Peachtree Road

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  “I want you to snap out of this shit right now, Lucy,” I said, angry and frightened. “I told Jack I’d bring you home where you belong, with him and Malory, and that’s what I’m going to do. Get your things and let’s go.”

  Her smile widened. She looked beautiful and utterly mad. “I’m going to Washington, Gibby, and I’m going to march for my president. Everybody who’s got any decency and conscience in the country will be there. I’ll bet my father’s there. I’ll bet he is, right now…. Did you ever think how much Jack Kennedy was like Daddy? Don’t you think the resemblance was just uncanny? Wouldn’t that be something, to run into my daddy there in Washington, at the greatest march in the history of the world—”

  “Lucy!” I cried.

  “Watch out, Gibby, or I’ll really get crazy,” she said, sliding her white-ringed eyes side wise at me, slyly. “You want to see me really crazy? Here we go: DADDY! I WANT MY DADDY! I WANT MY DADDY! MY DADDY’S NOT DEAD! SOMEBODY SHOT THE PRESIDENT!”

  Her screams spiraled up and up, so piercing and wild and fierce that they caromed around the little room like mad, trapped birds, and scattered, and flew into the corridors and up to the ceilings of the old building, ringing on and on. She did not seem to need breath for them.

  I pulled my arm back as far as it would go and slapped her with all the strength I could muster. I felt the blow into the wing of my shoulder blade. Her head flew sideways, and bounced on her slender neck. She drew in a long, long, sibilant breath, her eyes enormous and unfocused on my face, all pupil, and then she dropped her face into her hands and began to cry. I put my arms around her and drew her against me, and we stayed there, weeping together in that overheated, abysmally cluttered little room, until she literally began to retch from the force of her sobs, and I could no longer feel my knees. I could not see ahead in time; we seemed to have come, at that moment, to the flat, white end of everything.

  She was calm after that, a frail, tottering calm, but she could not stop crying. The tears flowed on and on, endlessly, sheeting silently down her ravaged white face and soaking her blouse and sweater. She did not talk on the drive back toward Buckhead, but she smoked through the tears, and listened in her stillness to the somber voices on the car radio until I could bear them no longer and turned it off. Finally, as we passed Brookwood Station, where, worlds and eons ago, two thin, like-hearted children had rolled under a slowly moving train, hearts in mouths, she said, “I can’t go home. I can stay fairly sane with you, but if I have to look at those poor, horrible little boys’ faces and hear them prattle about this I’ll start screaming like a banshee again. I know I will. I can’t even talk to Malory in my head right now. I can’t listen to Jack’s endless analyzing. I’m really afraid to go home, Gibby.”

  “We won’t go, then,” I said. “You can stay with me until you feel better. We can go out and have some dinner, or I’ll fix something for us. I told Jack I might not bring you back tonight.”

  “Did he mind that?” Her voice was remote.

  “It was his idea.”

  She was silent for a while, and then she said, “Somehow I don’t want to go back to the summerhouse, Gibby. I don’t want to have to associate it with this awfulness later on. And I don’t want to run the slightest risk of seeing Mama. She hated him. Or even worse, she only said she did, because all her snotty Republican buddies do. I think I’d kill her, literally strangle her, if she said one word about him right now.”

  “I know where let’s go,” I said, as if I had planned it all along. “Let’s go over to the Camerons’. I’ll bet you they’re there. Somebody will be, anyway. Okay with you?”

  All of a sudden I wanted to be there, in the little den of Merrivale House, more than I had ever wanted to be anywhere in my life. I did not even want any specific one of the Camerons; I just wanted to be there, in the house that had always seemed so safe and right and beautiful to me. I realized only at that moment that whenever I had thought of John Kennedy’s Camelot, I thought, somehow, of it as existing in and around the house on Muscogee Avenue.

  “Okay,” Lucy said dully. “Anywhere. Just not home or the summerhouse.”

  Ben and Dorothy were not there after all, but Sarah and Charlie were, and Ben Junior and Julia, and Snake and Lelia, and even Tom and Freddie Goodwin came in just after we did. Others followed. One by one, we came, the Buckhead boys and girls, from wherever we were, as if summoned out of the November night; we came to the nearest place Buckhead had to Camelot.

