Downtown Read online

  ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

  DOWNTOWN

  FOR JIM TOWNSEND and BOB DANIELS

  without whom,

  one way or another,

  this book would not have happened;

  and for BILL SHINKER,

  without whom many wouldn’t have.

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  All over Atlanta that Fall, in the blue twighlight…

  1 The first thing I saw was a half-naked woman dancing…

  2 I had never been to New York, But Carolyn Renfrow…

  3 I dreamed of home and early morning and breakfast, and…

  4 The city to which I came that autumn was a…

  5 I did the YMOG piece well. I sat up all…

  6 Sometime in the black early hours next morning Teddy shook…

  7 On a still green weekend in May Teddy’s parents invited…

  8 John Howard was as good as his word. He found…

  9 At the end of July, Brad asked me to go…

  10 After that, everything was different, and yet it was not.

  11 When we got home from the lake, Brad called from…

  12 Have you completely lost your mind? Have you flipped totally…

  13 I think that sometimes the great changes in our lives…

  14 Whenever I think back to that suspended time between Thanksgiving…

  15 On the second Sunday of January, Luke and I went…

  16 You have to realize that it’s just for now,” Luke…

  Epilogue

  Come with me,” My Husband says from the Bathroom, where…

  About the Author

  Critical Acclaim

  Books by Anne Rivers Siddons

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Author’s Note

  EVERYONE WHO WAS FORTUNATE ENOUGH TO FIND him or herself in Jim Townsend’s orbit during his time at Atlanta magazine, in the early and middle 1960s, will have a different notion of the man, the time, and the magazine. Jim was never the same to any two people—and neither, I suspect, were the sixties. Both remain elusive these thirty years later. Very early in the writing of Downtown I gave up trying to catch the precise essence of the early Atlanta magazine and its contentious, incandescent founder and editor; I realized that it couldn’t be done—not, at least, by me. So I tried instead to capture a slice of a particular city in a very particular time in the world, and let the characters become no more and no less than themselves. I am a fiction writer, not a biographer.

  So anyone who knew him will see immediately that Jim Townsend is not Matt Comfort—is, in fact, far from him, though perhaps they share some notable eccentricities. Nor is anyone else in these pages anyone I know, or you do, though many quirks will have overlapped.

  But the city and the times are as close to my own time Downtown as I could come. No, I’m not Smoky—she’s better woman than I, by far, and very little that happened to her happened to me. But I know her and her time and her world. In essence, if not in incidence, they were mine.

  Atlanta was a wonderful, terrible, particular, and special place in those cusp days of the sixties; it could have been no other place on earth, and it will not come again. That luminous particularity is what I strove to capture in these pages. It may not be precisely as you remember it, but to Smoky O’Donnell and to me, this is how it was, and this is the way we were.

  Prologue

  ALL OVER ATLANTA THAT FALL, IN THE BLUE TWILIGHTS, girls came clicking home from their jobs in their clunky heels and miniskirts and opened their apartment windows to the winesap air, and got out ice cubes, and put on Petula Clark singing “Downtown,” and sat down to wait. Soon the young men would come, drifting out of their bachelor apartments in Bermuda shorts and Topsiders, carrying beers and gin and tonics, looking for a refill and a date and the keeping of promises that hung in the bronze air like fruit on the eve of ripeness.

  Atlanta in the autumn of 1966 was a city being born, and the energy and promise of that lying-in sent out subterranean vibrations all over the just-stirring South, like underground shock waves—a call to those who could hear it best, the young. And they came; they came in droves; from small, sleeping towns and large, drowsing universities, from farms and industrial suburbs and backwaters so still that even the building firestorm of the Civil Rights movement had not yet rippled the surface.

  It was a time for youth. A tall, new young president had sent out a call of his own, and the young rose up for him with joy and purpose and the unbroken surety of his invincibility, and theirs. That he had died what was considered a true martyr’s death in another slow, smiling, murderous Southern city did nothing to stem the rush of their ascendancy. On the contrary, it gave them focus and outrage to leaven their callowness; lent them a touch of becoming darkness. It was, after all, a very heady thing to have a new-slain hero of one’s own. Strengthened and salted with his blood, the young surged toward the sun, and nowhere did they preen and jostle and mass themselves so thickly for the coming of…what?…than in Atlanta.

