Peachtree Road (39 page)

And there she was, standing poised on the railing with white-gripping toes, stripped down to her nylon panties and bra, naked on every silvery-white inch of her save a few, giving a strange, long, wordless, jubilant cry and diving like a polished knife out and down into the sky-smitten water, fully twenty feet below.

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Red Chastain, stripped also to his undershorts, followed her in a lazy, panther’s racing dive. We all stared in absolute, dream-snared silence. For a heart-stoppingly long time there was nothing on the steely water but the concentric stigmata of their dives, and then their sleek, wet heads broke the surface like seals, and their strong, slim arms Brought them to a little sandy beach some yards downstream, fringed with showering willows.

We were wrapped for another long moment in sun and singing air and river silence. And then Snake cupped his mouth with his hands and gave the great, hideous Tarzan cry out of all the Saturday matinees of our childhood and went off the bridge.

“Kowa Bunga!” yelled Ben, and followed him.

“Oh, God, I’m going to get
killed
for this!” Julia shrieked, but she slid out of her pedal pushers and blouse and squeezed her eyes shut and jumped in feet first, after Ben.

Julia would have leaped into hell after Ben; in a sense, she did.

The long tension of the day was broken then. One by one, shouting, the Pinks and Jells of Buckhead skinned out of their clothes and dived into the river. Before I could even get a strong breath, there were only four of us left on the bridge.

Pres could not swim in his heavy metal brace; he grinned and yelped from beside us. Charlie risked a diabetic’s death from cold and infection if he swam in any but summer-warmed water. I still stood there, on the pitted macadam.

And Sarah Cameron, by far the best swimmer and diver of us all, stood indolently at the railing, smiling coolly down at them while they shouted at us to strip and dive, dive, dive!

“It’s the worst kind of showing off,” she said to me in a low, urgent voice. “It’s gumption and not courage. Be really brave and don’t do it.”

PEACHTREE ROAD / 299

Of them all, only she and one other person knew that my fear of heights went beyond mere terror into mindlessness.

Lucy had always known.

They thrashed out of the water and stood on the little beach, gasping at the audacity of their own act, wet, laughing. Even the girls laughed. Even Freddie Slaton, looking like a water snake; even Little Lady, looking like a soaked Easter chick. Even Sarton Foy, looking like what she was—a sop-ping, near-naked aristocrat.

“Dive, y’all! Dive! Dive! Come
on
!” she shrieked. “You’re chickenshits if you don’t dive!”

Sarton is the only woman I ever knew besides Lucy on whose lips profanity sounded like an Ave Maria.

Everyone was laughing except Lucy. Lucy did not laugh, did not even smile. She stood a little apart, dripping and slender as a water reed, head thrown back, body gleaming through the sucking nylon, blue eyes blazing straight into mine, hands cupping her mouth, and called up, “Come on, Gibby, jump, or we’ll think you’re a North Fulton fruitcake!

Come on! Mark my trai-i-i-l!”

And at that shared, blood-and-heart-deep summons out of our childhood, I ripped off my pants and shirt, scrambled desperately up onto the hot steel railing, steadied myself on the struts and poised blindly for a dive. I opened my eyes then, for one despairing moment, and looked down into the water so sickeningly far below, and saw there instead only the endless, wheeling sky. I toppled backward onto the bridge, pulled myself up on my hands and knees, and vomited.

From below, Lucy’s laughter soared above a scrambled chorus of hard, bright jubilation. It seemed to go on forever.

By the time I had gotten numbly into my clothes and walked back to the Fury where I had parked it on the verge of the bridge, stiff and silent with Sarah in my wake, Lucy had come sleek and dripping and incandes

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cent up the bank, shimmering like a young otter. Red Chastain grinned insolently beside her.

“What’s the matter, Gibby?” she said lightly and merrily.

“Eat something that didn’t agree with you?”

Red laughed.

Sarah Cameron drew her slender brown arm back and slapped Lucy so hard that her neck snapped back and her wet hair lashed across her face. Someone is always slapping Lucy, I thought stupidly.

“I will never forgive you for that, Lucy Bondurant,” Sarah said in a voice I did not know and never heard again. “Shep will, because he’s a fool. But I won’t.”

