A Wild Winter Swan

by Gregory Maguire

  “That’s the only Montreal there is, anyway that I know about.”

  “You don’t mean I have to live there?”

  “Carissima,” said Nonna. “You can’t stay here hiding in your bedroom, worrying your grandfather and me to an early grave.”

  It’s too late for you to enjoy an early grave, you’re as old as sin.

  “I don’t hide,” said Laura. “And I’m not going. I can’t. I don’t know how to speak Canadian.”

  “They speak French and English in Montreal. Luckily this is an English-speaking school, though the nuns will try to teach to you some French. We’d all rather it be Italian, but the Italians didn’t colonize Quebec.”

  Laura said through her tears, “Nonna, this can’t be happening. I’ve changed my mind. I’ll go back to Driscoll. I was out of line but I’m ready now.”

  “Driscoll won’t have you back,” said Nonna the know-it-all. Was that a smirk?

  “I’ll go to public school.”

  “That would be worse. I’ve asked around. The Ladies’ Auxiliary agrees. A girl with hardly any academic interests, she needs a finishing school.” Nonna fished a letter from her pocketbook. “The institution has written me. They can take you after the first of the year. It’s called the Academy of—”

  “I don’t need to know what it’s called because I’m not going.”

  Nonna stood up. “I’m afraid you are, my dear. I can’t go into the whys and how-comes now. It’s in your best interest. After what happened at Driscoll and your grandfather’s worries, not to mention your poor mother—well, I’m not getting any younger, either. On Monday you go tell your first graders that it’s your last day.”

  “I don’t know how to do that.”

  “This is precisely what I mean,” said Nonna. “You are sixteen years old. Old enough to take charge of your life. You need finishing, and Nonno and I seem not to be up to the job.”

  “I’m fifteen. Mary Bernice can teach me at home.”

  “How to boil potatoes? I don’t think that’s enough.”

  “She can teach me how to be nice,” said Laura, nearly spitting.

  “I am trying to be nice,” said Nonna, attempting at a soft expression that succeeded only in making her look like an executioner enjoying a daydream. “If I’m failing, that’s more proof that we can’t do this any longer. Laura, we want the best for you. We always have done. It’s been how many years since your mother—”

  Laura wasn’t about to let Nonna go into that. If there was no news from her mother, there was no point in flapping about the subject. “May I be excused?” she asked.

  “We’ll talk about it at dinner. It won’t be so bad, you’ll see.”

  “I’m not in for dinner,” said Laura.

  “What do you mean by that?” Nonna’s look of tyranny returned. “I haven’t given you any permission—”

  “I’m going to church with Mary Bernice.”

  Nonna pursed her lips. She knew she’d been outmaneuvered. “In this snow?” she began, but gave up. Church trumped everything else. “Well, pray for me, too.”

  Laura plunged down the back stairs into the kitchen, which was half-sunk in the ground. The high windows above the sink looked out into the bereaved backyard. Snow was frosting the dead leaves clumped outside the windows.

  Tomorrow’s pot roast sizzled in a pressure cooker. Its little valve made a lonely jingle against the heavy pot lid. On top of the cookbooks, the cat opened one eye and uttered a monotonic comment. “Shut up, Garibaldi,” said Laura. Mary Bernice must be in the bathroom. Or no—now she could hear her—the cook was upstairs in the front hall, talking over life and its limitations with the workers.

  Generally Laura wasn’t allowed to make conversation with tradespeople, but she turned around and went upstairs. The front door was closing. John Greenglass and Sam, Sam what’s-he-called, Sam-I-am, were just gone. Mary Bernice was stowing the drop cloths in the hall closet beneath Nonna’s dripping boots. In the ceiling, the wet plaster had been torn out; only lathes and strapping showed. “Did they take the owl?” asked Laura. “I wanted to keep it. It belongs here.” She ran to the door.

  “You’ll catch your death,” said Mary Bernice, without conviction.

  In her stockinged feet Laura descended the steps of the brownstone to the slate paving stones of the sidewalk. Van Pruyn Place was a dead end, and there was only one way John’s blue truck could drive out. There it was at the corner, halted at the stop sign, blinker on, ready to turn onto East End Avenue. The rush hour traffic should hold the truck in time for Laura to reach it. And do—what? Say what? “Give me the owl.” “Let me in.” “Take me away.” “Come back.”

