The Swan House (8 page)

“Withdraw the Dare?” I asked, startled, momentarily shaken out of my stupor.

“Yes. We have several options, though. If you would like to be the Raven, then the girls will simply come up with another dare. If, however, you feel that in light of the . . . the crash, you would rather forget the whole thing, then another Raven can be chosen. We want whatever would be best for you.”

In truth, I had scarcely given the Dare a thought. “No, no. That won't be necessary, Mrs. Alexander. Don't change a thing.” I hardly knew what I was saying, but with more feeling than I'd had in ten days, I said, “I want to be the Raven, and I want to solve the Dare.” I nibbled a fingernail. “What I mean is that I
need
to solve the Dare. It's going to be important—for me and for Mama.”

Mrs. Alexander leaned toward me, her expression intense. “Are you sure, Mary Swan? Do you really want that pressure on you, that constant reminder?”

“Yes. I don't know why, Mrs. Alexander, but somehow that dare is going to help me. I think it will. I hope it will.”

She seemed flustered, unconvinced. “Well, then, please just know that if you ever change your mind, or if you ever just want to talk about it, I'll always be more than happy to meet with you.”

“Thank you. Thanks a lot.” I got tears in my eyes, and she hugged me again and said good-bye. As I watched her walk down the long driveway, I leaned against the opened door, thinking to myself,
That
was your chance to get off the hook. Why didn't you just accept her offer?
And the only answer that came to me was what I'd told Mrs. Alexander. I
needed
to solve the Dare. Never mind that I had not one idea or ounce of energy to tackle it now. Later I would.

Our
LIFE
magazine showed up about two weeks after the crash. On the front cover was this great picture of Natalie Wood, who was kind of like my heroine. She was absolutely gorgeous on the cover, her black hair tousled and windblown, her dark eyes looking up, a wide smile on her face displaying her perfectly straight white teeth. Sometimes I'd fantasize that I might look a tiny bit like Natalie Wood, although there was not one iota of resemblance—she was so stunning and buxom, and I was so plain and flat-chested.

But then I saw the headline in the upper right-hand corner of the cover: “ATLANTA: A City's Time of Sorrow and the Enduring Art Legacy the Plane Victims Left Behind.” I flipped through the pages until I found the article. There were pictures of the paintings that various victims had donated to the museum, and then a picture of a bunch of mourners kneeling outside the Cathedral of Christ the King for the memorial service held there. They were kneeling outside because there was no more room inside. Another picture showed a roomful of women, members of the Atlanta Junior League, standing with their heads bowed in the ballroom of the Piedmont Driving Club, grieving the loss of thirteen of their members. Mama was one of them.

There were shots of the artwork in some of the victims' bedrooms and an article about the different artists. There was a picture of a guard standing outside the museum, which was closed out of respect for the dead, with several wreaths of flowers in front of the door. And there was a picture of a self-portrait Mama had been painting, taken right in her studio. I remembered the day the reporters had come, invading our privacy for the benefit of the public.

I read every word about the crash written in
LIFE
, and when
Newsweek
came a few days later, I read it too. Maybe it was some kind of masochistic pleasure, but I don't think so. It was just me, Mary Swan Middleton, trying to make sense of something that could never be explained.

For days after the crash, the whole city of Atlanta seemed to be in mourning. She had lost over a hundred of her most prominent citizens, people whose lives had been spent investing in the culture of Atlanta.

The churches were full that Sunday morning on the third of June when the news of the horrible tragedy was announced. The president of the Atlanta Arts Center was a victim along with his wife.

“It is doubtful that any American city ever lost at a single stroke so much of its fineness,” said editor Eugene Patterson of the Atlanta Constitution. Most of the victims were members of the tightly knit cadre of old families which makes up the motive force behind much of this Southern city's financial and cultural growth. They were the money raisers, the civic project backers, the city leaders who by letting it be known that they favored peaceful desegregation were responsible for Atlanta's orderly handling of that most difficult problem.

