“Can you do it with a middle-aged woman who hasn’t done it for years, and only once before with you? Can you?” Sarah whispered. As she whispered she unhooked the brassiere and let it fall to the floor. Her breasts bobbed free in the firelight, sweet and heavy, the heft and fruit of them remembered in my palms and groin. Remembered from a night two decades before, in an apartment on the Lower West Side of Manhattan, in another time and another world altogether…Still, I could not speak.
“Can you, Shep?” Sarah said, and peeled the panty hose down, and stepped out of them. She wore, now, only black lace bikini panties.
“I don’t know,” I whispered truthfully, strangling on my own voice. I felt paralyzed, drowned in blackness and the heavy weight of time and the sediment of loss. A hunger as old and fierce as the world stirred in me. She was, in the dying firelight, the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, riper and more complete than any young girl. But I had been alone so long, so long…Aloneness ran in my veins and weighed like cold iron in my groin. I did not think I could move.
“I think you can,” Sarah said, and came, near-naked, across the floor to me and moved into the wooden arms I held out. “I think you can….”
She moved against me, pressing her body against mine, moving and moving, moving to the beat of the music and the rhythm of her blood, moving, moving. She arched her back and scrubbed her breasts into my chest. Her face was in its old spot in the hollow of my neck, and I could feel the wetness of tears, and the rush of breath as she murmured words I could not hear, soft, crooning words of loss and yearning and old, old love. My arms went around her automatically, and my hands found the smooth, warm hollow in the small of her back, and pulled her into my groin. As if they had life independent of me, they pulled the panties down on her hips, and, still moving against me, she wriggled them down and stepped out of them.
“Please help me,” she whispered. “Can you? Can you, Shep?”
Could I? I leaned onto and into her, mindless, moving with her. Could I? Could the cooled blood warm again, the banked heart flame, the body find the old, urgent moves, that long-forgotten ballet of thrust, thrust, thrust? Could the hopeless old love, so long starved and banished, find breath and being in her once again? Could I? Did I dare?
Sobbing softly, she pulled me down onto the sofa with her, and the small body squirmed under mine until it found the core of me, and opened in warmth and wetness and urgency to take me, finally, into the secret center of her. Yes. I could. I could, I dared, I could….
The telephone rang across the room. I knew without a shaving of a doubt, without a silvery hair of uncertainty, who it was. Even as I rocked and plunged, rocked and plunged, liberation from the blackness and the aloneness of two decades gathering inexorably in the starved groin, I knew. I knew, muscle and sinew and bone and blood and skin. My pounding heart knew. My ragged breath knew. My penis knew, and wilted in despair at the knowledge. I lay still atop Sarah, eyes closed, flaccid and finished, desolation and ending bitter in my mouth.
Sarah knew, too. She was out from under me with one smooth, violent movement, utterly and icily white, eyes blinded and unfocused. She was back in the satin dress and the silver sandals, with the coat clutched around her, before I could sit up, and she did not speak until she was at the door of the summerhouse. I looked across the room at her. She looked, in that moment, as old as Dorothy Cameron—older. She looked dead, like an animated corpse, come to call on the remorseless living in her mother’s old mink coat.
“I will not bother you again,” she said, in a voice to match the corpse-look of her. “I forgot. I truly forgot. But I won’t again.”
As she turned to go, the bells of Saint Philip’s Church just up Peachtree Road began to peal crazily through the wrecked night. Sarah turned back to me.
“I wish,” she said conversationally, “that Red Chastain had killed her when he had the chance.”
And she was gone into the first pealing moments of a new year.
The phone began ringing again even as the door slammed. I let it ring ten or fifteen times, and then I plodded heavily over and picked up the receiver.
“Hey, Gibby,” she said. Pause. Deep, shuddering draw of cigarette. “It’s Lucy, honey. Happy New Year!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Lucy never knew, after that New Year’s Eve, that she had doomed me with Sarah. At least, I do not think she knew in her mind. Her conscious weapons had always been more direct. The midnight telephone call that drowned the ember of hope between Sarah and me was not even coincidental: Lucy had been calling me at midnight on New Year’s Eve for years.
