Peachtree Road (64 page)

“And now,” she caroled, “the big surprise. The best part of my plan. Come on, Sheppie. It’s for you. And it’s upstairs.”

I got up and followed her out of the kitchen. The two grinding, interminable days on the road in the U-Haul and the meeting at the hospital and the sheer awfulness of my twisted and intubated father and the cold weight of Sarah in my heart washed over me like a great, freezing surf, and I stumbled silently along behind my mother up the beautiful free standing staircase simply because I was too tired to do anything else.

She paused at the door to her and my father’s bed 498 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

room, at the left end of the upstairs corridor, and looked back over her shoulder at me, and the smile she gave me was tight-stretched and glittering, like everything else about her on this strangest of nights.

“Are you ready?” she said. Her voice had a child’s lilt.

“I guess so,” I said numbly. I could not think of anything in the world I was less ready for on this night than a Christmas surprise. Sleep was what I wanted, sleep and sleep only.

“Voilà!” cried my mother, and flung open the door.

I had not been in this room a dozen times since I left the hateful little cubbyhole off it, where I had slept my captive voyeur’s sleep from infancy to the coming of Lucy. I frankly hated it, even though it was by far the best bedroom in the house. It seemed to me that the very walls had captured and held the force of my infant rage and fear and disgust. I avoided it even when expressly invited by my mother to enter, which had been seldom. My father had never bade me in. I stood behind my mother in the doorway, as reluctant to enter as if the room were a cobra farm.

It was an enormous room occupying most of the top left wing and running the depth of the house, with great floor-to-ceiling Palladian windows facing Peachtree Road and the back garden and the summerhouse. I remembered that when you looked out the back windows in summer, you could see the deep forests of Buckhead rolling away toward the river, with small, weblike tributaries of streets, and islands that were the rooftops of other great houses thrusting up out of the rolling green. It was like being on the bridge of a great ship, and was the one thing about the room that I had always loved. There was a vast, shining sea of polished oak floor, scattered with thin, glowing old Orientals in the soft pastel tints of Kirman and Bokhara, and in front of the rose marble fire

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place, set into another Palladian-arched niche in the ivory paneled walls, two pale rose brocade sofas faced each other across a pretty tea table.

My mother’s little French writing desk sat before the windows looking onto Peachtree Road, and two great mahogany armoires flanked the fireplace. On the wall across from it, floating in luminous ivory space, sat the bed she had shared all the years of her marriage with my father, a chaste, spare Hepplewhite tester with a starched lace canopy and a coverlet of faded, rose-strewn satin. The roses, I remembered her telling Aunt Willa when she first came to the house, had been embroidered by her maternal grandmother for her hope chest. The coverlet was always carefully folded back at night upon the blanket chest that sat at the foot of the bed; I knew that it concealed a dual-control electric blanket. My father might share in silence that white battlefield, but he would do it in comfort. Everything in the room had always been rich, elegant, serene, orderly, conventional. Like, in all respects, my mother.

Off the bedroom proper were, back to back, a glassed sleeping porch, also facing the garden, where my father sometimes read or napped on a sagging daybed, and the villainous little dressing room that had been my earliest Coventry. The doors giving onto them from the bedroom were shut now, and the big room was dim-lit. At first, my tired eyes could not accommodate the dimness.

“Well?” my mother chirped. “What do you think?”

Leaning around her, I nearly gasped aloud. I reached automatically for the doorjamb to steady myself. I was looking into the sanctum of a mad white hunter.

The entire room shimmered and swam, now, in a kind of demented pentimento. Underneath, the skin and bones, the wood and silks and velvets and plaster of the room as it had always been, shone in gracious harmony. But the overpaint-ing, the surface—it was as if Ernest

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Hemingway at his bloated, monomaniacal worst had battled to the death with Aubrey Beardsley, each determined to leave his imprint on the room. The bed, the chairs, the sofas and tables and chaise, even the floors and the tall windows were draped with samples of fabric, piled with pillows and paint samples and primitive bibelots, feverish with great, virulent, billowing and trailing green plants. The bed had been shrouded in a coarse, gauzy material resembling cheesecloth, and over its delicate coverlet lay a throw fashioned from the hide of some animal that had never set hoof to American soil. The old Orientals were covered with zebra hides, and in front of the fireplace a leopard-skin rug with the snarling head still attached had been laid down. Bedside and end tables had been pushed to the corners of the room, and great standing oblong drums replaced them. On the ivory walls, spears and javelins were crossed and grouped artfully, and over the twin sofas the heads of more great, snarling beasts howled their choler into the dimness. There was a stifling, jumbled impression of bamboo, vines and earth-toned batik.

