Peachtree Road

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  “You wouldn’t know it if there was nothing,” I pointed out, deliberately pedantic, trying to avert the spell with obtuseness. But my own heart still bucked and tore with the terror she had planted there.

  It worked, though. “I would too,” she said mulishly, and her chin went up, and the tears receded. Lucy did not like to be contradicted.

  I laughed, I remember. But now, deep in those middle-life night horrors that bring me up sweating out of sleep, my mouth already tasting that primal nothingness, my heart old with the burden of its truth, sick and corrupted beyond healing or redemption or resurrection and separated forever from the time that I did not know it, I see that she was right. That that is what death truly is, that awful and unending nothing and the eternal knowledge of nothingness. Not life, but death everlasting.

  As we were gathering ourselves this afternoon to leave Lucy to begin her long residence, I felt rather than saw the eyes of the women on me, and I heard old Mrs. Dorsey say to Mrs. Rawls, in the flat nasal shout of Atlanta’s wellborn deaf, “I hear Shep is taking it mighty hard. They always were as close as twins.”

  I grinned inwardly.

  “Sucks to you, Mrs. Dorsey,” I said under my breath. “You’re going to be one bored old sow now that you don’t have Lucy Bondurant to kick around anymore.”

  She was right, though, if not in the way she thinks. But what the hell. Let her keep the thought. I get points for being sensitive and wounded, which may buy me another unmolested chunk of solitude. Lucy and I did have an extraordinary and uncanny closeness, unlike anything else in our lives. It was eerie. I didn’t always like it. Sometimes I out-and-out hated it. But there it was. I could always see into and through Lucy’s mind. When she was young and beautiful and heartless, I was her heart. Later, in the times when she was essentially mindless, I was her mind. I don’t know now what I’m going to do with all this leftover Lucyness.

  Sitting here in the old summerhouse behind the Peachtree Road house where I was born and which I have owned for more than a quarter of a century, and which I have entered only a few times in almost as many years, it occurs to me that when this level, pleasant numbness lifts I may find that I can no longer live in a world where Lucy is not…though not, again, for the reason that Mrs. Dorsey and Company will espouse. It simply may not be possible. If not, I think I know how I’ll arrange things. Lucy would applaud the wit, irony and sheer appropriateness of it. It would match in artistry the panache of her own exit. If it comes to that, will it be the end of the Bondurants? As I said earlier, I’m not apt to know that, whether I stick around or let myself out by the back door. In either case, it scarcely matters.

  It is seven o’clock, and the shadows of the old oaks and hickories in the back garden are falling across the summerhouse and the veranda. The grass beyond that, around the empty oval of the fish pond, is dry and matted and bleached with the heat of September just past, but the shadows have in them the cold blue of winter coming on. Marty needs to get after the lawn service again. Everything looks used and dusty, as it always does in Atlanta in Indian summer. From the looks of the mounded acorns in the grass, and the continuous pelting of them on the old slate roof of the summerhouse, we’re going to have a cold winter, and a long one. I think the image of Lucy lying faceup to the winter—she who so hated cold that she used to weep with despair at the simple fact of February—would be more than I could bear, except that the scotch is working now, and instead of muddling my head into sentiment, it is sharpening it out of maudlinism. Liquor has always clarified things for me. It’s probably why I drink so seldom.

  I should know soon what is going to happen to me.

  Old Willa Bondurant was the last of the women to pass by me on her way out of the cemetery. She is almost perfectly preserved, mummified in her beauty, as is Little Lady, who held her mother’s mottled, birdlike arm as carefully as old Dresden. Only, unlike Little Lady, by age instead of alcohol. Willa has always taken exquisite care of herself. She stopped and smiled at me, a Junior Leaguer still with her simple black dress from Rich’s Regency Shops and her pearls and her “little heels,” and the throaty, slow “Old Atlanta” accent which she perfected early in her tenure in the house on Peachtree Road. Of all its occupants, she alone prevails there now. I knew she would go back to it from the cemetery, to a fire in the little sitting room and her endless cigarettes and afternoon sherries and bridge games and charities and the company of imperious old women.

