Peachtree Road

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  “Gibby,” Lucy said into my silence, “please come home. They’ll be gone for a couple of weeks at least. You won’t run into them. And I need to see you. I need to try and make some of this up to you. I think I can, if you’ll let me. But I can’t stand being…alienated from you like this. I want to go on with my life and try to make something out of it—by myself, I mean—and I don’t think I can do that until I know you’ve forgiven me. I have to know that.”

  “I do, Luce,” I said, and meant it. “I don’t have to come home to do that. I do—not that there’s anything to forgive you for, really. Why don’t you come see me instead? If you’re short, I can send you a plane ticket—”

  “Gibby…” She took a very deep breath. “I want you to come home because I’ve written a book and Scribners is publishing it and it comes out next week, and there are some parties and things here for me, and I want you to come and take me to them. I don’t want to go by myself, Gibby, and I don’t think Mama and Lady much want to go with me.”

  “Lucy!” I shouted over the phone, as if she could hear me only that way. “That’s…Goddamn! That’s wonderful! That’s…Why didn’t you say something? When did you do that?”

  “I wrote it way last summer and fall, after Red went on that eight-month tour. Remember? I called you up and whined for you to come out and keep me company, and you said to write a book or plant a tree or something? Well, I did—I wrote a book. And when it was finished I called Professor Dunne at Scott and she knew an agent in New York, and I sent it to him and he sent it around, and Scribners took it—and here it is. I didn’t say anything about it because I didn’t think you wanted to hear about that or anything else from me—and you didn’t, right then—and it seemed so far away, anyway…but, oh God, Gibby, it got closer and closer to publication day, and Rich’s is going to give me this autograph party, and Mr. and Mrs. Cameron want to give me this little cocktail party at the Driving Club, and even Mama thought she might manage a little tea with your mother, here at the house…and I just realized that I didn’t think I could get through any of it without you. So I went and talked to Mrs. Cameron about it, and she said—she called you, didn’t she?—she said she’d try and get you to come home, and so I thought maybe if I called you after she had…”

  “When are these parties?” I said, my heart pounding with pride in her.

  “Next weekend. Next Saturday and Sunday.”

  “I’ll be in Friday night. Can you meet me at the airport?”

  “Oh, Gibby, of course I can! Oh, bless you! I’ll pick you up at your gate; I’ve got a little car of my own now, a Volkswagen. I got the loan myself, and Mr. Cameron cosigned it, it’s blue—oh, shit, Gibby, I’ve missed you so! And I’m so scared!”

  “What are you scared of? Don’t be scared. You’ve got the world by the tail now,” I said. “Nothing ahead but roses and clover.”

  “Because,” she said, “I’m just so happy. And I don’t know how to handle that. And nobody ever gave me a party of my own before.”

  And she was right. Nobody ever had.

  I sat up all that night, noodling around on my clarinet and playing and replaying my Brubeck records, softly so the menopausal Puerto Rican widow upstairs would not call the police again, and I thought about the two of them: Sarah and Lucy. Lucy and Sarah. Or, rather, I did not so much think as let the lifelong tapes of the two of them stored in my memory run. I did not want, on that evening, to think. Through the long darkness two women shimmered and played behind my eyes, both of them vivid, both of them ardent, both of them beautiful, both of them in some way mine and then not mine. Neither easily definable, neither easily given over. Both of them in essential ways shapers of lives—mine and others—yet so different one from the other that it seemed incongruous that they could be the major bones in the armature of a single life. But they were. My life without them was unimaginable. And yet from this night forth I would be required to try to lead it without at least one of them.

  Lucy and Sarah, Sarah and Lucy. It seemed to me, in that still predawn hushed even stiller by the beginning of a silent, soft autumn rain, that they were like the figures on a Swiss clock, moving in and out and back and forth in my life in a formal, stylized dance, the one now advancing while the other retreated, and then changing to slow, measured order and beginning again. I could imagine nothing, should the clock stop, but emptiness. So I ceased the imagining and let the tapes run again. Lucy and Sarah, Sarah and Lucy…

  Toward daylight I slid finally and irrevocably toward sleep, and the thought that the music and the tapes in my mind had kept at bay through the dark hours surfaced and struck, and I finally let the desolation of it take me down: Tonight was the wedding night of Sarah Cameron Gentry, but it was not mine.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The next Friday night I slept, for the first time in my life, in the big back bedroom that was the guest room of the house on Peachtree Road.

