Peachtree Road (87 page)
Authors: Anne Rivers Siddons
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thick like a photographic negative, and frogs and peepers and other silver-voiced night things called in the murderous undergrowth, and wild honeysuckle and mimosa was so powerful that it seemed another breath, the living breath of an elemental spirit or God. There was no sign of life about the mission as we got out of the Rolls, but a dim yellow light, like that of a kerosene lantern, showed in a back window, and a bluish one flickered in a front one: television.
We walked together, silently and in a kind of lock step, to the porch of the cabin and knocked. The noise of our marauding knuckles was awful. There was no answer, and presently I took a deep breath to call out, but Jack laid an urgent hand on my arm.
“Don’t,” he said in a whisper. “God, don’t. Let me go in.”
“Not by yourself,” I whispered back.
“Stay out here, Shep,” he said in a low, fierce voice. “I don’t want you with me.”
“You can’t stop me,” I hissed back. He glared at me, then lifted his shoulders and dropped them, defeated, and we went into Beau Longshore’s clinic.
The large main room of the cabin was unbelievably filthy.
It smelled rankly of sweat and spoiling food and something else, sweet and pungent—marijuana, I supposed, mingled with some sort of homemade liquor or cheap wine—and illness and despair. No light burned, but a television set flickered against one wall:
The Tonight Show
. On it, a silent, gesticulating Johnny Carson was interviewing an equally mute black man, bearded and beaded and wild-haired and fierce; interchangeable with all the young blacks now in the media’s eye. He might have been rock star, activist, evangelist or felon. On bare, stained mattresses in front of the set several young black men and women lay sprawled in drug stupors or liquor comas—it was impossible to tell which, only that the
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languors were not those of fatigue and sleep.
No one spoke to us. I do not think anyone even noticed us. Some of the couples were half-dressed and in disarray, as if they had been making love, but none were naked, and none were engaged then in sex. Bottles and paper cups and ashtrays and paper plates half-full of something shining with grease that was turning fast in the thick, still heat littered the floor beside the mattresses. In a far corner, over a hot plate, an utterly silent and rather beautiful young black woman stirred something in a dented saucepan, slowly, slowly. She lifted a sullen, dead-eyed Circe’s head and looked at us, but did not speak or gesture, and presently dropped her eyes.
She wore what looked, grotesquely, like a child’s organdy pinafore, translucent over her ripe blackness and far too small, and nothing else. We walked past all of them and into the small space behind the main room, and there, by the light that was indeed that of a kerosene lantern, we found Lucy and Beau Longshore.
They were naked and intertwined on another mattress on the floor, and their clothes were piled on one side of it, below black-framed white rectangles that I suppose were Beau’s degrees from Sewanee and Johns Hopkins. Plates of the same mess that we had seen in the other room lay beside them, and several empty fifth bottles. I could not see the labels, but from the shape and smell of them I knew them to be scotch, and expensive scotch at that. Lucy’s scotch, Haig & Haig, or perhaps Cutty Sark. I wondered if she had brought them with her, or if some reluctantly scribbled aid check to Beau Longshore had bought them. The doctor was bonelessly unconscious, and looked, in the dim, leaping light, as if he might be moribund or already dead, his body and face were so thin and slack and livid. But Lucy was awake, and in her light blue eyes, deeply undercircled now with black and saffron, I saw the old, icy flame of liquor and 684 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS
madness, and on top of it a flat, new glitter that I knew must be one of the visionary young doctor’s liberating drugs. I felt only an endless gray annoyance, but I tasted in my mouth the salt of my own tears.
“Oh, shit, Lucy,” I whispered.
“Hey, Gibby,” Lucy Bondurant Chastain Venable sang.
“Hey, Jack. Stick it in your ear!”
