Peachtree Road

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  “Is this the girl who was dying to get away to the clean, pastoral country in a quaint old farmhouse and get her hands into the good earth?” I said. “Give Jack a break, Luce. He’s working his butt off. He deserves a hot dinner and a drink or two when he gets home. You know it’s you he’s thinking about, and he’s probably right. You don’t seem able just to do a job. You have to work yourself into the hospital.”

  She was quiet, and I heard the deep inhalation of her cigarette, and then she said, “Oh, I know it. He’s right. He’s always right. I had gotten myself in bad shape. And he never stops thinking of me—sometimes I wonder why he bothers. I’m really awful to him sometimes, Gibby. But he’s gotten so…old….”

  “Well, he isn’t exactly young,” I said, near exasperation with her. “He was more than ten years older than you when you married him and he still is. I hope you didn’t think that would change. And he works fourteen hours a day most days. What did you expect?”

  “I don’t know,” she said bleakly. “Not this.”

  “What about Malory?” I said. “Isn’t she company for you?”

  “Malory is a darling and a dream, but she’s in kindergarten now most of the day, and then she has play dates with the little retards around here in the afternoons—Jack makes her go; she hates it—and when he gets home she turns into Mary Poppins, buzzing around here with drinks and trays and newspapers and all till you’d like to trip her. And she is five years old. Five-year-olds are not the greatest dinner conversationalists, you know.”

  “I do know,” I said, distinctly annoyed now. “Didn’t you, until now? Is this a recent discovery? Mother discovers five-year-old’s conversation intellectually lacking? Maybe you should send her to Dale Carnegie. Or me—I think she’s terrific company.”

  “Oh, you’re impossible!” she snapped, and hung up the phone, but in a moment she called back.

  “It’s me who’s impossible, not you,” she said. “I’m sorry, Gibby. I’ve turned into a first-class, gold-plated bitch. I’m going to have another talk with Jack tonight about going back to work. He’s got to have noticed how miserable I am, and God knows we need the money, and this time I’ll find something that’s impossible to get absorbed in, like filing or typing or answering telephones.”

  “I didn’t know you could file or type, and I wouldn’t let you answer my telephone if it was ringing off the hook,” I said. “Jungle drums are more your style.”

  She laughed, the old dark, rich, fudgy laugh.

  “Why is it I only love bastards?” she said. “I can do anything I have to do to get out of God’s Little Acre; you’ll see how good I can be. This time it will be different. Will you back me up with Jack if he gives me a hard time?”

  I said I would, but in the end I did not have to. She must have convinced him that night that she could hold a job and not let it devour her, for she was phoning her contacts the next day. She eventually persuaded SOUTH to take her back, this time as a receptionist working from 10:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M., and soon she was back in the flood waters of the civil rights movement again—or at least paddling in the slow, sunny shallows at its borders. She seemed, for a span of months, to be content with speaking by telephone to the disembodied voices of the movement’s rank and file, foot soldiers now instead of lieutenants, but as the spring moved into an early inferno summer, I wondered often how long that dutiful new disassociation would last.

  I think she might have made it work, eventually made some sort of hard-won transition from activist to onlooker in the movement, if the movement itself had not let her down. If that great, pure, onrushing spate of personal heroism and selfless integrity had not faltered, I think she could have drawn enough stimulus, enough exaltation—who knows?—enough self-validation from simply wading near its peaceful banks. Lucy always did need intimate contact with heroes and legends; had, since the day she stepped into the house on Peachtree Road out of the dragon-infested world. The movement fed them to her by the hundreds for years.

  But in 1969, that lusterless year, Richard Nixon took office as the thirty-seventh president of a battered and reeling United States, and a diminished and spent Ben Cameron announced that he would not seek a third term as mayor, and Lucy’s fiercely idolized Ralph McGill died of a heart attack in the home of a black friend, and the great civil rights movement divided itself around the mammoth rocks of Vietnam and the youth movement and the drug culture, and never really came together again. It was the very young who raged in the streets now, and they marched and chanted and smoked and sang against the war and their fathers and mothers. The Negro youths who ran in the streets of the South ran largely with the nirvana-bent white young, beaded and fringed and belled and stoned.

