Peachtree Road

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  When I still said nothing, my mother took my arm and drew me into the room and over to one of the sofas, where she more or less pushed me down, to sit on a stiff fur pillow. Even as my head whirled and my eyes spun wildly around the room, my fingertips registered the fact that the fur was not real. I looked from my mother’s white, magenta-cheeked face, its crimson lips smiling, smiling, to the leopard’s head at my feet, and saw that it was not real, either. Neither, on closer examination, were the heads on the wall over the sofas. I was grateful for that. I did not know about the fur throw and the plants and the macaw. The javelin and spears looked real enough to gut you if you put them to the test. In the middle of all of it, my smiling, thrumming mother looked as crazily, plastically beautiful as a comic-strip drawing of Sheena, Queen of the Jungle.

  “Say something,” she ordered me, standing hip shot in her blood-red velvet, a jungle priestess about to order me staked out for the soldier ants.

  “Holy shit,” I breathed, entirely spontaneously. “Are you going to bring Dad home and put him in the middle of all this?”

  “Don’t be silly,” she said impatiently, flinging herself down on the sofa opposite me and taking a cigarette from a painted clay bowl I had never seen before. I felt simple gratitude that it was not a skull. “This is for you.”

  “Me?” It must have been an outright squeal, because she laughed and reached over and patted my knee, leaving her hand there.

  “You. You’re the man of this house now, and you need a man’s room. Time to get you out of that silly summerhouse and up here, in the big house and the big bedroom, where you belong. The little man from Rich’s—Ronnie, and he is good, darling, even if he’s terribly light on the rug—says that the safari look is just everywhere nowadays, what with the good new fur synthetics and all the inexpensive brass and copper imports, and everything. He says practically every important house in the East has at least one safari room. All this is just for effect, of course; these are samples for you to pick from, and you can…tone it down a little, if you like. Or you can even go a totally different way. The nautical look is good, too, he thinks, because of Jack Kennedy, you know, but we thought this was best for the scale of the room, and I knew you’d always liked adventure stories, and animals, and that book about the jungle that Kipling wrote. I told him about that—he wanted to know what you were like, of course, and when he heard it, he said this would be just the thing. It’s not my cup of tea, of course, but I have to admit it’s really very clever. Look, the drapery on the bed is supposed to simulate mosquito netting, and the drums are quite authentic, though I forget where he said they came from. I will say that the parrot may be a bit much….”

  She ran down then, and cocked her head to one side, and peered into my face. Her smile, as she waited for my reaction, was the full, creamy half-moon of a woman very sure that she has done a good thing.

  “Do you like your Christmas present, darling?” she said.

  “Mother,” I said, and my voice cracked in my throat like an adolescent’s. “Where are you going to sleep?”

  “Oh, sweetie, don’t worry about me,” she said merrily. “I’ll be in with Daddy a lot of the time. And I thought I’d just have a little nest made in the sleeping porch there, just a bed and a built-in closet and my dressing table. I don’t need much room. Ronnie says we can easily cut a separate entrance in from the hall, so I don’t have to go through your room to get to it. You can keep the little dressing room for your things. Isn’t it all fun, Sheppie?”

  I looked at her, there in her red and her power, in this terrible room where the frustrated little decorator from Rich’s had exorcised all his angry, skewed eroticism. Who was she? Medea, Gertrude, Jocasta? I did not know her. Whoever she was, she would, if I moved into this room, truly have it all: money, power, the fallen husband down the hall, the son in her bedroom again. I felt physical nausea, and swallowed hard against it. I rose from the couch on rubbery legs and walked toward the door. Behind me I heard the swish of her legs in their sheer nylon as she jumped up from the other sofa, and the soft pattering of her heels as she followed me.

  “Sheppie,” she said. “Sheppie…”

  I turned. She was standing by the bed.

