Downtown

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  The pain of lunchtime; the enormity of what we had done to each other, Brad and I; the violent wrenching away of the fragile new safety; the sheer humiliation, took me suddenly, along with the held-back tears. They spewed up into my throat and hung there. I took a deep breath, and willed them back savagely. I literally willed the sickening pain away, willed my mind and heart white and empty. Emptiness came. I waited, and took a long, tentative breath. Emptiness held. All right, then. I would make my own safety.

  “Lucas Geary,” I said, “we are going to start with several—several—drinks at an oasis of my choice. Not a cheap one. And then we are going to go to the Coach and Six and I am going to have wine and double lamb chops and maybe two desserts. And then I am going to have a stinger, a white crème de menthe one. And after that maybe—maybe—we will go and listen to Ramsey Lewis until the last cent you will ever have is gone. And we will leave only when it is. Do you read me?”

  “Loud and clear,” he said. “Go fix your face. Your lipstick is all over it. I’ll meet you at the car.”

  I went into the ladies’ room and fixed my face and added a great squirt of Ma Griffe, something I usually forgot to do. I started out and then went back and squirted a jet of it down into my bra, just where the swell of my breasts started. It felt cold, silken, sensuous.

  “Really last chance,” I said to the Blessed Virgin, but she said nothing, and I ran out of the ladies’ room and onto the elevator and rode down to meet Luke Geary in the dying day.

  We did indeed have several drinks, or at least I did, at the Top of Peachtree. I wanted to get back what it had always been to me; I wanted to lose the ugliness of the lunch hour and reclaim the lovely, lavender twilight full of laughter and sovereignty that it had always meant. After the drinks, I did. When you have a choice between laughter and wounding, ferocious pain, laughter will always win. It is when laughter is not an option that pain will kill you. I think that Luke Geary saved something very real in me that night, because he kept me laughing. The liquor helped.

  He sat across from me, looking as threadbare and disheveled as if he had passed the night in a mission for the indigent; unlike Matt, his disorder did not include expensive clothes and careful barbering. But somehow he looked fine to me that night, arresting, comforting. Luke was never handsome, but he was as appealing to look upon as a raw-boned Irish setter puppy. It was a completely misleading appearance, belying his complexity and cynicism and the odd distance in him. But I took pleasure in it, as I did the cold gin and tonics that he kept coming, one after another. I noticed somewhere along the way that he was drinking beer, and not a lot of that, but it did not matter to me. On this night I did not feel that I had to impress Lucas Geary with my gentility, restraint, or anything else.

  He told me funny stories about himself, stories about his boyhood and the people he had encountered and photographed since he had left Sewanee. He had graduated from college the year I had; that surprised me, faintly. He must be almost exactly my age. I had thought he was older.

  “You’ve been around enough for several lifetimes already,” I said, after listening to his adventures photographing the Civil Rights movement in Mississippi and Alabama and now Georgia. He made all of them scurrilously funny. No one, freedom rider or klansman, escaped the honeyed acid of his tongue.

  “Only after school,” he said. “Before that I was the proverbial fly in amber. You ain’t seen amber till you’ve seen Baltimore and Sewanee, Tennessee.”

  “How did a good Irish Catholic boy end up at Sewanee?” I said. I slurred it a little, I think.

  “Scholarship,” he said. “I applied for every scholarship they knew about in the guidance office in high school. That was the biggest one, and when I won it, my father suddenly developed an Anglican turn of mind. He’d given up on me playing football for Notre Dame, but I think he still had something at Georgetown in mind. But Sewanee’s stipend was too good to turn down. It was fine with me; I was real taken with the Fugitives at that time—you know, the Agrarian Manifesto—and Andrew Lytle was teaching at Sewanee then. It was while I was there that I found out about photography.”

  “Was your family very poor?” I said, feeling that I could say anything, in this envelope of glowing intoxication, to Luke Geary.

  “No. They were very rich. They still are,” he said matter-of-factly.

  I goggled silently at him. I had always assumed he was a child of poverty, and had clawed his way up out of it via his camera.

