Downtown

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  “Why in God’s name would she beat a baby for messing up his pants?” I whispered.

  Mrs. Holmes looked at me with ill-concealed contempt.

  “He ain’t a baby. He five,” she said. “He just ain’t never growed. Can’t control his bowels. Can’t speak, except to say his name. Lord knows, he says that enough, though.”

  “What will happen to him?” Luke said.

  “I reckon I’ll keep him for a while,” she said. “Then maybe somebody else will take him. I don’t want you to say his mother dead. I don’t want this child in foster.”

  Luke nodded. He went and crouched down in front of the child, and touched his face gently.

  “If you’ll tell me your name I’ll show you my car,” he said in a low voice.

  The child stared, and then his great face split into an enchanting smile. His eyes danced with it; his whole body seemed caught in the force of the smile.

  “Andre!” he shouted. “Andre! Andre, Andre!”

  “Well, come on, Andre,” Luke said, swinging him up onto his shoulders. He limped heavily under the weight, but he did not stagger. He bore Andre through the dark, stifling apartment and out onto the street, where the little Morgan sat, surrounded by an honor guard of small Negro children. Luke had hired them for a nickel apiece to watch the car when we arrived.

  There was a long gasp from the little boy, and then Luke set him down and he toddled as fast as his stunted legs would carry him over to the car, and hugged it. He literally hugged it, hugged the front fender and the bumper and the hood, hugged whatever part of it his short arms could encompass, and he kissed it. Luke shot swiftly as Andre hugged and kissed the Morgan, his face an epiphany of bliss.

  “Andre,” he crooned. “Andre, Andre.”

  Luke plopped him into the front seat of the Morgan and took him around the block, and as they drove away we heard his ecstatic anthem: “Andre, Andre!”

  I looked at Mrs. Holmes.

  “It’s what he says when he’s happy, when he wants to give you a present, or thank you,” she said. “I told him from the first day he come to me that Andre was the most beautiful word I ever heard, and he thinks it is. He’s a right happy little boy for what he’s been through.”

  I turned away. I was determined not to cry in front of this tough, cold, loving woman.

  Luke took the film straight back to his apartment and developed it, and that night we stayed late at Downtown and Tom and Luke and I put the first layout for Focus together. The photos were wonderful, strong black and white with a great deal of stark contrast, the faces of the children the only soft, diffused spots. We used photos of almost all of them. The lead one, a double-page spread, was a head shot of Andre kissing the Morgan, his eyes squeezed shut in rapture. I took the layout into my office and started my captions and text.

  “His name is Andre,” I began. “He is five years old and he can’t say anything else, but he can say his name, and he shouts it aloud in joy and affirmation. Andre. His name is Andre. Remember it….”

  I remembered our words, Luke’s and mine, the day before: “And that’s what you’ll do, shoot the faces.”

  “And that’s what you’ll do, write the names.”

  I put my head down on my typewriter and cried for a long time.

  Matt loved the Focus layout and copy. He blatted the taxi horn after he had studied it, and called the whole staff in and showed it to them. He crowed and capered and grinned. He clapped Lucas and Tom Gordon on the back, and kissed me soundly on the mouth, and said that at the very least it was Peabody stuff, and maybe even Pulitzer. Then he steamed out of the office on his way upstairs to show Culver Carnes.

  “This ought to buy me a fucking year of peace,” he yelled back, just before the elevator bell dinged.

  I went back to my office in a white dazzle of happiness and tried to get to work on captions and cutlines for the entertainment guide, but had little luck. The drumbeat of real, solid work was too loud in my blood.

  Culver Carnes was ecstatic. The next day he was in Matt’s office planning a press party for the venture.

