Peachtree Road (61 page)

Four days before Christmas, just as the first snowstorm of the season came howling in from New Jersey unfurling its battle banners of blowing snow, my telephone rang at 6:30

P.M., burring over the television newscast to which I had fallen asleep on my sofa. When I picked it up, it was to hear the voice of Lucy Bondurant Venable, which I had not thought to hear then or perhaps at any other time, thick with her familiar long-distanced tears, telling me that my father had had

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a massive stroke on the golf course at Brookhaven that afternoon and was completely paralyzed and not expected to live the night, and that my mother was prostrated and in seclusion, and could not be comforted until I promised to come home.

And so, I left New York at dawn the next day in a rented U-Haul and drove, instead of to Vermont, back to Atlanta and the house on Peachtree Road. I planned to bury my father, comfort my mother, stash my meager belongings and fly to Vermont as soon as I decently could. With luck I could still make the first day of classes.

If anyone had told me, when I saw the Atlanta city limits sign rise up out of a fast-failing December twilight on the highway in from Gainesville, that I would never leave it again, I would have laughed in his face.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

M
y father did not die, though. All through the cold, gray day and night that followed, I parked the U-Haul at truck stops and drive-ins and called home, and the message, relayed by my aunt Willa, was the same: “There’s been no change. He’s still in intensive care and is unconscious most of the time, and when he’s awake we can’t tell if he knows anybody. There’s been a little movement in one hand and in one side of his face, and maybe just the tiniest bit in one of his toes. But basically there isn’t any change. It’s a miracle he’s still alive. Hub Dorsey doesn’t think he can last another day.”

But he did last, through the gray miles that I hacked out of New Jersey and Pennsylvania and Virginia in the bumping, unwieldy truck, my few belongings rattling and shifting behind me with the vagaries of the monotonous four-lane federal highways. That first day I made North Carolina by full dark, and pulled up to a dingy little cinder-block motel outside Kannapolis when fatigue and a spitting sleetfall made driving any further impossible. I picked up a hamburger and french fries and a carton of coffee at the dirty, white-lit little motel diner and stumbled back to my room with them, and wolfed them down cold while Aunt Willa’s low “Atlanta”

voice told me what it had all day: “No change. No, there’s been no change.” I turned on the flickering old Philco television set across from my bed and stared stupidly at
Peter Gunn
until it melted and slid into blackness behind my stinging eyes, and when I opened them again, it was midmorning and a dispirited maid was rattling my door and an amazonian North Carolina lady was showing an ecstatic, adenoidal morning show host how to make corn bread dressing for turkey. I pulled on last night’s weary clothing and trotted 476 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

to the diner, and drank coffee as I received Aunt Willa’s morning message, “No change.”

Because of my late start, it was nearly dark when I followed Highway 23 into North Atlanta, through ugly, meager Doraville and Chamblee; past Oglethorpe University, where Lucy had once been apprehended necking with Boo Cutler by the almost forgotten Mr. Bovis Hardin; past Brookhaven Drive, where, out of sight to my right, the Atlanta Pinks and Jells had danced away so many nights at the Brookhaven Country Club, and where, two days earlier, my father had dropped, stricken, to the frozen earth; past the beginning of the big old houses that would line Peachtree Road, now, until they reached the bridge over Peachtree Creek at Peachtree Battle Avenue. On my left, where for many years Mr. John Ottley’s great farm, Joyeuse, had lain along a sweet-curved, deep-wooded sweep of Peachtree Road, a low white jumble of buildings in a sea of automobiles gleamed eerily in the icy mist, and I scrubbed at my reddened eyes with my fist, for a moment utterly lost, until I remembered that a shopping mall called Lenox Square had been built there a year or so before, a worldly Xanadu said to be, at present, the largest such mall in the country.

I could believe it. There seemed to be thousands upon thousands of cars bellied up to the mall like voraciously suckling piglets at the teats of a gleaming, corpulent white sow. White lights danced and twinkled on spindly evergreens fringing the parking lots. Of course: Christmas shopping. I felt, for a moment, such a nostalgia for the old, warm-lit, Evening in Paris—smelling confines of Wender & Roberts on Christmas Eve that my heart flopped in my chest, and then Lenox Square vanished and I was into and through Buckhead, bright-lit and traffic-choked now, and coming into the last great curve of Peachtree Road before I reached 2500.

