For Finch Wentworth, my grandfather lit up like a harvest moon and told seemingly endless stories of his own boyhood in Lytton, and took him duck hunting in the rich swamp of the Chattahoochee River where it cut in close around Lytton on its way to join the sea. I could never imagine my father hunting anything, but I know that he went. For him my grandmother’s cook, Bermuda, set dinners upon the mahogany dining room table that he still talked of when I was a child. No more meals at the yellow breakfast room table. Mahogany and starched linen for this young man.
For him my mother untied her pale hair from its ponytail and let it brush her shoulders. And doubled up on My Sin and shone like a pearl. It was all she had to do.
Finch Wentworth took her home to Buckhead to meet his parents before that quarter at Hamilton Academy was a month old. He may not have been able to read his future in that jewel-like October afternoon around his parents’ pool, but Caroline Wentworth did.
“I knew the minute she walked in that she was going to be my daughter-in-law,” Grand told me while I was still small.
“Were you excited?” I asked.
“Oh yes.” She smiled, putting on her sunglasses so I could not see the slanted amber eyes. “I was very excited.”
Whatever else she felt she never told me, but later I came to see that evening in Fellini-like detail. I did not know how, but I knew I was right. I’ve never had cause to doubt that.
My mother wore her black silk sheath, matchstick slim, that bared her golden shoulders, and her mother’s pearls around her neck. She had black high-heeled silk pumps to match, and a slim black satin clutch dotted with rhinestones. My grandfather took a picture of them as they got into my father’s modest blue Plymouth to leave for Atlanta. Daddy looks like just what he was: a tall, gangly young man in gray slacks and a blue blazer, his nice Coca Cola-ad face tilted down to my mother, beaming. My mother looked like a Vogue model out for a shimmering evening at the Pierre or the Carlyle.
My grandmother Leona had taken her daughter on many excursions to Atlanta, to shop at Rich’s and J.P. Allen and to drive the length of Peachtree Road, out to where it lost itself in the tangle of Buckhead. There were many fine and even palatial homes to see along its length, but they had never turned left off Peachtree and onto Peachtree Battle Avenue and the warren of quiet, curving, deep-forested streets that made up what Atlantans called, simply, the Northwest. I imagine my mother’s chatter slowing and finally stopping as Finch Wentworth turned the car onto Habersham Road and drove slowly up it.
Habersham, of all the golden streets in the Northwest, still shines brightest. It is a beautiful road, winding, swooping up small hills and down over little bridges, arched over with magnificent old hardwoods that have been fed and pruned almost since their birth. Deep emerald lawns sweep far back to large houses set like jewels into perfect flowering shrubbery and vibrant borders. More huge trees mass gracefully beside and behind them, spilling not a leaf anywhere and hiding, but hinting at, magnificent gardens and pools and who-knows-what-else… statuary, fountains, gazebos, guesthouses… all pristine and camera ready. There is nothing raw or raucous or ragged in the Northwest.
My father parked on the circular drive before the big gray stone house and carefully decanted my gaping mother.
“Everybody’s out back,” he said. “Let’s cut through the house.”
“Everybody?” squeaked my mother.
“Well, some friends of mine and I think Mom and Dad’s, too,” he said. “Everybody wants to meet you.”
“How nice,” Crystal said. It came out in a sheeplike bleat.
He took her hand and led her up the curved marble steps. The carved mahogany doors were closed but opened silently as he turned the knob. It flitted foolishly through Crystal’s head that she would never leave these doors unlocked if they were hers. She looked up and saw an ivy-covered turret with deep shuttered windows on either side of the house, decided then and there she would sleep in one of the rooms one day, and followed Finch into the cool dimness.
She could scarcely see but got the impression of a vast drawing room with dark, gleaming furniture; a silvery-green papered dining room with the largest oval table she had ever seen, shining like a skating pond, and two great cabinets holding intricate crystal and china in patterns that reminded her vaguely of the Renaissance; an enormous kitchen, all blinding white and as clean as an operating theater. The entire house had an indefinable smell, one she had never smelled but would never forget: rich, deep wood polish, the museum-like scent of old and very good fabric, a diffuse sweetness like the breath of flowers, and something else… money?
