Downtown (3 page)

We crawled with the Saturday night traffic out Peachtree Street, past the great department stores, lit for Christmas, past the towering new hotels that were springing up like white mushrooms—one, I had heard, had a cocktail lounge on its roof that revolved, presenting a spangled panorama of the entire city—past office buildings and restaurants and movie theaters and shops. There were people everywhere, heads lowered against the mist, hurrying across the streets and down the side-walks. Many carried Christmas packages and shopping

ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 14

bags from stores that were names out of legend to me: Rich’s, Davison-Paxon, J.P. Allen, Muse’s. There were many couples, heading into the movie theaters and restaurants, and who knew where else. Most walked quickly, some arm in arm, and it seemed to me that all of them were smiling. It was a world made of light; light was everywhere. Streetlights wore opalescent collars, neon signs streamed and flared, automobile lights blazed and flickered, tires left iridescent snail’s tracks on the shining black streets. Even closed away in the Vista Cruiser’s overheated interior, I could hear the music of the city: horns blaring, tires swishing wetly, brakes squealing, sirens, snatches of laughter and shouts at intersec-tions, from somewhere the heavy beat, though not the melody, of rock music. Saturday night in downtown Atlanta.

I swiveled my head from side to side, heart beating high in my throat, trying to slow my breathing so that my father would not think me inflamed by this Sodom, this Gomorrah.

I was close to weeping with an excitement that was the nearest thing I could imagine to the holy rapture Sister Dinitia once described to us. We had been force-fed Latin by Sister Mary Gregory, in whom the world had lost a great Classics scholar when she cast her lot with the cloister, and I said silently, with Cicero long before me, “The city, the city—residence elsewhere is mere eclipse.”

We slid out of the canyon of tall buildings and fetched up abruptly in stalled traffic in a part of town that was light-years, eons away from the romantic, MGM cityscape we had just passed through. On either side of Peachtree Street now were modest, two- and three-story buildings housing anonymous, largely unlit businesses and services, overhung with a bleak litter of electric wires and signs and frayed awnings and the crossbars of utility poles. But it would not have mattered

15 / DOWNTOWN

if it had been Park Avenue, Worth Avenue, the Rue de la Paix. The show was not the street, but the people on the street. Shoals of them, a great river of them, packed so tightly that they seemed to move all of a piece, like the tide, eddying slowly along the sidewalks on Peachtree Street, seemingly oblivious to the nearly stopped carfuls of people who were gawking out windows at them.

“Hippies!” My father spat. “Will you just look at them dirty hippies, now! Dear Jesus, there must be five thousand of them!”

He was right, or nearly; there were not, of course, five thousand of them, but there were a lot, and hippies they were, and more: I saw bikers and out-and-out addicts, so stoned on what they were smoking or had just swallowed or shot up that they were clearly not in the same universe with the rest of us; ragged and eerie children whose bizarre costumes owed more to economic circumstance than the current flower-child craze; supine bodies that might be stoned or ill or even dead; young girls who, even to my untutored eyes, could only be prostitutes; plumed and preening black youths who could only be pimps. Smoke lay in solid strata in the air above the sidewalks; even inside the car, its acrid bite advertised its backyard origins. Music keened and thumped from guitars and radios; ragged and belled cuffs and vests and beads and bare feet and a sea of thin, faded denim challenged the raw fog of the night. Everyone moved slowly and hypnotically, as if underwater; no one seemed at all bellicose or threatening—indeed, most merely looked wackily exalted—and virtually everyone was young. There was nothing at all in the entire lot to threaten, except the sheer numbers of them and perhaps their studied grotesquer-ie. But I saw many windows in the cars around us fly hastily up, and my father quickly locked the Vista Cruiser’s doors.

ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 16

“It’s straight home we’re going, and I want no sass from you,” he said tightly.

“Pa—”

“No! I’ll not leave you here by yourself where dirty hippies and God knows what else are shootin’ dope in their veins on the street, and fornicatin’ in the gutters! No decent Catholic girl should have to see that; no daughter of mine will have to go through that mess of whores and whoremon-gers to get to her work.”

