Peachtree Road (67 page)

“Don’t be an ass, Shep,” he said. “It was after hours, and they met in a back room. As I said, Ben isn’t stupid, and neither are the Negroes. Manhattans and London broil would blow the whole thing out of the water. We’ll work it out because we have to work it out. Because Mr. Woodruff and a few other men like him want very much to work it out.

Atlanta has two things going for it that most Southern cities don’t: an established black community with a gracious lot of money behind it, and a politically savvy and wealthy white power structure who are committed to making the race thing work. You watch Ben in the next few years. Hell, you’ll see results sooner than that; Forward Atlanta has already begun, and the six-point program goes into effect about the time he takes office. I’m prouder than hell to be part of it, no matter how small and how far behind the scenes I am. Or will be.”

“And I’m prouder than hell of you,” I said, and meant it.

“You’re a good man, Charlie. You deserve everything that’s happening to you. Don’t ever sell yourself short.”

The ormolu clock out in the hall rotunda chimed 522 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

eight, and he got up to leave. I got his coat off the chair where he’d dropped it, and helped him into it, and walked him to the door.

“Young Ben was here this afternoon,” I said. “I’m not at all easy about him. Something seems to be eating at him.

Have you noticed?”

He looked at me, perplexed. “No,” he said. “I thought things were coming up roses for him. The jobs and recognition, and the new baby and all…what could be wrong? You sound like Sarah.”

“What does Sarah think?” I said. I had to consciously form the sound of her name on my mouth, to consciously push it out into the air toward this small, staunch man who was now her husband.

“Just that something is wrong. She can’t put her finger on it, and she has to admit that she has no real reason for thinking so. But she’s mentioned it several times. I know it worries her.”

“It worries me, too,” I said.

“It’s probably just the baby coming,” he said. “It’s a…an extraordinary time. Shep…” and he paused.

“Yeah?” I said.

He turned his face up to mine, and it was absolutely luminous. “I wanted you to know before anybody except Ben and Dorothy. It’s really why I came by. Sarah wanted me to tell you. She’s…we’re going to have a baby. She’s almost three months pregnant. It’s due in June.”

I felt stillness come down over me like a cast net. I thought of Sarah’s thinness, and the circles under her amber eyes, and of her words at the hospital: “I look like twelve miles of bad road…. But it’s temporary.”

“Congratulations, Papa,” I said, and the tears that swam in my eyes, obscuring him for a moment, were for his joy as much as for the great, vast, windy emptiness that was the middle of me.

“Thank you,” he said. “I don’t guess I have to tell PEACHTREE ROAD / 523

you that next to Sarah herself, this makes me the happiest man on the face of the earth.”

“No,” I said. “You don’t have to tell me that.”

When the great white door shut behind him, there was a twin to it, an echo, inside me, somewhere in the vicinity of my arid heart.

Somehow we got through that travesty of a Christmas Day, my mother and I. It seemed that half of Buckhead asked us to share their family dinners, but my mother demurred, reluctant, perhaps, to surrender the picturesque pathos of the brave, beautiful wife alone beside her husband’s hospital bed on Christmas, and I was grateful. I don’t think I could have sat making conversation in some gracious dining room or beside an ancestral fire, awash in privileged celebration, while every fiber of my being shrieked to be away and gone.

My mother suggested that we go to the Driving Club for midday dinner, but I vetoed that quickly. It was too much my father’s place, too fraught with the flotsam and jetsam of my childhood. I did not want to suffer the courtly sympathies of dignified old black Frost, at the door, or of Chilton, in the bar, or of any of the stewards and waitresses, most of whom had known me by name and temperament since I could toddle. I wanted, from now on out, as few tendrils reaching out from that vanished Atlanta as possible. I wanted to leave here light and free, without the burning red marks of their suckers on my flesh.

So we went to Hart’s on Peachtree Road, that lovely old stone bastion of mediocre food and quintessential Buckhead-ness, one of the few approved places besides two or three clubs where Old Atlanta dined with regularity. When I was small it had been a private home, and its new owners had wisely left the beautiful, high-ceilinged rooms and the great, arching oaks outside nearly intact, so that you felt, sitting there, that you had entered still

524 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

another dining room like those you had visited all your life in Buckhead. I think perhaps that accounted for its popularity with my parents’ set. “Oh, we’re not really going out,” they would say to one another. “We’re just running up to Hart’s.”

