Peachtree Road

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  “This is a terrible time, darling,” she said. “Worse than terrible. Tragic. I’ve been so frightened and worried I thought I would die; and there’s been no one close to me to comfort me. Only that eternal Willa, hovering and whispering. But now that you’re home, everything will be all right. I can lean on my strong, brave boy. Oh, I thought the time would never pass until you got here, Sheppie!”

  “I went by the hospital before I came,” I said, “and Hub tells me he’s almost positive Dad will pull through. I guess Aunt Willa called you. Ben and Dorothy Cameron are there with her, and Lucy and Jack, and Sarah. You mustn’t worry too much, Mother. He seems to have rallied pretty well.”

  I saw no reason to tell her what Hub Dorsey had said about my father’s ultimate chances, and his prospects of having any sort of life. I knew I would never speak of his appearance.

  “I should be there with him, but I just wanted you so badly that I couldn’t seem to leave the house until you got here,” she said in a frail, tired little voice. “I’ve kept in touch constantly, though; Hub and Willa have called every half hour, and now that you’re here and Dad’s on the mend, I’m going to spend every waking hour at his side. I’ll go first thing in the morning, and stay all day. But now I want you to sit down here with me and get your breath and tell me your news, and have a real visit. Just like the Christmases when you were a little boy. Remember when you thought the living room was Rich’s, because the tree was so big? You were scared to come into the room. I think you were three then, but maybe it was four or five, and so adorable in your little pajamas with the feet…”

  The used, hurt little voice had gained strength and intensity as she spoke, until, incredibly, it was a freshet of glittering, girlish chatter, and I looked at her in simple disbelief. Could she have been drinking? Or was she slipping back into the hysteria Hub had described?

  “I don’t have any news that won’t keep,” I said, thinking of the looming haven of Haddonfield. It would be suicidal to speak of it now. “What I’d really like to do is have a bite to eat and a shower and go to bed. I haven’t eaten since noon. And you ought to get some sleep, too; you’re wound up like a clock. Did Hub leave you something to help you sleep?”

  “Oh, my poor baby,” she cried, pressing her white hands to her mouth as though she had been given appalling news. “Of course you must have something to eat! We’ll have Shem bring us sandwiches and drinks here in front of the fire, wouldn’t that be festive and Christmasy? Oh, do forgive your selfish old mother; I should have known you’d be hungry! Maybe we’ll open some of the Christmas champagne and have a real little party—”

  “Mother,” I said, holding up one hand, “no champagne, really. A sandwich and a glass of milk or a cup of coffee will be fine. Let’s just go raid the kitchen, okay? I don’t want to keep Shem and Martha up when they must have gotten as little sleep as anybody else.”

  She looked puzzled for a moment, as if she could not think why Shem and Martha Cater would be missing sleep, and then smiled ruefully.

  “My thoughtful boy,” she said. “Of course. They’ve been almost as worried about poor Dad as I have. Come on into the kitchen, then, and I’ll make you a sandwich with my own hands. It will be a pleasure to cook for my boy again.”

  Since I could not remember that she ever had, I said nothing. We went out of the dim living room, she preceding me, her slender body fairly dancing along on narrow feet in high-heeled gold pumps. I saw the gleam of sheer stocking on her instep, and also that she had fastened the knot of hair at her nape with a circlet of glittering stones—rhinestones? diamonds? She might have been walking into a charity ball at the Driving Club. She moved as if to music.

  The kitchen was warm and bright-lit, and there was a plate of turkey and ham sandwiches on a cloth-covered tray, and fresh coffee in the electric pot. Shem and Martha had apparently gone back to their rooms over the garage. The kitchen radio was turned to WSB, and the score from Camelot swam into the room, that ersatz anthem for an entire generation: “Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot…for one brief, shining moment that was known as Camelot….”

