The office was full of scraps of bright wrapping paper and curls of ribbon; fallen needles from the lopsided, drying tabletop tree in the lobby; piled gift boxes from Rich’s and Davison’s and Muse’s and J.P. Allen’s awaiting the talented ministrations of Sueanne, who was cajoled into wrapping everyone’s gifts; cloying bleats from Alvin and the Chipmunks, from the Muzak; and still-unopened gifts advertisers had brought Matt. There would be a staff Christmas party upstairs at the chamber the next evening, but we were going on to have our own afterward, at the Top of Peachtree.
No one’s mind was on the March issue, which we had met to try to finalize. Matt had to drag our flagging attention back to it so many times that he grew waspish and abrupt, the chestnut hair only partly veiling the annoyance in his slitted green eyes. He looked, in the watery gray afternoon light filtering in through the windows, like he had slept the last three nights at the Union Mission. Even though we knew we were pushing him, we grew sillier and sillier.
“All right,” he said finally. “None of you are worth shit, and won’t be until after New Year’s. But by God we’re going to finish this issue before you leave here, if it’s midnight. What’s next, Teddy?”
Teddy looked at her page layout boards.
“YMOG,” she sighed.
Everybody groaned.
“Is it in?” Matt said, glaring at us.
“No. I don’t think it’s even started. Frank Finley over at the paper was doing it; I thought he’d have it in by now. But he called this afternoon from Dobbins and said he was on his way to Vietnam and somebody else would have to take it. There are some notes in his office if we need them. He said somebody would hunt them up for us.”
“Christ, I hope somebody shoots the sonofabitch in the ass,” Matt snarled. “Is it too much to hope he was drafted?”
“’Fraid so,” Teddy said, and I thought her mouth quirked just a fraction. “Patterson finally sent him and a photographer over there to cover the First Cav.”
“Some people will do anything to get out of YMOG,” Tom said, grinning.
“Yeah, well, I’d give it to you, you bastard, if you could read or write,” Matt said. “Okay, Charlie, I want you to get on it. You’re going to have to move fast. You’ll need to interview him tonight or tomorrow if you’re going to get the piece in by the twenty-sixth.”
“Shit, Matt, I did the last one!” Charlie Stubbs howled. “Be fair, dammit! You know we’re leaving Wednesday morning; I’d have to write all through Christmas—”
Matt grinned ferally. “Poor baby,” he said.
“What’s Eemog?” I said. I could not imagine what it might be, to engender such animosity.
“Young Man on the Go,” Tom Gordon said, safe in the certainty that art directors did not get assigned editorial pieces. “We do one a month. It’s the chamber’s pride and joy. A profile on some young up-and-comer from the local business and professional community, as they are fond of saying. A kind of gallery of local young Turks. Nary an unflattering or discouraging word is ever, ever said about an YMOG. All their daddies are chamber honchos. The pieces are long as hell and dull as chicken-shit. Charlie and Hank usually take turns, but sometimes Matt gives up and farms them out. YMOG has driven more than one reporter to drink—or Vietnam, as the case may be.”
“Well, Charlie’s off the hook,” Hank said slyly. “Because this YMOG just called me and named his writer. Said if he couldn’t have…this person…the deal was off.”
“Just what we need,” Matt said between clenched teeth. “A fucking prima-donna YMOG. So who’s the writer?”
“Smoky,” Hank said, breaking into a grin. “Smoky or nobody.”
I stared at him. Everyone else looked at me. Teddy began to laugh. I turned my eyes to her.
“It’s Brad Hunt, Smoky,” she said. “Bradley Hunt III, scion and heir apparent of Hunt Construction. Oh, Lord, y’all, wait till I tell you what Smoky did….”
They listened as she told them about my encounter with Boy Slattery in her father’s billiard room. By the time she finished almost everyone was weak with laughter, and one or two of them got up to hug me. Only Alicia did not respond with glee, and Matt. Alicia sat smoking silently, studying her nails and then me. Matt stared at me so long that I grew uncomfortable. Then he broke into the long-toothed grin that so totally transformed his ruddy fox’s face. He reached over and squeezed the bulb of the Bahamian taxi horn, and said, “Way to go, Smoky. By God, I’d love to have seen you whip Boy Slattery’s fat ass. You got talents I never dreamed of.”
