When my breathing slowed and I moved off her and propped myself up on one elbow and looked down into her face, she smiled a smile of utter luminosity and reached up and traced a track down my cheek. I realized then that the wetness on my face was partly from my own tears.
“We did it,” she said, grinning. I thought that I had never seen anything so beautiful as Sarah Cameron was at that moment, lying stained and red-faced and slack on my sofa, wet curls matted black around her face, crimson flooding her still-tanned skin. She looked to me then like a ripe and perfect plum.
“We did it,” I echoed. “And I’m going out and hire a cannon and give a twenty-one-gun salute. God! I had no idea! You know, I guess, that I never have before…”
“I know,” she said.
“Has that ever bothered you? It’s not exactly normal.”
“What’s normal?” She said, stretching luxuriously. I watched the play of swimming muscles in her elegant little body, and the sheen of sweat on her. “It was the first time for me, too.”
“Well, God, of course it was,” I said. I had never considered that Sarah was not a virgin.
A thought struck me then, and wiped the goatish satisfaction clear out of me.
“Sarah, listen, do you think you could get pregnant? I mean, when’s your next…period?” And I appalled myself by reddening to my hairline.
“In a couple of weeks,” she said, blushing herself. Intercourse did not make the Pinks and the Jells of Atlanta blush, but menstruation did, and so far as I am concerned, still does.
“But it’s okay. I won’t get pregnant.”
“How do you know?” I said. “I didn’t…use anything.”
Sarah’s face flamed even redder, and she dropped her eyes.
“I did,” she said.
I simply stared at her.
“I have a diaphragm,” she went on rapidly in a voice so low that I could hardly hear her words. “I put it on right after we came in. I got it from Snake a year ago, and I’ve worn it since then every night we’ve been together when I came to New York. You may think I’m trashy, but you don’t have to worry about me getting pregnant.”
“Sarah…” I couldn’t think of anything to say. I thought of what it must have cost her to go to Snake and ask for a diaphragm; would he have had to examine and fit her for it? I did not know. The idea was too appalling to entertain. Had she so mistrusted me, then?
“Were you afraid I was going to force you?” I said.
“Oh, Shep, no!” She was truly aghast. “I wasn’t afraid you would, I hoped you would! I just couldn’t get myself past the…the point of no return…but I always hoped that one night you’d just go on and…do what I couldn’t…”
I took her back into my arms and held her close, not speaking, rocking with her a little, consumed with love and gratitude.
“It’s a good thing you’re leaving for Paris,” I said finally, “because I don’t think I’d ever let you out of bed if you weren’t across an entire ocean.”
“Am I worth waiting for?” She grinned.
“You bet your ass you are,” I said. “Your little perfect pink and white ass. But, Sarah—no longer than it takes you to get off the boat and get here. And then, just think…all those days and nights and months and years of sack time ahead of us…”
“Yes,” she said. “All the time in the world.”
It wasn’t until she was getting on the plane at La Guardia the next evening that, typically, she turned to me and said, her amber eyes crinkled with mischief, “You know who we have to thank for everything, don’t you?”
“Who?”
“Lucy, of course. You ought to send her a dozen roses. Or I ought. Or on second thought, forget it. It would make her crazy. She’d be back here in three hours, sobbing on your doorstep, and I won’t be here to tell her hands off.”
“Then I’ll tell her myself,” I said, kissing her a last long time.
“Don’t forge,” she said, turning to leave me for Atlanta and then Paris, and taking what felt to be the bulk of my soul with her. “If I ever catch you in Lucy Bondurant’s clutches, it’s going to be curtains for us. I am a woman of few words and strong mind.”
And she was gone into a dazzle of late September sun.
I went back to the apartment on West Twenty-first and sat down to wait for her to come home.
Three weeks after Sarah sailed for France on the United States, Red Chastain went out on his first long tour of sea duty, and Lucy was alone at Camp Pendleton for nearly eight months. She called me the night he left, the familiar liquor slur in her voice, the tears just under it.
