Peachtree Road (15 page)

110 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

V-J Day and rock candy came back to Lane’s and Wender

& Roberts Drugstore, James Bondurant left my pantheon of heroes and soared away out of my head like a falcon. It was, after that, as if he had never been there.

Oddly, the war made of the house on Peachtree Road a healthier place than it was ever again. I suppose that only something on the scale of a world war could loosen our attention from the sucking sands of self and neurosis and coax it outside. But all of us, from Lucy and me to the servants and my parents and Aunt Willa, had a focus for our hungers and energies, and, moreover, one that was universally approved. Lucy and I had our phantom warrior. My father had his essential occupation. My mother and Aunt Willa had war work. I think perhaps it was the first—and looking back on it, only—time in their lives Olivia and Willa Bondurant had the approval of their small society for something that they did, rather than something that they were. I wonder that they did not like the approbation well enough to continue the work, but they did not: Neither, so far as I know, did more than rudimentary volunteer work again for the balance of her life.

But for that time, all the women of Buckhead worked. The women of the larger Buckhead around us, which we saw every day but somehow did not see, went to work for pay; they took over the jobs that the young men had left when they went to war, in offices and factories and shops; they drove taxis and stood behind counters and served food and did laundry and pumped gas. Some of them went to work at the massive new Bell bomber plant in Marietta when it opened; the great mass of the “bummer plant,” as it became known, bulked comfortingly over my childhood like a fortress, like an arsenal, between Us and the enemy Them. These women gave up their nylons and silk stockings and wore cotton lisle, or dyed their legs a weeping brown; they wore PEACHTREE ROAD / 111

trousers and bandannas and berets and battle jackets, and some few of the young ones soon wore the uniforms of nurses, or Wacs, or Waves. Everybody, it seems, had a costume for the Great Ruffled War. Lucy received, that Christmas, a hideous Wac’s outfit with a flat-topped, brimmed hat, and I got and wore out a small white regulation sailor suit.

The women of the Buckhead we knew, in which we moved, had their own uniforms. They were the smart, somehow immensely flattering uniforms of the Red Cross, and to a woman, the circle my mother moved in and the wider circle of women from the great houses of Buckhead put them on for the duration of the war. My mother went three afternoons a week to Fort Mac-Pherson where she served coffee and doughnuts to homesick young men being processed there by the thousands. I’m sure she was the object of more than one yearning wartime crush. I remember how she looked on those afternoons when she got into the backseat of the Chrysler which Shem brought around to the front of the house: slender, austere, pale and fine-featured, her sleek wet-looking dark hair drawn smoothly up and under the becoming little billed cap, great, dark, drowned eyes somber. She looked the way a young Florence Nightingale should have looked. Even the lipstick-stained cigarette in her fingers did not spoil the ministering purity of her, on those first winter afternoons. Because she was going out to serve in the war that so absorbed me, I adored and admired her, for that little time, as well as loved her. It was the most and the fullest I have ever felt for her.

Some of the women we knew did work for which, had it not been volunteer, they would have held company presid-encies or board chairs. Dorothy Cameron directed a pioneer nurses’ aid training program for a seven-state area for the Red Cross, a program that

112 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

became, under her aegis, a national practical-nursing service.

She was, that year, Atlanta’s Woman of the Year in Defense, and missed her own awards banquet because she was down at Grady holding the head of a pregnant, husbandless young Negro woman volunteer as she vomited into a towel.

“How ghastly,” my mother said honestly, when she heard the story. “Isn’t that just like Dorothy?”

“Yes, it is,” my father replied. “I think she’s a pretty brave, smart gal.”

“You would,” my mother said sweetly.

My aunt Willa did Red Cross work too, partly, I suspect, because she knew instinctively how well she looked in the uniform. She stayed downtown after work two evenings a week, and helped staff a canteen near the bus station, and I know that she left a trail among the cheeky, gum-chewing young soldiers and sailors who flocked there, because not a few of them telephoned her at the Peachtree Road house, and one or two quite literally followed her home. I didn’t blame them. Aunt Willa in her battle dress was spectacular.

