A Wild Winter Swan Page 6

  “My aunt had a stroke,” said Fiona. “I think it was a stroke of midnight because she was lying on the floor until after breakfast-time.”

  The girl searched for ways to rescue her brothers but had no luck until finally (how did this go again?) she met someone, maybe a good witch, who told her to weave eleven cambric shirts out of the thread of moonlight. Next New Year’s Eve, when they turned into swans at the stroke of midnight, she should throw an enchanted shirt over each swan. They would turn back into her brothers and the spell would be lifted for good.

  “Well, that’s convenient,” said Leonora. “Still, more work for her. Figures.”

  “Swans can’t make shirts, they gots no hands,” said Philbert. “They should just get a gun and shoot the old Queen.”

  So the girl found out how to spin moonlight into thread, or something like that, and weave thread into fabric, and she worked day and night for eleven months of the year. On New Year’s Eve, all the swans flew in her window after bedtime, so the Queen and the King wouldn’t know. They became her brothers again for one hour. The sister had the eleven shirts ready. When the clock started striking twelve and her brothers turned back into swans, she tossed one shirt after another over them. They changed back into her brothers for good and hugged her and said thanks a lot. Except for the youngest brother, her favorite. His shirt wasn’t done. The final sleeve wasn’t finished. When she threw the shirt over his noble swan body, he turned back into her favorite brother, except for one arm, which remained a swan wing.

  “Then they all went and shot the Queen. Merry Christmas and happy new year!” shouted Philbert.

  The hot chocolate came. Miss Gerstein came back. The janitor said they had to leave the cafeteria because he needed to keep swabbing the deck. Miss Gerstein led the children up Staircase B, hunting for someplace else to spend the last half hour of after-school. At the landing with the emergency exit out to the alley next to the school, Laura set the Andersen stories down, opened the door, and slipped out. Snow was blowing. An alarm began to ring but gave up after a lackluster pipping. No one noticed her departure. She sidled down the alley between some wooden pallets stored on their side and a broken red Coke dispensary machine, and she became anonymous again in New York City.

  10

  Mary Bernice said, “They expect you to sit down with them and have a bite of supper. They want to hear how your afternoon went.”

  Laura scowled. “Can you tell them I have a headache?”

  This was code for you-know-what, but Mary Bernice replied, “Go up and join them. I’m not covering for you this time. I have the chicken cacciatore to plate while you’re enjoying them scraps of rabbit food they call salad.”

  So Laura went up. The dining room was set for three, as usual. On weekdays Mary Bernice removed the fussy lace tablecloth and she set out hard place mats with scenes from sunny Italy painted on them. The Leaning Tower of Pisa, the canals of Venice, Saint Peter’s in Rome. Today Laura got the Coliseum. “I’m working out the seating plan for Christmas Eve,” said Nonna. “I want to know who you would like to sit next to.”

  This was her way of being nice—really she didn’t care what Laura would like. Or where she sat. Laura said, “Can’t I eat in the dungeon with Mary Bernice?”

  “Grace,” declared Nonno, and led the prayer. A caesura, a daily truce lasting twelve seconds.

  Then Nonna said, “No, you can’t eat in the kitchen. My sister hasn’t seen you in many years, and Christmas is for families, Laura. So we have Nonno at the head of the table like the prince he is, and I will sit at the foot. Zia Geneva will sit at Nonno’s right and Mr. Corm Kennedy at mine. That leaves four other places. One for you, one for Mr. Vincequerra from the store—his wife is suddenly in Bellevue, don’t ask why—and one each for the Polumbos. The stout Polumbos from the nine o’clock Mass, not the thin Polumbos from the noon. Who do you want to sit next to?”

  Laura didn’t care about this tonight. “Oh, Nonno, I guess.”

  “Laura,” said Nonno, “you got friend you want come? We got room for more chairs.” He gestured with his fork. The table could take up to three leaves without crowding the sideboard. It was a good-size room with wallpaper showing Italian shepherds and milkmaids dancing in a rustic lane. From the beamed ceiling a chandelier dripped with teardrop crystal prisms. The effect was bright but ragged, because some of the pendants were missing.

