“I want Malory to grow up with a real mother, not a fake honky martyr,” I said.
But Lucy was blazing with zeal and exaltation, and did not hear me. She was back on the road the next Monday. She was not eating or sleeping well, and grew thinner and more haggard and incandescent by the day, and drove herself incredibly with her travels and deadlines and the long, passionate talk sessions with the new young black lieutenants now in the movement’s vanguard. I do not think that she loved or respected them any more than she had King and his honor guard, but there is no question but that they excited her more. She ran on stimulation, in those days, like a race car on high-octane gasoline.
I think Jack, and certainly I, might have moved more decisively to curtail her activities if the absences and obsession had been having a markedly adverse effect on the children, but they did not seem to do so. The boys, teenaged now, had been indifferent to her at best, and were no doubt glad to have their father to themselves so much of the time. And Malory, at five, was a sunny and self-possessed child, enchanting to look at and adept at pleasing the adults around her, and she showed no signs of missing her mother. She did not lack for company. Wherever she went, Malory charmed. She had an uncanny sense of just what small action or gesture or phrase would most please whom, and had a habit of making vivid little crayon drawings signed, “I love you, Malory B. Venable,” and giving them to family, friends and new acquaintances alike. A great many refrigerators around Lithonia and one or two in Buckhead, in those days, wore Malory’s drawings. Mine was nearly papered with them. I was not sure I liked or approved of the facility for self-endearment that she displayed; it spoke too loudly of subterranean need. But I was, as was everyone around her, totally captivated by it. Malory Venable midway into her sixth year of life was almost literally too good to be true.
You would often forget, around her, that she was a child. Despite her pointed pixie chin and Lucy’s huge, crystal-blue eyes and the silky child’s hair, cut in ragged points around her heartshaped face, Malory had about her the nurturing manner and outward focus of an adult. When I thought about it, I would realize that she had been cast by Lucy’s absences into the role of caretaker and helper early on. She brought trays and magazines and slippers and drinks and snacks to Jack, and she fetched and carried for the boys when they would allow her to, and when she was visiting with me she frequently pattered around collecting dishes and fluffing sofa cushions and bringing me astounding treats foraged from my refrigerator. I soon learned to accept them without fuss; if you praised Malory for a service, she would wear herself out finding others to perform.
Perhaps she did not seem to suffer from Lucy’s absences because the tenor of her mother’s presence, when she was there, was so intense. The old symbiosis still held; an arc of utter attention still leaped between the two of them when they were together, and the old eerie, voiceless communion still prevailed. I have seen Lucy, in front of visitors, stop and fall silent and somehow compose her face, and soon Malory would appear from wherever she was, trotting straight to her mother and looking up questioningly. It was in the nature of a parlor trick, and I hated it when Lucy did it, but it was admittedly startling to see. When Malory was older, she stopped automatically responding, refusing with a lovely and touching natural dignity to allow herself to be exploited, but she still felt Lucy’s call, and continued to do so, I know, for as long as her mother lived.
When she was in the city, Lucy was hardly ever away from her daughter. She took Malory into her and Jack’s bed in the morning and evenings, brought her along on interviews and into the office and allowed her to sit up late with the blacks and whites in the movement who came, inevitably, to the farmhouse to eat, rest, talk and often stay for a night or a week or more.
“Be brave like that, Malory,” she would say often. “Always be brave.”
And Malory would nod silently, her whole child’s heart in her eyes.
I detested that chaotic nonchildhood for Malory, but I could understand her fascination with her mother. I would try to see Lucy through her eyes, and the vision was irresistible and overpowering: the beautiful, vivid, shimmering mother, rarely seen but constantly felt, swooping in and out of her small life trailing passion and glory and swarms of intense, exotic people in her wake like the cosmic detritus in the tail of a comet. No wonder her father seemed, by contrast, simply dull. I know that she thought him so. How could she not? Sinking into the passivity that would last his lifetime, uniformly silvery gray and amorphous, slumped into his easy chair, mired in the anodynes of scotch and television; the reluctant disciplinarian, the unshining one, always and endlessly there—Jack Venable never had a chance with Malory. She loved him, I know, but as one might a great, sweet dog, or her familiar bed. By contrast Lucy burned like Venus on a winter night.
