“I do. I need to see you tomorrow.”
In a short while Maggie fell asleep. David reached across and took up her book from the bedside table. He recognized the cover of The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard, a Modern Library edition. The bookmark was a sheet from the notepad placed next to the telephone. He read, surprised to hear himself read aloud, in a whisper, at random from page 198: “When I returned to the City of Books I heard Monsieur Gelis and Mademoiselle Jeanne chatting — chatting together, if you please! as if they were the best friends in the world.”
The passage, of course, meant nothing; all David cared about was that he was reading next to Maggie in bed in a hotel in London. He knew that had he merely found The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard on the chair in the hotel lobby and read this passage, he would have closed the covers and set the book down for someone to retrieve. Yet when Maggie had, in the hotel bar, mentioned her college thesis on Anatole France, he vowed then and there to read every novel of his he could find.
He fell asleep too, and when he woke he heard Maggie speaking on the telephone: “Maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned this fellow at all, Dad.” The room held only the light from the streetlamps. Maggie had pulled the chair close to the French windows and was sitting with a blanket wrapped around her, facing the street. There was a pause, Maggie listening, then she said, “Far far far too soon to answer that, and trust me, it might not get answered at all, ever. On to the next subject, okay? How are the swans?” She listened for quite a while. “Poor swan,” she finally said. “Poor thing — what did Naomi say?” She listened again. “Well, I miss you, Pop. I hope to see you in a week and a half, okay? When I get back to Halifax, I’ll drive right out, how’s that?” Then: “Great, Dad. Okay. Love you. Bye-bye, now.” She set the phone on its cradle.
“Six hours time difference,” David said. “Or is it five? You did say your father was living in Nova Scotia, didn’t you?”
Maggie stood up, held the blanket around herself, sat next to him on the bed. “Yep, he still lives in Parrsboro, same village I was born in. I speak with my father as often as possible, David. I told you a lot in the bar, come to think of it. My lord, I told you a lot. I gave you an earful, didn’t I? That my mother died about ten years ago, all of that. And I know I told you my dad, William Field, caretakes an estate. But I failed to mention his great love, you might call it. His great love is the swans.”
“My own parents — they didn’t get along, to say the least. They both died the same year, 1979, three months apart.”
“I’m half orphaned, you’re the whole thing.”
“I’ve come to like swans again. I like looking at them along the Thames, or in a park, wherever.”
“Again?”
“Childhood story, Margaret. I actually was bitten by a swan when I was eleven years old. In Vancouver.”
“No kidding.”
“Actually, it had to do with photography, in a way.” Maggie turned away from David, as if allowing him some privacy in the recollection; she sensed a foreboding sadness in his shifted tone of voice; she held his left hand in her left hand at her breast. “My mother, Ardith, she used to have this phrase, ‘Your father’s away on business but still here in Vancouver.’”
“I take it your dad was stepping out.”
“He’d stay ‘stepped out’ months at a time. Anyway, one morning late in the school year, the telephone rings. My mom and I are eating breakfast. She worked at Belknap Adhesives. They made masking tape, glues and pastes. Anyway, the phone rings, my mom picks it up, I’m eating my cereal, and I hear her say, ‘All right, I’ve written that down. You understand I can’t say thank you.’ Then she slams down the phone. A few minutes go by and she says, ‘David, when you’re waiting for me after school, take some pictures of swans for me, will you?’ I had this Brownie Instamatic camera. Seldom without it. So that afternoon I went to Queen Elizabeth Park, near my school. I had about ten minutes until my mother picked me up. I took out my Brownie and started to snap pictures of the swans. That’s when I looked across the pond and saw my father. On a park bench. He was — how to say it? — smothering a woman with kisses. I took a picture of that. Maybe it was just an instinct to — I don’t know what — maybe preserve an image that proved my dad existed or something. I was just about to snap another picture when all of a sudden this one swan charges at me full throttle. It caught me on the thumb, then gave me a good solid bite above my eye. My mom comes running up. ‘Darling, are you all right?’ I said a swan just bit me. She saw it happen. So I took the opportunity to say, ‘When you say dad’s away on business but still in Vancouver, do you mean—?’”
“She meant what you saw on the park bench, of course,” Maggie said.
“The first time I saw that photograph, it was blown up a hundred times normal size, at the hearing for my parents’ divorce. My photograph as evidence.”
“Your mother sounded desperate, but she shouldn’t have done that to you is my opinion,” Maggie said.
“Weirder yet, the woman my dad was with? Mrs. Perec, wife of our school-bus driver. Every Wednesday Mr. Perec’d detour the school bus a few blocks and stop in front of his own house. I remember the exact address was 445 Klamath Road. Mrs. Perec would step from their house dressed in a bathrobe and slippers and bring Mr. Perec a cup of coffee. All the kids on the bus thought she was pretty.”
They lay there in silence. Maggie was still with the story. “Did you ever find out who called that morning?”
“Mrs. Perec. I guess she wanted it to end with my dad.”
“What a shit, your dad. Sorry, I shouldn’t make judgments like I do. It was probably a lot more complicated than that.”
“On the telephone before, you asked your father about the swans and you said, ‘Poor swan.’ Sounded like there was some kind of problem.”
“Oh, yes, well, a swan somehow got caught in a tangle of barbed wire. The swans don’t usually wander off too far from their pond, but this one did, and there must’ve been some barbed wire left over from something. Hidden for years maybe in the low brush, and the swan — who knows why? — the swan got into it. My dad said he heard a distress call. Hard to describe it, but swans can sound quite the alarm. He got a wire clipper, clipped the swan out and drove it to the veterinarian’s and woke her up. Her name’s Naomi Bloor. She’s very good at her work. Our swans are a great challenge to her. But she’s learned her way around them over the years.”
“How’s the swan doing?”
“Recovering. Bandaged up like a World War One casualty, my dad said.” Maggie pressed backward against David. “I often think of my father as a man who talks to swans all summer long. Growing up, I heard my dad consoling or reprimanding swans in ways that had some effect.”
“What kind of swans are they?”
“Mute swans. The classic-looking kind. Long, curved necks — not tundra swans. My father taught me the different kinds, from books, mainly. Their habits, migratory routes and such. It was a separate education, that’s for sure. It’s fair to say my dad’s a self-taught scholar on swans. Anyway, the ones he takes care of are called mute swans. ‘Leda and the Swan’ swans.”
“A girlhood spent with swans, then.”
“Don’t worry, I had human playmates too. I’m not — feral.”
“That’s disappointing.”
“When I was nine,” Maggie said, “I snuck around to the far side of the pond and skinny-dipped in and swam out there with a whole group of swans. That was absolutely forbidden me. Because they can get very very nasty, very aggressive. Guess I don’t have to tell you that, huh? But I did it anyway.”