“I don’t want to stay up here by myself,” I said. “It’s too hot. It makes me sick. And Lucy can’t stay out there by herself while Shem and Martha are at work. She’s too little. She gets scared. Why can’t she come up here with me, or why can’t we just go out to the summerhouse and stay there and not come out till you tell us to? It’s mean to make her stay by herself.”
My mother put her arms around me and pulled me against her, and I could feel the warmth of the flesh under the eyelet, and the smell of Lily of the Valley, which she always wore in those days. It felt so strange to be in her arms that it paralyzed me, and I did not, somehow, dare to take a breath. I could not remember the last time she had hugged me. I knew that my weak, unstoppable tears were splotching her pretty dress, and I was mortified, but powerless to staunch the flow. I bit my lip so hard that pain reddened the darkness behind my closed eyes, and the freshet abated a little.
“We’ve lost one little boy in this house,” my mother said, with an uncharacteristic fierceness. “I’m not going to lose my own. Maybe I haven’t taken enough trouble with you, letting you run wild all summer with Lucy, but that’s going to stop now. You’re all I have that’s really and truly my own, Sheppie, and I’m not going to take any more chances with you.”
I blinked, against the fragrant blackness of her breast. What was she up to? I knew I was not all she had; she had a big house, and two big cars, and lots of beautiful clothes, and all that dark, gleaming furniture and those frail, light-struck porcelains and crystal; she had an army of acquaintances almost identical to her, and clubs and parties and dances and luncheons and dinners that she went to all the time; she had my father. I had never considered myself to be in the pantheon of her prized possessions before. I felt deeply uneasy, a small forest creature turning in a circle, smelling rather than seeing the amorphous danger that lay thick in the air around it.
“But Lucy…” I began.
“Lucy is going out where ToTo and Martha can take care of her, and where she can’t get up to any more mischief for a while,” she said crisply. “She’s been exposed to polio just like you have, and she’s not going to spread it around this house. For all we know, she could be a carrier of some kind—”
“She is not!” I yelled, pulling away from her. “You just don’t like her, that’s why you’re locking her up down there and me up here! She is not either a carrier!”
“You don’t know,” my mother said coolly, sitting back upright on the edge of the bed. “We don’t know what causes polio. Don’t sass me, Shep. You can both move back to the summerhouse when it cools off a little, but for right now you’re staying here, and I don’t want to hear any more about it. A little vacation from Miss Lucy will do you good. I know who pushed that baby down and made him hit his head.”
“That was me!” I shouted. “I did that! Lucy didn’t touch the stupid baby!”
“That’s enough,” she said, the familiar ice back in her voice. “ToTo and Little Lady told us what happened. That child is nothing but trouble, and the fact that she’s got you lying for her only bears me out. I have to get ready for the funeral now, and I want you to take a bath and put on your good clothes. I’ll bring them up after I’ve finished dressing.”
“Why do I have to get dressed up if I’m only going to sit up here dying in the heat?” I said sullenly, mutiny simmering in my heart.
“Because your little cousin has died very terribly and is being buried today, and you can very well show some respect even if you show it by yourself. It’s what decent people do. It’s time you started learning how to live like the privileged and fortunate little gentleman you are. You were born to breeding and manners, Sheppie, even if you do spend all your time with…children who were not. I don’t want you to forget that.”
She was gone from the room before I figured out that she meant Lucy. I got out of bed and went hesitantly down the dim little hall in the unaccustomed silence. Always, at this stage in the morning, Lucy would be awake and calling out to me as we dressed for our day. But now there was only dust and heat and silence, and her cubicle, when I looked into it, was empty, even the small iron bed stripped down to its mattress. Her clothes were gone from the meager closet, too. Only Mickey lived; someone had forgotten to turn him off, and he glowed happily and somehow terribly there in the void where Lucy was not. The thought struck me that she had died, had died in the night of the polio that had carried off her small brother, and immediately upon thinking it I found myself at the top of the narrow stair down to the second floor screaming, “Lucy! Lucy!”
