Peachtree Road (85 page)

“Sweetie, it’s just a nightmare,” I said, profoundly disturbed by her words. It was a terrible image. “What on earth could happen even if he did give you the sack?”

“Then it would be my turn,” she said. “The gun is for me.

If he could do that to himself—if he could actually do it—why won’t it happen to me someday? I’ve got that same…thing in me that he did, Gibby. That darkness, that craziness. I’ve always known that, and so have you. What he did…it makes it possible, don’t you see? I’m more afraid of dying than anything else on earth. I would do anything…
anything
…to keep from dying!”

Her voice had risen, and I remembered that day so long ago in the living room of the house on Peachtree Road, when she and I had crept in to watch slides of Rome and she had had the first of those terrible fits of hysteria when she saw the tombs and mausoleums of the American cemetery there.

She had screamed then, over and over, “I’m so afraid to die!

I’m so afraid to die!”

“You aren’t going to die, baby,” Jack Venable said.

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He sounded very tired. “This is just nerves—you’re upset, and you’ve been sick. I really don’t want you to go to the graveside. I’ll stay in the car with you.”

“No,” she said. “I have to see him buried.”

And she did, and was finally quiet as we heard the benediction and walked away, as if she had left the terrible fear underneath the red earth of Oakland with Ben Cameron.

We did not go back to the Cameron house for sherry and coffee and refreshments, as old Atlanta usually does after laying one of its ranks to rest. There was not even any thought of it. The crowd at the cemetery—smaller by far than the one that had come to see Ben Cameron’s son married—moved off with one accord to their big, quiet cars and went home to their big, quiet houses and closed the great doors behind them. Ben’s own crowd—our crowd, mine—made no move to gather later, as we might have done following the death of one of us.

For to drink to the dead is to keep them with you for a little while longer, and I don’t think any of us could have borne the incorporeal presence of that desperate suicide.

Lucy was right. In some fundamental way, dead Ben Cameron frightened us badly. He had, as she said, made the unthinkable thinkable, the impossible possible. There had been too much of death in that terrible year 1968; this last one brought the national horror of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy home to our very Buckhead doorsteps. I remember thinking as I watched Lucy and Jack drive away down the semicircular drive in the battered Ford that what I felt—what we all must feel now, we golden elect of an entire generation—was, as well as grief and horror, a kind of dreary tarnish, the beginning of a subtle, stale cynicism, the first awful immutable certainty that the rules of the universe do not always hold.

For the rest of that fall and winter, Lucy seemed to 668 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

continue her slow recovery. She saw a new psychiatrist once a week, driving in to his office in one of the twin towers that had risen across the street from Lenox Square, and she stayed on the Antabuse-antidepressant regimen. She regained much of her irresistible old gloss and vitality, and her splendid looks. The doctor discontinued the tranquilizer and her energy and volatility began to seep back, and by the time the first timid flush of forsythia had appeared the following February, she was restless and prowling again, pacing the farmhouse and smoking incessantly and drinking gallons of coffee and making endless telephone calls.

“I’ll go out of my mind if I don’t get out of this backwater and into something useful again,” she fretted to me during one of them. “I’ll end up murdering Jack with a hoe and setting fire to this dump. I’m sick of reading and I hate television and I don’t want to work in the fucking garden and Estelle is driving me crazy. She gives Negroes a bad name.

She has the IQ of a mess of collards. I want to go back to work, Gibby, but Jack won’t hear of it. He says I’m too fragile yet. Do I sound fragile to you? Fragile, shit—I’m not too fragile to cook and clean and wash his stupid clothes and dig in his pissant garden and fetch his drinks for him while he watches television every night of the living world.”

“Is this the girl who was dying to get away to the clean, pastoral country in a quaint old farmhouse and get her hands into the good earth?” I said. “Give Jack a break, Luce. He’s working his butt off. He deserves a hot dinner and a drink or two when he gets home. You know it’s you he’s thinking about, and he’s probably right. You don’t seem able just to do a job. You have to work yourself into the hospital.”

She was quiet, and I heard the deep inhalation of her cigarette, and then she said, “Oh, I know it. He’s right. He’s always right. I had gotten myself in bad shape.

