Downtown

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  “And as for Matt,” he went on, “well, he gets off on pushing Culver to the edge. He knows just how to do it. He’s got this one-man war going against all that pomposity and blandness upstairs. He’s always one step ahead of the pack and one step shy of overstepping. He knows that most of the chamber would just love to see him brought down. He simply flies too high for them. We all do. But the rest of the town absolutely eats him up. And then, I really think he’s fond of Culver, too. It’s complicated.”

  “So I don’t have to worry about old Culver baby,” I said. “Lord, Hank, he looks just like an emperor penguin, doesn’t he?”

  Hank put his fork down and looked at me seriously. “Listen, Smoky,” he said. “Don’t ever underestimate him. Don’t underestimate any of them upstairs. Downtown depends on them; they subsidize us almost totally. We’d be drowning in red ink without them, the way Matt spends editorial money. They pay our salaries. We can laugh at Culver Carnes, but he can fire us. He could fire Matt, too, come to that. We do the stories the chamber says to do in exchange for doing the stuff we want to do, and they have final say on everything. So far, thank God, Culver knows the good stuff, but he could nix any story he wanted to and we couldn’t do a thing about it. Be as nice to him as you can and do the shit as well as you do the good stuff, and stay out of their way. We’re okay as long as Matt is.”

  I thought about what he said. It gave me a heady feeling, the sense of dancing on the edge of an abyss. I realized that I liked it. The Irish always have.

  “Is he married?” I said. “Matt, I mean?”

  “He was, I think,” Hank said. “He’s not now. I heard there was a wife back in Texas—he really is from Humble, Texas; it’s near Houston, population about three thousand. But so far as any of us know, they divorced before he came here. No kids that I know of. Nobody else knows anymore than that, except maybe Alicia, and she ain’t talking.”

  “He’s sleeping with her, isn’t he?”

  “Jesus, how’d you know that? We none of us ever admit by word or deed that we know about it.”

  “I don’t know how I knew, I just did,” I said. “You can just tell by the way he talks about her and to her, and the way she is with him.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s really not such a big deal,” Hank said. “There’s a lot of sleeping around in this town. I don’t know why that is, it just is. Maybe it’s all the energy floating around, or the fact that everybody’s young, or something. Everybody I know, practically, has somebody.”

  “What about you?” I said teasingly.

  “God, I wouldn’t have time even if I had the money,” he grimaced. “I work six and seven days a week, sometimes eighteen hours a day. Sometimes I sleep on the sofa in Matt’s office, when we’re getting an issue to bed. We all do. Besides, now I got you, babe.”

  I ignored that. “You mean everybody works seven days a week, eighteen hours a day?” I said. “I don’t think I can do that, Hank. When on earth would I meet anybody, or get to know Atlanta?”

  “You’ll do it and you’ll love it, Smokes, just wait and see,” he said. “Downtown—I don’t know. It gets to be your whole life. The people there become your family. You’ll spend all the time you’re not working with them, as well as office hours; you’ll come to really love them. Well, most of them, anyway. It’s really funny, how it happens, but I’ve seen it over and over again. Gradually everything else drops away and there’s just the magazine and all of us. And it’s enough. There’s more sheer excitement and…and…exuberance, more laughter, more intensity, in that one office than I ever thought there was in the world. In a way, Matt asks it of you. He doesn’t come right out and say it, and I don’t think he does it consciously, but pretty soon you’ll know that he means for you to put it and him and all of us first, before everything, and by then you’ll want to do it.”

  “What happens if I don’t?” I said, knowing that, of course, I would. I did already. I had, from the night of Hank’s phone call.

  “I know you. You will. But if you don’t, or can’t, well…you just wouldn’t stay. He wouldn’t fire you, but you’d leave. I’ve seen that happen, too. Not so much with the ad people; they kind of go their own way, and Sueanne is an exception because she’s married and has a family. But there’ve been a few editorial people who didn’t want to be one of Comfort’s People full-time, and sooner or later, they just left.”

  “Charlie’s married,” I said.

