Peachtree Road (11 page)

“I have gotten myself a job!” she said, and broke into laughter, a small gurgle of pure pleasure. “I am, as of right now, a saleswoman in Better Foundations at Rich’s. I start in the morning, and I’m going to be making twenty dollars a week, with benefits and an employee discount. Now what do you think of that?”

We stared at her, all of us. My mother spoke first.

“You certainly didn’t have to go and get a job selling cor-sets to God knows who, Willa, not to mention all my friends.

You know that it’s been my…our…pleasure to share what we have with you.”

Aunt Willa’s smile wrapped my mother in light and venom.

“I’ll never forget your generosity, Olivia,” she said, in her new, many-leveled voice. “But my mama used to say that sooner or later every tub has to get on its own bottom. And it was time for me to get on mine. I could not impose on your and Sheppard’s generosity any longer.”

I goggled. I had never heard her mention a mother, a life of any kind, before the one she had shared with my uncle Jim.

“I know you mean well, Willa, but you need to consider how it will look, your going to work, when you’re living in your own family’s house….” My mother paused delicately, and smiled. There was no warmth in it.

“What Olivia means is that her friends in the Junior League will think that we made you go to work,” my father said, getting up from his big leather chair with his whiskey and coming across the faded Oriental to kiss Aunt Willa wetly on the cheek. “Don’t pay any attention to her. It shows a lot of grit and gumption, and I’m proud of you. Besides, it’s a mighty pretty bottom that tub of yours is sitting on.”

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Lucy and I looked from one to another of them, still mute with surprise and interest and that back-of-the-neck radar with which children are necessarily endowed, which tells them to be silent or risk peril. Aunt Willa smiled, her lashes down over her blue eyes, but she said nothing, and neither did my mother. But her dark eyes blazed up as if kerosene had been dashed upon a fire, and I felt, rather than heard, the great ponderous grinding of a shift in the balance of power.

CHAPTER THREE

I
s that thing real?” Lucy whispered loudly to me, over the cicada-buzzing and giggling, in the Camerons’ back garden, of a small group of children.

We were seated on folding bridge chairs in a semicircle in the paved rear courtyard, watching tall, black Leroy Pickens lope in circles holding a tether, on the other end of which trotted a very small, tarted-up Shetland pony with a monkey astride it. The monkey’s owner, a swarthy, gypsyish young man with a full mustache and a rakish red bandanna, watched suspiciously from the edge of the formal boxwood maze. The white sun of August burned into small necks and arms, and wilted starched organdy and dotted swiss; the handful of adults had long since retreated to white wooden lawn chairs under the pergola roof, where small Glenn Pickens, Leroy’s son, his red tongue protruding from between his white teeth, passed a tray of Tom Collinses.

“What do you mean, is it real? Is what real?” I whispered back, in rare annoyance. For the last hour or so, Lucy had been acting as sulky and obdurate as the prim, evil-eyed pony. I did not know what was the matter with her, and was vaguely embarrassed and angry, because I had wanted this small society to be as enchanted with her as I was, and thus envious of me. Before she came, there had never been any cause for that.

“That stupid pony,” she said, not bothering to lower her voice. “And that stupid monkey. They must not be real. All they can do is run around in a circle.”

Heads turned to look at us, including those of my parents and her mother, and Ben and Dorothy Cameron. Ben winked at us, and Dorothy’s smile wrapped us both in warmth and favor. No one from the Peachtree Road

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house smiled or winked. My father looked blank and formal, and my mother smiled the small, superior smile she kept strictly for Aunt Willa and her children, and Aunt Willa herself, diaphanous and splendid in white voile and a big-brimmed, flower-trimmed hat that had Rich’s Wood Valley Shop written all over it, glared at Lucy out of eyes gone ice-white with anger. Ben Cameron, Junior, my age and as copper-haired and freckled as his father, glared at her too, but Sarah, his sister, whose sixth-birthday party it was, blushed furiously, and her golden-amber eyes filled with tears. Lucy ignored all the looks and began to scratch absorbedly and ostentatiously at a mosquito bite on her elbow.

The monkey did a somersault on the pony’s back, and the children, Lucy excepted, all clapped and cheered.

“Don’t be dumb,” I said furiously between my teeth. “Of course they’re real. Haven’t you ever seen a pony or a monkey before?”

