A Wild Winter Swan

by Gregory Maguire

  “I’m feeling a little queasy,” said Laura, because it was true and also because she wanted to begin to lay down a story about being too ill to join the guests for the Christmas Eve feast of the seven fishes.

  “Too bad. Tomorrow you’re going to feel well enough to help out all over again,” said Nonna. “You’re not off the hook, Laura. This investment we need from Mr. Corm Kennedy affects you, too, you know. The convent school isn’t cheap. We got the first semester’s bill in the mail today. La Société des Plaies Sacrées. I don’t quite know what that means but I can guess. The holy wounds.”

  “I don’t want to go to an expensive school. Or any school.”

  “I don’t want to bow down and scrape before my younger sister, either,” said Nonna, “but we have to manage somehow. You weren’t—what’s the word your Mr. G. used—you weren’t thriving at school. You didn’t have any friends, you weren’t getting along. Life is a challenge, Laura Maria Ciardi. You have to meet it.”

  “Don’t get yourself in a state.”

  “I don’t like the dark, I told you. Ah, Nonno.”

  “Ecco, I come bearing light,” said Nonno, because as he crossed the threshold into the room, the light in the bathroom came on. It flickered off and back on again, and stayed on. “I leave candle here because wires, wind, they might be start and stop all night, like last time. Till men in truck come and tie wires together again.”

  “Good night, Nonno, good night, Nonna.”

  “Stay a little while, bambina. You never come listen to music no more. Let me put record album on hi-fi. You want little Verdi tonight? Little Puccini?”

  Laura loved to imagine a little Verdi and a little Puccini standing on the edge of the mantelpiece, discussing the Ciardi marriage. What kind of opera would that make? “I want to go to bed, Nonno, I’m tired.”

  He walked to the portable record player in its houndstooth print case and he moved the newspapers off the lid to open the top. She saw that he was limping a little, favoring one leg. He was getting old, old, and working so hard, and trying so hard to cherish his granddaughter. “Look, the present you got from somebody. Mary Bernice put it here? She think it for Nonna and me. Why not, this room is home for music. Peter, Paul and Maria. Mary.” With his fingernail he slit open the paper glued across the mouth and pulled the album out of the sleeve. “We hear little bit, sugar for the ear, one aria, maybe two.”

  Nonna had leaned back with her plagued head on the bolster and kicked off her shoes. She put her lumpy feet on the ottoman. She closed her eyes. Her face fell into the repose of those who have lost ambition to maintain appearances. “Put on the music, Nonno; we’ll dance, or we’ll rest and dream that we’re dancing, that’s better.”

  The first track was too fast to dance to. Laura was glad, she was sure that Nonno would hate it. But he loosened his tie and undid his vest buttons—he dressed so formally when he was being Signore Ciardi of Ciardi’s Fine Foods and Delicacies—and he snapped his fingers like Frank Sinatra, except he missed the beat nearly every time. “Early in morning,” he crooned, the only part of the song he could pick up. “Dat’s-a da time to shave and get to work, ya bum.”

  Nonna started laughing. “Give those songbirds a chance to make their point. You’re insulting the singers with that stage Eye-talian of yours. Respectable Ovid is losing ground to Vito from the bad streets.”

  Nonno grinned, took off his white shirt, stained with some kind of brine at the cuffs, and went into the bathroom to find his pills.

  “He does love you, Laura,” said Nonna in a quiet voice, between the tracks.

  Laura couldn’t speak, she couldn’t move. She thought, Why does the most obvious thing, the only thing that doesn’t need to be said, hurt so much when it is actually said out loud?

  “Bella, you send my bathrobe to laundry?” called Nonno. “No here nowhere.”

  The next track came on. Laura would wait through this one—the songs were quick—and then dart upstairs. It was mostly a solo by the lady singer. She was on a train going one hundred, two hundred, three hundred, four hundred, five hundred miles. Five hundred miles from her home. It was the saddest song Laura had ever heard, sadder than Lasciatemi morire, the “Lamento d’Arianna” of Monteverdi that her grandmother favored. Leave me here to die! In Peter, Paul and Mary’s song, death wasn’t even a choice—just separation. Lord I’m one, Lord I’m two, Lord I’m three, Lord I’m four, Lord I’m five hundred miles from my home.

