“It’s a sorry life, and too much like what I left behind in County Tyrone,” intoned Mary Bernice. No one paid her any attention.
Laura stifled a yawn. “It’s ridiculous,” she said, “to go from scrounging bread crumbs in Italy to killing seven kinds of American fish for one meal.”
“It isn’t ridiculous to survive,” said Nonna, drawing herself up and looking like a bald eagle—especially the bald part. “Something plays a part in survival, something you don’t understand. Omertà, the men call it. Honor, says the military. Grace, says the priest. What do the women call it?”
That wasn’t rhetorical; she was waiting to have the question returned to her. “What do the women call it?” asked Laura.
“Despair,” said Nonna. “Despair can be stronger than faith or hope. When you have no faith and no hope, something else mounts up in you. It’s just—animal anger. I mean when all the other blessings fail you, the animal sense of desperation uses you. It stands you up and walks you across the room and puts you on a boat and gets you to America. And in America it finds a new name, and that name is—”
“Greed?” supplied Mary Bernice.
“Big, proud pride,” said Nonna, clapping her hands. “Seven goddamn fish, one for every day of the week, all at once. And a nice bottle of Asti Spumante from Signore Martini and Signore Rossi, to spit in the eye of bad fortune. Anger and love, same thing: they tell you: you serve this food and prove you survive.”
By the end of the day the three generations of kitchen magician had finished the prep for the next evening’s feast. The sea-green and yellow circles on the flared dress Laura had chosen that morning were now spotted with tomato sauce, as if the whole outfit had contracted a case of the measles.
Nonno came home and ventured kitchenward to supervise. He had a cardboard box of delicacies—a jar of caponata, two tins of sardines in olive oil, some extra virgin olive oil—“How anything can qualify for being extra virgin is a puzzle the Irish don’t know how to solve,” observed Mary Bernice. “Nor do we want to.”
“Profumato del paradiso,” said Nonno, raising two fingers in the air at the steam of pasta water, the sweet simmer of chopped tomato. “Worth every aching hour on the shop floor today to come home to heaven.”
“How were the takings?” Nonna, straight to the jugular as usual.
He looked at her with unblinking regard, at that shorn grey head and the pouchy eyes. It was a healthy what-the-hell, or it was a compliment to her inner virtue, that he didn’t mention the assault on her scalp, that he didn’t shriek and fall on the floor. “Very healthy cash box. Possible best day in ten years,” he replied. “I hear two fine ladies from Park Avenue, they looking at bottles of poached fruit in brandy. One lady say, ‘This bottle, he charge nearly twice for this as for other one, so get this. It must be better. Better costs. You pay for quality, honey.’”
“We won’t be talking about cash flow and the bottom line tomorrow night, Ovid,” Nonna reminded him.
“No, but it don’t hurt to pack your confidence in your back pocket with your billfold. Is too late to get some supper around here?”
“I can whistle up some scrambled eggs and some garlic toast,” said Mary Bernice.
“Do you mind if I just take a plate upstairs tonight?” asked Laura. This wasn’t generally allowed, but she had put in her time all day, and anyway she could see that Nonno and Nonna wanted to talk strategy. For once, nobody protested, so Laura made two big sandwiches of peanut butter and Fluff and grabbed some almond biscotti. She poured two glasses of milk without thinking about it, and when Mary Bernice raised her eyebrow, Laura blushed and said, “It’s too far down to come for seconds, and peanut butter always sticks to the roof of my mouth.”
I have to get some control over myself, she thought, heading out of the room. They’re going screwball over needing to cram so much good food into Mr. Corm Kennedy and Zia Geneva. Their livelihoods depend on the outcome. The whole house is shaky.
But as she was trudging upstairs, she wondered who she thought she was fooling. If Hans wouldn’t eat Maypo, why would she have any more luck with peanut butter? He was a northern boy—she’d been way wide of the mark to offer him lasagne. What did people from his part of the world eat? Sno-cones? She didn’t know where his story origins really were—Sweden, or Holland maybe. He reminded her of a more grown-up version of the boy in the Walt Disney program she’d seen a year ago, maybe, that Hans Brinker on his ice skates. Fleeing down the frozen river. Her swan-boy wasn’t from sunny Napoli, but from some snow globe world somewhere. He probably ate ice cubes. As well as eels.
