A rap on the door. John. “Hey, Laura—sorry to pester you, but what is the deal with that smell? Just asking in case it’s a sign of more trouble up here. I was pretty sure we got it all yesterday, but boy, is that a stink and a half.”
“I’m—I’m dyeing some clothes, it must be the dye,” said Laura, proud of being able to think up a lie, and able to deliver it without stuttering.
“Well, smells like something died in there all right. Okay, we’re checking the roof. We’ll be done in a jif.”
The swan-boy had frozen at the sound of their voices on the other side of the door. Laura was only two feet from him. This was probably illegal and Father Chiumiento would certainly raise both his hands in front of his cheeks at the thought of it. How could she even express such a moment the next time she was in the confessional, kneeling on that leathery pad behind the dark brown velvet drape? I helped a naked young man into the bathtub. That was probably more than ten thousand venials, maybe even a big fat black blotch of a mortal sin on her soul. But to get forgiveness for such a transgression she had to be able to confess it, and she couldn’t imagine how.
“Come,” she said softly, and touched him lightly on his elbow.
He inched forward. His wing elevated slightly to help him retain his balance as he gripped the side of the old clawfoot. Once he’d stepped in, and managed his second foot, he swiveled his round rump to the taps and his face to the door, so his wing could fall out of the tub and not get so wet. Maybe the water was the right temperature for the boy part but too hot for the swan part. In any case, the falling forward of the wing provided a sort of shower curtain allowing, indeed enforcing, a modicum of respectability. He sat down. She didn’t stop watching.
The grit swirled off him in rings like mud off a submerged boot. He closed his eyes with the blessing of warm water, and murmured “Tak . . . Danke schön,” and then, a moment later, in a rough but intelligible accent, “Thank you.”
“Thank you,” she replied, the nonsense weirdness of Catholic politeness getting the better of her. But it was what she meant, very truly.
14
Then came the awkwardness. She daren’t stare at him, but there was hardly anyplace else to look. She couldn’t leave—John and Sam were still monkeying about in the box room just a few feet down the hall. She sat on the toilet and put her head in her hands, and she let her glance slant down and sideways. The floor was tiled in black and white hexagons that could give you an optical illusion headache if you stared at them.
He was breathing out in long puffs. Frankly even his breath smelled bad, like a fishmonger’s blooded apron. She thought about adding a dollop of Mr. Bubble to the bath, but it was too late to propose it, and maybe too girlish. Then, thinking about soap, she stood up and turned to the sink. Intending not to look at him in the mirror, she looked anyway; she saw his articulated spine and the strong shoulders of a boy who maybe could partly fly, and the luscious skin, flushed rosy by the hot water, and spattered with an up-tilting, linear constellation of small darker freckles. In so looking she caught an unexpected glimpse of herself in the mirror, for almost the first time, and all she could tell of herself was that she looked hungry. She picked up the bar of white soap and turned and cleared her throat. He swiveled his head and she held it out to him. He took it as if it were a sandwich, or a secret, and held it in front of his face and looked at it, and smelled it. What did Ivory really smell like, she wondered. Like the inside of a washing machine. But that was comparing like to like, Miss Parsley commented in Laura’s head: Comparing Ivory bar soap to the residue of Ivory flakes doesn’t get us anywhere.
The swan-boy seemed to get the point of soap, and dropped the chalky-rubbery bar into the water. Then Laura handed him a yellow rubber duck from the five-and-dime. He squeezed it and it quacked, which made him laugh—a male laugh, unmistakable. She flushed the toilet quickly to try to disguise the noise. John and Sam sounded as if they were hanging out the window, inspecting their work, and luckily they didn’t hear the swan-boy. She put her finger to her lips again and scowled and he raised his eyebrows and grimaced. A universal gesture for oops, maybe. Sorry.
Still sitting, still sheathed by his forward-raking wing, he began to wash with the soap and then the intimacy really was intolerable. Sam and John were done in the box room and tramping back and forth across the hallway to the top of the stairs, presumably removing their supplies. “All clear,” called John Greenglass as they started to evacuate the attic floor.
