Peachtree Road

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  I could hear the fussiness in my own voice, and expected her to throw it back at me, but she didn’t. She got up from the sofa and paced around the little room, still wrapped in the raincoat, looking at the few photographs and posters I had tacked up, and the one drawing—a vivid, darkling pastel of Satchmo blowing it out at the Vanguard, done by someone named Pierce I had never heard of before—and picking up and putting down my few bibelots.

  “You don’t have to worry about me, Gibby,” she said over her shoulder. “When couldn’t I handle Red?”

  “Well, light somewhere,” I said grumpily, “and I’ll make us some coffee. From the looks of things you can use some. It’s a wonder you made it all the way in from Princeton on the train.”

  “I didn’t. I caught a ride with somebody,” she said.

  “Who?”

  “Oh, God, I don’t know, Gibby, I didn’t get his name. What difference does it make? I don’t want any coffee. Don’t you have anything to drink? And maybe an old abandoned cigarette?”

  “There are some cigarettes in the desk drawer,” I said. “They’ve been there since summer, so they’re probably unsmokable. And it’s coffee or nothing. Sit down and take your coat off. You make me nervous pacing around like that.”

  She turned to me, smiling a strange, closemouthed smile, and then suddenly threw the coat off and dropped it on the floor, and stood there wearing only a white nylon slip. She was naked underneath it. I could see the dark shadows of her nipples, and the patch of smoky hair at the V of her thighs. I dropped my eyes.

  “The rest of my pretties are hanging on the wall in the living room at Tiger,” she said. “I’m their fair lady of choice this weekend, and I gave them my favors. Instead of one knight, I’ve got seventy-four. Not counting Red, of course. See what you could have had, Gibby?”

  For some reason, I flushed as if this were not Lucy, whose narrow, white whippet body I had known almost as well as my own since childhood. I turned away and walked back to the kitchen, which lay at the end of the pullmanlike row of rooms that made up the apartment. I could hear her unsteady steps behind me. I filled the kettle and set it on the tiny stove and turned around to face her. I was not going to let a drunk, contentious Lucy throw me. I decided to ignore her nakedness.

  “Well, how do you like my place?” I said. “Is it anything like you thought it would be?”

  “To tell you the truth, I hadn’t thought about it,” she said. “But I do like it. It’s like a little train. It’s like…oh, Gibby, you know what it’s like? It’s like Dumboozletown, Florida! Do you remember Dumboozletown?”

  She began to laugh again, and the laughter spiraled up and up, until I was afraid that it would go off into one of her old fits of hysteria, but it didn’t. It was simply laughter. She threw her head back with it, and laughed and laughed.

  I was about to join in, seduced into mirth against my will, when I saw the marks on her throat. They were ugly and unmistakable, the vermilion prints of ten fingers there at the base, where the slender white column joined the elegant, ridged collarbone. An older, purple bruise spread up the side of her neck into her hairline.

  “Who choked you, Lucy?” I said. “Was it Red? It was Red, wasn’t it? Did it happen this weekend? Is that why you came?”

  She stopped laughing abruptly, and put her hand up to her neck, tentatively, as if the marks still hurt her.

  “He didn’t choke me,” she said. Her face closed. “He just kind of shook me a little. He didn’t know he was being so rough. He was awfully sorry. No, it’s not at all why I came. I told you. I just—”

  “Lucy, this is me. Cut the shit,” I said. “I know a choke hold when I see one. What was he, drunk, or just mean as hell?”

  She didn’t answer. I saw that her eyes had found my lone bottle of bourbon, which I kept mainly for visitors; besides the obligatory drinks at the jazz clubs, to make up the cover, I rarely drank then. I could not afford it, for one thing. She reached out for the bourbon, staring at me defiantly. I shrugged. I knew when I was beaten. She unscrewed the top and took a long pull from the bottle, and then put it down and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

  After a long moment of silence, she said, “He doesn’t mean anything by it, you know. Red doesn’t. I was being sort of loud and silly, and he couldn’t get me to stop, that was all. It’s just his way of showing me that he loves me.”

  I just looked at her.

