Peachtree Road (47 page)

She had said it as she got on a plane to go home after her previous visit, and so I could not pursue it with her. Sarah had a penchant for dropping provocative bones into the conversation just as she was leaving me; I thought perhaps that it was because she so hated confrontation and knew I could best her verbally in most arguments.

She dropped one on this Sunday night, as we were walking through the grubby, dun-colored concourse at La Guardia toward the Delta flight that would take her back for the spring quarter of her junior year at Agnes Scott.

“We have to talk about Lucy sometime, you know,” she said, apropos of nothing at all, and I looked at her in 364 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

surprise. She smiled at me and continued walking. “I know y’all have had some kind of falling out, and that it must have been a bad one, because you haven’t seen her, and you haven’t said a word about her since you were home for our prom, and that’s three years, Shep.”

“We did have an argument,” I said. “I guess you could say it was a bad one. She doesn’t want to see me, and I can’t say that I mind. I don’t see why we have to talk about her.

It really doesn’t amount to anything.”

“You must think about it, though,” she persisted. There was a troubled frown between her level black brows. “You must think about her
sometimes
.”

“I don’t,” I said slowly, tasting the words and finding them to be essentially true. “I really almost never do. It’s funny.”

Sarah said nothing, but her smile widened.

“What are you grinning at?”

“I just plain don’t believe you,” she said. “There is some corner of your heart that is forever Lucy Bondurant.” Sarah was reading Rupert Brooke that year.

“Well, you’re wrong,” I said impatiently. “This time you’re wrong.”

We talked no more about it, and in due time Sarah’s flight was called, and I kissed her and she walked away from me toward the gate. And then she turned, and I saw that her eyes were wet.

“Oh, Shep,” she said, “don’t come home! I don’t care what any of them say. You’re right; stay here. If you come home, it will be to her.”

And she was gone out onto the twilit tarmac and up the spidery steps into the DC-7 before I could answer her.

On the way back to West Twenty-first in the cab, I thought how very rarely Sarah was wrong about me, and how strange that she should be this time, and about this. For I was sure of it: I thought of Lucy very rarely, and then only fleetingly, and when I did, I felt, simply, noth

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ing at all. It was as if all those years under the vivid, all-consuming, head-spinning, life-giving spell of my cousin Lucy had never been. Had that last meeting with her in the summerhouse burned me so that I had simply buried it beyond reach? Or could it be that she was so totally and supernor-mally of that place that she could not be of this one?

Sarah was right about one thing, though. It had been almost a year since I had even heard about Lucy, and that information had come not from her, but from, of all people, her mother. My aunt Willa. She had called me one raw Friday evening and said that she was in New York on a buying trip, and would love to have lunch and a nice catch-up chat the next day. She was, she said, staying at the Royalton on West Forty-fourth Street, and thought we might run over to the Schrafft’s at Forty-third and Broadway. I hated the teahouse fussiness and the appalling food at all the Schrafft’s but she took me by surprise, and besides, I knew we could eat cheaply there and was fairly sure that I would be expected to pay. In Aunt Willa’s world the man, no matter how impe-cunious, always did. We made a date for noon the next day, and I went to sleep that night with the thought lying full-blown in my mind: There’s something about Lucy that she wants me to do, and I’m going to hate it.

I saw Aunt Willa immediately; she had snared a corner table by the window and sat there looking out into the flow of traffic on Forty-third Street like an incognito queen spying on her subjects. The past few years had deepened her beauty; I knew that she must be about forty now, but all that showed of the passing of time was a sort of sheen that lay on her like the bloom of a grape. She still wore a great deal of pale, opaque foundation and hectic scarlet lip and nail polish, and her eyes were made up into the slanted doe eyes of that period, but she was so slender now that the lush breasts and hips no longer

366 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

literally leapt out at you, only beckoned, and the clothes she wore were obviously expensive, though plain to the point of severity. Lucy had always had so much of the Bondurants about her, despite the startling Slagle coloring, that I had never seen even a vestige of Aunt Willa in her, but now, in her full and splendid maturity, I saw in Willa Slagle Bondurant’s dark grace and stillness something of what Lucy the woman might one day become. Both women took the eye, Willa with her utter femaleness, Lucy with both that and the exuberant life that literally leaped off her.

