Cora and Lou), it seemed that Addie grew more and more bored with accounts of her own life.
What she wanted to tell Scarlet, instead, were stories about birds. About the land and its history. About famous figures in her world—Audubon, Peterson, Rosalie Edge and others connected with the Hawk Mountain Sanctuary to the west of them—people who were heroes to her. But Scarlet was disappointed when Addie’s stories took this turn; eventually she began declining her mother’s invitations to join her at the blind, opting instead to play with neighborhood friends, or stay at home reading on her own.
At the time, it felt to Scarlet as if Addie was constantly trying to teach her something; she got enough of that at school, she thought. Years later she could see that Addie was, in fact, trying to give a kind of shape to her own life in telling her daughter those stories—to place herself in the landscape, in the footsteps of these people she admired. And many of the stories were ones that Tom had told Addie first, when they’d met and fallen in love, there in that beautiful corner of upper Bucks County, in the woods above and below Burnham Ridge, during a spring spent observing birds, and, when they finally lowered their field glasses, one another.
six
MAY 2002
THIS MORNING’S SCENE IS a familiar one: Cora at the small table on the screened porch in back, glasses perched on her nose and paper spread in front of her, distractedly petting Lucy, her old collie, who’s flopped down at her feet. For as long as Scarlet can remember, Cora has been gray, her hair cut sensibly short. She’s also always been pretty. The sweetness and openness in her face and in her wide blue eyes have always somehow invited Scarlet to bare her soul, to share her deepest hurts and most ridiculous longings with Cora—though Cora will never, under any circumstances, do the same. If Cora has ridiculous longings, Scarlet hasn’t heard about them; she knows for certain about the depth of Cora’s particular pain—but she never hears about this from Cora either.
The two women are bundled in sweaters because it’s cool on the porch in the early morning. Sunlight streams in, the early fog burned off by now, and the long, grassy slope down to the beach is wet with dew. A rope clangs against a flagpole several houses down. Tom has been at his scope for an hour or more; Scarlet has been watching him. She knows he’d rather be elsewhere—in the marsh near the lighthouse, for instance—but everyplace screams with Addie’s presence now, and there is so much to be decided today. But for now no one can bear to begin that process, and Scarlet sits with Cora, as if it were a year or two ago and she’d just arrived, sleepless and distraught over her love life, whimpering over the mess she’d made of everything. Worlds away from everything she is feeling today.
At the sound of her oven timer, Cora disappears into the kitchen. Minutes later she returns with a tray and sits down across from Scarlet. “Coffee?” she asks, as always. When Scarlet declines, she cocks a surprised eyebrow, then pours juice into a smoothly glazed mug—one of her own—and waits for Scarlet to speak first.
“Lucy’s looking tired,” Scarlet finally says. She longs for a sip of Cora’s marvelously strong coffee but tries to act like she hasn’t noticed its intoxicating smell.
“She’s an old girl, like me,” Cora says as she pats the dog again. “Like all of us, your mother and Lou and I were saying, just a few nights ago. We had the strangest conversation, about all the pets we’ve had fixed over the years. Wondering if an animal feels something about that, what that means to these poor girls, never to bear young. If it means anything at all.”
As Cora bends over Lucy, Scarlet watches the play of morning light and shadows on her face, on the lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth. She knows this face nearly as well as she knew her mother’s, before Addie grew so gaunt, if still achingly beautiful, over the past few months, and she knows this comfortable old house nearly as well as she knows the cottage on Haupt Bridge Road. No wonder Addie wanted to die here, she thinks now, with Cora’s soothing presence filling every room—the smells of her baking, the fresh salt air blowing through her windows, the dark glazed surfaces of her pots and vases and mugs, beckoning one to grasp and stroke.
And for a moment she is ashamed of her peevish reaction to Addie’s asking to be brought here, six weeks ago. “Why not at home?” she’d whined to Tom. At the time she’d felt strangely jealous, reluctant to share both her dying mother and Cora in this way.
“So somehow we got going on animal reproduction,” Cora says, “and suddenly we were back in Tom’s class, learning about k-selected and r-selected species. Do you remember when we used to talk about that? We would tease Addie when you were four or five, and she would say she couldn’t imagine sharing her love with any more children. ‘You’re the ultimate k-selected mom,’ Lou would say, missing the point about species of birds altogether, of course. But Addie loved that. ‘Yes!’ she’d say, ‘I’m a wood warbler! Sharing the planet, taking less space, only taking what my child and I need. No competitive exclusion principle, no intraspecific competition for me!’ ”
Cora seems lost in the memory. “Then Lou would say, ‘But watch out for that Tom, he’s a strutting blue jay, don’t you think? Don’t blue jays have babies everywhere and then leave them to fend for themselves? Or is that grackles? Cowbirds?’ ” Cora isn’t a particularly good mimic, yet Scarlet can hear Lou saying this, the edginess, the whiff of sarcasm always there in her voice.
“Addie’d correct her,” Cora goes on. “ ‘No, no,’ she’d say. ‘Cowbirds are brood parasites. Which just means they don’t build their own nests. They leave them for someone else to raise.’
“And then one of us would make that silly joke about phoebes. ‘For phoebes! They leave them for the phoebes!’ ” Cora’s eyes are dancing now, glittering. “ ‘Phoebes are acceptors!’ And we’d all cackle then because of course at Burnham there was a girl named Phoebe we didn’t like, and so we all scribbled that down in our notes right away the day Tom said it in a lecture, and then after that, every time we saw that poor girl—well, I say ‘poor girl,’ but really she was a horrible snob, truly a nasty person, it was more her nastiness that bothered us than her reputation for sleeping with everyone on the football team—every time we saw her, we’d whisper, ‘Phoebes are acceptors—oh yes, phoebes are acceptors!’
“And then we’d howl. Just like a pack of twelve-year-olds or something. Good Lord.” She laughs a little sadly and wipes her eyes.
Scarlet smiles; she has heard this story many times, and she’s always loved it—this image of Addie and her friends being trivial and petty, human. A side of Addie she rarely saw. The whole idea of Tom as a strutting jay is mysterious to her, though. Scarlet has always been puzzled by this view of her father, the notion that he was the restless one, the one prone to wander. An Irish rover. That seems to have been his image, in lots of people’s eyes, but it’s always seemed to her that it was Addie who grew restless, not Tom.
Cora is staring at the table, still picturing the past. “Of course at this point Lou would be off and running, making some off-color joke of some kind, something about cowbirds and deadbeat dads. Something racist or something, you know, faking a Southern drawl. ‘Down where ah come from they like to say the cowbirds live over there, over on that side of the tracks.’ As if she lived in the heart of Alabama or something, instead of the suburbs of Washington.
“She’d do it to get your mother started, of course. And it always worked. ‘See?’ Addie would say. ‘That’s what scientists do. Make so-called impartial observations and then let the rest of the world go to hell with them, segregating schools, dropping bombs, dumping chemicals all over rice paddies.’ ”
Scarlet shimmies out of the sleeping bag she’d kept wrapped around her legs; the sun is growing brighter, reaching in to warm the porch. “She’d say things like that even back then, even that early on?” she asks.
“Oh, sure. I was always glad Karl wasn’t around to hear her, working up steam and maligning everybody from Einstein to Oppenheimer. Never mind that the