The Swan House (13 page)

But when the three boys were gone, he pulled himself to his knees and crawled over to me, heaving as he did. “Come on, Mary Swan,” he rasped. “We gotta get outta here quick. Real quick.”

His face was all bloody and swollen, and he was holding his side, but he managed to help me up. We limped out of the cemetery, both of us trembling as we scrambled down the street toward Mt. Carmel.

“You liked to git us killed, Mary Swan,” Carl panted. “Don't ya know not to argue with rednecks, girl?”

“They were going to hurt you, and I was scared.” I looked up at him with one of my eyes shut. I could feel it beginning to swell.

He gave a weak chuckle. “If that's how you act when you're scared, I don't wanna git around you when you're feelin' real mean!”

“You know what they were planning to do?”

“Yep. And I bet you they're right now reporting somethin' to the police.”

I don't know if I felt more angry or scared, but finally I said, “I'm sorry, Carl. It's all my fault for wanting to see Mama's grave. I didn't realize it was so awful here. Has that ever happened to you before?”

“Happens all the time round these parts.”

“You mean you're used to it?”

He just nodded.

“But they could kill you!”

“Lotsa people git killed around here, Mary Swan. Either fighting over a girlfriend or trying to steal, or like with those boys—someone who just hates us because our skin is black. You learn to take a few punches, Mary Swan. If you fight back, those boys'll come back with knives and guns and a lotta friends.”

By this time we'd reached the church and gone inside to the bathrooms. No one was around except for Ella Mae and Miss Abigail. With one look at us, they both came running.

“What in the world—”

“Some rednecks found us at the cemetery. Wanted to rough me up a bit, but Mary Swan wouldn't let 'em. She was determined to take all the brunt herself.” He tried to smile.

“My, my, chil'un,” Ella Mae kept repeating as she and Miss Abigail got the first-aid supplies and started cleaning our wounds. “I tol' ya not to go there, Mary Swan. Ain't safe.” She grunted with disapproval. “Ain't safe.”

I didn't say anything but kept looking at Carl and thinking about how he could have run off and gotten away. Left me with those white boys. But he didn't. And I wanted more than ever to be his friend.

As I went to sleep that night, it was one of the first times I could remember when I wasn't thinking about myself. I kept seeing that pudgy white face and Carl's terrified black one, and I was thinking how comfortable I was cuddled in my bed and of how glad I was that Daddy hadn't been around to see my bruised face when I got home. If I wanted, I could close my eyes and forget about all the events of the afternoon. If I wanted, I didn't ever have to go down to Mt. Carmel Church again.

But I was especially thinking that for Carl and Mike and James and poor little Puddin' and probably everyone else who lived on that side of town, the fighting was just a way of life. They got used to it somehow and survived amid the violence. It was really my first peek at another reality, at something dark that made me shudder. Cruelty. I'd never really seen cruelty the way I had seen it that afternoon. I decided it would be so much easier to never go back to that part of town, to never be confronted with that part of life.

But of course, I wasn't really the type to look for the easy way out. As I've said before, I seemed to have a knack for stumbling into adventure. So as I fell asleep thinking about Carl and Ella Mae and Miss Abigail and those three redneck boys, I imagined myself as the Raven. Not only of Wellington Prep School, but also as a big black bird that sat on a tombstone in Oakland Cemetery and warned the good people of the bad ones who were lurking somewhere just out of sight.

Chapter 6

T
he next morning after Carl and I had had the run-in with the redneck boys, I woke feeling the way you must feel after you've drunk a pint of bourbon. My head was throbbing, and when I looked in the mirror, I let out an involuntary scream. The right side of my face was puffed out as if I were hiding Jimmy's baseball in my cheek, and the skin was a grayish, purplish blue. My right eye was really swollen. I crawled back to bed. Fifteen minutes later, Daddy knocked on my door.

“Mary Swan. Time to get up for church.”

I groaned. I'd forgotten it was Sunday.

“Mary Swan,” he repeated, cracking the door.

With the covers pulled over my head, I mumbled, “Daddy, I feel awful, like I'm gonna throw up.”

