Peachtree Road (51 page)

If I am sorry for anything about my absence in those years, I am sorry about missing Atlanta as it spun into the orbit of Camelot.

It was about the time of Ben and Julia’s wedding that the calls from Lucy began. When the first one came, the week after I had gotten back to New York from Sarah’s graduation and Ben’s wedding, I thought at first that something calamitous had happened. It was five o’clock in the morning, past the hour when even the most dedicated drinkers of my circle would call to cajole me into going somewhere or providing a last one for the road, and I was fully awake and focused in every fiber when I picked up the receiver.

“Hello?” I said warily.

There was a rushing silence like you get on long distance, and then a deep inhalation of breath, and then PEACHTREE ROAD / 395

Lucy’s voice came, familiar and strange at once, borne out on the little sigh that I knew was exhaled smoke.

“Hey, Gibby,” she said. “It’s Lucy, honey.” From then on until her death, almost every telephone conversation we had began with that deep drag from the cigarette, and her throaty little “Hey, Gibby.”

“Lucy? What’s the matter?”

“Nothing’s the matter,” she said. Her rich, lazy drawl did not sound as though anything was. “What would be the matter?”

“Lucy, it’s five o’clock in the morning!”

“Oh, that’s right. You’re three hours ahead. I never will get used to that. It’s just two here. Did I wake you up?”

“Oh, no,” I said sarcastically, annoyance at her flooding in after the relief of finding that she was all right. “I had to get up to answer the phone anyway.”

She laughed, and that dark silk banner rolled across three thousand miles to me, and brought her into the room. I could see her boneless slouch, and the precariously lengthening ash on her cigarette, and the long legs propped up on whatever was at hand. California seemed as close as the next apartment.

“What’s going on with you, Gibby?” she said. “Tell me your news. Tell me about graduation, and Ben and Julia’s wedding.”

“Lucy, I could tell you all that at eight o’clock at night, or in broad daylight, just as well as dawn. What are you doing still up? I know you didn’t just get up, so you must not have gone to bed yet.”

She laughed again, and I heard the slight edge of unstable brilliance that liquor always gave her laugh.

“I’ve been to a party,” she said, “and everybody else has pooped out, and I’m not sleepy yet. Just bored. And all of a sudden I thought I’d like to hear your voice. It’s been a long time, Gibby.”

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“Only eight months, two weeks and four days,” I said. I might have been, on some level, relieved to have Lucy in other hands than mine, but I was still nettled by her long silence.

Word of her and Red had come fairly frequently from my mother, who got it from Aunt Willa, who in turn got it from Red’s meek, woebegone mother. His father had not spoken to him since he had left Princeton and married Lucy. I was exasperated by my mother’s calls, and at the creaminess of the ill-concealed satisfaction in her voice when she related the latest of Red and Lucy’s decidedly unmeteor-like odyssey, but I always listened. I had, I found, a deep and simple need to know where Lucy was.

On the morning after their wedding, after waking in an Ocean City motel room with a monstrous crimson hangover and a ravening thirst, Red had telephoned his father in Atlanta and, with a fine show of bravado, told him about the wedding and announced that he was bringing Lucy home for a visit before returning to Princeton, and that he thought a small celebratory party at the Driving Club might not be amiss.

“The next party you have is apt to be at the V.F.W. in wherever you are,” Farrell Chastain said, “because you aren’t getting one more red cent from me while I’m alive or after that, either. Whether or not you keep on at Princeton depends on how bad you want to wait tables or jerk sodas.”

Red did not think these were viable options. He asked to speak to his mother. He could hear her weeping in the background, and pleading to be allowed to talk to her son, but Farrell Chastain would not permit it. He hung up. When Lucy awoke, as badly incapacitated as her new husband, it was to learn that he had been turned away from his father’s door like her own father before him at
his
marriage, and that her bridge to the cloistered

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world of Peachtree Road and its great houses—the only one she had ever known—was blazing away merrily. Whether she met it with fear or panache I do not know, but it must have been a very had moment for her. She was, she must have realized, as neatly trapped as a rat in a cage, and that knowledge had always sent Lucy wild.

