Birds of America

by Mary McCarthy

  Birds of America

  Mary McCarthy

  “… to attempt to embody the Idea in an example, as one might embody the wise man in a novel, is unseemly … for our natural limitations, which persistently interfere with the perfection of the Idea, forbid all illusion about such an attempt. …”

  To Hannah

  Contents

  Winter Visitors

  The Battle of Rocky Port

  To Be a Pilgrim

  Epistle from Mother Carey’s Chicken

  Greek Fire

  Round Table, With the Damsel Parcenet

  Leviticus

  Joy to the World

  A Sibylline Interlude

  Two-thirds of a Ghost

  A Biography of Mary McCarthy

  Winter Visitors

  IN THE WILD LIFE Sanctuary, the Great Horned Owl had died. The woman who showed the Palmer Homestead, on the edge of the woods, remembered the event distinctly: he had passed away the winter before last. Peter Levi, a college junior, swallowed this news with a long gulping movement of his prominent Adam’s apple; grief and shock choked him. “You have to expect changes,” he heard her say in a sharp tone, as he turned away from the doorstep, unable to speak. The old witch knew he was blaming her for the knockout punch she had just given him, standing calmly in her white shoes on the doormat that spelled out “WELCOME,” her hands on her hips. Until she spoke, he had supposed that the owl was still somewhere about, cruising in the woods, a noiseless shadow, hunting his prey. The idea that he could have “passed away” like any senior citizen had not crossed Peter’s mind. Revisiting the great bird in his tall outdoor cage littered with owl pellets of hair, claws, and bones was a treat Peter had been promising himself from the moment he heard from his mother that they were coming back to Rocky Port for the summer; it almost made up to him for the fact that she and his divorced father had agreed that he could not go to Mississippi with the Students for Civil Rights group. His mother, left to herself, might have let him go, but his father, who was more realistic, decided that Peter was too unsure of himself with people to take part in the program. Peter felt the babbo’s criticism was validated by his behavior this afternoon.

  Instead of simply knocking and asking what had happened to the owl, as he had planned when reconnoitering the house from across the road, he had paid the price of admission (Adults, $.50) and let himself be conducted through the homestead before he dared pop the question and at the last had nearly chickened out, for fear the woman would think he had been using her for his own stealthy purposes, which were antagonistic to old paneling and original floorboards. Peter, a philosophy minor, was an adept of the Kantian ethic; he had pledged himself never to treat anyone as a means (“The Other is always an End: thy Maxim,” said a card he carried in his wallet, with his driving license, vaccination certificate, and memberships in SNCC, CORE, and SANE), and yet because of his shyness, which made his approaches circuitous, he repeatedly found himself doing exactly that. It was only a kind of wild loyalty to the owl that had disgorged the question from his lips just as she was about to shut the door. If he did not ask now, he prodded himself, he would never find out. It would be no use asking in Rocky Port, where no one knew anything, and he could not come back here to inquire, for that would put his present visit, already suspicious (“Funny a boy your age should be interested in antiques”), in a still more bizarre light. Yet if he did not find out, it would be as if he did not care—another horrible sin. When he finally did ask, addressing her on the stoop from an inferior position on the lawn, it was in a casual, preppy voice. “By the way, could you tell me what’s become of the Great Horned Owl they used to have over there in the Wild Life Sanctuary?” How could he hope to fight for civil rights in Mississippi when he did not feel he had the right to ask a simple question in “neighborly” New England? The babbo knew best.