  But before she could get there, John’s truck eased out and turned, lost in the stream of taxis and cars and trucks.

  Laura stood on the pavement, shivering. The snow circled like carnival ticker tape. All of the great city around her was engaged and alive, and Laura alone stood shoeless in the snow outside the warmly lit brownstones. The loneliness she felt was so keen it was almost elegant. It cut her. Every snowflake on her bare arms had steel blades. There was no future and no past in such immediate pain.

  “Are you barmy, get in here before the devil gives you germs,” called Mary Bernice from the area near the rubbish bins. “And you wonder why everyone frets about you so.”

  Laura turned at last. The wind off the East River tore harder against her. A grade-school boy in a jacket three sizes too large for him slipped in the slush as he ran across the street with a fistful of Christmas greens in his palm. He righted himself without falling, though. He must be on his way to a school musicale, for he slid on down to the corner, singing something to himself about the holly and the ivy, and the running of the deer.

  3

  In the evenings, the kitchen was warmer than the attic. Mary Bernice was half through her own meal. “There’s a nice slice of Sunbeam in the bread bin with your name on it, Miss Laura.” Laura got the bread. There was no name written on it. She knew there wouldn’t be but she turned it over to check the other side. Real butter tonight, not margarine. The hard butter tore the bread into soft white clumps. Laura ate the morsels like hors d’oeuvres.

  “Why do they have to send me away?” she asked the cook.

  Mary Bernice hadn’t heard about this. She put her spoon down. “You’ve mistook something, I’m thinking. Where on earth do they want to put you?”

  “Some prison in Canada.”

  “I’m sure you’ve gotten the wrong end of the stick, Laura. Your grandparents have their notions, but I doubt they mean to do anything of the sort. They’re just fretting about that hole in the ceiling. Sure, aren’t they besides themselves with getting ready, and them relations. Give your elders and betters a little room.”

  Laura was mopey. She dawdled over the pasta fazool that Mary Bernice had set before her. “I don’t know why they are so jittery over a stupid dinner party. It’s Nonna’s sister coming for a visit, not the Pope.”

  “Families are mysteries. You of all people should know that,” said Mary Bernice, a little belligerently. But Laura didn’t want to consider her own family. She turned her shoulder away from Mary Bernice to indicate indifference. Facing the little room off the kitchen, where Mary Bernice sometimes slept instead of returning to her husband in Stuyvesant Heights, Laura saw Mary Bernice’s coat and hat folded neatly on the bed. “Are you going home tonight after church?” she asked the cook.

  “It’s Ted’s bingo night, so no. But I’m still hoping to take in the evening Mass. I prefer Guardian Angel in Chelsea, as I have a devotion to my own dear guardian, but not in weather like this. Queen of Angels will do in a pinch. I’ll hop the bus.”

  Laura said, “I’ve changed my mind. I’ll come with you. I need to get out of the house. I’m through talking to them for good. They don’t listen anyway.”

  Mary Bernice winked at Laura. “I’ll sort it out for you with mister and missus, shall I? We won’t be able to take Holy Communion
, having eaten so recently, but tomorrow’s weather may be worse, and the Lord will understand.” She stomped upstairs to make the arrangements. Laura waited for her, huddling inside the basement door that let out under the front stoop. The cat wreathed itself about Laura’s boots like a sooty spirit of chimneys past, yellowish eyes narrowing in its grey face.

  “Saints and celebrities, but you must have really given them a go,” said Mary Bernice. “If you’ve nothing else to pray for tonight, you can ask forgiveness for rudeness, I’m guessing. The missus was crying a little and old Ovid had set a copy of Life magazine on top of his bowl to keep the soup warm, he said, while he was looking through his hi-fi record albums. I think they weren’t talking to each other. Marriage is like that, more often than not. Now you stay put, kitty, or you’ll be sorry.”

  Though they could still hear the moist industrial hum of traffic on FDR Drive, the snowy world was more hush than rush. On the crosstown streets the traffic had already thinned. Perhaps everyone but Laura had known a storm was coming, and had gotten home early. “You’re smart to stay over tonight,” she said.

