The Ramblers (32 page)

Sunday, December 1, 2013

A block or two west of the new City of Man in Turtle Bay there is an old willow that presides over an interior garden. It is a battered tree, long suffering and much climbed, held together by strands of wire but beloved of those who know it. In a way it symbolizes the city: life under difficulties, growth against odds, sap-rise in the midst of concrete, and the steady reaching for the sun.

— E. B. White,
Here Is New York

S
EPTEMBER 30, 2001

HISTORY:
Designed by Frederick Law Olmsted & Calvert Vaux and completed in 1859. 38-acre area running between 73rd and 78th streets. Originally an expanse of rock outcrops running along a large swamp, it was transformed into a tranquil and lush woodland or “wild garden.” Per Olmsted, the area was created to “excite the childish playfulness and profuse careless utterance of Nature.”

LANDMARKS:
Azalea Pond, Balcony Bridge, Loeb Boathouse, Evodia Field, the Gill, Hernshead, Humming Tombstone, Indian Cave, the Lake, Maintenance Field, Mugger's Woods, Oven/Willow Rock, the Point, Rustic Shelter, Riviera, the Swampy Pin Oak, Tupelo Meadow, Upper Lobe, Warbler Rock.

THE RAMBLE'S BIRDS:
Central Park is situated on the Atlantic Flyway (favored migration route for many birds); more than 250 species of birds have been spotted in the Ramble and people come from all over the world to see them. Common sightings: pigeons, warblers, hawks, egrets, woodpeckers, ducks, vireos, cuckoos,
sandpipers, flycatchers. Also, many species pass through during spring and fall migration. Park has become magnet for migrating Neotropical songbirds and other species that winter in the south.

MIGRANT SPECIES:
Eastern Phoebe (mid-March through late May), wood warblers (small, brightly plumed Neotropical songbirds) including Prothonotary, Cape May, Yellow-throated, Hooded, Worm-eating. Also: Solitary and Spotted Sandpipers. American Woodcocks and a variety of sparrows.

BREEDING SPECIES:
Thirty-plus species (per Audubon), including: American Robin, Starling, Common Grackle, Song Sparrow, House Wren, Gray Catbird, Tufted Titmice, Downy Woodpecker, Warbling Vireo, Wood Thrush, Cedar Waxwing, Eastern Kingbird, Northern Flicker, Mallard, Green Heron, Eastern Screech-Owl, Red-tailed Hawk (two or three per year).

HUMMINGBIRDS:
Ruby-throated Hummingbirds visit in spring and fall and are attracted to deep-throated flowering plants. Extract nectar from flowers with long, thin bills and are very active feeders.

CELEBRITY BIRD:
Red-tailed Hawk Pale Male (named for his fair coloring) kicked out of nest it built on Fifth Avenue building. Celebrity protest brought nest back.

POINT IS TO GET LOST?:
In an 1860 essay, an NYT reporter had two complaints about the Ramble: (1) not enough benches, and (2) there were absolutely no signs indicating how to get out of the Ramble. Today, a few benches, but there are still no signs. Apparently, it was the designers' goal to make this intimate area seem big and complex through the use of winding paths, shrubbery and rock hills to block visibility. The result: no logical way to organize a tour of this place or give easy directions to someone who is lost in the Ramble. Maybe that is the point after all. To be lost.

“What will happen?”

A
ll she remembers from her dream: The harp, fluorescent, flickering fitfully in a grainy darkness. Under it, a single word, all caps, a conspicuous exhortation, lit up, blinding in its cartoon cast:
FORGIVENESS
. All other details are lost. The dream, she decides, was neither nightmare nor fairy tale.

When she opens her eyes, the world is befuddling in its sameness and strangeness. The hotel room is just as it has always been, arrestingly white, ever generic and pristine, but it's as if the quality of the air has been tweaked just so. The light is brilliant and lacelike; there's an almost viscous serenity to the space. Clio feels as if she's floating. She hears the faint rumblings of Henry
puttering on the other side of the cracked-open bathroom door. He hums opera. He runs the tap.

She sits up. Swings her legs over the side of the bed. Without thinking, she reaches to open the bedside drawer. Her mother's letter sits there, quiet and crisply folded, just as she left it last night. Clio retrieves it, smooths it open, the single page of paper, the cryptic swirl of her mother's head and heart a transfixing blur before it all grows sharp.

