Downtown

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  It was the high social season for Atlanta, as I suppose it still is, those gold-bitten weeks preceding Christmas, and it seemed to me that everyone in town was having a party or going to one. Restaurants and clubs and theaters opened like parasols in a rainstorm. We went in our gilded ensemble to complimentary lunches and dinners at new restaurants, drinks after work and after hours at new clubs and discos, had front-row tickets to first nights and first-run movies, danced until one or two at discos and go-go clubs. Everywhere, people nodded and smiled at Matt and, by extension, at us and everywhere people told us how much they enjoyed Downtown and how lucky they felt the city was to have us. Within a fortnight, having learned to sip wine or Champagne without getting sick or silly or feeling compelled to rush to confession, and to work like a tireless little engine on four or five hours’ sleep, I had come to agree with them, totally and with little attendant modesty. Separately we were, I think, rather ordinarily nice young people; together, we were Comfort’s People, and often near to being insufferable. What was said of Atlanta in cities like Charlotte and Birmingham—“if she could suck as hard as she could blow, she’d be a seaport”—might well have been said of us. I believe that if Downtown under Matt Comfort hadn’t been as good as it was, at least for its time and place, nobody would have been able to abide us. Fortunately for us and Downtown Matt’s capacity for work and insistence that we share it saved us from drowning in our own egos. It was always the best of his gifts, that uncanny ability to sense what it took to get the bests from each of us, and for almost as long as I knew him nothing, not the hours or the adulation, ever dimmed it. Part of the headiness of those days for all of us was the sense that we were working over our heads and beyond our capacities. I still remember the magical feeling of sheer creativity bubbling inside me, spilling over like a champagne fountain, like a geyser. We all made leaps of mind, connections, that we never made again. After that, whatever heights we reached, we got there more by craft and persistence than by those first flowing parabolas of intuition. And even though I came to know them for the fickle foxfire that they were, they are what I miss most about my time as one of Comfort’s People.

  It was a time for heroes, and it was not long until I had a full pantheon of them. Some, like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Gemini astronauts and the remaining Kennedys belonged to the nation, but most of mine belonged uniquely to Atlanta. I have had no others like them since. They came to be called the Club, and together they remade the city.

  They were Old Atlanta, or what passed for it, men with names like Ivan Allen Jr., Robert Woodruff, Ben Cameron, Richard Rich, who had lived all their lives in Buckhead within a four-mile radius of each other, grown up together, gone to the University of Georgia or Georgia Tech together, flirted and danced and married each other’s sisters and cousins, godparented each other’s children, laughed and wept and partied with each other, loved and sometimes hated each other, and often buried and mourned each other. A good many of them were rich, or what the world then called rich; men who had made millions from Coca-Cola, either directly or indirectly. Men who had built family businesses into international concerns; men who had dramatically altered the face of the South, and in some cases the nation, with their monolithic urban and suburban developments. Men who had, almost singlehandedly or in concert with a dozen or so of their peers, in the firestorm decade of their ascendancy, brought the city a major league sports arena, five professional sports teams, a great arts center, and a world-famous conductor to head its symphony, a world-class international airport, a state-of-the-art rapid transit system, a freeway system to boggle the mind, unparalleled convention facilities and the guests to fill them, and the harmoniously integrated school system—all of which lured the industry needed to fuel it all.

  They were men altogether of their time and place, and in another age would not, perhaps, have been thought heroes, because their motives were never altruistic. They did it all in the name of business and to keep the good life in Buckhead good, and that it spilled over into the arena of humanitarianism was an agreeable but secondary benefit. They did it with money, largely their own. There was enough money at home to do what had to be done, to accomplish what they had in mind: the ignition of the rocket that sent Atlanta soaring to the edge of the known universe. After that, the money would have to come from somewhere else, and they knew that. They knew, even as they started out, even as they mapped its course, that theirs would be a self-limiting journey, that they themselves, as a political entity, would be doomed by their own success.