  Even before she opened her mouth, I knew she was going to say something so terrible that it would, forever after, divide time.

  Oh, yes. We make our own monsters, but they inevitably have their revenge.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Lucy came to live with us in the house on Peachtree Road when she was five and I was seven, and before that April day was over I learned two things that altered almost grotesquely the landscape and weather of my small life. I learned that not all women wept in the nights after the act of love.

  And I learned that we were rich.

  That those tidbits of information should literally change a world seems perhaps a bit strange now, when children of seven digest with equanimity the daily disclosure of the sexual peccadilloes of politicians and television evangelists and the felonious traffic in billions by arbitragers and governments. But the Buckhead and Atlanta of that day were infinitely smaller principalities than now, and my own cosmos within them was minuscule. I literally had nothing with which to compare my life, and so assumed, in the manner of cloistered only children, that everything and everybody else was as we were.

  I knew that my mother cried at night after having intercourse with my father, because I had slept since my infancy in a small room that had been intended as the dressing room for my parents’ bedroom, and I could hear clearly each muffled grunt and thrust of that mute and furious coupling, each accelerating squeal of bedsprings, each of my father’s grudging, indrawn breaths. From my mother I heard nothing during the act, but each time, without fail, that he finished with a snort and began to snore, her weeping would start, and I would lie, muscles stiff and breath held with dread and unexamined fury, waiting for her to stop. I knew precisely how long she would cry, and when the weeping would cease on a deep, rattling sigh, and when the traitorous springs would creak once more as she turned over into sleep, and only then would I unknot my fists and let myself slide into sleep, following her.

  I cannot ever remember wondering what it was that they did in the nights that occasioned the strange hoarse cries, and the alien weeping—for at all other times my mother was one of the most self-possessed women I have ever known. I knew what transpired in their bedroom from the time I could barely walk, though I had no name for the act until Lucy came, and even then only the shadowiest notion of its import. My mother never closed the door between our rooms, and never allowed my father to close it, and for a few weeks and months when I was about two and had just learned to wriggle over the bars of my crib and toddle to the threshold of their bedroom, I watched that darkling coupling.

  It must have frightened me to see the two great titans of my existence grappling in murderous silence on the great canopied tester bed, but I never ran into the room and never cried out, and I do not know to this day whether they knew I was there. How they could have avoided at some time or other raising their heads to see my small, stone-struck figure silhouetted in the sickly glow from my Mickey Mouse night-light I cannot imagine, but neither of them ever gave the smallest sign, and I would hang there night after night, a small Oedipal ghost haunting in despair a chamber where he was not acknowledged.

  After a time I stopped going to the door to watch, and soon was no longer afraid, but I never slept until they were done, and I never lost the feeling of violation that the sounds gave me, or the resulting bile-flood of guilty rage at them. Even then, something cool and infinitesimal deep within me knew that I was being burdened and exploited as no child should be. Oddly, it was never at my father that the jet of my little fury was directed, but
at my mother. He was a massive, tight, furiously simple, red and white-blond man who vented his considerable tempers and passions directly, whenever and wherever they happened to erupt. As useless to feel rage at him as at a volcano, or a broken water main.

  No, it was my mother, the cool, slender, exquisite and infinitely aware vessel for his passions, at whom my anger steamed. It seemed to me that no one so totally self-defined and perceived and carefully calibrated as my mother should allow anything done to her person that would cause weeping, and I was angry at her both for the tears and for making me listen to them. But since my parents were all there was, for practical purposes, to my world, and since I loved my mother and feared my father passionately, I neither admitted the anger nor shut the door. I simply moved, for the first seven years of my life, in a dark and decaying stew of unacknowledged sexuality and anger, and neither cursed the darkness nor thought it out of the ordinary until Lucy Bondurant blew it away on a gust of her extraordinary laughter. On the surface, to the rest of the small society in which I moved, I must have appeared the most unremarkable and ordinary of small boys.

