Peachtree Road

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  Lucy looked up at me.

  “Do you see now?” she said.

  “See?” I said. I thought I did, but perversely did not want to give her that small gift.

  “See what I mean about the Negroes, and Dr. King, and the movement and Jack…oh, the whole thing. Can’t you see how wonderful, how special…it all is? Oh, come on, Gibby, I know you can.”

  But I could see only that from this night on I would walk through the world without my cousin Lucy. I do not know why the knowledge gave me such desolation. Until this weekend I had been profoundly angry with her, through with her, done with her; I had not had any thought of letting Lucy Bondurant back into my life.

  It was not until we were back on the Northside of Atlanta, bowling along under the yellowing trees that fell over Peachtree Street in front of the old brown stone pile of the High Museum, that I finally was able to give her what I knew she wanted.

  “He’s a good guy, Luce, and it was a good night,” I said. “You’re going to be okay now.”

  “Thank you, Gibby,” she said in a child’s small, drowsy voice, and put her dark head on my shoulder, and was asleep before we reached the green-hung intersection at Palisades where Peachtree Street becomes Peachtree Road.

  Her parties and the tea went off without a hitch, and were just what I had thought they would be: the occasion for a small flutter of congratulations to the author, more for the fact that she had finally and against all considered opinions made something of herself than for the slender little novel which all of them bought and few would read; and for much drinking and considerable eating; and for catching up on news after the hiatus of vacation and before the autumn social season began. Lucy, looking somehow diminished and muted in the unaccustomed public approbation, shook hands and kissed cheeks and smiled her new sweet smile, and signed her dashing black, back-slanted Lucy J. Bondurant on perhaps thirty books, and thanked everyone for coming, and behaved in general so like the biddable and charming debutante and Junior Leaguer she had refused to be that older Buckheaders were mollified and smiling and our own crowd was frankly puzzled. I saw eyes cut toward Lucy all weekend and heads go together, and heard whispers exchanged, and I felt rather than saw the same eyes on me. I knew that I was being scrutinized for evidence of trauma from Sarah and Charlie’s marriage, and so smiled more and wider and kissed more cheeks and clapped more backs than I would have ordinarily. My mother and Aunt Willa were at all the parties, elegant and cool, not showing by so much as a muscle tremor the outrage Lucy’s new preoccupation had engendered. I wondered how they would take the news, and the circumstances, of her new marriage. I thought I could imagine, and grinned involuntarily at the prospect.

  My father was not in attendance at any of the parties, and Ben Cameron was not at the cocktail party he and Dorothy gave at the Driving Club. Dorothy, whose welcoming kiss to me was as warm and natural as if great gulfs of pain did not lie between us, whispered in my ear in the receiving line, “Please don’t think Ben’s avoiding you. He’s down at the Walahauga at a rally, but he’s going to try to get back before the party’s over. Lester Maddox is giving us a hard time, and the election is only two months away. Ben absolutely must have the Negro vote to win or he’d be here.”

  It was only then that I remembered that Ben Cameron was running for mayor. I could not remember who Lester Maddox was.

  “Is he still mad at me, Dorothy?” I said.

  “Yes,” she said, “but not in the way he was. He’ll get over it, Shep. And he’s never stopped loving you.”

  “He should have,” I said. “He ought to just wash his hands of me.”

  “He’ll never do that, and neither will I,” she said and kissed me on the cheek, and passed me on to Lucy, slender and oddly prim in dark blue fall cotton and Ben Cameron’s snowdrift of white orchids.

  “Are you the lady who wrote the dirty book?” I said, hugging her. “How about letting me take you away from all this? Your place or mine?”

  She giggled, but it was a subdued and mannerly giggle. “I wish we could just go somewhere and talk,” she said. “I know you’re going back tomorrow right after the tea, and I don’t know when in the world we’ll really talk again. But I’m meeting Jack at Camellia Gardens after this, and we’re going to the eleven o’clock service at Damascus House in the morning….”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I think I’ll go out and get some dinner with Snake and Lelia and maybe A.J. and Lana. I’ll see you in the morning. By the way, you look wonderful. I remember when you had eight of those things stuck on you at one time.”

