Peachtree Road (23 page)

and the silky fan of lashes that shuttered the contemptuous triumph in her eyes, must have seared equally deep. But Aunt Willa accepted.

I think it was for that triumph, for that humiliation, that Willa Bondurant declared her war on Lucy, not for the van-dalizing of the empty house. But she accepted the offer with as much of her carefully cultivated, modest grace as she could salvage. Better to cast out the offending eye than risk having it cause irremediable damage. Aunt Willa was smart enough to know that talk about Lucy would inevitably turn back upon her.

After school Lucy was free for an hour or so to pursue her own interests, but since those had always centered around me and the summerhouse or the band of boys she led, and since she was forbidden absolutely to have anything to do with any neighborhood children except a few girls of her age deemed suitable companions, she was virtually without friends. Lucy simply would not associate with the little girls selected to be her playmates, and they in turn refused to play with her, and so she spent most of her time in the echoing upstairs rooms where we had once slept and whispered and read and dreamed our gaudy and unsuspected dreams.

She must have been hideously lonely and often afraid, for the silence and isolation of that attic warren seemed inviolable and complete if you were alone in it; there was no sense that below you the life of a great house hummed on. I know that it was then, in those cramped, silent little rooms, that she began to write, but I never knew what she wrote. She showed that first work to no one. I would see her dark head sometimes at the third-floor window as I left the summerhouse and started toward Charlie’s house on West Andrews, or Ben Cameron’s on Muscogee.

At the beginning of those days apart, she would be looking out at me, and would sometimes wave, a stiff, 174 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

formal little salute, and I could see the blue of her eyes burning in her white face even from the driveway. But she never motioned for me to come up to her, or opened the window and called out to me, and she did not attempt to leave her room and steal out to the summerhouse, as she had during the time of our imprisonment after Jamie’s death.

I thought she looked wonderfully beautiful and romantic, like a princess held captive in an enchanted tower, and my heart would literally leap in my chest like a gaffed fish with anguish for her. But my father had said after he brought us home from the police station, “If I catch you going anywhere near Lucy again I will send her and her mother and sister away that very day,” and I knew that he meant it.

I have never known him to be so angry with me as he was that day. He did not bellow; he could not even speak, and his face, usually red and knotted with annoyance at me, was absolutely white and still. His small blue eyes were actually pale, as though bleached by the acid of his fury, and his breath came so hard and fast that I thought he would have some sort of attack and die. It was my mother, weeping and hovering and touching me—first my cheeks, and then my shoulders, and then my disheveled hair, until I thought I would literally knock her manicured fingers away—who delivered the terms of my punishment and the outline of my life in the house after it was ended. Mainly, both consisted of an avoidance of Lucy. I would be required to work after school and during the following summer to help pay for the damage to the windows of the Pink Castle, but I had expected that and did not mind. All the other boys would, I knew, be charged with the same task. And I would have to move to the summerhouse, but that was such joy to me that I shut my eyes in order to keep my parents from seeing it and res-cinding the order. It was

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the absence of Lucy that they thought would bring me to my knees, and for a time it nearly did.

I really believe it was at that point that my father, simply and without too much regret, washed his hands of me, for it was then that the constant carping on my activities and interests and inadequacies ceased, and then that my mother’s doting and fussing began in earnest. He stopped planning my college career at Georgia Tech, or, a poor second, the University of Georgia, and abandoned almost completely any talk of bringing me into the family real estate business.

She escalated her campaign to make a proper princeling of me. I might have taken refuge in sneaking up the back stairs to Lucy in her tower, or smuggled notes and books to her, or at the very least engaged her in that deep and unspoken communion that we had always been able to carry on with our eyes, as we sat at meals and in church. But she would not look at me, or speak, and in any case, I knew that my father meant what he said about sending them away. The saintly knight still lived in my breast, but his shield was lost and his spear broken. After a while I laid them down and slipped gratefully into boyhood.

