There were tears there for Charlie, though, and they were, after all, worse than anything, for they fell from the bewildered gray eyes of Ben Cameron. He had not been at the church or at Oakland. I knew that he was beyond large gatherings now, and I wondered who had remained behind with him while we buried his son-in-law. Leroy Pickens, older by far than he had been the day before, and fairly puckered with grief, like a wind-fallen apple, had driven Sarah and Dorothy and the girls in the Lincoln. But sometime after we had all arrived back at the house on Muscogee Avenue Ben, dressed in a silver-gray summer suit which went wonderfully with his copper-gray thatch of hair and his slender, still-erect figure, came down the beautiful old stairs to the drawing room on the arm of Glenn Pickens. We all fell silent and stared at him, and I know we were all thinking and feeling what I was: the outrage, the sheer impossibility, that the man who still walked so lithely and carried his fine, narrow head so high, and whose charming, mobile face was so nearly the same as that of the primary architect of the new Atlanta, was essentially tenanted by a torn and faded mind.
I knew he had been told about Charlie, because tears rolled down the tanned cheeks, silently and ceaselessly, and the gray eyes were as reddened as a child’s fist-scrubbed eyes, and he turned his head slowly from side to side, as though looking for someone. It was Dorothy. She got up swiftly from the wing chair beside the great fireplace, where she had been stationed, and went to his side, and took his arm. Glenn Pickens stepped back as though relinquishing a flag, and stood silently, not looking at anyone in particular. His face was impassive.
“Come and sit down and say hello to everyone, darling,” Dorothy said. “They’ve come to pay their respects and tell you how much they love you.”
He looked at her, a long, uncomprehending look so full of simple pain that I averted my face.
“Ben is dead,” he said pitifully, in a cracked, thin, old voice. “Did they tell you, Dottie? They keep saying that Ben is dead. I don’t understand. He was just here.”
For the first and last time during that entire awful day, I saw Dorothy Cameron’s face twist with naked, powerful sorrow and anguish, and then it slid back into the old lines of gentle, rather austere repose.
“Not Ben, darling,” she said. “That was a long time ago. We’re all right about that now. This is Charlie. We’ve lost our dear Charlie, darling. You remember, I told you.”
“Charlie?” Ben Cameron said, turning his head to look at all of us, and resting his gaze on Sarah, who had come to stand whitely beside him. “Charlie, that young man who used to hang around here, the one that works for Bob Woodruff? What happened to him?”
“Charlie was my husband, Daddy. He had an accident,” Sarah said gently, still smiling, and I thought that I would die of the pain of that moment, right there in the drawing room of Merrivale House. Around me I heard murmurings of distress, and the rustle of people withdrawing from something too terrible to look upon.
“Shep is your husband,” Ben Cameron said, knitting his iron-gray brows together. “Where’s Shep? Tell him to come here. I want to talk to him about that god-awful slum down in Pumphouse Hill….”
I started forward, heart hammering, not knowing what I would say, only wanting more than anything to stop that beloved, insane voice, but then Glenn Pickens moved forward and took Ben’s arm and guided him silently out of the room and back up the stairs. Ben shuffled as he went.
“I know you’ll forgive him,” Dorothy said into the room. Her voice was modulated and clear. “He seemed quite good before we left for the church, and wanted so to come down and greet all his old friends. But I’m afraid it’s all been a bit too much for him.”
Sarah wheeled and walked on stiff, lamed legs into the kitchen.
Most of us left, then, quietly and with the incomparable and blessedly simpleminded dignity of people who are absolutely sure of the right thing to do, and I knew that the fresh tears on most of the cheeks were as much for Ben Cameron as for his beloved son-in-law.
I followed Sarah into the kitchen, my face stiff with pain. She stood with her own face in her hands, leaning against a counter. I touched her shoulder and she raised her head and looked at me. Her eyes were dry.
“Sarah…” I said.
She moved simply into my arms and I held her. I could not feel her heart, or her breath on my neck, but I could feel the chill of her flesh through the dark cotton dress.
“I keep losing my men, Shep,” she whispered presently. “There must be something bitterly wrong with me, or about me, because I keep losing my men.”
