Peachtree Road (3 page)

A few rich old men who changed a world. And finally their sons, who to my mind, no matter what our collective accomplishments, never were a patch on them.

The Buckhead Boys.

An intense female journalist, who was not one of us but would have died to be, wrote an article about us once, in
Cityscope
magazine. It was overheated and romantic in the extreme, and caused no end of scornful amusement in our ranks, but I have always thought that it did manage to capture something about us that was valid, a kind of oversimplified truth. No one I know agrees with me about that.

Back there
, the woman wrote,
in that dreaming cradle
slung between Depression and Camelot, there was, in Atlanta,
a golden group of boys and girls called the Pinks and the Jells.

They were, most of them, the scions of the great merchant
families that had built Atlanta back from the ashes of the Civil
War, and if the raw young city could be said to have an aristocracy, these were its heirs and heiresses, its best and
brightest…and its natural victims
.

Their fathers were the power structure of that youngest and
least typical Southern city, the movers and shakers, the

“club”…the bank presidents, the heads of the great utilities,
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the newspaper and radio empires, and the family-owned
businesses that had grown with the city into mid-century
monoliths. These fathers were the men who took the reins of
the stagnant city in the dying years of the Depression and
flogged it with money, muscle, single-mindedness, and pragmatic guile to the brink of what became known at the end of
the incendiary 1960s as “the next great international city.”

Their sons, the children of that endless, golden time, became
the men who, prepared or not, took up the torches that would
light the city and the entire South into an unimaginable new
world called the Sunbelt
.

Their daughters became the women who ran the great homes
and schools and children and charities of that time of transition, and who flourished like roses on its graceful trellis…or
who did not, and paid dearly
.

James Dickey, who was one of them, called them the Buckhead Boys. Not all of them survived the appellation and all
that it implied
.

Theirs was a rigidly masculine world of money, privilege,
grace, ritual, preening foolishness, high spirits, and low expectations. They were not groomed for their future roles as
power brokers because it was taken for granted that they would
slide as easily into them as their fathers had into their own
earlier and simpler niches. They remained children for a very
long time. They were probably genuinely loved and certainly
indulged. Most of them would have told you that they had
wonderful childhoods and adolescences
.

Insular, careless, totally and imperviously self-assured,
chauvinistic in the extreme, naive and unsophisticated, arrogant, profoundly physical rather than introspective, largely
unburdened by intellect, and almost laughably White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, they were as cohesive as cousins and as
stunningly insensitive as young royalty. They were oblivious
to anyone and anything outside their charmed circle of prep
schools, high school sororities and fraternities, drag racing,
endless formal dances, summer camps, drugstores and drive
PEACHTREE ROAD / 15

ins and hangouts, orchid corsages and staglines and cut-ins,
country clubs and Cokes and crinolines, and later, debuts and
Junior League and Assemblies and Rabun Gap-Nacoochee and
Tallulah Falls and Germans and Nine O’Clocks and Georgia
Tech and branch water and bourbon…endless, endless bourbon
It was a beautiful, bountiful, exuberant, frivolous, snobbish,
and silkily secure kingdom, and it was then, as it is still, a
very small and strictly delineated world, perhaps no more
than four miles square, in a green northern suburb of Atlanta
called Buckhead. And yet out of it came the men, and indirectly
the women, who, rather to their own surprise, would change
forever the definition of the word “South
.”

But it was a world with hidden reefs and shoals that could,
and did, wreck the unwary, the deviate, the maverick, the
vulnerable or gentle or complicated or different ones
.

The Pinks and the Jells. The Buckhead Boys and their girls.

The small, powerful and sometimes doomed group of people
who were born into a very dense, rich, small and unassailable
world, therein to move for the entirety of their lives, in which
their primary artery, metaphor, and pathway of the heart was
Peachtree Road
.

More than any of us, Lucy hated that article.

