Peachtree Road

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  “Kill the witch!” Lucy shrieked. “Tear down the castle!”

  “Tear it down!” we howled, obedient echoes. “Tear it down!”

  It took us two hours. We worked our way from the swimming pool enclosure into the first floor of the house and through all the dark, empty, filthy rooms, smashing and powdering glass. We climbed the littered and listing twin staircases and shattered the leaded glass windows on the landing, and brought down the great, gapprismed chandelier with a broom we picked up in the kitchen. We laid a singing crystal waste to the second floor, and to the small windows on the third. Not a pane, not a mirror, not an abandoned bibelot remained intact. We did not laugh, and I doubt that we spoke more than a few words to each other. I remember none. Like the maenads who tore Dionysus apart with their bare, blood-dappled hands, I don’t think we came to ourselves until we had finished the third floor and were standing at the bottom of the stairs leading up to the turret rooms, eyes blinded, chests heaving, and I don’t know if we would have stopped then, the love song of smashing glass was so loud in our ears, except that the banshee moan of the Buckhead police cruiser coming down the driveway finally outsang it. I don’t know to this day if they were on their regular rounds, or if someone saw us start into the driveway and called them.

  We stood silent, rooted with doom and enormity, waiting for them.

  “We are going to catch pure and tee hell,” fastidious Ben Cameron whispered, his vivid, clever face blanched. “And we deserve to. This was—just awful.”

  It was Charlie who told. I knew this time that he would. Even before the siren stopped and the police car spun to a halt on the loggia outside, I saw dawning comprehension and horror replace the wild, inhuman glass-lust in his brown eyes, large and spaniel-like behind the thick glasses, and saw the opaque skim of self-loathing dull them. I saw the look he bent on Lucy, too. I knew that he would not spare her, any more than he would spare himself. She knew it too, knew, in that instant, more: that her days at the head of the Buckhead Boys were ended here, in all this bizarre emptiness, amid spilled crystal blood. I saw her smoke-blue eyes clear of their madness and widen, and then go white-ringed with panic. She turned to me.

  “Gibby,” she began, in a child’s whimper. “Gibby, please…”

  “Don’t say a word, Shep,” Charlie said in a voice I did not know. Tears swam, magnified, behind the bottle-glass lenses. He was very pale. I could see him trembling from where I stood. “Shut up, Lucy. I’m not going to let Shep take the blame for this.”

  He was as good as his word. He told Billy Trammel, who came crunching up the glass-littered stairs and found us there, that Lucy had instigated the vandalism, and he told first his prim and furious father, who came to the station house to get him, and then mine when he arrived to fetch Lucy and me. I knew that he did not tell in order to divert punishment from his own head; Charlie was so straitlaced and honorable that his nickname within our pack was Judge, and in any case, he knew that there was no hope of deliverance now. We had all gone irredeemably past that. He had felt the bloodlust and been blinded by it just as we all had; he had rampaged freely with us through the house, breaking, breaking. Even if he himself had by some miracle escaped notice, he would have confessed his own blame. And all through the blistering tongue-lashing we received from Shorty Farr, the chief of police, and the quieter and infinitely more wounding words spoken by his stricken, sanctimonious father; even through his own tears—for we all broke down under the parental onslaughts and the enormity of our deed—I could see in his mild brown eyes a profound relief that it was ended, and that he would no longer have to follow Lucy on her mad, spiraling rides. I saw that same relief, though not so clear, in the eyes of several of the others.

  “It was Lucy who started it,” Charlie said over and over. “But none of us tried to stop her. I threw the first rock.”

  It was, of course, a lie, but at the words my long love for Charlie was born.