  “Himself will be glad to have a quiet night at home without my complaining, sure enough. I’d take a vacation from meself, too, if I knew how to book it.”

  They crossed several blocks and ran toward the next bus as it pulled to the stop. It was like a lighted tank of seawater rolling through the snowy gloaming. From outside, the riders were glazed with wet halos, but inside they all seemed to be on morphine, as if they expected never to get home again. Laura snagged a window seat and Mary Bernice settled in next to her and found her rosary. She didn’t care for public transport; she used the rosary as a distraction and as a defense against uninvited conversation.

  Laura watched the storefronts pass. The Rexall windows were particularly colorful, with their stacked displays of Lavoris, Old Spice, and whatnot. Most of the stores had their iron grates pulled already.

  Mary Bernice said that Our Lady Queen of Angels was in the East 110s. Laura knew how the streets worked but rarely bothered to count them, as they counted themselves so correctly. At 91st Laura watched a lady’s umbrella blow inside out; the pedestrian pitched the thing in the gutter and sloshed on. The night seemed bedeviled with potential catastrophe, but here they were at church at last, so trouble would have to wait outside in the cold.

  Laura didn’t have much feeling for Mass itself. Who could? She wasn’t expected to understand the Latin. It was a secret language, holiness in code. She read the prayers off the laminated cards in the pews—“Confiteor Dei omnipotenti”—(Confess your sins, murmured Mary Bernice helpfully). The congregation droned like zombies. The oddly clinical scent of beeswax candles laced itself into a mothbally fug of stone-pressed cold air.

  In stained glass high above the altar, the Archangel Gabriel slid into the world. He held a lily in his hand, as if to offer it to the Virgin. She was examining her nails and paying him no attention. Perhaps she was shy. Perhaps the angel was speaking in Latin and the Virgin knew only English.

  Finally the priest ascended to the pulpit and began to address the congregation in English. “Pay attention now, I’m going to grill you about it on the bus home,” growled Mary Bernice. So Laura tried to concentrate. She went back and forth between the words and the angel in the window, stitching everything together, like pictures and words in a storybook she read to the first graders at the after-school program at Driscoll.

  “Well,” said Mary Bernice on the way home, “did you spend the entirety of Holy Mass thinking about yourself, yourself, yourself?”

  “I did not,” said Laura, wondering what made Mary Bernice so crusty sometimes. Faith could be an angry urge in the cook. “Well, not the whole time.”

  “Miss Laura Ciardi. We go to Mass for courage in our trials. I know you’ve had a bad afternoon and you’re feeling punky. Your faith can inoculate you against despair. Come along now, what did you take in?”

  This was almost like being asked to cough up the natural resources of Brazil or the significant rivers of the African continent. Answers in words came so slowly. “He said angels were messengers. That the word angel means messenger in some rusty old language. That angels were a sign of, um, grace, and that Mary was one very lucky young virgin to win the big prize. Zip-a-dee-doo-dah. Also our guardian angels are invisible but this guy—Gabriel—came down from heaven and delivered a message, like someone from the telephone and telegraph company.”

  Mary Bernice started to laugh a little despite herself. “I’m sorry I asked. The lesson of the sermon, listen to me, Laura, was simply that Advent is a time of holding your breath. He is coming, said the angel. The salvation of the world is coming. Hold on, everybody, and expect the unexpected. At least,” she said with a roll of her shoulders, “that’s what I got out of it. Father isn’t always easy to follow, with that accent. I think he’s from West Africa. But he says a nice Mass, for my money.”

  “Is the owl from our ceiling like some angel sliding down on a slat of light?”

  “Beware your imagination, Laura. Occasion of sin if you don’t look out. An owl is not an angel. A bird in the house is a sign that someone will die soon. Nothing more than that.”

  They sat in silence the rest of the ride. The bus was emptier, sleepier. No other vehicles on the streets now but taxis.

  “I wouldn’t mind an angel,” said Laura, almost to herself.

