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    Birds of America: A Novel
    Birds of America: A Novel
    Birds of America: A Novel
    Ebook403 pages6 hours

    Birds of America: A Novel

    By Mary McCarthy

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    An “endlessly fascinating novel” of an American student finding his way in 1960s Paris from the #1 New York Times–bestselling author of The Group (San Francisco Chronicle).
      It is 1964, and Peter Levi, a young student and bird watcher, has come to Paris to study at the Sorbonne. Shy and innocent at nineteen years old, he arrives fresh from an extended Maine holiday with his vivacious mother, and is determined to live a life free of unwanted complications and unnecessary stress. But this is an era of great change in the world, a time when war is looming in Southeast Asia and social unrest is simmering. There is much to trouble and confuse the young American as he journeys through foreign countries—and feelings—into adulthood. For Peter, the simplicity of childhood is over—and his new life is becoming increasingly complex in a world growing more unrecognizable by the day.
    Mary McCarthy’s splendid Birds of America is a moving and surprising coming-of-age tale: the unforgettable story of a young man’s awakening, and a stunning evocation of the disorienting change of the 1960s.
    This ebook features an illustrated biography of Mary McCarthy including rare images from the author’s estate.  
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateAug 6, 2013
    ISBN9781480438262
    Birds of America: A Novel
    Author

    Mary McCarthy

    MARY MCCARTHY (1912–1989) was a short-story writer, bestselling novelist, essayist, and critic. She was the author of The Stones of Florence and Birds of America, among other books.

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    • 4/5
      Remarkably sensitive take on the '60s.Touching "coming of age" story. Oh hell, I really liked it.

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    Birds of America - Mary McCarthy

    Birds of America

    Mary McCarthy

    … to attempt to embody the Idea in an example, as one might embody the wise man in a novel, is unseemly … for our natural limitations, which persistently interfere with the perfection of the Idea, forbid all illusion about such an attempt. …

    To Hannah

    Contents

    Winter Visitors

    The Battle of Rocky Port

    To Be a Pilgrim

    Epistle from Mother Carey’s Chicken

    Greek Fire

    Round Table, With the Damsel Parcenet

    Leviticus

    Joy to the World

    A Sibylline Interlude

    Two-thirds of a Ghost

    A Biography of Mary McCarthy

    Winter Visitors

    IN THE WILD LIFE Sanctuary, the Great Horned Owl had died. The woman who showed the Palmer Homestead, on the edge of the woods, remembered the event distinctly: he had passed away the winter before last. Peter Levi, a college junior, swallowed this news with a long gulping movement of his prominent Adam’s apple; grief and shock choked him. You have to expect changes, he heard her say in a sharp tone, as he turned away from the doorstep, unable to speak. The old witch knew he was blaming her for the knockout punch she had just given him, standing calmly in her white shoes on the doormat that spelled out WELCOME, her hands on her hips. Until she spoke, he had supposed that the owl was still somewhere about, cruising in the woods, a noiseless shadow, hunting his prey. The idea that he could have passed away like any senior citizen had not crossed Peter’s mind. Revisiting the great bird in his tall outdoor cage littered with owl pellets of hair, claws, and bones was a treat Peter had been promising himself from the moment he heard from his mother that they were coming back to Rocky Port for the summer; it almost made up to him for the fact that she and his divorced father had agreed that he could not go to Mississippi with the Students for Civil Rights group. His mother, left to herself, might have let him go, but his father, who was more realistic, decided that Peter was too unsure of himself with people to take part in the program. Peter felt the babbo’s criticism was validated by his behavior this afternoon.

