Peachtree Road

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  And they kept the contacts fresh and immediate. Even during the heart of that anguished struggle, when the White Citizens’ Council and the flaming, colorful segregationists were the most vocal and the news out of Birmingham and Little Rock and Selma came smoking in over the wires, and every blinding-hot summer day dawned on another threatened riot in one embattled black community or another, the men of the Club and the black leadership of Atlanta talked. They talked daily and for hours, in black homes as well as white, and even though they met in secret, still they met. When action came—when the public schools were kept open in defiance of the state’s law and in compliance with the country’s; when Ben Cameron, then mayor, stood on top of an automobile in Mechanicsville for hours in the fierce heat of an incipient riot, talking, talking; when one by one the “White Only” signs began to come down, and even that innermost of sanctums, the Commerce Club, seated Negroes for lunch—it was usually because one specific and powerful white man said the necessary words into the necessary ears, and because many of those ears were black.

  It wasn’t, despite what the Chamber of Commerce did and does tell everyone who will listen, particularly exemplary handling of the matter of race; often it was not even decent handling. The motives behind it were never pure. Most of it came reluctantly and at least ten years too late. But it came, and it came without clubs and dogs and fire hoses and blood in the streets of the city. I think it came because the men who would soon make up the Club had their ears open in the early 1950s, and heard the soft mutter of the drums almost before they began.

  “Remember them all together at somebody’s party, back when we were at North Fulton?” Lucy said once during one of our nightly telephone calls. “God, they were gorgeous. Not physically, so much; but powerful. Lord! Power is just so goddamned sexy!”

  She was right. They were an impressive group, sitting all together at one of their luncheons or in one of their bank board meetings, or even gathered at a party in Buckhead. Young, attractive, tanned from golf and tennis, easy with one another, purposeful. They were still cadets, but they knew they would have the power of which she spoke, and they knew where it would come from: Their own fathers and mentors, for many years before them the official Club, would pass the batons on to them at the appointed time in an almost formal transfer of power. Even before they came into their real and final strength, they were formidable. To sit at lunch in the Capital City Club downtown on Peachtree Street, a symmetrical and mellow old cream-brick mansion rimmed about with leaning office buildings, was to see pure power in repose, drinking its ritual two prelunch bourbon and branch waters and eating its London broil. It was almost palpable in the air; you could get physically dizzy from it.

  Toward the end of March in my senior year at North Fulton, my father asked me to come downtown and meet him for lunch at the Capital City Club. I was as profoundly surprised as if he had asked me to attend a burlesque show with him. And I was distinctly apprehensive. I had been to the club, of course, many times; it and the Atlanta Athletic Club were my father’s downtown clubs, and he took us all there occasionally, for lunch or dinner after football games at Georgia Tech, or for the New Year’s Day buffet in the Mirador Room. But I had never been there alone with him. I had not been anywhere alone with my father, by that time, in several years. The last time I could remember was to see the Lone Ranger in a one-man show at Grant Field, on his great, shining horse, Silver. I think I was eleven then.

  I went down on a Friday noon, parking the Fury in the lot beside the club on Harris Street and tossing the keys to ancient liveried James, who had been fielding keys ever since I could remember. I ran lightly and in earringing dread up the shallow stone steps and into the marble lobby.

  “Morning, Mr. Sheppard,” fat Charles, who commanded the door, said to me, smiling as if I were his favorite nephew. With Charles’s memory and what he must have seen of white people’s foibles over the years, he could have been a very powerful and dangerous man, if it had occurred to him. Perhaps it had. Perhaps even then, Charles had, in some dark closet back at his home in Southwest Atlanta, a burgeoning file marked “Indiscretions, White.” I liked the idea then, and I like it even more now.