I was silent. We were at the heart of it now, the thing inside Liam O’Donnell that had killed my love for him; the thing that had driven me, ultimately, away from home. It was not the potheads and freaks and the affluent white teenagers playing at being hippies; it was the sex implicit among them. It was sheer bad luck that we should blunder into the fabled Tight Squeeze area of Atlanta that even we in hermetically sealed Corkie had heard of, but I was not surprised. If it had not been Tight Squeeze it would have been something else, anything. I turned my head away from him, feeling the old bile of anger and resentment rise up into my throat, wondering if I had the courage simply to snatch my suitcase out of the car and shut the door and walk away from it, and find my way to the Church’s Home on foot.

Remembering…

From the time we reached puberty, even before, we were taught by our mothers and the nuns and the Church in general that chastity was the only normal, desirable, permissible, or possible state for an unmarried girl, and that even thinking about “doing it” would result in instant corruption, begin the long slide into ruin. To actually do it meant pregnancy, disgrace, death, everlasting hell. No ifs, ands, or buts. I don’t know precisely what the boys were taught, but it must have been something similar, only with the added threats of defil-ing the

17 / DOWNTOWN

temples that were their bodies and bringing shame and anguish to their mothers’ hearts. The natural consequence was that we thought about it all the time—the Black Act, the Dirty Deed—and not a few of us did it. We wept, afterward; we burned inwardly with shame and fear; we suffered agonies of guilt, but we did it.

I never did, but I was a late bloomer, and had not yet begun to date in earnest by the time I was sixteen. But my best friend, Meg Conlon, had. She had gone steady with Frank Callahan since they were thirteen, and by the time she was sixteen, desperate with love and hormones, they did it in the back of Frank’s father’s car after a Demolay dance, and then they did it again, and yet again, and the February before she turned seventeen Meg got pregnant. I never did hear how she figured that happened; I knew that Frank was using the rubbers that his older brother got for him at Malone’s Drugstore. Perhaps the nuns were right; birth control of any kind was a sin, and the sinner would inevitably pay.

I didn’t know about Meg’s pregnancy. I don’t think anyone else did, either, perhaps not even Frank. Meg attempted to abort herself one night with a coat hanger, and ended up in Sisters of Mercy with a raging infection that brought her near to death for many days, and ended, we heard, any chance of her ever having children. I wanted to go to her but my father forbade me, and when she was well enough to come home she went, instead, to her mother’s mother in Jacksonville, ostensibly to care for that terrible old harridan in her long last illness. She never came back. Frank left Corkie the day after his high school graduation, and we never saw him again, either. My father forbade me to talk about either of them.

“She was no better than a whore,” he said when he found me in tears for Meg, soon after we heard. “And ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 18

what happened to her is no more than should have happened.”

I looked at him incredulously. If I had not been so shocked and outraged, I might have seen the living fear that looked out of his white-lashed blue eyes. But I did not. I saw only that his face was red with rage, tight and twisted and terrible.

“Why is she a whore when she does it,” I screamed at him,

“but when you do it with half of Corkie you’re not—”

He slapped me. Before he did that, I still loved my father after a fashion, as best I could. After that, I did not.

His words and the slap had finished the work that the Church had begun, though. After that I became a classic good girl, a model of Catholic young womanhood, the flower of my family. I was a true child of Saint John the Baptist and Corkie. I dated, decorously, many good Catholic boys, but never more than one at a time and never seriously. When things began to get serious, I fled. I still do not know if it was fear or anger that kept me, as the Church puts it, pure.

I had little time at Armstrong College for serious relationships; I studied endlessly to keep my Demolay scholarship and worked in the college bookstore after classes to help pay expenses. There was one young man, a dark, silent, awesomely gifted young Pole from Pittsburgh named Joe Men-kiewicz, the editor of the school paper, for which I wrote a column and served as feature editor, with whom I might have thrown caution and Corkie to the winds, but he transferred to Columbia journalism school before the relationship could catch fire, and no one like him happened to me again.

