Bird Read online

  ‘There is a story, you know,’ he finally said, ‘that when the queen of the Roman gods was nursing her son Hercules, some of her milk fell from the sky and lilies were created from the drops that fell to the earth. These flowers, they are the mother’s milk.’

  I’d been touched watching André and Anna together, but as soon as we left the house Anna’s vulnerability evaporated and a brittleness descended over her. She seemed reluctant to return home with me and when I presented Marilyn to her she wouldn’t take her. She just chucked her under the chin in a desolate fashion, before turning to me. ‘So, would you like to go out for another drink, darling?’

  ‘I have made a meal for us,’ I was taken aback. ‘And Marilyn, she’s eighteen months old,’ I said. ‘I can’t leave her alone.’

  ‘I thought with Col being home…but you know, no problem,’ she shrugged and sat down on the sofa. ‘Alfred thinks I look like Kim Novak. I am to be a body double. You know? To stand there when they set up the shots. Perhaps be filmed for some of those scenes where you only see her from behind. There are lots of scenes like that, when Jimmy Stewart loses his marbles and follows women that look like her up and down the street.’

  ‘Don’t you find it demeaning,’ I asked, ‘hanging around like that. Just being a stand in?’ As if I hadn’t spent months of my life hanging around as an extra on film sets.

  ‘Don’t you find it demeaning,’ Anna bristled, ‘keeping house for a man who is hardly ever home and puts his wage into his arm?’

  I didn’t see Anna again on that trip and once she returned to Paris our letter writing, the to and fro which had sustained our friendship during the time we were apart, ceased. We had nothing to say to each other.

  So I was surprised, but pleased, when she called me—it must have been in late 1959—and asked me to have a meal with her. I was at Miriam’s with Marilyn and she called me there, launching instantly into drama, ‘Is it true? Are we no longer friends?’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, taken aback. ‘That’s one way to break the ice. I didn’t even know you were in the country.’

  ‘Ice! There is nothing I don’t know about ice; or its breaking points. What I am trying to figure out is the temperature between us.’

  I didn’t laugh at her heavy accent—her time in Paris seemed to have complicated it even further—her florid metaphors. ‘Are you in one of your moods?’

  ‘Of course I am in a mood. You don’t love me.’

  ‘Meet me here at Mom’s,’ I said. ‘We’ll take Marilyn and go home and all eat together. Like old times.’

  So Anna came over and we went home and opened the front door—of course we did, who doesn’t open the front door when they go home?—and there was Col, all blue and twisted on the living-room couch. Then, I think, I fell down, which gave Marilyn such a shock that she began to scream. Anna scooped her up and held her close so that she didn’t run to me. I dragged myself towards Col, and that few feet of floor felt like the longest distance I had ever covered. It seemed to take an eternity. I wanted to touch him, though when I did it made things worse because he was hard, and cold.

  Anna stayed with me for several weeks after Col’s death. She looked after Marilyn and me. That’s the thing about Anna, you see. When it really counted, she didn’t let me down.

  After a time I told Anna she should return to Europe, that I needed to get on with my new life. What I really meant, of course, was that I wanted to wallow, alone, in my grief. Once she was back in Paris we wrote to each other every week. Neither of us wanted the distance that had grown between us to return.

  And then it was you, of course, who finally brought her home. August 5, 1962—that’s when you were born. I stood in the hospital hallway outside the labour ward for the 36 hours you took to arrive. Apparently they finally had to use forceps to turn you the right way around which meant that when Anna held you in her arms she looked as if she didn’t know whether to love you or blame you. I suppose that never changed. She touched your shock of blonde hair, your yellowy-brown skin. ‘Is this normal,’ she asked the nurse, ‘for a baby’s skin to be so dark?’

  ‘Jaundice,’ the nurse said.

  She inspected your delicate fingernails and the whorl of your ear. She felt the fine silk of you. She cupped her hand over your tiny skull and the soft bit where the bone had not yet joined.

  ‘That seems dangerous,’ she said to me. ‘Not to have proper bone here. What if she falls?’

