A Wild Winter Swan

by Gregory Maguire

“Smells like fresh paint,” said Maxine. “I like fresh paint.”

  “Whatcha do to your nose?” asked Sam.

  “Your grandfather said to leave this bill on his desk,” said John. “Can I give it to you to put there, Laura? Sam is clocking off so he can help you some, but I got places to get to, and it’s nearly noon.”

  “Wait here,” said Laura to Maxine. Taking the steps two at a time, she raced to the next floor, past the parlor door to Nonno’s office. She tossed the folded bit of paper on his desk. Before returning, she stood still for a moment, taking in the air of crisis that bubbled up the stairwells like coffee in the stem of the percolator.

  At the root of it, Nonna Ciardi was campaigning to save her husband’s business and his reputation. Even Laura could recognize their fear of slipping backward, deeper into the immigrant status they had so laboriously tried to shake, and that Nonna di Lorenzo had not managed, or cared to manage, as well. All that desperate cooking, the pomp and show of food, the fancy linens, the perfect painted ceiling. The effort of it all. It wasn’t quite fraud but it was certainly theater.

  Up on top, the pacing Hans. Laura could hear him now. He couldn’t stay there much longer. If he came downstairs with his torn clothes and his one wing flapping, the world would convulse, and Laura would be sent to live in a home for incurables like her mother. The situation was intolerable, the solution inconceivable. He had to leave the way he came—through the window, with nobody noticing but her. But if he grew desperate and flung himself out, he couldn’t escape except by leaping. He would fall, he would die, because who can fly with one wing?

  She found herself hurrying upstairs. The door to her room was closed, but when she opened it, she hardly recognized it. Her sheets and coverlet were torn to shreds, and so was Nonno’s bathrobe. Wherever he could, Hans was ripping the room apart with his teeth. Her comb, her brush, her framed photo of Marco, had been thrown against the wall. Though the glass in the frame was broken, Marco’s face bloomed, undiminished by time or attack or death by drowning. Laura swooped in and picked it up. “What do you think you are doing?” she hissed.

  “This is no place to stay, no longer,” he said to her. His eyes looked wild and angry.

  “You have to be quiet, Hans. You have to calm down.” That was what Nonna said to Nonno when his face turned carmine. “I am going to get you out. I am going to make you a second wing so you can fly away.”

  He swept out his own wing and turned in a circle. He was wearing Marco’s trousers but no shirt—the shirt was ripped to shreds, too. The wing was so large Laura had to fall back; it touched three walls of the room as he rotated, and it looked strong enough to beat her down the stairs. “No place for me in this story,” he said. For a minute Laura mistook him to mean on this floor, on this story of your five-story house.

  She tried to arrange her racing mind in its most efficient mode:

  For the first time, the young girl was frightened of the strength and power of the swan-boy, and saw him as an intruder in her life, a threat

  but while this was clarifying, it wasn’t prophetic. That girl in some story in Laura’s head didn’t know what to do any more than Laura did.

  “Your sister made you most of a shirt to make you her brother, make you whole again,” she said, “but she failed. So what is left is to let you go back to swan. I don’t have any magic but I can try to make a wing and let you go. Where will you go?”

  He didn’t answer her. No swan knows how to say the map of his ambitions.

  Miss Parsley had once told Nonna, at a back-to-school night, that most creative children had active imaginations, but that Laura had a passive imagination. Nonna had repeated this to Laura, hoping to understand the remark, but Laura had felt clueless. Perhaps, now, the way her story-mind had just explained Hans to her without her even trying, perhaps that was what an active imagination was like. Maybe it wasn’t to be all gloomy failure for her from now into the distant 1980s by which time she’d probably be dead of old age.

  She wished she had the courage of a movie heroine to approach Hans in his wild male panic and to calm him with an embrace, or better yet, a soothing song. All that came to her though was the haunting up-lilt of “500 Miles,” and that was a loss-and-longing number, not a courage-in-the-dark-night anthem like the ones preferred by Mr. Ed Sullivan on his TV show.

  “You stop this or you’ll get me in so much trouble,” she said to Hans strictly.

  This, it seemed, was enough, or enough for now. He dropped his wing and his chin and he sank on his knees next to her unraveled bed, and buried his face in torn cloth.

