a mother.
Addie looked like a child herself. Scarlet held her mother’s hand for a while, but eventually that felt forced to her, as though she were trying to play the role of the grieving daughter instead of actually being one. She had already had her moments, her real moments, with Addie: first, two nights before, when Addie had seemed suddenly present and clear, herself again, when Scarlet had spoken with her alone. And then just moments ago, following her father down the street, below the familiar Cider Cove streetlights, watching how tenderly he cradled Addie’s body, his face buried in her neck, breathing her in one last time.
They locked Addie into the cooler at last and walked back to Cora’s in silence as dawn broke around them. Tom went inside to gather his binoculars and scope and headed out in search of birds. Scarlet got her notebook and returned to the porch. Cora and Lou were nowhere in sight.
And so Scarlet started writing. Some years ago she’d had a moment of success as a poet, success that was complicated by its connection with her mother. Two of the better-known poems in her one published book were, indirectly but clearly, about Addie. They were also, in some ways, about birds. That book had won a small literary prize in 1995, at the peak of Addie’s fame—or notoriety, depending on one’s outlook. This was a year after Addie had run afoul of some people in Washington over an installation involving, among other things, two crucified gulls.
For years Alex, Scarlet’s editor, has been pushing her to write a memoir. “It’s a logical step for you, with all this awareness of your mother, her presence in your poems, all the connections,” he has told her repeatedly. “And frankly,” he seems always to add, “it’s the only way you’re going to make any money as a writer.”
But, as she has told Alex many times, Scarlet has no idea how one goes about writing a memoir. Sometimes she has tried to imagine telling the story of their lives as a play. Now, as she sits on Cora’s sunporch in the pink-gray light of dawn, she thinks about beginning with the cast of characters assembled nearby:
The husband, Tom, barely visible at the far southern end of the beach, his scope trained on a plover’s nest a hundred yards away.
The two friends from Addie’s college days, Cora and Lou, offstage doing who-knows-what. Probably Cora is baking something. Maybe Lou is shopping.
And then there is Dustin, the young man at work outside Cora’s studio window, sawing, planing, hammering old pieces of barn siding, shaping these into some semblance of a coffin. A more logical addition might surely be Addie’s brother, John. But he is in Scranton, probably at work. Scarlet wonders whether Tom will even call him. She hasn’t seen her uncle since her college graduation. Instead of a brother and an uncle, she thinks, her family has Dustin the coffin-maker.
Finally there is Scarlet herself: a sometime poet, wrapped in a sleeping bag on the chilly porch where she spent the night because her room upstairs holds too many memories. Scarlet, fighting the urge to seize one of the cigarettes Lou has left behind, not even drinking coffee, scribbling madly in a notebook, leading the others to imagine that she is penning eloquent, mournful poems.
When in fact she is trying to envision a memoir. Which, unlike the poems she wishes she was writing, feels to Scarlet like a kind of betrayal—of Addie, of Tom, of them all. How could she possibly pull together the scattered threads of all these lives?
So far she has managed only a list of possible titles. One is Zugun-ruhe—the term in German for the migratory restlessness of birds, and Tom’s affectionate name for the last twelve years of Scarlet’s life, spent making her way down the eastern seaboard, finally landing in New York. A migration punctuated with brief stays on the coast of New Jersey—a place that suddenly, once again, has begun to feel like home.
But that is Scarlet’s life, not Addie’s, and it’s Addie’s life that Alex, and others, are really interested in. The years of Scarlet’s migration, through the decade of the 1990s up to this cool and puzzling spring of 2002, were relatively quiet ones for Addie. Had her mother somehow been holding her breath, reining herself in, waiting to see how far south, and now how near to this overdeveloped coastline, Scarlet would fly? Had she been watching for those final fledgling years to pass before her next—and last—great scheme?
One thing Addie was doing in those years was handling her first bout with cancer in the most conventional of ways: two rounds of chemotherapy, a bit of radiation. Not many people know this. Far more people have heard about the second, far more invasive cancer, the one she chose not to fight.
There is another possible title for a story about Addie Kavanagh: Field Notebooks.
Scarlet has access to all of her father’s and nearly all of her mother’s notebooks from the field, all neatly penned in black ink on 15.2-by-24.1-centimeter loose-leaf paper, one side only, red margins penciled in an inch and a half from the left, bound in three-ring binders (20.3 by 25.4 cm). All of Addie’s coded to correspond with carefully compiled portfolios of her drawings and studies for paintings. All—except for their content—in accordance with the conventions established by Professor Joseph Grinnell at Berkeley in the early decades of the twentieth century. “No notebook this day, no sleep this night!” were Grinnell’s famous words; he also urged his students to view their notebooks as public documents, records designed to educate their readers, to add to the store of knowledge of all who might one day encounter them. Tom Kavanagh presented Grinnell’s field notebook conventions, in painstaking detail, to Addie and the other students in his May-term Biology of the Birds class at Burnham College in the spring of 1965—that notorious 1965 class, the one that might have gotten him fired. The class that prompted a year’s leave, which led to his only book and to Addie’s first rough but moving paintings of birds—and, ultimately, to Scarlet.
Scarlet has all of Addie’s notebooks save one, her first, the one from that five-week course in May, spanning the spring migration through the woods and rivers of eastern Pennsylvania. The notebook with which she seduced Tom. It will be Scarlet’s, he has told her, when he dies—leaving her to imagine, for now, what Addie might have written there.
There are times, despite her mother’s long and maddening silences, when Scarlet feels certain that she can.
6 May 1965
Thursday
Sunday Woods, Burnham, Bucks Co., PA (1–2 mi. from Burnham College campus, via Ridge Path behind the Hall of Science)
Time: 05:20–06:30—Plum Pond; 06:40–07:30—Large meadow SE of Plum Pond
Observers: Burnham College Biology of the Birds class (20 students + Prof. Kavanagh)
Habitat: Tall grasses at the muddy edge of Plum Pond, a small freshwater pond in a natural basin at the center of pine and scrub woods; meadow ½ mi. SE of pond—a former home site (foundation visible; 18th century?); vegetation includes yellow wood sorrel, fiddlehead ferns, and rue anemones (or windflowers, as Cora Davis says her mother calls them)
Weather: Temp. 58 degrees F; Dry, with variable winds
Sun, with drifting clouds—30% cloud cover, according to Professor Kavanagh (I am not sure how this is determined)
Remarks: Several of the girls were ridiculously underdressed, one in sandals; half the group seemed to be sleepwalking, others more alert.
SPECIES LIST
Canada Goose, Branta canadensis 25
Mallard, Anas platyrhyncho 8
Great Blue Heron, Ardea herodius 1
Downy Woodpecker, Picoides pubescens 1
Tree Swallow, Tachycineta bicolor 20+
Cardinal, Cardinalis cardinalis 2 (M & F)
Black-Capped Chickadee, Poecile atricapilla 1
Scarlet Tanager, Piranga olivacea 1
Purple Grackle, Quiscalus