I sat down warily, with a sense of walking clear-eyed and of my own volition into a trap. It could not be interest in my welfare that prompted this luncheon; Aunt Willa had never so much as held a conversation with me alone since she had brought her family to the Peachtree Road house. In fact, I had never seen her engaged in a one-on-one conversation with anyone in all my memory. She participated in conversations in whatever group she found herself in, turning from this person to that like a sly, clever child mimicking adult behavior, but she seldom seemed to initiate conversation, and she virtually never talked with the children of the big houses of Buckhead. I think that in her mind we had no power to either hurt or help her in her obsessive quest for Ladyhood, and so did not, for her, exist. Except, of course, her own daughters, the one who was boon, and the other who was bane. I could not imagine simply talking with her as I did with Dorothy Cameron, or even my mother, and I had a moment of panic as I walked across the floor to her table, and wanted to turn and run.
I need not have worried. Aunt Willa did all the talking. From the moment she pecked me on the cheek, engulfing me in a powerful musk of something dark and sophisticated, to the moment she put down her coffee cup and lighted a Parliament, icing its pristine white tip with a virulent berry stain, she did not stop her lilting, witless chatter. I did not need to say anything, and did not, beyond an occasional “umm-hmmm” and “oh yes.” Between the shrimp cocktail and the ladyfinger something-or-other, Aunt Willa talked incessantly about her career as a full-fledged buyer for Rich’s of Atlanta (soon to be head buyer), and what my “little crowd” was about (weddings and engagements popping like firecrackers), and what her set was up to (hitting every tea and fashion show and charitable ball that could possibly have been held in the past year, with herself, as well as my parents, as virtual mainstays of them), and what was happening to Atlanta (growing like a weed; skyscrapers and shopping malls shooting up everywhere, and the town absolutely full of tackpots nobody knew. “Everyone says Ben Cameron will be the next mayor, but why he wants to is beyond me”). It was more than I had heard her say in any given five years at home.
Finally she slowed and stopped, and gave me the full battery of her languid red smile.
“Well, I’ve really let myself run on, haven’t I?” she said archly. “And not a word about you. How are you, Shep? One reason I wanted to see you was that Lucy misses you so much, and I want to tell her all about you.”
“In a pig’s eye you do, Aunt Willa,” I thought, and said, “I’m just fine. How is Lucy?”
This was what she had come for; I had, of course, been right. You could literally see her marshal her weapons and take aim. She dropped her lids so that the impossible lashes feathered on her cheeks, and let her pretty white hands turn palm up, helplessly, on the table, and paused a beat. Her voice, when it came, was low and freighted with a mother’s sorrow.
“I am deeply worried about my daughter, Shep. She is headed for heartache, and I wanted to ask your advice. You always did seem to be able to get through to her when no one else could, and what daughter listens to her mama nowadays?”
She looked up with a rueful little smile. Mischief and forbearance danced in it. “Nice bit of business, Aunt Willa,” I said silently. Aloud I said, with such reluctance that my voice dragged with it, “What’s the matter with Lucy?”
“Lucy is about to get herself kicked out of Agnes Scott,” Aunt Willa said, “and if she does, she can forget all about marrying Nunnally Chastain, because his father will cut him off without a red cent when it comes out why she did. And it will come out, Shep. You know how Lucy always manages to get herself talked about by the very people she ought to be cultivating.”
I grinned in spite of myself, hiding it behind a swallow of coffee. I did indeed know how Lucy drew talk as easily as she did eyes, and how little she cared about either, except as they might be used as weapons in the long guerrilla war with her mother. I knew, too, that whatever Lucy was up to at Agnes Scott that might get her expelled was of virtually no import to Aunt Willa, compared to its consequences: the loss of the inestimable social gloss that the name Chastain shed over everything and everyone it brushed. If it weren’t for the jeopardy in which it put that gloss and the money that spawned it, Willa Bondurant wouldn’t care if Lucy was mainlining heroin on the steps of Presser Hall.
“What’s she up to?” I said.
