Peachtree Road Read online

  It always seemed to me in that house of infinitely lovely proportion and abundance of clear light that, no matter what miasma of disharmony prevailed at the moment, anything so beautiful could not be in and of itself hurtful, but was merely sleeping under some spell soon to be broken, and when it waked, the happiness that would come flooding in would be mythic in its scope, out of my small imagining entirely. I think the reason I was never really unhappy there is that I waited with such absolute conviction for joy. What child dares see his primal danger plain? Even now, when whatever future I might have imagined for it is past, the house at 2500 Peachtree Road still smites my eyes with its beauty whenever I look at it. I do, several times each day, from the summerhouse.

  “Lordee, but it’s big, ain’t it?” I remember Lucy saying on the first full day she spent in the house. We were standing on the half-moon front drive, looking up at it. Her blue eyes had a dazzle in them not entirely from the sun.

  “Do y’all charge admission for folks to come look at it?”

  “Why would we do that?” I asked, honestly puzzled.

  “Mama says people do in New Orleans.”

  “Well, nobody does here,” I said, defensively.

  “I bet you could make a pot if you did,” Lucy said. “I’m gon’ ask Aunt Olivia if I can do that. I bet lots of folks would pay to come see this house.”

  “Don’t do that,” I said quickly, knowing instinctively that my mother would be outraged by the idea. “If you want some money I’ll give you some. How much do you need?”

  “A nickel,” she said promptly.

  “Wouldn’t you rather have a dime? I’ve got one.”

  “No, silly,” she snorted. “Nickel’s twice as big as a dime.”

  I gave her the nickel.

  The house was designed in 1917, not by Neel Reid but by a young architectural student cousin of its first owner, a physician who made one of the early fortunes investing in Coca-Cola bottling equipment, as did so many of the men who built the first of the great Buckhead houses. Indeed, the intersection of West Paces Ferry and Roswell roads is still called Coca-Cola Corners. The young architect died a year after the house was finished, during the obligatory year’s study in Florence after graduating from Georgia Tech, attempting to swim the Arno after staying up all night drinking and reading Lord Byron. My mother told me the story when I was barely three; it is one of the very first memories I have: sitting in her lap in a rocking chair in front of the coal fire in her and my father’s big upstairs bedroom, rocking back and forth, back and forth as the red firelight leaped over her hands and the dark, seal-sleek curtain of hair that fell over her face and mine together.

  “Tragic,” she said, rocking, rocking. “Tragic, to die so young and so gifted, so far away from home. You must promise me never to drink, Sheppie, and never to leave your mama. Do you promise me that?”

  I suppose I remember it so vividly because it was such a rarity in my small life; she almost never rocked me. In fact, I can’t remember another time. Old Martha Cater did, and I am told that my unremembered grandmother Adelaide Bondurant did, but I think I was far too apt to spit up in those first years for my mother’s sensitive stomach. I can’t imagine why she was doing it that one time; perhaps I was sick with some small childhood affliction that did not involve bodily secretions. At any rate, I promised her then that I would never drink and never leave her. I would have promised her, in that moment of perfect, firelit bliss, to enter a Trappist monastery, if she had asked it of me.

  I never forgot the drowned young architect of my house. I did not think his fate tragic, but romantic and somehow unspeakably noble. Muzzily in my mind for years whenever I thought about the house was the thought, “Someone died for this house.” That dank and ignoble death in Florence gave it a kind of promissory import, as though set apart from its birth for some special fate.

  It is a spare, eloquent American Georgian house of soft rose brick, hip-roofed and stone-quoined, with a row of four gables showcasing the small third-floor Palladian windows, and twin chimneys at each end. The front door is an austere and lovely Federal, with fanlight and sidelights beneath a richly detailed portico supported by thin Ionic columns. A semicircular drive describes a half-moon in front, slicing through a small rectangle of lawn, and a black wrought-iron fence sets it off from the sidewalk along Peachtree Road. Most of its three acres lies behind it, where the long formal garden and lily pool and summerhouse are carved out of a hardwood forest which stretches over to meet the backyards of the houses on Rivers Road. Once behind the house, you would never know, even now, that the traffic of a city of nearly three million pours past virtually at the front door.

