A Wild Winter Swan

by Gregory Maguire

  She was alone, dripping. Her clothes were where she had left them except her training bra and her underpants, nowhere. Her hair was more rubber than human.

  The bell rang as she skidded into the doorway. “Oh, something new,” said Miss Parsley. “Last in, first up, Laura! We haven’t heard from you all year. Slap right to work, girls! Deliver your weekend, tell me what happened and what it signified, and that means we are new people, we are ready, girls, to be ourselves in a new way for this whole new week, girls! You have ten minutes.”

  Her classmates had set her up, out of no other impulse than meanness and boredom. They wanted to see her suffer.

  The girl turned and looked around at the class as Joan of Arc might have done, inspecting the arrangement of kindling at her feet. It was braided like a wreath, and she was the upright pillar of wax in the middle, ready for the match.

  (Oh, that was good. Laura sat up in Mary Bernice’s chair and said it again to herself.)

  She was the upright pillar of wax in the middle of the wreath of kindling, turning like Joan of Arc might have done, to inspect her murderers. “Better get your pen out, we can’t wait to hear about your weekend,” sniggered one of the girls. Miss Parsley didn’t catch the sarcasm. The girl asked to go to the bathroom. “You’ve just come from the gym,” said Miss P. “My hair is still sticky, it wouldn’t wash out,” said the girl, raising a hank as an exhibit, dropping it with disgust. “That’s Italiano for you: greasy,” murmured a back-seater. “Back in four minutes, and you’re still on deck for this assignment,” said Miss P. “We all want to hear what you’ve been up to.” “Hear it and see it,” someone snorted. “Show us everything. Why not bare your soul, since you’ve already bared your behind?”

  The girls didn’t take against Laura Ciardi in the locker room because she had done anything to them. Except ignore them, perhaps. They took against her because they could. Because Laura stood out the most, which conferred a practical normality to all the others. Laura with no parents. Laura with no brother to come home at Christmas. No boyfriend. And a history of belligerence if pushed.

  Last Monday, during third period, Laura had lingered in the girls’ room as long as she dared, hoping Parsley would give up waiting and ask someone else to read her paragraph. As Laura finally was going back to English, she found herself passing Maxine’s locker door. Laura checked out the corridors in both directions, peeked in the locker, and found the treasured Bobby Vee album wedged in at an angle—slanting above Maxine’s stash of illegal makeup. Laura had lifted the album out and closed the metal locker door without making any noise.

  But what to do with it? It was too wide to carry around with her schoolbooks and notebooks. Luckily she had worn a big old cardigan of Nonno’s to school that day because the heat in the library was on the fritz. Into the wooly brown sweater she wrapped Maxine’s present for her Big Brother Sugargarten—his name was Spike or something—and tucked it under her arm with her other books. More sloppy than usual, but who looked at Laura Ciardi enough to notice?

  Her campaign to avoid having to write something and read it aloud had worked, but the impromptu theft had come to light by lunchtime. Maxine Sugargarten was sobbing in the school cafeteria so dramatically that Miss Adenoid, or whatever her name was, the school nurse, had to be summoned. “He’s my brother,” gasped Maxine Sugargarten, as if she were talking about Bobby Vee and not Spike Sugargarten. “And he’s been off at basic training for months! And we’ve been writing letters about this stupid Bobby Vee album, and it is a personal tribute to my loving friendship with my brother!”

  “If anyone knows anything about this missing LP,” said Mr. Grackowicz over the public address system, “please bring such information to the attention of the front office. And I might add that for someone to snitch someone else’s Christmas present is not a very nice thing to do in this season of peace on earth, goodwill to men. End of transmission.” Mr. G. had been in the navy.

  After lunch, Laura hunched in the cold library with her grandfather’s sweater folded under her chair. She was supposed to be doing a biology project on anatomy. The subject was bones, which was mostly copying drawings from the acetate overlays in the World Book Encyclopedia. Laura had asked if she could do a drawing of a bird wing rather than a human arm, and label all the parts. It would still be a reticulated diagram. Miss Frobisher had held out for the human arm as being more pertinent to the subject of Human Anatomy, Fall Semester. Laura had thought that was small-minded of her because we all came from birds way back. Back when we could fly.

