Peachtree Road

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  And it gave me heroes, a different kind of romance from that Lucy and I had known in our reading and dreaming: not dead, not unreal. The radiant, careless ranks of the football and basketball and track stars. The editors of the Hi-Ways and the Scribbler. The cheerleaders and the beauties and the senior superlatives and the ROTC officers and their demure and beatific sponsors.

  It even gave me, totally unexpectedly, a tantalizing and heady dollop of popularity. Lucy had been right; going into high school I had lengthened and toughened, and my face had grown to fit my features a bit better, and I did have something of the look of that golden, hawk-faced knight she had envisioned for me so long ago; it was my uncle Jim’s face that I saw in my mirror now, though far younger and less defined. A mute shyness underlay and belied the knight, and I was never so naive as to be unaware that my family’s money gave me a cachet I never would have had otherwise, but I was a good enough dancer, and even shone modestly as a miler and relay team member, and so the scanty popularity—or rather, to be exact, recognition—was not entirely unearned. But I never wore it comfortably.

  High school did not give most of us from the big houses many new or close friends. I suspect it was already too late for that when we entered; Buckhead simply ran too deep in us. Like the Catholic Church, Buckhead kept for itself those it had for the first seven years of their lives. The boys from the other sections of Atlanta who came to North Fulton—from Sandy Springs and Brookhaven and Morningside and Peachtree Hills and Peachtree Heights and Brookwood Hills and Ansley Park—were suspicious of the smell of money that lingered about us, no matter how hard we tried to conceal or even eradicate it. Of all the boys I met in those teenaged years—literally hundreds—only one, A.J. Kemp, became close. A.J., from far out Cheshire Bridge Road. Thin, agile, clever, smoothly pompadoured, fiercely ambitious and almost feminine in demeanor; or at least, not simply and rudely masculine: always the best dancer, the lone male cheerleader, the “dresser,” the actor, the first smoker of cigarettes, the one with the most sweaters and 45 rpms. A.J., one of the funniest men I have ever known, and in the end, one of the most loyal. He attached himself to us, the moneyed ones, instantly and immovably, and made us accept him with the sheer force and wattage of his personality, and before eighth grade was over, he was one of us to the bone. I suspect he thought he had garnered great advantages for himself in the association, but it was we who got the long end of that stick. A.J. enriched us.

  Years later, when I had been literally flattened under the catastrophe that set me outside the company of the Pinks and the Jells, A.J. showed up at the summerhouse at lunchtime bearing sandwiches and éclairs from Henri’s and a six-pack of beer. Few of the others had come, and I was surprised and painfully embarrassed to see him standing in the winter sunlight at the door, blinking in at my dim, musty lair.

  I could not speak, and for a long moment he did not; I had the insane fancy that he would toss the food inside and flee, like a keeper at the cage of some wild and desperate animal. And then he grinned, his old, clever wizard’s grin.

  “I’ll probably find gnawed bones lying around, and turds piled up in the corner, but I’m coming in whether you like it or not,” he said, doing just that and leaving the door ajar so that the clean, merciless crystal light of noon flooded in.

  “And what’s more,” he added, “I’m coming back tomorrow at lunch, and the next day, and every one after that until you quit living in this cave with the wolves and act like a human being again.”

  Tears of sheer, weak humility and gratitude filled my eyes, and I turned away, mumbling, “It’s good to see you, A.J.”

  He followed me into the summerhouse and put his arms around me and hugged me. It was so unlike A.J. to do such a thing that my faltering composure limped back, and I was able to look curiously into his face.

  “Aren’t you afraid I’ll set your pants on fire?” I said.

  “Nope,” he said, sweeping litter off my coffee table and setting out the sandwiches and beer. “But I used to wish I could set yours on fire. I just want to say one thing, Shep, and then I won’t say anything more about all this crap. We all know you couldn’t have had anything to do with it; we know that. The others ought to come, but they probably won’t, for a while; you’d know better than me why that is, but I do know it’s true. The reason I can come is I was never really one of you, no matter what you thought, or I did. This Buckhead shit doesn’t bind me. So consider me an emissary from us all, and let me tell you that we think it’s all a load of horse manure and we…we love you.”

