What he heard no one else would hear for hundreds and hundreds of years.
The second time the Topaz Bird had been seen was in 1803 when Eva Hauser saw it one afternoon on the bough of a pear tree in Cummington, Massachusetts. Later, in her diary, she wrote, “All my art has been an attempt to recapture one image, that of a topaz bird I saw for one hour outside my house as a child. It refreshes me to think about and urges me on. Though I am already forty-five, my eyesight is still good and I have not given up the hope of seeing it once more.” She wrote this in 1837, having failed to make the gold leaf that would perhaps have approximated that vision. “It would have been easy to confuse it with the light of the sun and to have shaded my eyes or looked away, but it was a bird and I could not take my eyes from it.”
In the last years of her life, Eva, in an attempt to capture the Topaz Bird’s magnificent flight, found it necessary to add to her paintings snippets of paper, foreign stamps, pictures from tobacco packages, wood fragments, bits of glass, broken plates, photographs. “The audacity,” people said, “the audacity of this Eva Hauser.” But the women of the sewing circle gathering each week to make patchwork quilts were gentler; they felt sorry for Eva. “Let her be,” they whispered to their families, “let her just be.” She was mad, they knew, to see things that way, but “let her be.” And so they did. Eva was found dead in 1865, dried flowers, French stamps, corn husks, yarn, and scraps of paper surrounding her on the bed.
In the next century both Eva and George were treated more seriously by a nephew, Karl, who was studying the Hauser history. “It shall be very significant indeed,” he said, at a family gathering in 1900, “whoever sees the Topaz Bird next. It shall be very significant. This time we will know not to ridicule or humiliate. We know more now.”
So generation after generation of Hausers began to look into the air. People mistook them for snobs because their heads were always raised, but what they were looking for, of course, was that elusive bird. The tale was passed from father to son, mother to daughter. Filtered through time and various personalities, the interpretation changed. “It is the Bird of Truth and Light,” one man said. “It is the Bird of Supreme Sacrifice.” “The Bird of Insight.” “When it returns, it will be the Bird of Ultimate Pleasure.” During World War II, the Hausers, now real Americans, decided it was the Bird of Absolute Power, the Bird to Wipe Out Hitler. “No, it is the Bird of Peace,” another said.
Unbeknownst to them, the Topaz Bird was in Paterson, New Jersey, following a small girl as she went to school.
And so my Grandma Alice, though not surprised to see the bird outside her hospital window, must have smiled to herself, thinking of her family through time. And it must have occurred to her, remembering George and Eva, that they had only seen the bird for a short time, a moment really, and here it had lingered already all afternoon around her sweet but rather ordinary daughter. What could this mean, she wondered that night, as the nurse brought her baby to her. She held her tightly and felt her own heart give way. She would not live to read a single poem of her daughter’s or to find out what the Topaz Bird really meant.
What she knew was that the bird that followed my mother was precious.
I hope my young grandmother could fall a bit easier into death knowing that this special bird, years in forming, would always be with my mother. I hope she knew that it meant her no harm.
It was the Bird of Genius, Grandma Alice.
The wild, brilliant Bird of Imagination.
The Bird of Great Invention.
Invention was everything to my mother and in that quiet, dark house I too learned how to fill empty space and dispel silence.
In that house where she was so often absent, I learned how to conjure her back a little. Silence would give way to footsteps, shadows would lighten, and she would come a bit closer. I could see her stepping momentarily into light; I could see her gray gaze and the beautiful bone structure of her face. “Mother,” I would say, and she would turn to reveal the tendons in her neck or a curl that encircled her ear. I would see some familiar motion of hers and it would become new. I would see something more than I had before and I would understand her a little better.
I learned to halve the distance, then make smaller divisions. I might suddenly smell rain though the day was sunny, feel the texture of her hair, wild in such humidity, or watch her walk in moonlight as she followed a premonition, a strand of long hair in the rain, a scrap of voice, a melody, down a dark street in Nice.
And in that house Father, who was always so silent, would come clearer, too. I could invent the stories behind his cloudy glances, the hesitations in his speech. I could understand his hands finally, the mysterious way they moved from object to object but never landed. I could remember for him what he said he could not. I could easily fathom the great depths of his love for my mother and his loneliness because of it. Longing in me took shapes, but I think my father saw nothing when my mother was away — or what I imagine nothing to be: fields and fields of black or dark green or blue.
I was never lonely. In my house the darkness always gave way.
In my house, Grandma Alice is alive. She grows old. She has a long gray braid down her back. She has trouble reading the fine print. She watches my mother and me out in the garden. She sits with me on the porch and tells me the story of the Topaz Bird. She hugs me with her woolen arms. She never tires. “Tell me about Eva again,” I beg, and she always does.
My house whirls and whirls with mist and moonlight and lovers. On hot summer nights a handsome stranger from Spain plays the guitar and a slow fan turns within me.
In my house there are dresses of twilight, and snowstorms, and towers and castles, and music and laughter.
In my house there are intricate scenarios. I have seen a beautiful bride whispering her marriage vows in the white curtains that flutter in the wind. I have seen the groom in the dark door step forward, then back. In my house there are racehorses and flowers and satin and my mother is a little girl there, drifting off to sleep, dreaming of flowers and horses.
In my house the sun constructs perfect golden rectangles on the ceiling; they clang together, making lovely music. In my house there is always music: Mozart and Vivaldi and Bach.
And in my house there is order. In my house there is sense. In my house the father who is so remote smiles finally, as the crime he has brooded over for years, the crime he has carefully outlined on the table with his finger, finally falls into place. Everything has an explanation, a reason. Why the mother seems always to be leaving for France becomes clear.
In my house I can hear my grandfather two states away walking on the crackling earth, listening for water. In my house I can hear a clock ticking. It grows louder and louder and larger and larger as she stands under it, bathed in apricot light. In my house I hear her bracelets clinking; I hear the bright laughter of two women.
I move slowly through these fall days. In my heavy house, which I carry on my back like a turtle, a dark-eyed woman weeps for someone who is permanently lost to her.
But they are not lost to me. In my house, which is vibrant and alive, my Grandma Alice does not die before I am born. In my house there is love and there is mystery and there is longing. In my house my mother is a little girl, a college student, a woman reclining on a pink couch, sipping a cool drink and reading the poems of Rainer Maria Rilke.