The Ebony Swan

by Whitney, Phyllis A. ;

  He shook her hand and then examined it carefully. “You seem to have survived pretty well, in spite of me. All your bones intact? I wanted to be a doctor even then, as you may recall, and you were willing to be my patient—so I spent a lot of time mending your shattered bones and saving you from dire illnesses. You often had galloping pneumonia because I liked the sound of that disease even though broken bones—my specialty—weren’t involved.”

  “Your treatments were pretty imaginative,” she said, laughing with him and feeling wonderfully relaxed for the first time since she’d left Santa Fe. “You were always putting my arms into splints and bandaging my hands!”

  He sat down across the table from her. “So now you’ve come home. It’s the right time—I think your grandmother needs you.”

  His words brought back her misgivings. “How can she need me? We don’t even know each other. She’s never been in touch with me.”

  He let that go. “Perhaps you’re both worth knowing.” The slight smile that had reassured her was gone. “Your grandmother hasn’t been well lately. It’s nothing serious, but she gets easily upset. I hope you’ll keep that in mind.”

  “Why should I upset her?”

  “I’m sorry. I’m sure you won’t, but she’s been anxious about your coming.”

  “I’ve been anxious too. My father died a few months ago, and my stepmother encouraged me to get in touch with my grandmother.”

  Peter Macklin looked at her for a long moment and then stood up abruptly. “Perhaps we’d better get started. I know your grandmother is eager to see you.”

  She rose to follow him, noting his informal dress—a short-sleeved blue cotton shirt, worn outside his light cord pants. Hardly the clothes a doctor would wear in his office. She wondered that he should be taking time off in mid-afternoon.

  They thanked the librarian and walked outside together.

  “I’m sure I could have found the way myself,” she said as he opened the door of the car she’d rented at the airport in Richmond. “It wasn’t necessary to call you away from your patients.”

  “My office is closed,” he told her, and she noted that he hadn’t said “today,” or “this week,” which seemed puzzling.

  He went on. “It’s not far to Mrs. Montoro’s house, but there are a number of turns, so it’s simpler if I show you the way the first time.”

  When she was behind the wheel, he leaned in to touch her arm lightly, and his faint smile returned. “Besides, Susy, I wanted to see how you’d turned out.”

  For just a moment the boy she remembered was teasing her. Then the look was gone, and in contrast he seemed even more remote than before.

  She waited as he walked to his own slightly battered Chevy and pulled away from the curb. Instantly, she thought of the Mercedes Colin enjoyed so much—almost wearing it like a second skin.

  Peter drove slowly and it was easy to follow him. At this hour of the afternoon Kilmarnock seemed a busy little town, its main street lined with shops and shoppers.

  They were quickly out on the highway, and as she followed Peter’s car, Susan tried to register the turns for future reference. In only a few miles he pulled into a driveway, and she drew in behind him. For a moment she sat viewing the big gray and white house that seemed to have gone whimsically erratic in its architecture. Crape myrtle bloomed gloriously at one side of the steps—a delight to eyes more accustomed to the earth colors of New Mexico.

  A black man came from behind the house to greet her with a warm smile. “Welcome home, Miss Susy.”

  He was an older man, so she must have known him long ago. He saw the question in her eyes and reassured her quickly.

  “I’m George Dixon. Guess maybe that little girl was too small to remember.”

  She smiled warmly and held out her hand. “I’ll need a little time to remember everything.”

  He shook her hand and went to take her bags from the trunk. Peter left his car to join them, waiting while Susan stood looking up at this house that must be more than a hundred years old.

  Behind the peaked room over the entrance, rose a tower with windows and a gallery running around the outside. Here was something she remembered.

  “I remember that tower,” she told Peter.

  “How old were you when you went away, Susan?”

  “Six, I think. Or close to seven. I can only remember snatches of that life.”