  I remember the first time Matt took me, with the rest of the staff, upstairs to the lounge of the Commerce Club after work for a drink. Around us were several of the Club, though I did not know yet that they were. They sat bantering, as almost everyone who entered did, with Matt, and I sat listening. I was struck silent with awe at actually being in this all-male Holy of Holies and in the company of so much raw vitality and power. It is, in my head, Ben Cameron who said it, but it might well have been someone else. Ben Cameron shone over those days like the sun, and was the spokesman for a decade and a generation, and so it is his face in my mind, and his voice, but at any rate someone said, “We can do it at home. We have enough money here. We have just enough. After that, it’ll have to come from outside, and God knows who and what will bring it in. But for now, we have enough and we can do it.”

  In that moment I fell in love with the power structure of the city, and it was a love affair that did not end for a long time. It was my first glimpse of the pure force of personality, and though I have learned now that is as susceptible to corruption and decay as anything else mortal, power still attracts me. Without it, I would have had no career. I have built a life chronicling it.

  They were an impressive group, the Club, sitting together at one of their board meetings or luncheons. Attractive, easygoing, affable, with their own ritualized jargon, the argot of the well-born Atlanta male among his peers. “Hey, how you doin’?” one seersuckered man would say to another, smiling a slow smile and laying an arm easily over a shoulder. “Hey, good to see you, such.” This to a man with whom they had, perhaps, just come off a golf course or from a family dinner. That drawled “such” was the group’s familiar, as tu is to the French. It was not used outside the ranks.

  But the ease and indolence were by way of protective coloration. To sit and lunch in the Capital City Club or the Commerce Club was to see pure power in repose, drinking its prelunch bourbon and branch water and eating its London broil. It was almost palpable; you could get dizzy from it.

  “Let me write about them,” I begged Matt over and over. “Let me do a piece on Ben Cameron. We haven’t had a piece on him in two years. Let me interview Governor Wylie. Or Mills Lane. It could be a good piece, you know, a young newcomer from Savannah talking to its most famous expatriate here about the city? I know it could….”

  And it could have been a good piece, but Matt would not hear of it. All of my pleas to do pieces on the men who powered the city fell on deaf ears.

  “The next three issues are all assigned,” he would say, or “I really need you most on captions and the entertainment guide.”

  For the first three weeks of my time there, I wrote endless photo captions for the layouts that Tom did, and spent endless hours on the telephone getting time and place listings from galleries and theaters and clubs and restaurants and musical groups, and typing them on my secondhand IBM Selectric. Sometimes, by seven or eight in the evening, my eyes would sting and my throat would be closed from talking on the phone, my fingers stiff from typing columns of numbers and listings. I never stinted and I did well at what he gave me. But none of it merited the use of my new byline. And the more I asked for additional work, real stories to do, the more terse and annoyed Matt got. I did not understand; he had hired me, I thought, on the basis of the photo-essays I had done with Hank, but the ones that came in went to Charlie or to a freelancer.

  “You need to hold it down with Matt,” Hank said to me once,
after a story meeting in which I had lobbied once more, unsuccessfully, to do a real piece. “If you get him pissed with you he’ll never give you anything. Pay your dues first.”

  “I thought I had by now,” I said sulkily.

  “He needs to know you’re tough first, before he gives you anything.”

  “How’s he going to find that out if all I ever do is Guide listings and captions and subheads?” I said.

  “Well, he just doesn’t like it when people push him, especially women,” Hank said. I could tell he was uncomfortable. “I know you’ve had to learn to hold your own with all those brothers, but it comes across as pushing to him.”

  And so I stopped agitating for byline pieces for a while, because I was still a child of Corkie and of Liam O’Donnell, and pushing was not a thing that daughters of either did. But I was restless and puzzled. Tom Gordon, with whom I had a comfortable, sweetly flowering friendship from the hours spent toiling over layouts and character counts, interceded for me once in a meeting, saying he had a series of photos of the city in the spring from a new photographer that was the best thing he’d seen in a long while, and he thought I was just the person to do the text for a photo-essay using them.

