A Wild Swan Read online

  * * *

  They have lived together now, the three of them, for more than a year. The creature sprawls, during the days, in the upholstered chair, beside whatever flicker of fire has been coaxed from the wet logs. When night arrives, the creature hauls itself wordlessly upstairs, clumping on each tread, where it remains in its bedroom (there’s no telling whether it sleeps) until morning comes again, when it resumes its place at the fireside.

  Still, it is their child. What’s left of him. The Whites have covered the parlor walls with every old photograph they have: their son tiny in a snowsuit, grinning among a swirl of windblown white flakes; their son somberly adolescent in a bow tie, posing for the school’s photographer; their son smiling nervously beside the unsuitable girl (the hefty one, sly-eyed and morally slack, who is now the drunken wife of the town butcher) he took to his first dance.

  The Whites burn incense to cover the smell. When spring arrives, they fill the house with lilacs and roses.

  Mr. and Mrs. manage, as best they can, a version of their former days. They joke and reminisce. Mrs. White produces a mutton stew every Friday, although the creature no longer wants, or needs, to eat.

  Usually, it stares blankly at the struggling fire, though every now and then, when some conversation has been broached, when Mother or Father asks if it wouldn’t like another pillow, wonders if it remembers that trip they took, years ago, to that lake in the mountains, it raises what remains of its head, and trains on them its single, opaquely opalescent eyeball, with an expression not so much of anger as confusion. What crime has it committed? Its jailers are kind enough, they make their attempts at offering comfort, but why do they keep it here, what exactly did it do that was so wrong?

  Days pass into nights, and nights into days. Nothing changes, either within the house or outside, where gray skies and the bare branches of trees drop their reflections into the puddles on the road.

  The effort required to continue in this altered world shows, however. Mrs. White, on more than one evening, wonders wistfully over the whereabouts of Tom Barkin, the man she might have married, and the fact that the words “might have married” mean only that she was (as Mr. White points out) one of a dozen girls with whom Tom Barkin flirted shamelessly, seems to strengthen rather than deter her convictions about renounced possibility. Mr. White finally tells her he does not like, has never liked, her habit of whistling as she goes about her duties, but finds afterward that her grudgingly obedient cessation produces a strangled silence worse than the whistling had been. The undercooked bacon is no longer consumed by Mr. White without comment. His infrequent baths no longer produce assurances that there’s something nice about a man’s natural smell. His stories are more often suffered, by Mrs. White, with an undisguised glaze of boredom.

  The creature that sits staring into the smoking and smoldering logs appears to take no notice.

  Mr. and Mrs. White remind themselves: This is still their son. They stand by him, as they must. They have that, at least, by way of virtue. They willed him into being, not once, but twice.

  And so, the fire is kept alive. The stew is prepared every Friday. The occasional visitor is discouraged—the Whites are, they claim, simply too busy to receive, these days. There are moments, though, when Mrs. White imagines how much easier her life would be if Mr. White were to die of his compromised heart, and launch her into the simpler realm of widowhood, where nobody minds about whistling, or how the bacon is cooked; where Mr. White’s sour, sweaty pungency would evaporate; where she would not be asked to feign amusement over the same story, told one more time. There are moments when Mr. White imagines his wife going away with Tom Barkin, who’s old now, who’s lost half his teeth, who still flirts with girls even as they recoil in horror. She’d be an adulteress, and no one would blame him for maintaining a determinedly cheerful demeanor in his solitude. He’d be a figure of sympathy. An acquaintance or two might even venture the long-withheld opinion that, as everyone in the village agrees, Mr. White really could have done better. And there are a few youngish local widows who don’t seem like the kind of women who’d object to a man’s smell, or wouldn’t appreciate a rousing, well-told tale.

  It would be easier, it seems, if there were fewer of them on the premises.

  The Whites, all three of them, know exactly where the monkey’s paw resides—on the top shelf of the cupboard, beside the cracked mixing bowl. They know, they always know, all of them know, it has one more wish to grant.

