Addie didn’t argue; it seemed so important to Cora to give her the studio. Never mind that her feelings about birdsong had changed in recent years. What she didn’t tell Cora, but did tell Candace at lunch that day, was that over the last few weeks, as her energy had begun to flag and she’d found herself, once again, too exhausted to go on working, suddenly she was lost in her own mind, barely noticing anything outside her window—awash, instead, in memories, incredibly vivid ones: of places. Their colors and textures, the quality of the light and the way the air felt, on her skin and entering her nose and throat. And their smells.
In fact, after years of scoffing at bird-watchers and their life lists of every species they’d seen, she’d begun a life list of her own—of smells. Not all of them were, strictly speaking, the smells of the natural world, but all were connected with places she’d loved, like the woods on her parents’ farm or on Burnham Ridge, the green back roads of England and Ireland, the salty marshland between Cape May and Cider Cove. And new places too, where she’d traveled with Tom in recent years. She hadn’t written them down; she felt no need to do that. Instead she carried the list in her mind, running through each item, calling every smell to mind, several times a day:
The electric smell of must and mold before a Pennsylvania thunderstorm.
Hay in the eaves of her father’s barn, at war with the reeking manure below.
Bacon frying.
River mud.
Diesel exhaust from an English bus.
The water-stained covers of old books.
Cedar bark and damp, clotted leaves outside the door on Haupt Bridge Road.
Wood smoke.
Traces of rotting fish at low tide on the New Jersey shore.
Turpentine, borax, glue.
Hot, sun-baked pine in the hills along the northern California coast.
Piñon and sage one spring in New Mexico.
Slippery mangoes on a Costa Rican beach.
Bay rum aftershave on Tom’s neck, rusty tang of sweat on clothes he wore for days in the field, a salty, trickling stream of his semen on her inner thigh.
Her own skin, on her chest and arms, brought back to life by the sun on the first warm day of spring—the way she’d smelled every May for as long as she could remember—some kind of nameless blossom, barely open, its scent gone the moment she sensed it.
When she told Candace about her list that day at lunch, Candace had said, “Well, then maybe you should read Proust next.” But once past Marcel’s memory of his childhood in Combray—the taste of the madeleine, the longing for his mother’s kiss—she’d found her mind wandering. An hour would pass, and she might doze, or fall into a kind of waking dream, a memory of her own. Nursing Scarlet in the rocker in the sun. Those fevered days of painting up in Maine, soaking the canvas with pink and orange and green. Kissing Tom on the slippery rocks of Nisky Creek, where she’d fallen back deliberately, knowing he would catch her, desperate to know the taste of his lips and tongue.
She’d look at the clock and see that several hours had passed. She might have read, at most, three pages.
Well, she’d never really been all that literary. Even in her days as an English major, hadn’t she gladly thrown aside her Wordsworth and Keats for a chance to consider Audubon at Miss Smallwood’s first suggestion? Those plates had filled her with something that no poem ever could, it seemed.
Even Scarlet’s poems baffled her at times, though she’d tried to be open to them. She’d held on to certain lines like life rafts, repeating them to herself like the lyrics from familiar songs as she painted or stuffed or mounted her birds.
“In all this bilge and ruin, Mother Kollwitz, will you find us?”
“This rough music, murderous chords of singing bombs . . .”
“And sick with certainty we soldier on.”
“The bittern blows out air like it’s drowning . . .”
“The dark boy alone, while the others cycle through the graves.”
Were her poems about specific things? she’d ventured to ask Scarlet last year at Christmas in Cider Cove. Bobby had been there with Cora—thinner since his divorce and the hard weeks, since September 11, without alcohol. But alive in a new way too, just as, she could tell, Scarlet was. Of course, she’d thought, though she’d said nothing about it to anyone: Of course he and Scarlet had found their way back to each other.
Or, she went on, were the poems meant to call to mind many questions, many moments—unanswerable and disconnected, except for the moment when one read the poem? Because that was how she experienced them, at times (at other times, she simply gave up, but she didn’t tell Scarlet this).
