Peachtree Road

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  “Well,” I said, “but what about all those women who don’t want to do the charity bit? The ones like Lucy, who want to be something else, something more, and have the gifts for it?”

  She nodded. “They’re the casualties in this particular time and place,” she said. “Ambition and difference—they’re the two things the rest of us women won’t tolerate. We punish them. Maybe it reminds us of what we didn’t do. Lucy is going to be punished for this free-spirited little decision of hers, if not now, then later. She’s a casualty, whether she knows it or not. Now ambition for a man, for her husband, that’s a different matter.”

  “If you’re so wise, why don’t I feel better about this whole thing?” I said.

  “I suspect it’s because you see a truth that’s under the truth I’m talking about. I think you always could do that, Shep. Be careful with it—we’ll probably try to punish you for it, too.”

  “Who’s going to punish who for what?” Ben Cameron said, coming into the room with a tray bearing two melted cheese sandwiches and two tall glasses of pale beer. “Hi, stranger. Good to see you.”

  “I am you, if you spill that beer,” Dorothy Cameron said, rising to take the tray from him, and he came to me and put his arms around me and hugged me as naturally as if I had been young Ben. I felt a powerful tide of warmth toward him. He was, as Sarah said later of Charlie, constant. He had always been all I had known of fatherly affection.

  “It’s a real change to see your ugly face around here,” he said, one arm still around my shoulders. “All we ever see is Charlie Gentry. I asked Dottie the other night if he’d moved in with us.”

  I laughed. I knew and Ben knew that Sarah dated Charlie when I was not at home largely because he and Dorothy insisted that she see other boys, feeling that she was far too young for an exclusive relationship. Charlie knew it, too; he had said to me the last time I was home, “She’d drop me in a minute if you’d crook your little finger.” He said it matter-of-factly and without a trace of rancor on his sweet, freckled face. “But hell, I don’t care. You aren’t going to do that, apparently, fool that you are. And a little of Sarah is better than none.”

  I believe that Ben and Dorothy always knew where their daughter’s heart lay, long before I did, and they approved, if only tacitly, our relationship. Dorothy as much as said so that night.

  “I’m eternally greatful that I’m past all that social folderol and can stay home and watch Gunsmoke,” she said, smiling at me. “It’s a foul night. I’m glad it’s you taking Sarah. I don’t worry about her when she’s with you.”

  “That may not be all that flattering to Shep,” Ben said, the gray eyes twinkling. There were new lines etched in the thin skin under them, and the hints of pouches, as if he were very tired, and I thought he looked much older, and somehow extremely formidable. I remember that Sarah had said he was becoming active in Atlanta politics—not a normal thing for a man of his station—and I could see, suddenly, that he would make a leader to be reckoned with, for all his boneless ease and Celtic whimsy.

  “Shep knows what I mean,” Dorothy Cameron said. “He isn’t like the others, nice boys that they are. You say the same thing yourself, so don’t leer at me, Ben Cameron.”

  “I think I’d better get out of here before you turn my head,” I said, grinning back at her. I was very flattered, and tried not to show it.

  “I wish I could,” she said. “I’ll bet nobody has ever really tried. You deserve to have your head turned a little, Shep.”

  Sarah came into the room then, vivid as a zinnia in warm coral tulle, and I smiled involuntarily at the goodness of the way she looked. We hugged, stiffly and self-consciously, and said our good nights to Dorothy and Ben, and by eight o’clock we were bowling out Peachtree Road in the last of the evening rain toward Brookhaven and the North Fulton senior prom. I was eager, excited, even. I had seen few of the Pinks and the Jells in two years.

  They were all there, drifting and settling and eddying away again like migratory swallows. The old ballroom shimmered with crepe paper and lanterns and a spinning colored spotlight, and the band—a second-echelon but well-regarded rock ‘n’ roll group out of Nashville—was thumping and gyrating into its first number. A few couples were on the floor, and others were detaching themselves from small groups and sliding out into the music. It was steady and insinuating, but not frenzied, as it would be later in the evening, and I swung Sarah into an easy jitterbug, hoping to get in a respectable quota of dancing before the real madness started. I never learned to do the aggressive, sensual, pelvis-snapping rock steps of that time, and was grateful that Sarah’s bursting dance card would keep her on the floor as long as she wanted. I knew that she would be content to sit out most of the howling, insistent numbers—or go outside to the terrace with me. Sarah could do the beach-bop business of the fifties as faultlessly as she could do anything with her elegant little body, but her soul, like mine, shied away from it.

