Lucy came to live with us in the house on Peachtree Road when she was five and I was seven, and before that April day was over I learned two things that altered almost grotesquely the landscape and weather of my small life. I learned that not all women wept in the nights after the act of love.
And I learned that we were rich.
That those tidbits of information should literally change a world seems perhaps a bit strange now, when children of seven digest with equanimity the daily disclosure of the sexual peccadilloes of politicians and television evangelists and the felonious traffic in billions by arbitragers and governments. But the Buckhead and Atlanta of that day were infinitely smaller principalities than now, and my own cosmos within them was minuscule. I literally had nothing with which to compare my life, and so assumed, in the manner of cloistered only children, that everything and everybody else was as we were.
I knew that my mother cried at night after having intercourse with my father, because I had slept since my infancy in a small room that had been intended as the dressing room for my parents’ bedroom, and I could hear clearly each muffled grunt and thrust of that mute and furious coupling, each accelerating squeal of bedsprings, each of my father’s grudging, indrawn breaths. From my mother I heard nothing during the act, but each time, without fail, that he finished with a snort and began to snore, her weeping would start, and I would lie, muscles stiff and breath held with dread and unexamined fury, waiting for her to stop. I knew precisely how long she would cry, and when the weeping would cease on a deep, rattling sigh, and when the traitorous springs would creak once more as she turned over into sleep, and only then would I unknot my fists and let myself slide into sleep, following her.
I cannot ever remember wondering what it was that they did in the nights that occasioned the strange hoarse cries, and the alien weeping—for at all other times my mother was one of the most self-possessed women I have ever known. I knew what transpired in their bedroom from the time I could barely walk, though I had no name for the act until Lucy came, and even then only the shadowiest notion of its import. My mother never closed the door between our rooms, and never allowed my father to close it, and for a few weeks and months when I was about two and had just learned to wriggle over the bars of my crib and toddle to the threshold of their bedroom, I watched that darkling coupling.
It must have frightened me to see the two great titans of my existence grappling in murderous silence on the great canopied tester bed, but I never ran into the room and never cried out, and I do not know to this day whether they knew I was there. How they could have avoided at some time or other raising their heads to see my small, stone-struck figure silhouetted in the sickly glow from my Mickey Mouse night-light I cannot imagine, but neither of them ever gave the smallest sign, and I would hang there night after night, a small Oedipal ghost haunting in despair a chamber where he was not acknowledged.
After a time I stopped going to the door to watch, and soon was no longer afraid, but I never slept until they were done, and I never lost the feeling of violation that the sounds gave me, or the resulting bile-flood of guilty rage at them. Even then, something cool and infinitesimal deep within me knew that I was being burdened and exploited as no child should be. Oddly, it was never at my father that the jet of my little fury was directed, but at my mother. He was a massive, tight, furiously simple, red and white-blond man who vented his considerable tempers and passions directly, whenever and wherever they happened to erupt. As useless to feel rage at him as at a volcano, or a broken water main.
No, it was my mother, the cool, slender, exquisite and infinitely aware vessel for his passions, at whom my anger steamed. It seemed to me that no one so totally self-defined and perceived and carefully calibrated as my mother should allow anything done to her person that would cause weeping, and I was angry at her both for the tears and for making me listen to them. But since my parents were all there was, for practical purposes, to my world, and since I loved my mother and feared my father passionately, I neither admitted the anger nor shut the door. I simply moved, for the first seven years of my life, in a dark and decaying stew of unacknowledged sexuality and anger, and neither cursed the darkness nor thought it out of the ordinary until Lucy Bondurant blew it away on a gust of her extraordinary laughter. On the surface, to the rest of the small society in which I moved, I must have appeared the most unremarkable and ordinary of small boys.
It was for the same reason that I did not know we were rich: There was nothing and no one who appeared different from us Bondurants in the entire sphere of my existence, and where there is no concept of poor, neither can there be one of rich. There were, of course, Shem and Martha Cater, who lived over the old stable-turned-garage behind the house and worked in the kitchen and pantry and drove the Chrysler and answered the door and sometimes served meals in the big dining room when people came to dinner, and there was Amos, who worked in the yard, and Lottie, who came in to cook, and Princess, who brought the hand laundry, fragrant, silky, and still warm, in a rush basket.
And there were the dark men and women who worked in the houses and gardens and drove the cars and served the dinners of the few other families in the big houses on and just off Peachtree Road to which I had ingress—as familiar to me as anyone else in my world, known to me by first names as were my few small friends. I knew that these dark people were not like us and did not live as we did, but I did not think of them as poor. I thought of them as Negroes. The one had nothing to do with the other. I liked them, many of them, as well as my own friends, and much better than the white adults, for they neither asked of nor gave to me anything; did not in any way remark me, except as a not disagreeable part of the furnishings of that beautiful and insular and ridiculous fiefdom in which they served.
I knew about poor in the abstract; poor was the starving children in, for some reason, Albania, whom my mother bade me consider whenever I did not eat my dinner. But I did not know where Albania was and neither, I don’t think, did my parents, or at least my mother, for once, when I asked, over the cooling drumstick of the chicken that had only that morning flopped hysterically around in the backyard after Shem had hatcheted off its head, where Albania was, my father laughed his loud and mirthless laugh and jerked a stubby red finger at my mother and said, “Ask your mother. She thinks it’s down south there just past Griffin. Got kinfolks there that she’s never seen because her papa didn’t think they were fit for her to know.”
My mother, who had been born and raised the doted-upon, joyless and Christ-haunted only daughter of an unworldly and comparatively wealthy man and his pale effigy of a wife in tiny Griffin, Georgia, thirty miles safely to the southeast of Atlanta, where the Redwine family’s downtown slum real estate holdings lay, smiled sunlessly at him.
“Your papa is being funny,” she said. “Albania is in Europe and they’re poor because they’re oppressed and conquered.”
“Who oppressed them?” I asked.
“Soldiers. The army,” my mother replied.
“But what army?” I persisted. Like all children of ordered worlds, I was starved for drama, and this had the authentic ring of it.
“Yes, Olivia, what army? Tell us,” my father said, grinning his angry wolf’s grin.
“Tell us, tell us,” I chimed, light-headed in relief and gladness that the grin was not directed at me.
“It was…their own army,” my mother said decisively. “It was a civil war. Like our own poor South suffered, brother against brother. The worst kind of war, the worst kind of suffering. Albania is as desperately poor as Atlanta and the South were once. That chicken on your plate would feed a family of Albanians for a week.”
“Why don’t we send it to Albania then?” I said, choking with the appreciation of my own wit.
“Albania is not on your mother’s list of charities,” my father said. “Don’t have a ball or an auxiliary or a fashion show to their name. Not on the Junior League’s roster or the Driving Club’s calendar.”
