Peachtree Road (14 page)

I have never forgotten that night. It was so mythic, so somehow like an omen. It left Lucy stamped with the mark of otherness.

“How like Lucy, to have her own private omen,” Sarah Cameron said much later, when I told her about it. She was, by then, less than altogether enchanted with Lucy.

But for Lucy and me, the night of the deer remained a part of our private mythology. For though, as I have said, we were, both of us, sad-eyed small realists, still, what child does not make myths of its life? How else could it be borne?

We talked of it so often that fall and winter that our parents finally told us we were being tiresome; that nobody wanted to hear any more about the deer that jumped over Lucy up at Tate. But by that time it did not matter, for there came a Sunday afternoon in December when we were sitting around the Capehart in the library, waiting for Shem to bring the car around and take us to the Driving Club for lunch, and a voice broke into the

102 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

program of music to tell us that Japanese planes had bombed Pearl Harbor, in the Hawaiian Islands.

I remember clearly that my mother cried, and my aunt Willa gave a little squeal, and my father put his hands into his pockets and walked to the window and stood with his back to us, looking silently out into the leafless back garden.

But Lucy jumped to her feet, red flags snapping in her cheeks, blue eyes blazing up like flung diamonds. She stamped her feet on the old Oriental; she hugged herself and danced around like a marionette. And then she ran to me and flung her arms around me, her silky hair whipping across my face.

“That’s where he is!” she shouted, and her voice caroled like flutes and bells with joy. “That’s where my daddy went!

He didn’t leave us! He went to the war!”

And from then on, until the day in August four years later when the church bells and fire sirens of Buckhead called out to tell us of V-J Day, we followed the war, and Lucy was as happy as she would ever be.

CHAPTER FOUR

O
ver that first year of fighting there hung and still hangs a bright scrim of excitement, exhilaration; of pure, jingoistic glamour that emanated, for me, as much from Lucy’s mind as it did from the whole war ethos of America in those early days of conflict. World War II was, to most Americans except those actually embroiled in it, an extremely romantic war. It had all the ingredi-ents of a Tennysonian epic: a clear-cut moral imperative, highly visible forces of light and darkness, simple and larger-than-life heroes and villains, sacrifice, sanctioned violence, brave men fighting and dying for home and country, brave women waiting until they came home again. It was irresistible. There was not a living soul in America and Atlanta and Buckhead who was not caught up in the glittering web of that war.

And Lucy was the greatest acolyte it had. Much later she would write a fine little essay on those first days of war in Atlanta, called “The Last of the Great Ruffled Wars,” and in it catch some of the muddleheaded chauvinism that kept us as a city and a nation from perceiving the howling horrors under the ruffles. But in that first war year of 1942, no American, large or small, stuck to a radio or pored over newspapers and magazines with such single-minded ardor as small Lucy Bondurant, of 2500 Peachtree Road, Atlanta.

I stuck and pored beside her, willingly, and the glamour and power of it, that beat in her head like great wings, soon engulfed me. For that first year, we did little, thought little, said little that did not have its genesis in the war.

Buckhead was a small village still, then, and so the feathery wing tips of the war that reached out to brush 104 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

a Buckheader touched, inevitably and personally, someone we knew. Early in 1942, a Buckhead boy, the son of a clerk at Cantrell’s Grocery Store on Roswell Road, was shot through the throat in the Solomons, and all of us turned out to call on his parents, and to stare solemnly at the gold star, Buckhead’s first, in the window of the little bungalow on Mathieson Drive. Then a lifeguard from the Garden Hills pool died, and a track star at Boys’ High, and soon there was a small colony of gold stars.

They were, all of them, our very own dead. Later, a very few of the fathers of our small friends went to fight, leaving from the great induction center out at Fort MacPherson, in Southwest Atlanta. But the majority of them did not. Married men with families did not go to the early war, and when, later, they were needed, it seemed that in Buckhead, business empires needed them more. In most cases this was true. Few strings were pulled in North Atlanta to avoid fighting. The insular, truculent Southerner, violence never far under the surface courtesy and indolence, has always known that he fights better and with more savagery than other Americans; he does not shirk a chance to spill blood in the name of honor. The epithet “essential business” that most of our fathers wore was true. So there was, in those first winter evenings of war, around Buckhead dinner tables and radios, in libraries and drawing rooms, a full complement of sober young men listening with their women and children. When I think of my family as a family, as a group of people unified by blood and purpose, I think of those evenings in my father’s library, where we gathered to hear H. V. Kaltenborn with the news and to see, in the pages of
Life
magazine and the Atlanta
Journal
, the images of war.

