Downtown

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  And he grinned his doggy white grin at Lucas Geary. Lucas grinned back, a white crescent splitting the piratical red beard, framed Matt’s face with his two hands, and said, “Shocking.”

  “How about we go get a drink?” Matt said. And the two of them shambled out into the spring noon, in search of Cutty Sark and chicken livers at Emile’s.

  It was, I think, the start of a beautiful friendship. After that, you seldom saw Lucas Geary that you did not see Matt. Lucas spent long hours lying on the floor in Matt’s office, poring over his contact sheets and listening to Ramsey Lewis and the Modern Jazz Quartet on Matt’s tape machine, and when he and Matt did not lunch or dine alone, he came along with us on our staff lunches and evening freebies, as if he were one of us. Hank told me that they went out together many nights, staying until all hours, and that often Matt slept over at Lucas’s place in Ansley Park, an airy, secluded guest house behind the large, genteelly shabby home of the widow of the former conductor of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. It was, Hank said, surprisingly sophisticated and luxurious for one who seemingly lacked any visible means of support, and Matt thought that much of the furniture and many paintings and books and records had found their way there from the collection of the old lady. Lucas spent a good bit of time with her talking music, and she was frankly besotted with him. Hank thought a good bit of the musical chat was probably bullshit, but Lucas did seem to know a lot about all types of music, and did some chores and simple handyman work for her, and sometimes took her to the grocery store or the doctor in the Morgan, or walked her fusty old poodle. It was a good arrangement for both the old lady and Lucas Geary, and Matt enjoyed the aura of cultivation and the comforts of Lucas’s guest house.

  “I reckon Alicia is getting a lot of sleep these days,” Hank said.

  Alicia was not a happy woman in those first tender spring days. She said nothing, of course, but we did not see her getting into Matt’s car with him after the trips to the Top of Peachtree often anymore; instead Matt and Lucas would go off together, leaving Alicia to wait tight-mouthed with the rest of us in the building parking lot for her little yellow VW bug to come hurtling down the ramp. Tom Gordon said that until that spring no one had even known what sort of car she drove.

  For several weeks after Matt and Lucas became inseparable Alicia appeared almost daily in a new outfit, with freshly done nails and, two or three times, a new haircut. But, though she still spent a great deal of time with Matt in his office, now Lucas was there, also, supine or prone as the spirit took him. He never, Hank said, seemed to take photographs of Alicia.

  There had always been talk about Matt’s women, and now gossip began to drift back about Lucas Geary’s near-mystical appeal to anything under sixty and female. There were tales about women in other cities who pursued him feverishly on his out-of-town shoots, and women who slipped keys and pleading messages under his motel room doors all over the South, and beautiful women of all races who answered knocks at his door when he was at home, or soft voices that answered his telephone at all hours. He never stayed in a relationship more than a month or two, went the stories, and always had two or three going simultaneously, and there were even hints that there was an abandoned wife in this Northern city, or a small red-haired bastard in that one.

  I could scarcely believe the talk. In the first place, what was there in this gangling, shambling, wild-haired, glib-tongued Irishman that could account for such massive, ongoing fatal attraction? Most of the time Lucas Geary seemed to me lazy, sarcastic, almost insulting, and good-naturedly indifferent to the women in our office. He was focused mainly on his photography and his conversations with Matt. In the second place, when did he accomplish his legendary womanizing? Unless he and Matt worked in tandem, I could not imagine when he could fit in dalliance. And somehow team seduction did not seem to me to be Matt Comfort’s style. I wrote the stories off as the spillover luster of Lucas’s very real aura as a precocious Civil Rights photographer, and to the enmity of Culver Carnes and his minions.

  Lucas cultivated the latter assiduously. Besides shooting photographs of the underwear of all of the chamber secretaries, Culver’s own personal helpmeet included, he took Francis Brewton and Mr. Tommy T. Bliss to lunch at the Capital City Club and charged the meal to Culver Carnes’s account. He went into the poorest, most blasted and simmering public housing projects and slum neighborhoods in the city, alone with only his camera, staying for days at a time, telling the justly suspicious inhabitants that he was shooting for Culver Carnes at the chamber of commerce.

