Peachtree Road (53 page)

Fall passed, Christmas came and went, the spring was born and grew old. Sarah wrote vibrant, brimming letters and I answered with yearning ones. I saw friends or did not, ate or did not, listened to and played jazz or stayed home, buried myself in my underground tunnels and vaults and the cloistered aboveground stacks, slept, awoke, did it all again; and the emptiness where Sarah was not gradually filled, as the days passed and the time of her return approached, with a great, slumbering antic

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ipation that was born in my groin as well as my heart. I did not think I could wait to see and touch and smell and taste her again.

She was due in at midmorning on the fifth of June, 1961.

Ben and Dorothy Cameron came up from Atlanta to meet her, and I went up to the Plaza the night before she landed to meet them for dinner in the Oak Room. In all my years in New York, I had never been into the dark, graceful old room, with its air of age and privilege and substance. Ben and Dorothy always stayed at the Plaza; it had been Ben’s father’s accustomed lair when he visited New York, and as Ben said, the Camerons didn’t play around with tradition.

I looked at him closely that night, as if for the first time seeing the man the entire country would know, within a few years, as the aristocratic mayor of the Southern city that somehow managed to keep, in the fire storms of the mid-1960s, a kind of furious peace with its black citizens. Against the mellow old paneling of the Oak Room, I watched him toying with the silver and taking the level gray measure of the moneyed men and women around him, most of whom instinctively lifted their heads to stare at him, and I saw too that much of the laughter had gone out of his light Celt’s eyes, and been replaced with a kind of narrow measuring.

His pupils were contracted to pinpoints in the dim light; that, and the web of white weather lines in the thin, tanned skin around his eyes, gave him the look of a man accustomed to gazing great distances. For the first time in my life, I felt just a little uneasy with him, not quite so effortlessly comfortable as I had with the lounging, laughing young father of Ben and Sarah. Dorothy, beside him, did not seem changed.

In simple cream silk, which set off her vivid coloring and cameo features and enriched the dark hair and brows that were Sarah’s, she glowed like an Advent candle. I 412 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

thought she looked very beautiful. Sarah would be a beautiful older woman.

Ben talked a little, after the dessert plates had been taken away and the old five-star cognac that he loved brought, about the six-point program for the city’s growth that Sarah had told me about earlier, and about the public relations effort he hoped would bring Atlanta into national focus.

“It’s called Forward Atlanta,” he said, and I laughed before I thought.

“God,” I said. “Talk about horn blowing and flag waving.

It ain’t exactly subtle, is it?”

He grinned. “Nope,” he said. “Downright gauche. But I don’t knock it. In fact, I’m the one who thought of it. Atlanta is gauche, Shep. Always has been. But that gaucherie is going to set us on fire in the next ten years.”

“What about the race business?” I said. “That could literally burn you up.”

“That’s the kicker, of course,” he said, his grin fading. “That could sink us. But I don’t think it will. It’s not good for business. And I’ve got some agents in place who can do a lot to defuse it. But you’re right; it could be bad. We can’t let it happen, that’s all. We need the Negroes with us, not against us. We need their cooperation and we need their money. We can’t do everything that needs doing without them.”

“Can you do it even with them? It’s a radical proposal, Ben, to completely remake a city….”

“Yes. We can do it,” he said. “We can
just
do it. They call us the power structure, you know; sometimes, the Club. And we are those things, and that’s why we can get it done—we have a lot of money and we can finance the big stuff at home.

And we’re in absolute accord on what needs to be done.

That’s eighty percent of the battle. We can make the big push alone, by ourselves. But after that, to sustain it, we’ll have to have more than momentum.

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We’ll have to have outside money. And with that, of course, will come outsiders. And the Club, or we Buckhead guys, if you will, will be doomed. We know that; there it is. There just aren’t enough of you home town Young Turks coming up behind us.”

“Are you still pushing for me to come back to Atlanta?” I asked.

“I guess so,” he said.

“Why? The city you’re talking about doesn’t need another librarian.”

“The city I’m talking about needs another smart, thoughtful young man with money,” Ben Cameron said.

“I don’t have any money, Ben. I’m not apt to have any,”

I said honestly. Surely he knew about the estrangement between me and my father.

