Peachtree Road

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  Lucy was extremely popular. The other women deferred to her as people do to a natural leader, and the men were teasing and protective of her. I saw none of the instinctive distrust and alarm on the faces of the women who clustered around her that I had seen on female faces surrounding Lucy since her childhood; I supposed that here, in this sheltered place of rules and rituals and schedules and regimens, where aberration was the norm and the outside world kept at bay by bars and strident wellness, Lucy’s essential difference did not matter. She was one of them and one with them. Lucy herself bore this out.

  “I feel closer to the people in this nuthouse than I ever did to anybody outside but you and Jack and Malory,” she said. “England must have been like this during the blitz.”

  The men out and out adored her, and for her part, she catered to them and coddled them as if she had been hired to do so. Each time I visited, Lucy spent a large part of the time fetching snacks and coffee and cigarettes for me and any other men patients and their guests who were around, trotting in and out of the little kitchen like a slender, elegant servant.

  “Why do you do that, Lucy?” I asked her once. “You never used to fetch and carry for me like this, or anybody else, for that matter.”

  “No, I know it,” she said. “It’s funny. I don’t even believe in it. I don’t know where it came from—it sort of emerged, when I got over the worst of the craziness and started feeling better. All of a sudden there I was, needing to wait on these assholes like a damned maid. I guess it’s just atavistic, Gibby. This is what we know in our bones, we Southern women. To do it makes me feel sort of…mindlessly comfortable and right, in a cell-deep way, like I’m plugged into something old and unquestionable, running by remote control on some absolute track. I don’t know. It’s very comforting. It has nothing to do with what I believe with my mind. Sometimes you need sheer, simple comfort more than anything.”

  “No wonder so many of you go nuts,” I said, taking a plastic tray of empty cups away from her and putting it aside. “It’s an awful pull between shagging trays for other people and tending to your own needs.”

  Lucy squeezed my hand.

  “One reason I love you is that you’re the only man I ever knew who understood that,” she said.

  She came home at the end of June, and stayed there, content, under the kiss of the tranquilizer and the benison of the new antidepressant, to read and garden and watch television and sleep. SOUTH gave her a leave of absence with half pay, which was hardly a drop in the bucket in light of the staggering debt her illness had incurred, but made her feel as if she was contributing something to the household. Lucy had always been inordinately worried about money, but in those days she did not seem even to think about it—or rather, the lack of it.

  Very little penetrated the spell of the drugs and the long, slow summer days on the farm in the company of her beloved Malory. For the first and last time in her life, Malory had her mother completely with her, whole-souled and there, and I think she was about as happy as it is possible for a child to be. When they came to see me in the summerhouse, or more rarely, when I drove the Rolls out in the cool of the afternoons, I would notice playing around Malory the same kind of just-glimpsed, dark incandescence that had lit Lucy’s childhood. It made of her something entirely magical, an enchantment, but I was not completely easy at the seeing of it. That dark fire had burned, not warmed, her mother.

  But for the moment, that glow limned a summer out of time and remembrance for both of them, and they would recall it forever after with love and gratitude. It was not, in the summer of 1968, Lucy and Malory Venable who gave me unease, but Jack.

  I knew that he was near distraction with worries about money and Lucy’s ongoing emotional state, but he would not talk to me about either, and refused my offer of a loan so tersely that I did not offer again. He took a second job teaching accounting three nights a week at one of our dim, perfunctory local junior colleges, and soon was spending only the few hours after his classes and the weekends, during which he slept most of the time, at the farm. Lucy was strangely blithe about it; more than once I started to pull her up short when she spoke jeeringly of his being away so much she almost thought he had a woman on the side. I could not believe she had forgotten why he took the extra work in the first place. Then I would remember the sheer horsepower of the drugs boiling through her bloodstream, and hold my tongue. Lucy was a long way from being her old self in those days, though she was fey and dreaming and indolent, and seemed happy.

  There were other moments in which I thought, again, that some edge had gone from her mind, some cache of clarity and richness erased. She was on Antabuse too, now, because the drugs she was taking were dangerous when combined with alcohol, and I thought that the absence of liquor after so long a time might be taking a temporary toll.

