“She’s gorgeous, isn’t she. And she loves people, a true socialite. I used to give big fabulous parties, literal crushes of people, and she’d sojourn from shoulder to shoulder the whole evening long.”
I had finally remembered to ask Ralph one night, having emptied the pockets of a jacket and pulled out the card. “Oh dear God,” Ralph had groaned. “So the bitch deigned to darken our doorstep. Emphasis on
darken
.” Malachy Burns, Ralph told me, was chief music critic for the
New York Times
(a title Ralph was astonished not to find on the card, since the man was as conceited as, Ralph had to admit, he was perceptive). He specialized in opera, which explained why half the neighborhood had to listen to Callas and Domingo at top volume till two in the morning or starting at six. He compensated for these disturbances of the peace by inviting all his neighbors to the grand parties he gave (“and darling, you have never seen so many A list queens under one roof since the days of Fifty-Four”). Though come to think of it, Ralph said, the parties had not resumed after the summer, as they usually did. Predictable rumor held that Malachy Burns was ill.
This was the first I had seen of the man since his earlier visit, and I did not regard him much differently. (To look at his clothes and his sharp, clever haircut, I had guessed he held some important post, and to learn that anyone was ill these days elicited, sadly, more resignation than shock.)
“Felicity, sing a little for your new friend,” he said. His voice was soft, ample with affection, whenever he spoke to the bird.
Felicity straightened herself up on my shoulder and let out a clear ululation of notes that mimicked perfectly a singer’s warm-up. I had heard this before, this particular range of scales, especially during these rainy days. Whenever I heard it, I could tell only that it came from somewhere else along the street, and I had assumed someone was taking voice lessons (though I had not thought her a talented singer, I had never doubted that she was human).
“That’s remarkable. Does she talk?”
“A few words here and there, but never very intelligible. Eclectuses aren’t fancy talkers like Amazons or grays.”
“So you know your parrots.”
Malachy laughed. “Only perforce. Felicity was a gift, a few years ago, from an Italian tenor whose wife breeds these birds. I think they all sing scales because they hear it all day, every day, from the minute they hatch.”
Felicity had returned to grooming my ear, running the tip of her beak around the inside perimeter. It tickled terribly, but it was the most tangible affection I’d felt in months.
“If you have a bird, anyone you meet will tell you everything they know about whatever other kind of bird they or their acquaintances have. Achingly boring.” Malachy reached out and took my arm. “Hold your hand up like this and she’ll hop on.” She did, and her weight was impressive. She looked me in the eye and made her tutting noise.
“She’s scolding me.”
“Oh no, that’s love—or courtship at least.” Malachy laughed again. The bird set him at ease around others, I could tell, and made him far more likable.
Suddenly, Felicity turned and leaped onto his shoulder. She began to groom busily under a wing. As she splayed the feathers, they made an elegant dry rustling, the sound of a stiff satin gown in motion across a dance floor. Malachy moved the cage to my desk (heedless of my papers) and sat on the chair. “I have what will sound like a preposterous favor to ask.” When I did not move, he said, “Please sit down. You’re making me feel crazier than I already do.”
I sat. “Yes?”
“I’d like you to take Felicity on as a boarder—and maybe, if the two of you get along, you’d take her home with you at night. I’d pay for her upkeep—it’s not expensive—and if you have to leave town, there’s a boy across the street in the apartment below mine who likes to take care of her. I’d pay for that too.” Both Malachy Burns and his bird regarded me across my desk. When I did not answer, he said, “I hate to belittle her so, but she could be a sort of . . . mascot here, don’t you think? Even, perhaps, an attraction.”
“So you’re tired of her. Someone gave you this novel gift, and now that the novelty’s dimmed, she’s a burden.” I doubted this even as I said it, but wasn’t that the obvious explanation for such an offer?
He sighed. “I can understand your guessing that, but nothing could be further from the truth.”
“You’re expecting me to take this bird from you, just like that—this bird who will probably live a hundred years—as if you were handing over a parcel of secondhand books to sell on consignment?”
Mal’s eyes were his most striking feature. A very pale blue, the color of shaded snow, they could appear almost pure white, like a blind man’s eyes, when caught in the sun. Now they brightened with tears, and a ghastly silence spread between us. He said at last, “I am regrettably, to use the medical softsell, ‘immuno-compromised,’ and as if to add insult to injury, my all-knowing doctors informed me awhile back that I simply cannot have a bird, not so much as a chickadee, in my home. I refused to believe them until I read about it last month in my colleague Jane Brody’s column. Seems there’s some deadly ornithological pneumonia that may strike me down if I inhale poor Felicity’s vaporized guano.”
