The Swan House (44 page)

“Why don't y'all have a drink with us?” I suggested.

But Mrs. Appleby got a flustered look on her face and said, “Excuse me, Mary Swan, but we've already got a table set up for them in another room.” She smiled at me sweetly. “And of course they'll have a choice of all the food from the buffet. And the check. You definitely earned your wages tonight, boys.” She nodded at Robbie and me, making it clear we were to stay put, then turned to Carl and his friends. “If you'll just follow me . . .”

“Bye,” I whispered to Carl as they left. “You played great. Really great.” He just gave me the same wide white smile that had first captured my heart.

The rest of the evening was a blur to me, a blur of dancing and eating and laughing with friends and making polite conversation when the noise of the second band died down or they took a break. Several friends whispered to me that I looked gorgeous, and Patty gave me a wink when we were dancing beside each other. And I thought that I was indeed having the time of my life, fun enough for both Rachel and me, as she'd instructed. It was after midnight when Robbie gave his ticket to the black boy who was working in valet parking.

On the way home, Robbie was strangely quiet behind the wheel, while I babbled on about Carl's band and how they'd been every bit as good as the main band and how glad I was that Robbie had met them and that the band had been appreciated.

Finally, as Robbie was turning into my driveway, he said, “If there's somebody else you like, Mary Swan, just say it. I'd rather know. It's worse to like you and think you feel the same way about me and then find out I'm all wrong. It'll be awful, but it's better for me to know the truth. That's how I am.”

I stared at him, dumbfounded. “What are you talking about?”

“I'm talking about your black friend, Carl.”

“What?” I said feebly with this terrible sinking feeling inside.

“You're in love with the guy.” Robbie's voice had a sharp edge on it now.

“No! I mean, it's not what you think.”

“Mary Swan,” he said with a sad smile. “You're a lot of things, great things, but you are not discreet.”

I shook my head. “You're wrong, Robbie. There isn't anything between us. We're just friends.”

“You didn't look at him like you look at a friend.” That was an outright accusation. “You've never looked at me that way.”

Not one word came out of my mouth. But it was probably hanging wide open.

“I understand, Mary Swan. That's why you go to the inner city, isn't it?”

“That's not fair, Robbie! I don't go there because of Carl! That's not why I go. I swear it isn't. I go to help out. That's plain mean to say, after all you and I have talked about!”

He got out of the car, walked around to my side, and opened the door. When I stepped out, he put his arm around me tender-like and said, “Mary Swan, I'm not accusing you. You've got a great heart. That's what I love about you. Your wild imagination and your sensitive heart. I don't know another girl around like you. I really don't.”

I swiped at a few tears. “Do you hate me?”

“How could I ever hate you, Mary Swan?” His topaz eyes looked hurt. “You have a perfect right to like whoever you want. But I can't play that game. I have to know the truth. About us.”

“Robbie, you're my friend.” I thought of all the kissing we'd done and blushed. “You are so great. You talk to me, and . . . and you're kind.”

“Just like every Boy Scout should be. I also help little old ladies across the street.” He smiled wryly. “Unfortunately, none of that really counts.”

“It does count.”

“Yeah, maybe. But not for what I want.” He kissed me softly on the cheek and said, “See ya around, Mary Swan. You take care of yourself, you hear?”

And he was gone.

I walked into the house in a daze, tears blurring my view. Woodenly I locked the door and climbed all the way to my room. I flopped across my bed, brokenhearted. Brokenhearted because Robbie had seen through me and I had hurt him deeply. Brokenhearted because in spite of all the hard things I was learning, I could still be so impossibly naïve. Brokenhearted because the stirrings I felt for Carl were only stirrings. With Robbie I could talk. I reassured myself with that one thought. At least we could talk about it. Sometime soon we'd talk.

I had no desire to call Rachel when I awoke the next morning. When I finally did dial her number and she answered, all I said was, “Can't explain it on the phone. You've got to come over.”

Which, of course, she did. And she listened carefully to my whole tearful explanation of the previous evening.