We walked on past them, and were in the airless front seat of the Fury before we heard any of them speak, and I could not tell what it was they said. I turned the key and eased the car onto the sunlit emptiness of Paces Ferry Road. Neither of us looked back.

We drove home without a word, but when I let her out at the bottom of the long Cameron driveway, I leaned over and kissed Sarah briefly on her soft mouth, which tasted, surprisingly, of tears.

“Thank you, Sarah,” I said.

“You’re welcome, Shep,” she replied.

From that day until the summer morning I left for Princeton, I went few places without Sarah at my side.

Lucy’s tears of remorse that evening were fierce and real enough, and she was so wildly and desperately penitent that I forgave her as I always had and would; as Sarah had said I would. But the slight remove between us now was impenetrable. I had found to my great pain and profound surprise that the true legacy she had bestowed upon me was not, as I had thought, the power of savior and near-sainthood, but the open wound of vulnerability. An invisible and invincible shield, one that we had forged together on nearly the first day we had known each other, had been breached, and blood had been let.

PEACHTREE ROAD / 301

Neither of us, I know, ever forgot that day, though no one in our crowd spoke of it again, at least in my presence.

Almost immediately after the incident on the river the word got around that Lucy was doing the Black Act with Red Chastain almost every night, sometimes two and three times, and that they had vague plans to get engaged when he finally graduated, if he did. She wore no fraternity pin, for Red had refused to join one, so I had no way of knowing if the latter rumor was true.

I knew the former one was. Lucy walked in ripeness and moved in a new thick, sweet slowness that spelled, even to my wildly untutored eyes, completion. I seemed to feel about it, simply, no way at all.

I never spoke of those speculations to her, and she did not to me. We spoke of little in those last days; I kept away from the house as often and as long as I could, taking refuge at the Camerons’ until they good-naturedly ran me home each evening, and she kept to her room when she was not with Red. She did not even eat her meals with us in that last week.

I don’t know where she ate, or if she did. Once she stayed out all night and there was a flaming row with Aunt Willa in the foyer when she came in after sunrise, still adjusting her clothing. But I don’t think she was punished, or abided by it if she was, for she was not around the Peachtree Road house that week, and I felt, mainly, an obscure and guilty gratitude that I would not have to ride out another exile with her. I wanted, then, two things only: I wanted to be near the ease and lightness and safety that was Sarah, and I wanted to get away from Atlanta and into Princeton.

It did not occur to me until much later that both Sarah and Princeton might want something in return.

I left a full quarter earlier than I had planned, on a day in late June when rain and coolness had come back to town, and the air smelled of honeysuckle and newly 302 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

mown grass and grateful, sucking earth. I took the train from Brookwood station, for cars were not allowed on the Princeton campus until junior year, and my weeping mother and the smiling Camerons and Sarah came in the sweet, cool early morning to see me off. My father was at The Cloister on Sea Island at a realtors’ meeting; he had said his cold red good-byes earlier. Lucy was off somewhere with Red Chastain. We had, somehow, said no good-byes at all.

Sarah came regularly to Princeton for football games and, later, Colonial dances, and my mother and father came, rarely, for formal, constrained, parental visits, but except for brief and obligatory trips South for Christmas and Easter and a few unavoidable vacations, I did not come home again for a long time, and then through no choice of my own.

By that time, Lucy had gone.

PART TWO

CHAPTER ELEVEN

O
n a misted Sunday morning in late October, in the beginning of my junior year at Princeton, I sat with Sarah Cameron in the window seat of one of the big, grand suites high up in Blair Arch and kissed her, and put a trembling hand on the sweet heaviness of her breast.

She lifted her face to me from the hollow of my shoulder and smiled.

“Please don’t, Shep,” she said softly. “I don’t know how to handle it. And we said we wouldn’t, yet.”

“I know,” I said, my voice splintering in my throat. “But just think. You could tell people when you’re an old lady that you lost your virginity in Dub Vanderkellen’s room at Princeton when you were eighteen. It’s too good an opportunity to pass up.”

