Swan Place

by Augusta Trobaugh

  So maybe that’s why I wasn’t really much surprised when, on that Easter Sunday morning, the loud ringing of the telephone broke the silence of the dark living room just beyond my door. Because a phone ringing so early always means that something is wrong, somewhere. And for our house, it could only mean that something had happened to Mama.

  My heart started thudding in my chest like a squirrel trying to get out of a cage.

  Then the phone rang again, and it sounded even louder.

  No! I was thinking. No!

  I heard Roy-Ellis groan and roll out of bed.

  No! Don’t answer it!

  But I could hear him stumbling across his and Mama’s room and bumping his shoulder hard on the door frame as he came out. It rang again, and I felt as if all the breath had gone out of my body. No! Please don’t answer it! If you don’t answer it, Mama will be fine, like in my dream!

  But then the light in the living room went on, and I could see a little sliver of the light coming under my door.

  “Hello,” Roy-Ellis said in a roughsounding voice. Maybe because of his shoulder hurting him. I held my breath.

  “Yeah, this is him.”

  Then silence. A very long silence.

  I could hear Roy-Ellis breathing, because my cot was right up against the wall between the bedroom and the living room. Finally, he said, “She did?” And he sounded almost like Little Ellis, the way his voice tilted up in such a sad way. I felt my heart split in two, right inside my chest!

  “When?”

  Mama!

  Another long silence.

  Then, “Yes. I’ll take care of it.”

  The sound of the receiver clicking back into its place and after that, no sound at all. So I could hear what the silence said: Mama was gone! I heard Roy-Ellis pick the receiver up again and dial. Then his voice was husky when he said, “Bett? I’m afraid it’s bad news.” A long pause, then, “Yeah.” I shut my eyes tight and stayed just as still as could be, believing with all my heart that if I moved so much as my little finger, my cot would tilt, the whole world would tilt, and I’d fall out of bed and down into some deep, dark faraway place—wherever my mama was, all cold and dead.

  Mama!

  Then it almost seemed that my cot dropped away from under me, and I was floating up in the air, high above our little gray house and the other ones just like it, all lined up along the silent street, like little shaggy gray ponies waiting for a race to start and falling asleep while they were waiting. And I could look down on the big chinaberry tree in our yard, where the mockingbird curled his toes around a twig and sang his babysong into the darkness. Slowly I floated back down onto my cot, inside the bluepapered walls of the room in the little gray house, where nothing was ever going to be the same again.

  I heard Roy-Ellis hang up the phone and go along the hallway, into the kitchen, where the table was still covered with old, rainbow-colored newspapers and the thick white cups holding all those Easter egg colors—purple and blue, yellow and red, green and orange. And in the refrigerator were the three egg cartons holding all those pretty eggs we were supposed to hunt for in the tall grass in the backyard that afternoon. Only now, Mama was gone. And right then and there—in a way I’ll never understand—I knew that my path had just split in two again, that it had split with that very first ring of the telephone. Just like it split for the first time when my daddy—my real daddy, that is—ran off and left me and Mama when some blond-headed lady in the office of the construction company where he worked asked him if he would drive her to California, and he did. And he never came back.

  Maybe I could understand how he could leave me, because I was skinny and covered in freckles. I had wild-looking red hair, and my teeth were way too big for my face. But how could he leave Mama, and her so pretty and sweet—and her expecting a little baby any day, a baby that would be Molly, my little sister? That was the first time my path split, and Mama cried on Aunt Bett’s shoulder and said she didn’t know how we would be able to get along without him—without a paycheck coming in. So I decided I would stop loving him, right then and there. It really wasn’t hard, and it made me feel better right away. Now, Mama had gone off and left me and Molly and Little Ellis, and if I could only stop loving her too, maybe I wouldn’t hurt so bad.