They are still indelible to me: Whole families PEACHTREE ROAD / 105

sprawled lifeless at the entrance to an air raid shelter in Chungking, crushed in a panic to enter. They looked like tossed Chinese dolls: Why were they all naked from the waist down? Why was there no blood?

Boiling black smoke over the slow-toppling towers of battleships, in Pearl Harbor.

Joe Louis in his private’s uniform; Veronica Lake, her silky sheaf of hair caught in a drill press, demonstrating industrial safety.

For some reason, a great, forty-foot pile of stockpiled automobile tires in Akron.

The charred head of a Japanese tank man buried in blackened sand at Guadalcanal, the teeth living and terrible in their eternal grin.

The monstrous insect gaze of gas masks.

Afterward, Lucy and I would be banished to our upstairs beds, but we did not mind, for we were free then to talk openly between us until we fell asleep, and what we talked of, always, was the war. Or to be exact, the role in that war of my uncle and Lucy’s father, James Clay Bondurant.

For he was everywhere. His face hovered just beyond the great, jovial moon of Roosevelt’s in the newsreels at the Buckhead Theater. “There he is; see?” Lucy would whisper in the dark, poking me, and the anonymous aide would, indeed, become my fabled Uncle Jim.

He was there in the Solomons, and the Philippines, and Burma and Borneo and Singapore; he left Corregidor with General MacArthur and marched with the skeletal dead at Bataan. He almost alone survived; he alone led out the small band of survivors; he alone endured and prevailed. Lucy did not seem to care about the defeats and deaths of those early battles; perhaps she did not take them in. I would say, sometimes, feeling an obscure and smoldering jealousy of the phantom father-uncle who drifted like smoke over those lost battles and never

106 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

died, “We didn’t win that fight, stupid! We lost it! Everybody died. It was a defeat.”

“No, it wasn’t,” she would say calmly. “Everybody didn’t die; he didn’t die. How could he get his picture in the paper if he’d died?”

“That wasn’t his picture!” I shouted once, in rage. “That was somebody you never heard of, who doesn’t look a thing like your father!”

“How do you know?” Lucy said. “You never saw him.”

“Then how come he never writes to you, if he’s such a hotshot hero and he lives through all those battles and gets his picture in
Life
and the movies?”

“He’s busy, stupid,” she said.

And he was! James Bondurant turned the American tide single-handedly at Midway, in the Coral Sea, and waded ashore with the first wave on Guadalcanal. Soon he skipped across seas and mountains to the deserts of North Africa, and was seen posing in modest glory after finally trouncing Rommel’s Afrika Korps. When I pointed out to Lucy that that was a British engagement having nothing to do with American fighting men, she said, reasonably, “Well, then, that’s why there haven’t been any letters. My daddy doesn’t know how to write British.”

I don’t think Aunt Willa and my parents were aware of Lucy’s strange, skewed obsession with her father, at least not for that first year or so of the war. I don’t know how they could have missed it; she made no attempt to conceal it from them. The fact is, in that head-spinning, heart-bulging time, the adults at 2500 Peachtree Road were not much concerned with small Lucy Bondurant and her phantom fighting father.

But Aunt Willa eventually caught on to the extravagant fancy, and came down on Lucy like a Fury. I was there when she did. I will never forget it. I’m sure Lucy never did.

PEACHTREE ROAD / 107

It was near Christmas, 1942. We had been at war just over a year. Lucy lay on the floor of the little den on a Sunday afternoon, poring over the Sunday newspaper. I lay in my accustomed lair, half in and half out of the space behind the Capehart, reading a Captain America comic. The desultory talk of the adults, sated with starchy wartime fare at the Driving Club, eddied and surged over our heads.

Bored, I crept out of my nook and ambled over to Lucy.

“What’re you doing?” I said. I could see that she was reading, or at least looking at photographs. She was quite proficient with words by that time, but the small newsprint sometimes eluded her. It was raining, and we had been forbidden to go out. The afternoon seemed endless.