My mother rose from the table with that peculiar boneless, amphibian grace of hers that always reminded me of a salamander or a newt or something wet and flashing beneath the surface of water, and left us sitting sheathed in the ice of her disapproval.
“I think both of you are coarse,” she said, not turning her head. She was not just talking. She meant it. “Coarse” was the worst epithet in my mother’s strictured vocabulary, and I spent a great deal of my early childhood struggling against the vast natural coarseness rampant in my nature.
I was, I remember, profoundly ashamed of my bowel movements and my frequent thin and reflexive vomitings and asthmatic gaggings, because she would leave the room and summon Martha Cater to attend to me in my disgusting state, and though she never said as much, her sighs and silence were freighted with the implicit blight of “coarse.”
My father grinned at her departing back, but I did not. Flinty comfort though she might have been to me, my mother was the artery that connected me to life. My friends, some of them, like Sarah and Ben Cameron around the corner and down Muscogee Avenue, had parents different from mine, laughing young parents who sang and danced and spun them around and hugged them in public, but I merely thought those other parents a caprice of nature, or the luck of the draw, like blue eyes instead of brown ones, or freckles. It did not occur to me to aspire to them. Olivia Redwine Bondurant was all I knew personally of nurturing. I ate the chicken.
My father was right, though; we were not a family long on noblesse oblige. Perhaps our noblesse had been too recently acquired, even by Atlanta standards, to feel the need for oblige. It is an oversimplification, but a serviceable one, that in the Atlanta of that day there were basically two types of gentry: those involved in acquiring largesse and those involved in expending it. Some, like the families of Dorothy and Ben Cameron, Sarah and young Ben’s parents, were the latter; their families had, for three generations, been deeply involved in the fortunes and lives of the city, and their sense of privilege as a vehicle for service ran deep and strong. The Bondurants were the former.
I could not articulate it then, of course, but our house, beautiful and graceful though it was, was a house of delicate skewedness and aberration. Too many reined passions thrummed there, too many unfed hungers, too many unvoiced fears and unmet needs and marrow-deep repressions. My parents were not clever or active or happy people; did not fit foursquare into the world they had achieved with Redwine money and land and Bondurant guile and acumen. Neither was a native Atlantan, and though there were, in their set, relatively few of those, still, neither Olivia nor Sheppard Bondurant ever felt quite comfortable in the huge house that had been their entree. They did not wear their mantles of aristocracy, such as they were, naturally and lightly, for they were purchased garments and not heirloom ones, and my mother, at least, never forgot that. She, who might have reigned supremely and effortlessly back in tiny Griffin, had painstakingly scaled the pinnacle of the uppity city to the north, and she clung there in faultlessly concealed terror which had, early on, turned her rigid.
My father, who had been as a boy sublimely content and at home in the rough, hard-drinking, hunting and fishing masculine society that formed Fayetteville, Georgia’s, small upper crust, was perpetually clumping and red-wristed and truculent in the urban clubs and drawing and dining rooms, which he perceived as effete. She came to think that she had married beneath her and that the vitality and exuberance that had first won her had become the barnacles that weighted her heart and slowed her trajectory through the society of Atlanta. He came to feel that the delicacy and distance and sheen of family substance that had so charmed him had been forged into the weapons with which she cut him off from his kind and kept him isolated at politely hostile club dances and bridge evenings and benefit dinners. She had brought a considerable family fortune to their marriage as a dowry, and with part of it he had bought the house on Peachtree Road and the rural property to the west and north of the city which, coupled with the wretched downtown holdings her family had bequeathed to her, had increased that fortune nearly tenfold. She thought he had used her shamelessly, and he thought she scorned and failed to appreciate him. Both were right on all counts.
That no one else who knew them perceived them as the misfits they secretly felt themselves to be—for no one around them was introspective or sensitive enough to do so—did not occur to them, and would not have mattered if it had. Their distortions were interior ones, and they lived inwardly to those crooked measures. It was inevitable that from the beginning, I would be what my mother called Sensitive (always seeming to speak the word in capital letters) and my father called sissy.
“You’re going to make a goddamned preacher of him, Olivia,” he would bellow, when he found me totally immersed in reading my way through the Bible, not comprehending that it was the glorious, plumtasting language of King James and not the precepts contained within that drew me to the Good Book. I did know this, faintly, but could not, in the presence of all that red-faced congestion, explain it, and he would stump away into his study, muttering over his shoulder to my mother: “Always coughing and squinting and fumbling when he tries to play football. Puking up his guts when he tries to put a worm on a hook. Howling like a hound when I put him on a horse. Hell, he can’t even keep up with little Sarah Cameron playing kick the goddamn can, and she’s not knee-high to a grasshopper. He’s never going to have any gumption if you let him keep his nose stuck in a book like that.”
“He’s Sensitive, that’s what he is, Sheppard,” my mother would say, brushing the lank comma of white-blond hair that was my father’s legacy to me off my forehead, and exposing the hated glasses with the flesh-colored plastic rims. By the time I could read she had given up being disgusted at my bodily functions and had become passionately, breath-suckingly protective. “You wouldn’t know about sensitivity, of course, but it’s what makes my daddy the man he is, and I prize it in my son more than anything in the world.”
I would stare elaborately and sensitively into the pages of the Bible, not looking at my father, but inside I was smirking openly. I would have, then, bought my beautiful mother’s approbation with any coin available to me.
It’s funny about love: I can see now, looking back on the child that I was, that it was love that I needed more than anything in the world. Unconditional, eternal, immovable love. Of course it was. Her love mostly, but at that point, anybody’s would have served. But I don’t think I ever sought it. I waited instead for it to come and blow me across the face of the world. And it did not come until Lucy did. That was always her best gift to me, her primary health and her strength—that tornado of love and approval. And it was in the withholding of it that my mother both cursed me and stamped me forever hers. I still wonder if she could have possibly known what she was doing.
Both of my parents were right about me. I was both sensitive and a physical coward, being possessed, as many precocious only children are, of a soaring and vivid imagination that could illuminate in excruciating clarity the scope and detail of all the dangers the world was fraught with. I was also, like Lucy, that most vulnerable and creative of creatures, a total realist, and, I suppose, a pretty perceptive one. Those qualities enabled me to see all the perils of my world and know them for precisely what they were. It did not make me a comfortable child to be around, for adults or most of the other children I knew. Most children are one-celled and barbaric little sentimentalists, and can sense otherness and know it for the alien thing it is, even if they cannot comprehend it. This did not leave me friendless, but it left me essentially without peers, and the only two close friends I had at that time—Pres Hubbard, who was lame from a bout of infant polio and wore a clanking leg brace, and Charlie Gentry, who had childhood diabetes—were the only two among us who shared the sideline with me. Unlike me, they both had gumption aplenty, but could not exercise it. I was content that my handicap was in my spirit, as my father contended, as long as it excused me from the world of terrifying proper boys’ activities he envisioned for me.
