Peachtree Road

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  “You’re right, we need to do something about the clubs, and I’m afraid that’s going to be the toughest, though it’s by far the least important,” he said. “But we’ll do it eventually. We’re not stupid. The white leadership is not stupid. Ben Cameron has been meeting unofficially with some of the black leadership at the Commerce Club all during this sit-in business.”

  “And what did they have for lunch?” I said. I could not seem to stop baiting him.

  “Don’t be an ass, Shep,” he said. “It was after hours, and they met in a back room. As I said, Ben isn’t stupid, and neither are the Negroes. Manhattans and London broil would blow the whole thing out of the water. We’ll work it out because we have to work it out. Because Mr. Woodruff and a few other men like him want very much to work it out. Atlanta has two things going for it that most Southern cities don’t: an established black community with a gracious lot of money behind it, and a politically savvy and wealthy white power structure who are committed to making the race thing work. You watch Ben in the next few years. Hell, you’ll see results sooner than that; Forward Atlanta has already begun, and the six-point program goes into effect about the time he takes office. I’m prouder than hell to be part of it, no matter how small and how far behind the scenes I am. Or will be.”

  “And I’m prouder than hell of you,” I said, and meant it. “You’re a good man, Charlie. You deserve everything that’s happening to you. Don’t ever sell yourself short.”

  The ormolu clock out in the hall rotunda chimed eight, and he got up to leave. I got his coat off the chair where he’d dropped it, and helped him into it, and walked him to the door.

  “Young Ben was here this afternoon,” I said. “I’m not at all easy about him. Something seems to be eating at him. Have you noticed?”

  He looked at me, perplexed. “No,” he said. “I thought things were coming up roses for him. The jobs and recognition, and the new baby and all…what could be wrong? You sound like Sarah.”

  “What does Sarah think?” I said. I had to consciously form the sound of her name on my mouth, to consciously push it out into the air toward this small, staunch man who was now her husband.

  “Just that something is wrong. She can’t put her finger on it, and she has to admit that she has no real reason for thinking so. But she’s mentioned it several times. I know it worries her.”

  “It worries me, too,” I said.

  “It’s probably just the baby coming,” he said. “It’s a…an extraordinary time. Shep…” and he paused.

  “Yeah?” I said.

  He turned his face up to mine, and it was absolutely luminous. “I wanted you to know before anybody except Ben and Dorothy. It’s really why I came by. Sarah wanted me to tell you. She’s…we’re going to have a baby. She’s almost three months pregnant. It’s due in June.”

  I felt stillness come down over me like a cast net. I thought of Sarah’s thinness, and the circles under her amber eyes, and of her words at the hospital: “I look like twelve miles of bad road…. But it’s temporary.”

  “Congratulations, Papa,” I said, and the tears that swam in my eyes, obscuring him for a moment, were for his joy as much as for the great, vast, windy emptiness that was the middle of me.

  “Thank you,” he said. “I don’t guess I have to tell you that next to Sarah herself, this makes me the happiest man on the face of the earth.”

  “No,” I said. “You don’t have to tell me that.”

  When the great white door shut behind him, there was a twin to it, an echo, inside me, somewhere in the vicinity of my arid heart.

  Somehow we got through that travesty of a Christmas Day, my mother and I. It seemed that half of Buckhead asked us to share their family dinners, but my mother demurred, reluctant, perhaps, to surrender the picturesque pathos of the brave, beautiful wife alone beside her husband’s hospital bed on Christmas, and I was grateful. I don’t think I could have sat making conversation in some gracious dining room or beside an ancestral fire, awash in privileged celebration, while every fiber of my being shrieked to be away and gone. My mother suggested that we go to the Driving Club for midday dinner, but I vetoed that quickly. It was too much my father’s place, too fraught with the flotsam and jetsam of my childhood. I did not want to suffer the courtly sympathies of dignified old black Frost, at the door, or of Chilton, in the bar, or of any of the stewards and waitresses, most of whom had known me by name and temperament since I could toddle. I wanted, from now on out, as few tendrils reaching out from that vanished Atlanta as possible. I wanted to leave here light and free, without the burning red marks of their suckers on my flesh.