    Instead of simply knocking and asking what had happened to the owl, as he had planned when reconnoitering the house from across the road, he had paid the price of admission (Adults, $.50) and let himself be conducted through the homestead before he dared pop the question and at the last had nearly chickened out, for fear the woman would think he had been using her for his own stealthy purposes, which were antagonistic to old paneling and original floorboards. Peter, a philosophy minor, was an adept of the Kantian ethic; he had pledged himself never to treat anyone as a means (The Other is always an End: thy Maxim, said a card he carried in his wallet, with his driving license, vaccination certificate, and memberships in SNCC, CORE, and SANE), and yet because of his shyness, which made his approaches circuitous, he repeatedly found himself doing exactly that. It was only a kind of wild loyalty to the owl that had disgorged the question from his lips just as she was about to shut the door. If he did not ask now, he prodded himself, he would never find out. It would be no use asking in Rocky Port, where no one knew anything, and he could not come back here to inquire, for that would put his present visit, already suspicious (Funny a boy your age should be interested in antiques), in a still more bizarre light. Yet if he did not find out, it would be as if he did not care—another horrible sin. When he finally did ask, addressing her on the stoop from an inferior position on the lawn, it was in a casual, preppy voice. By the way, could you tell me what’s become of the Great Horned Owl they used to have over there in the Wild Life Sanctuary? How could he hope to fight for civil rights in Mississippi when he did not feel he had the right to ask a simple question in neighborly New England? The babbo knew best.

    Except in the classroom and of people he already knew outside it, Peter loathed asking questions. When he was little, he could not bear to have his mother stop the car and call out to a native for directions. "They won’t know, Mother! Please go on! Prevention being the best cure (Peter was fond of adages), at a very early age he became a whiz at map-reading, sitting on her right on a cushion; Peter the Navigator, his stepfather in the back seat used to call him. He had never outgrown the feeling that a quest for information was a series of maneuvers in a game of espionage. In a library, rather than apply to the librarian, he would loiter about till he discovered where the card catalogues were kept and then trace the book he wanted to its lair through the Dewey Decimal system—Melvil Dewey, on his school lists, figured as a Great American, outranking Eli Whitney and the inventor of the McCormick Reaper. In a museum, he learned how to use the plan posted near the cloakroom while he was still in the first grade and would be tugging his mother toward Armor" before she could question a guard. Similarly with a new A & P supermarket, whenever he and his mother moved; he raced about quivering like a magnetic needle till he found the bearings of Tide and tapioca and Grape-Nuts. He could always smoke out the toilets, hers and his, in filling stations and restaurants.

    When he was young, the game was easier and more fun, because no one noticed him; a child, he observed, possessed a natural camouflage and could blend into the social landscape—a corollary of Peter Levi’s Law that normal adults were not interested in children. But now that he was an adult himself, in all but the right to vote or marry without his parents’ consent, he had become suddenly visible, and the surreptitious pursuit of information had become not only much more difficult but also associated with a kind of anguish, whose source was a notion of duty.

    This afternoon, for example, when he found the cage in the woods empty and derelict and the wire netting torn, he at once knew that he would have to do something about it and he could not tell whether this was the cause of the anger he felt spurt out of him or whether that fury was a pure primary reaction to the fact that the marvelous bird was gone. He had slunk out of the sanctuary and sat down at the entrance under a tree labeled Buttonwood, where he noted that a house across the road, set back on a hillock, had a sign on the lawn: Open to the Public. Then he saw the manly course that was open to him: inquire of the owl’s nearest neighbor. He was scanning the small-paned, brown-shingled redoubt when a curtain twitched in a downstairs window; a counter-spy was watching him. Now or never, he said hoarsely, cawing like the Raven. The word never usually got results. Another magic formula, which he used to ward off discouragement after failure, was Once more unto the breach, dear friends. He was inclined to think of himself as a collection of persons who had to be assembled for any initiative.

    He ought to have thanked the woman for telling him but he could not. Still swallowing hard, he bolted across the stubbly lawn to where his motorbike was parked. The screen door slammed. In a minute it opened again. Young man! You didn’t sign the guest book! Starting the motor, he pretended not to hear her. This was the only satisfaction he could chalk up for the afternoon. She had not got him to sign! He had spotted the book, open, the moment he entered the homestead and had cunningly diverted her attention with a purchase of postcards, which were now in his jacket pocket. The total expense, including admission to this waste of shame, was $.65. The owl’s blood money. Peter, who was thrifty, decided to enter the sum as a reward he had offered for knowledge of the bird’s whereabouts. I am a propitiatory person, he chanted, to the tune of his sputtering motor, as he chugged home. He could already hear his mother’s cheerful voice, probably emanating from the kitchen, wanting to know if he had seen his friend the owl. The word friend stabbed him in the guts; he pictured himself in Mississippi, hanging about a county courthouse or a garage or general store, trying to learn, without directly asking, what had happened to a missing Negro friend. … Moreover, he knew that his mother would feel almost as badly as he did when he had to tell her the owl had croaked.

