A Wild Winter Swan

by Gregory Maguire

  “So there would have been room for Nonna di Lorenzo,” said Nonno to Laura, with an overeager, stagey smile.

  “There is room for everyone,” intoned Isabella Ciardi, making her way down the stairs. Oh, even with the big mistake of the fake hair, she looked glamorous, she could be Dean Martin’s mother or someone. She stopped halfway down the stairs and made a quarter-turn, as if to show off her legs and her outfit. She sported a skirt and a matching waist-length jacket in electric oranges and greens. The whole shebang was layered with clear beads, so she looked like a heap of garden vegetables after an ice storm. A heap of luxury vegetables, probably from Ciardi’s Fine Foods and Delicacies. “Geneva, è passato troppo tempo, perché mi fai soffrire?”

  “Cara!” cried the woman who wasn’t the fat Mrs. Polumbo. Indeed, Zia Geneva was a paper clip twisted open to fullest extension. Weighed down by a huge pink leather pocketbook, she fell upon her sister’s neck with cries of delight, as if she had swum all the way from Salerno to Staten Island and then caught the ferry and the uptown bus to get here in time.

  The Polumbos smiled and handed over a box of ribbon candy and a bottle of Asti Spumante. Mrs. Polumbo looked like a lunch lady, and Mr. Polumbo a janitor, which turned out to be pretty close to the truth, except they worked for a parish rectory downtown, not a school.

  Laura had hung back as far as she could, but she had to submit to an ear-piercing hello and a crushing hug from Zia Geneva, who was strong for such a skinny bug. Then Laura was presented to Mr. Corm Kennedy. He had been looming behind everyone else, probably because as a newcomer his level of zest wasn’t noisy enough, and anyway he wasn’t Italian.

  “Hey there, dollie,” he said to Laura, and made a clicking sound in the back of his mouth and wrinkled up the side of his mouth, an aural version of a wink. Laura hated him at once. Still, she tried to keep her first wave of revulsion in check. He was stuck with the most famous name in the world right now, and he had none of the Kennedy attributes. He was taller than anyone else in the front hall, so what. And he was almost entirely without any hair—Nonna’s wig would look better on him than on her. He had little half-glasses like Benjamin Franklin or someone, but he could never have played football at that famous compound in Hyannisport. Laura bet he had never run for a city bus. His middle was squishy, and his tobacco-colored vest could hardly button across his stomach. If he really had a lot of money it must be a sort of consolation prize by God. This was Zia Geneva’s great late-life catch? Laura couldn’t see it. Available cash must be a huge part of the attraction.

  “We’ll have a glass of something cheery in the parlor, shall we, while Mary Bernice lays the table?” suggested Nonna. “Ovid, would you show the guests upstairs?”

  “Isabella, what a gorgeous place on such a tight little tuck-away street. Did you do it all up yourself? I smell a lick of fresh paint—I hope not for us. We don’t stand on ceremony, do we, Corm?”

  “Not unless the ceremony involves a splash of bourbon,” said Mr. Corm Kennedy. Laura caught the Polumbos giving each other a look.

  “How’d you find a brownstone street here? Most of this neighborhood is brick,” said Zia Geneva. “Lucky you. It looks so Brooklyn.”

  “Maybe wrong materials get delivered wrong address,” said Nonno. “Driver he probably m—”

  Nonna coughed to keep him from saying mick.

  “Mobster,” said Nonno. “Mobster from Palermo.”

  “It’s a beaut,” said Mr. Corm Kennedy. “Three floors?”

  “Basement plus four,” said Nonno. “Last owner put illegal top floor, step back from street. Not us. We keep laws right and good.”

  “Do you need help bringing up the food?” Laura asked Mary Bernice.

  “Most of it is plated and sitting in a nice oven,” replied the cook. “And I’ve got those fancy domes your grandfather borrowed from the store, the ones that keep food warm on the table. You go up there with your folks, now, and make pretty, like a good girl.”

  “I haven’t qualified for ‘good girl’ since I was seven,” said Laura, but Mary Bernice waved her off.

  “Mary Bernice,” called Nonna over her shoulder, “if it is all laid out and you have nothing better to do, why don’t you run the extra poinsettia around the block to old Mrs. Steenhauser? She’s a widow neighbor, lives behind us,” she explained to the guests, “and we try to look in from time to time.” She simpered like the Spirit of Extra Niceness.

