Winter Birds (39 page)

In mid-June my lessons with Mindy come to an end. Having finished the last unit in her literature textbook, I have given her a final exam, on which she scored a respectable 95 percent. She has apparently taken in more than I would have guessed.

Today she comes back to my apartment at one o’clock for the second part of her exam, an essay on a topic of my choosing: “In two paragraphs discuss the form and content of Shakespeare’s sonnet 73.” I have added this part to the objective exam. It was not included in the teacher’s manual. I let Mindy think that every other student completing the homeschool curriculum for twelfth grade English is writing an exam essay.

It is easy to justify such an essay, for the textbook claims as one of its goals to challenge the students in the areas of “critical thinking and analysis” as well as in “skills of organization and composition.” I want to see if Mindy will correctly identify the rhyme and meter of the sonnet, if she will employ the words
quatrain
and
couplet
, if she will discuss Shakespeare’s use of enjambment, image, and metaphor. But more than this, I want to see what a girl like Mindy will write about the content of such a sonnet. Will she say it is a poem about growing old or a poem about love? Or perhaps both? Will she spout standard youthful generalities? Will she make murky unsubstantiated claims? I confess that I do not expect much from her.

It is hard to expect much from a girl who dresses the way Mindy does. Today she is wearing a stretchy yellow T-shirt and white shorts. Her shoes, which are not really shoes at all, are the same ones that snap as she walks. Around one ankle is a slender silver chain. She is also wearing a ball cap, and her hair is in a ponytail, which swings from the back opening of the cap.

After she sits down, I read aloud the sentence of essay instructions to her and then the sonnet. More accurately, I recite the sonnet. Mindy is following from a copy I have written out by hand. This is the only poem I remember by heart. When I was newly married, I dreamed of reciting it to Eliot someday when we were both old. I imagined that our love would deepen over the years.

When I come to the last two lines, I say them slowly:

“This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,

To love that well which thou must leave ere long.”

I do not give Mindy a time limit but tell her, as I have before, that I am more impressed with quality than quantity. She studies the sonnet at some length and then begins to write. She pauses frequently to look at the poem again. She chews on a knuckle and frowns. She rereads what she has written so far, then resumes writing. She shakes her head, erases something, and writes again. Perhaps she cares more about her grade in twelfth grade English than I thought. It is hard to tell what goes on inside a person. We shall see what comes out.

I go to my recliner to wait for her. I lean forward and see a small brown bird on the ground beneath the feeder. I have seen it before. It does not peck at the feeder but gleans the leftovers. With bright eyes and upturned tail, it hops to and fro in a jerky dance, stirring up dirt and mulch. In this fashion it brings to the surface seeds that have been knocked from the feeder by larger careless birds looking for an easy snack.

I watch the bird closely for several minutes. Perhaps I can find his picture in my bird book and call him by name the next time he comes. For now he is simply a small brown bird, quick and scrappy, content with the leavings of other birds. I think of other birds who take what is left, birds whose names I know. I have read in my book of bluebirds, whose nesting sites have been appropriated by more aggressive birds, who have vacated the eastern orchards and meadows where they once thronged. I think of people, too, who cannot compete with the masses, who stand to the side until others are finished, who step in to clean up or who sometimes simply pack up and leave.

“DIED. HAMILTON NAKI, 78, South African surgical pioneer with no formal training who was a central member of the team, led by Dr. Christiaan Barnard, that performed the first human heart transplant—yet went unrecognized for some three decades because of apartheid restrictions on blacks holding jobs deemed appropriate only for whites; of a heart attack; in Langa, South Africa.” I remember much talk about this operation. It was in 1967, the year before I married Eliot. Though Christiaan Barnard became a household name in the weeks that followed, I recall no mention of Hamilton Naki. And now forty years later, after his own heart has expired, I read about him in
Time
magazine.

The entry tells me that many years ago a white doctor operating on a giraffe in Cape Town called on Naki to help. Though officially a gardener, Naki had such fine hands and instincts in surgery that he was soon spending most of his time in laboratories and operating rooms. When he was seventy-six years old, the University of Cape Town awarded him an honorary degree in medicine.