Holding her there in the kitchen of Merrivale House, myself one of those lost men, I thought that she had a point. Little Sarah Cameron, who had had a legion of genuinely adoring men at her side and feet all her life, who had had a bountiful richness of loving brother and father and husband and companions, was now, for all intents and purposes, alone with her mother and daughters in a widow’s world of women. In Atlanta, most men will not come poaching in that chaste preserve.
“You’ve still got me,” I said, and winced at the sheer speciousness of it.
“Oh God.” Her voice was very tired. “I lost you twenty years ago.”
A ponderous, crushing guilt rolled over the grief I felt, as if I had left her, literally, at the church those two decades past.
“I wish it had been me,” I said, and found that I meant the words. Charlie Gentry was simply too valuable, and I would not have left behind me this legacy of wrecked women.
“Don’t be stupid,” Sarah said, and a hint of tartness crept into her voice. “How could Charlie and I have lived with that?”
Soon after, in August, Dorothy moved Ben Cameron into the Carlton House, an imposing, leprous-white retirement condominium on Peachtree Road where the fine old Georgian house of Dr. Thorne Champney had stood from the twenties until recently, and after that the house on Muscogee Avenue stood vacant. Sarah had, to my surprise, set her heels and refused to move out of the house in Collier Hills.
“I just can’t,” she said one evening in the small living room of Dorothy and Ben’s apartment at Carlton House, where I found her when I went to call. Ben slept, and we three sat sipping sherry. “What would we do in that big place, the three of us? We’re such…little people. We’d be like dolls in Versailles.”
“You fit just fine when you were much smaller than you are now,” Dorothy said, smiling.
“I can’t explain it, Mama, but I’ve…shrunk,” Sarah said. “I think all that space would simply scare me now. It needs somebody of Daddy’s stature to cut it down to size, or yours. You dominated it, even when it was just the two of you. You overflow this silly place now. But I’d be swallowed up. Charlie never really wanted to move there, you know. He would have. We planned to. But in his heart he wanted just to stay on Greystone Road. It was his place, his and mine. And it’s still mine. Somehow it wraps around me like a benediction now. Charlie is still there.”
She stopped, and gave a little snort of terrible laughter, and said, “Literally, he’s still there. There are specks of Charlie everywhere in the basement…oh God.” She got up and ran out of the room and into the tiny kitchen of the condominium, and I heard her begin to cry.
I looked at Dorothy helplessly.
“Let her cry,” she said, tears in her own eyes. “She’s only recently begun to. I thought she was going to die of all those unshed tears for a while. She has a lot more to go before she’s done.”
“It breaks my heart to think of the house empty,” Dorothy said later that fall, over coffee in an elegant, discreet little fireside nook in one of the vast lounges that flourished in Carlton House. We sat on facing velvet love seats and ate cookies and little sandwiches; we might have been having one of the legendary teas at the Ritz in Boston, or the Plaza, except that everyone in the lounge was old.
“Martin’s people are keeping it up just fine,” I said. “I run by there almost every evening. There’s not a blade of grass out of place, and they’re raking the leaves ri
ght along.”
I did not say that despite the ministrations of the lawn service she had hired to keep the house up—a cost that, with Ben’s special nurses and the asking price of the cramped little apartment and the property taxes on Muscogee Avenue, I was sure they could ill afford—Merrivale House looked just like what it was: a great, yearning, empty house with blind eyes and a cold, dead heart. I turned my face from it whenever I loped past in the falling blue dusk.
“I think we might have stayed, Ben and I, despite the cost, if I’d known Sarah wouldn’t change her mind about it,” she said. “And she still might, of course. But I’ll have to sell it if she doesn’t. The taxes are just horrendous, and Ben is probably going to live a long time yet, poor darling. And the damned lawn service is costing me an arm and a leg. Oh Lord, Shep, the sheer excess of that old way of life, the one that let us build those huge old monstrosities, and staff them! I don’t know a single widow in my crowd who isn’t looking for a buyer, or a married woman who doesn’t know in her heart she’ll have to one day.”
“Well, at least you should be able to get a terrific price,” I said. “Somebody told me what land on and just off Peachtree Road was going for. It’s just obscene.”