  And so once again Lucy and I were in virtual quarantine, though this time the sons of many other houses of Buckhead were also under house arrest, and while the punishment was longer and more severe, I minded it far less than the isolation that had followed little Jamie’s death. It was the beginning of my brief time as pure boy in a boy’s world, a time I doubt I would have had if it had not been for the punishment and its attendant separation from Lucy. I think if it had not been for that day, I simply would have followed Lucy’s erratic dance on into my teens and high school, and been the more sharply dashed against the rocks when she finally did open her hands and let me free. As it was, I moved into the last days of my childhood in the company of boys, and made of one of them—Charlie Gentry—the great male friend of my life. That incarceration, and the few years that followed it, contain all I know of the light, clear bonds of masculine friendship.

  But for Lucy it was a deep and howling loneliness, and anguish, and worse than that: an end, for all time, to power pure and simple. She had power again, great power, but it was never again clean and whole.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  This time our separation was complete. Martha and Shem Cater moved my bed and clothing and books out to the summerhouse and a crew from Moncrief came and installed an oil furnace, and my mother came out silent and red-eyed bringing winter curtains and bedspread and pillows and some Georgia Tech and University of Georgia pennants for the stucco walls, and from that day until this, I have lived in the summerhouse behind the house on Peachtree Road. Although I felt keenly the shame and isolation of my banishment, something under them leaped like a flame at the prospect of this, my own private kingdom in the sheltering garden, and something even under that, dim and shameful, stirred in mean and smug satisfaction that this perfect domain had come only to me, and was now barred to Lucy. I had never before had any power that had not, essentially, been borrowed from her.

  Her isolation was almost total. She was forbidden by a furious, screeching Aunt Willa to have anything more to do with me or with any of the boys in her former band, except in unavoidable and supervised public situations like church and, later, school. Meals together with the family were allowed, after the first two or three days of confinement and trays, and we were permitted to ride together in the Chrysler to Sunday lunches at the club, but even then she was made to sit in the backseat with her mother and the pious Little Lady, while I was sandwiched between my parents in the front. We were not allowed to speak to each other, and for a while did not attempt to do so. For a time during that incarceration Lucy spoke virtually to no one, and kept her blue eyes on her lap or fixed on some point in the middle distance.

  Never in all that time did I hear her cry or plead for leniency or attempt to justify herself. I think if she had denied culpability I would have backed her up, maybe even claimed blame myself, but I think we both knew that no one would have believed us. What was possible to Lucy was not, even then, possible to me, and our families knew it. Lucy might be, and often was, stricken with terror at the outcome of her actions, but she had a fierce small personal code that forbade begging for mercy—though she would fight savagely against what she perceived as inequities to others.

  I think it would have served her better if she had begged. Aunt Willa might then have ceased the grim battle of wills that marked her lifelong relationship with her older daughter, might have been appeased by Lucy’s terrible vulnerability. But Lucy never offered her that, and I don’t think Aunt Willa ever saw it. I truly think that what she saw when she looked at Lucy was merely a profoundly visible embarrassment and a threat to her position in the house and the city, a threat that might at any time banish her back to the chicken farm in South Georgia. Before the incident of the Pink Castle, Lucy had been to her a shackle and a stumbling block, but not without value simply because my father at times looked upon her with something resembling pity and fondness. Now both had gone out of his cold eyes, to be replaced by a remote and inexorable distaste, and Lucy became to her mother simply and forever the enemy. I never knew a woman so witho
ut maternal love.

  Many years later a psychiatrist, a warm, caring woman who treated and loved and ultimately despaired of Lucy, told me that in any family group there is a natural scapegoat, a sort of tacitly designated bearer of blame and punishment. There is no doubt that Lucy became, after the afternoon at the Pink Castle, the scapegoat in my father’s house, and I think that even if she had not done—and continued to do—things that shocked and outraged my parents and her mother, she still would have worn the wreath of the sacrificial goat. She was simply so visible. A few people, like me, saw the living fire in the air around her, and those who did not sensed the displacement and were troubled by it.