Of the dead, six were board members of the Atlanta Art Association; thirty were members of the Piedmont Driving Club; twenty-one were members of the Capital City Club; thirteen were Junior Leaguers, of which two were former presidents. As editor Jack Spalding of the Atlanta Journal said, “They were all involved in some sort of civic work. ...”

“These people were of the type the city can ill afford to lose, the type who made Atlanta what it is,” said ex-Mayor Hartsfield. “This is the greatest tragedy to strike Atlanta since the Civil War.”

As the week wore on, messages of sympathy arrived from President Kennedy, de Gaulle, the Pope, and many others. Homes in the Buckhead section were garbed in mourning wreaths, neighbors brought over food, and friends and relatives came to get the clothes and belongings of many of the thirty-one children orphaned by the disaster.

At Orly Field, Mayor Allen grimly inspected the wreckage and the partly burned guidebooks, billfolds, travelers checks, souvenir ashtrays, menus, gold slippers, blackened opera glasses, charred cameras, and antique silverware. He picked up a charred vacation brochure (“Your trip will be carefree and unforgettable”), and it crumbled in his hand.

After a trip to the morgue, the gray-haired mayor said wearily, “I had known most of these people since childhood, but I wasn't able to recognize any of them.” The grim task of identification was left to experts, and Allen returned to Atlanta to comfort the bereaved.

On Friday, the Art Association executive committee decided to raise $1.5 million from donations for the purpose of building a new art school as a memorial to the victims. This, they believed, was much more meaningful than eulogies. Dr. Reginald Poland, director of the Art Association Museum, put it about as simply as one could, “Anything you say would be inadequate.”

That was how the article in
Newsweek
ended, and that was how it should have. There was nothing else to say, no possible way to express the personal and communal grief that Atlanta was living. I was glad that the rest of America could know it, and yet I didn't want them to know too much, because, more than anything else, I thought that no one outside of those of us who were living this catastrophe could really understand it. And I didn't want it trivialized.

If I had been talented like Mama, I would have painted something to show how I felt. But every time I got my sketchbook out, all I could do was scribble horrible black lines all over the page. And day by day, I fell into a darker mood and a cycle of not eating and crying and sleeping and sitting on my bed just staring out the window.

When Daddy came home from Paris, he was greeted like the hero he'd been made into, since he was the one who had initially borne the grief for all of Atlanta. People said it again and again, whispered it with shining eyes, “Can you imagine what John Jason Middleton must be going through? Having watched the whole thing . . . seeing it explode with his wife inside.”

But Daddy went around in a daze, and I think he spent a lot of time with other men who had lost wives in the crash. He would come into a room and hold me tight, his unshaven face tickling my cheek.

Daddy always shaved. Daddy was the most sophisticated businessman I knew. He was tall, on the thin side, with that kind of hair that turns gray around the temples and gives men a distinguished look. His hair was jet-black otherwise, and I thought his looks very intriguing.

Not what some people would call knock-you-down handsome, but just so poised and honest. He was strong and sure of himself, but usually not overbearing. And he worked hard. Too hard, in my opinion, because I never felt I got to see enough of him. Even when he was at home, he seemed preoccupied with his job or with Mama. I longed for him to spend an afternoon alone with me. But that never happened. Mama had been impromptu and sporadic. She'd be in the middle of painting when we'd come home from school. Suddenly she'd drop her paintbrush and grab Jimmy and me in a huge hug and say, “Y'all ready for a treat?” We loved Mama's treats because there was no way we could ever guess what they would be. One time she said she was going to take us out for a Coke, and it ended up we got a tour of the Coca-Cola Bottling Company in downtown Atlanta by Mr. Woodruff, the genius behind the soft-drink empire. Another time, we got ice cream as we sat on the back of a white Lipizzaner stallion that was in Atlanta for a very special circus. I don't know how Mama worked those things out. I never asked. I just enjoyed the times when Mama was really happy.

But now, with Mama dead and Daddy looking so awful and me feeling like there was no reason to keep on living, I started wondering if Daddy could take care of us alone. I decided that we needed Ella Mae more than four times a week.