  Matt looked at him levelly from behind the wire-framed glasses and said, “I want the next photo-essay to go to Bill Towery at the Constitution. I promised it to him when we killed the legislature thing for January.”

  “Well, let’s give Smoky a photo-essay soon,” Tom said stubbornly. “She’s better at it than anybody we’ve got.”

  The green eyes behind the glasses narrowed. Alicia smiled creamily and lit a cigarette.

  “When we find the right photographer,” Matt said, and that was that. Tom did not persist, and I did not ask again. But there was, now, a slight edge to my joy in the city and the magazine. What was I doing that displeased Matt Comfort?

  Teddy told me, finally and plainly, as we sat drinking milk and eating cookies on one of the rare nights we were not out with the staff. I had said, not really expecting an answer by then, “I wonder why he hired me if he’s not going to let me write?”

  She took off the granny glasses she wore to read and watch television and looked at me seriously.

  “Matt really doesn’t like women,” she said. “Somebody should have told you before now. I thought Hank might have. You hear all about his legendary fucking, and how women find him irresistible and vice versa, but he simply won’t hire a woman to do significant editorial stuff. It’s not a policy, it’s just something we all know by now.”

  “He hired you,” I said. “He hired Alicia.”

  She grinned. “Well, Alicia. And as for me, I came on board to be managing editor. I was doing some good stuff at the Constitution. The deal was that I’d take over the ME’s spot and Hank would go on to do traveling and the glamour stuff. Production is as far as I got, or will. I doubt that I’d have gotten this far if it weren’t, you know, for Daddy. I’d leave and go back to the paper except that I’m hooked now. I can’t leave all that Downtown stuff; who could? We all give up something for the magic.”

  I looked at her, solid and plain in her flannel granny gown, her round face innocent of makeup. She had rolled her brown hair on fat rollers so that it would fall into its smooth brown bob in the morning, but that was her one concession to preening. Teddy’s looks were as they were, and her clothes, though expensive, were tailored and conservative, and she did not have a lot of them. It was possible to forget for long periods of time that she was the daughter of the house of Fairchild, whose octagonal residential and commercial real estate signs were as familiar in Atlanta as dogwood and Coca-Cola signs. I had not known until I read a piece we had run on him in a back issue that Oliver Fairchild’s fortune ran, even in those days, into the high multimillions. Teddy and her brother, young Ollie, had grown up in one of the largest houses in Buckhead, and summered in another at Sea Island, and gone to Princeton and Wellesley, and skied at Aspen and sailed out of Northeast Harbor and played tennis almost every weekend at the Piedmont Driving Club, but you seldom got an inkling of it around Teddy. She did not hide it, but neither did she flaunt it. Her money, or even the sense of it, seldom came up. Her reference to her father tonight was the first I had ever heard her make. It was a measure, I knew, of the friendship that was growing between us, and I smiled at her around a mouthful of chocolate chips, thinking that even my mother and father, who scorned loudly the rich and anything to do with them, would have to approve of Teddy. It would not have been hard, even, to convince them she was decorously and inalterably Catholic, though I knew that her family had been pillars of the great yellow St. Philip’s Cathedral on the hill that commanded Peachtree Road, entering Buckhead. There was about Teddy an invisible aura of knee-length uniform skirts and shined saddle shoes.

  “Well, why don’t we change all that, you and me?” I said. “Be the ones who win equality for women at Downtown, and blah-blah-blah? The dynamic duo.”

  “Ain’t gonna happen, O’Donnell,” she said. “I’d say the only way it might would be to seduce him, women being his Achilles’ heel, but even that doesn’t work. Alicia tried it, I know. She was hired to be just what she was, his secretary, but she decided she wanted her own byline so she put a move on him you could see a country mile. All it got her was the greatest apartment in Atlanta and probably more money than even Tom or Hank makes. No byline.”

