Peachtree Road

by Anne Rivers Siddons

“Most wonderfully good. Good to her always.”

  “Then that’s okay. That’s all that matters.”

  She was silent, and when I was sure she was not going to speak again, I said, “Lucy…I don’t think any of us should go. I’m not going. It’ll be just his family.”

  “Oh no,” she said, looking up at me with her clear, bottomless blue eyes. “I didn’t expect to. I don’t deserve to go.”

  My heart hurt, suddenly and simply and powerfully.

  “Oh, honey,” I said. “Oh, Luce. It’s not that….”

  “Oh yes,” she said matter-of-factly, and there was in her rich, bronzy drawl nothing of pathos but more than a little of the indomitable small girl who had stubbornly abjured self-pity. “It is that. I was awful. I know I was. I drove her away. And I don’t deserve to go to her wedding. But that’s over, that part of me. Maybe after a while she’ll see that, and she’ll bring her…husband…home to us.”

  “She will,” I said. “She’s already said she wanted to.”

  Lucy grinned at me. It was, suddenly and fully, her old grin, quicksilver and devilish and wonderful to see.

  “I promise, when she does, to keep my panties on,” she said.

  “I love you, Lucy Bondurant,” I said. I did. I did, in that moment, as much as I ever had in my life.

  “I love you, too, Gibby Bondurant,” she said.

  We sat in the high meadow and watched the sun drop, red and swollen, over the shoulder of Burnt Mountain. Away to the south the coppery cloud of smutch that was Atlanta belching and simmering in its own effluvia came clearer.

  Lucy pointed to it.

  “Do you still love it?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. “I guess I never did and I don’t even like it anymore now. It’s no kind of city that I know or care about. It’s loud and it stinks. It’s fifty times too big. It has no grace anymore. But I need it, if that makes any sense. You don’t have to love something to need it. Dimension and need can come from lots of other things…hate, or fear, or anger…. I couldn’t tell you how, but I know that’s so. I just…need it.”

  “You don’t have to tell me,” she said. “I know. It isn’t my town anymore, either. But it has something, Gibby. It has…oh, resonance. Passion, energy, and a kind of…not noticing quality to it. A carelessness. Impersonality. It doesn’t give a shit what you are or what you do. And power-lots of power. I might have amounted to something in a town like that. But I don’t love it. I guess I didn’t the other one, either, if you get right down to it.”

  She lit her last cigarette, and inhaled a long, deep lungful of smoke, and let it out into the lavender air of evening, looking through it down into the sour copper breath of the city to the south.

  “But, oh Lord,” she said, smiling faintly, “it was a wonderful town to be young in, wasn’t it?”

  Three weeks later, on the first Saturday night in October, the shrilling of the telephone brought me out of a deep, still sleep. It had been hot the past week, as hot as August, and I had turned on the window air conditioner in the bedroom, so that struggling up to the surface of wakefulness was like trying to swim up through pounding black surf. The room was totally dark and without context, and I knocked the telephone from the receiver before I managed to get it to my ear. I had no idea what time it was.

  “Gibby?” Pause. Great, indrawn inhalation, deep sigh of exhalation. “It’s Lucy, honey.”

  “Lucy,” I mumbled. “What time is it?” My eyes found the digital clock on my bedside table then. “Jesus,” I said. “It’s almost four o’clock. Is something wrong?”

  I knew that something was. The time, of course. Her nightly calls almost invariably came between ten and eleven, after Jack had drowned in sleep. But a wincing, clinching part of me had known when she spoke. The rich, slow voice sang with the honey of the old madness.

  “Gibby, did you know Malory was getting married? She’s getting married next weekend!” Lucy said in a pouting child’s voice.

  “Well, yes, I did, Luce,” I said carefully. “So did you. Remember, I told you up at Tate two or three weekends ago? We talked about it a long time.”

  “Well, you obviously told somebody else besides Malory’s mother, because it wasn’t me. I didn’t hear a word about it until Jack Venable just happened to mention it tonight, on his forty millionth scotch. I’m real mad at him. You, too, if you knew and wouldn’t tell me.”

  A vast, trembling, bottomless fatigue settled slowly down over me, like a great, drifting net of cobwebs. I thought it must be what Jack Venable felt a good bit of the time. Oh God, please not again, I said soundlessly.

