Peachtree Road

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  I fled back to Princeton and Firestone Library a few times that summer, but the small, persistent shade of Sarah Cameron was so palpable on that leaf-drowned campus that I kept half turning to her, and finding only vivid, shimmering air where she had just been, and I could not go back again. Obscure anger flared at those times; anger at life for stripping me of both Sarah and Princeton; anger at Sarah for purloining even Princeton from me; and most painful of all, anger at myself for letting her go. I could taste the validity of this last, and it smote me so that I buried it deep, and in time the fresh, blistering pain dulled from searing agony to visceral ache, and I knew, gratefully, that if I walked gingerly and held myself lightly, I could manage, in some fashion, to live with that.

  I did not hear from Sarah and Charlie again, of course. I believe I would have, if I had reached out a hand, apologized, made the first move, but I could not. It would not have brought her back, and any lesser payoff was not worth the enormous effort. I heard, in July, that they had moved the Thanksgiving wedding back to September, and that it would be very small, families and a few old friends only, in the little walled garden of the Muscogee Avenue house. I heard this from my mother, who seemed as aggrieved at being deprived of the season’s undisputed social event as she was furious at my defection from the house of Cameron.

  “I thought you’d want to know, and I don’t guess anybody else from here will bother to tell you,” she said on the telephone. She did not say that everyone there thought I was a bounder of the first water, and wondered avidly if Sarah was pregnant by me and Charlie was rescuing her, but the words shrilled and trembled on the wires between us, and I hung up as soon as I decently could. No wedding invitation came; I was grateful for that.

  My mother was right. I had heard from almost no one in Atlanta since I had brought Lucy home from California in June—not that that was unusual. With the exception of her and Sarah and Dorothy Cameron, I had seldom heard from home. Lucy called, a few days after Sarah and Charlie had returned to Atlanta, and when I hung up the telephone at the sound of her voice, called again. This time I let the phone ring, and she did not call a third time. Letters came from her, though, and kept up for some weeks, but I tore them up unopened, and finally they dwindled and stopped. I could not think of Lucy in those days without a red-fired blackness flooding my brain, a blind, implacable rage that frightened me badly. But it, too, abated after the letters stopped. By and large, the deadness held, and when it did not, the ache could, after all, be borne.

  And then, in early August, Dorothy Cameron called.

  “Shep, dear, it’s Dorothy,” she said, and in that split instant the anesthetized ache fled and a pure, silver and terrible new grief like a piano wire stabbed my heart. I wanted to weep, to keen like an Irishman at a wake, to wail like a banshee; I wanted to crawl through the eight hundred-odd miles of wire between West Twenty-first Street and Muscogee Avenue and lay my head in her lap and sob like a child, brokenhearted and inconsolable, until I fell asleep there, finally spent. I literally could not speak around the knot of anguish in my throat. It was not only Sarah who was lost to me now.

  I managed some sort of strictured croak that did not fool Dorothy Cameron.

  “Oh, my dear,” she said. “I am sorry. I haven’t called until now because I knew it would be as awful for you as it is for me; I haven’t been able to pick up the phone to call you without crying. It’s ridiculous. Neither of us has died. Ben is really quite annoyed with me. But it’s time to stop this foolishness now.”

  And magically, the lethal knot loosened and I was able to speak. It has always been Dorothy Cameron’s greatest gift, that of healing.

  “I’ve missed you,” I said. “And I didn’t even know how much till I heard your voice just now. I would have called, but I’ve acted like such a horse’s ass I didn’t think you’d want to talk to me. God, Dorothy, I’ve made such a mess of everything….”

  “Yes, you have,” she said, but she said it so matter-of-factly that even in the admission there was healing. “But you’re the one who’s been hurt the most by it, by far. We’re pretty much all right down here. Sad to say, the world has a nasty way of stepping over our prostrate bodies and going right on. Hiding away up there and not answering letters or the telephone is not necessary and really not very smart. I’m calling to ask you to reconsider coming home. Just for a visit, of course.”

