The Swan House (29 page)

Carl had his ear practically pinned to the radio, so I suggested, “Turn it up louder. We want to hear too.”

A commentator was explaining how the Mississippi governor, upon learning that a Supreme Court justice was ordering him to admit Meredith at once, had cried, “Never! We will not surrender to the evil and illegal forces of tyranny!”

Carl turned off the radio and shrugged. “Not gonna happen today, that's for sure. But next week, they say he'll be enrolled.” He smiled confidently and said, “Shore ain't fair to turn him away on the basis of race alone.”

Carl had never really talked to me much about civil rights, but he and Rachel launched into a discussion about the Freedom Riders from last year. Carl seemed pleased and fascinated that Rachel would be so interested. “My cousin was part of those rides last year,” he said proudly. “I went to most of those peaceful demonstrations in downtown Atlanta, ya know, letting the blacks eat at the same restaurants as whites. And have ya heard about all the stuff going on down in Albany? Even locked up Reverend King for a couple of weeks over the summer. My cousin's involved in all the demonstrations in Albany. I told him I'd go help out sometime. Someday, I even hope to meet Reverend King.”

He got an angry look in his eyes. “Don't know what'll happen with Meredith. I know what it feels like to be turned down for school. Miss Abigail tried to get me into a white high school for this year, but they wouldn't have it. Wouldn't dare hear talk of it.”

“Well, you know that since the Supreme Court's desegregation decision in 1954, only one school district in Georgia has desegregated, and that was here in Atlanta,” Rachel commented. “Last fall a school in our part of town took in black students. Caused quite an uproar.”

While listening to their conversation, I got my flute out and put it together. I had never really wanted to play the flute. Mama and Daddy thought every kid should have a musical background, and so, in the third grade, I'd chosen the instrument that looked the lightest and prettiest to me. Never mind that it took me two months of private lessons to even get a sound out of it. For three years I had struggled along with the flute.

Then, in sixth grade, I had met Rachel. If Rachel was book smart, she was also gifted with music. I'd never heard anyone else my age play the flute like she did. At the end-of-the-year banquet at Wellington, Rachel had stood up and played “The Carnival of Venice” from memory. Daddy had been so impressed that he'd signed me up with her flute teacher in seventh grade. Every Friday afternoon, Rachel and I rode together to Mrs. Hancock's house for flute lessons. We giggled and complained and acted like we hated those lessons.

Actually, I did hate them. I hated hearing Rachel play her scales perfectly, and I was jealous of the way she had already months ago finished the theory book I was struggling through. My legs shook and my stomach twitched as I listened to Rachel's skill. Then it would be my turn, and boy, was my teacher in for a letdown. That was what I thought. But to her credit, she never really compared me to Rachel. She did compare me to an off-key toad, though, and said my flute squeaked like a mouse.

When Rachel and Carl had finished talking about the civil rights movement, they immediately took out their instruments. Right away they started improvising. I sat back on the bed, my flute on my lap, enjoying listening to them and relieved to escape Carl's scrutiny. But he said, “Hey, Miss Lazy. What do you think you're doing? We're having a practice.”

Rachel and I were tuning our flutes when his aunt banged her way into the room and, with a disapproving look announced, “Carl, you'll have to go somewhere else to play. Those flutes are giving me a headache.”

“Yes, ma'am,” he replied politely. Then, after she'd left the room, he whispered, “She's in one of her grouchy moods today. Don't let it worry you.” He flashed his smile. “Anyway, I've got an idea. Come on, ladies.”

We left his house and followed him down the street past Oakland Cemetery to his high school, Fair Oaks. It didn't have any fancy entranceway or grounds like Wellington's. There was just a parking lot in front of a bunch of nondescript brick buildings. I noticed the trash that lay in front of the main door. But behind the buildings lay a football field that seemed to be in much better shape than the school buildings.

Carl motioned for us to sit in the bleachers. Then he stepped out on the field and started playing his saxophone, head tilted back and happy as a lark, marching—prancing, I'd call it—and twisting. Rachel and I were doubled over in hysterics.

“See how easy it is, girls,” he yelled up to the bleachers. “Nothin' to it.”

