Peachtree Road (89 page)

Lucy liked the doctor and had done well on the treatment, even talking of going back to work for
SOUTH
in the new year, and we were beginning to hope, tentatively, that she had left the darkness behind her and was at least approaching the light. Jack’s step and voice were lighter than they had been in the past four or five years of doctors and hospitals, and Malory laughed once more, shyly and hesitantly, and had not run away to us since the previous January.

Only I remained skeptical; it seemed to me clear that the darkness in Lucy was a thing of the blood and ran not only in her but through her and back beyond, and was thus out of the reach of drugs and positive thinking. But I did not speak of my doubts to anyone. I was not the clearest of observers when it came to Lucy Bondurant. Enough to let sleeping madness lie. The fact remained that Lucy had not taken a drink or a man for eleven months.

But then she lost it, whatever it was that was bearing 698 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

her up. As Christmas approached—a time she had, for some reason, come to hate and fear—she grew more and more taut and brittle and crystal-voiced, and though we all tried desperately not to see and hear, none of us was surprised when the telltale call to me came, this time at about midnight of December 17. She had left to go to a nearby suburban mall to do some Christmas shopping and had gone instead to a truckers’ motel and road stop up near Duluth, and when she called me, laughing crazily, I could hear the answering laughter of more than one man. When I got to the motel and found her room and let myself in the unlocked door, one was riding her like a bucking mare, and another was kneeling at her head with his fly open, and a third was watching television from the other bed and preparing for his turn with energetic masturbation. They had melted out of the room like dirty snowmen at the sight of me, still adjusting clothing, and Lucy screeched her laughter and defiance all the way to the hospital—not Brawner’s this time, for by now they were not anxious to have Lucy back—where the doctor practiced. She had been there ever since.

We had told Malory none of the details, of course; had never done that. We said this time, as we had all those others, only that her mother was ill and in the hospital to get better, and would soon be home. But Malory was light-years removed from a fool and was nearing adolescence, and could have found out the precise shape of her mother’s madness in any number of ways. I had, as I said, been waiting for this. I had been watching to see if any taint of that darkness might overshadow Malory—any precocious interest, any prurience, even, God help us, any hint that that same fever might bloom in her own blood. It had appeared in her mother at an age not much past her daughter’s now.

But Malory remained as chaste and sexless as a medieval page or a young saint. She had few close PEACHTREE ROAD / 699

acquaintances and no real friends, and none of the former were boys. Jack’s boys had long since elected the predictable, if tepid, hospitality of the Nashville aunt; they rarely visited at the farmhouse anymore. She was not overtly uncomfortable in the presence of the boys of her age I saw her with: Snake and Lelia’s three, and Freddie and Tom’s handsome, stupid Tommy and more rarely young Ben’s brace of volatile redheads. But she did not stay long in their presence, melting away as swiftly and silently as spring snow after a moment or so. I had often wondered if she was afraid of boys, and rather hoped, given Lucy’s history, that she was. I looked at her on that night in the firelight; she looked, in her tattered, faded blue jeans and fringed vest and boots, like an androgynous Remington sketch. Except for the budding of the sharp, unfettered young breasts and the poreless sheen of her skin, she might have been a young boy.

“I think you ought to ask your daddy about that,” I said finally, trying to keep my voice casual. “He’d probably rather talk to you about it than have me doing it.”

“I’ve already asked Jack,” she said. She still did not look up. “He said it wasn’t anything for me to worry about, and to put it out of my mind. It’s Mother’s problem, he said, not mine. But that’s just crap, Shep. It
is
something for me to worry about. It
is
my problem. It’s his problem, too, only he won’t act like it is. So I’m asking you.”

“Well,” I said, on a deep breath, “It’s something that liquor and her sickness make her do. Something that she wouldn’t do when she was well, and doesn’t do then. Something that she won’t, when she gets well for good—”

“Yeah, but what’s she
doing
there?” Malory asked. I could tell that she was near tears, even though her eyes were veiled by her long lashes.

