Why Peacocks?

by Sean Flynn

  “Metal? What kind of metal?”

  “Not sure. But look at this.” A new image popped up, a negative of an X-ray, the metal showing up dark against lighter soft tissues. There was a large collection of black dots and wedges and shards and, just left of center, a round hoop, like a thin donut. As we were looking at that, a printer started unspooling the results of Carl’s blood work, a long register receipt of abbreviations and numbers. “See that one?” Burkett said, pointing at a 2,400. “That should be three hundred. That means his kidneys aren’t working.”

  This was escalating at an unfortunate pace. The day before, I’d assumed he had worms, not multiple organ failure.

  Burkett scanned the rest of the numbers. My adolescent bird, he told me, had lead poisoning and probably zinc poisoning. I remembered raking the pen before I’d brought the birds home, pretty sure that I’d cleaned up all the dangerous fragments. I must have overlooked something. Or maybe those were misfired staples I might have left scattered when I was putting up chicken wire. “He’s going to need his blood chelated to avoid neurological damage,” Burkett said.

  “Like Keith Richards!” I said, a bit of trivia that brought momentary joy. It was mostly urban legend, but when I was a kid, everyone knew that the Rolling Stones guitarist had his blood pumped out and cleaned and put back in so he could get off heroin, which always struck me as a very rock-star thing to do. The story always got shortened to “Keith got his blood chelated,” though that’s not even what the word means.

  Burkett gave my joke an obligatory smile. Carl, he explained, would get dosed with intramuscular drugs that would bind to the metals in his bloodstream so they could be flushed out with his urine. “We’ll give him a couple of days with that, and on Monday I’ll go into his stomach through his crop and pull out as much of that stuff as I can and try to flush out the rest. If that doesn’t work… well, things could get complicated.”

  I rubbed the back of my neck. “What’s the prognosis?”

  “Oh, a hundred percent,” Burkett said. “I can fix him.”

  I felt my shoulders slump, an involuntary deflation that surprised me. I appreciated his confidence, but damn, those were expensive words. If he’d told me Carl was going to suffer horribly and probably die anyway, we could euthanize him with a minimum of guilt. Killing him would be almost noble, a sad yet humane end to his misery that the doctor and I would stoically execute. I didn’t want Carl to die, but veterinary therapies that get complicated are never cheap.

  Carl was just a bird, I told myself. I didn’t even like birds a year ago. And was neurological damage really so bad? Maybe it would be minor. He’d always been a skittish little dimwit. And he was barely a proper peacock, what with that mangy train and one silly, cockeyed eyespot.

  “Can I see him?”

  “Yeah, of course.” Burkett pointed through the operating room toward a small room stacked with cages. Carl was in one on the floor, the biggest box there, but even his stubby coverts had to be curved to fit. The stalk of his one eyespot had gotten creased halfway up, and it bent back to hang limply near his thigh. He seemed to be staring at the blank back of the crate.

  I squatted next to the cage. “Hey, Carl,” I whispered. “How you doing, buddy?” He twisted his head slightly toward me, blinked twice, then turned back to the wall. His toes were stretched over the holes of a plastic grate that allowed his droppings to fall through to a tray. There wasn’t enough room for him to turn around, let alone walk. I doubted he could sit. He looked miserable, had to be miserable, all cramped and poisoned, and I didn’t believe that was my presumptuous mind reading. I took a deep breath, held it, let it out through my mouth, a calming technique a shrink taught me once. Stimulates the vagus nerve.

  “All right, Doc,” I said loudly enough for him to hear me two rooms away. “Do what you gotta do.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Peacocks for centuries had been a luxury of the wealthy, at least in the Western world.

  In their native East, where India blues are abundant in the wild, almost as common as macaques or geckos, they were a bird of the people. A companion to gods, yes, shaded with mysticism, and a symbol, depending on the circumstances, of prosperity and beauty and wisdom. But the peacock’s charms were not reserved for the rich. It was a common bird for the common man.

