Peachtree Road

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  Little Lady would wriggle then like a toy terrier being petted, and climb up onto a lap, and dimple and duck her perfect little chin and look up under her inch-long, maple-syrup lashes. It was, for a very long time, all that was required of her, and all that was necessary. Everyone who saw her remembered her as a flaxen enchantress, and it was she they meant when they asked my aunt Willa, “How is that pretty daughter of yours?” I could never understand how they could look past the leaping fire that was Lucy to all that pink and white banality, but I truly think the adults of that time never came to see what I first saw, and what soon all the children of Buckhead, especially the boys, eventually did: that Lucy Bondurant was a great, distinguished and disturbing beauty.

  As for little Jamie, what is there to trouble the eye and heart about a beautiful baby who never cries? His beauty and sunniness toppled hearts like a perfectly placed bowling ball. Even my mother came to hold out her arms for him to be put into, fragrant and damp and crowing with delight, from his bath. Even my father laid aside his glasses and put down his cigar and held out his arms for little Jamie Bondurant, as he never did for me. I understood, in the wisdom and fullness of my own new status as saint, that it was not possible to be disappointed in something so uncomplicated and unfinished as a baby, and that my father surely knew, as I did, that this tiny male was, beside me, the only standard-bearer for the family name. I knew, too, without too much rancor and hurt, that he sensed that his own issue would refuse or fail that standard. I even conceded, in my innermost heart, that he was probably right. With the favor of Lucy firmly affixed to my knightly sleeve, that knowledge did not give me a great deal of pain.

  That second summer, though, the two younger children were miserable upstairs in the heat, and bored and lonely with their mother away during the day, and old enough to chafe within the comfortable prison of their tiny world. A beleaguered ToTo would finally, about two o’clock each afternoon, be driven downstairs by the murderously rising heat, herding her whining, scuffling charges ahead of her like small, fractious geese, and would be forbidden by her exasperated mother to bring them into the kitchen under her feet or let them stray into the library under my father’s or the “big” sun porch where my mother lay on her chaise in limp surrender to the July day. That left only the back porch, which for some reason they detested, or the garden and the summerhouse. Since the garden was by that time a blighted Sahara, ToTo brought them into the dim, snake-cool, tiled expanse of the summerhouse where Lucy and I were encamped, and said that if we didn’t like it to go tell her mother.

  We knew instinctively the consequences of that. Martha was unmaternal by nature, and though a good enough tender of children, not a long-sufferer. Her solution to being harried by small, yangy children was simply to tell my mother that she couldn’t get any work done with them underfoot. That produced instantaneous banishment and incarceration all the way around. With no real choice but to let the loathsome Little Lady and Jamie invade our domain at will, Lucy and I spent the summer engaged in creative torture. Not a day passed that we did not inflict agony of body and spirit on the two smaller children sufficient to send them howling and toddling for the house, bent on telling. We would then give ToTo a long, level look and she would uncoil off the sofa, where she slept away the afternoons, and go shuffling after them. She did not protest. ToTo knew that if she could not control the smaller children, if they ran to Martha with their angry bellows and tears, her tenure at 2500 Peachtree Road was over and she would find herself a member of the prodigious household of a shiftless, hard-smacking aunt down in Perry Homes. It was a devil’s bargain.

  On an endless August afternoon when the heat had turned even the tiled cave of the summerhouse into an inferno, Lucy and I moved our play out into the honeysuckle thicket, where the torpidly stirring air might at least dry the sweat on our bodies. For once we were alone. ToTo slept her usual deadened three o’clock sleep on the grimy sofa, and Jamie and Little Lady, both listless and drugged with too long in the sucking breath of that summer, dozed fitfully on the pallets where Lucy and I slept at night. They had been particularly maddening all day; Little Lady’s coy beauty had turned cloying and mule-sullen, and white-faced Jamie had fussed and mewled and scrubbed his shadowed eyes with his fists ever since ToTo had brought them out. He had not slept much at all the night before, she reported aggrievedly, but we took no notice of that. No one had slept well since the monstrous heat had set in.

