Peachtree Road

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  She began to scream then, when Malory and Jack attempted to pull her off Jinx Westcott’s lap, and she screamed long past the time the ambulance came to take her to Central State—for all the other hospitals in the area had by then declared her unwelcome. Lucy in her madness scratched, kicked and bit; her rage was endless. Her screams still rang in the empty air of the farmhouse when the Lithonia taxi came to take a white, punished Malory and a politely arctic John Hunter Westcott IV to the airport. I thought that Malory would hear them always, in her head.

  “I will never see her again as long as I live,” she sobbed to me when I called her at school, after the news came from a half-drunk and exhausted Jack Venable that Lucy had been hospitalized again. “I don’t care if she’s sick—I don’t care! I will not see her again!”

  And she broke down completely, and hung up the phone.

  I replaced the receiver in the summerhouse, swearing in my heart that if I could prevent it, she would not indeed. Lucy might be past my help, but Malory would, must, be saved.

  Something happened to Lucy at Central State. To this day we are not sure what it was. The physician on staff swore he found no evidence of a stroke, and Hub Dorsey, when I called him in, verified that.

  “Nothing on the EEG,” he said. “Nothing anywhere else to indicate vascular trouble. Whatever it is, it isn’t stroke.”

  What it was was a calmness, a lethargy almost, so profound that she did not require the usual tranquilizers and antidepressants but sat dreaming and nodding in the dayroom for hours at a time, often humming a little to herself, and almost always smiling. It was as if something had, at last, truly eased the flame in her, though when I visited I could see in her blue eyes the small, stubborn spark of intelligence which had not yet, through all the horror and pain, been quenched. She could move as well as ever. It simply seemed that she did not often choose to do so. And she did not speak. We did not know for a long time whether she had lost the function or whether she just considered that matters had gone beyond speech entirely. Whatever it was, she seemed tranquil and docile and quite often content.

  I thought then that the electroconvulsive therapy they gave her there had simply short-circuited some intricate and vital circuitry in her fevered brain. I still think that is what happened, although an entire phalanx of overworked young doctors assured us it did not and could not.

  I thought it far more probable that they simply did not know whereof they spoke than that they wished to circumvent legal trouble from a patient with a professional husband, for it was obvious to even the casual observer by then that Jack Venable was in no shape to pursue a lawsuit, and besides, he had signed an elaborate waiver of responsibility when he had committed Lucy.

  So she sat in her silence, smiling and thinking of who knew what, as lost to us without the connecting bridge of words as if she had died. I think both Jack and I, in our hearts, were furtively glad to see her so. I, at least, felt simple relief. We, as well as she, were released from the torment of the fire in Lucy.

  In three or four months she began to speak, but she spoke only in erratic bursts, sometimes muttering abrupt words and sentences that made no sense. I knew that the gibberish had meaning for her, for she often smiled in tender delight after completing a string of the heartbreaking nonsense, and looked up at me as if awaiting a reply. I did not know what to say, and could not bear the wounded sentences that spilled from her pretty mouth and tumbled to earth like slain birds, so I resorted to the old anodyne of her early hospitalization.

  “Stick it in your ear, Luce!” I would shout gaily, and Lucy would clap her hands and put her finger into her ear, and her blue eyes would spill light like kisses, and she would crow, “Stick it in your ear! Stick it in your ear, Gibby!”

  It was the only coherent sentence she made for many, many months.

  They could not keep her indefinitely at Central State, and in all ways except for the speech she seemed well—or as well as, now, she would ever be. And so we brought her home. The sweet, Buddhalike docility persisted, and she seemed to find a sort of sensual pleasure and comfort in a simple routine of morning television, afternoon naps, hearty meals and short, meandering strolls in the fields and woods around the farmhouse.

  Jack could afford no more home caretakers for her, and indeed, was back teaching nights at the floundering little community college in order to try to meet her staggering and unabating medical bills. But there was no hope that he would ever get ahead of them, and I thought that if his evening drinking did not stop and the lethargy that rode him like a succubus did not abate, he would soon lose one or both of the jobs. The farmhouse was unspeakable—a pigsty. Finally I could stand it no longer, and hired, over Jack’s objections, a round-the-clock nurse for Lucy. When she had been on the job for a couple of weeks, I went out to see how they were faring.

