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But I failed to mention his great love, you might call it. His great love is the swans.”
    â€œMy own parents—they didn’t get along, to say the least. They both died the same year, 1979, three months apart.”
    â€œI’m half orphaned, you’re the whole thing.”
    â€œI’ve come to like swans again. I like looking at them along the Thames, or in a park, wherever.”
    â€œAgain?”
    â€œChildhood story, Margaret. I actually was bitten by a swan when I was eleven years old. In Vancouver.”
    â€œNo kidding.”
    â€œActually, 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.’”
    â€œI take it your dad was stepping out.”
    â€œHe’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—?’”
    â€œShe meant what you saw on the park bench, of course,” Maggie said.
    â€œThe 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.”
    â€œYour mother sounded desperate, but she shouldn’t have done that to you is my opinion,” Maggie said.
    â€œWeirder 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?”
    â€œMrs. Perec. I guess she wanted it to end with my dad.”
    â€œWhat a shit, your dad. Sorry, I shouldn’t make judgments like I do. It was probably a lot more complicated than that.”
    â€œOn the telephone before, you asked your father about the swans and you said, ‘Poor swan.’ Sounded like there was some kind of problem.”
    â€œOh, 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