In the third week after school started, I went down onto the burning athletic field to meet the three other members of the 880 relay team for the second practice of the season. Ben Cameron and A. J. Kemp were both on the team; oddly, for few Jells participated in high school sports. But the 880 was perfect for Ben’s whiplike speed and grace, and A.J. in motion of any kind was wonderful to watch. The fourth member was Fraser Tilly, a small, rabbity, stone-silent junior from out beyond Sandy Springs, who could lope forever like a timber wolf and sprint like the jackrabbit he resembled, and was better at the 880 than the three of us Buckhead Jells put together.
It was the sixth and last period of the day, and several knots of boys and girls dotted the bleached grass of the field, preparing to stumble with loathing through the last physical education classes of the day. It was so hot that the figures on the far end of the field seemed to shimmer like mirages in a desert, and sweat soaked the hideous blue and white shorts and shirts that North ``egant Ben Cameron, looked awful in them, swaddled and storklike. The girls looked, simply, unspeakable. The Pinks at North Fulton hated being seen in their P.E. uniforms even more than being caught in home-permanent curlers and papers, with Noxzema on their acne.
I was late, and the track coach was a new one, a beetling, clifflike Teuton with a no-color burr of a crew cut and cold, Baltic eyes. He had tongue-lashed A.J. so badly for missing the first practice that A.J., the irrepressible one, the golden-tongued smart mouth, had had tears in his eyes before he was done. I ran silently down the stone steps of the stadium, my cleated shoes in my hand, in dread of the coach’s coiled tongue.
But they were not looking at me. They were standing close together in a huddle, backs to me, heads close together, obviously staring at something across the field that I could not see. They were laughing, and though I could not hear what they said, I knew the tenor of that laughter. I had heard it a hundred times in locker rooms and dark booths, when the talk of fucking and genitalia began; had even tried, clumsily, to join in myself. It was the laughter of the Buckhead Jells for a girl considered to be little better than a whore. I heard the huge coach say something that ended in “…little pussy right out there on a stick. Bet we could all get a lick of that without even asking for it.”
I reached the group and looked beyond it to see who they were talking about, and it was Lucy. She was standing with her sixth period soccer class, doing absolutely nothing but standing stockstill in the sun on the edge of the group of girls, dressed, as they all were, in the hated blue bloomers and white shirt. But all of a blinding sudden I could see what Ben and A.J. and Fraser Tilly and the coach saw: the white flesh of Lucy Bondurant looking so totally naked in the merciless sunlight of September that the shorts and shirt might as well not have been there; small, sharp breasts that appeared absolutely bared even under the starched white; long legs joined in so obvious a cupping of tender genitalia that the blue bloomers could have been made of transparent netting. Lucy’s clothing was not tight, and she did not flaunt her body; did not even move it. She simply stood straight and still, looking back across the field at them, and I could both feel and see the molten blueness of her eyes in an empty sunlit silence that rang like a bell, over and under the sly, fetid laughter of the 880 team.
They turned and saw me then, and fell abruptly silent, and the laughter stopped. Ben reddened, and A.J. looked away. Ben, A.J.…
Fraser Tilly and the Prussian coach busied themselves knocking dried mud off their cleats. The afternoon swung around me; the air swarmed like bees. Lucy stood before my friends and teammates and the hulking, alien betrayer utterly exposed, and now everyone knew what it was that, in the dark center of me, I had always known: Lucy Bondurant went naked in the world. Lucy could be taken. I had, once again and now irrevocably, failed to shield and protect her, and in that moment, the power of my sainthood fled for the last time, and only the hunger for it remained.
CHAPTER NINE
When I turned sixteen and got the red and white Fury, the last rational barrier to full participation in Jellhood fell, and I could think of no good reason to avoid the dinners and dances and breakfasts, and so, borne by the daunting splendor of my wheels and urged on by my mother, I began to attend the bulk of them.
“You simply cannot think of missing another one, Sheppie,” my mother would say, coming out to beard me in my den in the summerhouse when a determined inquisition at dinner unearthed the fact that I had not gone to the last two or three and had no plans for the one upcoming. “These little parties are where the debutante lists are drawn from; you know that as well as I do. Do you want to go through five or six entire seasons without being on a single list? Your future is being built right now. Of course you’re going. Now come on in the house and call one of your pretty girlfriends. Little Sarah Cameron would just love to go with you. Do you want me to call Dorothy for you?”
