Peachtree Road

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  I knew the former one was. Lucy walked in ripeness and moved in a new thick, sweet slowness that spelled, even to my wildly untutored eyes, completion. I seemed to feel about it, simply, no way at all.

  I never spoke of those speculations to her, and she did not to me. We spoke of little in those last days; I kept away from the house as often and as long as I could, taking refuge at the Camerons’ until they good-naturedly ran me home each evening, and she kept to her room when she was not with Red. She did not even eat her meals with us in that last week. I don’t know where she ate, or if she did. Once she stayed out all night and there was a flaming row with Aunt Willa in the foyer when she came in after sunrise, still adjusting her clothing. But I don’t think she was punished, or abided by it if she was, for she was not around the Peachtree Road house that week, and I felt, mainly, an obscure and guilty gratitude that I would not have to ride out another exile with her. I wanted, then, two things only: I wanted to be near the ease and lightness and safety that was Sarah, and I wanted to get away from Atlanta and into Princeton.

  It did not occur to me until much later that both Sarah and Princeton might want something in return.

  I left a full quarter earlier than I had planned, on a day in late June when rain and coolness had come back to town, and the air smelled of honeysuckle and newly mown grass and grateful, sucking earth. I took the train from Brookwood station, for cars were not allowed on the Princeton campus until junior year, and my weeping mother and the smiling Camerons and Sarah came in the sweet, cool early morning to see me off. My father was at The Cloister on Sea Island at a realtors’ meeting; he had said his cold red good-byes earlier. Lucy was off somewhere with Red Chastain. We had, somehow, said no good-byes at all.

  Sarah came regularly to Princeton for football games and, later, Colonial dances, and my mother and father came, rarely, for formal, constrained, parental visits, but except for brief and obligatory trips South for Christmas and Easter and a few unavoidable vacations, I did not come home again for a long time, and then through no choice of my own.

  By that time, Lucy had gone.

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  On a misted Sunday morning in late October, in the beginning of my junior year at Princeton, I sat with Sarah Cameron in the window seat of one of the big, grand suites high up in Blair Arch and kissed her, and put a trembling hand on the sweet heaviness of her breast.

  She lifted her face to me from the hollow of my shoulder and smiled.

  “Please don’t, Shep,” she said softly. “I don’t know how to handle it. And we said we wouldn’t, yet.”

  “I know,” I said, my voice splintering in my throat. “But just think. You could tell people when you’re an old lady that you lost your virginity in Dub Vanderkellen’s room at Princeton when you were eighteen. It’s too good an opportunity to pass up.”

  “Nevertheless, I think I will,” she said, sitting erect on the old tapestry pillows and pulling her shoulders sharply back, as she did when she was hurt or offended. I knew my attempt to be sophisticated and devil-may-care, as I felt befitted a visitor, even on sufferance, to the lair of one of the country’s richest scions and the school’s most accomplished womanizers, had instead sounded only crude and insulting. I reddened fiercely. Sarah, even half-lying on the window seat of Dub Vanderkellen’s legendary room, where uncounted indigo-blooded society girls had allegedly yielded up their family jewels, was still Sarah. What I had said was beneath both of us.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, looking at the rich mahogany tangle of her curls and the slim, shapely shoulders and winging little shoulder blades under the burgundy cashmere. I felt, besides shame and embarrassment, a powerful urge to shield Sarah which had nothing in it of the fierce, otherworldly protectiveness I had so often felt for Lucy. This was a practical and tender kind of feeling, and warmed instead of pierced. Sarah was only eighteen, and still very much Dorothy Cameron’s daughter, but she was also mine. Both of us had, over the space of this last year, come tacitly to acknowledge that.

  “I know,” she said, in her light, rich voice, and turned her face, still sun-browned with summer and lit with her whole-souled smile, back to mine. “It was too good to pass up. I might have said it if you hadn’t. But to make it a good story it would have to be Dub Vanderkellen in the flesh that I lost it to, and I’d just as soon do it with a frog. When I do, it’s going to be with Shep Bondurant, and I’ll be fifty times prouder, even though I don’t know where or when it will be.”

  I kissed her again, lightly, on the forehead just under the curls and felt expiation and a fine well-being flow through me. Sarah may not, in her entire life, have stopped hearts, but she certainly did start a lot of warm, steadfast engines.

