The Swan House (31 page)

We were at the Band Hut, and Rachel had taken her seat as first flute with me right beside her, when she whispered, “Hey! What about Carl? He can drive, can't he? And he's your second assistant. He's supposed to help. Ask Carl.”

Mr. Fogel, the orchestra director, started tapping his wand, as we called it, on the music stand, which meant silence and quick, so I just winked at Rachel. A date with Robbie on Friday night and time with Carl on Saturday and the possibility of a long drive in the country with him in the near future. Things were looking up. All I had to do before the weekend was find a time to talk to Trixie.

On Wednesday afternoon, I invited Lucy to go swimming with me one last time before we closed up the pool for the year. Trixie was sitting in a lounge chair reading an issue of
Vanity Fair
, periodically glancing up to comment on a dive Lucy had made. I saw my opportunity and pulled a lounge chair over beside hers, where she was tanning just perfectly.

I tried to look interested in the magazine, but Trixie didn't seem to notice, so finally I just blurted out, “Do you know Mama and Daddy's friends who live at a place called Resthaven?”

She lifted up her bright pink straw hat so I could see her face. “I beg your pardon?”

“Do you know where Resthaven is?”

Adjusting her leopard-spotted sunglasses, Trixie acknowledged, “I've heard of it, but I've never been there. Not sure who owns that place. Did you ask your father?”

“Yeah, but I told you, whenever I start talking about Mama he gets so uncomfortable and elusive. It's just that I found this sketchbook in Mama's studio with all these sketches of this great big brick house. She called it Resthaven. But Daddy won't say a word.”

Trixie looked pale all of a sudden, as if someone had come by and wiped off her tan with a washrag. “Then don't bother him with it, Mary Swan. He's grieving in his own way.”

“That's what I'm doing. Letting him grieve. And that's why I'm asking you.”

Trixie looked miserable. “I really think you should leave it alone, Mary Swan.”

“But why? Mama obviously liked the place. Are the people who live there murderers or something?”

“Of course not. It's not what you think, is all.”

“Well, then, explain it to me, Trixie. Please.”

“It really should be your father. . . .”

“He won't.”

She took a deep breath and called out to Lucy, “Great dive, sweetie. Absolutely perrrfect!” Then she turned her attention to me. “Resthaven isn't somebody's private home. It's a place, a place where you go when you're . . . when you're sick.”

I sat back, feeling a little quiver in my tummy. Trixie had just confirmed my suspicion. “You mean Mama went there because she was sick?”

Trixie nodded cautiously.

“Sick in the head, is what you mean, isn't it, Trixie? Resthaven is a place for nutty people.”

“Stop it, Swan. No. Listen. Resthaven is a private institution where people who are sick—depressed—can go to get better, to be helped, to be away from everything for a while. It's really a wonderful place.”

“And Mama went there in 1951 and drew all those pictures of the place.” I thought about that. “How long did she stay there?”

“A month. Maybe a little longer.”

I ventured on carefully. “So that was where I went to visit when I was a little girl. Daddy took me. I remember.”

Trixie nodded.

“And did she get better?”

“For a while.”

“You mean she went back?”

“Swan, your dad needs to tell you about all this.”

“But he won't!” I said so emphatically that Lucy popped her head over the side of the pool and asked, “What's wrong, Mary Swan?”

“Nothing, Luce. Everything's fine,” Trixie sang out.

“Did Mama go to Resthaven more than once?” I decided if I asked the questions in a way that she could answer with a yes or no, maybe Trixie would be more willing to divulge the information.

She nodded.

“More than twice?”

Another nod.

“For a month each time?”

“Yes.”

“But that's impossible! I don't remember her being gone!” In my mind I was calculating Trixie's confession and weighing it against the seven sketchbooks. They matched up. But how could they? “The only time she went away for very long was when she was at art exhibitions!”

Now Trixie looked completely disconsolate. But she didn't have to say another word. Suddenly the whole thing got crystal clear, clearer than the turquoise water in the swimming pool.

