Peachtree Road (18 page)

CHAPTER FIVE

T
hey quarantined us immediately. Even before Jamie’s funeral, they separated us from each other and from the rest of the family, and for the two weeks the isolation lasted, I felt as disoriented and alone and outside the human pale as I have ever felt. Even now, when days and weeks go by and I do not see anyone, there is no comparison to that alienation, that sense of being beyond communion and redemption. This solitude is of my own creation.

That one was cast around me like an unclean shroud.

Quarantine was not a medical consideration; Dr. George Ballentine, who lived down West Wesley and was a frequent dinner guest in my parents’ house, came on that second evening, looking wildly out of character in a short-sleeved shirt and two-tone shoes, examined Lucy and me and pro-nounced us, so far as he could tell, fit and free of incipient polio. He gave us both aspirins and bade that we be put to bed, but that was merely in consideration of Lucy’s exhausted sobbing and my paleness and nausea. He went into my parents’ bedroom and spoke with my mother, and then into Aunt Willa’s and gave her a shot to ease the terrible, wild crying that had shaken her like a fit ever since she had come back from the hospital. Hovering on the black lip of sleep, I heard him tell my father, who had walked out into the upper hallway with him, that we children should both be all right by the next morning, and to feed us lightly and keep us quiet for a day or two and call him if anything unusual came up.

But when the next morning broke, still, incredibly, as monotonously unchanged in its colorless heat and fetor as all the days before it, it was to find ToTo moving Lucy’s few clothes and toys out of her bedroom and into PEACHTREE ROAD / 135

the little rooms over the garage, and the big storeroom at the end of the attic corridor being cleared and aired.

My mother appeared in ToTo’s wake, elegant in black eyelet and so pale that her dark red lipstick looked the color of blackberry stain against her fair skin, carrying a breakfast tray for me. I did not like the looks of any of it, and began to scramble out from under my damp sheet preparatory to flight. My mother closed the door firmly behind her and sat down on the edge of my bed. Her brown eyes, so dark that you could never look into them, were heavily shadowed underneath with greenish smears, and her skin looked flat and large-grained. Even her dark hair, which always caught so much light that it looked newly wet, was lusterless.

“Jamie died of infantile paralysis,” she said. “Do you know what that is, Sheppie?”

I nodded in silence, looking at her uneasily. I had not heard that “Sheppie” since Lucy and her family had come to live with us and some of the sucking weight of my mother’s full attention had lifted from me. It rang with portent.

“Well, then,” she said, “you know how bad it is, and why we have to do everything in the world we can to see that you don’t get it. And since we don’t know where poor little Jamie got it, we’re going to have to keep you out of harm’s way until it gets cooler. Lucy’s going to stay with Shem and Martha for a little while, and we’re going to make you a lovely playroom all for yourself up here. We’ll bring you lots of books and toys, and Lottie is going to cook everything you like to eat and we’ll bring it to you up here. I’ll come up and read to you in the afternoons, and sometimes I’ll have my supper up here with you, and Daddy will bring you your very own radio and all the new comic books. It’ll be just like living in a hotel. You know how you enjoyed staying at the Waldorf that time we went to New York; it’ll be just like that.”

136 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

My eyes began to fill with frightened tears, and I despised them, but I could not will them back. They overflowed and ran silently down into the corners of my mouth. The warm salt of them nauseated me all over again.

“I don’t want to stay up here by myself,” I said. “It’s too hot. It makes me sick. And Lucy can’t stay out there by herself while Shem and Martha are at work. She’s too little. She gets scared. Why can’t she come up here with me, or why can’t we just go out to the summerhouse and stay there and not come out till you tell us to? It’s mean to make her stay by herself.”

My mother put her arms around me and pulled me against her, and I could feel the warmth of the flesh under the eyelet, and the smell of Lily of the Valley, which she always wore in those days. It felt so strange to be in her arms that it paralyzed me, and I did not, somehow, dare to take a breath.

I could not remember the last time she had hugged me. I knew that my weak, unstoppable tears were splotching her pretty dress, and I was mortified, but powerless to staunch the flow. I bit my lip so hard that pain reddened the darkness behind my closed eyes, and the freshet abated a little.

