Peachtree Road (74 page)

“revolutionary,” and had as little relevance. I could not rid myself of the image of my

576 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

mother’s long, lustrous, black hair, loose from its elegant twist and aflame. For a long time it was the only image in all that silent, hissing whiteness in my mind. Around me, the silence hammered and rang, and the light grew very bright, then dimmed.

After a while I picked up the telephone and dialed Lucy and Jack’s number. Jack answered on the second ring, in an angry whisper.

“She’s been trying to get you for an hour,” he said. “She was hysterical; she needed you, and she couldn’t get you.”

“I’ll come now,” I said. I was surprised to hear that my voice was steady.

“No. I’ve given her two tranquilizers and she’s finally asleep. Don’t come. It will only upset her now. Later, maybe, when she’s had some rest—”

I hung up on him.

“What about me, you ass hole?” I said aloud, but without heat. “It’s my mother who was sizzled down to a cinder, not Lucy’s.” I could not seem to stop yawning. I sat for a moment, not knowing what to do with myself, and then got up and walked up to the big house. Aunt Willa would, I knew, be at church at Saint Philip’s, but I did not want a nurse blurting out the news to my father.

Someone had obviously just called Shem and Martha Cater, looking for me, for Shem was on his way out the back door, his dark face actually ashen.

“Mr. Shep…” he began, and I saw that there were tears in his brown eyes, and that the yellowed whites of them were red with veins. I could not imagine that he had in any sense of the word loved my mother, but she and my father had given shape and definition to his and Martha’s lives for the past thirty years or so. The simple shock must have been profound. They would feel as lost and rudderless as I did.

“Has my father heard?” I said.

PEACHTREE ROAD / 577

“No, suh. He asleep. I tol’ the nurse to give him two of them pills, an’ hush up that cryin’ when he wake up. He gon’ sleep for a spell now.”

“Good work, Shem,” I said.

I put my hand on his shoulder, and he covered it with his rough brown one. We stood silent for a moment, and then he said, simply, “What we gon’ do now?”

“Bring the Rolls around,” I said, again enormously surprised at my own words, but knowing instantly that they were the right ones. “I’m going down to City Hall.”

“Yessuh,” he said, straightening his shoulders, and I thought that his step, as he turned away toward the garage, was stronger and more purposeful. When I had changed clothes and come out into the portico, he was standing beside the ridiculous, shining cliff of a car almost at attention, wearing a severe, dark livery that I had never seen.

“What’s with the uniform, Shem?” I said, getting into the backseat.

“You goin’ to see about bringing Miss Olivia home, ain’t you?” he said.

“I guess so,” I said, knowing only then that I was.

“Well, then,” Shem Cater said.

He said nothing else on the drive down the empty, sunny Sunday waste of Peachtree Road, a black man of Buckhead on the first leg of a long, long journey to bring his mistress home again. His silence, and the livery, pierced me like nothing else did the whole of that endless and terrible day.

It felt strange to be out, after the weeks of seclusion in the summerhouse. The very air and space around me pressed on my back and shoulders, as if I were stark naked, and terribly vulnerable. The feeling intensified the overbright queerness of the day.

The street in front of City Hall was deserted, but the 578 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

flags already hung at half-staff, and when I climbed the curving, shallow marble stairs to Ben Cameron’s office on the second floor, the crowd spilled out into the corridor. I recognized several people I knew, and stared, puzzled, until I remembered that of course, the crash in France was a Buckhead tragedy; almost everyone who had died in that ditch outside Paris had lived within two or three square miles of one another. These familiar faces, white and blank with the same shock that must have been mirrored on mine, were here on the same mission I was: to learn from our elected chieftain what we must do next. We nodded to one another, but did not speak. The tears, the comfortings, the mutual embraces, would come later, with the pain.

Most of the crowd were reporters, though, and I was scarcely on the top step before I saw recognition dawn on the first face, and then two or three of them detached themselves from the rest and began to move toward me. I could read “human interest” all over their pale, avid faces; here was the very fallen princeling slum lord whose mother had so recently condemned him for all the world’s delectation, come to lay claim to her charred flesh. Cameras swung into position and sweat broke out on my forehead. My heart began a sick trip-hammering, and nausea rose into my throat. I turned my head from side to side in panic; there was no retreat from them, and I knew that I could not face them.

