Birds of America

by Mary McCarthy

  She put that up to Peter; he could choose, providing it was not an island. He picked Rocky Port. It looked lonely—a thin finger of land pointing out to sea, far from a main highway. She laughed when he showed it to her on the map. “Define a peninsula, Peter.” A body of land almost entirely surrounded by water, from the Latin paene insula, an almost-island. Peter laughed too. Then she protested that they did not know a living soul in the vicinity; nobody she knew had ever been to Rocky Port. But that was how he had plotted it, dismissing Cape Cod, Vermont, commuters’ Connecticut, and hesitating over the Massachusetts North Shore, which attracted him but where they would be likely to get visits from the babbo. Peter had calculated the driving time from Wellesley to Ipswich; he was not taking any chances on a renewed romance between his parents.

  It worried her that he might not find friends of his own age in such an isolated (there was that word again) village. But this was the last year, Peter explained, that he would want to be solitary; next year, he would be interested in girls and parties. Up to now he had always lived in an academic community, even in the summer, because the babbo invariably vacationed with a lot of other professors. It was the last year too, he argued, that he would be allowed to be by himself with birds and animals unless he planned to be an ornithologist or a zoologist. A young boy was expected to like animals, but he would have to be forty before he could watch them again without somebody watching him. Hearing the desperation in his voice, his mother capitulated. Besides, she had told him he could choose.

  In her place, Peter would just have gone there, without further research, but his mother was trying to reform from being a “hopeless romantic,” in the words of her sister. She got the state guidebook out of the college library and looked up Rocky Port; she found the name of a real-estate agent in a directory of realtors and sent off a letter with their specifications, asking about schools and transportation. She signed it “Rosamund Brown,” her own name, which Peter would not have done, even though he was glad that she was giving up Hans’s moniker. He would have liked them to live under an alias.

  The agent, a Mrs. Curtis, wrote back immediately with listings and asked if she were the Rosamund Brown; if so, she had some of her records. Peter’s mother was a professional musician. “But my records are all out of print!” she cried. She was always surprised and touched when someone remembered her, because she had not played a recital or in a real concert for years—only for fun with a University chamber group. She had given up the concert stage when Hans was summoned to Berkeley; California was too far from the center. Peter could tell that she took the realtor’s letter as a wonderful, strange omen; she was being recalled to life. For his part, Peter took the omen as bad. If his mother had a fan in Rocky Port, it was no longer virgin territory. The place was probably full of artists and writers and music-lovers generally; he ought to have been put on guard by the elm-shaded streets and the Greek Revival doorways in the photographs in the state guidebook. He was relieved to learn from the agent’s second letter that the artistic colony closed their houses early in September.

  “I’m afraid you’ll find it rather bleak,” Mrs. Curtis wrote apologetically. “After Labor Day, we go ‘back to Nature.’ The little house you’re interested in is in rather a ‘slummy’ section, but it has a lovely view and you’ll be quite by yourselves. There’s no television set, I’m afraid, for your son, but there’s a good working piano. I realize that isn’t the same as a harpsichord, but you can probably ‘make do.’ The kitchen is fairly well equipped; I imagine that, like so many of our musical artists, you like to cook wonderful things. Your son can walk to the old Rocky Port high school on the harbor; the grand new consolidated high school on Route 1 isn’t finished yet—politics. Do I understand you won’t have a car? Would you like me to have the piano tuned?”

  His mother, as always, was her own piano-tuner, and they did not have a car, that fall. Both cars had stayed with Hans, which Peter, on the whole, was glad of, for it limited his mother’s movements. When his bicycle finally came by Railway Express, with the harpsichord and the clavichord, he mostly left it in the cellar, because she did not have one. Instead, they took walks together, which they had never done in Berkeley. Every clear evening they walked down to the point, past the abandoned lighthouse and the boarded-up whaling museum, to see the sun set; this was their daily contact with the natives, who came in their Fords and Chevrolets for the same reason. It was a local ritual, like the lowering of a flag. They watched the fishing boats come home; the pink sky was full of gulls. Then they would wend their own way back to supper, past the plastics factory and the Doric bank and the Civil War cannon in the square. At home, the cormorants would be standing on their piles, three black silhouettes in the paling light; they never came to the lighthouse point. They never mixed with the other birds—a fact that struck Peter from the beginning.

