Peachtree Road (5 page)

My father, who had been as a boy sublimely content and at home in the rough, hard-drinking, hunting and fishing masculine society that formed Fayetteville, Georgia’s, small upper crust, was perpetually clumping and red-wristed and truculent in the urban clubs and drawing and dining rooms, which he perceived as effete. She came to think that she had married beneath her and that the vitality and exuberance that had first won her had become the barnacles that weighted her heart and slowed her trajectory through the society of Atlanta. He came to feel that the delicacy and distance and sheen of family substance that had so charmed him had been forged into the weapons with which she cut him off from his kind and kept him isolated at politely hostile club dances and bridge evenings and benefit dinners. She had brought a considerable family fortune to their marriage as a dowry, and with part of it he had bought the house on Peachtree Road and the rural property to the west and north of the city which, coupled with the wretched downtown holdings her family had bequeathed to her, 30 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

had increased that fortune nearly tenfold. She thought he had used her shamelessly, and he thought she scorned and failed to appreciate him. Both were right on all counts.

That no one else who knew them perceived them as the misfits they secretly felt themselves to be—for no one around them was introspective or sensitive enough to do so—did not occur to them, and would not have mattered if it had.

Their distortions were interior ones, and they lived inwardly to those crooked measures. It was inevitable that from the beginning, I would be what my mother called Sensitive (always seeming to speak the word in capital letters) and my father called sissy.

“You’re going to make a goddamned preacher of him, Olivia,” he would bellow, when he found me totally immersed in reading my way through the Bible, not comprehending that it was the glorious, plumtasting language of King James and not the precepts contained within that drew me to the Good Book. I did know this, faintly, but could not, in the presence of all that red-faced congestion, explain it, and he would stump away into his study, muttering over his shoulder to my mother: “Always coughing and squinting and fumbling when he tries to play football. Puking up his guts when he tries to put a worm on a hook. Howling like a hound when I put him on a horse. Hell, he can’t even keep up with little Sarah Cameron playing kick the goddamn can, and she’s not knee-high to a grasshopper. He’s never going to have any gumption if you let him keep his nose stuck in a book like that.”

“He’s Sensitive, that’s what he is, Sheppard,” my mother would say, brushing the lank comma of white-blond hair that was my father’s legacy to me off my forehead, and exposing the hated glasses with the flesh-colored plastic rims.

By the time I could read she had given up being disgusted at my bodily functions and had become passion PEACHTREE ROAD / 31

ately, breath-suckingly protective. “You wouldn’t know about sensitivity, of course, but it’s what makes my daddy the man he is, and I prize it in my son more than anything in the world.”

I would stare elaborately and sensitively into the pages of the Bible, not looking at my father, but inside I was smirking openly. I would have, then, bought my beautiful mother’s approbation with any coin available to me.

It’s funny about love: I can see now, looking back on the child that I was, that it was love that I needed more than anything in the world. Unconditional, eternal, immovable love. Of course it was. Her love mostly, but at that point, anybody’s would have served. But I don’t think I ever sought it. I waited instead for it to come and blow me across the face of the world. And it did not come until Lucy did. That was always her best gift to me, her primary health and her strength—that tornado of love and approval. And it was in the withholding of it that my mother both cursed me and stamped me forever hers. I still wonder if she could have possibly known what she was doing.

Both of my parents were right about me. I was both sensitive and a physical coward, being possessed, as many precocious only children are, of a soaring and vivid imagination that could illuminate in excruciating clarity the scope and detail of all the dangers the world was fraught with. I was also, like Lucy, that most vulnerable and creative of creatures, a total realist, and, I suppose, a pretty perceptive one. Those qualities enabled me to see all the perils of my world and know them for precisely what they were. It did not make me a comfortable child to be around, for adults or most of the other children I knew. Most children are one-celled and barbaric little sentimentalists, and can sense otherness and know it for the alien thing it is, even if they cannot compre 32 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

hend it. This did not leave me friendless, but it left me essentially without peers, and the only two close friends I had at that time—Pres Hubbard, who was lame from a bout of infant polio and wore a clanking leg brace, and Charlie Gentry, who had childhood diabetes—were the only two among us who shared the sideline with me. Unlike me, they both had gumption aplenty, but could not exercise it. I was content that my handicap was in my spirit, as my father contended, as long as it excused me from the world of terrifying proper boys’ activities he envisioned for me.

