Peachtree Road

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  “It is,” Ben Cameron said. “See about another seat on the five-fifty-five Delta flight to New York while you’re at it, too.”

  To me he said, “You’re calling in an awful lot of chips at one time, Shep.”

  “I know,” I said. “There isn’t any way I can thank you.”

  “Yes there is, but that can come later,” he said, and went back to the telephone. I went out to the curb, where Shem Cater was idling the Rolls, and he drove me home to change. On the way, I heard Ben’s voice, deep and quiet and measured, begin an official statement over the radio: “Atlanta has suffered her greatest tragedy and loss. Our deepest sympathy is extended…”

  “Turn it off, Shem,” I said, and he did. We rode on home in silence.

  An hour later, as I walked into the big house with a small bag, dressed for my flight and dreading with all my cold, still heart going up to tell my father, Aunt Willa came tapping down to meet me, still in the white linen suit she had worn to church. Her face was colorless and blank, and her eyes looked somehow bleached, giving her the unfocused, witless look of a trapped rabbit. Her hands shook slightly, and she kept wetting her red lips with her tongue. I stared at her. What I read on her exquisitely enameled face was not grief, but fear, pure and simple. I could have imagined several reactions from my aunt Willa in the face of losing by violence her sister-in-law and captor, but fear was not one of them.

  “Is my father awake?” I said.

  “He’s just stirring. I came down to see if you wanted me to tell him. I know it isn’t my place, but he sometimes seems to accept things from me that he won’t from the nurse, and I know how terrible this is for you….” Her voice actually cracked, high and crystalline, with the weight of the fear.

  All at once I knew what she was afraid of, and a powerful surge of sympathy stirred me. It was gone quickly, but in its aftermath I felt closer to Willa Slagle Bondurant than I ever had, or ever would again. As awful as her servitude to my mother had been, and as odious her position of sufferance in this house must have felt to her, there was still a sort of warped symbiosis between them, a twisted but unbreakable bond which held her secure even as it bound her fast. Now that her smiling jailer was dead, that tie was gone, and I, the presumed successor, had no reason at all to honor or even tolerate her presence here. Both her dependent daughters were in the care of husbands, and she herself, as she well knew, was, in her tricked-up little attic suite, only one step away from the actual street. I knew, in that instant, so completely how she felt that my own mouth went dry. My own tenure here had often felt precisely that fragile.

  I set down my bag and put my arm around her shoulders and sat her down on the bottom stair in the foyer.

  “I’d be very grateful if you’d tell him,” I said. “He’s been more your responsibility than anybody’s since we brought him home, and nobody has a better right than you. It’s just something I don’t think I can do. I’ll see about him when I get back, but for the time being, I wish you’d take charge of him.”

  She simply looked at me, her huge eyes filling, incredibly, with tears. She did not speak.

  “And, Aunt Willa, for God’s sake, get your things out of that damned attic and move them down to Mother’s room,” I said. “There’s no sense in it just sitting there empty, and I’m not about to move from where I am. I want to see you settled in there when I get back, okay?”

  She only nodded, tears tracking mascara down her satiny cheeks, the red mouth trembling. She leaned forward and gave me a little hug, and I heard her whisper, “Thank you, Shep.” As I closed the great white door behind me and got into the Rolls, I reached up and touched the wetness her tears had left on my face.

  I never saw her cry again.

  When I got to the Delta gate that afternoon, Lucy Venable was waiting for me. She sat with a small suitcase beside her, feet firmly together, hands folded in her lap like a good child waiting for her train back to school. Her head was bowed and I could see that her eyes and nose were red, but her face was calm and still, and she showed no signs of the hysteria against which Jack had sedated her that morning. She looked surprisingly well, even rather wonderful, considering both her alleged prostration and her recent appearance. Her blue-black hair was back in its old glossy, raven’s-wing pageboy, falling forward against her high cheekbones, and she wore a red linen sheath and a red lacquered straw pillbox hat and low-heeled alligator pumps, none of which I had ever seen before. Several eyes in the crowd at the gate were on her, and coming upon her like this, unexpectedly and without context, I could see why. Lucy looked entirely herself again, awash, somehow, in the invisible fire that used to cling about her.