“Reading about my daddy,” she said. “He’s over in Yugo…Yugo…this place now.” Her small finger stabbed a fuzzily drawn map, and then moved to an out-of-focus photograph of the legendary Yugoslavian partisans, men, women and children, swarming out of ambush from a dark forest and into the very teeth of a Nazi panzer column. Lucy’s forefinger lingered lovingly on one shapeless and altogether unrecognizable figure in the foreground, arm raised as if to hurl a homemade grenade. Its face was obscured; you could not tell if it was man, woman or large child. I merely nodded and said, “Oh, yeah.”

But Aunt Willa was out of her armchair and down on her knees beside Lucy like a lithe whirlwind. She snatched the newspaper from her daughter’s grip and crumpled it in her fist. I stared, open mouthed, and Lucy went absolutely still and white.

“Lucy Bondurant, that’s a lie and you know it!” Aunt Willa shrilled. “I’m not going to let you sit there on the Lord’s day and tell
lies
like that about that no-good, 108 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

shiftless father of yours! That’s not your father! Your father isn’t anywhere near this…foreign place; those aren’t even Americans! He isn’t even in the army; the army wouldn’t have him! The
German
army wouldn’t even have him! If he’s still alive he’s hiding in some swamp somewhere so he won’t have to go in the army; he’s the worst coward on this green earth, and you can bet your prissy little bottom he’s as far away from it as he can get—if he’s even alive, which I doubt.

Most likely he’s long dead from liquor, or worse. So you just hush your mouth about him. I don’t ever want to hear any more of this nonsense!”

She broke off, and looked around her as if coming up out of deep water. My father had retreated behind his own newspaper, but my mother was looking steadily at Aunt Willa, her long hands knitting silently and competently at something olive drab, a cigarette burning in the ashtray beside her. She smiled, a small, odalisque’s smile.

Aunt Willa turned a deep, dull red, and dropped her blazing eyes.

“I didn’t mean to yell,” she said, not to Lucy, but to my mother. “But I won’t have her turning into a little liar.”

“We’re all under a strain these days,” my mother murmured silkily. “I’m sure Lucy was just playing…make-believe.”

Lucy turned the small white mask of her face from Aunt Willa to my mother.

“No I wasn’t,” she said. “It isn’t make-believe. This is my daddy. I don’t care what she says. I don’t care what anybody says. He’s right there in this newspaper, and anybody who says he isn’t is a goddamned liar.”

“Lucy!” Aunt Willa shrieked.

“I hate you,” Lucy said roundly and evenly to her mother.

“I hope your arms and legs rot and fall off and your tongue turns black and chokes you.”

PEACHTREE ROAD / 109

She got up carefully from the floor, smoothing out the crumpled ball of newspaper, and walked stiffly and regally out of the room. We could hear her feet, steady and firm, climbing the stairs to the attic, and the muffled slam of the door. I sat silent, my breath stopped.

“I apologize for her,” Aunt Willa said. “I’ll go and talk to her.”

And she left the room, the red still suffusing the back of her slender neck. My parents said nothing. My mother continued to smile.

Lucy would not let her mother into her locked bedroom.

She would not even let me in. It was morning of the next day before she opened the door, and then it was as if the ugly incident had never occurred. So far as I know, Aunt Willa never challenged Lucy’s fantasy again, and I simply gave up.

More than that, I entered into it. For much of that war, the face of my handsome young uncle was behind all the images of war I carried with me, like a kind of familial pentimento. I knew that she was wrong, but on another, deeper level, the one on which Lucy and I communicated, I believed.

We did not speak of this again to my parents or her mother.

The fact that they did not see Jim Bondurant did not surprise us. I knew, somehow, that he was given only to Lucy, and by her sufferance, to me: our own totem and her hero.

She was, oddly, never afraid for him, though the possibility of his death in battle was always with me, and I half dreaded, half yearned for the devastating, liberating telegram that began: “We regret to inform you”; the olive drab sedan on the circular driveway; the tall, pale officer at the door. They never came. For four years, despite my developing powers of reason and assessment, I continued to carry with me the certainty of his golden whippet ghost, going ahead into battle after battle like a Viking standard, and when the bells and sirens rang on