Peachtree Road (27 page)

“What was it really like, Luce?” I said on the day her incarceration at Miss Beauchamp’s finally ended.

“I will never in my life let anyone shut me up again. I will kill them first,” she said. And that, for Miss Beauchamp, was that.

So I knew that the school was bad and that she hated it, but I was never to know how bad, and how much. And I knew that my entering high school was abandonment anew, but again, I could only suspect how deep the wound went.

In those days, Lucy was letting no one know that what was done to her in my father’s house was ongoing anguish.

Already in general disfavor, she sensed, I think, that to roil the waters would be fatal. And there was always in her fierce little heart something that refused to give satisfaction to her tormentors, real or fancied.

It bothered me that she closed a part of herself to me, the saint knight bound so long ago with her protection, but the aftertaste of that night in the summerhouse still scalded my mouth, and for a very long time I found it hard to be totally natural with her. Eventually most of the strangeness simply wore away, and we drifted into our old routine of talking and reading together in the summerhouse or the sun porch or the library after school and in the evenings—for Lucy and I could never be apart

PEACHTREE ROAD / 205

for long—and I shared the bounty of high school with her, and once again we spun out the web of ken and dreams that had always bound us close. She still ran to me for comfort and showed her wild heart and its fears and joys and rages to me as she always had, but there was underneath it now a constraint that had never been there before, and I did not know how—or was unwilling—to break it. I know she must have felt my holding back, but she made no effort to move past it. All in all, Lucy had not, in the house on Peachtree Road, gotten very much return on the enormous investment of her hungry spirit and waiting heart.

And so she tightened her hold on the blacks around her.

Until I came home in the late afternoons, Lucy’s custodial care was largely in the rough, pink-palmed hands of Martha Cater, and she astonished all of us, Martha included, by loving that old black martinet so deeply and unconditionally that Martha finally capitulated and loved her back. Lucy was, always, the only white child I know whom Martha could truly abide. During that time she would say, whenever one of Little Lady’s newly learned wiles and graces drew special applause at the breakfast or dinner table, “Good thang she learnin’ how to act nice and please folks, ‘cause it gon’ be all she be able to do when she git grown. Ain’t nothin’ but wind behin’ them big ol’ blue eyes.”

She would say it under her breath, coming in or going out with platters and trays, but not so far under that it did not fall upon the ears it was designed to reach, and at such times, Lucy would give her such a smile of whole-souled gratitude that it was as if the sun had come out in the room. Little Lady would pout and Aunt Willa would mottle unbecomingly with bitten-back anger, and my mother would sigh and roll her eyes at my father, but no one reprimanded Martha. To do so was unseemly and drew one down to her level, and besides, I suspect that all

206 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

of us recognized the unfortunate truth in the remark. Little Lady was so abysmally unintelligent that her reading and spelling were, in fourth grade, barely on a second-grade level, and she was completely incapable of abstract thought. No matter, though. It was clear, even at age eight, that she was soon going to look just like Jane Powell.

As for Lucy, her relationship with Martha Cater was the font of a lifelong love for, and a marrow-deep kinship with, most of the blacks with whom she ever came in contact.

ToTo, young Glenn Pickens over at the Camerons’, Shem and Lottie and Princess and Amos, thin, yellow Johnnie Mae at the Gentrys’, Lubie at the Slatons’…by the time she was twelve, Lucy was spending more time with the servants of the big houses around her, and their children, than with anyone else but me, and transferred to whatever new black came within her orbit, instantly and indiscriminately, all the adoration that her small heart held. By the time she was in her teens, her predilection for Negroes was a source of great embarrassment for her mother and mine, and to a lesser extent, my father. Beginning in earnest in that, her eleventh year, they forbade and cajoled and punished, but Lucy would not give up her beloved black companions.

“Yes’m,” she would say to Aunt Willa, when she was taxed yet again with spending an afternoon with Glenn Pickens or an evening with Shem and Martha in their rooms over the garage.

“Yes’m,” I understand.”

And she would smile, the blue eyes melting with contrition.

But the next day she would be back with her cherished black companions once more. There was simply no stopping her.

