Peachtree Road

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  “Thank you,” Lucy said, and climbed down and pattered out of the room and back up the stairs.

  I followed her in a few moments.

  “Boy, that was some act you put on with Daddy,” I said admiringly. “You had him eating out of your hand. I could never get away with that.”

  “It wasn’t an act,” she said. “I meant it.”

  “But you didn’t have to do that. He’ll take care of you. He has to. You’re his niece.”

  “Well, I had to make sure,” Lucy said.

  “I’ll take care of you, Lucy,” I said. “I swore on my blood to do that. You don’t have to worry about that.”

  “You aren’t big enough yet,” she said, and there was an entirely unchildlike, workman’s practicality in her voice. “I have to make sure he does until you can.”

  That night a great storm, the grandfather of all summer thunderstorms, broke over the house on Peachtree Road, and even before the lightning and thunder swept cursing off to the east, a great breath of fresh, cool air out of the green-lit west came ghosting in to tell us that the heat—the monstrous, torpid Big Heat—had gone, and with it the sneaking, murdering polio, and for that year, at least, we were done with the shadow of that summer death.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Some people say that the great change began then, in the years just after World War II; that the wartime economy which lifted Atlanta out of the doldrums of Depression never really faltered, and that a great trajectory which would span fifty years and literally bridge worlds was launched with the planes and ships of that war.

  My friend Barry Gresham, who would later found the city’s first pure research institute, holds that Atlanta’s future was virtually assured when the young men who were our fathers returned from war or from wartime preoccupations and looked around them to scan the lay of the land. Those years were, Barry thinks, like a held breath, the preliminary gathering of muscles for a great leap of growth and progress that would never stop. Not, he says, overtly; the young men who would guide the progress and shape its direction were not yet themselves fully aware of their inherent power and their looming roles. They simply came home to tend to business and raise families, expand fortunes, carve niches, build lives.

  But one day, toward the end of the 1950s, they would look up and see that a slow stagnation had set in; that the last tall building of the city’s skyline had gone up nearly a decade before, and that Atlanta’s engine choked and stuttered on idle. Their own fortunes had increased dramatically, but the city’s had not. They would look around them and at one another in the clubs and libraries and patios of the Northwest, and, almost as if by prior design, would move together to ponder and plan, and the power of them would leap in the very air, almost as palpable as lightning, and wheels rusted for a decade would begin to grind.

  But we children did not see the fateful change beginning, of course; to us, these golden men were just our fathers. We might have been dimly aware, though I doubt it, that we were entering another stage of growth, emerging from small childhood into a kind of mittelkinder principality, but this was just that: a stage, a phase, an extension of the same privileged and insular existence we had led for the first few years of our lives. We were almost laughably, stereotypically boyish and girlish. Hollywood of that era would have loved us: princely little Disney piglets. Pretty little Shirleys and Deannas. What was the cloying movie so popular at that time? Angels with Dirty Faces? That was us. Our Gang, only with money.

  For we were the small heirs of Atlanta’s social and financial elite, and on some level we knew it, and were secure, even off-hand, within the impenetrable shell it cast around us. We knew, most of us, that we would inherit more than personal fortunes, but we were remarkably unaffected by the knowledge. Looking back, I can see that most of our parents labored mightily to keep us what they considered “natural,” untouched and unspoiled by this legacy of substance and style. I never knew until after my father’s death the extent of my family’s wealth. Sarah and Ben Cameron, both with formidable trusts set up by grandparents, were required to earn their spending and Sunday school money. Most of us, Lucy and I included, had allowances that were smaller than those of many children across Peachtree Road in Garden Hills, and almost all of us did some sort of work to earn them. Virtually all the boys had a job at some time or other during high school. Virtually all the girls baby-sat and did chores. None of us knew anything of our fathers’ businesses and professions; far less, perhaps, than the children of wealth and privilege in other cities. Sarah and Ben, Tom Goodwin, Carter Rawson, Snake Cheatham, Pres Hubbard, Charlie Gentry, me, Freddie Slaton, Lelia Blackburn, Julia Randolph…these small spawn of the big houses and others like us were sublimely unaware, even as it was beginning to happen, that our fathers would be mayor, bank presidents, heads of multistate utilities, editors and publishers and broadcasters, builders of cities and empires, chiefs of great altruistic foundations.

