The Bird House A Novel

February 16, 2010



Ellie is coming over tomorrow after her violin lesson, which is a few blocks away, and staying for an early supper. On the phone she asked, tentatively, what I would be serving, as if she knew it was bad manners to ask, then turned and whispered “macaroni and cheese” to her mother, who was clearly standing nearby, requesting an answer. I hadn’t seen her in a few months but I imagined she still liked cheese. At the last minute, I added, “Tell her it will be homemade. With organic cheddar cheese. From Whole Foods.” Oh, I was really laying it on, wasn’t I? I was also lying, as I’d never even set foot in Whole Foods, which is on Tinsley’s end of town, not mine.

But what did Tinsley think? That my cupboards are bare? That I’ve forgotten what little girls eat? I’d always thought of her as highly organized but I was beginning to suspect she was a control freak. Tom told me once it was because she skipped a grade in school, and had gone to college a year younger than everyone else. Said she was always trying to catch up, trying to prove herself to be grown up and mature and “together.” She’s been an adult her whole life, Mother, he’d said. Well, she didn’t need to tell this particular adult what to feed a child!

I still remember my own tea parties, the pale cups, marzipan apples, and soft sandwiches my mother helped Bertha assemble in the butler’s pantry near the patio. I remember her laughing and telling Bertha it didn’t matter what you put in a tea party sandwich as long as it wasn’t green and you cut the crusts off. She was right; my mother couldn’t boil an egg, but with children it was all about color and presentation. That was something Theo had never really understood. He winced when I’d bring home a plastic truck or a bright clown; he’d rub his head Christmas morning as if the shiny toys and metallic paper hurt his eyes. He liked wood, brass, leather. Toy trains were fine but matchbox cars were frowned upon. Toy soldiers were acceptable but those wind-up tin monkeys had to go. The pale blue walls in Tom’s room were a compromise; Theo couldn’t stand the idea of childish wallpaper. The walls are still blue, but it’s not a bedroom anymore. There is no crib or bed, only bookshelves and an armoire. Children don’t sleep here anymore, but they’ve left their imprint here nonetheless.

My bath was quick so I’d have time to prepare for Ellie’s arrival. I could make the macaroni and cheese tomorrow, but I needed to gather materials for her first. I went up in the attic, pulled the chain to the light, and surveyed the landscape of sheet-covered furniture, vinyl wardrobes, leather trunks, and boxes. The topography of the past. On my left were the dark brown ones, from my mother, stacked four deep; the smaller black one from Theo’s family, and farther away, on the right, the green ones Theo and I had packed with the children’s things. I knelt in front of Theo’s black family trunk and ran my hand across its dusty lid. A chimney fire at his parents’ Wilmington estate destroyed everything in their attic, the second floor, and most of the first; only a few scrapbooks and yearbooks from the library had been retrieved. I’d forgotten how little remained from Theo’s side, and I felt a sudden tenderness toward it now, as if it were an urn, or a small casket of bones. The Harris luggage tag dangled from the rightside handle, and I cupped it in my hand. When his parents sold the main property and moved into the carriage house, there wasn’t room for too many old memories, anyway; it was as if the fire conspired in their downsizing. But unlike my mother, they had at least lost their money the old-fashioned way: in a stock market crash.

I sighed and turned to my family’s trunks. Between my mother’s family, the Biddles, and my father’s, the Stinsons, I had dozens of leather-bound albums stashed inside, each embossed with the family crest. As I get older, I understand the practicality of monogramming—so useful for those with a flagging memory. Once I was at bridge club and couldn’t for the life of me remember my host’s first name. The hand towels in the bathroom saved me: M was for Mary. Of course!

I pulled out book after book and started to leaf through them. I’d have to pick and choose what would be useful to Ellie so as not to overwhelm her. My father’s African safari, for instance, with the bloody zebra carcasses, was probably something to avoid. She might, however, be interested in my aunt Lillian’s time as a missionary in Costa Rica. (We told people she was a missionary, but what she really did was give family money to young men she found attractive and compelling. “He speaks like a poet!” she’d told us one Christmas, and while my mother smiled tersely, my darling aunt Caro replied, “And have you played with his pentameter yet?”)

But choosing a topic? That was harder. Ellie’s teacher wanted the class to gather materials on an “aspect” of the family—a sport or a hobby that was threaded through the generations. Interview a grandparent and focus on one aspect of the family, was what the assignment sheet said. Collect items for scrapbook pages and write one or two paragraphs about this aspect. She read it to me over the phone, and her voice changed when she read it, in a serious, concentrating way.

“I think we should do cooking,” Ellie said.

I loved the way she said “we,” as if I were her classmate, but I had to stifle a bit of laughter as I informed her that neither of her great-grandmothers knew how to boil water.

“What about the great-grandfathers?”

This swelled me with pride for her father’s unique cooking abilities. I had taught him how to make a croque monsieur at ten, and by the time he was in high school, instead of taking his prom date to the country club for dinner, he made her steak on our patio. Tom, I was certain, packed his own lunch.

“Well, men didn’t cook much back then, dear. They worked and traveled a lot.”

“So there are no family recipes?” she asked innocently.

“Not really,” I sighed.

