A Wild Winter Swan

by Gregory Maguire

  “Go to bed and stop dropping things, e buonanotte e sogni d’oro,” he advised, and closed the door behind him.

  The visitor’s eyes had closed. A vicious-smelling dribble had slanted a question-mark on the floor. Laura ran into her bathroom and grabbed a towel, and then ducked into her bedroom for her comforter and the chenille spread. She put on the lamp next to her bed to provide some indirect lighting. Returning to the box room, she mopped up the vomit beside the creature. Creature? Man? Boy? Bird? Boy seemed nearest. It wasn’t quite accurate. It would have to do. The boy’s breathing settled almost at once. He curled onto his arm side, fetally, and the wing came forward like a sheet. Had he been naked underneath it, he’d still be modest. She flapped her bedclothes over him. He seemed not to notice. Whatever else he was or wasn’t, he was exhausted. He was going to revive or going to die, but either way he was going to do it privately under his wing, under her blankets.

  For a few moments she crouched in the doorway, ready to spring up and flee if he should rouse and get aggressive. When Garibaldi came padding by and rubbed against her hip, she almost fell over—his suddenness felt more startling than the arrival of a half-winged boy. The cat was halfway to a purr, but at the sight of the intruder Garibaldi began to hiss. Laura swatted him away and closed the door of the box room.

  Without forming clear plans, she found herself tiptoeing downstairs. This wasn’t so unusual; sometimes she went down and got some Life cereal in the middle of the night if she was hungry. Garibaldi came with her, head down and irritated but probably hoping for some milk out of the campaign. Which he got.

  She took one of the trays on which Mary Bernice piled meals for the dumbwaiter. Since the apparatus didn’t rise all the way to the attic Laura prepared to carry the tray up herself. She set out some bread and some cold lasagne in extra sauce, some imported artichoke hearts in oil and red and green peppercorns, a glass of milk, and then, making a quick act of contrition in case it was a sin, a juice glass filled with a nice Montepulciano. Silverware, and two paper napkins in case he was a sloppy eater. That should do it.

  Before she left, she refilled Garibaldi’s saucer with milk. This kept the cat engaged while she closed the door behind him. No more feline bother for this evening.

  Back upstairs, she set the tray down on the floor of the box room. Feeling cold herself, she ventured back into the room that Miss Gianna Tebaldi had once occupied. The bed had been taken out and given to the Salvation Army, but after all these years the blankets and pillows were still folded up on the dresser. She took an armful of everything and returned to the box room. Now that the cat was secured in the kitchen, she could leave the door open. She made herself a pallet, with her feet in her own room and her head on a pillow in the hall, facing the box room door. She was at the same level as her guest. All she could see were his naked feet and the mound of covers gently rising and falling, proof he had not yet died.

  His feet. One was lateral to the floor. The other foot lay atop it but cantilevered toward her, so she could examine the sole of the forward foot minutely. If there was a practice to telling fortunes by reading the soles of feet instead of the palms of hands, she could get to work and tell his fortune. But she couldn’t even tell if he was human. She just looked at the feet as if they were an art project she was supposed to be drawing.

  What can you tell of a boy by his feet? They were hard and callused at the toes, especially the back ridges of the four smaller toes. Stony, as if frostbit. The tender inward-arching sole was gammon pink, and surely that was a sign of a functioning circulatory system. (Thank you, Miss Frobisher.) The ball of the top foot, the one she could see better, had a blooded scar, but the cut wasn’t deep. The foot looked clammy with melting snow from the cuffs of the rough trousers and the ice-crud that might have formed between his toes.

  Then she began to worry about the toes falling off—how embarrassing that would be!—and she remembered Christ washing the feet of the sinner with oil. What the hell. She retrieved the dish of artichokes and poured some oil in her hands, sieving out the peppercorns. Wincing with uncertainty—she didn’t want to hurt him, for the love of all the saints and angels!—she put her hands upon his feet and massaged softly.

  He didn’t flinch, he didn’t kick in shock. When she was done she reached for the towel and held it along his feet to absorb the moisture. As long as he was still fast asleep or playing dead, she grew bolder and rubbed his feet harder. It only took a moment. When she was done, his toes looked more orange than white. She hoped she hadn’t accelerated their detaching, but she decided the color was from increased blood flow.