  And we remained unaware for a very long time. We were, simply, the wiry, skinned-kneed players of playground baseball and football, divers and swimmers in club and backyard pools, racers of soapbox cars, builders of model ships and airplanes, fliers of kites, artists of marbles and mumblety-peg and sharpshooters of Daisy air rifles, captives at small, creamy dancing schools, attenders of Saturday matinees and readers of comic books, mothers of dolls and guests at tea parties, tireless riders of Schwinns, rovers in woods and dabblers in creeks, wrestlers and brawlers and trick-or-treaters and fledgling flirts and belles of an era that, in its innocence and insularity, will likely never be seen or equaled again.

  Because our fathers were the most conservative of men personally, and because they idealized their wives and young children—most of them, at any rate—they strove to give us the childhoods of their own conventional dreams: carefree, sunny, simply and straightforwardly masculine for their sons, simply and sweetly feminine for their daughters, without stress or menace or the specter of premature and undue ambition. Without world-knowledge. With small, prescribed risks but little real challenge. They demanded almost nothing of us except what some of us could not give—conformity and adaptability—and if the price of those childhoods was as nothing to most of us, to a few, like Lucy and me, it was everything.

  No, we saw no change in the world around us. Not then. To me, the great change came in the inner landscape, not the outer, and it did not take place for some years, until a summer night when I was twelve and Lucy was ten. Before then I was a boy among other boys, running as free as I would ever run, in the company of boys almost ludicrously like myself, at least on the surface. And where we ran, freer and lighter of heart and fleeter of foot than any of us, Lucy ran, too.

  It was a wonderful time in the world for both of us. Both of us were, for the moment, free. Aunt Willa was almost obsessively concerned with the cultivation of herself and her younger daughter and had little time or attention left for Lucy, and for perhaps the only time in my life, my mother and father could find no truly glaring faults with which to tax me. I was as nearly an outgoing, normal, Buckhead-approved boy as it was possible for me to be, and I came close to excelling in one or two things that had the Bondurant stamp of approval. I played promising singles tennis, and I could, I discovered, run like the very wind. Both these skills drew from my father the only real smiles of whole-souled pride I have ever had. I cultivated them assiduously.

  In retrospect I can see that Lucy and I worked as hard at being acceptable pack members as many adults ever work at their careers, and for a far more valid reason: The acceptance bought us time for our real lives. Each foot race won, each victorious tennis match, each day spent without drawing down calamitous disapproval on our heads earned us commensurate time for reading and talking and dreaming in the summerhouse. My mother and father smiled at my modest athletic prowess and chose not to pursue their displeasure when I spent the whole of a bright summer day cooped up with books and Lucy. Aunt Willa was obviously grateful not to have an inventive and troublesome Lucy underfoot
, and did not care how much time she spent away from the house, or where. Lucy had concocted the elaborate fiction that her father was involved in a long-range, top secret mission for the government in occupied Europe, and so was free of her crippling preoccupation with his whereabouts, though she still had the devastating nightmares with some regularity. We had then a very good life, and we were under no illusions as to what it took to maintain it. In the age-old manner of born victims, we cooperated fully and cheerfully with both our captors and our peers and kept our inner freedom a secret.

  Lucy’s position as pack leader was so unusual as to nearly defy credibility: That a little girl two years younger than the boy pack around her could, in the bone-simple Atlanta of the late 1940s and early 1950s, come unknown, unpedigreed and unheralded into its small masculine society and simply assume command boggled truth. But that is what happened. From the first, she shunned and scorned the small girls of the big houses, and knew with an extraordinary intuitiveness what it would take to win the boys.

  “Would you like to come over and play with Sarah one afternoon this week?” I remember Dorothy Cameron asking Lucy during her first summer at 2500 Peachtree Road.

