Peachtree Road (77 page)

“She’s gorgeous, Luce,” I said. “She looks just like her mama.”

“More like her granddaddy, don’t you think? Or at least like the male Bondurants. I thought at first she had something of Mama around her mouth, but I don’t think so anymore.

And there’s nothing there at all of poor Jack. No, it’s all Bondurant. Look at that little blade of a nose—you all have it.”

There was nothing of portent in her words, nothing but enchantment with her baby. I relaxed and looked fully at Malory Venable for the first time. She turned her head from Lucy’s breast as if she had felt my

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look, and gave me a wide, fully focused smile. It was such a deep and direct look, and her lambent, light-spilling blue eyes, so like Lucy’s, had in them such a sheer sense of ken, that I felt a physical shock in my stomach. I moved my head and her eyes followed, and the smile widened. She made a soft, liquid little sound very near an adult chuckle of charm and joy. A great, helpless, foolish love flowered thickly in my heart and reached its tendrils out toward her. There was nothing in it of nuance and complexity; it was, and has remained, the purest and simplest emotion I have ever owned, all light and air and certitude.

Lucy was almost vibrating with joy and love that day, talking soft nonsense to the baby, whose eyes followed her face with a focus and concentration that were indeed adult in intensity. Her face as she looked down at tiny Malory was so incandescent that I wanted to turn my own away from it; outside eyes seemed, in the face of that hungry love, intrusive.

I felt a kind of superstitious fear for her, an apprehension that had nothing to do with any practical future. That kind of perfect, leaping, shimmering love surely tempted fates and gods. I felt the old, fierce desire to protect, to enfold, to cloister both of them away, and then remembered that that task now lay with Jack Venable.

You’d better do it right, buddy, I said inside my head, and meant the words.

To Lucy, I said, “Is there anything I can get you? Besides flowers? You won’t need any more of those for about ten years.”

“No,” she said. “I have everything I’ll ever want in the world, Gibby. Right here in this room. Oh…but you know what you could bring me? That old copy of Malory.
Morte
d’Arthur
. Is it still around the summerhouse, do you think?

And
The Jungle Book
. I want to read them to her right now, before we go home. I want her to

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know where she comes from, and what will be important to her.”

“I guess they’re still in the bookcase,” I said. “If they’re not I’ll buy them for her, my first present.”

“Oh, please find them, Gibby,” she cried. “I want her to hear ‘We be of one blood’ from the book we heard it from.

I want
our
books.”

“I’ll look,” I said. “And I’ll bring them tomorrow, if I can.

But it isn’t going to make any difference to her for about six years, you know.”

“No,” she said, perfectly seriously, her smile gone, the blue eyes burning, burning. “She’ll know. She knows now. She knows what I say to her, and I know what she says to me.

You can think I’m crazy if you like, but it’s true. Malory is me and she is mine, and she will hear me calling her all her life, no matter where she is in the world. And she’ll come.”

I left her then and went in the fast-falling dusk back to the haven of the summerhouse, a kind of dread hammering at my ribs that did not ease with firelight and bourbon and Martha Cater’s hot vegetable soup. I knew what the un-channeled force of Lucy’s love could do, and the fear was as much for her as for the infant on whom it focused. I found the Malory and the Kipling, and sat reading them late into that January night, and my dreams, when I fell asleep on the sofa before the dying fire, were full of kaleidoscopic images of great bears and black panthers and wolves and caparisoned chargers and fire: the endless, unquenchable fire of Pumphouse Hill and Paris.

Lucy’s feverish happiness shimmered on unabated until the day that Jack was to come and take her and Malory home, and on that morning she awoke already in the grip of a full-blown depression that bordered on catatonia. She lay with her white face turned to the window, looking at the bare trees lashing in the wind along

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Peachtree Road, not moving, not speaking, hardly breathing, and she would respond to nothing and no one. When the nurse laid Malory on her chest she did not put up her arms to cradle her, and the child would have slipped off the bed if the nurse had not snatched her up. They took the baby away to be rocked and given her first bottle in the nursery, and she did not cry until the door closed between her and her mother. But then her screams could be heard all the way down the hall and into the closed and glassed nursery, and the nurses there reported later that they did not stop until she literally fell asleep from fatigue, hours later.

