It was Sarah’s way to go to earth with her deepest emotions; Dorothy had taught her that trick early and well. I knew that she would not speak of that night, or of Lucy, again unless forced to. I was less clear as to why I could not do it. There was a real and acknowledged alienation between Lucy and me now, and part of my silence was anger and grief. That much I could own. The part that felt so like fear I could not, and so, like Sarah, I thrust that deep.
“You couldn’t be like Freddie Slaton if you tried,” I said. “But what you could be is late for your plane, if we don’t get going. You ready?”
“Yes,” she said. “Shep?”
“Hmmm?”
“I don’t think there’s ever been a more perfect weekend in the history of the world.”
“I don’t either,” I said. “Never better. First of many. First of very many.”
“Yes,” Sarah said.
CHAPTER TWELVE
When I came into the Peachtree road house on that Friday afternoon the previous May, for Sarah and Lucy’s senior prom, only my mother had come running downstairs to greet me, and for a moment the strangeness of coming out of Princeton and into this echoing world of my childhood kept me off-balance, so that I was not completely sure who this dark, lissome woman whose arms bound me so tightly might be, and stepped back a fraction.
It was a near-infinitesimal drawing away, but enough to make her tighten her arms and bury her face in my neck, and begin to weep. My mother did not often weep, and her tears appalled me then as they always had. I patted her awkwardly and hugged her as hard as I could will my muscles to do.
“I’ve lost you, just like I knew I would,” she wept into my new Brooks oxford cloth. “I knew if you left you’d never really come back to me. Oh, Sheppie, you pulled away from me!”
“No, I didn’t, Mother,” I said, still patting industriously. I thought she had lost weight; I could feel the ribs under the silk of her blouse, and the hammering of her heart. She had changed her scent; a muskier and more assertive one rose out of her inky hair to assail me.
“It’s just that you looked so young in this light; I thought you were Lucy running down the stairs.”
“Oh…Lucy!” she said in exasperation, but I could tell she was pleased. She pulled away from me and tilted her head as she looked at me, preening. “Lucy doesn’t run down these stairs, she sneaks up them—at four in the morning. She as good as lives with that Chastain creature now; God knows where they go. We never see her.”
I felt the faintest stab of something; the old Lucy-thrust. I don’t know why my mother’s words surprised me. I knew that Lucy was as deeply involved with Red Chastain as ever; my few brief visits home over the past two years and my mother’s letters confirmed that. Lucy herself, during the rare moments we had been together, had been airy and chattering and almost completely withdrawn from me. I thought that she was still angry and hurt with me for going away to Princeton; her behavior was almost exactly as it had been in the last days after my own graduation from North Fulton, when she had let me leave without saying good-bye.
All right, I had thought then, I’ll play it her way. I don’t owe her an apology for going away to school. She can come to me or we can just go on this way forever, I don’t care. I did, of course, but could not admit it. Lucy’s defection into the arms of all those Jells, and finally into Red’s, had gone deep with me.
I had thought, though, that Princeton and my new closeness to Sarah had healed the wound. And they had, or nearly. This stab was just that: a knife flick, tiny and delicate, and then gone.
“Let me look at you,” my mother said, and did. I had not seen her since the previous summer; I had spent holidays with Mac or Alan, and had gone with Haynes Potter and his family to their place in the Berkshires for Christmas.
Her eyes misted again, and there was something in them—a tiny point of light—that looked oddly like triumph.
“There’s nothing left of my boy,” she said. “It’s all man now. All man and all Bondurant. It’s almost uncanny. Your father will be livid.”
“I should think it might please him that I look like him,” I said, surprised at the hurt that her words engendered. My father had lost the power to hurt me while I was safely ensconced in Firestone and Colonial, but pain bit at me now, tiny and snakelike, under his roof.
“Oh no,” she said, smiling silkily. “Wrong Bondurant, you see.”
I did.
“Where is Dad?” I said, too casually. “Where’s Lucy? And Aunt Willa?”
“Your father is playing golf up at Highlands,” she said neutrally, as if we both did not know that my father kept as far away from the house on Peachtree Road as he could when I was in it.
