Peachtree Road (94 page)

PEACHTREE ROAD / 737

She threatened to run away for good if we put her mother in Central State, and I did not doubt that this time she would do it. I had asked her why she was so violently opposed to it after the third time I retrieved Lucy from a motel.

“It’s just a hospital, like all the others she’s been in,” I said.

“Not as fancy, but basically the same.”

“They’ll give her a lobotomy,” she sobbed. “Not many people know it, but that’s what they do with their alcoholic patients. Mama told me. Can you imagine Mama after a lobotomy, Shep? I’d rather she was dead. I’ll die myself before I let you all take her. I promised her—”

She stopped herself then, but the slip had told me what I needed to know. Lucy’s lurid picture of Central State Hospital had had just the effect on Malory that she had known it would. Lucy was safe from Central State or any other hospital after that. She had known she would be. She knew better than perhaps anyone else that Jack and I would do nothing to cause Malory such pain.

“So what was the loss this time?” I asked Faith.

“Malory, of course. Malory growing up and away from her, starting to date, maybe meeting someone she wanted to marry…the first period, and the brassiere—the whole thing. I could kick myself for not anticipating it and at least warning Jack and Malory.”

“It wouldn’t have changed anything,” I said.

“No,” she said, sadly. “No. It wouldn’t have.”

But a time came, as it had to come, when Lucy overstepped herself and lost her daughter, at least for the time being. Always before, she had bought her liquor and met her men away from the farmhouse. The one time she did not—when she brought the stumbling interstate trucker and his half-gallon of Rebel Yell home to her and Jack’s bedroom at noon and then fell with him into a long, stuporous sleep—was the one time Malory brought a rare

738 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

new friend, a shy, straitlaced country girl a grade ahead of her at the county high school, home for Cokes and television until the girl’s late bus came.

It was that weekend that Jack brought her to us. Lucy by then was weak and husk-voiced with hysterical weeping and imploring, but this time neither Jack nor I, on the telephone, would relent. And Malory herself, exhausted and desperate, was whitely and silently adamant. It was not until Jack made to drive away and leave her with us that the old, phantom pull began to assert itself and she began to waver. And by that time a team of Clydesdales could not have pried her out of my grasp. Malory was in the house on Peachtree Road at last, and our two lives lifted and deepened and entwined closer than I had ever dared hope they might.

I think she was happy. No, I know she was. As for me, I hummed as I pecked at the old typewriter that was, inch by laborious inch, tracking the spoor of the compleat Georgian, and sang abysmally in the afternoons as I filched snacks and milk and iced tea from a beaming Martha Cater for Malory’s and my daily catch-up meeting in the summerhouse, and for the first and last time in my adult life came, washed and pressed, to sit-down dinners in the beautiful old dining room with Malory and Aunt Willa, cooked by Martha and served with a rusty flourish by Shem. We had seldom had family meals there before, but Aunt Willa, thinking, I suppose, to make up for lost time with her elusive granddaughter, insisted on formal table service with candles and the old Redwine damask and proper courses, and I must admit that it pleased me to see Malory’s pale, chiseled face glowing with candlelight at my table, to watch her fingering the heavy, intricate old Tiffany sterling and the crystal and porcelain with delicate enjoyment, to hear her talking politely about her day.

For the first time since I had conceded Aunt Willa PEACHTREE ROAD / 739

the field, I was more than content to sign the checks with which she kept the house running. I was, in fact, eager to do it. The checks bought, now, a safe and privileged haven for Malory, and I thought that I would finance Willa Slagle Bondurant as chatelaine for all eternity and smile as I did so, if it would keep Malory in the house of her great-aunt and her great-uncle and her mother…and me. That that mother was now forbidden the house—for Aunt Willa and I had, for once, agreed that Lucy was not to come here—gave me only slight pause. There had been a time once for Lucy here, and might perhaps again. But for now, it was the time of Malory Bondurant Venable at 2500 Peachtree Road, and that time remains, to me and perhaps to Malory herself, as whole and perfect and complete unto itself as a robin’s azure egg.