    Coming back to Rocky Port, to strengthen his roots before going abroad, was just one radical blow after another, as far as Peter was concerned. Guess you’ll notice changes, the village chorus greeted him. Or, in fugue, You won’t find many changes. Peter always answered Yes to the first of these challenges and No to the second, wondering why the local amour-propre should keep twanging so insistently on the theme of change. The changes Peter noticed were not those the storekeepers and the mailman seemed to be alluding to. He was not even aware, till duly admonished, that the Portuguese had built a new Catholic church, replacing the old one, which the Yankees now said had been charming; his mother had had to point out to him the new Sugar ’N’ Spice Shop and the new Bait & Lure Shop and the new Corner Cupboard and the Lamplighter and the second art gallery and the hand-lettered signs advertising merchants and realtors that swung on curly iron brackets at the turn-off to the village, replacing the old commercial billboards. He did observe that most of the houses had sprouted little historical notices, bordered in yellow, also hand-lettered and with ampersands and wavy dashes, telling when they had been built and who had lived there or kept a school or a tavern or a marble yard there. The house his mother had rented, painted a dark colonial red, bore the date 1780, and Peleg Turnbull, a ship’s chandler, had kept a shop in the front rooms. One of Peter’s mother’s first actions had been to find a hammer and remove the placard stating this. At once there came a written protest from the landlady, to which his mother answered that this epidemic of historical notices reminded her unpleasantly of the colored quarantine signs of her childhood: Measles, Mumps, Scarlet Fever. Yellow, she thought, had been measles.

    Quarantined by history, Peter remarked in his slightly hoarse voice, backing up his mother’s stand. But really he was attached to history, provided it stayed still. Now that the point had been called to his attention, he rather missed the old billboards as well as the neon storefront signs. Except in the field of civil rights, he was opposed to progress in any direction, including backwards, which was the direction Rocky Port seemed to be heading in, and wanted everything in the sensuous world to be the same as it had been when he was younger. To be precise, when he was fifteen, nearly four years ago.

    That was when he and his mother had first come to Rocky Port, in the fall, out of season; she had rented a house near the water, in the wrong section of the village, where the Portuguese lived. From his bedroom window, he used to watch three cormorants that stood on pilings in the cove and he had been counting on seeing them again on his return. He had three sentimental journeys planned: the first to the cormorants, the second to the Great Horned Owl, and the third to a hidden waterfall up in the back country. To date, he had had two disappointments. Number One, the cormorants were gone. The first evening, while his mother was wrenching off the placard, he had hurried down on foot, past the laundress’ house, to where they used to live. A single boring gull sat on one of the piles; that was all. He kept coming back to look at different times of day, pretending to be taking a stroll. But it was no use. They were gone. And nobody but he and his mother seemed to be able to recall them.