The severity of the uniform both tempered and set off the tropical lushness and humidity of her, and the chaste white collared cuffs and the purity of the cross on her uniform were perfect foils for the smoky cat odor that somehow hung about her, no matter how demure her downcast eyes or practiced her aristocratic drawl became. Aunt Willa by that time had nearly perfected the outward armor, if not the inner anima, of a well born Atlantan woman, but there still clung to her like a spoor something that called out, stridently and urgently, to the raw, prowling young servicemen.

“Like tomcats to a cat in heat,” my mother muttered to my father after Shem had glared away the second randy youngster from the portico. “She can buy up the entire Wood Valley Shop, but she’s still as common as gully dirt.”

PEACHTREE ROAD / 113

“She’s holding down two jobs and raising three children, Olivia,” my father said, “and she hasn’t taken a cent from us since she went to work.”

“Why should she?” My mother smiled bitterly. “She has all those good clothes of mine and a nurse for her children and a lovely home and good food and a car at her disposal….

Why should she take any more? What more does she need?”

“Maybe a little support from her sister-in-law,” my father said.

“She doesn’t need that, either,” my mother said. “She gets all of that she needs from her brother-in-law. It makes me wonder what else she gets from him.”

“I never knew you were jealous,” my father said, leaving the drawing room with what looked to me, hiding with Lucy under the great foyer staircase in the telephone nook, like a strange, small smile.

“Don’t flatter yourself,” my mother said, and went on up the stairs.

“They’re fighting over your mother,” I said to Lucy. It was her idea to lurk under the stairs that winter, to spy on the adults in the house. I still do not know why she did it. She never seemed to me then, or at any other time, to be particularly interested in the comings and goings of my mother, or hers, though she was interested, almost endlessly, in those of my father.

“Yeah,” she said. “I think your daddy wants to get on Mama. He ought to, too. She likes it a lot better than your mama. At least, she yells and laughs, instead of crying.”

The thought was, to me, quite dreadful, though I did not, then, understand why. The undercurrents in the house, though overridden by the larger storm of the war, were still there. But I was enjoying the relative peace of those early war days, and the lessening of my parents’ hawklike scrutiny that they brought, and I did not want

114 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

anything to call those powerful tides out of their subterranean stasis.

“Come on upstairs,” I said, hoping to divert her from the subject of my father and Aunt Willa. “I got a new book at school. I’ll read some of it to you.”

It worked. She was past me and up the stairs like a small deer. Lucy reveled in the war and delighted in the peccadilloes of the adults, but she bloomed and thrived on words on a page like a parched vine in a spring rain.

She was reading proficiently by that time, even though she was scarcely into first grade at E. Rivers, and she could have read for herself any book that I brought home. But she loved to be read aloud to; loved it all her life, and all her life, or most of it, I spun webs of words out into the air between us, reading sometimes far into the night, reading through drying and husked throat and with aching eyes, for the sheer pleasure of watching Lucy’s face as she received the words.

She had a way, then, of looking intently at your eyes and lips as you read, her head tilted slightly to one side, lips just slightly parted in a smile so that the nacre of her small, pearly teeth showed through, eyes so suffused with the peculiar, still blue light that tears seemed to be standing in them. It was the rapt, passionate gaze of the young novice
receiving
the ring of Christ; it was a look that gave the reader the full status and power of a deity. Sometimes she listened to people talking to her with something of that look, and all her life it entranced people. But it was never quite the same full, blissful,
receiving
look that she kept for the person who gave the words of books to her. I don’t know if anyone else ever read to her; I know, when she was small, that no one in the Peachtree Road house did, and I cannot imagine Red Chastain doing it. Perhaps Jack Venable, though somehow I doubt that. By the time he entered Lucy’s life his best gift to her was his powerful, enabling passivity. At any rate, it was my fancy that I

PEACHTREE ROAD / 115

was the only person Lucy ever allowed to read to her, and I would have read my way through Plutarch’s
Lives
for her, if she had wanted that.

