The Swan House (27 page)

“Well, I'm sure he'll come home, JJ, for heaven's sake. There's no worry.”

Jimmy's sour face sprouted tears. “No! He's never run away before. Somebody might try to steal him! We have to keep looking.”

Daddy, mad and flustered, shrugged, and I guess Amanda caught on because she left in a big huff, saying something about kids and dogs. And so the rest of the evening was spent searching for Muffin, whom Jimmy had actually hidden in the bathhouse. Two hours later, Jimmy just happened to find Muffin somewhere in the woods, and as far we could tell, Daddy never suspected a thing. We all ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for dinner.

But the next evening when he got home from work, Daddy called me into his study. “Listen, Mary Swan. I know exactly what you and your brother are trying to do. And it won't work. Do you understand?” His face had this strained look on it. Then he relaxed. “Swannee, there's nothing I wouldn't do for you and Jimmy. But honestly. Please don't embarrass me in front of visitors.”

“But they're just after your money, Daddy!”

He smiled at that. “Mary Swan Middleton. I do believe I am old enough and, I do hope, wise enough to take care of myself and my money.” Then he added, “And my dates.”

“It's too early for you to be dating, Daddy! You're a grieving widower!”

“Swannee, for goodness' sake, the last thing I need is for my teenage daughter to give me dating tips. Anyway, I'd rather talk about your dates. You've been out with Robbie three times now.” He got a faraway look in his eyes. “Do you like Robbie Bartholomew?”

So Daddy had been counting. At least he seemed to want to know. “Yeah, I like him. He's nice.”

“He's from a good Atlanta family. I've known his dad for years.”

I could tell he was slipping away into his thoughts, but I desperately wanted him to talk to me. “What does his dad do?” I asked, even though I knew perfectly well.

“He's in finance at the Trust Company. President of the Board at the Capital City Club.” He listed a string of accomplishments that did not impress me. Robbie would probably grow up to be just like his father, successful, a pillar of society, boring. In my head I could hear the strident moaning of a saxophone.

Daddy cleared his throat and rubbed his chin. “If your mama were here, I guess she'd tell you all kinds of things about dating. . . .” He let the phrase hang. “But, um, well, I trust you to be good, Mary Swan.”

I went over to Daddy and kissed him on the cheek. “You don't have to worry about me, Daddy. I'll be good.” I thought about Robbie's kiss. That had not been boring! Maybe there was hope for Robert H. Bartholomew, Jr.

Daddy seemed relieved and turned back to his papers, and I left the room without a sound. But I couldn't help but wish for a few more minutes of Daddy's undivided attention.

Chapter 13

O
n Saturday Rachel promised to meet me at Mt. Carmel after lunch, so I laid my flute case on the seat in between Ella Mae and me as I slid into the Cadillac that morning. Ella Mae eyed me rather suspiciously. “You gonna be playin' for us over lunch, Mary Swan? A solo or somethin'?” she teased. She knew how much I detested playing my flute in front of others.

“No,” I said casually. “Just with Carl later on. Rachel is coming down, too, after lunch.”

“Mmm-hmm. I see.” She was sitting up straight, hands gripping the steering wheel. I don't think Ella Mae ever felt perfectly comfortable driving. She never took her eyes off the road. “Gettin' along perty well with Carl, ain't ya?”

“Yeah. He's really nice.”

“You and him, you stay outta trouble, Mary Swan. Won't do for no white girl to be hangin' round too much with a black boy.” She sneaked a glance my way and frowned slightly. “Yore daddy trusts me with you down here, Mary Swan. You understand?”

I swallowed. “Of course I do, Ella Mae. You know good and well that I just go to his house and play with Puddin' and talk with Mike and James. And Carl. That's all.”

“Well, you keep it like that. 'Specially with Rachel coming down. You two together is always into mischief. Mmm-hmm. You is.”

So I considered myself as having been warned. But that didn't make the butterflies go away when we got to the church and Carl greeted me out in the yard, and it didn't keep me from glancing at my watch at least three times, wishing the line of folks waiting to be served would end. Usually I grabbed a plate of spaghetti once everyone had been fed and ate it in the kitchen with the other volunteers. But today, since I wasn't on clean-up duty, I went out into the big open room and sat down at a table across from Cassandra.

