A Wild Swan

by Michael Cunningham

  She said softly, into the beast’s furry ear, which was bigger than a catcher’s mitt, that if he could revive himself, if he could manage to rise again, she’d marry him.

  The results were instantaneous.

  The beast leapt up with a lion’s fervor. Behind him, the fountain spurted water again.

  Beauty stepped back. The beast looked adoringly at her. He looked at her with a thankfulness that was marvelous and, somehow, dreadful to see.

  In less than a moment, the beast’s hide split open like a chrysalis. The claws and fangs fell away. The feral reek evaporated.

  And here he is.

  He’s stunning. He’s sturdy, square-faced, snapping with muscle.

  The prince stands among the snarls of shed fur, the claws that litter the paving stones. He looks down in amazement at his restored body. He flexes his human hands, tests the athletic springiness of legs that are no longer taloned haunches.

  The spell has been broken. Did Beauty suspect it, all along? She’ll enjoy the idea that she’d intuited it, that she was a girl who could ferret out the workings of enchantment, but she’ll never be sure.

  She waits breathlessly, ecstatically, for the newly summoned prince to take her in his arms. But first he has to check his reflection in the water, which is already rippling in the revived fountain.

  It’s worked. He’s managed it. He’s seduced a lovely woman into pledging her troth to a soul that’s been concealed—to everyone but her—by disfigurement.

  Beauty’s pale bosom heaves with anticipation.

  The prince turns slowly from his own reflection, shows her a lascivious, bestial smile; a rapacious and devouring smile. Although his face is impeccably handsome, something about it is not quite right. The eyes remain feral. The mouth seems capable, still, of tearing out the throat of a deer. He could almost be the beast’s younger, handsomer (much handsomer) brother, as if his parents had produced a deformed child and then a beautiful, perfectly proportioned one.

  Beauty begins, suddenly, to wonder. Is it possible that the beast-spell was meant, long ago, as protection? Had the prince been locked into a monster’s guise for decipherable reasons?

  She backs away. Grinning victoriously, emitting a low growl of triumph, he advances.

  HER HAIR

  After the witch caught on …

  after she cut off Rapunzel’s hair …

  after the prince fell from the tower onto the thornbush, which pricked out his eyes …

  He wandered the world searching for her, astride his horse. He took no one with him other than the horse.

  He knocked on a thousand doors. He rode along village streets and down country lanes, calling out her name. Her name was sufficiently strange that the villagers and farmers he passed assumed him to be deranged. It never occurred to them that he might be seeking an actual person.

  Some were helpful: There’s a river ahead, watch out for the gully coming up. Some threw stones at him, some flicked switches at his horse’s gaunt flanks.

  He didn’t stop. He searched for a year.

  Until, finally, he found her …

  he found her in the desert shanty to which the witch had banished her …

  he found her living alone, with dust devils swirling through the curtains, with flies thicker than the dust …

  She knew him the moment she opened the door, though he was all but unrecognizable by then, sallow and torn, his raiment in rags.

  And there were those empty black sockets, the size of ravens’ eggs, where his eyes had been.

  He said only, “Rapunzel.” A word he’d spoken at a thousand thresholds already, and been a thousand times turned away, either cruelly or kindly, for the destitute and deranged creature he’d become. There is, as he’d learned, a surprisingly fine line between a prince on a quest and an addled, eyeless wanderer who has nothing more useful to offer than that single, incomprehensible word.

  He’d come to know the condition of the benighted; he who had, a year earlier, been regal and splendid, broad and brave, climbing hand over hand up a rope of golden hair.

  When he stood finally at her doorway, having sensed the presence of a house, having felt his way along its splintery boards until he touched a threshold …

  when she reached out to touch his scabbed and bleeding hand, he recognized her fingers a moment before they made contact with his skin, the way a dog knows its master is approaching, while still a block away. He emitted a feral moan, which might have been ecstasy or might have been intolerable pain, as if there existed a sound that could convey both at the same time.