  She lifted her head and saw me, and jumped up and ran to me, throwing her arms around me, and by now all the eyes swung to us. Her face was devoid of makeup and very pale, but her extraordinary eyes danced with the old October flame, and she smelled of her signature Tabu. She kissed me on the cheek, and I felt her heart hammering against my chest, and she whispered into my ear, “We’re not going to talk about Aunt Olivia, not right now, so don’t worry. I’m going to help you, not make things harder for you.”

  “You look really wonderful,” I said. “Did you come to see me off? Where’s Jack?”

  “Thanks,” she said, smiling her great, affirming old Lucy-smile. “I borrowed it all, lock, stock and barrel, from Little Lady not two hours ago. And no, I didn’t come to see you off. I came to see you on. And Jack’s at home, sulking in his tent.”

  “To see me on…”

  “I’m going with you. I borrowed the fare from Carter. I have a seat and a passport—it’s all arranged. There’s nothing at all for you to bother about.”

  Before I could reply Ben Cameron came up with Hinton Drexel, the city attorney, and Carter Stephenson from WSB.

  “Hello, sugar,” he said, kissing Lucy. “Shep. You’ve got the prettiest bon voyage committee in the place, I see. We about ready? They’re holding a block of seats for us.”

  I opened my mouth, not knowing at all what I was going to say, but Lucy spoke before I could.

  “I’m coming with you, Mr. Cameron,” she said. “You can put me off this plane if you want to, but I’ll just get on another one if you do. There is no way Shep is going over there to see about his mama without me.”

  Ben Cameron looked from her to me in silence, and then shrugged. “It’s a free country,” he said, with a faint grin. “And a free airline. I’m sure Shep will be glad of your company, Lucy.”

  And so it was that Lucy Bondurant Venable sat beside me, those long hours into and out of New York, and later, over the limitless black Atlantic, as I flew to Paris, France, to attend to the mortal remains of the mother who had so loved and injured me, and who had never loved her niece at all. It was, I reflected somewhere in midflight over all that wild, heaving blackness, an awesome show of power, even though posthumous.

  Ben and Hinton Drexel and Carter Stephenson slept very little. I saw them, heads together in the seats in front of me, talking in low voices, whenever I lurched up out of the thin, sporadic sleep that swirled foglike about me in the darkened plane. Lucy did not talk much. After eating her dinner, during which she told me matter-of-factly that Jack was blackly furious with her for coming and had refused to drive her to the airport, and so she had simply taken a taxi from the farm to Little Lady Rawson’s house on Dellwood and put the arm on Carter for the enormous fare, she said, “I’m going to sleep if I can, and you should, too. Tomorrow is going to be a godawful day,” and huddled up into the corner by the window and slept, her hand in mine. After an hour or so I had the stewardess bring us a couple of blankets and pillows, and tucked Lucy into them and put my own head back, and to my surprise, did sleep a little. The first time I awoke, she had thrashed around in her seat so that her head drooped onto my shoulder, and I laid my cheek on her sleek crown and drifted back under, the clean, warm smell of her hair and her Tabu curling down into sleep with me. Whenever I awoke after that, the soft weight of her, and h
er scent, told me where I was, and why. When I came fully awake the last time, sweating and struggling up out of dreams of flames and endless running, she was yawning and stretching, and the early sun was touching the blazing silver wings of the big TWA jet, and below us, still blue with darkness, the lights of Paris were going out, one by one.

  As we began the long circle for our approach into Orly, Ben came and sat down on the arm of my seat. He had straightened his tie and put his jacket back on and combed the iron-threaded red hair, and looked, incredibly, controlled and immaculate, every inch the mayor of a great city. Only his gray eyes, pouched and dull with fatigue and pain, betrayed the long night’s anguish.

