Peachtree Road Read online

  “He’s Sensitive, that’s what he is, Sheppard,” my mother would say, brushing the lank comma of white-blond hair that was my father’s legacy to me off my forehead, and exposing the hated glasses with the flesh-colored plastic rims. By the time I could read she had given up being disgusted at my bodily functions and had become passionately, breath-suckingly protective. “You wouldn’t know about sensitivity, of course, but it’s what makes my daddy the man he is, and I prize it in my son more than anything in the world.”

  I would stare elaborately and sensitively into the pages of the Bible, not looking at my father, but inside I was smirking openly. I would have, then, bought my beautiful mother’s approbation with any coin available to me.

  It’s funny about love: I can see now, looking back on the child that I was, that it was love that I needed more than anything in the world. Unconditional, eternal, immovable love. Of course it was. Her love mostly, but at that point, anybody’s would have served. But I don’t think I ever sought it. I waited instead for it to come and blow me across the face of the world. And it did not come until Lucy did. That was always her best gift to me, her primary health and her strength—that tornado of love and approval. And it was in the withholding of it that my mother both cursed me and stamped me forever hers. I still wonder if she could have possibly known what she was doing.

  Both of my parents were right about me. I was both sensitive and a physical coward, being possessed, as many precocious only children are, of a soaring and vivid imagination that could illuminate in excruciating clarity the scope and detail of all the dangers the world was fraught with. I was also, like Lucy, that most vulnerable and creative of creatures, a total realist, and, I suppose, a pretty perceptive one. Those qualities enabled me to see all the perils of my world and know them for precisely what they were. It did not make me a comfortable child to be around, for adults or most of the other children I knew. Most children are one-celled and barbaric little sentimentalists, and can sense otherness and know it for the alien thing it is, even if they cannot comprehend it. This did not leave me friendless, but it left me essentially without peers, and the only two close friends I had at that time—Pres Hubbard, who was lame from a bout of infant polio and wore a clanking leg brace, and Charlie Gentry, who had childhood diabetes—were the only two among us who shared the sideline with me. Unlike me, they both had gumption aplenty, but could not exercise it. I was content that my handicap was in my spirit, as my father contended, as long as it excused me from the world of terrifying proper boys’ activities he envisioned for me.

  But still, I castigated myself bitterly and endlessly, if silently, for failing to like most of the things my companions did and for failing to please the great masculine elemental who towered and roared over my childhood like red Cronus over the embryo world. And dimly, dimly, I felt the lapping of a futile rage at my mother, who had so early doomed me to be Sensitive, and at my father, who would not, perhaps could not, rescue me from her. And hated and feared that rage, and felt the guilt of it festering in my soul like shrapnel. It was not, for a child, the most nurturing of worlds, even in its unabashed privilege.

  But oh, the seductiveness, the symmetry, the immutability, the sheer, heart-drugging beauty of that world! Especially in those days before it became chic and accessible and throttled with traffic and roving schools of the upscale, pleasure-bent young, Buckhead was one of the most beautiful places on earth. Oh, not the business district, such as it was; it was then, as it is now, a random, jury-rigged and jerry-built shamble of small shops and businesses, banks and offices, loading docks and parking lots, drugstores and cafés and service stations and a few banal brick government edifices, webbed and festooned with electric and telephone lines and wires and an eye-smiting array of signage. No, I mean residential Buckhead, that cloistered, deep green rectangle of great old trees and winding streets and fine, not-so-old houses set far back on emerald velvet lawns, carved out of deep hardwood forests, cushioned and insulated from the sweat, smells and cacophony of the city proper, to the south, by layers of money. No one has ever been quite sure what the official boundaries of Buckhead are, but for many years my own personal Buckhead was that four-odd square miles bounded on the south by Peachtree Creek, the north by West Paces Ferry Road, the west by Northside Drive, and the east by Peachtree Road.