  “It’s the clothes,” he grinned. “Plus the fact that I guess I look like po’ white trash. Daddy said I did once; said I looked like I had chronic hookworms. After that there didn’t seem any sense in ties and starched collars. I loved it when the flower chirrun came along. Now we all look the same. Don’t judge a man by his clothes, Smoky.”

  “Rich,” I said wonderingly. “Everybody around me turns out to be rich. Lord. First Brad, and then you tell me John Howard’s folks are well off, and now you—I need to get out of here and find some proletariat.”

  I slurred that, too, and he laughed again.

  “That sort of explains you and John Howard,” I said. “Two little rich boys in the middle of a poor folks’ movement. No wonder you get on so well.”

  “Maybe,” he said. “I always thought we got on because we’re both outsiders. I always felt like I was a slum kid who got adopted into a rich family, or something; the way we lived in Baltimore never seemed to fit right. Nothing did until I found cameras and the Civil Rights movement. And John was not only well off, he never really realized he was black. They lived in a white neighborhood, and he went away to a mostly white prep school. His father was adamant about that. His dad was light; he could have passed, John said, but he didn’t want to do that. His practice was among blacks, and he couldn’t have made any money trying to practice among white folks. But John always thought he wanted his only son to pass, because from the time he was born they raised him like he was a white kid. The result was, of course, that he never felt like he fit in anywhere. He went to an all-black theological seminary when he was barely seventeen because no white one would take him and then on to Howard Law School because his father insisted on a law degree, and he said it was only in those places that he found out he really was black, and these blacks weren’t exactly run-of-the-mill. He’s still not really used to it. I think it’s one reason he got so deeply into the SCLC and so attached to Dr. King. They made him feel like he truly belonged, somewhere, for the first time in his life. He’ll do anything for them; I think it’s why he put himself in the line of fire so often. He’ll never forget his loyalty to them. When we first met, during the Washington march in nineteen sixty-three, it was like we knew each other from the cradle. Inside two hours we were making jokes about the way we were raised. Two outsiders trying somehow to pass.”

  He paused. Then he said, “It’s why you’re so easy with him, isn’t it? I think it is; I think it’s why he’s comfortable with you. Otherwise he simply wouldn’t be around you. You’re an outsider, too. And you just never had a thing about Negroes. You can’t, if you’re raised really Irish. I know about that. If you’re brought up with the hard-core Irish thing, there’s just not any time or room to single out the Negroes. They’re only an incidental part of the bigotry you learn about everything that isn’t Irish.”

  I had not thought about this before. Finally I said, “My father hated the Negroes. He thought they were taking jobs that ought to belong to the men in Corkie. He tried to organize a rebellion against them; it eventually got him fired. He never had anything good to say about them after that.”

  “Ah, but that was because they took something from an Irishman,” Luke grinned. “He’d have hated the Lutherans, if he thought they’d taken Irish jobs. He’d have hated anybody who did that. You have to understand that with the Irish, hating is a reaction against a threat to the Irish. With your garden-variety Southerner, it’s hating for the blackness that counts. People say that white Southern prejudice is a matter of e
conomics and culture, that whites hate Negroes who threaten their jobs and their little bit of social supremacy. But there ain’t no hate like a rich white Southerner for a nigger, baby.”

  Suddenly I was tired of it all.

  “White, black, Irish, not Irish, rich, poor,” I said. “The hell with all of it. I’m hungry. I want lamb chops before your money runs out.”

  “It’s not going to,” he said. “I’m putting it all on Matt’s tab. Figure he owes you.”

  “How can you do that?”

  He shrugged.

  “I don’t hang around Downtown strictly for the honor of shooting photo-essays for Culver Carnes,” he said.

  “Then why?”

  “Let’s just say Matt finds a way to disguise my occasional, ah, indulgences, in the new business development budget. Don’t look so shocked, Smoky. Half of what Matt does is trade-off or write-off. He couldn’t run the magazine on the budget the chamber gives him. They know that.”

  “Then I’m changing to surf ’n’ turf,” I said.

  “Let the good times roll,” Luke said, and he paid the check and we left for the Coach and Six.