  It was a strange night, and largely sleepless; full of sounds and shadows and shiftings that I had heard all my life, but alien to me now because I heard and saw them from a different angle. When I did sleep, it was lightly and poised on the surface of unconsciousness, as a soldier will sleep in a battle zone where ambush is possible.

  I was acutely conscious of, could almost feel on my skin, the presence of my aunt Willa in the other back bedroom across the hall, and even more so of the bodies of my mother and father, which presumably lay side by side in the great front bedroom where they had, to the best of my knowledge, slept since before my birth. I lay very still in unaccustomed new pajamas under the thin white linen sheets, listening despite the ridiculousness of it for the joyless noise of their unimaginable coupling, as I had lain listening in the hated small dressing room in my infancy and early childhood. Lucy, who had put an end to that torture, did not sleep tonight under this roof, but in the summerhouse which had for so long been mine. I did not precisely begrudge it to her, but I missed the refuge of it keenly. This cold white bed in this austere dark room did not beget ease.

  We had sat late in the summerhouse, she and I, after the sorry little ritual of homecoming between me and my parents and Aunt Willa had been played out. My mother, looking glossier and more sinuous and whiter of skin than ever, had clung to me and fussed and patted and chirred, and Aunt Willa, every spectacular inch the Atlanta society matron now, smiled and smoked quietly in the warm darkness of the side porch where we gathered, looking, looking. My father, somehow redder and more furious of face even as he bared his yellowing teeth in what passed between us for greeting, had a couple of quick bourbons and nodded and grinned ferally and said yes, the Rolls-Royce in the driveway was new; I’d have to take it for a little spin sometime while I was home. I grinned back, feeling my mouth stretch with it, and said I’d sure like to do that, knowing that I would not, and that he would not offer again.

  Soon after that he took the bourbon decanter and went back inside to the library, saying that he had a good bit of paper work to get cleaned up if the ladies planned on having a tea party that weekend, and I did not see him again until just before I left for New York on Sunday night. He was not at Lucy’s autograph party at Rich’s the next day, or at the cocktail party Ben and Dorothy gave for her at the Driving Club; my mother told me that he had an out-of-town business appointment, but I do not remember where she said it was, and in any case I did not believe her. I did not know where he went, but I knew why. Lucy and I escaped to the summerhouse as soon as we decently could, with relief that was probably as obvious as it was profound.

  “I hope you don’t mind,” she said, snapping on a single lamp beside the deep, sagging old blue sofa and sinking into its cushions. “I moved out here a week or two after I got home, in June. Nobody seemed to know what to say to me, and I could tell that the cast and the bruises bothered everybody, and it just seemed easier all the way around. Martha brought me trays and I slept, mostly, and after I felt better I got the job, and then it was better to be out here because I didn’t wake a
nybody leaving or coming home. I work pretty late sometimes. And then, I didn’t think you were coming back; but if you mind, I’ll move my things out of here in a second. I didn’t change anything at all….”

  She had not. The summerhouse looked almost exactly as it had the day I had left it to enter Princeton. My books and records were in the same untidy rows I had left, and even the Georgia Tech and University of Georgia pennants on the walls were undisturbed. A hanging whatnot that my mother had put up still held my 880 trophies and a lone, blackened junior tennis trophy from the club, and a small glass case of perfect minié balls that Charlie had given me one long-ago Christmas still sat, thick-felted with dust, on my old desk. Only the desk showed evidence of Lucy; it was piled with books and notebooks and yellow legal pads, and a battered old Smith-Corona portable sat squarely in its middle, neatly covered. I’d have known that Lucy Bondurant lived in these rooms, though, if I had been led into them blindfolded. Over everything, over the drying musk of grass and the yellowing September woods out back, and the breath of the dank-scummed lily pool just beyond the veranda, and the cool-sour stucco smell of the summerhouse itself, rode the silky-teasing scent of her Tabu.