  There was a warren of roomlike partitions under the thicket of the honeysuckle; perfect, child-sized chambers that opened one into another, like a railroad flat. We had named it, for who knows what arcane reason, Dumboozle-town, Florida, and had peopled it, invented for it a history and an ongoing narrative line and sealed it off ruthlessly from the advances of the two smaller children. For the space of that summer, Dumboozletown, Florida, was as real to all four of us Bondurant children as Buckhead, and if it was absorbing to Lucy and me, it was absolutely irresistible to Little Lady and Jamie. But we had set around the entire perimeter of the thicket a circle of smooth white stones from the lily pond, and told the two small ones that it was a magic circle and their arms and legs would turn black and fall off if they stepped over it, and they believed us. They would stand outside the circle for hours on end, and cry and wheedle and whine, but never once did they come into Dumboozletown, Florida.

  But on this day, perhaps finally maddened with heat and ill feeling, the younger children awoke from their naps, heard us, and tumbled out of the summerhouse and across the veranda and straight over the magic circle into our lair, glaring truculently at us and then all about them, as if waiting for the first of the telltale blackness to begin creeping up their arms and legs. Little Lady sniggered and crooked her finger at us, and Jamie drew his tow-white brows together in a ridiculous scowl over his blue eyes and thrust out his underlip. His eyes looked weak and squinting, and his nose leaked copiously down onto his chapped upper lip, and his sagging diaper smelled powerfully. They were, at that moment, totally devoid of charm or humanity. I was redly, irrationally angry at them for defying us, but Lucy was utterly enraged.

  “Get out of here, you stupid babies!” she screamed.

  “Will not,” sang Little Lady.

  “Won’t,” droned Jamie.

  “Get out right now or I’ll beat your heads in,” Lucy howled.

  “I’ll tell Mama on you and she’ll put you in a ’norphanage,” Little Lady smirked. “She don’t like you as much as she does me, anyway. She thinks you’re mean and bad. You made our daddy leave home.”

  “Bad, bad,” Jamie sniveled. “Want my daddy!”

  Without an instant’s hesitation, Lucy swooped, shrieking, down on the two and half pummeled, half pushed them back across the stone circle and out into the sunlight. Her blue eyes looked white and mad, and her smoky hair escaped its loose pigtails and flew free around her blanched maenad’s face, and I was profoundly startled and more than a little frightened of her in that moment. Like the original avenging angel of the Book of Genesis, Lucy in her holy fury drove Jamie and Little Lady out of Dumboozletown, Florida.

  They went sprawling, and landed in a heap, fetching up against a white wooden garden settee at the edge of the veranda. They lay utterly still for a moment, while the hot-humming earth seemed to stop and listen, and then the great, rattling indrawn breaths came, which meant sky-splitting screams of pain and outrage and the ultimate certainty of our incarceration upstairs in our little cubicles, and Lucy and I looked at each other in dismay. Her breath still shook her chest, and her eyes were white-ringed. It was, after all, they who had broken the covenant, invaded the sanctum, smashed the taboo. But we both knew who would pay.

  The shrieks started then, as maddening and repetitious as a berserk train whistle or a stuck siren, and ToTo came stumbling out of the summerhouse. Little Lady had struggled to her feet and was dancing up and down in place, stamping her shapely, dirty little bare feet in rage and frustration, but Jamie lay where he had fallen, eyes c
losed, uttering short, strange, atonal cries, all on one note, like a dissonant night bird. He did not sound like a small boy who has been thwarted and bumped; he did not sound human. There was a small, dull-red mark on his temple, vivid against his white skin, and an unprepossessing little smear of blood at the corner of his mouth, where he had bitten his lip. Otherwise, he seemed virtually untouched. But he did not get up and he did not open his eyes.

  ToTo picked him up out of the dust and started into the house with him, Little Lady roaring and dancing along in her wake.

  “You all done be in the fire now,” ToTo said over her shoulder, not without satisfaction. “You all done hurt this here baby, an’ you know how Miss ‘Livia an’ Miss Willa suck up over him. You all not gon’ sit down for a month.”

