“Oh, he has a gun, you’ll just never see it,” she said in the crystalline singsong. “But I see it all the time. It’s the one he took away from his first wife once, before she left. Poor woman, I understand now why she did it. I never did before. I’ve misjudged her terribly, Gibby. Terribly. I’m being punished for that.”
Later in that decade, the calls began to come from other places. Perhaps three or four times a year the phone would ring in the evenings, and something about the silence on the other end of the receiver would alert me even before a laughing, lilting Lucy told me that she was in one or another of the cut-rate businessmen’s motels that ringed the city at the Interstate exits, with a man she had picked up in the adjacent piano bar.
It was as if that first act of illicit sex with Beau Longshore had lifted some essential governor off her dark, glinting mind, and the search for the sheltering father’s arms which she had never found became overt. In her periods of relative health and rationality, Lucy was as faithful to Jack Venable as some nineteenth-century farm bride. When the darkness came, it led her to the scanty sheets and thin mattresses of Holiday Inns and Howard Johnsons all over North Fulton County. In the beginning Jack would go and get her out, silent and grim, but she became so abusive and strident after a while, when he appeared to take her home, that he simply stopped going and, when she called, rolled over and went back to sleep. He knew that she would call me next, and that I would go. Lucy would usually come home with me.
I don’t know, really, why I made those hopeless night pilgrimages, or why I continued to listen when I heard that increasingly frequent, high-pitched “Gibby, honey? It’s Lucy,” followed by the inevitable threnody of madness and abuse and terror and pain. We were like two ghosts, I often thought, unable to rest, doomed to haunt a world we did not even go out into anymore, talking to each other in the consuming nights over spectral telephones. But I listened, with some degree of patience, no matter how often she phoned, or how preposterous her accusations were. Partly it was because she was simply so dependent on me; so totally, in her sickness, devoted to me; seeming to trust me with her pain when she would trust no other. And this devotion, sly and slantwise though it was, warmed and lighted my self-imposed exile.
But mostly, I listened to the wounded litanies of Lucy Venable because I knew that it defused her and kept, for a little while longer, the brunt of her madness from Malory.
For Malory was suffering. By now a serenely beautiful child with Lucy’s straight, black-satin hair and incandescent blue eyes and the pure young hawk’s profile of the Bondurants, she seemed to have skipped her childhood altogether. With the deepening of the darkness around her mother she lost most of her old sense of play and fun; her ridiculous, rich, bawdy laugh, so like Lucy’s, did not ring out often; her mobile, intelligent face did not slip so naturally into mischief or inquisitiveness as it did into lines of worry and sunless earnestness. There was in her, had always been, something of Lucy’s old force and intensity, but without that first lovely leavening of delicious, broad comedy and ridiculousness, it became a thing of fever and insistence, and I worried to see it. She had wit, but she was by then no longer gay or funny. Malory, her whole childhood one of reaction to Lucy, caromed around the spaces of her life like a wildly bounced ball, and I suppose it was natural that she would curtail, insofar as she could, whatever elements of surprise and spontaneity she encountered. I did not blame her. Impulse and eccentricity had cost her dearly all her young life.
At an age when she should have been going to children’s parties and running in noisy, yelping groups after school, and ranging free in the long, sweet springs and golden summers and autumns of the southern Piedmont, she stayed instead inside the crumbling farmhouse in the loving but limited company of the old black woman. She read and watched television and kept her pitiful little vigil over her mother, and waited on her silent, souring father when he slumped in from work and settled himself in front of the television set with the newspaper. She brought him his drinks, and heated and fetched the starchy suppers the old woman had left for them, and sat silently beside him watching the flickering screen until he fell into a scotch-sodden sleep. Only then did she pull the afghan over him, brush her teeth and slip into her own bed and, finally, sleep herself, a thin, used, old woman’s sleep.
Because this minimal little routine was of Malory’s own choosing, I did not really believe that Jack Venable actually neglected the quiet, lovely little specter in his home. But he could not, somehow, seem to reach out to her, to connect with her in any essential, nourishing way. Perhaps there was in her simply too much of the beautiful, flawed wife who was slipping away from him, or perhaps all real passion had been seared out of him in one too many of Lucy’s anonymous motel rooms. Perhaps it had not survived the civil rights movement, which had commanded so much of it. In any case, so far as Malory was concerned, his reasons scarcely mattered. She remained essentially alone in her father’s house.
