A Convergence Of Birds (5 page)

I was up at 5:00 a.m. reading DM’s essays and recollections in Writing In Restaurants. It was just getting light out. I decided to drive over to the old waterwheel housing in Maple Corner. For a number of days I had been observing a kingfisher working the pond there. I took Writing In Restaurants along with me, thinking it might be nice to sit reading with my back against the weathered, splintery wood of the wheelhouse. It was about a ten minute drive to the wheelhouse. When I stepped from the car, I immediately glimpsed the kingfisher. It was on the telephone wire, then flew over to the roof of the wheelhouse, then flew back to the wire. “Kingfishers have punk haircuts,” my daughter, Emma, had said. I was aware, in the early light and breeze off the pond, that if your criterion is succinct enough, moments of perfection might truly exist. Shorts, T-shirt, tennis shoes on, a book, a breeze off the pond, smell of old wood, a kingfisher plummeting along its sight line now and then, a world without humans except in a book—happiness was beside the point.

Screwloose ambushed silence, squawked and spoke in broken utterances as if attempting to translate the rain forest dialect in which he thought and dreamed into the 1950’s English he eavesdropped on day after day, my brother speaking, Paris speaking, the car radio. Actually, the parrot’s voice most closely mimicked that of the radio DJ, whose name was Ambroce Ambroce. Ambroce began his morning show with, “How ya doing this morning, my fine feathered friends?” Paris, at our breakfast table, would hear this, turn to Screwloose in his cage and say, “He’s addressing you, sir. Be polite. Answer Ambroce Ambroce’s question, you stupid bird!” One morning, I accidentally happened upon Paris naked from the waist up, standing next to the dryer in the basement. Through the oval glass, I could see her EXIST TO KISS YOU T-shirt tumbling. My mother was at work. My father was who-knew-where. My brother was working on his car. The hood was propped open. Naturally, I stared. Paris turned around. “Hey, there,” she said.

“I got an A minus on my cursive example,” I stammered.

“Well, that’s very good,” she said “But, hey, look. A girl needs her privacy.”

When I went outside, I heard the parrot railing from the back seat, “This is Ambroce—ka, ka, ka, Ambroce, reeeechak, reeeechak, don’t ya know.”

— for DAVID MAMET

Joseph Cornell

A SWAN LAKE FOR TAMARA TOUMANOVA {HOMAGE TO THE ROMANTIC BALLET}

1946

box construction: painted wood, glass pane, photostats on wood, blue glass, mirrors, painted paperboard, feathers, velvet and rhinestones.

John Burghardt

wanted to make an end—because the end

was motion, nothing. He’d been leaving too, out of the nest

of tubing, little taped-up breathing egg. You’d watch his chest.

I’d watch you doze: the bars, your face, your breathing hand suspended

with the paper swans in the mobile—

but probably I dreamed that too. The air—

conditioner was a little monastery

plainsinging commercials.

“Coffee?”

“Please.”

I thought you’d feel

him moving in your hand. If I had gotten back

in time—or in time: in a poem, in the week

I walked these syllables across the lake, thinking my bleak

mood was just winter, even the lines I thought would carry going slack:

I kept saying them faster, trying to revive them. Breath

was feathering my fingers

Joseph Cornell

UNTITLED {COCKATOO FOR HOLDERLIN}

c. 1954

16.25 x 10.125 x 3.75 in.

box construction

Paul West

FATHER GARNET SHRINKS from the renaissance outside his bolthole, not because he trickles and gurgles with sudden eruptive swaggers of his tripes, but because the huge polity out there bellows Death To Jesuits, as if any one label sufficed to evince this polymath, baritone singer, adroit mellow speaker, earthy Derbyshireman still close to the loam that bore him, his little knotted soul all chirps and cheeps, weary of going on being careful even as he reminds himself that memory is the pasture, the greensward, on which the mind can disport itself most ably, molding everything to the shape of heart’s desire. On a sailor’s grave, he recalls, no flowers bloom. He wonders where he heard that, and why, able here to summon all his mental moutons into one flock, baa-ing the gospel according to Saint Garnet, that not too gaudy, too precious, stone. Doomed to practice it day after day, even to the extent of dipping his nib in orange juice to make the words invisible, he has fallen in love with secrecy.

