Peachtree Road

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  “Lucy, what you’re meant to do with your life is write,” I said. I said it as neutrally as possible, so as not to echo the other furious voices in this house. “What is it you do at this Damascus House?”

  “I’m registering voters,” she said. “I’m matching government resources to individual needs. I’m working in the soup kitchen and driving the bus and getting bail bond money for the sit-ins, and…oh, Gibby, there’s so much to do.”

  Her blue eyes spilled out a light very near that of madness, and I was almost afraid of the otherworldliness about her.

  “Can’t you do as much for the movement by writing about it as by dishing up soup?” I said. “You must see what kind of career you could have as a novelist; you told me about your reviews. My God, the whole town is turning out to honor you tomorrow, practically. You have great power; couldn’t you reach more people that way?”

  “I love them, Gibby,” she said simply. “I love the black people. I need to be close to them. They’re better friends than any I ever had. I want to be right in this with them; Clay says we have to walk among them and with them to have any credibility.”

  “Ah, I see,” I said, thinking that I did. “Clay. The good father. Lucy, don’t you see that you’re doing nothing in the world but chasing off after another man, doing what your latest savior tells you to? Don’t you see that?”

  She smiled at me. It was a very sweet smile, and a gentle one. “I don’t blame you for thinking that, but you’re wrong, Gibby,” she said. “I told you I’ve changed, and I meant that. You’ll see what I mean about Clay when you meet him. The sheer goodness of him is just…consuming.”

  I was silent, looking at her in the lamplight. She seemed content to sit under my gaze without talking, curled up bonelessly in the depth of the sofa, smoking. At least she had not forsworn that. It struck me that Lucy, who had never been able to assure her safety by finding a trustworthy protector in any of her men, had decided to assure it now by being a very good girl indeed. The bad girl had, after all, come to endless grief. And who was, after all, more assured of society’s approbation and benison than its saints? I knew that this premise was as false as any she had lived by before, and that she would eventually come to fresh grief from adherence to it. I thought, also, that whether she knew it or not, there was a good measure of the child spiting its parents here.

  For indeed, from what she had told me, Aunt Willa and my mother and father were, for once, totally united in their disapproval of Lucy’s association with “that crazy radical and the niggers down there.” Quit that awful business, they had said, and get a decent job somewhere on the Northside—like the society section of the newspaper, or perhaps teaching in a little private academy in Buckhead, or even helping out in the gift shop at Piedmont Hospital as so many of the Leaguers do—or move out of the house. I could only marvel at her tranquility in the face of the ultimatum. Heretofore, she would have been stricken to blind white terror at the prospect of being ousted from the only security she had ever known.

  “I take it you’re not going to quit, then,” I said. It was not a question.

  “Of course not.”

  “Well, then, have you got an apartment or something?”

  “Or something, I guess. I’ve got better than an apartment, Gibby,” she said. “I’ve got, or I’m going to have, a husband.”

  This time I could only stare at her, as dumb as the proverbial ox there in the living room of the summer-house, which had been since childhood shelter and haven to both of us. The air between us seemed to shimmer just as her eyes and face did, and I felt dizzy and disoriented. I remembered that I had had no dinner, and had last eaten a hasty sandwich in the library employees’ cafeteria at noon. It seemed a thousand years ago, and in another country.

  She reached over and put her hands over mine, and looked intently into my face. I could see her features with stark, winter-light clarity: the extraordinary blue eyes, on fire; the high, straight-bridged nose; the kid-leather texture of her skin; the tender pink pulp of her mouth. But I could not make them come together into a face.

  “Be happy for me, Gibby,” she said, her voice little more than a whisper. “I love him. I respect him. He’s brave and committed and strong, and he adores the ground I walk on. He’s older—he’s thirty-eight—and he’s an accountant who’s been with Damascus House since Clay started it, and he’s solid and quiet and wry and cynical and he has a wonderful smile and the strength of the earth, of the world….”

  “An accountant. Lord, Lucy. Does he have a name?” I said.

