Downtown

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  “Oh, yes,” I whispered. “Now.”

  Looking back, I can see—though I could not then, caught in its midst as I was—what a strange, exhilarating, and contradictory time that was in the country. It was a cups moment in our national life, the year before the love turned to anger, the peace to militancy. Everything that had gone before us hung shimmering in the air, along with the unseen bulk of everything yet to come. At a Human Be-In in California, heads and freaks had announced happily that the number of live people equaled, for the first time in history, the number of the dead. From that outré coast the sound of mantras and chanting from yogis and the wailing of Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix drifted East; the Beatles reigned supreme everywhere; the hippies and yippies met in their trajectories. Gidget and go-go dancers and Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters competed for the national consciousness, along with Hugh Hefner and the Bunny Hutch. Stokely Carmichael and Eldridge Cleaver were moving toward their time in the sun as Martin Luther King Jr. and his doctrine of nonviolent change moved out of it. The war in Vietnam was not yet called a war, and the great protests still lay ahead, as did the militancy of the Black Panthers, the body of the sexual revolution, and the sisterhood of the women’s movement. In late 1966 the young said “fuck” as often as possible but the pill was still an innovation, and no one had yet bombed a chemistry building. In that year, women were still called “chicks,” even in the most radical circles, and Bunnyhood was as desirable a thing as sisterhood. NOW was in its infancy and both Twiggy and Doris Day were at their apogee. The ferocious, militant love of Woodstock Nation—the Hippies’ Last Hurrah—was more than two years away. The first terrible death, that of JFK in Dallas, was three years past.

  In the year I came to Atlanta, it was still possible to regard that assassination as an aberration, a terrible accident. I rode a crowded bus along a literal fault line, one that would soon cleave America apart, and I had no thought of anything except that the sun was shining and I was careening toward the rest of my life.

  When I got off the bus at the Five Points turnaround, I took a deep breath of cold, electric city air and looked up and saw the dancer’s cage, empty now, and above it, on the fourth floor of the gray stone building, a small sign in a window that said “Museum of the Deep South. Exhibits and Artifacts. Open by Appointment.” Below that a smaller sign said “See Big Snake.”

  I began to laugh. My poor father. His Good Catholic Girl had been delivered into the very jaws of the enemy by the 23 Oglethorpe bus. When I got off the packed elevator on the eleventh story of the Commerce Building, in a crowd smelling of youngness and cold wool and Miss Dior and cigarette smoke, I was still smiling.

  I stopped before a red-lacquered door that said DOWNTOWN in bold black capital letters, smoothed my hair, bit my lips, and took a deep breath. I could feel the smile still on my lips, stiff and frozen. I could not seem to make it go away. I closed my eyes, and then opened them and turned the knob and went in. Still smiling, I stood in the small lobby and looked around for the people who would soon shape my world, hearing my heart in my ears and feeling it in my throat.

  There was no one there. I could hear, off behind one of a row of closed red-lacquer doors, people laughing, and someone who seemed to be singing, but there was no sign of anyone. The lobby was so crowded that it was hard to take it in at first glance. A blue sofa piled so high with coats and cartons of glossy magazines and books and records that they spilled over onto the tweed carpet sat against one wall, and red tub chairs similarly laden were grouped around it. A coat rack held more coats, and, in front of the sofa, there was a coffee table on which sat a real stuffed coyote or timber wolf—it was so scruffy it was impossible to tell precisely what it was. On the coyote’s head was a Mexican sombrero. Three steel desks stretching toward the back of the lobby held signs that had women’s names on them, and typewriters, and in-boxes overflowing with papers. Two tall windows gave onto the jumbled rooftops of the city, shimmering with light. After the windows the individual offices began. There were names on these doors, too, but I could not read them. From the ceiling hung a miniature outhouse with a sign on it that said “Southern Comfort.” I simply stood there, not knowing what I should do next.