  “And Charlie’s on his way out,” Hank said. “You can see it happening already. Whenever he goes home to Caroline instead of going out for a drink with us after work, or spends weekends with her instead of down here, Matt gets kind of quiet. Charlie used to be the closest one of us to Matt; the nearest thing he had to a close man friend. They spent a lot of time together. Now they don’t. And I’ll bet you a week’s salary that in a few months Charlie will find something else that pays better and has better hours, and we’ll give him a huge party at the Top of Peachtree and a going-away present that cost more than he makes in a year, and Charlie will be history.”

  I could think of little to say to that. On the face of it, it seemed unreasonable in the extreme to expect the staff, young and attractive as they all were, to forsake all others and cast their lot exclusively with Matt Comfort and his magazine. On the other hand, I could not imagine wanting anything else.

  “Oh, Hank,” I said, “What if I can’t cut it, or I don’t fit in?”

  “You will,” he said. “He wouldn’t have hired you if he hadn’t known you would. If all else fails, he’ll simply make it happen.”

  On our way out I saw that Mr. McGill was still at the corner table. With him now were a square-jawed, blunt-faced blond man and a tall, thin dark one. They were deep in conversation.

  “That was Gene Patterson, the editor of the Constitution, and Reese Cleghorne from the Southern Regional Council with Pappy,” Hank said. “You don’t often see them together. I wonder what’s going on?”

  “I feel like I just saw history being made,” I said.

  “You probably did,” Hank said. “That’s the thing about Atlanta that knocks me out, Smoky. Almost anywhere you look, on any given day, it is.”

  I worked the rest of the afternoon in Tom Gordon’s office, learning to write photographic captions to fit a specific character count. It was frustrating, exacting work, and Tom was a stickler for captions that fit their spaces exactly. He wanted no gaps and no one-word lines. They were, he said, called widows, and no decent art director would allow them. By the end of the afternoon I had produced several galleys full of perfect, widowless captions, and was mussed and ink-smeared and aching of eye and head, but glowing from Tom’s grave praise. He was gentle and sweet-tempered, and, in a sly, quiet way, extremely funny. I felt as close to him at the end of that day as I might a companion with whom I had been through some natural calamity.

  “You’re a quick study, Smoky,” he said. “Charlie is a disaster with captions.”

  I stretched and looked around. Outside the day was ending; a glowing, grape-flushed twilight was falling down on the city, and lights were blooming in windows all around us. I looked at my watch. It was six-thirty, long past the usual five P.M. quitting time. Hank was right about Downtown’s hours, I thought. I wondered if I had missed supper at Our Lady, and what time the last 23 Oglethorpe bus ran, and if anyone would think it amiss if I simply got my raincoat and left. The thought made me feel oddly desolate. Our Lady seemed on the other side of the moon.

  A great blatting blare broke the silence of the office, and Matt Comfort’s rich bellow followed it.

  “Quittin’ time! Top in five minutes!” he bawled.

  “What on earth was that noise?” I asked Tom Gordon. He grimaced.

  “Somebody gave him a Bahamian taxi horn,” he said. “We’ve been trying to steal it, but it keeps turning up. Jack Greenburg is threatening to bring him a ram’s horn, just to vary things a little. Come on, get your coat. We go to the Top of Peachtree around the corner most a
fternoons for a drink. It’s got a sensational view of the city, and Matt pays.”

  “I don’t know…” I had started when Matt put his head into Tom’s office. He had on his coat and tie, but he still looked as if he had been wrestling alligators. The shining sheaf of hair completely obscured one eye.

  “Champagne in honor of you tonight, Smoky,” he said. “I think this is the start of a beautiful friendship.”

  “Well, the thing is,” I said, feeling stupidly young and prissy, “I already missed supper once, and I’m not sure when the last bus runs, and I think there’s a pretty early curfew on weeknights—”

  Matt stared at me, and then said, “Oh, Christ, the goddamned Church’s Home. I forgot. I’ll call Sister Joan and clear you for being late tonight, and Hank or Tom will feed you and take you home, but we’ve got to get you out of there. I’ve got to have you available when I need you. That curfew shit is ridiculous, anyway.”

