Peachtree Road (6 page)

Of all the people assembled in the hall, she was the first to speak.

“Something stinks,” she said in a voice that was slow and rich, like music, like dark honey.

“Lucy!” my aunt Willa said, scandalized. She had a flat, nasal drawl. My parents looked at each other, and then at the girl.

“Sure does,” I said back, joy caroling inexplicably in my veins. “It’s Martha in the kitchen. She’s cooking lamb for our dinner. Ugh!”

“Smells like she’s cooking dog,” Lucy Bondurant said, and laughed, a dark silk banner of a laugh, and I laughed, and even when the adults had made us both apologize, and sent us upstairs to the screened porch to “calm down until you can act like a lady and a gentleman,” we continued to laugh.

It was the first real laughter I could remember in the house on Peachtree Road. It was the first, last and longest thing I had and kept of Lucy: her laugh.

When we had stopped laughing, she said, “Are you all the children there are?”

“Yes,” I said, somehow ashamed of it.

“I guess she must not have liked it when your daddy got on her then,” Lucy said matter-of-factly.

“What do you mean?” My skin actually prickled with the portent of something coming.

“Well, my mama used to laugh and holler when 38 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

Daddy got on her, and there’s three of us. There’s just one of you, so I guess your mama didn’t like it and quit doing it, or there’d be more of you.”

“She didn’t quit,” I said. It was suddenly very important to tell Lucy about the nights in the little dressing room when my mother wept. Shame fled and indignation flooded in.

“He gets on her all the time, but she doesn’t laugh. She cries.

She cries almost every night. I know because I sleep right in their room.”

She looked at me in blue puzzlement.

“What for?” she said. “Why don’t you have a room of your own, as rich as y’all are?”

“Rich?” I said, stupidly.

“Sure. Why do you think we came all the way down here?

Now we’re gon’ be rich, too.”

It was too much, too much of suddenness and strangeness and revelation, too much of promise. My stomach heaved and flopped, and I ran for the bathroom and was sick, and Martha put me straight to bed, so that whatever else transpired that evening, I missed it, and I was still queasy and spinning when my mother came up to telephone her friends and tell them about the invasion of the infidels. It was a long time, late, before I slept.

But I did sleep, finally; slept that night in a different country, one where we were rich and therefore different from other people, and in which women laughed and shouted aloud their pleasure during the act of love.

A country where, now, Lucy was, and therefore all things might be possible.

I slept in a safe child’s sudden and simple, lightless peace, and when I awoke in the morning it was to joy.

I have said that I do not go out anymore, but that is not precisely true. I do go out, almost every night. After the last of the light has gone and the streetlights come on, no matter what time and what season it happens to be, I put PEACHTREE ROAD / 39

on my Nikes and I slip out of the summerhouse into the welcoming darkness and I run through Buckhead. I run for miles, some evenings as many as fifteen or twenty, some evenings just four or five. I am never sure when I set out which of my many routes I will take; my feet seem to make that decision for me when they touch the pavement of the sidewalk along Peachtree Road. But I always cover the same territory. It is the country of that long-ago Buckhead in which, as the Book of Common Prayer says, I lived, moved and had my being. Oh, yes, I run, and I suppose many people must see me, a tall, slight man whose thinning hair in the streetlights might be blond or might be silver; not young, but with the long-loping resilience of the runner. It doesn’t bother me that I am visible to them; it is not from their seeing of me that I hide during the daylight, but from the seeing of them.

I run; I run through a landscape that existed forty-odd years ago. I run for my life.

Pounding silently and steadily through a swelling spring night, or a star-chipped black winter one, I can tick the street and proper names off like rosary beads in the hands of a devout old Catholic, without thinking, without questioning the sense or import of them. The names are my catechism.

Whatever is raw and ragged and new and intrusive I don’t see; I am running, as I said, for my life, but it is the life that I had then.