  If Laura were to admit aloud that at this point her only friends were the first graders in the after-school program, Nonno’s face would just go slatted with worry. She thought to say, “Everyone I know will be with their own families.”

  “Sì, that’s normal.” He shrugged, smiled; problem solved.

  “Will you ask my mother to come?”

  She regretted the words the instant they sounded in the room. Nonno set his fork down so softly it didn’t make a sound. He removed his napkin from the collar of his shirt. He dabbed his mouth with a peculiar daintiness. “She no come, Laurita, she no come, you no ask for this.” His voice was hard, angry, offended maybe.

  “You’re going back to the docks, Vito,” said Nonna, which was her way to chastise him into remembering his Better English. His accent tended to backslide when he was upset. “Laura, this isn’t the time to be in touch. It isn’t a good time for your mother.”

  “It’s never a good time for her,” said Laura.

  “Not good time for us,” said Nonno, which wasn’t Laura’s point, but she felt herself becoming a little shaky. She put both hands in her lap and twisted her fingers together.

  There was a girl at Christmastime whose mother never—

  But that wasn’t even a full sentence, and she couldn’t think through the idea, because, oh, too vast, too vast, the number of things that the mother never.

  No father—some mishap in the U.S. occupation of Austria had killed him a few months before Laura was born. No brother—claimed by an accident a decade later, but just as lost—and no mother, because she had chosen to evaporate, go upstate, leaving Laura with her Ciardi grandparents. The original Thing One and Thing Two grown huge and ancient. Were they monstrous and selfish, or only clueless?

  “The truth about your mother is—” began Nonna.

  “Carissima,” interrupted Nonno, leveling a hand, palm down, signaling. Cut it out. Not now. You mean well but for the love of Christ, shut up.

  “She should be facing this, Ovid,” replied Nonna. “She has a right to know.”

  “Nobody talk nonsense about Renata, she so sick. Leave her be. And don’t talk across Laurita as if she deaf. She no deaf and she no stupid.”

  Nonna raised an eyebrow. She probably meant, Neither am I, Ovid; give me some credit. But Laura felt stung. She said, as much to change the subject for herself as for her grandparents, “Well, if not Mama, what about John Greenglass? Or the other guy? Or both of them?”

  “Don’t be silly, you’re being silly, don’t,” said Nonna, but her voice was back to its normal register, part kindly and part fed up.

  “They got their own families, and they’re just worker cretini anyway,” said Nonno. He leaned forward, a bit relieved to have left the subject of Renata Ciardi aside. “Is time for talking about boy thing, tesoro mio? No? Maybe so. Your nonna sit you down after supper and give you lesson.”

  “Ovid Ciardi, you’ve lost your mind,” said Nonna. “It’s no such time and I’ll make no such lesson plan. Laura is going to a convent school in two weeks. Not a moment too soon it seems. Laura, mind yourself. I feel a migraine in the roots of my hair. Nonno meant you could invite a girlfriend from school, but he was just being polite to you because he loves you, you fool.” How tenderly she could say fool, it was the way other people said lover—or so Laura imagined.

  “We keep you safe year after year, we keep you safe still!” shouted Nonno, and knocked over his glass of wine. His voice was full of some kind of fierce triumph. She was probably supposed to say thank you, but she knew her expression betrayed her thought: Safe from what?<
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  Mary Bernice came in and mopped up the wine. She had been waiting in the pantry to take the main course out of the dumbwaiter and bring it through. “Shall I clear this rubbish, then,” she said, which was dismissive of her own cooking, but Laura saw the jest in it. Mary Bernice brought Laura a glass of Chianti mixed with Coca-Cola. Laura wondered if the nuns of Montreal would serve this for dinner, too.

  Over the figs and nuts, Nonna carried on about the fat Polumbos, about the Vincequerra marriage, about Mr. Corm Kennedy and how he had swept Geneva Bentivengo Mastrangelo off her elderly ankles after her first husband died. “You’ll be between Nonno and Mr. Vincequerra,” said Nonna decisively. “He’s very nice and you will ask him about anything except why his wife has gone to a lunatic ward. Though if he tells you why, remember every word. I want to know.”

