A Wild Winter Swan

by Gregory Maguire

  “Where did you come from?” she asked.

  “Where did you come from?” he replied.

  “Were you flying?” she said. “How could you fly with one wing?”

  “I don’t remember,” he said. “I was blown in the dark, and struck something. I thought it was a rock in the sea, but I wake up in these rooms. Did you collect me from some island in the ocean?”

  “No,” she said. “You were just here.”

  “And you were just here.” He looked around and yawned. “Who is this?” He lifted his wing and used the tip of it like a finger, to point at a picture frame on the wall behind her. “Is this your kæreste? Your boyfriend, your beau?”

  She didn’t have to turn her head to know he wasn’t pointing to the framed picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the Lord Himself indicating His own spooky luminescent heart beneath His Jesus toga. Hans meant the other picture on the adjacent wall. “That, no, that’s not my boyfriend,” she said, lowering her eyes. “That’s my—that’s Marco.”

  “Marco.”

  “Marco.”

  He waited.

  “Marco Ciardi. My brother.”

  “You have a brother.” He chewed over this, glancing at the photograph several times, and back at Laura, as if to catch the resemblance.

  “I had a brother,” she said.

  “I think I had brothers, too,” he said. “And a sister.”

  “You think?”

  “I am not certain where I am or what has happened. Or who you are, really.”

  She said, “Well, I’m Laura Maria Ciardi. This is where I live. Upper East Side Manhattan. Yorkville. For a little while longer anyway.”

  He ran his hand along the outer ridge of his feathers, smoothing them down.

  “How come you flew into my roof?” she asked.

  He made a face of incomprehension.

  She tried again, working for a more storybook tone. “How did you come to crash into my house?”

  “I cannot tell you.” At first she thought he was saying he didn’t have the language, but his expression clarified the matter: he didn’t have the thoughts. The memories. Perhaps they’d been knocked out of him by the impact of his arrival outside her window. That must be a frightening thing.

  “You were lucky not to be speared on one of the pointy tops of the Queensboro Bridge.” He looked blank. She busied herself tucking her nightgown under her calves so her legs were merely a package of cottony roses. “Was your sister a younger sister?”

  But he only shook his face and used his one hand to hide both his eyes, an ineffectual strategy. Then he thought better of it and raised his wing instead. It made a more effective screen.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Some breakfast would help.”

  She wanted to give him a telling. It would go something like:

  She sat on her bed next to him and laid the wing of the trembling boy in her lap. I know about you, she said in a soft and doctorly voice. You are one of the Wild Swans, you are the youngest brother whose sister failed to finish the shirtsleeve that would turn you back into a full boy. You must have found some way to fly away. Maybe your sister made you an artificial wing out of a stout tree branch and a thick woolen blanket. And then he turned to her with his tear-filled eyes and fell upon her shoulder, and she held him.

  But she couldn’t say any of that. It sounded nutso. They’d commit her to an asylum someplace, some brooding brick prison with locked doors on the ward, and soft bad food served with plastic utensils.

  “I wonder,” she tried, “if you are famous?”

  He didn’t understand.

  “You are in a story.”

  This seemed to make him angry. “Everyone is in a story.”

  She tried to mimic that expression of his, the raising of eyebrows and the shrug, as if to say, So what? “So tell me your story,” she suggested.

  “I don’t know how a story goes, I don’t know my own story. Tell me your story and I’ll see if I can learn how to do it.”

  Ah, but she’d never told her story, not really. Mary Bernice knew some of it, and Nonno and Nonna knew all of it, but not what it meant to her. Not how it felt. Because stories, maybe, were drafts of reality based on feelings. Oh, what a Miss Parsley thing to say. Maybe Laura had been paying attention more than she knew.

  She didn’t know where to start—with the first mollusk, the first Ciardi back in Salerno, how Nonno and Nonna emigrated a thousand years ago, arriving just in time for the Great Depression? She couldn’t really tell their stories. Even though she lived with them, her grandparents were to her as holy mysteries.

  “You had parents,” he prompted her, “unless perhaps you didn’t?”

