Peachtree Road (103 page)

Lucy had not been lying. In the warmly lit, desperately littered living room she waited for me, sitting in her accustomed chair with feet demurely together and hands clasped in her lap, as Margaret Bryan had taught us all, years ago, to sit when we were not dancing. The televi PEACHTREE ROAD / 809

sion flickered wildly, an old black-and-white movie with George Raft, soundless. Lucy wore the good, if too-big, blue wool dress she had for special occasions, a gift from Little Lady, who had probably gotten it at Saint Philip’s thrift store; its sheath skirt and short, collared jacket spoke forlornly of Jacqueline Kennedy and Camelot. She held a little envelope purse on her lap. A battered fiberglass suitcase sat on the floor beside her, closed and tagged. A whining, laboring electric fan was trained on her, but sweat still ran from her hairline and stood in beads on her collarbone. She wore short white cotton gloves, but her black hair was wild, a raven’s nest, and on her feet she wore soiled terry scuffs.

Her legs were bare, and they were dappled with dark dried blood to the knee. More blood had dried in a swooping spatter across her cheek, and on one forearm. Above the rusty blood her blue eyes danced, danced. She dimpled, but did not speak. Her eyes swung from me across the room.

My own eyes followed them with a monstrous, dragging effort.

I could not even flinch at what I saw. I could not back away.

Jack Venable lay on the spavined old sofa across the room from Lucy. He lay with his back to me, knees drawn up, facing in toward the stained back cushions of the sofa. I had seen him lie so many times, safely sunk in his long sleeps.

He looked safe now, tidy and relaxed in rumpled khaki pants and a white shirt and just his yellowed old crew socks. His scuffed, thin loafers sat neatly side by side with their toes under the edge of the sofa, waiting for their owner to get up and shuffle them to bed.

But Jack was not going to rise from this sleep. He seemed immaculate from where I stood, but the blood that had burst from the ruined temple had soaked through the cushion beneath it, and spilled in a thin stream down the sofa skirt onto the old, liver-colored

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rug, and puddled there, looking for all the world like black cherry Jell-O only half-congealed.

I did not walk over to the sofa and look more closely at him. The utter whiteness of the skin of his neck and arms, and the pure, hopeless stillness of him, and the color and thickness of the blood told the minuscule part of my mind that stood outside the hot, howling wind what it must finally know: Jack Venable was dead, and had been for some time.

I looked back at Lucy. In her lap, partly covered by the little debutante’s clutch purse, a blunt black gun lay, as ugly and shocking as a snake. She wasn’t lying about the gun, I thought dimly. She was right, all those years ago. He did have one.

Lucy looked up at me archly, head cocked, and smiled.

“Hey, Gibby,” she said.

My knees unlocked then, and I slumped bonelessly to the floor at her dreadful feet, tailor-fashion. My heart was beating so slowly and thinly that I thought it must surely and simply stop. I was cold, cold, bone-cold, marrow-cold, despite the thick, malodorous heat in the room. An icy lump of nausea rose into my throat at the smell: a smell of burning, and liquor, and sweat, and the sour-sweet, sheared metal smell of turning blood. Something under the blood was too terrible even to register.

I looked blindly into the rug for a while, seeing the tiny lunar desert of a cigarette burn, and the stain of some dark, old liquid. Then I said, in a voice that croaked and scrabbled in my throat, “Lucy, what is going to become of you now?

What on earth will happen to you? I can’t fix this. This can’t be fixed. Who’s going to take care of you now?”

She leaned down slightly and peered into my face, and smiled again, as if satisfied at what she saw there.

“Why, you will, Gibby,” she said. “You can, too, fix PEACHTREE ROAD / 811

it. You know you can. And Malory. Malory will come. My best boyfriend and our beautiful, beautiful daughter. You knew that, of course, didn’t you? That she was our daughter?

Of course you did. We be of one blood, we three. So you both have to take care of me, you see. Call Malory, Gibby.

Malory will come.”

I looked up at the sweet, mad smile and realized that I had no idea whether or not she was lying about Malory, and would never know. Malory. Malory…Yes, Malory would come. Like a fierce, beautiful young hawk circling higher and higher in the thin, pure sunlight, only to heed, finally, the falconer’s cry and plummet in beauty and mortal peril straight into the snare, Malory would come.

