Peachtree Road (22 page)

“No,” Pres said, flaming red, “I can ride twice that far if I want to. I can outride you any day of the week, Lucy Bondurant. I just need to be back by five, is all.”

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“Well, you will be if we get started right now,” Lucy said, grinning over her shoulder. “I know you’ve really got to get back, Pres. You too, Ben. All of you, I guess. Because big old eleven-year-old boys couldn’t still be scared of ghosts and hants and things, could they? When a little ol’ nine-year-old girl ain’t?”

I knew by that that she was dead serious about riding out to the Pink Castle. Lucy never would have resorted to ridicule to get the Buckhead Boys to do something she wanted them to do unless she figured she had to. She had never, since the day of the train at Brookwood Station, had to.

“I’m not scared of ghosts or hants or you or anything else in shoe leather,” Pres said tightly, and got on his bicycle and began to pedal furiously away. One by one, as if by mute accord, we followed him silently. It took Lucy until the corner of Peachtree Road and West Paces Ferry to catch up and sail past us to the head of the column.

We went so fast that the wind whipped words from our mouths, and so we were silent until we reached the point, farther out West Paces Ferry than we had ever been, where the long, curving, overgrown ribbon of asphalt that was the driveway to the Pink Castle lay dreaming silently and ominously in the sullen glow of the waning afternoon. Still wordless, we got off our bikes and stood with Lucy at the mouth of that chain-barred tunnel of green.

“Well,” she said, finally, her voice loud in the thick silence.

“What y’all waiting for? Christmas?”

I truly believe that she had started out only to finally see it for herself, this forbidden enchanted kingdom in the woods, but by the time we had slipped the rusted chain easily from its morning and started in our Indian file down the tunnel of poison green, the danger and perversity in her was palpable in the hot, dense air, and

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leaped like heat lightning from her mind into ours. Our fingers fairly crackled and spat with undischarged trouble by the time we laid our bikes on their sides on the great, cracked marble loggia and looked up at the Pink Castle. The sheer excess and improbability of it kept us mute. We were accustomed to large houses, but we had never seen anything like this.

“Holy shit,” Snake said. “That’s the biggest house I ever saw.”

“Naw, it ain’t,” Lucy said. “But it sure is the ugliest.”

Still subdued, but jerking and shivering with nerves, we filed up the marble steps and around to the enormous, glassed enclosure on the castle’s right flank, which housed the stagnant swimming pool. We stooped and picked up rocks, chunks of broken concrete, rusted iron railings, whatever litter lay at hand.

When we reached the margin of the vile opaque green water, Lucy stooped and caught up a chunk of broken concrete.

“Might be snakes,” she said, grinning fiercely.

“Might be alligators,” Tom said, picking up a section of rusted iron railing.

“Might be elephants,” Snake said, hefting a huge piece of granite.

For the space of a minute we all stood in the blind air, our heads and veins thrumming with electricity, holding rocks and stones and litter. The day blazed with queerness and danger. We were not, in that moment, altogether human spawn.

I don’t know what might have happened if Lucy had not spoken, for even then we all hesitated, trembling like young animals at the scene of a slaughter. But she looked at us, one by one, in turn, and said, “Break the glass.” And when still we hesitated, she drew back her white arm and threw her crumbling concrete straight through the many-paned wall facing us. Before that first

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silvery tinkle had died away, all our rocks and bricks were flying.

“Kill the witch!” Lucy shrieked. “Tear down the castle!”

“Tear it down!” we howled, obedient echoes. “Tear it down!”

It took us two hours. We worked our way from the swimming pool enclosure into the first floor of the house and through all the dark, empty, filthy rooms, smashing and powdering glass. We climbed the littered and listing twin staircases and shattered the leaded glass windows on the landing, and brought down the great, gapprismed chandelier with a broom we picked up in the kitchen. We laid a singing crystal waste to the second floor, and to the small windows on the third. Not a pane, not a mirror, not an abandoned bibelot remained intact. We did not laugh, and I doubt that we spoke more than a few words to each other. I remember none. Like the maenads who tore Dionysus apart with their bare, blood-dappled hands, I don’t think we came to ourselves until we had finished the third floor and were standing at the bottom of the stairs leading up to the turret rooms, eyes blinded, chests heaving, and I don’t know if we would have stopped then, the love song of smashing glass was so loud in our ears, except that the banshee moan of the Buckhead police cruiser coming down the driveway finally outsang it. I don’t know to this day if they were on their regular rounds, or if someone saw us start into the driveway and called them.

