A Wild Winter Swan

by Gregory Maguire

  The wrought iron railings that had kept small children safe, back when Laura’s room was a nursery for some long-gone New York family, were leaning up like iron fencing in the box room next door. John Greenglass and Sam-Whoever-He-Is had taken them down that morning so they could climb out to repair the stonework and fix the leak.

  The sky was flat with snowlight. She could smell balsam, and a hint of the sea on the rising wind, and something like sauerkraut. She stayed there for quite a few minutes, her chin propped in her hands.

  O come, o come, Emmanuel, sang the girl.

  5

  The next morning set in, bleak as a diagnosis. The snow had stopped falling but the wind kept it unsettled, rushing it against the windows as Laura rambled about the empty house. It was well past ten before she accepted that Sam and John weren’t going to show up today. Of course: Sunday. Without realizing it, she had hoped that she would be home with them, and nobody else fussing about. She couldn’t name for herself what she wanted, so she tried to tell it as if she were a character in some story of her own life.

  The girl had wanted—well, company?

  At last she put on her everyday coat and let herself out the utility entrance. She headed west, which was the only way to go unless you wanted to throw yourself in the East River. She crossed East End Avenue and continued on toward the park, but at Fifth Avenue she decided to head downtown to look at the decorated store windows. She walked to keep warm underneath the low clouds, now a gritty caramel color. Foot traffic was steady. Nothing stopped New Yorkers from getting their Sunday papers and coffees, and their bagels in white wax bags.

  Once in a while she thought about Montreal, but there wasn’t much to think about it. It was up in the Arctic somewhere, up past Albany and Troy. She would be stationed there like a soldier at a hardship post. At least here she felt like a player with a walk-on part in her own life and times. In Montreal she would only be one of the stage mob saying “rhubarb rhubarb.”

  The ordinary world asserted itself through a smorgasbord of aromas. Hot air from a dryer vent. A sizzle of onions. A reek of roasting chestnuts and nearly scorched salt pretzels from a pushcart tended by an old woman in a babushka.

  Things got more evened out, even a little perfumed, on Fifth Avenue. She kept walking, lost in her thoughts or what passed for thoughts, until she caught sight of herself in the windows of Scribner’s. A cellophane cutout of a girl. Polar gusts flickered snow-dust around her. The wind tore her long, irresolutely colored hair out from her head scarf, an insult of apparel Laura was obliged to wear on Sundays whether in church or not. She tried to catch her eyes glancingly in the window to see if she looked as stupid as she felt. Coal-dark and judgmental, her eyes were forming some opinion about her that she couldn’t decipher.

  “Someone happy about herself,” said a big black lady in a striped yellow coat large enough to button around an ambulance. She was dragging a shopping bag bristling with about a dozen frothy heads of celery.

  “Sorry,” said Laura. She was in the way and inched over.

  “Celery soup for lunch at the Rescue Mission, and I’m late. My bus don’t show. Take some celery and lighten my load, or get out of my way, I got a stove to park myself in front of.”

  Laura ducked back and Celery Lady trudged on. The celery was getting frozen, but maybe soup didn’t care about that.

  Crossing Fifth Avenue, Laura headed back uptown so the wind would be at her back. Then she walked around Rockefeller Center. On Sixth Avenue near Radio City Music Hall she visited her favorite decorations, bas-reliefs carved in sand-toned stone above the doors at street level. A naked woman on the back of a swan. A Pegasus. A one-armed man hoisted aloft by an eagle. Well, he had a second arm but it was mostly hidden behind the outstretched wing. The ornamentations of the heavy limestone buildings were all about flying. She ignored the great ridiculous Christmas tree, too large to love, really sort of monstrous. She preferred the loose-limbed, gold-plated young god below it, nearly naked even in this weather, sprawled upon his ring of golden orbit.

  The ice-skating rink opened up beneath him. Laura sidled along the railing, gliding on her elbows. From above, she watched couples and singles on the ice. Beside her, a man in a stiff black hat with a feather in it was complaining about the waltzy music to a younger woman who might have been his daughter or his secretary or maybe a baby sister.

  “Shut up and let me listen to the music,” replied his companion. “It’s pretty. It’s all fairy-tale and princesses.”

