Peachtree Road

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  But in July she called, and her voice was her own, that of the old Malory, or rather, the old Malory but with a new and full dimension I could not name. She wanted more than anything, she said, for me to come and see her graduate. Jack, too, if he liked; she rather thought he wouldn’t. But I must.

  “And your mother?” I said.

  “No, Shep,” she said. “Please.”

  I called Jack Venable that evening and told him of the conversation.

  “Can you find a way to tell Lucy?” I asked.

  “Oh yes,” he said. “It won’t be a problem. She knows it’s coming up, and she hasn’t asked to go. She’ll be pleased and interested, but that fire’s out, Shep. I think it’s out for good. And I think I won’t go either. It just seems a bad time to leave Lucy alone. Can you make Malory understand?”

  “She’ll understand,” I said, grateful that I did not have to tell him Malory had forbidden her mother and all but dismissed him.

  “I hate being the only one of us there, though,” I said truthfully. “It makes me feel as if I’m usurping your places with her.”

  “Not usurping them. Filling them,” he said. “You are. And by rights, you should. You’ve done more to keep her safe and whole and happy than we ever have. Don’t feel bad about it. I’d go if I really wanted to. The truth is, I’m grateful not to have to. I love Mal, of course I do, but I’m just too tired.”

  And so, in August; I went to Wellesley. I waited for Malory at the stone bench under a great old lilac tree outside her dormitory, and when she came around the corner of the building and ran toward me with her arms outstretched, it was as if a strange and rather terrible young sun had just flamed out of the mists of millenniums of rain.

  Because of her pain and devastation when I had last really talked with her, and the long months of ensuing brittleness and silence, I was not prepared for the radiant and complete woman I held in my arms in the close, gray-green morning. She was so like Lucy at that age as to stop my heart, and yet with an otherness about her that I had only sensed before, which was entirely new, her own: a strength, a well-used integrity touching in one so young, a kind of tender gravity for the world, which she had had, in lesser measure, since she was a child. Out of Lucy’s face, all October-blue eyes and tea rose skin and silken black hair and brow and lash, my own stubborn chin and high-bridged hawk’s nose looked back at me. But of course, she had her own, and legitimate, claim to the Bondurant features through her mother and grandfather.

  Over it all sheer, simple happiness shimmered like the flame from a Bunsen burner.

  “Oh, Shep,” she said, her face finding Sarah Cameron’s old spot under my chin, though she had to stoop a bit to accomplish it. “I’ve never been so glad to see anyone in my life!”

  Only then did I see the tall young man at her side. And on seeing him, knew, instantly and without doubt, that Malory Venable had found her future.

  It was there in the way their eyes clung to each other’s and could not pull away; I remembered that pull. It was there in the numerous tiny, hypnotized brushings of fingertips and hands and shoulders; I remembered those bird’s-wing brushings. It was there in the delighted grins that would not let the corners of their mouths rest. My own mouth felt the tremors of that delight. I felt a great stab of pain that was as purely physical as a heart attack, nearly breath-stopping, but over it there crept a great joy, and a warm and boundless relief. Even before I learned his name, even before I took the damp and callused hand, I knew that Malory would be safe with this young man. There was great strength here. And a leavening of humor. And uncannily, out of good brown eyes behind thick, horn-rimmed glasses, Charlie Gentry looked, smiling.

  His name was Peter Hopkins Dallett. He was thin, rangy, nutmeg-brown almost all over, hair, eyes and tanned skin, near to being ugly. He had graduated with honors from Yale architecture school in June, after five years spent on full scholarship. He had already had a building erected. He lived in a hamlet on the coast of Penobscot Bay, up in Maine, so small that it did not have a name or a post office; the nearest town of any size was Ellsworth, seventeen miles away. He was the youngest of four brothers, and his father was a lobsterman and ran a small general store during the season. His mother had died when he was twelve. He and Malory had met the previous March, at the wedding of a mutual friend in New Hampshire. They had not spent a weekend apart since. There was no question that they would marry—I had known that before a word was spoken. Only a question of when, and where they would live afterward.

