“It wasn’t because I was afraid of her, Thayer,” Grand said, reaching up to trace my face with her forefinger. “I’ve never seen the day that I couldn’t handle your mother six ways to Sunday. No, I did it for you. Believe it or not, Lytton is a much… sweeter place to grow up than the Northwest of Atlanta; at least as it was in those days.”
“But I wasn’t even born yet. How’d you know there would even be me?”
“I knew,” she said very softly. “I always knew there’d be you.”
Somehow, I always believed that she did know. I didn’t believe that of anyone else, though. I was born nine years after my older sister, Lily—the afterthought baby, the accidental child. Not that anyone ever called me those things, but I overheard my mother’s fluting laughter more than once, at this bridge game or that dinner party: “Oh, Thayer, my little wild child. We’d resigned ourselves to the fact that Lily would be an only, and then, poof! Here she comes, our little redheaded caboose. Didn’t even look like any of us; Finch used to tease me about the mailman. I was planning Lily’s wedding before Thayer even needed a bra.”
And she would ruffle my carroty hair and laugh, so that everyone would know it was our little joke. I learned to laugh, too, a dreadful, false little trill as much like my mother’s lilt as I could manage.
It did not occur to me until much later that being the family joke was not really anything to aspire to. It got you fond laughter but little else.
My father didn’t think I was a joke. My earliest memories are of him walking around the house or the garden with me in his arms and later riding piggyback on his shoulders, choking by then in a miasma of makeup and perfume and wet stockings and slips hanging corpselike on shower and towel rails, his naturally soft voice drowned under dinner-table talk of boys and dates and clothes and the shalts and shalt-nots of burgeoning genteel womanhood. I knew that he meant it when he said, “Come on, Red. Let’s get some fresh air and spit tobacco and tell lies.”
“You’ll be sorry when she grows up thinking she’s a boy!” Mother would call after us.
“Not in a million years!” my father would toss back. “This one’s going to leave them all in the shade.”
“Yeah, like that’s going to happen!” I heard Lily call after us once.
“What does she mean?” I asked my father, reaching up from my perch on his shoulders to snatch a chinaberry off the tree in our garden.
“She means she doesn’t want you to turn out prettier than she is,” Daddy said. “Think she’s scared you will.”
I could not get my mind around this. Nobody could be prettier than my mother and my older sister; everybody knew that. People called them the Wentworth girls, and indeed, they did seem of a piece, silkily blond and gentian eyed, with incredible complexions. In those days of “laying out” slathered with a mixture of baby oil and iodine, my mother and sister never let the sun fall on their faces if they could help it. Their skins were the translucent milkiness of Wedgwood or Crown Derby. My own face was, almost from the beginning, dusted with freckles. My hair burned in the sun like a supernova. My eyes were not blue but the amber of sea glass.
“Your grandmother Wentworth’s eyes,” my father would tell me. “Hair, too, before hers got the gray in it. In fact, you look almost exactly like the photos I’ve seen of her when she was your age.”
“That’s good, isn’t it?” I said. I did not see a lot of my grandmother Wentworth in those days. She spent a great deal of time traveling abroad, usually alone, to places with names like songs and poetry to me… Samarkand. Galapagos. Sri Lanka. Dubrovnik.
“Outrageous!” My mother sniffed. “What on earth do people think of her?”
“That she’s rich enough to do what she damn well pleases,” my father replied once, weary of it all. “And I very much doubt that she is alone, usually.”
“That’s just what I mean,” Mother said, but scarcely loud enough to be heard. My father would brook no complaints about his mother.
“Oh yes, that’s good,” he said to me that day in the garden. “That’s the best. Your grandmother is a great beauty. Always has been.”
“I thought that was Mama.”
“Your mama’s very pretty. It’s not the same thing.”
“You think that’s why she doesn’t like me?” I said. “Because I look like Grand? I don’t think she likes Grand very much.”
He swung me down and we sat together on the stone bench that overlooked the fishpond. It flashed with fat orange shapes, some black speckled. My mother called them koi. My father called them goldfish.
