Mary Bernice tramped through with her coat on. “I’m going home to Ted,” she said to Laura. “If you’re up when your grandparents come in, tell them I’m fed up. I’ve had it. To work a whole week and have my work sabotaged? Bloody hell. I’ll be in on Boxing Day. If I still have a job. I’ll get blamed for this somehow—the help always does. Merry Christmas.”
Out of her coat pocket she withdrew a small plastic vial in the shape of the Virgin. The crown of stars was a plastic screw-top, which she removed. She sprinkled some water into the dining room and made the sign of the Cross. She then walked to the waiting room and opened the door, and sprinkled the false wing lying dead in its shadows. Then the Christmas tree. For good measure she jerked her hand up the stairwell and water hung in the air before beading onto the polished stairs. “Holy water from Lourdes,” said the cook, “and may it do a little good. My sister brought it for me a few years ago and I’ve been saving it for an emergency. There’s enough left for Ted’s heart attack if he ever has one. So long, Laura, and may the peace of Christ descend upon this house and beat a little sense into you.”
Laura crept upstairs on her knees as if on a pilgrimage. In the parlor she took Aretha Franklin off the turntable and put on La Cenerentola, at a lower volume. “A story of Cinderella,” said the record sleeve. In Italian, big surprise. She let side one play to the end, and when she heard the front door opening, she set the needle down in the first track again, and hustled herself farther upstairs.
She couldn’t go into her room, though. She was frightened of what she might do, and what she might not do, and what Hans might do, and what he might not do. She crouched at the top of her stairs, holding on to the newel post. The diners returned. It seemed as if they were taking their desserts in the dining room after all, and mounting the stairs to the parlor for a last round of drinks. Even Mrs. Polumbo sounded as if she had warmed up some. She probably adored Panetta’s.
Laura stayed there, hunched in the dark, for what felt like several nights, while the guests lingered and loitered. Nonno must have gone up to their bedroom to get Peter, Paul and Mary without Laura hearing him, because “500 Miles” began to ghost up the stairwell like a prophecy.
At last the guests left, fluting farewells and buon Natale. Nonno’s and Nonna’s footsteps as they made their way upstairs after the final goodbyes were much slower than they’d been all evening. They were talking to each other in low voices as if they expected Laura to be asleep. But before the bedroom door closed, one of them stumped to the bottom of the attic steps—and then started up. So it wasn’t Nonna, she couldn’t manage that. Laura sprang up and showed herself at the top of the steps before he got very far.
“You awake,” Nonno said. “I think so. I tell Nonna you still awake. Laurita, we talk about this tomorrow, Christmas Day or no Christmas Day. You tell us why you leave Miss Aretha Franklin and come downstairs and make trash and war in our house. When so much depend on good time for guests. You tell us why you ruin us.”
“I—” she began.
“You tell us tomorrow,” he reminded her. “Tomorrow. Now, you just tell me one thing, and I go sleep and count my blessings anyway and curse my fate. Laura. You tell me. You good? You good, Laura?”
She said, “I can’t tell.”
His face fell and he began to haul himself up to the next step to look at her expression more closely. “I can’t tell,” she said again, “but I’ll tell you tomorrow. Go to sleep, Nonno. Tell Nonna I’m sorry.”
“You tell Nonna. Tomorrow,” he said. “Now, I tell her you asleep. She rest better if she think so. Even if a lie. You lose your mind like your mother, or you just a silly girl, who know, nobody but Gesù know. But Nonna need to sleep. So do you. Go to sleep.”
28
Nonno didn’t put on an aria tonight. It was too late and the record player was still downstairs in the parlor. Laura waited at the top of the stairs, still as ice. She heard Nonno begin to snore almost at once, and then she heard Nonna crying a little and blowing her nose. Nonna sounded like a kitten issuing little asthmatic snorts all on the same note. They didn’t last for long. The water rang in the master bathroom sink, the toilet flushed, the house grew quiet.
A house knows when almost everyone else is asleep. It either grows more relaxed or more alert at that moment, depending.