“You don’t know what you have, Shep,” he said. “Your father never
let
you know, and never let your mother tell you. Do you even know where your family’s holdings are?”

“Not really,” I said. “Down in the southeast part of town somewhere around the old cotton mill, I think….”

“Well, I’ll show you exactly where when you get home.”

“Ben…”

“Goddamn it, Shep, you’ll have to come home eventually to marry Sarah, even if you leave the next day,” he said crisply. “I’m not going to let you get out of town without taking you by the hand and marching you down to Cabbagetown and showing you just where the Bondurant dough comes from.”

I lifted my hands and let them fall. I did not feel like arguing that my family’s real estate holdings were as unlikely to become mine as the Brooklyn Bridge was. My head was too full of tomorrow and the coming of Sarah.

They arranged to pick me up the next morning on the way over to the West Side docks, and I waved aside 414 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

Ben’s offer of a cab and walked the forty blocks home. I walked slowly in the soft air, letting the slackening rhythm of the city night suck and swirl around me. I thought of nothing, and was happy. It was nearly midnight when I got back to my apartment, and the shrilling telephone had almost stopped ringing when I got the door unlocked and picked up the receiver.

I was fully expecting to hear Ben’s voice, or Dorothy’s, but the voice that came on the line in the little hollow of air that meant long distance was that of a crisp, businesslike young doctor in the base hospital at Camp Pendleton, California, and for a moment I could not take in what he was saying. And then I could: Lucy was in the hospital, five of her teeth knocked out and her broken jaw wired shut, with an additional broken collarbone and fractured forearm. And there was, in her scalp, a shallow, trench like laceration where the bullet from Red Chastain’s service revolver had grazed her.

I did not say anything, and the voice went on. The Pendleton MPs were looking for Lieutenant Chastain, it said, and Mrs. Chastain would be well enough to be released on the following Monday morning, but since she could not be alone, and since no one at the Atlanta number she had given them would speak with her doctors or her husband’s superiors, all of whom were very concerned for her precarious emotional state as well as her injuries, there seemed to be nowhere for her to go. She had said that her cousin, Mr.

Bondurant, would come and take her to her home in Atlanta, and if it was possible, they hoped I would do so immediately.

She was so frantic for me to come that they could not restrain her, and had twice had to snip the wires that held her shattered jaw so that she could breathe. They could not, the doctor said, be responsible for her condition if I did not come.

I sat on the edge of my bed for a long time, looking PEACHTREE ROAD / 415

blindly at my feet in their smudged white bucks, sitting squarely together on the floor like good poodles commanded to stay. Then I lifted the receiver and called the Plaza.

I have never known Ben Cameron to be so coldly angry before or since. He said, “I see,” a couple of times while I talked, in a voice that was as flat and arctic as a tundra, and when I was done he said, “Shep, you are a complete and miserable goddamned fool if you go out to California after that poor little piece, and if you do, I can’t imagine how long it’s going to take before I can talk to you reasonably again.”

And he left the line and handed the phone to Dorothy.

I really believe she understood. She indicated that she did.

But she was greatly hurt and disappointed; I knew that, though she did not say so. Instead, in her lovely, low, patrician voice, she said, “What is it about Lucy, do you suppose, Shep? What do you see there, what do you sense?”

“I…it’s just that she’s so vulnerable, Dorothy,” I said, endlessly and utterly tired. “And she’s totally alone now, and helpless. And in spite of what you think and the way she acts sometimes, there’s something innately good and simple in her….”

“No,” Dorothy Cameron said. “There’s no such thing as innate goodness. Goodness is learned, hard. It presupposes kindness. And Lucy is not kind; she is too afraid and hungry for that. Innocence; that’s another matter. That’s what’s under Lucy, that’s what you sense. A terrible, ruthless, implacable innocence. But kindness is a corrupt angel, and it is learned, and Lucy has not learned it and never will learn it.”

She paused, and I heard her sigh, and heard a world of fatigue and defeat in the sigh.