  It was a ghastly homecoming. All of us were crying, I remember, even those of us who had not been particularly smitten with Kennedy. We knew, somehow, that far more than a single visionary life had ended. We knew that we had lost far more than a president. Our youth had died, our collective childhoods were over, now. This day divided time; forever after we would think of our lives as separated into what had gone before this, and what came after. I suppose that at this, our last great personal transition before our deaths began, on this night of the shattering of time, it was natural that we should gather. I thought, looking at the unabashed tears on these faces I had known literally since my infancy, that except for Lucy and Sarah I had never seen any of these people weep before, and probably never would again, not even at the death of one or another of us. Somehow this night was past and beyond the need or the reach of control. There were no rituals for this.

  Sarah met us at the door and brought us back to the little den, her face bleached and scourged with desolation. She had a drink in her hand, and she sipped steadily at it all evening. Like all of us, she was crying. We all drank a great deal, and some of us got frankly drunk for perhaps the first time in our lives. I remembered seeing Ben half carrying Julia up the stairs to his old bedroom at some point in the night, and Tom Goodwin kept stumbling and falling on his way to the drinks tray by the fireplace. Charlie said little, but he wept quietly and steadily, even as he went about his hostly chores, mixing and passing drinks, lighting cigarettes, fetching napkins to mop up spills, taking and producing coats as people came and went. All the while the silent river of tears ran ceaselessly from behind his thick glasses down into his collar.

  Sarah brought trays of sandwiches and a platter of cake and set out Dorothy’s old Sheffield coffee service, but no one ate. We drank and watched the television set, staring into its flickering maw at images and sounds so unimaginable they did not register, but which were even then being etched in acid in the deepest and smallest folds of our brains: Lyndon Johnson, looming and wolflike, his hand raised in a cramped airplane cabin. Jackie, erect and stained, alone on a loading dock in Virginia. Flags at half-staff, and people around the world crying in our own horror, and the beginning of the awful voices of the drums.

  At about ten, Freddie Goodwin cocked her avian little head and said, “I wonder if this means we’ll have to cancel the Junior League Follies? I don’t see how on earth we can; we’ve worked like dogs for months. This would have to happen now—”

  “SHUT UP, FREDDIE!” Lucy screamed, coming white-faced out of the chair she had been slumped in all evening, her fingers actually curved into talons before her. I caught her by the back of her sweater before she reached Freddie. She was breathing so hard and rapidly that I thought she was going to faint, or even die. The sound rasped and grated in the room.

  “You listen here, Lucy Bondurant,” Freddie began, but Tom overrode her. “Put a lid on it, Freddie,” he said thickly. “Fuck the Junior League Follies. Fuck the entire Junior League, for that matter.”

  Freddie huffed off into the kitchen, looking sidewise for sympathy as she went, but finding none. No one noticed her. Most of the others were looking sidewise themselves, at Lucy. The outburst had had about it the intensity and swiftness of murder, or madness.

  Sometime after midnight, Glenn Pickens came by looking for Ben. His face was wet too, silver-scummed, but I never saw him cry. He sat down with us for a moment, with the looseness and slackness of deathly fatigue, drinking the coffee that Sarah brought him, but say
ing nothing. Like us, he stared at the television set. Presently he got up to leave, and Lucy saw him and pushed herself heavily from her chair and followed him to the door. She held out her arms, wordlessly, and he hesitated a moment, and then came into them. They held each other briefly, and from where I was sitting, behind him, I saw his shoulders heave, and saw tears start afresh from Lucy’s tight-shut eyes.

  “I know how you felt about him,” Lucy sobbed to him. “I’m so sorry, Glenn. We’ve lost…we’ve lost…God, I don’t know…everything.”

  “No, Lucy, you don’t know how I felt about him,” Glenn Pickens said, in a taut, angry voice. Then he smiled. It looked as if it hurt him as much as the tears must have. “But I know you’re sorry. Poor, nice little Lucy. Poor, good little white girl. I wonder if you really know what we’ve lost.”

