Peachtree Road (90 page)

“Understand that I’m talking to you strictly for Malory’s sake and no other reason, Shep,” she said, blowing on her steaming coffee. “You’ve really got no business knowing anything about Lucy. It’s her business, and Jack’s, and Malory’s, not yours. I think the interdependency between you and Lucy is as unhealthy as hell, and it’s one of the main things I hope to help her break. It isn’t all that good for you, and it’s dangerous for her. I might even go so far as to say that it’s helped her get and stay sick.”

“God Almighty, Faith, there’ve been times that I was literally all she had,” I exploded. “What should I have done, walked away from her? And besides, I’m damned well not dependent on her.”

“The hell you’re not,” she said calmly. “And as for walking away from her, yes, that’s just what you should have done.

It isn’t true that you were all she had—she had herself. But she’s never learned to use it. That’s what we’ve been working on, like two mules on a sugarcane plantation, for the past year and a half. She’s coming along with it. She might even make it if you let her walk by herself. You and Jack and yes, even little Malory. I’m going to talk to them about this before she goes home.”

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I was silent for so long that she reached over and touched my hand.

“Don’t feel bad about it,” she said. “You thought you were doing the right thing. Everybody who picks her up and shores her up thinks they’re doing the right thing. That’s her gift as well as her sickness, the ability to make you think that. It’s almost impossible to see the artifice. She even fooled me at first. But try not to bail her out anymore. If you have to help somebody, be there for Malory. Much as she loves her and dotes on her, Lucy can’t do that, and Jack…oh, poor Jack.

He can’t even help himself. He’s as much a victim of Lucy as she is of herself, and maybe worse. I just don’t have any idea if the burnout is permanent. But I do know he’s not going to be any good to Malory for a long time. I think that will probably remain to you and her grandmother.”

I grimaced, thinking of Malory in the manicured grasp of Willa Slagle Bondurant.

“Do you see any signs of damage?” I said. “I’m worried about her having so few friends and sticking around that house waiting on Jack and Lucy when she’s home. And I’m worried as hell about the way she feels about sex. She’s really afraid of it. She hates the very thought of it.”

“I knew about the waiting on and care taking,” Faith said slowly. “I’m not wild about that, but so far it seems within bounds. I didn’t know about the sex thing, though I’m not surprised. It’s too early to tell if it’s serious, I think. Part of it could be her age—some thirteen-year-olds just haven’t gotten there yet. And then, you can understand why she’d feel that way, with her mother in and out of all those beds.”

“She’s perceptive as hell,” I said. “She’s already hit on the fact that Lucy, in some entirely unconscious way, was trying to screw her father. Literally, I mean. The only thing she didn’t understand was why. I must admit I don’t, either.”

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“Well, a well-fucked man is not so quick to hit the road, Shep.” Faith Farr grinned wryly. “That’s what this whole thing with Lucy is about, of course. Loss, and the fear of loss. It feels to her that all losses are a replay of that first awful one, her father. She knows better now, but the gut is not long on intellectual knowledge. Changing her reactions to loss, and her fear of it, is going to be a long, long road.”

“Loss,” I said, old pictures slipping into my mind. “Loss…”

“Think back,” she said. “Whenever she’s lost something valuable to her, or thought she had, she’s gone into one of these things. Alcohol is the ignition switch, but it isn’t the engine. It only gets her to where the loss doesn’t hurt so much. The first one, after Malory was born? She lost her status as a child to be cared for to her own child. Remember her saying, ‘I’m the little girl and she’s the mother now’?

And when John Kennedy and Martin Luther King died, she lost two classic father figures. And not long before she went off with that preacher or whatever he was down there in Mississippi she had lost the movement, which gave her life so much focus and stability, and the hero-fathers in it….”

“And all the other times, when there didn’t seem to be anything to trigger it?” I said.