  My mother perched herself on a kitchen stool and crossed her elegant legs, and sipped the coffee I poured out for her. I wolfed sandwiches until a restoring satiety bloomed in my stomach, and poured coffee for myself. It was hot and heartening. We might have been an illustration in one of my mother’s glossy women’s magazines, by Norman Rockwell or even worse, Jon Whitcomb: mother and son, smiling over a late-night snack in a warm, bright kitchen in Anywhere, U.S.A., in that most benedictory of times, the opening years of the 1960s. Pain and stenches, death and tubes, frozen snarls on silent lips and deadly flowers blooming in ruined brains—these did not, in our four-color, dot-matrix world, exist. My mother had not just this evening risen from a sleep of drugs and anguish; my father did not lie, wired and spasmed, in a hospital two miles away; Sarah Cameron did not wear the gold ring of Charlie Gentry on her slim finger; my heart was not wizened and gray because of it. I put down my coffee cup and grinned fatuously at my mother, once again aware that I had nothing at all to say to her, no words of wisdom or comfort, none of fealty. I wanted nothing so much as the old, peaceful oblivion of my darkened bedroom out in the summer-house. I could not think how to get there without getting up from the kitchen and bolting out into the cold night, and my mother’s bright, waiting smile said plainly that there was more expected of this night, and of me. The dolorous medieval lady of the sorrows had fled midway in her little speech about Christmas when I was a child, and had not returned. This woman was a creature of wiles and pleasures, waiting and wanting only to ply them for her son.

  “Well,” I said, finally. “That really hit the spot. Would you like to go back in by the fire?”

  “Oh no, it’s really too stiff and formal in there, isn’t it?” she said. “Let’s sit here for a little while and talk, and then I have a surprise for you upstairs. Tell me, how was Sarah? Was she glad to see you? Is she pregnant yet?”

  It was such a completely unexpected turn of conversation that I actually choked on my coffee, and spit a little onto the table in front of me. She laughed, a silvery little giggle.

  “You’ve still got a tiny little bit of a crush on her, haven’t you, Sheppie?” she said, almost gaily. “I thought you did. Well, it doesn’t matter. There are a million pretty girls in Atlanta, and we’re going to see that you get reacquainted with every one of them, now that you’re home. There are some of the cutest new girls in town you ever saw, too; I see them all the time at League meetings and at lunch. Career girls, lots of them. Pretty and smart. You don’t need Sarah. You’ll cut such a swath you just won’t believe it. You’re really a handsome boy, Sheppie, I always thought you were, no matter what Daddy said, and now that you’re all grown up—”

  “Mother,” I said in a kind of disbelieving desperation, “we probably need to talk some about Dad. We’ll wait until you’ve seen him tomorrow and had a chance to talk to Hub before we settle anything, but I think you ought to be aware that things aren’t…very good with him….”

  “Well, of course, I know that,” she said. Her face did not change. “He’s had a bad stroke. How could things be good with him? But Willa and you both said he wasn’t going to die….”

  “Not die, maybe, but there’s a very good chance he won’t ever be himself again, and he might not…might not…be able to take care of himself, or maybe even move…. I just don’t want you to think that everything is going to be like it was,” I said. “I don’t want you to think that and be hurt when it isn’t. Mother, he could live for years without ever moving again. We really are going to have to make some plans….”

  She gave me a smile of such brilliance that it was nearly feral, and I felt the skin on my neck and the backs of my hands crawl.

  “I have already made what plans need to be made,” she said. She might have been discussing a speech school luncheon. “I did that yesterday and today while everybody was at the hospital
. Of course nothing is going to be the same. I know it’s likely he’ll be paralyzed. At least he won’t be dead—that’s something. I’ll have a husband; you’ll have a father. There’ll still be a man in the house. Two, now that you’re home.”

  “Mother,” I said, “you can’t mean that you’re going to bring him home! Do you know what it means to be totally paralyzed, to have somebody in the house who’s totally paralyzed? Who would look after him? You’d never in the world manage, not even with Shem and Martha and Aunt Willa. When I said make some plans, I meant find a good nursing home, get him into it when he leaves the hospital, find somebody to look after the business—”

  Her red-tipped hand dismissed me.

