Peachtree Road

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  I do not really know how she fared during the month in her tower. I still do not know why she immured herself there. If it was to avoid censure and consequence, she must have seen within a week that there would, for her, be none. If it was to avoid me, it must have been apparent almost that quickly that she need not bother. When I went into the summerhouse on the second night after the fire, it was, so far as she was concerned, for good. I doubt very much that she felt shame or remorse about Pumphouse Hill or the fire, though she undoubtedly did suffer honestly and deeply over my withdrawal from her. For the first week or so after the event, she sent almost hourly messages by Shem or Martha importuning me to come out and talk to her, and when they did not prevail, sent Tom Carmichael to see me. I would not open the door to him, either. Finally Hub Dorsey pounded on the door one evening until I let him in, and he pleaded with me to end this foolishness and go and see my mother.

  “She’s in terrible shape, Shep,” he said. “She isn’t sleeping, and I don’t think she’s eaten for nearly a week; she must have lost ten pounds. She cries all the time. Look, I know the score on things. Ben talked to me. It’s a heavy load for you; we all know that, even if we can’t talk about it. But I really can’t be responsible for her welfare if you won’t let her try to square things with you, or at least talk to her. It’s punishment enough for her, to have to live with what she’s done. If she loses you on top of your dad, I don’t think she’ll come out of it. This is killing her.”

  “No it isn’t, Hub,” I said, and he soon went away, shaking his head. I did not blame him. Two generations of physicians had had very little joy of the Bondurants.

  After that, for a day or two, my mother herself came and wept at my door, and rapped on it, and called and called and called, promising all manner of things which I managed to effectively drown out with Beethoven and Brubeck. She sent reams of notes in on the trays that Shem Cater brought me from the kitchen, but I burned them in the fireplace in the living room of the summer-house, and scattered the ashes. I was profoundly thankful that she had never gotten around to having a telephone installed. She tried once to send a message to me by Ben Cameron, who was the only visitor I permitted during that time, but he told me matter-of-factly that he had advised her to back off. Apparently she listened to him. Her sorties and entreaties stopped, and she pulled herself together and bathed and dressed and had her hair and nails done and stepped back into the careening winter social orbit that was her day-to-day life, paler and thinner and more beautiful than ever, and no doubt much admired for her bravery in the face of the disgrace her son had brought on the house of Bondurant. Except for Ben and the Club, I did not think that many of Old Buckhead knew the truth of that.

  I quickly learned her schedule, and fashioned a life around it. When she was out of the house, I would go up and bring back books and papers and whatever furnishings I wanted from my father’s library, and a few paintings and trinkets. Shem told me that my mother never went into the library, and that they had not seen her in the kitchen since before Christmas. It was from the Caters that I learned that Aunt Willa had finally moved her belongings up into the newly refurbished attic rooms, and that my mother was bringing my father home, with a full complement of round-the-clock nurses, the second week in February. After he was installed there, they told me, Aunt Willa took to sitting serenely beside him for hours at a time in the evenings, knitting or reading or doing her nails, while the night nurse drank coffee in the kitchen or watched television in her tiny bedroom. My mother, they said, came in to visit him once in the morning and again late in the afternoon, after she returned home from whatever luncheon or committee meeting or shopping trip was on her agenda, and stayed a half hour or so each time. It was Willa Slagle Bondurant who was constant.

  I would have loved to know how my mother felt about that, but somehow I could not ask the Caters, and they did not volunteer the information. Mother would have kept her composure in front of them, in any case. It must have been a bad time for them, these two black custodians of whatever family life there had been in the house on Peachtree Road, with my mother and me at such odds and a wire-grass outlander ensconced at the bedside of their fallen employer. But they never betrayed by so much as an eye-blink that they felt grief or unease. Perhaps they did not. Shem fetched trays for me and helped me move furniture and volunteered, occasionally, to drive me somewhere, and Martha cooked and cleaned for me and washed my clothes and grumbled and fussed and muttered just as she always had, and I thought more than once how much we all owed to their constancy, and how excruciatingly little we deserved it.

