“I won’t,” I said. “I’ve got too much invested in you.”
“I know it,” she said. “I count on that. Good-bye, Gibby.”
“Bye, Luce,” I said, and then, not really knowing why, “Stick it in your ear.”
Her laughter came over the wire, low and full and delighted. “Stick it in your own ear!” And she was gone.
At the end of the two-day weekend she did not come home, and when Jack called Chip Turner at Newsweek Chip said Lucy had called and asked to keep the car a few more days, and said that the story was taking longer than she had thought but promised to be wonderful. He was surprised that she hadn’t called home.
“But I’m not worried now that I know she’s called in,” Jack told me when I telephoned to see how the weekend had gone. “I didn’t really expect her back after two days. You know Lucy. She gets so caught up in whatever she’s interested in she forgets to eat, even. I only hope that asshole is worth it. Malory is really upset this time. She’s been fussing and crying off and on ever since Lucy left. She’s never done that before.”
“Could you put her on?” I said, uneasiness mounting in me like mercury in a thermometer.
“Hey, Shep,” Malory said into the wire. Her voice was listless.
“Your daddy tells me you’re fussing because your mama’s gone,” I said. “That doesn’t sound like my girl.”
“I can’t hear her,” Malory said softly, as if she was afraid to say the words aloud. “I call her and call her, but she doesn’t answer me. She always answers, Shep. You don’t think she ran off or died or something, do you?”
“Oh, punkin, of course not,” I said. “She’s just having such a good time she hasn’t got…her radio turned on. She’ll be home before you know it.”
“She always answers,” Malory said, and I heard the tears begin. “She always does. She said she always would, no matter where she went.”
“She’s just fine, you’ll see,” I said. “Damn you, Lucy,” I said under my breath. “Damn you for setting her up as some kind of little psychic receiving station, and damn you for tuning her out after you did, and damn you for going off and leaving her in the first place.”
Jack took the telephone then and said, “If she calls you will you let me know? She told Chip she couldn’t be reached by phone, but that she’d be calling in. It may be you she calls. She was mad as hell at me when she left. Like I said, I’m not worried, but I’d like to wring her neck for upsetting Malory.”
But Lucy did not call me, and she did not come home, and when five days had passed Jack called Chip Turner again. This time there was a long, hollow silence, and then Chip said, “Christ, I thought surely she’d have been in touch, or somebody would have. She…Jack, she was sounding so erratic when she called in and asked for more time and money, and then we got word from a stringer down there that she’d been seen in a couple of real badass little backwoods joints, in…not very good shape…. Well, we took her off the story two days ago. She promised she’d come on home, and said not to call you, that she would. But I should have…Jesus. What can I do? What would be the most help to you?”
“Just tell me how to find her,” Jack said. “And keep all this as quiet as you can, will you?”
“Of course,” Chip said. “Listen, do you want me or somebody from the office to go down with you?”
“No,” Jack said in a tight voice. “I have somebody.”
He took Malory out of school at noon that day, and brought her, with her pajamas and toothbrush, to stay with Aunt Willa in the big house, and by one o’clock we were on the road southwest toward the Mississippi coast, the Rolls eating up the miles of narrow blacktop in a smooth rush of silence. We said almost nothing to each other beyond consulting the map and asking and receiving directions. I know that in both of us dread hummed like a motor, but we did not speak of it. I thought once, entering the Alabama coastal plain, where ribbons of black ditchwater stood mirrorlike along the margin of the road and the first Spanish moss bearded the trees, that all Jack Venable and I had or ever would have in common was Lucy, and that while it was a bond likely to last our lifetimes and hers, it was not a comfortable one. If it had not existed, we would not have chosen each other for even casual companions.
But I did not think that we would ever be free of each other, now. Going together in search and in aid of Lucy Bondurant seemed to have settled into the very genes of us, as irrevocably as the great marches toward death in the genes of lemmings, and, who knows, perhaps as destructively.