“Apparently,” Alicia breathed.
“Okay,” he said, sobering. “Brad Hunt’s yours. Go call him now and do the interview today or tomorrow. I want the piece on my desk the morning of the twenty-sixth, no excuses. If you have to write it on the bus going home, do it. And Smoky, we don’t sluff off the YMOGs just because they’re crap. We treat them like the most important piece we’ve ever done.”
“It’s the only piece I’ve ever done, so far,” I said.
“Smartmouth is a privilege we earn around here,” he said shortly, and I flushed. Alicia’s laugh tinkled. I got up from his sofa and went back to my office to call Brad Hunt.
“Well, if it’s not Savannah Fats,” he said. “My wild Irish hustler. I’ve been waiting to hear from you.”
He took me to dinner the following night at the Piedmont Driving Club for our interview. He picked me up after work in an incredible little automobile that looked like a bird in flight; only later did Hank and Matt, who were standing at the curb with me, tell me that it was a gull-wing Mercedes.
“Holy shit,” I heard Matt Comfort breathe, as Brad Hunt reached over and somehow raised the door up so that it did, indeed, look like the wing on an airborne gull.
“Long way from Corkie, Smokes,” Hank said, handing me into the little car. It smelled of leather and cigarette smoke and a wonderful, bronzy aftershave. The car was so opulently ostentatious that I could only laugh helplessly, completely forgetting that a minute before I had been nearly mute with nerves.
“I hope this thing turns into a pumpkin one second past midnight, and you a rat,” I said to Brad Hunt as he gunned the car away from the curb.
“It turns into my brother Chris’s garage, from whence it came,” he smiled. “He races it around the South, and this is only the second time in my life I’ve been allowed to drive it. If I get so much as a scratch on it, I do indeed turn into a rat, a dead one. I borrowed it because the gal who beat Boy Slattery at eight ball deserves something fancier than my four-year-old Pontiac. Hi, Smoky O’Donnell. You look mighty pretty tonight.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I needed that. I’ve been shaking in my boots all day. This is my first piece for Downtown. I’ve never interviewed an YMOG before.”
“Thank God,” he said. “I’ve never been one, either. Well, don’t think of it as an interview. Think of it as a first date. I’m going to take you to the Driving Club for dinner and show you off, and then maybe we’ll go somewhere and dance. Can you dance as well as you play pool?”
“No,” I said. “And dinner would be fine, but I’m going to have to go home and start writing after that. You’re due on Matt’s desk the morning of the day after Christmas. I’ll be writing all through the holidays. What’s the Driving Club?”
He looked at me for a moment, and then laughed again.
“By God, I think we’ll skip dinner and go to North Georgia and get married,” he said. “It’s this old club where we—where a lot of quote, Old Atlanta, unquote belongs. Supposed to be harder than heaven to get into; somebody has to die before there’s a vacancy. Dull as dishwater. Terrible food. If you hate it, I will marry you.”
I didn’t hate the Piedmont Driving Club, but I was not comfortable there. I never was, in all the times I went there, with Brad or anyone else. It was simply too static, too assuredly placid, too steeped in its stone-and-oak exclusivity to get a deep breath in. It sat on its low, wooded hill north of the city like the fortress that it
was, walled away by stone and mortar and money, and all of the well-dressed, middle-aged people who came in and out of it that night seemed to me the same person. There were many small Christmas parties in its private rooms that evening, and diners in the low, beamed tavernlike room where we ate before a huge fire were all decked in sedate glitter, and all spoke warmly to Brad, and asked after his mother and father, and smiled at me when he introduced me, and all might have been the same stocky, graying man in a dark blue suit, the same small, silver-rinsed woman in dark wool just touched with pearls or a lone diamond.
