Peachtree Road (81 page)

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Atlanta’s momentum did not come cheap. Nearriots simmered in the bright, hot days and the thick nights. Ben Cameron met and talked and met and talked until, at one point, he was put to bed in the house on Muscogee Avenue by Hub Dorsey and a determined Dorothy and forbidden to talk for a week on pain of losing his voice permanently.

During one particularly spectacular confrontation he climbed atop a parked car, a surging sea of angry, frustrated black faces at his feet, his coppery head a target for any murderous fool within a mile radius, and pleaded through a borrowed bullhorn for order. He finally got it—and his photograph in the newspapers of an entire nation—before he was toppled from the car and ended up in Piedmont Emergency with a sprained ankle and a hole in the seat of his pants. But Atlanta did not blossom into flames as Detroit and Watts and Pittsburgh and other cities did in those summers, and as Ben himself said, that was worth a considerable chunk of a mayor’s ass.

In Buckhead, Sarah and Charlie had another little girl, called Charlsie, and young Ben and Julia Cameron another small red-haired son, and Ben rapidly became one of the young architects of the hour and the day, mentioned often in almost the same tone of voice as Philip Johnson and I. M.

Pei. He was out of town a great deal in those days, and Julia would say, ruefully, that she supposed he had another family somewhere who was doting and fussing over him, because she and the boys certainly never saw him. But her voice was warm with pride. There was no doubt in the mind of anyone who saw them together that Ben was absolutely besotted with his sons.

Little Lady had the first of many discreet blackouts and did a discreet stint at Brawner’s while her own small children were cared for by Atlanta’s only, and cordially hated, English nanny, and Carter grew richer and richer 636 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

and more remote. Aunt Willa finally gave up any pretense of working as a buyer at Rich’s and became one of Buckhead’s most elegant chatelaines.
The Compleat Georgian
moved ponderously out of my notes and into my typewriter.

And Lucy quit her job at Damascus House and took one with
SOUTH
, a little foundation-funded, ultraliberal journal which put her, as she said, far more into the thick of things.

It was, from everyone’s standpoint but hers, an appallingly bad move.

From spending her days and nights within the walls of Damascus House, she was soon traveling all over the South in the little Austin the journal provided her, hastily gathered clothes strewn over the backseat and a bearded, cool-eyed, laughably young photographer in the front beside her, covering the movement. It was, by then, surging inexorably out of the deep, calm channel King and his early supporters had dug for it and into the glinting, murderous shoals of radical violence, and we at home feared both the sniper’s bullet and Lucy’s own erratic hands on the Austin’s steering wheel when she was away. She was by then literally intoxicated with the momentum and glamour of the movement, and most of her time was spent in the company of the young heroes and guerrilla fighters whose names and cold, closed faces were familiar on television screens and in newspapers on half a dozen fronts: Little Rock, Selma, Birmingham, Montgomery, Oxford. More than once she went beyond the bounds of her job and the instructions of her editors and ended up in jail herself. Jack and the older children were frightened and resentful, Malory was bewildered, Aunt Willa was predictably outraged and Lucy herself was as exalted as an avenging angel.

Once, after I had wired bail money yet again, I laid into her on her return. She had brought Malory to the summerhouse for a rare visit, and when the little girl ran PEACHTREE ROAD / 637

out to play by the lily pool I said without preamble, “I guess you think it would be really wonderful to be slain on the altar of the goddamned movement.”

“Maybe not slain,” she said around her inevitable cigarette.

“But I’d love to be beaten or hosed or bitten by dogs. Maybe even shot, if it didn’t kill me. I need to know how it feels. I need to go through it all with them. They’re my people. It’s my fight. You ought to be in it with us, Gibby.”

“They’re fucking well not your people,” I snarled. “Jack is your people. Malory is your people. Toby and Tommy are your people. What good are you to them if you’re dead on a dirt road in Mississippi? And I
am
in it with you. I’m financing the damned thing with your bail and fines.”