  He couldn’t cry. He had no more apparatus for that.

  Before he and Rapunzel left for his castle, she made a quick excuse, ran back into the shanty, and took her hair out of the bureau drawer in which she’d been keeping it all the past year, wrapped in tissue, as safe and sequestered as the family silver.

  She hadn’t looked at it, not once, since the witch took her to the shanty.

  What if it had turned drab and lusterless …

  what if it was infested with mites …

  what if it simply looked … dead … like an artifact in some small local museum …

  But there it was, two twenty-foot-long red-blond skeins, intertwined, shining, healthy as a well-fed cat.

  She slipped the hair into her bag before leaving with the prince.

  They live in the castle now. Every night the prince lies beside her and caresses her hair, which she keeps by the bedside …

  which she washes and perfumes …

  which she pulls out discreetly, as the prince finds his way into bed.

  He buries his face in her hair. Sometimes she wonders—why doesn’t he ask how the hair still grows from her head? Didn’t he see it severed by the witch? He can’t possibly imagine it’s grown back in only a year.

  But he still, with his eyeless face swaddled by her hair, lets out (though less and less often) that terrible howl, that protestation of revelation and loss, that mewling tentative as a kitten’s yet loud as a leopard’s growl.

  It seems he’s either forgotten or prefers not to remember. So she never reminds him that the hair is no longer attached …

  she never reminds him it’s not a living thing any longer …

  she never reminds him it’s a memory that she keeps intact, that she maintains in the present, for him.

  Why would he want to know?

  EVER/AFTER

  Once, in time, a prince lived in a castle on a knoll, under a sky brightened by the royal blue of the harbor. Arrayed along the slope that descended from castle to harbor was a town in which carpenters made widely coveted tables and chairs, and bakers baked cakes and pies that people traveled some distance to procure. Every morning, the local fishermen hauled in nets full of sparkling silver fish; every night the smell of grilling fish filled the air. The avenue that skirted the harbor was lit by cafés and taverns, from which music and laughter were gently wind-borne throughout the town and into the forest, where hares and pheasants paused occasionally to listen.

  When the prince turned eighteen, he was married to a princess from a nearby, less prosperous kingdom; an inland kingdom built on a river centuries dry; a place where the chalky soil produced only cabbages and parsnips and other such hearty but uncompelling vegetables; where the cafés were all closed by nine o’clock and the local artisans produced nothing but coarse, heavy woolen blankets and jerseys, which were offered optimistically as the best defense against the icy winds that blew from the glacier on the mountaintop.

  The princess’s hand was sought for the prince by the prince’s father, the king, as protection against the day when the princess’s kingdom sent its soldiers—scrawny and weak from their meager diet, but all the more dangerous for their endless feelings of deprivation—bearing bows and longswords, into the verdancy and abundance of the kingdom on the harbor, and declared it rightfully theirs.

  The princess’s father agreed, in part because he had too little confidence in h
is own starved and sullen army, and in part because the princess in question, the eldest of his three daughters, the one most lacking in traditional charms, had received no other offers by the age of twenty-two, but was required by law to be married before marriage could be permitted either of her younger sisters, both of whom (it struck the king as a cruel joke) were lithe and lovely.

  The marriage did not go well, at first. The prince recognized his duty, and performed it. The princess did, as well. The princess, being other than beautiful, needed no delusions about how a deal had been struck, how she had been foisted off on a husband who would, she believed, carry out the perfunctory marital duties and then set about on his true amorous vocation with chambermaids and duchesses and the occasional harlot, smuggled in from town.

  She was, as it turned out, mistaken.

