Peachtree Road (60 page)

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Nashville. Somebody said, ‘Well, we don’t serve niggers here,’ and somebody else said, ‘Well, that’s okay because we don’t eat’ em.’”

There was more laughter. I felt an inadequacy that bordered on shame, and a dark fascination. These young men were dangerous; they were total, they were whole. Behind the banter and the cool laughter and the dismissing eyes were marches; beatings in dark, hot country nights and squalling, mean urban noons; terror and imprisonment and bombs and fire hoses and dogs and guns in darkness. In those eyes ambushed black men spun forever in their doorways, frozen; children flew into pieces in the roaring air of churches.

I dropped my own eyes.

“It’s not the only way,” Glenn Pickens said suddenly.

Everyone looked at him.

“Malcolm X said just the other day at the militant labor forum that the day of nonviolent resistance will soon be over,” he said evenly, pleasantly.

Still, they looked at him. No one spoke. Gwen rolled her eyes to the ceiling and tossed her sleek head; I thought I had never seen anyone who wished so sincerely not to be present.

The silence spun out.

Finally Rosser Willingham said, “Oh, hell, Glenn, Brother Malcolm’s nothing but an uppity nigger who didn’t make the cut.” He laughed, but no one laughed with him.

“He’s a born rabble-rouser,” Tony Sellers said.

“Isn’t that what we’re all trying to do?” Glenn said. “All of us? Rouse the rabble?”

Jack Venable laughed, a rasping, nervous sound. No one else did. The music wove its separate strands around us. The tension held. My skin crawled with it, and I knew Lucy’s did, too. I wondered how soon we might leave, and where the bathroom was, and if I could ever cross the staring room to find it. I could not see Lucy’s face,

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and I did not really know Jack Venable and Glenn Pickens, and Gwen Caffrey seemed to have gone as far away from us all as was possible without getting up and leaving the table.

I felt primally, abysmally alone. It was as bad a moment as I could remember.

Another figure was beside us suddenly.

“Do your mothers know you boys are out?” said a voice that would have a dream, had stirred a nation, preached love and gentleness from a hundred besieged pulpits and a score of jails. My breath seemed to stop. I heard Lucy give a little soft gasp. I looked up. He stood there wearing a cardigan sweater against the chill of the air-conditioning, and a white shirt with an open collar, and slacks, looking as inevitable as a mountain, larger than any of us, preternaturally solid and focused,
there
.

We were on our feet in an instant. Lucy almost upset her chair as she scrambled out of it, and Jack reached out to steady her. So did Martin Luther King. At his touch she stopped still and looked up at him, her old, special radiance in her face, not speaking, staring at the dark moon of his face, the thick lips smiling, the slanted, faintly Mongolian eyes, the solid set of the shoulders, the good hands. He smiled back. Of course he did.

There were introductions all around. He did not linger.

He said a few words to Sellers and Willingham and told Glenn Pickens he was proud of his new master’s degree. He shook Jack Venable’s hand, and gently disengaged it when Jack could not seem to stop pumping it. As he turned to leave, he paused beside Lucy. “I hear you’re going to be married soon, Mrs. Chastain,” he said. “I wish you every joy.

It’s a wonderful, hopeful time in your life. A wedding is always a fine thing.”

Lucy looked into his eyes and smiled with her whole being, and he touched her arm, softly, and then he was gone into the crowd, and the trio broke gleefully into “You Been Talkin’

’Bout Me, Baby,” and Jack Venable

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pushed back his chair and said, “We’ve got to get going, Lucy. Tomorrow’s a school day.” I could hear the exaltation under the prosaic words.

We all dispersed then, Tony Sellers and Rosser Willingham into the sacrosanct back room of the club after King, Glenn Pickens and Gwen Caffrey to another and presumably more agreeable table, Lucy and Jack and I outside into the just-cooling night air. We were silent for a moment on the pitted pavement under the pallid neon, still caught in the currents of the evening. Lucy stood with her arms linked through mine and Jack’s, her head drooping onto Jack’s shoulder.

Still we said nothing. All of us, I think, had a sense of import greater than the evening’s events warranted. Nothing, after all, had transpired in the dimness of La Carrousel that might not have been expected to take place between young Atlanta Negroes and liberal whites on a September night in 1961.