I think it was because she saw so clearly what most of us did not, or chose not to: that the Negroes in our PEACHTREE ROAD / 207

world were underdogs, supplicants, victims. I alone knew that this was the role in which Lucy had clad herself. Underneath her public gaiety, sassiness, charm, intelligence, generosity, what Aunt Willa called her feistiness, I had long known she felt profoundly helpless in the world, uncherished, vulnerable and alone. I knew, too, that she had fair reason to feel so. And because she did, she became, in the end, just that: helpless and vulnerable, though seldom alone, and never uncherished. That helplessness was always her greatest strength.

At any rate, in those last lonely days between childhood and puberty, Lucy at least had her blacks, and I believe that bond saved her. I had high school.

North Fulton High School gave me everything I was to know of heterogeneity until Princeton. It gave me a gleeful taste for, and sanction of, eccentricity; it showed me madness and meanness and goodness and absurdity; it limned for me both the value of particularity and the use of conformity. It showed me goodness, in the person of Miss Reba Marks, a slat-thin, blond-marcelled, much-mimicked old maid who taught passionate chemistry and died instantly at the cross-walk in front of the school, shoving to safety the Garden Hills Elementary child who darted out in front of a yellow Fulton County school bus.

It showed me evil, in the person of the short-lived, hulking, loose-lipped assistant football coach who got retarded and homely Scarlett Mitchum, from the rural wilds of Sandy Springs, pregnant, and then jeered openly at her hard, basketball-round mound of belly as she tagged after him adoringly through the halls and into the locker room.

It showed me danger, in the cool-eyed blond person of the legendary Boo Cutler, he of the lightning Mercury and the thunderous midnight runs out of Cherokee County, loaded with shine; it showed me despair, in the bleached persons of those anonymous students doomed, 208 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

it seemed from birth, to be library staffers, nutrition aides, infirmary assistants, science clubbers.

And it gave me heroes, a different kind of romance from that Lucy and I had known in our reading and dreaming: not dead, not unreal. The radiant, careless ranks of the football and basketball and track stars. The editors of the
Hi-Ways
and the
Scribbler
. The cheerleaders and the beauties and the senior superlatives and the ROTC officers and their demure and beatific sponsors.

It even gave me, totally unexpectedly, a tantalizing and heady dollop of popularity. Lucy had been right; going into high school I had lengthened and toughened, and my face had grown to fit my features a bit better, and I did have something of the look of that golden, hawk-faced knight she had envisioned for me so long ago; it was my uncle Jim’s face that I saw in my mirror now, though far younger and less defined. A mute shyness underlay and belied the knight, and I was never so naive as to be unaware that my family’s money gave me a cachet I never would have had otherwise, but I was a good enough dancer, and even shone modestly as a miler and relay team member, and so the scanty popularity—or rather, to be exact, recognition—was not entirely unearned. But I never wore it comfortably.

High school did not give most of us from the big houses many new or close friends. I suspect it was already too late for that when we entered; Buckhead simply ran too deep in us. Like the Catholic Church, Buckhead kept for itself those it had for the first seven years of their lives. The boys from the other sections of Atlanta who came to North Fulton—from Sandy Springs and Brookhaven and Morning-side and Peachtree Hills and Peachtree Heights and Brookwood Hills and Ansley Park—were suspicious of the smell of money that lingered about us, no matter how hard we tried to conceal or even eradicate it. Of all the boys I met in those

PEACHTREE ROAD / 209

teenaged years—literally hundreds—only one, A.J. Kemp, became close. A.J., from far out Cheshire Bridge Road. Thin, agile, clever, smoothly pompadoured, fiercely ambitious and almost feminine in demeanor; or at least, not simply and rudely masculine: always the best dancer, the lone male cheerleader, the “dresser,” the actor, the first smoker of cigarettes, the one with the most sweaters and 45 rpms. A.J., one of the funniest men I have ever known, and in the end, one of the most loyal. He attached himself to us, the moneyed ones, instantly and immovably, and made us accept him with the sheer force and wattage of his personality, and before eighth grade was over, he was one of us to the bone.