  But then I thought about Mama not going off and leaving me because she wanted to, like my daddy did. So, lying there in the darkness, I figured that I would always love my mama, but that from then on—from that very minute—I wasn’t going to love anybody else in the whole world, not ever again. Because if I didn’t love anybody, I wouldn’t have to hurt so bad.

  I heard Roy-Ellis come back into the living room, and his footsteps stopped right outside the door to our room. The knob turned, the door opened, and his voice came over me like a wave, like how I feel when I’m going to be sick at my stomach.

  “Dove, honey? You awake?”

  “I’m awake.”

  “Well, come on out here and let me talk to you a little bit,” he said.

  I threw back the covers and sat up, expecting my cot to tilt. But it didn’t, and I went out into the living room where Roy-Ellis was sitting on the couch with his head in his hands.

  “You don’t have to tell me, Roy-Ellis,” I whispered. “I already know.” My voice tried to catch, but I wouldn’t let it.

  “Let’s not say anything around the little ones just yet,” Roy-Ellis said, and he didn’t look at me. Just cleared his throat, got up, and flicked the switch to turn on the porch light. So I figured Aunt Bett was on her way. We sat there without speaking, both of us looking mostly at the floor. Almost like we didn’t know each other. I glanced at him once, and he looked so bad, I almost felt like I should say something to try and comfort him. But I didn’t.

  I don’t care how bad you look, I thought. I won’t love you. I won’t love anybody.

  Aunt Bett finally came, and she looked all pale and shaky. She and Roy-Ellis locked eyes, and then they both looked at me.

  “Dove knows,” Roy-Ellis whispered to Aunt Bett, and then he motioned his head toward the kitchen. Aunt Bett hesitated.

  “Why don’t you go on back to bed for a little while, Dove,” Aunt Bett said. “Roy-Ellis and me got some things we got to talk about.” So they went into the kitchen and shut the door. But I didn’t want to go back into the bedroom, because I was afraid I’d see my mama’s face smiling down at me from the ceiling, so I turned off the porch light and went out and sat in the swing on the dark porch and listened to that little mockingbird singing his crooked song.

  Chapter Two

  Aunt Bett and Roy-Ellis were in the kitchen for a very long time, and I sat there in the swing with a big old war going on inside of me. A war between Mama’s gone! and No! She can’t be! When the Mama’s gone! started winning, I hummed one of Mama’s honky-tonk songs. Why, Mama can’t be gone! Because if Mama was gone, then everything in Heaven and earth would have to stop. If Mama was gone, then the dawn wouldn’t come at all. So I sat there thinking about that and waiting to see if daylight was going to come, or whether darkness was going to cover the earth forever and ever. And what would happen then? Finally, I started rocking just a little in the swing and listening to the soft clink of the chains that held so strong and tight to the big iron hooks, and to the creak of the porch beams. Watching and waiting.

  Then a tiny silver color seemed to glow out of the tops of the leaves, and soon, things began to appear out of the darkness—the pink dwarf azaleas around the porch and Little Ellis’s tricycle with the dew shining on it, and at the last, golden fingers of sunlight coming through the trees and streaming across the yard. So the world was going to go on. But it would never be the same. Me sitting in the swing in my pajamas, with my mama gone, but life going on anyway.

  Finally, I heard the familiar squeak of the screen door, and Aunt Bett came out onto the porch. She sighed and closed the door very gently. No matter what, Aunt Bett wasn’t one to ever let a door slam shut.

  “You o
kay?” Her voice floated across the porch, and I was thinking, No. I’ll never be okay again. But instead, I said, “Yes’m.” She sat down beside me in the swing and put her arm around my shoulder, squeezing me tight. I thought that maybe she was going to try to talk to me about Mama being gone, and I didn’t want to talk about that. It was all too fresh. It all hurt too bad. And when something hurts that bad, I guess there’s no way you can put words to it at all. But Aunt Bett merely took in a deep breath and relaxed her hold on my shoulder.

