“It’s even more beautiful than a swan,” we said in unison. “I call it the Topaz Bird,” she sighed. “A bird that shines like topaz. A bird so beautiful that you scarcely can bear to look at it.” I knew what my mother meant. I felt I could barely look at her straight on, most times.
“But when you do, once you finally get the courage, your eyes begin to shine, bright, bright.”
“To become the Topaz Bird somehow,” I said, pausing for a moment trying to picture this. “It has the most magnificent—”
“Plumage,” my mother said. I loved the way she said plumage, the beautiful mouth she made for the word plumage.
“Plumage,” I said, trying to imitate her.
“And you must follow it — wherever it takes you. You must not be afraid,” she whispered. “It means us no harm.”
I love her in the deepest cells of my sleep. I feel her warm breath as I descend into sleep and hear her voice long after she has left the room. The Topaz Bird sings in her throat. The Topaz Bird flies from her mouth. I could almost see it those nights. There was such longing there in the dark.
I would love to follow that bird through my moody half-sleep. “My precious, precious,” I would say, reaching, straining.
She kisses me on the forehead and shuts off the light. I have never seen the Topaz Bird but I feel that something of it forms with the part of my mother I keep after she has left the room — her smell on me still, her kiss resting on my forehead. Each night, I take the simple, strange story into sleep and dream it.
I will find that precious bird. I build a nest in my ear for it. I prepare a place. I make a circle of my forefinger and thumb and fill it with something soft. I open the palm of my hand and offer it.
Oh, if I saw that bird—
Oh, if I saw that bird I would not hesitate to follow. The kiss lingers…
Though I am nineteen years old now, I have never seen that precious bird, but the kiss lingers. “Mom,” I say.
She is so far away.
Mother, here are the parts of the story you forgot to tell, the parts of the story I learned in my sleep.
When the Topaz Bird finally appeared after hundreds of years, your mother recognized it, even before opening her pale eyes, and through the layers of her fatigue she let out a small cry. Her family had waited so long and intently for that mythic creature to appear again that she could hardly fail to see it, even in the dark, even through her lidded eyes, as it flew past the hospital window at the hour her first child was born.
The doctors had advised my grandmother, a young woman with a rheumatic heart, not a grandmother at all then, not to have children; the consequences would be grave. But, holding in her arms her healthy baby, which felt quite strong, she knew it had been the right thing. “I will have children,” she had told the doctors, “there is nothing you can do about it.” The bird flew bv again. She opened her eyes. She saw only a blur but she knew what it was, and the pain from childbirth was mingled with an enormous joy. So the bird was the Bird of Luck, she thought, and of Good Health.
She heard its song. No one as far as she could remember, not even George, had ever mentioned its song. She wondered whether anyone had ever heard it before. She did not know if it was a happy song or a sad song — that was the way she was accustomed to thinking — but its beauty brought tears to her eyes, and she would write in her diary often of the haunting melody that followed her up and down the sloping terrain of her illness.
As she sat up in the white bed holding her daughter close, the melody grew louder. She struggled to get up so that she might see the bird clearly at last. When she finally reached the window and looked out into the snow, she gasped, for she saw exactly what she had pictured since she had first heard the story as a little girl. It was perched on the bare branch of a chestnut tree. It was tiny, tiny, a sort of hummingbird, she thought, with a few crimson feathers, green at the throat, and possessing an all-over topaz glow. It was beautiful, even more beautiful than they had said, and the young mother and her daughter stood drenched in its magnificent light.
Grandma Alice knew right away that her life was a bordering life, that the bird was not reallv hers to see, and she wondered, looking at it, what transformations the Topaz Bird had made on that journey from the branch of the chestnut tree to her brain. She was aware that she was probably not seeing it clearly. She held her daughter up to the glow and watched her new eyes turn from pale blue to violet to deep blue to turquoise then back to pale blue again. What did the bird, here on this first day of March, mean for her sweet, smiling little girl?
She held my mother at the window for what seemed a long time. The Topaz Bird continued to sing and did not move from the tree, and my grandmother, too, standing in the brilliant light, felt only an hour old. She felt as if the world were only beginning for her, too. In fact my grandmother was entering a new stage as she stood before the Topaz Bird, having brought it back, after so long, with her daughter’s birth: it was the beginning of the end of her life.
Chased back to bed by the nurses, the Topaz Bird flown off, the baby back in the nursery, my grandmother had a chance to think now for the first time about what was happening. There, as she drifted in and out of sleep, each member of the Hauser family appeared before her, perfectly clear against the hospital white. So the dead are even more detailed in appearance than the living, she sighed, looking at the knotted hands, counting the wrinkles, noting the many tones that made up the color of hair. She felt exhausted.
They were still searching for the Topaz Bird as she conjured them. Since the reunion in 1900 when they were alerted of the bird’s existence, each Hauser had searched for it, dreamt of it, convinced they would see it if they were diligent, patient. In the middle of many nights they had opened their eyes, positive that the bird would be there, only to see empty space, a straight-backed chair, a bowl of fruit. A few had written through the years of a glowing feeling, a sudden flush on their faces, a strange fluttering in their chests, the bird apparently caught in the human rib cage with no way out.
I imagine my grandmother must have felt the Topaz Bird near her her whole life, that presence having grown stronger and stronger with each month of pregnancy. Perhaps it was the Bird of Death after all, she thought through those months, as the doctors had said. But no, now she saw that it was not. Her baby was healthy and she felt fine.
Whatever it meant, she had prepared for it, knowing it was getting closer and closer, and so she was not surprised to see it at the birth of her daughter Christine. Yet despite her preparation, she was frightened a little, she didn’t know why, and she wrote later in her journal of that fear. What did it mean for her perfect, healthy daughter? In the family folklore the bird was rumored to be the Luminous Bird of Genius.
In the long history of the Hauser family the Topaz Bird had been sighted only twice. The first time was in Germany by George Hauser, a pianist and composer. He had had a glimpse of it, the story goes, while out for his mid-morning walk. “A piece has broken off the sun and taken the shape of a bird,” he told his wife Hannah, breathlessly, upon his return. But at this point Hannah was no longer a good listener. She shook her head; her large arms shook as she kneaded the bread. So I have married a crazy man, she thought. This vision of a bird only reinforced what she already knew. On endless staves he furiously wrote notes, but what came out was not music, everyone agreed about that. What came out, despite all the notes he wrote, the neat clefs, the rests, was not music. It was noise, anarchy. He looked so much like a composer as he wrote. Oh, that was the worst part; he looked so serious, so concentrated, so wrapped in it, but it was all nonsense. There was no discernible order. Everyone said so. And order was everything in Germany in those days.