She reads it again, the words whirring through her, awakening her veins, better than caffeine. A curious thing happens. Anger doesn't alight. It will again, Clio knows this, but these moments, as they tumble past, don't contain vitriol and bitterness. Just longing. Now it's soothingly simple: she's just a daughter who has lost her mother and misses her deeply.

Clio looks up. Henry comes toward her wrapped up in his robe, his hair glistening wet and dark, carefully combed. His blue eyes beam as he sits on the edge of the bed next to her. “You slept hard,” he says, sweeping a strand of hair from her eyes.

She smiles. “I did. I can't remember the last time I slept that well.”

“Good,” he says. One word.
Good.

A knock on the door.

“Breakfast,” he says, popping up. “Hope you're hungry.”

She is. She's more ravenous than she's been in many months. She slips into the bathroom but watches through the crack as silver steaming trays float by and through the other door,
their
door. The empty shelf is tucked into the corner of the room, where it will stay. She will fill it with Eloise's books.

She throws cold water on her face and blots it dry. Dregs of makeup from the wedding linger defiantly on her lashes and under her eyes. She wraps up in her own robe, the one that matches his. She knots the sash tightly and looks in the mirror again. She sees something: a true smile.

In the new place—what will be their home
—
Henry stands by the triplet windows, his silhouette framed by sunshine that spills in from the street. She walks over and stands with him for a moment. Looks out. The trees sway in a slight wind.

It's December again.

He turns to her. “Good morning, my Clio.”

“Good morning, my Henry,” she says.

Plates upon plates of food await them. Eggs and bacon and French toast and exotic fruit, and it all looks good, worth tasting. There are plenty of chairs, but Clio settles on a square of carpet by the coffee table and begins to eat. He sits with her on the floor, feeds her cubes of cantaloupe.

Side by side, they sit like this and eat in silence, trading sections of the Sunday
New York Times
. Over the pages of her newspaper, she steals glances at him to remember that this is real.

It is.

She stands and walks around the place, the place she didn't really see a week ago because she was so stunned, so scared, so riddled with panic. On the wall hangs a Currier and Ives print of Central Park.

Henry comes up behind her, drapes his arms around her chest.

“I was hoping you might give me a private tour,” he whispers in her ear.

“Let's go,” Clio says, grabbing his hand. They dress.

Outside the hotel entrance, pigeons peck at a piece of poppy-seed bagel.

“So,” he says. “What are our thoughts on pigeons?”

“Our thought is that despite conventional wisdom and widespread disgust, they are brilliant birds. Considered to be among the most intelligent. They can do things only humans and primates were thought to be able to do. They can pass the mirror test.”

“The mirror test?” Henry asks eagerly.

“A pigeon can recognize its own reflection in a mirror. It's the only
non-mammal species that can do this. They can also recognize all twenty-six letters in the alphabet.”

“Incredible.”

She nods.

Say hello hello to the pigeons.

They hold hands as they walk toward the park. They enter on Eighty-First Street and pass the Delacorte Theater, where they saw Shakespeare in the Park in August, then wind along the Great Lawn toward Turtle Pond. She leads him to the dock, to the spot where she meets her walkers each week, and they stand together gazing out over the water. In the distance, a pair of Mallards swims, leaving behind them a gentle wake.

Then the Ramble, the labyrinthine heart of the park. She thinks of the passion-filled, metaphor-laden journal notes she wrote so many years ago. Hiding and seeking. Lost and found. City and wild. Humans and nature. It was about these things and so much more: getting out here, experiencing something, seeing, feeling.

Rambling.

“So what's the scoop for winter in these parts? Pretty quiet birding time?” Henry says.

“A little quiet, but maybe my favorite season here. When there are no leaves on the trees, it's easy to spot the owls and the hawks. And there are these thistle and sunflower feeders in Evodia Field that attract lots of birds . . . Hairy and Downy Woodpeckers, White-breasted Nuthatches, Carolina Wrens, Fox Sparrows, Blue Jays, Northern Cardinals, Common Redpolls, Black-capped Chickadees, Tufted Titmice. And on the Harlem Meer and the Lake, you'll see Hooded Mergansers and Pied-billed Grebes and Ruddy Ducks and Wood Ducks. And it's pretty remarkable to see this place in a snowstorm.”

She points at the walkway near Bow Bridge. “Years ago, five Long-eared Owls perched in that tree right there. They stayed for weeks. Huge crowds gathered. It was pretty incredible. Rumor has it there's a crew this year too.”