We stood silent, rooted with doom and enormity, waiting for them.

“We are going to catch pure and tee hell,” fastidious Ben Cameron whispered, his vivid, clever face blanched. “And we deserve to. This was—just awful.”

It was Charlie who told. I knew this time that he would.

Even before the siren stopped and the police car spun to a halt on the loggia outside, I saw dawning com 168 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

prehension and horror replace the wild, inhuman glass-lust in his brown eyes, large and spaniel-like behind the thick glasses, and saw the opaque skim of self-loathing dull them.

I saw the look he bent on Lucy, too. I knew that he would not spare her, any more than he would spare himself. She knew it too, knew, in that instant, more: that her days at the head of the Buckhead Boys were ended here, in all this bizarre emptiness, amid spilled crystal blood. I saw her smoke-blue eyes clear of their madness and widen, and then go white-ringed with panic. She turned to me.

“Gibby,” she began, in a child’s whimper. “Gibby, please…”

“Don’t say a word, Shep,” Charlie said in a voice I did not know. Tears swam, magnified, behind the bottle-glass lenses.

He was very pale. I could see him trembling from where I stood. “Shut up, Lucy. I’m not going to let Shep take the blame for this.”

He was as good as his word. He told Billy Trammel, who came crunching up the glass-littered stairs and found us there, that Lucy had instigated the vandalism, and he told first his prim and furious father, who came to the station house to get him, and then mine when he arrived to fetch Lucy and me. I knew that he did not tell in order to divert punishment from his own head; Charlie was so straitlaced and honorable that his nickname within our pack was Judge, and in any case, he knew that there was no hope of deliverance now.

We had all gone irredeemably past that. He had felt the bloodlust and been blinded by it just as we all had; he had rampaged freely with us through the house, breaking, breaking. Even if he himself had by some miracle escaped notice, he would have confessed his own blame. And all through the blistering tongue-lashing we received from Shorty Farr, the chief of police, and the quieter and infinitely more wounding words spoken by his stricken, sanctimonious PEACHTREE ROAD / 169

father; even through his own tears—for we all broke down under the parental onslaughts and the enormity of our deed—I could see in his mild brown eyes a profound relief that it was ended, and that he would no longer have to follow Lucy on her mad, spiraling rides. I saw that same relief, though not so clear, in the eyes of several of the others.

“It was Lucy who started it,” Charlie said over and over.

“But none of us tried to stop her. I threw the first rock.”

It was, of course, a lie, but at the words my long love for Charlie was born.

And so once again Lucy and I were in virtual quarantine, though this time the sons of many other houses of Buckhead were also under house arrest, and while the punishment was longer and more severe, I minded it far less than the isolation that had followed little Jamie’s death. It was the beginning of my brief time as pure boy in a boy’s world, a time I doubt I would have had if it had not been for the punishment and its attendant separation from Lucy. I think if it had not been for that day, I simply would have followed Lucy’s erratic dance on into my teens and high school, and been the more sharply dashed against the rocks when she finally did open her hands and let me free. As it was, I moved into the last days of my childhood in the company of boys, and made of one of them—Charlie Gentry—the great male friend of my life. That incarceration, and the few years that followed it, contain all I know of the light, clear bonds of masculine friendship.

But for Lucy it was a deep and howling loneliness, and anguish, and worse than that: an end, for all time, to power pure and simple. She had power again, great power, but it was never again clean and whole.

CHAPTER SEVEN

T
his time our separation was complete. Martha and Shem Cater moved my bed and clothing and books out to the summerhouse and a crew from Moncrief came and installed an oil furnace, and my mother came out silent and red-eyed bringing winter curtains and bedspread and pillows and some Georgia Tech and University of Georgia pennants for the stucco walls, and from that day until this, I have lived in the summerhouse behind the house on Peachtree Road. Although I felt keenly the shame and isolation of my banishment, something under them leaped like a flame at the prospect of this, my own private kingdom in the sheltering garden, and something even under that, dim and shameful, stirred in mean and smug satisfaction that this perfect domain had come only to me, and was now barred to Lucy. I had never before had any power that had not, essentially, been borrowed from her.