“What is it, Swannee?”

I could tell he was coming to the bed, so I said quickly, “Oh, it's nothing, Daddy. Just my time of the month, you know. I'll be all right.”

Daddy was always embarrassed to talk about women's things, so he left the room quickly, saying, “Well, you just stay home today, Swannee. Jimmy and I'll go on to church. You'll be okay alone?”

“Fine!” I said a little too brightly, but he didn't seem to notice and left the room.

I waited in bed probably thirty minutes, until I heard the car go down the driveway. Then I got up, pulled on my overalls, and went downstairs. In the kitchen I gulped down a glass of orange juice and two aspirins. Ten minutes later, with sketchbook and charcoal pencils in hand, I headed through the woods to the left of the house.

There were several well-worn trails in the woods leading to the Swan House, trails that I had trampled with Mama when I was little and had made my own through the years. These were my woods, a long, luxurious hyphen between life at home and life in a dream. Sometimes I saw gray squirrels or brown rabbits scurrying along near me, and once I'd seen a little red fox, and another time a deer. The trees felt like my friends, so familiar were they to me. The thick-barked pines that shot straight to the sky and the majestic hardwoods, hickories and oaks and wide-leafed magnolias and sumac and dogwoods; all of them formed a protective canopy with their leaves far, far above me, a canopy that became a multicolored umbrella in the fall.

Today everything was green. I sat down on my favorite log, staring at the bright green moss at my feet. I listened intently to the caw of a blue jay and the delicate call of the whippoorwill, and I thought I could hear a woodpecker knocking his beak into the trunk of a tree. Not far away, water gurgled through a stream.
These woods are peaceful, dark
and deep, but I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep
. I repeated the lines from one of my favorite poems by Robert Frost in my mind. Peaceful, yes. Only these woods,
my
woods, were infused with light today, light that filtered down through the leaves, light that I could almost reach out and touch as it sparkled on a sunray. A few minutes later, I stood up and followed the trail to where it burst forth onto the green lawn of the Swan House.

As I've already said, the Swan House was a beautiful old mansion. It had been built for the Inman family in 1928 by a very famous architect named Philip Trammel Shutze. Mama knew all about it. She told me that Mr. Shutze had spent several years in Italy studying architecture and had won some sort of fancy prize. When he came back to the States, his work was influenced by his time in Italy. Mama loved Italian architecture, so she was always explaining things about her favorite house to me. I could still hear her saying in her soft Southern accent, “The Swan House was modeled after a mix of graceful Italian villas and Palladian country houses. See how clean and symmetrical it is? It reflects a return to Classicism and away from the more ornate Victorian architecture.” That had never interested me much, but now, with Mama gone, I wished I had listened to her better.

What I loved was the front of the house. When I stood on Andrews Drive and looked at the mansion, well, it almost took my breath away. First you saw two cloverleaf fountains near the bottom of the hill and a long ivy-covered retaining wall that cut across the property horizontally. Then a terraced lawn spread out long and wide in front of you on a gradual slope that led two hundred yards to the mansion. And then there was the mansion itself. Mama said it was built of cement blocks that had been stuccoed to look like the smooth, light gray stone of the eighteenth century. The house rose three stories high with six long windows on the first floor and eight on the second floor and one round one on the third. On either side of the round window were cornices, each with a statue on top, and behind the statues and over a little were the two chimneys.

But the best part were the cascading fountains that led to the horseshoe-shaped stairway at the front. Cascading fountains! There were five tiers of round stone basins holding water, starting with the smallest at the top and descending in ever-larger circles as the water cascaded from one basin to the next.

As a child I liked to sit in the woods, brushing away the gnats and contemplating the mysteries of the house. After all, I was in a way its namesake. Mary Swan. It was a fine name, rich in symbolism, Mama used to say, for which I took her to mean later that even I, the ugly duckling, might someday be transformed. But what she meant, she used to explain to me, was that my name embodied, like my portrait, all the fine subtleties of my personality, and that, like the swan, beauty and grace were part of me. “Mary Swan is just looking for herself in my house,” Mrs. Inman had said. Maybe someday I would find myself there.