So far as I knew, Jack did not ever think of leaving Lucy, and was not and never had been any of the monstrous things of which she accused him. Indeed, in the considerable periods when she was whole and clean, Lucy obviously adored and depended on him as much as she ever had. His only failing to mother and daughter that I could ever see was, perhaps fatally, his failure to nurture either.
And so Malory Venable ran away. I never once reprimanded her for that. It was perhaps the strongest and wisest thing she could do, under the circumstances. It was when Lucy called and she ran back home, as straight and as true as a silver dart, that my fear for her became, until I knew that she was safe and Lucy sane again, a living thing.
During those first years of Lucy’s precipitous journey into aberrance, I fretted often about Malory’s presence in the farmhouse. Even in Lucy’s “good” periods, when she was home from whatever hospital her current psychiatrist had placed her in and keeping up some pretense of doing freelance writing, it was a skewed and unhealthy household. At her worst, when she was slipping into still another fen of alcohol and promiscuity and paranoia, it must have been an emotional charnel house. I watched Malory carefully, in the periods when she was with me, for signs of damage, for wounds, but aside from her almost pragmatic running away, I saw few. She seemed to me in her late childhood, on the verge of adolescence, a creature of such miraculous beauty and presence that she might have been gotten by demigods. I literally never, in those days, chided her; I honestly saw nothing to chide. Her emerging habit of simply ghosting away when something displeased or upset her, or of threatening, matter-of-factly and very politely, to run away when Aunt Willa or Jack attempted to make her do something she did not wish to do, seemed to me entirely reasonable and even charming.
It took Dorothy Cameron to open my eyes.
I had taken to visiting her more frequently over the past year, because Ben was slipping slowly into a sly fog of dementia which had seemed to begin with young Ben’s death and deepen when his decade as mayor ended, and would be termed, in another decade, Alzheimer’s disease. Dorothy was nearly homebound by then; she did not often leave him in the sole company of Leroy Pickens or Minnie, their cook. He was not, yet, continually confused or belligerent, and had long periods of relative alertness and well-being, when the teasing specter of the man he had been flirted through.
But he could go suddenly blank, and it frightened him badly, and more than once he had strayed out of the house and even into his beloved Lincoln, and once had set the woods behind the house afire burning trash and simply walked away from the blaze. It hurt me terribly, and angered me, to see the engaging face and vital sinewy body of this man I loved above all others governed by a frail and flickering intelligence, but I knew that it must be unspeakable for Dorothy, and that she welcomed my visits, largely because Ben still responded almost normally to me. So I went often, and sometimes I took Malory with me. She adored Dorothy Cameron and Ben, who often thought she was Lucy but always remembered her, and they lavished on her almost the same largesse of easy aff
ection that they did on diminutive Livvy and Charlsie Gentry. They did not see Ben’s boys much. Julia could not forgive, even those who needed no forgiveness. I knew that the absence of young Ben’s sons must be an unhealed and unhealable wound, but neither Dorothy nor Ben spoke of it. It was another reason I took Malory there.
One afternoon when she was ten, we sat with Dorothy Cameron over tea in the little library while Ben napped upstairs, and Dorothy asked Malory what her plans for the rest of the week were. She was spending it with us; Lucy was at Brawner’s then, fighting out of the fog that had cast her up at the North Druid Hills Howard Johnson in the bed of a computer salesman from Spartanburg, and not due home for another week or two.
“I forget,” she said, smiling at Dorothy and looking quizzically at me. I often planned excursions for her, even if I did not attend them.
“You’ve got the dentist tomorrow afternoon,” I said. “And on Friday your grandmother is going to—”
“No,” Malory said.
I looked at her, and Dorothy lifted a dark eyebrow.
“No, what?” I said.
“No dentist. I’m not going to the dentist.”
“Sure you are,” I said. “You have one more cavity before you’re through. You know that. You made the appointment the last time you were there.”
