From my room, I could gaze out the bay window and into the treetops. Beyond the treetops I could see the Bishops’ house, perfectly. Since the variety of birds in Brooklyn was small—sparrows, robins, and finches mostly—watching the Bishops was at least equally as interesting.
The day they moved in, a cold and rainy March day, I was home with a new bout of sore tonsils, eating blue Popsicles and hoping for a cardinal sighting. Instead, I saw the U-Haul truck pull up and the Bishops emerge, blinking and dazed like they had landed on the moon. All of them looked misplaced, even the father, who lacked the efficient demeanor of most of the fathers I knew. Mr. Bishop appeared to have just woken up. Mrs. Bishop seemed about to break, too delicate and fragile for a mother. Normally I would have delighted in spying on two girls moving into our neighborhood, but these two, shivering in their thin cotton shirts and jeans jackets, wispy blond hair tangling in the rain, did not look like new friends to me.
Just-beginning-to-bud trees blocked the view between the street and the Bishops’ third floor. Disappointed, I turned my attention back to birdwatching. “The only essential equipment for seeing birds is a pair of eyes,” my guidebook said. I ate blue Popsicles and chewed Aspergum. Our house filled with the sounds of repair, drills, saws, large things being torn apart. I watched.
“THE PHOEBE,” MY mother, Phoebe, announced drunkenly, “is the only bird who says its name.”
We were hosting the welcome party for the Bishops. All the parties in those days were the same. Vats of vegetarian food—hummus and lasagna and tabouleh. Down on Atlantic Avenue Middle Eastern stores lined the street and supplied our neighborhood with all of its hors d’ouevres. The adults drank jugs of chianti, talked too loudly, burned thick candles everywhere, played old Bob Dylan albums, sang Simon and Garfunkel songs until their voices cracked. The Bishops didn’t know what to make of any of it.
“It’s true,” my mother insisted. “The phoebe is unique that way.”
Mr. Bishop, who had been aloof and maybe even bored the entire night, said suddenly and loudly, “Bobwhite! Bobwhite!” He said it like a challenge, in a booming voice.
My mother laughed. “Excuse me?” she said. Whenever she drank too much wine she grew an accent like the Queen of England.
“The bobwhite, darling,” Mr. Bishop said, leaning his tall frame until his face was very close to hers. “The bobwhite says its name.”
Of course everyone was watching. Already no one much liked the Bishops. He drank scotch all night and refused the lasagna; he was a playwright who had come here from California. His wife had murder in her past, which explained the terrified look she wore. Her entire family—parents and two brothers—had been famously killed while they slept in their suburban Ohio home; Mrs. Bishop was away at college. She was an artist of some kind, a dancer or a poet, mysterious and sad. Mr. Bishop, Colin, was tall and hawk-nosed but his wife was small and slender with thick wavy blond hair. Her name was Babe.
“They’re quails, you know,” Mr. Bishop told my mother as if he were sharing a great confidence.
From where I sat, bored and sleepy, my throat still aching, on our brown corduroy beanbag, I could see that Mr. Bishop had one ear pierced and wore a diamond stud in it.
“Honestly,” my mother said, all la-di-dah, “I don’t know one fucking thing about birds.”
Mr. Bishop thought this was the funniest thing ever. He laughed long and hard, still way too close to my mother, who smiled up at him.
“Do you know anything about stained-glass windows?” Mrs. Randall was asking Mrs. Bishop. That’s how Mrs. Randall was, relentless. At her house she never left you alone, always plying you with her homemade granola or iced tea with soggy mint leaves floating in it. “Because I believe this one could be a Tiffany. An original. The amethyst and topaz colors are as rich as any I’ve seen in the books. Maybe you could come and look at it? Maybe tomorrow?”
“I don’t know,” Mrs. Bishop said, trying to catch her husband’s attention. But he only had eyes for my mother. He had knelt down at her side and the two of them, heads bent toward each other, were talking quietly.
“I won’t hold you to it,” Mrs. Randall said. “Just a look-see.”