But still, I castigated myself bitterly and endlessly, if silently, for failing to like most of the things my companions did and for failing to please the great masculine elemental who towered and roared over my childhood like red Cronus over the embryo world. And dimly, dimly, I felt the lapping of a futile rage at my mother, who had so early doomed me to be Sensitive, and at my father, who would not, perhaps could not, rescue me from her. And hated and feared that rage, and felt the guilt of it festering in my soul like shrapnel. It was not, for a child, the most nurturing of worlds, even in its unabashed privilege.
But oh, the seductiveness, the symmetry, the immutability, the sheer, heart-drugging beauty of that world! Especially in those days before it became chic and accessible and throttled with traffic and roving schools of the upscale, pleasure-bent young, Buckhead was one of the most beautiful places on earth. Oh, not the business district, such as it was; it was then, as it is now, a random, jury-rigged and jerry-built shamble of small shops and businesses, banks and offices, loading docks and parking lots, drugstores and cafés and service stations and a few banal brick government edifices, webbed and festooned with electric and telephone lines and wires and an eye-smiting array of signage. No, I mean residential Buckhead, that cloistered, deep green rectangle of great old trees and winding streets and fine, not-so-old houses set far back on emerald velvet lawns, carved out of deep hardwood forests, cushioned and insulated from the sweat, smells and cacophony of the city proper, to the south, by layers of money. No one has ever been quite sure what the official boundaries of Buckhead are, but for many years my own personal Buckhead was that four-odd square miles bounded on the south by Peachtree Creek, the north by West Paces Ferry Road, the west by Northside Drive, and the east by Peachtree Road.
Peachtree Road…It is to me a name with far more scope and resonance to it than its dozen or so meandering miles of asphalt should rightly command. The restless, well-heeled floods of people who come to Atlanta each year now to meet and convene and visit and do business think they are seeing Atlanta when they see Peachtree Street, but they are not. Visitors visit on Peachtree Street. Atlanta lives—or did—on and just off Peachtree Road. As little as I love the city now, I still, perversely and despite what it has become, love Peachtree Road. To me it encompasses and personifies all that is particular and powerful about the city, as well as all that is abstract and illusory and beautiful. Even its ugliness—and much of it is simply and profoundly ugly—seems to me to be rich, deeply textured and unique to Atlanta. Admittedly I see it now through the scrim of childhood, but I do not think it looks like anywhere else on earth. The very name of it rings in my heart like a bell. And still, to my eyes, the most beautiful and singular point on all of Peachtree Road is the house at 2500, where I was born and have lived for the entirety of my life.
These, then, were my worlds in that portentous spring that Lucy came to us: the larger one of Buckhead proper and the smaller of 2500 Peachtree Road. Worlds that had, despite the dearth of real and sustained love, a kind of charm and promise that I have never found again anywhere. And one of the sweetest and most solemn promises was that they would never change. I don’t know why I thought that, but I always did in those earliest days. I think perhaps that the very contrast of banality and beauty in those two worlds served to give them heft and the authority of permanence.
So when the telegram came, in early April, from my aunt Willa Bondurant, saying that Uncle Jim had left them in New Orleans and she had no choice but to come to us and bring her children, it was a cataclysm of enormous proportions, not only to my mother and father but to me. Whatever my scant status with them, it had, so far, at least been that of only child. The thought of sharing my house and their attention engendered in me a rage so murderous that I could only deal with it as I had learned early to deal with all things that threatened. I shoved it completely out of my mind. By the morning after the telegram, the tattered little band of my unfortunate kin had never, for me, existed.
Even on the day of their arrival, even after my deep-sighing, eye-rolling mother had had Martha Cater make up the extra bedrooms and my stomping, red-faced father had dispatched Shem to the Greyhound bus station with the Chrysler, I was unruffled. I knew absolutely and to the core of me that no alien, white-trash aunt—my mother’s overheard epithet—and cousins would appear in the round foyer of my domain out of the luminous green night. I could repeat word for word the message that would come soon by telephone or telegram: “So sorry but all your relatives have been killed in an accident and therefore can’t come.” I knew how the voice would sound saying the words, and what my words of wisdom and comfort would be to my father, whose younger brother’s wife and children these were. I could only think of my uncle Jim as that, my father’s brother, for I had never seen him, and had no sense that anywhere in the world did I have a tall, drowsy-eyed, blond young uncle who was the obverse, the fatal, radiant side, of my father, and whom in time I would grow to resemble almost uncannily. There was no photograph of James Clay Bondurant in our house, and few words about him ever passed my father’s lips. My mother spoke of him once in a while, but not in words intended for my ears, and even though I only half heard them, I could hear in her voice when she spoke of him something that was not there at other times. It was only in this way, and almost subliminally, as is the way of children, that I knew that my uncle Jim had a kind of dark importance in that house that was all the more disturbing because it was unnamed.
When the doorbell rang, then, I pounded downstairs behind my mother in full expectation of opening it to the lugubrious face of the telegram messenger, and so the four figures who stood there with the twilight falling down over them were as shocking and aberrant to me as murderers or trolls. I could only stare at them, my heart banging so loudly in my ears that I could not even make out my mother’s words of welcome, which were, in any case, crisp and short and soon ended; I could hear my father coming heavily down the stairs behind me. But the four did not move, and I could not speak. The moment seemed to spin out forever.
The first clear thought that struck me was that my aunt Willa assaulted the eye and nose and ear simultaneously, though not, to me, unpleasantly. She had hair so black it shone blue and purple in the light over the front door, and she wore garnet lipstick and nail polish “laid on with a trowel,” as my mother said to someone over the telephone later that evening, in a low, only half-amused voice. She smelled powerfully of the acrid sweat of travel and nervousness, though this was masked with a friendly, evocative scent that I always associated with Wender & Roberts Drugstore at Christmastime.
“Evening in Paris, a ton of it,” my mother further instructed her phone friend.
My aunt Willa’s face was blanched and chalky with powder and fatigue, and there were tiny, clumped beads of blackness at the ends of her long eyelashes. Her eyes were the pure, impossible blue that coal fire makes when it has burned itself almost out. She wore a print rayon dress with a peplum that accentuated her willow-wand waist and the rich swell of her hips and breasts, and her long, slender legs were bare and dirty. She tottered lamely on towering sling-back heels, and her toenails were the same dried-blood red of her lips and fingernails. I found her powerfully, magically glamorous, there in that dim foyer with its dim old Oriental rugs and dim, stained stucco walls and dim, ornate old gilt-framed paintings of my Redwine ancestors. Dim, dim…Suddenly it seemed to me that, until these four maniacally unknown people had walked in out of the warm April night to light my foyer into rawness and vitality, my whole life had been dim.
