Burnt Mountain

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  I turned my face into the hollow of his neck.

  “That’s beautiful.”

  “Is it not, now?” The brogue was thick. “Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill. She calls it ‘The Silken Bed.’ “

  “I’ll think about that now, whenever we…”

  “I always do,” he said.

  This morning he was sitting on the grass planing a long, slender piece of wood. It looked to be sword shaped.

  “What on earth are you doing?” I asked.

  “Making a sword.”

  Far up on Peachtree Road to the east, the bells of St. Philip’s rang, shivering down to us on the clear, still air. Early-morning service.

  “A fine thing to be doing on the Sabbath,” I said.

  He did not stop.

  “It will be a blessed sword, then.”

  “If I may be permitted to ask, who’s going to get whapped with it?”

  “Woodies?” Aengus said, smiling. “No. Nobody, really. There are just so many Celtic myths that call for swords, I thought I’d make me one to order.”

  “You planning to be the hit of everybody’s party?” I said, walking over to hug him. His skin was warm and smooth.

  “No, but it just felt so good to be one last night. It was like living another life. Awfully real. I’m going to see if Coltrane will let our classes do some reenactments. If anything could bring mythology alive, that could….”

  “Aengus…,” I began, then stopped. I seemed to hear Grand’s voice, faint and very far away: Don’t let him go too far into the Irish thing. Don’t let him take you there with him.

  “What?”

  “You want pancakes for breakfast?”

  We were scarcely half through breakfast when the veranda door swung open and Carol Partridge came into the breakfast room. She was in faded, oversized pajamas that had to have been her ex-husband’s, violently striped in maroon and gold, and she was fairly dancing on her bare feet. Her yellow hair was in its accustomed exuberant explosion; perhaps, I thought, that was its accustomed style after all. Her sleep-crumpled face was stretched into a jack-o’-lantern grin, and she was singsonging, in a voice that sounded much like Bummer’s froggy one, “I know a secret! I know a secret!”

  “Have you come to prevail on me to pick up bottle tops or foot the bill for psychiatric care for the whole street? After last night…,” Aengus began.

  She threw her arms around him and buried her face in his dark hair. “I came to crawl in bed with you and your gold necklace, but I see I’m too late, so I’ll settle for telling you a wonderful secret, but you’ve got to promise you didn’t hear it from me.”

  “Actually, that was Thayer’s necklace, but I’ll pop it on anytime for you.” Aengus grinned, hugging her. “What’s your secret, pajama girl?”

  She looked at herself ruefully and shook her head. “I forget,” she said. “I really do. Can you spare a cup of coffee? I haven’t even plugged mine in yet.”

  I poured a cup and set it in front of her at the table. She was shimmering with her news, almost as Aengus had been last night. Lord, was there no one at all phlegmatic on Bell’s Ferry Road?

  “Well,” she said, draining her cup. “I just happened to be talking to Mayor Carmichael last night, and he said—”

  “The mayor was there?” Aengus said. “God, I could have at least kept my shirt on—”

  “Shut up, Aengus. He’s that white-haired guy with the little thatch mustache; you talked to him half the night, Thayer. Mayor Gibson Carmichael. Lives in that brick Colonial right on the river across from me—”

  “Oh, him!” I said. “For some reason I thought he was a pharmacist—”

  “Anyway, he’s going to call you today, Aengus, and ask you to be on some hotsy-totsy advisory panel he’s putting together for the Olympics next summer. You did know they were going to be here, didn’t you?”

  “I guess I did,” Aengus said, frowning a little. “What kind of panel did he mean? I can’t imagine he wants me to run around the Olympics with my shirt off and Thayer’s necklace on—”

  “I don’t know, you idiot. Something about representing the creative, artistic side of the city; I guess there’ll be other people on it doing other things. The point is, he’s going to call you today and ask you. He said last night that you beat some fool singing ‘Dixie’ and accompanying himself on the harmonica all to hell.”

  “Well, I do know a goat that farts the—”

  “Oh, get serious! I thought you’d be pleased—”

  “He is!” I cried. “Oh, Carol, of course he is! Oh, Aengus, it’s just what you were wishing for….”

  He looked at Carol, then at me.