  He mumbled this last, and his thin monkey’s face flamed, and he ducked his head and bit into his sandwich. I got up and went into the bathroom and wept. Only one other man—not my father, not Ben Cameron—had ever told me that he loved me. No man ever did again.

  A.J. came for lunch at least three days a week for a month after that, leaving his job at the bank downtown and taking the 23 Oglethorpe bus to the stop at Peachtree and Lindbergh and walking straight through the front yard to the summerhouse, bypassing the big house and any chance encounter with my mother. We never spoke of the fire again, only of the more distant past—of high school at North Fulton, and what it had given us. I don’t suppose I will ever be able to tell A.J. what he gave me during that dark month. But I believe that he knows.

  What high school gave us all, the gift that the Atlanta of that time alone in all the world had to give, was the Pinks and the Jells. I don’t think any high school experience anywhere could have been even remotely like it. I know nothing has ever been precisely like it since.

  No one is quite sure what the terms meant. “Pinks” is at least moderately self-explanatory: Pink tulle. Pink angora. Pink Revlon and Tangee lipstick. Pink cashmere twin sets. Pinks, for the girls of that golden elect of an entire generation. “Jells,” or “Jellies,” is almost impossible to etymologize. Jelly beans, I suppose, give birth to the term: bright, sweet, foolish, frivolous, almost entirely without substance or nourishment, but long indeed on pleasure. A confection completely of the moment.

  The Jells of Buckhead toiled not, neither did they spin. They did not, on the main, play football or any other team sport, though some of them excelled at the showier and more indolent individual sports, like tennis, swimming and diving. Some even rode horses with considerable flair and style. All could dance, though, and did, endlessly. Dancing, in one sense, is what the Pinks and the Jells were all about.

  The high school athletes largely ignored the Jells, and spoke of them, if they did, with contempt, and they were never a part of that elite teenaged brotherhood of drag racers, contact sports players, booze runners, Saturday night brawlers, bar drinkers, tobacco spitters, and legendary cocksmen. The Jells might occasionally hang out where the jocks and the toughs did, at the Peachtree Hills Pub or the Blue Lantern or even, and much worse, the Cameo Lounge down near the Greyhound bus station, but they were never welcome or comfortable there, and did not make a habit of it.

  Almost to a Jell they worshiped the draggers, those fleet young gods of speed and smoke, and their rococo souped-up chariots. I remember countless afternoons and Saturdays, hanging over the fence out at the weedy dirt strip near the Bell bomber plant—later Lockheed—in Marietta, watching Boo Cutler and Floyd Sutton and their hard-muscled, greasy-nailed, narrow-eyed ilk throttling their screaming Mercurys and Pontiacs. We wouldn’t have risked our necks and our cashmeres in the cars and couldn’t have driven them if we had dared, but we worshiped, nonetheless. Automobiles were our Baals, our golden calves. Not all of us had them, by any means; Jellhood was bestowed on the poor and the average as well as the rich, and many Jells simply could not afford them. But most of the Buckhead Jells did. I received a vicious-looking two-toned red and white Plymouth Fury trimmed with bronze for my sixteenth birthday, and was as surprised as anyone at the gift. Even I did not think I was the type for such a car. I suppose it might have been my father’s last shot at making me into a fitting rich man’s son, a creature of charisma and dash
, and it succeeded, at least for a little while, for it bought me no end of attendant Jells and flocking, fluttering Pinks. In the end, though, I could not sustain the image, and increasingly during the last two years of high school, it was Lucy who drove the Fury. It was always far more suited to her.

  The Jells existed because the Pinks did. We squired them, admired them, set them off like shadow boxes, and ultimately—the point, I suppose, of it all—many of us married them. To have been a Pink in Atlanta in those dreaming days between Depression and Camelot was to have known, briefly, a kind of lambent perfection that does not—cannot—come again to any given life. How could it? It had nothing whatsoever to do with reality; Pinkhood was a four-year carnival a million miles long and an inch deep. What it lacked in substance it made up for in sheer excessiveness and style. Total adulation was the order of the day, and the girl who knew how to command it led a sort of Grand Waltz so intricate, all-consuming and extravagant that everything else—college, the debut year, the Junior League, sometimes even marriage—tended to pale beside it.