To her credit, Aunt Willa managed to give Malory all she would accept of privilege and near-normalcy. Unlike her re-calcitrant daughter, her granddaughter was everything she could have asked for: lovely, graceful, biddable, wellborn enough, unaffected, and with the prospect of infinite eligibil-ity. She was Lucy without the devil in her, Little Lady with brains, a beauty already, a belle waiting to bloom. Best of all, she was the glue that would affix Willa Slagle Bondurant to the house on Peachtree Road once and for all. One look at my face when Malory was near would have told a fool that.

Aunt Willa was in her element. She enrolled Malory in Westminster and saw her safely into the creamy ports of Rabun Gap-Nacoochee and the Junior Cotillion. She gave a small tea for her at 2500 when she turned sixteen, and bought her flocks of pretty clothes, which, I think, pleased Malory even though she remained devoted to her blue jeans.

She took her to the symphony and the ballet and the theater and the High Museum, and sometimes to dinner and an early movie. Shem Cater grew so

740 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

accustomed to bringing the Rolls around that I had to spring for another hideous dark suit and chauffeur’s cap. He absolutely refused to drive Malory in the casual clothes that the few remaining chauffeurs of Buckhead had, almost to a man, espoused by now. Shem had his own ironclad notions of propriety, and would no more deviate from them than Aunt Willa would from hers.

When Malory was sixteen Aunt Willa launched a campaign to get her out and about in the social world of what she called her “proper young set,” but here Malory set her heels.

She did not care for parties and dating, refused with vague politeness the suggestions about spend-the-night parties and turned down the not inconsiderable invitations she had from the young of her milieu, very few of whom I knew, with a sweet and formal distance that discouraged them from asking again. Like Lucy before her, she would not even discuss a debut or the Junior League.

I knew that she was not really shy. It was just that she had been deprived since birth of the flocking instinct and was comfortable only with the nurturing one. Unlike the teenagers around her, she had never truly been young. I was not surprised when she balked at joining any of the clubs and cliques and groups which held, to my mind, so little luster compared to the glittering excesses of the Pinks and the Jells. I was even less surprised when, after I gave her a small Toyota for her sixteenth birthday, she began to spend much of her free time working with a group of young volunteers in a halfway house for teenage drug and alcohol addicts down in the by-now-infamous Tight Squeeze section at Tenth Street and Peachtree.

In that time of the flourishing drug culture, when Atlanta was the mecca for the Southeast’s forlorn crop of dropouts and runaways and seekers of chemical solace, Malory Venable’s tender young face was one of the first many of those wounded

PEACHTREE ROAD / 741

pilgrims saw, coming out of their murderous hazes. And it was the last many saw on their way back home or to jobs and schools. Malory had the touch; she healed as well as comforted. She had learned the skill early and indelibly. She loved the work, and it bothered her not at all that she had virtually no social life, even though it drove Aunt Willa wild.

“I don’t need it, Shep,” she said, when finally, at Aunt Willa’s distracted behest, I taxed her with it. “I love this work. It gives me almost everything I need. And I always have you.”

“Yes,” I thought, looking at her with the weight of my whole unspoken heart in the look. “You always have me.”

At the close of that decade, Jack Venable found Lucy in one anonymous rented bed too many, and put her out of the farmhouse. He would not, he said, divorce her, but he would answer neither her hammering on the door nor the frantic phone calls that followed it, and so she came, on a night of bitter, blowing spring rain, to the summerhouse. I knew that she would not have tried the main house. Aunt Willa had been icily adamant about that.

I opened the door to her, of course. In the end I could refuse Lucy almost nothing, and she knew it. So did I.

I sat on the sofa looking at her, my hands dangling despairingly over my crossed knees. She looked dreadful, ill and lamed and old, her glossy good looks thickened and dis-colored. Her hair was a snarled rat’s nest, and her mouth and neck and shoulders were abraded with hard use. The fire-blue eyes were scummed.

She drew deeply on her cigarette and then threw it into the dead fireplace.

“I suppose it’s no good telling you about my desper 742 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

ate search for the father I never had,” she said, the wounded attempt at cajoling irony curdling in my ears.

“None in the world,” I said. “I guess we’re lucky it’s men you take up with. Women would be more than I could stand.”

“Of course it’s men,” she said, shivering. “Men have all the power. My father taught me that.”