“We’ve lost one little boy in this house,” my mother said, with an uncharacteristic fierceness. “I’m not going to lose my own. Maybe I haven’t taken enough trouble with you, letting you run wild all summer with Lucy, but that’s going to stop now. You’re all I have that’s really and truly my own, Sheppie, and I’m not going to take any more chances with you.”

I blinked, against the fragrant blackness of her breast.

What was she up to? I knew I was not all she had; she had a big house, and two big cars, and lots of beautiful clothes, and all that dark, gleaming furniture and those frail, light-struck porcelains and crystal; she had an army of acquaintances almost identical to her, and clubs PEACHTREE ROAD / 137

and parties and dances and luncheons and dinners that she went to all the time; she had my father. I had never considered myself to be in the pantheon of her prized possessions before. I felt deeply uneasy, a small forest creature turning in a circle, smelling rather than seeing the amorphous danger that lay thick in the air around it.

“But Lucy…” I began.

“Lucy is going out where ToTo and Martha can take care of her, and where she can’t get up to any more mischief for a while,” she said crisply. “She’s been exposed to polio just like you have, and she’s not going to spread it around this house. For all we know, she could be a carrier of some kind—”

“She is not!” I yelled, pulling away from her. “You just don’t like her, that’s why you’re locking her up down there and me up here! She is not either a carrier!”

“You don’t know,” my mother said coolly, sitting back upright on the edge of the bed. “We don’t know what causes polio. Don’t sass me, Shep. You can both move back to the summerhouse when it cools off a little, but for right now you’re staying here, and I don’t want to hear any more about it. A little vacation from Miss Lucy will do you good. I know who pushed that baby down and made him hit his head.”

“That was me!” I shouted. “I did that! Lucy didn’t touch the stupid baby!”

“That’s enough,” she said, the familiar ice back in her voice.

“ToTo and Little Lady told us what happened. That child is nothing but trouble, and the fact that she’s got you lying for her only bears me out. I have to get ready for the funeral now, and I want you to take a bath and put on your good clothes. I’ll bring them up after I’ve finished dressing.”

“Why do I have to get dressed up if I’m only going to sit up here dying in the heat?” I said sullenly, mutiny simmering in my heart.

138 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

“Because your little cousin has died very terribly and is being buried today, and you can very well show some respect even if you show it by yourself. It’s what decent people do.

It’s time you started learning how to live like the privileged and fortunate little gentleman you are. You were born to breeding and manners, Sheppie, even if you do spend all your time with…children who were not. I don’t want you to forget that.”

She was gone from the room before I figured out that she meant Lucy. I got out of bed and went hesitantly down the dim little hall in the unaccustomed silence. Always, at this stage in the morning, Lucy would be awake and calling out to me as we dressed for our day. But now there was only dust and heat and silence, and her cubicle, when I looked into it, was empty, even the small iron bed stripped down to its mattress. Her clothes were gone from the meager closet, too. Only Mickey lived; someone had forgotten to turn him off, and he glowed happily and somehow terribly there in the void where Lucy was not. The thought struck me that she had died, had died in the night of the polio that had carried off her small brother, and immediately upon thinking it I found myself at the top of the narrow stair down to the second floor screaming, “Lucy! Lucy!”

There was a long and awful silence, endlessly ringing, in which my heart almost knocked me to my knees with its force, and then Martha Cater appeared at the foot of the stairs and glared up at me.

“Hush that yellin’, Shep! This is a house of mournin’! I kin hear you all over the downstairs. What you want?”

“Lucy!” I bellowed. “Where is Lucy?”

“She in her mama’s bathroom gettin’ a bath just lak you ought to be,” she said severely. “What the matter with you two chirrun? You a’hollerin’ and her a’screamin’ lak a fiah engine, and yo’ po’ folkses tryin’ to git ready to PEACHTREE ROAD / 139

go bury that po’ little boy. You ought to be ashamed of yo’se’fs!”