“Just about a million times,” Lucy said boredly, but with red rising smartly in her neck and cheeks, and her blue eyes narrowing. “I had a pony and a monkey both when we lived in Charlotte. My daddy got them for me. Nobody else but me could play with them. They could do lots more stuff than run in circles. That’s why I thought those weren’t real.”

I knew then that she had, in fact, never seen a Shetland pony or a monkey before, and that the wonder of seeing them was, for her, murdered by the fact that it took place in the garden of, and at the party of, another little girl who was a figure of some unknown but real importance in my life.

For when we had rounded the sun porch to the back garden where the party was beginning, small Sarah Cameron had run up to me with her wide, incandescent smile and her sherry eyes glowing like candles, and her mother had hugged me with the easy

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warmth and affection that she lavished on all of us. Lucy, who had been gleaming and chattering all morning in anticipation of the party, began to go quiet then. That the cold wings in her eyes were not those merely of envy, but of a kind of fear, was a precocious insight for a seven-year-old boy to have, but from the beginning there was little about Lucy that I did not ken. My anger faded and I took her hand.

I did not have words to comfort her, but I knew that my touch usually had the power to dispel whatever demons were threatening her.

A shadow dropped down over us, and Ben Cameron squatted beside us, rocking on his heels, gray Scot’s eyes and red hair giving back the sun in splendor. He was a tall man, younger than my father, wiry and knotted with an athlete’s muscles, and he wore white duck pants and white shoes and a blue, open-collared shirt with the sleeves rolled up his prodigiously freckled forearms. He had, for some reason, a striped necktie knotted around his waist. I thought he looked wonderful, gay and accessible. He put his arm around Lucy’s shoulders and smiled his magical smile into her face, and after a wavering moment she smiled back.

“Everybody knows Charlotte ponies and monkeys are the best in the world,” he said. “These are just in training to get good enough. When they shape up, we’re going to ship them off to Charlotte. I bet they won’t ever be as good as your pony and monkey, though.”

Lucy looked up at him through her inky lashes and smiled, and was, at that moment, pure Willa.

“No,” she said.

The clouds rolled off her face then, and for the rest of the afternoon she was the center of the group, darting in and out of the shrubbery and woods playing hide-and-seek, pinning the tail on the donkey with sure, swift grace, spilling as much ice cream as anyone else on the elaborately ruffled Rich’s frock Aunt Willa had brought

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home for this, her daughter’s debut into the small society of junior Buckhead.

She had met one or two of the neighborhood children over the spring and summer she had been with us, but this was the first group she had been in, and it was not a large one.

Though we ran with a much larger pack of children at E.

Rivers Elementary School, on the corner of Peachtree Road and Peachtree Battle Avenue, during the fall and winter, none of the young of those golden roads and houses saw much of one another in hot weather. Polio stalked the canyons of Buckhead as relentlessly as it did the warrens of Cabbagetown and Vine City in those long, deadly summers, and the fear of it was never out of anyone’s mind. My friend Pres Hubbard, who lived on Chatham Road, had gone white and quiet one afternoon several summers before, and complained of a headache, and the next day he was in Crawford Long Hospital in an iron lung. Pres was lucky. He walked now with a heavy iron brace, but he walked. Alfreda Slaton’s small sister had died two years ago of infantile paralysis.

By the time some of the red anger began to go out of the afternoon and the adults put down their tepid glasses and rose to leave, Lucy had, with her physical daring, her infectious laugh and her light-spilling blue eyes, gathered a crowd around her that would, with some defections, remain there until high school. I had heard her say more than once that afternoon, “Hey, I know a story,” and seen them all—Freddie Slaton, Snake Cheatham, Tom Goodwin, Charlie Gentry, Pres Hubbard, even young Ben Cameron—gather close around her. Only Sarah Cameron did not succumb, pressing close to her mother’s side, her huge eyes shadowed and grave on Lucy. I was as proud of Lucy in that moment as I have ever been. She was a hit, and she was mine. Vindication ran sweetly in my veins.

But that night she had one of her terrible night PEACHTREE ROAD / 83

mares, and after Martha Cater had soothed her wild crying and sponged the sour sweat of panic off her and settled her back in her bed and gone back to her own room, leaving Mickey glowing staunchly from the baseboard of Lucy’s cubicle, she came and slid into my bed with me.