  “If my plan works, you can leave tonight,” she said. “Trust me.”

  No one had ever trusted her before, and no one should; she had no record of trustworthiness. No history of accomplishment in school or out of it. On the other hand, she didn’t have a record of larceny and deceit, either, except for Bobby Vee albums.

  She went to the box room and gathered up the ten long thin pieces of wood John Greenglass had called strapping. This was technically stealing, too, no doubt, but she’d have to worry about that later. She managed to get the strips of light wood down the stairs without poking them through the banisters like giant pick-up sticks.

  Nonna came up from the kitchen as Laura arrived in the front hall. “Cosa diamine! What, this junk, why?” she said, nearly screaming.

  “Maxine has to make a wing for the Christmas pageant in her church and we’re helping her,” said Laura. “It’s an emergency. Oh, this is Maxine, by the way.”

  Maxine’s poker face was magnificent. She didn’t know why Laura was lying and was just fine with it. “Hi, Mrs. Ciardi,” she said, unflappable behind her bandages.

  Nonna took a look at Maxine’s nose and Sam’s serene expression and Laura’s intensity. Perhaps she did a moral calculation about what was owed to a girl whose nose was broken through Ciardi malfeasance. In any case, she said, “Move into the waiting room. You have one hour and then this goes out in the street. I break it, I burn it myself in the ash can. You hear me, Mr. Roscoe?”

  Roscoe? So that was it. Sam Rescue was really Sam Roscoe. It kind of made sense.

  “So what’s your plan?” asked Sam. Laura said that the wing had to be a little bit longer than her own arm as measured from armpit to palm—maybe three inches longer. It needed three or four thicknesses of strapping for the length, and a roughly triangular armature descending, with the narrowing wingtip at the fingertips. “Obviously,” said Sam, and got to work. “I’ve been watching wings for several nights now.” He used small carpet nails and some kind of metal twine to build the skeletal wing-ridge. Meanwhile, Maxine and Laura stretched out the drop cloths. Covered in white plaster dust, drops of white primer and white paint as they were, they looked vaguely feathery already, or like the suggestion of feathers, at least if you squinted your eyes.

  Next door in the dining room, Nonna finished setting the candles in their sconces and went up to take a quick bath. Laura prayed, prayed to Jesus Christ and all the saints, that Hans wouldn’t be thumping around on the floor above Nonna’s rooms. What was a miracle but an enchantment conferred for someone’s good? In any case, no shrieks were heard from Nonna. She did not flee from her bath wailing about brigands or beasts in the attic rooms above her.

  Downstairs, Laura begged from Mary Bernice the old cookie tin that held needles and yarn, string and scissors, and all manner of sewing implements too vague and surgical for Laura’s taste. “You’re going to string popcorn for the tree or something?” asked Mary Bernice, tasting the fish broth and wrinkling her nose in displeasure.

  “Something,” said Laura. “How are things down here?”

  “If the pipes don’t burst and a ceiling don’t collapse and no owls attack us in our beds, we might just get this show on the road and survive the whole thing,” replied the cook. “I’ll say this for your crazy nonna, she knows how to whip the help into doing what she wants. And she’s got a mind like a calculator. We’re right on
schedule as far as I can tell.”

  Back in the waiting room, the wing was taking shape. Sam needed some white strips with which to fasten the costume wing to the human arm, so Laura tiptoed upstairs again. Hans was on the floor of her room, looking both furious and exhausted in his sleep. She grabbed most of the torn bedding and trundled it downstairs. The coverlet could give some interior bulk to the wing so it wouldn’t look flat like a sailboat sail. And the coverlet, who could have guessed, was stuffed with goose down. As Maxine snipped and stitched to make the coverlet conform, feathers wafted all over the waiting room like snow. Quite a few landed on the Christmas tree. Some leftover grouting compound, thinned with turpentine and dabbed on the wing panel, made a kind of mucilage. Feathers stuck to the fabric. An effort at realism, tawdry but kind of neat.

