Downtown (11 page)

“You’re the one who put her in there, Matt,” Hank said, coming up behind him. He was grinning widely. “You’re the one that sits on the board.”

“You know damned well I’m on that board because I owed the archbishop a big one and he called me on it,” Matt grumbled. “And I put her in there, smart ass, because you told me her daddy wouldn’t let her come up here unless I did. That doesn’t mean she’s got to stay there. Teddy, dear heart,” and he raised his voice to a roar, “when is it your roommate is getting married?”

“Christmas,” came floating out of the office where Teddy Fairchild had been cloistered away all afternoon with the door closed.

ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 80

“Well, come on out here and meet your new roommate,”

Matt yelled back, and I flinched.

“Oh, please, Matt, don’t make her do that; she doesn’t even know me. She’ll have somebody she wants to live with her.”

But Teddy Fairchild came into Tom’s office and put her small, grubby hand on my arm and smiled her warm smile and said, “No, I’d love to have you. It’ll be wonderful, having somebody who realizes what working here means. Polly stays mad at me all the time because I’m never there to cook when it’s my week, or do my part of the housework. You might want to think about it, though. Colonial Homes is pretty far out for people who work downtown. There are lots of places closer.”

I began to laugh.

“Colonial Homes will be just fine,” I said. “And if you’re sure, I accept with pleasure. I already don’t fit in at Our Lady, and I’ve only been there two days.”

“Polly’s leaving the first of December to stay with her folks until she gets married,” Teddy said. “There’s no reason you couldn’t move the end of this week, if you’d like to.”

“Oh, boy, would I.”

Matt came back into the room. “I’ve called Sister Joan and sprung you until midnight,” he said. “A fine broth of a gal, that. Now, let’s do it. I have a towering thirst.”

We walked in a loose formation down the street and around the corner to the National Bank of Georgia building, which soared above any of the others downtown. The air was cold and clear, and swirls of people passed us, talking and laughing among themselves. Several of them nodded and spoke as they passed: “Hi, Matt.” “Hello, Matt.”

Matt Comfort spoke to all of them by name. Warm in the envelope of light that seemed to wrap us all, I smiled 81 / DOWNTOWN

at them. I noticed for the first time that the sidewalks had small specks of glitter in them, like diamond dust.

We rode up in the elevator with other pilgrims seeking to wait out the motionless glacier of light that was stalled downtown traffic, and emerged into a vast cage of glass and soft gray velvet and plush, hung in the night sky. A great central bar of black leather had stools and drinkers two and three deep, and small tables lined the ceiling-to-floor windows. Outside, in the blue evening, the city pulsed and glowed like a single perfect jewel. I gasped, a small, soft, involuntary sound, and Matt Comfort grinned.

“City at your feet tonight, dear heart,” he said.

Across the room a small combo played popular music, softly. When the piano player looked up and saw us he grinned and segued into Petula Clark’s “Downtown.”

When you’re alone and life is making you lonely, you can always
go…downtown.

When you’ve got worries, all the noise and the hurry seem to
help, I know…downtown…

I thought, in that moment, that my heart would burst with joy.

We sat at a corner table next to the window and Matt ordered champagne, and when it came and the waitress had poured it all around, he lifted his glass to me and said, “To the new kid. Cheers, Smoky O’Donnell.”

I tried, one last time.

“Ashley. I’m going to use Ashley as a byline, I think,” I said.

“Not a chance,” Matt Comfort said. “It’s got to be Smoky.

It’s why I hired you, dear heart. Smoky ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 82

O’Donnell—it’s the best byline I ever heard. With a name like that you’ll be editing
Holiday
in five years. Ashley is a goddamned debutante’s name. No offense, Teddy.”

He reached into his briefcase and brought out a flat, ob-long package wrapped in silver paper and tied with blue ribbons, and handed it to me. I opened it. Inside was a slim bronze plate that said, in
Downtown
’s distinctive Roman script, SMOKY O’DONNELL, SENIOR EDITOR.

