Peachtree Road (57 page)

“I hope you don’t mind,” she said, snapping on a single lamp beside the deep, sagging old blue sofa and sinking into its cushions. “I moved out here a week or two after I got home, in June. Nobody seemed to know what to say to me, and I could tell that the cast and the bruises bothered everybody, and it just seemed easier all the way around. Martha brought me trays and I slept, mostly, and after I felt better I got the job, and then it was better to be out here because I didn’t wake anybody leaving or coming home. I work pretty late sometimes. And then, I didn’t think you were coming back; but if you mind, I’ll move my things out of here in a second. I didn’t change anything at all….”

PEACHTREE ROAD / 443

She had not. The summerhouse looked almost exactly as it had the day I had left it to enter Princeton. My books and records were in the same untidy rows I had left, and even the Georgia Tech and University of Georgia pennants on the walls were undisturbed. A hanging whatnot that my mother had put up still held my 880 trophies and a lone, blackened junior tennis trophy from the club, and a small glass case of perfect minié balls that Charlie had given me one long-ago Christmas still sat, thick-felted with dust, on my old desk.

Only the desk showed evidence of Lucy; it was piled with books and notebooks and yellow legal pads, and a battered old Smith-Corona portable sat squarely in its middle, neatly covered. I’d have known that Lucy Bondurant lived in these rooms, though, if I had been led into them blindfolded. Over everything, over the drying musk of grass and the yellowing September woods out back, and the breath of the dank-scummed lily pool just beyond the veranda, and the cool-sour stucco smell of the summerhouse itself, rode the silky-teasing scent of her Tabu.

“I don’t mind,” I said. “I like to see you out here with your typewriter and your brand-new life; I’ll like thinking of you here when I’m back in New York. It’s a good hideout for an author. And I think it must suit you. You look wonderful.”

She did. Lucy had always looked wonderful, of course, but there was something totally new about her this weekend; Dorothy Cameron had been right. I had noticed it the moment I stepped off the plane, and the sense of it had grown with each passing hour that we spent together. There wasn’t any physical difference; I had looked for that when I hugged her and held her away from me and studied her, because the sense of otherness had smitten me so powerfully the moment I saw her tall figure in the crowd around the airline gate. Her 444 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

black-satin hair still fell in its blue-sheened pageboy against her slanted white cheekbones, and her rose and cream color was the same, if a bit heightened with excitement. She wore no lipstick and no makeup on her light-drowned eyes, and that was, for Lucy, unusual, but I had seen her without makeup many times before. And if she had been slender before, she was downright thin now, a thinness of sinew and taut-stretched flesh that vein and bone, here and there, gleamed through. But on Lucy, thinness still meant only whippet elegance, and a refining of her extraordinary grace.

No, the difference was born inside her, and it shone out of her blue eyes and in the soft curve of her mouth like mist from morning water. I thought of the trick we used to do with a flashlight when we were small; we would hold it, lit, in our mouths or shine it behind our hands, and were in those moments illumined from the inside out, glowing creatures of light and bone. If Lucy had done the same with a pure white candle, the effect would have been what I saw now. There was a word that fit her but I could not think of it.

We stopped at Rusty’s on the way to the Peachtree Road house, “to shore you up before the onslaught,” she said.

“Once the weekend gets into gear, we won’t have any time together at all.
Après moi le déluge
. I hope you aren’t going to hate all this folderol about the book.”

“Are you kidding?” I said. “I couldn’t be any prouder of you if you’d won the Nobel Prize for literature. I’ll happily go through this with every book you write. Are you working on another one? And when are you going to tell me about this one?”

“Oh…later. Soon. Tonight, maybe,” she said.

She finished her Coke and made a rude childhood noise against the bottom of the glass with the straw. I was drinking beer, and had asked if she wanted one, too, but she had shaken her head and asked for Coke instead.

PEACHTREE ROAD / 445

“No more booze,” she said. “I’m strictly a Cokaholic now.”

“Well, good,” I said. “I was getting a little worried about you there for a while, to tell you the truth.”

“With good reason,” she said. “I’m not the nicest person in the world when I drink. Or when I don’t, for that matter.

