Peachtree Road (43 page)

She was right. Traditionally, the girls at North Fulton wore flounced and ruffled pastel hoopskirts to their senior proms, but when she came down the beautiful old staircase the next evening, before Red came to pick her up, Lucy was in white silk, as fluid and sweetly poured over her luminous slenderness as a column of cream, and her shoulders gleamed absolutely naked and pearled with youth and powder. She wore no jewelry, but

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had brushed her shoulder-length pageboy until it flew like dark thistledown around her narrow head, and in her hair she had fastened three perfect white gardenias from the bush in the garden outside the summerhouse. The dress was slit up to midthigh on one side, and one impossibly long leg, a pale satin-brown from the spring sun, glimmered in and out.

She wore white high-heeled sandals and carried a little silver envelope. The only color in all that incandescent black and white was the red of her soft mouth, a translucent scarlet stain, as if she had been eating berries, or drinking blood.

She gave off her own light, there in the dim foyer. I turned from adjusting my black tie in the ormolu hall mirror and stared at her. I could not have spoken. There wasn’t, on this night, anything else to be said about Lucy James Bondurant.

No other girl at the prom would even be noticed.

She smiled. And then she came a few little running steps down the last of the stairs and into my arms, and I swung her around again, and she was laughing, laughing with a kind of fierce joy.

“Oh, Gibby,” she said. “I thought you never
would
come home again!”

“I thought you didn’t want me to,” I said, setting her down.

“Well, I was being silly; I thought you’d know that. You always did. But anyway, here you are, and now everything’s going to be all right.”

“What’s going to be all right? What’s wrong?” I said, my ears pricking.

“Nothing, now that you’re here. Absolutely nothing at all.

Here, fasten these for me, will you? Aren’t they sweet?”

She handed me a string of pearls, still warm from the cup of her hand, and turned to face the mirror and lifted her heavy dark hair with both hands. I fastened the strand. They were beautiful, small and perfectly matched.

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“From your daddy,” she said. “Before, I might add, he knew that I wouldn’t be coming out. I offered to give them back, but he said no, of course to keep them. So I did. I ain’t no fool.”

I heard the deep, powerful purr of a great engine on the driveway, and cocked an eyebrow at her.

“Red’s got his daddy’s Rolls tonight,” she said. “I told him I wasn’t going a step out of this house if he came in that fucking MG.”

She looked into the mirror at our heads, one fair, one ebony, close together.

“Aren’t we a matched pair, though?” she said. “We look like an ad for…oh, I don’t know, something rich and wonderful. Like we couldn’t possibly have anything but the most perfect life in the world. It should be you taking me to this thing tonight, you know, Gibby.”

“I’m no match for Prince Charming Chastain, Luce,” I said.

“You’d make me miserable flirting your head off and going outside to neck or worse with everybody under ninety. But he knows how to control you.”

“Yes, he does,” she said, and her smile was gone. “That’s why I hang on to him, you know. He’s a mean bastard, really, but he wrote the book on control.”

Shem brought the Fury, waxed and humming, around to the front of the house and I drove around the corner to Muscogee to pick up Sarah. She was still upstairs dressing, but Amos showed me into the little den at the back of the house, where Dorothy Cameron was watching television alone. It had been a day of thunderstorms and high winds, and another storm was grinding through, peppering the black window glass with driving rain, splitting the lashing trees with lightning.

Dorothy kissed me and indicated the chair where Ben usually sat.

“You’ll have to get up when he comes, because he won’t sit anywhere else, but right now he’s out in the 334 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

kitchen toasting some cheese sandwiches,” she said. “Would you like a drink?”

“I guess not,” I said. “It’s going to be a long night.”

“Then come and tell me all about Lucy,” she said. There was more than prurient interest in her severe, beautiful face: I knew she had always been genuinely concerned about Lucy.

“Well, it’s just that she didn’t want to make her debut, and I can’t say that I blame her,” I said defensively. “What kind of a life is that for a woman, really, all that volunteering and do-gooding? There’s so much more an intelligent woman could be doing—”

And then I remembered that she had been voted Woman of the Year by the American Red Cross for her volunteer work at Grady Hospital, and I flushed a dull, hot red. “I didn’t mean you….”

She laughed. “I know you didn’t. But tell me. If we volunteers didn’t do the things we do, who do you think would do them?”

