Peachtree Road (65 page)

I smiled. Lucy had always loved Frost.

I propped myself up on one elbow, shivering in the cold, switched on the bedside lamp and opened the book. On the dedication page, I read, “To my father, James Clay Bondurant. We be of one blood, thou and I.” And on the title page, in Lucy’s slanting backhand, “Dear, darling Gibby: Mark my Trail!”

I laid the book back down on the table and turned the light off again, and rolled over, and scrubbed my face into the crook of my arm, and wept—for the diminished and doomed woman in the mountebank’s bed in the big house, and for the unwritten and unmourned books of Lucy Venable, and for the clean fingernails of Sarah Cameron Gentry.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

I
n Buckhead, when a titan falls, the rest of his kind draw close around, to shield the fallen one from predatory, alien eyes and claws and to succor the stricken family.

Or at least that was so in the Buckhead of my father’s time. Nowadays a felled member of the Old Guard would probably be lucky if three people of public consequence know his name. Today’s power brokers are several generations newer and often many shades darker than those of that whirlwind decade, and they tend to meet, lunch and network at places like Morton’s, Mary Mac’s and the Peasant Restaurant chain. Old Atlanta still does not lunch at these spots.

Hardly anyone cares that they do not, except, perhaps, a few of them.

And so it was that beginning the next morning, on Christmas Eve, the house on Peachtree Road was filled with the familiar faces and voices that had been the foundation of my entire childhood. From about eleven o’clock on they came, the men and women who had been my parents’ contemporaries and the fathers and mothers of the Pinks and the Jells, and, in smaller numbers, the Pinks and the Jells themselves.

All morning and afternoon Shem Cater answered the door and took hats and topcoats and parked and brought around cars, smiling decorously and wearing a white jacket I had never seen, and Martha, in the kitchen, kept coffee and cookies and little sandwiches and cheese straws coming, and at about four that afternoon, set out the sherry and bourbon and gin decanters on the tea cart in the living room. I don’t know where the food came from, or when they prepared it; I could only think that the black people of Buckhead had as keen a sense of ritual and propriety in these cases as did the PEACHTREE ROAD / 507

white, and probably keener. I know it had not once occurred to me to see to the basting of hams and the stocking of the liquor cabinet, and I did not think that my mother, embroiled as she had been with Ronnie of Rich’s in transforming her bedroom into an African veldt, had done so. My father’s wake—for I thought of it as such, even though he clung on and on to his blipping and blasted life in Piedmont Hospital—was entirely, and most properly, the province of Shem and Martha Cater.

My mother spent the day at the hospital, so I hovered uncomfortably in the living room in a coat and tie and received the stream of visitors. Across Peachtree Road in Garden Hills, they would have come bearing cakes and casseroles; on this side, they brought armfuls of forced blooms from greenhouses or great, showy, foilruffed poinsettias, and cards to be laid on the silver tray in the hall rotunda. From somewhere a chaste leather book for addresses had been produced, and sat on the table next to the card tray, and everyone signed their name as matter-of-factly as if it had been a funeral at Patterson’s. I suppose the Buckhead equivalent of the jungle drums had done their work, and all his contemporaries knew that when Sheppard Bondurant had collapsed on the golf course at Brookhaven, he had entered his own covenant with death, even if the fact of it had not yet occurred. Hub Dorsey was one of them. His prognosis would be known. It was, indeed, a death they came to mark.

I kissed the cold, sweet-smelling cheeks of the women, and shook the gray-gloved hands of the men, and looked at all of them with eyes sensitized by fatigue and circumstance.

The women seemed to me much the same, pretty and warm and elegant in their furs, smiling and moving easily in this house that they knew, as they did all the other great houses of Buckhead, nearly as well as their own. None of them called me Sheppie, but the

508 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

nickname was implicit in their hugs and soft “Sweetie, I
am
so sorry”s. There was not one of them who had not known me from infancy.

