Peachtree Road

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  For it was in actuality my house now, and not my father’s. I don’t think Aunt Willa was certain of that, either then or for a long time afterward. I believe she reckoned that it might still be my father’s, and that I, too, might well live there on sufferance, and I think that that was why she spent all those hours keeping vigil beside his bed, perhaps thinking, in some corner of her wire-grass soul, that he might reward her by changing his will and leaving her the house, or perhaps simply his insurance.

  It would be interesting to know what he thought about her presence beside his bed; we were never sure if he fully comprehended what had happened to my mother, but he must have missed her and concluded at some point that she was dead. If he was lucid enough to grasp it, the splendid futility of Aunt Willa’s vigil beside him must have given him a great deal of dark glee. For he had known for many years what I learned only in the days after Orly, from Tom Carmichael: that the house, as well as virtually all the rental property and other Bondurant holdings that my father had tended and maneuvered and multiplied, had been in my mother’s name, and that they had passed, at her death, not to him, but to me. I became, in one fiery instant, quite a rich young man and he nominally a paralyzed pauper, and I have always wondered if he did not hate both my mother and me for that knowledge long before it ever became fact. It would explain, at least partly, his cold red distaste for me, and his long retreat from my mother’s presence into his study. After the day Tom Carmichael brought Marty Fox to the house and introduced him to me, I never went into that room again.

  I did not feel rich, or even different in any way, and forgot for long stretches of time, until Marty brought his monthly sheaf of bills and checks and papers for me to sign, that the reins of the Bondurant holdings rested now in my own vastly unqualified hands. The only significant advantage all that money had for me was its ability to buy me privacy and freedom from onerous duty and detail. I used it shamelessly. Marty Fox virtually ran the business, and Aunt Willa ran the house; I had enough raw Cameron history at my fingertips to keep me absorbed into senility if I wished, and very little outside the summerhouse walls called insistently enough to me to lure me out of it. The smoldering stigma of the Pump-house Hill fire and the natural preoccupation with young families and fledgling careers kept the Buckhead Boys and their wives at a seemly remove from me now.

  If I had truly been one of them, raising a family and pursuing a career and moving with them between the clubs and homes and summer places of our old orbit, I know that I would have been forgiven the fire and taken back into the fold, but I had the mark of the loner on my forehead by that time, and pack animals to their very marrows, they saw and smelled it, and largely let me be. They dutifully, one by one, had me to dinner in their near-identical “starter” houses in the days after my mother’s death, and included me in holiday parties and club dances, and other familiar herd rituals, but by then I was outside their ranks, derailed once and for all from the track that would take them to the forefront of the city’s corridors of power one day, ready to take up the torches when the Club passed on to them. I did not care. In those days all human encounters seemed collisions, and the dead in the summerhouse received me far more gently than the living in Buckhead. My money bought me seclusion; I could afford to become something of a recluse, and so, gratefully, I became one.

  Dorothy Cameron alone in those days tried to lure me back out into the world.

  “There’s not much excuse that I can see for you to hide out in that summerhouse for weeks on end now,” she said, on an evening in the early autumn of 1963, when I loped over in the dusk to see her. “You ought to be out putting some of that money to good use.”

  I knew that Ben was away; the morning newspaper had said he was meeting that evening with representatives of several black organizations to draft recommendations for a public accommodations act and for laws facilitating open-occupancy housing, fair employment machinery and desegregation of public facilities. He was rarely at home, day or night, in those days. I found Dorothy in the little den of the Muscogee Avenue house, tiny Livvy Gentry playing quietly in the playpen at her feet. Sarah was, she said, practicing for the Junior League Follies, and Charlie was closeted again with Mr. Woodruff, as he was two or three nights a week now.

