Peachtree Road

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  “You scared too, Charlie?” she said.

  “Yeah,” Charlie said, Charlie, who never in his life, to my knowledge, told a lie. “I sure am. And if you try to make any of us do it, I’ll tell all our dads and your uncle Shep. He’ll tan your hide good.” Charlie wasn’t a snitch either, but he would do what he deemed necessary to stop an injustice aborning, and he did not like Lucy. He never had, not from the first day they met. I knew that he would, indeed, tell my father if Lucy continued to egg us on to crawl under the train, and I knew that retribution would be swift and terrible. This went far beyond mischief.

  “Hey, Lucy,” I said. “You’re late for your music lesson. Let’s go home and come back another time.”

  “Okay, then, you scaredy-cats,” she said, ignoring me as if I had not spoken. “I’ll go first.”

  And she slipped to the apron and snaked herself beneath the engine before we could blink our dazzled eyes. A heart-hammering eternity seemed to pass. My ears roared as they had on the day in the woods when we had cut our wrists. Finally, from the other side of the train, obscured by its huge, bulking blackness, we heard her voice sing out, “Easy as pie! Nothing to it, you scaredies!”

  And at the same time we heard the first deep, preliminary chuff of the engine, and felt and saw the great black body shiver with the beginnings of its forward motion.

  “Bum, bum, bum, here I come!” Lucy yelled, and she wriggled beneath the engine and appeared again at our feet, covered with cinders and dust and flushed with a positive luminosity of triumph. The train began, almost imperceptibly, to move forward. A second huge, subterranean chuff issued from its belly, and a third.

  “I’m flat going to tell your uncle Sheppard on you the minute I get home,” Charlie said, glaring whitely at her. His freckles stood out against his face.

  “Yeah,” Ben and Snake echoed, shamed and angry at her daring, and badly frightened. It was Lucy’s dark genius, always, to frighten with her flaunting of the limits of the possible.

  Charlie turned away and started up the apron toward his bicycle, and I plunged forward desperately and threw myself under the engine. The day seemed to go impossibly bright, and then dark. I seemed enclosed in a bubble of soundlessness and unreality. The great back wheels were crawling toward me as I wriggled lizardlike in the cinders and dust underneath, and the tracks were hot and hard under my back. There was a powerful smell of oil and smoke and heated metal. The blackness stank, and was total. I closed my eyes in utter terror and gave a great sideways thrust like a sidewinder and rolled out into the sunlight on the other side just as the huge wheels ground past me, and the giant’s deepening breath filled the world.

  I lay still in the sun of that spring day, eyes closed, breath coming in wheezes and gasps, and it was not until the last car was rolling past me that I scrambled to my feet and brushed myself off and arranged my clothing and body into a semblance of casual repose, so that by the time their goggling faces reappeared after the caboose, I was able to smirk at them like a young god, and flipped them a maddening small salute. All my limbs were shaking with a fine, palsied tremor, and I could not have spoken if I had tried, but I did not have to. Leadership surged sweet and powerful in my veins; approbation, envy and awe, in equal measures, shone on their faces. I could tell by their eyes that they would not tell, not on me and not on Lucy. We had stepped up onto a plateau where they could not follow. One by one, in total silence, they turned and went back up the steps and got on their bicycles and pedaled away. Lucy and I followed alone, a good distance behind them.

  We did not speak until we were nearly home.

  “Don’t you ever do anything like that again, Lucy,” I said. My voice was still shaking.

  “No, Gibby,” she said meekly. “I won’t ever have to.”

  From then on her world was woven, warp and woof, into ours. She had more than earned her place at our head, and no one thought to question it for four or five years at least. And in all that time, there was no one who could best her. Indeed, even when she was eventually cut out of the herd, as befalls all leaders, it was not any failure of nerve or achievement that unseated her, but simply and inevitably her irredeemable womanhood.

