Peachtree Road

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  “Sure,” I said, tears of love and gratitude prickling behind my eyes. I squinted as if in the sun, so he would not see. “But can’t you tell me now?”

  “Nope. Not the right time for it. But before too long. Don’t let me forget. It’s important.”

  “I won’t,” I said, and he eased the car into gear and flipped me a small wave and slid out into the stream of traffic on Harris Street.

  I drove back to North Fulton in the Fury, filled, if I had not been before, with the absolute, still certainty that whatever there was for me in the world lay far away from Atlanta and all its sucking resonances. I had forgotten the last thing he said to me before I got as far as Palisades Road, where Peachtree Street becomes Peachtree Road.

  CHAPTER TEN

  That afternoon I had a tentative date with Charlie Gentry to try out a new World War II metal detector he had gotten for his birthday, in the vast, echoing battlefield out at Kennesaw Mountain, but I did not keep it. I did not even remember it until I was eating dinner that evening. I drove instead straight from North Fulton over to Muscogee and went looking for whichever Cameron was around. I was, by that time, so drowned in confusion and self-doubt and the delayed pain of my father’s dismissal that I knew I would have to talk with someone about it or founder under the misery, and I headed for Merrivale like a pigeon homing toward its cote.

  As I left the Fury in the cobbled front courtyard and headed around the side of the house toward the little den where the Camerons were usually to be found at that hour, it struck me that this was literally the first time in my life when I did not, swiftly and instinctively, bear my hurts home to Lucy. It was such a jolting perception that I stumbled in midlope, feeling somehow traitorous and skulking, as if I were actually betraying her. And then the thought came whole and clear into my mind: Don’t talk to her about Princeton until you’ve lined up your allies. I knew then on some hidden level what my conscious mind had not admitted before, that Lucy was the most powerful obstacle my flight from Atlanta would ever have. I had not gone home because I was afraid to.

  She had never said much of anything about my plans to go away to school after graduation because I had not talked much of them myself. I did not speak of them to my parents, beyond the necessary self-conscious exchanges about applications and fees and such, because I feared that my mother’s possessiveness and my father’s angry contempt would break down my resolve. As it happened, neither had made much fuss about it when the application had gone off, or even when the acceptance had come. It had been in the late spring of my junior year, and I suppose that both of them thought I might see the folly of my ways in the intervening year if they simply left me alone. Why Lucy had not responded more fervently, one way or another, I could not even guess, except that she was, in those days, sunk in her own alienation, and perhaps did not really register the import of the acceptance letter.

  I had put it away in my desk out in the summer-house the day after it had come and showed it to no one else, but I could sense it there all through the next year, glowing steadily like a talisman. It had been Dorothy and Sarah Cameron who had seemed the happiest for me, and so I knew that if succor and resolve were going to be available to me, it would come from them. Lucy, I sensed, was not going to take the actuality of my leaving at all well, and I could not, bruised as I was by the luncheon at the Capital City Club, have stood up to her.

  I found Sarah in the little glass-walled studio that Ben had had built for her just off the pool house in the back garden when the extent of her talent had become obvious. She was there most afternoons when she was not at swim team practice or one of her extracurricular activities, I knew; she loved the white-walled, light-washed haven in the wooded garden, and I liked to see her in it. To watch Sarah in her studio, silky dark hair tumbled and amber eyes intent, moving back and forth from her easel to her palette, was like watching some wild creature function perfectly in its habitat, at ease and unobserved. I had the same sense of rightness when I watched her in the water. She was absolutely, totally unself-conscious and natural in those two milieus, and I felt soothed and suspended watching her in them, like Pippa in my knowing that just then, all was right with the world.

  Even now, at sixteen, Sarah did not go in the swooping, shouting caravans of the Pinks and the Jells on their after-school expeditions. She never had. It was not that she was not asked; by her sophomore year, there was not a Jell in Atlanta who would not have been pleased to have Sarah Cameron beside him at Wender & Roberts or in the Buckhead Theatre, and Charlie would have died for it. It was simply that the world Ben and Dorothy Cameron spun out on Muscogee Avenue was still so all-encompassing and enriching that Sarah, if not young Ben, had no desire yet to leave it.