  “Daddy used to do it,” she went on, her voice getting louder. “It’s not uncommon. Daddy did it because he loved me, too. I’d be bad, and he’d kind of hit me, and then he’d cry because he’d had to…”

  I suddenly remembered a twilight in the foyer of the house on Peachtree Road, long ago, after small Lucy had run away for the first time and had been spanked by Aunt Willa, and had said then, “Will you hug me now, Mama?” and Aunt Willa had snapped at her, and Lucy had retorted that her father had hugged her all the time, and Aunt Willa had said, “No, he didn’t. He never did hug you. You always were a bad girl, and he never did hug you one single time. He hit you, that’s what he did. You were so bad he hit you every time you turned around.”

  And Lucy’s great cry of anguish and betrayal, and her sobs diminishing up the great curved stair…

  “Your mother was telling the truth,” I said softly.

  She knew what I meant; of course she did. She had always known what I meant.

  “Well, maybe. A little, I guess,” she said. “But it was only because he loved me, Gibby. That was all it was.”

  I was silent under the great surge of pain I felt, and the hopelessness. Of course Red Chastain hit her; of course she allowed it; courted it, even. The smiting father, Red’s quick fist…

  After a little space of time she said, matter-of-factly, “I think he’s dead, Gibby. In fact, I’m sure of it. I know now that he died in the war, and they didn’t know how to let us know.”

  I did not have to ask who she was talking about. Jim Bondurant stood there in the room with us, whole and living and radiant with remoteness.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because he would have come for me otherwise,” she said simply.

  There was nothing to say to that either, so I didn’t reply. I just leaned against the counter sipping coffee and watching her. She took a couple more sips from the bottle and lit one of the brittle cigarettes I had found for her, and then she looked up at me and smiled. It was her old smile once more, free and light-hearted.

  “Do you remember when we cut our wrists and mixed our blood, Gibby?” she said.

  “Sure,” I said. “I thought I was going to faint for about five hours afterward.”

  “I still have my scar,” she said, holding up her slim wrist. A thin white line crossed the little delta of blue veins beating there, like half a delicate bracelet. “Do you have yours?”

  I held my wrist up to the kitchen light. I had not thought of that day for a long time, not since the day in the summerhouse after her senior prom, when she had evoked the promise that we made then. The scar was there, smaller and fainter than hers, a tiny bleached tributary in the faded tan on my wrist. I held my arm out beside hers and we looked at the scars.

  “Poor Luce,” I said. “Some knight I made you. I haven’t managed to save you from a single dragon so far, have I?”

  She looked at me intently, as though by sheer force of will she could extract something from me. Her pupils were black and huge.

  “You could save me from one now,” she said.

  “Red?” I said, dread starting cold in my veins.

  “No,” she said. Her face looked, abruptly, as if it was starting to crumble, and suddenly she was crying silently, tears sliding down from her light-struck eyes to her chin, dripping off it and pearling down onto her slim, bare shoulders. “No, not Red.”

  I put my hands on her shoulders, feeling the fine bird’s bones through the silky, taut skin, and walked her to the bed and sat her down on the side of it. She did not lift her head, a
nd the tears fell, hot and light, on my hands.

  “What, then?” I said.

  “Oh, Gibby, I’m so afraid,” she whispered, turning into my shoulder, burying her face in the hollow of my neck. I put my arms around her and stroked her back. How many times had I sat like this, holding Lucy while her dreams shook her like a malevolent terrier?

  “Tell me what you’re afraid of, Lucy,” I said.

  “Of everything in the world,” she sobbed, her voice muffled in my neck. “Of everything that I can’t control.”

  I tried to laugh hearteningly, and did not succeed.

  “Then you’ll be afraid most of your life, baby,” I said.

  She turned her face up to me, and it was fierce, savage, half-blind.

  “Then I won’t live, because I can’t stand that—to be afraid for the next sixty or seventy years! I can’t even stand it for one more! I’d rather die!”

  “Lucy, nobody can control their lives, not really,” I said, as reasonably as I could. “But it doesn’t mean you have to be afraid all the time. You just…sort of forget about it and go on and live your life. You cope. You hang on. And nothing much happens to you, really, in the long run.”