“Your mother loves you,” he said into my hair as I squirmed on his lap. “Don’t ever think she doesn’t. It’s just that she’s more tied up with Lily right now because Lily’s at an age when it’s really important to get things right. You don’t need that kind of fussing over. You’re a pretty easy little customer to deal with.”
“What would happen if Lily didn’t get things right?”
“God knows. She might run off and join the circus.”
“Cool! We could all get in free!”
He laughed.
“So we could, my funny valentine, but I don’t think that’s what your mother has in mind for her. Best we just go on our way rejoicing and leave them to it.”
“Okay.” I shrugged. “But if I look like Grand I don’t think Mama will like that much. She thinks Grand looks like one of those women Pisossa painted, all neck and eyes. I heard her tell Mrs. Etheridge that.”
He laughed again. “She does, does she? Well, in that case, you’ll be a raving beauty. His women are famous all over the world. It’s Picasso, by the way.”
After that, none of my mother’s carelessly chirped little darts hurt me. I looked like my grandmother Wentworth, and she looked like a lady this Picasso painted. We were famous all over the world.
There are maybe ten small towns and communities orbiting Atlanta like dwarf moons. Most of them are close enough to the city to lie, figuratively, under its canopy, like fruit dropped from a great tree. Since their settling, many of them have had a love-hate relationship with the city, insisting on their own uniqueness and autonomy but fed by the life force of the mother tree. If you could have bitten into one of them, like an apple, I think you would have tasted first Atlanta. But few Lytton dwellers ever admitted to wishing they lived in Atlanta instead.
“Too big, too loud, too smelly,” went the litany of my acquaintances. “Either Yankee tackpots or too good to piss in the same pot as anybody else. I wouldn’t live there for a million dollars. Lytton has everything you could ever want, without the traffic.”
Fully half of them shopped weekly in Atlanta, though, and sometimes more often. Dressed defiantly in their Sunday best, gloved, hatted, and handbagged, they surged into the city in waves, on Greyhound buses and in newly washed family sedans. A few of the Lytton men who were not merchants or farmers or makers or repairers of objects worked there. A scattering of lawyers, a big-town banker or two, airline personnel, toilers in the huge industries that besmirched the municipal skies with smoke and stink. But my father was the only Atlanta native I ever knew who chose to leave it and live and work in Lytton.
The Alexander Hamilton Academy, a well-endowed and -regarded boys’ preparatory school on Lytton’s northern outskirts, drew students from all over the South. The school was known to have been founded by an eccentric Atlanta millionaire who believed that the bucolic drowsiness of a small town would be the best atmosphere for learning, unfettered as it was by such distracting amenities as movie theaters, soda shops, or gaming establishments. Most students boarded, and undoubtedly would have mutinied and fled in droves except that the educations they received were first-rate.
To a man—or boy—they howled at the lack of recreational amenities, but most went on to colleges of their choice, and so, in turn, they sent their scowling sons there.
Lytton boys did not attend Hamilton Academy. Not that there were none qualified; a few would have done well. But the sch
ool was still owned by the family of the founding millionaire, and the curse of Atlanta still hovered over it. Lytton High had been good enough for generations of Lyttoners, and it was good enough, by God, for their sons. Or maybe that nice military school down in Newnan that was said to be stricter than the army itself.
How many Lytton boys might have found their futures smothered and shaped by Hamilton Academy will never be known.
I still wonder if any of the other Atlanta satellite towns could possibly have had the sheer animus toward it that Lytton pumped out. After all these years I still don’t understand. But it did not surprise me that none of Hamilton’s faculty lived in Lytton; no rental opportunities were ever offered them. I imagine most of them figured they were well out of Lytton, anyway.
And then came my father.