I saw them lower the cameras and step back before I felt the hands on my shoulders from behind, and then they parted and made a path for me, and I was steered through them and into the outer office and beyond it, into Ben’s own private office. The door closed firmly, and I turned around to see Glenn Pickens, massive and looming in his dark suit and tie, his long yellow face hard and still and something looking out of his obsidian eyes that would have scattered far more than a band of reporters.

PEACHTREE ROAD / 579

“Thanks, Glenn,” I said weakly.

“I’m sorry, Shep,” he said in his flat voice. “About all of it.”

We looked at each other for a moment, and then he turned and went out of the office without speaking again and closed the door behind him, and I looked through the small knot of silent people to where Ben Cameron leaned against his desk, a telephone to his ear and one in his hand. He looked up and saw me and paused a moment in his conversation, and then lifted the idle receiver and motioned me into a chair and went on talking. I sat down and watched him.

He was dressed in the tennis clothes he had obviously been wearing when the first call came, and there were streaks of red dust on his shoes and shorts. I knew from those that he had been playing at the Rawsons’; they had the only dirt court in Buckhead. His face was bone-white beneath the permanent tan and the scattering of dark freckles across his cheekbones, and the flesh of it looked stretched and flayed, almost hanging from his thin, good bones. He looked older by years than I had ever seen him, and his gray eyes were almost as red and swollen as his daughter’s had been that morning. For the first time I thought what exquisite anguish he must be living. Not only had he lost nearly a hundred of the people who were the mainstays of his life, but he must bury his own grief deep and act with coolness, grace and authority for their families and the city at large; swallow his own pain that theirs might be the more quickly assuaged.

Most of us could retreat into the comfort of our substantial caves, dragging our sorrow in behind us like bones, and press close among the pack of our peers for warmth, but he must go now, his own agony deep and silent, to a foreign land and sift those burned bones and see them home again, the eyes of the world upon him, and then come home himself and start his city forward

580 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

once more. It would be a long time before Ben Cameron could weep, or even sleep. I felt a great rush of pure love for him. I had no doubt at all that he could and would do it, and do it well.

Despite the pandemonium in the outside office, which had been set up as a sort of nerve center for the press, the inner one was quiet. Ben’s assistant, Peg Hartley, ample and tearstained and capable, manned another telephone. Two or three aides came in and out with telegrams and lists and statements to be read and signed. A shrunken, silent Air France representative slumped in a chair by a window. Snake Cheatham’s father and Doug Fowler, Mr. Woodruff’s right-hand man at Coca-Cola, stood together at another window, backs to the room, talking in low voices. Carter Stephenson from WSB and Gordy Farr from the
Constitution
sat facing each other across a small table, writing furiously. On Ben’s desk I saw a yellow telegram, atop a steadily mounting pile, that read, “Mrs. Kennedy and I are terribly distressed to learn of the plane crash in France which cost your community and the country so heavily. Please convey our very deepest sympathy to the families who experienced this tragedy.” A note in Dorothy’s handwriting said, “I’ve sent Leroy over to get Alice and Bax’s children and their clothes until Tully can get herself together. If anyone calls about them, tell them they’re with us, and I don’t think they know anything yet.”

Alice and Baxter Fuller, young Ben’s age, the latter Ben Senior’s godchild, among the youngest of the couples to die in the crash. Married their freshman year at the university, they had had their family immediately, and the two little boys were now five and three. This had been the first time Alice and Bax had ever left them; I remembered that Dorothy had said she and Ben had practically browbeat them into taking the vacation and leaving the children with their grandmother and nurse. I

PEACHTREE ROAD / 581

could only imagine how they must feel about that. Besides being personally beloved of them, Bax Fuller was obviously going to be one of the most luminous of the next generation, a prime contender to take up the torch of the Club. A rising young lawyer, church elder, former president of the Legal Aid Society, Atlanta’s Outstanding Young Man a few years earlier, a director of the state YMCA and member of the Driving Club and Commerce Club, a nearly lone young voice lifted against segregation—and a Buckhead Jell without peer.

The flames in my white mind, which had engulfed only the hair of my mother, reached out now to frame another known and living face, this one nearly my own age.

