Peachtree Road

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  “I don’t need it, Shep,” she said, when finally, at Aunt Willa’s distracted behest, I taxed her with it. “I love this work. It gives me almost everything I need. And I always have you.”

  “Yes,” I thought, looking at her with the weight of my whole unspoken heart in the look. “You always have me.”

  At the close of that decade, Jack Venable found Lucy in one anonymous rented bed too many, and put her out of the farmhouse. He would not, he said, divorce her, but he would answer neither her hammering on the door nor the frantic phone calls that followed it, and so she came, on a night of bitter, blowing spring rain, to the summerhouse. I knew that she would not have tried the main house. Aunt Willa had been icily adamant about that.

  I opened the door to her, of course. In the end I could refuse Lucy almost nothing, and she knew it. So did I.

  I sat on the sofa looking at her, my hands dangling despairingly over my crossed knees. She looked dreadful, ill and lamed and old, her glossy good looks thickened and discolored. Her hair was a snarled rat’s nest, and her mouth and neck and shoulders were abraded with hard use. The fire-blue eyes were scummed.

  She drew deeply on her cigarette and then threw it into the dead fireplace.

  “I suppose it’s no good telling you about my desperate search for the father I never had,” she said, the wounded attempt at cajoling irony curdling in my ears.

  “None in the world,” I said. “I guess we’re lucky it’s men you take up with. Women would be more than I could stand.”

  “Of course it’s men,” she said, shivering. “Men have all the power. My father taught me that.”

  I rose stiffly and brought a towel and tossed it to her.

  “He sure as hell did a lot for you with that power, didn’t he?” I said. “Christ, Lucy, he did exactly zero for you. He wasn’t a factor in your growing up at all. That’s power?”

  “He left,” she said matter-of-factly. “The power to do that is the biggest one there is.”

  She begged me to let her stay for a time in the summerhouse, just until she “got on her feet,” and I did let her sleep that night on the sofa, covered with my own comforter and blanket. But the thought of Malory, sleeping unaware and healing in the small white bed that had once been her mother’s up in the big house, made anything further impossible. Lucy had not mentioned her daughter, but I knew that that was why, in large part, she had come. In the morning, or the next one, they would meet, and Lucy would send the old dark, glinting hound in her mind sniffing inexorably toward Malory, searching, searching, and then the time of Malory Venable in the big house, and possibly in the world of reality and health, would be over.

  No you won’t, I thought. No you won’t.

  After she slept I went into my bedroom and called Jack Venable and told him she was with me.

  There was a long pause, and then he said, “Ah, shit. Okay, Shep. I’ll come get her in the morning. By no means let her near Malory, though.”

  “No, don’t come,” I said. “This has got to stop. I’m going to stop it. Don’t worry, she isn’t going to get within fifty miles of Malory. But I don’t want her back with you either, Jack. Not right now. Let me try it my way and see what happens.”

  He was silent again, and then he burst out, “Holy Christ, Shep! She’s cost me my boys. She’s cost me my daughter. She has all of me—she always did have. What more does she want?”

  “She’s afraid you’ll leave her, so she leaves first,” I said. I found that I only half believed the words, and did not care about them. I sounded, even to myself, like a bad recording.

  “I wouldn’t leave her, not really,” he said. He was nearly crying. I had never heard him speak so. Anguish leaped like fresh flame in his bleached voice. “How could I leave her? In her good spells she’s totally enchanting, all I ever wanted on earth. Why, after all this, after everything, does she still think I’ll leave her?”

  You already did that, a long time ago, I did not say, thinking of the ardent, burning man I had met that night many years before at Paschal’s La Carrousel.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess it’s the old father thing, and Red. And me. It’s what men do to Lucy. They leave her. It all goes back to the old man….”

  “I’d like to kill the sonofabitch,” he said hopelessly.

  I thought of that gaudy phantom, sly in his gilded, magical blondness and his striped shoes, who had so devoured and spat out Lucy’s childhood.

  “So would she,” I said.

  The next morning I had Shem bring the Rolls around and I drove Lucy down to the only apartment complex I knew, Colonial Homes, where so many of our crowd had begun their post-college lives. It looked dingy and banal in the rain-freshened morning, and the flocks of handsome, sleek people leaving it in their handsome, sleek, expensive cars to go to their jobs were of a world that no more knew me than I did it. I averted my face and shut my ears grimly to Lucy’s cries of pain and outrage and entreaty and rented her a studio apartment, paid the deposit and the first three months’ rent by check, drove her back out to the empty farmhouse and waited while she packed the few worn things she had, drove her back to Colonial Homes and moved her into the apartment. I said almost nothing to her as I worked. I would, I said, pay her rent and utilities and send her a living allowance until she could get herself on her feet. But she was under no circumstances to try to see Malory. No visits, no letters, no telephone calls. I would enlist Aunt Willa, I said, and have Shem and Martha monitor the telephone, and she would not be allowed to speak to her daughter.

  She wept. The fear and despair were real. She still thought Jack had abandoned her, and now not only was I doing the same, I was shutting her off from the child who so succored and fulfilled her.

