Downtown (5 page)

Breakfast is at eight, so you can have it after early Mass or before the nine o’clock. Saint Joseph’s is one street over and two down. Almost everyone has gone home for Thanksgiving, but they’ll be coming in tomorrow. I believe Ansonia said she would be back about four. She’s visiting her parents in South Carolina. Rachel Vaughn down the hall is here and will no doubt be happy to take you to Mass with her. She goes to the eleven o’clock when she goes. And you may have company in the parlor tomorrow from one p.m. until nine in the evening, if you have friends here.”

She paused and looked at me. The eyes behind the flesh-colored plastic glasses clearly did not believe that I had any friends in Atlanta.

“No, I thought I would just…walk around and get to know the city a little bit,” I said lamely.

“You’ll find it very quiet on a holiday Sunday,” she said and made as if to leave, and then turned back. “We had thought to meet your father,” she said. “Sister Clementia made a cake, and has waited up, I believe. But I see that he has gone on—”

31 / DOWNTOWN

“He had to get back,” I said, the lie sliding out smoothly on a little rush of annoyance. “My mother isn’t well.”

“I am sorry. I will remember her in my prayers,” Sister Mary James said, nodded at me, and closed the door. I could not hear her footsteps going away, and somehow had the fancy that she was standing just outside the door, listening.

But for what? It was an absurd notion.

All the same, I did not move from the edge of my bed for a long time, and it was even longer until I reached over the desk and raised the shade and let the blaze of city lights stream back into the room. They set me free, and I moved about the room in my stocking feet putting away my clothes in the unlocked armoire, my eyes drawn over and over again to the blaze of light and life outside.

I got into my nightgown and robe and slippers and tiptoed down the hall peering at doors until I found the one labeled bathroom, went in and washed my face and brushed my teeth among the bulbous old white fixtures, examined my face in the wavering, underwater mirror. The dim, sterile light and the speckled, greenish glass made me look like something at the bottom of the sea, blanched and sodden, long drowned. I bit my lips and rubbed my cheeks hard, but the drowned girl still looked back at me, and I shook my head hard and went back, silently, to my new room. I will never sleep, I thought. I will simply never sleep.

But despite the strange, bare room and the clattering radiator and the prowling of the night wind in the branches outside, and despite the cold radiance of the lighted streets pouring down over my narrow bed, I did sleep. I knelt and said the mechanical small prayer that I had said almost every night of my life, slipped into bed, ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 32

turned my face to the streaming window, whispered, “I’m here. Wait for me,” and closed my eyes. And when I opened them, it was morning.

That afternoon I went out in search of Atlanta and couldn’t find it anywhere. By the time I lay again in bed under the window into the soul of the city I was almost ready to call my father and tell him to come and get me. And to call the insurance company and say that I would, after all, be coming back to edit the employee newspaper. I have always wondered what would have become of me if it had not been forbidden to use the communal upstairs telephone after ten P.M.

I got up late on that first morning. The previous night’s mist had slumped into a ceaseless, defeated rain, so that it was not possible to tell what precise time it was, and my watch had stopped just after midnight. But it felt late. The bare room around me had the slightly hangdog air of a place where no one should be, but was. I started downstairs, where I thought I might find breakfast, in my robe and scuffs, met Sister Mary James on the stairs and was told “We dress for breakfast.” I went back and put on my blue suit and high heels so as to be ready for Mass if the late-rising Rachel Vaughn seemed, as Sister had said, amenable to company, then went back down. When I found the breakfast room, a large room at the back of the house off the kitchen with a great round oak table and chairs and a sideboard and a battered upright piano, there was no one there but a thin redhead in a ponytail so tight that it gave a Chinese slant to her eyes. She was slumped on a chair with her stockinged feet propped on another, drinking coffee and reading the Sunday comics. She wore, oddly, a khaki London Fog raincoat, the twin of my navy one, buttoned up under the chin, and there was a great

33 / DOWNTOWN

deal of makeup on her sharp little fox’s face. Her eyes were heavily shadowed and feathered with jet lashes that I knew were not her own because the end of one set had pulled away from her lid and arched into the air like a caterpillar. Her mouth was small and round and thick with pale pink frost.

