Peachtree Road Read online

  “Yeah. You know, dolls. Big ones, with strings hanging off of ’em, walking all jerky and talking funny. Like that place we went when I first came.”

  Puppets. My parents and Aunt Willa had taken me and Lucy to a much-heralded children’s puppet show at the old Erlanger Theater down near the Fox that spring, just at Easter, and I remembered then that Lucy had not liked it. I thought of Ben and Dorothy Cameron, of Sarah and Ben Junior, smiling painted smiles from the darkness of the vast, shadowy sun porch where they lived during the summers, wooden arms stretched out avariciously. The image was terrible.

  “Did they chase you?” I said.

  “No. They didn’t do anything. But I knew they wanted me.”

  “Why would that be so bad?” I asked, to reassure both of us. “They’re real nice people.”

  “Because,” she said. “They weren’t real.”

  As she often did, Lucy had gotten hold of an essence that had, in her starved and vulnerable heart, been skewed and magnified into something dangerous. The Camerons were such an exemplary, whole and healthful family that it was not hard to see that they might appear, to some few original eyes, simply unreal. They were not that to me, but they were, perhaps, hyperreal. Super-normal. And they were revelatory. Willa Bondurant brought to the Peachtree Road house, already askew, her own poverty of soul, and Lucy’s deep starvation darkened the stew. I would not have known lightness, grace and normalcy if it had not been for the household of Dorothy and Ben Cameron, and their children, Sarah and Ben. I said that to Sarah once, years later, in the paneled drawing room of the house on Muscogee Avenue, after a funeral.

  “You all showed me everything I ever knew of lightness and straightness,” I said. “You were my models for how sane, normal, productive people act, for how well privilege can be used. I really think you all—your mother and dad, especially—are the reason I’m just a little funny and not dead myself.”

  Sarah’s eyes were red from weeping, but she smiled. It was not a smile of amusement.

  “If you can say that after today,” she said, “then you must be worse off than anybody ever thought.”

  “It wasn’t aberration that did this, Sarah,” I said. “It was the times. It was the town. In another place he’d have seen options he could have lived with. In another time, maybe, he could have done it here.”

  They were, Ben and Dorothy Cameron, as close, to my mind, as Atlanta can come to producing aristocrats. Benjamin Aird Cameron’s family had come from Scotland to Virginia before the Revolution, to Atlanta the year it was founded and back to Atlanta before the ashes were cooled, to begin rebuilding the city. Dorothy Chase Cameron’s family hailed originally from Dorsetshire, England, and it was a copy of the Chase manor house, which her father had built on Muscogee, into which she and Ben moved at his death. Merrivale House, it was named, after that first one, though only outsiders called it that, never the Cameron family.

  I never knew a family so vital and energetic and so devoted to—even infatuated with—each other. They played together endlessly: rode their bicycles around Buckhead and deep into the surrounding country together, played tennis and swam together at the Driving Club, played badminton and croquet on the satiny lawn beyond the box maze behind the house, performed so many family plays and pageants and skits and spoofs and entertainments that their cottage in the old colony up at Tate had a minstrel’s gallery built into it just for that purpose. In the long evenings of winter they read aloud to one another and listened to music on the big Capehart that was a twin to ours and the ones in half the Buckhead houses—popular songs and light classics and show tunes, for they were not intellectuals; I was well established at Princeton before I encountered families who were truly intellectually cultivated—and they even had a sort of family band. Dorothy played an accomplished, if conventional, piano, Sarah was not half bad on the flute, Ben played the saxophone, and Ben Junior the clarinet. It was from noodling around on his instrument in the long afternoons of our later boyhood, and tasting the slick-sweet taste of the bitten reed, that my lifelong passion for the clarinet was born. It was as if I could taste the sweet marrow of music sunk in the long ebony and silver cylinder, though, for a long time, I couldn’t get it out.