  “Will you be taking her away from us?” I said to Peter Dallett over a lunch of champagne and oysters on the half shell. Nobody was hungry, but we drank quite a bit of bad champagne. Peter insisted on buying, and cheerfully ordered what he could afford. It was by no means Taittinger, but it ran in our veins like sweet fire.

  “I don’t know yet,” he said. “I’d really like to come down and take a look at Atlanta. Malory hates the idea, and I realize why, but she’d be okay there. I can take care of her. It would be all right. And the best designing in the country is coming out of the Sunbelt, or will….”

  I flinched involuntarily, and Malory said, quickly, “I don’t think we really will, though, Shep. Peter has already got such good contacts here.”

  She must not come home, my mind shrieked. She must not come.

  “Well, good contacts aren’t a thing to just toss aside,” I said, as casually as I could. “I think you might find that the so-called Sunbelt is not all it’s cracked up to be.”

  “It’s a whole new frontier,” Peter Dallett said. “There’s nothing else like it—it’s wide open to a whole new kind of design. We haven’t even found a metaphor for it yet. I’d love to be in on that.”

  I liked the enthusiasm in his voice, but I feared it more.

  “If you like strip shopping centers and tanning salons and no real urban centers and solid traffic from Atlanta to Baltimore and endless, endless suburbs, you’ll love it. But you should have seen it when it was a real city, when I was Malory’s age—”

  “That’s over,” he said, with the casual implacability of the young. “The Sunbelt is what we have now. Enormous vitality. Unlimited growth potential. A whole new set of problems and solutions. Nobody ever designed for it before. Nobody ever worked in it before.”

  “But could you live in it?” I said. “There is that one little thing, you know.”

  He laughed, and the glasses bobbled on his short brown nose. I saw that it was peeling.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But the point is, people won’t be actually living in it. Only near it. The cities of the future, especially in the Sunbelt, will be commuter cities. I don’t care what the urban renewers and planners say—they will. There’s wonderful clear land near Atlanta.”

  “Tate…” Malory said softly, as if she was tasting the word.

  Tate. Green, silent, sunstruck and alone, dreaming in its Appalachian eternity on the side of Burnt Mountain, by covenant unchanged and unchangeable. Malory, dancing in the sunlight of Tate on the floor of the big old cottage there, utterly enthralled. Tate…

  “I could live at Tate,” Malory said into her own green distance. “I’ve been thinking I never wanted to see Atlanta again, but I could live up at Tate….”

  She shifted her blue eyes to me, and then dropped them.

  “Is Mother all right?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “She’s doing fine. She sends her love. She’s very proud of you. You might write and tell her about…things. In your own time, of course. She’d love a letter from you.”

  “Does…does she need me?” In a ghost of the old anxious voice.

  “No. Really. Just to know that you’re happy and taken care of. That you’re safe. That’s all any of us care about.”

  “Well, I am that.” She smiled. “I truly am that. Shep…I thought we’d just have a tiny, quiet wedding, probably up at Peter’s little family church, in the fall. I’m going there with him after today and stay. His father has as
ked me, and it seems just the best thing to go on and get married when the tourist season is over and he can close the store. Nobody but his immediate family. Unless you think we should come home and get married there. I know…Mama…can’t travel…”

  “No,” I said. “You do just that. Come later, after she’s had time to digest things. I’ll tell both of them for you, shall I? And then you write. It’ll be less of a strain for her that way, and for you, too.”

  She looked at me there in the August light, her young face serious and very beautiful, and then it crumpled, and tears started from the water-blue eyes that were, and were not, Lucy’s. She flew into my arms. I felt the tears warm on my face.

  “Thank you, Shep. Thank you for everything,” she whispered. “Thank you for my whole life.”

  “You’re most welcome, Malory,” I said.