  In her flaming soul, Lucy did not give a tinker’s damn for Vietnam or the hippies. There were no heroes among them; not to her vision-dazzled blue eyes. She did not even care for the budding feminist movement. She found no heroes in those sly jungles, or in the strident bands of bra burners, or in the stoned and supine young. I don’t know why I did not anticipate that, lacking heroes, she would eventually go in search of them. It is easier to understand why Jack Venable did not see it; he was, by then, simply so tired that he would have looked the other way if she had put on a suit of armor and brought a white horse around to the front door.

  But I, who had watched her quests and even ridden out beside her, on occasion, since childhood; I, who had, when she could not find a hero, tried to become one for her myself; I, who felt her hungers and thirsts, once, as my own—I should have seen. I should have known.

  Lucy met Beau Longshore when he came shambling into the office of SOUTH looking for funds for his Mississippi mission, and she was probably beyond help by the time he told her what he sought. As terrible as its consequences were, I often thought I would have loved to be there to witness that meeting. Sparks must have danced like fireflies in the overheated air of the dingy little office. I have seen Lucy connect before with certain receptive people, and have felt her do it with me; I can testify to the palpability of those invisible explosions of pure light. But they must have been both palpable and visible that day.

  It was inevitable that she took Beau home with her to the farmhouse for the night, since he was without cash or contacts or any other resource in the city. She brought him by the summerhouse on the way, to meet me and cadge a sandwich and a drink, and a contribution, and when I was introduced I had the eerie feeling that I was shaking hands with Lucy’s twin. The same luminosity looked out of his sunken eyes; the same fever; the same veiled madness. By the time the makeshift meal was over I was almost as captivated by him as she was, but also profoundly alarmed by the meeting of the two of them. I almost called Jack Venable and told him to put an end to the association no matter what it took, but then I didn’t. I think perhaps I knew, on some level, that it was already far too late.

  Beau’s detractors, even then, would have peopled a small county in wire-grass Georgia, but he was personally almost irresistible. Later, after he achieved national recognition, his following gained almost the status and intensity of a religious cult—which, in a very real way, it was—and his detractors feared as well as hated him. He was very tall, and thin to the point of emaciation, and, like Jack Venable, prematurely white-haired, either by hereditary disposition or by bodily abuse. His brown eyes burned in sockets so deep and shadowed they looked like pits in a pear bog in which live coals smoldered. He was deeply tanned from the relentless sun of the Mississippi gulf coast, and the effect was oddly patrician, coupled with his long, graceful bones and good facial modeling. He wore white duck pants and a faded blue denim shirt, and in them he looked as if he had just rowed ashore in a dinghy from the family racing sloop.

  In fact, the pants were the white ones he had been issued in the African clinic where he had gone as a medical missionary, and the shirt had come out of the same poor box that clothed his patients in the swamp near Pass Christian. But the aristocratic demeanor was legitimate. He was, Lucy told me l
ater, about as FFV as it was possible to be, having in his ancestry both Custis and Lee blood, and he had graduated from theology school at Sewanee and medical school at Johns Hopkins, both with honors. He did not trade on his family back in Richmond, and they in turn did not acknowledge him. The breach had been opened when he passed up the pulpit of the old gray stone Episcopal church in Richmond to go to Gabon, and had become an abyss when he came home with a shining black, Oxford-educated wife. She had quickly become disenchanted with being a missionary’s wife and disappeared back to her people in Bandundu, and he had not seen her again.

  “I’m sure we’re divorced in her eyes,” he told Lucy. “I think they do it by dancing around a chicken, or something. As for God’s eyes, he winks at a hell of a lot in Africa.”

  In Africa he saw that it was disease and passivity, not Godlessness, that was the ancient enemy, and so he came home and put himself through medical school with a stipend from the church and three and four odd jobs at a time. It was inevitable that he would turn to drugs. The whole tenor of that generation was one of chemical exaltation, and he found that the easily purloined drugs gave strength to his intensity and got him through Hopkins. Many medical students of the Age of Aquarius regularly took uppers and downers and Percodan and Demerol; Beau Longshore simply never came down. He graduated to cocaine and flirted with LSD, and in between he drank.