I saw next that my aunt held a cherubic little blond boy of less than a year in the crook of one arm, and by the other hand held an equally angelic little girl of, perhaps, three, solemn and sweating and overdressed in a fuchsia velvet coat, bonnet and leggings. Behind her, with one hand on the small girl’s shoulder, a girl taller than I, but obviously younger, stood, staring directly at me with her mother’s extraordinary blue eyes, and something looking out of them flew into and through my own and straight into my heart with a directness and force that felt as though I had swallowed a fire-tipped arrow. I blinked and gulped soundlessly, like a fish drowning in air, and then, surprising myself profoundly, grinned.
The girl grinned back. Her hair was the pure, clear dark of cold winter creek water over fallen leaves, and it flew loosely around her narrow head like corn silk. Her lashes were sooty cobwebs on her pink-flushed cheeks, and she was tall and willowy like her mother, with long limbs and small hands and feet and a whippet waist. She was standing still, but she looked as if she had been in motion all over and had just settled to earth. She wore corduroy overalls and dirty saddle shoes.
Of all the people assembled in the hall, she was the first to speak.
“Something stinks,” she said in a voice that was slow and rich, like music, like dark honey.
“Lucy!” my aunt Willa said, scandalized. She had a flat, nasal drawl. My parents looked at each other, and then at the girl.
“Sure does,” I said back, joy caroling inexplicably in my veins. “It’s Martha in the kitchen. She’s cooking lamb for our dinner. Ugh!”
“Smells like she’s cooking dog,” Lucy Bondurant said, and laughed, a dark silk banner of a laugh, and I laughed, and even when the adults had made us both apologize, and sent us upstairs to the screened porch to “calm down until you can act like a lady and a gentleman,” we continued to laugh. It was the first real laughter I could remember in the house on Peachtree Road. It was the first, last and longest thing I had and kept of Lucy: her laugh.
When we had stopped laughing, she said, “Are you all the children there are?”
“Yes,” I said, somehow ashamed of it.
“I guess she must not have liked it when your daddy got on her then,” Lucy said matter-of-factly.
“What do you mean?” My skin actually prickled with the portent of something coming.
“Well, my mama used to laugh and holler when Daddy got on her, and there’s three of us. There’s just one of you, so I guess your mama didn’t like it and quit doing it, or there’d be more of you.”
“She didn’t quit,” I said. It was suddenly very important to tell Lucy about the nights in the little dressing room when my mother wept. Shame fled and indignation flooded in. “He gets on her all the time, but she doesn’t laugh. She cries. She cries almost every night. I know because I sleep right in their room.”
She looked at me in blue puzzlement.
“What for?” she said. “Why don’t you have a room of your own, as rich as y’all are?”
“Rich?” I said, stupidly.
“Sure. Why do you think we came all the way down here? Now we’re gon’ be rich, too.”
It was too much, too much of suddenness and strangeness and revelation, too much of promise. My stomach heaved and flopped, and I ran for the bathroom and was sick, and Martha put me straight to bed, so that whatever else transpired that evening, I missed it, and I was still queasy and spinning when my mother came up to telephone her friends and tell them about the invasion of the infidels. It was a long time, late, before I slept.
But I did sleep, finally; slept that night in a different country, one where we were rich and therefore different from other people, and in which women laughed and shouted aloud their pleasure during the act of love.
A country where, now, Lucy was, and therefore all things might be possible.
I slept in a safe child’s sudden and simple, lightless peace, and when I awoke in the morning it was to joy.
I have said that I do not go out anymore, but that is not precisely true. I do go out, almost every night. After the last of the light has gone and the streetlights come on, no matter what time and what season it happens to be, I put on my Nikes and I slip out of the summerhouse into the welcoming darkness and I run through Buckhead. I run for miles, some evenings as many as fifteen or twenty, some evenings just four or five. I am never sure when I set out which of my many routes I will take; my feet seem to make that decision for me when they touch the pavement of the sidewalk along Peachtree Road. But I always cover the same territory. It is the country of that long-ago Buckhead in which, as the Book of Common Prayer says, I lived, moved and had my being. Oh, yes, I run, and I suppose many people must see me, a tall, slight man whose thinning hair in the streetlights might be blond or might be silver; not young, but with the long-loping resilience of the runner. It doesn’t bother me that I am visible to them; it is not from their seeing of me that I hide during the daylight, but from the seeing of them. I run; I run through a landscape that existed forty-odd years ago. I run for my life.
Pounding silently and steadily through a swelling spring night, or a star-chipped black winter one, I can tick the street and proper names off like rosary beads in the hands of a devout old Catholic, without thinking, without questioning the sense or import of them. The names are my catechism. Whatever is raw and ragged and new and intrusive I don’t see; I am running, as I said, for my life, but it is the life that I had then.
Right and down Muscogee, past the Camerons’ house, Merrivale House, they called it, after Dorothy’s family seat in Dorsetshire: 17 Muscogee Avenue. It was built in 1921 by Neel Reid, a classical architect in whom Atlanta has always set great store, whose years abroad studded Northwest Atlanta’s wooded hills and ridges with Renaissance, American Georgian, Federal, Greek Revival, Baroque and Italianate estates of uncommon style and substance. These suburban villas, as they were termed, were designed to be summer homes in some cases, and highly visible showcases for their owners’ soaring positions in others. At the time most were built, in the late teens and twenties and on into the thirties, entertaining and gardening were two of Old Atlanta’s overweening passions, and formal reception and dining rooms and extensive, formally landscaped grounds were de rigueur. Most of the houses had, and many still have, vast acreages of gardens, all flowing together, mile after mile, so that whole streets seem in the spring to be one great lapping surge of color.
It is at the great amplitude of space, and the random, puckish cant of the wooded hills, and the sheer scope of the surf of azaleas and dogwood and flowering trees that make the spring here a neck-prickling and breath-stopping time. Traffic along the narrow old streets in April is near critical mass, and many a grand dowager curses now the splendor she and her yardman labored so mightily to achieve when both were young. I remember vividly the gardeners and yardmen of all these old estates. Most of the children in my crowd took their first steps tottering after the impassive black yardmen and their wonderful arrays of tools and treasures.
I do not, on these night runs, see the fleets of minivans and the Davey Tree trucks that keep the gardens up now. If they are kept up at all. Many of the old houses are falling to the glittering, trashy condominium developments that are littering Buckhead. Others are going like hotcakes to the Arabs and the tackpots, who are the only ones who can afford to keep them up. They are occupied now, many of them, by elderly widows, and the cost of heating and cooling and maintaining them is just too prohibitive, the money being offered just too much. In 1907, when the first trolley line from downtown to Buckhead was laid down, you could buy land on West Paces Ferry Road for ninety dollars an acre. Now it’s going, some of it, for nearly two million. Old Dorothy Cameron, in the last years before she moved from the Muscogee Avenue house, paid ten thousand annually for taxes alone, and by that time she and Ben were far from wealthy. It was hear and breeding they had in the end, not money.