“Maybe somebody with fewer talents,” I said. “Somebody who didn’t have so much else to give somewhere else. Look at you. You could have been a great chief operating officer, a chairman of the board, or a doctor, or…whatever you wanted to be. Anything. You didn’t have to
give
it away.”

“And how many lifetimes would all that have taken?” she said, smiling affectionately at me, as she had when I was an outspoken little boy. “No, Shep, it’s the only decent thing to do with prestige and privilege, with money. People without those things don’t have the resources or the drive to get done what needs doing. It’s poverty that corrupts the will and energy, not wealth.”

“Well,” I said, “but what about all those women who don’t want to do the charity bit? The ones like Lucy, who want to be something else, something more, and have the gifts for it?”

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She nodded. “They’re the casualties in this particular time and place,” she said. “Ambition and difference—they’re the two things the rest of us women won’t tolerate. We punish them. Maybe it reminds us of what we didn’t do. Lucy is going to be punished for this free-spirited little decision of hers, if not now, then later. She’s a casualty, whether she knows it or not. Now ambition for a man, for her husband, that’s a different matter.”

“If you’re so wise, why don’t I feel better about this whole thing?” I said.

“I suspect it’s because you see a truth that’s under the truth I’m talking about. I think you always could do that, Shep.

Be careful with it—we’ll probably try to punish you for it, too.”

“Who’s going to punish who for what?” Ben Cameron said, coming into the room with a tray bearing two melted cheese sandwiches and two tall glasses of pale beer. “Hi, stranger. Good to see you.”

“I am you, if you spill that beer,” Dorothy Cameron said, rising to take the tray from him, and he came to me and put his arms around me and hugged me as naturally as if I had been young Ben. I felt a powerful tide of warmth toward him. He was, as Sarah said later of Charlie, constant. He had always been all I had known of fatherly affection.

“It’s a real change to see your ugly face around here,” he said, one arm still around my shoulders. “All we ever see is Charlie Gentry. I asked Dottie the other night if he’d moved in with us.”

I laughed. I knew and Ben knew that Sarah dated Charlie when I was not at home largely because he and Dorothy insisted that she see other boys, feeling that she was far too young for an exclusive relationship. Charlie knew it, too; he had said to me the last time I was home, “She’d drop me in a minute if you’d crook your little finger.” He said it matter-of-factly and without a trace of

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rancor on his sweet, freckled face. “But hell, I don’t care.

You aren’t going to do that, apparently, fool that you are.

And a little of Sarah is better than none.”

I believe that Ben and Dorothy always knew where their daughter’s heart lay, long before I did, and they approved, if only tacitly, our relationship. Dorothy as much as said so that night.

“I’m eternally greatful that I’m past all that social folderol and can stay home and watch
Gunsmoke
,” she said, smiling at me. “It’s a foul night. I’m glad it’s you taking Sarah. I don’t worry about her when she’s with you.”

“That may not be all that flattering to Shep,” Ben said, the gray eyes twinkling. There were new lines etched in the thin skin under them, and the hints of pouches, as if he were very tired, and I thought he looked much older, and somehow extremely formidable. I remember that Sarah had said he was becoming active in Atlanta politics—not a normal thing for a man of his station—and I could see, suddenly, that he would make a leader to be reckoned with, for all his boneless ease and Celtic whimsy.

“Shep knows what I mean,” Dorothy Cameron said. “He isn’t like the others, nice boys that they are. You say the same thing yourself, so don’t leer at me, Ben Cameron.”

“I think I’d better get out of here before you turn my head,”

I said, grinning back at her. I was very flattered, and tried not to show it.

“I wish I could,” she said. “I’ll bet nobody has ever really tried. You deserve to have your head turned a little, Shep.”

Sarah came into the room then, vivid as a zinnia in warm coral tulle, and I smiled involuntarily at the goodness of the way she looked. We hugged, stiffly and self-consciously, and said our good nights to Dorothy and Ben, and by eight o’clock we were bowling out Peachtree

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Road in the last of the evening rain toward Brookhaven and the North Fulton senior prom. I was eager, excited, even. I had seen few of the Pinks and the Jells in two years.