But still, I castigated myself bitterly and endlessly, if silently, for failing to like most of the things my companions did and for failing to please the great masculine elemental who towered and roared over my childhood like red Cronus over the embryo world. And dimly, dimly, I felt the lapping of a futile rage at my mother, who had so early doomed me to be Sensitive, and at my father, who would not, perhaps could not, rescue me from her. And hated and feared that rage, and felt the guilt of it festering in my soul like shrapnel.

It was not, for a child, the most nurturing of worlds, even in its unabashed privilege.

But oh, the seductiveness, the symmetry, the immutability, the sheer, heart-drugging beauty of that world! Especially in those days before it became chic and accessible and throttled with traffic and roving schools of the upscale, pleasure-bent young, Buckhead was one of the most beautiful places on earth. Oh, not the business district, such as it was; it was then, as it is now, a random, jury-rigged and jerry-built shamble of small shops and businesses, banks and offices, loading docks and parking lots, drugstores and cafés and service stations and a few banal brick government edifices, webbed and festooned with electric and telephone lines and wires and an eye-smiting array of signage. No, I mean residential Buck

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head, that cloistered, deep green rectangle of great old trees and winding streets and fine, not-so-old houses set far back on emerald velvet lawns, carved out of deep hardwood forests, cushioned and insulated from the sweat, smells and cacophony of the city proper, to the south, by layers of money. No one has ever been quite sure what the official boundaries of Buckhead are, but for many years my own personal Buckhead was that four-odd square miles bounded on the south by Peachtree Creek, the north by West Paces Ferry Road, the west by Northside Drive, and the east by Peachtree Road.

Peachtree Road…It is to me a name with far more scope and resonance to it than its dozen or so meandering miles of asphalt should rightly command. The restless, well-heeled floods of people who come to Atlanta each year now to meet and convene and visit and do business think they are seeing Atlanta when they see Peachtree Street, but they are not.

Visitors visit on Peachtree Street. Atlanta lives—or did—on and just off Peachtree Road. As little as I love the city now, I still, perversely and despite what it has become, love Peachtree Road. To me it encompasses and personifies all that is particular and powerful about the city, as well as all that is abstract and illusory and beautiful. Even its ugliness—and much of it is simply and profoundly ugly—seems to me to be rich, deeply textured and unique to Atlanta.

Admittedly I see it now through the scrim of childhood, but I do not think it looks like anywhere else on earth. The very name of it rings in my heart like a bell. And still, to my eyes, the most beautiful and singular point on all of Peachtree Road is the house at 2500, where I was born and have lived for the entirety of my life.

These, then, were my worlds in that portentous spring that Lucy came to us: the larger one of Buckhead proper and the smaller of 2500 Peachtree Road. Worlds that had, despite the dearth of real and sustained love, a 34 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

kind of charm and promise that I have never found again anywhere. And one of the sweetest and most solemn promises was that they would never change. I don’t know why I thought that, but I always did in those earliest days. I think perhaps that the very contrast of banality and beauty in those two worlds served to give them heft and the authority of permanence.

So when the telegram came, in early April, from my aunt Willa Bondurant, saying that Uncle Jim had left them in New Orleans and she had no choice but to come to us and bring her children, it was a cataclysm of enormous proportions, not only to my mother and father but to me. Whatever my scant status with them, it had, so far, at least been that of only child. The thought of sharing my house and their attention engendered in me a rage so murderous that I could only deal with it as I had learned early to deal with all things that threatened. I shoved it completely out of my mind. By the morning after the telegram, the tattered little band of my unfortunate kin had never, for me, existed.

