The Swan House (21 page)

“You and your friend Rachel should bring your flutes down here sometime. You could play with my band.”

“You have a band? All your own?”

“Shore, Mary Swan. A jazz band.”

“I don't know much about jazz. And I can't improvise like you.”

“Aw, Mary Swan, you might have it in you if you tried.” Then he grinned mischievously. “'Course it's a known fact that we blacks have got jazz in the blood. Just runs in our veins. Know what I mean?”

“I wish I knew. I don't think you can teach someone to improvise.”

“Sure you can, girl! Anyway, you're already a master at improvisation. You told me yourself about making up those poems. That's what got you the Raven Dare, isn't it?”

“But that's different. I mean making up poems is easy for me. It's . . .”

“It's in your blood, flowing through your veins.” The way he looked at me when he said that made my face get all red. Mainly it was because our eyes met and locked, and it was as if he was daring me not to let him see inside my mind. I don't think Carl ever meant to flirt with me. But I'm pretty sure that at that moment something passed between us, something that Rachel would call “chemistry.”

“I'll bring my flute the next time if you want,” I said quickly.

He didn't answer but went back to playing the saxophone, swaying his body to the left and to the right and leaning his head back and making his instrument sing the way it was supposed to. When he stopped, his skin was glistening with sweat. He held out his saxophone and asked, “Wanna try it?”

And before I could answer, he'd put the strap around my neck, stood behind me, and started placing my fingers on the keys. Then he chuckled and said, “Blow, Mary Swan!”

I knew that reed instruments took a different kind of embouchure than woodwinds, so I wasn't a bit surprised that the first sounds that came out of the horn were horrible squeaks, which set Carl to chuckling even harder. But eventually I got out an A and then a B and then a C.

“Good goin', girl!” He patted me on the back.

That suddenly made me feel even hotter and a bit dizzy. I told myself it was from blowing so hard, but I knew it was from something else. I handed the sax back to Carl and said, “I'd better be going. What time is it anyway?”

Carl just smiled at me and said, “I'll walk you back to the church. Ella Mae'll have my hide if I let you walk these streets alone.”

We stepped back out in the sun, and I blinked my eyes several times to adjust to the fierce light. Puddin' was jumping rope with a friend, and for a moment I stood and listened to them chanting as they jumped.

“Einy, meeny, miny moe, catch a rabbit by his toe, if he hollers let him go, einy, meeny, miny moe.”

I went over to her, and when she stopped, I ran my fingers along her braids and kissed her cheek and said, “See you soon, Puddin'.” She dropped her jump rope and gave me a quick hug.

Carl fell into stride beside me. I didn't say a word.

“Somethin' the matter?”

“No. Not at all. Just thinking about how well you play the sax. You've got a lot of talent for music. Just like Rachel.” He smiled at that. “I'll see if I can get her to come next week, and we'll bring our flutes.”

But what I was really thinking was that I liked Carl; I liked him a lot. And I kept repeating in my mind, as if I were talking to Daddy,
But we're the same. We like music and kids and books. We're the same.

But, of course, we weren't the same at all. And when I waved good-bye to him that afternoon, I swallowed hard and had to force myself to find something to talk to Ella Mae about while she drove me home, so I wouldn't be remembering the way Carl had looked at me with his head tilted back and his eyebrows slightly raised and a puckered smile on his lips.

Chapter 10

S
chool started on Tuesday, September fourth, the day after Labor Day. I hadn't been on the campus of Wellington since the night Rachel and I climbed the wall and searched for the riddle. When Ella Mae drove me through the gates that morning, I felt an odd mixture of excitement and heaviness. My life had been so simple and uninterrupted on June first. Today the administration building's columns did not look ghostly at all as I hopped out of the car, book satchel in hand, and waved good-bye to Ella Mae. I fingered one of the fluted columns and walked into the garden area where the ape-man statue stood. I stuck three fingers in his mouth, then leaned on the statue and cried. Everything had changed!

