Peachtree Road (72 page)

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I am happy. Not in the way you mean, I don’t think, but in another and very good way I
am
happy. How could I not be? Charlie is maybe the best man I’ve ever known, in the real sense of the word, and he’s wonderful to me, and this baby has made me happier than I ever dreamed it would. I really didn’t know I was going to feel this way about having a baby. I’ll probably have seven thousand of them.”

She paused, and then she said, “I won’t ever be happy the way we could have been happy together, but this is another thing entirely, and it was a total surprise to me. I did marry Charlie on the rebound, Shep, and he knew I did, and I don’t deserve what I got in return for that. But you don’t have to worry about me.”

“I won’t, then,” I said, my eyes stinging. “Are you painting now?”

She laughed, uncomfortably, I thought. “Where in the world would I paint in that doll’s house?” she said. “And then Dr. Farmer doesn’t want me to fool around with all that lead until the baby’s here. There’ll be plenty of time for painting.”

“Don’t stop too long,” I said. “You’re too good. It’s too much a part of you.”

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“It was a part of something else,” she said. Her voice sounded as though she was talking to herself. “It just doesn’t seem to have anything to do with now. It’s…not real, somehow.”

I was silent, and so was she. She drank off her tea, and looked at me obliquely, and I was aware that there had sprung up in the air between us a strain so intense and uncomfortable that it was almost palpable. We were out of things that could safely be spoken of, and neither of us dared enter that other country.

Finally she rose and I walked to the door with her, and she reached up and kissed me on the cheek and said, “Is this as hard on you as it is on me?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I thought it was,” she said, grinning her old light-up-the-world grin. My heart did its now-accustomed, aching fish flop.

“I don’t think I’ll come again, Shep,” she said. “Maybe sometime with Charlie, but not often. You understand why, I know. And I think you know that we…that I love you. I’ll be here in two seconds flat if you need me. But we can’t be…just friends.”

“No,” I said. It was true. Sarah and I could be perfectly amiable acquaintances, and we had, at least once, been truly glorious lovers, but simple friendship was now forever lost to us.

For the first time since that night so long ago in the same room with Lucy, I drank until the bourbon tide took me completely under and when I awoke it was morning, and the sun was high.

On a day in March of booming wind and high sun, when the first of the great spring skies had begun, a man from Southern Bell came in his panel truck with instructions to install a telephone in the summerhouse. When I asked him who had authorized it, he jerked a thumb backward 562 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

and said, “Lady in the big house yonder.”

“Well, you can tell the lady in the big house yonder that I don’t want a telephone, thanks just the same,” I said. “Wait a minute, let me get you something for your trouble, though.”

“You Mr. Bondurant?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Lady said to tell you not to be an ass, that she was tired of waiting for you to come to her, and she couldn’t very well come to you. Said to call her the minute this thing was in.

Said you’d know who she was.”

I did, too. The “ass” had tipped me off. It was not my mother’s style.

When the phone was installed, I sat down and dialed Merrivale House. Dorothy Cameron answered on the second ring.

“Well,” she said. “The corpse that speaks like a man. Can you walk, too, or is it just the voice that works?”

“Dorothy, you ought to know me well enough to know I don’t want this goddamned thing,” I said. “Appreciate the gesture though I do. My mother will be on it fourteen times a day.”

“She won’t if you don’t tell her you have it,” she said. “I told them to bill me for it. It’s not charity. I fully intend you to pay me back. Listen, Shep, I want to see you. Enough of this foolishness is enough. I’d come over there, but somebody would be sure to see me—I’m not about to crawl through the brush with a knife in my teeth like Ben does—and it would get back to Olivia that I was sneaking over there to see you, when I won’t even speak to her, and the fat really would be in the fire. I want to be able to talk to you when I want to, and for starters I want you to come over here.”

“Over there?” I said. “Now?”

“Well, now would be wonderful, but I don’t think I can expect that from Buckhead’s only authentic hermit, PEACHTREE ROAD / 563

can I? No, come after dark, if you don’t want to see anybody, and let yourself in the sun porch door. Ben will be downtown at a meeting tonight.”