“Hi, Corella,” Finch said to the smiling black woman at the stove, who wore the only honest-to-God maid’s uniform Crystal had ever seen, complete with little frilled cap.
“This is Crystal; you be sweet to her. She’s special,” Finch said.
“She sho’ is,” Corella said. “Tell that by lookin’ at her. You mama ‘n’ them are out by the pool.”
Crystal put out her hand and the black woman took it slowly, looking down at their joined hands, then back up with a wide smile.
“It’s nice to meet you,” Crystal trilled, realizing by Corella’s look and Finch’s small pause that one apparently did not shake hands with the help in Buckhead.
They stepped out onto a large, cool back porch carpeted with a faded Kilim and set about with flowered, deep-cushioned wicker sofas and chairs. Great bouquets of garden flowers and foliage—zinnias, asters, sunflowers, chrysanthemums, eucalyptus stems, feathery grasses—sat on the low glass tables. Small, shapely potted trees gave the porch the appearance of being nestled into an intimate forest. A ceiling fan turned lazily. Beyond the porch, down another flight of steps, lay the garden… and the pool, and the fountains, and the statuary and gazebo, and the guesthouse. It was the largest garden Crystal had ever seen outside House Beautiful. The sounds of splashing water and tinkling ice and low, amused conversation floated up to her. When it stopped, she knew that they had seen her.
There were perhaps ten of them: a striking woman sitting under an umbrella who looked nothing like Finch but was nevertheless undoubtedly his mother; a squat, dark man with a thick mat of wet hair over almost every inch of him, with a face like Julius Caesar’s and wet bathing trunks, who had Finch’s dark hair and profile and was, of course, his father; another couple of adults, deeply tanned and in swimsuits with half-filled glasses of something lime garnished; two tall, bronzed young men with crew cuts, also in tartan and madras swimsuits; and four girls with perfect white smiles, glowing tans, and little makeup, in swimsuits or sundresses. Every foot in the group was bare or sandaled. Most hair was wet and slicked simply back.
Every inch of Crystal felt as though she had had hot, shining black tar poured over her. The silk shoes seemed to have been suddenly magnified to Clydesdale proportions. She was able to furtively toss the flossy clutch into a potted ficus tree beside the back door, but otherwise there was no salvation at all for Crystal Thayer, come to be presented to the world of Habersham Road and the Piedmont Driving Club looking, as Bermuda would have said, like a mule dressed up in buggy harness.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” she hissed at Finch, who had taken her arm preparatory to leading her down into the fatal garden.
“Tell you what?” he asked, mystified.
But his friends were streaming up the stairs to meet them and she did not reply. She herself did not know quite what she meant, only that her otherness was bone-deep and ineradicable, and always would be no matter what she wore.
They were wonderful to her. Never by so much as a raised eyebrow or the faltering of a smile did they let their condescension show. But Crystal heard it in every drawled syllable, saw it in every attentively cocked head. Perhaps it was not even there, but by the time the evening was over it did not matter. Hatred and a determination of a degree she had never known had been born in her breast. It did not truly die for as long as she lived.
“You’re just as pretty
as Finch told us,” Caroline Wentworth said, hugging her lightly. Caroline’s skin against Crystal’s cheek was sun warmed and satiny, and she smelled of sun oil and tuberoses, and her amber eyes swallowed you whole. Her body, in a faded copper racing suit, was small and curved and neatly muscled. Crystal had never seen a muscular woman in her life. If a Lytton girl was so unfortunate as to have chiseled shoulders, she covered them no matter where she was. There was a vivid white scar like a lightning bolt that ran down Caroline’s polished calf; she did not seem to notice it.
The imperial-faced, frog-bodied man who was indeed Finch’s father hugged Crystal, too, a trifle too long and hard, and said, “No wonder that boy didn’t let you wear a bathing suit. You’d cause a riot.”