  The nurse was a smart, quick, brisk young Trinidadian named Amelia Kincaid, who handled Lucy with firm competence and impersonal, unflinching kindness. To my astonishment, Lucy detested her.

  “Damned nigger,” she spit at Amelia Kincaid and glared obliquely up at me with sly blue malice. “I hate niggers. Hate niggers!”

  Face flaming, I turned to the nurse.

  “She doesn’t mean that,” I said. “She’s always loved black people far more than she did white; she’s worked all her life for the civil rights movement—”

  “Stick it in your ear, Gibby!” Lucy sang.

  “It’s nothing, Mr. Bondurant,” Amelia Kincaid said in her lovely, lilting voice. “A kind of glitch in the brain, I think. I don’t take it seriously.”

  But I could not bear to hear the venom in Lucy’s beautiful, rich, drawling voice, which had told me such wonderments; could not bear the mumbled, “Went to the dance and help me, Gibby. Daddy won’t like the blood, blood, blood.”

  I looked in despair at Jack Venable, but Jack had passed out on the sofa in front of a Mary Tyler Moore rerun. It was a house of waste and decay and hopelessness. I would not, I thought, go back to it.

  But, incredibly, the phoenix in Lucy’s blood struggled up once again, and pulled her partway out of the bonfire of madness with it, enough so that she fetched up once more on a kind of benevolent plateau, calm and tender and childlike, seemingly pleased to drift in the moment, to receive the few visitors who came and gobble the sweet treats they brought, to watch endless blaring television. She grew quite fat, and Amelia Kincaid cut her dry, lusterless hair short so that it would not trail into her food, and it fell sleekly and becomingly about her fine, narrow head. She spent some time each afternoon, in those long late summer and early autumn days, outside in the sun in a lawn chair, and a faint rose flush stained her thin skin, webbed now like spider’s silk with a network of tiny lines. She looked quite pretty, though never again beautiful with the old eerie light, and seemed pleased with whatever small lagniappe the minimal days dealt her. Jack was able, at last, to dismiss Amelia Kincaid, and with her went the last of Lucy’s strange, isolated rage. And with a sighing and delicately affronted Little Lady Rawson looking in every day or so, Lucy was able once more to stay alone.

  I do not think she was unhappy.

  I have come to think of the next year as the time in which we all came to terms with our lives, as bitter or minimal as they were and as tenuous as those terms were. We did not so much find peace as we simply stopped struggling, we three: Lucy and Jack and I. Or perhaps I mean Lucy and me; Jack Venable had stopped struggling years before. I think it was why he was still alive.

  “Middle age is when you do that, or die,” Dorothy Cameron said, when I told her how I felt about that time. “Conventional wisdom has it that you don’t grow up until middle age, but old people know that it isn’t growing up at all—it’s giving up. Just stop fighting and go with the flow, as the hideous saying now goes. Maturity is passivity in fancy dress.”

  “It sounds like an awful cop-out, when you put it that way,” I said. “Just to let go the reins, when you’ve had charge of your life for all those
years.”

  “But you haven’t,” she said. “You’re grown up, finally, when you realize that you never did. Then you stop squirming like a gigged frog and let the current take you. You get there just as fast, and you feel a great deal better on the trip.”

  I left her feeling distinctly less noble and more slug-like, but I realized that the free-fall drift we had all found ourselves in was, perhaps, kinder to us than all the desperate, anguished struggles to make ourselves better. We would make no one particularly happy this way, least of all ourselves, but to me and to Jack Venable and certainly to Lucy, her long fires banked at last, the stasis had a certain sweetness, like a safe, if featureless and unlovely, port gained after years of magnificent tempest. I think if there had come for me, at that time, a last great call to life and glory, I would have turned tail and run.

