“Malory,” I said desperately, “You’re only thirteen years old. So far as I can tell, you’ve never in your life had any real fun.”
“My life is perfect for me,” she said in prim surprise. “Mother is better fun than anybody my own age when she’s…you know…well, and I know she’s well this time. And besides, school is not for fun. Is it?”
“Yes,” I said, thinking of North Fulton High when the Pinks and the Jells were in full flower, and of my exhilaration at Princeton. “I think it is.”
“Excuse me, but I think I hear Jack’s car,” she said, politely and inexorably, and hung up the receiver softly.
The next day I called Charlie Gentry and asked if I could come over and see him about a financial matter, and ended up accepting his insistent offer of dinner first with him and Sarah. And on Thursday night of that week, I went to the little house of Sarah and Charlie Gentry for the first time in more than a decade.
They had never moved from the first small house in Collier Hills, as most of our crowd long since had. Charlie, by then administrator of one of the country’s mightiest private philanthropic trusts and by his own wry admission a sort of “messenger of the gods” to beseechers all over the country, was not himself a wealthy man. I know that he probably could have made many times over his salary in a private law firm, and any one of the large ones founded and operated by the fathers of our Buckhead friends and now, increasingly, by those friends themselves would have gladly snapped him up. It would not have been that ghastliest of emerging terms, networking, either. Charlie Gentry was awesomely good at what he did. His fierce, good heart had found its home in the genteel, anonymous world of private philanthropy, but his old affinity for the law was still alive and leaping, and I knew he could be employed with full honors and perks within a day, should he choose to leave the foundation, by making at most three phone calls.
No, money had never been the carrot for Charlie that it was for many of us, and he had found the perfect wife in Sarah, in that respect. I knew that she would one day come into the entirety of Ben Cameron’s estate, but I knew, too, that it consisted largely now of the property and house on Muscogee Avenue. Ben’s illness had been long and would be far longer; Dorothy would not be left rich, nor Sarah after her. Sarah would not care. Of all the Buckhead girls I have ever known with access to substantial money, Sarah Cameron Gentry cared least for it.
They had added on to the little Cape Cod over the years, and now it climbed and wandered and tumbled over the steep, wooded lot and down to a small creek at the bottom of a ravine behind it. It could have used a paint job, I saw in the lowering summer dusk, and a few of the shingles were missing from the steeply pitched roof, but the lawn was green and deep, and flowers rioted everywhere in the wavering miasma of the heat. A battered hose sent a lawn sprinkler whirling, and twin bicycles lay on their sides in the driveway. The entire house would have fit into the drawing room of Little Lady and Carter Rawson’s, I thought, and would not have missed it by much in some of the other homes our contemporaries now occupied, or would come into, Merrivale House included.
I wondered if Sarah ever missed the sheer space and magnificence of her first home. I did not, somehow, think so. She had been ready, after all, to live in that Lower West Side apartment with me. And as long as his precious relics and his beloved wife and daughters were there with him, Charlie would have subsisted happily in an igloo. When he and Sarah came out to meet me on the front steps of the little house, in the hot twilight, I was struck with how right and organic they looked there, and how much like one another they had grown. The promise of that night so long ago at the Plaza, before they were married, when they had come seeking me and my blessing, had long since been fulfilled; it would not have been possible for any two people to look more married than Sarah and Charlie Gentry. I felt an old, deep pang that I had not thought to feel again, seeing Sarah there in the circle of Charlie’s arm, looking down at me from such an unassailable unit, and wondered if the night was, after all, going to be a mistake.
But it was not. That dinner, only the second I had ever had in their home, might have been the two hundredth. Sarah, in shorts and an Agnes Scott T-shirt, her beautiful small body as supple and tanned as it had ever been in her first youth, might have been eighteen again, instead of nearly forty. Only the threads of her father’s vigorous iron-gray in her glossy mop told of passing time; the faint webbing of white lines in the tanned skin around her eyes had been there since her late teens. Charlie, on the other hand, looked every day of his years and beyond; he was as padded and settled onto his stocky frame as a good old morris chair, and his glasses were thicker, and the well-creased old chinos strained over his comfortable mound of stomach, and the bald tonsure in his dark, graying hair was larger.
