Peachtree Road (32 page)

I was not used to being so close to my mother, and felt a powerful, nervous urge to push her away and run. She half turned, and I closed my eyes so as not to see the pearly cleft of her breasts in the keyhole cutout of her neckline. She straightened and pushed me away to arms’ length, her hands hard on my shoulders, and looked up at me with a sheen of tears in her dark sloe eyes.

“My handsome man,” she said. “My little blond PEACHTREE ROAD / 243

boy, all grown up now and going off into the world, leaving his mama behind all alone. It cuts me to the heart to have you leave me, Sheppie.”

Since I wasn’t going anywhere but around the corner to the Camerons’ to pick up Sarah and then perhaps three miles farther away at best, out to the Brookhaven Country Club, I felt that the tears were gratuitous and false, a bit of arcana staged for my benefit, and was embarrassed.

“I’m not going anywhere, Mama,” I said.

“Yes you are, Sheppie,” she said, smiling her closed, odalisque smile at me. “You’re going very, very far in your life.

I’ve always known that. Your father can’t see it, but I can.

You’re a very special boy, and you’re going to be a very special man. A sensitive, talented, gentle man. And so handsome; well, just look at you. You look as handsome as Leslie Howard tonight, in your new tuxedo. Oh, I
am
jealous, Sheppie. All the girls are going to be crazy about you. I’ll bet half of them are in love with you now. You’ll make somebody a wonderful husband, and then you’ll forget all about your poor old mother. But one day you’ll see that nobody, not one of them, ever loved you like your mother did.”

She leaned forward to kiss me, and her eyes were half-shut, and she smiled a smile of something I had never seen before, something slow and secret and out-curling like a tentacle, and in pure panic I jerked away and turned to my image in the mirror. A blank-eyed, wavering blond man looked back at me, tall and badly frightened. Both the woman and the image were so totally alien that I felt, for a moment, completely without a context, utterly awry in my own skin. Then my mother laughed, her old, indulgent laugh, and the world came spinning back into focus.

“Don’t worry, I’m not going to embarrass you to death by kissing you,” she said. “Go on now, and pick up 244 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

little Sarah. I have to tell you, Sheppie, that we’re so glad it’s her you’re taking and not Lucy. Time you had some other little friends besides Lucy. You’re just too old for that cousin business now. People are already talking about it.”

I fled blindly, hot to the roots of my hair, and did not take a deep, easing breath until I gained the seclusion of the Fury, which stood gleaming and ready for me on the circular drive in front of the house, shined to a lacquer polish earlier in the day by Shem Cater. Increasingly, in those latter days of high school, my encounters with my mother left me shying with nerves and near to staggering under an oppressive weight whose name I did not know. It was pure, clear, light relief to walk into the little sitting room at the Camerons’

house where Sarah, Dorothy and Ben waited for me. Ben Junior had already left, to pick up pretty, pug-nosed Julia Randolph over on Arden.

Even in her freshman year, Sarah was already well known and popular at North Fulton, destined to be, as her mother had been before her, the one who ran, with sunny willingness and no vain-glorious aspirations at all, the “serious,” service-oriented organizations and activities of high school. Not that she was a goody-goody or a grind; she was a varsity cheerleader, and known throughout the city for her swimming and painting skills, and she never once in four years, that I know of, sat out a Friday night dance. With her perfect, supple little body and her clear, deep amber eyes and instant dimpling smile and cap of dark, glossy hair—cut short so that she did not have to wear a cap in the water when she dived and swam—she was as appealing and good to the eye as a pet squirrel, and as captivating. It has never been possible to look upon Sarah Cameron without a smile of pure response starting on your mouth. From her birth, she has had Dorothy’s enormous energy and purpose without PEACHTREE ROAD / 245

her austerity, and Ben’s easy charisma without his pure, focused ego. The best—or at least, the most livable—of both.

When Sarah graduated from North Fulton, the list of honors and organizations under her photograph was the longest in the
Hi-Ways
. It read, “Sarah Tolliver Cameron.