“You’re just like Jack Venable,” she snapped. “Putting yourselves ahead of the greatest and most…morally important…movement in history. Why can’t you see that I do this for the children? I want Malory to grow up knowing what’s really important.”

“I want Malory to grow up with a real mother, not a fake honky martyr,” I said.

But Lucy was blazing with zeal and exaltation, and did not hear me. She was back on the road the next Monday.

She was not eating or sleeping well, and grew thinner and more haggard and incandescent by the day, and drove herself incredibly with her travels and deadlines and the long, passionate talk sessions with the new young black lieutenants now in the movement’s vanguard. I do not think that she loved or respected them any more than she had King and his honor guard, but there is no question but that they excited her more. She ran on stimulation, in those days, like a race car on high-octane gasoline.

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and obsession had been having a markedly adverse effect on the children, but they did not seem to do so. The boys, teenaged now, had been indifferent to her at best, and were no doubt glad to have their father to themselves so much of the time. And Malory, at five, was a sunny and self-possessed child, enchanting to look at and adept at pleasing the adults around her, and she showed no signs of missing her mother.

She did not lack for company. Wherever she went, Malory charmed. She had an uncanny sense of just what small action or gesture or phrase would most please whom, and had a habit of making vivid little crayon drawings signed, “I love you, Malory B. Venable,” and giving them to family, friends and new acquaintances alike. A great many refrigerators around Lithonia and one or two in Buckhead, in those days, wore Malory’s drawings. Mine was nearly papered with them.

I was not sure I liked or approved of the facility for self-endearment that she displayed; it spoke too loudly of subterranean need. But I was, as was everyone around her, totally captivated by it. Malory Venable midway into her sixth year of life was almost literally too good to be true.

You would often forget, around her, that she was a child.

Despite her pointed pixie chin and Lucy’s huge, crystal-blue eyes and the silky child’s hair, cut in ragged points around her heartshaped face, Malory had about her the nurturing manner and outward focus of an adult. When I thought about it, I would realize that she had been cast by Lucy’s absences into the role of caretaker and helper early on. She brought trays and magazines and slippers and drinks and snacks to Jack, and she fetched and carried for the boys when they would allow her to, and when she was visiting with me she frequently pattered around collecting dishes and fluffing sofa cushions and bringing me astounding treats foraged from my refrigerator. I soon learned to accept them without fuss;

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if you praised Malory for a service, she would wear herself out finding others to perform.

Perhaps she did not seem to suffer from Lucy’s absences because the tenor of her mother’s presence, when she was there, was so intense. The old symbiosis still held; an arc of utter attention still leaped between the two of them when they were together, and the old eerie, voiceless communion still prevailed. I have seen Lucy, in front of visitors, stop and fall silent and somehow compose her face, and soon Malory would appear from wherever she was, trotting straight to her mother and looking up questioningly. It was in the nature of a parlor trick, and I hated it when Lucy did it, but it was admittedly startling to see. When Malory was older, she stopped automatically responding, refusing with a lovely and touching natural dignity to allow herself to be exploited, but she still felt Lucy’s call, and continued to do so, I know, for as long as her mother lived.

When she was in the city, Lucy was hardly ever away from her daughter. She took Malory into her and Jack’s bed in the morning and evenings, brought her along on interviews and into the office and allowed her to sit up late with the blacks and whites in the movement who came, inevitably, to the farmhouse to eat, rest, talk and often stay for a night or a week or more.

“Be brave like that, Malory,” she would say often. “Always be brave.”

And Malory would nod silently, her whole child’s heart in her eyes.

I detested that chaotic nonchildhood for Malory, but I could understand her fascination with her mother. I would try to see Lucy through her eyes, and the vision was irresistible and overpowering: the beautiful, vivid, shimmering mother, rarely seen but constantly felt, swooping in and out of her small life trailing passion and glory and swarms of intense, exotic people in her wake

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like the cosmic detritus in the tail of a comet. No wonder her father seemed, by contrast, simply dull. I know that she thought him so. How could she not? Sinking into the passivity that would last his lifetime, uniformly silvery gray and amorphous, slumped into his easy chair, mired in the anodynes of scotch and television; the reluctant disciplinarian, the unshining one, always and endlessly
there
—Jack Venable never had a chance with Malory. She loved him, I know, but as one might a great, sweet dog, or her familiar bed. By contrast Lucy burned like Venus on a winter night.