  Once they were caged up and hauled away by traders, however, peacocks became objects to own, to covet. The mythical stories grew darker—remember Hera and her dead giant—and the bird came to be more explicitly associated with a kind of ostentatious wealth. A peacock was to be boastfully displayed, whether in the courtyard or on the banquet table. Henry III, for example, had 120 of them served at his Christmas feast in 1251, and the Archbishop of York had 104 prepared for a feast in the fifteenth century. Yet the peacock’s beauty was always the point, even when it was being eaten: A regally prepared peacock would be skinned and dressed, roasted, and then covered again with its own skin for serving, the feathers still lovely and gleaming. The menu for a relatively small banquet for France’s Lord of Foyes in the fourteen hundreds—three courses followed by fruit—included a second course of “stuffed kid shoulders, sea pullets, young peacocks in full display, quails with sugar.”

  The flavor and texture of the meat wasn’t the primary appeal. “All present at [a medieval banquet] would admire the beautiful bird when it was brought ceremoniously to the table of the host,” a Dutch food historian and onetime peacock chef named Christianne Muusers wrote. “The admiration was probably somewhat less when it came to eating the peacock: its meat is very dry. No wonder the peacock disappeared from the tables when the turkey… made its entrance in Europe during the sixteenth century!”

  It’s unclear when the first peacocks arrived in America, or who brought them, but it was no later than 1870, when the landscape painter Frederic Church had them scratching around his Hudson Valley estate. There is no doubt, however, that they were imported strictly as ornaments, as there was no practical reason to bother. Peacocks were not viable game birds, as they are too big, too slow, and too easy to spot to make much sport of shooting them (though some people do anyway). Nor were they worth raising commercially for food. Some modern chefs and home cooks have had success preparing them—a long simmer in a Crock-Pot reportedly helps—but they grow more slowly than chickens, take up more space than turkeys, and taste worse than both. India blues, ever alert and exceedingly vocal, do make for fine watchdogs, but so do other animals, like, say, dogs.

  That is all to the good of the peacock. Its most significant feature was not designed, by the gods or by nature, to be anything other than lovely; that chickens and turkeys are plainer and tastier is to the great detriment of their miserably short lives. The peacock’s unsubtle beauty, by contrast, often made it part of a show, a set piece in the act of being a certain kind of rich at the beginning of the Gilded Age. (Peahens never really figured into this other than as incubators for more peacocks.) Even the word itself, peacock, was evolving into useful shorthand for a type of showboating excess.

  In the early sixteen hundreds, for instance, Shah Jahan, perhaps the greatest of the Mughal emperors and the one who built the Taj Mahal, commissioned an elaborate throne for himself. It took seven years for the finest goldsmiths and artisans to create a platform roughly six feet by four feet set on four golden legs, from which a dozen columns rose to support a silk canopy. More than a ton of gold was hammered and shaped to form the structure, and it was inlaid with more than five hundred pounds of gemstones, including 116 emeralds, 108 rubies, and more diamonds than anyone bothered counting. The twelve columns, according to a French jeweler who saw the throne before the Persians looted it in 1739, were each covered with rows of pearls. The throne also had several showstopper gems, such as the Koh-i-Noor, a diamond the size of a ping-pong ball whose name means “mountain of light.” It is reputed to be the most expensive throne ever crafted; one estimate suggests it would have cost $1.2 billion in today’s dollars, and it was widely claimed
to have cost twice as much as the Taj Mahal, which would peg the number at $1.8 billion or so. The Mughals called this sparkling perch the Jeweled Throne or the Ornamented Throne, perfectly appropriate titles for a canopied seat encrusted with ornamental jewels. Decades later, however, after the throne had been destroyed and the gems scattered—the Koh-i-Noor ended up in the British crown jewels, where it was cut down from 186 carats to just under 106—Western historians started calling it the Peacock Throne. That name is not inaccurate; peacocks were an important symbol in Mughal design, and they were incorporated into the throne, though accounts of exactly how differ. But amid the rubies and the gold and the pearls, birds were hardly the most notable feature. Calling the throne a peacock just encapsulated the gaudy spectacle more clearly.