  They gave off, when together, a kind of soft, clear light, a diffuse energy born of love, mutual admiration, curiosity, endless appetite for the charmed lives they led, and above all, a respect for each other which was, to me, totally seductive. I knew about love; it was, even if canted and lamed, what I felt for my mother. But the Camerons were the first people to show me that respect and love could go hand in hand. So far as I know, so far as the world knows, none of them ever did anything to damage that respect in the others’ eyes. Even after what happened to Ben Junior, there was no betrayal of respect; only bewilderment and grief.

  And the light that they gave off fell, as naturally and abundantly and indiscriminately as the light from a star, over the people who came close to them. I always felt, in the presence of the Camerons, more than I was…or possibly, all that I could be. I will never understand why, in all her life, Lucy did not feel it, but she didn’t. She used to say, even after we were grown, that an hour in the company of Ben and Dorothy and, to a lesser extent, Sarah made her want to go home and take a nap.

  Looking back, I can see what she meant, even if I do not agree with her. I remember a night late in the summer Lucy came, when she and I had been taken over to the Camerons’ house by our parents for an early supper and badminton in the back garden. After the last game, when the adults had collapsed on lawn chairs with drinks and the first fireflies were winking in the cutting garden, Sarah and Ben broke into one of their impromptu “shows,” presenting, with uncannily synchronized steps and gestures, a pantomime of Gene Kelly and Vivienne Segal in Pal Joey. Dorothy and Ben Senior had taken them to see it in New York at Easter that year, and they had been utterly beguiled with the dark, glinting Rodgers and Hart arcana. My mother, who had not seen the play but had heard of it, had been scandalized by the Camerons’ exposing their children to such steamily suggestive goings-on, and having those exemplary children present them to her flushed face kept her on the telephone to her circle for days afterward. She listened that night in tight-lipped silence as Ben Junior and Sarah wriggled and leered their way through “I Could Write a Book,” “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” and worst of all, “Zip,” and gave Ben and Dorothy a sidewise glare of honest outrage when they laughed and applauded. Aunt Willa kept her dense lashes modestly over her eyes, and my father swallowed his bourbon in silence, but I was enchanted, and even Lucy laughed and clapped her hands.

  When at last Ben and Sarah took their bows and made as if to sit down, Dorothy and Ben Senior jumped to their feet and pulled me and Lucy with them, and ran out to the smooth grass of the badminton court.

  “‘Hut-Sut Rawlson,’” Dorothy Cameron cried, and she and Ben and the Cameron children swung into a mad, syncopated version of that witless doggerel, which in an eye-blink had me and Lucy shucking and jiving right along with them.

  “Hut-sut Rawlson on the rillerah and a brawla, brawla soo-it,” we six bellowed into the fast-falling dark of Muscogee Avenue. “Hut-sut Rawlson on the rillerah…”

  We were wonderful that night, magnificent. It was as if our twelve hands and feet were synchronized by some unseen master choreographer, and our voices silkened and silvered by a consummate cosmic musician. I could not and cannot sing, and Lucy never could carry a tune in a bucket, but that night it seemed to me that the world should have paid pure gold to see and hear us. We performed “Hut-Sut Rawlson” again, and then “The Music Goes Round and Round,” and finished up with a great flourish with “Three Little Fishes.”

  When we were done, sweating and gasping and laughing, Dorothy hugged us and said there was no doubt in her mind we both had an unlimited future on the stage, and we danced on joyful, clumping feet all the way home, where our grimly silent parents banished us immediately to bed.

  “I think livin
g at the Camerons’ house must be the most fun there is,” I said as we turned off Mickey and crept into our beds.

  “Shoot, I think they are the silliest grown-ups I’ve ever seen,” Lucy said. But I just grinned into the darkness. I had felt the music and joy in her, there on the lawn behind Merrivale House. It was only later, back inside the dark-souled walls of 2500 Peachtree, that the spell of the Camerons left her.

