Peachtree Road (40 page)

I had seen the same look on the face of Mac Thornton, my melancholy Warrenton, Virginia, roommate in Holder, and on the face of Chalmers Stringfellow just this weekend, that I had seen so often on the blunt, spectacled face of Charlie Gentry. Real caring, it was. And tenderness. It made me proud of Sarah on many counts, not least among them that it was on my arm that she came into this endlessly beguiling, infinitely wider world of Princeton.

Now Sarah butted me under the chin with the silky top of her head, her hair smelling clean and dry and somehow like trapped sun, and said, “Dub Vanderkellen looks like a frog and he
is
a frog. Nobody in their right mind would get near him, in this room or anywhere else, if his name was Smith or Jones. Or,” she added gravely, “Bondurant.”

I gave her a mock crack on the chin with my balled fist and turned and looked out into the wet late morning, and sighed a great sigh of pure happiness. For the moment, everything was so perfect in my world that I could almost hear the great minor, interior music of the planet. This small treasure, this perfect, compact being that was Sarah, that was my own, sat beside me in the very rooms of one of the great names in American society and industry, who was now incredibly my own club-mate; and spread out below us in the last of a light autumn rain was this place that had so quickly and totally claimed my heart and soul and imagination, this Princeton.

I had felt the spell of it the moment I had gotten off the dinkey from Penn Station at Princeton Junction two autumns before and looked around me into a gray-greenness that was as timeless and rich with myths and

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shades as Arthur’s England. It was a different feeling altogether from the fierce pull of 2500 Peachtree Road, and the sheltering arms of the summerhouse. Those enclosed. Princeton enlarged. From that moment, something in my heart flew free and soared up to meet it, singing. I feel it still, whenever I think about Princeton in those years, and the years in New York that came later.

This had been an autumn of mists and mellowness, warm and as yet without real bite, and so even in the last weekend in October, some of the living wildfire of the centuries-old hardwoods on Cannon Green still flamed. There had come, in the night, a brief, soft little rain which had lingered through the morning, and though it was ending now, puddles still lay on the walks crisscrossing the green and the many quadrangles, and gleamed on the gray and rose and blue slate roofs, and dripped from the black iron posts and chain links that bordered the grassy areas. All of Princeton that we could see—the great, grim Romanesque bulk of Alexander, the mellowed bricks of Nassau, the white gleam of Whig and Clio, the arches and spires of Witherspoon and Holder and Dodd and Murray Dodge; the spires of the University Chapel and the Firestone Library, the Sunday quiet of Nassau Street and Palmer Square—shimmered with wetness. The campus seemed as it did so often to me, especially in winter: underwater. It is the image that I still see, these many years later.

“I think I like it best when it rains. Gray seems right for it,” I said to Sarah, taking a deep breath of thick air. There had been a bonfire on the green the night before, after we had beaten Yale, and the smell of the wet fire still curled upward, sour and alien and faintly dangerous, and yet somehow good.

“I can see a hundred colors in the gray,” Sarah said, leaning out alongside me. I rested my chin on the top of her head.

“Rose and blue and green and violet and black 310 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

and even yellow. Chrome yellow. Can’t you? Princeton could never be just plain gray.”

It had been the kind of weekend that I had envisioned whenever I thought “college” in my childhood. Disney might have created it, or rather, James Hilton, along with Mr.

Chips. Sarah had flown in from Atlanta on Friday evening, on a big Delta DC-7, and I had borrowed Mac’s Plymouth, so like my own Fury, and driven over and picked her up. As a junior, I was entitled to have the Fury with me now, but of course Lucy had taken care of that and so I was without wheels, and would remain so until I graduated, and even after. It did not particularly inconvenience me. I seldom left the campus except to go into New York with Alan Greenfeld, my third suitemate from Holder, and we took the PJ&B for that, and I almost never went home. An automobile could be borrowed from a Colonial member when necessary, as it had been today. I suppose my father would have replaced the Fury for me if I had asked, and I am sure my mother would have, but I did not. It did not seem important. As I have said, the Fury always seemed more a part of Lucy than of me, and I did not miss it.