  “How far is Montreal from here?” asked Laura.

  “Don’t ask,” said Nonna. Her eyes were wet. “Don’t do that to us, Laura.”

  “I’m guessing it’s about five hundred miles.”

  “Take off the damn record, then.”

  “You take it off.” She called through the bathroom door, now closed, “Ciao, Nonno, good night.” She had already kissed her grandmother once and she didn’t bother to repeat the gesture. She took her candle and that was a good thing, because as she mounted the flight to her rooms, the electric power stuttered again and the lights went dead. The voice of Mary cut out, probably about three hundred and twenty-five miles from her home.

  22

  She set the candle on her dresser. An oval wobbled on the ceiling; that was the thicker glass of the edge of the jar. Her room by candlelight. She’d never seen it like this.

  He was lying on the bed, on his back. His eyes were closed but his breath was interested; his lungs weren’t making the long ellipses of sleep like the ones Miss Gianna Tebaldi had been prone to issuing from her room down the hall. He was intact and alert. With his one hand he had somehow managed to undo the snap of Marco’s trousers and they were a swirl of shadow kicked against the baseboard.

  She looked at her nightgown on its hook. It hung there like an old life, like a disguise, like Nonna’s new hair—vague, and vaguely repulsive, and redundant.

  She took off her dress and draped it neatly across the back of the wicker chair where he had slung the T-shirt and the sash from Nonno’s bathrobe. Then she sat on the side of her narrow bed. He didn’t inch over to make room and he didn’t flinch. Slowly, gingerly she lay back upon his chest, settling her head in the crook between his neck and the curve of shoulder-into-wing. They were both facing the ceiling, the dancing ovals thrown by candlelight. The wind scored the night with long atonal flourishes, accelerando, fortissimo, ritardando.

  His arm was stretched out, cantilevered like a dead Christ’s arm. She threw her right arm out over his. He was only a little taller than she; her hand fell against his wrist and her fingers washed up into the cup of his palm.

  She kept her other arm loosely across her breasts. After a while he folded his wing upon her arm and the sensitive tops of her legs, a swan’s down blanket beating with his own blood. She thought: His Nordic chill, my Mediterranean sun. His heroic north against my Catholic south. Pagan magic against Christian miracle. Had she not been lying down she might have swooned.

  Take good care of my baby.

  500 miles, 500 miles, 500 miles, 500 miles.

  Leave me here to die.

  Dolce, più dolce.

  23

  As she passed the dining room doorway the next morning, Laura saw two elderly men having breakfast across from one another. Then she realized the second man was Nonna without her new hair. Today she looked like a Roman senator or Caesar, erect, capable, bloodthirsty.

  “And now that I’ve finally got you to myself,” said Mary Bernice in the kitchen, fiddling with scorched toast stuck in the gridlines of the device, “may I please be honored with the news of what happened to that third eel?”

  “What third eel?”

  “You know what third eel. When you bring them down yesterday, there’s only a pair of them. What with everything else, the missus didn’t notice, but I did.”

  Laura tried to tell it in her head before she spoke it.

  “Oh,” said the girl casually, tossing her long beautiful hair, “the cat got it.”

  “Garibaldi,�
� said Laura.

  “Garibaldi never did such a thing in his sainted life.”

  “Maybe having the little owl in the house awakened Garibaldi’s killer instinct.”

  “That geriatric cat got it out of the tub?”

  “I found it out of the tub. It flipped out by itself and the cat only mauled it after it was dead? Maybe? You know how they wriggle. I cleaned it up and threw it out. I didn’t want to tell you because I know you love that cat.”

  They both looked at Garibaldi, who was sitting on the windowsill, scrupulously studying the nothing that was going on in the backyard. “Shame on you, you filthy beast,” said the cook. “And at holy Christmastide, no less.”

  “We were going to eat it anyway,” said Laura. “And it isn’t sacrilegious, because as far as I ever heard, there weren’t any eels at the stable worshiping the baby Jesus.”

  “You’re full of beans this morning. Eat up this toast, I haven’t got time for oatmeal. We’re in the run-up to blessed insanity today, I can just feel it.” Mary Bernice stood on the stool to reach the larger colander. She cast a sidelong glance at Laura. “You’ve been looking peaky this past week. Do you seem a little rosier this morning or are my old Irish eyes playing tricks on me?”