  It was for the same reason that I did not know we were rich: There was nothing and no one who appeared different from us Bondurants in the entire sphere of my existence, and where there is no concept of poor, neither can there be one of rich. There were, of course, Shem and Martha Cater, who lived over the old stable-turned-garage behind the house and worked in the kitchen and pantry and drove the Chrysler and answered the door and sometimes served meals in the big dining room when people came to dinner, and there was Amos, who worked in the yard, and Lottie, who came in to cook, and Princess, who brought the hand laundry, fragrant, silky, and still warm, in a rush basket.

  And there were the dark men and women who worked in the houses and gardens and drove the cars and served the dinners of the few other families in the big houses on and just off Peachtree Road to which I had ingress—as familiar to me as anyone else in my world, known to me by first names as were my few small friends. I knew that these dark people were not like us and did not live as we did, but I did not think of them as poor. I thought of them as Negroes. The one had nothing to do with the other. I liked them, many of them, as well as my own friends, and much better than the white adults, for they neither asked of nor gave to me anything; did not in any way remark me, except as a not disagreeable part of the furnishings of that beautiful and insular and ridiculous fiefdom in which they served.

  I knew about poor in the abstract; poor was the starving children in, for some reason, Albania, whom my mother bade me consider whenever I did not eat my dinner. But I did not know where Albania was and neither, I don’t think, did my parents, or at least my mother, for once, when I asked, over the cooling drumstick of the chicken that had only that morning flopped hysterically around in the backyard after Shem had hatcheted off its head, where Albania was, my father laughed his loud and mirthless laugh and jerked a stubby red finger at my mother and said, “Ask your mother. She thinks it’s down south there just past Griffin. Got kinfolks there that she’s never seen because her papa didn’t think they were fit for her to know.”

  My mother, who had been born and raised the doted-upon, joyless and Christ-haunted only daughter of an unworldly and comparatively wealthy man and his pale effigy of a wife in tiny Griffin, Georgia, thirty miles safely to the southeast of Atlanta, where the Redwine family’s downtown slum real estate holdings lay, smiled sunlessly at him.

  “Your papa is being funny,” she said. “Albania is in Europe and they’re poor because they’re oppressed and conquered.”

  “Who oppressed them?” I asked.

  “Soldiers. The army,” my mother replied.

  “But what army?” I persisted. Like all children of ordered worlds, I was starved for drama, and this had the authentic ring of it.

  “Yes, Olivia, what army? Tell us,” my father said, grinning his angry wolf’s grin.

  “Tell us, tell us,” I chimed, light-headed in relief and gladness that the grin was not directed at me.

  “It was…their own army,” my mother said decisively. “It was a civil war. Like our own poor South suffered, brother against brother. The worst kind of war, the worst kind of suffering. Albania is as desperately poor as Atlanta and the South were once. That chicken on your plate would feed a family of Albanians for a week.”

  “Why don’t we send it to Albania then?” I said, choking with the appreciation of my own wit.

  “Albania is not on your mother’s list of charities,” my father said. “Don’t have a ball or an auxiliary or a fashion show to their name. Not on the Junior League’s roster or the Driving Club’s calendar.”

  My mother rose from the table with that peculiar boneless, amphibian grace of hers that always reminded me of a salamander or a newt or something wet and flashing beneath the surface of water, and left us sitting sheathed in the ice of her disapproval.

  “I think both of you are coarse,” she said, not turning her head. She was not just talking. She meant it. “Coarse” was the worst epithet in my mother’s strictured vocabulary, and I spent a great deal of my early childhood struggling against the vast natural coarseness rampant in my nature.

  I was, I remember, profoundly ashamed of my bowel movements and my frequent thin and reflexive vomitings and asthmatic gaggings, because she would leave the room and summon Martha Cater to attend to me in my disgusting state, and though she never said as much, her sighs and silence were freighted with the implicit blight of “coarse.”

