Peachtree Road

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  I was an attendant, as were the entirety of our set and a spillover of Cameron and Randolph cousins and a couple of fraternity brothers and sorority sisters. There were twenty-four of us in all, a double phalanx of massed black and white and drifted, banked pink organdy at the altar. Sarah was Julia’s maid of honor, and so came down the aisle last of the attendants, on the arm of A.J. Kemp, who looked dapper and almost feral in the flickering dimness, like a clever monkey dressed in a tuxedo. I was at the altar in place when they started down the aisle, and Sarah’s great eyes flew to mine the length of that vast, shadowy oblong, and she winked. I winked back. Ben and young Ben stood at the foot of the altar, facing the back of the church, where Julia would appear, and in the soft candlelight Ben Senior looked almost as young as his son, humorous and slender and seeming somehow to lounge, even though he stood erect and poised. As for young Ben, I thought at first that he had been drinking, such hectic circles of color burned in his cheeks, and such a tinsel glitter filmed his gray Cameron eyes. But I knew that he would not do that on his wedding day, and put it down to nerves. Ben had always been nervy and volatile.

  The organ segued into Purcell’s “Trumpet Voluntary” then, and the crowd stirred and murmured softly and turned to watch as Dorothy Cameron came down the aisle alone, on the arm of the young Cameron cousin who was her usher. She was out of place in the traditional Atlanta formal wedding structure; she should have preceded the attendants, after the mother of the bride. But Augusta Randolph had died when Julia was eleven, and Ben had wanted his mother to have this singular place of honor, and Julia agreed. Dorothy Cameron walked the aisle with the same easy grace with which she might have crossed her front lawn.

  She smiled as naturally at her son far down at the foot of the great altar as if they had been alone in the Cameron sun-room, and he smiled back, a wide, vivid white smile, and then she moved her eyes and smiled to Sarah, and then to me. I felt a sudden and consuming rush of love for her. She was giving her son to another woman as openhandedly and full-heartedly as she had given everything to him all of his life, and taking joy from the giving. There was nothing in her of my mother’s dark, sucking love. Dorothy Cameron at that moment, in her soft French blue and her little corsage of white lilacs, was all light and warmth.

  In the choir loft, partially hidden by the great altar itself, a trumpet quartet stood, brass blazing golden, and tossed the shining, pure notes of the voluntary out into the cathedral air, and the murmur that had started with Dorothy’s appearance swelled as Julia came into view, on the arm of her father. Angular and snubnosed and among the nimblest of the Washington Seminary varsity basketball team, Julia on that day, in a cloud of her grandmother’s candlelight lace, seemed to hover above the aisle like a feather, or a snowdrop, and glided like a young queen. Her plain, freckled face flamed with the day and her adoration for Ben, and I thought it was true, that old saw, that all brides were beautiful on their wedding day. Lucy’s white face leaped unbidden into my mind for a split second, bleached by fatigue and the fluorescent light in the bare little office of a Maryland justice of the peace, the marks of her new husband’s hands on her throat hidden by the heavy fall of hair. I banished her image into air, and turned my eyes to Sarah. Her own eyes welled with tears as Julia reached the foot of the altar and gave Ben a tremulous smile, and she glanced at me, made a tiny, disgusted moue and blushed, but the tears did not stop. They slid silently down her cheeks and into the bouquet of stephanotis she held, as her beloved older brother became a married man and leaned over and lifted his wife’s veil and kissed her gaily.

  “That ought to be us,” I thought. “What’s the matter with me? She’s lovely and whole and strong and good inside and out. I don’t think I can love her any more than I do now. I know she loves me. Why don’t I just marry her? When she comes back from Paris…”

  Ben went straight from his Sea Island honeymoon to a job with a promising new firm of rather controversial young architects, two of whom had studied with the radical Bruce Goff at the University of Oklahoma, and he and Julia moved into the obligatory small clapboard salt box on Greystone Road in Collier Hills, which had been John Randolph’s wedding present to his daughter.