  “Matt says he’s the only absolutely fearless human being he’s ever seen,” Hank told me one day. “It’s not that he’s macho or anything. Matt says that he just lacks the human capacity for fear. Everything goes into the photographs. Matt says it’ll get him killed one day.”

  “I sort of figured he’d die in bed,” I said. “Not, of course, his own.”

  “He been hitting on you?” Hank said, frowning at me.

  “No, of course not. Don’t be silly,” I said. There was, I knew, an unspoken rule that women on the staff were off-limits to casual sorties from outsiders; I would have been truly surprised if Lucas Geary had made any sort of overture to me, or any other Downtown woman. But still, the stories that drifted around him like smoke were intriguing.

  It was a beautiful spring, even for a city that bragged in national print about its springs. I still don’t know a place with lovelier Aprils. The mornings and nights are fresh and cool, and the sun pours down like spilled honey, warm without the thick, wet weight of the coming summer. The damp earth is as red as flesh, or blood, and so fecund that you can almost hear the thrumming, rustling push of growth up through it. The new foliage is a thousand different shades of pink, red, gold, and green. I could not seem to stay indoors at night in that first spring; I was enraptured with the startling, ghostly white snowfalls of dogwood in dusk-green woods, and with streetlights shining through new leaves. Azaleas rolled like surf through the wooded hills of the northwest, where the great houses of Buckhead stood. Brad and I spent more than a few nights simply drifting up one street and down another in his brother’s gull-wing Mercedes, drinking in the smells and sights of April. Teddy and I often walked on the dark sweep of Bobby Jones golf course, saying little, simply breathing in the sweet night wind. Even downtown, walking back to the garage after an evening out, the staff lingered, raising our heads to evening skies milky with stars, holding out bare arms as if warm rain fell upon them. I fell in love, that year, with spring.

  On an evening in mid-April Brad picked me up after work and told me that he wanted to cook dinner for me in his guest-house apartment.

  “I am a true artist with a small palette,” he said. “I do terrific steaks, hamburgers, and spaghetti. We’ll eat out on my terrace and sip champagne by the pool. We’d swim, but it hasn’t been cleaned yet, and I don’t fancy swimming in stuff that looks like lime Jell-O. Maybe we’ll get drunk.”

  I looked sideways at him. He smiled at me, and winked. He looked relaxed and carefree and young in the soft twilight; he had thrown his seersucker suit coat in the backseat and loosened his tie, and rolled up his sleeves. The last sun glistened gold on the hairs of his forearms. They and his hands were tanned and corded with veins and thick with muscle. I forgot for long periods of time that Brad was a builder and had started out working with his father’s construction crews.

  “Your parents must be out,” I said.

  “Nope, but they’re busy. They’ve got some people coming in. And besides, mother’s so crazy about the YMOG you did that she ordered fifty copies of the magazine. You’re way up in her book now.”

  “I’m so grateful,” I said sourly, and he laughed.

  “Relax. We won’t even see them. We’ll go straight on back to my place. You can’t see it from the big house when the leaves are out, only the lights. She’ll never know you’re there if you don’t want her to.”

  “I’m not going to sneak past your mother to have supper wit
h you,” I said. “I’d rather get a hamburger at Harry’s.”

  “I’ll never ask you to sneak, Smoky,” he said.

  When we pulled in between the great, white painted-brick gate posts that guarded the Hunt house, I remembered something from a college English class and said, “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again, and for a time I could not enter, for the way was closed to me—”

  “Yeah, I always thought Mother would make a great Rebecca,” Brad said. “Or do I mean Mrs. Danvers?”

  “You’re a man of many parts, Mr. Hunt,” I said. “When do you find time to read?”

  “Saw the movie,” he said. “I like that about the parts. Wanna see a few?”

  “Shut up and drive,” I said, and he gunned the car up the long driveway.

  The drive curved around in front of the big white house and then looped on toward the back. I had thought we would follow it back into the thicket of tall hardwoods that made a backdrop for the house, but he braked abruptly and stopped. There were two or three other cars pulled up under the porte cochere, Cadillacs and Lincolns, dark and sedate.

