“I don’t ask how Matt does anything,” Ben Cameron laughed.
“It could be some of the best writing and photography coming out of the South, or the country, for that matter,” Brad said. “Far out of the PR category. The fact that it’s officially sponsored, so to speak, doesn’t bother me a bit.”
“No, just think of Agee and Walker Evans and Dorothy Stead for the WPA,” I said, forgetting my shyness and whose house I was in.
“Good point,” the mayor said. “But how do you know any of them would agree to do it?”
“Well, Matt would do it if Culver told him to,” Brad said, smiling. “And Geary would jump at it, and so would Smoky, and I think John Howard would do it for Geary. And I think I could promise that the business community would, for the most part, like to be seen as part of the solution, not the problem. I volunteer here and now to sort of stand for the construction people. I’ll bet Evan and George would agree to offer some resources from their shops. It could have a lot of impact, and even Boy would think twice if his hunting and poker buddies were on deck working with the Negro community.”
There was a silence. Ben Cameron stared at Brad, nodding slowly, his gray eyes far away. The other two men looked at each other, then at Ben, and nodded, too. Ben’s father said nothing, but his face was slowly purpling, and the veins on the backs of his hands were engorging. Marylou Hunt was so still that she might have turned to stone. She did not even blink. But white lines ran like a bolt of lightning from the corners of her mouth to her chin, and there were white patches on her cheeks and around her eyes.
“It wouldn’t hurt to have a little chat with Culver in the morning,” Ben said. “What about it, Smoky? You think it would work? You think we could pull it off?”
“I think Mr. Carnes would love to do it, for you,” I said. “I think Mr. Comfort would love to do it, even if it was Mr. Carnes’s idea. I don’t know about John Howard, but I believe Lucas would like it, and I would absolutely adore it. I would.”
“Then we’ll check it out,” Ben Cameron said, getting to his feet. “Good thinking, Brad. Thanks for the idea and the offer to stand for construction. I take it there won’t be any family…feeling…about your involvement.”
He smiled at Brad’s father and mother. It was an easy smile, but a knowing one.
“We’ll do what we can, of course, if everyone else is in,” Mr. Hunt said stiffly. I could see a pulse beating in his temple.
“What a strange little idea, Brad,” Marylou Hunt said, ice in her voice. “However did you come up with it?”
She looked at me. I looked back.
“I had help,” Brad said, and his mother smiled, the animal’s smile. He gave it back to her.
“I’ll bet you did,” she said.
“Well, we’ll be going on,” Brad said. “I’m going to cook for Smoky tonight. She doesn’t think I’ve got a domestic bone in my body.”
“I’d like to see that,” Ben Cameron smiled, and clapped him on the shoulder. “Make sure he wears an apron, Smoky, and don’t let him con you into doing dishes.”
“Oh, I don’t imagine Smoky had dishes in mind.” Marylou Hunt could not keep the venom from her voice.
“No, I didn’t,” I said. “I do windows, but not dishes. Good night, Mr. Cameron, Mr. Tarpley, Mr. Carmichael. Mr. Hunt. Mrs. Hunt. I hope I’ll see you again soon.”
“Oh, you will,” Brad said, and gave a small wave over his shoulder and walked me off the porch.
Behind me, I heard Marylou Hunt call, softly but sharply, “Bradley, wait a minute.”
“Later, Ma,” he said, still not turning.
We were through the living room and back out on the veranda before he spoke.
“She hates it when I call her Ma,” he said.
We stayed very late in the little house behind Brad’s parents’ big one. He did indeed cook better-than-average spaghetti for me in the tiny kitchen, and we did indeed sip champagne and eat our dinner on small tables on his pocket veranda, facing the still, stagnant swimming pool. There were crickets, and from somewhere close by the heavy, heartbreaking scent of mimosa blew in lightly. He lit candles and we toasted each other and the spring and the hopeful new Focus series. Once or twice he leaned over and kissed me softly. It was an enchanted evening, after its ugly start, but somehow I never fully relaxed and let myself slide into it. Marylou Hunt was simply too near. I could not see her, of course, but I could see the lights of what I knew, late in the evening, must be her bedroom, and I could feel her prowling near us with those extraordinary eyes. Brad’s eyes.
