I know that she was not merely attempting to please and impress me, because she played the prized records from her own extensive jazz library almost daily, throughout her life. But I did like to think that I showed her new dimensions and depth to something she already loved. She told me once that if it had not been for those New York nights at the Blue Note or Birdland or the Village Gate or Nick’s or Basin Street East or the venerable old Vanguard she would still be snapping her fingers to Count Basie and Woody Herman. I fed on the remark: Sarah’s gratitude made wonderful nourishment.
When we came up out of the smoky dark onto the street, we were sweating and still dazzled and full to our hairlines with the boundless exuberance of the quartet. Their odd-metered time signatures and skittering improvisations were mesmerizing, but the thing that set the room rocking and clapping and shouting aloud was the sheer joy in the music and the unfeigned and open delight in each other that flashed like heat lightning between Brubeck, Morello, Wright and Desmond. Their eyes were constantly on one another; they could sense when one or the other was going to seize a riff before it happened, and would slide back to accommodate it; their heads nodded and grins widened until finally they were nodding and laughing aloud with the wonder of the never-to-be-repeated flight of sound, which careened around the room like a captured bird. When you heard Brubeck and his group, even then, you heard love as well as artistry in action, love for the sound and for each other, and it was impossible not to drown in it and then burst up dripping and shouting.
We were quite drunk when we reached the sidewalk, and only half the intoxication was from the seemingly endless stream of gin and tonics that I had signaled for. The dent the evening had made in my grandfather’s legacy would have popped his dry old eyes, but I think he could have been persuaded of its necessity if he could have sat in the smoke-blued dark of the Vanguard that night and heard Brubeck take off. Sarah and I both were on our feet with the rest of the crowd at the evening’s end, when the quartet swung out of “Time Out” at a hundred miles an hour and came crashing down the last stretch into “Take the A Train.”
It was the third time Sarah had visited me in New York. I had not been home since the weekend of her and Lucy’s senior prom, except for two or three visits, each lasting hardly more than a day. I did not go home to take Sarah to the Harvest Ball that Thanksgiving, as I had promised; I called and told her—the only lie I have ever told Sarah, and one I am quite sure she did not believe, though she accepted it with her customary cheerful grace—that I thought I was coming down with the flu, and wished she would ask Charlie to step in for me. She did, simply and sweetly, I’m sure, and he accepted, and I think that they both had a wonderful time. Sarah always loved Charlie; loved being with him, loved the ease and staunchness of him, and his wonderful sweetness. Charlie, for his part, loved Sarah, of course, in quite another way, and would, I knew, gladly give up his scholarship to Emory Law to be a part of that ball, one of the great formal rituals of her life.
I did not go home that Christmas or Easter, either, and I did not go between my junior and senior years at Princeton, and I never told Sarah why, hoping she would assume that the tension between me and my father was behind my absences. But I know that she knew of the alienation between Lucy and me, though probably not what had caused it, or how deeply it went. I know because she did not speak of Lucy even when it would have been natural to do so. Sarah and I spent most of my last two years at Princeton and my first in New York speaking of everything in the world but Lucy Bondurant.
A week before I graduated satisfactorily cum laude, in June of 1958, a letter came from Bud Houston in the trust department of the Trust Company of Georgia, telling me that my grandfather Redwine’s trust for me was operable effective the date of my graduation, and what the terms were. They were liberal: a small yearly set amount for the rest of my life, which I could spend any way I chose, without restriction or penalty. I went into New York and opened an account at Manufacturer’s Trust, and asked Bud to transfer the entire sum into it, and to do the same each year on the anniversary of the trust’s becoming active. He did not like that at all, and spoke of investments and instruments and whatever bankers use to keep your money working for them, but in the end he only grumbled mildly and complied. He said nothing about consulting my father; I would have taken his head off if he had.
I had heard nothing from my father for more than a year, except for the careful, neutral mealtime pleasantries we exchanged the very few times I did go home, and I knew that with the activation of my trust fund, he had in fact as well as in spirit at last washed his hands of me, and that I would get no more of the Bondurant largesse from him, either then or, probably, ever.
And though this bothered my mother greatly and caused her to weep on my shirt front for nearly a half-hour the last time I was home, and to sob, “It would all be yours, Sheppie, all of it, if you’d just come home,” the defection of my father and his money lay weightless on my heart. What I had on my own was enough. My ties to him, and consequently, to my mother, were broken with the receipt of my grandfather’s money. The great primary artery connecting me to Atlanta, that of Lucy, was cut. I left Princeton on the Saturday afternoon of my graduation and went straight into Manhattan and slid into it like a liner into the sea.
