Ben loved residential architecture, and had so far held out for that, but Snake Cheatham’s father was so taken with his design sense that he had talked Ben into designing one of his suburban branch banks, and the beautiful, winged stone and glass structure caused so much comment that Ben was at work now on preliminary designs for two more. The first had been featured in Architectural Digest, and the calls were beginning to come in now from around the country. He was, my mother said, thinking of leaving the firm and going out on his own, but would make no decision about that until Julia had her baby. Even with his obvious prospects and Ben Senior’s money behind him, Julia was, Mother reported, extremely nervous about Ben’s leaving an established firm to fly solo.
“I understand from Dorothy that they had a real row about it,” Mother had said, with some relish. I suppose that since her own son had little of note that she might boast of, it pleased her when the crown prince of the house of Cameron came a modest cropper in his marriage.
Ben and I sat in companionable silence for a little while, the dying fire snickering behind its screen, the tree beginning to glow in the unlit room. He finished his bourbon and put the glass down on the table beside the sofa.
“I have to get on home,” he said. “Julia’s folks are expecting us for supper. Her stepmother makes oyster stew every Christmas Eve, out of library paste and sheep’s milk, I think. It’s a tradition.” But he made no move to get up.
Then he said, “You’re not going to stay, are you?” and I was so taken by surprise that I said, simply, “No. I’m not.”
“Good boy,” he said, and I looked at him more closely. It seemed to me then that he burned with the same kind of fever-shimmer I had seen on the day of his wedding, and that his gray eyes were so bright with it that if I had not been so close to him I would have mistaken their glitter for tears. But he was not crying.
“How did you know?” I asked. I had not spoken of leaving Atlanta to Dorothy, or to anyone else for that matter.
“Because you’re like me now,” he said, closing his eyes and resting his head against the dull sheen of the brocade. His coppery hair against the apricot, the firelight leaping on both, was beautiful. “You’re different. You walk on the outside. You wear the mark of Cain. There’s nothing for you here.”
“What mark of Cain?” I said, puzzled. Why did he speak of being an outsider, of being different? I could think of few human beings more fitted for the life of Buckhead than Ben Cameron, Junior.
“I don’t know. It sounded good.” He grinned, his eyes still closed. “But I’m right, aren’t I? Whatever there is for you is out there, isn’t it?”
He did not speak of Sarah, never had, but I knew what he meant.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m leaving the first of the year. But please don’t say anything about it. I’m going to have to climb out the window in the dead of night as it is. God, my mother…”
“I know,” he said. “They wrap you around and suck your life and pull you right down to the bottom, don’t they?” Aside from the bitterness of the words, there was something old and dead in his voice that made me sit slightly forward at the same time I shrank back. I hated the sound of it. What was happening here?
“Go soon, Shep. And go fast and far,” he said, the gray eyes still shuttered with thick, coppery lashes. “Zigzag while you run and don’t look back. Bomb the bridge behind you.”
“Ben…” I began, and he grinned and heaved himself upright and rubbed his long, slender fingers through his hair.
“Sorry,” he said. “I’m just feeling elegiac tonight. I don’t like Christmas, and it makes me nervous to see my friends’ fathers start to die, and the baby’s late and everybody’s jumpy as hell. Christ, I think one minute I can’t stand it until that kid gets here, and then I think I’d just as soon it never did. I don’t mean that, of course, but a baby…it’s so final, Shep. Nothing is ever the same after a baby comes. The…possibilities shrink so.”
“I guess it comes with the territory,” I said lamely. I could not imagine how it would feel to be going home on a Christmas Eve to a wife and a soon-to-be-born, life-changing child.
“That it does,” he said. He laughed. “That it does. Well. This time I’m really out the door. Julia will be fit to be tied. She can’t get out of her chair and into her clothes without help now, and it makes her mean as hell. I’ll have to get home and dress her.”