  This chemical pot-au-feu in his bloodstream did not, for many years, seem to affect him materially. The shimmer of energy and elation in his veins was offset by his lounging, slouching demeanor and his deceptively strong constitution, and in the ten years or so that he had been out of medical school and in Africa and later on the steaming Mississippi gulf coast, he had been able to accomplish an astounding amount of social good on an astoundingly small amount of money. But now he was running out of cash and physical impetus, and his methods of practicing medicine and theology had alienated him from the church and his profession, and so he had come, for the first time, looking for help.

  And what he found was Lucy Venable.

  “Nobody knows about the work he’s doing, Gibby,” she caroled to me on the telephone the next day, after Beau had headed back to Mississippi. “He doesn’t go looking for publicity, and nobody down there cares about the poor coastal Negroes. They never have. Beau’s not a saint, thank God—he’s really very realistic about them, and very funny. Cynical, you might say. He says that he never met a noble savage, but he has met an awful lot of sorry ones, and the same thing is true of the Negroes on the coast over there. He says they won’t hit a lick at a snake to help themselves and probably wouldn’t if they had a million dollars apiece, and what they really need more than money or food or the vote or anything is just to feel good. He says that feeling bad is probably the root of all racial oppression; the man who’s starved and sick and hook-wormy and tired all the time just won’t stand up and insist on his rights. He says they need energy as well as legislation, and he probably can’t do anything about the latter, but he can the former. So he gives them drugs.”

  “Holy shit, Lucy,” I exclaimed. “Just what the world needs now. A latter-day saint who goes around turning on the poor and the downtrodden. You know, of course, that what he’s doing is illegal.”

  “No it’s not,” she said hotly. “He’s a doctor as well as a minister—he prescribes the drugs he gives them, with a written prescription and everything. And he does an awful lot of other things. He preaches at their little church once a month, and goes around to others, and he marries and baptizes and buries them, and he organizes them for voter registration and takes them to get their teeth fixed, and begs clothes and food and money for them from whoever he can, and he even teaches classes for the smallest ones, and for the ones who can’t read. Most of them can’t. There’s no school for miles and miles. And of course, he runs a free clinic. Nobody has any idea what he’s doing down there—I don’t even think that miserable little backwater has a name. The nearest big towns are New Orleans and Mobile, but they’re hundreds of miles away, and they never heard of him there. His church and the doctors he knows won’t help him anymore because of the drugs. What he needs most of all is publicity, and I’m going to get him some. I talked to Chip Turner at Newsweek, and he said they’d love to see a piece on him. I’m going to see if SOUTH will let me go down and do it, and then Chip can pick it up, and that way it’ll get local and national exposure. I’ll give Beau whatever Chip pays me, of course. I want you to write him a nice, fat check in the meantime. He doesn’t even have enough money to get back. He hitchhiked up here.”

  “You’re out of your mind if you think I’m going to finance the habits of a bunch of black junkies in Nowheresville, Mississippi,” I said. “I’ll send a truckload of medical supplies and food and clothes or whatever else he needs down there, but I’m not going to give him money to buy drugs. Marijuana for the masses is not my idea of an answer to poverty and oppression.”

  “He doesn’t give out downers, only uppers,” Lucy said reasonably. “Amphetamines. It’s just the stuff in diet pills, it doesn’t hurt anybody. Maybe some tranquilizers for the ones who can’t sleep or have anxiety problems. And pain medication for the ones who need it. Never any hard stuff. It’s not any different from what any doctor would do.”

  “Most doctors don’t prescribe drugs as a philosophy of social change,” I said. “I guess he’s on something himself, isn’t he? He sure looks like a junkie.”

  “He looks wonderful,” Lucy said hotly. “He is wonderful. He’s a real hero in an anti-hero age, and I’m going to do a sensational piece on him. Lord, you sound more like Jack Venable every day. If you all have so many answers, why aren’t you out somewhere helping people in need, instead of hiding out in front of a television set or in an overblown dollhouse?”