  “Of course I have nothing better to do,” muttered Mary Bernice, but this was a good time for her to take her comments back to the kitchen and deliver them to Garibaldi, so she did.

  “We’ll want to see the whole house,” Zia Geneva was gushing at the top of the first flight. “Is that your office in there? You’ve done so well, Ovid. Business must be booming to support a fancy home like this. Nothing like Hester Street. Not even Bensonhurst, where I was with dear Paolo. But you don’t mind all the Germans? It’s Germantown around here,” she added to Mr. Corm Kennedy.

  “Parlor beyond, front of house, come, come,” said Nonno theatrically. They moved into the parlor.

  “Isn’t it grand,” said Mr. Corm Kennedy, rather flatly, waiting for his drink.

  “We got it for song,” said Nonno, “auction by city for tax cheat or something.”

  Nonna frowned at her husband over her sister’s shoulder; that wasn’t the script they were supposed to be following. She touched her sister’s elbow. “You are downright chic, Geneva, love suits you; you are so elegant!”

  “Peww peww, stai scherzando, sembro una merda.”

  “Hey, no secret sister talk, you promised,” said her beau, loomingly.

  “And what you do, sir?” Mr. Polumbo said to Mr. Corm Kennedy. Everyone paused because this was probably rude to ask out loud. Kennedys didn’t do things, they just had things.

  But Mr. Corm Kennedy didn’t seem to mind the question. He threw back a healthy swallow of whatever Nonno had given him and he said, “Mostly I just make money. Investments out in the Texas area.”

  “Oil?” asked Mrs. Polumbo, the first thing she’d said so far.

  “In a manner of speaking. Corn oil. How’d you find this place, Ovid?” asked Mr. Corm Kennedy, taking in the flocked wallpaper. The crucifix. The fringed lampshades. The nineteenth-century stamped tin Roman medallions, probably notices of special intentions for prayer, hung on the wall above the Zenith television packed into its console. The famous reproduction of David doing his sex-maniac thing on the corner table. The oil painting of Nonno, Nonna, and their teenage son Giuseppe hanging over the mantel, looking like a commercial advertisement for an old-world family-style tomato sauce recipe.

  “That hair,” Geneva was saying to Isabella. “You’ve always been so brave, Bella. I wouldn’t have the strength of heart to walk into Grand Central Station looking so Mussolini about it. How I admire you.”

  “Jenny,” said Nonna, “I do it for you, to make you feel better about yourself.” But this wasn’t mean, this was sisters joking, and they were both downing their sparkling whatever. Doughty Mrs. Polumbo held her drink, untasted, in her hands and tried not to stare straight at David’s signal attribute, which was at her precise eye level three feet away and seemed to be the only thing paying attention to her.

  “But she’s beautiful, too,” Zia Geneva was saying, about Laura. “A credit to us Bentivengos. Mama and Papa, come sarebbero venuti se potessero vederla! Stunning. A comfort to you in your old age, you nonna!”

  “Not that old, Jenny,” said Nonna.

  “Older than me. I don’t suppose she’s smart? But doesn’t matter, never matter, with beauty like that. Such happiness, you deserve it all, Bella, after such sorrow, my darling. At least you got your Ovid still, after all these years, and what do you think of my very own Kennedy, Bella? Tell me true while they’re deep in tales of the stock exchange.”

  “He looks like a standing lamp,” said Nonna. “Very tall.”

  “Tall enough for what matters, Bella.”


  “Basta, Jenny.”

  “I mean enough to change the lightbulb in the pantry!”

  “Mr. Corm Kennedy,” said Nonno, “you come by Ciardi’s while you in city, I fix you up good with Parma ham and best imported pesto you ever meet.”

  “Already been by,” said the guest. His hosts looked stunned. Uh-oh, thought Laura. “I dropped by today to introduce myself and have a look around.”

  “Nobody introduce nobody to me?” said Nonno with a strained smile.

  “Thought I’d pick up a house gift for you as a kind of joke,” said Mr. Corm Kennedy, “but I couldn’t find anything I thought you’d like. Awfully busy store today, though. Didn’t want to interrupt anyone at the cash registers. Ca-ching.” He winked at Laura. “Ca-ching is Italian for moola.”

  “We brought something else,” said Geneva. “I almost forgot. Where’s my purse?” She had dropped the huge thing by the side of the sofa, and now she scrabbled at the clasp and withdrew a flat parcel wrapped in red and green paper. Great, thought Laura. Another Peter, Paul and Mary. But it wasn’t.

