Peachtree Road (34 page)

I knew there was talk among the Jells about my hov 258 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

ering, and a good bit of avid speculation about the nature of my attachment to my cousin Lucy. I hated the idea of the talk, but I hated even more the lack of interest that the absence of parents and relatives when her dates called implied.

It seemed to me tawdry and lax, a disgrace on the family and the house. I knew the neglect and its implication could mark Lucy as “easy” faster than almost anything she might do herself. And so, like Anias, I watched at the gate.

Aunt Willa watched, too, though not openly and publicly.

She hovered when Lucy got a telephone call from a boy, and always seemed to be outside the little downstairs sun-room that had become Lucy’s teenaged haunt when boys were in the house. They almost always were that year. She openly forbade her the summerhouse with anyone other than me, and early on in Lucy’s dating career there were hushed, hissing tirades behind the closed door of Lucy’s room when she came home late, which she did increasingly. After a while Aunt Willa stopped sitting up, and the futile tongue-lashings ceased, and no one waited up for Lucy anymore. I knew that the lack of supervision was common knowledge at school, and that the early-morning necking and petting sessions in the shadows of our porte cochere lengthened accordingly, because I heard the cars as they drove in, and I usually heard them much later as they ghosted guiltily away. I would wait until I saw the flush of yellow from the portico light go out, and then, finally, I would sleep. After that first year, I did not lie awake listening for Lucy.

When I was fully grown and well away from there, I came to see that Lucy’s powerful and burgeoning seductiveness was not only a reminder to Aunt Willa of her own teen persona, but a threat to the flimsy respectability and social ac-ceptability she had managed to draw around herself. Willa Bondurant’s presence in the drawing rooms and clubs and at the luncheons and fashion

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shows and charity balls of Atlanta was too hard won and tenuous for her to allow talk about Lucy to jeopardize it. But not even I could control Lucy, much less her mother, and so Willa simply withdrew, hoping, ostrichlike, that she would draw down upon herself no guilt by association.

For her part, Lucy, who had begun employing her natural seductiveness to keep herself comfortingly surrounded by and, more often, in the arms of the various highborn young men who were copies, albeit pale ones, of her father, began then to use her sexuality as a weapon of defiance against her mother. She dated more and more frequently, often having an engagement with one young man for an afternoon movie, another for a milkshake afterward and a third that evening.

She pulled her belts tight and thrust her breasts forward and rolled her hips. She went to every dinner and dance and breakfast given by every high school sorority and fraternity in Atlanta for the next four years, and came in from each of them smeared and crumpled and heavy-eyed and hick-eyed and irrepressible. Her smile grew steadily more brilliant and promissory, and her laugh richer, and her eyes bluer and more intense, and her whole flamelike ethos more glittering.

The talk began in earnest in her sophomore year and never ceased, and I heard every bit of it, and suffered. The only thing I did not hear was that she had finally done the Dirty Deed with one of the groaning Jells, and so I knew that technically she was still a virgin, although that technicality hung by the thinnest of filaments imaginable. Lucy in those years left a trail of tumescence behind her as thick as the Great Wall of China.

I don’t think Aunt Willa heard any of the talk. Her preoccupation with Little Lady had deepened into obsession, and by then even my mother had to admit that this little gilt ace in our familial hole had become as mal

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leable and chiming and lovely and essentially brainless a little Atlanta belle as one could wish. Little Lady was a virgin of the highest and most marketable order. She could not remember her father, but she did remember, vividly, her mother’s histrionic descriptions, when they first came to our house, of the times James Bondurant had come home drunk and beat her and little Lucy, and of how he had once threatened to kill all of them with a claw hammer. Consequently, she was so terrified of the men she had been trained to please that she allowed no one to touch her beyond the obligatory dance holds, and those lightly, and so went through her immaculate debut a few years later and her dainty provisional year of Junior League, and finally to her early and brilliant wedding to bull-necked, blue-blooded Carter Rawson a virgin of vestal purity.

That she began, ever so discreetly, to sip bourbon steadily through the days and evenings soon after that grand affair did not necessarily have anything to do with any trauma from her wedding night; might, indeed, have been Jim Bondurant’s genetic legacy to her. However, as Lucy said after the first time Little Lady fell on her pretty Pekingese face during dinner at the Driving Club, “Oh, bullshit, of course it was fuck-shock. Lady always thought, until her wedding night, that you did it with pistils and stamens. Lord, I can’t abide a fool.”

