A Wild Winter Swan

by Gregory Maguire

  “You’ve got yourself dolled up for helping in the kitchen,” said Mary Bernice drily, pausing for breath with her hand on the towel rack. “You can bloody well go change into some clamdiggers and an old jersey, you can, for we have work to do.”

  “This dress has a stain on the sash so it’s not an outdoor dress anymore,” said Laura. “I’ll be down in a little while.”

  Garibaldi was in the hall, sniffing first at Laura’s door and then stalking the perimeter of the bathroom. “The old devil himself,” said Mary Bernice fondly. “No, m’dear, you’re not getting your claws into these eels, or else your granny will get her claws into me, and then where would we be?” She closed the door to Laura’s bathroom firmly and shooed the cat ahead of her down the stairs. “This may be a school holiday but it’s no picnic,” said the cook. “Slide your feet into some flats and hurry down. We have to scrub the mushrooms to get ready for all them unhealthy spices and vinegar she drowns them in, and then there’s leeks that want rinsing, and the plum tomatoes, and don’t get me started.”

  When Mary Bernice had traipsed down the stairs, leaving the box by the tub for hauling the eels back down to the kitchen when called for, Laura ducked into her bedroom. “I’m going to go get your clothes into the dryer and we’ll have you decent in no time,” she told Hans. He was prowling around her room, opening her dresser drawers. He must be bored. “We’ll figure it out,” she said. “Miss Parsley says we all have to rescue ourselves. Just be quiet and stay here, and eat something. Please? I’ll be back as soon as I can. Here’s a couple of Teen magazines you can look at. On my dresser, see? And my old reader from English class, which I forgot to give back. It has some pretty good stories in it.” It didn’t really, but she had nothing much else to offer. He raised a wing without turning around, as if signaling that he heard her. She guessed he must be bored. She couldn’t blame him.

  She closed the door once more and launched herself downstairs, two steps at a time, the way she did in Driscoll if she was running late for a class. Flashing through the front hall, she saw the lads going out the door. “See you later, alligator,” said Sam.

  “Wait?” she asked, and Sam waited in the open doorway, all the cold of a New York December flooding in around him, crisp, coniferous, and diesel. “The owl,” she said. “The baby.”

  “She wants out,” he said. “Who don’t?”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “She’s starting to bash her wings against the overturned milk crate I got her in. She’s about to hurt herself.”

  “Why don’t you let her fly around your place?”

  “Would, but I worry about Mittens.”

  “Who?”

  “My mama’s pet snake. Now, when I can, I’ll let Fluster go. I’ll take her to Central Park at nighttime, maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow night. She find her mama, or some juicy mouse out for a midnight stroll, I dunno. But I’m not doing Fluster any good anymore by keeping her. Don’t want her to hex me. I got enough hex already.” He lifted his chin. “You want to come with me when I let her go?”

  “They’d never let me do that,” she said.

  “She’s in her box, you in yours,” replied Sam. “Same thing. See you tomorrow.”

  “Little chinwag with the locals,” observed Mary Bernice when she had clattered down to the kitchen. “Your grandmother would have some opinions about that.”

  “I’m a local, too, you know. I live here. For now.”

  “So do these vegetables until they get served up tomorrow night. Can you start by rinsing the lot of them? Then lay them on a towel on the drainboard.”

  “I have to move over the wash first.” She scurried into the laundry room, an airless chamber fitted out with venting for the exhaust. She lifted the washing machine lid and pulled out hanks of rotted material, more like seaweed than items of clothing. The fabric came apart in her hands, one gloppy fistful after another. “Crap,” she muttered, such an unholy word for the Advent season, but she had run out of holy words several days ago. She clawed out the washer and dumped the mess in one of Mary Bernice’s aprons. This she rolled up like a parcel destined for the laundry, tying it with the apron strings, and she bundled it out the back door into a trash can. She’d have to make a new plan. Hans couldn’t spend the rest of his life in Nonno’s bathrobe.