In the corner by the sun porch door, a brilliant macaw sat on a perch in a tall standing cage.

When I still said nothing, my mother took my arm and drew me into the room and over to one of the sofas, where she more or less pushed me down, to sit on a stiff fur pillow.

Even as my head whirled and my eyes spun wildly around the room, my fingertips registered the fact that the fur was not real. I looked from my mother’s white, magenta-cheeked face, its crimson lips smiling, smiling, to the leopard’s head at my feet, and saw that it was not real, either. Neither, on closer examination, were the heads on the wall over the sofas.

I was grateful for that. I did not know about the fur throw and the plants and the macaw. The javelin and spears looked real enough to gut you if you put them to the test. In the PEACHTREE ROAD / 501

middle of all of it, my smiling, thrumming mother looked as crazily, plastically beautiful as a comic-strip drawing of Sheena, Queen of the Jungle.

“Say something,” she ordered me, standing hip shot in her blood-red velvet, a jungle priestess about to order me staked out for the soldier ants.

“Holy shit,” I breathed, entirely spontaneously. “Are you going to bring Dad home and put him in the middle of all this?”

“Don’t be silly,” she said impatiently, flinging herself down on the sofa opposite me and taking a cigarette from a painted clay bowl I had never seen before. I felt simple gratitude that it was not a skull. “This is for you.”

“Me?” It must have been an outright squeal, because she laughed and reached over and patted my knee, leaving her hand there.

“You. You’re the man of this house now, and you need a man’s room. Time to get you out of that silly summerhouse and up here, in the big house and the big bedroom, where you belong. The little man from Rich’s—Ronnie, and he
is
good, darling, even if he’s terribly light on the rug—says that the safari look is just everywhere nowadays, what with the good new fur synthetics and all the inexpensive brass and copper imports, and everything. He says practically every important house in the East has at least one safari room. All this is just for effect, of course; these are samples for you to pick from, and you can…tone it down a little, if you like. Or you can even go a totally different way. The nautical look is good, too, he thinks, because of Jack Kennedy, you know, but we thought this was best for the scale of the room, and I knew you’d always liked adventure stories, and animals, and that book about the jungle that Kipling wrote. I told him about that—he wanted to know what you were like, of course, and when he heard it, he said this would be just the thing. It’s not my cup of tea, of course, but I have 502 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

to admit it’s really very clever. Look, the drapery on the bed is supposed to simulate mosquito netting, and the drums are quite authentic, though I forget where he said they came from. I will say that the parrot may be a bit much….”

She ran down then, and cocked her head to one side, and peered into my face. Her smile, as she waited for my reaction, was the full, creamy half-moon of a woman very sure that she has done a good thing.

“Do you like your Christmas present, darling?” she said.

“Mother,” I said, and my voice cracked in my throat like an adolescent’s. “Where are you going to sleep?”

“Oh, sweetie, don’t worry about me,” she said merrily. “I’ll be in with Daddy a lot of the time. And I thought I’d just have a little nest made in the sleeping porch there, just a bed and a built-in closet and my dressing table. I don’t need much room. Ronnie says we can easily cut a separate entrance in from the hall, so I don’t have to go through your room to get to it. You can keep the little dressing room for your things. Isn’t it all fun, Sheppie?”

I looked at her, there in her red and her power, in this terrible room where the frustrated little decorator from Rich’s had exorcised all his angry, skewed eroticism. Who was she?

Medea, Gertrude, Jocasta? I did not know her. Whoever she was, she would, if I moved into this room, truly have it all: money, power, the fallen husband down the hall, the son in her bedroom again. I felt physical nausea, and swallowed hard against it. I rose from the couch on rubbery legs and walked toward the door. Behind me I heard the swish of her legs in their sheer nylon as she jumped up from the other sofa, and the soft pattering of her heels as she followed me.

