All this I saw, in the dying decade of the seventies, when I raised my head and looked around me. And it seemed to me, when I did, that only I, in the summerhouse behind the house on Peachtree Road, and my father, mute and motionless in his absurd Turkish seraglio upstairs in it, were unchanged, voiceless ghosts in a city that did not know us.
But the changes did not, in the main, concern me, for the cloistered microcosm that was the house on Peachtree Road and the summerhouse behind it was by then, as old Omar put it, Paradise enow. Malory Venable came to live with us when she was fifteen, and from that time on everyone who came into 2500 walked with a lighter step and a higher heart.
She came because, ultimately, it was impossible for her to stay at the farmhouse. Even Lucy, who drove her away while sobbing her devotion, saw that. Even Jack, whose face as he deposited her in our care on a flickering April day was that of a man watching the last ship slide away over the cold sea in which he struggled, brought her with gratitude that she had a haven.
“Take care of her for us,” he said, his voice as gray and slack as his heavy face under the scant white hair. “Her mother can’t keep from wrecking her and I can’t help her. I don’t know what the hell is going to become of us, but I have to know she’s safe.”
Malory was crying, unwilling tears streaking the beautiful, austere young face, so like and yet so unlike Lucy’s. She stood clutching a dreadful, scuffed little aqua Samsonite train case that had been her mother’s and looked from Jack Venable to me, and I have never seen another living creature so torn.
“Tell Mama I love her and I’ll call her every day,” she said in a stricken voice. “Tell her if she needs me I can be there in an hour.”
“I’ll tell her you love her,” Jack Venable said. “But I won’t tell her you’ll call, and I won’t tell her you’ll come. I won’t have either of those things, Malory. We agreed. There’s no point in your coming here if you’re going to stay poised to fly home every time she yells for you. If you do, even once, until she’s a whole lot better than she is now, I’ll put you in boarding school. And don’t think I won’t. You have absolutely got to have some kind of life for yourself, and she’s not going to get better until she stops leaning on you. You know what Faith said.”
Malory did not answer. She turned away so we could not see her tears and I started to put my arm around her, and then stopped. I knew she would lose her battle for composure if I did, and Malory at fifteen was as fierce as a young Amazon about that.
“We’ll keep you posted, and you can call her anytime you want to, or come by,” I said. “The coffeepot’s always on. It’s going to work out just fine, Jack. We’re going to make things really special for her.”
“I hope so,” he said dully. “Nothing has been, so far.”
He got into the old Ford and drove away, and he did not look back at us. I watched him out of sight in the omnipresent traffic on Peachtree Road and then turned to Malory.
“Let’s get your stuff upstairs and let your grandmother do her worst, and then you can come out and have tea with me. Don’t be surprised if she’s draped your entire room in pink organdy. I saw that little chap from Rich’s—the one who put your great-uncle in the harem—floating up the stairs in a veritable cloud of pink the other day.”
She giggled, a weak, watery giggle.
“I know I can’t stay out in the summerhouse with you,” she said. “But I don’t see why I have to stay just down the hall from her. That little place up in the attic that you and Mama had when you were little would be just fine. I don’t know if I can take pink ruffles.”
“Give it a try,” I said. “A few pink ruffles might do you good. And besides, your grandmother is so eager to have things perfect for you that she’ll probably let you redo it all in black and worship Satan if you want to. If you just can’t stand it, we’ll see about the attic. But I warn you, your mother and I thought it was pretty awful a good deal of the time. It’s no place to be under house arrest, I’ll tell you.”
She looked at me gravely, and my heart squeezed afresh at the clean, severe beauty of her purely carved face and long, light dancer’s body.
“Mama was always in trouble, wasn’t she?” she said. “She tells me funny stories about the Great Captivity, as she calls it, and how furious Grandmother always was with her, but some of it must have been her own fault. People don’t just…persecute little children. It must have been going on even then—the sickness, I mean.”
“I think it was, on a much smaller scale,” I said. “Of course, I didn’t think of it like that then. I was right in it with her most of the time. But yes, the seeds were there, I guess. She was a wild little thing, always. But probably the most…entrancing…I’ve ever known.”
