Burnt Mountain (3 page)

Fully half of them shopped weekly in Atlanta, though, and sometimes more often. Dressed defiantly in their Sunday best, gloved,
hatted, and handbagged, they surged into the city in waves, on Greyhound buses and in newly washed family sedans. A few of
the Lytton men who were not merchants or farmers or makers or repairers of objects worked there. A scattering of lawyers,
a big-town banker or two, airline personnel, toilers in the huge industries that besmirched the municipal skies with smoke
and stink. But my father was the only Atlanta native I ever knew who chose to leave it and live and work in Lytton.

The Alexander Hamilton Academy, a well-endowed and -regarded boys’ preparatory school on Lytton’s northern outskirts, drew
students from all over the South. The school was known to have been founded by an eccentric Atlanta millionaire who believed
that the bucolic drowsiness of a small town would be the best atmosphere for learning, unfettered as it was by such distracting
amenities as movie theaters, soda shops, or gaming establishments. Most students boarded, and undoubtedly would have mutinied
and fled in droves except that the educations they received were first-rate.

To a man—or boy—they howled at the lack of recreational amenities, but most went on to colleges of their choice, and so, in
turn, they sent their scowling sons there.

Lytton boys did not attend Hamilton Academy. Not that
there were none qualified; a few would have done well. But the school was still owned by the family of the founding millionaire,
and the curse of Atlanta still hovered over it. Lytton High had been good enough for generations of Lyttoners, and it was
good enough, by God, for their sons. Or maybe that nice military school down in Newnan that was said to be stricter than the
army itself.

How many Lytton boys might have found their futures smothered and shaped by Hamilton Academy will never be known.

I still wonder if any of the other Atlanta satellite towns could possibly have had the sheer animus toward it that Lytton
pumped out. After all these years I still don’t understand. But it did not surprise me that none of Hamilton’s faculty lived
in Lytton; no rental opportunities were ever offered them. I imagine most of them figured they were well out of Lytton, anyway.

And then came my father.

It was his great-grandfather, known to his associates to be crazier than batshit, who had founded the academy, and the family
down to and including Finch’s mother and father had kept it viable, not as much for fun as for profit. Hamilton added a nice
heft to the bag of profitable endeavors that the enterprising Wentworth men had cobbled together. By the time young Finch
Wentworth, the only son of his generation, graduated from Princeton, the Wentworth clan was coining money and living at the
top of Atlanta’s scanty social heap, on Habersham Road. Finch, who had studied history
at Princeton and wanted only to teach it, was a natural for Hamilton, not only for a faculty position but also as incumbent
owner of the school.

He had been teaching for scarcely two weeks, living at home on Habersham Road and beginning to think he should be nearer to
Hamilton, both in fact and spirit, when he walked into my grandfather Thayer’s drugstore on Lytton’s main street and asked
to see the owner. My grandfather Owen sauntered out from behind the drug window and asked what he could do to help him.

My mother, Crystal, sampling colognes behind the gift counter, sauntered out to see who this tall stranger might be.

My father saw my mother and forgot what he had come for.

“I think I need some Band-Aids,” he said, still looking at Crystal Thayer. In the soft artificial lighting of the gift department,
smelling of My Sin, she burned on his retinas like a solar flare.

Recognizing the symptoms of his affliction—for she was by then almost MGM pretty—she smiled at him and faded back behind the
counter. But she kept her ears open. Not too many tall, well-dressed strangers walked into her father’s drugstore.

My father jerked his head back around at my grandfather Thayer, waiting politely beside him, and stammered, “… Uh, uh—Oh!
And some iodine and Mercurochrome, too, and aspirin, and a whole bunch of first-aid stuff, and soap and things like that,
and I guess vitamins and cotton swabs… lots of those…”

My grandfather lifted his eyebrows.

“I’m buying them for the school,” my father said. “For Hamilton Academy. I guess I’ll be buying a good bit of stuff in bulk
every month. Maybe I should open an account….”

“And your relationship to the school would be…?” my grandfather said a trifle coolly. This addled young man could be setting
up a field hospital for terrorists, for all he knew.

“Well,” my father said, “I guess I own it. Or at least my family does. And I teach history there. Finch Wentworth,” he added
hastily, putting his hand out.

“Owen Thayer,” my grandfather said, taking it.

My mother came out from behind her counter and wafted up beside her father.

“I’m Crystal Thayer,” she said, cocking her head winsomely up at my father. Her silvery hair swung over her cheek like a bell.

“You’re from Atlanta, aren’t you?”

“Ah… yeah,” he said. “But I’m thinking I really ought to find a place here, you know, with the school here and everything.”

“Well.” She dimpled. “That shouldn’t be any problem, should it, Daddy?”

“I don’t know of any places right off, honey,” Dr. Thayer said, “but I suppose I could look around….”

“Oh, shoot, Daddy, I can think of one place right off. You know our garage apartment’s just been sitting here since Memaw
died. You were saying just the other day we ought to do something with it.”

“Well, you know, your mother…”

“I’ll talk to Mama.”

My grandfather went back behind his window to start gathering up my father’s supplies. He knew a done deal when he heard one.

E
ven now, with all that has passed between and around us, I sometimes think that I am not entirely fair to my mother. Is any
daughter, ever? What girl child can ever see the woman who bore her whole? The mask of mother is a totality; there are no
fissures in it where the vast complexity of otherness can show through. I think comprehension can come later, on both sides,
if both mother and daughter are willing to do the work. I never was. I think I simply grew too comfortable with the role of
victim—dependent on it, really. It defined me so early that I never had to search for a legitimate self until much later.