And, face flaming with the sheer awfulness of my mother calling the mother of a girl, even Sarah, I would stalk into the big house and slink sullenly into the telephone niche under the foyer staircase, and dial the Camerons’ number.
“Sarah,” I would say without identifying myself, “I’ve got to go to that stupid Alpha Nu thing Friday night, and my mother won’t get off my back until I get a date. I don’t guess you want to go, do you?”
“Thanks, Shep,” Sarah would say. “I’d love to go. It sounds like fun.”
Even at fourteen, she had a woman’s full-throated and warming voice, with the rich little hill of laughter under it that always drew people to her, and her simple, glad-hearted acceptance was so much more gracious than my mean, muttered invitation that I blush even now, all these years later, to think of it. It didn’t occur to me then that I was being rude to Sarah. It was many years before I fully stopped taking that bounty of approval and affection for granted.
Those Friday evenings when I departed in the Fury, white orchid in hand, pleased my parents almost more than anything I had ever done, and the fact of that made me obscurely truculent and melancholy. I went to the dances gracelessly and morosely, but I went correctly. My father took me down to John Jarrell’s and had me fitted for a magnificent tuxedo, the only one I have ever owned; it was a lustrous, penguin-black single-breasted suit of fine wool, with a rich satin shawl collar, and with it I wore a blinding white pleat-front shirt with a soft collar and French cuffs. A black satin cummerbund and tie completed the outfit, and my grandfather Redwine’s onyx and gold cuff links and smoked pearl studs were grace notes.
These my mother brought me on the night of the first Friday evening dance of that season, insisting on inserting and fastening them herself. As she bent in front of me, I could smell the smoky, bittersweet breath of Hermès’ Calèche that was her signature that autumn, and the clean, light floral odor of the shampoo that her hairdresser at J. P. Allen’s used. I was not used to being so close to my mother, and felt a powerful, nervous urge to push her away and run. She half turned, and I closed my eyes so as not to see the pearly cleft of her breasts in the keyhole cutout of her neckline. She straightened and pushed me away to arms’ length, her hands hard on my shoulders, and looked up at me with a sheen of tears in her dark sloe eyes.
“My handsome man,” she said. “My little blond boy, all grown up now and going off into the world, leaving his mama behind all alone. It cuts me to the heart to have you leave me, Sheppie.”
Since I wasn’t going anywhere but around the corner to the Camerons’ to pick up Sarah and then perhaps three miles farther away at best, out to the Brookhaven Country Club, I felt that the tears were gratuitous and false, a bit of arcana staged for my benefit, and was embarrassed.
“I’m not going anywhere, Mama,” I said.
“Yes you are, Sheppie,” she said, smiling her closed, odalisque smile at me. “You’re going very, very far in your life. I’ve always known that. Your father can’t see it, but I can. You’re a very special boy, and you’re going to be a very special man. A sensitive, talented, gentle man. And so ha
ndsome; well, just look at you. You look as handsome as Leslie Howard tonight, in your new tuxedo. Oh, I am jealous, Sheppie. All the girls are going to be crazy about you. I’ll bet half of them are in love with you now. You’ll make somebody a wonderful husband, and then you’ll forget all about your poor old mother. But one day you’ll see that nobody, not one of them, ever loved you like your mother did.”
She leaned forward to kiss me, and her eyes were half-shut, and she smiled a smile of something I had never seen before, something slow and secret and out-curling like a tentacle, and in pure panic I jerked away and turned to my image in the mirror. A blank-eyed, wavering blond man looked back at me, tall and badly frightened. Both the woman and the image were so totally alien that I felt, for a moment, completely without a context, utterly awry in my own skin. Then my mother laughed, her old, indulgent laugh, and the world came spinning back into focus.
“Don’t worry, I’m not going to embarrass you to death by kissing you,” she said. “Go on now, and pick up little Sarah. I have to tell you, Sheppie, that we’re so glad it’s her you’re taking and not Lucy. Time you had some other little friends besides Lucy. You’re just too old for that cousin business now. People are already talking about it.”