Ironic, that it was money that built Buckhead, and it is money that is killing it.
But I do not see the Sotheby and Harry Norman and Buckhead Brokers signs, the dark windows, the encroaching weeds where once lawns the color and texture of good billiard tables rolled away. I see, instead, Sarah and Ben and me, in the back garden of 17 Muscogee, running through the dazzling shower from the hose held by Leroy Pickens, the Camerons’ driver, as he washes the identical black Lincoln limousines that Ben Cameron kept. The fine spray rainbows off fenders and tall, mullioned windows and our sleek, tanned hides, tasting warm and metallic and somehow like the red clay of North Georgia, and butterflies dance in the little picking garden, and a hummingbird strafes the roses beyond, just coming into bloom in the formal garden where the gazebo sits, and a fat black crow struts along the high stone wall that snakes around the front courtyard and the boxwood parterre by the sun porch.
“This is the way my daddy takes a bath,” Ben says, leaping high into the shattered rainbow of the water and contorting himself extraordinarily, so that, for a moment, pinned at the apex of the leap against the melting blue of June, he looks fantastically like some slender, small Cossack dancer, or a creature entirely formed of air and dazzle, like Ariel.
“No, like this,” small Sarah chimes, and throws herself high against the blue, curved into a beautiful, brown, unconscious arc like an otter entering water. In that moment Sarah foreshadows the lithe and lovely water creature she will become.
I collapse in laughter in the spray, because the thought of anyone’s parents taking baths at all, even Dorothy and Ben Cameron, Senior, whom I adore, is beyond conception.
“How does your daddy take a bath, Shep?” Ben Cameron says. “I bet he wallows and snorts like a warthog!”
And he mimes that action expertly, so that we see as clearly as if we stood before it the grunting, furious beast, and the stinking, slimy mud, and the vast African plain stretching away. Ben is not being cruel; the analogy of my tight, massive, red father in the mudhole is uncannily apt. And in fact, Ben and Sarah have actually seen a warthog in a mudhole, on a trip to Africa with their parents the preceding spring.
But the laughter drains out of me. I think about it, and then I say, “I don’t think he takes baths.” For the thought of my father wet and naked is light-years beyond my mightiest imagining. I shrink even from the attempt.
“Then he sure must stink,” Ben crows, and collapses in helpless glee.
Sarah stops her capering and glares at him, her great brown eyes thunderous.
“Shep’s right,” she says. “You can just stop laughing, Ben Cameron, because I happen to know that Mama and Daddy don’t really take baths, either.” She turns her eyes to me, and I feel the healing and benediction that flow from them.
“We were just making it up, Shep,” she says. “My mama and daddy never, never, never, never take baths, ever.”
It is an enormous, towering, glorious lie. We laugh, and Leroy Pickens laughs, and water chuckles, and their Scottie, Yappie, does just that, and I run on past this now-dark house that I have always thought, of all the estates in Buckhead, the most romantic.
Left on Rivers Road, past the Slatons’ white wooden Federal. I see Alfreda, small and darting and avian in many crinolines, getting into Tom Goodwin’s 1935 Chevy, which is bereft of fenders and top and muffler, to go to a Phi Chi dance. Tiny Freddie, as pretty as she will ever be, her hand on Tom’s arm tight with promissory possessiveness.
I am with Lucy in the backseat of the Chevy—for it is in the days before the advent of Red Chastain—and Freddie’s sharp little eyes take in the small forest of orchids on Lucy’s dress and wrist and in her hair. They are not mine; they have been sent by the dates she will have for the dance and the breakfast after that, and by her general admirers. It is a barbaric custom, but an immutable one. Freddie wears only Tom’s small purple bloom. His father is not in the same financial league as most of ours, and groves of opulent white orchids are forever beyond Tom. Freddie’s face goes tight and hard.
“Goodness, Lucy, you look like a fruit salad,” she says sweetly, the acid of have-not thin and virulent in her voice. Poor Freddie, she is forever being propelled by her great, formless wanting into competitions where she is outclassed and outmatched.
“I guess I do,” Lucy says in her lazy, smoky drawl. “And you, sweetie, look like an empty salad plate.”
It is a clear victory. Freddie is silent in her pain and rage for the rest of the drive to Brookhaven Country Club. The back of Tom’s neck is dull red, and I glare sternly at Lucy. I am in my Saint Shep the Defender mode, and feminine pain, even Freddie’s, is anathema to me. She glares back and then grins.
“Tough titty,” she whispers. And reluctantly, I grin back.
I run right onto Peachtree Battle Avenue, divided by its wooded park. It is, I think, spring: April, with the new leaves point d’esprit—tender and lacy—and the white stars of the dogwood incandescent in the streetlight. Streetlights through new green…they hang over my childhood and pack my heart tight, the small, perfect icons of the urban child. On down past Woodward Way, and up Dellwood to the right, past the huge, Adamesque pile where Carter Rawson’s family lived. He and Little Lady still live there; the house is awash with light now as it must have been then, though I did not, in those years, know Carter. Indeed, I never went into the house at all until the engagement party that Carter’s parents gave for him and Little Lady, and so what I see now is the long, exquisitely proportioned formal boxwood garden behind the house, leading down a central allée to the domed Ionic gazebo, where Little Lady stands beside Carter framed in Cape jessamine and columns, glowing like a Dresden shepherdess.
“Hello, Mrs. Draper,” Little Lady says sweetly to a formidable, tanklike matron, fluttering her famous feathery, gold-tipped lashes. “Hello, Mrs. Dorsey. You’re mighty sweet to come share this happy day with Carter and me. We hope you’ll be our very first visitors when we get back from Sea Island. We just love the beautiful toast rack; I know it’s a family piece, isn’t it?”
And two old ladies, finally, smile, and Little Lady is launched like a rocket into the ionosphere of Atlanta society.
“Shit,” says Lucy, who is behind me on Red Chastain’s arm, under her breath. “What’s wrong with this picture? I know. There’s no background music. Ought to have an orchestra squatting behind the bushes over there. Playing ‘Fascination.”’
Right on West Wesley and left on Habersham, and long lòpe up to Tom Goodwin’s much smaller house on the right, a neat brick and frame that was built not by Neel Reid or Philip Shutze or anyone else likely to be known in Atlanta, but by a contractor whose firm was a client of Tom’s father, the owner of the city’s first advertising agency. Tom’s family has some money, but not enough, and some background, but not enough, and the house is not nearly grand enough to keep the Goodwins securely in the pantheon in which they teeter. But the location is beyond reproach, and that Habersham Road address and the prospects of one day commanding it will eventually win for Tom the birdlike little hand of Freddie Slaton. Better, I guess, that his father had gone on and bought an affordable bungalow safely across Peachtree Road in Garden Hills, and so beyond the pale.