Crystal went hot all over, at both his frank appraisal of her body and what she wore on it. The lack of respect was like a pinch on a buttock. She could not imagine her father saying it to anyone, most certainly the person his child was in love with. She could not imagine anyone saying it, for that matter, except maybe Sonny Prichard and his crowd in Lytton, who hung around Buddy Slattery’s gas station and only dated girls from other towns, and only certain kinds of girls at that.
She darted a look at Finch, to see if he was going to defend her honor, but he only laughed, and the rest of the crowd did, too.
“Don’t mind Finch’s horrible father,” Caroline Wentworth said, raising her beautiful coppery eyebrows and flicking her husband lightly with the corner of a towel. “His testosterone level is sky-high. He’s been on the road too long.”
Everyone laughed again, so Crystal did, too. The dialogue might have come straight from a Cary Grant movie. No, not Cary Grant. Steve McQueen, maybe. Nobody in Lytton…
They ate at a long table under two vast umbrellas beside the pool. It was laid with a vividly colored runner Caroline Wentworth said was a tribal scarf from Morocco. Tiny white lights fringing the umbrella sparkled off heavy, square crystal tumblers and the heaviest and most ornate silver Crystal had ever seen. Japanese lanterns glowed from the low branches of the nearest trees, and the candles were set about everywhere. It was a lush blue velvet night and the mothy, warm darkness was fragrant with the thick scent of ivory magnolias in a bowl at the table’s center.
“Ron at Quelques Fleurs got them for me,” Finch’s mother said. “God knows where this time of year. But the garden at night has a kind of Moorish feel to it, I’ve always thought, and that thick, waxy smell always seems to me sort of exotic and Oriental. Besides, it covers up the bug spray. Wouldn’t you think the damned mosquitoes would be gone by now?”
The evening did seem out of the world entirely to Crystal. Shawls and soft sweaters had come out to bloom over the women’s shoulders, and the men had drawn polo shirts over their swimsuits. There was absolutely no sound besides the gentle lap of the pool and fountains and the droning of cicadas and the talk. Not a single street noise penetrated into the enchanted duskiness behind the house. There was not even the chink of silver on fine china. The perfectly broiled filets in mustard sauce Corella passed around were served on paper plates.
“Nobody but you, darling,” said one of the older women to Caroline.
“Well, it’s just a little backyard cookout, after all,” she replied.
The evening seemed endless to Crystal, stopped in time. Swimming in candlelight. She sat near one end of the table, with Finch opposite his mother at the far other one. His friends were grouped around them. They drank what looked to be endless glasses of a pale green wine, and leaned in to talk to one another so that the candles underlit their sun-flushed faces, and laughed, and chatted, and laughed some more. Crystal smiled brilliantly the entire evening. None of the talk seemed to be about her.
Oh, they tried. She could see them remembering, breaking off in mid-warble and turning to her and saying something like, “Are your men in Lytton as awful as they are here? Well, of course they are. All men are awful.”
And Crystal smiled.
All of them were, like Finch, out of college and into their lives. Crystal caught mention of bond sales and law clerking and volunteering at the Junior League. But all the talk seemed to center on schools.
“Do you remember him from freshman year? He told everybody his father was in oil and it turned out that he ran a gas station in Opp, Alabama, for God’s sake….”
“… no, no, he did date her for a long time, but he ended up marrying some girl he met at his cousin’s debut in Newark. I didn’t know they had debuts in Newark….”
“… swear to God she did; I saw it with my own eyes. She was at the Old South Ball with Corny Jarrett and they were doing this really fast jitterbug and he swung her around and one stocking just popped right out of her bra and dangled down the front of her dress to her waist. It looked like somebody was stuck down in there trying to get out….”
A long silence fell into the candlelight and they all stopped and wiped their eyes and shook their heads and then, as if given a cue, looked over at Crystal.
“Oh, my God, we are all so rude,” chirped a curly haired, snub-nosed girl who was, Crystal thought, some kind of docent somewhere, whatever that was.
“We’ve just been sitting here all night yucking it up about our own precious selves and leaving you out completely. You must think we’re barbarians….”