“Well, among other things, among many other things,” Aunt Willa said, drawing a great vermilion mouth with a slim gold lipstick and deftly flicking a glob off a canine tooth, “she has written an editorial in the little campus paper she edits about that horrible Martin Luther King and how he’s a new American saint, and several newspapers around the South have printed it. The Constitution had a headline that said, ‘Deb Defends Sit-Ins: An Atlanta Princess Takes up the Flag of Freedom.’ Can you imagine? The idea! All over the South! And she’s not even a deb, strictly speaking, much less a princess. I tell you, I’ve heard nothing since the story ran but that; everybody’s laughing about it. Well, not everybody. Babs Rawson didn’t think it was a bit funny. She literally cut us dead at the Driving Club last week, and Little Lady was sitting right there with Carter!”
Well, I thought, of course, Lucy and the Negroes again. It was the only thing left that raised Willa’s ire, and the only one likely, in these days, to inflame Buckhead enough to seriously threaten her clawed-out niche in its society. But surely…
“Surely they can’t be serious about expelling her from Scott for that,” I said. “My God, she’s been editor of that paper for both years she’s been there, and that’s unheard of for a freshman and sophomore. They must know what they have in Lucy. I thought her journalism and English grades were right at the top….”
“Oh yes, they are, but they’re the only ones that are,” Aunt Willa said. “She’s so close to flunking everything else she’s taking that I’ve had letters from every one of her teachers. And then of course she’s broken every rule they’ve got in the book, and when they call her up before that what-do-you-call-it, judiciary thing, and punish her she just laughs and goes right on doing whatever she likes. Why, I got a letter only two days ago from the dean of women, and it said that Lucy could be one of the most vital voices—that’s what she said, vital voices—to speak out of the South in her time, she’s got such a gift for writing. But first, she said, she’s got to graduate, and the way she’s going, she’s not going to make it. I know what she means, of course. Lucy never studies. She spends all her time with that Negro boy Ben Cameron is raising over there, that Glenn Pickens person. Now Ben’s sending him to college, no less, down at that Negro school on the Southside, More-something—”
“Morehouse,” I said automatically.
“—Morehouse,” she went on, “and half the time Lucy’s down there with him, in meetings about civil rights and sit-ins and all that vulgar stuff. Why, last week there was some kind of sit-in over in South Carolina, and there was your cousin Lucy right in the middle of it, the only white face in all those black ones. Of course both papers got ahold of it and ran it!”
“Is Agnes Scott upset about that?” I asked doubtfully. I knew Scott to be conservative in the extreme when it came to its educational policies and the rules by which it bound its girls, but I did not think it could afford to take an official stance on such matters as the incendiary new civil rights movement. Scott shunned publicity of any sort. And then Sarah had said nothing about it, and I knew that Ben and Dorothy would have her out of there in a moment if the school spoke out against desegregation.
“They say not. They say it’s her grades, and her attitude about the rules she breaks,” Aunt Willa said. “But of course that’s it. And Farrell Chastain is plenty mad about it, let me tell you, and so are Babs and Bill Rawson.”
“What about Red?” I asked curiously. I knew that Red Chastain was an indolent and merciless bigot, but I also knew that he was about as politically aware as a dung beetle. “Is Red mad at her, too?”
�
�Oh no, I don’t think so,” Aunt Willa said. “I gave in and let her start going up to visit him at Princeton, hoping it would keep her too busy to run around with the niggers”—her voice had slid up gradually into its wiregrass whine, and several heads turned toward her, but she did not notice. I felt myself redden, and wanted to disappear under the table—“but it doesn’t matter whether he is or not, because if Farrell Chastain lays the law down to him, you can bet he’ll drop Miss Lucy faster than a rattlesnake, rather than lose all that money.”
“Well, and has she stopped?” I asked, genuinely curious. I had never known Lucy to be either intimidated into dropping something she wished to do, or diverted from it.
