T. Boyle - Greasy Lake and Other Stories

“… nothing at all,” her husband says below. “I think I counted eighty-six or — seven birds. . uh-huh, uh-huh… yeah, well, you going to try again?”

She doesn’t have to listen to the rest — she already knows what the county supervisor is saying on the other end of the line, the smooth, reasonable politician’s voice pouring honey into the receiver, talking of cost overruns, uncooperative weather, the little unpleasantries in life we just have to learn to live with. Egon will be discouraged, she knows that. Over the past few weeks he’s become increasingly touchy, the presence of the birds an ongoing ache, an open wound, an obsession. “It’s not bad enough that the drought withered the soybeans last summer or that the damned government is cutting out price supports for feed corn,” he’d shouted one night after paying the Bird Man his daily fee, “Now I can’t even enjoy the one stand of trees on my property. Christ,” he roared, “I can’t even sit down to dinner without the taste of bird piss in my mouth.” Then he’d turned to her, his face flushed, hands shaking with rage, and she’d quietly reminded him what the doctor had said about his blood pressure. He poured himself a drink and looked at her with drooping eyes. “Have I done something to deserve this, Mai?” he said.

Poor Egon, she thinks. He lets things upset him so. Of course the birds are a nuisance, she’ll admit that now, but what about the man with the distress calls and the helicopters and firemen and all the rest? She tilts back the bottle of cough syrup, thinking she ought to call him in and tell him to take it easy, forget about it. In a month or so, when the leaves start to come in, the flock will break up and head north: why kill yourself over nothing? That’s what she wants to tell him, but when she calls his name her voice cracks and the cough comes up on her again, racking, relentless, worse than before. She lets the spasm pass, then calls his name again. There is no answer.

It is then that she hears the sputter of the chainsaw somewhere beyond the window. She listens to the keening whine of the blade as it engages wood — a sound curiously like the starling distress call — and then the dry heaving crash of the first tree.

An utter stillness permeates the Tuxedo Club, a hush bred of money and privilege, a soothing patrician quiet insisted upon by the arrases and thick damask curtains, bound up in the weave of the rugs, built into the very walls. Eugene Schiefflin, dilettante, portraitist, man of leisure, and amateur ornithologist, sits before the marble fireplace, leafing through the Oologist Monthly and sipping meditatively at a glass of sherry. The red-eyed vireo, he reads, nests twice a year, both sexes participating in the incubation of the eggs. The eggs, two to four in number, are white with brown maculations at the larger extremity, and measure by ⅔ of an inch…. When his glass is empty, he raises a single languid finger and the waiter appears with a replacement, removes the superfluous glass, and vanishes, the whole operation as instantaneous and effortless as an act of the will.

Despite appearances to the contrary — the casually crossed legs, the proprietary air, the look of dignity and composure stamped into the seams of his face — Eugene is agitated. His eyes give him away. They leap from the page at the slightest movement in the doorway, and then surreptitiously drop to his waistcoat pocket to examine the face of the gold watch he produces each minute or so. He is impatient, concerned. His brother Maunsell is half an hour late already — has he forgotten their appointment? That would be just like him, damn it. Irritated, Eugene lights a cigar and begins drumming his fingertips on the arm of the chair while the windows go gray with dusk.

At sixty-three, with his great drooping mustache and sharp, accipiter’s nose, Eugene Schiefflin is a salient and highly regarded figure in New York society. Always correct, a master of manners and a promoter of culture and refinement, a fixture of both the Society List and the Club Register, he is in great demand as commencement speaker and dinner guest. His grandfather, a cagey, backbiting immigrant, had made a fortune in the wholesale drug business, and his father, a lawyer, had encouraged that fortune to burgeon and flower like some clinging vine, the scent of money as sweet as bougainvillaea. Eugene himself went into business when he was just out of college, but he soon lost interest. A few years later he married an heiress from Brooklyn and retired to hold forth at the Corinthian Yacht Club, listen to string quartets, and devote himself to his consuming passions — painting, Shakespeare, and the study of birds.

It wasn’t until he was nearly fifty, however, that he had his awakening, his epiphany, the moment that brought the disparate threads of his life together and infused them with import and purpose. He and Maunsell were sitting before the fire one evening in his apartment at Madison and Sixty-fifth, reading aloud from Romeo and Juliet. Maunsell, because his voice was pitched higher, was reading Juliet, and Eugene, Romeo. “Wilt thou be gone?” Maunsell read, “it is not yet near day: / It was the nightingale, and not the lark, / That pierc’d the fearful hollow of thine ear.” The iambs tripped in his head, and suddenly Eugene felt as if he’d been suffused with light, electrocuted, felt as if Shakespeare’s muse had touched him with lambent inspiration. He jumped up, kicking over his brandy and spilling the book to the floor. “Maunsell,” he shouted, “Maunsell, that’s it!”

His brother looked up at him, alarmed and puzzled. He made a’n interrogatory noise.

“The nightingale,” Eugene said, “and, and… woodlarks, siskins, linnets, chafHnehes — and whatever else he mentions!”

“What? Who?”

“Shakespeare, of course. The greatest poet — the greatest man — of all time. Don’t you see? This will be our enduring contribution to culture; this is how we’ll do our little bit to enrich the lives of all the generations of Americans to come—

Maunsell’s mouth had dropped open. He looked like a classics scholar who’s just been asked to identify the members of the Chicago White Stockings. “What in Christ’s name are you talking about?”

“We’re going to form the American Acclimatization Society, Maunsell, here and now — and we’re going to import and release every species of bird — every last one — mentioned in the works of the Bard of Avon.”

That was thirteen years ago.

Now, sitting in the main room of the Tuxedo Club and waiting for his brother, Eugene has begun to show his impatience. He jerks round in his seat, pats at his hair, fiddles with his spats. He is imbibing his fourth sherry and examining a table enumerating the stomach contents of three hundred and fifty-nine bay-breasted warblers when he looks up to see Maunsell in the vestibule, shrugging out of his overcoat and handing his hat and cane over to the limp little fellow in the cloakroom.

“Well?” Eugene says, rising to greet him. “Any news?”

Maunsell’s face is flushed with the sting of the March wind. “Yes,” he says, “yes,” the timbre of his voice instantly soaked up in the drapes and rugs and converted to a whisper. “She’s on schedule as far as they know, and all incoming ships have reported clear weather and moderate seas.”

Any irritation Eugene may have shown earlier has vanished from his face. He is grinning broadly, the dead white comers of his mustache lifted in exultation, gold teeth glittering. “That’s the best news I’ve heard all week,” he says. “Tomorrow morning, then?”