Peachtree Road (42 page)

“Yes,” she said. Her eyes were on the furry old carvings in the tabletop. “But you didn’t come for graduation. And you said you would.”

We were both silent, and then she lifted her head.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m nagging, and I swore I never would. Lord, I sound like Freddie Slaton. It didn’t matter about graduation. Not to me. I don’t know about Lucy.”

So here it was.

It burst over me then, the surging, deep-buried sense of the absent one, she who was not here and yet was most powerfully here; she about whom our elaborate silences had rung loudly: Lucy.

Lucy.

Yes, I had gone to Sarah’s senior prom, which was also Lucy’s, the previous spring but not, as I had promised, to their graduation.

And yes, I think it had, for a little while, mattered a 324 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

great deal to Lucy that I had not. But only for a little while.

After that night, even I could see why Sarah did not mention Lucy to me in any of the letters she wrote me at Princeton, and why she had not during this autumn weekend. If the incident on the Chattahoochee River bridge had not drawn the battle lines between them clearly, those last moments on the dance floor at Brookhaven did—and for all the assembled Pinks and Jells of a generation to witness.

It was Sarah’s way to go to earth with her deepest emo-tions; Dorothy had taught her that trick early and well. I knew that she would not speak of that night, or of Lucy, again unless forced to. I was less clear as to why I could not do it. There was a real and acknowledged alienation between Lucy and me now, and part of my silence was anger and grief. That much I could own. The part that felt so like fear I could not, and so, like Sarah, I thrust that deep.

“You couldn’t be like Freddie Slaton if you tried,” I said.

“But what you could be is late for your plane, if we don’t get going. You ready?”

“Yes,” she said. “Shep?”

“Hmmm?”

“I don’t think there’s ever been a more perfect weekend in the history of the world.”

“I don’t either,” I said. “Never better. First of many. First of very many.”

“Yes,” Sarah said.

CHAPTER TWELVE

W
hen I came into the Peachtree road house on that Friday afternoon the previous May, for Sarah and Lucy’s senior prom, only my mother had come running downstairs to greet me, and for a moment the strangeness of coming out of Princeton and into this echoing world of my childhood kept me off-balance, so that I was not completely sure who this dark, lissome woman whose arms bound me so tightly might be, and stepped back a fraction.

It was a near-infinitesimal drawing away, but enough to make her tighten her arms and bury her face in my neck, and begin to weep. My mother did not often weep, and her tears appalled me then as they always had. I patted her awkwardly and hugged her as hard as I could will my muscles to do.

“I’ve lost you, just like I knew I would,” she wept into my new Brooks oxford cloth. “I knew if you left you’d never really come back to me. Oh, Sheppie, you pulled away from me!”

“No, I didn’t, Mother,” I said, still patting industriously. I thought she had lost weight; I could feel the ribs under the silk of her blouse, and the hammering of her heart. She had changed her scent; a muskier and more assertive one rose out of her inky hair to assail me.

“It’s just that you looked so young in this light; I thought you were Lucy running down the stairs.”

“Oh…Lucy!” she said in exasperation, but I could tell she was pleased. She pulled away from me and tilted her head as she looked at me, preening. “Lucy doesn’t run down these stairs, she sneaks up them—at four in the morning. She as good as lives with that Chastain creature now; God knows where they go. We never see her.”

I felt the faintest stab of something; the old Lucy-326 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

thrust. I don’t know why my mother’s words surprised me.

I knew that Lucy was as deeply involved with Red Chastain as ever; my few brief visits home over the past two years and my mother’s letters confirmed that. Lucy herself, during the rare moments we had been together, had been airy and chattering and almost completely withdrawn from me. I thought that she was still angry and hurt with me for going away to Princeton; her behavior was almost exactly as it had been in the last days after my own graduation from North Fulton, when she had let me leave without saying good-bye.

All right, I had thought then, I’ll play it her way. I don’t owe her an apology for going away to school. She can come to me or we can just go on this way forever, I don’t care. I did, of course, but could not admit it. Lucy’s defection into the arms of all those Jells, and finally into Red’s, had gone deep with me.

I had thought, though, that Princeton and my new closeness to Sarah had healed the wound. And they had, or nearly.