  “I did tell you, sweetie,” I said. “I wouldn’t not tell you. You said you thought it was wonderful and you agreed that none of us should go because Peter’s family is so poorly off, and that you’d be very happy to see them when they came home after the wedding. We were awfully proud of the way you took it.”

  “Took it, shmook it,” Lucy said in fretful annoyance. “You got the wrong lady, toots. I don’t think it’s fucking wonderful at all. That baby isn’t old enough to get married! She hasn’t even talked to me about it—I could tell her a thing or two about marriage. I don’t know any fucking Peter in fucking Maine. I fucking well did not agree we shouldn’t go. Of course I’m going! In fact, that’s why I called you. I want you to come out here and get me and take me to the airport. I’m almost packed. No thanks to Jack Venable, I might add. He absolutely refused to take me. He got awfully abusive about it, Gibby.”

  Her voice slid into an injured child’s whine. Something ran lightly up my spine, claws of ice digging into my flesh.

  “Put Jack on the phone, Luce,” I said neutrally. “Is he awake?”

  There was a long pause and then she laughed. The sound tinkled in my ears like shards of crystal ice.

  “No,” she said gaily. “I don’t think you could say he’s awake. In fact, I’m fairly sure the sonofabitch is dead. I just shot him in the head with that old gun of his. Not take me to my own baby’s wedding! Jesus!”

  She had, in her madness, told so many lies about Jack’s abuse of her that my first instinct was to hang up on her. But the eerie finger of ice along my spine would not let me do that.

  “Are you telling me the truth, Lucy?” I asked. My voice sounded high and silly in my ears.

  “Oh yes,” she said. “He’s bleeding like anything. It’s a real mess. That’s another reason I want you to come on out here, Gibby. I can’t clean this up by myself.”

  A fine trembling started up deep inside me, and spread from my stomach into my arms and legs, so that I sagged from where I had been standing, naked and perspiring beside the telephone table, down onto my rumpled bed. Even my head shook, and my lips, so that I could not speak for a moment.

  “Lucy, I’m going to come on out there as soon as I can,” I said very carefully, around the ridiculous, waffling mouth. “Just let me get some clothes on. Now listen—don’t call anybody else until I get there. Have you called anybody else?”

  “Of course not,” she said indignantly. “I don’t have any friends in this one-horse hick town. Nobody out here even bothered to get to know Malory. I wouldn’t let anybody out here take me to the airport to go to my baby’s wedding!”

  “Well, don’t make any more calls,” I said. “Tell you what you do. You get dressed, and put on some coffee, and then you sit down and wait for me. Can you do that?”

  “Well, of course I can do that, silly,” she sang. Delight had crept into her voice, and gaiety. “I’m not paralyzed! You’ll take me, then?”

  “I’ll take you,” I said, around the roaring that had begun in my head.

  “Oh, Gibby, I could always count on you!”

  It was the voice of the delivered changeling, huddled into the corner of a narrow iron bed in a dim attic atop a great, graceful house in a small, beautiful, vanished city, waiting for me to come and vanquish nightmares.

  “I’m on my way,” I said.

  The night was th
ick and hot and still. No lights showed in the big house. Up on Peachtree Road, winking through the yellowing leaves of the woods around the summerhouse, the eternal cold white lights of the great, hovering buildings burned, useless sentinels of a long-victorious army. The traffic, as I idled at the foot of the driveway, was steady and brisk, as heavy as it had once been at high noon. I found a break in it and slid the Rolls out into Peachtree Road, marveling at my own expertise with the smooth, heavy old wheel. I drove carefully over to the 1-85 South ramp at Piedmont, and took that into and through the white-lit city, and then bore off left on I-20 East. Out on the Interstate, once the diminishing lights of the suburban fringes of the city dropped away, the parched October country flowed steadily past in blackness. Only an occasional all-night filling station or motel lit my passage. I bowled silently toward a smudge of lightening gray on the horizon; I was driving east to meet the dawn.