  Except in the classroom and of people he already knew outside it, Peter loathed asking questions. When he was little, he could not bear to have his mother stop the car and call out to a native for directions. “They won’t know, Mother! Please go on!” Prevention being the best cure (Peter was fond of adages), at a very early age he became a whiz at map-reading, sitting on her right on a cushion; Peter the Navigator, his stepfather in the back seat used to call him. He had never outgrown the feeling that a quest for information was a series of maneuvers in a game of espionage. In a library, rather than apply to the librarian, he would loiter about till he discovered where the card catalogues were kept and then trace the book he wanted to its lair through the Dewey Decimal system—Melvil Dewey, on his school lists, figured as a Great American, outranking Eli Whitney and the inventor of the McCormick Reaper. In a museum, he learned how to use the plan posted near the cloakroom while he was still in the first grade and would be tugging his mother toward “Armor” before she could question a guard. Similarly with a new A & P supermarket, whenever he and his mother moved; he raced about quivering like a magnetic needle till he found the bearings of Tide and tapioca and Grape-Nuts. He could always smoke out the toilets, hers and his, in filling stations and restaurants.

  When he was young, the game was easier and more fun, because no one noticed him; a child, he observed, possessed a natural camouflage and could blend into the social landscape—a corollary of Peter Levi’s Law that normal adults were not interested in children. But now that he was an adult himself, in all but the right to vote or marry without his parents’ consent, he had become suddenly visible, and the surreptitious pursuit of information had become not only much more difficult but also associated with a kind of anguish, whose source was a notion of duty.

  This afternoon, for example, when he found the cage in the woods empty and derelict and the wire netting torn, he at once knew that he would have to do something about it and he could not tell whether this was the cause of the anger he felt spurt out of him or whether that fury was a pure primary reaction to the fact that the marvelous bird was gone. He had slunk out of the sanctuary and sat down at the entrance under a tree labeled “Buttonwood,” where he noted that a house across the road, set back on a hillock, had a sign on the lawn: “Open to the Public.” Then he saw the manly course that was open to him: inquire of the owl’s nearest neighbor. He was scanning the small-paned, brown-shingled redoubt when a curtain twitched in a downstairs window; a counter-spy was watching him. “Now or never,” he said hoarsely, cawing like the Raven. The word never usually got results. Another magic formula, which he used to ward off discouragement after failure, was “Once more unto the breach, dear friends.” He was inclined to think of himself as a collection of persons who had to be assembled for any initiative.

  He ought to have thanked the woman for telling him but he could not. Still swallowing hard, he bolted across the stubbly lawn to where his motorbike was parked. The screen door slammed. In a minute it opened again. “Young man! You didn’t sign the guest book!” Starting the motor, he pretended not to hear her. This was the only satisfaction he could chalk up for the afternoon. She had not got him to sign! He had spotted the book, open, the moment he entered the homestead and had cunningly diverted her attention with a purchase of postcards, which were now in his jacket pocket. The total expense, including admission to this waste of shame, was $.65. The owl’s blood money. Peter, who was thrifty, decided to enter the sum as a reward he had offered for knowledge of the bird’s whereabouts. “I am a propitiatory person,” he chanted, to the tune of his sputtering motor, as he chugged home. He could already hear his mother’s cheerful voice, probably emanating from the kitchen, wanting to know if he had seen his friend the owl. The word friend stabbed him in the guts; he pictured himself in Mississippi, hanging about a county courthouse or a garage or general store, trying to learn, without
directly asking, what had happened to a missing Negro friend. … Moreover, he knew that his mother would feel almost as badly as he did when he had to tell her the owl had croaked.

  Coming back to Rocky Port, to strengthen his roots before going abroad, was just one radical blow after another, as far as Peter was concerned. “Guess you’ll notice changes,” the village chorus greeted him. Or, in fugue, “You won’t find many changes.” Peter always answered “Yes” to the first of these challenges and “No” to the second, wondering why the local amour-propre should keep twanging so insistently on the theme of change. The changes Peter noticed were not those the storekeepers and the mailman seemed to be alluding to. He was not even aware, till duly admonished, that the Portuguese had built a new Catholic church, replacing the old one, which the Yankees now said had been “charming”; his mother had had to point out to him the new Sugar ’N’ Spice Shop and the new Bait & Lure Shop and the new Corner Cupboard and the Lamplighter and the second art gallery and the hand-lettered signs advertising merchants and realtors that swung on curly iron brackets at the turn-off to the village, replacing the old “commercial” billboards. He did observe that most of the houses had sprouted little historical notices, bordered in yellow, also hand-lettered and with ampersands and wavy dashes, telling when they had been built and who had lived there or kept a school or a tavern or a marble yard there. The house his mother had rented, painted a dark colonial red, bore the date 1780, and Peleg Turnbull, a ship’s chandler, had kept a shop in the front rooms. One of Peter’s mother’s first actions had been to find a hammer and remove the placard stating this. At once there came a written protest from the landlady, to which his mother answered that this epidemic of historical notices reminded her unpleasantly of the colored quarantine signs of her childhood: “Measles,” “Mumps,” “Scarlet Fever.” Yellow, she thought, had been measles.