  She looked down at the orchids, and her blue eyes filled with tears.

  “I was the prettiest girl in town then, wasn’t I?” she said.

  “What do you mean, was? You still are,” I said. “You talk like you’re fifty years old.”

  “Part of me is,” she said softly. She was not smiling.

  “Well, the part I can see is still the girl every Jell in Atlanta had the twenty-year hots for,” I said, squeezing her hands, and was dismayed to see the tears spill over the black fringe of her lower lashes and run silently down her cheeks to her chin. Her mouth trembled and broke. She put her arms around me and fitted her face into the side of my neck, as Sarah had done so often, and whispered something into my ear. I could feel the heat of her tears, but I could not hear what she said, and I raised her chin with one hand and looked questioningly at her.

  “I said, ‘I love you, Gibby,’” she said. One of the tears fell from her chin and trembled, crystal and perfect, on, the waxy white petal of her corsage. “And I said, ‘Good-bye and God-speed.’”

  “I’m just going back to work,” I said in a too-jolly voice. “I’m not going away forever and ever.”

  “Yes, you are,” she said.

  After the tea my mother and my aunt Willa gave for Lucy at the Peachtree Road house the next afternoon, I did not see her again, and I did not wait for my father to come back from wherever he had been, to say good-bye to him. I hugged my mother longer and harder than was my custom when I left Atlanta to go back to New York, for the thought was in my mind that I probably would not come back to the house on Peachtree Road, or to the city, for a very long time, if ever. There was no reason, now, to do so. Two of the three women who had claimed my heart were gone from me, and so was the man who should have, and most of the other ties that I had to the city were light and ephemeral. My mother, as if reading my thoughts, began to cry again, and I pulled myself gently out of her grasp and patted her shoulder, and said, “Tell-Dad good-bye for me,” and took a cab to the airport. I got a seven o’clock Delta flight back to La Guardia. By the time I unlocked my door on West Twenty-first Street, the Sunday night traffic was thinning, and only a stream of lights over on Ninth spoke of any life, or the forward momentum of time. The air in my apartment was as old and arid as the breath of tombs.

  Sometime in the small hours of the morning I came awake with the heavy, marrow-deep certainty that my time in New York was over. I knew, utterly and passionlessly, as an old man knows, that there was behind me in Atlanta no one who needed me, and there was, now, in New York nothing more that I needed. That afternoon I wrote my Colonial Club friend Corey Appleby, who was teaching French at Haddonfield Academy, in Vermont, asking if there were any faculty positions open, and when his affirmative reply came by return mail I borrowed Alan Greenfeld’s Corvette and drove up the following weekend. Within another two weeks I had been accepted as an instructor in medieval history, with additional classes in freshman English, to start when the new term did, on January 5, 1962. I did not feel any way at all about this change in my life except very tired, and endlessly, stupidly sleepy. For the remainder of that autumn and early winter, when I was not at work, I came home to West Twenty-first Street and slept.

  Four days before Christmas, just as the first snowstorm of the season came howling in from New Jersey unfurling its battle banners of blowing snow, my telephone rang at 6:30 P.M., burring over the televisio
n newscast to which I had fallen asleep on my sofa. When I picked it up, it was to hear the voice of Lucy Bondurant Venable, which I had not thought to hear then or perhaps at any other time, thick with her familiar long-distanced tears, telling me that my father had had a massive stroke on the golf course at Brookhaven that afternoon and was completely paralyzed and not expected to live the night, and that my mother was prostrated and in seclusion, and could not be comforted until I promised to come home.

  And so, I left New York at dawn the next day in a rented U-Haul and drove, instead of to Vermont, back to Atlanta and the house on Peachtree Road. I planned to bury my father, comfort my mother, stash my meager belongings and fly to Vermont as soon as I decently could. With luck I could still make the first day of classes.