“Well, yes, Addie, that’s it exactly, I’d say,” Scarlet answered. Later that night, Addie thought maybe she’d caught a piece of the memory—“sick with certainty”—something they’d been discussing one morning at breakfast. Had it been the Gulf War, then? Wasn’t that what the poem was about? She forgot to ask Scarlet about it later.
Of course the Kollwitz references, those she thought she might take a little credit for.
But she truly wasn’t literary, and—increasingly, it seemed, since the cancer’s return—she was also unable to muster much of her former anger, her “righteous indignation,” as Tom called it. And so through that fall and winter she’d mainly sketched and, only occasionally, painted. Whatever birds she happened to see. As if she were a love-struck, bird-struck girl again, but calmer now. She felt almost serene, drawing then.
Not literary and, truthfully, probably not much of an artist either. True, she’d felt compelled to make the things she’d made—and it amused her, now, to think that her assemblages had actually brought her a kind of fame. Because she had never once, she knew, captured what she was seeing in her mind’s eye. Even Peterson said as much: “There’s a difference between illustration, which is a teaching device, as in my field guides,” he wrote, “and painting that’s evocative of your emotions. I’m envious of certain painters who have achieved that.” He wished he could have made paintings with a more “Audubonesque quality,” he said. It comforted her, reading that.
Maybe she had made work that was somehow “evocative of her emotions.” But now she wondered what, if anything, she’d accomplished by doing that. And now too, with this sudden rush of memories, first throughout the winter in Burnham, and now in Cora’s studio in Cider Cove, with everyone hovering and fussing—how she wished she could somehow capture this, the unbelievable clarity of her memories of all these places.
Maybe that was all it came down to, really, in the end. A kind of nostalgia fueling everything she did. A longing for the past, for places where she’d been so young and full of yearning, a full and melancholy kind of yearning, that she’d forgotten about until these last months. A need to somehow freeze those places in time, to preserve them, to protect them, and thereby keep the lost world of her youth intact.
Still, she did wish she could have done something about the woods on Burnham Ridge. That she might have had the last word there, at least. But of course that was a bit ridiculous. Tom and Scarlet and her grandchild deserved a little peace now, surely, a rest from all those worries.
It did pain her that she would never know her grandchild.
It pained her too, that she had never managed to make a painting of the Cuvier’s kinglet, for Tom.
10 May 2001
Thursday
Burnham Ridge (Small clearing fifty yards or so off the trail leading up from Nisky Creek, probably a homestead from the last century, flanked on either side by two perfect oaks)
Time: 5:30–9 A.M.
Observer: Addie Kavanagh
Habitat: Primarily these two oaks, and the mosses below; some attention to a stand of pines and a handful of residual crab-apple trees farther west along the ridge. Bloodroot, spring larkspur, Cora’s favorite anemones.
Weather: Overcast and cool, damp with the previous night’s rain. Temperatures rising from 58 degrees when I left home to 65 degrees by the time I’d
returned.
Remarks: I wish there were a way to convey this stillness. That alone will be a terrible loss.
SPECIES LIST
In the pines and crabapples:
American Robin 4
Black-Capped Chickadee 5
Hermit Thrush 1
Chipping Sparrow 2
Baltimore Oriole 2
Scarlet Tanager 1
In the taller oak at southeastern edge of clearing:
Cuvier’s Kinglet [hypothetical?] 1
Number of Species: 7; Number of Individuals: 16; Time: 3½ hrs.
Comments: No sign of the cerulean warbler this morning, I’m afraid. But there it was again, Audubon’s wren, on a branch of one of those towering oaks. It isn’t possible, yet there it was. A ruby-crowned kinglet, but with a golden-crowned’s head stripe. The Cuvier’s kinglet.
10 May—An optimist, and a magician—I half suspect you of rigging up a mechanical ruby-crowned kinglet and dabbing on a little paint to make that stripe (Don’t I have a stuffed one somewhere in the shed? To be honest, I’ve lost track; you and Scarlet can have fun cataloging them all when I’m gone). After all these years I probably could have been fooled, still, as you know.
