Peachtree Road Read online

  “I do know. You can put your mind at rest about that,” my mother said, and Aunt Willa fell silent.

  But I didn’t know, and the unimaginable and unnamed thing iced my heart and lungs so that, behind the glider, I struggled for breath, and the world grew overly bright and buzzing for a moment.

  It was full dark and my father was on his way to the telephone to call the police when Lucy came drifting up from the garden, hair wild and caught with bits of leaf trash and eyes smoke-dark and large. Even in the green darkness I could see the white sweetness of her smile.

  She did not tell us where she had been, except to say, “Back there.” Even after Willa had taken her by her thin shoulders and shaken her until her head flopped on her neck like a chicken’s, and had spanked her with a ferocity that finally prompted my father to say, “That’s enough. It’s all right,” she did not say any more than “Back there,” and she never did after that. She did not seem to understand why she was being punished.

  When Aunt Willa had finished spanking her and let her hands fall, breathing hard, Lucy looked up at her, white-faced and dry-eyed, and said, “Will you hug me now, Mama?”

  “Of course I won’t hug you,” Aunt Willa shrilled. “You been an awfully bad girl. Like to scared us all to death, and your uncle Sheppard out in the car looking all over for you, and dinner ruint…. Bad girls like you don’t deserve hugs.”

  “Daddy hugged me all the time,” Lucy said, more to me, hovering in the background, than to her furious mother.

  “No, he didn’t,” Willa said. “He never did hug you. You always were a bad girl, and he never did hug you one single time. He hit you, that’s what he did. You were so bad he hit you every time you turned around.”

  Lucy cried then. Her blue eyes slit shut in anguish, and her hands flew to her mouth.

  “Not any more than he hit you!” she cried, whirling away from us. “Hit you lots more’n he did me!”

  “LUCY!” Aunt Willa shrieked, but Lucy was gone up the stairs into the dimness of the second floor. We could hear her small feet beating a diminishing tattoo of woe.

  I could not look at my aunt Willa’s mottled, dull-red face, so I looked at my father. He grimaced in distaste. I looked at my mother. Incredibly, she was smiling, a full, slow smile. I had not seen that smile in nearly a week. She laid one slim hand on my aunt Willa’s arm.

  “Come on up to my room with me, Willa,” she said in her slow “Atlanta” accent. “I have a few things in my closet that I never wear anymore. I think they’d look awfully pretty on you. Martha will see to Lucy.”

  Only then did I look full at my aunt Willa. Before the black lashes dropped down, I saw in her eyes a pure and living hate.

  “Thank you, Olivia,” she murmured.

  A long and terrible symbiosis had begun.

  I followed Lucy upstairs and waited until I heard Martha leave the little bedroom, and then I went in and sat down on the side of her bed. She was not crying, but staring straight ahead in the darkness. I could see the fevered blue of her eyes.

  “I’ll hug you, Lucy,” I said. “Do you want me to?”

  “Please,” Lucy said, in a small, frail voice. “I need for you to so I won’t fly off the floor of the world.”

  This did not sound at all strange to me then, or ominous. I crawled into the bed beside her and put my arms awkwardly around her, and there we stayed, her small bones feeling, under my hands, like a bird’s, until the hammering of her heart slowed, and she fell asleep.

  Before she did, just before, she murmured to me, “He did too hug me. My daddy hugged me all the time, and he never did the other two, or Mama either. Just me.”

  I held her until my arms began to ache and prickle, and then I got out of her bed and into mine, slowly and carefully, so that she would not miss the feeling of my arms, and waken. But I knew even then, though I could not have sculpted the thought, that it was not my arms that Lucy sought. It was those first arms, that vanished phantom’s arms, and whether or not what she had said as she slid into sleep was true, never again in all her careening life did she find them.