  As close as they were, the Camerons encouraged in one another the development of individual gifts. Young Ben, besides being a musician of some skill, was the sort of workmanlike, untemperamental athlete his father had been, a perfect team player and content with that role despite his impetuous nature and flamboyant grace, and knew practically from infancy that he would become the visionary architect he eventually did. Sarah’s talent for drawing and painting was the stronger of their gifts; she was truly talented, and endeared herself to her parents and their friends by painting odd and hauntingly lovely little portraits and landscapes and giving them as gifts. In grammar school, she did a brisk and profitable business drawing naked women and rearing horses on commission, until her mother discovered the thriving cottage industry and put a stop to it. She had the obligatory Saturday afternoon lessons in watercolors and pastels at the High Museum of Art, and more than one teacher called Dorothy Cameron and urged special tutors, serious study and consideration of one of the really good schools of art in the East or abroad for her.

  But Dorothy did not like the thought of a self-serving artist’s life for her daughter, and sunny, biddable Sarah, by then in love with her family and her world and her near-amphibian swimming and diving, did not push for the studies. I often wonder what the world lost when Sarah laid aside her brushes and strode to the end of the Club diving board. It is hard for me to mourn the loss totally; the memory of her small, perfectly shaped body suspended at the top of its lovely arc like a swan in flight is one that I will never lose.

  If it did not sound so gummily, cloyingly banal, you might say that the Camerons en masse personified the ideal of noblesse oblige. Ben’s grandfather made the family fortune in the manufacture of a popular and virulent patent medicine, and Ben’s father and Ben himself tended it well, and so by the time he had married Dorothy and begun his family, he was free to devote himself to civic and political endeavors that had the very real power and weight of a considerable personal fortune behind them. Soon after Sarah graduated from college, in 1960, he was elected mayor of Atlanta, and held its helm sensitively and sure-footedly through the most explosive decade of growth and upheaval it would ever know. His thatch of hair, rusted iron-gray by then, and his freckled, fine-boned face became almost as familiar in the national media as the chestnut shock and white grin of the young president who admired and lauded him. More than Atlanta would eventually come to mourn his decline and death.

  Dorothy Cameron was a small, straight-spined, beautiful woman with the thick, dark hair, warm, sherry-brown eyes and straight black brows that became her daughter’s. She was intelligent, outspoken and carefully, if not deeply, cultivated; a bit prepossessingly high-minded for the far earthier society of Atlanta in which she moved; a fierce, self-proclaimed Jeffersonian democrat. Her caustic humor saved her from the impossibility of utter worthiness, and her energy and awesome concentration were a good foil for Ben’s lazy grace and catlike physical indolence. She was a tireless volunteer worker, and her pioneering program at the city’s massive charity hospital, Grady, became the model for other hospital volunteer programs all over the South. She toiled tirelessly in auxiliaries, leagues, committees, task forces and study clubs.

  I can still see Dorothy Cameron, as vivid and commanding as an actress in her Red Cross uniform, looking out from the pages of the Sunday society section of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, seeming beside all the other women in their ball and benefit gowns as intrepid and otherworldly and androgynous as a young Joan of Arc. Unlike the other adult women in my world, she did not like formal social occasions, and though she dutifully attended them, and invariably looked marvelous in her austere, handmade gowns and shoes, she would not have been there if she had not been on some committee that required her presence. The other women must have known it. Looking back, it is clear to me why not many of them liked her, and also why so many of their husbands and all of their children did. For to a youngster, we all adored her.

  The winter I was ten and Lucy eight, Atlanta had one of the rare, magical snowfalls that come along perhaps once a decade. We have small, spitting snows nearly every winter, but the genuine, deep, creaming big ones come so seldom that when they do the entire city halts with both the breath-held blue sorcery of it and the utter impossibility of getting around. On the evening after this one, Lucy and I were both in our beds with the beginnings of tedious, dripping colds brought on, no doubt, by our stubborn refusal to come in out of the silent, lapping white back garden when our mothers called us.

  “I hope you’re both happy,” my mother said, closing the door on us. “You’re going to be stuck in that attic until the last cough is coughed, and you’ll miss days and days of school, and have to make them all up.”

  By that time the snow was effectively ruined for us, and we were just drifting into fretful, feverish sleep when the door opened again and my glaring mother came into the room, followed by Dorothy Cameron wrapped in her fur coat and swathed in scarves.

  “I’ve told Mrs. Cameron you’re both sick with colds, but she’s talked me into letting you do something I’ll probably regret forever,” my mother said. “I don’t know why I listen to her.”

