The Swan House (7 page)

I stared at the article again. Daddy loved the High Museum almost as much as Mama did, and Jimmy and I knew it like the back of our hand. Whatever happened at the museum, the Middleton family would be there to help. Then I remembered—I was the Raven. A tragic twist of fate would make the Raven Dare all the more important. I
had
to help the museum, and one way would be by finding Mama's missing painting.

I turned the page and saw the next article, which brought the tears once again: “Thirteen Artists Among 130 Killed in Jet—Thirteen artists, at least three of whom were highly professional people with rising reputations, perished in the Paris air crash. . . .” It listed all the names, and Mama's was mentioned as being a very well-respected and sought-after artist, not only in Atlanta, but throughout the Southeast. The article ended with the quote, “They contributed in their enthusiasm and proved that art is worthwhile for life. They instilled their enthusiasm in their community and made life for themselves and others richer.”

I found a very brief editorial on page twenty-two of the
Journal
that I thought pretty well summed up what we were all feeling. I read it over and over:

There are some tragedies too great, some shocks too severe for the human spirit to understand and encompass at once. Such was the tragedy Sunday in Paris that took the lives of so many Atlantans and Georgians. Families were broken by it, and children were orphaned. The personal suffering and loss are so intense that years will pass before the sharp edge of grief is dulled.

The loss will be felt, too, by those who were not bound by ties of kinship and friendship to those who died. For these were the people who did things, who had the extra something that kept them in front. They were the ones who in times of crisis could be counted upon to come to the rescue of whatever worthy cause might be failing. They were the ones who could be depended upon to successfully sponsor whatever project might be important at the time. Their particular cares were the Art Association, the opera, the symphony, the Speech School, the agencies of the Community Chest, or whatever might bring greater richness and depth to life in Atlanta. The Journal extends its deepest and most heartfelt sympathy to their families and friends.

It was that same evening that I discovered the obituaries. I'd never read them before. In fact, I doubted I even knew such a page existed, but I learned a lot of new things in the summer of 1962. One of the most unimportant and yet most painful was the obituary page. Ever after, seeing it in a newspaper would bring back the terrible memories of that first discovery.

Somebody else had said it, and it was true. It felt as if I was being punched in the stomach with every name I read. Page after page, the obituaries listed the history of the crash victims, interspersed with their pictures, and I knew almost all of their names. Some of their daughters were attending or had graduated from Wellington Prep School. One of my classmates, Lanie Bradshaw, had suddenly become an orphan overnight. At least I still had Daddy.

Between the names and histories of the deceased were four ads of such extreme banality that I wondered at the insensitivity of the press. There was an ad for Supreme Coffee with musical notes floating around and the caption “Sparkling note for guests.” Another ad claimed the benefits of using a special type of termite control. And then there was the ad for shoes to prove you appreciated your dad on Father's Day.

But the absolute worst was the ad for whiskey. “There's nothing to life but good living,” the ad read. “Folks, here's my pride and joy. Friendships and whiskies improve with age.”
There's nothing to life but
good living
. Why did they print that on a page filled with death? How could they? It was right next to Mama's name. Mama wasn't living and nothing was good. Nothing.

On the second page of the
Journal
in bold letters was the headline: “Negroes Rejected at Decatur High.” I suppose if it had been any other day, I would have noticed that article, my being so staunchly, if naïvely, in support of civil rights. But I didn't see it until months later when I at last got up the courage to leaf back through the paper whose words proclaimed the news that had changed my life. When I did read that headline, long after all the heartache had happened, it occurred to me that the
Atlanta Journal
, in two brief pages, had summed up everything that would have meaning to me for the rest of my teenage years: a plane crash, a memorial museum, and a boy with dark skin who was not allowed to attend a white high school.

Chapter 3

I
t was late on Tuesday afternoon when Ella Mae called out from below. “Swannee! Jimmy! Yore daddy's here.” I flew down the stairs and into my daddy's arms, Jimmy close behind and impatiently waiting his turn. Ever since Sunday, Jimmy and I had wavered between childhood and adolescence, wrestling with the emotions that bumped around inside of us. But when we saw Daddy, we, or at least I, was sure: I was just a little girl. His little girl.

