Covering most of the opposite wall was a bird-watcher’s map of the world. It made the birds look like conquerors, their colorful shapes crowding every continent like game pieces or markers on a battle plan. Birds had such wonderful names, Saga thought as she let her eyes roam the map. Way down in Australia, Rainbow Lorikeet, Satin Bowerbird, Tawny Frogmouth; in Africa, the Green Wood-Hoopoe, the Sacred Ibis, the Fulvous Whistling Duck. (Fulvous?! Was that an ordinary word with an ordinary meaning? A word swollen, tender, and pink, like a nursing breast…) In Europe, her favorites were the Chiffchaff, the Fieldfare, the Stonechat, the Capercaillie; to the far north, Oldsquaw and Parasitic Jaeger.
The birds’ migration routes crisscrossed the map like a craze of telephone wires, swooping gracefully from one coast to another. They seemed almost to secure the world, all these well-traveled paths in the sky, the way ribbon or twine secures a precious gift. And yet, it occurred to Saga, all the creatures pictured here, though they might venture the whole world over, returned in the end to their separate colonies. Could you be a roving homebody?
Is that what I might be? she wondered: someone who roams and roams yet always goes home to roost?
After leaving the bathroom, she stopped to look at the desk against the back wall. There, pinned to another board, was another picture of those same two children, younger perhaps. They sat in the lap of a pretty woman with milky skin and red hair threaded with silver. Saga had been in the store many times by now and was sure she would remember if she’d seen this woman before. Or maybe she wouldn’t. Or maybe Fenno was divorced. There was also a picture of a Border collie lying against a bookcase. That must be the dog he’d lost, the one he missed. Saga touched the dog’s nose—graying, just like the hair of the pretty woman. A dog who’d lived to a ripe old age; that pleased her. Fenno took good care of those he loved—but where were his children?
For most of the time since the accident, certainly since David had left, Saga had assumed that she would probably never find someone to marry, certainly never have babies. Her doctors did not bring it up, and neither did she. She had her periods—the part of her that could nurture a baby was healthy—but until two years ago there had been the seizures, and even now she had spells of vertigo, numbnesses that came and went, the headaches. Whenever she felt a longing—as she did when she heard Michael’s news—she couldn’t help feeling that to ask for too much was to tempt fate. She was lucky to be walking, conversing, leading an almost regular life.
And she had her shared life with Uncle Marsden. Alone together, they joked about what it must look like to people who didn’t know them. “Look at that bozo. He thinks you’re my child bride—my trophy wife—and I don’t mind one bit!” Uncle Marsden had said one evening last summer. It was a gorgeous evening, the air about them soothing and pink. They’d been playing Parcheesi on the front porch as neighbors and their weekend guests walked along the road and waved. Uncle Marsden and Saga waved back. Sometimes they took a picnic to the beach just as the sun began its slide toward the west. Uncle Marsden might take a book of poems and read to her. It was awfully close to romantic.
But ever since the strange, frightening day when Saga had met Stan and they’d had sex, the impression of that physical encounter had trailed her like a ghost, one that grew less malevolent with time. Saga could not forget the orgasm, nor could she stop herself from re-creating it—and when she did, she thought not of Stan (certainly not!) but of men she’d seen yet did not know, men from the train, the beach, the supermarket. Across the street, in Commodore Perry’s house, there was a grown son who came to visit on weekends: he had long dark hair, wide shoulders, and a smooth golden chest. In the summer, he walked about in nothing more than a skimpy black bathing suit and sneakers.
It was as if she’d rediscovered a flavor of life that the accident had erased from her mental palate—a flavor she now craved, as maybe she had in the time before. Had David fulfilled that craving? She supposed he must have, though she did not recall sex with David very clearly. The memories had faded naturally, or they had been blurred.
And then she had stumbled into that bookstore, and she had met Fenno: the bird prince, the man who made her think of Rapunzel, the princess trapped in the tower, the tower in the garden. Not that Saga was Rapunzel, certainly not. And not that Uncle Marsden’s wonderful, wonderful house could ever be seen as a prison. No, it was a palace, the place a princess would want to end up, would want to live happily ever after. If, of course, it was rightfully hers.
