Peachtree Road Page 11

  They are still indelible to me: Whole families sprawled lifeless at the entrance to an air raid shelter in Chungking, crushed in a panic to enter. They looked like tossed Chinese dolls: Why were they all naked from the waist down? Why was there no blood?

  Boiling black smoke over the slow-toppling towers of battleships, in Pearl Harbor.

  Joe Louis in his private’s uniform; Veronica Lake, her silky sheaf of hair caught in a drill press, demonstrating industrial safety.

  For some reason, a great, forty-foot pile of stockpiled automobile tires in Akron.

  The charred head of a Japanese tank man buried in blackened sand at Guadalcanal, the teeth living and terrible in their eternal grin.

  The monstrous insect gaze of gas masks.

  Afterward, Lucy and I would be banished to our upstairs beds, but we did not mind, for we were free then to talk openly between us until we fell asleep, and what we talked of, always, was the war. Or to be exact, the role in that war of my uncle and Lucy’s father, James Clay Bondurant.

  For he was everywhere. His face hovered just beyond the great, jovial moon of Roosevelt’s in the newsreels at the Buckhead Theater. “There he is; see?” Lucy would whisper in the dark, poking me, and the anonymous aide would, indeed, become my fabled Uncle Jim.

  He was there in the Solomons, and the Philippines, and Burma and Borneo and Singapore; he left Corregidor with General MacArthur and marched with the skeletal dead at Bataan. He almost alone survived; he alone led out the small band of survivors; he alone endured and prevailed. Lucy did not seem to care about the defeats and deaths of those early battles; perhaps she did not take them in. I would say, sometimes, feeling an obscure and smoldering jealousy of the phantom father-uncle who drifted like smoke over those lost battles and never died, “We didn’t win that fight, stupid! We lost it! Everybody died. It was a defeat.”

  “No, it wasn’t,” she would say calmly. “Everybody didn’t die; he didn’t die. How could he get his picture in the paper if he’d died?”

  “That wasn’t his picture!” I shouted once, in rage. “That was somebody you never heard of, who doesn’t look a thing like your father!”

  “How do you know?” Lucy said. “You never saw him.”

  “Then how come he never writes to you, if he’s such a hotshot hero and he lives through all those battles and gets his picture in Life and the movies?”

  “He’s busy, stupid,” she said.

  And he was! James Bondurant turned the American tide single-handedly at Midway, in the Coral Sea, and waded ashore with the first wave on Guadalcanal. Soon he skipped across seas and mountains to the deserts of North Africa, and was seen posing in modest glory after finally trouncing Rommel’s Afrika Korps. When I pointed out to Lucy that that was a British engagement having nothing to do with American fighting men, she said, reasonably, “Well, then, that’s why there haven’t been any letters. My daddy doesn’t know how to write British.”

  I don’t think Aunt Willa and my parents were aware of Lucy’s strange, skewed obsession with her father, at least not for that first year or so of the war. I don’t know how they could have missed it; she made no attempt to conceal it from them. The fact is, in that head-spinning, heart-bulging time, the adults at 2500 Peachtree Road were not much concerned with small Lucy Bondurant and her phantom fighting father.

  But Aunt Willa eventually caught on to the extravagant fancy, and came down on Lucy like a Fury. I was there when she did. I will never forget it. I’m sure Lucy never did.

  It was near Christmas, 1942. We had been at war just over a year. Lucy lay on the floor of the little den on a Sunday afternoon, poring over the Sunday newspaper. I lay in my accustomed lair, half in and half out of the space behind the Capehart, reading a Captain America comic. The desultory talk of the adults, sated with starchy wartime fare at the Driving Club, eddied and surged over our heads.

  Bored, I crept out of my nook and ambled over to Lucy.

  “What’re you doing?” I said. I could see that she was reading, or at least looking at photographs. She was quite proficient with words by that time, but the small newsprint sometimes eluded her. It was raining, and we had been forbidden to go out. The afternoon seemed endless.

