Peachtree Road (82 page)

The first of her truly bad times came, as we might have foreseen, with the murder of Martin Luther King in Memphis.

She was on her way to Pascagoula, Mississippi, in the Austin when the news came over the radio, and the young photographer with her said that she simply dropped her hands from the steering wheel and began to scream, and that if he had not grabbed the wheel they would have gone off the road and been killed. She had screamed until he had gotten her to the emergency room of the nearest little community hospital, where they had had to literally sedate her into unconsciousness, and they kept her that way until Jack and Shem Cater and a trained nurse I had hired arrived PEACHTREE ROAD / 643

in the Rolls to bring her back to Atlanta.

We took her straight to Ridgecrest. It took them two days to get her coherent enough to diagnose her, and even then it was not a unanimous diagnosis. One psychiatrist said flatly that it was schizophrenia and a severe case at that, another opted for manic-depressive psychosis, another favored fatigue and shock and hormonal imbalance and two simply shrugged.

By that time Lucy was talking again, and I gather that what she said had not exactly won friends and influenced people.

Between expletives and epithets and the shrill eldritch shrieking, she was obsessed with two separate and bizarre notions: that her father was going to be at King’s funeral looking for her and that Jacqueline Kennedy was in Atlanta for the sole purpose of spiriting MLK’s body away. It was hard to tell which agitated her more. She strained and struggled against her attendants—seeking to rise and go down to Ebenezer Baptist Church to the funeral, both to meet the phantom father and to confront the treacherous Jackie—until they finally had to place her in isolation.

“Can’t you
hear
them, you assholes?” she would cry over and over. “Can’t you hear them calling? Are you going to sit here and let her take him and dump him in the ocean at Hyannis Port?”

And when they would not let her go, she subsided, finally, into heartbroken sobs, and then into a muteness that resembled, as it had after Malory’s birth, catatonia.

She seemed to surface again in the days following the funeral, but she was dull and lethargic, and grew slovenly and unkempt and had to be bathed and fed by attendants. Jack, exhausted by shuttling between his office and the hospital and home, was forced in the end to send the boys to their aunt back in Nashville, who promptly put them into Castle Heights Military School for the summer, and he gave up and sent Malory to stay

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with us on Peachtree Road. He was by this time so emotionally and physically depleted that I was relieved to have the children away. I felt, in some obscure and unexamined way, that for the moment they were, at least, safe.

Lucy began to improve slowly with the administration of a powerful tranquilizer and one of the new tri-cyclic antidepressants, and begged so insistently to have Malory visit her that the doctors finally decided it might be therapeutic, and so, on a Saturday afternoon in June, I picked Jack up in the Rolls with Malory and drove them there. I had not seen Lucy since we admitted her, but from the little Jack had told me of her condition and appearance, I was apprehensive in the extreme about letting Malory see her. Malory had been strangely unperturbed by her mother’s illness during her stay with us; she had said, when I broached the subject with her, only, “Mama is all right. She says so.”

But Lucy was not all right, and the sight of her in the hospital’s mercilessly lit, plastic-furnished dayroom smote Malory to white-faced silence. I felt enormous red anger at all of them—the doctors, Jack, Lucy herself—but it was too late to do anything at all. Malory walked up to her mother where she was sitting on a green vinyl sofa, an attendant standing behind her, and sat down beside her silently. For what seemed an eternity, she simply stared at Lucy. I could see the rise and fall, rise and fall, of the breath in her thin little chest, but I could not hear her breathing.

It was one of Lucy’s bad days, they told us later. She sat dull-eyed and obviously drugged under the sucking lights, her hands clenched motionless in her lap. Her slacks and shirt were spotted with food and stippled with pinpoint cigarette burns, and her fall of heavy, silky black hair had been cut brutally short and square around her fine head, so that there were nicks in the white scalp

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behind her ears. She had obviously been given shock therapy, for the red stigmata of the electrodes still marred her translucent temples. She was bruised and scratched from her struggles against the restraints, and did not smell clean, and at first she did not speak, only looked into our faces with opaque eyes. Then she put out her hand and touched Malory, and said, in her startling old rich, gay voice, “Hey, sweet-heart. Give Mommy a kiss.”

