“But every boy needs to know how to dance,” Dorothy Cameron said. “It’s one social skill that’s absolutely indispensable.”
“He knows how, better than anybody in Margaret’s entire gang of little gigolos,” Ben Cameron said, the gray eyes that were also his son’s resting with such open and unabashed love on Ben that quick tears stung my eyes, startling me. “He just doesn’t want to do it. Isn’t football and baseball and tennis and swimming and music and his design work enough? Not to mention his grades. What more does he need?”
Ben reddened and ducked back out of the little den where his mother and father were sitting, and Dorothy Cameron’s eyes lit on me. I did not follow Ben; I was then, as I have always been, as drawn to the Camerons in a group as a cold, starving wild animal is to a fire, and I stood warming myself at their light.
“Shep will take Sarah to dancing class, won’t you, Shep?” Dorothy said, smiling at me. Her warm amber eyes saw me, every inch of me, inside and out, and liked what she saw. It was her gift, as it was always Sarah’s, to see you plain and like, even love, you for just that; to ask nothing of you; instead, to give to you. I could dance, after a fashion, but was shy and did not like the close contact with the girls, and found every excuse that my mother would accept to miss the classes. But for Dorothy Cameron I would have gone down to the Fox Theater and danced alone on the great bare stage before a packed house, and besides, I liked sunny, elfin little Sarah.
“Sure,” I said. “Sarah will be my girl for tonight.”
I grinned at Sarah, and she reddened and smiled her soft, three-cornered, kitten’s smile.
“Thanks, Shep,” she said, and ducked her chin and vanished up the stairs after Ben.
“She’ll be walking on air for weeks,” Dorothy Cameron said. “She’s been in love with you all her life, you know.”
For all his generosity and near-theatrical gregariousness, though, young Ben Cameron was moody, and sometimes he would, quite literally, go away from you, uncurling as softly and quietly as a cat and padding out of the room, leaving whatever you were doing together spread out on the desk or table. At other times he would merely retreat back into his own head; you could still talk to him and get an answer of sorts, but the essential Ben Cameron was contained somewhere behind those clear gray eyes. You could see the essence of him moving there. It was unsettling, and never failed to leave me with a small frisson, as if, we were fond of saying, a rabbit had just run over my grave.
He did not look like a boy then. It was possible, when that happened, to see what Ben Cameron the man would look like, and I did not think that that man was happy, though I could not have said why. “What more does he need?” Ben Cameron, Senior, had said of his son. Could he, if he had been another sort of man, have seen the awful import of those words? Would it have made a difference? I don’t know. But at those times, it seemed very clear to me that there was something more that young Ben Cameron needed, something vital to life. But I had no idea, then, what it was.
In addition to the tutoring in mathematics, Ben gave me one of the great and enduring loves of my life, gave it to me as lightly and openhandedly as he shared with me his expertise at marbles and dancing and the flying of kites. He let me chomp and hoot around on his clarinet, at which he was as effortlessly proficient as he was at everything else he attempted, and though I never quite achieved his technical virtuosity on it, I was smitten with a passion far stronger than his the instant I picked it up and felt the sweet heft of that ebony cylinder in my hands, and tasted the smoky-persimmon taste of the slick, bitten reed. I was hooked before the first mallardlike honks and skirling shrieks came issuing forth from the instrument, and nagged my mother so desperately and tirelessly that within a week I had a shining new clarinet of my own, chosen by me from Rutan’s on one totally glorious spring afternoon, and lessons three times a week from the resigned, fastidious little man who taught Ben. I was quick to learn, if not especially talented, and I practiced so prodigiously that the sheer effort and the pounding force of my passion produced music sufficient to feed my yearning heart before that summer was out.
I will never forget the day the clarinet came alive for me. I was lying on my back in the deep grass of the meadow that ringed the lake up at Tate, totally alone in the day, noodling idly, the reed vibrating smoothly and tinnily against my teeth, watching a red-tailed hawk riding the thermals over Burnt Mountain and thinking of nothing at all, emptied out, still. And then, all of a sudden, the molten honey of “Frenesi” came spilling out of the mouthpiece, abundant and silvery and perfect. I gave a great start, and looked around as if I were being observed, and then I put the clarinet down and laid my head on my arms and wept.