  “I want to tell you what I know about the crash,” he said. “There’s probably not going to be time later, and I don’t even know who, if anybody, will be meeting us, and how much English will be spoken. This is everything I have; it’s all the Air France people could give me just before we left New York.”

  He took a deep breath, and so did I. Beside me, Lucy shifted in her seat and took my hand. The Air France flight, borne by the chartered Boeing 707 Château de Sully, was about to become alive at last, and I don’t think any of us was sure we could bear the reality.

  “They started down the runway on time, at about twelve-thirty,” Ben said. “From what the witnesses say, they never lifted off the ground. The pilot must have realized immediately that something was wrong—apparently he locked the wheels and tried to abort. The tires wore off on the runway, and then the rims; they say you can see the skid marks for about eleven hundred feet. It clipped a couple of telephone poles and jumped an access road and slid another thousand feet on its belly and went into a maintenance shed. That’s what broke it up and probably what caused the explosion—that and all those tons of fuel that flooded through the fuselage. It stopped within a hundred yards of some little town near the airport; they think the pilot was trying to avoid it. It flew apart in several pieces, and they all burned except the tail section. That’s where the crew that survived were. They were thrown clear. Practically the whole village heard and saw it, as well as a crowd at the airport, but nobody has any idea what went wrong, or why the pilot tried to abort. It’s not likely anyone ever will. Fire trucks were there almost immediately, and people from the village, but they couldn’t get close enough to pull anybody out, and in any case it would have been too late. It was…very, very quick.”

  Nobody spoke, and then I said, “So they were…blown up.”

  “No,” Ben Cameron said. “They were incinerated. The fuel was a fire storm. It burned itself out pretty quickly, but there’s no question of any identification.”

  Lucy made a small sound beside me, and her nails dug deep into my palm. I did not feel them; it was only later that I saw the red crescents where they had bitten into the flesh. But she did not cry out.

  “I’m sorry, Lucy,” Ben said. “But you need to know what to expect, both of you. I imagine there’ll be some international press there, and we may—you may, Shep—have to try and identify…any personal effects. I don’t want you to be sandbagged in front of reporters and cameras. I’m here to represent the whole city, and you’ll be doing that, too, like it or not, just because you’re with me. If you think you can’t handle it, I’ll get somebody to take you to a private lounge in the airport till we get done there. I surely wouldn’t blame you. I don’t know if I can handle it myself, and I don’t have anybody kin to me down there. Lucy, I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to stay behind when we go…to the morgues. It’s just no place for you.”

  “All right, Mr. Cameron,” Lucy said meekly, and I shot a sideways look at her. I knew with my old, infallible Lucy-radar that she had no intention of staying behind while I combed the scene of the sunlit slaughter for evidence of my mother. I knew too, with the same antennae, that she would be all right. I could not say the same for myself. I still felt no emotion, but a fine, delicate trembling had taken possession of my arms and legs, and my veins felt as though they crawled with swarming bees. I did not think I could stand or walk.

  After Ben went back to his seat and we began our descent, Lucy took my hand into both of hers and turned it over so that my wrist was exposed. She put her cheek down and pressed it against the thin white bracelet of the scar the kitchen knife had made so long ago, out behind the summerhouse.

  “You didn’t faint or get sick or anything that time,” she said. “Remember? You went right ahead and did it, and in the end you were fine. It must have hurt you like hell, because it did me, and I’m not even funny about blood. But you did it. And you can do this. There won’t be any blood, Gibby, and there wasn’t ever any pain. There couldn’t have been time for that. Not even time to be afraid. Just…light. Remember that. Clean, radiant light. That’s all. I know I can do it, and I know you can, too, because we be of one blood, thou and I.”

  And even though I knew that she was wrong about the fear, that there would have been time for that, and that one day, sooner or later, the awful speculation about what the last moments before impact must have been like for those hundred of my friends and acquaintances and my mother would come to haunt my days and nights—even though I knew all that as well as I knew that Lucy sat beside me in an airline seat—I knew, too, that I could indeed do what I had come to do. Clean, radiant light…

  I could do it.

  “I love you, Lucy,” I said.