  I made a little song as I drove. I sang it over and over, just under my breath, feeling my stiff lips making the nonsense words, hearing nothing but the high roaring in my head, as though a hot wind keened there. I sang it to the tune of “Jada”: “Liar, Liar, Liar-Liar-Lie-Lie-Lie. Liar, Liar, Liar-Liar-Lie-Lie-Lie.” I think that I sang it all the way to sleeping Lithonia and through it to the turnoff down which, nearly a mile distant, the farmhouse lay.

  It was only when I drove out of the tunnel of thin, scabrous woods into the rutted yard and found the house ablaze with lights that I realized I had hoped and halfway expected to find it dark, and Lucy and Jack safely fast in banal sleep. My heart gave a great, sick lurch and dropped in my chest. The song died on my lips. As I got out of the car and shut the door, precisely and softly, and walked on unfelt feet up the sagging steps, I whispered, desolately, “Liar, liar, pants on fire.” Looking back, I think that in that moment I was no saner than Lucy.

  Lucy had not been lying. In the warmly lit, desperately littered living room she waited for me, sitting in her accustomed chair with feet demurely together and hands clasped in her lap, as Margaret Bryan had taught us all, years ago, to sit when we were not dancing. The television flickered wildly, an old black-and-white movie with George Raft, soundless. Lucy wore the good, if too-big, blue wool dress she had for special occasions, a gift from Little Lady, who had probably gotten it at Saint Philip’s thrift store; its sheath skirt and short, collared jacket spoke forlornly of Jacqueline Kennedy and Camelot. She held a little envelope purse on her lap. A battered fiberglass suitcase sat on the floor beside her, closed and tagged. A whining, laboring electric fan was trained on her, but sweat still ran from her hairline and stood in beads on her collarbone. She wore short white cotton gloves, but her black hair was wild, a raven’s nest, and on her feet she wore soiled terry scuffs.

  Her legs were bare, and they were dappled with dark dried blood to the knee. More blood had dried in a swooping spatter across her cheek, and on one forearm. Above the rusty blood her blue eyes danced, danced. She dimpled, but did not speak. Her eyes swung from me across the room. My own eyes followed them with a monstrous, dragging effort.

  I could not even flinch at what I saw. I could not back away.

  Jack Venable lay on the spavined old sofa across the room from Lucy. He lay with his back to me, knees drawn up, facing in toward the stained back cushions of the sofa. I had seen him lie so many times, safely sunk in his long sleeps. He looked safe now, tidy and relaxed in rumpled khaki pants and a white shirt and just his yellowed old crew socks. His scuffed, thin loafers sat neatly side by side with their toes under the edge of the sofa, waiting for their owner to get up and shuffle them to bed.

  But Jack was not going to rise from this sleep. He seemed immaculate from where I stood, but the blood that had burst from the ruined temple had soaked through the cushion beneath it, and spilled in a thin stream down the sofa skirt onto the old, liver-colored rug, and puddled there, looking for all the world like black cherry Jell-O only half-congealed.

  I did not walk over to the sofa and look more closely at him. The utter whiteness of the skin of his neck and arms, and the pure, hopeless stillness of him, and the color and thickness of the blood told the minuscule part of my mind that stood outside the hot, howling wind what it must finally know: Jack Venable was dead, and had been for some time.

  I looked back at Lucy. In her lap, partly covered by the little debutante’s clutch purse, a blunt black gun lay, as ugly and shocking as a snake. She wasn’t lying about the gun, I thought dimly. She was right, all those years ago. He did have one.

  Lucy looked up at me archly, head cocked, and smiled.

  “Hey, Gibby,” she said.

  My knees unlocked then, and I slumped bonelessly to the floor at her dreadful feet, tailor-fashion. My heart was beating so slowly and thinly that I thought it must surely and simply stop. I was cold, cold, bone-cold, marrow-cold, despite the thick, malodorous heat in the room. An icy lump of nausea rose into my throat at the smell: a smell of burning, and liquor, and sweat, and the sour-sweet, sheared metal smell of turning blood. Something under the blood was too terrible even to register.

  I looked blindly into the rug for a while, seeing the tiny lunar desert of a cigarette burn, and the stain of some dark, old liquid. Then I said, in a voice that croaked and scrabbled in my throat, “Lucy, what is going to become of you now? What on earth will happen to you? I can’t fix this. This can’t be fixed. Who’s going to take care of you now?”

