It had been a uniquely dreadful thing for Lucy to say, a terrible analogy; it had always been her gift to find the kernel of unalterable truth in everything, and there was, in the analogy of those awful, grotesque, painted elf-parodies, grinning from among the little bridges and white, puffy toadstools of every miniature golf course we had ever seen, a tiny, caricatured core of Sarah. It was there in her carved, miniature body, her generous red mouth nearly always smiling, her high color and her huge sherry eyes under straight black brows. I knew that everyone in that room would, whenever they saw one of those ghastly homunculi, think fleetingly and guiltily of Sarah Cameron, no matter how much they might love her. I knew that I would, and Sarah would. At that moment I could have killed Lucy for that diminishment.
Sarah did not speak when I handed her into the car. I reached out to take her in my arms, but she gave me a look of such desperate control and entreaty that I did not. I knew she was fighting tears, and that any gentleness would break her. It upset Sarah so badly to cry in front of people that it almost made her sick, and so I just said, softly and helplessly, “Sorry”; she nodded, and I nosed the car out onto West Brookhaven, and then onto Peachtree Road. As we came into Buckhead, deserted and lunar, she reached over and switched on the radio, and I knew she had won for the moment her battle with the tears, but I still did not touch her.
“Don’t come in, please, Shep,” she said, when I pulled into the cobbled courtyard of the Muscogee Avenue house. “I know I’m going to go upstairs and cry, and then I’ll feel better and I’ll be okay in the morning. Come talk to me then, and have some lunch. And don’t worry. You aren’t responsible for Lucy. I know that.”
“Sarah,” I said, tasting the words on my tongue in the darkness. “Sarah, I love you.”
“I know that, too,” she said, and let herself out of the car, and vanished into the door to the little sunroom.
I went home determined to wait up for Lucy no matter how late she came in, and confront her with her behavior. I did not know what I would say to her, but I did know that what she had done to Sarah Cameron was beyond any pale I could imagine, and that I must not let her get away with it. It seemed the most important thing I would ever do; it seemed to me, that night, that great, profound things, things of deep and everlasting import, rode on my forcing some accounting from Lucy. But I had no idea what those things might be, and in any case, I did not do it, for she had not come in by full light the next morning, and I finally fell asleep in the hot, ashy dawn of a new spring day.
When I awoke, at eleven o’clock, she was sitting on the end of my bed in the summerhouse wearing black Capri pants and a fresh yellow blouse and smoking a Viceroy. I squinted stupidly at her through the smoke, and then the previous night came sliding back into my mind, and I sat up and took a deep breath and said, “Look, Lucy…”
She smiled. She looked as if she’d had ten hours of sweet, untroubled sleep, and only the faintest ghost fingerprints on her forearms and another set at the base of her throat remained of all the anger and ugliness.
“If it’s about last night, I’m sorry, Gibby, and I know I was horrible, and I’ll go over later and tell Sarah how sorry I am. I had a good reason for acting so awful, though, and I wanted to tell you about it.”
I could not imagine how she could look so untouched and young and somehow clean and whole there in the dimness of the summerhouse, and I simply stared at her for a moment, and then I said, “Lucy, there can’t be any reason in the world good enough to justify how you acted last night, and whatever it is, I don’t want to hear it.”
“Well,” she said equably, blowing smoke out in twin plumes through her nose, “you have to hear it, want to or not. You have to help me fix it. I’m three and a half months pregnant, and we’ve got to make some plans. I thought I better catch you before you went in for breakfast so we can figure out the best way to go about this.”
My ears rang. I simply could not answer her.
“I want to have an abortion,” she said, when I did not speak, “and I don’t have any money. I know a place in Copper Hill, Tennessee, I can go to, a real doctor in a real clinic, and perfectly safe, but it costs six hundred dollars and I can’t get that much. And I know you have that trust money from your granddaddy….”
“It’s Red’s, of course,” I said. My mouth felt stiff and clumsy, numb. My tongue was enormous.
“Of course,” Lucy said. “Whose else would it be? What do you think I am, Gibby?”
“Then get the goddamned money from him!” I shouted. I was surprised at the depth of my anger and shock. Given Lucy’s behavior with Red, this was almost to be expected.
Lucy’s reasonable aplomb vanished.