  One of those snatches had to do with a loving, comforting woman and another with crying when her father took her away. When she was older he told her that they were no longer welcome in her grandmother’s house and that it had been necessary to leave when they did.

  A woman walked onto the porch, and Susan moved toward her. Though she seemed very old to Susan she still looked proudly handsome, with wonderful facial bones that age couldn’t touch. She held herself tall, her shoulders straight in her white Chinese jacket, her legs long in slim white trousers. Her manner was grave and somewhat intimidating, so that Susan felt even more uncertain.

  Peter ran up the steps ahead of her. “I’m sorry we’re late, Alex, something came up that I had to take care of. I’ve brought your granddaughter.”

  As Susan stepped onto the porch, the old woman moved forward and held out a formal hand in greeting. “Welcome to Virginia, Susan. I hope your journey hasn’t been too tiring.”

  She shouldn’t have expected an affectionate welcome, Susan thought. Long ago this woman had held her on her lap, and they had cried together because her mother had died—a flash of brief memory told her that—but this stiff formality made her wish she were elsewhere.

  “Thank you for helping us out, Peter. I hope you will stay for tea,” Alex said, then turned to the black man, who was waiting. “George, will you carry Miss Susan’s bags upstairs, please.”

  Miss Susan? But, of course, this was the South.

  Peter opened the screen door for the two women, and Susan walked into a hall that ran from the front to the back of the house. On her right an open double doorway revealed a long, beautiful room with pine-paneled walls and a flowered Chinese rug, faded to softly luminous colors.

  Her grandmother gestured and Susan stepped into the room. A fireplace, set almost flat against the wall, caught her eye. The protrusion of mantelpiece formed a narrow ledge, on which stood several ceramic cats. One cat was only a head, with a huge grin that ran from ear to ear.

  “The Cheshire cat!” Susan cried. “I remember him.”

  “Yes.” Her grandmother spoke softly. “Your mother used to read you Alice in Wonderland, though you were much too young for that book. You are the one who dropped him on the hearth and took a piece out of his ear.”

  A smile touched her grandmother’s face—a wonderful, warming smile that lasted for only an instant, before the guarded expression returned. A long-fingered hand, beautiful in its grace, invited Susan to a chair. Then she seated herself regally in the center of a sofa, disdaining the supportive damask cushions behind her.

  “I’ve ordered tea,” she said. “I thought you might need refreshment after your long trip, Susan. And you will stay, won’t you, Peter?”

  There seemed a faint entreaty in her voice, and Susan suspected that, for all her assurance, this woman did not want to be left alone with a granddaughter she barely knew.

  Peter agreed to stay, though he sat down a bit stiffly on a delicate chair—a chair that might have come from some French salon.

  Tension seemed to fill the room, and Susan’s feeling that this was never going to work increased.

  Peter made an effort toward conversation. “How long has it been since you two saw each other?”

  “About twenty-five years,” Alex said, and added with an emotion she couldn’t control, “All those senseless years!” At once she suppressed her feelings. “Did your father tell you much about us here in Virginia?”

  “He didn
’t talk about you very much,” Susan admitted. “He never told me what happened, but his views were pretty prejudiced. I never knew what to believe. Perhaps that’s one reason why I’m here.”

  Her grandmother made no response to her words, changing the subject quickly. “I can’t think where Theresa is. She promised to join us for tea. Susan, do you remember your cousin Theresa?”

  Before she could answer, Theresa Montoro came through a rear door, her arms filled with sprays of crape myrtle, the pink blossoms lending a glow to her cheeks. Her big dark eyes were luminous, offset by black, dramatic eyebrows. Susan remembered her instantly.

  “Hello, Susan,” Theresa said, nodding, and then turned to Alex Montoro. “I’ll put these into water and tell Gracie to bring in your tea. Everything is ready, I’m sure.”

  “In a few minutes,” Alex told her. “There’s no hurry. Run along and take care of your flowers. Peter, perhaps you should take Susan up to her room before we have tea, so that she can freshen up.”

