Authors: Anne Rivers Siddons
Peachtree Road (76 page)
Clean, radiant light…” But there was no light here.
Firemen and police had been at work for twenty-four hours, and the wreckage had been raked over and over again after the bodies had been loaded into mortuary vans and taken away; sifted for the burned memento 592 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS
mori that would aid in identification. The huge tail section, towering four stories into the air, stood intact, a great, ungainly space-age stele. Below it, strewn over the burned earth, chunks of twisted and fused metal were the plane’s unidenti-fiable vitals, molten and bright as viscera in spots where the soot and char had been knocked off. The four engines were recognizable, but they had been blown so far apart that they were without context on that silent, black plain. Beyond the blackness the little town of Villeneuve le Roi, which the pilot had managed to spare, lay dreaming in the sun. Birds chirped and the knots of people behind the guards’ cordons talked in low voices, staring at the first of the clansmen come from America to bear home their dead, but sound seemed to stop and fall to earth at the edge of the blackness. It was as if that great scar was inimical to any offering from the living. Beside me, her feet scrunching in ashes, Lucy whispered over and over, “We be of one blood, thou and I.” Her hand was cold and tight in mine, and I do not think that she knew what she whispered; it was like a child’s mindless and comforting little incantation. Ahead of me, Ben and Hinton Drexel said nothing at all as they walked. Carter Stephenson scribbled in a small notebook.
We were ankle-deep in those hundred-odd lives. Personal objects were as thick in the rubble and ashes as hailstones after a storm. Most were half-burned and so blackened that it was useless to probe them, but many were recognizable, piercing, incongruous, icons not of death, but of stubborn, unquenchable life. Guidebooks, menus, ashtrays, wallets, traveler’s checks, a French doll bought for a child who would never hold it, and incredibly unbroken bottle of fine champagne, an Athens, Georgia, Rotary Club flag, a silver-knobbed cane, a gold evening slipper, scraps of tulle and velvet, an intact brocade shawl. Ben reached over and picked up the cane and
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the shawl. I could see that tears ran down his face, but it was still.
“This is Wynn Farrell’s cane,” he said, in a thin, old voice.
He was not speaking to anyone in particular. “It was his father’s, and his grandfather’s before that, I think. Wynn didn’t need the damned thing, but he took it everywhere with him. Said it made him feel like Maurice Chevalier. And this is Elizabeth Carling’s shawl. I’ve seen her in it a hundred times, on cool nights, at the club or at parties. Dear Jesus, none of us are going to get over this.”
“Light,” I said to myself, half-aloud. “Clean, radiant light…”
After a while the objects stopped making any sense to me and might have been clods of earth, or stones, and I was no more affected by them than I might have been by anonymous outcroppings in some ancient lava field. I had been far more moved by the crumbling manuscripts that I ferried in my cart in the tunnels beneath the New York Public Library. When at last we left that sunstruck, silent charnel field and headed in the limousines into Paris for lunch, I found that I was quite hungry.
Lucy did not go with us to the morgues to look at the dead.
In the end, she did not even ask to go. Ben had our driver drop her, along with Carter Stephenson and the obviously smitten young man from the American embassy, at the excellent and anonymous small hotel near the embassy where rooms were held for us, and she said only, getting out of the car on the arm of the young man, “Remember, Gibby. We be of one blood….”
Even when I met her in the dark little hotel bar afterward, and we drank steadily through the dinner hour and into the evening, and there was ample time and opportunity for her to do so, she did not ask about that afternoon, and she never did in her life. By that time, after so many hours in my company and the invisible
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company of the dead, I am sure that she simply, as she always had, knew. It was, that full and silent knowing, almost her best gift to me.
Ben and Hinton Drexel and their party went to all five morgues that afternoon. After the first one, I waited in the limousine. It was not that I was shocked or sickened or near collapse; it was that after the first one I knew that any more searching of the dead faces was futile. It would not be by sight that they were identified, and it would not be that day or that week, or even, probably, for many weeks. My presence seemed, suddenly, an unbearably boorish and brutal intrusion. If my mother lay in the morgue that I visited, I did not know it, and if she lay in one of the others, no one of us could have told. The bodies, severe and formal in proper white sheeting and chilled into antiseptic stasis in the cold rooms, were hardly defaced. In most cases the hair had not even been burned off. The skin had simply been browned a taut, shellacked yellow-brown, almost the precise shade of centuries-old mummies, so that identification was impossible.
