A Wild Winter Swan

by Gregory Maguire

  He saw her on the stairs. “Laura. Don’t bother men. What you doing here?”

  “I’m not allowed to go to school today, Nonno. Again. Remember?”

  “Abbi pietà, o Signore. Well, take breakfast, stay out of sight. Workers they finish today or Nonna she serve my head on platter for Christmas Eve buffet.”

  “How is the owl?” Laura asked Sam.

  “I’m not making funnies, Laura. Vai fuori di qui.” Nonno was old-fashioned and didn’t like Laura to speak to men.

  “The little white owl is home,” replied Sam. “My mama is feeding her pellets of raw hamburger. Don’t think she’s strong enough to fly out into this snowstorm yet. When the weather clears and she’s better, I gonna release her in Central Park.”

  “Does she have a name?”

  “Laura!” said Nonno, pulling his unfastened bow tie at both ends, as if getting ready to wrap it around her neck.

  “We call her Fluster,” said Sam. Laura grinned and fled to the kitchen.

  Mary Bernice was in a cheery mood. She was making a shopping list for the Christmas Eve dinner. Eventually Nonna would descend to the kitchen like a queen and wrap an apron on her big bosom and do most of the cooking herself, because she didn’t trust an Irishwoman to do convincing Neapolitan dishes. But the supplies had to be ready. The onions and garlic, the several sorts of fish, the tomatoes and herbs. Anything precious and packaged would come from Ciardi’s counters and shelves, but a lot of the list was standard supermarket fare. “The lads are back to have another go at the drip drip drip, I hear,” said Mary Bernice to Laura. “Rosa Mendoza is in those Honduras, don’t you know, so I was going to start this morning in the parlor and maneuver the Hoover. But it’s scarcely worth it, what with the workers tramping about. Now, will you join me going round to the shops and help me carry things home?”

  “Do I have to?”

  “Anyone you want to avoid will be in school, so why not?”

  “Their mothers.”

  “Ah, the parade of mothers. I see. Well, I can manage on my own sure enough, don’t I do so every week. But I thought you might like a distraction.”

  “I have to think about packing for prison. I have to lay all my clothes out on the bed and see if anything needs mending.”

  “All righty-o, but I’m going to nab you when I get back. With Mrs. Ciardi’s sister and her fella coming this year, the fuss has gone feverish. You best stay upstairs and out of the way of those two handsome johnnies, now.”

  “I’m not allowed to talk to anyone,” said Laura blankly. “Anyone. Ever.”

  “Right, and you’ve done such a good job so far obeying every instruction that you’re being sent out of the country,” said Mary Bernice, without malice or mockery. “Mind your p’s and q’s, young Laura.”

  As she ate her Maypo, Laura listened to the little domestic fanfare of departures. When the coast was clear, she tiptoed up to the front hall. The drop cloths were down and the stepladders opened. Sam and John must be upstairs somewhere. Laura climbed to the second floor and peered into the parlor, then the third and checked out her grandparents’ bedroom. The noises were still higher. Well, no one told me I couldn’t go back to my own bedroom, she thought, so she followed Garibaldi as he sped his way to the attic level.

  Cold air was rushing in the open window of the box room. John and Sam had already pried off the lid of a plastic tub of some kind of purplish gunk. They readied a paint tray and some trowels for application outside. “There she is, fresh from the winter season at Cape Canaveral,” said John when Laura appeared at the door. To her inquiry, he said, “First we have to check and see if what we slapped on the other day has gapped, leaving a channel for more snowmelt to get in. If so, we’ll plug it with more grouting compound and trim the excess. Then I’m going to get up the slope of the mansard and double-check the seals just below the parapet. We finished them already, but water’s still getting in somewhere.”

  “That sounds dangerous. Can I help?”

  “Sam will spot me. You can stay out of the way.” Perhaps that sounded meaner than John had intended, but Laura took it as a rejection, and she sidled into her room. She didn’t close the door. She could hear the guys next door. She could tell when John was sitting on the windowsill and inching out. He must be putting his weight on a narrow ledge, a stone gutter built into the wall below the mansard windows on the top flight. It was just wide enough for a male foot set sideways.