  “I think we should at least invite my mother,” said Laura. “Who cares about these others? If she’s sick, all the more reason to ask her to come visit.”

  “You know nothing,” snapped Nonna. “Go to your room, you ungrateful goat.”

  “You every reason we have to live,” said Nonno, getting up and bowing formally to his granddaughter, but his face was pomodoro.

  Then why are you sending me away, Laura wanted to know. They were demented, that’s why. She threw her napkin on her plate and fled up the stairs to her safe garret. The storm had begun again. The skylight at the top of the stairwell was an iron lid of frozen snow. Her room was a prison, a treehouse morgue.

  She lay on her bed in the cold room, in the dark, and began to die.

  11

  What was wind, was it a pushing or a resisting, or was it both.

  Pushing and resisting, motion and rest. Waking and sleeping, living and drowning.

  No tell left in her. The efforts at narration, only sputtery abortions.

  There was

  and

  It must

  but they didn’t tinder up enough to flame a single sentence. The push too weak, the resistance too powerful.

  She was listening for nothing. Though she caught Mary Bernice singsong her goodbyes from below.

  Later, Laura heard Nonna laboring upstairs to follow Nonno to bed on the third floor. In the hall at the base of the steep flight to the attic, Nonna was pausing to catch her breath. “Laura, Laurita, Laura,” called Nonna, though a few minutes later Laura wondered if that had been Nonna or the wind. The gale whipping in from Long Island Sound was a ventriloquist.

  In any case, Laura did not answer with a whispered what? until after their bedroom door had closed and the sound of the toilet flushing offered legitimate cover. And Nonno’s album of the nightly opera began to spin its overtures and arias and choruses through the floorboards. Mary Bernice thought it scandalous that people so old should have a hi-fi in their bedroom; it somehow didn’t seem at all proper and certainly not Catholic. Sometimes the cook had wondered aloud about her employers. So venal, so pagan.

  Tonight it was Tancredi. “L’aura che intorno spiri . . .” The very air you breathe brings mortal threat, if Nonno’s translations on Laura’s behalf were to be trusted. If her own memory was to be trusted. The beginning was filled with urgent high notes that sound like someone signaling a whole fleet of taxis. Maybe Nonno intended this nightly musical interlude to be a lullaby kiss for Laura, since at this point neither he nor his wife could make it up that final flight of steps. In any case, Laura had learned to tune out the private broadcast. Tonight the melodramas of Rossini were little more than aural wash, subsumed by the roar of tidal winds. Gale force, Atlantic arias in accelerando and fortissimo. Laura almost felt seasick, as if the building were veering.

  The music ended and the toilet below flushed again, and the house hunched on its mighty limestone thighs, holding tight against the assault of the storm. Through her closed eyes Laura saw snowflakes as if from grave eternity, spinning through the cold and lonely universe with no place to land. Particles of white nothing, with nothing to adhere to. Storybooks torn into scraps so small not a single whole word survived, just the orphaned alphabet.

  She felt a sudden aggressive thump in her spine and forearms, and in the very frame of the bed, too, or so it seemed. She sat up and opened her eyes. Nonna had fallen out of bed, must be; or Nonno had tumbled over that ridiculous ottoman in the corner. But had one of them gotten hurt, the other would be hollering. There was no sound of panic from below except a single exploratory complaint from Garibaldi, who stalked the halls at nighttime and sometimes ended up on Laura’s bed by dawn, if she left her door open.

  She got out of the bed and stood quite still in her cotton flannel nightgown with the drippy red rosebuds and the blue ink stain on the sleeve from that time she had fallen asleep doing homework in bed. The floor was ice. The radiators began to hiss and clank like a factory in thrombosis, in overdrive.

  “What is it,” she said, though whether aloud or to herself she didn’t know.

  Oh goody, I’m having a nervous breakdown, she said to herself. She felt a little giddy, because those were words she never had quite understood. A higher-class sort of diagnosis. People in Nonna’s Sodality were always having nervous breakdowns; it seemed quite the thing. Nonna thought it was all complete and utter cavolo, but sometimes she spoke of it as if she wished she could try it, too, not unlike wanting to go to Elizabeth Arden someday before she died.