  It might have been my own senior prom, not Sarah and Lucy’s, there was, on the surface, so little sense of time passed and change happened. The original core group of us was there in the familiar formations: Sarah and me, Ben and Julia, Snake and Lelia, Pres and Sarton Foy, looking even plainer and more aristocratic than ever, Tom and Freddie Slaton. A.J. had brought a stunningly pretty pink and white-blond senior from Washington Seminary, who looked all evening like a white baroness captured by Amazonian pygmies, and Charlie was, as usual, stag.

  On closer examination, there were a few surface transmutations, many of them merely a deepening of the small stigmata already laid down: Ben Cameron was now so brilliantly animated that his old, quick grace seemed flamboyant and theatrical; Charlie’s sweet, shambling pragmatism had deepened almost into phlegm; the anxious discontent in Freddie’s sharp little eyes had atrophied into darting malice. And despite the first-glance sameness of the setting and the dress and the players in this stylized masque, there hung about it, for me, a profound strangeness which lay just below the surface of the night. It was not the old sense of unreality I remembered from my earliest days at the dances of the Pinks and the Jells, but a keen aura of impermanence, so that I almost expected the entire scene to slide away into the wings, like a lavish set from an opera, and some other, utterly unimaginable set to come grinding out. Two years had altered me irrevocably, if not the others.

  Lucy and Red Chastain were nowhere to be seen.

  By intermission the evening was in full, sweating cry, and we Buckhead Boys drifted out into the parking lot with our dates and sat on the bumper and fenders of A.J.’s newest vehicle, a 1938 Cadillac hearse so vast and shining and massive that it resembled a lava rock atoll. A.J. had brought grape juice and a bag of ice and Ben Cameron had vodka, and we sat drinking Purple Passion in the still-wet parking lot under a slim silver moon, the piercing fragrance of honeysuckle and mimosa from the lawns of the big houses on West Brookhaven washing across to us on the still air. I hated the thick, cloying taste of the drink, and I think most of us did, but we drank from the thermos top that A.J. passed around as deeply and solemnly as if it had been a communion chalice. I think we all knew, that night, that it was just that, and that this was in all likelihood our last communion.

  Out here in the dark, change, endings, little dyings quivered in the air around us like a silent detonation, even more powerfully than in the last few days of my senior year at North Fulton, for now, after this upcoming graduation, the girls—the glue that had held us together since birth—would be dispersing, too. We boys had, two years before, moved out into our own arenas: I to Princeton; Ben into the architectural school at Georgia Tech; Snake into premed at Emory; A.J. downtown to the Atlanta Division of the University of Georgia; Pres Hubbard to the university itself, over at Athens; Tom Goodwin to his father’s school, Sewanee; Charlie into prelaw at Emory. But, except for me, we had stayed close to Atlanta, or at least within a couple of hours’ driving distance.

  The girls were different. Only two of them—Sarah and Lucy,
who would enter Agnes Scott College in Decatur—would be staying in Atlanta after this summer. Julia Randolph planned to go to Auburn with three of her Washington Seminary classmates, Lelia Blackburn was slated for Sweet Briar, Sarton Foy would follow her female ancestors into Wellesley and Freddie Slaton was being shipped off to Pine Manor Junior College in the dim parental hope that separation from Tom would dull some of her gnawing hungers and proximity to Boston would burnish some of her razor edges. We would come back together again, of course, at holidays and summer vacations, and in the endless formal patterns of the great Atlanta social quadrille that we were entering, but after tonight a flawless surface would be ruptured, a perfect wholeness opened and corrupted, and we knew it. The Purple Passion made several more rounds than it might have ordinarily.

