Birds of America

by Mary McCarthy

  At his present age, he looked on the fair Rosamund with cooler eyes. He loved her still, but he was no longer in love with her. He had become cautious about her, mistrusting her consistent sweetness and unruffled temper. She was too good to be true, he discovered. Like all older people, she betrayed. Besides, her faults were no longer unfamiliar. He recognized them in himself. Her zeal to please had set him a bad example; it had made him placatory. Her scruples in him had become irresolution and an endless picking at himself that was like masturbation—a habit he had not completely outgrown and which seemed to him ignominious, even though both she and the babbo had said it was natural in puberty; on that score, he felt, they had given him a wrong steer. Moreover, her good qualities (she was generous, to a fault, he acknowledged dryly) did not inspire imitation. Rather the contrary. Everyone, he had observed, around the fair Rosamund turned into an ogre to protect her from herself. With his nineteenth birthday coming up, he admired his father for having the strength of his defects (something Peter would never achieve, thanks to her training, alas) and viewed his mother with a kind of ironic sympathy. But when he was fifteen, he was living in a childish world of magic, where his mother was the stranger and his captive.

  While he was in school, she practiced or analyzed pieces on the clavichord, working out the fingering; he gathered this was quite hard. She was preparing an all-Elizabethan lecture-recital to go on a tour of colleges. That was how she had got started, when she had left Landowska’s master classes. Her field used to be early English music; she talked about it to college audiences and illustrated her talk on the harpsichord. Later on, she gave recitals and played with a group. His aunt told him confidentially that his mother was a better musical scholar than she was a performer. Remembering this, Peter wondered whether she would ever make the grade again. He hoped she knew that that music of olden time was not so much of a novelty as it had been in her day, right after the war. He did not let himself dwell on what would happen to him if her tour finally materialized. She could not play at colleges, obviously, during summer vacations, which was the time he would normally be with his father. And if she went away in the school year, who would stay with him? He was too old for a sitter and too young—public opinion would say—to stay by himself; he would not want her to get into trouble with the SPCC. Hans would have come in handy, but now there was no Hans.

  When he was little, it seemed, before they were divorced from his father, he used to start crying at the sight of the truckers who were coming to take the harpsichord. He had learned that this meant that his mother was going away again. The babbo and his nurse could never persuade him that she would come back. Once when he was holding onto the harpsichord’s legs, to keep the movers from taking it (he must have been about four, he guessed), his father had picked him up and spanked him hard; he remembered his mother crying, which made his father even angrier. “Ricatto!” he shouted. “Blackmail! The boy must get used to it. He should be glad you are an artist!” Peter’s nurse would not tell him what that funny word, blackmail, meant; later he heard it quite often and always applied to himself.

  When he was little, Peter hated his father for (as he thought) making his mother go away when she did not want to. He did not believe her when she explained that she liked having people listen to her music. If she liked it, why did she and his father argue about it? Why did his father yell at him if he disturbed her when she was practicing, while she was always glad to stop and get him a cookie or an animal cracker? Why had he overheard her, pleading, in his father’s study, “Have pity, Paolo” (the fair Rosamund talked like one of her madrigals when emotional). “Let me cancel the concert. This is killing me”? He had gone and got his toy gun and pointed it at his father: “You let my mother stay home!” His mother always said, now, that she was grateful to his father for having made her go on with her concert appearances. He ought to be grateful himself, he guessed, for not having been permitted to tyrannize over his mother. But would it have been so bad for him if she had laid off the concert stage for a couple of years, till he was old enough to understand what it was all about?

  That fall in Rocky Port, he was reconciled, he thought, to his mother’s career for practical reasons. They were living off capital, which he gathered was some sort of sin. If she did not take alimony, she would have to earn some dough. But the day was still far off, he assured himself; it would be months before her program was ready, at the rate she was going. He had nothing to worry about so long as she was still tinkering with the clavichord. When she started working on the harpsichord, that would mean she was really rehearsing. He knew this because she had told him so. He did not understand much about her instruments, except that you could not do mains croisées on the clavichord because it had only one keyboard. But the point of mains croisées escaped him. Nor did he follow her when she talked about things like figured basses and continuo. He did not regard her seriously as a musician, because she was his mother; besides, the only music he liked much, in his heart, was opera.

