Peachtree Road (48 page)

“Well, she hasn’t been out with that colored boy for the past week, but then he’s over in Mississippi stirring up the niggers over there about registering to vote, so she hasn’t had the opportunity. She’d be over there too, except he told her she couldn’t go. Said it was too dangerous. Listen, Shep, I want you to talk to her. Surely you can see she’s about to ruin her life, much less all our good names. Will you call her and talk to her? She’ll listen to you; she always would.”

“Aunt Willa,” I said as forcefully as I could, “I can’t do that. The last time I really talked to Lucy was two years ago, and at the end of that conversation, she told me she never wanted to see me again. She’d hang up on me before I said hello.”

To my utter horror, she put her face down in her hands and began to cry. I knew she was not faking. The sobs were harsh and ugly and racking. More eyes fastened on us. They seemed to leave smoking craters in my flesh. She did not appear to notice.

“She’s going to ruin everything for me,” she sobbed, and her voice was that of the chicken farmer’s daughter again, fifteen years of careful, relentless cultivation gone from it.

“She’s not going to stop until she’s done it. Oh, I wish she’d just died when she was born….”

Anger flooded me, over the embarrassment. “All right, I’ll call her, but I don’t want to hear you say that about her ever again,” I said, the iron and ice in my voice surprising me.

Her, too, apparently; she stopped crying and looked up at me. Despite the tears, her mascara had not run.

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“Thank you, Shep,” she said meekly. “She’s over at Princeton this weekend, but she’ll be back tomorrow night.

Sunday. Could you call her then?”

I agreed to do it, not at all sure that I would, but so eager to get out of the terrible ruffled restaurant and into the cold, bright Saturday sunlight that I would have promised her anything. Restored, she kissed me airily on the cheek and clicked off on her four-inch heels, unable to keep the waggle entirely out of her shapely, taupes-wathed behind. I saw heads turn after her as she sailed down Forty-third Street, heading east toward Fifth. And then she was gone.

I might not have called Lucy after all, but I met Alan Greenfeld for dinner that night and we went down to hear Horace Silver at Nick’s, and he told me that he had been over to Princeton that day, to pick up some things he had left in his old suite in Holder, and had seen Lucy with Red Chastain on the veranda of Tiger, and that both had been falling-down drunk at high noon, and all over each other.

The old Lucy-worry, which had been dormant so long, flooded back over me like cold salt water, and I hardly slept at all that night. I knew then that I would call her, and would probably regret doing it, but that it couldn’t be helped. The old ties had held after all; the old bond still ran deep. “We be of one blood, thou and I…”

Red was a junior at Princeton then, and I had not seen him for two years, and had seen him very little even in the year we had been there together. But I had heard enough about him to know that he was trouble pure and simple, if I had not known it before. He had lived his first two years in a suite with three other Southern boys whom I had not known, Southerners of a certain type that used to turn up at Princeton with some regularity. They were, like Red, cool and smilingly murderous of temper, lazily athletic and prowlingly indolent, and

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entered Princeton wilder and more jaded than most of us left it. Red and his roommates were the centerpiece of an entire set of these attractive and decadent Southerners, most of whom eventually found their way into Tiger, and all of whom spent their spare time drinking in their rooms and whoring in New York. Red and his roommates had moved all the beds in their suite into one room and fitted the other up as an elegant working bar, and the endless cocktail party and worse that prevailed there was the stuff of legend far beyond the Ivy League. I did not care a whit about Lucy and her involvement with her beloved Negroes, nor, really, if she flunked out of Agnes Scott, but I cared about her association with a whole crowd of Red Chastains. I made the call.

After I said hello, there was a long silence, and then Lucy said neutrally, “Hello, Gibby,” and her rich voice might have been in the very room with me. In my mind I saw her slouched on the Chinese Chippendale chair in the telephone alcove under the front stairs, feet up on the risers, a cigarette dangling from her long fingers. I had seen her that way a hundred times before.

It was not a good call. I stumbled and hemmed and hawed and stopped and started, and through it all she was silent, not helping me at all. Finally, in desperation, I blurted out that I had seen her mother in New York and that everyone was very worried about her, and I wanted to talk to her about it.