  “Dub would not be exactly thrilled to hear you called him a frog,” I said, tossing the luminous name off my tongue with a familiarity that two short months of shared membership in Colonial Club did not warrant. I might not be able to admit it to myself, but I was mightily impressed with belonging to the same eating club as one of the mighty Vanderkellens of Pittsburgh, Palm Beach, Antigua and London. I had known wealth all my life back in Atlanta, but I had never even conceived of wealth on a scale such as I encountered at Princeton, in the persons of three or four, in the main, rather nondescript undergraduates, of whom Dub Vanderkellen was hands down the crown prince. Vanderkellen steel under-girt, it seemed, the entire free world. Still, it was the romance of the great family name, and not its money and power, that so intrigued me. I have always known pretty much where my weaknesses lie.

  When I had seen Dub leave the Sunday morning milk punch party at Colonial in the savage little racing automobile of a whippetlike Bryn Mawr girl in a camel hair cape, I had made bold to ask him if I could take Sarah up to his room to see his fabled view. Dub had one of the few truly grand suites, vast and sumptuously furnished with old family pieces and commanding a spectacular 180-degree vista of the campus over Cannon Green toward Nassau Street, at the very top of Blair Arch, a crenellated and cloistered and mullioned Tudor Gothic pile of brick and pale stone which established for good and all the trend toward Gothic architecture on American college campuses. My own freshman and sophomore suite in Holder, before I had moved into Colonial, had reeked picturesquely of antiquity and genteel dust, but it did not hold a candle to the big suites in Blair.

  “Sure,” Dub had flung back over his shoulder, intent on the flash of pearly thigh the Bryn Mawr girl was showing as she slid into the Jaguar. “Go on up. Lay off Sarah, though. She’s too nice a girl for what you’re thinking. Leave that to the pros.”

  His laughter, even that froggy, followed him insinuatingly out onto Prospect Street as the Jaguar growled off, and the group around us laughed, as Sarah and I did, though I was the only one who flushed. Dub knew, of course, that it wasn’t the view, but the wondrous room itself and the spoor of its storied occupant, that I had wanted to flaunt in front of Sarah. Everyone else knew it, too, and chafed me good-naturedly. Sarah had only visited Colonial this one time, for the Yale game, but she was an instant hit with the members, as she had been with my smaller and earlier crowd when I lived in the fourth entry of Holder Hall. I knew that already there were Colonial members who would have drubbed me with workmanlike thoroughness if they had thought I might dishonor her. Sarah inspired that feeling of little-sister, daughter-of-the-regiment closeness wherever she went, and it spilled over into stronger stuff here as well as in Atlanta. I had seen the same look on the face of Mac Thornton, my melancholy Warrenton, Virginia, roommate in Holder, and on the face of Chalmers Stringfellow just this weekend, that I had seen so often on the blunt, spectacled face of Charlie Gentry. Real caring, it was. And tenderness. It made me proud of Sarah on many counts, not least among them that it was on my arm that she came into this endlessly beguiling, infinitely wider world of Princeton.

  Now Sarah butted me under the chin with the silky top of her head, her hair smelling clean and dry and somehow like trapped sun, and said, “Dub V
anderkellen looks like a frog and he is a frog. Nobody in their right mind would get near him, in this room or anywhere else, if his name was Smith or Jones. Or,” she added gravely, “Bondurant.”

  I gave her a mock crack on the chin with my balled fist and turned and looked out into the wet late morning, and sighed a great sigh of pure happiness. For the moment, everything was so perfect in my world that I could almost hear the great minor, interior music of the planet. This small treasure, this perfect, compact being that was Sarah, that was my own, sat beside me in the very rooms of one of the great names in American society and industry, who was now incredibly my own club-mate; and spread out below us in the last of a light autumn rain was this place that had so quickly and totally claimed my heart and soul and imagination, this Princeton.

  I had felt the spell of it the moment I had gotten off the dinkey from Penn Station at Princeton Junction two autumns before and looked around me into a gray-greenness that was as timeless and rich with myths and shades as Arthur’s England. It was a different feeling altogether from the fierce pull of 2500 Peachtree Road, and the sheltering arms of the summerhouse. Those enclosed. Princeton enlarged. From that moment, something in my heart flew free and soared up to meet it, singing. I feel it still, whenever I think about Princeton in those years, and the years in New York that came later.

