Peachtree Road

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  I felt ice form along my spine.

  “It’s March 1963, and you have a new little girl, and it’s time now to cut this out and take her home with Jack,” I said, too loudly. She closed her eyes and turned her face back to the window.

  “I don’t know any Jack,” she said in a frail, fretful child’s whimper. “I don’t have any stupid little girl. Gibby, take me home. I want my daddy. I want to go home.”

  Jack Venable gave a soft grunt of pain, and Aunt Willa snorted in delicate outrage. I shut my eyes in despair. Lucy said no more that day. The psychiatrist closeted himself with her for an hour or so, and the results of the tests her obstetrician had ordered came back, and at dusk both came out to the waiting room and sat down with us amid the magazines and coffee cups and overflowing ashtrays.

  “It’s a classic postpartum psychosis,” the psychiatrist said. He had pure silver hair over a face as satin-pink and unlined as an infant’s. A baby-butt face, Lucy would have called it.

  “I know it looks bizarre, but it’s not uncommon, and this is by no means the worst case I’ve ever seen. I think she’ll pull out of it fairly quickly with medication and some good nursing care, but both will have to be constant. I understand Mr. Venable can’t manage that at home. Is there somewhere we can take her where she’ll be able to have total rest and quiet, and the baby can be looked after?” He looked at Aunt Willa and me; I knew that there was no other choice, and nodded. Aunt Willa followed my lead, lips compressed.

  “We’ll be glad to have her,” I said. “Martha Cater can look after her, and I’m sure she can find us a baby nurse. Maybe her daughter can come. She looked after Lucy when she was little herself. We’re close to the hospital and not all that far from your office, Jack, and you can come by before and after work—or stay over yourself, if you like. We’ve got plenty of room.”

  I looked at him questioningly. For some reason, my heart was lifting, and wings beat in my chest.

  “I…well, okay. Sure,” Jack said. I knew that he hated the idea of Lucy back in that house of wealth and privilege and coldness. I also knew that he knew he had no choice. “I’ll be much obliged. But just till she can get on her feet again. And I’ll pass on staying over, thanks. I’ll look in when I can.”

  “Fine,” the psychiatrist and Lucy’s obstetrician said heartily, in concert, clearly relieved to be rid of the embarrassment of a messily skewed ending to a routine case of seemly Buckhead childbirth.

  “Sounds like the best solution,” the psychiatrist said.

  “Well.” Aunt Willa got up smartly and smoothed the gray wool sheath that cupped her elegant hips and buttocks. “I’d better go get things changed around so we can fit a baby in. Let’s see…hmmm…no, there’s no other way but for Lucy and the baby to have my room, and the little dressing room, and I’ll move up to the attic. We can’t very well move poor Big Shep, or his nurse. My goodness, so many sick people and nurses…” Her voice trailed away as she clicked down the hall toward the elevator, a path of poisoned honey spreading behind her. I knew, and Jack probably guessed, that beneath the honey and the martyred mother’s words, Willa Slagle was raging anew at this troublesome daughter who would not leave her in peace in the gracious bower where she had, finally, gone to earth.

  And so Lucy came home again to 2500 Peachtree Road, with a nurse and Malory, and was installed in the big bedroom upstairs, and old Martha brought ToTo in from Forest Park and found a wet nurse from one of the projects, and Aunt Willa went back to work, and I went back to the summerhouse and the clamoring ancestors of Sarah Gentry. And all the time, as I worked, the knowledge of tiny Malory Bondurant Venable, shimmering there in the little dressing room that had been my own first nursery, lay whole and still and perfect in my heart.

  For a week or so Lucy simply lay still, staring out her window into the tops of the trees that had sheltered her summers until she married Red Chastain. She was allowed no visitors, but occasionally I stole in from the summerhouse to stare down at Malory, sleeping in her pearly perfection as ToTo rocked and napped, and then I sat for a while beside Lucy’s bed. I would hold her hand and talk to her of small things and nonsense, and sometimes she would press my hand, and once or twice she smiled. One afternoon, toward the end of the first week, she said, abruptly and weakly, “I get so tired when I think about having to take care of her always, Gibby. I can’t even take good care of myself. I don’t know what’s going to happen to us.”