But my mother was never simply a victimizer; she was a wife, a lover, and a mother in the best sense of the words, as well
as the worst, a daughter and a dreamer, a yearner. Oh, a great, great yearner. As a larva might, if such things were possible,
yearn for the completion of butterfly wings and endless
nectar, my mother yearned for the perfect complexion and habitat for her specialness.

No one had ever told her that she was not special; from the time she could understand words, her mother told her of her beauty,
her gifts, her talents, her destiny. She was to be, though I doubt if my grandmother ever came right out and said it, all
that plain, frail little Leona Brumby was not and never had been. My grandmother Leona was in one respect a very tough cookie.
I think she could have bent silver spoons if it had been her will. That will got her a handsome, wellborn druggist husband
and one of Lytton’s more substantial homes. And as for all the other things… the looks, the vitality, the promise… she would
have them. She knew this. If not for herself, through this last, porcelain daughter.

Like my father, my mother was a late-born child. Her clamorous older sisters were away at school or, in one case, married,
so there was no competition for Crystal Thayer’s throne. She had childhood virtually to herself.

Leona Thayer was by then often bedridden with the frightening spells that left her white and gasping and kept Owen Thayer’s
worried attention constantly upon her. The son of a physician, he adored medicine and he would have studied it himself if
his IQ had matched his father’s. The drugstore was the next best thing, and fussing over Leona came as naturally to him as
breathing. No doctor had ever seemed to diagnose her debilitating spells with any degree of certainty, but there could be
no doubt that Leona Thayer was chronically and gravely afflicted. Most of Lytton thought she was lucky to have a handsome,
attentive husband, a beautiful
youngest child, and free medicine all her life. And everyone said how sweet that pretty child was to her mother, not going
away to school as her sisters had done but staying close to her mother’s side. Crystal often politely refused invitations
with a shy smile.

“I promised Mama I’d read to her this afternoon,” she would say. “We’re reading
Wind in the Willows.
Mama’s Ratty and I’m being Mole.”

By the time she was grammar-school age her bewitched father had offered boarding schools in six states, but Crystal refused
to leave her mother.

“There’s plenty of time for that
later
, Daddy,” she would say tremulously, the “later” tolling like a funeral bell with import. And Owen Thayer would hug her with
tears in his eyes. He knew that his wife would not live a great deal longer, even if he was not and never would be quite sure
what it was she died from.

“You’re our special angel,” he would say to his daughter. The special angel would hug him back and go, sighing audibly, back
to her classes at the little Lytton school. The truth was, she loved being head cheerleader, homecoming queen, best all-around
everything, booked up months ahead for every dance, and being courted by every eligible young man in the area. Achieving all
this in Lytton was a cakewalk. She was not entirely sure how she might have fared elsewhere.

She knew where elsewhere would be, though.

“Atlanta,” Leona would say to her over and over. “Atlanta was just made for you. You could have the richest husband and the
biggest house in town. The Piedmont Driving Club,
that’s where you belong. You can have it all without lifting a finger; you just wait and see. It won’t be too long now.”

Both Thayer women would allow tears to stand in their eyes for a moment. Both knew what Leona meant.

“What’s the Piedmont Driving Club, Mama?” Crystal had asked early on. “What do they drive?”

“It’s one of the fanciest private clubs in the world,” her mother assured her. “Everybody who’s anybody in Atlanta belongs
to it. They don’t drive anything; it’s just an old-fashioned name. But there’s no other club like it.”

Leona Thayer had never been inside the sacred walls of the Piedmont Driving Club, but she had read the
Atlanta Journal
and
Constitution
society pages until she memorized them, every day.

And because she heard the litany so often and there was no one to disabuse her of it, the Piedmont Driving Club shone in Crystal’s
not-too-capacious mind like the names of Paris, London, and Monte Carlo by the time she was in her teens. She also knew the
names of the streets she would choose from to have her showplace of a home, and even the family names of some of the young
men she might, with impunity, consider marriageable.

She did not recall at the time she met Finch Wentworth in her father’s store if his had been among the names, but she knew
with her infallible butterfly antennae that this was what she had been bred and groomed for. The white satin knot was tied
before the first feathering of My Sin smote my father’s nostrils.

He did indeed, without much coaching, rent the apartment
over the garage where Crystal’s grandmother Thayer had lived. It seemed an arrangement made in heaven. For him my grandmother
Leona rallied herself and wore crisp cottons and kitten heels and cologne, though never My Sin. She had her hair done and
her nails lacquered pale rose at Ginger’s Beauty Nook, and hung on to my father’s every syllable with a murmuring interest
Crystal had never seen before. In fact, she had never seen this woman before at any time. She could see now exactly why her
father had married Leona Brumby; she had always wondered.

For Finch Wentworth, my grandfather lit up like a harvest moon and told seemingly endless stories of his own boyhood in Lytton,
and took him duck hunting in the rich swamp of the Chattahoochee River where it cut in close around Lytton on its way to join
the sea. I could never imagine my father hunting anything, but I know that he went. For him my grandmother’s cook, Bermuda,
set dinners upon the mahogany dining room table that he still talked of when I was a child. No more meals at the yellow breakfast
room table. Mahogany and starched linen for this young man.

For him my mother untied her pale hair from its ponytail and let it brush her shoulders. And doubled up on My Sin and shone
like a pearl. It was all she had to do.

Finch Wentworth took her home to Buckhead to meet his parents before that quarter at Hamilton Academy was a month old. He
may not have been able to read his future in that jewel-like October afternoon around his parents’ pool, but Caroline Wentworth
did.