her icy room in Oxford, on the gray streets of London, tramping along sodden paths in the Lake District or through fields of grazing sheep in the Cotswolds? And discovering, remarkably, that she had a real talent for drawing and for painting.
Back in Pennsylvania in December, she’d told her parents nothing about her change in plans. She’d also said nothing to her college boyfriend, though she’d known since October that she would break up with him at the first opportunity when she returned to campus. Still, she did worry at times that she’d be foolish to give him up. They had talked, vaguely, of marriage after graduation. And what would she do now, with no teaching degree to back her up?
“Work as a waitress and live in Greenwich Village and meet fabulous, sexy artists like Willem de Kooning,” Lou—who was an art major herself, and from a wealthy family from Philadelphia—said when the three friends were together again in January. “Get a job as a secretary in Philadelphia and take night classes in art until you have enough credits to become an art teacher” was Cora’s alternative. They were still the only ones who knew of Addie’s plans. While she was abroad she had longed for them as if they were lovers, her beloved roommates, the only people who understood her.
At home, in her parents’ house over the Christmas holidays, there’d been no one who could understand. She’d returned from Britain thinner than she’d been in years, no longer setting and teasing her dark-blond hair. Her mother watched her worriedly, urging more food on her at every meal. But Addie could barely touch the eggs, the fried potatoes, all the foods of her childhood. She only sipped some coffee and nibbled at a piece of her mother’s homemade bread. She also found it nearly impossible to draw. Each day she bundled herself in a rag wool sweater and tattered tweed coat, both purchased for pennies in a tiny secondhand shop in London, then pulled on her mud-splattered Wellingtons. These had left a layer of dust and grime at the bottom of her suitcase, where it remained because it was English dirt and she could not bear to part with it. And each day, though she feared it would be no different from any other since her return, she took along her sketchbook and a pencil.
At the frozen pond down a country road from her parents’ house, away from the smells of mud and manure and her mother’s daily baking, away from her childhood bedroom and, in the barn, the mournful, cheated-looking eyes of the cows—only at the frozen pond could she catch a glimmer of what she’d felt on the banks of Grasmere or walking in the shadow of Westminster Cathedral, notebook in hand, sketching furiously. But not the rippling lake and not a flying buttress; what she drew, obsessively, religiously, with the devotion of a pilgrim, were the ruffled wings of a magpie, the dusty breast of a wood pigeon. Creatures that seemed to be moving through their lives as randomly and fitfully as she.
By March, Addie was drawing and painting furiously again. And Cora and Lou had adjusted to the changes in their friend, who, on her return from England, wore black tights and flats with wool jumpers and let her hair grow long and straight. Now, instead of tending to her hair and nails and baking cookies for her boyfriend on the weekend, Addie took the train into New York City with Lou as often as she could afford it. They would start at the Metropolitan Museum or the Museum of Modern Art, eat sandwiches in Central Park while Addie sketched and Lou chatted with strangers, and step reverently into one of the galleries on 57th Street. Then, flush with the confidence that art always gave them, they’d ride the subway downtown to drink wine and smoke cigarettes at the Cedar Tavern or Max’s Kansas City, eyes scanning the crowd in search of famous artists.
Once, lingering longer than they’d intended, hoping to sight, say, de Kooning or Robert Motherwell, they missed the last bus back to Doylestown and walked the streets of Manhattan until dawn, drunk for the first half of the night, sober and staring, entranced, for the second. When they returned at midday to the dorm suite they shared with Cora, she made them coffee in their illegal percolator. Lou went to bed and slept until her first class on Monday morning. Addie locked herself into her tiny studio in the crumbling old Art Department building, where she spent her time obsessively painting the pigeons she’d seen on the steps of the New York Public Library, finally sleeping for a few hours on the sofa in the student lounge.
By the last week of April, when classes ended for a one-week recess, Cora and Lou had grown accustomed to the new Addie; her English adviser, Dr. Curtis, had abandoned his efforts to persuade her to complete her teaching certification requirements; her boyfriend was a thing of the past; and the dean had granted her request to fulfill the science requirement by taking Biology of the Birds. At a small school like Burnham, radical changes in a student like Addie Sturmer were duly noted, and administrators eyed the budding artist nervously, happy to hurry her along to graduation.
She spent the April recess with Lou and Cora and Cora’s boyfriend Karl, a studious engineering major, at Lou’s family farm, riding horses, eating exotic “gourmet” dinners, and drawing constantly. Then, early on the third morning of May, the three young women walked up a sloping path through the damp patch of woods that separated the campus dormitories from the academic buildings. Slowly, each lost in her own thoughts, they approached the stately Hall of Science, a second home to Cora, foreign territory to Lou and Addie, for Tom Kavanagh’s eight A.M. lecture.
As they walked through the edge of the woods to the building’s side entrance, a bird chirruped in a towering oak above their heads. Its flutelike song was barely noticed by Lou, who, despite being barely awake after a night spent drinking wine along the river, had arranged her long dark hair in an artful chignon and whose slow, willowy walk was noted appreciatively by every sleepy-eyed male they passed. But Cora—newly engaged and deeply in love—thrilled at the sound of the bird’s song, which she heard as a splendid echo of her own happiness on this crisp and sunny morning.
For Addie, who’d been wondering, at that moment, what in the world she was doing, this bird’s song was a revelation. She paused, gazing up into the tangle of branches, hoping for a rustle of wing. She did not yet know that thrilling sound as the song of the wood thrush; for her, at that moment, it was nothing less than the voice of all her unnamed longing.
three
TOM KAVANAGH STARED AT the expectant faces that greeted him as he entered the room; this was the most alert they would be, he knew, for the next five weeks. It was a large group for Biology of the Birds: twenty brave souls. He wondered how many would fade away by the second or third morning’s field excursion. Over half were majors, and most of these he knew; in a small program like Burnham’s, he was sure to have had them in Zoology at least, maybe even back in the introductory course for majors. There was Cora Davis, a lovely girl, smart and reliable, cheerfully attractive; he gladly returned her ready smile, and it was then that he noticed the two next to her.
One, who could only be described as dark and sultry, with her long legs languidly crossed beneath her desk, was giving him a frankly suggestive look: expectant in a different way. It was a look he’d come to recognize, even expect, and, in past semesters, to deflect good-humoredly. Though now he wondered, momentarily, what might happen if he didn’t smile back like a tolerant friend of their older brother’s (he was, after all, only a dozen years older than most of them) but instead stared back with equal, or greater, interest. Why don’t you meet me in my office after class to discuss this further?
Certainly it had begun to cross his mind, with things the way they were at home, Polly so restless and bitter, always furious at him, chafing at the role of “faculty wife,” longing for a city, for a chance to pursue her singing with real seriousness.
“And what work would there be for an unemployed ornithologist in New York City?” he’d asked her last fall, gently at first, trying, but as always failing, to soothe her.
And then, after a few more glasses of wine, she’d begun to harp, there was no other word for it, her angry voice growing louder, filling the room. “There’s nothing for me here. You don’t care for me at all. And where is your illustrious career, stuck here in the sticks in Pennsylvania, teaching and tending to your little students all the time . . . what are you doing that’s so valuable, you haven’t written a word since your dissertation, there’s no sign you ever will. . . .”
“So now I’m to sacrifice