  Lucy and I went back across the ring of smooth stones, scattered now, and sat down in the last of the string of rooms in Dumboozletown, Florida, to wait. ToTo was right. The baby was the undisputed treasure, the crown jewel, of the Peachtree Road house. Retribution would be swift and certain. We both knew it would be bad.

  “I’m going to say it was me that pushed them,” I said to Lucy, my new sainthood singing sweetly in my veins. “Don’t you worry about it. Nothing’s going to happen to you.”

  Besides its overripe taste of virtue, the offer had a basis in practicality. No one in the house had ever really punished me, certainly not struck me; I had never before had the wit or courage to do anything that warranted it. I did not think that anyone would do so now, though I did believe there would be punishment—grounding or imprisonment somewhere apart from Lucy, probably, and likely for a long time. I would hate that, but the saint would endure stoically.

  But Lucy always suffered terribly when Willa punished her. She would not, absolutely refused to, weep or cry out under the spankings, but they left her diminished and dimmed for days. And imprisonment simply sent her wild. On the whole, I knew I could handle it better. And the points I would gain with Lucy were pure lagniappe.

  “They’ll know I did it,” she said dully. She did not look after ToTo’s retreating back, or at me, but straight ahead of her, into the hot green haze of the thicket. “Little Lady will tell. ToTo will tell. Mama will beat me. And then they’ll lock me upstairs forever and ever.”

  “They can’t do that,” I said reasonably. “That’s not fair.”

  She looked at me then. The blue eyes were very old.

  “They aren’t fair,” she said. “Why did you think they would be?”

  And so we fell silent. And we waited for them to come and punish us.

  But they did not come. The white fire went out of the day, and then the red, and soon only the hot, graying ash of twilight remained, and still no one came to mete out justice for Jamie and Little Lady’s sake. It was nearly full dark when we heard the siren, almost eight-thirty, and by the time the ambulance pulled up in front of the house and the running steps of men hit the portico, and we heard the soft, frantic babble of voices in the foyer, the last of the light was gone and the fireflies were beginning to wink in the black woods and garden. The stars seemed scummed with heat, and there was no moon. Before the ambulance door slammed shut and the siren began its long, awful cat’s howl, we heard the first katydid begin his song, and after it had screamed away down Peachtree Road, diminishing toward Crawford Long Hospital, the full night chorus was out. We lurched to our feet and began to run.

  When we got to the house, our breath high in our throats and thin with dread, no one was there. There was no one on the sun porch or in the library, and none of our parents were in their upstairs bedrooms. I had the insane fancy that everyone was dead, that the ambulance had come for all of them. We trotted around that great hot, empty, darkened house, in and out of room after echoing room, and by the time we reached the kitchen the dread had turned into terror so acute that I was weeping quite uncontrollably with it. Lucy was silent. The kitchen was empty, too, and starkly clean. No food simmered on the vast stove, no dishes sat out. The wrought-iron table on the screened porch was not set for dinner.

  Our hair was wet to the roots with panic by the time we pounded up the outside stairs to Martha and Shem’s little rooms over the garage and hammered on the door, and it was only then that we learned that little Jamie had been taken to the hospital near death, and that my parents and Aunt Willa had gone with him. Little Lady lay asleep on Martha’s narrow iron bed; Martha’s gnarled finger to her lips quieted us, and we noticed then, in the stifling gloom, the misery-stooped figure of ToTo, sitting beside the bed, watching over Little Lady.

  “Look lak they done clean forgot about y’all,” Martha said in a weary whisper. “Go on back to the house an’ I’ll come fix y’all some supper.”

  We saw that there were tear tracks on her dark face, like the trail of sticky silver that a snail leaves. She and ToTo were alone with the sleeping Little Lady. We knew that Shem would have taken my parents to the hospital in the Chrysler, behind the ambulance.