  “Of course,” he said.

  Susan was glad to escape the increasingly uncomfortable atmosphere.

  Peter led the way into the hall and toward a flight of stairs rising against the wall. Susan paused at the foot of the stairs, looking upward, arrested. Some frightening twinge of memory had stopped her, only to evaporate before she could grasp it.

  “Is something the matter?” Peter asked.

  She shook her head, unable to explain, and went past him to the floor above, where a second flight climbed to a long hallway. They followed this to the tower room, built a few steps up from the hall level.

  The door stood open and Susan walked in, while Peter waited in the doorway. She remembered this room. A curving wall followed the outside shape of the tower, though the room was not a complete circle, since a portion of it had been partitioned off, forming the shape of a half moon. A door in the outer wall opened on the balcony. All this she recognized uneasily and without joy.

  “Perhaps you’d like to settle in a bit,” he suggested. “Your bathroom is next door, and if you want to rest a little, I can tell your grandmother.”

  “No, no. I’ll come down soon, thank you—I don’t need to rest.”

  When he’d gone she stood looking around, studying the room’s detail, trying to quiet the tugging of something ominous that seemed just out of reach of her consciousness.

  The room was simply furnished. A highboy with brass pulls stood against the flat wall, and a comfortable armchair sat in the open, with a lamp on the table beside it. A small, straight-backed chair had been pulled up to a desk with cubbyholes. The faded wallpaper, with sprigs of violets in the pattern, seemed familiar. She smiled, recalling that she’d tried to smell those tiny flowers as a child. On the wall above the bed a bright square of wallpaper stood out, as though a picture might have hung there until recently.

  Farther along, a framed watercolor of a lighthouse caught her eye—circular and squat, built on pilings out in the water. Gulls soared around it, and she knew she must have sat fascinated before this painting as a child. A name flashed into her mind—though she wasn’t sure it had any connection with the painting: Tangerine Island. Was there really such a place?

  The next painting was of a little girl, and she stopped in recognition. The face was hers. It must have been painted only a little while before she left Virginia. By her mother? she wondered. She seemed to remember watercolor paints, and a room where they’d painted happily together.

  The artist had shown a dreamy quality in the young face—wide eyes and a mouth almost ready to smile. This must have been the way she’d looked just before her mother’s death. Just before her father had taken her away from Virginia forever. No details of that time remained—only a heavy sense of tears and pain. This was why she had come—to find all the memories that had been shut away from her for these many years.

  The tower door to the balcony drew her and she stepped outside to look down on a wide green lawn at the rear of the house. Grass sloped to the lapping waters of the creek, reaching to the edge of a small beach. She could remember running down there to paddle at the water’s edge, though it had been forbidden unless a grownup was with her. Sometimes Theresa had served in that capacity, young as she was.

  A few memories stirred and she recalled the stories Theresa used to tell. One was about a time when she was a princess in a palace high in the mountains of Peru. She had been born in Peru, and clearly looked down on Susan, whose birthplace was Virginia’s Northern Neck. But there was no time for this now, much as she wanted to remember.

  She went into the delightfully old-fashioned bathroom and washed her face and hands, feeling better immediately. Then she returned to put on a blue cambric shirt. Her gray slacks would do for now, and she would unpack properly later. Just as she brushed her hair into its smooth cap, Theresa appeared.

  “Your grandmother would like you to come down for tea now. Peter has to leave in a little while.”

  “Thank you, I’m ready,” Susan told her, and added curiously, “Do you remember me, Theresa?”

  “Of course I remember you. And I remember your father very well—a dark, angry man who frightened me a little.”

  That sounded like Lawrence Prentice, Susan thought. She followed Theresa down the stairs. “Perhaps you can tell me about my parents sometime. I remember so little about the years when I lived here.”

