Peachtree Road

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  “I think you ought to ask your daddy about that,” I said finally, trying to keep my voice casual. “He’d probably rather talk to you about it than have me doing it.”

  “I’ve already asked Jack,” she said. She still did not look up. “He said it wasn’t anything for me to worry about, and to put it out of my mind. It’s Mother’s problem, he said, not mine. But that’s just crap, Shep. It is something for me to worry about. It is my problem. It’s his problem, too, only he won’t act like it is. So I’m asking you.”

  “Well,” I said, on a deep breath, “It’s something that liquor and her sickness make her do. Something that she wouldn’t do when she was well, and doesn’t do then. Something that she won’t, when she gets well for good—”

  “Yeah, but what’s she doing there?” Malory asked. I could tell that she was near tears, even though her eyes were veiled by her long lashes.

  “Malory, it’s not anything so bad, it’s just…I don’t—”

  “Oh, Shep, I know she screws men,” she said angrily, turning finally to look at me. Her eyes were terrible, bottomless pools of pain. “I know she fucks her brains out with men she never saw before. When Jack wouldn’t talk to me I asked the shrink and she told me. What I guess I mean is why? Why does she have to do that? Why isn’t Jack enough? Why aren’t I?”

  The tears started, a slow, silent track down her face, but she did not seem to know they were there, and did not move to brush them away. She stared at me as if the whole of her life hung on my answer. I knew that in a way, perhaps, it did, and hated Lucy in that moment with a hatred as pure and bright as fire, and as undiluted.

  “She isn’t herself when she does it,” I began in dull despair. “I don’t think she even knows she’s doing it. It may be something to do with brain chemistry, that we don’t know about yet, something she can’t help. Or more likely it’s a way of running away from something that hurts her terribly….”

  “You mean like me?” she said, her voice quavering pitifully.

  “No, baby, not you, not ever you,” I said. “You know that your mother loves you like nothing else in the world, no matter what. Don’t you know that? No, it probably all started when she was very small, just a little girl, maybe even before she came to live here. And then finally something, maybe that chemical in her brain, just…pulled a kind of trigger….”

  “Mama told me once that she had the first…sick spell right after I was born,” she said neutrally, and I could only think, over the red roaring in my ears, I would like to kill you for that, Lucy. I truly would.

  “Well, she was wrong,” I said evenly. “She had some small…spells, I guess you’d call them…when she was in college, and right after. Maybe she doesn’t remember them, but I do. So it couldn’t have been you that caused them.”

  “Dr. Farr said it was a way of looking for her father. My grandfather,” she said. The tears still ran, but the awful rigidity had gone out of her shoulders, and she slumped against my knees.

  “I think she’s right,” I said.

  “Well, then…what I really want to know is…does she…did she want to do that with her father? I mean, are you supposed to want to…you know…with your father? Or are you not supposed to and it makes you crazy to want to? Or what?”

  “Has she ever said anything about that to you?” I asked, already feeling, with crimson pleasure, Lucy’s slender throat in my hands.

  “Oh no. No, I just wondered. I mean, if she was looking for her father with all those men, and that was what she did with them, was that what she wanted to do with him? All along?”

  The truth of it was so absurd and shining and whole that I wanted to laugh aloud. I found that I could not frame a comforting lie for her.

  “I don’t know,” I said on a long exhalation. “I really don’t. I doubt if she does, either. It could be.”

  She sat leaning against my knees for a long time, there in the firelight, and then she put her forehead down on them and rolled it slowly from side to side, as if trying to dislodge the knowledge behind it.

  “It’s really awful, isn’t it? The whole sex thing?” she said.

  “It can be,” I said. “It can be pretty awful indeed. On the other hand, it can be pretty terrific. It all depends on a lot of things. Who you do it with, mainly.”

  “Is it awful for you? Is that why you don’t…you know…have a girlfriend or a wife?”

  “Me? No,” I said, surprised and profoundly uncomfortable. “It isn’t awful. It never was. It was…pretty great. I just don’t have anybody right now I really want to do it with.”

  “Did you ever?”

  “Yes. I did.”

  “But not now.”

  “No. Not now.”

  “Did she go away? Did she die?”

  “Malory,” I said, “I love you a very great deal, and I will never lie to you, but there are some things that I simply reserve the right not to answer. When it’s your business, there is nothing I won’t tell you. But this is not your business. This is adult business. You are eleven years old. No matter how well-behaved and mature you are, you are still eleven years old.”

  “Almost twelve. Twelve in three months and two weeks. How old do I have to be before you tell me?” she said, giggling, and I knew that whatever cliff we had teetered on, we were away from the brink now.

  “Thirty-seven,” I said. “Maybe forty. Get up now and I’ll race you over to the Camerons’. Dorothy said she was going to make tea cakes this afternoon.”

  “I still think sex is awful,” she said, getting up from the floor in one fluid motion of long legs and arms and hair. “I’m not ever going to do it. Not ever. Ugh.”

  “Famous last words,” I said.