“No I’m not,” Malory said, her voice soft and agreeable, her blue eyes level on mine. “I’m not going. If you try to make me I’ll run away. You know I will, too, Shep.”
I shrugged, knowing that she well might. On the other hand, she could just as easily forget about the threat when tomorrow came, and go willingly to the dentist in the Rolls with Shem Cater. It did not seem important.
“Malory, Pickles has a new litter out in the garage,” Dorothy said. “Why don’t you go take a look at them? I think their eyes should be open by now.”
“I’ll be glad to, Mrs. Cameron,” Malory said equably, and rose. “Will fifteen minutes be long enough?”
“Quite,” Dorothy said, her mouth quirking with suppressed laughter. But when she looked back at me she was not smiling.
“She’s almost as frightening as she is charming,” she said. “And that’s considerable. Listen, you may think this is none of my business, but there’s nobody else to tell you. It’s time you got tough on her now. She’s going to grow up badly wounded if you don’t.”
“Tough?” I said. The very word tasted hard and queer on my tongue. “What’s there to be tough about? She’s as proper as a little adult now—”
“And just as stubborn and headstrong as most of them,” Dorothy said. “And a good bit more imperious than most. Shep, from what you tell me, literally nobody is raising that child. Her father is either at work or passed out in front of the TV and her mother…well. Malory is more than a match for any poor, uneducated Negro I ever met. So that leaves you. You may not realize it, but you’ve become her primary caretaker. If you’re going to be that, then you’ve got to take care. You can’t just dote. This business of threatening to run away whenever she’s displeased is serious. And it’s the worst kind of manipulation. You need to put a stop to it, and apparently you’re the only one who can.”
“Jesus, Dorothy, I never asked to be a…caretaker,” I said weakly.
“Didn’t you?” she said. “You set yourself up to be her rock and her refuge. The tough comes with the sweet, my dear.”
“How can I get tough with her now?” I said despairingly. “She’s been through so much, she goes through so much—she may look self-possessed, but under it she’s got to be frail, even damaged already. I don’t want to damage her any more….”
“Then you’ll be handing her the same awful power her mother has,” Dorothy said. “And don’t think it’s not awful. The power of the weak over the strong. She’s already learned the drill. Who do you think she learned it from? You’ve got to counter that because there isn’t anybody else to do it. Or do you want that role for Malory?”
“No,” I said, closing my eyes wearily. “No.”
And it was true. Much as I would hate it, I knew that I would take Malory aside and talk to her as I never had before. I did not want Lucy’s best legacy to her daughter to be a talent for flight or manipulation.
It was a bad afternoon, the one when I broached the subject to her. I did it badly, and she took it badly. She wept and stormed and cried in a manner I had never seen before, so reminiscent of Lucy’s early, desperate hysterics that my heart froze within me, and then she ran sobbing out of the summerhouse saying that she would run away and nobody would ever see her again, and only the incorporeal hand of Dorothy Cameron on my shoulder kept me from rushing after her. She did not appear for dinner with her grandmother, and I was on the verge of getting Shem and starting a search through the woods for her—a mirror journey of those her mother had precipitated decades before—when she drifted into the darkening summerhouse, red-eyed and bleared with weeping, and threw her slender arms around me, and said, “I’m sorry. I was being a jerk and you were only trying to take care of me. I won’t do it again, Shep.”
“No more running away?” I said, hugging her, feeling the lovely, frail cage of her ribs, and my own prickling tears, and a wonderful pride in her.
“I don’t think I can promise that,” she said after a long pause, still muffled in my neck. “I might have to run away to here some more. But I promise I won’t threaten to do it unless I really do mean it.”
“Fair enough,” I said, over the pride and a dull rasp of rage at the premature adultness she had had forced upon her. Despite my best efforts, Malory Venable was not going to be accorded much in the way of a childhood.
It was not until she was nearly twelve that the other thing that I feared, a specter much slyer and more dangerous, raised its gaudy cobra’s head. I had been watching her apprehensively for it for some years: How could it not have touched her in some way, given the thrust of her mother’s madness? How not marked or shadowed her? But though I had watched, I had seen nothing.