My first friend was Ben Cameron, and though the friendship never deepened and smoothed into the mellow, nourishing thing I had with Charlie Gentry, still it showed me the sheer pleasure of a relationship that lay lightly and was fed without pain from shallow roots. I never really got to know Ben. Nobody did, I think, except his family, and as it turned out, they knew him, perhaps, least of all. Certainly Julia Randolph, whom he began to go steady with soon after his sixteenth birthday and married just out of Georgia Tech, never knew Ben, though she thought she did. I like to think the two little boys of that marriage, the sons he adored so openly and fully, and with whom he became again a boy himself, knew him as deeply as he could be known, but it would have

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been the father they perceived and loved, not the man.

In any case, it did not matter, for with Ben the abundance of his flamboyant charm and his dark, glinting, sardonic wit made up for those depths held back. His enthusiasms were many and mercurial; February’s clicking aggies and taws gave way to March’s exquisite homemade kites, dancing in the spring wind over the Bobby Jones Golf Course, before you could blink your eyes, and you scarcely would have mastered his floating racing dives into the Driving Club pool before he was out and onto the flying roller skates that were the autumn thing we did. He was generous with his skills, and a swift and gracious teacher, but his body was so lithe and stylized in its power and grace, and his movements so liquid and exaggerated and dancerlike, that none of us could follow where he led, and he would be on to another passion before we had become passable in the last one he taught us.

He was a born dancer; Sarah and Dorothy Cameron both used to say that it was a shame ballet dancers were thought to be sissies, because Ben would have been a star and made a million dollars at it. He would shrug that off, flushing up to his coppery hairline, and laugh, but it was true. Ben on a dance floor was a light and a flame that flickered over our high school years. Girls actually shoved and jostled to be asked to partner his jitterbug, and he was such a natural that Margaret Bryan, who flogged ballroom dancing into us in her musty little studio above Spencers, Ltd., downtown, asked him at age fourteen to be a student instructor. She had never asked another of us, boy or girl, and we were all deeply impressed, though of course we teased him unmercifully.

But Ben hated ballroom dancing and went to her classes only because small, shy Sarah asked him to be her escort, and as soon as the offer to instruct came, he quit going entirely, and refused to go back. Dorothy urged him, and Sarah’s great eyes filled with blinked-back tears at the PEACHTREE ROAD / 177

prospect of bearding that ersatz little cotillion alone, but in this, as in few other matters, his father overrode his mother.

“For God’s sake, let him be, Dottie,” he said once, when I was over at the Muscogee Avenue house being tutored in math by Ben, and his mother was after him to take Sarah to dancing class that evening. “Dancing should be as much fun as you can have with your clothes on. If he doesn’t like it, there’s no sense in doing it.”

“But every boy needs to know how to dance,” Dorothy Cameron said. “It’s one social skill that’s absolutely indispensable.”

“He knows how, better than anybody in Margaret’s entire gang of little gigolos,” Ben Cameron said, the gray eyes that were also his son’s resting with such open and unabashed love on Ben that quick tears stung my eyes, startling me. “He just doesn’t want to do it. Isn’t football and baseball and tennis and swimming and music and his design work enough? Not to mention his grades. What more does he need?”

Ben reddened and ducked back out of the little den where his mother and father were sitting, and Dorothy Cameron’s eyes lit on me. I did not follow Ben; I was then, as I have always been, as drawn to the Camerons in a group as a cold, starving wild animal is to a fire, and I stood warming myself at their light.

“Shep will take Sarah to dancing class, won’t you, Shep?”

Dorothy said, smiling at me. Her warm amber eyes saw me, every inch of me, inside and out, and liked what she saw. It was her gift, as it was always Sarah’s, to see you plain and like, even love, you for just that; to ask nothing of you; instead, to give to you. I could dance, after a fashion, but was shy and did not like the close contact with the girls, and found every excuse that my mother would accept to miss the classes. But for Dorothy Cameron I would have gone down to the Fox Theater

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and danced alone on the great bare stage before a packed house, and besides, I liked sunny, elfin little Sarah.

“Sure,” I said. “Sarah will be my girl for tonight.”

I grinned at Sarah, and she reddened and smiled her soft, three-cornered, kitten’s smile.

“Thanks, Shep,” she said, and ducked her chin and vanished up the stairs after Ben.

“She’ll be walking on air for weeks,” Dorothy Cameron said. “She’s been in love with you all her life, you know.”