  It was two phonograph albums wrapped in the same paper. One was a recording of Rossini’s La Cenerentola, which Laura guessed Nonno might already have. “Goodness Triumphant” it said under the title as the album was passed around so everyone could admire it. “Jenny tells me you like the old-fogey stuff,” said Mr. Corm Kennedy, “so this seemed as good as any of them. You know it?”

  “I heard of it,” said Nonno stiffly.

  “Then for balance, this other one. Less stodgy, you know?”

  It was called The Electrifying Aretha Franklin. “Now that baby doll can sing,” said Mr. Corm Kennedy. “Put this on at night to get comfy, if you know what I mean. ‘You Made Me Love You.’ Does the trick. Gotta hear it. You have a phonograph player?”

  “Now?” said Nonno. “You mean now?”

  “We have a portable hi-fi,” said Nonna quickly. “It’s upstairs. Laura, can you go get it? Remember to unplug it first and latch the lid. Don’t let the cord drag or you might trip. And put La Sonnambula back in its paper sleeve? Can you manage?”

  “I’m not an idiot,” said Laura, glad for the chance to escape the nightmare of grown-up society.

  She closed the parlor door after she passed through. Downstairs, she heard the front door slam. Mary Bernice heading out in the storm with the poor unwanted poinsettia. She was probably going to walk to the river and toss it overboard. The house was redolent of fish; it was a veritable harborside of smells. Mary Bernice must have finished setting up already but had been too annoyed to come upstairs to announce it yet. She was cooling off with an outdoor chore. Laura knew how she felt.

  The record player in her grandparents’ bedroom wasn’t too heavy to carry, but Laura watched her step coming back downstairs anyway. The noise in the parlor was picking up. Maybe the prickliness was wearing off. “Here you go,” said Laura.

  Mr. Corm Kennedy took it upon himself to set up Nonno’s precious hi-fi on the table with the statue of David, whose gaze now appeared to be trying to read the record label as it spun. A sultry, glazed accompaniment of strings and some relaxed woodwind or saxophone turned the Ciardi parlor into a kind of cocktail lounge. Mrs. Polumbo visibly stiffened and Mr. Polumbo patted her hand. “Voodoo music,” said Mrs. Polumbo, sotto voce.

  “I didn’t want to do it, I didn’t want to do it,” sang Miss Aretha Franklin.

  “Another drink,” said Nonno, getting into the spirit of things.

  “Now you’re talking,” said Mr. Corm Kennedy, and then to Laura, “Crank that thing up, will you, kitten?”

  “I can’t think how you afford such a home,” said Zia Geneva. “Will you show me everything, Bella? Corm has the pokiest little penthouse on Louisburg Square, not enough room to skin a cat. Is that the phrase? Though there’s the Vineyard of course.”

  “Mr. Corm Kennedy have vineyard?” asked Nonno. “Sangiovese grape perhaps, like Chianti?”

  Something ticked, some noise from downstairs got through the commotion of the popular music. “Would you go downstairs and see how Mary Bernice is getting on?” asked Nonna softly to Laura. “We don’t want to drink too much on an empty stomach, and the Ritz crackers and cream cheese are vanishing.” Too soon for Mary Bernice to be back, thought Laura, unless she just junked the plant in the gutter somewhere.

  Laura’s stomach twisted in a different way, a frightened way. She left the parlor and closed the door. She half wished she had a key so she could lock them all in.

  She was halfway down the stairs when she heard the clatter of food domes hitting the carpet, the breaking of china. She knew what she would see, she had always known it, somehow. The sliding dining room doors, stuck in their open position, had nothing to hide. Hans was squatting on the table, his swung wing knocking over wineglasses and flowers, his hand rushing fistful after fistful of eels, brandade, lobster tail, the rest of it to his mouth. He drank a third of the tureen of bisque and threw the tureen to the floor when he couldn’t get to the liquid pooled behind the broad lip. “Stop,” said Laura, “stop, stop,” but it was already too late, much too late. Much too late for anything.

  She grabbed the carving knife from its usual place on the sideboard. Hans paused, sickened, dazed with animal surfeit, and turned his left shoulder and extended his wing, a gesture that said, Slice it off, slice here.

  “Get upstairs before I kill you,” she said.

  His expression was inscrutable, but then it had always been so, hadn’t it? She advanced, and he made an inhuman sound, low in his throat, but it was only the sort of grief that can never fully dislodge itself from the human breast—from any breast, maybe. He disappeared up the back stairs.

