Peachtree Road (78 page)

It crossed my mind not infrequently, in those days before Lucy took the baby home to the farmhouse, that she was most assuredly not the stablest and most responsible mother for this or any other child. I was usually able to bury the notion deep under the knowledge that there would always be other loving caretakers around Malory: Jack, who adored her; the old black woman at the farmhouse, who had a firm and loving way with children; me; even Aunt Willa, who evinced in her granddaughter a

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sucking, proprietary interest she had never displayed toward Lucy. But once or twice the thought broke free, and the last time it did, it cost me Malory’s presence in the house on Peachtree Road.

Lucy had taken to bringing the baby out to the summerhouse to visit in the afternoons, when my reading and note taking were done and she and Malory had had baths and naps. I would make coffee and set out the cake or cookies that Martha Cater brought and light the fire and put Vivaldi or Palestrina on the record player, and Lucy would put Malory’s small, fragrant weight into my arms and stretch out on the sofa and light a cigarette. Sometimes she drank sherry instead of coffee, and on these afternoons she grew vivid and voluble and talked once again of the escalating civil rights movement and the never-ended work at Damascus House.

With segregation beginning to crumble in the schools and colleges, black activists were focusing on the still-segregated hotels and restaurants, and scarcely a day passed that spring without a demonstration or picket or sit-in. I knew that Ben Cameron met almost daily with black leaders now. Around that time, a “lie-in” had been held at the Henry Grady Hotel downtown on Peachtree Street—that bastion of middle-class white gentility, where even the cloistered young of Buckhead were allowed to go to the Dogwood or Paradise room to watch an occasional second-class magician or comic—and half the population of Damascus House, including the charismatic Claiborne Cantrell, went happily to the Fulton County jail, singing “We Shall Overcome.” Lucy burned with eagerness to be with them.

“I should have been there,” she said over and over, through smoke. “I should have been with them. It’s my fight, too.

I’ve been away too long.”

“Terrific,” I said, rocking a sleeping Malory in the old nursery rocker I had had Shem Cater bring from the 612 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

attic to the summerhouse. “Just what Malory needs. A mother in the Fulton County pokey.”

“She’d be okay,” Lucy said. “I’d talk to her. She’d have you.”

“And Jack,” I said. “If he wasn’t in jail alongside you.”

“And Jack,” she said. “He wouldn’t be in jail. He’s the money man. He’s too important. Clay won’t let him demonstrate anymore. Jack says he hates being out of the action, but I don’t think he does. Besides, Jack would never let himself be arrested. No scotch in jail. No Huntley-Brinkley.

No books and records.”

But after the news of the arrests from Damascus House, she grew restless and remote, and I would see a light in her bedroom window burning at all hours in the warming nights.

Late in that week, she brought Malory out to the summerhouse wrapped in one of her own blouses, wearing a lace trimmed blanket of Malory’s draped around her own shoulders.

“We’re switching off, Gibby,” she chortled. “See? She’s the mommy and I’m the baby now. It’s her turn to take care of me.”

She held the baby up gaily, and Malory pawed fretfully at the enfolding blouse, trying to free her tiny feet and fists, and mewled fussily. I felt anger and a tiny lick of the dread I had felt on the morning of Lucy’s retreat into depression.

I snorted and took Malory out of her arms and jerked the grotesque, trailing blouse off her, and wrapped her in the blanket from Lucy’s shoulders.

“Don’t ever make her ridiculous, Lucy,” I said levelly around the anger.

She stared at me, her eyes burning blue-white.

“Don’t you tell me what to do with my own baby,” she snapped finally. Her voice was sullen.

I continued to look at her, silently, and presently PEACHTREE ROAD / 613

she dropped her eyes and took Malory from me, and went back into the house. The next evening Jack Venable came and took her and the baby home to the farmhouse in Lithonia, and his joy in his daughter and love for Lucy were so palpable that they almost filled my own hollow heart as I watched the pink-swathed baby being driven away, finally, home.