  “Sometimes it’s better not to remember,” Theresa said and went busily ahead as though she wanted no more talk. Susan hurried after her down to the long room where Alex Montoro sat before a dropleaf table that had been opened to serve them tea. When Peter had brought chairs for Susan, Theresa, and himself, he sat down with them. He still seemed absent at times, as though his focus lay elsewhere, and Susan wondered what it was that troubled him so deeply.

  Tea with lemon was refreshing, and shortbread from Scotland unexpected and delicious. Alex smiled and explained that imported shortbread was a little luxury the family had always indulged.

  “The Montoro family boasted a stray Highlander who turned up in Peru in his wanderings during the last century, and stayed on to marry a Montoro girl. Perhaps that’s why Kilmarnock, which was named for a town in Scotland, appealed to Juan Gabriel.”

  This was the first time her grandfather had been mentioned. Susan had no memory of him at all, but was eager to absorb every scrap of information about the family that came her way. She felt closer to that long-ago Scotsman who had wandered out of his ken, than to her Spanish ancestors in Peru.

  Peter continued to seem preoccupied, and Susan made an effort to pull him back into the conversation.

  “Are you a family physician, Peter? Or do you specialize?”

  Theresa made a small sound of dismay, as though Susan had said something inappropriate. Alex set her cup down carefully, waiting.

  Peter didn’t seem to mind. “I suppose I’m still in family practice, though I’ve closed my office for the time being.”

  The silence that followed seemed awkward, and Peter asked a question of his own.

  “I understand you’re a nurse, Susan?”

  “That’s what I’m trained for, though I’m not sure it’s a profession I want to follow.”

  “Why is that?”

  She tried to speak evenly. “The last four private patients I’ve nursed have died. Perhaps needlessly—as much from their treatment as from their disease. But when I challenge and ask questions, I’m cut off, dismissed.” There was challenge in the look she turned on Peter.

  “You’re quite right to ask questions,” he said gravely. “I’m inclined to agree with you.”

  Alex Montoro moved quietly away from what Susan sensed might be an uncomfortable topic.

  “How much do you know about my adopted land of Virginia, Susan? This Northern Neck? It was given that name by the English back in the 1600s.”

  “Not very
much. I’ve looked at maps and there seem to be three peninsulas extending along Virginia’s northeastern shore.”

  “Those are the Necks. Tidal rivers have carved them out of the mainland. Ours is the northern peninsula, between the Rappahannock and the Potomac. It’s almost a hundred miles long, but only fifteen or twenty wide at various points. And it’s sliced into by hundreds of tidal creeks, which give it a good deal of coastline. Up near Fredricksburg the rivers almost meet. Peter—you’re a native—tell her about the Northern Neck.”

  Here was a subject he could warm to. “In the old days there were no bridges and few roads, so this area was almost an island. Our little towns, especially in the south, are still pretty isolated. People who live in one part of the peninsula may not see much of those in other parts. And there’s an opposite shore of Virginia, across the Chesapeake, that we seldom get to at all.”

  “There are two little islands as well, out on the bay. One belongs to Virginia, the other to Maryland,” her grandmother put in.

  Susan smiled. “Did I used to call one of those islands Tangerine?”

  “I had forgotten that,” Peter said happily, “but you’re right, Susan. You could never remember Tangier.” He went on with his account. “A good deal of history was made in this area. The Algonquins were here first, of course. Then Captain John Smith came along—he was brought here as a captive. According to his own account, this is where Pocahontas saved him. Jamestown was settled in the northern county of Northumberland. English kings began to take an interest in Virginia’s rich prospects—tobacco growing, for one thing.”

  Alex brightened. “Tell her how Virginia came to be called the Old Dominion.”

  “It’s a good story. When Cromwell was dead and his son had abdicated, Charles II returned to England in 1660. Because Virginia had been loyal to his cause, when he became king, he had coins struck commemorating the dominions of ‘England, Scotland, Ireland, and Virginia.’ So we Virginians are still proud to call our state the Old Dominion.”