Jack and Aunt Willa came and sat beside Lucy and chafed her hands and talked to her, but she did not answer. Jack, his hair and hands still bearing smudges of the fresh white paint with which he had prepared the farmhouse for Lucy and Malory’s arrival, was near frantic. It was obvious that the old black woman back in Lithonia could not cope with both the baby and Lucy in this condition, and he could not stay away from his job more than a few days. Without Lucy’s salary, tiny as it was, he could ill afford to miss even the few days he had planned to take to bring them home. When, by noon, Lucy had not responded to either of them or her obstetrician, and a psychiatrist had been summoned, Jack called me, and I came and sat down beside her and took her hand and called her name softly.

“Luce,” I said. “Come on, Luce. It’s Gibby. Talk to me.”

This time she turned her head and looked at me, and I almost gasped aloud. The change in her since the day before was profound. Her vivid blue eyes were so devoid of light and life that they looked like a watercolor that had been left out in the rain. Her entire face was flattened and somehow thickened, without planes, and paper-white. Her cracked lips made the shape of my

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name: Gibby. And then she said, in a dry whisper, “I never saw the trees so pretty. October really is the best month, isn’t it?”

I felt ice form along my spine.

“It’s March 1963, and you have a new little girl, and it’s time now to cut this out and take her home with Jack,” I said, too loudly. She closed her eyes and turned her face back to the window.

“I don’t know any Jack,” she said in a frail, fretful child’s whimper. “I don’t have any stupid little girl. Gibby, take me home. I want my daddy. I want to go home.”

Jack Venable gave a soft grunt of pain, and Aunt Willa snorted in delicate outrage. I shut my eyes in despair. Lucy said no more that day. The psychiatrist closeted himself with her for an hour or so, and the results of the tests her obstetrician had ordered came back, and at dusk both came out to the waiting room and sat down with us amid the magazines and coffee cups and overflowing ashtrays.

“It’s a classic postpartum psychosis,” the psychiatrist said.

He had pure silver hair over a face as satin-pink and unlined as an infant’s. A baby-butt face, Lucy would have called it.

“I know it looks bizarre, but it’s not uncommon, and this is by no means the worst case I’ve ever seen. I think she’ll pull out of it fairly quickly with medication and some good nursing care, but both will have to be constant. I understand Mr. Venable can’t manage that at home. Is there somewhere we can take her where she’ll be able to have total rest and quiet, and the baby can be looked after?” He looked at Aunt Willa and me; I knew that there was no other choice, and nodded. Aunt Willa followed my lead, lips compressed.

“We’ll be glad to have her,” I said. “Martha Cater can look after her, and I’m sure she can find us a baby PEACHTREE ROAD / 607

nurse. Maybe her daughter can come. She looked after Lucy when she was little herself. We’re close to the hospital and not all that far from your office, Jack, and you can come by before and after work—or stay over yourself, if you like.

We’ve got plenty of room.”

I looked at him questioningly. For some reason, my heart was lifting, and wings beat in my chest.

“I…well, okay. Sure,” Jack said. I knew that he hated the idea of Lucy back in that house of wealth and privilege and coldness. I also knew that he knew he had no choice. “I’ll be much obliged. But just till she can get on her feet again.

And I’ll pass on staying over, thanks. I’ll look in when I can.”

“Fine,” the psychiatrist and Lucy’s obstetrician said heartily, in concert, clearly relieved to be rid of the embarrassment of a messily skewed ending to a routine case of seemly Buckhead childbirth.

“Sounds like the best solution,” the psychiatrist said.

“Well.” Aunt Willa got up smartly and smoothed the gray wool sheath that cupped her elegant hips and buttocks. “I’d better go get things changed around so we can fit a baby in.

Let’s see…hmmm…no, there’s no other way but for Lucy and the baby to have my room, and the little dressing room, and I’ll move up to the attic. We can’t very well move poor Big Shep, or his nurse. My goodness, so many sick people and nurses…” Her voice trailed away as she clicked down the hall toward the elevator, a path of poisoned honey spreading behind her. I knew, and Jack probably guessed, that beneath the honey and the martyred mother’s words, Willa Slagle was raging anew at this troublesome daughter who would not leave her in peace in the gracious bower where she had, finally, gone to earth.