“What a cute nickname,” the women all twinkled at me, assessing my suit and accent like Jack Russell terriers. “I bet it’s your daddy’s, too. Savannah, did you say? We have lots of friends in Savannah—”
“Downtown?” said the men. “Good boy, Matt Comfort. Heard him speak at Rotary. Real go-getter. Gon’ do well in ol’ Atlanta. You going to write stories for him?”
“She’s the one who put Boy Slattery away at the Fairchilds’ the other night,” Brad said over and over, and all the men laughed. They had heard.
“They won’t forget that,” Brad said when we had been seated, and ordered drinks. “They may never read a word you write, but they’ll remember that. Boy is not universally loved in this town. My father may be one of the few who really like him.”
“Are they old friends?” I said, thinking of Teddy’s father.
“Sort of,” he said. “What they really are is soulmates. My dad thinks Boy’s politics are right on. He thinks he’ll be the next governor, and not a minute too soon. My dad’s construction company builds, among other things, dangerously substandard low-cost housing for the Negroes in the southeast part of town. Saves the owners a bundle in niceties.”
I looked at him curiously in the candlelight. He wore a beautifully cut sage green suit with a blue oxford cloth shirt and a striped tie, and looked like a fashion sketch in Esquire with his narrow head and good features and the cap of rough, silver-blond hair. He looked, it struck me suddenly, like a portrait of one of the young Medicis, which in effect was what he was, or this city’s equivalent, at any rate. And yet he sat talking easily, even humorously, of what could only be called his father’s racism, and something that was not at all complacent, something on the edge of anger, looked out of his blue eyes.
“Don’t forget you’re talking to a reporter,” I said.
He laughed. “I know Culver Carnes and his precious YMOGs,” he said. “You could write that my father is a Nazi war criminal and he’d just take it out. I’m safe, whether or not you like it, and whether or not I do.”
“But you don’t approve of the way your father does things. And I gather you don’t approve of Boy Slattery, for governor or anything else.”
“Right to both. That’s no secret to people who know me, especially the younger ones of us. Boy Slattery would be the biggest disaster this state ever had, and Atlanta couldn’t survive if the old-time hard-liners like Dad should prevail. Race is the single most important problem we’ll ever have. A lot of us know that. We’ve got to do better than we have so far, by a long shot.”
“I would like to quote you on that,” I said. “Matt will like that. He thinks the same thing. He’s on this committee, or council, or something, a kind of task force the mayor set up to help sort out the racial thing—”
“I know,” Brad said, smiling. “Focus. I’m on it, too. Dad almost had apoplexy.”
“I know somebody else on it,” I said. “Sister Joan, from Our Lady. Matt got me a room there for a week or so when I first came here, until I moved in with Teddy.”
“Sister Joan, yeah. Nice lady. Plays a mean guitar. Well, well. So you’re one of Our Lady’s girls. I can’t wait for you to meet my father. He thinks the Catholics are the ones stirring up the Negroes.”
“I can hardly wait,” I said dryly. “Hadn’t you better tell me something good about your dad, drop just a little filial loyalty, as befits a scion and future president of Hunt Construction? Mr. Carnes will make me invent it if you don’t.”
“My dad’s probably the best businessman in Atlanta, and that’s saying something,” Brad said. “It’s no secret I don’t always get along with him. Chris doesn’t, either, or Sally. It’s why Chris races sports cars and Sally married a Jew and moved to Upper Montclair. In your face, Daddy-o. That doesn’t mean I don’t think we’ve got the solidest family business in the state, or that I don’t plan to run it as well as I can one day. I’ll tell you interview stuff after dinner. Let’s don’t ruin this…whatever this extraordinary meat is…with that. Tell me, why is it that you had an Irish accent last Saturday night, but you don’t tonight?”
“I only do that when I’m very nervous,” I smiled. “I’m not nervous now.”
“No? I hope not. I sincerely hope not. All the same, I liked the accent. Don’t lose it entirely.”
