Peachtree Road

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  There were my father’s friends and associates, or the ones who were left, the fabled Club of the sixties: old men now, though many were still erect and slender and fit. Some wore the burden of the years badly, and some, like Ben Cameron, mumbling in his shadowland back at Carlton House, were missing from the ranks. Many others were dead. But no matter how well they had weathered the passage of time, I did not think they had weathered so well the profound changes it had brought. There was something in many of those eyes now, something tentative and puzzled, that was hard to countenance in eyes that had so recently seen a great vision for the city and watched it brought to life under their hands. They had, they would be the first to acknowledge, been dethroned by the very people they sought to attract—and also by those they did not: the businessmen of the world and the concerted Atlanta black community. The Club had foreseen and even courted the outside interests, but they had not foreseen the depth and scope of the black power emergence in the city.

  I remembered that a social historian from an Eastern university, perhaps my own, once asked Ben Cameron, while he was mayor, if the blacks would ever have full membership in the Club.

  “Well.” Ben had smiled his famous smile. “They’ll always be consulted, of course. But full membership?” and he had spread his hands eloquently, and fallen silent. The national press gave it full play.

  But now they themselves were the Club, those blacks who had had to creep in the after-hours darkness of the Commerce Club to a back meeting room in order to help the mayor of their city formulate plans to save it. The inevitable coalition of outside interests and money and sheer physical numbers brought it about. And the mayor of the city now was Glenn Pickens, whose father had driven Ben Cameron’s Lincolns and still did, for his family, but who had never owned a car himself. Glenn had won the will-o’-the-wisp mayorship handily in the last election, and had been in office almost two years, and was proving to be a very good mayor indeed, tough and efficient and coolly visionary, though to older Atlantans far too inclined to advocate the razing of the city’s old homes and businesses to accommodate the inexorable mercenary army of high rises marching north out Peachtree Road. He was an international mayor for an international city, a new kind of man for a new region called, inelegantly, the Sunbelt.

  But the bewildered old Club, watching its venerable social clubs and homes and watering holes come tumbling down, seeing the small, graceful familiar city of their reign swallowed up in concrete and steel and exhaust fumes, could not keep themselves from thinking of him and often speaking of him as “Ben Cameron’s chauffeur’s boy.”

  “Ben put him through Morehouse, you know,” one would remind another. “Ben virtually raised him. I’m glad he can’t see what’s come of it.”

  I thought that, on the contrary, Ben would approve Glenn Pickens’s odyssey. Indeed, he had been the architect and the navigator of it. But I was glad that he could not see the physical changes in his city; did not have to see his beloved Merrivale House growing dim and tattered in its emptiness, did not have to try to cope with the hordes of newcomers. It gave me physical pain to watch when the old members of the Club occasionally met and attempted to deal with the forceful, no-nonsense, almost laughably rich young outlanders who had the city’s reins in their hands now. The old rules, those oblique, graceful, slow rules of order by which they had conducted their business and the city’s, no longer worked. The newcomers did not comprehend the need for the graceful rituals of their glory days, the joviality and nuance and offhand courtesy, the ballet of thrust and parry. They did not comprehend the innate special-ness of Buckhead that the old lions remembered. There were too many new eyes, hard and flat and canny. They formed a different fulcrum for a new and enormously larger city.

  I looked around at my own friends, standing in a tight knot, shoulder to shoulder, as they had stood since childhood and tend to do at all gatherings still. Even if I had not been seated across the new grave with Jack and Lucy and Aunt Willa, they still would have stood a little apart from me. They did not mean to wound with the distance; indeed, in the beginning, it had been I who chose it. Now it seemed to me that a slight pall of the smoke of Pumphouse Hill still hung about me. It did not stink so much as simply obscure me slightly from their view. In the main, I had not minded, and did not now.

