“Who care what he think?” said Nonno. “Cash is cash.”
“He thinks he can buy his way into our family!” said Nonna.
“Isn’t that what you wanted?” asked Laura.
“Yes, yes, you idiot child. So we not ruined on Christmas morning, thank you Gesù and Mary and the angel on the stable. But no thanks to you, Laura. You act so proper but you go and try and ruin us. And all because we have to send you to Montreal.”
“So much anger,” Nonno said sadly. “You have to be addled now, Laura, and kill anger inside you. It bad, you kill it or it kill you.”
“Yes, Nonno,” said Laura, sensing that l’agitazione was dying down.
The first time the girl had thought in Italian, as far as she could remember. Yes? Maybe.
“Why you so angry?” he asked her. “You no have father, you no have mother, your brother he die. But you have us who love you so much, too much. We not enough for you? No, we not enough for you! But we not nothing.”
“You’re not nothing,” Laura agreed. “But if all you have left is me, how can you send me to Montreal?”
“They won’t let you back in that school,” said Nonna. She downed a tablet of something. “We’ve been over this, Laura. We don’t want you in public school where bad things happen to girls like you. And the Catholic schools, they require better grades than the grades you get. Driscoll School was working just about good enough, and then you ruin it, the way you ruin our dinner party last night. Montreal is the only place we know of. It comes recommended by Monsignor.”
“I’ve told you a hundred times, it was an accident,” said Laura. “I didn’t mean to break Maxine Sugargarten’s nose. Anyway she’s getting a nose job out of it, so she is kind of grateful.”
“The headmaster, he tells me that they worry you have no friends, that you don’t know how to make friends. You are, what is the word, isolated and disapproving. Superior.”
“If no one likes me because I’m so stupid, how can I be superior? How can I like them?” asked Laura, and her eyes, her stupid eyes, filled with stupid tears.
“So this Maxine liking you now because you break her nose?” asked Nonno.
“Yeah well, she likes the idea of her new nose.”
Nonna said, “You break my heart, Laura, you really do. Tell you what. Christmas mercy from mean old Nonna. You get one more chance—you write to Mr. G. at Driscoll School and you tell him you have learned your lesson and you want another chance. You realize all this anger, it is too much. You do realize this? It can’t hurt, though I doubt it can help. Mr. G. thinks that Driscoll is not a good place for you. But I will mail a letter from you, and if he changes his mind, we will agree to reconsider Montreal. Ovid, you good with this?”
“I am in,” he said. “Hope is strong but you have to work for hope. Now we get up please on our feet, and go to Mass and pray for a Christmas miracle, and you write a good letter and Mr. G. say yes. We already miss the ten a.m.”
“We missed the High Mass?” shrieked Nonna. “Curses upon the Ciardi house. Mrs. Pill is in the country and I was supposed to do the coffees.”
“Maybe some Christmas miracle happen, somebody else make coffee,” said Nonno.
“Dammi la forza. Oh well, hurry up. If we make the eleven we’ll pick up some bagels on the way home. Did I say, Zia Geneva and Mr. Corm Kennedy are coming back for dinner tonight.”
Nonno said firmly, “Pasta puttanesca. Anchovies, capers, little red wine. Nothing more fancy. In kitchen like family. Get what you pay for.”
A couple of days later, Maxine Sugargarten and Donna Flotarde came over to Van Pruyn Place. Donna played with Garibaldi until he scratched her. “Ow. It’s always injury and assault with you, isn’t it, Laura,” said Donna, and flounced away through the snow to go see Doll Pettigrew and her new beautifying kit in its mint-blue leatherette case.
Maxine and Laura worked all afternoon on a letter to Mr. G. Not easy. Laura tried to explain all over again that while it was true that she had borrowed the record album from Maxine’s locker, it wasn’t wrecked or ruined like everything else Laura touched, and she had given it back, after all. And the blood and emergency room was a distraction to the plain truth of it, which is that she and Maxine were now friends, like Shari Lewis and Lamb Chop, only one of them was not a puppet.