  “You’re going to be a good woman when you grow up, Dove. A good woman and very strong.”

  Her words surprised me.

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “Well, I can see how strong you’re trying to be right now. And I’ve seen how good you are to Molly and Little Ellis. And you don’t fuss with me about going to church,” she added. I thought about it being Easter Sunday and about the clothes Aunt Bett had brought over for us to wear.

  “Thank you for the nice clothes you let us use,” I said.

  “Goodness!” Aunt Bett exclaimed. “You’re grateful, as well. Yes, you most certainly will be a good woman. A strong woman.”

  I didn’t reply: My Mama did too raise me right! And I’m only being this polite to let you know that. And I won’t be strong. I don’t know how to be!

  Instead, I said, “Roy-Ellis didn’t cry.” The words surprised me.

  “What?”

  “I said, Roy-Ellis didn’t cry.”

  “Well, honey, he’s a man. And maybe you don’t know much about men yet, but they don’t like to let other folks see them like that.”

  “Did you cry?” I asked, once again surprised by my own words.

  Aunt Bett waited awhile before she murmured, “No. I didn’t cry.”

  “Why not?” I really wanted to know, even if I hadn’t known I was going to ask.

  “I loved her, Dove. Even if we didn’t agree on . . . some things. And even though we sometimes fussed with each other.” She heaved a deep sigh. “But she was so sick. You know that. She’d suffered through so much, and now there’s no more suffering for her. No more pain.”

  “Is she in Heaven?”

  “That’s not for me to say. Not at all. That’s for Jesus to decide.” And with that, Aunt Bett stood up. “If you think you can do it, help Molly and Little Ellis get ready and you all come on and go to church with me this morning, just like always. We need to keep things as normal as possible for the little ones. I can take you all’s colored eggs home with me now—I could tell by the mess on the kitchen table that you all did color some last night. After church, we’ll have a nice dinner and a little Easter egg hunt at my house.”

  The thought of trying to make things “normal” was something I couldn’t even imagine, but I didn’t say anything. Aunt Bett added, “Let’s just try to get through today, and tomorrow we’ll figure how to get through tomorrow.” But her voice was a little bit too cheerful-sounding, like she was trying to convince herself that everything was going to be just fine.

  “Then,” she added in a more solemn tone, “at some point, I’ll tell Molly. Little Ellis isn’t old enough to understand.”

  I was remembering about what Aunt Bett said to Mama about hellfire and honky-tonking, so I said, “I’ll be the one to tell Molly. I think she’ll take it better from me.”

  Aunt Bett nodded, obviously relieved. “Well, go on then and get me you all’s colored eggs so I can put them in my refrigerator. Did Roy-Ellis fix up Easter baskets?”

  “I figured he had too much on his mind what with . . . Mama being sick, so I fixed baskets—little ones—for Molly and Little Ellis.”

  “Well, get those too, and the children can find them at my house after church. I’ll come back for you around ten-forty-five. Usual time.”

  “Yes’m.”

  “We just have to carry on, Dove,” she added. “We just have to get on with living.” Her words repeated themselves over and over while I went into the kitchen to get the eggs out of the refrigerator and the Easter baskets from behind Roy-Ellis’s chair, where I had hidden them for Molly and Little Ellis to find. Roy-Ellis wasn’t in the kitchen, but I could hear water running in the bathroom. We loaded the eggs and the Easter baskets into Aunt Bett’s car, and she looked me full in the face for a moment before she drove off. “We just have to do the best we can. Remember that.”

  When I went back toward the kitchen, Roy-Ellis was sitting at the table with his elbows resting on the rainbow-colored newspapers. His hair was wet and combed, and he was wearing a clean shirt. I waited in the doorway until he looked up at me.

  “You and the children going to church with Bett?” he asked, and that pleased me mightily, the way he separated me from “the children.”