  “Reading about my daddy,” she said. “He’s over in Yugo…Yugo…this place now.” Her small finger stabbed a fuzzily drawn map, and then moved to an out-of-focus photograph of the legendary Yugoslavian partisans, men, women and children, swarming out of ambush from a dark forest and into the very teeth of a Nazi panzer column. Lucy’s forefinger lingered lovingly on one shapeless and altogether unrecognizable figure in the foreground, arm raised as if to hurl a homemade grenade. Its face was obscured; you could not tell if it was man, woman or large child. I merely nodded and said, “Oh, yeah.”

  But Aunt Willa was out of her armchair and down on her knees beside Lucy like a lithe whirlwind. She snatched the newspaper from her daughter’s grip and crumpled it in her fist. I stared, open mouthed, and Lucy went absolutely still and white.

  “Lucy Bondurant, that’s a lie and you know it!” Aunt Willa shrilled. “I’m not going to let you sit there on the Lord’s day and tell lies like that about that no-good, shiftless father of yours! That’s not your father! Your father isn’t anywhere near this…foreign place; those aren’t even Americans! He isn’t even in the army; the army wouldn’t have him! The German army wouldn’t even have him! If he’s still alive he’s hiding in some swamp somewhere so he won’t have to go in the army; he’s the worst coward on this green earth, and you can bet your prissy little bottom he’s as far away from it as he can get—if he’s even alive, which I doubt. Most likely he’s long dead from liquor, or worse. So you just hush your mouth about him. I don’t ever want to hear any more of this nonsense!”

  She broke off, and looked around her as if coming up out of deep water. My father had retreated behind his own newspaper, but my mother was looking steadily at Aunt Willa, her long hands knitting silently and competently at something olive drab, a cigarette burning in the ashtray beside her. She smiled, a small, odalisque’s smile.

  Aunt Willa turned a deep, dull red, and dropped her blazing eyes.

  “I didn’t mean to yell,” she said, not to Lucy, but to my mother. “But I won’t have her turning into a little liar.”

  “We’re all under a strain these days,” my mother murmured silkily. “I’m sure Lucy was just playing…make-believe.”

  Lucy turned the small white mask of her face from Aunt Willa to my mother.

  “No I wasn’t,” she said. “It isn’t make-believe. This is my daddy. I don’t care what she says. I don’t care what anybody says. He’s right there in this newspaper, and anybody who says he isn’t is a goddamned liar.”

  “Lucy!” Aunt Willa shrieked.

  “I hate you,” Lucy said roundly and evenly to her mother. “I hope your arms and legs rot and fall off and your tongue turns black and chokes you.”

  She got up carefully from the floor, smoothing out the crumpled ball of newspaper, and walked stiffly and regally out of the room. We could hear her feet, steady and firm, climbing the stairs to the attic, and the muffled slam of the door. I sat silent, my breath stopped.

  “I apologize for her,” Aunt Willa said. “I’ll go and talk to her.”

  And she left the room, the red still suffusing the back of her slender neck. My parents said nothing. My mother continued to smile.

  Lucy would not let her mother into her locked bedroom. She would not even let me in. It was morning of the next day before she opened the door, and then it was as if the ugly incident had never occurred. So far as I know, Aunt Willa never challenged Lucy’s fantasy again, and I simply gave up.

  More than that, I entered into it. For much of that war, the face of my handsome young uncle was behind all the images of war I carried with me, like a kind of familial pentimento. I knew that she was wrong, but on another, deeper level, the one on which Lucy and I communicated, I believed. We did not speak of this agai
n to my parents or her mother. The fact that they did not see Jim Bondurant did not surprise us. I knew, somehow, that he was given only to Lucy, and by her sufferance, to me: our own totem and her hero.

