The Swan House (5 page)

“All the streets going downtown near the
Atlanta Journal Constitution
building at Forsyth Street are jammed with traffic. You can't believe it. You just can't believe it. Nobody can. Not a soul can believe it.” Her hands were trembling as she held out five copies of the special edition, and Grandmom and Granddad and Ella Mae and Jimmy and I each took one. I sank to the floor right there in the entrance hall, staring at the picture on the front page. In the foreground were a bunch of firemen with their hard hats on, and behind them was the tail of the plane all broken and sticking up toward the sky. The caption read, “Charred section of tail only recognizable part of plane.”

“Oh my gosh,” Jimmy mumbled.

On the right-hand side of the front page there was a long, long list of the Atlanta victims, typed in alphabetical order and bold print. I felt as if I might faint. The names were too numerous to fit on the front page but spilled over to another page, one after another, husbands and wives, a few children, and almost every one was a name that I recognized.

I saw Mama's name before the others did, and I let out a little sob. There it was, right after Mrs. William Merritt of Peachtree Battle Avenue and right before Mrs. Lawton Miller of Argonne Drive: Mrs. John Jason Middleton of Andrews Drive. Somehow, seeing her name in black-and-white made it final and sure. There was no way to fantasize that she had somehow escaped, especially when I examined the photo of the remains of the plane.

One of the main articles said that Mayor Ivan Allen was heading for Paris late that afternoon. “With this much of Atlanta there, I think we ought to be on the scene,” he had said. And then the mayor had spoken on behalf of the whole city. “Atlanta has suffered her greatest tragedy and loss.” And Mr. Carmichael, who was a close friend of Daddy's and the chairman of the board of the Atlanta Art Association, was quoted as saying, “It's like an atomic bomb has hit Atlanta. It's the most tragic thing for all of us. At the Art Association, it has simply wiped out our basic support. These were the hard workers, the people we depended on.”

Mama and Daddy had always been very involved in the Art Association. I had grown up seeing my parents off at the door, me clinging to Mama's leg and then to Ella Mae as they left for some fundraising affair, both of them looking elegant. And now Mama would never dress up again, wearing the tight-fitting luxurious satin gowns for which she was known.

I couldn't bear to read anything else. I left the paper in the middle of the hall, ran up two flights of stairs and into my bathroom, and vomited. Then I fell on my bed. I was still lying there, in the same clothes and the same position, when I woke up late the next morning.

Chapter 2

T
hose first two days were nothing but a constant flow of people, of radio and television announcements and newspaper articles, all talking about the crash. It was as if Atlanta was a walled-in city of medieval times, taken siege and oblivious to the rest of the world, so consumed were we all by what had happened. It was everywhere, and we were terribly drained. The hardest article to read was the one in the
Atlanta Constitution
that talked about my family. “Two young teens would have been orphaned by the Paris plane crash if their parents had not decided to take separate planes home from abroad. . . .” It sounded like Daddy was a hero in the article—the fact that he had decided not to fly with Mama for the sake of us kids. I really can't explain how strange I felt reading about myself and Jimmy in the paper and how we still had a daddy. It seemed to me like the reporters went too far, telling something so personal, something meant to make the readers cry, something sentimental to pull at their hearts. Well, everyone's heart was already breaking. It struck me all wrong. If Daddy was a hero, then there should have been some sort of celebration, but it was simply the blackest time in the world, the blackest time in my whole life.

For most of the day Monday, Jimmy and I just sat around the house waiting for Daddy to return and wearing our darkest clothes, since we were in mourning. Trixie and Ella Mae stayed at the house all day, helping Grandmom and Granddad. They spoke with all the callers who came, literally by the hundreds, bringing flowers and casseroles and custards and all kinds of delicious, mouth-watering goodies of the South. But none of us had any appetite. Somehow it seemed sacrilegious to enjoy something that tasted so good when Mama had just perished in that awful plane, burned to death in an explosion of heat.