“I know,” she said. “She still is, to me. There’s nobody like her. I wish I had her…energy, and her gift for making you feel that the world is a special, magical kind of place, and that you’re the most important person in it. And her humor…she’s just so funny, Shep. I’ll never have half her wit, or her…vivacity. Is that the right word? It’s so much more than that….”
“Thank God you won’t,” I said, wrestling her bags into the foyer of the big house. “It’s wrecked a lot of lives, or nearly. What you’ve got is a thousand times better, but I don’t think you’ll be able to see that till you’ve been away from her for a while.”
“What have I got?” She looked at me with grave, curious eyes.
“Goodness,” I said, surprising myself. “Integrity. Plus a few million other pretty nice things. You’ll be an extraordinary woman, Malory, if you’ll let yourself be a teenager first.”
She blushed, a deep, vivid rose that stained her translucent skin like summer heat, and smiled shyly.
“That’s nice. I hope I will,” she said.
“Count on it,” I said. “Look out, now. I hear your grandmother coming down in full cry.”
Malory herself seemed to realize that she could not live in the house with her mother any longer. It was not a realization that had come easily.
For the first two years after she was home from the last stay in the hospital, it had looked as though Faith Farr had been right, and that Lucy had, this time, really gotten a handle on the illness and drinking. She took her medication faithfully, and continued to see Faith at her office twice a week—much of the time for free, I know, for Faith knew as well as I, by then, what the state of Jack and Lucy’s finances was—and got herself a job three mornings a week in the office of the little country weekly published in Lithonia. At first she simply answered the telephone, and then she graduated to some light civic and business reporting, and when her first byline ran she was as exalted as if she had won a Pulitzer Prize.
“It’s a start, Gibby,” she lilted on one of her evening telephone calls, which had resumed when she came home from the hospital. Her voice was full of hope.
“It’s a dinky little story, and the money won’t even pay for gas and lunches, but it’s a start. And it’s a damned good story, if I do say so myself.”
“It is that,” I said. And it was. Lucy writing county business briefs was like a Lippizaner pulling a plow, but the little job engaged her and kept her mounting restlessness and energy from reaching out to Malory, and there was nothing in the minimal little office, or in that end of the county, for that matter, to either threaten or overstimulate her. For what seemed a very long time, Jack continued to work and sleep, work and sleep, and Lucy spent her afternoons holed up writing something she would neither show nor discuss with anyone, and Malory, poised on the brink of puberty and high school, continued to come home from school and see to the housework and prepare dinner and minister to Jack and Lucy—for black Estelle was simply too old and tired by then to work anymore. I thought that the order and balance of those days were weighted heavily against Malory, but it was a routine she throve upon, and they all three seemed to find a measure of stability and respite in that quiet time.
But then, almost overnight, Malory
turned from child into woman, and the stability and respite flew end over end. After her daughter got her first period Lucy bought a bottle of champagne to celebrate and drank the whole thing by herself, and ended up piling the Ford into a stop sign on the way to Wendy’s at three o’clock in the morning “to see who might want to come out and play.” She was so stricken and remorseful when she sobered up, weeping and apologizing to her white-faced daughter and gray-faced husband when they came to get her in the little county hospital emergency room, that they did not call Faith Farr. For an entire weekend, Lucy was violently ill from the liquor—something that had never happened before—so ill that she swore she never wanted even to smell alcohol again, and Malory, trembling with fatigue from two straight days of holding her heaving, retching mother’s bandaged head, believed her. Surely no one would willingly court that awful, gut-tearing nausea again.
But when Malory bought her first brassiere, red-faced with embarrassment and pride, out of the money she had saved from the grocery fund, and came home with her narrow chest thrown elaborately out, Lucy brought home scotch and drank it in her bedroom, while Malory was making dinner and before Jack got home from work. Unlike the champagne, the scotch did not make her sick. They did not even realize that she was drunk until they heard the Ford scratch off into the night, well after she had supposedly gone to bed. This time she did not come home until the next morning, and when she did, she had the look they both knew well by now, the hollowness and flaccidity, the spent and sated look that Jack called her overfucked and underfed look.