Lucy went back to work soon after that, leaving Malory in the care of the old black woman, and reported in her soon resumed evening telephone calls that Malory was as contented with her new nurse and the grudging company of Toby and Thomas as she had been with her mother’s and mine.

“She’s just one of those rare perfect, unflappable babies, Gibby,” she said, inhaling. “Estelle says she never cries. She’s getting fat as a little butterball, and she’s just as happy to see us when we come in as if we’d been there all day.”

And then she would segue from Malory into the work of Damascus House without missing a beat, and I would think again that she seemed deeply content to be back and submerged in the swimming-pool- and park-desegregation plans there, as if her old bone-deep ease and sureness among the activist blacks was a relief after the intense, consuming emotional pitch of her day-to-day interrelation with Malory.

She was soon working longer and longer hours, and in the middle of the summer Jack left Damascus House—with visible relief, I thought—and took a job with a large downtown firm of CPAs for shorter hours and slightly better pay. After that, he had almost sole evening care of the three children.

I went back to my own work in the summerhouse, and it was many months before I went into the big house again. It was not that I was avoiding it, particularly; it was just that, with Lucy and Malory gone and my father as unresponsive as a drugged and chained wild animal,

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there was no reason to do so. I did not mind. The Peachtree Road house was now as in alterably and indisputably the territory of my aunt Willa as if she, not I, had been born there. I felt, on my rare forays there to pick up clothing or books I wanted, as if I were burgling a stranger’s home. The very air smelled of her bitter, expensive scent, and the few times I went to sit briefly beside my mute, grimacing father, the entire bedroom seemed steeped in it. I knew from that, and from the occasional generic mutters from Martha and Shem Cater, that she was still spending many of her free hours sitting with him, occupying herself God alone knew how—for it surely was not in conversation with him. He remained as silent and blasted as a Toltec idol.

It was odd about Willa Slagle Bondurant in those days: She had, of course, absolutely no more claim to the Peachtree Road house than she had had while my mother lived, and yet it was somehow, nail and roof beam, hers. The visitors who drove up the semicircular drive and left their cards on the old silver card tray were, now, as often hers as my father’s. It was for her that Shem brought the Rolls around to the front, and for her that he held the heavy door. Delivery vans brought her orders, and lawn and linen services arrived at her telephoned command, and the smart, slender women in wools and silks who came to luncheon and for bridge and drinks were her guests. They were not the same ones who had come for my mother, but they were, to all but the fully initiated eye, indistinguishable from them, and they certainly were not tackpots. High second echelon, one might have said; the very first echelon had largely been crisped along with my mother in a ditch at Orly, and in any case, the ones who had not would not have come to Willa Bondurant. But I believe that Aunt Willa was, largely, satisfied with them.

They were, as she was now, a long way from the chicken farm.

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Her move to establish herself in the house had been as slowly and delicately accomplished as a cat’s tracking of a chipmunk. Preoccupied with the family of Sarah Gentry and the coming of Malory, I had not noticed it, although it was I, with my admonition to her on the day I left for Orly that she move into my mother’s bedroom, who had given her the implicit permission. And, I suppose, she read my failure to curtail or supplant her in the house as tacit permission to colonize it. I can see now, too, that there was another and stronger license granted: that of queen mother. Aunt Willa was no fool. She must have seen from the first day how I felt about Malory, and she had always known of my immutable and twisted ties to Lucy. I believe she moved into my mother’s bedroom and later her house absolutely secure in the knowledge that I would not oust the mother of Lucy and the grandmother of Malory from the house she and Lucy both—and I as well—considered their first home. And she was right.

Shem and Martha Cater hated taking orders from her, I knew, but their sensitive servants’ antennae told them, correctly, that I did not wish to hear about it, and would not do anything about it if I did, and so they kept their grievances mostly to themselves. No one else seemed to notice, except perhaps to say, at one time or another, how fortunate it was that my aunt Willa was willing and able to serve as a housekeeper for me and my father, and to wonder what we would ever do without her.

By this time, few of the handsome, middle-aged women who were her contemporaries remembered that they had once laughed with my mother at Aunt Willa behind her back.