  “Quarantined by history,” Peter remarked in his slightly hoarse voice, backing up his mother’s stand. But really he was attached to history, provided it stayed still. Now that the point had been called to his attention, he rather missed the old billboards as well as the neon storefront signs. Except in the field of civil rights, he was opposed to progress in any direction, including backwards, which was the direction Rocky Port seemed to be heading in, and wanted everything in the sensuous world to be the same as it had been when he was younger. To be precise, when he was fifteen, nearly four years ago.

  That was when he and his mother had first come to Rocky Port, in the fall, out of season; she had rented a house near the water, in the “wrong” section of the village, where the Portuguese lived. From his bedroom window, he used to watch three cormorants that stood on pilings in the cove and he had been counting on seeing them again on his return. He had three sentimental journeys planned: the first to the cormorants, the second to the Great Horned Owl, and the third to a hidden waterfall up in the back country. To date, he had had two disappointments. Number One, the cormorants were gone. The first evening, while his mother was wrenching off the placard, he had hurried down on foot, past the laundress’ house, to where they used to live. A single boring gull sat on one of the piles; that was all. He kept coming back to look at different times of day, pretending to be taking a stroll. But it was no use. They were gone. And nobody but he and his mother seemed to be able to recall them.

  “You mean gulls, don’t you, Peter?” his mother’s new friends said. “No,” he said. “Not gulls. I know gulls.” “Can he mean the Arctic Tern?” “He means cormorants,” said his mother. Then at a cocktail party, given at a house on the harbor, he met a retired admiral whose small hawk face he remembered. “The cormorants? Sure, son,” said the admiral, who came from the South. “They’re nesting now in Labrador. They’ll be back in the fall.” “I won’t be here then,” said Peter. In the fall, he would be in Paris, taking his junior year at the Sorbonne. For the first time, he felt sad at the thought. He could not understand, either, how he could have forgotten that cormorants migrated, when he had spent hours in the reference section of the village Free Library, identifying the three black birds, uncertain to start with whether they were the Double Crested Cormorant or the Common Cormorant, which was a lot rarer. He was worried that he might be losing his memory. To cheer himself up, he decided that some fall he could come back here and find them again, when he was through with college and the Army. Maybe on his honeymoon. “The cormorant’s life span?” said the admiral. “Hell, son, maybe ten, fifteen years. Those three damn birds have been here winters as long as I have. Now let’s see. I retired in ’58. …” It was clear to Peter that the admiral was just gassing to cover up his ignorance; like most of the people here, he was not interested in getting to the bottom of anything. He began to talk vociferously, waving his short pipe, about the ages attained by ships’ parrots, in an argumentative tone that Peter was coming to recognize as the cry of the Rocky Port species, mature, male, which always sounded as if its assertions were about to be contested by another species—foreign or black. Peter felt he would not welcome a heart-to-heart with the admiral on the topic of integration. Yet this chat, he feared, was on his summer calendar, as predictable as Fourth of July fireworks or the appearance of a spring robin on a Rocky Port lawn. Despite that, he rather liked the old man, first for remembering the cormorants, second for remembering him, and third for surviving unchanged from that other year.

