Downtown

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  “I think Twenty-three Oglethorpe is the bus I take to work,” I said. “I’ve got it written down somewhere…. I thought you said you already had a boyfriend, who worked for that automobile thing…Carl?”

  “Carl is fine for the Church’s Home,” Rachel grinned. “You’ve gotta have some fun, after all. But when I hit Colonial Homes it’s good-bye Carl, hello Buckhead. And let the good times roll.”

  “I hope you haven’t told Carl that.”

  “I’m not a fool. Carl’s going to think he’s the greatest thing in shoe leather until he’s on the way out the door. But listen, it’s all a game. He knows. He’d bounce me out on the sidewalk so fast my head would spin if he got something better. It’s just the way you do things up here. You gotta move fast and travel light.”

  I said nothing, thinking that if this was the way the game was played in Atlanta, I would never get the hang of it. Nothing here was like it had been back home. My clothes were wrong, my expectations unfounded, the experiences of my entire lifetime totally alien.

  But then I thought, well, that’s why I’m here, isn’t it? To learn how to move fast and travel light? So I’ll learn. I can learn anything this silly child can.

  And when Rachel said, “Let’s cruise around a little and see what we can scare up,” I said, “Fine,” and got up behind her, and took a deep breath and squared my shoulders under my all-wrong navy blue coat and followed her into the crowd.

  I can remember few more uncomfortable journeys in my life. Rachel seemed to know many of the brightly plumed young in the IHOP, and reached out to lay a hand on this shoulder and that; tossed back the red hair, now unbound and kinking furiously on her shoulders; laughed and blew smoke and dodged away from grasping hands. But she never stopped, and behind her, I plowed on, a stiff smile pasted on my mouth, feeling with every step the four or five all-wrong extra inches of cloth around my knees, feeling flat, assessing eyes on me, hearing barely muffled laughter that I did not doubt was aimed at me. When Rachel finally stopped beside a booth where two pasty-faced, wolfish young men in lank, collar-brushing hair and scuffed ankle boots lolled amid overflowing ashtrays, I said lightly, “Ladies room,” and found it and ducked gratefully inside. It was cramped and filthy, but blessedly empty, and I drew a deep breath and let it out, and then ran cold water into a basin and splashed my burning face repeatedly.

  Some minutes later Rachel came in. Her face was flushed and her eyes were very bright. She opened her shoulder bag and fished in it for makeup, and began brushing brick-red blush on her cheeks and applying a thick icing of chalky lipstick to her mouth. She was excited; I could smell the musk of her body through the sharp-sweet perfume she wore.

  “Bingo,” she said. “We’re invited to a party. Those two guys say there’s a great one going on over on Lindbergh; there’s some kicky apartments over there, and they want us to go with them. They’ve got a car, and they’ll bring it around and pick us up. The dark one, Earl, thinks you’re cute. He wants you to be his date.”

  “Rachel, I really don’t think—”

  “Come on. He’s older than he looks; he has a good job at Lockheed. And there’s nothing else to do but sit around Our Lady and wash out pantyhose. It’s dead on Sunday. Here’s your chance to meet some swingers and get to know the party scene. Here, let me poof some of this on you, and do up your eyes a little….”

  She dug deeper into the purse and it spilled its contents over the counter. A small cardboard wheel tumbled out. Tiny pills were embedded in it. About half were gone. I stared as if an asp had crawled out of her handbag. I knew as surely as I knew anything, as surely as I had known the condom, that they were birth control pills. I felt my chest and cheeks flame, and snapped my eyes to my own reflection in the mirror, busying myself with fluffing my hair. I wanted to say something hip and funny, but I could think of nothing. Embarrassment almost strangled me.

  She said nothing for a long moment. Then she swept the pills back into her purse and clicked it shut. I expected her to make a wisecrack, but she said, sullenly, “I suppose you think I’m going straight to hell, don’t you?”

  “No, I—”

  “Well, I don’t give a shit what you or anybody else thinks. I’m up here to swing for a change, to have a little fun before I get old and ugly and stuck with a million screaming brats, and nobody, not you or the Church or anybody else, is going to tell me how to live my life. Come or don’t come, I don’t care. But don’t stick up your nose at the way I do things.”