And indeed, the elderly Negro staff knew most of them by name, and would ask after their health and their children, and so the sense of being among their own prevailed there.

I think that perhaps the most virulently regarded consequence of the civil rights movement, among old Buckhead, was when its proprietors closed Hart’s rather than allow Negroes to dine there.

My father continued his clawing, imperceptible ascent out of the stroke’s mortal grip, though the paralysis did not improve, and except for his foot, which gained mobility every day, he lay rigid and ruined, turning his furious face back and forth from my mother and me to the window, making no sound. But each day another tube or so was removed, and by the end of that week he was able to swallow some of the viscous mess a nurse spooned into his blasted mouth, though most of it dribbled down his chin. Hub Dorsey thought that once the catheter could be removed, and he was able to swallow medication easily, we might begin to think of taking him out of the hospital. He simply shook his head despairingly when I told him of my mother’s plan to bring my father home and install him upstairs, and said he would talk to her himself. I don’t know whether he did or not. If he did, it was in vain. Mr.Ronnie of Rich’s, wall-eyed with silent reproach at me and trailed by a flying wedge of minions, came with wallpaper and fabric and paints and pillows, and the suite of rooms in the right wing that had been the province of Aunt Willa and Little Lady and, so briefly, little Jamie Bondurant began to be fitted out for an invalid Eastern emperor. I lay low in the summerhouse or the downstairs sun porch, out of

PEACHTREE ROAD / 525

the way of his bustling malevolence and the paisleys and velvets and silks and gilt that streamed up the staircase like the spoils of Cathay. I did not like Mr. Ronnie’s idea of an imperial sickroom any better than I had his safari bedroom.

It might have succored a dying Philip of Macedon, but I thought it was likely to hasten my father, whose idea of decorative frivolity was the murkier clan tartans of the Scot-tish Highlands, right off across the Styx.

My aunt Willa, faced with the loss of both her long-occupied bower and the summerhouse, had no recourse but to accept my mother’s lilting proposal that she make “a darling, private little apartment of your very own” up on the third floor, in the little warren of rooms that had been mine and Lucy’s in early childhood. She was momentarily bested, and knew it, but to her credit, she put a good face on it, and immediately set out to charm the fickle Mr. Ronnie until he was spending most of his time up there with her, happily spreading out his samples and stapling fabric and poufing pillows. My mother seethed at his defection, but said nothing.

She knew as well as Willa, as well as Lucy and I before her, that the attic was Coventry, even done up to resemble a seraglio. So it was an impasse. With both women in the house thrumming with subterranean anger and masking it with sweet smiles and drawled pleasantries, I took to burrowing into my father’s hallowed library, where the huge oak doors shut out sight and sound, and beginning to thumb, tentatively, through the files and papers that were the visible hieroglyphics of his business affairs. They made absolutely no sense to me. I had fared far better with my Babylonian antiquities.

I visited a few of the Buckhead Boys and their wives that week, largely because it would have looked odd if I had not, though I did not go to see Charlie and Sarah. And I spent one evening with Lucy and Jack, in the farm 526 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

house at the end of an unspeakable dirt road miles outside Lithonia. I had never been that far east in DeKalb County, and got lost, lurching along black, sodden country roads where the undergrowth leaned so close that I could hear the squeals of its furrows in the hand-rubbed lacquer of my father’s great, wallowing Rolls. When I finally arrived, an hour late, it was to find Lucy flushed and disheveled from the heat of the old gas stove in the vast, dingy kitchen, and the two sallow, thin-faced boys querulous with hunger and their hated “good” clothes, and dinner drying in the oven, and Jack Venable pinched and dry-voiced with exasperation.

The house itself was a shambles, sadly in need of paint inside and out and without central heating, so that you dashed from one small, overheated room to another through dark, arctic wastes of plasterboard and canted linoleum. Jack had wanted a “real” farm; he had gotten a bargain in this one.

