Burnt Mountain

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  “Why does she need magic? She’s got to live in the real world just like the rest of us.”

  “That’s why she needs magic. Some people need it more than others. The real world is not going to be enough for Thayer.”

  He had continued to read me the shining, shifting, bloody myths, and I continued to tell them to Lavonda. On the whole she got the best of the deal. She taught her smaller siblings never to be afraid when it thundered; it was only Old Thor banging around Asgard with his hammer. On the other hand, when I painted our front door blue (as far as I could reach) it wasn’t comfort and accolades that I got. My well-deserved reputation as a troublesome child was born early.

  I never thought my beautiful mother disliked me. Not then and even now, not really. I know now that what she felt for me was kind of a despairing puzzlement. There was not a thread in my entire fabric that seemed to come from her, or any other woman she knew.

  My sister, Lily, was Mother in miniature, and there was a deep understanding between them even when Lily was behaving her worst. Lily’s small sins were smearing herself with my mother’s makeup, ruining her pretty satin shoes clomping up and down the stairs in them, giggling and flirting at school chapel services, throwing tantrums because she was not allowed to wear her pretty Easter outfit to school. Things that my mother might deplore but understood in her deepest heart. Lily was a wellborn and beautiful little girl. Mother had been one of those things herself, at least relatively. She only had to look over her own territory to find the words that would best chasten Lily.

  “Take those off. Nobody likes a little girl who makes herself gaudy and cheap. You won’t have a beau to your name if you don’t stop that. I don’t want to be ashamed of my pretty daughter.”

  But that would not have worked with me, and Mother knew it even if she did not know what would.

  “Do you want everybody to think you’re a wild thing with nobody to bring you up right?” she said once, when I had stripped down to my underpants and smeared my chest with red mud and was creeping through the boxwood maze dragging my father’s kindling hatchet after a sniggering Lavonda.

  “Who are you supposed to be now?”

  “I’m Smee. He scalped people in Peter Pan. He didn’t cut off your whole head, though, just your hair. I don’t think that sounds so bad, but the way Lavonda’s carrying on…”

  My mother launched a long, level look at the capering Lavonda and Lavonda straightened herself into seemly erectness and stood there, a veritable statue of biddability, her enormous breasts straining at the old Atlanta Braves tee shirt she wore.

  “Take her inside and wash that mud off of her, Lavonda, and put Mr. Wentworth’s hatchet back where it’s supposed to be. And go in through the basement. I don’t want anybody from the school to see you.”

  “Yes’m,” Lavonda said sweetly, and my mother turned and swept back into the house, trailing a cloud of Casaque behind her. She had come a long way since the days of My Sin.

  “She sho’ smells good,” Lavonda said.

  “It comes out of a bottle,” I said.

  “Well, I know that. I just wish I had a bottle of that.”

  “I’ll get you one. I know just which one it is. She’s got more than one of them. You just better not let on where it came from.”

  “You think I’m dumb?” Lavonda sniffed. “I ain’t gon’ wear it here. I’m gon’ wear it to ‘vival tonight. J. W. Fishburne’s mama makes him come every night, and I’m gon’ sit right behind him and fan my perfume at him. He’ll notice me then, I betcha.”

  It occurred to me, even in my half-naked red mud days, that if J. W. Fishburne hadn’t noticed her bazonkers by now he must be blind, but I said nothing. Bathed and dressed again, I ran into my mother’s bedroom and swiped a half-full bottle of Casaque and gave it to Lavonda, and she swished home that afternoon with a heart full of hope and roughly a half a year’s salary in her cotton tote bag.

  “I don’t know where that child gets it,” I overheard my mother say to my father that night. The heating register in my upstairs bedroom was directly above the one in the downstairs sitting room, and through it, for most of my childhood, I heard all manner of things that I don’t suppose would have ever been said to me.

  “Certainly not from me or my mother, and she’s absolutely nothing like Lily. If you had a sister, maybe…”

  “I have Mother,” my father said, “and from what I know of her when she was little, I know exactly where she gets it.”

  “I simply can’t imagine Caroline ever—”

  “Taking off her clothes in the backyard? Chasing people with a hatchet? You’d be surprised.”

