In Hovering Flight

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In Hovering Flight Page 20

by Joyce Hinnefeld


  Pointing to the two gulls, which she’d mounted in an awkwardly splayed position, he said, “Those you’ve crucified, haven’t you?” He walked over to examine them more closely. “Two of the ‘untouchables,’ the underclass. They could hang on either side of a peregrine falcon, maybe. Or our sorry long-eared owl.” He laughed quietly.

  But she stared at the gulls in silence, her mouth open. How had she failed to see it? She looked then at the stuffed body of the hawk in her hands, and saw something else she’d only been feeling, moments before: a mother’s body, soft and mournful, curving inward. She’d felt, as she shaped it, how she would mount it: as the anchor for a kind of feathered pietà. All these Catholic images! Of course Tom would see this immediately; for her, though, they’d been echoes of something else: Kollwitz’s sculptures and engravings.

  Her fingers, sticky with papier-mâché and bleeding at the tips, where she’d pricked them with the raw ends of wire, suddenly tingled. That night the dreams started again. And once again, the images washed over her faster than she could even begin to sketch them, to store them somehow for the months of work ahead.

  She worked ceaselessly after that; every dead bird set off something like visions in her. If she still wasn’t certain what she was making, it hardly mattered; all that mattered, now, was doing it.

  If Tom had not forced her to go for a checkup in the fall of 1988 (making the appointment, dragging her from the shed to the car, driving her there), who knew how advanced her cancer might have grown? As it was, by the time the three of them, Tom, Scarlet, and Addie, sat in the oncologist’s office two weeks later, there were already several lumps in Addie’s breast. And they were not benign. At Tom’s request, Scarlet had come home to accompany them to Addie’s appointment with the oncologist, who urged her to begin chemotherapy as soon as possible.

  Tom had hesitated, at first, to involve Scarlet in this way. But in the end he was glad he had. Clearly it was Scarlet’s tears that convinced Addie to agree to the conventional rounds of treatment—Scarlet’s tears that saved her; he was sure of it. Scarlet often said it was Addie who chose to fight the first time. But he remained convinced that Addie had fought for Scarlet.

  She had never been able to bear her daughter’s tears—bringing Scarlet to their bed at night at the first whimper, allowing her to stay home from school whenever her feelings were hurt by another child or, later, an unfeeling teacher. It was peculiar really, how powerfully it affected tough, steely Addie, seeing her daughter cry. Maybe, Tom thought, it was because Scarlet so seldom did, at least in their presence, past the age of three or four.

  “You’re going to make her incapable of getting on in the world,” he sometimes warned his wife. Lamely, of course; he couldn’t bear to see Scarlet’s sadness either. Somehow Tom’s tenderness when it came to his daughter made more sense. It was stranger in Addie, this unexpected softness, this hidden capacity for pain and sorrow in a woman whose own tears always seemed connected, not with sorrow, but with a bottomless rage. Strange, but there it was: It was Scarlet’s tears that did it. Scarlet’s tears, which cut her mother more deeply than every round of pesticides, every felled woodland, every diminished species of bird.

  sixteen

  PEOPLE SENT HER THE most ridiculous things during that year of chemotherapy, followed by a dose of radiation—and, lest she miss out on any of the horrors late-twentieth-century medicine had to offer, years of follow-up hormone therapy to wreak its own brand of havoc.

  Books on visualization and “psychic healing.” Endless arrangements of hideously tinted cut flowers. Even a newly released recording of bird-songs—two volumes, on compact disks (though of course she and Tom did not own a CD player). This even Tom had to laugh about (“All we have to do is open a window to hear most of these,” he said, reading over the liner notes). Though he did borrow a machine from the college and listen to both volumes, pronouncing the recordings, in the end, “not that bad.”

  But Addie couldn’t bear to listen to it. Even birdsongs, even Tom’s beloved dawn chorus, had taken on a menacing timbre for her of late, linked, as she’d grown convinced those riotous songs were, with competition over shrinking territory; one study she’d read posited the dawn chorus as nothing more than a hostile choir of male birds signaling their aggressive intentions by mimicking each others’ songs. So much for the friendly, playful banter she’d imagined she was hearing as a love-struck coed twenty-five years before, wandering aimlessly through the English countryside and the Pennsylvania woods.

