Peachtree Road

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  I have never known such exhilaration; I remember thinking, swinging Sarah into another endless chorus of “In the Mood,” that A.J. Kemp had nothing on me. Vernon Castle didn’t, Gene Kelly didn’t, Fred Astaire didn’t. As for Sarah, she might have been liquid poured from a golden ladle by a celestial hand: When we finished our exhibition, laughing and sweating, the entire club lined up to dance with her. She was still high on the night and the music and the approbation when I took her back to her room on the quiet street just off University Place, where the genteel old widow of a much-loved Romance languages professor let chaste rooms to visiting girls of good birth. I had found the old lady early in my freshman year, on Mac’s recommendation, and had presented her for, and received, the approval of Ben and Dorothy Cameron, so that Sarah might visit as she liked. They placed no restrictions on her trips to Princeton; they had always trusted her, and did so completely, I think, with me. It was she herself who limited the visits to two or three a year.

  “I don’t want you to get tired of me,” she said matter-of-factly, after her first visit, when I was a freshman and she was only sixteen. “And you will, if I’m up there every time you turn around. And then I need to keep my grades as high as I can, because I want to go to Paris to study at the Sorbonne for a year after college, and Mother and Daddy said I could if I kept up an A average through North Fulton and Scott. It would mean everything to my painting, Shep.”

  Now I lifted her small hands there in the shadows of the widow’s front porch, and looked at them, and saw the faint lines of Prussian blue and alizarin crimson under her short nails, where no amount of turpentine and scrubbing could reach. Her hands were rough and warm and capable. Sarah would never have the slender, elegant fingers that were Lucy’s, or the polished, perfect ovals that gleamed at the tips of the Radcliffe and Bryn Mawr fingers. I kissed first one hand and then the other.

  “See you for breakfast, or do you want to sleep?”

  “Are you kidding?” she said, beaming up in the dark. “Breakfast! And then…what? Is there some place here you can dance at nine o’clock in the morning?”

  “No,” I said, and kissed her mouth, feeling the shape of her laughter on it. “You can put some of that energy into a softball game. We’ve got a game with Ivy and their girls at ten.”

  “Watch out then, because I have a fast ball that’s never been hit in recorded history,” she said, turning and walking to the door. And then she ran back and flung her arms around me and hugged me hard, and when I looked down into her face, tears glinted in her shadowed eyes, even though she was smiling.

  “Oh, Shep,” she said, “I’m just so happy.”

  And before I could reply, she was gone into the house of the widow. I watched until the dim downstairs light went out and one went on in an upstairs window, and then I walked back up University and picked up McCosh Walk and went across the sleeping campus under a high, white-sailing moon to Washington Road, turning onto Prospect across from the dark bulk of 1879. This time I whistled a tune that shivered with resonances out of Atlanta and the endless, Byzantine dances of the Pinks and the Jells: “It must have been moonglow…way up in the blue…it must have been moonglow…that moonglow gave me you.”

  I was asleep the instant my head hit the thin inherited pillow in my cubbyhole at Colonial.

  We dived into Saturday and whirled through it as we had the dancing on Friday night. The day was a glory, perfect in itself. The sun rose gentle and stayed so. A small wind redolent of the faraway ocean and the nearer, sun-warmed pine forests blew upon us until sunset. We won the softball game with Ivy and the football game with Yale, and the night air at the bonfire afterward, on Cannon Green, had been balmy enough for beer jackets and shirtsleeves and cardigans. We whooped and yelled before the leaping flames and shadows, and then walked around the campus in the moonlight, dimming by then with the fast-scudding clouds from the west that came in freighted with rain. Someone, some group—not the Nasoons, I know, but almost as good—was singing under Blair Arch, and a crowd had gathered to listen. We paused for a moment.

  “…situated and saturated in New Jersee,” they sang. And then, “Going back, going back, going back to Nassau Hall. Going back, going back…”

  The crowd joined in, Sarah and I with them. She had learned the Princeton songs early.

