Peachtree Road (26 page)

Dorothy Cameron did not reply.

“You don’t like her, do you?” I said, seeing it suddenly.

The conversation was an extraordinary one for a woman of forty and a boy of twelve to be having, but it was a mark of my curious and nourishing relationship with Dorothy Cameron that it did not seem at all so to me.

“It’s not that,” she said, sitting back cross-legged on the grass and wiping her face on her sleeve. “It’s more…that maybe I’m just a little afraid of her.”

My ears pricked. What was this fear of small, ephemeral Lucy Bondurant that lay over the hearts of the Cameron women?

“What on earth for?” I said.

“Because she
needs
so much,” Dorothy Cameron said. “The poor child seems to be absolutely ravenous. She’s like…some kind of motor with the governor left off, like a little engine out of control. I think she could be dangerous.”

I laughed aloud. Lucy dangerous? To whom? She was herself the most vulnerable human being I had ever known, or would know.

“Oh, Shep.” She looked at me and there was pity in her eyes. “Listen to you. You’re already in thrall.

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Dangerous to you, maybe. To anybody she thinks might help her, have something she needs…”

I was suddenly and clearly angry, I who could not even own my own anger at my mother. Though Lucy had pulled away from me and was not a figure of consequence in my life now, except by the sheer force of her absence, I felt the familiar stirrings of the saint-protector in my meager breast.

“Well, she’s out of luck, then, because nobody’s going to help her,” I said sharply. “Nobody can, or will. They’ve got her cut off from everybody on earth but the Negroes. And how are they going to help her?”

It was true. Lucy now spent all the time when she was not at school or in her room or eating her silent meals with ToTo in the kitchen or in the little rooms over the garage or, sometimes, over in the Camerons’ back garden, in the little house that Glenn Pickens shared with his parents. When she was there she never came around to the house or the pool where Sarah and Charlie, and Ben and I played. And she virtually never set foot in the back garden of our house, much less the summerhouse that she had so loved. Except for the lingering aura of Lucyness that lay in the air of all places where she was, I might not have known that she was still alive.

It was an odd time for me, that time swung between the first great Lucy-drunk stretch of my young childhood and high school. I had already had, in Lucy, a strange, chaste love so strong and pure that this absence of it was almost restful. And I had now a friend; had two, really, in Charlie and Sarah. I was grateful for the latter, and largely content to live in the mindless, sensation-drowned nowness of the moment, of simply being young. But there was a prowling unease and a waiting under the peaceful stasis, an emptiness.

The hole in my heart was shaped like Lucy. I missed her. I did not know why she would not have anything to do with me. And

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yet, something in me was, disgracefully and cravenly, grateful for the hiatus.

I am sure that I knew, on some level, that it could not last.

Lucy broke it herself, on a summer night later that year, when my parents and Aunt Willa gave the largest party I could remember in the Peachtree Road house. It was in all ways a night I will not forget. It was a portentous night, and a terrible one. But if it had not happened, I might have lost her forever.

The party was, I heard my mother say, to pay back a number of social obligations that she and my father had incurred during the past season. But I knew that it was to market Little Lady and, grudgingly, Lucy, to the mother-brokers of the Buckhead Boys. Mothers of daughters just coming to flower had one like it every summer. The formal selling of familial flesh would begin much later, with the elaborate machinery of the debut year. This first testing of the waters was much like a match race for year-old fillies.

Everyone would be there.

Except me.

“No,” I said. “I’m sorry. I’m not coming. Y’all can lock me up till I’m fifty, if you want to, but I’m not coming.”

They could not budge me. Try as my mother might, I simply refused to put on my lone, too-short summer suit and pass hors d’oeuvres and trays of drinks to the coiffed and curried and strange-eyed mothers of the boys who were my friends. I did not care if they put an apple in the beautiful and foolish Little Lady’s mouth and plumped her down, naked and buffed, on a silver tray in the center of the dining room table, but I was prepared to be grounded until I was twenty-one before I watched them parade Lucy before the matrons of Buckhead. I knew that she would only be there on sufferance, and that she would know it; that the real prize of this house was Little Lady, and they were only dragging Lucy out to

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show because people would talk if they did not…and besides, someone might take a fancy to her when the time came to marry off a son; who knew? Stranger things had happened.