I sat down warily, with a sense of walking clear-eyed and of my own volition into a trap. It could not be interest in my welfare that prompted this luncheon; Aunt Willa had never so much as held a conversation with me alone since she had brought her family to the Peachtree Road house. In fact, I had never seen her engaged in a one-on-one conversation with anyone in all my memory. She participated in conversations in whatever group she found herself in, turning from this person to that like a sly, clever child mimicking adult behavior, but she seldom seemed to initiate conversation, and she virtually never talked with the children of the big houses of Buckhead. I think that in her mind we had no power to either hurt or help her in her obsessive quest for Ladyhood, and so did not, for her, exist. Except, of course, her own daughters, the one who was boon, and the other who was bane. I could not imagine simply talking with her as I did with Dorothy Cameron, or even my mother, and I had a moment of panic as I walked across the floor to her table, and wanted to turn and run.

I need not have worried. Aunt Willa did all the talking.

From the moment she pecked me on the cheek, engulfing me in a powerful musk of something dark and sophisticated, to the moment she put down her coffee cup and lighted a Parliament, icing its pristine white tip PEACHTREE ROAD / 367

with a virulent berry stain, she did not stop her lilting, witless chatter. I did not need to say anything, and did not, beyond an occasional “umm-hmmm” and “oh yes.” Between the shrimp cocktail and the ladyfinger something-or-other, Aunt Willa talked incessantly about her career as a full-fledged buyer for Rich’s of Atlanta (soon to be head buyer), and what my “little crowd” was about (weddings and engagements popping like firecrackers), and what her set was up to (hitting every tea and fashion show and charitable ball that could possibly have been held in the past year, with herself, as well as my parents, as virtual mainstays of them), and what was happening to Atlanta (growing like a weed; skyscrapers and shopping malls shooting up everywhere, and the town absolutely full of tackpots nobody knew. “Everyone says Ben Cameron will be the next mayor, but why he wants to is beyond me”). It was more than I had heard her say in any given five years at home.

Finally she slowed and stopped, and gave me the full bat-tery of her languid red smile.

“Well, I’ve really let myself run on, haven’t I?” she said archly. “And not a word about you. How are you, Shep?

One reason I wanted to see you was that Lucy misses you so much, and I want to tell her all about you.”

“In a pig’s eye you do, Aunt Willa,” I thought, and said,

“I’m just fine. How is Lucy?”

This was what she had come for; I had, of course, been right. You could literally see her marshal her weapons and take aim. She dropped her lids so that the impossible lashes feathered on her cheeks, and let her pretty white hands turn palm up, helplessly, on the table, and paused a beat. Her voice, when it came, was low and freighted with a mother’s sorrow.

“I am deeply worried about my daughter, Shep. She is headed for heartache, and I wanted to ask your advice. You always did seem to be able to get through to her 368 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

when no one else could, and what daughter listens to her mama nowadays?”

She looked up with a rueful little smile. Mischief and forbearance danced in it. “Nice bit of business, Aunt Willa,” I said silently. Aloud I said, with such reluctance that my voice dragged with it, “What’s the matter with Lucy?”

“Lucy is about to get herself kicked out of Agnes Scott,”

Aunt Willa said, “and if she does, she can forget all about marrying Nunnally Chastain, because his father will cut him off without a red cent when it comes out why she did. And it will come out, Shep. You know how Lucy always manages to get herself talked about by the very people she ought to be cultivating.”

I grinned in spite of myself, hiding it behind a swallow of coffee. I did indeed know how Lucy drew talk as easily as she did eyes, and how little she cared about either, except as they might be used as weapons in the long guerrilla war with her mother. I knew, too, that whatever Lucy was up to at Agnes Scott that might get her expelled was of virtually no import to Aunt Willa, compared to its consequences: the loss of the inestimable social gloss that the name Chastain shed over everything and everyone it brushed. If it weren’t for the jeopardy in which it put that gloss and the money that spawned it, Willa Bondurant wouldn’t care if Lucy was mainlining heroin on the steps of Presser Hall.