“I don’t know, Dorothy,” I began. The thought of leaving the summerhouse suddenly panicked me.

“Get over here, Shep, before you freeze up entirely and really aren’t able to leave that pretty little prison of yours,”

she said curtly, and I said I would. I knew that I would have to leave the summerhouse sometime and venture out into the world, and that what she said was true. I was indeed in danger, as each day went by, of never leaving it at all.

I started out after dark that night, thinking to go through the woods, but suddenly the close-pressing undergrowth and trees felt suffocating and fetid, and the night wind was dense and heavy with swelling buds and sweetness and the promise of spring. On impulse I turned toward the big house and began to trot, and jogged past it down the drive to the sidewalk, and soon was loping flat out up Peachtree Road toward Muscogee. I wore tennis shoes and my old high school warm-up sweats, and the sidewalk felt wonderful under my feet, almost springy, and the tight muscles in my calves and things worked and throbbed and loosened. There was no one on the sidewalk, though cars went by steadily on Peachtree Road, and except for the pale pools of the streetlights, I ran in cool, sweet darkness. My heart labored in my chest, and a stitch started, flamelike, under my ribs, but the singing, free-ranging wind ran behind me, propelling me along, and by the time I turned the corner onto Muscogee and began the long pound down its first dark hill, I felt that I was naked as a newborn and swimming, drowning in air and space. It was a wonderful feeling, glorious. When I came crunching up to the side door to the Camerons’s sun porch I was soaked through and blowing like a dolphin, but I felt light as a hollowed reed, and clean.

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I hugged Dorothy Cameron in an excess of euphoria, aware all at once how very much I had missed her. In her long cherry velvet robe she looked, in the lamplight, so much like Sarah that I had to laugh. Only the streaks of silver in her coarse curls gave her age away, those and the fine little lines that radiated out from the corners of her eyes. Her strong chin and cheekbones were just as clean and chiseled as Sarah’s, and her step as light. She laughed back at me, and hugged me, and held her nose lightly.

“To quote Leroy,” she said, “you smells tired. Is you been working?”

“No,” I said. “I’s been running.”

She poured me a bourbon without asking if I wanted it, and one for herself, and we sat in the little sun porch that was almost as familiar to me as the one at 2500 Peachtree Road, and talked. On shelves and on the paneling of the fireplace wall the lares and penates of that great house rested: Ben’s civic awards and honorary degrees and diplomas, young Ben’s trophies and plaques, Sarah’s swimming and diving ribbons and medals and her wonderful, incandescent paintings. I felt a keen physical pang looking at the paintings; they were like the left-behind clothing of someone who had died. Ben’s trophies troubled me, too, though the import of the feeling eluded me. I kept my eyes, for the rest of the evening, on Dorothy.

She did not speak of the fire and its aftermath except to say, “It’s time you began to come out of the summerhouse now,” and, when I asked her if she really hadn’t spoken to my mother since, “I really haven’t and I probably won’t.

She’s beyond my forgiveness or lack of it, but she shan’t have it, anyway.”

And so I knew that she, unlike her daughter, had been told of my mother’s part in the thing, and was, like the men of the Club, a member of the conspiracy of silence. I did not think she was a willing one. I knew that PEACHTREE ROAD / 565

Ben had always told her everything and would not hold this from her, but I knew, too, that he would swear her to silence, and that she would honor it, even while hating her pledge.

I suspected that she was the only woman in Atlanta except my mother and probably a number of black women who knew the entire truth. Something smoothed and eased deep within me, and a vestigial kind of peace breathed itself across my heart.

We talked, instead, of the comings and goings of Buckhead, and of its gossip and eccentricities, and of Ben’s hopeful young term in the fast-changing city, and of the red-haired young president with his fingers in the sky as well as the earth, and of the accelerating civil rights movement and Lucy’s deepening involvement in it. We talked of gardening and music, and the litter of kittens out in the garage, and the greening trees and the newly built beaver dam in the cold, deep little lake up at Tate, and of art and drama and travel.