  The next weekend I took Lucy and Jack up to Tate. It seemed to me somehow that telling them of Malory’s wedding up there, in the cool blue hills, shut away from the lingering heat and fever of the September-worn city, might defuse the volatility of the situation a little—if indeed, there was any volatility. There would be none, I knew, from Jack Venable, and looking at Lucy on the seat beside me in the shifting gold light of late afternoon as I drove, I could not imagine madness and hunger washing that tranquil and emptied face. But still, better somehow at Tate…

  We heated the pizzas I had brought from Everybody’s for our dinner that night, and Jack and I drank raw, thin Chianti with it, and Lucy her endless coffee, which had supplanted the liquor and supplemented the cigarettes, and all of us were in our beds by ten. It was as if, when we turned in between the gateposts up on the ridge road and dipped down into the bowl of the colony, some great, spiteful hand which had held us fast relaxed its grip, and ease came flooding in. I lay listening to the night sounds of those worn old mountains—not many in the exhausted air of early fall: a few late-lingering cicadas and crickets, a dog barking over to the west, on some far ridge—and slid into a sleep so profound that when I awoke, with the early sun spilling across my face, I was still in the same position in which I had dropped off.

  I was sitting at the scarred old trestle table in the kitchen looking across the meadow to the misted, mirror-still lake and drinking coffee when Jack appeared, sagging and stupefied in a sweatshirt and pants that were far too big for him. Had they ever fit? I wondered. How had he shrunk, withered, diminished so before my very eyes, and I had not noticed?

  He looked gray and heavy-faced in the clear, tender light, and shambled across the kitchen to the table with the tiredness that was the same in the morning as it was at night. White stubble dusted his pale jaw. The white hair was utterly devoid of life, the blue eyes dull and half-shut. It struck me with a pang that Jack Venable was tired from the soul out. Tired and perhaps ill, with one of the wasting illnesses despair summons from the very DNA.

  “I’d hoped you’d sleep at least till noon,” I said, pouring him coffee out of the old spatterware pot.

  “Lucy was having one of her nightmares, thrashing around and crying in her sleep,” he said. “A rock couldn’t sleep through that. It’s funny—there’s no agitation in her when she’s awake. And it’s not that she’s suppressing it, either. I can always tell when she does that. It’s really not there. But then, once or twice a month, when she’s asleep, these things come…. I wonder what she dreams. She says she doesn’t remember.”

  “She’s always had them,” I said. “They were really terrible when she was little—awful things about being lost, or abandoned, or in mortal danger, or dying. We’d have an awful time calming her. I thought she’d outgrown them.”

  “Poor Luce,” he said gently, gently. “Her demons grew up along with her. She met the enemy and it was her. You know, there was a time, there at the beginning, that I really thought I could help her. Be the rock she needed, somebody to lean on. But after a while I just couldn’t seem to take her weight. I never meant to let her down. I’ve hated myself for it. But I just…wasn’t enough.”

  “Nobody could have been, Jack. Nobody mortal could have met all that need,” I said, my heart twisting with pity for this flawed, weary, emptied man whose passion had not withstood the tidal suck of both the civil rights movement and Lucy Bondurant. I did not think that tragedy was too strong a word for him.

  “I guess not,” he said. “But God, how I wanted to be the one mortal who did. And now I sit and look at her, one step up from a happy turnip and still just so beautiful to me, and instead of mourning for all that lost light and…sorcery…I thank God for the happy turnip and go back to sleep.”

  “Don’t beat up on yourself for that,” I said. “All of us have blessed the turnip at one time or another. And prayed like cowards for it to last.”

  “It will,” he said. “That devil’s exorcised for good. I’m sure of that. What you see now is the Lucy we’ll have from here on out. Good luck for us, maybe. Not so good for Luce.”

  “I hope you’re right, at least temporarily,” I said. “We’re going to have to tell her something today that scares the bejesus out of me. I want to run it past you first.”

  “Malory,” he said, looking up from the coffee. It was not a question.