  She not only did things better than we could, she knew more. She knew more about the things that did not count in that minimal and rigid little world—words, pain, loneliness; the heart, the mind, the spirit—and she knew more about the things that did. Like sports. Lucy was a small savant at sports. Those were the great days of radio and newspaper heroes, and we had a pantheon of them: Charlie Trippi and Frank Sinkwich at the University of Georgia, Choo-Choo Justice at North Carolina, Doc Blanchard and Glenn Davis at West Point. Joe DiMaggio and Bob Feller and Stan the Man Musial. Jack Kramer and Pancho Gonzalez and, in Atlanta, Bobby Jones and Bitsy Grant. Joe Louis. We worshiped at the Saturday shrines of the big Capeharts, and Lucy worshiped just as fervently and unfeignedly as we did. And she went us, invariably, one better.

  If I idolized Doc Blanchard, Lucy espoused Arnold Tucker. If Charlie followed Feller, Lucy cheered for Snuffy Stirnweiss. If Tom worshiped Pancho Gonzalez, Lucy was an acolyte of Ted Schroeder. While Snake could speak knowledgeably of half a dozen legendary North Georgia moonshine runners and stock car drivers, Lucy had pasted on her mirror a newspaper photograph of Baron Taffy Von Tripps winning at Monza. It was Lucy who introduced me to the career of that luminous Swede, Gunder Haegg, whose 4:01.4 mile hung perfect and alone in my mind for years, like the evening star. These were not affectations with her, but genuine passions, as fierce, if as ephemeral, as all Lucy’s passions. We did not resent them and we did not aspire to them. It was as if, in Lucy, we had for a leader, instead of a thin, vivid, small girl, some sort of wondrous genetic superboy. I used to watch their faces sometimes, Charlie’s and Ben’s and Tom’s and Pres’s and occasionally Carter Rawson’s; watch them looking at Lucy. With the exception of Charlie, I am sure that they looked upon her and saw another, if infinitely superior, boy. Charlie, I think, saw what I saw, but unlike me, he did not see it with love.

  I saw, as I had from the very first moment, the powerful and unconscious seductiveness of her, and the sheer, strange, burning beauty, and I could not believe that they did not. But they never did, not until much later, and when they did see it, it was all at once, and by then too late for them and Lucy ever again to be what they had once been to each other, or ever again even to be friends.

  I suppose it was inevitable that she would overreach herself, push her power over us past its limits and into catastrophe. To small Lucy Bondurant last from New Orleans, fatherless, poor, without patrons and on sufferance in the house of her uncle, the exhilaration of her hold on the small princes of the big houses must have been irresistible. All her life Lucy was a creature of careening excesses and impulse; that first great step beyond the bounds was entirely understandable and probably forgivable. But those who guided her star were the ones least equipped to understand and forgive. The consequences to all of us were swift and severe. To her they were disastrous.

  It happened on a sullen afternoon in September when we were eleven and Lucy nine. By then our afternoon forays on our bicycles were refined and sophisticated enough so that we ranged quite incredible distances, in a sort of Lafayette Escadrille formation, spread out behind Lucy on our shining Schwinns and Atlantic Flyers, flying fast and trailing immortality like a bright comet’s tail. It was a still, thick afternoon, heavy on our prickling skins, and the wildness of the past summer still ran in our veins, unthinned by two weeks back at E. Rivers Elementary. Lucy had shot up over the summer, and was as attenuated and stylized as a young willow tree, or a good colt, and nearly as tall as she would ever be. The blue of her eyes was deepening to violet, and her hair had finally been liberated from its pigtails and shaped at Rich’s Beauty Salon, courtesy of Aunt Willa’s employee discount, so that it fell clean and straight to her shoulders, a sheaf of pure, ash-dark silk with a sheen on it like a grape. She no longer looked like a midget ruler of a race of
simpler giants, but a tall young boy king. She had no breasts and hips, but her waist was beginning to narrow into the handspan that would for years be her pride, and her small hands and feet were lovely. Astride her bicycle, one arm upflung to urge us on, her hair spindrift and wild, she might, I thought, be Hippolyta leading her Amazons into battle, and once told her so.

  “Yeah, but the Amazons were all girls,” she said dismissively. “Boys are better.”

  No one else in our crowd would have known Hippolyta from Wonder Woman, but they responded instinctively to the patina of leadership that she wore so securely by now. There was no place that we would not have followed her.