“Of course you’ll have to go, Shep,” she said. “You can’t live your life, nor Sarah with you, under the 416 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

shadow of a refusal to do so. I only ask that you be very, very careful with her. She is a danger to herself and a worse one to you. I’ll explain to Sarah. She’ll understand.”

But Sarah did not understand. By the time I came home from California almost a week later, with a pale, shrunken, nearly unrecognizable Lucy and installed her in her old room in the house on Peachtree Road, after having extracted from my mother and hers a reluctant promise of no I-told-you-so, and rushed to the downstairs telephone niche to call Sarah, it was to hear, from a muted and old-voiced Dorothy Cameron, that Sarah had, just two nights before, announced her engagement to Charlie Gentry. The announcement had been sent to both newspapers, Dorothy said, and would appear in the combined edition on Sunday. That was, of course, tomorrow. She hoped that I would come by and speak to Sarah and to Charlie, who would be there with the family for the congratulatory calls that would follow the announcement as inevitably as the morning sun followed the dawn. Both were anxious to talk with me.

“I hope you will, Shep,” she said. “This has been a very, very hard thing for Sarah. It will be a kindness to her if you’ll come. She said to tell you that she’ll wait for you tomorrow afternoon in the studio.”

But I left Atlanta later that day and went back to New York without seeing her.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

W
hen I would not go to them, they came to me. I had not been back in New York a week before the phone rang in my apartment, on a Friday evening, and I lifted it to hear Charlie Gentry’s voice. Even without the absence of the small hollowness that meant long distance I would have known that he was in the city with me. His voice had such an immediacy that I instinctively held the receiver away from my ear.

“Sarah and I are at the Plaza, and we want to see you,” he said without preamble. “None of us can live decently until we’ve talked. We’re not going to go home until we have.

When have you got some time?”

He had not said “Hello,” or “How are you,” or identified himself. Despite his phlegm, Charlie had delicacy and empathy, and he knew that there was no need and no way to frame this conversation in convention. And he knew very well how I was. He had been that way for years: stricken and without Sarah.

Pain and a child’s simple, consuming fury at the unfairness of it all surged into the cold, whistling hollow that had filled my chest ever since I had heard Dorothy Cameron’s words the Saturday before, and washed back out, tidelike. I saw rather than felt that my knuckles around the black plastic telephone receiver were blue-white, and my whole body was clenched, as one does just after a sudden injury to brace for the pain that will inevitably come boiling in. I hated them both in that moment, weakly and hopelessly, and I felt tears prickle in my eyes. But I willed the pain to stay back.

“I haven’t got any time for you, now or ever,” I said. My words sounded childish and impotent even to me, though my voice was level. “I don’t have anything to say 418 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

to either of you. I don’t know what you can possibly think you have to say to me. Go on home and go to some parties, or get married, or do good works, or all three.”

He sighed.

“Sarah said you wouldn’t want to. I didn’t believe her. I thought we were more to each other than all this. We’re not going home, Shep. We can outwait you, if we have to, but we’re going to talk to you. Can we come down?”

“No,” I said instantly, in something close to abhorrence.

“I’ll come up there.” I thought I would die, would kill them both, before I let them come here, to these rooms that were my own, that were where Sarah and I had made love and the beginnings of a life. If they came here, every place and everything I had would be contaminated with the pain of them, and I would literally have no refuge. I already sensed the poison of their pairing in the warm air of the city outside, as if it had drifted out from the hotel uptown and curled down into the Lower West Side to find me. When I hung up the telephone I went to the windows, mindlessly, and closed them. Then I put on a gray seersucker suit and a black knit tie and went over to Eighth and hailed a cab. When I got out in front of the Plaza, it was almost nine, the hot, pearled gray of a Manhattan summer twilight, and the white globes of lights were just blooming on Fifth Avenue along the perimeter of the park.

I thought it was sly and meanspirited of them to go to earth in the Plaza, that impenetrable, unassailable fortress of privilege and grace, that spiritual
pied-à-terre
of all the Camerons back to Ben’s grandfather. They might as well have been receiving an enemy at an ancestral castle. Power bulked dark against the lucent west, over the hotel. A small part of me, clear and somehow divorced from the clenched deadness, knew that there was not one fiber of Sarah Cameron that was sly or meanspirited,