  Although, during the wedding (which was also the occasion of their first meeting) and immediately after, he struck her as posturing and false—a prince who seemed to have been inexpertly instructed in the ways of princes (Hold your head a little higher, no, not quite that high; speak in a commanding tone … No, that doesn’t mean shout…)—he soon proved not to be, as she’d expected, deceitfully confident about the skills he lacked. He was handsome, far handsomer than she, but his beauty was milky and ephemeral, moist-eyed; he was one of those delicate boys of whom, by the time he’d turned fifty, others would whisper, “You wouldn’t believe it, he was once such a pretty boy,” in tones of scandalized satisfaction.

  But, more unexpected … he was so nervous, so unsure, that he could not imagine himself as king, though his becoming king one day was inevitable as mortality itself. All of which he confessed to her, immediately, on their wedding night. It did not seem to occur to him that a fear might go unspoken, that anxiety could be masked.

  He, for his part, was initially disappointed, but soon surprised by her, as well.

  When she first appeared to him, on their wedding day, her bridal finery, however artful, could not disguise her heftiness, the great dome of her forehead or the stunted apostrophe of her nose. She might have been a barge, steered by her father with the steady determination of commerce along the cathedral aisle. This, then, would be the face, these would be the mannish shoulders and the breadth of hip, he’d be seeing, daily, for the rest of his life.

  And yet, on their wedding night, when they were finally alone together in the royal bedchamber … Let’s say she could not have been the virgin that tradition and propriety demanded her to be. She couldn’t have invented tricks like that, untutored. Who knew how many stableboys, how many pages, she had pushed down onto haystack or secluded lawn?

  He liked not only the fleshly revelations—he who was, in fact, as virginal as she was supposed to be—but the evidence that she had been ill-behaved. He liked as well his first sight of her nakedness. She was stocky but firm, her body all hillocks and white, satiny risings. On that first night she told him, unembarrassed, what to do, and he, being inexperienced, was glad to obey; he who faced a future of issuing commands, of others looking at him questioningly, waiting for him to make the decision, every decision, every time.

  The king died soon after, trampled on a hunt by the very horse he’d considered his truest companion. The prince was, to his horror, made king three weeks before his nineteenth birthday.

  She fell into love with a strange sense of powerlessness, as if she and her husband had contracted the same disease at the same time. She looked forward to the mornings, seeing him groggy but sweet upon awakening (he liked to be held, just for a few minutes, before getting out of bed and attending to his kingly duties); she liked talking to him at night, after the duties had been dispatched, about everything, from the small particulars of the day to his love of a local poet, recently deceased, from whose work the new king could quote, at length. She was surprised (and oddly, if only briefly, disappointed) to find that she’d been wrong about the chambermaids and harlots; that he actually intended, every night, to return to their bed; that he did not cease to delight in her willingness to command (Hold still, relax, I know it hurts a little but give in to it, pain in moderation has its pleasures…)

  During the months after his coronation, it was increasingly impossible for her to believe that he undervalued her intelligence (she was, in fact, intelligent). It was ever more apparent that he prized her opinions over those of his counselors (she whose only official purposes were peacekeeping and the production of heirs). By the time he’d turned twenty (just after she’d turned twenty-four), it was evident that they ruled together, secretly; that he (as tradition demanded) would offer as his own pronouncements, every day, that which they had decided together, the night before, when they were alone, in bed.

  Decades passed. They had a son, a daughter, and a second son.

  Their lives, their reign, was not untroubled. Among their subjects there were robberies, contract disputes, lawsuits over property lines that had been drawn a century ago. The axe-maker’s wife beat her husband to death with a lamb bone and, as the police took her away, proclaimed that she hadn’t wanted to sully one of the axes. In the castle, a maid was impregnated by a page, and (although the king and queen would not have punished her) drowned herself in a well. The cook fought continually with the housekeeper, each delivering, for almost thirty years, a weekly report about the excesses and callousness of the other.

  Among the family, the daughter, the middle child, who had not only inherited but doubled her mother’s tendency to corpulence, jumped out a window at the age of twelve, but—it being only a second-story window—landed unharmed on a hydrangea bush and, having made the gesture once, seemed to feel no need of making it again.