But what she knew in her blood was another matter. There in that dark Styx of vivid, indestructible life which sustained Lucy Bondurant Chastain Venable through so much horror, something was that met and knew every inch of me, perfectly. It was not the leaping, singing thing that called between her and Malory, but nevertheless, it knew. The fact remained that twenty years after I had first loved and wanted her, Sarah Cameron was still lost to me, now irrevocably, and even given my own fecklessness, Lucy was the author of that.
Dorothy Cameron knew, too, and unlike Lucy, she knew with the full of her honed and prescient mind. Not far into the new year I took her a first draft of The Compleat Georgian, feeling as shy and tongue-tied as if I were calling at Merrivale House to pick up Sarah for a dance when I was fifteen. Ben had had a bad day, roaming and thrashing and falling, and had had to be sedated and moved to the infirmary, so we sat in the downstairs sun-room of Carlton House, drinking tea amid the bamboo furniture and tropical plants and caged birds which had, I suspected, been patterned after the decor of the sun-room at The Cloister on Sea Island, so as to give a dimension of familiar luxury and festivity to this last cloister of privileged old age. In the gray-white light from the window walls, fully half of the population of Carlton House took the winter sun like old turtles.
The light, or more likely the long grief and strain of Ben’s deterioration, had leached the high color out of Dorothy’s face, that last brave ensign of youth. I wondered if Sarah would ever lose it permanently. She already had, in that last glimpse I had had of her.
“So here it is,” she said, hefting the thick folder of manuscript in her thin hands. “The house of Cameron, as seen through the eyes of Bondurant. An unbeatable combination. I’m sorrier than I can say that it’s the only one that will ever be.”
I knew then that Sarah had told her mother about what happened on New Year’s Eve, or at least some of it. What she had not, Dorothy would have filled in for herself. I remembered that long ago, just before I had left on that fatal journey across America after Lucy’s frantic call, Dorothy Cameron had warned me about her.
“She is a danger to herself and a worse one to you,” she had said. To her credit, she did not remind me now of that conversation. She knew, of course, that it was far too late for that.
“I’m sorry, too,” I said. I started to go on, to amplify, justify, explain, offer hope, and then did not. There was nothing further to say, and so I said nothing.
“It would have almost made these last dreadful years worth it,” she said, in her usual rich, level voice, but when I looked into her face I saw an anguish that I had seen there only at young Ben’s death, and the start of Ben Senior’s long decline. Her eyes were closed.
Oh, Lucy, so many lives, I thought wearily. I could not be angry at her. We were beyond that, too.
“But this is wonderful, darling, just wonderful,” she said briskly, and the anguish was gone and only her pleasure in the manuscript remained. I felt foolish elation.
“It is, isn’t it?” I said. “I did it, by God. I really did. And I didn’t even leave Atlanta. Most of the time if you want to be a creative genius—or ugly, or anything outside the playpen—you have to leave.”
“Well, you didn’t,” she said. “You may have hidden out like a possum in a hollow tree, but you didn’t leave.”
“I amend that,” I said. “If you want to be creative
or ugly or happy. You can’t stay here and be all of them.”
She smiled softly. “But does anybody have all those things, Shep?” she said. “Doesn’t everybody have to choose some things over others, no matter where they are?”
“Maybe,” I said, feeling an obscure annoyance at her. “But by God, I don’t know many places where your very life has to be one of the choices.”
“If you’re referring to yourself, you’ve had an awful lot of privilege,” she said.
“You pay so goddamn dearly for the privilege of…privilege in this town,” I said stubbornly. I did not know why I could not let it go. “Look at Lucy.”
“Well, if you insist, then let’s do look at Lucy,” Dorothy said crisply. “What so terrible has happened to Lucy that she did not bring down on herself? She’s been loved, protected, taken care of….”
“But it wasn’t enough, and it wasn’t the right kind of love,” I said. “The original covenant was broken—that her father would take care of her when she needed him—and she’s spent her entire life alternately trying to placate and punish him. Privilege didn’t help her there.”