  The human arm was repulsive, really, when you thought about it. That coronoid process, and the shading where the ulna turned. How slender, how easily broken. The very airiness of a wing so much more useful—more flexible, more giving.

  When the bell rang she saw she had only doodled seagulls flapping above a single-line horizon. The Human Bone had failed to emerge any further than an outline. Laura had slapped her stuff together and headed up toward Remedial Reading.

  The luck of high school traffic patterns brought Maxine Sugargarten and Donna Flotarde heading down the steps of Staircase B just as Laura was starting up. Maxine’s face looked like a Halloween fright mask, tracks of tears betraying her illicit eyeliner. Maxine was dragging her heels. By now everyone in the school knew Maxine was Trauma Case Number One for the day, and she’d be given some leeway. But Donna Flotarde had too many demerits to be late again, so she was leaping ahead. Finding herself alone with Maxine, Laura made her big mistake. “I am so sorry about your lost record, Maxine.”

  Maxine halted at the landing. She was just one of the pretty thugs who plagued Laura, she wasn’t any kind of friend. Laura hurried a little to pass her. “I just mean, you have a brother, that’s the good part, I guess,” Laura said, pausing at the top.

  “Of course it’s the good part, but my surprise is ruined,” snapped Maxine.

  “I mean at least he’s coming home.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  Oh, she’d gone too far. “Nothing. Wow for your brother, wow. Great. See ya. I’m going to be late for Pretzel.” (Miss Prelutsky.)

  Maxine’s snake-eyes had narrowed. “You’re awfully interested in my brother.”

  “I’m not at all interested in any brothers of yours.”

  “You never even met him.”

  “How could I meet him, he’s at basic training you said. I don’t care about him.”

  “What do you have under your sweater? Laura? Did you take my Bobby Vee?”

  “You’re medically off your rocker, Maxine.” Laura hugged the sweater to her bosom. The second bell had rung and they were alone in the stairwell, Maxine still paused at the halfway point, and Laura frozen on high alert at the top landing.

  “Wave out your sweater, Laura Ciardi, or I’ll tell Mr. G. It’s just the kind of stupid thing you’d do. Prove you don’t have my brother’s record album. Show me.”

  What could she do but live and suffer. Laura clopped her science book and her other books and binder on the floor. Opposite her, across the stairwell, the tall double-sashed window was partly open. It had been stuck that way since the summer. The gap up top was about a foot or so. Laura said, “Take good care of my baby,” and then, “I don’t have your stupid LP, see?” and with a flick of her wrist she sent the square record sleeve skirling toward the open part of the window. Maxine could find it in the alley with the cigarette butts and greasy pizza-slice papers. But a downdraft or some other perversity interfered, and the LP became a guided missile. Its thin edge smashed hard against the bridge of Maxine Sugargarten’s nose. It took good care of her baby squirmy face. There was a trip to Miss Adenoid’s office, and the emergency room, and Maxine’s precious nose had had to be cauterized. And on Tuesday morning Laura came back to school in her Sunday coat from Macy’s and she sat outside Mr. Grackowicz’s office while Nonna and Nonno went inside to bargain for her.

  The slatted bench was hard. The school secretary was adding up packets of lu
nch money and coming to different sums each time, and swearing softly under her minted breath. Laura tried to eavesdrop between the counting and the swearing.

  “She not a girl, she nearly addled,” Nonno was saying. His accent betrayed his anxiety; Laura knew he was trying to call her adult, not addled. “This only play, only fun time, this no assault. We send Sugargartens fat brick Parmigiano and small smoked ham and nice bottle best imported Barolo.”

  “Also some crystal ginger slices, Mr. Headmaster,” added Nonna. “Mountains and molehills, do not mistake them, Mr. Headmaster. Everything is not the Alps. Some things are pimples, not Alps.” She was trotting out her Ladies’ Auxiliary elocution voice big-time.

  Mr. G. had replied in a low tone. Laura couldn’t pick out a word.

  “She sorry, she write sorry letter, that she can do,” said Nonno. “We make her. We help her. She no write but she think sorry. We write, she sign, love, love.”