“I can’t tell him! I could never tell him!” she cried.
“Why the hell not?” I hissed furiously. “He who dances must pay the piper. Or he who fucks must pay the abortionist, to be exact. God almighty, Lucy, he’s got money coming out of his ass! Why can’t he take responsibility for his own baby? Come to that, why can’t he marry you? Wasn’t he going to, anyway? What difference does it make if it’s now rather than later? His old man can support all of you; that’s what you ought to be thinking about, not a damned abortion—”
“He can’t marry me!” She burst into tears. I saw that they were the old, old tears of real pain and fear and desperation, and my heart contracted. This was Lucy, this was still Lucy….
“Why the hell not?” I said again, my voice softening in spite of myself.
“Because his father says he’ll cut him off without a cent if he either knocks anybody up or marries anybody till he’s out of Princeton, and Red knows he’ll do it. He told me if I got pregnant it was the last I’d see of him, and he meant it!”
“Christ, what a bastard,” I exploded. “Then good riddance to him. No, Lucy, I’m not going to pay for any abortionist. You could die….”
“This man is good, Shep; everybody goes to him.”
“What do you mean, everybody?”
“God, do you think I’m the only girl in Atlanta this has ever happened to?” She laughed bitterly. “You don’t see any shotgun weddings or unwed mothers in this crowd, do you? You bet your ass you don’t. This is the guy they go to. The families always pay. He…he’s fashionable, like the hairdresser all the Buckhead girls go to, or the right fitter. Only, can you see your mother or father paying for my abortion? Or Mr. Chastain, for Christ’s sake? And Red’s not going to.”
“Lucy,” I said, “you could have the baby.”
“I WILL NOT HAVE A BABY WITHOUT BEING MARRIED!” Lucy shrieked. “I CAN’T TAKE CARE OF A BABY! I CAN’T EVEN TAKE CARE OF MYSELF!”
She began to cry then, and she cried so hard that I went to her and put my arms around her, as I had first on that day so long ago when she had run away and been punished, and gradually she stopped the terrible sobbing. We sat in silence for a time.
“You said you’d always look after me, Gibby,” she whispered against my bare chest. “You promised, the day we cut our wrists.”
Here it was again, that peculiar litany, the maiden supplicant to the knight, that she reverted to whenever she was pushed to the brink of terror and impotence. Those narrow childhood wounds, that thin young blood that ran so deep…
“Luce, I don’t have any six hundred dollars,” I said. “I don’t have anywhere near that, until I graduate. That’ll be way too late.”
“You could marry me,” my cousin Lucy said. She raised her face to mine, and it was radiant with more than tears. Deliverance shone there, simple and joyous. “You could marry me, Gibby. We could drive to Maryland today, this morning, and I could come live in Princeton and we could get a place somewhere, and I could get a job, and you could go right on studying….”
“I can’t do that,” I said numbly. “You can’t do that. You know you can’t. Lucy, I can’t always take care of you. I’m not able to. You just can’t expect me to do that.”
“That’s just what I do expect,” she exploded again
, tears jetting anew from her eyes. “Because you promised me on your blood that you would!”
“Lucy,” I said again desperately, “I wasn’t even nine years old when I said that! You weren’t even seven! You always keep coming back to that day, and you must know that we were just children playing a game….”
My voice dwindled and stopped. I sat still and slumped. She did not speak. She stared intently into my face. Presently, I suppose, she read my answer there, because she stiffened and sat up, and pushed my arms away.
“I have to go back to school this afternoon,” I said. “I tell you what. You go see a doctor and find out for sure, and then call me. I’ll think about it, and we’ll work something out that will maybe let you go away and have the baby, and you can say you’re visiting…oh, somebody….”
She gave me a brilliant and truly terrible smile.
“Never mind, Gibby,” she said. “With any luck, maybe we’ll find out it’s only cancer, and you’ll be off the hook. You can be the one crying the loudest at my funeral, and everybody will say what a devoted cousin you were.”
“Lucy,” I whispered, but she turned and walked out of the summerhouse.
I started after her.
“If you come one step further I’ll tell everybody it’s yours, Gibby,” she said without looking back. “And you’d better believe I mean that. Go on back to your precious Princeton. I don’t ever want to see you again.”