Dear, dear Rachel appeared beside me, resting a hand on mine, draping an arm over my bent shoulders, and led me into the assembly hall. That's how we filed into the big auditorium where morning assembly was held—all of us in our cotton blouses and gray jumpers with our heads turned down, as though the weight of our dead parents was pressing down on our shoulders.

So the morning of the first day of school at Wellington in the fall of 1962 was very subdued. That's the only word for it. All of us had seen each other at the funerals, but it did something awful to the spirit of the school when we got together and realized that thirteen of us had lost loved ones in the crash. The usual silliness and gossip and chatter were replaced by a common grief.

The morning assembly was a memorial service, and each of us who had been robbed because of Orly went forward and received yellow roses. Lanie Bradshaw, the girl in my class who had lost both of her parents, walked down the aisle in front of me. Lanie had always been considered a tomboy and was a real athlete, with short-cropped jet-black hair and a thick, compact build. But walking behind her that morning, I thought she looked misshapen, her shoulders slumped and her jumper hanging loosely. I wanted to reach out and give her a hug and ask her how she was doing,
really
. But I didn't because I was concentrating hard on not sobbing out loud. Not that it would have mattered, because everyone else was crying too.

Dr. Stadlander, the principal, a stout woman of German descent with an impossible accent that we loved to imitate, began to speak. “Girls. This tragedy will be used to make us stronger. We will pull together and embrace those who are grieving. Wellington . . .” I shut my eyes, wishing she would stop reminding me of what I'd tried all summer to forget. But of course, I would never, we would never, forget.

By nine-fifteen all the tears were dried, and we left the auditorium in little clusters. Just ahead of Rachel and me, Patty Masters launched into a story about one of her infamous capers. “Y'all aren't gonna believe what happened to me the other day.”

When she talked, her big brown eyes grew wide, and her blond eyebrows lifted high on her forehead, and her softly curled blond hair, which fell practically to her waist, swished from side to side.

“I was at the A&P with my mom and had the grocery cart loaded full, sweating up a storm. All of a sudden my bra snapped and got all tangled somehow in my shirt. . . .” Patty, all five feet eleven of her, was well developed, to say the least. But much greater than her physical size was her incredible sense of humor and timing, and at that moment, we needed her genius as never before. The tension evaporated in the stuffy auditorium, and ten of us around Patty began to laugh hysterically, the kind of laughter that makes everyone else stare and then laugh too, so that pretty soon everyone was laughing. Most of the girls had no idea what they were even laughing at, but we were all thankful for the excuse to turn our thoughts from morbid memories.

Wellington was an elite private day school. The boarding program had ended two years earlier when Lilly Bawden was caught smoking in the bathroom for the fourth time. She wasn't smoking cigarettes. The Honor Council decided that boarders brought nothing but trouble and extra expense, so the boarding program, which had never housed more than fifteen girls from any one class, was done away with. Now fifty-nine socialites-in-training made up the junior class, with about the same number for each of the classes from sixth grade through senior year. Four hundred thirteen girls in all. Four hundred thirteen girls in gray jumpers and white cotton button-down blouses and white bobby socks and saddle oxfords.

But although we were all dressed alike, we did not in any way all look the same. I was just average in every way, but some of those girls were what we called “cream of the crop.” I did have long fingers, which were good for playing the flute, I guess, but I bit my fingernails whenever I was nervous. The beautiful girls, some of them at least, wore makeup and paid twenty dollars to get their hair cut at that fancy new salon at Rich's. Rachel said I was paranoid about my looks, but she didn't know what it was like to be so terribly plain and skinny in a school filled with remarkable brains and beauty. She couldn't possibly understand.

But I think she understood another type of paranoia, even though she wouldn't admit it: paranoia over religion. Wellington had a reputation to uphold, so getting in was rather difficult—unless, of course, your family had a lot of money, which many of the families did. But Wellington being a Protestant Christian preparatory school, first choice was given to what we called the WASPs—white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. So no matter how rich a Jewish girl's family was, what mattered most were her grades. At least that's what Rachel always said, and knowing all the Jewish girls in my class, I had to agree with her. They were smart.

