We were ankle-deep in those hundred-odd lives. Personal objects were as thick in the rubble and ashes as hailstones after a storm. Most were half-burned and so blackened that it was useless to probe them, but many were recognizable, piercing, incongruous, icons not of death, but of stubborn, unquenchable life. Guidebooks, menus, ashtrays, wallets, traveler’s checks, a French doll bought for a child who would never hold it, and incredibly unbroken bottle of fine champagne, an Athens, Georgia, Rotary Club flag, a silver-knobbed cane, a gold evening slipper, scraps of tulle and velvet, an intact brocade shawl. Ben reached over and picked up the cane and the shawl. I could see that tears ran down his face, but it was still.
“This is Wynn Farrell’s cane,” he said, in a thin, old voice. He was not speaking to anyone in particular. “It was his father’s, and his grandfather’s before that, I think. Wynn didn’t need the damned thing, but he took it everywhere with him. Said it made him feel like Maurice Chevalier. And this is Elizabeth Carling’s shawl. I’ve seen her in it a hundred times, on cool nights, at the club or at parties. Dear Jesus, none of us are going to get over this.”
“Light,” I said to myself, half-aloud. “Clean, radiant light…”
After a while the objects stopped making any sense to me and might have been clods of earth, or stones, and I was no more affected by them than I might have been by anonymous outcroppings in some ancient lava field. I had been far more moved by the crumbling manuscripts that I ferried in my cart in the tunnels beneath the New York Public Library. When at last we left that sunstruck, silent charnel field and headed in the limousines into Paris for lunch, I found that I was quite hungry.
Lucy did not go with us to the morgues to look at the dead. In the end, she did not even ask to go. Ben had our driver drop her, along with Carter Stephenson and the obviously smitten young man from the American embassy, at the excellent and anonymous small hotel near the embassy where rooms were held for us, and she said only, getting out of the car on the arm of the young man, “Remember, Gibby. We be of one blood….”
Even when I met her in the dark little hotel bar afterward, and we drank steadily through the dinner hour and into the evening, and there was ample time and opportunity for her to do so, she did not ask about that afternoon, and she never did in her life. By that time, after so many hours in my company and the invisible company of the dead, I am sure that she simply, as she always had, knew. It was, that full and silent knowing, almost her best gift to me.
Ben and Hinton Drexel and their party went to all five morgues that afternoon. After the first one, I waited in the limousine. It was not that I was shocked or sickened or near collapse; it was that after the first one I knew that any more searching of the dead faces was futile. It would not be by sight that they were identified, and it would not be that day or that week, or even, probably, for many weeks. My presence seemed, suddenly, an unbearably boorish and brutal intrusion. If my mother lay in the morgue that I visited, I did not know it, and if she lay in one of the others, no one of us could have told. The bodies, severe and formal in proper white sheeting and chilled into antiseptic stasis in the cold rooms, were hardly defaced. In most cases the hair had not even been burned off. The skin had simply been browned a taut, shellacked yellow-brown, almost the precise shade of centuries-old mummies, so that identification was impossible.
I walked with Ben among the smiling brown dead of Atlanta in that first morgue and saw nothing that had to do with life and living; life had been closer out on that silent, terrible plain, under the new summer sun. Ben stayed behind to look over the personal effects that had been taken from the bodies while I went back out to the limousine and sat down in the backseat. The middle-aged driver asked me something in rapid, nasal French, and when I simply shook my head, handed me a small aluminum glass of brandy, and I drank it, thinking with an insane peevishness that I would have to surrender the now-familiar image that my mind had kept, of my mother with her hair in flames, and in its place try to fix a new one of my mother with the hard ocher face of a millenniums-dead Egyptian princess.
Ben and Hinton Drexel went back to their rooms to begin the long, awful business of telephoning the families back in Atlanta, and Carter Stephenson went to file his stories, and Lucy and I drank through the fabled l’heure bleu of Paris and into its cool, late-falling night. We held hands but we did not talk much. We did not get drunk. Neither of us mentioned dinner, nor did we speak of what we both knew: that there was nothing more for us in Paris, and that we would arrange the next day to go home. I do not think that either of us felt the trip had been useless. I know that I felt, obscurely but deeply, that some unnamed and unknowable but essential thing had been accomplished, and I have been grateful all the years since that I went, and that Lucy went with me.