  “Are we going in?” I said, looking down at my hot pink—flowered Pucci bell-bottoms and skimpy pink T-shirt. “I’m not dressed for seeing people.”

  “Just for a minute. There’s someone I want you to meet,” he said. “You look fine. It’s not a party, just some of Dad’s buddies breaking a little ice and talking a little trash.”

  “What trash?”

  “I think maybe your old buddy Boy Slattery has been a bad boy again, and some of the others are meeting to see what they can do to shut him up. He’s been popping off to the press; Newsweek picked up a real cute thing he said about financing day care for little jungle bunnies the other day. He was talking about some federal funds Ben Cameron thought he had in the bag for a program of day care and early education down in the projects. He went to the feds because they love him after he fell off that car down in Vine City a few years ago, and he knew he wasn’t going to get a dime out of the statehouse. Lint Wylie would have given it to him, but Boy and his yahoos, as Ben calls ’em, would have blocked even a penny for the Atlanta Negroes until hell freezes over. LBJ’s folks were all set to dish out, I hear, and then Boy gets drunk at some legislature barbecue back in January and shoots off his mouth to the press pool, and now the White House is all uptight and publicly washing their hands of Georgia. You can’t really blame them. Ben’s going around to all Boy’s old buddies and trying to get them to reason with him. I think he’s wasting his breath with Dad, but I know Ben. He’ll do whatever he has to do. Somebody ought to just take ol’ Boy hunting and see that he has a little accident. Maybe that’s what Ben’s thinking. Boy and Dad hunt together a good bit down around Thomasville.”

  “I’ve got no business in a meeting like that,” I said, meaning it, but I was intrigued, too. Ben Cameron. For several years I had been accustomed to seeing the tanned face and level gray eyes of the legendary Ben Cameron, mayor of Atlanta, in the pages of the state and national newspapers; I’d seen the thatch of iron-red hair and the wide grin beside the smiling faces of many of my heroes: John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Cameron was a rich man, a patrician, and yet a tireless and pragmatic battler for the civil rights of all his constituency. He had done more than orchestrate legislation; he had put himself in harm’s way more than once, as when he had stood in a mob of angry Negroes in one of the city’s grimmest ghettos on a broiling hot summer day, atop a car, virtually the only white face visible, and shouted for order and communication until the crowd was diffused and he himself was knocked, as he said later, on his ass. I would give a lot to meet Ben Cameron. I would even face Marylou Hunt.

  She was on the long screened porch that stretched across the back of the house, passing a tray of tall drinks to the three or four men who lounged about on the comfortable old wicker furniture. They were all in shirt-sleeves, and most had taken off their ties and rolled up their sleeves, as Brad had. Marylou Hunt wore a long flowered caftan that I recognized as a Lilly Pulitzer. Her silvery hair was pulled severely back from her wonderful face, as it had been the night of New Year’s Eve, when I had last seen her, and there was a great flame-colored azalea pinned in her chignon. It matched the flame and salmon splashes on the caftan, and set off the velvety new tan that lightened her blue eyes to the color you sometimes see in the heart of flame. She smiled when she saw her son, and the smile widened into something else entirely when she saw me. Brad had her small, very white teeth. Both looked, at times, like beautiful animals snarling. That was how she looked now.

  “Children,” she said. “How nice. Come in and have a sundowner with us. These boys are almost done with their silly business. Bradley, I’m sure you remember Brad’s little friend Sooty. Sooty, this is Evan Tarpley and George Carmichael, and of course you’ll know our mayor and Bradley’s and my dear friend, Ben Cameron. Gentlemen, Sooty…O’Leary, is it, dear?”

  “It’s Smoky,” I said, feeling my chest ignite. Why had I let myself in for this? “Smoky O’Donnell. It’s a pleasure to meet all of you.”

  They all smiled, and Marylou Hunt gave a small cry of patently false distress and said, “Of course, Smoky,” and one of the men—Evan Tarpley, I think—said, “Well, well, Miss Smoky O’Donnell. I’m exceedingly glad to meet you. Didn’t I see your name on a piece about this boy here a few days ago? And didn’t I hear something about you whipping Boy Slattery’s butt at pool awhile back?”

