It was an odd time for me, that time swung between the first great Lucy-drunk stretch of my young childhood and high school. I had already had, in Lucy, a strange, chaste love so strong and pure that this absence of it was almost restful. And I had now a friend; had two, really, in Charlie and Sarah. I was grateful for the latter, and largely content to live in the mindless, sensation-drowned nowness of the moment, of simply being young. But there was a prowling unease and a waiting under the peaceful stasis, an emptiness. The hole in my heart was shaped like Lucy. I missed her. I did not know why she would not have anything to do with me. And yet, something in me was, disgracefully and cravenly, grateful for the hiatus.
I am sure that I knew, on some level, that it could not last.
Lucy broke it herself, on a summer night later that year, when my parents and Aunt Willa gave the largest party I could remember in the Peachtree Road house. It was in all ways a night I will not forget. It was a portentous night, and a terrible one. But if it had not happened, I might have lost her forever.
The party was, I heard my mother say, to pay back a number of social obligations that she and my father had incurred during the past season. But I knew that it was to market Little Lady and, grudgingly, Lucy, to the mother-brokers of the Buckhead Boys. Mothers of daughters just coming to flower had one like it every summer. The formal selling of familial flesh would begin much later, with the elaborate machinery of the debut year. This first testing of the waters was much like a match race for year-old fillies. Everyone would be there.
Except me.
“No,” I said. “I’m sorry. I’m not coming. Y’all can lock me up till I’m fifty, if you want to, but I’m not coming.”
They could not budge me. Try as my mother might, I simply refused to put on my lone, too-short summer suit and pass hors d’oeuvres and trays of drinks to the coiffed and curried and strange-eyed mothers of the boys who were my friends. I did not care if they put an apple in the beautiful and foolish Little Lady’s mouth and plumped her down, naked and buffed, on a silver tray in the center of the dining room table, but I was prepared to be grounded until I was twenty-one before I watched them parade Lucy before the matrons of Buckhead. I knew that she would only be there on sufferance, and that she would know it; that the real prize of this house was Little Lady, and they were only dragging Lucy out to show because people would talk if they did not…and besides, someone might take a fancy to her when the time came to marry off a son; who knew? Stranger things had happened.
“No,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
In the end, my mother gave in. Better an absent son and heir than one made stupid by sullenness.
And so I was alone when Lucy came to me in the summerhouse, lying on my back on the daybed under the lone wall lamp, reading Moby Dick, drowned in the power and sheer, awful truth of it. She stood in the door, against the light from the radiant, reverberating house, without speaking, and when I sensed her presence and raised my head to look at her, I did not know who she was for a moment. In her new yellow princess dress from J. P. Allen’s 219 Shop and her first Cuban heels, with a gardenia from the bush beside the lily pond in her cloudy hair, she was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. Before my eyes fully cleared and some of the old Lucyness settled back around her, I saw a woman, and could not speak with the weight of it on my chest.
I saw also that she held a nearly full bottle of bourbon in one hand, and that she was more than a little drunk. Her mouth was loose and her eyes hilarious with liquor. In an instant she became small Lucy Bondurant again, ten years old, gaudy trouble riding her head like a Cuban dancer’s hat.
“Hey, Gibby,” she said, giggling. “I brought you a surprise.”
I do not know what got into us that night. I had never tasted liquor and so far as I knew, neither had she. My father would be furious, I knew, if he caught us drinking his stolen bourbon in the summerhouse, and my mother would come near to dying; volubly so. I could not even imagine what Aunt Willa would do. I knew only that the consequences would be far more imaginative, far-reaching and terrible than any we had suffered so far. Maybe Lucy and her mother and sister really would have to leave the house. Perhaps I would be sent to McCallie or Gordon or Georgia Military Academy, those last resorts of the unmanageable Buckhead Boy. I did not, looking at her and feeling a great plume of pure joy and lightness rising up from somewhere behind my ribs, care in the least. Lucy was far too drunk for caring.
“Wait’ll I get a glass,” I said. And before another hour was out, we had drunk it all.