“Mary Swan, you're in love with a combination of Carl and Robbie. And it isn't going to work. That guy doesn't exist.”

“But what do I do then?”

“Choose.”

“But you're the one who told me just to have fun.”

“I know. And now you've had fun, and it's time to choose.”

“But I like them both a lot.”

“Do you really deep down inside think that anything could ever work out between you and Carl? Do you?”

“No. No, I know it's impossible.”

“Because if I were you, I'd think about it long and hard, Mary Swan Middleton. Robbie is a great guy. He's like you, from the same place. He understands you.”

“But Carl is so different. That's what I want. It's impossible, then, Rachel, for a black and a white to date, isn't it?”

She thought for a moment. “No, not impossible. But hard. Very, very hard. Forever.”

“And what if I choose Carl and I make a huge mistake?”

“Well, it's not like you're gonna marry the guy tomorrow, is it?”

“No, of course not. But if I choose Carl, well, I'm obviously not choosing Robbie, and I may never get another chance to go back and fix things up.”

“Then you just live with it, Swan. It seems to me like that's the whole point of life. You know? You do your best, flub up, learn something from it, and then you go on. You learn to be strong.”

“Have you ever made a really big mistake, Rachel?”

She got up from my bed and walked over to the window and looked out. The day was gray and cold. “I almost did—I almost made the biggest mistake of my life.”

I rolled over on my back and stared at her, suddenly very interested. “What was it?”

She didn't look at me. “I almost didn't let you become my friend.” She got choked up when she said it. “I hated Wellington when I first got there in sixth grade. I felt like there was this big neon sign around my neck that flashed ‘Jewish' all the time. Jewish in the midst of a WASP nest. And so many of the girls were snobby and petty and mean. Really mean. And I hated you from afar, Mary Swan. I hated you. I swear I did.”

“You hated me? Why?”

“Because you were funny and creative, and somehow even being different, you fit in. You fit in because you were a WASP like the rest of them. And your dad was really rich and belonged to the Capital City Club and the Piedmont Driving Club.”

“But your family's rich too.”

“Sure we're well-off. But we'd never be allowed to join those clubs.”

“How do you know?”

“Oh, Swan, for heaven's sake. Don't be a total fool. I know. Everyone knows it.” She smiled at me. “But gradually I got to know you, and I found out that you were this great, silly, scatterbrained, multitalented Swannee creature with the craziest ideas and the biggest imagination and a good heart. A real good heart.”

“Oh, quit it, Rach.”

“It's true. Perfectly true. A good heart and a weird name. And you know what I like most is that you don't see color or race—you are so impossibly naïve, you can't tell if I'm Jewish or Carl is black. You don't care about money or jobs or last names or religion. You don't care. That's it—you just don't care. I have always loved that about you, Mary Swan.”

I felt a mixture of misery and great respect for Rachel. “I think that's meant as a compliment, so I'll say thanks. But we still haven't figured out what I should do.”

We both laughed again, and she gave me an all-engulfing hug, and then she just looked at me, shook her head, and said in her best Ella Mae imitation voice, “All I knows is that yore fixin' to git in a heap o' trouble, girl.”

Chapter 21

I
n spite of the fact that Robbie and I were no longer dating, he held fast to his plans for the Day at the Park. Saturday the twenty-second of December was the first day of Christmas break for most Atlanta students. And almost twenty of them from Buckhead were at Grant Park that bright and chilly morning. Pastor James greeted us warmly. “So good to see you teenagers here. Mighty fine of ya to come out this morning, 'stead of stayin' home in bed.” He and Robbie had already bought all the needed supplies and had made a long list of the repairs we were to work on. “Robbie here and I will be helpin' everyone git started. I'd like ta say that Robbie's quite an organizer. So listen to him, and everythin' will run smoothly.”

And it did, which made me feel quite proud of Robbie Bartholomew. About ten or fifteen of the older teens from Mt. Carmel were there, Carl and Mike and James and Larry and Leo and Big Man and Cassandra and even Puddin', along with several others I'd never met before.