Laura wasn’t certain which way the mood was tending tonight, but the time had come, for good or for ill. Her grandparents were asleep. Hans could stay no longer.
She found him in her room, squatting on her bed, the knees of her brother’s jeans nearly touching his out-thrust chin. Somehow Hans had located another shirt of her brother’s, a long-sleeved Oxford one, and he had managed to get his arm in the sleeve and more or less pull the other side about him like a shawl, skipping the wing and joining at the waist. Laura straightened his collar, buttoned his cuff, and did up the bottom two buttons of the shirt. It wouldn’t afford much warmth, but Laura wasn’t sure how much Hans felt the cold. And even if he did, it wasn’t the most urgent problem they had.
“We are going now,” she said. “We are following the baby owl.”
“We?”
“I will bring you as far as I can go.”
He went to the window and looked out into the snow. It was about midnight on Christmas Eve and a few church bells were ringing in the old-fashioned way of parishes back home across the ocean. “Not the window, not that way,” said Laura. “You have to stay somewhat human a little while longer. We’ll do the stairs, now I know you can manage them.”
She turned off the light in her disheveled room. He looked about himself in the dark, as if only seeing the room for the first time as he saw it for the last, and then he lunged forward and touched his mouth to hers. A wild, unnatural energy, full of threat and portent and angelic magnificence. One hand gripping the doorknob to her room, her other hand lacing into the curls at his right temple, she didn’t pull away. His wing stuttered upward like a Venetian blind with a broken cord on one side, rising on its other side in a fanning vector of pleats and shadows.
They made their way down the attic steps, past the doors to the master bedroom and Nonna’s sewing room; down the next flight past the doors to the parlor and Nonno’s office; downstairs past the open broken doors to the dining room. In the waiting room, Laura picked up the artificial wing. “Let me carry it,” she said to Hans, “for a while. This is as close to being a swan as I am going to get.”
Garibaldi came skulking out of the shadows of the dining room. He didn’t yowl or hiss at Hans, but came and sat neatly near the doormat by the front door, as if ready to accept his station again as king animal in this house of human woe. He looked up at Hans with as much respect as a cat ever can seem to show—not much—and then yawned and looked away.
Laura found her coat and gloves and she put on her grandfather’s fedora. She pulled on her black rubber boots. There were no boots for Hans, but he’d arrived with bare feet—so there was nothing else for it. Then she pressed the button in the front door so it wouldn’t lock behind her.
The snow was still falling. Van Pruyn Place was empty. The last footprints had already begun to fill in, and the parked cars had become soft humps. The black iron palings in the front yards were swollen with white icing.
Laura carried the wing under her arm as she imagined an art student might carry a big portfolio. His wing on his left side, hers on the right, they touched wingless shoulders as they trod down the middle of the street toward East End Avenue.
No moment of enchantment ever empties Manhattan of its night owls, and here and there in the distance as they crossed the avenue Laura could make out the red taillights of disappearing traffic. Churchgoers late for midnight Mass, and partygoers and skulkers and loners, they all showed as human silhouettes, dark against the white snow, never very close. They came and went as Laura and Hans came and went, uptown a little, crosstown the next block, along the decorated median strip of Park Avenue, crosstown again. Laura leading the way, try
ing to make the walk last, taking long ways around. Detours to delay finality. The great bluff-faces of Park Avenue apartments were lost in the uplift of snow. Snow gyring from black nothingness into the faces of Hans and Laura, settling along the fledges of their wings.
They reached Central Park and entered it north of the museum. They rounded the palace of art and ventured deeper into the park. The world became more disoriented. Snow turned Laura around. She clung to Hans, she laced her arm through his, she took off the glove of her left hand so her cold fingers could feel the warmth underneath her brother’s shirtsleeve for the last time. Then their hands linked. Chained, they pushed on, stumbled on, across paths and beneath trees.