Her isolation was almost total. She was forbidden by a furious, screeching Aunt Willa to have anything more to do with me or with any of the boys in her former band, except in unavoidable and supervised public situations like church and, later, school. Meals together with the family were allowed, after the first two or three days of confinement and trays, and we were permitted to ride together in the Chrysler to Sunday lunches at the club, but even then she was made to sit in the backseat with her mother and the pious Little Lady, while I was sandwiched between my parents in the front. We were not allowed to speak to each other, and for a while did not attempt to do so. For a time during that incarceration Lucy spoke virtually to no one, and kept her blue eyes on her lap or fixed on some point in the middle distance.

Never in all that time did I hear her cry or plead for PEACHTREE ROAD / 171

leniency or attempt to justify herself. I think if she had denied culpability I would have backed her up, maybe even claimed blame myself, but I think we both knew that no one would have believed us. What was possible to Lucy was not, even then, possible to me, and our families knew it. Lucy might be, and often was, stricken with terror at the outcome of her actions, but she had a fierce small personal code that forbade begging for mercy—though she would fight savagely against what she perceived as inequities to others.

I think it would have served her better if she had begged.

Aunt Willa might then have ceased the grim battle of wills that marked her lifelong relationship with her older daughter, might have been appeased by Lucy’s terrible vulnerability.

But Lucy never offered her that, and I don’t think Aunt Willa ever saw it. I truly think that what she saw when she looked at Lucy was merely a profoundly visible embarrassment and a threat to her position in the house and the city, a threat that might at any time banish her back to the chicken farm in South Georgia. Before the incident of the Pink Castle, Lucy had been to her a shackle and a stumbling block, but not without value simply because my father at times looked upon her with something resembling pity and fondness. Now both had gone out of his cold eyes, to be replaced by a remote and inexorable distaste, and Lucy became to her mother simply and forever the enemy. I never knew a woman so without maternal love.

Many years later a psychiatrist, a warm, caring woman who treated and loved and ultimately despaired of Lucy, told me that in any family group there is a natural scapegoat, a sort of tacitly designated bearer of blame and punishment.

There is no doubt that Lucy became, after the afternoon at the Pink Castle, the scapegoat in my father’s house, and I think that even if she had not done—and continued to do—things that shocked and

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outraged my parents and her mother, she still would have worn the wreath of the sacrificial goat. She was simply so visible. A few people, like me, saw the living fire in the air around her, and those who did not sensed the displacement and were troubled by it.

I think in total darkness you could have sensed that Lucy was in the room with you. The force in her was so strong as to threaten to break free, and that kind of vivid, roiling life inevitably disturbs. It is far easier to label it aberrant and punish it than to examine it. And of course, all her life, and with a sort of blinded innocence, Lucy went in harm’s way.

The need for rescue and protection lay so deep and burned so strong that it outweighed virtually any lesson she might have learned, any punishment she might receive. I could not have understood that then, but I did understand that punishment of Lucy achieved nothing and harmed her cruelly. What was meant to break her cleanly succeeded only in bending, and that permanently.

For she was almost literally banished from our sight. Even when the incarceration was ended and we were free to go about our routines once more and resume speaking to each other, Lucy was effectively removed from all but minimal contact with her mother and sister and my parents and me.

She had none with the children of Buckhead. I am sure that Aunt Willa would have put her into a convent if there had been any such thing in Atlanta and the stench of Rome had not been so taboo, or sent her to a boarding school if there had been money available. As it was, it must have burned her starved and stinging heart like fire to accept my father’s curt offer of tuition to a small, pretentious and patently inferior private day school that purported to “finish” subdebs but was widely known to break high-spirited or problem preadolescent girls with an iron snaffle. And my mother’s tiny, knowing smile as she extended the offer, PEACHTREE ROAD / 173