She said, ruefully, that she and Ben had had to give up a long-dreamed-of trip to Europe that May with more than a hundred members of the Atlanta Art Association, because Ben felt that a newly elected mayor shouldn’t spend a month during the first year of his administration away from his city.

“I see his point,” she said. “It would look awful. But Lord, I hate to miss that trip. Practically everybody on it is a lifelong friend of ours. It would be like a monthlong house party. It’s been a long time since Ben and I have just cut loose and done anything silly. This would have been the perfect excuse. I tried to give the trip to Sarah and Charlie, but of course she’s due in early June, and they don’t get back until then. You don’t want to go and take a friend, do you?”

“Not on your life,” I said. “My mother’s going. I don’t think Europe’s big enough for both of us.”

She reached over and squeezed my hand. “If you can joke about it, you’re going to be all right,” she said.

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“Of course I am,” I said. “Did you think I wasn’t?”

“I didn’t know. It’s been as bad a thing as you’re likely to have in your life.”

“Well, then,” I said, “maybe it’s good to get it over with early. From here on out will be gravy.”

When I was set to leave, Dorothy Cameron did a wonderful thing for me. She probably did not even know how wonderful, though I think she had some idea that it would be useful. She took me into their library and showed me five large wooden crates sitting there on the old stone floor, and said that they were the diaries and journals her father, grandfather and great-grandfather had kept from childhood on. Three complete, lovingly and faithfully detailed patrician lives, bridging more than two hundred years and reaching from a Dorsetshire manor house to the warm red earth of Virginia, and then down through the Carolinas to, finally, Atlanta. The Chase men of Merrivale House, Dorset, and points far west and south, alive now in fine, spidery writing in volume after volume of yellowed vellum.

“It’s an idea I had,” she said, when I stood staring at the crates, uncomprehending. “I know how you love pure research, and I know what a gifted writer you are. And I know, too, that to save your soul and sanity you need some real work to do, something valuable. So I’m going to give you my family, instead of dumping them on the historical society where nobody will ever even read them, much less really see what’s there. I’m not just being conceited, Shep. It strikes me that my family is almost laughably, prototypically Georgian—the compleat Georgians, sort of—from England via Virginia and the Carolinas and on down into Georgia and here. We didn’t come over with the debtors just out of prison to Savannah, with Oglethorpe; there’s been lots written about them. We were one of the few relatively educated and wellborn families to migrate to the colonies. I don’t PEACHTREE ROAD / 567

recall ever reading anything comprehensive about that sort of settler. But the South’s bones rest on them. You have a huge work of history and sociology here, all bound together by blood ties, and in the words of the men who lived it. I think you ought to write it. I think you could do a splendid job of it. Altogether, it would take you about twenty years, but I suspect you’ve got the time. And it would be an enormously valuable thing to do. Would you like to try? I’d rather you did this with your life than take to drink or bug-gery or pedophilia.”

The Compleat Georgian
was born that night, and Dorothy was right. I fell in love with the gifted, ornery, eccentric men who were clamoring and jostling to get off those crumbling pages, and the liberation of them did indeed, many times over, save my sanity and my soul. Perhaps it may again. I would very much like to see the
Georgian
go out into the world, fully fleshed and breathing. If it should happen, it will be because Dorothy Cameron knew on that night, as perhaps no one else alive could know then, what it would take to redeem me. And she gave me, that evening, the next quarter century of my life. When I went home it was with Leroy in Ben’s Lincoln, the five crates of Chases shimmering in their life and richness on the backseat and in the trunk.

I unloaded them that very evening, and the next morning, even before I could get a carpenter in to measure for the bookcases that would be needed to house them, I sat down on the floor in a pool of spring sunlight and began.

I had a sense that spring that I was, slowly and imperceptibly, fashioning a life for myself as well as an order for those other lives. Before, in the bowels of the New York Public Library, I had been merely passing through antiquity, biding time in the parchment lives of others. Now I was beginning to map a universe wherein I, as well as those captive Southerners, might honorably

568 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

live. The thought was deeply satisfying, and fed, in part, the insatiable mouth of the pain that the fire and its aftermath, and my mother’s terrified treachery, had unleashed.