  “We’ll clear the track as we go back,” we sang, our voices spiraling up into the far shadows of the old stone arch. “Going back to Nassau Hall….”

  I sensed rather than saw Sarah’s tears, and turned.

  “If you say one word to me,” she whispered fiercely, moonlit tracks on her wet face, “I’m going back to my room and stay there until time to go home tomorrow.”

  I did not. I merely squeezed her hand and bellowed my way into the next offering, thinking, but only very dimly, how fortunate I was to be standing here in this place, on this night, with, beside me, a small, greathearted girl who would weep for the beauty of Princeton.

  I wish that I had thought it more clearly.

  We went on then, back to Colonial for cocktails and the alumni buffet, and danced again, far into the evening, to the trio from Eddie Condon’s, and I kissed Sarah again before the widow’s dark house, a longer and deeper kiss this time, and this time it was not she but I who disengaged us and gently steered her up the steps and into the house. I think I could have known all there was to know of Sarah’s small body and vivid heart that night, but something in me wanted almost desperately to keep the surface and the tenor of the night as the day had been: all of a piece, evenly weighted, perfect. I remember thinking as I hurried back across McCosh Walk, this time jogging to beat the beginning rain, that Sarah and I had all the time in the world.

  Now, in two hours at best, it would be time to take her back to the Philadelphia airport. I thought that we would go and have some lunch at Lahiere’s again, and then maybe drift down and watch the 150-pound boats practicing for the Ivy League regattas on Lake Carnegie, but I stayed where I was, forearms on the thick stone sill of Dub Vanderkellen’s window, looking out over the campus. A small break in the scudding clouds spilled a ray of pale sun onto the spires of the chapel and the library. A black, sideways-loping campus dog larruped maniacally into a pile of yellow leaves and scattered them, a miniature golden tornado in the gray morning, and then loped away toward who knows what doggy destination. I was not even aware that I was smiling until Sarah’s finger traced my mouth.

  “I can see why you love it so,” she said. “It’s like a movie, isn’t it? Not completely real. Like a book.”

  She was right on both counts. There was, for me, a powerful and seductive storybook perfection about Princeton that nothing—not the gray sludge of February or the endless cold rains of March or the suffocating damp heat of late May and early September; not the real inequities of the caste system or the imagined vengefulness of some of the Irish and Italian proctors; not the endless mashed potatoes in Commons or the anxiety of Bicker or the aching humiliation of not being asked to be part of an ironbound or getting the bid to Cottage or Ivy that you wanted; not even the two suicides in anonymous, below-the-salt dorm rooms over the Christmas holidays that happened while I was there—ever spoiled for me. I think I was one of the few people to graduate from Princeton fully as smitten as the day I entered. It seemed the first thing in my life that was just as it should have been; that fulfilled its promises, that was mine alone. Even 2500 Peachtree Road, even the summer-house, had been partly Lucy’s. Princeton was the one great love in my life that I never had to share.

  And I loved the world around it. New York, of course: visiting Alan Greenfeld’s family in their cavernous, dark old apartment on the Upper West Side, with the severe Bauhaus furniture, listening to the first real intellectual and liberal political talk I had ever heard at a family table, then going on with Alan to meet our blind dates (Sarah Lawrence and Jewish, pale and interesting) under the clock at the Biltmore, and then out into that peculiarly Manhattan blue-purple that always, to me, see
med to be a November twilight. The Taft Grill, Peacock Alley, Café Society Downtown, Eddie Condon’s Basin Street East, the Village Vanguard, the Five Note, the Village Gate. Jazz pouring wild and free, honey and smoke, seemingly endless Manhattans. Perhaps, after we had seen the girls to their train, Roseland, where a dime-a-dance girl, beautiful in every way to my eager-to-be-jaded eyes, once asked me, “What’s your tie? That’s Cap, isn’t it? I bet you were Lawrenceville.”

  “How’d you know?” I asked, blushing at the lie.

  And back again the next weekend, on the early train from the PJ&B to Penn Station, or to Philadelphia’s Thirtieth Street Station for the Penn game, or Bryn Mawr….

