As if he planned to give them any sort of exam. As if their performance in this course would ever be evaluated on any grounds other than the quality of their attention in the field, and the seriousness and probity of their field notebooks.
Then, to shift from the drier, if crucial, background from Haeckel and Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace and to give them more to copy maniacally (and absurdly), he read them one of his favorite quotations, from the poet John Clare:
For my part I love to look on nature with a poetic feeling, which magnifies the pleasure. I love to see the Nightingale in its hazel retreat, and the Cuckoo hiding in its solitude of oaken foliage, and not to examine their carcasses in glass cases. Yet naturalists and botanists seem to have no taste for this poetic feeling.
“Now. Take a good long look at this ‘carcass,’” he went on, turning to the desk to lift the stuffed owl aloft, then setting it back down with a dramatic thud, “removed, for the moment, from its ‘glass case.’ This is a great horned owl, male, killed and stuffed right here in the valley of the Delaware River forty years ago, by none other than my predecessor at Burnham College.
“Take careful note, now. Record everything you see that might help you recognize this bird in the future.” As always, the majors began writing immediately, while the nonmajors stared helplessly for a full minute or more before beginning to write some tentative notes.
All except the blond girl, “the artist,” as he thought of her now, who sat quietly, her hands in her lap, staring at the stuffed owl, occasionally glancing at her drawing and making some small adjustment. Her bold friend, sitting next to her, pointed to her drawing and whispered something, to which the artist responded with a nod, then made some adjustment. The look on her face when she glanced up at the owl was completely unreadable to him. It was not, as far as he could tell, the absorption of someone who was studying a specimen carefully; it was something else, and though he couldn’t quite place it, he began to believe it might be something like contempt. Not for him, not for the poor bird, but more for this exercise he had assigned the class.
It astonished him that he recognized that look on her face. Contempt for the practice of closely observing something that had been killed and stuffed was precisely what he felt. But in all his years of teaching, no student had ever failed to register surprise at what he did next. To audible groans from those who had only begun to notice some feature of the great horned owl that they might record in their notes, he grasped the owl at its base and returned it to the black case in which he’d carried it into the room.
“And that,” he announced, “is the last time you will look at a stuffed carcass, in or out of a glass case, in my class.” He glanced at the artist again, searching for even the smallest smile of complicity, but her head was down, her hair once again shielding her eyes.
“Tomorrow we enter the woods from the path behind this building at five A.M. sharp,” he continued. “We’ll return by eight, you’ll have an hour to get breakfast, then back here for the day’s lecture at nine. Afternoons and evenings will be for additional excursions of your own and tending to your field notebooks. In the words of the renowned ornithologist Joseph Grinnell, ‘No notebook this day, no sleep this night.’
“Advice, by the way, that you’ll do well to attend to—more so than to anything I’ve said to you so far this morning, which, I assure you, will at no time nor at any place appear on an examination.” More groans then, along with a few gasps of disbelief. “I take it as a given that you are in this class because you wish to learn, deeply and meaningfully, about birds. If you have other reasons, you may wish to consider a visit to the registrar’s office to see what other courses remain open at this point.”
Here he found himself looking not at the usual lost-looking, gum-chewing sorority girl in the back row, nor at her boyfriend, the misguided young man who suddenly believed he should pick up some science classes and go the premed route, like his father, but instead at the frankly flirtatious girl in the front, between Cora and the artist. He was surprised by how much his feelings had changed over the course of an hour’s opening lecture, surprised and a bit amused to see how undaunted she was, staring back at him readily. He suppressed a laugh, thinking about how valuable his work was when it came to sustaining his faithfulness to his marriage, crumbling though that marriage might be. He did, however, find himself once again avoiding the eyes of the artist.
He glanced at the papers on the podium, reaching now for the class roster. Resting a pair of horn-rimmed glasses on his nose, he began to call the roll. Hers was the second-to-last name on the list. Just as he read it—“Adeline Sturmer”—and she responded with “Call me Addie,” a wood thrush trilled from the branches of the ancient oak outside the open window. All heads turned, and Tom Kavanagh laughed.
“That’s a wood thrush, Addie Sturmer. Is he a friend of yours?” he asked, and when she looked back at him and smiled, then turned back to the window, clearly hoping to hear the bird again, there was no denying it: Something in his chest hurt, and it was a blissful kind of pain, of a sort he remembered from his lonely days on the hills of Donegal.
He forgot to call the last name on the list, that of a timid young man in the back row, who waited until the end of that morning’s lecture to approach the professor and make sure his presence was noted.
four
WHEN HE OPENED HIS mouth to speak and she heard the first soft lilt of his Irish accent, she did not know what to do, or where to look; she could hardly contain her joy, the feeling of something bubbling up inside her. And so to keep herself from suddenly singing, or whooping, or hysterically laughing, she grabbed her pencil and began to draw.
That ridiculous, fusty old owl. She knew without thinking that he had brought it as some sort of joke; it bore absolutely no resemblance to a real bird.
So she drew it, realistically enough in outline and obvious detail, the large head with its tufted ears, the ringed eyes, the white bib with the bars below. But she gave it a recognizable, if caricatured, human face.
“Dr. Curtis?” Lou leaned over and asked in a whisper when Addie had nearly finished the bulging eyes below a receding hairline. She nodded, and then Lou wrote, on a page of her own notebook, “I’d rather draw him,” finishing with an arrow toward the front of the room.
Addie smiled and went back to the shadows under her owl’s eyes until Lou pinched her arm and pointed, again, to her own notebook, where she’d added one more word: “Nude.”
Addie rolled her eyes, her standard response to Lou’s excesses. She kept to herself the fact that while mindlessly sketching a moldering stuffed owl with human features, she was, in fact, memorizing the rich contours, the lines and shadows, of Tom Kavanagh’s remarkable face, the thin nose and strong jaw, the large, dark eyes, all shadowed by a head of unruly black hair that showed some streaks of gray. Later, in the privacy of her student studio, she would do her best to reproduce some image of that face from memory. She would work on it each day, she decided, immediately after leaving his lecture.
And she would, just as he’d urged, devote her afternoons and evenings to more outings in the woods, and to keeping a careful field notebook. Not because she cared at all about how she did in his course, but because from the moment she’d heard the wood thrush sing, just as Tom Kavanagh had called her name, she had realized something powerful. What she wanted was not only to draw birds but to understand them, to come as close as she could to feeling what it was like to fly with hollow bones. To sit atop a warm and throbbing egg within a delicate bed that rests in the crook of a branch. To sing not from something like a human throat but from a place deep within the breast.
Tom Kavanagh’s