  “No’m,” Lucy said promptly, and then remembering Aunt Willa’s edict, “Thank you. I’d like to come play with Ben, though.”

  “Do you think you could keep up with him?” Dorothy asked, amused. “He’s pretty big, you know.”

  “Yes’m,” Lucy said. “But I don’t much think he could keep up with me.”

  What it took to win the boys in our crowd was mastery. Lucy seemed born with it. More than any one of us, male or female, she had daring, physical prowess, imagination. There was no feat of strength or agility she could not master, no flight of fancy or fable she could not best. Her great, world-invalidating laugh and matchless eyes mesmerized us all, and she could always gather a crowd with her throaty “Hey, listen, I have something to tell you!” But it was the boys who crowded closest and stayed longest. The girls of our crowd would, at the birthday parties and after-school play sessions, gradually withdraw to the fringes of the group, falling silent, looking large-eyed and speculatively at Lucy Bondurant spinning her magic around their brothers and playmates. It was a look I saw in the eyes of the women around her all her life, a look of wariness, a slight flaring of nostrils, as if scenting danger.

  It was Lucy who handed to me my position as, if not leader, then fully vested comember of that small, yelping golden pack. I learned to run simply trying to keep up with her; when I found that I had an entirely unearned gift for loping great distances as fleetly as a gazelle, I out-ran her and all the others in the group and gloried in the victories, and her joy and delight in them was as great as my own. When I beat Tom Goodwin in singles at the Driving Club’s junior matches one fine spring—the first and only time, for Tom was as natural a tennis player as any I have ever seen—Lucy’s cheers were as loud as my father’s. Lucy was, over the years, many complex and disturbing things, but she was never in her incandescent life jealous or small-spirited. What she had she gave away freely and with both hands, and she had, in those brief and bright young days, everything it took to lead the Buckhead Boys.

  What she had most of was courage of such a high and glinting-edged degree that it flirted with being, and often was, sheer foolhardiness. The day she became our unacknowledged but unquestioned leader was also the day she secured for me an unshakable place in those small ranks, and none of us there has ever forgotten it. I know that to be true; it was that day down at Brookwood Station of which we spoke first, we diminished and old-young Buckhead Boys, on the day of her funeral.

  The Southern Railway’s Peachtree Station, a beautiful small Neel Reid building in red Flemish-bond brick with the trademark Palladian windows, still stands on a long curve in Peachtree Road about halfway between Buckhead and downtown, in the section of the city called Brookwood Hills. In my grandparents’ and even my parents’ day it was where all of Buckhead left on the first stage of their Grand Tours abroad, and during the war just past it had been thronged with young men in khaki. It was in my boyhood still an extremely active station, with freight and passenger trains arriving and leaving almost on the hour, for Atlanta was first and foremost a railroad town, and its iron tentacles once reached out to the entire world. It was not a long bicycle ride from Buckhead; we could toil up the short hills and swoop down the long ones to reach it in about fifteen minutes, and though none of us were permitted to take our bikes onto Peachtree Road, we did so with regularity, and in relative safety, for the unspeakable traffic that clots its meager lanes now was manageable then, and much slower. We were accustomed to going south at least as far as Peachtree Creek at Peachtree Battle Avenue, to run wild in the memorial park there and wade and slosh in the reedy, still-clean creek, and it was only about a mile farther, up a long, heart-shaking final hill and down another, to where the station sat, brooded over to the south by the graceful, white-columned old mansion that housed the Washington Seminary for girls.

  The station was irresistible to Lucy. She could, and did whenever possible, spend hours down on the long concrete apron behind the station where the trains lay at berth like great black bison, and whenever she was taken there she would come home covered with cinders and with great distances shining in her eyes. When we all graduated to bicycles, it was there that she led us whenever we had time to get there and back without our parents’ missing us.

  We first went there on one of the early-spring Saturdays after we all, by some seemingly tacit agreement, got our bicycles for Christmas. I think it was the bane of Lucy’s existence that she was given a girls’ bicycle, without the proud bar from seat to handlebars, and from the very beginning she took enormous, careening risks, as if to exorcise by her very daring the hated void where the bar that spelled manhood was not.