“No, no,” Crystal said, still smiling. “It’s all so interesting.”
“So where did you go to school?” the docent said, seeming to quiver slightly with interest.
They all looked at Crystal.
Crystal played her ace. She had been wondering desperately how to work it into the conversation. Her smile faded slightly and she looked down.
“I haven’t gone. Not yet. My… my mother is very ill and I’ve just sort of been, you know, sticking close. She… I… don’t think it will be forever….”
There was a hush, and then they flocked to her and hugged her and kissed her cheeks and murmured what an angel she was, and how brave, and how hard it must be.
“I don’t know how you do it,” one of the other girls whispered.
“Oh, you’d do the same, if it was your mother,” Crystal said softly, letting her gentian eyes slowly fill with tears and looking away.
When they said good night they all hugged her again and said they hoped her mother would be better soon and that they would look forward to seeing Crystal whenever Finch brought her home. More than one pair of eyes glistened.
Crystal smiled shyly around at them, stopping when she came to Caroline Wentworth. There were no tears in those amber eyes. Instead they sparkled with what appeared, incredibly, to be suppressed mirth. Slowly she inclined her head to Crystal.
After the good-byes and the plans to meet again and another too-hard, too-long hug from Finch’s father, Crystal and Finch got into the car and ghosted down the drive and back down Habersham Road. It was true dark and smelled of honeysuckle, and a few of the huge houses had lit windows, but the purring of the motor was the only sound that broke the sweet autumn night. They rode in silence until they turned back out onto Peachtree Road again and the world flowed abruptly back around them.
“Well,” Finch said, taking her small, warm hand in his. “What do you think?”
“About what?” she said carelessly, hugging herself in secret glee. No matter how it had started out, this night was hers.
“Oh, everybody. You know. The house…”
“I thought it must be like living in the Taj Mahal,” she said with a rich little hill of laughter in her voice. “What happened to your mother’s leg?”
“Oh… she fell off a racing camel in Kabul. It was a long time ago. I’m still not sure where that is.”
Crystal threw back her head and laughed, a throaty little laugh of sheer exuberance with a sort of purr in it. In a moment he joined in, hugging her hard. She knew he had no idea under the sun why she laughed but loved the laughter anyway. And she knew that when they got home, before they went into her father’s house, Finch would ask her
to marry him. She knew that as surely as she knew that the sun would rise the next morning, or that the night would follow.
And of all the scenes from the jeweled, faultless tapestry of her life that unrolled before her, this was indeed her finest hour.
But she did not know that.
CHAPTER 3
About an hour and fifteen minutes above Atlanta, on State Highway 575, a smaller road, Talking Rock Road, cuts east and up into the ragged edges of the Blue Ridge Mountains. These are old mountains, among the oldest on earth, and they have been gentled by aeons of weather so that their peaks, though high, are rounded, voluptuous, instead of jagged like the newer, more savage, and often still-smoking mountains of the West. You will not drive long before you come to Burnt Mountain, the last of that dying chain, a great, wild excrescence that did not go gentle into the good night as its sister hills did but raged against the dying of the light.
Burnt Mountain is high, smoke blue from far away, a wild disgorged green when you are upon it. Its right flank, facing the distant bowl that holds the city, is gentler, the spiraling road open to wide vistas and scenic overlooks and friendly little lanes leading off through the woods to undoubtedly even friendlier places. For the first part of your ascent, the hollows and the foothills themselves are drowned, throttled in virulent seas of kudzu. It has taken houses, barns, cars, whole farms, a few telephone poles. Even these toy topiary habitats are beautiful, in a surreal way, if you don’t think of them as ever having harbored life, ever having been slowly strangled by the inexorable green.
The left slope of Burnt Mountain is an almost sheer drop of shale and gravel ledges and great green cliffs to the valley floor. In that valley robust signs of human enterprise—gated communities, tiny strip malls—flourish. If human life flourishes up on that slope of the mountain proper, there is very little sign of it.
Burnt Mountain Page 3