“It’s sentimental shit, Gibby,” she snorted. “The worst kind of junk, because it has a little streak of truth to it. That silly woman didn’t dig any further to get down to where all the real truth of us was. Jim Dickey’s the only one who ever did that, and nobody reads poetry in this town. Oh, hell, who would have told it to her, anyhow? But this kind of stuff is kiss-off shit.”

As I have said, Lucy was an utter realist. She had a bone-deep knowledge of how things really are. She had it even as a very small child; learned it early, learned it cruelly and indelibly. It is a terrible burden, this gift of truth, especially for so fragile a child as Lucy Bondurant was, but I suspect it was the source of her great charm. She

16 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

stood apart with it like wildfire on a mountain of blasted stone.

I suppose you could also say that it finally killed her.

Brought her there to lie among all those other Bondurants, next to a stone for an unlikable aunt that reads, “She stood foursquare to all the winds that blew.” Lucy would have laughed at that, her rich, pouring, froggy belly laugh. In all her life, Lucy was not, for one instant, foursquare to anything.

She was all dazzle, shimmer, movement, smoke and light.

There were so many Bondurants at Oakland Cemetery this afternoon, most of them, thank God, safely belowground.

My grandmother and grandfather, Adelaide and Sheppard Gibbs Bondurant. My great-aunt Lorena. The aforementioned four-square Aunt Eugenie. Olivia Redwine Bondurant and Sheppard Gibbs Bondurant, Jr., my mother and father. A small, sad row of newly born and perished infants, all but one of their stones kin to so many in the old cemetery, dating from the days of typhoid and smallpox and diphtheria. Lucy’s small brother, Jamie. And aboveground, her narrow Fer-ragamos gleaming in the dust of early October, old Willa Bondurant, standing now like a lacquered chimera with the other women, on the arm of her surviving daughter, Adelaide.

Little Lady Bondurant Rawson, Lucy’s younger sister. The

“good” one.

Lucy herself.

And me, Sheppard Gibbs Bondurant III. The last Bondurant. Or am I? This is and will likely always be the central mystery of my life.

Lucy’s second husband, Jack, does not lie in the Bondurant plot beside her. He is buried in the Venable family plot outside Nashville. Even if he had not died first, he would not have been there this afternoon, in that most essential of all Bondurant countries. He never had any use at all for the Bondurants—includ

PEACHTREE ROAD / 17

ing, I think, me—and there was never any question of his lying here beside his widow. I know that his sons came and took him home for burial, but I am not sure when they did so. I had liked Jack, but the moment he was gone it was as if his life had never rippled the surface of ours, mine or Lucy’s. I did not go to his funeral, and she did not either.

His widow. The widow Venable. I cannot think of Lucy like that, though of course, technically and for a short time, she was. The word sounds so tissue-dry and alone, and Lucy was never, in her entire life, alone. It was what she feared most, aloneness, and what she spent the whole of her life holding at bay. She did it well.

The other thing she feared above all else was death itself, which is why I find it impossible to connect her with what we buried in Oakland Cemetery this afternoon. I saw her after her death, and even though they say that only the viewing of your dead can bring the healing reality of it home to you, that poor spilled and slackened mannequin had absolutely nothing to do with Lucy, and so I felt no grief then, and have not yet. It is a great relief, though I don’t suppose I can expect it to last. Still, it always seemed to me that Lucy and death were such anathema to each other that the sheer force of the aversion might, after all, keep them apart.

Once, when Lucy had first come to the Peachtree Road house, my mother’s altar guild met in our drawing room and one of the women brought slides of the American cemetery in Rome, where a kinsman of hers was buried. Lucy and I had been permitted by old Martha Cater, who took care of us, to creep just inside the room and sit quietly in the hot, mote-dancing August gloom to watch the show. About halfway through, after flash after flash of tombstones and mausoleums and angels and cherubim and classical fragments that far outshone Oakland, Lucy began to cry. Before Martha could whisk

18 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

her out of the room she was sobbing aloud, and by the time she had been tucked into her bed in the small third-floor bedroom next to mine, she was screaming. It was the first of the terrible, inconsolable fits of hysteria that quaked her childhood. All anyone could get out of her was “I’m so afraid to die! I’m so afraid to die!”

