Doug Maloof moved to the forefront then, and said, “There’s one more unveiling to go tonight,” and pulled a silken cord dangling from the blue drape over the bar, and it fell away, and I gasped with pure delight, and my eyes filled with tears.
On the wall behind the bar was a great, vivid mural of this very bar, and around it were skillfully painted caricatures of the luminaries of the city. Ben Cameron was there, and most of the Club, and not a few of the news media and our more colorful local eccentrics. In the very center, in a tight circle, was…us. The staff of Downtown. Matt, standing dead in our midst with his red hair flaming in his eyes, a glass raised; around him, Tom and Hank and Lucas Geary. In front of them, seated, Sister and Alicia and Teddy and me. We were all immediately recognizable, if primitively limned, and we were all laughing.
At the piano, Tony swung into “Downtown”:
When you’re alone and life is making you lonely, you can always go…
downtown.
When you’ve got worries, all the noise and the hurry seem to help, I know…
downtown.
The room broke into a great cheer, and we all hugged Doug, and I know that there were tears on more faces than mine. Tom Gordon was wiping his eyes unashamedly, and Matt found occasion to put his dark glasses on. In my ear, Hank Cantwell whispered, “It don’t get any better than this, Holy Smokes! Don’t you wish your mama could see you now?”
“No,” I said, dull sadness and anger stabbing through the glorious giddiness, “but I wish my father could.”
The hubbub had almost died away, and the press was packing up its lights and cameras and downing a last quick drink when Boy Slattery held up the hand that was not attached to Alicia and said loudly, “Wait up, folks, I got a question for Mr. Howard here.”
John Howard nodded gravely to Boy Slattery, and the cameras and microphones swung in close.
“Little bird told me some of your buddies from Lowndes County are in town, John,” Boy said affably. “Hear they’re lookin’ to do a little organizing, and I wondered if you were helping them out some, and if so, could you share your plans with us simple folks here in the city, so we can be prepared, like? Oh, and also, if your good wife and your little boy are with them? I know the rest of the old gang’s all here, including your great good friend Miss—or is it Sister—Juanita Hollings, and maybe even Mr.—or is it Brother—Carmichael…”
There was a long, airless silence in which I could hear only my heart hammering in my ears, even though the import of Boy Slattery’s words was not yet clear to me. Then John Howard said, very softly and clearly, “I can think of very little that is less your business, Lieutenant Governor,” and Ben Cameron said, equally clearly, “All right, folks, this press conference is over,” and more softly, “Sorry, John. Goddamn you, Boy.”
Boy Slattery held up a pink hand and said, smiling cheerfully, “Just askin’, Ben.”
The group of black men turned and walked deliberately out of the room, John Howard with them, and Boy Slattery followed them at a distance, Alicia still in tow. This time she did not look at him, or back at Matt. She simply followed Boy out of the room. Presently, with little more of import said, the Club fell back into formation and left, and we did, too. As I walked out of the still-bright room with Hank and Luke and Teddy, I looked back. At the bar, under the laughing image of himself on the wall, Matt sat, eyes on the starry cityscape beyond the windows. He was drinking a vodka and tonic with only Doug Maloof for company, and he was not smiling.
On the street in front of the parking lot, John Howard stood alone, waiting for his car.
“I’ll get the car, Smoky,” Teddy said, and vanished into the cubicle. Luke and Hank and I stood uncomfortably, saying nothing to John Howard, not knowing what to say.
Then he smiled.
It was a small smile, and did not reach his eyes, but it was a smile.
“I wish to God I’d been there to see you beat his ass, Smoky,” he said, and we all laughed louder than the comment merited, in sheer relief.
“Can we give you a lift?” I said, and then blushed in the darkness. Of course, John Howard would not be going to Buckhead.
He picked up on it.
“What’s a po’ nigger like me gon’ be doin’ out in Buckhead?” he drawled.
I heard Hank take a deep, quick breath. None of us had ever heard John Howard use that word, or speak in dialect.
“Lord, I’m more a nigger than you ever thought about being, John Howard,” I said. “You try the docks in Corkie before you go assigning niggerhood.”