  Dorothy put Livvy into my arms. She was a rather simian baby, as slight in stature as Sarah had been as an infant, but with Charlie’s button eyes and long upper lip, and holding her was like cradling a tiny, plucking monkey. After a moment I handed her back to Dorothy; the child might have borne my mother’s name, and might be flesh and bone of my lost love, but aside from gratitude at Sarah for thinking to please me by keeping my mother’s name alive, I felt absolutely nothing for her daughter except mild regret that she so little resembled Sarah. The powerful, knee-loosening love that I felt when Malory was in my arms was obviously her province alone. I was grateful that with Dorothy I did not have to pretend affection I didn’t feel for her granddaughter.

  “I’m doing good with all those ancestors of Ben’s,” I said. “It could be a magnificent book, Dorothy, if I can do it right. It needs a lot of time and concentration. I’m feeling my way. What good is money if it can’t buy you the time and privacy to do your work? And besides, what’s wrong with a rich recluse? Poverty stricken recluses get all the good press.”

  She snorted, taking a Rose Medallion saucer away from the baby. “I don’t think there’s really any such thing as a poor recluse, not by choice,” she said. “The poor man is rarely reclusive by choice. I’ll bet you anything the classic, pure recluse is that way because he can’t afford to be a rich, corrupt voluptuary.”

  I laughed. “Well, that’s the ticket, then. I’ll give up the recluse business and become a rich, corrupt voluptuary, and then everybody will say how money has changed me, and that I’m not the good old plain, down-to-earth hermit I used to be.”

  “I don’t think that idea holds any water whatsoever,” Dorothy said. “I’ve seen an awful lot of money in my life, some of it acquired almost overnight, and the popular theory is that it changes people. Like you said. So-and-so is not the old so-and-so we knew in the lean days. But I think just the opposite is true. Poverty dictates what you will think about the world you live in, and so that’s what and who you become. Your poverty defines you. Money lets you choose, lets you buy yourself a persona—indulge your true character, so to speak. People who are most ‘themselves’ are people who can afford to be. Does that make any sense at all?”

  “As much as you ever do, which is a lot,” I said. “But if that’s true, why is it so awful for me to be a private person? I mean, if that’s what I am naturally. What does money have to do with that?”

  She shook her head impatiently. “It just ought to be put to work. If you don’t want to go out and do it, give it to somebody like Charlie and let him find a use for it. You don’t need it, Shep. It’s immoral to just sit there playing with Ben’s ancestors when some of that money could make such a difference to so many people.”

  “I cleaned up Pumphouse Hill, Dorothy,” I said resentfully. “I’m having Tom and Marty renovate every piece of property we own. I’m not going to waste the money. I’ll leave it where it will do good when I die, and right now I’m trying to get some kind of trust set up for Malory.”

  She looked at me keenly.

  “Very generous of you, Shep. I don’t imagine Jack Venable thinks too highly of that, does he? And from what I hear, I don’t imagine Lucy even realizes Malory needs it, or will. I hear she’s harder at it than ever with the movement, and doesn’t get home until the baby is asleep, more often than not. It’s reabsorbed her like a sponge.”

  “You hear an awful lot,” I said without rancor.

  “I do,” she said, equally mildly. “People tell me an amazing number of things. Am I right about Jack?”

  “Yes,” I said. “You are. He flat refused to even discuss a trust for Malory, and said he wouldn’t let her touch a penny of it if I went against his wishes and set it up.
He’ll reconsider, though. He and Lucy don’t make enough between them to send her to day camp, much less school and college and…whatever else she needs.”

  “A proud man,” she said. “I can see his point, though. She’s his daughter, after all.”

  “She’s my family, too,” I said.

  “I know she is,” Dorothy Cameron said, and something in her low, rich voice told me that she knew as much as I did or ever would about Malory Venable’s patrimony, and had since her birth. But she said no more, then or ever. Dorothy might never cease in her attempt to force perfectibility upon me, but she knew down to a hair when to let me be. It was not the least of the reasons I loved her.

