Burnt Mountain

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  “You haven’t really looked, darling,” I said. “Maybe a school for younger people.”

  I had thought until now that his college work had absorbed him fairly well; it had seemed so at Sewanee. But this was serious business. We would have to address this….

  It was also the first inkling I had that I was not the be-all and end-all of Aengus’s prowling heart. The moment I realized that, I realized also that it had been a foolish thing to assume in the first place. Nobody could be absolutely everything to anyone else. Not in real life, anyway.

  But Aengus has been to me, some small hidden voice deep within me whispered. Hasn’t he? But if, indeed, that was not possible, then what else was it that filled my heart? For it was full. Had been, since we met. I would have known if there had been empty space there. There had been long, aching times when emptiness howled before I met him. I knew that territory. I did not live there now.

  But still… but still. Where was this path down from Burnt Mountain taking us?

  I brought it up with Carol Partridge one morning. We were in her kitchen, surrounded by small mountains of vegetables. She was leaning against the counter poking fretfully at a pile of glorious purple eggplants.

  “I started putting all this crap up when Walter first told me about his cherished childhood Thanksgivings at Grandma Partridge’s,” she said. “Apparently the old bat didn’t have anything to do all year but put up vegetables. It never seems to occur to me that I don’t have to do it anymore.”

  “Would you miss them if you didn’t have them?” I said.

  “No more than I miss him, and that ain’t much.”

  “Do you miss not having the boys around?”

  “Of course. Bummer especially. But I couldn’t have let things go on like they have been. I just hope that famous camp is the answer. I paid way too high a price for it not to work.”

  “I know,” I said, and hugged her. She was tense and still in my arms, and then loosened all over, and melted into me. She had said almost nothing about her meeting with Big Jim Mabry, the one that got her boys to Camp Forever, but she knew that Aengus and I knew the gist of it. The first time we had seen her after the incident, I had said, “You could probably take him to court or something for that,” and she had simply given me a dead look.

  “I didn’t say no,” she said. Her voice was so lifeless that it was frightening, and after she had gone I said, “It’s simply unbelievable to me that a man who’s being talked about as our next governor could do a thing like that.”

  “I should have thought it out better before I told her I’d talk to him,” Aengus said. “But still, all she had to do was say no.”

  “I don’t think she thought that was an option,” I said slowly. “I think that when it comes to your kids, you just do what you believe you have to.”

  “Maybe so,” he said slowly. “I’m just glad it’s not my problem.”

  “What if it was?” I said. “What would you do if your kids were behaving like that?”

  “Send ‘em to Camp Forever.” He smiled.

  “Yeah, but you wouldn’t have to fuck Big Jim Mabry to get them in.”

  “Thank God for small favors. I never heard you say ‘fuck’ before, Thayer.”

  In Carol’s kitchen that morning, after I had hugged her I said, “When things started to go wrong with you and Walter, was it just small things every once in a while, that you hardly noticed, or did it all just blow up at once?”

  “Hiroshima from the get-go,” she said, and looked at me keenly.

  “What’s Aengus up to, up there on that damned mountain? I know he’s up there a lot,” she said.

  I did not know how she knew that Aengus went often to the camp, but I did not doubt that she did. Probably everybody on Bell’s Ferry Road knew. It was simply the way the world of women worked. My mother had shown me that.

  “I don’t honestly know,” I said slowly. “Probably nothing worrisome; I’m inclined to blow things out of proportion. It’s just that he’s up to two to three nights a week now, and I think he’d like to go weekends, though he hasn’t exactly said so. He was never away from me before. And when we do talk, at home, or rather when he does, it’s getting to be all about the old stories, the old gods, the old Ireland. I know he’s an expert on the Celts, and I know he loves teaching them, but all this… I feel like some night I’m going to get in bed with a naked man wearing a gold torque. I’ve said that to you sometime before now, haven’t I?”

  She looked down at her bare brown feet and then up at me. “Don’t go up there with him, Thayer,” she said. Her voice was low and level.

