Peachtree Road (59 page)

have walked in the prickling darkness of La Carrousel as naturally and fluidly as she walked into, or out of, water.

But I could not. I was rigid to my eyebrows with the desire not to appear as if I were slumming. In truth, I had never felt less like Lord Bountiful in my life. I was consumed with a simple desire to let everyone see how grateful I was to be there. I caught myself smiling right and left, and felt my face go hot in the darkness.

“Jesus, will you stop nodding like somebody in a bad play, Gibby?” Lucy whispered over her shoulder, amused. “You look like Lord Mountbatten reviewing the troops.”

They stopped at a table against a far wall and lowered themselves into chairs, and I dropped into one at the end of the table. Glenn Pickens sat across from me, not smiling but not frowning either, and when he had kissed Lucy lightly on her proffered cheek and hit Jack’s shoulder softly with his lightly balled fist, he said pleasantly and neutrally, “Hello, Shep. It’s been a long time.”

“Hello, Glenn,” I said. “It has. How are you? You’re looking good.”

He was. I remembered him as a thin, intense, reedy-necked boy, a jug-eared, caramel colored stripling eternally polishing one or another of Ben Cameron’s succession of black Lincolns or passing a tray with tongue-clamping concentration at some soiree or other of Dorothy’s. But he had filled out since then, and seemed to have grown considerably taller, so that he bulked large in the semidark of the room. His head was long and narrow and well shaped, and either the jug ears had receded or his skull had grown to accommodate them, and the glasses that now sat on his oddly Indian nose were horn-rimmed, giving him a scholarly, prosperous air.

I remembered Lucy saying that his grades at Morehouse had been extraordinary, and that he planned to get a law degree at Howard when he felt that he was no longer needed in the movement, but

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that he had become so valuable to Dr. King, along with a few other young lieutenants like Julian Bond and Andrew Young and John Lewis, that she could not foresee a time when he could do so. I knew, too, that he had served considerable time in exceedingly inhospitable jails around the South, and that those young shoulders had felt the bite of more than one truncheon and fire hose. I was stricken suddenly mute in his presence. I had thought, when I heard those things about him, how odd it was for a figure that had been almost part of the furniture of my childhood to be transmuted, willy-nilly, into a warrior on the ramparts of history. Interesting, I had thought.

Now, in his presence, I could not seem to speak. I caught myself about to say, “Tell me what you’ve been doing,” and reddened again, thinking that saying it to him would be as incongruous as saying it to Martin Luther King himself. The music swelled up then, and I was grateful for the din.

Across the table, Lucy leaned over to talk to the young woman at Glenn Pickens’s side, and Jack held up two fingers for the waitress. The girl with Glenn was very pretty, almost as striking as Lucy in the dark room. She looked smart and finished and composed, and there was about her an air of crisp authority. I thought that she seemed vaguely familiar, but I could not find the association. She wore a simple beige linen skirt and silk shirt, but they were so perfectly cut and so fluidly poured over her small, ripe body that they might have been cut and hand sewn for her. I thought that she was built like Sarah, and she had Sarah’s ease and elegance and presence, except that she was a rich, shining chocolate brown. My own whiteness seemed to wink rottenly in the gloom beside all the rich shades of dark flesh around me.

They’re light-years ahead of me, I thought, lumping 460 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

Lucy and Jack into the world of the young woman and Glenn Pickens. My world is practically second nature to them, but I can’t be at ease for five minutes in theirs. It was probably a mistake to come here.

Lucy touched my hand. “This is Gwen Caffrey,” she said, her hand laid lightly on the dark girl’s arm. “She’s the new six o’clock anchor at Channel Seven. She’s very, very good at what she does and she’s mean as a snake, so watch your step and your mouth.”

She smiled, and the girl smiled, and held out her hand. I took it. It was warm and surprisingly rough, as if she did hard work with her hands. Perhaps she did. Or had.

“I’m glad to meet you,” I said. “I’ve never met an anchor before, much less a lady anchor.”

“Nor a black one either, I’ll be bound,” she said, and it was so nearly what I had been thinking that I felt the traitorous blood rush up my neck into my face yet again. Shit, I thought, I’ve blushed more tonight than I did in grammar and high school put together. She laughed, but it was a friendly laugh. I smiled uncertainly.