I walked with Ben among the smiling brown dead of Atlanta in that first morgue and saw nothing that had to do with life and living; life had been closer out on that silent, terrible plain, under the new summer sun. Ben stayed behind to look over the personal effects that had been taken from the bodies while I went back out to the limousine and sat down in the backseat. The middle-aged driver asked me something in rapid, nasal French, and when I simply shook my head, handed me a small aluminum glass of brandy, and I drank it, thinking with an insane peevishness that I would have to surrender the now-familiar image that my mind had kept, of my mother with her hair in flames, and in its place try to fix a new one of my mother with the hard ocher face of a millenniums-dead Egyptian princess.
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Ben and Hinton Drexel went back to their rooms to begin the long, awful business of telephoning the families back in Atlanta, and Carter Stephenson went to file his stories, and Lucy and I drank through the fabled
l’heure bleu
of Paris and into its cool, late-falling night. We held hands but we did not talk much. We did not get drunk. Neither of us mentioned dinner, nor did we speak of what we both knew: that there was nothing more for us in Paris, and that we would arrange the next day to go home. I do not think that either of us felt the trip had been useless. I know that I felt, obscurely but deeply, that some unnamed and unknowable but essential thing had been accomplished, and I have been grateful all the years since that I went, and that Lucy went with me.
But I felt just as strongly that we must not linger in Paris.
By tacit agreement, we both rose from our table at about nine o’clock and went upstairs in the little scrolled, iron-caged lift to our adjoining rooms. She did not ask me if I wanted to talk for a while, or needed company; she simply kissed me on the cheek and said, “’Night, Gibby,” and unlocked her door and went in, closing it behind her. I undressed and got into bed, tired beyond thought and nearly beyond feeling, and waited for sleep.
But it did not come. Nothing did. For what seemed like an eternity I lay in the dark, aware of everything and nothing, the very air seeming textured and heavy against my naked flesh, as empty and cool as a grape skin.
Around midnight, Ben Cameron rapped softly on the door and then pushed it open, and I realized that I had forgotten to lock it. He came in and sat down on the edge of my bed as Sarah had done, incredibly, only thirty-six hours before.
“Are you asleep?” he said, and when I said no, he reached out and turned on the little bedside lamp. He was so drawn that the skin of his face looked like crumpled tissue paper, but he was smiling.
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“I just had a call from home,” he said. “Sarah had a little girl this afternoon at four-seventeen. She and the baby are just fine. She wanted me to tell you. And she wanted me to tell you that they’re naming her Olivia Redwine Gentry…because she wants your mother’s name to go on.
She asked me to tell you that.”
“Thank you, Ben,” I said.
“I brought this back for you, too,” he said. “They had it in storage at the third…place we went. I’m pretty sure it’s your mother’s, and I thought you might want to keep it. We know where she is, now, Shep, and we can bring her home for you. She wasn’t…she was unmarked.”
He put a small object onto the bedside table and got up and left the room, closing the door behind him. I reached over to the table. He had put a shoe there, a narrow, stiletto-heeled evening pump of the sort that I had seen a hundred times before, in my mother’s closet or on her narrow feet as she left for a party. She had them custom made in New York and sent to her, and they had her monogram embroidered in gold thread in the inside lining. This one was blackened on the outside, but the satin lined inside was unsullied, and I saw it there, in intricate script: ORB. Olivia Redwine Bondurant.
I turned off the light and sat holding my mother’s shoe in my hand, and then, finally, in the heavy darkness, I wept, aloud and hard and painfully, like an utterly inconsolable child, not for what lay in the third morgue of Paris, but for what had laughed and danced in the beautiful, foolish shoe and for the hopeful best that would live on, now, in the name of Sarah’s first born. I cried until I thought my chest would burst with the anguish; I could not stop; the tears poured and pounded on. I remember thinking, for the first time in my life, that it was possible to simply die of tears.