“He’ll be back Sunday before you go. He wants to see you. Lucy is out with Red Chastain, of course, doing whatever it is that they do. And Willa is on a buying trip to New York, believe it or not. They actually made the creature head buyer for the lingerie department, and she’s gone up to load Rich’s up with Yankee underwear. Come have a glass of iced tea with me and tell me all your news.”
“Well, I thought I’d run over and see Sarah a minute…” I said.
“Oh, of course, Sarah,” said my mother. She did not say it as icily as she might. My strengthened alliance with the house of Cameron pleased her mightily, I knew. Besides, she liked Sarah. All the women in her crowd did. Sarah had a manner with older women that was respectful but not deferential, and she was genuinely knowledgeable about the things that mattered to them: porcelains, English antiques, genealogy, who was who in and around Atlanta. “Nothing but refeened ass kissing,” Lucy called it. Sarah herself called it her “biddy routine.”
I moved toward the telephone under the stairwell, and at that moment Lucy burst into the house and threw her arms around me with such force that we both stumbled. My mother sniffed and retreated upstairs. Outside on the circular driveway I heard Red Chastain’s MG burring away, out into the traffic on Peachtree Road.
As remote as she had been before, she was immediate now, hugging me enormously with arms that I remembered and yet did not, laughing and crying at the same time, her face buried in the hollow of my neck where it just fit, smelling of the heart-tuggingly familiar Tabu, feeling marrow-stirringly like…Lucy. I felt the constraint of the past two years drain away as if it had never been, and was instantly and in every way home. I held her away by her shoulders, and looked into her face, and knew that I had Lucy—the Lucy of my childhood, the gay and brave companion, the radiant enabler, the Scheherazade, the magical Elaine to my Lancelot—back again. I kissed her on the cheek and swung her around, and set her down on the tiles of the foyer. I had forgotten how tall she was, and how slim: Her dark blue eyes were almost level with mine, and I could have lifted her with one arm. And I had forgotten the sheer, electric impact of her. The same invisible but palpable implosion that I always felt on seeing her after an absence radiated out in the air around her. At eighteen, Lucy Bondurant was quite simply splendid.
“You look great,” I said ineffectually.
“So do you,” she said. “You’ve changed. I like it. You remind me of somebody, but I can’t put my finger on it…. Tab Hunter, maybe, but with a hawk’s nose…. Oh well, it’ll come to me.”
I was astounded that she could not put a name to the likeness she saw in me, but she could not, not then or ever. I think she was unable to in many more ways than one.
“You’ll stop traffic tomorrow night,” I said. “Are you going with Red, or is that a silly question?”
“Who else?” she said. “I won’t have much more time with him. His dad got him into Princeton, finally, after making him spend this whole last year at North Georgia, and says he can kiss the family loot good-bye unless he toes the line up there. Translated, that means I can’t go up and visit him until at least his junior year, and he can’t come home except at Christmas and for a week in the summers. Mr. Chastain likes me, but he knows me pretty well, and Red too. He’s already talked to Mama about it.
She says she’ll jerk me out of Scott the instant I get off the plane if I sneak off and go. They both mean it, I’m afraid.”
“You mean he won’t be here for your debut?” I said.
“I’m not making my debut,” she said, grinning at me.
“The shit you say!” I exclaimed, aghast. “You have to, Lucy!”
It was the reflexive Buckhead Jell talking, through and through. My reversion had been almost instantaneous. For Lucy to miss that gilded autumn rite of passage was as unthinkable as her bowing to Old Atlanta buck naked. It was the beginning of everything for the Buckhead girls and their boys, that one grand November night at the Piedmont Driving Club, the Harvest Ball. From there the girls would move on as inexorably as figures on a Swiss clock through the prescribed stations of the Atlanta social cross: Christmas dance, Bal de Salut, Rabun Gap-Nacoochee Guild, Tallulah Falls Circle, Cotillion, Music Club, Piedmont Ball, and on into the endless pantheon of charities and auxiliaries, each with its crowded and glittering social calendar, and its ceaseless volunteer labor.
