Peachtree Road

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  Now, in his presence, I could not seem to speak. I caught myself about to say, “Tell me what you’ve been doing,” and reddened again, thinking that saying it to him would be as incongruous as saying it to Martin Luther King himself. The music swelled up then, and I was grateful for the din.

  Across the table, Lucy leaned over to talk to the young woman at Glenn Pickens’s side, and Jack held up two fingers for the waitress. The girl with Glenn was very pretty, almost as striking as Lucy in the dark room. She looked smart and finished and composed, and there was about her an air of crisp authority. I thought that she seemed vaguely familiar, but I could not find the association. She wore a simple beige linen skirt and silk shirt, but they were so perfectly cut and so fluidly poured over her small, ripe body that they might have been cut and hand sewn for her. I thought that she was built like Sarah, and she had Sarah’s ease and elegance and presence, except that she was a rich, shining chocolate brown. My own whiteness seemed to wink rottenly in the gloom beside all the rich shades of dark flesh around me.

  They’re light-years ahead of me, I thought, lumping Lucy and Jack into the world of the young woman and Glenn Pickens. My world is practically second nature to them, but I can’t be at ease for five minutes in theirs. It was probably a mistake to come here.

  Lucy touched my hand. “This is Gwen Caffrey,” she said, her hand laid lightly on the dark girl’s arm. “She’s the new six o’clock anchor at Channel Seven. She’s very, very good at what she does and she’s mean as a snake, so watch your step and your mouth.”

  She smiled, and the girl smiled, and held out her hand. I took it. It was warm and surprisingly rough, as if she did hard work with her hands. Perhaps she did. Or had.

  “I’m glad to meet you,” I said. “I’ve never met an anchor before, much less a lady anchor.”

  “Nor a black one either, I’ll be bound,” she said, and it was so nearly what I had been thinking that I felt the traitorous blood rush up my neck into my face yet again. Shit, I thought, I’ve blushed more tonight than I did in grammar and high school put together. She laughed, but it was a friendly laugh. I smiled uncertainly.

  “Relax,” she said. “Nobody else has, either. There haven’t been but a handful of us, and none before me in Atlanta. I’ve never met a Princeton man before, so we’re even.”

  “Lucy’s been talking again,” I said, just to have something to say. I was not exactly coming off as a raconteur this evening.

  “No, actually it was Glenn who told me about you,” Gwen Caffrey said. “He said he knew you when you were all growing up in Buckhead.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “But I’m surprised he remembered me. There were such a lot of us around the Camerons’ all the time—”

  “And all little white kids look alike,” Glenn Pickens said from across the table. I could not tell if he was teasing or not; his impassive face did not change, or his eyes behind the thick glasses. Somehow I did not think he was. I remembered that Lucy had said earlier, of the blacks at Damascus House, “They know who you are,” and I felt naked and uneasy. I had not ever considered that I might exist as a person to Glenn Pickens, son of Benjamin Cameron’s chauffeur, any more than he had existed, as a person, to me.

  Lucy and Jack Venable laughed, easily and naturally, and I thought that Glenn Pickens was smiling, though it was more a very small grimace and looked as though it might split his carved taffy face. So I grinned too, feeling like a blundering albatross in a flock of lustrous crows. A willowy young waitress came by, and hugged Glenn Pickens briefly, and we ordered a round of drinks. The music, a playful piano weaving in and out around a bass and drums, swarmed through the room like a loosened hive of bees; the very walls throbbed with it, a teasing rhythm now bright as a school of minnows in sundappled shallows, now as glistening-dark as viscera, with a heavy blues beat and a witty, self-mocking counterpoint. I swam into it instinctively, my feet tapping with it, my face turning to it of its own volition. The pianist, a crew-cut young man with glasses who might have been, like Jack, an accountant, raised a cheerful hand to us, and Jack and Glenn Pickens saluted back. Lucy looked young and at ease and very happy; I knew that she was loving the night and the lounge and the sound and the evening. I began to relax, very slightly.

  Lucy leaned over and touched my shoulder.