  In the course of time the university press that had been interested in The Compleat Georgian accepted it, and sent a brace of ghostly, avid scholars to consult with me on it, and after weeks of polite hemmings and “well, actually”s and “but don’t you think perhaps”s, they left me to begin the satisfyingly long task of revision.

  Well, Dorothy, you don’t have to worry about the next year, at least, I thought, sitting down at my desk to begin deciphering the spectral editors’ pale notes. This should last me into next fall, and with luck I can string it out until Christmas.

  It was anodyne and anesthetic to go back into that country of dead Camerons. The living ones offered me, now, little but pain. Dorothy Cameron had broken her knee back in the summer, and it was not mending well around the implacable steel pin that held it, and she was growing vague and listless with pain. She could not come down to the lounge at Carlton House anymore, and the times I could go up to the apartment grew further and further apart, for Ben was almost gone from us now, flickering disconnectedly in and out of the raging, blinded body, running on pure will and bitter, empty health. I saw increasingly little of Dorothy, and her voice when I phoned her seemed to have preceded her into another country, one as yet closed to me.

  And Sarah I simply did not see. Perhaps she had changed her route when she went about her errands in Buckhead, or perhaps she did them in other parts of the city now. Perhaps she did not wish to encounter me, or perhaps she simply did not care. Whatever the reasons for it, I came, finally, to be grateful for her absence from my life. This new, level country of my heart had sealed its borders against pain.

  In the spring of that year Martha Cater had a slight stroke in the night in the Caters’ quarters over the garage, and awoke with no knowledge of where she was or who the distraught Shem might be. The confusion passed by noon, but what I had resolutely refused to admit to myself now came clear: Martha and Shem Cater were past their determined toiling in the house on Peachtree Road—even the curtailed amount of work that one genteel old beauty and a recluse required—and arrangements would have to be made for them.

  I offered to let them stay on in the garage apartment which had been their only home for so much of their lives, but Martha could not manage the stairs with safety, and Shem winced when he climbed them, when he thought he was unobserved. And Martha stubbornly refused to stay in a place where she could not work when she wanted to.

  “I ain’t gon’ set up there on my bee-hind while you an’ Miss Willa tries to do for yourselves,” she said thunderously. “Ain’t neither of you know how to light no stove, even. You starve in a week.”

  It was not true, but I saw that if she stayed, Martha Cater would die as she had lived, in the service of the Bondurants, and I was not going to have that. When they hemmed and hawed and would not tell me what they wished to do—or perhaps could not—I drove with Tom Carmichael and Marty Fox out to Forest Park, where the feckless ToTo lived with her brood of laconic children, and bought a one-year-old, three-bedroom brick ranch house hard by a new full-service shopping center, framed the deed and hung it over the mantel, and moved the reluctant Caters in. Both professed to hate the house, but Shem’s milky old eyes grew liquid with tears when he saw parked in the driveway the immaculate 1972 Buick Marty had found for me. It was as big and heavy a car as we could find, and Shem would look like a gnome peering over a toadstool driving it, but years of the Rolls had left him with a profound contempt for what he called “little old trash cars.” The Buick had a heft worthy of his mighty old heart.

  And Martha wept and hugged me when she saw her kitchen. I had decreed that it be similar as possible to the one at 2500, and Marty had searched for more than a week until he found the house that harbored this one. I had then duplicated Martha’s appliances and cookware down to the baker’s rack and the balloon whisks she favored, and added a small kitchen television for good measure, and the oak and rattan rocker from our kitchen, whose seat now cupped Martha’s ample buttocks and no others on earth. It was exactly the right thing to do, and I had loved doing it, and if I live to be a hundred—a thought I do not cherish—I will not do so good a thing again. I still smile when I think of Shem and Martha in their first and long-delayed real nest.

  But the emptiness that they left was enormous, profound. The house on Peachtree Road cried with it as it never had after the departures of my mother and my father. I had done a loving duty, and in so doing had cut the heart out of my home. I found that I could not abide the efficient, jumpsuited white maids who spilled like circus clowns out of their Clean-As-A-Whistle van twice a week and swarmed into the house. They looked like aerobically trimmed Dunwoody housewives, and probably were. Their eyes, as they came into my house from their scanty, thin-walled Tudors in the suburbs, were avid; they swept the grounds and the summerhouse and me, when I ventured into their line of vision, like homing bats.