“Loss, as surely as I sit here. Jack for certain, changing before her eyes from the stable, vital, older man, the father figure, to a passive-aggressive child himself, waited on by a child, unwilling even to come to those motels and get her out of the messes she got herself in. You did that. Over and over she tried to get him to take care of her by provoking him with the booze and the men in the motels. And when he wouldn’t, the loss was underscored again. A black circle.

I think one reason she does so well in the hospital is that the structure and the authority make her feel protected and safe.

It’s one reason I’ve kept

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her here so long this time—to try to give her time to find the weapons to fend for herself and not go back to leaning when she gets home. And to give Malory time to grow up a little, too.”

“You think there’s going to be trouble for Malory again this time?”

“I think Lucy will try to lean on her again,” she said. “I think that famous, eerie old telepathy thing has to do with great need and the response of a hyperreceptive child to it.

The need is still there.”

“Why, of all people, would she need so to lean on and possess her own child, who’s not much more than a baby herself?” I asked. “There was always me. There was Jack….”

She smiled sadly.

“Well,” she said. “Lucy never really had much of a mother, did she? Or any female figure who was hers alone. That’s the why of that, I think. And that’s why it worries me. It’s such a primal thing, it goes so deep with both of them. Look at Malory—she’s the classic little alkie-psychotic’s child. The perfect little caretaker; the little mother. A great many of them never get free of it. And it can be a life wrecker. That’s why I’m talking to you like this. It may never come to that, but watch her closely, and take care of her. If it gets too bizarre, just get her away from there. I may not always be around to watch—I’ll have to terminate with Lucy someday, for both our sakes. But I gather you will be.”

“You bet I will,” I said. “You’re damned right I will.”

“Well, watch out for yourself, too,” she said mildly. “You’re almost as vulnerable as Malory is. And I don’t do traumatized hermits.”

I laughed and kissed her cheek and went back to the summerhouse, but the next evening I called Malory and asked her, casually, if she thought she might like to go away to school somewhere.

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“I’d love to send you,” I said, as nonchalantly as I could.

“Anywhere you think you’d like. We could go the horse route, or the dance route”—her two great passions so far—“or we could get you up in snow country, or even find some place that specializes in pre-pre-pre-vet training. You call it.”

“I couldn’t do that, Shep,” she said, in a brisk, no-nonsense adult’s voice that rasped in my ears. “Thanks a million.

You’re a real angel, but it’s just out of the question. There wouldn’t be anybody to look out for Jack, and then Mother will be home in a couple of weeks. I can’t leave her.”

“Malory,” I said desperately, “You’re only thirteen years old. So far as I can tell, you’ve never in your life had any real fun.”

“My life is perfect for me,” she said in prim surprise.

“Mother is better fun than anybody my own age when she’s…you know…well, and I know she’s well this time.

And besides, school is not for fun. Is it?”

“Yes,” I said, thinking of North Fulton High when the Pinks and the Jells were in full flower, and of my exhilaration at Princeton. “I think it is.”

“Excuse me, but I think I hear Jack’s car,” she said, politely and inexorably, and hung up the receiver softly.

The next day I called Charlie Gentry and asked if I could come over and see him about a financial matter, and ended up accepting his insistent offer of dinner first with him and Sarah. And on Thursday night of that week, I went to the little house of Sarah and Charlie Gentry for the first time in more than a decade.

They had never moved from the first small house in Collier Hills, as most of our crowd long since had. Charlie, by then administrator of one of the country’s mightiest private philanthropic trusts and by his own wry admission a sort of

“messenger of the gods” to beseechers all over the country, was not himself a

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wealthy man. I know that he probably could have made many times over his salary in a private law firm, and any one of the large ones founded and operated by the fathers of our Buckhead friends and now, increasingly, by those friends themselves would have gladly snapped him up. It would not have been that ghastliest of emerging terms, networking, either. Charlie Gentry was awesomely good at what he did. His fierce, good heart had found its home in the genteel, anonymous world of private philanthropy, but his old affinity for the law was still alive and leaping, and I knew he could be employed with full honors and perks within a day, should he choose to leave the foundation, by making at most three phone calls.