  Of course, when my father bought the house, in 1930, Peachtree Road was very nearly country, and the traffic was minimal. That was one reason he chose it. Newly come to Atlanta from tiny, rural Fayetteville to the southeast, he was resigned to the fact that his fortune and his future lay in the city, but he was damned if he would live among its humors and noises and hauteur. As for my mother, only the knowledge that Buckhead was the city’s smartest new address lured her out into the wilds of its northern suburbs. She was one small-town girl who would have lived in the middle of Five Points downtown if she could have. But when my father brought her to see the house and told her that on her left was one of the Coca-Cola Candler daughters and just behind her on Muscogee a former governor, she saw the wisdom of it. Besides, the price the doctor’s newly widowed wife was asking was low, and my mother, though a banal woman, was not a stupid one. And the house was bought, after all, with her money.

  “It’s an investment in your future, Sheppie,” I can remember her saying many times when I was small. And it has indeed been that, if not in the way she envisioned. She meant, I know, for me to marry and raise an exemplary Buckhead family in it after she herself had enjoyed the full fruits of its irreproachable address and proximity. She never envisioned it to shelter my self-imposed exile from the world.

  Inside, it was almost classically Georgian: A round, domed, rotunda-like entrance hall with niches for flowers or statuary gave on the left onto a vast living room, with a formal columned porch beyond that, and on the right onto a dining room with the pantry and service porch behind it and the kitchen beyond it on the right. Behind the entrance hall lay a soaring two-story stair hall with a beautiful curved Adam stair ascending five flights and six landing levels. When I was small, I used to picture Lucy in her wedding white coming down that stair to meet me in the rotunda of the entrance hall, and indeed I did see her in white, years later, descending it, but it was not to her wedding that she came. That was left to Little Lady, and I have to think that my aunt Willa began planning it when she first stepped into the house out of that spring night in 1941.

  Behind the stair hall was the octagonal paneled library, which my father used largely as his study, and though it was a beautiful and air-washed room, lambent with sunlight, as were all the downstairs rooms, from the floor-to-ceiling Palladian windows, I never liked it, and was never allowed to spend much time there. We sat there for an hour or so on winter evenings, all of us, while my father and mother and Aunt Willa sipped whiskeys or sherry before dinner and we children, scrubbed and combed, played the Victrola or listened to the big Capehart with the volume turned down. But mostly the family sat, when we were together, in the small morning room behind the living room or, during the long, warm springs and summers and autumns, on the comfortable, slightly shabby lattice-screened porch that ran off to the right of the library.

  Upstairs, to the left of the stair hall, were my parents’ bedroom and bath with a seldom-used sleeping porch off them and the little dressing room where I slept my furious, captive sleep. To the right were the two bedrooms that became Aunt Willa’s and Little Lady’s, and the small maids’ room in which little Jamie Bondurant slept so briefly. Behind the stair hall, over the library, was a screened porch where Lucy and I sometimes played on warm days, before we appropriated the summerhouse.

  On
the third floor, up a narrow stair, was the low-ceilinged, musty warren of rooms where the servants refused to stay, which became Lucy’s and my childhood retreat. They were meanly lit and airless in the extreme, suffocating in the summertime, but to us they were a refuge to be guarded fiercely, and we shared them in a kind of bone-and-skin-deep accord, the only secure burrows we had ever known, until we grew too old for such proximity. Even then, when the wisdom of our separation was apparent even to me, I mourned the loss of those cell-like nests under the roof, and Lucy wept inconsolably for days.

  “What did they think we were going to do that was so bad?” she stormed to me, in my new fastness out in the summerhouse, after the incident that resulted in our separation.

  “Well, you know,” I said, reddening.