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And he never stops thinking of me—sometimes I wonder why he bothers. I’m really awful to him sometimes, Gibby.

But he’s gotten so…old….”

“Well, he isn’t exactly young,” I said, near exasperation with her. “He was more than ten years older than you when you married him and he still is. I hope you didn’t think that would change. And he works fourteen hours a day most days. What did you expect?”

“I don’t know,” she said bleakly. “Not this.”

“What about Malory?” I said. “Isn’t she company for you?”

“Malory is a darling and a dream, but she’s in kindergarten now most of the day, and then she has play dates with the little retards around here in the afternoons—Jack makes her go; she hates it—and when he gets home she turns into Mary Poppins, buzzing around here with drinks and trays and newspapers and all till you’d like to trip her. And she is five years old. Five-year-olds are not the greatest dinner conver-sationalists, you know.”

“I do know,” I said, distinctly annoyed now. “Didn’t you, until now? Is this a recent discovery? Mother discovers five-year-old’s conversation intellectually lacking? Maybe you should send her to Dale Carnegie. Or me—I think she’s terrific company.”

“Oh, you’re impossible!” she snapped, and hung up the phone, but in a moment she called back.

“It’s me who’s impossible, not you,” she said. “I’m sorry, Gibby. I’ve turned into a first-class, gold-plated bitch. I’m going to have another talk with Jack tonight about going back to work. He’s got to have noticed how miserable I am, and God knows we need the money, and this time I’ll find something that’s impossible to get absorbed in, like filing or typing or answering telephones.”

“I didn’t know you could file or type, and I wouldn’t let you answer my telephone if it was ringing off the 670 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

hook,” I said. “Jungle drums are more your style.”

She laughed, the old dark, rich, fudgy laugh.

“Why is it I only love bastards?” she said. “I can do anything I have to do to get out of God’s Little Acre; you’ll see how good I can be. This time it will be different. Will you back me up with Jack if he gives me a hard time?”

I said I would, but in the end I did not have to. She must have convinced him that night that she could hold a job and not let it devour her, for she was phoning her contacts the next day. She eventually persuaded SOUTH to take her back, this time as a receptionist working from 10:00 A.M. to 4:00

P.M., and soon she was back in the flood waters of the civil rights movement again—or at least paddling in the slow, sunny shallows at its borders. She seemed, for a span of months, to be content with speaking by telephone to the disembodied voices of the movement’s rank and file, foot soldiers now instead of lieutenants, but as the spring moved into an early inferno summer, I wondered often how long that dutiful new disassociation would last.

I think she might have made it work, eventually made some sort of hard-won transition from activist to onlooker in the movement, if the movement itself had not let her down.

If that great, pure, onrushing spate of personal heroism and selfless integrity had not faltered, I think she could have drawn enough stimulus, enough exaltation—who knows?—enough self-validation from simply wading near its peaceful banks. Lucy always did need intimate contact with heroes and legends; had, since the day she stepped into the house on Peachtree Road out of the dragon-infested world. The movement fed them to her by the hundreds for years.

But in 1969, that lusterless year, Richard Nixon took office as the thirty-seventh president of a battered and reeling United States, and a diminished and spent Ben PEACHTREE ROAD / 671

Cameron announced that he would not seek a third term as mayor, and Lucy’s fiercely idolized Ralph McGill died of a heart attack in the home of a black friend, and the great civil rights movement divided itself around the mammoth rocks of Vietnam and the youth movement and the drug culture, and never really came together again. It was the very young who raged in the streets now, and they marched and chanted and smoked and sang against the war and their fathers and mothers. The Negro youths who ran in the streets of the South ran largely with the nirvana-bent white young, beaded and fringed and belled and stoned.

In her flaming soul, Lucy did not give a tinker’s damn for Vietnam or the hippies. There were no heroes among them; not to her vision-dazzled blue eyes. She did not even care for the budding feminist movement. She found no heroes in those sly jungles, or in the strident bands of bra burners, or in the stoned and supine young. I don’t know why I did not anticipate that, lacking heroes, she would eventually go in search of them. It is easier to understand why Jack Venable did not see it; he was, by then, simply so tired that he would have looked the other way if she had put on a suit of armor and brought a white horse around to the front door.