  “I need her, Gibby,” she sobbed. “I can’t stay in this place alone, you know I can’t! Who’ll look after me? Who’ll talk to me, and…you know…be with me? Malory could have the pullout bed. I don’t mind the chair, or a mattress—”

  “No,” I said coldly. “Call me if it gets so bad you can’t stand it. Or get yourself a roommate. Or join the church. I don’t know what you’re going to do, Lucy. But you’re going to back off Malory. You’re going to let her have a shot at growing up straight.”

  “I love her, Gibby,” she whispered.

  “Then let her go,” I said. She did not answer, and there was not really anything more to say, so I stood to leave.

  She came trotting to the door behind me.

  “Gibby! I can’t live in this place!” she yelped.

  “Why the fuck not?” I shouted. “What’s wrong with it? It beats the hell out of those roach motels you’ve been hitting lately.”

  “It’s a singles complex, Gibby,” she said, outraged. “It just now dawned on me.”

  “Well, then, it should be right up your alley now, Luce,” I said and grinned mirthlessly, and walked, for the time being, out of her life.

  For a few months the telephone calls did not come, and I heard presently from Sarah Gentry, who had run into her at the Colonial Store, that Lucy had started with AA and taken a job with a new Buckhead weekly, and was struggling hard to make a decent life for herself and stay sober. She did both, and so well that in the fall Jack asked her to come home, and she did, with the alacrity of an abandoned dog finding its way home at last. One day not long after that she phoned Malory, and, with hammering heart, I allowed them to speak, and she was so subdued and engaging and remorseful and, above all, loving, that Malory went home that weekend to the farmhouse, and ultimately spent the remainder of her senior year at Westminster there with her mother and Jack, as nearly happy with them as she would ever be again.

  I felt, that autumn, like a thin veneer of scourged flesh spread tautly over a howling abyss, but I did not intervene. Malory would be eighteen the next March. Her choices from now on out must be hers alone. I had learned, finally, the value of love held lightly in an open hand.

  She graduated second in her class that May, and in the early su
mmer left to begin an accelerated program at Wellesley, where she had won a small tuition scholarship in English literature. I paid with a bursting heart her first year’s room and board and expenses, and sent Jack and Lucy with her to Wellesley in the little Toyota, rocking and sagging with a new wardrobe and a cache of books and tapes, all my graduation presents to her. I did not even think of going myself. If they were ever to be a family, it must be cemented now. When she came home again, changed as all the young are who first leave home to go into the world, it would be too late.

  It was a lighthearted and almost ludicrously normal little expedition that set off from Atlanta that flawless morning in June, achingly like the one on which my mother and Ben and Dorothy and Sarah Cameron had seen me off for Princeton so long ago, and my best hope and deepest love, except for that stubborn and toothless old passion that Sarah Cameron Gentry still held, all unknowing, went with the slender, newly radiant girl who might or might not be my daughter.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  In October of Malory’s freshman year at Wellesley my father died in his rotting emir’s fastness on the second floor of the house on Peachtree Road, a swift, spasmed, gargling death that he should have died almost twenty years before, and once again Old Buckhead gathered at Saint Philip’s and Oakland.

  “Are you awfully sad, darling?” Dorothy Cameron said to me in the Rolls on the way through the city, burning in the blue bowl of autumn, toward the old cemetery.

  I knew that it was unorthodox that she accompany me in the first family car behind the Spring Hill hearse that bore my father, but she cared little for orthodoxy, and as for me, both my father’s friends and my own would have been rather nonplused if I had, at that late date, observed convention. Shem Cater, wizened and fierce in his new chauffeur’s black, was our lone bow to conformity. He drove the shining old car impeccably, and maintained a dignified silence, but an occasional large, rattling sniff gave him away. I wondered how that desiccated old raptor in the hearse ahead of us could have, after all those years of mute and frozen not-thereness, still commanded grief from his chauffeur, but then I remembered that Shem had come to my father as his first employee, and that despite his old primate’s agility, he was slightly older than the dead man he had served.

  Poor Shem, I thought. He’s just plain seen too much change.

  I turned to look at Dorothy. In the sunlight streaming through the immaculate window of the Rolls she looked old herself, but still beautiful. Her small body had thinned with advancing age, though she still carried herself as erect as a girl, and her skin had the soft, dull, loose texture of draped silk velvet. The network of wrinkles on her strongly modeled face and throat was cobweb-fine, and her hands were gnarled with arthritis and years of hard work in her garden, but her translucent, golden-sherry eyes glowed with life, and her thick, glorious dark hair, only lightly dusted with gray, shone with the vitality of Sarah’s. She wore it in an old-fashioned and becoming French knot now, and looked in it like a miniature Edwardian duchess. She smiled and put her frail hand over mine, and squeezed.

  “Maybe I ought to be, but I’m not,” I said. “I was sad when he had the stroke, terribly, and I felt miserable for him when Mother died—though it might well have been me I was feeling sorry for, because there was no way to tell how he felt about that. But not now. The past twenty years have been nothing but a long dying for him. I know damned well he must have wanted to check on out every day of his life. If he knew that much, even. Aunt Willa was the only one of us he seemed to want around him. I stopped going up there except about once a month a long time ago. It’s like somebody just…moved out a piece of furniture. I guess that sounds callous as hell, doesn’t it?”