Daddy's hug was fierce; he kept holding me and then Jimmy and hugging us and saying things like “Thank God, you're both okay. Thank God.”

“Oh, Daddy,” I sobbed. “It's the most terrible thing.”

There he was without Mama. Without his Sheila. We walked, all three of us interlaced arm in arm, back to Daddy's study.

I was stunned by the change in my father. In the space of the month since I'd last seen him, he looked as though he had aged twenty years. He was haggard and pale with dark circles under his brown eyes, and it seemed as though he had indeed been carrying the grief of a half million people on his shoulders.

I hugged him all the tighter and felt the prickle of his unshaven face against mine. When I was a child, I had called his shadow beard “pepper,” and somehow it was comforting to feel that pepper again while he was holding me. So we sat on the leather couch in his study, me leaning on one of his shoulders and Jimmy on the other. I don't know what Jimmy was thinking, but I was pretending in my big imagination that Mama was upstairs in her studio, painting a still life. At any minute she would step into the study, paintbrush in hand, and dab a bit of red on my nose, giggling and whispering in her soft Southern drawl, “My, Swannee, don't you look marrrrvelous!” And then we'd all start laughing, as we had done so many times before.

“Your mama had the time of her life on the trip,” Daddy was saying, and that brought me back to reality. “Of course she missed you both so much. There wasn't a day that went by when she didn't say, ‘Now, JJ, don't you just wish Swannee could see this exhibit? She'd love it.' And ‘Jimmy would spend hours in front of Napoleon's Tomb, can't you just see it?'” He chuckled a little with the memory, and that was okay. Then he sighed and said, “She was really happy during the whole trip.”

Daddy looked at us hard, his eyes a little misty. But it wasn't the tears I saw, but that look of love in his eyes when he emphasized to us that she was really happy while in France.

As a painter, Mama was wild and sensitive and as fragile as a dry twig. I loved her fiercely for all her strange, deep ways. Daddy was kind of like her guardian angel, I think. But I don't think I ever realized how hard it was for Daddy to put up with the dark moods and the fits of crying that came along with what he called Mama's “gift.” Jimmy and I knew about the black moods, too, although we didn't understand them or even try to. That was just how Mama was. There were days when she couldn't get out of bed and days when she'd lock herself in her studio and paint almost ferociously. Daddy was imperturbable, and Ella Mae was a rock, so it was okay that Mama was a leaf or a twig or a petal from a rose. That was how our family worked. And when Mama was in her happy moods, we were the luckiest kids in all of Atlanta.

Daddy was a stockbroker. He was born into what everyone called an “old Atlanta family.” That meant they'd been in Atlanta for a long time and that they had money. Lots of money. Granddad was a great businessman, who had sensed the instability of the market back in 1929 and, fearing a crash, had put all of his money into what Daddy called “something safe.” Thus the Middletons had not been hard hit when everyone else was. Daddy and his siblings, all five of them, grew up with his parents' wealth and heard Granddad's constant admonition, “Son, make wise investments and make lots of connections. Never hurts you to know a lot of people.”

It certainly hadn't hurt Granddad. He'd been a friend of the Candlers, who owned Coca-Cola, and he was one of the early investors in Coke stock. All along Daddy had seen what wise investments could do, and it got into his blood, I guess. As a stockbroker, Daddy successfully kept the money that he and Mama had inherited from their respective families and made a name for himself in the brokerage business. He was well respected in Buckhead, the part of northwest Atlanta where we lived. It was filled with these giant old homes with rambling yards, and I loved to ride around and admire the houses, especially in spring when all the dogwoods and azaleas were in bloom. And Buckhead was where most of the victims of the crash had lived.

“Did she get to do the sketches she wanted?” I asked, content to disappear into the past for a while.

“She did. She sketched so many things.”

“But they were all destroyed, right, Daddy?” Jimmy interrupted.