We predict, the first Mrs. President. Student Council, Annual Representative, P.T.A. Representative, Y-Teens, Secretary and Treasurer, Junior Class, President, Senior Class, Swimming Team, Gold Medal, All-City Swimming and Diving Competition, Cheerleader, Nominating Committee, Rabun Gap Guild, Home Economics Fashion Show, Le Circle Francaise, R.O.T.C. Sponsor, Honor Roll 10 Quarters, National Honor Society, Who’s Who, Student Court, Senior Superlatives, Senior Play, Southeastern Outstanding Young Artist of the Year, Atlanta
Journal-Constitution
Best All-Round Cup, Graduation Speaker.”

“Just look at the list of honors little Sarah has under her name,” my mother said at the breakfast table the morning after Lucy brought her senior annual home. My mother never ceased in her campaign to ally the houses of Bondurant and Cameron, and she never managed to refer to Sarah as anything but “little Sarah.” I looked at the
Hi-Ways
, smelling new leatherette and fresh, sour ink, and saw Sarah’s familiar chipmunk face smiling out at me over a vast sea of type. On the opposite page, Lucy’s face, dimmed to mere piquancy as always by a camera, looked obliquely out over a naked line or two.

“Yeah, isn’t that something?” Lucy said, yawning and scrubbing swollen, smudged eyes with her fists. She had been out with Red Chastain the night before, and I had heard the MG come burring up the driveway at nearly 5:00 A.M. By now, no one even bothered to admonish Lucy about it. She looked like a petal from an

246 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

exotic flower that had lain out all night in a driving rain, damp and bruised and used up.

“I imagine they charged her the standard ad rate,” Lucy drawled, draining black coffee. I scowled at her, and Aunt Willa frowned, but did not bother to say anything. My mother smiled her secret smile. She knew her point was well taken; the contrast between Sarah’s bountiful accolades and Lucy’s meager two lines hung vibrating in the air of the breakfast room. Lucy’s said, “Lucy James Bondurant. Hold the presses! Men overboard!
Scribbler
Staff Four Years, Editor in Chief, Senior Year. Rabun Gap, Tallulah Falls, Who’s Who.”

Four years of Lucy Bondurant, and in summary, all one could know of that complex stroke of pure flame was that she belonged to two organizations that were bestowed upon the elect of the Buckhead Pinks as automatically as their smallpox vaccinations and their birth certificates; that she labored only for the student newspaper and only there left a spoor of herself; and that she had as her middle name that of her early-lost and long-adored father. It was Sarah Cameron who shone from the pages of that world.

But at age fourteen, when I first began to squire her to dances and a few other
de rigueur
social occasions, Sarah was still, to me, endearing little Sarah Cameron, who was comfortable to be with for hours on end, who could swim like a minnow and dive like an otter and keep up with me on any weed-choked battlefield or any dance floor, and toward whom I felt absolutely no compelling obligation. She did not, therefore, weigh heavy on my heart, but sat lightly as thistledown in my mind. It was still, then, for me, Lucy who bore down, who burned, who clung, who shone.

Going into her teens, there was not a girl or woman in Atlanta from twelve to thirty who could touch Lucy Bondurant for sheer impact. She was an absolute, essen PEACHTREE ROAD / 247

tial flame; everyone who knew her in that time would remember her all their lives. At thirteen, she was as tall and fully developed as she would ever be, her blue eyes unclouded and black-lashed and extraordinary, her waist spannable by two masculine hands, her dark wings of hair, not cut into the flips and later the ducktails of the day, but falling softly against her cheeks in the sleek, loose pageboy of the preceding decade. Until they cut it in the hospital, many years later, Lucy wore her hair that way.

Her impact was not that of classical beauty, but a matter of what she called her engine and I thought of as her aura: a vivacity, a sheen, an electricity that ran at full throttle and, except when she slept, continuously. Even her bad habits had charm, a cachet, which many were, all her life, to imitate unsuccessfully. From somewhere—I suppose her beloved Negroes—she had learned to swear like a sailor, but she did it in such a pure, honeyed drawl and with such a vulnerable innocence in her blue eyes that the effect was entrancing. A whole generation of Atlanta Pinks learned to say “shit” and

“fuck” from Lucy Bondurant, but it became none of them but her.

She also adopted smoking two or three years before the other girls in her crowd took it up—for almost everyone in our day smoked, Pall Malls and Viceroys and Parliaments, in blue and white crushproof boxes—and she adored liquor from that first stolen swallow of my father’s Jack Daniel’s.