  So I was silent, and Lucy moved on in her underwater pas de deux of delight with her daughter, and Jack Venable continued to work himself near to death. It was he, that summer and early fall, who drank steadily through the evenings and into the small hours of the next day, not Lucy.

  In October of that year I grew so worried about him that I nagged him into asking his firm for a long weekend, and I took him and Lucy and Malory up to the cottage at Tate. I had lent it to Lucy, who still loved it, on several occasions over the years, but it had been more than a decade since I had been up there, and when the Rolls purred up into the first of the abrupt hills of Pickens County, some long-unnoticed weight lifted from my heart and it seemed to climb straight into the cobalt sky over Burnt Mountain. It was Thursday evening when we got there, and the big old cottages on the hillside overlooking the meadow and the lake were dark. I had called ahead and asked Rafer Spruill, who was the colony caretaker, to get the cottage cleaned and opened for me and lay a fire, and when we walked into the big, vaulted room with its window wall framing the darkening woods beyond the lake, the smell of household cleaner and freshcut logs and the dark, loamy earth of the autumn woods was thick in my nostrils. I lit the lamps, and the shabby, familiar old room came leaping at me and closed its arms around me, and I was home in a boyhood that was, in this beguiled and traitorous remembering, as idyllic as any book Lucy and I had loved as children.

  Malory was enchanted.

  “Oh, Shep, I love this place,” she squealed. “Is this ours? Is this mine?”

  “Of course not,” Jack said impatiently. “You know where your house is, Mal.”

  “Of course it is,” Lucy overrode him gaily. “It’s Gibby’s, so it’s as good as ours too, isn’t it, Gibby?”

  “It’s yours for as long as ever you want it,” I said. “And I hope you do, because I never come up here anymore. It’s a shame for it to go to waste.”

  “Why don’t you like it, Shep?” Malory said, whirling around in the middle of the floor on one foot. “Is it haunted?”

  “In a way, I guess it is,” I said, laughing. “Though not by ghosts. This place is haunted by real people. But it’s me they haunt, not you or anybody else,” for she had looked alarmed. “For you it should be just about perfect.”

  “Oh, it is, it is!” Malory cried. “I think I want to come live up here forever and ever!”

  “Without me?” Lucy said lightly, but her eyes were intent on Malory. Malory felt the look and turned her blue eyes to her mother.

  “Well…no. Not without you, Mama. But sometime when you could come, too. And Jack. We could live on berries and acorns and honey, like bears do in the mountains, and nobody would have to worry about money anymore.”

  “Nobody’s worried about money now, punkin,” Jack said.

  She did not reply, but her eyes were full of the lie, and gave it back to him. He turned away.

  “I want the martini to end all martinis,” he said, “and then I’m going to broil those steaks and eat mine in front of the fire, and then I’m going upstairs and sleep for thirty-six hours. You guys can greet the rosy-fingered dawn over the goddamned beaver dam if you want to. Somebody has to ke
ep ahold of the priorities.”

  Lucy laughed and kissed him and made him a murderous martini and brought it to him in the shabby old plaid wing chair by the great stone fireplace, and Malory curled up in the crook of his arm, and he was asleep long before the coals on the grill were ready for the steaks. Lucy led him, mumbling and protesting, upstairs to the big double bedroom that had been my mother and father’s, though seldom used, and it was noon the next day before we saw him again. He looked ten years younger when he came yawning down the stairs, and nearly carefree, and I remember thinking that I really ought to just deed the house over to him and Lucy. Something in the clear blue air had, in the night, restored him. It is just possible that, given free and early access to it, Tate might have healed Jack Venable. It has done so for other Atlanta wounded.