  She said something about that once, many years later, on a New Year’s Eve that must have been the most painful of her life, and I was surprised at the depth and clarity of her perception. I don’t know why I should have been, by that time. The fruit of my unawareness had become bitterly ripe then.

  “You could have been really good. Maybe great,” I said on that night. “You could have been one of the ones they know in New York and Europe, if you’d kept on with your painting. You’re just as much a casualty of all that Cameron wonderfulness as Ben was.”

  “No,” Sarah said. “I’m a casualty of my own nature. I’m like Browning’s last duchess. I ‘liked whate’er I looked on, and my looks went everywhere.’ I loved my art, but I didn’t have any real focus, Shep. If my family ever did me any harm, maybe it was that. All that virtue, all that happiness and balance and energy…it flattens peaks and fills up valleys.”

  On this March day, Sarah was working on a still life of flowers and the family’s battle-scarred old black tomcat, Moggy. The flowers were daffodils, a great, rowdy whoop of them so crammed into a blue pottery pitcher that they seemed a solid, shimmering sun of pure yellow, and I thought that she had just picked them from the wooded back garden, because moisture still clung to their frilled cups and leaves, and the fresh-rain smell of them was powerful in the air. Moggy had already been painted in, and lay black and glowering and wonderful on the canvas, with the ebony presence of a panther, on the scarlet wool shawl that Sarah had posed him on. The daffodils were just coming alive under her brush, strokes of captive, teeming light. The painting shouted and leaped and quivered with life, all primary bursts: red, blue, yellow, black, green. It was as primal and fierce as a Gauguin, but with a dancing, linear delicacy that was pure Sarah. The painting was massively adult, joyously sensual. It was hard to believe it was the work of a sixteen-year-old girl. But Sarah at work, slight as she was and childlike in an enveloping old paint-smeared shirt of her father’s, had nothing of girlishness about her. Before she saw me I watched her for a moment through the open studio door. The sense of power and focus about her smote through the silence.

  She saw me then, and grinned and waved her brush, and I came through the door and flopped down on the rump-sprung sofa against the fireplace wall. She was lightly tanned from the first of the spring sun, and the little crinkles of white that radiated out from her eyes were already etched in faintly. Under the shirt she wore blue jeans and sneakers and a striped T-shirt, and in them she looked more than ever like a taut, golden little boy. But the deep swell of her breasts under the shirt was all Dorothy’s and all woman. Sarah and her mother had the most perfect bodies I have ever seen without, for some reason, ever being in the least overtly sexual. Sarah today has a waist that I could wrap my hands around, and not a hint of blurring under her chin, and a spine as straight as a hollyhock. In the pure, underwater light of the studio she was as clean and light and good to look at as a fish in clear water. Some of the heaviness on my heart lifted.

  She looked at me.

  “Is it the Princeton thing?” she asked.

  I gaped at her. It had been months since we had talked of Princeton.

  “Daddy called Mother when he got back from lunch with you and your father,” she said. “He said it was pretty a
wful for you. He feels really bad about being a part of it. He thinks you’re doing the right thing by going. I don’t think he’d have done it except your father asked him to.”

  “I know,” I said, grateful that I did not have to explain the whole thing to her. “He told me when we were leaving the club. I don’t blame him. He and Dad have known each other practically all their lives. And he loves this town. I can understand why he’d think I ought to stay here. I just don’t think he understands why I need to go…or he didn’t, until today. He said some things that make me think he does now.”

  “He does,” Sarah said. “And he’s right. Why are you so upset? You’re not changing your mind, are you?”

  “I’m not upset,” I said.

  “Come on, Shep,” Sarah said quietly.

  “It was just that…God, Sarah, I wish you could have seen my father’s face. Or his eyes. He didn’t even hate me. He just didn’t see me anymore. You could feel him washing his hands of me right there at the table. I thought we’d settled the business about Princeton; I thought he’d at least accepted it, even if he didn’t like it. It’s not like he still thought I was going to stay here and go into the business with him. I didn’t know he was still thinking that I might….”