And all during that day, we'd look out from the second-story window and see the cars parked down at the bottom of the hill, and Jimmy would lean out the window and tell me about every person who was walking up the driveway. Jimmy was at that awkward age of thirteen. I guess I had always loved my kid brother, but I was immensely grateful that we went to different schools so he didn't embarrass me in front of my friends. He had gotten Mama's blond hair and fine features and Daddy's dark brown eyes, which meant, all and all, he was a pretty good-looking kid. But, of course, since he drove me practically insane, I would never admit it. He had collections of rocks and baseball cards, and he liked to take the tops off of soda bottles and make weird art out of them, so that Mama had sometimes called him Jimmy Picasso.

But being there, just the two of us without Daddy, at the worst time in our lives, kind of drew us together. Daddy called twice a day just to hear our voices and explained that the French authorities needed him to help with the investigation. And I guess he was a big support to the mayor because they knew each other well.

Neither Jimmy nor I wanted to see all the people coming by. We'd hide upstairs and listen to the voices when the doorbell rang, looking down the staircase to see who was there, or we'd tiptoe down the back stairs and through the kitchen and peek through those doors. It became our twisted game, our way of simply surviving those first few days. When the doorbell rang, Jimmy would go tearing down the back stairs and through the kitchen, and I would peep around the corner of the upstairs. As soon as we discovered who the caller was, we'd race back to the bedroom. The first one there with the right answer won. And so the game continued for hours and hours as if we were preschoolers instead of teenagers. We clung to that game tenaciously, and I loved my brother all the more for the passion with which he played it.

It was after another lunch that Ella Mae fixed and no one ate that Papy and Mamie McKenzie, Mama's parents, arrived. They lived on a big cotton plantation in South Georgia and were in their late sixties. Papy looked as Scottish as his roots from the Borders, and he could imitate his father's brogue perfectly, even though he'd spent the last forty-five years in Georgia. He was a giant of a man with reddish hair that curled all over his head and piercing green eyes, and he loved to call me Lassie. At Christmas he would put on his family's McKenzie kilt and bring out his bagpipes and delight us with that haunting music and the jigs that he danced with Mamie.

Mamie was one hundred percent French and spoke English with an accent that I thought was beautiful and intriguing. Papy had met her while serving in France during the First World War and had fallen in love with her. I guess I could understand why, because, from what I could tell from the photographs, Mamie had been stunning. She'd had really dark hair, maybe black, and clear brown eyes with thick dark lashes, and she was skinny as a rail except for where it mattered most. But I think their love story had been a big scandal back in Scotland, because Mamie was from what they called “a different social class.” But Papy had convinced her to marry him. Soon after, to the shock of his whole family, Papy bought a cotton plantation in South Georgia, and he and Mamie moved across the ocean. His family, Papy liked to say, had made their fortune in Scottish wool, and now he wanted to try his hand at spinning cotton. It had worked, I guess, because Papy certainly seemed to have loads of money.

I don't think Mamie ever really adjusted to life in the American South. She was always complaining about the lack of real cheese and the
faible vin
, and she insisted that Jimmy and I call her Mamie, which was the French equivalent of Grandmom. So my grandfather went along with her game, and that's why we called him Papy.

Mamie always scared me. If she got upset,
énervée
as she called it, she'd scream at us, and once she even slapped me in the face. When I went crying to Mama, she hushed me up and explained that was just how Mamie had been raised, the way things had been done in her family in France. She was a strange, high-strung woman, and I'd once overheard Daddy complaining to his parents that all she wanted from Papy was his money. She did like to travel back to France two or three times a year, and sometimes she spent months going to the most exotic places, without Papy. I always hoped she would invite me on one of her trips, but she never had. She did bring Jimmy and me back some great souvenirs.

But if Papy's marriage to Mamie had been kind of a scandal, I'd seen the old newspaper clippings about Mama and Daddy's marriage that touted their union as a great social success, bringing together the Middleton and McKenzie fortunes. And while all four of our grandparents smothered us with love in their own distinct ways, they barely tolerated each other. And Mamie distrusted Daddy.