  “I was going to wait until we had published magazines, but that will be fall, and this is just too good to pass up,” he said. “The riots in Watts and Newark and the others have had me worried; Atlanta could go up, too. We’d be fools to think it couldn’t. And the Panthers have been in town, and that’s not good. I took the layout over to Ben Cameron, Matt, after you left, and he asked to keep it overnight, and he’s talked to Dr. King, and they both think we ought to do something with this right now. Press party, or something. Show the world what Atlanta’s doing, the black and white communities together. King has agreed to let John Howard represent SCLC before the press, and said he’d see about sending a bunch of their people over—Bond, maybe, and Rosser Sellers, and some of the others who’ve been visible all along. He won’t come himself, says it would turn into a media field day if he did, and he doesn’t want to divert attention from the Focus project. I see his point. I thought the governor, and some of our civic leaders, and of course you and your staff, Smoky and this young photographer—”

  Matt watched him neutrally, and I knew that he was seething that Culver Carnes had seized the piece as his own, and was hastening to make hay with it. But he was proud of it, too, and the press party would showcase Downtown as well as the chamber of commerce.

  “Sounds like a good idea,” he said. “Where did you figure on having it?”

  “Well, I thought the Commerce Club. Put on a real spread, have an open bar, the works—”

  “You might want to rethink that, Culver,” Matt said. “It ain’t exactly a bastion of racial harmony.”

  “Negroes have been able to eat there since 1965,” Culver Carnes said.

  “Yeah, but they can’t join,” Matt drawled. “I haven’t noticed any membership drives down in the projects. I have a better idea. Let’s do it at the Top of Peachtree. They’ve been remodeling this summer, and they’re reopening next week. Let it be a grand occasion; symbolic as hell—the whole city at our feet, et cetera, et cetera. All the press guys love the Top; they spend half their time in the bar there. And Doug was one of the first owners in town to integrate, even when he didn’t have to, so some of the Negro leadership go there occasionally. What do you think? They’d probably give you a real deal on the price.”

  Culver liked that, and so it was that on a Thursday evening in July, after a thunderstorm had whirled up out of the west and washed the city clean of the oppressive wet heat that had stifled it for weeks, Luke and Tom Gordon and I walked across the street and around the corner in the lucent summer twilight to go to the party for our Focus piece.

  Matt had wanted us all at the Top of Peachtree early, and he and Teddy and Sister and the advertising staff were already there when we got off the elevator, sitting at our favorite long table against the corner window, the rain-shined city spread out around them. I had a quick, stabbing flash of sheer community and love when I saw them: my people, in our place, waiting for me. I had never felt anything quite like it before. I had always been an outsider, I thought, even when I did not know I was. But I was outsider no more, now. I belonged to Downtown. I was, unquestionably and forever, one of Comfort’s People.

  “You all look absolutely fabulous,” I said, my voice thick with joy.

  They did. We all did. Matt had on a new summer-weight gray suit that set off the shock of chestnut hair and turned his eyes the color of a winter sea. It looked slightly less slept-in than his others, and he was grinning with frank satisfaction and sipping a vodka and tonic. Hank was avuncular and bankerly in a dark blue suit, and Tom Gordon looked so coolly elegant and totally wonderful in gray-striped seersucker that I felt afresh the small shock that his hawklike looks sometimes wrought in me, and thought again how utterly stupid was the lover, male or female, who could leave him. Teddy wore yellow linen and shone like the young sun, and Sister was resplendent in ruffled blue crepe up to midthigh, looking like the University of Ge
orgia homecoming queen she had been not so long ago. Sueanne Hudspeth wore deep purple with a tiny waist and peplum and stiletto heels and looked, as Matt said, dangerous as all hell. I had a new red linen sheath and felt as vivid and glamorous as Lady Brett Ashley, whom I had always admired inordinately. Only Hank knew about Lady Brett, and as he pointed out, I had zero chance of looking like her, given my height and stubborn breasts and hips. But I loved the feeling, anyway.

  Only Charlie Stubbs and Alicia were missing. Charlie almost never joined us after work now, and Alicia was on vacation with Buzzy in Nassau. Buzzy liked to gamble there, Matt said, grinning. “Guess he wanted one sure thing along,” he said. I disliked the comment, but I was just as glad Alicia was not present. She would have dimmed my Lady Brett splendor.

  “You look good enough to eat,” Lucas Geary said, smirking so that I could not miss the double entendre. He looked astonishingly grand in an Edwardian-cut coat and narrow trousers that clung to his long legs; he even had a ruffled shirt, and his beard and mustache had been neatly trimmed around his long face, so that his wicked white grin and pointed chin showed plainly. He looked like he had stepped from a Vermeer, or a Rembrandt, with his shining red hair and beard and the dark, mannered clothes, and I was sure that he knew it.