“About what?” Lucy said pleasantly.

“About…oh, shit, Lucy, about school, and the poor stupid Negroes, and mostly that bunch of corrupt fools Red runs around with at Tiger,” I said in a rush. “You’ve got no business messing around with that gang. You’re going to get yourself talked about all over the East Coast.”

There was another pause, and then her creamy, winy belly laugh curled out at me over the wire. Despite 374 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

my annoyance, the corners of my mouth quirked at the sound.

“What else is new?” she said. And then she stopped laughing. “You’ve turned into a real prick, Gibby,” she said coolly, and the words stung me more sharply than I thought was possible. “You’ve got no business telling me who I can and cannot hang around with. You lost that right two years ago. Remember?”

And she slammed down the telephone. A blast of the old desolation in which absence from her had once drowned me swept over me again. For one anguished moment, the empty space between us where once so much had spun and sung back and forth bruised and lacerated me. And then both feelings were gone as if they had never been, and Lucy faded out of my mind like smoke, and what I had told Sarah tonight became again true. I had seldom thought of her since.

So I was as shocked as if I had seen a literal apparition when, at three o’clock on a Sunday morning the following November, I floundered out of sleep to answer a pounding on my door and opened it to find Lucy, distinctly drunk and looking lost and lovely in a man’s filthy London Fog, leaning against the doorsill, smoking and smiling at me.

“Hey, Gibby,” she said. Her voice was loose with liquor, but as rich and warm as I remembered. It seemed as if I had heard it only hours before, instead of months. I felt stupid and thick with sleep and confusion, and could not, for a moment, make my voice work.

“Lucy?” I said finally, hoarsely.

“Can I come in?” she said.

I cleared my throat. “Yeah. Sure. Come on in,” I said, and held the door for her. She turned and waved toward the street, and I saw an idling cab slide away into a fine, opalescent mist that had not been there when I went to bed.

There was a chill under the rain, and Lucy’s breath, as PEACHTREE ROAD / 375

she turned back to me, was frosted white. The misting rain was caught in her tangled, silky dark hair and haloed her head like the streetlights below. She came into my apartment and glanced around my tiny living room carelessly, as if she was not registering what she was seeing. She probably was not; her eyes had the flat glitter they got when she had had too much to drink. She sat down on my thrift store sofa and crossed her long legs and stuffed her hands into the coat pockets and looked up at me, still smiling, still glittering.

Then she laughed aloud, the deep, plummy laugh that she had had since her earliest childhood, and I grinned in return, a completely involuntary twitch. Few people failed to respond to Lucy’s laugh.

“Aren’t you going to ask me what I’m doing here?” she said gaily, and I thought then that there was something more than alcohol burning inside her. For the first time, it occurred to me that her presence here might mean trouble of some sort. I had not thought to ask her if there was anything wrong, despite the hour and the fact that she had said she did not want to see me again, and that I had not known she was anywhere within a thousand miles of me. She appeared, was here; that was all. Lucy in my apartment at three o’clock on an autumn morning was an absolute, and needed nothing else. She filled it as naturally and totally as she had our childhood nursery, or the summerhouse.

“What
are
you doing here?” I said. I was suddenly and uncomfortably aware that I wore only the pair of chinos I had pulled on hastily when the knocking had begun. I was not cold; the rattling old radiator kept the apartment almost tropically warm—when it worked—but I felt vulnerably naked.

“I was in the neighborhood,” she said, giggling, “and thought I’d drop in.”

I sat down in a rump-sprung butterfly chair opposite her.

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“I assume you’re up for a weekend with Red and the gang at Old Nassau,” I said.

“Right you are,” she said. The hectic laughter bubbled just under her voice and burned in her cheeks. “It’s the Yale game.

Red never misses it. Only he did this year. He’s been passed out in his room since eleven o’clock this morning. Well, who gives a shit? There were seventy-four others to party with.”

“Lucy,” I said, stung with annoyance and distaste and something else I could not name, “you’re heading for more trouble than you knew there was in the world.”