Another time, perhaps two years later, when she was seven and I was nine, I was lying in the hammock on the veranda of the summerhouse, as I so often did, thinking of nothing but being drowned in the dapple of light and shade falling through the latticework, when Lucy appeared silently beside me. I knew she had been swinging alone on the swing set by the goldfish pond. She did that for hours on summer days, humming tonelessly to herself, mesmerized and lost. When I looked up, her face was even whiter than it usually was, and her October-blue eyes were all pupil, almost mad-looking. Her hair was smoke around her head.

“You know what, Gibby?” she said. “I think there isn’t any God.”

I was shocked, force-fed little Christian that I was then.

“Of course there’s a God, stupid. You’ll go to Hell for talking like that.”

“No. If there’s not any God, there’s not any Hell.”

“Well, where do you think you’ll be when you’re dead then, if there’s not any God or Heaven or Hell?” I was beginning to smell trouble, and flinched from it.

“Nowhere. That’s where. I won’t be anywhere, and you won’t either. There’ll just be…nothing. That’s all there is.

Close your eyes and think about it, Gibby. Black, black, black nothing always and forever, without any end…”

I did, and gradually, as she chanted, the red weight of the sun on my eyelids cooled and lightened, and the heat went out of the June day, and suddenly I was float PEACHTREE ROAD / 19

ing frozen and suspended and paralyzed and utterly, totally alone in a howling black void for which there was no help and to which there was no end. Tears of fright and despair stung my eyes, and when I opened them the world spun sickly, and my heart hammered with the first and still worst real terror I have ever known.

Tears were standing in Lucy’s eyes, too, and her chest was beginning to heave with the onset of one of the dreadful, mindless screaming fits.

“Anything is better than dying,” she said, and there was that familiar knife-edge of panic in her voice. “
Anything
!”

“Lots of things are worse than dying.” I parroted my mother and some of the women who visited her in the afternoons. “Dishonor, and being poor, and being conquered, and being tacky, and rape are all worse than dying.”

“That’s bullshit,” she said shrilly. It was her favorite word that summer. “Any of those things is ten million thousand times better than being dead and nothing! The one thing I couldn’t stand is for there to be nothing!”

“You wouldn’t know it if there was nothing,” I pointed out, deliberately pedantic, trying to avert the spell with obtuseness. But my own heart still bucked and tore with the terror she had planted there.

It worked, though. “I would too,” she said mulishly, and her chin went up, and the tears receded. Lucy did not like to be contradicted.

I laughed, I remember. But now, deep in those middle-life night horrors that bring me up sweating out of sleep, my mouth already tasting that primal nothingness, my heart old with the burden of its truth, sick and corrupted beyond healing or redemption or resurrection and separated forever from the time that I did not know it, I see that she was right.

That that is what death truly is, that awful and unending nothing and the eternal knowledge

20 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

of nothingness. Not life, but death everlasting.

As we were gathering ourselves this afternoon to leave Lucy to begin her long residence, I felt rather than saw the eyes of the women on me, and I heard old Mrs. Dorsey say to Mrs. Rawls, in the flat nasal shout of Atlanta’s wellborn deaf, “I hear Shep is taking it mighty hard. They always were as close as twins.”

I grinned inwardly.

“Sucks to you, Mrs. Dorsey,” I said under my breath.

“You’re going to be one bored old sow now that you don’t have Lucy Bondurant to kick around anymore.”

She was right, though, if not in the way she thinks. But what the hell. Let her keep the thought. I get points for being sensitive and wounded, which may buy me another unmo-lested chunk of solitude. Lucy and I did have an extraordinary and uncanny closeness, unlike anything else in our lives. It was eerie. I didn’t always like it. Sometimes I out-and-out hated it. But there it was. I could always see into and through Lucy’s mind. When she was young and beautiful and heart-less, I was her heart. Later, in the times when she was essentially mindless, I was her mind. I don’t know now what I’m going to do with all this leftover Lucyness.