  “Dorothy,” I said, “I can’t do that. I agree with you that hiding out is stupid as hell, but one thing I can’t do is come home yet. Did…did Sarah ask you to call?” A starved and craven hope slunk up from somewhere out of the ice-packed depths of me, skulking like a coyote through my heart.

  “Sarah? No,” Dorothy said. “You were awfully rough on her, Shep. I don’t think Sarah’s going to call you, or Charlie either, and in any case, I wouldn’t intercede for either of them. They’re fully capable of handling their own affairs, no matter how badly I might think they’re doing it. No, Sarah didn’t ask me to call you, but Lucy did. She says you won’t answer her calls and letters, and she needs very badly to see you and talk to you. I believe she does, Shep.”

  “Lucy? My cousin Lucy?” Simple astonishment made me stupid. I had packed Lucy at the very bottom of the ice crevasse, lower even than the pain of Sarah and Charlie. Lucy was the last name I had ever expected to hear on Dorothy Cameron’s lips, and to hear it couched in a request for help was as alien to my ears as if she had begun speaking Senegalese.

  “Lucy, yes,” Dorothy said briskly, and I could tell she was losing patience with my obtuseness. I shook my head like a dog coming out of water.

  “Okay,” I said. “What kind of trouble has Lucy gotten herself into now? And I warn you, Dorothy, I don’t much want to hear it, whatever it is. Lucy has wrecked things for me the last time she’s going to. She’s a grown-up woman, a divorcée, and she’s got enough sense and skills to look after herself now. Let her do it, or let her find somebody else to hang on to. I can’t afford to talk to Lucy right now, much less come down there and grub around trying to clean up whatever mess she’s made.”

  “As a matter of fact, she hasn’t made any kind of mess that I can see,” Dorothy said equably. From childhood she had been used to my outbursts; I had felt safe in letting her field them when I had trusted no one else but Lucy with them. “Rather the opposite, in fact. She has a job that she seems to love, and she’s paying what she can toward her room and board to your parents, and I’ve never seen her quite like this. She seems…happy. Just happy. Not excited, or keyed up, or manic; there’s a sort of inner glow to her, and a quietness that I never saw before, and that I frankly find most appealing. I think she may have a new young man, though she won’t say, but in any case she’s been coming over and talking with me in the evenings for the past few weeks, and I’ve simply never seen such a change in a young woman. She says you’re responsible; I can’t imagine what you said to her. I don’t think it’s a pose, either; I’d spot that in Lucy in a minute. Sarah thinks it’s genuine, too. Lucy has spent a good bit of time with Sarah, going shopping with her and helping with wedding details. Sarah says she apologized very genuinely for all the trouble she caused for everybody, and with real tears in her eyes. Sarah was quite touched. Charlie’s still holding out, but you know Charlie….”

  I did, indeed, and knew that Charlie had what Hemingway called an infallible shit detector when it came to Lucy Bondurant. I did, too.

  “Well, I’m glad to hear she’s not in trouble, but if I were you I’d walk softly around the new Lucy,” I said. “She’s capable of being whoever she needs to be. This makes me nervous as hell.”

  “I know,” she said. “That’s why I think you should come home and see for yourself. She wants you to so badly that you can tell she’s nearly bursting with it. She says she really needs to try and make things right for you, that she can’t get on with her life until she does, and that she doesn’t know how to reach you. Shep, I’m convinced that that’s just what she means to do—get on with he
r life on her own. The work she’s doing is really quite valuable, and she’s done some writing, too, that she says something might come of one day or another. It’s as though she knows a lovely secret; as though there’s a candle lit within her. Luminous…”

  Well, I thought. Luminous is the word for Lucy. Always was. What is it really? I wonder. Aloud I said, “I’m not going to come home, Dorothy; I just can’t do that yet. But I’ll talk to her if she still wants me to. Tell her to call me. I’ll take it this time. And…Dorothy…how is Sarah? How is she, really? Is she…you know…happy?”

  “Happy?” She tasted the word as if she did not know what it meant. “No, I don’t think Sarah is particularly happy right now, Shep, but she’s very much all right. She will be very useful in her marriage and here in Atlanta, and I believe that in time that will make her happy. She could not be useful in New York. No matter what you think, she could not be. And for girls like Sarah, being useful is far more important in the long run than being merely happy.”

