The Swan House (2 page)

Abbie rolls her eyes and smiles a half-patronizing, half-sympathetic smile. “Just start, Mom. Just tell it.” Then I think she realizes that this is not a simple thing she has asked—for her mother to go back almost forty years to something very painful—so she gets up with difficulty and comes over to me and gives me a warm hug and kisses my cheek and whispers, “It really matters to me. After all, I wouldn't be here without your story. This is important.”

I close my eyes and try to put myself back into a schoolgirl's body. So much is still the same and so much is completely different, but when I think about Rachel, I know I can start talking. And so, sipping my tea, I begin. . . .

Atlanta, Georgia
June 1, 1962

It wasn't that I went looking for trouble on a regular basis, but adventures seemed to follow me around like a frisky kitten, waiting to pounce whenever I stopped to contemplate my next steps. But my most famous mishap started out innocuously enough. I was in tenth grade at Wellington Preparatory School for Girls, sitting in Mrs. Wilson's Latin class, transfixed by the way this now-defunct language fit together like pieces of a puzzle. Several girls yawned; others fidgeted. It was our last day of classes. Exams started on Monday.

“Sum levis, et mecum levis est mea cura, Cupido,”
I answered enthusiastically to the teacher's challenge to recite a line from a poem by Ovid. No sooner had the words been spoken than a small piece of folded paper was slipped onto my desk. I hastily stashed it under my spiral notebook and tried to concentrate as Mrs. Wilson turned away from the blackboard and addressed another question to me. I stammered my reply, mortified at the thought that she might have seen the note being slipped to me. Perhaps she did, for she kept interrogating me for the last few minutes of class until I was sure that wad of paper was burning a hole in my notebook just as it was doing in my mind.

When the bell rang, the seventeen other girls sprang for the door, and I never had a chance to verify who had written that note. I read it as I walked down the hall to Honors English, and I'll swear I'm not making this part up. Scrawled in black pen across that small wadded paper were the three words that a sophomore girl at Wellington Prep School desired most to see in that year of 1962:
Quoth the Raven.

When I saw those three words, the hairs on my arms stood straight up, even though it was as hot as the oil in a frying pan that June afternoon. I almost didn't go to Honors English because that note made me feel as if I might just wet my pants right there in the hall. But it wasn't like me to skip class, so I went into Mrs. Alexander's class and sat rigidly with my legs crossed twice (only girls with long skinny legs can do that), holding that note in my hands until it grew soggy like the cornflakes in the bottom of my cereal bowl.

It didn't help that for the past two weeks we'd been studying Edgar Allen Poe in class and that yesterday we'd watched a movie called
The
Telltale Heart
based on Poe's short story by the same name. I could almost hear that heart beating under the floor of the classroom as it had beat under the floorboards of the house in the movie.

And now I had been chosen to be the Raven.

Looking back, I almost laugh to think that I was selected for this most elusive of honors at Wellington. The ritual of the Raven dated back to the school's inception in 1927 when a spunky junior had challenged the senior valedictorian to a battle of wits and won. That contest had something to do with Poe's poem, “The Raven,” and since then, at the end of each school year, a “Raven” was chosen. She was always an end-of-the-year sophomore, someone considered “different and daring enough” to meet the new challenge thought up by the rising senior-class officers.

I was flat-chested with braces and straight brown hair, as plain as a girl can get, but the one good thing about me was that I had a big imagination. Sometimes before Mrs. Alexander came to English class, I'd start reciting the poem she'd had us memorize that week, only I'd change the words as I went along, to the great amusement of the other girls. The rhymes came to my mind as quickly and as simply as those chants we used to sing while jumping rope at recess in grade school, so that Mr. Tennyson and Mr. Keats and a whole bunch of other poets were probably turning over in their graves, their hearts beating as loudly and angrily as the one in Mr. Poe's story.

A few weeks earlier, I'd cast my spell on James Whitcomb Riley's “Little Orphant Annie” and twisted the words to be about dear Mrs. Alexander. So instead of reciting the first verse of the poem as it should be:

Little Orphant Annie's come to our house to stay
An' wash the cups an' saucers up, an' brush the crumbs away
An' shoo the chickens off the porch, an' dust the hearth, an' sweep
An' make the fire, an' bake the bread, an' earn her board-an'-keep . . .