And me? I thought. Yes. As long as Lucy lives, God help me, I will come too. I will come.

I saw us, far back in my ringing head, going on forever, the three of us, locked in a crazy troika of loss and blood and waste and madness. Forever. Forever…

I rose to my knees as stiffly as an old, ill man, and took the gun from Lucy’s lap and pressed it into her hands. I closed them around it. They were rough and hot, even against the chill of the heavy steel. They trembled tinily, like the throat of a singing bird. I looked back into her face and she smiled at me again. It was a good child’s smile, sweet and simple. Above it her eyes shone, blue, blue, the extraordinary, light-drowned eyes of that doomed child who had stood in the foyer of the house on Peachtree Road, pinning my heart to my ribs with her very presence, and said in a voice like dark honey, “Something stinks.”

“Stick it in your ear, Luce,” I said.

She laughed, the old rich, bawdy, wonderful laugh.

She put the dark gun to her ear, still laughing, her blue eyes spilling the healing light of redemption and benediction over me.

“Pull the trigger,” I said.

Lucy did.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

W
ell, and so there we were again this afternoon, at Oakland. Just as Freddie had said. The aging Buckhead Boys and their girls, come once more to bury one of their own, though only nominally.

This one had always walked outside us.

I had an insane desire to rush up to someone and say, earnestly, “We simply have to stop meeting like this.” But the three people who would have liked that most, and laughed at it, were under this elegiac October earth now, not atop it with the diminished rest of us. Young Ben Cameron. Charlie. And now Lucy.

Too rich a sowing, for an earth that would yield no harvest.

I remembered the long-ago party in the grand new house out in the Chattahoochee Triangle, when the leathery, discontented Northern woman had asked me where she could find the real Old Atlanta, and I had said, only half jesting,

“Oakland Cemetery.”

Now, I supposed, we were Old Atlanta, we bewildered and disenfranchised Pinks and Jells of a Buckhead that was deader than Pompeii.

And not a patch on the ones that went before us, I thought again, as I had at my father’s funeral here.

I was almost the last one left in the cemetery. Malory, ravaged and mute, had been helped back into the Spring Hill limousine with Peter Dallett’s steady brown hand at her back, and would be waiting for me at the Peachtree Road house before flying back to Maine and whatever life awaited her there. She was, of course, devastated; terribly, terribly wounded. I felt her wounds bitterly in my own flesh and heart, atop my own. But it was, I knew, a devastation that had an ending to it. That other wreckage would have been without limit and with

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out end. She could heal, and when she did, Malory Bondurant Venable would be free. Whether she would ever come home to Atlanta did not, somehow, matter to me now. I felt, as deeply as I could feel anything, that she would, in some way and at some time, be a part of this unimaginable city which was no longer a part of me, but I could not justify the feeling, and was content not to probe it. I wished I could have felt sorrier, for all of us, and for everything.

“I’m sorry, Mal,” my mouth whispered, but my heart was not sorry. I felt very little on this day but emptiness and a great, poised, focused waiting. I could not have said what it was that I waited for.

Old Willa Bondurant, trailing her cherished Little Lady like a Pekingese, stopped before me and gave me a sly, hooded snake’s look, the look, of an ancient enemy. I knew she no longer remembered the day in the foyer of 2500 when I told her to move her things out of the attic and into my dead mother’s room, and she had wept with deliverance.

She could not have afforded that memory.

“I’m a tough old bird, wouldn’t you say, Shep?” she said, in her hard-won, genteel drawl. “I’m a survivor. I survived Jim Bondurant, and I’ve survived two of his three children.

God knows it’s a terrible thing to be old and lose your looks”—and she patted her lacquered steel-blue hair with the air of one who knows she has kept most of them—“but you can at least take your revenge by outliving everybody.”

Something in me, which I had thought long dead, stirred and went into a cold, still crouch.

“How did you know Uncle Jim was dead?” I said. I thought my voice was even and pleasant, but she knew what it sprang from. The basilisk’s smile deepened. Old dimples yawned crazily.