Right onto the major artery that is West Paces Ferry Road. It runs out to the river, where Hardy Pace did, indeed, operate a ferry, and has now become one of the Northside’s most lamentably snarled traffic arteries from west to east. But in the timestopped nights in which I run, all that can be seen in the darkling woods are the lights of the few big houses on either side. Where the new governor’s mansion—Greek Revival, it is not so fondly known as in some circles—sits now, these thirty years later, there is in my eyes only forest. The great pile of stone just down from it is still the Grant family home, and not the Cherokee Town Club, that unsuccessful pretender to the Driving Club’s throne. Woods, and the smell of honeysuckle and heartbreak, and warm tar in cooling night air, and late-mown grass…and ahead, the scattered lights and occasional sibilant, swishing traffic sounds of Buckhead proper.
Gaining the familiar intersection of Peachtree, West Paces Ferry, and Roswell roads is like coming out of black, raging Midgard into the eternal radiant whiteness of Valhalla. It has always been so to me. It is all there in that one shabby 1950s crossroads, life and succor and promise and a kind of secular immortality. What power those few dim, perfunctory, yellow and pink and blue neon lights have for the myriad ghosts who flutter like moths around Buckhead! Jim Dickey wrote about it in “Looking for the Buckhead Boys”; that poem took the top of my head off when I first read it, and I tried to find Jim to call him and tell him what it meant to me, but he was out of the state and the South, his sister said, and probably wouldn’t be back anytime soon. Jim knew what it took to survive Buckhead: a kind of distance not measured in miles.
He wrote:
First in the heart
Of my blind spot are
The Buckhead Boys. If I can find them, even one,
I’m home. And if I can find him catch him in or around
Buckhead, I’ll never die; it’s likely my youth will walk
Inside me like a king.
Yes! And I quicken my steps and run into Buckhead. On my right, Wender & Roberts Drugstore, and Lane’s, and just across the street in the arrow tip formed by the confluence of Peachtree and Roswell, Jacob’s Drugs and Madder’s Service Station and above it all the great moon of the Coca-Cola sign. Just past Roswell, the Buckhead Theatre, with the balcony upstairs for the Negroes lucky enough to have the nights off from the big houses all around. I don’t think, excepting servants, there was another black head in North Atlanta in those days. I can see us all, a flock of us, jostling and crowing and knuckling each other on the biceps, walking from Wender & Roberts across the street to the midnight movie. Just up East Paces Ferry there was the taxi stand where even the smallest of us could reach far up to the counter with a penny and receive, in exchange, one cigarette. And Burt’s Bottle Shop, where a lank, depressed bear languished in a cage out in the weedy, cinder-block-littered back.
Across the street where the monolithic and hideous Buckhead Plaza is going up now (unseen, unseen!) was a miniature-auto racetrack, on whose grassy infield Caroline Gentry, Charlie’s little sister, used to tether her pony and cart after driving it in from the Gentrys’ sprawling, stained stucco on West Andrews. From there she’d cross the street to Wender & Roberts and meet, illicitly, Boo Cutler and have a fountain cherry Coke and a package of Tom’s potato chips, and they’d go to the afternoon show at the Buckhead Theatre and neck. Nobody, not Mr. and Mrs. Gentry, not Caroline’s Sunday school teacher, not her teachers at North Fulton High, not Charlie himself, could break that match up.
Boo Cutler. With the drooping-lidded blue eyes and the spoiled, corrupted baby’s face and the bubblegumpink underlip and butter-yellow crew cut and the fastest ’48 Mercury in the South. Boo of the legends and the homeroom whispers: That he ran shine down from Hall County to South Georgia on weekends, and had been shot at many times by police and agents, but never hit. That he had laid more than fifty women by the time he was old enough to drive, and one of them taught at North Fulton. That he had a shotgun in the trunk of the Mercury with notches in it that represented the number of Negroes killed on back country roads in wire-grass South Georgia. That he had done it with a cow.
It was the literal truth, I think, that he ran shine; at any rate, I remember one night when I was fifteen and he was sixteen the word went out that Boo was coming through Buckhead from up in Hall at precisely midnight with a load, and that he had vowed to be going a hundred and twenty when he did it, and that he didn’t care what cops were waiting for him, the Merc could take them all. It was in the late fall, I remember, on a Friday night after a home football game, and we all told our parents we were going to the show, and we went and stood out of sight around the corner on East Paces Ferry and Peachtree in the silent cold, waiting for him. There was, as usual for that time of night, virtually no traffic and few lights except for the marquee farther up at the movie house, and the wind was high and prowling, abroad in the sky, and the silence rang with our efforts to hear his engine. At first, when we did, it was so high and keening that we just thought the wind had intensified. And then Snake Cheatham said, “It’s him. That’s him.”
And we came out of the lee into the full stream of the wind, eyes tearing, and we heard and saw Boo Cutler coming like a devil out of Hell down the empty middle of Peachtree Road, the few sickly streetlights catching the flying Mercury and flinging it along, its engine screaming full-throated and terrible and wonderful.
We did not speak. He was past us and gone down Peachtree Road before we could comprehend the splendor and speed of him, the Merc riding so low that the exhaust bit great fountains of sparks out of the pavement, and before we could even turn our heads to test the new sound, a DeKalb County black-and-white flashed past impossibly far behind him, its siren sounding thin and mewling in contrast to the Mercury’s Valkyrie cry. Both were gone into the silence in an eye-blink, and we did not speak for a moment.
“Jesus Christ, he must have been doing a hundred and forty,” Tom said weakly.
“I just creamed my jeans,” Charlie said reverently.
I remember that I cried, silently in the sheltering dark, and was ashamed of it, but not so ashamed that the memory of that perfect moment does not still have the power, all these years later, to bring tears of joy and thankfulness to my eyes. It was, in its fullness, as round and whole as an egg.
Boo Cutler, Charlie…
Buckhead is called that because a man named Hardy Ivy mounted, in 1838, the head of a buck on a tree over his tavern and crossroads store, and the name stuck among the settlers who met there. The tree on which the grisly trophy hung still stands in the parking lot of a liquor store. Hardy paid $605 for the land that makes up the core of Buckhead, 202 acres where the racetrack sat, and then Sears, and where now Buckhead Plaza is going up. We always heard that there was gold buried in a box under that earth, put there by an old man and his slave during the siege of the city to the south, “out yonder so the damn Yankees won’t get it.”
