Peachtree Road

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  “Why did you take me up there?” I said to Ben Cameron.

  He poured brandy into coffee and handed it to me. He looked for a long time into my face, his gray eyes opaque.

  “I thought you ought to see it firsthand,” he said. “Your family owns it.”

  The wave of revulsion and rage that swept me then knocked me, literally, against the backseat of the car.

  “I don’t believe you,” I said through stiff lips, my ears ringing as if someone had fired an elk gun hard by them. “My parents…they couldn’t…they couldn’t possibly know it was like this. They can’t…they wouldn’t…”

  “They can, and they do,” Ben said, and I knew that he was telling me the truth. It was as if I had always known, or rather, that the blood and bone of me had known about Pumphouse Hill, even though my brain had not.

  “Or your father does, anyway,” Ben Cameron went on. “He has for years, because I’ve been after him that long to clean it up, and so have the others. I can only assume Olivia doesn’t know. I don’t believe she would permit it. Shep, I’ve known your father half my life; his backing made my campaign possible, and I owe him in ways you’ll probably never know about. But I swear I’d have him in court over this if it weren’t for Miss Olivia. I grew up playing with her when we visited in Griffin. Our families have been friends for decades. We’ve led our entire adult lives together. So I really haven’t pushed this, and I’ve persuaded…some of the others…not to, either. Now, though, your dad is out of the picture, and you’re here, and it’s a different ball game. It can’t wait any longer. I’d have given you some time, because I know you’re unfamiliar with your father’s business, and everything’s in an uproar, but we’re out of time now. Glenn says there’s really bad feeling down here, and it’s getting worse, and with things shaping up the way they are around the South between the races, this has got to be remedied and remedied quick. It could go up just anytime. I thought the quickest way to get it started was to show you.”

  I said nothing, and then I looked at Glenn Pickens.

  “I really didn’t know,” I said.

  “I didn’t figure you did, Shep,” he said. His face was closed. “But you do now.”

  “I do now,” I said.

  We did not speak on the way home, and we did not have lunch downtown or at the club, and the Lincoln had not stopped completely on the half-moon drive at 2500 Peachtree Road before I was out of it and running up the staircase to my mother’s room. I could hear myself shouting in my own ears, a crazy and faraway sound, as though, two blocks over, a madman raved, close to tears. I must have screamed at her for a long time. When I stopped, my voice was so hoarse that I could hardly whisper.

  My mother looked up from the hand of solitaire she had laid out on her writing desk; she did not speak, but watched me attentively while I shouted and screamed, there in a pool of honeyed afternoon sunlight.

  “It has never been your father’s property,” she said calmly. “It is mine, and always has been. My daddy left it all to me, every bit, and said it would be my…my annuity, and I should just sit and let the money pour in, and never put a penny of my capital into it, and that’s just what I’ve done. Your father would have sunk half our assets into it long ago, but I’ve always remembered what Daddy said, and I would never sign it over to him, or let him pour the money that will soon be yours down that awful rathole. And don’t get haughty with me, my dear son. I don’t have any complaints from my tenants. God knows where they’d find lower rents in the entire city.”

  I had to turn my back on her. I thought of the way she had lived all her life, and what the hopeless misery of those silent, invisible wretches in the cold beds of Pumphouse Hill had bought her, and how little of that misery would ever penetrate these creamy white walls, or her creamy white skin. I thought of what it had bought me. I thought of my gentle, patrician grandfather Redwine, and of the trust he had left me, and of what had financed it. My head swam with shame, my ears rang with it, my veins ran with it.

  Without turning back to her, I said, “You will let me authorize Tom and Marshall Haynes to get started tomorrow cleaning that place up and getting some decent housing in there, or I will be on a plane out of here before nightfall. I mean it, Mother. As much as it takes, for as long as it takes. Or I’m gone, and before God, I’ll never set foot in this house or look at your face again.”

  “Sheppie…”

  “Take your pick, Mother,” I said.