Maxine asked Laura to come over to her house. Laura met Maxine’s big brother Spike, home from basic training. They all listened to Bobby Vee. Spike acted as if he found himself to be really cool but he wasn’t, he was almost as boring as Maxine used to be.
A couple of days later Mr. Grackowicz rang the house. He kept Nonna on the line for a long time, but Laura couldn’t hear what Nonna was saying, since the cagey old sinner kept her hand over her mouth and the mouthpiece, and she muttered. When she hung up, she told Laura that Mr. G. had to be in the neighborhood that evening for an emergency finance committee meeting about raising funds to repair the broken pipes. So Nonna had invited him to come by for a little refreshment. Then she rang up Nonno at the store and told him to bring a small ham, a bottle of Campari, and a tin of almond biscuits that weren’t too stale.
The arrangement of bribes in the parlor—underneath the statue of ever-vigilant David—was, thought Laura, a pretty good sign that Mr. G. was weakening. Nonna made Laura put on a dress that made her look—thank you so much, Nonna, you and your sense of style can go back to Italy—like a teenage Shirley Temple foundering in a reform school for wayward girls. For herself, Nonna bravely tossed off the wig and showed up in her grey prison hairdo, in a powder-blue twinset with pearls and a huge cross on a chain dragging at her around the neck. She had done without rouge. Maybe she was trying for a look of leukemia. The sympathy strategy.
Nonno poured a stiff drink, but Mr. G. just wanted a cup of tea because, he said, it wouldn’t do any good for him to walk into a finance committee meeting sporting the aroma of indulgence. Mary Bernice brought in the tea, and before she left she said, “I have an opinion, too, you know, though nobody ever asks me.”
Nonno and Nonna were so startled at her talking out of turn that they were speechless. Mr. G. said, kindly enough, “Well, what would that be?”
“You want to keep her away from the nuns if you possibly can,” said Mary Bernice. “They’re good women, most of them, but they either convert you or they help you lose your faith too early, if you ask me. And I’m Irish, so I know whereof I speak.”
“So I can tell,” said Mr. G.
He talked to Nonno and Nonna, who nodded and sputtered only a little, but Laura couldn’t get the gist of how the negotiation was going. Then, starting to sum things up, he said to the grandparents, “May I talk with Miss Ciardi by herself for a moment, please?”
“Of course, you our guest,” said Nonno, heaving himself up out of his easy chair. “We go next door to office, we find little something for donate to burst pipes.”
“No need for that, Mr. Ciardi.” When they had gone, Mr. Grackowicz turned to Laura, who had been standing close to the mantelpiece with her hands clasped in front of her waist like a waitress at Frombacher’s Viennese Café on East 86th and Madison. “Laura. I have a question to ask, and I don’t want you to lie. Did you write this letter all by yourself?”
She tried to gather her thoughts and to assess what he wanted to hear, and he saw her confusion. “Wait,” he said. “Let me put it another way. Someone else helped you write this letter. Am I right? Tell the truth.”
Her face dropped. “How did you know?” she said in a small voice.
“Well, it wasn’t either of your grandparents, I can tell that,” he said, “and it wasn’t you alone, Laura. I know your work. You have a reputation for refusing to hand in your writing assignments. You say you can’t write. So who was it? Was it your cook? Or someone from school? A student?”
There was no point in lying now—Laura realized the jig was up, as they said in the movies. The gambit hadn’t worked. “It was Maxine Sugargarten,” she admitted. “We worked on it
together. I’m sorry.”
“I’m not,” he replied. “Or not too much.”
She couldn’t figure him out. “What do you mean?”
He drained his teacup and looked around, as if wishing he had decided on something stronger after all. “School isn’t only about learning to write and read, though it is mostly that. It’s also about learning how to manage friendships. How to get along. You’ve always been very strong with the younger kids, but you’ve been isolated from children your own age. Your peers. A lot of your problems have come from holding yourself out from them, as if you’re something special.”