I felt tears sting into my eyes, and took a deep swallow of the first champagne I had ever tasted, remembering that I had read somewhere that the monk who invented it said, on first tasting it, “It is like drinking stars.”

And when the last stars had faded in my mouth, Maureen Aisling O’Donnell had gone with them, gone, I knew, for good.

Only Smoky remained.

4

T
HE CITY TO WHICH I CAME THAT AUTUMN WAS A metaphor for the times. It was changing at the speed of light, and it was young. No matter what it was before or what it became after, Atlanta in the midst of its great decade-long trajectory was a splendid town to be young in. It seemed to me that everyone around me was young, and everywhere I looked the sheen and gloss and leaping blood of youth glimmered and dazzled. Youth bloomed in the soft city nights; Youth burned from the downtown skies; youth sat warm on faces and forearms like October sun. It was as if Atlanta had wakened from a hundred-year sleep and found itself, not old like Rip Van Winkle, but fiercely and joyously and ass-over-teakettle young.

It was, to us young newcomers, the best of times, period.

There wasn’t any worst. Oh, there might have been a shadowy underside, perhaps; a deep-running current of black water at the roots. Bound to be. This was the South in the middle of the twentieth century, after all; this was a Deep South city just struggling up out of stasis. How could there not be shadows on the grass in Eden?

83

ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 84

But I think I speak for most of us when I say that we simply did not, for a long time, see them. I think we were, in the fullness of that time, about as canny and sophisticated and politically aware as the terrible, time-frozen and utterly charming denizens of Brigadoon. And the town had a sliver of Brigadoon through its heart. For all its big-city roar and bustle, it was a naive and insular town in many ways, eager to show the big mules and money from outside that it could compete. In 1966 it was still small enough to be perceived all at once, seen and tasted and swallowed whole. For the hordes of us who poured in on every freeway and Greyhound bus, it was a kind of enchanted village of the future.

Those of us who worked downtown belonged to a common fraternity. Most of us knew or had heard of one another, or we soon would, and we pursued our lives and our loves and our fortunes together, downtown. Petula Clark’s poignant and galvanic ballad of the previous year was our anthem. It was, we knew, all true: the lights were much brighter there; we could forget all our troubles, forget all our cares…downtown. Everyone in a ten-block radius of Five Points, it seemed to me in that dying year, was young and talented and in a hurry, and the bellwether for us all was Matt Comfort. Our field manual was his smart, erratic, ad-olescent magazine that spoke to and for the city:
Downtown
.

To be on its masthead was to own a piece of the city. I learned that the first week I was there. We might, and did, work prodigiously, enormously, for twelve-and eighteen-hour spans, but when we went out into the city it was in a flying wedge, with Matt at our head, and there was literally no one I met in those first days who did not say, on learning that I worked for
Downtown
, “Oh, yes. That’s got to be a dream job. I’ll look for your byline.”

85 / DOWNTOWN

Or words to that effect.

And, “Yes, it really is. I’m awfully lucky to be there,” I said over and over, and meant every syllable of it. I could not, in those days, still quite believe where I had landed when I left Corkie in my father’s Vista Cruiser.

The glamour of my first urban Christmas lay over everything that season. Downtown was awash in secular splendor. Rich’s Great Tree, on the top floor of the bridge that linked its two edifices together, shone in the cold blue nights, and by day the Pink Pig Flyer on its roof ran round and round its track, bearing loads of enchanted children. I was enchanted, too; I spent a great deal of time at my window, elbows on the cold marble still, drinking coffee and staring at the Pink Pig by day and the incandescent tree after dark. On my lunch hour I sometimes went with Teddy or Sister into the store proper, to wander the tinseled aisles and sniff the perfume of money and privilege and Joy and stare at the counters and racks piled and hung with things so beautiful and bountiful that I could not even take them in. I lost my head and a large part of my first paycheck in one evening there, getting a new haircut in the beauty salon and a new red wool dinner suit with black braid piping in the Wood Valley Shop and presents for everybody back in Corkie that I had wrapped in extravagant Rich’s giftwrap. What change I had left over I gave to the Salvation Army girl outside in an exalation of silver bells and city magic. I had to borrow lunch money for a week from Teddy, and did not do it again, but I still remember that no-holds-barred shopping spree with nostalgic delight. Nothing else I have ever bought, in New York or London or Rome, has ever come close to it.