  “Oh, shoot, that’s silly. I don’t want to, and you wouldn’t even know what it was if I hadn’t told you. I don’t even think you’ve got your doohickey yet, have you?”

  “Go on, now, Lucy, I hear your mama calling you. I’ve got stuff I need to do,” I said, face flaming.

  “Well, even if you did have one, which I don’t believe you do, I wouldn’t do it with you,” she said, the angry tears beginning again. “I don’t think you’d be a bit of fun. You’d probably cough or vomit.”

  Lucy was ten then, to my going-on-twelve, and knew the frailties of my flesh, as well as the deficiencies of my soul, better than my mother ever had.

  The summerhouse! Always, to me, and then to Lucy, it was sheer enchantment, a place apart both in distance and in spirit, with the utter and endless fascination that all perfect, miniature things have for children. It was a complete small house, a near-replica of the big one, except that it was done in white frame, with the same hipped roof, black-shuttered Palladian windows to the floor and a pedimented, columned portico. It was buried in a surf of old boxwoods and crape myrtles and backed by dense woods, and a wisteria vine arched over the portico and bathed the two big rooms inside in a wash of lavender light and fragrance each spring. There was one great room for living and dining, floored in Italian quarry tiles and with a small stone fireplace, and a smaller one adjoining it for sleeping and dressing. Behind these rooms were a small bath and a complete, compact kitchen. It had been built for my grandmother Adelaide, who came to live with her son and daughter-in-law when my grandfather died, before I was born, but she lived in it for only two years before she too died, and it was largely unused until Lucy and I claimed it and moved our daytime base of operations there. My parents and her mother did not really mind. The furnishings were too grand for the servants, who in any case had quarters over the garage, and not grand enough for use in entertaining. My mother never liked my grandmother’s plain, well-used old family pieces. She had thought once of building a swimming pool in the garden where the lily pool has always been, and using the little house as a pool house, but she and my father both were too fair to take the sun, and I was adjudged too frail, especially in the summer polio season; so the house became known as the summerhouse, albeit an empty one that had known, until we opened it for our play, no summers.

  All this, then, had been mine from birth, this overflowing largesse of physical grace and symmetry and seclusion, but it took the clear, light-sparked blue eyes and strange, silverfish imagination of my cousin Lucy Bondurant to open my own eyes and heart to its unique place-magic. I do not know what would have become of me ultimately—a suicide? a stockbroker?—if she had not come to live with us, but she did, and in one revelatory split second when she stepped into the foyer of the house on Peachtree Road and said in her extraordinary, musky voice, “Something stinks,” my star was as fixed in its far firmament as Orion: Joy and aloneness were mine, in equal measure, gift of Lucy, out to the distant edges of my life.

  CHAPTER TWO

  They had not been in the house a week before it became apparent to me, my spongelike pores newly opened to revelation, that my uncle Jim was to loom over Lucy’s life, and therefore mine, like one of those menacing grotesques in Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

  I had not thought of him again since the day they came, and then only abstractly, as the author of Lucy’s appearance in my life, and no one—not my parents, not my aunt Willa, not Lucy herself—had mentioned him. If Little Lady wept for her father, or lisped his name, we did not hear it, for she spent her days in the second-floor bedroom-nursery hastily fashioned by my mother and Martha, attended by Martha’s teenaged daughter ToTo. Little Jamie, a happy child, did not cry at all, for his father or anyone else. For a small space of time it was as if Jim Bondurant had never existed.

  Then, around four o’clock in the afternoon of the fifth day they had been with us, Martha Cater put her head into my newly acquired little third-floor cubicle, where I was just yawning my way out of an enforced nap, and asked if I knew where Lucy was. I did not. She had been put to bed in her new room, next to mine, at two o’clock, as had become the custom, and had fallen asleep before I did. I knew that because she had not answered the last of the sleep-silly questions I had called in to her. I had drifted off soon after.

