In Hovering Flight

by Joyce Hinnefeld

  “He’ll be interested if there’s a collector who’s already interested,” Scarlet said.

  He stared at her blankly. “Well, sure,” he said. “You have someone in mind?”

  “Call Lou,” she said then, with a casualness that he somehow didn’t trust. What exactly had she and Lou talked about last winter, when Scarlet and her friends had stayed at Lou’s house?

  She squatted down to examine something at the edge of the canal; they were walking the old German shepherd named Jinx (Tom and Addie’s most recent stray, found foraging in their compost pile three years before, on the morning when Addie’s doctor had discovered several new lumps in her breast). No, he decided as he watched her; she doesn’t know. If she did, she’d never have suggested such a thing.

  “How’d you suddenly become so clever and conniving?” he ventured, clearing his throat.

  She shrugged and smiled as she stood, reaching to take Jinx’s leash from him. “I’ve been talking to Cora. It was her idea. A good one, don’t you think?”

  He didn’t really think so, for a lot of reasons. Addie would never go for that, he thought, and Lou was such a loose cannon; who’d want to have to deal with her? But then he realized that all it really came down to—the main reason, really, that he didn’t like the idea—was that it meant he would have to call Lou.

  “Why doesn’t Cora ask her about it?” he said. As soon as he asked, he realized that of course Cora had to know; both women had surely told her. How could he have imagined otherwise? And now, presumably, she’d come up with a way for them to make up for the mistakes of the past.

  “She thinks the idea should really come from you, Dad,” Scarlet said, yanking Jinx away from another dog’s recent deposit. “Maybe you could invite Lou up to see what Addie’s been doing, that kind of thing.” She winked at him then. “You know, flatter her. Court her a bit!” With that she shook the leash and clicked her tongue, running ahead of him, pulling Jinx into a reluctant trot.

  He watched her gamboling with the dog, looking—from this distance—like she had as a thirteen-year-old, all arms and legs and boundless energy, running ahead of him on whatever trail they were traveling. Well, he thought, now of course he’d have to make the call. How could he not?

  Through the years that followed, he did wonder whether Lou had truly loved Addie’s new work as much as she said. The piece she chose to buy, via Tom’s former student the gallery owner, was the one that would eventually cause all the trouble—or all the excitement, depending on how you saw it; Tom could never quite decide.

  Titled After Kollwitz, it was based on an 1896 etching of Kollwitz’s called From Many Wounds You Bleed, O People, a triptych of sorts. In the center panel, a traditional Christian lamentation scene, a man with a sword bends over a nude male corpse; on either side are nude female figures, bound to columns, crucifixion-style.

  In Addie’s assemblage, the female figures were replaced by lifelike models of two stuffed ring-billed gulls, hideously splayed and nailed to miniature crosses. Between them was a painting—a large one, four feet by five feet: a self-portrait of Addie on a hospital bed, bald, gaunt, and nude (the likeness is impressive, and eerily prescient), an IV tube attached to her arm. Above her is a window, a view onto the world outside: rows and rows of Burnham Estates–style McMansions. In the center of the window is a gate before this hillside clogged with new houses as far as the eye can see, and on the gate is a sign—a photograph of the actual sign at the entrance to the real Burnham Estates. Eventually Addie’s show in New Hope—centered on this piece, along with a Pietà depicting a wounded juvenile hawk and its mother—generated a bit of a fuss, a flutter of indignation here and there, and some admiration too.

  But reactions in New Hope in 1992 were nothing compared to the trouble, or excitement, to come two years later, when Lou pushed Addie to apply for a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (and pulled some strings to make sure she got one). Then she helped arrange for several of Addie’s assemblages, including After Kollwitz and Pietà, to be included in a show at a prominent gallery in Washington. And one cold and dreary day in 1994, Bert Schafer invited the conservative Republican senator Howard Swenson—a devout Catholic from western Pennsylvania, to whose last campaign Schafer had made several sizable contributions—to join him in viewing that show.

  Schafer must have thought he’d won the battle when Swenson and his cronies in the Senate had succeeded in getting Addie’s grant rescinded. He’d made much of the fact that he’d chosen not to sue her for libel. “It’s not about money, or about the defaming of a wonderful, small-town neighborhood,” he said. “The shocking thing here is this so-called artist’s despicable use of the most sacred images of Christianity.”