I suspect he thought he had garnered great advantages for himself in the association, but it was we who got the long end of that stick. A.J. enriched us.

Years later, when I had been literally flattened under the catastrophe that set me outside the company of the Pinks and the Jells, A.J. showed up at the summerhouse at lunchtime bearing sandwiches and éclairs from Henri’s and a six-pack of beer. Few of the others had come, and I was surprised and painfully embarrassed to see him standing in the winter sunlight at the door, blinking in at my dim, musty lair.

I could not speak, and for a long moment he did not; I had the insane fancy that he would toss the food inside and flee, like a keeper at the cage of some wild and desperate animal. And then he grinned, his old, clever wizard’s grin.

“I’ll probably find gnawed bones lying around, and turds piled up in the corner, but I’m coming in whether you like it or not,” he said, doing just that and leaving the door ajar so that the clean, merciless crystal light of noon flooded in.

“And what’s more,” he added, “I’m coming back tomorrow at lunch, and the next day, and every one after 210 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

that until you quit living in this cave with the wolves and act like a human being again.”

Tears of sheer, weak humility and gratitude filled my eyes, and I turned away, mumbling, “It’s good to see you, A.J.”

He followed me into the summerhouse and put his arms around me and hugged me. It was so unlike A.J. to do such a thing that my faltering composure limped back, and I was able to look curiously into his face.

“Aren’t you afraid I’ll set your pants on fire?” I said.

“Nope,” he said, sweeping litter off my coffee table and setting out the sandwiches and beer. “But I used to wish I could set yours on fire. I just want to say one thing, Shep, and then I won’t say anything more about all this crap. We all know you couldn’t have had anything to do with it; we
know
that. The others ought to come, but they probably won’t, for a while; you’d know better than me why that is, but I do know it’s true. The reason I can come is I was never really one of you, no matter what you thought, or I did. This Buckhead shit doesn’t bind me. So consider me an emissary from us all, and let me tell you that we think it’s all a load of horse manure and we…we love you.”

He mumbled this last, and his thin monkey’s face flamed, and he ducked his head and bit into his sandwich. I got up and went into the bathroom and wept. Only one other man—not my father, not Ben Cameron—had ever told me that he loved me. No man ever did again.

A.J. came for lunch at least three days a week for a month after that, leaving his job at the bank downtown and taking the 23 Oglethorpe bus to the stop at Peachtree and Lindbergh and walking straight through the front yard to the summerhouse, bypassing the big house and any chance encounter with my mother. We never spoke of the fire again, only of the more distant

PEACHTREE ROAD / 211

past—of high school at North Fulton, and what it had given us. I don’t suppose I will ever be able to tell A.J. what he gave me during that dark month. But I believe that he knows.

What high school gave us all, the gift that the Atlanta of that time alone in all the world had to give, was the Pinks and the Jells. I don’t think any high school experience anywhere could have been even remotely like it. I know nothing has ever been precisely like it since.

No one is quite sure what the terms meant. “Pinks” is at least moderately self-explanatory: Pink tulle. Pink angora.

Pink Revlon and Tangee lipstick. Pink cashmere twin sets.

Pinks, for the girls of that golden elect of an entire generation.

“Jells,” or “Jellies,” is almost impossible to etymologize. Jelly beans, I suppose, give birth to the term: bright, sweet, foolish, frivolous, almost entirely without substance or nourishment, but long indeed on pleasure. A confection completely of the moment.

The Jells of Buckhead toiled not, neither did they spin.

They did not, on the main, play football or any other team sport, though some of them excelled at the showier and more indolent individual sports, like tennis, swimming and diving.

Some even rode horses with considerable flair and style. All could dance, though, and did, endlessly. Dancing, in one sense, is what the Pinks and the Jells were all about.

The high school athletes largely ignored the Jells, and spoke of them, if they did, with contempt, and they were never a part of that elite teenaged brotherhood of drag racers, contact sports players, booze runners, Saturday night brawlers, bar drinkers, tobacco spitters, and legendary cocksmen. The Jells might occasionally hang out where the jocks and the toughs did, at the Peachtree Hills Pub or the Blue Lantern or even, and much worse, the Cameo Lounge down near the