“Many children have that covenant broken.” Her beautiful voice was soft and implacable. The woman who had felt sorrow and pity for little Lucy Bondurant was long vanished.
“But somehow Lucy just couldn’t get past it,” I said. “At the same time she realized he wasn’t going to come and take care of her, she got the message that she herself was essentially worthless and utterly unworthy of care, that nothing she did or ever could do by herself would be enough to keep her whole and safe. That’s where all the anger and dependency and self-sabotage comes from.”
“Who gave her that message?” Dorothy was stirring restlessly on her rattan love seat.
“The old man,” I said. “The South. The South speaking through Willa and all the other women around her. Women, too—women did it to her, too.”
“But she’s seen strong women,” Dorothy said impatiently. “Your mother was a strong woman, in her way. Old Martha Cater was a brick, and loved her dearly. I’m tough in my own way, too.”
“Yes, but you’re all strong in a man’s world, or were,” I insisted. “My mother as an accessory to a powerful man, at least to outward appearances. Martha as a servant in that man’s house. You were a lioness in that hospital, Dorothy, but it was men who owned and ran it. Lucy happened to want it all. Unheard of, for a Southern woman. Not, of course, for any sorry man in shoe leather, but for a woman…”
“And who ever gave her that notion?” Dorothy Cameron said tartly. “Nobody else I know ever had it all, man or woman, past the age of thirteen. Oh, don’t bother to answer, it’s the Bondurant in her, of course. You always were the wantingest tribe I ever saw.”
“Except me,” I said.
“Oh, Shep, you most of all! Don’t you remember all those passions of yours when you were small? Look at you—you’ve been in a twenty-year tantrum because you lost part of what you wanted. You’ve been saying, ‘If I can’t have it all, I’ll reject it all.’ You’ve let an awful lot of good go. You let an entire world go not two weeks ago. It’s not Lucy who’s the victim, it’s you. And God help you, it is quite beyond you to change that now.”
I was silent, feeling the old, dead blackness of New Year’s Eve well up from its headwater deep within me. Her words seemed to me an immutable condemnation.
“Tough words,” I said, finally.
“I wouldn’t waste them on many people left on this earth, my dear,” she said. “I have loved you most of your life. I wanted better for you than you have chosen for yourself.”
“What is this, chopped liver?” I said, attempting lightness. I patted the manuscript in her lap.
“This is marvelous,” she said. “A tour de force. A fine appetizer. Now, what about the next twenty years?”
“I really hadn’t thought about it,” I said, the blackness fleeing like fog before a sharp wind of panic. I had not. The pile of pages mounting in their slowness through the years had seemed sufficient, complete in themselves. What about the next twenty-five years? I saw whirling whiteness ahead, and nothing else.
“Well, you’d better get your ass in gear,” Dorothy Cameron said matter-of-factly. “Because I’m tired and I want to die sometime soon, and I absolutely will not do it until I know you’ve got something to occupy you. On your head be it if I live to be a miserable, mewling, puking centenarian.”
“Dorothy, I think I’d just as soon die when you do,” I said, nakedly and honestly. The thought of Atlanta without her was not to be borne.
She was quiet for a long time.
“Please live,” she said at last, in a frail, light, infinitely weary voice. There were tears in the corners of her great, hooded amber eyes. “Please find a way, finally, to live.”
I left her then, thinking as I loped down Peachtree Road toward 2500, cold in the perpetual blueness of shadows from the beetling, blind-eyed buildings on either side, that when she was gone there would be very few people left in my world who might wear the term “fineness.” Only her daughter came to mind.
Lucy continued to do so well in her job and at home on the farm that Malory called me just before Christmas of her sophomore year and asked if I thought it would be all right to bring her friend from Boston and Marblehead home.
“I think,” she said, and I could hear the tentative joy in her voice, “that he may be going to ask me to marry him!”
“Oh, Mal—” I said, stricken, and then caught myself. I had been about to shout at her, “No! No! Too young, you’re too young…”
“Does he have a name?” I asked instead.