  Peachtree Road…It is to me a name with far more scope and resonance to it than its dozen or so meandering miles of asphalt should rightly command. The restless, well-heeled floods of people who come to Atlanta each year now to meet and convene and visit and do business think they are seeing Atlanta when they see Peachtree Street, but they are not. Visitors visit on Peachtree Street. Atlanta lives—or did—on and just off Peachtree Road. As little as I love the city now, I still, perversely and despite what it has become, love Peachtree Road. To me it encompasses and personifies all that is particular and powerful about the city, as well as all that is abstract and illusory and beautiful. Even its ugliness—and much of it is simply and profoundly ugly—seems to me to be rich, deeply textured and unique to Atlanta. Admittedly I see it now through the scrim of childhood, but I do not think it looks like anywhere else on earth. The very name of it rings in my heart like a bell. And still, to my eyes, the most beautiful and singular point on all of Peachtree Road is the house at 2500, where I was born and have lived for the entirety of my life.

  These, then, were my worlds in that portentous spring that Lucy came to us: the larger one of Buckhead proper and the smaller of 2500 Peachtree Road. Worlds that had, despite the dearth of real and sustained love, a kind of charm and promise that I have never found again anywhere. And one of the sweetest and most solemn promises was that they would never change. I don’t know why I thought that, but I always did in those earliest days. I think perhaps that the very contrast of banality and beauty in those two worlds served to give them heft and the authority of permanence.

  So when the telegram came, in early April, from my aunt Willa Bondurant, saying that Uncle Jim had left them in New Orleans and she had no choice but to come to us and bring her children, it was a cataclysm of enormous proportions, not only to my mother and father but to me. Whatever my scant status with them, it had, so far, at least been that of only child. The thought of sharing my house and their attention engendered in me a rage so murderous that I could only deal with it as I had learned early to deal with all things that threatened. I shoved it completely out of my mind. By the morning after the telegram, the tattered little band of my unfortunate kin had never, for me, existed.

  Even on the day of their arrival, even after my deep-sighing, eye-rolling mother had had Martha Cater make up the extra bedrooms and my stomping, red-faced father had dispatched Shem to the Greyhound bus station with the Chrysler, I was unruffled. I knew absolutely and to the core of me that no alien, white-trash aunt—my mother’s overheard epithet—and cousins would appear in the round foyer of my domain out of the luminous green night. I could repeat word for word the message that would come soon by telephone or telegram: “So sorry but all your relatives have been killed in an accident and therefore can’t come.” I knew how the voice would sound saying the words, and what my words of wisdom and comfort would be to my father, whose younger brother’s wife and children these were. I could only think of my uncle Jim as that, my father’s brother, for I had never seen him, and had no sense that anywhere in the world did I have a tall, drowsy-eyed, blond young uncle who was the obverse, the fatal, radiant side, of my father, and whom in time I would grow to resemble almost uncannily. There was no photograph of James Clay Bondurant in our house, and few words about him ever passed my father’s lips. My mother spoke of him once in a while, but not in words intended for my ears, and even though I only half heard them, I could hear in her voice when she spoke of him something that was not there at other times. It was only in this way, and almost subliminally, as is the way of children, that I knew that my uncle Jim had a kind of dark importance in that house that was all the more distu
rbing because it was unnamed.

  When the doorbell rang, then, I pounded downstairs behind my mother in full expectation of opening it to the lugubrious face of the telegram messenger, and so the four figures who stood there with the twilight falling down over them were as shocking and aberrant to me as murderers or trolls. I could only stare at them, my heart banging so loudly in my ears that I could not even make out my mother’s words of welcome, which were, in any case, crisp and short and soon ended; I could hear my father coming heavily down the stairs behind me. But the four did not move, and I could not speak. The moment seemed to spin out forever.

  The first clear thought that struck me was that my aunt Willa assaulted the eye and nose and ear simultaneously, though not, to me, unpleasantly. She had hair so black it shone blue and purple in the light over the front door, and she wore garnet lipstick and nail polish “laid on with a trowel,” as my mother said to someone over the telephone later that evening, in a low, only half-amused voice. She smelled powerfully of the acrid sweat of travel and nervousness, though this was masked with a friendly, evocative scent that I always associated with Wender & Roberts Drugstore at Christmastime.

