The Swan House (6 page)

“I think I better go home,” I said to Rachel after I'd been there for only five minutes. “Sorry, Bonnie,” I whispered, running my hand across my mare's soft muzzle. “I don't feel like riding today.”

We walked back toward Rachel's house in silence. Her mother, Mrs. Abrams, met us in the backyard. She was a very attractive woman, a lot shorter than Rachel's five foot six, with blond shoulder-length hair and an oval face. She looked at the moment very prim and proper in her rose-colored suit, but I knew her to be as tough as nails. Mrs. Abrams loved horses as much as Rachel and I did, and most of the time she was at the barn with us, wearing worn jeans and a dirty sweatshirt and rubber boots, her hair covered by a bandana. The three of us shared the responsibility of feeding the five horses, cleaning out their stalls, and doing what Mrs. Abrams called the “general upkeep of the barn.” That translated into a lot of hot, sweaty work, especially when the muggy summer hit.

“Mary Swan, my dear.” She patted my shoulder. Mrs. Abrams was not usually an affectionate woman. “We are all terribly sorry.” She had sent over a casserole that morning. Her eyes looked very red and swollen, and I guessed that she'd already made visits that afternoon to homes of several of her friends who had been on the Orly flight. Although our parents were well acquainted because of Rachel's and my friendship, they were not particularly close friends. They did see each other at the symphony, and Dr. Abrams, a well-respected professor, was one of Daddy's clients.

Mrs. Abrams came up close to me and looked me straight in the eyes, as was her habit. “Mary Swan,” she said, “you know that you are always welcome here and at the barn. Always. But in view of what has happened—” She cleared her throat. “In view of what has happened, you certainly won't be expected to take part in the general upkeep of the place. Take your time. All the time you need.” I believe that she blinked back tears.

“Thank you,” I managed to mumble.

Rachel draped her arm around my shoulder and walked me down her driveway. “They canceled all the exams at Welly. I guess you heard, huh?”

I nodded.

“Memorial service at school is Thursday. I'll come and pick you up for it, Swan, okay?”

I nodded again.

Then I forced one foot in front of the other as I walked back down that wide, winding street. Seeing the cars lined up again in front of my house, I found my way through the woods on the left, taking a well-worn path that led away from my house.

A few minutes later, I emerged from the woods and gazed longingly in front of me to where hundreds of yards of grass and trees and flowering plants led to the Swan House, an Italian-style villa that was well-known in Atlanta and had long ago captured my heart. It was called the Swan House because its owner, Mrs. Inman, used the swan motif throughout the residence. The first swan that greeted a visitor was above the porte cochere of the house. That swan, made of lead and surrounded by glass, was depicted amidst a spray of cattails, and the crescent shape that framed the swan emphasized the delicate beauty of the swan's curving neck.

Mama loved that house so much that it was part of the reason she named me Mary Swan. The other was the fact that Swan was the last name of some distant relatives of Daddy's. And since Mama and Daddy were friends of the Inmans, I'd been inside the house on several occasions. On my first visit as a young child, while the grown-ups played bridge and sipped brandy in the library, I spent several hours searching for all the swans in the house. At first Daddy and Mama had disapproved of my wandering in and out of every room, but Mrs. Inman just chuckled gaily and said, “Leave her alone. It's fine. Mary Swan is just looking for herself in my house.” I had never forgotten those words.

Mama used to say that the Swan House was the place she escaped to when she got tired of painting portraits. I had many memories of playing around her legs as she stood in front of her easel at the bottom of the long yard and painted the house. What she never knew was that when I was older, I, too, often escaped through the woods all alone to contemplate this architectural masterpiece. Its beauty, its name, and its treasures inspired and encouraged me that someday maybe I would be graceful and poised and breathtaking. Someday I would find myself there.

And now, with my life unraveling around me, the simple sight of the elegant mansion, unchanged from my last visit, reassured me. If I had had pencil and paper with me, I would have sketched the house, as I had done so often before. But being empty-handed, I contented myself by sitting at the bottom of the long rolling yard and listening for sounds of birds and insects, hoping to hear echoes of Rampal's flute amidst the tranquil panorama. There, in one of my favorite settings, I could cry in peace.