  They’re what’s left of the old Club, I thought, or what it’s turned into. And they’re doing okay. Some of them are powerful as hell in their own right. Some of them are right up there with the Arabs and the top blacks and the newcomers, moving and shaking with the best of them. Carter Rawson now, he can buy himself a chunk of any city in the world and tear it down and redevelop it if he chooses. Snake Cheatham has enough real estate, in addition to his income from medicine, to start his own city. And Charlie—in his time, old Charlie had more money at his fingertips than most small nations, even if very little of it was his. Charlie had had more power than any of us, and thought less about it. Oh, Charlie…

  But we’re not a patch on them, the ones who came before us, I thought. We didn’t pull together. We haven’t worn all that well. Ours was the generation that started to question the rules, maybe. Or maybe the blood just thins out in the second echelon. Young Ben Cameron gone. Tom Goodwin stuck out in limbo with his virulent little Freddie; nowhere, really; not even a part of us anymore. Although maybe he could have been, if he’d ditched that little terrier bitch back while he still could. Now, like most of us, he’s just too tired. Pres and Sarton Hubbard gone back to Savannah, sick of the whole scene here, gone back where things you know stay the same. A.J. and Lana Kemp working a hundred-acre farm now, and maybe better off than any of us. Charlie gone. And of course, me. The Buckhead Boys’ own recluse.

  I was not, I knew, a recluse in the strictest sense of the word. I got out now and then to the drug or hardware store or the post office, or to do a small errand. I spent a lot of time in the downtown library and in the archives of the Historical Society, where no one made any fuss over me. I went often out Peachtree Road past Lenox Square to the Carlton House, to see Dorothy Cameron and look at Ben. I jogged five or so miles every morning at dawn over on the empty North Fulton track, and still made my loping rounds of Buckhead in the evenings. I attended the obligatory funerals, though not the weddings, which were, now, beginning to be the weddings of the offspring of the Pinks and the Jells. For those, I called Tiffany’s and ordered another of the little enameled boxes that they stocked, and had it sent. I answered with courtesy and promptness the few dutiful invitations that still came, but only to refuse them. I saw, really, only Dorothy Cameron, Lucy and Jack Venable, Malory whenever I could and once in a great while, either by accident at Wender & Roberts or at a state occasion such as this, Sarah Cameron Gentry. Little Sarah, trim and tanned still, lithe as a girl in her skirts and sweaters and good wool pants, laughing her girl’s rich, gay laugh, only her great amber eyes deeper now with the kind of pain given only to those who must go on alone. Sarah, once mine, lost now and speaking to me out of the mists of another, greener country.

  Ben Cameron had told me on the afternoon after the fire on Pumphouse Hill that my time would come, my day in the sun. Had it come and gone, I wondered all at once, while I was in the summerhouse annotating dead Camerons? Could I have lived comfortably…outside? Could I now? No. Not then and not now. Not yet. Maybe someday…But then, what do I have to show for all those years? Enough notes for the world’s longest Southern genealogy? Who needs another one of those? Nobody, probably. But I did. I do. It has not been dishonorable work.

  What might I have had? During the concluding prayers for my uncomprehended father, I looked inside myself, deep, deep, into chambers that I usually kept resolutely shut. I saw nothing. I felt blinded, bound, tethered, caged. Behind my closed eyes there was nothing of the present or future, but the past crowded close: all of us, the Pinks and the Jells, the Buckhead Boys and our girls, young and golden and untouched, in the coolness of Wender & Robert’s Drugstore; in the high, hot yellow sun of a
n April day nearly thirty years ago, beside a great slow, brown river with the blue sky caught in it….

  The Pinks and the Jells. My eyes stung behind my closed lids. “We are almost fifty years old,” I thought, “and we are lost in our own country.”

  Coming up the long hill just past Peachtree Battle Avenue on the way home from Oakland I lifted my head, as I always did at this spot, for the first glimpse of 2500’s sweet symmetry, and could not see it. Except for the short block of Peachtree Road where the house sat, and the small square of untouched woods behind it, Peachtree Road was lined out of sight with high rises. Not just the four- and five-story apartment buildings and condominiums that prevailed along some parts of it, but twenty- and thirty-story office and residential towers, blocking the October sun off the brow of the house, casting the blazing garden and the summerhouse into deep blue shadow. My house, that miracle of proportion and grace and light, looked now like an embattled old dowager completely surrounded by blind, marching giants. I drew a sharp breath. The house’s extraordinary beauty was eclipsed now by its air of obstinacy, its ludicrous refusal to accept the inevitable and fall to the great blind Goths. People not familiar with it must laugh to see it: “Wonder who the holdout is? Some old geezer out to make a pile off the developers pissing their pants for that land, probably. Go to it, Pops! Stick it to ’em!”

