The Swan House Read Online Free PDF Page A

because I might break.
    It was Ella Mae who, crying quietly, fixed a glass of orange juice for me and one for Trixie, and then she took my hands as she had done so often in my life and began to hum very low and reverently, “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen. Nobody knows but Jesus.”
    It was when she was humming the part about nobody knowing but Jesus that I began to cry. And then I wept and I heaved, and the most excruciating pain I had ever known wracked my body. Not physical. A pain so deep down in my soul that it felt like a type of death itself. We sat there, me crying and Trixie biting her lip and Ella Mae humming, for a long time.
    We went back into the den and listened to the radio, sitting there numblike, as the persuasive voice of some man selling sedatives ended, and the neutral voice of the newscaster came on the air, announcing the most awful tragedy in the most impersonal way. Then it would switch to singing commercials, and the hard-sell adman would come back on again, while we listened in agony, waiting. Waiting. Waiting to hear a list of names, waiting for a phone call to confirm our worst fears, waiting for time to start ticking again and assure us that there was a future out there. That morning, the morning without fried chicken or the sound of the vacuum cleaner, was a day when I, on the brink of womanhood, became again just a skinny flat-chested girl who wanted more than anything else to curl up in her maid’s lap and be rocked to sleep.
    It was Trixie who got up the courage to call the Air France office on Forsyth Street. The line was busy for so long that we gave up and just sat again, Trixie smoking one cigarette after another. The phone must have rung around ten-thirty, its shrill clanging bringing us out of our stupor. And not one of us wanted to answer it. But Ella Mae picked it up and said in a voice much changed from her usual robust greeting, “Middleton residence.”
    She listened intently for a moment, then screwed her face up in a perplexing expression and began to yell. “Hello. Hello! Who is this? Whatcha sayin’? Is you tryin’ to trick us, Mista? Hurt us more than we already be hurtin’?”
    Then she paused, leaned in even closer to the phone as if she were trying to peer through the lines to check out the caller. Finally she let out a “Lawd be praised, it is you, Mr. Middleton!” which caused me to jump up and grab the phone from her hand.
    â€œDaddy! Daddy! Is it you? Is it really you? Ella Mae heard at church about a plane crash, and we thought it was yours. . . .”
    But Daddy’s voice was filled with anguish and punctuated by sobs as he said through a crackling phone line, “Mary Swan, sweetheart. Mama was on the plane. Mama . . . Mama died in the crash.”
    â€œNo!” I screamed because the horror had been replaced by a moment of hope, and now the horror struck again. I let the phone drop and sank to the floor as Jimmy came into the room, his face holding a thousand questions. Trixie took the phone and Ella Mae held on to Jimmy, and somehow we got through the agony of that hour. I do not know how. All I remembered later was the delicious sound of Daddy’s voice and then the sound of it breaking and then the realization that Mama was gone. Daddy was stuck thousands of miles away from us, alone in his grief, and we were in shock. I did not know anything except a shattering pain in my chest and a desire to run, run backward in time to when life was the way it had always been.
    After Daddy’s phone call, after so many tears, I fell back onto the couch in the study, completely exhausted. Grandmom and Granddad arrived soon afterward. They had been in church when they heard the news. As soon as they walked in the front door, I could tell they’d been crying, something I had never seen them do before. But Grandmom tried not to show it as she wrapped her tiny arms around me. She wasn’t even as tall as