  LITTLE MAN

  What if you had a child?

  If you had a child, your job would be more than getting through the various holiday rushes, and wondering exactly how insane Mrs. Witters in Accounts Payable is going to be on any given day. It’d be about procuring tiny shoes and pull-toys and dental checkups; it’d be about paying into a college fund.

  The unextraordinary house to which you return nightly? It’d be someone’s future ur-house. It’d be the place—decades hence—someone will remember forever, a seat of comfort and succor, its rooms rendered larger and grander, exalted, by memory. This sofa, those lamps, purchased in a hurry, deemed good enough for now, then (they seem to be here still, years later): they’d be legendary, to someone.

  Imagine reaching the point at which you want a child more than you can remember wanting anything else.

  * * *

  Having a child is not, however, anything like ordering a pizza. All the more so if you’re a malformed, dwarfish man whose occupation, were you forced to name one, would be … What would you call yourself? A goblin? An imp? Adoption agencies are reluctant about doctors and lawyers, if they’re single and over forty. So go ahead. Apply to adopt an infant as a two-hundred-year-old gnome.

  You are driven slightly insane—you try to talk yourself down, it works some nights better than others—by the fact that for so much of the population, children simply … appear. Bing bang boom. A single act of love and, nine months later, this flowering, as mindless and senseless as a crocus bursting out of a bulb.

  It’s one thing to envy wealth and beauty and other gifts that seem to have been granted to others, but not you, by obscure but inarguable givers. It’s another thing entirely to yearn for what’s so readily available to any drunk and barmaid who link up for three minutes in one of the darker corners of any dank and scrofulous pub.

  * * *

  You listen carefully, then, when you hear the rumor. Some impoverished miller, a man whose business is going under (the small mill-owners, the ones who grind by hand, are vanishing—their flour and meal cost twice what the corporations can churn out, and the big-brand product is free of the gritty bits that find their way into a sack of flour no matter how careful you are); a man who hasn’t got health insurance or investments, who hasn’t been putting money into a pension (he’s needed every cent just to keep the mill open).

  That man has told the king his daughter can spin straw into gold.

  The miller must have felt driven to it. He must have thought he needed a claim that outrageous if he was going to attract the attention of the king at all.

  You suppose (as an aspiring parent yourself, you prefer to think of other parents as un-deranged) he hopes that if he can get his daughter into the palace, if he can figure out a way for her to meet the king, the king will be so smitten (doesn’t every father believe his daughter to be irresistible?) that he’ll forget about the absurd straw-into-gold story, after he’s seen the pale grace of the girl’s neck; after she’s aimed that smile at him; after he’s heard the sweet clarinet tone of her soft but surprisingly sonorous voice.

  The miller apparently was unable to imagine all the pale-necked, shyly smiling girls the king has met already. Like most fathers, it’s inconceivable to him that his daughter may not be singular; that she may be lovely and funny and smart, but not so much more so as to obliterate all the other contending girls.

  The miller, poor foolish doting father that he is, never expected his daughter to get locked into a room full of straw, and command
ed to spin it all into gold by morning, any more than most fathers expect their daughters to be un-sought-after by boys, or rejected by colleges, or abused by the men they eventually marry. Such notions don’t appear on the spectrum of paternal possibility.

  It gets worse.

  The king, who really hates being fooled, announces, from the doorway of the cellar room filled with straw, that if the girl hasn’t spun it all into gold by morning, he’ll have her executed.

  What? Wait a minute …

  The miller starts to confess, to beg forgiveness. He was joking; no, he was sinfully proud, he wanted his daughter to meet the king, he was worried about her future; I mean, your majesty, you can’t be thinking of killing her …

  The king looks glacially at the miller, has a guard escort him away, and withdraws, locking the door behind him.

  Here’s where you come in.