But the men were different. I could see and feel it vividly, I suppose because I had not seen many of them in literally years, and my eyes were fresh. These twenty or thirty men, the young fathers I remembered from Little League and high school football games and country club locker rooms and backyard swimming pools and gardens and verandas; these indulgent and paternal men who smiled knowingly when their wives fussed over their sons’ late hours and slipping grades and general hell-raising—they had come into their power, and banded together, and were poised to make their move, and something looked out of their eyes that I had never seen. They were the Club now, and they knew it, and soon the city and the Southeast would know it, and the young princelings who were their sons finally knew it, and knew, consequently, where their own power would one day lie.

All this I could sense as clearly as an animal senses the nearness of water in a dry month, though I could not have articulated it. I could read it in their faces and bearings, and in the manner of their sons, my friends, the Buckhead Boys.

I felt as alien from it all, as conspicuously alone and profoundly different, as if I were another species entirely.

Something altogether new and heady seemed to crackle in the firelit room, and seep outside into the cold air of the dying year, to reach out and pervade all Atlanta. Ben Cameron, coming in at midafternoon with young Ben behind him, was the newly elected mayor of the city and would take office in the new year, and underneath the grace and courtliness and seeming indolence which had always been his hallmark, I seemed to see and hear and taste the force that would resculpt the city’s skyline and rewrite its future. He was, in that PEACHTREE ROAD / 509

room, fulcrum and focus and funnel of the concentrated power of a generation. When he took my hand I half expected to see sparks fly between our flesh, and feel the bite of him.

Ben did not stay long. He greeted the small crowd in the living room, exchanged Merry Christmases, ducked into the kitchen to speak to Shem and Martha, as he always did, clapped me perfunctorily on the shoulder again and said,

“Anything we can do, Shep, of course. Don’t be a stranger.”

I knew that he meant the former. I was not sure about the latter. Ben and I had not spoken at any length since that night the previous June at the Plaza, just before Sarah came home from Paris. I knew that he was furious at me, but he had not betrayed that anger to me in the few brief meetings we had had since, and I wondered if it had abated. On the whole, I thought perhaps it had. Dorothy was as warm as she had ever been, though she did not discuss Sarah and Charlie, and Sarah herself seemed settled into her role as young Buckhead wife and volunteer worker. With his election and the revolutionary plans he and his set had for the city, I thought that Ben Cameron surely had more on his mind than the bumblings of Shep Bondurant. All the same, I caught his eyes on me several times during his visit, and they were as measuring and speculative as if I were a newcomer to the group. I felt obscurely uncomfortable under that sharp gray gaze, like a child or a dog who knows something is expected of it, but not what.

“Come by the house when you have a leg up on things,”

he said as he shrugged into his camel hair coat and took his felt hat from Shem. “We need to have a real talk.”

“I’ll do that,” I said, knowing that I probably would not.

I could not imagine what we might have, now, to talk about, except Sarah, and I did not think either of us 510 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

wanted to venture into that closed country. I would go and see Dorothy Cameron, but I would do it during a morning or afternoon when Ben was at work. The week after Christmas, before I left for Haddonfield, would be fine for that.

Somehow it was important to me that Dorothy know why I was not staying in Atlanta.

Young Ben lingered behind his father, and stayed in the living room drinking bourbon by the fire until the last visitors had gone home to their Christmas Eve dinners. When I came into the room after seeing the last caller off, he was standing at the drinks tray mixing another, and he lifted it in salute and dipped his narrow head, the dark red hair, cut longer than was in fashion, slipping down over his gray eyes. He retreated to one of the apricot sofas and sank into it and stretched his long legs out before him, crossed at the ankles.

He wore a pale blue cashmere sweater over an open-necked white oxford cloth shirt, and gray slacks precisely tailored to his long legs and slender hips, and his narrow dancer’s feet were shod in rich, buffed loafers. Except for the web of thin lines around his eyes and the incipient creepiness on the backs of his hands and his neck, he literally did not look a day older than he had in high school. I knew he had accomplished much, however; he was becoming known for the soaring, gull-winged single-family houses he was building in the wild hills and river bluffs of the city’s northwest suburbs, and was, my mother had told me, the chic young architect of the moment among the new money that was pouring into town.

