And he disappeared up into the darkness, leaving us helpless with laughter in the light of the dying fire. From the blackness above us, on the long gallery, his voice drifted down: “As the late, great Harold Ross always said, ‘Jesus, nature is prodigal.’”
We went back to Atlanta the next day in midafternoon, Lucy and Jack and Malory and I, and as we drove by the Cameron cottage, I looked up to see if the cars were still there, but they were gone, and the cottage was dark and shuttered.
A week later, on a night of wild wind and rain, Charlie Gentry called to tell me that they had just had the news that Ben had shot and killed himself in a hotel room in Cleveland and that they knew very little as yet, but they did know that he had left a letter for Julia which indicated that he had killed himself for the love, obviously hopeless, of a much younger man.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“Did you know about him?”
In the first unspeakable hours after young Ben’s death became known to them, Dorothy Cameron said little else.
She sat in her accustomed chair in the small den, erect and perfectly groomed and devastated beyond all healing, and said it over and over to those of us who kept that first vigil with her: “Did you know? Did you know about him?”
And all of us—Ben Senior, Sarah, Charlie, I—shook our heads, no. No. We did not, had not, known.
They had the full contents of the letter by then, brought to them by Julia Randolph Cameron’s grayfaced father and left in the trembling hands of old Leroy Pickens at the front door. Ben had written Julia that he finally had had to admit to himself and her that he was and always would be homosexual; and that he was deeply in love with a young man from his firm with whom, of course, there could be no future; and that this seemed to be the only way out of the predicament for all of them. Julia’s father added; in his own hand, the news that Julia had discovered the relationship while Ben and the young man were away in Cleveland and had threatened by telephone to take him to court and divorce him publicly and conspicuously if he did not end the relationship, and Ben had found that he could not do that. Nor could he allow the pain of exposure to touch his children.
“Julia lost the baby an hour ago at Piedmont,” her father’s note concluded. “Please don’t attempt to come or phone or contact her in any way, nor the children. We are taking them away when she can travel. I will keep you informed.”
We sat there into the early hours of the morning, the fire burning low and being replenished by Charlie or Ben, both moving like very old men, Sarah crying quietly in the corner of the deep sofa, wrapped in the old afghan her grandmother Milliment had knit, Dorothy as erect as a small queen in the tall wing chair opposite her. I sat in the chair that had been young Ben’s. No one else had moved to occupy it, and somehow I could not bear to see it empty: a break, eternal now, in the circle around the hearth of the house on Muscogee Avenue. Rain, driven by the first of the autumn gales, spattered monotonously against the leaded windows. The wind prowled and moaned among the chimney stacks and turrets. Leroy Pickens brought hot coffee and sandwiches at some point during the night, but no one ate or drank. His old face was so ashen and crumpled that Dorothy went to him and hugged him and sent him to bed.
“Ben was as much his boy as Glenn was,” she said to no one in particular. “He’s going to sit with the family, Ben; there’s not going to be any argument about that.”
She was crying; had been, steadily and silently, since I had arrived, but her handsome face did not change except to blanch a deathly white, and her voice and hands were steady. Except for the wetness on her face, she did not seem fundamentally changed. Still, I had never seen her cry, and was as moved and somehow frightened as if some great, primal foundation—a mountain, the very earth—had shivered and swayed. There are not a few people in Atlanta who think Dorothy Cameron cold and unfeeling, but they have always missed the point of her. Her code, and Ben’s, had always had at its core the tenet of strength and sustenance for others. The tears were the first fissure I had ever seen in the fastness of that code.
I had seen Ben Cameron weep, in the debris of his very childhood in that charred field at Orly, but he did not weep now for his only son. I am sure he was an eternity beyond that. At Dorothy’s words about Leroy sitting with the family he covered his eyes with his hand and took a great, shuddering breath, and I knew he was seeing, as I was, the awful, the unimaginable morning now so near, in Saint Philip’s Church and later Oakland Cemetery, when he laid his firstborn in the earth.