Hans took up at the sandwiches with a glum regard, and even pressed a finger upon the top piece of bread, but at the spongy resistance he recoiled.
He must have slept most of the day. He seemed somewhat stronger. The dreadful eel had restored him. Now that his color was better, Laura realized that when he’d arrived, he’d been pale as hoarfrost. “Are you my sister?”
“I’m not your sister,” she said, very softly.
“Will you sister me?”
It was possible for a man to father someone—to make some woman pregnant. And any nice lady could mother some crying kid. But Laura had never heard the word sister used as an action before. Nor did she want him to brother her—no no no no, not at all. The one thing she knew was that her brother Marco was dead, and nobody could ever take his place.
“Eat the damn sandwiches or don’t eat them,” she said. “I’m going to rinse out the bathtub and then have myself a soak.”
21
It took four or five good go-rounds to clear the tub of any stink or stain of eel. Laura dumped several big splashes of Mr. Bubble into the thunderous cataract from the faucet, which built up a Catskill mountain range of suds. She locked the door and took off her clothes and sank down till her chin was grazed by peninsulas of foam. She lay in the tub for a long time, not so much thinking as floating.
There was once a girl whose brother had died in a plane crash. Because his body was lost at sea and had never washed up on any shore, she lived in the dreadful hope that he might someday drop into her life again. The hope was dreadful because it was a lie, but it still lay upon her like a millstone around her neck. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t hardly breathe.
Laura didn’t know what a millstone was but it didn’t sound like fun.
The problem with a tell like this one was that there was no place for it to go. She could never say that one day the brother came back. One day he didn’t come back, and also the next day he didn’t come back, and the next day, and the next. Nothing ever happened next.
Still—it seemed so urgent to try. She never got beyond the start of things. One day she might. One day when she was ninety-five. What else could happen in a tell except stating things as they were?
One night during a fierce snowstorm, a boy with one wing of a swan was shipwrecked onto the roof outside of her attic bedroom. The girl rescued the castaway and took care of him. He wasn’t her brother, but he was the next best thing—a boy in need. She was nearly not scared of him at all.
Well, that was something, but that was as far as it went. She topped up the hot water and lay, glazed and half asleep, in the greasy slick of expired bubbles.
Finally she rallied. She could hear Hans moving around the room. She had no idea how much longer she could keep him here, and why she should bother. Sooner or later she would have to get him out and away. But it was too much like the story of her brother—there was no next to be able to imagine for him. Who wanted a broken brother who could neither swim nor fly? The only thing a broken brother could do was drown.
Still. Somewhere Hans had a sister who had been able to bring him mostly back from the curse of being a swan. Laura, who had become an only child two-thirds through her life so far, could sister that sister. From a distance of an ocean and a century. Laura could try to finish the job somehow. She couldn’t weave a cloth out of some enchanted flax and throw a cobbled-together loose slee
ve over his swan wing before the year ended. (There were only nine days left to the year, and she didn’t even know how to sew, much less weave.) She couldn’t turn the boy part of Hans back into a swan, either—where was the magic to do that? She just had to help him get away from here.
She just had to help him get away from her.
That line wasn’t what she had thought, but it edited itself in her head. She yanked the plug on its beaded chain, and the bathwater gargled into the pipes.
She had to get dressed again in her puffy dress just to be decent while she retrieved her nightclothes from her bedroom. She left off her bra and her tights because she’d be changing out of them shortly anyway. Once in the bedroom, she found Hans at the window, sitting on the sill and leaning out, holding on to the window frame with his hand and angling his face to the Manhattan sky. He batted his wing with minute adjustments to help him maintain his balance. “What are you doing?” she barked in a throttled voice.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Looking up, looking down.”
