the woods from the path behind this building at five A.M. sharp,” he continued. “We’ll return by eight, you’ll have an hour to get breakfast, then back here for the day’s lecture at nine. Afternoons and evenings will be for additional excursions of your own and tending to your field notebooks. In the words of the renowned ornithologist Joseph Grinnell, ‘No notebook this day, no sleep this night.’
“Advice, by the way, that you’ll do well to attend to—more so than to anything I’ve said to you so far this morning, which, I assure you, will at no time nor at any place appear on an examination.” More groans then, along with a few gasps of disbelief. “I take it as a given that you are in this class because you wish to learn, deeply and meaningfully, about birds. If you have other reasons, you may wish to consider a visit to the registrar’s office to see what other courses remain open at this point.”
Here he found himself looking not at the usual lost-looking, gum-chewing sorority girl in the back row, nor at her boyfriend, the misguided young man who suddenly believed he should pick up some science classes and go the premed route, like his father, but instead at the frankly flirtatious girl in the front, between Cora and the artist. He was surprised by how much his feelings had changed over the course of an hour’s opening lecture, surprised and a bit amused to see how undaunted she was, staring back at him readily. He suppressed a laugh, thinking about how valuable his work was when it came to sustaining his faithfulness to his marriage, crumbling though that marriage might be. He did, however, find himself once again avoiding the eyes of the artist.
He glanced at the papers on the podium, reaching now for the class roster. Resting a pair of horn-rimmed glasses on his nose, he began to call the roll. Hers was the second-to-last name on the list. Just as he read it—“Adeline Sturmer”—and she responded with “Call me Addie,” a wood thrush trilled from the branches of the ancient oak outside the open window. All heads turned, and Tom Kavanagh laughed.
“That’s a wood thrush, Addie Sturmer. Is he a friend of yours?” he asked, and when she looked back at him and smiled, then turned back to the window, clearly hoping to hear the bird again, there was no denying it: Something in his chest hurt, and it was a blissful kind of pain, of a sort he remembered from his lonely days on the hills of Donegal.
He forgot to call the last name on the list, that of a timid young man in the back row, who waited until the end of that morning’s lecture to approach the professor and make sure his presence was noted.
four
WHEN HE OPENED HIS mouth to speak and she heard the first soft lilt of his Irish accent, she did not know what to do, or where to look; she could hardly contain her joy, the feeling of something bubbling up inside her. And so to keep herself from suddenly singing, or whooping, or hysterically laughing, she grabbed her pencil and began to draw.
That ridiculous, fusty old owl. She knew without thinking that he had brought it as some sort of joke; it bore absolutely no resemblance to a real bird.
So she drew it, realistically enough in outline and obvious detail, the large head with its tufted ears, the ringed eyes, the white bib with the bars below. But she gave it a recognizable, if caricatured, human face.
“Dr. Curtis?” Lou leaned over and asked in a whisper when Addie had nearly finished the bulging eyes below a receding hairline. She nodded, and then Lou wrote, on a page of her own notebook, “I’d rather draw him,” finishing with an arrow toward the front of the room.
Addie smiled and went back to the shadows under her owl’s eyes until Lou pinched her arm and pointed, again, to her own notebook, where she’d added one more word: “Nude.”
Addie rolled her eyes, her standard response to Lou’s excesses. She kept to herself the fact that while mindlessly sketching a moldering stuffed owl with human features, she was, in fact, memorizing the rich contours, the lines and shadows, of Tom Kavanagh’s remarkable face, the thin nose and strong jaw, the large, dark eyes, all shadowed by a head of unruly black hair that showed some streaks of gray. Later, in the privacy of her student studio, she would do her best to reproduce some image of that face from memory. She would work on it each day, she decided, immediately after leaving his lecture.
And she would, just as he’d urged, devote her afternoons and evenings to more outings in the woods, and to keeping a careful field notebook. Not because she cared at all about how she did in his course, but because from the moment she’d heard the wood thrush sing, just as Tom Kavanagh had called her name, she had realized something powerful. What she wanted was not only to draw birds but to understand them, to come as close as she could to feeling what it was like to fly with hollow bones. To sit atop a warm and throbbing egg within a delicate bed that rests in the crook of a branch. To sing not from something like a human throat but from a place deep within the breast.
Tom Kavanagh’s passion for birds did not frighten her. And she found evolutionary theory less threatening than sleep-inducing. But what he had, and what she wanted, was clear to her from that first morning: a passion for birds—for truly hearing, seeing, knowing them—that made everything else in life seem trivial.
Somehow, she felt that if she had his face in front of her all the time she could hold on to that possibility. So she planned to throw herself into the course as wholeheartedly as she knew Cora would. (Lou was a different story; surely Lou would be one of the ones who went in search of another course.) But Addie knew that in the midst of her attention to birds she would also draw him, secretly, from the memory of watching him each day.
12 May 1965
Wednesday
Riegel’s Point, Plumville, Bucks Co., PA (Spit of wooded land between the Delaware Canal and the Delaware River, ½ mi. north of Plumville)
Time: 06:00–06:30—Mouth of Kleine Creek, near intersection of Old Philadelphia Road and the river road; 06:45–08:00—Riegel’s Point
Observers: Addie Sturmer. Alone.
Habitat: Pin oak, maple, and what, at home, we call an osage orange tree (with those odd, baseball-sized, brain-looking pods). Bluebells are blooming, and I saw more of Cora’s beloved windflowers.
Weather: Temp. 65 degrees F
Overcast and still, after a heavy rain. Would this be considered 100% cloud cover? Or did I see a small (1%?) patch of blue for just a moment at the turn in Kleine Creek at Haupt Bridge Road?
Remarks: I’ve taken your advice to cut class and listen, on my own.
SPECIES LIST
At mouth of Kleine Creek:
American Robin 3
Song Sparrow 1
Downy Woodpecker 1
Goldfinch 6
At Riegel’s Point:
Spotted Sandpiper (I think) 2
Number of Species: 5; Number of Individuals: 13; Time: 2 hrs.
Comments: I heard—and recognized—the Robin and the Downy Woodpecker. But the best moments were spent drawing a Sandpiper, pecking at the mud like an irritable old man who’s dropped all his change.
I just can’t keep writing all that Latin. I’m sorry.
12 May—I’m flattered that you’re willing to take me out in the field alone on Saturday; I look forward to this.
And I’m also flattered that you’re interested in seeing my drawings from England. Yes, I’ll bring along some of these. But not the paintings, no. They’re absolutely awful; I don’t think I’ll ever let anyone see those.
If I’m feeling brave maybe I’ll bring along a painting of a goldfinch I’ve been working on. I drew it for hours one day in New York City, in Central Park.