Even on the day of their arrival, even after my deep-sighing, eye-rolling mother had had Martha Cater make up the extra bedrooms and my stomping, red-faced father had dispatched Shem to the Greyhound bus station with the Chrysler, I was unruffled. I knew absolutely and to the core of me that no alien, white-trash aunt—my mother’s overheard epithet—and cousins would appear in the round foyer of my domain out of the luminous green night. I could repeat word for word the message that would come soon by telephone or telegram:

“So sorry but all your relatives have been killed in an accident and therefore can’t come.” I knew how the voice would sound saying the words, and what my words of wisdom and comfort would be to my father, whose younger brother’s wife and children these were. I could only think of my uncle Jim as that, my father’s brother,

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for I had never seen him, and had no sense that anywhere in the world did I have a tall, drowsy-eyed, blond young uncle who was the obverse, the fatal, radiant side, of my father, and whom in time I would grow to resemble almost uncannily. There was no photograph of James Clay Bondurant in our house, and few words about him ever passed my father’s lips. My mother spoke of him once in a while, but not in words intended for my ears, and even though I only half heard them, I could hear in her voice when she spoke of him something that was not there at other times. It was only in this way, and almost subliminally, as is the way of children, that I knew that my uncle Jim had a kind of dark importance in that house that was all the more disturbing because it was unnamed.

When the doorbell rang, then, I pounded downstairs behind my mother in full expectation of opening it to the lugubrious face of the telegram messenger, and so the four figures who stood there with the twilight falling down over them were as shocking and aberrant to me as murderers or trolls. I could only stare at them, my heart banging so loudly in my ears that I could not even make out my mother’s words of welcome, which were, in any case, crisp and short and soon ended; I could hear my father coming heavily down the stairs behind me. But the four did not move, and I could not speak. The moment seemed to spin out forever.

The first clear thought that struck me was that my aunt Willa assaulted the eye and nose and ear simultaneously, though not, to me, unpleasantly. She had hair so black it shone blue and purple in the light over the front door, and she wore garnet lipstick and nail polish “laid on with a trowel,” as my mother said to someone over the telephone later that evening, in a low, only half-amused voice. She smelled powerfully of the acrid sweat of travel and nervous-ness, though this was masked with

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a friendly, evocative scent that I always associated with Wender & Roberts Drugstore at Christmastime.

“Evening in Paris, a ton of it,” my mother further instructed her phone friend.

My aunt Willa’s face was blanched and chalky with powder and fatigue, and there were tiny, clumped beads of blackness at the ends of her long eyelashes. Her eyes were the pure, impossible blue that coal fire makes when it has burned itself almost out. She wore a print rayon dress with a peplum that accentuated her willow-wand waist and the rich swell of her hips and breasts, and her long, slender legs were bare and dirty. She tottered lamely on towering sling-back heels, and her toenails were the same dried-blood red of her lips and fingernails. I found her powerfully, magically glamorous, there in that dim foyer with its dim old Oriental rugs and dim, stained stucco walls and dim, ornate old gilt-framed paintings of my Redwine ancestors. Dim, dim…Suddenly it seemed to me that, until these four maniacally unknown people had walked in out of the warm April night to light my foyer into rawness and vitality, my whole life had been dim.

I saw next that my aunt held a cherubic little blond boy of less than a year in the crook of one arm, and by the other hand held an equally angelic little girl of, perhaps, three, solemn and sweating and overdressed in a fuchsia velvet coat, bonnet and leggings. Behind her, with one hand on the small girl’s shoulder, a girl taller than I, but obviously younger, stood, staring directly at me with her mother’s extraordinary blue eyes, and something looking out of them flew into and through my own and straight into my heart with a directness and force that felt as though I had swallowed a fire-tipped arrow. I blinked and gulped soundlessly, like a fish drowning in air, and then, surprising myself profoundly, grinned.

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The girl grinned back. Her hair was the pure, clear dark of cold winter creek water over fallen leaves, and it flew loosely around her narrow head like corn silk. Her lashes were sooty cobwebs on her pink-flushed cheeks, and she was tall and willowy like her mother, with long limbs and small hands and feet and a whippet waist. She was standing still, but she looked as if she had been in motion all over and had just settled to earth. She wore corduroy overalls and dirty saddle shoes.