  She made scrambled eggs and bacon for us, and sat us down at the kitchen table to eat, but we were not hungry, and only picked at the cooling food. Oddly, we did not ask her about the baby’s condition; could not. I simply assumed that he had been hurt in some terrible, unseen way when Lucy had pushed him out of Dumboozletown, Florida, and that he would surely die, and that nothing in our world would ever be the same again. I knew with marrow-deep certainty that Lucy thought so, too, but she was very white and mute and did not say, and she never did say afterward. There seemed to me, sitting in the dark of that endless night with Lucy, absolutely nothing in my power, or in anyone’s, that could be done to make things right again. It was the first I ever knew of despair, and it remains the worst.

  The baby died at 4:15 the next morning, August 11, 1942, and it was not until late afternoon of the following day that anyone thought to tell us that he died, not of Lucy’s anger, but of polio. Then and only then did Lucy finally begin to cry, and though my father came belatedly and picked her up and held her on his lap and attempted, stiffly, to soothe her, and though she finally did subside, hiccuping, into silence and then at last into exhausted sleep, only she and I ever knew that she cried, not from sorrow, but from relief.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  They quarantined us immediately. Even before Jamie’s funeral, they separated us from each other and from the rest of the family, and for the two weeks the isolation lasted, I felt as disoriented and alone and outside the human pale as I have ever felt. Even now, when days and weeks go by and I do not see anyone, there is no comparison to that alienation, that sense of being beyond communion and redemption. This solitude is of my own creation. That one was cast around me like an unclean shroud.

  Quarantine was not a medical consideration; Dr. George Ballentine, who lived down West Wesley and was a frequent dinner guest in my parents’ house, came on that second evening, looking wildly out of character in a short-sleeved shirt and two-tone shoes, examined Lucy and me and pronounced us, so far as he could tell, fit and free of incipient polio. He gave us both aspirins and bade that we be put to bed, but that was merely in consideration of Lucy’s exhausted sobbing and my paleness and nausea. He went into my parents’ bedroom and spoke with my mother, and then into Aunt Willa’s and gave her a shot to ease the terrible, wild crying that had shaken her like a fit ever since she had come back from the hospital. Hovering on the black lip of sleep, I heard him tell my father, who had walked out into the upper hallway with him, that we children should both be all right by the next morning, and to feed us lightly and keep us quiet for a day or two and call him if anything unusual came up.

  But when the next morning broke, still, incredibly, as monotonously unchanged in its colorless heat and fetor as all the days before it, it was to find ToTo moving Lucy’s few clothes and toys out of her bedroom and into the little rooms over the garage, and the big storeroom at the end of the attic corridor being cleared and aired.

  My mother appeared in ToTo’s wake, elegant in black eyelet and so pale t
hat her dark red lipstick looked the color of blackberry stain against her fair skin, carrying a breakfast tray for me. I did not like the looks of any of it, and began to scramble out from under my damp sheet preparatory to flight. My mother closed the door firmly behind her and sat down on the edge of my bed. Her brown eyes, so dark that you could never look into them, were heavily shadowed underneath with greenish smears, and her skin looked flat and large-grained. Even her dark hair, which always caught so much light that it looked newly wet, was lusterless.

  “Jamie died of infantile paralysis,” she said. “Do you know what that is, Sheppie?”

  I nodded in silence, looking at her uneasily. I had not heard that “Sheppie” since Lucy and her family had come to live with us and some of the sucking weight of my mother’s full attention had lifted from me. It rang with portent.

  “Well, then,” she said, “you know how bad it is, and why we have to do everything in the world we can to see that you don’t get it. And since we don’t know where poor little Jamie got it, we’re going to have to keep you out of harm’s way until it gets cooler. Lucy’s going to stay with Shem and Martha for a little while, and we’re going to make you a lovely playroom all for yourself up here. We’ll bring you lots of books and toys, and Lottie is going to cook everything you like to eat and we’ll bring it to you up here. I’ll come up and read to you in the afternoons, and sometimes I’ll have my supper up here with you, and Daddy will bring you your very own radio and all the new comic books. It’ll be just like living in a hotel. You know how you enjoyed staying at the Waldorf that time we went to New York; it’ll be just like that.”

  My eyes began to fill with frightened tears, and I despised them, but I could not will them back. They overflowed and ran silently down into the corners of my mouth. The warm salt of them nauseated me all over again.