  He did not mind an instrument like the hunting horn or the trumpet in The Messiah (“the trumpet shall sound … and we shall be changed”; his mother said that was a musical pun) that made him think of a solo voice. If he had been able to play himself, he would have been a trumpeter. But that would have to wait for his next incarnation. On his eighth birthday, he had learned the awful truth. Kindly Hans gave him a child’s violin; Peter found it at his place at breakfast, and he saw from his mother’s stricken face that it was a surprise to her too. “You think he is too young, Rosie?” Hans queried anxiously. The next thing Peter remembered, he was standing by the harpsichord, singing a scale as she struck the notes for him. “Ach!” said Hans. Hans had not noticed, till then, that Peter was tone-deaf. Or at least, as his mother put it, he did not hear intervals well enough to play the violin. He could be trained, she said, to read music and appreciate it; no one was really tone-deaf. He could learn to play the piano, which did not require an ear and would teach him something about music. “You can have piano lessons for your birthday instead,” she said gaily to Peter. But Peter did not want that. He wanted the little violin, which Hans, an Indian giver, took back to the store. In revenge, he would not listen to the childish music like Peter and the Wolf that Hans brought home to instruct him. When he got interested in opera, he always started the record after the overture. He refused to be broadened by going to concerts with Hans and his mother, and though he had recently admitted the horn family to his friendship, he drew the line there. He would not let his mother buy him more Haydn or Handel; he suspected her of using the Hunting Horn and the Water Music as the opening wedge.

  Yet sometimes in Rocky Port, when he came home from school, he would hear the clavichord tinkling in her bedroom upstairs and he would shut the front door quietly and listen, imagining that this was a fairy-tale house with the miller’s daughter upstairs spinning a room full of gold for the king, her husband. For the first time, he “got” this courtly music. Before disturbing her, he would fetch some wood and build a fire in the fireplace, making a fanciful design of logs and kindling. He would have liked to get ice and fix her a drink, but she disapproved of children serving as bartenders to their parents—a custom Hans, who liked his schnapps, had tried to introduce on the grounds that it was American.

  Of course, it was American, but his mother would not admit it. She had her own notions of what was American, going back to her own childhood. Reading aloud to children in the evening, Fourth of July sparklers and fireworks, Easter-egg hunts, Christmas stockings with an orange in the toe, popcorn and cranberry chains on the Christmas tree, ducking for apples at Halloween, shadow pictures on the walls, lemonade, fresh cider, picnics, treasure hunts, anagrams, checkers, eggs goldenrod, home-made cakes, muffins, popovers, and corn breads, fortune-tellings, sweet peas, butterfly nets, narcissus bulbs in pebbles, Trillium, Spring Beauty, arbutus, lady’s-slippers, cat’s cradles, swings, bicycles, wooden ice-cream freezers, fishing with angleworms, rowing, ice-ska
ting, blueberrying, hymn-singing. Her family had been mostly doctors, judges, and ministers; when she was in grade school, she had learned to play the organ in her grandfather’s church. Her first professional performance was substituting for the organist when he was drunk one Whitsunday morning—when he was drunk he always wanted to play “We Three Kings of Orient Are.”