“He never built his own house,” he said, eyes still covered. “Remember, Dottie, he almost started it last year, and then that job in Houston came up and he didn’t? I wish he’d built himself a house.”
“Oh, my dear,” Dorothy Cameron said, and went swiftly to him, and wrapped her slender arms around him. Across the room Sarah’s sobs became audible at last, and the pain of them turned in my heart until I thought I would scream aloud with it. Charlie pulled her close, his own face empty and nearly comical with shock. I rose to leave, but Dorothy motioned me down.
“Please, Shep, I want you to stay. Will you stay? We need a head and a heart here that isn’t so…irrevocably Cameron.”
Sarah lifted her ravaged face to me. “Yes. Please, Shep,” she whispered. “You’re as near to being a Cameron as there is, without being one. You feel like one of us, only better, maybe. Stay.”
I wanted, in that moment, to lunge at her and shove Charlie aside and hold her against me so fiercely that pain and loss and monstrousness were literally squeezed out of her; wanted it so badly that my knuckles whitened.
I sat back down in young Ben’s chair.
I found, at the bottom of me, that I was not surprised by his suicide. Shocked, grieved, outraged, but not surprised. “Did you know?” Dorothy had cried, and we had said no, but I think that I, at least, lied. I had not known about the homosexuality per se, but I had known that there was in Ben Cameron some unassailable core of shadow and pain, for I had felt my own kin with it. I had known that from our childhood.
I think Sarah had, too. I remembered her face the week before, up at Tate, and the plea in her great brown eyes. We had known, always, of that essential otherness. We had known, just as surely as Ben himself had known. I thought of how it must have been for him when he first began to realize, how it had been through all the desperate years since then. Atlanta was a murderously bad city for a homosexual in the time when Ben Cameron must have first tasted the terrifying truth about himself. Not only the vicious cretins like Boo Cutler, but the others of us, the best, the Buckhead Boys themselves, Ben’s own peers—we all sneered and laughed and baited them, the feminine ones, the oblique, the pansies, the fruits, the faggots. Under it all lay the one great taboo: different. We are something of a national mecca for gays now, I am told, but it did not come in time to save Ben Cameron. The Rubicon he crossed had its headwaters in a time as distant, in perspective and ethics, as the first Dark Ages. Oh, Ben, I thought. My good and beautiful friend. My other.
It was a tragedy all the more unbearable for Ben and Dorothy Cameron, I knew, because it could not be shared, could not be dissipated a bit by the succor of their circle of friends. The code of fineness, service, health and, above all, wholeness with which they had always steered their own lives and attempted to guide those of their children could not permit the aberration, the sheer, self-centered excess of homosexuality. I knew that they would never speak of it. Ben Cameron, Junior, would be eulogized and buried a suicide, but few outside the walls of Merrivale House would ever know why. Julia Randolph Cameron would never speak of it, either; Ben’s sons were likely to know only that their father chose to leave them by the most radical and irrevocable means possible, but never why. Over my grief a great, weary, flaccid anger slumped.
He’s the first real casualty of our way of life, our Buckhead way, our Southern way, I thought. I felt wearily sure that there would be others. The utter, shadowless simplicity of it, the rigidity—they were unquestionably the ki
llers of complexity, delicacy and nuance, those dubious riches which a few children of that code, like Ben and Lucy and me, had in such abundance. I knew that it was not any implicit moral lapse that so shocked the Camerons underneath their searing grief, but the deviation from the established norm, the lack of straightness and health and light.
They loved him literally to death, I thought. Love killed him. The love he could not live up to. The love he could not return and pass on. The love he could not have. Somehow, illogically, it was Ben I was sorriest for, dead Ben Cameron, who should by all rights be safely past pain now. I knew that Julia and her children and Dorothy and Ben Cameron, Senior, were hardy; had their undamaged code; would, in the end, survive. Sorriest for Ben and for sunny, bewildered and diminished Sarah, who had been taught that willingness, loving kindness and goodness were enough to ward off demons and monstrousness and loss.