If she was not one of them she had taken on their patina perfectly and subtly, and in Atlanta appearances have always soothed and charmed. There is not enough genuinely blue blood here to run warm with

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outrage at the insinuation into its ranks of a Willa Slagle Bondurant. And too, spinning into the mid-sixties, Atlanta was riding the tail of a comet, and Old Atlanta, like it or not, spun with it, gasping and even giggling dizzily among un-dreamed-of galaxies and constellations. No one had the time or inclination to snub Aunt Willa as they might have done a decade before.

And so she reigned creamily and snugly in the house to which she had come, teetering and faltering in slipshod high heels, a quarter century before, as beautiful and polished and curried as any of the women who had smirked at her at the Driving Club. I was, in the main, grateful enough to let her run the house, as I let canny, abrasive Marty Fox, whom Tom Carmichael and I had hired the year before to manage my father’s business affairs, run those. I knew her power over Lucy, but I had also seen her tears and her fear, and so her vulnerability, and I did not think that she had any power over Malory. If she attempted to exercise any in that direction, I could always stop it simply by threatening to put her out of the house, and I would not have hesitated to do so.

For it was in actuality my house now, and not my father’s.

I don’t think Aunt Willa was certain of that, either then or for a long time afterward. I believe she reckoned that it might still be my father’s, and that I, too, might well live there on sufferance, and I think that that was why she spent all those hours keeping vigil beside his bed, perhaps thinking, in some corner of her wire-grass soul, that he might reward her by changing his will and leaving her the house, or perhaps simply his insurance.

It would be interesting to know what he thought about her presence beside his bed; we were never sure if he fully comprehended what had happened to my mother, but he must have missed her and concluded at some point that she was dead. If he was lucid enough to

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grasp it, the splendid futility of Aunt Willa’s vigil beside him must have given him a great deal of dark glee. For he had known for many years what I learned only in the days after Orly, from Tom Carmichael: that the house, as well as virtually all the rental property and other Bondurant holdings that my father had tended and maneuvered and multiplied, had been in my mother’s name, and that they had passed, at her death, not to him, but to me. I became, in one fiery instant, quite a rich young man and he nominally a paralyzed pauper, and I have always wondered if he did not hate both my mother and me for that knowledge long before it ever became fact. It would explain, at least partly, his cold red distaste for me, and his long retreat from my mother’s presence into his study. After the day Tom Carmichael brought Marty Fox to the house and introduced him to me, I never went into that room again.

I did not feel rich, or even different in any way, and forgot for long stretches of time, until Marty brought his monthly sheaf of bills and checks and papers for me to sign, that the reins of the Bondurant holdings rested now in my own vastly unqualified hands. The only significant advantage all that money had for me was its ability to buy me privacy and freedom from onerous duty and detail. I used it shamelessly.

Marty Fox virtually ran the business, and Aunt Willa ran the house; I had enough raw Cameron history at my fingertips to keep me absorbed into senility if I wished, and very little outside the summerhouse walls called insistently enough to me to lure me out of it. The smoldering stigma of the Pumphouse Hill fire and the natural preoccupation with young families and fledgling careers kept the Buckhead Boys and their wives at a seemly remove from me now.

If I had truly been one of them, raising a family and pursuing a career and moving with them between the clubs and homes and summer places of our old orbit, I 618 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

know that I would have been forgiven the fire and taken back into the fold, but I had the mark of the loner on my forehead by that time, and pack animals to their very marrows, they saw and smelled it, and largely let me be. They dutifully, one by one, had me to dinner in their near-identical “starter”

houses in the days after my mother’s death, and included me in holiday parties and club dances, and other familiar herd rituals, but by then I was outside their ranks, derailed once and for all from the track that would take them to the forefront of the city’s corridors of power one day, ready to take up the torches when the Club passed on to them. I did not care. In those days all human encounters seemed colli-sions, and the dead in the summerhouse received me far more gently than the living in Buckhead. My money bought me seclusion; I could afford to become something of a recluse, and so, gratefully, I became one.