“Gibby, can you come out here and see me? I’m going to die of loneliness by myself all that time.”
It was three-thirty in the morning, and it suddenly struck me with the clarity of revelation that there was no earthly reason why Lucy had to call me at that hour to tell me she was lonely for Red Chastain. I took a deep breath.
“Lucy,” I said, “no. I can’t come out there to see you. I can’t and I won’t. You’re a grown, married woman. You’ve got eight months to be safe from Red, if that’s what you want, and nothing you have to do and nobody to be accountable to, and I don’t want you to call me again unless it’s a certifiable, life-threatening emergency, and then it better be in the daylight, my time. If you’re lonesome, make some friends. Take a course. Plant a garden. Plant a tree. Write a book. But don’t tell me about it.”
“What would I write about, Gibby?”
“Anything, Luce,” I said. “Anything at all that comes into your head. I’m sure you’ll think of something.”
And I hung up the phone and turned off the light. The telephone rang twice after that, at thirty-minute intervals, but I ground my teeth and did not answer. It rang again the next night at eleven, and the next at eight, and both times I sat staring at it while it rang, fists clenched, teeth gritted, and after that it did not ring again. Whatever Lucy elected to do to pass the days and weeks and months until her husband came back to catch her up in their dreadful red waltz, I did not hear of it.
Fall passed, Christmas came and went, the spring was born and grew old. Sarah wrote vibrant, brimming letters and I answered with yearning ones. I saw friends or did not, ate or did not, listened to and played jazz or stayed home, buried myself in my underground tunnels and vaults and the cloistered aboveground stacks, slept, awoke, did it all again; and the emptiness where Sarah was not gradually filled, as the days passed and the time of her return approached, with a great, slumbering anticipation that was born in my groin as well as my heart. I did not think I could wait to see and touch and smell and taste her again.
She was due in at midmorning on the fifth of June, 1961. Ben and Dorothy Cameron came up from Atlanta to meet her, and I went up to the Plaza the night before she landed to meet them for dinner in the Oak Room. In all my years in New York, I had never been into the dark, graceful old room, with its air of age and privilege and substance. Ben and Dorothy always stayed at the Plaza; it had been Ben’s father’s accustomed lair when he visited New York, and as Ben said, the Camerons didn’t play around with tradition.
I looked at him closely that night, as if for the first time seeing the man the entire country would know, within a few years, as the aristocratic mayor of the Southern city that somehow managed to keep, in the fire storms of the mid-1960s, a kind of furious peace with its black citizens. Against the mellow old paneling of the Oak Room, I watched him toying with the silver and taking the level gray measure of the moneyed men and women around him, most of whom instinctively lifted their heads to stare at him, and I saw too that much of the laughter had gone out of his light Celt’s eyes, and been replaced with a kind of narrow measuring. His pupils were contracted to pinpoints in the dim light; that, and the web of white weather lines in the thin, tanned skin around his eyes, gave him the look of a man accustomed to gazing great distances. For the first time in my life, I felt just a little uneasy with him, not quite so effortlessly comfortable a
s I had with the lounging, laughing young father of Ben and Sarah. Dorothy, beside him, did not seem changed. In simple cream silk, which set off her vivid coloring and cameo features and enriched the dark hair and brows that were Sarah’s, she glowed like an Advent candle. I thought she looked very beautiful. Sarah would be a beautiful older woman.
Ben talked a little, after the dessert plates had been taken away and the old five-star cognac that he loved brought, about the six-point program for the city’s growth that Sarah had told me about earlier, and about the public relations effort he hoped would bring Atlanta into national focus.
“It’s called Forward Atlanta,” he said, and I laughed before I thought.
“God,” I said. “Talk about horn blowing and flag waving. It ain’t exactly subtle, is it?”
He grinned. “Nope,” he said. “Downright gauche. But I don’t knock it. In fact, I’m the one who thought of it. Atlanta is gauche, Shep. Always has been. But that gaucherie is going to set us on fire in the next ten years.”