Ben put the phone down and came around the desk and hugged me.

“Bad news, partner,” he said. “Bad day. The worst. I’m sorrier than I can say about your mother.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I’m…me, too. It’s just not possible to believe it, is it?”

“Ah, God, no,” he said, and his voice broke. “Christ, Shep, this was…my entire generation. I grew up with most of these folks. Laura Rainey was the first date I ever had; we went to a swimming party at Sibley French’s house, and she had a two piece bathing suit. We all talked about that for weeks.

And if I hadn’t met Dorothy I probably would have married Jane Ellen Alexander. And the first time I ever got drunk—and practically the last—was with Tommy Burns, up at Tate one Fourth of July, on sloe gin. Whit Turner and Howard Shelton and Marjorie Callahan…dear God, it’s like a small city was just wiped out, or a little country. And in a way it was….”

He stopped and rubbed his eyes, and looked at me.

“Is there anything special I can do for you?” he said. “You know I’m going over tonight. I promise you I’ll…see that she gets home safely.”

“I want to go with you, Ben,” I said.

582 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

He shook his head back and forth quickly, no, and opened his mouth to speak, and then stopped.

“There’s no way it’s going to be anything but grim,” he said. “And there’s nothing you can do—there’s probably not much even I can do. This is the time for official people, the medical and government boys, and they’re not going to take too kindly to me, much less you…”

“I won’t get in the way,” I said. “You won’t even know I’m there. But I’ve got to go, Ben. And I really want it to be with you.”

“All right,” he said finally. “I guess this is one trip you’ve earned. Got a passport?”

“Oh God—no,” I said.

“Doug,” Ben called across the room to Doug Fowler. “Can the Man pull one more string and get us another passport by tonight?”

Doug Fowler looked dubiously at me. “I guess he can, if it’s absolutely necessary,” he said.

“It is,” Ben Cameron said. “See about another seat on the five-fifty-five Delta flight to New York while you’re at it, too.”

To me he said, “You’re calling in an awful lot of chips at one time, Shep.”

“I know,” I said. “There isn’t any way I can thank you.”

“Yes there is, but that can come later,” he said, and went back to the telephone. I went out to the curb, where Shem Cater was idling the Rolls, and he drove me home to change.

On the way, I heard Ben’s voice, deep and quiet and measured, begin an official statement over the radio: “Atlanta has suffered her greatest tragedy and loss. Our deepest sympathy is extended…”

“Turn it off, Shem,” I said, and he did. We rode on home in silence.

An hour later, as I walked into the big house with a small bag, dressed for my flight and dreading with all my PEACHTREE ROAD / 583

cold, still heart going up to tell my father, Aunt Willa came tapping down to meet me, still in the white linen suit she had worn to church. Her face was colorless and blank, and her eyes looked somehow bleached, giving her the unfocused, witless look of a trapped rabbit. Her hands shook slightly, and she kept wetting her red lips with her tongue. I stared at her. What I read on her exquisitely enameled face was not grief, but fear, pure and simple. I could have imagined several reactions from my aunt Willa in the face of losing by violence her sister-in-law and captor, but fear was not one of them.

“Is my father awake?” I said.

“He’s just stirring. I came down to see if you wanted me to tell him. I know it isn’t my place, but he sometimes seems to accept things from me that he won’t from the nurse, and I know how terrible this is for you….” Her voice actually cracked, high and crystalline, with the weight of the fear.

All at once I knew what she was afraid of, and a powerful surge of sympathy stirred me. It was gone quickly, but in its aftermath I felt closer to Willa Slagle Bondurant than I ever had, or ever would again. As awful as her servitude to my mother had been, and as odious her position of sufferance in this house must have felt to her, there was still a sort of warped symbiosis between them, a twisted but unbreakable bond which held her secure even as it bound her fast. Now that her smiling jailer was dead, that tie was gone, and I, the presumed successor, had no reason at all to honor or even tolerate her presence here. Both her dependent daughters were in the care of husbands, and she herself, as she well knew, was, in her tricked-up little attic suite, only one step away from the actual street. I knew, in that instant, so completely how she felt that my own mouth went dry. My own tenure here had often felt precisely that fragile.