Later that morning, at dawn, when she and Charlie had finally persuaded Dorothy and Ben to go up to the big, light-washed bedroom they had shared all their lives and Charlie had gone to begin the ghastly business of phone calls and arrangements, Sarah came and climbed into my lap as simply and naturally as a tired child. I do not even think she knew that she was doing it. She burrowed her head instinctively into its old place beneath my chin, and I sat holding the small, wounded weight of her against me, not speaking, my chin on her curly head, rocking her lightly to and fro. She had stopped crying, but her voice was damaged, wrecked. She sounded as if she had been hurt physically.
“I never once asked him what was wrong,” she whispered. “I knew something was, but I just…didn’t ask. I think I didn’t want him to confide in me. There wasn’t anybody for him, Shep. Nobody to comfort him or support him, or just tell him that he wasn’t…awful…He was my brother, and I loved him, and I let him down. He died without anybody knowing who he was. He thought he couldn’t tell us. He thought it was too terrible. He died because of that. That’s what I don’t think I’ll ever be able to bear—that he never had anybody who knew who he was and loved him anyway.”
“Yes he did,” I said into the thick, springy curls. “You may not like who it was, but somebody knew…and loved him. He didn’t die unloved.”
She sat still, and then, as the realization that I spoke of the young man in Ben’s firm penetrated, scrubbed her head back and forth against my neck.
“Then why didn’t the little bastard save him?” she wept afresh. “Why in God’s name couldn’t he be a love worth living for? Nobody should have to die for love!”
I could have told her that Ben himself chose his death, but in that bleak, rain-hammered morning it just did not wash. She was right. No one should have to die of his love. There was nothing I could say to her, and so I said nothing.
We buried Ben Cameron in the family plot at Oakland, down the hill a bit from the Bondurant plot. The grave site was shaded by a Japanese maple which was, in the autumn sunlight, so altogether glorious it seemed a sentinel, a beacon fire lit for Ben. Somehow that radiant, translucent tree gave me comfort in that otherwise comfortless day. I stood with one arm around Lucy—behind the mute, bowed ranks of Camerons, with the stricken Buckhead Boys and their girls and most of the Pinks and Jells of another, kinder Atlanta around me—bathed in rose-gold light and as gray as a dead lava field inside, trying to think a good-bye to him. But I could not. Death still seemed abstract to me then, the province of the old and used, and I could not particularize it to include this friend of my youth, this young man so like me. It could have been anyone—old, unknown, man, woman, even animal—in the casket that lay in its cradle, waiting to ride into the patient earth. To our crowd, to me and to the Buckhead Boys and to Ben Cameron, Oakland had meant hijinks and pranks and picnics and illicit drinking and necking; we did not come here to bury our own. I had the absurd notion that when the service was over Ben would rise out of the coffin and go back to Buckhead with us, stopping on the way for a chili dog and onion rings at the Varsity.
I felt Lucy, beside me, trembling. She had been terribly upset about Ben and I was a little surprised; they had never been particularly close. Something in each of them had always seemed to take the measure of the other, and be wary of it. Her upset had seemed to take the form of an anxiety that bordered on outright terror, and I could not understand it. On the way to the cemetery from Saint Philip’s with her and Jack, I had tried to allay some of the fear. I thought, perhaps, in light of her emotional fragility, that she was afraid of losing control at the graveside.
“You don’t have to go to the grave with us, you know,” I said. “Nobody would think a thing about it if you stayed in the car. Jack will stay with you. You’ve already paid your respects at the church; everybody will appreciate that. It’s enough.”
“No, I have to go,” she said in a small, tight voice, thin with dread. “I have to see him buried. I won’t know for sure until then that he’s really gone.”
“Lucy—” I began, feeling the ominous strangeness of the words, but she overrode me.