  She laughed. “Jack. Jack Venable. John Creighton Venable, of the Chattanooga Venables. He’s an accountant mainly because his family has money. It’s even older money than your folks’, and his folks won’t speak to him, either; we have an awful lot in common. He moved here about two years ago; he’s had a terrible time in his life, Gibby, and he needs me as much as I do him. His wife—Kitty, they called her—ran off with another woman and left him with two little boys. Toby and Thomas; they’re nine and eleven now. The boys found her note and read it before Jack did…. She was always unstable, but nobody suspected she was a lesbian. Those poor children! Toby, the littlest one, didn’t talk for almost a year after that. I’m going to take such good care of those children, Gibby, you just won’t believe it’s me. And Jack…he’s just the most wonderful father.”

  “Yes, but…an accountant? Audits and P and Ls amid the great unwashed masses?” I grinned. I could no more conceive of Lucy married to an accountant than to a Bantu chieftain. Less, as a matter of fact.

  “Don’t knock it, Gibby,” she said evenly, and her eyes snapped fire. “Those great unwashed masses, as you so charmingly put it, need a few little minor things like household budgets and help with welfare and social security. Frivolous stuff like that. Jack does it for them twenty hours a day for money you’d drop in five minutes at John Jarrell’s. What are you doing?”

  I reddened, and was quiet.

  When I met Jack Venable later that night, I saw immediately that this plain, pale man, with his stark white hair and his air of deep stillness that verged on stolidity and his patience and obvious quiet enchantment with the burning, leaping flame that was Lucy was, indeed, just what she had said he was—a wonderful father. For her. The perception was unavoidable. I wondered if he saw it. I did not think that she did.

  Well, why not? I thought, around the ghostly old desolation, the old, old Lucy-loss that the news of her impending marriage had resurrected in my heart. Maybe what she needs is somebody older and settled, who’ll take care of her and cherish her. God knows, she’s had little enough of that.

  Jack Venable and his motherless children lived in a century-old farmhouse, she said that evening in the summerhouse, outside the little town of Lithonia, twenty miles to the east of the city. The boys attended public school while Jack commuted to his job, and were cared for after school by an old black woman, who also cooked and cleaned and did the family laundry. Lucy was enchanted with the prospect of living in the country, on a real farm.

  “Later on we’ll raise chickens and pigs and…stuff,” she bubbled. “And I’ll have vegetables and flowers, and the children will have a pony, and Jack can watch his birds and things…. It’s perfect. And meanwhile he and I can ride to and from Damascus House together. Oh, Gibby, it’s what I always needed and didn’t even know it—this commitment to something really important, and a truly good, quiet man, and simplicity…nature, the seasons, the earth….”

  Remembering the firefly who so thrived and shimmered in the insular, urban air of Buckhead, my heart shrank at the thought of Lucy on a farm in rural DeKalb County. But I did not, of course, voice my apprehension.

  “Well, Lucy, sweetie,” I said, “it all sounds…as nearly perfect as this earth gets. When is the wedding? Can I come be best man?”

  Her face flamed, and she dropped her eyes. “Well, you see, Gibby,” she said, “it’s going to be right soon, maybe like in a couple of weeks, and Glenn—G
lenn Pickens, you know, the Camerons’ Glenn—wants to be our best man, and of course Clay will perform the ceremony. It’s going to be at Damascus House, really a tiny affair, and only the…the Negroes who live there, the residents…are going to be guests. Nobody here even knows it yet. I thought with the way my mother and your folks felt about everything, and the way some of the Negroes feel about rich white people…”

  “I’m as poor as Job’s turkey, you know that,” I said, stung. Even her discomfort did not compensate for the obvious fact that I would not be welcome at my cousin Lucy’s wedding. “Come on. This is me, Luce.”

  “I know, Gibby, and if it were just me and Jack, I wouldn’t think of having a wedding without you. But your daddy—your family—owns an awful lot of land down around Damascus House, and people down there know it. Some of the folks there are tenants of y’all’s. White absentee landlords are not exactly popular down there.”

  “I don’t own any of it,” I said stubbornly. “It’s my father’s, not mine. And nobody knows who I am, anyway.”

  “Yes,” she said in a subdued voice, “they do.”

  I let it go at that. I did not, really, want to give her pain. And she would, as she said, be cared for, be safe…. Atlanta was, after all, nothing to me anymore.

  “Well,” I said, as cheerfully as I could, “when do I get to meet this paragon of virtue, this Jack Venable?”

  “Later tonight, I hope. He’s been out of town all week,” she said. “But he’s going to meet us down at Paschal’s La Carrousel tonight at ten. One of your high muckety-muck jazz guys is playing down there, and I thought you might like to go with us. Glenn Pickens is going to be there; you know Glenn. You know where it is; we’ve been before, remember? Senior year at North Fulton? Lord, you don’t care that it’s a black club, do you?”

