Peachtree Road (56 page)

The Pendleton MPs had finally tracked Red to a fly-specked cantina back room on an unimaginable side street in Tijuana, and had brought him back to base in handcuffs on the day before we left for home; two of his superior officers had come to see Lucy in the hospital, to ask what action she thought she might want taken, but she had begun to tremble and cry again and so the doctor and I had asked them to leave, and they had, and we quit that high, sun-punished plain without seeing her husband again, and to my knowledge she never saw him again while she lived. I knew that she planned to file for divorce as soon as she got back to Atlanta, but beyond that, she had no plans at all, and so I switched my attack to her work, and what she hoped to do with the rest of her life.

My own seemed, then, firmly set in its own incandescent orbit, and I wanted to get back to it and on with it, and to see her set onto some path that was least PEACHTREE ROAD / 435

likely to disturb mine. I was wild, at that time, to be home with Sarah.

“You could be a really good writer,” I said to her. “You could be published nationally right now, that’s how good you are. All your professors said so. I know from reading your stuff—what little there’s been of it. You know so, too.

But instead you’ve wasted all those good years screwing around with people like Red Chastain. God, you Southern women. You’re content with so damned
little
.”

“Lord, Gibby, are you one of those feminists?” Lucy said, gingerly tasting with her broken mouth the term that had just begun to creep into the vernacular.

“I guess I am,” I said, after thinking about it. “Aren’t you?

I thought all women with half a brain would be.”

“No,” she said. “I hate women. You know that. Men are all you can trust.”

“Lucy, just look at your men,” I said in despair.

“Yes, Gibby, but they’re predictable, all of them. I know what they’re going to do. I can handle that. Women are mysterious. You can’t read them. And that makes them automatic enemies. It’s better to have a man on your side, as well as by it.”

“That’s bullshit,” I said. “It’s an excuse you women use for not doing anything of your own with your lives.”

“Well, we’ve raised a damned lot of you Southern boys’

children,” she said sharply, stung.

“No you haven’t,” I said. “Black women do that.”

She was silent for a long time, and then she fell asleep and slept the rest of the way home. Could that small snippet of talk, words spoken in a sealed metal cylinder hung somewhere over the fabled red West, really have changed Lucy Bondurant? I could not imagine that it had, but I could recall no other….

Charlie and Sarah were married on the Saturday after Labor Day, and I did not mark the occasion in any 436 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

special way at all. I had saved a lot of chores for that Saturday, and at the particular moment that I estimated Sarah Cameron became Sarah Gentry, I was midway between Gristede’s and my laundry with a package of Kraft macaroni and cheese dinner and a sack full of soiled clothing. I passed the kosher deli on the corner of Ninth and Twenty-third, and muttered aloud, “
Mazel tov
, Sarah,” and on impulse went into the dark, garlicky shop and bought a carton of chopped liver, which Sarah had loved with an absolutely Hebraic avidity. I went on home in the still-hot September twilight and put the liver into the refrigerator, and the telephone rang as I closed the scabrous door.

It was Lucy.

“Hey, Gibby,” she said, and all of a sudden joy and sadness and pain and glee and simple one-celled nostalgia swept me, so that my voice, as I said, “Hey, Luce,” sounded like that of someone else entirely in my own ears.

“What’s happening?” I said.

“I’ve just come back from the wedding,” she said, and her voice, around the small exhalations of the inevitable cigarette, sounded soft and full of something that I did not associate with her. Tenderness? Pity?

“Yeah?” I said. “And how was the wedding?”

“Well, it was very sweet. Very small and simple, and over in almost no time, and not really so awful at all. Nobody cried or carried on, and both of them seemed okay happy but not delirious. Already settled, somehow. Sarah hugged me before they left and told me to call you up and tell you about it before some old battle-ax did, and that they missed you and hoped you’d come see them when they got back from their honeymoon, and that was that. I was the only one of our family to go; not many outside people were there at all. I just wanted to tell you before anybody else did, or sent you some stupid

PEACHTREE ROAD / 437

clipping, that it was okay. It really was. You wouldn’t have minded it at all.”

There
was
something different; it was there in her voice, like a quality of light. I kept listening for the bright sharpness, the wild-honey irony, the little tongues of captivating malice that I knew so well, but they were not there. Nothing was but gentleness and a most un-Lucylike succor.