But the eyes behind the glasses were still Charlie’s eyes, the eyes of that sweet, ardent, largehearted boy I had first met and ranged the battlefields of the city with, and his smile was as it had always been: open and delighted and innocent still, Charlie’s and no other’s. We ate good pasta and drank bad wine and laughed at all that had been good and gay between the three of us, and did not speak of the other. I found myself, to my own surprise, loving the night and them—the two of them together, not Sarah and Charlie separately, as I always had before. I determined, as we rose at last from the round maple table, to see them far more often.
Sarah picked up my thought, as she had done so often before.
“This is number one in a series,” she said, crinkling the great golden-amber eyes at me. “You take us somewhere for every three dinners here. You simply have no idea how we’ve missed you, Shep. Charlie has been pining for you for years without knowing it.”
“Next one’s on me,” I said. “Anywhere you say. I don’t think I’ve been out to dinner since Hart’s closed.”
Sarah snorted her contempt for that.
“On that exceedingly sorry note I’m going to clear away and you-all can get on with your business,” she said.
“No need for you to leave,” I said. “I just want to see about setting up some kind of trust for Malory, a school or college fund, or something that will be hers alone, no strings, no chance of anybody else getting hold of it. I’d like your ideas, as a matter of fact.”
Charlie smiled. “I’ve often thought I should tell you how great I think you are with her,” he said. “I wish I had before. You’ve been more a father to her than Jack Venable ever has.”
Into the long silence Sarah said, energetically, “Well. Let me get at those dishes. Go on down to the basement, you-all, and do your business, and I’ll join you when I’m done. Charlie, show Shep that new batch of shells you got from the guy in Louisiana. I’ll bet he’s never seen anything like that big one before.”
Blessing her, I followed Charlie down into the cramped little pine-paneled den he had fashioned for himself in the basement. He switched on the overhead light, and I laughed, entirely spontaneously.
“I know, I know,” he said, grinning. “Sarah says it looks like some kind of Civil War toy store for big kids.”
It did, and worse. Every surface in the room was covered with the Civil War artifacts and relics that had so beguiled Charlie from that long-ago day in the attic of the Andrews Drive house when he had found his great-grandfather’s uniform. They marched in precise rows on shelves and tables, hung in shadow boxes, leaned against furniture, banked the damp concrete-block walls. Shells, minié balls, belt buckles, canteens, spurs, small arms, medals, swords, stirrups, eating utensils, shone with polish and love. A smaller collection of perishable artifacts was housed behind glass cases that covered an entire wall: whole uniforms and parts of them, flags, guidons, regimental standards, gloves, hats, caps, holsters, boots, sashes….
“You’ve got everything here but the guys,” I said. “I wouldn’t dare dig in your backyard for fear of who I’d find.”
“You might find somebody at that,” he said. “The battle of Peachtree Creek took place not three blocks from
here. It’s one reason I’ve never wanted to move. Did Sarah tell you that we might be moving?”
“No,” I said. “Where to?”
“Her folks’ place. Dorothy’s gotten to the point that she just can’t keep Ben there any longer, even with help. It’s too big and too full of pitfalls for him. And the property taxes are eating them up now. She wants to move to that place up on Peachtree Road, the great big, hideous thing that’s some kind of fancy retirement condominium. It has an infirmary and maid service and therapy and all kinds of things that Ben will need before long, and she says the inside of it is really quite plush. Restaurants and movie theaters and bridge rooms and libraries, and good-sized apartments. She’s trying to give us Merrivale House.”
“Well, God, take it,” I said. “It’s the greatest house in Atlanta. You know it is. Wouldn’t Sarah love to be back home?”
“I guess so,” he said, without enthusiasm. “We’ll probably do that.”
“What’s the matter, Charlie?” I said.
