The Bird Artist (5 page)

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Authors: Howard Norman

BOOK: The Bird Artist
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We had a late supper of sea bass, lettuce and tomatoes from my mother's garden, which produced almost through September.
“How's the hand?” my father asked.
“I can feel my pulse in it.”
“Nothing to die for, now, is it.”
“Did we get paid?”
“Two separate stacks of money, Canadian. Yours is in an envelope, in the potato cupboard.”
“I'll use a little to buy inks.”
“And groceries. You're still part of this family.”
“All right.”
“Don't let that hand get infected or you won't be doing much bird drawing, I'll tell you that.”
“I saw Margaret along the road. She knows of an ointment in Romeo's pharmaceuticals that'll ease the pain better than iodine. She kindly said she'd pick it up for me. I'll visit her later.”
“Margaret ease the pain,” my mother said. But it sounded like an abbreviated request of her own and embarrassed her. She turned to the stove.
I was in bed by eight-thirty, thinking about an early morning of sketching ducks at the tidal flats, when my mother appeared in the doorway.
“I washed the fingerprint smudges off the glass,” she said, referring to the photograph.
“I didn't notice.”
“Well,
notice.
” She sat on the end of my bed. “That Cora Holly's got a mesmerizing face, don't you think?”
“I wouldn't use those words, no.”
“What's your opinion, then?”
“I'd say it's a face the photographer caught just right to favor it.”
“Do you suspect that the Hollys chose an uncharacteristic likeness to represent their daughter?”
“How could I know that? I've never met them. I've never met this Cora Holly. You and Father never once mentioned their family. And then this photograph shows up.”
“It
arrived,
Fabian. It's part of a correspondence between hopeful parents. Don't fool yourself. There's no one normal way in this world to meet a bride. It can happen in all sorts of surprising ways, really. I could tell you stories. What's important for you to know is that Pavel and Klara are honest people. I can vouch for that. And I noticed that you didn't stuff the photograph in the rubbish.”
“The frame is nice handiwork.”
“My next question is, can you believe that curiosity might be the first part of passion?”
“I haven't thought about it.”
“Did your own mother just now saying the word ‘passion' embarrass you?”
“I don't think so.”
“It means a lot in life, Fabian, passion does. Especially if it's absent.”
“Maybe that's a thing you'd say to Father.”
“Let me educate you here.” She was annoyed. She shifted uneasily on the bed, squaring herself directly in front of me. “Once in a while I say something to you that I purposely choose not to say to Orkney. And what I
do
say to him, in private, is none of your business in turn. Kindly
move that photograph back from the table edge, will you?”
My mother closed her eyes; she sometimes gathered her thoughts so intensely that she all but sank into sleep. This was a sort of interlude I was accustomed to.
Breathing lightly, propped up by one arm, her hand pressed into the blanket, she suddenly trembled—and I mean that the bed shook—as if she had compressed a nightlong fever chill into a single moment. I all but got the quilt out of its cedar chest at the end of my bed to cover her up, it was that convincing. I recalled, then, a sermon that Reverend Sillet had given. He had quoted someone, a martyr, blind sage, someone, to the effect that in the lifelong vigil for redemption, each show of faith in the face of torment and doubt was a reprieve from madness. At the moment of hearing that, I had especially clung to the word “vigil.” I thought that the word fit my mother. That her life was a vigil. Though waiting for redemption for which sin, which trespass, exactly, I could not say at the time, nor could I say now. Passion for what, or whom, I did not know. Later, of course, I thought it all applied to her adultery with Botho August. Yet as time passed, I realized that Botho August —that one man—was finally too narrow and convenient a way to consider my mother's emptiness, her longings.
Opening her eyes then, my mother absently turned her wedding ring, rubbed her hands over her face, and said, “I'm tired, darling. Good night.”
“Good night.”
All through my life at home with my parents, I knew that my mother's sadness (that is the word I always fall back
on) had a grip on her. I did not know all of the ways it worked, or all of the things it made her do, but I felt its existence early on. Some days in our house you could breathe it like air. I had felt it as a child, and by adolescence regarded it as permanent. I think back on the dozens of conversations we had had at the kitchen table after supper, my father asleep or working half the night at the dry dock, the dishes cleared, me drinking coffee, my mother sipping tea. I had often wondered if I had missed what she had intended as most intimate in her observations, opinions, advice, even in her very occasional teasing. I have come to the conclusion, with bracing regret, that I had. Furthermore, I believe that on certain topics she would detect a blank or at best a puzzled look of incomprehension on my face and be disappointed in me. I suppose this is true for any son, but when I look back, certain declarations become my mother—“I neither champion nor repudiate my life thus far,” she said one evening. “I mostly feel stuck somewhere in between.”
“I just like to wake up early, wash my face, and get out and draw birds,” I said in reply. “Maybe I should be more brainy and philosophical.”
“No, no—lucky life for lack of that,” she said.
My mother had a clear, resonant voice. She articulated like a schoolteacher. She was graceful, it was nice to watch her walk. She said what was on her mind, though her boldest assertions were often followed by “Now,
where
on earth did I get
that
thought? Obviously that's just the kind of girl I am!” She would blush, as if she had had a revelation not only about her own character but
about what she was truly capable of saying to her son.
From as far back as age five or six, perhaps earlier, I remember that she demonstrated great empathy toward me, though she'd never allow me to play out my catastrophes or confusions for too long, or whine, or wallow in self-pity. Her pet phrase was “Get on with it, then.” Once in a while this became an extended meditation: “I'm quite impatient with people who tell me they're going to do something and don't at least try. You get all caught up with their enthusiasms, and then things change and what have you got?”