“Well, she hasn’t been out with that colored boy for the past week, but then he’s over in Mississippi stirring up the niggers over there about registering to vote, so she hasn’t had the opportunity. She’d be over there too, except he told her she couldn’t go. Said it was too dangerous. Listen, Shep, I want you to talk to her. Surely you can see she’s about to ruin her life, much less all our good names. Will you call her and talk to her? She’ll listen to you; she always would.”
“Aunt Willa,” I said as forcefully as I could, “I can’t do that. The last time I really talked to Lucy was two years ago, and at the end of that conversation, she told me she never wanted to see me again. She’d hang up on me before I said hello.”
To my utter horror, she put her face down in her hands and began to cry. I knew she was not faking. The sobs were harsh and ugly and racking. More eyes fastened on us. They seemed to leave smoking craters in my flesh. She did not appear to notice.
“She’s going to ruin everything for me,” she sobbed, and her voice was that of the chicken farmer’s daughter again, fifteen years of careful, relentless cultivation gone from it. “She’s not going to stop until she’s done it. Oh, I wish she’d just died when she was born….”
Anger flooded me, over the embarrassment. “All right, I’ll call her, but I don’t want to hear you say that about her ever again,” I said, the iron and ice in my voice surprising me. Her, too, apparently; she stopped crying and looked up at me. Despite the tears, her mascara had not run.
“Thank you, Shep,” she said meekly. “She’s over at Princeton this weekend, but she’ll be back tomorrow night. Sunday. Could you call her then?”
I agreed to do it, not at all sure that I would, but so eager to get out of the terrible ruffled restaurant and into the cold, bright Saturday sunlight that I would have promised her anything. Restored, she kissed me airily on the cheek and clicked off on her four-inch heels, unable to keep the waggle entirely out of her shapely, taupes-wathed behind. I saw heads turn after her as she sailed down Forty-third Street, heading east toward Fifth. And then she was gone.
I might not have called Lucy after all, but I met Alan Greenfeld for dinner that night and we went down to hear Horace Silver at Nick’s, and he told me that he had been over to Princeton that day, to pick up some things he had left in his old suite in Holder, and had seen Lucy with Red Chastain on the veranda of Tiger, and that both had been falling-down drunk at high noon, and all over each other. The old Lucy-worry, which had been dormant so long, flooded back over me like cold salt water, and I hardly slept at all that night. I knew then that I would call her, and would probably regret doing it, but that it couldn’t be helped. The old ties had held after all; the old bond still ran deep. “We be of one blood, thou and I…”
Red was a junior at Princeton then, and I had not seen him for two years, and had seen him very little even in the year we had been there together. But I had heard enough about him to know that he was trouble pure and simple, if I had not known it before. He had lived his first two years in a suite with three other Southern boys whom I had not known, Southerners of a certain type that used to turn up at Princeton with some regularity. They were, like Red, cool and smilingly murderous of temper, lazily athletic and prowlingly indolent, and entered Princeton wilder and more jaded than most of us left it. Red and his roommates were the centerpiece of an entire set of these attractive and decadent Southerners, most of whom eventually found their way into Tiger, and all of whom spent their spare time drinking in their rooms and whoring in New York. Red and his roommates had moved all the beds in their suite into one room and fitted the other up as an elegant working bar, and the endless cocktail party and worse that prevailed there was the stuff of legend far beyond the Ivy League. I did not care a whit about Lucy and her involvement with her beloved Negroes, nor, really, if she flunked out of Agnes Scott, but I cared about her association with a whole crowd of Red Chastains. I made the call.
After I said hello, there was a long silence, and then Lucy said neutrally, “Hello, Gibby,” and her rich voice might have been in the very room with me. In my mind I saw her slouched on the Chinese Chippendale chair in the telephone alcove under the front stairs, feet up on the risers, a cigarette dangling from her long fingers. I had seen her that way a hundred times before.
It was not a good call. I stumbled and hemmed and hawed and stopped and started, and through it all she was silent, not helping me at all. Finally, in desperation, I blurted out that I had seen her mother in New York and that everyone was very worried about her, and I wanted to talk to her about it.