  “Okay?” she said. “Do you like it?”

  The trio slid into Ellington’s “Come Sunday,” and I smiled at Lucy. “It’s wonderful. They’re terrific. It’s a treat to hear them in person; I never have. Thanks for letting me come, Luce.”

  She gave a little wiggle of pure happiness. “If Martin Luther King should come in I think I’d ascend straight to Heaven,” she said.

  Jack Venable smiled and tightened his arm around her shoulders and gave her a little squeeze. “I’m not going to let you leave me even for him,” he said.

  “King might be here,” Glenn Pickens said. “He’s in here a lot. Some of his crowd are over there at that table by the bandstand; I see a couple of kids from my old neighborhood who are good lieutenants of his now. Want to meet them?” He did not wait for Lucy’s assent, but raised his pale hand and beckoned toward a large table in the opposite corner of the room.

  Two very young men materialized out of the gloom at Glenn’s elbow and stood looking down at us. One was round and short, almost fat, with skin lighter than Glenn’s, and startling ghost gray eyes. The other was slender and very handsome, and as dark as Gwen Caffrey. Both were a good bit younger than any of us; I did not think they could be much past their teens. But it’s a young man’s crusade, I reminded myself. Dr. King himself is only in his thirties.

  They greeted Glenn cheerfully, and he clapped each on the back and introduced them. The short, pudgy one was Tony Sellers and the taller, blacker one Rosser Willingham; I vaguely recognized their names from news accounts of the student sit-ins last year, and the freedom rides earlier this summer. Both had demonstrated and marched with King, and both had gone quietly and matter-of-factly to Alabama jails with him. Both had been beaten, bitten, kicked, gassed, shot at. Rosser Willingham had, I knew, been hit. Self-consciousness thickened my tongue when Glenn introduced me, which was, I thought, just as well. Lucy smiled her incomparable smile and held up her hand to be shaken. As always, at Lucy’s smile, there were quick and genuine answering smiles.

  “It’s good to meet you, Lucy Bondurant Chastain,” Tony Sellers said. “I hear about you. How do you like Ramsey Lewis?”

  “I think he’s fantastic,” Lucy said. “I like him better than Don Shirley, even, and Shep here will tell you that for me that’s going some.”

  “Ramsey will be pleased to hear that,” Sellers said.

  “We missed you in Washington this summer,” Willingham said to Glenn Pickens. “You’d have loved it. If I remember correctly, you always did love a crowd. You’d have been in your element.”

  “I was busy this summer,” Glenn said. He was not smiling now. I thought I heard something very near defensiveness in his voice. “I figure we’re going to need a master’s degree or two somewhere in all this horsepower. There’ll be other marches. I’ll be there for those.”

  He looked hard at Rosser Willingham, and then he smiled his minimal smile.

  “Gwen almost got to go, though,” he said, touching her arm lightly. “Her station was going to send her up there, but at the last minute they decided she was too little, and sent a guy instead. She promised them she’d grow five inches if they’d let her play with the big kids, but nothing doing.”

  “Station?” Tony Sellers said, looking across the table at Gwen.

  “She’s just been made six o’clock anchor at Seven,” Glenn said. “And she has a talk show on WCAT three nights a week.”

  “Terrific, we can use you,” said Rosser Willingham. He was not smiling.

  “Not unless I can interest you in coming on the show with a new recipe for three-bean salad or a spray for rose blight, you can’t,” Gwen said.

  “Rose
s. Whooeee!” said Willingham.

  “That’s right,” Gwen said. “Roses.”

  Eyes held.

  What’s going on here? I thought. She’s just told both of them to flake off, in so many words. And Glenn’s acting funny as hell toward them. Aren’t they all in the movement together? Why are they trying to one-up each other? I felt acutely uncomfortable. My earlier awe fled before the discomfort.

  “I was with you in the sit-ins when I could get loose,” Jack Venable said suddenly, with such unaccustomed solemnity that I thought he must be speaking satirically, but the moist, messianic gleam behind the plain, serviceable glasses told me that he was not. “I wanted to go on the freedom rides, but my time wasn’t my own then. I have more, now. Is…are you…is there anything coming up that could use some willing bodies?” His soft body, leaning very slightly toward the two young black men, radiated a nearly bizarre middle-aged willingness.