I simply said,

“Mrs. Alexander's come to English class to stay
And force the sophomores to throw up at all she has to say
And shoo the seniors off the porch and pick her nose and beep
And quiz the girls and pull their curls to earn her board and keep.”

The class had dissolved into hysterical laughter when Mrs. Alexander entered the room, and I, gangly and giggling in spite of myself, was too terrified to move. I'm sure that story, among many others, had spread around school throughout the year, and that's how I got elected to be the Raven. Tradition held that the Raven's task would be revealed at midnight on the last official day of school, before exams began. The first challenge of being chosen to be the Raven was to find the paper that explained the Dare, hidden somewhere on the school grounds. I glanced at my watch. It was two in the afternoon. I had ten long hours to wait, but with an imagination like mine, there was plenty to keep me busy.

At precisely midnight on June first, my best friend, Rachel Abrams, and I shimmied over the large wrought-iron gate that separated Wellington from the rest of the world. As I sat perched atop the gate in my cotton shirt and pedal pushers, hands clammy, I whispered down to Rachel, who was already safely inside the campus, “How in the heck do I get down?”

Rachel laughed in her practical way and said, “You jump, stupid.

Just jump!”

And so I did, all nine feet down. I landed with one foot twisted under me, and I was sure it was broken, but Rachel grabbed my hand and yanked me up. “Come on, you silly, scatterbrained girl! We've only got an hour before they come looking. You are so clumsy.” That was part of the deal too. You had to get onto the school grounds at midnight, and you only had an hour to find the clue. At 1:00 A.M. the rising senior officers supposedly invaded the campus and took back an unretrieved clue.

I winced with pain and scowled at Rachel when she turned her back, but I obediently followed her. I limped along the paved road surrounded by flowering magnolia trees that led to the shadow of a large brick building way in front of us.

“Slow down, will you, Rach?” I whispered.

“Shh. Hurry up!” was her unsympathetic reply.

From somewhere behind the high shrubs near the security hut to the right of the main building, a dog barked. “Rachel should be the Raven,” I muttered to myself. She was loving this. “How do you know where the clue is hidden?” I called after her.

“Idiot! Didn't you even study the map on the back of the paper?” Rachel held the wadded ball of paper that I'd received in Latin class in her hands. She stopped abruptly, pulled out a pocket flashlight, and held it to the paper. Sure enough, a map of the Wellington school grounds was sketched on the back.

“See. It's right here.” She pointed to a spot on the map marked with an
X
. “They aren't very imaginative this year, Swannee. Using the old statue again. Same as five years ago.”

“How in the world do you know that?”

“Julie Jacobs told me. Her sister helped find the Dare that year. It was stuffed in the mouth of Mr. Augustus Parks himself.”

We were jogging now, I with great difficulty, and had reached the administration building of Wellington. It housed all the offices on the main floor, as well as the assembly hall, with the art classrooms and the drama rooms upstairs. Normally stately looking, with its red brick and thick white columns, the building struck me as spooky at midnight. Or maybe it was just a combination of Mr. Poe's influence and my overactive imagination that made the fluted columns look like strange, sturdy ghosts, ready for some ghoulish battle. Behind the administration building was a large open terrace, with immaculate gardens surrounding a bronze statue of the founder of the school, Mr. Augustus Parks Emerson Wellington. We called him APE for short.

“There's the ape-man,” Rachel giggled. “You look in his mouth. I'll check his hands.”

The APE had been sculpted by one of Atlanta's finest sculptors, and everyone who had known Mr. Wellington said it looked just like him—he was long since dead. The girls at Wellington found great merriment in the way his mouth was open and you could literally put your hand, well, at least three fingers, inside. Which is precisely what I did. But there was nothing there.

“No luck?” Rachel inquired, pulling herself off the ground where she'd been inspecting the pedestal with her flashlight.

“Nothing.” I suppressed a giggle.

“What's so funny?”

“Your tights are black with dirt!”

Rachel stuck out her tongue and, unperturbed, began to search the rest of the monument.