  The arc of losing one’s balance, veering backward, falling: the tragic parabolic swoop. Feeling the plummet in the pit of her stomach, Laura nearly gave up her breakfast, but was able to recover. She took solace in folding the ribbed sleeves of her white school sweaters into neat cross-the-breast X’s. One, two, three, and there was a fourth somewhere, maybe at the dry cleaner’s.

  The girl knew nothing about Montreal except that it was north. Whatever cold and snow could fall in Manhattan would likely be doubled up there. In a way, it is hard to fear a change when you can’t even picture it. All she could do was imagine that she might come to dread a new place, too. This slow folding of sweaters was a delay. No help in the long run.

  As if thinking about falling had made it come to pass, she heard a terrible sound, a thump, and an inarticulate wordless yelp. Sam shouted something. Laura ran into the box room. Sam was leaning out the window. Gripping Sam’s forearms, John was dangling above Van Pruyn Place.

  He wasn’t speaking, John; he was saving his breath. Sam called over his shoulder into the room. “Laura. That rope! Quick now.” She scooped up the coiled length and joined Sam at the window. “Make a loop and let it out. John can slip his other foot in it.” She did as she was told, but her hands trembled. She wasn’t trying to save John from dying, only to save his foot. How calm these guys were. As if they fell off rooftops every week.

  She wrapped most of the rope around her waist but dropped out a segment the way Sam suggested. “It’s not open enough,” grunted Sam. “Lean out and divide the sides so he can get his foot in.” Laura was afraid of being dragged out, but she managed to part the sides of the dropped noose till it was nearly a foot wide, and she caught John’s madly circling left foot.

  Now she could see that his right foot was already lodged in the gutter, but it was at an awkward angle from which he couldn’t right himself on his own. His center of gravity was too low. “Walk it backward, bring it up,” said Sam.

  Laura retreated into the box room, her waist and her hands pulling on the rope. John’s foot rose with it up to the level of the ledge. He was able to hook his second foot over the parapet, but his body sagged, and his rump cantilevered out into the wind. Still, now that he had some purchase, and with Sam tugging with panicky might, John pushed with his calves and elevated his torso so his head was partway in the window. Then Laura could grab him under one armpit, and in a blur of energy, by instinct more than design, they managed together to haul John in the window. They fell into a heap of limbs and rope and scattered snow on the floorboards, and lay there panting.

  Laura turned her head. John’s eyes were closed; he was breathing himself to safety. On John’s other side, Sam had raised himself to an elbow. He was looking at her.

  “You did it,” she said. “You rescued him.”

  “We did it,” he told her. “Good job. Can you make us a pot of tea while we pull ourselves together and see if we can keep going here?”

  “Milk and sugar,” said John from behind his closed eyelids.

  By the time she came back upstairs, feeling like Mary Bernice with a tray of tea things and some imported nougat, the lads were already back at work. John was outside again, this time with a safety rope tied around his waist. Sam was passing supplies back. They’d gone through half a bucket of that gunk already. Laura felt incidental and useless. She set the tea down without comment, and left the room.

  The way men fall.

  But there was nothing more to say about that. She went back to cotton percale shirts. She decided not to start on her
Playtex and nylons and garter belts until after the men had finished upstairs.

  Sometime later—she’d lost track of the time—John Greenglass paused in her doorway. He had the rope around his shoulder and the empty bucket in one meaty hand. “You saved my life today,” said John. “Merry Christmas to you.” Behind his shoulder, Sam winked at her.

  “And a happy new year to you,” she said, stupidly. Because what else was there to say? You’re welcome?

  “Your grandmother will be happy. We found the problem and I think we fixed it,” said John. “Just in time, too, because a new cold front is slamming down the coast—fierce wind and snow from the maritimes expected by midnight.”

  “Oh.”

  “Thanks for the tea,” said Sam. “I’ll bring this kitchen stuff downstairs. You did a good job with that rope, Laura Ciardi. Couldna done it without you.”

