In Hovering Flight. Joyce Hinnefeld

      Unbridled Books

      Denver, Colorado

      Copyright © 2008

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Hinnefeld, Joyce.

      In hovering flight / by Joyce Hinnefeld.

      p. cm.

      ISBN 978-1-932961-58-4

      1. Mothers and daughters—Fiction. 2. Terminally ill—Fiction.

      3. Birds—Fiction. 4. Women—Fiction. 5. Family secrets—

      Fiction. 6. Maine—Fiction. I. Title.

      PS3558.I5448I5 2008

      813′.54—dc22

      2008018616

      1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

       Book Design by SH • CV

      First Printing

      For my parents, Wilma and Lynn Hinnefeld

      Whatever it was I lost, whatever I wept for Was a wild, gentle thing, the small dark eyes Loving me in secret. It is here. At a touch of my hand, The air fills with delicate creatures From the other world.

      —James Wright (from “Milkweed”)

      Occasionally my parents themselves said to me, “There are also cheery things in life. Why do you only show the dark side?” That I could not answer. It held no charm for me.

      —Käthe Kollwitz

       one

      ACCORDING TO JOHN JAMES Audubon, there was once a species of bird in southeastern Pennsylvania, the Cuvier’s kinglet, Regulus cuvieri, or, as Audubon liked to call it, Cuvier’s wren. And according to Addie and Tom Kavanagh, the mysterious bird may have magically appeared again nearly two hundred years later on a ridge near their home, seventy-five miles north of Audubon’s original sighting.

      Audubon claimed that he had discovered this “pretty and rare species” on his father-in-law’s plantation, Fatland Ford, northwest of Philadelphia, in June of 1812. As was his custom, he shot it in order to draw it, thinking at first it was the more common ruby-crowned kinglet. “I have not seen another since, nor have I been able to learn that this species has been observed by any other individual,” he wrote in his famous Birds of America.

      But Audubon wasn’t known for his honesty. He claimed to be the son of a French admiral and a beautiful Spanish Creole woman from the islands, but his father was actually a French merchant, slave dealer, and naval lieutenant, his mother an illiterate French chambermaid. And surely it was a practical move, this naming of a bird (real or not) for Baron Georges Cuvier, the famed French naturalist and one of Audubon’s earliest patrons.

      Consider, also, the “joke” Audubon played on a naturalist named Constantine Samuel Rafinesque, when Audubon and his wife, Lucy, hosted Rafinesque at their Kentucky home in the summer of 1818. For his guest Audubon described—and drew—ten species of imaginary fish that he claimed were native to the Ohio River. Rafinesque included accounts of these fish (including something called the “devil-jack diamond fish,” described as between four and ten feet long, weighing up to four hundred pounds, and covered with bulletproof scales) in several articles and eventually a book.

      There has been no single sighting of a Cuvier’s kinglet in the two hundred years since Audubon claimed to have shot one. Unless, that is, one believes the Kavanaghs, the bird-artist-and-ornithologist team who published the environmentalist and antiwar classic A Prosody of Birds—an odd blend of delicate artist’s plates and dense poetic scansions of bird-songs—in 1969. Actually, only Addie claimed to have spotted the Cuvier’s kinglet, one morning at dawn. It was an overcast morning in May 2001, and she was on a routine excursion into the field, on the ridge above her home along the Nisky Creek, near Burnham, Pennsylvania. Though he wasn’t present at the time, Tom has never disputed his wife’s claim. But, strange as it may seem to question the veracity of a serious scientist and teacher like Tom Kavanagh, there are reasons to doubt both him and Addie.

      If what Addie saw that morning was not a Cuvier’s kinglet but a ruby-crowned kinglet—a mistake neither Addie nor Tom would be likely to make—then she had her reasons for such a mysterious lapse. Addie always had her reasons for every outlandish choice she made. And Tom loved her deeply through all of them.

      Tom and Addie’s daughter, Scarlet, has always loved birds too, though not with the nearly fanatical passion of her parents. She has loved them enough to write about them, off and on, since she was a child. But now she is less concerned about whether or not the Cuvier’s kinglet suddenly, magically, reappeared in southeastern Pennsylvania than about the instructions her mother presented to her and Tom two weeks ago—for what she wished them to do with her body: clear orders for a brazenly illegal burial. There is no easy way to handle such a request, as far as Scarlet can see. And it’s hard to say what Tom is thinking.

      Now it is early May 2002, the beginning of the spring migration through the northeastern United States. Scarlet and Tom are in Cider Cove, a sleepy, off-season town on the New Jersey shore, in the rambling old house, now a bed-and-breakfast, of Addie’s dear friend Cora. Scarlet would have expected her mother to choose to die in her own ramshackle cottage in Burnham, windows open to each morning’s raucous dawn chorus. But the Burnham cottage is a place filled with much history, and in the last ten years or so, even birdsong seemed, at times, to make Addie angry, or sad, or both.

      Last night Scarlet left Addie, who was clearly drawing her last breaths, alone with Tom. She couldn’t bear to be there for the actual moment when her mother died. She curled up on a wicker divan on Cora’s screened porch, watching the stars, listening to the wind and the pounding of the waves at the end of the long slope down from Cora’s house. When Tom roused her a couple hours later, a filmy light was slipping through the purple clouds, and the hospice worker was packing her bag.

      “Addie’s gone, Scarlet,” Tom said. “I’d like you to help me move her body down the street.” And so Scarlet followed him into Cora’s studio, fitted for several weeks now with Addie’s hospital bed. Cora had been there through the last days too, along with Lou, Addie’s other good friend. Now both of them were crying silently, busying themselves with straightening the bedclothes, tidying vases of flowers; they seemed desperate to find something useful to do. Tom tucked a blanket around Addie’s body, as if to keep her warm. Every move, every gesture like this one seemed to Scarlet both funny and heartbreaking. She watched as he lifted her mother’s tiny, weightless body in his arms.

      Tom tucked Addie in carefully once again when he lowered her onto the cot in the walk-in cooler of a restaurant several doors down from Cora’s house. This was Cider Cove’s only seafood restaurant, owned by a trusted and discreet friend of Cora’s and open, in the off-season, only on weekends. Tom had told Cora that they might need a few days to work out “the arrangements,” and within fifteen minutes she’d arranged this access to the restaurant cooler with her friend.

      Neither of them wanted to leave her. But, Tom said, it was surely better to have her body there, not worrying them all back at Cora’s while they tried to figure out what to do next. Scarlet was quiet and compliant as they moved and arranged Addie’s body;