  After he left, Lucy sat back down and quite deliberately and silently drank herself into senselessness. Near dawn Charlie helped me carry her out to the Rolls, and as we slid her long, loose-limbed body, almost birdlike in its lightness, into the backseat, I looked down at her stained face in the light from the Camerons’ black iron carriage lamps. It was emptied and blunted and absolutely devoid of the quicksilver life that animated it when she was awake. She looked, suddenly, middle-aged and very nearly ugly, and as if she might be dead. My heart twisted with pain for her. I thought of Glenn Pickens’s words: “I wonder if you really know what we’ve lost.”

  Much later, months after that night, I read somewhere words that Patrick Moynihan had spoken to Mary McGrory, and wept afresh at that terse elegy for so many and so much: “Mary McGrory said to me that we’d never laugh again. And I said, Heavens, Mary, we’ll laugh again. It’s just that we’ll never be young again.”

  And it was so. In the rest of her runaway comet’s life Lucy Bondurant Chastain Venable laughed a great deal, but she was never again, after that day in November, truly young.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Looking back, I have come to think of the five or so years after John Kennedy’s assassination as the half decade in which nothing happened. Much did happen, of course: In that time America was catapulted by Lee Harvey Oswald’s bullet out of the long, doo-wah span of the fifties and into the psychedelic nervous breakdown that only ended with the resignation of Richard Nixon; and Atlanta left its pretty pool of dreaming, century-old sunlight and leaped into the high, thin, cold sun of space.

  Yes, indeed, much happened. But not a great deal happened, at least as such things are measured, to us—to me, and to Jack and Lucy and Malory Venable. I suppose what I really mean was that Lucy was not, at least overtly, mad in those years, not visibly out of control. There was no repeat of the scene on the day Kennedy died. By that time, we were all fairly accustomed to having our lives defined and the weather of them forecast by Lucy’s emotional state.

  So of course, I, of all people, should have known better.

  Out and abroad in the country, two centuries’ worth of walls were crumbling, few of them peacefully. The Civil Rights Act was at last signed. Martin Luther King won the Nobel Peace Prize. James Meredith was shot in Mississippi. Blacks and whites marched and sang and were beaten and bitten and jailed in Selma, Alabama. Watts and Detroit and Newark burned as angry riots flowered in the dangerous summers. A world away the feverish green jungles of Vietnam burned, too, and at home at least half of the riots and rallies decried that sad and sorry nonwar. The Beatles conquered America, and skirts went thigh-high and teenagers higher as substances most adults had never heard of slammed through their bloodstreams, and beads and bells and strobes and synthesizers supplanted Japanese lanterns and “Moonglow” at the parties of the American young. America in those years was like an automobile with the governor off its motor and its accelerator jammed to the floor.

  In Atlanta, we were almost precisely where Ben and the Club thought we should be. The new major league stadium was begun and built in a record fifty-one days, and the Milwaukee Braves became the Atlanta Braves, and the NFL Falcons came to town, and we played ball. Restaurants and bars were desegregated. An area-wide rapid transit system was authorized. We were, in the middle of those years, the second highest city in the country in terms of new construction. Sleek, sunstruck new hotels and office buildings and apartment houses soared into the sky along Peachtree Street downtown, dwarfing the comfortable Edward Hopper jumble of eight-and ten-story businesses there. New amusement and theme parks opened around and even under the city; new bars and restaurants and clubs sprang up like mushrooms after a summer rain. Malls and strip shopping centers burgeoned. Grady Hospital was desegregated, and the city received a HUD grant for a Model Cities program that encompassed four percent of its land and ten percent of its population. A great new government complex and a flamboyant new governor’s mansion went up and the grand old mansions along Peachtree Road began to come down, and in the proper, shabby little Tenth Street section of Peachtree Road historically known as Tight Squeeze, the bearded, beaded, long-haired, perpetually stoned young of the entire Southeast set up camp and renamed themselves hippies. I think that not a few of them swung by there after their sessions with Margaret Bryan, changing into jeans and beads and discarding shoes somewhere along the way.