  If anyone had told me, when I saw the Atlanta city limits sign rise up out of a fast-failing December twilight on the highway in from Gainesville, that I would never leave it again, I would have laughed in his face.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  My father did not die, though. All through the cold, gray day and night that followed, I parked the U-Haul at truck stops and drive-ins and called home, and the message, relayed by my aunt Willa, was the same: “There’s been no change. He’s still in intensive care and is unconscious most of the time, and when he’s awake we can’t tell if he knows anybody. There’s been a little movement in one hand and in one side of his face, and maybe just the tiniest bit in one of his toes. But basically there isn’t any change. It’s a miracle he’s still alive. Hub Dorsey doesn’t think he can last another day.”

  But he did last, through the gray miles that I hacked out of New Jersey and Pennsylvania and Virginia in the bumping, unwieldy truck, my few belongings rattling and shifting behind me with the vagaries of the monotonous four-lane federal highways. That first day I made North Carolina by full dark, and pulled up to a dingy little cinder-block motel outside Kannapolis when fatigue and a spitting sleetfall made driving any further impossible. I picked up a hamburger and french fries and a carton of coffee at the dirty, white-lit little motel diner and stumbled back to my room with them, and wolfed them down cold while Aunt Willa’s low “Atlanta” voice told me what it had all day: “No change. No, there’s been no change.” I turned on the flickering old Philco television set across from my bed and stared stupidly at Peter Gunn until it melted and slid into blackness behind my stinging eyes, and when I opened them again, it was midmorning and a dispirited maid was rattling my door and an amazonian North Carolina lady was showing an ecstatic, adenoidal morning show host how to make corn bread dressing for turkey. I pulled on last night’s weary clothing and trotted to the diner, and drank coffee as I received Aunt Willa’s morning message, “No change.”

  Because of my late start, it was nearly dark when I followed Highway 23 into North Atlanta, through ugly, meager Doraville and Chamblee; past Oglethorpe University, where Lucy had once been apprehended necking with Boo Cutler by the almost forgotten Mr. Bovis Hardin; past Brookhaven Drive, where, out of sight to my right, the Atlanta Pinks and Jells had danced away so many nights at the Brookhaven Country Club, and where, two days earlier, my father had dropped, stricken, to the frozen earth; past the beginning of the big old houses that would line Peachtree Road, now, until they reached the bridge over Peachtree Creek at Peachtree Battle Avenue. On my left, where for many years Mr. John Ottley’s great farm, Joyeuse, had lain along a sweet-curved, deep-wooded sweep of Peachtree Road, a low white jumble of buildings in a sea of automobiles gleamed eerily in the icy mist, and I scrubbed at my reddened eyes with my fist, for a moment utterly lost, until I remembered that a shopping mall called Lenox Square had been built there a year or so before, a worldly Xanadu said to be, at present, the largest such mall in the country.

  I could believe it. There seemed to be thousands upon thousands of cars bellied up to the mall like voraciously suckling piglets at the teats of a gleaming, corpulent white sow. White lights danced and twinkled on spindly evergreens fringing the parking lots. Of course: Christmas shopping. I felt, for a moment, such a nostalgia for the old, warm-lit, Evening in Paris—smelling confines of Wender & Roberts on Christmas Eve that my heart flopped in my chest, and then Lenox Square vanished and I was into and through Buckhead, bright-lit and traffic-choked now, and coming into the last great curve of Peachtree Road before I reached 2500.

  And then even it was past, dark-bulked and beautiful behind its iron fence, only one light burning upstairs in my parents’ room, no automobiles waiting on the graceful half-moon front drive. I drove on down Peachtree Road past Peachtree Battle shopping center and up the long hill to Piedmont Hospital where my aunt Willa had said she would be waiting. When I had last talked to her, at noon, she said my mother had wakened from the deep, drugged sleep Dr. Dorsey’s needle had given her, and was bathing and dressing to receive visitors. Hub Dorsey had forbidden the hospital to her until tomorrow—if indeed, there was one for my father. Dorothy Cameron had been with Mother most of the time since she heard the news about my father, and was coming back after lunch to see to the flow of traffic in the house. Shem, Aunt Willa said, would drive me down to Piedmont if I wanted to stop by the house first, but I said I would come straight there. I wanted to see for myself how the land lay before I encountered my mother. I wanted to be informed, crisp, authoritative and very, very clear about what must be done and who would do it; I wanted to have a long-range plan of action formulated and ready for presentation. The plan did not include any possibility of my staying at home. My mother must see that from the very beginning.