Only with me was Lucy her old, flickering, will-o’-the-wisp self; me and the Negroes in her orbit. With them, especially with moody, brilliant Glenn Pickens over at the Camerons’

and dumpy, stolid ToTo at our house, who were near her own age, she was, perhaps, even more essentially herself, because she loved to give, to please, to teach, to impart information and watch it sink home, and there was little by then that she could tell me that we had not already shared.

ToTo was hopeless; her response to Lucy contained, only and ever, a one-PEACHTREE ROAD / 261

celled, doglike devotion. But Glenn Pickens’s mind leaped and flashed like a rainbow trout in sunstruck spray, and he spent hours listening to Lucy’s free-flowing fancies and odd, glinting insights.

The only times I ever saw Glenn really smile in my life, then or later, was at some notion of Lucy’s, and I think that the only tendrils of humor and whimsy he has in his complex, darkling soul today were planted there in those days by her.

With him the seductress simply took herself off and the open, sunny changeling came out of hiding, and the two odd and good young minds, so far apart in the countries of birth and environment, met in a shower of sparks. Even Ben and Dorothy Cameron stopped sometimes to listen to them spar and banter, and though Glenn and Lucy would temper their talk to the adult ears, in the sun of that easy approval they would go on.

“She’s good for him,” Ben said once, walking with me and Dorothy back to their house while Lucy gathered up her books and Glenn got ready for his late-afternoon sessions with the English tutor the Camerons had found for him. “I can’t quite grab hold of it, but she does something for him all the studying we can buy for him doesn’t do.”

“It’s that she shows him a white person’s world with no holds barred and no strings attached,” Dorothy said. “She gives him all of herself and no matter how hard we try, most of us white folks just can’t do that with the Negroes. But how can we expect them to move into our world if we don’t show them what it’s really like? Or what we are? That’s what Lucy does for Glenn. She shows him what is possible.”

“Lord God,” Ben Cameron said, ruffling Dorothy’s dark hair. “Don’t ever let anybody outside us and Shep hear you say that. The Klan will start knocking crosses together before you can say ‘Jim Crow.’ You’re right,

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though, of course. That’s just what it is. The possible. It could open more doors than any law we could manage to get on the books.”

“Now who’s Klan bait?” Dorothy Cameron said.

“Well, let’s hope she doesn’t get bored with Glenn and stop coming,” Ben said. “I often wonder why she does. Pretty as she is, I wonder that every little thug in Buckhead isn’t camped on your doorstep, Shep.”

“They are,” I said, and though that’s all I did say, Dorothy Cameron shot me a swift look of pure compassion. She knew, of course, what Ben Cameron or any of our fathers would not have: that Lucy Bondurant was the talk of Buckhead, and why. And she knew more; knew, somehow, that the fact was a kind of obscure agony to me. I was grateful for the knowing, but it embarrassed me, and I did not go to the Camerons’ after school again when I knew Lucy was there with Glenn Pickens.

In any case, it did not matter, for Aunt Willa somehow got wind of the afternoons that Lucy spent with Glenn in the Pickenses’ little house behind Merrivale House and forbade her to go there ever again, or even to speak to Glenn, and made it so plain that if she disobeyed she would be sent away to whatever out-of-state boarding school could be found for her—“and with what I can afford you won’t like it, sister”—that Lucy capitulated without a word. She simply drew in a little closer upon herself, and clung more tightly to Martha and ToTo and me, and escalated her sexual warfare against Willa to include open smoking and covert drinking.

Nobody knew about the drinking yet but me, for no one else heard her hectic giggle when she came in at night, or the clumsy stumblings at the front door, but I thought it was only a matter of time for that, too, and my silent Lucy-anguish bored deeper.

I do not remember seeing Glenn Pickens smile ever again, though, of course, he must have.