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“Malory, it’s not anything so bad, it’s just…I don’t—”

“Oh, Shep, I know she screws men,” she said angrily, turning finally to look at me. Her eyes were terrible, bottomless pools of pain. “I know she fucks her brains out with men she never saw before. When Jack wouldn’t talk to me I asked the shrink and she told me. What I guess I mean is why?

Why does she have to do that? Why isn’t Jack enough? Why aren’t I?”

The tears started, a slow, silent track down her face, but she did not seem to know they were there, and did not move to brush them away. She stared at me as if the whole of her life hung on my answer. I knew that in a way, perhaps, it did, and hated Lucy in that moment with a hatred as pure and bright as fire, and as undiluted.

“She isn’t herself when she does it,” I began in dull despair.

“I don’t think she even knows she’s doing it. It may be something to do with brain chemistry, that we don’t know about yet, something she can’t help. Or more likely it’s a way of running away from something that hurts her terribly….”

“You mean like me?” she said, her voice quavering pitifully.

“No, baby, not you, not ever you,” I said. “You know that your mother loves you like nothing else in the world, no matter what. Don’t you know that? No, it probably all started when she was very small, just a little girl, maybe even before she came to live here. And then finally something, maybe that chemical in her brain, just…pulled a kind of trigger….”

“Mama told me once that she had the first…sick spell right after I was born,” she said neutrally, and I could only think, over the red roaring in my ears, I would like to kill you for that, Lucy. I truly would.

“Well, she was wrong,” I said evenly. “She had some small…spells, I guess you’d call them…when she was PEACHTREE ROAD / 701

in college, and right after. Maybe she doesn’t remember them, but I do. So it couldn’t have been you that caused them.”

“Dr. Farr said it was a way of looking for her father. My grandfather,” she said. The tears still ran, but the awful rigidity had gone out of her shoulders, and she slumped against my knees.

“I think she’s right,” I said.

“Well, then…what I really want to know is…does she…did she want to do that with her father? I mean, are you supposed to want to…you know…with your father? Or are you
not
supposed to and it makes you crazy to want to? Or what?”

“Has she ever said anything about that to you?” I asked, already feeling, with crimson pleasure, Lucy’s slender throat in my hands.

“Oh no. No, I just wondered. I mean, if she was looking for her father with all those men, and that was what she did with them, was that what she wanted to do with him? All along?”

The truth of it was so absurd and shining and whole that I wanted to laugh aloud. I found that I could not frame a comforting lie for her.

“I don’t know,” I said on a long exhalation. “I really don’t.

I doubt if she does, either. It could be.”

She sat leaning against my knees for a long time, there in the firelight, and then she put her forehead down on them and rolled it slowly from side to side, as if trying to dislodge the knowledge behind it.

“It’s really awful, isn’t it? The whole sex thing?” she said.

“It can be,” I said. “It can be pretty awful indeed. On the other hand, it can be pretty terrific. It all depends on a lot of things. Who you do it with, mainly.”

“Is it awful for you? Is that why you don’t…you know…have a girlfriend or a wife?”

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“Me? No,” I said, surprised and profoundly uncomfortable.

“It isn’t awful. It never was. It was…pretty great. I just don’t have anybody right now I really want to do it with.”

“Did you ever?”

“Yes. I did.”

“But not now.”

“No. Not now.”

“Did she go away? Did she die?”

“Malory,” I said, “I love you a very great deal, and I will never lie to you, but there are some things that I simply reserve the right not to answer. When it’s your business, there is nothing I won’t tell you. But this is not your business. This is adult business. You are eleven years old. No matter how well-behaved and mature you are, you are still eleven years old.”

“Almost twelve. Twelve in three months and two weeks.

How old do I have to be before you tell me?” she said, giggling, and I knew that whatever cliff we had teetered on, we were away from the brink now.

“Thirty-seven,” I said. “Maybe forty. Get up now and I’ll race you over to the Camerons’. Dorothy said she was going to make tea cakes this afternoon.”

“I still think sex is awful,” she said, getting up from the floor in one fluid motion of long legs and arms and hair.

“I’m not ever going to do it. Not ever. Ugh.”

