“What do you mean?” Isabel asked severely. “Did you talk to him?”
Alice shook her head.
“Alice,” Isabel said, “I know it’s hard. But he’ll be back! Just give him time!”
Alice held out a sheet of paper crushed in her white hand. It was a printout of an e-mail message. Isabel took the paper and, with growing anxiety, smoothed it out as well as she could.
“Dearest Alice,” it began. Isabel looked up at her sister.
“Read it,” Alice said.
Dearest Alice,
I am no doubt even a greater idiot than I imagine myself to be to give up the loveliest angel that ever presented herself to man. Being in your presence is like a drug, and I would willingly subject myself to your sweet anesthesia forever. Going cold turkey from you these last weeks has been the most painful experience of my life. But it has also brought back to me feelings of consciousness and—don’t laugh—duty that I can no longer blind myself to, no matter how much I might prefer to remain happily senseless.
I told you that I was coming to California to help a friend. That was a lie. I hid from you what I should have been open about—that I had promised my son I would visit him, and that I knew I had to keep this promise. Why I couldn’t tell you the truth and trust to your goodness to understand, God only knows. I felt that it would hurt you even to mention my children—my obligations apart from you—despite what you have often said about wanting to know them and be a mother to them. I guess I felt this was too much to ask even from someone as loving and generous as you. Besides which, I admit I selfishly wanted all your love and attention for myself. I wanted to *will* myself back to the young man you made me feel I was again! I wanted to start my life over again with you.
But as I now see clearly, starting over is only a kind of a pipe dream. I’ve tried it before and failed, and I don’t dare try it again. It wouldn’t be fair either to you or to the children I already have, two innocents who I have put through some terrible times. I know there is no one on earth more likely than you to understand that, having reclaimed them, I cannot leave them again now. My responsibilities are here, wherever my heart might prefer to reside.
I suspect, too, knowing you, that you are likely to offer to throw everything up—your life, your work, your family—and join me here. But this I cannot even consider. You have your whole life in front of you.
I will think of you always with tenderness.
—Anthony
Isabel put her arms around her sister and held her tight. The thin shoulders shook. Alice’s tears seeped into Isabel’s hair. Isabel had thought she would never again have to ask herself why these things happened to Alice—bad luck, or bad judgment, or something invisible about her sister: some blemish or crookedness only men could see.
“Look at us,” Alice cried. “Two old, spinstery sisters. Are we going to live together forever? Get old? Two old crones, doing needlepoint!”
“Oh, Alice,” Isabel said. “I don’t think anyone does needlepoint anymore.”
“Yes, they do. I see old women doing it on the bus.”
Isabel tried to recall the thoughts that had sustained her during the evening; to feel again the sense of freedom and possibility. But even as she sat here, the confidence she had felt on the riverbank began, under the influence of the cluttered room and the glare of the streetlight and the false, terrible words sprayed grayly on the crumpled paper, to drain away.
“You have a great life, Alice,” she said a little desperately, trying to convey hope and strength but feeling instead that her words were matches snuffed out as soon as they were lit. “You love your work. You have good friends. You’re financially independent. It’s not the nineteenth century anymore. So what if you don’t get married? Men are rats! Just look at Theo.”
Alice sat up and blew her nose again. “You’re right,” she said. “Of course you’re right.”
But they didn’t meet each other’s eyes. They both knew that while they were not impoverished ladies of an earlier era for whom marriage “must be their pleasantest preservation from want,” it was equally true that married life formed the core of their expectations and desires. Whatever they claimed to believe to the contrary, neither of them was likely to be very happy without it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Some days, getting divorced seemed like a full-time job. With Alice’s help Isabel found a lawyer, but still there were a hundred decisions to be made, issues to be negotiated and renegotiated, mostly involving money. Eventually Theo offered to move out of the house and let Isabel live there, but she didn’t want to. She wanted a place of her own. It occurred to her that the only year of her life she had lived by herself had been when she was twenty-two years old.