I'd never seen this side of Carl—the performer.

“He's adorable,” Rachel whispered admiringly.

We urged him to keep on marching, and he did, as if the whole two-hundred-piece band were out there with him performing for a halftime show. We were mesmerized. I think at different times, both Rachel and I had wanted to play in a marching band. At Wellington we had only an orchestra. A very well-known and respected orchestra, the only completely feminine one in the state. But seeing Carl having so much fun on the field brought back, at least to me, memories of attending football games with friends and applauding the marching band.

Finally a perspiring Carl came and joined us on the bleachers. He started making the sax moan again, the way he'd done for me. “Let's do some jazz, girls,” he said, lifting his eyebrows.

Seeing my baffled expression, he set down his saxophone, and he came and sat behind me in the bleachers and reached forward, holding his hands over my eyes and whispering in my ear, “Hear the music, Mary Swan. Hear it. Just let your fingers play a scale.” I could barely concentrate on anything except his smooth voice and the warmth of his hands over my eyes, but I tried to relax. “There you go,” he said as, trembling with a mixture of fear and anticipation, I let my fingers play around with the keys on my flute. “Now make it a minor key. That's right, Mary Swan. Mm-hmm. That's right.”

And by the time he let me go, I almost fell right back into his arms. Every cell in my body was screaming for more—more of his touch, of his time, of his music.

Ella Mae was waiting for us with a scowl on her face and her hands on her hips when we got back to church. “Sorry we're late,” I squeaked out, trying not to grin foolishly while inside I felt like flying.

So Rachel and I didn't say a word on the way home, but when we were tucked safely in my room with the door shut, Rachel grabbed me by the shoulders and said, imitating Ella Mae, “You're in a heap o' trouble, Swan.” Then she announced delightedly, “Carl is smitten too.”

“I told you he was nice. And cute.”

“And charming.” We simultaneously burst into a high-pitched scream.

“He's never kissed you, has he?”

“Are you insane? Of course not. Never. Never even thought about it, I'm sure.”

“I wouldn't be so sure.”

“He's not like that.”

“Like what? He's a man, isn't he? Same hormones as any other man. Believe me, Swan, he's thought about it.”

“What do I do?”

“What do you mean, ‘What do I do?'”

“I mean, is it okay to like two boys and for two boys to like me?”

“Of course it is!” Rachel stuck out her tongue and then laughed really hard. “What you do, Mary Swan, is enjoy it! You simply enjoy it!”

So I figured for the time being I'd follow her advice, because if there was anybody who knew about enjoying getting attention from boys, it was Rachel Abrams.

Chapter 14

R
obbie had called twice that week, each time right after football practice. But his game on Friday night had been one of the few played out of town, so I had not gone. And Saturday night he lamented that his whole family had to attend his great-uncle's eightieth birthday party. “But I'll see you at church,” he promised and sounded happy about it.

So instead of hiding in the bathroom as I had last Sunday, I met him at the back of the church after the service, and we walked out into the gardens.

“Congrats on the game,” I stammered, all of a sudden flushed with excitement. “How'd the birthday party go?”

“Boring.” He grinned, showing his dimples, and I saw that his cheeks were flushed too. “Poor Uncle Oscar has a hard time hearing, and he really isn't all there, so he never could get straight who had given him which gift. I think he received seven ties and four silk handkerchiefs.” We laughed together. “What'd you do yesterday?”

“Oh, me?” I knew I couldn't tell him about Grant Park. “Not much. Rachel and I went riding in the late afternoon. Took a trail down by the Chattahoochee. And then last night”—I made a face—“Jennifer Peabody joined us for drinks at the Magnolia Room, and Jimmy was absolutely awful. Rude. I, on the other hand, acted like a perfect lady. Daddy was pretty furious with me last week after we chased off Amanda Hunnicutt. So I just sat there and acted interested in Miss Peabody's endless chatter about the Junior League raising money for something.”

Then Robbie took my hand in his and looked straight at me with his topaz eyes wide and sincere. I thought he was going to ask me out again to the movies, but he didn't. He just said, “It's great to see you, Mary Swan. Do you think we could go out after the football game Friday night? I have to be there real early, but if your dad could drop you off, I'll take you home later.”