Listen, Gibby,” and she turned to me quickly, so that the bell of hair swung against her cheek. “I want to say this before you shush me. I’ll be sorry until the day I die for what I did to you and Sarah. You should be up there at Tate with her, not Charlie Gentry, and you would be if it hadn’t been for me, and I know that. No”—for I had started to protest—”let me finish. I can’t undo that, but I can keep from making anybody else unhappy ever again with my selfishness and my neuroses, and I’m going to. My heart will hurt me every time I see Sarah Gentry or you again as long as I live, and if it helps at all, I want you to know that I’ve changed. I really have. That may be small comfort, but it’s all I can give you. That and just to love you always and wish you everything that’s good in the world for the rest of your life.”

It was an extraordinary speech by any standards, and for Lucy it was astounding. I literally did not know what to say, so I said, for a moment, nothing at all. And then: “I liked the old model pretty well. I hope she’s not in mothballs for good.”

Her glorious, throaty laugh rang out, and relief flooded me. Somewhere under this—the word I wanted danced maddeningly just out of reach—this paragon my old adored and enthralling Lucy lay. It was enough, for now, and I switched on the radio of her little VW bug, and leaned my head back against the seat and inhaled deeply, eyes closed.

The smell of the dusty honeysuckle foliage that fell over Rusty’s parking lot fence swam into the car on the sharp-cutting strains of “Moonglow,” and the ash from Lucy’s cigarette reddened in the darkness as

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she dragged deeply on it, and sudden young laughter spilled from the open window of the car next to us, and just for that moment it was 1953 again, and the summer moon shone on us, and I was truly home. It was not until hours later, when we sat in the semidarkness of the summerhouse and Lucy, her face carved pure and cleanly in lamplight and shadow like a young Joan of Orléans, spoke of moving out here to avoid giving bother to the household, that the word I had wanted at the airport flashed into my mind: saintly.

“There’s another reason I’m out here, too,” she said as if reading my thoughts.

“And that is?” I said.

“Mother and your folks don’t want me in the house. In fact, they want me to move all the way out of it and get a place of my own. They’ve given me a month to look around, and I thought it would be better to lie low while I did, so I wouldn’t keep everybody upset. They’re really pretty angry with me. I can’t say that I blame them.”

Here we go, I thought. There
is
trouble, then; I should have known. Why else would she want me to come home?

But I can see why she pulled the wool over Dorothy’s and Sarah’s eyes. This new-Lucy business is so good it’s eerie….

I felt deeply, endlessly tired. Worse, I felt near-sick with disappointment.

Aloud I said, “Let’s have it, Luce.”

She looked at me quickly, and I could swear that the bewilderment in her eyes was genuine. And then she laughed again, the healing, full Lucy-laugh.

“Oh, poor Gibby! No, it’s nothing you have to do anything about. It’s nothing you could do anything about even if I wanted you to. Only I can, and I have.”

“Then what?”

She did not answer at once. It was as hot as a mid-summer night in the room, and she twisted her heavy PEACHTREE ROAD / 447

hair up off her neck and held it atop her head. Her plain white oxford shirt fell away from her thin neck, and I could see clearly the notch where Red Chastain’s gun butt had smashed her fragile collarbone, and the little white tracks in her hairline from the stitches in the scalp laceration his bullet had made. Sweat pearled her neck and upper lip. I wanted to cry, suddenly, she looked so punished and vulnerable and young. The armor her insouciance had given her was gone.

Then she said, “It’s my job. They really hate what I’m doing, and they think I took it to spite them, like I…guess I did those editorials I wrote at Scott, and the marches and sitins and things I went on. You know. I don’t blame them for thinking that; why shouldn’t they? But I can’t give it up, Gibby. I love it with every little shred and scrap of me. I don’t think I ever really knew what it was to love work, or to love people in the way I love these—”

“For God’s sake,” I said, “what are you doing? Nursing lepers? Hooking? What?”