  Or, sometimes, to some age-blurred, fortresslike house in Bronxville or Old Saybrook or Short Hills or Bucks County, for more intoxicating talk about books and music and art and theater and national politics (this time, conservative) with the parents of friends, parents who seemed to perceive me as an equal, parents who had so little in common with any I knew in Atlanta save, perhaps, Ben and Dorothy Cameron that they might have been from another planet.

  And always, New York. It lay there just out of reach, physically and chronologically just beyond Princeton, a promise in itself, a continuum. It meant that the new enchantment would not end with graduation, but would only enlarge, expand, ripen and bloom. After Princeton, this.

  I found the Firestone Library early on. Besides Lucy and Sarah, there was one other meeting in my life that changed the shape and direction of it, and it was with that great, spired eminence, not two decades old but with the look of ages about its splendid bulk, even then the largest open-stack research library in the world. There was never any doubt in my dazzled mind, when I first set foot in it, that it was mine alone. After my initial visit to Firestone, when I was not eating or sleeping or in classes or at Colonial or spending a weekend in New York or, far more rarely, with Sarah, I was immersed in it.

  I took to independent study and research like a long-landlocked duck to water, and immediately changed my major from political science to history, with a minor in English literature, as the discipline that allowed the most time for submerging myself in Firestone. I would, I thought, when I did think, get myself some sort of job in New York after graduation that allowed pure, cloistered research—a museum, a historical foundation of some sort, not more than an hour’s drive from Firestone—and after that, perhaps I might teach, at some fine, small New England school or college that had its own first-rate library. I did not in the least mind the reality of low pay and obscurity for the rest of my life. My heart had found its watershed, my mind its manna.

  Now I looked over at Sarah. The weak sun sidled repentantly in through the infamous Vanderkellen window and caught her face and hair and the deep, rich cranberry of her cashmere sweater. She had pinned on the orange chrysanthemum with the little gold football and the orange and black ribbons I had given her yesterday for the game, and it should have looked awful with the deep red, but it didn’t. Sarah in the new sunlight looked made of light and fire and flowers. She grinned.

  “I expect Mickey Mouse to lead a locomotive right down Nassau in one minute,” she said. “Or to see a unicorn grazing on the green.”

  “I know,” I said. “I feel the same way about it. It’s wonderful, it’s idyllic, but what does it have to do with the real world? Will it even work in the real world?”

  “Who cares if it’s make-believe, so long as it works for you?” she said.

  “Not me,” I said. “So far it’s working just fine. Maybe I’m not real myself, and that’s why it fits so well.”

  “None of you are,” she said, the grin deepening. “Not anybody I’ve met at Princeton is…oh, I don’t know; totally real. You’re all alike somehow, as different as you all are. Such innocents.”

  “Dub Vanderkellen is an innocent? Grunt Grady is an innocent?”

  “I mean…it’s like Peter Pan. You’re like the legion of lost boys up here, all hidden away up here in this wonderful boys’ world.”

  “I’m not sure that’s so good,” I said, frowning. I wasn’t. Innocent? Lost boys? “Besides, who’s calling who innocent?”

  “Whatever else it is, it’s awfully attractive,” she said, ignoring that last. “It makes me wish I could be part of it, a real part.”

  “You are,” I said.

  She was…and not, perhaps, in a way she would have liked. I was aware, as dimly as I was about everything in that time, that Sarah herself was a part of the seduction, the sorcery of Princeton, and as such, was a part of the make-believe. I knew that our relationship was a light, shadowless, Technicolor college love, without anguish or anger or pain or sweat, and certainly without much physical fulfillment. Oh, we necked a great deal: kissed, petted, even, and we found it very good indeed. But somehow I did not, then, need to take it any further. Not in those pregnancy-haunted years. Not with Sarah. When she pulled herself away, saying, as she always did, “We really shouldn’t, Shep. Not yet,” I did not press her. I could have had her at almost any time; I know that now. But: Time, I thought, we have all the time we want.