  “I’ll take all the blame,” Dorothy Cameron said. “And we’ll personally pay the doctor bills if they get sick. But I don’t think they will. I think this is the perfect cure for what ails them. Get up, you two, and put on your warmest coats over your pajamas, and your galoshes, and your hats and scarves and mittens, and come on with me. I’m kidnapping you.”

  We did, silent and solemn with the weight of doing something my mother so obviously disliked, yet with her approval. We could not imagine what awaited us downstairs.

  What did was, wonder of wonders, an old-fashioned sleigh with two chestnut horses in harness before it, stamping and jingling on the semicircular drive in front of the house, a mummy-wrapped Ben Cameron at the reins and swaddled-to-the-eyebrows Ben Junior and Sarah behind him. We gaped in absolute and perfect awe.

  “Come on!” Ben cried, gesturing with an elegant black whip. “I borrowed them and the sleigh from George Haynes over at the stable at Chastain Park, and I’ve got to get them back in a couple of hours. Let’s make tracks!”

  And we did. Under a high, sailing, white galleon of a moon, which came riding down the star-strewn sky on a vast, skirling night wind, we made magical, enchanted snow-tracks all over a ghostly Buckhead: straight up Peachtree Road where virtually no automobile traffic could pass, out a white, deserted West Paces Ferry, down winding, silent Habersham to West Wesley and Peachtree Battle, and up Peachtree again to our house. We four children were too rapt with exaltation and strangeness to utter a word above a whisper, and the sounds of the horses’ chiming bells and the scrunching clop of their iron-shod feet and the low voices of Ben and Dorothy Cameron talking to each other and occasionally breaking into soft snatches of song were the only ones in all that hushed, bewitched silver and black night.

  When we got back to our house, my mother received us grimly and sent us off to bed, and as we pattered up the stairs I heard her say to Dorothy Cameron, “I hope it was worth it. They’re going to absolutely perish of pneumonia.”

  “No they’re not,” Dorothy said, laughing. “I guarantee they won’t. But it would be worth it, almost, if they did.”

  We did not get pneumonia, of course, and our colds never materialized. And she was right. That magical night sleigh ride was worth…everything. Neither of us ever forgot it. Dorothy Cameron always knew what was important, and she gave well and widely the gift of imagination and acceptance. Sarah is very like her.

/>   Dorothy and Ben were, rather surprisingly for their day and backgrounds, ardent champions of the Negroes and their cause. Dorothy did not have a shred of Lady Bountiful in her makeup, nor Ben of the massa, and so they were permitted the classic dichotomy of both espousing black needs and having in their home black servants. The result was that the black families who served in and lived behind most of the big houses were accustomed to dropping by, during their times off, to pass the time of day with whatever Cameron was around. I think the tendrils that reached out to the sad black ghettos from these taproots in the Northwest were one of the strongest reasons why Ben Cameron was able, almost single-handedly among the whites who labored to do so, to quell the incipient race riots that threatened his city in the sixties, by the simple expedient of going into the hot streets and talking to the furious mobs. During one of them, potentially the worst, he went, alone except for young Glenn Pickens, into the melee, climbed atop a parked automobile and talked for hours to the angry and frustrated crowd, all of whom knew who he was and many of whom knew him personally. Until the very end of that bitter time, Ben Cameron kept Atlanta the city that, as it had always boasted, “was too busy to hate.” On the surface, at any rate. What went on below it, in the dark, roiled waters there, was another matter entirely, and Ben Cameron would have been the first to acknowledge that. In those days, surfaces, if they kept the first match from being lit, were enough at least to serve.

  “This kid at school says Mr. and Mrs. Cameron are nigger-lovers,” Lucy said at dinner one night during the early days of her stay with us. She had just entered the first grade at E. Rivers, and was finding the society of other children both a baffling and a stimulating thing.

  “He says Mr. Cameron sleeps in the bed with a nigra lady, and Mrs. Cameron hugs and kisses Leroy Pickens all the time. He says his mama said Ben and Sarah are probably Leroy’s children.”