The Swan House (11 page)

The little girl gazed at me timidly. “I'm Puddin', and I ain't never heard a name like Mary Swan before!”

I bent down to her level and shrugged. “I know. It's kinda weird. Family name.”

Their eyes got wide at that comment, and James said, “You mean they's lotsa folks in yore family called Swan?”

I laughed. “No. That's not what I meant.”

But Carl brushed it aside and said, “Why don't y'all take Mary Swan to the kitchen, and we'll fix her some iced tea?”

Puddin' took my hand in hers and said, “Come on in our front room.” We left the porch and went through the “front room,” which looked to me just like a bedroom. A table in the corner was piled with newspapers and old magazines, the floor had a dirty rug and a dirtier dog on it, and a skinny woman with droopy eyes that followed my every move sat on an unmade bed.

“Afternoon, ma'am,” she said with a scowl on her face.

“Good afternoon,” I replied and licked my dry lips.

“That's my aunt Neta,” Puddin' confided as she led me through the front room and into the kitchen. Mike opened the fridge, and James gave me a big grin and pointed to a chair. I sat down and tried my hardest not to stare at the flies that were swarming around several crusty plates beside the sink. I could hear Carl whispering something unintelligible to his aunt.

Mike placed a glass of iced tea on the table, and Puddin' whined, “I want some too, Michael. You betta' fix me some right now.” Then she stood behind me and started twisting my hair around her fingers.

James gave her a hard look and said, “Stop it, Puddin'! Ain't polite.”

“Oh no, it's fine,” I said and winked at Puddin'. “Do you think you could braid it for me one day?”

Puddin' scrunched up her nose, looking unconvinced. Then she giggled. “I could try, I guess. Shore feels funny, yore hair, Mary Swan.

All thin and straight.” She giggled again.

For some reason, I pulled her into my lap and started tickling her the way I used to tickle Lucy, Trixie's daughter, when she was younger.

Puddin' howled with delight, and Carl came into the kitchen to see what was going on. When he saw Puddin' squirming happily on my lap, he nodded at me in approval.

So I stayed at Carl's house for about an hour and listened to the kids babbling about their dog and their friends and their school, and I forgot all about Buckhead and Mama and Oakland Cemetery. And when Carl said we needed to be getting back to the church so that Ella Mae wouldn't worry, I didn't really want to leave. I felt all warm inside and nervous, sort of the way I'd felt when I'd been given the Raven Dare. Only this seemed so much better. I'd discovered a whole new world.

Chapter 5

I
t was on July fourteenth that we buried Mama. Daddy chose that day because Mama, being half French, loved France, and that was France's Independence Day. The funeral services for the victims of the crash stretched over the whole summer, and I went to probably fifteen of them, along with Daddy and Trixie and about everyone else in Buckhead. Mama's service at St. Philip's was filled with the same sad people wearing their black suits and dresses, dabbing their eyes with handkerchiefs as they quietly cried.

Daddy's family had several plots in Oakland Cemetery. It was an historic place because it was the first cemetery in Atlanta, established in 1850. The first twenty-five of Atlanta's mayors were buried there, along with the great golfer Bobby Jones; the author of
Gone With the
Wind
, Margaret Mitchell; a lot of Confederate soldiers; and a large portion of Atlanta's elite families, white, black, and Jewish. But as I'd seen with Carl, Oakland was located in the section of Atlanta that was fast becoming known as the bad part of town. As we drove to the cemetery, I thought of my peek through the bars the Saturday before. For a split second I forgot I was at Mama's funeral and remembered the afternoon with Carl and his family. It was a pleasure to lose myself for a moment, because I felt as though I was suffocating inside. We'd cried and grieved and hurt for over a month, and now we had to do it all over again. Would Atlanta never finish grieving for her dead?

A bunch of my friends were there and some of Jimmy's. After the graveside service, Jimmy wandered over to stand with his friend Andy Bartholomew. Andy's older brother, Robbie, was my age, and I'd met him several times before. Now he came up to me. He reminded me of a cross between a football jock and a Boy Scout—and actually, he was involved in both of those activities. He was as tall as Daddy, maybe six feet, with reddish brown hair that was cropped short and a tanned face and warm golden eyes. He had an athletic build, strong and svelte, but when he smiled, his face filled with dimples and he lost any suave look. He seemed, I don't know. . . he seemed nice, kind. Boy Scoutish.

