Peachtree Road

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  “Yes.”

  “Lady said to tell you not to be an ass, that she was tired of waiting for you to come to her, and she couldn’t very well come to you. Said to call her the minute this thing was in. Said you’d know who she was.”

  I did, too. The “ass” had tipped me off. It was not my mother’s style.

  When the phone was installed, I sat down and dialed Merrivale House. Dorothy Cameron answered on the second ring.

  “Well,” she said. “The corpse that speaks like a man. Can you walk, too, or is it just the voice that works?”

  “Dorothy, you ought to know me well enough to know I don’t want this goddamned thing,” I said. “Appreciate the gesture though I do. My mother will be on it fourteen times a day.”

  “She won’t if you don’t tell her you have it,” she said. “I told them to bill me for it. It’s not charity. I fully intend you to pay me back. Listen, Shep, I want to see you. Enough of this foolishness is enough. I’d come over there, but somebody would be sure to see me—I’m not about to crawl through the brush with a knife in my teeth like Ben does—and it would get back to Olivia that I was sneaking over there to see you, when I won’t even speak to her, and the fat really would be in the fire. I want to be able to talk to you when I want to, and for starters I want you to come over here.”

  “Over there?” I said. “Now?”

  “Well, now would be wonderful, but I don’t think I can expect that from Buckhead’s only authentic hermit, can I? No, come after dark, if you don’t want to see anybody, and let yourself in the sun porch door. Ben will be downtown at a meeting tonight.”

  “I don’t know, Dorothy,” I began. The thought of leaving the summerhouse suddenly panicked me.

  “Get over here, Shep, before you freeze up entirely and really aren’t able to leave that pretty little prison of yours,” she said curtly, and I said I would. I knew that I would have to leave the summerhouse sometime and venture out into the world, and that what she said was true. I was indeed in danger, as each day went by, of never leaving it at all.

  I started out after dark that night, thinking to go through the woods, but suddenly the close-pressing undergrowth and trees felt suffocating and fetid, and the night wind was dense and heavy with swelling buds and sweetness and the promise of spring. On impulse I turned toward the big house and began to trot, and jogged past it down the drive to the sidewalk, and soon was loping flat out up Peachtree Road toward Muscogee. I wore tennis shoes and my old high school warm-up sweats, and the sidewalk felt wonderful under my feet, almost springy, and the tight muscles in my calves and things worked and throbbed and loosened. There was no one on the sidewalk, though cars went by steadily on Peachtree Road, and except for the pale pools of the streetlights, I ran in cool, sweet darkness. My heart labored in my chest, and a stitch started, flamelike, under my ribs, but the singing, free-ranging wind ran behind me, propelling me along, and by the time I turned the corner onto Muscogee and began the long pound down its first dark hill, I felt that I was naked as a newborn and swimming, drowning in air and space. It was a wonderful feeling, glorious. When I came crunching up to the side door to the Camerons’s sun porch I was soaked through and blowing like a dolphin, but I felt light as a hollowed reed, and clean.

  I hugged Dorothy Cameron in an excess of euphoria, aware all at once how very much I had missed her. In her long cherry velvet robe she looked, in the lamplight, so much like Sarah that I had to laugh. Only the streaks of silver in her coarse curls gave her age away, those and the fine little lines that radiated out from the corners of her eyes. Her strong chin and cheekbones were just as clean and chiseled as Sarah’s, and her step as light. She laughed back at me, and hugged me, and held her nose lightly.

  “To quote Leroy,” she said, “you smells tired. Is you been working?”

  “No,” I said. “I’s been running.”

  She poured me a bourbon without asking if I wanted it, and one for herself, and we sat in the little sun porch that was almost as familiar to me as the one at 2500 Peachtree Road, and talked. On shelves and on the paneling of the fireplace wall the lares and penates of that great house rested: Ben’s civic awards and honorary degrees and diplomas, young Ben’s trophies and plaques, Sarah’s swimming and diving ribbons and medals and her wonderful, incandescent paintings. I felt a keen physical pang looking at the paintings; they were like the left-behind clothing of someone who had died. Ben’s trophies troubled me, too, though the import of the feeling eluded me. I kept my eyes, for the rest of the evening, on Dorothy.