  “Yessir,” I answered. Then we didn’t say anything else. I made him a cup of instant coffee and sat at the table with him while he drank it. Every time he took the cup away from his mouth, he stared down at the remaining coffee. Finally, the cup was empty.

  “That was good, Dove,” he said.

  “You want me to fix you some . . . cereal?” I’d started to ask if he wanted some eggs, but then I remembered that I didn’t know how to cook eggs. Roy-Ellis shook his head, stood up.

  “I have to go . . . take care of some things,” he mumbled.

  After Roy-Ellis left, I pulled all the old newspapers off the table and jammed them into the trash can on the back porch. The door to Mama’s beauty shop was closed, and I didn’t want to open it. Instead, I went into Mama and Roy-Ellis’s room and opened the closet where Mama’s spangle dresses and her beauty parlor smocks were hanging. I ran my fingers across the sequins on her dresses, and I stuck my hand into the pocket of one of her smocks. There were two silvery hair clips in the pocket, and I took them out and pinned them in my hair. On the other side of the closet hung Roy-Ellis’s blue work shirts and some of his bright cowboy-looking shirts. And they made me think about how Roy-Ellis always made Mama so happy. He never made her cry, not one single time. That was lots more than I could say about my own daddy.

  Because right after my daddy ran off to California, Molly was born, and as soon as Roy-Ellis heard about that, he came right over to our house, and he came again almost every single evening, as soon as he got off work, so Mama could cry on his shoulder. Because Mama and Roy-Ellis had known each other almost all their lives, and when they were in high school together, they’d even been girlfriend and boyfriend, right up until just before Mama met and married my daddy.

  I think it was because of Roy-Ellis that Mama got done with all her crying so soon. And he took to fixing up a real beauty parlor on our back porch, so Mama would have a nice place to work, once she got done with her classes at cosmetology school. On the very day Mama graduated and got her license, Roy-Ellis drove up in our yard, took a window airconditioner out of his truck, and staggered up the steps with it.

  “Now, don’t you go saying anything about this to your mama,” Roy-Ellis grunted to me as he lugged the airconditioner to the back porch beauty parlor. “It’s a surprise for her.” I didn’t say a single word about the airconditioner when Mama came home, not even when Roy-Ellis made her close her eyes and led her to the beauty parlor door. I guess she heard the airconditioner running, though, and probably guessed what it was. Because she smiled. Roy-Ellis opened the door, and a blast of that wonderful, chilled air swept out across what was left of our old porch.

  “Oh, honey,” Mama breathed. “It’s wonderful!”

  Yes, Roy-Ellis was always good to Mama. And I liked him right well, even though he didn’t pay much attention to me or Molly. When Mama’s divorce papers came, it seemed the most natural thing in this world for Mama and Roy-Ellis to get married. On the day before the wedding, Roy-Ellis came sauntering across the yard carrying a big plastic bag full of clothes in one hand and his guitar in the other. After Mama helped him put away his clothes in two big drawers she’d emptied for him, I heard her say real soft-like, “Come on and stay the night,
honey.”

  “Can’t do that, sugar,” he said in a mournful way. “My mama’d be sure to find out, and she’d get all over me for shaming her like that.”

  “And there’s Bett, as well,” Mama agreed.

  “Well, between my mama and your sister, we got no choice but to behave ourselves.”

  “Yeah, honey,” Mama said.

  But Roy-Ellis did stay on for supper with us, and afterward, he sat on the porch and played his guitar and sang songs for us. Some of them were songs I could sing along to, but most were what Mama called love songs. They were soft and slow, and while Roy-Ellis sang, I watched Mama smiling and with the tips of her ears turning bright pink. Those love songs made me happy because they made Mama happy, and I figured she deserved that, after what all my own daddy had done to her. That last night before their wedding, Roy-Ellis stayed on the porch with Mama for a long time after Molly and I went to bed, and when I fell asleep, it was to a soft, sweet song with lots of “darlings” in it.