Once again he hears the noise of himself, squirreled away here in a priest hole made by a maimed dwarf of a carpenter who also happens to be a lay brother. Saved by woodwork, and a little tampering with the original masonry, Garnet languishes in the bosom of a vast country house—or rather in a thimble carved within a nipple—waiting for daylight, unable even to stand in the space allotted him. Why, he moans, are we hated so? He sneezes, once, twice, pressing his nose hard to quell the seizure, each time murmuring the time-honored formula, Bless you, that saves the soul from being flung far away, angelic silver skein aloft amid the tawdry of this world, never to return. You could sneeze yourself soulless. But he never will, although strictly speaking someone other than you should babble the housekeeping, nose-saving formula. Dieu vous aide, he knows, is what the soul-saving French neighbor says, automatic in this as in almost every other prayer. It is good, he reassures himself, to be prayed for in this way by just about anyone standing nearby. So, what does the King do when he sneezes? Bless himself or have a chorus of courtiers mumble the phrase? That is what they are there for, to keep his soul in his body in the interests of, well, not the one and only church, but his sect anyway. Father Garnet thinks that for the soul to speak it should have a language of its own, pure and godly, unknown to humankind and therefore blessing itself in blindest esoterica. Now, there’s just the kind of phrase to get him damned, socially at least, hoicked out of his hidey-hole and hanged along with hundreds of other mildly dissenting churls. Father Garnet has no room in which to shrug, but his mind makes the motion for him.

This carpenter troubles him, this builder of hiding holes. He, Garnet, prefers the old-fashioned country word joiner. Little John Owen, the joiner in question, makes a fetish of joining priests to their mouseholes, almost as if he thinks of the priesthood as a furtive, shy calling: nothing of titles and fancy robes, but the essential spirit hidden within the rind of the planet, within all these lavish country houses. Hide-and-seek is not far from it, not when daily or even nightly life can be shattered at any hour by the arrival of priest-hunting poursuivants armed with torches and dogs, probes and huge cones of bark through which they listen to the masonry, the chimneys, the passageways. Garnet chides himself for thinking ill of his savior, but sticks to his point nonetheless: hiding us away as he does, and making endless provision for ever more of us all over the Midlands and the South, he presumes to some kind of power, making us invisible and yet at the same time even more spiritual than ever, more abstract, more distant, more creatures of the mind than of ritual, splendor, office.

It is like being made obsolete, he tells his creaking bones, remembering only too well the crippled joiner’s instructions: “You will not stand, Father, you will have to contain yourself at the crouch, there can be little easing once you have been installed. To make your little place any bigger would be to expose you.” He is a priest-shrinker, as alive in his trade as the old word for plough in such a word as carucate, which means as much land as you might reasonably plough in a year. In a way, Father Garnet broods in his cramp, our Little John is the ideal candidate for these cubbyholes, but he has no need, can go abroad as he pleases, more or less an upright dwarf, bubbling with good humor and perhaps more than a little amused by the spectacle of us all crouched until doomsday. He is almost a sexton of the living, omitting only to smooth the earth over us at the last and no doubt tempted sometimes to seal us in with trowel and mortar, which, if we do not burst out while the seals are still soft, encases us forever. Between cramp and suffocation, we have a poorer life than we envisioned, far from the august panoply of the high-ranking prelate. Father Garnet, the ranking Jesuit in England, tries to soothe his mind with his own name, derived from the word pomegranate, the color of whose pulp approximates the stone. No use. The sheer inappropriateness of light hidden under a bushel provokes him and makes his stomach queasy, a fate little eased by recourse to the drinking tube that enters his hideaway from behind the wardrobe outside. A small pan, a slight tilt to the feeder, and water can reach its priest: anything that will flow, soup or gruel, just to keep body attached to soul. Father Henry Garnet of Heanor, Derbyshire, thinks of himself as a light.

