Free The Swan House by Elizabeth Musser Page B

the dormer window, looking far below to where a massive hickory tree grew in the backyard, a rope swing attached to one of the lower branches. I could almost see Mama there, sitting in the yard with her easel and palette, painting me as I pumped my legs and forced the swing higher and higher, laughing in delighted four-year-old reverie, my light brown hair flying behind in a tangled swirl.
    Mama was always happiest with a paintbrush in her hand. At other times she was sullen and pouty or sharp and critical, but a paintbrush almost always assured a smile and then a happy, if concentrated, intense look.
    Why did you have to die, Mama, in a burst of flame? Angrily I rubbed the back of my hand across my face, wiping all the salty tears away. But it didn’t do a bit of good. They came right back.
    About an hour later I left my room, coming down the two flights of steps with slow deliberation. When my feet touched on the landing of the main floor, I caught sight of the portrait in the entrance hall. I loved it more than anything else that had ever belonged to me or ever would.
    Mama painted many children’s portraits. I remembered often coming home from school or waking from my nap to find Mama in her studio touching up a portrait of some finely clad child. The little girls were almost always dressed in pink taffeta, it seemed to me, with big pink ribbons in their long silky hair. Their expressions were serene and submissive, a flower or a kitten or a small book in their hands.
    So when Mama decided that it was time to paint me at the age of four and a half, she went out and bought a beautiful taffeta dress, pink with smocking of little kittens and pansies across the front. And a wide pink ribbon for my hair. The dress lay across the twin bed in my room that I didn’t use. Lay there for days. I tried it on for Mama and wriggled uncomfortably inside the scratchy new material. Mama laughed, with a little gleam in her eyes.
    When the day came for her to do the sketch and take the photographs, I started up the stairs to my room, dreading the pink dress. Halfway up, Mama caught my arm and pulled me close. “Mary Swan,” she whispered in the delightful way that meant she was really happy, “I don’t much like the pink dress. Do you?”
    Hesitantly I peered at her, wondering. Then I shook my head vehemently. “Well, then, if you don’t like it either, I think you should go up and pick out your very favorite clothes to wear while you pose for the portrait.”
    It was like the taste of your first strawberry in late March, so wild and sweet. Of course Mama knew what I would choose. I ran to my room, threw open the bottom drawer of my white wicker chest, the drawer reserved for my playclothes, and retrieved a pair of boy’s denim overalls. Old, stained, twice my size, and terribly faded, with patches sewn all over, they had been cut off and rolled up above the knees. Underneath I pulled on a light blue T-shirt, equally faded and worn. No shoes. I turned and looked at the taffeta dress draped across my bed with the stiff pink bow lying beside it, and I laughed a luxurious little-girl laugh. Mama was painting my portrait in my favorite clothes!
    She was a genius with expression. Even with the serene children whose hands were folded in their laps, Mama managed to convey their personality in the way the eyes shone or flashed and the turn of the lips. And for me, the child she knew best, she offered herself the luxury— la gourmandise , as she called it—of painting me just as I was. On the rope swing, bare feet stretching in the foreground of the painting, my mouth wide open in glee, and my tangled hair flying out behind me. The look in my eyes was of perfect, wild contentment, and even the big hickory from which the swing hung seemed to be smiling.
    It was the kind of painting that made people smile when they looked at it, the kind that inspired you to hold out your arms and go running through