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We saw the Negroes in our world, in those last tranquil days before May 17, 1954, when
Brown v. Board of Education
fissured the dike, in a kind of simplistic pentimento. On the surface, they filled two roles for us: furniture and court jesters. The Pinks and the Jells of Buckhead had grown up in a sea of black faces, but those faces invariably loomed over hands at work in our service: nurses, cooks, maids, chauffeurs, gardeners, washwomen, even wet nurses. They might be infinitely and boundlessly loving and patient with us, and we might revel in their warmth, but it was the warmth and comfort of old, well-padded furniture that we took from them, anonymous and belonging inalterably to our houses. Most of us were aware, on some deep and never-probed level, that we had power over them, even as small children; too many shrieks and tears and complaints from us, and the nurses and tenders would be gone back to the projects before our pink little mouths had closed. I don’t think any of us ever examined the basic horror of that power then, for children—especially the children of that time and place, and even its teenagers and young men and women—do not question the anatomy of their worlds. It is as it is. For most of us, introspection and awareness came much later, if at all, when the fire storms raging over the South could not be ignored even by us out in our Buckhead fastnesses. By then, of course, it was all academic.

When they were not providing us with comfort, the Negroes we knew entertained us. The Pinks and the Jells had a ready stable of Negroes who could be counted on to amuse and charm us endlessly with their antics, antics so redolent, in our blind young eyes, of the only kind of blackness we knew. They were those most prized pieces in our furniture collections, “characters,” and we loved and laughed at all of them, and knew none of them.

There was Blind Willie, who played wildly infec 264 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

tious, raunchy rhythm and blues guitar at Peacock Alley, and Snake-Eyes the carhop, who named several of his countless children after favored Jells, and mincing, transvestite Sister, who wore a Carmen Miranda turban and high heels and dispensed languid curb service at Rusty’s until a committee of indignant Northside mothers descended upon Rusty or whoever his factotum was and demanded Sister’s banishment on moral grounds. There were the incredible carhops at the Varsity, monarch among them the outrageous, androgynous Flossie May, whose singsong litanies and lightning feet provided diversion nearly as enthralling as the celebrated and utterly taboo jig shows down at the Municipal Auditorium on Saturday nights. We attended these latter affairs regularly, lying to our parents, and stationed ourselves in the upstairs balcony, where we danced and drank beer and shouted and laughed, and rained trash and bottles down upon the dancers, and rocked our bodies to the blasting, insinuating rhythm of the Negro music that was unlike any we had ever heard before, pounding and insistently sexual. Why we were not simply set upon and murdered afterward for our insolence is a tribute to both the good nature of those dancers and the smug and muffled tenor of the times. Ten years later, we would have been.

It was one of the real dichotomies of Lucy’s character that she so openly and truly loved many individual Negroes, and yet participated with such obvious relish in the mimicking and debasing of the race itself in those awful balconies, pointing and laughing with the best of us at the dancing Negroes out on the floor. And yet I knew that even while she did, she was the only one of us who would have cheerfully and naturally gone right on home after the show with any one of them who had asked her and danced and talked away the remaining hours of the night, and thought absolutely nothing of it.

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As Yul Brynner said in
The King and I
, “is a puzzlement,”

and one of the many about her I never solved.

We were, most of us, openly and casually racist, and told and laughed at our share of nigger jokes, but I think it was largely a cultural thing and had nothing in it of personal heat, like our laughing rudely at Yankees while knowing virtually none of them, or our parents’ denying stoutly that they were archconservatives, even as their chauffeurs drove them to the polls to vote for Franklin Roosevelt. But a few of the boys I knew at North Fulton were venomously and very personally bigoted, and acted—or were said to act—upon it. Boo Cutler and Floyd Sutton come to mind; both were said to have stalked and shot Negroes from their streaking cars in the black nights on nameless South Georgia farm roads, and I have seen Boo, once at the Blue Lantern and once at Moe’s & Joe’s, knock a weary and smartmouthed Negro carhop to the ground and kick him nearly unconscious.

When Martin Luther King was shot in Memphis, the story was all over Buckhead, in the weeks following, that Boo Cutler was actively and intimately involved in the plot, was perhaps even the finger behind the one on the trigger. There may have been some credence to it; the story still has currency today, though Boo himself is long dead of a brain tu-mor. I remember that I thought of that story when I heard of his death, lingering and lonely in the dreary VA hospital out on Briarcliff Road, and then thought how strange it was that so many of those eerie loners who alter history in violent and terrible ways turn out to have had blooming in their brains that hideous, silent flower. Perhaps Boo always had it. None of us were surprised when we heard.