  “No,” she said, looking at the great city skyline sliding by. “You come to that when the body is still here but the person has gone away. I know how that is. It’s a terrible feeling, worse, in a way, than death.”

  We were silent, looking at the preposterous sunstruck towers whose names we did not know. Then she said, “It was a sad little funeral, wasn’t it? Sad not so much for him as for what it represented. So few of us gathered around to see him off. There’ll be even fewer to send off my dear old Ben. Sad to see those…giants…looking like ordinary old men, bewildered and belligerent. I sometimes think the worst thing there is is to live past your time. It’s the final obscenity.”

  “I don’t even know whose time it is anymore,” I said. “I’m not exactly old, but all that over there might as well be the back of the moon to me,” I said, jerking a thumb at the skyline. “It doesn’t have anything to do with the Atlanta I know. Knew.”

  “It’s a new day all right, no doubt about that,” Dorothy said. She did not sound particularly sad; rather, interested. “A new day, a new world. That’s exciting. When you think about what we’ve seen in the last fifty years…Lord! I’d love to live long enough to see what the next fifty will bring, but I’m afraid that will be the province of the young.”

  “I wonder if they’ll even want it,” I said. “All the young I know have left to go east or west or even abroad to school. Nobody seems to go to Tech or Georgia anymore. I imagine a lot of them just won’t come home again.”

  She made a slight exasperated sound.

  “You sound like the Ancient Mariner sometimes, Shep. I didn’t mean Sarah’s young, or Malory, or that generation. I meant you. You and Sarah, your crowd. There’s still so much time for you, and so much living….”

  She trailed off, but I knew what she meant. She meant Sarah and me. Together now in our aloneness, with no barriers between us. Shep and Sarah, Sarah and Shep…The old ache that under-girt the two joined names flared up sharp and fresh, briefly, but then it died back down to its welcome dullness.

  I had, of course, thought of it, after Charlie’s death. But I could see nothing clearly in that country, as if it were shrouded in mist, and the effort to penetrate it was more than I could summon. Maybe, I thought, I had simply lived alone too long, shut away from life and its abrasive passions. Most of us simply give up passion eventually because it presupposes, in its core, intimacy, and we simply get too tired and used up to risk that, and the little deaths that hide in it. Even the passion that I felt for Malory, even that fierce and enduring flame, threatened continually to burn me with its breath, so that sometimes I almost flinched from it. Too hard, now, to lose, too hard…

  Dorothy picked up my thought in the way her daughter always had.

  “Malory didn’t come down for the funeral,” she observed. “Good. That was wise. I was afraid Lucy would use this to get her home.”

  I grinned. “Not much gets by you, does it?” I said. “No. Lucy’s behaving herself very well these days, but Jack and I agreed there wasn’t any reason for Malory to leave school in the middle of the quarter and come home for the funeral of an old man she really didn’t know.”

  “Do you really not want me to come? I can be on a plane in two hours,” Malory had said two days before, when I had called her and told her I’d prefer that she stay at Wellesley.

  “No,” I said. “I’ll see you at Thanksgiving. You aren’t homesick for Atlanta, are you?”

  “No. I thought I might be, but except for you and Mama and Jack, I don’t miss it. You know what I do miss, though? I miss Tate. Could we go up there at Thanksgiving? I haven’t been since I was a little girl, and I keep thinking of it, for some reason.”

  I thought of that long-ago weekend of the impromptu house party up at Tate, only days before Ben Cameron shot himself, and of small Malory Venable whirling in a transport of delight in the middle of the cottage floor, exclaiming, “Is it ours? Can we come up here and live forever and ever?”

  “We’ll go for sure,” I said. “Maybe we’ll spend the whole weekend, if it’s warm enough. Have Thanksgiving dinner up there.”

  “I’d love that,” she said. “Listen—how’s Mama, really?”

  “She’s fine,” I said.

  “I mean really, Shep,” she said, and I heard the old,
protective fussiness in her voice.

  “So do I,” I said. “Not a whisper of a drink. Loves her job, and is beginning to do some awfully good stuff for it. She’s at AA every Monday night when the doors open, and there’s a new young shrink in Lithonia—can you imagine?—who has her on a different medication. She’s gained a little weight, and let her hair grow out. It looks pretty. I think you’re going to be pleased with her when you see her.”

  “I can’t wait,” Malory said. “I hear her calling me all the time. It’s hard not to answer.”

  “Try,” I said.

  I looked about me during the grave side service at Oakland, at the handful of old people and the smaller scattering of my own friends gathered in the shade of the old oaks and crape myrtles. It seemed to me that I was seeing them for the first time in years, and indeed, in the case of many, I was. “What a long way we’ve all come,” I thought. “We’re like survivors of some kind of captive intergalactic journey. And I guess there’s more truth than poetry to that.”