  Not all the high school girls of Atlanta knew how to command it, by any means. Those who did not were ciphers, nonentities, miserable; those who did were Pinks. It was that simple, and that brutal. The ones who could not never forgot it. The ones who could never did, either. Many Buckhead women of my acquaintance will tell you, over a fourth or fifth gin and tonic at the club, that being a Pink in Atlanta was the best time of their lives. God help them.

  What a Pink had to do to attain and keep the title was to be popular. It meant a kind of sprightly flirtatiousness, a covertly sensual perkiness, which forbade even as it invited. A fresh-faced, ponytailed actress of stunningly professional naiveteé and virginity named Millie Perkins was the role model for my generation of Pinks, who all learned to flip their ponytails and thrust out their Peter-Panned breasts even as they clamped their knees together. Beauty was not a necessity, but pertness was. “Cute” was the best thing you could call a Pink. “Peppy” was next best. Monumental self-assurance underlay everything, or its facsimile; a Pink would rather be caught at a Phi Pi dance without an orchid to her name or an unbooked no-break than be adjudged nervous. Wender & Roberts must have led the nation in sales of Mum and Odor-O-No in those days, for a Buckhead Pink never sweated, did not even mist; and though she might duck her head and blush a hundred times a day, and drop her Maybellined lashes, it was never from social embarrassment.

  “She’s a lovely girl; so poised,” was the highest accolade our mothers could bestow on our steadies. It was tantamount to the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, and predated many of the Northwest’s grandest weddings.

  Somehow, by the time they reached high school, the small, nondescript girls we had known and tormented and ignored all our lives had flowered overnight into Pinks. I never knew personally a girl from Buckhead who failed, or eschewed, Pinkness. It came with the Cedar 7 telephone exchange. There must have been some, but I think they were sent away to schools where lives and futures did not ride on such fickle, flimsy steeds.

  Lucy knew who they were. I put the question to her once, when she had been at North Fulton about a year, and had bloomed into the pinkest Pink of them all.

  “The fleebs?” she said carelessly. “They go off somewhere up North and study. They get acne and A’s. They’re gone, poof; you never see ’em again after seventh grade.”

  “Don’t people think they got P.G.?” I said. It was what my crowd whispered about girls who suddenly enrolled in out-of-state schools.

  “Lord, no.” Lucy laughed. “Nobody would screw a fleeb.”

  The Pinks and the Jells grew up within the armature of a high school fraternity and sorority system that for sheer baroqueness would have dimmed the court of Louis XIV. Other cities may have had such organizations, but ours was an arena of such Venetian excess that by the time we graduated and met the real world head-on, many of us were ruined forever for it, and wandered through our lives in a sort of bewildered and petulant fog of loss, like colored Easter chicks peeping away in a coal yard. There were about twenty quasi-Greek organizations all told, perhaps a dozen fraternities and seven or eight sororities. Within their ranks was a gilded subculture of the “best”: Phi Pi, to which Lucy and Sarah and Little Lady and all the girls I knew belonged, and Rho Mu, which was mine simply because it was where the Buckhead Boys invariably landed. Most of the larger Atlanta high schools had chapters; we had brothers and sisters at North Fulton, Boys’ and Girls’ highs, Marist, Druid Hills, Northside, NAPS (North Avenue Presbyterian School) and Washington Seminary.

  Well, of course, Washington Seminary. So interwoven in the fabric of Buckhead life was that stately, columned old white mansion on the wooded knoll where a Ramada Inn stands now that practically every young woman of sterling Atlanta lineage since 1878 had been through its massive doors. Of my set, only Sarah Cameron, whose parents did not approve of private secondary schools, and Lucy, whose mother could not afford it and who in any case would have died before she allowed herself to be sent into another girls’ school, did not attend. Both went to North Fulton, and neither suffered for it, for the education dispensed in the white high schools of Atlanta in those days was thorough, workmanlike and broad. In truth, more good, budding minds probably had fires lit under them in these schools than at most of the surrounding private schools favored then by Atlanta families, Washington Seminary included.

  It was not, really, for an education that the daughters of the big houses went to Seminary, but for the first-rate polishing and marketing offered there. Traditionally, the sixth and last class period was devoted to the rapt, serious grooming of hair, nails and faces, in preparation for the ritual after-school stroll from front door down the driveway to sidewalk on Peachtree Road, where the assembled ranks of Atlanta’s Jells, gathered like the clans of Scotland from the surrounding high schools, jostled and lolled, watching the sweet-swaying Pinks come nonchalantly out.