  The city was suddenly full of them: pretty girls in new Carnaby Street knockoffs, streaming into the heart of town to their secretarial jobs; young men in dark suits and narrow ties and polished Cordovans and self-conscious new sideburns, marching into banks and brokerage offices and law firms and the budding businesses that they would ride, like the tails of comets, up to meet the high young sun.

  They met, of course they did; they met, and came together in pairs and groups and broke apart and reformed, like patterns in a kaleidoscope. It was a common saying in the first singles’ apartments of the city that if a girl couldn’t get a date in Atlanta, the nunnery was the next step. And it was said, too, that if a man couldn’t get a girl there, he’d do better to go back to Birmingham. And it was largely true.

  A girl, a man, a career, a romance, a life…it was all out there, just ahead. I remember those autumn days of hope and exuberance and pale lemon sunlight, of softly chilled nights with scarlet leaves lit to translucence by city lights, so full of portent and promise that I often felt my very heart would burst with it.

  Oh, wait, just wait, ran the song in mine and many hearts.

  Oh, soon. Soon.

  1

  THE FIRST THING I SAW WAS A HALF-NAKED WOMAN dancing in a cage above Peachtree Street.

  It was a floodlit steel and Plexiglas affair hung from a second-story window, and the dancer closed her eyes and snapped her fingers as she danced in place, in a spangled miniskirt and white go-go boots, moving raptly to unheard music. It was twilight on the Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend, 1966, when we reached Five Points in downtown Atlanta, and the time-and-temperature sign on the bank opposite the dancer said “6:12 P.M. 43 degrees.” The neon sign that chased itself around the bottom of the dancer’s cage said “Peach-a-Go-Go.”

  “Holy Mother of God, look at that,” my father said, and slammed on the brakes of the Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser that he loved only marginally less than my mother. Or rather, by that time, more.

  I thought he meant the go-go dancer, and opened my mouth to make reassuring noises of shock and disapproval, but he was not looking up at her. He was looking at a straggling line of young Negro men and women walking up and down in front of what I thought must be a delicatessen. There was an enormous pickle, glowing poison neon green, over its door. It was raining softly, blending neon and automobile and streetlights into a magical, underwater smear. The walkers seemed to swim in the heavy air; they carried cardboard placards, ink running in the mist, that read “Freedom Now,” and “We Shall Overcome.” My heart gave a small fish-flop of recognition. Pickets. Real Civil Rights pickets. Perhaps, inside, a sit-in was in process. Here it was at last, after all the endless, airless years in
the Irish Channel back in Savannah, drowned in the twin shadows of the sleeping Creole South and the Mother Church.

  Here was Life.

  Caught in traffic—a significant, intractable traffic jam, what a wonder—my father averted his eyes from the picketers as if they were naked, and, lifting them toward the alien heavens above him, saw the dancer in her cage. He jerked his foot off the clutch, and the Vista Cruiser stalled.

  “Jesus, Joseph, and Mary,” he squalled. “I’m turning around this minute and taking you home! Sodom and Gomorrah, this place is. You got no business in this place, darlin’; look at that hussy, her bare bottom hangin’ out for all the world to see. Look at those spooks, wantin’ to eat in a place that don’t want them. And have we passed a single church in all this time? We have not, and likely the ones that are here are all Protestant. I told your mother, didn’t I? Didn’t I tell her? You come on back with me now, and go back to work for the insurance people, them that want you so bad. Didn’t they say they’d let you run the company newspaper, if you’d stay?”

  Behind us a horn blared, and then another.