Now he is trying to work out which is better: being alone in the hole or having another priest for company: Father Oldcorne, as on other occasions, or Father Gerard, as on a few. There is certainly more talk, he decides, but of such an abortive, thwarted nature it were better to keep still. Perhaps the pallid patter of the inward voice consorts best with secret living on the run from King James’s hunters. For those eligible to have women with them—if any—it might be better, he reckons: not so much cuddling as meeting head-on a different point of view; after all, those bearing within them the secretest hiding place might better adjust to circumstances and so cheer up anyone with them. A Jesuit, he tells himself, should be able to reason the pros and cons without too much trouble, but he finds his mind blocked, twisted, perversely longing for daylight, sleep, a reassuring companion voice. Instead, he hears the echo of a refrain voiced by Little John Owen:

Him that can’t stand it tight

May never see the morrow’s light.

Small consolation, that. Imagine, then, the confessional even smaller than usual, even for the recipient, with the confessee granted room to squirm about during the painful act. What then? Should the priest freeze in there, shocked by what he hears? Should he practice in the confessional for the hole or vice versa? Has either any bearing on the other?

If there is any moral to be drawn from recusants’ experiences of being hidden, it is that it is better, if you intend to hide, not to do so on your own premises—or on those of anyone else. Best go to Saint Omer with Father Tesimond. Or, if that proves impossible, make sure you deal with a country house that has no servants in it and is not located in any of the English counties. It is not that Robert Wintour and Stephen Littleton on the run, camping out in barns, washhouses, seed stores, stables, and byres, were found by a drunken poacher, whom they had to gag and bind, but that in their next abode, Hagley, the country home of “Red Humphrey” Littleton in Worcestershire, they were exposed by a certain cook, Findwood, who wondered at the excessive amount of food being sent upstairs. That Findwood receives an annual pension for his good deed goes without saying. When the poursuivants arrive, Red Humphrey denies everything, after trying to block their entry. “This is our home, you shall not pass.” Something Roman in his demeanor pleases him at this point. They come in anyway and receive the immediate cooperation of yet another servant, David Bate, who shows them the courtyard in which the conspirators have gone to ground.

Hindlip is not far away, readied like a fortress, although who is to guarantee the behavior of servants when they hear of John Findwood’s pension, setting him up as an eternal spy before the word gets out about him grafting himself onto the domestic life of some country house in order to undo it, pay promised, no vengeance as yet visited upon him. His breed will prosper in these gruesome times, and the trade of household spy will establish itself among the poor, almost in itself a revenge calling.