It was his great-grandfather, known to his associates to be crazier than batshit, who had founded the academy, and the family down to and including Finch’s mother and father had kept it viable, not as much for fun as for profit. Hamilton added a nice heft to the bag of profitable endeavors that the enterprising Wentworth men had cobbled together. By the time young Finch Wentworth, the only son of his generation, graduated from Princeton, the Wentworth clan was coining money and living at the top of Atlanta’s scanty social heap, on Habersham Road. Finch, who had studied history at Princeton and wanted only to teach it, was a natural for Hamilton, not only for a faculty position but also as incumbent owner of the school.
He had been teaching for scarcely two weeks, living at home on Habersham Road and beginning to think he should be nearer to Hamilton, both in fact and spirit, when he walked into my grandfather Thayer’s drugstore on Lytton’s main street and asked to see the owner. My grandfather Owen sauntered out from behind the drug window and asked what he could do to help him.
My mother, Crystal, sampling colognes behind the gift counter, sauntered out to see who this tall stranger might be.
My father saw my mother and forgot what he had come for.
“I think I need some Band-Aids,” he said, still looking at Crystal Thayer. In the soft artificial lighting of the gift department, smelling of My Sin, she burned on his retinas like a solar flare.
Recognizing the symptoms of his affliction—for she was by then almost MGM pretty—she smiled at him and faded back behind the counter. But she kept her ears open. Not too many tall, well-dressed strangers walked into her father’s drugstore.
My father jerked his head back around at my grandfather Thayer, waiting politely beside him, and stammered, “… Uh, uh—Oh! And some iodine and Mercurochrome, too, and aspirin, and a whole bunch of first-aid stuff, and soap and things like that, and I guess vitamins and cotton swabs… lots of those…”
My grandfather lifted his eyebrows.
“I’m buying them for the school,” my father said. “For Hamilton Academy. I guess I’ll be buying a good bit of stuff in bulk every month. Maybe I should open an account….”
“And your relationship to the school would be…?” my grandfather said a trifle coolly. This addled young man could be setting up a field hospital for terrorists, for all he knew.
“Well,” my father said, “I guess I own it. Or at least my family does. And I teach history there. Finch Wentworth,” he added hastily, putting his hand out.
“Owen Thayer,” my grandfather said, taking it.
My mother came out from behind her counter and wafted up beside her father.
“I’m Crystal Thayer,” she said, cocking her head winsomely up at my father. Her silvery hair swung over her cheek like a bell.
“You’re from Atlanta, aren’t you?”
“Ah… yeah,” he said. “But I’m thinking I really ought to find a place here, you know, with the school here and everything.”
“Well.” She dimpled. “That shouldn’t be any problem, should it, Daddy?”
“I don’t know of any places right off, honey,” Dr. Thayer said, “but I suppose I could look around….”
“Oh, shoot, Daddy, I can think of one place right off. You know our garage apartment’s just been sitting here since Memaw died. You were saying just the other day we ought to do something with it.”
“Well, you know, your mother…”
“I’ll talk to Mama.”
My grandfather went back behind his window to start gathering up my father’s supplies. He knew a done deal when he heard one.
CHAPTER 2
Even now, with all that has passed between and around us, I sometimes think that I am not entirely fair to my mother. Is any daughter, ever? What girl child can ever see the woman who bore her whole? The mask of mother is a totality; there are no fissures in it where the vast complexity of otherness can show through. I think comprehension can come later, on both sides, if both mother and daughter are willing to do the work. I never was. I think I simply grew too comfortable with the role of victim—dependent on it, really. It defined me so early that I never had to search for a legitimate self until much later.
But my mother was never simply a victimizer; she was a wife, a lover, and a mother in the best sense of the words, as well as the worst, a daughter and a dreamer, a yearner. Oh, a great, great yearner. As a larva might, if such things were possible, yearn for the completion of butterfly wings and endless nectar, my mother yearned for the perfect complexion and habitat for her specialness.
No one had ever told her that she was not special; from the time she could understand words, her mother told her of her beauty, her gifts, her talents, her destiny. She was to be, though I doubt if my grandmother ever came right out and said it, all that plain, frail little Leona Brumby was not and never had been. My grandmother Leona was in one respect a very tough cookie. I think she could have bent silver spoons if it had been her will. That will got her a handsome, wellborn druggist husband and one of Lytton’s more substantial homes. And as for all the other things… the looks, the vitality, the promise… she would have them. She knew this. If not for herself, through this last, porcelain daughter.