She leads him to her bench.
Their bench.
They sit for a while. They don't say much even though there's much to say. They just sit, their legs touching, dappled by sun. People pass, kind-faced strangers who clutch coffees and papers and phones and dreams. People somewhere between here and there, then and when.

“Oh, that day. That first day on this good, green bench,” he says. “I was a world-class wreck, wasn't I?”

Clio nods, remembers. “There's poetry in the wreckage.”

Henry laughs. “Indeed there is.”

The sun continues to shine. Birds sing. Sirens croon in the distance.

For Clio, a singular thought alights, bold, quiet, unbidden:
I'm home.

The air is fresh and full. She breathes it in and out and looks up at the San Remo, the austere and brooding building where she's lived all these years, these complex and important years, and wonders what it will be like to move on, to have a fresh view of the world. She thinks of Smith. As Clio and Henry left the wedding last night, they walked by Smith and Tate on the street. The two were lost in an embrace, blind to the world. Clio wonders if he's up there this morning, next to Smith in bed. The thought makes her smile.

Friends. A dance of moments and memories, a tumble of years and tears and talks and walks, of sameness and difference, closeness and distance, words and silence, secrets and survivals big and small, a swirl of
I'm okay
and
I'm a mess
and
It is what it is
. And it is.

Time passes, as it does. An uncertain amount. Wordlessly Clio stands, pulls Henry up too.

“Let's go home,” she says.

“Home, huh?” he says, beaming. “I like the sound of that.”

And she leads him along, under her trees and through her birds. Her mind tangles with memories and questions and then she feels it, the subtle but also unmistakable sensation of emptying, of letting go. Hand in his hand, one foot in front of the other, she is going forward for once.

They exit the park where they entered. Wait for the green light to cross.

She leads Henry along her shortcut by the planetarium, and this is when she sees it: the blurry object near the foliage that flanks the ground-level entrance to the Rose Center.

“Wait. What was that?” she says, dropping Henry's hand, sneaking toward to the blooming
Mahonia japonica
plant to take a closer look. “What in the world?”

“What is it?” Henry says. “What do you see?”

“Come,” Clio whispers emphatically, waving him over. “
Come.
”

He comes to her and she points at the small blur hovering over the bushes.

“A
hummingbird,
Henry. On the first of
December
.”

She studies the tiny creature. It's no more than four inches long, with its rapierlike bill. It hovers insectlike, remaining stationary in midair. Then it flies backward, straight up and down, side to side. Its colors are grand: kelly green above, white below, strongly washed with red on its sides, flanks and under-tail coverts. The center of its throat is a pure, unmarked white, which suggests she's an immature female.

“You see the bright plumage?” she whispers. “It's often a trick of the sun. In some species, the coloring doesn't actually derive from pigmentation in the feather structure, but rather from these prismlike cells found in the topmost layers of the feathers. When sunlight hits these cells, it breaks into wavelengths that reflect to us in various degrees of intensity. So, if we change position, a muted-looking bird might suddenly look fire-engine red or bright green.”

“So, it's all about the light we see things in. All about perspective,” he says.

“Exactly.”

Clio snaps a quick photo with her phone, sends it to her museum colleagues.

Clio: Probable immature female rufous spotted in shrubbery at AMNH 81st Street entrance. Confirm ID. Could also be Allen's or broad-tailed?

She looks up at the blue sky and then into Henry's blue eyes. And then she settles her gaze back on the bird, the bird that buzzes around the nectar-filled plant. She's careful to keep enough distance, not to disturb the small creature. She knows how quickly word will spread, but for now, it's just the three of them.

“As far as I know, this is the first vagrant in a while to show up in New York State. She was probably on the way to Mexico and miscalculated the angle of her southern flight path and ended up here. A small navigational error can amount to a big mistake.”

“So, she got lost?” Henry says, breaking it down.

“Yes,” Clio says, and laughs.

He laughs with her.

We haven't laughed enough yet. We will. We will laugh at it all.

She thinks of her mother, feels with every bit of her being that Eloise is behind this. Around them, the world goes on.

“Can you believe it?” she whispers, looking up at him.

“I can,” he says through a smile, throwing his arm around her. “What will happen? Do you think she'll survive?”

Clio leans into him. Buries her face in his chest. Inhales.

“I do,” she says. “I think she'll make it. She'll do what she has to do.”