The bathrobe had rucked high up upon his thighs. “Get in here before you fall,” she snapped at him.
“You do sound like a sister,” he replied, which almost made her vision zigzag with tears. But she slammed her dresser drawers instead, and she kept her head turned so he could inch back into the room without exposing himself to her.
“I am getting something for you. Stay here,” she said.
“Forever?”
“For now.”
She went to the crawl space behind the chimney and pulled out the two suitcases. She dragged them to her room and heaved them onto her bed. The buttons to open the latches were stuck, but they sprang open with a little more application of force.
To come upon the clothes of someone who has died five years earlier is to imagine a naked ghost out there somewhere. The clothes still smelled of Marco somehow, but also of dust and time. Laura drove herself forward, through more kinds of resistance than she could name. She was ruthless in her campaign. She located some boxers and some socks and a pair of creased black denim trousers with very tight legs. She found a white T-shirt and a baby-blue button-down shirt. There were no shoes in either suitcase. “Can you get dressed in these?” she asked.
He looked at the clothes with a certain amount of confusion. They didn’t look like the outfit of a figure from a fairy tale. They looked like the boys who used to hang around at the soda fountain near 67th and Lexington or underneath the old elevated train on Third. “Come on,” she said impatiently, “we haven’t got all night.”
“Are we going somewhere?” he asked.
“Yes. As soon as we figure out where,” she replied, “and how.”
He picked up the boxer shorts. He could tell what they were. He dropped them on the floor and stepped in the leg-hole of one, and leaned down to pinch the waistband at the right side. Then his left foot fumbled for the other leg-hole. Laura stooped and guided his foot. She let him hoist the shorts up under the bathrobe. He ran his hand back and forth under the elastic, making the boxers hang straight.
The trousers were more difficult and more intimate. Because the cut featured such a narrow leg, Hans couldn’t put them on by himself. Laura turned her head toward the hallway as she helped him draw up the slacks. Since he seemed not to know how a zipper worked, she held her breath and guided his hand to the zipper pull. She showed him how to tug it, and she pulled the fabric in the front of the trousers on both sides so the fastener could rise. Then she snapped the metal rivet for him and breathed out. The punch of the trouser snap was so loud in Laura’s ears that she was surprised her grandparents couldn’t hear it all the way down in the kitchen, where they were probably finishing their eggs.
Hans let the bathrobe drop—he did, then, have some sense of modesty. She didn’t know much more about boys than she knew about swans, when it came to propriety, but she had seen boys in bathing suits before, so his naked chest wasn’t very shocking. Flying, if flying he had done, had been good for his pectoral muscles, a term of biology she remembered from Frobisher’s week on Human Musculature.
The T-shirt was a problem, but Laura solved it. With her nail scissors she snipped the seam on the left side of the torso from the waistline to the sleeve join, and then across to the hem of the left sleeve. Starting again on the left side of the collar, she scissored from the neck hole through to the top side of the sleeve’s hem. Now the T-shirt opened on one side like—
Like a book
Together Hans and Laura wrestled the ripped T-shirt over his right arm and his head, and as for clasping the torn sides together with some kind of button—it just wasn’t possible. Laura drew the sash from Nonno’s bathrobe through a belt loop under the wing, and tied it over the opposite shoulder. The snug fit of the cord more or less kept the flapping T-shirt from falling off.
She stood back. To dress someone, it was a different kind of tell. “Did you fly here on some artificial wing?” she asked him.
He pouted and shrugged. In that throwaway, insouciant expression he looked American modern, a boy from the CYO dance, a boy on the street with his chums. It was the clothes, mostly, but it was also the disaffected, casual look of kids in charge. Maxine Sugargarten often flashed the female version of that look.
“Could we make you a replacement wing?” she asked him. He turned his head and studied her sideways with the beady scrutiny of a swan readying to raise a wing and beat her to death.
“I can’t make anything,” he told her, in a voice that suggested she hadn’t been paying attention and he hated her for it.
“I can’t either. We’re made for each other,” she said. But as soon as the words were out they sounded flirty, like rough-girl talk.