And I did. I did not even go over to see Sarah; just called and said I’d overslept and needed to go on to the airport, and that I’d see her for graduation in a couple of weeks, and took the noon plane to Philadelphia and the dinkey to the PJ&B. All that week I waited for Lucy’s call, sick with misery, worry for her and an anger that I still could not name.
The call from Atlanta came five days later, but it was from my mother, not Lucy. As calmly as if she were discussing my laundry, she told me that Lucy had taken the Fury out in a great afternoon rainstorm and had lost control of it and slammed into a bridge abutment on the new interestate highway up near Gainesville. She was in Piedmont Hospital with a concussion and a deep laceration on her temple, and internal injuries, but she was expected to heal routinely, even though she had lost a great deal of blood. But the Fury was a total wreck. I thought there was a certain measure of satisfaction in my mother’s voice, though whether it was in relation to the damaged niece or the wrecked car, neither of which she had ever liked, I could not tell.
I called Lucy in her private room at Piedmont after supper that night.
“What about the baby?” I said without preamble.
“What baby?” she said, and her voice was gay. “There isn’t any baby, Gibby. Not anymore, there isn’t.”
Lucy graduated with her and Sarah’s class a week later, looking, according to the photographs that Aunt Willa took, like an El Greco angel, in a white cap and gown, with a small white bandage like a beauty spot on her delicately hollowed temple. Aunt Willa and my mother and father were there to see her, and Red Chastain, looking handsome and supercilious in his blue blazer and gray flannels and white bucks, and even Red’s father, grinning enormously and ferally.
But I wasn’t.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“Inever get over the feeling that I’m going to see Frank Sinatra scrooched up under your steps, screaming for heroin,” Sarah said, pressing closer to me as I fumbled for the key to my apartment. She had never quite gotten over The Man with the Golden Arm when I had taken her to see it at the Playhouse on one of the Princeton weekends, and she never failed to evoke Sinatra’s tortured wraith when we climbed the marble steps to my place on West Twenty-first Street.
I could see her point. That area of lower Manhattan, from about Eighth Avenue over to the Hudson River, is called Chelsea now, and is, I understand, thoroughly gentrified. But in the late fifties, when I moved there, it was a dim and, in places, downright eerie slice of the city, decaying and sullen, with all manner of funny stuff in the air and in the blood, including heroin. I routinely found supine bodies amid the trash cans and more unspeakable jetsam in the basement stairwells of my block, between Eighth and Ninth, and after the first two or three encounters, stopped automatically calling the police. In all but two cases, the bodies turned out to be derelicts sleeping off the night’s load of muscatel out of the wind. Of the other two, one was comatose from heroin, and the other, a livid and terrified-looking old woman, was dead. After nearly a year, I prided myself on being able to distinguish the quick from the dead at a glance.
The bodies did not bother me. My apartment was the entire first floor of a once-grand old brownstone with a rear view into a ruined garden—I literally looked into a low, sturdy ginkgo from my rudimentary kitchen—and it was cheap enough so that I did not have to have a roommate. That it was airless, dark, scurrilously shabby and probably deserving of condemnation hardly even registered with me two days after I had moved in. It was now as clean as a week of scrubbing and chipping and mopping and painting could get it, it was comfortable enough if you did not insist upon aesthetics and it was close via foot, bus and subway to both my job at the New York Public Library and the jazz clubs in the Village. I stepped over the human refuse of the Lower West Side and walked on the lambent air of pure joy.
I heated water for coffee on the stained old gas stove in the tiny kitchen, and Sarah and I took our cups and sat out on the fire escape. It was April, and the ginkgo was lacy with transparent new green. From the dark garden below, the smell of the tough urban honeysuckle rose up, battling the general miasma of the West Side. It had been an early, warm spring, and the night was almost as balmy as an April night in Atlanta. The clash and snarl of traffic on Ninth had tapered off in the small hours of Sunday morning so that we could hear human sounds: footfalls on Twenty-first, and a radio from an apartment down the block, and a dissonant mewling that might have been feline or human, but certainly meant climactic passion, from the unseen garden floor. Sarah giggled at the sound, which told me that she was still tipsy from the gin and tonics we had drunk. Ordinarily, she would have ignored the sounds of love.