Right and down Muscogee, past the Camerons’ house, Merrivale House, they called it, after Dorothy’s family seat in Dorsetshire: 17 Muscogee Avenue. It was built in 1921

by Neel Reid, a classical architect in whom Atlanta has always set great store, whose years abroad studded Northwest Atlanta’s wooded hills and ridges with Renaissance, American Georgian, Federal, Greek Revival, Baroque and Italianate estates of uncommon style and substance. These suburban villas, as they were termed, were designed to be summer homes in some

40 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

cases, and highly visible showcases for their owners’ soaring positions in others. At the time most were built, in the late teens and twenties and on into the thirties, entertaining and gardening were two of Old Atlanta’s overweening passions, and formal reception and dining rooms and extensive, formally landscaped grounds were
de rigueur
. Most of the houses had, and many still have, vast acreages of gardens, all flowing together, mile after mile, so that whole streets seem in the spring to be one great lapping surge of color.

It is at the great amplitude of space, and the random, puckish cant of the wooded hills, and the sheer scope of the surf of azaleas and dogwood and flowering trees that make the spring here a neck-prickling and breath-stopping time.

Traffic along the narrow old streets in April is near critical mass, and many a grand dowager curses now the splendor she and her yardman labored so mightily to achieve when both were young. I remember vividly the gardeners and yardmen of all these old estates. Most of the children in my crowd took their first steps tottering after the impassive black yardmen and their wonderful arrays of tools and treasures.

I do not, on these night runs, see the fleets of minivans and the Davey Tree trucks that keep the gardens up now. If they are kept up at all. Many of the old houses are falling to the glittering, trashy condominium developments that are littering Buckhead. Others are going like hotcakes to the Arabs and the tackpots, who are the only ones who can afford to keep them up. They are occupied now, many of them, by elderly widows, and the cost of heating and cooling and maintaining them is just too prohibitive, the money being offered just too much. In 1907, when the first trolley line from downtown to Buckhead was laid down, you could buy land on West Paces Ferry Road for ninety dollars an acre.

Now it’s going, some of it, for nearly two million. Old Dorothy

PEACHTREE ROAD / 41

Cameron, in the last years before she moved from the Muscogee Avenue house, paid ten thousand annually for taxes alone, and by that time she and Ben were far from wealthy.

It was hear and breeding they had in the end, not money.

Ironic, that it was money that built Buckhead, and it is money that is killing it.

But I do not see the Sotheby and Harry Norman and Buckhead Brokers signs, the dark windows, the encroaching weeds where once lawns the color and texture of good bil-liard tables rolled away. I see, instead, Sarah and Ben and me, in the back garden of 17 Muscogee, running through the dazzling shower from the hose held by Leroy Pickens, the Camerons’ driver, as he washes the identical black Lincoln limousines that Ben Cameron kept. The fine spray rainbows off fenders and tall, mullioned windows and our sleek, tanned hides, tasting warm and metallic and somehow like the red clay of North Georgia, and butterflies dance in the little picking garden, and a hummingbird strafes the roses beyond, just coming into bloom in the formal garden where the gazebo sits, and a fat black crow struts along the high stone wall that snakes around the front courtyard and the boxwood parterre by the sun porch.

“This is the way my daddy takes a bath,” Ben says, leaping high into the shattered rainbow of the water and contorting himself extraordinarily, so that, for a moment, pinned at the apex of the leap against the melting blue of June, he looks fantastically like some slender, small Cossack dancer, or a creature entirely formed of air and dazzle, like Ariel.

“No, like this,” small Sarah chimes, and throws herself high against the blue, curved into a beautiful, brown, unconscious arc like an otter entering water. In that moment Sarah foreshadows the lithe and lovely water creature she will become.

42 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

I collapse in laughter in the spray, because the thought of anyone’s parents taking baths at all, even Dorothy and Ben Cameron, Senior, whom I adore, is beyond conception.

“How does your daddy take a bath, Shep?” Ben Cameron says. “I bet he wallows and snorts like a warthog!”

And he mimes that action expertly, so that we see as clearly as if we stood before it the grunting, furious beast, and the stinking, slimy mud, and the vast African plain stretching away. Ben is not being cruel; the analogy of my tight, massive, red father in the mudhole is uncannily apt. And in fact, Ben and Sarah have actually seen a warthog in a mudhole, on a trip to Africa with their parents the preceding spring.

But the laughter drains out of me. I think about it, and then I say, “I don’t think he takes baths.” For the thought of my father wet and naked is light-years beyond my mightiest imagining. I shrink even from the attempt.

