Here in the city lives a prince
whose left arm is like any other man’s and whose right arm is a swan’s wing.
He and his eleven brothers were
turned into swans by their vituperative stepmother, who had no intention of
raising the twelve sons of her husband’s former wife (whose pallid, mortified
face stared glassily from portrait after portrait; whose unending pregnancies
had dispatched her before her fortieth birthday). Twelve brawling, boastful
boys; twelve fragile and rapacious egos; twelve adolescences—all presented to
the new queen as routine aspects of her job. Do we blame her? Do we, really?
She turned the boys into swans,
and commanded them to fly away.
Problem solved.
She spared the thirteenth child,
the youngest, because she was a girl, though the stepmother’s fantasies about
shared confidences and daylong shopping trips evaporated quickly enough. Why,
after all, would a girl be anything but surly and petulant toward the woman
who’d turned her brothers into birds? And so—after a certain patient lenience
toward sulking silences, after a number of ball gowns purchased but never
worn—the queen gave up. The princess lived in the castle like an impoverished
relative, fed and housed, tolerated but not loved.
The twelve swan-princes lived on
a rock far out at sea, and were permitted only an annual, daylong return to their
kingdom, a visit that was both eagerly anticipated and awkward for the king and
his consort. It was hard to exult in a day spent among twelve formerly stalwart
and valiant sons who could only, during that single yearly interlude, honk and
preen and peck at mites as they flapped around in the castle courtyard. The
king did his best at pretending to be glad to see them. The queen was always
struck by one of her migraines.
Years passed. And then… At long
last…
On one of the swan-princes’
yearly furloughs, their little sister broke the spell, having learned from a
beggar woman she met while picking berries in the forest that the only known
cure for the swan transformation curse was coats made of nettles.
However. The girl was compelled
to knit the coats in secret, because they needed (or so the beggar woman told
her) not only to be made of nettles, but of nettles collected from graveyards,
after dark. If the princess was caught gathering nettles from among tombstones,
past midnight, her stepmother would surely have accused her of witchcraft, and
had her burned along with the rest of the garbage. The girl, no fool, knew she
couldn’t count on her father, who by then harbored a secret wish (which he
acknowledged not even to himself) to be free of all his children.
The princess crept nightly into
local graveyards to gather nettles, and spent her days weaving them into coats.
It was, as it turned out, a blessing that no one in the castle paid much
attention to her.
She had almost finished the
twelve coats when the local archbishop (who was not asked why he himself
happened to be in a graveyard so late at night) saw her picking nettles, and
turned her in. The queen felt confirmed in her suspicions (this being the girl
who shared not a single virginal secret, who claimed complete indifference to
shoes exquisite enough to be shown in museums). The king, unsurprisingly,
acceded, hoping he’d be seen as strong and unsentimental, a true king, a king
so devoted to protecting his people from the darker forces that he’d agree to
the execution of his own daughter, if it kept his subjects safe, free of
curses, unafraid of demonic transformations.
Just as the princess was about to
be burned at the stake, however, the swan-brothers descended from the smoky
sky, and their sister threw the coats onto them. Suddenly, with a loud
crackling sound, amid a flurry of sparkling wind, twelve studly young men,
naked under their nettle coats, stood in the courtyard, with only a few stray
white feathers wafting around them.
Actually…
…there were eleven fully intact
princes and one, the twelfth, restored save for a single detail—his right arm
remained a swan’s wing, because his sister, interrupted at her work, had had to
leave one coat with a missing sleeve.
It seemed a small-enough price to
pay.
Eleven of the young men soon
married, had children, joined organizations, gave parties that thrilled
everyone, right down to the mice in the walls. Their thwarted stepmother, so
raucously outnumbered, so unmotherly, retreated to a convent, which inspired the
king to fabricate memories of abiding loyalty to his transfigured sons and
helplessness before his harridan of a wife, a version the boys were more than
willing to believe.
End of story. “Happily ever
after” fell on everyone like a guillotine’s blade.
Almost everyone.
It was difficult for the twelfth
brother, the swan-winged one. His father, his uncles and aunts, the various
lords and ladies, were not pleased by the reminder of their brush with such
sinister elements, or their unskeptical willingness to execute the princess as
she worked to save her siblings.
