Downtown (30 page)

“I wore those to my coming-out party,” Teddy said.

“If you’d rather I didn’t—” I began.

“Oh, no,” she said hastily. “They killed me all night. I hated them and the party, too. I’m not sentimental about anything from that period of my life.”

I would have liked to ask her about that time in her life, but something in her manner stopped me. Teddy always could, without seeming to move a muscle in her sweet, round face, hang up a “no admittance” sign there. It was in place now.

“Thanks, then,” I said, and held up the next article, a two-piece bathing suit in gray-striped, white-piped seer-sucker cotton, with little-boy legs.

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“The waist is elastic,” she said, “and if you don’t take a deep breath you won’t fall out of the top. It’ll give you terrific cleavage. I used to stuff stockings in there to get it. Brad will salivate, and Marylou will die. It’s perfect.”

I laughed, and picked up the knife-creased plaid madras bermudas and matching pink T-shirt and the little plaid wrap skirt that completed her offering.

“If nobody mistakes me for Gidget it won’t be your fault,”

I said wryly. “Thanks, pardner. I’ll try to be worthy of them.”

And I reached over and hugged her.

She hugged me back, hard.

“I really am happy for you,” she whispered. “It really is a special place, and it…means more than you think.”

I drew back, beginning to protest once more, and she clapped her hand lightly over my mouth.

“Give it a chance, at least,” she said. “Now. Do you need stockings?”

Brad and I left at six A.M. on Friday, and by eight were past Macon and nearing Perry, where, he said, it was a family tradition to stop for breakfast in the coffee shop of the New Perry Hotel. He was driving his sober sedan, and I was glad, for once, not to be in the gull-winged Mercedes. His brother would be driving that down the next day. The sedan had an air-conditioner, and we already needed it. The air outside had turned as thick and hot and humid as if we were in the tropics.

“Got your protective coloration on, I see,” he said, nodding at the wrap skirt and sleeveless blouse that I had, after all, put on that morning. “You look like a proper little Buckhead postdeb. Didn’t we meet in dancing class?”

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“You almost got me in a bare midriff and bell-bottoms, so don’t push your luck,” I said. “If it weren’t for Teddy I’d be doomed before I started with Sea Island.”

“Have you ever been?”

It was a nice touch. He must know that I had not, not to stay.

“Well, I saw the Cloister once,” I said deliberately. “We went down there from Corkie when I was about five, in my father’s old La Salle that he bought second-hand from the foreman on his shift before the war. It was just after V-J Day; I think we were celebrating being able to get gas again.

Anyway, the car was full of us kids and all over road dirt, and my father was in his undershirt, and when we went past that gatehouse thing I remember that they stopped us and asked my father if we had business over there, and Daddy said he just wanted to show us the Cloister, and the guard said for us to make the circle in front and come right on back out. I never forgot that. We went past the Cloister so fast that all I remember is a blur of light stucco and red tiles, and Daddy cursing. It made a big impression on me.”

“Arrogant sons of bitches,” Brad said, and his voice was so hard and tight that I glanced over at him. His face was pale under its tan, and his mouth was set in a thin line. I felt a surge of affection for him, and a warm wash of safety.

“Don’t look like that,” I said, putting my hand on his knee, and he covered it with his own.

“That will never happen to you again, Smoky,” he said.

“Not here and not anywhere. Not as long as I’m around.”

“Well,” I said mildly, “It probably wouldn’t happen again anyway; I’ve cleaned myself up some, and learned a few manners. But thanks, anyway.”

“I didn’t mean that the way it sounded,” he said. “I just meant—”

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“I know. I really meant thanks,” I said, and we drove on for a time in silence, holding hands.

I told him about the press party for the Focus piece, and he was interested and complimentary, and suitably appalled at Boy Slattery’s behavior. He laughed outright at my account of Alicia leaving on Boy’s arm after electrifying the crowd of reporters, but then the laughter trailed off, and he said soberly, “I wonder if Buzzy knew she was going to that party.”

“I think so,” I think I heard her tell somebody he was still in Nassau because some friends of his were coming down from Las Vegas to gamble, and he didn’t want to break his streak. He told her to go on. I doubt if he knew she took up with Boy, though.”