This time she went to Park Forest, a new psychiatric facility in the foothills north of the city specializing in alcohol and substance abuse. A stricken Chip Turner insisted that
Newsweek
cover her bills, even though they had no liability for her, and Jack gratefully accepted. He was, by then, completely out of money, and would take none from me. If it had not been for Chip’s offer, Lucy would have had to go to the regional alcoholic facility in Decatur. I do not think she would have come out. But Park Forest was experimental and state-of-the-art, and had a wealth of new therapies and medications to try on her, and did not, in its jaunty newness, brook defeat. We left her there knowing that what could be done for her they would do. We agreed not to call or visit for the specified two weeks. We signed the papers and handed over her bag and kissed her thin, wet cheek and shut our ears to her cries and pleading and went home to see what might be done for that other small victim of Beau Longshore’s odyssey.
Malory was quiet and docile when Jack picked her up at the house on Peachtree Road, and went with him obediently after kissing her grandmother and me goodbye, but the very next afternoon a frantic Jack Venable was on the telephone asking if I had seen or heard from her, saying that he had just learned from the old black woman, who had it from her first-grade teacher, that she had not gotten off the school bus that morning. Before I had gotten through to the Atlanta police, just as Shem was bringing the Rolls around to the front door, a yellow
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cab drew up to the portico and small Malory Venable got out of the back and walked hesitantly into my arms.
She had waited until Jack had driven away from the school bus stop and walked the few blocks into down-town Lithonia, and taken the bus with her lunch money and ridden it into the Greyhound terminal in downtown Atlanta, and gotten into the first taxicab that she had seen outside, and they had brought her to us. I paid the driver and took her out to the summerhouse while Martha Cater called Jack. I had not wanted Aunt Willa fluttering around me wringing her hands and excoriating Lucy, and so had not yet told her that Malory was missing. So far as I knew, she was still napping in her room. But I took no chances. I sat Malory down on the summerhouse sofa with a cup of hot chocolate and looked at her, wondering whether to scold or caress or cry myself, in answer to the great tears that were only then beginning to slide down her cheeks.
“You scared us, you know,” I said around the lump in my throat. “We didn’t know what had happened to you.”
“I don’t want to be there anymore,” she said, trying very hard not to let her small face knot up, struggling to hold back the tears. “I was scared and Jack doesn’t do anything but sleep and I can’t hear my mother. Nobody was taking care of me, and Mama said you would if nobody else did, and so…I came. If you make me go back I’ll just come again.”
I took her in my arms then, and sat with her pulled hard against me in that dying spring twilight, feeling the trembling and sobbing of relief and release start and swell and then wane into drowsiness, watching the lights of the big house bloom in the lavender dusk, and cursed with pain and anger the particular and malevolent world that sent a vivid little girl and, many years later, her own small daughter in the selfsame headlong flight from it.
M
alory ran away so many times during the next decade that when Willie Nelson recorded “On the Road Again” in her adolescence, I gave her a gold charm of the record, and she laughed, and put it on her charm bracelet.
“He should dedicate it to me, shouldn’t he?” she said ruefully. “I guess I’m on the road almost as much as he is. Are you tired of me?”
“Oh, not yet, I guess,” I said lightly. “You add a certain touch of class to this dump.”
For it was to me that she came when the darkening burdens in the farmhouse overwhelmed her small shoulders, first by bus and taxi and then, in the heart-stopping manner of her generation, hitchhiking. In time it became Jack and Lucy’s custom to look first for her in the summerhouse of the Peachtree Road house, and almost always she was there, curled up on the sofa reading or listening to music, played softly, while I limned the ancestry of Sarah Gentry. Sometimes, too, she asked to spend the night at 2500 with her grandmother Willa, who adored her, and I would take her formally by the hand and present her at the back door of the big house, and Shem or Martha would bear her away to the small room next to Aunt Willa’s that was kept for her, smiling broadly in the joy and pride of her presence. Often she stayed two or three days with us, but always there came a phone call from Lucy saying that she needed Malory, and to please have Shem bring her home.
And Malory would go obediently and without protest, for with her the operative word was and always would be “need.”
For the first third of her life, whenever her mother’s phone calls speaking of need came, Malory laid aside whatever she was doing and, like the good
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child she was, went home. The certainty that she would was, I think, one of the few fixed stars in Lucy’s careening firmament.