“Relax,” she said. “Nobody else has, either. There haven’t been but a handful of us, and none before me in Atlanta.

I’ve never met a Princeton man before, so we’re even.”

“Lucy’s been talking again,” I said, just to have something to say. I was not exactly coming off as a raconteur this evening.

“No, actually it was Glenn who told me about you,” Gwen Caffrey said. “He said he knew you when you were all growing up in Buckhead.”

“That’s right,” I said. “But I’m surprised he remembered me. There were such a lot of us around the Camerons’ all the time—”

“And all little white kids look alike,” Glenn Pickens said from across the table. I could not tell if he was teas PEACHTREE ROAD / 461

ing or not; his impassive face did not change, or his eyes behind the thick glasses. Somehow I did not think he was.

I remembered that Lucy had said earlier, of the blacks at Damascus House, “They know who you are,” and I felt naked and uneasy. I had not ever considered that I might exist as a person to Glenn Pickens, son of Benjamin Cameron’s chauffeur, any more than he had existed, as a person, to me.

Lucy and Jack Venable laughed, easily and naturally, and I thought that Glenn Pickens was smiling, though it was more a very small grimace and looked as though it might split his carved taffy face. So I grinned too, feeling like a blundering albatross in a flock of lustrous crows. A willowy young waitress came by, and hugged Glenn Pickens briefly, and we ordered a round of drinks. The music, a playful piano weaving in and out around a bass and drums, swarmed through the room like a loosened hive of bees; the very walls throbbed with it, a teasing rhythm now bright as a school of minnows in sundappled shallows, now as glistening-dark as viscera, with a heavy blues beat and a witty, self-mocking counterpoint. I swam into it instinctively, my feet tapping with it, my face turning to it of its own volition. The pianist, a crew-cut young man with glasses who might have been, like Jack, an accountant, raised a cheerful hand to us, and Jack and Glenn Pickens saluted back. Lucy looked young and at ease and very happy; I knew that she was loving the night and the lounge and the sound and the evening. I began to relax, very slightly.

Lucy leaned over and touched my shoulder.

“Okay?” she said. “Do you like it?”

The trio slid into Ellington’s “Come Sunday,” and I smiled at Lucy. “It’s wonderful. They’re terrific. It’s a treat to hear them in person; I never have. Thanks for letting me come, Luce.”

She gave a little wiggle of pure happiness. “If Martin 462 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

Luther King should come in I think I’d ascend straight to Heaven,” she said.

Jack Venable smiled and tightened his arm around her shoulders and gave her a little squeeze. “I’m not going to let you leave me even for him,” he said.

“King might be here,” Glenn Pickens said. “He’s in here a lot. Some of his crowd are over there at that table by the bandstand; I see a couple of kids from my old neighborhood who are good lieutenants of his now. Want to meet them?”

He did not wait for Lucy’s assent, but raised his pale hand and beckoned toward a large table in the opposite corner of the room.

Two very young men materialized out of the gloom at Glenn’s elbow and stood looking down at us. One was round and short, almost fat, with skin lighter than Glenn’s, and startling ghost gray eyes. The other was slender and very handsome, and as dark as Gwen Caffrey. Both were a good bit younger than any of us; I did not think they could be much past their teens. But it’s a young man’s crusade, I reminded myself. Dr. King himself is only in his thirties.

They greeted Glenn cheerfully, and he clapped each on the back and introduced them. The short, pudgy one was Tony Sellers and the taller, blacker one Rosser Willingham; I vaguely recognized their names from news accounts of the student sit-ins last year, and the freedom rides earlier this summer. Both had demonstrated and marched with King, and both had gone quietly and matter-of-factly to Alabama jails with him. Both had been beaten, bitten, kicked, gassed, shot at. Rosser Willingham had, I knew, been hit. Self-consciousness thickened my tongue when Glenn introduced me, which was, I thought, just as well. Lucy smiled her incomparable smile and held up her hand to be shaken. As always, at Lucy’s smile, there were quick and genuine answering smiles.

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“It’s good to meet you, Lucy Bondurant Chastain,” Tony Sellers said. “I hear about you. How do you like Ramsey Lewis?”

“I think he’s fantastic,” Lucy said. “I like him better than Don Shirley, even, and Shep here will tell you that for me that’s going some.”

“Ramsey will be pleased to hear that,” Sellers said.

