The Swan House (19 page)

Sometimes guys went inside to order, but women couldn't go inside. That night Robbie ordered from the curb, telling Flossie Mae, “We'll have a naked dog, a regular C dog, one naked steak, one glorified steak, two orders of strings, an order of rings, two frosted oranges, and two PCs.” That was Varsity lingo, which translated meant, a plain hot dog; a chili dog; a plain hamburger; a hamburger with mayonnaise, lettuce, and tomato; two milkshakes made out of frozen orange juice and vanilla ice cream; and two cups of plain chocolate milk, served over ice.

“Pick up in Snellville,” belted a voice over a loudspeaker, and a waiter ran over to the part of the parking lot by that name. There were different names for each section, names like Techwood and Morningside and Buttermilk Bottom, places that really existed around Atlanta.

Robbie smiled that Boy Scout smile, and Virginia Lawson and Herbert Thomas held hands in the backseat.

“Flossie Mae's the smartest colored guy I ever knew. He ain't bad at all for a Negro,” Herbert laughed.

I bristled and shot him a look that said
You jerk
! But I didn't say a thing.

When Flossie Mae came back with the order, I smiled at him and said thank you, but I don't think he noticed. He ran off yelling, “What d'ya have?” to another car.

It had never before made one bit of difference to me that all the waiters were black, or that we mocked the way they talked and made crude jokes behind their backs. But tonight it suddenly mattered.

“Since when are you so kind to colored boys, Mary Swan?” Herbert asked with a sneer.

I was boiling inside while Robbie distributed the food.

“Let's drop it, Herb,” Robbie said a little nervously.

Soon Virginia and Herbert and Robbie were all laughing about some silly joke, but Robbie kept watching me out of the corner of his eye. I hardly said a word. I just nibbled at my hamburger and slurped the frosted orange.

It wasn't until after Robbie had let off Herbert and Virginia that I spit out what was bothering me. “Do you hate Negroes?”

“No, should I?”

“Of course not! What I mean is, do you treat them bad and call them names?”

“You pick a fine subject for a first conversation, Mary Swan.”

Suddenly I felt extremely unconfident and foolish. “Sorry. Never mind.”

“No, doesn't bother me. Fact is, I've never thought too much about it. Lou Ann has worked for us for almost as long as I've been alive, and so has Danny. They're practically like family.” He made a face and squirmed. “Tell you the truth, I probably am nice to the ones I know and not so nice to the others. But I'd never act like Herbert. He's just like that. Don't let it bother you.”

I almost said, “But it
does
bother me,” then decided against it. We didn't talk much while he drove me home. But I was thinking hard. I wanted Robbie Bartholomew to like blacks if he was going to be my date to the Back-to-School Ball.

When he dropped me off at the house, I jumped out of the car and waved back, saying “Thanks” before he ever had a chance to open his door.

He smiled his Boy Scout smile, shrugged, and waved back. “See you soon, Mary Swan.”

Daddy had left the porch light on. If it had been Mama, she would've been waiting at the window, watching. As it was, Daddy was holed up in his study. I peeked in the door and said, “I'm home.”

Daddy was bent over a stack of papers. He looked up, letting a smile erase the worn look, and asked, “How'd it go?”

“Fine.”

“Fine. That's all?”

“Yep. That's all for tonight.” I kissed him on his bristly cheek and ran all the way up the stairs to my room, flopped on the bed, and grabbed the phone. Rachel and I talked for an hour about Robbie and Carl and the rednecks who followed us to the museum and how I hoped Robbie really did like blacks. And then for some reason, after I hung up the phone, I buried my head in my pillow and cried.

Chapter 9

O
n Monday afternoon, Rachel and I sat cross-legged on the floor of my room with the papers I'd gotten from the museum strewn all over the floor. “Are you sure you feel good enough to do this?” I inquired. She'd slept all morning after being awake half the night with the trots.

“I feel absolutely awful, but you've got a bathroom close by, and I might as well do something instead of sitting in bed all day. Two days of that is enough to drive a person crazy.”