For all his generosity and near-theatrical gregariousness, though, young Ben Cameron was moody, and sometimes he would, quite literally, go away from you, uncurling as softly and quietly as a cat and padding out of the room, leaving whatever you were doing together spread out on the desk or table. At other times he would merely retreat back into his own head; you could still talk to him and get an answer of sorts, but the essential Ben Cameron was contained somewhere behind those clear gray eyes. You could see the essence of him moving there. It was unsettling, and never failed to leave me with a small frisson, as if, we were fond of saying, a rabbit had just run over my grave.

He did not look like a boy then. It was possible, when that happened, to see what Ben Cameron the man would look like, and I did not think that that man was happy, though I could not have said why. “What more does he need?” Ben Cameron, Senior, had said of his son. Could he, if he had been another sort of man, have seen the awful import of those words? Would it have made a difference? I don’t know. But at those times, it seemed very clear to me that there was something more that young Ben Cameron needed, something vital to life. But I had no idea, then, what it was.

In addition to the tutoring in mathematics, Ben gave me one of the great and enduring loves of my life, PEACHTREE ROAD / 179

gave it to me as lightly and openhandedly as he shared with me his expertise at marbles and dancing and the flying of kites. He let me chomp and hoot around on his clarinet, at which he was as effortlessly proficient as he was at everything else he attempted, and though I never quite achieved his technical virtuosity on it, I was smitten with a passion far stronger than his the instant I picked it up and felt the sweet heft of that ebony cylinder in my hands, and tasted the smoky-persimmon taste of the slick, bitten reed. I was hooked before the first mallardlike honks and skirling shrieks came issuing forth from the instrument, and nagged my mother so desperately and tirelessly that within a week I had a shining new clarinet of my own, chosen by me from Rutan’s on one totally glorious spring afternoon, and lessons three times a week from the resigned, fastidious little man who taught Ben. I was quick to learn, if not especially talented, and I practiced so prodigiously that the sheer effort and the pounding force of my passion produced music sufficient to feed my yearning heart before that summer was out.

I will never forget the day the clarinet came alive for me.

I was lying on my back in the deep grass of the meadow that ringed the lake up at Tate, totally alone in the day, noodling idly, the reed vibrating smoothly and tinnily against my teeth, watching a red-tailed hawk riding the thermals over Burnt Mountain and thinking of nothing at all, emptied out, still.

And then, all of a sudden, the molten honey of “Frenesi”

came spilling out of the mouthpiece, abundant and silvery and perfect. I gave a great start, and looked around as if I were being observed, and then I put the clarinet down and laid my head on my arms and wept.

Mathematics and music. Two absolutely true things that I have and would not have except for Ben Cameron. Now, whenever I think of him, over the pain and the 180 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

outrage, always comes the healing gratitude. Ben; Ben of the gray-lit eyes and the ardent heart. I will not forgive Atlanta for Ben.

The other friend of my boyhood, and indeed, of my life, was Charlie Gentry. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know Charlie. Illness was the first tie that bound us; our mothers took us to the same pediatrician for treatment of his diabetes and my asthma. And as our families knew each other from the club and Saint Philip’s Episcopal Church and shared a hundred other nearly imperceptible ties of the sort that bound the families of Buckhead, it was only natural that we would become regular playmates.

For one thing, our infirmities relegated us to the role of onlookers in the fiercely masculine little society in which we moved. For another, the invisible ties of the “different” child, the one set apart, reached out swiftly and went deeply into us. Charlie and I knew one another in our hearts when we first set toddlers’ eyes on each other in Dr. Forrest Daven-port’s office on Ponce de Leon, and that ken lasted, with few breaks, well past boyhood. We did not become close friends until that summer after Lucy and I were separated, but I think we both knew early, somewhere down where such things lie, that we would do so. I know that sometimes in my early childhood, when the asthma that disappeared around my tenth birthday still kept me awkward and withdrawn, a hoverer at edges, I would look across a group of shrieking, milling children and meet the grave brown eyes of Charlie Gentry and feel a kind of obscure peace, an occult comfort, steal through me. “Later,” our glances seemed to say to one another. “Later.”