  On this day the wildness and perversity that shimmered around Lucy Bondurant set me in mind of the day, two years before, when we had rolled under the moving train at Brookwood Station, and I felt the beginning of dread in the cooling hollow around my heart. I think we all did. Nobody would quite look at Lucy, and someone—I think it was Tom Goodwin—said, “I can’t stay long. I told my mom I’d clean the gutters for her.”

  “Me, either,” Ben Cameron said. “Ma wants me back by five. Daddy’s bringing some folks home to dinner.”

  “Well, my mother doesn’t make me run home like a puppy,” Lucy said waspishly. “We’ve got three whole hours before you sissies have to run home to yours. That’s plenty of time.”

  “Time for what?” I said reluctantly. I emphatically did not want to hear what she was going to say.

  “Time,” Lucy said, a little smile curving her pink mouth, “to ride out to the Pink Castle.”

  We were all silent, and then Pres said, completely spontaneously, “The Pink Castle! The shit you say, Lucy!”

  The Pink Castle was a great, crenellated, bulbous pile of pink stucco and red pantile that lay far out West Paces Ferry Road, where the big houses were farther and farther apart and more and more sheltered by the dense hardwood river forest. It had thirty rooms and countless porches and terraces and loggias, and had been built vaguely in the sixteenth-century Italian style in 1923 by a wild-haired, captive Italian brought over for the purpose by Mr. and Mrs. Chalmers French. Mr. French came to Atlanta from Macon with an enormous, unexplained fortune, built his huge, improbable fairy tale of a house, and then died, leaving his much older and pathologically shy, childless wife, Hester, to rattle around in his mad fantasy in the deep woods, alone and friendless.

  Because they had been in the city for only two years when the house was finished and Mr. French shuffled off this mortal coil, and because they had not entertained and virtually no one had seen the great house going up, there was no one to call on Hester French, and it was assumed that she would go back to her people in Macon. But she did not, and neither did she show herself; well after the acceptable period of mourning had passed she was still sequestered in what had become known as the Pink Castle, and still no one ever saw her except what tradesmen she would allow to approach the house, a gardener and his minions and a succession of maids and household help generally held to be inferior, so that they could not get work at the other big houses of Buckhead.

  Our parents were avidly curious to see her, and even more to see her great, rococo lair, about which a curious mixture of fact and legend had sprung up like virulent green kudzu. But because she kept an armed and truculent guard in a gatehouse guarding the long driveway, and because the heavy chain from one massive stone post to the other was always kept fastened unless a tradesman’s vehicle required ingress, not a single credulous soul had been into the enormous tangle of half-finished formal gardens and outbuildings that surrounded the main house, much less seen the house itself.

  The delivery boys and the Negroes talked, though, and what they said titillated Buckhead. No one really believed them, but still…There was a moat full of black water and great things that thrashed and splashed and roared. Dogs so huge that they dwarfed even mastiffs roamed free through the grounds, and were kept so starved that they instantly set upon any visitor who was not accompanied by the guard. A strange, iridescent light flitted from window to window in the upper turrets of the castle, whose staircases were always kept barred and locked. The boxwood parterres on the multileveled terraces behind the house were clipped and shaped to form religious symbols, and a long sculpture allée held many terrible and grotesque representations of Christ hanging crucified on a variety of crosses. Hester French herself was, alternately, a raving madwoman who prowled the turret rooms, hair gone white with grief and loneliness, murderously bright cleaver in hand; or a strange, fierce, beautiful half-savage who swam naked in the indoor swimming pool and offered herself hungrily to all tradesmen and servants, black and white, male and female, who entered the premises. Dogs and cats and small wild animals vanished into the grounds—their entire fifteen acres surrounded by a great brick wall topped with barbed wire and broken glass—and were never seen again, at least not intact.

  Over the years, tradespeople and servants gradually stopped being summoned to the Pink Castle, and mean necessities were purchased in Buckhead by a gnomelike little manservant thought to be an Indian from India, who proffered a written list and never once spoke to the various shopkeepers he visited, and so information and consequently most interest about the house gradually dwindled and died. By that September afternoon, all that was known about the Pink Castle was that it had been empty for some years—for the little Indian had not been seen in Buckhead for that length of time—and that it had never been put on the market for sale. No one knew whether Hester French had died or moved away. The Buckhead police patrolled its grounds once in a while, though they did not enter the locked and barred doors and windows, but they never reported seeing anything amiss. Our parents did not even forbid us to go there anymore, the house and its denizens and legends were so long out of mind. I had not thought of it for years, and I don’t think any of us had, except Lucy. But I can imagine, thinking of it now, that the house must have lain as perfect and seductive in her mind as any Avalon.