It was an auspicious omen. Buckhead has always been known, proudly, as the wealthiest unincorporated suburb in America, whether or not the appellation was true. It remained unincorporated only because a stubborn little town also named Buckhead, in Morgan County, refused to surrender its charter and let Buckhead have the name officially, else it would have, early on, been a town proper. It has always considered itself apart both in spirit and in fact from the pushy giant directly to the south, and fought annexation tooth and nail. I remember that when I was ten, the community trounced one attempt and staged a mock funeral, featuring three caskets labeled Mayor Hartsfield, the Atlanta Journal and the Atlanta Constitution, and bore them proudly down the middle of Peachtree Road to the strains of Finlandia played falteringly by the North Fulton High marching band. It wasn’t until 1950 that the city got us, and it remains to many Buckheaders still alive a catastrophe of only slightly less magnitude than the one wrought by General Sherman.
Well. I run out of the beneficence of central Buckhead, then, and back into the dark, pounding south on Peachtree Road. In that earlier country, a dying straggle of stores and businesses stood on either side, and directly beyond them on my left, the subdivision of Garden Hills: firmly middle-class, agreeable and substantial, but another world entirely from the kingdom on the other side of Peachtree Road. It was not until I began high school at North Fulton High, off to my left down Delmont, that I came to know anybody who lived in Garden Hills, and though we children were not, that I remember, snobs in particular—at least not about where people lived—it was as if, in my early childhood, Peachtree Road was as impenetrable and decisive a dividing line as Hadrian’s Wall. Later on, I got to know and like many of my schoolmates who lived Over the Line, and one, A. J. Kemp, became, after Charlie Gentry, perhaps my best friend. But in that first country of childhood, none of us crossed—or wished to—the Rubicon.
On down Peachtree Road I run, past North Fulton High and Garden Hills Elementary, both out of sight on my left; past, on my right, Saint Philip’s Church, where we went in perfunctory piety each Sunday when it was still a small parish church; past Second Ponce de Leon (Baptist and just a bit below the salt) and the Cathedral of Christ the King (Catholic and resoundingly so); past the last commercial lights and down into the dark of, now, only sleeping houses. Big houses in a line on my right, like the ones on the cloistered streets behind them; houses that could and did shelter princelings and sit out, for an incredible number of years, the siege of the city to the south. Mostly mellow, rosy brick, these few Peachtree Road houses were, two-and three-storied and black- or green-trimmed, some with columns and some with Adam fanlights and fine Georgian facades. Safe, sleeping there in the dark. Safe and dignified and beautiful.
And the last before you reached Muscogee Avenue and the safest and most dignified and, to me, always the most beautiful…my own: 2500 Peachtree Road.
Looking back, it might seem that, in light of my hungry and strictured childhood in that house, my passion for it borders on self-destructiveness. The sane thing to do, for anyone with the slightest bent for survival, would have been to draw in his head and deny in spirit the walls that starved and imprisoned him until the earliest possible opportunity for escape presented itself, and then to leave them behind with no regrets and a singing heart. But those stout, sheltering brick walls were never oppressive to me in themselves; indeed, they were sanctuary and solace whenever my eye or mind fell upon them. And though I did leave them at an early juncture, it was with—for the house, at least—an almost physical stab of sorrow. And when I came back, even though the return was not initially of my own choosing, my heart gave the same small, glad wing-waggle that it always did when I rounded the long curve past Peachtree Battle going north and saw again those soft-rose bricks and the sweetly hipped roof.
It always seemed to me in that house of infinitely lovely proportion and abundance of clear light that, no matter what miasma of disharmony prevailed at the moment, anything so beautiful could not be in and of itself hurtful, but was merely sleeping under some spell soon to be broken, and when it waked, the happiness that would come flooding in would be mythic in its scope, out of my small imagining entirely. I think the reason I was never really unhappy there is that I waited with such absolute conviction for joy. What child dares see his primal danger plain? Even now, when whatever future I might have imagined for it is past, the house at 2500 Peachtree Road still smites my eyes with its beauty whenever I look at it. I do, several times each day, from the summerhouse.
“Lordee, but it’s big, ain’t it?” I remember Lucy saying on the first full day she spent in the house. We were standing on the half-moon front drive, looking up at it. Her blue eyes had a dazzle in them not entirely from the sun.
“Do y’all charge admission for folks to come look at it?”
“Why would we do that?” I asked, honestly puzzled.
“Mama says people do in New Orleans.”
“Well, nobody does here,” I said, defensively.
“I bet you could make a pot if you did,” Lucy said. “I’m gon’ ask Aunt Olivia if I can do that. I bet lots of folks would pay to come see this house.”
“Don’t do that,” I said quickly, knowing instinctively that my mother would be outraged by the idea. “If you want some money I’ll give you some. How much do you need?”
“A nickel,” she said promptly.
“Wouldn’t you rather have a dime? I’ve got one.”
“No, silly,” she snorted. “Nickel’s twice as big as a dime.”
I gave her the nickel.
The house was designed in 1917, not by Neel Reid but by a young architectural student cousin of its first owner, a physician who made one of the early fortunes investing in Coca-Cola bottling equipment, as did so many of the men who built the first of the great Buckhead houses. Indeed, the intersection of West Paces Ferry and Roswell roads is still called Coca-Cola Corners. The young architect died a year after the house was finished, during the obligatory year’s study in Florence after graduating from Georgia Tech, attempting to swim the Arno after staying up all night drinking and reading Lord Byron. My mother told me the story when I was barely three; it is one of the very first memories I have: sitting in her lap in a rocking chair in front of the coal fire in her and my father’s big upstairs bedroom, rocking back and forth, back and forth as the red firelight leaped over her hands and the dark, seal-sleek curtain of hair that fell over her face and mine together.
“Tragic,” she said, rocking, rocking. “Tragic, to die so young and so gifted, so far away from home. You must promise me never to drink, Sheppie, and never to leave your mama. Do you promise me that?”
I suppose I remember it so vividly because it was such a rarity in my small life; she almost never rocked me. In fact, I can’t remember another time. Old Martha Cater did, and I am told that my unremembered grandmother Adelaide Bondurant did, but I think I was far too apt to spit up in those first years for my mother’s sensitive stomach. I can’t imagine why she was doing it that one time; perhaps I was sick with some small childhood affliction that did not involve bodily secretions. At any rate, I promised her then that I would never drink and never leave her. I would have promised her, in that moment of perfect, firelit bliss, to enter a Trappist monastery, if she had asked it of me.
I never forgot the drowned young architect of my house. I did not think his fate tragic, but romantic and somehow unspeakably noble. Muzzily in my mind for years whenever I thought about the house was the thought, “Someone died for this house.” That dank and ignoble death in Florence gave it a kind of promissory import, as though set apart from its birth for some special fate.