“I…well, thanks, Luce,” I said lamely. “I appreciate that.

I’m glad you went. Dorothy said you’d really been a help to her and Sarah since you got back.”

“I hope so,” she said simply. “I’ve been awful to Sarah all my life, and I hope I can begin to make it up to her. I wish I thought I could to you.”

“No need,” I said. For the first time in my life I was uncomfortable talking to Lucy. I could not think of anything to say.

I felt none of the red rage toward her that I had earlier in the summer, but this quiet-voiced stranger called up no other emotion to take its place. It was like trying to make telephone conversation to the most casual of acquaintances.

“So where are they going on their honeymoon?” I said, merely for something to say, and then was horrified at myself.

I did not want to know, did not want Lucy to think that I did, and shrank from the images that the word evoked as from a pit of fire and vipers.

“I think just up to Tate,” Lucy said, and I smiled involuntarily. Of course. Tate. The big old family cottage up on Burnt Mountain, which Sarah loved so much. I could see her there, diving like a brown otter into the dark blue, freezing little mountain lake, riding her bicycle around the little dirt road that ringed it, tossing lichen-furred logs from the woodpile beside the back door onto the fire booming in the great stone fireplace, standing hipshot at the old stove deftly handling a cast-iron skillet. I could see square, dark Charlie stumping

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along behind her, standing beside her, looking up at her from the disreputable easy chair beside the fire with his whole soul in his eyes. But I could not see them climb the old pine staircase together, toward the bedrooms off the gallery upstairs; I closed my eyes against that….

Of course Sarah would take Charlie up to Tate. It was where we would have gone, she and I. I had not thought of it before, but I knew that it was. Sea Island would have come later.

“Gibby,” Lucy said into my silence, “please come home.

They’ll be gone for a couple of weeks at least. You won’t run into them. And I need to see you. I need to try and make some of this up to you. I think I can, if you’ll let me. But I can’t stand being…alienated from you like this. I want to go on with my life and try to make something out of it—by myself, I mean—and I don’t think I can do that until I know you’ve forgiven me. I have to know that.”

“I do, Luce,” I said, and meant it. “I don’t have to come home to do that. I do—not that there’s anything to forgive you for, really. Why don’t you come see me instead? If you’re short, I can send you a plane ticket—”

“Gibby…” She took a very deep breath. “I want you to come home because I’ve written a book and Scribners is publishing it and it comes out next week, and there are some parties and things here for me, and I want you to come and take me to them. I don’t want to go by myself, Gibby, and I don’t think Mama and Lady much want to go with me.”

“Lucy!” I shouted over the phone, as if she could hear me only that way. “That’s…Goddamn! That’s wonderful!

That’s…Why didn’t you say something? When did you do that?”

“I wrote it way last summer and fall, after Red went on that eight-month tour. Remember? I called you up and whined for you to come out and keep me company, PEACHTREE ROAD / 439

and you said to write a book or plant a tree or something?

Well, I did—I wrote a book. And when it was finished I called Professor Dunne at Scott and she knew an agent in New York, and I sent it to him and he sent it around, and Scribners took it—and here it is. I didn’t say anything about it because I didn’t think you wanted to hear about that or anything else from me—and you didn’t, right then—and it seemed so far away, anyway…but, oh God, Gibby, it got closer and closer to publication day, and Rich’s is going to give me this autograph party, and Mr. and Mrs. Cameron want to give me this little cocktail party at the Driving Club, and even Mama thought she might manage a little tea with your mother, here at the house…and I just realized that I didn’t think I could get through any of it without you. So I went and talked to Mrs. Cameron about it, and she said—she called you, didn’t she?—she said she’d try and get you to come home, and so I thought maybe if I called you after she had…”

“When are these parties?” I said, my heart pounding with pride in her.

“Next weekend. Next Saturday and Sunday.”

“I’ll be in Friday night. Can you meet me at the airport?”

“Oh, Gibby, of course I can! Oh, bless you! I’ll pick you up at your gate; I’ve got a little car of my own now, a Volkswagen. I got the loan myself, and Mr. Cameron cosigned it, it’s blue—oh, shit, Gibby, I’ve missed you so! And I’m so scared!”