  The second son, the youngest child—knowing he’d never be king—ran off when he turned seventeen, but returned less than a year later, thin and ragged, having tried to live as a bard and troubadour in a neighboring kingdom, but having found that his limited gifts attracted scant attention. He decided he could manage as a prince, composing verses and singing songs at occasional palace recitals.

  The oldest boy was almost suspiciously untroubled. He was hale and stalwart, confident without an edge of arrogance, but his was not the most subtle and penetrating of minds, and it was impossible for his parents to refrain from periods of doubt about his ability to be king himself when the day arrived.

  Although the king and queen never ceased entirely to worry over their children, the older boy remained true and devoted, and took on a more royal aspect as he entered his twenties. The younger boy married a homely but insightful princess from several kingdoms away, wrote volumes of verse for his wife, who believed him to be a genius, unheralded in his time but sure to be vindicated by history. The daughter did not marry (though she had offers) but became an expert archer, a hunter, and a sailor, and took great joy in everything she did so well.

  The king and queen themselves were not untouched by sorrows or trials. In late middle age, the king believed himself to have fallen in love with an absurd but imperiously serene, lunar and ethereally pallid duchess, and needed a fortnight to learn that she intoxicated but bored him. The queen, soon after the duchess episode, returned to her old habit of pushing pages and stableboys down onto hay bales and secluded lawns, until the boys’ helpless willingness, the thoughts of advancement that were audible through their lascivious moans, became more humiliating than gratifying.

  The king and queen returned to each other, battered, humbled, and strangely amused by their escapades. They found, to their mutual surprise, that they seemed to love each other more rather than less for having shown, rather late in the game, this capacity for their blood to rise.

  She said to him, on occasion, I’m turning slender and sly, I’m learning to weep discreetly when the nightingale sings.

  He said to her, on occasion, Straddling me won’t raise you any higher, are you sure it’s worth the effort?

  Which (to their shared surprise) always made them both laugh.

  * * *

  Eventually, d
ecades later, when the king was dying, the queen gently ushered everybody out into the corridor, closed the door to the royal bedchamber, and got into bed with her husband. She started singing to him. They laughed. He was short of breath, but he could still laugh. They asked each other, Is this silly? Is this … pretentious? But they both knew that everything there was to say had been said already, over and over, across the years. And so the king, relieved, released, free to be silly, asked her to sing him a song from his childhood. He didn’t need to be regal anymore, he didn’t need to seem commanding or dignified, not with her. They were, in their way, dying together, and they both knew it. It wasn’t happening only to him. So she started singing. They shared one last laugh—they agreed that the cat had a better voice than she did. Still, she sang him out of the world.

  When the queen was dying, years later, there were twenty-three people in the room, as well as three cats and two dogs. There were her children and their children and their children’s children, three of her maids, two pages (the older and the younger, long known to be lovers, their secret honored by everyone), and the cook and the housekeeper (who’d delivered their final complaints only weeks earlier). The animals—the dogs and cats—were in bed with the queen. The people knew, somehow, to stand at a certain distance, except for Sophia, the oldest maid, who moistened the queen’s brow with a handkerchief.

  The room wasn’t silent, or reverent. One of the babies fussed. One of the dogs snarled at one of the cats. But the queen, who was enormous by then, and pale as milk, looked at all the beings surrounding her, human and animal, with a certain grave compassion, as if they were the ones who were dying.

  Just before she passed away, a grandchild said to another, “She’s like a planet, don’t you think?”

  The other replied, “No, she’s like a sick old lady.”

  Each felt pleased by the proof of the other’s foolishness. Each boy, as their grandmother the queen sank away, thought of his own promising future; one because he had a poet’s eye and heart; the other because he was unsentimental and true. Each believed, as their grandmother died, that he’d go far in the world.