The Swan House by Elizabeth Musser Read Free Book Online Page B

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.
    â€œThis 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.”