  Soon after that, Tom Goodwin married small, sharpedged Alfreda Slaton, along with all her hungers and wiles, and they moved into a one-bedroom apartment in Colonial Homes. Tom’s father had lost the agency and the house and most of his savings the year before, and for the first time in his life, Tom faced a future that would be fueled by his earnings alone. A.J. told me that they had taken bets among themselves on whether or not Freddie would go through with the marriage, knowing that the Habersham Road property was beyond her nimble little talons for good and all now, but she had—probably, A.J. said, because she had spent the best years of youth pursuing Tom, and knew that to take the field after new quarry now, her few skimpy bridges long since burned, would be folly amounting to perpetual maidenhood. Another theory was that Colby Slaton had said he would put his daughter out of the house if she did not marry Tom; no one, it seems, was eager to harbor Freddie. It would have been as uneasy a menage as a house with a small cobra in it.

  Freddie Slaton Goodwin hated Colonial Homes, and suffered while she lived there. She was bitten raw with ambition for Tom, her jealous resentment of the new houses and cars and parties and vacations and family heirlooms the others were taking for granted only slightly concealed by a saccharine winsomeness. It was generally agreed among the Buckhead Boys that Tom was a good guy, if not overly endowed in the brains department, and would probably do middling well in his job as an account executive for a novelty advertising firm for a while, but that Freddie was going to ruin him in the end.

  “Dealing with Freddie Goodwin is like being strangled to death by a climbing rose,” Charlie wrote me later that year. Just out of Atlanta Law, where he had transferred when his father had his breakdown, Charlie had moved out of his mother’s house and into an apartment in Colonial Homes with a friend from Emory, and had an active social life among the young lawyers and bankers and corporate executives who were beginning to flock to the city. Everyone liked Charlie, both in his social circle and in his job as a fledgling corporate attorney with the Coca-Cola Company, whose stock had made his family’s now-dissipated fortune. Of us all, Charlie was the only one who was not seeing anyone in particular—except, of course, Sarah, and everyone, including Charlie, knew that for the sweetly futile exercise it was.

  Before that year was out, Snake Cheatham married Lelia Blackburn, Pres Hubbard married Sarton Foy and Little Lady Bondurant made the match of the season and possibly the decade by marrying, in her sophomore year at Brenau, the baroquely wealthy Carter Rawson. We had not really known Carter well; he was a couple of years older than most of us, and had spent most of his time away at Phillips Exeter and then Yale and Wharton. But none-of us doubted that Carter was a genius at business, as his father was and his grandfather before him, and that he would make of his family’s vast land development company a name that shone on other shores than America’s. Nobody questioned, either, what a man of his vision and worldliness saw in the essentially turkey-brained Little Lady. She was so exquisitely beautiful and well and specifically trained for a pivotal position in society that she could have walked into any city in the country and run its foremost charity balls without turning a honey-blond hair.

  Adelaide Bondurant Rawson was possibly the most valuable property that Carter Rawson would ever acquire, and her long, arduous cultivation paid off in spades and diamonds for my aunt Willa. On the day she gave over Little Lady into Carter’s pirate-dark hands, she was asked to serve on the hospitality committee of the Piedmont Ball and to join both the Friday Femmes and the Every Thursday Study Club. Not even my mother belonged to the Every Thursday. Mother went to bed for an entire weekend with one of her migraines, and did not get up until Monday. Aunt Willa went, for the first time in twenty years, to lunch at the Driving Club alone with my father. Not a blue-rinsed head turned; she had known t
hey would not. People might talk about Willa Slagle Bondurant, lingerie buyer, lunching alone with her brother-in-law; they would not talk about Willa Slagle Bondurant, mother-in-law of Carter Rawson III.

  A.J. Kemp, like Charlie, was unmarried, laughing that he could not afford a wife until he had made his fortune in the large and conservative bank of which Snake Cheatham’s father was president. But he was said to be serious about an agreeable, intelligent, awesomely plain and warmhearted girl of no background at all from Hogansville, Georgia, named Lana Bates. None of us except Freddie Goodwin had met Lana or knew anything about her, except that she was a teller at the bank, and was starting into the bank’s junior executive training program, where A.J. had met her. Freddie knew her only because when she had learned of her existence, she had gone straight downtown and into the bank and up to Lana’s window and introduced herself, and asked her to have coffee at her break, and had spent the entire fifteen minutes sweetly catechizing her.

