Peachtree Road (19 page)

My mother did not reply, and I knew that Sarah’s mother had bested her again. For some reason she was a little afraid of tiny Dorothy Cameron, or at least, respected her enough so that she would accept with unaccustomed meekness words she would have flung back into anyone else’s face. I knew also that she would

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be on the phone to her circle after Dorothy left, reporting this latest Cameronian breach of decorum.

There was a little silence, and then Dorothy Cameron said,

“How are the children taking it? I haven’t seen Shep since it happened. I’ve thought about him and Lucy. She’s a sensitive little thing. I hope this hasn’t upset her too much.”

“We’re keeping them quiet and apart for a little while,”

my mother said, and I grinned an adult’s mirthless grin at the enormity of the understatement. “Lucy isn’t a very good influence on Shep, and this little break is doing him a world of good. He’s fine; I spend all my afternoons and nights with him, and I’ve really enjoyed getting to know my little boy again. He’s awfully precious to me, Dorothy, especially since I’ve seen how easy it is for them to just slip away. I’m not ever going to let him run wild again, like he has this summer with that child, that Lucy. There’s too much of sensitivity and talent in Sheppie that ought to be cultivated. She’s a wild little thing, you know, and not at all stable. Way too big for her britches and spoiled from running loose. Willa hasn’t spent a minute with her since the baby died; she’s with Little Lady every second that she’s home. Now
that
poor baby was just devastated. She hasn’t stopped crying yet. But Lucy…not a tear, not a word. Oh well. Given the givens, what can you expect?”

“Who stays with Lucy?” Dorothy Cameron asked.

“Why…no one, really, I guess,” my mother said. “ToTo every now and then, maybe. She doesn’t seem to want anybody around her; won’t answer if you ask her a direct question; won’t even look at you when you’re talking to her. So we’re just leaving her pretty much alone and letting her sulk.

I think she’ll soon catch on to how unattractive it is. I don’t worry a bit about that child. She doesn’t need anybody. If this little spell by herself teaches her a few manners, so much to the good.”

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I rolled off the register and drew myself up on the floor in a ball of sheer pain. I did not want to hear any more. It was far worse than I had thought. Apart from me, Lucy was without a protector in the house. Her own mother, perhaps sensing the loss of power that Jamie’s dying had dealt her, had bent her efforts now upon nurturing and cultivating Little Lady, her only other viable little commodity. My mother had, for some unfathomable reason, bent her whole obsessive attention once again upon me. My already remote father, grieving in his own way over the loss of that tiny male Bondurant, would, I knew, have retreated into the library and pulled his distance in behind him. ToTo was with Little Lady all day. That left only Martha Cater—an already exasperated, spread-too-thin Martha. Lucy had become that for which, it must seem to her, her very birth had marked her: pariah.

Rage filled me and became tears, and as I wept I resolved to go downstairs that night when everyone was sleeping and comfort her, and whoever found me be damned. If they removed me I would go back. And I would go back again.

Whatever they did to me, I did not care. Sainthood surged back, strong and simple and sweet.

But I did not, after all, have to put myself to the test, for just after my mother had brought my dinner tray and settled down with me for the evening, my father came into the little room, his face a thundercloud, and said, “Is Lucy up here?”

“Why, of course not,” my mother said. “What’s the matter?”

“She’s not in her room,” he said. “She was gone when Willa got in from Canteen, and we can’t find her anywhere around the place. Little Lady is gone, too.”

“ToTo…,” my mother began, half rising.

“ToTo,” my father said in profound disgust, “was asleep.

It took me and Martha five minutes to wake her 144 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

up. She wouldn’t have heard the Third Army Band if it had gone through.”

“Where is Willa?” my mother said.

“Downstairs having a fit.” My father bit off the words.

“Martha has called George Ballentine, and I’ve called the police. I’m not going to fool around with that little brat this time.”

My blood ran cold with fear for Lucy, but under the ice leaped a tongue of sheer exultation: “Good for you, Lucy!

Good for you!”