“What’s she up to?” I said.

“Well, among other things, among
many
other things,”

Aunt Willa said, drawing a great vermilion mouth with a slim gold lipstick and deftly flicking a glob off a canine tooth,

“she has written an editorial in the little campus paper she edits about that horrible Martin Luther King and how he’s a new American saint, and several newspapers around the South have printed it. The
Constitution
had a headline that said, ‘Deb Defends Sit-PEACHTREE ROAD / 369

Ins: An Atlanta Princess Takes up the Flag of Freedom.’ Can you imagine? The
idea
! All over the South! And she’s not even a deb, strictly speaking, much less a princess. I tell you, I’ve heard nothing since the story ran but that; everybody’s laughing about it. Well, not everybody. Babs Rawson didn’t think it was a bit funny. She literally cut us dead at the Driving Club last week, and Little Lady was sitting right there
with Carter
!”

Well, I thought, of course, Lucy and the Negroes again.

It was the only thing left that raised Willa’s ire, and the only one likely, in these days, to inflame Buckhead enough to seriously threaten her clawed-out niche in its society. But surely…

“Surely they can’t be serious about expelling her from Scott for
that
,” I said. “My God, she’s been editor of that paper for both years she’s been there, and that’s unheard of for a freshman and sophomore. They must know what they have in Lucy. I thought her journalism and English grades were right at the top….”

“Oh yes, they are, but they’re the only ones that are,” Aunt Willa said. “She’s so close to flunking everything else she’s taking that I’ve had letters from every one of her teachers.

And then of course she’s broken every rule they’ve got in the book, and when they call her up before that what-do-you-call-it, judiciary thing, and punish her she just laughs and goes right on doing whatever she likes. Why, I got a letter only two days ago from the dean of women, and it said that Lucy could be one of the most vital voices—that’s what she said, vital voices—to speak out of the South in her time, she’s got such a gift for writing. But first, she said, she’s got to graduate, and the way she’s going, she’s not going to make it. I know what she means, of course. Lucy never studies.

She spends all her time with that Negro boy Ben Cameron is raising over there, that Glenn Pickens person. Now Ben’s sending him to col

370 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

lege, no less, down at that Negro school on the Southside, More-something—”

“Morehouse,” I said automatically.

“—Morehouse,” she went on, “and half the time Lucy’s down there with him, in meetings about civil rights and sitins and all that vulgar stuff. Why, last week there was some kind of sit-in over in South Carolina, and there was your cousin Lucy right in the middle of it, the only white face in all those black ones. Of course both papers got ahold of it and ran it!”

“Is Agnes Scott upset about that?” I asked doubtfully. I knew Scott to be conservative in the extreme when it came to its educational policies and the rules by which it bound its girls, but I did not think it could afford to take an official stance on such matters as the incendiary new civil rights movement. Scott shunned publicity of any sort. And then Sarah had said nothing about it, and I knew that Ben and Dorothy would have her out of there in a moment if the school spoke out against desegregation.

“They say not. They say it’s her grades, and her attitude about the rules she breaks,” Aunt Willa said. “But of course that’s it. And Farrell Chastain is plenty mad about it, let me tell you, and so are Babs and Bill Rawson.”

“What about Red?” I asked curiously. I knew that Red Chastain was an indolent and merciless bigot, but I also knew that he was about as politically aware as a dung beetle.

“Is Red mad at her, too?”

“Oh no, I don’t think so,” Aunt Willa said. “I gave in and let her start going up to visit him at Princeton, hoping it would keep her too busy to run around with the niggers”—her voice had slid up gradually into its wiregrass whine, and several heads turned toward her, but she did not notice. I felt myself redden, and wanted to disappear under the table—“but it doesn’t matter whether he is or not, because if Farrell Chastain lays the law down to PEACHTREE ROAD / 371

him, you can bet he’ll drop Miss Lucy faster than a rattlesnake, rather than lose all that money.”

“Well, and has she stopped?” I asked, genuinely curious.

I had never known Lucy to be either intimidated into dropping something she wished to do, or diverted from it.