  “You’re the one who put her in there, Matt,” Hank said, coming up behind him. He was grinning widely. “You’re the one that sits on the board.”

  “You know damned well I’m on that board because I owed the archbishop a big one and he called me on it,” Matt grumbled. “And I put her in there, smart ass, because you told me her daddy wouldn’t let her come up here unless I did. That doesn’t mean she’s got to stay there. Teddy, dear heart,” and he raised his voice to a roar, “when is it your roommate is getting married?”

  “Christmas,” came floating out of the office where Teddy Fairchild had been cloistered away all afternoon with the door closed.

  “Well, come on out here and meet your new roommate,” Matt yelled back, and I flinched.

  “Oh, please, Matt, don’t make her do that; she doesn’t even know me. She’ll have somebody she wants to live with her.”

  But Teddy Fairchild came into Tom’s office and put her small, grubby hand on my arm and smiled her warm smile and said, “No, I’d love to have you. It’ll be wonderful, having somebody who realizes what working here means. Polly stays mad at me all the time because I’m never there to cook when it’s my week, or do my part of the housework. You might want to think about it, though. Colonial Homes is pretty far out for people who work downtown. There are lots of places closer.”

  I began to laugh.

  “Colonial Homes will be just fine,” I said. “And if you’re sure, I accept with pleasure. I already don’t fit in at Our Lady, and I’ve only been there two days.”

  “Polly’s leaving the first of December to stay with her folks until she gets married,” Teddy said. “There’s no reason you couldn’t move the end of this week, if you’d like to.”

  “Oh, boy, would I.”

  Matt came back into the room. “I’ve called Sister Joan and sprung you until midnight,” he said. “A fine broth of a gal, that. Now, let’s do it. I have a towering thirst.”

  We walked in a loose formation down the street and around the corner to the National Bank of Georgia building, which soared above any of the others downtown. The air was cold and clear, and swirls of people passed us, talking and laughing among themselves. Several of them nodded and spoke as they passed: “Hi, Matt.” “Hello, Matt.”

  Matt Comfort spoke to all of them by name. Warm in the envelope of light that seemed to wrap us all, I smiled at them. I noticed for the first time that the sidewalks had small specks of glitter in them, like diamond dust.

  We rode up in the elevator with other pilgrims seeking to wait out the motionless glacier of light that was stalled downtown traffic, and emerged into a vast cage of glass and soft gray velvet and plush, hung in the night sky. A great central bar of black leather had stools and drinkers two and three deep, and small tables lined the ceiling-to-floor windows. Outside, in the blue evening, the city pulsed and glowed like a single perfect jewel. I gasped, a small, soft, involuntary sound, and Matt Comfort grinned.

  “City at your feet tonight, dear heart,” he said.

  Across the room a small combo played popular music, softly. When the piano player looked up and saw us he grinned and segued into Petula Clark’s “Downtown.”

  When you’re alone and life is making you lonely, you can always go…

  downtown.

  When you’ve got worries, all the noise and the hurry seem to help, I know…

  downtown…

  I thought, in that moment, that my heart would burst with joy.

  We sat at a corner table next to the window and Matt ordered champagne, and when it came and the waitress had poured it all around, he lifted his glass to me and said, “To the new kid. Cheers, Smoky O’Donnell.”

  I tried, one last time.

  “Ashley. I’m going to use Ashley as a byline, I think,” I said.

  “Not a chance,” Matt Comfort said. “It’s got to be Smoky. It’s why I hired you, dear heart. Smoky O’Donnell—it’s the best byline I ever heard. With a name like that you’ll be editing Holiday in five years. Ashley is a goddamned debutante’s name. No offense, Teddy.”

  He reached into his briefcase and brought out a flat, oblong package wrapped in silver paper and tied with blue ribbons, and handed it to me. I opened it. Inside was a slim bronze plate that said, in Downtown’s distinctive Roman script, SMOKY O’DONNELL, SENIOR EDITOR.

  I felt tears sting into my eyes, and took a deep swallow of the first champagne I had ever tasted, remembering that I had read somewhere that the monk who invented it said, on first tasting it, “It is like drinking stars.”