  Once, when Shem had driven my mother away in the Rolls, I went up to the big house and climbed the stairs to where my father lay in the unspeakable seraglio that had been created for him by the triumphant Mr. Ronnie, and sat for an hour in the chair by his bed. He looked at me with the one fierce, membraned old eagle’s eye that was open, and the skewed mouth moved a few times and a sound like a maddened beehive came from it, and the fingers of one wasted hand scrabbled at the bed covers, but he could do or say no more than that, and was so sapped and bleached and twisted that I could recognize literally nothing of the fierce blond Visigoth who had loomed over my childhood except the enraged, blue-white eye, and did not mind when the nurse came and drove me away. It was months before I went back. On the whole I saw little reason, for a long time, to leave the summerhouse.

  I could not, now, leave Atlanta for Vermont or New York or anywhere else. I was free enough to go of course, but it was somehow unthinkable. I suppose it was an obscure and savage kind of pride that kept me captive in a small house behind my own great one, in hiding from the woman who had betrayed me before her and my entire world. Or perhaps it was depression; the real, clinical kind, which saps will and freezes limbs and thickens thought and reaction. Lucy told me later that she thought so; she was no stranger, by then, to the deeper malaises of the human spirit.

  But I did not feel sad or anxious or even discomfited in those diamond-bright early days of my first winter at home. I felt, in the bowered fastness of the little white Georgian summerhouse, as clear and still and neutral and somehow fitted as mountain water in a pool. Later, I thought, I would decide what course I would set my life upon; later I would make calls, write letters, see people, think of leaving the summerhouse and the city and the South once more, find a direction and a momentum. Later I would explore how I felt about my father, and perhaps even begin to touch, very gently and infinitely slowly, the interior crypt where I had buried the enormity of Pumphouse Hill and the fire and my mother’s words. Later…

  I did not even think of seeing my mother.

  I have said that Buckhead circled the wagons and cast me out on the plain, but that is not entirely true. From the beginning Lucy came, almost every night at first, and always with Jack in tow because the Volkswagen had finally died in its tracks and they had, now, only the little Ford station wagon that had been the one thing he brought away from his first marriage, and they rode to and from Damascus House in it. The first night she came, after about a week of trying to reach me on the telephone, she said, “I don’t care what the papers say and I don’t care what you’re not saying. I know that you had nothing to do with that horrible slum or the fire or any of it, and I think somebody is hanging you out to dry. I don’t know for sure, but I suppose it’s Aunt Olivia. It makes me madder than shit that you won’t talk to me about it, but if you won’t, and if you want to bury yourself out here for a million years, that’s okay with me. You can’t stop me from coming by here, and you can’t fire me, and I won’t quit. Now. I’m not going to talk about it anymore until you bring it up yourself. I just want you to know that I love you and you can’t fool me.”

  “I know it,” I said. “I love you, too. Tell me what’s happening at Damascus House.”

  And she launched into her newest tale of sit-ins and marches and Martin Luther King sightings, while Jack Venable sprawled before my fire, drinking scotch and eating peanuts and smiling at
her with his whole good, gray heart.

  It seemed outwardly more a badge of Lucy’s newly espoused high-mindedness than of any essential poverty that she wore her pilled and shapeless high school sweaters and skirts, and that her shoes were thin-soled and scuffed and her only winter coat the one Aunt Willa had bought her at the Wood Valley Shop the year of her aborted debut. She wore them all with her usual dash and slouching elegance, so that, on her long, thin-to-bone body, they seemed rakish and perversely attractive. But I knew that between them she and Jack must scarcely make enough at Damascus House to keep food on their table and gas in the Ford. Jack’s Harris Tweed jacket was good, but so old that its cuffs and collar were frayed, and his pants were shiny and stretched taut over his ample rump. I wished, that winter, that I could just go out and charge an entire new wardrobe for Lucy at Rich’s or at Frohsin’s or J. P. Allen’s. And I probably could have done so. I have an idea my mother would have paid, silently and swiftly, any bills I might have incurred. It was part of the enslaving pride that I incurred, that winter and spring, almost no expenses at all.