  27

  Nonna was leading the party down the front staircase. “Careful there, Cormac,” sang out Zia Geneva. “You’ll take a tumble, you’ll spend Christmas Eve in Mount Sinai.”

  “It all smells swell,” said Mr. Corm Kennedy. “Been looking forward to this.”

  “A tradition we cherish,” said Nonno, though the Ciardis had only occasionally worked themselves up to a whole feast of the seven fishes—they usually got through about four recipes and were too exhausted to keep going.

  Nonna turned at the bottom step and saw Laura in the door of the dining room. Beyond, Nonna caught a glimpse of the mayhem, the snapshot edge of spatter and fracture, and she turned on her heel and clapped her hands. “Change of plans,” she said briskly. “Panetta’s.”

  “Bella?” asked Nonno.

  “Panetta’s,” she said. “They’ll be able to squeeze six of us in. Non discutere con me ora, Vito. Dopo. Andiamo.”

  “There seven of us,” said Nonno, circling his finger.

  “Laura is under the weather, she’s staying home,” said Nonna. With her arms folded across her lacquered bosom, she stood like a crossing guard in the middle of the hall, forcing the guests to their coats and hats on the rack by the front door.

  “But it smells like heaven,” said Zia Geneva in a whine. “You tease us, Bella!”

  “One of the fish turns out to be bad. You never know with fish. Nonno, hurry ahead and get a table.”

  “At such hour on Christmas Eve?” Nonno couldn’t move his thinking as fast as his wife.

  “You’ll get the table,” replied Nonna. “Please. You’re Signore Ovid Ciardi. That means something in this city.”

  He shrugged himself into his coat and plopped his fedora on his head and scurried out. “Snow on snow, watch your stepfoots,” he called behind him.

  “What the devil?” asked Mary Bernice, coming back from her chore. She was hiking up the stoop to the front door instead of using the kitchen entrance, for once, so she could interrogate the departing guests. “Don’t tell me. Not enough salt in the béarnaise?”

  “See to it, Mary Bernice,” said Nonna. “All of it. Laura will help.”

  “Well, I do love a sudden change of plans, makes me feel young,” Zia Geneva was trilling, sounding like some old bat escaped
from a nursing home. Mary Bernice shut the front door behind them.

  “For the love of Christ, are you going to tell me what the hell is going on?” she asked Laura. They retreated down the hall to the dining room. Laura swept a hand out, as if saying, Here’s my science project. Mary Bernice shrieked. Laura gave her a sideways hug, fierce though somewhat false. “What happened?” asked Mary Bernice, sobbing.

  “Garibaldi?” said Laura, tentatively.

  “But I locked him in my room! Where is he now?”

  “He must have got out. I just put him back there.”

  The damage wasn’t as bad as it had first looked. Two broken soup bowls and one plate, and three cracked wineglasses. Most of the food was spilled on the tablecloth, so when they rolled up the white linen and bundled it away, the wreckage was manageable. Mary Bernice kept blowing her nose and wiping her eyes on the napkins Laura had ironed. “They’ll come back for dessert,” said Mary Bernice. “Get the Hoover.”

  Before she turned on the appliance, though, Mary Bernice pivoted to face Laura closely. “No cat ever did this much damage unless it was a cougar,” she said. “Something else is in this house, Laura. And I don’t like it one bit. It’s been keeping out of sight but not very well, and you’d best do something about it before your grandparents have a double-action stroke. My grandmother had the evil eye and I didn’t inherit more than an evil blink, but every now and then it comes over me. Listen to me: Something isn’t right here.”

  “I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about,” said Laura, and in a certain way she was telling the truth. She still didn’t have any idea what was going on, or why. But she agreed that it had to stop.

  You weren’t supposed to be afraid of a miracle, were you? Maybe the young virgin Mary had been terrified. Maybe she hadn’t wanted the job. Whoever could know how to handle such mystery. But Laura was afraid to go upstairs.

  She sat on the bottom step, waiting for her grandparents to come home. The maître d’ must have found a table for Signore Ciardi. Of course he had. Laura hoped the lights were turned down very low. Panetta’s was no place to take guests in order to impress them. It was standard fare for a certain nondiscriminating clientele, with red-checkered tablecloths pocked with holes in the fabric, and candles stuck in bulbous green glass bottles wrapped in rattan. Every dish arrived with the same red sauce, probably even the ice cream. According to Nonna, it must come out of a spigot direct from Little Italy.