  “You’re the princess, you know that? But you should get yourself some better taste in tunes. This stuff gives me a pain in my wiener schnitzel. Gimme a bit of Dean Martin and a Scotch on the rocks any day. ‘Fly Me to the Moon,’ why doncha.”

  “At this hour? Herbie, you’re the rat’s ass, hands off me, we’re supposed to be at church, I told my ma. Someone could see us.”

  Laura made sure her eyes were facing away but she kept listening. The music surged in tempered waves. “Herbie, get your hand outa my pocket, I might have an open mousetrap in there.”

  Probably not father and daughter, Laura thought, but then, how would she know?

  She was reluctant to leave the music but the self-approval of people braving the winds before Christmas was getting on her nerves. She scurried uptown, crossing just at 58th to glance in the windows of F. A. O. Schwarz. Stuffed animals drowning in tinsel. Then she veered back across Fifth Avenue and into Central Park, with its glistening, wet-sugar paths and its happy goofy dogs and their hungover owners. The outcroppings of schist—thank you Mrs. Mulvaney in fourth grade, for schist, and gneiss, and limestone—were sprayed with diamond gleam. Two young men walked by holding hands until they saw Laura looking. Don’t mind me, what’s wrong with brotherly affection, she thought. But she wouldn’t really know about that either.

  This was the great mystery of the city in which she lived. It was so filled with variety that she had always trusted, somehow, that she would find her own available place in it. A perch, like that of any bird. A hidey-hole like the one that little white owl had found. There was enough otherliness here to have room for Laura. Surely?

  But being moved to the care of nuns in Montreal—that couldn’t be good. That didn’t sound like roosting, but like migration. Or banishment. Or jail.

  She passed pigeons scavenging for grain spilled from the feed buckets of the carriage horses. Crossed some widths where the wind growled with turbid force. Paced the stately alley of leafless elms, ended up at the snowy steps descending to the drained water basin of Bethesda Fountain. She approached the angel statue with its flared wings and its loving but blank expression. She tried to find the exact place to stand in which she could meet the angel’s eyes and be recognized. But either the angel was blind, like justice, or Laura was just not worth noticing. Into the corridors of wind and time the angel looked, seeing what Laura could not see, seeing anything and maybe everything but Laura herself. Seeing the blank space that made up Laura.

  Someone was urging his kids to climb over the basin’s stone edge and stand and face his big box camera. “The Cohn family,” said the dad. “Three Cohns in the fountain! Smile, kids.” The kids, dad-rich, smiled at him.

  6

  Waiting at the light at 63rd and Madison, Laura turned her head to keep from being splashed by a taxi grinding to a halt. Grey water dashed upon her coat. Looking up at the sound of someone snickering, she saw Donna Flotarde a few steps away. Donna’s parents were behind her a step or two, arm in arm like real people, smiling. Donna was hissing, “She’s the one—Ciardi’s Fine Foods, remember I told you?” When Donna realized she’d been overheard, she winced out a fake smile. “Oh, hi, Laura,” said Donna Flotarde. Laura had no words with which to reply, but Mr. and Mrs. Flotarde said, “Merry Christmas, honey,” as if they were all cousins or something, and the Flotardes picked their way past in single file.

  Two storefronts on this side of Madison were packed from doorway to curb with Christmas trees for sale, leavin
g only a narrow path through the green woods. The Flotardes disappeared in the temporary forest.

  “Hi, Donna,” said Laura finally, after they were too distant to hear her. Laura wondered how far along the next block they would get before Donna Flotarde would fill her parents in on the story of why Laura had been expelled from Driscoll. It was so stupid, still; Laura could hardly bear to think about it. Instead, she looked at the taxi, which had dumped onto the pavement four irate ladies in Sunday church clothes.

  “We going to heaven, but not in your taxi, you want to kill us all before we get to Salvation Chapel? No, I don’t think so, Mister Manny.” The chief church lady threw a few bills in the taxi window. “More than one cab working this avenue, and anyways we can walk and hallelujah at the same time if we got to.” The women stepped out into Madison with four gloved hands lifted in formation, alerting the next taxi driver to their immediate need.