  “Your old Irish eyes are blind.”

  “I know a young girl’s fancy. That’s an awful nice dress for a day of house chores. And you’ve put your hair up like bloody Audrey Hepburn. Either you’re trying to be Breakfast at Tiffany’s or you’re out to shame your grandmother, which isn’t very nice of you, though I get it.”

  “I want my hair out of the way. I have a lot to do today. If you need my help, can we get started.”

  “You can start by having your toast. Then we’ll rinse the lettuce and go on from there, and see how we get on.” She eyed the heap of shaved Parmigiano-Reggiano in a bowl. “I might need to send you out for some cheese reinforcements.” She poured a saucer of milk for the cat, purring at it in an Irish accent. “I have another theory.”

  “About the eel?”

  “About Little Miss Fancy. You’ve cast your eye on that John Greenglass, haven’t you.”

  “Don’t be silly. Or rude.”

  “Oooh, I’m gettin’ above me station, am I,” said Mary Bernice. “So sue me, sweetheart.”

  Laura ate a couple of bites of toast and made a show of tossing the rest in the trash. “Feeling our oats,” observed Mary Bernice in a drier tone of voice. “Well, I better get the eggs up to your grandparents before they terminate my services on Christmas Eve, and me out in the cold with my nose pressed against the glass.” She slung a tray of eggs and small sausages into the dumbwaiter. “You can get a head start on ironing the napkins if you have nothing better to do. Wash your hands first lest you get butter on them.”

  “How much flatter can napkins be?” asked Laura, but did as she was told.

  Standing over the ironing board, she waited for the iron to heat up. That smell of hot starch and slightly scorched soap powder residue. The heft of the iron in her hand. She had new measures for heat and heft this morning. Her whole body was different, her whole self. The world screening itself through her senses had a renewed character.

  When Mary Bernice returned to the kitchen, she lit the back burner and put on a big pot. “Potatoes,” she said.

  “Potatoes, with all this pasta?”

  “Potatoes for me and Ted, tomorrow. I won’t get home till midnight tonight, the way things are going, and I have his Christmas dinner to get, too, you know. None of this messy Mediterranean menu for Ted. I’m doing a sensible roast with carrots and onions. I already made the Christmas pudding last week with suet I picked up at Frombacher’s, and it’s getting drunker by the day. This isn’t the only household that celebrates Christmas, you know.”

  “Does Ted mind that you spend so much time here?”

  “He likes the pay packet I bring home, and so do I. Could I dare to think you might peel these potatoes if you’re done with the napkins?”

  “What made you choose Ted?” Laura asked. “Were you always in love with him?”

  Mary Bernice wrestled with a five-pound bag of flour. She dumped it in the flour bin of the Napanee, a battered, stand-alone cabinet. “I’m not much of a catch,” she said, “four-foot-eleven in my best pumps. And I seem to lack the right factory for being a mother because it’s been twenty-some years and never a breath of hope in that department. But Ted is steady, and so am I, and steady likes steady.”

  “Like isn’t love,” observed Laura, gouging the eyes out of her victim potato.

  “Oh, sweet Jesus of Queens and the Bronx, and parts beyond,” said Mary Bernice, “this is a fine time to start dissecting romance. Really, I’m not the right person, but who else will show you sense from nonsense? I’ll only say this, my duckie. When you’re young, there’s a lot of flare in the dark, a lot of struck matches and sparks. They shock and please and they don’t last. That’s a lot of like and a whole lot of like. Love is something slower to find. It’s usually muted and in my experience you are standing right there at the bus stop next to it for a year before you even notice it. That’s one Irishwoman’s opinion and it doesn’t count for much, but Ted and I have been together going on twenty-two years. He has no roving eye and nor do I.”

  “I think it’s you who are stuck on John Greenglass, not me,” said Laura.

  “Dig your own eyes out with that peeler, why don’t you, and let me get on with my work. You’ve a bit of a mouth on you this morning, Laura. Can’t say I mind, but it’s damn poor timing. Now shush about all this. Here comes your nonna to beat us with an iron skillet. Throw a towel over them potatoes before I get sacked. We’ll get back to them later.”

