David had his own deep affection for Stefania and Izzy. He had got much biographical information about them from Maggie, who considered them grandparents. And he’d got certain things firsthand when he and Maggie stayed in the Port Charles Hotel on Islay during their honeymoon. The Tecoskys’ house was nearby, on Upper Loch Indaal. “We’ve come to love Islay,” Isador said one afternoon at tea. “We can’t possibly consider Poland home, though we were born there. Stefania always wanted to live by the sea, but this Scottish island? Plenty of swans, plenty of sea birds, plenty of open space, but no synagogue! That’s our little joke. After the war we wandered two years. Scotland was the first to take us in. We never forget this. Not for one day do we forget this. Memory and prayer, what else is there for us at this age? Do you see photographs of any children on our tables? No. No children. Our final resting place will be Nova Scotia. We agree on this. Many Jews went to Halifax when the war ended, through Pier 21. There were many helpful Jewish organizations waiting. In 1948 we purchased two cemetery plots in Halifax. We love Islay, but we’ll finally rest in Halifax. Who could have predicted such a thing?”
In late May of 1986 the Tecoskys had visited the estate. They had come specifically to look in on William. Worried as they were about his condition. During their weeklong stay David received compliments on his upkeep of the five-bedroom main house. Each morning they had breakfast with William in his bedroom, the largest on the ground floor. David brought them tea, toast, butter, jam, and slices of melon on a tray, and left the room. Late morning, Stefania and Isador took the first of two daily naps in the master bedroom upstairs.
On their last day at the estate, David brought back the swans from the children’s zoo in Halifax. The Tecoskys had waited to see this. In late autumn and winter, the swans, each identified by a thin leather collar with numbered metal tag, were featured in the indoor exhibit, which had heated pools. In exchange, the Tecoskys’ swans were kept to their accustomed diet and had a pool separate from the permanent ducks, geese, and loons. Also, Parrsboro’s veterinarian, Naomi Bloor, whom Stefania and Isador much admired and trusted, was allowed a monthly appraisal of the swans’ health, paid for by the Tecoskys. Naomi kept a precise itemization of her expenses — gas receipts, hotel bill — on the rare occasions when she had to stay overnight in Halifax, plus the regular bill for her services.
David drove up in the estate’s Dodge pickup, specially fitted with padded trailer sides and a wire cage. He let the swans loose. They headed directly for the pond, distributing themselves in four preening armadas. Their statuesque beauty. Each of their heads forming an elegant cursive’S. The invisible rudders of their feet. “Since they can’t fly,” Isador said, “this is their great moment of freedom, I always think.”
They all three watched the swans a while. “I’m remembering, just now,” Stefania said. “When I was a girl, swans — from where, who knows? Norway or Sweden possibly. As a girl they would fly over my village.”
William’s Recovery
WILLIAM RECOVERED at a steady, impressive rate, his doctor had said. This was Dr. Rasmussen, at the hospital in Truro. Rasmussen had received all of William’s medical information from London and took over. Thirty years earlier he had delivered Maggie. He was an old-style general practitioner, their family doctor. Even though she lived in Halifax, Maggie continued to consult with Dr. Rasmussen and get his second opinion on any small concern she ran past her Halifax physician, covered by Dalhousie’s insurance policy.
William underwent surgery in London on August 21, 1985, which took the better part of seven hours. Before Maggie had arrived from Halifax the day after the accident, the surgeon, Dr. Moore, spoke to David about William’s condition. “His larynx is the biggest problem,” he said. He had just stepped from the operating room and was exhausted. They stood in the waiting room. “His voice might return, but it won’t be the same voice. The best I can come up with just now is, he might sound like the actor Peter Lorre.”
“I know what you mean,” David said.
“Just to utter a word or two may take a long time. Much effort. He won’t have to use an electronic enhancer — that’s what we call it. You’ve no doubt seen people holding amplifiers to their throats in order to be heard. That’s positive news. He might retain a polyphonic aspect.”
“Meaning?”
“It would be like, oh, I don’t know, a ventriloquist without a dummy, but still managing two voices. Things will change over time, as his voice attempts the right calibration. I must warn you, Mr. Kozol, there’s an outside chance the voice disappears altogether. We can’t predict. We don’t have the science for it. Mr. Field will need extensive voice therapy. The reasonable hope is that, given time, people will be able to understand him without difficulty.”
“His other injuries?”
“Extensive. Four cracked ribs, fractured left arm. We’re monitoring closely for internal bleeding and the like. But we think he’ll do well on the mend. The pelvic bone’s quite shattered. He won’t need a new hip. But it’s still a long road home.”
William was sixty-one. Still broad-shouldered, he was just shy of six feet tall. He had white hair cut short, white eyebrows (his hair had turned completely white after the accident), deep crow’s-feet at the corners of his dark blue eyes, tight smile and often a day or two’s growth of white whiskers. “Your father’s a man of substance and poise,” Janice once said, rather objectively, to Maggie when she was fifteen. “Also witty and a good mind and something of a stormy temper, though I have to say, the storm usually stays offshore. Still, you can see it brewing. You’re aware of it.”
He was born and raised in Edinburgh, and lived there up until the age of nineteen. After a year of technical school in Boston, he returned to Scotland, where he worked as a tradesman — bricklayer, carpenter and occasional dairyman. At the age of thirty-three, on a sojourn to Gairloch to look at the cliffs and soaring sea birds, he met Janice McNeill and six months later they married there. They kept a small flat in Edinburgh, where Janice apprenticed in bookbinding. One day a letter from a Scottish friend living in Halifax included a one-paragraph advertisement for a caretaker’s position, published in the Halifax Herald. The friend, Richard, wrote: “Patricia and I took it upon ourselves to motor out to a lovely little village called Parrsboro and speak on your behalf to the owners, named Stefania and Isador Tecosky. We sang your praises and they were interested. So there, we’ve put in a good word and here’s their telephone exchange. They are of the Hebrew persuasion. What’s more, as blessed fate would have it, somehow after the war they landed on Islay out in the Hebrides! And that’s the very reason they need a caretaker, because they’re determined to return to Islay to live now.”
After reading this letter, and without further need of encouragement except their own sense of possibility, William and Janice stayed up the entire night, drinking coffee and whiskey, talking about a new life. At dinner the following evening they made their first transcontinental telephone call. The conversation took about fifteen minutes. The Tecoskys agreed to provide airplane tickets (“A surprising amount of faith and generosity for just one telephone call,” William commented), and a month later picked up William and Janice at the airport in Halifax.
The Fields took up temporary residence in the guesthouse. With their little savings, Janice straightaway bought tools and materials, and with the Tecoskys’ permission repaired a few of the worse-for-wear books in the library, including a volume of Heinrich Heine’s poems and, as Janice remarked to William in bed, “sacred Hebrew prayer books.” In 1956 there were only eleven swans in residence. Over the next two weeks William demonstrated that he could handle these birds. He also oversaw the complicated task of installing a new septic system, replaced rotted sections of the wraparound porch’s railing, took care of other odds and ends, some assigned by Isador, others suggested by himself.