  My face burned for him. I was glad of the darkness. I had not dreamed that a romantic boy lived in that phlegmatic CPA’s flesh. Is that what had so called out to Lucy?

  “There’s some good action coming up in Mississippi this fall, if you’re really interested,” Tony Sellers drawled. “Real knife-in-the-teeth guerrilla stuff. Might be just up your alley.”

  I saw Jack’s face darken, and felt my sympathetic flush mount.

  Lucy leaned forward.

  “I loved your sit-in at Rich’s,” she said. “I was there. It was wonderful. God!”

  The young men looked at her expressionlessly, politely.

  “I’m glad you liked it, Miss Bondurant,” Willingham said. “It was strictly an amateur job, of course, but we thought it had a certain energy and freshness.”

  I felt the heat spring out at my hairline in drops of perspiration. Glenn looked down into the depths of his drink, and Gwen Caffrey attended brightly and determinedly to the jazz trio, which was swinging into “The In Crowd,” pulling herself almost physically away from the rest of us. I could not look at anyone. They think we’re utter fools, I thought.

  Lucy grinned.

  “Don’t patronize me, sonny,” she said. “My maiden name is Feldstein. My grandma is a lampshade in some fat burgher’s house in Argentina as we speak. I know your act. I have style. Spurn me at your own loss.”

  Rosser Willingham grinned back at her, suddenly. He raised two fingers in salute. The group slipped into ease once more.

  “Those were some kind of days,” he said, laughing. “There must have been close to fifteen hundred folks on that picket line downtown at one time. It circled all downtown Atlanta. God, there were shuttle buses to take people down there and back, and we had two-way radios and special signs that rain and spit and worse wouldn’t wash off, and we had special coats for the girls so they wouldn’t get spit on—and worse again. Man, we thought we were big stuff. Hot shit. And we were, we were.”

  Glenn Pickens alone did not laugh with them.

  “Is the Lord here?” he said.

  “The Lord?” said Lucy.

  “King. I heard he might be.”

  Willingham and Sellers looked narrowly at him.

  “He’s in the dining room,” Tony Sellers said.

  “God,” Jack said reverently. “It really is headquarters, isn’t it?” He looked as if he might weep with the wonder of it.

  “Yeah, well, at least we know we can get served here,” Willingham said. “We can’t say that about every place, you know. It’s like John Lewis said about Nashville. Somebody said, ‘Well, we don’t serve niggers here,’ and somebody else said, ‘Well, that’s okay because we don’t eat’ em.’”

  There was more laughter. I felt an inadequacy that bordered on shame, and a dark fascination. These young men were dangerous; they were total, they were whole. Behind the banter and the cool laughter and the dismissing eyes were marches; beatings in dark, hot country nights and squalling, mean urban noons; terror and imprisonment and bombs and fire hoses and dogs and guns in darkness. In those eyes ambushed black men spun forever in their doorways, frozen; children flew into pieces in the roaring air of churches.

  I dropped my own eyes.

  “It’s not the only way,” Glenn Pickens said suddenly. Everyone looked at him.

  “Malcolm X said just the other day at the militant labor forum that the day of nonviolent resistance will soon be over,” he said evenly, pleasantly.

  Still, they looked at him. No one spoke. Gwen rolled her eyes to the ceiling and tossed her sleek head; I thought I had never seen anyone who wished so sincerely not to be present. The silence spun out.

  Finally Rosser Willingham said, “Oh, hell, Glenn, Brother Malcolm’s nothing but an uppity nigger who didn’t make the cut.” He laughed, but no one laughed with him.

  “He’s a born rabble-rouser,” Tony Sellers said.

  “Isn’t that what we’re all trying to do?” Glenn said. “All of us? Rouse the rabble?”

