“I’m a tough old bird, wouldn’t you say, Shep?” she said, in her hard-won, genteel drawl. “I’m a survivor. I survived Jim Bondurant, and I’ve survived two of his three children. God knows it’s a terrible thing to be old and lose your looks”—and she patted her lacquered steel-blue hair with the air of one who knows she has kept most of them—“but you can at least take your revenge by outliving everybody.”
Something in me, which I had thought long dead, stirred and went into a cold, still crouch.
“How did you know Uncle Jim was dead?” I said. I thought my voice was even and pleasant, but she knew what it sprang from. The basilisk’s smile deepened. Old dimples yawned crazily.
“Because he wrote to Lucy for ages,” she said with a dreadful arch, conspiratorial lift to her brows. “Ever since she was nine or ten. It went on for years. Of course, I burned the letters. I’d never have let that animal touch my girl in any way. But he kept sending them, the filthy things, and so I finally wrote and told him to stop or I’d have the law on him for desertion, and the letter came back from his last address stamped ‘Deceased.’”
I simply looked at her. Speech was impossible. Burned them. She had burned them. Burned them, the letters that might have saved Lucy. Who was to say? There might have been, in those long-awaited words, some deliverance, something that could have fed that monstrous hunger, opened and cleansed that hard bud of madness….
Oh yes. We make our own monsters, but they inevitably have their revenge.
I looked after her retreating figure. She turned and smiled again at me, a bizarre old Junior Leaguer in her simple black dress and her pearls and her “little heels,” back to her bridge luncheons at the Driving Club and her pills and her internists and her charities. She was as old and soulless and simple as a Galapagos turtle, there in the waning sunlight, but she looked at that moment younger than the raddled daughter she had just buried.
I knew that she would go back now to the cool, quiet, gracious old house on Peachtree Road—where she, the pretender, had reigned for so long—for the rarely taken cigarette and the thin crystal glass of good sherry served by her elegant mulatto, and the comfort of old women like her. Alive.
Alive.
I turned and followed her back to the line of cars parked on the narrow brick road. When I reached the Rolls, Carter and Little Lady had driven away. I was the last one to leave Oakland.
When I reached the house I left the car in the driveway, door ajar, and went straight to the telephone in the summerhouse and dialed Carter Rawson. For once he answered himself.
“Carter?” I said. “Listen. I’ve changed my mind about the house. Call Marty Fox tomorrow and give him your best offer. It better be a goddamned good one. There won’t be any problem with the zoning.”
And I hung up before he could answer.
I dialed the mayor’s office at City Hall. When Glenn Pickens’s secretary said he was in a meeting and would be glad to call me back, I said, “Just tell him Mr. Bondurant said the debt’s been paid in full and to cancel it.”
She repeated it back to me, carefully.
“Is that all?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said. “That’s all.”
“Willa,” I said aloud into the still, sunny air of the summerhouse, “stick it in your ear.”
By seven-thirty that evening I stood at the railing of the old iron bridge over the Chattahoochee River where, thirty years ago, Lucy had shouted my shame across a spring sky before the assembled Pinks and Jells of Atlanta. The Rolls was parked on the weedy apron at the approach to the bridge. There was no traffic on the old road, and the hot silence was complete except for the chorus of cicadas in the fringe of trees along the river, and the sturdy chuckle of the slow brown water far below. It seemed to me very hot and still, and no time at all.
Through the bubble of suspended silence that had wrapped me for the past two days I was suddenly aware of the low slanting sun on my head and face, and the little twilight breeze which had sprung up off the water. It was soft on my arms and chest and face, though the sharp bones of winter lay just below the surface. I wore jogging shorts and no shirt, and was barefoot, for I was going on a very long journey, and I wanted nothing about me to snag upon the wind of my leaving. I was neither happy nor unhappy, only profoundly aware that I and the world around me were totally stopped and still, frozen on some great axis, and that I did not know or care if either I or it would start forward again. The pale blue arch of the evening sky was reflected perfectly and wholly in the water far below me, just as it had been on that spring day so long ago. The old willows still trailed on its surface, yellow now.
I stood for a while, thinking of nothing at all, and then climbed up onto the railing and looked down at the water. It had been a wet summer and the river was high and running full, but that was down deep; the skin of it was silken and whole. As it had on that other day, the sky wheeled sickly above and below me, and I closed my eyes against the vertigo. From far below and out of time I heard, distinctly, Lucy’s silvery, jeering voice: “Come on, Gibby, jump, or we’ll think you’re a North Fulton fruitcake! Come on! Mark my trai-i-i-l!”
Opening my eyes to slits, I saw below on the willow bank the gleam of white flesh, and the fine shape, under wet black hair, of narrow, beautiful skull. The very air shivered with her vivid aliveness.
I threw back my head and cupped my mouth with my hands and shouted into the wheeling blue emptiness: “Lucy! Lucy Bondurant! Are you listening? Lucy…mark my trai-i-i-l!”
Only silence answered. She had gone, leaving to me the emptiness of willows and river. Empty, empty…My knees sagged, and the hopeless nausea rose in my throat.
And then another voice also, from far below me, came riding out of our childhood on the little evening wind.
“Shep Bondurant! I mark your trail!”
I snapped my head down, space swooping around me.
Sarah Cameron Gentry stood below on the weedy approach to the bridge, her little blue Dodge parked hard beside the Rolls, her red scarf and black hair blowing on the wind. Her cupped hand shielded her eyes from the dazzle of evening light, and even from that distance I could see that she was laughing.