  “You know I don’t,” I said. “But isn’t Jack going to be at the autograph party? Or the cocktail thing?”

  “No,” she smiled ruefully. “He hates the Driving Club and everything it stands for, though with his family’s background I’m sure he could get in if he wanted to…or had the money. His family has cut him off that, too. And he isn’t very high on my writing, so I’m not going to make him come to the thing at Rich’s. He hates all that publishing stuff.”

  “He sure seems to hate a lot of things, for a licensed professional peacemaker,” I said. “Don’t tell me he doesn’t think your writing is any good.”

  “Oh, no, it’s just that he thinks I’m so much more valuable to…society, I guess, at Damascus House. And he’s right, Gibby. Writing seems awfully self-indulgent in times like these. Later, when the movement has accomplished what it means to, and I’ve quit work and we’re home in the country…he says he won’t mind me writing some then.”

  “Good of him,” I muttered. I did not like the sound of this.

  But I did like Jack Venable when I met him later that night, on the weedy sidewalk down in Southwest Atlanta in front of Paschal’s Motor Hotel. It was nearly ten-thirty, and there was no one else on the street in front of the unprepossessing two-story motel and restaurant that was the unofficial epicenter of the fledgling civil rights movement. I felt as if I were in another Atlanta, one I had not really known existed, for this was a street of shadows and banal shabbiness and thin, dreary light from the few streetlights left unbroken, and I was distinctly glad when the stocky figure that stepped out of the doorway proved to be Lucy’s future husband. I had, as Lucy had said, been to La Carrousel before, but it was with a jeering, jostling group of Pinks and Jells, and in another time altogether, and we had gone in the same spirit in which we went to jig shows at the auditorium and to Peacock Alley to laugh at Blind Willie. This lunar street was not a place in which to laugh. I was acutely conscious that an aura of Buckhead and the Driving Club hung about me as powerfully as an actual scent. Lucy seemed untouched by the sense of strangeness and incipient peril; we had left her VW in a parking place a block and a half down the street toward Atlanta University, and she had walked the prickling no-man’s-land beside me with the same slouching ease that she walked the waxed floors of the Driving Club. Once she had glanced at me.

  “Relax.” She grinned. “You’d think we were going into the heart of darkness. Got your blowgun on you? The group we’re going to hear, incidentally, is called the Mau Maus.”

  “God, really?” I said.

  “Christ. No. It’s called the Ramsey Lewis Trio,” she said. “They’re terrific; I’ve got one of their albums. Jack got to know them when he was doing some work in Washington. They’re more civilized than we are.”

  “I know who Ramsey Lewis is,” I said shortly. “I have every album he ever made.” It irritated me that she had so quickly scented the slight, sour fear coming off me like heat. Physical bravery has always been hard-won for me, but Lucy was born with an abundance of it.

  I knew, in the way that a native will know things about his city without knowing how he became aware of them, that some of the greatest jazz names in the world had for decades come to La Carrousel, the motel’s club, on a regular basis. Basie, Hampton, Don Shirley, Red Norvo, and the entire pantheon before and after them, ducked in and out of town to play their incomparable sets in that elaborately ordinary, even dingy, cinder-block motel and restaurant and club, and very few whites ever heard them, or even knew that they were there. The Paschal brothers did not advertise. They did not have to. People in the large black community who knew jazz, and a few favored whites, always seemed to know who was in town when, and the club was always jammed.

  We stood on the sidewalk for a moment, blinking in the light from Paschal’s sign, and when Jack Venable came out to meet us, Lucy’s smile lit her face with an intensity that paled the neon.

  “Hi, sweetie,” she said, going to him with both hands out. “Have you been waiting long? Come over here and meet Gibby.”

  “Hi,” he said, kissing her on the cheek. “No, I’ve just been walking around softly and carrying a big banjo. Hello, Shep. I damned sure ain’t going to call you Gibby. I don’t think I’ll kiss you, either.”

  “God forbid,” I said, grinning in response to his sweet white smile. Except for that, and the white hair, he looked so astoundingly anonymous that he might have been sent from Central Casting to play a middle-aged man in a crowd. He was pale all over, from his thinning hair to his small blue eyes, webbed and pouched in fine wrinkles, to his face and hands and arms. He wore transparent plastic-rimmed glasses and a beige golf shirt and tan gabardine trousers and old desert boots, and his stomach was soft and mounded over the belt of the slacks. His jowls and the underside of his arms were loose. He did not miss being short by far.

