A Wild Winter Swan by Gregory Maguire

Author:Gregory Maguire [Maguire, Gregory]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780062980809
Google: S9vHDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2020-10-05T23:00:00+00:00

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.

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