  You’re descended from a long line of minor wizards. Your people have, for generations, been able to summon rain, exorcise poltergeists, find lost wedding rings.

  No one in the family, not over the last few centuries at any rate, has thought of making a living at it. It’s not … respectable. It smells of desperation. And—as is the way with spells and conjurings—it’s not one hundred percent reliable. It’s an art, not a science. Who wants to refund a farmer’s money as he stands destitute in his still-parched fields? Who wants to say, I’m sorry, it works most of the time, to the elderly couple who still hear cackles of laughter coming from under their mattress, whose cutlery still jumps up from the dinner table and flies around the room?

  When you hear the story about the girl who can supposedly spin straw into gold (it’s the talk of the kingdom), you don’t immediately think, This might be a way for me to get a child. That would be too many steps down the line for most people, and you, though you have a potent heart and ferocity of intention, are not a particularly serious thinker. You work more from instinct. It’s instinct, then, that tells you, Help this girl, good might come of it. Maybe simply because you, and you alone, have something to offer her. You who’ve never before had much to offer any of the girls who passed by, laughing with their boyfriends, leaving traces of perfume in their wake; perfume and powder and a quickening of the air they so recently occupied.

  Spinning straw into gold is beyond your current capabilities, but not necessarily impossible to learn. There are ancient texts. There’s your Aunt Farfalee, older than some of the texts but still alive, as far as you know; the only truly gifted member of your ragtag cohort, who are more generally prone to making rats speak in Flemish, or summoning beetles out of other people’s Christmas pies.

  * * *

  Castles are easy to penetrate. Most people don’t know that; most people think of them as fortified, impregnable. Castles, however, have been remodeled and revised, over and over again, by countless generations. There was the child-king who insisted on secret passageways, with peepholes that opened through the eyes of the ancestral portraits. There was the paranoid king who had escape tunnels dug, miles of them, opening out into woods, country lanes, and graveyards.

  The girl, however, is surprised and impressed when you materialize in the chamber full of straw. It has nothing to do with magic. Already, though, you’ve got credibility.

  At first glance you see why the miller thought his gamble might work. She’s a true beauty, slightly unorthodox, in the way of most great beauties. Her skin is smooth and poreless as pale pink china, her nose ever so slightly longer than it should be, her brown-black eyes wide-set, sable-lashed, all but quivering with curiosity, with depths.

  She stares at you. She doesn’t speak. Her life, starting this morning, has become so strange to her (she who yesterday was sewing grain sacks and sweeping stray corn kernels from the floor) that the sudden appearance of a twisted and stub-footed man, just under four feet tall, with a chin as long as a turnip, seems like merely another in the new string of impossibilities.

  You tell her you’re there to help. She nods her thanks. You get to work.

  It doesn’t go well, at first. The straw, run through the spinning wheel, comes out simply as straw, shredded and bent.

  You refuse to panic, though. You repeat, silently, the spell taught to you by Aunt Farfalee (who is by now no bigger than a badger, with blank white eyes and fingers thin and stiff as icicles). You concentrate—belief is crucial. One of the reasons ordinary people are incapable of magic is simple dearth of conviction.

  And, eventually … yes. The first few stalks are only touched with gold, like eroded relics, but the next are more gold than straw, and soon enough the wheel is spitting them out, strand upon strand of pure golden straw, deep in color, not the hard yellow of some gold but a yellow suffused with pink, ever so slightly incandescent in the torchlit room.

  You both—you and the girl—watch, enraptured, as the piles of straw dwindle and masses of golden strands skitter onto the limestone floor. It’s the closest you’ve come, yet, to love, to lovemaking—you at the spinning wheel with the girl behind you (she forgetfully puts her hand, gently, on your shoulder), watching in shared astonishment as the straw is spun into gold.

  When it’s all finished, she says, “My lord.”

  You’re not sure whether she’s referring to you or to God.

  “Glad to be of service,” you answer. “I should go, now.”