“Hey, Gibby,” she said—for she had begun to call me that immediately upon finding that my middle name was Gibbs—“are you awake?”

“What do you think, after all that?” I said. I moved over toward the wall to give her room, and she burrowed against my side like a small animal.

“What were you dreaming?” I asked.

“I dreamed…that I went over to the Camerons’ house to play and I went inside and it was dark, and I couldn’t find anybody, and then I heard them in back and I went back there and they were all there, grinning at me and holding out their arms to me…but, Gibby, they were all…dolls.”

“Dolls?” I could not imagine what there was in the image of toys that would set Lucy to shaking and screaming, but the fine tremor still had not completely gone out of her arms and legs against mine, and her tear-thickened voice was not completely steady.

“Yeah. You know, dolls. Big ones, with strings hanging off of ’em, walking all jerky and talking funny. Like that place we went when I first came.”

Puppets. My parents and Aunt Willa had taken me and Lucy to a much-heralded children’s puppet show at the old Erlanger Theater down near the Fox that spring, just at Easter, and I remembered then that Lucy had not liked it. I thought of Ben and Dorothy Cameron, of Sarah and Ben Junior, smiling painted smiles from the darkness of the vast, shadowy sun porch where they lived during the summers, wooden arms stretched out avariciously. The image was terrible.

“Did they chase you?” I said.

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“No. They didn’t do anything. But I knew they wanted me.”

“Why would that be so bad?” I asked, to reassure both of us. “They’re real nice people.”

“Because,” she said. “They weren’t real.”

As she often did, Lucy had gotten hold of an essence that had, in her starved and vulnerable heart, been skewed and magnified into something dangerous. The Camerons were such an exemplary, whole and healthful family that it was not hard to see that they might appear, to some few original eyes, simply unreal. They were not that to me, but they were, perhaps, hyperreal. Super-normal. And they were revelatory.

Willa Bondurant brought to the Peachtree Road house, already askew, her own poverty of soul, and Lucy’s deep starvation darkened the stew. I would not have known lightness, grace and normalcy if it had not been for the household of Dorothy and Ben Cameron, and their children, Sarah and Ben. I said that to Sarah once, years later, in the paneled drawing room of the house on Muscogee Avenue, after a funeral.

“You all showed me everything I ever knew of lightness and straightness,” I said. “You were my models for how sane, normal, productive people act, for how well privilege can be used. I really think you all—your mother and dad, especially—are the reason I’m just a little funny and not dead myself.”

Sarah’s eyes were red from weeping, but she smiled. It was not a smile of amusement.

“If you can say that after today,” she said, “then you must be worse off than anybody ever thought.”

“It wasn’t aberration that did this, Sarah,” I said. “It was the times. It was the town. In another place he’d have seen options he could have lived with. In another time, maybe, he could have done it here.”

They were, Ben and Dorothy Cameron, as close, to PEACHTREE ROAD / 85

my mind, as Atlanta can come to producing aristocrats.

Benjamin Aird Cameron’s family had come from Scotland to Virginia before the Revolution, to Atlanta the year it was founded and back to Atlanta before the ashes were cooled, to begin rebuilding the city. Dorothy Chase Cameron’s family hailed originally from Dorsetshire, England, and it was a copy of the Chase manor house, which her father had built on Muscogee, into which she and Ben moved at his death. Merrivale House, it was named, after that first one, though only outsiders called it that, never the Cameron family.

I never knew a family so vital and energetic and so devoted to—even infatuated with—each other. They played together endlessly: rode their bicycles around Buckhead and deep into the surrounding country together, played tennis and swam together at the Driving Club, played badminton and croquet on the satiny lawn beyond the box maze behind the house, performed so many family plays and pageants and skits and spoofs and entertainments that their cottage in the old colony up at Tate had a minstrel’s gallery built into it just for that purpose. In the long evenings of winter they read aloud to one another and listened to music on the big Capehart that was a twin to ours and the ones in half the Buckhead houses—popular songs and light classics and show tunes, for they were not intellectuals; I was well established at Princeton before I encountered families who were truly intellectually cultivated—and they even had a sort of family band.