  Setting aside the towel again, she put her head back on her pillow. Two feet from his own two feet, she watched him for some indefinite length of midnight. The green light upcast from the hall below began to waver. In the way of sleep, she was waking again in somewhat brighter light before she was certain she could ever fall asleep again.

  13

  But either it wasn’t a dream after all or she had really better make a reservation at the funny farm, because she woke up on the floor of the attic hallway. The snow hadn’t stopped falling, but it had grown thinner. You could see through it to the top windows and carved rooflines of the brownstones across Van Pruyn Place. The wind had dropped some, too, now just a workaday bluster. The house was silent. It was about dawn. Christmas Eve was coming, Christmas Day. Unless the storm had slowed the subways or choked the streets, Mary Bernice would be here soon to start breakfast for the grandparents. John Greenglass and Sam Who-Could-He-Be—oh, Sam Rescue, that’s right—would arrive to finish the repair of the front hall ceiling.

  She sat up slowly. The chenille bedspread, her bedspread, was on the floor in the box room. The room was empty. The window was closed. Her comforter wasn’t on the floor or in her bedroom.

  Menace, danger, worry, holiday eggnog with strychnine. What a menu.

  She hopped to the bathroom because the floor was icy, and closed the door behind her. Then she locked it, something she had never done before. She used the toilet and washed her hands and scrubbed her teeth with a dry toothbrush, just to wake herself up. Her hairbrush was in the bedroom, but she soothed and smoothed her hair as best she could with her hands.

  She found him crouching in a stain of brightness in a corner of Miss Gianna Tebaldi’s old room. (Oh he was still here he was still here he was still here.)

  He must have stepped over her while she slept. The coverlet was up to his chin and his eyes were closed. The tray she had brought up—the milk was gone, and also the wine. The lasagne, sagging laterally, looked disagreeable, and she didn’t wonder that he had left it. Maybe he couldn’t work a fork? For the first time she stopped to figure out which arm he had, and which wing. She wasn’t good at left and right in the best of times, and even worse at working out someone else’s left and right. But she stood there and took her time. The left wing, the right arm. So unless he was left-handed he could probably use a fork. But fork and knife at once, no. She ought to have thought of that. She ought to have cut the slab of cold lasagne for him. It looked viciously unappealing in the daylight.

  He was asleep, or he was in a coma. He wasn’t dead, for his shoulders rose and fell with the work of his lungs.

  Not knowing what to do, how even to think about what this was all about, she stood there and stared at the crown of curls that had dried into crisp, clotted circlets of pale beach sand. Maybe salt water had clumped the ringlets together. At the Jersey shore, when people came out of the water and fell asleep in the sun, sometimes their hair went stiff like that. Like a natural perm.

  She tried to tell it to herself so she could understand it better. But.

  . . . . . . !

  Not a word came to her head. The storyteller inside her was defeated by the irruption of real story.

  She could see him. How could this be real? But it couldn’t be a dream. None of the walls were sliding about. Time wasn’t slippery. Details that she didn’t need to notice were there,
regardless. The moccasins that Miss Gianna Tebaldi had bought in lake george, new york, and said so in beaded letters sewn onto the tongues, were still paired neatly by the baseboard where the governess had left them when she eloped. She’d never come back for them, and as they were all that was left of her, Laura just let them sit there, advertising the pleasures of upstate. Why would Laura bother with abandoned moccasins in a dream about a swan-boy? So: not a dream?

  He stirred, and groaned. His wing fanned a little against the floorboards. He was still in a state of shock or something. Maybe feverish. Maybe he was cold, even with the comforter. Suddenly Laura was aware of the smell, how very strong. Even if no one ever came upstairs this far, and if Nonna and Nonno were too old to smell much, someone might notice. It was hard to tell what the smell was like. Greasy, and nautical; sweet and clinically sour. A bit old people’s nursing home. He just wasn’t clean, that was the sorry truth of it.