Through the doubtless annoyed but supremely effective offices of Dub Vanderkellen’s father, who was a major benefactor and president of the New York Friends of the Library, I found almost immediately a job as an assistant to an assistant curator in the rare manuscripts department of the New York Public Library, which consisted mainly, that first year, of pushing carts laden with desiccated seventeenth-century Flemish illuminated sacred parchments, bound in gnawed and stinking, perpetually damp leather, from the dank bowels of the library to the new temperature-controlled manuscript hospital. It was undemanding work and mildly absorbing, as ferrying mummies might be, and ended at two o’clock in the afternoon, and it paid me just slightly above starvation wages. They were sufficient to procure the apartment, and the trust fund bought a small amount of unhealthy food and a larger amount of good liquor, and most important, opened the museum and theater and gallery and concert hall and restaurant and jazz club doors through which I dived like a fox into its earth. I rather liked the job, and had no immediate plans to look for something more challenging, spending most of my free afternoons upstairs in the library’s open stacks reading. I loved the city with every fiber of my being. Princeton had been, I found, the preliminary round; Manhattan was the main event.
Nights I spent at the small jazz clubs both uptown and in the Village, and once in a while even up in Harlem, listening transported to the cold, wailing or hot, skittering dissonance of a new kind of jazz that seemed to fry the very roots of the hair on my scalp. I heard them all: Ellington, Hines, Krupa, Hampton, Kenton, Rich, Gillespie, Blakey. And best of all, the legendary reed men who followed Bird Parker out into the world: Coleman Hawkins, Paul Desmond, Zoot Sims, John Coltrane, Stan Getz, Gerry Mulligan, Sonny Rollins, Ornette Coleman. I would go home after the last set and noodle far into the clanking dawn on my clarinet and the secondhand saxophone I had bought at a pawnshop my first week in the city. When I was not listening or playing or working, I was talking, endlessly talking, of the immortal profundities and never-ending possibilities that seemed to glitter in the thick air of New York, and bounce sunstruck off the very pavement like the flecks of mica in it. My companions were New York Princeton classmates and the friends of friends I collected in the city; not many, but enough to give me the warm-wrapped feeling of a set to belong to. We were all of similar swathed and privileged backgrounds and education and all bound with the common cord of music and youth and endless promise and the deep, constant kiss of the great city itself. I lived on almost nothing, grew thinner and nervier each day, read and worked and played and explored, and in general stretched and used every fiber and sinew and nerve and drop of blood and vapor of spirit within me.
And always, the music, and alwa
ys, Sarah.
I could not imagine that I would ever want anything else.
But if I could not, it seemed to me that everyone else could. Throughout that first year, my mother kept up a steady barrage of telephone calls and then, when I simply stopped answering the phone, switched to letters. The gist of them was always the same: “You are throwing away your life. All we have given and could give you will count for nothing if you stay up there playing at that ignominious little job and frittering away your grandpapa’s money on that awful music and liquor. You are an Atlanta Bondurant. People are talking about you. Come home. I don’t care if you don’t want to go into the business; do anything you want, but just come home. I’ll see to it that your father is reasonable about everything.”
By “everything” I knew she meant the Bondurant money, and I thought she probably could make my father see reason, as she put it, simply because at least half of it was hers. After a while I did not answer the letters, either. But she kept them coming. “Come home, Sheppie. Oh, come home, my baby. Come home.”
Letters came from Dorothy Cameron, too, and they said essentially the same thing, though in gentler tones, and for different, loftier reasons: “You are very special to Ben and me, Shep, and you have gifts and talents you have not dreamed of yet. You should put them to work. There’s nothing in the world so satisfying as giving back to the world some of what it has given you. It’s a sacred trust. We flout it at our own risk. And Shep, New York doesn’t need those gifts. But Atlanta…oh, how we need our rare Shep Bondurants.”
Dorothy, the eternal altruist, the inexorable, if gentle, conscience to a generation. I knew she meant what she said about giving back to Atlanta, and I also knew that she and Ben would grieve deeply, if silently, should Sarah leave home and cast her lot with me, a thousand miles away. I did answer Dorothy’s letters, cheerfully and promptly, but I suspect she was not satisfied with the noncommittal tone or content of them. But unlike my mother, she did not plead or chide.
Even Charlie wrote me: “Enough is enough. The big city is all well and good, but Buckhead’s a dump without you. Come on home, boy. There’s a little curly headed Scottie who misses you something awful. And I warn you, I’ve taken her to five dances this year, and I’m taking her to another one Saturday night.”
I called him after that letter, at home where he was still living, resignedly I knew, with his mother. I just wanted to hear his froggy, familiar voice.
“You don’t have to report to me or ask my permission to take Sarah around,” I said. “She’s free to date anybody she wants to, and you’re it, apparently. I’m glad you are.”
“You ought to be,” Charlie said, and I could see the wide grin on his square face. “Nobody else would look after your interests like I do.”
The letters disturbed me, though, and finally I asked Sarah if she felt the same way everyone else seemed to about the way I was leading my life.
“Well,” she said practically, “you’re not ever going to have much money, you know, and you grew up used to a lot of that. But I don’t think that matters much to you, and it certainly doesn’t to me. I’m only glad to see you so happy. You’re like somebody turned a light on inside you. I never saw that at home. I only wonder if it’s always going to be enough for you…if one day you’re not going to want more from life. I don’t mean materially. I mean…oh, I guess I mean experientially. If the way you’re living now ever loses its intensity, it might seem awfully minimal to you, I’m afraid. And by that time, you may have lost the best chances you’ll have to make other moves, and your contacts, and your momentum.”