  “Well, it could be, at that. Gee. You know, it really might turn into something—”

  “Shut up!” Carol and I cried together.

  He laughed.

  “Champagne,” Carole said. “There should be champagne. Do you have any—”

  “No!” Aengus roared. She looked at him quizzically.

  “He thinks to celebrate a thing before it’s formally been offered is to curse it,” I said. “Wait till hizzoner calls and then we drink champagne. Probably lots of it. It really is wonderful, isn’t it?”

  “Better than. Good enough to get me off the hook for that damned party for the next five years. Got to go, thanks for the coffee, yay, Aengus!”

  She was gone back through the hedge before we could get our breaths.

  We tried to act as if nothing had happened, and we did it badly. The telephone did not ring until late that afternoon. Aengus ambled to pick it up so slowly that I was drawing a breath to scream at him.

  “Just what Carol said,” he said mildly, coming back out onto the veranda. “It’s just a committee to educate international visitors about what resources Atlanta has to offer different groups. There might be some traveling. I don’t really understand quite what it’s about yet. But I don’t think I’m going to do it.”

  “My God, why? It’s a great honor!”

  “Because the chairman is, and I quote, ‘Jim (Call Me Big Jim) Mabry.’ He’s given untold millions to various city concerns, and there’s talk that he might well be the next governor, or maybe a senator.”

  “So?”

  “He lives in Riverwood. I’m not going,” Aengus said again mulishly.

  “Oh yes, you are!” I cried. “You can stand it for one night. There’s no telling what this could do for you.”

  The matter was more or less settled for us on the following Wednesday, when the Atlanta Journal-Constitution ran a photograph of Aengus over a cutline that read: “Noted local mythologist Aengus O’Neill to sit on Mayor’s Olympics Panel.” The photo was of Aengus standing before the fire, almost a silhouette, without his shirt, wearing my gold necklace and holding a clenched fist aloft. His eyes were closed and his face was rapt, unsmiling; he looked like a pagan war god.

  “Or an escaped lunatic trying to evade capture,” Aengus spat when he saw the picture. “Who the hell took that picture? I didn’t see any press there that night.”

  He stalked toward the telephone. I sat regarding the picture. It was a beautiful image to me, but I could see that without its context, without all the firelit magic that had gone before, it could look… strange, perhaps. A little over-the-top, especially crammed in between an article about an offshore oil rig spill and a Campus Crusade for Christ dinner at Georgia Tech. Oh, God, now Aengus was really going to want to cancel it.

  He came back into the den and slumped heavily into his chair.

  “Bummer,” he said thinly. “Bummer took it, and was so proud of it he gave it to the mayor, who was apparently quite taken with it himself. A next-door neighbor to whom the mayor is an old family friend is a fine thing, is it not? Carol was almost speechless. She just saw it herself.”

  “Aengus, you’re not going to refuse to do it?”

  “How can I?” he snarled. “Carol’s already been all over Bummer. Not that it’s an ‘unflattering photo,’ you understand, just that he d
idn’t ask my permission to show it to the mayor. She says he’s been in his room crying for the last fifteen minutes. How can I add to that? Christ, I wish I had cursed the lot of them when I had the chance….”

  “Maybe nobody much will notice it—”

  “A half-naked guy in somebody’s backyard wearing his wife’s necklace? You’re right, who the hell would notice that?”

  A great many people apparently did. Most of them called us. They were people who had been at the party, or friends from Sewanee or Coltrane, a few of my friends. All were congratulatory or at least affectionately humorous, but Aengus took the phone off the hook just after dinner.

  “They’ve all been great calls, Aengus,” I said, chiding him mildly.

  “Well, I wanted to put a stop to them before your mother weighed in.” He sighed. “I ain’t up to that tonight.”

  Suddenly we were both laughing, laughing so hard that we could not talk, clutching each other, almost rolling from our chairs onto the floor. We laughed for a long time. Then we went upstairs to bed and made love. We laughed during that, too.

  My mother did indeed weigh in, just before eight o’clock the next morning, via my sister, Lily.