  Deep in my head I heard Grand:… Don’t let him take you there with him. What else had she said? Something about losing him to moonbeams and sea mist…

  “I couldn’t if I wanted to,” I said, striving for a lighter tone. “No ladies except on Parents’ Day.”

  “Which is coming up soon, and to which I am not planning to go.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I hear Big Jim puts on a tremendous fireworks show up there on Parents’ Day, and I’m afraid if I went I’d stick a rocket up his ass.”

  I went home from Carol’s feeling considerably better. She could always do that to me.

  When I crossed through the hedge to our back lawn I saw that Aengus was home, sitting on the veranda with his feet up and a legal pad on his lap. He was busy scribbling away. When I touched his shoulder he looked up at me, smiling vividly. I saw that the fire was in him again; it flickered in his eyes and lit his face.

  “Wha’cha doin’?” I said, kissing the top of his head. “School out early?”

  He put his arm around my waist and pulled me down into his lap. The legal pad went sprawling.

  “I’m writing a book,” he said.

  I could make no sense of what he had said. It was the first I had heard of it.

  “You’re writing a book….”

  “A book of Celtic myths for kids. Nobody’s ever done it, that I can find on the Internet. Or at the library. I never saw anybody take to the old stories the way these kids have. This book will make us a fortune. I know I’m right about this.”

  “Aengus… honey… do you know what it takes to get a book published? You have to know the editors, and have an agent, and… oh, I don’t know… there are all these contracts and things. I have no doubt in the world it will be a wonderful book, but I think it takes a lot more than that….”

  “Big Jim knows editors and agents. He’s calling around. He says I’ll probably have an agent sometime this week. He thinks this book would sell like hotcakes. The boys do, too. I’m going to read it to them chapter by chapter, around the campfire. Maybe make fiction of the old tales. I’ll probably be up there a little more often now, but…”

  “How are you going to find the time?” I said in a voice like crumpling paper. “Do you think you can teach and still write in the afternoons? It’s a good month or six weeks till my school starts, and you’ll be swamped with work. What if you lost Coltrane?”

  “Thayer, this isn’t going to take forever. Camp closes in September; I hope to be almost done with it by then. I can handle Coltrane without batting an eyelash or find another college, if it comes to that. Big Jim knows every college president in the Southeast. We’ve talked all this out, baby. He and I both think it would help a little if you got a temporary job, and if we needed a little extra, you could borrow some of that trust money Grand gave Lily for any kids that come along….”

  “I won’t be having any kids, Aengus,” I whispered, my heart making great loops and dives almost into my stomach. “You know that. And what’s all this Big Jim stuff? I thought you thought… he was an obnoxious ass….”

  “We’d get the trust if we adopted. Who’s to say we can’t do that? We just don’t have to say when. And as for Big Jim… you just have to get to know him, Thayer. Nobody on this side of the river has ever given him a chance. This will all work! I feel it way down in my bones.”


  I sat still and boneless in his lap. Could he be… oh, what? Delusional? Unhappy enough to want to destroy his world and totally rearrange it? It was my world, too….

  But Aengus was not unhappy now. He seemed happier at this moment than I had ever known him. His arms were hard around me, and his hands caressed my breasts and stomach as they often had in his moments of joy. Happy the way a gleeful child is happy. Totally, deliriously happy.

  “I’ll go make some lunch,” I said. I wondered if this manic joy could possibly last.

  For the rest of the weekend, at least, it did.

  On a mid-August day of such sucking, enervating heat that I felt frail and sickened by it, I was walking across the first floor of the big main library downtown, thinking despairingly of the four-block walk to the garage where I had finally found a parking place. Parking downtown in Atlanta is a municipal joke at the best of times. Parking downtown on a Friday afternoon around rush hour is insanity. Parking downtown on a Friday afternoon around rush hour in ninety-seven-degree heat is close to self-immolation. Even in the stale-cold vastness of the library my summer dress was sticking to me. By the time I got home it would be indecent. This past summer had been a comatose animal of a season, bloated and corpulent and pumping out heat like a giant furnace. It was my first experience with an urban summer, though our stone house in the woods was about as cool as it could get, all things considered. I shifted my heavy book bag over my bare shoulder and thought that I would get out of my car and crawl straight into Carol’s pool without even going home first. There was no need to make dinner. Aengus was at camp.