Malory put her arms around her mother. She closed her eyes. She whispered into Lucy’s dreadful hair: “Mama, I want you to come home. I’ll be a good girl if you’ll just come home. I won’t ever be bad anymore. I’ll take care of you, Mama. I’ll be the mommy all the time, and you can be the little girl.”

“That’s right,” Lucy said, smiling happily, rocking Malory against her. “You be the mommy and I’ll be the little girl.”

Even through the great, rushing wind of shock and rage in my head, I wondered how many times Malory had heard those words, and how deeply the conviction went that Lucy’s illness and incarceration were her fault. I seemed to hear, miles and years away, a small Lucy Bondurant pleading with my own father to take care of her, and promising to be a good girl if only he would do so. Beside me, Jack Venable cursed in a defeated monotone.

She seemed to see Jack and me then, for the first time, and the smile widened until it threatened to split her dry, splotched face. I winced. Lucy’s fine, fresh porcelain skin seemed to have been tanned like delicate leather, crazing like centuries-old kid gloves at the corners of her eyes and mouth.

There were sores at the corners of her lips and the base of her nostrils, where the skin had cracked and bled and healed and cracked all over again. The hands that she clapped in glee were as dry and rough as an old woman’s. She held them out to

646 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

us, and Jack took them in his, and I sat down on the other side of her and put my arm around her shoulders.

“Hi, sugar,” Jack said.

“What’s happening, Luce?” I said, tasting the ludicrousness of the words as I said them.

“Jack! Gibby!” she cried. “Stick it in your ear!”

We looked at her. She laughed mightily.

“Stick it in your ear, you bastards,” she sang. “Stick it in your ear!” And she disengaged her hand from Jack’s and put her finger into her ear.

“I think she picked it up from one of the other…guests,”

the attendant said. “We don’t think it means anything. But she loves it. Sometimes the only way we can get her to take her medication or go to bed is to play stick it in your ear with her. It works every time, so we don’t knock it.”

“No,” Jack said. “If that’s what it takes, I’ll go around with my finger in my ear for the rest of my life.”

His face was bleached, and he had aged years in the days of her hospitalization, but the look he gave Lucy was still heavy with the freight of his first, dazzled love for her.

“Stick it in your ear, Jack!” Lucy chimed.

He put his forefinger into his ear and smiled, and she laughed and clapped her hands. The dull drug haze seemed to lift with her laughter. She shook her head slightly. The mad rictus became her old smile. Malory crept close to her and Lucy hugged her, and reached up and kissed my cheek, and looked into our faces one by one.

“I’ve been away a long time,” she said. “I’d really like to come home now.”

She improved rapidly after that. Her psychiatrist kept her at Ridgecrest until the antidepressant had time to take effect, but the next two weeks there were uneventful. Lucy was obedient to hospital routine and

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participated dutifully in the group therapy sessions and the crafts and exercise classes. She attended meals in a group with other adult patients, leaving the large, barred area containing the dayroom and patients’ rooms in the company of an attendant three times a day to go down to the sunny, modern cafeteria for meals. Once or twice, she said, they were taken in the Ridgecrest bus to a nearby movie and a bowling alley, and once a day they walked on the paths and sat in the garden, looking, in their slacks and shorts, like vacationers, albeit pale and ill-barbered ones, at some spartan, economy-class resort.

“It’s like a big, bland camp for grown-ups; not as fancy as Camp Greystone, by any means, but a hell of a lot more fun,” she said on one of my visits that summer. We were sitting in the dayroom, and she had introduced me to nearly every adult patient in the hospital; they came up, one by one, as if drawn to some magnetic force field. I thought, remembering the irresistible light and energy that had played around her in her first youth, that they probably had been. She seemed happy in the hospital, oddly so—somehow safe and shielded and free—and Lucy, when she was happy, had always been irresistible.

She was looking better, too; the harsh, terrible haircut was beginning to soften and fall around her face, and her skin had plumped and smoothed under the rich moisturizing cream I had brought her, and she had asked for her makeup and Tabu to be brought from home. Except for the fading saffron bruises and the red indentations in her temples, she did not look so different from the way she had in the months before her hospitalization. She was even gaining a little weight; the dayroom had its own small kitchen attached, and it was kept stocked with food and snacks of all kinds.