  From behind one of the floor-length drapes at the first window an arm with its hand formed into a claw emerged slowly. I stared at it in silence. The fingers opened and closed like a spider flexing its legs, and the arm stretched farther from behind the drape, and then its owner followed. He was a tall, swarthy young man with thick black hair falling over hooded brown eyes, and he had a dark hawk’s face and the most elegant body I had ever seen. His shoulders were wide and square and his long waist tapered in a narrow vee toward lean hips and long legs. He wore a soft, beautiful gray tweed coat and lighter gray flannel trousers and a white oxford cloth button-down shirt. His tie was askew.

  “Speak,” he commanded solemnly. His voice was soft and deep.

  “Mr. Comfort, please,” I said. I could hear it as plainly as he must: my faint Irish brogue, almost vanquished by now, had so thickened with nerves as to make my speech almost unintelligible.

  A slow, very white grin broke his brown face.

  “Well, darlin’, and who might you be, then?” he said, in a perfect parody of Corkie. “Sure, and ’tis shamrocks you’ll be sellin’ us this fine mornin’.”

  The people I had heard but not seen came out of the last office in the row and stood looking at me. My chest caught fire.

  “I’m Ashley O’Donnell,” I said faintly, thinking as I said it how silly and contrived the name sounded, like something from a comic book for teenage girls. The fire spread to my cheeks and forehead.

  “I work here,” I whispered.

  Hank Cantwell broke out of the small crowed and caught me up and swung me around, my feet bumping against his shins.

  “Well, old Holy Smoke,” he yelled excuberantly, and set me down, and they moved in then, crowding around me. Over their murmurs of greeting I heard for the second time the rich music of Matt Comfort’s voice, demanding “Is it her? The once and future Smoky O’Donnell? Bring her in here and let me get a look at her, by God!”

  “This is your new senior editor, Smoky O’Donnell,” Hank said to the people around me, and they smiled and said, “Hi, Smoky,” and “Welcome, Smoky O’Donnell,” and “Glad to have you on board,” and other things like that, and walked behind me as Hank ushered me into the last office in the row.

  And so my time with Comfort’s People began.

  After I had known him for a while, I realized that Matt Comfort could have had no other office than the precise one he had; that given another he would have stamped his imprint on it swiftly and indelibly, and it would have come to look exactly like this one did. It was the corner office, twice as large as any of the others, and it was at once elegant and eccentric, refuge and crucible, more a home than an office to the man who sat behind the great black rosewood desk before the windows. It was carpeted in deep, velvet-gray plush, and had a gray tweed sofa and two of the legendary, consummately beautiful Eames armchairs and ottomans. A glass and chrome étagère stood between the windows, and glass and chrome end tables and a cocktail table made a conversational grouping around the sofa and chairs. An Oriental area rug glowed like a jewel against the gray plush. Twin speakers hidden somewhere on the wall of books blasted out “England Swings Like a Pendulum Do.” There was not a vacant square inch of surface in the entire room.

  People slumped in the Eames chairs and crowded onto the sofa, sat on the floor around the coffee table, sprawled on the Oriental. Some smoked and some drank coffee and some did both. The surfaces not occupied by people held things: books piled until they spilled onto the floor; magazines and record albums; sheets of photographic prints and contacts; large dummy sheets; mail both opened and unopened; cameras and agfaloupes and magnifying glasses; jars of rubber cement and mugs holding pencils and Pentels and others holding the dregs of coffee; overflowing ashtrays; a tarnished silv
er tray with a beautiful, dusky black bottle of something surrounded by small crystal glasses. On the walls were framed covers of Downtown magazine from its inception; awards and citations; photographic portraits of many people I did not know and some, incredibly, that I did—all signed; and a great white calendar sheet that read December 1966, most of its squares penciled in, crossed out, rewritten. I looked around giddily, unable at first to see the man who lived at the epicenter of all this.

  Then he rose and came around the desk and gave me a swift hug and a kiss on the cheek, and said, “Welcome to hard times, dear heart. I’m Matt Comfort.”

  “Of course,” I said, and began to laugh. Everybody else laughed, too.

  Because who else could he be? He looked just like his office. He was elegant and eccentric and wonderfully appointed and charged with particularity, and there was not an inch of him that was not in disarray. Until the last day that I saw him, he looked, as someone said of The New Yorker’s legendary Harold Ross—whom Matt admired inordinately—like an unmade bed, even though that bed was of the very best quality and outfitted by Porthault.