I heard Lucy then, over Martha’s voice; heard her screams, far away and muffled through several closed doors, though I could not at first make out the words that she cried. But I knew the tone; knew what she was feeling, as I always knew with Lucy. Outrage, betrayal and that ultimate and mindless panic that being pent up always set loose in her. In the midst of her screams I heard my name: “Gibby! I want Gibby!”

Martha turned away in disgust, and I went back to my room and shut the door so that I could not hear her calling me. I knew that if I tried to go down to her I would simply be picked up and carried bodily back upstairs like the impotent small boy I was. My new sainthood had deserted both of us. I did not wish to compound the desertion with humiliation.

“Okay,” I said under my breath, fiercely, and yet with a kind of detached calmness. I was absolutely clear in my mind.

“Just all of you wait until I get big enough. None of you are going to be able to stop me then. I’m going to take Lucy and go far away from here, and you’ll never see either one of us anymore in the world. I don’t care how long it takes. I’m going to do it.”

And I lay back on my rumpled little bed and folded my arms under my head and began, in a kind of furious peace, that long wait.

It was a terrible time, a hiatus made all the more unendurable because we did not know when it would end. We knew only that freedom would come with the abating of the heat, and it seemed to us, by then, that the very weather that wrapped the earth was in immutable conspiracy against us.

Day after day dawned pale and featureless and still; afternoon after afternoon fulfilled the punishing promise of the thick morning. Even the boisterous, ineffectual thunder 140 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

storms that had broken the days stopped toward the end of that August, and then there was nothing, nothing, but whiteness and stillness and quiet and boredom and heat. My sharp and particular yearning for Lucy dulled and slumped back into the general, featureless malaise of misery in which I spent my days, despite the daily visits from my mother and sometimes my father, despite the piles of books and magazines and the new radio and the trays of special tidbits that ascended three times a day from the kitchen.

After that first day, I did not hear her cry out for me again, and I stopped asking for her, because the invariable answer to my queries was “She’s just fine. Living the life of Riley, reading and listening to the radio and playing games with ToTo.” I knew that was not true, but I did not know what was.

Sometime during that first week of mourning, my aunt Willa stopped her wild crying and washed her face and re-applied her makeup and went back to her job, and was much applauded for her pluck and gumption. I had discovered that by lying with my ear pressed against the hot-air register in the floor of the storeroom, which had become my daytime playroom, I could hear, through some elemental magic of physics, the conversations that were held on the sun porch off the drawing room, and I assumed the position whenever I heard a visiting automobile’s tires crunching on the gravel of the drive. My mother received her callers there in those days of formal mourning, as Aunt Willa had before her duty called her back, and it was in that way I kept my finger on the pulse of some tenuous reality. It was there, too, lying on the floor with my ear to that painful grid, I learned that Lucy was without patronage in the house.

Dorothy Cameron had come to call on my mother that day, bringing with her some red and green pepper jelly for which I heard my mother’s languid voice thank PEACHTREE ROAD / 141

ing her, and it was she who praised my aunt Willa. My mother brushed the praise aside.

“You’d have thought she was dying herself, the way she carried on up there, with poor Martha hauling trays and the doctor in and out five times a day,” she said. “And then before we know it, she’s downstairs all tarted up and with the makeup on an inch thick, asking if Shem could drive her downtown; says she’s needed at the Red Cross canteen. Now I ask you! Her only boy just dead and she’s going down and throw herself at that trash around the bus station! What on earth will people say?”

“Good for her,” Dorothy Cameron said, her voice crisp and edged. “I think she’s absolutely right. We
are
at war, you know, Olivia, and lying around crying isn’t going to bring that poor baby back. The Red Cross needs all the hands it can get. People will say she’s just what she is, a brave woman who puts her country above her own personal sorrow.”

“You sound just like Sheppard.” My mother’s languid voice was clearly exasperated. “I thought he was going to run right out and get her a Congressional Medal of Honor. Oh well, I know her type even if you’re too nice to see it, and I know what men are. Sooner or later she’s going to do something so tacky that even he’ll see her in her true colors, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t put her right out of the house then.”

“Which would be an awful shame for those two poor, fatherless children that are left,” Dorothy Cameron said.