“She can’t see us,” he said once, when I pulled away from a long kiss. We were lying stretched out on a chaise beside the pool, and if it had not been for the sheltering trees, I knew that anyone in the house could have watched.
“Are you sure?”
“I’m certain. I used to lie up there in my bedroom next to hers when I was a kid, and try to spy on the grown-ups down by the pool. You can’t do it.”
“She can see the lights, though—”
“So?”
“She’ll know how late I stay.”
He reached over and snuffed out the candle with his thumb and forefinger.
“No she won’t. Though I wouldn’t care if she did.”
I did not think he would care. He was nervy and vividly animated, thrumming with a kind of interior energy, like an engine running softly, deep down. It was different from his usual loose-jointed calm, and exciting in a sharp, physical way. In another way, though, there was something just faintly—what was the word I wanted? Not dangerous, surely?—about being with Brad that night. The kisses and caresses we exchanged slid quickly from our usual long, soft, slow ones to something else, swift and hard and so insistent that by the time I finally pulled away, flushed and breathing hard, I was half undressed and we were more than halfway to making love. I sat up, heart hammering with something not far from fear.
“Stop. No. I can’t. Please, Brad—”
“I want it to be tonight, Smoky.”
“No. Not here. Don’t you see? Not right under your mother’s nose, not to…to celebrate some kind of victory over her—”
He sat up, too.
“Is that what you think?”
I knew I had made him angry. But this was not right, not for our first time.
“I’m sorry, but it’s just not the right place.”
He was silent for a time, looking out into the darkness. Through the trees the lone light still burned.
“Christ, maybe you’re right,” he said finally. “It makes sense. She’s screwed up every other—”
“Every other girl you’ve been interested in?”
“I wasn’t going to say that.”
But I thought he had been going to say precisely that. After a moment I got up and straightened my clothing and went inside to wash my face. When I came back out again, he was standing beside the pool, scowling at the light in the big house and tossing his car keys up and down in his hand.
“Bad call on my part,” he said. “Shall we try again, out of the line of fire, so to speak? One day soon?”
I was relieved that he was not angry, and felt a sudden wash of simple happiness and well-being.
“By all means,” I said, and reached up and kissed his cheek.
When we finally drove away from the little pool house, the greenlit dashboard clock read two-thirty A.M. Above us, through the translucent green leaves, Marylou Hunt’s light still burned, like an eye.
7
ON A STILL GREEN WEEKEND IN MAY TEDDY’S PARENTS invited the staff over for an afternoon of swimming, with a backyard picnic to follow. It was a small ritual that the Fairchilds’ had established in the first year to Teddy’s tenure with Downtown, and though Matt grumbled about having to spend a Sunday afternoon stroking Northside egos, the fact was that his was the first car there. Teddy had gone early to help her parents, and Brad picked me up at Colonial Homes. When we got there Matt was sprawled in a chaise by the oval p
ool with a gin and tonic in his hand, gesticulating as he talked to Oliver Fairchild and Teddy’s brother, Ollie. Or rather, lectured. I recognized the note his rich voice acquired when he was in what Hank called his visionary persona.
“…in another ten years, whether you guys in Buckhead want to acknowledge it or not,” I heard him say, and knew Hank was right. He regularly lectured the Club on their shortsightedness in this matter or their failure to adapt to that trend. Oliver Fairchild nodded thoughtfully, his eyes intent on Matt’s sharp face. I often wondered why the Club put up with it. But they all seemed to hang on Matt’s words. For a poor boy from rural Texas, I thought, it must be a real power trip.
Matt was wearing swimming trunks with an oxford cloth shirt, tails out, over it. Both were so rumpled that they looked as if he had just plucked them out of the clothes dryer. His eyes were shielded behind wire-rimmed sunglasses, and his shock of hair burned in the sun. His thin arms and legs were pale, and he looked altogether like a wizened, freckled child huddled in the deep-cushioned chaise. His feet were narrow and so white they had a bluish undertinge. I thought suddenly that he looked like some sort of tiny amphibian, blinking in the alien sunlight, except for the hair. The hair changed him altogether.