  Sarah and Charlie came, too. The first time, they sat side by Side on the sofa in the summerhouse living room, dressed almost alike in gray flannel slacks and loafers and oxford shirts under crewneck sweaters, and I was struck, as I never had been before, how similar physically they were, now that Sarah’s pregnancy had squared her off and puffed her vivid cheeks slightly. Both were small and dark and solid, there in the low lamp-and firelight, and both wore the same expression of determined cheerfulness. Strain showed itself in every line of their bodies, though, and twice they spoke together and stopped, and began again, and broke off, laughing uncomfortably. They talked of everything except the one thing on all our minds: the charring of children in the glacial predawn of Pumphouse Hill. I don’t think it would have been so bad if they had come alone to see me, but together Sarah and Charlie Gentry had a newly acquired gloss of genteel conventionality that neither had ever worn separately. It was as if the only map they had for marriage was the elaborate and banal one that had circulated for half a century in Buckhead.

  Finally, Sarah knit her dark brows together and said, “Listen, Shep, something feels queer to me and I want to get it out in the open,” and I saw Charlie, behind her, shake his head quickly at me, no. So I knew then, if I had not before, that Charlie knew the truth of Pumphouse Hill, but that he and Ben and the Club had deemed that their women not be told, not even Sarah. Of course. The old code would be brought into service now, in the face of unpleasantness and disgrace: Let us protect our impressionable, frail women, even at the cost of trivializing them. To me the cost was much higher; it was dishonor. Sarah Cameron Gentry would have been better able to deal with Pumphouse Hill, as she was with all reality, than any of them.

  But I said, lightly, “Everything feels queer to you, probably. It’s called pregnant. You look great, Sarah. How do you feel? You weren’t too pert there for a while.”

  She stared at me out of the black-fringed sherry eyes for a moment, and then said, “Oh, all right, Shep. I’ll play this stupid game, whatever it is, that you and Daddy and Charlie have thought up. But you simply have no idea how childish it is. Yes, I feel terrific, thanks. No more morning sickness, no nothing. But ‘great’ is, I think, the wrong term. What I look like is an illustration for a story on unwed teenage mothers in some damn woman’s magazine.”

  I laughed aloud and Charlie did, too—more out of relief that the taboo had not been broken, I think, than at the aptness of Sarah’s description of herself. But she was right. With her scrubbed face and huge, clear eyes and glossy red cheeks and tousled cap of curls, the small shelf of pregnancy that showed under the crewneck sweater made her look like a waif on the way to the Florence Crittenton home for wayward girls. Her athlete’s muscles had kept the rest of her slender body taut, and her deep breasts were hidden under the oversized sweater, and she looked entirely as young as she had that long-ago day out at the Chattahoochee River, when I had first become aware of her as a woman. It seemed, all at once, incredible that so much time and change and pain had passed between us.

  A week later, on a warm night in February, she came again to the summerhouse. This time she was alone.

  “Something is wrong. I want you to tell me what it is,” she said without preamble, sitting down beside me on the sofa and peering into my face.

  “Nothing is wrong in the way you mean,” I said, knowing that she knew I was lying. “Plenty is wrong, of course, but you know about that. It’s going to take me a long time to get over the fire.”

  “I hate this,” she said, leaning back and jamming her hands into the pockets of her maternity top. “I absolutely hate this stupid…code of silence, or whatever it is. It dishonors all of us, but it dishonors me the worst. For God’s sake, Shep, this is me. Can you possibly think so little of me that you won’t trust me with the truth? Don’t you know by now that I would never tell anyone else, if you asked me not to? Having this between us is…a wall. A wall we can’t get around or over.”