“I’ve been having horrible nightmares ever since he died, Gibby,” she said. “I wake up crying and shaking and can’t go back to sleep. Jack is furious with me. I wake him up every night. It’s always the same dream. I dream that he’s in the room with me—Ben is—and he has the gun in a paper sack or a box or something, and he’s trying to give it to me. For some reason he can’t get close enough to me to hand it to me, and I keep pulling back from him, till I’m jammed up against the head of the bed, but I know that soon he’ll get to me and put the sack on my lap or something, and then it will be too late. He’s real eager for me to take it, once he said, ‘Come on, Lucy, I can’t wait around here forever.’ Jesus, Gibby, I don’t want that gun!”
“Sweetie, it’s just a nightmare,” I said, profoundly disturbed by her words. It was a terrible image. “What on earth could happen even if he did give you the sack?”
“Then it would be my turn,” she said. “The gun is for me. If he could do that to himself—if he could actually do it—why won’t it happen to me someday? I’ve got that same…thing in me that he did, Gibby. That darkness, that craziness. I’ve always known that, and so have you. What he did…it makes it possible, don’t you see? I’m more afraid of dying than anything else on earth. I would do anything…anything…to keep from dying!”
Her voice had risen, and I remembered that day so long ago in the living room of the house on Peachtree Road, when she and I had crept in to watch slides of Rome and she had had the first of those terrible fits of hysteria when she saw the tombs and mausoleums of the American cemetery there. She had screamed then, over and over, “I’m so afraid to die! I’m so afraid to die!”
“You aren’t going to die, baby,” Jack Venable said. He sounded very tired. “This is just nerves—you’re upset, and you’ve been sick. I really don’t want you to go to the graveside. I’ll stay in the car with you.”
“No,” she said. “I have to see him buried.”
And she did, and was finally quiet as we heard the benediction and walked away, as if she had left the terrible fear underneath the red earth of Oakland with Ben Cameron.
We did not go back to the Cameron house for sherry and coffee and refreshments, as old Atlanta usually does after laying one of its ranks to rest. There was not even any thought of it. The crowd at the cemetery—smaller by far than the one that had come to see Ben Cameron’s son married—moved off with one accord to their big, quiet cars and went home to their big, quiet houses and closed the great doors behind them. Ben’s own crowd—our crowd, mine—made no move to gather later, as we might have done following the death of one of us.
For to drink to the dead is to keep them with you for a little while longer, and I don’t think any of us could have borne the incorporeal presence of that desperate suicide. Lucy was right. In some fundamental way, dead Ben Cameron frightened us badly. He had, as she said, made the unthinkable thinkable, the impossible possible. There had been too much of death in that terrible year 19
68; this last one brought the national horror of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy home to our very Buckhead doorsteps. I remember thinking as I watched Lucy and Jack drive away down the semicircular drive in the battered Ford that what I felt—what we all must feel now, we golden elect of an entire generation—was, as well as grief and horror, a kind of dreary tarnish, the beginning of a subtle, stale cynicism, the first awful immutable certainty that the rules of the universe do not always hold.
For the rest of that fall and winter, Lucy seemed to continue her slow recovery. She saw a new psychiatrist once a week, driving in to his office in one of the twin towers that had risen across the street from Lenox Square, and she stayed on the Antabuse-antidepressant regimen. She regained much of her irresistible old gloss and vitality, and her splendid looks. The doctor discontinued the tranquilizer and her energy and volatility began to seep back, and by the time the first timid flush of forsythia had appeared the following February, she was restless and prowling again, pacing the farmhouse and smoking incessantly and drinking gallons of coffee and making endless telephone calls.
“I’ll go out of my mind if I don’t get out of this backwater and into something useful again,” she fretted to me during one of them. “I’ll end up murdering Jack with a hoe and setting fire to this dump. I’m sick of reading and I hate television and I don’t want to work in the fucking garden and Estelle is driving me crazy. She gives Negroes a bad name. She has the IQ of a mess of collards. I want to go back to work, Gibby, but Jack won’t hear of it. He says I’m too fragile yet. Do I sound fragile to you? Fragile, shit—I’m not too fragile to cook and clean and wash his stupid clothes and dig in his pissant garden and fetch his drinks for him while he watches television every night of the living world.”
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