I imagine Patrick reading this and saying, “How wonderful! A black gardener rewarded for his years of service and raised to a position of honor in the field of medicine!” And I could not begin to explain to my nephew the great tragedy of his saying such a thing.

Though there is no picture of Hamilton Naki in
Time
magazine, in my mind I see a tall thin man in a white lab coat, stooped from years of gardening and kowtowing to men who held jobs for which he did not qualify by reason of his skin color. I see his long delicate fingers and his knowing eyes. I see him take his honorary degree in his steady hands, give it a long look, and then put it away in a drawer.

As Mindy writes, I hear the sound of water filling Rachel’s washing machine. I hear her close the lid, and then all is quiet again. Perhaps she is folding clothes she has removed from the dryer. Imagine this, a white woman doing a colored man’s laundry. For this is something Rachel has taken on. It is not enough for her to keep the boy for Mitchell. She must wash their clothes, also.

For her help Mitchell pays her a small amount. And with this money I have seen her buy things for the child. She and Teri have taken him to McDonald’s, they have taken him to the public swimming pool, they have taken him to the park to ride a train, they have taken him to the Humane Pet Shelter to choose a kitten. This animal lives in Patrick’s garage, mews at his kitchen door, pounces at little bits of lint and string. He is a black cat with a white face and white paws, or, as Patrick says in an attempt to be witty, a white cat with a black body. The cat’s name is Zeego, a name the boy chose for reasons he cannot explain, a name he says quite clearly.

The boy’s name is Ahab, a name his mother chose for reasons Mitchell never thought to ask. In the Bible I have read that King Ahab made idols, that he stole a man’s vineyard, that he “did more to provoke the Lord God of Israel to anger than all the kings of Israel that were before him.” There is another Ahab in literature, a man whose leg was bitten off by a whale, whose life pursuit was to kill the whale. Indeed, it is a sinister name for a child, but one he bears with all cheerful innocence.

Ahab is an active boy, the kind whose naps a mother would anticipate. His young mother must have been exhausted, yet when I look into his eyes and hear him laugh, I cannot imagine how she could have left him behind. Every day I expect to hear that she has returned to fetch him. For over three weeks, however, he has spent every weekday on Edison Street. The four of us—Rachel, Teri, Mindy, and I—join forces to watch him. In truth, this is all we do much of the time, watch him, for there is no keeping up with such a child.

Today while Mindy writes her essay, Teri is keeping Ahab at her house. He likes to play in Teri’s backyard, where there are three attractions: a sandbox, a swing set with slide and seesaw, and Stonewall the bulldog. At Rachel’s house he has a rope swing, a tricycle, a plastic swimming pool, and Zeego. Inside both houses are toys and books. He likes balls of all sizes and can hit, kick, and throw them with remarkable power and accuracy for so young a child. He eats large quantities of peanut butter, bread, cheese, and fruit. His favorite drink is chocolate milk, which Rachel buys in small glass bottles. This is not a child who suffers from want of attention, provisions, or playthings.

Perhaps I drift off to sleep as Mindy writes. I imagine that I am walking down a dirt road with a tall black doctor. Together we are pulling a wagon that holds dozens of small birdhouses. We stop along the roadside, and he nails a birdhouse to a tree. Then he purses his lips and whistles. A bluebird comes and lights on his finger. “Here,” he says, “here’s a place for your nest. Rest your weary heart.” Then the doctor turns his gentle eyes to me and says, “Now, Sophie, how about your weary heart?”

“I’m done,” I hear Mindy say. She is standing in front of me, the pages of her essay in hand. I lift my head and nod, then take the pages from her. “Can I go?” she says. I nod again. She walks toward the door in her flip-flopping shoes and then stops and turns around. “Well, I guess this is . . .” We look at each other across the room. “Okay, then,” she says, then half shrugs and adds, “Well, thank you.” And she is gone.

As one grows old, losing becomes a way of life. One loses people, possessions, health, and memory. He loses heart. One learns over time to hold things lightly, to quit fighting, to let go easily. And yet as I hear Mindy close the kitchen door, I have a sudden desperate wish to call her back. I have other stories to tell her. The world of literature is vast. We have not yet begun to explore it. I want to keep scratching at the ground, bringing small things to the surface.