Anne Vaux and Father Garnet, Anne and Henry as they are now just about calling each other, have exhausted all means of delay, even standing their horses in the fashion of a love-seat, he pointing northward, she pointing south, in fervid contemplation of each other, with no help from tradition or literature, but left to the meager resources of eye and hand to express what is forbidden. Now they change places, advancing not at all, but feeling heavy at the much shrunken extent of land between here and Hindlip, that labyrinth of lighthouses; almost, Henry Garnet thinks, like Sicily in little. When at last after much dawdling (which Henry Garnet in his original way calls prevarication) they arrive at the rear of the building, he dismounts on a patch of ice, unassisted by grooms, and immediately slips backward, gathers himself to surge forward, then loses his feet altogether and crashes to the ground, in one fall slamming his knee, outside left ankle, his right thumb and his head on the virtually invisible ice. It is a poor welcome, but he survives it, feeling shaken and shocked, a whole series of fresh pains and aches moving through his body, and in his hands a potent trembling. Anne is almost in tears at this last sight of him before the mansion gobbles him up for what? A month or more. Already Mary Wharmcliff, a scullery maid with child by her lover on a neighboring estate, Blackstone Grange, where she has walked to confront him, has returned with news that Sir Henry Bromley, a local justice of the peace, eldest son of Thomas Bromley, who conducted the trial of Mary Queen of Scots—a brash, invasive family—was already on his way from who knows where, intent on combing through Hindlip from top to bottom. This leads, of course, to a further piece of wisdom that says: If you wish to move from one country house to another, say from Coughton to Hindlip, do not do it on horseback or by any other means that entails travel between two points, lest you gallop right into the gang led by one of the Bromleys. Nor, knowing this and some of the Bromley history, should you extend too much trust to the idea that Sir Henry, related to the recusant Littletons, might go easy on certain Catholics. The schizophrenia of the times allows him to do his job without, in this case, altogether losing face with Muriel Littleton, his sister. It is simply another variant of the William Byrd philosophy, enabling the happy practitioner to face both ways without ever being damned as a hypocrite. It is almost as if opinions, tenets, beliefs, were so many silken handkerchiefs to be floated about in the wind, no more committing you to a certain code of conduct than the passage overhead of a moulting sparrow. Whence, Anne Vaux asks herself, this new breed of trimmers, people who out of corrupt self-interest trim their conduct for each situation? Is this the fabled opportunism of wolves, or what Henry Garnet, rarely at a loss for a classical exemplum, calls homo homini lupus: man a wolf to man. Perhaps, though, she thinks, if nobody believes in anything very much then all persecution is going to come to an end, because nobody believes much in that either, except as entertainment for the mob. It is all too much for her, being severed here and now as Henry Garnet, with no time for a meal or a drink, goes his way to join those already cached in the house: The house chaplain, Father Oldcorne, and the lay brother Ralph Ashley. Outside, by special dispensation granted to himself, Little John Owen hides in a dwarf-adapted birdhouse that, through a miracle of hydraulics known to him alone, floats in a duck pond. Or it did; thanks to the freeze, it now sits there, compelling upon him all kinds of privation but permitting him, as he so often said during the design phase, fresh air galore. Crouched out there, the engineer and artificer of the whole hideaway (there is room for a dozen more, should need arise), he fulfils yet another part of his destiny, as much in charge of his scheme as Cecil of his, and indeed a consummate piece of the drama. Simply, as he designed it, the birdhouse goes over him like a cloak; he then steps into a specially designed circular punt, fashioned after the coracle, and waits, lowering the birdhouse to the coracle rim, which it exactly matches. Supplies abound, more or less, as if he is truly a flightless bird; the birdhouse is not round, but has a round base, and this, he has assured the Habingtons, aghast at his perverse ingenuity, enables the birdhouse to move around in the water, making it the center of a perfectly self-controlling motion. It spins itself very slowly, without favoring any particular direction, whereas a rectangular punt will not. As if itinerant birds have left emergency packages for later comers (the code of the distant, romantic log cabin in America), the Owen birdhouse contains in tiny compartments bits of twig, called locally Spanish juice, an import like strawberries, from Aranjuez; hazelnuts, beech nuts and roasting chestnuts; tiny pastry pockets of quince jelly; sunflower seeds collected in small leather pouches that might once have held rings; unicorns made of gingerbread, none more than two inches high. On the quiet, in the hours that are left over when he subtracts his work from his life, he bakes and rolls, stamps out two-dimensional pastries, and polishes nuts for storage. A squirrel, in short, with a higher destiny ever awaiting him: There will never, what with the new influx of priests from the Continent, be enough hiding places. Yes, he grins, chilled in his private minaret, you can’t always get a good hiding even though you deserve one. Such wit warms him when nothing else does. Attracted by the small holes de rigueur in a birdhouse, some nonmigrating birds have already called on him, and he has made the reckless error of sharing his supplies with them, in the interior dark proffering what he can, a sunflower seed, say, between finger and thumb, with aviary refinement. Surely, he thinks, hardly giving a thought to Hindlip’s crew of festive, garrulous servants, they will never find me here; I am too blatant. No, the birdhouse is. They will search the house, but nothing else save the outhouses and barns. This is much better than suicide with beautifully crafted swords or being shot in a courtyard or blown up by gunpowder arranged to dry out in front of a roaring fire like a drenched cat. When they come, they will bounce off, as always; I wonder why they bother. Well, it must be to earn their wages, little realizing their real wages will be paid after death, in another world altogether.