“You can come live with us,” I stated naïvely to her one day. “You could move in here. There's plenty of room.”

“No, chile, I couldn't do that. I gotta take care o' Roy, and sometimes my daughter needs he'p with the gran'baby.”

Amazingly, I had never thought of Ella Mae as having any family other than us. I knew she was married, because her husband, Roy, did yard work for Daddy occasionally. But I had never once heard her talk about her children, never seen a picture, and never thought that it might be odd that I did not know.

I guess Mama had known about Ella Mae's family. She often told the story of being nine months' pregnant with me and ready to deliver on the sidewalk. In that uncomfortable position she had decided that she must have a maid to help her after the baby came. And so she put an ad in the paper for help. When Ella Mae showed up at our house for an interview, Mama couldn't understand a word she said, not even her first name, which she repeated five times until finally Mama got it.

“Bring your family to live here, Ella Mae,” I said stubbornly, determined that my world would not change.

“Chile, you think I could move my black family up heah and live with white folk—heah in the rich part of Atlanta? You don't know whatcha askin'.”

Ella Mae's stubborn refusal to even consider my deepest request made me angry, and I left the room to sulk. I went up the two flights of stairs to the big open bedroom with the skylight that let in the afternoon sun. I didn't know what to do with myself. I had never been patient. When I had an idea, I wanted to get moving with it. And now I had an idea for the first time in weeks: Ella Mae would come live with us.

I stared out the dormer window, looking far below to where a massive hickory tree grew in the backyard, a rope swing attached to one of the lower branches. I could almost see Mama there, sitting in the yard with her easel and palette, painting me as I pumped my legs and forced the swing higher and higher, laughing in delighted four-year-old reverie, my light brown hair flying behind in a tangled swirl.

Mama was always happiest with a paintbrush in her hand. At other times she was sullen and pouty or sharp and critical, but a paintbrush almost always assured a smile and then a happy, if concentrated, intense look.

Why did you have to die, Mama, in a burst of flame?
Angrily I rubbed the back of my hand across my face, wiping all the salty tears away. But it didn't do a bit of good. They came right back.

About an hour later I left my room, coming down the two flights of steps with slow deliberation. When my feet touched on the landing of the main floor, I caught sight of the portrait in the entrance hall. I loved it more than anything else that had ever belonged to me or ever would.

Mama painted many children's portraits. I remembered often coming home from school or waking from my nap to find Mama in her studio touching up a portrait of some finely clad child. The little girls were almost always dressed in pink taffeta, it seemed to me, with big pink ribbons in their long silky hair. Their expressions were serene and submissive, a flower or a kitten or a small book in their hands.

So when Mama decided that it was time to paint me at the age of four and a half, she went out and bought a beautiful taffeta dress, pink with smocking of little kittens and pansies across the front. And a wide pink ribbon for my hair. The dress lay across the twin bed in my room that I didn't use. Lay there for days. I tried it on for Mama and wriggled uncomfortably inside the scratchy new material. Mama laughed, with a little gleam in her eyes.

When the day came for her to do the sketch and take the photographs, I started up the stairs to my room, dreading the pink dress. Halfway up, Mama caught my arm and pulled me close. “Mary Swan,” she whispered in the delightful way that meant she was really happy, “I don't much like the pink dress. Do you?”

Hesitantly I peered at her, wondering. Then I shook my head vehemently. “Well, then, if you don't like it either, I think you should go up and pick out your very favorite clothes to wear while you pose for the portrait.”

It was like the taste of your first strawberry in late March, so wild and sweet. Of course Mama knew what I would choose. I ran to my room, threw open the bottom drawer of my white wicker chest, the drawer reserved for my playclothes, and retrieved a pair of boy's denim overalls. Old, stained, twice my size, and terribly faded, with patches sewn all over, they had been cut off and rolled up above the knees. Underneath I pulled on a light blue T-shirt, equally faded and worn. No shoes. I turned and looked at the taffeta dress draped across my bed with the stiff pink bow lying beside it, and I laughed a luxurious little-girl laugh. Mama was painting my portrait in my favorite clothes!