  She did not speak of the fire and its aftermath except to say, “It’s time you began to come out of the summerhouse now,” and, when I asked her if she really hadn’t spoken to my mother since, “I really haven’t and I probably won’t. She’s beyond my forgiveness or lack of it, but she shan’t have it, anyway.”

  And so I knew that she, unlike her daughter, had been told of my mother’s part in the thing, and was, like the men of the Club, a member of the conspiracy of silence. I did not think she was a willing one. I knew that Ben had always told her everything and would not hold this from her, but I knew, too, that he would swear her to silence, and that she would honor it, even while hating her pledge. I suspected that she was the only woman in Atlanta except my mother and probably a number of black women who knew the entire truth. Something smoothed and eased deep within me, and a vestigial kind of peace breathed itself across my heart.

  We talked, instead, of the comings and goings of Buckhead, and of its gossip and eccentricities, and of Ben’s hopeful young term in the fast-changing city, and of the red-haired young president with his fingers in the sky as well as the earth, and of the accelerating civil rights movement and Lucy’s deepening involvement in it. We talked of gardening and music, and the litter of kittens out in the garage, and the greening trees and the newly built beaver dam in the cold, deep little lake up at Tate, and of art and drama and travel. She said, ruefully, that she and Ben had had to give up a long-dreamed-of trip to Europe that May with more than a hundred members of the Atlanta Art Association, because Ben felt that a newly elected mayor shouldn’t spend a month during the first year of his administration away from his city.

  “I see his point,” she said. “It would look awful. But Lord, I hate to miss that trip. Practically everybody on it is a lifelong friend of ours. It would be like a monthlong house party. It’s been a long time since Ben and I have just cut loose and done anything silly. This would have been the perfect excuse. I tried to give the trip to Sarah and Charlie, but of course she’s due in early June, and they don’t get back until then. You don’t want to go and take a friend, do you?”

  “Not on your life,” I said. “My mother’s going. I don’t think Europe’s big enough for both of us.”

  She reached over and squeezed my hand. “If you can joke about it, you’re going to be all right,” she said.

  “Of course I am,” I said. “Did you think I wasn’t?”

  “I didn’t know. It’s been as bad a thing as you’re likely to have in your life.”

  “Well, then,” I said, “maybe it’s good to get it over with early. From here on out will be gravy.”

  When I was set to leave, Dorothy Cameron did a wonderful thing for me. She probably did not even know how wonderful, though I think she had some idea that it would be useful. She took me into their library and showed me five large wooden crates sitting there on the old stone floor, and said that they were the diaries and journals her father, grandfather and great-grandfather had kept from childhood on. Three complete, lovingly and faithfully detailed patrician lives, bridging more than two hundred years and reaching from a Dorsetshire manor house to the warm red earth of Virginia, and then down through the Carolinas to, finally, Atlanta. The Chase men of Merrivale House, Dorset, and points far west and south, alive now in fine, spidery writing in volume after volume of yellowed vellum.

  “It’s an idea I had,” she said, when I stood staring at the crates, uncomprehending
. “I know how you love pure research, and I know what a gifted writer you are. And I know, too, that to save your soul and sanity you need some real work to do, something valuable. So I’m going to give you my family, instead of dumping them on the historical society where nobody will ever even read them, much less really see what’s there. I’m not just being conceited, Shep. It strikes me that my family is almost laughably, prototypically Georgian—the compleat Georgians, sort of—from England via Virginia and the Carolinas and on down into Georgia and here. We didn’t come over with the debtors just out of prison to Savannah, with Oglethorpe; there’s been lots written about them. We were one of the few relatively educated and wellborn families to migrate to the colonies. I don’t recall ever reading anything comprehensive about that sort of settler. But the South’s bones rest on them. You have a huge work of history and sociology here, all bound together by blood ties, and in the words of the men who lived it. I think you ought to write it. I think you could do a splendid job of it. Altogether, it would take you about twenty years, but I suspect you’ve got the time. And it would be an enormously valuable thing to do. Would you like to try? I’d rather you did this with your life than take to drink or buggery or pedophilia.”