  “Evening in Paris, a ton of it,” my mother further instructed her phone friend.

  My aunt Willa’s face was blanched and chalky with powder and fatigue, and there were tiny, clumped beads of blackness at the ends of her long eyelashes. Her eyes were the pure, impossible blue that coal fire makes when it has burned itself almost out. She wore a print rayon dress with a peplum that accentuated her willow-wand waist and the rich swell of her hips and breasts, and her long, slender legs were bare and dirty. She tottered lamely on towering sling-back heels, and her toenails were the same dried-blood red of her lips and fingernails. I found her powerfully, magically glamorous, there in that dim foyer with its dim old Oriental rugs and dim, stained stucco walls and dim, ornate old gilt-framed paintings of my Redwine ancestors. Dim, dim…Suddenly it seemed to me that, until these four maniacally unknown people had walked in out of the warm April night to light my foyer into rawness and vitality, my whole life had been dim.

  I saw next that my aunt held a cherubic little blond boy of less than a year in the crook of one arm, and by the other hand held an equally angelic little girl of, perhaps, three, solemn and sweating and overdressed in a fuchsia velvet coat, bonnet and leggings. Behind her, with one hand on the small girl’s shoulder, a girl taller than I, but obviously younger, stood, staring directly at me with her mother’s extraordinary blue eyes, and something looking out of them flew into and through my own and straight into my heart with a directness and force that felt as though I had swallowed a fire-tipped arrow. I blinked and gulped soundlessly, like a fish drowning in air, and then, surprising myself profoundly, grinned.

  The girl grinned back. Her hair was the pure, clear dark of cold winter creek water over fallen leaves, and it flew loosely around her narrow head like corn silk. Her lashes were sooty cobwebs on her pink-flushed cheeks, and she was tall and willowy like her mother, with long limbs and small hands and feet and a whippet waist. She was standing still, but she looked as if she had been in motion all over and had just settled to earth. She wore corduroy overalls and dirty saddle shoes.

  Of all the people assembled in the hall, she was the first to speak.

  “Something stinks,” she said in a voice that was slow and rich, like music, like dark honey.

  “Lucy!” my aunt Willa said, scandalized. She had a flat, nasal drawl. My parents looked at each other, and then at the girl.

  “Sure does,” I said back, joy caroling inexplicably in my veins. “It’s Martha in the kitchen. She’s cooking lamb for our dinner. Ugh!”

  “Smells like she’s cooking dog,” Lucy Bondurant said, and laughed, a dark silk banner of a laugh, and I laughed, and even when the adults had made us both apologize, and sent us upstairs to the screened porch to “calm down until you can act like a lady and a gentleman,” we continued to laugh. It was the first real laughter I could remember in the house on Peachtree Road. It was the first, last and longest thing I had and kept of Lucy: her laugh.

  When we had stopped laughing, she said, “Are you all the children there are?”

  “Yes,” I said, somehow ashamed of it.

  “I guess she must not have liked it when your daddy got on her then,” Lucy said matter-of-factly.

  “What do you mean?” My skin actually prickled with the portent of something coming.

  “Well, my mama used to laugh and holler when Daddy got on her, and there’s three of us. There’s just one of you, so I guess your mama didn’t like it and quit doing it, or there’d be more of you.”

  “She didn’t quit,” I said. It was suddenly very important to tell Lucy about the nights in the little dressing room when my mother wept. Shame fled and indignation flooded in. “He gets on her all the time, but she doesn’t laugh. She cries. She cries almost every night. I know because I sleep right in their room.”

  She looked at me in blue puzzlement.

  “What for?” she said. “Why don’t you have a room of your own, as rich as y’all are?”

  “Rich?” I said, stupidly.

  “Sure. Why do you think we came all the way down here? Now we’re gon’ be rich, too.”

  It was too much, too much of suddenness and strangeness and revelation, too much of promise. My stomach heaved and flopped, and I ran for the bathroom and was sick, and Martha put me straight to bed, so that whatever else transpired that evening, I missed it, and I was still queasy and spinning when my mother came up to telephone her friends and tell them about the invasion of the infidels. It was a long time, late, before I slept.

