Peachtree Road Read online

  “Lucy!” Aunt Willa hissed, cutting her eyes at my mother. “You know I don’t like that kind of talk.”

  “Well, I didn’t say it, this kid did,” Lucy said.

  “What little boy was that, Lucy?” my mother said interestedly. There was a glimmer of something amused and avid in her dark eyes, like a fish far down in dark water, and all of a sudden I wanted Lucy just to be quiet. But I knew that she would not be.

  She wasn’t.

  “I don’t know his name,” she said. “He’s a funny-looking kid with scabs around his nose and a fat fanny. His folks’ nigra driver comes for him in a big old car every day. I beat him up.”

  This time the outrage was evident in my mother’s dark, beautiful face.

  “We don’t beat people up in this house, Lucy,” she said. “I think that was little Todd Beauchamp. I’m going to have to call his mother and apologize for your behavior.”

  “Wasn’t in this house,” Lucy said earnestly. “It was on the playground. I had to beat him up, Aunt Olivia. It wasn’t true. I mean, I know Mr. and Mrs. Cameron love the nigras because they said they do…gee, so do we, don’t we? I mean, Shem and Martha and all…but they don’t sleep in the bed with them, or hug and kiss them. And Ben and Sarah aren’t Leroy’s children. I asked.”

  “LUCY!” Aunt Willa out-and-out squalled.

  “Oh, for goodness’ sake, Willa,” my mother drawled, her amusement at the thought of Lucy asking the totally exemplary Dorothy Cameron if she hugged and kissed Leroy Pickens apparently outweighing her disapproval of the thrashing of fat Toddy Beauchamp.

  “Everybody knows Ben and Dorothy are funny about the Negroes. It’s no wonder the children pick it up.”

  Indeed, Ben and Dorothy’s friends paid little heed to their crackpot sentiments, which would have gotten any other Atlantans drummed so rapidly out of the Driving, Capital City, and Commerce clubs that their seersucker coattails would have smoked. The Camerons, particularly Dorothy’s side, had always been “funny.” Old Milliment, Dorothy’s mother, that martinet of eminent respectability, had once ridden a white horse at the head of a column of suffragettes straight down Peachtree Street during a Fourth of July parade, black hair flowing down her ramrod back, in the middle of a difficult menopause. Later, long before it was seemly for ladies to drive themselves into town for shopping, she would take out her huge black Cadillac each Tuesday—the traditional Buckhead chauffeur’s day off—and drive herself, leaving carnage and mayhem in her wake, never looking back. She lived, after her husband’s death, in the Cameron guest house behind the box maze, and for many years had living with her there a younger, unmarried sister who was a dwarf. Neighborhood children swore that Miss Callie, as the tiny woman was called, did not live in the guest house at all, but in a huge doghouse out behind it, fitted out with doll’s furniture and screened and shielded with honeysuckle.

  “She has a teeny little bathtub and she uses a baby’s potty chair,” Lucy once told a breath-held group of ladies at one of my mother’s endless committee luncheons. “Her doo-doo is like a little ol’ chicken’s.”

  But as Sarah and Ben Cameron had vivid imaginations and Lucy was a liar of no small reputation and it was known that I would parrot whatever Lucy said, this was given little credence. I myself never saw the doghouse, but it might have been true. Any dwarf sister of old Milliment was bound to be eccentric enough to demand one and see that it was obtained. There was and is, in old Atlanta, an eccentricity that is tolerated, even cherished, and an eccentricity that will never be countenanced. Ben and Dorothy were of the former. Lucy came to be of the latter. There are not many people left who know the difference.

  In addition to all their closeness, their talents, their kindness, their charm, their worthiness and good works and their infinitely engaging gregariousness, Ben and Dorothy Cameron had traveled almost all over the world, often taking young Ben and Sarah with them. The result was a family that would, in its attractiveness and wholesome worldliness, have been at home and welcome in a far more sophisticated arena than Atlanta. Given their very fullness, I suppose I can see, after all, why Lucy in her emptiness and hunger flinched away from them, shied like a colt at their bounty. But to me, they shone like the sun, and I loved them with an uncritical and grateful heart.