  “I don’t care who you put in this room,” I said. “You can put H. Rider Haggard and Frank Buck and Mr. Ronnie from Rich’s in here all at once, if you want to. I wouldn’t sleep one night in it if it was the last room in the continental United States. Not like this, and not in a goddamned nautical decor, for Christ’s sake, and not—I repeat not—with you in the little room right under my elbow. Not any way at all. Mother, I’m not going to stay in Atlanta, get used to that idea now; I only came home to see about Dad and get things squared away for you—”

  “NOO-O-O-O-O!” It was a long, terrible wail; I thought of wakes and deaths and banshees. She sagged down onto the bed, and sat there, half-sunk in fur, her hands clenched in her lap, her little feet in gold shoes neatly together, her mouth squared off in a child’s rictus of grief and outrage.

  “You can’t leave me!” she howled. Tears spurted from her closed eyes and tracked mascara down her white face. “You can’t leave me now! Not after him, not after that—I won’t have anything, if you leave me! I won’t have anything, then….”

  I looked at her in silence. On the huge bed she looked very small, no larger than a child, a prim, good and very simple child, bewildered and foundering in a grief she could not comprehend. And I knew that at this moment she was not Jocasta, but only little Olivia Redwine from Griffin, Georgia, invalidated in her soul, like her foremothers and sisters and heirs, without a man. Even with everything around her—the money, the position in the city, the great house and its furnishings, the clothes and cars and clubs and charities and balls and luncheons—even with all this, she was nothing without a man of her own, be he husband or son, paralyzed, emasculated, dead. Everything in her life told her this. She believed it in her shrinking soul. And I knew she was right. I thought of Lucy, and of Little Lady, sold into marriage with Carter Rawson, and of my flayed and driven Aunt Willa, and of the fingernails of Sarah Cameron, innocent now of paint. I suddenly hated the South, hated it fully and redly, this beautiful land of woman-killers, this country of soul-breakers. I would not stay here. I would not.

  But I would not press that matter until after Christmas. I could not do that to the sobbing child-woman in the terrible fur bed. Let her think that I would stay; if need be, I would sneak away in a near-distant cold red dawn, as I had thought I might. I had, by now, no compunctions at all about that, or about lying to my mother.

  I went to her and sat down beside her, and put my arms around her.

  “Hush,” I said, “Hush, now. I didn’t mean it. If you really need me, of course I’ll stay. I just…it’s just that I can’t stay here in this room. This is your room. This is Dad’s room. The summerhouse is my place; I love it out there. I always have. If you want me to stay, you’re going to have to let me have my way about that.”

  She gave in without a whimper. I think that the threatened loss of me wiped out any disappointment she might have felt at my reception of Mr. Ronnie’s handiwork. The ghastly bedroom was not mentioned again; I do not know when, in the span of days that followed, Mr. Ronnie of Rich’s and his minions came and took away the unwanted artifacts of the heart of darkness. I held my mother until she stopped her sobbing and nodded in my arms, and I pressed her back gently on the fur pillows and drew Mr. Ronnie’s impossible fur throw up over her, and turned off the lamps, and escaped through the icy-breathed night to the summerhouse. The day seemed, by now, forty-eight hours old.

  I was just slipping into sleep myself when I turned over and saw, on the bedside table, a copy of Lucy’s book. I had one in New York, but I had not read it; had meant to start it in the new year at Haddonfield. She had not pressed me for comment. Indeed, oddly, she had scarcely mentioned her novel the entire time I had been home for its publication, and had not talked of it since, either in her letter
s or her phone calls to me. These latter had been full of Jack and the movement and the day-to-day routine at Damascus House, of her adventures in the bus and the government agencies and the soup kitchen and, less frequently, at La Carrousel; but of this book and any others she might one day write, Lucy said nothing. I wondered who had put it here, beside the bed. Not, I was sure, my mother. I reached out and picked up the little volume. It was the story of a small white girl raised by a black family in New Orleans during the Depression, I knew, and its title was Darkness and Old Trees. I smiled. Lucy had always loved Frost.