  Lucy was by no means the first woman to know the promise and pain of my uncle Jim’s arms. He had been pledging and betraying since his birth. Six years younger than my father, Jim Bondurant was, from the moment he slid redly into life in my grandmother Adelaide’s bed in Fayetteville, the favored one. His had been a swift and easy birth; my father’s long and arduous. His fairness was from the first hour smooth and silvery, his eyes a dark, velvet pansy-blue. My father’s blondness was white almost to the point of albinism, his eyes milk-pale and perpetually squinted shut. My uncle Jim’s face was rose satin and his smile pure and focused. My father’s was mottled with fury and woe, and he bellowed his anguish abroad to a world that he must have, from the outset, perceived as unloving. His features, even then, and more so later, were heavy; my uncle Jim’s blade-fine and aristocratic. All his life, my handsome, high-spirited, feckless uncle must have seemed the one for whom my father was the rough, blunt, half-finished model. From his birth, women rushed to grant his wishes and win his magical sweet smile, and wept when he left them. In all his life, James Clay Bondurant found no good reason to stay and confront rough weather. Fair skies always lay, for him, as near as the next valley.

  My father, reduced to battering his way through life with ham fists and furious red face, must have hated him, must have welcomed, even as he deplored aloud, each scrape and escapade that brought tears to my grandmother Adelaide’s eyes. But to his credit he did not excoriate his brother, to his parents or anyone else, and it was finally his taciturn loyalty, his rocklike thereness, that won for him the grudging accolade from old Adelaide: “He’s a good boy, a good steady boy. And he’s a money-maker.”

  This she said to a group of ladies gathered in the drawing room of her son’s great house, during her short stay with him and my mother just before her death. By this time my father was on his way to real wealth, and she had not heard from her younger son in more than five years. The periodic checks that were dispatched to him to cover the series of disasters and false starts that were his life went now, not from her, but from my father. She did know that he was married, but she died without knowing—for she would, finally, not permit his name to be spoken in her presence—that he had a daughter Lucy who was said to be the image of her as a child. It must have been gall and wormwood to my aunt Willa that the old lady died before the birth of the granddaughter who was her namesake—though by that time Willa Bondurant must have grasped that a veritable platoon of small, white-blond Adelaides would not have melted her mother-in-law. Perhaps she used the name Adelaide because she thought that candy-box Little Lady would cut some future ice with my father, the only Bondurant left by then who might conceivably throw her a lifeline. He was, after all, a money-maker.

  In the Atlanta of that day, as in this one, that was perhaps the highest accolade you could pin on a man. I can remember lying on the floor behind the Capehart, my warm winter nest, as my mother talked with a group of her bridge ladies one roaring January afternoon when I was very small. I don’t know who they were talking about, and I don’t know why their words pricked my ears, but one of the women said, “Well, I know he’s sorry in a lot of ways. I was there when he peed in the punch bowl from the Driving Club stairs. I went with Laura in the ambulance when they took him to Brawner’s this last time. He’s a drunk and a rooster. But whatever else you say about him, you can’t say he’s not a money-maker.”

  My ears pricked further: Here, then, was another signpost on the way to the baffling country of adulthood. A money-maker. I filed it away, along with Gumption and Respect for Women. I already had a surfeit of the latter, but I thought it highly unlikely that I would ever attain the former two.

  I have come to think that the store we set on making money here is not so much a purely materialistic trait as it is a reflexive twitch left over from the poverty and humiliation of defeat and occupation after the Civil War. We had seen tha
t witless gallantry and conviction were not enough to save our land and homes. We had seen that they could be smashed by armies of superior wealth and strength, and bought by carpetbaggers of superior means. The defeat left us with a near-genetic hangover of fear and inferiority and truculence—and yes, guilt—which, it seemed, only the balm of money could soothe. Crass as this trait undoubtedly is, it also built us back a viable city in a very short time. Very few Southerners, no matter how blue their blood or high their ideals, will, in their deepest hearts and souls, truly scorn a money-maker.

  And so that obedient and industrious money-maker, my father, must have felt at least a small snake-slither of satisfaction at the spectacularly destructive trajectory in which his wasted younger brother launched himself. After flunking out of the University of Georgia and being expelled from Emory at Oxford for drinking, Jim Bondurant had been sent to Georgia Southern College in Statesboro, in Bulloch County, then a minimal little school on Georgia’s sun-punished coastal plain. The nearest city was Savannah, some sixty miles away, and since almost the last act my grandfather Bondurant performed before his death was to take away his youngest son’s automobile, the spoiled young demigod was a captive in this arid wire-grass Lilliput. He had, he felt, only one recourse. He proceeded to fuck his way through the scant female contingent of the student body.