  “Oh, pooh on the business. Tom Carmichael can run the silly business until you learn your way around it. He can tell you all you need to know about it, and you can turn your father’s library into your own office, or go downtown a few times a week, if you want to—it’s all he ever did. And of course I’m going to bring him home. I’m moving him into Willa’s room, and making a sitting room out of Little Lady’s bedroom, and turning the little dressing room into a nurse’s bedroom, and we’ll have them around the clock, and later I’ll hire him a live-in companion-nurse. And I’ll help look after him myself. Who else did you think would do it? He’s my husband. In my family, we look after our own….”

  This time I simply looked at her. Her face seemed to shine with plans and busyness and a kind of crazy saintliness, and with something else too. Power played there like heat lightning. Of course she would keep him near her, of course she would tend him herself. She would have it all, then: the power of this house, power over him; she would have both the power and the man at her fingertips. And she would have the added luster of this new saintliness: Olivia Bondurant, caring for the helpless husband, sitting patiently by the bedside, laying cool hands on the silent, raging face. The mantle of smalltown selflessness, long laid aside in little Griffin when she left it to marry and come with my father to this worldly city, slipped as easily onto her shoulders as if it had been tailored for her.

  “Where will Aunt Willa sleep?” It was all I could think to say.

  “Willa is going out to the summerhouse, and if you don’t think she’s furious about that, you can think again,” my mother said in obvious satisfaction. “But what can she say? She can’t dictate where she’ll sleep in her sister-in-law’s house; she’s been lucky all these years even to have a roof over her head. And Little Lady and Carter surely haven’t knocked the doors down setting her up over there. No, the summerhouse is perfectly fine for her, and that way she won’t be underfoot upstairs with a sick man in the house. Though I know she’d love to nurse him herself, thinking she could get him to leave her a little something in his will. Willa! Lord! She’s lucky I don’t put her out in the street altogether!”

  My throat and tongue dried to dust, and my heart knocked sickly. The summerhouse—my cool, beautiful haven; the one place where Lucy and I had hidden from the world and felt, at last, perfectly safe. It made me literally sick to think of Aunt Willa in it, her chic, insinuating head buyer’s clothes, her carefully chosen little bric-a-brac, as like the ones in the Peachtree Road house as she could find, the clinging female scent of her…. I swallowed hard, and felt salt bile flooding the back of my throat. Even if I was not going to be here, was not, for all practical purposes, ever coming home again, I could not bear the thought of Willa Slagle Bondurant in the summerhouse.

  “When…when is she moving out there?” I said around my thickened tongue. The thought hit me, sudden and terrible, that perhaps she had already moved, and that I would have to spend these necessary Christmas nights in the cold, cheerless guest room, or even worse, in Aunt Willa’s cast-off lair. I was ready to run howling into the night and take hold of her alien possessions with my bare hands and fling them out of the summerhouse into the cold, dead garden.

  “She’s moving as soon as I can get that dreadful little fairy from Rich’s in here to redo her room for Daddy, and to make a few other changes,” my mother said. “He’s already brought some sketches and fabric over; he did that the same day I called. Let’s see. Was it day before yesterday? I guess it was. It seems like a million years ago. Oh yes, he was dancing on the doorstep not four hours after I called the decorating service. The name Bondurant still means something at Rich’s, even with all the tackpots in town.”

  She smiled in obvious satisfaction at the thought of the poor Rich’s decorator, rushing through the festive debris of Christmas to her doorstep clutching his swatches and samples and sketches, and I thought, She means the same afternoon Dad had his stroke. He was in the hospital and they didn’t know whether he was going to live or die, and she was shut up in her room with everybody thinking she was hysterical and prostrate, and what she was doing was planning to redecorate the house. She’s refeathering the nest and he’s not even out of it yet. I could not speak.

  “And now,” she caroled, “the big surprise. The best part of my plan. Come on, Sheppie. It’s for you. And it’s upstairs.”

  I got up and followed her out of the kitchen. The two grinding, interminable days on the road in the U-Haul and the meeting at the hospital and the sheer awfulness of my twisted and intubated father and the cold weight of Sarah in my heart washed over me like a great, freezing surf, and I stumbled silently along behind my mother up the beautiful free standing staircase simply because I was too tired to do anything else.

  She paused at the door to her and my father’s bedroom, at the left end of the upstairs corridor, and looked back over her shoulder at me, and the smile she gave me was tight-stretched and glittering, like everything else about her on this strangest of nights.