  “Something in your voice does sound like you’re changing your mind,” Sarah said.

  “Not really,” I said, not wanting to look at her intent cola-brown eyes, but not able to look away, either. They held mine like a cobra’s held a mongoose.

  “It’s just that all of a sudden I wondered…what difference it was all going to make, in the long run. I can go to New York from Georgia or Tech or Emory as well as I could from Princeton.”

  “You’d never do it,” Sarah said. “Never in this world.”

  “Well, I would,” I said, annoyed.

  “Even if you did,” Sarah said, “you need Princeton before you do it. You need to meet some people who aren’t like us before you actually get out in the middle of them. You don’t know any people who aren’t like us. You don’t know any artists, or any…Jews, or any milkmen.”

  “I know you. I can meet Jews and milkmen here.”

  “No,” she said. “It’s not the same.”

  “Well, there sure as hell aren’t any milkmen at Princeton,” I said flippantly. I didn’t like the tenor of the conversation. Sarah was supposed to comfort, not challenge, me.

  “Oh, don’t be thick,” she said impatiently. “If you back out now you’ll be sorry the rest of your life. Where’s your gumption?”

  I blew up at Sarah for the first time in my life. I had come to loathe that word, that uniquely Atlanta epithet, that flattener and oversimplifier and homogenizer of souls, and I absolutely refused to hear it from her soft, sunny mouth.

  “Goddamn it, Sarah, if there’s one word in the English language that stinks to me, it’s ‘gumption,’” I shouted. “It’s a word for Babbitts and bullies and bone-heads. It’s synonymous with a total lack of imagination and empathy. It’s simplistic and it’s…sentimental. God, it’s not possible to have gumption and be realistic at the same time! It’s an arrogant word, and it’s a tyrant’s word. Look at my father, or your grandma Millie. She beat people over the head with gumption till the day she died. Hell, I think she actually hated any woman who wasn’t fighting off Indians while she was dropping her baby in a cornfield during a tornado. Don’t use that stupid word on me because it doesn’t mean shit!”

  “I know,” Sarah said, grinning. “Wrong word. I’m sorry. You’re right. And you’re right about Granny. You could never have told Granny that it’s courage that’s the real prize, not gumption. The two don’t have a thing to do with each other.”

  “I don’t know anybody with courage, either,” I said sulkily.

  “I do,” she said. “You have it.”

  “Sarah, what on earth are you talking about? You know I never did have any courage,” I said. I was honestly surprised.

  “You endure, Shep,” she said, looking down at her little brown, paint-smeared hands. “You carry that family of yours on your back like Atlas did the world, and Lucy too—yes, her too—and you go right on doing what you need to do. You’ve refused to go into your father’s business, you’ve refused to go to Georgia, or Tech, or Emory—Lord, I’d be terrified to do that. What is all that if it isn’t courage?”

  I looked at her and smiled, and she smiled back, the full, healing smile that had first made me easy with her.

  “I wasn’t really going to back out,” I said. “I just needed to talk to somebody before I went home. I’m sure Mother knows about the famous lunch today, and the whole thing is going to come up again at dinner. Thanks for the ammunition.”

  “Anytime,” Sarah said, equably, turning back to her easel. I went out of the studio and back around the house to the Fury, and I could feel rather than see the amber eyes on my back as I walked. Under their weight I strutted just a little.

  I was wrong about dinner. Aside from saying mildly, “Shep has decided he’ll be going on to Princeton this fall after all,” my father did not mention our luncheon at the Capital City Club, either during the meal or, essentially, ever again. The handwashing had been complete. My mother did not seem too displeased, either. I came later to see the reason: Many of the best families of the South had sent sons to Princeton over the years. With its classically beautiful campus and its reputation for bestowing with some frequency the gentleman’s C, it was the only Ivy League school deemed proper for an Atlanta boy who intended to come back home and ply the family trade. And it did, admittedly, add a certain cachet.

  “They don’t seem to come back changed, somehow,” my mother told Dorothy Cameron one day not long after that, and Sarah reported the comment to me with glee. I laughed with her and let it lie. I intended with all my heart not only not to come back, but to be changed as completely as possible. New York still shone like a grail for me, safely away up there beyond the dreaming spires of Princeton.