  I went along the short, thick-carpeted corridor under the mural of ecstatic darkies sitting on cotton bales on an idyllic, never-seen riverfront dock, past the glowering bust of some dour, anonymous Confederate general or other and the lined portraits of past presidents, and up the mahogany stairs to the Mirador Room on the second floor. My heart was hammering so hard under my new blue lightweight wool blazer that I thought I would hyperventilate and faint at the feet of Edgar, who opened the door into the holy of holies with the same “Good morning, Mr. Sheppard,” only minus the smile. Dignity was the order of the day in the Mirador Room.

  I could not imagine why my father wanted to have lunch with me, but I sensed that there was no hope of its being casual or even pleasant. It had about it the air of an appointment in Samarra. On the way across the gleaming parquet floor, which became, in the evenings, a little dance floor, I imagined that he would tell me that we had lost all our money, and I would have to drop out of Princeton, where I had applied and been accepted, and go to work. Or that he had cancer and was dying, and I would have to do the same. Or that Lucy was being sent away somewhere irrevocable and distant, and I would never see her again, and he was preparing me. Even as I smiled at him, sitting at his accustomed table in the corner of the second tier, his face red under the thinning thatch of blond hair, and registered that the smile he gave me back was as ghastly as a death rictus, I was marshaling my defenses and lining up my arguments. The last weapon in my arsenal, outright refusal, seemed, in his actual presence, simply unimaginable. I did not think I was going to come out of this encounter unchanged.

  To my surprise, Ben Cameron unfolded his lean length from the chair opposite my father and rose to greet me, and my thrashing heart gave a mad buck of relief and subsided. Whatever it was, I had an ally. I reached the table and put out my hand like the confident young man I was not and had never been.

  “Hello, Mr. Cameron,” I said. “Daddy.”

  “Hello, Shep,” Ben Cameron said, giving me his warm grin that had nothing in it but pleasure at seeing me. “Good to see you.”

  “Son,” my father said formally. The fierce wolf’s smile never left his red face. He gestured at the chair next to Ben and I slid into it.

  “Sorry I’m late,” I said, frowning purposefully, like a man who has set aside important affairs to keep a date. “Traffic on Peachtree was awful all the way in.”

  “Get used to it,” Ben Cameron said, smiling ruefully. “It’s not going to get any better in your lifetime. Although it’s a fond, if perhaps premature, hope of mine that one day we’ll have some kind of fast rail system that will bring people right through all that mess and downtown in a few minutes. But I’m afraid you’ll have to muck it out along with the rest of us until we can part the city from enough money to do it.”

  I looked at him blankly, and then at my father. I had not made any secret of the fact that I had been accepted at Princeton and then hoped to go to New York to work for a year or two afterward, before I decided what I would do with the history or political science degree I planned to acquire. My father certainly knew all that, though he had long since ceased to comment on my plans when I talked of them. I had thought he had lost interest, and I had been glad of the fact, if left with a surprisingly sharp taste of loss in my mouth.

  Ben Cameron knew, too. I had talked about Princeton with him more than once; his father had gone there, and Ben had gone with him to reunions once or twice as a child. Why, then, was he talking as though I would soon be driving down Peachtree Road to the office downtown where my father had recently moved his real estate affairs? Was this something to do with Princeton? Had my acceptance been a mistake, and were they trying to break it to me gently?

  Ben lifted a lazy hand and smiled genially at me. All of a sudden I did not know him; it was as if I h
ad never seen him before. My father continued to smile, too.

  “I know, I know,” Ben said. His voice was slow and thick and hearty, not his at all. “Princeton and all that. But look here, Shep, I got to talking with your daddy at the Athletic Club last week, me and Tom Rawson and Frank Hubbard, and it just seemed to us, all of a sudden, that your going all the way up there and then on to that overgrown Yankee town is a terrible loss, both to your mama and daddy and to this town of ours. Your dad here told me your mind was made up and there was no use trying to change it, but hell, you know me, I’ll try anything once. So I invited myself to lunch with you and your pa and I’m going to give you my best shot.”