  We stepped out into the hot morning light of Paris and into a controlled frenzy of official sympathy. There must have been thirty or forty people in all, many of them members of the French official family, in frock coats and striped trousers, others representatives of government agencies and private concerns with connections to the airline. The American ambassador, a short, solid man who looked as though he should be walking an I beam high above a city somewhere, was on hand with members of his staff, and behind them all, held at bay by a cordon of blue-coated gendarmes, a couple of hundred reporters waited quietly. I remember virtually nothing of those first minutes except being handed from one pumping hand and working mouth to another, nodding and smiling inanely, with Lucy behind me murmuring softly, over and over, “Merci, monsieur. Merci, bien sûr.”

  The only clear thought I carried away with me from that morning was surprise that she knew French—I had not known that she studied it at Scott. Once I looked back and saw that a small throng of the dignified and formidable Frenchmen in their grand, ritual morning costumes were clustered about her, bowing deeply over her outstretched hand and kissing it, and I thought how typical of Lucy that she should come, uninvited and without status, in her sister’s borrowed red, and steal the entire show from the newly prestigious dead of Atlanta. My mother, I thought, would be furious with her. I suppressed a horrifying desire to giggle, and remembered what John Kennedy had said about his wife’s thunderous French conquest: “I am the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris.” In that moment, Ben Cameron and Hinton Drexel and Carter Stephenson and I were the men who had accompanied Lucy Bondurant Venable to Paris. The thought stiffened my spine and legs, and I clung to it as to a buoy in a wild sea.

  After the greetings, which seemed to stretch into sunny infinity, we were taken into the airport to an Air France lounge, where the reporters followed us, and Ben held a press conference. The reporters of half a dozen nations were surprisingly deferential and considerate, and Ben fielded their questions with the same dignity and composure with which he had handled the greetings, even though he knew no French, and once even grinned, when a third or fourth reporter inquired politely who the beautiful lady in red was. Lucy was introduced as a niece of one of the victims and I was presented as the bereaved son, and we both nodded and blinked into a hundred exploding flashbulbs, most of which were trained on Lucy, and then, finally, the press conference was ended and we were taken, by limousine, out to the end of runway 26 where the Château de Sully had burrowed into the unforgiving earth like a great, ungainly phoenix missing its appointment with the air, but failing,
this time, to rise from its deadly birth flames.

  The crash site had not been visible from the air; either we had come in from a different angle, or the dying night had shrouded it. Now, in the clear sun of Monday, June 4, there was no avoiding that blasted moonscape, no leaving that black country of the dead. Desolation spread for hundreds of yards, ashen and silent, and the only thought that ran through my mind as I walked into it behind Ben, Lucy at my side, was a refrain made of her words that morning: “Light. Clean, radiant light…” But there was no light here.

  Firemen and police had been at work for twenty-four hours, and the wreckage had been raked over and over again after the bodies had been loaded into mortuary vans and taken away; sifted for the burned memento mori that would aid in identification. The huge tail section, towering four stories into the air, stood intact, a great, ungainly space-age stele. Below it, strewn over the burned earth, chunks of twisted and fused metal were the plane’s unidentifiable vitals, molten and bright as viscera in spots where the soot and char had been knocked off. The four engines were recognizable, but they had been blown so far apart that they were without context on that silent, black plain. Beyond the blackness the little town of Villeneuve le Roi, which the pilot had managed to spare, lay dreaming in the sun. Birds chirped and the knots of people behind the guards’ cordons talked in low voices, staring at the first of the clansmen come from America to bear home their dead, but sound seemed to stop and fall to earth at the edge of the blackness. It was as if that great scar was inimical to any offering from the living. Beside me, her feet scrunching in ashes, Lucy whispered over and over, “We be of one blood, thou and I.” Her hand was cold and tight in mine, and I do not think that she knew what she whispered; it was like a child’s mindless and comforting little incantation. Ahead of me, Ben and Hinton Drexel said nothing at all as they walked. Carter Stephenson scribbled in a small notebook.