“Jack is a lump,” Malory said to me once when she was spending the day with me in the summerhouse. “He sleeps all the time and he smells funny.”
She visited fairly often in those years, when Jack had to work on weekends, or when she had a shopping or movie expedition planned with her grandmother. We both loved those days, I because I loved her, by then, with all the passion I could never spend on Sarah or Lucy or my mother, and she, I suppose, because I interested her. She seemed to see nothing odd about an uncle—or cousin, or however she thought of me—who had shut himself up in a summerhouse behind the great house of his birth and saw almost no one. We had long conversations about a startling variety of things: leaping, veering, shining talk that refreshed and enchanted me. It was I who read her Kipling and Malory, and she loved them as her mother had done before her. Lucy had told her about the two books, those icons of safety and magic which had burned so clearly and steadily through our childhood, and when she cried aloud with Mowgli, “Mark my trai-i-i-1!” and, “We be of one blood, thou and I,” it was nearly impossible for me to distinguish between mother’s and daughter’s voices; both resonated, intertwined, in my heart. The words never failed to bring a thickness to my throat: she was, after all, one way or another, of my blood. I like to think that it was, in part, from me that she learned to assess and reflect and think abstractly, and it was from her that I learned again to dream and suppose and play. There was little that she did not say to me. It was hard indeed to remember that she was only five.
“He’s not a lump,” I said, on the day that she spoke so of Jack Venable. “He works hard all day and he’s tired when he gets home. If he didn’t rest he couldn’t go to work and take care of you.”
“Phooey,” she said. “He doesn’t have to do that. You’ll do that. Mama says you will.”
“Well, I would if he couldn’t for some reason,” I said, cursing Lucy silently for that tacit belittlement of Jack. “But he can. It’s his job. It’s what fathers do. He loves you and your mama.”
“You love my mama, don’t you?” she said.
“Of course I do,” I said, not at all liking where this was going. “But in a different way.”
“Well, I think your way is better than Jack’s,” she said. “He really is a lump. He’s a collection of bumping molecules.”
I recognized Lucy’s voice in that, and said, severely, “I don’t want to hear any more talk about your father, Malory. He’s a good man. You’d really be up the creek without him around to look after you.”
“Maybe,” she said equably. “But I could probably look after myself just fine. I wouldn’t be afraid.”
I knew that she wouldn’t. Malory was afraid of almost nothing. Almost. But there was one thing of which she was afraid, afraid with a terror so deep and consuming that it sent her into the kind of white, blind hysterics that I had not seen since Lucy’s childhood. At first, when she was very small, we could not determine what it was; the fits came at random, once or twice at the Peachtree Road house, more often in the farmhouse. She could only gasp and sob something that sounded like “shoo man, shoo man.”
Finally we isolated what it was that sent her into that awful, mindless shrieking:
It was the framed photographs that stood about the farmhouse, all taken on the same day, of her grandfather, James Bondurant, Lucy’s father. In all of them, he was wearing black and white saddle shoes, and it was only when she was old enough to shape words into sentences that we could fathom why she was so terrified of him. She was afraid he was going to come in his strange, striped shoes and take her mother away. Until she was eight or nine, we could not disabuse her of that notion.
“Did you tell her that?” I demanded of Lucy, the first time the root of the fear came to light.
“Of course not,” she said indignantly.
“Well, where the hell else would she get it?”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Gibby, I might have said something about him coming back to get me one day, but nothing that would make her behave like that.”
“Lucy,” I said, “sometimes I think you’re just plain crazy.”
I would remember those words.
The first of her truly bad times came, as we might have foreseen, with the murder of Martin Luther King in Memphis. She was on her way to Pascagoula, Mississippi, in the Austin when the news came over the radio, and the young photographer with her said that she simply dropped her hands from the steering wheel and began to scream, and that if he had not grabbed the wheel they would have gone off the road and been killed. She had screamed until he had gotten her to the emergency room of the nearest little community hospital, where they had had to literally sedate her into unconsciousness, and they kept her that way until Jack and Shem Cater and a trained nurse I had hired arrived in the Rolls to bring her back to Atlanta.
