Winter Birds (26 page)

The program goes on to describe the different species of penguins besides the emperor penguin: names such as the rock hopper, the yellow-eyed, and the jackass. I am struck again with the connectedness of life as Patrick’s voice, unbidden, fills my mind: “All this wonderful variety!” it says. “What divine intelligence! What an imagination! What capacity for fun!”

As much as I want to dismiss Patrick’s words as so much blather, I feel the weight of their truth sinking into my heart. More than once I have leafed through the last section of my bird book, some thirty pages titled “Special Collection,” filled with pictures of birds described as “rarities with restricted ranges and specialized habitats,” whose “very elusiveness only adds to the pleasures of encountering them.” The elegant trogon, the mangrove cuckoo, the brown noddy, the wandering tattler, the hoary redpoll. So many different kinds.

Had I not heard Patrick’s speech to Rachel, perhaps I would never have thought to ask the question that comes to me now: Why? Why would a designer make so many variations of a single thing? Did he simply get carried away? He could have made all birds small, plain, and timid and stopped at that. But even among the small, plain, and timid, there is remarkable variety. My book shows thirty-two species of sparrows. It shows a bird called the warbling vireo—a rarely sighted grayish olive bird with no special markings, no wing bars, no vivid colors, no wattle or crest, its sweet melodious song its sole distinguishing feature. I used to think that I, though lacking physical charms, possessed a beautiful song. That time is past.

The voice on the television says, “The dense feathers on a penguin’s body, around eighty per square inch, insulate it from the extreme Antarctic temperatures.” I hear the pop of firecrackers nearby and turn my eyes to the darkened window. As New Year’s Eve approaches the midnight hour, I sit in my recliner staring out into the black night, watching the burst of colors in the sky and thinking about the designer of the universe, who gave his smallest creatures claws and beaks, feathers and camouflage colors, and wings to fly from trouble. I think about the ways man tries to insulate himself against the extremes of life. And I think about death, the ultimate extreme of life, against which there is no insulation.

Chapter 20

And Therefore Is Winged Cupid Painted Blind

Few people have seen the brown creeper and still fewer have identified it. A small bird with a curved beak, the creeper searches for food by spiraling upward on a tree trunk and then fluttering, leaflike, down to the base of the next tree. Though it can be a sociable bird, it most often feeds alone
.

Patrick’s earlier warnings concerning the malfunction of the furnace have materialized into reality. In the middle of January it is clear that the unit will no longer hobble along until spring. It must be replaced. That this is an inconvenience goes without saying. At eighty, I have no pioneering spirit. I desire heat, a great deal of it, especially in midwinter. Patrick and Rachel have apologized profusely. Rachel I instantly forgave. Patrick I hold responsible for the lack of foresight that impinges on my comfort.

It is early morning, but I have been awake for over an hour. I am sitting in my recliner with an electric blanket draped over me. The radio announces the temperature to be thirty-seven degrees. The thermostat in my apartment shows it to be sixty-eight. Patrick knocks on my door and calls out, “I have heaters, Aunt Sophie! May I come in?” He brings two portable electric heaters into my apartment, plugs them in, and turns them to high. “There now,” he says, rubbing his hands together, “these will keep you toasty for the next three days until we’re up and running.” Because of the ailing furnace, I have not felt toasty for weeks.

Men are coming today to begin the project. Today they will tear out the old ductwork, tomorrow they will install the new, and the next they will get the furnace in place and turn it on. This is the plan. We shall see. I know all about the schedules of workmen, which must almost always be multiplied by three concerning time and by even more concerning disruption and untidiness. As for cost, I have heard Patrick tell Rachel they will take out a home equity loan.

In addition to the portable heaters he has borrowed, Patrick now sets about laying a fire in the wood stove in the kitchen before he leaves for work. He tells me that the wood stove has a powerful blower that “puts out heat like you won’t believe”—heat that I will feel if I leave my door open. I can see him through my apartment door, which stands open. The wood stove, which is a fireplace insert, has never been put to use since I have been here, though Patrick tells me that it was one of the features of which he was most fond when he bought the house.