  “Poor baby,” I said sarcastically. “What a bum deal. Does he pay for her apartment? I never knew anybody who was actually kept.”

  “Not directly. I think he trades it off to the real estate company for ads. He does that a lot. God help us if Mr. Carnes ever gets wind of it. No, if he paid for it I doubt if he could afford more than Colonial Homes. He doesn’t really make much. There’re just a lot of fringe benefits that go with the job.”

  “I’m glad she’s not in Colonial Homes,” I said, looking around at the sung living room that I shared now, miraculously, with Teddy. It was small and even rather Spartan, but compared to Our Lady it was nearly sumptuous. “Wouldn’t it be awful always to be worrying about running into Matt Comfort at dawn in the parking lot, or something?”

  “He doesn’t stay over,” Teddy said. “It’s the one rule he has. He never stays over.” She stopped and flushed, deep red, and looked away. “At least that’s what I’ve heard.”

  I was silent, dumbfounded. Teddy and Matt Comfort? Here, in this cheerful fishbowl of a singles complex? In this very living room, perhaps, with its worn brown tweed sofa and the butterfly chairs from Teddy’s college room, and the faded Oriental and good, if slightly battered, oval cherry dining table and chairs from her family? In the little upstairs bedroom with the single window overlooking the fairway of Bobby Jones golf course, on the narrow four-poster bed she had brought, also, from home? I could not imagine it. It seemed as unlikely as the mating of different species. There had never been anything in their manner with each other but casual affection—that I had seen, anyway. I thought suddenly that if there had been anything between them, Teddy was bound to have suffered from it. I knew her well enough by now to know that she would never give her body or her heart lightly. I felt a swift surge of pure dislike for Matt Comfort, followed by the old, hot embarrassment.

  “Well, I’m not giving up on the byline,” I said. “But it’s nice to know I’m not going to have to sleep with him to get it. It would be like screwing Secret Squirrel.”

  She burst into laughter and reached over and hugged me.

  “I’m glad you decided to move in here,” she said. “Polly is an old and dear friend, but she’s got the sense of humor of a bull moose. She never said screw in her life; I hope by now she knows what it means, but I doubt it.”

  I smiled back at her, thinking that I had said it perhaps twice now in my life, and had no more idea than the hapless, moose-witted Polly what it meant.

  “I’m glad I did, too,” I said.

  The week before Christmas, Teddy invited me to a party at her parents’
home. It was, she said, their annual open house, a long-held custom with the Fairchilds, and traditionally only their oldest and closest friends were invited.

  “Which means about four hundred people,” Teddy grimaced. “It will probably bore you to death; there won’t be many people under fifty, and virtually nobody swings. But I always bring a special friend, and I hope you’ll come. Otherwise I’m going to be stuck listening to some Buckhead matron tell me about her problems with her servants now that Dr. King has gotten everybody stirred up.”

  I knew Teddy was, like everyone on Downtown’s staff, a social and political liberal, and wondered for the first time how that must be for her in her own world. I did not think that many of the people of the big Buckhead houses would be liberal thinkers. It was a given, in Corkie, that none of Savannah’s wealthy were.

  “Are you sure?” I said. “Somehow I don’t feel that your folks would have exactly chosen a blue-collar Irish Catholic for one of your special friends. And, if they’re like mine, they’d much rather you brought a man. Aren’t they always on your back to get married?”

  She rolled her brown eyes. “Only about every second of their lives. You’d think I’d disgraced my entire caste or something by being single. But I think they’ve given up for the time being. I’d far rather take you than one of the guys I grew up with. Most of them have already lost some of their hair and voted for Barry Goldwater.”

  “Do you have somebody special?” I said tentatively. She had not dated since I had moved in, but that had only been three weeks. It did not mean that there was no one in her life.

  “Not really,” Teddy said. “I’ve had fairly serious boy-friends, but…I don’t know. There’s so little time after work. Right now, the magazine just seems enough—”