“You’re all grown up,” she says, looking at me like the college student she remembers herself being. “I realize now how much living we’ve missed together. But for now—you’d better go—your train.”
“No, Mom. I don’t want to leave you.”
“Vanessa, yes,” she says.
“You’ll need help with your suitcases,” I say. I am still smiling.
She shakes her head no.
“Please go now,” she says, and I recognize the tone of her voice. It means she is not going to change her mind.
“But—”
“Please go. You’ll miss your train.”
“I’ll call you Sunday,” I say.
“Oh, don’t forget to call.” She is taking the Elsa Peretti bracelet from her bag.
“Mom,” I say, “are you all right?”
“Yes,” she nods. “I’m fine.”
I turn and begin to walk away from her, then turn back. “Mom!” I shout. I can’t bear to say good-bye yet.
I am some distance from her. The snow presses against the high semicircular windows. I feel it hugging us, pressing us, telling us to part, parting us. Her face has changed. Her voice now, as she begins to speak, is not raised but still somehow separates itself from the noise of the station. I can hear it perfectly. She looks up at the snow, then to me. She is focused and clear now, lucid in this last moment.
“I have loved you my whole life,” she says.
She lifts her beautiful braceleted arm into the air. “Go now.”
She waves good-bye.
“You must never forget, Vanessa,” my mother told me over and over through the years I was growing up, “that the Topaz Bird means us no harm.” This is how she would always end her final story of the night just as I was falling into sleep.
“You must never forget,” she would whisper, leaning over my bed as she turned out the light and covered me with night, as she kissed me hard on the forehead, “it means us no harm.”
She would enter my large, odd-shaped room, sometimes ecstatic, sometimes exhausted, sometimes sad and afraid, but the story never changed and it seemed to calm her. She would rest in the telling of it. I helped her, too, I think, in my half-sleep, dreaming the bird with her, inventing it over and over, reaching for it, reaching, my whole body straining to see it.
“Only the luckiest people,” she’d begin, “are born with a bird flying over their lives.”
“Only the very luckiest,” I’d say back to her, she leading, I following her through the story I knew by heart. She would start a sentence, and I would complete it. At times we talked together, our voices weaving in and out of each other’s. We were like lovers drifting off to sleep together, whispering in the dark. I loved her voice at these times, it was so sweet and peaceful. It was the voice of an angel, the voice of a star.
“Only the luckiest people are born with a bird flying over their lives. It’s no ordinary bird, mind you,” she’d smile.
“It’s not a green parrot,” I said.
“Oh, no!” she said. “Not a green parrot.”
“It’s not a cardinal.”
“It’s not a dove either. It’s not…”
“A pink flamingo,” I’d say.
“Or a toucan,” my mother would say.
“No, it’s not a toucan.”
“It’s more beautiful…” My mother closed her eyes. “It’s even more beautiful than a swan.”
Her golden robe shone in the dark room. She was asking me to see the Topaz Bird with her. But I could not imagine a more exotic creature than my mother. I would have been happy to have lived in a world defined solely by the parameters of her arms, to have sunk into her large, soothing voice and stayed there, safe in her dark love, but even before I could get comfortable in her lap she had begun telling the story and pointing my head away from her, asking me to look upward, to grow wings though I had just barely learned to walk.
“It’s even more beautiful than a swan,” we said in unison. “I call it the Topaz Bird,” she sighed. “A bird that shines like topaz. A bird so beautiful that you scarcely can bear to look at it.” I knew what my mother meant. I felt I could barely look at her straight on, most times.
“But when you do, once you finally get the courage, your eyes begin to shine, bright, bright.”
“To become the Topaz Bird somehow,” I said, pausing for a moment trying to picture this. “It has the most magnificent—-”
“Plumage,” my mother said. I loved the way she said plumage, the beautiful mouth she made for the word plumage.
“Plumage,” I said, trying to imitate her.
“And you must follow it—wherever it takes you. You must not be afraid,” she whispered. “It means us no harm.”
I love her in the deepest cells of my sleep. I feel her warm breath as I descend into sleep and hear her voice long after she has left the room. The Topaz Bird sings in her throat. The Topaz Bird flies from her mouth. I could almost see it those nights. There was such longing there in the dark.