But I, for one, had a powerful sense of something ending, and something else beginning, and more: a powerful sense of Lucy’s having stepped away from me and irrevocably into another country, one where I could not follow.

I thought, looking at the two of them there on the sidewalk—Jack and Lucy, one known to me, the other not—that they were initiates into some kind of mystery as exalted and profound as those of Eleusis, and as such were a unit now, a singleness, that I could never penetrate. A sorrow as old and dark as the earth washed me briefly, a kind of September
Weltschmerz
. I have lost Lucy too now, I said in my heart, and knew it to be true. It had never been, before: not to physical separation, not to anger, not to marriage. I had lost her, now, to a dream and an army of arrogant young martyrs and a pragmatic urban saint who would not live out the decade. I did not think she would return.

Finally she reached up and kissed Jack Venable on PEACHTREE ROAD / 469

the cheek and he kissed her in return, and said, “I hope it’s the first of a million good nights, Shep,” and I said, “I hope so, too. I don’t have to tell you to take good care of her,”

and he said, “No, you don’t,” and raised a pale, freckled hand in salute and turned and shambled away toward his car. I wondered, irrelevantly, what sort of car he would have; his retreating figure looked as though it should fold itself into a road-worn Chevrolet with its backseat piled high with sample goods. He looked almost grotesquely, in the warm darkness, like Willy Loman.

Lucy looked up at me.

“Do you see now?” she said.

“See?” I said. I thought I did, but perversely did not want to give her that small gift.

“See what I mean about the Negroes, and Dr. King, and the movement and Jack…oh, the whole thing. Can’t you see how wonderful, how special…it all is? Oh, come on, Gibby, I know you can.”

But I could see only that from this night on I would walk through the world without my cousin Lucy. I do not know why the knowledge gave me such desolation. Until this weekend I had been profoundly angry with her, through with her, done with her; I had not had any thought of letting Lucy Bondurant back into my life.

It was not until we were back on the Northside of Atlanta, bowling along under the yellowing trees that fell over Peachtree Street in front of the old brown stone pile of the High Museum, that I finally was able to give her what I knew she wanted.

“He’s a good guy, Luce, and it was a good night,” I said.

“You’re going to be okay now.”

“Thank you, Gibby,” she said in a child’s small, drowsy voice, and put her dark head on my shoulder, and was asleep before we reached the green-hung intersection at Palisades where Peachtree Street becomes Peachtree Road.

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Her parties and the tea went off without a hitch, and were just what I had thought they would be: the occasion for a small flutter of congratulations to the author, more for the fact that she had finally and against all considered opinions made something of herself than for the slender little novel which all of them bought and few would read; and for much drinking and considerable eating; and for catching up on news after the hiatus of vacation and before the autumn social season began. Lucy, looking somehow diminished and muted in the unaccustomed public approbation, shook hands and kissed cheeks and smiled her new sweet smile, and signed her dashing black, back-slanted Lucy J. Bondurant on perhaps thirty books, and thanked everyone for coming, and behaved in general so like the biddable and charming debutante and Junior Leaguer she had refused to be that older Buckheaders were mollified and smiling and our own crowd was frankly puzzled. I saw eyes cut toward Lucy all weekend and heads go together, and heard whispers exchanged, and I felt rather than saw the same eyes on me. I knew that I was being scrutinized for evidence of trauma from Sarah and Charlie’s marriage, and so smiled more and wider and kissed more cheeks and clapped more backs than I would have ordinarily.

My mother and Aunt Willa were at all the parties, elegant and cool, not showing by so much as a muscle tremor the outrage Lucy’s new preoccupation had engendered. I wondered how they would take the news, and the circumstances, of her new marriage. I thought I could imagine, and grinned involuntarily at the prospect.

My father was not in attendance at any of the parties, and Ben Cameron was not at the cocktail party he and Dorothy gave at the Driving Club. Dorothy, whose welcoming kiss to me was as warm and natural as if great PEACHTREE ROAD / 471

gulfs of pain did not lie between us, whispered in my ear in the receiving line, “Please don’t think Ben’s avoiding you.

He’s down at the Walahauga at a rally, but he’s going to try to get back before the party’s over. Lester Maddox is giving us a hard time, and the election is only two months away.