Like my father, my mother was a late-born child. Her clamorous older sisters were away at school or, in one case, married, so there was no competition for Crystal Thayer’s throne. She had childhood virtually to herself.
Leona Thayer was by then often bedridden with the frightening spells that left her white and gasping and kept Owen Thayer’s worried attention constantly upon her. The son of a physician, he adored medicine and he would have studied it himself if his IQ had matched his father’s. The drugstore was the next best thing, and fussing over Leona came as naturally to him as breathing. No doctor had ever seemed to diagnose her debilitating spells with any degree of certainty, but there could be no doubt that Leona Thayer was chronically and gravely afflicted. Most of Lytton thought she was lucky to have a handsome, attentive husband, a beautiful youngest child, and free medicine all her life. And everyone said how sweet that pretty child was to her mother, not going away to school as her sisters had done but staying close to her mother’s side. Crystal often politely refused invitations with a shy smile.
“I promised Mama I’d read to her this afternoon,” she would say. “We’re reading Wind in the Willows. Mama’s Ratty and I’m being Mole.”
By the time she was grammar-school age her bewitched father had offered boarding schools in six states, but Crystal refused to leave her mother.
“There’s plenty of time for that later, Daddy,” she would say tremulously, the “later” tolling like a funeral bell with import. And Owen Thayer would hug her with tears in his eyes. He knew that his wife would not live a great deal longer, even if he was not and never would be quite sure what it was she died from.
“You’re our special angel,” he would say to his daughter. The special angel would hug him back and go, sighing audibly, back to her classes at the little Lytton school. The truth was, she loved being head cheerleader, homecoming queen, best all-around everything, booked up months ahead for every dance, and being courted by every eligible young man in the
area. Achieving all this in Lytton was a cakewalk. She was not entirely sure how she might have fared elsewhere.
She knew where elsewhere would be, though.
“Atlanta,” Leona would say to her over and over. “Atlanta was just made for you. You could have the richest husband and the biggest house in town. The Piedmont Driving Club, that’s where you belong. You can have it all without lifting a finger; you just wait and see. It won’t be too long now.”
Both Thayer women would allow tears to stand in their eyes for a moment. Both knew what Leona meant.
“What’s the Piedmont Driving Club, Mama?” Crystal had asked early on. “What do they drive?”
“It’s one of the fanciest private clubs in the world,” her mother assured her. “Everybody who’s anybody in Atlanta belongs to it. They don’t drive anything; it’s just an old-fashioned name. But there’s no other club like it.”
Leona Thayer had never been inside the sacred walls of the Piedmont Driving Club, but she had read the Atlanta Journal and Constitution society pages until she memorized them, every day.
And because she heard the litany so often and there was no one to disabuse her of it, the Piedmont Driving Club shone in Crystal’s not-too-capacious mind like the names of Paris, London, and Monte Carlo by the time she was in her teens. She also knew the names of the streets she would choose from to have her showplace of a home, and even the family names of some of the young men she might, with impunity, consider marriageable.
She did not recall at the time she met Finch Wentworth in her father’s store if his had been among the names, but she knew with her infallible butterfly antennae that this was what she had been bred and groomed for. The white satin knot was tied before the first feathering of My Sin smote my father’s nostrils.
He did indeed, without much coaching, rent the apartment over the garage where Crystal’s grandmother Thayer had lived. It seemed an arrangement made in heaven. For him my grandmother Leona rallied herself and wore crisp cottons and kitten heels and cologne, though never My Sin. She had her hair done and her nails lacquered pale rose at Ginger’s Beauty Nook, and hung on to my father’s every syllable with a murmuring interest Crystal had never seen before. In fact, she had never seen this woman before at any time. She could see now exactly why her father had married Leona Brumby; she had always wondered.
Burnt Mountain Page 2