WHEN SAGA ARRIVED AT HOME THAT NIGHT, she found Uncle Marsden sitting on the living room floor. Beside him, on a patch of newspapers in the middle of the Persian rug, stood an antique cradle, dark wood with long graceful rockers and spindles carved to look like slender pine cones. There was also a pile of rags and a bucket of gray water. The air smelled heavy, like varnish.
“Hello, my dear! Will you come have a peek at this grand little treasure I’ve rescued from oblivion and rot? My father made it. I could hardly manage so much as a balsa toy plane! I missed out on these genes.” Uncle Marsden ran four fingers along the rail he had been polishing.
He stood and went over to the sofa. He lifted a lumpy rectangular object. “Horsehair,” he said. “I can hardly believe I let our daughters sleep on this. Ouch! Like a pincushion now. Feel how heavy.” Saga took the mattress from her uncle. It was prickly and leaden and smelled like mildew.
“You’ll need to get a new mattress,” she said as she leaned it against a wall. She began opening windows. The air that poured in was fresh and cold, a relief from the stifling chemical smell.
“Yes, some newfangled fireproof organic-wool moth-resistant never-wrinkle sort of thing that will cost an arm and a leg—which bringing this thing down two flights of stairs nearly cost me as well.”
Saga ran her own hand along the cradle. Cleverly, it had been made to rock not side to side but head to foot, the way a mother would rock her baby in her arms. The pine cones must have taken forever. Words were carved into one of the plain pale slats in the bottom; she knelt to look. PRO FILIO MEO 1925. A small thrill ran through Saga; this cradle had been made by her own grandfather. Had her mother slept in it, too? “Filio—isn’t that ‘son’? Uncle Marsden, this was made for you.”
He looked over her shoulder. “Young lady, you will not carbon-date me. Now stop snooping into chronological matters and make me a drink. Please.”
As she stood at the bar, Saga watched her uncle reach into a cardboard box. He shook out a parcel of tissue paper and held up a tiny lacy dress, impossibly long and lapsed from its original white to the yellow of untended teeth.
“Oh my.” Uncle Marsden peered at the dress. “Michael’s christening gown.” He smoothed it out against the back of the sofa. “Oh my.”
Saga gave him his drink. The gown looked like an object from a museum; hard to believe that Aunt Liz would have dressed a baby in this garment. Had this, too, been Uncle Marsden’s before it was Michael’s?
The box was labeled BABY MICHAEL. Her uncle reached into it and pulled out a grubby stuffed elephant in a clear plastic bag; a wooden fire engine, its red paint cracked and peeling; a tiny three-legged stool painted with a fleeing dish and spoon; a pair of brown leather shoes that had curled and petrified; and three picture books: Roar and More, Wee Gillis, and The Cat in the Hat Comes Back.
“Oh my goodness, my goodness me,” said Uncle Marsden. “I do remember reading this.” He opened Roar and More, a yellow book with a crouching lion on the front. The spine snapped. “If a lion comes to visit, don’t open your door. Just firmly ask ‘What is it?’ and listen to him…ROOOOOAAAARRR.”
Saga and Uncle Marsden laughed loudly. She sat beside him on the couch as he flipped through the book, murmuring with pleasure. “Oh, this verse I always loved. ‘Fishes are finny, fishes are funny. They don’t go dancing. They don’t make money. They live under water. They don’t have troubles. And when they talk, it looks like bubbles.’” Uncle Marsden attempted a bubbling noise.
>
Saga looked closely at the illustration of pastel green fish. She felt a gust of cold air from an open window. She was sure she could remember Uncle Marsden reading this book to her, this very verse, along with her cousins. He paged slowly to the end—past a cat, a pack of yellow dogs, bees, a mouse, a giraffe—and closed the book. He let it sit on his lap, both hands flat on the cover. Saga noticed all the brown spots on his hands, the sliver of fragile white skin under the edge of his wedding ring.
“Let me see that one.” Saga reached across her uncle and picked up Wee Gillis, a book with a plaid jacket and a drawing of a boy in a jaunty Scottish cap.