When she had started first grade, her teacher had read the class a snippet of Kipling’s
The Jungle Book
, and Lucy was instantly and utterly captivated. Her face was so incandescent when she told me about small Mowgli, who was saved from starvation and raised by the wolf pack, that I badgered my mother to take us downtown to the big gray stone pile of the Carnegie Library and check the book out. That night, with the aid of Mickey Mouse and a stolen flashlight, I read the book in its entirety to her, and for the rest of that fall we lived in the enchanted emerald jungle of those pages. Each evening I reread a portion of the book to her until she fell asleep, and after school, in the autumn-gilded honeysuckle thicket behind the summerhouse, we played endless games of Jungle Book. Lucy sometimes took the role of Bagheera, the sleek black panther, but most of the time she was Mowgli, and she always accorded me the role of Baloo, the great, fierce, protective bear.

“We be of one blood, thou and I,” Lucy would intone endlessly, in a kind of incantatory singsong, through those warm, vivid afternoons. And when we were separated from each other, or met again, we would cry, “Mark my trai-i-i-i-l! Mark my trai-i-i-l!”

One afternoon, when the cicada-buzzing, dry heat of Indian summer had burned so endlessly onto our heads and forearms that we felt time-stopped and weightless in a dusty golden void, Lucy unwrapped the ball of her red sweater and pulled out a kitchen paring knife.

“Let’s really be of one blood,” she said. “Let’s cut our wrists and bleed in each other, so we’ll always be blood kin.”

The mere sight of the knife made me weak and sick.

116 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

I knew instantly that she would do it. Lucy often did not seem to feel the pain of a skinned knee or a stubbed toe, and blood meant no more to her than water or Kool-Aid. I knew, too, that she knew that blood and pain weakened and sickened me profoundly. She had never taunted me with it, nor lured me into harm’s way. I felt the old preLucy vulnerability and shame wash over me.

“We
are
blood kin,” I said. “We’re first cousins. We couldn’t be any closer kin unless we were brothers and sisters.”

“You know what I mean,” Lucy said.

I did.

“Lucy, if you think I’m going to cut myself with that thing, you’re crazy,” I said desperately. “We’ll get a whipping if we do it.”

“We won’t if they don’t know it,” Lucy said. “How will they know it if we don’t tell them?”

“They’ll just know.”

“Come on, Gibby,” Lucy said. “You’ll do it if you love me.”

She took the small, bone-handled knife, kept keen and glittering by Shem’s whetstone, and drew a welling line of red on her fragile, blue-veined wrist. It filled, trembled, and showered down in a cascade of red drops onto the dry earth of the thicket floor, which drank it thirstily and instantly.

She stared dreamily at the blood, as if to memorize its course over her arm. Then she raised her light-drowned eyes to me and smiled. She held the knife out.

The dry, burning day quite literally described a slow, stately, shimmering arc over my head, and the scraping song of the cicadas retreated from my ears in a long, sucking surge, as if a tide were going out. A great, faraway roaring remained. I could seem to see nothing but the evil, efficient glitter of the little knife.

“Your turn,” she said. I could scarcely hear her through the roaring in my ears.

PEACHTREE ROAD / 117

I turned a blinded, shamed face to her.

“I can’t do that,” I said humbly. “I can’t cut myself. There’s lots I’d do for you, Lucy, but I can’t cut my arm with that knife. I’d get sick and urp all over you. Or I’d faint. You know that. You know what happened when I got that nosebleed last spring. I was in bed all day.”

“You have to,” Lucy said inexorably. In her stillness and implacability she was like some pagan priestess, kneeling there in the burning woods with the autumn sun glinting off the knife in her hand.

“I can’t,” I said. “You might as well ask me to cut my throat.”

“I’ll do it for you,” she said earnestly. “I’ll do it real quick, so you won’t have time to be scared. You won’t even feel it, hardly. It’s real sharp. And I’ll put my sweater over it, so you won’t have to look at the blood. And if you urp I’ll clean it up.”

“I can’t,” I said again, in dull despair. The humiliation of the endless moment was complete.

She was beside me in a moment, in a silent, sinuous wriggle like the movement of a snake.

“You have to do it, Gibby,” she hissed, in an urgent, sibilant whisper that snapped my tight-screwed eyes open. Her face was paper-white and her eyes blazed, and tears stood in them. She did not, in that moment, even look like my cousin Lucy; she looked like something out of a forest far older and wilder than the one in which we sat; she looked like something that should wear, on her beautiful, narrow head, a crown of living, writhing snakes. I felt my mouth drop open into a slack
O
.