Peachtree Road (55 page)

It was sharp and particular and mappable: pure loss, pure loss. Sometimes, when I had been hidden and deadened away from it for a few hours, it would waylay me afresh, and the force of it would fold me over like stomach cramps.

Its worst component was the scalding memory of my behavior toward Sarah and Charlie, and the sheer treachery of my reaction to their engagement. I

PEACHTREE ROAD / 427

had never before so completely lost control of myself, never before so completely hated and hurt. I had not known that such excess was in me. I had not known that I could behave so badly, and exult in it in the bargain. Shame burned its own separate path alongside the other, larger pain’s trajectory, and pure fright at finding such alien corn in my own level field compounded both. It was a vicious potion. I could not seem to summon the strength to fight it, even as I recognized the ludicrousness of languishing in it. Even my own absurdity was clear to me; I was spared, that terrible summer, nothing at all.

Sometimes, when I could not sleep in the thick, hot nights, I would try, doggedly, to understand this thing that had my entrails in its talons and would not let me go. I had, after all, had plenty of experience with loss, starting with my father and ending up, over and over again, with Lucy. I was not, had never been, so naive as to think one did not ever lose what one valued.

But somehow my father and Lucy were things that belonged to me by birthright, things that I came into the world already in some way attached to. The first was not so much mine as I was his; that rejection might be explained simply and brutally by the fact that I did not measure up to his cri-teria. In the case of Lucy, we were mutually and synergistically fashioned to meet and feed each other’s needs, and did so for a long time before she, too, was—or seemed to be—lost to me. And whatever else she was to me, Lucy was, and always had been, my responsibility.

But Sarah…Sarah was a gift. Sarah Cameron had been my gift from life, the only one I was ever given until Princeton came to me. That I had not cherished her enough, had in my blind fashion taken her sadly for granted, did not change the fact that Sarah came to me fully and wholly and without condition. Every time the

428 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

loss of her surfaced anew, the anguish was as red and wet as the day it had been born, and underneath it lay, each time, incredulity. I had not thought that life took its gifts back. But then, as I said, I had never really had any gifts except Sarah and Princeton.

I fled back to Princeton and Firestone Library a few times that summer, but the small, persistent shade of Sarah Cameron was so palpable on that leaf-drowned campus that I kept half turning to her, and finding only vivid, shimmering air where she had just been, and I could not go back again.

Obscure anger flared at those times; anger at life for stripping me of both Sarah and Princeton; anger at Sarah for purloin-ing even Princeton from me; and most painful of all, anger at myself for letting her go. I could taste the validity of this last, and it smote me so that I buried it deep, and in time the fresh, blistering pain dulled from searing agony to visceral ache, and I knew, gratefully, that if I walked gingerly and held myself lightly, I could manage, in some fashion, to live with that.

I did not hear from Sarah and Charlie again, of course. I believe I would have, if I had reached out a hand, apologized, made the first move, but I could not. It would not have brought her back, and any lesser payoff was not worth the enormous effort. I heard, in July, that they had moved the Thanksgiving wedding back to September, and that it would be very small, families and a few old friends only, in the little walled garden of the Muscogee Avenue house. I heard this from my mother, who seemed as aggrieved at being deprived of the season’s undisputed social event as she was furious at my defection from the house of Cameron.

“I thought you’d want to know, and I don’t guess anybody else from here will bother to tell you,” she said on the telephone. She did not say that everyone there thought I was a bounder of the first water, and wondered PEACHTREE ROAD / 429

avidly if Sarah was pregnant by me and Charlie was rescuing her, but the words shrilled and trembled on the wires between us, and I hung up as soon as I decently could. No wedding invitation came; I was grateful for that.

My mother was right. I had heard from almost no one in Atlanta since I had brought Lucy home from California in June—not that that was unusual. With the exception of her and Sarah and Dorothy Cameron, I had seldom heard from home. Lucy called, a few days after Sarah and Charlie had returned to Atlanta, and when I hung up the telephone at the sound of her voice, called again. This time I let the phone ring, and she did not call a third time. Letters came from her, though, and kept up for some weeks, but I tore them up unopened, and finally they dwindled and stopped. I could not think of Lucy in those days without a red-fired blackness flooding my brain, a blind, implacable rage that frightened me badly. But it, too, abated after the letters stopped. By and large, the deadness held, and when it did not, the ache could, after all, be borne.