When they went out of the room and down the stairs I was behind them, and I don’t believe they ever did realize that I had, without a word, ended forever that hateful quarantine. Or no, that Lucy had ended it for both of us, when she had kidnapped her younger sister. A missing Lucy Bondurant was one thing, but a missing Little Lady was another matter entirely. We heard the sirens of the first police car before we reached the foyer.

They found Lucy in the Greyhound bus station downtown, pushing a shrieking, filthy Little Lady in her outgrown stroller, waiting for the bus to New Orleans for which Lucy had purchased two tickets. She had, she calmly and freely admitted, stolen the money from her mother’s purse and watched and waited until no one seemed to be about, called a taxi and put Little Lady and the stroller into it and been driven to the station. And no, she had had no trouble at all in doing so. It was easy when you knew how.

But where was she going? they asked. And what did she think she was doing, taking her little sister all the way downtown and trying to get on a bus with her?

“I was saving her from the polio so Mama wouldn’t cry anymore,” Lucy said earnestly, her eyes wide and lambent and impossibly blue. “I was going to find Daddy and he would save her from the polio.”

After she had been spanked and sent to bed without PEACHTREE ROAD / 145

her supper, and—much worse, unheard of—scolded soundly and coldly by my father, she sobbed quietly in her little bed up under the eaves, and at first would not answer when I slipped in beside her and gathered her into my arms. It seemed as though the quarantine had never happened, and as if she had never been away from me.

“I think what you did was real brave,” I whispered. “She shouldn’t have licked you for it.”

I felt her start to tremble, and tightened my arms around her, and then I heard, incredibly, her rich, glorious laugh.

“I wasn’t gon’ to save her from the polio, silly,” she said.

“I was gon’ put her on that bus and send her off, and then I’d be the only one. Like I was in the beginning, with Daddy.

It was her and Jamie that ran Daddy off, I know. If I was the only one, I know he’d come back. I know he would. He said he wasn’t ever going to leave me, and he wouldn’t have, if it hadn’t been for those crybabies.”

In the narrow white bed, in the white August moonlight, I felt very cold. She was asleep almost before she had murmured the last sentence, but it was a long time before I slept.

The next morning she did not come down to breakfast with the rest of us, and I did not like to remark on her absence, because I was afraid they would remember the quarantine and declare it back in effect. I knew that she was awake, and that she was not sulking, because she had talked cheerfully to me as I dressed.

We were almost through when she came into the breakfast room. She went straight to my father and climbed onto his lap, and put her hands on his shoulders and peered into his face. Her eyes were almost black with intensity, and her hair, which she had worn braided all summer, was unbound and stood in a just-brushed nimbus around her small, pointed face. The tea rose color came and went.

146 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

“I’m sorry I was a bad girl, Uncle Sheppard,” she said. “I promise never to do it again. Please don’t be so mad at me that you won’t take care of me anymore.”

My father looked at her silently for a space of time, delicate and rose-flushed in her thin white batiste nightgown. Then he gave her a hug, awkward but hard. I heard the breath go out of her in a little chuff.

“I’ll take care of you until the cows come home, Puddin’,”

he said, and I thought that there was a trace, a minute and incredible gleam of wetness in his pale blue eyes.

“Thank you,” Lucy said, and climbed down and pattered out of the room and back up the stairs.

I followed her in a few moments.

“Boy, that was some act you put on with Daddy,” I said admiringly. “You had him eating out of your hand. I could never get away with that.”

“It wasn’t an act,” she said. “I meant it.”

“But you didn’t have to do that. He’ll take care of you. He has to. You’re his niece.”

“Well, I had to make sure,” Lucy said.

“I’ll take care of you, Lucy,” I said. “I swore on my blood to do that. You don’t have to worry about that.”

“You aren’t big enough yet,” she said, and there was an entirely unchildlike, workman’s practicality in her voice. “I have to make sure he does until you can.”

That night a great storm, the grandfather of all summer thunderstorms, broke over the house on Peachtree Road, and even before the lightning and thunder swept cursing off to the east, a great breath of fresh, cool air out of the green-lit west came ghosting in to tell us that the heat—the monstrous, torpid Big Heat—had gone, and with it the sneaking, murdering polio, and for that year, at least, we were done with the shadow of that summer death.