  But over its pristine, shimmering image now there hung, like some bright scrim in a dream, Lucy’s face, wretched and importuning.

  For I had been right in that flash of insight I had had about Lucy directly after the lunch with my father and Ben. She had reacted instantaneously and violently to my father’s dry, small comment at dinner. I had not seen her behave so at a meal since we were both children. Everyone at the table simply looked at her openmouthed.

  “You can’t!” she cried, standing up so suddenly that her chair nearly toppled behind her. “Gibby, you can’t! You promised! I won’t let you! Uncle Sheppard, don’t let him! Make him stay here, make him go to Emory and live at home—”

  “LUCY!” Aunt Willa’s voice cut Lucy’s anguished tirade short, and she stopped in midsentence. Her blue eyes lost their wild white ring and their mad colt’s light and went abruptly dead, and then tears welled and spilled over. They ran silently down her face, which had gone as white as long-bleached bone. She looked at me silently, the tears running, running.

  “Oh, Gibby, how could you?” her lips said, but no sound came out with the words. She turned and knocked the chair the rest of the way over, and ran out of the dining room and up the stairs. No one spoke until the thud of her feet vanished behind the slamming of her door.

  “I’ll just see about this,” Aunt Willa said in a tight, high, furious voice, slamming her napkin down beside her plate and then catching herself and folding it elegantly and replacing it. She made as if to rise, but my mother laid a hand on her arm.

  “Better let her compose herself, Willa,” she murmured, her curved little smile showing nothing but a calm, Madonna-like sweetness, her lashes veiling her eyes. “You know how undone she’s been lately. Sheppie can go talk to her later and fix things right up. We don’t want her doing anything she might…regret later.”

  I felt, at that moment, the same hate for my mother that blazed out of Aunt Willa’s eyes before she flattened them back into civility. Lucy’s midnight petting sessions had gone no more unnotic
ed in our house than they had in the other houses of Buckhead, only unremarked. I knew it was to these that my mother referred.

  Lucy was still crying hard when I went up to her room at ten that night, and she would not let me come in.

  “Go away,” she sobbed. “I don’t want to see your face. I hate you! You promised, and you broke your promise!”

  “Come on, Lucy, let me in,” I called softly, rapping on the door. “What did I promise? Not to stay here and go to school, I didn’t. You knew about Princeton; I told you a long time ago. You saw the letter last year….”

  “I didn’t think you’d really do it,” she said, in a voice thick and hopeless with abandonment. “I thought you were just fooling around about it. I never thought you really meant to leave.”

  “But you said—”

  “I DON’T CARE WHAT I SAID! YOU PROMISED ME YOU WOULD TAKE CARE OF ME FOREVER AND YOU’RE BREAKING YOUR PROMISE!” she shrieked, and there followed a loud thud, where she had thrown something heavy against the door. I was suddenly infinitely weary and sad, and I simply did not think I could cope with Lucy any longer on this night.

  “Good night,” I said dully. “I’ll see you in the morning. We’ll talk about it then.”

  She did not answer, and I heard the crying start again.

  But in the morning she was calm, if red-eyed and pale, and she did not mention my going to Princeton. She left for school early, and I can’t remember if we talked of it again at any length before I left, because it was that very afternoon she came home enveloped smugly in the yellow MG and the goatish golden aura of Red Chastain.

  She had met him at one of the Friday night dances the past winter, at the same time we all did, and he had been hanging around her at the various dances and dinners and breakfasts ever since like a randy hound, but she had never shown even the slightest interest in him, and he had never been in the Peachtree Road house. I often wondered why. By any standard I could imagine, Nunnally “Red” Chastain should have been a prize infinitely worthy of Lucy’s steel. There was scarcely a Pink in Atlanta who would not have given up her no-breaks to go steady with him, but though many of them managed to capture his attention long enough for one or two dates, no one but Lucy seemed to hold his interest very long. Small wonder. I honestly think, even in those unformed high school days, Red Chastain could have had any woman over twelve and under thirty he set his sights on.