  “I did,” she admitted. “My father was Giuseppe Victor Emmanuel Ciardi. Called Joe. He was born in Rome and raised in Little Italy, here in New York, in the house where his parents lived until about five years ago. He married my mother before the war. She was Renata di Lorenzo till she got married. She sounds like a movie star like that, but she became ordinary Mrs. Ciardi. They were just Joe and Rennie Ciardi. They had a baby boy a year or two before my father went off to boot camp. That’s Marco, that’s my brother.” She pointed over her shoulder. She still didn’t look at the photo, but she didn’t have to. She knew it by heart—every corpuscle of red blood in her body had his face stamped upon it.

  “Marco,” he said.

  “My father came home after the end of the war, hugged his growing boy, but he wanted a career in the military. He went to Europe. Austria. We were going to follow. My mother was pregnant with me. He died there, an infection, far away across the world. It was after the war, you see. The big war.”

  She had expected him to be sympathetic, or sad for her, but all he said was: “I like the sound of far away across the world.”

  “I hate that sound,” she told him. “So I was born, picture this, after my father was already dead. We lived in a flat upstairs from my grandparents near Mulberry and Hester. My mother, my brother, and me. Then, five years ago, the same month that my grandparents were moving here, something happened to my brother.”

  “What happened to Marco?”

  He got blown out to sea.

  The things she could never say to anyone ordinary, like a Maxine or a Miss Parsley or even a Mary Bernice. Laura tried to say them anyway. “He and a friend were in a small plane that left LaGuardia in a fog. They were on their way to an air show in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Their plane crashed in the Sound forty minutes later.”

  Hans repeated “crashed in the Sound” as if it were a phrase of wicked enchantment. Did he make any sense of airplanes, was he just humoring her? What did she really know of airplanes for that matter? He just shook his head. “Crashed in the Sound. But what happened to him?”

  She wiped her nose on the back of her hand. “They never found him.”

  “So he might come back one day?”

  “They found parts of the plane. Weeks later. In Connecticut.”

  “Oh.” He looked at her with an evenness both dry and horrific. “I see.”

  “My mother couldn’t stand the second loss. She went into a padlocked ward in some hospital and when she got out she couldn’t come back and live with her in-laws and me. She went back upstate where she comes from. She lives there now with her mother. Nonna di Lorenzo. Some town on the Hudson River. East Greenbush. I don’t see my mother. She doesn’t come to visit. I live with Nonno and Nonna, at least for now. But I’m moving to Montreal.”

  He seemed not to know where Montreal was, but then, she hardly did either.

  “That’s my story,” she said. “My grandparents love me but they are getting rid of me because I’m a bad influence on the other girls in school. I guess. Can you give me your story now?”

  That was something he couldn’t do. Faced with her life, Hans’s life seemed even thinner. He was like something made of paper and air. He held out his wing to one side and his arm to the other. Nonno’s bathrobe was way too big for him, and
now Laura was able to pick up a kick of Old Spice and also a hint of stale sweat seeping from the ample folds. “Here I am,” said Hans. “That’s all the story I have. I am here.”

  18

  Before that impossible story in her head—that she could console Hans somehow—could come to pass in reality, the sound of the workers rose up the stairwell. They arrived at the bottom of the attic flight and readied to clomp up to the top.

  Laura put her finger to her lips and made a look of panic at Hans. She flew to her doorway. She swiveled the door till it was only open an inch, and called out, “What do you think you’re doing now?” She sounded just like Nonna.

  “Hey there, Miss Laura,” said Sam. “We bringing up supplies to put in the box room.”

  “You can’t do that, I’m not dressed! What supplies? Who told you you could? Leave me alone.”

  They paused. Laura had been more than eager to loiter on the outskirts of their work zone earlier. “It’s the strapping and a few of the panels of Sheetrock we’re going to need to redo the master bedroom,” called John, warily, as if he didn’t see why she needed to know.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” She didn’t care what they were talking about but she had to keep them from taking another step. By now she was at the top of the staircase, flapping in her nightgown. In this ankle-length garment she’d already walked by them twice this morning, so her sudden attack of propriety wasn’t believable, even to her.