I don't know how long I sat there. Later I plodded back through the woods to my house, which was like all the homes in our part of town, big and beautiful with immaculate green lawns that were carefully landscaped with the brightest flowers blooming at the appropriate season. Our house was white brick, three stories high, with a chimney on each side and a gable on the roof. It sat far back from the street on a gently sloping hill, and a little creek wiggled its way through the yard near the street, continuing on toward the Swan House. When we were younger, Jimmy and I built branch bridges over the creek and watched the frogs sunning themselves on the rocky little bank.

The trees that lined the front yard were hickory and oak and magnolia and dogwood and pine. The driveway wound its way up the left side of the property and opened into a wide turnaround behind the house. A guest quarters and two-car garage were located farther behind the main house, curving off to the right of the turnaround. Directly behind the turnaround on the left, there was a long expanse of grass that led to the swimming pool. A huge hickory tree rose rather magnificently up toward the sky, right in the middle of the lawn. And all the other trees, dogwood and oak and hickory and pine, made a tall green fence around the yard, so that you felt completely surrounded by nature and protected from the outside world.

The interior of our house had its share of antiques and art and real Oriental rugs and old elaborate chandeliers and stuff like that. But I preferred the poppy red, sun yellow, and berry blue kitchen, where Mama had framed some of Jimmy's and my childish art in big gilded frames and hung them on the wall that led into the breakfast room. And I liked the den because I could watch TV there, stretched out on a big comfortable couch, and I could set my glass of Coke on either of the end tables without Ella Mae chasing after me saying, “You gonna mess up Miz Sheila's fine table if ya aren't careful, Mary Swan.”

It was the kind of house you could easily get lost in, and when we were young we loved to play hide 'n' seek in it with our friends. I liked to sneak down the front staircase and then run past the living and dining rooms and dash up the back stairs whenever anyone got close to finding me. And there were lots of doors in the hallways leading to closets that a small child could disappear into.

Mama and Daddy's bedroom was on the main floor, but upstairs were four more. One for Jimmy, with his own bath and an adjoining bedroom that had been transformed into a boy's playroom. Another bedroom for guests. And the last one with the best light and the big glass windows that opened onto the woods behind the house was Mama's studio, what she called her
atelier
.

The attic was my domain. When I turned twelve, Daddy had announced that it would be redone to become my private rooms, a whole floor all to myself, even though the house already had five bedrooms. Daddy wanted me to be far away from my younger brother and his friends, who loved action and fighting and never seemed to have time to curl up on a bed with a good book.

But that day, nothing about our house pleased me. As soon as I stepped inside the back door, I heard the voices of all those people who had come to express their condolences, and a horrible heaviness settled on me. I crept into the breakfast room, closed the door that led out into the hall, slumped into a chair, and picked up the newspaper from where it lay on the breakfast room table. I stared at the headlines of the
Atlanta Journal
's final home edition. It read “Allen Arrives in Paris to Check Crash Victims.”

I certainly wasn't in the mood to read more morbid details, and yet, there was this insatiable desire to know everything about the crash. So I read, “Paris, June 4—Atlanta Mayor Ivan Allen arrived Monday at the scene of the flaming jetliner crash that carried 130 persons to their death. One hundred and six of them were Atlantans, and many of those were Mayor Allen's personal friends.” Mama was his friend. We had dined with the mayor on two different occasions in the past year. And now there was this awful picture splashed across the front page of Mayor Allen touching the burnt-up remains of the Air France jet.

“This was my generation . . . my friends,” Mayor Allen had said, according to an article on page three of the Monday paper. “Our deepest sympathy is extended to the hundreds of families and thousands of friends of the victims. Atlanta mourns very deeply this group. There is no way to express adequately our sympathy to these families.” And now the mayor was in Paris, personally representing Atlanta at the scene of the tragedy, and at this very moment I imagined he and Daddy were going from one morgue to the next, trying to identify bodies.