  “If they only charged the same for chocolate milk as for white,” said the secretary to Laura, “this wouldn’t be my weekly migraine.”

  “I’m not so good at counting, can’t help,” replied Laura in a whisper, wanting the woman to shut up.

  “Of course who forget childhood, it shake everyone, childhood, Mr. Headmaster. Your childhood shake you up, you turn into Mr. Headmaster. All good.” But the accent was getting stronger. Nonno was losing confidence in his argument. “But she no child no more, she addled. Her father—”

  Mr. Grackowicz cleared his throat; he didn’t want to hear the family history.

  Nonno wouldn’t be deterred. “Our only child, Mr. G. In World War Number Two, he fight on our side, Mr. G., on our American side. We already here, we Ciardis, we no Fascist. We come here 1929, just in time for Great Depression, we in line at soup table. First we eat, and when we can, we cook and we serve. We make our way. We Yankee doodles. We fight for American freedom. Laura’s papa, he our son. Our son Giuseppe, he fight for freedom in South Pacific Ocean. After war, when he get demobbed, he go join U.S. occupation in Austria. He die there, service to his country. Giuseppe Ciardi, buried in American military grave. You can’t throw Giuseppe daughter out of your brave free U.S.A. school, not when our Giuseppe he sacrifice his life. Honor our son, Mr. G. Honor. His soldier friends they call him Joe. American hero Joe Ciardi, riposa in pace.”

  Mr. Grackowicz really didn’t want to hear the full history of the Ciardi family, but once Nonno got started, look out.

  “And the mother, Laura’s mama, her with only one boy, then he go down in crash, Mr. G.! This Marco, this Laura only brother! Laura only one left! Who can blame Laura mama for sickness in head, in heart? I ask you. We know what mama feel, we feel same. Two deaths in ten years, what family is to bear? I ask you! We do what we can to make Laura her leftover child addled. We take her in, we love her Laura, we raise her. We need Laura here. She big, big help in store. I send you box of best Campania blood oranges by special bicycle delivery boy before you leave school today, Mr. G.”

  Then Mr. G. talked for a long, long time. He was probably reading from reports by other teachers, who had “concerns” about “fitness” and “deportment.” Maybe “fistfights.” When the door finally opened and Mr. G. said, “Miss Ciardi, come in here please,” Laura could hardly move.

  She came to the doorway and wouldn’t sit down. “I’m sorry, I said I was sorry,” said Laura. “I didn’t mean to hit Maxine Sugargarten in the schnozzle.”

  “That was only the tip of the iceberg, Laura,” said Mr. G., shaking his head.

  “That’s some iceberg,” replied Laura, which no one thought was funny. She didn’t tell about the locker room ambush earlier that day. It was too awful to say aloud.

  “I’ll put everything in writing,” said Mr. G. “That is how we do it.”

  “Giuseppe Ciardi, only son, sacrifice for our chosen nation,” said Signore Ovid Ciardi, but with failing conviction. “And it come to this.”

  So it came to this, with Laura sitting in Mary Bernice’s chair of a Sunday morning, teetering between a wreck of a high school career and becoming an exile to someplace so far away it might as well be another country. Well, it was, wasn’t it? Canada wasn’t in New York. The air would be clean and clear and she might die of oxygen poisoning without the rich diesel winds of Manhattan.

  She pressed against her sides as if she were showing a doctor where it hurt. But nothing hurt. It just—it just felt.

  Everything hurt, actually, except her skin and her bones and muscles. Everything inside her was dry as old spiderweb. She was too young to feel old.

  So she was almost relieved now to hear Nonna home from her devotions. The key in the lock, the creak of the old door. “Madre di Dio, what are we going to do?” called Nonna. Perhaps she forgot that Mary Bernice was off for the day.

  “I’m coming, Nonna,” called Laura, dumping the cat on the braided rug laid on top of the linoleum floor. “Mary Bernice is out today.”

  “The whole house is collapsing,” said Nonna. “Everything is collapsing.” It did look a wreck. More of the hall ceiling had fallen down while Laura had been stalking the snowy streets. “Mop this up, would you, Laura, you’ll find a bucket in Rosa Mendoza’s cupboard. If I didn’t believe the Christ Child had come to bring us peace and joy, I’d say there was a Christmas plague upon this house.”