  It was that autumn when I first began to worry seriously about Lucy, and consequently, about Malory. From absorption with her work at Damascus House and the civil rights movement, Lucy seemed to sheer over into obsession; from two or three late nights a week, she began to spend three and four there, and often weekend days, and once or twice she slept over on a cot in the business office. I learned this only because, when she made her nightly telephone calls to me, the background noise was indisputably that of other telephones and mimeograph machines and clipped black voices speaking. I don’t think she would have told me where she was calling from if I had not asked. She knew, by then, how I felt about her time away from Malory.

  “Back off, Gibby,” she would say. “Malory is fine; she’s wonderful. I just checked on her. She ate seconds at supper and went right to sleep, and Jack says she hasn’t crièd once tonight. Oh, and he thinks she’s about to walk; she’s maybe a day or two from real steps. How about that? It’s awfully early for walking, you know.”

  “I hope you’re there to see it,” I said. “What does this make, Luce, three nights this week? Four? She’s going to think Estelle is her mother.”

  “She knows who her mother is, don’t you worry about that,” Lucy said defensively. “There’s not an hour of the day I’m not talking to her by radar. She always answers. Isn’t that good about the walking? I’ll have her marching with us before the year’s out.”

  “I’d like to come over there and march you home,” I said, exasperated. “She needs her mother, Lucy. It’s that simple.”

  “She needs a world where Negro children aren’t blown up in churches, or bitten by dogs or knocked down by fire hoses and clubs,” Lucy said, in a near-hiss. “It’s that simple. Do you think for one minute I’m not doing this for her?”

  “The thought has crossed my mind that you’re doing it for yourself, now that you mention it,” I said. The words were unfair, but sometimes Lucy veered off into glib, liberal cant, and that sent me wild. For some reason I could not bear banality from her.

  “Fuck off,” Lucy said, and slammed the telephone down, and did not call again until I telephoned her, two days later, and apologized. After that I left her hours and her deepening obsession alone, but I did not stop thinking uneasily about them. The bombing of the black Baptist church in Birmingham in September had sent her nearly mad; she had wept and raged for days, and, earlier, Jack had been able to prevent her from joining the Washington March, where Martin Luther King made his electrifying “I have a dream” speech, only by threatening to bring Malory to live with me and Aunt Willa if she went. Her emotional pitch had risen steadily since then; I wondered if, now, that threat would deter her. I prayed that Jack did not put it to the test.

  In midafternoon of a Friday in November Jack Venable called me.

  “Can you do me an enormous favor?” he said. His voice was thick and flat, as with great fatigue.

  “Sure,” I said. “What’s up?”

  “Could you go down to Damascus House and get Lucy? They called a minute ago and said she’s…in some kind of fit, or collapse, and they can’t get her home with all the turmoil, and I can’t leave the children to go myself. If you could bring her home, I’d be eternally grateful.”

  Something did not fit, was badly skewed. “What are you doing at home in the middle of the day?” I said. “Is something the matter with Malory?”

  There was a long silence, and then he said, “Don’t you know?”

  “Know what?” I said, my heart freezing in my chest.

  “Kennedy was shot in Dallas around noon. He’s dead.”

  The room swelled and brightened around me, and his voice faded out, and then came sweeping back like a cold storm tide.

  “…know how she felt about him,” he was saying, and what I had thought was fatigue turned to grief as he spoke. His voice broke and he cleared his throat and went on.

  “He was Jesus Christ to King’s God with her. And she’s been unstable as hell since the baby came. I don’t want to pile all three children in the car and go down and get her, and I’d just as soon they don’t see her in this state anyway, whatever it is. I don’t think they could cope with it, and I’m not sure I could, either. You could always calm her down; I can’t tell you how I’d appreciate it if you’d get her and keep her there or somewhere until she’s in shape to be around the children. Estelle has taken off someplace and there’s nobody but me with them.”

  “Where was he shot?” I said, numbly and stupidly.

  “In a motorcade somewhere in downtown Dallas. Near some kind of schoolbook thing.”

  “No, I mean…where on his…was he disfigured?”