“It’s just that…that house is so Cameron,” he said slowly. “Everything in it is Cameron. You know them, larger than life. Every time I’m in it I feel like little pieces of me are coming loose and just floating away. If I lived there, I’m afraid I’d turn into a Cameron myself inside a year. Sarah can’t understand that, but of course, her Cameronness gets stronger when she’s in it, too. I love the Camerons, and I love her more than my life, of course, but I want something around me that says Gentry.”
“Then stay here and sell the house,” I said, loving him, understanding. “Dorothy wouldn’t care. She’s never been a sentimentalist. And Sarah would be happy wherever you are.”
“I guess she would,” he said. “Or if she wasn’t, she’d never let me know. But I know she loves that house. She just seems to…bloom, somehow, when she goes home. See? I’m doing it. Home is here. Oh, hell. What difference does it make? It’s a great house, and like as not we’ll be neighbors come fall. At least Sarah and I would love that.”
“Me, too,” I said, thinking that I would not love it at all. Too close, too near…“What’s in the box?”
He prodded a large wooden crate in the middle of the floor with a sneakered toe.
“A box of stuff I bought sight unseen from a collector in Louisiana. I know his reputation, though. Shells, mainly, I think. These would be forty-millimeter mortar shells they used in one of the big battles, probably Vicksburg. Did you know that mortars were invented during the Civil War?”
“No,” I said, eyeing the box. “They’re not live, of course.”
“Of course not,” he laughed. “Relickers are fanatics about that. Come on and sit down, it’s not going to explode. We’ll open it after we talk. You said something about a trust for Malory?”
I told him what I wanted, and he listened, nodding thoughtfully, making a note every now and then on a yellow legal pad, chewing his lip.
“That’s feasible,” he said. “But why me? Wouldn’t it be better if Tom Carmichael and your guys down at the bank worked this out?”
“I want it to be separate from all the other Bondurant business,” I said. “I don’t want there to be anything of anyone else’s attached to it. I want there to be no question but that it’s hers, from me to her. Airtight and easily getatable. And I don’t want anybody else to know about it. You can do that, can’t you? I know you can—you pass out millions every day, with more strings on them than a kite contest.”
“I can do that, sure,” he said. “I’ll get on it first thing this weekend. You can sign it Monday, if you like. It will feel sort of good to practice some law. Sometimes I wonder if I haven’t come awfully far afield from what I’d planned.”
“I think you must be the happiest man in America.” I grinned at him. “They pay you to give money away and make people happy. I know you. You couldn’t ask for anything more.”
He smiled in return.
“I’m glad I got my foot in the door of the city when I did,” he said. “It’s mattered to me to be able to give something back, and I don’t think one person starting out today could make much of a difference. The city’s just gotten too big. I’m an awfully lucky man, Shep. I got to do exactly what I wanted to do and what I was meant to do. I got the woman I wanted, and the kids I wanted, and the life I wanted. Don’t you believe I don’t think often about how I got them. Don’t think it doesn’t bother me.”
“Don’t let it,” I said. “I think I’ve ended up doing what I was meant to do, too.”
“And wanted to do?” he said, cocking an eyebrow at me.
“Maybe. Or maybe not. But in the long run, meant to do is always better than wanted to do—provided they’re not the same.”
He closed the legal pad and got up from his desk chair, stretching. “Sarah will be down in a minute with some coffee,” he said. “Or brandy, if you’d rather. Stay and have some and let’s open my new toys.”
I looked at him in the lamplight, stooped a little, solid, rumpled, sweet-faced, his head turned to listen up the stairs for the sound of Sarah, who was his wife and his love and his life. I wanted to hug him, suddenly. I knew that I would not stay.
They saw me off together, arms around each other’s waists, waving and calling out plans for our next meeting, and then snapped off the light over the front door and moved out of my range of vision. It was the last time I ever saw Charlie Gentry. I remembered later wanting to hug him, there in the dreadful little basement-den of his funny little house in Collier Hills, and among all the things in my life I wish I had done and did not, that is the one I wish most that I had done.