    You mean gulls, don’t you, Peter? his mother’s new friends said. No, he said. Not gulls. I know gulls. Can he mean the Arctic Tern? He means cormorants, said his mother. Then at a cocktail party, given at a house on the harbor, he met a retired admiral whose small hawk face he remembered. The cormorants? Sure, son, said the admiral, who came from the South. They’re nesting now in Labrador. They’ll be back in the fall. I won’t be here then, said Peter. In the fall, he would be in Paris, taking his junior year at the Sorbonne. For the first time, he felt sad at the thought. He could not understand, either, how he could have forgotten that cormorants migrated, when he had spent hours in the reference section of the village Free Library, identifying the three black birds, uncertain to start with whether they were the Double Crested Cormorant or the Common Cormorant, which was a lot rarer. He was worried that he might be losing his memory. To cheer himself up, he decided that some fall he could come back here and find them again, when he was through with college and the Army. Maybe on his honeymoon. The cormorant’s life span? said the admiral. Hell, son, maybe ten, fifteen years. Those three damn birds have been here winters as long as I have. Now let’s see. I retired in ’58. … It was clear to Peter that the admiral was just gassing to cover up his ignorance; like most of the people here, he was not interested in getting to the bottom of anything. He began to talk vociferously, waving his short pipe, about the ages attained by ships’ parrots, in an argumentative tone that Peter was coming to recognize as the cry of the Rocky Port species, mature, male, which always sounded as if its assertions were about to be contested by another species—foreign or black. Peter felt he would not welcome a heart-to-heart with the admiral on the topic of integration. Yet this chat, he feared, was on his summer calendar, as predictable as Fourth of July fireworks or the appearance of a spring robin on a Rocky Port lawn. Despite that, he rather liked the old man, first for remembering the cormorants, second for remembering him, and third for surviving unchanged from that other year.

    That year had a special value for Peter because that year he got the wish he used to make on every baby tooth he put under his pillow to dream on: to live in a little house in New England with his mother by themselves. He had never liked California; he missed the winter. He hated his stepfather’s garden in Berkeley, with roses and daffodils and tulips and irises all blooming at the same time, so that there was never anything to look forward to. The only birds that appealed to him there were the hummingbirds. He hated the desert; he was convinced that it was the product of some nuclear catastrophe that had befallen an earlier race of scientists. He declined to consider Death Valley a part of Nature. Peter was strongly in favor of Nature, and he was against modern physics for interfering with Her.

    His stepfather was in the physics department of the University of California, a very valuable man; he had helped bring heavy water to England from the Continent during the war. Peter had always imagined Hans carrying it in his suitcase through customs. He was a refugee, like Peter’s own father. The difference was that Peter’s father, who taught history at Wellesley, had left Italy for political reasons and not just because he was Jewish, while Hans might still be pottering in his laboratory in the Fatherland if he had not been born a Jew. Peter’s mother was not Jewish. He had heard his aunt say that her sister had a thing about Jews, which he hoped included him. Peter slightly preferred his own father to Hans, but he tried to think that this preference was impersonal, like preferring the seashore to the mountains or breakfast to lunch: he liked the East better than the West, Italy better than Germany, history better than physics. Personally, Hans was genial, and the babbo was bad-tempered. Peter always felt wicked when he would place his baby tooth under his pillow, to dream of running away with the fair Rosamund (called Rosie by Hans), and then wake up the next morning to find a silver dollar that he knew Hans had put there. Silver dollars were one item Peter approved of in the West. In the end, when the wish came true, he was quite sorry for Hans, who had agreed to a trial separation. Coming east on the train, four years ago, come September, the gladder Peter was at the thought that he and his mother were alone at last, the sorrier he felt for Hans, who had waved them off at the station.

    Four years ago, he was deeply in love with his mother. He was a tall boy with a long nose and gaunt features—the picture of his father at the same age, except for his eyes, which were gray, like hers. He often stared at himself in the mirror, but for the opposite reason from Narcissus; it was her eyes he gazed into, captive in his Jewish face. He had known for a long time about the Oedipus complex; his stepfather used to tease him with And how is young Oedipus? But he did not think that, on balance, he would like to sleep with his mother, only to be with her where there were no other people. He was sure that despite what she said she would marry again, and he would have a new set of stepbrothers and stepsisters, probably. All he asked of the gods was a year with her. Already he realized that this year, when he was fifteen, would be the last year of his childhood; at sixteen, he would be a youth and lose his innocence. He had seen it happen to his stepbrothers.

    Peter wanted to grow up; he did not plan to be a Peter Pan. But he felt that a halcyon interval was owing him, particularly because of the divorce, which required him to spend the summer with his father, so that only the school year, the darker part, belonged to her. Because of school and activities, he hardly ever had her to himself, unless he was sick, and unfortunately he got sick mostly in the summer. When he was little, she used to read to him at bedtime, but now he was too old for that. Holidays—Christmas and Easter—were allocated by Hans to family trips. On weekends, Hans was always home. That was the way the ball bounced. The fact that his mother did not love Hans as much as she did Peter made her always anxious to include him in all their projects. Knowing his mother, Peter often felt that it would have been a lucky break for him if he had been her stepchild, instead of the wormy apple of her eye.

