Peachtree Road (73 page)

It was a good thing. Almost no one from my previous life in Buckhead came near me that spring. I don’t think it was censure so much as embarrassment, a kind of tribal reticence for which I myself had set the standard with my withdrawal, that kept the Buckhead Boys away from me. A.J. came, of course. And Charlie looked in occasionally, and Ben, and I talked with Dorothy Cameron regularly, but Sarah did not come again, and in mid-spring, even Lucy stopped her nearly nightly visits to the summerhouse with Jack. She called me one night, tears thick in her throaty voice, and told me that Jack had balked at coming by the house that evening, and that they had had a fight about it, and he had ended by refusing to visit anymore and forbidding her to come alone on the rare occasions when she had the Ford to herself.

“It’s not you, Gibby,” she said, around drags from her cigarette. She was drinking, too; I could hear the chink of ice against glass over the wire. “He’s truly fond of you. It’s me. He says I’m a bad example to the children, and that I’m neglecting them and spending all my free time with you. He says from now on we’re coming straight home from work and doing things with the boys, like a normal family. It’s bullshit, of course. We never were a normal family. They’re not normal kids. They never liked me worth a damn, and it’s worse now than it ever was, and they hate every minute I spend with them. These evenings together around the goddamned family hearth are as much an ordeal for them as they are for me. But Jack eats them up. All of a sudden he wants us to be Ozzie and Harriet, or the fucking Cleavers, or somebody. He knew I wasn’t like that when he married me. He knew what I was; he knew where my real com PEACHTREE ROAD / 569

mitment was. This is a total switch. I can’t be that kind of stupid, smirking little wife and mother.”

All her saintliness seemed, in that moment, to have fled, and I was vaguely relieved.

“Maybe the kids will come around when they’re a little more used to you,” I said. “Nights at home with them for a while can’t be all that bad.”

“With those two they’re hideous,” she said. “Unless you’re into advanced nose picking. There’s no way they’re ever going to accept me, Gibby. To their little minds now it was I who ran off their sainted mother. And to make it worse, Jack wants us to have a baby of our own. He’s thrown away my diaphragm. We try every night—God, how we try.

Wouldn’t that be a fine mess, me pregnant as a yard dog trying to march and drive a bus and register voters?”

“Don’t you want children?” I asked. “Somehow I just took it for granted that you’d have them.”

“Not everybody is as maternal as your precious Sarah,”

she said waspishly, and then, “Oh Lord, I’m sorry. It’s the liquor talking. I guess I’m jealous because I suspect that she’ll be a better mother than I could in a million years. And then I have to be honest with you, I hate this business of your rooting around over there in Sarah’s family tree.”

“Why on earth would you hate that?” I said, honestly surprised. She had professed herself overjoyed that I had found significant and absorbing work to do. It would, she had said, make her feel much better to think that I was not withering with loneliness and isolation.

“I don’t really know,” she said. “It’s illogical and totally unworthy. I guess…I just feel like it’s one more tie to Sarah Cameron, and one that will last practically all your life. I don’t know why that bothers me, but it does.”

“Sarah is out of my life now, Luce,” I said. “You know that as well as anybody.”

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“No, I don’t,” she said in a low voice. But she dropped the subject, and thereafter, every night, her throaty “Hey, Gibby?”

(Pause. Long, indrawn breath of cigarette smoke.) “It’s Lucy, honey,” prefaced my daily dose of life outside the summerhouse walls. I came to depend on it, and miss it keenly when, on rare occasions, it did not come. During those first long months of isolation, Lucy was my window on the world.

In early May my mother left with a hundred-odd members of the Atlanta Art Association for her month long tour of the galleries and museums of Europe, and I felt free to wander, in the late afternoons, into the big house. Sometimes I visited with Shem and Martha Cater in the kitchen, and sometimes I went upstairs and sat for a few silent minutes beside my father, mute and captive still in his warped flesh, and sometimes I simply sat on the little sun porch off the living room, with the afternoon light falling on the black and white tiled floor and the deep green walls and the airy white wicker furniture, deep-cushioned in what my mother always called

“Dorothy Draper red.” The cushion in the big armchair that had been my father’s was gradually springing back without the ongoing burden of his heavy frame, and the indentation there now fit my own thinner and lighter body. It was the only place in my mother’s house where I felt that I had some small territorial imperative. By this time, I no longer thought of it as my father’s house. Even an ocean away, my mother dominated it now.