I smiled at the memory, but Brad’s brow furrowed.

“I hope to God not,” he said. “Buzzy can get downright ugly when his women indicate a preference for someone else.”

“Lord, Brad, what’s he going to do, beat her up?” I said, amused at the thought of silly, puddinglike Buzzy in the throes of a grand passion such as jealousy.

“No, it’s more his style to have it done,” Brad said matter-of-factly, and I simply stared at him.

“You’re kidding,” I said finally.

“I wish I was. I’ve heard some pretty scary things about some of Buzzy’s ex-girlfriends and those whitetied Cro-Magnons he travels with. Nobody knows for absolute certain sure, you understand, and the girls themselves sure ain’t going to talk, but I’ve heard that there’s a sort of marginal plastic surgeon on the West Coast who occasionally does a little cosmetic work for a few of Buzzy’s ladies. I hear he gives them such a deal.”

I felt cold, colder than the air-conditioning warranted.

“That’s awful,” I said. “That’s…terrifying.”

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“Well, it just might be a kind of urban legend,” Brad said.

“They spring up like weeds around Buzzy. Alicia ought to watch it, though. At the very least, Buzzy is to be taken seriously.”

“Should I tell her? Should you?”

“Christ, no, don’t you go telling her anything she could spill to Buzzy. Let me talk to Matt. You forget about it.”

But I did not think that that would happen.

At breakfast I told him about Pumphouse Hill and the beautiful young woman whom Luke said was a Panther, and about the shoot at Mrs. Holmes’s apartment in Summerhill, and about Andre. I still found it hard to speak about Andre without quick tears sabotaging me, and this time was no exception. He looked at me sympathetically.

“You can’t help him by crying for him,” he said. “What you did for him will help him far more than tears. Him and a lot of other little kids who don’t know their last names.

Good job, Smoky.”

“You just don’t know how good it felt to do some serious work for a cause that means something, for something bigger than yourself, outside yourself,” I said. “Or at least, you probably do, but I never did. It…changes things. It makes me look at myself differently.”

“How?” His voice was intent, interested.

“Well, it makes me think that I might make some kind of difference to the world one day. That it’s not impossible that I could…count for something as a writer, make people look at things differently—”

“You’ve got the gift for it, no doubt about that,” Brad said.

“It might make you feel good to know that you make a big difference to me right now.”

I touched his hand, lightly. “It makes me feel terrific,” I said. “Now if Matt could just see me that way—”

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“Your job means a lot to you, doesn’t it?”

I looked at him. He was not smiling. All of a sudden I felt tentative, cautious, uncertain, as if I were walking on mined earth. What was going on here? He knew how I felt about
Downtown
; he had always known that. I talked often of it.

“You know it does,” I said.

“Does it mean everything?”

“I don’t know how to answer that,” I said. “Why should it have to mean everything? I mean, you talk as if I have to make some sort of choice, my job or…everything else—”

“No choice,” he said. “I wouldn’t ask that of you. No reason why you shouldn’t have your job and…everything else.”

Back in the car, he said, “What’s next for Focus? You doing the next piece, too?”

“Right now it’s my baby, mine and Luke’s and John Howard’s,” I said. “Ben Cameron saw to that, God bless him, or I’d still be the subhead queen of Atlanta. Next is, of all things, a convention of Negro disc jockeys. It’s a big convention, and one of the oldest around, but all of a sudden no major hotel in Atlanta can find room for them. They’re all mysteriously full up, and the deejays have had to go to this dinky little motel way out on Stewart Avenue. To a string of third-rate motels, as a matter of fact. Nobody will say that it’s because they’re black since the Public Accommodations Act passed, but Ben Cameron says it’s the first time in his life he can remember such a shortage of hotel rooms in late summer. I mean, it isn’t exactly the height of the tourist season. Ben says if it were true, Atlanta would be the richest city in the country, at least for that week. He’s really steamed about it. Public Accommodations is his baby; he testified before the Senate for the bill. Kennedy asked 243 / DOWNTOWN

him to do it. And we were doing pretty good down here, he says, until this summer, when all of a sudden all these big-shot hotels are turning up full for the black deejays. He’s sure Boy and his crowd are behind it, but he can’t prove anything. We’re going to do a photo-essay on them, show who they are and what they do, and show how hard it is for them to do their business stuck out there in a string of substandard motels on Stewart Avenue—”

“Y’all going after Boy?”