  He met Willie Catherine Slagle, a freshman in home economics on a scholarship from her local Optimists’ Club, when he was a senior. She was the improbably lush daughter of a shiftless chicken farmer in a nearby hamlet so small and hookworm-poor that it had no name, and by the time she got to college and secured for herself a job waiting tables in the town’s lone, dingy soda shop, she would have done anything to escape the ramshackle pens and coops and stinking carcasses and burning feathers that were her life—including sleeping with the handsome, said-to-be-rich young man from a fine family near Atlanta who swept her off her tired little feet.

  By the time she found that she was pregnant, Jim Bondurant’s graduation was nearing, and his newly widowed mother was showing signs of welcoming him back to her ample bosom and dowering him with funds sufficient to “give him a little start in business.” Knowing full well what the advent of a pregnant, poor white trash daughter-in-law would do to that nest egg, he refused to marry Willie. Well, said Willie Catherine Slagle pragmatically, then she would, of course, have to kill herself, but not before she had gone to see his mother in person and told her about the grandchild soon to be murdered.

  “I’ll pay for an abortion,” Jim said hastily.

  “You don’t have the money for that,” Willie Slagle said calmly. She kept her spectacular blue eyes cast down on her folded hands. Things were not going, on the main, too badly.

  “I’ll get the money,” he said.

  “Yes,” she smiled. “You do that.”

  She knew what would happen when he asked his mother for money, and it did. Essentially a slow-witted young man who had never needed to employ guile or deceit in his dealings with his mother, he called her and told her what he needed the money for. To his outrage and utter surprise, she hung up on him. Willie Catherine Slagle kept on smiling and pressed her good rayon dress.

  They were married by a justice of the peace in Savannah in May, the afternoon of his near-miss graduation. Jim was not displeased with his new wife. She was possessed of a true, if conventional, peasant beauty, and her untutored farm appetites were overwhelming. Furious that his mother had refused to bail him out of this last boyish scrape, and bitterly homesick for the glittering urban arena of Atlanta, he saw in the fecund Willie Slagle a source of both endless sexual delight and just retribution. He kept her rolling happily in the spavined bed of a down-at-heel tourist court all of their honeymoon weekend, bought her two new dresses and a pink rayon negligee at the Sears Roebuck in Macon on their way back north and finally, on a tender night in late May, presented her at the front door of 2500 Peachtree Road, where his brother and dark, languid sister-in-law and, lately, his mother lived.

  An uppity, ashy-gray Negro man answered the door and said that no one was at home. Since he could see lights in windows and curtains upstairs stirring, he knew this was not true. He yelled and cursed at the Negro man, and Willie Catherine, shivering in her flowered silk despite the balmy spring evening, began to cry. She held her hands protectively over the hard little mound of her belly. Eventually the Negro man closed the great door in their faces, and before Jim could double his fists to hammer on it, his wife took his arm and jerked him away from there. The old Bondurant place in Fayetteville had been sold, so he could not take her there. For the first time in his life, Jim Bondurant was forced to fend for himself. He never got over the shock of it.

  He got a job ineptly pumping gas in a Decatur service station, but lost it almost immediately because he could not conceal his distaste for the oil and grease and customers, and appeared to them to be fully as arrogant as he was. It was mid-Depression, and jobs were scarce for even the most qualified and able of young men. Jim, Willa (as she had taken to calling herself immediately upon becoming a Bondurant) and tiny Lucy, who arrived that murderous red September, drifted from city to small, wasted city around the Southeast, staying in a succession of dismal rooming houses and attic apartments. Kewpie doll Adelaide came along when they were living in Charlotte and Jim was working, when he did work, as a freelance house painter. Two years after that their first son and last child, James Clay Bondurant, Jr., was born in Greensboro, North Carolina.