We reached Pass Christian by nightfall, but it was nearly midnight before we found, at the end of a sandy, grass-matted road so dim it seemed a part of the very tangled coastal forest it pierced, the mission and dispensary of Dr. Beau Longshore. It had taken us all those intervening hours of searching and phoning and stopping to ask directions in peeling cinder-block groceries and bait stores, and getting lost at the end of black, moss-hung tunnels and trying to turn the Rolls around in sucking, burr-matted sand, and swatting at vicious coastal mosquitoes, and cursing and squinting in the interior lights at Chip Turner’s map, and breathing deeper and harder over the mounting dread, to reach the moment, near-perfect in its awfulness, that we pulled into that last clearing and saw the leaning, shored-up frame structure with the raw wooden sign that said: COASTAL MISSION AND CLINIC. ALL WELCOME. KNOCK OR HONK HORN. BEAU LONGSHORE, M.D.
The white moon of that gentle, beautiful shore bathed the leaning building and the four or five disreputable cars and one filthy new Hertz Mustang convertible in a light so clear and lambent that it seemed palpable, like spring water. The moss in the live oaks and tall black pines was silver-gray, and shadows were inky and thick like a photographic negative, and frogs and peepers and other silver-voiced night things called in the murderous undergrowth, and wild honeysuckle and mimosa was so powerful that it seemed another breath, the living breath of an elemental spirit or God. There was no sign of life about the mission as we got out of the Rolls, but a dim yellow light, like that of a kerosene lantern, showed in a back window, and a bluish one flickered in a front one: television.
We walked together, silently and in a kind of lock step, to the porch of the cabin and knocked. The noise of our marauding knuckles was awful. There was no answer, and presently I took a deep breath to call out, but Jack laid an urgent hand on my arm.
“Don’t,” he said in a whisper. “God, don’t. Let me go in.”
“Not by yourself,” I whispered back.
“Stay out here, Shep,” he said in a low, fierce voice. “I don’t want you with me.”
“You can’t stop me,” I hissed back. He glared at me, then lifted his shoulders and dropped them, defeated, and we went into Beau Longshore’s clinic.
The large main room of the cabin was unbelievably filthy. It smelled rankly of sweat and spoiling food and something else, sweet and pungent—marijuana, I supposed, mingled with some sort of homemade liquor or cheap wine—and illness and despair. No light burned, but a television set flickered against one wall: The Tonight Show. On it, a silent, gesticulating Johnny Carson was interviewing an equally mute black man, bearded and beaded and wild-haired and fierce; interchangeable with all the young blacks now in the media’s eye. He might have been rock star, activist, evangelist or felon. On bare, stained mattresses in front of the set several young black men and women lay sprawled in drug stupors or liquor comas—it was impossible to tell which, only that the languors were not those of fatigue and sleep.
No one spoke to us. I do not think anyone even noticed us. Some of the couples were half-dressed and in disarray, as if they had been making love, but none were naked, and none were engaged then in sex. Bottles and paper cups and ashtrays and paper plates half-full of something shining with grease that was turning fast in the thick, still heat littered the floor beside the mattresses. In a far corner, over a hot plate, an utterly silent and rather beautiful young black woman stirred something in a dented saucepan, slowly, slowly. She lifted a sullen, dead-eyed Cir
ce’s head and looked at us, but did not speak or gesture, and presently dropped her eyes. She wore what looked, grotesquely, like a child’s organdy pinafore, translucent over her ripe blackness and far too small, and nothing else. We walked past all of them and into the small space behind the main room, and there, by the light that was indeed that of a kerosene lantern, we found Lucy and Beau Longshore.