  When I got off the elevator in the scaldingly bright intensive care waiting room at the hospital it seemed for a moment that my entire life lay in ambush for me. The knot of people who sat about on plastic chairs and sofas or stood looking out at the lights of the traffic streaming past on Peachtree Road were all there for my father; old Buckhead had, like great elephants, come to encircle one of their own fallen tribe. Dorothy Cameron sat, small, erect and calm-faced, on a sofa beside Lucy, patting her clenched hands. Jack Venable stood at the windows, back to the room, hands in pockets, looking out into the night. Ben Cameron, almost totally iron-gray now, and looking tired and grim, sat on another sofa beside Aunt Willa, who was pale and still and perfectly turned out in severe black jersey, smoking a filter-tipped cigarette. On a molded plastic chair a little apart from the others Sarah Gentry sat, as straight-spined and composed as her mother in the pink and white stripes of a Piedmont volunteer, her dark, curly head slightly bowed, her small hands clasped in her lap. I saw the modest fire of Charlie’s diamond on her finger. At the sound of the elevator bell she lifted her head and looked straight into my eyes and I saw the smudges of fatigue under her own, and the spark of recognition and then the old joy that leaped in them. Her wide mouth, bare of lipstick, slid into its warm, bone-remembered smile.

  “Shep,” she said soundlessly, her lips forming my name. In the merciless light of the waiting room, my own fatigue dragging at my limbs, I felt the renewing joy of the sight of her run into my arms and legs, followed by a near-physical blow to my heart.

  Lucy saw Sarah’s smile and turned her head and saw me, and jumped up and ran to me, her face stained with recent tears, her eyes red and swollen. She looked blue-white and terribly thin, and nearly shabby in a wrinkled plaid skirt and sweater I thought I recognized from our North Fulton days, and her glossy hair was tied back in an untidy ponytail. Even in her obvious anxiety and dishevelment she looked beautiful, but suddenly, years older. The hands she thrust into mine were icy cold and chapped nearly raw.

  “I thought you’d never get here,” she said, and the tears welled into her eyes afresh, and I hugged her distractedly.

  “What’s the news?” I said.

  “Still no change,” she said, her voice strangled. “He’s on a lung machine, Gibby, and Dr. Dorsey still says he doesn’t see how he can live…oh, he just looks so awful! White and all twisted and shrunken, and hooked up to about a million tubes…I can’t stand t
o see him like that!”

  I wondered, holding her loosely and getting my bearings, why she was so upset. My father had never been close to Lucy; even she must have acknowledged that years ago. I remembered the morning in childhood after she had run away with Little Lady, after Jamie had died, and been so terribly punished, her coming in her thin nightgown and climbing into his lap and making her little speech about being sorry, and being a good girl if only he would not send her away, and his arms going reluctantly around her, and his voice promising that he would look after her always. Puddin’, he had called her; I remembered it vividly. And afterward, she had said to me, “I have to make sure he takes care of me until you’re old enough to do it.”

  But he had not, and I never had been.

  That was the key, of course; my father represented to Lucy the only security and Safety she had had in all her childhood, and his stroke must have called up that old black terror, the stuff of her nightmares. But she was grown and married now, and had moreover married, almost literally, a father. I looked across at Jack Venable, still staring out into the December night. His rigid shoulders and back told me that he wanted no part of this insular, privileged group, and was here only for sufferance of Lucy. I wondered if the harbor Lucy had thought to enter with her marriage had been, after all, closed to her.

  I started over to speak to Aunt Willa and Dorothy and Ben and Sarah; and then Hubbard Dorsey, my family’s physician since old Dr. Ballentine had died and my father’s occasional golfing partner, came out of the swinging doors from the intensive care unit. He, too, looked tired and rumpled in his white coat, a stethoscope swinging around his neck, but when he saw me he smiled and came toward me, and I knew, somehow, from the set of his shoulders and the quickness of his step that my father had turned some sort of corner and was not going to die.