“What are you scared of? Don’t be scared. You’ve got the world by the tail now,” I said. “Nothing ahead but roses and clover.”

“Because,” she said, “I’m just so happy. And I don’t know how to handle that. And nobody ever gave me a party of my own before.”

And she was right. Nobody ever had.

440 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

I sat up all that night, noodling around on my clarinet and playing and replaying my Brubeck records, softly so the menopausal Puerto Rican widow upstairs would not call the police again, and I thought about the two of them: Sarah and Lucy. Lucy and Sarah. Or, rather, I did not so much think as let the lifelong tapes of the two of them stored in my memory run. I did not want, on that evening, to think.

Through the long darkness two women shimmered and played behind my eyes, both of them vivid, both of them ardent, both of them beautiful, both of them in some way mine and then not mine. Neither easily definable, neither easily given over. Both of them in essential ways shapers of lives—mine and others—yet so different one from the other that it seemed incongruous that they could be the major bones in the armature of a single life. But they were. My life without them was unimaginable. And yet from this night forth I would be required to try to lead it without at least one of them.

Lucy and Sarah, Sarah and Lucy. It seemed to me, in that still predawn hushed even stiller by the beginning of a silent, soft autumn rain, that they were like the figures on a Swiss clock, moving in and out and back and forth in my life in a formal, stylized dance, the one now advancing while the other retreated, and then changing to slow, measured order and beginning again. I could imagine nothing, should the clock stop, but emptiness. So I ceased the imagining and let the tapes run again. Lucy and Sarah, Sarah and Lucy…

Toward daylight I slid finally and irrevocably toward sleep, and the thought that the music and the tapes in my mind had kept at bay through the dark hours surfaced and struck, and I finally let the desolation of it take me down: Tonight was the wedding night of Sarah Cameron Gentry, but it was not mine.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

T
he next Friday night I slept, for the first time in my life, in the big back bedroom that was the guest room of the house on Peachtree Road.

It was a strange night, and largely sleepless; full of sounds and shadows and shiftings that I had heard all my life, but alien to me now because I heard and saw them from a different angle. When I did sleep, it was lightly and poised on the surface of unconsciousness, as a soldier will sleep in a battle zone where ambush is possible.

I was acutely conscious of, could almost feel on my skin, the presence of my aunt Willa in the other back bedroom across the hall, and even more so of the bodies of my mother and father, which presumably lay side by side in the great front bedroom where they had, to the best of my knowledge, slept since before my birth. I lay very still in unaccustomed new pajamas under the thin white linen sheets, listening despite the ridiculousness of it for the joyless noise of their unimaginable coupling, as I had lain listening in the hated small dressing room in my infancy and early childhood.

Lucy, who had put an end to that torture, did not sleep tonight under this roof, but in the summerhouse which had for so long been mine. I did not precisely begrudge it to her, but I missed the refuge of it keenly. This cold white bed in this austere dark room did not beget ease.

We had sat late in the summerhouse, she and I, after the sorry little ritual of homecoming between me and my parents and Aunt Willa had been played out. My mother, looking glossier and more sinuous and whiter of skin than ever, had clung to me and fussed and patted and chirred, and Aunt Willa, every spectacular inch the Atlanta society matron now, smiled and smoked quietly in the warm darkness of the side porch where we gath

442 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

ered, looking, looking. My father, somehow redder and more furious of face even as he bared his yellowing teeth in what passed between us for greeting, had a couple of quick bourbons and nodded and grinned ferally and said yes, the Rolls-Royce in the driveway was new; I’d have to take it for a little spin sometime while I was home. I grinned back, feeling my mouth stretch with it, and said I’d sure like to do that, knowing that I would not, and that he would not offer again.

Soon after that he took the bourbon decanter and went back inside to the library, saying that he had a good bit of paper work to get cleaned up if the ladies planned on having a tea party that weekend, and I did not see him again until just before I left for New York on Sunday night. He was not at Lucy’s autograph party at Rich’s the next day, or at the cocktail party Ben and Dorothy gave for her at the Driving Club; my mother told me that he had an out-of-town business appointment, but I do not remember where she said it was, and in any case I did not believe her. I did not know where he went, but I knew why. Lucy and I escaped to the summerhouse as soon as we decently could, with relief that was probably as obvious as it was profound.