Peachtree Road (68 page)

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out of his chair and walked with me and Lucy to the door, and gave me only a perfunctory handshake and a “Come again, Shep. And watch the drive there. You don’t want to knock the bloom off that Rolls.”

I was so angry with him, and his coldness toward Lucy, and the mean-spirited lack of cherishing, that I turned back halfway to the Rolls, meaning to say something light but significant like, “Take care of her, Jack, I’m taking names,”

but the words died in my throat. He stood with his arms around her in the dark doorway of the farmhouse, his head bent to hers, and there was such tenderness in the angle of his face, and in his hands on her shoulders, that I felt a lump rise in my throat. Whatever ate at Jack Venable and had caused him to freeze Lucy out tonight, it was not lack of love for her. I navigated the lurching miles back to Atlanta troubled in my soul for my cousin Lucy, but not on that score.

The day after that, Tom Carmichael and Marshall Haynes, my father’s man at the Trust Company, came by to see me.

Shem Cater brought them into the library, where I had given up for the morning on the ledgers and statements and files and taken refuge in an old volume of Bulfinch that had been my grandfather Redwine’s. They got right down to business.

“We need to set up a series of meetings, Shep, either here or at my office or down at the bank,” Tom said, and Marshall nodded his sandy, crew-cut head. It was said by my crowd, who undoubtedly got it from their fathers, that he was a wizard with corporate accounts, and very much the young man to watch during the next couple of decades. To me, he looked about thirteen, an anemic thirteen, at that, and I remembered that when my father had first been passed along to him, after old Claude Maddox had retired, that he had been furious at the seeming slight of being handed over to a mere child. But after the first month or two, he had stopped his grum

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bling, and had after that begun to speak of “Haynes” in the same tone that he did “Carmichael” and “Cheatham” and

“Cameron.” Marshall Haynes and I looked at each other with the instinctive dislike of the young, competent hireling for the young, incompetent princeling, and vice versa, and smiled brilliantly. Each of us knew the other had something that he would never have, and that he envied.

“I figure we can get you in shape to operate autonomously in about six weeks,” Haynes began pleasantly, and Tom Carmichael picked it up: “The day-to-day operating procedure is really quite simple; your dad handled it in a couple or three hours each day, and there wasn’t any reason for him to go down to the office everyday, except to have lunch at the Capital City or Commerce Club,” he said. “You know the staff; they’re as fine people as you’ll find for their sort of thing, and your dad trained them the way he wanted them.

They can, essentially, carry on day to day by themselves. But you need to be able to function as manager and decision-maker, and between us, Marshall and I can fill you in on assets and portfolios and such, and broad-brush a picture of the structure and legalities of things.”

Marshall Haynes nodded this time, and I thought they resembled nothing so much as a second-rate father-and-son comic routine.

“You’re going to need some brushing up, even if you’ve been familiar with the business all your life,” he said. “Though Tom tells me your field is classics, not real estate. The real estate picture has changed almost entirely since you left for school, and there’s just no telling which way it’s going to take off in the next year or so. Foreign capital, REITs—there are a lot of new wrinkles we can teach you. Better get it out of the way right in the beginning, so you can pick up the reins before too much time has elapsed. Then it’ll be pretty much your show,

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with us in the wings to back you up, of course. We’ll be there whenever you need us.”

He grinned, an attractive replica of Tom Carmichael’s grin—the official Old Boy grin of the men who were now the Club—and I leaned back and gave the grin back to him and said, perversely, “Sorry, but no dice. I’m glad you came by; it’ll save me a phone call. But I’m not going to be brushing up and picking up reins and running shows. I’m leaving the next week for Vermont to teach classics to fat little rich kids, and what I really need for you guys to do is find me a good business manager who can brush up and pick up and run shows, and find him fast, and turn the whole shooting match over to him. Like tomorrow or the next day.

You can do that, Tom, can’t you?” I purposely did not include Marshall Haynes in the question.

They were silent for a moment, looking at each other, and then Tom said, “I can do that, yes. But I’d hate to. Listen, Shep, don’t do anything ill-considered or hasty. I know things haven’t always been…roses and clover with you and your dad, but everything’s changed now. You just can’t up and walk away from this.”