  The waiter came and put an amber glass with ice in it down in front of me, and said, “Mr. Shep,” just as he did to my father, and I stared as stupidly at the glass as I had at Ben Cameron. Then I looked at my father. His face was redder than usual, and his small blue eyes were fierce with something I could not name, but he kept on grinning, and gestured at the glass.

  “House bourbon,” he said. “Good stuff. Thought you might as well have one with Ben and your old man. You’re old enough now. Practically a man; shot up before I noticed, somehow.”

  “They’ll do it, won’t they?” Ben Cameron said, still in a voice that sounded as if he were in a not very good play. “Ben Junior’s practically into Tech now, and taller than I am, and my little old Sarah-puss is a grown woman. Pretty one too, huh, Shep?”

  “Sure is,” I said, sounding as banal as he did, and knowing it. What was wrong with him? He did not sound even marginally intelligent, and yet the far-ranging, high-soaring conversations I sometimes had with Ben and Dorothy Cameron were among the most prized hours in my life.

  I took a large swallow of the bourbon, to cover the silence that was worse, even, than Ben Cameron’s false bravado and my father’s fierce, gnarled smile. I choked into the silence, and spit bourbon onto my blazer and the table, and felt the fire run from my collar to the roots of my hair. I had not tasted bourbon since that night with Lucy so long ago in the summerhouse, when trouble had hung thick and deadly around us. I felt it here too, now, in this dim, grand room of mirrors and damask and polished dark wood.

  “That’s sippin’ whiskey,” Ben Cameron said. “Fry your eyeballs. Better take it slow. You don’t want to go out of here on your hands and knees…though I’ve seen your pa do just that in his time.”

  He poked my father on the arm, and my father gave a great, jolly bray of laughter. I realized that they were talking, or attempting to talk, to me as they did among themselves, in the rough, simplistic, ritualized jargon of the wellborn Atlanta man among his peers. Instead of pleasing me, it made me want to jump up from the table and run.

  “Well.” Ben put his hands flat on the table and looked at me, and the amiable, red-faced jester was gone and a taut, contained, commanding stranger looked out of the clear gray eyes. I had never seen this Ben Cameron either, but knew instinctively that I was seeing the man who counted in clubs and boardrooms, who moved matters and men and would one day lead them.

  “What do you say to rethinking this Princeton business, Shep?” he said. “The university’s got a good history department if that’s what you want, or Tech’s got a first-rate industrial management or even political science department. Don’t worry about getting in; we can take care of that. Get you into Chi Phi, too, if you want to, or SAE, or God help us, even KA; I think Alex Cheatham was one of those sorry hounds over at Athens. Or track; you ought to do real well in the 880 at either Tech or Georgia. Coach Kress is a good friend of mine. You ought not have any trouble running a little varsity track if you want to.”

  I was still silent, and I suppose he mistook my silence for refusal, but in truth, I could not have said anything if I had wanted to. What was going on here? Why was this conversation happening?

  “If it’s real estate you’re worried about, I don’t think your daddy would be too heartbroken if you tried your hand at something else for a little while,” Ben went on, cocking a sandy eyebrow at my father, who nodded solemnly, not looking at either one of us. “It’s a rewarding career for a man, Shep, real estate; an honorable way to make a living, and done right, a way to give something back to the community. And your dad’s holdings are considerable indeed. You surely know that. Managed well, they would do a lot both for your family and your town. But if, you know, you just aren’t interested, well, I don’t think your dad would mind if you went into another field, as long as you stayed around home. That right, Shep?”

  He looked at my father again, and my father nodded once more, looking now, intently, at the little shaded lamp on the table, as if he had never seen one before. I continued to gape.