And then, in early August, Dorothy Cameron called.

“Shep, dear, it’s Dorothy,” she said, and in that split instant the anesthetized ache fled and a pure, silver and terrible new grief like a piano wire stabbed my heart. I wanted to weep, to keen like an Irishman at a wake, to wail like a banshee; I wanted to crawl through the eight hundred-odd miles of wire between West Twenty-first Street and Muscogee Avenue and lay my head in her lap and sob like a child, brokenhearted and inconsolable, until I fell asleep there, finally spent. I literally could not speak around the knot of anguish in my throat. It was not only Sarah who was lost to me now.

I managed some sort of strictured croak that did not fool Dorothy Cameron.

“Oh, my dear,” she said. “I
am
sorry. I haven’t called until now because I knew it would be as awful for you as 430 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

it is for me; I haven’t been able to pick up the phone to call you without crying. It’s ridiculous. Neither of us has died.

Ben is really quite annoyed with me. But it’s time to stop this foolishness now.”

And magically, the lethal knot loosened and I was able to speak. It has always been Dorothy Cameron’s greatest gift, that of healing.

“I’ve missed you,” I said. “And I didn’t even know how much till I heard your voice just now. I would have called, but I’ve acted like such a horse’s ass I didn’t think you’d want to talk to me. God, Dorothy, I’ve made such a mess of everything….”

“Yes, you have,” she said, but she said it so matter-of-factly that even in the admission there was healing. “But you’re the one who’s been hurt the most by it, by far. We’re pretty much all right down here. Sad to say, the world has a nasty way of stepping over our prostrate bodies and going right on. Hiding away up there and not answering letters or the telephone is not necessary and really not very smart. I’m calling to ask you to reconsider coming home. Just for a visit, of course.”

“Dorothy,” I said, “I can’t do that. I agree with you that hiding out is stupid as hell, but one thing I can’t do is come home yet. Did…did Sarah ask you to call?” A starved and craven hope slunk up from somewhere out of the ice-packed depths of me, skulking like a coyote through my heart.

“Sarah? No,” Dorothy said. “You were awfully rough on her, Shep. I don’t think Sarah’s going to call you, or Charlie either, and in any case, I wouldn’t intercede for either of them. They’re fully capable of handling their own affairs, no matter how badly I might think they’re doing it. No, Sarah didn’t ask me to call you, but Lucy did. She says you won’t answer her calls and letters, and she needs very badly to see you and talk to you. I believe she does, Shep.”

PEACHTREE ROAD / 431

“Lucy? My cousin Lucy?” Simple astonishment made me stupid. I had packed Lucy at the very bottom of the ice cre-vasse, lower even than the pain of Sarah and Charlie. Lucy was the last name I had ever expected to hear on Dorothy Cameron’s lips, and to hear it couched in a request for help was as alien to my ears as if she had begun speaking Seneg-alese.

“Lucy, yes,” Dorothy said briskly, and I could tell she was losing patience with my obtuseness. I shook my head like a dog coming out of water.

“Okay,” I said. “What kind of trouble has Lucy gotten herself into now? And I warn you, Dorothy, I don’t much want to hear it, whatever it is. Lucy has wrecked things for me the last time she’s going to. She’s a grown-up woman, a divorcée, and she’s got enough sense and skills to look after herself now. Let her do it, or let her find somebody else to hang on to. I can’t afford to talk to Lucy right now, much less come down there and grub around trying to clean up whatever mess she’s made.”

“As a matter of fact, she hasn’t made any kind of mess that I can see,” Dorothy said equably. From childhood she had been used to my outbursts; I had felt safe in letting her field them when I had trusted no one else but Lucy with them.

“Rather the opposite, in fact. She has a job that she seems to love, and she’s paying what she can toward her room and board to your parents, and I’ve never seen her quite like this.