  “Please don’t ask me, Sarah,” I said, in a tight, low voice.

  “I don’t have to ask you,” she said. “I know. It wasn’t you, was it? It wasn’t you, and everybody is letting you take the blame for it. Oh, Shep, I hate them all, and I almost hate you for letting them do it—”

  “Sarah!” My eyes were shut tight with pain and despair. Her words and her rich, low voice were red-hot iron spears in my heart.

  “Okay,” she said softly. “All right. I’m sorry. I won’t put you through any more of this. Will you give me some coffee, or a cup of tea? I’d absolutely love a bourbon and water, but that’s out until the baby comes.”

  I heated water and poured it into an old Quimper cup with a tea bag and brought it, with one teaspoon of sugar as she took it, and put it on the table beside her.

  “Thanks,” she said, but she did not drink the tea. She sat, arms around her knees, staring into the ashes of last week’s dead fire, which I had not yet cleaned out of the fireplace.

  Out of nowhere, I heard myself say, “Sarah, are you happy?” and then wished I could bite off my tongue. We had been so careful, both of us, when we met, to steer our conversations extravagantly wide of these rapids.

  She looked at me without surprise.

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I am happy. Not in the way you mean, I don’t think, but in another and very good way I am happy. How could I not be? Charlie is maybe the best man I’ve ever known, in the real sense of the word, and he’s wonderful to me, and this baby has made me happier than I ever dreamed it would. I really didn’t know I was going to feel this way about having a baby. I’ll probably have seven thousand of them.”

  She paused, and then she said, “I won’t ever be happy the way we could have been happy together, but this is another thing entirely, and it was a total surprise to me. I did marry Charlie on the rebound, Shep, and he knew I did, and I don’t deserve what I got in return for that. But you don’t have to worry about me.”

  “I won’t, then,” I said, my eyes stinging. “Are you painting now?”

  She laughed, uncomfortably, I thought. “Where in the world would I paint in that doll’s house?” she said. “And then Dr. Farmer doesn’t want me to fool around with all that lead until the baby’s here. There’ll be plenty of time for painting.”

  “Don’t stop too long,” I said. “You’re too good. It’s too much a part of you.”

  “It was a part of something else,” she said. Her voice sounded as though she was talking to herself. “It just doesn’t seem to have anything to do with now. It’s…not real, somehow.”

  I was silent, and so was she. She drank off her tea, and looked at me obliquely, and I was aware that there had sprung up in the air between us a strain so intense and uncomfortable that it was almost palpable. We were out of things that could safely be spoken of, and neither of us dared enter that other country.

  Finally she rose and I walked to the door with her, and
she reached up and kissed me on the cheek and said, “Is this as hard on you as it is on me?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I thought it was,” she said, grinning her old light-up-the-world grin. My heart did its now-accustomed, aching fish flop.

  “I don’t think I’ll come again, Shep,” she said. “Maybe sometime with Charlie, but not often. You understand why, I know. And I think you know that we…that I love you. I’ll be here in two seconds flat if you need me. But we can’t be…just friends.”

  “No,” I said. It was true. Sarah and I could be perfectly amiable acquaintances, and we had, at least once, been truly glorious lovers, but simple friendship was now forever lost to us.

  For the first time since that night so long ago in the same room with Lucy, I drank until the bourbon tide took me completely under and when I awoke it was morning, and the sun was high.

  On a day in March of booming wind and high sun, when the first of the great spring skies had begun, a man from Southern Bell came in his panel truck with instructions to install a telephone in the summerhouse. When I asked him who had authorized it, he jerked a thumb backward and said, “Lady in the big house yonder.”

  “Well, you can tell the lady in the big house yonder that I don’t want a telephone, thanks just the same,” I said. “Wait a minute, let me get you something for your trouble, though.”

  “You Mr. Bondurant?” he said.