  And when the last stars had faded in my mouth, Maureen Aisling O’Donnell had gone with them, gone, I knew, for good.

  Only Smoky remained.

  4

  THE CITY TO WHICH I CAME THAT AUTUMN WAS A metaphor for the times. It was changing at the speed of light, and it was young. No matter what it was before or what it became after, Atlanta in the midst of its great decade-long trajectory was a splendid town to be young in. It seemed to me that everyone around me was young, and everywhere I looked the sheen and gloss and leaping blood of youth glimmered and dazzled. Youth bloomed in the soft city nights; Youth burned from the downtown skies; youth sat warm on faces and forearms like October sun. It was as if Atlanta had wakened from a hundred-year sleep and found itself, not old like Rip Van Winkle, but fiercely and joyously and ass-over-teakettle young.

  It was, to us young newcomers, the best of times, period. There wasn’t any worst. Oh, there might have been a shadowy underside, perhaps; a deep-running current of black water at the roots. Bound to be. This was the South in the middle of the twentieth century, after all; this was a Deep South city just struggling up out of stasis. How could there not be shadows on the grass in Eden?

  But I think I speak for most of us when I say that we simply did not, for a long time, see them. I think we were, in the fullness of that time, about as canny and sophisticated and politically aware as the terrible, time-frozen and utterly charming denizens of Brigadoon. And the town had a sliver of Brigadoon through its heart. For all its big-city roar and bustle, it was a naive and insular town in many ways, eager to show the big mules and money from outside that it could compete. In 1966 it was still small enough to be perceived all at once, seen and tasted and swallowed whole. For the hordes of us who poured in on every freeway and Greyhound bus, it was a kind of enchanted village of the future.

  Those of us who worked downtown belonged to a common fraternity. Most of us knew or had heard of one another, or we soon would, and we pursued our lives and our loves and our fortunes together, downtown. Petula Clark’s poignant and galvanic ballad of the previous year was our anthem. It was, we knew, all true: the lights were much brighter there; we could forget all our troubles, forget all our cares…downtown. Everyone in a ten-block radius of Five Points, it seemed to me in that dying year, was young and talented and in a hurry, and the bellwether for us all was Matt Comfort. Our field manual was his smart, erratic, adolescent magazine that spoke to and for the city: Downtown.

  To be on its masthead was to
own a piece of the city. I learned that the first week I was there. We might, and did, work prodigiously, enormously, for twelve-and eighteen-hour spans, but when we went out into the city it was in a flying wedge, with Matt at our head, and there was literally no one I met in those first days who did not say, on learning that I worked for Downtown, “Oh, yes. That’s got to be a dream job. I’ll look for your byline.”

  Or words to that effect.

  And, “Yes, it really is. I’m awfully lucky to be there,” I said over and over, and meant every syllable of it. I could not, in those days, still quite believe where I had landed when I left Corkie in my father’s Vista Cruiser.

  The glamour of my first urban Christmas lay over everything that season. Downtown was awash in secular splendor. Rich’s Great Tree, on the top floor of the bridge that linked its two edifices together, shone in the cold blue nights, and by day the Pink Pig Flyer on its roof ran round and round its track, bearing loads of enchanted children. I was enchanted, too; I spent a great deal of time at my window, elbows on the cold marble still, drinking coffee and staring at the Pink Pig by day and the incandescent tree after dark. On my lunch hour I sometimes went with Teddy or Sister into the store proper, to wander the tinseled aisles and sniff the perfume of money and privilege and Joy and stare at the counters and racks piled and hung with things so beautiful and bountiful that I could not even take them in. I lost my head and a large part of my first paycheck in one evening there, getting a new haircut in the beauty salon and a new red wool dinner suit with black braid piping in the Wood Valley Shop and presents for everybody back in Corkie that I had wrapped in extravagant Rich’s giftwrap. What change I had left over I gave to the Salvation Army girl outside in an exalation of silver bells and city magic. I had to borrow lunch money for a week from Teddy, and did not do it again, but I still remember that no-holds-barred shopping spree with nostalgic delight. Nothing else I have ever bought, in New York or London or Rome, has ever come close to it.