I found and nurtured as best I could a talent for writing and editing, and graduated with honors and as editor of the
Armstrong Argonaut
, and went to work in the office of a large 19 / DOWNTOWN

marine insurance company on Bay Street, on the bluff above the docks where my father had worked for so long. I lived at home, paying room and board to my mother and father, and advanced quickly at work, and dated steadily, all good young Catholics from the old neighborhood, trainees in insurance offices like mine, banks, real estate firms, or perhaps the sons of prosperous local Irish merchants. A few of them were truly interested in me and wanted for me just what my family wanted: marriage, children, a life of service in the Church, a neat house on a neat square in the old city a little—but not too much—more affluent than the ones we grew up in, a prosperous middle age, an old age full of years and respectful grandchildren, an honorable death, and a huge funeral at Saint John.

I wanted none of that, but I did not know what I did want.

Like Scarlett O’Hara I would, I decided, figure all that out tomorrow. I bent myself to my work. Before I even raised my head I was twenty-six years old and a rising star in my company and more than half-seriously involved with a handsome young claims adjuster there who was on what would one day be known as the fast track and who was still a virgin.

And I still did not know what I really wanted.

And then one day I did. It was the night Hank Cantwell, my best friend from Armstrong days, the art director of the
Argonaut
and the college yearbook, called me from Atlanta and said, “You remember those photo-essays we did on the

’
Naut
about the old town? The cityscape things that I shot and you did the captions for? Well, I showed them to somebody, and he wants to talk to you.”

And a voice like rich honey, like poured wine, deep and complex, came on the line and said, “Hello, dear heart. My name is Matt Comfort, and I’m the editor of ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 20

Downtown
magazine, and I want you to come up here and work for me.”

I said nothing for a moment, while the rest of my life roared in my ears. I knew in that instant that I would go. I knew before I knew who this man was, or even what manner of magazine his might be, that I would go, that I would go if I had to walk every step of the way to Atlanta, and that nothing forever after would be the same. All that was in the extraordinary voice, and more.

Before I could speak, Matt Comfort said, “Hank has told me about your daddy. Is he around? If he is, put him on.”

I looked at the phone and then at my father, sitting as he always sat, in front of the television set, drinking John Jameson. The set that year was an RCA. He looked up at me when I did not speak, and I simply walked across the room and handed the phone to him, the cord stretched tight.

And I sat down to wait.

It was not a very long conversation. Mostly my father said,

“Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Yes. Uh-huh. I see.”

Finally he said, “Well, she’ll be calling you back, Mr.

Comfort…Matt, then…in the morning. You, too. Good-bye, now.” And he hung up the phone and studied me in silence.

My mother had come in from the kitchen, and we stood looking back at my father.

“Fellow Comfort thinks highly of your work, Smoky,” my father said, as if it had only just occurred to him that I might have any sort of proficiency. “Starting a new magazine up there for the chamber of commerce, he is, says it’s going to be the best one of its kind in the world. Says it’s already more than halfway there.”

I nodded. My father looked at my mother.

“Wants Smoky to come up there and work for him. That Cantwell fellow that Smoky had here once, the one with the glasses and the fat behind, you remember, he 21 / DOWNTOWN

showed this fellow Comfort some of the work our girl did while she was at college, and this Comfort told him to get her right on the phone. What do you think of that? Mama?”

My mother started to shake her head, and my father lifted a hand. She subsided.

“Fellow says he knows how we must feel about letting her go all the way up there by herself, but says he’s a Catholic, too, and he’s on the…the board or something of the Church’s home for working girls or something like that, right near this magazine office, and he’ll see she gets a nice room there, and makes friends with some other Catholic girls—he’s got two working for him—and he’ll look after her himself, and even take her to Mass with him until she’s found her way.

Goes to a big church called Saint Matthew’s. Says he can’t pay Smoky much, but he can see that she comes to no harm, and he says she’s got that kind of talent ought to be given a chance—”

“Is he married? Does he have a family?” my mother said.

“Well, of course he does. I mean, he didn’t say, but no chamber of commerce is going to be giving a grand new magazine to some young, unmarried upstart, now are they?”