It was not late, perhaps ten-thirty. The party was in full spate. We could hear the steady, deep rhythm of it chugging along like a well-tuned engine; it would not start to falter for another two hours. The night was thick and dark and hot; moonless, almost starless. Cicadas droned off in the woods, and bugs committed small, ticking suicides against the yellow light over the summerhouse door. Honeysuckle smelled powerfully all around us. Full summer flowed in the night, but winter crouched off in the distance beyond the house and woods, winter and high school and a profound change, an ending. A deep, sweet sadness like an itch lay just beneath everything we said and did, but riding atop that was laughter, the endless, mindless, unstoppable, drowning laughter of first intoxication. I felt that I could laugh forever with the sheer gladness of having her back with me, flopped on her back on the daybed beside me with her pretty shoes kicked any which way on the floor and her skirts up, showing a ruffle of crinoline and a gleam of smooth white leg. She laughed, too, laughed and laughed, laughed the rich, bawdy, affirming laugh that will forever be in my ears, essence of Lucy.
And then, all of a sudden, she was crying. Crying so fiercely and terribly that I thought they would hear her in the house, over their music and their laughter, and I put my clumsy, bourbon-bumbling fingers over her mouth; but she shook them away. The crying spiraled up and up. I knew that if she did not stop she would go out of control, and one of those great, desperate fits of her childhood would carry her away, and she would be, for a long time, beyond help. She had not had one for years.
I pulled her against me and buried her face in my chest and held her until the crying began to slow and the trembling abate, held her so hard that her ribs hurt my fingers.
Presently she whispered, still sobbing, but less violently, “Gibby, it was so awful! I missed you so much! I finally just couldn’t stand it anymore; I thought I was going to die and they would just let me; they wouldn’t care!”
“But you wouldn’t even talk to me, Lucy,” I said. “I thought maybe you were mad at me or something; I thought you didn’t want me around you. Why didn’t you say something? I would have come….”
“I was waiting for you to come save me! You said you would; you said you always would! Gibby, why didn’t you come?”
“I…” I began, and then fell silent. She was right. I had promised. And I had not come. Why hadn’t I?
“OH, GIBBY, I WAS SO AFRAID!” It was a great, primal howl of pure aloneness, with nothing in it of childhood.
My own boyhood fled as if it had never been. I took her in my arms again and stopped her cries with my own blind mouth, and before I finally pulled myself back from the answering mouth and hands and body of my cousin Lucy, I was on top of her, and she was thrashing wildly beneath me on the daybed, and moaning words I still, to this day, blush to remember, and I was so near to entering her that only catastrophe saved me. Instead of making love to Lucy in the summerhouse in my twelfth year and her tenth, I leaned over her and vomited on the floor, from Jack Daniel’s black label and terror, and the sheer awfulness of it wrenched me sober.
I think it did her, too. I sat up, clothing half off, rubbing the vile taste off my mouth, looking at her with eyes absolutely wild and appalled, and she looked back at me from her huddle of skirts, mouth bruised and bare, silvery young breasts gleaming white, and in that instant she was sober again, and the desperate tears were gone.
In a moment she, too, was straightening her clothes a
s she left, pattering back toward the house through the summer dark with her new yellow shoes swinging by their straps from her hand. She did not say good night, or wave, or turn to look back when she gained the back door, and I spent the first entirely sleepless night of my life on the hot, tangled daybed, writhing in bottomless shame and misery and short-circuited adolescent tumescence.
In the morning at breakfast Lucy the darting, glinting child was back again, prattling happily to me, eating her cereal matter-of-factly, talking of the party as any excited ten-year-old would. My parents smiled on her for the first time in months, and even Aunt Willa, if she did not smile, at least stopped frowning, and only I seemed to notice the tiny quiver in Lucy’s hands and the red stigmata of what must have been as virulent a hangover as my own in her eyes. She never mentioned that night to me again.