  “Well, other people are stronger than I am, then,” she said, hiccuping. “Or they have something I don’t, something that was left out of me. Because I can’t stand not being…safe. Not knowing what’s going to happen to me next. It’s like waiting to fall off the world. I feel that way all the time, Gibby, all the time!” Her voice rose. “I have to know I’m safe. I have to know somebody’s taking care of me….”

  “Lucy…”

  The crying became wilder, spiraled up, up.

  “Promise!” She sobbed. “Promise me! Promise me you’ll take care of me!”

  “I promise,” I said automatically, stroking her back and her hair, feeling the force of the fear and grief out of her deepest childhood under my hands.

  She rested there against me for a moment, taking great, deep breaths, and I thought, my own breath held, that perhaps this time one of the terrible spells had, after all, been averted. Then she said, “Do you mean it?”

  “Sure I do,” I said.

  “Then marry me.”

  I was silent, the shock stopping my breath in earnest for a moment, cursing myself for not seeing where she was heading. Then I said, my mouth still against her hair, “Lucy, the surest way I know to wreck both our lives is to marry you. Understand right now that that isn’t going to happen. Not now, not ever. It wouldn’t be right. It would ruin us both. Cousins don’t. Cousins can’t.”

  Her movement was almost that of some great snake, one of the constrictors, a boa or an anaconda. She turned in my arms as swiftly and with such a smooth slide of muscle that before I could even flex my own she was all over me, and against me, wrapping her legs around my waist, squirming herself beneath me, wriggling out of the slip. She did not speak; her breath came in short, sharp snorts through her nostrils, and she made little high, keening sounds, like an animal. Her hands were at my fly and then inside, and then I felt her warm nakedness against mine, and a great deep, primal thrust and surge, a monstrous great stiffening, and knew that I was about one beat away from losing this fury inside her. My erection felt as massive and volatile and inexorable as a volcano. She found it frantically and was guiding it into herself at the same moment that I tore myself free of her and rolled off the bed. Under the pounding desire was a white anger, and under that, even more powerful, a blind fear.

  I turned to the wall and zipped up my pants, fighting for breath and control. I did not hear her move. I pulled on a T-shirt and stuffed it into my pants, and buckled my belt.

  “Get up and put on your coat,” I said levelly around the breath laboring in my chest. “I’m going to take you back to Princeton.”

  Incredibly, I heard her laugh, and turned. She was lying naked on her back, hands under her head, legs asprawl. I turned my head away.

  “You did want it, didn’t you, Gibby?” she said, and her voice was light and sweet and young. “I know you did. I could feel it. I can see it now, down there in your pants. Lordy, it must be something fantastic by now, because I know you’ve been saving it all this time for Sarah, and we both know she wouldn’t know a hump from a hula hoop, don’t we? So what do you do? Jerk off? Get it down in Times Square? What a waste! You better think again, Gibby. I could give you a hundred times better before breakfast than little Sarahpoo Cameron ever could in her entire life.”

  I picked up the raincoat and jerked her up off the bed and pulled it around her. She stared at me, smiling and wild-eyed, and then the subterranean something that had burned deep within her all evening, like a fire in the earth under a peat bog, died abruptly out and her face was empty and tired and slack.

  “I’m sorry, Gibby,” she said, and her voice was so nearly normal that I blinked at her. Nearly normal, but not quite. The life had gone from it. “I get really sloppy when I drink too much. Red was right to belt me. Look, I don’t want you to take me back. I’ve made enough mess of your life tonight. Just call me a cab and lend me some money, will you? I’ll send it to you when I get home. I can be back in Princeton before my hero even misses me.”

  “You sure?” I said, looking at her intently. She smiled briefly and pulled the belt of the trench coat tight, and raked her long hands through her wild hair.

  “I’m sure. I’d apologize, but it’s too late for that. Besides, you know me. Incorrigible. Oh, Gibby, sweetie, I do love you. I do. Don’t look so worried. I’m okay, truly. I’m going back to Tiger and rout Red out and make him buy me breakfast at the Tavern. I’m going to eat until he doesn’t have a red cent left.”