Rachel had a mind for organization. Whereas I had randomly spread all the newspapers and files on the floor, she immediately set about putting an order to it. As we worked, she threw out a quote from Shakespeare, which launched us into a little game we often played, recalling poetry and plays we'd been forced to memorize over the years at Wellington.

“‘This above all, to thine own self be true, And it must follow as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.'”

“Oh please, Rach,” I lamented. “I'm not an idiot. Something a little more challenging next. Everyone knows that's from
Hamlet
, Po-lonius speaking. Now my turn. ‘Though this be madness, yet there is method in't.'” I winked at her, indicating the papers on the floor.

“Clever, Swan! But also cinchy. Polonius again. My turn. ‘Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow. A poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.'”

“Oh, that is just awful. So sad!”

“Quit stalling, Swan.”

“I'm not stalling. Who could forget Macbeth's great soliloquy? But I hope it's not true, Rachel.”

“What?”

“That life is just an hour on the stage that amounts to nothing in the end. I want my life to count.”

“Well, look who's getting deep on me.”

So I left Shakespeare for the moment, stood up, and quoted in a lyrical voice that sped up and slowed down according to the words of the poem,

“Out of the hills of Habersham,
Down the valleys of Hall,
I hurry amain to reach the plain,
Run the rapid and leap the fall,
Split at the rock and together again,
Accept my bed, or narrow or wide,
And flee from folly on every side
With a lover's pain to attain the plain
Far from the hills of Habersham,
Far from the valleys of Hall.”

With the first line, Rachel was standing too, and quoting along with me one of our favorite poems. The Chattahoochee River ran through Atlanta, and six girls in our class lived on Habersham Road, named after the hills of Habersham in North Georgia. “‘Song of the Chattahoochee!'” Rachel cried. “By Sidney Lanier!”

Rachel was really getting into our game, momentarily healed of her stomach virus. She started galloping around my spacious room like a frenzied stallion, chanting,

“‘Forward, the Light Brigade!'
Was there a man dismayed?
Not though the soldier knew
Someone had blundered.”

She screeched to a halt, became a soldier who dismounted from her steed, saluted me with a make-believe sword, and continued,

“Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die,
Into the valley of death,
Rode the six hundred.”

“Bravo, Rachel!” She bowed to my applause. “Excellent performance, but you kind of gave it away! Tennyson, ‘Charge of the Light Brigade.'”

And not to be outdone, I stood up and, in my most dramatic stage voice, said,

“‘Why, what an ass am I! This is most brave,
That I, the son of a dear father murdered,
Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell,
Must like a whore unpack my heart with words and fall a-cursing
like a very drab, a stallion!'”

I had picked up one of the newspapers halfway through the soliloquy and now fairly shook it in my hand.

Rachel's eyes grew wide. “Wow, Swan. You make a great Hamlet. It's really spooky, when you think about the lines.”

I let go of the paper and gave a wry smile. “Yeah. I'm no prince of Denmark, but my dear mother has been killed, and I swear I'll have my revenge, and it will be by solving this dare. I swear it.” My heartfelt outburst turned our silly game into something a bit too serious, and we fell into silence.

Then Rachel whispered sadly as she flopped across my bed,

“‘No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two, advise the prince; no
doubt an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.'”

“Oh, Rachel, how in the world did you remember that!” I was frankly more than impressed. “It's what's-his-face. Don't say it.We just studied him.” I closed my eyes and nibbled a fingernail. “Prufrock!

That's it! ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' by T. S. Eliot.” Rachel could tell I was proud of myself for having recalled the poet and the poem. “But we never had to memorize that.”

Rachel shrugged. “I know. But I liked it. I liked the whole thing.”

“Please don't tell me you memorized the whole stinking poem. Just for fun?”

She didn't answer but turned over on her back and stared up at the ceiling. “We are wasting a bunch of time, Swan.”

“I know it.”