  Nonna came downstairs in her new terrifying hair and a dressing gown over her good clothes. She seemed to be readying to be the placid queen of life around here. “This is a royal mess, this room,” she said, “but if we keep the lights off in here except the tree lights, which Geneva and Mr. Corm Kennedy and the other guests can admire from the street, I’ll just take everyone upstairs to the parlor for drinks. That was the plan anyway. And why stand on ceremony?” she said, suddenly gay. “If they want to open every door in our home, we have nothing to hide. So we happen to have a teenager at home and there was a last-minute school project. In families, these things happen. This is real life here. Take it or leave it.”

  “Sorry about all the feathers, Mrs. Ciardi,” said Maxine. “That quilt, hoooo-boy.”

  Laura was afraid to try on the wing and Maxine wasn’t interested, so they tied the white loops onto the right arm of Sam Roscoe, who was about the same size as Hans. He raised the wing and lowered it. When dropped, it pleated in a more or less believable fashion. When raised, it looked strong and also ridiculous, like a joke of a wing. But it looked more strong than it did ridiculous, and that would have to do.

  Besides, thought the girl, what miracle didn’t look ridiculous while it was happening? If a miracle looked ordinary it would be like, just, so what?

  26

  Maxine stayed a good part of the afternoon. She got the idea to try to sew some of the goose feathers onto the wing to make it look even more three-dimensional. “I still can’t figure out why you need only one wing,” she said to Laura.

  “I told you, someone else is going to be holding the other wing.”

  “And why you told your grandmother it was me who needed this.”

  Laura shot her a look of gratitude for her collusion in the lie, but didn’t reply further. She wasn’t going to ask Maxine why she arranged an ambush of Laura in the shower, she wasn’t going to tell Maxine why she had needed an alibi. Too much truth got in the way.

  Maxine grabbed her coat at last. She was going to see Hayley Mills, something just out called In Search of the Castaways. The Sugargarten family apparently didn’t do Mass and possibly they didn’t even do church. Beyond that level of social mystery Laura felt it improper to inquire.

  Nonno slumped into the front hall, peeling off his gloves, swiping his heels on the sisal mat. It was snowing out again—just for a change. “You still here,” said Nonno to Sam, a little gruffly.

  “Was helping Miss Laura with a project. Just about done now.”

  “Well, you take yourself off. Company coming, got to get ready.”

  “You bet, Mr. C. Be back after Christmas to tackle the new wall in your bedroom.”

  “If we still have house,” said Nonno, “we fix bedroom. If not, we sleep in Bryant Park with other bums.”

  Laura didn’t want to bring the wing upstairs in case Hans was tempted to try to fly away in daylight. All of New York City’s finest would be swarming the neighborhood with police cars and alarms if a young man with wings was seen perching on the top of a brownstone, even in a dead-end street. She followed Nonno up to his room, where Nonna was putting the finishing touches of her makeup on, and choosing among earrings. “Ovid,” said Nonna, “are these too Miss Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra?”

  “Who knows what is that?”

  “The movie coming out next year, they’ve been releasing all the photos already. I saw them in a magazine at the hairdresser yesterday. You’ve seen them, too. She looks like she should be hanging in the window of Baumann’s Lighting Fixtures. Do these make me look too much like a tomato?”

  “You can’t look tomato, you Hope Diamond.”

  “What do you think, Laura?”

  Laura thought that Nonna looked more like Bob Hope in a dress than the Hope Diamond, but she only said, “They’re pretty.”

  “Oh, Ovid, and guess what; Magdelena di Lorenzo stopped by and rang the bell today.”

  He was on the ottoman, taking off his shoes and socks and rubbing his feet. “She in town? You invite her, come tonight, eat?”

  “She was hurrying back upstate.”

  “Bella,” he said sternly, pausing with his eyes looking up under his bushy eyebrows. “You invite her? This holy night, you no turn her away?”

  “Of course I invited her, Ovid, I’m not a monster. She came to tell us that Renata has had a stroke or something, and is gone to an invalid home. She seems to be failing and cannot speak. Magdelena wanted to say thank you for the money you send every two weeks, and I think she is saying you ought not send it anymore, at least unless Renata recovers and comes home. She is a proud proud woman of the old country, that Magdelena. She doesn’t want your help.”

  “Renata is our daughter-in-law still, even if she leave us behind.”