  The Compleat Georgian was born that night, and Dorothy was right. I fell in love with the gifted, ornery, eccentric men who were clamoring and jostling to get off those crumbling pages, and the liberation of them did indeed, many times over, save my sanity and my soul. Perhaps it may again. I would very much like to see the Georgian go out into the world, fully fleshed and breathing. If it should happen, it will be because Dorothy Cameron knew on that night, as perhaps no one else alive could know then, what it would take to redeem me. And she gave me, that evening, the next quarter century of my life. When I went home it was with Leroy in Ben’s Lincoln, the five crates of Chases shimmering in their life and richness on the backseat and in the trunk.

  I unloaded them that very evening, and the next morning, even before I could get a carpenter in to measure for the bookcases that would be needed to house them, I sat down on the floor in a pool of spring sunlight and began.

  I had a sense that spring that I was, slowly and imperceptibly, fashioning a life for myself as well as an order for those other lives. Before, in the bowels of the New York Public Library, I had been merely passing through antiquity, biding time in the parchment lives of others. Now I was beginning to map a universe wherein I, as well as those captive Southerners, might honorably live. The thought was deeply satisfying, and fed, in part, the insatiable mouth of the pain that the fire and its aftermath, and my mother’s terrified treachery, had unleashed.

  It was a good thing. Almost no one from my previous life in Buckhead came near me that spring. I don’t think it was censure so much as embarrassment, a kind of tribal reticence for which I myself had set the standard with my withdrawal, that kept the Buckhead Boys away from me. A.J. came, of course. And Charlie looked in occasionally, and Ben, and I talked with Dorothy Cameron regularly, but Sarah did not come again, and in mid-spring, even Lucy stopped her nearly nightly visits to the summerhouse with Jack. She called me one night, tears thick in her throaty voice, and told me that Jack had balked at coming by the house that evening, and that they had had a fight about it, and he had ended by refusing to visit anymore and forbidding her to come alone on the rare occasions when she had the Ford to herself.

  “It’s not you, Gibby,” she said, around drags from her cigarette. She was drinking, too; I could hear the chink of ice against glass over the wire. “He’s truly fond of you. It’s me. He says I’m a bad example to the children, and that I’m neglecting them and spending all my free time with you. He says from now on we’re coming straight home from work and doing things with the boys, like a normal family. It’s bullshit, of course. We never were a normal family. They’re not normal kids. They never liked me worth a damn, and it’s worse now than it ever was, and they hate every minute I spend with them. These evenings together around the goddamned family hearth are as much an ordeal for them as they are for me. But Jack eats them up. All of a sudden he wants us to be Ozzie and Harriet, or the fucking Cleavers, or somebody. He knew I wasn’t like that when he married me. He knew what I was; he knew where my real commitment was. This is a total switch. I can’t be that kind of stupid, smirking little wife and mother.”

  All her saintliness seemed, in that moment, to have fled, and I was vaguely relieved.

  “Maybe the kids will come around when they’re a little more used to you,” I said. “Nights at home with them for a while can’t be all that bad.”

  “With those two they’re hideous,” she said. “Unless you’re into advanced nose picking. There’s no way they’re ever going to accept me, Gibby. To their little minds now it was I who ran off their sainted mother. And to make it worse, Jack wants us to have a baby of our own. He’s thrown away my diaphragm. We try every night—God, how we try. Wouldn’t that be a fine mess, me pregnant as a yard dog trying to march and drive a bus and register voters?”

  “Don’t you want children?” I asked. “Somehow I just took it for granted that you’d have them.”

  “Not everybody is as maternal as your precious Sarah,” she said waspishly, and then, “Oh Lord, I’m sorry. It’s the liquor talking. I guess I’m jealous because I suspect that she’ll be a better mother than I could in a million years. And then I have to be honest with you, I hate this business of your rooting around over there in Sarah’s family tree.”