“Last one. Your turn. Then we've got to get busy. Give me something challenging, my dear.”

I groaned. Nothing was challenging to Rachel. I think she had a photographic memory. Then I got an idea and quoted, “‘Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.'”

Rachel narrowed her eyes, made her lips into two thin lines, and thought for a moment. “Sounds like Martin Luther King, Jr.”

I made a loud, obnoxious buzzing sound. “Aannnh! Wrong! Try again.”

“Did we have this in class?”

“Maybe we did and maybe we didn't.”

“Come on, Swannee. Cheater.” She thought for a while longer, then shrugged. “I give up.”

I smiled triumphantly and exclaimed, “The Bible!”

Rachel didn't let that pass. “Hey, you can't just say ‘The Bible.' You have to give the author and the name of the work.”

“Okay, the Bible; author, God. How's that?”

“No good. As I recall from our class at dear Wellington, the Bible was written by a bunch of different men and has a whole lot of books. Sixty something in all. So spit it out, Miss Know-It-All. Who said it and where?”

“Drat, Rachel.” It was something Miss Abigail had said ten days ago, but she was always quoting stuff from the Bible and then telling me to look it up at home, which I never did.

“I'm sure it's somewhere in the New Testament,” I replied lamely. “Jesus probably said it.”

“Well, if you don't know for sure, it doesn't count,” Rachel announced
Journal
matter-of-factly as she neatly folded a copy of the
Atlanta
to the page that spoke about the art exhibition. That marked the end of our little game and the beginning of some serious work.

For an hour we nibbled Saltines and sipped Coke and read every- thing Lillian MacIlvain had given me about the mysterious disappearance of the paintings. Rachel had divided the papers by date. She took all the articles that were written before the disappearance and gave me the ones dated after April twenty-ninth.

“Listen, Swannee,” she commented after we'd silently perused the papers. “This is from the
Journal
, dated April 23, 1961.

“A new exhibition has been planned at the High Museum to honor Southern painters. Three previously unshown paintings by Georgia artists Henry Becker, Leslie Leschamps, and Sheila Middleton will be featured. An anonymous donor has graciously agreed to give these three paintings to the museum. The exhibition opens on April 29 for art patrons, where a seated dinner will be followed by a viewing of the newly acquired paintings as well as the rest of the exhibition. Sheila Middleton, whose portrait and landscape work is already known to many Atlantans, will deliver a brief talk about her newest painting. When asked if the other two Southern artists would be present, Mr. Shaw, the museum's curator, said no. He did verify that art specialists had examined all three paintings and that they were impressed by the ‘very high quality of painting.'”

“Did you know your mom was supposed to speak at that dinner?”

“Nope.”

“Well, then, you need to ask your dad about that. Find out if she really did speak, and if so, what she said.” Rachel pulled out a pen from behind her ear and noted the questions in a small spiral notebook.

“I can't ask Daddy! I'll be disqualified if he finds out.”

“You can ask about the exhibition. You have to. He doesn't have to know that you're the Raven. You can ask as a daughter wanting to find out as much as she can about her mom.”

“Well, that might work.”

“Of course it will. Now, listen to this. It's from the
Northside
News.
” That was the weekly society paper in Buckhead.

“For art enthusiasts, this Saturday marks the opening of a new exhibition at the High Museum. Three paintings have been donated to the museum. One of the artists, Buckhead resident Sheila Middleton of 3083 Andrews Drive, will speak briefly at a fundraising dinner to be held the night before the opening of the exhibition. Mrs. Middleton is the wife of Atlanta broker John Jason Middleton and daughter of Ian and Evelyne McKenzie, the well-known cotton magnate and his wife whose plantation is located in Griffin, Georgia.”

“Nothing new there.”
“Wait, let me finish, Swannee.

“Mrs. Middleton said that she was ‘surprised and pleased that one of her paintings was being donated to the museum.' She was flattered that the donor regarded her work so highly. When asked to identity this person, she smiled and said she had been instructed not to reveal the name.