On the first Sunday morning in June, I was hovering between sleep and an elusive wakefulness that promised breakfast in the sun-room of the big house, where I had taken it for the past four Sunday mornings of my mother’s absence, with a pot of coffee and the Sunday papers. She was due home from Paris late that evening, and then my tenure as master of the manor at 2500 Peachtree Road would end. I did not mind, except for the

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loss of those tranquil Sunday mornings, and was considering abandoning sleep for waffles and sausage when I heard the bedroom door open and a soft voice call, “Shep?”

Even with my eyes closed, even half-submerged in sleep, I knew the voice was Sarah’s, but I was not surprised. In that half-lit world where all ambiguities can be rationalized and all discrepancies justified, I felt only a deep, sweet contentment at the rightness of Sarah’s voice calling me out of sleep, and I felt myself smile even before I opened my eyes.

I kept them closed for a moment, knowing that the perfect contentment would flee with the falling of the light upon them.

I felt her weight as she sat down on the edge of my bed, and was reaching out for her, eyes still closed, when she said again, “Shep,” and this time something in her voice snapped my lids up as if they were attached to wires. I sat up in the tumbled bed and blinked against the fierce white June light streaming in from the door through which she had just entered, and looked at her.

At first I thought she had come to tell me of some terrible thing that had happened to Charlie, or her soon-to-be-born baby, for her face was so swollen and distorted from crying that I could scarcely recognize her, and I could hear the sobs caught in her throat and see its strong column trying to work around the strangling brine. Fresh tears ran from her reddened eyes and dripped from her chin onto her maternity smock, and I stared stupidly at the splotches they made against the blue chambray. It was only then that I realized that nothing could be wrong with the baby, because it was still there, a great, elastic mound under the smock. I lifted my eyes in dread from the front of her to her face.

“Has something happened to Charlie?” I said. I could scarcely form the words.

“No. Not Charlie. It’s…Shep, Daddy just got a call 572 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

from Carter Stephenson at WSB. The…the…your mother’s plane…it crashed, Shep. It crashed on takeoff at Orly, and I’m afraid they’re all gone. It’s just now coming in over the radio, and there aren’t any details yet, but Daddy made sure there’s been no mistake, and…I’m sorry.” She dropped her face into her hands and wept aloud. “I’m sorry. I came over here to tell you because I didn’t want you to hear it by yourself on the radio or when some reporter calls, and now I can’t…”

“All gone,” I said, stupidly. “That’s absurd, Sarah. It has to be a mistake. There were too many of them….”

The pit of my stomach was icy cold, and the coldness was seeping up and out and into my arms and legs, turning them flaccid and useless. I remember thinking very clearly that if I got up out of the bed I would crumple to the floor, or worse, wet my pants. But beyond that I could not seem to think, and I did not feel anything at all. Despite what I had said, I knew, somehow, that Sarah was right. She would never come here to bring me such news unless she was absolutely sure that there could be no possibility of mistake. My ponderous mind, struggling to get into some kind of forward gear, embraced another tidbit of information like a jellyfish settling down over a minnow, and set about assimilating it.

“More than a hundred,” I said. “More than a hundred, and I…you…we knew all of them. That was Buckhead, Sarah.

Those were the people we’ve known all our lives.”

“One hundred and six of them,” she said, as if she were reciting sums in school. “One hundred and six members of the Art Association. One hundred and fourteen people from Georgia. A hundred and twenty-nine in all…”

“Survivors,” I said thickly. “Were there any survivors? You can’t be sure about that yet….”

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“Two or three people, when part of the plane broke off,”

she said.

“Maybe…” I began.

“No. They were all crew. Nobody else. Nobody, Shep. All gone.”

“Jesus,” I said, utterly crazily. “Aunt Willa can move out of the attic.”

“Oh, my poor darling Shep,” Sarah cried, and put her arms around me and buried her face in my shoulder, in the hollow where it had always fit so neatly, and I held her as she cried, thinking only that holding Sarah now was like holding a basketball between us. The glacier that had crept down over my mind was snowy and seamless, perfect.