  “Are you ready?” she said. Her voice had a child’s lilt.

  “I guess so,” I said numbly. I could not think of anything in the world I was less ready for on this night than a Christmas surprise. Sleep was what I wanted, sleep and sleep only.

  “Voilà!” cried my mother, and flung open the door.

  I had not been in this room a dozen times since I left the hateful little cubbyhole off it, where I had slept my captive voyeur’s sleep from infancy to the coming of Lucy. I frankly hated it, even though it was by far the best bedroom in the house. It seemed to me that the very walls had captured and held the force of my infant rage and fear and disgust. I avoided it even when expressly invited by my mother to enter, which had been seldom. My father had never bade me in. I stood behind my mother in the doorway, as reluctant to enter as if the room were a cobra farm.

  It was an enormous room occupying most of the top left wing and running the depth of the house, with great floor-to-ceiling Palladian windows facing Peachtree Road and the back garden and the summerhouse. I remembered that when you looked out the back windows in summer, you could see the deep forests of Buckhead rolling away toward the river, with small, weblike tributaries of streets, and islands that were the rooftops of other great houses thrusting up out of the rolling green. It was like being on the bridge of a great ship, and was the one thing about the room that I had always loved. There was a vast, shining sea of polished oak floor, scattered with thin, glowing old Orientals in the soft pastel tints of Kirman and Bokhara, and in front of the rose marble fireplace, set into another Palladian-arched niche in the ivory paneled walls, two pale rose brocade sofas faced each other across a pretty tea table.

  My mother’s little French writing desk sat before the windows looking onto Peachtree Road, and two great mahogany armoires flanked the fireplace. On the wall across from it, floating in luminous ivory space, sat the bed she had shared all the years of her marriage with my father, a chaste, spare Hepplewhite tester with a starched lace canopy and a coverlet of faded, rose-strewn satin. The roses, I remembered her telling Aunt Willa when she first came to the house, had been embroidered by her maternal grandmother for her hope chest. The coverlet was always carefully folded back at night upon the blanket chest that sat at the foot of the bed; I knew that it
concealed a dual-control electric blanket. My father might share in silence that white battlefield, but he would do it in comfort. Everything in the room had always been rich, elegant, serene, orderly, conventional. Like, in all respects, my mother.

  Off the bedroom proper were, back to back, a glassed sleeping porch, also facing the garden, where my father sometimes read or napped on a sagging daybed, and the villainous little dressing room that had been my earliest Coventry. The doors giving onto them from the bedroom were shut now, and the big room was dim-lit. At first, my tired eyes could not accommodate the dimness.

  “Well?” my mother chirped. “What do you think?”

  Leaning around her, I nearly gasped aloud. I reached automatically for the doorjamb to steady myself. I was looking into the sanctum of a mad white hunter.

  The entire room shimmered and swam, now, in a kind of demented pentimento. Underneath, the skin and bones, the wood and silks and velvets and plaster of the room as it had always been, shone in gracious harmony. But the overpainting, the surface—it was as if Ernest Hemingway at his bloated, monomaniacal worst had battled to the death with Aubrey Beardsley, each determined to leave his imprint on the room. The bed, the chairs, the sofas and tables and chaise, even the floors and the tall windows were draped with samples of fabric, piled with pillows and paint samples and primitive bibelots, feverish with great, virulent, billowing and trailing green plants. The bed had been shrouded in a coarse, gauzy material resembling cheesecloth, and over its delicate coverlet lay a throw fashioned from the hide of some animal that had never set hoof to American soil. The old Orientals were covered with zebra hides, and in front of the fireplace a leopard-skin rug with the snarling head still attached had been laid down. Bedside and end tables had been pushed to the corners of the room, and great standing oblong drums replaced them. On the ivory walls, spears and javelins were crossed and grouped artfully, and over the twin sofas the heads of more great, snarling beasts howled their choler into the dimness. There was a stifling, jumbled impression of bamboo, vines and earth-toned batik. In the corner by the sun porch door, a brilliant macaw sat on a perch in a tall standing cage.