  But the smile was wonderful, wrapping you in celebration, and his voice was deep and good, and I liked the way he looked at Lucy. I had seen Charlie Gentry look at Sarah that way, and I knew that all of this man, flesh, spirit and sinew, was extended as votive offering to the slender girl-woman whose hands he held.

  “You all ready?” he said. “Glenn’s waiting for us inside. He went ahead to get a table. I don’t know who else will be around. The word is that the man himself is coming, a little later.”

  Lucy said, softly, “Oh…”

  “The man?” I asked.

  “King,” he said over his shoulder. “MLK. He’s here a lot. The guy could teach a course in jazz at any university in the country, if he wasn’t otherwise engaged.”

  A little frisson played on my backbone, vertebra by vertebra. The night became, suddenly, very real. I was not slumming in a Negro jive joint where I might take my ease and watch the jolly blacks disport themselves for my amusement. I was walking into the nerve center of a movement whose purpose and passion paled with its simple human significance anything my privileged and pallid life had known, and I would be, for a few hours, among the awesome young men and women who had made and were making it happen. I might even be in the presence of one of the great and luminous legends of my time or any other. Nonchalance fled.

  Thre
ading my way through the close-crowding small tables, pushing through the near-palpable planes of smoke lying motionless in the air, I was keenly aware of eyes on us. Jack and Lucy walked ahead. I followed them erectly, my head held high, a silly-feeling, unbanishable smile on my mouth. I had never before been one of the few whites in the midst of an all-black crowd, and I was aware that a part of me was searching the room for hostility as a wolf would sniff the wind.

  But there was no hostility and there was very little curiosity, that I could feel. It was a quiet crowd, with only the sinuous, seminal flow of the music winding through it like a great, joyous heartbeat. I had time to think, stumbling after Lucy and Jack, that Sarah would have loved the sound of the Ramsey Lewis Trio, and would have walked in the prickling darkness of La Carrousel as naturally and fluidly as she walked into, or out of, water. But I could not. I was rigid to my eyebrows with the desire not to appear as if I were slumming. In truth, I had never felt less like Lord Bountiful in my life. I was consumed with a simple desire to let everyone see how grateful I was to be there. I caught myself smiling right and left, and felt my face go hot in the darkness.

  “Jesus, will you stop nodding like somebody in a bad play, Gibby?” Lucy whispered over her shoulder, amused. “You look like Lord Mountbatten reviewing the troops.”

  They stopped at a table against a far wall and lowered themselves into chairs, and I dropped into one at the end of the table. Glenn Pickens sat across from me, not smiling but not frowning either, and when he had kissed Lucy lightly on her proffered cheek and hit Jack’s shoulder softly with his lightly balled fist, he said pleasantly and neutrally, “Hello, Shep. It’s been a long time.”

  “Hello, Glenn,” I said. “It has. How are you? You’re looking good.”

  He was. I remembered him as a thin, intense, reedy-necked boy, a jug-eared, caramel colored stripling eternally polishing one or another of Ben Cameron’s succession of black Lincolns or passing a tray with tongue-clamping concentration at some soiree or other of Dorothy’s. But he had filled out since then, and seemed to have grown considerably taller, so that he bulked large in the semidark of the room. His head was long and narrow and well shaped, and either the jug ears had receded or his skull had grown to accommodate them, and the glasses that now sat on his oddly Indian nose were horn-rimmed, giving him a scholarly, prosperous air. I remembered Lucy saying that his grades at Morehouse had been extraordinary, and that he planned to get a law degree at Howard when he felt that he was no longer needed in the movement, but that he had become so valuable to Dr. King, along with a few other young lieutenants like Julian Bond and Andrew Young and John Lewis, that she could not foresee a time when he could do so. I knew, too, that he had served considerable time in exceedingly inhospitable jails around the South, and that those young shoulders had felt the bite of more than one truncheon and fire hose. I was stricken suddenly mute in his presence. I had thought, when I heard those things about him, how odd it was for a figure that had been almost part of the furniture of my childhood to be transmuted, willy-nilly, into a warrior on the ramparts of history. Interesting, I had thought.