Silhouette of a Sparrow

Finally, Thursday arrived. I’d warned Mrs. Harrington that I’d be spending the entire afternoon at the library and she should not expect me for lunch, so after work I headed directly for the lakeshore. The three rocks where I was to meet Isabella for an afternoon of fishing stood near the beaches, a ways up the shoreline from the Galpin House. I was pretty sure I’d be out of sight from the hotel’s veranda once I got there, but the walk took me right past it, and I prayed the Harringtons were safely at their lunch in the dining room as I hurried by.

The bellboy was helping a petite elderly woman up the front steps. He looked up and caught my eye. Oh, no! He saw me! Panic stopped me in my tracks.

It had all taken no more than a few seconds, but I mulled it over for the rest of the walk. Finally, I resolved to ignore the unsettled feeling in my stomach. The bellboy—no, she’d called him a doorman and the term was clearly much more dignified—the doorman was a friend of Isabella’s and that made him a friend of mine. Besides, he was the cormorant who’d helped us all through the hailstorm and I’d liked him from the beginning; I’d just never thought of him as someone to make friends with. But I needed all the friends I could get if I was going to keep seeing Isabella in secret—and I had every intention of doing just that.

The pants were rolled up almost to the knee, showing off firm, bare calves and little-girl feet, and she wore a sleeveless blouse with two buttons open at the neck. She managed to look grown-up in whatever she wore, even though she was hardly older than me.

How does she stay so pale? I wondered, staring at the milky white collarbones that she thought nothing of exposing to the harsh summer sun. It must be in her blood.

“Nonsense, you look beautiful,” she said. Then she set me up with a pole. I tried to imitate her casual posture, tried to hold the fishing pole in that comfortable, careless way that she was holding hers. It was just like the cigarette holder the other night—the thing just belonged with her; it was a part of her body that she carried with ease and confidence. I wondered if I looked like that with a sewing needle or a soup ladle, and I shuddered a little at the thought.

“Well, naturally. I know her type. They’re the ones that send the police to the dance hall every other night claiming that we’re ‘disturbing the peace.’ The managers hate that and so do I. You’ll have peace when you’re dead, that’s what I say. I bet she doesn’t care for books because ‘they give young girls all kinds of crazy ideas.’ How many times have I heard that one? But I suppose books are more wholesome and refined companions for you than I am, right?”

“That’s the general idea . . .” I squirmed in my seat on the rock. “But please don’t think, you know I don’t, I mean—”

“Of course not, Garnet, don’t worry. I’m flattered, actually, to be considered a bad influence. You don’t think I got my reputation by chance, do you?”

“Someone might see you. And some of them are gossips, I’m sure. But most of them will be too caught up in their own outings on a warm, sunny day like this to be worried about you. You’d be amazed how self-involved people can be.”

“Plus, from what I hear, plenty of people don’t much care for your aunt. So it’s not as though the town is crawling with her spies. But let’s be quiet now,” she said. “We’re frightening the fish.”

We sat there silently with our lines in the water for a long time and I could feel her beside me even though we didn’t touch. The fish weren’t biting but I didn’t mind—I could’ve waited all afternoon like that.

But then a great egret swooped low and landed in the shallows not fifteen feet down the shore from us. Bright white, slender, and elegant, it stalked its prey from above on stiltlike legs. Now and then it plunged its sharp beak into the water and surfaced with a small, struggling fish or frog clamped in its bill. It swallowed the creatures whole. The egret was so beautiful and so fierce that I couldn’t help myself—I slowly set down my fishing pole and reached into my pocket for scissors and paper. I began to cut. Gradually, the bird’s dark twin emerged from the paper.

Isabella looked dismayed that I’d given up on my pole to watch our highly skilled neighbor fish instead. But, intrigued, she turned to watch me as the image took shape in my hands. I felt her eyes on me.

“How do you do that?” she asked, her line still in the water. When I’d snipped back the last of the tail feathers, I pulled out a clean sheet and handed it to her, along with my scissors.

Reluctantly, she reeled in her line and set her pole down next to mine. She took the crane scissors from me and turned them over and over in her hand. She touched them with reverence, as though she’d never held anything so delicate in her life, running her slender fingers over the handles, the crane’s arched body, the hinge, the blades.

“My mother gave them to me so I wouldn’t dull my sewing scissors on paper. I was twelve. Father had just come home from the war and it was clear he wouldn’t be taking my side and helping me get back to real birding. So I make these.”

“Yes. She prefers it to the alternative—collecting specimens and things like that. But here’s what she doesn’t know.” I took out the chalk and labeled the bird Ardea alba.