  We were slow at the bookstore and I had taken the afternoon off to come downtown to research early Celtic swords for Aengus but had paused on the way out and then crammed my bag full of old Mary Roberts Rinehart mysteries. I had been through most of them at Grand’s house when I was a child. They seemed to me suddenly, on that afternoon when the entire steaming world shifted sickly under my feet, the most comforting and coolly bloodless sustenance I could think of. I could fall asleep literally soothed into another world, one of faithful servants and fine linens and grand old summer houses in places like Bar Harbor and haute murders solved by plucky ladylike governesses or even the plucky daughters of the great houses themselves. I grinned to myself. Most of them would begin with something like “If we had known then what we do now about the theft of old Mrs. Thornwood’s garnets…” Yes, in the big bed alone under the milky smear of stars Mrs. Thornwood’s garnets would comfort me like a shabby teddy bear.

  I settled the bubble more closely around my head and put out my hand to open the massive bronze front door.

  The bubble. Somewhere around the time that Aengus had told me that he was writing a book—perhaps the same day—I had been given a bubble to wear. It enclosed my head like a snow globe or a diver’s helmet, invisible to me and everyone else, but so irrefutably there that sometimes I could not imagine that other people did not see it glistening around my head like a great shield. I thought that I could touch it if I put up my hand to do so, but I never did. I knew when it was there. It came when I needed it.

  I was sometimes unaware of the need, but when it settled down, hurtful noise became a murmur, and sharp edges outside it softened, and faces that came too close and wanted too much from me became faces outside a goldfish bowl. They might bump the bubble, but they could not reach me and I could hardly hear them.

  A subterranean part of me knew that the bubble was my own protective device, and not necessarily a healthy one, but it did not matter. Inside was safety and the kind of dreaming contentment that had wrapped me during my earliest days at Sewanee.

  I was certain that in some way Grand had sent the bubble.

  Behind me, faintly because of the bubble, a voice said, “Thayer? Thayer Wentworth?”

  I stood still. The bubble cracked and a fire-shot long-ago summer night flooded in. Sensations smote me as if I was being whipped with the smell of pines and cold lake water nearby, guttering smoke from a dying campfire, the rustle and murmur of restless little girls, fire heat on my face and legs and the chill of a mountain night on the back of me. And a deep voice out of the dark across the fire where a small group of boys lay sprawled.

  This voice.

  I opened my mouth to speak, and for a moment nothing came out, and then it did.

  “Didn’t anybody ever tell you that Zeus was a serial rapist?” I whispered, and turned around.

  We simply looked at each other. Brown. He was still brown. The dark copper hair still fell over his face; the eyes under the long straight brows still seemed deep and dark as well water; the spattering of freckles was still strewn over the angled cheekbones. The only thing missing was the raw pink skin of the straight nose under peeling brown and the chipped front tooth. Only a faint webbing of wrinkles at the corners of his eyes spoke of the passing of time. But time had passed.

  “You’ve still got hair in your eyes,” Nick Abrams said in a voice I could barely hear, and pushed the tangled strand away from my forehead with a large brown hand I knew like my own.

  I still said nothing. I could not quite manage it yet. He wore khakis and a faded blue Yale tee shirt and his arms were full of rolled blueprints.

  He cleared his throat.

  “Where did you go?” he said.

  “Why didn’t you write?”

  He took a deep breath and let it out, and then said, “I did. I wrote every day. I called, from Paris and Siena. Both times they said you had moved away. They said you didn’t want to hear from me….”

  “Who is ‘they’?” I said in a torn, almost inaudible voice. But I knew who.

  “I guess it was your mother.”

  I felt myself sway, felt my bag of books start to slide out of my arms. Felt his arms go around me, to steady me. They were bare and warm, as if he had recently been in the sunlight.

  “Of course it was my mother!” I said. I laid my head down on my arms, at the table to which he had steered me.