  He was very small. I had not thought of him like that, and even after I had known him intimately for years. I still never did. But he was scarcely five foot six or seven, and thin to wiriness; he looked, always, as if he had been fashioned out of fine copper tendrils. He was so far from handsome it was almost laughable: round-shouldered and a little stooped, with a large head and sharp, chiseled, ruddy features that looked sometimes Lincolnesque and sometimes vulpine; he appeared to be always in motion, even when sitting down. The air around him seemed to ring, as if with silent percussion. It was his hair that first drew the eye and somehow saved him from simple ludicrousness: it was a great, shining shock of pure chestnut that fell over his forehead and into one narrow green eye, and it was glorious. In that time of straggling beards and lank sideburns on the one hand and residual John Wayne brush cuts on the other, he had the glinting, sun-anointed head of the young Kennedy. This was never lost on anyone, and certainly not on Matt Comfort. He wore round, wire-rimmed glasses mended with adhesive tape, and dressed beautifully, in custom-tailored tweed and flannel and oxford cloth, though his clothes were invariably rumpled and semi-buttonless and his face and forearms smudged with ink. But even the few times I saw him in old clothes or a bathing suit, he still had more pure style than anyone I have ever known. In the panache-starved South of his day, he was Merlin and Huck Finn and Casanova rolled into one small body, and I don’t think there was anyone who ever met him who did not come away from the meeting convinced that he was tall.

  Holding me by the arm, he scowled at the sofa and said, “Goddammit, get up, Gordon, and let this lady sit down. You too Stubbs. Alicia, dear heart, run get us all some fresh coffee, will you, darling? The rest of you guys go on back to work, unless Patterson just fired the lost of you. I ain’t your mother.”

  The tall, hawk-faced young man grinned and unfolded himself from the sofa, followed by a stocky, bearded man in sunglasses. A stunning young woman in a muted plaid wool mini and red tights on her endless legs stood up from one of the Eames chairs and gave Matt Comfort and me both an unreadable look and glided out of the office, trailing clouds of silky ash-blond hair and Joy perfume. I would have bet her duties, whatever they were, did not ordinarily include fetching coffee for the new girl. Except for Hank and a compact, snub-nosed girl in a navy A-line skirt and white turtleneck, the rest of the people in the office—young men, all of them—got up and straggled out, grumbling good-naturedly. Hank patted the sofa and I sat down on the edge of it. It was low, and I could find no place to put my knees that did not hike my rolled-up skirt indecently up my thighs. I put my purse in my lap and dropped my knees as far as they would go, and Matt Comfort laughed and tossed me an afghan from the arm of the sofa.

  “God bless miniskirts,” he said. “I had the sofa legs shortened when it was obvious they were more than a passing fad. Well, let’s see. The lazy sonofabitch on your left is Tom Gordon, our art director. That there behind those Foster Grants is Charlie Stubbs, our other senior editor. He’s just back today from his honeymoon; we won’t know till he takes his glasses off if he had a good time or not. Hank you know. This precious muffin here is Teddy Fairchild, who handles production. Look upon her with abject terror.”

  The chunky girl smiled and murmured hello. She wore little makeup and had her brown hair pulled back with a hair band, and she had a nice smile that crinkled her brown eyes and her nose. I smiled back. The blonde came back with a tray of coffee and put it down on the coffee table and sank down onto the floor beside Matt Comfort’s chair all in one sinuous motion. She brushed the long, shining curtain of hair out of her eyes with the back of one slender hand and waggled the fingers of the other toward Tom Gordon, who was fishing a Viceroy out of a pack. He handed her one, and she put it between her pink lips and waited while he produced a lighter.

  “This is Alicia Crowley, otherwise known as Tondelayo,” Matt Comfort said. “She’s a terrible secretary, but everybody upstairs at the Chamber wants to get in her pants, so we keep her around for insurance.”