  A bath would warm him up. A bath would clean him up. Some of the smell would rinse down the drain. A bath wouldn’t hurt the wing because swans swam in ponds and rivers and she was pretty sure that wings were treated with a kind of natural water repellent, like lanolin in sheep’s wool. Like her good coat from Macy’s.

  She tiptoed into her bathroom and turned on the taps. The plastic plug leaked, but if you kept running the water every few moments you could keep the level topped up. She fit the plug into the drain.

  It wasn’t so improbable that Laura would be running a bath at this hour of a Tuesday morning. She didn’t have to get ready to go to school, after all. Her grandparents were probably still asleep, or Nonno was up doing his toe-touching exercises in his one-piece buttoned underwear, and Nonna was saying her morning rosary in bed, propped up by about ninety pillows. Anyway they were deaf enough not to notice the running water, or so Laura told herself. They never talked to her until they all met downstairs in the dining room for breakfast or until Laura hollered “Ciao!” as she rushed by them and dashed off to school, most often on the late side. But never again, that.

  When the tub was about two-thirds full, hot water vaporing the air and steaming the pink tiles, Laura turned off the taps. She returned to Miss Gianna Tebaldi’s room. This was the hard part—how to wake him up enough to draw him into the bathroom and show him the hot water. She didn’t want to frighten him and certainly didn’t want him to make any noise. It was impossible for her to imagine what would happen next if, say, he made some sort of fuss that alerted the household. She would have to go in the bathroom, close the door, and drown herself, and let everyone else sort it out.

  “Lord above, is that a fish in the ceiling this morning?” called Mary Bernice. She was brisking about, making her usual racket to alert Nonno and Nonna that she had arrived and had the Medaglia D’Oro stewing in the fancy-pants Italian coffeepot.

  That would be a great way to startle the visitor, a voice shrieking from a few floors away, but the swan-boy didn’t stir. Laura was loath to inch forward and shake him by the shoulder in case he woke in a panic and attacked her. But she didn’t have to try. Noiselessly Garibaldi must have streaked up the stairs once Mary Bernice released him from his imprisonment in the kitchen. He appeared so suddenly at Laura’s ankle that she almost jumped. Taking one look at the interloper, the cat let out a dry sibilant warning, as if at another cat.

  The swan-boy shook awake with a complex motion that Laura couldn’t comprehend and couldn’t describe. Some kind of shudder that rippled one way and then back the way it started, like a shook-out rug. His eyes clocked open in a single instant of alertness. His neck arched up and his head and face plunged forward. He hissed back at the cat out of the sides of his mouth somehow. Garibaldi just about had a coronary and fell down the stairs.

  “Hi,” said Laura. “Sorry—”

  She wasn’t sure what she was sorry for. She had rescued him, after all.

  He took her in with a feral, almost a savage look. The face and neck and everything else were so human, but the look was avian; he turned his head and scrutinized her with his face in profile, first from one eye and then another, as if he had forgotten how to use them both together.

  “I’m Laura.”

  He didn’t say his name, maybe he couldn’t speak, though that would be a problem. Or only speak swan. Swans didn’t speak, did they, until they died, and then they sang a song. What song. Probably Bobby Vee’s “Take Good Care of My Baby,” if they had little swanlettes. Ducklings. Cygnets. Whatever they were called.

  She was giggling, a nervous habit. He hissed again, but his head returned to a normal human position, and the sound was more experimental, tentative. A fourth-grade boy with a lisp trying out his first wolf whistle on the school playground.

  “I’m okay, I’m no trouble, not to you anyway,” she said. She gestured to him: Come. She didn’t want to touch him, nor did she think that would be correct. But her hand cupping toward herself as she backed away, he would understand that. A universal gesture, she hoped.

  He did seem to understand. He let the coverlet slide off his shoulders. In the daylight he looked more—what was the word—common. Like someone who worked the shooting arcade at Coney Island, or trundled crates of pickled pepperoncini and balsamic vinegars down the sidewalks to the lift embedded in the sidewalk in front of Ciardi’s Fine Foods and Delicacies. Like a contadino, only not dark-roasted like southern Italian farmers. Bleached, fair, nearly blond. The swan-eyes were Nordic ice-green. Not at all warm. He put his right hand upon the windowsill and pulled himself to his bare feet. His wing, now she could see it in daylight, went down to just above his ankle.

