Free The Swan House by Elizabeth Musser

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.
    â€œIt 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. ...”
    â€œThese 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