I rose stiffly and brought a towel and tossed it to her.

“He sure as hell did a lot for you with that power, didn’t he?” I said. “Christ, Lucy, he did exactly zero for you. He wasn’t a factor in your growing up at all. That’s power?”

“He left,” she said matter-of-factly. “The power to do that is the biggest one there is.”

She begged me to let her stay for a time in the summerhouse, just until she “got on her feet,” and I did let her sleep that night on the sofa, covered with my own comforter and blanket. But the thought of Malory, sleeping unaware and healing in the small white bed that had once been her mother’s up in the big house, made anything further impossible. Lucy had not mentioned her daughter, but I knew that that was why, in large part, she had come. In the morning, or the next one, they would meet, and Lucy would send the old dark, glinting hound in her mind sniffing inexorably toward Malory, searching, searching, and then the time of Malory Venable in the big house, and possibly in the world of reality and health, would be over.

No you won’t, I thought. No you won’t.

After she slept I went into my bedroom and called Jack Venable and told him she was with me.

There was a long pause, and then he said, “Ah, shit. Okay, Shep. I’ll come get her in the morning. By no means let her near Malory, though.”

“No, don’t come,” I said. “This has got to stop. I’m going to stop it. Don’t worry, she isn’t going to get PEACHTREE ROAD / 743

within fifty miles of Malory. But I don’t want her back with you either, Jack. Not right now. Let me try it my way and see what happens.”

He was silent again, and then he burst out, “Holy
Christ
, Shep! She’s cost me my boys. She’s cost me my daughter.

She has all of me—she always did have. What more does she want?”

“She’s afraid you’ll leave her, so she leaves first,” I said. I found that I only half believed the words, and did not care about them. I sounded, even to myself, like a bad recording.

“I wouldn’t leave her, not really,” he said. He was nearly crying. I had never heard him speak so. Anguish leaped like fresh flame in his bleached voice. “How could I leave her?

In her good spells she’s totally enchanting, all I ever wanted on earth. Why, after all this, after everything, does she still think I’ll leave her?”

You already did that, a long time ago, I did not say, thinking of the ardent, burning man I had met that night many years before at Paschal’s La Carrousel.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess it’s the old father thing, and Red. And me. It’s what men do to Lucy. They leave her.

It all goes back to the old man….”

“I’d like to kill the sonofabitch,” he said hopelessly.

I thought of that gaudy phantom, sly in his gilded, magical blondness and his striped shoes, who had so devoured and spat out Lucy’s childhood.

“So would she,” I said.

The next morning I had Shem bring the Rolls around and I drove Lucy down to the only apartment complex I knew, Colonial Homes, where so many of our crowd had begun their post-college lives. It looked dingy and banal in the rain-freshened morning, and the flocks of handsome, sleek people leaving it in their handsome, sleek, expensive cars to go to their jobs were of a world that no more knew me than I did it. I averted my face and shut

744 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

my ears grimly to Lucy’s cries of pain and outrage and entreaty and rented her a studio apartment, paid the deposit and the first three months’ rent by check, drove her back out to the empty farmhouse and waited while she packed the few worn things she had, drove her back to Colonial Homes and moved her into the apartment. I said almost nothing to her as I worked. I would, I said, pay her rent and utilities and send her a living allowance until she could get herself on her feet. But she was under no circumstances to try to see Malory. No visits, no letters, no telephone calls. I would enlist Aunt Willa, I said, and have Shem and Martha monitor the telephone, and she would not be allowed to speak to her daughter.

She wept. The fear and despair were real. She still thought Jack had abandoned her, and now not only was I doing the same, I was shutting her off from the child who so succored and fulfilled her.

“I need her, Gibby,” she sobbed. “I can’t stay in this place alone, you know I can’t! Who’ll look after me? Who’ll talk to me, and…you know…
be
with me? Malory could have the pullout bed. I don’t mind the chair, or a mattress—”

“No,” I said coldly. “Call me if it gets so bad you can’t stand it. Or get yourself a roommate. Or join the church. I don’t know what you’re going to do, Lucy. But you’re going to back off Malory. You’re going to let her have a shot at growing up straight.”