Robbie walked right up to Carl, stuck out his hand, and shook Carl's forcefully. “Good to see you again,” he said, and repeated his greeting to every member of the jazz band. He winked at Mike and James and promised, “If we get all the work done, I'll take you for another spin in the convertible.”

A bunch of Robbie's friends had come too. Football players and wrestlers and Boy Scouts and even a few of the fathers were there to lend a hand. Almost every single friend I had invited came, which shocked me. But what really shocked me was the conversation we had that morning while we sanded down the walls in the fellowship hall and prepared them for paint.

“Oh yeah, my mom's Sunday school class has helped out like this in Summerhill,” Julie Jacobs said as she filled holes in the wall with putty. Summerhill was another poverty-stricken neighborhood nearby.

“Yeah, Mom takes all our old clothes down there. They have a big clothes closet at the Baptist church,” Patty Masters added as she scraped off some loose paint.

Gail Anderson, who went to the big white Baptist church across the street from St. Philip's, even knew some of the young children from Grant Park. “For years, Mom and these other ladies have brought our church bus down here and loaded it up with the kids and taken them roller skating at our church's gymnasium. They come the last Wednesday of every month. And I always help out with the skates.”

Millie Garrett burst into laughter as a piece of plaster as big as her hand broke off of the wall. “Oops! Hurry up over here, Julie, with that putty!” Then Millie said to Gail, “My mom's circle from church knits baby blankets and booties for the new babies around here.”

I thought of Jessie as a newborn, swaddled in a handmade blanket, and my eyes started to sting.

“It's funny, Swan. I told my grandma that we were going to help down here, and she said that a bunch of the ladies at her nursing home sew and knit for families in the poor part of Atlanta,” Rachel added.

Later in the morning, as Cassandra and Rachel and Patty and Julie were working side by side, Cassandra started singing in her beautiful alto voice a chorus I'd never heard before. “Jesus will fix it afta' awhile. Trouble in my way, makes me cry sometimes, I lay awake at night, but that's all right. Jesus will fix it afta' awhile.” Just by the way she sang it, you could tell that Cassandra knew what she was talking about. She kept singing that chorus over and over, sometimes with words and sometimes just humming it softly to herself.

When she stopped, Gail said, “You have a great voice, Cassandra. Sing us something else.”

Cassandra got an embarrassed smile on her face, but we kept pleading with her. Finally she agreed. “But y'all gotta join in afta' ya learn it. Promise?” So we promised. She broke into a chorus that I had heard the night that Robbie and I had attended Mt. Carmel's service. “Jesus on my main line, tell 'im whatcha want. Jesus on my main line, tell 'im whatcha want. Jesus on my main line, tell 'im whatcha want. Ya call 'im up, and ya tell 'im whatcha want!” It had a strong rhythm, and soon we were belting it out in our untrained voices and clapping our hands together, letting the scalpels and the paintbrushes slap together. That's when I first felt the tingles.

At noon we uncovered the tables in the fellowship hall—they had been draped with white sheets to protect them from paint—and prepared for lunch. It felt funny to be on the receiving end of the spaghetti line, but Miss Abigail and Carl had insisted. Several of the women I usually served were serving me and smiling. Carl brought his plate and sat down beside me, and I got a tummy full of butterflies. “Mighty fine guy, yore boyfriend Robbie. He's done a good job of getting people to work. Hadn't stopped for a second, gettin' supplies, answerin' questions. He's got a head for that, Mary Swan.”

I simply nodded, my mouth full of garlic bread. I wanted to look Carl straight in the eyes and say, “He's not my boyfriend! Not at all.
You're
supposed to be my boyfriend!
You're
the one I've chosen.” But, of course, I just kept chewing on the bread, even though it suddenly tasted dry and stale.

It was a good thing that Robbie was too busy for us to talk, because I have no idea what I would have said to him. I felt as though I'd betrayed him and stomped on his heart. But he didn't show it that day. That day just brimmed over with a lot of hard work. White hand next to black hand. Side by side. Thirty teenagers, painting and cleaning and scraping and singing our hearts out in our old sweatshirts. And every single one of us was happy to be there.