  “When in God’s name did all this happen?” I said aloud. It was a rhetorical question, and Dorothy Cameron and Shem both knew it was. Neither answered. I knew when it had happened, of course: I had seen the dozers, had heard the jackhammers. I had seen the bleeding earth where the great trees and the old houses of my youth had been torn living from their roots. I could not have failed to see. It had gone on under my very eyes these past five or ten years.

  But in a larger and deeper way, I had not seen. My very retinas had rejected those images of devastation.

  When I got back to the summerhouse I called Carter Rawson.

  “How long have I got before somebody yanks my house out from under me and puts up a fifty-story Taco Bell?” I said without preamble.

  Carter gave the short hyena’s bark that passes with him for mirth. “Forever, from the looks of things. Everybody with any money in all fifty states and about ten countries has been after your place. The whole block, as a matter of fact. Me included. Hasn’t Marty Fox told you?”

  “No,” I said. “After the first three calls five or ten years ago I had the number changed and the phone unlisted and told him the answer was no now and forever more, and not to even tell me about any offers he got.”

  “Any offers—Holy Mother of God.” Carter laughed again. “Time was you could have bought yourself an emerging nation with what you could get for that property, with one phone call. And whatever it was, I’d have doubled it. But right now I doubt if you could get MARTA fare for it.”

  “What’s the matter with it?”

  “It’s the zoning. The word is out that it’s R-one forever; I can’t count the times a change has gotten past the review board and into the city council, and every time it’s rejected. Unanimously. No debate, no argument and no explanation. Nobody’s going to mess with it until it goes commercial or at least mixed-use.”

  “Why is that? Who’s blocking it?” I said. The cold fear around my heart which had sprung up that afternoon when I had seen, as if for the first time, the house surrounded by sky-stabbing monstrosities eased a little.

  “I have no idea. Nobody does, or I’d know it. Somebody awfully high up, who doesn’t give a shit about money. And in this town, I simply don’t know anybody like that. I’d have said you could buy the entire council for a new BMW, but obviously somebody doesn’t need one. It’s not that people don’t want to sell. Poor old Dorothy Cameron has been trying to unload that old heap of hers for years. So have the Cobbs, and Rhodes Bayliss. Everybody, in fact, but you. You haven’t bought off the council, have you?”

  “I didn’t even know there was one,” I said honestly. “So, am I safe, then? Can I count on the house being there for…a long time? My lifetime?” And Malory’s, I did not say.

  “I didn’t say that,” he said. “In fact, I’d be willing to bet we’ll get that zoning changed within five or ten years. Maybe before. We’ll get to whoever’s blocking it eventually. We always do. Listen, Shep,” and his voice deepened and smoothed into his notion of the famous Club drawl, “I meant what I said. When the zoning falls—and it will—I’ll go double the best offer you get for it. No matter what it is. Call me first. You won’t be sorry. I’ll find you another house, one that fits you to a T. Hell, I’ll even build it for you and move you in. You won’t have to lift a finger.”

  “I’m not selling, Carter, even if the zoning changes tomorrow,” I said. “But just out of curiosity, what would you do with it? Tear it down, I know, but what would you put there?”

  “Parking,” he said instantly, and I heard the obsessive single-mindedness of the starving man in his voice. “There’s not a single public parking lot between Brookwood Station and Lenox Square. The place would mint money. Hey, you want a little piece of it? I can do that—”

  “I’m not selling, Carter,” I said. “Maybe I didn’t make myself clear.”

  “Oh, you’ll sell, when the zoning changes,” he said. “One way or another, you’ll sell. Willingly or unwillingly. Unwillingly is not usually much fun. I’d hope it was willingly. And to me.”