  “Everyone wants to get something, everyone has something to give,” replied Mary Bernice. “Even the rich want their Christmas presents, even the poor want to give their mite. Aren’t I just after saying to our cousin Sheila in the Bronx that I wanted to give a nice coat to the clothing drive for the poor. ‘Ooh,’ says our Sheila, ‘I’ll take that coat off your hands, I like it.’ I said, ‘It’s bloody Christmas, Sheila. I want to give this to the poor, not to the cheap and miserly. Buy your own damn coat.’”

  In the most basic of terms, Laura knew that she herself was not actually poor. She had a coat from Macy’s in Herald Square, full price, not picked up at a sale. It was pearl blue edged with a rolled white cord that finished in braidwork around the buttonholes. She had seen in the pews three or four people who wore the plastic sleeves from dry cleaning around their shoulders to keep the snow off their threadbare jackets. Poor was poor and rich was something else. But she slept in a cold attic room and had no parents to speak of, and virtually no friends. Mary Bernice didn’t count. So while this wasn’t poverty, it was some cousin to poverty.

  4

  When she went upstairs, she saw the light was still on in the parlor and the door was open a crack. “Is that you, Laurita?” called her grandfather. “Come down and see us before you go to bed.” He used his sweet-touch voice. Somehow she resented him most when he was trying to be thoughtful.

  “I have a headache, I’ll see you tomorrow.” She was up on her own floor now, and closed the bathroom door to avoid hearing any argument.

  She was still thinking about ways of being rich and poor, and how she had eaten a bowl of pasta fazool for supper and had clean blankets and her own bathroom, even if the sink sported a big crack in it. On the windowsill she had two kinds of shampoo and a bottle of spray to hold her do in place. But here she was lying in the dark again. She whisked her forefingers along her closed eyelashes, removing damp. She heard the sound of footsteps in the hall below.

  “Laura?” It was her grandmother, wheezing from the effort of stairs. “You can’t be asleep, I just heard the toilet flush. This last flight is too steep for me so come where I can see you. I want to talk to you.”

  The struggle over being obedient or being willful. Laura got up and walked in her slip to the top of the stairs and stood there sullenly with her arms folded over her.

  “I know you need some time to get used to everything new,” said Nonna. She had made it up the first two steps. A world record. “It’s normal. I want to talk to you some more about this tomorrow. We’re all going to ten o’clock Mass and I have Sodality afterward. Non
no has to count the collections as usual, so we’ll go over all this Montreal business at lunchtime when we get back. Capisci?”

  “Mary Bernice thinks I caught a cold being out tonight. At church.”

  Nonna grunted like a cavewoman. “Terrific. Well, get some rest and we’ll see how you feel in the morning.”

  Laura coughed stagily and tried to change the subject. “I’m going to stay home tomorrow and have Mary Bernice teach me how to smoke a cigarette.”

  But Nonna just laughed at that. “I think she’s leaving after she makes the morning coffee. But if she stays, have her give you a glass or two of beer while you’re at it. If you’re going to go to hell, take the express train. Now, seriously, if you’re sick, I’ll see you tomorrow at lunch. It’s the pot roast. Don’t forget to say your prayers.”

  “I said them at church.”

  “Say them again. Insurance.”

  Laura’s silence was, in her opinion anyway, both belligerent and magnificent.

  Nonna continued cagily. “You could always join us at church after Mass and do Sodality with me. If you feel better by then.”

  Sodality of the Virgin Mary was extra-credit rosaries chanted by a phalanx of old women wearing black lace veils. “No thank you. Good night.”

  “Yes,” said Nonna, turning around and fastening her hand upon the rail. She never said good night back; one remark seemed to serve for the whole household.

  Nonna huffed away, landing both feet on each step for security before proceeding to the next. Her broad back made a perfect target. But all Laura could put her hands on quickly was a can of Elegance hairspray, and probably it would just bounce off Nonna without her noticing. It wasn’t worth it.

  Laura returned to her room and lay down so she could be poor and cold on the Upper East Side. But then she got up. She was remembering something the priest had said about Veni, Veni, Emmanuel. O come, o come, Emmanuel. She went to her window. The cord in the sash was broken but there was a piece of wood on the sill that she used to prop the window up on hot summer nights. She used it now. Never mind the cold air.