And so it started again. The third time she did it she lost the job at the little weekly, and the fourth time Faith Farr terminated the therapy.
“It’s the booze by now that’s the main problem,” she said, when I finally got wind of Lucy’s relapse and called her. Jack and Malory had said nothing to me about the freshening of the illness. It was Lucy herself, in one of the late-night telephone calls from a motel outside Athens, who alerted me.
“She won’t go to AA,” Faith went on, “and she won’t take her Antabuse, and I can’t do a goddamned thing for her until she does. Alcohol always gets to be the main problem, sooner or later. I helped her before and maybe I could again, Shep, but I don’t do alcoholics. There’s no percentage in it. And I’m not going to let her play games with me.”
“Then who’ll help her?” I said in angry despair, thinking of Malory’s strained young face and haunted eyes. “Jack can’t handle her. Malory sure as hell can’t, though she tries her best. They don’t have a red cent between them—they owe everybody in east DeKalb County. She’ll have to go to Central State or somewhere if you don’t help her. They can’t afford anything else, and Jack won’t let me pay for her hospitalization.”
“Good for Jack,” she said. “I guess Central State it is, if they can get her there. They’ll have to commit her, though. You know she’s not going to let them take her. And I wish you all joy of that. Sorry, Shep. I know you don’t believe me, but I love Lucy. I really do. Let’s say I love her enough to send her to Central State or wherever it takes. Can you say the same?”
I knew I couldn’t. And I knew that Jack, for all his exhausted disengagement, probably could not, either. As for Malory, the mere mention of the name sent her wild. She threatened to run away for good if we put her mother in Central State, and I did not doubt that this time she would do it. I had asked her why she was so violently opposed to it after the third time I retrieved Lucy from a motel.
“It’s just a hospital, like all the others she’s been in,” I said. “Not as fancy, but basically the same.”
“They’ll give her a lobotomy,” she sobbed. “Not many people know it, but that’s what they do with their alcoholic patients. Mama told me. Can you imagine Mama after a lobotomy, Shep? I’d rather she was dead. I’ll die myself before I let you all take her. I promised her—”
She stopped herself then, but the slip had told me what I needed to know. Lucy’s lurid picture of Central State Hospital had had just the effect on Malory that she had known it would. Lucy was safe from Central State or any other hospital after that. She had known she would be. She knew better than perhaps anyone else that Jack and I would do nothing to cause Malory such pain.
“So what was the loss this time?” I asked Faith.
“Malory, of course. Malory growing up and away from her, starting to date, maybe meeting someone she wanted to marry…the first period, and the brassiere—the whole thing. I could kick myself for not anticipating it and at least warning Jack and Malory.”
“It wouldn’t have changed anything,” I said.
“No,” she said, sadly. “No. It wouldn’t have.”
But a time came, as it had to come, when Lucy overstepped herself and lost her daughter, at least for the time being. Always before, she had bought her liquor and met her men away from the farmhouse. The one time she did not—when she brought the stumbling interstate trucker and his half-gallon of Rebel Yell home to her and Jack’s bedroom at noon and then fell with him into a long, stuporous sleep—was the one time Malory brought a rare new friend, a shy, straitlaced country girl a grade ahead of her at the county high school, home for Cokes and television until the girl’s late bus came.
It was that weekend that Jack brought her to us. Lucy by then was weak and husk-voiced with hysterical weeping and imploring, but this time neither Jack nor I, on the telephone, would relent. And Malory herself, exhausted and desperate, was whitely and silently adamant. It was not until Jack made to drive away and leave her with us that the old, phantom pull began to assert itself and she began to waver. And by that time a team of Clydesdales could not have pried her out of my grasp. Malory was in the house on Peachtree Road at last, and our two lives lifted and deepened and entwined closer than I had ever dared hope they might.