  They propped the Sheetrock on the bottom stairs and looked up at her much, she supposed, as they had looked at the baby white owl in the ceiling. Get a load a this, will ya?

  With patience probably born of many sessions with excitable lady clients, John Greenglass said, “Let me tell you what we’re up to. The leak we finally plugged in the coping beneath your windowsill? It drained down the front wall of the building. For some reason it erupted a little in your grandparents’ bedroom and yellowed their ceiling and stained the wallpaper between their windows. That new wallpaper we just installed at Thanksgiving. Then the drip somehow bypassed the parlor on the floor below that. It traveled along some hidden track in the lathing on that floor and finished up down in the front hall, where as you know it ran across a beam and emerged as a heavy drip in the hall ceiling. We’ve found and plugged the original breach outside your window. We’ve finished repairing the downstairs ceiling for today, and we’ll be back tomorrow morning to give it a couple of quick coats before that party tomorrow night. It’ll smell of paint, but your grandmother says it’s the feast of the little fishies or something, so the smell of dinner will hide it somewhat. As for your grandparents’ bedroom, they don’t want us to start repair today. After Christmas we’ll come back and do what need’s doing. Before she left Mrs. C. told us to store this strapping and wallboard and crud in the box room. Do we have clearance to pass? We’ll be quick.”

  “Leave it there and I’ll bring it up,” said Laura.

  Sam said, “Miss Laura, you can’t shift these sons of . . . They heavy as the wages of sin. Just let us by and we be outa your hair in two minutes flat. If you’re feeling shy, go in your room and we won’t bother you there.”

  “You can’t,” she said. “I’m sorry I’m such an inconvenience to you.”

  But really, she thought, I’m mostly an inconvenience to myself.

  They started up the stairs anyway, John in front. “In and out in a jif, you’ll see.”

  She fled back to her room and slammed the door shut. She had thought Hans might be terrified, but he looked relaxed and curious. He was too dazed, she realized, to be frightened. She covered her mouth with her hand and pointed at him. He covered his mouth, too, but his eyes were laughing at her. Too much drama.

  This couldn’t go on. He couldn’t live here. He hadn’t eaten much yet, he was mostly naked, and the house would be crawling with people from now till the day after Christmas, at least. She had to find some other place for him to stay.

  While she was waiting for John and Sam to finish bashing about in there, she slipped to her shallow closet. It was only a bump-out in the hall because there was no space in her room for it. She couldn’t spend the day in her nightgown. She pulled out her shirtwaist dress with the large polka dots in turquoise and iodine yellow. They floated serenely on an ivory field. It was decent enough without being flashy. Back in her room, she grabbed from her dresser a pair of black tights and the necessaries, as Mary Bernice called them: some panties, a girdle, and a bra so sensible that even a nun could sport it without becoming an occasion of sin. “Finishing up now, we’ll leave you alone,” called John when they were done.

  “We’ll be back tomorrow to give the downstairs ceiling its final coat,” added Sam. “Don’t be a stranger, stranger.”

  “Who are they?” whispered Hans as they descended deeper in the house.

  “Greenglass and Rescue,” she replied. She didn’t want to call them John and Sam. That would sound way too familiar. “I have to get dressed.”

  When she got back from her bathroom, he was standing with his back to the room, looking out her window. She crossed the floor and stood next to him. She tried to see if Van Pruyn Place was pretty or pretty ugly. Looking through new eyes wasn’t as easy as it sounded, though. Directly across the street, the brownstones took on a lurid pink tinge in the sunlight. She saw where a violinist of some orchestra or other was sitting in front of a music stand in his kitchen, vigorous in his wifebeater and gabardines, practicing to beat the band. (Ha! A violinist beating the band.) The taller buildings beyond, over on the avenue, looked as if sprayed there on the horizon; they seemed dimensionless, like a cityscape in cartoon backdrops. An airplane was coming in toward Idlewild. You could see it but not hear its roar; the city traffic gave it competition.