  So we went to Hart’s on Peachtree Road, that lovely old stone bastion of mediocre food and quintessential Buckheadness, one of the few approved places besides two or three clubs where Old Atlanta dined with regularity. When I was small it had been a private home, and its new owners had wisely left the beautiful, high-ceilinged rooms and the great, arching oaks outside nearly intact, so that you felt, sitting there, that you had entered still another dining room like those you had visited all your life in Buckhead. I think perhaps that accounted for its popularity with my parents’ set. “Oh, we’re not really going out,” they would say to one another. “We’re just running up to Hart’s.” And indeed, the elderly Negro staff knew most of them by name, and would ask after their health and their children, and so the sense of being among their own prevailed there. I think that perhaps the most virulently regarded consequence of the civil rights movement, among old Buckhead, was when its proprietors closed Hart’s rather than allow Negroes to dine there.

  My father continued his clawing, imperceptible ascent out of the stroke’s mortal grip, though the paralysis did not improve, and except for his foot, which gained mobility every day, he lay rigid and ruined, turning his furious face back and forth from my mother and me to the window, making no sound. But each day another tube or so was removed, and by the end of that week he was able to swallow some of the viscous mess a nurse spooned into his blasted mouth, though most of it dribbled down his chin. Hub Dorsey thought that once the catheter could be removed, and he was able to swallow medication easily, we might begin to think of taking him out of the hospital. He simply shook his head despairingly when I told him of my mother’s plan to bring my father home and install him upstairs, and said he would talk to her himself. I don’t know whether he did or not. If he did, it was in vain. Mr.Ronnie of Rich’s, wall-eyed with silent reproach at me and trailed by a flying wedge of minions, came with wallpaper and fabric and paints and pillows, and the suite of rooms in the right wing that had been the province of Aunt Willa and Little Lady and, so briefly, little Jamie Bondurant began to be fitted out for an invalid Eastern emperor. I lay low in the summerhouse or the downstairs sun porch, out of the way of his bustling malevolence and the paisleys and velvets and silks and gilt that streamed up the staircase like the spoils of Cathay. I did not like Mr. Ronnie’s idea of an imperial sickroom any better than I had his safari bedroom. It might have succored a dying Philip of Macedon, but I thought it was likely to hasten my father, whose idea of decorative frivolity was the murkier clan tartans of the Scottish Highlands, right off across the Styx.

  My aunt Willa, faced with the loss of both her long-occupied bower and the summerhouse, had no recourse but to accept my mother’s lilting proposal that she make “a darling, private little apartment of your very own” up on the third floor, in the little warren of rooms that had been mine and Lucy’s in early childhood. She was momentarily bested, and knew it, but to her credit, she put a good face on it, and immediately set out to charm the fickle Mr. Ronnie until he was spending most of his time up there with her, happily spreading out his samples and stapling fabric and poufing pillows. My mother seethed at his defection, but said nothing. She knew as well as Willa, as well as Lucy and I before her, that the attic was Coventry, even done up to resemble a seraglio. So it was an impasse. With both women in the house thrumming with subterranean anger an
d masking it with sweet smiles and drawled pleasantries, I took to burrowing into my father’s hallowed library, where the huge oak doors shut out sight and sound, and beginning to thumb, tentatively, through the files and papers that were the visible hieroglyphics of his business affairs. They made absolutely no sense to me. I had fared far better with my Babylonian antiquities.

  I visited a few of the Buckhead Boys and their wives that week, largely because it would have looked odd if I had not, though I did not go to see Charlie and Sarah. And I spent one evening with Lucy and Jack, in the farmhouse at the end of an unspeakable dirt road miles outside Lithonia. I had never been that far east in DeKalb County, and got lost, lurching along black, sodden country roads where the undergrowth leaned so close that I could hear the squeals of its furrows in the hand-rubbed lacquer of my father’s great, wallowing Rolls. When I finally arrived, an hour late, it was to find Lucy flushed and disheveled from the heat of the old gas stove in the vast, dingy kitchen, and the two sallow, thin-faced boys querulous with hunger and their hated “good” clothes, and dinner drying in the oven, and Jack Venable pinched and dry-voiced with exasperation. The house itself was a shambles, sadly in need of paint inside and out and without central heating, so that you dashed from one small, overheated room to another through dark, arctic wastes of plasterboard and canted linoleum. Jack had wanted a “real” farm; he had gotten a bargain in this one.