  She looked at the shiny white toes of her saddle shoes. “Everybody has to rescue themselves,” she said, sounding like Miss Parsley.

  “Not us, we rescue each other,” said Sam.

  “Uh-huh,” said John, and thumped away heavily, as if so happy to be alive that he didn’t mind if he broke every step in the attic staircase. Sam grinned and pretended to kick John in the rear end as he followed him down the stairs. Sam, Sam. Sam Rescue, that would be his name, as long as Laura didn’t know what his real last name might be.

  9

  At about two-thirty that afternoon Laura poked her head in the parlor door. Nonna was sitting and making notes with a Bic pen. She seemed surprised to see Laura, as if she thought Laura would already have taken herself off to Montreal. “I got so involved,” she said. “The Sodality is doing the coffee hour after High Mass on Christmas morning and Mrs. Pill is going to be out in Hicksville with her daughter’s family, so it has fallen to me. Why are you so dressed up? You’re not thinking of going out.”

  “You remember? I have to clear out my locker and hand in my books? Also I’m doing my last hour with the after-school first graders.”

  “Laurita, I’ve been thinking about that. Maybe you’d better not tell the bambinos you won’t be back after the Christmas break.”

  “Why not?”

  “Do you think it would be kind? Small children form attachments.”

  “Are they the only ones who do?” asked Laura flatly. She thought it would be nastier just to disappear without warning, but maybe Nonna was right. Maybe with the delights of Christmas, her kids wouldn’t even notice when she didn’t show up again in January. “Well, Mr. G. said I was to see out my term on this, and it’s the last day today. So I’m going to school. But I’ll wait at the counter at Moxie’s until everyone gets dismissed. I don’t feel like bumping into anybody.”

  Nonna put her pen to her lips and looked at her granddaughter without speaking for a moment. Then she laid the ballpoint down and said levelly, “Would you like me to come with you, Laura?”

  Almost the weirdest thing the old lady had ever said. But probably it was meant kindly. “No,” said Laura, then, “I mean: no, thank you.”

  “Well,” said Nonna. “It won’t be fun, but what has fun got to do with it? We’ll expect you back, what, about four-thirty?”

  “More or less.” Laura shrugged and headed out without saying goodbye.

  In the front hall, John Greenglass was perched near the top of the stepladder. He was checking some measurements with a collapsible wooden yardstick fitted with brass hinges. “Think we’ve got it,” he told Laura. “The drip is yesterday’s news. We’re cutting the plasterboard to install it tomorrow, assuming the ceiling can finish drying out overnight.”

  “No more owls,” said Laura.

  “One owl is weird enough. More would be haunted.”

  “You going out, we see you tomorrow,” said Sam. He winked at her again. He had a gold tooth about halfway back that glinted when he grinned, and the glint brought rose and copper into his soft brown face. “I’ll tell Fluster you said hi.”

  The street was scraped by wind and torn branches. The little New York city trees pinched between sidewalks and curbs, all adolescent, were half buried in shoveled snow. It was a wonder they could make it through the winter.

  She didn’t need to stop at Moxie’s because the kids were already coursing out the doors of Driscoll, fifteen minutes early. Mr. G. must have been full of Christmas cheer. When the surge had spent itself, Laura took a deep breath and pushed in the front door. A school could go from full to empty in three minutes flat. The silence echoing in the corridors made Laura feel a thousand years older than fifteen. She grabbed a few things from her locker and dropped her schoolbooks on a bench for someone in charge to find them.

  Then holiday music jingle-belled itself over the loudspeaker, and a burst of adult hilarity rolled from the front offices. Maybe the teachers were having a glass of eggnog before heading off for their own vacations. Laura went the other way to Staircase B—the crime scene—and climbed up two flights. The library door was open and the lights were on, but half the work desks were crowded to one side of the room. The librarian, Mr. Xaridopoulos, was stacking chairs on top of the study table. “Hi, Mr. X.,” said Laura in a small voice, and said it again because he didn’t hear her, what with chair-leg banging and scraping.