“Mama never went to art exhibitions, did she?” I accused. And not giving Trixie time to answer, I continued. “Why would he lie? Why did Daddy lie? Why did he say she was going to show her paintings when she was really just going to a place for crazy people?” Hot tears burned my face.

“Swan, whatever your dad did, he thought he was doing the best thing for you and Jimmy. . . .”

“Well, he was wrong! Dead wrong!” I exploded. “He lied so that I'd have to hear the truth from a drunken boy at my first dance! And piece it together from one of Mama's sketchbooks! I hate him! I hate him!”

And to keep Trixie and Lucy from seeing all my tears, I jumped up and dived into the pool and swam under water for as long as I could, until finally I burst to the surface, gasping for air.

Trixie's horrified expression somehow pleased me. I swam fourteen laps without stopping, then threw my arms across the hot pavement. “It's okay, Trixie. Thanks for telling me. I'd have found out soon enough. I'm not a complete idiot, you know.”

At last I'd found the thing that would make me paint, make me get beyond the simple sketchpad and to the easel. Anger. Anger, no, fury, made me paint. I locked myself in Mama's studio on Wednesday afternoon after Trixie and Lucy left, dragged an easel across the floor to the windows, grabbed a palette and a handful of brushes, and placed a canvas on the easel. My strokes were so forceful and out of control that I thought I might punch my fist through the canvas. I didn't know what I was painting, but I did know that I had to get this pain, this awful, hideous, all-engulfing pain, out of my soul and onto the canvas.

From time to time little phrases from Mama would come back to me. She'd said things like
“One color at a time, Mary Swan. Use contrasting
colors. Opposites. Mix the paints on the palette and dab them on the
canvas and have fun. Just have fun. Get the idea and then give the details
later. That's what's so great about painting—you can always cover amistake.
Always.”

Poor Mama. If only she had known how
unfun
this was for me at that instant. How painting was my attempt at expressing the insanity I felt, the brokenness of my family, the disappointment with my dad. But somewhere inside, as I experimented with the tiny brushes and the thick wide ones and every color of paint on the palette, the anger dissipated, and I became engrossed in my work.

Two hours must have passed before I put down the paintbrush for the last time. The colors on the canvas resembled absolutely nothing, but it didn't matter. That afternoon I had felt a thrill when I held the paintbrush in my hand. Maybe Rachel felt like this when she held her flute or Carl when he played his saxophone or Miss Abigail when she snuggled a child to her breast. The feeling of “At last! At last! This is what I was meant to do!”

For me, on that horrible afternoon of yet another tragic revelation, I felt a warmth stronger than the momentary tingles, something deep down and satisfying. What I'd always wanted to be true, and what I had always suspected but been much too terrified to admit, had just been confirmed. I was made to paint. When I closed my eyes, I could almost feel Mama there behind me, looking over my shoulder, laughing in the lighthearted way that meant she was happy and saying, “It's good, Swan. Really good.”

Chapter 15

E
arly the next evening, September twentieth, I was home alone. Jimmy was still at football practice and Daddy at the office. The phone rang.

“Swan, quick. Turn on the news. You've gotta see this.” It was Rachel, adamant.

So I ran to the den and flipped on the TV to Channel 5, and all I could see was what looked like a lot of college students yelling something. The anchorman was concluding his report, saying, “So despite promises from Governor Ross Barnett and orders from President Kennedy, James Meredith was not permitted to register for classes at the University of Mississippi today.” There on the screen a young black man was being escorted by a policeman down a short flight of steps while a crowd of what the commentator said were two thousand white students chanted, “Glory, glory, segregation.”

I imagined Carl with his ear glued to the radio, listening with a sinking heart to the news. James Meredith wasn't going to be registered tonight, that was for sure. It scared me to see the anger on the students' faces and hear them chanting in their loud, obnoxious way. I wondered what Carl was feeling right now, what the rest of the black community in inner-city Atlanta felt.

Even if I'd had the courage to call him, I would never have been able to bring up the newest info on the Raven Dare or the possibility of his driving us to Resthaven.
“Sounds awful silly to me, Mary Swan,”
he had said the first time I mentioned it. He was right. It was just a stupid, silly tradition. But it was tearing apart my world with every bit as much power as the angry students and the stubborn government were tearing apart the dream of racial equality of James Meredith and Carl Matthews and every other civil-rights-minded person in the whole country.