And then this funny, sweet smile came over Daddy's face. “No, Jimmy, they weren't. I have all the sketches. Mama carried her art supplies in one of her suitcases, but the sketchpad was too big to fit in hers, so I kept it in the bottom of my case, where it was well protected.”

“Oh, Daddy! Go get it!” we cried in unison.

And so he did. And there in his study, we drifted back in time, like in a sweet dream, as Daddy described his Sheila through the pages of her sketchbook.

“On our very first day in Paris, she insisted on sketching by the Seine. She said the light was perfect, and she could even see the Eiffel Tower way off in the distance. See how she did it? And of course she sketched Notre Dame right after that.” He flipped the page, and the famous cathedral appeared.

“Oh, just look at the gargoyles leaning over with their wicked expressions,” I said, peering intently at the page. Then I howled in glee. “Jimmy, look! She put your face on one of the gargoyles!” Mama was known for her touches of humor.

“Did not!” Jimmy insisted. Then upon closer inspection, he shrugged. “Who cares?” But I could tell he was thrilled. And then he snorted. “Look at you, Miss Goody-Two-Shoes. You're the Virgin Mary!” And he was right. “That's a good one! You the Virgin Mary!”

“I hadn't even noticed that,” Daddy said, chuckling, but all too soon we were sniffling and brushing our sleeves across our eyes.

He flipped to the next page, and there was a little girl feeding a pigeon and in the background were lines of people waiting to get into the Louvre.

Daddy gave a nod, as if he'd just remembered something, and said, “It was the strangest thing, that little girl, oblivious to the crowds, intent on her pigeon. And your mama took off her shoes and sat in the grass in the Jardin des Tuileries and started sketching her, equally oblivious to those staring around her. Sheila was so much like a child sometimes. . . .”

Jimmy gave me this queer look, and I raised my eyebrows to warn him to be quiet and listen as Daddy reminisced. So Daddy took us to Rome and Florence and Madrid and Vienna and Amsterdam and London and Edinburgh, and every page was filled with the sketches from those great cities.

Then, quite suddenly, Daddy buried his face in his hands and gave this horrible, deep sigh. I quickly closed the pad. “I'm sorry, Daddy. We don't have to look at it anymore.”

“You keep Mama's sketchpad, Swannee. She'd want it that way,” he said, brushing my forehead with his bristly cheek.

I took it up to my room and set it beside my own sketchbook, the one I used almost daily, the one Mama had given me. Her sketchpad would be one of my most treasured possessions, and with the inspiration from her European trip tucked safely in its pages, I reaffirmed something that I'd felt from my earliest years: I was going to be a painter too.

But it turned out that for weeks I didn't sketch a thing. The June days were muggy and long, and I found myself slipping into a stupor that matched the sticky heat. I typically had a million ideas running around in my head, but now, as hard as I tried, there was nothing there at all. No energy, no interests, no appetite.

“You's gonna git too skinny, Mary Swan, if'n you don't eat nothin',” Ella Mae chided.

I shrugged.

Rachel Abrams's calls went unanswered. My mare was not ridden. My sketchpad lay closed. The lethargy seemed to swallow me up, and I sat for hours staring out the window of my bedroom into the backyard. I didn't know what was the matter with me. I just cried for days on end, and I couldn't eat, and my sleep was fitful.

And I couldn't get away from the articles and the reporters and the citywide grief.

Mrs. Alexander, my English teacher, stopped by my house one afternoon. At Wellington she was prim and proper and demanding, a straight-backed woman in her midforties. But standing there in the entrance hall, she took me in her arms and held me tight. “Mary Swan, I am so sorry.”

Squashed against her bosom, I felt a stab of guilt. How many times had I made fun of her in class by sticking her name into some famous poem at just the right place?

“Would you like to sit down?” I offered. “And what about some lemonade?”

“No, no. I won't be long.” She followed me into the living room, and we sat across from each other on the matching love seats. “Mary Swan, as you know I am the senior girls' advisor, and one of my roles is to supervise the Raven Dare. I know you were selected as this year's Raven—a wonderful choice. But I am also aware that, by a tragic twist of fate, this dare has become quite inappropriate for you. The senior-class officers and I would like to withdraw it.”