There was a long and awful silence, endlessly ringing, in which my heart almost knocked me to my knees with its force, and then Martha Cater appeared at the foot of the stairs and glared up at me.
“Hush that yellin’, Shep! This is a house of mournin’! I kin hear you all over the downstairs. What you want?”
“Lucy!” I bellowed. “Where is Lucy?”
“She in her mama’s bathroom gettin’ a bath just lak you ought to be,” she said severely. “What the matter with you two chirrun? You a’hollerin’ and her a’screamin’ lak a fiah engine, and yo’ po’ folkses tryin’ to git ready to go bury that po’ little boy. You ought to be ashamed of yo’se’fs!”
I heard Lucy then, over Martha’s voice; heard her screams, far away and muffled through several closed doors, though I could not at first make out the words that she cried. But I knew the tone; knew what she was feeling, as I always knew with Lucy. Outrage, betrayal and that ultimate and mindless panic that being pent up always set loose in her. In the midst of her screams I heard my name: “Gibby! I want Gibby!”
Martha turned away in disgust, and I went back to my room and shut the door so that I could not hear her calling me. I knew that if I tried to go down to her I would simply be picked up and carried bodily back upstairs like the impotent small boy I was. My new sainthood had deserted both of us. I did not wish to compound the desertion with humiliation.
“Okay,” I said under my breath, fiercely, and yet with a kind of detached calmness. I was absolutely clear in my mind. “Just all of you wait until I get big enough. None of you are going to be able to stop me then. I’m going to take Lucy and go far away from here, and you’ll never see either one of us anymore in the world. I don’t care how long it takes. I’m going to do it.”
And I lay back on my rumpled little bed and folded my arms under my head and began, in a kind of furious peace, that long wait.
It was a terrible time, a hiatus made all the more unendurable because we did not know when it would end. We knew only that freedom would come with the abating of the heat, and it seemed to us, by then, that the very weather that wrapped the earth was in immutable conspiracy against us. Day after day dawned pale and featureless and still; afternoon after afternoon fulfilled the punishing promise of the thick morning. Even the boisterous, ineffectual thunderstorms that had broken the days stopped toward the end of that August, and then there was nothing, nothing, but whiteness and stillness and quiet and boredom and heat. My sharp and particular yearning for Lucy dulled and slumped back into the general, featureless malaise of misery in which I spent my days, despite the daily visits from my mother and sometimes my father, despite the piles of books and magazines and the new radio and the trays of special tidbits that ascended three times a day from the kitchen.
After that first day, I did not hear her cry out for me again, and I stopped asking for her, because the invariable answer to my queries was “She’s just fine. Living the life of Riley, reading and listening to the radio and playing games with ToTo.” I knew that was not true, but I did not know what was.
Sometime during that first week of mourning, my aunt Willa stopped her wild crying and washed her face and reapplied her makeup and went back to her job, and was much applauded for her pluck and gumption. I had discovered that by lying with my ear pressed against the hot-air register in the floor of the storeroom, which had become my daytime playroom, I could hear, through some elemental magic of physics,
the conversations that were held on the sun porch off the drawing room, and I assumed the position whenever I heard a visiting automobile’s tires crunching on the gravel of the drive. My mother received her callers there in those days of formal mourning, as Aunt Willa had before her duty called her back, and it was in that way I kept my finger on the pulse of some tenuous reality. It was there, too, lying on the floor with my ear to that painful grid, I learned that Lucy was without patronage in the house.
Dorothy Cameron had come to call on my mother that day, bringing with her some red and green pepper jelly for which I heard my mother’s languid voice thanking her, and it was she who praised my aunt Willa. My mother brushed the praise aside.
“You’d have thought she was dying herself, the way she carried on up there, with poor Martha hauling trays and the doctor in and out five times a day,” she said. “And then before we know it, she’s downstairs all tarted up and with the makeup on an inch thick, asking if Shem could drive her downtown; says she’s needed at the Red Cross canteen. Now I ask you! Her only boy just dead and she’s going down and throw herself at that trash around the bus station! What on earth will people say?”