I had dressed carefully for the trip to the airport in Philadelphia. We would be coming back for a cocktail party at Colonial, and then I planned to take Sarah to Lahiere’s for dinner, and then we would come back again to the club and dance. The “big” dance was Saturday night, with a jazz group from Eddie Condon’s that someone’s father had arranged for, and drinks and a buffet for the alumni, but Friday would be in some ways better: the living room darkened, the records long on slow, smoky ballads and short on rock ’n’ roll, the members and their dates locked together in the ritual swaying that had run through and under and over so many of our diverse teens, a glinting common thread.

I wore a light Harris Tweed jacket and a new white PEACHTREE ROAD / 311

oxford button-down from Langrock’s, and white bucks, and gray flannel trousers. I knotted and reknotted a new Colonial tie until I had it just right, and turned my head this way and that in the dim, watery little mirror in my cubicle in the club, to see if Harold at the barbershop had taken too much off the top. It was the era of crew cuts, but with my long fledgling hawk’s face I looked ridiculously like a molting bird in them, pink scalp shining through the blond, so I settled for a kind of short, smooth helmet, as created for me by the resigned Harold. I was as close, in those years, as I would ever come to being vain about my looks.

I walked out of Colonial into the soft bronze sunlight of late afternoon, jingling the keys to Mac’s Plymouth and whistling “Darktown Strutters’ Ball,” not at all unaware of the picture I made on the veranda of the old columned clubhouse, on this old, leaf-lit street of clubs and privilege and influence. The best so far of young America, I thought mistily and insufferably smugly, at play in the spring of youth after a week of preparing for the service of the nation.

It was Princeton’s primary skeletal bone, that notion of service; I had heard it since my first chapel service, and I bought it instantly and openheartedly. Most of us then, I think, did. There at that service I heard first the great prayer for Princeton: “…And to all who work here and to all its graduates the worldwide give your guiding Spirit of sacrificial courage and loving service.” Service. I loved it. I felt, on that October evening, that I could dedicate my life to it gladly.

But first, I would go and pick up Sarah.

The old street was alive with young men like me, taking a breather from their sacrificial labors to slide into the drumbeat of the Yale weekend. On the verandas and steps of every club we stood, wellborn, well dowered, well dressed, well connected, well primed for our worlds, 312 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

present and future. A few early-arriving girls stood with us, vivid in suits and twin sets against all the muted tweed and gray flannel, laughing the fruited laughs of youth and confid-ence and mastery.

All the clubs were out in force. They varied subtly in ethos and rank, these creamy bastions of casual privilege, but not a man on those verandas this autumn night felt himself completely untouched by the finger of God. Whether the others, the great submerged iceberg of Princeton, the independents, the grinds, the meatballs, felt that validating finger was a matter of the idlest speculation, because none of us on Prospect knew many of them. The eating clubs of Princeton are not and never pretended to be long on democracy and compassion; indeed, when Woodrow Wilson, who was then president of the university, outlawed fraternities, the clubs were what sprang up to replace them, and were essentially different only in name and degree.

But those of us who dwelled in the Eden of Prospect Street did not often consider the dichotomy between sacrificial service and the organized exclusion of outsiders. Even I, essentially an outsider from birth, was too warmed at the life-giving fire of exclusivity to let that worm emerge often from the golden apple. I had, after all, a bright heritage of privilege and exclusivity of my own. We all did. Consistent awareness would at that point have been asking, I think, a great deal.

Sarah got off the plane in Philadelphia looking every inch grown-up and wonderful in a dark red suit with a mouton collar, her swift smile and the red wool lighting her face like a candle. I kissed her on the cheek before speaking, trying to buy myself some time to assimilate the sheer strangeness of her. It was a thing that happened for the first few moments every time I saw Sarah in Princeton: Such a strangeness, an utter lack of context, surrounded her that I literally could not think who this

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small, radiant woman—for she was that, obviously—trotting on slender high heels to meet me might be. Sarah in the limbo of airports or railroad stations was not a part of the world I had left behind in Atlanta and not a part of the world of Princeton either, but an exquisitely carved small denizen of nowhere and everywhere.