  A tootling fusillade of rock music from the old stone clubhouse signaled the band’s return, and we slid down off the hearse and began to move toward it, walking slowly and in pairs, arm in arm. I remember that the moonlight lay so dense and shadowless over the surging hills of the golf course that it looked bathed in some ancient, awful silver sun, and the smell of mimosa was heartbreaking. Just as Sarah and I gained the door, a scream of engine and tires broke the thick night behind us, and we turned to see Red Chastain’s father’s black Rolls careen into the parking lot, rocking viciously on two tires. We all stood still, waiting for Red and Lucy to get out of the car and come toward us, but they did not. Rock music louder than that inside the club blared out of the Rolls’s open windows, and over it we could hear the sound of Red’s voice, and then Lucy’s, raised in a furious quarrel.

  “Trouble in paradise,” A.J. said.

  “Oh, just a little lovers’ spat, probably.” Snake grinned. “Maybe we ought to go throw cold water on them.”

  “Are they fussing, Shep?” Freddie asked, sweetly and avidly. “I heard they’ve been fussing all spring over Lucy running around with Mr. Cameron’s Negro houseboy, or whatever he is. Poor thing. I heard Red told her he’d take his pin back if she didn’t stop. And she didn’t, because I saw them out in the Camerons’ side yard the other day when I drove by there.”

  She looked brightly at me, her red head cocked like a malicious little bird’s, and in that moment I truly hated her. Freddie Slaton would always peck delicately at pain and trouble like a vulture in offal.

  “I don’t have the slightest idea, Freddie,” I said. “I’ve barely seen her since Christmas.”

  “Well, what about it, Sarah? Ben?” Freddie pressed. “You have to admit she’s around your place with that Glenn What’s-his-name an awful lot, whenever she’s not with Red. What’s going on there, anyway? Tell!”

  Sarah drew a sharp breath preparatory to answering her, but Ben Cameron cut in with his smooth, dry voice which managed somehow to glitter.

  “You probably see a lot more of Glenn Pickens and Lucy than Sarah and me, Freddie,” he said. “As much as you seem to ride by our house. Daddy said at breakfast the other day that if he didn’t know better, he’d think the little Slat on girl was thinking of buying the house.”

  Freddie looked affronted, as she always did when one of her intrusions provoked the response it deserved, and huffed herself up like a bantam chicken, but whatever she might have said to Ben was lost in an explosion of sound from the far end of the parking lot. We saw a glass come spinning through the window of the Rolls and shatter on the asphalt, followed by something larger that might have been a bottle, and a shriek from Lucy. Even at this distance I could tell that it was rage and not pain or fear. I was embarrassed and angry with her, and with Red and Freddie, and ready to be angry with whoever spoke, but no one did. After a moment we went back into the club and the dance bowled on.

  For the rest of the evening I kept an uneasy eye on the door, waiting for them to come in, but by the time the band finished the last throbbing, shouting chorus of “I Got a Woman” and segued into “Goodnight, Sweetheart,” they still had not appeared, and I figured that the quarrel had been serious enough so that he had taken Lucy home—or that they were coupled in furious atonement in the velvety backseat of the Rolls. The thought repelled and disturbed me as the image of Lucy copulating with Red always did, and I pulled Sarah closer to me and buried my face in the springy silk of her hair. She nuzzled her face into my shoulder, and we swayed together wordlessly and dreamily, abandoning ourselves to the myriad endings that were now upon us, drowning, at last, in them. All around us, couples were doing the same thing. As loud and explosive as the entire evening had been, these last few minutes of it were quiet, quiet.

  So that when Lucy came pelting into the ballroom and across the floor, her breath sobbing in her throat, her sandals clattering on the waxed old boards, everyone stopped and looked at her. In truth, it was not possible to look anywhere else.

  Lucy looked utterly wild, mad, almost dangerous. Her face was nearly as white as the silk dress. Her blue eyes had that eldritch white ring around them that I had rarely seen since the terrible nightmares and fits of hysteria of her childhood. Her dress was pulled askew so that one breast trembled nearly out of it. The gardenias were gone from her hair, and it flew wild around her head; strands of it whipped across her forehead and her mouth. Her lips were reddened and puffed and bare of lipstick.