  “So do we all,” I said, refusing to acknowledge the intent of his words. “Even you. You should have a Cavalier King Charles spaniel attached to you somewhere. I can think of just the place.”

  “Do you think of it often?” he said.

  “Almost never,” I said, and Matt raised his glass to me and said, “Great dress, Smokes,” and the afternoon flowed on into lavender evening.

  Culver Carnes had had the layout for the Focus spread enlarged and set up on easels at one end of the bar, and draped them in blue cloth. Behind the bar, where the Top’s owner and manager, Doug Maloof, had had a faded mural of the potted peach trees that had once lined downtown Peachtree Street in front of Davison’s department store, another blue drop cloth hung. The bar and restaurant had been done over in shades of deep green and peach and white, and it looked altogether fresher and more chic than the old gray plush and black leather. But I missed the old; it had been like a cave hung in the sky. Doug himself was hovering over the bar, where uniformed waiters stood at attention. A long buffet table laden with cocktail fare stood under the far window, and Tony, the piano player, was noodling idly at the Steinway, playing soft jazz and a smattering of early Beatles, his one nod to the times. Tony always said you had to go around the corner to the A Go-Go if you wanted to hear the new stuff.

  The press came early and ate and drank like locusts. Matt knew all of them, and they him. He was popular with them all, but there was a nervy edge to most of them that spoke of envy, too, either professional or personal. I thought probably that it was both. He was at his most ebullient that night, telling outrageous stories; teasing, almost insulting, all the men; coming on shamelessly to the women; drinking steadily and showing none of the drinks, smoking ceaselessly. In the dim room he seemed to shine, to give off a light of his own. I thought it must be hard, especially for the varnished anchor men and weather girls, to yield the limelight to a wizened, simian little man with aviator glasses and red hair hanging in his eyes and a suit that looked just out of a Salvation Army bin. But yield it they did, this night.

  A good deal of liquor had been drunk, the hors d’oeuvres table nearly decimated, and the room filled up with smoke when the elevator bell in the lobby dinged, and the men of the Club walked in in a sort of informal military formation. They looked so easily powerful and so all of a piece that they might have been struck from the same mint, as indeed, they had, and the room seemed to tighten around them. Men straightened their lounging stances and their ties; women patted their hair; everyone fell silent. Ben Cameron walked at their head, and Culver Carnes brought up the rear, much as if he was shepherding them. I looked at Matt, who was grinning.

  “If he nips anybody in the ass I’m not going to be able to hold it,” he said under his breath, and I giggled.

  Behind them walked a handful of solemn black men, young and not so young, all in dark suits and white shirts, all looking as solid and substantial as the men ahead of them, which in all respects they were. I recognized many of the faces from newspaper and television images; knew their names from half a hundred pages of recent and terrible history. I felt the nape of my neck go cool. They looked pleasant, ordinary, unremarkable, but I knew that they were not. They were total, whole. One might even call them dangerous. Behind the small, formal smiles and nods, behind the cool, assessing eyes were marches; beatings in dark, hot country nights and mean urban noons; terror and imprisonment and bombs; firehoses and dogs and guns flashing in darkness. In the eyes, ambushed black men spun forever in their doorways; children flew into pieces in the roaring air of churches.

  When I said hello to John Howard, who walked up to where Luke and I stood, my voice sounded high and silly in my throat, like the bleat of a lamb.

  The men of the Club were warm to Matt and cordial to all of us. All of them complimented me on the Focus piece, with a wash of indulgent gallantry over their words that I knew they used only with women. But they all seemed to know who I was, and almost all had heard of my victory at pool over Boy Slattery, and referred to it with enjoyment. I knew that of anything I might do, it would be that that they remembered.

  Drinks had been passed around and pleasantries exchanged and Culver Carnes was moving toward the draped easels to begin his presentation when the elevator bell dinged again, and Boy Slattery came into the room.

  “Oh, hell,” Ben Cameron said in a low voice to Matt. They were standing just behind me, and I listened unashamedly.

  “Lint’s not coming?” Matt said.