So we were back in that old dance, she and I. Shep and Lucy, Lucy and Shep. But under it, now, a different music surged. That fall I entered the eighth grade at North Fulton High School, and the world widened just as I had thought that it would, to include a great many odd and marvelous things, but so deeply did the scent of danger and taboo cling in my mind to that night in the summerhouse that it was, literally, years before I kissed a girl again.
CHAPTER EIGHT
When I crossed Peachtree Road on a breathless, flaccid morning that September and entered for the first time the red brick pile of North Fulton High School, I quite literally walked into another world.
I had moved easily in and around Buckhead all my life, of course, and had traveled east across Peachtree Road countless times, but it was always as a voyager on a specific quest: to buy something, to see something, on the way to somewhere else. I always returned home to our side of Peachtree Road like Odysseus, bearing the treasures I had gone questing for, without being touched in any significant way by the natives of that pleasant but lesser continent. The only time I had ever been in a home east of Peachtree was with my mother, when I was quite small and she went to get a home permanent from a gifted and deferential little woman who worked out of the kitchen of her home on Pharr Road.
To me, that visit was official, service-oriented: I felt about my visit to that neat, tree-shaded frame bungalow as I did about the few times I went with Shem Cater in the Chrysler to pick up our laundry from Princess in Capitol Homes, or to fetch Amos from Pittsburgh, or Lottie, our cook, from Mechanicsville. I got no sense, from these visits, that people really lived in those places. They were, instead, destinations that provided the great houses of Buckhead with their provender.
But I went into North Fulton High School, in a sense, to live. And inside those tall, arched doors a world wider and deeper than any I had known before flowered: wider, deeper, denser, more eccentric, far more raffish, many times poorer, a hundred times more exotic, a thousand times more seductive. I first goggled at it in simple disbelief, and then dived into it like a warm and all-nourishing sea. High school came for me, and for many of the Buckhead Boys, I think, just in time.
Lucy would not be entering North Fulton for two more years, and so it must have seemed to her, still held fast in the bowery little prison of Miss Beauchamp’s School, that I was deserting her once again. She never said so; Lucy first learned her lifelong habit of long, veiled silences and closed face during her years in that terrible little dotted swiss ghetto, and she never spoke of them after they were ended except once.
“What was it really like, Luce?” I said on the day her incarceration at Miss Beauchamp’s finally ended.
“I will never in my life let anyone shut me up again. I will kill them first,” she said. And that, for Miss Beauchamp, was that.
So I knew that the school was bad and that she hated it, but I was never to know how bad, and how much. And I knew that my entering high school was abandonment anew, but again, I could only suspect how deep the wound went. In those days, Lucy was letting no one know that what was done to her in my father’s house was ongoing anguish. Already in general disfavor, she sensed, I think, that to roil the waters would be fatal. And there was always in her fierce little heart something that refused to give satisfaction to her tormentors, real or fancied.
It bothered me that she closed a part of herself to me, the saint knight bound so long ago with her protection, but the aftertaste of that night in the summerhouse still scalded my mouth, and for a very long time I found it hard to be totally natural with her. Eventually most of the strangeness simply wore away, and we drifted into our old routine of talking and reading together in the summerhouse or the sun porch or the library after school and in the evenings—for Lucy and I could never be apart for long—and I shared the bounty of high school with her, and once again we spun out the web of ken and dreams that had always bound us close. She still ran to me for comfort and showed her wild heart and its fears and joys and rages to me as she always had, but there was underneath it now a constraint that had never been there before, and I did not know how—or was unwilling—to break it. I know she must have felt my holding back, but she made no effort to move past it. All in all, Lucy had not, in the house on Peachtree Road, gotten very much return on the enormous investment of her hungry spirit and waiting heart.
And so she tightened her hold on the blacks around her. Until I came home in the late afternoons, Lucy’s custodial care was largely in the rough, pink-palmed hands of Martha Cater, and she astonished all of us, Martha included, by loving that old black martinet so deeply and unconditionally that Martha finally capitulated and loved her back. Lucy was, always, the only white child I know whom Martha could truly abide. During that time she would say, whenever one of Little Lady’s newly learned wiles and graces drew special applause at the breakfast or dinner table, “Good thang she learnin’ how to act nice and please folks, ‘cause it gon’ be all she be able to do when she git grown. Ain’t nothin’ but wind behin’ them big ol’ blue eyes.”