  ‘She won’t,’ I said, though in truth I’d felt the same terror when Marilyn was born. ‘What are you going to call her?’

  ‘I had planned to call her Saskia after a very special friend from my childhood, but I have changed my mind: I will call her my name and my mother’s,’ she said to me. ‘That way we will be joined always.’ Then she leaned down and whispered your name into your ear.

  I drove André into the hospital to meet you. He walked in close to the wall in the hope it might offer him some protection. Despite the fact he was almost scuttling, like a crab, he moved so quickly down the hospital corridor that I had to break into a run to keep up with him. When he got to the room where Anna lay he stood at a distance from her, tentative. Anna held you out towards him.

  ‘I have named her after Mama, Mama and me: Ana-Sofia,’ she smiled at him.

  André staggered, as if the shock of hearing your name was going to knock him over. I put Marilyn down, stepped towards him and took his elbow. ‘Mr Davidoff?’ I steered him towards the bed. ‘It’s okay. Really it is.’

  You woke up. Your face crumpled in shock and went bright red; all in a couple of seconds. The cries you made were barely human: the animal sounds of a newborn. The sounds pulled André towards you; they tugged at Anna’s heart. For the first time in two decades Anna smiled at André with uncomplicated love. There they were, three generations of Davidoffs, together, in a state of wonder. Then André, as Anna knew he was compelled to, said, ‘If only your mother…’

  But she forgave him this time because, as she told me later, if she’d been able to choose a moment for her mother to return to life, for just a few seconds, this would have been the one.

  In the months after you were born, Anna barely slept and when she did she woke up with a start. Sometimes you would be crying to be fed but Anna woke other times too: a branch scraped her window; a tap dripped; there was the sound of her own beating heart. The nights went on forever, it seemed that dawn would never come. Sometimes Anna gave up on sleep altogether and lifted you out of her crib. She put you on the bed beside her. She listened to your breathing, your little snuffles. She put up with the startled flinging and twitching of your limbs, as if, in sleep, you were falling through air.

  Some of Anna’s fears were realistic. What if your father’s wife realised there was money leaving their bank account every month and stopped him from sending it? What if, when Anna felt confident enough to sing again, she found she had lost her voice?

  She read the LA Times looking for facts to support her free-ranging anxiety and the facts weren’t hard to find. Cars plunged into swimming pools, doctors delayed reporting causes of a polio outbreak, Russia and China were at each other’s throats and a woman Anna had never met, a Mrs Dorothy Kapturkiewicz, had to be comforted by a passerby after her five-year-old daughter dashed in front of a car. When Anna read about the Bay of Pigs she became convinced that the Russians would lay siege to Los Angeles—their troops lining the Hollywood hills, their submarines lurking under water—and that the city would starve. So many things, so many fates, to protect you from.

  By the time you were nine months old there was almost no headline that didn’t spin Anna off for several hours: ‘Check shows average car can be fatal,’ led her to put a ‘For Sale’ sign in the windscreen of her car.

  ‘How will you get around?’ I asked her.

  ‘Rail,’ Anna replied, ignoring the fact the last track had been ripped up almost ten years ago. In the end Anna did not give away her car. She did, however, dig a vegetable garden in her
apartment’s garden courtyard and then had to beg the landlord not to kick her out once complaints were laid. That had been after reading an article about the use of pesticides in commercial crops.

  Most days she would call me when I was in the middle of something and talk to me of various horrors. And most days—it was 1963 by now—there were stories in the paper about the race to the moon. This caused Anna to obsess, years after the event, about Laika, the dog the Soviet Union sent up into space back in ’57 then left orbiting the earth until she starved to death.

  ‘What would it be like,’ Anna called to ask me, ‘being left to circle the globe in a metal box in an endless twilight as you slowly starved to death?’

  ‘I’m in the middle of something here. Can we do this another time?’ I said. I was always saying. But there was no point. Anna wasn’t interested in what I might or might not be doing.