And then, the week after Christmas, before she turned twelve, she said from the rug in front of the fire, where she was listening to Jimi Hendrix on her headphones while I read Walker Percy, “Why does Mother go to all those motel rooms?” She did not look up at me as she said it, and though her voice was her own, low and sweet, I could see the dull red creeping up the back of her neck.
Dear Jesus, help me now, I thought in pure panic, recognizing in the firelight the old, long-awaited enemy.
Lucy had not had one of her dark times for almost a year. We had high hopes for her new psychiatrist, a wry, warm-voiced woman who had wanted to try her on lithium and a new kind of therapy called cognitive. She thought perhaps the primary trouble might be manic-depressive illness, long concealed under and confused by the alcohol abuse, but thought, too, that Lucy’s great anxiety and consequent rage might spring from a bleakly negative way of looking at life. The lithium, she thought, might help with the manic-depressive part and the resulting craving for the anodyne of alcohol, and the cognitive therapy could well address her essential nihilism.
Lucy liked the doctor and had done well on the treatment, even talking of going back to work for SOUTH in the new year, and we were beginning to hope, tentatively, that she had left the darkness behind her and was at least approaching the light. Jack’s step and voice were lighter than they had been in the past four or five years of doctors and hospitals, and Malory laughed once more, shyly and hesitantly, and had not run away to us since the previous January.
Only I remained skeptical; it seemed to me clear that the darkness in Lucy was a thing of the blood and ran not only in her but through her and back beyond, and was thus out of the reach of drugs and positive thinking. But I did not speak of my doubts to anyone. I was not the clearest of observers when it came to Lucy Bondurant. Enough to let sleeping madness lie. The fact remained that Lucy had not taken a drink or a man for eleven months.
But then she lost it, whatever it was that was bearing her up. As
Christmas approached—a time she had, for some reason, come to hate and fear—she grew more and more taut and brittle and crystal-voiced, and though we all tried desperately not to see and hear, none of us was surprised when the telltale call to me came, this time at about midnight of December 17. She had left to go to a nearby suburban mall to do some Christmas shopping and had gone instead to a truckers’ motel and road stop up near Duluth, and when she called me, laughing crazily, I could hear the answering laughter of more than one man. When I got to the motel and found her room and let myself in the unlocked door, one was riding her like a bucking mare, and another was kneeling at her head with his fly open, and a third was watching television from the other bed and preparing for his turn with energetic masturbation. They had melted out of the room like dirty snowmen at the sight of me, still adjusting clothing, and Lucy screeched her laughter and defiance all the way to the hospital—not Brawner’s this time, for by now they were not anxious to have Lucy back—where the doctor practiced. She had been there ever since.
We had told Malory none of the details, of course; had never done that. We said this time, as we had all those others, only that her mother was ill and in the hospital to get better, and would soon be home. But Malory was light-years removed from a fool and was nearing adolescence, and could have found out the precise shape of her mother’s madness in any number of ways. I had, as I said, been waiting for this. I had been watching to see if any taint of that darkness might overshadow Malory—any precocious interest, any prurience, even, God help us, any hint that that same fever might bloom in her own blood. It had appeared in her mother at an age not much past her daughter’s now.
But Malory remained as chaste and sexless as a medieval page or a young saint. She had few close acquaintances and no real friends, and none of the former were boys. Jack’s boys had long since elected the predictable, if tepid, hospitality of the Nashville aunt; they rarely visited at the farmhouse anymore. She was not overtly uncomfortable in the presence of the boys of her age I saw her with: Snake and Lelia’s three, and Freddie and Tom’s handsome, stupid Tommy and more rarely young Ben’s brace of volatile redheads. But she did not stay long in their presence, melting away as swiftly and silently as spring snow after a moment or so. I had often wondered if she was afraid of boys, and rather hoped, given Lucy’s history, that she was. I looked at her on that night in the firelight; she looked, in her tattered, faded blue jeans and fringed vest and boots, like an androgynous Remington sketch. Except for the budding of the sharp, unfettered young breasts and the poreless sheen of her skin, she might have been a young boy.
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