It is a spare, eloquent American Georgian house of soft rose brick, hip-roofed and stone-quoined, with a row of four gables showcasing the small third-floor Palladian windows, and twin chimneys at each end. The front door is an austere and lovely Federal, with fanlight and sidelights beneath a richly detailed portico supported by thin Ionic columns. A semicircular drive describes a half-moon in front, slicing through a small rectangle of lawn, and a black wrought-iron fence sets it off from the sidewalk along Peachtree Road. Most of its three acres lies behind it, where the long formal garden and lily pool and summerhouse are carved out of a hardwood forest which stretches over to meet the backyards of the houses on Rivers Road. Once behind the house, you would never know, even now, that the traffic of a city of nearly three million pours past virtually at the front door.
Of course, when my father bought the house, in 1930, Peachtree Road was very nearly country, and the traffic was minimal. That was one reason he chose it. Newly come to Atlanta from tiny, rural Fayetteville to the southeast, he was resigned to the fact that his fortune and his future lay in the city, but he was damned if he would live among its humors and noises and hauteur. As for my mother, only the knowledge that Buckhead was the city’s smartest new address lured her out into the wilds of its northern suburbs. She was one small-town girl who would have lived in the middle of Five Points downtown if she could have. But when my father brought her to see the house and told her that on her left was one of the Coca-Cola Candler daughters and just behind her on Muscogee a former governor, she saw the wisdom of it. Besides, the price the doctor’s newly widowed wife was asking was low, and my mother, though a banal woman, was not a stupid one. And the house was bought, after all, with her money.
“It’s an investment in your future, Sheppie,” I can remember her saying many times when I was small. And it has indeed been that, if not in the way she envisioned. She meant, I know, for me to marry and raise an exemplary Buckhead family in it after she herself had enjoyed the full fruits of its irreproachable address and proximity. She never envisioned it to shelter my self-imposed exile from the world.
Inside, it was almost classically Georgian: A round, domed, rotunda-like entrance hall with niches for flowers or statuary gave on the left onto a vast living room, with a formal columned porch beyond that, and on the right onto a dining room with the pantry and service porch behind it and the kitchen beyond it on the right. Behind the entrance hall lay a soaring two-story stair hall with a beautiful curved Adam stair ascending five flights and six landing levels. When I was small, I used to picture Lucy in her wedding white coming down that stair to meet me in the rotunda of the entrance hall, and indeed I did see her in white, years later, descending it, but it was not to her wedding that she came. That was left to Little Lady, and I have to think that my aunt Willa began planning it when she first stepped into the house out of that spring night in 1941.
Behind the stair hall was the octagonal paneled library, which my father used largely as his study, and though it was a beautiful and air-washed room, lambent with sunlight, as were all the downstairs rooms, from the floor-to-ceiling Palladian windows, I never liked it, and was never allowed to spend much time there. We sat there for an hour or so on winter evenings, all of us, while my father and mother and Aunt Willa sipped whiskeys or sherry before dinner and we children, scrubbed and combed, played the Victrola or listened to the big Capehart with the volume turned down. But mostly the family sat, when we were together, in the small morning room behind the living room or, during the long, warm springs and summers and autumns, on the comfortable, slightly shabby lattice-screened porch that ran off to the right of the library.
Upstairs, to the left of the stair hall, were my parents’ bedroom and bath with a seldom-used sleeping porch off them and the little dressing room where I slept my furious, captive sleep. To the right were the two bedrooms that became Aunt Willa’s and Little Lady’s, and the small maids’ room in which little Jamie Bondurant slept so briefly. Behind the stair hall, over the library, was a screened porch where Lucy and I sometimes played on warm days, before we appropriated the summerhouse.
On the third floor, up a narrow stair, was the low-ceilinged, musty warren of rooms where the servants refused to stay, which became Lucy’s and my childhood retreat. They were meanly lit and airless in the extreme, suffocating in the summertime, but to us they were a refuge to be guarded fiercely, and we shared them in a kind of bone-and-skin-deep accord, the only secure burrows we had ever known, until we grew too old for such proximity. Even then, when the wisdom of our separation was apparent even to me, I mourned the loss of those cell-like nests under the roof, and Lucy wept inconsolably for days.
“What did they think we were going to do that was so bad?” she stormed to me, in my new fastness out in the summerhouse, after the incident that resulted in our separation.
“Well, you know,” I said, reddening.
“Oh, shoot, that’s silly. I don’t want to, and you wouldn’t even know what it was if I hadn’t told you. I don’t even think you’ve got your doohickey yet, have you?”
“Go on, now, Lucy, I hear your mama calling you. I’ve got stuff I need to do,” I said, face flaming.
“Well, even if you did have one, which I don’t believe you do, I wouldn’t do it with you,” she said, the angry tears beginning again. “I don’t think you’d be a bit of fun. You’d probably cough or vomit.”
Lucy was ten then, to my going-on-twelve, and knew the frailties of my flesh, as well as the deficiencies of my soul, better than my mother ever had.
The summerhouse! Always, to me, and then to Lucy, it was sheer enchantment, a place apart both in distance and in spirit, with the utter and endless fascination that all perfect, miniature things have for children. It was a complete small house, a near-replica of the big one, except that it was done in white frame, with the same hipped roof, black-shuttered Palladian windows to the floor and a pedimented, columned portico. It was buried in a surf of old boxwoods and crape myrtles and backed by dense woods, and a wisteria vine arched over the portico and bathed the two big rooms inside in a wash of lavender light and fragrance each spring. There was one great room for living and dining, floored in Italian quarry tiles and with a small stone fireplace, and a smaller one adjoining it for sleeping and dressing. Behind these rooms were a small bath and a complete, compact kitchen. It had been built for my grandmother Adelaide, who came to live with her son and daughter-in-law when my grandfather died, before I was born, but she lived in it for only two years before she too died, and it was largely unused until Lucy and I claimed it and moved our daytime base of operations there. My parents and her mother did not really mind. The furnishings were too grand for the servants, who in any case had quarters over the garage, and not grand enough for use in entertaining. My mother never liked my grandmother’s plain, well-used old family pieces. She had thought once of building a swimming pool in the garden where the lily pool has always been, and using the little house as a pool house, but she and my father both were too fair to take the sun, and I was adjudged too frail, especially in the summer polio season; so the house became known as the summerhouse, albeit an empty one that had known, until we opened it for our play, no summers.
All this, then, had been mine from birth, this overflowing largesse of physical grace and symmetry and seclusion, but it took the clear, light-sparked blue eyes and strange, silverfish imagination of my cousin Lucy Bondurant to open my own eyes and heart to its unique place-magic. I do not know what would have become of me ultimately—a suicide? a stockbroker?—if she had not come to live with us, but she did, and in one revelatory split second when she stepped into the foyer of the house on Peachtree Road and said in her extraordinary, musky voice, “Something stinks,” my star was as fixed in its far firmament as Orion: Joy and aloneness were mine, in equal measure, gift of Lucy, out to the distant edges of my life.