  One day she rang to talk to me about the Sherry Biltmore fire. ‘Darling, listen. This is terrible, I read it today: “A pale dark-haired boy of eight whose mother is in the road company cast of Sound of Music admitted Friday, police said, he was playing with matches in a room where the Sherry Biltmore fire started a week ago.” Guess what the boy said to the police when they asked him why he liked to strike matches?’

  I didn’t know, I didn’t care, but I relented and said I’d be around soon. We both lived on Franklin these days, only a few blocks away from each other. Half an hour later I walked in the front door and Anna announced, ‘“I like to strike matches because I like to hear the fizz sound.” That is what he said. Unbelievable, no?’

  ‘You used to be the kind of girl who liked the fizz sound,’ I said, looking around Anna’s small living room where clothes, washed but unfolded diapers and newspapers were piled high. You were asleep in a cot in the corner of the room. It was a pretty apartment, with lots of sunlight, a white wicker chaise longue and chair, and a deep old easy chair André had given her—but was so messy I couldn’t find anywhere to sit. That was pretty typical. I ended up going into the kitchen and pulling up a chair in there.

  ‘Well yes,’ Anna said, following me into the kitchen. ‘But he is only eight. Too young to know about the fizz. Anyway these days I don’t look for fizz. I read the dharma.’

  ‘I thought that was a Parisian fad?’

  ‘Oh no, darling,’ Anna said, very seriously. ‘I still am reading my books. You know, like Zen and other things.’ She gave a subdued smile, passed me my cup of tea and sat down at the table. ‘I think I am going mad in this house all by myself. You are very good to me.’ The tears started. It was the first time in months that I’d seen her cry. I hoped it was a good sign.

  ‘After Col died,’ I said, ‘I wouldn’t have survived without you.’

  ‘You don’t owe me a thing,’ Anna shook her head.

  ‘I went on a date the other night,’ I said.

  Anna looked surprised and wiped her tears away. ‘Oh. Was that nice?’

  ‘It didn’t work out. He tried to kiss me and I just panicked and pushed him away. Then I had to try and explain the whole palaver.’

  ‘Did he behave like a gentleman after that?’

  ‘He was very polite,’ I said. ‘An ex-army man.’

  ‘Sounds to me like you might have a boyfriend,’ Anna teased.

  I grimaced at the thought. ‘What about you?’ I asked. ‘How long since you’ve been on a date? Dating might get you back in the swing of things.’

  Anna laughed. It was the first time I’d heard her laugh in a long time. ‘When we first met you were always telling me to get into the swing of things.’ She stood up and swung her hips. ‘You see, I have much more hip and belly to swing these days. I am even more in the swing of things.’

  ‘Don’t,’ I said. ‘It’s ten years since we danced in that film. You’re making me feel old.’

  ‘It is having daughters that makes us feel old. Come, dance with me.’

  Anna held out her hand and I took it. We stepped away from the table with our arms stretched between us. It was as if, for a moment, we were still young enough to be jiving at Bergs.

  ‘Let’s rock!’ Anna half-said, half-sang and there we were. Two women heading for middle-age bumping and grinding away in a tiny kitchen as if we were teenagers.

  Anna’s fears for you—for all of us—took shape late one night when Lieutenant Patrowski knocked on my door. My failed date. I’d never told him where I lived and seeing him there made me nervous.

  Anna was working on The Birds and I was minding you. ‘I do not think I like the word double,’ she used to say to me, about the work she did for Hitchcock. ‘Nowadays I call myself a shadow. It is more mysterious, no?’ Her first scene was in a playground, a scene where first one bird came, and then another, and then there were many. When the scene was finally being filmed the lead actress would have to pretend they were in her hair and attacking her face and arms. It was violent. ‘Special effects,’ Hitchcock told Anna. ‘You don’t have to worry about real birds for now. We just need to set up the lights.’ So Anna sat still and imagined what it would be like for the actress when she actually did the shoot, to be pecked all over. In the next scene Anna worked on, Tippi Hedren really did have live birds tied to her, and the gulls panicked. They swooped at her face and she was gashed by a beak. It was only a few moments before she stopped the scene and insisted the birds be untied. So, that’s when Anna was needed to step her way through the rest of the scene to allow the cameras to figure out how to get the shot in such a cramped space.