  * * *

  The birds in Frederic Church’s day still had an air of exclusivity about them. Live ones were uncommon in North America in the late eighteen hundreds, but stuffed ones were advertised to the well heeled as household decorations, notably as screens for sooty, unlit fireplaces. Over the next century, peacocks would go mass market, selling everything from cigarettes in the nineteen teens to condoms in the thirties and forties to Jell-O in the fifties. The bird went thoroughly mainstream in May 1956, when NBC introduced its peacock logo to highlight the increasing number of color broadcasts and, more to the point, to sell color TVs for its parent company, RCA. That was an appropriate position for the peacock, fronting for the modern medium of fables and mythology. Twenty years later, the bird either fell more deeply into mythology or it collapsed completely into kitsch, depending on one’s opinion of Vegas-era Elvis: His favorite costume of 1974 was the peacock jumpsuit, ten thousand dollars of white fabric and brocade and gold lamé, a stylized bird across the chest, plumage raining down the right leg, and another on the back with the train sweeping down the left leg. He wore it on the cover of his Promised Land album, and a collector bought it in 2014, sweat-stained and with a broken zipper, for $245,000.

  Around the same time India blues were arriving in the United States, the peacock was making a resurgence as a subject of serious art, as opposed to the commercial silliness to follow. For centuries, the bird had been incorporated into paintings and etchings and mosaics, its popularity waxing and waning. By the late eighteen hundreds, it was at an apex, “the go-to image of the 19th-century’s Aesthetic Movement,” wrote Michael Botwinick, the former director of the Hudson River Museum, which in 2014 hosted an exhibit called Strut: The Peacock and Beauty in Art.

  Perhaps the most famous peacock art to emerge from that movement was a piece by James McNeill Whistler. In 1876, he was living in London and doing some work in the Kensington home of a shipping magnate and art collector named Frederick Leyland. Also working in the house was an architect, Thomas Jeckyll, whom Leyland had hired to design a dining room to display his collection of Chinese porcelains. Jeckyll asked Whistler for advice on a color scheme to best show off the intricate blue patterns on the white porcelains. Yellow, he suggested. And then Leyland left the city on business, and Jeckyll took ill and stopped overseeing his project, and Whistler went hog wild with the yellow. Gold, actually, and blue, though not a bright peacock blue. He painted everything that summer: the antique leather wall panels and the wainscoting, the cornices. The motif, daubed onto the walls and ceiling, was of semicircles mimicking the green-gold scales at the base of Mr. Pickle’s neck. Pairs of peacocks covered the folding shutters, and Whistler painted the walnut shelving meant to display Leyland’s porcelains. Whistler titled it Harmony in Blue and Gold.

  It’s still around, the room restored and fully assembled in the Freer Gallery of Art, which is part of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. Louise and I took the boys to see it one rainy spring day, though really, for them, it was more of a soggy forced march than an adventure. Adolescent boys rarely appreciate art museums to begin with, and they tend to be even less enthusiastic when Dad is dragging them along for work.

  Whistler, of course, was a genius, and the room is a masterpiece. Not the sort of thing I’d want in my house; I imagine it would run more toward the taste of a nineteenth-century industrialist. The room is roughly twenty feet wide and thirty feet long, and the shelves were lined with porcelains, just as Leyland had intended. The shutters were closed—the museum opens them only on the third Thursday of every month to prevent the work from fading in the sunlight—so the peacocks painted in gold were on full display. At one end of the room was a Whistler portrait, The Princess from the Land of Porcelain, which Leyland also owned, as he was Whistler’s patron at the time.

  I stood in the center of the room, made a slow pirouette, and did a visual sweep of the walls. “What do you think?” I whispered to Calvin. I was pretty sure I didn’t have to whisper, but my voice instinctively drops in museums and churches.

  “It’s cool, I guess,” he said. “Can we go now?”

  I gave him a quiet half-laugh. We’d met one of Louise’s sisters and her kids in DC, and I knew the boys would rather be running around with their cousins. “Yeah, go on,” I said. “I’m gonna stick around a little longer.”

  The mural on the south wall of the room, the one Leyland would have seen when he sat down to dinner, was my favorite. It was the last part Whistler painted, and it told, in one broad panel, the early history of Harmony in Blue and Gold.