  We ate a horrendously bad chicken fricassee in the large front room that obviously served as Lucy and Jack’s bed-sitting-room, on card tables which had been covered with the exquisite old damask that my mother had given Lucy for a wedding present. My own Georg Jensen crystal candlesticks sat on the grown-ups’ table, and I recognized the rose-sprigged china and the thin goblets as my family’s Royal Doulton and Baccarat “second set,” which had been my paternal grandmother’s and which my mother had never liked. An enormous space heater glowered furiously in front of the closed-off fireplace, and the great bed in the corner, as dark and tall and massive as a Viking ship, was obviously an old piece from Jack’s family. It was covered with a thin, faded chenille spread, but at its bottom a cloudlike peach drift of goose-down comforter lay.

  The whole house was a schizophrenic amalgam of spavined, dismal authentic North Georgia country and satiny Buckhead wedding largesse. On the whole, I thought that the stubborn, dreary country was winning the battle. Lucy’s brave bits of china and crystal and damask and silver were poignant to me, instead of stylish and go-to-hell, as she no doubt intended them to be. I wondered how she felt about the reality of her bucolic new kingdom. When I left the room after dinner to go to the bathroom, at the other end of the house, I hurried through what seemed endless wastes of glacial darkness and found, in the dim, stained bathroom, along with a bulbous, claw-footed tub and tall, skinny, rusting old fixtures, another roaring space heater and a Dewar’s scotch carton in which a rangy, suspicious mother cat lay on an old flannel bathrobe and nursed lank, striped kittens. When I reached over to pet her, she spat and hissed expertly.

  It was not a good evening. My lateness and the ruined dinner undoubtedly contributed, but the strangeness went deeper than that. The children were, I thought, unusually unattractive even given the trauma of their mother’s defection and their father’s redefection to this much younger interloper. They eyed me and Lucy out of the corners of small, pale eyes, and picked their noses, and pointedly refused to respond to her questions and comments, speaking elaborately and only to their father. They would not even look at me.

  Jack himself was silent, eating methodically, nodding and saying “yes” and “no” to direct questions, but little else. He drank gin martinis steadily before dinner, and scotch after, and sat in a great, sagging morris chair beside the space heater and watched television in silence while Lucy served coffee and cognac and made conversation that was so animated it bordered on the febrile. She was drinking a good bit herself, sipping steadily on a never-dwindling glass of orange juice that smote the air around it with vodka, and though she was dressed in black velvet Capri pants and a silk shirt, and wore her graduation pearls around her slender throat, I did not think she looked well. Her creamy, rose-flushed skin was raw around her mouth and on her knuckles, as if she washed only in hard, cold water, and her suede flats were scuffed and slick and stretched on her slender feet. Her heavy, silky blue-black hair had been drawn back into a ponytail as it had when I saw her at the hospital. The ends straggled at her nape, and I felt a sudden surge of anger. Lucy’s regular haircuts at Rich’s were one of the precise, immutable rituals of her life, and her glorious hair was the only one of her splendid physical assets of which she had ever seemed vain. Were they so poor that she had given up haircuts along with nearly every other luxury she had been casually accustomed to? Why did Jack not get her shoes fixed for her, or buy her new ones? Was she so absorbed in the drama and momentum of their work with the movement that she had simply abjured all worldly trappings, or were they now beyond her reach? I hated the way she looked and the way she obviously lived. The house, besides being dilapidated, was not clean. In it, she was like an Arabian mare in a muck-wet draft horses’ barn. If this was the haven Jack Venable had offered her, I wanted to shove it back down his fleshy throat. And why was he so silent and so rude? Had they had a fight, or was this his customary demeanor, now that they were married and she was no longer an elusive flame, but struggled to burn on his hearth?

