1
Knuckles of hail rapped against Laura’s window with a musical jumpiness. Hardly tidings of comfort and joy, comfort and joy, though, when the room was an icebox. Coming downstairs to get warm, Laura trailed her hand on the greens wound round the banister. This raised a note of balsam in the air. But she knew better than to trust the false hope of the holidays.
Every green garland ends up in the ash can.
She paused, in a silence rich and pertinent to herself if to no one else, and told herself into the moment. Not a silent narration spoken in her mind, but a story as it felt, something more or less like this:
In the city of New York once stood a house on Van Pruyn Place. It was owned by a fierce old Italian importer known as Ovid Ciardi, of Ciardi’s Fine Foods and Delicacies. His stout hobbley wife lived there, too, griping the whole livelong day. Their granddaughter had come to live with them, nobody remembered why. One day she walked down the shiny fancy stairs to find two workers in the front hall. Fellows who had come out on a Saturday, no less, to repair the grouting of the stone windowsills on the top floor. But they were puttering around here instead. One was climbing a stepladder that had been set up in a circle of plaster dust and fallen fragments of ceiling. They didn’t notice the girl. She was fifteen and had long brown hair, very straight. She wished her eyes were mossy green but they were Italian brown, espresso brown. The workers didn’t notice her eyes or her. They were staring at something else.
That was as far as she could go. She didn’t know what happened next because it hadn’t happened yet. “What are you doing?”
From a hole in the plaster ceiling John Greenglass withdrew a baby—a baby something. An owl? It was still alive. “This is an item,” said John. He backed down the stepladder, cupping with both hands the clot of fussing feather. His helper, Sam, steadied him. Laura watched from the landing.
“Come lookit, such a surprise,” said Sam, gesturing.
Laura was not meant to be downstairs while the workers were there. But so much of the ordinary was overturned now. She approached as John opened his hands. Beneath the grit and plaster dust, the creature was nearly white all over. It shivered and half-flexed its wings. Maybe shocked, and also a bit of what’s-it-to-you?
“Little scamp’s scared witless,” said Sam.
“How did it get in our ceiling?” asked Laura.
John shrugged. “The coping on the roof was a mess. Mortar joints washed out. That’s where the water got in. But I don’t know how a baby owl could wriggle inside and make its way down three flights behind the walls and across this ceiling.”
“Well,” said Sam affably, “maybe a rat caught it and dragged it inside.”
“No rats,” said Laura. Rats didn’t fit into a Christmas story, even in a bitter season.
“You’re too old to be blind to rats in the city, Miz Laura.” Sam made cooing sounds at the small owl, who didn’t reply. “What’re you, fourteen?”
“Fifteen.”
John shook his head. “Fifteen, Miss Laura, too grown-up to shiver at real life.” Mocking her grandfather’s accent, John pronounced Laura’s name broadly, in three syllables: Laow—OO—rah. Like the bulb horn of an old-timey Model T.
“It’s scared to death. Let it go,” she said.
John shrugged. “You’re the boss.”
Sam was more tender than John. “Give it here, John. I can take it in my lunch box and bring it to the park when it’s ready. Some other birds will raise it up.”
“A dog will eat her, or a cat,” Laura protested.
The door under the back stairs, which led to the kitchen below, swung open. Out lurched Mary Bernice, alerted by the fuss. “You’s not to be loitering in the hall with no contractors,” said the cook. “Laura Ciardi, you get upstairs as you’re told to do. No consorting. Not on my watch.”
“You’re not in charge of me,” said Laura. Hardly a withering retort, but she was better with sentences in her head than in her mouth.
“I’m keeping you safe from your elders lest they get word of such shenanigans.” Like some kind of stage nanny, the cook flapped her apron at Laura.
“She doing nobody harm, Laura a good girl,” said Sam. “Lookee, my baby owl. It gots eyes like little black punch holes.”
“For sure, if a bird comes in the house, a death comes next,” replied Mary Bernice. “Get it out for once and for all. Laura, your grandda will be home any moment. Trouble twice over and never mind apologies. Will you get back upstairs while there’s young fellows working on the premises. Go now as I’m telling you, go.”
The white bird twisted its head on its neck and glared across the room to where Laura stood on the stairs.
The little owl baby looked at the orphan girl as if wanting to give her a message. But then the handsome workman closed his hand again and dropped the owl into his companion’s lunch box. The lid fell shut softly, and softly did the clasps clasp. The little owl in darkness. Like a tomb.
“She’ll suffocate in there,” said Laura.
“It’s a she? Okay then. I’ll see she gets some air and something to eat,” said Sam. Laura didn’t know his last name. He was on his way to being dark-skinned and had a soft, sing-along voice. “If she can fly, why, I’ll let her fly away.”
“How did you even know there was a baby owl in the ceiling?” asked Laura.
John said, “We were tracking the leak from the ledge outside your window, up top of the house. It runs down the wall of the master bedroom below you. Stained your grandparents’ room, then skipped the parlor below that. Must’ve followed an internal channel, and so it emerges here. Water does that.” Hence, Laura supposed, the torn and crumbled plaster and the glimpse of lathes. “Reached in to see how much rot we’d have to pull down, and what do we find but this little bundle. Surprises in New York City every day of the year, I always say.”
“Your grandfather, he won’t be happy to see this surprise, the week before Christmas,” said Sam.
“O come all ye faithful,” sang John, “joyful and triumphant.” Then, speaking, “I always wondered why not, O come all ye doubtful, lazybones and losers.”
“They’re invited too,” said Mary Bernice, “but they have to stand in back because there’s an unruly number of them. Hoo, listen up and buckle your britches, lads, the mister’s on the stoop. Laura, shoo!”
Laura flew up the stairs, reaching the second floor just as the key turned in the front door and her grandfather came in, stomping snow off his overshoes. At the sight of the mess in the front hall, a sound of under-his-breath cursing in Italian.
Across the landing Laura tiptoed. She bypassed the office and the parlor doors, and pivoted to the back staircase, which went down to the kitchen and upstairs too. She rose to the floor above, skirting the door to her grandparents’ room, and up once more, till she reached the top of the house.
The governess’s room, unused since Laura was twelve, was full of junk removed from the box room. Opposite the top of the stairs, across the landing, Laura’s little bathroom was squeezed in alongside the bricks of the chimney stack. In the front of the house, two pinched rooms. The box room stood haunted and echoey on the right-hand side, empty but for some tools and buckets and work gloves on the floor. On the left, Laura’s bedroom. Its single window, set in a slanting ceiling inside the mansard roof of the top flight, was filled with white wings.