Peachtree Road (10 page)

For the first time in his life, Jim Bondurant was forced to fend for himself. He never got over the shock of it.

He got a job ineptly pumping gas in a Decatur service station, but lost it almost immediately because he could not conceal his distaste for the oil and grease and customers, and appeared to them to be fully as arrogant as he was. It was mid-Depression, and jobs were scarce for even the most qualified and able of young men. Jim, Willa (as she had taken to calling herself immediately upon becoming a Bondurant) and tiny Lucy, who arrived that murderous red September, drifted from city to small, wasted city around the Southeast, staying in a succession of dismal rooming houses and attic apartments. Kewpie doll Adelaide came along when they were living in Charlotte and Jim was working, when he did work, as a freelance house painter. Two years after that their first son and last child, James Clay Bondurant, Jr., was born in Greensboro, North Carolina.

By this time little Jamie’s father was not working at all.

He was, instead, drinking his way steadily across 70 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

the Southeast toward the Mississippi River, alternately striking and smothering with caresses his children and his wife.

In time, Willa and the two younger children took to cowering away from his fists in a groveling terror that maddened him, so he no longer caressed them, but only smote. But smoky, quicksilver Lucy, his oldest daughter, took his blows with averted dry eyes and a small-smiling silence that was oddly soothing to him, and turned after each beating with slender, bruised white arms held out to him, and his heart would turn over with a raging love for her, and he lavished on her all the caresses that the rest of his fearful family abjured. Pain and love, love and pain…dark twins which were, by then, all that he could give, and all that Lucy could accept.

A few months into 1941, Jim Bondurant left for New Orleans to look for work, said to be more plentiful there, and soon after wired Willa and the children to give him three days to find them a place to live, and then catch the Greyhound and come. When they arrived at the New Orleans station, he was not there, and there was no message, and after waiting for almost nine hours, until it was quite dark, it was apparent to Willa Bondurant that he was not coming at all. And he did not, then or ever, and it was the last that any one of them ever saw of him.

Willa called Sheppard Bondurant in Atlanta with her last nickel, and Travelers Aid bought the midnight tickets that sent them grinding through the flat, humid, mosquito-plagued fields of Louisiana toward the gullied and scrub-pined red hills of the Georgia Piedmont Plateau. Shem Cater met them at the Greyhound station that evening, in Sheppard’s big car, and brought them in the twilight to the house on Peachtree Road. Sheppard and Olivia were not with him; Willa had not thought that they would be. She was, by then, as bereft of worldly

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goods as an animal, and as unself-pitying. She had four cents and a roll of butterscotch Life Savers in her purse. The children had not eaten since breakfast, in Mobile.

It was a journey measured in immensities. Somewhere during it, in that endless fugue of flying miles, Willa Slagle Bondurant stopped crying and began planning. Driving through the luminous, cloistered northwest quadrant of Atlanta in the backseat of the big car, she marked with a coldly assessing eye the architecture, landscaping and details of each great house they passed. When she walked into 2500

Peachtree Road, she was determined to do whatever it took to ensure that she never left it again.

All this I learned from Lucy years later, during one of the rare times when she spoke of the life she had had before she came to Atlanta. It was the last time we were together up at the mountain house at Tate, and we had talked so easily and about so much of the past, and with such a genuine benison of rancorless remembrance, that I was not at all surprised when she segued into the night of that awful bus ride.

Though only a few miles separated them, Lucy did not often speak, in those last years, of her mother.

“You have to hand it to her,” Lucy said that night on the mountain. “Not a cent to her name, no education to speak of, no family, no future…nothing but her and us three children. And she’d been to the house before, remember, and they’d turned her away. She had to be terrified. And she was; when I finally fell asleep, about Biloxi, she was still crying.

But when I woke up, at Mobile, she was putting on lipstick and fixing her hair, and she had that little Mona Lisa smile on her face. When I asked her what she was smiling at, she said, ‘The future. We’re going to have a fine future in that big old house.’