  “The shit I do say,” Lucy said into the windless afternoon. “What’s the matter, Pres, is it too far for you to ride?”

  It was a measure of the perversity simmering in her that she referred to the brace aloud, even indirectly. Lucy was never knowingly cruel. I still do not, to this day, know what so gnawed at her on that afternoon, but I know that it was powerful enough for her to break with ease her code of honor about Pres, and powerful enough to suck us boys along in her wake on a voyage none of us wanted to make.

  “No,” Pres said, flaming red, “I can ride twice that far if I want to. I can outride you any day of the week, Lucy Bondurant. I just need to be back by five, is all.”

  “Well, you will be if we get started right now,” Lucy said, grinning over her shoulder. “I know you’ve really got to get back, Pres. You too, Ben. All of you, I guess. Because big old eleven-year-old boys couldn’t still be scared of ghosts and hants and things, could they? When a little ol’ nine-year-old girl ain’t?”

  I knew by that that she was dead serious about riding out to the Pink Castle. Lucy never would have resorted to ridicule to get the Buckhead Boys to do something she wanted them to do unless she figured she had to. She had never, since the day of the train at Brookwood Station, had to.

  “I’m not scared of ghosts or hants or you or anything else in shoe leather,” Pres said tightly, and got on his bicycle and began to pedal furiously away. One by one, as if by mute accord, we followed him silently. It took Lucy until the corner of Peachtree Road and West Paces Ferry to catch up and sail past us to the head of the column.

  We went so fast that the wind whipped words from our mouths, and so we were silent until we reached the point, farther out West Paces Ferry than we had ever been, where the long, curving, overgrown ribbon of asphalt that was the driveway to the Pink Castle lay dreaming silently and ominously in the sullen glow of the waning afternoon. Still wordless, we got off our bikes and stood with Lucy at the mouth of that chain-barred tunnel of green.

  “Well,” she
said, finally, her voice loud in the thick silence. “What y’all waiting for? Christmas?”

  I truly believe that she had started out only to finally see it for herself, this forbidden enchanted kingdom in the woods, but by the time we had slipped the rusted chain easily from its morning and started in our Indian file down the tunnel of poison green, the danger and perversity in her was palpable in the hot, dense air, and leaped like heat lightning from her mind into ours. Our fingers fairly crackled and spat with undischarged trouble by the time we laid our bikes on their sides on the great, cracked marble loggia and looked up at the Pink Castle. The sheer excess and improbability of it kept us mute. We were accustomed to large houses, but we had never seen anything like this.

  “Holy shit,” Snake said. “That’s the biggest house I ever saw.”

  “Naw, it ain’t,” Lucy said. “But it sure is the ugliest.”

  Still subdued, but jerking and shivering with nerves, we filed up the marble steps and around to the enormous, glassed enclosure on the castle’s right flank, which housed the stagnant swimming pool. We stooped and picked up rocks, chunks of broken concrete, rusted iron railings, whatever litter lay at hand.

  When we reached the margin of the vile opaque green water, Lucy stooped and caught up a chunk of broken concrete.

  “Might be snakes,” she said, grinning fiercely.

  “Might be alligators,” Tom said, picking up a section of rusted iron railing.

  “Might be elephants,” Snake said, hefting a huge piece of granite.

  For the space of a minute we all stood in the blind air, our heads and veins thrumming with electricity, holding rocks and stones and litter. The day blazed with queerness and danger. We were not, in that moment, altogether human spawn.

  I don’t know what might have happened if Lucy had not spoken, for even then we all hesitated, trembling like young animals at the scene of a slaughter. But she looked at us, one by one, in turn, and said, “Break the glass.” And when still we hesitated, she drew back her white arm and threw her crumbling concrete straight through the many-paned wall facing us. Before that first silvery tinkle had died away, all our rocks and bricks were flying.