  “No,” she said, turning her face to me. I could see that the laughter and the eleven-year-old child were gone from the blue eyes, and something much older and almost fierce was there, something implacable. “I mean that. I’d rather be dead than go in a room and…do that with a man. I’d rather die.”

  I hope one day you have to account for that too, Lucy, I said to her, silently, as I jogged with her daughter in the tender dark up Peachtree Road. I hope one day you get a chance to heal that wound in Malory, because it’s gone beyond my ability to do it. And sick as you were, and are, you better make it good.

  Lucy stayed in the new hospital, with periodic visits its home, for almost a year and a half. At Faith Farr’s emphatic insistence, Malory did not visit her there, but she talked to her mother on the telephone and, I suppose, by way of their old silent communication almost every day. She visited often with me and Aunt Willa on Peachtree Road, short visits, but with the boys gone, she was uncomfortable leaving Jack alone for long, and so her primary role in that time of banked turmoil and tough, wiry, greening hope was that of caretaker to him.

  He was still working two jobs, and drinking and dozing when he came home, and his waking time with Malory must have shrunk to a matter of an hour or less a day, but she did not seem to mind the long stretches of time alone. Old Estelle still came at noon and stayed until she had prepared their supper, and Malory had discovered early her mother’s and my refuge in books. I would have found a way to get her out of the farmhouse for good if I had seen any evidence of loneliness or neglect, but I did not. Malory with something or someone to nurture was Malory fulfilled. So for the time being, I let things ride as they were. Faith Farr, who had drifted into the role of family counselor and confidante as well as therapist to Lucy, seemed to think she was doing relatively well as Jack’s housekeeper and companion. But she, as I did, had serious reservations about Malory for the long haul.

  “Let’s don’t try to make plans for her future now,” she said more than once, when I cornered her in a new fit of anxiety about Malory. “If we’ve really got a handle on the thing with Lucy this time, everything may sort itself out just fine. The dependency on Malory may just break itself, and that would be the best way, by far. It if ain’t broke, let’s don’t try to fix it.”

&nb
sp; “Can you really say it ain’t broke?” I would say.

  “It may be right now,” she said, “but that doesn’t mean it always will be. It’s all a part of the total dependency package Lucy lugs around, I think. Break one, or find the cause, and the rest will follow. I think.”

  “You think? Jesus, Faith, if you don’t know by now, when will you?” I said.

  “Probably never,” she replied, looking narrowly at me through smoke from her Belair. “No therapist knows. What we do is think. I think better than most. And that’s what I think.”

  So I had to be content with that. But as the months wore on, I had to concede that it did indeed look as though she had a handle of some sort on the monstrous engine that drove Lucy. Lucy looked almost as well as she ever had, except for a permanent webbing of fine lines around her eyes and mouth and the kind of furrows that pain makes between her delicate brows, and had even gained a softening cloak of flesh, and asked for her makeup and favorite clothes once again. She had not had an episode of violence or hysteria or catatonia for months, and had made what the staff shrink termed several significant breakthroughs in her group, and was so well and fully transferred to Faith Farr that Faith said their sessions together were often pure delight.

  “She’s one of the most charismatic people I’ve ever met,” she said to me and Jack. “It’s impossible not to love her. Her charm is immense, and so far as I can see, it’s entirely natural now.”

  “It is,” I said. “Everything about her is entirely natural. What you see is what you get, no matter if it’s her best or her craziest.”

  She looked at me. “Lucy has more artifice than anybody I have ever known,” she said. “And she’s better at it than anybody I’ve ever seen. That you never saw it is a mark of her skill.”

  “I simply can’t believe that,” I said, dumbfounded. “I’d know if she was faking. I’ve always known when she was.”

  Jack grinned at me. It was not a pleasant grin.

  “Believe it,” he said.

  A month or so before Lucy was finally scheduled to be discharged, I caught up with Faith in the snack bar of the hospital and asked for an overview of Lucy’s condition, and a prognosis. She did not want to give it to me, but in the end she did.

  “Understand that I’m talking to you strictly for Malory’s sake and no other reason, Shep,” she said, blowing on her steaming coffee. “You’ve really got no business knowing anything about Lucy. It’s her business, and Jack’s, and Malory’s, not yours. I think the interdependency between you and Lucy is as unhealthy as hell, and it’s one of the main things I hope to help her break. It isn’t all that good for you, and it’s dangerous for her. I might even go so far as to say that it’s helped her get and stay sick.”

  “God Almighty, Faith, there’ve been times that I was literally all she had,” I exploded. “What should I have done, walked away from her? And besides, I’m damned well not dependent on her.”

  “The hell you’re not,” she said calmly. “And as for walking away from her, yes, that’s just what you should have done. It isn’t true that you were all she had—she had herself. But she’s never learned to use it. That’s what we’ve been working on, like two mules on a sugarcane plantation, for the past year and a half. She’s coming along with it. She might even make it if you let her walk by herself. You and Jack and yes, even little Malory. I’m going to talk to them about this before she goes home.”

  I was silent for so long that she reached over and touched my hand.