  She was halfway through the vegetables, lost in her own thoughts, while Mary Bernice cleaned the shrimp with a paring knife and hummed “Silent Night” so slowly it sounded like a dirge, when they heard Nonna’s foot on the stairs. She came down the flight of steps slowly, cautiously. “Eccola, la nuova donna,” she said when she finally appeared in the doorway.

  “Holy Mother of God,” said Mary Bernice. Laura looked up.

  Nonna stood with her arms outstretched. “Very in fashion?” she said brightly, nervously. “Today’s beauty?”

  She meant her hair. Some sorceress had waved a wand and replaced Nonna’s grey heap of pompadour with a shiny black military helmet. The hairdo was stoic and cruel on her head, and looked hard as boiled candy. It made Nonna’s face more lined than ever. “It isn’t too much, do you think?”

  “Any more and you’d need the services of an undertaker,” muttered Mary Bernice. “I mean that in a mostly pleasant way.”

  “It’s—it’s—whatever were you thinking of?” asked Laura, buying time.

  “Tell me you like it, that’s what I came for,” snapped Nonna.

  “I think it’ll scare the owls back into the ceiling,” said Mary Bernice. “And that’s a good thing.”

  “I love it,” said Laura insincerely. “Especially how it seems so stiff and unnatural.”

  “It’s the latest style, that’s what Miss Agnes tells me. A sort of understated Jackie Kennedy without the flip. It wants a pillbox to complete it but I would look like a walking bottle of aspirin if I put a little cloth cap on top of my head.”

  “Really,” said Laura. “It’s not so bad. We’re just surprised.”

  “Startled,” said Mary Bernice, “into silent rapture, no less.”

  “Not quite silent enough,” said Nonna. Then she reached to her forehead and pulled off her hair. Laura let out a soft scream. “It’s a wig, carissima.” But underneath the wig Nonna’s hair had been shorn to make her look like a general from the armed forces, or a mother superior whose wimple had blown off in a gale. “I’m going to put this hairpiece on your dresser, Mary Bernice, if you don’t mind. And we’ll keep Garibaldi out of your room lest he get ideas.”

  “Cozying up to a pelt,” whispered Mary Bernice to Laura as Nonna headed into the half-size bedroom. “Being a house cat, Garibaldi might take that wig for a kind of Times Square floozy, I bet. A pussycat from outer space.”

  “Mary Bernice!” Laura whispered back.

  “What can I tell you, he’s an Italian cat.”

  Nonna returned. Her marine crew cut glistened in the overhead light, and you could see liver spots on her very scalp. “It’ll grow out,” she said grimly.

  So she knew.

  She began mixing up the dough for the pasta while Mary Bernice finished deveining the shrimp and Laura diced carrots. “We won’t even begin on the spumoni until we’re done with onions and garlic and anything to do with fish, and we’ve hosed the kitchen down,” announced Nonna. “Ice cream picks up neighbor flavor.”

  They worked companionably enough in silence. With short hair, Nonna resembled her husband a lot more than Laura might have guessed. Her hips might be stiff and her breath short when it came to stairs, but her wrists and fingers had lost none of their snap. She had the impasto per pasta done up in moments and set aside to rest. “Oh, and the eels arrived, can you credit it?” reported Mary Bernice.

  “That’s a blessing. We can get them salted and work the slime off. Where did you park them?”

  “Laura’s bathtub.”

  Nonna raised her eyebrows, which were now bushier than her hairline.

  “What else was I to do, I ask you, with the laundry sink
sprung a leak the Titanic could admire?”

  “I can’t possibly manage those stairs and Nonno’s contractors have left for the day, so they’re no help. You’ll have to go fetch them down.”

  “I’ll get them,” said Laura hastily.

  “You can manage them wriggly nasties?” asked the cook. “Bring some towels or a couple of oven mitts so you don’t have to touch them. They’d raise the flesh on a six-day corpse, they would.”

  “Grab them at the neck, because they can bite, like snakes,” said Nonna.

  “That’s all they are, neck,” said Mary Bernice.

  Laura did as she was told, hustling upstairs in her silly rustling skirts—Mary Bernice was right, what was she thinking, on a day of chores like this?—and trying to figure out how to clothe Hans while she was at it. Up three flights from the kitchen to the grandparents’ floor, and then the steep final stairs to the top floor. She was huffing by the time she arrived.