    Yet she must have had it in mind all along to make it up to Peter when she was free. Then it would be his turn. Though she was reticent about personal things, Peter guessed there was some sort of promise between them, which involved, on his side, being patient. It did not surprise him when she told him that she and Hans were parting. Each of her marriages, Peter pointed out to her, had lasted seven years—a Biblical span. She had never counted, but he had. Nor had there ever been any question for Peter but that she was living in exile out there in corny California; when the two of them finally cut and ran, it would be back to New England, their real home. The only problem was where.

    She put that up to Peter; he could choose, providing it was not an island. He picked Rocky Port. It looked lonely—a thin finger of land pointing out to sea, far from a main highway. She laughed when he showed it to her on the map. Define a peninsula, Peter. A body of land almost entirely surrounded by water, from the Latin paene insula, an almost-island. Peter laughed too. Then she protested that they did not know a living soul in the vicinity; nobody she knew had ever been to Rocky Port. But that was how he had plotted it, dismissing Cape Cod, Vermont, commuters’ Connecticut, and hesitating over the Massachusetts North Shore, which attracted him but where they would be likely to get visits from the babbo. Peter had calculated the driving time from Wellesley to Ipswich; he was not taking any chances on a renewed romance between his parents.

    It worried her that he might not find friends of his own age in such an isolated (there was that word again) village. But this was the last year, Peter explained, that he would want to be solitary; next year, he would be interested in girls and parties. Up to now he had always lived in an academic community, even in the summer, because the babbo invariably vacationed with a lot of other professors. It was the last year too, he argued, that he would be allowed to be by himself with birds and animals unless he planned to be an ornithologist or a zoologist. A young boy was expected to like animals, but he would have to be forty before he could watch them again without somebody watching him. Hearing the desperation in his voice, his mother capitulated. Besides, she had told him he could choose.

    In her place, Peter would just have gone there, without further research, but his mother was trying to reform from being a hopeless romantic, in the words of her sister. She got the state guidebook out of the college library and looked up Rocky Port; she found the name of a real-estate agent in a directory of realtors and sent off a letter with their specifications, asking about schools and transportation. She signed it Rosamund Brown, her own name, which Peter would not have done, even though he was glad that she was giving up Hans’s moniker. He would have liked them to live under an alias.

    The agent, a Mrs. Curtis, wrote back immediately with listings and asked if she were the Rosamund Brown; if so, she had some of her records. Peter’s mother was a professional musician. But my records are all out of print! she cried. She was always surprised and touched when someone remembered her, because she had not played a recital or in a real concert for years—only for fun with a University chamber group. She had given up the concert stage when Hans was summoned to Berkeley; California was too far from the center. Peter could tell that she took the realtor’s letter as a wonderful, strange omen; she was being recalled to life. For his part, Peter took the omen as bad. If his mother had a fan in Rocky Port, it was no longer virgin territory. The place was probably full of artists and writers and music-lovers generally; he ought to have been put on guard by the elm-shaded streets and the Greek Revival doorways in the photographs in the state guidebook. He was relieved to learn from the agent’s second letter that the artistic colony closed their houses early in September.

    I’m afraid you’ll find it rather bleak, Mrs. Curtis wrote apologetically. After Labor Day, we go ‘back to Nature.’ The little house you’re interested in is in rather a ‘slummy’ section, but it has a lovely view and you’ll be quite by yourselves. There’s no television set, I’m afraid, for your son, but there’s a good working piano. I realize that isn’t the same as a harpsichord, but you can probably ‘make do.’ The kitchen is fairly well equipped; I imagine that, like so many of our musical artists, you like to cook wonderful things. Your son can walk to the old Rocky Port high school on the harbor; the grand new consolidated high school on Route 1 isn’t finished yet—politics. Do I understand you won’t have a car? Would you like me to have the piano tuned?