  He decided they were sacred birds, an unholy trinity. Standing on their dark piles in the water, they had an evil, old, Egyptian look; gorged, their black wings spread to dry in the sun, they resembled hieroglyphs or emblems on an escutcheon. In their neck was a pouch that bulged when they had been fishing. They did not swim or float on the surface like other birds but darted through the water in a sinuous, snake-like way. He had never seen them squat or sit. They were always erect, spread-eagled; not sedentary—vigilant. They seldom moved, though they occasionally gave a flap of their wings or a turn of their long serpentine necks. They usually stood facing away, surveying the cove like sentries, or, in profile, commanding the open sea, but sometimes he would come back from some private sleeveless errand to find that they had wheeled about and were facing him in glistening formation. Unlike the shrieking terns and squawking gulls, they did not utter a sound. This stillness and fixity were what made them seem so horribly ancient, Peter thought, as though they preceded time. That and their snaky appearance, which took you back to the age of flying reptiles. Moreover, their soundless habit gave their slightest movement the quality of a pantomime; from his bedroom window, he could pretend he was watching a drama of hieratic gesture.

  He did not know why he connected the cormorants with his mother and their flight back to Nature’s bosom, but if he could have had a seal ring made (he was still a sealing-wax addict) in memory of that year, it would have been incised with three cormorants—his sign. His mother said they made her think of the three black-cloaked masked Revenges at the end of the first act of Don Giovanni: Donna Elvira, Donna Anna, and Don Ottavio. Peter agreed. There was that about them too. Three pouchy pursuers, storers-up of grudges. He wondered about their sex. Were they father, mother, and son? Or three brothers? The last of their race. In one bird book he had read that only a few hundred Common European Cormorants were left in North America. There must be even fewer now than when the book was written. Unless, of course, they were protected.

  The Great Horned Owl seemed very old too, nearly extinct, with its immobile dilated pupils and its long nightgown of ruffly feathers. He was exceptionally pale for his species, cruel-looking, and very big. Peter’s mother almost thought he must be an Arctic Horned Owl because he was so pale. They had come upon him like an apparition in the chill solitary woods, having discovered the Wild Life Sanctuary in the course of a Saturday walk. The Boy Scouts, they decided, must have marked the trails with visual aids pointing to squirrels, autumn foliage, and owls—ordinary screech owls, not this great tufted tigerish creature. And someone, a very brave Scout, must have captured him and put him in the home-made cage nailed to a tree and labeled “Bubo Virginianus—Great Horned Owl”; someone must feed him field mice and whatever other sacrifices he regurgitated in the form of those hairy pellets. But they never met a Scout or any other human being in the sanctuary.

  Besides the trails through the woods and the captive owl in his tree-house, it had a log cabin with educational exhibits of pyrites and quartzes and shells and stuffed birds and stuffed animals and butterflies and amusing insects like the Walking Stick. There were wild-flower and
fern charts on the walls. It was the kind of place where you would expect to find a custodian to reprimand you or get you to join the Audubon Society, but it was empty except for the taxidermic presences in the glass cabinets. To come on it, swept and garnished, in the woods was spooky, like the story his mother used to tell of the ship Marie Celeste, which was found afloat in mid-ocean in apple-pie order, with mess tables set and ovens still warm and not a hand aboard.

  Nobody Peter and his mother met in Rocky Port had ever visited the sanctuary or could say who ran it; they thought Peter and his mother were talking about the bird sanctuary, which was something different, a desolate state preserve of dunes and marshes and jackpine, where couples went to make love. Mrs. Curtis took Peter and his mother there in her car one Sunday morning, and they did not see a single worthwhile bird—just beer cans and the remains of campfires. It seemed funny to Peter that there should be two sanctuaries in the locality and each, as it were, unaware of the other, like two people that had not been introduced. Mrs. Curtis could not explain it. If Peter wanted to find out more about his sanctuary, she advised him to sign up at school with a Nature Study group. The manual training teacher was the one to see; he would know all about it. Peter refused the suggestion. He did not want his relationship with Nature organized and managed for him.