  Nonna arrived. Nonno left for the shop. The kitchen was a madhouse for the second day running. At one point Garibaldi escaped out the door to the upstairs, but Laura forgot to worry about that. Twenty minutes later he came streaking downstairs and hid under the pleated skirt of Mary Bernice’s rocker. “What’s gotten into that maniac?” said Mary Bernice. “He’s at Panic Central like the rest of us, but what’s taken him so long, is my question.” Laura thought: He’s met Hans upstairs, and he’s lost his mind, the way I have.

  The doorbell rang, and Laura was sent to answer it. John Greenglass and Sam Rescue. “You’re not going back upstairs today, I imagine,” she told them more than asked them.

  “Shouldn’t need to,” said John, scrutinizing his work on the ground floor. “Looks like the repair is holding. This ceiling has dried, the primer is dry. We’ll just roll over a clean coat of white across this ceiling. Be done in a jiffy, and out of here till the next time the building falls down.”

  “You want to hear about the owl?” asked Sam Rescue.

  Laura pivoted at the doorway to the kitchen steps. “Well, yes, of course.”

  “Took her to Central Park last night. Had to let her go or I’ll be watching her kill herself, won’t I. I wait till the middle of the night. Bring her in my lunch box. When I get to a wide-open space, nobody around, I sit on a bench and put the lunch box next to me. I open it up, and guess what, she just sits there for about five minutes, looking around at the big ole sky. It was clear, nothing but stars.”

  “I know,” said Laura.

  “Then she sort of hop up and kind of fall over onto the bench, and she hop some more, like a pigeon. I din’t know owls could hop. She come right up on my leg and squeeze my leg with her little thorny things—”

  “Talons,” said John, setting up a ladder.

  “And she stay there for another couple of minutes. It was getting pretty cold and I din’t want to sit there all night, but I din’t want to shoo her off, either.”

  “Steady is steady,” said Laura.

  “Then she leave, all at once, a big whoosh of feathers and noise in my face, and a little rip in my blue jeans and a bloody scratch I see later when I get home. She fly like a pro, Laura, like she never fell in no house and scrabble down into a damp ceiling. Like she know the
whole map of Central Park and she got someplace to go. You know what I think?”

  “You think it’s time to open the paint and give it a good stir,” said John.

  “I think I wish I knew the map of the world as good as she does,” said Sam. “I can’t hardly remember whether it’s the GG or the Number Two to get from heaven to hell and back again.”

  Laura said, “Do you think you would know how to build a wing?”

  “A wing of a house?”

  “A wing for a—” Laura paused to ask herself what

  A wing for an angel, said the girl, with the most honesty ever she spoke.

  “—a wing for an angel.”

  “Why, you break one of your own wings?” asked Sam Rescue, and gave her a wrinkled, wicked little sparkly smile.

  “It’s—for the church pageant.”

  Oh, if necessity is the mother of invention, who is the father? Fantasy.

  She continued. “The angel, you know, Hark, the herald angel sings? He has two wings, of course, and there were two girls, one to hold each wing. But Donna Flotarde got hit by a bus and she couldn’t finish her wing. So could you help me make one?”

  “She wasn’t hurt bad?”

  “Oh, very bad. Sadly, she’ll probably live. But that wing?”

  “Your grandparents going to pay for the overtime?” asked John Greenglass.

  “Hey, Greenglass, I do it on my own time, if I can,” said Sam. “We knocking off early today, so Laura, you tell me what you have in mind. You need it by tonight, right, because poor Hark the Herald Tribune, he got to sing his song?”

  “That’s the idea.”

  “I’ll holler for you when we’re done with this ceiling, and we’ll see what we can jig up.”

  “You’re on your own,” said John. “I got to get a last-minute present for my baby.” The way he said it, Laura couldn’t tell if he meant his girlfriend or his infant child.

  Back to the kitchen, back to the rinsing of scallops and the chopping of red peppers and then, yes, by midmorning, a run for more cheese. What was Nonno thinking, only half a pound? There were six guests tonight. But the corner supermarket would have to do; Ciardi’s Fine Foods and Delicacies was several blocks farther away.