It was the high social season for Atlanta, as I suppose it still is, those gold-bitten weeks preceding Christmas, and it seemed to me that everyone in town was having a ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 86

party or going to one. Restaurants and clubs and theaters opened like parasols in a rainstorm. We went in our gilded ensemble to complimentary lunches and dinners at new restaurants, drinks after work and after hours at new clubs and discos, had front-row tickets to first nights and first-run movies, danced until one or two at discos and go-go clubs.

Everywhere, people nodded and smiled at Matt and, by extension, at us and everywhere people told us how much they enjoyed
Downtown
and how lucky they felt the city was to have us. Within a fortnight, having learned to sip wine or Champagne without getting sick or silly or feeling compelled to rush to confession, and to work like a tireless little engine on four or five hours’ sleep, I had come to agree with them, totally and with little attendant modesty. Separately we were, I think, rather ordinarily nice young people; together, we were Comfort’s People, and often near to being insufferable.

What was said of Atlanta in cities like Charlotte and Birmingham—“if she could suck as hard as she could blow, she’d be a seaport”—might well have been said of us. I believe that if
Downtown
under Matt Comfort hadn’t been as good as it was, at least for its time and place, nobody would have been able to abide us. Fortunately for us and
Downtown
Matt’s capacity for work and insistence that we share it saved us from drowning in our own egos. It was always the best of his gifts, that uncanny ability to sense what it took to get the bests from each of us, and for almost as long as I knew him nothing, not the hours or the adulation, ever dimmed it. Part of the headiness of those days for all of us was the sense that we were working over our heads and beyond our capacities.

I still remember the magical feeling of sheer creativity bubbling inside me, spilling over like a champagne fountain, like a geyser. We all made leaps of mind, connections, 87 / DOWNTOWN

that we never made again. After that, whatever heights we reached, we got there more by craft and persistence than by those first flowing parabolas of intuition. And even though I came to know them for the fickle foxfire that they were, they are what I miss most about my time as one of Comfort’s People.

It was a time for heroes, and it was not long until I had a full pantheon of them. Some, like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the
Gemini
astronauts and the remaining Kennedys belonged to the nation, but most of mine belonged uniquely to Atlanta. I have had no others like them since. They came to be called the Club, and together they remade the city.

They were Old Atlanta, or what passed for it, men with names like Ivan Allen Jr., Robert Woodruff, Ben Cameron, Richard Rich, who had lived all their lives in Buckhead within a four-mile radius of each other, grown up together, gone to the University of Georgia or Georgia Tech together, flirted and danced and married each other’s sisters and cousins, godparented each other’s children, laughed and wept and partied with each other, loved and sometimes hated each other, and often buried and mourned each other. A good many of them were rich, or what the world then called rich; men who had made millions from Coca-Cola, either directly or indirectly. Men who had built family businesses into international concerns; men who had dramatically altered the face of the South, and in some cases the nation, with their monolithic urban and suburban developments.

Men who had, almost singlehandedly or in concert with a dozen or so of their peers, in the firestorm decade of their ascendancy, brought the city a major league sports arena, five professional sports teams, a great arts center, and a world-famous conductor to head its symphony, a world-class international airport, a state-of-the-art rapid transit ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 88

system, a freeway system to boggle the mind, unparalleled convention facilities and the guests to fill them, and the har-moniously integrated school system—all of which lured the industry needed to fuel it all.

They were men altogether of their time and place, and in another age would not, perhaps, have been thought heroes, because their motives were never altruistic. They did it all in the name of business and to keep the good life in Buckhead good, and that it spilled over into the arena of humanitarian-ism was an agreeable but secondary benefit. They did it with money, largely their own. There was enough money at home to do what had to be done, to accomplish what they had in mind: the ignition of the rocket that sent Atlanta soaring to the edge of the known universe. After that, the money would have to come from somewhere else, and they knew that.