They came upon that odd cluster of statuary, Alice in Wonderland and her creatures, covered in white and looking ready to stop holding their breath and to break out of their ice casing. They skirted a formal reflecting pool with beveled edges. A little farther on, Hans Christian Andersen himself. The ugly duckling at his shin was up to his breast feathers in drift.
She knew where they were now, roughly, but she couldn’t let him go yet. They stumbled and held themselves together until she could delay it no longer. The Plaza was beginning to loom ahead, and the city would start up again there. They couldn’t go back to the city.
They turned. The world regularized itself into huge and natural symmetry. They were alone in the grand concourse of elms, walking north with their wings. Not just alone together, the way couples are in New York, but alone in the world. Snow on Christmas Eve, or early on Christmas morning now, had cloaked the population of the entire world, and removed it. Only the hundreds of lit windows from buildings on the East Side and the West Side apartment mansions proved that Hans and Laura had not fully left the world of time and human agency.
At the top of Bethesda Terrace they paused. They were higher than that noble statue perched in the emptied and snowy concrete pond below. They could see its flared wings like the hood ornament of a fancy automobile. It was promise of some sort, or so it seemed to Laura.
In any event, it was the only rescue idea she had ever had.
Down the unshoveled and sloppy steps they made their way, slipping and clutching each other for balance. There were hardly any other words to say, except when they reached the edge of the pond basin, Laura managed to get Hans’s attention by squeezing his hand tightly. He turned his face to hers.
“Do you know where you are going?” she asked him.
“Away from here,” he said. “That’s all I know.”
She wanted to ask him if he would look for his baby sister, his human brothers, but then she thought: No, he has flown away from them once because he could not bear to be other than wholly human. Now he has to try the alternative. He really doesn’t have a choice. Do we.
She bade him to raise his arm outstretched and level. Using the strips from her ripped bedsheet, she tied on the crazy armature of wing the way she had tied it onto Sam Roscoe. In the snowlight, the goose-down feathers seemed to have multiplied, or maybe that was snow upon them, thickening them up. For a rush job, it was a nearly convincing item, that wing.
He didn’t touch her again, he didn’t look at her again, he didn’t speak to her again, he didn’t clasp her in his wings, he didn’t pause as he leaped in his bare feet upon the ridge of Bethesda Fountain. All she said was “Godspeed,” because she could think of nothing else. He probably didn’t hear her anyway. The wind had picked up, the snow was clotting into paste, gumming her eyes and wiping out most of what she could see. He may have made it into the air as a swan-boy, but by the time he alighted on the left shoulder of the Bethesda angel, he was less boy, less real. His prison, his release. He was probably a swan. Anyway, there was a shape like a swan in the storm.
It was Christmas Day now, but he didn’t sing a carol to her. Later, she was glad of this, when she remembered that a swan only sings as he is about to die. He left her without a word, and without a song.
29
A week later, Laura boarded the Delaware and Hudson train that ran from Grand Central Station to Montreal. She had a small suitcase stored at her feet—a Christmas present from Nonno and Nonna. She had a sack of hazelnut chocolates and wrapped Amaretto biscuits and a few bars of lavender soap in fancy paper. She sat on the left-hand side of the train, watching the Hudson River pulse northward with its tidal appetite, past cliffs and mountains that had reminded early settlers of the Rhineland. The sky was a peerless, top-of-the-morning blue, straight out of County Tyrone and no mistake, Mary Bernice had told her.
Laura had never taken a train by herself before—indeed she’d never been in the New York City subway system without a friend or relative—so this trip was a challenge and a proposition. She had to manage this alone, said Nonno. She had to prove she was ready to take on some responsibility, for he and Nonna were getting too old to keep tending her as if she were a child.
The hills were black and icy, the little trackside towns like toy sets. People who lived outside of New York City were too friendly. Laura had to fend off nosy conversations in order to be able to think about what had happened. And how it had come about. And what was next. She opened a hardcover copy of Franny and Zooey and let it rest on her lap, showing pages of smart dense type. Her eye often fell upon it as if she were ruminating over its mysteries thoughtfully. Once in a while she remembered to turn a page. But she was only reading her own thoughts, really.