“Sounds like fun,” she said, burrowing her curly head into my shoulder in its accustomed niche. I pulled her close against me.
“Want to try it?” I said.
“Uh-uh,” she mumbled. “I’m too comfortable. Another time, thanks.”
I grinned into the night, over the tangled curls. We both knew by now that we weren’t going to make love, not, at least, at present; knew it well enough and were comfortable enough with it to tease each other about it. I think she enjoyed the teasing, and I know I did. It lent a titillating saltiness to what would otherwise have been almost too deep and sweet a relationship. Not now, the teasing said, but soon. Maybe tomorrow. You never can tell. In any case, there wouldn’t have been time tonight. Sarah’s spring break from Agnes Scott College ended on Sunday, and she would have to go back to Atlanta on an afternoon plane. I glanced at my watch. Only hours away now. It was very late.
It had been a weekend as idyllic in its way as the ones at Princeton. As she had there, Sarah slipped without a ripple into the world I had staked out for myself in New York, and if the things we did and the places we went and the way we were with each other did not delight her totally, I never knew it. She merged into the all-consuming fugue I had created as seamlessly as vapor or air, became a part of the wholeness and flow and lilt and pulse of my life in Manhattan as she had in Princeton, as if she were flesh and bone of both me and it. It was such an androgynous thing, this fitting of Sarah to me, that it seemed a part of the larger legerdemain that the city wrought on me, and I often could not—or did not stop to—observe where Sarah left off and New York began. It was wonderful for me; I gloried in all of it, but it struck me later that perhaps Sarah would have welcomed a kingdom of the heart that was all her own. She did not, on those weekends, get that exclusive focus from me, but she did share down to the last cell of her the kingdom wherein I dwelled. It spelled such a total absorption to m
e that I never once wondered if, for her, it was enough.
On Friday, when she got in, we had dropped her luggage off at the Barbizon Hotel for Women, where Ben and Dorothy insisted that she stay and where indeed she did, and had gone to dinner at Alan Greenfeld’s family’s apartment near Columbus Circle. Alan was there with a fair, straight-haired Bennington graduate named Gerta Neumann who was an intern at The New Republic, where Alan had worked for the past year as a junior political editor. It was the first time Sarah had been with me to Alan’s, and I did not know how she would fare; she was as alien to this world of liberal Eastern Jewish families and activist leftist politics as they were to our cloistered banal Buckhead one. But she did fine; her quirky wit and unaffected openness won them, as did her soft accent and beautiful manners. Ben and Dorothy had left a great many doors open for Sarah.
On Saturday—yesterday, now—we had nearly worn ourselves and the city out. One thing about Sarah that especially endeared her to me was her stamina; her little athlete’s body and shapely steel-muscled legs ate up New York as effortlessly as even my loping attenuation did, and we walked what must have been ten miles before the tender green sunset. By 6:00 P.M. I was waiting in the primly collegiate lounge of the Barbizon while Sarah changed, feeling as though I were back at a mixer at Bryn Mawr or Sarah Lawrence, and then we went to dinner at Mama Leone’s, Sarah glowing beside me in polished peach cotton, and ate garlic-smitten pasta with white beans, the cheapest thing Mama was proffering that night. We drank a great deal of equally cheap Chianti and laughed a lot and held hands under the table, aching pleasantly with the day’s walking, and then I took her down to hear Brubeck at the Village Vanguard.
I was always aware of feeling the most deeply about Sarah when we were listening to jazz together. She soaked it in through every pore and assimilated it in every cell and gave off its delirious fruits from her very skin, like body heat. She knew what it meant to me, and so she would have put all her heart and soul into listening in any event, but her childhood years in the Muscogee Avenue house with young Ben had given her an early start; she had been brought up on the elegant intricacies of Artie Shaw and the arid crystal syncopation of Charlie Parker. Her wonderfully orchestrated body swayed as naturally to the aggressive, hard-driving bop of the forties and early fifties as to the slightly later drifting, pastel atonalities of the so-called “cool” jazz that so spoke to me. Sarah loved and listened to a lot of music—symphonies, opera and even the yowling country ballads that besieged Atlanta from all sides—but I have never seen her so lost in anything as jazz, except her own painting.
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