  “Yes. She’s going to get married very soon, to a young architect from Maine she met this spring. They’ll marry there, with just his folks. I think the family is dirt-poor. His mother’s dead. But he’s solid rock. I met him at her graduation. You’ll like him, Jack. So will Lucy, I think. Malory will be safe with him. And she’s crazy about him, and he about her. I…none of us will be going, but she’ll call her mother, or at least write, when I give her the word that we’ve told her.”

  His thin face lit briefly.

  “Good for her,” he said, smiling. The smile was gray and wounded, like the rest of him. “Good for Mal. I want her happiness very much. I’ve never seemed to be able to show her that, though. Somehow, everything I had went to Lucy.”

  “So you think it’s safe to tell her?”

  “Oh, sure,” he said. “Like I said, that fire is out. Whatever they did at Central State cooked it right out of her. You can tell her anything. There’s no danger anymore. No matter what I said a minute ago, I almost wish there was….”

  “Do you want to be with me when I do?” I said.

  “No. Do you mind? I’m not afraid. I’m just”—and he grinned, hearing his own words—“tired. I think I’ll go back to bed for a while.”

  He slept for most of the day. Lucy herself slept until noon. When she awoke, she surprised me by wanting to walk around the lake by the sun-dappled dirt road that encircled it. It was our old walk, a smooth and pretty one, but long.

  “Can you make it?” I said.

  “Yes,” she said. “I can if we take it slow, and stop along the way. Let’s do it, Gibby. Let’s stop by all the old places, and take some sandwiches and have a picnic up in the meadow. Oh, and bring your clarinet—is it up here?”

  “The old one is,” I said. “The one I learned to play on. Rusted solid, probably. But I’ll bring it anyway.”

  And so we set out, Lucy in blue jeans and a loose old plaid shirt someone had left in her closet, looking, if one did not lean too near, rested and almost young and very close once more to being beautiful. She walked slowly, and she leaned on me, and she did tire, so that we made frequent stops, but when we were seated in the deep shade of a hickory grove, the tawny bowl of the mountains walling us in under the clarion blue of the first autumn sky, she was as delighted as she had been as a child with the old places where so much of our magic and mischief had been wrought, where so much still seemed to hover.

  “Tell about the Fourth of July parade, Gibby,” she cried, and I spun it out for her in the sunny silence, that joyous long-ago procession of children and adults and teenagers and babies and dogs and banners and bunting and raucous, braying musical instruments.

  “Tell about us swimming,” she said, and all of a sudden there we were, as thin and supple and sli
ppery as young otters, yelping soundlessly in the hot sun and cold water of the little indigo lake, and there was small Sarah Cameron, pinned against a cobalt July sky in the highest arc of a dive, as beautiful as a young gull.

  “Tell about the night the deer jumped over me,” she said, and the day darkened into that long-ago magical and terrible night, still and star-struck and moon-dappled, and ahead of me on this very road a will-o’-the-wisp little Lucy Bondurant ran blithely into a pool of utter, soulless blackness, and the spectral shadow of the leaping deer fell down straight upon her like an evil fairy’s curse.

  I shivered with that one, and not wanting to invoke any more of the small, lost ghosts of Tate, moved with her out into the sun of the high meadow, and played as well as I could on the squawking clarinet that had, so long ago in this same long grass, spilled out “Frenesi” for me like crystal water. I played “Frenesi” again, and “Amapola,” and “In the Mood,” and several of the other songs we had grown up dancing to, the Pinks and the Jells, on the polished wooden floors of half a dozen clubs, and I finished up, as those vanished dances had, with “Moonglow.”

  Lucy lay quiet, stretched out on her back in the last of the slanting sun. It gilded her face and struck fire from her dark hair.

  “Thank you, Gibby,” she said at last. “It was as good as going back.”

  “You’re welcome,” I said.

  I told her then, told her about Malory, told her with my heart in my mouth and my eyes riveted to her still face and mild blue eyes. But after I was finished, and had fallen silent, all she said was “Oh, Gibby, really? Isn’t that wonderful! Tell me about him.”

  I did.

  “Will he be good to her?” she asked.