  Sometimes, though rarely, I thought past the shadowy museum in New York and would envision, as if through a scrim of peace and pleasure, a small house somewhere on an Eastern campus and myself, in dilapidated slippers and elbow-patched cardigan, reading in a book-strewn library while a slim, sweatered woman poured amber sherry into delicate old glasses on a silver tray beside a fire, humming Vivaldi as she did so. She looked a great deal as I thought Sarah would in some years, and though I did not pursue this, still it gave me the same obscure and warming comfort the entire vision did. The whole scene seemed welcoming, comfortable, dense and rich; it fit like a perfect skin. Once or twice it crossed my mind that that was what the life I had left back home on Peachtree Road should have offered me, as heir of that house, but the thought was without pain or bitterness, and I did not harbor it long.

  For now, and here in this wondrous place, I had Sarah. When she was not with me, days and sometimes a week would pass without my thinking of her, and that did not seem to me strange, either. Our closeness was born of Princeton, not Atlanta, and when she was here she occupied me totally. There was no real conclusion in sight for us, and none was needed—for me. That there was for her I could not see; she demanded nothing of me, then or ever. I wish she had. My Princeton fugue drowned out, then, the rare and beautiful melody that had been given to me long ago.

  We went out into the brightening day and walked across Nassau Street to lunch. She did not want to go to Lahiere’s, but instead to the Nassau Tavern, so we sat in the cool, subterranean dimness with the carved lives thick around us and ate cheeseburgers and drank coffee. Norman Rockwell’s Yankee Doodle mural and Dick Kazmaier and Hobey Baker stared down at us. Somebody punched Bing Crosby on the jukebox—“I give to you, and you give to me…true love, true love”—and we held hands across the table.

  “Will I see you anytime soon?” I said.

  “How should I know?” she said. “You don’t ever come home.”

  “I’ll come for the Harvest Ball and for a day or two at Christmas,” I said. “Mac wants me to go skiing at Stowe with him and Brad over New Year’s. They’re taking dates; want to come?”

  “I can’t,” she said. “You know there’s all that stuff, all those parties. I was hoping you’d be home to take me.”

  It was the year of her debut, and after the great June ball at the Piedmont Driving Club there was all the furor of the Little Season in the summer, and the Harvest Ball at Thanksgiving, and parties again at Christmas. There would, I knew, be parties every night through December, and often in the afternoons as well.

  “You know why I don’t come home, Sarah,” I said. “You know what it’s like with my father now. I’ll be home for the Harvest Ball; I said I would. Let Charlie take you to the others. He’d carry you on his back barefoot in a snowstorm to every one of them, if you wanted him to.”

  “Don’t make fun of Charlie,” she
said crisply. “He’s very dear, and he’s constant. Charlie is there, Shep.”

  “I wasn’t making fun of him,” I said. “And I’m there, too, when it counts. I’m there when it’s you. I came for your senior prom.”

  “Yes,” she said. Her eyes were on the furry old carvings in the tabletop. “But you didn’t come for graduation. And you said you would.”

  We were both silent, and then she lifted her head.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m nagging, and I swore I never would. Lord, I sound like Freddie Slaton. It didn’t matter about graduation. Not to me. I don’t know about Lucy.”

  So here it was.

  It burst over me then, the surging, deep-buried sense of the absent one, she who was not here and yet was most powerfully here; she about whom our elaborate silences had rung loudly: Lucy.

  Lucy.

  Yes, I had gone to Sarah’s senior prom, which was also Lucy’s, the previous spring but not, as I had promised, to their graduation.

  And yes, I think it had, for a little while, mattered a great deal to Lucy that I had not. But only for a little while.

  After that night, even I could see why Sarah did not mention Lucy to me in any of the letters she wrote me at Princeton, and why she had not during this autumn weekend. If the incident on the Chattahoochee River bridge had not drawn the battle lines between them clearly, those last moments on the dance floor at Brookhaven did—and for all the assembled Pinks and Jells of a generation to witness.