“When you come down, I’ll tell you about Fluster this morning,” called Sam Rescue.
Phew. Relief. When they were well and truly on the floor below, and not returning, Laura turned and looked at the swan-boy. She said, “Parli italiano? Or English?”
“Dansk, tysk,” he replied. “And yes, engelsk. English. Some little-time engelsk.” The accent was anything but Italian. More like soft vocal clapping.
“Okay, down to brass tacks then. What is your name?”
He looked puzzled. “What is your name?” She thought he was repeating the question to understand it, but when he rolled his hand, the one with the toy duck in it, she realized he was asking her.
“I am Laura,” she said, pointing to herself, as if there were several other girls in the bathroom. “You?”
“I am Hans,” he said.
Laura, Hans. Hans, Laura. That was that then. It seemed to Laura that there was nothing else to say, except this: “Does it hurt?” Pointing to the drapery of the wing.
“Everywhere,” he said. “Overalt.” He ran his dripping fingers from the top rack of bridal-white feathers, at the place where they pinned into his human skin, to the round of his shoulder, and then behind his head to the nape of his neck.
It was too much to look at, to think about. Pain overalt. “I have to do something about these clothes,” she said. “They stink to high heaven. The cook will be up here with the plumbers if not the police. I have to wash them or get rid of them, something.”
Even as Laura spoke, Nonna was hollering up the stairwell. “Laura? What is that unholy smell? Are you unwell? Do you want me to ask Dr. Buechlein to pay a call?”
Again with the lies, they were just fountaining up out of Laura this morning. She opened the door and replied, calmly as possible, “Sorry, Nonna. The cat came up and got sick. I’m cleaning it up.”
“What did that cat eat, a rotten rat?” asked Nonna, but she sounded mollified. “I’ll send up Mary Bernice with a bucket of water and ammonia.”
“Don’t,” said Laura, fiercely. “I said I’ll take care of it.”
Nonna began her way down the steps toward her breakfast. “First we have Noah’s flood in the ceiling, and now a beached whale in the attic. Does Jesus want us to suffer so? I can’t think that this is fair, with my sister and her great catch Mr. Corm Kennedy coming tomorrow evening. If we have to take them round the corner to Panetta’s because the house is uninhabitable, all is lost. We’ll be celebrating Christmas with the Bowery bums or gli indigenti at the soup kitchen. Now I have to make the scialatelli this morning and, Laura, I don’t want my noodles to pick up the stench of vomited rat.”
“I’ll handle it, Nonna!”
“The excitement of the Nativity is getting to her, Ovid, you can hear it in her voice.” Nonna’s words were broadcast downstairs to her husband, who must already be at the breakfast table. “She’s being rude. The young always get so overexcited at this time of year.”
“These can’t stay here, or you’ll be found out,” said Laura to Hans. She picked up his clothes. “I will wash them later if I can sneak them downstairs. For now—do you mind?” Hans looked as if he didn’t understand, but he shrugged. A shrug to which a trailing wing is attached expressed a more mighty class of bewilderment than Laura had ever conceived. It was just so intense.
She picked up the tunic and the trousers and folded them into as small a bundle as she could. She wrapped them in her striped bath towel.
“I’ll be right back,” she sai
d. “Stay. Stay here. Stay quiet. You know how to stay?”
He didn’t answer at first. “I do not know how to leave,” he replied at last.
“I’ll be right back.”
He squeaked the duck at her.
She closed the door behind her so carefully that the tongue of the doorknob mechanism hardly clicked in its slot. All the other human life in the house had settled to the bottom floors. She ran on tiptoes into Miss Gianna Tebaldi’s old room. Garibaldi was there, making inroads into the discarded lasagne. Laura took Miss Gianna Tebaldi’s old metal clothes hamper, once painted a pretty lime green and now spotted with a pox of rust. She crammed the offending clothes and the towel inside and she shut the lid. Then she opened the window and set the whole hamper out onto the fire escape. Several pigeons hobbled on the rail to investigate, got a whiff, thought better of it, and flew away.