I would love to follow that bird through my moody half-sleep. “My precious, precious,” I would say, reaching, straining.
She kisses me on the forehead and shuts off the light. I have never seen the Topaz Bird but I feel that something of it forms with the part of my mother I keep after she has left the room—her smell on me still, her kiss resting on my forehead. Each night, I take the simple, strange story into sleep and dream it.
I will find that precious bird. I build a nest in my ear for it. I prepare a place. I make a circle of my forefinger and thumb and fill it with something soft. I open the palm of my hand and offer it.
Oh, if I saw that bird—
Oh, if I saw that bird I would not hesitate to follow. The kiss lingers…
Though I am nineteen years old now, I have never seen that precious bird, but the kiss lingers. “Mom,” I say.
She is so far away.
Mother, here are the parts of the story you forgot to tell, the parts of the story I learned in my sleep.
When the Topaz Bird finally appeared after hundreds of years, your mother recognized it, even before opening her pale eyes, and through the layers of her fatigue she let out a small cry. Her family had waited so long and intently for that mythic creature to appear again that she could hardly fail to see it, even in the dark, even through her lidded eyes, as it flew past the hospital window at the hour her first child was born.
The doctors had advised my grandmother, a young woman with a rheumatic heart, not a grandmother at all then, not to have children; the consequences would be grave. But, holding in her arms her healthy baby, which felt quite strong, she knew it had been the right thing. “I will have children,” she had told the doctors, “there is nothing you can do about it.” The bird flew bv again. She opened her eyes. She saw only a blur but she knew what it was, and the pain from childbirth was mingled with an enormous joy. So the bird was the Bird of Luck, she thought, and of Good Health.
She heard its song. No one as far as she could remember, not even George, had ever mentioned its song. She wondered whether anyone had ever heard it before. She did not know if it was a happy song or a sad song—that was the way she was accustomed to thinking—but its beauty brought tears to her eyes, and she would write in her diary often of the haunting melody that followed her up and down the sloping terrain of her illness.
As she sat up in the white bed holding her daughter close, the melody grew louder. She struggled to get up so that she might see the bird clearly at last. When she finally reached the window and looked out into the snow, she gasped, for she saw exactly what she had pictured since she had first heard the story as a little girl. It was perched on the bare branch of a chestnut tree. It was tiny, tiny, a sort of hummingbird, she thought, with a few crimson feathers, green at the throat, and possessing an all-over topaz glow. It
was
beautiful, even more beautiful than they had said, and the young mother and her daughter stood drenched in its magnificent light.
Grandma Alice knew right away that her life was a bordering life, that the bird was not reallv hers to see, and she wondered, looking at it, what transformations the Topaz Bird had made on that journey from the branch of the chestnut tree to her brain. She was aware that she was probably not seeing it clearly. She held her daughter up to the glow and watched her new eyes turn from pale blue to violet to deep blue to turquoise then back to pale blue again. What did the bird, here on this first day of March, mean for her sweet, smiling little girl?
She held my mother at the window for what seemed a long time. The Topaz Bird continued to sing and did not move from the tree, and my grandmother, too, standing in the brilliant light, felt only an hour old. She felt as if the world were only beginning for her, too. In fact my grandmother
was
entering a new stage as she stood before the Topaz Bird, having brought it back, after so long, with her daughter’s birth: it was the beginning of the end of her life.
Chased back to bed by the nurses, the Topaz Bird flown off, the baby back in the nursery, my grandmother had a chance to think now for the first time about what was happening. There, as she drifted in and out of sleep, each member of the Hauser family appeared before her, perfectly clear against the hospital white. So the dead are even more detailed in appearance than the living, she sighed, looking at the knotted hands, counting the wrinkles, noting the many tones that made up the color of hair. She felt exhausted.