  “Let me give you something.”

  “No need.”

  But still, she takes a strand of beads from her neck, and holds them out to you. They’re garnets, cheap, probably dyed, though in this room, at this moment, with all that golden straw emanating its faint light, they’re as potently red-black as heart’s blood.

  She says, “My father gave me these for my eighteenth birthday.”

  She drapes the necklace over your head. An awkward moment occurs, when the beads catch on your chin, but the girl lifts them off, and her fingertips brush against your face. The strand of beads falls onto your chest. Onto the declivity where, were you a normal man, your chest would be.

  “Thank you,” she says.

  You bow and depart. She sees you slipping away through the secret door, devoid of hinges or knob, one of the many commanded by the long-dead paranoid king.

  “That’s not magic,” she laughs.

  “No,” you answer. “But magic is sometimes all about knowing where the secret door is, and how to open it.”

  With that, you’re gone.

  * * *

  You hear about it the next day, as you walk along the edges of town, wearing the strand of garnets under your stained woolen shirt.

  The girl pulled it off. She spun the straw into gold.

  The king’s response? Do it again tonight, in a bigger room, with twice as much straw.

  He’s joking. Right?

  He’s not joking. This, after all, is the king who passed the law about putting trousers on cats and dogs, who made too-loud laughter a punishable crime. According to rumor, he was abused by his father, the last king. But that’s the story people always tell, isn’t it, when they want to explain inexplicable behavior?

  * * *

  You do it again that night. The spinning is effortless by now. As you spin, you perform little comic flourishes for the girl. You spin for a while one-handed. You spin with your back to the wheel. You spin with your eyes closed.

  She laughs and claps her hands. Her laughter is low and sonorous, like the sound of a clarinet.

  This time, when you’ve finished, she gives you a ring. It, too, is cheap—silver, with a speck of diamond sunk into it.

  She says, “This was my mother’s.”

  She slips it onto your pinkie. It fits, just barely. You stand for a moment, staring at your own hand, which is not by any standards a pretty sight, with its knobbed knuckles and thick, yellowed nails. But here it is, your hand, with her ring on one of its fingers.

  You slip away without speaking. You’re afraid that anything you might say would be embarrassingly earnest.

  * *
*

  The next day …

  Right. One last roomful of straw, twice the size again. The king promises that this is the last, but insists on this third and final act of alchemy. He believes, it seems, that value resides in threes, which would explain the three garish and unnecessary towers he’s had plunked onto the castle walls, the three advisers to whom he never listens, the three annual parades in commemoration of nothing in particular beyond the celebration of the king himself.

  And …

  If the girl pulls it off one more time, the king has announced he’ll marry her, make her his queen.

  That’s the reward? Marriage to a man who’d have had you decapitated if you’d failed to produce not just one but three miracles?

  Surely the girl will refuse.

  You go to the castle one more time and do it again. It seems that it should be routine by now, the sight of the golden straw piling up, the fiery gleam of it, but somehow repetition hasn’t rendered it commonplace. It is (or so you imagine) a little like being in love; like wondering anew, every morning, over the outwardly unremarkable fact that your lover is there, in bed beside you, about to open her eyes, and that, every morning, your face will be the first thing she sees.

  When you’ve finished, she says, “I’m afraid I have nothing more to give you.”

  You pause. You’re shocked to realize that you want something more from her. You’ve told yourself, the past two nights, that the necklace and the ring are marvels, but extraneous acts of gratitude; that you’d have done what you’ve done for nothing more than the sight of her thankful face.

  It’s surprising, then, that on this final night, you don’t want to leave unrewarded. That you desire, with upsetting urgency, another token, a talisman, a further piece of evidence. Maybe it’s because you know you won’t see her again.

  You say, “You aren’t going to marry him, are you?”

  She looks down at the floor, which is littered with stray strands of golden straw.

  She says, “I’d be queen.”