All of the patients, she told me, were complaining about getting fat.

Lucy was extremely popular. The other women 648 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

deferred to her as people do to a natural leader, and the men were teasing and protective of her. I saw none of the instinctive distrust and alarm on the faces of the women who clustered around her that I had seen on female faces surrounding Lucy since her childhood; I supposed that here, in this sheltered place of rules and rituals and schedules and regimens, where aberration was the norm and the outside world kept at bay by bars and strident wellness, Lucy’s essential difference did not matter. She was one of them and one with them. Lucy herself bore this out.

“I feel closer to the people in this nuthouse than I ever did to anybody outside but you and Jack and Malory,” she said.

“England must have been like this during the blitz.”

The men out and out adored her, and for her part, she catered to them and coddled them as if she had been hired to do so. Each time I visited, Lucy spent a large part of the time fetching snacks and coffee and cigarettes for me and any other men patients and their guests who were around, trotting in and out of the little kitchen like a slender, elegant servant.

“Why do you do that, Lucy?” I asked her once. “You never used to fetch and carry for me like this, or anybody else, for that matter.”

“No, I know it,” she said. “It’s funny. I don’t even believe in it. I don’t know where it came from—it sort of emerged, when I got over the worst of the craziness and started feeling better. All of a sudden there I was, needing to wait on these assholes like a damned maid. I guess it’s just atavistic, Gibby.

This is what we know in our bones, we Southern women.

To do it makes me feel sort of…mindlessly comfortable and
right
, in a cell-deep way, like I’m plugged into something old and unquestionable, running by remote control on some absolute track. I don’t know. It’s very comforting. It has nothing to do

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with what I believe with my mind. Sometimes you need sheer, simple comfort more than anything.”

“No wonder so many of you go nuts,” I said, taking a plastic tray of empty cups away from her and putting it aside.

“It’s an awful pull between shagging trays for other people and tending to your own needs.”

Lucy squeezed my hand.

“One reason I love you is that you’re the only man I ever knew who understood that,” she said.

She came home at the end of June, and stayed there, content, under the kiss of the tranquilizer and the benison of the new antidepressant, to read and garden and watch television and sleep.
SOUTH
gave her a leave of absence with half pay, which was hardly a drop in the bucket in light of the staggering debt her illness had incurred, but made her feel as if she was contributing something to the household. Lucy had always been inordinately worried about money, but in those days she did not seem even to think about it—or rather, the lack of it.

Very little penetrated the spell of the drugs and the long, slow summer days on the farm in the company of her beloved Malory. For the first and last time in her life, Malory had her mother completely with her, whole-souled and
there
, and I think she was about as happy as it is possible for a child to be. When they came to see me in the summerhouse, or more rarely, when I drove the Rolls out in the cool of the afternoons, I would notice playing around Malory the same kind of just-glimpsed, dark incandescence that had lit Lucy’s childhood. It made of her something entirely magical, an enchantment, but I was not completely easy at the seeing of it. That dark fire had burned, not warmed, her mother.

But for the moment, that glow limned a summer out of time and remembrance for both of them, and they would recall it forever after with love and gratitude. It was not, in the summer of 1968, Lucy and Malory

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Venable who gave me unease, but Jack.

I knew that he was near distraction with worries about money and Lucy’s ongoing emotional state, but he would not talk to me about either, and refused my offer of a loan so tersely that I did not offer again. He took a second job teaching accounting three nights a week at one of our dim, perfunctory local junior colleges, and soon was spending only the few hours after his classes and the weekends, during which he slept most of the time, at the farm. Lucy was strangely blithe about it; more than once I started to pull her up short when she spoke jeeringly of his being away so much she almost thought he had a woman on the side. I could not believe she had forgotten why he took the extra work in the first place. Then I would remember the sheer horsepower of the drugs boiling through her bloodstream, and hold my tongue. Lucy was a long way from being her old self in those days, though she was fey and dreaming and indolent, and seemed happy.