The Bird Market of Paris (10 page)

“Nicole, please let us in,” Poppy urged, knocking on the door.

“Only Poppy,” I said.

“And Daddy,” my dad said, tears in his throat. Somewhere in all this I had forgotten that he had lost his mother, a woman he had either seen or called on the phone every day of his life.

I unlocked the door.

*   *   *

The day of the funeral, my parents and I dressed in black. Poppy wept when he saw us and asked us to change clothes. He didn't want us in black—he'd had a sister who died in Egypt at seventeen, and his mother wore black and mourned for the rest of her life. I changed into a blue skirt Poppy had sewn for me, and a starched white collared shirt. I spent the entire funeral with my head buried in Poppy's jacket. I missed everything except Poppy and my dad scooping dirt with a shovel and tossing it on top of Nona's plain pine coffin. Poppy asked me if I wanted to toss some dirt on it, too, and I declined, trying to push away the giant, burning stone in my throat, and buried my face into his jacket again.

Every time a funeral was held for one of Poppy's friends, or even someone in our family, he always said, “Funerals are sad,
Chérie
. You are too young for funerals. Do not come.” And I didn't, except for Nona's. He instilled in me a strong aversion to funerals—even stronger than our shared fear of flying, ironic for two people who felt a kinship with flying creatures. I didn't know at what age a person was old enough for funerals, because he never told me, but I avoided them no matter who had died, unless I was cornered or guilted into it.

A few days after Nona's funeral, we moved Poppy's possessions from his condo and into our home. He and Nona had been living on Social Security, and with Nona gone, it wouldn't be enough.

Poppy fended off grief by cooking dinner every evening, sometimes two and three dinners a day, putting the next day's meal into the freezer, baked ziti with béchamel sauce, lasagnas, and spinach pies. We ate at the table as a family every night for the first time in many years. Before that, my parents ate together in front of the TV, and my mom kept a plate for me for whenever I rolled in, or I foraged in the refrigerator for myself.

“I like this change of eating at the table as a family,” my mom told me privately. “But you have to talk to your grandfather about his food. We're all going to gain a hundred pounds.”

It was peculiar not having Nona around. I knew she had passed away, but I couldn't get my head around the permanence of death. Poppy spent most of his time either cooking or shut in his room. My mom said he felt guilty, and that deepened his grief. I didn't know what she meant, and she changed the subject when I asked. I felt guilty, too. I could have saved her. I could have stayed with her twenty-four hours a day, watching, guarding.

Poppy had moved his birds in with us, my babies and grandbabies, and our combined flock grew to more than seventy birds, flying free in one of two outside walk-in aviaries, or living in the bird room in pairs in large cages. We shared bird cleaning and feeding duties. I liked having him across the hall, in spite of the circumstances that had brought him there.

“Did I ever tell you about the sparrow merchants?” Poppy asked one evening as we sat together after dinner.

I shook my head, though he had told me about the sparrow merchants dozens of times.

“I used to sit outside at Café Riche,” Poppy said. “Cairo was like Paris then, everyone strolling arm in arm, a beautiful, clean city. The sparrow vendor pushed a metal cart with a cooking grill on top and burning coals beneath. The cart had long hooks on each corner hung with dozens of small cages, each crammed with tiny sparrows, like a hot dog man, but with birds.”

At this point in the story Poppy's voice always became quieter and deepened, as if he were revealing the secret to a long-held mystery. “The sparrow merchant speared a dozen brown sparrows alive onto a stick, then roasted them on his coals, plucked off their little feathers, and someone would eat the sparrow kabob for lunch.”

This is the part where I gasped and placed my hand over my mouth. “He didn't,” I said.

“I swear to you. And every time he passed I bought two cages of sparrows, fifty to a tiny cage, and took them home to your daddy when he was a boy. We opened the cages and let them fly from our balcony, so happy to be free.”

“People ate the birds alive?” I asked, horrified again by the story, unable to envision the scene.

“Not alive. Roasted.”

“What happened to the sparrows you released?”

“I hope they flew far away.”

“What if they didn't?”

Poppy thought for a minute, staring over the waterway through the sliding glass door. “The sparrow merchant would catch them again.”

“I'd rather hear about the bird market of Paris. Did Nona ever go there with you?”

“Of course. Your daddy, too. We went every Sunday, crossing the bridge over the Seine on foot, maybe stopping to have an ice cream. Your daddy loved the birds. Why do you think he allows you to keep so many?”

“I don't know.”

“Ah! We have found something you do not know. Write down the date.” Poppy reached to tickle me and I pushed my chair back on two legs, avoiding his tickling hand by an inch. He pulled my chair back down on four legs, and I laughed.

“Birds are mystical creatures,” he said, still holding down my chair. “Did you know that birds are messengers? Doves mean
peace
and bring messages of hope. When a dove comes to you, all possibilities are open.”

“What happens if two doves come to you?” I thought about the pair of ring-necked doves who sat together on the asphalt near my car every morning.

“If two doves arrive at your feet you are very lucky. Pigeons are lucky, too. Pigeons mean
safety
and
home
. No matter where you take them, they always come home.”

“What do lovebirds mean?”

“Lovebirds mean
love
,
Chérie
. What else could they mean? But you have not seen lovebirds until you have gone to the bird market in Paris. Tremendous colors, a living rainbow of feathers, the best birds you have ever seen.”

 

Part Two

 

Chapter 10

In a Florida summer, there are oppressive days and rainy days, and days when cookies will bake on the dashboard of a car—but there's no
perfect
day. Perfect days are relegated to January and February, when the tropical thunderstorm pattern fizzles, leaving South Florida cool under cloudless skies. But we had one perfect Florida day the summer I was twenty-two years old: August 23, 1992, the date of my parents' twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. The wind picked up from the east, the palm trees bent their heads west, and the sun steeped everything in golden light. The storm a few hundred miles to the east sucked the bad weather into its whirling eye, leaving us cool, breezy, and flawless.