Everyone laughed again, he as loudly as anyone.
“No, thanks, Smoky,” he said. “I’ve got my car. I’m going to stop by Paschal’s.”
“You got a freedom fighter suit in it?” Luke said, and I remembered the neat little pile of preppy clothes in the back of John’s smart Mustang the day of the first Focus shoot, on Pumphouse Hill.
John Howard laughed again. It was a young sound.
“Nah,” he said. “I wear that under my clothes. Drop into a telephone booth when the need arises.”
His Mustang came squalling down the ramp and he tossed the attendant a dollar and gunned the car out of the lot, turning left toward the Southwest, toward the Atlanta University Complex and Paschal’s La Carrousel Lounge.
I watched his taillights wink out of sight around the corner, and then said to Luke, “Okay, tell me what all that was about, that with Boy Slattery.”
Luke paused, and then sighed, and said, “It’s no secret, obviously. John and Stokely Carmichael and Juanita Hollings—the woman you met in Pumphouse Hill—and a bunch from SCLC and SNCC and some others were all together during the Lowndes County voter registration project, where Jonathan Daniels was killed. It was…a very intense time. I was there for a little while; I know. You get so damned close, like in a war. It was there, after Jon was killed, that a lot of them just decided that nonviolence wasn’t the way anymore, that there it was time for something else. I’ve always thought the Panthers were born that night, really. I truly think that’s when Stokely went over, and Juanita. But anyway, before that…well, there was a lot of fooling around. Nobody really knew whether they’d live till the next day; you can’t know unless you were there…anyway. John and Juanita got…real close. Real close. We all knew it. Everybody did. It was serious enough to break up John’s marriage. His wife took their kid and went back to her folks up North. She divorced him not long after that. We all thought he’d go over to the Panthers then, but he never did. He’s been closer to King, and for longer, than almost any of them. I guess, in the end, he just couldn’t leave the movement. But I know he’s always been of two minds about it, really been pulled, ever since…Jon…”
His voice trailed off, and he looked down at me. I said nothing.
“Shit, Smoky, he may be a civil rights hero, but he ain’t no saint,” he said sharply, and I guessed that my face must have mirrored my thoughts. “You can’t possibly know how it was in those days. If you want saints, look somewhere else.”
“Yeah,” Hank said, seeking to defuse the moment. “Like Luke here.”
Luke snorted and moved away impatiently, and I said, sarcastically, “Mah hero,” and we all laughed, dutifully.
But I realized that I did want saints, and I did want John Howard to be one, and I wished with all my heart I did not know what Luke had just told me. Anything else for that broken copper face, I thought as Teddy’s car came screeching down the ramp, was simply trivial.
9
AT THE END OF JULY, BRAD ASKED ME TO GO WITH HIM to his grandmother Hunt’s ninety-second birthday party on Sea Island, and I asked Matt for that Friday off. I had worked straight through two prior weekends, and I did not think he would balk at the request, but he did.
“I need you in here this weekend,” he said curtly. “I sold Seth Parks at Delta a full-page inside cover ad, and promised him you’d write it. He can’t get over you beating Boy at pool.”
“I’m not a c
opywriter, you know that,” I said, anger rising on a flood of red to my cheeks. “And I wish to hell I’d never seen Boy Slattery. You can’t just pass me around like candy to anybody who’s glad Boy got his behind beat.”
“I can assign you to any writing job I see fit,” he said stonily, and went into his office and slammed the door.
“Don’t worry about it, Smoky, I promise you you’ll get Friday off,” Hank said, and followed Matt into his office. He slammed the door, too. Presently he came back out, red-faced, and said, “All set for Friday. I’m afraid you’ll have to do the ad before you go, though. He knows he’s wrong but he’s not going to back down any further. It’s not the ad, it’s just that…you know he doesn’t like anybody breaking up the team. He’s scared you’re going to go off and marry Brad, and he’ll be out a writer and one of his people to boot. You know as well as any of us he doesn’t like Brad.”
“That’s just too bad,” I said, only slightly mollified. “What I do on my own time is my own business. Besides that, I’m not an advertising writer. I resent him dangling me like a plum to get ads, or whatever he thinks he can get.”