  “Thayer?” she said hesitantly, and before I could even reply I began to laugh again. Presently she did, too. We laughed as hard and long as Aengus and I had the evening before, and I was still gasping when I finally got out, “Well, tell me. Don’t keep me in suspense.”

  “Oh, Jesus, Thay, she said… she said…,” and Lily was off again. Finally she chortled, “She said she’d never be able to hold her head up in town anymore, that everybody knew that gold neck-plate thing had been hers before she gave it to you, that Daddy gave it to her for an anniversary gift—”

  I shrieked with renewed laughter. “He did not! Grand gave me that necklace; she brought it back from Crete—”

  “I know it!” Lily howled, and we laughed some more.

  It was a good five minutes before we could collect ourselves enough to wind up our conversation. I was still giggling when I went back in to Aengus.

  “Your mother,” he said, not looking up from the New York Times.

  “My sister about my mother,” I said.

  “Tell me later. I’ve got a feeling I’m going to need another good laugh before this thing is over.”

  That was on Thursday morning. That afternoon Mayor Carmichael called and said that he hoped I would be agreeable to coming along with Aengus to the meeting the next night.

  “Big Jim wants to meet all the committee’s womenfolks. Says the way to get a committee in action is to include the womenfolks. Hidden assets, he calls all of you. I’m sorry, Mrs. O’Neill, but if you could just put up with this for a couple of hours I think that’ll be the end of it, for you anyway. I’ve made it plain to Jim that I was not asking anyone’s wife to sit on this committee—”

  “Of course, Mr. Mayor,” I said. “I’ve never seen Riverwood. It’ll be interesting.”

  “It probably ain’t worth crossin’ the river for, but thank you,” he said, and hung up.

  “Guess what,” I said to Aengus, who was again planing his sword on the veranda. He looked up, one eyebrow raised.

  “I’m going to the big party across the river with you. Big Jim wants to meet all us wives.”

  “I’ll just bet he does, the old porker,” Aengus said, but the good humor was back in his voice. I was glad for that.

  On Friday evening we drove across the old iron bridge and into Riverwood. The old river forest was just as lush and green here as it was on our side of the Chattahoochee, but there was not nearly so much of it. What there was, was a lot of grass. Undulant, endless, velvety, perfectly manicured grass. It seemed to sweep up out of the river and out of sight over the first rolling hill of Riverwood, pierced only occasionally by an immaculate ribbon of driveway. At the end of each driveway was a House. There was no way one would use a small h on these Houses; “t’wouldn’t,” as Grand might say, “be proper.” I stared mutely as we rolled along looking for the street number. I saw a Versailles, a Monticello, a Petra, and a Taj Mahal. I saw Jaguars, huge Mercedes and BMW touring cars, Rolls-Royces, Bentleys. I saw a Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s worth of perfectly tended blooms. Only behind all this did I see the trees of the river forest. They seemed to cower behind the homes of Riverwood in shame. Fury tightened in my throat.

  “I’m not getting out of this car,” I muttered between clenched teeth.

  “Too bad.” Aengus grinned. “Also too late. Here we are and we’ve been spotted. There seems to be a reception committee. Welcome, my dear, to the Parthenon.”

  My mouth opened. I could not seem to close it. It was the Parthenon, or at least a smaller copy of it, from the great frieze of nobly reclining Greeks to the eight monolithic columns atop the shallow steps. Yellow and red tulips bloomed in marble basins at its feet and pruned, phallic junipers rose behind it. Before it stood, poised on the circular white driveway, one perfect silver Rolls-Royce. Behind the car stood an honest-to-God liveried butler (unless, Aengus whispered, he, too, was marble) and a woman in a one-shouldered black silk sheath and stiletto heels. She was gesturing toward the huge double front doors, and a shrinking couple, the woman in what I thought of as the Atlanta woman’s casual summer night out uniform, linen slacks and sleeveless top, such as I wore, cowered before her.

  “Oh, dearest God,” I whispered.

  “Make that ‘gods,’ ” Aengus whispered back.

  We got out of the Volvo and went to meet Artemis, or whoever the hell she was. I felt laughter shiver like jelly in my throat. Aengus’s shoulders were shaking lightly.

  “Don’t you dare!” I hissed furiously into his ear.

