Read Online The Swan House by Elizabeth Musser - Free Book Online

all start laughing, as we had done so many times before.
    â€œYour 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.
    â€œDid she get to do the sketches she wanted?” I asked, content to disappear into the past for a while.
    â€œShe did. She sketched so many things.”
    â€œBut 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.”
    â€œOh, 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.
    â€œOn 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