She saw wings.
No, not wings. Shadows of snowflakes, big fat snowflakes falling outside in the icy December dusk.
2
Laura threw herself on her bed. She lay in velvet shadow. She took in how things looked in the slop of her own life. The hall light, slanting through her doorway, picked out the grey-sheeted linoleum tacked in place with brass strips, the faded flowery wallpaper. Here and there the archaic lilacs were browned with waterstains from other winter leaks.
She could hear the rhythm of Nonno’s interview with John and Sam. Subdued and civil tones, until the front door opened again and Nonna came in. Laura’s grandmother had never sung on the stage and her voice could hardly be called musical, but she clinched her entrance every time like a pro.
Whose story is it now? Whoever talks the loudest when they walk through the door, do they own it?
Right on schedule, the orchestrated hysterics of Laura’s grandmother. That baby owl, trapped in a lunch box, probably scared to death from the drama. Behind the door to the kitchen steps Mary Bernice was listening, too, Laura would bet on it.
Isabella Bentivengo Ciardi would be clutching the two ends of the fox fur around her neck as she harangued the men who had perpetrated this inconvenience, it amounted to a catastrophe, a disaster, Madonna mia! That last was not a curse, but a prayer. Mother of God, what you ask of me now, eh? prayed Nonna Ciardi. A dinner was to happen here this week, did none of them understand this?
Laura got every syllable. Nonna Ciardi didn’t need mechanical assistance when she was ready to broadcast the state of her nervous disposition. Nonno said his wife could be heard nightly from Hell’s Kitchen to Astoria, and on clear nights as far as Randalls Island.
“But Vito, Vito, we have family coming on Christmas Eve, my elevated sister, her superior husband. And our house looking now like what, like what, I ask you? Like a goat shed on a back road in Calabria! What it says to them? I ask you, Vito!” The more upset she got, the closer she came to losing the Rules of Better Speech that she picked up at the Ladies’ Auxiliary seminars at church on Tuesdays.
Nonno’s voice was quiet but firm. He preferred to be called Ovid, or Signore Ciardi. Vito was too old country, Vito was too Esquilino, too down-and-out-in-Mussolini’s-Rome. Ovid was Vito turned backward, sort of, and the first vowel softened. To his wife he now became prophetic. The ceiling would be repaired. The guests would be delighted by this lovely house in Van Pruyn Place. They need not know how it had come into Vito’s possession. They need not hear that the ceiling had just collapsed. It would look rich as Rockefeller’s.
“Jenny and her man will smell the raw paint, Vito, they will smell desperation!”
“And if loose stone from top of house fall on their heads as they stand at front door, Bella? That would be better to happen? Buon Natale, riposa in pace?”
Laura could not hear any more of what Nonno Ciardi was saying to calm down his wife, but her voice dropped, pianissimo, until what carried up three flights of steps was only the urgency of her syllables.
Laura watched the snow make feathers upon her wall. The snow had a glow of its own. The afternoon darkened. Downstairs, doors opened and closed emphatically.
The girl thought: Doors have a language, too. They talk to each other.
The workers were returning materials to John Greenglass’s rusty old blue truck, probably. Even if Laura had stood and craned, she wouldn’t have been able to see it at the curb. The street too narrow, the house too high.
From below, Mary Bernice hissing. Her voice like the rasp of a match on sandpaper. (She smoked every night after washing up the dinner dishes.) “You’re wanted in the parlor, Laura. Your granny needs to speak to you.”
Laura waited on her bedspread until Mary Bernice called again, just to hear the increased impatience in the cook’s voice. Then Laura darted down two flights, slowing to a more ladylike pace as she approached the parlor. The cook was lurking with a beady expression. “Bring in this tea for me, will you? And Laura—I’m going to church tonight. You want to come with me?”
“You think I’m in need of grace, too?” said Laura’s words, but her tone said Nope.
“Laura,” cooed Nonna without looking up. She was flipping through the mail. Her ankles were crossed upon the new wall-to-wall, which still smelled of glue and resin. Laura examined her grandmother.
The old woman was worn out. Her hands trembled as she tore open the bill from the Consolidated Edison Company. Her lips pursed in worry. Who knew what troubles rested upon those stooped shoulders?
“Don’t stand there gaping like a chimpanzee. Close the door. There’s a draft with all that coming and going. My tea, please, and then sit down. I haven’t got all night,” said Nonna.
Actually the old grandmother was something of a bitch.
No, that was too intense, but Laura couldn’t rethink it now. She crossed the room, leaving footprints in the plush pile of the rug that Mary Bernice would eradicate tomorrow with the carpet sweeper.
“So much to try to manage at this time of year,” said Nonna. Laura waited. Nonna’s rhetorical practice was to review her schedule of troubles aloud before alighting on the one appropriate to her audience. “My sister Geneva and her mighty husband, Mr. Corm Kennedy, are coming for Christmas Eve. She’s your great-aunt. I’ve told you this.” Nonna had recovered her artificial upper-class diction, sort of.
“You sure have. Is Mr. Corm Kennedy related to our president?” asked Laura.
“I doubt President John Fitzgerald Kennedy would even know. He has had other things on his mind, what with all this Cuba annoyance. His is a large Irish family with a thousand cousins. But you must not ask Mr. Corm Kennedy about his relations. I’m told that’s rude.”
“Mary Bernice could ask him. She’s from Ireland.”
“Don’t interrupt, Laura. And don’t be nosy. Listen to me. Since Mr. Corm Kennedy is a new member of our family and my glamorous sister is trying to show him off, I want us to appear the equal to him. Good with the manners, perfect with the food. Sure in our feeting. Footing. Unashamed, Laura, because we have nothing to be ashamed about. Do you understand?”
“You’ve mentioned this before, Nonna. Every night for two weeks.”
Nonna sighed. “Hand me my wrap from the pouffe, please Laura, I can’t shake the chill. A wet snow, and wind? You wouldn’t believe. I could hardly see the curbstones on Lexington Avenue.”
Laura did as she was told.
“But to the moment at hand. My dear, I have some unsettling news for you.”
“Is it about Mama?”
Isabella Bentivengo Ciardi straightened her spine and fixed Laura with a steel pin of an expression. “I’ve told you if there is ever any news I will not keep it from you. There is no news.”
That was all that mattered; nothing else mattered. Then Nonna said, “We have found you a finishing school.”
“I don’t want to go back to school. I hate school.”
“You are too young to make up your own mind about that. In any case, it’s against the law for us to keep you home merely because your friends despise you.”
“They don’t bother to despise me, I’m not worth the effort. And they aren’t my friends. They just think I’m an idiot. They laugh at me. I’m not going back there.”