  It wasn’t as bad as the job she’d had to do before, the year that Col died. That was when she found herself on another Hitchcock set, soaking wet as she died and died again: ‘Imagine the knife is going into your chest, here. Stand still.’ Then Hitchcock would speak to the cameraman. ‘Can you get that shot without her breasts being in view? Good,’ he’d return to Anna. ‘Now the knife is going in her leg. Anna, you need to face the wall.’ And so it went on.

  But I’m drifting; some things, I find, are easier to write than others. Patrowski stood there in my doorway. ‘So darlin’,’ he said, ‘are you going to ask me in for that drink?’ I didn’t really know what to do so I said sure, and stepped back into the hall—and before I could even think what I should do next, he shut the door behind me and punched me in the face. I was trying to bring myself back to consciousness when I heard Marilyn run towards me screaming and then suddenly go quiet. I felt the most terrible panic—what was happening to my baby?—and began to get to my feet but Patrowski knocked me down without so much as glancing away from Marilyn. ‘If you be quiet,’ he was saying, ‘I won’t hurt your mom. That’s right now Miss Eleanor, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s right,’ I looked my seven-year-old daughter in the face. ‘It’s going to be okay, honey. Go and check on Az for me, will you do that?’ See, I already had my special name for you. I willed Marilyn to know what I was thinking: there was a window in the bedroom and she could take you and climb out. I held the image of my two girls climbing to safety in my mind for as long as possible. It helped that you were crying in the next room and Patrowski wanted you shut up. There were tears pouring down Marilyn’s face but she seemed to understand me; anyway she ran from the room and I lost the image then because Patrowski grabbed me by the hair and dragged me into the living room. I reached back, held onto his hands to lessen the pull on my hair, and he paused for a moment and smiled at me. Like he thought I was touching him because I wanted him. To this day I can’t imagine how he could have thought that. He picked me up and threw me on the couch, me wiping the blood from my eyes and trying to smile, trying to defuse him, but he just pushed my head down, got out a knife from somewhere and started to cut away at my clothes, and into my legs. That’s when I fainted.

  When I came to there was Anna, like a vision, standing behind him with a bottle in her hand. She was a tall woman, sure, but right then, I remember it so vividly, she looked huge, twice her normal size. She slammed the bottle down and there was a sicke
ning thud as it hit the side of his head. A second thud when I pushed him off me and he hit the floor. Patrowski groaned and reached out for his knife but Anna stepped on his wrist, leaned over and picked it up.

  Later, during the court case, we found out that Patrowski had been a member of the first American occupying forces into Japan, arriving in Nagasaki a few days after the bomb dropped. Fifteen years later he’d been one of the first into Vietnam. But Anna knew none of that when she dropped her weight onto his body and held the knife to his throat. She looked—there is no other word for this—exhilarated.

  ‘The girls?’ I asked.

  ‘Safe,’ Anna said. ‘Marilyn flagged down my car before I’d parked out the front. I came in the back door.’ Then she stopped talking for a moment and she looked at me. Her face went soft. ‘Oh, Ellie.’

  Marilyn was in the room, holding you in her arms. She was a small girl to be holding a toddler up, but she too seemed to have found strength she shouldn’t have had. I heard Anna tell her to get a towel and hold it against my legs, and I realised then how much blood there was. It was everywhere. Some of it was his, I guess, and quite a lot of it was mine. Marilyn was so brave. Before she went into the bathroom she put you down carefully next to Anna, making sure to avoid the pool of blood that was spreading out from under Patrowksi’s head. I saw you lean over, fluttering your eyelashes on your mother’s cheeks. Anna looked at you. ‘Butterfly kisses? My beautiful girl,’ and fluttered her lashes on the silk of your cheek in return.

  Then, after the court case, she took you to Morocco and India. It would be three years before I saw either of you again.

  Lama Dorje Rinpoche

  The Second Noble Truth: The cause of suffering is our

  ignorance of the true nature of reality and our attachment

  to our selves and to the world of appearances.

  Anna said she wanted a guru. Just like that. First thing up.