“I just wanted you to know again how sorry I am, Mary Swan,” he said, clearing his throat. He managed a half smile, and one dimple appeared. “You know my family's here if there's anything we can do.”

“Thanks, Robbie.” I felt suddenly awkward in my new black linen suit from J.P. Allen's. I nibbled on my lip. “You know, Andy's been great about inviting Jimmy over. It's no fun being alone with your thoughts in our big house.”

“Andy's glad to have him over.” He reached for my hand and held it briefly. “I am so sorry, Mary Swan.” He started to leave, then added, “And if you need anything, if you ever want to get a burger or something, there's a bunch of us who meet at the Varsity on Sunday evenings.” He smiled briefly again and met my eyes.

I could feel the heat running up my cheeks. “Thanks. Thanks, Robbie. I'll think about it. I will.”

As soon as Robbie walked away, Rachel Abrams was by my side, poking me in the ribs. “Talking to Robbie Bartholomew, are you?” she teased.

“Rachel! Don't you have any respect for etiquette!” I scolded. “It's Mama's funeral.”

Rachel gave me a quick hug and then took me by the shoulders. “I loved your mom, and I love you. And you know as well as I do that life has got to keep going. It can crawl by unnoticed while you suffocate at home, or it can be discovered.” Then those magnificent blue-gray eyes of hers gleamed at me as she whispered mischievously, “And who are you to talk to me about etiquette anyway?”

I wiped the frown off my face and confided, “He offered, well, kind of offered, to ask me to the Varsity. I mean, he said I could come.” I almost giggled.

Rachel glanced around and then pulled me away from the main crowd of people around the grave site. Her eyes were on fire. “Tell me more!”

I wiped my perspiring brow. “Not here, Rach. I have to see all these people. But come over tonight, and I'll tell you about it. And about something else.”

“What else?”

“Someone I met,” I answered ambiguously.

“Tell me now!”

“Tonight!”

She would have pulled it out of me if just then I hadn't seen Helen Goodman out of the corner of my eye. This flirtatious woman, who had quite a reputation, was deep in conversation with Daddy. Something inside me bristled, and I whispered, “I gotta go, Rachel. See you tonight.”

It started to rain a little. Everyone stood there respectfully, talking in low tones, in spite of a steady drizzle and thunder in the background. It seemed fitting for Mama to be buried in the rain. She had died on a perfect summer day in Paris. But I didn't mind her being buried in the rain.

Late that afternoon after the funeral, I found Daddy in his study, his desk crowded with neat piles of papers, his head in his hands. I knocked softly on the opened door.

“Can I come in, Daddy?”

He looked up, gave me a weak smile, and nodded. “Sure, Swannee. What's up?”

“Are you okay, Daddy?”

“It was a hard day.”

“Yep. Really hard.”

He motioned for me to come to him and scooted his big leather chair with the brass studs on the sides back away from the desk so I could perch on one of the arms.

“What are you doing?”

“Looking over papers for the museum. And for my clients. Lots of legal problems with the crash, Swannee. Lots of money floating around.”

“And you're in charge?”

He shrugged. “Yes, of quite a few of the estates. It's good for me to be busy.”

“Are they gonna make that memorial arts school in honor of the victims? Has a lot of money come in?”

“Yes, quite a lot, but it's a bit complicated.”

“You can tell me about it if you want.”

“That's just what your mama would say. ‘JJ, don't look so worried. Tell me about it.' But”—he smiled sadly, remembering something—“Mama couldn't handle business talk for too long. Pretty soon her eyes would glaze over, and I could tell she was far away thinking of a painting. Bless her soul.”

“I'll listen, Daddy. I promise.”

Daddy sat back in his chair and stretched his long legs out under the desk. “A lot of people think Atlanta is just a small Southern city with not much to offer, kind of backward. But many Atlantans, and plenty of them who died in the crash, felt differently. They wanted—we want—Atlanta to be a cultural center in the South. We have a long way to go. You know what Symphony Hall looks like.”