I fled blindly, hot to the roots of my hair, and did not take a deep, easing breath until I gained the seclusion of the Fury, which stood gleaming and ready for me on the circular drive in front of the house, shined to a lacquer polish earlier in the day by Shem Cater. Increasingly, in those latter days of high school, my encounters with my mother left me shying with nerves and near to staggering under an oppressive weight whose name I did not know. It was pure, clear, light relief to walk into the little sitting room at the Camerons’ house where Sarah, Dorothy and Ben waited for me. Ben Junior had already left, to pick up pretty, pug-nosed Julia Randolph over on Arden.
Even in her freshman year, Sarah was already well known and popular at North Fulton, destined to be, as her mother had been before her, the one who ran, with sunny willingness and no vain-glorious aspirations at all, the “serious,” service-oriented organizations and activities of high school. Not that she was a goody-goody or a grind; she was a varsity cheerleader, and known throughout the city for her swimming and painting skills, and she never once in four years, that I know of, sat out a Friday night dance. With her perfect, supple little body and her clear, deep amber eyes and instant dimpling smile and cap of dark, glossy hair—cut short so that she did not have to wear a cap in the water when she dived and swam—she was as appealing and good to the eye as a pet squirrel, and as captivating. It has never been possible to look upon Sarah Cameron without a smile of pure response starting on your mouth. From her birth, she has had Dorothy’s enormous energy and purpose without her austerity, and Ben’s easy charisma without his pure, focused ego. The best—or at least, the most livable—of both.
When Sarah graduated from North Fulton, the list of honors and organizations under her photograph was the longest in the Hi-Ways. It read, “Sarah Tolliver Cameron. We predict, the first Mrs. President. Student Council, Annual Representative, P.T.A. Representative, Y-Teens, Secretary and Treasurer, Junior Class, President, Senior Class, Swimming Team, Gold Medal, All-City Swimming and Diving Competition, Cheerleader, Nominating Committee, Rabun Gap Guild, Home Economics Fashion Show, Le Circle Francaise, R.O.T.C. Sponsor, Honor Roll 10 Quarters, National Honor Society, Who’s Who, Student Court, Senior Superlatives, Senior Play, Southeastern Outstanding Young Artist of the Year, Atlanta Journal-Constitution Best All-Round Cup, Graduation Speaker.”
“Just look at the list of honors little Sarah has under her name,” my mother said at the breakfast table the morning after Lucy brought her senior annual home. My mother never ceased in her campaign to ally the houses of Bondurant and Cameron, and she never managed to refer to Sarah as anything but “little Sarah.” I looked at the Hi-Ways, smelling new leatherette and fresh, sour ink, and saw Sarah’s familiar chipmunk face smiling out at me over a vast sea of type. On the opposite page, Lucy’s face, dimmed to mere piquancy as always by a camera, looked obliquely out over a naked line or two.
“Yeah, isn’t that something?” Lucy said, yawning and scrubbing swollen, smudged eyes with her fists. She had been out with Red Chastain the night before, and I had heard the MG come burring up the driveway at nearly 5:00 A.M. By now, no one even bothered to admonish Lucy about it. She looked like a petal from an exotic flower that had lain out all night in a driving rain, damp and bruised and used up.
“I imagine they charged her the standard ad rate,” Lucy drawled, draining black coffee. I scowled at her, and Aunt Willa frowned, but did not bother to say anything. My mother smiled her secret smile. She knew her point was well taken; the contrast between Sarah’s bountiful accolades and Lucy’s meager two lines hung vibrating in the air of the breakfast room. Lucy’s said, “Lucy James Bondurant. Hold the presses! Men overboard! Scribbler Staff Four Years, Editor in Chief, Senior Year. Rabun Gap, Tallulah Falls, Who’s Who.”
Four years of Lucy Bondurant, and in summary, all one could know of that complex stroke of pure flame was that she belonged to two organizations that were bestowed upon the elect of the Buckhead Pinks as automatically as their smallpox vaccinations and their birth certificates; that she labored only for the student newspaper and only there left a spoor of herself; and that she had as her middle name that of her early-lost and long-adored father. It was Sarah Cameron who shone from the pages of that world.
But at age fourteen, when I first began to squire her to dances and a few other de rigueur social occasions, Sarah was still, to me, endearing little Sarah Cameron, who was comfortable to be with for hours on end, who could swim like a minnow and dive like an otter and keep up with me on any weed-choked battlefield or any dance floor, and toward whom I felt absolutely no compelling obligation. She did not, therefore, weigh heavy on my heart, but sat lightly as thistledown in my mind. It was still, then, for me, Lucy who bore down, who burned, who clung, who shone.