  “So I took the liberty of calling a few of your daddy’s and my old friends,” Ben Cameron went on. “You know, Snake’s daddy, and Carter’s, and Pres’s. One or two others. Good men, that you’ve known all your life. And all of them said they’d be proud to have a boy like you in their business. What do you think, Shep? Construction? Banking? One of the utilities? Television? The market? Hell, I’d even let you give selling my little old snake oil a shot, if you think you’d like that. Point is”—and he pointed his fork at me, and looked intently into my eyes with an expression in his own that was as oblique, and yet as freighted with import, as any I have ever seen in a man’s—“we need you here. In Atlanta. Not only us, but a whole new generation of people coming on behind us. Your generation, and even the one after you. You have talents—a weight, if you will—that you may not even know you have, and you surely will have substantial family assets one day, and both should be kept in your own city. Do you read me, Shep?”

  “Yessir,” I said. “I guess I do.”

  “Well? Will you think about it?”

  I looked at my father again, and this time he was looking at me, and I saw in his face a kind of enormous, guarded flatness that covered something I could not fathom. And then suddenly, I will never know how, I did know it. It was a great, formless, all-pervading indifference, to me and to this conversation, and beneath even that was a simple dislike that I knew had its genesis not in me—for you do not dislike that which you have put out of your mind—but in Ben Cameron. My father did not want to be here with me and Ben Cameron having this conversation, and he did not want me to stay in Atlanta and manage his real estate holdings one day, and he could barely veil the resentment at the man opposite him, who was trying so hard to persuade me.

  It was a moment of perfect, ringing epiphany, and through the shock of it I wondered, mildly and mindlessly, at what precise moment my father had given up on me as the son he had so long intended to inherit his kingdom.

  And then I wondered what power Ben Cameron had over him, that he sat here with the skull’s smile on his heavy face, and listened while his oldest acquaintance tried to keep me where he himself no longer wanted me: in the house on Peachtree Road.

  I don’t know where I found the clarity or the courage. I have never been noted, in my dealings with my father, for either.

  “Thanks, sir, but there’s really no use thinking about it,” I said briskly. “I really do want to go to Princeton and on to New York like I’d planned, and that’s what I’m going to do, if my father will still agree to it.”

  My father made a gesture of concurrence and dismissal, and raised his finger for the waiter with the check, and excused himself.

  “I’ve got a man waiting in my office about the Summerhill property, Ben,” he said. “By all means have coffee and dessert and put it on my tab. Thanks for coming over. I didn’t think it would do any good, but I wanted you to see that for yourself. Shep.” And he nodded again at me without looking at me, and walked across the shining lake of the floor and out of the Mirador Room.

  “Want anything more?” Ben Cameron said to me, and I shook my head, misery falling down over me like a thick, dark curtain. I had made my point and gained for once and all that freedom I had longed for, but the pain in my heart told me that it wa
s at a price I could not yet even calculate. It was one thing to suspect that your father simply did not consider your existence significant. It was another to have it demonstrated to you.

  “Let’s get out of here, then,” Ben said. We were silent as we walked down the stairs and out to the parking lot, and then, as we waited for James to bring our cars around, he said, “You’re smarter than I gave you credit for, Shep. Princeton’s the place for you, and after that…well, we’ll see. I had no business putting the arm on you like that. I hope you’ll forgive me for any pain it caused you. Will you shake on it?”

  I took his hand, and he grinned his slow, magical grin, which had fired so many of my small childhood darknesses into healing light, and I felt a very small curl of hope and easiness trickling back into my frozen heart. I grinned back.

  He got into his big new Lincoln, and shut the door, and then put his red head out the window and squinted up at me in the bright sunlight. The pure, thin light of early spring touched his head with fire.

  “You know, I’ve always thought you were pretty special, Shep,” he said. “I’d have been proud to have you as a son; still would, much as I think of that son of mine. I was wrong to pressure you. But one day when you’re back from school and have some time, I want you to come over and talk to me about your family’s business. I promise I won’t try to sell you on it, if by that time you truly believe it’s not for you. But there are some things about it you need to know, and I don’t think your father is ever going to tell you. Will you do that?”