Another headline stated poetically: “City of Sorrow Too Hurt to Cry.” Yes, that was true—the tears had stopped momentarily, and there was just the emptiest feeling in the air. It was suffocating grief, and I think we all just about went around numb for the first forty-eight hours. The flags were all flying at half-mast, and William B. Hartsfield, the former mayor of Atlanta who was very much respected among the people, called the crash “the greatest tragedy to strike Atlanta since the Civil War.” President and Mrs. Kennedy sent their condolences to the Atlanta Art Association in a telegram that stated: “Mrs. Kennedy and I are terribly distressed to learn of the plane crash in France, which cost your community and the country so heavily. Please convey our deepest sympathy to the families who experienced this tragedy.” Our Senators Talmadge and Russell wrote, too, as did, I guess, about every other important person in the country.

I forced myself to read all of that first article, and as I did so, I tried to imagine Daddy standing there waving as the plane hurtled down the runway and then watching it explode into flames. I could picture it in all its gruesome detail, and I could not shut it out even when I blinked my eyes. The printed page seared its words into my sensitive spirit as I read on:

The crash took the lives of 121 passengers, all of them Americans, eight crewmen, and Air France's Atlanta agent. Many of the Atlantans were members of the Atlanta Art Association, en route home from a three-week tour of European art galleries and cultural sites. The big mystery is why the plane crashed. One of the two young stewardesses, the only people who survived the crash, said Monday that everything happened so quickly that she hardly had time to realize that she was involved in a disaster.

Witnesses said that the captain, one of Air France's most experienced pilots, apparently tried to halt the airliner after the engine trouble developed as it roared down the runway, but the plane was going too fast. The six-million-dollar, four-engine airliner rose only a few feet, if at all, then plunged to the ground and kept thundering ahead for 300 yards toward a cluster of homes in a village bordering the airfield. Spouting flames, the jet smashed through a fence at the end of the runway and raced wildly over a rolling wooded slope before coming to a halt at the doorsteps of homes in the hamlet of Villeneuve le Roi.

The takeoff just before 1:00 P.M. Paris time was in clear, bright weather—one of Paris's sunniest days this summer—and everything seemed normal as the plane warmed up for the Atlantic crossing. The recording of the pilot's last words with the control tower at Orly Field was requested by the district magistrate for use in the investigation of the crash. The magistrate said the pilot's exchange was routine—asking the tower for permission to take off and getting the go-ahead. ... What the radioman described was one of aviation's greatest tragedies. The big Air France jet, chartered to take Georgians home from a “carefree and unforgettable vacation” in European art museums, as the brochure described the flight, careened across a bare field where one wing dug a trench in the soft earth and shattered a fence separating Orly Field from the adjacent village.

I stopped reading for a moment because everything was so blurry. There was a box of Kleenex sitting on the breakfast room table, and I guess I had used about half of it just to get through the first page of the evening paper. Another article at the bottom of the first page said, “Memorial for Paris Dead Considered at Meeting Here—A grief-stricken Atlanta turned its thoughts Monday to possible ways to memorialize the Atlantans who perished in the air crash in Paris. The subject was one of those taken up Monday afternoon at a specially called meeting of the executive committee of the Atlanta Art Association.

” Jimmy had come into the kitchen and was eating a banana. “Look, Jimmy,” I cried.

Startled, he said, “Gosh, Mary Swan! You don't hafta yell. I'm right here.”

“Sorry,” I replied sheepishly. “But did you see this? Did you see what it says? They're gonna do something at the art museum for the people, for the people in the . . . for Mama.”

“I don't wanna hear it, Swan. I'm tired of that paper. I hate it all! I just hate it!”

He was definitely crying, but I pretended not to notice. I did get up and go over to him and give him a big hug and say, “It's gonna be all right, Jimmy. I swear it.” But I didn't believe a word I said.

Jimmy tossed his banana peel into the trash can and left the room. I didn't even have the strength to say anything else to him. A minute later, I caught sight of him outside wrestling in the carport with his dog, a rust-colored Brittany spaniel named Muffin. Somehow it seemed perfectly appropriate that Jimmy could find consolation with his dog.