“About what?” Lucy said pleasantly.
“About…oh, shit, Lucy, about school, and the poor stupid Negroes, and mostly that bunch of corrupt fools Red runs around with at Tiger,” I said in a rush. “You’ve got no business messing around with that gang. You’re going to get yourself talked about all over the East Coast.”
There was another pause, and then her creamy, winy belly laugh curled out at me over the wire. Despite my annoyance, the corners of my mouth quirked at the sound.
“What else is new?” she said. And then she stopped laughing. “You’ve turned into a real prick, Gibby,” she said coolly, and the words stung me more sharply than I thought was possible. “You’ve got no business telling me who I can and cannot hang around with. You lost that right two years ago. Remember?”
And she slammed down the telephone. A blast of the old desolation in which absence from her had once drowned me swept over me again. For one anguished moment, the empty space between us where once so much had spun and sung back and forth bruised and lacerated me. And then both feelings were gone as if they had never been, and Lucy faded out of my mind like smoke, and what I had told Sarah tonight became again true. I had seldom thought of her since.
So I was as shocked as if I had seen a literal apparition when, at three o’clock on a Sunday morning the following November, I floundered out of sleep to answer a pounding on my door and opened it to find Lucy, distinctly drunk and looking lost and lovely in a man’s filthy London Fog, leaning against the doorsill, smoking and smiling at me.
“Hey, Gibby,” she said. Her voice was loose with liquor, but as rich and warm as I remembered. It seemed as if I had heard it only hours before, instead of months. I felt stupid and thick with sleep and confusion, and could not, for a moment, make my voice work.
“Lucy?” I said finally, hoarsely.
“Can I come in?” she said.
I cleared my throat. “Yeah. Sure. Come on in,” I said, and held the door for her. She turned and waved toward the street, and I saw an idling cab slide away into a fine, opalescent mist that had not been there when I went to bed. There was a chill under the rain, and Lucy’s breath, as she turned back to me, was frosted white. The misting rain was caught in her tangled, silky dark hair and haloed her head like the streetlights below. She came into my apartment and glanced around my tiny living room carelessly, as if she was not registering what she was seeing. She probably was not; her eyes had the flat glitter they got when she had had too much to drink. She sat down on my thrift store sofa and crossed her long legs and stuffed her hands into the coat pockets and looked up at me, still smiling, still glittering. Then she laughed aloud, the deep, plummy laugh that she had had since her earliest childhood, and
I grinned in return, a completely involuntary twitch. Few people failed to respond to Lucy’s laugh.
“Aren’t you going to ask me what I’m doing here?” she said gaily, and I thought then that there was something more than alcohol burning inside her. For the first time, it occurred to me that her presence here might mean trouble of some sort. I had not thought to ask her if there was anything wrong, despite the hour and the fact that she had said she did not want to see me again, and that I had not known she was anywhere within a thousand miles of me. She appeared, was here; that was all. Lucy in my apartment at three o’clock on an autumn morning was an absolute, and needed nothing else. She filled it as naturally and totally as she had our childhood nursery, or the summerhouse.
“What are you doing here?” I said. I was suddenly and uncomfortably aware that I wore only the pair of chinos I had pulled on hastily when the knocking had begun. I was not cold; the rattling old radiator kept the apartment almost tropically warm—when it worked—but I felt vulnerably naked.
“I was in the neighborhood,” she said, giggling, “and thought I’d drop in.”
I sat down in a rump-sprung butterfly chair opposite her.
“I assume you’re up for a weekend with Red and the gang at Old Nassau,” I said.
“Right you are,” she said. The hectic laughter bubbled just under her voice and burned in her cheeks. “It’s the Yale game. Red never misses it. Only he did this year. He’s been passed out in his room since eleven o’clock this morning. Well, who gives a shit? There were seventy-four others to party with.”
“Lucy,” I said, stung with annoyance and distaste and something else I could not name, “you’re heading for more trouble than you knew there was in the world.”
Peachtree Road Page 36