  “Hello, sweeties, I’m Precious Mabry,” the woman caroled, extending both hands. “Now, I know you’ve got to be our famous mythologist, Dr. O’Neill, because I saw that gorgeous picture of you in the paper. My goodness! What a pity you wore a shirt tonight. And you are, of course, Mrs. O’Neill.”

  Aengus goggled stupidly at her and took her outstretched hands. She leaned up and gave him a peck on the cheek. A wave of something primal and floral perfume smote me. She turned to me.

  “I’m Thayer O’Neill,” I said. “You’re nice to include us wives, Mrs. Mabry.”

  She gave us both an enormous smile. It seemed to stretch into her jet-black lacquered hair and tangle with her diamond hoop earrings. Suddenly I felt like a smudged and tattered child deep in alien adult territory. I actually caught myself standing on one foot, hiding my other flat sandal behind it.

  “Well, aren’t you the pretty thing.” She glistened at me. “Dr. O’Neill, I’ll introduce you around, but you, my dear, I’m saving for Big Jim.”

  She tugged us both across the porch and down the steps toward the garden. This turned out to be a vast clipped maze of boxwood and cypress, with symmetrical ranks of tulips bordering it and a gazebo in the middle. In the gazebo a knot of people surrounded the biggest man I have ever seen. He was at least six feet, seven inches, and nearly as round as he was tall. His chins and face and bald head were red almost to vermilion, with sun and perhaps general temperament, for he was laughing, a laugh that boomed out and, I thought, must surely reach the river. He was, he must be, Big Jim Mabry.

  Without turning his head away from the crowd he reached a gigantic arm out for me, and Precious Mabry pushed me into it. The arm nearly crushed me, Aengus reached for me, and Big Jim turned to look at him, then at me.

  “Dr. Aengus O’Neill,” he bellowed, his great moon face radiating cheer. “Know you anywhere, even with your clothes on. And this must be your missus. Or maybe your daughter? Don’t matter; she’s a right armful, isn’t she?”

  I saw blank white anger start on Aengus’s face and said loudly, “Wife, of course, Mr. Mabry. Thayer O’Neill. It’s a remarkable house and garden. I’m so glad for a chance to see it.”

  “Well, now, you come on in and I’ll show you the rest of it,” he boomed. “Got a pretty little doo
hickey behind the pool, think my wife calls it a fancy.”

  “Folly, Jim,” Precious Mabry said. Her voice was not glittering now. I tried gently to pull away from Big Jim, but he only tightened his grip and widened his smile at Aengus.

  “Get one like this, you gotta hold on to her, don’t you, son?”

  Before Aengus could open his mouth, a woman’s slow, sweet voice spoke beside me.

  “My dear, I’m Helena Carmichael,” the owner of the voice said. She was slender and suntanned and her dark hair was pulled simply back, showing tiny diamond clips and a graceful neck. “I missed meeting you the other night, but Gibby told me about you. We knew your grandmother, and we’re so glad to have you in the neighborhood. Jim, you let go of her now; I want her to meet some of the rest of us wives, and she’ll never get away from you on her own.”

  “Known me too long, haven’t you, Helena?” Big Jim chortled, and she said, “Much too,” and put her arm around me and led me toward the pool, where a small crowd of women chatted and laughed together.

  “What he needs is a spike heel in the instep, but he’ll get that later from Precious.” Helena smiled. “Your husband looks like he can hold his own.”

  “Thanks so much,” I said. “He can. I never know quite what to do when something like that happens. Not that it does, very often,” I hastened to add, thinking how smug I must sound.

  “I would think quite often,” she said. “It’s just that Big Jim has an inflated sense of his own charm, to match everything else about him. I don’t think you’ll have to see much of either one of them. But your poor Aengus… it’s a full year until the Olympics.”

  “Well, I can’t thank you enough,” I said. “I was beginning to feel like somebody’s overdressed teenage daughter.”

  “You are pretty young,” she said. “But there’s not a woman here you couldn’t hold your own with. You look very much like your grandmother; I’m sure people have told you. A truly wonderful woman.”

  “Yes,” I said, my eyes prickling suddenly with the missing of Grand. “She was, wasn’t she?”