“Good for her,” Dorothy Cameron said, her voice crisp and edged. “I think she’s absolutely right. We are at war, you know, Olivia, and lying around crying isn’t going to bring that poor baby back. The Red Cross needs all the hands it can get. People will say she’s just what she is, a brave woman who puts her country above her own personal sorrow.”
“You sound just like Sheppard.” My mother’s languid voice was clearly exasperated. “I thought he was going to run right out and get her a Congressional Medal of Honor. Oh well, I know her type even if you’re too nice to see it, and I know what men are. Sooner or later she’s going to do something so tacky that even he’ll see her in her true colors, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t put her right out of the house then.”
“Which would be an awful shame for those two poor, fatherless children that are left,” Dorothy Cameron said.
My mother did not reply, and I knew that Sarah’s mother had bested her again. For some reason she was a little afraid of tiny Dorothy Cameron, or at least, respected her enough so that she would accept with unaccustomed meekness words she would have flung back into anyone else’s face. I knew also that she would be on the phone to her circle after Dorothy left, reporting this latest Cameronian breach of decorum.
There was a little silence, and then Dorothy Cameron said, “How are the children taking it? I haven’t seen Shep since it happened. I’ve thought about him and Lucy. She’s a sensitive little thing. I hope this hasn’t upset her too much.”
“We’re keeping them quiet and apart for a little while,” my mother said, and I grinned an adult’s mirthless grin at the enormity of the understatement. “Lucy isn’t a very good influence on Shep, and this little break is doing him a world of good. He’s fine; I spend all my afternoons and nights with him, and I’ve really enjoyed getting to know my little boy again. He’s awfully precious to me, Dorothy, especially since I’ve seen how easy it is for them to just slip away. I’m not ever going to let him run wild again, like he has this summer with that child, that Lucy. There’s too much of sensitivity and talent in Sheppie that ought to be cultivated. She’s a wild little thing, you know, and not at all stable. Way too big for her britches and spoiled from running loose. Willa hasn’t spent a minute with her since the baby died; she’s with Little Lady every second that she’s home. Now that poor baby was just devastated. She hasn’t stopped crying yet. But Lucy…not a tear, not a word. Oh well. Given the givens, what can you expect?”
“Who stays with Lucy?” Dorothy Cameron asked.
“Why…no one, really, I guess,” my mother said. “ToTo every now and then, maybe. She doesn’t seem to want anybody around her; won’t answer if you ask her a direct question; won’t even look at you when you’re talking to her. So we’re just leaving her pretty much alone and letting her sulk. I think she’ll soon catch on to how unattractive it is. I don’t worry a bit about that child. She doesn’t need anybody. If this little spell by herself teaches her a few manners, so much to the good.”
I rolled off the register and drew myself up on the floor in a ball of sheer pain. I did not want to hear any more. It was far worse than I had thought. Apart from me, Lucy was without a protector in the house. Her own mother, perhaps sensing the loss of power that Jamie’s dying had dealt her, had bent her efforts now upon nurturing and cultivating Little Lady, her only other viable little commodity. My mother had, for some unfathomable reason, bent her whole obsessive attention once again upon me. My already remote father, grieving in his own way over the loss of that tiny male Bondurant, would, I knew, have retreated into the library and pulled his distance in behind him. ToTo was with Little Lady all day. That left only Martha Cater—an already exasperated, spread-too-thin Martha. Lucy had become that for which, it must seem to her, her very birth had marked her: pariah.
Rage filled me and became tears, and as I wept I resolved to go downstairs that night when everyone was sleeping and comfort her, and whoever found me be damned. If they removed me I would go back. And I would go back again. Whatever they did to me, I did not care. Sainthood surged back, strong and simple and sweet.
But I did not, after all, have to put myself to the test, for just after my mother had brought my dinner tray and settled down with me for the evening, my father came into the little room, his face a thundercloud, and said, “Is Lucy up here?”