  We fought it savagely back and forth like two wild animals all that afternoon and into the night, but finally she agreed. I knew she would. For once I was glad of the sickly power over her that she herself had invested me with: that of the sovereign man, he alone able to validate her. I used it efficiently and with a ruthlessness born of horror at her and contempt for myself. Before we retired, she to her restored bedroom and I to the summerhouse, she had agreed to let me redeem, as best I could, Pumphouse Hill. I fell into a hollowed-out sleep thinking that I would call Ben Cameron first thing in the morning and tell him. With any luck, it could be livable by summer.

  But it was not a day for luck, or for mercy. In the small hours of that morning, while my mother and I slept our separate sleeps of depletion, an arsonist’s fire howled through Pumphouse Hill, and the fire department, hampered by sixteen-degree temperatures and high winds and inoperable fireplugs, could do little. In the morning some hundred-odd homes were burned to the frozen ground, and eleven people were dead, seven of them children.

  Afterward, I heard, the police came to believe that someone who knew that my family owned the property had set the fire and then alerted the newspapers virtually when the first match was struck, because a reporter was on the telephone to my mother almost before the first fire truck screamed into the inferno, and only minutes later a cadre of reporters and photographers was on the doorstep of 2500. I was wakened by a wild-eyed Shem and stumbled, blinded with sleep and still struggling into my bathrobe, up the path to the house and into the foyer, but it was too late. In this, too, mercy had abdicated us entirely.

  My mother, bone-white and idiot-faced with terror, stood at bay in her own foyer, her satin and lace robe askew and her black hair wild and witchlike on her shoulders. I was just in time to hear her shriek, “It’s not my property! I don’t know anything about it! I’ve never even seen it! It…my son owns it! I deeded it to him years ago! He’s the one who always looked after it! He’s the one, he’s the one you ought to be talking to….”

  Her words, and my photograph, gaping and blank-eyed in the beautiful foyer of the house on Peachtree Road, were on the front page of every newspaper in the state the next morning, and in many out-of-state ones. In the Atlanta Constitution, the headline read: “Fire Destroys Holdings of Buckhead Slum Lord.” And a subhead under it: “Heir to Buckhead fortune called responsible for slum death trap.”

  I did not speak to my mother again while she lived.

  Ben came again that night, late, and brought a bottle of Wild Turkey with him. I was in the library, where I had been since the reporters and photographers had left in the cold red dawn. I had been there all day. No one had come into the room, not even Shem Cater, who had, without my instructing him, left trays of food at intervals on the console outside the door and rapped softly on it and gone away again. I had not eaten any of it. I did not think many people had come to the house; though I could not hear the front-door bell from the library, I could, through some trick of acoustics, hear tires on the front drive. I had heard them only twice. Buckhead encircles its own when death or sorrow strikes, but when disgrace visits, they circle the wagons and the offender is left naked outside on the howling plain. On this day, I was glad of that.

  I had lit the fire that Shem kept laid in the fireplace early that morning, and kept it roaring with wood from the brass chest beside it. But I had not turned on any lights, and when Ben came into the room, he seemed to leap and swell with shadow and firelight. I had not heard his car, and my first thought was that he must have
cut diagonally through the woods that linked the back of Muscogee to Peachtree Road. He wore a thick Scandinavian ski sweater under an old down hunting parka and ancient rubber hunting boots from L. L. Bean. The heavy outdoor clothes made him look much younger, more like the Ben Cameron I had always known. I was not surprised to see him. I had, I realized, been sitting in the dark room like a child at the end of its resources, waiting for Ben to come and tell me what to do now. I had not been able to think or feel since my mother’s voice had died away in the foyer.

  He sat down on the deep sofa across from my chair and opened the Wild Turkey and poured us both a tumblerful. We drank it silently in the firelight, looking at each other.

  “Where is your mother?” he said finally.

  “She went up to her room early this morning and locked the door,” I said. My voice was rusty with disuse. “I don’t think anybody has seen her but Hub Dorsey and Tom Carmichael. They’ve both been here. And Martha takes food up. She’d probably see you if you went up.”

  His hand dismissed my mother.

