JOYCE HINNEFELD
IN HOVERING FLIGHT
#1 Indie Next Pick
At 34, Scarlet Kavanagh has the kind of homecoming no child wishes, a visit back to family and dear friends for the gentle passing of her mother, Addie, a famous bird artist and an even more infamous environmental activist. Though Addie and her husband, ornithologist Tom Kavanagh, have made their life in southeastern Pennsylvania, Addie has chosen to die at the New Jersey home of her dearest friend, Cora. This is because the Kavanagh’s ramshackle cottage is filled with too much history and because, in the last ten years or so, and for reasons that are not entirely clear, even bird song has seemed to make Addie angry, or sad, or both. Now, in their final moments together, Scarlet hopes to put to rest the last tensions that have marked their relationship.
Through tender conversations with Cora and Lou, another of Addie’s dear friends, Scarlet slowly comes to peace with her mother’s complicated life. But can she do the same with her own? Scarlet has carried a secret into these foggy days - a secret for Addie, one that involves Cora, too.
In its structure and style this novel follows in the tradition of writers like Virginia Woolf, Harriet Doerr, and Carol Shields: musical and dramatic, with myriad stories and voices. But the evocative language of this soaring novel is Hinnefeld’s own.
$15.95 / $18.95 Can | Fiction Paperback | 6x9 | 288 pages
September 2009
ISBN: 978-1-932961-89-8 | Carton Quantity: 24
This morning’s scene is a familiar one: Cora at the small table on the screened porch in back, glasses perched on her nose and paper spread in front of her, distractedly petting Lucy, her old collie, who’s flopped down at her feet. For as long as Scarlet can remember Cora has been gray, her hair cut sensibly short. She’s also always been pretty. The sweetness and openness in her face and in her wide blue eyes have always somehow invited Scarlet to bare her soul, to share her deepest hurts and most ridiculous longings with Cora—though Cora will never, under any circumstances, do the same. If Cora has ridiculous longings, Scarlet hasn’t heard about them; she knows for certain about the depth of Cora’s particular pain—but she never hears about this from Cora either.
The two women are bundled in sweaters because it’s cool on the porch in the early morning. Sunlight streams in, the early fog burned off by now, and the long, grassy slope down to the beach is wet with dew. A rope clangs against a flagpole several houses down. Tom has been at his scope for an hour or more; Scarlet has been watching him. She knows he’d rather be elsewhere—in the marsh near the lighthouse, for instance—but everyplace screams with Addie’s presence now, and there is so much to be decided today. But for now no one can bear to begin that process, and Scarlet sits with Cora, as if it were a year or two ago and she’d just arrived, sleepless and distraught over her love life, whimpering over the mess she’d made of everything. Worlds away from everything she is feeling today.
. . .
As Cora bends over Lucy, Scarlet watches the play of morning light and shadows on her face, on the lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth. She knows this face nearly as well as she knew her mother’s, before Addie grew so gaunt, if still achingly beautiful, over the past few months, and she knows this comfortable old house nearly as well as she knows the cottage on Haupt Bridge Road. No wonder Addie wanted to die here, she thinks now, with Cora’s soothing presence filling every room—the smells of her baking, the fresh salt air blowing through her windows, the dark glazed surfaces of her pots and vases and mugs, beckoning one to grasp and stroke.
And for a moment she is ashamed of her peevish reaction to Addie’s asking to be brought here, six weeks ago. “Why not at home?” she’d whined to Tom. At the time she’d felt strangely jealous, reluctant to share both her dying mother and Cora in this way.
Joyce Hinnefeld is the Cohen Chair in English and Literature at Moravian in Bethlehem, Pa. She is the author of a short story collection, Tell Me Everything and Other Stories (University Press of New England, 1998), which was awarded the 1997 Breadloaf Writer’s Conference Bakeless Prize in fiction in 1997. Her first novel, In Hovering Flight, was a #1 Indie Next Pick.