“Where's Jessie?”

“She's over there with her grandmama.” Cassandra pointed to the back of the room where several women were huddled around the baby.

“Which one is your mother?”

“Well, the one holdin' Jessie, of course.”

I squinted to get a good look at the woman. She didn't look more than thirty.

Ever since I'd been coming down to Grant Park, I'd been trying to figure out the way things worked in poor, inner-city Atlanta. I dared to ask Cassandra about it. “Do you think you'll get married to Jessie's father?”

“Married to him?” she giggled. “Ain't no way I'll be marryin' a rascal like her father. Un-unn.”

“You mean you don't even like him?”

“I like him okay. And with Jessie, I'm keeping a piece of him. Ya know what I mean?”

That startled me a bit, but I didn't let it show. “What did your parents say when they found out you were pregnant?” I prodded.

“Well, ain't seen my daddy since I was knee-high to a grasshopper. But, Mama! Well, she said jus' what Pastor James said. ‘Ain't right to be foolin' around, Cassandra. You goin' be bringin' a whole lotta trouble on yorese'f.' But I didn't pay her no neva' mind, 'cause she done got pregnant with me when she was fifteen.”

I tried to hide my surprise. No wonder her mother looked so young. She was.

“And it didn't bother you that you weren't married when you got pregnant?”

“Happens all the time round these parts.” She squinted at me and got this mischievous smile on her face. “Ya don't gotta be married, Mary Swan, to do what it takes to git pregnant, ya know.”

My face probably turned five shades of red. I changed the subject. “And your mom's taking care of Jessie so you can go back to school?”

“Well . . .” Cassandra shrugged. “If I wanna go back to school.”

“You don't like school, don't like to learn?”

“Nope. Boring as a Sunday sermon.” She clapped her hand over her mouth and whispered gleefully, “Can't let Miss Abigail hear me say that!”

“But you need to go to school.”

“Why? I already knows all I need to know about takin' care of a baby. Know how ta cook and change a diaper and stuff like that. Ain't gonna learn nothin' ta he'p me at that there school.”

I considered her statement. Wellington's unspoken motto was that we were the cream of the crop, being groomed for the best colleges. Radcliffe, Vassar, and Smith. I certainly wouldn't learn how to cook or change a diaper at Wellington.

“You got a boyfriend, Mary Swan?” Cassandra interrupted my thoughts.

I shrugged. “No. Not really.”

“Got your eye on somebody, though?”

I laughed self-consciously. “Maybe.”

“Well, I do too!” She leaned across the table and motioned with her eyes toward the kitchen. Then she whispered, “I got my eye on Carl. I sure do.”

My mouth went dry. “On Carl? Really?”

“Sure 'nuff, I do. So do a lotta other girls, though. Mighty fine boy, Carl. Smart, educated, goin' to college in a year, he is.” She grimaced. “'Course Miss Abigail watches him like a hawk. I guess if I'm gonna git me Carl, I'll jus' have ta go back to school. That'd sit right well with Miss Abigail. And I'd git Carl to be my man! Ain't ya seen how he looks at little Jessie? He's crazy 'bout my baby.” Then she leaned even farther over the table. “An' I'm perty shore he's takin' a likin' ta me too.”

I felt dizzy.

“'Course, Miss Abigail says that now that I'm a Christian, I need to stop foolin' around. Ya know what I mean?” she giggled.

I had a good idea what she meant, even though I'd just had my first kiss. I remembered how a senior a few years ago had quietly disappeared from Wellington. Later we learned she was pregnant. “So are you going to stop?”

She grinned again. “I'm gonna try. For right now, I'll try.”

Well, at least she's honest,
I thought. I really did not want to talk about Carl or about “fooling around,” so I asked her about something else that had been bothering me for a while. “Do you feel any different since you and Miss Abigail . . . since y'all talked together last month?”

“You mean after we prayed, and I asked Jesus in my heart?”

“Yeah, that's what I mean.”

“Well, shore I do. Heap o' difference. Got me my sins forgiven, got me a place reserved up in heaven. Not gonna let that ole devil be botherin' me no more. Yeah. I feel clean, Mary Swan. Clean in here.” She pointed to her heart. “And I know I gots Somebody lookin' after me and Jessie now. For real. The Lawd Jesus be lookin' out for us. I want Him to be in charge from now on.” She had such a strange, radiant smile on her face that I felt uneasy. I certainly didn't understand what she meant.