  “Pa, please,” I said. “It’s nothing to do with me. I don’t think my office is anywhere near here. Hank said it’s across from a museum. I don’t see any museum around here; I bet this part of town is just for tourists. And Pa? I’ll go to Mass every Sunday and Friday, too, if I have time. And after all, I’m staying in the Church home for girls. What on earth could happen to me at Our Lady?”

  “We don’t know anything about these Atlanta Catholics,” my father said darkly, but he started the Oldsmobile and inched it forward, into the next block.

  “Catholics are Catholics. You’ve seen one, you’ve seen us all,” I said in relief. We were past the go-go dancer and the marching Negroes now.

  “I heard some of them take that pill thing—”

  “Of course they don’t!” I said, honestly scandalized. “You’re just talking now. You heard no such thing.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t be surprised if I did hear it,” he said, but my shock had reassured him. He looked at me out of the corner of one faded blue eye and winked, and I squeezed his arm. My father was in his late sixties then; I was the last child of six, spawn of his middle age, born after he had thought the five squat red sons who were his images would be his allotted issue, and he was a bitter caricature of the bandy-legged, brawling little man upon whose wide shoulders I had ridden when I was small. But his wink could still make me smile, still summon a shaving of the old adoration that his corrosive age and his endless anger had all but smothered. Most of the time now I no longer loved my father, but here, closed in this warm car with the jeweled dark of my new city all around me, I could remember how I had.

  “There’s nothing for you to worry about,” I said. “Aren’t I Liam O’Donnell’s daughter, then?”

  The convent school where I had spent twelve millennial years back in Savannah, Saint Zita’s—named after the patron saint of servants and those who must cross bridges; apt for my contentious lower-class neighborhood—was big on epiphanies. It was a favored mode of deliverance among the nuns in my day, perhaps because no one stuck in Corkie could conceive of any other means of escape. I had a speaking acquaintance with every significant epiphany suffered by every child of the Church from Adam on. But I had never been personally seized by one. It seemed somehow déclassé, bumbling and rural; my best friend Meg Conlon and I used to snicker whenever Sister Mary Gregory trotted out another for our edification.

  “Zap! Another epic has epiphed!” we would whisper to each other.

  I had one then.

  I sat in the warm darkness of my father’s automobile, for the moment totally without contact with the world outside and newly without context of any sort, and saw that indeed I was Liam O’Donnell’s daughter, wholly that, just that. Maureen Aisling O’Donnell, known as Smoky, partly for the sooty smudges of my eyelashes and brows and my ash-brown hair; smoke amid the pure red flame on the heads of my brothers. Twenty-six years on earth and all of them within the fourteen city blocks near the Savannah wharves that was Corkie, for County Cork, whence most of us who lived there had our provenance. Daughter of Maureen, sister of John, James, Patrick, Sean, and Terry. But unquestionably, particle and cell and blood and tenet, daughter of Liam O’Donnell.

  It stopped my breath and paralyzed me with terror, and in the stillness my father laughed and pummeled my thigh, pleased and mollified, and said, “You are and no mistaking. See you remember it.”

  And we inched on up Peachtree Street toward midtown Atlanta, where the Our Lady’s Home for Catholic Girls waited to receive me in its red Medusa’s arms.

  I know that he was handsome once. There are yellowed, saw tooth-edged snapshots stuck in old albums and curling in drawers at home to attest to that. Never tall, of course, but powerful through the chest and arms from his years of wrestling reams and bales of Monarch paper products on and off the freighters that wallowed at the Savannah municipal docks. He was dark, too, from the malignant kiss of that coastal sun, even though his hair was as thick and red as molten copper. Even in the old photographs it looked red, like lava. His eyes were bright blue, though in the photos they were always narrowed with laughter; he laughed constantly when he was young, it seems. Laughed and sang and cursed and flirted; I have heard the stories of his legendary charm ever since I was old enough to understand them, and some of it I remember. He was still a force to be reckoned with when I was a child.