“Famous last words,” I said.

“No,” she said, turning her face to me. I could see that the laughter and the eleven-year-old child were gone from the blue eyes, and something much older and almost fierce was there, something implacable. “I mean that. I’d rather be dead than go in a room and…do that with a man. I’d rather die.”

I hope one day you have to account for that too, Lucy, I said to her, silently, as I jogged with her daughter in the tender dark up Peachtree Road. I hope one day you PEACHTREE ROAD / 703

get a chance to heal that wound in Malory, because it’s gone beyond my ability to do it. And sick as you were, and are, you better make it good.

Lucy stayed in the new hospital, with periodic visits its home, for almost a year and a half. At Faith Farr’s emphatic insistence, Malory did not visit her there, but she talked to her mother on the telephone and, I suppose, by way of their old silent communication almost every day. She visited often with me and Aunt Willa on Peachtree Road, short visits, but with the boys gone, she was uncomfortable leaving Jack alone for long, and so her primary role in that time of banked turmoil and tough, wiry, greening hope was that of caretaker to him.

He was still working two jobs, and drinking and dozing when he came home, and his waking time with Malory must have shrunk to a matter of an hour or less a day, but she did not seem to mind the long stretches of time alone. Old Estelle still came at noon and stayed until she had prepared their supper, and Malory had discovered early her mother’s and my refuge in books. I would have found a way to get her out of the farmhouse for good if I had seen any evidence of loneliness or neglect, but I did not. Malory with something or someone to nurture was Malory fulfilled. So for the time being, I let things ride as they were. Faith Farr, who had drifted into the role of family counselor and confidante as well as therapist to Lucy, seemed to think she was doing relatively well as Jack’s housekeeper and companion. But she, as I did, had serious reservations about Malory for the long haul.

“Let’s don’t try to make plans for her future now,” she said more than once, when I cornered her in a new fit of anxiety about Malory. “If we’ve really got a handle on the thing with Lucy this time, everything may sort itself out just fine. The dependency on Malory may just break

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itself, and that would be the best way, by far. It if ain’t broke, let’s don’t try to fix it.”

“Can you really say it ain’t broke?” I would say.

“It may be right now,” she said, “but that doesn’t mean it always will be. It’s all a part of the total dependency package Lucy lugs around, I think. Break one, or find the cause, and the rest will follow. I
think
.”

“You think? Jesus, Faith, if you don’t
know
by now, when will you?” I said.

“Probably never,” she replied, looking narrowly at me through smoke from her Belair. “No therapist knows. What we do is think. I think better than most. And that’s what I think.”

So I had to be content with that. But as the months wore on, I had to concede that it did indeed look as though she had a handle of some sort on the monstrous engine that drove Lucy. Lucy looked almost as well as she ever had, except for a permanent webbing of fine lines around her eyes and mouth and the kind of furrows that pain makes between her delicate brows, and had even gained a softening cloak of flesh, and asked for her makeup and favorite clothes once again. She had not had an episode of violence or hysteria or catatonia for months, and had made what the staff shrink termed several significant breakthroughs in her group, and was so well and fully transferred to Faith Farr that Faith said their sessions together were often pure delight.

“She’s one of the most charismatic people I’ve ever met,”

she said to me and Jack. “It’s impossible not to love her. Her charm is immense, and so far as I can see, it’s entirely natural now.”

“It is,” I said. “Everything about her is entirely natural.

What you see is what you get, no matter if it’s her best or her craziest.”

She looked at me. “Lucy has more artifice than any PEACHTREE ROAD / 705

body I have ever known,” she said. “And she’s better at it than anybody I’ve ever seen. That you never saw it is a mark of her skill.”

“I simply can’t believe that,” I said, dumbfounded. “I’d know if she was faking. I’ve always known when she was.”

Jack grinned at me. It was not a pleasant grin.

“Believe it,” he said.

A month or so before Lucy was finally scheduled to be discharged, I caught up with Faith in the snack bar of the hospital and asked for an overview of Lucy’s condition, and a prognosis. She did not want to give it to me, but in the end she did.