They were all there, drifting and settling and eddying away again like migratory swallows. The old ballroom shimmered with crepe paper and lanterns and a spinning colored spotlight, and the band—a second-echelon but well-regarded rock

‘n’ roll group out of Nashville—was thumping and gyrating into its first number. A few couples were on the floor, and others were detaching themselves from small groups and sliding out into the music. It was steady and insinuating, but not frenzied, as it would be later in the evening, and I swung Sarah into an easy jitterbug, hoping to get in a respectable quota of dancing before the real madness started. I never learned to do the aggressive, sensual, pelvis-snapping rock steps of that time, and was grateful that Sarah’s bursting dance card would keep her on the floor as long as she wanted. I knew that she would be content to sit out most of the howling, insistent numbers—or go outside to the terrace with me. Sarah could do the beach-bop business of the fifties as faultlessly as she could do anything with her elegant little body, but her soul, like mine, shied away from it.

It might have been my own senior prom, not Sarah and Lucy’s, there was, on the surface, so little sense of time passed and change happened. The original core group of us was there in the familiar formations: Sarah and me, Ben and Julia, Snake and Lelia, Pres and Sarton Foy, looking even plainer and more aristocratic than ever, Tom and Freddie Slaton.

A.J. had brought a stunningly pretty pink and white-blond senior from Washington Seminary, who looked all evening like a white baroness captured by Amazonian pygmies, and Charlie was, as usual, stag.

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On closer examination, there were a few surface transmutations, many of them merely a deepening of the small stigmata already laid down: Ben Cameron was now so brilliantly animated that his old, quick grace seemed flamboyant and theatrical; Charlie’s sweet, shambling pragmatism had deepened almost into phlegm; the anxious discontent in Freddie’s sharp little eyes had atrophied into darting malice.

And despite the first-glance sameness of the setting and the dress and the players in this stylized masque, there hung about it, for me, a profound strangeness which lay just below the surface of the night. It was not the old sense of unreality I remembered from my earliest days at the dances of the Pinks and the Jells, but a keen aura of impermanence, so that I almost expected the entire scene to slide away into the wings, like a lavish set from an opera, and some other, utterly unimaginable set to come grinding out. Two years had altered me irrevocably, if not the others.

Lucy and Red Chastain were nowhere to be seen.

By intermission the evening was in full, sweating cry, and we Buckhead Boys drifted out into the parking lot with our dates and sat on the bumper and fenders of A.J.’s newest vehicle, a 1938 Cadillac hearse so vast and shining and massive that it resembled a lava rock atoll. A.J. had brought grape juice and a bag of ice and Ben Cameron had vodka, and we sat drinking Purple Passion in the still-wet parking lot under a slim silver moon, the piercing fragrance of honeysuckle and mimosa from the lawns of the big houses on West Brookhaven washing across to us on the still air. I hated the thick, cloying taste of the drink, and I think most of us did, but we drank from the thermos top that A.J. passed around as deeply and solemnly as if it had been a communion chalice. I think we all knew, that night, that it was just that, and that this was in all likelihood our last communion.

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Out here in the dark, change, endings, little dyings quivered in the air around us like a silent detonation, even more powerfully than in the last few days of my senior year at North Fulton, for now, after this upcoming graduation, the girls—the glue that had held us together since birth—would be dispersing, too. We boys had, two years before, moved out into our own arenas: I to Princeton; Ben into the architectural school at Georgia Tech; Snake into premed at Emory; A.J. downtown to the Atlanta Division of the University of Georgia; Pres Hubbard to the university itself, over at Athens; Tom Goodwin to his father’s school, Sewanee; Charlie into prelaw at Emory. But, except for me, we had stayed close to Atlanta, or at least within a couple of hours’ driving distance.

The girls were different. Only two of them—Sarah and Lucy, who would enter Agnes Scott College in Decatur—would be staying in Atlanta after this summer. Julia Randolph planned to go to Auburn with three of her Washington Seminary classmates, Lelia Blackburn was slated for Sweet Briar, Sarton Foy would follow her female ancestors into Wellesley and Freddie Slaton was being shipped off to Pine Manor Junior College in the dim parental hope that separation from Tom would dull some of her gnawing hungers and proximity to Boston would burnish some of her razor edges. We would come back together again, of course, at holidays and summer vacations, and in the endless formal patterns of the great Atlanta social quadrille that we were entering, but after tonight a flawless surface would be rup-tured, a perfect wholeness opened and corrupted, and we knew it. The Purple Passion made several more rounds than it might have ordinarily.