I could hear the fussiness in my own voice, and expected her to throw it back at me, but she didn’t. She got up from the sofa and paced around the little room, still wrapped in the raincoat, looking at the few photographs and posters I had tacked up, and the one drawing—a vivid, darkling pastel of Satchmo blowing it out at the Vanguard, done by someone named Pierce I had never heard of before—and picking up and putting down my few bibelots.

“You don’t have to worry about me, Gibby,” she said over her shoulder. “When couldn’t I handle Red?”

“Well, light somewhere,” I said grumpily, “and I’ll make us some coffee. From the looks of things you can use some.

It’s a wonder you made it all the way in from Princeton on the train.”

“I didn’t. I caught a ride with somebody,” she said.

“Who?”

“Oh, God, I don’t know, Gibby, I didn’t get his name.

What difference does it make? I don’t want any coffee. Don’t you have anything to drink? And maybe an old abandoned cigarette?”

“There are some cigarettes in the desk drawer,” I said.

“They’ve been there since summer, so they’re probably un-smokable. And it’s coffee or nothing. Sit down PEACHTREE ROAD / 377

and take your coat off. You make me nervous pacing around like that.”

She turned to me, smiling a strange, closemouthed smile, and then suddenly threw the coat off and dropped it on the floor, and stood there wearing only a white nylon slip. She was naked underneath it. I could see the dark shadows of her nipples, and the patch of smoky hair at the V of her thighs. I dropped my eyes.

“The rest of my pretties are hanging on the wall in the living room at Tiger,” she said. “I’m their fair lady of choice this weekend, and I gave them my favors. Instead of one knight, I’ve got seventy-four. Not counting Red, of course.

See what you could have had, Gibby?”

For some reason, I flushed as if this were not Lucy, whose narrow, white whippet body I had known almost as well as my own since childhood. I turned away and walked back to the kitchen, which lay at the end of the pullmanlike row of rooms that made up the apartment. I could hear her unsteady steps behind me. I filled the kettle and set it on the tiny stove and turned around to face her. I was not going to let a drunk, contentious Lucy throw me. I decided to ignore her nakedness.

“Well, how do you like my place?” I said. “Is it anything like you thought it would be?”

“To tell you the truth, I hadn’t thought about it,” she said.

“But I do like it. It’s like a little train. It’s like…oh, Gibby, you know what it’s like? It’s like Dumboozletown, Florida!

Do you remember Dumboozletown?”

She began to laugh again, and the laughter spiraled up and up, until I was afraid that it would go off into one of her old fits of hysteria, but it didn’t. It was simply laughter.

She threw her head back with it, and laughed and laughed.

I was about to join in, seduced into mirth against my will, when I saw the marks on her throat. They were ugly and unmistakable, the vermilion prints of ten fin 378 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

gers there at the base, where the slender white column joined the elegant, ridged collarbone. An older, purple bruise spread up the side of her neck into her hairline.

“Who choked you, Lucy?” I said. “Was it Red? It was Red, wasn’t it? Did it happen this weekend? Is that why you came?”

She stopped laughing abruptly, and put her hand up to her neck, tentatively, as if the marks still hurt her.

“He didn’t choke me,” she said. Her face closed. “He just kind of shook me a little. He didn’t know he was being so rough. He was awfully sorry. No, it’s not at all why I came.

I told you. I just—”

“Lucy, this is me. Cut the shit,” I said. “I know a choke hold when I see one. What was he, drunk, or just mean as hell?”

She didn’t answer. I saw that her eyes had found my lone bottle of bourbon, which I kept mainly for visitors; besides the obligatory drinks at the jazz clubs, to make up the cover, I rarely drank then. I could not afford it, for one thing. She reached out for the bourbon, staring at me defiantly. I shrugged. I knew when I was beaten. She unscrewed the top and took a long pull from the bottle, and then put it down and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

After a long moment of silence, she said, “He doesn’t mean anything by it, you know. Red doesn’t. I was being sort of loud and silly, and he couldn’t get me to stop, that was all.

It’s just his way of showing me that he loves me.”

I just looked at her.

“Daddy used to do it,” she went on, her voice getting louder. “It’s not uncommon. Daddy did it because he loved me, too. I’d be bad, and he’d kind of hit me, and then he’d cry because he’d had to…”