We ate a horrendously bad chicken fricassee in the large front room that obviously served as Lucy and Jack’s bed-sitting-room, on card tables which had been covered with the exquisite old damask that my mother had given Lucy for a wedding present. My own Georg Jensen crystal candlesticks sat on the grown-ups’ table, and I recognized the rose-sprigged china and the thin goblets as my family’s Royal Doulton and Baccarat “second set,” which had been my paternal grandmother’s and which my mother had never liked.

An enormous space heater glowered furiously in front of the closed-off fireplace, and the great bed in the corner, as dark and tall and massive as a Viking ship, was obviously an old piece from Jack’s family. It was covered with a thin, faded chenille spread, but at its bottom a cloudlike peach drift of goose-down comforter lay.

The whole house was a schizophrenic amalgam of spavined, dismal authentic North Georgia country and PEACHTREE ROAD / 527

satiny Buckhead wedding largesse. On the whole, I thought that the stubborn, dreary country was winning the battle.

Lucy’s brave bits of china and crystal and damask and silver were poignant to me, instead of stylish and go-to-hell, as she no doubt intended them to be. I wondered how she felt about the reality of her bucolic new kingdom. When I left the room after dinner to go to the bathroom, at the other end of the house, I hurried through what seemed endless wastes of glacial darkness and found, in the dim, stained bathroom, along with a bulbous, claw-footed tub and tall, skinny, rusting old fixtures, another roaring space heater and a Dewar’s scotch carton in which a rangy, suspicious mother cat lay on an old flannel bathrobe and nursed lank, striped kittens.

When I reached over to pet her, she spat and hissed expertly.

It was not a good evening. My lateness and the ruined dinner undoubtedly contributed, but the strangeness went deeper than that. The children were, I thought, unusually unattractive even given the trauma of their mother’s defection and their father’s redefection to this much younger interloper.

They eyed me and Lucy out of the corners of small, pale eyes, and picked their noses, and pointedly refused to respond to her questions and comments, speaking elaborately and only to their father. They would not even look at me.

Jack himself was silent, eating methodically, nodding and saying “yes” and “no” to direct questions, but little else. He drank gin martinis steadily before dinner, and scotch after, and sat in a great, sagging morris chair beside the space heater and watched television in silence while Lucy served coffee and cognac and made conversation that was so animated it bordered on the febrile. She was drinking a good bit herself, sipping steadily on a never-dwindling glass of orange juice that smote the air around it with vodka, and though she was dressed in

528 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

black velvet Capri pants and a silk shirt, and wore her graduation pearls around her slender throat, I did not think she looked well. Her creamy, rose-flushed skin was raw around her mouth and on her knuckles, as if she washed only in hard, cold water, and her suede flats were scuffed and slick and stretched on her slender feet. Her heavy, silky blue-black hair had been drawn back into a ponytail as it had when I saw her at the hospital. The ends straggled at her nape, and I felt a sudden surge of anger. Lucy’s regular haircuts at Rich’s were one of the precise, immutable rituals of her life, and her glorious hair was the only one of her splendid physical assets of which she had ever seemed vain.

Were they so poor that she had given up haircuts along with nearly every other luxury she had been casually accustomed to? Why did Jack not get her shoes fixed for her, or buy her new ones? Was she so absorbed in the drama and momentum of their work with the movement that she had simply abjured all worldly trappings, or were they now beyond her reach? I hated the way she looked and the way she obviously lived. The house, besides being dilapidated, was not clean.

In it, she was like an Arabian mare in a muck-wet draft horses’ barn. If this was the haven Jack Venable had offered her, I wanted to shove it back down his fleshy throat. And why was he so silent and so rude? Had they had a fight, or was this his customary demeanor, now that they were married and she was no longer an elusive flame, but struggled to burn on his hearth?

Despite Lucy’s chatter and gaiety, and her rich laugh and her bawdy gossip, invariably prefaced with her breathy, rushed little “Oh, listen, Gibby,” the evening rolled over and lay lumpen and dead at our feet, and I rose to leave only a couple of hours after I arrived, pleading the freezing wind and the bad roads and the distance back to Peachtree Road.

Jack heaved himself reluctantly