“Not directly. Not in so many words. We’re hoping that just the exposure, just showing that these are average guys trying to have a business convention and not being able to do it right, here in the premier city in the South, will open a few eyes and make a few faces red.”

“I wouldn’t count on making many faces red,” Brad said.

“It’s an awful long leap from little black kids kissing cars to big black deejays in earrings and high heels and all that. I mean the guys. These are not just your run-of-the-mill blue-collar working stiffs, Smokes. These guys are weird. There’s not apt to be a lot of sympathy for them.”

“Well, the point is, you don’t have to have sympathy for them,” I said. “You just have to give them equal treatment under the law of the land. All the problems Focus will tackle can’t be about cute little children. Ben thinks the diversity, the contrast, will be good, and Matt loves the idea. It’ll be a wonderful human interest feature. I’m looking forward to it.”

“Well, go to it,” he said. “But let me give you just one little word of advice. Don’t talk about it this weekend. It’s going to be bad enough when the Andre piece comes out with your byline on it. The people who go to Sea Island, especially the ones who’ll be at Mama Hunt’s party, aren’t your typical
Downtown
readers. You won’t ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 244

exactly be making new friends talking about the problems of the Atlanta Negroes. What with Andre, and now the black deejays, a lot of them are going to look on you as the appointed ‘black’ writer.”

“So what if they do?” I said, stung.

He held up a propitiatory hand.

“Hey, don’t shoot the messenger,” he said. “You have to realize that the only Negroes most of them know work in their kitchens. Their hearts are in the right place—most of them, anyway—but it’s going to take a long time.”

“Well, let’s get them started, then,” I snapped.

He shrugged. “Do what you think is best,” he said coolly, and we did not speak for a long while after that. I was determined not to apologize, or sound as if I were, and apparently he was not, either. I solved the matter by putting my head back and falling asleep. When I woke, dry mouthed and stiff necked, it was with my head resting on his shoulder and his arm lightly around me, and the rusty, stinking smell of the paper mill in Brunswick curling in through the tightly shut windows.

“Almost there,” he said, and it was as if the small coldness between us had never existed. I stretched and looked around, seeing the great, flat, green waterworld of the marshes of Glynn County flash past me as we crossed the causeway onto Saint Simons Island. All of a sudden my mouth was dry with more than heavy sleep, and my heart began to beat fast and light. the landscape was almost eerily like that you passed through going into Savannah and Corkie, but it was not Savannah and Corkie ahead of me. It was one of the creamiest, plushest bastions of old money in the United States of America, and I was going to the birthday party of its un-challenged social doyenne, taken there by the grandson who would one day inherit her kingdom by the sea.

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“I think I’m scared,” I said.

“I can’t wait to show you how little you have to be afraid of,” Brad said, and smiled, and I smiled back. Safe. Yes.

That’s what it was, or a large part of it, that warmth that he gave off, that wrapped me close whenever I was with him.

With him I was, among many other things, safe.

It was such a new feeling for me that I had not known its name.

We bowled past the gatehouse on the Sea Island causeway that I remembered, and a guard raised his hand in salute to Brad. Brad waved back.

“I did remember it,” I said. “Where are the arrow slits?

Where are the gun emplacements?”

“There,” Brad grinned, and we passed, on the left, the low, shrub-shaded Sea Island Gun Club. Even in the swaying, cobralike heat, a man and a woman stood, erect in their khaki canvas jackets, guns raised, aiming out across the shimmering marshes.

“Pull,” I heard one of them cry, faintly, and a gun cracked.

“Is it open season on Irishmen?” I asked.

“Not on my watch,” Brad said, and then we were across the Black Banks River and on Sea Island proper, and plunged instantly into a deep, cool, permanent semigloom of monstrous old live oaks and silvery, shrouding moss, and masses of brilliant semitropical flowers and perfect sweeps of velvet lawns. After the blinding, searing white light and heat of the coastal plain and the marshes, it was like tumbling out of purgatory and into paradise, or into the jewellike waters of the Great Barrier Reef. In that instant I felt my temperature drop ten degrees.