  We met in the cobbled courtyard of Ben and Sarah Cameron’s house, and Lucy was already shimmering with her plan.

  “I double-dog dare y’all to go down to Brookwood Station,” she said, grinning.

  No one spoke, and then Pres Hubbard said, “I’m not supposed to go any farther than Peachtree Battle.”

  Lucy’s cool gaze took in his brace and dismissed him. He flushed. She did not mention his infirmity, but it palpitated in the air like a beating heart.

  Charlie Gentry, who had always been protective of Pres, said, “That’s stupid. None of us is supposed to go that far. We’ll all be grounded. I ain’t going.”

  Lucy did not even look at him.

  “You afraid too, Ben?” she said.

  “I’m not really supposed to go that far either,” Ben Cameron said. “But if you think I’m afraid…”

  She dismissed him with a gesture.

  “Well, I’m not scared,” she said. She kicked the stand away from her bicycle and pedaled out onto Muscogee. She did not look back.

  She was almost up the hill to Peachtree when I said desperately, “I’m going, too.”

  In the blink of an eye we were all pedaling up Muscogee after Lucy.

  It was the first time we had ventured out of our immediate neighborhood, and the first that we had ridden very far on Peachtree Road proper, and we were, though we never would have admitted it, nervous and apprehensive. If any one of us had said, “Let’s go back,” we all would have followed him with alacrity, but since it was small Lucy who was urging us on, retreat was unthinkable. By the time we got to the station and left our bikes and went down behind where the noon train to Charlotte and points north lay panting from its morning run, we were all shying like ponies in a cloud of horseflies. It would not have taken much to scatter us like wild things.

  “See, it’s not late. The train’s still here,” Lucy said.

  “It’s going to leave any time,” Tom Goodwin said. “It’s almost noon. We really ought to go back.”

  “Shoot,” Lucy said. “It won’t leave for hours.”

  We all knew the train was due to leave. The luggage and passengers were aboard, and th
e conductor was making his final sortie along the apron, headed away from us. The breath of the great black giant came strong and even and slow, but we knew that at any moment it would deepen and fall into the gathering rhythm of departure. We looked at each other and then at Lucy, long and white-limbed with winter and slender as a young birch in her outgrown summer shorts and T-shirt. She had been restless and almost aflame all morning; we knew that we were not going to be spared being, somehow or other, scared to death. She looked back at us, bluely.

  “I double-dog dare any of you to crawl under that train,” Lucy said.

  To a boy, we gaped at her. High spirits were orne thing; suicide was quite another.

  “Is everybody scared?” Lucy said. In the still afternoon she fairly shimmered.

  No one answered her.

  “I bet you are scared, all of you. Scaredy, scaredy, scaredy,” she sang. “Big old boys two years older’n me, all scaredy-cats!”

  “You shut up, Lucy Bondurant,” Snake Cheatham spat. He was the largest of us, and a bully, but he was not afraid. Snake on the long hill over on Northside Drive where the Soap Box Derbies were held was wonderful, heart-swelling to behold. There was no dare he would not take, no risk run, in his spidery, magically engineered vehicle.

  “Snake’s a coward,” Lucy said evenly. We waited for him to hit her, but he did not. Snake knew he was not a coward.

  “Shut up, Lucy,” he said sullenly. But he did not move.

  “Ben?” she looked at Ben Cameron. He flushed with the red-haired temper he had from his father, but he dropped his eyes.

  “No,” he said shortly.

  “Tom?” Tom Goodwin hawked and spat into the cinder dust of the apron and looked away.

  “You’re plain crazy, Lucy Bondurant,” he mumbled. He, too, stood still.

  That left, besides me, only Pres Hubbard, whose polio-stiffened leg would not bend for train-scrambling, though he did manage to keep up with us on his bike, and Charlie Gentry, who had severe diabetes and did not often accompany us on our cycle forays. Lucy’s eyes skipped over Pres; she had left her mark on him already. Her eyes lit on Charlie.