  Leyland was out of town in the summer of 1876, when Whistler began painting his dining room. Upon his return in the autumn, Leyland was wildly displeased with the redecorating (upon further consideration, maybe the shipping magnate and I weren’t so different after all). He was even less pleased with Whistler’s invoice for roughly two hundred thousand dollars. There was an acrimonious fallout, and while Leyland eventually agreed to pay half the fee, the two men never reconciled. (Jeckyll, meanwhile, never recovered at all: After his efforts were covered in paint, albeit by a master, he had a mental breakdown in 1877 and died in an institution four years later, at the age of fifty-three.) But when Leyland again left town, Whistler slipped into the house to paint the leather panel spanning the south wall of the room. He created a mural of two peacocks, one passionate, animated, rising in defensive anger, his silver toodle echoing the white in Whistler’s hair. The other stood with his wings spread, imperious, silver shillings scattered on the ground beneath him; the feathers on his chest were round, like coins, a bird decorated with crass money. Whistler called it Art and Money; or, the Story of the Room.

  Leyland, perhaps sensing the value of an entire room painted by Whistler, did not have it dismantled or repainted. The Peacock Room, as it came to be called, remained intact, if tarnished by cigar smoke, until Leyland died in 1892. As it happened, the room was built from panels that could be disassembled, so the subsequent owner of Leyland’s house was able to sell it. Charles Lang Freer, a Detroit art collector who made his fortune in railcars, bought it in 1904. He bequeathed his Whistler collection to the Smithsonian, which is how it eventually came to be fully assembled in the Freer Gallery of Art after he died in 1919. The boys weren’t impressed, but Louise and I lingered, examining porcelains but mostly studying the birds. They looked nothing like Carl and Mr. Pickle, but I suspected that was because I didn’t imbue them with the same passion that Whistler did the ones he put on those walls.

  Chapter Twelve

  Monday morning, Burkett was in blue scrubs, wide-eyed by the side of Julie’s desk. “Man,” he said, slowly shaking his head, “this just keeps getting worse.”

  “It’s been two days,” I said. “How much more could go wrong?”

  “It’s all the stuff that was already wrong,” he said, turning toward the back and motioning for me to follow him. “I’m still finding things out.”

  Carl was on the operating table, standing up, eyes closed and wrapped in blankets, a bandage taped to his neck about halfway down. The floor was littered with bloody swabs and torn packaging of medical supplies. Burkett had been pulling rubble out of my bird for hours, all of which he’d collected in stain
less-steel bowls. There were pebbles and sparkles of glass and undigested feed and bits of his stomach lining that looked like soggy rice paper. There was also that donut we saw in the X-ray. It was a copper grommet, almost the size of my fingertip.

  “He’s gotta have copper poisoning, too,” Burkett said.

  “Bad?”

  “Really bad. Very toxic. Don’t see it often, though. I had a chicken come in a few months ago, got it from a pebble with a little speck of copper ore in it.”

  Carl had a whole grommet in his gut.

  Burkett’s theory was that Carl had scratched the grommet out of the dirt—it could have been there from an old tarp that rotted away fifty years ago—got a stomachache, and ate all the pebbles and other rubble to make himself feel better, except he only made himself sicker because some of that rubble was poisonous. There was, oddly, some relief in that. After Saturday’s diagnosis of lead poisoning, Louise had an acute panic that Carl had picked it up from the dust around the barn. Considering the boys used to run around in that dust, and still played hockey and basketball in the old hayloft, she was already researching lead-abatement companies. Because the idea that you might have done permanent neurological damage to your children is the kind of anxious thought that has to be promptly addressed, I deployed the most sophisticated diagnostic tool I could find on a Saturday afternoon: a couple of store-bought lead-test kits, the ones that tell you if the ancient paint on the windowsill is toxic. I rubbed fiber swabs in a dozen different spots around the garbage coop that afternoon. The results were all negative, which was encouraging but, I assumed, not scientifically reliable.

  If Carl’s primary problem was a chunk of copper in his belly, that was good news. If he’d given himself lead poisoning from eating pebbles flecked with lead and, most likely, fragments of actual lead, instead of breathing in ambient dust, then Louise could stop pricing out decontamination procedures. I was making some optimistic leaps, but none of the other birds was sick, and the pediatrician had never raised concerns. The toxins, it seemed, were contained to Carl.