“So I said, ‘When we gon’ leave it?’ You know, 72 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

because we always left every house we stayed in. And she said, ‘We’re not.’”

Willa was as good as her word. She shoe horned herself into the life of the house with a persistence as seemingly effortless as it must have been enormous. She smiled. Endlessly and charmingly, she smiled. She pleased whenever an opportunity arose. She was helpful, modest, grateful, unassuming, dutiful, deferential to my mother, girlish and just short of adoring to my father. And from the outset, as if to make up for my mother’s distance, he seemed to me to be uncharacteristically warm to the beautiful, flat-voiced, lushly built farm girl who was his sister-in-law, and to her children.

I know that his manner was unusual enough for my mother to mark it; I saw in her eyes, before the sooty, feathery lashes came down over them, something as nervous and darting as a small wild animal, when she looked at my father and my aunt Willa in those first long evenings. But the strangeness did not bother me; indeed, I was glad for it.

Some of his new benevolence seemed to spill over onto me, and for a long space of time after they came, I was no longer the focus of his discontented stare and probing questions at meals. I was happily engaged, heart, soul and mind, with Lucy.

We did not run wild. Aunt Willa tended her children well.

She stayed out of the way of the household as she must have sensed quickly my mother wished her to do; accepted with comely murmurs of appreciation the cast-off clothing my mother found for her; smiled and accepted with grace and modest pleasure the weekly “Of course, you’ll be our guest at the club this Sunday for lunch” that Mother proffered, never failing in all the years I heard her extend the invitation to accent the word “guest”; accepted with small, real pleasure the single sherry my father poured out of the bottle he kept on the liquor tray in the library, each evening before Martha PEACHTREE ROAD / 73

stumped in to announce dinner; kept her children out of sight of the adults except when they were washed and brushed and dressed and drilled to come and murmur their polite hellos and thank-yous to my parents…and she learned.

She learned prodigiously and constantly, by rote, through her pores and fingertips, with a wary animal’s untutored cunning, how to become a woman to match the house.

Within a year, by the time World War II had taken our minds off slow and graceful rituals and taken many of the men from the great Buckhead houses, she had largely accomplished her mission. My father, whose blood pressure and flat feet kept him out of the army, remarked and applauded the sea change. Even my mother, whose shuttering lashes concealed the eyes of a harpy eagle, could find in Willa by that time little of the awkward, vulgar, overdressed, rankly sexual young woman who had alighted in her foyer a year before. Reluctantly, and at my father’s insistence, she began to introduce my aunt Willa into the sanctity of her garden club, bridge circle and a few selected lesser charities. It was, in retrospect, a stunning achievement. What it cost Willa Slagle Bondurant might never have occurred to me if I had not seen so clearly and with such a palpable shock the living adder of hatred that had stirred in her eyes on the night Lucy first ran away, when my mother had bidden her to come upstairs and be dressed in the first of a long succession of cast-off garments from the closet of her enemy.

Now, even more than ever, tides ran through that house that I sensed had the power to capsize and sink us all, deep-running tides that obeyed some great moon whose name I did not know. I don’t know if the adults in the house were aware of them, though on some level I think they must have been. How could they not be, when all three of them seemed involved in some slow, formal, highly stylized waltz of manners? The oblique

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looks sent and received, the silences spun out at meals and over cocktails, the conversations that seemed freighted with some import far weightier than their actual words merited, the laughter that rang, to me, utterly false. Sometimes it seemed to me that a kind of crazy power shimmered loose in those rooms like a haze of lightning, seeking a place to come to rest.

I don’t know why my father smiled so benignly on my aunt Willa, especially in the presence of my mother; it was totally alien to him to notice, at least openly, other women.

Revenge on the will-o’-the-wisp brother and the wife gone cold? Simple lust? I don’t know why my mother, noticing it, smiled her secret smile and drew the shutters of her lashes down over her eyes. This new arcanum of theirs was as unfathomable to me as the old legerdemain had been. I do know now, and I suppose I sensed then, what my aunt Willa was about. Of them all, she was the simplest, the most direct, the least oblique. It should have made me easier in her company, but it did not then, and it does not now.