  She tried, though, to be grateful, to thank visitors for the flowers, read the books and articles Tom brought for her, enjoy the show of Käthe Kollwitz’s prints that Tom took her and Scarlet to see during that year’s Christmas break. But never, in her life, had she felt so tired. So tired, and so sick—and so convinced, this time, that it wasn’t going to end.

  “You can’t think that way,” Tom told her with tears in his eyes. “You have to try harder to be optimistic, Addie. Or you really never will get well.”

  Suddenly Tom, the rational scientist, had turned into Norman Cousins.

  He worked tirelessly to boost her spirits in any way he could. For years he’d been envisioning another sabbatical—maybe spent at Hawk Mountain, then Cider Cove, again. Nothing elaborate. Of course now they needed to be near the hospital in Philadelphia, at least for the months ahead. It also seemed to him less pressing to try to get Addie away from Burnham, now that she had work that, however different from the work of their early years together, was clearly satisfying to her. Or at least had been satisfying to her, before this setback.

  He wondered about the following year, when Addie’s course of treatment would be over. But he hesitated to ask her, fearing her grim response. Maybe, he sometimes thought, resting at home would be better for her than a sabbatical trip somewhere. Maybe Cider Cove would hold too many difficult memories for her. She seemed peaceful, now, at home in Burnham—too resigned for his liking, yes, but at least peaceful for a change.

  Still, the machinations of Bert Schafer were always there on the horizon, buzzing or humming there like an out-of-tune fiddle, throwing everything out of whack. In recent years—and especially since Schafer had set his sights on the college, dropping money almost tauntingly here and there, clearly with his greedy eyes on all that land—Tom had come to dread the very sound of his name, reacting as strongly as Addie had years before.

  Teaching satisfied him less too, in these waning years of Ronald Reagan’s decade; students seemed to have become complacent consumers with little interest in learning, bored by everything—and boring themselves. He was turning, he realized with despair, into a jaded old boy of the faculty—one of those perpetually disgruntled geezers, lecturing from their yellowed notes, filled with a deep and abiding contempt for their students: the kind of colleague who’d both amused and annoyed him in his early days of teaching. It was time for a change, he knew.

  But something or someone interfered with his plans, every time. First there’d been Addie’s presumed connection with the fires at Burnham Estates, then Scarlet’s choosing to live apart from them, in Cider Cove. Then, the next year, Karl’s death and Cora’s retreat into herself had made a stay in Cider Cove seem wrong, for everyone concerned. And of course now there was Scarlet’s tuition to contend with—still a strain for them, despite her healthy scholarships.

  But then, with Addie’s sickness and exhaustion there in front of him each day, and—more disturbing than that—her apparent resignation, her inability, or unwillingness, whatever it was, to fight the damn disease, he thought, again, of trying to make it work anyway. In December, after the first dose of cytotoxins, he said to her, “What if we spent next year in Cider Cove? Would you like that? Wouldn’t it be good for you to get away from here? You might rest better somewhere else.”

  Actually, all she did now, it seemed, was rest. Reading no longer seemed to interest her; even the trip to New York for the Kollwitz show appeared not to have reached her.

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nbsp; She stared vacantly at him for so long that he wondered if she’d even heard his questions. She sat in the rocker by the woodstove where she spent most of her days, dressed in a sweatshirt and jeans that hung loosely on her now. She’d lost a good deal of her hair as well, but it was her empty eyes, Tom thought, not her thin frame or nearly bald head, that made her look more like a corpse than like anything resembling the stubborn woman he’d loved for twenty-five years.

  Finally she turned her gaze back to the window, to the light snow that had begun to fall that morning, dusting the feeder Tom had erected outside the window earlier in the fall. He’d set it up with the vague (and slim) hope that Addie might, at least, pick up a pad to sketch a bit through the difficult weeks ahead. Now it appeared that she didn’t even see the junco below the feeder, doggedly pecking at seeds, though she was staring directly at it.