“We quit using it six or seven years ago,” he says, his back toward me. As always, he is talking more loudly than necessary. “I got to thinking maybe it was one cause for Rachel’s having such respiratory problems every winter. Somebody suggested maybe she was allergic to woodsmoke, so we decided to give it a try.” He pauses. “I can’t say it changed much,” he says, “but we just never got back in the habit. Besides, we ran out of wood, and I never did get it restocked.” All this he tells me as he squats in front of the wood stove, arranging oak logs donated by Steve and kindling in the form of wadded newspaper.

Rachel comes to my door in her brown flannel bathrobe. She is carrying the tray with my breakfast on it. At the round table she removes the dishes one by one—a bowl of cream of wheat, a large biscuit on a saucer, a poached egg on another saucer, and a mug of hot cocoa. She sets a small pitcher of milk beside the bowl and a jar of red jelly next to that, then neatly lays my silverware and napkin side by side. From across the room she lifts her eyes to mine for a moment before she takes the tray and leaves. Rachel never says, “Good morning,” for which I am thankful, but when she brings my breakfast she always looks at me with what appears to be kindness in her eyes.

Perhaps it is Patrick’s mention of Rachel’s past respiratory problems that triggers a thought. It now comes to me that Rachel may be seriously ill. She has taken to her bed off and on since I came to live here, more frequently of late. Though she always gets up again and resumes her duties, I realize now that she never fully recovers from whatever it is that weakens her. I try to remember how she looked when I visited last summer and then when I first arrived last fall. I study her now and try to compare the Rachel of mid-January with those other ones. Too many days have passed, however, and I cannot remember the other ones.

“There,” says Patrick in the kitchen, “I’ve got it going now.” He raises his voice even more. “We’ll leave your door open, Aunt Sophie, so you can feel the heat, too.” He has already told me this. To Rachel he says, “You can put another log on whenever these burn down some. I’ll leave some right here in this bucket.” I hear several heavy clunks, then the clicking on of the blower. Patrick runs water at the sink, tells Rachel it will be a busy day at the Main Office because of a computer sale. “Well, let me put it this way,” he says. “I
hope
it will be a busy day!” He tells her about several good buys—“deep discounts,” he calls them. At last he goes to the door to leave. “I’ll call later to check on things,” he says to Rachel. “We’ll need to eat early tonight, remember. I have my first class.” I imagine Rachel nodding mutely to her husband. I think of the long patience of her life, a life as devoid of real pleasure as a woman’s life can be.

And still Patrick does not leave. “I sure wish I could stay till they get started under the house,” he says at the door. “I was hoping they’d already be here by now.” Another pause. “At least it’s not as cold as they’d predicted for today. You should stay plenty warm.” No response from Rachel. These also are things Patrick has already said this morning. “Well, okay, I guess I’m going now,” he says, then adds, “If you talk to Teri today, tell her the wood is great, okay? Hard and dry—the best kind. Tell her I’ll get Steve some more.” He pauses again, then thinks of something else. “You all right? Did you sleep last night?” Then, “I won’t go tonight if you’re not feeling good. I can stay here and get something together for supper if you need me to.”

“No, no. You go on now,” Rachel says mildly. “I’m fine. I can take a nap later.”

“Why don’t you go back to bed now?” he says. “The furnace men will be under the house. They won’t need to talk to you. I made sure of that yesterday. I covered all the bases with them.”

“I’ve got a few things to do,” Rachel says. “I’m making a cake for tomorrow night.”

“Can’t it wait till tomorrow?” Patrick says.

“I’m helping Teri tomorrow,” she says.

“What kind of cake?” he asks. I wonder if Rachel ever imagines doing harm to this man. I picture her throwing the bucket of logs at him now, shouting, “Leave the house right this minute! Quit hanging around repeating yourself and asking stupid questions!”

“It’s just a Bundt cake,” she says. “Chocolate sour cream. It won’t take long.”

Finally the door closes, and Rachel is left in peace.