“John Hunter Westcott the Fourth,” she said, laughing a little over the name. “Is that perfect, or is it perfect? Jinx, of course. He’s tall and blond and cool and beautiful, and he’s so impeccably bred that you’d think he had ‘Groton-Harvard-Wall Street’ stamped on his aristocratic behind. He doesn’t, though. What he has is a severe case of Long Island lockjaw and a place waiting for him in his father’s and grandfather’s impeccable WASP law firm. You’ll probably hate him.”
“I can’t wait for that pleasure,” I said honestly. “I assure you that I will hate him, and as openly and nastily as I can. I’m going to tell him all about your many eccentricities and hideous hidden habits, and send him yelping back to Marblehead, or wherever.”
“Lord, don’t,” she said, only half teasing. “Mother is going to be quite enough. But they have to meet him, and he wants to know them. Do you think she can handle it?”
I thought about it for a bit, and then said, “I think she can, if he doesn’t try to count her teeth. I wouldn’t say anything about marriage, though, Mal. It might just be better to let it be a casual visit.”
“I won’t. But she’s going to know,” Malory said.
“Probably. But she won’t know for sure unless you talk about it.”
“I won’t, then,” she said. “You’re probably right. Okay, I’ll call her right now. Can I bring Jinx by to meet you the day after we get home?”
“Oh, by all means,” I said. “I’ll dig out my old club tie. Would you like me to meet you at the airport and drive you out? Soften the first minutes a little?”
“No,” she said. “I think she’d rather I brought him there to them first.”
And so I did not go to the farmhouse with Malory and her cool, aristocratic and altogether perfect captive Brahmin, and I have regretted that every day of my life since. It was only afterward that I learned what happened that evening, and by that time Malory was back in Massachusetts determined that she would never look upon her mother again.
Jack had met their plane and driven them out to Lithonia in the ancient Ford, and I am sure Jinx Westcott was as gentlemanly about it as he must have been appalled. Lucy had decorated the farmhouse from rafters to hearth with evergreens from the woods and the battered ornaments they had bought when Malory was born, and I think that it probably looked, in its festive dress and
the warmth of the leaping fire and candlelight, as well as it could ever look, though by then the old house had sagged past genteel shabbiness and into outright dilapidation. I am certain Jinx was a gentleman about that, too. What, if anything, went on in the elegant brainpan behind the cool blue Nordic eyes, narrowed by the stenosis of centuries of breeding, is another matter. Malory could not tell me that.
What she did tell me was that it was not she, but Jinx Westcott, who said to Lucy, as she and Malory worked in the kitchen and Jack nodded with his drink before the television set, “That looks terrific, Mrs. Venable. I hope Mal got your talent in the kitchen as well as your looks. None of the women in my family can cook worth a damn, and I refuse to go through a lifetime of Stouffer’s.”
Lucy turned her blue, blue eyes to the blond young demigod in her ramshackle kitchen.
“Aren’t you nice?” she drawled. “I can tell your mama raised you right. Will you be a sweetie and go see if Lucy’s father would like another drink?”
When Jinx Westcott strode manfully off into the living room, she turned to Malory.
“Well, darling. Secrets?” she caroled.
“I think maybe he’s going to ask me to marry him, Mama,” Malory said in a subdued voice, her heart hammering.
“Well,” Lucy said. “He has a nice ass.”
It should have tipped Malory off. It would have me. But Malory was blinded by hope, and Jack was drugged with scotch and Dan Rather, and no one saw the level in the scotch bottle that Jack kept on the kitchen counter dropping, dropping, as Lucy cooked. By dinnertime, when Malory and Jinx Westcott came in to lay the table, Lucy had turned abruptly and staggeringly drunk, bestial and hectic and mad-eyed, mumbling and stumbling and laughing and letting herself fall heavily against Jinx.
Malory fled wordlessly to the living room to fetch Jack. It took her some little time to rouse him. When they returned to the kitchen, they found Lucy, skirt pulled up and panties down around her thin white ankles, squirming in the lap of the appalled John Hunter Westcott IV, crying aloud with the shrill mindlessness of a deranged cuckoo clock, “I want to come! I want to come!”
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