If I had been Rachel, I would have known whether to act aloof, seductive, or enthusiastic. But as Mary Swan Middleton, I just got a goofy grin on my face and said “Gee, that sounds great.” And I waved after him like a little kid saying good-bye to her grandma.

Late Sunday afternoon, after church and a meal at the club with Daddy and Jimmy and Grandmom and Granddad, and Amanda Hunnicutt unfortunately joining us for dessert, I needed time alone to think about what my mind was processing. I had to get to the Swan House.

I grabbed up my sketchpad and pencils and left the house. Back in the woods, with the flowering gardens in sight, I sat down. And although I wanted to think about Robbie and Carl, all I could hear in my mind was Miss Abigail talking about Someone who could make good out of bad and about white ladies from Buckhead loving those inner-city children. My pencil flew across the page, scratching and sketching something from inside my head.

The faintest tinge of fall kept the gnats away that afternoon in mid-September. From where I was sitting the mansion was almost out of view, but I could see the tumbling fountains, and if I listened carefully, I could hear the water splashing from one fountain to the next. Peaceful. That's what it felt like. Peaceful, when my mind was crowded with too many things: Miss Abigail's sad stories, kind white ladies, black hands covering my eyes, a kiss, Mama's struggles, a dare, a swan. Without realizing it, I started chanting verses from “Song of the Chattahoochee” while I sketched. “Out of the hills of Habersham down the valleys of Hall, I hurry amain to reach the plain, run the rapids and leap the fall. . . .”

I finally got up and tucked my sketchpad against my chest with the pencils clutched tightly in my hand. I retraced my steps on the well-worn path through the woods to my house. When I was safe in my room I fell onto my bed, opened the pad to the afternoon's sketch, and stared at it. The foreground held the cascading fountains, sketched fairly realistically. I sensed the flow of the water. Squatting on the steps to the right of the fountains was the figure of a black man. He was smiling and dipping his hand in one of the pools where a miniature swan swam. Embarrassed by the sketch, I slapped the sketchbook closed and went down to the second floor, slipping into Mama's studio. It was quite obvious to me that I needed inspiration from her
atelier
.

The wall with the built-in shelves beckoned to me. I counted the shelves. Six wide and four high, reaching all the way from floor to ceiling. These were big shelves, boxlike, the kind Mama could lean several yard-high paintings in. I had inherited my creativity and lack of organizational sense from Mama. I could almost hear her laughing with Trixie as she described her studio in perfect French.
“C'est la pagaille!”
A disaster area! Well, she'd been right.

A bottom shelf held her paints and palettes, all of which looked as if she had randomly tossed them inside, as someone might toss empty Coke bottles into a big trash can. Half of the tubes of paint lacked tops, so that the paint was caked on, hard and useless. The palettes, covered in rainbow colors, had apparently been stacked with wet paint on them, because several were stuck together. Another shelf held unused canvases, but most of them had smudges of paint from other projects on them.

One shelf was filled with sketchpads, lying one on top of the other as if Mama had thrown them inside in a hurry. I pulled two from the bottom of the stack and then plopped onto the floor. I flipped through the pages one by one. Mama had the habit of writing the date of when she started a sketchpad on the inside cover. The first one said 1955, and inside were several sketches of Jimmy when he was about six. The rest I recognized as other children whom Mama had eventually painted.

The other sketchpad was the one she'd used to sketch me as a little girl on the tree swing. Sweet Mama.
You said it was good therapy
to sketch me
. I had not understood how much that one sentence meant at the time, but now I was beginning to see it. Mama the artist and Mama the tormented soul. I studied the way she had drawn my face. I liked the way my cheeks had been round and ruddy then, healthy and full. I liked the way I could feel myself moving back and forth on the swing. And I especially liked realizing how much time Mama had put into the sketches before she ever put paintbrush to canvas. No matter what had been running through her head in those months, she had taken the time lovingly and painstakingly to sketch me in a dozen different positions on that tree swing. Finally she had created the one that embodied her Swannee, the one with my toes fairly puncturing the paper, so far were they flung out in front of me as I leaned back, clutching the rope swing and giggling.