  It was a horrid and irrelevant question, and I knew it, but all I could think of was the ruin of that splendidly enabling white grin, and the fine shock of red hair, which he had worn with the offhand grace of a battle panache. I did not think I could bear the knowledge of his disfigurement, though I did not know why.

  “Christ, Shep, I don’t know. The back of his head, I think. What goddamned difference does it make? It killed him, wherever it was.”

  “I’m on my way,” I said.

  “Thanks,” he said heavily. “Thanks.”

  But I was not on my way for some moments. My treacherous knees buckled under the loss, even though my overtaxed heart would not acknowledge it, so that I had to sit down on the sofa for a few minutes. I kept shaking my head to clear it. I wondered if I should call Shem Cater to drive me, but I did not want company, and in the end I took the Rolls myself and drove down into the bleak section southeast of Five Points, where Damascus House was, my hands and legs shaking profoundly all the way, as if gripped by an influenza chill.

  Claiborne Cantrell was conducting a service in the sanctuary when I arrived, so that there was almost no one about. I could hear sobbing and a peculiar low, timeless keening that lifted the hair on the back of my neck, and an occasional howl of pure grief, doglike and terrible, and the strains of old hymns, sung in cracked voices: “Abide With Me,” “The Old Rugged Cross,” and that poignant and now heartbreaking anthem of hope and commitment and valor, “We Shall Overcome.”

  “I don’t think we shall overcome this,” I whispered to myself, going up the old stone steps and turning right toward the little office where Lucy worked. The music gave searing life to the enormity that lay frozen in my chest, and I felt tears begin to run down my face. I did not wipe them away; it did not seem important to do so.

  Lucy was sitting in her desk chair when I entered the tiny, cluttered office, and a vastly fat, middle-aged black woman was sitting beside her, holding both her hands. It did not take me more than a second to realize that she was literally holding Lucy in the chair; Lucy kept struggling to rise, and her head thrashed from side to side, sending the wings of blue-black hair swinging. Her face was the yellow-white of cheap office paper, and there were white rings around her blazing, light blue eyes and deep scarlet patches on her high cheekbones, and she smiled, a terrible, radiant, fixed smile.

  “Hey, Gibby,” she sang, smiling, smiling. “Did you come for the march? Flora, this is my cousin Gibby. He always knows the best thing to do. He came for the march—I told you people would start coming, if you’d just be patient. Oh, shit, where in hell is Claiborne with that bus? We’re wasting time. All that singing and yelling
can come later. We need to get this show on the road….”

  She leaned around the black woman to peer out the door toward the sounds of sobbing and singing. The woman shook her head, her great hands still enfolding Lucy’s. The silver tracks of tears had dried on her cheeks, but her face was impassive.

  “She think we gon’ go to Washington and march on the White House,” she said. “She say with the president laying dead an’ the biggest march in history, it be the end of the fight, an’ there ain’t be no more racial injustice. She think he been shot by a bunch of segregationists, and this gon’ end it all—”

  “It will, it will!” Lucy caroled. Her voice literally shook with excitement, a high tremolo, like a castrato’s. “We’ve won, don’t you see? After this, nobody on earth will still believe in segregation—he’s the greatest martyr the movement could possibly have! But we have to go now, we have to get there by the time they bring him back. Everybody else will be there already….”

  I went and knelt before her and took her hands from the black woman, who touched Lucy’s hair gently and went out of the office toward the sound of the singing.

  “Lucy,” I said, “be quiet and listen to me. You aren’t going to Washington. There isn’t going to be any march. It wasn’t any segregationist plot; it didn’t have anything to do with civil rights. I heard on the radio coming down here that they just got the guy, and they think he’s some kind of Communist, and he acted alone.”

  She looked at me quite calmly.

  “They want you to think that, of course,” she said. “It’s all part of it. You’ll see—you’ll see in the end. Of course they’d want us to think that, but any fool knows it was over civil rights, not some silly little lonesome Communist…. Gibby, will you go get Claiborne out of that stupid service right now? Every other city in the country will have their people there while we’re still sitting on our asses down here, singing!”