“Not, unfortunately, in our immediate area,” she replied. “There’s something about the zoning and nobody wants those big old houses to live in. They just want the land for commercial building. I’m stuck with it.”
“It must be awful for you,” I said. “It hurts me to see it. I can imagine what it must be like for you.”
“I hate it, of course, but I’m not a sentimental woman, you know, Shep,” she said. “I’m grateful for this place, awful as it is. I don’t know where else I could put Ben and be with him, too. Between this and a nursing home, I’ll take this any day. And I’d forgotten what a joy it is just to get around easily. For instance, there’s a special little space in the dining room for the ones of us who’re still spry, and another one for all the walkers and wheelchairs and such—we call them the Cane and Able rooms. And a nurse materializes if you lift your hand, only wearing the kind of clothes a good servant would. No, miss it though I do, I don’t pine for Merrivale House. That’s over; that part of my life is gone. I just don’t go by there anymore. It’s Ben who misses it. He doesn’t understand why we’re staying so long in this hotel. He wants to go home.”
“Well, I can see why,” I said.
“Of course you can,” she said. “My poor, sweet old Ben. This tarted-up geriatric ghetto is not his home. This god-awful place they call Buckhead with the silly, glitzy little shops and the chic little restaurants and those ridiculous little German cars running around all over the place isn’t his home. This isn’t even his city anymore, not the one he helped build. I wish he could go home. I wish he’d just go to sleep one night and wake up…home. And I wish, if Sarah doesn’t want it, that somebody would just tear that old place down.”
I thought it was likely that someone would, in time. Buckhead—or the Buckhead that bordered on Peachtree Road, the one that I thought of when I heard the word—was not a place of living families anymore. Back in the luxe green enclaves of the Northwest, in a cloistered and forested wedge stretching from Buckhead to the Chattahoochee River and now beyond, the great homes of Old Atlanta and the startling ones of the wealthy new still rose, serene and velvety and silent, girded around by mammoth trees and vast lawns and money. But along Peachtree Road itself, that richest and most evocative of arteries, the fine old houses of my youth stood empty or were coming down, falling to prissy, ridiculous, and hugely expensive, ersatz Federal “townehomes” or thrusting glass condominium towers; to thirty- and forty-story office towers and hotels and great “mixed-use” developments, with all three butting up to one another out of the abused red earth. To the south of Buckhead proper, only a scant square block of Peachtree Road where my own home stood was still inhabited by the old houses and their original families. Past us toward downtown not another private home stood. To the north, out Peachtree Road into and past Brookhaven—where the unbroken walls of black-green forest, in which huge old houses hid like reclusive royalty, had once rolled north to Chamblee and Doraville—another mini city like the one in midtown was rising, its towers squeezed onto land that went, in some instances, for $3 million an acre.
And Buckhead proper, that laconic, lunar, jumbled little province of the Buckhead Boys on their bicycles and later their souped-up jalopies, the spiritual home of a generation of Pinks and Jells—what of Buckhead? Well, suffice it to say that I had recently heard Buckhead called, in all seriousness, the Beverly Hills of Atlanta. I had laughed helplessly. Buckhead? Where, at the corner of East Paces Ferry and Peachtree Road, Boo Cutler had written his immortality on the wind in his mighty Merc? Home of Minhennet’s and Wender & Roberts and Tidwell’s Barbecue and Burt’s Bottle Shop and the Buckhead Men’s Shop and four additional drugstores, all with lunch counters? Where dogwood and wild honeysuckle and mimosa handily overpowered automobile exhaust? Where, under the great daytime moon of the benevolent Coca-Cola sign, we had streamed in bright shoals across the five empty, sunstruck converging roads on our way to an afternoon movie at the Buckhead Theater to eat popcorn and neck a little if we were lucky and cop a terrified feel if we were luckier still?
Buckhead? Where we were young and golden, and the sweating, jostling body of Atlanta proper lay safely to the south, and all that we could see for green, dreaming miles around us was ours?