CHAPTER SIX

S
ome people say that the great change began then, in the years just after World War II; that the wartime economy which lifted Atlanta out of the doldrums of Depression never really faltered, and that a great trajectory which would span fifty years and literally bridge worlds was launched with the planes and ships of that war.

My friend Barry Gresham, who would later found the city’s first pure research institute, holds that Atlanta’s future was virtually assured when the young men who were our fathers returned from war or from wartime preoccupations and looked around them to scan the lay of the land. Those years were, Barry thinks, like a held breath, the preliminary gathering of muscles for a great leap of growth and progress that would never stop. Not, he says, overtly; the young men who would guide the progress and shape its direction were not yet themselves fully aware of their inherent power and their looming roles. They simply came home to tend to business and raise families, expand fortunes, carve niches, build lives.

But one day, toward the end of the 1950s, they would look up and see that a slow stagnation had set in; that the last tall building of the city’s skyline had gone up nearly a decade before, and that Atlanta’s engine choked and stuttered on idle. Their own fortunes had increased dramatically, but the city’s had not. They would look around them and at one another in the clubs and libraries and patios of the Northwest, and, almost as if by prior design, would move together to ponder and plan, and the power of them would leap in the very air, almost as palpable as lightning, and wheels rusted for a decade would begin to grind.

But we children did not see the fateful change begin 148 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

ning, of course; to us, these golden men were just our fathers.

We might have been dimly aware, though I doubt it, that we were entering another stage of growth, emerging from small childhood into a kind of
mittelkinder
principality, but this was just that: a stage, a phase, an extension of the same privileged and insular existence we had led for the first few years of our lives. We were almost laughably, stereotypically boyish and girlish. Hollywood of that era would have loved us: princely little Disney piglets. Pretty little Shirleys and Deannas. What was the cloying movie so popular at that time?
Angels with Dirty Faces
? That was us.
Our Gang
, only with money.

For we were the small heirs of Atlanta’s social and financial elite, and on some level we knew it, and were secure, even off-hand, within the impenetrable shell it cast around us. We knew, most of us, that we would inherit more than personal fortunes, but we were remarkably unaffected by the knowledge. Looking back, I can see that most of our parents labored mightily to keep us what they considered “natural,”

untouched and unspoiled by this legacy of substance and style. I never knew until after my father’s death the extent of my family’s wealth. Sarah and Ben Cameron, both with formidable trusts set up by grandparents, were required to earn their spending and Sunday school money. Most of us, Lucy and I included, had allowances that were smaller than those of many children across Peachtree Road in Garden Hills, and almost all of us did some sort of work to earn them. Virtually all the boys had a job at some time or other during high school. Virtually all the girls baby-sat and did chores. None of us knew anything of our fathers’ businesses and professions; far less, perhaps, than the children of wealth and privilege in other cities. Sarah and Ben, Tom Goodwin, Carter Rawson, Snake Cheatham, Pres Hubbard, Charlie Gentry, me, Freddie Slaton, Lelia Blackburn, Julia Randolph…these small spawn of the

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big houses and others like us were sublimely unaware, even as it was beginning to happen, that our fathers would be mayor, bank presidents, heads of multistate utilities, editors and publishers and broadcasters, builders of cities and empires, chiefs of great altruistic foundations.

And we remained unaware for a very long time. We were, simply, the wiry, skinned-kneed players of playground baseball and football, divers and swimmers in club and backyard pools, racers of soapbox cars, builders of model ships and airplanes, fliers of kites, artists of marbles and mumblety-peg and sharpshooters of Daisy air rifles, captives at small, creamy dancing schools, attenders of Saturday matinees and readers of comic books, mothers of dolls and guests at tea parties, tireless riders of Schwinns, rovers in woods and dabblers in creeks, wrestlers and brawlers and trick-or-treaters and fledgling flirts and belles of an era that, in its innocence and insularity, will likely never be seen or equaled again.