  “Why on earth would you hate that?” I said, honestly surprised. She had professed herself overjoyed that I had found significant and absorbing work to do. It would, she had said, make her feel much better to think that I was not withering with loneliness and isolation.

  “I don’t really know,” she said. “It’s illogical and totally unworthy. I guess…I just feel like it’s one more tie to Sarah Cameron, and one that will last practically all your life. I don’t know why that bothers me, but it does.”

  “Sarah is out of my life now, Luce,” I said. “You know that as well as anybody.”

  “No, I don’t,” she said in a low voice. But she dropped the subject, and thereafter, every night, her throaty “Hey, Gibby?” (Pause. Long, indrawn breath of cigarette smoke.) “It’s Lucy, honey,” prefaced my daily dose of life outside the summerhouse walls. I came to depend on it, and miss it keenly when, on rare occasions, it did not come. During those first long months of isolation, Lucy was my window on the world.

  In early May my mother left with a hundred-odd members of the Atlanta Art Association for her month long tour of the galleries and museums of Europe, and I felt free to wander, in the late afternoons, into the big house. Sometimes I visited with Shem and Martha Cater in the kitchen, and sometimes I went upstairs and sat for a few silent minutes beside my father, mute and captive still in his warped flesh, and sometimes I simply sat on the little sun porch off the living room, with the afternoon light falling on the black and white tiled floor and the deep green walls and the airy white wicker furniture, deep-cushioned in what my mother always called “Dorothy Draper red.” The cushion in the big armchair that had been my father’s was gradually springing back without the ongoing burden of his heavy frame, and the indentation there now fit my own thinner and lighter body. It was the only place in my mother’s house where I felt that I had some small territorial imperative. By this time, I no longer thought of it as my father’s house. Even an ocean away, my mother dominated it now.

  On the first Sunday morning in June, I was hovering between sleep and an elusive wakefulness that promised breakfast in the sun-room of the big house, where I had taken it for the past four Sunday mornings of my mother’s absence, with a pot of coffee and the Sunday papers. She was due home from Paris late that evening, and then my tenure as master of the manor at 2500 Peachtree Road would end. I did not mind, except for the loss of those tranquil Sunday mornings, and was considering abandoning sleep for waffles and sausage when I heard the bedroom door ope
n and a soft voice call, “Shep?”

  Even with my eyes closed, even half-submerged in sleep, I knew the voice was Sarah’s, but I was not surprised. In that half-lit world where all ambiguities can be rationalized and all discrepancies justified, I felt only a deep, sweet contentment at the rightness of Sarah’s voice calling me out of sleep, and I felt myself smile even before I opened my eyes. I kept them closed for a moment, knowing that the perfect contentment would flee with the falling of the light upon them.

  I felt her weight as she sat down on the edge of my bed, and was reaching out for her, eyes still closed, when she said again, “Shep,” and this time something in her voice snapped my lids up as if they were attached to wires. I sat up in the tumbled bed and blinked against the fierce white June light streaming in from the door through which she had just entered, and looked at her.

  At first I thought she had come to tell me of some terrible thing that had happened to Charlie, or her soon-to-be-born baby, for her face was so swollen and distorted from crying that I could scarcely recognize her, and I could hear the sobs caught in her throat and see its strong column trying to work around the strangling brine. Fresh tears ran from her reddened eyes and dripped from her chin onto her maternity smock, and I stared stupidly at the splotches they made against the blue chambray. It was only then that I realized that nothing could be wrong with the baby, because it was still there, a great, elastic mound under the smock. I lifted my eyes in dread from the front of her to her face.

  “Has something happened to Charlie?” I said. I could scarcely form the words.

  “No. Not Charlie. It’s…Shep, Daddy just got a call from Carter Stephenson at WSB. The…the…your mother’s plane…it crashed, Shep. It crashed on takeoff at Orly, and I’m afraid they’re all gone. It’s just now coming in over the radio, and there aren’t any details yet, but Daddy made sure there’s been no mistake, and…I’m sorry.” She dropped her face into her hands and wept aloud. “I’m sorry. I came over here to tell you because I didn’t want you to hear it by yourself on the radio or when some reporter calls, and now I can’t…”