“Do you have anyone in mind?” I once said. I think I was fifteen.
“Fabian, be polite to your mother. When I'm thinking out loud, just hush up and listen.”
I dutifully listened then, but she would not say another word. We fell silent. And I heard gulls. Once again, it seemed that in our house when you turned away from talk, day or night, with the windows open, the keening of gulls marked every passing minute.
As for her brief, dry laughter, it seemed more of an accompaniment to her silence than an actual change of heart. It scored up her forehead with deep wrinkles, and caused her to cup her hands over her mouth, as if trying to hold it back.
“My grandmother always said heavy hoop dresses strengthened your back and stayed your posture upright, but when I wore them, my back always ached. It was like taking off a barrel every night. I just had enough,” my mother once said. By and large, most women in Witless
Bay dressed alike, skirts and blouses made of serge or woolen cloth. The skirt bottoms were flat at the front waist, but tucked up high and full in back, all sewn with tiny stitches. To make such a dress was detailed labor, and most every girl could sew one by age ten. Mostly the sleeves were puffed at the shoulders and tight-fitting at the wrists. We had muddy and dusty roads, and women had to lift their skirts while walking. As a boy I recall washing and polishing my mother's shoes nearly every day from the spring mud and summer dust. In summer, women generally wore “winseys,” lighter, more ruffled dresses, except when doing outdoor work—salting, potato scraping, gardening, and the like—when they wore housedresses covered with rough burlap aprons, or aprons made of burny cloth.
Some of the time my mother wore such local clothing, as she called it. But deep down she had another way of thinking. “You may not realize it,” she said to me, “but when I stroll into Gillette's store, or to church, or anywhere, I feel that I have the soul of a world traveler. I've just stepped off a schooner, and lo and behold, look at this odd little village we blew off course to! You may laugh, but I cannot begin to count how many days this lie to myself has got me through, Fabian.” She sighed and shook her head at her own invention. But I knew, too, that there were more nights than I could count when my mother had stayed up until morning light, working on one new dress or waistcoat or other.
As for her manner of dress, I had the impression that she as much organized clothes on her person as merely wore
them. She was an expert seamstress. She made most of her own dresses, shawls, and vests. She preferred somewhat odd combinations of color. This, to me, was less an eye for fashion—there was only the fashion of Witless Bay, and the occasional magazine—than a composition of thought that wore her inside. She would spend a ritual half hour or so standing in front of her closet, riffling through dresses, greatly amused. “How do I look?” she would ask, whirling, modeling a familiar dress combined with an equally familiar vest or shawl. “If you say ‘interesting,' I'll know I've failed.”
She spent a good deal of time alone. I thought of her as someone who knew how to do that. I did most of the grocery shopping, errands. Even in summer she had an indoor pallor. Coming home from the dry dock, I would see her crouched in her garden and think, My mother's outside—though this tends toward exaggeration, because in fact she did go on long walks, some days more than one. And she would row a dinghy out into the harbor. She would pack a lunch and row out, staying all afternoon. She did that two or three times a summer.
I cannot say she had one close friend in Witless Bay, no one she called that, at least. People were, as I have mentioned, friendly to her. Romeo Gillette was flirtatious, which my mother took in good humor. Otherwise, she would be matter-of-fact in her visits to his store, unfailingly polite, measured in her inquiry as to his health, and so on. She was pretty much that way with everyone. By the summer route—a horse path through the meadow, then through Giles LaCotte's apple orchard—it was less than a mile to
the store. Yet my mother's appearances on the store porch or in its cluttered aisles were few and far between.
She was in 1911 still a very pretty woman, I thought, though perhaps the accumulation of estrangements from my father and from family life, combined with her storm-in-a-bottle emotions toward Botho August, or a hundred other factors had begun to tighten her features. Crow's-feet webbed out at the corners of her eyes. She had bouts of arthritis that no liniment seemed to relieve at all; then, quite suddenly, the pain would disappear.
She used skin creams from France. She kept them in a separate cabinet in the pantry. Her skin was a forthright vanity, though she would take only a few moments each evening to massage cream in around her eyes, on her forehead, the backs of her hands. And she would leave the door open when she did. I once mixed hues of white and pale grey paint in order to match the color of one of her skin creams, a color which reminded me of a sky I had seen one day at Portugal Cove, when I had painted a dozen or so murres heading fast toward a cliff. For three nights of painting in a row I referred to the open jar of cream on my desk, returning it to the pantry before I went to bed.
At about eleven o'clock, late for me to be awake, after that long day's work on the
Aunt Ivy Barnacle
, I replenished the iodine on my thumb. I had gone to visit Margaret, but she had told me that Romeo had run out of the special ointment. We stood in the apple orchard kissing for a long time, then parted.
In my room I set my lantern on the night table. Lantern light made it seem as if a bonfire glowed to the left of Cora Holly. My curtains shifting in the breeze, the moonlight, all flickered shadows across the framed glass. In the photograph, Cora Holly stood in front of a shed. There was cordwood stacked nearby. She wore a dark sweater over a darker dress, and fur-lined white snowboots. Her knees showed. Her lips were pursed into a smile. She had made fists and held them outward close to her waist. Her hair was tucked under her fur hat. She had, I thought, a mature bearing for someone her age, which I guessed was fifteen. In that I was wrong. In the photograph she was sixteen. All in all, it struck me that Cora Holly was barely tolerating the moment. This made me laugh. I was convinced that it was true. I had a random thought then:
She's had her photograph taken
,
and I haven't.

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