    His mother, as always, was her own piano-tuner, and they did not have a car, that fall. Both cars had stayed with Hans, which Peter, on the whole, was glad of, for it limited his mother’s movements. When his bicycle finally came by Railway Express, with the harpsichord and the clavichord, he mostly left it in the cellar, because she did not have one. Instead, they took walks together, which they had never done in Berkeley. Every clear evening they walked down to the point, past the abandoned lighthouse and the boarded-up whaling museum, to see the sun set; this was their daily contact with the natives, who came in their Fords and Chevrolets for the same reason. It was a local ritual, like the lowering of a flag. They watched the fishing boats come home; the pink sky was full of gulls. Then they would wend their own way back to supper, past the plastics factory and the Doric bank and the Civil War cannon in the square. At home, the cormorants would be standing on their piles, three black silhouettes in the paling light; they never came to the lighthouse point. They never mixed with the other birds—a fact that struck Peter from the beginning.

    He decided they were sacred birds, an unholy trinity. Standing on their dark piles in the water, they had an evil, old, Egyptian look; gorged, their black wings spread to dry in the sun, they resembled hieroglyphs or emblems on an escutcheon. In their neck was a pouch that bulged when they had been fishing. They did not swim or float on the surface like other birds but darted through the water in a sinuous, snake-like way. He had never seen them squat or sit. They were always erect, spread-eagled; not sedentary—vigilant. They seldom moved, though they occasionally gave a flap of their wings or a turn of their long serpentine necks. They usually stood facing away, surveying the cove like sentries, or, in profile, commanding the open sea, but sometimes he would come back from some private sleeveless errand to find that they had wheeled about and were facing him in glistening formation. Unlike the shrieking terns and squawking gulls, they did not utter a sound. This stillness and fixity were what made them seem so horribly ancient, Peter thought, as though they preceded time. That and their snaky appearance, which took you back to the age of flying reptiles. Moreover, their soundless habit gave their slightest movement the quality of a pantomime; from his bedroom window, he could pretend he was watching a drama of hieratic gesture.

    He did not know why he connected the cormorants with his mother and their flight back to Nature’s bosom, but if he could have had a seal ring made (he was still a sealing-wax addict) in memory of that year, it would have been incised with three cormorants—his sign. His mother said they made her think of the three black-cloaked masked Revenges at the end of the first act of Don Giovanni: Donna Elvira, Donna Anna, and Don Ottavio. Peter agreed. There was that about them too. Three pouchy pursuers, storers-up of grudges. He wondered about their sex. Were they father, mother, and son? Or three brothers? The last of their race. In one bird book he had read that only a few hundred Common European Cormorants were left in North America. There must be even fewer now than when the book was written. Unless, of course, they were protected.

    The Great Horned Owl seemed very old too, nearly extinct, with its immobile dilated pupils and its long nightgown of ruffly feathers. He was exceptionally pale for his species, cruel-looking, and very big. Peter’s mother almost thought he must be an Arctic Horned Owl because he was so pale. They had come upon him like an apparition in the chill solitary woods, having discovered the Wild Life Sanctuary in the course of a Saturday walk. The Boy Scouts, they decided, must have marked the trails with visual aids pointing to squirrels, autumn foliage, and owls—ordinary screech owls, not this great tufted tigerish creature. And someone, a very brave Scout, must have captured him and put him in the home-made cage nailed to a tree and labeled "Bubo Virginianus—Great Horned Owl"; someone must feed him field mice and whatever other sacrifices he regurgitated in the form of those hairy pellets. But they never met a Scout or any other human being in the sanctuary.

    Besides the trails through the woods and the captive owl in his tree-house, it had a log cabin with educational exhibits of pyrites and quartzes and shells and stuffed birds and stuffed animals and butterflies and amusing insects like the Walking Stick. There were wild-flower and fern charts on the walls. It was the kind of place where you would expect to find a custodian to reprimand you or get you to join the Audubon Society, but it was empty except for the taxidermic presences in the glass cabinets. To come on it, swept and garnished, in the woods was spooky, like the story his mother used to tell of the ship Marie Celeste, which was found afloat in mid-ocean in apple-pie order, with mess tables set and ovens still warm and not a hand aboard.