This stab was just that: a knife flick, tiny and delicate, and then gone.

“Let me look at you,” my mother said, and did. I had not seen her since the previous summer; I had spent holidays with Mac or Alan, and had gone with Haynes Potter and his family to their place in the Berkshires for Christmas.

Her eyes misted again, and there was something in them—a tiny point of light—that looked oddly like triumph.

“There’s nothing left of my boy,” she said. “It’s all man now. All man and all Bondurant. It’s almost uncanny. Your father will be livid.”

“I should think it might please him that I look like him,”

I said, surprised at the hurt that her words engendered. My father had lost the power to hurt me while I PEACHTREE ROAD / 327

was safely ensconced in Firestone and Colonial, but pain bit at me now, tiny and snakelike, under his roof.

“Oh no,” she said, smiling silkily. “Wrong Bondurant, you see.”

I did.

“Where is Dad?” I said, too casually. “Where’s Lucy? And Aunt Willa?”

“Your father is playing golf up at Highlands,” she said neutrally, as if we both did not know that my father kept as far away from the house on Peachtree Road as he could when I was in it.

“He’ll be back Sunday before you go. He wants to see you.

Lucy is out with Red Chastain, of course, doing whatever it is that they do. And Willa is on a buying trip to New York, believe it or not. They actually made the creature head buyer for the lingerie department, and she’s gone up to load Rich’s up with Yankee underwear. Come have a glass of iced tea with me and tell me all your news.”

“Well, I thought I’d run over and see Sarah a minute…” I said.

“Oh, of course, Sarah,” said my mother. She did not say it as icily as she might. My strengthened alliance with the house of Cameron pleased her mightily, I knew. Besides, she liked Sarah. All the women in her crowd did. Sarah had a manner with older women that was respectful but not deferential, and she was genuinely knowledgeable about the things that mattered to them: porcelains, English antiques, genealogy, who was who in and around Atlanta. “Nothing but refeened ass kissing,” Lucy called it. Sarah herself called it her “biddy routine.”

I moved toward the telephone under the stairwell, and at that moment Lucy burst into the house and threw her arms around me with such force that we both stumbled. My mother sniffed and retreated upstairs. Outside 328 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

on the circular driveway I heard Red Chastain’s MG burring away, out into the traffic on Peachtree Road.

As remote as she had been before, she was immediate now, hugging me enormously with arms that I remembered and yet did not, laughing and crying at the same time, her face buried in the hollow of my neck where it just fit, smelling of the heart-tuggingly familiar Tabu, feeling marrow-stirringly like…Lucy. I felt the constraint of the past two years drain away as if it had never been, and was instantly and in every way home. I held her away by her shoulders, and looked into her face, and knew that I had Lucy—the Lucy of my childhood, the gay and brave companion, the radiant enabler, the Scheherazade, the magical Elaine to my Lancelot—back again. I kissed her on the cheek and swung her around, and set her down on the tiles of the foyer. I had forgotten how tall she was, and how slim: Her dark blue eyes were almost level with mine, and I could have lifted her with one arm.

And I had forgotten the sheer, electric impact of her. The same invisible but palpable implosion that I always felt on seeing her after an absence radiated out in the air around her. At eighteen, Lucy Bondurant was quite simply splendid.

“You look great,” I said ineffectually.

“So do you,” she said. “You’ve changed. I like it. You remind me of somebody, but I can’t put my finger on it…. Tab Hunter, maybe, but with a hawk’s nose…. Oh well, it’ll come to me.”

I was astounded that she could not put a name to the likeness she saw in me, but she could not, not then or ever.

I think she was unable to in many more ways than one.

“You’ll stop traffic tomorrow night,” I said. “Are you going with Red, or is that a silly question?”

“Who else?” she said. “I won’t have much more time with him. His dad got him into Princeton,
finally
, PEACHTREE ROAD / 329

after making him spend this whole last year at North Georgia, and says he can kiss the family loot good-bye unless he toes the line up there. Translated, that means I can’t go up and visit him until at least his junior year, and he can’t come home except at Christmas and for a week in the summers.

Mr. Chastain likes me, but he knows me pretty well, and Red too. He’s already talked to Mama about it. She says she’ll jerk me out of Scott the instant I get off the plane if I sneak off and go. They both mean it, I’m afraid.”