  I think it was the dark side of Lucy that shrank from the Camerons’ light. I know that we all have our dark sides; no one is shadowless. But I came to think, in that first year, that there was an actual darkness, a real shadow, that lay over Lucy. You didn’t see it often, because she was almost always in motion, flying in radiance, moving in a wind of light. But it waited for her, off in the edges of the sunlight, and when it swept over her it was unmistakable, like the shadow of wings.

  I saw it once, darkness visible, lightlessness tangible. It was in the fall of that year, a warm stretch of Indian summer days after an early frost that had left the hardwoods afire, when we all went up to the cottage at Tate for the weekend. We had not taken Willa and her children there before, even though it would have made, in its coolness and isolation, a perfect fortress against polio. My mother never liked the Tate cottage, and I know that she did not want to take Aunt Willa there. I heard her telling my father once, “If you think she’s conspicuous here, wait till you get her up at Tate. A sore thumb doesn’t begin to describe it.”

  Even I could understand what she meant. The little colony of summer places up in Pickens County, about an hour’s drive to the northwest, was so unfashionable and simple that most Atlantans who did not have homes there would not know it existed. That is why, of course, it was, and is, thought to be so exclusive. The families who summer there are, for the most part, the descendants of the original owners, the colonists who made up the Tate Mountain Corporation and built the old houses and the golf course and the lake and dam and dock and boathouses. It is extremely hard to buy into Tate if you have not always been grounded there, and we acquired our cottage only because it was part of the package the doctor’s widow offered us. Even then, I wonder if my parents would have been accepted if the other colonists had not known that the old lady needed a quick sale. As it was, though the other residents were cordial to us, they were never really warm, and my mother was not one to either miss that nuance or forgive it. I think my father might have eventually found a haven there, with his knowledge and love of fishing and the outdoors, but after the first two or three visits, my mother refused to go back, until Aunt Willa and her children came to us, and so the house mainly sat idle in its grove of fine hardwoods on the flank of Burnt Mountain, and we went, in the summers, either to Sea Island or to Highlands.

  “You couldn’t get a decent game of bridge in Tate if your life depended on it,” my mother would say, “and your name is mud from the word go if you don’t want to dig in the dirt or tromp around after birds and beavers or freeze yourself in that damned little lake.”

  And she was right. There was plenty of socializing in Tate, down at the swimming and diving dock, or on the golf course, or walking in the cool mornings and evenings around the lake, or even at the late-afternoon ice-crackings, as they were called, on screened porches and before vast stone fireplaces. But these gatherings centered around a communal life in the mountains that was generations deep, rooted in the original families, rich in anecdotal lore from summers long past. Suppers were family affairs and bedtimes early, and in the daytime, activities ran to supervising children’s play or gardening or ambling, to desultory golf or serious canoeing and swimming. All of it was extremely plain, even austere; there was not a pair of high heels or a tie in the entire colony, and there has never been even one telephone. I think, now, that the Elliots’ cottage has an old black-and-white television set, but they do not use it except for Braves games, which are old Mr. Elliot’s passion, and the Saturday gardening show on the educational channel, which is Mrs. Elliot’s. The Camerons’ log cottage is one of the largest and oldest, and was the center, from June on, of a constant stream of children, eddying and swirling arou
nd Ben and Sarah. Tate might have been created with the Camerons in mind.

  My aunt Willa, true to my mother’s prediction, did indeed fit into Tate, on that one autumn weekend in 1941, like a peacock in a sparrowcote. She ruined her new Newton Elkin heels in the red mud at the front door, was routed from the rudimentary bathroom by the resident scorpion, nearly froze in the chill night in her flimsy peignoir and ended up sleeping in one of my father’s ripe old flannel shirts, and was badly frightened by the thin, shuffling she-bear who foraged on weekends in the colony garbage cans.

  In the glorious blue and gold morning, when the sun broke free over Burnt Mountain and turned the woods to yellow wildfire, she came red-eyed and shivering down to breakfast only to find that my father had taken us children on a hike to see the beavers and my mother had gone back to bed and let the fire die out, and when she tottered desperately out into the rutted little road that encircled the lake in search of another human face, she met none. We were the only family there. Most of the other cottages had been closed before the first frost. Aunt Willa was near tears by the time we came back and built up the fire and my mother arose to set out our hot dog lunch. We went back to Tate a few times during my childhood, but Aunt Willa never again in all her long life set foot on Burnt Mountain.