  The boost of energy needed to mount the steps must have broken a logjam in her brain. Of course. There were two suitcases of clothes in the crawl space behind the chimney. Marco’s clothes. Weeping his head off, Nonno had carried them upstairs himself, five years ago, and slotted them into the shadowy aperture. Unwilling to throw them out, unwilling to give them away, unwilling to look at them ever again. His darling grandson.

  “I have a plan,” said Laura in a carrying whisper. She could hear it in the echoey hallway, as this upper floor was bare of carpets, except for the pale dingy flop rug next to the bathtub.

  Her door was open, and so was the bathroom door, and Hans was standing there. She could feel it almost before she turned the corner to see it. The room was spattered with blood. The swan-boy had bitten through the neck of one of the shorter eels. He was pulling strips of flesh from the slimy black skin. Blood dripped from his mouth, his hands, back into the tub—making it a blood bath, literally.

  19

  She felt she was seeing—an image too deep to emerge in any tell—the forearms of her brother swimming for Old Saybrook, where the wreck of the small plane had washed up. Reaching, blooded, out to claw at the rocky shore. Though Hans had only one forearm, of course, unlike Marco.

  She retched a dollop of breakfast into her hand, and managed to make it the three feet to the toilet bowl before her gorge geysered up again. She used her finger to clear out the scum of cereal from behind her teeth, and wiped the back of her hand on her nose, and her eyes. She flushed the toilet, she stood and rinsed her hands and her mouth, all the while keeping her eyes directly in front of her—no mirror, no sidelong glance. Her heart seemed to be a hammering on metal, rough menace in her ears.

  “What are you doing?” she asked, when she could manage words.

  “Hungry,” he said. “Eating.”

  “Pick up those other two and put them in the box,” she ordered him, and he did, with his bare hand. She had to slap the lid on to keep the eels from rising up like serpents. “I will have your clothes later today,” she continued in a trembling voice. “I will get them. I have work to do now. I know this is hard. We have to figure it out together.”

  When have I ever figured anything out at all, let alone together with someone, she asked herself, and would have slammed the bathroom door behind her as she left, except her arms were full of eels.

  20

  The rest of the morning spun by like the world seen from a horse on the Central Park carousel—the same things over and over, the replay that just wouldn’t settle down. The sink, the oven, the pantry, the table. Back and forth. The washing up, the rinsing the sink, the boiling of water, the smell of eels growing stronger. They were salted now, gently dying in an old white enamel laundry tub of Nonna’s that dated back to the Fall of Rome. Their death reek reminded Laura of the smell that the swan-boy had blown in with. She kept thinking that Hans might come downstairs and scare the hell out of Nonna and Mary Bernice, and then at least it would be a family problem, not just hers. Mary Bernice would get the hiccups and pass out. But Nonna would roll up her sleeves and grab the rolling pin she’d used on the pasta dough. Laura almost wished Hans would show up so she could watch what happened. But of course he didn’t.

  And he wasn’t a foe, he wasn’t a threat. He hadn’t come to her on purpose. He had no—what was the word the school counselor always used—he had no agenda. He just needed to get to wherever he was going without causing World War III around here.

  Decant the capers and smush them with the blade of the cleaver. Chop up the fresh thyme and toss it in simmering tomatoes and onions. Go upstairs and bring down the napkins we’ll use tomorrow night. No, not the blue ones, go back—the red ones. No, the other red ones, these are the stained everyday ones. I’ll do it myself. Yes, these ones. Put them in the washing machine and set it on low. Single rinse, cold wash—we’re not made of money. Will ye be wantin’ the bloody silver polished, Mrs. C.? (Mary Bernice got more and more Oirish the more overworked she felt.)

  They paused for lunch, some improvised bruschetta made with the heel of a loaf of Bavarian rye and the remains of three poppyseed bagels. Washed down with a glass of beer for Nonna and another one for Mary Bernice, and a glass of milk for Laura.