But I felt just as strongly that we must not linger in Paris. By tacit agreement, we both rose from our table at about nine o’clock and went upstairs in the little scrolled, iron-caged lift to our adjoining rooms. She did not ask me if I wanted to talk for a while, or needed company; she simply kissed me on the cheek and said, “’Night, Gibby,” and unlocked her door and went in, closing it behind her. I undressed and got into bed, tired beyond thought and nearly beyond feeling, and waited for sleep.
But it did not come. Nothing did. For what seemed like an eternity I lay in the dark, aware of everything and nothing, the very air seeming textured and heavy against my naked flesh, as empty and cool as a grape skin.
Around midnight, Ben Cameron rapped softly on the door and then pushed it open, and I realized that I had forgotten to lock it. He came in and sat down on the edge of my bed as Sarah had done, incredibly, only thirty-six hours before.
“Are you asleep?” he said, and when I said no, he reached out and turned on the little bedside lamp. He was so drawn that the skin of his face looked like crumpled tissue paper, but he was smiling.
“I just had a call from home,” he said. “Sarah had a little girl this afternoon at four-seventeen. She and the baby are just fine. She wanted me to tell you. And she wanted me to tell you that they’re naming her Olivia Redwine Gentry…because she wants your mother’s name to go on. She asked me to tell you that.”
“Thank you, Ben,” I said.
“I brought this back for you, too,” he said. “They had it in storage at the third…place we went. I’m pretty sure it’s your mother’s, and I thought you might want to keep it. We know where she is, now, Shep, and we can bring her home for you. She wasn’t…she was unmarked.”
He put a small object onto the bedside table and got up and left the room, closing the door behind him. I reached over to the table. He had put a shoe there, a narrow, stiletto-heeled evening pump of the sort that I had seen a hundred times before, in my mother’s closet or on her narrow feet as she left for a party. She had them custom made in New York and sent to her, and they had her monogram embroidered in gold thread in the inside lining. This one was blackened on the outside, but the satin lined inside was unsullied, and I saw it there, in intricate script: ORB. Olivia Redwine Bondurant.
I turned off the light and sat holding my mother’s shoe in my hand, and then, finally, in the heavy darkness, I wept, aloud and hard and painfully, like an utterly inconsolable child, not for what lay in the third morgue of Paris, but for what had laughed and danced in the beautiful, foolish shoe and for the hopeful best that would live on, now, in the name of Sarah’s first born. I cried until I thought my chest would burst with the anguish; I could not stop; the tears poured and pounded on. I remember thinking, for the first time in my life, that it was possible to simply die of tears.
Sometime that night—I do not know when—Lucy came into the room and slipped into the bed with me. She was naked, and her body was long and light and silken and cool, and she pressed it around and against and under and over me, and her warm, sweet open mouth was against my face and hair and cheeks and eyelids and nose, and finally over my mouth, so that I sobbed directly into the breath of her, and then, simply and with a deep, deep floweri
ng, she took me inside her, and rocked with me to a beat as old and deep and primal as the world, and was Lucy was Sarah was Lucy was Sarah was Lucy was my mother was Sarah was Lucy, was the world, was the universe…and all that I had not felt budded and bloomed and swelled and burst loose and roared through me and she took it into herself, and I was freed.
We flew home to Atlanta the next day, and we did not speak of that night directly, then or ever. When she told me three months later on a day of high honey sun up at Tate, where she and Jack and I had gone for the weekend, that she was pregnant, and I said, “Lucy, is it…?” she only shook her head.
“I don’t know,” she said.” “I honestly and truly don’t know and never will, Gibby. It could just as easily be Jack’s, and if it isn’t he’ll never know it.”
And I had to be content with that, because she seemed so.
But when, in March of 1963, her daughter was born in Piedmont Hospital, in the middle of a three-day ice storm, and I asked the baby’s name, there was something more than pride and love for that tiny, perfect girl child in her luminous blue eyes when she said, “Malory. Her name is Malory Bondurant Venable.”