When I was twelve Mama bought me a sketchbook that looked a lot like hers. She also gave me some fancy drawing pencils and instructed me to “enjoy.” After she died, I was sorry that I'd never let her know just how much I had enjoyed sketching. I could sit for hours sketching the fountains and the stately mansion. The Inmans never minded a bit, and one of the maids had commented years ago, “You's jus' like yore mama,” which had made me feel proud.

I walked up the long yard to the boxwood garden on the right of the house. Mr. Shutze designed this garden to be a green garden, like one found in Rome, since Atlanta was on the same latitude as Rome. Two mimosa trees sat right outside a huge screened-in porch, their fuzzy pink flowers giving off a sweet fragrance that wafted up to guests in the summertime. Beside the mimosa trees grew the gardenia bushes, in full bloom before me, their waxy, creamy white flowers almost heavy with a luxurious odor. I stopped, closed my eyes, and breathed in the fragrances. In the middle of two islands of grass, surrounded by liriope, white wisteria grew with a perfume of its own. And there was crepe myrtle all along the retaining walls with their bright pink and purple blooms. And of course throughout the garden were neatly trimmed balls of boxwood.

I sat down on the stone bench at the end of the garden, staring back at the porch and the rest of the house. I felt wild and exotic because on either side of me rose these two columns, made to look like Greek temple ruins. A stone eagle, wings spread wide, was perched behind me, and slag hung from the columns to give the appearance and the feeling of something in a garden from Pompeii. Interspersed along the stone walls of the garden sat huge stone urns with the same slag dripping from their lips. In the spring and summer, buxom impatiens made a hedge under the crepe myrtle. And in the fall they were replaced by delicate, sweet-faced pansies. There were boxwoods surrounding the front of the house too, and on either side of the cascading fountains were big clay pots filled with oleander and other blooming plants.

I loved to try to recreate different spots in the garden on my sketchpad. Those sketches were never very good, but I left them in the pad nonetheless. I had grown up seeing Mama toss out sketches like the trash, impatient and childish in her mood. I didn't want to repeat that gesture, even if no one else would ever see my drawings. In my mind, they were something created out of my spirit, and I had a desperate hope that they were proof that I had inherited a smidgen of Mama's talent. Now, with her dead, I knew that I would save them forever.

So this morning, for the first time in several months, seated on that stone bench in the garden, I began to sketch. I didn't have a diary, which was popular at the time with girls my age. Somehow it was easier for me to draw what I felt. A tiny breeze occasionally ruffled the stagnant air, causing a corner of my paper to turn up. I welcomed the refreshment. I was sketching the screened porch on the side of the Swan House with the blooming mimosas and lavish gardenia bushes. I must have sketched for two hours without realizing it. While I sketched, I thought about Carl and those awful boys and how scared I'd been and how right now, sitting in this garden, that all seemed like a nightmare. I was warm and happy, and surely none of those things had really happened. I closed my eyes momentarily, choosing to forget the inner city and remember my adventures inside the Swan House.

I remembered standing as a young child in the great open hallway, called the rotunda, and bending down to touch the black and white squares on the smooth, cool floor. “That's Italian marble, Swannee,” Mama had cooed. “And see the staircase with a bronze balustrade and walnut treads. It looks like it's floating!”

But of course, as a little girl, I had not been impressed. Instead, I had exclaimed gleefully, “There's a swan!” pointing to a shadow on the wall.

“Good for you, Swannee. You're right!” Mama had congratulated. “See, it's coming from the curving spires of the crystal chandelier. Mrs. Inman planned it that way, I think, so that at certain times of the day, when the sun hits the chandelier in just the right way, it casts a shadow on the wall that looks like a swan's neck.”

I nodded happily, and off I went to find the swans. To the left of the rotunda was the library, but to get to it you passed under a thick archway with what Mama called a coffered ceiling, which meant all kinds of fancy stuff was carved into it. But as I strained my neck to look, I found no swans. On a desk in the library, a swan finial sat on a little wooden box. I picked it up and liked its smooth, metal feel. But Mama frowned and motioned with her eyes for me to put it back in its place.