  I stayed out of their sight after the first encounter. I liked only slightly more the thin, elegant mulatto personal maid Aunt Willa hired to come at ten and hover boredly about her until five or so, when she poured out sherry and passed cheese straws for Willa Slagle Bondurant and whoever shared her ice-crackings. The woman looked and dressed like Jane Fonda, and I did not care for the huge tote she carried. Besides being, I think, a genuine Gucci, I suspected that it harbored its share of Bondurant Lalique and Tiffany as it disappeared into its owner’s smart little Honda. But Aunt Willa liked the girl and was satisfied with the maid service, and so I let things go with only a dull and enduring ache in my grateful heart for the Caters. Willa satisfied was Willa out of my hair. She had sulked, delicately and with the air of a highborn sixteenth-century martyr, for weeks when I had refused to hire her a driver for the Rolls.

  “I would look absurd driving that big old thing, Shep,” she said. “And at my age, I don’t think a heavy car is safe.”

  Since she invoked age and infirmity only when she wanted something, and I knew her to be as healthy and indomitable as a T’ang horse, I smiled affably at her.

  “Marty says he’ll be happy to drop you wherever you want to go,” I said. “His afternoons are pretty much free since we hired Fred Perry. He’s a good driver.”

  She drove the Rolls. I knew she would. Willa would far rather chance ridicule and bodily harm in the old Rolls-Royce than be driven about Buckhead, even the booming, screeching, runaway Buckhead that she would not acknowledge, by a slick Jewish lawyer from Newark. It struck me, watching her slide majestically away down the drive like an aging queen astride a glacier, that I had no idea when in her tenure with us Aunt Willa had learned to drive, or how. She remained into her seventies a creature of infinite surprise. Few of them were as pleasant as that one.

  And so, in our stases, we lived. Jack Venable, in the farmhouse, worked and drank and slept. Lucy, in her new tranquility, sat in the moonglow of the television and the sun of the spring and summer and slowly, slowly, slowly, healed herself back to a fragile and infinitely simpler wholeness. By June her speech was normal, if what she said was vastly diminished in its essential Lucy-ness. By August she could read again. By September she could write a little. The first thing she wrote was a letter to
Malory. So far as I know, it was the first communication that had passed between them since that terrible Christmas past. Neither Jack nor I knew what she said, or if Malory ever answered.

  Malory had meant what she said. She had not been home since Lucy’s last convulsive spasm of madness. She had not called, and she had not written. I knew because Jack told me. Lucy did not speak of her daughter. Jack said that she had said no word to him about Malory since her last illness; it was as if she had simply lost her from her head and heart. She did not seem unhappy about it, or about anything else. Jack, steeping like an old tea bag in weariness and apathy and scotch, did not wish to risk his stale peace by mentioning Malory. It was as if she had never lived there with them.

  She wrote me weekly, dutiful letters with all of her activities and none of herself in them, and these I passed on to Jack. She did not phone. When I called her, she was polite and even cordial, but she was no Malory Bondurant Venable I had any ken of, and so I stopped my calls, miserable but resigned to the tepid broth of the letters. I knew she must put herself back together in her own mold after her shattering at Lucy’s hands, not in any image I might create for her. She must come back to me on her own wings, even if I risked her not coming at all. I thought of her constantly, and there was a great, empty, wind-scoured plain within me where she was not, but I answered the dutiful letters with short, chatty notes of my own, saying essentially nothing, and I waited to see what she would do and who she would become.

  Because she had not wanted to come home, she had gone to summer school and doubled her course loads, and that, in addition to her accelerated honors program, enabled her to graduate three quarters early, at the end of August. I knew that she was finishing with honors, but she had not said what she planned after her graduation. Some sort of counseling work perhaps, I thought, but only because her temperament and experience seemed to dictate it, not because she had told me. So far as I knew, Malory’s future was as white and featureless as my own.