Lucy was in a kind of free-fall by then, not precipitous and horrifying to see, but a kind of sideslipping drifting, a dreaming, spiraling descent, as a sky-diver will experience riding the thermal currents before he pulls his cord. I have heard that to the diver, that dreamlike free-fall is more dangerous than the moment of his impact, for it is often so hypnotic, so altogether free and rapturous, that the temptation to prolong it until it is too late to pull the cord is very great. I think perhaps that Lucy found in her long descent something of that freedom and rapture, for she often seemed to retreat into it when the world pierced her too hard and frequently, or she bruised herself upon reality. It was not, I have never thought, that she courted madness and deterioration, but rather that she simply did not seek very hard to elude them. Perhaps she did not, by then, even fully realize when she entered that comfortable fugue. Lucy had lived in the cold land of reality as long as she could bear it; by the fourth decade of her life she was largely an occasional visitor there. It was we who watched, not she, who knew, almost to the moment, when she left it.
I knew by her voice on the telephone. When she was in one of her stretches of smooth water, her voice was rich and slow and husky from her eternal cigarettes, and her drawled
“Gibby? It’s Lucy, honey” was dark and thick with promised laughter and irony. When she had begun drinking—for it was alcohol now, whatever secret white roots of madness lay still unplowed in her mind, alcohol that began those long, slow spirals, and became the whole of her torment and ours—her voice was as pure and sharp and glittering as broken glass, high and humming with secret glee.
“Gibby, honey?” she would sing out in the crystal 688 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS
voice, followed by a deep, sucking inhalation of smoke. “Are you there, dahlin’? It’s Lucy.”
I hated that voice. I hated those calls. After a while I stopped wondering, even, what had set her off and braced myself for the litany of anger and terror that would inevitably follow. For after the incident with Beau Longshore on that nameless Mississippi coast, her aberration took a different tack from the hysteria followed by near-catatonic depression that had begun to form a pattern with her, and she became obsessed with fear of, and a terrible rage at, Jack.
She seemed to believe, then, when liquor ushered in her glittering madness, that he was plotting to have her committed to the state institution for the insane, and was in collusion with Aunt Willa and the hapless Little Lady to keep her a prisoner there for the rest of her life. She said, too, with a frail child’s terror that would have been heartbreaking if I had not heard it so often, that he was abusing her both mentally and physically, often slapping and hitting and kicking her, and she was afraid that someday he would kill her with a gun. I could not disabuse her of these notions while she was in that state. Nothing, not my insistence that she wake Jack and put him on the phone and let me talk to him, not my pointing out to her, over and over, that she had no marks or bruises upon her, nothing brooked the tide of rage and fear, the nightly recitals of his monstrousness.
“Lucy, he doesn’t even have a gun,” I said to her once, in the early days, when I was still trying to reason with her.
“He told me he hated them and that he’d rather be killed by a burglar than keep a gun in the house with the children there.”
“Oh, he has a gun, you’ll just never see it,” she said in the crystalline singsong. “But I see it all the time. It’s the one he took away from his first wife once, before she left. Poor woman, I understand now why she did it. I PEACHTREE ROAD / 689
never did before. I’ve misjudged her terribly, Gibby. Terribly.
I’m being punished for that.”
Later in that decade, the calls began to come from other places. Perhaps three or four times a year the phone would ring in the evenings, and something about the silence on the other end of the receiver would alert me even before a laughing, lilting Lucy told me that she was in one or another of the cut-rate businessmen’s motels that ringed the city at the Interstate exits, with a man she had picked up in the adjacent piano bar.
It was as if that first act of illicit sex with Beau Longshore had lifted some essential governor off her dark, glinting mind, and the search for the sheltering father’s arms which she had never found became overt. In her periods of relative health and rationality, Lucy was as faithful to Jack Venable as some nineteenth-century farm bride. When the darkness came, it led her to the scanty sheets and thin mattresses of Holiday Inns and Howard Johnsons all over North Fulton County.
In the beginning Jack would go and get her out, silent and grim, but she became so abusive and strident after a while, when he appeared to take her home, that he simply stopped going and, when she called, rolled over and went back to sleep. He knew that she would call me next, and that I would go. Lucy would usually come home with me.