As if in response, under the lampshade with the caballeros and señoritas dancing across it in sensuous and unbalanced abandon, the forty-watt bulb flickered twice and failed. It made the room appear to go inside out, like a white-and-black negative of a black-and-white photograph. The world in the street seemed to thump itself, cough, and stand up straight. Hans didn’t notice, just kept looking at Laura. From below, Mary Bernice, siren to the universe. “Laura? You all right up there?”
“Of course I’m all right,” said Laura. “My bulb just blew out.”
“The whole street is out. A downed power line. I’ll come up with a candle.”
“No, don’t do that! I don’t need one.”
“I’ve known blackouts to last a while. Don’t want you falling down the stairs, mind. I’m coming up.”
“I’ll come down,” she called, hearing impatience in her voice. “Stay there!”
“Keep your shirt on,” she replied. “Only trying to help.”
Laura felt she no longer needed to shhh Hans or to give him instructions. He knew the rules of his prison aerie. She felt her way along the hall to the top of the stairs. The mild snowlight marked out the windows, which gave her a sense of the dimensions of the hallways as she descended. Mary Bernice was standing in the front hall just below the repaired ceiling. She had two kitchen candles in wide glass jars, one for her and one for Laura.
“You drop this going upstairs, mind, and you’ll burn the house down,” she said. “Why don’t you stop a while in the kitchen with me and the cat?”
“I’m not scared,” she said, “not scared of anything. Are Nonno and Nonna in bed already?”
The key in the front door sounded before Mary Bernice could answer, and in came Nonna with her new hair under a shawl, and Nonno shaking his shoulders and arms the way a duck shakes its wings. “We on our way anyway,” said Nonno, “when pouf, someone flip city light switch.”
“Panetta’s,” said Nonna, to Laura’s raised eyebrow. “Thought we deserved a little treat after the long day Nonno had, and me, too. We had a glass of wine at the bar and some crostini and olives.”
“Two dollar seventy-five,” said Nonno, hanging up his coat.
“As Signora Steenhauser says, it’s cheap and cheerful, Panetta’s,” said Non
na. “But you don’t want to examine the tablecloths under strong light. Nor the silverware.”
“And don’t order no scallopini,” added Nonno. “We call upstairs to see if you want to come, cara, but you run the water, you no hear us.”
“That’s okay. I wasn’t hungry,” said Laura. “I’m going back upstairs.”
“Help your nonna up steps. So dark, she slip, her new head fall off.”
Laura gave Nonna an arm and they inched up two flights, so terribly slowly, until they were at the door to Nonna’s bedroom. Nonno was still downstairs, talking with Mary Bernice. “Just get me settled in my chair and wait with me here until Nonno arrives with a candle for us,” said Nonna. “I don’t like the dark. I sleep with the bathroom light on, which makes Nonno angry, running up the electric bill. But I need a little light.”
She settled in the easy chair in the corner of the master bedroom and took off her wig. “What do you think about this, Laura, honestly? Big mistake?”
“Big change.”
“I thought I saw Flaviana Zulo, the hat-check girl at Panetta’s, stifle a laugh when we came in. I thought she was going to ask me if I wanted to check my hair.”
“It’s just different.” Laura shrugged. “Nothing wrong with different. Your sister will be surprised.”
“I haven’t seen Geneva since the funeral Mass we had for the soul of Marco,” said Nonna. “She doesn’t know what I look like these days. She couldn’t tell me from Gina Lollobrigida.”
Oh yeah? thought Laura. She was eager to get back upstairs to Hans but she couldn’t leave her grandmother alone. “We’re mostly ready for tomorrow night?”
“Lots more work tomorrow, carissima. Mostly setting up. But it’s fine. Nonno will be out all day again, and he’ll close the store at five. Geneva and her new man are expected at six, and the other guests, too. We’ll have drinks in the parlor while Mary Bernice is arranging the food in the dining room, and we’ll come down about seven.”
A Wild Winter Swan Page 12