  But from that first day, Lucy adored it, almost as much as she did the summerhouse, and even though she was not taken there with any regularity during her childhood, we did go on occasion, and Lucy never forgot those visits. I let her have the keys whenever she liked after we were grown, and I think she spent quite a bit of time up there. Malory loved it, too, in her turn. After she was born we went fairly often. That is why after my parents died, I never sold the Tate house, and why I probably never will. It is entirely possible that I will never see it again, but it makes me happy to think of Malory’s young-willow height and slenderness, so like Lucy’s, vivid as a live flame against the green of Burnt Mountain.

  On the second evening we were there, that first autumn, there was a meteor shower, and Lucy and I bundled up and took blankets and went down to the dock to watch it. We lay on our backs, utterly silent as the very sky above us arced and bloomed, and when it was over we decided to walk around the lake, so as to prolong the magic. We walked quietly, without speaking. The silver spell of the teeming sky was too recent and close for words. I remember that there was a huge white moon, hanging perfectly full and so low that it seemed to rest on the top of Burnt Mountain, and the whole world was black and silver, like a photographic negative. Where the road and lake and meadow lay in the clear, it was as if the world was flooded in a kind of cold, burning radiance, but in the shadows of trees it was as thick and black as ink. Magic. That night it was just magic. It took your breath; you wanted to whisper. Something old as the world and outside it entirely walked that silver road with us. Lucy, skipping a little ahead of me, was bathed in silver; the radiance seemed to flow off her like phosphorescence does off your skin when you’re in a warm night ocean. I knew that something enormous and awesome was going to happen. How could it not?

  There is one point on the road, on the far side of the lake, where the old mountain highway runs right alongside it, but it is higher than the road, about twelve feet; it hangs over the little lake roadway. But you can’t see it, or the bank that leads up to it, for the enshrouding trees. The lake road lies black there, deep in tree shadow. It looks as if you’re approaching a tunnel. All of a sudden I did not like the look of it, that troll’s tunnel, and I said to Lucy, in a small voice, “Let’s go back the other way. I left my flip down on the dock.”

  “No you didn’t,” she said, not looking back. “Your flip’s in your pocket. You’re scared to go through that dark place. Scaredy, scaredy, scaredy-cat!” And she ran ahead, trailing silver, and headed straight for the blackness. Suddenly I was so frightened that I could not even get my breath to call out to her. Something was so heavy in the air that it crushed my chest. I began to trot after her, but it was as if my feet were mired in concrete.

  And then, just the instant before she plunged into that black tunnel, an enormous, flying…I don’t know, shape, a great, black canopy of shadow…came flying over her, just over her head, like a curse falling down on her out of the sky. And then she was gone into the tree shadow, and I heard a dull little crack and a kind of scream, and then nothing.

  My heart literally stopped. I could not move my feet. My legs were ice water. I did not know what it was; it was not like anything from the world. I called out, a thin bleat of fear, but she didn’t answer, and then I heard something crashing down through the underbrush toward the lake, and a deer came leaping out and crossed the road and flew on into the woods at the water’s edge. That’s what it had been—a deer from up on the road above us, frightened by a car. I saw headlights swing over us then, and heard an engine swell and die. The deer had bounded down the bank and jumped right over Lucy and run on into the woods, and the crack I heard had been its hoof, glancing off her cheekbone. It half stunned her for a moment, and laid her cheek open. We had to take her into Jasper and get it sewn up. She was so proud of the scar it left; she had it all her life. She didn’t cry when it happened and she didn’t cry while the doctor was working on it, and she was only five. It was Aunt Willa who cried, loudly and in, I think, vindication. It was the dot over the i of her distaste for Tate.

  I have never forgotten that night. It was so mythic, so somehow like an omen. It left Lucy stamped with the mark of otherness.

  “How like Lucy, to have her own private omen,” Sarah Cameron said much later, when I told her about it. She was, by then, less than altogether enchanted with Lucy.