  “Why do you support her?” asked Laura. They had forgotten she was there.

  “What a question, I ask you,” said Nonno. “Help out, that what people do, Laura. Why you hang around with Mr. Sam downstairs, you having romance feelings?”

  “Nonno!” Laura and Isabella Ciardi spoke the same word at once.

  “Nice fellow,” said Nonno, “but is too dark for you.”

  “The idea, Nonno,” said Nonna. “Aren’t we getting beyond that? When we come to this country in 1929, people called us too dark. We become Americans, we get on. For shame.”

  “No shame,” said Nonno, “just reality. It hard to be unmatching. When you want marry, Laurita, I find you nice Italian boy.”

  “When we came into this country,” Nonna said to Laura, “your grandfather considered changing our name from Ciardi to Chase, to sound more American.”

  “Why didn’t you?” asked Laura.

  “Because he couldn’t pronounce Chase in a single syllable. It was Chase-ah.”

  “Back then, no could you, tootsie,” said Nonno.

  “We’ve come far, and we’re still moving,” agreed Nonna. Just then, dusk having fallen when no one was looking, the doorbell rang. Laura ran upstairs to get changed while Nonna steadied her hair and waited for Mary Bernice to answer the door and welcome in the first of the guests.

  Laura tore through her clothes closet in the hallway. The blue corduroy jumper with two rhinestone pins at the yoke, the piqué shirt whose lace collar fell down like a collapsing doily around her neck. She dressed in the hall, afraid to peek into her room and see what business Hans might be up to next. Only a few hours now, if all went well.

  She dared to open the door a crack before she went back downstairs, and was sorry that she had. Hans was crouching at the open window again. He had taken something—her nail file, perhaps?—and scratched lines in his right shoulder. She knew what that was for. Trying to find a wing rolled flag-like within, like a butterfly coiled up in a chrysalis.

  Hans heard her at the door and jumped down, more graceful than Garibaldi. Though he put his arm out and his face was so stricken, Laura pulled back and avoided his embrace. “I have to get through this,” she whispered. “No blood on my clothes, Hans. Hold on just a while longer. Please.”

  “Hungry,” he said, and raised his wing in a backward, slicing motion, almost as a warrior might raise a spear. “Make me finished.” Then he brough
t the wing down. At the top of the arc it was close to a beating, but the wing slowed as it fell, and it only touched Laura with the softest of pressure. She came within its partial shell. She could feel his heart beating in his bare chest and the blood pulsing in the fallen feathered canopy.

  “They’d never believe a word of this in Miss Parsley’s class,” she found herself saying. “Good thing I’m not going back, because I’d be in detention for lying after the first sentence. What I did over my Christmas vacation.”

  “Hungry,” he said again, and pressed her closer to him with his wing, as if he might ravish her and then eat her before somehow escaping into some other tell.

  But she was strong, she pulled away, she said, “Later, you have to wait. But not for too long,” and before he could stop her, she scooped up the nail file she saw on the top of her dresser. “Tonight, tonight.” She grabbed her dancer’s flats and fled down the stairs, tossing the nail file into an arrangement of evergreens and red Christmas tree ornaments that Nonna had artfully planted on the demi-lune outside the parlor door. Nonna was waiting in the shadows at the top of the main flight. She was choosing her moment to descend, so she waved Laura on.

  By accident of timing they arrived at the same time, the fat Polumbos and the famous Zia Geneva and Mr. Corm Kennedy. They were squeezing through the vestibule and into the front hall with a false, kinetic cheer they couldn’t possibly feel so early in the evening. Snow and slop everywhere. Hats and scarves unwrapping and falling away. Mary Bernice was on one side, taking coats. Nonno on the other, pumping Mr. Corm Kennedy’s big pink hammy hand as if it were a wrench. The earlier gift of the poinsettia, in its paper sleeve and ribbons, had been forgotten in the front hall. Its presence lent an air of saucy informality and even something impromptu. Though of course perhaps Nonna had planned that, too. “It’s from Signore Vincequerra,” said Mary Bernice, squinting at the card. “He’s had a dental emergency, poor dear, and will not be joining the Ciardi party this evening.”