  I remember running down to meet him at the edge of the docks when his shift was over. I was not allowed to go any farther into that den of iniquitous cursing and brawling and innuendo than that, but I would stand with one or more of my brothers, waiting for him, and I heard the laughter and the admiring jeers about his sexual prowess from the small crowd of men that always surrounded him. The talk would stop when the men reached my brothers and me, and change to the mindless, crooning endearments that Irishmen always have for girl children, and the sly, freighted teasing that they keep for boys. But I knew the sense of it. All of us kids in Corkie knew, early on. You could not live in the warren of small row houses and tenements that bordered the docks, off Gallien Street, and not know about sex. You would have to have been deaf and blind. The great, smothering mantle of Saint John the Baptist may have effectively stifled our actions, but it could do nothing about our minds and our groins. I never knew of more people in one time and place who thought more about sex and did less about it than the children of Corkie, in Savannah, Georgia, in the last two decades before the pill.

  So I always understood that my father was two people: Liam O’Donnell who was my father and the head of our cramped, noisome household, whose savage hand lay heavy on all of us and whose sentimental, conventional Irish tongue glibly celebrated the joys and values of Family; and Liam O’Donnell the laughing, quick-handed rogue male, who, not unlike Browning’s last duchess, liked whate’er in skirts he looked on, and whose looks went everywhere. For a long time I loved the one and was awed by and proud of the other, even as I pretended to know nothing of him. Not knowing has been the way of the women of Corkie since time out of mind.

  Of my mother I have always had less of a sense. She was when I first remember her as she was, to me, all of her life: gray of hair and face, deft and constant as a robot in her kitchen, silent and smileless, heavy-footed, and red-handed from daily washing of the family’s clothes and dishes. She wept when my father bought her a washer and dryer, when I was about ten, and not from joy, either. She wept because she said that the Blessed Virgin never had such, and nowhere in the scriptures did it say that a virtuous woman should, and she might be only plain little Maureen Downy O’Donnell from Pritkin Street, but there was no woman in the parish that kept a better house or did more for her family. Even Father Terry said that. She kept the washer and dryer, but she made sure that we all knew she made an act of contrition.

  That’s what I remember most of her: her great, limitless, blind, joyless faith. For a very long ti
me it maddened and embarrassed me. By the time that I saw that it was what she had in place of love or laughter or joy or even contentment, she was gone. Of all the things I never did, telling her that I understood that is the bitterest to me. I wish I could have seen it, or, failing that, I wish I had had the wit to lie and say I did. But in those days I had little of understanding and less of the sort of wit that breeds kindness. When James and John, my oldest brothers, used to speak of the slender, curly-haired young woman who laughed in the hot evenings on the stoop as the children of Corkie played around the marble doorsteps, or who sang in the mornings while breakfast cooked, I could only look at them. They might have been talking of someone they saw on the screen at the Bijou on Saturday afternoons.

  I look like her though, or as she once looked. I have the old photos, and they do not lie. I am, as she was, pale of skin, with her soot-fringed, water-clear gray eyes and her coarse, unruly dark curls; deep-breasted and small-waisted, with round hips that I used to try, vainly, to subdue with fearsome junior girdles. I have not bothered with these in many years. One day, perhaps, like her, I will be as soft as a pudding, but so far I am not. I have her deceptively sweet face; I will always look younger than I am, a fact that I hated for many years and have come, now, to appreciate. Sometimes, I am told, I can look almost sanctimonious, with a cloying, missal-saint’s rapt stare; this, usually, when I am lost in thought or tired to mindlessness. Those who tell me this do not mean it as a compliment, and I do not take it as such. I am very far from saintly. I have from my father, in addition to his smallness of stature, his pigheadedness and swift, hot temper and his sentimental penchant for lost causes, although the nuns and my mother taught me early and well to put a cap on all of them. From the time I was four or five I could hold my own in a fight with my brothers, and learned soon after that I could devastate them with my tongue. But from almost as early an age, I was wracked with guilt when I did either one. I think if I had not gotten out of Corkie I would eventually simply have exploded from the force of all those warring, tightly repressed factions roiling within me. Many Corkie women did explode, or, like my mother, simply and gratefully turn to stone.