  But for Lucy and me, the night of the deer remained a part of our private mythology. For though, as I have said, we were, both of us, sad-eyed small realists, still, what child does not make myths of its life? How else could it be borne?

  We talked of it so often that fall and winter that our parents finally told us we were being tiresome; that nobody wanted to hear any more about the deer that jumped over Lucy up at Tate. But by that time it did not matter, for there came a Sunday afternoon in December when we were sitting around the Capehart in the library, waiting for Shem to bring the car around and take us to the Driving Club for lunch, and a voice broke into the program of music to tell us that Japanese planes had bombed Pearl Harbor, in the Hawaiian Islands.

  I remember clearly that my mother cried, and my aunt Willa gave a little squeal, and my father put his hands into his pockets and walked to the window and stood with his back to us, looking silently out into the leafless back garden.

  But Lucy jumped to her feet, red flags snapping in her cheeks, blue eyes blazing up like flung diamonds. She stamped her feet on the old Oriental; she hugged herself and danced around like a marionette. And then she ran to me and flung her arms around me, her silky hair whipping across my face.

  “That’s where he is!” she shouted, and her voice caroled like flutes and bells with joy. “That’s where my daddy went! He didn’t leave us! He went to the war!”

  And from then on, until the day in August four years later when the church bells and fire sirens of Buckhead called out to tell us of V-J Day, we followed the war, and Lucy was as happy as she would ever be.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Over that first year of fighting there hung and still hangs a bright scrim of excitement, exhilaration; of pure, jingoistic glamour that emanated, for me, as much from Lucy’s mind as it did from the whole war ethos of America in those early days of conflict. World War II was, to most Americans except those actually embroiled in it, an extremely romantic war. It had all the ingredients of a Tennysonian epic: a clear-cut moral imperative, highly visible forces of light and darkness, simple and larger-than-life heroes and villains, sacrifice, sanctioned violence, brave men fighting and dying for home and country, brave women waiting until they came home again. It was irresistible. There was not a living soul in America and Atlanta and Buckhead who was not caught up in the glittering web of
that war.

  And Lucy was the greatest acolyte it had. Much later she would write a fine little essay on those first days of war in Atlanta, called “The Last of the Great Ruffled Wars,” and in it catch some of the muddleheaded chauvinism that kept us as a city and a nation from perceiving the howling horrors under the ruffles. But in that first war year of 1942, no American, large or small, stuck to a radio or pored over newspapers and magazines with such single-minded ardor as small Lucy Bondurant, of 2500 Peachtree Road, Atlanta.

  I stuck and pored beside her, willingly, and the glamour and power of it, that beat in her head like great wings, soon engulfed me. For that first year, we did little, thought little, said little that did not have its genesis in the war.

  Buckhead was a small village still, then, and so the feathery wing tips of the war that reached out to brush a Buckheader touched, inevitably and personally, someone we knew. Early in 1942, a Buckhead boy, the son of a clerk at Cantrell’s Grocery Store on Roswell Road, was shot through the throat in the Solomons, and all of us turned out to call on his parents, and to stare solemnly at the gold star, Buckhead’s first, in the window of the little bungalow on Mathieson Drive. Then a lifeguard from the Garden Hills pool died, and a track star at Boys’ High, and soon there was a small colony of gold stars.

  They were, all of them, our very own dead. Later, a very few of the fathers of our small friends went to fight, leaving from the great induction center out at Fort MacPherson, in Southwest Atlanta. But the majority of them did not. Married men with families did not go to the early war, and when, later, they were needed, it seemed that in Buckhead, business empires needed them more. In most cases this was true. Few strings were pulled in North Atlanta to avoid fighting. The insular, truculent Southerner, violence never far under the surface courtesy and indolence, has always known that he fights better and with more savagery than other Americans; he does not shirk a chance to spill blood in the name of honor. The epithet “essential business” that most of our fathers wore was true. So there was, in those first winter evenings of war, around Buckhead dinner tables and radios, in libraries and drawing rooms, a full complement of sober young men listening with their women and children. When I think of my family as a family, as a group of people unified by blood and purpose, I think of those evenings in my father’s library, where we gathered to hear H. V. Kaltenborn with the news and to see, in the pages of Life magazine and the Atlanta Journal, the images of war.