  “Libel?” Lou screamed with laughter. “Libel! Against what—a goddamn housing development? Against Jesus Christ?”

  They all laughed then, and clinked their glasses. They were all together again—Addie and Tom, Cora, Lou—now in the fall of 1994, this time seated on the plush sofas and chairs in Lou’s living room, celebrating once again. This time Scarlet was there too, taking a break from her graduate work in Massachusetts.

  They were celebrating because suddenly After Kollwitz was worth well over ten times the amount Lou had paid the New Hope gallery owner two years before. And now plans were under way for a show in New York.

  Tom looked at Addie that evening, trying to read her dazed smile. Was she enjoying this? Certainly she looked happy, glowing really, lovelier than she had in years. And why shouldn’t she be happy? Suddenly her work—and her passionate anger—was reaching more people than she would have ever dreamed. For her sake, then, he sipped his champagne, kissed his wife’s cheek, and smiled.

  His kiss woke her from a kind of reverie. She’d been thinking, almost dreaming really, behind her glazed smile, about her twenty-one-year-old self, roaming the Burnham hills and woods with Tom. She felt like that now—as if she were twenty-one again, her life just beginning, but knowing a bit more. Knowing this time, for instance, that it couldn’t last. Because of course the cancer would return; she knew this with absolute certainty. The sense of urgency this gave her made her giddy, like she might bubble over some edge at any moment, like the champagne Lou kept uncorking.

  It was all she could do not to take Tom’s hand and lead him, right now, up to their king-sized bed in Lou’s “guest suite” upstairs.

  The more she smiled, barely able to suppress whatever this was—perhaps only the hormone therapy, she thought—the more they all smiled back at her. Seeing this made her giddier still, and she bit her lip to keep from laughing. Of course she knew they thought, Lou particularly, that she was only grinning and giggling over all that had happened in the last few months—the success of the show in Washington, all the attention and acclaim once the grant had been rescinded.

  In truth, she could take or leave all the attention, though the money was certainly nice. She and Tom were planning to travel; already there were invitations, from a foundation in Santa Fe, from an artists’ retreat in Florida, from a private collector who wanted to host them at his home in Costa Rica. And it pleased her, of course, that suddenly her work, and all she’d been trying to say for years, was finally reaching people. But she doubted this was going to change that many minds, in the long run; she was still convinced it would take more than art to do that.

  She’d known that Lou had not loved After Kollwitz half as much as she’d claimed. Since their days as students—since, maybe, the earliest days of her crush on Willem de Kooning—Lou’s tastes had run more toward Abstract Expressionism and the like. She’d always hated “art with a message.”

  But Addie had gone along with Tom and Lou and all their plans. For them. For their sakes: finally to soothe their guilty consciences, to free them.

  Meanwhile, all she wanted was to get back to work. To make love to her husband, get out of bed early, and take a big mug of coffee back to her shed. But for now she’d swallow her restlessness and tip her glass an
d join in the merriment.

  Lou was ebullient, and Cora was happily passing around pictures of her first grandchild, now a month old. And there was Scarlet, watching them all and smiling, her hair cut short, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, fresh from her simple life in her simple room in Massachusetts (a celibate life, she’d told Addie, with a peculiar sort of pride). Even as she watched the rest of them, smiling absently, Scarlet was thinking about a poem, Addie was sure of it; she recognized that faraway, happy look and the way her daughter’s fingers tapped a rhythm on her knee.

  Even Tom was smiling happily, seated in this richly decorated room that she knew he hated, sipping champagne, which he also hated, from Lou’s expensive crystal.

  And she, Addie Sturmer Kavanagh, was alive and, for the moment, well. She took Tom’s hand and squeezed it. She didn’t tell him, then or later, that she’d stayed at that and countless other parties and receptions and tributes in the years that followed, for him.

  seventeen

  THE SUMMER AFTER SCARLET’S sophomore year at Bates, she worked as a waitress in the restaurant of an old inn in’Sconset, on the eastern shore of Nantucket.’Sconset was a glorious town, with wild roses blooming along every perfectly weathered fence row and with beautiful beaches, populated mainly by summer residents, some of whose families had been summering on Nantucket for generations.