  She was, oddly, never afraid for him, though the possibility of his death in battle was always with me, and I half dreaded, half yearned for the devastating, liberating telegram that began: “We regret to inform you”; the olive drab sedan on the circular driveway; the tall, pale officer at the door. They never came. For four years, despite my developing powers of reason and assessment, I continued to carry with me the certainty of his golden whippet ghost, going ahead into battle after battle like a Viking standard, and when the bells and sirens rang on V-J Day and rock candy came back to Lane’s and Wender & Roberts Drugstore, James Bondurant left my pantheon of heroes and soared away out of my head like a falcon. It was, after that, as if he had never been there.

  Oddly, the war made of the house on Peachtree Road a healthier place than it was ever again. I suppose that only something on the scale of a world war could loosen our attention from the sucking sands of self and neurosis and coax it outside. But all of us, from Lucy and me to the servants and my parents and Aunt Willa, had a focus for our hungers and energies, and, moreover, one that was universally approved. Lucy and I had our phantom warrior. My father had his essential occupation. My mother and Aunt Willa had war work. I think perhaps it was the first—and looking back on it, only—time in their lives Olivia and Willa Bondurant had the approval of their small society for something that they did, rather than something that they were. I wonder that they did not like the approbation well enough to continue the work, but they did not: Neither, so far as I know, did more than rudimentary volunteer work again for the balance of her life.

  But for that time, all the women of Buckhead worked. The women of the larger Buckhead around us, which we saw every day but somehow did not see, went to work for pay; they took over the jobs that the young men had left when they went to war, in offices and factories and shops; they drove taxis and stood behind counters and served food and did laundry and pumped gas. Some of them went to work at the massive new Bell bomber plant in Marietta when it opened; the great mass of the “bummer plant,” as it became known, bulked comfortingly over my childhood like a fortress, like an arsenal, between Us and the enemy Them. These women gave up their nylons and silk stockings and wore cotton lisle, or dyed their legs a weeping brown; they wore trousers and bandannas and berets and battle jackets, and some few of the young ones soon wore the uniforms of nurses, or Wacs, or Waves. Everybody, it seems, had a costume for the Great Ruffled War. Lucy received, that Christmas, a hideous Wac’s outfit with a flat-topped, brimmed hat, and I got and wore out a small white regulation sailor suit.

  The women of the Buckhead we knew, in which we moved, had their own uniforms. They were the smart, somehow immensely flattering uniforms of the Red Cross, and to a woman, the circle my mother moved in and the wider circle of women from the great houses of Buckhead put them on for the duration of the war. My mother went three afternoons a week to Fort Mac-Pherson where she served coffee and doughnuts to homesick young men being processed there by the thousands. I’m sure she was the object of more than one yearning wartime crush. I remember how she looked on those afternoons when she got into the backseat of the Chrysler which Shem brought around to the front of the house: slender, austere, pale and fine-featured, her sleek wet-looking dark hair drawn smoothly up and under the becoming little billed cap, great, dark, drowned eyes somber. She looked the way a young Florence Nightingale should have looked. Even the lipstick-stained cigarette in her fingers did not spoil the ministering purity of her, on those first winter afternoons. Because she was going out to serve in the war that so absorbed me, I adored and admired her, for that little time, as well as loved her. It was the most and the fullest I have ever felt for her.

  Some of the women we knew did work for which, had it not been volunteer, they would have held company presidencies or board chairs. Dorothy Cameron directed a pioneer nurses’ aid training program for a seven-state area for the Red Cross, a program that became, under her aegis, a national practical-nursing service. She was, that year, Atlanta’s Woman of the Year in Defense, and missed her own awards banquet because she was down at Grady holding the head of a pregnant, husbandless young Negro woman volunteer as she vomited into a towel.

  “How ghastly,” my mother said honestly, when she heard the story. “Isn’t that just like Dorothy?”

  “Yes, it is,” my father replied. “I think she’s a pretty brave, smart gal.”

  “You would,” my mother said sweetly.