  “Her father is a livestock farmer,” Freddie said afterward, her little eyes glinting with the satisfaction of one who has found, at last, someone impossible to be envious of. “And it ain’t white Angus, either, if you know what I mean. He raises Poland China hogs. Lana had a prize hog herself when she was a 4-H girl. Some of it must have rubbed off. She could definitely lose a tad of lard, and her nose turns right up like a little old pink snout.”

  Somebody told her to shut up, causing her to huff and sputter, but when our crowd did meet Lana, no one was impressed, and we treated her with such remote, exquisite courtesy that A.J. didn’t bring her around anymore, and didn’t come himself; he married her that Christmas in the little white frame church in Hogansville with no one from Atlanta in attendance but his mother, Melba, who must have bitterly, if silently, mourned the phantom Buckhead princess bride she had labored so long to make possible for A.J.

  “The right wife could have really made something of A.J.” was the common word among the aging Buckhead Boys a few years later, when A.J. and Lana left Atlanta and went back to Hogansville, where A.J., to everyone’s astonishment, ran the farm that Lana’s father had left her.

  “And it’s no bigger now than it was when he met her,” a renewed Freddie murmured. “It’s still just a little old thing with pigs and chickens and cows and not but one or two tenants. A.J. does his own plowing. She helps him in the field.”

  But I thought by then that A.J. had known early something we did not, and had precisely the right wife, and that she had, indeed, made something of him. Loyal A.J., his hunger finally fed….

  It was, everyone who lived it has said, a particularly good time to be young and hopeful and possessed of limitless bright prospects, and a good city to be all that in. After the smug, uneasy years of the Silent Generation, where archconservative eyes saw a wild-eyed Communist behind every tree (“and a wild-eyed nigger behind every Communist,” Lucy said later), a new decade was blowing in on the freshening salt wind off the coattails of the vivid young presidential candidate from Massachusetts, who spoke of new commitments and unimaginable horizons and selfless service, that old seductress of the young, and who left the graphite-jowled Richard Nixon in his silvery dust on the nation’s television screens. In Atlanta, as in the rest of the South, racial unrest stirred like the great dragon at the base of the Norse earth tree Yggdrasil, but the city’s penultimate pragmatism bid fair to tame the serpent, in the name of good business. After years of stagnation, Ben Cameron and his tough, aristocratic new power structure were training their sights on a six-point program designed to keep the public schools open, build a vast new network of local freeways, implement a new program of urban renewal, erect a world-class auditorium-coliseum and stadium, get a rapid-transit system rolling and tell the country about it in an ambitious, if chauvinistic, public relations effort called Forward Atlanta. An attractive and high-spirited spate of bright young men and women from small towns and cities and universities all over the South were pouring into the city to work and live and play, and were staying to marry and settle down and become themselves Atlantans. Many of them became, in time, our crowd’s friends, and remained so all their lives. Our parents wouldn’t have given them house or club room, though they would, of course, have been courteous, but we would and did; by the end of that decade, about half the memberships in the social and civic clubs around the city were in the names of the out-of-towners, and even the Driving Club had a few on its rosters. These were not the tackpots of whom Old Atlanta still speaks; those tend to be Yankees and Arabs and Texans, or whoever is perceived to have enormous push and money and no commonality at all of ancestry. These new youngsters were, to our astonishment, as presentable as we were. They just hadn’t had the good fortune to have been born in Buckhead. No one but the oldest of the Old Guard held it against them.

  What we had, I think, in those first hopeful days of that incredible decade, was a town that was fast becoming a real city, in every sense of the word: a young upland city whose beauty, was still untrivialized by asphalt and concrete, whose youth had not yet become arrogance, whose ambition had not become venality, whose energy had not become uproar. It was beginning to be a city of uncountable intriguing parts, yet it was, then, still small enough to be perceived all at once. If I am sorry for anything about my absence in those years, I am sorry about missing Atlanta as it spun into the orbit of Camelot.