An enormous lightness seized me. Gladness started up in my chest like a lark in the meadow at Tate. The world jerked, shifted, flowed forward again like flood water. The wheeling space around me bellowed joy. I lifted one fist straight up and out in the old black power salute and, borne up on a great gust of laughter, dived into the sky.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The fruits of many lives, minds and hearts went into the making of this book, and I am profoundly indebted to each one. The authors of more books, newspaper and magazine articles than I can count deserve—and have—my gratitude, and the support and forbearance of more friends than I knew I had have kept the essential fires burning.
Special thanks are due to the dedicated and tireless staff of the Atlanta Historical Society, and to the many generous friends who shared their stories of Atlanta lore with me, especially Ham Stockton, David LeBey, Dick Williams, Betsy Fancher, Patsy Dickey and Marty Yarbrough;
And to Emily and Joe Cumming, who shared the magic of Tate colony and the richness of their lives; Emily’s story of the deer’s leap is, I think, a special point of light in these pages;
And to Alex Sanders, whose extraordinary anecdotes have been shamelessly purloined, as have the lifelong memories of my incomparable typist and dear friend, Martha Gray;
And to my beautiful friend Virginia Schneider, gone now, who showed me what Atlanta could be at its best;
And to my husband, Heyward, who knew this book would happen and never let me forget it;
And to my agent and editor, Ginger Barber and Larry Ashmead, who helped it happen at each step along the way.
And finally, and with love and gratitude, to my friend Pat Conroy, who, on an autumn Saturday two years ago, made me see that it could happen…and should.
Thanks, guys. I love you all.
>
—Anne Rivers Siddons
February 1, 1988
Atlanta
CRITICAL ACCLAIM FOR
ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS
AND
PEACHTREE ROAD
“Anne Rivers Siddons establishes herself in the front ranks of Southern writers…. While there are hints of Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams…Siddons is her own woman in this absorbing tale.”
Los Angeles Times Book Review
“One doesn’t read Anne Rivers Siddons’s books, one dwells in them.”
Chicago Tribune
“A sweeping chronicle of wealthy Atlanta gentry ruined by their privileged destinies.”
New York Times Book Review
“A brilliant novel with richly Southern themes of change and lost love. It pulsates with its vital portrayal of a Southern city in transition and the universal sadness of love left behind.”
Richmond Times-Dispatch
“A true work of art…. Moving and powerful…. To finally come to the end of a novel of the sheer power and magnificence of Peachtree Road is like leaving a small portion of your life behind.”
Asheville Citizen-Times
“A blockbuster of a novel…. Peachtree Road is the meaty and absorbing story of a city turned on to power and of the privileged inhabitants who led it to its current station as a mecca of business, culture, and progress…. To say this book is potent and commanding does not come close to doing it justice. More than merely powerful, it is mesmerizing, enthralling, and totally unforgettable.”
Chattanooga News-Free Press
“Like Faulkner and Conroy, the author cannily manipulates the reader, unfurling familial horrors with just the right degree of psychic tension….Peachtree Road tantalizes its way to triumphs.”
Miami Herald
“Siddons masterfully uses the story of Lucy, Shep, and their generation to present a richly detailed portrait of an Atlanta in transition, lurching towards uncertainty, then speeding rapidly towards its position as capital of the Southeast.”
Dallas Morning News
“Peachtree Road is love story, history, mystery, and tragedy. As in all her novels, Ms. Siddons’s characters develop, grow, and change for the best and worst.”
Baltimore Sun
“Filled with interesting people, a wonderful plot, and a grand sweep of history.”
Detroit Free Press
“Excellent…. Scarlett O’Hara’s ‘tomorrow’ has come to the South and Anne Rivers Siddons has written the quintessential account of its arrival in Atlanta…. An intricate blend of truth and imagination…. Siddons takes her story beyond child[ish] loss of innocence to mid-life intransigency with wonderful, lyrical prose that sweeps and sings and soars.”
Publishers Weekly
“Peachtree Road chronicles the death not only of an individual but of a way of life…. Siddons’s style, like that of Pat Conroy…is lush and full…. The novel is peopled with complex characters in an absorbing tale that will hold readers’ interest.”
Kansas City Sun
“Siddons’s way of delving into a character’s psyche is deeply satisfying.”
Denver Post
“Much of the power of Peachtree Road rests on Siddons’s understanding of the South, both its good and bad sides…. She is a fine writer, and her prose here is lush and evocative as she depicts a city in transition and the sometimes-crippling effects of change on the very people who were its instigators.”
Macon Telegraph & News
“A vastly interesting, entertaining chronicle of life, love, and hate in the not-too-Old South. It has good depth of meaning in the intertwined lives of its characters.”
Grand Rapids Press
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS’s bestselling novels include Nora, Nora; Low Country; Up Island; Fault Lines; Downtown; Hill Towns; Colony; Outer Banks; King’s Oak; Peachtree Road; Homeplace; Fox’s Earth; The House Next Door; and Heartbreak Hotel. She is also the author of a work of nonfiction, John Chancellor Makes Me Cry. She lives in Charleston, South Carolina.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors
Books by Anne Rivers Siddons
Homeplace
Peachtree Road
King's Oak
Outer Banks
Colony
Hill Towns
Downtown
Fault Lines
Up Island
Low Country
"Nora, Nora"
Islands
Sweetwater Creek
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
PEACHTREE ROAD. Copyright ©1988 by Anne Rivers Siddons. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © November 2005 ISBN: 9780061847158
20 19 18 17
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Peachtree Road Page 79