“I know it. I told him so. Just screw up the ad and he won’t ask you to do it again.”
We walked out of my office and into his, where Luke Geary lay on the floor, his head on his camera bag. The bad ankle was propped on Hank’s visitor’s chair, and I removed it silently and none too gently and sat down. Luke lifted his camera and aimed it idly at me.
“Don’t do that,” I said irritably.
He clicked the shutter and gave me the shit-eating grin.
“Hear you’re goin’ down to the island with ol’ Brad,” he said. He pronounced it “ahlan,” drawling it out.
“You listening at keyholes these days?”
“I have my sources,” he said. “You going to marry that ol’ boy?”
“Don’t be an utter ass,” I said, reddening. “Of course I’m not.”
“Bet you do,” he said. “Bet once he gets you down there on the ahlan you’ll be so overcome with all that wealth and splendor and shit that you’ll say ‘ah do’ before you know what hit you. Allow me to take the first photograph of the bride.”
I jumped to my feet to flounce out of Hank’s office and he aimed the camera up my skirt, and I said, “Lucas Geary, if you touch that shutter I’m going to step on your face.”
“I’d a whole lot rather you sat on it,” he leered, and I stepped out of my shoe and put my stockinged foot over his face. I was balancing on the other foot, holding onto the edge of Hank’s desk and scrubbing my foot into his face when I saw, from the corner of my eye, a shape go by the open doorway. I looked up to see Culver Carnes’s face, blank with shocked disapproval, disappear past the door.
Hank slammed the door and the three of us collapsed into helpless laughter.
“We’re all going to pay for that,” I said, when we finally stopped.
“You bet your ass we will,” Hank said. “But it was worth it.”
“I hope you appreciate what that means,” Teddy burbled gleefully, when I told her about the weekend at Sea Island.
“What?” I said warily.
“It means you’re as good as engaged,” she said. “It’s practically an Atlanta tradition, getting engaged at Sea Island, and going there on your honeymoon. I know maybe ten girls from Westminster alone who did it. And old Mrs. Hunt’s birthday party to boot. Yep. You’re as good as gone.”
“I’m not going at all if you’re going to talk like that,” I said. We were sitting on her bed, drinking milk and eating cookies, as we sometimes did late at night. We seldom had a chance to talk intimately except at times like these. I loved them. They had an MGM, best-friend, big-sister quality I had dreamed of all my life.
“I’ll stop,” she said. “But seriously, it’s really something, that birthday party. Everybody from here goes down for it. And she’s really something. Do you know anything about her?”
“Only that Brad says she lives down there year-round, with a companion and some servants, and that she’s a little…foggy these days.”
“Foggy! She’s crazy as batshit,” Teddy crowed. “I saw her when we were down there last summer—everybody goes by and pays their respects, like she’s the queen mother, which in a way she is—and she thought it was right after Pearl Harbor and we’d come to pick her up and take her to the Red Cross to roll bandages. Got madder than hell when Mother told her that it was twenty-five years later and we’d won the war. She practically threw us out. She’s a mean old biddy. And she hates Brad’s mother like poison.”
“What a lovely family,” I said. “Does anybody in it like anybody else?”
“Brad and his brother and sister like each other. And of course his mother really likes Brad, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. That’s about it, except when you’re a member of it they’ll all like you. Of course, you may have a little problem with Marylou.”
I ignored that.
“Why does his grandmother hate his mother?” I said. “Not that I blame her.”