  Nonna sent Laura upstairs to the closet in the master bedroom to see if the better tablecloth was hanging there alongside the other dry cleaning, because the tablecloth didn’t seem to be in the dining room sideboard where it lived usually. Laura took advantage of the mission and hurried up one flight more to her own floor. Peeking in the door of the bathroom, she saw the head and skin and mess, all that was left of the eviscerated eel. Hans had made some effort to wrap it in a striped beach towel. He’d wiped his hands—his hand—on it—a bloody handprint—and then apparently he’d figured out how to work the taps enough to rinse his hand. A rim of dried watery blood spots circled the bowl halfway up.

  She next peered into her bedroom. Hans was asleep on his back, with Nonno’s bathrobe open almost to his waist. He sure wasn’t Italian; his chest was more marble than mossy. Rock-ribbed but downright doeskin. His arm was flung over his eyes and forehead, and his wing trailed like something broken off the side of the bed. She almost stepped on it as she came closer to make sure he was still breathing. He was.

  Of course he was in a coma of exhaustion. How far had he come, she couldn’t say. It wasn’t just distance, across the heaving cold Atlantic, from some country where they spoke their native tongue in that curt, aggressive gargle. He’d come also, maybe, across time. For the story of the Wild Swans was one of the old ones. Even the book where Laura had found it was distinguished by a smell of mildew. Its stories were printed on yellowing pages in two close columns of very small print. Etchings showed the figures in the tales being old-fashioned. Wearing loose peasant clothes, like the ones Hans had arrived in. No wonder they fell apart in the wash. Maybe they were a hundred years old.

  Where was he going that he hadn’t yet gotten to? Her life was only a stopping point for him, she was sure.

  She found the missing tablecloth and brought it downstairs, flapping in its transparent plastic envelope. Back to work they got.

  About four o’clock they paused. The eels had given up their eel-ghosts and stopped wriggling in their tub; Garibaldi had wanted to get at them so badly that Mary Bernice had had to lock him in the laundry. Now the cook made herself a cup of tea, and a cup of hot chocolate for Laura. For Mrs. C. she arranged to reheat some coffee and add a small, restorative glass of Galliano on the side. The snow had begun again, but in an insincere and even insulting way; it spat against the kitchen windows. The falling dark seemed devoid of joy. Not even the tinny radio offering a program of holiday carols could lift their spirits, and Nonna reached over and turned it off.

  “How long have you been doing this supper, Nonna?” asked Laura. “Did your parents put on such a feast back in the old country?”

  “Ah, the old country.” Nonna slipped off her shoes and maneuvered her feet up on the seat of the extra chair. The overhead kitche
n light took on a laboratory intensity, thanks to the undrawn shades and the dark outside the window-glass. In her shorn state Nonna resembled a prison matron. “Back in those broke-tooth days, who had the means to offer even one fish on Christmas Eve? Not us, cara mia. But for weeks we saved all our bread crumbs in a clay pot, so we could scatter the tablecloth with them. Waiting until people were walking to church at midnight past our house, my mama would flap the tablecloth out the window in the moonlight, making the crumbs sparkle like this damn snow, to prove we had so much to serve we couldn’t even finish the crumbs. My papa would steal used wine bottles from the back of the tavern all through Advent, so he could put empty wine bottles out on the doorstep on Christmas Eve. What a table we must have set, said the wine bottles. No no no my dear, I never heard of such a feast where I come from in Italy. I don’t know if anyone does such a thing there. Feast of seven fishes, oh, maybe an American gesture of lotsa-lotsa, you know what I mean? Abbondanza. Plenty. I’m tired, the English, it gives out. We had no new clothes, too little food, we didn’t even have paper, when we wanted to send letters to your great-uncle in jail, we wrote them on oak leaves.”

  “Why is he in jail?” asked Laura.

  “He is not still there, you silly child. He died in the early 1930s. He was my brother, do you get this? I saw him before we left Italy in June of 1929. I brought him a lemon and two spoons of honey in a little porcelain cheese dish. He was a thief, of course. Like anyone poor enough, why else would they steal? What else can you do when you need to eat and no one will pay you to pick fruit or olives? You pick for yourself and you eat.”