  My heart hurt, briefly and profoundly. Sarah was not happy. Three weeks away from her marriage and she was not happy. Useful…useful Sarah. In that instant I saw her life.

  “Damn your high-minded crap, Dorothy,” I said, not loudly, but with trembling vehemence in my voice.

  “Shep, don’t,” she said. “We love you. We feel your pain. All of us do. Don’t lash out at us like this.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  That night I wrote Sarah and Charlie, a letter apiece, short but as warm and penitent as I could make them, benedictory. I apologized for my behavior and gave my blessing, feeling like a Borgia pope as I did so, false and corrupted. I love you, I signed off to both of them. I wept a little, tired, shamed tears in the hot, thick darkness as I dropped the letters into the mailbox on the corner of Twenty-first and Ninth, but I felt somehow ennobled too, exalted. I imagined Sarah opening hers in her studio and reading it, saw the blessing of the autumn light from the window wall on her face, saw her close her glowing eyes and droop her dark head over the letter. I could not see where Charlie would open his, for his apartment in Colonial Homes was not a part of the country of our youth, and it seemed that I could really see Charlie Gentry only there. He seemed caught in our mutual boyhood as in amber, and I could no more imagine him at the altar with Sarah, or in a new white bed with her, than I could at his executive’s desk at the Coca-Cola Company’s new headquarters on North Avenue. I was glad for that.

  Two days later a telegram came from them, signed, all our love, Sarah and Charlie. Please, please, it said, come home for the wedding.

  But I could not do that.

  During the next three weeks I managed quite well not to think of them, but I did think a lot about Lucy.

  “She says you’re responsible for the change in her,” Dorothy Cameron had said. “I can’t imagine what you said to her.”

  For a long time I could not remember, either, and then I thought perhaps I did. It had been on the plane that lumbered interminably toward Atlanta from Los Angeles, somewhere over Utah, I thought, or at least early in the trip, before fatigue and the afterwash of pain and drugs took her down into sleep. I had been trying to have a serious talk with her, but it had turned out to be pretty much a monologue, for she would not talk about Red Chastain or her marriage, except to say that it was, of course, over.

  The Pendleton MPs had finally tracked Red to a fly-specked cantina back room on an unimaginable side street in Tijuana, and had brought him back to base in handcuffs on the day before we left for home; two of his superior officers had come to see Lucy in the hospital, to ask what action she thought she might want taken, but she had begun to tremble and cry again and so the doctor and I had asked them to leave, and they had, and we quit that high, sun-punished plain without seeing her husband again, and to my knowledge she never saw him again while she lived. I knew that she planned to file for divorce as soon as she got back to Atlanta, but beyond that, she had no plans at all, and so I switched my attack to her work, and what she hoped to do with the rest of her life. My own seemed, then, firmly set in its own incandescent orbit, and I wanted to get back to it and on with it, and to see her set onto some path that was least likely to disturb mine. I was wild, at that time, to be home with Sarah.

  “You could be a really good writer,” I said to her. “You could be published nationally right now, that’s how good you are. All your professors said so. I know from reading your stuff—what little there’s been of it. You know so, too. But instead you’ve wasted all those good years screwing around with people like Red Chastain. God, you Southern women. You’re content with so damned little.”

  “Lord, Gibby, are you one of those feminists?” Lucy said, gingerly tasting with her broken mouth the term that had just begun to creep into the vernacular.

  “I guess I am,” I said, after thinking about it. “Aren’t you? I thought all women with half a brain would be.”

  “No,” she said. “I hate women. You know that. Men are all you can trust.”

  “Lucy, just look at your men,” I said in despair.

  “Yes, Gibby, but they’re predictable, all of them. I know what they’re going to do. I can handle that. Women are mysterious. You can’t read them. And that makes them automatic enemies. It’s better to have a man on your side, as well as by it.”

  “That’s bullshit,” I said. “It’s an excuse you women use for not doing anything of your own with your lives.”