  By this time little Jamie’s father was not working at all. He was, instead, drinking his way steadily across the Southeast toward the Mississippi River, alternately striking and smothering with caresses his children and his wife. In time, Willa and the two younger children took to cowering away from his fists in a groveling terror that maddened him, so he no longer caressed them, but only smote. But smoky, quicksilver Lucy, his oldest daughter, took his blows with averted dry eyes and a small-smiling silence that was oddly soothing to him, and turned after each beating with slender, bruised white arms held out to him, and his heart would turn over with a raging love for her, and he lavished on her all the caresses that the rest of his fearful family abjured. Pain and love, love and pain…dark twins which were, by then, all that he could give, and all that Lucy could accept.

  A few months into 1941, Jim Bondurant left for New Orleans to look for work, said to be more plentiful there, and soon after wired Willa and the children to give him three days to find them a place to live, and then catch the Greyhound and come. When they arrived at the New Orleans station, he was not there, and there was no message, and after waiting for almost nine hours, until it was quite dark, it was apparent to Willa Bondurant that he was not coming at all. And he did not, then or ever, and it was the last that any one of them ever saw of him.

  Willa called Sheppard Bondurant in Atlanta with her last nickel, and Travelers Aid bought the midnight tickets that sent them grinding through the flat, humid, mosquito-plagued fields of Louisiana toward the gullied and scrub-pined red hills of the Georgia Piedmont Plateau. Shem Cater met them at the Greyhound station that evening, in Sheppard’s big car, and brought them in the twilight to the house on Peachtree Road. Sheppard and Olivia were not with him; Willa had not thought that they would be. She was, by then, as bereft of worldly goods as an animal, and as unself-pitying. She had four cents and a roll of butterscotch Life Savers in her purse. The children had not eaten since breakfast, in Mobile.

  It was a journey measured in immensities. Somewhere during it, in that endless fugue of flying miles, Willa Slagle Bondurant stopped crying and began planning. Driving through the luminous, cloistered northwest quadrant of Atlanta in the backseat of the big car, she marked with a coldly assessing eye the architecture, landscaping and details of each great house they passed. When she walked into 2500 Peachtree Road, she was determined to do whatever it took to ensure that she never left it again.

  All this I learned from Lucy years later, during one of the rare times when she
spoke of the life she had had before she came to Atlanta. It was the last time we were together up at the mountain house at Tate, and we had talked so easily and about so much of the past, and with such a genuine benison of rancorless remembrance, that I was not at all surprised when she segued into the night of that awful bus ride. Though only a few miles separated them, Lucy did not often speak, in those last years, of her mother.

  “You have to hand it to her,” Lucy said that night on the mountain. “Not a cent to her name, no education to speak of, no family, no future…nothing but her and us three children. And she’d been to the house before, remember, and they’d turned her away. She had to be terrified. And she was; when I finally fell asleep, about Biloxi, she was still crying. But when I woke up, at Mobile, she was putting on lipstick and fixing her hair, and she had that little Mona Lisa smile on her face. When I asked her what she was smiling at, she said, ‘The future. We’re going to have a fine future in that big old house.’

  “So I said, ‘When we gon’ leave it?’ You know, because we always left every house we stayed in. And she said, ‘We’re not.’”

  Willa was as good as her word. She shoe horned herself into the life of the house with a persistence as seemingly effortless as it must have been enormous. She smiled. Endlessly and charmingly, she smiled. She pleased whenever an opportunity arose. She was helpful, modest, grateful, unassuming, dutiful, deferential to my mother, girlish and just short of adoring to my father. And from the outset, as if to make up for my mother’s distance, he seemed to me to be uncharacteristically warm to the beautiful, flat-voiced, lushly built farm girl who was his sister-in-law, and to her children.

  I know that his manner was unusual enough for my mother to mark it; I saw in her eyes, before the sooty, feathery lashes came down over them, something as nervous and darting as a small wild animal, when she looked at my father and my aunt Willa in those first long evenings. But the strangeness did not bother me; indeed, I was glad for it. Some of his new benevolence seemed to spill over onto me, and for a long space of time after they came, I was no longer the focus of his discontented stare and probing questions at meals. I was happily engaged, heart, soul and mind, with Lucy.