  I think in total darkness you could have sensed that Lucy was in the room with you. The force in her was so strong as to threaten to break free, and that kind of vivid, roiling life inevitably disturbs. It is far easier to label it aberrant and punish it than to examine it. And of course, all her life, and with a sort of blinded innocence, Lucy went in harm’s way. The need for rescue and protection lay so deep and burned so strong that it outweighed virtually any lesson she might have learned, any punishment she might receive. I could not have understood that then, but I did understand that punishment of Lucy achieved nothing and harmed her cruelly. What was meant to break her cleanly succeeded only in bending, and that permanently.

  For she was almost literally banished from our sight. Even when the incarceration was ended and we were free to go about our routines once more and resume speaking to each other, Lucy was effectively removed from all but minimal contact with her mother and sister and my parents and me. She had none with the children of Buckhead. I am sure that Aunt Willa would have put her into a convent if there had been any such thing in Atlanta and the stench of Rome had not been so taboo, or sent her to a boarding school if there had been money available. As it was, it must have burned her starved and stinging heart like fire to accept my father’s curt offer of tuition to a small, pretentious and patently inferior private day school that purported to “finish” subdebs but was widely known to break high-spirited or problem preadolescent girls with an iron snaffle. And my mother’s tiny, knowing smile as she extended the offer, and the silky fan of lashes that shuttered the contemptuous triumph in her eyes, must have seared equally deep. But Aunt Willa accepted.

  I think it was for that triumph, for that humiliation, that Willa Bondurant declared her war on Lucy, not for the vandalizing of the empty house. But she accepted the offer with as much of her carefully cultivated, modest grace as she could salvage. Better to cast out the offending eye than risk having it cause irremediable damage. Aunt Willa was smart enough to know that talk about Lucy would inevitably turn back upon her.

  After school Lucy was free for an hour or so to pursue her own interests, but since those had always centered around me and the summerhouse or the band of boys she led, and since she was forbidden absolutely to have anything to do with any neighborhood children except a few girls of her age deemed suitable companions, she was virtually without friends. Lucy simply would not associate with the little girls selected to be her playmates, and they in turn refused to play with her, and so she spent most of her time in the echoing upstairs rooms where we had once slept and whispered and read and dreamed our gaudy and unsuspected dreams.

  She must have been hideously lonely and often afraid, for the silence and isolation of that attic warren seemed inviolable and complete if you were alone in it; there was no sense that below you the life of a great house hummed on. I know that it was then, in those cramped, silent little rooms, that she began to write, but I never knew what she wrote. She showed that first work to no one. I would see her dark head sometimes at the third-floor window as I left the summerhouse and started toward Charlie’s house on West Andrews, or Ben Cameron’s on Muscogee.

  At the beginning of those days apart, she would be looking out at me, and would sometimes wave, a stiff, formal little salute, and I could see the blue of her eyes burning in her white face even from the driveway. But she never motioned for me to come up to her, or opened the window and called out to me, and she did not attempt to leave her room and steal out to the summerhouse, as she had during the time of our imprisonment after Jamie’s death. I thought she looked wonderfully beautiful and romantic, like a princess held captive in an enchanted tower, and my heart would literally leap in my chest like a gaffed fish with anguish for her. But my father had said after he brought us home from the police station, “If I catch you going anywhere near Lucy again I will send her and her mother and sister away that very day,” and I knew that he meant it.

  I have never known him to be so angry with me as he was that day. He did not bellow; he could not even speak, and his face, usually red and knotted with annoyance at me, was absolutely white and still. His small blue eyes were actually pale, as though bleached by the acid of his fury, and his breath came so hard and fast that I thought he would have some sort of attack and die. It was my mother, weeping and hovering and touching me—first my cheeks, and then my shoulders, and then my disheveled hair, until I thought I would literally knock her manicured fingers away—who delivered the terms of my punishment and the outline of my life in the house after it was ended. Mainly, both consisted of an avoidance of Lucy. I would be required to work after school and during the following summer to help pay for the damage to the windows of the Pink Castle, but I had expected that and did not mind. All the other boys would, I knew, be charged with the same task. And I would have to move to the summerhouse, but that was such joy to me that I shut my eyes in order to keep my parents from seeing it and rescinding the order. It was the absence of Lucy that they thought would bring me to my knees, and for a time it nearly did.