And so Lucy came home again to 2500 Peachtree Road, with a nurse and Malory, and was installed in the big bedroom upstairs, and old Martha brought ToTo in 608 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

from Forest Park and found a wet nurse from one of the projects, and Aunt Willa went back to work, and I went back to the summerhouse and the clamoring ancestors of Sarah Gentry. And all the time, as I worked, the knowledge of tiny Malory Bondurant Venable, shimmering there in the little dressing room that had been my own first nursery, lay whole and still and perfect in my heart.

For a week or so Lucy simply lay still, staring out her window into the tops of the trees that had sheltered her summers until she married Red Chastain. She was allowed no visitors, but occasionally I stole in from the summerhouse to stare down at Malory, sleeping in her pearly perfection as ToTo rocked and napped, and then I sat for a while beside Lucy’s bed. I would hold her hand and talk to her of small things and nonsense, and sometimes she would press my hand, and once or twice she smiled. One afternoon, toward the end of the first week, she said, abruptly and weakly, “I get so tired when I think about having to take care of her always, Gibby. I can’t even take good care of myself. I don’t know what’s going to happen to us.”

They were the first words she had said to me since she left the hospital, and I started visibly.

“Jack will take care of both of you, of course, Luce,” I said, but she only shook her head weakly and fretfully on the pillow.

“He’ll try, but in the end he won’t be able to,” she said.

“Sure he will. But I’ll help,” I said. “If you and Malory ever need any extra taking care of, I’ll always be here.”

“Will you, Gibby?” she said, turning her thin, white face to me.

“Of course. Always.”

She was silent for a bit, and then she smiled. It was a fuller smile, stronger.

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“Yes,” she said. “I think you will, now.”

Soon after that she began to improve, and in another week Aunt Willa took her to Sea Island for ten days in the early spring sun, and when she came home, lightly tanned and with some of the sunken hollows in her face and body filled in, she was gay to near-ferocity again, and seized Malory and hugged her until the baby screamed.

“You didn’t cry for Mommy, did you, precious angel?” she said into Malory’s satiny cheek. “I know you didn’t. I felt you every minute, and I sent you messages a thousand times a day, and I know you were a good girl. She was, wasn’t she, Martha? Wasn’t she, Shep?”

“Yes’m,” Martha Cater growled. “She ain’t cry after you gone. I ain’t never seen no new baby as good as this one.”

I knew that old Martha hated making the admission; she had glowered and stomped around the house when Lucy told her she was going away, and predicted havoc and sleepless nights and the ruin of Malory. But it had not happened. The baby had cried bitterly and inconsolably for an hour or so after Aunt Willa and Lucy had driven away, and then, as if indeed receiving some interior signal, had looked about her, startled, and stopped the crying, and gone promptly to sleep. I know, because I was holding her at the time. Her cries had reached me even in the summerhouse, and I had not been able to let her cry on and on, without solace. She knew me, I thought, and relaxed the tiny, knotted muscles when I picked her up, but the crying did not stop until nearly an hour later. I told Lucy this, and she smiled her thousand-watt smile.

“I know,” she said. “We stopped for breakfast at the New Perry Hotel and I heard her, all of a sudden. Just in midbite.

I can’t explain it. And I…just talked to her. I went back in my head and sent her a message, not to

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cry, that I was with her and it was all right. That you were there and would take care of her. I know she stopped then.

I felt it. It’s an enormous relief, Gibby—it means I can go back to work or anywhere else I want to and she’ll be all right, because I can talk to her.”

“All we need around here is a couple of spooks,” I said, disquieted in spite of myself. I did not like the idea of Lucy’s practicing psychic communication on Malory. I wanted nothing murky, shadowed, esoteric, overly passionate, to touch her. When I thought ahead to her growing-up years, I saw sunlight and order and sand-boxes and kittens and ponies; children’s parties and nurses and starched pinafores and pigtails and family suppers around shining, silver-set tables. It was, of course, my own Buckhead childhood that I saw, or rather the furniture of it; even I knew that I was blithely painting out the pain and fear and treachery of that world, and that it was foolish, perhaps even dangerous, to wish it for Malory. But I did. Order and control—those were the things I most wished for the little girl who bore my name and my nose and my heart; order and control, not the careening, erratic, quicksilver world of excess and privation and kisses and absences and surging subterranean tides that would, I knew, be Lucy’s legacy to her. But I knew by then that neither I nor Jack Venable nor anyone else would have much say over the raising of Malory. The symbiosis between her and Lucy was simply too strong.