She seems…happy. Just happy. Not excited, or keyed up, or manic; there’s a sort of inner glow to her, and a quietness that I never saw before, and that I frankly find most appealing. I think she may have a new young man, though she won’t say, but in any case she’s been coming over and talking with me in the evenings for the past few weeks, and I’ve simply never seen such a change in a young woman. She says you’re responsible; I can’t imagine what you said to her. I don’t think it’s a pose, either; I’d spot that in Lucy in a

432 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

minute. Sarah thinks it’s genuine, too. Lucy has spent a good bit of time with Sarah, going shopping with her and helping with wedding details. Sarah says she apologized very genuinely for all the trouble she caused for everybody, and with real tears in her eyes. Sarah was quite touched. Charlie’s still holding out, but you know Charlie….”

I did, indeed, and knew that Charlie had what Hemingway called an infallible shit detector when it came to Lucy Bondurant. I did, too.

“Well, I’m glad to hear she’s not in trouble, but if I were you I’d walk softly around the new Lucy,” I said. “She’s capable of being whoever she needs to be. This makes me nervous as hell.”

“I know,” she said. “That’s why I think you should come home and see for yourself. She wants you to so badly that you can tell she’s nearly bursting with it. She says she really needs to try and make things right for you, that she can’t get on with her life until she does, and that she doesn’t know how to reach you. Shep, I’m convinced that that’s just what she means to do—get on with her life on her own. The work she’s doing is really quite valuable, and she’s done some writing, too, that she says something might come of one day or another. It’s as though she knows a lovely secret; as though there’s a candle lit within her. Luminous…”

Well, I thought. Luminous is the word for Lucy. Always was. What is it really? I wonder. Aloud I said, “I’m not going to come home, Dorothy; I just can’t do that yet. But I’ll talk to her if she still wants me to. Tell her to call me. I’ll take it this time. And…Dorothy…how is Sarah? How is she, really?

Is she…you know…happy?”

“Happy?” She tasted the word as if she did not know what it meant. “No, I don’t think Sarah is particularly happy right now, Shep, but she’s very much all right. She PEACHTREE ROAD / 433

will be very useful in her marriage and here in Atlanta, and I believe that in time that will make her happy. She could not be useful in New York. No matter what you think, she could not be. And for girls like Sarah, being useful is far more important in the long run than being merely happy.”

My heart hurt, briefly and profoundly. Sarah was not happy. Three weeks away from her marriage and she was not happy. Useful…useful Sarah. In that instant I saw her life.

“Damn your high-minded crap, Dorothy,” I said, not loudly, but with trembling vehemence in my voice.

“Shep, don’t,” she said. “We love you. We feel your pain.

All of us do. Don’t lash out at us like this.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

That night I wrote Sarah and Charlie, a letter apiece, short but as warm and penitent as I could make them, benedictory.

I apologized for my behavior and gave my blessing, feeling like a Borgia pope as I did so, false and corrupted. I love you, I signed off to both of them. I wept a little, tired, shamed tears in the hot, thick darkness as I dropped the letters into the mailbox on the corner of Twenty-first and Ninth, but I felt somehow ennobled too, exalted. I imagined Sarah opening hers in her studio and reading it, saw the blessing of the autumn light from the window wall on her face, saw her close her glowing eyes and droop her dark head over the letter. I could not see where Charlie would open his, for his apartment in Colonial Homes was not a part of the country of our youth, and it seemed that I could really see Charlie Gentry only there. He seemed caught in our mutual boyhood as in amber, and I could no more imagine him at the altar with Sarah, or in a new white bed with her, than I could at his executive’s desk at the Coca-Cola Company’s new headquarters on North Avenue. I was glad for that.

434 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

Two days later a telegram came from them, signed, all our love, Sarah and Charlie. Please, please, it said, come home for the wedding.

But I could not do that.

During the next three weeks I managed quite well not to think of them, but I did think a lot about Lucy.

“She says you’re responsible for the change in her,”

Dorothy Cameron had said. “I can’t imagine what you said to her.”

For a long time I could not remember, either, and then I thought perhaps I did. It had been on the plane that lumbered interminably toward Atlanta from Los Angeles, somewhere over Utah, I thought, or at least early in the trip, before fatigue and the afterwash of pain and drugs took her down into sleep. I had been trying to have a serious talk with her, but it had turned out to be pretty much a monologue, for she would not talk about Red Chastain or her marriage, except to say that it was, of course, over.