  This had been an autumn of mists and mellowness, warm and as yet without real bite, and so even in the last weekend in October, some of the living wildfire of the centuries-old hardwoods on Cannon Green still flamed. There had come, in the night, a brief, soft little rain which had lingered through the morning, and though it was ending now, puddles still lay on the walks crisscrossing the green and the many quadrangles, and gleamed on the gray and rose and blue slate roofs, and dripped from the black iron posts and chain links that bordered the grassy areas. All of Princeton that we could see—the great, grim Romanesque bulk of Alexander, the mellowed bricks of Nassau, the white gleam of Whig and Clio, the arches and spires of Witherspoon and Holder and Dodd and Murray Dodge; the spires of the University Chapel and the Firestone Library, the Sunday quiet of Nassau Street and Palmer Square—shimmered with wetness. The campus seemed as it did so often to me, especially in winter: underwater. It is the image that I still see, these many years later.

  “I think I like it best when it rains. Gray seems right for it,” I said to Sarah, taking a deep breath of thick air. There had been a bonfire on the green the night before, after we had beaten Yale, and the smell of the wet fire still curled upward, sour and alien and faintly dangerous, and yet somehow good.

  “I can see a hundred colors in the gray,” Sarah said, leaning out alongside me. I rested my chin on the top of her head. “Rose and blue and green and violet and black and even yellow. Chrome yellow. Can’t you? Princeton could never be just plain gray.”

  It had been the kind of weekend that I had envisioned whenever I thought “college” in my childhood. Disney might have created it, or rather, James Hilton, along with Mr. Chips. Sarah had flown in from Atlanta on Friday evening, on a big Delta DC-7, and I had borrowed Mac’s Plymouth, so like my own Fury, and driven over and picked her up. As a junior, I was entitled to have the Fury with me now, but of course Lucy had taken care of that and so I was without wheels, and would remain so until I graduated, and even after. It did not particularly inconvenience me. I seldom left the campus except to go into New York with Alan Greenfeld, my third suitemate from Holder, and we took the PJ&B for that, and I almost never went home. An automobile could be borrowed from a Colonial member when necessary, as it had been today. I suppose my father would have replaced the Fury for me if I had asked, and I am sure my mother would have, but I did not. It did not seem important. As I have said, the Fury always seemed more a part of Lucy than of me, and I did not miss it.

  I had dressed carefully for the trip to the airport in Philadelphia. We would be coming back for a cocktail party at Colonial, and then I planned to take Sarah to Lahiere’s for dinner, and then we would come back again to the club and dance. The “big” dance was Saturday night, with a jazz group from Eddie Condon’s that someone’s father had arranged for, and drinks and a buffet for the alumni, but Friday would be in some ways better: the living room darkened, the records long on slow, smoky ballads and short on rock ’n’ roll, the members and their dates locked together in the ritual swaying that had run through and under and over so many of our diverse teens, a glinting common thread.

  I wore a light Harris Tweed jacket and a new white oxford button-down from Langrock’s, and white bucks, and gray flannel trousers. I knotted and reknotted a new Colonial tie until I had it just right, and turned my head this way and that in the dim, watery little mirror in my cubicle in the club, to see if Harold at the barbershop had taken too much off the top. It was the era of crew cuts, but with my long fledgling hawk’s face I looked ridiculously like a molting bird in them, pink scalp shining through the blond, so I settled for a kind of short, smooth helmet, as created for me by the resigned Harold. I was as close, in those years, as I would ever come to being vain about my looks.

  I walked out of Colonial into the soft bronze sunlight of late afternoon, jingling the keys to Mac’s Plymouth and whistling “Darktown Strutters’ Ball,” not at all unaware of the picture I made on the veranda of the old columned clubhouse, on this old, leaf-lit street of clubs and privilege and influence. The best so far of young America, I thought mistily and insufferably smugly, at play in the spring of youth after a week of preparing for the service of the nation.