  It was, entirely accidentally, a golden, perfect weekend. On Friday Charlie and Sarah and the children and Ben and Julia Cameron and their two little boys came up and opened the big Cameron cottage, and what had been planned as a solitary retreat turned into an impromptu house party. Tate was that kind of place; neighbors who would not dream of dropping in unannounced back in the city ambled in and out of each other’s houses as if they were their own, and shared meals and walks and volleyball games and swims and children, and sometimes even slept over in unused beds if the hour and the number of drinks made scrambling back up dark, steep, rhododendron-shadowed paths problematical.

  And so it was on this weekend. On Saturday morning, the four of them, children in tow, appeared at the back door with blankets and baskets and a thermos of Bloody Marys and announced a picnic, Ben Cameron yelling at me to bring my clarinet. By early afternoon we were sprawled in the deep golden grass of the long meadow above the lake, winded from volleyball and chasing dogs and children, the high honey sun warming the earth and our heads and shoulders, drinking Bloody Marys and laughing. Even I, to whom the sight of another human being was ordinarily almost tantamount to an invasion, felt washed and nurtured in old and easy companionship; even Jack, who had never taken to Lucy’s childhood acquaintances and kept himself at a stiff, formal distance from them, was laughing with Ben and Charlie and teasing Julia—who was vastly pregnant again—and unfolding like a flower under the warmth of Sarah’s old unfeigned charm.

  I don’t know why all rules seemed suspended that weekend. It is the special place-magic of Tate, I think, but I had never felt it so powerfully and clearly before, perhaps because my parents had taken me there so seldom. All that blue and tawny amplitude of wild, singing space; the high, thin pure sun; the wildfire of the autumn trees on the high shoulder of the mountain above us; the immense bowl of the sky and the smaller, reflecting cup of the lake; the symmetry of the cold blue evening shadows falling on the still-warmed earth—Tate was and is larger than the people who go there, and at the same time intimate and sheltering, so that old tenets and strictures do not seem to apply. It is as if past and future are left at the gatehouse up on the old macadam highway, and only the intense and pure moment prevails inside.

  There in that high meadow I could watch the lithe, small beauty of Sarah running in tall grass with her girls and not feel pain; I could walk with Charlie along the sun-dappled dirt road around the lake and over the creaking wooden footbridge and feel nothing in the air between us but old, easy love; I could lie on my back in the deep grass beside Ben Cameron, my rusty clarinet answering his as smoothly as water pouring over stones, and see, not the thin, feverish, somehow haunted man he had become, but the old, golden Pan of our childhoods; I could look at Lucy, filling up with radiance in that enchanted afternoon like a crystal pitcher with water, and see straight into the soul of her as I had done when we were young, and hear in the air between us her unspoken “We be of one blood, thou and I…”

  That night, after we had put the children to bed in the bunk bedrooms off the gallery in the Camerons’ cottage and sat long at the old trestle table in the big kitchen over the mortal remains of Sarah and Julia’s lasagna, we moved at last into the living room and Charlie built up the fire. We sprawled around in the old furniture sprung by half a century of Cameron rumps, and Sarah brought cheese and apples and pears and cognac, and without consciously planning to do so, we replayed our childhoods.

  There in the firelit room the invincible Buckhead Boys sailed again down Peachtree Road on their wind-borne bicycles, Lucy Bondurant at their head like a dark, slender Valkyrie; we crawled under a monstrous, creeping black train at Brookwood Station; we danced at Margaret Bryan’s and streamed in packs across Peachtree Road to the Buckhead Theatre and yelled ourselves hoarse in the cold Friday night bleachers of North Fulton High stadium; we whirled and dipped and leaped like roseate trouts on the dance floor at Brookhaven and the Capital City Club, mimosa in our nostrils and “Moonglow” in our ears. Once again Charlie and I stood in the punishing flood of a black November wind on the corner of East Paces Ferry, watching Boo Cutler’s Mercury screaming like a devil out of Hell down the middle of Peachtree Road, trailing immortality and a DeKalb County black-and-white. Once again he and I pedaled in perfect despair out night-black Roswell Road toward our appointment in Samarra and a date to screw Frances Spurling. Once again all of us—I and Snake and Ben and Tom and Charlie and A.J. Kemp—suffered a five-year agony of aching testicles and galloping pulses, and called it love.