Before I reached Peachtree Road in the thick, still summer night, Charlie pried open the package from the careful collector in Louisiana and lifted out the dead mortar shell that was not, after all, dead, and in a blinding white moment all that was Charlie Gentry—glasses and bald spot and paunch and dark, sweet eyes and great and loving heart—was gone into the ringing air of the little house where he had lived with Sarah, and which he had not wanted to leave.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“From now on we’ll be meeting mainly at funerals,” somebody—Freddie Goodwin, I think—said at the small, quiet gathering at Merrivale House after Charlie’s. By custom we would have gone back to Sarah’s little house in Collier Hills, but of course, with the damage from the explosion, there was no question of that. Besides, in Buckhead we have always gathered after the natural deaths, the conventional ones, if you will, but not usually after the ones that shock and outrage. We had not gathered after Sarah’s brother chose awfulness for himself. We would not now when her husband, however inadvertently, followed him. Not within the walls that still stank with his leaving.
But Merrivale House—ah, that was different. Merrivale, on Muscogee: massive, beautiful, cloistered, dignified. Merrivale House sanctified and sanitized. Here Charlie was and yet was not; here he remained eternally safe and whole and sweet and unscandalous; here we could deal with him with fondness and not recoil. I suppose that I, remembering our last conversation about that seductive éminence grise of his wife’s family, was the only one of us who hated being there. Here Charlie Gentry became, forever, the Cameron he had not wanted to be. They owned him, now, forever.
I hated Freddie’s words, too. They were slick with unwarranted and unearned cynicism—pure Freddie. She spoke as though we had reached the time when our deaths would come faster than the other rituals of our lives. That was not true. What had remained ahead for Charlie, after all the planting and tending years, were the sweet years of harvest. I think of all the deaths I remember, I felt more pure, unadulterated grief at Charlie’s than any other.
It was a dreadful day, unredeemed. Unlike the days immediately following young Ben’s death, Sarah did not cry. She walked around her father’s house devoid of all suppleness and moisture; rigid, dry, robotic. Her cheeks flamed like a circus clown’s, or Lucy’s long-ago plaster elf, and her great eyes glittered like frozen Coca-Cola. Otherwise she was paper-whit
e from her heart-shaped face to her small, arched feet, as cold and white as carved marble in black high-heeled pumps. To touch her hands was to touch death by dry-freezing. Her white lips were stretched in a smile of terrible entreaty. I could not look long into her face. I could not talk to her; the arid glitter precluded words. They bounced off the surface of her like buckshot off glare ice. One after another we came, Old Buckhead, the Pinks and the Jells, to glance despairingly off the shell of Charlie Gentry’s wife.
The two little girls—I say little; they were near Malory’s age, but both so elfin, so small—did not cry either, not afterward in their grandparents’ house, though both had wept, quietly and almost politely, at the funeral and graveside out at Oakland. They had remained pressed to their mother’s sides like small animals then, bewildered and huge-eyed and pathetically still, like exuberant young monkeys gone motionless with grief and enormity. They sat on either side of Dorothy Cameron in the drawing room of Merrivale House later during that hot, gray afternoon, diminutive in short-skirted, severe white cotton—for Sarah would not have permitted mourning’s crushing black on her frail-shouldered young—and shook hands and murmured thank-yous and suffered with Sarah’s old grace the tearful embraces of their father’s friends. But their dark eyes, so like Charlie’s, kept darting to Sarah, moving stiff-spined and smiling through the small crowd, and she would feel the glances and turn and widen the awful smile, and nod her approval.
I am sure that almost every man and woman who came to Merrivale House that day was moved by the graceful, seemly daughters of Sarah and Charlie Gentry, and told them that their father would have been very proud of them. And he would have: I knew that Sarah’s light, firm and loving hand on the heads of her children, so exactly that of her mother, was one of the things he loved best about her. I would have preferred tears, howling, rage, despair, anything but Sarah’s awful glitter and the patrician dignity of the girls and Dorothy’s calm endurance, but I knew I was not going to get them. Not in the house of the Camerons.
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