“Something special about covers it,” she said, making a face.
“That’s not what I mean. I’m saying that if you and Maxine, who is in your grade, have been able to patch up your differences so you could work together with her on this letter, this shows a new ability to collaborate. And a lot of learning, especially for girls like you, comes from friendship. I’m encouraged just enough by the fact of this campaign, and that it was conceived and carried out by the both of you, to let you have one more try. On probation till Easter. We’ll reassess then, and see if you have been able to build on this beginning. But I’ll be requiring some heavy lifting from you, Laura. You’ll have to spread your wings now.”
“Oh,” said Laura. “Well, I have some practice there.”
That night Laura had gone to her first sleepover ever. The Sugargartens’ was a cramped, five-room railroad flat two stories above a mattress warehouse showroom on Third Avenue. “I like it here. It has a lot of character,” said Laura.
“Tell me about character,” said Maxine’s mother, pouring herself another glass of rye whiskey and Fanta. “I never picked up the concept. Does having a goddamn nose job come into it?”
It wasn’t going to be easy, this friendship thing, but Laura was determined to try to make it work. Maxine got annoyed that Laura had to get changed into her nightgown in the bathroom, such a prude! and went sulky for about fifteen minutes. But after lights-out, they flopped down on blankets spread on the floor of Maxine’s tiny bedroom and whispered. It was the closest Laura had ever lain to someone except for the swan-brother. The subjects were: vacations, crummy teachers, the other girls, which boys you liked and which ones you liked best and which one you would kiss if you absolutely had to or someone in your family would die. Laura was so busy trying to keep up with the conversation that there wasn’t a moment in which she could pause and try out her answers by telling herself into a story sort of like this. She just couldn’t concentrate on both at the same time. It was moving too fast.
Then Maxine confessed to certain things she had once done at summer camp. Last year with a boy named Ernie Gilhooley, when they were both in sick bay with a summer flu. “Ew, you both had the flu?” said Laura. “And you did that?”
“We couldn’t get infected, we already were,” said Maxine, with hapless logic. “How about you, Laura? Have you ever slept with a boy?”
Well. It came down to that. Had Laura ever slept with a boy? Was he a boy? Was he a swan? It had been too hard to tell at the time, and it was too hard to tell now, so Laura had said the only thing possible. It was true both in her imagination and in dark of night. “I’m not telling,” she said.
The Delaware and Hudson train racked and rattled along the river. The cabin smelled of chicken lo mein and Lysol. A few of the travelers seemed to have had some early drinks in the Oyster Bar at Grand Central Station; it was New Year’s Eve after all. Laura looked at the postcard she had picked up. The Manhattan skyline at night, golden jeweled lights stacked in buildings profiled against blackness. She turned the card over. She had already addressed the card to Sam Roscoe. The message area was still blank, though.
She took the pen she’d filched from Nonno’s desk. It said ciardi’s fine foods and delicacies on it in sober capitals. To this pen she had attached a single white swan feather she’d found in a fold of her bedspread when she woke on Christmas morning. She’d wrapped a rubber band around the pen’s pocket clip and the hollow quill of the stem. It was a pen, it was a bayonet, it was a signal. Tightening her hand around it, she was able to write.
Dear Sam someday I’d like to see where you let Fluster go free into the wild. Would you show me, from your friend Laura C.
It was a beginning but it seemed complete in itself, enough for her to feel satisfied.
Then she took the envelope that her ticket had been stored in and scribbled on the back. Her words looked foreign but the sound of them was intimate somehow. She had heard words in her head for such a long time. She would keep trying to tell herself into her own life.
Someday I will learn to write. Someday, maybe, I will learn to write. Someday I may be able to write the truth.