  Back to the dead-end lane of Van Pruyn Place at last. Nonno and Nonna weren’t home from church yet. In the warm light of the kitchen with its contact paper wallpaper and the lampshade featuring a parade of jolly fat cooks, Laura was, if not happy, at least alone and safe. Mary Bernice was a mere ghost of Jean Naté in the pantry, a trace of personality among the Christmas cloves and cinnamon. The cook had probably taken some gingerbread to give to her husband, Ted, who worked Sunday mornings in a Thruway tollbooth too far away, Nyack or somewhere.

  Laura filled the kettle and pulled some loose mint tea from the canister and milk from the Frigidaire. After checking to make sure there were no peeping Toms in the back alley, she rolled off her tights and hung them over the radiator, which was hissing in a jazzy way. Garibaldi sidled over to sniff the fabric and to claw at it, but Laura made the pssst sound, and the cat ran off.

  She turned on the radio, a red plastic dome-top device seething with emphysema. She’d get in trouble if she fiddled with the dial, so she tolerated what came on. The program was running seasonal. A dulcet voice introduced a carol Laura remembered having sung in the school Christmas pageant a few years ago.

  In the bleak midwinter

  Frosty winds made moan

  Earth stood hard as iron

  Water like a stone.

  Snow had fallen, snow on snow,

  Snow on snow,

  In the bleak midwinter

  Long time ago.

  Laura settled into Mary Bernice’s chair. She sniffed at the tea and let the aroma become both warmth and wetness upon her cheeks. It felt like tears, though generally tears didn’t taste of peppermint.

  A rare moment of—something—continued to fall over her. Outside, frosty winds were making moan again. A branch dropped on the metal palings that divided the Ciardi yard from that of old Mrs. Steenhauser the next street over.

  The world wanted so hard to be poetic, and really it was only stupid.

  Everything falling through the air. Baby owls, branches, snow on snow on snow. Airplanes. A Bobby Vee record hurtling down Stairwell B at Driscoll School.

  Where would she fall from in the end, she wondered—how high need she climb to find out how steep is the fatal fall?

  She’d been here about five years now, more or less. Ovid and Isabella Ciardi were growing old as she was growing up. Laura could do the counting backward and figure it out perfectly if she wanted, but she was ashamed still to be using her fingers to count on.

  This house on Van Pruyn Place. Home and yet not home; more a here than a home. Even with her own room upstairs, and a blue chenille bedspread, and a nightstand with a picture of her brother Marco on it. Her own bathroom with its pink tiles and black trim. She didn’t even have to close the door to her bathroom if she didn’t want, not since the governess left a few years ago. Nobody came upstairs anymore.

  Not very like home, but the most home she had had for the past years, ever since her mother. Since her mother.

  But she wouldn’t allow that thought to fall upon her. She twitched her head and, Sunday or not, said, “Damnation.”

  If she could tell what she had done, maybe she could think of a way to undo it. If she could write it out? But probably not—she hadn’t been able to produce a paragraph about herself and how she had spent her summer, not once in five years. Something blocked her words from escaping through the pen.

  Still, she could see Maxine Sugargarten. Weird stuck-up alluring Maxine. Laura could see herself at the top of the flight of steps, holding Maxine’s record album in its sleeve. Maxine had been going on for ten days about how her brother was coming home for Christmas. She had gotten him Bobby Vee’s record album called Take Good Care of My Baby. It wasn’t such a terrific album, and wasn’t even new anymore, but Maxine had been carting it around the halls and showing it off and talking about her big brother coming home until Laura could stand it no longer.

  Put the disaster in order, she announced to herself. If you can arrange it in your mind as it happened, maybe you can predict the next step forward. Maybe even manage to take that step. If there is one.

  There was always a before to every story. “What is past is prologue,” fluted Miss Parsley in Composition, period three every Monday morning. “Who have you become over the weekend? Who are you now? Tell me something that happened to you since seventh period Friday. What happened. Make me see it! Let me be able to hand your paragraph straight to a certain Mr. Alfred Hitchcock. Supply so many visual details and human gestures that he can set up a camera and record your incident without delay. Short is good! But do it right away! Be readable now. And remember your ending: it’s most important. What does your experience mean? What does it signify? Change, growth, understanding, realization?”