They were still searching for the Topaz Bird as she conjured them. Since the reunion in 1900 when they were alerted of the bird’s existence, each Hauser had searched for it, dreamt of it, convinced they would see it if they were diligent, patient. In the middle of many nights they had opened their eyes, positive that the bird would be there, only to see empty space, a straight-backed chair, a bowl of fruit. A few had written through the years of a glowing feeling, a sudden flush on their faces, a strange fluttering in their chests, the bird apparently caught in the human rib cage with no way out.
I imagine my grandmother must have felt the Topaz Bird near her her whole life, that presence having grown stronger and stronger with each month of pregnancy. Perhaps it was the Bird of Death after all, she thought through those months, as the doctors had said. But no, now she saw that it was not. Her baby was healthy and she felt fine.
Whatever it meant, she had prepared for it, knowing it was getting closer and closer, and so she was not surprised to see it at the birth of her daughter Christine. Yet despite her preparation, she was frightened a little, she didn’t know why, and she wrote later in her journal of that fear. What did it mean for her perfect, healthy daughter? In the family folklore the bird was rumored to be the Luminous Bird of Genius.
In the long history of the Hauser family the Topaz Bird had been sighted only twice. The first time was in Germany by George Hauser, a pianist and composer. He had had a glimpse of it, the story goes, while out for his mid-morning walk. “A piece has broken off the sun and taken the shape of a bird,” he told his wife Hannah, breathlessly, upon his return. But at this point Hannah was no longer a good listener. She shook her head; her large arms shook as she kneaded the bread. So I have married a crazy man, she thought. This vision of a bird only reinforced what she already knew. On endless staves he furiously wrote notes, but what came out was not music, everyone agreed about that. What came out, despite all the notes he wrote, the neat clefs, the rests, was not music. It was noise, anarchy. He looked so much like a composer as he wrote. Oh, that was the worst part; he looked so serious, so concentrated, so wrapped in it, but it was all nonsense. There was no discernible order. Everyone said so. And order was everything in Germany in those days.
What he heard no one else would hear for hundreds and hundreds of years.
The second time the Topaz Bird had been seen was in 1803 when Eva Hauser saw it one afternoon on the bough of a pear tree in Cummington, Massachusetts. Later, in her diary, she wrote, “All my art has been an attempt to recapture one image, that of a topaz bird I saw for one hour outside my house as a child. It refreshes me to think about and urges me on. Though I am already forty-five, my eyesight is still good and I have not given up the hope of seeing it once more.” She wrote this in 1837, having failed to make the gold leaf that would perhaps have approximated that vision. “It would have been easy to confuse it with the light of the sun and to have shaded my eyes or looked away, but it was a bird and I could not take my eyes from it.”
In the last years of her life, Eva, in an attempt to capture the Topaz Bird’s magnificent flight, found it necessary to add to her paintings snippets of paper, foreign stamps, pictures from tobacco packages, wood fragments, bits of glass, broken plates, photographs. “The audacity,” people said, “the audacity of this Eva Hauser.” But the women of the sewing circle gathering each week to make patchwork quilts were gentler; they felt sorry for Eva. “Let her be,” they whispered to their families, “let her just be.” She was mad, they knew, to see things that way, but “let her be.” And so they did. Eva was found dead in 1865, dried flowers, French stamps, corn husks, yarn, and scraps of paper surrounding her on the bed.
In the next century both Eva and George were treated more seriously by a nephew, Karl, who was studying the Hauser history. “It shall be very significant indeed,” he said, at a family gathering in 1900, “whoever sees the Topaz Bird next. It shall be very significant. This time we will know not to ridicule or humiliate. We know more now.”
So generation after generation of Hausers began to look into the air. People mistook them for snobs because their heads were always raised, but what they were looking for, of course, was that elusive bird. The tale was passed from father to son, mother to daughter. Filtered through time and various personalities, the interpretation changed. “It is the Bird of Truth and Light,” one man said. “It is the Bird of Supreme Sacrifice.” “The Bird of Insight.” “When it returns, it will be the Bird of Ultimate Pleasure.” During World War II, the Hausers, now real Americans, decided it was the Bird of Absolute Power, the Bird to Wipe Out Hitler. “No, it is the Bird of Peace,” another said.
Unbeknownst to them, the Topaz Bird was in Paterson, New Jersey, following a small girl as she went to school.