Peachtree Road Read online

  Lucy was early, and ever, a realist.

  At a party once, again in those days when I was still going out, a smart, thin woman with a deep, leathery tan and the unmistakable smack of that New York-Palm Beach axis in her voice asked me, discontentedly, where you had to go to find Old Atlanta.

  “They certainly aren’t at any of the parties I’ve been to, and I’ve been to every decent party this entire winter,” she said.

  I looked around the drawing room of the big house, a beetling ersatz Norman in one of those frightening developments out on the river where florists’ and caterers’ trucks are lost by the thousands. The Chattahoochee Triangle, we call it. Everybody there was what the old ladies in my crowd would call tackpots, and every other one seemed to be a lawyer. I didn’t know anybody; I had come with clever, Jewish Marty Fox, whom I had just hired to help me sort out my father’s estate, and whom I liked enormously. The talk of deals and money had bored me, but the hors d’oeuvres were spectacular, and the host had provided a fleet of minivans to shuttle guests from their cars to the house, and there was more décolletage in the room than I had ever seen, except at the strip shows we used to sneak into Manhattan from Princeton to see.

  “Funerals,” I said. “Most especially funerals at Saint Philip’s or All Saints or Saint Luke’s. Or Oakland Cemetery.”

  “You mean they’re all dead?” she said, staring at me belligerently, to see if I was making fun of her. I was not.

  “No. I mean the only time I ever see what I guess you’d call Old Atlanta all together in a group is at a funeral or beside somebody’s grave at Oakland.”

  “Or at the Driving Club or the Capital City Club or Brookhaven,” I did not say. The woman would never find out for herself. Those were still the days when new money, no matter how much there was of it, didn’t get into the older clubs. This, like almost everything else, has changed now, of course, and it’s one change of which I heartily approve—or would, if I still went to the clubs. Those pretackpot days at the Piedmont Driving Club were among the most astoundingly boring in the history of the world.

  I had spoken the truth to the leathery lady, however facetiously. There we all were this afternoon: Old Atlanta en masse, or what passes for it. The quick of it, as well as the dead. A dwindling handful of men and women, young and old, who had lived within a four-mile radius of each other all their lives; grown up together, gone to school and college together, flirted and danced with and courted and married each other, godparented each other’s children, laughed and wept and partied with each other, loved and sometimes hated each other, mourned and buried each other. Rich, or what the world calls rich, a good many of them. Incomprehensibly rich, a few of them. Once, all-powerful in the smaller arena that was the Atlanta of their prime.

  There beside Lucy’s grave today we had a past and present mayor, a governor, an ex-governor, a United States senator; men who had built family mercantile and service businesses into international concerns, men who had made literally millions from Coca-Cola, either directly or indirectly, men who had dramatically altered the face of the South and in some cases the nation with their monolithic urban and suburban developments; men who had, almost single-handedly or in concert with five or six of their peers, brought to the city, in the firestorm decade of the sixties, a major league sports arena, five professional sports teams, a great, dead-white marble arts center and a world-famous conductor to inhabit it, a world-class international airport, a state-of-the-art rapid transit system, a freeway system to boggle the mind, unparalleled convention facilities and the people to fill them—and the peacefully integrated school system that lured in the industry to fuel it all.

  They are a superannuated, largely toothless pride of old lions whose days of glory are past, perhaps, but their turf is still that cloistered world for which they wrought everything, and it is still inviolable, even if it is shrunken now, and teeters sometimes on its foundations. And they still move with grace and ease in it.

