tell you all this.
The thing I most want from this class (you did ask us to write about this) is the ability to hear a bird’s song and know it instantly, as you do.
Already I’ve forgotten the song of the wood thrush. On Monday, when we heard it during class, I thought it was the most glorious sound I’d ever heard. Now I’d give anything to recall it, but it’s gone.
two
TYPICALLY, MORE WOMEN THAN men were enrolled in Biology of the Birds, which was thought to be a function of Tom Kavanagh’s allure; it was affectionately known, among the students, as “Birds and Chicks.” For all its appeal, though, the handsome Irish instructor and the strange blend of science, music, and poetry he was famous for bringing to this unusual class also scared many students away. There was the poetry, for one thing; “What does this have to do with biology?” science majors had been known to ask. And there was also Tom Kavanagh’s fervent insistence on the tenets of evolutionary theory, as notorious among the more religious and conservative students at Burnham as the required five A.M. field excursions, every weekday for the entire five weeks of the term.
Cora and Lou had signed up for the course as well. Cora, a biology major, had been saving the course for her final term at Burnham. Lou, always the curious flirt, had different reasons; throughout her four years at Burnham she’d admired Tom Kavanagh from a distance—his wiry, muscular skill on the basketball court at intramural games, his accomplished fiddle playing with a group of local musicians. And now she wanted a closer look.
Addie had her own reasons for taking the class. She had been longing to take it since the previous fall, her full-scholarship semester abroad in Great Britain, a time when she was to have been awash in Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth. And when she had, instead, immersed herself in Turner landscapes and the works of John James Audubon.
How could she have known that she would feel so at home, so comfortable in her own skin, maybe for the first time—in her icy room in Oxford, on the gray streets of London, tramping along sodden paths in the Lake District or through fields of grazing sheep in the Cotswolds? And discovering, remarkably, that she had a real talent for drawing and for painting.
Back in Pennsylvania in December, she’d told her parents nothing about her change in plans. She’d also said nothing to her college boyfriend, though she’d known since October that she would break up with him at the first opportunity when she returned to campus. Still, she did worry at times that she’d be foolish to give him up. They had talked, vaguely, of marriage after graduation. And what would she do now, with no teaching degree to back her up?
“Work as a waitress and live in Greenwich Village and meet fabulous, sexy artists like Willem de Kooning,” Lou—who was an art major herself, and from a wealthy family from Philadelphia—said when the three friends were together again in January. “Get a job as a secretary in Philadelphia and take night classes in art until you have enough credits to become an art teacher” was Cora’s alternative. They were still the only ones who knew of Addie’s plans. While she was abroad she had longed for them as if they were lovers, her beloved roommates, the only people who understood her.
At home, in her parents’ house over the Christmas holidays, there’d been no one who could understand. She’d returned from Britain thinner than she’d been in years, no longer setting and teasing her dark-blond hair. Her mother watched her worriedly, urging more food on her at every meal. But Addie could barely touch the eggs, the fried potatoes, all the foods of her childhood. She only sipped some coffee and nibbled at a piece of her mother’s homemade bread. She also found it nearly impossible to draw. Each day she bundled herself in a rag wool sweater and tattered tweed coat, both purchased for pennies in a tiny secondhand shop in London, then pulled on her mud-splattered Wellingtons. These had left a layer of dust and grime at the bottom of her suitcase, where it remained because it was English dirt and she could not bear to part with it. And each day, though she feared it would be no different from any other since her return, she took along her sketchbook and a pencil.
At the frozen pond down a country road from her parents’ house, away from the smells of mud and manure and her mother’s daily baking, away from her childhood bedroom and, in the barn, the mournful, cheated-looking eyes of the cows—only at the frozen pond could she catch a glimmer of what she’d felt on the banks of Grasmere or walking in the shadow of Westminster Cathedral, notebook in hand, sketching furiously. But not the rippling lake and not a flying buttress; what she drew, obsessively, religiously, with the devotion of a pilgrim, were the ruffled wings of a magpie, the dusty breast of a wood pigeon. Creatures that seemed to be moving through their lives as randomly and fitfully as she.
By March, Addie was drawing and painting furiously again. And Cora and Lou had adjusted to the changes in their friend, who, on her return from England, wore black tights and flats with wool jumpers and let her hair grow long and straight. Now, instead of tending to her hair and nails and baking cookies for her boyfriend on the weekend, Addie took the train into New York City with Lou as often as she could afford it. They would start at the Metropolitan Museum or the Museum of Modern Art, eat sandwiches in Central Park while Addie sketched and Lou chatted with strangers, and step reverently into one of the galleries on 57th Street. Then, flush with the confidence that art always gave them, they’d ride the subway downtown to drink wine and smoke cigarettes at the Cedar Tavern or Max’s Kansas City, eyes scanning the crowd in search of famous artists.
Once, lingering longer than they’d intended, hoping to sight, say, de Kooning or Robert Motherwell, they missed the last bus back to Doylestown and walked the streets of Manhattan until dawn, drunk for the first half of the night, sober and staring, entranced, for the second. When they returned at midday to the dorm suite they shared with Cora, she made them coffee in their illegal percolator. Lou went to bed and slept until her first class on Monday morning. Addie locked herself into her tiny studio in the crumbling old Art Department building, where she spent her time obsessively painting the pigeons she’d seen on the steps of the New York Public Library, finally sleeping for a few hours on the sofa in the student lounge.
By the last week of April, when classes ended for a one-week recess, Cora and Lou had grown accustomed to the new Addie; her English adviser, Dr. Curtis, had abandoned his efforts to persuade her to complete her teaching certification requirements; her boyfriend was a thing of the past; and the dean had granted her request to fulfill the science requirement by taking Biology of the Birds. At a small school like Burnham, radical changes in a student like Addie Sturmer were duly noted, and administrators eyed the budding artist nervously, happy to hurry her along to graduation.
She spent the April recess with Lou and Cora and Cora’s boyfriend Karl, a studious engineering major, at Lou’s family farm, riding horses, eating exotic “gourmet” dinners, and drawing constantly. Then, early on the third morning of May, the three young women walked up a sloping path through the damp patch of woods that separated the campus dormitories from the academic buildings. Slowly, each lost in her own thoughts, they approached the stately Hall of Science, a second home to Cora, foreign territory to Lou and Addie, for Tom Kavanagh’s eight A.M. lecture.
As they walked through the edge of the woods to the building’s side entrance, a bird chirruped in a towering oak above their heads. Its flutelike song was barely noticed by Lou, who, despite being barely awake after a night spent drinking wine along the river, had arranged her long dark hair in an artful chignon and whose slow, willowy walk was noted appreciatively by every sleepy-eyed male they passed. But Cora—newly engaged and deeply in love—thrilled at the sound of the bird’s song, which she heard as a splendid echo of her own happiness on this crisp and sunny morning.
For Addie, who’d been wondering, at that moment, what in the world she was doing, this bird’s song was a revelation. She paused, gazing up into the tangle of branches,