“Latin names. I saw that on the gull you gave me. You’re a scientist as well as an artist then, I see.” I blushed. “Okay. You tried fishing, so I’ll give this a try.” She took the paper from me and looked down into the water. A small sunny drifted just below the surface. Tiny minnows darted anxiously around it, but it seemed to sense that we’d given up fishing for the moment, and it treaded water calmly It practically posed for Isabella.

A minute later, she’d hacked a fish shape out of the black paper—an oval with tail fins and pouting lips. “It’s no use,” she said. “I’m terrible at this.” She crumpled the paper in her hand and tried to give the scissors back. I didn’t take them. Instead, I pulled another fresh sheet out of my oversized pocket.

I’d never tried to put it into words before. I looked to the great white bird for help as I set out to explain a new way of seeing.

“You can’t just look at it and say ‘it’s an egret’ and then try to cut the shape of an egret,” I told her, thinking it out as I went. “You have to see it differently. You have to follow its edges and know that it’s only an egret because it isn’t water or sky or beach. It’s an egret because it has boundaries.”

I took a deep breath, turning my eyes back to the bird. “You have to look for the borders between things and trace those dividing lines without thinking that you know what an egret is, or what a cormorant is, or what a grouse is. It’ll surprise you every time when the silhouette turns out looking real—like you just snatched the bird’s shadow from under its feet.”

I smiled. “That’s what makes it a challenge. You just have to be quiet and not startle them, like a real field biologist.” I pointed to the egret and said, “Look—she posed for me, and she stayed here fishing with us this long.” Isabella still seemed interested, so I went on. “Scientists used to kill birds in order to study them, you know. They shot them down and stuffed them, and then they made their drawings and took their measurements. Modern scientists have been trying to study birds from life, like we are. It was Audubon who changed all that.”

“He was an ornithologist. He pointed out that scientists were doing more damage than good with the way they were studying birds. Showed them another way. I’ve been a Junior Audubon Society member since I was six. Father and I used to do all kinds of excursions. Then Aunt Rachel would take me while he was away at war even though Mother didn’t like it. I thought Father would start up again when he came home—but it didn’t happen that way.”

What was I doing? Why was I telling her all this? “Mother thinks it’s time for me to be a lady . . . and Father doesn’t really trust his sister, I don’t think. But at least he speaks to her. The rest of his family cut her off when she moved in with Sarah. I’ll bet Mrs. Harrington wouldn’t even admit to being related to Aunt Rachel—her own first cousin.”

“‘Moved in with Sarah,’ you said? Is that her lover?” Isabella’s voice was casual. The word lover took me by surprise and then sank in slowly.

“I suppose so. We never really talk about it that way. I guess my parents still like to consider it a Victorian friendship. They saw it differently in their time. Intimacy between women was just, well, normal. Now everyone thinks it’s a scandal. Sarah is just Aunt Rachel’s family, and we all know that. But I suppose they are . . . lovers.”

We were quiet for a moment, watching the waves. I turned the word over and over in my mind: lovers . . . lovers . . . lovers . . . My skin tingled.

“Anyway,” I said, shaking the word out of my head and handing Isabella the sheet of paper I still held, “pretend you’ve never seen a sunfish before, and look again. This kind of thing takes practice, so I’ll practice fishing while you try a second time.” I grabbed my pole and moved a little ways away so I wouldn’t frighten Isabella’s subject. And so my hands would stop trembling. I moved a little too quickly, though, and the egret shot me a suspicious glance. Then she flapped her wings and glided down the shore another twenty feet.

I cast my line back into the water. The rocks made a rough seat and the sun glared down at me. I’d left my hat back with Isabella. But I barely noticed any discomfort as I gazed out at the lake and watched the sailboats drift like white clouds across the blue. I thought about egrets and fathers and aunts and beautiful girls in pants, and I thought about how many kinds of love there are in the world.

The egret caught four or five courses of lunch in her new fishing spot. Isabella caught a decently rendered image of the sunny, and then put her line back in and caught the sunny himself, in celebration. “You’re not even a snack,” she said before releasing him again. I caught nothing, except maybe another freckle or two from the bright sun.

“Do you want an ice cream?” Isabella asked, coming to join me on my rock. Midday had turned to afternoon and sweat had begun to collect at my temples. My stomach growled in protest over missing lunch. There was nothing I wanted more than an ice cream.

But would Hannah be suspicious if I was gone too long? Would she tell her mother? If Mrs. Harrington knew I was out fishing with the dance hall girl she’d surely write to Mother. And what would Mother do? Tell Mrs. Harrington to keep a closer watch on me? Tell me to quit my job because it was clearly giving me improper ideas? Tell me to come home this instant so that she could keep me on a short leash for the rest of the summer, or the rest of my life? I could not let those things happen. I had to be careful.