  “Carter,” I said, “it would please me very much if you would go fuck an I beam.”

  And I hung up.

  Without an instant’s hesitation I sat down and dialed City Hall. My index finger knew only milliseconds before my brain who I should be talking to.

  “I wondered when you’d be calling,” Glenn Pickens said. “You don’t catch on very fast, do you?”

  “No,” I said. “It’s never been my long suit. Tell me about my house. How long am I safe, first. And why, second.”

  He laughed. I did not remember ever hearing him do that, but I recalled that Lucy had said once that they laughed together a great deal when they were very young, she and Glenn.

  “Perfect timing, anyway,” he said. “There’s another application in front of the board right now, and I happen to know that it has the unanimous approval of the council. Like they all have. Which means that I’m going to have to spend another four or five nights and probably a weekend calling and bargaining and making promises and moving and shaking, of which I am getting extremely tired. If anybody ever calls in all my chips I’ll have to move to Buenos Aires.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  The laughter was gone from his voice, abruptly. “Ben Cameron was able to save your asses out in Buckhead until he got sick,” he said, “but I’m not in the business of saving Buckhead asses. I want you to know, though, that I’m going to make sure that zoning doesn’t go through. I’ve done it about five million times before, and I’ll keep doing it as long as I can. The house is yours for that long. Though it’s probably not going to be so peaceful from now on, because it’s a matter of time before the money boys tumble to me. You may get a bunch of flak—rest assured I’ll get more. But you’re safe as long as I’m where I am. I figure I’m good for several more terms. I’m a good mayor. And there are more of us than there are of you.”

  Tears of simple relief and gratitude stung my eyes, and I was afraid that he would hear them in my voice. I kept it even.

  “I can’t imagine how I’ll ever thank you, Glenn,” I said.

  “Understand this, Shep,” Glenn Pickens said. “This is not sentiment and it sure as hell isn’t friendship. The city owes you. You took a bad beating back then after the fire, and you didn’t have to. You saved a lot of asses with that, black and white. So this is an old debt. But don’t thank me, because it’s Ben Cameron you owe, not me.”

  “Ben?”

  He laughed again. “Ben. He’s got a long arm. I owe him as much as you do. If I didn’t, Buckhead would be solid high rise right now. You th
ink your tax base is anything like what I could make for this city out of that residential real estate out there? No, Ben took me aside when I was getting ready to graduate from high school and said he’d pay my way through college and law school, and take care of my dad for the rest of his life, and he’d make me mayor one day, if I’d do everything he said to, because we were going to have a black mayor as sure as gun’s iron, and it ought to be somebody like me. He meant somebody in his pocket, of course, but hell, I didn’t care. Every mayor in America is in somebody’s pocket, and there are worse by far than his. And in exchange for all that, I was to spare this little hunk of Buckhead real estate that his and your houses sat on when the developers got after it, and later, after the fire, he was doubly emphatic about yours. And he did all those things on his end. And so have I. And so, like I say, you’re okay as long as I am. But probably not a second longer.”

  “Thank you, Glenn,” I said.

  “Thank him,” Glenn Pickens said. “And thank Lucy Bondurant. You I owe. Her, I love.” And he hung up the phone.

  We did not talk again.

  I lay on my back on the sofa in the living room of the summerhouse and stared up into the smoke-blackened old beams. So I’m safe now, I thought. The house is safe—or as safe as anything can be, in this town. But for what, really? Malory will marry; she may not even come home again from Massachusetts. It’s a money-eating hunk of junk, when you think about it. It’s nothing but an arena for those obscene pretensions Aunt Willa puts on. Lucy can’t even come back to it. I don’t go into it for months on end. I could go anywhere. I could get an apartment, I could go up to Tate…Why stay?

  The answer came riding into my mind over her vivid face: Malory. If Malory should want to come home to live…

  She came home for Christmas. It was the first time she had come since she left us the previous June, for she had not, after all, come at Thanksgiving. At almost the last moment she had called me and said that a new friend had asked her to spend the holiday at the family house in Marblehead.