“How is Julia?” I said automatically. I thought of the small, wiry athlete’s body, and the adoring brown eyes and snub nose and tiny monkey hands of Julia Randolph Cameron. I could not imagine her foundering in a chair, unable to dress herself.
“As big as a beached whale and twice as unaesthetic,” he said, and he was not smiling. “Whoever said that pregnant women are glowing and beautiful sure as hell didn’t know Julia.”
It was such a meanspirited thing to say that I could not reply. I did not even know the voice in which he spoke. In the firelight the planes of his face were sharpened into near-caricature, a jack-o’-lantern’s face. I thought suddenly of his grandmother, old Milliment, and what a terrible tongue she had had. There must be a dominant gene there somewhere. There was nothing in Ben now of his father or his gentle mother, or of Sarah.
At the front door he paused, and suddenly put his arms around me and hugged me hard, and then was gone out into the dusk. Last night’s icy mist was coming down again, and the streetlights beyond the iron fence along Peachtree Road wore opalescent collars. Headlights wore aureoles, and tire tracks left a snail’s nacre on the black asphalt.
“Merry Christmas, Shep,” his voice floated back. “God-speed!” I did not hear a car door slam, and thought he must have left his car around the corner and down Muscogee, at his parents’ house. I wondered if Sarah and Charlie would be there tonight, for the Welsh rarebit that was Dorothy Cameron’s Christmas Eve tradition.
My mother was still at the hospital, and Shem and Martha had said good night and left. They were going to visit ToTo and her husband, Shem had told me earlier in the day; ToTo had married a line mechanic at the Ford plant out in Hapeville, and lived in Forest Park, and had two little girls. I thought of calling Lucy, then realized that I did not know her number in Lithonia, and in any case, she would be having her first family Christmas Eve with Jack and the boys in the old farmhouse. Even Aunt Willa was absent; she had, I knew, gone to Little Lady and Carter’s new brick Georgian in Wyngate, and would be spending Christmas Day with them at Carter’s parents’ great stone pile on Dellwood. The house around me was dark, and I was very much alone.
I went out into the kitchen and fixed a plate of leftover party sandwiches and poured myself a cup of coffee, and retreated into the little sun porch off the living room and put an old Charlie Parker album on the phonograph. I settled, self-consciously, into the big, rump-sprung chair that was my father’s, found it surprisingly comfortable, leaned my head back and let the Bird’s liquid silver skitter over and around me like mercury spilled from a thermometer. I was drifting far away, sitting with Sarah at the Vanguard, when I heard a voice say, “Shep? You asleep?” and looked up. Charlie Gentry stood in the doorway to the living room, his topcoat pearled with droplets, his wood-colored hair plastered to his square skull. The old smile of extraordinary, heartbreaking sweetness curved his mouth.
“I knocked and hollered, and I could hear the music, so I came on in,” he said. “The door was unlocked. I figured you were here; nobody else listens to the Bird.”
“Charlie!” I cried out, sleep washing away constraint so that only the old joy at seeing him prevailed. “God, I’m glad to see you! Come on in. I was sitting here feeling like Little Nell.”
“I thought you probably were. I was just by the hospital and saw your mother, and she said you were here by yourself. I’m on my way over to the…to Dorothy and Ben’s, but I wanted to check in here first. Sarah’s still at the children’s party at the speech school.”
I stood before him, stiffly and awkwardly, love and anger and hur
t and the sheer span of years thick in the air between us, and then, as if some common restraint had broken, we both laughed and moved into each other’s arms and hugged.
“I’ve missed you,” I said, into his clean-smelling mouse’s fur. The top of his head came just under my chin. I noticed that his hair was beginning to thin on top, like a tonsure.
“Me, too,” he said. “Asshole though you are.”
I poured us a couple of bourbons and threw another log on the living room fire and we sat in the tree-lit darkness. Outside, full night had fallen, and the mist had thickened until it only missed becoming sleet by a hair. I thought we would probably have ice before morning. The branches that scratched against the windows and the ornate black iron scrolls of the fence gleamed with more than wetness, and the great furnace in the subterranean depths of the basement kicked on, and I heard the carolers from Covenant Presbyterian Church, across the street, begin their traditional Christmas Eve rounds of Buckhead.