  “Addie,” he said finally, “do you hate the feeder too?” He knew some part of her surely did hate this clear emblem of connection to the cult of backyard birders—those who can’t be bothered to walk into the woods, who expect the birds to come to them. But he’d hoped, since she was too weak to make her way to her old blind, that a feeder might somehow soothe her.

  She turned back to him, her gaze a bit clearer now, he thought. “What?” she said, then shook her head. “I’m sorry. Cider Cove—you asked about Cider Cove. We can go there if you’d like, Tom. Whatever you’d like.” She stood then, slowly, and turned toward the bedroom. “I’m going to lie down for a while.”

  It was Scarlet who helped him see what Addie needed. Not the blind, not a feeder. Scarlet, who’d been transformed, somehow, through some mysterious alchemy triggered by her time, the preceding summer, on Nantucket, and the writing course she’d taken during the fall when Addie had been diagnosed, into what he could only describe (in a phone call to Cora) as a contemporary version of her mother at this age. To which Cora had only replied, “Hmmm,” then mumbled something about Scarlet’s being, perhaps, a bit more independent than Addie had been. He’d decided not to take that as a criticism of him.

  “I think you need to get her back into her charnel house,” Scarlet said during her Christmas break, when they returned from the Kollwitz show in New York. And so one weekend after the holidays, when Scarlet had returned to school and the snow had melted, he set to work, installing a small woodstove, putting in sturdy windows, and—before he wrapped her in her old down coat and led her there—depositing, on the new work table he’d set up in place of the rickety old card table she’d been using before, two dead crows. He’d found them that morning, below the ridiculously oversized window above the entrance to Burnham College’s newest building, the Mildred Schafer Auditorium.

  Later Addie would credit Tom with pulling her through that very bad time, at the end of her first round of chemotherapy, and getting her back to work. “Everything I’ve done has been in collaboration with Tom,” she would say in an interview; “he’s been my teacher for thirty-five years, since the day I walked into his classroom.” By that time, when A Prosody of Birds was being reissued in its millennial edition, it was Addie everyone called for pithy quotes about the dire state of the planet. To Tom’s amusement, she worried that he might mind.

  Gradually, in the winter of 1989, accustomed now to the nausea and fatigue, she got back to work. By springtime she’d begun painting a bit as well. In June, after another family gathering in the oncologist’s office, Scarlet’s tears once again working their magic, Addie reluctantly agreed to a follow-up round of radiation. In August she didn’t even object—she seemed, in fact, hardly to notice—when the oncologist urged her to follow this up with hormone therapy: that daily pill. By then she seemed too engrossed in her work, maybe even too determined to go on living, to argue.

  Meanwhile Scarlet, home for a month’s visit and traveling back and forth between Burnham and Cider Cove, read them a draft of a poem she called “All the Bilge and Ruin.” Here she was, their beautiful grown daughter, long legs filling the entire front-room sofa, long hair falling loose from a ribbon tied carelessly at the nape of her neck. A poet. She made them sit behind her, where she couldn’t see them. “I can’t see you looking at me while I read; I’ll start laughing if I do,” she said, and blushed. Her voice filled the room like honey, as gold and pure as that.

  The poem seemed to be about everything from cormorants and herons flailing on some nameless shore, their faulty wings slick with the rainbow hues of an oil spill, to the struggles of Käthe Kollwitz, to the hidden lives of illegal immigrants. “A mystery, what or whom the artist loves” was one line Tom would never forget.

  By the winter of 1991, after graduating and then moving to Vermont, into some sort of communal something-or-other in an old farmhouse outside Burlington, Scarlet had begun working on “Sick with Certainty,” her blood-for-oil elegy in response to the Gulf War.

  “Trust me, there’s more than grand utopian visions going on there,” Lou said, a few weeks after Scarlet and a pack of her friends (“neohippies,” Lou dubbed them) had camped out at her house after marching against the war—protesting by day, relishing their host’s food and wine by night. “Yes, they want to get back to the land and share the labor and the wealth and so on,” she said. “But they’re sharing more than that. And I could tell you exactly which one Scarlet’s sharing hers with, if you’d care to know.”