  “Don’t feel bad about it,” she said. “You thought you were doing the right thing. Everybody who picks her up and shores her up thinks they’re doing the right thing. That’s her gift as well as her sickness, the ability to make you think that. It’s almost impossible to see the artifice. She even fooled me at first. But try not to bail her out anymore. If you have to help somebody, be there for Malory. Much as she loves her and dotes on her, Lucy can’t do that, and Jack…oh, poor Jack. He can’t even help himself. He’s as much a victim of Lucy as she is of herself, and maybe worse. I just don’t have any idea if the burnout is permanent. But I do know he’s not going to be any good to Malory for a long time. I think that will probably remain to you and her grandmother.”

  I grimaced, thinking of Malory in the manicured grasp of Willa Slagle Bondurant.

  “Do you see any signs of damage?” I said. “I’m worried about her having so few friends and sticking around that house waiting on Jack and Lucy when she’s home. And I’m worried as hell about the way she feels about sex. She’s really afraid of it. She hates the very thought of it.”

  “I knew about the waiting on and care taking,” Faith said slowly. “I’m not wild about that, but so far it seems within bounds. I didn’t know about the sex thing, though I’m not surprised. It’s too early to tell if it’s serious, I think. Part of it could be her age—some thirteen-year-olds just haven’t gotten there yet. And then, you can understand why she’d feel that way, with her mother in and out of all those beds.”

  “She’s perceptive as hell,” I said. “She’s already hit on the fact that Lucy, in some entirely unconscious way, was trying to screw her father. Literally, I mean. The only thing she didn’t understand was why. I must admit I don’t, either.”

  “Well, a well-fucked man is not so quick to hit the road, Shep.” Faith Farr grinned wryly. “That’s what this whole thing with Lucy is about, of course. Loss, and the fear of loss. It feels to her that all losses are a replay of that first awful one, her father. She knows better now, but the gut is not long on intellectual knowledge. Changing her reactions to loss, and her fear of it, is going to be a long, long road.”

  “Loss,” I said, old pictures slipping into my mind. “Loss…”

  “Think back,” she said. “Whenever she’s lost something valuable to her, or thought she had, she’s gone into one of these things. Alcohol is the ignition switch, but it isn’t the engine. It only gets her to where the loss doesn’t hurt so much. The first one, after Malory was born? She lost her status as a child to be cared for to her own child. Remember her saying, ‘I’m the little girl and she’s the mother now’? And when John Kennedy and Martin Luther King died, she lost two classic father figures. And not long before she went off with that preacher or whatever he was down there in Mississippi she had lost the movement, which gave her life so much focus and stability, and the hero-fathers in it….”

  “And all the other times, when there didn’t seem to be anything to trigger it?” I said.

  “Loss, as surely as I sit here. Jack for certain, changing before her eyes from the stable, vital, older man, the father figure, to a passive-aggressive child himself, waited on by a child, unwilling even to come to those motels and get her out of the messes she got herself in. You did that. Over and over she tried to get him to take care of her by provoking him with the booze and the men in the motels. And when he wouldn’t, the loss was underscored again. A black circle. I think one reason she does so well in the hospital is that the structure and the authority make her feel protected and safe. It’s one reason I’ve kept her here so long this time—to try to give her time to find the weapons to fend for herself and not go back to leaning when she gets home. And to give Malory time to grow up a little, too.”

  “You think there’s going to be trouble for Malory again this time?”

  “I think Lucy will try to lean on her again,” she said. “I think that famous, eerie old telepathy thing has to do with great need and the response of a hyperreceptive child to it. The need is still there.”

  “Why, of all people, would she need so to lean on and possess her own child, who’s not much more than a baby herself?” I asked. “There was always me. There was Jack….”

  She smiled sadly.

  “Well,” she said. “Lucy never really had much of a mother, did she? Or any female figure who was hers alone. That’s the why of that, I think. And that’s why it worries me. It’s such a primal thing, it goes so deep with both of them. Look
at Malory—she’s the classic little alkie-psychotic’s child. The perfect little caretaker; the little mother. A great many of them never get free of it. And it can be a life wrecker. That’s why I’m talking to you like this. It may never come to that, but watch her closely, and take care of her. If it gets too bizarre, just get her away from there. I may not always be around to watch—I’ll have to terminate with Lucy someday, for both our sakes. But I gather you will be.”

  “You bet I will,” I said. “You’re damned right I will.”

  “Well, watch out for yourself, too,” she said mildly. “You’re almost as vulnerable as Malory is. And I don’t do traumatized hermits.”

  I laughed and kissed her cheek and went back to the summerhouse, but the next evening I called Malory and asked her, casually, if she thought she might like to go away to school somewhere.

  “I’d love to send you,” I said, as nonchalantly as I could. “Anywhere you think you’d like. We could go the horse route, or the dance route”—her two great passions so far—“or we could get you up in snow country, or even find some place that specializes in pre-pre-pre-vet training. You call it.”

  “I couldn’t do that, Shep,” she said, in a brisk, no-nonsense adult’s voice that rasped in my ears. “Thanks a million. You’re a real angel, but it’s just out of the question. There wouldn’t be anybody to look out for Jack, and then Mother will be home in a couple of weeks. I can’t leave her.”