PEACHTREE ROAD / 477

And then even it was past, dark-bulked and beautiful behind its iron fence, only one light burning upstairs in my parents’ room, no automobiles waiting on the graceful half-moon front drive. I drove on down Peachtree Road past Peachtree Battle shopping center and up the long hill to Piedmont Hospital where my aunt Willa had said she would be waiting. When I had last talked to her, at noon, she said my mother had wakened from the deep, drugged sleep Dr.

Dorsey’s needle had given her, and was bathing and dressing to receive visitors. Hub Dorsey had forbidden the hospital to her until tomorrow—if indeed, there was one for my father. Dorothy Cameron had been with Mother most of the time since she heard the news about my father, and was coming back after lunch to see to the flow of traffic in the house. Shem, Aunt Willa said, would drive me down to Piedmont if I wanted to stop by the house first, but I said I would come straight there. I wanted to see for myself how the land lay before I encountered my mother. I wanted to be informed, crisp, authoritative and very, very clear about what must be done and who would do it; I wanted to have a long-range plan of action formulated and ready for presentation. The plan did not include any possibility of my staying at home. My mother must see that from the very beginning.

When I got off the elevator in the scaldingly bright intensive care waiting room at the hospital it seemed for a moment that my entire life lay in ambush for me. The knot of people who sat about on plastic chairs and sofas or stood looking out at the lights of the traffic streaming past on Peachtree Road were all there for my father; old Buckhead had, like great elephants, come to encircle one of their own fallen tribe. Dorothy Cameron sat, small, erect and calm-faced, on a sofa beside Lucy, patting her clenched hands. Jack Venable stood at the windows,

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back to the room, hands in pockets, looking out into the night. Ben Cameron, almost totally iron-gray now, and looking tired and grim, sat on another sofa beside Aunt Willa, who was pale and still and perfectly turned out in severe black jersey, smoking a filter-tipped cigarette. On a molded plastic chair a little apart from the others Sarah Gentry sat, as straight-spined and composed as her mother in the pink and white stripes of a Piedmont volunteer, her dark, curly head slightly bowed, her small hands clasped in her lap. I saw the modest fire of Charlie’s diamond on her finger. At the sound of the elevator bell she lifted her head and looked straight into my eyes and I saw the smudges of fatigue under her own, and the spark of recognition and then the old joy that leaped in them. Her wide mouth, bare of lipstick, slid into its warm, bone-remembered smile.

“Shep,” she said soundlessly, her lips forming my name.

In the merciless light of the waiting room, my own fatigue dragging at my limbs, I felt the renewing joy of the sight of her run into my arms and legs, followed by a near-physical blow to my heart.

Lucy saw Sarah’s smile and turned her head and saw me, and jumped up and ran to me, her face stained with recent tears, her eyes red and swollen. She looked blue-white and terribly thin, and nearly shabby in a wrinkled plaid skirt and sweater I thought I recognized from our North Fulton days, and her glossy hair was tied back in an untidy ponytail. Even in her obvious anxiety and dishevelment she looked beautiful, but suddenly, years older. The hands she thrust into mine were icy cold and chapped nearly raw.

“I thought you’d never get here,” she said, and the tears welled into her eyes afresh, and I hugged her distractedly.

“What’s the news?” I said.

“Still no change,” she said, her voice strangled.

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“He’s on a lung machine, Gibby, and Dr. Dorsey still says he doesn’t see how he can live…oh, he just looks so awful!

White and all twisted and shrunken, and hooked up to about a million tubes…I can’t stand to see him like that!”

I wondered, holding her loosely and getting my bearings, why she was so upset. My father had never been close to Lucy; even she must have acknowledged that years ago. I remembered the morning in childhood after she had run away with Little Lady, after Jamie had died, and been so terribly punished, her coming in her thin nightgown and climbing into his lap and making her little speech about being sorry, and being a good girl if only he would not send her away, and his arms going reluctantly around her, and his voice promising that he would look after her always. Puddin’, he had called her; I remembered it vividly. And afterward, she had said to me, “I have to make sure he takes care of me until you’re old enough to do it.”

But he had not, and I never had been.