  It was Princeton’s primary skeletal bone, that notion of service; I had heard it since my first chapel service, and I bought it instantly and openheartedly. Most of us then, I think, did. There at that service I heard first the great prayer for Princeton: “…And to all who work here and to all its graduates the worldwide give your guiding Spirit of sacrificial courage and loving service.” Service. I loved it. I felt, on that October evening, that I could dedicate my life to it gladly. But first, I would go and pick up Sarah.

  The old street was alive with young men like me, taking a breather from their sacrificial labors to slide into the drumbeat of the Yale weekend. On the verandas and steps of every club we stood, wellborn, well dowered, well dressed, well connected, well primed for our worlds, present and future. A few early-arriving girls stood with us, vivid in suits and twin sets against all the muted tweed and gray flannel, laughing the fruited laughs of youth and confidence and mastery.

  All the clubs were out in force. They varied subtly in ethos and rank, these creamy bastions of casual privilege, but not a man on those verandas this autumn night felt himself completely untouched by the finger of God. Whether the others, the great submerged iceberg of Princeton, the independents, the grinds, the meatballs, felt that validating finger was a matter of the idlest speculation, because none of us on Prospect knew many of them. The eating clubs of Princeton are not and never pretended to be long on democracy and compassion; indeed, when Woodrow Wilson, who was then president of the university, outlawed fraternities, the clubs were what sprang up to replace them, and were essentially different only in name and degree.

  But those of us who dwelled in the Eden of Prospect Street did not often consider the dichotomy between sacrificial service and the organized exclusion of outsiders. Even I, essentially an outsider from birth, was too warmed at the life-giving fire of exclusivity to let that worm emerge often from the golden apple. I had, after all, a bright heritage of privilege and exclusivity of my own. We all did. Consistent awareness would at that point have been asking, I think, a great deal.

  Sarah got off the plane in Philadelphia looking every inch grown-up and wonderful in a dark red suit with a mouton collar, her swift smile and the red wool lighting her face like a candle. I kissed her on the cheek before speaking, trying to buy myself some time to assimilate the sheer strangeness of her. It was a thing that happened for the first few moments every time I saw Sarah in Princeton: Such a strangeness, an utter
lack of context, surrounded her that I literally could not think who this small, radiant woman—for she was that, obviously—trotting on slender high heels to meet me might be. Sarah in the limbo of airports or railroad stations was not a part of the world I had left behind in Atlanta and not a part of the world of Princeton either, but an exquisitely carved small denizen of nowhere and everywhere.

  I felt the satiny sheen of her cheek and smelled the clean, soapy smell of her, and heard her hesitant “Hey, Shep,” and all of a sudden she was Sarah, and a humming, sweet-fitting part of this new world, and I felt a surge of something near love that she could do that: be at once a part of both. I did not think anyone else from Buckhead could have managed it. Sometimes, when a fresh wonder emerged from the soil of this new Eastern world and caught me in surprise and delight, I instinctively turned to the shadow figures of Charlie or Lucy to tell them about it, and then realized, with a small sinking that was keenly physical, that they would not—could not—have understood. That they could not in any sense come into Princeton, as Sarah could, and share it with me. Charlie was too sunk in Atlanta and the South; Lucy in her own complex needs and soaring fancies, and her new insistence that the only Shep Bondurant she would acknowledge was the one of Peachtree Road and the great house on it.

  But Sarah…Sarah walked regularly and effortlessly out of that world to go with me wherever I went, and the joy I took in her whenever she did it was, indeed, very near to a kind of love.

  “Hey, Sarah,” I said. And then, laughing, “Hey, Sarah Tolliver Cameron!”

  At the dance that night she shimmered in her red and her joyful, unaffected Southerness, and the exotic dark birds from Radcliffe and Bryn Mawr and Sarah Lawrence and even Wellesley and Vassar paled in annoyed comparison. Everyone in Colonial, indeed everyone in all the clubs, could dance, but that night Sarah and I showed them what the dancing of the Atlanta Pinks and Jells could be, and it was something else entirely. I have never danced so long and so well and so effortlessly, and she matched me step for step, beat for beat, down to the smallest pause and pat and sway. We might have been hatched from a double-yolked egg; we held the floor for nearly an hour, ringed with clapping Colonials and scowling Seven Sisters. Margaret Bryan would have counted her life well spent if she could have seen us.