What had happened to Buckhead? When had the towers and the cafés and grills and bistros and boîtes and wine bars and parking lots and antique shops and collectibles galleries and Mercedeses and BMWs and Jaguars come surging in from the Southside and Cobb and DeKalb counties? When had the gates sagged open and the walls crashed down? While I was not looking, the city had eaten Buckhead. While I was dreaming in the summerhouse, they had come: the feared Yankees and tackpots—and the Arabs and the Lebanese and the Japanese and Germans and South Americans, and the district managers from New York and Scranton and Pocatello and Mill Valley and St. Paul and the small and medium-sized towns and cities of the nation and the world, and we had fallen without a shot, toppled like the dinosaurs we were by the swift, silent defoliant that was money.
I don’t know why I was so shocked. The changes had been coming for a long time, first a trickle and then a flood tide, ever since the decade of Ben and the Club had ended almost ten years before and the political and economic base and mix of the city had changed. Ben had predicted it even before he took office, had said that he and his contemporaries were setting out to build a city that would first depose and then eclipse them. I wondered if he had been aware of much of the change, or if the fog in his mind had spared him that. And then I thought that perhaps, after all, he would not have minded, but would have found the transformation exhilarating. Many people did, even though most Old Atlantans were not among them; in its first groping formative days as a Sunbelt city, Atlanta had enormous energy and a kind of brash, raffish charm. And it still was, and is, one of the most beautiful places on earth; to drive into residential North Atlanta in the springtime, or in the bronze and blue of a good October, is to leave the world and move into pure enchantment.
The city Ben Cameron had left behind him in the mists of his wounded mind was a city of severely curtailed white influence, aristocratic or otherwise. Much of Old Atlanta still had money. Our crowd was, in the main, doing almost ludicrously well for ourselves, adding new luster and dimensions to the estates our fathers and grandfathers had amassed. Many of us were so well-dowered initially that it would have been almost impossible to fail. But we were by no means the only money in town now, or even the most substantial. There were hundreds of larger and newer fortunes in the city that rose on the shoulders of Ben Cameron’s town, and more streaming in every day. And even these, even a coalition of these, did not buy anything like the political power our fathers had had.
These days, political power and governmental influence lay squarely in the bl
ack hands that had stretched out to receive it when the Club had passed the torches. Ben had handed over the symbolic keys to the city to Atlanta’s first Jewish mayor and black vice mayor, and since then the South’s first black mayor of any real power had been in City Hall for almost an entire term. Blacks dominated all phases of city and county government, and a younger, newer and more worldly echelon stirred restlessly in the wings behind the old street fighters, waiting their turns. Glenn Pickens was one of them. He had left his storefront law practice in 1972 to join the large, prestigious one whose great mahogany doors Ben Cameron had opened for him, and shortly after had run for, and won, a Fulton County judgeship. Now he was beginning to be spoken of as a serious candidate for mayor when the aging and ailing Horace Short stepped down. He kept his own counsel about that, at least publicly, but I could see him as clearly in that second-floor office in City Hall as I had seen him on the day, more than fifteen years ago, of the crash at Orly. Only this time he sat in the chair he had, then, stood behind.
It would not be a city of unity and purpose and wholeness of ethos that he straddled. Atlanta was too big for that now, too fragmented, too much a city of parts and factions and interests. White money and property and, consequently, much of its power had fled the city proper to suburbs stretching fifty miles to the north and west, encamping in great, gleaming, treeless subdivisions that rolled away to the Blue Ridge foothills like tents on the plain of Ilion, and leaving along the way the stigmata of their passing armies: strip shopping centers, malls, fast-food outlets, office and industrial parks turning shabby in the relentless sun even before they were up to full occupancy, wholesale outlets and Honda dealerships.
Behind, in the city proper, the blacks who were left did not move with one body, mind and voice, as Ben and the Club had done, but snarled and jostled in warring packs. But I thought that cohesion would come for them, as it had for us before them, when they finally and fully comprehended that what was at stake was simply a matter of economics. Atlanta was still, as it had always been, a business town first and foremost, if by now a riotous and overblown one. Glenn Pickens, groomed by Ben Cameron and raised in the very holy of holies of economic power, would know that.
Peachtree Road Page 70