  I propped myself up on one elbow, shivering in the cold, switched on the bedside lamp and opened the book. On the dedication page, I read, “To my father, James Clay Bondurant. We be of one blood, thou and I.” And on the title page, in Lucy’s slanting backhand, “Dear, darling Gibby: Mark my Trail!”

  I laid the book back down on the table and turned the light off again, and rolled over, and scrubbed my face into the crook of my arm, and wept—for the diminished and doomed woman in the mountebank’s bed in the big house, and for the unwritten and unmourned books of Lucy Venable, and for the clean fingernails of Sarah Cameron Gentry.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  In Buckhead, when a titan falls, the rest of his kind draw close around, to shield the fallen one from predatory, alien eyes and claws and to succor the stricken family. Or at least that was so in the Buckhead of my father’s time. Nowadays a felled member of the Old Guard would probably be lucky if three people of public consequence know his name. Today’s power brokers are several generations newer and often many shades darker than those of that whirlwind decade, and they tend to meet, lunch and network at places like Morton’s, Mary Mac’s and the Peasant Restaurant chain. Old Atlanta still does not lunch at these spots. Hardly anyone cares that they do not, except, perhaps, a few of them.

  And so it was that beginning the next morning, on Christmas Eve, the house on Peachtree Road was filled with the familiar faces and voices that had been the foundation of my entire childhood. From about eleven o’clock on they came, the men and women who had been my parents’ contemporaries and the fathers and mothers of the Pinks and the Jells, and, in smaller numbers, the Pinks and the Jells themselves.

  All morning and afternoon Shem Cater answered the door and took hats and topcoats and parked and brought around cars, smiling decorously and wearing a white jacket I had never seen, and Martha, in the kitchen, kept coffee and cookies and little sandwiches and cheese straws coming, and at about four that afternoon, set out the sherry and bourbon and gin decanters on the tea cart in the living room. I don’t know where the food came from, or when they prepared it; I could only think that the black people of Buckhead had as keen a sense of ritual and propriety in these cases as did the white, and probably keener. I know it had not once occurred to me to see to the basting of hams and the stocking of the liquor cabinet, and I did not think that my mother, embroiled as she had been with Ronnie of Rich’s in transforming her bedroom into an African veldt, had done so. My father’s wake—for I thought of it as such, even though he clung on and on to his blipping and blasted life in Piedmont Hospital—was entirely, and most properly, the province of Shem and Martha Cater.

  My mother spent the day at the hospital, so I hovered uncomfortably in the living room in a coat and tie and received the stream of visitors. Across Peachtree Road in Garden Hills, they would have come bearing cakes and casseroles; on this side, they brought armfuls of forced blooms from greenhouses or great, showy, foilruffed poinsettias, and cards to be laid on the silver tray in the hall rotunda. From somewhere a chaste leather book for addresses had been produced, and sat on the table next to the card tray, and everyone signed their name as matter-of-factly as if it had been a funeral at Patterson’s. I suppose the Buckhead equivalent of the jungle drums had done their work, and all his contemporaries knew that when Sheppard Bondurant had collapsed on the golf course at Brookhaven, he had entered his own covenant with death, even if the fact of it had not yet occurred. Hub Dorsey was one of them. His prognosis would be known. It was, indeed, a death they came to mark.

  I kissed the cold, sweet-smelling cheeks of the women, and shook the gray-gloved hands of the men, and looked at all of them with eyes sensitized by fatigue and circumstance. The women seemed to me much the same, pretty and warm and elegant in their furs, smiling and moving easily in this house that they knew, as they did all the other great houses of Buckhead, nearly as well as their own. None of them called me Sheppie, but the nickname was implicit in their hugs and soft “Sweetie, I am so sorry”s. There was not one of them who had not known me from infancy.