Ben loved residential architecture, and had so far held out for that, but Snake Cheatham’s father was so taken with his design sense that he had talked Ben into designing one of his suburban branch banks, and the beautiful, winged stone and glass structure caused so much comment that Ben was at work now on preliminary designs for two more. The first had been featured in

PEACHTREE ROAD / 511

Architectural Digest
, and the calls were beginning to come in now from around the country. He was, my mother said, thinking of leaving the firm and going out on his own, but would make no decision about that until Julia had her baby.

Even with his obvious prospects and Ben Senior’s money behind him, Julia was, Mother reported, extremely nervous about Ben’s leaving an established firm to fly solo.

“I understand from Dorothy that they had a real row about it,” Mother had said, with some relish. I suppose that since her own son had little of note that she might boast of, it pleased her when the crown prince of the house of Cameron came a modest cropper in his marriage.

Ben and I sat in companionable silence for a little while, the dying fire snickering behind its screen, the tree beginning to glow in the unlit room. He finished his bourbon and put the glass down on the table beside the sofa.

“I have to get on home,” he said. “Julia’s folks are expecting us for supper. Her stepmother makes oyster stew every Christmas Eve, out of library paste and sheep’s milk, I think.

It’s a tradition.” But he made no move to get up.

Then he said, “You’re not going to stay, are you?” and I was so taken by surprise that I said, simply, “No. I’m not.”

“Good boy,” he said, and I looked at him more closely. It seemed to me then that he burned with the same kind of fever-shimmer I had seen on the day of his wedding, and that his gray eyes were so bright with it that if I had not been so close to him I would have mistaken their glitter for tears.

But he was not crying.

“How did you know?” I asked. I had not spoken of leaving Atlanta to Dorothy, or to anyone else for that matter.

512 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

“Because you’re like me now,” he said, closing his eyes and resting his head against the dull sheen of the brocade.

His coppery hair against the apricot, the firelight leaping on both, was beautiful. “You’re different. You walk on the outside. You wear the mark of Cain. There’s nothing for you here.”

“What mark of Cain?” I said, puzzled. Why did he speak of being an outsider, of being different? I could think of few human beings more fitted for the life of Buckhead than Ben Cameron, Junior.

“I don’t know. It sounded good.” He grinned, his eyes still closed. “But I’m right, aren’t I? Whatever there is for you is out there, isn’t it?”

He did not speak of Sarah, never had, but I knew what he meant.

“Yes,” I said. “I’m leaving the first of the year. But please don’t say anything about it. I’m going to have to climb out the window in the dead of night as it is. God, my mother…”

“I know,” he said. “They wrap you around and suck your life and pull you right down to the bottom, don’t they?”

Aside from the bitterness of the words, there was something old and dead in his voice that made me sit slightly forward at the same time I shrank back. I hated the sound of it. What was happening here?

“Go soon, Shep. And go fast and far,” he said, the gray eyes still shuttered with thick, coppery lashes. “Zigzag while you run and don’t look back. Bomb the bridge behind you.”

“Ben…” I began, and he grinned and heaved himself upright and rubbed his long, slender fingers through his hair.

“Sorry,” he said. “I’m just feeling elegiac tonight. I don’t like Christmas, and it makes me nervous to see my friends’

fathers start to die, and the baby’s late and everybody’s jumpy as hell. Christ, I think one minute I can’t PEACHTREE ROAD / 513

stand it until that kid gets here, and then I think I’d just as soon it never did. I don’t mean that, of course, but a baby…it’s so final, Shep. Nothing is ever the same after a baby comes. The…possibilities shrink so.”

“I guess it comes with the territory,” I said lamely. I could not imagine how it would feel to be going home on a Christmas Eve to a wife and a soon-to-be-born, life-changing child.

“That it does,” he said. He laughed. “That it does. Well.

This time I’m really out the door. Julia will be fit to be tied.

She can’t get out of her chair and into her clothes without help now, and it makes her mean as hell. I’ll have to get home and dress her.”

“How is Julia?” I said automatically. I thought of the small, wiry athlete’s body, and the adoring brown eyes and snub nose and tiny monkey hands of Julia Randolph Cameron. I could not imagine her foundering in a chair, unable to dress herself.