  Come, she gestured. “Vieni con me.” Though why should he know Italian, he looked more like a Dutchman or a Swede. “Come,” she said, and extended her hand, as if it were a kind of wing. She backed away onto the top step so he could pass before her down the short hall to the bathroom door on the left.

  He shrugged and grunted, no particular language but that of effort and ache. He did as she proposed. He walked by and swept by. His human shoulder near her, the wing on his left side away. It brushed the wall and made a sound like Mrs. Steenhauser sweeping her back steps with that old broom she used. He seemed to know what Laura meant, because he didn’t go as far as her room or the box room in the front of the house, but paused and looked in the bathroom door. The expression on his face was unreadable.

  She came up behind him, murmuring, but his wing made him seem wider than, say, John Greenglass or Sam Rescue. The hall was narrow and she couldn’t get around him. Finally she said, “Well, go on in?” with a lilt in her voice, as if she were Nonna saying, Won’t you try one of my biscotti?

  “Ah,” he said, in a normal voice. Luckily, downstairs a clock was chiming—it was 7:30, not 7:00 a.m. as she had guessed. He went in and turned to look over his shoulder—well, you’d have to say his wing. Laura put her finger to her lips. She didn’t know if this was a universal symbol for shhhhh or just high school study hall, but he gave a bit of a nod, and moved into the room.

  Then the noise of steps coming up the stairwell from the hall below. It wasn’t Mary Bernice, she walked more lopsidedly with that hip, off the beat; nor could it be Nonno or Nonna, because neither of them could move so quickly. “Hey up there, morning glory,” called someone, must be John Greenglass. “We know you’re up because we heard the pipes—are you decent? We’re coming up to take a quick glance at the work we did yesterday. All clear?”

  She panicked, but could hardly say no—she was supposed to be in the bathroom. “Make it snappy,” she called, and shut the bathroom door behind her and locked it, and made the shhhh sign to the swan-boy again, more urgently than before. This time the swan-boy nodded in response, no doubt about it.

  The noise of feet on the stairs. John and Sam both, it seemed. The swan-boy, now half turned toward Laura, undid his tunic with one hand. The buttons were broad flat irregular discs. At first Laura thought they might be dials cut from the bough of a tree, but she then realized they were probably
sliced with a hacksaw from the antler of a deer, and someone had drilled holes in them to take the thread.

  The five front buttons slipped out of their loose buttonholes easily enough. Then the swan-boy’s hand went to his opposite shoulder, and Laura saw that the tunic was attached across his left shoulder by two more buttons joining a top seam. So that was how he could be dressed while sporting a wing that could fit in no human sleeve.

  Once unbuttoned at the clavicle, the blue tunic fell to the floor in one piece, like an orange peel if you do it just so. He wore no undershirt. The swan-boy made a quarter-turn out of modesty, perhaps, and with the flick of his wrist pulled out the slipknot of his belted trousers. They dropped to his ankles. He was naked without them, pink and raw and about as perfectly formed a young man as the Renaissance liked to paint them, if you could discount the monstrous wing.

  Laura knew nothing of the male form except from museums. It had been too long since she had seen Marco, and of course she’d never seen him in such a revelation. The Twelve Questions and Answers for Young People About Becoming Adults brochure, so favored by all the biology teachers at Driscoll, was replete with diagrams of human-shaped mannikins. But the artists had mostly fudged the details, skipping right from silhouetted growth charts of standard-issue humans, from birth to twenty-five, to close-up diagrams of male piping and female pockets. Too little attention (meaning none) was paid to the surface details and the interest that was presumed to exist between them.

  Even of the female body Laura could draw little inference. Girls in locker rooms were either bold and brassy or they dressed under towels and slips. The easygoing type made fun of the prudes, who consequently didn’t even look at themselves, much less anyone else. It was hard to draw conclusions about normal looks when you never looked. All you could examine was yourself in the glass, and who didn’t look fairly fake and even suspicious in her own bathroom mirror? The embarrassed, unconfident breasts, the untutored softness everywhere.