  “I would indeed,” sniffed my mother, and that was the end of the affair.

  But still, I got my share of hugs and sweet-smelling cheek kisses, and she always read me a story and tucked me into bed at night. The stories ran more to “Jack and Jill” than Peter Pan, but I could count on my father for literary excitement. I loved it when my mother read to me, loved it all: the one lit lamp and the shadows leaping up the walls, the silky hush of the bedclothes when she drew them closer up under my chin, the rising and falling lullaby of her voice. My mother always had a beautiful voice. Lily has it, too.

  When I started first grade, in the little Lytton elementary school my mother had gone to, and her mother before her, my mother had become the legendary hostess she seemed born to be and we had parties large and small at our house almost weekly. Many were for the school: alumni and trustees and faculty and very occasionally, say at Christmas or Easter, for the entire student body. I never tired of them: house shining and smelling of flowers and furniture polish and wonderful things cooking in the kitchen, the dining room spread with beautiful things, iced and decorated and parslied, the big Rose Medallion punch bowl that my grandmother Wentworth had given Mother ringed with camellias and smelling faintly of bourbon or gin and clinking with icebergs of tiny cubes, and most of all my mother, in something floor sweeping and bare shouldered, eclipsing every other woman in her house.

  Except perhaps when my grandmother and grandfather Wentworth came, as they sometimes did. My grandmother Caroline drew eyes like a living flame. She always dressed simply, though her pearly shoulders might be bare—I think now that she tried never to outshine her daughter-in-law—and her copper hair, only slightly darker than mine, was always piled on top of her small head. She frequently wore a pair of dangling amber earrings that I coveted with all my heart. They matched her eyes perfectly. They were usually her only jewelry, but they gave her the appearance of being clad in a queen’s ransom of precious stones. My mother would sometimes tighten her mouth at the sight of her, and I once heard my mother whisper to my father, “Those earrings are barbaric. How she dares, at a little party for a boys’ school—”

  “And yours, my dear, are brushing your shoulders.” He smiled at her. He must have been aware by then that his wife was searingly resentful of the mother who did not ensconce her son and his family in the heart of Buckhead, but I truly don’t believe it ever bothered him. He could have done little about it, anyway.

  I liked first and second grades, I remember, though it seemed strange to me that there could be another school besides Hamilton, the one that so dominated our world. My father went there every day and often on weekends. My mother’s very life was circumscribed by it. My sister, who at fifteen could have stepped out of the pages of Seventeen magazine—that was her bible—drew virtually all her suitors from it. And I was in and out of it almost every day because I would regularly break my mother’s rule and escape Lavonda and dart across the front lawn and around the road’s curve into the sweet, chalky dimness of Hamilton. It was, to me, simply another and larger part of our house. Invariably a long-suffering teacher would corral me and lead me by the hand to my father’s office, or even home, and I would get the Hamilton-is-out-of-bounds lecture again. It made no sense to me and I never remembered it. Hamilton Academy was where my father was. Therefore, so would I be.

 
He died when I was nine years old and just beginning fourth grade. His father died with him. It was a brilliant iron-blue October day and my father and grandfather had driven up into the edge of the mountains above Atlanta, not far up Burnt Mountain from Burnt Cove, where my parents had spent their honeymoon, to look at the summer camp Edgewood, on the flank of the mountain, where many Atlantans had sent their children for generations. My father had summered there and thought that it might make a good summer adjunct for the school. I don’t know what they decided. On the trip home my grandfather’s stately old Bentley missed the hairpin curve at the first scenic overlook and soared up and out into the blue air and into the valley below, where the suburbs of Atlanta began. Whatever their decision, Edgewood never became a part of the Hamilton school. I suppose it would have been impossible, after the accident.

  It happened while I was at school, and they told me when I came clattering into the house with an armful of pastel drawings. We had been reading Tom Sawyer, and my drawings were full of a chalky, heroic Tom, whom I liked, and a stunted and squinting Becky, whom I did not. I was already yelling and waving the drawings in the air for Lavonda to see, but it was not Lavonda who came out of the kitchen to meet me. It was my grandmother Caroline, customarily elegant in a jade suit.