“Nevertheless, I think I will,” she said, sitting erect on the old tapestry pillows and pulling her shoulders sharply back, as she did when she was hurt or offended. I knew my attempt to be sophisticated and devil-may-care, as I felt befitted a visitor, even on sufferance, to the lair of one of the country’s richest scions and the school’s most accomplished woman-izers, had instead sounded only crude and insulting. I reddened fiercely. Sarah, even half-lying on the window seat of Dub Vanderkellen’s legendary room, where uncounted indigo-blooded society girls had allegedly yielded up their family jewels, was still Sarah. What I had said was beneath both of us.

“I’m sorry,” I said, looking at the rich mahogany tangle of her curls and the slim, shapely shoulders and winging little shoulder blades under the burgundy cashmere. I felt, besides shame and embarrassment, a powerful urge to shield Sarah which had nothing in it of the fierce, otherworldly protective-ness I had so often felt for

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Lucy. This was a practical and tender kind of feeling, and warmed instead of pierced. Sarah was only eighteen, and still very much Dorothy Cameron’s daughter, but she was also mine. Both of us had, over the space of this last year, come tacitly to acknowledge that.

“I know,” she said, in her light, rich voice, and turned her face, still sun-browned with summer and lit with her whole-souled smile, back to mine. “It was too good to pass up. I might have said it if you hadn’t. But to make it a good story it would have to be Dub Vanderkellen in the flesh that I lost it to, and I’d just as soon do it with a frog. When I do, it’s going to be with Shep Bondurant, and I’ll be fifty times prouder, even though I don’t know where or when it will be.”

I kissed her again, lightly, on the forehead just under the curls and felt expiation and a fine well-being flow through me. Sarah may not, in her entire life, have stopped hearts, but she certainly did start a lot of warm, steadfast engines.

“Dub would not be exactly thrilled to hear you called him a frog,” I said, tossing the luminous name off my tongue with a familiarity that two short months of shared membership in Colonial Club did not warrant. I might not be able to admit it to myself, but I was mightily impressed with belonging to the same eating club as one of the mighty Vanderkellens of Pittsburgh, Palm Beach, Antigua and London. I had known wealth all my life back in Atlanta, but I had never even conceived of wealth on a scale such as I encountered at Princeton, in the persons of three or four, in the main, rather nondescript undergraduates, of whom Dub Vanderkellen was hands down the crown prince. Vanderkellen steel under-girt, it seemed, the entire free world. Still, it was the romance of the great family name, and not its money and power, that so intrigued me. I have always known pretty much where my weaknesses lie.

PEACHTREE ROAD / 307

When I had seen Dub leave the Sunday morning milk punch party at Colonial in the savage little racing automobile of a whippetlike Bryn Mawr girl in a camel hair cape, I had made bold to ask him if I could take Sarah up to his room to see his fabled view. Dub had one of the few truly grand suites, vast and sumptuously furnished with old family pieces and commanding a spectacular 180-degree vista of the campus over Cannon Green toward Nassau Street, at the very top of Blair Arch, a crenellated and cloistered and mullioned Tudor Gothic pile of brick and pale stone which established for good and all the trend toward Gothic architecture on American college campuses. My own freshman and sophomore suite in Holder, before I had moved into Colonial, had reeked picturesquely of antiquity and genteel dust, but it did not hold a candle to the big suites in Blair.

“Sure,” Dub had flung back over his shoulder, intent on the flash of pearly thigh the Bryn Mawr girl was showing as she slid into the Jaguar. “Go on up. Lay off Sarah, though.

She’s too nice a girl for what you’re thinking. Leave that to the pros.”

His laughter, even that froggy, followed him insinuatingly out onto Prospect Street as the Jaguar growled off, and the group around us laughed, as Sarah and I did, though I was the only one who flushed. Dub knew, of course, that it wasn’t the view, but the wondrous room itself and the spoor of its storied occupant, that I had wanted to flaunt in front of Sarah. Everyone else knew it, too, and chafed me good-naturedly. Sarah had only visited Colonial this one time, for the Yale game, but she was an instant hit with the members, as she had been with my smaller and earlier crowd when I lived in the fourth entry of Holder Hall. I knew that already there were Colonial members who would have drubbed me with workmanlike thoroughness if they had thought I 308 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

might dishonor her. Sarah inspired that feeling of little-sister, daughter-of-the-regiment closeness wherever she went, and it spilled over into stronger stuff here as well as in Atlanta.