PART THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY
From the very beginning, Lucy’s bond with her daughter was an extraordinary thing. I did not imagine it; everyone spoke of it. Aunt Willa, every inch the doting Buckhead grandmother, said, “I swear, that child is listening to Lucy. Look at those eyes following her.” And Jack, leaning back exultantly in his chair in the summerhouse living room on the night of Malory’s birth, said, “It’s like looking at two mirror images facing each other. Or twins of some kind. Those identical blue eyes staring at each other with such intensity you can almost see the sparks jumping between them. And the sounds the baby makes when Lucy talks to her. Like she understands, and talks back. Lucy says she does. I swear to God, Shep, I love my boys, of course I do, but I never felt anything quite like the feeling I have for that little girl. It’s almost out of the same piece of what I feel for Lucy. Tell me, really…did you ever see such a beautiful baby?”
“No,” I said. “I never did. Of course, you could count the babies I’ve seen on the fingers of one hand. But she does seem prettier than it’s right for a baby to be.”
“Thank God she takes after Lucy,” he said, swallowing his scotch. His doughy face was flushed, and softer than I had seen it since the first days of his marriage to Lucy; somehow boy like, despite the thinning white hair and fine-etched lines. “I’d hate to pass the Venable puss on to a little girl. But Malory is pure Bondurant.”
I kept my face still over the queer pang in my chest. I would have to get used to that momentary sweet-sick heaviness, I thought, for Malory Venable was indeed pure Bondurant, though it was more the Bondurant-ness that looked out of Lucy’s eyes and the eyes in her treasured old photographs of her father, than mine. I thanked God for that, even though an infinitesimal part of me felt an obscure disappointment. After all, I decided, what did it matter? Malory Venable was blood of my blood, to one degree or another, and I had the license, at least, of doting cousin to excuse my enthrallment. For like everyone else who saw her in her first days of life, I fell to tiny Malory Venable without a shot’s being fired.
I saw her on the afternoon of her birth, before anyone besides Jack and Aunt Willa did. Lucy had left instructions that I was to be admitted as family, and so, when I came into her hospital room on that brilliant afternoon of crystal ice-chaos, she was alone with the baby, banked and bowered in flowers and bathed in the first of the returning sun, Malory sucking sleepily at her blue-veined breast. I felt my face go hot at the sight of her translucent, remembered flesh, but I am sure she did not notice. Lucy, that day, was afire with rapture.
We looked at each other over the baby’s silky dark head for a long moment, and then she said softly, “Oh, Gibby, look. Just look at her.”
I walked over and kissed Lucy on the cheek, and smelled the fresh, milky smell of new baby over her Tabu, and my eyes prickled. I could not, for some reason, look full at the baby.
“She’s gorgeous, Luce,” I said. “She looks just like her mama.”
“More like her granddaddy, don’t you think? Or at least like the male Bondurants. I thought at first she had something of Mama around her mouth, but I don’t think so anymore. And there’s nothing there at all of poor Jack. No, it’s all Bondurant. Look at that little blade of a nose—you all have it.”
There was nothing of portent in her words, nothing but enchantment with her baby. I relaxed and looked fully at Malory Venable for the first time. She turned her head from Lucy’s breast as if she had felt my look, and gave me a wide, fully focused smile. It was such a deep and direct look, and her lambent, light-spilling blue eyes, so like Lucy’s, had in them such a sheer sense of ken, that I felt a physical shock in my stomach. I moved my head and her eyes followed, and the smile widened. She made a soft, liquid little sound very near an adult chuckle of charm and joy. A great, helpless, foolish love flowered thickly in my heart and reached its tendrils out toward her. There was nothing in it of nuance and complexity; it was, and has remained, the purest and simplest emotion I have ever owned, all light and air and certitude.