  “Grand,” I shouted, “look what I—”… and stopped. Her face was blotched and swollen, and tears ran down her cheeks.

  I stared, terror rising in my throat like bile.

  “Come here, darling,” she said in a wet, rough voice, and held out her arms. I flew into them. I dug my face as hard as I could into her soft woolen shoulder. My own tears began. Whatever it was that could so twist and smear my grandmother, it could only be beyond bearing.

  I don’t remember what she said to me. I couldn’t seem to hear her clearly. I pulled back and stared into her face for a long time, registering the tracks the tears had made through her mascara and the soft rose blush on her cheeks. The rest of her face was bone white, and her lipstick was bitten away from her mouth so that only a ragged rim of coral remained, outlining her lips. They were as white as her face. The amber eyes were dull and red and swollen.

  Suddenly I couldn’t remember who she was and broke away from her and ran into the kitchen, sobbing and hiccupping. Nellie was there, sitting on the kitchen stool with her face covered by her work-gnarled black hands, but my mother was not.

  “Where is my mama?” I sobbed. “Where is my daddy?”

  “Oh, baby, you come here to Nellie,” she said, reaching out for me, but the silver snail’s track of tears down her furrowed face frightened me even more, and I turned and ran up the stairs two at a time, stumbling, weeping. My mother’s bedroom door was closed, and when I hammered on it my sister’s thin, high voice called out, “Go away! You can’t come in here now!”

  My mother cried out something to me, but by that time I was back down the stairs, dodging my grandmother, and out the door and across the front lawn running for the school as hard as I could.

  I burst in through the front door and down the short hall to my father’s office. I jerked the door open and stood in the doorway, gasping in great swallows of air. A man sat at my father’s desk, his head down, talking on the desk telephone, but he was not my father. I did not know this man. He looked up and saw me, and his face blanched, and he rose and made as if to come around the desk toward me, but I was frightened of him, too, and turned to run back home. My grandmother’s arms closed around me again. As she led me from the school I heard the man say, “We’re so terribly sorry, Mrs. Wentworth.” But I did not hear what she said in return. Outside, on the still, sunny lawn, a man was lowering the flag to half-staff.

  “Why is he doing that?” I croaked to my grandmother. It seemed to me that if only people would stop doing strange things the day would right itself back into its proper fading after-school somnolence.

  “He’s doing that for your daddy and your granddaddy,” she said. “To show respect for their memories.”

  Her voice was still trembling, but it was stronger.

  “I want my daddy. I want him to come home right now. Where is he?”

  She stooped down so that she was kneeling in the gravel of our driveway and put her hands on my shoulders and looked into my face. I saw as if for the first time how very much like her my father looked.

  “Thayer. He isn’t coming home. He and your granddaddy died. I told you that. Their car ran off Burnt Mountain. It was very, very quick and it couldn’t have hurt them at all. But your daddy can’t come home anymore. You mustn’t think he will.”

  I cried all that afternoon, lying on my bed with my flowered comforter drawn up over me and my grandmother’s arms tightly around me. She pressed her face into my hair, but she said very little. Sometimes she rocked me, and sometimes she hummed into my ear. Once she sang, so softly that I could scarcely hear her, “This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius, the age of Aquarius, Aquar… ius….”

  It was years before I considered what a strange song it was for my grandmother to be singing to me on the day of my father’s death and how even stranger that she, who had lost both a son and a husband, could comfort me while my mother and sister clung together in their prostration and could speak to no one, could see no one but each other.

  Life changed of course, after that, but not so much as it might have. My father’s substantial endowment from his grandparents came to my mother, and we stayed in the beautiful old white house by the river, and Nellie and Lavonda and the grounds people stayed on with us. Once I overheard my mother saying to one of her friends who had come to make a condolence call, “At least we still have the house. That’s a great comfort to me, and I know it is for the girls. I can’t think how terrible it would be for them if we’d had to move.”