“What about the race business?” I said. “That could literally burn you up.”
“That’s the kicker, of course,” he said, his grin fading. “That could sink us. But I don’t think it will. It’s not good for business. And I’ve got some agents in place who can do a lot to defuse it. But you’re right; it could be bad. We can’t let it happen, that’s all. We need the Negroes with us, not against us. We need their cooperation and we need their money. We can’t do everything that needs doing without them.”
“Can you do it even with them? It’s a radical proposal, Ben, to completely remake a city….”
“Yes. We can do it,” he said. “We can just do it. They call us the power structure, you know; sometimes, the Club. And we are those things, and that’s why we can get it done—we have a lot of money and we can finance the big stuff at home. And we’re in absolute accord on what needs to be done. That’s eighty percent of the battle. We can make the big push alone, by ourselves. But after that, to sustain it, we’ll have to have more than momentum. We’ll have to have outside money. And with that, of course, will come outsiders. And the Club, or we Buckhead guys, if you will, will be doomed. We know that; there it is. There just aren’t enough of you home town Young Turks coming up behind us.”
“Are you still pushing for me to come back to Atlanta?” I asked.
“I guess so,” he said.
“Why? The city you’re talking about doesn’t need another librarian.”
“The city I’m talking about needs another smart, thoughtful young man with money,” Ben Cameron said.
“I don’t have any money, Ben. I’m not apt to have any,” I said honestly. Surely he knew about the estrangement between me and my father.
“You don’t know what you have, Shep,” he said. “Your father never let you know, and never let your mother tell you. Do you even know where your family’s holdings are?”
“Not really,” I said. “Down in the southeast part of town somewhere around the old cotton mill, I think….”
“Well, I’ll show you exactly where when you get home.”
“Ben…”
“Goddamn it, Shep, you’ll have to come home eventually to marry Sarah, even if you leave the next day,” he said crisply. “I’m not going to let you get out of town without taking you by the hand and marching you down to Cabbagetown and showing you just where the Bondurant dough comes from.”
I lifted my hands and let them fall. I did not feel like arguing that my family’s real estate holdings were as unlikely to become mine as the Brooklyn Bridge was. My head was too full of tomorrow and the coming of Sarah.
They arranged to pick me up the next morning on the way over to the West Side docks, and I waved aside Ben’s offer of a cab and walked the forty blocks home. I walked slowly in the soft air, letting the slackening rhythm of the city night suck and swirl around me. I thought of nothing, and was happy. It was nearly midnight when I got back to my apartment, and the shrilling telephone had almost stopped ringing when I got the door unlocked and picked up the receiver.
I was fully expecting to hear Ben’s voice, or Dorothy’s, but the voice that came on the line in the little hollow of air that meant long distance was that of a crisp, businesslike young doctor in the base hospital at Camp Pendleton, California, and for a moment I could not take in what he was saying. And then I could: Lucy was in the hospital, five of her teeth knocked out and her broken jaw wired shut, with an additional broken collarbone and fractured forearm. And there was, in her scalp, a shallow, trench like laceration where the bullet from Red Chastain’s service revolver had grazed her.
I did not say anything, and the voice went on. The Pendleton MPs were looking for Lieutenant Chastain, it said, and Mrs. Chastain would be well enough to be released on the following Monday morning, but since she could not be alone, and since no one at the Atlanta number she had given them would speak with her doctors or her husband’s superiors, all of whom were very concerned for her precarious emotional state as well as her injuries, there seemed to be nowhere for her to go. She had said that her cousin, Mr. Bondurant, would come and take her to her home in Atlanta, and if it was possible, they hoped I would do so immediately. She was so frantic for me to come that they could not restrain her, and had twice had to snip the wires that held her shattered jaw so that she could breathe. They could not, the doctor said, be responsible for her condition if I did not come.
I sat on the edge of my bed for a long time, looking blindly at my feet in their smudged white bucks, sitting squarely together on the floor like good poodles commanded to stay. Then I lifted the receiver and called the Plaza.