The shoes that lay on their sides under the table were Cuban-heeled, square-toed affairs constructed almost totally of cobwebby straps. Perhaps, I thought, she is going on to a party somewhere after Mass, though I couldn’t think what sort of party might be held, even in Atlanta, on a Sunday afternoon that occasioned bare sandals and false eyelashes.

She was smoking a cigarette from a pack of Salems that lay on the table beside her plate, which held only a half-empty bowl of cereal. There were ashtrays all around the room—the Church forbids a great deal, but is fairly pragmatic about what it will allow; it has never pushed its luck. When I came into the room she smiled and put her cigarette out in the cereal bowl.

“Good morning and welcome,” she said over the sizzle.

“You have to be Maureen O’Donnell. Who else would you be? Isn’t it a horrible morning? I’m Rachel Vaughn. Sister told me you might like to go to eleven o’clock Mass, so I waited for you.”

She rolled her eyes toward the door into what I supposed was the kitchen, and mouthed, “Say yes. We don’t really have to.”

I grinned.

“Thanks,” I said loudly. “That was nice of you. It’s nice to meet you.”

She put her hands together over her head and shook them in a victorious prize-fighter’s gesture. She chattered aimlessly while I had coffee and cereal: about the others who lived there; her job in a beauty salon (“I’m almost finished with my course at Brower College of Beauty and I’m going to work full-time at Antoine’s when I do”); my ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 34

job at
Downtown
(“Are you a secretary? No? An editor?

Really? Like on a newspaper? Fabulous!”); her boyfriend, Carl, who worked for Triple A right around the corner; her boyfriend’s friend Lee who would simply flip over me, no kidding; the Beatles, who were rumored to be making an American tour and might even come to Atlanta; current movies around town; my age (“No kidding? Twenty-six?

You don’t look it. I thought you were maybe eighteen”); my romantic status (“Well, don’t worry about it. There’re so many single men in this town you have to step over them on the street. You won’t have a bit of trouble, cute as you are. Whyn’t you let me fix you up a little?”); and, in response to my query about how many nuns there were at Our Lady, a terse, “Two. At a time, that is. Different ones, but always two.”

This was accompanied by a parody of suicide, her white-lacquered nail being drawn across her throat, her red head flopping to one side, her pink tongue sticking out the corner of her mouth, and the caterpillared blue eyes crossing. I could not suppress an explosive giggle, but turned it into a sneeze.

“Let’s go on before the rain gets worse,” she said, projecting her voice toward the kitchen. “I have an umbrella. You ready?

Bye, Sisters! See you at dinner!”

An indistinct mumble from behind the doors followed us out of the kitchen and onto a small back stoop, and she put up her umbrella and we clattered under it down the three rain-slicked steps, through a dismal alleyway where rusted old garbage cans leaned, and out onto Fourteenth Street, our shoulders touching, our heads bumping together as if we were old friends.

“You didn’t really want to go to Mass, did you?” she said, pausing on Our Lady’s front walkway.

“Well…I guess not,” I said, thinking I could go later that afternoon, or to evening Mass, if I had to. Surely the 35 / DOWNTOWN

Church would want me to make friends among its flock. “But where else would we go?”

“To the IHOP and get a decent cup of coffee and a stack of potato pancakes with sour cream,” she said. “My treat, since you’re new. I got a humongous tip yesterday. And after that…who knows? We’ll scare up something. That is, if you want to. And I hope you do. You’re the first inmate of that joint I’ve ever seen that didn’t look like a junior Sister Mary James. Just please don’t tell me you’ve given all your worldly goods to the poor and have come up here to do missions among the heads and freaks. It’s a big thing with the Church.”

“Not me,” I said. “I don’t have any worldly goods. What’s the IHOP?”

“The International House of Pancakes. The first reason you’ll be glad you left—wherever you left.”

“Savannah.”

We picked our way through the skin-prickling rain down to the corner of Fourteenth Street and turned south onto Peachtree Street.

I’m walking down Peachtree Street, I said to myself. I’m walking where Scarlett O’Hara walked, where Margaret Mitchell walked. Where, as a matter of fact, she was fatally injured. But I did not know that yet.