We took her straight to Ridgecrest. It took them two days to get her coherent enough to diagnose her, and even then it was not a unanimous diagnosis. One psychiatrist said flatly that it was schizophrenia and a severe case at that, another opted for manic-depressive psychosis, another favored fatigue and shock and hormonal imbalance and two simply shrugged.
By that time Lucy was talking again, and I gather that what she said had not exactly won friends and influenced people. Between expletives and epithets and the shrill eldritch shrieking, she was obsessed with two separate and bizarre notions: that her father was going to be at King’s funeral looking for her and that Jacqueline Kennedy was in Atlanta for the sole purpose of spiriting MLK’s body away. It was hard to tell which agitated her more. She strained and struggled against her attendants—seeking to rise and go down to Ebenezer Baptist Church to the funeral, both to meet the phantom father and to confront the treacherous Jackie—until they finally had to place her in isolation.
“Can’t you hear them, you assholes?” she would cry over and over. “Can’t you hear them calling? Are you going to sit here and let her take him and dump him in the ocean at Hyannis Port?”
And when they would not let her go, she subsided, finally, into heartbroken sobs, and then into a muteness that resembled, as it had after Malory’s birth, catatonia.
She seemed to surface again in the days following the funeral, but she was dull and lethargic, and grew slovenly and unkempt and had to be bathed and fed by attendants. Jack, exhausted by shuttling between his office and the hospital and home, was forced in the end to send the boys to their aunt back in Nashville, who promptly put them into Castle Heights Military School for the summer, and he gave up and sent Malory to stay with us on Peachtree Road. He was by this time so emotionally and physically depleted that I was relieved to have the children away. I felt, in some obscure and unexamined way, that for the moment they were, at least, safe.
Lucy began to improve slowly with the administration of a powerful tranquilizer and one of the new tri-cyclic antidepressants, and begged so insistently to have Malory visit her that the doctors finally decided it might be therapeutic, and so, on a Saturday afternoon in June, I picked Jack up in the Rolls with Malory and drove them there. I had not seen Lucy since we admitted her, but from the little Jack had told me of her condition and appearance, I was apprehensive in the extreme about letting Malory see her. Malory had been strangely unperturbed by her mother’s illness during her stay with us; she had said, when I broached the subject with her, only, “Mama is all right. She says so.”
But Lucy was not all right, and the sight of her in the hospital’s mercilessly lit, plastic-furnished dayroom smote Malory to white-faced silence. I felt enormous red anger at all of them—the doctors, Jack, Lucy herself—but it was too late to do anything at all. Malory walked up to her mother where she was sitting on a green vinyl sofa, an attendant standing behind her, and sat down beside her silently. For what seemed an eternity, she simply stared at Lucy. I could see the rise and fall, rise and fall, of the breath in her thin little chest, but I could not hear her breathing.
It was one of Lucy’s bad days, they told us later. She sat dull-eyed and obviously drugged under the sucking lights, her hands clenched motionless in her lap. Her slacks and shirt were spotted with food and stippled with pinpoint cigarette burns, and her fall of heavy, silky black hair had been cut brutally short and square around her fine head, so that there were nicks in the white scalp behind her ears. She had obviously been given shock therapy, for the red stigmata of the electrodes still marred her translucent temples. She was bruised and scratched from her struggles against the restraints, and did not smell clean, and at first she did not speak, only looked into our faces with opaque eyes. Then she put out her hand and touched Malory, and said, in her startling old rich, gay voice, “Hey, sweetheart. Give Mommy a kiss.”
Malory put her arms around her mother. She closed her eyes. She whispered into Lucy’s dreadful hair: “Mama, I want you to come home. I’ll be a good girl if you’ll just come home. I won’t ever be bad anymore. I’ll take care of you, Mama. I’ll be the mommy all the time, and you can be the little girl.”