  Indeed, he liked the mystery surrounding his sanctuary and the fact that he and his mother were its only (visible) initiates. Exploring, they found a dark stream, stepping-stones, mallards, a pond. By Christmas, his mother said, the pond would surely freeze over; she promised to buy skates at the hardware store and teach him to skate. They could use the log cabin as a shelter to thaw out their feet. Already a black frost had come; the autumn leaves had fallen, and you could identify the deciduous trees only by their shapes. With the end of daylight-saving time, the afternoons were shortened; when they left the sanctuary, it was almost night. In the dusk sometimes, from the road home, they would hear a ululating cry, and Peter would hoot back. He knew from his reading that Great Horned Owls bred in snow and ice; it worried him that the lonely hooter did not have a mate. The idea occurred to him to let him out of his cage, which would not be hard; his mother, who was fearless of authority, would help him. Selfishly, too, Peter longed to see him fly, just once—the drifting flight the books described, like a big moth coasting overhead.

  But then Peter would be responsible for the sequel. What if the owl, weakened by captivity, was unequal to liberation? It might starve, left on its own in the woods. Alternatively, the predatory killer, freed, might make a holocaust in the wildlife refuge. Peter thought with anguish of the pine grosbeaks he and his mother had seen, almost tame, in a wild apple tree on Columbus Day; he imagined their rosy bodies all red with gore. A sanctuary was meant to be safe. He recognized with a sad Hello the classic conservative arguments as they passed through his head—arguments for not meddling with the status quo. A silent shadow, like the shadow of the hunting bird, fell across his happiness. He wished he had never thought of releasing the owl in the first place. Now that the notion of change had glided into his mind, he could not just accept the bird’s being there as natural. It had to be justified. Perhaps he was simply getting bored, but it no longer gave him much pleasure to engage in a staring match with the barred and striped prisoner—a game that, in any case, his mother deplored. When Armistice Day came, he rejected her offer to bring a picnic to the sanctuary. “Let’s take in a movie,” he said in a sullen voice.

  His mother was bewildered; he often hurt her by his unwillingness to explain himself. It would have killed him to tell her that he was depressed by his lack of guts about the owl; she did not even know that he had been weighing the question of setting him free. He loved her too much to confide his weaknesses to her. He preferred discussing hers, which were obvious.

  For example, she had gone and bought him a large illustrated Birds of America, to replace (in her mind) the little blue Peterson guide that had been left behind in Berkeley. Peter was quite happy using the reference section of the Free Library, even if they did not let you take the books home—it was good training for his memory. He enjoyed being resourceful, living off the land, like a hunter, not always having to buy things in a store. Moreover, he considered the gift a placebo. He disapproved of her habit of leaving their possessions behind whenever she got a divorce; she had done the same thing with his father.

  He particularly objected to her leaving the phonograph with Hans, who never remembered to change the needle. He and his mother had long arguments about this on the train coming east; he loved arguing with his mother, who was quite intelligent, he used to tell her, for a faculty wife. A house that had a piano would surely have a phonograph, she said, and when she found she was wrong (the real-estate agent, Peter said, would have mentioned a phonograph), she went and bought a cheap stereo portable. “Did it have to be stereo?” Peter groaned, homesick for their old mono set. He disliked being offered substitutes. At least she had brought along some of their records—those she called “Peter’s,” like the Haydn Hunting Horn, which bayed, he thought (his mother said no), like a lost hound in the woods, and Handel’s Water Music, which bubbled and gurgled. But Peter had not been able to reason her into taking any of the art books or the eleventh edition of the Britannica. “Hans doesn’t want it, Mother. He says it’s completely out of date in all the sciences.” “We’ll advertise for another,” she said, soothing. “If we take it, he’ll miss it.”

