book as well. She wanted both of them to read it, though she couldn’t have said exactly what message she wanted to send them with this account of a life as mother and artist, cheerful and productive one day, the next filled with despair and self-doubt.
With the book she included a note that read simply, “I’m sorry.” She hoped Scarlet might see the note as well; it could have been addressed to either her friend or her daughter. This was her attempt, however indirect, to apologize to both of them.
In the months after that painful Christmas in Cider Cove, Addie devoted much of her time to collecting, stuffing, and preserving dead birds, using Tom’s state license and the tiny Burnham College “museum” of specimens to justify her work—at first. For years people had been bringing dead birds to Tom and her, convinced that the shining blue-black grackle or the flamboyant downy woodpecker corpse they’d found in their backyard (the former left there, no doubt, by their cat, the latter probably done in by a confused flight directly into their big bay window) was some rare and exotic species, tropical, maybe, based on those dramatic hues. Others, more thoughtful and aware (and often older), did bring less common species—a meadowlark, a Swainson’s thrush, a sharp-shinned hawk—assuming Tom or Addie might want to stuff and mount it for their work. Dead birds had always been part of their life together, an occupational hazard of sorts for an ornithologist and a bird artist.
How did they die? Lots of ways. Cats. Still the occasional brush with a boy with a BB gun. Confused flights into large plate-glass windows—like those stretching above the front doors and illuminating the cathedral-ceilinged foyers of Bert Schafer’s Burnham Estates. And some—in fact most, Addie was convinced; certainly far more than anyone wanted to admit—had been sickened by eating plants or insects that were poisoned by pesticides, or by drinking water contaminated by runoff from the new developments popping up everywhere.
At first she simply decided to take the more intact ones to Richard Schantz, to have them stuffed and mounted; this was, after all, what the people who brought most of them seemed to expect. Before long she found herself collecting them on her own—a dead Canada goose she found along the canal towpath, two gulls from a weekend visit to the Eastern Shore; she wasn’t looking for trophy birds.
One morning in early May, Addie arrived at Schantz’s shop with a great blue heron someone had left on her doorstep. He laughed and said, “You ought to just learn to do this on your own, you know.”
“Could you teach me?” she asked. She’d been thinking the same thing herself.
“I could, yes,” he said. “But I’d say you’re probably smart enough to figure it out on your own,” and he pulled his dog-eared copy of Leon Pray’s Taxidermy out of a drawer in his desk. She borrowed the book for a few weeks, eventually ordering a copy of her own. Even Mrs. Hodges, who thought she’d seen everything in ordering books for Addie through the years, raised her eyebrows at that one.
For a long time she couldn’t have said what she was doing—gutting the poor things, disjointing their knees and tails, hanging them on a savage-looking chain-and-hooks contraption so as to pull their skins down over their heads and shoulders more easily. Perhaps she should have been a surgeon, she thought on occasion, contentedly immersed in the delicate work of trimming away ear and eyelid linings, removing eyeballs and brains. She set up shop in the tumbledown garden shed behind the cabin—a space both Tom and Scarlet, when she was home for visits, began to avoid assiduously—stocking it with tools ranging from scalpels and forceps to claw hammers, heavy thread and baling twine, galvanized wire, cotton batting, excelsior, glass eyes.
And there she worked through that winter and spring, and on into Scarlet’s first years of college, with a dogged enthusiasm she could never explain to her husband or daughter. Sketching the stiff corpses from various angles. Using her paints and brushes, now, to touch up patches of bare skin and give bills and feet more lifelike color. Treating skins and dusting feathers with borax powder. She liked Pray’s bluntness, his praise for borax—a recent replacement, at the time of his book, in the 1940s, for the formerly much-used arsenic—as taxidermy’s “greatest boon—mothproofing that will not kill the operator.”
One morning, well into her second year of this new obsession, Tom asked Addie if he might join her in the gardening shed (which he’d dubbed the “charnel house”), to watch her at work.
She raised her eyebrows over her cup of coffee. “You’re sure you want to?” she asked. “You’ve always seemed kind of squeamish about it.”
He shrugged. “Well, I’ve handled the finished product nearly every day for the last thirty years,” he said, acknowledging the various stuffed and mounted specimens that were part of every ornithologist’s laboratory. Necessary evils, Tom m
ight have said, though he himself had never felt compelled to add anything to Burnham’s inventory.
“If I start to grow faint you can wave some turpentine under my nose,” he said, and she laughed.
Tom watched quietly through the morning, while she worked on shaping and stitching the false body of a red-tailed hawk that had been shot in the woods nearby, presumably by a bored teenager with a hunting rifle.
“Better a hawk than a bunch of kids at the high school, I suppose,” said the owner of a nearby orchard, who’d found the dead bird and delivered it to Addie and Tom’s house a couple days before.
Addie shuddered when he said it, relieved that Scarlet’s years at the area high school were over. And thinking too of the photographs of nearby Hawk Mountain in the 1930s, its crest spread with hundreds of dead hawks, all laid in neat rows below a group of smiling hunters with their rifles held aloft. Now, as Tom examined the hawk’s skin while she tucked, wrapped, and stitched, she said, “This one was harder. I haven’t had to deal with too many shot holes or dried blood.”
“You’ve cleaned it up quite well, I’d say,” he said, turning the drying skin to examine it more closely. Then he walked over and sat down beside her, watching her work in silence for a while. Finally he said, “You know, I don’t know why this never occurred to me before. You’ve turned to sculpture now. You’re sculpting.”
Of course. That was it. And how odd that for all these months it hadn’t occurred to her, either, that this was what she was doing. But then, Tom had always had more confidence in her and her work than she’d ever had in herself. It may have been, in the end, her lack of training. Or her sense that she was trying, somehow, to do something else—to change people’s minds, maybe, about how they chose to live—however much she might fail. Still, if she could never bring herself to say that what she was doing was “making art,” she also could never stay away from the work for long.
In Hovering Flight Page 19