“Sheppie,” she said. “Sheppie…”

I turned. She was standing by the bed.

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“I don’t care who you put in this room,” I said. “You can put H. Rider Haggard and Frank Buck and Mr. Ronnie from Rich’s in here all at once, if you want to. I wouldn’t sleep one night in it if it was the last room in the continental United States. Not like this, and not in a goddamned nautical decor, for Christ’s sake, and not—I repeat
not
—with you in the little room right under my elbow. Not any way at all.

Mother, I’m not going to stay in Atlanta, get used to that idea now; I only came home to see about Dad and get things squared away for you—”

“NOO-O-O-O-O!” It was a long, terrible wail; I thought of wakes and deaths and banshees. She sagged down onto the bed, and sat there, half-sunk in fur, her hands clenched in her lap, her little feet in gold shoes neatly together, her mouth squared off in a child’s rictus of grief and outrage.

“You can’t leave me!” she howled. Tears spurted from her closed eyes and tracked mascara down her white face. “You can’t leave me now! Not after him, not after that—I won’t have anything, if you leave me! I won’t have anything, then….”

I looked at her in silence. On the huge bed she looked very small, no larger than a child, a prim, good and very simple child, bewildered and foundering in a grief she could not comprehend. And I knew that at this moment she was not Jocasta, but only little Olivia Redwine from Griffin, Georgia, invalidated in her soul, like her foremothers and sisters and heirs, without a man. Even with everything around her—the money, the position in the city, the great house and its furnishings, the clothes and cars and clubs and charities and balls and luncheons—even with all this, she was nothing without a man of her own, be he husband or son, paralyzed, emasculated, dead. Everything in her life told her this. She believed it in her shrinking soul. And I knew she was right.

I thought of Lucy, and of Little Lady, sold into mar 504 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

riage with Carter Rawson, and of my flayed and driven Aunt Willa, and of the fingernails of Sarah Cameron, innocent now of paint. I suddenly hated the South, hated it fully and redly, this beautiful land of woman-killers, this country of soul-breakers. I would not stay here. I would not.

But I would not press that matter until after Christmas. I could not do that to the sobbing child-woman in the terrible fur bed. Let her think that I would stay; if need be, I would sneak away in a near-distant cold red dawn, as I had thought I might. I had, by now, no compunctions at all about that, or about lying to my mother.

I went to her and sat down beside her, and put my arms around her.

“Hush,” I said, “Hush, now. I didn’t mean it. If you really need me, of course I’ll stay. I just…it’s just that I can’t stay here in this room. This is your room. This is Dad’s room.

The summerhouse is my place; I love it out there. I always have. If you want me to stay, you’re going to have to let me have my way about that.”

She gave in without a whimper. I think that the threatened loss of me wiped out any disappointment she might have felt at my reception of Mr. Ronnie’s handiwork. The ghastly bedroom was not mentioned again; I do not know when, in the span of days that followed, Mr. Ronnie of Rich’s and his minions came and took away the unwanted artifacts of the heart of darkness. I held my mother until she stopped her sobbing and nodded in my arms, and I pressed her back gently on the fur pillows and drew Mr. Ronnie’s impossible fur throw up over her, and turned off the lamps, and escaped through the icy-breathed night to the summerhouse. The day seemed, by now, forty-eight hours old.

I was just slipping into sleep myself when I turned over and saw, on the bedside table, a copy of Lucy’s book.

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I had one in New York, but I had not read it; had meant to start it in the new year at Haddonfield. She had not pressed me for comment. Indeed, oddly, she had scarcely mentioned her novel the entire time I had been home for its publication, and had not talked of it since, either in her letters or her phone calls to me. These latter had been full of Jack and the movement and the day-to-day routine at Damascus House, of her adventures in the bus and the government agencies and the soup kitchen and, less frequently, at La Carrousel; but of this book and any others she might one day write, Lucy said nothing. I wondered who had put it here, beside the bed. Not, I was sure, my mother. I reached out and picked up the little volume. It was the story of a small white girl raised by a black family in New Orleans during the Depression, I knew, and its title was
Darkness and Old Trees
.