I think she was happy. No, I know she was. As for me, I hummed as I pecked at the old typewriter that was, inch by laborious inch, tracking the spoor of the compleat Georgian, and sang abysmally in the afternoons as I filched snacks and milk and iced tea from a beaming Martha Cater for Malory’s and my daily catch-up meeting in the summerhouse, and for the first and last time in my adult life came, washed and pressed, to sit-down dinners in the beautiful old dining room with Malory and Aunt Willa, cooked by Martha and served with a rusty flourish by Shem. We had seldom had family meals there before, but Aunt Willa, thinking, I suppose, to make up for lost time with her elusive granddaughter, insisted on formal table service with candles and the old Redwine damask and proper courses, and I must admit that it pleased me to see Malory’s pale, chiseled face glowing with candlelight at my table, to watch her fingering the heavy, intricate old Tiffany sterling and the crystal and porcelain with delicate enjoyment, to hear her talking politely about her day.
For the first time since I had conceded Aunt Willa the field, I was more than content to sign the checks with which she kept the house running. I was, in fact, eager to do it. The checks bought, now, a safe and privileged haven for Malory, and I thought that I would finance Willa Slagle Bondurant as chatelaine for all eternity and smile as I did so, if it would keep Malory in the house of her great-aunt and her great-uncle and her mother…and me. That that mother was now forbidden the house—for Aunt Willa and I had, for once, agreed that Lucy was not to come here—gave me only slight pause. There had been a time once for Lucy here, and might perhaps again. But for now, it was the time of Malory Bondurant Venable at 2500 Peachtree Road, and that time remains, to me and perhaps to Malory herself, as whole and perfect and complete unto itself as a robin’s azure egg.
To her credit, Aunt Willa managed to give Malory all she would accept of privilege and near-normalcy. Unlike her recalcitrant daughter, her granddaughter was everything she could have asked for: lovely, graceful, biddable, wellborn enough, unaffected, and with the prospect of infinite eligibility. She was Lucy without the devil in her, Little Lady with brains, a beauty already, a belle waiting to bloom. Best of all, she was the glue that would affix
Willa Slagle Bondurant to the house on Peachtree Road once and for all. One look at my face when Malory was near would have told a fool that.
Aunt Willa was in her element. She enrolled Malory in Westminster and saw her safely into the creamy ports of Rabun Gap-Nacoochee and the Junior Cotillion. She gave a small tea for her at 2500 when she turned sixteen, and bought her flocks of pretty clothes, which, I think, pleased Malory even though she remained devoted to her blue jeans. She took her to the symphony and the ballet and the theater and the High Museum, and sometimes to dinner and an early movie. Shem Cater grew so accustomed to bringing the Rolls around that I had to spring for another hideous dark suit and chauffeur’s cap. He absolutely refused to drive Malory in the casual clothes that the few remaining chauffeurs of Buckhead had, almost to a man, espoused by now. Shem had his own ironclad notions of propriety, and would no more deviate from them than Aunt Willa would from hers.
When Malory was sixteen Aunt Willa launched a campaign to get her out and about in the social world of what she called her “proper young set,” but here Malory set her heels. She did not care for parties and dating, refused with vague politeness the suggestions about spend-the-night parties and turned down the not inconsiderable invitations she had from the young of her milieu, very few of whom I knew, with a sweet and formal distance that discouraged them from asking again. Like Lucy before her, she would not even discuss a debut or the Junior League.
I knew that she was not really shy. It was just that she had been deprived since birth of the flocking instinct and was comfortable only with the nurturing one. Unlike the teenagers around her, she had never truly been young. I was not surprised when she balked at joining any of the clubs and cliques and groups which held, to my mind, so little luster compared to the glittering excesses of the Pinks and the Jells. I was even less surprised when, after I gave her a small Toyota for her sixteenth birthday, she began to spend much of her free time working with a group of young volunteers in a halfway house for teenage drug and alcohol addicts down in the by-now-infamous Tight Squeeze section at Tenth Street and Peachtree. In that time of the flourishing drug culture, when Atlanta was the mecca for the Southeast’s forlorn crop of dropouts and runaways and seekers of chemical solace, Malory Venable’s tender young face was one of the first many of those wounded pilgrims saw, coming out of their murderous hazes. And it was the last many saw on their way back home or to jobs and schools. Malory had the touch; she healed as well as comforted. She had learned the skill early and indelibly. She loved the work, and it bothered her not at all that she had virtually no social life, even though it drove Aunt Willa wild.
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