So I watched carefully as Grandmom met Mamie at the door. Mamie's face was hard and creased, and the bright red lipstick she wore was smeared on so that it went above her top lip and left several specks on her front teeth. “Ian, Evelyne,” Grandmom said. She kissed Papy gently on the cheek. “We are so sorry.” Then she took Mamie by her frail shoulders and kissed her softly on each cheek, French style. That seemed to touch Mamie's heart, because the hard, pinched expression left her face, and it was replaced by genuine misery.

Papy grabbed Jimmy and me in his big bear hug and held us close and didn't say a word. But by the way his chest rose and fell and the horrible, deep sighs that accompanied the rising and falling, I knew he was crying too. Everyone in my life who had always seemed invincible was broken in two.

Trixie was so organized that she thought of everything, right down to the guest book that everyone signed after they'd expressed their condolences. I was leafing through the book on Monday afternoon when the bell rang once again. Before I could run to hide, in walked my best friend, Rachel, with a huge bouquet of flowers in her hands. “It's from everyone at school,” she choked out. She handed the flowers to Trixie, and then she took me in her arms and just wept, and I wept, and she smoothed my long hair and said over and over, “Swan, I'm so sorry. So very sorry.”

Rachel was made for crises. She took me upstairs and we sat in my room, and she talked on and on about everything and nothing and what the rest of our part of Atlanta looked like, how the cars really were lined up for miles in front of each home. She reported the facts without emotion, so it didn't make me want to cry anymore, and besides, I didn't have any tears left for the time being.

“It's just all over the news, you know, and your dad's picture with the mayor and all the photos of that plane just smashed into pieces.” She glanced my way and continued. “And they say that they'll be raising lots of money for the art museum now—people are already giving huge sums in memory of those who . . . perished.” Another glance at me. “You all right, Swan? You want me to stop talking?”

I shrugged. After a few moments of silence I said, “Rach, will you put on JP?”

“You sure?”

“Positive.”

Soon the sounds of flute and harpsichord filled my room. Handel. Sonata in B Minor, Opus 1, number 9. Jean-Pierre Rampal, the brilliant French flutist who had gained international renown, played the Largo, his vibrato so strong and yet so soft and so smooth that it sent chills running up and down my spine. I closed my eyes and pictured mountain peaks and snow and a piercing sun breaking through the clouds. It felt at that moment like JP, as Rachel and I called him, was playing a funeral hymn for my mother, lovingly, slowly, with emotion. And as he played, I imagined a little girl delicately placing a bundle of handpicked wild flowers on a fresh grave in a field far below the snow-covered ridges.

“It's like he's mourning with me,” I whispered, and Rachel nodded. We were transported by that music in an ethereal way that later we would try to explain and couldn't. But it was the first time I really felt what I had long understood: that something could be extremely beautiful and intensely painful at the same time.

“You're gonna be okay, Swan,” Rachel stated in her practical way when we got up and headed downstairs. “If you can laugh and cry like that, it means that you're gonna be okay.”

She was halfway out the door when Trixie caught up with us. “Swan, why don't you go to the barn with Rachel for a while? Get away from all the people.”

I shrugged, already headed toward the kitchen and the
Atlanta Constitution
.

“Go on, sweetie,” Trixie urged. “It'll do you good.”

It was only a five-minute walk up the street from my house to Rachel's. I walked it almost every day, usually with a bounce to my step, because behind Rachel's house was a stable, and in the stable was my chestnut mare, Bonnie. The stable had five stalls and, behind it, a large riding ring and several acres of woods with trails. Most all of the houses in the part of Atlanta where I lived sat on spacious yards with plenty of land surrounding them. Some homes, like mine, had a pool behind them. Rachel's had a stable.

But I dragged my feet to the barn that day. Bonnie greeted me with a soft nicker, her head peering over the door of her stall, small ears pricked forward. I sat down across from her stall in the overflowing shavings that were stored there. The smells of horses and hay and shavings and manure and leather, the smells of this part of my life, permeated the air, but the excitement and fond memories they usually awakened in me were absent that afternoon.