I’m ill again, Tom. I know the cancer is back. I’ll tell you in another week or so. But I want nothing to do with the usual treatment.
I believe I’d like to die in Cider Cove. Cora has made a kind of peace with death; she’s had to, of course. You and Scarlet will too, but I don’t want to drag you both there by dying slowly on the banks of your beloved creeks. Cora and Lou can help out at first, and you can escape to the lighthouse or the marsh whenever you need to. If it drags on, our insurance should cover hospice care, I’m told; if that isn’t enough, go ahead and sell River Nile to the Driscolls or the Lloyds, or to Lou if she insists (I expect she will, though God knows why. Well, God and the two of you.)
I’m concerned that Scarlet will think she needs to be the one who cares for me as I get worse. Please encourage her to visit when she can, but don’t let her try to do this. Tell her to stay busy with her work and her life in New York.
I hope I do have some time, to travel a bit more, maybe. To keep going with you into the field. To spread our blanket below the trees and make love, as if it were 1965 all over again. This morning in the cottage you looked and smelled and felt to me exactly like you did back then.
It’s funny what I’ve been remembering lately. Not the sorts of things you’d expect. I’ve been thinking a lot about my mother and father, how all Mother wanted was to live in town—or, if she wasn’t going to get to live there, to be buried there. And I’ve been remembering my dad, tending to the graves in the middle of the field next to my parents’ little strip of land. Remember when I showed it to you? Just five or six flat, old little gravestones, and a crumbling old statue of an angel in the middle, right in the center of a cornfield.
It drove Mother crazy that he fussed so over those graves—pulling the weeds that grew around them, sweeping off the dirt. “Crazy old Slovak, dusting off the graves of some poor old German family he never even knew,” she used to say.
But I admired him for it. I often wished there’d been a way to bury him there too. But of course Mother never would have stood for that. And it wasn’t even their land, of course. Still, it does seem like a person should be able to rest, finally, in a place he’s loved.
Strange, isn’t it, how sentimental I’ve become! Like when you first knew me, I suppose.
If you’d like, give my notebooks to Scarlet when you’ve read them. Apologies to Joseph Grinnell, but I don’t think I’ll write any more entries in here.
Here is my sketch of the kinglet. Maybe it’s enough to go on; maybe I’ll manage to paint it too.
I love you more than ever, Tom.
twenty-one
IN THE YEARS FOLLOWING Addie’s death, a core group of avid environmentalists and fans of her work, both early and late, have persisted in their impassioned belief that she is buried somewhere on the nearly three hundred acres of the new preserve surrounding Burnham College—that at the time of her principled death she chose to have an equally principled and simple burial. Rumors spread quickly among this group of true believers—about a refrigerated truck being spotted near the Kavanagh home shortly after Addie’s death, about Tom’s claiming to have lost the New Jersey certificate of death when the Pennsylvania authorities came to inquire.
Most days a handful of Addie’s followers—a couple of Birkenstock-wearing members of Greenpeace here, a few pierced and alienated admirers of her assemblages there—can be found wandering the trails of the Addie Sturmer Kavanagh Preserve, in search of her grave.
Others, more rational types for instance, like the bird-watchers, both amateur and professional, who also frequent the preserve, consider the notion that Addie is buried there a myth, urban lore of a sort—rather like the oft-told story of Addie’s having spotted a Cuvier’s kinglet somewhere along Burnham Ridge. Still, when they visit the preserve early in the morning during nesting season, many, if not most, of these more rational types scan the woods of Burnham Ridge with their high-powered binoculars and scopes, half believing they might spot a four-and-a-half-inch bird with a vermilion patch on its head, and a faint stripe from its eye to the back of its head.