Watching the news report made me feel worse than ever. James Meredith hadn't even opened his mouth. Just his simple presence had inspired hatred in two thousand students. Judged and sentenced simply for being black. I understood what it meant to be judged; only it worked out pretty well for me. Where I lived, you only had to say your last name or the name of your street or what school you went to, and everybody thought they knew everything about you. The list was always the same: rich, well-bred, good family, fine education, successful father.

Crazy mother
.

“It's not fair!” I said out loud to no one. Nothing was fair.

Trixie rang the doorbell a few minutes later, and when I let her in, she grabbed me up in a hug. “Sweetheart, Mary Swan. I've been worried about you all day. How are you?”

I shrugged.

“I shouldn't have told you. Any of it. It's my fault, sweetheart. I'm sorry.” Then she took both of my hands in hers and looked at me as if I were a child and implored, “Please leave it all alone, Mary Swan. It isn't worth it. You can't change anything now. Leave it alone. Forgive your father and get on with life. All that isn't important. What's important is that you were and are loved.”

I didn't have the strength to argue with her. Anyway, I'd gotten what I needed from her, even though it had cost me another part of my soul to get it. Scribbled on a piece of paper in my room was the address of Resthaven Sanatorium, located near Dillard, Georgia, five miles south of the North Carolina state line.

I called Rachel back when Trixie left and told her what I thought about life at that moment. “It's not fair. It's awful. Awful for the blacks.”

“Of course it's not fair. Not fair for the starving Africans or the persecuted people in Communist China or in Russia or for the folks who woke up one morning last August and found a wall had been built down the middle of their city of Berlin and they were separated from their families. It stinks. I think about it a lot.” She paused. “Maybe it's because I'm a Jew. Maybe it's because my mother's family all died in the concentration camps. Murdered, Mary Swan. Good, decent, smart people murdered because they were Jews.

“Think about what happened right here in Atlanta just four years ago. Remember the bomb that blew up the temple on Peachtree Street? Remember how Ralph McGill wrote that great article that blasted the hatemongers?”

I did remember, although I'm sure that Rachel, being Jewish, had that image of the destroyed temple seared into her mind. Ralph McGill was the controversial editor of the
Atlanta Constitution
who had written an editorial after the bombing. The article had later earned him a Pulitzer Prize.

Rachel was saying, “He called all decent citizens to face the facts and said, ‘When the wolves of hate are loosed on one people, then no one is safe.' It has happened throughout history. And it's scary and terrible. No, it isn't fair, and James Meredith and all the other blacks in the South are going to keep having to learn it the hard way. The way they have all their lives.”

With the pensive, almost bitter mood she was in combined with my despondency, I didn't figure we'd be good for anything that night. But I had to tell her about my conversation with Trixie. “You know what really isn't fair, Rach? You know what stinks to high heaven? Daddy lied to us. All those trips Mama went on weren't to art exhibitions. She went to a sanatorium. That's what I learned from Trixie, and I tell you it stinks.”

That took a few seconds to sink in, and then Rachel, for once sounding repentant and almost docile, said, “Gee, I'm sorry I suggested you talk to her.”

We never even mentioned the whole Resthaven bit to Carl, because the Meredith issue filled the news right up until the end of September, and when I saw Carl on Saturdays he was different, not his usual happy self. I think he got to watch the news on TV at Miss Abigail's house. Anyway, James Meredith was refused the right to register about three times, and every time the crowds of students and just a lot of other whites would yell awful things.

Finally the army or the National Guard or something had to come in, and there was this horrible riot where two people were killed while Meredith was being hidden and guarded by plain-clothed marshals. And hundreds of white people chanted racial slurs and “Two-four-one- three, we hate Kennedy!” and all the while the president thought things were going well, and he came on TV and said so, and it wasn't until later that we saw the reports of the riot. But Meredith finally did get registered on the first of October.