  “I don’t mind,” I said. “I like to see you out here with your typewriter and your brand-new life; I’ll like thinking of you here when I’m back in New York. It’s a good hideout for an author. And I think it must suit you. You look wonderful.”

  She did. Lucy had always looked wonderful, of course, but there was something totally new about her this weekend; Dorothy Cameron had been right. I had noticed it the moment I stepped off the plane, and the sense of it had grown with each passing hour that we spent together. There wasn’t any physical difference; I had looked for that when I hugged her and held her away from me and studied her, because the sense of otherness had smitten me so powerfully the moment I saw her tall figure in the crowd around the airline gate. Her black-satin hair still fell in its blue-sheened pageboy against her slanted white cheekbones, and her rose and cream color was the same, if a bit heightened with excitement. She wore no lipstick and no makeup on her light-drowned eyes, and that was, for Lucy, unusual, but I had seen her without makeup many times before. And if she had been slender before, she was downright thin now, a thinness of sinew and taut-stretched flesh that vein and bone, here and there, gleamed through. But on Lucy, thinness still meant only whippet elegance, and a refining of her extraordinary grace.

  No, the difference was born inside her, and it shone out of her blue eyes and in the soft curve of her mouth like mist from morning water. I thought of the trick we used to do with a flashlight when we were small; we would hold it, lit, in our mouths or shine it behind our hands, and were in those moments illumined from the inside out, glowing creatures of light and bone. If Lucy had done the same with a pure white candle, the effect would have been what I saw now. There was a word that fit her but I could not think of it.

  We stopped at Rusty’s on the way to the Peachtree Road house, “to shore you up before the onslaught,” she said. “Once the weekend gets into gear, we won’t have any time together at all. Après moi le déluge. I hope you aren’t going to hate all this folderol about the book.”

  “Are you kidding?” I said. “I couldn’t be any prouder of you if you’d won the Nobel Prize for literature. I’ll happily go through this with every book you write. Are you working on another one? And when are you going to tell me about this one?”

  “Oh…later. Soon. Tonight, maybe,” she said.

  She finished her Coke and made a rude childhood noise against the bottom of the glass with the straw. I was drinking beer, and had asked if she wanted one, too, but she had shaken her head and asked for Coke instead.

  “No more booze,” she said. “I’m strictly a Cokaholic now.”

  “Well, good,” I said. “I was getting a little worried about you there for a while, to tell you the truth.”

  “With good reason,” she said. “I’m not the nicest person in the world when I drink. Or when I don’t, for that matter. Listen, Gibby,” and she turned to me quickly, so that the bell of hair swung against her cheek. “I want to say this before you shush me. I’ll be sorry until the day I die for what I did to you and Sarah. You should be up there at Tate with her, not Charlie Gentry, and you would be if it hadn’t been for me, and I know that. No”—for I had started to protest—”let me finish. I can’t undo that, but I can keep from making anybody else unhappy ever again with my selfishness and my neuroses, and I’m going to. My heart will hurt me every time I see Sarah Gentry or you again as long as I live, and if it helps at all, I want you to know that I’ve changed. I really have. That may be small comfort, but it’s all I can give you. That and just to love you always and wish you everything that’s good in the world for the rest of your life.”

  It was an extraordinary speech by any standards, and for Lucy it was astounding. I literally did not know what to say, so I said, for a moment, nothing at all. And then: “I liked the old model pretty well. I hope she’s not in mothballs for good.”