  We did have lobster, though not the ubiquitous surf ’n’ turf that dominated Atlanta menus then. Luke had broiled stuffed lobster and I had a silken, elegant Thermidor, and white wine like a kiss of air, and something many-layered and chocolate sporting thin shavings of darker chocolate from the dessert cart, and the white crème de menthe stinger I had coveted. By then the evening was beginning to slant oddly, canting in and out as with the tide, and the pain that lay like jumbled razor blades around my heart had dulled down. Laughter nibbled at my lips like tiny fish in warm water, though it frequently shivered on the edge of tears. When we walked out to wait for the Morgan, I was unsteady on my feet, and Luke put a casual arm about my waist that served somewhat to keep me erect. He put the Morgan’s top down, and by the time we had ridden in the warm, rushing air through downtown and into Southwest Atlanta, I was fairly clear again. I did not think I wanted to go home for a very long time.

  Luke found a parking place on the street a block and a half down, toward the Atlanta University complex, and we walked the weedy, deserted no-man’s-land back to Paschal’s in silence. It was nearly ten-thirty, and there was no one else in the street in front of the unprepossessing two-story motel and restaurant that was the unofficial epicenter of the Civil Rights movement. I had walked without real fear in Pumphouse Hill and Summerhill, but somehow this shabby, lunar street left me uneasy. I was acutely conscious that my skin shone white in the pale light from the few unbroken streetlights. I looked around me as we walked.

  “Relax,” Luke said. “Put away your blowgun. We’re not exactly going into the heart of darkness. Most nights this is the center of the civilized world. They’ve had Basie, Hampton, Don Shirley, Red Norvo, Gillespie—you name it. We probably won’t be the only white faces, if that’s what worries you. Matt and I come here a lot. We’ve never been the only ones.”

  “I’m not worried about that.”

  “Then what?”

  “I don’t know. I guess it seems very real to me all of a sudden. The movement and all…”

  And it did. I felt acutely conscious, on every inch of my skin, that I was walking into a place that often drew together the members of something whose passion and purpose paled, with its simple human significance, anything my small life had known. I might even be, for a short time, in the presence of one of the great and luminous legends of my time and any other. My residual drunkenness fled, and so did the scraps of the pain, as well as the tremulous laughter.

  We went inside, threading our way through the close-crowded, small tables, pushing through nearly palpable planes of smoke lying motionless in the air. Luke looked around for John Howard, who had promised to hold a table for us. I followed him, head held high, a silly feeling, unmovable smile on my mouth. I knew that a part of me was searching the room for hostility as a wolf would sniff the wind.

  But I felt none, and felt little curiosity. It was a quiet crowd, with only the sinuous, seminal flow of the music winding through it like a joyous heartbeat. Luke slouched along, nodding here and there to people he knew, and I stumbled along behind him, rigid to my eyebrows with the simple desire not to appear as if I were slumming. I was consumed with a ridiculous desire to let everyone in the room see how delighted I was to be there. I caught myself smiling right and left, and felt myself redden in the darkness.

  “Will you stop nodding like somebody in a bad play?” Luke whispered over his shoulder. “You look like Queen Elizabeth reviewing the troops.”

  I stopped.

  We fetched up at a table against a far wall, and slid into chairs. John Howard sat on the far side, chair tipped back against the wall. Beside him, on his left, Juanita Hollings sat. John had a half-empty beer glass in front of him, but there was nothing on the table in front of her. She sat quietly, her shapely small head bound tonight in a bright African kerchief, gold hoops in her ears. She wore, instead of the djellaba, a simple white blouse and blue jeans. Nevertheless, she looked exotic, nearly feral, in the smoky gloom. Her bone structure was extraordinary; I thought she would be beautiful in whatever she chose to wear. The thought flashed into my mind that she would be even more beautiful in nothing. I looked from her to John Howard, and they both nodded to me. Only John smiled.

  “Hi, Smoky,” he said.

  Juanita said nothing.