  Jack Venable laughed, a rasping, nervous sound. No one else did. The music wove its separate strands around us. The tension held. My skin crawled with it, and I knew Lucy’s did, too. I wondered how soon we might leave, and where the bathroom was, and if I could ever cross the staring room to find it. I could not see Lucy’s face, and I did not really know Jack Venable and Glenn Pickens, and Gwen Caffrey seemed to have gone as far away from us all as was possible without getting up and leaving the table. I felt primally, abysmally alone. It was as bad a moment as I could remember.

  Another figure was beside us suddenly.

  “Do your mothers know you boys are out?” said a voice that would have a dream, had stirred a nation, preached love and gentleness from a hundred besieged pulpits and a score of jails. My breath seemed to stop. I heard Lucy give a little soft gasp. I looked up. He stood there wearing a cardigan sweater against the chill of the air-conditioning, and a white shirt with an open collar, and slacks, looking as inevitable as a mountain, larger than any of us, preternaturally solid and focused, there.

  We were on our feet in an instant. Lucy almost upset her chair as she scrambled out of it, and Jack reached out to steady her. So did Martin Luther King. At his touch she stopped still and looked up at him, her old, special radiance in her face, not speaking, staring at the dark moon of his face, the thick lips smiling, the slanted, faintly Mongolian eyes, the solid set of the shoulders, the good hands. He smiled back. Of course he did.

  There were introductions all around. He did not linger. He said a few words to Sellers and Willingham and told Glenn Pickens he was proud of his new master’s degree. He shook Jack Venable’s hand, and gently disengaged it when Jack could not seem to stop pumping it. As he turned to leave, he paused beside Lucy. “I hear you’re going to be married soon, Mrs. Chastain,” he said. “I wish you every joy. It’s a wonderful, hopeful time in your life. A wedding is always a fine thing.”

  Lucy looked into his eyes and smiled with her whole being, and he touched her arm, softly, and then he was gone into the crowd, and the trio broke gleefully into “You Been Talkin’ ’Bout Me, Baby,” and Jack Venable pushed back his chair and said, “We’ve got to get going, Lucy. Tomorrow’s a school day.” I could hear the exaltation under the prosaic words.

  We all dispersed then, Tony Sellers and Rosser Willingham into the sacrosanct back room of the club after King, Glenn Pickens and Gwen Caffrey to another and presumably more agreeable table, Lucy and Jack and I outside into the just-cooling night air. We were silent for a moment on the pitted pavement under the pallid neon, still caught in the currents of the evening. Lucy stood with her arms linked through mine and Jack’s, her head drooping onto Jack’s shoulder. Still we said nothing. All of us, I think, had a sense of import greater than the evening’s events warranted. Nothing, after all, had transpired in the dimness of La Carrousel that might not have been expected to take place between young Atlanta Negroes and liberal whites on a September night in 1961. But I, for one, had a powerful sense of something ending, and something else beginning, and more: a powerful sense
of Lucy’s having stepped away from me and irrevocably into another country, one where I could not follow.

  I thought, looking at the two of them there on the sidewalk—Jack and Lucy, one known to me, the other not—that they were initiates into some kind of mystery as exalted and profound as those of Eleusis, and as such were a unit now, a singleness, that I could never penetrate. A sorrow as old and dark as the earth washed me briefly, a kind of September Weltschmerz. I have lost Lucy too now, I said in my heart, and knew it to be true. It had never been, before: not to physical separation, not to anger, not to marriage. I had lost her, now, to a dream and an army of arrogant young martyrs and a pragmatic urban saint who would not live out the decade. I did not think she would return.

  Finally she reached up and kissed Jack Venable on the cheek and he kissed her in return, and said, “I hope it’s the first of a million good nights, Shep,” and I said, “I hope so, too. I don’t have to tell you to take good care of her,” and he said, “No, you don’t,” and raised a pale, freckled hand in salute and turned and shambled away toward his car. I wondered, irrelevantly, what sort of car he would have; his retreating figure looked as though it should fold itself into a road-worn Chevrolet with its backseat piled high with sample goods. He looked almost grotesquely, in the warm darkness, like Willy Loman.