“This isn’t hasty, Tom, and it’s been considered every way it can be,” I said. “And I can indeed just up and walk away from it. In fact, I can run. All this stuff is nothing to me, and that’s the way it’s going to stay.”

His face was wintry and disapproving. “I’d say it was everything to you, on the face of it,” he said. “Of course, it’s your business.”

“Yes,” I said. “It is. And this is what I choose to do with it. I want you to go ahead and do it for me right away, Tom, or I’ll do it myself, and it will undoubtedly be done wrong if I do. Okay?”

“I…okay,” he said. “All right. I ask only that you think it over for a day or two, talk with your mother—”

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that you’ve breathed a word of it to her, I’ll have your hide,”

I said. I did not know why I was being so hard on him; he was a man of dignity and substance, and had served my father well for a long time. It felt wonderful, though. Marshall Haynes’s eyes on me were watchful and held a glint of grudging respect, and that felt even better.

“Surely you mean to tell her what you’ve told us,” Tom Carmichael said frostily. “You can’t just flit out of here without telling her. Her own holdings are substantial, to say the least—”

“Of course I’ll tell her,” I said. “I may be a classicist, but I’m not an ogre. But I’m not going to tell her until later. Next week, just before I flit out of here, I think. She’s got too much else on her mind now. I don’t want to upset her before I have to.”

Seeing that I could not be swayed, they went away, undoubtedly to the Capital City Club to lick their wounds and plan, over the Catch of the Day and a nice little Chardonnay, how best to circumvent me. They need not have bothered.

I was back in the library the next morning, deep in Bulfinch, when Shem Cater put his head into the door, grinning like a bad imitation of Rochester, and said,

“Comp’ny to see you, Mr. Shep,” and Ben Cameron walked into the room behind him.

He stood in a patch of pale midmorning sunlight on the faded old Oriental, hands in the pockets of a beautiful dark blue cashmere topcoat, his ruddy hair like rusted iron in the weak morning light. He was not smiling.

“Morning, Ben,” I said, getting up from the morris chair I had been slumped in. “Sit down. Can I offer you some coffee?”

“No,” he said. “I’ve got a thermos in the car. Get your coat and a muffler and gloves, Shep, and come with me, if you’ve got a little time to spare. I want to show you something.”

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“What is it?” I asked.

“I’d rather show you,” he said. “Indulge me if you will. I’ll have you back in a couple of hours. We can get some lunch downtown, or at Brookhaven, if you’d rather. You’re not in the middle of something that can’t wait, are you?” He looked pointedly at the Bulfinch, and I laughed.

“No,” I said. “Nothing that won’t wait. Let me get my stuff.”

When I came back from the summerhouse in my coat and an old Princeton muffler, he was already waiting in the big black Lincoln on the front drive. He was sitting in the backseat, and I was profoundly surprised to see Glenn Pickens sitting at the wheel in a neat, dark suit and tie, gray driving gloves on his hands. The Lincoln’s powerful motor was idling, and Glenn eased it into motion as soon as I closed the door on my side behind me. He, too, was unsmiling, and said nothing beyond his neutral “Good morning, Shep” in response to my greeting. Looking at his impassive yellow face, I found it impossible to believe that not four months before we had shared a night of unease and transcendence at La Carrousel. I did not know he still drove for Ben Cameron; somehow I thought that chore had ended when he had graduated from Morehouse and law school. But then, remembering that it was Ben who had put him through both, I figured that he was probably grateful enough to oblige Ben whenever he could. His greeting was the last time he spoke until nearly the end of the drive.

“Am I being kidnapped?” I asked, accepting a cup of coffee from Ben’s thermos, and grinning as he added a dollop of brandy from a silver flask in his pocket.

“As a matter of fact, you are,” he said. “This is in the nature of a command performance. And there’s a condition. No questions—not until we’ve seen what I have to show you.

Agreed?”

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“Sure,” I said. “Just keep that brandy coming and you won’t hear a peep out of me.”