That was the key, of course; my father represented to Lucy the only security and Safety she had had in all her childhood, and his stroke must have called up that old black terror, the stuff of her nightmares. But she was grown and married now, and had moreover married, almost literally, a father. I looked across at Jack Venable, still staring out into the December night. His rigid shoulders and back told me that he wanted no part of this insular, privileged group, and was here only for sufferance of Lucy. I wondered if the harbor Lucy had thought to enter with her marriage had been, after all, closed to her.

I started over to speak to Aunt Willa and Dorothy and Ben and Sarah; and then Hubbard Dorsey, my family’s physician since old Dr. Ballentine had died and my father’s occasional golfing partner, came out of the 480 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

swinging doors from the intensive care unit. He, too, looked tired and rumpled in his white coat, a stethoscope swinging around his neck, but when he saw me he smiled and came toward me, and I knew, somehow, from the set of his shoulders and the quickness of his step that my father had turned some sort of corner and was not going to die.

He put his arm around my shoulder and drew me to the group in the sitting area, and said, “Well, I don’t think we’re going to lose him for a while after all. His vitals are much more stable all of a sudden, and he’s breathing on his own, and his EKG is nearly normal again. He’s still profoundly paralyzed; I don’t think that’s going to change, though I can’t say for sure at this point. He could fool us; he sure has me, tonight. But unless he has another massive stroke—and that’s always possible, of course, especially now—I think he’s going to make it. This time.”

Lucy began to cry in earnest, and I handed her over to Jack, who put his arm around her and drew her over to the window with him, away from the group. Dorothy and Ben Cameron smiled and stood and stretched, and Dorothy kissed me and Ben gave me a small, stiff, wordless hug, and my aunt Willa rose and came over to me and kissed my cheek as if we did that sort of thing routinely, and said, in the candied voice that had long since replaced her wire-grass cat’s squall, “Hello, Shep dear. What good news, isn’t it?

You brought him luck. I’ll go call Olivia right now, and then you must go on home and see her. She’s wanted nobody but you since this happened.”

“I’ll go home in a little while, Aunt Willa,” I said. “I want to see Dad first, if I can.” I looked questioningly at Hub Dorsey, and he nodded.

“For a minute. I’ll go back in with you.”

I walked over to Sarah then, and stood before her PEACHTREE ROAD / 481

with absolutely no idea what I was going to say. I had not seen her since her marriage, indeed, not since that terrible night at the beginning of the summer, at the Plaza, and no words formed in my brain or on my lips. I simply looked at her. It seemed to me that she was much thinner than when I had last seen her; a thinness that seemed more an atrophy of her fine, taut swimmer’s muscles than any loss of flesh.

Her faint year-round tan had faded to a sallowness I had never seen before, and the circles under her amber eyes were a deep saffron. Her thick, dark brows were untidy. I wondered if she had been ill. She put her hand up, tentatively, and touched my cheek, and I noticed, over the trip hammering of my heart, that it was as cold as Lucy’s, and that for the first time since I had known her, there were no faint half-moons of paint under her nails. I covered her hand with my own and said, “Hello, Sarah. It was good of you to come.”

“Oh, Shep,” she said, and the rich voice was the same, warming my heart even as it smote it, “of course I came.

How could I not? This is my day for the mail cart, and I stayed on till you came. I wanted to see you before I went home.”

“I’m glad you did,” I said. “Is Charlie around?”

She laughed, and the laugh was the same, too, simply Sarah’s and no other.

“No, he’s at the office again for the third time this week.

Mr. Woodruff has a new project going, and everybody’s hopping to over there. He says to give you his love and he’ll see you tomorrow, and he especially says to get you over to the house for dinner as soon as you can come.”

“Where do you live?” I said. It seemed an insane thing to ask, but I realized that I did not know.

“We have a little house on Greystone, about a block down from Ben and Julia,” she said. “I think Ben hates having his little sister right under his nose, but he can’t 482 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

say so. They’re having a baby just any minute now—did anybody tell you? Everybody you know lives in Collier Hills, Shep, or nearby. Snake and Lelia are one street over on Meredith, and Pres and Sarton are looking at a house on Walthall, and Tom and Freddie are in Colonial Homes, just a minute away. When Christmas is over and things have calmed down for you a little, I want to get us all together at a little party for you….”