  I did not reply. She went to the door, opened it, and looked back.

  “Coming?”

  I shook my head.

  “I really thought you were different,” she said, and went out of the door and closed it. Through it, I heard: “You can make the last Mass at Saint Joseph’s if you hurry.”

  I stayed there for a while, looking at myself in the mirror, my heart finally slowing its pounding. And then I put on my raincoat and walked through the crowd out onto Peachtree Street. Rachel and the two young men were nowhere in sight. The rain had stopped, but last night’s heavy fog had come down again. I set off through it back the way we had come, stepping over the puddles and the litter, feeling more sharply than ever the rawness through my thin coat. I felt shamed, chastened, humiliated by my shock at the pills and her scorn at my prissy naiveté; disoriented, near to tears, and lonelier than I had ever been in my life. Loneliness was an emotion almost entirely alien to Corkie; we all lived, simply, too packed together for loneliness. I almost did not know what the emptiness was.

  I had meant to find my way over to Saint Joseph’s, but suddenly I wanted, instead of dimness and stale incense and the mustiness of a dingy winter church, lights and chatter and the warm, buttery smell of popcorn. When I passed back by the little theater, I went in. Two hours later I came back out into the lowering darkness as one pulling exhaustedly for the surface of dark water, nearly drowned in somberness and obliqueness and Bergman’s enigmatic flickering, doom-charged images. I could not have made a worse choice, on this dark Sunday, to show me the Atlanta I had come in search of.

  Walking the last empty block toward Fourteenth Street, watching the pale streetlights making shallow pools in the foggy emptiness, my shoulders felt weighted, literally burdened with the great freight of wrongness. Why had I thought it would be special, this upstart young city so far to the north of everything I knew? Why had I known so surely that I was coming to Camelot? I could not remember. I had only been to Atlanta twice before: once to a Beta Club Convention when I was in the eleventh grade at Saint Zita’s, when I and another girl had slept in the same room with the chaperoning nun and never left the anonymous downtown hotel; and once to visit my father’s younger brother Gerald in his little house in Kirkwood, when I was perhaps nine. We had only stayed two nights before my father and my uncle got into a fight over some fancied slight to Ireland and we left and drove back to Savannah. I had thought of Atlanta, before I came here this time, as a place much like Corkie, except that it had yards and did not smell of ships and shrimp and sulphur and the sea. Indeed, except for a trip to Ponce de Leon Park to see the Atlanta Crackers play and one to the great, dark brick Sears Roebuck on Ponce de Leon, I had done nothing here that we did not do at home in Corkie.

  But it was different; somehow I had always known that it was. It was Camelot, the Camelot of the wonderful stage play, the movie. Splendor, glamour, it was all here. If I could only find the key.

  In that dark twilight, I knew for the first time that perhaps I would not.

  When I got back to Our Lady, I went straight to the dining room, for I felt a great, whistling hollowness inside, and thought that part of it, at least, might be hunger. But the room was bare and dark. Sister Mary James, putting her head out of her quarters, told me that there was no dinner served on Sunday nights.

  “So many of our girls have a heavy Sunday meal with their families. I thought you would have seen that we do not serve, in the pamphlet. In any case, I supposed you would have a meal s
omewhere with Rachel. She is usually out on Sunday evenings.”

  “I’m not really hungry,” I said.

  “Did you enjoy Mass?” she said. “I believe Father Diehl takes the eleven o’clock.”

  “It was very interesting,” I said. “Well, I think I’ll go and write a few letters, and meet some of the others—”

  “I believe most of them have retired for the night,” Sister Mary James said. “I was up a few minutes ago and all of their doors were closed. You’ll be without a roommate for one more night; Ansonia’s mother called to say that Ansonia has another of her sinus infections, and will not be coming back until tomorrow or the next day. Poor child, she suffers terribly in weather like this. Remember breakfast is at six, in case you want to go to early Mass. You’ll hear the bell.”

  “Thank you, sister. Goodnight,” I said, and went up the stairs and down the silent hall to my room. Sister Mary James was right. None of the doors was open.