  “I’m afraid so, to both questions,” I said, smiling gratefully.

  “It was a good piece of writing, Smoky,” Ben Cameron said in the tenor voice that was familiar to me, and yet not. “And it was an even better piece of ass-whipping, if you’ll excuse my French.”

  “Is this the little gal?” George Carmichael said, and Brad laughed and said it was. They all laughed, even Brad’s father, although, I thought, unwillingly. He had had a flushed, mulish look on his heavy face when we entered.

  Marylou Hunt laughed too, a high crystal tinkle.

  “Boy’s no match for the fighting Irish,” she said.

  “Doesn’t seem to be,” the mayor said. “Maybe Smoky’s what we need on this team.”

  “As a matter of fact, that’s why I brought her by,” Brad said. “If you’ll forgive the intrusion, Ben, I’ve got the germ of an idea that might end up making our side look pretty good and shutting Boy’s mouth at the same time. I thought you might be willing to hear it.”

  Ben Cameron took a glass from Marylou Hunt’s tray and settled back on his chaise and propped his long legs up. He smiled at Marylou and raised his glass at me and Brad.

  “Always glad, Brad, you know that,” he said.

  “Well, it’s this,” Brad said, pulling up a chair beside Ben Cameron and sitting astride it, his arms crossed on its back, with the ease of one who has walked among powerful men all his life. His mother smiled fondly at him; his father gave him a guarded, unreadable look.

  “You know Focus, that commission you set up a while back to pull in representatives from the business and professional and, ah—spiritual, I guess—communities, to sort of spotlight the places the private sector could help out the city? I’m on it, and Smoky’s boss, Matt Comfort, you know Matt…well, you know everybody on it. Your office put it together.”

  Ben Cameron nodded, following Brad with his eyes.

  “Well, I know it can’t be official, or you’d have hell’s own time with the city and the state people, but what if we gave it some real teeth? Put it to work on a continuing basis, like a really good ongoing PR campaign, only with more…dignity, more bite. Spotlight a different need, say, each month, along with a team from the private sector and a plan to address it? You’ve got a lot of talent on Focus, and you could beef it up some, with people who could tell us what the real problems are and the kinds of minds that could come up with real solutions. All you’d need is money. I think if the public was used to seeing problems set out with solutions suggested and w
ays to implement them, they might be willing to come up with some money. I feel like our business leaders would kick in, and I think if it was an ongoing media campaign, Washington might see that we mean business down here, and know how to get it done, and mean to do it no matter how much rednecks like Boy Slattery flap their gums. They might feel like letting go of more money.”

  They all looked at Brad. His father narrowed his eyes, and his mother simply stared.

  “Interesting,” Ben Cameron said. “Except that a PR campaign of that magnitude would cost a mint, and PR smells like PR no matter how you pretty it up.”

  “Well, you know, it depends on who presents it,” Brad said mildly. “You know John Howard, don’t you? From Selma; he’s over at Morehouse now, I think.”

  “Oh, yes, I know John. Good man,” Ben Cameron said. “Been a help to me in ways not many people know about. What about him?”

  “I see an ongoing feature in Downtown, full-color, several pages a month, with Focus as the subject and a new task force tackling a new problem area every month. I see John Howard as the spokesperson for both the black community—because let’s face it, that’s where the problems are going to be—and sort of the official host of the series. Smoky here would write it, because she knows Howard and she’s good, and a photographer named Lucas Geary would shoot it every month. You know, Focus on day care, Focus on decent housing, Focus on working conditions for city workers, Focus on health care for the elderly, Focus on Grady Hospital, Focus on street gangs—”

  “I know,” Ben Cameron nodded.

  “All shot by the hottest young photographer in the country, the one who did that shot of Howard getting his head bashed in on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. It was a hell of a shot, ran all over the place. Geary’s got carte blanche with all the big magazines now, and Matt Comfort’s got him pretty much in the bag at Downtown, don’t ask me how.”