  And their wives, old now, too, but still chic in the soft, pastel way of their primes, and their widows; equally smart, equally erect and slender and expensively and unobtrusively dressed—all there. And their sons and daughters: us, my crowd, Lucy’s and my contemporaries, our own ranks thinned and wounded, our faces surprised with middle age. And even their grandchildren, a few of them. Our children. I saw Sarah Gentry’s two quicksilver daughters, and Little Lady Rawson’s lone eighteen-year-old Circe, and Lelia Cheatham’s tall, gangling sons. And Lucy’s daughter, Malory, stricken and smeared with grief but still looking so heartstoppingly like her mother in her own first youth and slender, smoky beauty that my eyes stung with it. Malory, standing for the moment with the other women, apart, as they always seem to be in groups, from the closed ranks of their men. Malory…

  The women were an attractive lot, I thought, not for the first time. They were all still soft-faced, soft-voiced, poised, and they talked today in low voices with each other, smiling sometimes over at their men. Without being in the least physically similar, they gave an impression of agreeable sameness. I knew, of course, that they were as varied as the women in any comparable peer group; that the sameness was merely protective coloration, a softly buffed armor they acquired along with their charm bracelets and white debut frocks when they came of age in the big old houses off Peachtree Road.

  My eye caught a flash of red in all the quiet taupes and navies, and I grinned involuntarily at the openly defiant scarlet chiffon scarf around the strongly modeled brown throat of Sarah Cameron Gentry. None of the girls in our crowd had liked Lucy worth a damn, and Sarah, of all of them, had had good reason. Too well bred to rejoice on this day, Sarah was nevertheless flying all her flags. Small, staunch, perfectly made Sarah, also my friend from infancy, and once, more than friend. In an earlier time, I might have married Sarah, and thus been saved. In an earlier time, and a better one…. Sarah caught my eye and gave me a slow amber wink. Her dark head is threaded now with gray, but it is still the springy, cropped tumble of mahogany curls that she has worn since girlhood. She always kept it short for her swimming and diving. Her body still retains its fine, shapely, flat athlete’s muscles, and I still remember with pleasure the pearly sheen of baby oil and iodine on her golden back, and the music and grace of her racing dives off the board at the Driving Club pool.

  I wondered if Sarah still dived and swam. I have not been to the club for a very long time.

  Over to the left of the women, us. That most endangered of species, the masculine remnants of Old Atlanta, far outnumbered even in middle age by our widows and daughters. Speaking to each other in that peculiar shorthand of ours that marks and dates and explains us: “How are you, suh?” “Good to see you, suh.” That “suh” is not politesse; it is our crowd’s familiar. We use it among ourselves as the French do their familiar “tu.”

  A few rich old men who changed a world. And finally their sons, who to my mind, no matter what our collective accomplishments, never were a patch on them.

  The Buckhead Boys.

  An intense female journalist, who was not one of us but would have died to be, wrote an article about us once, in Cityscope magazine. It was overheated and romantic in the extreme, and caused no end of scornful amusement in our ranks, but I have always thought that it did manage to capture something about us that was valid, a kind of oversimplified truth. No one I know agrees with me about that.

  Back there, the woman wrote, in that dreaming cradle slung between Depression and Camelot, there was, in Atlanta, a golden group of boys and girls called the Pinks and the Jells. They were, most of them, the scions of the great merchant families that had built Atlanta back from the ashes of the Civil War, and if the raw young city could be said to have an aristocracy, these were its heirs and heiresses, its best and brightest…and its natural victims.

  Their fathers were the power structure of that youngest and least typical Southern city, the movers and shakers, the “club”…the bank presidents, the heads of the great utilities, the
newspaper and radio empires, and the family-owned businesses that had grown with the city into mid-century monoliths. These fathers were the men who took the reins of the stagnant city in the dying years of the Depression and flogged it with money, muscle, single-mindedness, and pragmatic guile to the brink of what became known at the end of the incendiary 1960s as “the next great international city.” Their sons, the children of that endless, golden time, became the men who, prepared or not, took up the torches that would light the city and the entire South into an unimaginable new world called the Sunbelt.

  Their daughters became the women who ran the great homes and schools and children and charities of that time of transition, and who flourished like roses on its graceful trellis…or who did not, and paid dearly.

  James Dickey, who was one of them, called them the Buckhead Boys. Not all of them survived the appellation and all that it implied.

  Theirs was a rigidly masculine world of money, privilege, grace, ritual, preening foolishness, high spirits, and low expectations. They were not groomed for their future roles as power brokers because it was taken for granted that they would slide as easily into them as their fathers had into their own earlier and simpler niches. They remained children for a very long time. They were probably genuinely loved and certainly indulged. Most of them would have told you that they had wonderful childhoods and adolescences.