Uncle Marsden winced and set his book aside. He clasped his left shin with both hands.
“What is it?” said Saga.
“Oh, I bollixed myself up good when I was trying to get the cradle around that turn on the landing.”
“Let me look.” Saga sat on the floor at Uncle Marsden’s feet. He did not protest when she lifted his trouser leg. Sure enough, there was a nasty red and purple scrape below his knee. “You don’t want this to get infected.”
“I think I’d look dashing with a peg leg, don’t you?”
She went to the bathroom and brought back alcohol, cotton, a large Band-Aid, and a tube of ointment.
“Let’s go hunting for lichens this weekend, shall we?” said Uncle Marsden as she tended to his leg. “We’re supposed to have a last little warm spell, and I need to add to my slide show for that lecture I’m giving in March. Freshen my material. Though, alas, morphology is now passé. It’s all about DNA.”
Saga agreed to the expedition. Unless Stan summoned her, she rarely went to the city on weekends; the bookstore had so many customers then, and Fenno did not work on Sundays. Perhaps he spent Sunday with his children.
The house still stank of turpentine, so Uncle Marsden decided they would go out to dinner. At the Oyster Shack, a place with dusty fishing nets and lobster traps suspended from the ceiling, they ate fried clams while Uncle Marsden reminisced about what it was like to take on fatherhood in his late thirties, how his best friend’s children had been applying to college when Marsden was helping Liz, for the second and not the last time, warm bottles at four in the morning. “I was the laughingstock of the department. And now,” he said, “only now does it occur to me that Michael’s doing the same thing—though nowadays it seems to be the norm, does it not? Now I wouldn’t be snickered at, would I? I’d be doing the mature thing. Parenthood as a rational choice.”
“People want to pack a lot in now,” said Saga. “Before they have kids.”
“I saw people pack in plenty back then, even with kids in tow,” said Uncle Marsden. “We weren’t so finicky. Everything wasn’t so scheduled. Everything wasn’t so absurdly safe. People drove across the country in station wagons with half a dozen children bouncing around like billiard balls.”
“I don’t think wanting to be safe is bad,” said Saga. Her remark came out accidentally as scolding, and Uncle Marsden looked at her intently. She knew the look: it meant he was thinking about her in some critically tender way. This always made her nervous. She didn’t want him to comment on her “progress” or ask when her next checkup would be or, worse, how her friend Stan was doing.
She said, “A year from now, we’ll have a baby around.” She smiled.
“Yes,” Uncle Marsden said quietly. “Won’t that be something.” He was still giving her that look, but when he next spoke, he was back on the condominiums again, how they must be stopped.
Only later, as she climbed into bed with this curious book, Wee Gillis, did it occur to Saga that Uncle Marsden had asked her nothing about her day.
SAGA HAD LOVED BEING AN ONLY CHILD. She’d had the best of both worlds: all her parents’ attention when they had time to play, all her grandparents’ attention when the cousins were not around—and then, whenever they went to the big house (her grandparents’ summer place before it was Uncle Marsden’s all year round), the easy company of her cousins.
How different it had been when they were small. Michael was always a little bossy, but you had to excuse that behavior in an oldest child—and in an only boy, which back then counted for a lot. Frida and Pansy, only two years apart, were close in those days. By junior high, they’d formed a plan to grow up and be stewardesses for TWA. Sometimes together and sometimes apart, they would fly to every continent; by the time they grew up, there would be regular service to both poles as well. Fatefully, they would meet foreign princes in first class. Having read an article about the world’s young royals in Life magazine, they kept a list of the candidates, along with other titled heirs.
The sisters would marry their princes—preferably in countries not too far apart, like Monaco and Greece—and each would have her own private jet, which she would already know how to fly. Frida said that if you were a stewardess, you had to learn to fly a plane, in case your pilot had a heart attack while he was in the air. So they would visit back and forth whenever they pleased, borrow each other’s ball gowns and learn each other’s second languages. Their royal husbands would be best friends, soul mates, each godfather to the other one’s children. Frida wanted seven children, Pansy just three.