Mathematics and music. Two absolutely true things that I have and would not have except for Ben Cameron. Now, whenever I think of him, over the pain and the outrage, always comes the healing gratitude. Ben; Ben of the gray-lit eyes and the ardent heart. I will not forgive Atlanta for Ben.
The other friend of my boyhood, and indeed, of my life, was Charlie Gentry. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know Charlie. Illness was the first tie that bound us; our mothers took us to the same pediatrician for treatment of his diabetes and my asthma. And as our families knew each other from the club and Saint Philip’s Episcopal Church and shared a hundred other nearly imperceptible ties of the sort that bound the families of Buckhead, it was only natural that we would become regular playmates.
For one thing, our infirmities relegated us to the role of onlookers in the fiercely masculine little society in which we moved. For another, the invisible ties of the “different” child, the one set apart, reached out swiftly and went deeply into us. Charlie and I knew one another in our hearts when we first set toddlers’ eyes on each other in Dr. Forrest Davenport’s office on Ponce de Leon, and that ken lasted, with few breaks, well past boyhood. We did not become close friends until that summer after Lucy and I were separated, but I think we both knew early, somewhere down where such things lie, that we would do so. I know that sometimes in my early childhood, when the asthma that disappeared around my tenth birthday still kept me awkward and withdrawn, a hoverer at edges, I would look across a group of shrieking, milling children and meet the grave brown eyes of Charlie Gentry and feel a kind of obscure peace, an occult comfort, steal through me. “Later,” our glances seemed to say to one another. “Later.”
I think our friendship would have become fact a lot sooner if Lucy had not come to live with me in my house. For, as I have said, from the very beginning, Charlie did not like her, and it was plain that the feeling was mutual.
He was the first one of us to call her a name, a thing so unlike Charlie that the spiteful little incident hung on the air quivering with shock, and was remembered for a long time by all of us who heard it. It was at the Easter egg hunt on the great hill in front of Saint Philip’s, overlooking the bend in Peachtree Road just before it sweeps into Buckhead proper, and we were all standing in a bemused and dazzled knot watching Lucy, her fiercely frilled new organdy skirts over her head, hanging by her knees from the branches of a low-spreading dowager oak, dangling in her hand the gold-painted, beribboned prize egg she had found almost immediately.
The promissory enchantment I had seen early in her had ripened into a full-fledged spell on this fey April day of strange green light and running cloud shadow and warm little winds that doubled back upon themselves. By now the knot of children standing below her was silent in entirely proper respect mingled with superstitious awe…for hadn’t she known exactly where the prize egg was; skipped, in fact, straight to it? And didn’t she look, upside down in the lambent, shivering air, like some elemental spirit newly come among us from a magical place called New Orleans, a creature of light and vapors and quicksilver? I remember that no one spoke for what seemed the longest time, and then Charlie’s gruff, matter-of-fact voice came clearly: “Shoot, that ain’t so hot. Anybody can hang from a stupid tree. Even a woods colt. She ain’t nothing but a woods colt from
country-hick New Orleans.”
The effect on Lucy was astounding. In an eye-blink she had skinned down from the tree and charged Charlie, small fists flailing, eyes shut tight with fury, face mottled white and red, tears strangling in her throat. She did not say a word until she had knocked him backward onto the new-green grass and bloodied his nose, and she only stopped then because I grabbed her from behind and pinioned her arms. I was both awed and embarrassed. Awed because I had never seen a girl lick a boy, much less one two years older than she was, and embarrassed because it was strictly against our code to hit Charlie, who both wore glasses and had something so badly wrong with him that he had to take shots for it every day of his life. No one had told Lucy this, of course, but it seemed to me she should have known it anyway. It was an etiquette born of the blood. Besides, I wondered, what was so terrible about being called a woods colt? It sounded lovely to me, fabled and magical, like a unicorn or a griffin. And with her silky black mane of hair and long, gossamer-slender arms and legs, she did look rather like a colt, a crystal one.