  Despite Lucy’s chatter and gaiety, and her rich laugh and her bawdy gossip, invariably prefaced with her breathy, rushed little “Oh, listen, Gibby,” the evening rolled over and lay lumpen and dead at our feet, and I rose to leave only a couple of hours after I arrived, pleading the freezing wind and the bad roads and the distance back to Peachtree Road. Jack heaved himself reluctantly out of his chair and walked with me and Lucy to the door, and gave me only a perfunctory handshake and a “Come again, Shep. And watch the drive there. You don’t want to knock the bloom off that Rolls.”

  I was so angry with him, and his coldness toward Lucy, and the mean-spirited lack of cherishing, that I turned back halfway to the Rolls, meaning to say something light but significant like, “Take care of her, Jack, I’m taking names,” but the words died in my throat. He stood with his arms around her in the dark doorway of the farmhouse, his head bent to hers, and there was such tenderness in the angle of his face, and in his hands on her shoulders, that I felt a lump rise in my throat. Whatever ate at Jack Venable and had caused him to freeze Lucy out tonight, it was not lack of love for her. I navigated the lurching miles back to Atlanta troubled in my soul for my cousin Lucy, but not on that score.

  The day after that, Tom Carmichael and Marshall Haynes, my father’s man at the Trust Company, came by to see me. Shem Cater brought them into the library, where I had given up for the morning on the ledgers and statements and files and taken refuge in an old volume of Bulfinch that had been my grandfather Redwine’s. They got right down to business.

  “We need to set up a series of meetings, Shep, either here or at my office or down at the bank,” Tom said, and Marshall nodded his sandy, crew-cut head. It was said by my crowd, who undoubtedly got it from their fathers, that he was a wizard with corporate accounts, and very much the young man to watch during the next couple of decades. To me, he looked about thirteen, an anemic thirteen, at that, and I remembered that when my father had first been passed along to him, after old Claude Maddox had retired, that he had been furious at the seeming slight of being handed over to a mere child. But after the first month or two, he had stopped his grumbling, and had after that begun to speak of “Haynes” in the same tone that he did “Carmichael” and “Cheatham” and “Cameron.” Marshall Haynes and I looked at each other with the instinctive dislike of the young, competent hireling for the young, incompetent princeling, and vice versa, and smiled brilliantly. Each of us knew the other had something that he would never have, and that he envied.

  “I figure we can get you in shape to operate autonomously in about
six weeks,” Haynes began pleasantly, and Tom Carmichael picked it up: “The day-to-day operating procedure is really quite simple; your dad handled it in a couple or three hours each day, and there wasn’t any reason for him to go down to the office everyday, except to have lunch at the Capital City or Commerce Club,” he said. “You know the staff; they’re as fine people as you’ll find for their sort of thing, and your dad trained them the way he wanted them. They can, essentially, carry on day to day by themselves. But you need to be able to function as manager and decision-maker, and between us, Marshall and I can fill you in on assets and portfolios and such, and broad-brush a picture of the structure and legalities of things.”

  Marshall Haynes nodded this time, and I thought they resembled nothing so much as a second-rate father-and-son comic routine.

  “You’re going to need some brushing up, even if you’ve been familiar with the business all your life,” he said. “Though Tom tells me your field is classics, not real estate. The real estate picture has changed almost entirely since you left for school, and there’s just no telling which way it’s going to take off in the next year or so. Foreign capital, REITs—there are a lot of new wrinkles we can teach you. Better get it out of the way right in the beginning, so you can pick up the reins before too much time has elapsed. Then it’ll be pretty much your show, with us in the wings to back you up, of course. We’ll be there whenever you need us.”

  He grinned, an attractive replica of Tom Carmichael’s grin—the official Old Boy grin of the men who were now the Club—and I leaned back and gave the grin back to him and said, perversely, “Sorry, but no dice. I’m glad you came by; it’ll save me a phone call. But I’m not going to be brushing up and picking up reins and running shows. I’m leaving the next week for Vermont to teach classics to fat little rich kids, and what I really need for you guys to do is find me a good business manager who can brush up and pick up and run shows, and find him fast, and turn the whole shooting match over to him. Like tomorrow or the next day. You can do that, Tom, can’t you?” I purposely did not include Marshall Haynes in the question.