  She was strong for the traditional and whenever she made an innovation, it became part of the tradition, something that had “always” been. Like chess, which Hans had introduced, or Peter’s Monopoly game. On the other hand, certain items of Americana were never admitted to the fair Rosamund’s canon. They included ketchup, trick-or-treat, square-dancing, sailing, golf, skiing, bridge, and virtually anything in a can. Also Christmas-tree lights and those colored Christmas-tree balls you bought in boxes. Peter had got her to confess that out in Marietta in her childhood they had had balls and lights on the tree as well as ketchup in the pantry. But he did this only to try her. He too preferred the tree as it had “always” been, with everything on it edible except the paper chains he cut and pasted and the star he used to make, with her help. He was averse himself to sailing and skiing or at least to the smooth types who went in for them, and she had persuaded him, empirically, that home-made chili sauce was better than the bottled ketchup his peer-groupers poured on their hamburgers, just as she had converted him to the doctrine of the home-made cake by teaching him and his school friends in Berkeley to bake in her kitchen on Saturdays—first a cake made with a mix and then a real one; their mothers, he estimated, had not necessarily thanked her for this proselytizing work. As for being a bartender, back in Berkeley he had accepted the deprivation, agreeing that it was nauseating to see little kids shaking up Martinis for a smirking crowd.

  In Rocky Port, with just the two of them, it would have been different, he thought. But he guessed she was bothered by the old Oedipus business there. Somebody had warned her or she had warned herself that she should never let Peter take over the offices of a husband, which meant that he could not make drinks or put out the lights for the night or unlock the house door when they came home from a trip together. He was allowed to set the table and sometimes to help her with the dishes; on Sundays he could make scrambled eggs for their breakfast, because he had always done that; on Saturdays occasionally he could bake a cake—ditto. But if she had a drink before dinner, she did not even like it if he joined her with a Coke. Too connubial, he supposed. After he had done this a few times, she discontinued her nightly Scotch before the fire. That was her way (a sacrifice) of edging out of an awkward situation. Her plight called forth Peter’s chivalry. He rescued her, perceiving that she as an adult needed a pleasure that he did not share. Shortly before dinner, after their sunset tryst, he would take a Coke from the icebox and repair with it upstairs to his room. “Why don’t you have a drink, Mother, while I hit the homework?” Thus she knew the coast was clear. He would stay at his desk till he heard her rattling things in the kitchen, which told him that she had had her grog. Then he would come down and lounge in the kitchen doorway, watching her with critical comments while she cooked. It would never occur to her to do as most kids’ mothers did and bring her drink to the kitchen.

  Her problems in keeping him at a filial distance amused him and made his heart swell with tenderness—the same tenderness he felt for those laborious creatures, birds and animals. Watching her fend him off, he was also reassured for the future. She would never “encourage” a suitor, if Peter’s experience was an index. And yet how had it happened that Hans had subtracted her from his father?

  He could always get her goat by calling her by her first name. “Stop that, Peter! Stop it, this minute!” “Why should I, Rosamund?” he would say, in a clowning voice. “Rosamund, give me a reason.” It was as if she were being tickled; she laughed but really she was scared. His mother, he decided, was dressed in a little brief of authority that she was afraid would slip off. She was firm about being treated as his parent and no nonsense. After supper came the Children’s Hour; they would sit by the fire and talk. Sometimes she mended. Or they would both read. If the night was clear and still, they would go out and look at the stars. He was teaching her to find the simpler constellations from his old star book—a present from Hans. If it was not a school night, he could vanquish her at chess. At nine-thirty, on school nights, he would start upstairs for his bath. Once he was in bed, she would come and open his window and kiss him good night on the top of his head. After he was asleep, she set the table, he supposed, for breakfast, measured and sifted flour for flapjacks or muffins or whatever, put out the garbage, lowered the thermostat, went around turning out lights, drew a bath. This night self of hers was unknown to him; he never heard her go to bed. In the morning, the first thing he knew, she was shutting his window and opening the curtains to let in the light. Usually, she was dressed and she was always in a good humor, which he was not.