  Her glorious, throaty laugh rang out, and relief flooded me. Somewhere under this—the word I wanted danced maddeningly just out of reach—this paragon my old adored and enthralling Lucy lay. It was enough, for now, and I switched on the radio of her little VW bug, and leaned my head back against the seat and inhaled deeply, eyes closed. The smell of the dusty honeysuckle foliage that fell over Rusty’s parking lot fence swam into the car on the sharp-cutting strains of “Moonglow,” and the ash from Lucy’s cigarette reddened in the darkness as she dragged deeply on it, and sudden young laughter spilled from the open window of the car next to us, and just for that moment it was 1953 again, and the summer moon shone on us, and I was truly home. It was not until hours later, when we sat in the semidarkness of the summerhouse and Lucy, her face carved pure and cleanly in lamplight and shadow like a young Joan of Orléans, spoke of moving out here to avoid giving bother to the household, that the word I had wanted at the airport flashed into my mind: saintly.

  “There’s another reason I’m out here, too,” she said as if reading my thoughts.

  “And that is?” I said.

  “Mother and your folks don’t want me in the house. In fact, they want me to move all the way out of it and get a place of my own. They’ve given me a month to look around, and I thought it would be better to lie low while I did, so I wouldn’t keep everybody upset. They’re really pretty angry with me. I can’t say that I blame them.”

  Here we go, I thought. There is trouble, then; I should have known. Why else would she want me to come home? But I can see why she pulled the wool over Dorothy’s and Sarah’s eyes. This new-Lucy business is so good it’s eerie….

  I felt deeply, endlessly tired. Worse, I felt near-sick with disappointment.

  Aloud I said, “Let’s have it, Luce.”

  She looked at me quickly, and I could swear that the bewilderment in her eyes was genuine. And then she laughed again, the healing, full Lucy-laugh.

  “Oh, poor Gibby! No, it’s nothing you have to do anything about. It’s nothing you could do anything about even if I wanted you to. Only I can, and I have.”

  “Then what?”

  She did not answer at once. It was as hot as a mid-summer night in the room, and she twisted her heavy hair up off her neck and held it atop her head. Her plain white oxford shirt fell away from her thin neck, and I could see clearly the notch where Red Chastain’s gun butt had smashed her fragile collarbone, and the little white tracks in her hairline from the stitches in the scalp laceration his bullet had made. Sweat pearled her neck and upper lip. I wanted to cry, suddenly, she looked so punished and vulnerable and young. The armor her insouciance had given her was gone.

  Then she said, “It’s my job. They really hate what I’m doing, and they think I took it to spite them, like I…guess I did those editorials I wrote at Scott, and the marches and sitins and things I went on. You know. I don’t blame them for thinking that; why shouldn’t they?
But I can’t give it up, Gibby. I love it with every little shred and scrap of me. I don’t think I ever really knew what it was to love work, or to love people in the way I love these—”

  “For God’s sake,” I said, “what are you doing? Nursing lepers? Hooking? What?”

  “I’m working with the civil rights movement,” she said, her face literally aflame with a kind of joy. “I’m working downtown at a place called Damascus House, in an old church in the black section down below the capital. Right next to Capitol Homes, you know; where we used to go to get the laundry from Princess? It’s an innercity mission, really, run by Father Claiborne Cantrell. I know you’ve heard of him, or read about him—he’s been in Time and Newsweek both. I guess he’s pretty radical for a Southern Episcopalian. Anyway, he had to give up his ministry at Saint Martin’s after he’d gotten arrested for the fourth time sitting in, so he just went down to Capitol Homes and found this old empty church and outbuildings and set up Damascus House, and it’s been the model for literally dozens of inner-city missions all over the South. I met Clay—Father Cantrell—at a rally in early July, and was just spellbound by him like everybody is, and literally begged him with tears running down my face to let me come and work for him, and he finally did…. Oh, God, I just never knew until now, but this is my real niche, the thing I was meant to do with my life!”

  I had to smile, even as the import of her incandescence and the new, uncritical affection for the human race dawned. Lucy and the Negroes again. No wonder her mother and my parents were furious. An amusing little feature about the Defiant Deb taking up the cause of equality in the Atlanta Constitution was one thing; Time and Newsweek were quite another. When would they learn that trying to separate Lucy from her beloved Negroes was as futile as parting the moon from its tides?

  But the implications of her passion were, to me, ominous.