  Insular, careless, totally and imperviously self-assured, chauvinistic in the extreme, naive and unsophisticated, arrogant, profoundly physical rather than introspective, largely unburdened by intellect, and almost laughably White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, they were as cohesive as cousins and as stunningly insensitive as young royalty. They were oblivious to anyone and anything outside their charmed circle of prep schools, high school sororities and fraternities, drag racing, endless formal dances, summer camps, drugstores and driveins and hangouts, orchid corsages and staglines and cut-ins, country clubs and Cokes and crinolines, and later, debuts and Junior League and Assemblies and Rabun Gap-Nacoochee and Tallulah Falls and Germans and Nine O’Clocks and Georgia Tech and branch water and bourbon…endless, endless bourbon

  It was a beautiful, bountiful, exuberant, frivolous, snobbish, and silkily secure kingdom, and it was then, as it is still, a very small and strictly delineated world, perhaps no more than four miles square, in a green northern suburb of Atlanta called Buckhead. And yet out of it came the men, and indirectly the women, who, rather to their own surprise, would change forever the definition of the word “South.”

  But it was a world with hidden reefs and shoals that could, and did, wreck the unwary, the deviate, the maverick, the vulnerable or gentle or complicated or different ones.

  The Pinks and the Jells. The Buckhead Boys and their girls. The small, powerful and sometimes doomed group of people who were born into a very dense, rich, small and unassailable world, therein to move for the entirety of their lives, in which their primary artery, metaphor, and pathway of the heart was Peachtree Road.

  More than any of us, Lucy hated that article.

  “It’s sentimental shit, Gibby,” she snorted. “The worst kind of junk, because it has a little streak of truth to it. That silly woman didn’t dig any further to get down to where all the real truth of us was. Jim Dickey’s the only one who ever did that, and nobody reads poetry in this town. Oh, hell, who would have told it to her, anyhow? But this kind of stuff is kiss-off shit.”

  As I have said, Lucy was an utter realist. She had a bone-deep knowledge of how things really are. She had it even as a very small child; learned it early, learned it cruelly and indelibly. It is a terrible burden, this gift of truth, especially for so fragile a child as Lucy Bondurant was, but I suspect it was the source of her great charm. She stood apart with it like wildfire on a mountain of blasted stone.

  I suppose you could also say that it finally killed her. Brought her there to lie among all those other Bondurants, next to a stone for an unlikable aunt that reads, “She stood foursquare to all the winds that blew.” Lucy would have laughed at that, her rich, pouring, froggy belly laugh. In all her life, Lucy was not, for one instant, foursquare to anything. She was all dazzle, shimmer, movement, smoke and light.

  There were so many Bondurants at Oakland Cemetery this afternoon, most of them, thank God, safely belowground. My grandmother and grandfather, Adelaide and Sheppard Gibbs Bondurant. My great-aunt Lorena. The aforementioned four-square Aunt Eugenie. Olivia Redwine Bondurant and Sheppard Gibbs Bondurant, Jr., my mother and father. A small, sad row of newly born and perished infants, all but one of their stones kin to so many in the old cemetery, dating from the days of typhoid and smallpox and diphtheria. Lucy’s small brother, Jamie. And aboveground, her narrow Ferragamos gleaming in the dust of early October, old Willa Bondurant, standing now like a lacquered chimera with the other women, on the arm of her surviving daughter, Adelaide. Little Lady Bondurant Rawson, Lucy’s younger sister. The “good” one.

  Lucy herself.

  And me, Sheppard Gibbs Bondurant III. The last Bondurant. Or am I? This is and will likely always be the central mystery of my life.