  That year, he did not masturbate. He had kicked the habit, temporarily, because of her. It did not seem to him democratic to give himself that solitary bang when she was all alone in her bedroom or downstairs in the kitchen getting things ready for his breakfast. It had been all right, from that point of view, when Hans was around, but it was not all right now. Peter, his family said, was a born Solon on points of equity; the babbo never tired of telling a story Peter hoped was apocryphal: about how he had worried about chattel slavery when he was in the first grade and had announced to his teacher that it was “a good idea, but quite mean.” His fair-mindedness made his mother hope that he would be a judge, like her father. His birthday was under the sign of Libra, and family legend had it that as a child his passion was weighing things on a toy scales, which he toddled around with like an attribute of Justice. “Peter ponders,” said his mother. One notion he had pondered, while still quite young, was the accepted idea that grownups should work while children played. “Your work is to grow, my boy,” Hans used to tell him. Peter could never buy that. It was not a just division of labor. Still less could he “play with himself” when his mother, thanks to him, was not even going to parties. After a while he was not in the mood.

  They were living a life of virtue, or so he believed. That year he equated virtue with happiness, still ignorant of Kant’s teaching. From a Kantian angle, he now recognized, nearly everything he did or refrained from doing in Rocky Port was outside the moral law, strictly speaking, since he was obeying not Duty but Inclination. Being helpful, chaste, minding his mother was a pleasure in those circumstances, where the well-tuned clavichord gave the pitch; he no longer sighed over his homework, though he missed Hans’s help with his algebra. Nor did he groan at getting up in the morning, for his rising was a daily ceremony like the cormorants’ toilet, which he could watch from his window while he pulled on his clothes. From his present vantage point, he could confirm that he had been living not just in a fairy tale but in a paradise, in which his love for his mother coincided with his love of Nature and of the austere New England landscape. That was why he had that sense of homecoming or repatriation. And one of the features of the Earthly Paradise (which made it preferable, in Peter’s view, to Heaven) was the absence of others.

  Winter was in the air, described by the postman as a cold snap; Peter’s favorite stars, the Pleiades, were so clear in the frosty night that he had seen the Lost Pleiad. Yet except for the tradespeople, the postman, and sundry ministers of grace like Mrs. Curtis, Peter and his mother still knew no one in Rocky Port. Peter was on terms with his classmates, but he had deliberately made no friends. He did not want to invite anyone home, as though it would break a spell.

  He liked to fancy that he and his mother were pioneers, exploring a wilderness unknown to the aborigines. This notion gained support not only from their lack of friends and of a car and a television set but also from the ghostly music of the clavichord, from an American history course he was taking, and from the meals his mother dished up. Having left her cookbooks behind (naturally), she had bought an old Fannie F
armer in the village junkshop. This gave her the idea of cooking American, at which Peter to start with had raised an eyebrow. American in his experience meant steaks spread with charcoal seasoning, frozen corn-on-the-cob, shredded lettuce with “Russian” dressing, “Hawaiian” ham and sticky pineapple. In Berkeley, he had been proud of his mother’s disdain for the prevailing cookery. For a while there, she had had a game of cooking the foods of the countries Peter was studying in geography or whose stamps he was collecting in his album—his favorites had been black beans (Brazilian) with orange slices and Persian chicken with rose water. For Hans she had made Tafelspitz and German and Austrian desserts and for Peter her old Italian stand-bys, such as green lasagne al forno—he used to help her roll out the sheets of pasta for it and hang them up in the kitchen like dish towels. In contrast to this, an American diet would be pretty monotonous; he hoped she was not going to ask him to dig a barbecue pit. She told him to wait and see.

  Peter waited. They had pot roast and New England boiled dinner and fried chicken and lobsters and scallops and bluefish and mackerel and scalloped oysters and clam chowder. They had Cape Cod Turkey, which some people said was salmon but his mother thought was baked fresh cod with a stuffing. They had codfish cakes and corned beef hash and red flannel hash and chicken hash (three ways), spoon bread and hominy and Rhode Island jonny-cake and country sausage with fried apple rings and Brown Betty and Indian pudding and pandowdy and apple pie and cranberry pie. Before the first black frost, she bought green tomatoes and made jars of pickles. They stole quinces from a bush in the yard of a closed-up captain’s house with a widow’s walk, and she put up quince jelly. Peter was ready to admit that he had never had it so good.