“No,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

In the end, my mother gave in. Better an absent son and heir than one made stupid by sullenness.

And so I was alone when Lucy came to me in the summerhouse, lying on my back on the daybed under the lone wall lamp, reading
Moby Dick
, drowned in the power and sheer, awful truth of it. She stood in the door, against the light from the radiant, reverberating house, without speaking, and when I sensed her presence and raised my head to look at her, I did not know who she was for a moment. In her new yellow princess dress from J. P. Allen’s 219 Shop and her first Cuban heels, with a gardenia from the bush beside the lily pond in her cloudy hair, she was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. Before my eyes fully cleared and some of the old Lucyness settled back around her, I saw a woman, and could not speak with the weight of it on my chest.

I saw also that she held a nearly full bottle of bourbon in one hand, and that she was more than a little drunk. Her mouth was loose and her eyes hilarious with liquor. In an instant she became small Lucy Bondurant again, ten years old, gaudy trouble riding her head like a Cuban dancer’s hat.

“Hey, Gibby,” she said, giggling. “I brought you a surprise.”

I do not know what got into us that night. I had never tasted liquor and so far as I knew, neither had she. My father would be furious, I knew, if he caught us drinking his stolen bourbon in the summerhouse, and my mother would come near to dying; volubly so. I could not even imagine what Aunt Willa would do. I knew only that the consequences would be far more imagina

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tive, far-reaching and terrible than any we had suffered so far. Maybe Lucy and her mother and sister really would have to leave the house. Perhaps I would be sent to McCallie or Gordon or Georgia Military Academy, those last resorts of the unmanageable Buckhead Boy. I did not, looking at her and feeling a great plume of pure joy and lightness rising up from somewhere behind my ribs, care in the least. Lucy was far too drunk for caring.

“Wait’ll I get a glass,” I said. And before another hour was out, we had drunk it all.

It was not late, perhaps ten-thirty. The party was in full spate. We could hear the steady, deep rhythm of it chugging along like a well-tuned engine; it would not start to falter for another two hours. The night was thick and dark and hot; moonless, almost starless. Cicadas droned off in the woods, and bugs committed small, ticking suicides against the yellow light over the summerhouse door. Honeysuckle smelled powerfully all around us. Full summer flowed in the night, but winter crouched off in the distance beyond the house and woods, winter and high school and a profound change, an ending. A deep, sweet sadness like an itch lay just beneath everything we said and did, but riding atop that was laughter, the endless, mindless, unstoppable, drowning laughter of first intoxication. I felt that I could laugh forever with the sheer gladness of having her back with me, flopped on her back on the daybed beside me with her pretty shoes kicked any which way on the floor and her skirts up, showing a ruffle of crinoline and a gleam of smooth white leg. She laughed, too, laughed and laughed, laughed the rich, bawdy, affirming laugh that will forever be in my ears, essence of Lucy.

And then, all of a sudden, she was crying. Crying so fiercely and terribly that I thought they would hear her in the house, over their music and their laughter, and I put my clumsy, bourbon-bumbling fingers over her PEACHTREE ROAD / 201

mouth; but she shook them away. The crying spiraled up and up. I knew that if she did not stop she would go out of control, and one of those great, desperate fits of her childhood would carry her away, and she would be, for a long time, beyond help. She had not had one for years.

I pulled her against me and buried her face in my chest and held her until the crying began to slow and the trembling abate, held her so hard that her ribs hurt my fingers.

Presently she whispered, still sobbing, but less violently,

“Gibby, it was so awful! I missed you so much! I finally just couldn’t stand it anymore; I thought I was going to die and they would just let me; they wouldn’t care!”

“But you wouldn’t even talk to me, Lucy,” I said. “I thought maybe you were mad at me or something; I thought you didn’t want me around you. Why didn’t you say something?

I would have come….”

“I was waiting for you to come save me! You said you would; you said you always would!
Gibby, why didn’t you
come?
”

“I…” I began, and then fell silent. She was right. I had promised. And I had not come. Why hadn’t I?