  They were the first words she had said to me since she left the hospital, and I started visibly.

  “Jack will take care of both of you, of course, Luce,” I said, but she only shook her head weakly and fretfully on the pillow.

  “He’ll try, but in the end he won’t be able to,” she said.

  “Sure he will. But I’ll help,” I said. “If you and Malory ever need any extra taking care of, I’ll always be here.”

  “Will you, Gibby?” she said, turning her thin, white face to me.

  “Of course. Always.”

  She was silent for a bit, and then she smiled. It was a fuller smile, stronger.

  “Yes,” she said. “I think you will, now.”

  Soon after that she began to improve, and in another week Aunt Willa took her to Sea Island for ten days in the early spring sun, and when she came home, lightly tanned and with some of the sunken hollows in her face and body filled in, she was gay to near-ferocity again, and seized Malory and hugged her until the baby screamed.

  “You didn’t cry for Mommy, did you, precious angel?” she said into Malory’s satiny cheek. “I know you didn’t. I felt you every minute, and I sent you messages a thousand times a day, and I know you were a good girl. She was, wasn’t she, Martha? Wasn’t she, Shep?”

  “Yes’m,” Martha Cater growled. “She ain’t cry after you gone. I ain’t never seen no new baby as good as this one.”

  I knew that old Martha hated making the admission; she had glowered and stomped around the house when Lucy told her she was going away, and predicted havoc and sleepless nights and the ruin of Malory. But it had not happened. The baby had cried bitterly and inconsolably for an hour or so after Aunt Willa and Lucy had driven away, and then, as if indeed receiving some interior signal, had looked about her, startled, and stopped the crying, and gone promptly to sleep. I know, because I was holding her at the time. Her cries had reached me even in the summerhouse, and I had not been able to let her cry on and on, without solace. She knew me, I thought, and relaxed the tiny, knotted muscles when I picked her up, but the crying did not stop until nearly an hour later. I told Lucy this, and she smiled her thousand-watt smile.

  “I know,” she said. “We stopped for breakfast at the New Perry Hotel and I heard her, all of a sudden. Just in midbite. I can’t explain it. And I…just talked to her. I went back in my head and sent her a message, not to cry, that I was with her and it was all right. That you were there and would take care of her. I know she stopped then. I felt it. It’s an enormous relief, Gibby—it means I can go back to work or anywhere else I want to and she’ll be all right, because I can talk to her.”

  “All we need around here is a couple of spooks,” I said, disquieted in spite of myself. I did not like the idea of Lucy’s practicing psychic communication on Malory. I wanted nothing murky, shadowed, esoteric, overly passionate, to touch her. When I thought ahead to her growing-up years, I saw sunlight and order and sand-boxes and kittens and ponies; children’s parties and nurses and starched pinafores and pigtails and family suppers around shining, silver-set tables. It was, of course, my own Buckhead childhood that I saw, or rather the furniture of it; even I knew that I was blithely painting out the pain and fear and treachery of that world, and that it was foolish, perhaps even dangerous, to wish it for Malory. But I did. Order and control—those were the things I most wished for the little girl who bore my name and my nose and my heart; order and control, not the careening, erratic, quicksilver world of excess and privation and kisses and absences and surging subterranean tides that
would, I knew, be Lucy’s legacy to her. But I knew by then that neither I nor Jack Venable nor anyone else would have much say over the raising of Malory. The symbiosis between her and Lucy was simply too strong.

  It crossed my mind not infrequently, in those days before Lucy took the baby home to the farmhouse, that she was most assuredly not the stablest and most responsible mother for this or any other child. I was usually able to bury the notion deep under the knowledge that there would always be other loving caretakers around Malory: Jack, who adored her; the old black woman at the farmhouse, who had a firm and loving way with children; me; even Aunt Willa, who evinced in her granddaughter a sucking, proprietary interest she had never displayed toward Lucy. But once or twice the thought broke free, and the last time it did, it cost me Malory’s presence in the house on Peachtree Road.