  “Don’t you wish,” Alicia Crowley said. Her voice was tiny and breathy, like Jackie Kennedy’s. I knew two things about her in that instant, absolutely and without question, though I did not know how I knew: that she would never be an ally of mine and that Matt Comfort was sleeping with her.

  “This is the whole staff, except for our receptionist and editorial secretary and the ad salesmen and our comptroller, who’s off somewhere comptrolling,” Matt Comfort said. “Most of the editorial and graphic stuff we freelance out. That gang that just left are some of them; from the Constitution. They’re good reporters and some of them are good writers in general, and they hang around here all the time because Gene Patterson won’t let them sit around over there and drink coffee and smoke cigarettes, and because they want to get into Alicia’s pants, too. So far it’s no dice—I don’t think—but they keep hoping.”

  I felt the hated blush surge up my neck again. I had never heard a man talk so around women before.

  “It sounds like you’re the most valuable member of the staff,” I said, smiling at Alicia, acutely conscious that I sounded prissy and was dressed like a five-year-old ad for Villager dresses and circle pins. She smiled back at me, a small, cool smile, but did not answer.

  Hank showed me my office, a smaller one than the others in the line along the window wall, but private, and with a window of its own that commanded a sweep of the city to the south. It wasn’t the breath-stopping vista that you would get looking north, where John Portman’s revolutionary white urban complex was rising, but I stood transfixed, my heart singing. The dome of the State Capitol flashed in the sun, gilded with gold from Georgia’s low blue mountains, and nearby were the white sugar cubes of the new state government buildings, and the scrollwork of the just-completed freeway system, and the blue bowl of the new major league stadium. Back in Corkie the talk of the Atlanta Braves’ first season had been fierce.

  I thought, looking out my window into the cold sun, that that one glass square commanded the essence of Atlanta in the middle of the decade. The stadium and the freeway had both been conceived and executed in a scant six years, and just out of sight to the southeast, along the ribbon of the interstate, the new Hartsfield International Airport hummed like the active beehive that it was. It was said that at certain times of the day it was the second busiest airport in the country, first being Chicago’s O’Hare. I, who had never flown, was enormously proud of that. I may have drifted tranquilly in the backwater that was Corkie for all of my life, but even there we knew what was happening in Atlanta in the supercharged sixties, that a handful of men—scions of the old families, sons of the big Buckhead houses, merchant princes—were literally reinventing it. One of them, the exuberant Mills B. Lane of the Citizens and Southern Bank, was one of our own. C&S had had its genesis on the bluff above the docks in Savannah, and in its sleeping cotton and cane fiel
ds. Mr. Lane had always been sort of a patron saint to me, the one who left Savannah and wrote his name across the face of Atlanta. It could be done. I would do it, too.

  “It’s kind of small, but it’s all yours,” Hank said. “So what do you think, Smokes? Does it beat the ’Naut office or not?”

  I turned and gave him a brief, hard hug.

  “By a country mile,” I said. “Oh, Hank, I can hardly believe I’m here!”

  “Me, either, but here you are, in the very considerable flesh,” he said, giving my behind a proprietary pat, and I thought affectionately of the years of teasing, semisexual banter we had shared at Armstrong, working together in the Argonaut office. It had been the first completely easy friendship I had ever had with a male, and remained almost the only one. With Hank I found the work for which I was born; to Hank I said the things in my heart that I had said only to Meg Conlon, and not all of them to her. It was Hank who showed me the larger world that danced and crackled outside the bell jar that was Savannah and the Creole South; gave me my first sense of the changes that were sweeping it, and the change-makers. It was with Hank that I had sat, late into the night, in a coffee shop at the edge of the campus, crying in anguish and disbelief, when John Kennedy had been shot. Hank had driven all the way from Atlanta to be with me. And in all of Corkie, weeping maudlin tears for its fallen son, it was only Hank I wanted to be with. Corkie wept for the broken red head of a prince of Ireland; Hank and I for the beauty and symmetry of the dream that had been shattered with it. I loved Hank Cantwell with a whole, comfortable, and selfish love that took everything and questioned nothing. I could not remember wondering why he never asked me out, or thought of me in any way except as I did of him. As I said, I was not, then, in the habit of questioning.