For the moment, however, she didn’t have enough cash for an apartment. She had started looking through the classified section of the newspaper. The rents shocked her, as did her own ignorance about them. She saw now, sitting at Alice’s cluttered, rickety eating table in the corner, that she had not been masquerading—as she had sometimes liked to think—as an affluent, sheltered housewife. She had really been one. And now she would have to become something else. What, she didn’t know. She didn’t want to go back to the zoo. She felt that her only hope was to move forward, to carve out a new place for herself.
In the meantime she took care of Alice, who, after the first night, refused to talk about Anthony. “I’ve closed that chapter,” she said shortly when Isabel asked her how she was. “I’m moving on.”
“All right,” Isabel said. “But you need to be sad before you can move on.”
“Don’t tell me what I have to do,” Alice said.
Isabel didn’t want to argue with her. In the mornings, Alice got up and got dressed and went to work. In the evenings, she came home and pretended to eat the food Isabel cooked for her, and Isabel chattered about whatever she could think of—her errands, whom she had seen on the street, what she had heard on the news. Sometimes her own loquacity reminded her of her mother, which made her wonder about the origins of Doc’s supercharged cheerfulness.
Poor Dr. Rubin hardly knew how to think about the current situation. Only a few days before, all three of her daughters had seemed on the verge of being well settled, and now two of them were cast back to the limbo of singleness. She couldn’t help feeling partly responsible for what had happened to Alice. She had seen it coming, hadn’t she? She had failed Alice, she felt, in giving up her opposition to the marriage. She should have stuck to her guns. But at least the whole thing was over now. At least the blow had come before the wedding. It could have been much worse.
As for Isabel, Dr. Rubin had sympathy for her unhappiness, but she believed that Isabel was wrong not to take Theo back if he was willing to come back. She felt that Isabel was not taking seriously enough the damage she was permitting to happen to her life and that she was likely to regret it later. Dr. Rubin took to phoning in the evenings, partly to check on Alice and partly to see if she couldn’t nudge Isabel back in the direction of safety, stability, and reason.
“Have you talked to Theo?” she asked.
“What is there to say?” Isabel replied, impatient to get back to the TV show she was watching about vampire bats in Argentina. “‘How many of our marriage vows have you broken, Theo? Just the one?’”
Dr. Rubin changed tacks. “At least tell him you want to think it over. Buy yourself some time.”
“I have thought it over,” Isabel said.
“Isabel. The hurt is so fresh right now you can’t see past it! But who’s to say you won’t feel different in a month or two?”
Isabel shut her eyes. “I won’t feel different,” she said. “I don’t want to be married to Theo anymore. What he did was unforgivable.” Tina’s name rang in her head like an alarm bell, and it took all her self-restraint not to say it out loud.
“But everyone makes mistakes! I would have thought you were a more forgiving person!”
“Well, I’m not,” Isabel
said. She opened her eyes. On the screen, the vampire bat hung on the neck of a cow, feeding. The cow fidgeted, a dark shape in a gray, flat, nocturnal landscape. It shook its horned head and stamped, but the bat clung on.
“Was there something else?” Dr. Rubin suggested. “Was there another problem you haven’t told me about?”
Isabel guessed this was her mother’s way of asking about sex. Rather than answer she said, “I wish you would try to see things from my point of view!”
“I do see them from your point of view, sweetheart! What I’m asking is that you listen—just for a moment—to the voice of experience.”
This was too much for Isabel. “What do you mean, the ‘voice of experience’? Are you telling me that Dad—”
“Of course not!” Dr. Rubin said.
On the television, the bat flew away, sated, into the purple night. It wasn’t its fault that it fed on blood, that was what nature had made it to do. The bat didn’t have a choice, but what about Theo? What about Tina? Was she made to sleep with her sister’s husband? And if so, what had made her that way?