The king’s consort made jokes
about the swan-winged prince, which his eleven flawlessly formed brothers took
up readily, insisting they were only meant in fun. The young nieces and
nephews, children of the eleven brothers, hid whenever the twelfth son entered
a room, and giggled from behind the chaises and tapestries. His brothers’ wives
asked repeatedly that he do his best to remain calm at dinner (he was prone to
gesticulating with the wing while telling a joke, and had once flicked an
entire haunch of venison against the opposite wall).
The palace cats tended to snarl
and slink away whenever he came near.
Finally he packed a few things
and went out into the world. The world, however, proved no easier for him than
the palace had been. He could only get the most menial of jobs. He had no
marketable skills (princes don’t), and just one working hand. Every now and
then a woman grew interested, but it always turned out that she was briefly
drawn to some Leda fantasy or, worse, hoped her love could bring him back his
arm. Nothing ever lasted. The wing was awkward on the subway, impossible in
cabs. It had to be checked constantly for lice. And unless it was washed daily,
feather by feather, it turned from the creamy white of a French tulip to a
linty, dispiriting gray.
He lived with his wing as another
man might live with a dog adopted from the pound: sweet-tempered, but neurotic
and untrainable. He loved his wing, helplessly. He also found it exasperating,
adorable, irritating, wearying, heartbreaking. It embarrassed him, not only
because he didn’t manage to keep it cleaner, or because getting through doors
and turnstiles never got less awkward, but because he failed to insist on it as
an asset. Which wasn’t all that hard to imagine. He could see himself selling
himself as a compelling metamorphosis, a young god, proud to the point of sexy
arrogance of his anatomical deviation: ninety percent thriving muscled
man-flesh and ten percent glorious blindingly white angel wing.
Baby, these feathers are going to
tickle you halfway to heaven, and this man-part is going to take you the rest
of the way.
Where, he asked himself, was that
version of him? What dearth of nerve rendered him, as year followed year,
increasingly paunchy and slack-shouldered, a walking apology? Why was it beyond
his capacities to get back into shape, to cop an attitude, to stroll
insouciantly into clubs in a black lizardskin suit with one sleeve cut off?
Yeah, right, sweetheart, it’s a
wing, I’m part angel, but trust me, the rest is pure devil.
He couldn’t seem to manage that.
He might as well have tried to run a three-minute mile, or become a virtuoso on
the violin.
He’s still around. He pays his
rent one way or another. He takes his love where he can find it. In late middle
age he’s grown ironic, and cheerful in a toughened, seen-it-all way. He’s
become possessed of a world-weary wit. He’s realized he can either descend into
bitterness or become a wised-up holy fool. It’s better, it’s less mortifying,
to be the guy who understands that the joke’s on him, and is the first to laugh
when the punch line lands.
Most of his brothers back at the
palace are on their second or third wives. Their children, having been cosseted
and catered to all their lives, can be difficult. The princes spend their days
knocking golden balls into silver cups, or skewering moths with their swords.
At night they watch the jesters and jugglers and acrobats perform.
The twelfth brother can be found,
most nights, in one of the bars on the city’s outer edges, the ones that cater
to people who were only partly cured of their curses, or not cured at all.
There’s the three-hundred-year-old woman who wasn’t specific enough when she
spoke to the magic fish, and found herself crying, “No, wait, I meant alive and
young forever,” into a suddenly empty sea. There’s the crownletted frog who
can’t seem to truly love any of the women willing to kiss him, and break the
spell. There’s the prince who’s spent years trying to determine the location of
the comatose princess he’s meant to revive with a kiss, and has lately been
less devoted to searching mountain and glen, more prone to bar-crawling, given to
long stories about the girl who got away.
In such bars, a man with a single
swan wing is considered lucky.
His life, he tells himself, is
not the worst of all possible lives. Maybe that’s enough. Maybe that’s what
there is to hope for—that it merely won’t get any worse.
Some nights, when he’s stumbled
home smashed (there are many such nights), negotiated the five flights up to
his apartment, turned on the TV, and passed out on the sofa, he awakes, hours
later, as the first light grays the slats of the venetian blinds, with only his
hangover for company, to find that he’s curled his wing over his chest and
belly; or rather (he knows this to be impossible, and yet…) that the wing has
curled itself, by its own volition, over him, both blanket and companion, his
devoted resident alien, every bit as imploring and ardent and inconvenient as
that mutt from the pound would have been. His dreadful familiar. His burden,
his comrade.