  But the men were different. I could see and feel it vividly, I suppose because I had not seen many of them in literally years, and my eyes were fresh. These twenty or thirty men, the young fathers I remembered from Little League and high school football games and country club locker rooms and backyard swimming pools and gardens and verandas; these indulgent and paternal men who smiled knowingly when their wives fussed over their sons’ late hours and slipping grades and general hell-raising—they had come into their power, and banded together, and were poised to make their move, and something looked out of their eyes that I had never seen. They were the Club now, and they knew it, and soon the city and the Southeast would know it, and the young princelings who were their sons finally knew it, and knew, consequently, where their own power would one day lie.

  All this I could sense as clearly as an animal senses the nearness of water in a dry month, though I could not have articulated it. I could read it in their faces and bearings, and in the manner of their sons, my friends, the Buckhead Boys. I felt as alien from it all, as conspicuously alone and profoundly different, as if I were another species entirely. Something altogether new and heady seemed to crackle in the firelit room, and seep outside into the cold air of the dying year, to reach out and pervade all Atlanta. Ben Cameron, coming in at midafternoon with young Ben behind him, was the newly elected mayor of the city and would take office in the new year, and underneath the grace and courtliness and seeming indolence which had always been his hallmark, I seemed to see and hear and taste the force that would resculpt the city’s skyline and rewrite its future. He was, in that room, fulcrum and focus and funnel of the concentrated power of a generation. When he took my hand I half expected to see sparks fly between our flesh, and feel the bite of him.

  Ben did not stay long. He greeted the small crowd in the living room, exchanged Merry Christmases, ducked into the kitchen to speak to Shem and Martha, as he always did, clapped me perfunctorily on the shoulder again and said, “Anything we can do, Shep, of course. Don’t be a stranger.”

  I knew that he meant the former. I was not sure about the latter. Ben and I had not spoken at any length since that night the previous June at the Plaza, just before Sarah came home from Paris. I knew that he was furious at me, but he had not betrayed that anger to me in the few brief meetings we had had since, and I wondered if it had abated. On the whole, I thought perhaps it had. Dorothy was as warm as she had ever been, though she did not discuss Sarah and Charlie, and Sarah herself seemed settled into her role as young Buckhead wife and volunteer worker. With his election and the revolutionary plans he and his set had for the city, I thought that Ben Cameron surely had more on his mind than the bumblings of Shep Bondurant. All the same, I caught his eyes on me several times during his visit, and they were as measuring and speculative as if I were a newcomer to the group. I felt obscurely uncomfortable under that sharp gray gaze, like a child or a dog who knows something is expected of it, but not what.

  “Come by the house when you have a leg up on things,” he said as he shrugged into his camel hair coat and took his felt hat from Shem. “We need to have a real talk.”

  “I’ll do that,” I said, knowing that I probably would not. I could not imagine what we might have, now, to talk about, except Sarah, and I did not think either of us wanted to venture into that closed country. I would go and see Doroth
y Cameron, but I would do it during a morning or afternoon when Ben was at work. The week after Christmas, before I left for Haddonfield, would be fine for that. Somehow it was important to me that Dorothy know why I was not staying in Atlanta.

  Young Ben lingered behind his father, and stayed in the living room drinking bourbon by the fire until the last visitors had gone home to their Christmas Eve dinners. When I came into the room after seeing the last caller off, he was standing at the drinks tray mixing another, and he lifted it in salute and dipped his narrow head, the dark red hair, cut longer than was in fashion, slipping down over his gray eyes. He retreated to one of the apricot sofas and sank into it and stretched his long legs out before him, crossed at the ankles. He wore a pale blue cashmere sweater over an open-necked white oxford cloth shirt, and gray slacks precisely tailored to his long legs and slender hips, and his narrow dancer’s feet were shod in rich, buffed loafers. Except for the web of thin lines around his eyes and the incipient creepiness on the backs of his hands and his neck, he literally did not look a day older than he had in high school. I knew he had accomplished much, however; he was becoming known for the soaring, gull-winged single-family houses he was building in the wild hills and river bluffs of the city’s northwest suburbs, and was, my mother had told me, the chic young architect of the moment among the new money that was pouring into town.