  But I did sleep, finally; slept that night in a different country, one where we were rich and therefore different from other people, and in which women laughed and shouted aloud their pleasure during the act of love.

  A country where, now, Lucy was, and therefore all things might be possible.

  I slept in a safe child’s sudden and simple, lightless peace, and when I awoke in the morning it was to joy.

  I have said that I do not go out anymore, but that is not precisely true. I do go out, almost every night. After the last of the light has gone and the streetlights come on, no matter what time and what season it happens to be, I put on my Nikes and I slip out of the summerhouse into the welcoming darkness and I run through Buckhead. I run for miles, some evenings as many as fifteen or twenty, some evenings just four or five. I am never sure when I set out which of my many routes I will take; my feet seem to make that decision for me when they touch the pavement of the sidewalk along Peachtree Road. But I always cover the same territory. It is the country of that long-ago Buckhead in which, as the Book of Common Prayer says, I lived, moved and had my being. Oh, yes, I run, and I suppose many people must see me, a tall, slight man whose thinning hair in the streetlights might be blond or might be silver; not young, but with the long-loping resilience of the runner. It doesn’t bother me that I am visible to them; it is not from their seeing of me that I hide during the daylight, but from the seeing of them. I run; I run through a landscape that existed forty-odd years ago. I run for my life.

  Pounding silently and steadily through a swelling spring night, or a star-chipped black winter one, I can tick the street and proper names off like rosary beads in the hands of a devout old Catholic, without thinking, without questioning the sense or import of them. The names are my catechism. Whatever is raw and ragged and new and intrusive I don’t see; I am running, as I said, for my life, but it is the life that I had then.

  Right and down Muscogee, past the Camerons’ house, Merrivale House, they called it, after Dorothy’s family seat in Dorsetshire: 17 Muscogee Avenue. It was built in 1921 by Neel Reid, a classical architect in whom Atlanta has always set great store, whose years abroad studded Northwest Atlanta’s wooded hills and ridges with Renaissance, American Georgian, Federal, Greek Revival, Baroque and Italianate estates of uncommon style and substance. These su
burban villas, as they were termed, were designed to be summer homes in some cases, and highly visible showcases for their owners’ soaring positions in others. At the time most were built, in the late teens and twenties and on into the thirties, entertaining and gardening were two of Old Atlanta’s overweening passions, and formal reception and dining rooms and extensive, formally landscaped grounds were de rigueur. Most of the houses had, and many still have, vast acreages of gardens, all flowing together, mile after mile, so that whole streets seem in the spring to be one great lapping surge of color.

  It is at the great amplitude of space, and the random, puckish cant of the wooded hills, and the sheer scope of the surf of azaleas and dogwood and flowering trees that make the spring here a neck-prickling and breath-stopping time. Traffic along the narrow old streets in April is near critical mass, and many a grand dowager curses now the splendor she and her yardman labored so mightily to achieve when both were young. I remember vividly the gardeners and yardmen of all these old estates. Most of the children in my crowd took their first steps tottering after the impassive black yardmen and their wonderful arrays of tools and treasures.

  I do not, on these night runs, see the fleets of minivans and the Davey Tree trucks that keep the gardens up now. If they are kept up at all. Many of the old houses are falling to the glittering, trashy condominium developments that are littering Buckhead. Others are going like hotcakes to the Arabs and the tackpots, who are the only ones who can afford to keep them up. They are occupied now, many of them, by elderly widows, and the cost of heating and cooling and maintaining them is just too prohibitive, the money being offered just too much. In 1907, when the first trolley line from downtown to Buckhead was laid down, you could buy land on West Paces Ferry Road for ninety dollars an acre. Now it’s going, some of it, for nearly two million. Old Dorothy Cameron, in the last years before she moved from the Muscogee Avenue house, paid ten thousand annually for taxes alone, and by that time she and Ben were far from wealthy. It was hear and breeding they had in the end, not money.