We ate a middling bad dinner and drank a lot of wine, and had rich, wonderful Black Russians before the fire afterward, and laughed a lot, and he did, indeed, give me, tersely and as if he were reciting, more than enough to make an interview. I knew that I would do it well. I did not know if I could manage to capture the duality about him that intrigued me; the almost exotic—at least to me—mantle of the well-born Southern liberal that he wore; the wing-brush of darkness that I sensed about him. I had met no one like him. He made me laugh and he made me think, and by the time we stood in the chill air of the portico waiting for the Mercedes to be brought around, I realized that I had not felt in the least ill at ease with him since I climbed into his brother’s ridiculous car at the beginning of the evening.
When we drew up in front of my apartment he did not get out immediately. He lit a cigarette and sat looking out over the dark golf course, at the lights of the houses along Northside Drive on its other side winking through the bare branches of the trees, then he turned and took my chin in his hand and raised my face to his and kissed me, softly. He kissed me again, not so softly, and then dropped his hand and studied me. In the green light from the dashboard his narrow, uplit face looked Oriental, eerie, a Chinese statue’s face.
“Will you be back for New Year’s Eve?” he said. “If you are, I’d like to take you to a party. One of my fraternity brothers from the university is giving it. We’ll drop by my parents’ open house beforehand. I want them to meet you. That is, if you’re not tied up with family doings in Savannah.”
“Brad,” I said, “what happens at my house in Corkie on New Year’s Eve is that my mother goes to midnight Mass and my brothers go to Perkins’s Pub and my father gets drunk in front of the TV and waits for the ball to drop in Times Square. I want to be clear about all that from the very start. We’re light-years away from…your parents’ open house and the Driving Club. We’re probably downright poor, truth be known, only I don’t guess I ever realized that. Poor and Irish Catholic. I’d love to go to your party, and meet your parents, but I’m still going to be poor and Irish and Catholic after I do. That’s not going to change. I’m not sure, from what you’ve told me, that your parents are going to think a whole lot of that.”
He did not speak, only smiled.
“Or is that the point?” I said.
“Partly,” Bradley Hunt III said. “Partly it is the point. But only partly.”
And he kissed me again.
5
I DID THE YMOG PIECE WELL. I SAT UP ALL NIGHT AFTER Brad left and wrote it. I could not have slept. There was too much roiling around in my head. My first story for Downtown; my first real foray into the insular, complex world of Old Atlanta; my first kiss since I came here. I thought back, and laughed softly to myself: my first non-Catholic kiss ever. Not bad, I told myself, for a Corkie girl who’s been in town less than a month.
I was pleased with myself. I knew I had written well. The piece had seemed to organize itself swiftly and surely, as they did when I was writing at the top of my form. From the first sentence it found its voice; it was particular and cogent and informative and l
aced with small glimmers of irony. I thought Brad would like it, and Matt. I write badly often enough to know when I do it well, and allowed myself the small surge of self-satisfaction because I knew that all too often in the days ahead I would flounder in self-doubt. I had already seen that Matt could do that to me with the lift of an eyebrow or a drawled word.
I was just gathering up my papers when Teddy appeared downstairs, dragging her robe and knuckling her eyes.
“Lord, how long have you been up?” she said.
“I haven’t been down yet,” I said. “I thought I’d just go on and do this so Matt could have it today, instead of after Christmas. It’ll give me more time if he wants a rewrite.”
She put on coffee and flopped down heavily on the other end of the sofa. Morning is not Teddy’s best time.
“So. What did you think of the Driving Club?” she said.
“It’s big and pretty, and the food is awful.”
She laughed. “And Brad?”
“Big and pretty.”
“But not awful.” It was not a question.
“Not awful. Not a bit awful. Strange, though. There are so many contradictory things about him. I wanted to dislike him on principle, but I don’t.”
“Nobody does,” Teddy said. “What’s to dislike? He’s rich, handsome, nice, funny, and his heart is in the right place. He believes in all the right things—”
“So why isn’t he married or at least taken? I’m assuming he’s not.”
“Not that I know of. He’s always been the despair of my crowd, and our mothers. He dates all the time, of course, but when it gets right down to it he just…withdraws. Nicely; Brad doesn’t do anything mean or vulgar, ever. He must have been through every girl in Buckhead between the ages of twenty and thirty, and none of them have taken. I think it’s his mother.”
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