    Nobody Peter and his mother met in Rocky Port had ever visited the sanctuary or could say who ran it; they thought Peter and his mother were talking about the bird sanctuary, which was something different, a desolate state preserve of dunes and marshes and jackpine, where couples went to make love. Mrs. Curtis took Peter and his mother there in her car one Sunday morning, and they did not see a single worthwhile bird—just beer cans and the remains of campfires. It seemed funny to Peter that there should be two sanctuaries in the locality and each, as it were, unaware of the other, like two people that had not been introduced. Mrs. Curtis could not explain it. If Peter wanted to find out more about his sanctuary, she advised him to sign up at school with a Nature Study group. The manual training teacher was the one to see; he would know all about it. Peter refused the suggestion. He did not want his relationship with Nature organized and managed for him.

    Indeed, he liked the mystery surrounding his sanctuary and the fact that he and his mother were its only (visible) initiates. Exploring, they found a dark stream, stepping-stones, mallards, a pond. By Christmas, his mother said, the pond would surely freeze over; she promised to buy skates at the hardware store and teach him to skate. They could use the log cabin as a shelter to thaw out their feet. Already a black frost had come; the autumn leaves had fallen, and you could identify the deciduous trees only by their shapes. With the end of daylight-saving time, the afternoons were shortened; when they left the sanctuary, it was almost night. In the dusk sometimes, from the road home, they would hear a ululating cry, and Peter would hoot back. He knew from his reading that Great Horned Owls bred in snow and ice; it worried him that the lonely hooter did not have a mate. The idea occurred to him to let him out of his cage, which would not be hard; his mother, who was fearless of authority, would help him. Selfishly, too, Peter longed to see him fly, just once—the drifting flight the books described, like a big moth coasting overhead.

    But then Peter would be responsible for the sequel. What if the owl, weakened by captivity, was unequal to liberation? It might starve, left on its own in the woods. Alternatively, the predatory killer, freed, might make a holocaust in the wildlife refuge. Peter thought with anguish of the pine grosbeaks he and his mother had seen, almost tame, in a wild apple tree on Columbus Day; he imagined their rosy bodies all red with gore. A sanctuary was meant to be safe. He recognized with a sad Hello the classic conservative arguments as they passed through his head—arguments for not meddling with the status quo. A silent shadow, like the shadow of the hunting bird, fell across his happiness. He wished he had never thought of releasing the owl in the first place. Now that the notion of change had glided into his mind, he could not just accept the bird’s being there as natural. It had to be justified. Perhaps he was simply getting bored, but it no longer gave him much pleasure to engage in a staring match with the barred and striped prisoner—a game that, in any case, his mother deplored. When Armistice Day came, he rejected her offer to bring a picnic to the sanctuary. Let’s take in a movie, he said in a sullen voice.

    His mother was bewildered; he often hurt her by his unwillingness to explain himself. It would have killed him to tell her that he was depressed by his lack of guts about the owl; she did not even know that he had been weighing the question of setting him free. He loved her too much to confide his weaknesses to her. He preferred discussing hers, which were obvious.

    For example, she had gone and bought him a large illustrated Birds of America, to replace (in her mind) the little blue Peterson guide that had been left behind in Berkeley. Peter was quite happy using the reference section of the Free Library, even if they did not let you take the books home—it was good training for his memory. He enjoyed being resourceful, living off the land, like a hunter, not always having to buy things in a store. Moreover, he considered the gift a placebo. He disapproved of her habit of leaving their possessions behind whenever she got a divorce; she had done the same thing with his father.

    He particularly objected to her leaving the phonograph with Hans, who never remembered to change the needle. He and his mother had long arguments about this on the train coming east; he loved arguing with his mother, who was quite intelligent, he used to tell her, for a faculty wife. A house that had a piano would surely have a phonograph, she said,

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