The white-whiskered conductor came through. “Next stop Hudson, Albany after that,” he croaked to everyone. He sounded as if he had nodules on his vocal cords—a cold, or maybe cancer. Because Mary Bernice had asked him to give Laura special attention, he singled her out as he passed her seat. “Understand, Miss? Don’t get off this stop. I’ll help you with your luggage when the time comes. About forty-five minutes give or take.”
Though alone, she leaned against the glass, feeling well taken care of. The Hudson River Valley looked vaguely like Japan because it was snowing yet again, and everything was black and white. Black water, white ice, white air, black trees. An old lady on the platform at Hudson struggled with a man’s umbrella against the clotting snow. Laura tucked the postcard into her handbag and began to tidy her belongings. Albany next stop.
She straightened the collar of her good Macy’s coat. Nonna di Lorenzo and that mysterious Umberto were going to meet Laura’s train at Albany Union Station. They would drive Laura out to the Ann Lee nursing home in the countryside. Laura would go into her mother’s room and, whether she was still alert or whether it was too late, Laura would sit down on the bed next to her. Maybe even lie down on the bed. And then Laura would spread over her mother whatever harboring wing she had in herself to spread.
“Ready to go, young lady?” asked the conductor.
“Guess so.”
“That’s the ticket, buttercup.” Despite Laura’s protest, he took her suitcase for her. He hummed while bumping it down the aisle. “Repeat the sounding joy, repeat the sounding joy, repeat, repeat the sounding joy,” he warbled, mostly to himself. “Christmas is over a week already but the song, well, it repeats the sounding joy. Can’t shake it.”
Standing in the corridor, she leaned down to look out the windows. Across the southbound tracks, across the badlands of snowy bracken and abandoned tires and pools of Hudson River backwater, she could see the broad ribbon of river. Black as a tarred road. Then, as she watched, out on the open water a single swan swept up from some hidden cranny. It paced itself in the snowy air more or less across from her window. Moving at the same rate, but out in the wild. Heading north. It was single, yes—unless you counted its reflection, which made it a pair of swans.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to a few friends whose support has been as welcome as it has been kind. In no particular order, my gratitude is due to my husband, Andy Newman, and to Maggie Terris for close readings of an early draft; to Zach and Ana Tarpagos who, one rainy night in Athens, selected and played flute duets on the subject of swans at a reading in the home of Nikos Trivoulidis and Christos Lygas; to Barbara Harrison and the Examined Life team for inviting me again to Greece where I introduced this story to that convivial assembly; to concert singer Anne Azéma, who supplied me the Carolingian lyric and her translation that launches this story; to Stephen Guerriero for his recollections of Guerriero family Christmas Eve feasts of the seven fishes; to Cassie Jones and her team at HarperCollins, of course; to Scott McKowen for his evocative cover artwork; and to P. L. Travers, in loving memory, whose remark to me, about a year before she died, may have been the initial prompt for this novel.
About the Author
GREGORY MAGUIRE is th
e New York Times best-selling author of Hiddensee; After Alice; Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister; Lost; Mirror Mirror; and the Wicked Years, a series that includes Wicked—the beloved classic that is the basis for the blockbuster Tony Award–winning Broadway musical—Son of a Witch, A Lion Among Men, and Out of Oz. Maguire has lectured on art, literature, and culture both at home and abroad. He lives with his family in New England.
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Also by Gregory Maguire
Fiction
Hiddensee
After Alice
The Next Queen of Heaven
Lost
Mirror Mirror
Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister
The Wicked Years
Wicked
Son of a Witch
A Lion Among Men
Out of Oz
For Younger Readers
Matchless
Egg & Spoon
What-the-Dickens
Missing Sisters
The Good Liar
Leaping Beauty
Nonfiction
Making Mischief: A Maurice Sendak Appreciation
Copyright
The adaptation from the Latin of the Aquitanian lyric by Anne Azéma is used with her permission.
a wild winter swan. Copyright © 2020 by Gregory Maguire. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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