Sometime that night—I do not know when—Lucy came into the room and slipped into the bed with me.
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She was naked, and her body was long and light and silken and cool, and she pressed it around and against and under and over me, and her warm, sweet open mouth was against my face and hair and cheeks and eyelids and nose, and finally over my mouth, so that I sobbed directly into the breath of her, and then, simply and with a deep, deep flowering, she took me inside her, and rocked with me to a beat as old and deep and primal as the world, and was Lucy was Sarah was Lucy was Sarah was Lucy was my mother was Sarah was Lucy, was the world, was the universe…and all that I had not felt budded and bloomed and swelled and burst loose and roared through me and she took it into herself, and I was freed.
We flew home to Atlanta the next day, and we did not speak of that night directly, then or ever. When she told me three months later on a day of high honey sun up at Tate, where she and Jack and I had gone for the weekend, that she was pregnant, and I said, “Lucy, is it…?” she only shook her head.
“I don’t know,” she said.” “I honestly and truly don’t know and never will, Gibby. It could just as easily be Jack’s, and if it isn’t he’ll never know it.”
And I had to be content with that, because she seemed so.
But when, in March of 1963, her daughter was born in Piedmont Hospital, in the middle of a three-day ice storm, and I asked the baby’s name, there was something more than pride and love for that tiny, perfect girl child in her luminous blue eyes when she said, “Malory. Her name is Malory Bondurant Venable.”
F
rom the very beginning, Lucy’s bond with her daughter was an extraordinary thing. I did not imagine it; everyone spoke of it. Aunt Willa, every inch the doting Buckhead grandmother, said, “I swear, that child is listening to Lucy. Look at those eyes following her.” And Jack, leaning back exultantly in his chair in the summerhouse living room on the night of Malory’s birth, said, “It’s like looking at two mirror images facing each other. Or twins of some kind. Those identical blue eyes staring at each other with such intensity you can almost see the sparks jumping between them. And the sounds the baby makes when Lucy talks to her. Like she understands, and talks back. Lucy says she does. I swear to God, Shep, I love my boys, of course I do, but I never felt anything quite like the feeling I have for that little girl. It’s almost out of the same piece of what I feel for Lucy. Tell me, really…did you ever see such a beautiful baby?”
“No,” I said. “I never did. Of course, you could count the babies I’ve seen on the fingers of one hand. But she does seem prettier than it’s right for a baby to be.”
“Thank God she takes after Lucy,” he said, swallowing his scotch. His doughy face was flushed, and softer than I had seen it since the first days of his marriage to Lucy; somehow boy like, despite the thinning white hair and fine-etched lines.
“I’d hate to pass the Venable puss on to a little girl. But Malory is pure Bondurant.”
I kept my face still over the queer pang in my chest. I would have to get used to that momentary sweet-sick heaviness, I thought, for Malory Venable was indeed pure Bondurant, though it was more the Bondurant-ness that looked out of Lucy’s eyes and the eyes in her treasured old photographs of her father, than mine. I
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thanked God for that, even though an infinitesimal part of me felt an obscure disappointment. After all, I decided, what did it matter? Malory Venable was blood of my blood, to one degree or another, and I had the license, at least, of doting cousin to excuse my enthrallment. For like everyone else who saw her in her first days of life, I fell to tiny Malory Venable without a shot’s being fired.
I saw her on the afternoon of her birth, before anyone besides Jack and Aunt Willa did. Lucy had left instructions that I was to be admitted as family, and so, when I came into her hospital room on that brilliant afternoon of crystal ice-chaos, she was alone with the baby, banked and bowered in flowers and bathed in the first of the returning sun, Malory sucking sleepily at her blue-veined breast. I felt my face go hot at the sight of her translucent, remembered flesh, but I am sure she did not notice. Lucy, that day, was afire with rapture.
We looked at each other over the baby’s silky dark head for a long moment, and then she said softly, “Oh, Gibby, look. Just look at her.”
I walked over and kissed Lucy on the cheek, and smelled the fresh, milky smell of new baby over her Tabu, and my eyes prickled. I could not, for some reason, look full at the baby.