  When Nonno got home, he picked up the phone. “They come back at seven a.m. domani,” he then reported. “They find leak, they fix. Tomorrow only wind, no snow. They start on ceiling repair. They say not worry, Bella. They have time and they have smart hands. They good boys. Mrs. Steenhauser give them good notices. They do her back porch steps last summer, spic and span. They finish us up here tomorrow.”

  “I want a small Negroni before Laura brings out the antipasti and the rice salad,” replied Bella Ciardi. “What is the thing the American ladies tell me say? Yes, I remember. ‘I can’t cope.’ How that, Nonno? ‘I can’t cope, get me my Negroni.’ I am so up-to-the-minute, no, caro?”

  7

  Laura curled the edge of her blanket in her clenched fingers. Who ever said that the wind howls? That’s no howl, thought Laura.

  It wasn’t a cheery sound, and she tried to tell herself braver than she was.

  The dark was full of movement. Tides of night sweeping. The wind howled—

  No, not howled.

  The wind made a pitchy shriek like a teakettle still a few moments from the boil.

  That wasn’t bad, that was accurate, that was what it sounded like. Still, the trick of putting herself in the middle of a told tale didn’t make her feel any better, for once.

  The snow had stopped, though Nonno had said it was expected again by the following evening. Perhaps a heavier fall next time. Laura looked up at the yellow undersides of the clouds. Beveled smudges, vaguely purgatorial.

  The girl felt the buzz of inactivity in her breast.

  But what did that mean? A buzz of inactivity? That was a figure-of-speech thing, she couldn’t remember what it was called. Contradiction. A buzz of inactivity. That must be what the primordial ooze felt before the first single-celled animal pulled itself together and decided to crawl toward the seashore for a little sunbathing. Ambition.

  It would be beyond midnight. She got up, restless, and went to the bathroom and then paced her bedroom. She picked up the souvenir snow globe and she shook white confusion all over the plastic cutout skyline of Manhattan, then set the paperweight down again. At the window she peered out. Nothing was changed. Nothing changed in New York City except of course that everything changed a thousand times faster than one could ever notice.

  Later, as she was almost asleep, she wondered if an angel had entered her room. But any angels she knew about, like angels in stained glass windows or angels in the Italian Renaissance rooms of the Met, those guys never arrived at night. They needed full light to be pictured. Angels at night were invisible. There was nothing there. Perhaps Laura wasn’t really there either.

  No one stoo
d nearby to look down at the girl in the bed and witness whether or not she really existed.

  8

  Monday morning broke with the anarchy of a school holiday but without the privilege of relief. By 7:45 a.m., everyone else she knew was already in homeroom. It was the last school day before the break. Laura wasn’t supposed to show up and clear out her locker and hand in her textbooks until after release at three. Fewer goodbyes, less chance of guerrilla ambush in the corridors of war. Maxine Sugargarten and Donna Flotarde and Doll Pettigrew and the others would have to strut along and seize upon some other victim. Happy holidays to that sucker.

  She dressed and went downstairs. In the front hall she found Nonno in his store whites. He was holding the door open for the repair fellows, that John Greenglass, that Sam-the-helper, who brought in a cardboard box of supplies and tool belts.

  “It no working,” Nonno was saying to them. “Is no good. You no find hole. Look, such disaster. Mia moglie, she have nervous screaming from this.” The ceiling was damper than before. It looked nasty.

  “We did some caulking on Saturday but we must not have got it all,” said John. “I promise you, Mr. Ovid, we’ll seal it up good. More snow isn’t called for till later. By the time you get home tonight the breach will be plugged. The walls and ceiling will take a day or two to dry out, and we can do a quick paint job on Wednesday. Our level best, that’s all we can give.”

  Sam scowled at the ceiling. “Any more owls show up?”

  Signore Ciardi hadn’t heard about the owl but he didn’t bother to ask Sam what the hell he was talking about. “You look in bedroom. See if is worse in there, too. Signora go out this morning. She leaving soon.” Laura knew he meant: So the busybody old lady won’t be in your way with her hand-wringing and suchlike.