She would never tell anyone what had led her to attack Charlie, and she would never again have anything substantial to do with him. He did not seem to care; seemed, rather, to be relieved. I have often thought that the years in which she rode at the head of the Buckhead Boys on their invincible bikes must have been rather bad years for him, but by that time they had come to a sort of elaborately indifferent armed truce, and I suppose that the inclusion in that streaking golden pack was too precious, to a boy used to making his way alone, to forswear for a point of honor no one else even recognized.
On that day, I remember, I sought him out just before we left the party, and whispered, “What’s a woods colt?”
“It means she doesn’t have any daddy,” he said.
“Well, shoot, sure she does,” I said. “He’s not here, but she sure does have one. He’s in New Orleans or someplace. She’s crazy about him. Talks about him all the time.”
“Well, that’s what I heard my mother tell Mrs. Goodwin,” he said stubbornly. “And I don’t guess she’d say that if it wasn’t so.”
I knew he was wrong, but I did not argue with him. I could understand why he was so sure. Charlie’s mother would rather go naked at noon in Five Points than lie.
Of all the so-called “good” people I have ever known in my life, Ben and Dorothy Cameron included, Charlie’s mother and father were hands down the saintliest. The odor of piety stood so strongly in the air around them that in their presence even dirty bare feet seemed un-Christian. Marianne Gentry taught Sunday school and sang in Saint Philip’s choir and was chairman of Saint Rhoda’s altar guild, and ran the Episcopal thrift shop, where the cast-off garments of the women of Buckhead were dispensed at greatly reduced prices to a singularly unappreciative clientele of indigent women from “down there” in Atlanta proper, and in her spare time she painted flamingo-pink faces of Jesus on china plates. Every newlywed couple in Buckhead had one by the time she abjured portraiture and moved on to sacramental macramè. She was the first face one saw on one’s doorstep when a loved one died, and often, uncannily, seemed to precede the event itself by appearing, casserole in hand, before the death rattle had begun.
I once heard Ben Cameron say to Dorothy, “If you ever open the door and see Marianne Gentry standing there with a chicken pot pie, don’t hesitate. Go straight down to the bank and open the lockbox and get everything out before the IRS seals it. I’ll surely be dead by the time you get home.”
Charlie’s father, Thaddeus Gentry, was a major stockholder in the Coca-Cola Company, and I always heard that he was “in business,” but I don’t think I ever knew precisely what that business was, as close as Charlie and I became and as often as I was in and out of the house on West Andrews. Mr. Gentry went to an office downtown; he was driven by a wizened little blue-black gnome of a Negro man who smelled perpetually of the White Rose snuff that bulged his upper lip like a lipoma. I believe now that Thad Gentry must have had a sort of rudimentary family philanthropic foundation going, for he was widely known to give away money to the poor, and wore the epithet “Christian businessman” with the same pride that he wore his Rotary button. His ferocious cheerfulness smote the very air around him, and he would set upon you and cry, “Smile! God loves you!” whenever his path crossed yours. He was a round, squat little man with the same thick glasses that Charlie wore, and the great fleshy, smacking lips of a fish, and he liked putting moist, avuncular hands on the flesh of young girls almost as much as he liked to give away his sanctified money. When he did, the girls would smile thinly, and Marianne Gentry would smile thinly, and he would merrily quote a snippet from the Song of Solomon, though never going so far as to get to the part about the breasts being like twin roes.
I never knew what he was about, with his scuttling hands and stalklike crab’s eyes, but I feel sure Charlie, with his quick sensitivity, did. I think Charlie’s younger sister, Caroline, did, too. I would see the dull red creep up her neck and into her cheeks when her father laid his hands on the arms and shoulders of one of her playmates. Caroline had her revenge, though. She ran as amok as she could as soon as she was able, starting with the legendary Boo Cutler of Buckhead and working her way up the eastern seaboard to New York, where she had acquired her second husband by the time she was twenty-five. I saw her once, years after our childhood, at the Village Gate, listening to Bird Parker, very drunk and leaning on the shoulder of a still-faced black man wreathed in smoke that was definitely not that of a Pall Mall. She did not see me and I did not cross the room to speak to her. Caroline had left us all behind by then. I think she lives now in Barbados in a villa left to her by who knows what husband. My aunt Willa always clicks her tongue and shakes her head when she speaks of Caroline Gentry, but I think on the whole that Caroline didn’t do so badly for herself. Not at all. Not in comparison to those of us whose venue she fled.