  Lucy had taken to bringing the baby out to the summerhouse to visit in the afternoons, when my reading and note taking were done and she and Malory had had baths and naps. I would make coffee and set out the cake or cookies that Martha Cater brought and light the fire and put Vivaldi or Palestrina on the record player, and Lucy would put Malory’s small, fragrant weight into my arms and stretch out on the sofa and light a cigarette. Sometimes she drank sherry instead of coffee, and on these afternoons she grew vivid and voluble and talked once again of the escalating civil rights movement and the never-ended work at Damascus House.

  With segregation beginning to crumble in the schools and colleges, black activists were focusing on the still-segregated hotels and restaurants, and scarcely a day passed that spring without a demonstration or picket or sit-in. I knew that Ben Cameron met almost daily with black leaders now. Around that time, a “lie-in” had been held at the Henry Grady Hotel downtown on Peachtree Street—that bastion of middle-class white gentility, where even the cloistered young of Buckhead were allowed to go to the Dogwood or Paradise room to watch an occasional second-class magician or comic—and half the population of Damascus House, including the charismatic Claiborne Cantrell, went happily to the Fulton County jail, singing “We Shall Overcome.” Lucy burned with eagerness to be with them.

  “I should have been there,” she said over and over, through smoke. “I should have been with them. It’s my fight, too. I’ve been away too long.”

  “Terrific,” I said, rocking a sleeping Malory in the old nursery rocker I had had Shem Cater bring from the attic to the summerhouse. “Just what Malory needs. A mother in the Fulton County pokey.”

  “She’d be okay,” Lucy said. “I’d talk to her. She’d have you.”

  “And Jack,” I said. “If he wasn’t in jail alongside you.”

  “And Jack,” she said. “He wouldn’t be in jail. He’s the money man. He’s too important. Clay won’t let him demonstrate anymore. Jack says he hates being out of the action, but I don’t think he does. Besides, Jack would never let himself be arrested. No scotch in jail. No Huntley-Brinkley. No books and records.”

  But after the news of the arrests from Damascus House, she grew restless and remote, and I would see a light in her bedroom window burning at all hours in the warming nights.

  Late in that week, she brought Malory out to the summerhouse wrapped in one of her own blouses, wearing a lace trimmed blanket of Malory’s draped around her own shoulders.

  “We’re switching off, Gibby,” she chortled. “See? She’s the mommy and I’m the baby now. It’s her turn to take care of me.”

  She held the baby up gaily, and Malory pawed fretfully at the enfolding blouse, trying to free her tiny feet and fists, and mewled fussily. I felt anger and a tiny lick of the dread I had felt on the morning of Lucy’s retreat into depression. I snorted and took Malory out of her arms and jerked the grotesque, trailing blouse off her, and wrapped her in the blanket from Lucy’s shoulders.

  “Don’t ever make her ridiculous, Lucy,” I said levelly around the anger.

  She stared at me, her eyes burning blue-white.

  “Don’t you tell me what to do with my own baby,” she snapped finally. Her voice was sullen.

  I continued to look at her, silently, and presently she dropped her eyes and took Malory from me, and went back into the house. The next evening Jack Venable came and took her and the baby home to the farmhouse in Lithonia, and his joy in his daughter and love for Lucy were so palpable that they almost filled my own hollow heart as I watched the pink-swathed baby being driven away, finally, home.

  Lucy went back to work soon after that, leaving Malory in the care of the old black woman, and reported in her soon resumed evening telephone calls that Malory was as contented with her new nurse and the grudging company of Toby and Thomas as she had been with her mother’s and mine.

  “She’s just one of those rare perfect, unflappable babies, Gibby,” she said, inhaling. “Estelle says she never cries. She’s getting fat as a little butterball, and she’s just as happy to see us when we come in as if we’d been there all day.”

  And then she would segue from Malory into the work of Damascus House without missing a beat, and I would think again that she seemed deeply content to be back and submerged in the swimming-pool- and park-desegregation plans there, as if her old bone-deep ease and sureness among the activist blacks was a relief after the intense, consuming emotional pitch of her day-to-day interrelation with Malory. She was soon working longer and longer hours, and in the middle of the summer Jack left Damascus House—with visible relief, I thought—and took a job with a large downtown firm of CPAs for shorter hours and slightly better pay. After that, he had almost sole evening care of the three children.