Only days ago I read this in one of Patrick’s discarded issues of
Time
magazine: “DIED. H. DAVID DALQUIST, 86, inventor of the Bundt pan, the world’s top-selling baking pan.” Again I am struck with the many connections between the world at large and my small one on Edison Street. I wonder if this perception speaks of the broadening of my mind or, rather, of its constriction. At the age of eighty, is it possible for one to enlarge the landscape in his mind, or does he merely keep cluttering it with more details until at last they all overlap? Who can answer such a question? I rise from my recliner. At this moment my world is a still life: a small breakfast on a round table.

I feel the heat from the wood stove wafting through my apartment door. I smell it, too. It is a pungent smell, not unpleasant, yet one I have not missed. Both my father and Eliot considered the keeping of a fire to be a messy business, more trouble than it was worth. Having never gotten used to a fire and having no nostalgic associations with one, I have never felt its absence. I laid only one fire in my life, in Eliot’s study after his accident. It was a brisk, hot fire, soon burned down to only the smallest scattering of ashes. A paper fire burns briefly, without the spice and elegance of a wood fire.

At the table I press my fork against the poached egg until the yolk breaks. Rachel has once again achieved the right doneness. The yolk must not run but neither must it be hard. As I lift the fork to my mouth, I allow myself to imagine what would happen, specifically what would happen to me, if Rachel were to be critically ill. In choosing family members almost thirty years my junior with whom to spend the winter of my life, I never thought of their falling sick or becoming disabled.

But I should have. I should have made backup plans, for I know how speedily things may change. I turn to look toward the window that frames my bird feeder. This is my picture of the world. The trees in the backyard, so full of color when I came in the fall, are now only dry skeletons, their leaves like loose scraps of music swept away by the winter wind. I think again of the words of the sonnet: “Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.”

And yet I hear Rachel moving about in the kitchen, humming. I cannot name the song. It is something plaintive, meditative. Or perhaps it is not meditative at all. Perhaps it is the opposite, the kind of tuneless noise one makes to fill up silence. It is unlike Rachel, however, to fill up silence. I hear stacking and clinking sounds. She is unloading the dishwasher. I try to decide whether she is moving more slowly than she used to, but I cannot say. Perhaps she wears her brown bathrobe later into the day than she used to, but again I can’t be certain. I think she may lie down during the afternoons, for sometimes I don’t hear her for long hours at a time. Yet perhaps she has always done this, and I am only now noticing it.

On the other hand she talks to Teri every day and often walks across the street to see her in the early afternoon. I heard her on the telephone just yesterday saying to someone, “We can have it here next week. Okay. I’ll tell Patrick.” If she is seriously ill, she isn’t surrendering. I have read of a bird called the brown creeper, a bird which most often keeps to itself, though it is capable of socializing.

Rachel coughs. Perhaps the smell of the woodsmoke will not be good for her. I am finishing my egg when she appears at my door with the laundry basket on her hip.

“I have a few white clothes to do. May I check your hamper?” she asks.

I nod. Perhaps I should laugh at her politeness. Perhaps I should gently mock her: “Yes, Rachel, I grant you permission to check my hamper for soiled underwear and then to wash it in hot, soapy water.”

She opens the lid of the hamper and gazes inside for a moment, then bends to retrieve what is there. No doubt she realizes that I take care to soak and rinse out the worst things. These I hang in the bathroom to dry before placing them in the hamper. Sometimes they are still damp when I transfer them.

I am spreading jelly on my biscuit as she passes the table on her way out. An impulse seizes me, and words come out of my mouth: “Did you know that the man who invented the Bundt pan died?”

She stops and looks at me as if doubly surprised—at the question itself and at my asking it.

More words flow from my mouth: “
Time
magazine says that the pan became popular in 1966, when a woman in Texas used one for her second-place entry in a Pillsbury contest.”

I can’t remember hearing Rachel laugh, but she does so now. It is a hesitant, low-pitched laugh, as if venturing out from cramped quarters. She glances over to the bookcase shelf where the issues of
Time
are stacked. “I was going to ask you if you wanted me to throw those out,” she says, “but then I didn’t. I thought you might be reading them.”

I nod and take a bite of my biscuit, which is still warm. She has no doubt seen copies in the trash can and others folded back beside my chair.

“What kind was it?” Rachel says. “The cake that won the contest.”