As for Tina’s situation, Dr. Rubin’s attitude was clear. The uncomfortable circumstances of the engagement were forgotten as quickly as possible and only the happy fact itself dwelt upon. The wedding was scheduled for mid-September. The couple would go to City Hall in the morning, and in the evening there would be a spectacular ceremony presided over by a friend of Soren’s, a Buddhist of German-Jewish extraction with a mail-order officiating certificate valid only in California. Isabel didn’t see how she was going to bear it, but there was no way to get out of it. She hadn’t had to see Tina at all in the past few weeks, at least, and she tried as much as possible to forget she existed. Still, Tina had a way of worming herself into conversations.
“Maid of honor sounds better than matron of honor, at least,” Alice said one evening while she and Isabel were watching the local news.
“At the rate things are happening,” Isabel said, “you could be engaged to a whole new person by then.”
Alice smiled, but it was such a sad smile that Isabel regretted saying anything.
“What a horrible wedding it’s going to be,” Isabel said. “It hardly seems worth the effort. I bet their marriage doesn’t last five years!” She could feel the anger rising inside her even as she tried to keep her tone light.
“Maybe it will,” Alice said. “Soren’s an openhearted person. And generous.”
“Rich, you mean. And free with his affections.”
“I think they can make each other happy,” Alice said.
“They wouldn’t be getting married at all if Tina weren’t pregnant,” Isabel said, pushing away, as she always did when confronted with Tina’s pregnancy, the thought that Tina had been sleeping with Theo not very long ago. Tina had sworn to Alice that the baby was Soren’s, and what else was there to do but try to believe her? “Can you believe Tina’s going to be the first one of us to have a baby? It’s flabbergasting! Tell me you’re flabbergasted, Alice.”
Alice didn’t answer. She was staring at the television. “Isabel,” she said, and pointed at a face that, as Isabel looked to see who it was, seemed at first only vaguely familiar. But as it turned toward the camera, the well-known features seemed to leap off the screen at the same moment the reporter said:
“Cicily Lamont, known locally as the ‘Bird Lady,’ lives alone in this modest house in Alapocas, Delaware—unless you count her dozens of feathered housemates.”
“My God,” Isabel said, and leaned toward Alice. Cicily was older, certainly, and her face was thinner. The bones showed through the finely wrinkled skin, but it was her: the same thin nose, the same sharp eyes softened by affection, trained now not on little girls, but on the bright feathered creatures that fluttered and called all around her.
“I started with one little canary,” Cicily said, her voice releasing in Isabel’s chest a rush of memory and emotion. Here before her eyes was the woman who had spent more waking hours with her than her own mother; who had said good-bye one day and hopped on a bus never to be seen again. She couldn’t speak. “My husband had died and a friend gave me Pete as a gift, for company,” Cicily said from the flickering screen. “That was fifteen years ago.”
“Her husband died!” Alice cried. “I wonder if Doc knew?” Nineteen years earlier, Cicily had left them to get married. It was the year Alice went away to college and Tina was ten.
“After that,” Cicily said, “I found a blue jay fledgling on the ground, half-starved, and I just took him on home. I figured I knew about taking care of birds, I could take care of him!” She laughed, her face breaking open with amusement, the sight of it so familiar that it brought tears to Isabel’s eyes, although she would have said she didn’t remember Cicily laughing.
The reporter’s voice-over came on: “But taking care of wild birds was a whole new ball game—as Lamont, who works by day as a file clerk at a local hospital, soon found out. Still, the little blue jay survived. Soon Lamont found herself playing nanny to a whole host of birds, both wild- and captive-born.”
“I didn’t know then that baby birds imprinted on you,” Cicily said. “Well, there was a lot I didn’t know! But the word got around, and then the neighbors started bringing me hawks with broken wings. Macaws no one wanted. Even an eagle with a bullet wound someone had pulled out of the river.” The camera, pulling back, showed a room filled with birds of all sizes, chirping and squawking, fluttering on the furniture and the windowsills. It cut to an outdoor flight made of chicken wire, twelve feet high, with a red-tailed hawk inside perched on a post.