“Hi, Matt,” I said, after I had greeted Mr. Fairchild and Ollie. “I’ve never seen you without clothes before.”
He grinned.
“Hi, Smoky. I can’t wait to say the same to you.”
It was a nice day. After the peripatetic pace of Downtown’s daily routine, a day in the sun in this orderly, cloistered wedge of privilege was hypnotic. We swam and sunned lazily, listening to Ollie Fairchild’s portable radio playing jazz softly and sipping the drinks that Teddy’s father kept coming from the little bar under the pavilion at poolside. By five o’clock, when the sting of the high sun began to fade, most of us were somnolent and a little drunk, except for Matt, whose cheeks glowed with color and whose speech was more staccato and ebullient than when we had arrived. Matt never, I had noticed, got drunk, and the only effect liquor seemed to have on him was to make him more focused, more exuberant, more forceful.
I looked around the small group on the brick pool apron. I knew that the Fairchilds had included spouses and dates in their invitation, but with the exception of Brad, who had come with me and was in any case almost a son of this house, and Charlie Stubbs’s wife, no one had brought anyone else. Charlie and the outland wife had left early, pleading another engagement, and I thought suddenly of what Teddy had said to me on a night when I had first moved into the apartment with her: “We all give up something for the magic.” We had, it seemed, given up a great deal. We had literally, except for Charlie, forsaken all others. Hank had said we would.
But I haven’t, I thought, and looked across at Brad and smiled. He lifted his glass to me and smiled back, his narrow face under the light, crinkled hair bronze with new sunburn.
Right at this moment, I thought, I have it all, and closed my eyes in a fugue of sun and gin and well-being.
There were two of us who were not present that day. Alicia Crowley had not come with Matt, and Tom Gordon was missing. Tom, I knew, was on a swing across the country with Lucas Geary for an editorial photo-essay dear to Matt’s heart that he had only with difficulty and outright bribery persuaded Culver Carnes to allow him to do, and no one knew where Alicia was. Except Matt, and he wasn’t saying.
“She had plans,” he said, grinning so that you knew what plans he meant you to infer Alicia had. “Alicia has secret and private plans for this weekend. Wouldn’t you like to be a fly on those walls, though?”
All of a sudden I knew, with a flash of the puzzling prescience that I sometimes had around him, that he did not know where Alicia was, and was jealous and resentful of the plans that did not include him, even though he rarely saw her after work now, except when Lucas Geary was out of pocket. I did not like Alicia, but neither did I like the way Matt Comfort spoke of her in her absence. She had given up any private life she might have had for him, and he had ignored her except when it pleased him.
“Well, I imagine she could have her pick of plans,” I said, my eyes still closed to the last of the sun.
“She sure could,” Matt said. “All at one time, probably.”
Something cold and argumentative had crept into his voice, and Hank said, “Matt, tell Mr. Fairchild about the piece you’ve got Tom Gordon and Luke off on.”
Matt was silent for a moment, and I thought he was going to argue with or speak sharply to Hank, but then he laughed and said, “Great save, Cantwell. Well, Oliver, it’s this…” and I sat up to listen, once more, because I thought the story was going to be one of the most exciting and valuable ones we would run in Downtown.
Lucas Geary had been in San Francisco back in January for the much-ballyhooed Human Be-In held in the Haight-Ashbury district. To me, a continent away in a city so self-absorbed by its own trajectory that news from the Outside seemed to reach it, like blown smoke, months later, the Be-In had seemed only another of the raucous and somehow exotic commotions stirred up by the legendary San Francisco hippies, who for sheer theater put our own Tight Squeeze denizens in the shade. But Lucas had come back moved and somehow changed by it, and had brought with him photographs that were stunning in their particularity and portent.
“It’s different; it’s the start of something else entirely,” he told us at a staff meeting. Lucas was never articulate with words. But the photographs touched Matt; he seemed to extrapolate from them what Lucas was trying to say. It was always his best gift, that ability to leap, to make connections. We all felt the power of those black-and-white images, but Matt knew it for what it was.
A day or two later he announced a story idea, and we could tell he was enormously excited about it. He was fairly humming with energy, fiddling with the change from his pockets and his watch until Teddy finally reached over and took them away from him.