It would launch us, too, the brothers and suitors and husbands-to-be of those carefully tended blossoms, into our own fixed trajectories: From the escort lists of half a hundred mothers in and out of the South, we would go on into the Nine O’Clocks and the German Club and the Benedicts and the Racket Club and so on and so forth, ending up in the Driving Club and Capital City and Brookhaven and at the heads of those myriad charities and committees whose balls our wives chaired, and from there on into the service of the city. It was the one true way and the one true path. Nobody of substance did it any other way.
A thought sandbagged me. Would they dare, even to Lucy Bondurant?
“You don’t mean to tell me you didn’t get into the club?” I goggled. Saint Shep the Defender leaped out of his moldy cave, snatched his rusty armor and scrambled to buckle it on. I would have a full complement of carefully waved, blue-rinsed heads for this.
“Oh, don’t be dumb, of course I got into the club,” Lucy said. “They wouldn’t dare not ask me, while I’m living in Uncle Sheppard’s house, anyway. I didn’t join, that’s all. Holy shit, Gibby, you should have seen Mother’s face when I told her. And your father’s, for that matter. You’d have thought I’d said I was going to marry a nigger at Saint Philip’s on Easter Sunday. Mama still isn’t speaking to me, and I don’t think your daddy is, either. I haven’t really seen him since then. The only reason I’m walking around free is that your mother told them to lay off me. She said she thought I’d made the right decision, under the circumstances. Trust Aunt Olivia to do the right thing.”
Her smile had nothing in it of mirth.
“What circumstances?” I said dimly.
“Jesus, Gibby, are they giving you stupid pills along with the saltpeter up there in Boys’ Town? The Red Chastain circumstances, of course. Why should I come out? I’ve been about as out as a girl can get for two years now. Aunt Olivia wasn’t born yesterday.”
“You mean, because you’re…”
“Sleeping with him,” she said sweetly. Her smile burned almost through me to the bone. The radiance in the air around her was, all of a sudden, too bright. Her eyes glittered with more than high spirits and joy at seeing me. I felt, then, the million little knife edges that hedged her in.
“The Dirty Deed, the Black Act. Fucking. You have, I trust, heard of fucking? Though I don’t suppose for a minute that you and the Divine Sarah have—”
“Well, God, you surely aren’t the only girl in Atlanta who ever made her debut as anything less than a virgin,” I said hastily.
“No, but I’m probably the only girl in Atlanta who got caught in the act on the pool table in the men’s grill at Brookhaven by the greens committee,” she said.
“Christ, you don’t mean…”
“Yes, I do. In midhump, as it were. Doing it like a mink. It’s the only time I’ve ever known Red not to be able to finish what he started.”
I knew that she was trying, for some reason, to shock me, but I also knew that she was telling the truth. I had an infallible radar when it came to Lucy’s lying. This was no lie. I was silent.
“Don’t worry, Gibby,” she said. “You don’t have to save me from this one. I would have absolutely hated all that charity and volunteer shit. And I’ve saved your folks a ton of money. Little Lady’s coming right along behind me, you know, and it’s going to take a mint to bring her out. No, tomorrow night is my debut. Wait’ll you see my dress. I’m flat going to scald some eyeballs.”
She was right. Traditionally, the girls at North Fulton wore flounced and ruffled pastel hoopskirts to their senior proms, but when she came down the beautiful old staircase the next evening, before Red came to pick her up, Lucy was in white silk, as fluid and sweetly poured over her luminous slenderness as a column of cream, and her shoulders gleamed absolutely naked and pearled with youth and powder. She wore no jewelry, but had brushed her shoulder-length pageboy until it flew like dark thistledown around her narrow head, and in her hair she had fastened three perfect white gardenias from the bush in the garden outside the summerhouse. The dress was slit up to midthigh on one side, and one impossibly long leg, a pale satin-brown from the spring sun, glimmered in and out. She wore white high-heeled sandals and carried a little silver envelope. The only color in all that incandescent black and white was the red of her soft mouth, a translucent scarlet stain, as if she had been eating berries, or drinking blood. She gave off her own light, there in the dim foyer. I turned from adjusting my black tie in the ormolu hall mirror and stared at her. I could not have spoken. There wasn’t, on this night, anything else to be said about Lucy James Bondurant. No other girl at the prom would even be noticed.