  My father grinned at her departing back, but I did not. Flinty comfort though she might have been to me, my mother was the artery that connected me to life. My friends, some of them, like Sarah and Ben Cameron around the corner and down Muscogee Avenue, had parents different from mine, laughing young parents who sang and danced and spun them around and hugged them in public, but I merely thought those other parents a caprice of nature, or the luck of the draw, like blue eyes instead of brown ones, or freckles. It did not occur to me to aspire to them. Olivia Redwine Bondurant was all I knew personally of nurturing. I ate the chicken.

  My father was right, though; we were not a family long on noblesse oblige. Perhaps our noblesse had been too recently acquired, even by Atlanta standards, to feel the need for oblige. It is an oversimplification, but a serviceable one, that in the Atlanta of that day there were basically two types of gentry: those involved in acquiring largesse and those involved in expending it. Some, like the families of Dorothy and Ben Cameron, Sarah and young Ben’s parents, were the latter; their families had, for three generations, been deeply involved in the fortunes and lives of the city, and their sense of privilege as a vehicle for service ran deep and strong. The Bondurants were the former.

  I could not articulate it then, of course, but our house, beautiful and graceful though it was, was a house of delicate skewedness and aberration. Too many reined passions thrummed there, too many unfed hungers, too many unvoiced fears and unmet needs and marrow-deep repressions. My parents were not clever or active or happy people; did not fit foursquare into the world they had achieved with Redwine money and land and Bondurant guile and acumen. Neither was a native Atlantan, and though there were, in their set, relatively few of those, still, neither Olivia nor Sheppard Bondurant ever felt quite comfortable in the huge house that had been their entree. They did not wear their mantles of aristocracy, such as they were, naturally and lightly, for they were purchased garments and not heirloom ones, and my mother, at least, never forgot that. She, who might have reigned supremely and effortlessly back in tiny Griffin, had painstakingly scaled the pinnacle of the uppity city to the north, and she clung there in faultlessly concealed terror which had, early on, turned her rigid.

  My father, who had been as a boy sublimely content and at home in the rough, hard-drinking, hunting and fishing masculine society that formed Fayetteville, Georgia’s, small upper crust, was perpetually clumping and red-wristed and truculent in the urban clubs and drawing and dining
rooms, which he perceived as effete. She came to think that she had married beneath her and that the vitality and exuberance that had first won her had become the barnacles that weighted her heart and slowed her trajectory through the society of Atlanta. He came to feel that the delicacy and distance and sheen of family substance that had so charmed him had been forged into the weapons with which she cut him off from his kind and kept him isolated at politely hostile club dances and bridge evenings and benefit dinners. She had brought a considerable family fortune to their marriage as a dowry, and with part of it he had bought the house on Peachtree Road and the rural property to the west and north of the city which, coupled with the wretched downtown holdings her family had bequeathed to her, had increased that fortune nearly tenfold. She thought he had used her shamelessly, and he thought she scorned and failed to appreciate him. Both were right on all counts.

  That no one else who knew them perceived them as the misfits they secretly felt themselves to be—for no one around them was introspective or sensitive enough to do so—did not occur to them, and would not have mattered if it had. Their distortions were interior ones, and they lived inwardly to those crooked measures. It was inevitable that from the beginning, I would be what my mother called Sensitive (always seeming to speak the word in capital letters) and my father called sissy.

  “You’re going to make a goddamned preacher of him, Olivia,” he would bellow, when he found me totally immersed in reading my way through the Bible, not comprehending that it was the glorious, plumtasting language of King James and not the precepts contained within that drew me to the Good Book. I did know this, faintly, but could not, in the presence of all that red-faced congestion, explain it, and he would stump away into his study, muttering over his shoulder to my mother: “Always coughing and squinting and fumbling when he tries to play football. Puking up his guts when he tries to put a worm on a hook. Howling like a hound when I put him on a horse. Hell, he can’t even keep up with little Sarah Cameron playing kick the goddamn can, and she’s not knee-high to a grasshopper. He’s never going to have any gumption if you let him keep his nose stuck in a book like that.”