Michael Cunningham - A Wild Swan - And Other Tales

He couldn’t cry. He had no more apparatus for that.

Before he and Rapunzel left for his castle, she made a quick excuse, ran back into the shanty, and took her hair out of the bureau drawer in which she’d been keeping it all the past year, wrapped in tissue, as safe and sequestered as the family silver.

She hadn’t looked at it, not once, since the witch took her to the shanty.

What if it had turned drab and lusterless …

what if it was infested with mites …

what if it simply looked … dead … like an artifact in some small local museum …

But there it was, two twenty-foot-long red-blond skeins, intertwined, shining, healthy as a well-fed cat.

She slipped the hair into her bag before leaving with the prince.

They live in the castle now. Every night the prince lies beside her and caresses her hair, which she keeps by the bedside …

which she washes and perfumes …

which she pulls out discreetly, as the prince finds his way into bed.

He buries his face in her hair. Sometimes she wonders — why doesn’t he ask how the hair still grows from her head? Didn’t he see it severed by the witch? He can’t possibly imagine it’s grown back in only a year.

But he still, with his eyeless face swaddled by her hair, lets out (though less and less often) that terrible howl, that protestation of revelation and loss, that mewling tentative as a kitten’s yet loud as a leopard’s growl.

It seems he’s either forgotten or prefers not to remember. So she never reminds him that the hair is no longer attached …

she never reminds him it’s not a living thing any longer …

she never reminds him it’s a memory that she keeps intact, that she maintains in the present, for him.

Why would he want to know?

Once, in time, a prince lived in a castle on a knoll, under a sky brightened by the royal blue of the harbor. Arrayed along the slope that descended from castle to harbor was a town in which carpenters made widely coveted tables and chairs, and bakers baked cakes and pies that people traveled some distance to procure. Every morning, the local fishermen hauled in nets full of sparkling silver fish; every night the smell of grilling fish filled the air. The avenue that skirted the harbor was lit by cafés and taverns, from which music and laughter were gently wind-borne throughout the town and into the forest, where hares and pheasants paused occasionally to listen.

When the prince turned eighteen, he was married to a princess from a nearby, less prosperous kingdom; an inland kingdom built on a river centuries dry; a place where the chalky soil produced only cabbages and parsnips and other such hearty but uncompelling vegetables; where the cafés were all closed by nine o’clock and the local artisans produced nothing but coarse, heavy woolen blankets and jerseys, which were offered optimistically as the best defense against the icy winds that blew from the glacier on the mountaintop.

The princess’s hand was sought for the prince by the prince’s father, the king, as protection against the day when the princess’s kingdom sent its soldiers — scrawny and weak from their meager diet, but all the more dangerous for their endless feelings of deprivation — bearing bows and longswords, into the verdancy and abundance of the kingdom on the harbor, and declared it rightfully theirs.

The princess’s father agreed, in part because he had too little confidence in his own starved and sullen army, and in part because the princess in question, the eldest of his three daughters, the one most lacking in traditional charms, had received no other offers by the age of twenty-two, but was required by law to be married before marriage could be permitted either of her younger sisters, both of whom (it struck the king as a cruel joke) were lithe and lovely.

The marriage did not go well, at first. The prince recognized his duty, and performed it. The princess did, as well. The princess, being other than beautiful, needed no delusions about how a deal had been struck, how she had been foisted off on a husband who would, she believed, carry out the perfunctory marital duties and then set about on his true amorous vocation with chambermaids and duchesses and the occasional harlot, smuggled in from town.

She was, as it turned out, mistaken.

Although, during the wedding (which was also the occasion of their first meeting) and immediately after, he struck her as posturing and false — a prince who seemed to have been inexpertly instructed in the ways of princes ( Hold your head a little higher, no, not quite that high; speak in a commanding tone … No, that doesn’t mean shout…) —he soon proved not to be, as she’d expected, deceitfully confident about the skills he lacked. He was handsome, far handsomer than she, but his beauty was milky and ephemeral, moist-eyed; he was one of those delicate boys of whom, by the time he’d turned fifty, others would whisper, “You wouldn’t believe it, he was once such a pretty boy,” in tones of scandalized satisfaction.

But, more unexpected … he was so nervous, so unsure, that he could not imagine himself as king, though his becoming king one day was inevitable as mortality itself. All of which he confessed to her, immediately, on their wedding night. It did not seem to occur to him that a fear might go unspoken, that anxiety could be masked.

He, for his part, was initially disappointed, but soon surprised by her, as well.

When she first appeared to him, on their wedding day, her bridal finery, however artful, could not disguise her heftiness, the great dome of her forehead or the stunted apostrophe of her nose. She might have been a barge, steered by her father with the steady determination of commerce along the cathedral aisle. This, then, would be the face, these would be the mannish shoulders and the breadth of hip, he’d be seeing, daily, for the rest of his life.

And yet, on their wedding night, when they were finally alone together in the royal bedchamber … Let’s say she could not have been the virgin that tradition and propriety demanded her to be. She couldn’t have invented tricks like that, untutored. Who knew how many stableboys, how many pages, she had pushed down onto haystack or secluded lawn?

He liked not only the fleshly revelations — he who was, in fact, as virginal as she was supposed to be — but the evidence that she had been ill-behaved. He liked as well his first sight of her nakedness. She was stocky but firm, her body all hillocks and white, satiny risings. On that first night she told him, unembarrassed, what to do, and he, being inexperienced, was glad to obey; he who faced a future of issuing commands, of others looking at him questioningly, waiting for him to make the decision, every decision, every time.

The king died soon after, trampled on a hunt by the very horse he’d considered his truest companion. The prince was, to his horror, made king three weeks before his nineteenth birthday.

She fell into love with a strange sense of powerlessness, as if she and her husband had contracted the same disease at the same time. She looked forward to the mornings, seeing him groggy but sweet upon awakening (he liked to be held, just for a few minutes, before getting out of bed and attending to his kingly duties); she liked talking to him at night, after the duties had been dispatched, about everything, from the small particulars of the day to his love of a local poet, recently deceased, from whose work the new king could quote, at length. She was surprised (and oddly, if only briefly, disappointed) to find that she’d been wrong about the chambermaids and harlots; that he actually intended, every night, to return to their bed; that he did not cease to delight in her willingness to command ( Hold still, relax, I know it hurts a little but give in to it, pain in moderation has its pleasures…)