  “You’ve been in here all day,” he said. “Shem told me. I stopped by the summerhouse, but you weren’t there, and I came on to the back door.”

  “It’s better in here,” I said briefly. I was so endlessly and profoundly tired that it was an effort to frame the words. Tired, and disinclined entirely to tell him that I had felt too vulnerable and unguarded in the summerhouse, too open to intrusion and prying eyes and voices and cameras. The big house, at least, was as tight as the fortress my mother and I had turned it into. And too, I was obscurely reluctant to sully my perfect refuge with the poison of this treachery.

  “Better stay here in the house for a day or two, just to be on the safe side,” Ben said. “I’ve got some unofficial guards posted out front and back to keep the press and the gawkers away, and with any luck at all—which you haven’t exactly been long on lately—all the hooraw will die down in a few days. I’m going to cut through the woods and come in the back door for a spell for the same reason. I don’t want it to get out that there’s any collusion between us. Besides, it’s kind of fun.”

  “Collusion?” I said thickly. I did not understand.

  Ben put his drink down and leaned forward, his forearms resting on his knees and his slender brown hands dangling loosely. He looked into the blue-spitting fire. Then he began to speak. He talked for quite a long time, while the graying log fell in a shower of red sparks and I tossed a new one on, and it too began to dull into ashen gray.

  By the time he was done, he had told me that, in essence, he and the Club were going to let my mother throw me to the wolves. They were all aware of my blamelessness, he said, and were unanimously outraged by her betrayal. I would have the best legal counsel in the South, if matters came to that; several of their own lawyers were at that moment in conference back at the house on Muscogee Avenue, and a direct line to Mr. Woodruff was open and in use. They could with some assurance promise me that though there would likely be an investigation, there would be no grand jury, no more press coverage, and of course, no criminal charges.

  But no one was going to come forward and refute my mother’s charges.

  I knew that they could do what they promised. Physically, I would be safe. I knew, too, that they would do the rest of it. His grim face told me that. There did not seem anything to say, so I said nothing.

  “Do you know why we’re letting you hang, Shep?” he said presently, when I continued to stare out into the star-chipped night and did not respond to him.

  “To save my mother, I guess,” I said dully.

  “No,” he said. “To save us all. You included. All of us out here in Buckhead. To save Buckhead itself, and the way of life that’s all we know. These are dangerous times, and a false step from any one of us now could lose us that way of life in an eye-blink. Just up in smoke. It almost went last night. It’s going to go soon enough anyway, but if we play things just right, we can hold that day off until you—all of you boys, the next wave, so to speak—are ready to take up the reins, and our families are safely provided for. It can’t get out that one of us right here in Buckhead, one of our women especially, sat by and knowingly permitted this awful thing. I can’t let that happen. This goddamned race thing is just too volatile. Better you, an outsider of sorts, someone who just might have had the excuse of not being on the spot. It’s the worst thing I’ll ever do, letting this fiction go on, and it’s probably the worst thing this city will ever deal you. But I’m going to do it. I’m going to have to save my people. I’m going to have to spare my city the consequences of this. I’m not just going to be saying words next week when I put my hand on that Bible.”

  I still did not say anything. He reached over and laid his hand on my hair, and brushed it lightly back from my forehead. I felt warm, weak tears in my throat.

  “In every sense but the biological one, you’ve been my son,” he said. “God, I wanted you for a son-in-law, as good a man as Charlie is. But I’ll take you any way I can get you. Nothing’s going to change between us. Not on my part, anyway; I wouldn’t blame you if it did on yours. There’s something I want you to remember, though, and think about. Your day is still to come, Shep. In twenty years or so, when it’s your time, there’ll be an entirely new and different set of folks in power in Atlanta, new people who’ll never have heard of this fire, and couldn’t care less if they had. You’re not going to lose your…place in the sun, not in the long run. But we are asking you to defer it. I’m asking. We’ll be eternally in your debt; the whole city will, though sadly, they’ll never know it. We’ll try to make this up to you, somehow.

  “But if you feel you just can’t go along with us, if you really think you have to bring your mother into it…well, I’ll have to let the courts and the press have their way. The stakes are just too high.”