When she went back into the bathroom, he was just beginning to stand. Having shucked off his pelt of dirt, he was beginning to regain some sense of propriety, and he turned his regal back to her, hiding his nakedness like Adam.
“Sit right back down there,” she said, “we have to do your hair. It’s an absolute fright.”
He obeyed, but complained, “The water, cold and full of dirt and salt.”
“I’ll let some water out and we’ll refill. Here’s a tin pail from the Jersey shore. I fill it up and rinse my hair with it.” She knelt at the tub toward the end with the plug, and tugged at the chain. The water began to gurgle out, leaving lines of sediment on the porcelain as the level dropped. She kept her eyes glued to the drain. Custody of the senses, Laura. With her peripheral vision, however, she could tell that he had arranged his one hand like a human fig leaf in the place where fig leaves usually find themselves. A gentleman, she thought. A gentle-swan.
Using her blue bucket with the white seashells painted around the rim, she washed his hair for him. She lavished upon him dollops of shampoo. She rinsed and rinsed, all the while refilling the tub and letting it out. The shampoo sudsed up the bathwater, which was growing cleaner with the repeated drainings and refills. Finally the slick of shampoo was mostly gone, and even in a room without a window, his hair appeared bright as rings of shaved sunlight. He looked at her and smiled. “Never before,” he said.
“Me either.”
15
There was the problem of nakedness. Laura was already figuring out that she could probably commandeer the washing machine when Mary Bernice went out to do the morning shopping. “Popping round to the shops,” she always said, when she meant haunting the little Greek grocery where the complacent owner sat on a stool by the door and watched out for riffraff pinching the wares, and the tall thin wife with the wobbly arms ran back and forth grabbing things for people as if they couldn’t read labels for themselves. It could take Mary Bernice an hour to get the most basic stuff, tuna fish and Bab-O and olives and revolting hard-boiled eggs in glass jars, because she liked the exhausted Greek wife and felt bad for her and talked to her about missing the old country. Apparently they could make common cause in nostalgia, even if their old countries were on the kitty-corner opposite ends of the puzzle-piece map of Europe.
Once the cook had left, Laura would squirrel down the stairs and wash Hans’s storm-drenched clothes. She could get them done with the washer and into the dryer before Mary Bernice returned. Those rags wouldn’t smell so bad after spending a hot rinse cycle improved by a cup of Tide powder. But in the meantime, the bath was over and Hans had to get out, and though the furnace was working overtime it was still late December during a cold snap. He had to wear something. Laura’s towel was outside on the fire escape. The only thing she had big enough to clothe nakedness was her own nightgown, which she still had on, and a scratchy old bathrobe with large white polka dots on a pink background. For so many reasons, neither of those outfits would suit him.
“Wait here again,” she said. “Wait.”
“Cold,” he said. He was starting to shiver. That was probably a sign of improving circulation. She thought of the coverlet and grabbed that. He could use it as a towel and maybe she could run it through the dryer later. “I’ll be right back,” she said. “Can you be quiet?”
“I can be nothing,” he said, which caught her heart in her throat, until he finished, “but quiet.”
She leaped down the stairs two at a time. One level below, her grandmother’s sewing room stood in the back of the house. It faced the fire escape and the backyard and Mrs. Steenhauser’s backyard. Next to the sewing room was the master bathroom, and forward of that, her grandparents’ bedroom, which looked out into Van Pruyn Place. You could get into their bathroom from the hall or the bedroom. She opened the hall bathroom door very slowly, just in case she had misunderstood everyone’s whereabouts and Nonno was still shaving. But he wasn’t. The moist air smelled of old man, stinky-sweet, and also of bay lime splash. On the back of the door Laura hoped to find Nonno’s bathrobe, a great, belted prehistoric cloak of some weirdly fluffy, camel-colored yardage. Nonno often wore it down to breakfast, but he must be in a hurry to get to the shop this morning. The last day or two before Christmas were among the busiest days of the year for Ciardi’s Fine Foods and Delicacies. So here was the precious robe, ready for filching. It was still a little warm from big old Nonno. Well, good.