Red had then announced that he had always wanted to be a marine and enlisted within the hour at an Ocean City recruiting office, and they left at noon for Parris Island, South Carolina, in the white Jaguar that had been Farrell’s high school graduation present to his son. Between them, they had fifty-five dollars and fourteen cents. When he wired his bank in Princeton for funds, Red discovered that his father had closed his account, and a furtive phone call home at an hour when he knew his father would be at work yielded only the two hundred-odd dollars that his mother had in her household account. She promised, still sobbing, to wire it as soon as they let her know where they would be living, or Lucy would be. Red would live on base in conditions he had not known existed. Given their combined assets, Lucy’s first married home was the Flamingo Motel, located two miles outside the base on a pitted two-lane blacktop road, backed by a savage, mosquito-spawning low-country marsh. The Flamingo did not have a pool. It did not even have air-conditioning. By the time Red’s first paycheck came and she found a tiny cinder block efficiency apartment in nearby Beaufort, she was welted all over with festering bites, and had dropped six pounds from her elegant greyhound’s body.

There had followed, for Red, boot camp, officer candidate school at Quantico, Virginia, an invitation to the elite and dangerous Army Ranger School at Fort Benning, and finally, a tour of duty as a second lieutenant at Camp Pendleton, California. For the spoiled and indolent son of a very rich man, Red took to it all like a pintail to 398 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

water. Whatever recessive outlaw genes underlay his smiling, sleepy rages and scarlet lapses into brutality came surging to the fore during the grueling hours of basic training and the stylized savagery of ranger training, and Red at last found his level. It was not nearly so refined as the one he had occupied for the first twenty-one years of his life, but the constant adrenaline high of danger and mastery and the small, select society of his murderous peers more than made up for the loss of creature comforts and privilege his father’s money had bought him.

Red found that he was as good at being a golden killing machine as he had been at being a rich boy. And he liked it a great deal more. It gave him a focus and a license that all the civilian years of his life had not. By the time he was twenty-four years old he was as totally assimilated into his new persona and world as if he had been born to it, and Lucy hung there with him, a silver and ebony fly in an elite and lethal amber.

I don’t know precisely how her new life was for her, or what she thought about it. As she had done with the hated little girls’ school when she was small, she refused to talk to me about those first months as a marine bride, traipsing from South Carolina swamp to sun-blasted Georgia plain and finally to that barren Quonset hut on the high ocean plains of southern California, scoured by the merciless sun and punished by the Santa Ana winds. She never did, to my knowledge, tell anyone about them and her silence spoke for itself. To sensitive, imaginative Lucy Bondurant, quivering with life and terror and bravado and vulnerability like a tuning fork, uprooted from the only refuge she had ever known and the few friends and family who were all she had; no longer the devil-may-care, supremely desirable will-o’-the-wisp who tormented and titillated a generation of sweating Jells, but now merely a thin, mosquito-bitten second lieu PEACHTREE ROAD / 399

tenant’s wife at the rock bottom of the Marine Corps social pecking order, it must have truly been what her silence proclaimed it to be—unspeakable. But there was nothing of that in her voice during that first telephone call, and it was only much later that I began to think what indeed her first year as Mrs. Nunnally Chastain must have been like.

“Why don’t you wake up Red and party with him?” I said on that June night in 1960, when the first call came. “As I recall, he was always in the forefront of the better parties of our generation.”

“Red’s been out for two weeks slithering through the swamps with a knife between his teeth, garroting rattlesnakes and blowing up yuccas,” she said, giggling, and the liquor flashed in the giggle, too. “He’s in training to overthrow Cleveland.”

“Then who were you partying with?” I asked.

“His C.O.,” she chortled. “Perfectly adorable little old Texas boy named Rafer Hodges. Captain Rafer Hodges, U.S.M.C.

Seven feet tall and towheaded as a yard dog, and with a tattoo that says ‘Semper Fi.’ I’m not going to tell you where it is. Only his platoon and his wife and I know that.”

“And where was this wife?” I asked carefully. This sounded like more trouble. I did not know why I was surprised.

“At home polishing his saber, I guess, or sleeping the sleep of the just. Where she said she was going when she stormed out of the officers’ club after old Rafer danced with me for the fourth time straight. She really pulls rank, Gibby. Six other senior wives toddled right out behind her. What the hell, it just left that many more marines to party with. And I out drank them all. Think of it, Gibby, I drank seven marines under the table in one night!”