They were naked and intertwined on another mattress on the floor, and their clothes were piled on one side of it, below black-framed white rectangles that I suppose were Beau’s degrees from Sewanee and Johns Hopkins. Plates of the same mess that we had seen in the other room lay beside them, and several empty fifth bottles. I could not see the labels, but from the shape and smell of them I knew them to be scotch, and expensive scotch at that. Lucy’s scotch, Haig & Haig, or perhaps Cutty Sark. I wondered if she had brought them with her, or if some reluctantly scribbled aid check to Beau Longshore had bought them. The doctor was bonelessly unconscious, and looked, in the dim, leaping light, as if he might be moribund or already dead, his body and face were so thin and slack and livid. But Lucy was awake, and in her light blue eyes, deeply undercircled now with black and saffron, I saw the old, icy flame of liquor and madness, and on top of it a flat, new glitter that I knew must be one of the visionary young doctor’s liberating drugs. I felt only an endless gray annoyance, but I tasted in my mouth the salt of my own tears.
“Oh, shit, Lucy,” I whispered.
“Hey, Gibby,” Lucy Bondurant Chastain Venable sang. “Hey, Jack. Stick it in your ear!”
This time she went to Park Forest, a new psychiatric facility in the foothills north of the city specializing in alcohol and substance abuse. A stricken Chip Turner insisted that Newsweek cover her bills, even though they had no liability for her, and Jack gratefully accepted. He was, by then, completely out of money, and would take none from me. If it had not been for Chip’s offer, Lucy would have had to go to the regional alcoholic facility in Decatur. I do not think she would have come out. But Park Forest was experimental and state-of-the-art, and had a wealth of new therapies and medications to try on her, and did not, in its jaunty newness, brook defeat. We left her there knowing that what could be done for her they would do. We agreed not to call or visit for the specified two weeks. We signed the papers and handed over her bag and kissed her thin, wet cheek and shut our ears to her cries and pleading and went home to see what might be done for that other small victim of Beau Longshore’s odyssey.
Malory was quiet and docile when Jack picked her up at the house on Peachtree Road, and went with him obediently after kissing her grandmother and me goodbye, but the very next afternoon a frantic Jack Venable was on the telephone asking if I had seen or heard from her, saying that he had just learned from the old black woman, who had it from her first-grade teacher, that she had not gotten off the school bus that morning. Before I had gotten through to the Atlanta police, just as Shem was bringing the Rolls around to the front door, a yellow cab drew up to the portico and small Malory Venable got out of the back and walked hesitantly into my arms.
She had waited until Jack had driven away from the school bus stop and walked the few blocks into down-town Lithonia, and taken the bus with her lunch money and ridden it into the Greyhound terminal in downtown Atlanta, and gotten into the first taxicab that she had seen outside, and they had brought her to us. I paid the driver and took her out to the summerhouse while Martha Cater called Jack. I had not wanted Aunt Willa fluttering around me wringing her hands and excoriating Lucy, and so had not yet told her that Malory was missing. So far as I knew, she was still napping in her room. But I took no chances. I sat Malory down on the summerhouse sofa with a cup of hot chocolate and looked at her, wondering whether to scold or caress or cry myself, in answer to the great tears that were only then beginning to slide down her cheeks.
“You scared us, you know,” I said around the lump in my throat. “We didn’t know what had happened to you.”
“I don’t want to be there anymore,” she said, trying very hard not to let her small face knot up, struggling to hold back the tears. “I was scared and Jack doesn’t do anything but sleep and I can’t hear my mother. Nobody was taking care of me, and Mama said you would if nobody else did, and so…I came. If you make me go back I’ll just come again.”
I took her in my arms then, and sat with her pulled hard against me in that dying spring twilight, feeling the trembling and sobbing of relief and release start and swell and then wane into drowsiness, watching the lights of the big house bloom in the lavender dusk, and cursed with pain and anger the particular and malevolent world that sent a vivid little girl and, many years later, her own small daughter in the selfsame headlong flight from it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Malory ran away so many times during the next decade that when Willie Nelson recorded “On the Road Again” in her adolescence, I gave her a gold charm of the record, and she laughed, and put it on her charm bracelet.
“He should dedicate it to me, shouldn’t he?” she said ruefully. “I guess I’m on the road almost as much as he is. Are you tired of me?”
“Oh, not yet, I guess,” I said lightly. “You add a certain touch of class to this dump.”