On her walks there with Tom and her daughter, Scarlet has yet to spot either a cerulean warbler or a Cuvier’s kinglet. But often, as she sits on the fallen log beside Addie’s grave in the early morning, she listens to the call of the wood thrush, and she remembers her parents, together and singing.
acknowledgments
My reading as I worked on In Hovering Flight was as wide, eclectic, and rich (not to say undisciplined) as that of my characters Addie and Scarlet. Among the works that were helpful, inspiring, or both were Roger Tory Peterson and Virginia Marie Peterson’s edition of Audubon’s Birds of America (The Audubon Society Baby Elephant Folio); various editions of the Peterson Field Guide to Birds of Eastern and Central North America; Richard K. Walton and Robert W. Lawson’s sound recordings, Birding by Ear, Eastern/Central; the Library of America’s John James Audubon, compiled by Christoph Irmscher; David Sibley’s Birding Basics; various publications of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology; Maurice Broun’s Hawks Aloft: The Story of Hawk Mountain; Judy Pelikan’s illustrated adaptation of F. Schuyler Matthews’ Field Book of Wild Birds and Their Music, titled The Music of Wild Birds; Duff Hart-Davis’s Audubon’s Elephant: America’s Great Naturalist and the Making of The Birds of America; George Miksch Sutton’s To a Young Bird Artist: Letters from Louis Agassiz Fuertes to George Miksch Sutton; Roger Tory Peterson and Rudy Hoglund’s Roger Tory Peterson: The Art and Photography of the World’s Foremost Birder; The Diary and Letters of Kaethe Kollwitz, edited by Hans Kollwitz; Martha Kearns’ Käthe Kollwitz: Woman and Artist; Elizabeth Prelinger’s Käthe Kollwitz; Bruno Bettelheim’s The Empty Fortress: Infanitle Autism and the Birth of the Self; and Richard Pollak’s The Creation of Dr. B.: A Biography of Bruno Bettelheim. Also helpful was a March 2005 lecture in Santa Fe, New Mexico by Ami Ronnberg, Curator of New York’s Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism—a lecture that enriched my understanding of the powerful place of birds in historical and contemporary art, and that made me aware of the work of Kiki Smith, whose “Jersey Crows” is a clear inspiration for Addie’s “River Nile.”
For the love of birds and birdsong that is this book’s deepest root, I want to acknowledge, and thank, my father, Lynn Hinnefeld, and my brother, Steve Hinnefeld. For his lectures, field work, answers to my many questions, and patient reading of the book in manuscript, I am deeply grateful to Dan Klem, Sarkis Acopian Professor of Ornithology & Conservation Biology at Muhlenberg College.
My friends and fellow writers, Mark Harris and Ruth Knafo Setton, read this manuscript repeatedly and with such kind and intelligent devotion; I am thankful to them, and to my other writer’s group members, Paul Acampora and Virginia Wiles, for their wise insights and wonderful humor. F
or thoughtful readings, and for advice on birds, art, writing, and other matters, I am grateful to Ursula Hegi, Joanna Scott, Alix Ohlin, Billy Weber, Martha Christine, Dana Van Horn, Stephanie Anderson, and Pat Mansfield-Phelan and Tom Phelan.
For providing beautiful spaces and quiet, uninterrupted time—as well as delightful conversation—I thank Ann and Preston Browning of Wellspring House in Ashfield, Massachusetts, and the staff and students at Pendle Hill in Wallingford, Pennsylvania. For their enthusiastic support of my work on this novel I thank Moravian College’s Dean of the Faculty, Gordon Weil, and the Chair of the English Department—and my good friend—Theresa Dougal.
For her faith in this book and in me, I thank my agent, Liv Blumer, and for his good sense, insightful editing, and clear commitment to this book I thank my editor, Fred Ramey. Thanks also to Caitlin Hamilton Summie and Libby Jordan at Unbridled Books.
My daughter Anna Hauser, artist and singer, though she was only six as I finished work on this novel, has been a vital inspiration for the character of Scarlet—particularly for Scarlet’s sensitivity and independence. My husband Jim Hauser is my wisest editor, my most thoughtful adviser on language and art, and my steadfast solace; my deepest thanks go to him.
In Hovering Flight Page 26