“Nobody really knows. She just always has, from the minute Mr. Hunt married her,” Teddy said. “I’ve always thought it was because Marylou is so beautiful, and Grandma looks…exactly like Brad’s father in a wig. It would be hard to lose your favorite son to a woman that drop-dead gorgeous when you were, to say the least, a tad homely, and Mr. Hunt is the absolute apple of her eye. Or was, until she got older and queer enough to say whatever came into her head, and started insulting Marylou. Mr. Hunt got on her about that, so she got mad at him and transferred her affection to Brad. Now he can do no wrong in her eyes, and she won’t even let Marylou spend the night under her roof. When his folks go down there they stay at the Cloister. Marylou’s been itching for years to get her hands on that house; it’s really a fabulous old place. Huge and pink and kind of Spanish, with wrought iron balconies and loggias and verandas, and this wonderful old Spanish tile pool and cabana, and about a million rooms, right on the ocean. It’s terribly rundown now; the old lady’s way past spending any money on it, and couldn’t care less, anyway. She and her companion, who’s almost as old as she is, live in one or two rooms upstairs. The beach has eroded until the ocean is practically up to the doorstep at high tide, but she won’t put in a sea wall, and Marylou won’t let Brad’s dad put a penny into it, because—get this—the old lady’s leaving it to Brad. Said that common daughter-in-law of hers would never get her claws on it, and wrote out a new will naming Brad as sole heir of the place, and made sure it would stick. Grayson Venable drew it up. Marylou pretends she hates the place, but everybody knows she loves Sea Island, and would kill for that house. Nobody else in her crowd has to stay at the Cloister when they’re down there but her—not that it’s exactly hardship duty. It’s just that most of her friends have houses. It’s hard on Marylou because Sea Island is her kind of place. She hates Highlands and she wouldn’t be caught dead anywhere as simple and rustic as Tate. You’ll see when you get down there. Sea Island is just her.”'
“Teddy,” I said in simple wonderment. “How do you know all that stuff?”
She looked at me in astonishment.
“Everybody knows that,” she said, and turned her attention to the problem of my wardrobe.
“Your red linen will be good for Friday night, but you’ll need something long for Mama Hunt’s party and dinner afterward—it’s always in the Spanish Lounge at the Cloister, and the Hunts take her to dinner in the dining room afterward. That’s formal on Saturday night. And you’ll need bermuda shorts and a bathing suit with boy legs, and sandals, and maybe something white for tennis, and a Lilly would be good—”
“Stop,” I said, holding up my hand. “Right now. I do not now and have never owned anything long except my First Communion dress, and I look like an elf on a goofy golf course in Bermuda shorts, and a horrible little boy with boobs in boy-legged bathing suits, and I can’t play tennis and don’t intend to learn, and anyway I don’t have any money, and as for a
Lilly—”
“This is not the time to haul out your principles,” Teddy said. “We’re talking about the rest of your life here. I’ll grant you the tennis and the Lilly, but you absolutely have to have the other stuff. You’re going into the heart of Ward and June Cleaver country, that is, if they were rich. Let me see what I can do.”
We said no more about it, and I went to bed determined to go to Sea Island with the few distinctly urban, inexpensive clothes that I had and no others. But the following night Teddy came home late, having “run by” her parents’ house, and dropped an armful of clothing on my bed, still swathed in dry cleaner’s plastic.
“Lucky my mother never throws anything away,” she said. “She’s been waiting for me to lose fifteen pounds for years so I could get back into these, but that’s not going to happen, and she was tickled to death that you might be able to wear them. She thinks it’s wonderful about the weekend. She and Dad will be at the birthday party, as a matter of fact. She says to wear these and look pretty for Brad, and that she’s keeping her fingers crossed.”
I shot Teddy a look, but her round face was suffused with such genuine, unaffected interest and joy at my good fortune in capturing Buckhead’s most eligible and elusive bachelor that I just shook my head and turned to the clothes. I could, after all, simply leave them hanging in my closet. Or, that is, the closet of Brad’s grandmother’s guest room. He had said we would be staying at her home.
Most of the clothes had labels from Atlanta’s best shops, and a few were from New York, and they were all straight out of the fifties. But it was a fifties that I had never been privy to, and I examined each piece with something akin to hunger. Even if I would never choose them, the clothes were all pretty, and wonderfully made. There was a straight, floor-length white piqué with spaghetti straps and little embroidered flowers scattered over it that had a long pink satin sash. It was only a size larger than I wore, and I knew that I could cinch in the sash and it would be perfect for the formal party and dinner afterward. There was a white, fringed silk shawl that would go over it, and also over my red sleeveless linen, and there were white satin sandals with tiny Cuban heels that looked as if they, too, would fit.
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