  I went back to my own work in the summerhouse, and it was many months before I went into the big house again. It was not that I was avoiding it, particularly; it was just that, with Lucy and Malory gone and my father as unresponsive as a drugged and chained wild animal, there was no reason to do so. I did not mind. The Peachtree Road house was now as in alterably and indisputably the territory of my aunt Willa as if she, not I, had been born there. I felt, on my rare forays there to pick up clothing or books I wanted, as if I were burgling a stranger’s home. The very air smelled of her bitter, expensive scent, and the few times I went to sit briefly beside my mute, grimacing father, the entire bedroom seemed steeped in it. I knew from that, and from the occasional generic mutters from Martha and Shem Cater, that she was still spending many of her free hours sitting with him, occupying herself God alone knew how—for it surely was not in conversation with him. He remained as silent and blasted as a Toltec idol.

  It was odd about Willa Slagle Bondurant in those days: She had, of course, absolutely no more claim to the Peachtree Road house than she had had while my mother lived, and yet it was somehow, nail and roof beam, hers. The visitors who drove up the semicircular drive and left their cards on the old silver card tray were, now, as often hers as my father’s. It was for her that Shem brought the Rolls around to the front, and for her that he held the heavy door. Delivery vans brought her orders, and lawn and linen services arrived at her telephoned command, and the smart, slender women in wools and silks who came to luncheon and for bridge and drinks were her guests. They were not the same ones who had come for my mother, but they were, to all but the fully initiated eye, indistinguishable from them, and they certainly were not tackpots. High second echelon, one might have said; the very first echelon had largely been crisped along with my mother in a ditch at Orly, and in any case, the ones who had not would not have come to Willa Bondurant. But I believe that Aunt Willa was, largely, satisfied with them. They were, as she was now, a long way from the chicken farm.

  Her move to establish herself in the house had been as slowly and delicately accomplished as a cat’s tracking of a chipmunk. Preoccupied with the family of Sarah Gentry and the coming of Malory, I had not noticed it, although it was I, with my admonition to her on the day I left for Orly that she move into my mother’s bedroom, who had given her the implicit permission. And, I suppose, she read my failure to curtail or supplant her
in the house as tacit permission to colonize it. I can see now, too, that there was another and stronger license granted: that of queen mother. Aunt Willa was no fool. She must have seen from the first day how I felt about Malory, and she had always known of my immutable and twisted ties to Lucy. I believe she moved into my mother’s bedroom and later her house absolutely secure in the knowledge that I would not oust the mother of Lucy and the grandmother of Malory from the house she and Lucy both—and I as well—considered their first home. And she was right.

  Shem and Martha Cater hated taking orders from her, I knew, but their sensitive servants’ antennae told them, correctly, that I did not wish to hear about it, and would not do anything about it if I did, and so they kept their grievances mostly to themselves. No one else seemed to notice, except perhaps to say, at one time or another, how fortunate it was that my aunt Willa was willing and able to serve as a housekeeper for me and my father, and to wonder what we would ever do without her.

  By this time, few of the handsome, middle-aged women who were her contemporaries remembered that they had once laughed with my mother at Aunt Willa behind her back. If she was not one of them she had taken on their patina perfectly and subtly, and in Atlanta appearances have always soothed and charmed. There is not enough genuinely blue blood here to run warm with outrage at the insinuation into its ranks of a Willa Slagle Bondurant. And too, spinning into the mid-sixties, Atlanta was riding the tail of a comet, and Old Atlanta, like it or not, spun with it, gasping and even giggling dizzily among undreamed-of galaxies and constellations. No one had the time or inclination to snub Aunt Willa as they might have done a decade before.

  And so she reigned creamily and snugly in the house to which she had come, teetering and faltering in slipshod high heels, a quarter century before, as beautiful and polished and curried as any of the women who had smirked at her at the Driving Club. I was, in the main, grateful enough to let her run the house, as I let canny, abrasive Marty Fox, whom Tom Carmichael and I had hired the year before to manage my father’s business affairs, run those. I knew her power over Lucy, but I had also seen her tears and her fear, and so her vulnerability, and I did not think that she had any power over Malory. If she attempted to exercise any in that direction, I could always stop it simply by threatening to put her out of the house, and I would not have hesitated to do so.