But I, who had watched her quests and even ridden out beside her, on occasion, since childhood; I, who had, when she could not find a hero, tried to become one for her myself; I, who felt her hungers and thirsts, once, as my own—I should have seen. I should have known.

Lucy met Beau Longshore when he came shambling into the office of
SOUTH
looking for funds for his Mississippi mission, and she was probably beyond help by the time he told her what he sought. As terrible as its consequences were, I often thought I would have loved to be there to witness that meeting. Sparks must have danced like fireflies in the overheated air of the dingy lit

672 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

tle office. I have seen Lucy
connect
before with certain receptive people, and have felt her do it with me; I can testify to the palpability of those invisible explosions of pure light. But they must have been both palpable and visible that day.

It was inevitable that she took Beau home with her to the farmhouse for the night, since he was without cash or contacts or any other resource in the city. She brought him by the summerhouse on the way, to meet me and cadge a sandwich and a drink, and a contribution, and when I was introduced I had the eerie feeling that I was shaking hands with Lucy’s twin. The same luminosity looked out of his sunken eyes; the same fever; the same veiled madness. By the time the makeshift meal was over I was almost as captivated by him as she was, but also profoundly alarmed by the meeting of the two of them. I almost called Jack Venable and told him to put an end to the association no matter what it took, but then I didn’t. I think perhaps I knew, on some level, that it was already far too late.

Beau’s detractors, even then, would have peopled a small county in wire-grass Georgia, but he was personally almost irresistible. Later, after he achieved national recognition, his following gained almost the status and intensity of a religious cult—which, in a very real way, it was—and his detractors feared as well as hated him. He was very tall, and thin to the point of emaciation, and, like Jack Venable, prematurely white-haired, either by hereditary disposition or by bodily abuse. His brown eyes burned in sockets so deep and shadowed they looked like pits in a pear bog in which live coals smoldered. He was deeply tanned from the relentless sun of the Mississippi gulf coast, and the effect was oddly patrician, coupled with his long, graceful bones and good facial modeling. He wore white duck pants and a faded blue denim shirt, and in them he looked as if he had just rowed ashore in

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a dinghy from the family racing sloop.

In fact, the pants were the white ones he had been issued in the African clinic where he had gone as a medical missionary, and the shirt had come out of the same poor box that clothed his patients in the swamp near Pass Christian. But the aristocratic demeanor was legitimate. He was, Lucy told me later, about as FFV as it was possible to be, having in his ancestry both Custis and Lee blood, and he had graduated from theology school at Sewanee and medical school at Johns Hopkins, both with honors. He did not trade on his family back in Richmond, and they in turn did not acknowledge him. The breach had been opened when he passed up the pulpit of the old gray stone Episcopal church in Richmond to go to Gabon, and had become an abyss when he came home with a shining black, Oxford-educated wife. She had quickly become disenchanted with being a missionary’s wife and disappeared back to her people in Bandundu, and he had not seen her again.

“I’m sure we’re divorced in her eyes,” he told Lucy. “I think they do it by dancing around a chicken, or something. As for God’s eyes, he winks at a hell of a lot in Africa.”

In Africa he saw that it was disease and passivity, not Godlessness, that was the ancient enemy, and so he came home and put himself through medical school with a stipend from the church and three and four odd jobs at a time. It was inevitable that he would turn to drugs. The whole tenor of that generation was one of chemical exaltation, and he found that the easily purloined drugs gave strength to his intensity and got him through Hopkins. Many medical students of the Age of Aquarius regularly took uppers and downers and Percodan and Demerol; Beau Longshore simply never came down. He graduated to cocaine and flirted with LSD, and in between he drank.

674 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

This chemical
pot-au-feu
in his bloodstream did not, for many years, seem to affect him materially. The shimmer of energy and elation in his veins was offset by his lounging, slouching demeanor and his deceptively strong constitution, and in the ten years or so that he had been out of medical school and in Africa and later on the steaming Mississippi gulf coast, he had been able to accomplish an astounding amount of social good on an astoundingly small amount of money. But now he was running out of cash and physical impetus, and his methods of practicing medicine and theology had alienated him from the church and his profession, and so he had come, for the first time, looking for help.