  No one downstairs had seen her either, and a quick search of the immediate back garden did not turn her up, and so Martha went muttering upstairs to my mother in her bedroom and my aunt Willa in hers. In those first days, Willa Bondurant spent all the time when she was not bidden into my parents’ presence, such as breakfast, lunch, cocktail time and dinner, in that room, with her children. I don’t know what she did there—her nails and hair and sparse clothing, probably, for each evening’s manicure and hairdo excelled in splendor and intricacy the previous day’s, when she appeared downstairs on the “good” porch for afternoon drinks, and her clothes were as faultlessly pressed as they were startling in cut and pattern. I know she did not read.

  Mother and Aunt Willa were sufficiently alarmed at Lucy’s absence to come down in dressing gowns and slippers, Mother only halfway through her careful evening’s makeup, Aunt Willa as fully anointed as a Kabuki dancer. Not wanting to disturb my father in his study, they sent Martha back upstairs to look into all the imaginable hiding places that the house harbored, and me out to the back garden and the summer house to search. They themselves stood on the back veranda calling softly, “Lucy! Lucy Bondurant! Come in the house this minute!” I could hear their voices spiraling up, intertwined, the soft drawl and the metallic kitten’s mewl, as I riffled aside bushes and vines and walked through each room of the summer house.

  “You ought to come on out now,” I said aloud, for I felt sure that Lucy was somewhere in the vicinity of the summer house. “You’re really going to be in the soup if my father gets mad at you.”

  But there was no answer, and my own voice in my ears frightened me somehow, and I did not call again. I went back to the house in defeat.

  Mother called Shem Cater then, and he beat his way through the dense woods, newly greened and swollen with spring, all the way over to Rivers Road, and even asked at the back doors of some of the nearest houses, but there was no trace of Lucy. By the time my father, attracted by the subdued furor and ready for his six o’clock bourbon, came out of the library and around to the porch, the light was seeping out of the afternoon and the shadows were going long and blue. He and Shem took the Chrysler out and canvassed Buckhead, up one winding, green-canopied street and down another, pulling up before the big houses at the end of the long drives. Shem would wait while my father knocked on each door in turn and asked if anyone had seen a thin, dark-haired, blue-eyed five-year-old in corduroy bib overalls and saddle shoes. No one had.

  I was in agony, drowned in mute pain. It was my first experience with loss, for I had, somehow, never had the common child’s fantasy that my parents would die and leave me, and there had been no one else in my life whom I had valued, at least not directly and particularly. I had never had a pet, so never had lost one, and had not known a name to put to the uneasiness that the death of my little-known grandfather Redwine had left. But Lucy was the perfect hostage to fortune. She had blow
n into my life like a radiant whirlwind, bringing liberation and laughter and childhood with her, and I had fallen without a shot being fired. Moreover, I had accepted the new state of joy she had brought as the secret in the house for which I had waited so long, and it had never even crossed my mind that I could lose it. Now I tasted for the first time vulnerability and frailty and the terrible, casual power of the world, and the fear and outrage howled so powerfully in me that I could only crouch behind the striped canvas glider, arms around knees, head down, thinking of all the things that could have happened to Lucy.

  My mother was tight-lipped with annoyance and, I suppose, a sort of worry, and my father was openly exasperated. Aunt Willa seemed more embarrassed than upset.

  “I’m gon’ tan her hide when I get my hands on her,” she said over and over, looking side wise at my still-faced mother and up under her spiked lashes at my father. “She’s a willful child; takes after her daddy. But she don’t do this kind of thing, usually. Lord, I hope she hasn’t gone off with a man. She loves men, and she ain’t…isn’t…afraid of anything in shoe leather. I’ve told her and told her, but it looks like she just doesn’t hear me…. ”

  “There aren’t any men around here who would hurt her,” my mother said icily. “We know everyone in the neighborhood, of course, including the servants. She would be quite safe with anyone she happened across.”

  “Well, of course she would,” my aunt Willa said, reddening. “I didn’t mean I thought anybody you all knew would…you know…”