Saga admired their plan and their complete confidence that they would carry it out. It was decided that Saga, with her love of animals and her fantasies of seeing the world, would create and run a wildlife park in each of their countries. Saga would meet and marry someone like James Herriott or one of the Leakeys—a “prince of science,” as Frida put it.
Michael, meanwhile, planned to become either a magician or the doctor who would cure cancer. He would not need the use of their silly, frivolous jets. Sometimes the girls gave in and played Michael’s games: they submitted to being sawed in half, or they were the nurses in his clinic.
When the four children were not constructing the future, they would dig great holes on the beach, down to where the sand became a glistening black, or hunt in the tide pools among the rocks or, back at the house, play board games or sardines. Charades was a favorite after dinner, though the grown-ups would insist on joining if they had nothing better to do. They drank their golden cocktails and clowned around like the apes Saga would one day have collected for her twin royal wildlife parks if Frida and Pansy hadn’t let life—real, nonroyal boyfriends and down-to-earth college professors and summer jobs—distract them from their plans.
Now Pansy was a school psychologist in New Haven, and Frida ran a hunger project in Boston. They had not married princes, not yet anyway. They had not married anyone. Pansy was thirty-five, Frida thirty-seven. They wanted to be more than aunts. They had never discussed this in depth with Saga, but you’d have to be an idiot not to know it.
SHE WAS DOWN IN THE BASEMENT. Oneeka was off for the day, so Saga had volunteered to flatten the week’s cardboard boxes and stack them up for recycling. She worked carefully with the box cutter, a tool she would not have trusted herself to use two years before.
The first time she heard a customer talking to Fenno upstairs, she laid down the box and the cutter and went to the desk. She sat in the chair, facing the bulletin board with the photographs of the children. Slowly, she opened the center drawer. In its trays she found the usual things: pencils, pens, paper clips, rubber bands, a box of staples, a roll of Wint O Green Life Savers, a nest of crumpled receipts. Under a pack of bookplates with the store’s trademark owl, she found a Polaroid picture of Fenno with Felicity. He looked a little younger—maybe just because he was laughing. Felicity’s wings were a blur; she might have been about to take flight from his shoulder. They were indoors somewhere, but it didn’t look like the store.
She closed the drawer quietly when she heard Fenno say good-bye to the latest customer, heard the string of bells on the door jostle and jingle. “Faring well down there?” Fenno called out.
“Oh yes!” she answered. She went back to slitting seams on the boxes until she heard Fenno talking on the phone.
The drawers on the l
eft contained business: invoices, order forms, letters from publishers, best-seller lists. In the top-right drawer she found Scotch tape, scissors, a stapler, three rubber stamps, a stamp pad, a bag of sunflower seeds.
On her final round of snooping, in the right-hand bottom drawer, she found a soft plaid scarf (struggling, in vain, to find the word for that very expensive, very fine wool; was it from goats?), a compact umbrella, and a framed picture where Fenno—definitely younger, with blonder hair and rosy cheeks—stood in front of a blooming lilac bush with two other men. Had he mentioned brothers?
She was jolted, and nearly slammed the drawer, when Fenno called down, “Leave the rest, why don’t you, and come up for tea.”
It was no longer warm enough to sit in the garden, so Saga joined Fenno at his upstairs desk (she supposed there was no way she could explore those drawers). Fenno made a series of phone calls to customers waiting for books. Saga sipped her tea. She was happy listening to his voice, which could carry you off to some green hilly place in Scotland. Saga had never been to Scotland, but she had a clear image of the land. The landscape in Wee Gillis, that book from Michael’s box, looked a lot like the landscape in the photo of Fenno with those children.
Cashmere. There: that was the soft, expensive wool. A deep lavender word, an early twilight word, expansive as the folded hills of the Highlands but pillowy, gentle.
When Fenno finished his calls, he thanked Saga for her help, the way he always did. “I’m not awfully good at hiring new people when I need them,” he said. “So it’s a blessing of sorts that you found me.”
Saga blushed. “You have Oneeka.”
Fenno laughed as if she’d made a joke. “Yes I do, and she’s smashing. But in a way she found me, too.”