“Because he wrote to Lucy for ages,” she said with a dreadful arch, conspiratorial lift to her brows. “Ever since 814 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

she was nine or ten. It went on for years. Of course, I burned the letters. I’d never have let that animal touch my girl in any way. But he kept sending them, the filthy things, and so I finally wrote and told him to stop or I’d have the law on him for desertion, and the letter came back from his last address stamped ‘Deceased.’”

I simply looked at her. Speech was impossible. Burned them. She had burned them. Burned them, the letters that might have saved Lucy. Who was to say? There might have been, in those long-awaited words, some deliverance, something that could have fed that monstrous hunger, opened and cleansed that hard bud of madness….

Oh yes. We make our own monsters, but they inevitably have their revenge.

I looked after her retreating figure. She turned and smiled again at me, a bizarre old Junior Leaguer in her simple black dress and her pearls and her “little heels,” back to her bridge luncheons at the Driving Club and her pills and her internists and her charities. She was as old and soulless and simple as a Galapagos turtle, there in the waning sunlight, but she looked at that moment younger than the raddled daughter she had just buried.

I knew that she would go back now to the cool, quiet, gracious old house on Peachtree Road—where she, the pretender, had reigned for so long—for the rarely taken cigarette and the thin crystal glass of good sherry served by her elegant mulatto, and the comfort of old women like her. Alive.

Alive.

I turned and followed her back to the line of cars parked on the narrow brick road. When I reached the Rolls, Carter and Little Lady had driven away. I was the last one to leave Oakland.

When I reached the house I left the car in the driveway, door ajar, and went straight to the telephone in the PEACHTREE ROAD / 815

summerhouse and dialed Carter Rawson. For once he answered himself.

“Carter?” I said. “Listen. I’ve changed my mind about the house. Call Marty Fox tomorrow and give him your best offer. It better be a goddamned good one. There won’t be any problem with the zoning.”

And I hung up before he could answer.

I dialed the mayor’s office at City Hall. When Glenn Pickens’s secretary said he was in a meeting and would be glad to call me back, I said, “Just tell him Mr. Bondurant said the debt’s been paid in full and to cancel it.”

She repeated it back to me, carefully.

“Is that all?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said. “That’s all.”

“Willa,” I said aloud into the still, sunny air of the summerhouse, “stick it in your ear.”

By seven-thirty that evening I stood at the railing of the old iron bridge over the Chattahoochee River where, thirty years ago, Lucy had shouted my shame across a spring sky before the assembled Pinks and Jells of Atlanta. The Rolls was parked on the weedy apron at the approach to the bridge.

There was no traffic on the old road, and the hot silence was complete except for the chorus of cicadas in the fringe of trees along the river, and the sturdy chuckle of the slow brown water far below. It seemed to me very hot and still, and no time at all.

Through the bubble of suspended silence that had wrapped me for the past two days I was suddenly aware of the low slanting sun on my head and face, and the little twilight breeze which had sprung up off the water. It was soft on my arms and chest and face, though the sharp bones of winter lay just below the surface. I wore jogging shorts and no shirt, and was barefoot, for I was going on a very long journey, and I wanted nothing

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about me to snag upon the wind of my leaving. I was neither happy nor unhappy, only profoundly aware that I and the world around me were totally stopped and still, frozen on some great axis, and that I did not know or care if either I or it would start forward again. The pale blue arch of the evening sky was reflected perfectly and wholly in the water far below me, just as it had been on that spring day so long ago. The old willows still trailed on its surface, yellow now.

I stood for a while, thinking of nothing at all, and then climbed up onto the railing and looked down at the water.

It had been a wet summer and the river was high and running full, but that was down deep; the skin of it was silken and whole. As it had on that other day, the sky wheeled sickly above and below me, and I closed my eyes against the ver-tigo. From far below and out of time I heard, distinctly, Lucy’s silvery, jeering voice: “Come on, Gibby, jump, or we’ll think you’re a North Fulton fruitcake! Come on! Mark my trai-i-i-l!”

Opening my eyes to slits, I saw below on the willow bank the gleam of white flesh, and the fine shape, under wet black hair, of narrow, beautiful skull. The very air shivered with her vivid aliveness.

I threw back my head and cupped my mouth with my hands and shouted into the wheeling blue emptiness: “Lucy!