Lucy was almost vibrating with joy and love that day, talking soft nonsense to the baby, whose eyes followed her face with a focus and concentration that were indeed adult in intensity. Her face as she looked down at tiny Malory was so incandescent that I wanted to turn my own away from it; outside eyes seemed, in the face of that hungry love, intrusive. I felt a kind of superstitious fear for her, an apprehension that had nothing to do with any practical future. That kind of perfect, leaping, shimmering love surely tempted fates and gods. I felt the old, fierce desire to protect, to enfold, to cloister both of them away, and then remembered that that task now lay with Jack Venable.
You’d better do it right, buddy, I said inside my head, and meant the words.
To Lucy, I said, “Is there anything I can get you? Besides flowers? You won’t need any more of those for about ten years.”
“No,” she said. “I have everything I’ll ever want in the world, Gibby. Right here in this room. Oh…but you know what you could bring me? That old copy of Malory. Morte d’Arthur. Is it still around the summerhouse, do you think? And The Jungle Book. I want to read them to her right now, before we go home. I want her to know where she comes from, and what will be important to her.”
“I guess they’re still in the bookcase,” I said. “If they’re not I’ll buy them for her, my first present.”
“Oh, please find them, Gibby,” she cried. “I want her to hear ‘We be of one blood’ from the book we heard it from. I want our books.”
“I’ll look,” I said. “And I’ll bring them tomorrow, if I can. But it isn’t going to make any difference to her for about six years, you know.”
“No,” she said, perfectly seriously, her smile gone, the blue eyes burning, burning. “She’ll know. She knows now. She knows what I say to her, and I know what she says to me. You can think I’m crazy if you like, but it’s true. Malory is me and she is mine, and she will hear me calling her all her life, no matter where she is in the world. And she’ll come.”
I left her then and went in the fast-falling dusk back to the haven of the summerhouse, a kind of dread hammering at my ribs that did not ease with firelight and bourbon and Martha Cater’s hot vegetable soup. I knew what the unchanneled force of Lucy’s love could do, and the fear was as much for her as for the infant on whom it focused. I found the Malory and the Kipling, and sat reading them late into that January night, and my dreams, when I fell asleep on the sofa before the dying fire, were full of kaleidoscopic images of great bears and black panthers and wolves and caparisoned chargers and fire: the endless, unquenchable fire of Pumphouse Hill and Paris.
Lucy’s feverish happiness shimmered on unabated until the day that Jack was to come and take her and Malory home, and on that morning she awoke already in the grip of a full-blown depres
sion that bordered on catatonia. She lay with her white face turned to the window, looking at the bare trees lashing in the wind along Peachtree Road, not moving, not speaking, hardly breathing, and she would respond to nothing and no one. When the nurse laid Malory on her chest she did not put up her arms to cradle her, and the child would have slipped off the bed if the nurse had not snatched her up. They took the baby away to be rocked and given her first bottle in the nursery, and she did not cry until the door closed between her and her mother. But then her screams could be heard all the way down the hall and into the closed and glassed nursery, and the nurses there reported later that they did not stop until she literally fell asleep from fatigue, hours later.
Jack and Aunt Willa came and sat beside Lucy and chafed her hands and talked to her, but she did not answer. Jack, his hair and hands still bearing smudges of the fresh white paint with which he had prepared the farmhouse for Lucy and Malory’s arrival, was near frantic. It was obvious that the old black woman back in Lithonia could not cope with both the baby and Lucy in this condition, and he could not stay away from his job more than a few days. Without Lucy’s salary, tiny as it was, he could ill afford to miss even the few days he had planned to take to bring them home. When, by noon, Lucy had not responded to either of them or her obstetrician, and a psychiatrist had been summoned, Jack called me, and I came and sat down beside her and took her hand and called her name softly.
“Luce,” I said. “Come on, Luce. It’s Gibby. Talk to me.”
This time she turned her head and looked at me, and I almost gasped aloud. The change in her since the day before was profound. Her vivid blue eyes were so devoid of light and life that they looked like a watercolor that had been left out in the rain. Her entire face was flattened and somehow thickened, without planes, and paper-white. Her cracked lips made the shape of my name: Gibby. And then she said, in a dry whisper, “I never saw the trees so pretty. October really is the best month, isn’t it?”
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