For it was to me that she came when the darkening burdens in the farmhouse overwhelmed her small shoulders, first by bus and taxi and then, in the heart-stopping manner of her generation, hitchhiking. In time it became Jack and Lucy’s custom to look first for her in the summerhouse of the Peachtree Road house, and almost always she was there, curled up on the sofa reading or listening to music, played softly, while I limned the ancestry of Sarah Gentry. Sometimes, too, she asked to spend the night at 2500 with her grandmother Willa, who adored her, and I would take her formally by the hand and present her at the back door of the big house, and Shem or Martha would bear her away to the small room next to Aunt Willa’s that was kept for her, smiling broadly in the joy and pride of her presence. Often she stayed two or three days with us, but always there came a phone call from Lucy saying that she needed Malory, and to please have Shem bring her home.
And Malory would go obediently and without protest, for with her the operative word was and always would be “need.” For the first third of her life, whenever her mother’s phone calls speaking of need came, Malory laid aside whatever she was doing and, like the good child she was, went home. The certainty that she would was, I think, one of the few fixed stars in Lucy’s careening firmament.
Lucy was in a kind of free-fall by then, not precipitous and horrifying to see, but a kind of sideslipping drifting, a dreaming, spiraling descent, as a sky-diver will experience riding the thermal currents before he pulls his cord. I have heard that to the diver, that dreamlike free-fall is more dangerous than the moment of his impact, for it is often so hypnotic, so altogether free and rapturous, that the temptation to prolong it until it is too late to pull the cord is very great. I think perhaps that Lucy found in her long descent something of that freedom and rapture, for she often seemed to retreat into it when the world pierced her too hard and frequently, or she bruised herself upon reality. It was not, I have never thought, that she courted madness and deterioration, but rather that she simply did not seek very hard to elude them. Perhaps she did not, by then, even fully realize when she entered that comfortable fugue. Lucy had lived in the cold land of reality as long as she could bear it; by the fourth decade of her life she was largely an occasional visitor there. It was we who watched, not she, who knew, almost to the moment, when she left it.
I knew by her voice on the telephone. When she was in one of her stretches of smooth water, her voice was rich and slow and husky from her eternal cigarettes, and her drawled “Gibby? It’s Lucy, honey” was dark and thick with promised laughter and irony. When she had begun drinking—for it was alcohol now, whatever secret white roots of madness lay still unplowed in her mind, alcohol that began those long, slow spirals, and became the whole of her torment and ours—her voice was as pure and
sharp and glittering as broken glass, high and humming with secret glee.
“Gibby, honey?” she would sing out in the crystal voice, followed by a deep, sucking inhalation of smoke. “Are you there, dahlin’? It’s Lucy.”
I hated that voice. I hated those calls. After a while I stopped wondering, even, what had set her off and braced myself for the litany of anger and terror that would inevitably follow. For after the incident with Beau Longshore on that nameless Mississippi coast, her aberration took a different tack from the hysteria followed by near-catatonic depression that had begun to form a pattern with her, and she became obsessed with fear of, and a terrible rage at, Jack.
She seemed to believe, then, when liquor ushered in her glittering madness, that he was plotting to have her committed to the state institution for the insane, and was in collusion with Aunt Willa and the hapless Little Lady to keep her a prisoner there for the rest of her life. She said, too, with a frail child’s terror that would have been heartbreaking if I had not heard it so often, that he was abusing her both mentally and physically, often slapping and hitting and kicking her, and she was afraid that someday he would kill her with a gun. I could not disabuse her of these notions while she was in that state. Nothing, not my insistence that she wake Jack and put him on the phone and let me talk to him, not my pointing out to her, over and over, that she had no marks or bruises upon her, nothing brooked the tide of rage and fear, the nightly recitals of his monstrousness.
“Lucy, he doesn’t even have a gun,” I said to her once, in the early days, when I was still trying to reason with her. “He told me he hated them and that he’d rather be killed by a burglar than keep a gun in the house with the children there.”
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