It was now raining so viciously that Mal had raised his voice. The word
guano,
spoken in righteous sarcasm, rang out like an ultimatum.
“Now is where you apologize and are mortified into submission,” he said before I did exactly that. “Which I won’t have. I don’t know why I expected not to be blunt about this.” He leaned forward. A mistress of timing, as I would learn over the years, Felicity began to sing her scales again.
“I do like her,” I said, “but . . .”
“Oh please do not tell me you have to ask permission from that old biddy Ralph.”
I’m afraid this made me laugh. “I suppose I don’t.”
Malachy Burns stood. “Well this is a relief, and I’m leaving before you change your mind.”
“I’m not prepared . . .”
“You’re not getting her now,” he said as he arranged a brocade cover over the cage. “I’m planning to have a few last bittersweet days of her morning company, fuck their epidemiological doom, and I’d like you to come for dinner tomorrow if you’re free. It’s clear you don’t like me much—no one does at first—but I am an excellent cook.” He pulled on his mackintosh. “Once Felicity moves over here, I’ll be spying on you constantly. But I also promise to send lots of spendthrifty bookworms your way. Maybe a little ass in the bargain. I may not have my health, but I still have my cultural clout.”
I walked him to the door, to lock it behind him. Before leaving, he held up the cage and pulled aside the cover so that I could have a last look at Felicity. “In answer to your speculation, it’s unlikely she’ll live a hundred years. But decades, yes. She’s just four. In my will, I’ve left her to my mother, but I’ll have to amend that, won’t I?”
AFTER WE’VE STACKED THE TABLES
and chairs in the garage (and after David’s counted them at least twice and fussed over the bad manners of people who haven’t yet responded to their telephoned invitations for lunch), we head behind the house to decide where we’ll arrange them tomorrow. Meteorologists have forecast the kind of June day that Wimbledon competitors pray for; indeed, Dad’s mourners will have to miss the women’s finals.
David does a lot of pacing and thinking out loud, and I agree with everything he suggests. My three nieces are playing under a cluster of lilacs which separates Tealing from the bed-and-breakfast next door, and Véronique is inspecting the gardens that Dad revived in recent years. Peonies and irises are in full sanguine bloom, along with the requisite roses and a few smaller plantings I couldn’t identify at gunpoint. Véronique is actually taking notes; you’d think she was planning a military campaign. Claiming she can’t use the ferns because they have some sort of blight, she’s sent Lil into town to buy the greenery required to show off the flowers. This irks me not just because I think it frivolous but because I’ve yet to spend any time alone with Lil.
Satisfied with his plans, David wanders toward the burn. I follow him across the footbridge our father built to the meadow on the other side. With the sheep and the collies long gone, it’s grown over, but beautifully, in wildflowers and timothy. Stray birch saplings encroach from the edges.
“Dennis wanted me to mow a big swath so we could have the lunch here. Nothing’s an impediment to his romantic vision.”
“And you’d have done the mowing.”
David nods. “Although, you know, I do want to put a vegetable garden out here for Lillian, now that we’ll . . .”
“Now that you’ll be taking over.” I say this lightly.
“Taking over, yes, I suppose we are,” David agrees. “And the first thing I plan to do, next week, is take down that old ruin.” He points to the abandoned kennel.
“I wish you wouldn’t. That place is the last vestige of Mum.”
“But useless, and an eyesore. I think it’s full of bats.”
“O ye of little sentiment.” I try to sound like I’m joking, but David picks up on my spite.
“You’d like, what, a temple here? A sheepdogging shrine?”
I decide on silence as my best option. Practically, he’s in the right.
“You know, Fen, our parents didn’t have this dishy harmonious union you imagine.”
“‘Dishy’? Who was talking about anyone’s marriage?” Should I be flattered that he even bothers to imagine what I imagine?
“There wasn’t a single picture of Mum in the house on Naxos,” he continues. And here it comes, I think. David, too, visited Dad in Greece and partook of his “little affairs.” Of course he did.
“Sometimes,” David says, “except for the fact that Dennis so clearly inherited Grandfather’s enormous ears and nose, I used to wonder if the two of us were really Dad’s.”