  Other families—like her boyfriend, Nate’s—went even further back, to the original English residents of the island, whalers from Nantucket Town. It was Nate who’d gotten Scarlet the job at the inn; the owner was a friend of his father’s.

  Every moment that she wasn’t waitressing that summer (and there were precious few of these, as the summer wore on; by early August, most of her fellow college-aged waiters and waitresses had quit, happy to burn through the money they’d earned so far, partying and beach-hopping on Martha’s Vineyard or the Cape), Scarlet spent sailing with Nate. This, she thought at the time, was to be her future: summers spent sailing with her handsome, suntanned husband at the family compound on the outskirts of’Sconset, winters in Boston or New York with her husband the successful lawyer, which was Nate’s plan, if he could get his grades up.

  Never mind that that summer, while Nate barhopped with his friends, Scarlet was working two shifts a day at the inn, serving endless plates of artfully arranged swordfish and scallops, opening bottle after bottle of chardonnay. And that she was staying not at the family compound—his parents wouldn’t really approve, Nate had said apologetically—but in a T-shirt- and underwear-strewn room above the inn’s kitchen that she shared with two other “summer girls,” girls whom she rarely saw and whose names she had forgotten by the end of the summer.

  Still, through June, July, and into August, Scarlet persisted in this belief: She would marry, if not Nate, then someone like him. And eventually she and this husband would live, with their two perfect children, in a big, spotless house in some old, tasteful, and moneyed suburb with good schools. They would have a television, two nice, new, and rust-free cars, and a big, tidy backyard without a single bird carcass visible anywhere. At last she would be normal. Marriage would give her that, at last.

  This vision persisted through not one but two women’s studies courses, in which Scarlet did quite well. Which wasn’t to say that anything she read, talked about, or wrote about in those courses actually reached her. So she had every right to expect to earn as much as, or more than, her male peers at Bates. So what? she thought. At that point, she knew that what she wanted to do was write poetry, a profession that would leave her equally destitute were she male or female. Marriage seemed the only viable route.

  It wasn’t women’s studies that changed Scarlet’s mind. It was Käthe Kollwitz—and, indirectly, Addie and Cora. Addie, who surely knew that if she’d sent a book like Kollwitz’s Diary to Scarlet directly (she’d tried, often enough over the years, with Rachel Carson, then people like Aldo Leopold, Jessica Mitford, Wendell Berry), she wouldn’t read it. And Cora, who might have left the book out in plain view on the coffee table in the living room, but chose instead to leave it—along with Addie’s brief, cryptic note—half hidden in a pile of books in her study. So of course Scarlet found it, and read it in secret.

  In 1941 Kollwitz wrote in her diary that “originally pity and sympathy were only minor elements leading me to the representation of proletarian life; rather, I simply found it beautiful.” Scarlet might have found this impossibly smug and patronizing if she hadn’t, on some gut level, also found it true. If she hadn’t found the busboys and dishwashers and maids at the inn, many of them illegal immigrants from Guatemala, kinder, more interesting—and yes, more beautiful—than Nate’s friends and family, truthfully even than Nate.

  And if she hadn’t, one morning in August, awoken bleary and hungover from a night of drinking with Nate and his friends, sickened by that morning’s mechanical sex with her still drunk boyfriend—who, Scarlet felt, could have been humping a piece of furniture, for all the interest and affection he displayed. Later that morning she stepped into the motorboat she and Nate were to take out to his sailboat, anchored farther out in the bay, took one look at the oil-slick puddle of bilge below her feet, and immediately vomited over the side.

  She and Nate had little to say to each other after that morning, when Scarlet stepped out of the boat without a word, went back to her room, and fell asleep. That night, after her shift in the restaurant, she climbed out the window of her room and sat on the folding chair on the fire escape where her roommates, both of whom had quit their jobs and moved on by then, had gone to smoke. It was a gorgeous night, a full moon and a sky blazing with stars, and Scarlet sat there, notebook on her knees, scribbling away until dawn.