  It was about the time of Ben and Julia’s wedding that the calls from Lucy began. When the first one came, the week after I had gotten back to New York from Sarah’s graduation and Ben’s wedding, I thought at first that something calamitous had happened. It was five o’clock in the morning, past the hour when even the most dedicated drinkers of my circle would call to cajole me into going somewhere or providing a last one for the road, and I was fully awake and focused in every fiber when I picked up the receiver.

  “Hello?” I said warily.

  There was a rushing silence like you get on long distance, and then a deep inhalation of breath, and then Lucy’s voice came, familiar and strange at once, borne out on the little sigh that I knew was exhaled smoke.

  “Hey, Gibby,” she said. “It’s Lucy, honey.” From then on until her death, almost every telephone conversation we had began with that deep drag from the cigarette, and her throaty little “Hey, Gibby.”

  “Lucy? What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing’s the matter,” she said. Her rich, lazy drawl did not sound as though anything was. “What would be the matter?”

  “Lucy, it’s five o’clock in the morning!”

  “Oh, that’s right. You’re three hours ahead. I never will get used to that. It’s just two here. Did I wake you up?”

  “Oh, no,” I said sarcastically, annoyance at her flooding in after the relief of finding that she was all right. “I had to get up to answer the phone anyway.”

  She laughed, and that dark silk banner rolled across three thousand miles to me, and brought her into the room. I could see her boneless slouch, and the precariously lengthening ash on her cigarette, and the long legs propped up on whatever was at hand. California seemed as close as the next apartment.

  “What’s going on with you, Gibby?” she said. “Tell me your news. Tell me about graduation, and Ben and Julia’s wedding.”

  “Lucy, I could tell you all that at eight o’clock at night, or in broad daylight, just as well as dawn. What are you doing still up? I know you didn’t just get up, so you must not have gone to bed yet.”

  She laughed again, and I heard the slight edge of unstable brilliance that liquor always gave her laugh.

  “I’ve been to a party,” she said, “and everybody else has pooped out, and I’m not sleepy yet. Just bored. And all of a sudden I thought I’d like to hear your voice. It’s been a long time, Gibby.”

  “Only eight months, two weeks and four days,” I said. I might have been, on some level, relieved to have Lucy in other hands than mine, but I was still nettled by her long silence.

  Word of her and Red had come
fairly frequently from my mother, who got it from Aunt Willa, who in turn got it from Red’s meek, woebegone mother. His father had not spoken to him since he had left Princeton and married Lucy. I was exasperated by my mother’s calls, and at the creaminess of the ill-concealed satisfaction in her voice when she related the latest of Red and Lucy’s decidedly unmeteor-like odyssey, but I always listened. I had, I found, a deep and simple need to know where Lucy was.

  On the morning after their wedding, after waking in an Ocean City motel room with a monstrous crimson hangover and a ravening thirst, Red had telephoned his father in Atlanta and, with a fine show of bravado, told him about the wedding and announced that he was bringing Lucy home for a visit before returning to Princeton, and that he thought a small celebratory party at the Driving Club might not be amiss.

  “The next party you have is apt to be at the V.F.W. in wherever you are,” Farrell Chastain said, “because you aren’t getting one more red cent from me while I’m alive or after that, either. Whether or not you keep on at Princeton depends on how bad you want to wait tables or jerk sodas.”

  Red did not think these were viable options. He asked to speak to his mother. He could hear her weeping in the background, and pleading to be allowed to talk to her son, but Farrell Chastain would not permit it. He hung up. When Lucy awoke, as badly incapacitated as her new husband, it was to learn that he had been turned away from his father’s door like her own father before him at his marriage, and that her bridge to the cloistered world of Peachtree Road and its great houses—the only one she had ever known—was blazing away merrily. Whether she met it with fear or panache I do not know, but it must have been a very had moment for her. She was, she must have realized, as neatly trapped as a rat in a cage, and that knowledge had always sent Lucy wild.