“We missed you in Washington this summer,” Willingham said to Glenn Pickens. “You’d have loved it. If I remember correctly, you always did love a crowd. You’d have been in your element.”

“I was busy this summer,” Glenn said. He was not smiling now. I thought I heard something very near defensiveness in his voice. “I figure we’re going to need a master’s degree or two somewhere in all this horsepower. There’ll be other marches. I’ll be there for those.”

He looked hard at Rosser Willingham, and then he smiled his minimal smile.

“Gwen almost got to go, though,” he said, touching her arm lightly. “Her station was going to send her up there, but at the last minute they decided she was too little, and sent a guy instead. She promised them she’d grow five inches if they’d let her play with the big kids, but nothing doing.”

“Station?” Tony Sellers said, looking across the table at Gwen.

“She’s just been made six o’clock anchor at Seven,” Glenn said. “And she has a talk show on WCAT three nights a week.”

“Terrific, we can use you,” said Rosser Willingham. He was not smiling.

“Not unless I can interest you in coming on the show with a new recipe for three-bean salad or a spray for rose blight, you can’t,” Gwen said.

“Roses. Whoo
eee!
” said Willingham.

“That’s right,” Gwen said. “Roses.”

464 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

Eyes held.

What’s going on here? I thought. She’s just told both of them to flake off, in so many words. And Glenn’s acting funny as hell toward them. Aren’t they all in the movement together? Why are they trying to one-up each other? I felt acutely uncomfortable. My earlier awe fled before the discomfort.

“I was with you in the sit-ins when I could get loose,” Jack Venable said suddenly, with such unaccustomed solemnity that I thought he must be speaking satirically, but the moist, messianic gleam behind the plain, serviceable glasses told me that he was not. “I wanted to go on the freedom rides, but my time wasn’t my own then. I have more, now. Is…are you…is there anything coming up that could use some willing bodies?” His soft body, leaning very slightly toward the two young black men, radiated a nearly bizarre middle-aged willingness.

My face burned for him. I was glad of the darkness. I had not dreamed that a romantic boy lived in that phlegmatic CPA’s flesh. Is that what had so called out to Lucy?

“There’s some good action coming up in Mississippi this fall, if you’re really interested,” Tony Sellers drawled. “Real knife-in-the-teeth guerrilla stuff. Might be just up your alley.”

I saw Jack’s face darken, and felt my sympathetic flush mount.

Lucy leaned forward.

“I loved your sit-in at Rich’s,” she said. “I was there. It was wonderful. God!”

The young men looked at her expressionlessly, politely.

“I’m glad you liked it, Miss Bondurant,” Willingham said.

“It was strictly an amateur job, of course, but we thought it had a certain energy and freshness.”

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I felt the heat spring out at my hairline in drops of perspir-ation. Glenn looked down into the depths of his drink, and Gwen Caffrey attended brightly and determinedly to the jazz trio, which was swinging into “The In Crowd,” pulling herself almost physically away from the rest of us. I could not look at anyone. They think we’re utter fools, I thought.

Lucy grinned.

“Don’t patronize me, sonny,” she said. “My maiden name is Feldstein. My grandma is a lampshade in some fat burgher’s house in Argentina as we speak. I know your act. I have style. Spurn me at your own loss.”

Rosser Willingham grinned back at her, suddenly. He raised two fingers in salute. The group slipped into ease once more.

“Those were some kind of days,” he said, laughing. “There must have been close to fifteen hundred folks on that picket line downtown at one time. It circled all downtown Atlanta.

God, there were shuttle buses to take people down there and back, and we had two-way radios and special signs that rain and spit and worse wouldn’t wash off, and we had special coats for the girls so they wouldn’t get spit on—and worse again. Man, we thought we were big stuff. Hot shit. And we were, we were.”

Glenn Pickens alone did not laugh with them.

“Is the Lord here?” he said.

“The Lord?” said Lucy.

“King. I heard he might be.”

Willingham and Sellers looked narrowly at him.

“He’s in the dining room,” Tony Sellers said.

“God,” Jack said reverently. “It really is headquarters, isn’t it?” He looked as if he might weep with the wonder of it.

“Yeah, well, at least we know we can get served here,”

Willingham said. “We can’t say that about every place, you know. It’s like John Lewis said about