Lucy felt the subterranean surges as keenly as I did, but being vastly more at home with nuance, simply shrugged her thin colt’s shoulders and said, “Don’t pay any attention to them. If they think you think they’re actin’ funny they’ll get all over you.”

And so, on the main, I didn’t. That spring was altogether too dazzlingly, burstingly full of Lucy.

The bond that had leaped into life between us that first evening in the foyer deepened steadily. On the surface, I suppose, our temperaments could not have seemed more divergent: I was shy where she was gregarious; cosseted where she was, of necessity, used to fending for herself; physically clumsy and crippled by asthma (and my mother’s fear of those terrible clawing, choking attacks) where she was bird-slender, swift and agile; timid where she was fearless.

But our needs and hurts met and

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knew each other with absolute fidelity. Both of us bore the indelible stigmata of difference. Both of us knew the terrible, unpayable penalty, in our small worlds, of our essential in-ability to adhere to the rules. This kinship made her, to me, irresistible.

And then, there was her beauty. It was clear from the outset that both my aunt Willa and my mother greatly favored Little Lady and young Jamie, but I could never understand why. To me, my cousin Lucy was by far the most interesting and beautiful creature I had ever encountered.

There was a light, an aura, a sort of halo, like streetlights sometimes wear in mist, that lay at times around Lucy Bondurant. I saw it that first evening, and it did not fade for me until the end of her life. She drew eyes to her, even in the company of rose-gilt Little Lady, who was a much more conventionally pretty child. Lucy’s looks were, I heard my mother say once, her mother’s looks, the Slagle woods-colt looks. Blond Little Lady and Jamie, on the other hand, were obviously Bondurants, icons of the vanished Jim. Perhaps that was the reason my mother was cold to Lucy from the first, as cold as she was to Aunt Willa, while she was warmer, if not affectionate, to Little Lady and Jamie. And maybe it was because Lucy was, from the beginning, too vivid, too alive, too
much
, for the eminently proper mistress of the house on Peachtree Road.

Lucy was animated, vibrant; life seemed to brim and leap in her so that her transparent skin could scarcely contain it.

All her life, the small blue pulses that beat in her throat and temples seemed to me to be the drums of a sort of special vitality, which she possessed in greater measure than most mortals. Her laugh was rich and deep and almost bawdy, and she found things funny that would and did terrify most children of her age, and horrify most adults.

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She was ferociously bright, possessed a quirky, silver fish intelligence that soared and looped and doubled back upon itself; her mind described its own windborne ballet, which few people in her life but I ever really followed. She was an accomplished and amusing liar, telling herself and whoever would listen wonderful, towering, complex tales of intrigue and adventure, in which she was perpetually the rescued heroine, the saved damsel in distress. She was a dreamer, a firebrand, a small poet, a great reader. She taught herself to read when she was three, and by the time she came to us had spent a great deal of her life in trees and under back porches in the various mean homes Uncle Jim and Aunt Willa inhabited, lost and safe in books beyond her age but not her ken.

As that spring swam into and through summer and toward the crisper hummock of autumn, I was as nearly totally happy as I have ever been in my life, and perhaps will ever be again.

Who could not love Lucy?

On an autumn evening when it had just turned cool enough to have a fire in the library when we gathered for drinks there, my aunt Willa came into the room a little later than usual, and I saw my mother lift her head and flare her nostrils, as if she smelled on a faraway wind something sharp and alien and dangerous. Aunt Willa looked especially pretty to me that night. Her cheeks were pink with a stain that had not come from her rouge cake, and her jewel-blue eyes were very bright. She had on a dress I had never seen before, a very plain, soft blue wool which fitted her beautiful body like water, but not, as the clothing she had brought with her from New Orleans had, like paint. The difference was enormous. I could see it in my mother’s eyes, and my father’s.

“I have something to tell you all,” she said, her voice lilting out of its flatness with practice and excitement.

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She did not sound at all like the woman who had first come to our door. We looked at her silently.