I have never known Ben Cameron to be so coldly angry before or since. He said, “I see,” a couple of times while I talked, in a voice that was as flat and arctic as a tundra, and when I was done he said, “Shep, you are a complete and miserable goddamned fool if you go out to California after that poor little piece, and if you do, I can’t imagine how long it’s going to take before I can talk to you reasonably again.” And he left the line and handed the phone to Dorothy.
I really believe she understood. She indicated that she did. But she was greatly hurt and disappointed; I knew that, though she did not say so. Instead, in her lovely, low, patrician voice, she said, “What is it about Lucy, do you suppose, Shep? What do you see there, what do you sense?”
“I…it’s just that she’s so vulnerable, Dorothy,” I said, endlessly and utterly tired. “And she’s totally alone now, and helpless. And in spite of what you think and the way she acts sometimes, there’s something innately good and simple in her….”
“No,” Dorothy Cameron said. “There’s no such thing as innate goodness. Goodness is learned, hard. It presupposes kindness. And Lucy is not kind; she is too afraid and hungry for that. Innocence; that’s another matter. That’s what’s under Lucy, that’s what you sense. A terrible, ruthless, implacable innocence. But kindness is a corrupt angel, and it is learned, and Lucy has not learned it and never will learn it.”
She paused, and I heard her sigh, and heard a world of fatigue and defeat in the sigh.
“Of course you’ll have to go, Shep,” she said. “You can’t live your life, nor Sarah with you, under the shadow of a refusal to do so. I only ask that you be very, very careful with her. She is a danger to herself and a worse one to you. I’ll explain to Sarah. She’ll understand.”
But Sarah did not understand. By the time I came home from California almost a week later, with a pale, shrunken, nearly unrecognizable Lucy and installed her in her old room in the house on Peachtree Road, after having extracted from my mother and hers a reluctant promise of no I-told-you-so, and rushed to the downstairs telephone niche to call Sarah, it was to hear, from a muted and old-voiced Dorothy Cameron, that Sarah had, just two nights before, announced her engagement to Charlie Gentry. The announcement had been sent to both newspapers, Dorothy said, and would appear in the combined edition on Sunday. That was, of course, tomorrow. She
hoped that I would come by and speak to Sarah and to Charlie, who would be there with the family for the congratulatory calls that would follow the announcement as inevitably as the morning sun followed the dawn. Both were anxious to talk with me.
“I hope you will, Shep,” she said. “This has been a very, very hard thing for Sarah. It will be a kindness to her if you’ll come. She said to tell you that she’ll wait for you tomorrow afternoon in the studio.”
But I left Atlanta later that day and went back to New York without seeing her.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
When I would not go to them, they came to me. I had not been back in New York a week before the phone rang in my apartment, on a Friday evening, and I lifted it to hear Charlie Gentry’s voice. Even without the absence of the small hollowness that meant long distance I would have known that he was in the city with me. His voice had such an immediacy that I instinctively held the receiver away from my ear.
“Sarah and I are at the Plaza, and we want to see you,” he said without preamble. “None of us can live decently until we’ve talked. We’re not going to go home until we have. When have you got some time?”
He had not said “Hello,” or “How are you,” or identified himself. Despite his phlegm, Charlie had delicacy and empathy, and he knew that there was no need and no way to frame this conversation in convention. And he knew very well how I was. He had been that way for years: stricken and without Sarah.
Pain and a child’s simple, consuming fury at the unfairness of it all surged into the cold, whistling hollow that had filled my chest ever since I had heard Dorothy Cameron’s words the Saturday before, and washed back out, tidelike. I saw rather than felt that my knuckles around the black plastic telephone receiver were blue-white, and my whole body was clenched, as one does just after a sudden injury to brace for the pain that will inevitably come boiling in. I hated them both in that moment, weakly and hopelessly, and I felt tears prickle in my eyes. But I willed the pain to stay back.
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