  Laura could tell her first paragraph to herself any time of the day or night. She was good at looking and seeing. She just couldn’t write it down. As for the conclusions, forget it. What things meant was impossible to guess or say, even in her secret soliloquies.

  Garibaldi kneaded his way into Laura’s lap. She began to tell it as if she were the point of the story, but even Garibaldi yawned, as if it would be a stretch to expect him to care much about her travails.

  Gym. Second period, Monday morning. At the end of the volleyball game, the girl had plunged into the locker room with the rest of the team. They had twelve minutes to shower, change, and be in English two flights up. The last one in the door of the English room at the start of third period on Mondays had to read aloud her “Past Is Prologue” paragraph. So the girl made sure she was never last. Ever.

  Maxine Sugargarten blasting reports about her big brother returning from basic training for Christmas. Donna Flotarde as some sort of cheer squad behind her most of the time, and then Aarathi and Cindy and Mary Colleen O’Cassidy snaking around on the sidelines, too. They’d taken against Laura, to be sure. Oh, yes, long before the locker room, and the stolen record album. In the gym, in the halls, in assembly, everywhere.

  Back when there were boys in class it hadn’t been so bad. Laura had been too quiet to pester. Boys equal noise. But after promotion from sixth grade at Driscoll, the boys had to go to Prentiss-Drake. In seventh grade, Driscoll became all girls. And once the camouflage of boys was cleared away, Laura’s status among her classmates devolved into being a sort of cafona from the back of beyond. Brought to light in order to make the other girls feel good about themselves. Laura, a half-orphan, stuck in a house with those ridiculous ancient Italian people.

  Garibaldi looked up at her accusatorily. You had friends, said the cat. Don’t say you didn’t.

  But she didn’t. The cat was wrong. Sure, two fourth-grade girls had looked up to Laura when she’d helped out in the art room that one time. They’d followed her around in the cafeteria for a while.

  “On Saturday afternoon I went on a date with my boyfriend to see Birdman of Alcatraz at the rep,” said one of her volleyball teammates as they rushed into the shower last Monday morning. “We wanted to see To Kill a Mockingbird but it isn’t out till next week. What did you do over the weekend, Laura? Did you hang out
with your fourth-grade fan club at the soda fountain? What fun!”

  “Shut up,” said Laura, quietly; she could hardly even hear herself.

  Usually she was so eager to be the first one to English that she skipped the showers, barely swabbing under her arms with a damp paper towel before getting dressed. But the girls in the locker room were feeling gangstery, maybe from holiday high spirits. As Laura turned to reach for her camisole, Aarathi opened the top of her liquid Prell and gave it a squeeze. Green globs jumped on Laura’s hair and shoulder blades. “Oh,” said Aarathi, nearly sneezing with joy. “What a disaster! So sorry, Laura. Quick, you have time to shower.”

  She had no choice, and the other girls were half-dressed already. If she didn’t hurry, she’d be last. Then she’d have to admit out loud in Parsley’s class that she did nothing on the weekend but go to church, and with her elderly grandparents. Her imagination was rich, but her life straitjacketed, and panic seized up her mind in the best of times.

  She had careered into the shower stall and turned on the hot water. Her hair was goopy. She snapped the curtain shut and powered up the hot. She could still make it; she was faster than everyone. Not until later did she remember the sound of a plastic-seated bench dragging across the floor tiles of the next stall. After her ski accident at Killington, Doll Pettigrew had been using the bench to balance herself in the shower. Laura should have noticed the scrape.

  This was the part she couldn’t bear to picture. Someone—was it Maxine, was it Aarathi, Donna, Cindy?—someone had climbed on the bench in the next shower stall and peered over the wall at naked Laura Ciardi in the shower. Laura’s eyes were closed because the shampoo was in her hair. She kept trying to rinse it out but the suds wouldn’t go; they were the Sorcerer’s Apprentice of liquid Prell soapsuds. They kept coming and coming. She would be late. There was giggling. Finally she tore the curtain open. The other girls were all dressed and dashing for the locker room door.