  “That’s her business, Lou!” Addie chirped in response. She had been pronounced clear of cancer the month before, and finally they were all together—Lou, Cora, Addie, and Tom—in Cider Cove, to celebrate. Addie was working steadily on several new pieces. “Assemblages,” she called these new works, some of which incorporated paintings, both old and new. And all of which included models of actual birds that she’d gutted and stuffed—many of them found in or near newer housing developments, most of these Bert Schafer’s, in southeastern Pennsylvania. And most of them, in all likelihood, poisoned by pesticides, a point Addie planned to stress in her accompanying artist’s statement.

  “That would be Kevin you’re talking about, Lou,” Tom said. “We’ve already met him. Seems like a terrific guy.”

  “Better than the Nantucket playboy, is he?” Cora asked. Though of course she knew the answer; Scarlet had spoken to her often, about both young men.

  “Well, more to our liking, yes,” Tom said, prompting Lou to roll her eyes.

  “Seems to me a Nantucket playboy might set her up better than some sweet organic farmer boy in Vermont,” she said. “A wealthy patron’s not a bad thing, for an artist or a poet.” She looked pointedly at Addie, who only laughed at her friend and shook her head.

  Actually, Addie seemed circumspect about Kevin, as she had, also, about Scarlet’s previous boyfriend, Nate. Tom had imagined that it would be harder for him to tolerate this—his daughter becoming a young woman, and clearly a sexual one. But in fact he’d liked both Nate and Kevin; it made him happy to think that his daughter found pleasure with these engaging young men, both of them like students he’d enjoyed through the years. And he’d been undeniably proud to watch Scarlet grow into such a beautiful girl, hints of red brightening her long brown hair, her former gangliness transformed into a graceful, long-legged frame (where her height came from was anyone’s guess), so wonderfully at ease in her filmy peasant skirts and lacy camisoles.

  He also adored her friends, the ones connected, now, with her confident new poet self—the girls, Kira and Gianna, who sang old Joni Mitchell songs in breathy harmony, Kevin with his guitar, clownish Mike who kept excusing himself to go outside to smoke. (Did he really think, Tom wondered, that they didn’t know what he was smoking?) When Scarlet and several of these friends had visited for a few nights, en route back to Vermont after marching in Washington, he’d pulled out his fiddle, and they’d all drunk beer and danced and sung until the middle of the night. Their visit had even energized his teaching, grown so routine and stale in recent years. The morning after they’d left, he’d carried his fiddle to class, leaving his le
cture notes behind in his office—something he hadn’t done in years.

  But a mother—and Addie in particular, he supposed—surely has her reasons for not completely trusting the men in her daughter’s life. It pained him to think of it.

  Did she ever speak of her fears or doubts to Scarlet? Not that he could see. It seemed to him that they barely spoke at all. And through those years of Addie’s getting back to work and Scarlet’s finding herself as a poet, it seemed particularly strange to Tom that his wife and daughter never spoke to each other about their work. Clearly they were influencing, even inspiring, one another—both of them making repeated references to Kollwitz. But it was Tom that Scarlet spoke to about poetry during those years, late at night, sipping scotch beside the woodstove, or staring at the moon and slapping at mosquitoes as they dangled their feet in Kleine Creek. Mostly they joked and teased, Tom insisting on the superiority of birdsong, Scarlet berating a typical passerine’s limited emotional range.

  With Scarlet, he thought, Addie seemed almost shy. The same was true of Scarlet with her mother.

  Yet, though credit always seemed to be given to him, for helping Addie through the first cancer, for steering her back to her work, the truth was it was Scarlet who seemed to keep making the right suggestions. First it was getting Addie back to her charnel house, a place Scarlet would never have stooped to mention by name just a couple years before. Then, home from Vermont for Christmas in 1991 (and clearly mourning, but tight-lipped about, her recent breakup with Kevin), she suggested Tom call his former student, the owner of the gallery in New Hope where Addie had had a show of her paintings eight years before.

  He balked at that idea at first. “You mean a show of these new things, the assemblages?” This work was so radically different, Tom thought; what might the gallery owner who’d loved her earlier work think of it? And if he declined, what might that do to Addie? “I don’t know, Scarlet. I’m not sure what he’d think of this stuff.”

 

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