She would say it under her breath, coming in or going out with platters and trays, but not so far under that it did not fall upon the ears it was designed to reach, and at such times, Lucy would give her such a smile of whole-souled gratitude that it was as if the sun had come out in the room. Little Lady would pout and Aunt Willa would mottle unbecomingly with bitten-back anger, and my mother would sigh and roll her eyes at my father, but no one reprimanded Martha. To do so was unseemly and drew one down to her level, and besides, I suspect that all of us recognized the unfortunate truth in the remark. Little Lady was so abysmally unintelligent that her reading and spelling were, in fourth grade, barely on a second-grade level, and she was completely incapable of abstract thought. No matter, though. It was clear, even at age eight, that she was soon going to look just like Jane Powell.
As for Lucy, her relationship with Martha Cater was the font of a lifelong love for, and a marrow-deep kinship with, most of the blacks with whom she ever came in contact. ToTo, young Glenn Pickens over at the Camerons’, Shem and Lottie and Princess and Amos, thin, yellow Johnnie Mae at the Gentrys’, Lubie at the Slatons’…by the time she was twelve, Lucy was spending more time with the servants of the big houses around her, and their children, than with anyone else but me, and transferred to whatever new black came within her orbit, instantly and indiscriminately, all the adoration that her small heart held. By the time she was in her teens, her predilection for Negroes was a source of great embarrassment for her mother and mine, and to a lesser extent, my father. Beginning in earnest in that, her eleventh year, they forbade and cajoled and punished, but Lucy would not give up her beloved black companions.
“Yes’m,” she would say to Aunt Willa, when she was taxed yet again with spending an afternoon with Glenn Pickens or an evening with Shem and Martha in their rooms over the garage.
“Yes’m,” I understand.”
And she would smile, the blue eyes melting with contrition. But the next day she would be back with her cherished black companions once more. There was simply no stopping her.
I think it was because she saw so clearly wha
t most of us did not, or chose not to: that the Negroes in our world were underdogs, supplicants, victims. I alone knew that this was the role in which Lucy had clad herself. Underneath her public gaiety, sassiness, charm, intelligence, generosity, what Aunt Willa called her feistiness, I had long known she felt profoundly helpless in the world, uncherished, vulnerable and alone. I knew, too, that she had fair reason to feel so. And because she did, she became, in the end, just that: helpless and vulnerable, though seldom alone, and never uncherished. That helplessness was always her greatest strength.
At any rate, in those last lonely days between childhood and puberty, Lucy at least had her blacks, and I believe that bond saved her. I had high school.
North Fulton High School gave me everything I was to know of heterogeneity until Princeton. It gave me a gleeful taste for, and sanction of, eccentricity; it showed me madness and meanness and goodness and absurdity; it limned for me both the value of particularity and the use of conformity. It showed me goodness, in the person of Miss Reba Marks, a slat-thin, blond-marcelled, much-mimicked old maid who taught passionate chemistry and died instantly at the crosswalk in front of the school, shoving to safety the Garden Hills Elementary child who darted out in front of a yellow Fulton County school bus.
It showed me evil, in the person of the short-lived, hulking, loose-lipped assistant football coach who got retarded and homely Scarlett Mitchum, from the rural wilds of Sandy Springs, pregnant, and then jeered openly at her hard, basketball-round mound of belly as she tagged after him adoringly through the halls and into the locker room.
It showed me danger, in the cool-eyed blond person of the legendary Boo Cutler, he of the lightning Mercury and the thunderous midnight runs out of Cherokee County, loaded with shine; it showed me despair, in the bleached persons of those anonymous students doomed, it seemed from birth, to be library staffers, nutrition aides, infirmary assistants, science clubbers.
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