Back upstairs, she said gingerly, “Can you put this on by yourself?”
Hans had stepped out of the tub and was mostly decent in the coverlet. He looked at Nonno’s bathrobe. “En frakke?” he ventured, and corrected himself. “Sorry. I try to English. A coat?”
“Close enough. You could put your arm in this side and sort of just, you know, drape the other sleeve maybe down in front? It’s so big. The belt would go under your wing and keep the robe closed around your waist. For warmth and—privacy. For now. I’ll find you something else soon. Yes?”
“Where is this place?” he said, almost to himself, but it was English so of course it was to her, too. “Yes,” he answered.
Laura might be going to Montreal but she didn’t want to go to hell, too, so she helped Hans keep the coverlet cinched at his waist. She wasn’t ready to be this close to a naked creature any larger than Garibaldi. When she imagined Nonna showing up at the bathroom door, she almost felt faint, but there was no reason to scare herself silly, because that nightmare could never happen. Nonna’s bad knees, the acute angle of the attic staircase.
Hans shimmied his arm into the right sleeve and used his teeth to draw the collar closer to his shoulder. Laura pulled the back of the robe around as Hans lifted his wing. He found one end of the sash and she brought up the other, and when she had made sure the front panels of the robe were overlapping and cozy and dignified, she tied the sash in place. It was like helping some of her first graders get their snowsuits on.
Then at least he was dressed, he was decent, he was clean. The bathtub was a wreckage of silt, however. It looked like the tub at the shore house after she’d been playing at the beach all day. She’d have to take care of that later. Now, she gripped him by the hand and led him to her bed. “I need to go eat breakfast or they’ll wonder,” she said. “I’ll be back as soon as I can. I’ll bring you some fruit and bread and cheese and maybe a bowl of Maypo.”
He didn’t hear her. He had put his head on her pillow. His tender clean pink feet arched. His tide-green eyes went vague, and she felt herself going invisible in his sight. Not an unfamiliar feeling for Laura. Before she’d backed up to reach for her own slippers, his eyes had closed. Still on the bathroom floor, the coverlet was wet on one side but the other side was dry. She retrieved it, turned it over and fluffed it upon him, and she hurried downstairs before anyone got suspicious. The bad smell was lifting.
In the front hall, John Greenglass and Sam Rescue were putting down drop cloths and setting up ladders with a board across them so they could reach the ceiling. Nonno was armoring himself in his thick wool coat. His grey scarf, his grey hat with a green parrot feather in the band, his lea
ther gloves. “You’re early, Nonno,” said Laura.
“You late,” he said, teasingly. “Shipment of figs in honey come in this morning, before shop open, and our poor Matteo don’t multiply by dozens so he can’t count for check bill of lading. You come by today, help out on floor?”
“I’m not sure. I don’t feel ready.”
“Why not, you fifteen. You addled enough.”
“I might need to help Nonna roll out the pasta.”
“She let you help, I ring up Corriere della Serra and Vatican and tell them, Christmas miracle.” He kissed her and touched her face with his gloved hand, which felt tender and distant at the same time. The world outside the open front door, when he left, was bright and white but clear. Shine adhered to the surfaces; ice polished the brownstones.
“So our owl,” began Sam Rescue. “Didn’t let her go yesterday, because of the weather report. Such high winds last night, poor thing would’ve been blown to Buffalo. But she’s eating better. I tried to feed her some herring but she turned her head. But she liked some smoosh of persimmon my auntie gave her on a spoon. She flapping her wings stronger. Wants to go, doesn’t like that wooden milk crate I got her caged in. But we gotta wait till a better day.”
Laura, in a hurry to get her breakfast, and some for Hans, and rush back upstairs, paused anyway to say, “What makes a better day?”
“You know it when you see it, child,” said Sam.
“Stir the primer, Sam, and rest your tongue, or we’ll be here all morning,” said John Greenglass.
“I have to have my breakfast or they’ll kill me,” said Laura.
“They would never do that. They might wound you, but they wouldn’t finish you off,” muttered John. “They’re not so bad.”
A Wild Winter Swan Page 8