Presently she lifted her head and wiped her eyes and looked at me.

“I told Charlie I’d be right back,” she said. “He’s over at the house with Mother. Daddy’s gone down to City Hall.

He’s going to Paris tonight. Mother is in pretty bad shape; everybody on that plane was her and Daddy’s close friend from babyhood, practically. I wanted to come and tell you, and Charlie said I should…. Shep, I’d like to stay with you today, if you’ll let me. I don’t want you to be by yourself.

Or maybe you’d come back with me to Mother and Daddy’s…”

“No. Thank you, Sarah, but I think I’ll go out to Lucy’s,”

I said, surprising myself. I could think of little with my rational mind that would be as comfortless as that meager little farmhouse in the company of a taciturn Jack Venable and the two sullen changelings. But something in me, powerful and visceral, wanted my cousin Lucy. We had both lost the great anchor of our childhoods, cold iron though it was, and I did not think that Sarah, with her constant legacy of Ben and Dorothy’s clear, sunlit love, could begin to understand the clutching complexities of that loss. I was perfectly numb now, but I knew that the numbness would not 574 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

last, and when it lifted, I wanted to be with the one person who would understand my canted grief—if grief, indeed, there was.

“I understand,” Sarah said in a small voice, and I thought my old radar, once so alive to all of Sarah’s tides and nuances, detected a tiny edge of hurt.

She got up to go, ponderous and bowed under the weight of the low-hanging baby and the grief, and said, “We’re only a few steps away, and we want you to come or call any time of the night or day. Mother said to tell you the guest room is made up and ready, if you’d like to spend the night, and in any case she’ll call in an hour or two.”

“Thank you. Thank you both,” I said. “Tell her for me.

And thank you for coming, Sarah. It must have been hard for you….”

“Of course I would come,” she said, beginning to cry again.

“Of course I would come. Nothing on earth would have kept me away….”

“I know that,” I said. “Go on home now. Your mother will need you. I’ll be all right. I’ve got to talk to Aunt Willa and see about telling my father.”

“Oh God,” she said, and went out of the summer-house, sobbing.

After she left, I simply sat there in the June morning, trying to keep the cold silence white and perfect in my mind. But the edges of it now were beginning to be licked with flame.

The telephone rang, and I lifted it and laid the receiver on the table, where it burred hopelessly for what seemed an eternity before stopping. I got up and walked on reedy, wavering legs over to the radio, and switched it on.

The reports were fuller now, and clearer. At a little after noon, 6:29 A.M. Atlanta time, the chartered Air France Boeing 707, carrying a full crew and complement PEACHTREE ROAD / 575

of passengers, skidded off a runway on takeoff at Orly Field, Paris, killing all passengers and all but two of its crew in a fireball of yellow JP4 fuel when it exploded in a gully at the end of the strip. Among the victims were 106 members of the Atlanta Art Association returning from a month’s vacation via the chartered jet. It was the worst single-plane disaster in aviation history. Most of the charred bodies, still strapped into their seats, had not yet been recovered, but those that had were being taken to temporary morgues in an old part of Orly Airport. Later they would be taken to the morgues of Paris….

I sat there for a long time, mindless, floating, while the news from France swelled and grew like a monstrous lily.

An entire family of six: the Carters…I had known them all.

Sister Carter had been one of the prettiest Pinks of my generation. Freddy had run track two years ahead of me at North Fulton. Twenty-seven married couples, many of them with children back in Atlanta. Doctors, lawyers, brokers, businessmen, bankers, ministers, artists, patrons, philanthropists—the civic, cultural and business leadership of a city of a million people, their names familiar to anyone who read the newspapers of that city, in stories concerning the Capital City Club, the Driving Club, business development, hospital aid, opera, symphony, drama, art shows…Thirteen Junior Leaguers. Thirty members of the Driving Club. Twenty-one of the Capital City Club. Old Atlanta. Buckhead. “In the City of Light,” a eulogy later that week read, “all that bright light gone.”

And Olivia Redwine Bondurant. She, too. Gone. Burned up in a radiant mushroom three thousand miles away from Peachtree Road. I was, I thought in dull surprise, in all but name, an orphan. The thought was as alien as if someone had suddenly assigned to me the appellation “assassin” or