I look at the door through which Mindy has disappeared. Through it I can see two of the four new pictures on the kitchen wall. More accurately, they are old pictures in old frames but newly hung. They are pictures from a Bible storybook that once belonged to Rachel’s mother, a book in which all the pages have come loose from the binding. There are captions beneath the pictures: “Noah Releases a Dove,” “Moses Receives the Ten Commandments,” “David Fights the Giant,” and “Daniel Faces the Lions.” The day Rachel hung them, I asked her what became of the other pictures that used to be in the blue frames, the ones of happy Negroes beside cotton fields. “Oh, I covered them up with these,” she said. “I like these better.”

“Do you need something?” Rachel asks a few minutes later. She is standing at the door of my apartment with a spray bottle in one hand and a sponge in the other.

“No,” I say.

“Oh, I thought I heard you say something.”

I shake my head. I do not tell her that it may have been a laugh she heard, a laugh of disbelief. I am reading Mindy’s essay, meeting with surprise upon surprise.

“Teri will be bringing Ahab back in a minute,” Rachel says. “Shall I close your door so you can read?”

“No,” I say.

“You know he’ll be in and out of here if I don’t,” Rachel says.

“I know,” I say.

She disappears, and I return to Mindy’s essay. As for her discussion of the form of Shakespeare’s sonnet, she properly labels the meter as iambic pentameter and the rhyme as that of an English sonnet:
abab cdcd efef gg
. Though she does not mention the use of enjambment, she discusses the imagery and metaphors in some detail. She misspells
metaphor
as metaphore. I did not expect her to take note of the diminishing length of time in the images, moving from months to days to minutes, but she does. I did not expect her to ponder the use of
thy
and
thou
instead of
my
and
I
in the closing lines. This she also does.

Certainly I did not expect her to write the following: “Shakespeare is describing how love does the opposite of what the body does. Just because an old person’s body keeps on getting weaker, it doesn’t mean his heart can’t love anymore. In fact, he’s saying love can keep getting stronger the older a person gets.” The depth of her insights exceeds her power to express them. Still, it is a better essay by far than most of my college freshmen could have written.

But the most astounding observation is one that has never occurred to me, that most likely never occurred to Shakespeare himself. Mindy strains to illustrate another literary term:
ambiguity
. It is a term we explored in some detail in one of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s stories. “
Where late the sweet birds sang
,” she writes, “illustrates ambiguity. It could mean either that the birds used to sing on the bare branches of the tree before they flew away for the winter or else that the best birds aren’t afraid of the cold, so they stay late in the year and sing late in the night.” To think of a seventeen-year-old girl coming up with something like this. I read the sentence many times to make sure I have not fallen asleep again.

I think of birds I have read about in my book: night-herons, nighthawks, owls. I think of the vesper sparrow that winters in the South and sings plaintively in the quiet of evening. And who can say? Perhaps Shakespeare was thinking of night birds when he wrote the line. Perhaps he was listening to a nightingale.

I hear the sound of Ahab’s voice in the kitchen. He bursts in, calling out, “Aunt Wachel! Aunt Wachel!” We are all aunts and uncles except Mitchell, who is Daddy. All of Ahab’s r’s are w’s. Patrick is Unca Patwick, Potts is Unca Cicewo, and Teri is Aunt Tewi. Mitchell has told us that a doctor has used the term
verbal delay
in reference to Ahab, who didn’t start talking at all until a couple of months ago. Now it appears that he is making up for lost time.

The boy appears at my door, Rachel and Teri behind him. “Buds?” he asks, which is his word for birds. He is pointing to my bird window and moving across the room at the same time. He runs, wiggles, and flails his arms. This is his customary method of moving. He arrives at the window and squeals, “Bud eating!” A chickadee at the feeder takes flight.

Ahab sees the plastic swimming pool in the backyard and begins cavorting. “Go swim! Go swim!”

“After you lie down a little bit,” Rachel says.

“Good luck on that,” Teri says. They both laugh, and Teri leaves for home.