  I think that all of us, even now, remember that night. Sarah, her head thrown back on the strong, slender brown column of her throat, laughed until she sputtered and choked. Julia, pregnant as she was, did a wicked imitation of a Washington Seminary Pink trying to learn to do the Negro bop. Charlie and I drank an entire fifth of Courvoisier and sang North Fulton fight songs, leaning against each other so that we would not fall. Lucy, wrapped in an old sweater of mine, huddled on the couch, literally aflame with incandescence, and cheered them on: “Oh, sing another one! Tell another story about Freddie Slaton! Tell the one about A.J. and the Sope Creek bridge, tell what Snake said to Flossie May that night at the Varsity, tell…tell…tell…”

  It was as if the old stories were a rosary, and each telling brought her closer to deliverance and redemption. It was wonderful to see her flaming face, and hear her old bawdy, lilting laugh.

  Of us all, only Ben Cameron and Jack did not join in the litany. Jack smiled and listened, laughing aloud occasionally, and Ben drank cognac steadily and quietly, his clever, haggard face flame-lit into chiaroscuro, looking off into some distance of his own, his thin hands and feet twitching nervously. Toward the end of the evening he remembered a phone call he had to make to a client in Philadelphia, and went out into the still, crystal moonlight to the feral little Jaguar XKE that he had driven up behind Julia and the children in the station wagon. We heard the motor growl into life, and soon he had spurted off down the gravel road toward the gate cottage, where the sole telephone was.

  “I wish sometimes that he’d just give it up and be a general contractor,” Julia said, watching the XKE’s lights careen off into the darkness. “He drives himself so that he can’t even rest on weekends and holidays. You wouldn’t believe the calls that come at all hours, and the times he gets called away to go hold some damned fool client’s hand—you’d think he was the only architect in the country. He’s burning himself up. He’s lost I don’t know how much weight this year. And there’s another long trip coming up to Cleveland or somewhere next week.”

  “He always was as restless as a flea on a hot griddle,” Charlie said. “I don’t think you’re going to be able to reform him at this late date.”

  “And I wouldn’t want to if I could,” Julia said fondly. “At least I know he’s happy doing what he wants to do. He’s an authentic genius—you can’t put a fence around him. I know he’d cut back on some of the work if I asked him to, but he wouldn’t be happy any way but the way he is. You know Ben, he thinks he can have it all. And I guess he can, at that.”

  For some reason I looked across at Sarah in the semidarkness, and her face made my breath catch in my throat. The
re was on it such a still, contained dread that I wondered why the rest of them did not literally feel the force of it. But no one else was looking at her. She turned her head and met my eyes and I read in hers such a naked plea for help that I actually started to rise from my chair and then she dropped her eyes and reached for her glass and the moment was gone, and I wondered if it had ever been. For the rest of the evening she was as easy and bantering as ever, and I soon came to think that the look was a trick of the firelight and my own solitude-sharpened nerves. But the weight of it remained, cold in my chest.

  Ben came back presently, red-cheeked from the chill of the night and glittering like broken glass. He was humming like a fine motor, and for the rest of the evening regaled us with such scurrilous and absurd stories that we wiped tears from our faces and begged for mercy.

  “I will leave you with something truly wondrous to think about,” he said, standing on the lowest step of the rustic stair, a fresh cognac bottle in his hand. “And I swear it’s the God’s truth. I heard it from a guy in San Francisco who heard it firsthand. You know those little old watchmakers, the ones who make watches so fine that they have to work under microscopes with little tiny, miniature tools? You know what they lubricate those little tiny watchworks with? Mole sperm. Actual sperm from those little blind moles you see in your front yard after rain. Anything else is too heavy and thick—only mole sperm will do it. But here’s the kicker: Where the hell do you think they get that mole sperm? Do you think they have little rooms where they go jerk off the moles one by one? Or do they put ’em in a sleazy motel room and show ’em porn movies and play Ravel’s Bolero to a bunch of ’em all at once? Anyone with a better idea may submit it at breakfast in the morning.”