She smiled. And then she came a few little running steps down the last of the stairs and into my arms, and I swung her around again, and she was laughing, laughing with a kind of fierce joy.
“Oh, Gibby,” she said. “I thought you never would come home again!”
“I thought you didn’t want me to,” I said, setting her down.
“Well, I was being silly; I thought you’d know that. You always did. But anyway, here you are, and now everything’s going to be all right.”
“What’s going to be all right? What’s wrong?” I said, my ears pricking.
“Nothing, now that you’re here. Absolutely nothing at all. Here, fasten these for me, will you? Aren’t they sweet?”
She handed me a string of pearls, still warm from the cup of her hand, and turned to face the mirror and lifted her heavy dark hair with both hands. I fastened the strand. They were beautiful, small and perfectly matched.
“From your daddy,” she said. “Before, I might add, he knew that I wouldn’t be coming out. I offered to give them back, but he said no, of course to keep them. So I did. I ain’t no fool.”
I heard the deep, powerful purr of a great engine on the driveway, and cocked an eyebrow at her.
“Red’s got his daddy’s Rolls tonight,” she said. “I told him I wasn’t going a step out of this house if he came in that fucking MG.”
She looked into the mirror at our heads, one fair, one ebony, close together.
“Aren’t we a matched pair, though?” she said. “We look like an ad for…oh, I don’t know, something rich and wonderful. Like we couldn’t possibly have anything but the most perfect life in the world. It should be you taking me to this thing tonight, you know, Gibby.”
“I’m no match for Prince Charming Chastain, Luce,” I said. “You’d make me miserable flirting your head off and going outside to neck or worse with everybody under ninety. But he knows how to control you.”
“Yes, he does,” she said, and her smile was gone. “That’s why I hang on to him, you know. He’s a mean bastard, really, but he wrote the book on control.”
Shem brought the Fury, waxed and humming, around to the front of the house and I drove around the corner to Muscogee to pick up Sarah. She was still upstairs dressing, but Amos showed me into the littl
e den at the back of the house, where Dorothy Cameron was watching television alone. It had been a day of thunderstorms and high winds, and another storm was grinding through, peppering the black window glass with driving rain, splitting the lashing trees with lightning.
Dorothy kissed me and indicated the chair where Ben usually sat.
“You’ll have to get up when he comes, because he won’t sit anywhere else, but right now he’s out in the kitchen toasting some cheese sandwiches,” she said. “Would you like a drink?”
“I guess not,” I said. “It’s going to be a long night.”
“Then come and tell me all about Lucy,” she said. There was more than prurient interest in her severe, beautiful face: I knew she had always been genuinely concerned about Lucy.
“Well, it’s just that she didn’t want to make her debut, and I can’t say that I blame her,” I said defensively. “What kind of a life is that for a woman, really, all that volunteering and do-gooding? There’s so much more an intelligent woman could be doing—”
And then I remembered that she had been voted Woman of the Year by the American Red Cross for her volunteer work at Grady Hospital, and I flushed a dull, hot red. “I didn’t mean you….”
She laughed. “I know you didn’t. But tell me. If we volunteers didn’t do the things we do, who do you think would do them?”
“Maybe somebody with fewer talents,” I said. “Somebody who didn’t have so much else to give somewhere else. Look at you. You could have been a great chief operating officer, a chairman of the board, or a doctor, or…whatever you wanted to be. Anything. You didn’t have to give it away.”
“And how many lifetimes would all that have taken?” she said, smiling affectionately at me, as she had when I was an outspoken little boy. “No, Shep, it’s the only decent thing to do with prestige and privilege, with money. People without those things don’t have the resources or the drive to get done what needs doing. It’s poverty that corrupts the will and energy, not wealth.”
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