“I’m working with the civil rights movement,” she said, her face literally aflame with a kind of joy. “I’m working downtown at a place called Damascus House, in an old church in the black section down below the capital. Right next to Capitol Homes, you know; where we used to go to get the laundry from Princess? It’s an innercity mission, really, run by Father Claiborne Cantrell. I know you’ve heard of him, or read about him—he’s been in
Time
and
Newsweek
both. I guess he’s pretty radical for a Southern Episcopalian.

Anyway, he had to give up his ministry at Saint Martin’s after he’d gotten arrested for the fourth time sitting in, so he just went down to Capitol Homes and found this old empty church and outbuildings and set up Damascus House, and it’s been the model for literally dozens of inner-city missions all over the South. I met Clay—Father Cantrell—at a rally in

448 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

early July, and was just spellbound by him like everybody is, and literally begged him with tears running down my face to let me come and work for him, and he finally did…. Oh, God, I just never knew until now, but this is my real niche, the thing I was meant to do with my life!”

I had to smile, even as the import of her incandescence and the new, uncritical affection for the human race dawned.

Lucy and the Negroes again. No wonder her mother and my parents were furious. An amusing little feature about the Defiant Deb taking up the cause of equality in the Atlanta
Constitution
was one thing;
Time
and
Newsweek
were quite another. When would they learn that trying to separate Lucy from her beloved Negroes was as futile as parting the moon from its tides?

But the implications of her passion were, to me, ominous.

“Lucy, what you’re meant to do with your life is write,” I said. I said it as neutrally as possible, so as not to echo the other furious voices in this house. “What is it you do at this Damascus House?”

“I’m registering voters,” she said. “I’m matching government resources to individual needs. I’m working in the soup kitchen and driving the bus and getting bail bond money for the sit-ins, and…oh, Gibby, there’s so much to do.”

Her blue eyes spilled out a light very near that of madness, and I was almost afraid of the otherworldliness about her.

“Can’t you do as much for the movement by writing about it as by dishing up soup?” I said. “You must see what kind of career you could have as a novelist; you told me about your reviews. My God, the whole town is turning out to honor you tomorrow, practically. You have great power; couldn’t you reach more people that way?”

“I love them, Gibby,” she said simply. “I love the PEACHTREE ROAD / 449

black people. I need to be close to them. They’re better friends than any I ever had. I want to be right in this with them; Clay says we have to walk among them and with them to have any credibility.”

“Ah, I see,” I said, thinking that I did. “Clay. The good father. Lucy, don’t you see that you’re doing nothing in the world but chasing off after another man, doing what your latest savior tells you to? Don’t you see that?”

She smiled at me. It was a very sweet smile, and a gentle one. “I don’t blame you for thinking that, but you’re wrong, Gibby,” she said. “I told you I’ve changed, and I meant that.

You’ll see what I mean about Clay when you meet him. The sheer goodness of him is just…consuming.”

I was silent, looking at her in the lamplight. She seemed content to sit under my gaze without talking, curled up bonelessly in the depth of the sofa, smoking. At least she had not forsworn that. It struck me that Lucy, who had never been able to assure her safety by finding a trustworthy protector in any of her men, had decided to assure it now by being a very good girl indeed. The bad girl had, after all, come to endless grief. And who was, after all, more assured of society’s approbation and benison than its saints? I knew that this premise was as false as any she had lived by before, and that she would eventually come to fresh grief from adherence to it. I thought, also, that whether she knew it or not, there was a good measure of the child spiting its parents here.

For indeed, from what she had told me, Aunt Willa and my mother and father were, for once, totally united in their disapproval of Lucy’s association with “that crazy radical and the niggers down there.” Quit that awful business, they had said, and get a decent job somewhere on the Northside—like the society section of the newspaper, or perhaps teaching in a little private

450 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

academy in Buckhead, or even helping out in the gift shop at Piedmont Hospital as so many of the Leaguers do—or move out of the house. I could only marvel at her tranquility in the face of the ultimatum. Heretofore, she would have been stricken to blind white terror at the prospect of being ousted from the only security she had ever known.

“I take it you’re not going to quit, then,” I said. It was not a question.

“Of course not.”

“Well, then, have you got an apartment or something?”