  That year had a special value for Peter because that year he got the wish he used to make on every baby tooth he put under his pillow to dream on: to live in a little house in New England with his mother by themselves. He had never liked California; he missed the winter. He hated his stepfather’s garden in Berkeley, with roses and daffodils and tulips and irises all blooming at the same time, so that there was never anything to look forward to. The only birds that appealed to him there were the hummingbirds. He hated the desert; he was convinced that it was the product of some nuclear catastrophe that had befallen an earlier race of scientists. He declined to consider Death Valley a part of Nature. Peter was strongly in favor of Nature, and he was against modern physics for interfering with Her.

  His stepfather was in the physics department of the University of California, a very valuable man; he had helped bring heavy water to England from the Continent during the war. Peter had always imagined Hans carrying it in his suitcase through customs. He was a refugee, like Peter’s own father. The difference was that Peter’s father, who taught history at Wellesley, had left Italy for political reasons and not just because he was Jewish, while Hans might still be pottering in his laboratory in the Fatherland if he had not been born a Jew. Peter’s mother was not Jewish. He had heard his aunt say that her sister had a “thing” about Jews, which he hoped included him. Peter slightly preferred his own father to Hans, but he tried to think that this preference was impersonal, like preferring the seashore to the mountains or breakfast to lunch: he liked the East better than the West, Italy better than Germany, history better than physics. Personally, Hans was genial, and the babbo was bad-tempered. Peter always felt wicked when he would place his baby tooth under his pillow, to dream of running away with the fair Rosamund (called “Rosie” by Hans), and then wake up the next morning to find a silver dollar that he knew Hans had put there. Silver dollars were one item Peter approved of in the West. In the end, when the wish came true, he was quite sorry for Hans, who had agreed to a “trial separation.” Coming east on the train, four years ago, come September, the gladder Peter was at the thought that he and his mother were alone at last, the sorrier he felt for Hans, who had waved them off at the station.

  Four years ago, he was deeply in love with his mother. He was a tall boy with a long nose and gaunt features—the picture of his father at the same age, except for his eyes, which were gray, like hers. He often stared at himself in the mirror, but for the opposite reason from Narcissus; it was her eyes he gazed into, captive in his Jewish face. He had known for a long time about the Oedipus complex; his stepfather used to tease him
with “And how is young Oedipus?” But he did not think that, on balance, he would like to sleep with his mother, only to be with her where there were no other people. He was sure that despite what she said she would marry again, and he would have a new set of stepbrothers and stepsisters, probably. All he asked of the gods was a year with her. Already he realized that this year, when he was fifteen, would be the last year of his childhood; at sixteen, he would be a youth and lose his innocence. He had seen it happen to his stepbrothers.

  Peter wanted to grow up; he did not plan to be a Peter Pan. But he felt that a halcyon interval was owing him, particularly because of the divorce, which required him to spend the summer with his father, so that only the school year, the darker part, belonged to her. Because of school and “activities,” he hardly ever had her to himself, unless he was sick, and unfortunately he got sick mostly in the summer. When he was little, she used to read to him at bedtime, but now he was too old for that. Holidays—Christmas and Easter—were allocated by Hans to family trips. On weekends, Hans was always home. That was the way the ball bounced. The fact that his mother did not love Hans as much as she did Peter made her always anxious to “include” him in all their projects. Knowing his mother, Peter often felt that it would have been a lucky break for him if he had been her stepchild, instead of the wormy apple of her eye.

  Yet she must have had it in mind all along to “make it up” to Peter when she was free. Then it would be his turn. Though she was reticent about personal things, Peter guessed there was some sort of promise between them, which involved, on his side, being patient. It did not surprise him when she told him that she and Hans were parting. Each of her marriages, Peter pointed out to her, had lasted seven years—a Biblical span. She had never counted, but he had. Nor had there ever been any question for Peter but that she was living in exile out there in corny California; when the two of them finally cut and ran, it would be back to New England, their real home. The only problem was where.