  I can still see us, laughing in my idling Fury or A.J.’s renegade Chevy, watching the vestal parade switching down the driveway. Known to us since birth, the parading Pinks were as strange and exotic then as Mayan princesses. It was as if we had never seen them before.

  “Look at those boobies!” A.J. would squeal in exaltation, his face contorted in ecstasy. “Look at that pair!”

  And we would hoot, groan, clutch our heads and fall against the seats in transports of rapture, as if we had never seen that particular pair of cashmere-sweatered breasts before in all our lives.

  “Oh, Jesus, look at that can,” Snake would bellow. “Backfield in motion!”

  And we would beat upon the sides of the cars, baying excelsior. I do not know why Seminary’s chatelaines did not chase us away with fire hoses, but they did not. The school always lived Louis Sullivan’s great adage, “Form follows function.”

  Oh yes, Washington Seminary knew on which side its dainty bread was buttered. It took the combined ranks of the city’s school officials close to two decades to stamp out the sororities and fraternities, and at the height of the campaign, in 1952, Seminary lifted its lovely head, gave an aristocratic sniff and announced that it would ignore the ban. As Washington Seminary went, so went the city. The Pinks and the Jells went dancing on.

  Indeed, dancing was what we were about, we wellborn, time-lavished, cashmered and saddle-shod spawn of this small city on the make and on its way up. From December to June, each Friday night, one or another of the sororities or fraternities would hold its great formal dance of the season, to which all the other sororities and fraternities in Atlanta were invited, and in the fall, before the formality set in with the winter rains, we had citywide skirt-and-sweater dances. Thirty-odd glittering, jittering Fridays, stretching in a crackling silver skein from October until late May, and on each one of them, like a gemstone, a dance.

  We danced at the Brookhaven Country Club and the Druid Hills Golf Club and the Ansley Golf Club and sometimes, if one of our parents would stand sponsor, at the Driving Club. We dan
ced in high school gymnasiums and out at Robinson’s Tropical Gardens on the Chattahoochee River and in each other’s homes and on each other’s porches and terraces and verandas, and around each other’s pools. We slow-danced, noses buried in fragrant, Halo- and Prell-scented hair, fingers splayed against fiercely boned young waists, bare, dizzying white shoulders and cheeks pressed against us, lost and drowning in “Moonglow” or “Sentimental Journey” or “These Foolish Things,” aching with love and grateful for the bobbling, swaying bells of crinoline that smothered our fierce erections.

  We jitterbugged, skittering and popping at the end of one another’s arms like drops of water on a griddle; our springy, nimble feet flew like gandy dancers’ to the strains of “Pennsylvania 6-5000” and “In the Mood” and “String of Pearls” and “Chattanooga Choo Choo.” Music washed over us and eddied around us as endlessly as the sea: tides of music lapped through our days and surged over our nights. Music poured out of record players and jukeboxes and radios all over Atlanta, connecting us one to another like a surf of blood in our veins; music spilled out of the horns and reeds and drums and pianos of fifty different combos and dance bands, from Bill Haley and the Emory Aces to the legendary likes of Ralph Marterie and Woody Herman, the latter secured through the good offices of a brother or cousin at Georgia Tech and our fathers’ cash money.

  We waltzed and tangoed and shagged and lindied; we bunny-hopped and boogied. Some of us even Charlestoned, and A. J. Kemp once drew a cheering, clapping crowd at Brookhaven with a twenty-minute exhibition of the Lambeth Walk, looking for all the world, in his rented tux and his boneless snake’s elegance, like a lank-haired Fred Astaire. Stag lines ran out the doors into the May-sweet nights on half a dozen country club terraces, and we cut in methodically on the Pinks of our choice in a grand, ritualized pattern of advance and retreat. Some exceptional Pinks could not dance three steps before they were cut in on, and one girl—I think it was Little Lady, just after I went away to school—established the amateur record with thirty breaks during one chorus of “Stardust.” That one still stands, I am told. All over Atlanta, on those luminous Fridays, in the velvet dark of winter and the tender new green lace of spring, to the music that beat like a pulse buried deep in the marrow of our youth, we danced. We danced.