But she did not drink as a matter of course until considerably later. Lucy in her early and middle teens ran largely on spirit.

Her galvanic physical presence assured her a constant swarming circle of boys, Jells and otherwise, but it did nothing to endear her to a generation of Atlanta women. I don’t think she even noticed, and I know she never cared.

From the moment she walked into North Fulton High School, from the moment she lifted her head and stared across a bleached

248 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

and blinding athletic field into the hungry, betraying eyes of the 880 relay team, it was men for Lucy, men all the way.

Despite the portent of that day on the athletic field, it began slowly, that consuming, lifelong passion and refuge of Lucy’s. For the entirety of her freshman year, Aunt Willa did not allow her to date, despite the fact that other freshman girls, especially the Pinks, went regularly on double, if not single, dates to the dinners and dances and even breakfasts afterward, and were allowed to go in groups to early movie dates, or for sodas after school. I don’t know why Aunt Willa was so strict with Lucy that year. There had never been any trouble with boys up to then, and I am sure she did not know about the night in the summerhouse. Perhaps she, too, saw in her daughter that naked, hungry, infinitely vulnerable and powerfully sexual creature the relay team had seen on that hot September afternoon. Perhaps she knew that unlike the repressed and biddable Little Lady, Lucy was not going to go sweetly and conventionally through her adolescence to an early and stable marriage. Perhaps she remembered her own sexual abandon, and its consequences—though I doubt that. I don’t believe that concern for Lucy motivated the prohibition. I think, as I thought then, and as Lucy knew absolutely, that forbidding her daughter to date when everyone else did was Willa Bondurant’s way of punishing her, of saying, in effect, you are cheap and trashy and cannot be trusted, so you must be curbed. It must have planted the idea of promiscuity deep. And as any captivity always had, the ban made Lucy furious and desperate. I truly believe that if Aunt Willa had been reasonable about her dating in that first year of high school, Lucy’s life might have taken a different course. But it may be that, even then, the die was too decisively cast for malleability.

She did not rail and storm and protest, as she would PEACHTREE ROAD / 249

have once. She had learned well the consequences of that.

She simply set out, efficiently and methodically, to attract every male who came within range, and she did it without lifting a finger. Lucy unaware was as seductive, in those early days, as a prepubescent nymph. Lucy aware and plying all her weapons was in another league altogether. By the end of the school year, there was not a male student at North Fulton High, and not many among the Jells of all Atlanta, who did not know that Lucy Bondurant was hot to trot, and loaded for bear—though it was not generally thought that she would, as yet, put out. The consensus on that was that it was just a matter of time, and the stampede to be first geared up then, and did not cease, so far as I knew, until Red Chastain came along and put the competition on ice.

Lucy made her move rather elegantly, even I had to admit, if not particularly subtly. She left home ahead of me in the mornings, claiming an early homeroom, and promptly upon arrival at North Fulton went into the ground-floor girls’ rest room and made her face up. Since Aunt Willa had also forbidden makeup, Lucy had simply stolen what she needed from Wender & Roberts, and when she emerged from the rest room it was under a vivid, expertly applied frosting of Maybelline and Revlon. She needed no mascara or eyeliner, but I seldom saw her during those days at school without a hectic slash of “Cherries in the Snow” on her soft mouth, and she smelled exotically of a scent called Tabu, which she loved and wore all through high school and beyond, until her bluestocking classmates at Agnes Scott College told her she smelled like a
cocotte
.

“They meant French whore, of course,” she told me that year, “but God forbid that word should cross a Scottie’s lips.

You should see their faces when I say ‘fuck’ and ‘shit.’ They call fuck ‘the F word.’ And they say ‘the Black Act’ or ‘the Dirty Deed’ when they mean fucking. I

250 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

don’t know what they’re going to tell their children: ‘Daddy and I got you the night we did the Black Act,’ do you think?”

Lucy did not have to steal the Tabu. I bought it for her the Christmas of her freshman year, and gave it to her in the summerhouse, so my parents and Aunt Willa wouldn’t know she had it. She only dabbed it on after she left for school, and solved the problem of its lingering ghost by telling Aunt Willa that her sixth-period teacher sprayed it lavishly on herself just before the final bell rang, and invariably got some on Lucy and those other students who sat in the front rows.