  Reassured, if only slightly, I walked her out into the silent, wet predawn street and over to Ninth, where I flagged a late-cruising cab. Ninth looked, in the iridescent mist, like a movie set, neon-slicked and ribboned with the opalescent snail’s track of a few just-vanished tires, empty and yellow and black and white. I half expected to see Gene Kelly dancing his way home through the gutters of Chelsea.

  I put all the money I had into Lucy’s hand and closed her fingers over it, and put her into the cab.

  “Penn Station,” I said to the driver. I put my head into the window and kissed Lucy’s cheek, feeling the wetness of the mist and of her still-fresh tears there. She looked, in spite of the liquor and the long night and the dirty raincoat, utterly beautiful, and at her answering wide, world-healing smile I wondered, briefly and wildly, what it might be like, after all, being married to Lucy Bondurant and custodian of that slender, lovely body and all its urgent hungers.

  “Be good,” I said. “Maybe I’ll see you Christmas. Take care of yourself, Luce.”

  She reached up and touched my mouth very lightly with the tips of her fingers.

  “That’s just what I’m going to do, Gibby,” she said.

  That night, just past nine, when the night rates came into effect, my mother called me and told me that Lucy and Red Chastain had left Princeton early that morning and driven straight through to Elkton, Maryland, and had been married there by a justice of the peace.

  A great stillness settled over me then, which might have been emptiness, or might have been peace.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Sarah graduated magna cum laude from Agnes Scott College in June of 1960, and then all the Buckhead Boys and their girls were, to all practical purposes, launched into a wider world. For most of us, that simply meant leaving our nearby Southern college cocoons and moving back into our old rooms in the big houses of Buckhead, or to apartments no more than three miles at most from them, and taking jobs in our fathers’ businesses or in those of their friends, none of which were located more than five miles from the pedimented and porticoed doorways we had grown up behind.

  But close to home as these new establishments were, they were important rites of passage, not to be skipped, and gave all of us a heady sense of having left the nest. The few of us who actually had left, in the literal sense
of the word, like me and Lucy and Red Chastain, were not spoken of so often as mavericks and loners, now that all of us were, in effect, scattered to the winds of fate. The leaving of home was the thing, whether it meant three blocks away or two thousand miles. We turned, in that year, from the sons and daughters of the big houses to young adults with our own venues.

  It was the year that the marriages began, and so those venues of our own tended to be, if not the traditional minuscule brick and cinder-block garden apartments in Colonial Homes and East Wesley Court, or the red-brick tenements behind WSB Broadcasting on its high hill overlooking Peachtree Road, then small, neat Colonial “starter” houses in Collier Hills or the area west of Bobby Jones Golf Course just off Northside Drive. Even in the vastly reduced circumstances that Buckhead’s young marrieds found themselves, it never occurred to any of us to move east of Peachtree Road. On our own, we had precious little money, but everyone knew that we would have, and we had had from birth our territorial imperatives.

  Ben Cameron and Julia Randolph were the first of us to marry, and I went home for the ceremony at All Saints, at four o’clock on the Saturday afternoon Sarah graduated, six hours earlier, from Scott. Despite the blazing hot June sun outside, the old red stone church was dim and cool, and so many white tapers glowed at the altar that the sanctuary looked like the Christmas court of Henry II. There must have been five hundred people there that day, the majority of them unknown to the bride and groom.

  Ben Cameron was fifty years old and just coming into his legendary power in Atlanta, and for the past few years had been chairman of every successful fund-raising effort from the Community Chest to the March of Dimes. He was, that year, vice president of the Chamber of Commerce, to become its president the next, and was already, Sarah said, formulating a formal plan of growth and progress for the city that he felt would literally transform it into one of the country’s great urban centers. He seemed to know literally everyone who might conceivably wield muscle and influence in that pursuit, and they were all in the church that day, to share the marriage pageant of his first born child and only son. Young Ben had had a full complement of friends at North Fulton and Tech, and Julia and her own prominent family were suitably endowed with friends and relatives, but on that day the sanctuary of All Saints fairly teemed with the dark-suited, unassuming, imperial power brokers of a city poised to make its move. Charlie Gentry would reflect later that the feeling that crackled silently in the air of the hushed and radiant church was just what it had seemed to be—electricity.