Hurricane Andrew was coming.

Offshore hurricanes threatened us each year, but the last big one to slam South Florida had been Betsy in 1965. Hurricane Andrew looked like another storm that might choose a different tack, maybe detouring to Cape Hatteras or out to sea. As South Floridians emptied Home Depot of batteries and plywood, I stood outside in my purple bikini cutting coconuts off the palms with a twelve-foot tree saw. They might fly off in the storm and break our windows, and it was my job to remove them while my dad tied my new aviary to our sea grape tree with a long chain. I was into my second Corona and slicked from head to toe with suntan oil.

A hundred yards across the calm, brown water that served as our backyard, at King's Bay Yacht Club, hundreds of sailboats and yachts cruised into the basin like refugees. Their captains lashed them onto docks, the walls of the turning basin, and to one another, hoping the basin would provide a nautical refuge. After a few hours I could have walked from one side of the basin to the other hopping from boat to boat.

I sunbathed on the bow of our little open fisherman, the
Déjà Vu
, as a manatee cow and her baby cruised by, their tails sluicing the water. I leaned over the boat's railing and watched a blue parrotfish picking at crustaceans on the dock pilings. The manatees toured through the boats in the basin, then swam back the way they came.

We watched the hurricane on a small black-and-white antenna television in the kitchen. Hurricane Andrew's circumference was larger than the width of the state of Florida, and meteorologists speculated that its eye winds spun up to 175 miles per hour, with tornadoes inside of the storm gusting up to 206 miles per hour. Andrew had been upgraded from a Category 4 to a Category 5 hurricane. We were used to seeing hurricanes bounce away from us, following the warm Gulf Stream to the north. But I still couldn't understand why we were among the only people in the neighborhood not taking precautions.

“Why aren't we boarding up?” I asked my parents, who were preparing tuna fish sandwiches for lunch. “Should we do something?”

“The lights will go off, maybe a window'll break, and a little water might come in,” my mom said. “It's not a big deal. We've seen this a hundred times.”

“It'll be fun,” my dad said. “We'll light candles and play some games and it'll all be over.”

“Tell that to the neighbors,” I said. From outdoors came the sounds of buzz saws slicing plywood and hammers driving nails. Poppy walked into the kitchen, concern on his face.

“You're worrying for nothing,” my mom said. “Come have a sandwich.”

“Should we go somewhere safer?” Poppy said. He and my dad exchanged a few words in French about “the little one” being overly concerned.

“I understand you,” I said. They switched to Arabic.

“It's not like we have a lot of places to take a flock of birds and a bunch of cats,” my mom said.

“North. Inland. Somewhere away from this thing's path.”

“You're a worrywart,” my mom said.

On television, people cleared grocery stores of water and canned goods, and the home improvement stores ran out of wood, tape, flashlights, and batteries. The ATMs were stripped of money, the gas stations emptied of fuel. This was bad news because I often let my aging Oldsmobile Cutlass Calais run on fumes. I went out and turned on the ignition, and the low fuel warning light shone yellow.

Back inside, the phone rang and my mom handed it to me.

“I found a baby bird,” the male voice said. “I don't know what to do with him.” It was my friend Matt, a sweet younger guy who suffered a puppy crush on me, though he had accepted our arrangement as “just friends” and had become one of my dearest confidants. I wanted to date someone older than I was—as most girls I knew did—and I didn't give Matt a chance. He bought me thoughtful presents for every holiday, took me to romantic restaurants, flattered me with kind and heartfelt words. He was cute, too: dark hair and a well-proportioned face, deep-set dark eyes, and long eyelashes. We spent hours hand in hand, walking from frozen yogurt shop to frozen yogurt shop, thinking the exercise earned us giant hot fudge sundaes along the way. We made tie-dyed T-shirts and sold them at the flea market together, and spent long days at the beach tanning and playing in the water.

“What kind of bird is it?” I asked.

“I don't know. Just a brown baby bird.”

Had this been an average day, I would have told him to leave it alone if it was fully feathered. Its parents were likely nearby, and it was learning to fly; but it would never survive a storm. I told Matt to bring the bird to me.

I didn't want a North American native bird in my possession, but I had little choice. The Migratory Bird Treaty Act, the breaking of which comes with a fine of up to two thousand dollars and two years in jail, kept most people from capturing songbirds, such as cardinals and blue jays. Matt dropped off the baby bird and rushed home to continue boarding up his house.

The wild bird's alert eyes peered at me from his fragile head. He looked like a woodpecker, but intuition told me he wasn't one. I didn't recognize his species, which wasn't unusual, because I didn't know much about native birds. He had a brown body, a small red crest, and lanky gray legs. I wasn't sure how to care for him, not knowing his species, but I couldn't take him to a wildlife care center with the impending storm and no fuel in my car. Poppy said he didn't know what kind of bird he was, either, and Poppy was superior to me at bird identification. I cooked some hand-feeding formula and offered it to the baby in a pipette. He opened his mouth wide and swallowed the pipette, notably different from how my baby lovebirds ate.

What I didn't know about feeding passerines, the order of birds to which I knew he belonged, could have filled a book back then; but I did know he needed to be fed every couple hours. If the electricity blew, how would I heat the hand-feeding formula? Cold hand-feeding formula slows down a nestling's digestion and can cause infection, even death. Baby birds also need to be kept warm in an incubator, or at least with a heating pad, and I wasn't going to have access to either should the storm take down our power lines. And did he have diseases he could pass on to my birds? There was no way to tell.