  Another sound, not a thump but more of a scrabbling and maybe a moan. Not in Van Pruyn Place and not downstairs, but outside—  Outside her window—

  She was afraid to look. There was no way an intruder could climb up the outside of the building from the street level, not without a fireman’s extendable ladder. But the sound. Could one of those slender curbside baby trees have been uprooted and catapulted aloft by the winds to catch in the high stone gutter?

  Baby trees don’t generally moan, unless they did so during your own personal private nervous breakdown.

  Laura had never gone downstairs to knock on her grandparents’ bedroom door during the night. Once or twice, in the grip of the throwups, Laura had presented herself to Miss Gianna Tebaldi in her room down the hall from Laura’s. But it had been years since the governess had gotten pregnant and run off with the RCA repairman. So the house was bereft of useful backup, what with Nonno already snoring so hard that Nonna probably had her earplugs in.

  The noise was becoming a scrabbling that sounded less furtive than desperate. What worse could happen to me, thought Laura. Leaving her light off, she inched up to the window. She stayed close to the wall so she couldn’t be seen. She was in The Twilight Zone Hotel. She peered into the flatness of a hard close snow. She thought she saw a rack of ice raking up and down.

  It’s the mother, it’s the white owl’s mother, and it’s coming looking for Fluster, she thought. But what a mother—it must be as big as I am.

  A wounded animal was less frightening than a prowler or a rapist. Laura hurried to the box room next door. The creature had landed against the roof closer to the box room window. Maybe she could keep the creature from blowing away again, or falling to its death. She opened the lower half of the sash as high as she could get it. Since John Greenglass had been in and out that morning, the window was only a little stuck with snow and ice. She leaned into the storm.

  She had seen this already today. She must be dreaming it again. But even in a dream every attempt must be made. She scurried backward, grabbed the coil of rope as she had that morning. Looping it double, she ducked her head and shoulders out into the storm again. Instantly drenched with icy snow, she managed to secure the flailing foot. It was naked, and blue in the stormlight. “Bloody eejit, get in here, you, before you catch your death,” she said, an homage to Mary Bernice Molloy, late of County Tyrone and currently residing in Brooklyn.

  The castaway in the high winds wasn’t as much in danger of falling as John Greenglass had been. He was splayed across the imbricated tiles of the insloping mansard roof, held there by the flat hand of the wind. Laura pulled a
t his looped foot. To keep his balance, he had no choice but to inch toward the window. When both his thighs were in front of the window—he was trousered in some coarse blue buckram—she said, “Now you’ll lean sideways and get your shoulders in from the cold, and the rest will be easy as a piece of pizza pie.”

  Whether he was obeying her or just following his own instincts for survival, she didn’t know. One way or the other he got his drenched head in—a shaggy head of wildly unshorn and dirty-straw hair, more curled wood shavings than anything else. Then his navy tunic-ed torso, then the knees and bare frozen feet. One arm reached out for Laura and she took it boldly if formally, square at the forearm, just as she might the arm of some elderly gentleman struggling to get out of a pew. The castaway toppled in at an angle and his other arm was last, flexing in a complicated sequence of compression as he slowly straightened his spine; only it wasn’t an arm at all, and why should she be surprised, so she wasn’t, not after finding a young man blown onto her roof: the other arm swept in, a vast snowy wing of a swan.

  12

  He straightened up but his eyes were trained on the floor. He was taller than she was by half a head. The wing trembled and shook out wetness in what seemed an involuntary motion. He turned his head the other way and ducked his chin to his shoulder. When the wing had settled again, he managed to raise his eyes to look at her. His eyes were heavy-lidded like those of some sorry-lot ladies Laura had seen over toward Times Square after a matinee of My Fair Lady last year. Before she could finish the thought, though, his knees seemed to buckle and he thudded to the floor of the box room.

  That’s my effect on boys, right there, Laura thought.

  She stood in turmoil, twisting her hands together as if a classic and clueless bystander. But when she heard the door open downstairs and Nonno’s ratchety voice called up to her to see if she was all right, she was levelheaded enough to reply, “I’m sorry for waking you, Nonno. I dropped something.”