He wanted to send Lucas and Tom Gordon around the country, to the great urban centers, to see, as he said, what was going on with the young. They would find the pockets of activity and unrest, the enclaves in major cities like the Haight in San Francisco and Tight Squeeze in Atlanta, and do a photo-essay on them. He wanted to call it the Children’s Crusade because so many of the young were very young indeed, and it was his intention that only the images and Tom’s art direction of them would carry the message. There would, perhaps, be a few captions, nothing more. The story was in the young faces. He thought it would have value and pertinence for Downtown’s readers; send a message to the city. Culver had not thought so, but Matt had dangled the prospect of major national advertising in support, and Culver had capitulated.
“I had to promise him his choice of the next three YMOGs, though,” Matt said. “Smoky, be warned.”
Oliver Fairchild Senior and Junior looked at each other, and then, gravely, at Matt.
“Interesting,” Teddy’s father said. “And what message do you think these…ah, hippies…out there in California and in Boston and Washington and so forth might have for us down here? Except for that little nest around Tenth Street, we don’t see much of ’em. Seems to me our kids are all, you know, going to school and getting summer jobs or off at camp, things like that.”
Teddy closed her eyes and Hank Cantwell and I looked at each other. He hadn’t a clue, then, Teddy’s father. Nor, for that matter, did her brother. In their world, in Buckhead, in the Northwest, that was precisely what the young of the great houses were doing. The world outside the boundaries of Buckhead did not, for them, exist.
Matt looked for a long moment at Oliver Fairchild, and then shrugged and reached for his fresh drink and downed half of it.
“They’re what we’re going to have next, Oliver,” he said. “They’re the future. Seems to me we ought to spend a little time with them.”
“Surely, not here,” Oliver Fairchild murmured, smiling. “This is a pretty simple little old world down here, when you get right down to it.”
&nb
sp; “It’s going to change. All of it is,” Matt said mildly, but there was a glitter in the eyes behind the glasses. I thought of Rachel Vaughn and her defiant, pitiful little wheel of birth control pills, in the IHOP bathroom. I thought of John Howard’s ruined face. I looked from Matt Comfort to the Fairchilds, father and son, and to Brad. All three were regarding Matt with grave, courteous interest, their faces attentive and interested. And yet, nothing he had said had changed them.
That’s the difference, I thought suddenly. They change him. Somehow, when he is with the rich and powerful of Buckhead, the people who live in these big houses and belong to the clubs, who make the policies and the rules, he is changed by them. He becomes, just slightly, someone else. But they don’t. He does not change them.
And then I thought, if he can’t, nothing can. Nothing will. It was a disquieting thought.
There was a small silence, like a drawn breath, and then the sun-dappled late afternoon flowed on. From the distant kitchen I could hear the clink of china and silver as Teddy’s mother and her cook and butler put together trays of picnic food to bring out onto the terrace.
“There’s time for one more round,” Oliver Fairchild said, and rose to fetch them.
I stretched, and said, “I think I’ll go get out of this wet suit. Teddy, you coming?”
“Yes,” Teddy said, and at that moment, from the front of the big house, we heard the silvery claxon of an automobile horn. It drifted around through the great banks of rhododendron and Cape Jessamine down to the terrace, and rode over the flabby little slappings of the pool water like birdsong.
“Eng-a-land swings like a pendulum do,” sang out the little horn, in the first line of the nonsense song that was on everybody’s lips that spring.
“Shit,” said Matt Comfort. “It’s that asshole Buzzy,” and most of us on the staff groaned.
Leo DiCiccio (“Call me Buzzy”) was the cherished only son of an Italian family from Boston that had migrated South. Enzo DiCiccio, Buzzy’s father, had made a fortune in used cars. His pennanted dealerships bestrewed the burgeoning Atlanta suburbs like kudzu, and his tight, dark, fistlike face dominated prime-time television hours, braying of cream puffs and deals like your mama would offer you. Everyone knew Enzo DiCiccio in one way or another. Almost no one knew Buzzy. Buzzy spent every waking hour that he could escape his father’s ham-fisted domination trying to remedy that.
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