Going into her teens, there was not a girl or woman in Atlanta from twelve to thirty who could touch Lucy Bondurant for sheer impact. She was an absolute, essential flame; everyone who knew her in that time would remember her all their lives. At thirteen, she was as tall and fully developed as she would ever be, her blue eyes unclouded and black-lashed and extraordinary, her waist spannable by two masculine hands, her dark wings of hair, not cut into the flips and later the ducktails of the day, but falling softly against her cheeks in the sleek, loose pageboy of the preceding decade. Until they cut it in the hospital, many years later, Lucy wore her hair that way.
Her impact was not that of classical beauty, but a matter of what she called her engine and I thought of as her aura: a vivacity, a sheen, an electricity that ran at full throttle and, except when she slept, continuously. Even her bad habits had charm, a cachet, which many were, all her life, to imitate unsuccessfully. From somewhere—I suppose her beloved Negroes—she had learned to swear like a sailor, but she did it in such a pure, honeyed drawl and with such a vulnerable innocence in her blue eyes that the effect was entrancing. A whole generation of Atlanta Pinks learned to say “shit” and “fuck” from Lucy Bondurant, but it became none of them but her.
She also adopted smoking two or three years before the other girls in her crowd took it up—for almost everyone in our day smoked, Pall Malls and Viceroys and Parliaments, in blue and white crushproof boxes—and she adored liquor from that first stolen swallow of my father’s Jack Daniel’s. But she did not drink as a matter of course until considerably later. Lucy in her early and middle teens ran largely on spirit. Her galvanic physical presence assured her a constant swarming circle of boys, Jells and otherwise, but it did nothing to endear her to a generation of Atlanta women. I don’t think she even noticed, and I know she never cared. From the moment she walked into North Fulton High School, from the moment she lifted her head and stared across a bleached and blinding athletic field into the hungry, betraying eyes of the
880 relay team, it was men for Lucy, men all the way.
Despite the portent of that day on the athletic field, it began slowly, that consuming, lifelong passion and refuge of Lucy’s. For the entirety of her freshman year, Aunt Willa did not allow her to date, despite the fact that other freshman girls, especially the Pinks, went regularly on double, if not single, dates to the dinners and dances and even breakfasts afterward, and were allowed to go in groups to early movie dates, or for sodas after school. I don’t know why Aunt Willa was so strict with Lucy that year. There had never been any trouble with boys up to then, and I am sure she did not know about the night in the summerhouse. Perhaps she, too, saw in her daughter that naked, hungry, infinitely vulnerable and powerfully sexual creature the relay team had seen on that hot September afternoon. Perhaps she knew that unlike the repressed and biddable Little Lady, Lucy was not going to go sweetly and conventionally through her adolescence to an early and stable marriage. Perhaps she remembered her own sexual abandon, and its consequences—though I doubt that. I don’t believe that concern for Lucy motivated the prohibition. I think, as I thought then, and as Lucy knew absolutely, that forbidding her daughter to date when everyone else did was Willa Bondurant’s way of punishing her, of saying, in effect, you are cheap and trashy and cannot be trusted, so you must be curbed. It must have planted the idea of promiscuity deep. And as any captivity always had, the ban made Lucy furious and desperate. I truly believe that if Aunt Willa had been reasonable about her dating in that first year of high school, Lucy’s life might have taken a different course. But it may be that, even then, the die was too decisively cast for malleability.
She did not rail and storm and protest, as she would have once. She had learned well the consequences of that. She simply set out, efficiently and methodically, to attract every male who came within range, and she did it without lifting a finger. Lucy unaware was as seductive, in those early days, as a prepubescent nymph. Lucy aware and plying all her weapons was in another league altogether. By the end of the school year, there was not a male student at North Fulton High, and not many among the Jells of all Atlanta, who did not know that Lucy Bondurant was hot to trot, and loaded for bear—though it was not generally thought that she would, as yet, put out. The consensus on that was that it was just a matter of time, and the stampede to be first geared up then, and did not cease, so far as I knew, until Red Chastain came along and put the competition on ice.
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