  That was the beginning of a change in Scarlet—or maybe less a change, she sometimes thought, than a simple acceptance of who she truly was. A would-be poet. Tom and Addie Kavanagh’s daughter. Not particularly normal. Addie’s cancer contributed to this acceptance, though Scarlet spent a good part of her junior year in college, the year of Addie’s diagnosis and treatment, pretending it wasn’t happening. But each time there was to be an appointment with the oncologist—a loaded one, a “what do we try next” one—at Tom’s request, Scarlet was there.

  Not surprisingly, Addie had no use for pink ribbons and pink teddy bears, or for walks and runs “for the cure.” “No cure is going to come from making the damn disease look cute and pink,” she said when Scarlet came home with a breast-cancer awareness T-shirt and mistakenly wore it into the kitchen one morning.

  Scarlet had been running since her last summer in Cider Cove. She wasn’t a competitive runner, but during the spring semester of her junior year at Bates, as Addie’s chemotherapy was winding down and she was once again immersed in her work, Scarlet signed up for the local Race for the Cure. It would be, she decided, her own personal vigil for and tribute to her mother, whom she’d barely recognized when she was home for Christmas break.

  Scarlet hadn’t gone with Addie to a single session of her treatment. She liked to think this was because Addie refused to let her. This might well have been the case, had Scarlet offered; Addie was adamant about her daughter going on with her life at school, and not making extra trips back to Burnham to be with her parents during that time. But in fact Tom never asked her to go, and she never offered.

  For some misguided reason Scarlet wanted Addie to see her Race for the Cure T-shirt that morning in the early summer, on her first visit home in two months. There were no teddy bears on it at least. But there was an image of a big pink ribbon, the words “Race” and “Cure” in neon-pink letters. When she heard Addie’s response to the shirt, she thought about running again, this time out of the house and into her car—back, maybe, to the relative safety of Cider Cove.

  “I’m sorry, Addie,” she said, stepping back from the stove, where Addie stood stirring a pot of oatmeal. “I wasn’t thinking—I’ll go and change.”

  Addie reached over to stop her, her thin hand resting on Scarle
t’s shoulder. Scarlet glanced at the band of pale skin on Addie’s ring finger; she’d removed her one piece of jewelry, her gold wedding band, now too loose for her bony finger. She’d never seen her mother’s hand without it, Scarlet realized.

  “You don’t have to change, Scarlet,” Addie said, covering the oatmeal and then sinking into a chair at the kitchen table and reaching for a section of the newspaper. “I’m sorry—that must have sounded thankless and cruel.” She whipped open the newspaper, then put it down in front of her and rested her head on her hand. “Do I sound that way a lot?” she asked, looking up at Scarlet. She knew the answer, of course; Tom had repeatedly pointed out to Addie, in recent months, that she ought to at least try to express gratitude for people’s gestures. Scarlet stared at the table, uncertain how to respond. Cooing, comforting noises of reassurance wouldn’t sit well with Addie, she knew.

  “Sometimes,” she finally said.

  Addie smiled, staring at Scarlet, who suddenly realized there were tears in her mother’s eyes. “I really am sorry, Scarlet,” she said. “It’s just that I feel like we’re all sick, so sick with all our certainty about this disease, all our silly self-assurances. Our teddy bears and pink ribbons. And meanwhile we go on living like we always have, poisoning ourselves and our children, just setting ourselves up for more.”

  It was the first time Scarlet realized how deeply all this truly pained her mother. How preventable her own suffering, and that of every other cancer victim, seemed, to her, if only people would open their eyes and see.

  Less than a year later Scarlet watched “smart bombs” coursing across a television screen, video-game-style, masking the reality that most of the bombs used in the Gulf War—like the one dropped on the Ameriyya air-raid shelter in Baghdad that killed over two hundred civilians, many of them children—weren’t, apparently, all that smart. She thought then of her mother’s words. “Sick with certainty,” she kept muttering to herself. She’d read somewhere that birds can, somehow, anticipate the shocking arrival of a bomb, rising and fleeing in panicked flocks, seconds before the explosion. Actually, she couldn’t recall whether she had read this or dreamed it. Wherever it came from, she realized that what she had, suddenly, was the rough outline of a poem.