  Lucy’s second husband, Jack, does not lie in the Bondurant plot beside her. He is buried in the Venable family plot outside Nashville. Even if he had not died first, he would not have been there this afternoon, in that most essential of all Bondurant countries. He never had any use at all for the Bondurants—including, I think, me—and there was never any question of his lying here beside his widow. I know that his sons came and took him home for burial, but I am not sure when they did so. I had liked Jack, but the moment he was gone it was as if his life had never rippled the surface of ours, mine or Lucy’s. I did not go to his funeral, and she did not either.

  His widow. The widow Venable. I cannot think of Lucy like that, though of course, technically and for a short time, she was. The word sounds so tissue-dry and alone, and Lucy was never, in her entire life, alone. It was what she feared most, aloneness, and what she spent the whole of her life holding at bay. She did it well.

  The other thing she feared above all else was death itself, which is why I find it impossible to connect her with what we buried in Oakland Cemetery this afternoon. I saw her after her death, and even though they say that only the viewing of your dead can bring the healing reality of it home to you, that poor spilled and slackened mannequin had absolutely nothing to do with Lucy, and so I felt no grief then, and have not yet. It is a great relief, though I don’t suppose I can expect it to last. Still, it always seemed to me that Lucy and death were such anathema to each other that the sheer force of the aversion might, after all, keep them apart.

  Once, when Lucy had first come to the Peachtree Road house, my mother’s altar guild met in our drawing room and one of the women brought slides of the American cemetery in Rome, where a kinsman of hers was buried. Lucy and I had been permitted by old Martha Cater, who took care of us, to creep just inside the room and sit quietly in the hot, mote-dancing August gloom to watch the show. About halfway through, after flash after flash of tombstones and mausoleums and angels and cherubim and classical fragments that far outshone Oakland, Lucy began to cry. Before Martha could whisk her out of the room she was sobbing aloud, and by the time she had been tucked into her bed in the small third-floor bedroom next to mine, she was screaming. It was the first of the terrible, inconsolable fits of hysteria that quaked her childhood. All anyone could get out of her was “I’m so afraid to die! I’m so afraid to die!”

  Another time, perhaps two years later, when she was seven and I was nine, I was lying in the hammock on the veranda of the summerhouse, as I so often did, thinking of nothing but being drowned in the dapple of light and shade falling through the latticework, when Lucy appeared silently beside me. I knew she had been swinging alone on the swing set by the goldfish pond. She did that for hours on summer days, humming tonelessly to herself, mesmerized and lost. When I looked up, her face was even whiter than it usually was, and her October-blue eyes were all pupil, almos
t mad-looking. Her hair was smoke around her head.

  “You know what, Gibby?” she said. “I think there isn’t any God.”

  I was shocked, force-fed little Christian that I was then.

  “Of course there’s a God, stupid. You’ll go to Hell for talking like that.”

  “No. If there’s not any God, there’s not any Hell.”

  “Well, where do you think you’ll be when you’re dead then, if there’s not any God or Heaven or Hell?” I was beginning to smell trouble, and flinched from it.

  “Nowhere. That’s where. I won’t be anywhere, and you won’t either. There’ll just be…nothing. That’s all there is. Close your eyes and think about it, Gibby. Black, black, black nothing always and forever, without any end…”

  I did, and gradually, as she chanted, the red weight of the sun on my eyelids cooled and lightened, and the heat went out of the June day, and suddenly I was floating frozen and suspended and paralyzed and utterly, totally alone in a howling black void for which there was no help and to which there was no end. Tears of fright and despair stung my eyes, and when I opened them the world spun sickly, and my heart hammered with the first and still worst real terror I have ever known.

  Tears were standing in Lucy’s eyes, too, and her chest was beginning to heave with the onset of one of the dreadful, mindless screaming fits.

  “Anything is better than dying,” she said, and there was that familiar knife-edge of panic in her voice. “Anything!”

  “Lots of things are worse than dying.” I parroted my mother and some of the women who visited her in the afternoons. “Dishonor, and being poor, and being conquered, and being tacky, and rape are all worse than dying.”

  “That’s bullshit,” she said shrilly. It was her favorite word that summer. “Any of those things is ten million thousand times better than being dead and nothing! The one thing I couldn’t stand is for there to be nothing!”