“Jack is a lump,” Malory said to me once when she was spending the day with me in the summerhouse. “He sleeps all the time and he smells funny.”

She visited fairly often in those years, when Jack had to work on weekends, or when she had a shopping or movie expedition planned with her grandmother. We both loved those days, I because I loved her, by then, with all the passion I could never spend on Sarah or Lucy or my mother, and she, I suppose, because I interested her. She seemed to see nothing odd about an uncle—or cousin, or however she thought of me—who had shut himself up in a summerhouse behind the great house of his birth and saw almost no one.

We had long conversations about a startling variety of things: leaping, veering, shining talk that refreshed and enchanted me. It was I who read her Kipling and Malory, and she loved them as her mother had done before her. Lucy had told her about the two books, those icons of safety and magic which had burned so clearly and steadily through our childhood, and when she cried aloud with Mowgli, “Mark my trai-i-i-1!”

and, “We be of one blood, thou and I,” it was nearly impossible for me to distinguish between mother’s and daughter’s voices; both resonated, intertwined, in my heart. The words never failed to bring a thickness to my throat: she was, after all, one way or

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another, of my blood. I like to think that it was, in part, from me that she learned to assess and reflect and think abstractly, and it was from her that I learned again to dream and suppose and play. There was little that she did not say to me.

It was hard indeed to remember that she was only five.

“He’s not a lump,” I said, on the day that she spoke so of Jack Venable. “He works hard all day and he’s tired when he gets home. If he didn’t rest he couldn’t go to work and take care of you.”

“Phooey,” she said. “He doesn’t have to do that. You’ll do that. Mama says you will.”

“Well, I would if he couldn’t for some reason,” I said, cursing Lucy silently for that tacit belittlement of Jack. “But he can. It’s his job. It’s what fathers do. He loves you and your mama.”

“You love my mama, don’t you?” she said.

“Of course I do,” I said, not at all liking where this was going. “But in a different way.”

“Well, I think your way is better than Jack’s,” she said. “He really is a lump. He’s a collection of bumping molecules.”

I recognized Lucy’s voice in that, and said, severely, “I don’t want to hear any more talk about your father, Malory.

He’s a good man. You’d really be up the creek without him around to look after you.”

“Maybe,” she said equably. “But I could probably look after myself just fine. I wouldn’t be afraid.”

I knew that she wouldn’t. Malory was afraid of almost nothing. Almost. But there was one thing of which she
was
afraid, afraid with a terror so deep and consuming that it sent her into the kind of white, blind hysterics that I had not seen since Lucy’s childhood. At first, when she was very small, we could not determine what it was; the fits came at random, once or twice at the Peachtree Road house, more often in the farmhouse. She

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could only gasp and sob something that sounded like “shoo man, shoo man.”

Finally we isolated what it was that sent her into that awful, mindless shrieking: It was the framed photographs that stood about the farmhouse, all taken on the same day, of her grandfather, James Bondurant, Lucy’s father. In all of them, he was wearing black and white saddle shoes, and it was only when she was old enough to shape words into sentences that we could fathom why she was so terrified of him. She was afraid he was going to come in his strange, striped shoes and take her mother away. Until she was eight or nine, we could not disabuse her of that notion.

“Did you tell her that?” I demanded of Lucy, the first time the root of the fear came to light.

“Of course not,” she said indignantly.

“Well, where the hell else would she get it?”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Gibby, I might have said something about him coming back to get me one day, but nothing that would make her behave like that.”

“Lucy,” I said, “sometimes I think you’re just plain crazy.”

I would remember those words.