  My aunt Willa did Red Cross work too, partly, I suspect, because she knew instinctively how well she looked in the uniform. She stayed downtown after work two evenings a week, and helped staff a canteen near the bus station, and I know that she left a trail among the cheeky, gum-chewing young soldiers and sailors who flocked there, because not a few of them telephoned her at the Peachtree Road house, and one or two quite literally followed her home. I didn’t blame them. Aunt Willa in her battle dress was spectacular. The severity of the uniform both tempered and set off the tropical lushness and humidity of her, and the chaste white collared cuffs and the purity of the cross on her uniform were perfect foils for the smoky cat odor that somehow hung about her, no matter how demure her downcast eyes or practiced her aristocratic drawl became. Aunt Willa by that time had nearly perfected the outward armor, if not the inner anima, of a well born Atlantan woman, but there still clung to her like a spoor something that called out, stridently and urgently, to the raw, prowling young servicemen.

  “Like tomcats to a cat in heat,” my mother muttered to my father after Shem had glared away the second randy youngster from the portico. “She can buy up the entire Wood Valley Shop, but she’s still as common as gully dirt.”

  “She’s holding down two jobs and raising three children, Olivia,” my father said, “and she hasn’t taken a cent from us since she went to work.”

  “Why should she?” My mother smiled bitterly. “She has all those good clothes of mine and a nurse for her children and a lovely home and good food and a car at her disposal…. Why should she take any more? What more does she need?”

  “Maybe a little support from her sister-in-law,” my father said.

  “She doesn’t need that, either,” my mother said. “She gets all of that she needs from her brother-in-law. It makes me wonder what else she gets from him.”

  “I never knew you were jealous,” my father said, leaving the drawing room with what looked to me, hiding with Lucy under the great foyer staircase in the telephone nook, like a strange, small smile.

  “Don’t flatter yourself,” my mother said, and went on up the stairs.

  “They’re fighting over your mother,” I said to Lucy. It was her idea to lurk under the stairs that winter, to spy on the adults in the house. I still do not know why she did it. She never seemed to me then, or at any other time, to be particularly interested in the comings and goings of my mother, or hers, though she was interested, almost endlessly, in those of my father.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I think your daddy wants to get on Mama. He ought to, too. She likes it a lot better than your mama. At least, she yells and laughs, instead of crying.”

  The thought was, to me, quite dreadful, though I did not, then, understand why. The undercurrents in the house, though overridden by the larger storm of the war, were still there. But I was enjoying the relative peace of those early war days, and the lessening of my parents’ hawklike scrutiny that they brought, and I did not want anything to call those powerful tides out of their subterranean stasis.

  “Come on upstairs,” I said, hoping to divert her from the subject of my father and Aunt Willa. “I got a new book at school. I’ll read some of it to you.”

  It worked. She was past me and up the stairs like a small deer. Lucy reveled in the war and delighted in the peccadilloes of the adults, but she bloomed and thrived
on words on a page like a parched vine in a spring rain.

  She was reading proficiently by that time, even though she was scarcely into first grade at E. Rivers, and she could have read for herself any book that I brought home. But she loved to be read aloud to; loved it all her life, and all her life, or most of it, I spun webs of words out into the air between us, reading sometimes far into the night, reading through drying and husked throat and with aching eyes, for the sheer pleasure of watching Lucy’s face as she received the words. She had a way, then, of looking intently at your eyes and lips as you read, her head tilted slightly to one side, lips just slightly parted in a smile so that the nacre of her small, pearly teeth showed through, eyes so suffused with the peculiar, still blue light that tears seemed to be standing in them. It was the rapt, passionate gaze of the young novice receiving the ring of Christ; it was a look that gave the reader the full status and power of a deity. Sometimes she listened to people talking to her with something of that look, and all her life it entranced people. But it was never quite the same full, blissful, receiving look that she kept for the person who gave the words of books to her. I don’t know if anyone else ever read to her; I know, when she was small, that no one in the Peachtree Road house did, and I cannot imagine Red Chastain doing it. Perhaps Jack Venable, though somehow I doubt that. By the time he entered Lucy’s life his best gift to her was his powerful, enabling passivity. At any rate, it was my fancy that I was the only person Lucy ever allowed to read to her, and I would have read my way through Plutarch’s Lives for her, if she had wanted that.