He was silent and preoccupied, and I stole an occasional quick glance at the clean, sharp profile I had known all my life and yet did not know, feeling oddly constrained to be bowling down Peachtree Road toward the downtown section beside the mayor-to-be of the city, drinking his brandy and being driven by a life-long acquaintance. I wondered if he did not feel strange himself sometimes, out of context and ambushed by his own life. He hardly spoke as we floated along, the big Lincoln, a new one, eating up the familiar miles into the city’s heart. Once, as we gained Five Points, the epicenter of the business and financial district, he turned to me and said, “You knew that Sarah is pregnant, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” I said. “Charlie told me Christmas Eve. Is she all right?”

“No,” Ben Cameron said somberly. “She’s not. She looks like hell, and she’s sicker than a dog. Dorothy tells me that’s temporary, but it bothers the hell out of me. Sarah’s never sick.”

“I’m really sorry,” I said lamely. For some reason his tone made me feel as guilty as if I had caused Sarah’s morning nausea.

“You ought to be,” he said. He withdrew again into abstracted silence, whistling soundlessly between his teeth and drumming his fingers on his knee, and I fell silent too, affronted. Whatever his daughter suffered, I was sure my pain was the greater.

Glenn Pickens slid the Lincoln through Five Points and east on Mitchell Street, past the courthouse, the beautiful Art Deco spire of City Hall and the dirty granite and marble pile of the state capitol. In this hiatus between Christmas and the New Year, the streets were nearly bare of traffic, and only a few pedestrians, Negroes mainly, scurried up the long hill beside the capitol building

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thin coats and jackets pulled close against the icy wind that had come booming in with the long-hidden sun. The dead, brown mats of lawn and bare peach tree saplings around the government buildings looked desolate and forsaken, and the big Christmas tree on the Capitol lawn, beside the statue of Tom Watson, whipped in the gusts from the west. Occasionally, in the wide, clear spaces around the government buildings, the Lincoln rocked softly from side to side in the wind’s unbroken force. I closed my eyes against the glare arrowing off the hood of the Lincoln, and Ben put black sun-glasses on his narrow brown face. With his clear gray eyes shielded, he looked dangerous and foreign, like a Sicilian bandit.

Glenn Pickens turned behind the Capitol onto Capitol Avenue and we slid down into the great, and to me featureless, wasteland to the south and east, where much of Atlanta’s Negro population lived. I had been down into the Southeast before, usually with Shem Cater in the Chrysler, to fetch or return one or another of my family’s servants, but to my blind white eyes, the streets on which the Negroes lived were much like the Negroes themselves: they all looked alike. I looked questioningly at Ben, and he gave me back the look, but he did not speak. Glenn Pickens did not, either.

I felt a very faint tremor of uneasiness, like a foreshock to an earthquake that only a bird or an animal might sense. What could there be, in this back landscape, that Ben Cameron wanted to show me?

One by one, we ghosted through the black communities to the south of the city’s heart: Summerhill, Peoplestown, Joyland. The desolation and poverty of these small communities seemed to me as unredeemed as they were uniform; I could not tell where one left off and the other picked up. But Ben knew; he pointed them out by name as we passed through, and in the

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same conversational tone as he had spoken earlier of Sarah and the weather, talked of their distinct characters, their particularities. Every now and then he’d say, “Am I right, Glenn?” and Glenn Pickens would say, “That’s right, Ben,”

or, “Not exactly. That’s Mule Coggins’s poolroom, not Morley’s.” How in the world, I wondered, in the course of his crowded juggernaut life, had Ben Cameron had time to learn the geography and ethnology of these dismal little black habitats in the bowels of the city? Were there, in his quicksilver mind, faces to go with the names? Another man entirely might have been sitting beside me, and I felt shy and stupid and young. In point of fact, I was all those things.

The Negro communities were comprised of warrens of small, narrow streets, many unpaved, with wooden and cinder-block and brick one-and, infrequently, two-story houses crowded so close together that often not even a driveway separated them—which did not seem to matter so much. I saw few automobiles. Most sat squarely on the streets, or sidewalks where such, with only a few feet of dirt or concrete for yard space, these littered with broken toys and bottles and trash. Most of the houses had long since lost their paint and some had lost their windowpanes, and had blind eyes of cardboard or newspaper. Steps up to sagging porches were pilled bricks or cinder blocks, and outhouses leaned crazily in some of the weed-choked backyards. I knew there was city water—I saw fire hydrants, and open sewage stood frozen in gutters—but still the outhouses prevailed.