“OH, GIBBY, I WAS SO AFRAID!” It was a great, primal howl of pure aloneness, with nothing in it of childhood.

My own boyhood fled as if it had never been. I took her in my arms again and stopped her cries with my own blind mouth, and before I finally pulled myself back from the answering mouth and hands and body of my cousin Lucy, I was on top of her, and she was thrashing wildly beneath me on the daybed, and moaning words I still, to this day, blush to remember, and I was so near to entering her that only catastrophe saved me. Instead of making love to Lucy in the summerhouse in my twelfth year and her tenth, I leaned over her and vomited on the

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floor, from Jack Daniel’s black label and terror, and the sheer awfulness of it wrenched me sober.

I think it did her, too. I sat up, clothing half off, rubbing the vile taste off my mouth, looking at her with eyes absolutely wild and appalled, and she looked back at me from her huddle of skirts, mouth bruised and bare, silvery young breasts gleaming white, and in that instant she was sober again, and the desperate tears were gone.

In a moment she, too, was straightening her clothes as she left, pattering back toward the house through the summer dark with her new yellow shoes swinging by their straps from her hand. She did not say good night, or wave, or turn to look back when she gained the back door, and I spent the first entirely sleepless night of my life on the hot, tangled daybed, writhing in bottomless shame and misery and short-circuited adolescent tumescence.

In the morning at breakfast Lucy the darting, glinting child was back again, prattling happily to me, eating her cereal matter-of-factly, talking of the party as any excited ten-year-old would. My parents smiled on her for the first time in months, and even Aunt Willa, if she did not smile, at least stopped frowning, and only I seemed to notice the tiny quiver in Lucy’s hands and the red stigmata of what must have been as virulent a hangover as my own in her eyes. She never mentioned that night to me again.

So we were back in that old dance, she and I. Shep and Lucy, Lucy and Shep. But under it, now, a different music surged. That fall I entered the eighth grade at North Fulton High School, and the world widened just as I had thought that it would, to include a great many odd and marvelous things, but so deeply did the scent of danger and taboo cling in my mind to that night in the summerhouse that it was, literally, years before I kissed a girl again.

CHAPTER EIGHT

W
hen I crossed Peachtree Road on a breathless, flaccid morning that September and entered for the first time the red brick pile of North Fulton High School, I quite literally walked into another world.

I had moved easily in and around Buckhead all my life, of course, and had traveled east across Peachtree Road countless times, but it was always as a voyager on a specific quest: to buy something, to see something, on the way to somewhere else. I always returned home to our side of Peachtree Road like Odysseus, bearing the treasures I had gone questing for, without being touched in any significant way by the natives of that pleasant but lesser continent. The only time I had ever been in a home east of Peachtree was with my mother, when I was quite small and she went to get a home permanent from a gifted and deferential little woman who worked out of the kitchen of her home on Pharr Road.

To me, that visit was official, service-oriented: I felt about my visit to that neat, tree-shaded frame bungalow as I did about the few times I went with Shem Cater in the Chrysler to pick up our laundry from Princess in Capitol Homes, or to fetch Amos from Pittsburgh, or Lottie, our cook, from Mechanicsville. I got no sense, from these visits, that people really lived in those places. They were, instead, destinations that provided the great houses of Buckhead with their provender.

But I went into North Fulton High School, in a sense, to live. And inside those tall, arched doors a world wider and deeper than any I had known before flowered: wider, deeper, denser, more eccentric, far more raffish, many times poorer, a hundred times more exotic, a thousand times more seductive. I first goggled at it in simple

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disbelief, and then dived into it like a warm and all-nourishing sea. High school came for me, and for many of the Buckhead Boys, I think, just in time.

Lucy would not be entering North Fulton for two more years, and so it must have seemed to her, still held fast in the bowery little prison of Miss Beauchamp’s School, that I was deserting her once again. She never said so; Lucy first learned her lifelong habit of long, veiled silences and closed face during her years in that terrible little dotted swiss ghetto, and she never spoke of them after they were ended except once.