“Then he sure must stink,” Ben crows, and collapses in helpless glee.

Sarah stops her capering and glares at him, her great brown eyes thunderous.

“Shep’s right,” she says. “You can just stop laughing, Ben Cameron, because I happen to know that Mama and Daddy don’t really take baths, either.” She turns her eyes to me, and I feel the healing and benediction that flow from them.

“We were just making it up, Shep,” she says. “My mama and daddy never, never, never,
never
take baths,
ever
.”

It is an enormous, towering, glorious lie. We laugh, and Leroy Pickens laughs, and water chuckles, and their Scottie, Yappie, does just that, and I run on past this now-dark house that I have always thought, of all the estates in Buckhead, the most romantic.

PEACHTREE ROAD / 43

Left on Rivers Road, past the Slatons’ white wooden Federal. I see Alfreda, small and darting and avian in many crinolines, getting into Tom Goodwin’s 1935 Chevy, which is bereft of fenders and top and muffler, to go to a Phi Chi dance. Tiny Freddie, as pretty as she will ever be, her hand on Tom’s arm tight with promissory possessiveness.

I am with Lucy in the backseat of the Chevy—for it is in the days before the advent of Red Chastain—and Freddie’s sharp little eyes take in the small forest of orchids on Lucy’s dress and wrist and in her hair. They are not mine; they have been sent by the dates she will have for the dance and the breakfast after that, and by her general admirers. It is a barbaric custom, but an immutable one. Freddie wears only Tom’s small purple bloom. His father is not in the same financial league as most of ours, and groves of opulent white orchids are forever beyond Tom. Freddie’s face goes tight and hard.

“Goodness, Lucy, you look like a fruit salad,” she says sweetly, the acid of have-not thin and virulent in her voice.

Poor Freddie, she is forever being propelled by her great, formless wanting into competitions where she is outclassed and outmatched.

“I guess I do,” Lucy says in her lazy, smoky drawl. “And you, sweetie, look like an empty salad plate.”

It is a clear victory. Freddie is silent in her pain and rage for the rest of the drive to Brookhaven Country Club. The back of Tom’s neck is dull red, and I glare sternly at Lucy. I am in my Saint Shep the Defender mode, and feminine pain, even Freddie’s, is anathema to me. She glares back and then grins.

“Tough titty,” she whispers. And reluctantly, I grin back.

I run right onto Peachtree Battle Avenue, divided by its wooded park. It is, I think, spring: April, with the new leaves
point d’esprit
—tender and lacy—and the white 44 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

stars of the dogwood incandescent in the streetlight. Streetlights through new green…they hang over my childhood and pack my heart tight, the small, perfect icons of the urban child. On down past Woodward Way, and up Dellwood to the right, past the huge, Adamesque pile where Carter Rawson’s family lived. He and Little Lady still live there; the house is awash with light now as it must have been then, though I did not, in those years, know Carter. Indeed, I never went into the house at all until the engagement party that Carter’s parents gave for him and Little Lady, and so what I see now is the long, exquisitely proportioned formal boxwood garden behind the house, leading down a central allée to the domed Ionic gazebo, where Little Lady stands beside Carter framed in Cape jessamine and columns, glowing like a Dresden shepherdess.

“Hello, Mrs. Draper,” Little Lady says sweetly to a formidable, tanklike matron, fluttering her famous feathery, gold-tipped lashes. “Hello, Mrs. Dorsey. You’re mighty sweet to come share this happy day with Carter and me. We hope you’ll be our very first visitors when we get back from Sea Island. We just
love
the beautiful toast rack; I know it’s a family piece, isn’t it?”

And two old ladies, finally, smile, and Little Lady is launched like a rocket into the ionosphere of Atlanta society.

“Shit,” says Lucy, who is behind me on Red Chastain’s arm, under her breath. “What’s wrong with this picture? I know. There’s no background music. Ought to have an orchestra squatting behind the bushes over there. Playing

‘Fascination.”’

Right on West Wesley and left on Habersham, and long lòpe up to Tom Goodwin’s much smaller house on the right, a neat brick and frame that was built not by Neel Reid or Philip Shutze or anyone else likely to be known in Atlanta, but by a contractor whose firm was a