“But weren't you already a Christian? Didn't you go to church?”

“Shore did. Every Sunday. Even sang in the choir. But that didn't make me a Christian. I had to invite Jesus to come in. And I'm gettin' baptized next Sunday!”

“In my church we get baptized as a baby.”

“Ya do? Well, I ain't been baptized yet, but Miss Abigail says it's mighty important for me to do it. She says that the Bible says baptism is a symbol of what you's done in yore heart. Shows everybody in the church that you has asked Jesus in yore heart, that you want Him to be in control. So I'm gonna do it.”

Just then Carl came over and sat down next to me, and I saw right away how Cassandra's face brightened. I watched her schoolgirl flirting and the way he responded, and I wondered what I had stumbled into. Carl was the heartthrob of Grant Park. What in the world did I think was going to happen between him and me? He came from a place where young girls became mothers at fifteen and grandmothers at thirty, where you didn't marry but had a man's baby to keep a piece of him with you. Where there was no dream of anything beyond this squalid existence.

“What do you say, Mary Swan?”

“Huh?” I hadn't heard Carl's question.

“I asked if you brought your flute and if your friend was coming?” He was smiling at me that same smile, but I felt a bunch of rocks in the pit of my stomach.

“Yeah, Rachel will be here at two. I told her we'd meet her here at the church.” Then I slid away and left Carl and Cassandra to talk and laugh and flirt, and I found Miss Abigail in the kitchen.

“Can I talk to you when you have a second?”

She was wiping her hands on a dish towel. “I've got time now, if you want, Mary Swan.”

“It's a little private.”

So Miss Abigail took me up the stairs and across the hall into what she called the sanctuary. It was the first time I'd been in there. Compared to St. Philip's, where the sanctuary seated 1,200, Mt. Carmel was small. Kind of quaint. The pews were wooden with worn gray cushions, and there was a slot on the back of each pew for the hymnals and Bibles. The walls were painted white, and on each wall were big stained-glass windows divided into three sections, rising into an arch. The ceiling had wooden rafters across it. A piano stood at the front of the church to the left of a plain wooden pulpit. And behind the pulpit there was an alcove whose ceiling rose in a point. It was filled with pews for the choir and behind them, the biggest of the stained-glass windows.

We sat down on the front pew, and Miss Abigail closed her eyes and seemed to be meditating. Then she took hold of my hands and said, “What can I do for you, Mary Swan?”

“I want to know, I need to know, how this culture works. I don't mean the black culture, but this part of it. The poverty. The way they have families. Does anyone get married? Do grandmothers raise all the kids? What was Carl's family like? I want to know.”

Miss Abigail smoothed a few tendrils of hair away from her face and then ran her hands behind her, tightening the rubber band that held her hair in that long ponytail. “Poverty is a terrible thing, Mary Swan. So often it seems hopeless. You can't really imagine how some of these people live. Or maybe I should say survive, because it doesn't always seem like a life. An existence. A condemnation.” There was something in her voice that made me feel uncomfortable, something like a righteous indignation.

“The poor inner-city culture doesn't see morality the way you and I do, Mary Swan. The girls don't dream of a husband and a home and a good education for their kids. Their dreams are for survival. Sure Pastor James preaches abstinence, and I teach on sexual purity. And the mothers in the church talk about it with their children. But it's hard for a mother to tell her daughter to stop fooling around when she herself got pregnant at fourteen. Sex isn't the first thing I deal with down here. It comes later.”

“Cassandra said you told her that now that she's a Christian, she needs to stop fooling around.”

“I did. But that wasn't the first thing I told her. First I told her about Jesus and how much He loves her, just as she is. How much grace He's got for her, how He can turn bad into good. If you look at Jesus in the Bible, He didn't start with a list of do's and don'ts when He talked to the adulteress or the Samaritan woman. He asked them questions, good questions. And He listened and understood their need. Then He told about himself, of love and forgiveness and eternal life. It was only after He'd given the good news that He said, ‘Go and sin no more.'”