Audubon’s Birds of America

Audubon’s Birds of America is the monumental book around which Clare and Henry’s first meeting at the Field Museum takes shape. Removed from a locked glass case and opened for a five-year-old boy, it gives their encounter a shared focus: a sequence of engraved birds, a cookie kept clear of the pages, and a memory that Clare will carry forward. The volume’s beauty and physical scale matter, but so does its place in the lovers’ circular chronology, where a book encountered in childhood becomes one of the objects through which their history can be remembered and retold.

The Volume and Its Setting

The book is a deluxe double-elephant folio, described as almost as tall as Clare when she is young. It is kept by itself in a large glass-and-oak case in the Field Museum’s Reading Room, a closed-stacks library intended for scientists and scholars rather than children. The surrounding room is substantial and formal: heavy wooden tables and chairs, maroon carpet, an imposing Reference Desk, and shelves largely occupied by leather-bound Victorian science periodicals. Against that institutional setting, the folio stands apart as the object Clare has come to see.

Clare knows the book well before she opens it for Henry. She has spent many rainy afternoons admiring this copy, which she regards as the finest in existence. For her, it is not an interchangeable reference volume: its plates have been familiar companions, and the first book she loved. That private attachment shapes the way she presents it, turning a visit to the museum library into a carefully arranged act of sharing.

Opening the Case

Clare opens the case with a bobby pin, then retrieves felt and support pads from behind the Reference Desk. She lays the protective materials on a table and carefully lifts the volume from its case onto the felt. Because the book is so large, she draws up a chair for Henry to stand on, allowing him to see the plates. The scene joins affectionate improvisation to real care: the lock is bypassed, but the rare object is handled with deliberate support rather than treated casually.

The first plate is the Common Loon. Henry remarks that it looks like a duck, and Clare takes his response as an opening for conversation rather than correcting him. She guesses his favorite bird, and when she is right, she gives him an Oreo while keeping her own reward. The cookies must wait until they have finished looking, since crumbs could fall on the bluebirds. The small rule makes the book’s fragility tangible and establishes the intimacy of the encounter through a child’s attention, a shared game, and a practical act of preservation.

Looking Through the Plates

They begin again at the start and turn the pages slowly. Clare points out a Great Blue Heron and tells Henry that it is bigger than a flamingo; when he asks whether she saw a hummingbird in the museum, she says she did, then describes how its wings outside move so quickly that they appear as a blur. Each turn of the enormous sheet becomes an event in itself: the paper rises and folds over with the scale of making a bed, and a new bird comes into view.

Henry waits attentively for each plate, responding with small sounds of pleasure to the Sandhill Crane, American Coot, Great Auk, and Pileated Woodpecker. The sequence gives him time to look rather than merely to receive information. Clare contrasts the engraved birds with the specimens in glass tubes down the hall: on the page, they seem more alive than the museum’s preserved examples. The book does not simply name its subjects; its large, unfolding pages organize a shared act of attention.

At the last plate, the Snow Bunting, Henry leans down and delicately strokes the engraving. The gesture is strikingly careful, echoing the handling with which Clare first removed the folio from its case. She looks at him and at the book, remembering that she once wanted to crawl into it and sleep. The page thus holds two scales of experience at once: a child’s wonder at a pictured bird and Clare’s adult awareness that this is the first book she loved, now opened for the boy who will become central to her life.

Memory, Recurrence, and Meaning

When Henry is tired, Clare closes the volume and returns it to its glass case. She opens it again to the Flamingo, shuts the case, and locks it; Henry jumps down from the chair and eats his Oreo. Their attention then shifts to other subjects in the museum, but the encounter with the folio has already become one of the memories through which Clare understands their shared past. The return to the case completes a material routine—remove, open, look, protect, replace—while leaving the emotional experience with them.

The scene’s significance is sharpened by the novel’s non-linear time. Clare’s recollection of sharing the book with young Henry belongs to a relationship that crosses childhood and adulthood, so the folio is both an object in a museum and a point of contact between different moments in their lives. The volume’s permanence contrasts with Henry’s sudden departures: after they leave the library and wander through the museum, he cries out and vanishes, leaving Clare holding his warm, empty T-shirt. The book can be closed and locked away; the person beside it cannot be kept present by care or by memory.

The folio also sits within the story’s larger world of objects that preserve knowledge across separation. At dinner, Clare gives Henry her pale-blue childhood diary, whose 152 carefully written dates record his visits to her in the Meadow. She explains that he had dictated the dates to her, creating a circular record she later used to know when to meet him. Unlike that list, Audubon’s Birds of America does not function as a calendar or explicit evidence of their history. Its role is experiential: it preserves a remembered scene through the particular scale of its pages, the birds they viewed, and the attention they shared.

Elsewhere, the narrative gives other books, images, and records their own forms of attachment. Clare’s signed drawing of Henry is already hanging beside her drawing table at home, and Henry asks her not to date it because he has seen it before without a date. When he tells his father he intends to marry, he carries a photograph of Clare looking over Lighthouse Beach; the image helps him introduce the artist who will become his wife. After Clare’s mother dies, Clare sorts handwritten papers from the desk drawer, smoothing and separating them as she searches through the contents. A bootleg recording of Henry’s mother, labeled with her name, the Paris Opera, a date, and the opera Lulu, is found for him by a record-shop owner who had been keeping an eye out for her work. And after Henry’s death, Clare opens the bundles of letters and papers he left in his desk, beginning with a letter marked to be opened in the event of his death. These objects have distinct uses, but together they show how the novel makes memory material: dates can guide a meeting, an image can introduce a beloved person, handwriting can lead into a mother’s private traces, a recording can return a voice, and a letter can address someone beyond its writer’s life.

Audubon’s Birds of America remains distinctive among these objects because its force comes from the act of looking together, not from a message stored in its pages. Clare’s adult recollection gathers the encounter’s details—the lock, the felt, the Oreo, the last engraving—into a scene that can be revisited even though Henry’s presence cannot be made continuous. The book’s protected physical form offers a quiet counterpoint to the instability of their time: its pages can be opened again, but the meeting they preserve can only be remembered.