I felt the satiny sheen of her cheek and smelled the clean, soapy smell of her, and heard her hesitant “Hey, Shep,” and all of a sudden she was Sarah, and a humming, sweet-fitting part of this new world, and I felt a surge of something near love that she could do that: be at once a part of both. I did not think anyone else from Buckhead could have managed it. Sometimes, when a fresh wonder emerged from the soil of this new Eastern world and caught me in surprise and delight, I instinctively turned to the shadow figures of Charlie or Lucy to tell them about it, and then realized, with a small sinking that was keenly physical, that they would not—could not—have understood. That they could not in any sense come into Princeton, as Sarah could, and share it with me.

Charlie was too sunk in Atlanta and the South; Lucy in her own complex needs and soaring fancies, and her new insistence that the only Shep Bondurant she would acknowledge was the one of Peachtree Road and the great house on it.

But Sarah…Sarah walked regularly and effortlessly out of that world to go with me wherever I went, and the joy I took in her whenever she did it was, indeed, very near to a kind of love.

“Hey, Sarah,” I said. And then, laughing, “Hey, Sarah Tolliver Cameron!”

At the dance that night she shimmered in her red and her joyful, unaffected Southerness, and the exotic dark birds from Radcliffe and Bryn Mawr and Sarah Lawrence and even Wellesley and Vassar paled in annoyed comparison. Everyone in Colonial, indeed every

314 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

one in all the clubs, could dance, but that night Sarah and I showed them what the dancing of the Atlanta Pinks and Jells could be, and it was something else entirely. I have never danced so long and so well and so effortlessly, and she matched me step for step, beat for beat, down to the smallest pause and pat and sway. We might have been hatched from a double-yolked egg; we held the floor for nearly an hour, ringed with clapping Colonials and scowling Seven Sisters.

Margaret Bryan would have counted her life well spent if she could have seen us.

I have never known such exhilaration; I remember thinking, swinging Sarah into another endless chorus of “In the Mood,” that A.J. Kemp had nothing on me. Vernon Castle didn’t, Gene Kelly didn’t, Fred Astaire didn’t. As for Sarah, she might have been liquid poured from a golden ladle by a celestial hand: When we finished our exhibition, laughing and sweating, the entire club lined up to dance with her. She was still high on the night and the music and the approbation when I took her back to her room on the quiet street just off University Place, where the genteel old widow of a much-loved Romance languages professor let chaste rooms to visiting girls of good birth. I had found the old lady early in my freshman year, on Mac’s recommendation, and had presented her for, and received, the approval of Ben and Dorothy Cameron, so that Sarah might visit as she liked.

They placed no restrictions on her trips to Princeton; they had always trusted her, and did so completely, I think, with me. It was she herself who limited the visits to two or three a year.

“I don’t want you to get tired of me,” she said matter-of-factly, after her first visit, when I was a freshman and she was only sixteen. “And you will, if I’m up there every time you turn around. And then I need to keep my grades as high as I can, because I want to go to Paris to study at the Sorbonne for a year after college, and Mother PEACHTREE ROAD / 315

and Daddy said I could if I kept up an A average through North Fulton and Scott. It would mean everything to my painting, Shep.”

Now I lifted her small hands there in the shadows of the widow’s front porch, and looked at them, and saw the faint lines of Prussian blue and alizarin crimson under her short nails, where no amount of turpentine and scrubbing could reach. Her hands were rough and warm and capable. Sarah would never have the slender, elegant fingers that were Lucy’s, or the polished, perfect ovals that gleamed at the tips of the Radcliffe and Bryn Mawr fingers. I kissed first one hand and then the other.

“See you for breakfast, or do you want to sleep?”

“Are you kidding?” she said, beaming up in the dark.

“Breakfast! And then…what? Is there some place here you can dance at nine o’clock in the morning?”

“No,” I said, and kissed her mouth, feeling the shape of her laughter on it. “You can put some of that energy into a softball game. We’ve got a game with Ivy and their girls at ten.”

“Watch out then, because I have a fast ball that’s never been hit in recorded history,” she said, turning and walking to the door. And then she ran back and flung her arms around me and hugged me hard, and when I looked down into her face, tears glinted in her shadowed eyes, even though she was smiling.