  Peter did not applaud his mother’s “noble” side. Naturally, he would have hated it if she had stuck Hans for alimony, but it would have been a kindness to Hans, in Peter’s opinion, to take the espresso pots and half the sheets and towels, to speak only of the baser items, instead of borrowing the sheets they were now sleeping on from Mrs. Curtis and drinking awful coffee from a dripolator. The least his mother could do for Hans, if she was going to leave him, was to give him some petty cause for grievance, something that would lay her open to criticism in the Faculty Club. Instead, she had been “perfect,” taking only her mother’s silver and Peter’s baby cup and fork and spoon and every Christmas present Hans had ever given them, naturally—so as not to hurt his feelings—no matter how useless or hard to pack. The result was that it was Hans who was open to criticism, sitting out there with two cars in his garage and cupboards full of china and linen and glasses and kitchen stuff, while she, innocent and good, was “roughing it” with chipped plates and corny glasses with mottoes and taking the bus to the nearest town twice a week to buy groceries in the supermarket. His mother, he decided, was being so good she was bad, and this worried him.

  She must want Hans to feel that an angel had left him, which meant, according to Peter, that she wanted Hans to still be in love with her. If she was really eager for Hans to “get over” her, she should show him her worst side. Like letting Peter pinch the old German binoculars that were hanging in the hall closet in Berkeley and that Hans never used because he could not bother to take off his regular glasses.

  She claimed that you had to pay for freedom by being ready to give up everything. It was ignoble, she said, to latch onto property, even if it was partly yours. OK, but every week she bought something that was a duplicate or reasonable facsimile of some article she had left in Berkeley. Like the stereo set or cake racks or an iron griddle for flapjacks. This jarred on Peter morally, as well as on his bump of thrift. To buy the same things over again, even if you needed them, was not his definition of renunciation.

  This being alone with her with the leisure to study her faults was a great pleasure to him. Peter loved America, and his mother’s shortcomings were exactly those of the country; they could be summed up under the heading of extravagance. That formulation he owed to the babbo, who often held forth on the theme to other academics. Puritanism, the babbo said, was an extravagance, like Prohibition; Americans were logicians with no idea of limit. Peter’s father loved America too—which tended to puzzle Americans, Peter noticed. He always liked to hear the story of his m
other’s first meeting with his father, at a party in New York toward the end of the war—she was studying musicology then at the Mannes School and working with Landowska. After the party, they walked down Park Avenue, and she said to him “But what do you like about America?” since most refugees she had met were musicians who were pining for the cafés they had come from. Peter’s father thought. “I like the American birds.” She said this was what had made her fall in love with that dark, scowling man. “It was such a funny thing to hear. Instead of ‘I like your tall buildings’ or ‘I like your long-legged women’ or ‘Your democratic institutions.’ ” “But what did he mean?” Peter always asked. His mother was not certain. “Maybe he just meant they were different from the ones he knew.”

  Now that he was a full-grown male, Peter thought he understood the babbo’s gambit. With her light-brown hair and gray eyes and rosy skin, his mother was like an American bird—the rose-breasted grosbeak, for instance, modest and vivid. His father had been paying her a compliment. And probably, like a lot of Europeans, he was fed up with what he knew and wanted to meet another human species, which at least would be different, like the birds of the New World. “Mi piaceva il suo candore,” he said to Peter one summer, as if grudgingly, when Peter was drawing him out. Peter had taken this to mean that the young Rosamund, like the Father of her Country, could not tell a lie. Now that he knew Italian better (he was taking Italian Lit. at college as part of his Romance languages major), he knew that candore was the usual word for naïveté.

  The babbo used to say that Peter’s mother was the first girl he met who was what he called a “real American,” meaning a descendant of the old Puritan colonists. To an historian, Peter guessed, that might have been pretty exciting, and the more so because her forebears out in Ohio had taken part in the opening of the West. A Boston deb could have bored the babbo, but Peter’s mother came from pioneer stock that had settled in Marietta from New England after the Revolutionary War. The fact that she had been very pretty was a point his father did not mention. Nor did he recall having said anything about birds the night he met her. According to him, he had told her that he liked her name: Rosamund Brown. Peter liked her name too; it reminded him of a Thomas Hardy poem she had once set to music and which had a refrain: “Dear Lizbie Browne.” When he was small, he could not connect “Brown” with himself; he felt much more like his father than like her, to the extent of always thinking of her as a Gentile. That was why her faults pleased him, like an unfamiliar kind of marking or speckling.