  But I wished we had moved, wished it with all my abraded heart. Our house was terrible beyond words to me without my father. Everywhere I was used to seeing him was a howling, empty space. After a while I grew actually afraid of those spaces and would not go into them. I would not watch television with my mother and Lily in the big den. He was not there, but his books were, shelves and shelves of them reaching from the floor to the ceiling, and they all seemed to me to be threatening to spill over and engulf me. I would not eat dinner in the dining room. Eventually we all took our meals at the smaller table in the breakfast room, and my mother never ceased telling me and others what a willful child I had become. I absolutely refused to even pass the door to my father’s study, and soon that door was closed and never reopened.

  And I was, of course, forbidden to go near the Hamilton school. The new president and his young wife were an attractive couple and lived in the private apartment at the school, and my mother was still invited to the big formal evenings. She often went, resplendent in her long dresses and her jewelry, still beautiful as ever, perhaps even more so now, with the richness and patina of widowhood clinging about her like smoke. Indeed, until I went away to college she was still the Queen Mother of the Hamilton school and no decision was made without her input. For technically, she as well as my grandmother owned Hamilton now. The school was my mother’s calling and her definition. I do not know what would have become of her without its vast presence at her back, like a sheltering fortress.

  Lily wore the mantle of bereaved daughter with tremendous grace, and the stream of young men from Hamilton hardly abated. But I had neither grace nor fortitude, and my behavior at home and at school crept beyond willfulness into intractability and out-and-out anger. I was perpetually furious; I couldn’t have said at whom. The rage was at my father, of course, for abandoning me, but no one ever seemed to consider this, least of all me, and my tantrums and sullenness soon strained every part of life in the white house on the river.

  I hid from everyone when I could, staying in my room with the door locked or in the underbrush fringing the river. I made a small house for myself there, in a hollow between the roots of a great live oak, and thatched it over with broken branches and laid an old
oilcloth table covering on the ground and took a pillow and blanket into the house, and there I stayed, when I was not in my room, until someone sent Lavonda to flush me out. She was the only person in the big house who knew about my hideout; at least I think she was. No one else ever came there. When I was in my cave I felt, if still disemboweled with grief, at least secure, not called upon to interact with people who did not seem to me to remember that my father had died.

  I felt comforted only by my grandmother Caroline, but after that first terrible two or three days I did not see much of her. She asked my mother once if I could come to Atlanta for a while and stay with her, but my mother said no, she needed me close by. It was Lavonda who told me this. I knew that it was a lie and a terrible one. My mother did not need me close by. She did not even want me close by. Hardly a day passed that someone at my school did not call my mother to report my transgressions. It was, if anything, worse than at home. At school hardly anyone had known my father. I set out to punish them all for that.

  It was a long time before I remembered that I had not gone to his funeral. I never did remember why that was.

  After perhaps half a year of those phone calls and my behavior at home, my mother took me out of school at Lytton and enrolled me in a small private boarding school a few miles south, in Newnan. It was called the Paley School, after its founder, who was not only a devout Baptist but a missionary as well. It did not bill itself as a parochial school, but upon setting foot in it you could smell the Baptist-ness rolling off it like the scent of tar from fresh pavement.

  I stayed there almost three years.

  It must have been a pretty dreadful place. I vaguely remember the fact that I hated it, but mired in the swamp of grief over my father I could not differentiate between the two great, sucking whirlpools of that year. It occupied a grand old house on many manicured acres, three stories of stucco and stone that had been the home of one of Newnan’s first family of millionaires. There had been many in the little town and, I believe, still are. The first floor was a large reception room that once had been the “consuhvatory,” as Miss Paley, headmistress and granddaughter of the founders and so cloyingly gracious that she was loathed by all the captive girls, though much admired by their parents, always called it. The second story was classrooms, small and beautiful, with high ceilings and crown moldings and mahogany paneling. The third was a vast attic lined with narrow beds, each with a trunk at its foot, two small bedside tables, a potty-chair, and drawable curtains around it. There was no carpeting, only one great white antiseptic bathroom, and no bed had a light or a lamp beside it. We went to bed just after our dinner and an hour or so of curdled piano music courtesy of Miss Paley, and most of us stared silently at the ceiling for what seemed hours before sleep took us. Talking was forbidden. Getting out of bed except for the potty-chairs was punishable by expulsion.