  “Well, we’ve raised a damned lot of you Southern boys’ children,” she said sharply, stung.

  “No you haven’t,” I said. “Black women do that.”

  She was silent for a long time, and then she fell asleep and slept the rest of the way home. Could that small snippet of talk, words spoken in a sealed metal cylinder hung somewhere over the fabled red West, really have changed Lucy Bondurant? I could not imagine that it had, but I could recall no other….

  Charlie and Sarah were married on the Saturday after Labor Day, and I did not mark the occasion in any special way at all. I had saved a lot of chores for that Saturday, and at the particular moment that I estimated Sarah Cameron became Sarah Gentry, I was midway between Gristede’s and my laundry with a package of Kraft macaroni and cheese dinner and a sack full of soiled clothing. I passed the kosher deli on the corner of Ninth and Twenty-third, and muttered aloud, “Mazel tov, Sarah,” and on impulse went into the dark, garlicky shop and bought a carton of chopped liver, which Sarah had loved with an absolutely Hebraic avidity. I went on home in the still-hot September twilight and put the liver into the refrigerator, and the telephone rang as I closed the scabrous door.

  It was Lucy.

  “Hey, Gibby,” she said, and all of a sudden joy and sadness and pain and glee and simple one-celled nostalgia swept me, so that my voice, as I said, “Hey, Luce,” sounded like that of someone else entirely in my own ears.

  “What’s happening?” I said.

  “I’ve just come back from the wedding,” she said, and her voice, around the small exhalations of the inevitable cigarette, sounded soft and full of something that I did not associate with her. Tenderness? Pity?

  “Yeah?” I said. “And how was the wedding?”

  “Well, it was very sweet. Very small and simple, and over in almost no time, and not really so awful at all. Nobody cried or carried on, and both of them seemed okay happy but not delirious. Already settled, somehow. Sarah hugged me before they left and told me to call you up and tell you about it before some old battle-ax did, and that they missed you and hoped you’d come see them when they got back from their honeymoon, and that was that. I was the only one of our family to go; not many outside people were there at all. I just wanted to tell you before anybody else did, or sent you some stupid clipping, that it was okay. It really was. You wouldn’t have minded it at all.”

  There was something different; it was there in her voice, like a quality of light. I kept listening for the bright sharpness, the wild-honey irony, the little tongues
of captivating malice that I knew so well, but they were not there. Nothing was but gentleness and a most un-Lucylike succor.

  “I…well, thanks, Luce,” I said lamely. “I appreciate that. I’m glad you went. Dorothy said you’d really been a help to her and Sarah since you got back.”

  “I hope so,” she said simply. “I’ve been awful to Sarah all my life, and I hope I can begin to make it up to her. I wish I thought I could to you.”

  “No need,” I said. For the first time in my life I was uncomfortable talking to Lucy. I could not think of anything to say. I felt none of the red rage toward her that I had earlier in the summer, but this quiet-voiced stranger called up no other emotion to take its place. It was like trying to make telephone conversation to the most casual of acquaintances.

  “So where are they going on their honeymoon?” I said, merely for something to say, and then was horrified at myself. I did not want to know, did not want Lucy to think that I did, and shrank from the images that the word evoked as from a pit of fire and vipers.

  “I think just up to Tate,” Lucy said, and I smiled involuntarily. Of course. Tate. The big old family cottage up on Burnt Mountain, which Sarah loved so much. I could see her there, diving like a brown otter into the dark blue, freezing little mountain lake, riding her bicycle around the little dirt road that ringed it, tossing lichen-furred logs from the woodpile beside the back door onto the fire booming in the great stone fireplace, standing hipshot at the old stove deftly handling a cast-iron skillet. I could see square, dark Charlie stumping along behind her, standing beside her, looking up at her from the disreputable easy chair beside the fire with his whole soul in his eyes. But I could not see them climb the old pine staircase together, toward the bedrooms off the gallery upstairs; I closed my eyes against that….

  Of course Sarah would take Charlie up to Tate. It was where we would have gone, she and I. I had not thought of it before, but I knew that it was. Sea Island would have come later.