  What Hans might make of all this, she didn’t know. She glanced sideways at him. His eyes were open, but it wasn’t clear to her he was actually looking, or even seeing. Maybe he was just feeling the daylight on his face. How delicate and even girlish his eyelashes were. His eyebrows so fair they were almost invisible in the strong sun.

  “Laura, Laura, are you choosing today to have one of your fits of pique?” called Mary Bernice. “Get down here and help me struggle with these eels before I throw them out in the gutter and lose my job.”

  “This house is never crazy, till today,” said Laura to Hans. “I have to go help her.”

  “I’m bringing them up to your tub,” called Mary Bernice, “but they’ve been fed on oxblood or something; they’re eighty pounds each.”

  Mary Bernice had been born with a bad hip and she was pint-size to boot: not a midget, as she always said, but the very tiniest giant there ever was. She couldn’t manage to carry anything heavy up three or four flights of stairs, and Laura couldn’t imagine why she thought she was bringing them upstairs anyway.

  “Are you out of your mind?” she yelled. This time she didn’t even signal to Hans to stay still and hide—either he had gotten the point by now or it was time to see what would happen if he hadn’t. But she closed her door firmly and dashed down, two steps at a time, to where Mary Bernice was struggling with a flat wooden crate lined with plastic. She had gotten as far as the landing on the flight from the front hall. “Where do you think you’re going with these?” she asked.

  “Grab one end of this before I give myself the heart attack I’ve always deserved,” huffed the cook.

  “These don’t come upstairs,” said Laura. “What are you thinking?”

  “Don’t give me guff. Aren’t I just after returning from the shop when I hear this knock on the utility door. The fishmonger’s, and not expected till after lunch today, but their truck busts a gadget and goes out of commission, so they have to do the East Side deliveries early. What am I supposed to say? If your grandmother were here we could pack them in the salt to kill them at once, but I’ve never done it on my own and if I ruin them Mrs. C. will pack me in salt. So we have to keep them alive till she gets home and she can put them out of their mi
sery.”

  “But where are you bringing them?”

  Mary Bernice lodged a hip against a chair rail at the base of the next flight. “The laundry sink has split a seam, don’t you know, and the water gushes out fast as you can fill it. Would go all over the laundry floor if you let it. I can’t have this mess of eels dying in the kitchen sink, not when I’ve forty-five chores to do in the next hour. The only place is your tub, Laura.”

  “You’re not putting filthy fresh eels in my tub!”

  “You think I dare put it in your grandmother’s lavatory? You’ve already had your bath, I heard the water run for an hour. It’s just till your nonna comes back from the beauty station. These eels won’t bother anyone. They can’t get out.”

  “Why can’t she cook with tinned eels like everyone else?”

  “A certain Mr. Corm Kennedy, do I need to spell it out for you again? She wants everything the most sumptuous that money can buy. Every fresh ingredient, no expense spared. Watch the corner of that banister, you don’t want to dump these fresh gals out all over the carpet. Your folks would have to put the house on the market.”

  The more Laura protested, the longer it would take. She gritted her teeth and together they heaved the box to the top floor. Don’t come out, Hans, thought Laura, don’t come out. You’ll send Mary Bernice into conniption fits.

  They balanced the wooden crate on the edge of the clawfoot. Mary Bernice turned on the taps. “Rosa Mendoza’s been avoiding her scouring duties up here, I see,” said Mary Bernice, looking at the state of the tub. “I’ll have a word with her before she gets sacked. Disgraceful. But it won’t hurt the eels none. In you go, ladies.” The water having reached a good eight inches, Mary Bernice cracked open one end of the crate with the screwdriver she kept in the kitchen for knocking sense into sticky jar lids. She and Laura tilted the box. It said american ills in hand-scrawled block letters on the side. Three eels and a slush of melting packing ice slipped out. Released, the eels writhed like octopus tentacles, like live black stockings, slipping in and out and around one another with a sensuous, desperate, evil intensity. It was hard to settle each one as single; they were like the snakes on Medusa’s head. Two of them a foot long, and one a foot and a half, maybe. The smell was Baltic.