“It sounds like it wouldn’t be enough for you,” I said, looking at her sharply. “I thought you loved the way I lived, and the city, and the things we do…”
“I do. Right now, I think being here in New York with you is about the most perfect thing I can imagine in the world. But I don’t know that I always will.”
“Would you want more money, or a better place to live?” I asked. This was disturbing.
“No, I thought you understood that. What I’d want more of is achievement. Mine, mainly. There it is, Shep. It’s what I was raised for. It’s all I know. I can’t do all that much, but I need to take what I can do as far as it will go. And I need to give something to the world; I’m my mother’s daughter there. It’s why I want that year in Paris for my painting, and why I don’t just chuck most of that ridiculous Junior League charity stuff.”
“You could certainly achieve almost anything you wanted to in New York,” I said. I was aware that I sounded more than a bit sullen. “You could take your painting further here than you ever could in Atlanta.”
“I know it,” she said, and smiled. “That’s why I don’t get on you about coming home. It’s not me I worry about needing more. It’s you.”
She had said it as she got on a plane to go home after her previous visit, and so I could not pursue it with her. Sarah had a penchant for dropping provocative bones into the conversation just as she was leaving me; I thought perhaps that it was because she so hated confrontation and knew I could best her verbally in most arguments.
She dropped one on this Sunday night, as we were walking through the grubby, dun-colored concourse at La Guardia toward the Delta flight that would take her back for the spring quarter of her junior year at Agnes Scott.
“We have to talk about Lucy sometime, you know,” she said, apropos of nothing at all, and I looked at her in surprise. She smiled at me and continued walking. “I know y’all have had some kind of falling out, and that it must have been a bad one, because you haven’t seen her, and you haven’t said a word about her since you were home for our prom, and that’s three years, Shep.”
“We did have an argument,” I said. “I guess you could say it was a bad one. She doesn’t want to see me, and I can’t say that I mind. I don’t see why we have to talk about her. It really doesn’t amount to anything.”
“You must think about it, though,” she persisted. There was a troubled frown between her level black brows. “You must think about her sometimes.”
“I don’t,” I said slowly, tasting the words and finding them to be essentially true. “I really almost never do. It’s funny.”
Sarah said nothing, but her smile widened.
“What are you grinning at?”
“I just plain don’t believe you,” she said. “There is some corner of your heart that is forever Lucy Bondurant.” Sarah was reading Rupert Brooke that year.
“Well, you’re wrong,” I said impatiently. “This time you’re wrong.”
We talked no more about it, and in due time Sarah’s flight was called, and I kissed her and she walked away from me toward the gate. And then she turned, and I saw that her eyes were wet.
“Oh, Shep,” she said, “don’t come home! I don’t care what any of them say. You’re right; stay here. If you come home, it will be to her.”
And she was gone out onto the twilit tarmac and up the spidery steps into the DC-7 before I could answer her.
On the way back to West Twenty-first in the cab, I thought how very rarely Sarah was wrong about me, and how strange that she should be this time, and about this. For I was sure of it: I thought of Lucy very rarely, and then only fleetingly, and when I did, I felt, simply, nothing at all. It was as if all those years under the vivid, all-consuming, head-spinning, life-giving spell of my cousin Lucy had never been. Had that last meeting with her in the summerhouse burned me so that I had simply buried it beyond reach? Or could it be that she was so totally and supernormally of that place that she could not be of this one?
Sarah was right about one thing, though. It had been almost a year since I had even heard about Lucy, and that information had come not from her, but from, of all people, her mother. My aunt Willa. She had called me one raw Friday evening and said that she was in New York on a buying trip, and would love to have lunch and a nice catch-up chat the next day. She was, she said, staying at the Royalton on West Forty-fourth Street,
and thought we might run over to the Schrafft’s at Forty-third and Broadway. I hated the teahouse fussiness and the appalling food at all the Schrafft’s but she took me by surprise, and besides, I knew we could eat cheaply there and was fairly sure that I would be expected to pay. In Aunt Willa’s world the man, no matter how impecunious, always did. We made a date for noon the next day, and I went to sleep that night with the thought lying full-blown in my mind: There’s something about Lucy that she wants me to do, and I’m going to hate it.
I saw Aunt Willa immediately; she had snared a corner table by the window and sat there looking out into the flow of traffic on Forty-third Street like an incognito queen spying on her subjects. The past few years had deepened her beauty; I knew that she must be about forty now, but all that showed of the passing of time was a sort of sheen that lay on her like the bloom of a grape. She still wore a great deal of pale, opaque foundation and hectic scarlet lip and nail polish, and her eyes were made up into the slanted doe eyes of that period, but she was so slender now that the lush breasts and hips no longer literally leapt out at you, only beckoned, and the clothes she wore were obviously expensive, though plain to the point of severity. Lucy had always had so much of the Bondurants about her, despite the startling Slagle coloring, that I had never seen even a vestige of Aunt Willa in her, but now, in her full and splendid maturity, I saw in Willa Slagle Bondurant’s dark grace and stillness something of what Lucy the woman might one day become. Both women took the eye, Willa with her utter femaleness, Lucy with both that and the exuberant life that literally leaped off her.
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