“Why, of course not,” my mother said. “What’s the matter?”
“She’s not in her room,” he said. “She was gone when Willa got in from Canteen, and we can’t find her anywhere around the place. Little Lady is gone, too.”
“ToTo…,” my mother began, half rising.
“ToTo,” my father said in profound disgust, “was asleep. It took me and Martha five minutes to wake her up. She wouldn’t have heard the Third Army Band if it had gone through.”
“Where is Willa?” my mother said.
“Downstairs having a fit.” My father bit off the words. “Martha has called George Ballentine, and I’ve called the police. I’m not going to fool around with that little brat this time.”
My blood ran cold with fear for Lucy, but under the ice leaped a tongue of sheer exultation: “Good for you, Lucy! Good for you!”
When they went out of the room and down the stairs I was behind them, and I don’t believe they ever did realize that I had, without a word, ended forever that hateful quarantine. Or no, that Lucy had ended it for both of us, when she had kidnapped her younger sister. A missing Lucy Bondurant was one thing, but a missing Little Lady was another matter entirely. We heard the sirens of the first police car before we reached the foyer.
They found Lucy in the Greyhound bus station downtown, pushing a shrieking, filthy Little Lady in her outgrown stroller, waiting for the bus to New Orleans for which Lucy had purchased two tickets. She had, she calmly and freely admitted, stolen the money from her mother’s purse and watched and waited until no one seemed to be about, called a taxi and put Little Lady and the stroller into it and been driven to the station. And no, she had had no trouble at all in doing so. It was easy when you knew how.
But where was she going? they asked. And what did she think she was doing, taking her little sister all the way downtown and trying to get on a bus with her?
“I was saving her from the polio so Mama wouldn’t cry anymore,” Lucy said earnestly, her eyes wide and lambent and impossibly blue. “I was going to find Daddy and he would save her from the polio.”
After she had been spanked and sent to bed without her supper, and—much worse, unheard of—scolded soundly and coldly by my father, she sobbed quietly in her little bed up under the eaves, and at first would not answer when I slipped in beside her and gathered her into my arms. It seemed as though the quarantine had never happened, and as if she had never been away from me.
“I think what
you did was real brave,” I whispered. “She shouldn’t have licked you for it.”
I felt her start to tremble, and tightened my arms around her, and then I heard, incredibly, her rich, glorious laugh.
“I wasn’t gon’ to save her from the polio, silly,” she said. “I was gon’ put her on that bus and send her off, and then I’d be the only one. Like I was in the beginning, with Daddy. It was her and Jamie that ran Daddy off, I know. If I was the only one, I know he’d come back. I know he would. He said he wasn’t ever going to leave me, and he wouldn’t have, if it hadn’t been for those crybabies.”
In the narrow white bed, in the white August moonlight, I felt very cold. She was asleep almost before she had murmured the last sentence, but it was a long time before I slept.
The next morning she did not come down to breakfast with the rest of us, and I did not like to remark on her absence, because I was afraid they would remember the quarantine and declare it back in effect. I knew that she was awake, and that she was not sulking, because she had talked cheerfully to me as I dressed.
We were almost through when she came into the breakfast room. She went straight to my father and climbed onto his lap, and put her hands on his shoulders and peered into his face. Her eyes were almost black with intensity, and her hair, which she had worn braided all summer, was unbound and stood in a just-brushed nimbus around her small, pointed face. The tea rose color came and went.
“I’m sorry I was a bad girl, Uncle Sheppard,” she said. “I promise never to do it again. Please don’t be so mad at me that you won’t take care of me anymore.”
My father looked at her silently for a space of time, delicate and rose-flushed in her thin white batiste nightgown. Then he gave her a hug, awkward but hard. I heard the breath go out of her in a little chuff.
“I’ll take care of you until the cows come home, Puddin’,” he said, and I thought that there was a trace, a minute and incredible gleam of wetness in his pale blue eyes.
Peachtree Road Page 14