“I don't see why they'd choose the statue again if it was the hiding place five years ago. Maybe it's a trick,” I reasoned.

Rachel ignored me and continued her frantic search, groaning, “Swan, hurry, we've only got forty-one more minutes! Do you want to be the first nincompoop in twenty years who couldn't even locate the Dare?”

I certainly didn't, and I was grateful Rachel was with me, but I didn't have a clue what to do next. I sat down beside Old Ape-Face and tried to think. Rachel was chattering away. “Be quiet, will you, Rach? Give me a chance to concentrate. I'll come up with something.”

I put my hands on my forehead, resting my elbows on my knees, and closed my eyes. I could still hear the dog barking off to my right and the sound of a car screeching somewhere in the distance outside the Wellington campus. Then I looked up. Straight in front of me were the woods, and dangling from one thin branch of a pine tree was something white.

“Hey, Rach, look!” I pointed to the tree.

Rachel jumped up from the ground, went to the branch, yanked the paper loose, and read:

“Just in case you need a hint
Behind the ape beneath the trees
A spot where many hours are spent.
No escape, get on your knees.”

We reread the clue several times with the help of the flashlight. Suddenly I grabbed the paper and exclaimed, “I know where it is! It's at the Band Hut!”

“The Band Hut?” she said, incredulous. Then she whistled low. “Hey, Swannee, I bet you're right.”

We took off through the woods on the path we knew so well. We trudged it nearly every day. Stopping before the white clapboard building, I tried the door. Locked, of course.

“Swannee, don't try the door—it says to get on your knees!”

I fell to my knees and stuck my arms under the Band Hut, which sat (rather precariously, it seemed to me at that moment) on piles of cinder blocks about a foot off the ground. I felt around, sticking my hand in spider webs and moist leaves and who knows what else. “Give me the light, Rachel.”

And there it was. An old beat-up flute case, the one that usually sat opened on the front table as we entered the Band Hut. If anyone was late to orchestra practice, she had to place a penny in the case. I grabbed its handle from under a pile of leaves and backed out from under the hut. “Ta-da!” I said triumphantly, holding up the flute case for Rachel to inspect. “I bet it's in here.”

Rachel frowned.

“Don't you get it, Rach? ‘Just in case you need a hint.'
In case
. In the case. That's where the Dare is.” To prove my point, I opened it.

A folded piece of paper with a big
R
printed on the outside sat neatly on the velvet blue lining of the flute case. My mouth went dry, and as I licked my lips, I slowly unfolded the paper and read the typewritten words.

“You, Mary Swan Middleton, Raven of Wellington for the school year of 1962 and 63, have been chosen to locate three missing works of art before the end of the annual Mardi Gras Festival on Friday, February 8, 1963. These paintings were given to the Atlanta High Museum of Art by an anonymous donor and were due to be delivered on April 29 of the past year, 1961. But the paintings never arrived. There was rumor of theft, but the donor never complained to the authorities. In fact, there was never another word received from the donor, and no one knows who this mysterious person is. Locate the paintings and become one of the few successful Ravens in Wellington's history.”

Below were written the names of the three paintings and their artists. It didn't surprise me a bit to see that one of the artists was Mama.

Spring Bouquet—Henry Becker, 1958
Child at Rest—Sheila Middleton, 1952
Joie de Vivre—Leslie Leschamps, 1956

My mind was spinning as Rachel grabbed the paper from my hand. It was a commonly known story among Atlanta's art patrons, and especially our family, that three paintings which had been acquired for the summer of '61 collection had disappeared the night before they were to be displayed at the opening of a new exhibition at the museum. The riddle of the donor had never been solved. Mama and Daddy had tried to help the museum locate this mysterious person with no luck.

I immediately loved the challenge. The Raven had all summer and all fall and winter of her junior year to come up with an answer to the Dare. But, as every girl at Wellington knew, the Raven's identity had to remain a secret. If at any point during the course of the nine months she revealed herself, the Dare became moot and void. Fortunately, the Raven was allowed to choose two people to help her solve the mystery. I figured that I'd be just fine with Rachel. She had more brains than the rest of my class put together, at least in my humble opinion.