“Eventually Lamont, who never finished high school, got certified as a wildlife rehabilitator. Now she tends to a flock of up to twenty feathered friends at a time! She loves the company, but when an injured wild bird is ready to be released”—the camera showed Cicily with a kestrel lifting off from her hand—“that’s when the Bird Lady of Alapocas is really flying high.”
A commercial for dishwashing soap came on. Alice and Isabel stared at each other. “Oh!” Alice said. “Oh, she looked happy, didn’t she? I thought she looked great!”
“She always loved birds,” Isabel said.
“Only four years with her husband,” Alice said. “What was his name?”
“I can’t remember.” What Isabel remembered was the blue, battered suitcase waiting by the door in the hall, the room under the stairs with the mattress stripped bare, the smell of Cicily’s hair oil lingering.
“How old was she when she married him?” Alice asked.
“She would never say how old she was.”
“We should call her,” Alice said. “How could we have entirely lost touch with her!”
“Imagine her becoming a rehabber,” Isabel said. “In a different world she might have been a vet. Or a doctor.”
“She looks happy enough being what she is.”
“Was she happy when she took care of us?” Isabel said. “Maybe she likes birds better than she liked children.”
“Maybe they give her less trouble,” Alice said.
Isabel remembered how quiet the house had been in the afternoons, after Cicily left. Alice had gone away to college, and Doc had arranged for Tina to go to the Jacksons after school (Maureen Jackson was Tina’s best friend). The houses on their street were far apart. Every now and then you could hear a car pass, but mostly there was only the sound of the wind in the trees and the furnace cycling on. Isabel was fifteen, but the silence spooked her. How could Cicily have gotten married? She had always thought of their family as the center of Cicily’s existence, and it was a shock to realize it wasn’t true. Of course it wasn’t. Once she thought about it, she was ashamed to have ever believed it was. She was still ashamed.
Alice picked up the phone and called directory assistance. There was no listing for any Lamonts in Alapocas, or for anyone named Grenadier, which had been Cicily’s maiden name. She got the numbers for a handful of Lamonts and one Grenadier in the surrounding towns and
tried them, but none of the people she reached knew Cicily. She called Doc and asked her, but the last number Doc had was years out of date.
“Birds?” Doc said over the phone. “Imagine that. She always liked birds. She had the patience to watch them that I never had. I remember once she told me she’d seen a pileated woodpecker in the yard. She showed me a picture of it in a book, but I never saw it. Or maybe I did and I didn’t recognize it. After all, I can hardly tell a sparrow from a crow.
“Too bad about her husband,” Doc went on. “I remember how surprised I was when she told me she was getting married. Somehow Cicily never seemed to me like the marrying kind. But I guess I was just wrong about that.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Alice’s colleague Jaime invited Alice and Isabel to a salsa dance party. He was going with his partner, Tom, a high school chemistry teacher. “I told him no,” Alice said to Isabel. “I said I couldn’t enjoy it.”
But Isabel thought it might cheer Alice up. “You love to dance,” she said. “It won’t be like going on a date.”
“Do you want to go?” Alice asked.
“Sure,” Isabel said.
Alice’s face brightened incrementally.
The dance party was held in a club in Powelton Village, a one-story building set back from the street behind a courtyard. Inside was a big, low-ceilinged room with a bar at one end and a low stage for the band. The walls were painted with murals, one of farmworkers digging, another of people dancing. Colorful wooden masks hung from nails all around the room just below the level of the ceiling.
There were only a few people there when they arrived for the lesson before the dance. The instructor, who was also the singer for the band, sized up the clumsy-looking beginners. “Why don’t you come up here,” he said to Alice. She was wearing a sleeveless cotton dress embroidered with flowers, and when she began to dance, even without any music, she looked less weary and unhappy than she had in weeks. She and the instructor demonstrated the way to hold your partner, the up and back of the step, the critical hitch of hesitation. Alice’s skirt floated around her legs as the instructor spun her. The rest of the line struggled to follow along.
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