Assuming he’s referring to some Freudian teenage delusion, that age-old desire to disown our fathers when they refuse, maddeningly, to disown us, I say, “And me? Did you stop to wonder if I was really Dad’s?” (I look, as our parents’ friends never tired of remarking, exactly like our mother: fair, blue-eyed, wide-faced. My brothers both have Dad’s darker hair and windblown complexion.)
David’s laugh is contemptuous. “Well now, Fen, you’d be the love child, wouldn’t you? The oldest offspring is rarely illegitimate. That is, in postfeudal times.”
Like most brothers, as children the three of us would wrestle at the slightest provocation (and unlike most mothers, ours rarely forced us apart, letting us hash out conflict, real or symbolic, on physical terms). Just before I went away to school, David became strong and wily enough to beat me. Yet I would refuse to cry uncle and often came out the worse for wear, limping or nursing a sprained wrist. Now, never mind that I’m old enough to know better, I let the same instincts goad me on.
“Oh, and I suppose this reproductive expertise comes from being paid to oversee innumerable fuckings in farmyards. Though what a relief to hear you think me
legitimate
.”
“Did that lover of yours bring out this nasty streak? You never used to be so brittle.”
“In point of fact, he wasn’t my lover.”
“Whatever.”
“Yes. Whatever.”
David sighs. “Fenno, I’m going to regret this, but bloody hell, you’re like a textbook poofter, blindly worshiping your mum and looking down your aesthetically superior nose at the rest of us heterosexual rubes.”
“David. You a rube? Down at the Globe, I’m sure a few of your best mates are flamers.” Behind him, I spot the three little girls headed toward us across the bridge. I wave to them, and David glances around.
He turns back to me and lowers his voice. “From up there”—he points to the highest window of the house, the foxhole above his bedroom—“I saw more of the world than I was meant to.”
Unwittingly, I make a snorting noise. David ignores it.
“I saw things that wouldn’t have pleased Dad.”
“Just what, precisely, do you mean by ‘things’?” My voice sounds frightfully mincing, as if to confirm David’s vision of me as a poofter.
Laurie grabs our sleeves, both of us at once. “Papa says come,
à table
. He’s making omelettes! You have to eat them while they’re still puffed up!”
Without looking at me again, David lifts Théa, seats her on his shoulders, and starts for the house. I pick up Christine, who at two and a half keeps up valiantly with her sisters. Laurie scowls at me, as if I’ve snubbed her, and I say, “I’ll be your pony later, after lunch. I promise.”
Her scowl deepens. “I’m getting a little old for that.” She bolts toward David, who’s turned back to extend her his hand.
Abruptly, Christine starts crying.
“Où est mon chat?”
“Oh, sweetheart, we’ll find him, we’ll find him,” I say. As I carry her across the bridge, I hold her close to my body out of self-pity and loneliness as much as love. Grateful that she’s bought me even minutes away from my brothers, both of them, I let Christine direct me round the lawn to search for her sorry little cat. We find him under the lilacs, where the older girls have laid a play picnic for their dolls, using one of my mother’s best linen napkins as a blanket and a clutch of tiny silver ashtrays as plates. Grapes and quartered biscuits have been carefully apportioned all around. In the center of the napkin, a crystal saltcellar holds violets.
As we kneel on the ground, I take out my handkerchief and wipe Christine’s wet face. When I put it back in my pocket, one of the mystery medals pricks my thumb, as if to taunt me about how little I know. I look toward the house and steel myself. It’s as if I am standing on an ice floe that’s drifted too far south; the illusions that keep me high and dry are busily melting toward nil. And I am not the world’s most confident swimmer.
MY FIRST REWARD
for taking in Felicity was her very company, which I loved at times to the point of doubting my sanity. I loved her weighty presence on my shoulder when I reshelved books. I loved the way she craned her neck (a busybody, just like me) to watch people passing the shop window, the way she might suddenly up and fly, her wide wings narrowly but infallibly clearing the tight spaces of the shop. I loved her occasional bouts of gratuitous laughter, and sometimes while I was on the phone—in her eyes, I must have been talking to her—she would shuffle about on my opposite shoulder and murmur in my ear a muffled phrase that sounded like “Didn’t I say so, sweet?” I should probably not confess that at moments I felt as if I’d found a soul mate.