I nodded. The Atlanta Symphony played in the Municipal Auditorium, a shabby building that was built in the early 1900s and was now only fit, as Mama used to say, to house cockfights and circuses.

“If we want our city to keep up with the likes of New York and Washington, we need a reputable arts center that fuses visual arts, performing arts, and art education into a single institution.”

“You mean a place for the symphony and the theater?”

“Exactly. As well as an art museum and an art school.” He chewed on a pencil. “So for a while we'd been trying to set up a big fundraiser to launch the project. Then came the crash, and gifts started pouring in to the Art Association. So we've got to decide what to do with that money, and the consensus is to use it to start a new arts school.” He placed a hand lightly on my back. “You know what people are saying, Mary Swan?”

I shook my head.

“They're saying that arts in Atlanta will rise again, from the ashes of the plane crash, just like the city itself rose from the ashes of the Civil War.”

“The phoenix, right?” I knew well that Atlanta's symbol was the beautiful mythological bird that was fabled to live 500 years in the Arabian wilderness, burn itself on a funeral pyre, and then rise from its own ashes into youth to live on in an unending cycle.

Daddy nodded. “The phoenix.”

“Did lots of the crash victims leave money in their wills to help with the museum?”

“As a matter of fact, that's just what I'm working on. Look at this.” He found a neat pile on his desk and pulled out a folder.
Weinstein
was marked across the top. “Remember Mr. and Mrs. Weinstein? They both died on the plane. Two days before the crash, Mr. Weinstein and I had been talking about the art museum's potential fundraiser while we sat in that famous café , Les Deux Magots, on the Left Bank in Paris. He said he had some money to give and that he'd show me what he was thinking when we got home. But he never got home. And I'm in charge of the estate and have to prove that the money is there for the museum.”

“You can't get away from the crash, can you, Daddy?”

“No. No, sure can't. Not for a long time. A real long time.” He turned toward the big picture window that looked out onto the carport. “They're setting up a memorial exhibition at the museum for the artists who perished in the crash. Two of Mama's paintings will be displayed.”

“Really? When will it open?”

“Very soon, sweetie.”

“Have you picked which paintings to show?”

“Yes, though it wasn't easy to decide. There are so many more to choose from than I would have thought.”

“What do you mean, Daddy?” We both knew that Mama had never been considered a prolific painter. “Have you found more of her paintings?”

He had that far-off look in his eyes. “What? More paintings? No, no. Of course not, Mary Swan. Where would we find more paintings?” But the way he said it made me feel really funny inside.

“So which ones did you choose?”

“I figured we had to send one of the Swan House. Absolutely. And I wondered . . . I wondered if you'd mind if I lent the museum the painting of you on the tree swing?”

“Honest, Daddy? You want them to display that one?”

“Only if you don't mind.” He started making excuses, misreading my thoughts. “Hard to part with it, even for a couple of months. Leave an awful kind of emptiness in the entrance hall, I guess. Maybe that's not such a good idea.”

“Oh no, Daddy! I don't mind. It would be . . .” I got a lump in my throat. “It would be an honor for me.”

“Good, then. We agree.” He rested his hand on my back. “I've set up a special fund for donations that have come in specifically in memory of your mother. What do you think she'd want those donations to go toward?”

“Something about art, for sure,” I said without hesitating.

“Exactly what I thought. I'm calling it the Sheila McKenzie Middleton Memorial Fund, and I've stipulated that it is to be a scholarship fund to help struggling artists get the training they need.” The more Daddy spoke, the more his voice kind of quivered.

“It sounds good, Daddy. Really good.”

“Yes, I thought it was the right thing to do.”

I kissed him on his cheek, wishing it weren't so gaunt and prickly. Wishing that Daddy would sit up tall at his desk and talk loudly on the phone and then push back his big leather chair with the brass rivets and go to the closet and pull out his golf putter. That's what he always used to do. Play golf in his office. But he hadn't held that golf club since the crash, and from the look on his face, I didn't know if he ever would again.