  She stopped at the edge of the dance floor and looked around in intense concentration, seemingly oblivious that nearly three hundred people were staring silently at her. Her eyes scanned and scanned, and then found me, and she smiled. I had never seen such a smile on her face before, and could only stare. If it had not been for the dress and the indefinable Lucyness of her slender body and her lithe, free stride, I would not have known who she was.

  She walked straight across the dance floor to where Sarah and I stood, and put her hand on my arm, ignoring Sarah as totally as if she did not stand there beside me. At this distance I could see the magenta prints of fingers on her upper arms and shoulders and throat, and smell a strong gust of bourbon. I did not doubt that she and Red had been drinking all evening. I knew that they did to some extent whenever they were out together now, but I had never seen Lucy drunk in public before. I would have known that she was tonight, though, even if I had not seen the hot, opaque, unfocused glitter in her eyes.

  “Hey, Gibby,” she said merrily and clearly. She did not slur. “I came to claim my dance. You know, you promised me the last dance.”

  I did not reply for a moment, and Sarah did not either. She stood quietly beside me, her hand still on my shoulder, looking gravely at Lucy. She knew I had not promised Lucy the last dance; this was historically reserved for the girl you came with. All of us knew that; had for years. It was a tacit rule none of us would have thought of breaking.

  Lucy seemed to see Sarah for the first time, and smiled again, a great, broad, incandescent smile.

  “Sarah won’t mind, Gibby,” she said, and this time she did slur just a little, and rocked on her high heels so that she had to put out one hand to steady herself against my arm. “Sarah’ll wait for us to finish. Good old Sarah. Sarah’ll just sit all quiet like a little old puppy dog and wait for us…”

  “Where’s Red, Lucy?” I said, steadying her and trying not to see the avid, embarrassed faces of my friends and classmates around me. I damned her silently. “Let’s go find Red—”

  “No! I want you to dance with me!” she said. Her voice rose. “Put your arms around me, Gibby, and dance with me…dance with me…” She locked her arms around my neck and sagged against me, so that I was forced to hold her to prevent her from slipping to the floor. I looked at Sarah desperately over Lucy’s head; her face was scarlet, but it was still and composed.

  “Why don’t you take her outside for some air?” she said to me, in a low, even voice. “I’ll be fine; I can get a lift home with Ben and Julia.”

  “That’s right,” Lucy said in a singsong voice, her eyes closed, smiling, swaying. “You’re a nice girl, Sarah; go on home with your big brother and let me dance with Shep—”

&nbs
p; Rage flooded me coldly and fully then. I took Lucy by her upper arms and thrust her away from me so suddenly and sharply that her head bounced on her neck, and she opened her eyes and looked at me in the old simple, lost, Lucy bewilderment. I felt the traitorous twist begin in my heart, but the rage was stronger.

  “Stand up, Lucy,” I said. “I have this dance with Sarah, and I’m going to dance with her, and then I’m going to take her home. If you need some help getting back out to the car, I’m sure somebody will help you”—I looked around and found Charlie’s calm white face, and our eyes met, and he nodded slightly. I thought there was a tiny flicker of triumph behind his thick glasses—“Charlie will help you. But I am going to dance this dance with Sarah.”

  Lucy stared back at me, and her face blanched even whiter than I had thought possible, and a quick wash of tears filmed her eyes, and then vanished, to be replaced with a pure and silver glitter of something I could not name.

  “You do that, Gibby,” she said. It was a drawl, low and controlled, all drunkenness gone as if it had never been. It rang in the huge room like a bell. “You dance with little Sarah, and then you take her home, and when you get there you roll her over and fuck her brains out, why don’t you? Oh, but of course…you can’t do that. She doesn’t have anything to fuck. Red tried, he told me all about it; tried all one night while you were at Princeton, and you know what? She didn’t have a hole! Got no hole at all, because Sarah isn’t really Sarah, you know; she’s one of those cute little plaster elf things that grin at you in miniature golf courses, and everybody knows elves don’t have holes….”

  Sarah turned and walked off the dance floor and I followed her. It was very quiet in the big ballroom; Lucy had stopped talking and no one else spoke. It was a truly terrible moment, and the worst and longest walk I have ever taken, or ever will again. I could not imagine how Sarah could keep her head erect and her shoulders even and her step firm and steady after those killing words, but she did.