  I really believe it was at that point that my father, simply and without too much regret, washed his hands of me, for it was then that the constant carping on my activities and interests and inadequacies ceased, and then that my mother’s doting and fussing began in earnest. He stopped planning my college career at Georgia Tech, or, a poor second, the University of Georgia, and abandoned almost completely any talk of bringing me into the family real estate business. She escalated her campaign to make a proper princeling of me. I might have taken refuge in sneaking up the back stairs to Lucy in her tower, or smuggled notes and books to her, or at the very least engaged her in that deep and unspoken communion that we had always been able to carry on with our eyes, as we sat at meals and in church. But she would not look at me, or speak, and in any case, I knew that my father meant what he said about sending them away. The saintly knight still lived in my breast, but his shield was lost and his spear broken. After a while I laid them down and slipped gratefully into boyhood.

  My first friend was Ben Cameron, and though the friendship never deepened and smoothed into the mellow, nourishing thing I had with Charlie Gentry, still it showed me the sheer pleasure of a relationship that lay lightly and was fed without pain from shallow roots. I never really got to know Ben. Nobody did, I think, except his family, and as it turned out, they knew him, perhaps, least of all. Certainly Julia Randolph, whom he began to go steady with soon after his sixteenth birthday and married just out of Georgia Tech, never knew Ben, though she thought she did. I like to think the two little boys of that marriage, the sons he adored so openly and fully, and with whom he became again a boy himself, knew him as deeply as he could be known, but it would have been the father they perceived and loved, not the man.

  In any case, it did not matter, for with Ben the abundance of his flamboyant charm and his dark, glinting, sardonic wit made up for those depths held back. His enthusiasms were many and mercurial; February’s clicking aggies and taws gave way to March’s exquisite homemade kites, dancing in the spring wind over the Bobby Jones Golf Course, before you could blink your eyes, and you scarcely would have mastered his floating racing dives into the Driving Club pool before he was out and onto the flying roller skates that were the autumn thing we did. He was generous with his skills, and a swift and gracious t
eacher, but his body was so lithe and stylized in its power and grace, and his movements so liquid and exaggerated and dancerlike, that none of us could follow where he led, and he would be on to another passion before we had become passable in the last one he taught us.

  He was a born dancer; Sarah and Dorothy Cameron both used to say that it was a shame ballet dancers were thought to be sissies, because Ben would have been a star and made a million dollars at it. He would shrug that off, flushing up to his coppery hairline, and laugh, but it was true. Ben on a dance floor was a light and a flame that flickered over our high school years. Girls actually shoved and jostled to be asked to partner his jitterbug, and he was such a natural that Margaret Bryan, who flogged ballroom dancing into us in her musty little studio above Spencers, Ltd., downtown, asked him at age fourteen to be a student instructor. She had never asked another of us, boy or girl, and we were all deeply impressed, though of course we teased him unmercifully. But Ben hated ballroom dancing and went to her classes only because small, shy Sarah asked him to be her escort, and as soon as the offer to instruct came, he quit going entirely, and refused to go back. Dorothy urged him, and Sarah’s great eyes filled with blinked-back tears at the prospect of bearding that ersatz little cotillion alone, but in this, as in few other matters, his father overrode his mother.

  “For God’s sake, let him be, Dottie,” he said once, when I was over at the Muscogee Avenue house being tutored in math by Ben, and his mother was after him to take Sarah to dancing class that evening. “Dancing should be as much fun as you can have with your clothes on. If he doesn’t like it, there’s no sense in doing it.”