  Much later, after I had set out my clothes for the next day and written a brief, determinedly cheerful postcard home, and taken a quick, uneasy bath in the chilly, too-big bathroom, I turned out my light and crawled into bed. This time I did not lift the shade that Sister Mary James had let down over the window. I lay in the thick, airless darkness and listened to the thumping, pinging radiator and thought, Well, I can call them in the morning and tell them it was a mistake and I want to come home. It’s not a disgrace. At least I would know my way, know how to live there. It may be all I do know, but I know it well. I could be somebody there, a big fish, a kind of queen….

  No, I can’t, I thought then. Whatever happens to me here, that is not an option. This may turn out to be the worst mistake I ever made, but going back is not an option.

  For the first time I could remember I had not said my prayers, and I started to get out of bed and kneel on the floor beside it, but then I did not. The thought came, ridiculous but powerful, that I would simply be too exposed there. I closed my eyes and said, rapidly, “Holy Mary, Mother of God…”

  The words crashed into the ceiling and scattered back down over me. I tried again: “Holy Mary, Mother of God…”

  It was no use. Apparently the Blessed Virgin had turned her head as inexorably away from me as her handmaiden downstairs. I did not try again.

  Far down the hall I heard someone begin to cry. The sound was muffled behind the thickness of old oak and perhaps thin layers of old percale, but it was unmistakable. In my house in Corkie I had heard that and all the other sounds of living through the paper-thin walls. I knew tears when I heard them. I lay still listening to the crying, wondering if I should get up and make my way down the dark hall, listening at each door in turn, until I found it. But then I heard heavy footsteps ascending the stairs and moving down the hall, and stopping, and the sound of a door opening and closing, and soon the weeping stopped, and at last I slept.

  3

  I DREAMED OF HOME AND EARLY MORNING AND BREAKFAST, and when I smelled coffee and the hot steam of pancakes I tried at first, in the manner of dreamers waking, to work it into my dream.

  Then I felt and saw light spilling over me, and heard a voice on the edge of laughter say, “Good morning, sleepy head. Don’t you have a date downtown?”

  I raised my head groggily and saw a young nun setting a covered tray down on the desk. In the dazzle of light from the window her face seemed to gleam with a kind of translucence. She sat down on the edge of my bed and held out a cup of coffee.

  “Drink up,” she said, and her voice was crisp and light, like the first bite from an apple. It was neither Southern nor Irish. “Sister Mary James told me you missed your dinner last night, and I know it’s your first day at your new job, so I thought a little head start on it might come in handy. Don’t go thinking breakfast in bed is part of the service, though.”

  “Thank you, Sister,” I said automatically, blinking in the brightness of the diamond light through the window, and the music of her voice. The whole room, the whole world, seemed transmuted by light. After two days in murkiness I could scarcely take it in.

  “Are you Sister Clementia?” I said, not believing it. She simply could not move in tandem with the dark Sister Mary James.

  The young nun laughed. “Sister would not thank you for that,” she said. “No, I’m Sister Joan. I’m one of the two weekday sisters. Sister Clementia and Sister Mary James take weekends. I saw them when we changed shifts, though, and they said that you’d spent your first day out with Rachel and come in too late for supper, and I knew then that neither of them would have offered you anything on the side. I’m afraid they’re both convinced that Rachel is their cross to bear on this earth. And I knew you’d be in a hurry to get to your job. What a grand one, too. An editor, now. Do you know that Downtown just won some kind of fancy award for best city magazine, or something? Everyone is talking about it, and Mr. Comfort, too. I think it’s fully as good as any national magazine I see.”

  “You read Downtown?” I could not help staring. She laughed again. Her eyes were warm and brown, and there was a scattering of freckles on her nose. I thought she could not be much older than I.

  “I graduated from the Chicago Art Institute,” she said. “I know good graphics when I see them. You must be very good. Mr. Comfort said you’re coming in as senior editor.”

  “You know Mr. Comfort?” I knew that I must sound like a parrot.

  “We all know him here. He’s on the board. And I serve on a kind of unofficial commission he and some other city leaders have started, an ecumenical council on race. There are representatives from all the churches, black and white. Rabbi Jacob Rothschild is on it, and our Archbishop Hallinan. It’s going to do great good, I think. Anyway, Mr. Comfort said to look out for you. And,” her eyes crinkled, “not to let the weekend sisters get you down. They’re some of the most devout we have, but they’re having a hard time with the twentieth century, and Vatican Two was a great shock to them. This is not a good town for the old-liners.”