  Of course. I could see her as clearly as a figure done in violent strokes of ink behind my closed lids. Answering every phone call: “No, I’m sorry, she doesn’t live here anymore.” Going every day to the post office and dropping his latest letter into her handbag. Had she burned the letters? Did it really matter?

  “She never could get past the name Abrams,” I said into my arms. My words had no breath behind them.

  “Oh, God.” He began to laugh. “She could have gotten so much worse than Abrams.”

  I raised my head and looked at him. “She did,” I said. “To her mind, she did.”

  He looked into my bag briefly. “Celtic armor and Mary Roberts Rinehart?”

  It was very strange. One side of my mind wanted to respond as I might usually have done, with something quick and supple; it was an odd combination. I would have laughed about it with Aengus. But I could think of nothing, almost literally.

  “One is for my husband,” I said finally, lifting my head. “The other one is mine.”

  “I don’t imagine I have to ask which is which,” Nick said, smiling. His smile seemed to grow until it filled my entire field of vision. I closed my eyes. The smile was still there. So were the freckles; I could have charted them like stars. Only the faint crow’s-feet were new, but somehow they were where they should be.

  “Mine’s the Mary Roberts Rinehart,” I said thickly. My head was spinning, and my face and mouth prickled. “My husband doesn’t read mysteries.”

  He was silent for a moment, and then he said, “Thayer? Are you all right?”

  “I think so,” I said in a small voice. “It’s very hot. I should go home, probably. My husband… Nick, I have a husband. Did I tell you that?”

  “Yes,” he said. “You did. Look, I think we’d better sit down someplace and get you some coffee or something. You look like you’re about to hit the floor. God, I hope it’s not me….”

  “No,” I whispered. I felt as if I were underwater, naked and drowning. The bubble was gone;
not a shard of it remained. I did not remember when it shattered. When I first saw him, I supposed. When I first heard his voice…

  “Have you got time? I just can’t let you leave like this….”

  “I have time,” I said. Where did this child’s trembling voice come from?

  We went out of the vast, book-smelling cool and into the blazing street. Passersby crowded into margins of shade. He held my elbow. In a few minutes we turned into the lobby of a nondescript fifties hotel that had, I knew, apartments on the top floors. The air inside was stale and glacial, smelling of carpet cleaner.

  “You live here?” I said. “In Atlanta? Somehow I thought you lived somewhere like California, or maybe back down on St. Simons. I thought I’d know it if you were here….”

  “No. I’ve got an apartment here because I’m designing part of the Olympics complex and our firm thought I ought to be on the spot. I live and work in New York, actually. Have since I got out of Yale.”

  “You did go to Yale, then….”

  “Yeah. Did you go on to Agnes Scott?”

  “No, I went to the University of the South. Sewanee. It’s on a mountaintop in Tennessee. They call it the Domain. You’d have liked it, I always thought.”

  “I’ve heard of it. The Domain… sounds like you.”

  “How so?”

  “Oh… kind of mystical, maybe. A little magical.”

  “I’ve given up magic,” I said, trying for lightness, and failing.

  He was silent till we got off the creaking elevator and I had followed him from the dim, sauce-smelling hallway into a large room blazing with afternoon light and very nearly empty.

  “Did you give up magic when… you and I didn’t get together?” he said quietly, settling me onto the couch. “Because if you did, I really may have to go kill your mother….”

  “No. I guess what I mean is that I’ve learned that most of the time when you think you’ve found some magic, you really haven’t….”

  He didn’t answer and went into the spartan kitchen. I was glad. The direction our talk had veered into frightened me.

  I sat on his low blue couch and stared out the huge uncurtained glass windows at the immensity of Atlanta rearing itself up around us. He had very little furniture, but stacks and stacks of books and plans and sketches were scattered all over. Apparently he worked at what should have been the dining room table; it was a mare’s nest of drawings and sketches and crumpled tracing paper. On a counter between the kitchen and living room stood a photograph of two very small girls, hardly past babyhood, with balloons on a seashore.