“Hark the herald angels sing, glory to the newborn king…”
Their voices were thin and silvery in the tender hush of the night. Traffic on Peachtree Road had thinned almost to a trickle.
“This is the first time it’s seemed like Christmas,” I said.
“I know. Tough Christmas for you folks,” Charlie said. “Hub Dorsey says he thinks your dad will pull through, though. That’s good news.”
“No, it isn’t, Charlie,” I said. I had just gotten Charlie back. I was not going to start talking platitudes to him now.
“No, I guess it isn’t, at that,” he said. “As bad as it is for him, it’s going to be worse for you. It’s hard, trying to be the man of the house when nobody’s prepared you for it.”
I thought of Thad Gentry, radiantly maniacal, a permanent fixture at Brawner’s now, and of the hard years when Charlie was trying to put himself through law school, and work, and take care of his mother. Now he was the man of two houses. I wondered if he found it an extra strain. I did not think so, not with Sarah in one of them.
He did not ask me if I would be staying in Atlanta; I was sure he just assumed that I would. We did not, that night, speak much of our personal futures. But Charlie did talk of his present, and with such unfeigned and humble joy that I found myself grinning broadly as he talked. Even though Sarah was the principal component of his happiness, he was so sweetly fitted into his world, so obviously and perfectly a creature of it, that it was impossible not to smile at the sheer rightness of it all, as you would at a woodland creature in total harmony with its environment. In his dark blue suit and polished oxfords he looked years older, as he had on the awful night at the Plaza, but his face, now, was smooth and pink with contentment and enthusiasm. He had put on a few pounds, and I could see that in a few years Charlie would be, instead of a small square man, a small round one. He would, I thought, be the archetypal Jaycee and Rotarian, the one the others all depended on, the one who chaired the less visible and glamorous committees, the one who stayed latest and got in soonest, the one who would forever be secretary-treasurer. I did not think this pejoratively. Charlie was an innocent and a believer, and that kind of goodness is only scorned by small, stupid men. And under the stolid decency and the burgher’s happiness, the fierce, holy passion of the small boy with the new relic still burned.
“Things are going good for you,” I said. It was not a question.
He looked at me shyly, as though the awareness that his happiness had been bought, in large part, with my pain made him ashamed.
“To paraphrase Max Shulman, Charlie, God never told nobody to be stupid,” I said, and he grinned, and I knew that it was exorcism enough.
“So good it scares me sometimes,” he said. “You know, Shep, I never thought I would be any kind of star, and I never even wanted to be. Just a good lawyer and to have a family, and to be able to make Atlanta better in some small way—shit, even I can hear how holy that sounds—but it really was all I ever wanted. But now…I don’t know, something nice is happening at Coke. I can’t explain it, except that…well, some of the higher-ups have kind of noticed me, and are smoothing the way for me, and the word on the top floor is that they’ve got big things planned for me.”
He looked so pleased and embarrassed at the same time that I laughed aloud.
“Wait till they find out you never got your knottying merit badge,” I said. “Who is they? How high is up?”
“Well…Mr. Woodruff.”
“Jesus,” I said sincerely. “You really have caught a comet’s tail.”
It was true. Robert W. Woodruff, longtime chief executive of the Coca-Cola Company and one of the country’s great philanthropists, whose several family foundations had reshaped the city: hospitals, libraries, museums, theaters, university centers, parks, schools of engineering and liberal arts, endowments, public buildings and private charities; disburser of hundreds of millions of dollars to the benefit of Atlanta; fiercely anonymous power behind literally every throne in the metropolitan area, a man whose will was, without its being known, the city’s command—not an insignificant patron for a twenty-five-year-old attorney with a new degree on whose pristine whiteness the ink was barely dry.
“What did you do, catch him in the barn with the bottler’s daughter? Save his setter from a runaway train?” I said.