  She leaned down slightly and peered into my face, and smiled again, as if satisfied at what she saw there.

  “Why, you will, Gibby,” she said. “You can, too, fix it. You know you can. And Malory. Malory will come. My best boyfriend and our beautiful, beautiful daughter. You knew that, of course, didn’t you? That she was our daughter? Of course you did. We be of one blood, we three. So you both have to take care of me, you see. Call Malory, Gibby. Malory will come.”

  I looked up at the sweet, mad smile and realized that I had no idea whether or not she was lying about Malory, and would never know. Malory. Malory…Yes, Malory would come. Like a fierce, beautiful young hawk circling higher and higher in the thin, pure sunlight, only to heed, finally, the falconer’s cry and plummet in beauty and mortal peril straight into the snare, Malory would come.

  And me? I thought. Yes. As long as Lucy lives, God help me, I will come too. I will come.

  I saw us, far back in my ringing head, going on forever, the three of us, locked in a crazy troika of loss and blood and waste and madness. Forever. Forever…

  I rose to my knees as stiffly as an old, ill man, and took the gun from Lucy’s lap and pressed it into her hands. I closed them around it. They were rough and hot, even against the chill of the heavy steel. They trembled tinily, like the throat of a singing bird. I looked back into her face and she smiled at me again. It was a good child’s smile, sweet and simple. Above it her eyes shone, blue, blue, the extraordinary, light-drowned eyes of that doomed child who had stood in the foyer of the house on Peachtree Road, pinning my heart to my ribs with her very presence, and said in a voice like dark honey, “Something stinks.”

  “Stick it in your ear, Luce,” I said.

  She laughed, the old rich, bawdy, wonderful laugh.

  She put the dark gun to her ear, still laughing, her blue eyes spilling the healing light of redemption and benediction over me.

  “Pull the trigger,” I said.

  Lucy did.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Well, and so there we were again this afternoon, at Oakland. Just as Freddie had said. The aging Buckhead Boys and their girls, come once more to bury one of their own, though only nominally. This one had always walked outside us.

  I had an insane desire to rush up to someone and say, earnestly, “We simply have to stop meeting like this.” But the three people who would have liked that most, and laughed at it, were under this elegiac October earth now, not atop it with the diminished rest of us. Young Ben Cameron. Charlie. And now Lucy.

  Too rich a sowing, for an earth th
at would yield no harvest.

  I remembered the long-ago party in the grand new house out in the Chattahoochee Triangle, when the leathery, discontented Northern woman had asked me where she could find the real Old Atlanta, and I had said, only half jesting, “Oakland Cemetery.”

  Now, I supposed, we were Old Atlanta, we bewildered and disenfranchised Pinks and Jells of a Buckhead that was deader than Pompeii.

  And not a patch on the ones that went before us, I thought again, as I had at my father’s funeral here.

  I was almost the last one left in the cemetery. Malory, ravaged and mute, had been helped back into the Spring Hill limousine with Peter Dallett’s steady brown hand at her back, and would be waiting for me at the Peachtree Road house before flying back to Maine and whatever life awaited her there. She was, of course, devastated; terribly, terribly wounded. I felt her wounds bitterly in my own flesh and heart, atop my own. But it was, I knew, a devastation that had an ending to it. That other wreckage would have been without limit and without end. She could heal, and when she did, Malory Bondurant Venable would be free. Whether she would ever come home to Atlanta did not, somehow, matter to me now. I felt, as deeply as I could feel anything, that she would, in some way and at some time, be a part of this unimaginable city which was no longer a part of me, but I could not justify the feeling, and was content not to probe it. I wished I could have felt sorrier, for all of us, and for everything.

  “I’m sorry, Mal,” my mouth whispered, but my heart was not sorry. I felt very little on this day but emptiness and a great, poised, focused waiting. I could not have said what it was that I waited for.

  Old Willa Bondurant, trailing her cherished Little Lady like a Pekingese, stopped before me and gave me a sly, hooded snake’s look, the look, of an ancient enemy. I knew she no longer remembered the day in the foyer of 2500 when I told her to move her things out of the attic and into my dead mother’s room, and she had wept with deliverance. She could not have afforded that memory.