No, money had never been the carrot for Charlie that it was for many of us, and he had found the perfect wife in Sarah, in that respect. I knew that she would one day come into the entirety of Ben Cameron’s estate, but I knew, too, that it consisted largely now of the property and house on Muscogee Avenue. Ben’s illness had been long and would be far longer; Dorothy would not be left rich, nor Sarah after her. Sarah would not care. Of all the Buckhead girls I have ever known with access to substantial money, Sarah Cameron Gentry cared least for it.

They had added on to the little Cape Cod over the years, and now it climbed and wandered and tumbled over the steep, wooded lot and down to a small creek at the bottom of a ravine behind it. It could have used a paint job, I saw in the lowering summer dusk, and a few of the shingles were missing from the steeply pitched roof, but the lawn was green and deep, and flowers rioted everywhere in the wavering miasma of the heat. A battered hose sent a lawn sprinkler whirling, and twin bicycles lay on their sides in the driveway.

The entire house would have fit into the drawing room of Little Lady and

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Carter Rawson’s, I thought, and would not have missed it by much in some of the other homes our contemporaries now occupied, or would come into, Merrivale House included.

I wondered if Sarah ever missed the sheer space and magnificence of her first home. I did not, somehow, think so. She had been ready, after all, to live in that Lower West Side apartment with me. And as long as his precious relics and his beloved wife and daughters were there with him, Charlie would have subsisted happily in an igloo. When he and Sarah came out to meet me on the front steps of the little house, in the hot twilight, I was struck with how right and organic they looked there, and how much like one another they had grown. The promise of that night so long ago at the Plaza, before they were married, when they had come seeking me and my blessing, had long since been fulfilled; it would not have been possible for any two people to look more married than Sarah and Charlie Gentry. I felt an old, deep pang that I had not thought to feel again, seeing Sarah there in the circle of Charlie’s arm, looking down at me from such an unassailable unit, and wondered if the night was, after all, going to be a mistake.

But it was not. That dinner, only the second I had ever had in their home, might have been the two hundredth.

Sarah, in shorts and an Agnes Scott T-shirt, her beautiful small body as supple and tanned as it had ever been in her first youth, might have been eighteen again, instead of nearly forty. Only the threads of her father’s vigorous iron-gray in her glossy mop told of passing time; the faint webbing of white lines in the tanned skin around her eyes had been there since her late teens. Charlie, on the other hand, looked every day of his years and beyond; he was as padded and settled onto his stocky frame as a good old morris chair, and his glasses were thicker, and the well-creased old chinos strained 712 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

over his comfortable mound of stomach, and the bald tonsure in his dark, graying hair was larger.

But the eyes behind the glasses were still Charlie’s eyes, the eyes of that sweet, ardent, largehearted boy I had first met and ranged the battlefields of the city with, and his smile was as it had always been: open and delighted and innocent still, Charlie’s and no other’s. We ate good pasta and drank bad wine and laughed at all that had been good and gay between the three of us, and did not speak of the other. I found myself, to my own surprise, loving the night and them—the two of them together, not Sarah and Charlie separately, as I always had before. I determined, as we rose at last from the round maple table, to see them far more often.

Sarah picked up my thought, as she had done so often before.

“This is number one in a series,” she said, crinkling the great golden-amber eyes at me. “You take us somewhere for every three dinners here. You simply have no idea how we’ve missed you, Shep. Charlie has been pining for you for years without knowing it.”

“Next one’s on me,” I said. “Anywhere you say. I don’t think I’ve been out to dinner since Hart’s closed.”

Sarah snorted her contempt for that.

“On that exceedingly sorry note I’m going to clear away and you-all can get on with your business,” she said.

“No need for you to leave,” I said. “I just want to see about setting up some kind of trust for Malory, a school or college fund, or something that will be hers alone, no strings, no chance of anybody else getting hold of it. I’d like your ideas, as a matter of fact.”

Charlie smiled. “I’ve often thought I should tell you how great I think you are with her,” he said. “I wish I had before.

You’ve been more a father to her than Jack Venable ever has.”

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