I waited for the frission of exaltation to begin in my stomach, where all my raptures had their genesis, but nothing happened. The rain-slicked street was largely bare of pedes-trian traffic and even the cars that swished by looked dull and furtive, seeming to sneak through the heavy air. As they had been the night before, the tops of the buildings downtown were lost in cloud and mist, and I could not see clearly more than a block ahead of me. There were few lights in the buildings along this section of Peachtree; structures that crouched stolidly, none more than five or six stories high, largely mustardy yellow stone or dark red brick weeping ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 36

black soot. A movie theater’s marquee advertised, dimly, Ingmar Bergman’s
Persona
, but there was no line waiting to see it, and in the lighted drugstore across from it I saw no customers among the Hallmark Santas and folding bells and scanty displays of tinsel. At the far corner, nearly lost in mist, a red, black, and white Texaco sign flashed on and off. Far beyond that, an anonymous building glowed yellow and faint. Everything was dingy, indistinct, as if someone had dropped dirty stage scrim down over the whole of midtown Atlanta. There was an astonishing amount of litter in the gutters.

“Uggh,” Rachel said, skipping over a rich mound of dog excrement at the curb. “Watch your step. Come on, let’s run.

This is gross.”

I huddled closer to her under the umbrella and put my head down and we trotted off down the sidewalk. Under the bumping umbrella I could see very little but our feet. The air that crept under my raincoat collar and around my legs was cold, raw; I seldom felt air of this temperature in Savannah.

Savannah—for a moment the sense of it enveloped me so totally that I was lost in it, drowned; I perceived it, in that instant, more sharply and wholly than I ever had in all the years I had spent there. I saw, through the wet black dome of Rachel Vaughn’s umbrella, the lush canopies of live oaks in its small, beautiful squares; the surging banks of ruffled azaleas and camellias in the long, warm springs; the spectral gray curtains of hanging moss; the lovely woman-curves of wrought iron balconies and stair railings; the grimy, tight-packed, once-beautiful row houses that lined the noisy cobbled streets of Corkie. I heard the hooting of the great ships that wallowed at the docks under the bluff and the liquid spill of mockingbirds in the crape myrtle trees; I smelled the ineffable perfume of the night-blooming Cape Jessamine along the slow

37 / DOWNTOWN

river, and the thick, dank, shrimpy smell of the river itself; smelled sweat and linseed oil and iron fittings heating in the sun and exotic spices from who knew where in the world, that was the breath of the docks. I tasted on my lips the salt of the sea and the sweet, fetid aftertaste of the sulphurous water and the nectar of sun-ripened peaches from roadside stands out toward Tybee Island. I felt the dark, amniotic water of the August shallows of the ocean in my own blood; felt the soft, blood-warm rain of summer under the icy needles of the rain I ran through; felt as well as saw the strange, silken spring light that seemed to rise from the greening marshes.

Savannah…

“Look out!” Rachel cried, giving a little hop, and I looked down and saw a used condom lying on the sidewalk almost directly beneath my blue pumps, and sprang over it like a startled rabbit. When I came down I landed in a puddle, and felt the filthy water spatter my pale new stockings.

“Somebody must have had an awfully good time last night,” Rachel laughed. I could not answer her. My cheeks flamed and my voice seemed to have died in my throat. I had never seen a condom before, used or otherwise. My brothers and father had conspired to keep me mindlessly chaste all my life. I could not have said how I know that that was what I had seen, but I did know.

We fetched up in front of a little Permastone chalet blazing light and full of people, its windows frosted over with their breath and the warmth inside.

“Here’s the IHOP,” Rachel said. “Is this okay, or is there any place else you’d rather go?”

“I’d sort of like to go down to Tight Squeeze,” I said. “We drove through it last night, and I could see it from my window till all hours. It looked…I loved the way it looked. I’d love to really see it—”

ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 38

“You just did,” she said. “That was Tight Squeeze right about where the guy left his calling card on the sidewalk.

We were the only living souls in it. Take it from me, you’d rather see Tight Squeeze on a nice sunny day, or a warm spring night. It’s the pits on Sundays and in bad weather.”

I felt like a small child who had just been told about Santa Claus. In silence I followed Rachel into the International House of Pancakes. I still go to IHOPs sometime, when I happen upon one. It was the first place I ever went in Atlanta beside the Church’s Home for Girls, my first journey out, and it still makes the best potato pancakes with sour cream I have ever eaten. And I have eaten them everywhere, from the Russian Tea Room to neighborhood delis in half a dozen countries.