“Lucy, you are going to absolutely fry yourself with 400 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

those women if you don’t watch it,” I said despairingly. “You can’t behave in the service like you did at home. You’ll be an outcast and Red’s career will be down the drain. You must know that. Is that what you’re trying to do, wreck him with the marines?”

“Oh, shit, Gibby, you’re still a prick, aren’t you?” she said, sullen now. “Those women were squiffed to the eyeballs themselves. I’ll be good from now on, and charm their pants off them, and they’ll forget it in no time.”

“Tell me something,” I said. “Why are you drinking so much?”

“Because,” she said, “it makes everything special.”

“Luce, you haven’t even been married a year. You shouldn’t have to drink for things to be special. Even if you hate the life out there, there’s Red; you don’t hate Red. My God, you went with him for five years before you married.

You must love him.”

“Red’s changed,” she said briefly.

“How?” I asked, not wanting to hear it. Those dark fingerprints…

“Oh…I don’t know. No way and every way, really.

He’s…totally absorbed in the rangers; sometimes he doesn’t even come home when he could. He and some of the other guys will go out for days at a time into the desert, with just knives and a couple of matches, and come back stinking and filthy and drunk and happy as larks. And he doesn’t much want to party and dance at the club anymore, and you know how he used to love that…but mainly, Gibby, it’s just that he doesn’t understand me. I know now that he never did.”

I could have told you that five years ago, I did not say.

“You’re not the easiest gal in the world to understand,” I said instead.

“You understand me, Gibby,” she said softly. “You always did.”

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Presently she hung up, and I lay there in the bleached, clamorous New York dawn, troubled, trying to imagine the truth of Lucy. Later, I put it together: The absences from the meager base housing, more and more frequent, longer and longer, while Red slipped into that literal country of lost boys, the U.S. Rangers. Later, the tours of sea duty, long months on end. Lucy left behind, knowing no one but marine wives, who disliked and distrusted her for her beauty, her high spirits, her Southern exoticism and the dangerous shoals of mischief and more than mischief they sensed just below her vibrant surface. Their husbands and their husbands’ superiors, much taken with her reckless dash and splendid looks, and in some cases downright smitten, but sensing in Lucy Bondurant Chastain the stuff of reprimands and toppled careers. A few disastrous evenings at the officers’ club in which she drank too much, flirted too brazenly, slipped outside with too many crew-cut young officers. A few equally disastrous teas and receptions in which she wore outrageously provocative clothing and said “shit” in the hearing of wives much her senior. And so she found herself a literal pariah, on that hot and unimaginable coast, alone both in her home and away from it. And the phone calls to New York, over the course of that hot summer, began in earnest.

The pattern was always the same: the late-night burr of the telephone, the deep, in drawn breath as the dragged comfortingly on her cigarette, and then her voice spinning across the country to me, rich and low and thick with all our shared history: “Hey, Gibby. It’s Lucy, honey.”

And there would follow the gleeful recounting of her latest escapade, and what she had said to whom in the commissary, and how she had that fool of a captain lifting bumpers out in the officers’ club parking lot, and how she had shocked that old trout, the rear admiral’s

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wife. She was usually drunk, and always, under the glee and high spirits, there ran a litany, a near frantic dirge, of loneliness and something more, something high and silvery and skewed. The calls came closer and closer together, and by the end of the summer they were coming almost every night.

About the middle of August the tales of Red Chastain’s drunken and abusive behavior toward her began, and she would sometimes sob plaintively over the telephone, frankly drunk herself more often than not, and began to beg me to come out to Pendleton and rescue her.

After each of the first of these calls I had called her back the next morning, when she was clearheaded and sober, and each time she laughed her warm, infectious laugh and told me not to pay any attention to her, she couldn’t hold her liquor worth a damn anymore. So I did not, after a while, worry quite so frantically about her, and listened to the next call with a reasonable amount of skepticism. But the calls continued, and each time she sounded so genuinely frightened, and so desperate, that fear for her and rage at Red would come flooding back, and I would find myself in the same old stew of Lucy-begotten agitation I had simmered in for much of my life.