But for a while in my childhood, one of the smarmier little witticisms went, “What’s pink and white and turns into a motel when you say the magic words?”
“Caroline Gentry!”
The Gentrys were quite rich when Charlie and I first became friends, but when Charlie was in his first year at Emory Law, Thad Gentry suddenly went ferociously and ebulliently mad and gave all the family Coca-Cola stock to a black television evangelist called Reverend Buddy, and Charlie and his mother were left in severely straitened circumstances.
“You’d think the sonofabitch would have the sense to give it to Billy Graham, at least,” Charlie said mildly, but I knew that the breakdown was a cataclysm for him.
He transferred to Atlanta Law School at night and went to work for the Coca-Cola Company by day to support his mother and keep the big old Italianate house up, and Marianne Gentry went into a long and gentle decline.
Dorothy Cameron, who was perhaps a bit too enamored of that much-prized quality called gumption and was wont to apply it like a poultice to every ill that the flesh was heir to, snapped, “Marianne Gentry hasn’t got an ounce of gumption. I don’t think faith is worth a plugged nickel if there isn’t a little gumption to back it up.”
I know, though, that it was she and Ben who paid the taxes on the Gentry house while Charlie got on his feet. She and Ben always did like Charlie.
By the time Charlie graduated and married, he was doing so well at Coca-Cola that the upkeep of his mother was no problem, and he was able to bring his father home from Central State and install him properly and permanently at Brawner’s. “And that,” Charlie said resignedly, “considering the number of Buckhead people who end up there, is like coming home.”
It’s a mystery to me how Charlie kept himself so whole, so steeped in the cheerful, pragmatic integrity that was always, to me, the thing about him that set him so apart from the rest of us. Not many people are genuinely good. It may be that the tremendous effort he had to expend to accommodate his diabetes made him early into invincible stuff. Or it may have simply been genetic. Charlie sprang from a good
gene pool, his palely loitering mother and exuberantly mad father notwithstanding. His grandfather had a glorious stint as a Mississippi riverboat captain before he came to Atlanta and settled down to buying Coca-Cola stock, and his great-grandfather rode with that glittering rogue, Jubal Early, in northern Virginia. I always thought that Charlie got the best of all of it. He was gentle, and honest to a fault, and fiercely loyal, even as a small boy, and what had been, in Thaddeus and Marianne, cant and fanaticism was smoothed in Charlie into a genuine and appealing decency which shone out of his astigmatic eyes like love, like perennial joy. Not that he was pious; far from it. Charlie was, if anything, wry and taciturn and in repose, his sweet-ugly frog’s face unlit by his mordant black-Celt’s wit, he seemed downright phlegmatic. And he had learned early on to shield his vulnerability with a kind of affable, shambling passivity that sat perfectly on his short, stocky frame. But I knew, and more than a few other people came to know, that under the dun-colored cloak of the artisan beat a great and passionate heart.
I first saw that passion, perhaps saw it born, on an afternoon in March, when Lucy was still under strict house arrest and Charlie and I had just begun to go around together. There had been a peevish late winter ice storm the evening before, and Marianne Gentry had forbidden Charlie, with his penchant for colds and susceptibility to any infection, to go outside. Instead, we ended up on the third floor in the dark warren of rooms so similar to the ones in my own house, poking boredly through old trunks. Like me, Charlie was an inveterate reader—though his own reading ran to popular science and the Hardy Boys and Big Little Books, of which he had stacks and stacks—and a great builder of model airplanes. They hung about his room like clumsy, desiccated insects, and his hands always smelled, in those years, of dope. He was not a great imaginer or a dreamer of dreams, and he was certainly not a rummager in attics. I don’t know why we were at it that day. But we were, probably because it was just slightly more interesting than the Monopoly game that his mother was pressing us to play with restless little Caroline downstairs. Trunk after trunk yielded only fragile, brittle old clothes and hats and scrapbooks and linens; the totems of many lives, I suppose, and things that, as such, would move and involve me deeply now. But then they seemed to us just old. Old and dirty. And they made me cough so badly that I feared that one of the long-dormant asthma attacks was about to shake my throat and chest like a demon terrier.
Peachtree Road Page 18