“I don’t know what I did,” Charlie said. “I’ve been in Legal over there all along. And by no means on the top of the heap, either, and then one day Mac Draper came by and said Mr. Woodruff wondered if I’d join him and a few others in the executive dining room for lunch, and I did—we didn’t even talk business, really; just about Atlanta, and how I feel about it, and what I thought—and a few days after that he calls me in and says he wonders if somewhere down the road apiece I’d consider leaving the company and coming to work for him at one of the foundations.”
“Is that good?” I said. I realized that I honestly did not know, and that a true Buckhead Boy would have. The gulf between me and the city yawned even further.
“Are you kidding? It’s like being pulled out of the orchestra and given the baton. Or it is to me, anyway. It’s not likely to be a job with much pizzazz attached to it, but I think I could do a lot of good there in the long run. For the city, I mean. What I can’t figure out is why me?”
“Why not you?” I said, feeling the old warmth his diffidence had always called out in me. “You’re bound to be a good lawyer, Charlie, or you wouldn’t have finished first in your class. You’ve got terrific prospects. Ben Cameron’s son-in-law ain’t chopped liver. And I don’t know anybody who loves this benighted town like you do. If I had six hundred million dollars you’re just the guy I’d ask to give it away for me. Besides everything else, you’re the most incorruptible guy I know.”
He reddened with pleasure, and actually ducked his head. I laughed again.
“So what’s going on right now?” I asked.
His face lit up. “God, Shep, everything. Just everything. You’re not going to believe this town in ten or fifteen years; I can’t even begin to tell you what’s on the drawing board. Everything’s coming together for Atlanta: Ben as mayor, these men we’ve known all our lives behind him, money and muscle and intellect and passion—and Mr. Woodruff at the nerve center, with his lines out everywhere, like a…like a spider in the center of a gigantic web. Awful analogy, but he’s in touch with literally everything and everybody; nobody makes a move in town without his okay. You’ll never hear about it, but it’s true. The best thing we’ve got going for us—or they’ve got going for them—is that there’s enough money in the power structure to finance the growth. We don’t have to go out of town for it. Lord God, listen to what’s on tap for the next ten years or so: a major league sports stadium and teams to go in it? We can do that at home. No need to go borrowing outside. A new arts center? A rapid transit system, a new freeway system, a new airport? Let us make a few calls. We can work something out. Direct flights to the capitals of Europe, offices and consulates of every major co
untry in the world on Peachtree Street? More new skyscrapers in the next decade than almost any other American city has ever put up in fifty, branch offices of virtually every Fortune 500 company, office parks stretching for hundreds of square miles in the five counties around us, shopping centers in every community in the same radius, apartments and housing? Give us a year or two…”
He paused for breath, his face messianic.
“What about the race thing?” I said to him, as I had said to Ben Cameron during a similar conversation not a year earlier.
His face cooled, and a troubled frown crept between his clear, magnified brown eyes.
“Race is everything, of course,” he said. “The schools have to be desegregated next September by law, and if we can’t cope with that none of this will get off the ground. The city just won’t survive it. But Mr. Woodruff wants them kept open, and so, somehow, they will be.”
“Just like that?” I said.
“Just like that.” He was not smiling.
“You think the schools’ being kept open will be enough? It seems to me that even here, in the very war room of the civil rights movement, there’s not enough integration to fill a gnat’s drawers,” I said. “I don’t notice any black tide creeping out Peachtree Road.”
He frowned, then.
“It’s not all that bad,” he said. “The buses are integrated. Negroes can play on the public golf courses. They can stay at a few hotels and some of the restaurants, and go to the movies most places. They just don’t do those things yet.”
“So when does Martin Luther King join the Capital City Club?” I said. Charlie was not complacent, but his innocence suddenly made me want to poke him a little. How could he live in Atlanta, profess to love it as he did and not see that, essentially, the barriers were still in place, that no load-bearing walls had come tumbling down?
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