  He said nothing more. In a minute or two he got up and padded out of the room on his rubber soles and closed the door softly behind him. He left the Wild Turkey on the table between our chairs.

  It was a measure of Ben Cameron’s power and grace that, sitting in my father’s library in the ruins of my life, I saw his point.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The police never found the Pumphouse Hill arsonist. In truth, I am not sure how hard they looked. Clem Coffee, the first of an entirely new breed of college-educated cop and as alien to Atlanta’s blue ranks as a ballerina in a split T formation, was Ben Cameron’s man, and though he put his men through the correct motions, he did so quietly, and with virtually nothing leaked to the press. Apprehending the arsonist would have opened an enormous can of worms, a squirming feast for the press, and I can imagine that Clem was as relieved as Ben and the Club and, I suppose, my mother when the one slender lead—the anonymous call to the newspaper at 4:50 that morning—remained anonymous.

  There was almost nothing to go on. The reporter who took the call could say only that the voice sounded as if it came through fabric of some kind, and was educated and precise, and gave the location of the fire and suggested that the newspaper contact Sheppard Gibbs Bondurant of Buckhead for further information. Clem Coffee, who came once to the house with Ben to talk with me and look upon me with some small compassion (though he carefully and quite correctly said nothing that was not routine), believed that someone who knew of Pumphouse Hill’s ownership saw Ben and Glenn Pickens and me walking through it that afternoon, or was told about our visit by someone who did, and seized the moment, as it were. I thought that that must surely narrow the field enormously. How many residents of the Southeast could possibly know who held the titles to their purgatories? How many would care?

  “You’d be surprised,” Ben said, and Clem laughed sourly. “There’s an information network down there that would put USIA to shame,” he said. “I’d be surprised if it wasn’t common knowledge that the property was…not yours.”

  “Then why won’t somebody come forward?” I said.

  “Shit, Shep, they don’t care who hangs, as long as
one of us does,” Clem said. “But there’s not a lot anybody can do if the arsonist can’t be found, and you can bet your ass nobody down there is going to blow the whistle on a brother. They won’t even talk to my boys.”

  “Not even for murder? That’s what it was,” I said.

  “Especially not for murder. Better that you carry that load, whether or not you deserve it. Whoever set it was pretty sure there wouldn’t be any reprisals to you or your family or to anybody in the Southeast; at least that’s my theory. It’s not one I’m making public, needless to say. Besides, it worked, didn’t it? Pumphouse Hill is being cleaned up.”

  It was, tentatively and excruciatingly slowly. My mother had conveyed to me through Tom Carmichael her belated eagerness to divert some family money toward the rehabilitation of the existing property there, and I had authorized him to hire a general contractor and get started. Ben was looking for some loan money, to see what could be done about rebuilding the burned blocks. He thought there might be some federal assistance available. As Ben had predicted, in the absence of a suspect and no criminal investigation, the uproar over Pumphouse Hill soon died away in that first month of the new year.

  It was of no particular comfort to me to find that the world did indeed go on, but, of course, it did. Ben Cameron was inaugurated on January 2, looking like a slender, steel-crowned king in the winter sunlight as he stood on the steps of City Hall afterward, Dorothy and Sarah and Charlie and Ben and Julia, holding tiny Ben Cameron III in her arms, around him. An indefinable something, the sense of gears moving forward and a great, interior motor purring softly into life, permeated the hard crystal air of 1962. Ben immediately rammed through legislation to wipe out all restrictions on duties of black policemen; it was his first act as mayor, and prophetic of the tenor of his entire administration. A new $50 million municipal auditorium was announced, and an urban residential development for blacks opened in Thomasville, down in the Southeast. In Washington, John Kennedy was at the apogee of his trajectory, and Jacqueline Kennedy had quite simply conquered the world. Late in February, Colonel John Glenn rode a ridiculous, flame-farting little comet around the earth and Camelot moved into the heavens. And in the Peachtree Road house, my mother came out of her self-imposed exile and took up again, with scarcely a ripple, the silken tapestry of her life.