  “Oh, you,” he said. “Looking for a book to read to your little kids? They’re not coming here today.” He gestured. Tarps over most of the dictionaries and the picture book section. “Broken pipes upstairs. You can grab something from the fairy tales if you can reach them. I’m locking up in two minutes.”

  “But the little kids. Where are they?”

  “Cafeteria. I think the cook is going to make them hot chocolate. They can’t come in here, it’s a disaster area.”

  Librarians love nothing better than a disaster because then they can prove they are the rescuers of civilization they are so sure already that they are.

  She grabbed a volume of Hans Christian Andersen stories. The pictures were insipid, wreathed in daisies and crawling with ladybugs, but by experience Laura knew the stories to be strong enough to hold a small population of displaced first graders. “Have a nice Christmas, Mr. X.,” she said. He chortled noncommittally.

  The cafeteria smelled of corned beef and stale sneakers. The janitor was already mopping the floor with dirty sudsy water. He looked as if he were adding a layer of filth instead of erasing it. “Are we meeting in here?” asked Laura, as bravely as she could.

  The janitor replied, “There you are, and here am I, and the moon’s in the sky and a song in my heart. Would you move your foot, thank you.”

  “The first-grade after-school kids? Because the library’s closed due to the pipes?”

  The kids were clattering downstairs now, arrived from Driscoll Primary around the corner. “So it seems,” said the janitor, and gave up trying to correct his little universe with a mop. “Santa’s elves in a frenzy. And so the nightmare continues.”

  The chaperone, Miss Gerstein, came in with the last small child. Miss Gerstein was rattled. “Up the stairs and down the stairs! And pipes bursting in both buildings, did you hear? Laura, can you manage storytime? I have to run pick up a prescription for my mother, who is having angina attacks on the hour.”

  Laura was used to this. Actually she preferred it when Miss Gerstein stole time for personal errands. She just waved Miss G. out the door and opened the book.

  “I hope it’s Christmas story time,” said Bernard.

  “But not Baby Jesus. I hate Baby Jesus. I’m Jewish,” said Rita.

  “Some Christmas party,” said Mugsy. “Feels like torture.”

  “They said hot chocolate,” said Xian Lee. “Milk makes me sick but I love it.”

  “Shhh,” said Laura, and opened the book. She knew the twelve stories in this collection, and had read most of them already. Not “The Ugly Duckling,” not “The Steadfast Tin Soldier.” Not “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” even though the kids loved nakedness of any variety. Not “The Little Mermaid”; it wa
s too long, and so was “The Snow Queen.” “The Little Match Girl” was too sad. Laura settled on the final story in the book, which she had read to herself last September when she’d first been asked to help out at the after-school program. It was called “The Wild Swans.” Like a lot of the Andersen stories, it rambled. The dozen or so kids were in no mood for rambling stories, but they needed something to settle them, especially here in the creepy basement cafeteria instead of the cozy library they were used to.

  “Okay,” said Laura, “everybody sit in this corner. Sit on your coats because the floor is cold.”

  “It’s wet,” said Mugsy. “That guy mopped here. Yuck. It stinks like I don’t know what.”

  It did stink, and Laura knew of what, but she didn’t say.

  Christmas fever. It was going to be hard to hold them. Though Laura could read to young kids in a way she couldn’t even read to herself, this afternoon the prose failed to command their attention. So she slammed the book closed with a bang. This shut the kids up and made them straighten their spines, and two of them put their thumbs in their mouths. “I’m just going to tell you this story. It’ll go faster. When we’re done we can march around the tables.”

  “March on the tables,” suggested Bernard. But they quieted down.

  Laura made quick work of the story. There was a girl with eleven big brothers. When their father married a wicked Queen, the new wife tired of the noisy boys and turned them into swans. One by one they flew out the window into the wide wide world. The girl alone was left to do all the work.

  The little girls were nodding, and the boys were nodding, too. So far so good.

  Laura told how the swan-brothers came back to see their sister once a year and how they turned back into her brothers for one hour, but they always became swans again at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve and flew away.