He’d been gone a week, had Hans, and the world had settled into a normalcy that only partly resembled what had gone before.
Christmas Day or not, Nonna had lit into Laura like, as Mary Bernice put it, an Italian banshee. “Don’t give me that crap,” she said to her granddaughter, using an expression Laura had never heard the Italian matriarch utter before. “No cat turns a whole table upside down no matter how much he likes fish. There wasn’t time. He hasn’t the strength. You did this. You are a bitter, angry, broken child, and who can blame you for any of that, but you are still responsible for your behavior, young lady. How close you came to ruining us, you’ll never know, for I’ll never tell you.”
“Tell me, why don’t you,” said Laura. “Go ahead. I dare you. What’s left to lose?”
“All right, I’ll tell you then. Miss Uppity-in-Charge. Tell you all the risks we’ve taken to better ourselves for thirty-five years. Tell you again about the loss of a son who might have helped us with the work at this stage of our old lives. Tell you, all right since you asked, about all the cash we’ve sent to help Nonna di Lorenzo with our daughter-in-law, your poor blighted mama. Not to mention your school fees, did I mention that? I won’t mention it. Nonno builds Ciardi’s Fine Foods and Delicacies up from a single packing crate on the Lower East Side to this establishment known up and down the eastern seaboard for the best in continental, what’s the word, confections and comestibles, all the imported stuff rich people like to eat to make them feel rich. And to make them feel less alone in godless New York. All these years, we crawl out of the gutters of Rome and the slums of Salerno and the dumps of Hester Street and we somehow survive the Depression and the War and we lose first our son and then our grandson, life is no fair, and we are left with only you to console us. And you’re too young to help yet. Then Nonno overextends with this house, and takes out a second mortgage, and that fool shop Buccelli’s with its cut-rate junk opens over on Second Avenue, and suddenly we are losing our footing. Losing our shirt, losing our way, losing our minds, do I have to spell it out?”
“I get it,” said Laura. “Stop screaming. Don’t get excited, Nonna. Cardiac alert.”
“And our one hope is that Mr. Richie Rich Corm Kennedy, maybe he wants to invest in a shop that is a real going concern, because he falls in love with crazy Jenny, who frankly is the one who should be in a lockup facility, but who am I to say, I love her but she is nuts.”
“Take a sip of water, Nonna.”
“And here he comes all the way from Boston, Massachusetts, and we put on the dog for him, is that the saying
? We put on the dog. I work my fingers to the bone and not to mention poor Mary Bernice, I can’t say about her now, it makes me crazy. And then you leave us all in the parlor listening to that sexpot Miss Aretha Franklin, I don’t know about her, maybe her voice makes you a little nuts like your Zia Geneva. You waltz downstairs and you bash up the work of a week and you risk the work of a lifetime.”
Laura had nothing she could say to this. She studied her hands in her lap. Garibaldi was inching around the parlor as if smelling for traces of Hans.
“And should it all come tumbling down? Should we take a bunkbed in the poorhouse and piss in a clay pot like we did in the old country? And you know why I am not killing you right this minute, I am so angry?”
“Nonna, please, she just girl,” said Nonno, with one hand over both his eyes. “She no need to hear all this.”
“Because Mr. Corm Kennedy, he like Panetta’s!” shouted Nonna. She was sounding more and more like her husband. “All that cooking we do, and he think crummy Panetta’s is real Italy! It make him feel rich and superior to us, better than us instead of family with the same degree of rich. I could spit. He swan out of there with his big fat bald-headed smile and he pat Nonno on his shoulder like he some pushcart sandwich king or somebody—”
“Isabella,” said Nonno sternly. “I got dignity, some left. Leave alone.”
“He agree to come in as partner,” spat Nonna. She breathed out little gusts like a lapdog and spoke more quietly then. “The whole thing is good, is rotten, it works, not because we are equals, but because he thinks he is rescuing us.”
A Wild Winter Swan Page 17