“That’s right,” Lucy said, smiling happily, rocking Malory against her. “You be the mommy and I’ll be the little girl.”
Even through the great, rushing wind of shock and rage in my head, I wondered how many times Malory had heard those words, and how deeply the conviction went that Lucy’s illness and incarceration were her fault. I seemed to hear, miles and years away, a small Lucy Bondurant pleading with my own father to take care of her, and promising to be a good girl if only he would do so. Beside me, Jack Venable cursed in a defeated monotone.
She seemed to see Jack and me then, for the first time, and the smile widened until it threatened to split her dry, splotched face. I winced. Lucy’s fine, fresh porcelain skin seemed to have been tanned like delicate leather, crazing like centuries-old kid gloves at the corners of her eyes and mouth. There were sores at the corners of her lips and the base of her nostrils, where the skin had cracked and bled and healed and cracked all over again. The hands that she clapped in glee were as dry and rough as an old woman’s. She held them out to us, and Jack took them in his, and I sat down on the other side of her and put my arm around her shoulders.
“Hi, sugar,” Jack said.
“What’s happening, Luce?” I said, tasting the ludicrousness of the words as I said them.
“Jack! Gibby!” she cried. “Stick it in your ear!”
We looked at her. She laughed mightily.
“Stick it in your ear, you bastards,” she sang. “Stick it in your ear!” And she disengaged her hand from Jack’s and put her finger into her ear.
“I think she picked it up from one of the other…guests,” the attendant said. “We don’t think it means anything. But she loves it. Sometimes the only way we can get her to take her medication or go to bed is to play stick it in your ear with her. It works every time, so we don’t knock it.”
“No,” Jack said. “If that’s what it takes, I’ll go around with my finger in my ear for the rest of my life.”
His face was bleached, and he had aged years in the days of her hospitalization, but the look he gave Lucy was still heavy with the freight of his first, dazzled love for her.
“Stick it in your ear, Jack!” Lucy chimed.
> He put his forefinger into his ear and smiled, and she laughed and clapped her hands. The dull drug haze seemed to lift with her laughter. She shook her head slightly. The mad rictus became her old smile. Malory crept close to her and Lucy hugged her, and reached up and kissed my cheek, and looked into our faces one by one.
“I’ve been away a long time,” she said. “I’d really like to come home now.”
She improved rapidly after that. Her psychiatrist kept her at Ridgecrest until the antidepressant had time to take effect, but the next two weeks there were uneventful. Lucy was obedient to hospital routine and participated dutifully in the group therapy sessions and the crafts and exercise classes. She attended meals in a group with other adult patients, leaving the large, barred area containing the dayroom and patients’ rooms in the company of an attendant three times a day to go down to the sunny, modern cafeteria for meals. Once or twice, she said, they were taken in the Ridgecrest bus to a nearby movie and a bowling alley, and once a day they walked on the paths and sat in the garden, looking, in their slacks and shorts, like vacationers, albeit pale and ill-barbered ones, at some spartan, economy-class resort.
“It’s like a big, bland camp for grown-ups; not as fancy as Camp Greystone, by any means, but a hell of a lot more fun,” she said on one of my visits that summer. We were sitting in the dayroom, and she had introduced me to nearly every adult patient in the hospital; they came up, one by one, as if drawn to some magnetic force field. I thought, remembering the irresistible light and energy that had played around her in her first youth, that they probably had been. She seemed happy in the hospital, oddly so—somehow safe and shielded and free—and Lucy, when she was happy, had always been irresistible.
She was looking better, too; the harsh, terrible haircut was beginning to soften and fall around her face, and her skin had plumped and smoothed under the rich moisturizing cream I had brought her, and she had asked for her makeup and Tabu to be brought from home. Except for the fading saffron bruises and the red indentations in her temples, she did not look so different from the way she had in the months before her hospitalization. She was even gaining a little weight; the dayroom had its own small kitchen attached, and it was kept stocked with food and snacks of all kinds. All of the patients, she told me, were complaining about getting fat.
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