  I bit back an angry reply, largely because she had a point. I was not exactly proud of my noninvolvement in the great social issues swirling around me, but I could not seem to fight the entropy that kept me fast in the summerhouse. I could convince myself for long periods of time that my work on The Compleat Georgian would, in the long run, have greater lasting import than any sporadic, knee-jerk attempt I might make at social activism, but I knew very well too, underneath it all, that the only real value my magnum opus might ever have was that of refuge and solace for an aging Peter Pan afraid to go out into the world. So I let her stinging remark about the summerhouse lie.

  “I gather Jack is not totally enchanted with Dr. Longshore,” I said.

  “Jack was rude as hell to him the whole time he was here, and absolutely refused to let me wake Malory up to meet him. And he made me take him down to the bus station first thing the next morning; wouldn’t even let him sleep late and have some breakfast, when it was clear the poor man was half-dead for lack of sleep and malnourished to boot. He said he wasn’t going to have any stray lions of God under his roof; he’d had enough of my stray black panthers. I was so mad at him I could have really killed him, Gibby. And Beau was such a gentleman about it. So graceful and funny. He actually had Jack laughing in the end, even as he was pointing him toward the door.”

  “What did he say that made Jack laugh?” I asked.

  “He said he didn’t blame him. He said the only thing worse than a professional do-gooder was a professional do-gooder who was also a stoned-out-of-his-mind fund-raiser who said ‘aboot’ and ‘hoose.’ He said if he were Jack he’d throw him out, too.”

  I laughed, reluctantly liking Beau Longshore even more than I had the day before. “He’s a charismatic sonofabitch, I’ll say that for him,” I said. “Don’t worry about him, Luce. I have a very strong feeling he can take care of himself. Let Chip Turner go down there himself and do a story on him, or send some fresh, bushy-tailed kid. You promised you wouldn’t overdo it.”

  “What’s to overdo about a spring weekend on a subtropical beach?” Lucy said gaily. “With a medical missionary close at hand? It sounds like a church retreat instead of a news story. I’m thinking of taking Ma
lory.”

  “NO!” It was a cry straight out of my heart and viscera, without thought or volition. “I mean it, Lucy! You can go trailing off after that middle-aged Pied Piper if you want to—nobody can stop you. But you are not going to take Malory. I absolutely forbid it.”

  There was a long pause, and then she laughed softly. “You forbid it, Gibby? “You forbid me to take my own child with me on a weekend trip to the beach? Who do you think you are?”

  “You know who I am,” I said, rage running red and hot in my blood. “If Jack won’t stop you, I will. I promise you that.”

  Another pause. “Oh, calm down,” she said, in a lighter, conciliatory voice. “I’m not going to take her, really. I just said I was thinking about it. Lord, you’d think I wanted to take her to a white slaver’s den, the way you and Jack Venable are carrying on. He threatened to take her to live with you and Mother if she went with me. It’s going to be you-all’s fault if she grows up scared to take risks or meet new people.”

  Good, I thought. I hope she gets through her entire life without taking your kind of risks or meeting many of your kind of people. But I did not say it aloud. I heard in Lucy’s voice an edge of febrile gaiety that could easily spill over into recklessness and worse; I had heard it before, and it did not do to push or challenge it. Not where Malory was concerned.

  “So when are you going down there?” I said.

  “In the morning. As soon as I can cash a check and pack a bag and rent a car. Chip won’t advance me any money, but he’s paying for a car for the weekend. I’m going to get a convertible if they have one. The weather on the gulf coast should be beautiful.”

  “Be careful, then,” I said neutrally. I did not want her to hear the unease in my voice. It was an effort to keep it out.

  “I will. I’ll see you early next week, and tell you all about it. And I’m sorry I snapped at you. I didn’t mean that about the summerhouse, or Malory, either. I love you, Gibby, and all I ever do is apologize to you. Please don’t ever give up on me, even if I deserve it.”