  Something clicked behind my eyes. “Sister Joan, were you…could you have been playing a guitar and singing in Tight Squeeze Saturday night? My father and I were passing through, and—”

  “And saw two renegade nuns and a priest singing to the hippies and ran your poor father’s blood pressure sky high? I confess. That was me, and Sister Catherine and Father Mark from Saint Stephen’s. We call it a street ministry, but we all enjoy it as much as the kids. I hope your father wasn’t too upset. I realize we do things here that some of our older church members have a hard time with. But we think—the archbishop thinks—that there’s a great need for them. Atlanta is a town for the young.”

  “No, Daddy was all ready to take me home, and seeing you all did the trick,” I said, feeling a rush of love for her, a surge of something near sisterly, in the filial sense, sitting on the edge of my bed with her freckled face screwed up in laughter. I had never felt anything like it for a nun before.

  “Good. Well, I’ll get on downstairs and let you get dressed. I just wanted to say hello, and welcome. Oh, and to see if you knew where Rachel might have gotten to? She wasn’t at breakfast, and her bed hasn’t been slept in. We’re all a little worried.”

  Cold fingers brushed my spine. “She was going on to a party with some boys we met,” I said. “It was at some apartments that she said were popular, but I don’t remember their name. The boys seemed okay—”

  “And were, no doubt,” Sister Joan said. “Don’t you go worrying about her. She’s stayed out before. I just thought I’d ask. The other sisters are upset—”

  “I hope she won’t…you know, lose her room or anything,” I said, wishing I had not informed on Rachel.

  “We’re not her keepers,” Sister Joan said. “The only way she can lose her room is to not pay her rent, or do something much worse than the hours she keeps. I think about her a lot, though. Sometimes, God help me, I think she may simply be one of the lost ones.”

  I blinked at her in surprise. This was a woman
-to-woman conversation, not nun to parishioner, or teacher to pupil. I thought of the little cardboard wheel of pills in Rachel’s purse. I would have bet anything, in that moment, that Sister Joan knew about them.

  “Thank you for breakfast and everything, Sister,” I said.

  “You’re very welcome. I’ll be waiting to hear about your first day. Do they call you Maureen, by the way?”

  “Some people call me Aisling,” I said, thinking to try again to circumvent Smoky.

  “Ashley.” She misunderstood me. “Ashley O’Donnell. How very pretty. It sounds like a byline, doesn’t it? Very smart and now. Well. Happy landings, Ashley O’Donnell.”

  And she was gone in a swirl of skirts.

  I stood looking after her. Ashley O’Donnell. Ashley O’Donnell…I liked it. It did not sound Irish, or Catholic, or anything except young and smart and rather glamorous. That was it, then. From here on out, I would be Ashley O’Donnell, senior editor of Downtown magazine, Atlanta, Georgia.

  When I left Our Lady and ran out into the cold, dazzling morning, I had rolled the waistband of my blue skirt until the hem brushed the tops of my knees, and brushed and shaken my hair until it sprang from its accustomed careful flip and fell over my forehead and one eye in a tousle of curls. I rubbed my cheeks and bit my lips for good measure. Aisling O’Donnell of Corkie might not wear miniskirts and Sassoon hair, but Ashley O’Donnell of Atlanta most certainly would.

  The city pulsed with light and morning; the sidewalks danced with them. The streets were crowded with people on their way downtown, and they looked wonderful to me, vibrant and smart and eager to be on their way. The 23 Oglethorpe bus rocked along between shops and office buildings glinting in the morning light, and everyone on it seemed to be young. The drivers of the bright cars caught in traffic beside the bus looked young, too, sleek and well-groomed. I felt ginger ale bubbles of glee rising in my chest, and bit my lips to keep from laughing aloud with joy and anticipation. Wherever they were going, these chic young men and women alongside me, only I was going into the heart of the city to begin being the new senior editor at Matthew Comfort’s remarkable Downtown magazine. Only I. Ahead of us the city came wheeling up in the dazzling sun. Bronze and silver and blue towers rose up around me.