  “This is just for you to know,” Ben Cameron said, “but Lint is, at this minute, at Johns Hopkins undergoing extensive tests. He hasn’t been looking at all well this summer, and we’ve been after him to get himself looked at, but apparently something came up right suddenly, and Hill Fraser sent him to Hopkins straight from his office. I didn’t ask Boy specifically, but of course he’s the man when Lint’s not around—”

  “How bad is it?” Matt said. His voice was tight.

  “Don’t know,” Ben Cameron said. “You better pray for all our sakes it’s not serious. Christ, how come nothing ever happens to Boy?”

  Before Matt could answer, Boy paused and looked over his shoulder and held his hand out behind him, and Alicia Crowley came out of the dimness of the lobby into the room, taking his hand as she walked.

  The low roar of conversation stopped dead, a collective breath was drawn, and a soft babble broke out. In it, I recognized fervent, prayerlike exclamations of “Holy shit!” and “Jesus, Joseph, and Mary!” At my side, Luke whispered, “Shiver me timbers.” Behind me, Matt said nothing.

  “Look what followed me up in the elevator,” Boy Slattery said, a smile of stunning slyness and offensiveness splitting his broad, red face. “I think I’ll keep her. May I, Matt?”

  “It’s the lady’s call, Boy,” Matt said, his voice slow and amused and lethal.

  “The lady is honored,” Alicia said in her little-girl drawl, and the room erupted into laughter and applause. Boy bowed, still holding Alicia’s hand. Alicia smiled a small, self-possessed smile, and looked sleepily at Matt.

  I have never seen a woman enter a room with the same impact that Alicia contrived that night. I’m still not sure what it was. She looked wonderful; she was tanned to a light, polished gold from the Nassau sun, and it or something had streaked her long, straight honey-colored hair with strands of pure platinum, so that it looked like a light-struck waterfall cascading over her cheekbones to her bare shoulders. She wore a short black sheath with one thin strap over her right shoulder, cut very low, and her flesh gleamed dully and without a white mark anywhere, so that you automatically wondered where her tan mark stopped, or if it did. Her eyes were a startling light blue in her tanned face, and her long, lo
ng legs were bare.

  But it was more than her looks. It was as if something small and powerful and viciously, elementally female lived inside Alicia, and she had untethered it and sent it out ahead of her this night. You could almost see the darting shape of it, smell its musk, in the air around her. After she entered the room, conversation stalled and died out, and people simply stood looking at her and Boy Slattery, who kept his fat fingers solidly on her flesh all evening. He nodded to Matt and the staff of Downtown, said with a small, mean smile that he was ready for a rematch with me any time, greeted the Club affably and nodded to the black contingent, but he did not by so much as a nod or a look acknowledge the press. I could hear them stirring among themselves, heard derisive laughter and a muffled comment or two, but none of the reporters came up to him to engage him in conversation. Boy was not popular with the Atlanta press. He had maligned them to his statewide constituency too many times.

  Culver Carnes read the crowd with a practiced showman’s eye and moved to the front. He made a short speech of welcome, recognized Luke and John Howard and my efforts, and unveiled the layouts on their easels. Even though I was accustomed to them by now, the photographs leaped out at me with powerful immediacy. In their center, four or five times as large as life, a small boy hugged the front of a car in an ecstasy of delight, eyes screwed shut, and my words ran in bold white type over the dark background: “His name is Andre…”

  The presentation was a great success. There was spontaneous applause and cheering when the layouts were first unveiled, followed by a tumbling spate of just the sort of questions Culver Carnes and Ben Cameron wanted. Microphones were held close when John Howard, who was the appointed spokesman for the project, talked; television lights flared and flashbulbs popped and cameras ground. We all said our few words for the press, and Ben skillfully brought the questions back into focus when they threatened to stray into the overtly political, and the conference wound down in a glow of mutual congratulations and praise. Only the black members of the party did not participate in the bonhomie; they stood a little apart, studying the white faces, saying nothing, their eyes revealing nothing. His duties over, John Howard moved to join them. Once I caught his eyes and smiled and held up my thumb and forefinger in a circle, but he did not respond to me. I felt hurt, like a publicly chastised child.