A Wild Swan by Michael Cunningham Page A

leave the station; that although you’ll willingly board a different train, one bound for marriage and motherhood, that train may take its passengers to a verdant and orderly realm from which few ever return; that the few who try to return discover that what’s felt like mere hours to them has been twenty years back home; that they feel grotesque and desperate at parties they could swear had wanted them, had pawed and nuzzled them, just last night, or the night before.
    Or because you believe, you actually believe, you can undo the damage others have done to the jittery, gauntly handsome guy with the cigarettes and the Slim Jim, to the dour young subway boy, to the glib and cynical fast-talker who looks at others as if to say, Are you an asshole or a fool? , those being his only two categories.
    *   *   *
    Beauty was the eldest of three sisters. When the girls’ father went off to the city on business, and asked his daughters what presents they’d like him to bring back, the two younger girls asked for finery. They asked for silk stockings, for petticoats, for laces and ribbons.
    Beauty, however, asked only for a single rose, a rose like any that could have been snipped from a half dozen or more bushes not fifty feet from the family’s cottage.
    Her point: Bring back from your journey something I could easily procure right here. My desire for treasure is cleansed of greed by the fact that I could fulfill it myself, in minutes, with a pair of garden shears. I’m moved by the effort, not the object; a demand for something rare and precious can only turn devotion into errand.
    Was she saying as well, Do you really imagine a frock or hair ribbon will help? Do you think it’ll improve the ten or so barely passable village men, or alter the modest hope that I will, at least, not end up marrying Claude the hog butcher, or Henri with the withered arm? Do you believe a petticoat could be compensation for our paucity of chances?
    I’d rather just have a rose.
    The father did not comprehend any of that. He was merely surprised, and disappointed, by the modesty of Beauty’s request. He’d been saving up for this trip; he’d finally found a potential buyer for his revolutionary milking machine; he was at long last a man with a meeting to go to; he liked the idea of returning from a business trip as treasure-laden as a raja.
    That’s all you want, Beauty?
    That’s all.
    You’re sure? You’re not going to be disappointed when Cheri and Madeline are trying on their new frocks?
    No. I’ll love my rose.
    There was no point in telling him that Cheri and Madeline were inane; that the finery he’d bring them was destined to be worn once or twice, at village parties, and then folded into a drawer, to be looked at wistfully every now and then after their husbands and children kept them housebound; after the silks and crinolines were so peppered with moth holes they were no longer wearable anyway.
    A single rose it would be, then, for Beauty. She who possessed a sharper and less sentimental mind than her sisters. She who knew there was no point in acquiring anything she didn’t have already, because there was no future she couldn’t read in the dung-strewn streets of the village, in the lewd grins of the young chimney sweep, or the anticipatory silence of the miller’s boy.
    All right, then. A rose was what she wanted. A rose was what she would get.
    *   *   *
    The father, on his way back from his trip to the city (the meeting with the buyer had not gone well), stopped on the verge of a castle surrounded by lush gardens. He needed, after all, to pick a rose that grew close to the village, or else he’d have nothing for Beauty but a stem and a few withered leaves when he got home.
    Grumbling, annoyed by his daughter’s perverse and hostile modesty (but relieved as well that, unlike her sisters, she wasn’t costing him money