Ben absolutely must have the Negro vote to win or he’d be here.”

It was only then that I remembered that Ben Cameron was running for mayor. I could not remember who Lester Maddox was.

“Is he still mad at me, Dorothy?” I said.

“Yes,” she said, “but not in the way he was. He’ll get over it, Shep. And he’s never stopped loving you.”

“He should have,” I said. “He ought to just wash his hands of me.”

“He’ll never do that, and neither will I,” she said and kissed me on the cheek, and passed me on to Lucy, slender and oddly prim in dark blue fall cotton and Ben Cameron’s snowdrift of white orchids.

“Are you the lady who wrote the dirty book?” I said, hugging her. “How about letting me take you away from all this?

Your place or mine?”

She giggled, but it was a subdued and mannerly giggle. “I wish we could just go somewhere and talk,” she said. “I know you’re going back tomorrow right after the tea, and I don’t know when in the world we’ll really talk again. But I’m meeting Jack at Camellia Gardens after this, and we’re going to the eleven o’clock service at Damascus House in the morning….”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I think I’ll go out and get some dinner with Snake and Lelia and maybe A.J. and Lana.

I’ll see you in the morning. By the way, you look wonderful.

I remember when you had eight of those things stuck on you at one time.”

She looked down at the orchids, and her blue eyes filled with tears.

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“I was the prettiest girl in town then, wasn’t I?” she said.

“What do you mean, was? You still are,” I said. “You talk like you’re fifty years old.”

“Part of me is,” she said softly. She was not smiling.

“Well, the part I can see is still the girl every Jell in Atlanta had the twenty-year hots for,” I said, squeezing her hands, and was dismayed to see the tears spill over the black fringe of her lower lashes and run silently down her cheeks to her chin. Her mouth trembled and broke. She put her arms around me and fitted her face into the side of my neck, as Sarah had done so often, and whispered something into my ear. I could feel the heat of her tears, but I could not hear what she said, and I raised her chin with one hand and looked questioningly at her.

“I said, ‘I love you, Gibby,’” she said. One of the tears fell from her chin and trembled, crystal and perfect, on, the waxy white petal of her corsage. “And I said, ‘Good-bye and God-speed.’”

“I’m just going back to work,” I said in a too-jolly voice.

“I’m not going away forever and ever.”

“Yes, you are,” she said.

After the tea my mother and my aunt Willa gave for Lucy at the Peachtree Road house the next afternoon, I did not see her again, and I did not wait for my father to come back from wherever he had been, to say good-bye to him. I hugged my mother longer and harder than was my custom when I left Atlanta to go back to New York, for the thought was in my mind that I probably would not come back to the house on Peachtree Road, or to the city, for a very long time, if ever. There was no reason, now, to do so. Two of the three women who had claimed my heart were gone from me, and so was the man who should have, and most of the other ties that I had to the city were light and ephemeral. My mother, as if reading my thoughts, began to cry again, and I pulled myself

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gently out of her grasp and patted her shoulder, and said,

“Tell-Dad good-bye for me,” and took a cab to the airport.

I got a seven o’clock Delta flight back to La Guardia. By the time I unlocked my door on West Twenty-first Street, the Sunday night traffic was thinning, and only a stream of lights over on Ninth spoke of any life, or the forward momentum of time. The air in my apartment was as old and arid as the breath of tombs.

Sometime in the small hours of the morning I came awake with the heavy, marrow-deep certainty that my time in New York was over. I knew, utterly and passionlessly, as an old man knows, that there was behind me in Atlanta no one who needed me, and there was, now, in New York nothing more that I needed. That afternoon I wrote my Colonial Club friend Corey Appleby, who was teaching French at Haddonfield Academy, in Vermont, asking if there were any faculty positions open, and when his affirmative reply came by return mail I borrowed Alan Greenfeld’s Corvette and drove up the following weekend. Within another two weeks I had been accepted as an instructor in medieval history, with additional classes in freshman English, to start when the new term did, on January 5, 1962. I did not feel any way at all about this change in my life except very tired, and endlessly, stupidly sleepy. For the remainder of that autumn and early winter, when I was not at work, I came home to West Twenty-first Street and slept.