  John hit Luke’s shoulder lightly with a balled fist and held up his hand for a waitress. When one came, he ordered beers all around. He did not ask me if I preferred anything else, and I would not have said I did for anything on earth. I wanted only to sit very still and try to melt into the smoke and gloom. My whiteness seemed to wink rottenly beside all the rich shades of dark flesh around me. Not even Lucas Geary seemed so blindingly white. He looked, in fact, somehow as black as the blacks around him. It was amazing.

  A young black man leaned forward out of the shadows beside Juanita, someone I had never seen before. He had been tipped back against the wall; I had not noticed him in the gloom.

  “Introduce me to your friends, John,” he said, in a thick, slow voice, and at first I thought he might be drunk, but there were no empty glasses around him, and I realized that he was, with the exaggerated, gentle drawl, mocking us very slightly. I flushed again.

  “Smoky O’Donnell and Luke Geary, this is Sonny Pickens,” John said. “An old friend of Juanita’s, in town from Berkeley. He’s never been to Atlanta, and we’re softening him up with some barbecue and Ramsey Lewis.”

  Luke grinned and nodded affably, and I smiled, too. Sonny Pickens gave us both a wide white smile that looked, in the murk, more like a shark’s demeanor than a smile. His voice might be slow, but he himself was thin and quick, with nervous, jerky movements. I thought of something small and darting, quick to bite. A fox? A weasel? His face was pointed and his cheekbones high and sharp, and his Afro was larger even than Juanita’s. He was yellow rather than brown. I thought that he might well be someone you would want to soften up. I also thought he was years younger than John Howard, though not, perhaps, Juanita.

  “How do you like Atlanta?” I said politely.

  “I think I’m going to like it right well,” he said. His voice, though slow, was not Southern. “It’s got everything Juanita said it did. Good folks, good food, good music,” he nodded toward the band. “Really good…connections. Just looka here, this very room is full of heroes. Why, I’m sitting at the table with a real live hero…”

  John Howard looked unreadably at him.

  “Don’t be an ass, Sonny,” Juanita said. Her voice was light and sweet, but there was steel under it. Sonny grinned and leaned back against the wall. He folded his arms across his thin chest and closed his eyes, rocking slightly with the music. Like Juanita, he wore a neat, unremarkable white shirt and blue jeans, but also like her, there was something powerfully electric about him, as though he were a young monarch masquerading as a commoner.
A sense, I thought, of being something other than he appeared.

  The music swarmed through the room like a loosened hive of bees: a playful piano weaving in and out around bass and drums. The very walls throbbed with it, a teasing rhythm now bright as a school of minnows in sunny, shallow water, now as glistening dark as viscera, with a heavy blues beat and a skittering counterpoint. I swam into it instinctively, my feet tapping with it, my face turning to it of its own volition. The pianist, a crew-cut young man in horn-rimmed glasses who might have been an accountant, raised a cheerful hand to us, and John and Luke saluted back. I began to relax, very slightly.

  Luke looked down at me.

  “Like it?”

  The trio slid into Duke Ellington’s “Come Sunday” and I smiled at him. “It’s wonderful. They’re terrific. I’d like to have some of their stuff.”

  “I’ve got it all,” he said. “I’ll lend you some. I’ll introduce you, when the set’s over.”

  He looked at John Howard, across the table.

  “Dr. King here?” he said.

  “Might be. He’s here a lot. We just got here ourselves. I see some of our folks over there at the table by the bandstand. I’ll ask.”

  He beckoned toward a large table in the opposite corner of the room.

  Two men rose and came across the room and stood behind John Howard, looking down at us. The short, pudgy one was Tony Willingham and the taller, blacker one Rosser Sellers. I knew their names from half a decade of news accounts, and their faces, vaguely, from the press conference for the day care story. I knew they were, like John Howard, SCLC—King’s men. I knew that both had demonstrated and marched with him; gone quietly to shabby county jails with him; been beaten, bitten, kicked, gassed, shot at. Rosser Sellers had, I knew, been hit, though I could not remember where, or how badly. Self-consciousness thickened my tongue to silence, which was, I knew, just as well. I felt the Irish brogue hovering just behind my lips. It was not exactly just what we needed tonight.