She thought about this for a moment; you could feel the heat of her brain absorbing this new information, this lacking. Recipes could fill up many pages of a report. Cooking was an excellent choice when you were going for quantity.

“Did they eat a lot of takeout?”

“Yes,” I said and smiled, and left it at that. Let one of her other privileged Main Line classmates be the one to stand up and say her family had servants who planned seasonal menus, who shopped, cooked, and cleaned up after them. That her family recipes included Mamie’s buttermilk pancakes.

Her disappointment was palpable, even over the phone. She’d imagined photos of her grandmother and great-grandmother in the kitchen, heads bowed over a marble rolling pin. She’d hoped for photographs of birthday cakes, of glistening roasts, of generations gathered around the barbecue pit. She’d hoped, in short, for another family. I told her I thought a lot of other children would choose “Family Recipes”; that if she wanted to stand out, she’d have to think of something cleverer anyway.

“But I already drew the cover,” she confessed.

I laughed, and she giggled, too, realizing how silly and futile a decision that was. I decided to let Tinsley handle the rest of that conversation—about being organized but also being flexible. Applauding the cover before it was thrown away. A mother’s place, not a grandmother’s. Still, I glistened with a mother’s pride as I held the phone—that some part of me had resulted in a child who could see a project complete, whole and pleasing, before she’d even begun.

I sat on the attic floor paging through the scrapbooks, looking for “aspects.” There were no common sports—some played tennis, some golf. Some rode animals and some hunted them, like my father. (My great-grandfather Biddle and his brother were alcoholics, but I didn’t think a family recipe like shaken martinis would go over so well.) There wasn’t even a common town—we’d scattered. Some lived in Chestnut Hill and Connecticut, in addition to the Main Line. And Theo’s family was from Wilmington of course.

Gardening? There was a photo of my father and me cross-legged on the path, fiddling near the stone wall past the patio. We must have been working on our fairy garden. I remember how gently he gathered toadstools and wove lean-tos of grass with moss roofs, while I assembled a family of pinecone mice. We made a new one every year, until I was sixteen and stopped speaking to him. I’d tried to get Tom interested in building one, but he preferred large projects—he loved digging, carrying rocks, getting dirty. Even as a little boy, he thought big, and had no patience for anything too twee. But Ellie—perhaps she’d enjoy it? It was possible she was too old, and had already passed through her magical phase. I’d have to ask her come spring.

I turned the pages. All the family homes featured beautiful gardens, especially my mother’s first “rose cottage” in Nantucket, before it was sold to pay taxes. I ran my hand over the photo, feeling the warmth and minerals and salty air that combined to make that corner of the island magical enough to allow roses to climb up walls. I remember how much it hurt my mother to give it up, how she cried over it twice; once when she sold it, and once, years later, in her hospital bed, knowing she’d never go there again. That was the last thing she wanted to see, imprinted on her for eternity: pink roses and blue sky. It proved as ephemeral as the fairy garden, though, didn’t it, Daddy?

That little garden started a lifelong love of flowers and plants, though, so I suppose I should thank my dear departed dad. I fill my own flower boxes, plant my own bulbs, pull my own weeds, but I know none of the other women in my family had ever actually touched soil. (Or diapers, or dishwater, for that matter.) My mother creamed her hands and slept with cotton gloves on; she even wore gloves when she drove a car, as if to protect her hands from leather. When she died and they folded her hands across her chest in the casket, they still looked alive, as if they could reach out suddenly and touch me across the cheek.

No, “Gardening” was probably not destined to be Ellie’s “aspect,” either. After several hours of searching, the best common theme I could come up with was “Architecture.” Two architects in the family, after all—my father and Theo—and every house in every photo elegant and grand. Even mine, so leaky and imperfect, so inappropriate for old age with its sets of steep stairs—even mine has the high tin ceilings, the deep windowsills, the three miniature fireplaces Theo was so proud of. We are a people, all of us, who love the great bones of a house. Even when it’s drafty and expensive to heat. Even when it sits on the auction block. The last year of my mother’s life, I would sit with her in her little room, me in the armchair, and she on one edge of the bed, working the trim of the matelasse coverlet between two fingers like a talisman. Suddenly, she’d stand up and walk over to the dresser, pick up her silver mirror or brush, then stop, one hand in the air, and spin around. “Where’s the drawing room?” she’d cry. “Where is the foyer?” She looked at me the way children have looked at parents since the beginning of time. Expectantly. Assuming I would know the answer to even an unanswerable question.

“That’s in the other house, Mother. This is your pied-à-terre.”

“Ah,” she’d say, and smile, lulled by the information, or merely soothed by the sound of foreign words.

Architecture; that would be my recommendation. The cover, I thought, would be easy for Ellie to redraw. A door perhaps, or a charming door knocker. Why, I could give her all of Theo’s old blueprints to use! They were in one of the dark trunks, I think.

When I reached the attic stairs, the momentum of the creaking floor sent the light cord swinging slightly over my head. I could feel the breeze on my scalp as my eyes landed briefly on the green trunks in the corner, the ones I didn’t dare open.

I turned off the light, climbed back down, and went to bed, much as Ellie must have the evening before, thinking I had it all planned out.