  Atlanta’s momentum did not come cheap. Nearriots simmered in the bright, hot days and the thick nights. Ben Cameron met and talked and met and talked until, at one point, he was put to bed in the house on Muscogee Avenue by Hub Dorsey and a determined Dorothy and forbidden to talk for a week on pain of losing his voice permanently. During one particularly spectacular confrontation he climbed atop a parked car, a surging sea of angry, frustrated black faces at his feet, his coppery head a target for any murderous fool within a mile radius, and pleaded through a borrowed bullhorn for order. He finally got it—and his photograph in the newspapers of an entire nation—before he was toppled from the car and ended up in Piedmont Emergency with a sprained ankle and a hole in the seat of his pants. But Atlanta did not blossom into flames as Detroit and Watts and Pittsburgh and other cities did in those summers, and as Ben himself said, that was worth a considerable chunk of a mayor’s ass.

  In Buckhead, Sarah and Charlie had another little girl, called Charlsie, and young Ben and Julia Cameron another small red-haired son, and Ben rapidly became one of the young architects of the hour and the day, mentioned often in almost the same tone of voice as Philip Johnson and I. M. Pei. He was out of town a great deal in those days, and Julia would say, ruefully, that she supposed he had another family somewhere who was doting and fussing over him, because she and the boys certainly never saw him. But her voice was warm with pride. There was no doubt in the mind of anyone who saw them together that Ben was absolutely besotted with his sons.

  Little Lady had the first of many discreet blackouts and did a discreet stint at Brawner’s while her own small children were cared for by Atlanta’s only, and cordially hated, English nanny, and Carter grew richer and richer and more remote. Aunt Willa finally gave up any pretense of working as a buyer at Rich’s and became one of Buckhead’s most elegant chatelaines. The Compleat Georgian moved ponderously out of my notes and into my typewriter. And Lucy quit her job at Damascus House and took one with SOUTH, a little foundation-funded, ultraliberal journal which put her, as she said, far more into the thick of things.

  It was, from everyone’s standpoint but hers, an appallingly bad move.

  From spending her days and nights within the walls of Damascus House, she was soon traveling all over the South in the little Austin the journal provided her, hastily gathered clothes strewn over the backseat and a bearded, cool-eyed, laughably young photographer in the front beside her, covering the movement. It was, by then, surging inexorably out of the deep, calm channel King and his early supporters had dug for it and into the glinting, murderous shoals of radical violence, and we at home feared both the sniper’s bullet and Lucy’s own erratic hands on the Austin’s steering wheel when she was away. She was by then literally intoxicated with the momentum and glamou
r of the movement, and most of her time was spent in the company of the young heroes and guerrilla fighters whose names and cold, closed faces were familiar on television screens and in newspapers on half a dozen fronts: Little Rock, Selma, Birmingham, Montgomery, Oxford. More than once she went beyond the bounds of her job and the instructions of her editors and ended up in jail herself. Jack and the older children were frightened and resentful, Malory was bewildered, Aunt Willa was predictably outraged and Lucy herself was as exalted as an avenging angel.

  Once, after I had wired bail money yet again, I laid into her on her return. She had brought Malory to the summerhouse for a rare visit, and when the little girl ran out to play by the lily pool I said without preamble, “I guess you think it would be really wonderful to be slain on the altar of the goddamned movement.”

  “Maybe not slain,” she said around her inevitable cigarette. “But I’d love to be beaten or hosed or bitten by dogs. Maybe even shot, if it didn’t kill me. I need to know how it feels. I need to go through it all with them. They’re my people. It’s my fight. You ought to be in it with us, Gibby.”

  “They’re fucking well not your people,” I snarled. “Jack is your people. Malory is your people. Toby and Tommy are your people. What good are you to them if you’re dead on a dirt road in Mississippi? And I am in it with you. I’m financing the damned thing with your bail and fines.”

  “You’re just like Jack Venable,” she snapped. “Putting yourselves ahead of the greatest and most…morally important…movement in history. Why can’t you see that I do this for the children? I want Malory to grow up knowing what’s really important.”