The school was considered one of the top in the Southeast, so good Jewish families, concerned for their daughters' education, chose Wellington. There was no rule against it. They simply had to agree to comply with the school etiquette. Chapel every morning. Prayers in homeroom. Mandatory Bible classes—Old
and
New Testaments. I guessed the parents figured their girls could hear a little about Jesus for the sake of their education. But it wasn't exactly easy to be Jewish at Wellington.

There was this unspoken thing, this difference that I could never really understand. Being a WASP placed you on a higher social level at Wellington than being a Catholic or a Jew. Well, no one ever said that, but we understood it, as if it were as much a part of the dress code as our gray jumpers and black-and-white saddle oxfords.

And if Catholics and Jews had a hard time getting into Wellington, blacks were not even considered. In the spring of 1963 a hot story in the news would be the fact that Reverend Martin Luther King's five-year-old son's application had been turned down at another private school. In the end, the school relented because its church-based funding required it. The church adopted a definite policy saying that segregation on the sole basis of race was inconsistent with the Christian religion. But that was still months away, and to my knowledge, no black family had ever tried to enroll their daughter at Wellington.

We were all friends with each other at Wellington, but each girl knew her social position. Sometimes it seemed that the Catholic girls felt like second-class citizens, and the Jewish girls felt almost like outcasts. Except for Rachel Abrams. She never cared one iota for stupid traditions, and she refused to be bullied by some unwritten rule. And anyway, as she told me frequently, her family were not practicing Jews. They were staunch atheists.

By the end of that first day, our love for gossip returned, and the buzz was all about the Back-to-School Ball and who had invited whom and what we'd be wearing on Friday night. Will Weston had asked Rachel, and I was hoping we could double-date, because I really had no desire to be stuck in a car with Herbert and Virginia again. Although the prospect of attending the ball with Robbie Bartholomew made me blush with pleasure, I think my greater excitement was for the fact that Rachel had agreed to go to Grant Park with me on Saturday. With my thoughts bouncing back and forth in my brain like a tennis ball between Robbie and Carl, I didn't know how I'd make it through the rest of the week.

The day before the ball, I laid four different outfits out on my bed and tried to figure out which one to wear. Rachel had already given me her opinion, and when Ella Mae came into my room, dragging the vacuum cleaner behind her, I thought I'd get her advice too.

“Which of these dresses will make me look beautiful, Ella Mae? I mean, as beautiful as someone who looks like me can be?”

Ella Mae glanced at the dresses and frowned. “Don't ya be worryin' none about bein' beautiful, Mary Swan. Uh-un. No, ma'am.”

Mama always said that if and when Ella Mae said more than two sentences at a time I should pay attention. “I don't always understand what she means,” Mama confided with a laugh, “but I know this. It's important, and she's usually right.” Mama said Ella Mae wasn't what I called book smart—I don't even think she could read—but she had been through a lot, and according to Mama, “That grows you up fast and gives you character.”

Ella Mae's husband, Roy, was small and skinny and had the reddest eyes. He drank a lot and couldn't hold down a job, so Daddy sometimes had him come out and do yard work, but it always ended up with Ella Mae chasing after him and saying, “Git yorese'f ta work, Roy!” And twice Daddy had caught him nipping at his bottles of gin, and once he was asleep by the pool with a girlie magazine.

Anyway, when Ella Mae started harping on me about what was beautiful, I guessed I should at least give it some thought.

“Ain't no blessing to be born beautiful, Mary Swan, I tell you it ain't. That kind of thing don't have nothin' to do with who you are really, deep down inside. Ain't nothin' you's done to deserve beauty. It jus' happens.” Ella Mae spoke with such conviction that it seemed almost like a speech she had given somewhere before. “But we's a twisted world, chile. Jus' 'cause someone's got a perty head, we's ready to fall down and worship 'im, without him ever provin' he has anything worth worshippin'. And often it's the opposite. We make them beautiful people into some kinda celebrity without payin' one bit o' attention as to how they lives their lives.”