“You mean he won’t be here for your debut?” I said.

“I’m not making my debut,” she said, grinning at me.

“The shit you say!” I exclaimed, aghast. “You
have
to, Lucy!”

It was the reflexive Buckhead Jell talking, through and through. My reversion had been almost instantaneous. For Lucy to miss that gilded autumn rite of passage was as unthinkable as her bowing to Old Atlanta buck naked. It was the beginning of everything for the Buckhead girls and their boys, that one grand November night at the Piedmont Driving Club, the Harvest Ball. From there the girls would move on as inexorably as figures on a Swiss clock through the prescribed stations of the Atlanta social cross: Christmas dance, Bal de Salut, Rabun Gap-Nacoochee Guild, Tallulah Falls Circle, Cotillion, Music Club, Piedmont Ball, and on into the endless pantheon of charities and auxiliaries, each with its crowded and glittering social calendar, and its ceaseless volunteer labor.

It would launch us, too, the brothers and suitors and husbands-to-be of those carefully tended blossoms, into our own fixed trajectories: From the escort lists of half a hundred mothers in and out of the South, we would go on into the Nine O’Clocks and the German Club and the Benedicts and the Racket Club and so on and so forth, 330 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

ending up in the Driving Club and Capital City and Brookhaven and at the heads of those myriad charities and committees whose balls our wives chaired, and from there on into the service of the city. It was the one true way and the one true path. Nobody of substance did it any other way.

A thought sandbagged me. Would they dare, even to Lucy Bondurant?

“You don’t mean to tell me you didn’t get into the club?”

I goggled. Saint Shep the Defender leaped out of his moldy cave, snatched his rusty armor and scrambled to buckle it on. I would have a full complement of carefully waved, blue-rinsed heads for this.

“Oh, don’t be dumb, of course I got into the club,” Lucy said. “They wouldn’t dare not ask me, while I’m living in Uncle Sheppard’s house, anyway. I didn’t join, that’s all.

Holy shit, Gibby, you should have seen Mother’s face when I told her. And your father’s, for that matter. You’d have thought I’d said I was going to marry a nigger at Saint Philip’s on Easter Sunday. Mama still isn’t speaking to me, and I don’t think your daddy is, either. I haven’t really seen him since then. The only reason I’m walking around free is that your mother told them to lay off me. She said she thought I’d made the right decision, under the circumstances.

Trust Aunt Olivia to do the right thing.”

Her smile had nothing in it of mirth.

“What circumstances?” I said dimly.

“Jesus, Gibby, are they giving you stupid pills along with the saltpeter up there in Boys’ Town? The Red Chastain circumstances, of course. Why should I come out? I’ve been about as out as a girl can get for two years now. Aunt Olivia wasn’t born yesterday.”

“You mean, because you’re…”

“Sleeping with him,” she said sweetly. Her smile burned almost through me to the bone. The radiance in PEACHTREE ROAD / 331

the air around her was, all of a sudden, too bright. Her eyes glittered with more than high spirits and joy at seeing me. I felt, then, the million little knife edges that hedged her in.

“The Dirty Deed, the Black Act. Fucking. You have, I trust, heard of fucking? Though I don’t suppose for a minute that you and the Divine Sarah have—”

“Well, God, you surely aren’t the only girl in Atlanta who ever made her debut as anything less than a virgin,” I said hastily.

“No, but I’m probably the only girl in Atlanta who got caught in the act on the pool table in the men’s grill at Brookhaven by the greens committee,” she said.

“Christ, you don’t mean…”

“Yes, I do. In midhump, as it were. Doing it like a mink.

It’s the only time I’ve ever known Red not to be able to finish what he started.”

I knew that she was trying, for some reason, to shock me, but I also knew that she was telling the truth. I had an infallible radar when it came to Lucy’s lying. This was no lie. I was silent.

“Don’t worry, Gibby,” she said. “You don’t have to save me from this one. I would have absolutely
hated
all that charity and volunteer shit. And I’ve saved your folks a ton of money. Little Lady’s coming right along behind me, you know, and it’s going to take a mint to bring her out. No, tomorrow night is my debut. Wait’ll you see my dress. I’m flat going to scald some eyeballs.”