That afternoon I had a tentative date with Charlie Gentry to try out a new World War II metal detector he had gotten for his birthday, in the vast, echoing battlefield out at Kennesaw Mountain, but I did not keep it. I did not even remember it until I was eating dinner that evening. I drove instead straight from North Fulton over to Muscogee and went looking for whichever Cameron was around. I was, by that time, so drowned in confusion and self-doubt and the delayed pain of my father’s dismissal that I knew I would have to talk with someone about it or founder under the misery, and I headed for Merrivale like a pigeon homing toward its cote.
As I left the Fury in the cobbled front courtyard and headed around the side of the house toward the little den where the Camerons were usually to be found at that hour, it struck me that this was literally the first time in my life when I did not, swiftly and instinctively, bear my hurts home to Lucy. It was such a jolting perception that I stumbled in midlope, feeling somehow traitorous and skulking, as if I were actually betraying her. And then the thought came whole and clear into my mind: Don’t talk to her about Princeton until you’ve lined up your allies. I knew then on some hidden level what my conscious mind had not admitted before, that Lucy was the most powerful obstacle my flight from Atlanta would ever have. I had not gone home because I was afraid to.
She had never said much of anything about my plans to go away to school after graduation because I had not talked much of them myself. I did not speak of them to my parents, beyond the necessary self-conscious exchanges about applications and fees and such, because I feared that my mother’s possessiveness and my father’s angry contempt would break down my resolve. As it happened, neither had made much fuss about it when the application had gone off, or even when the acceptance had come. It had been in the late spring of my junior year, and I suppose that both of them thought I might see the folly of my ways in the intervening year if they simply left me alone. Why Lucy had not responded more fervently, one way or another, I could not even guess, except that she was, in those days, sunk in her own alienation, and perhaps did not really register the import of the acceptance letter.
I had put it away in my desk out in the summer-house the day after it had come and showed it to no one else, but I could sense it there all through the next year, glowing steadily like a talisman. It had been Dorothy and Sarah Cameron who had seemed the happiest for me, and so I knew that if succor and resolve were going to be available to me, it would come from them. Lucy, I sensed, was not going to take the actuality of my leaving at all well, and I could not, bruised as I was by the luncheon at the Capital City Club, have stood up to her.
I found Sarah in the little glass-walled studio that Ben had had built for her just off the pool house in the back garden when the extent of her talent had become obvious. She was there most afternoons when she was not at swim team practice or one of her extracurricular activities, I knew; she loved the white-walled, light-washed haven in the wooded garden, and I liked to see her in it. To watch Sarah in her studio, silky dark hair tumbled and amber eyes intent, moving back and forth from her easel to her palette, was like watching some wild creature function perfectly in its habitat, at ease and unobserved. I had the same sense of rightness when I watched her in the water. She was absolutely, totally unself-conscious and natural in those two milieus, and I felt soothed and suspended watching her in them, like Pippa in my knowing that just then, all was right with the world.
Even now, at sixteen, Sarah did not go in the swooping, shouting caravans of the Pinks and the Jells on their after-school expeditions. She never had. It was not that she was not asked; by her sophomore year, there was not a Jell in Atlanta who would not have been pleased to have Sarah Cameron beside him at Wender & Roberts or in the Buckhead Theatre, and Charlie would have died for it. It was simply that the world Ben and Dorothy Cameron spun out on Muscogee Avenue was still so all-encompassing and enriching that Sarah, if not young Ben, had no desire yet to leave it.
She said something about that once, many years later, on a New Year’s Eve that must have been the most painful of her life, and I was surprised at the depth and clarity of her perception. I don’t know why I should have been, by that time. The fruit of my unawareness had become bitterly ripe then.
“You could have been really good. Maybe great,” I said on that night. “You could have been one of the ones they know in New York and Europe, if you’d kept on with your painting. You’re just as much a casualty of all that Cameron wonderfulness as Ben was.”
“No,” Sarah said. “I’m a casualty of my own nature. I’m like Browning’s last duchess. I ‘liked whate’er I looked on, and my looks went everywhere.’ I loved my art, but I didn’t have any real focus, Shep. If my family ever did me any harm, maybe it was that. All that virtue, all that happiness and balance and energy…it flattens peaks and fills up valleys.”
On this March day, Sarah was working on a still life of flowers and the family’s battle-scarred old black tomcat, Moggy. The flowers were daffodils, a great, rowdy whoop of them so crammed into a blue pottery pitcher that they seemed a solid, shimmering sun of pure yellow, and I thought that she had just picked them from the wooded back garden, because moisture still clung to their frilled cups and leaves, and the fresh-rain smell of them was powerful in the air. Moggy had already been painted in, and lay black and glowering and wonderful on the canvas, with the ebony presence of a panther, on the scarlet wool shawl that Sarah had posed him on. The daffodils were just coming alive under her brush, strokes of captive, teeming light. The painting shouted and leaped and quivered with life, all primary bursts: red, blue, yellow, black, green. It was as primal and fierce as a Gauguin, but with a dancing, linear delicacy that was pure Sarah. The painting was massively adult, joyously sensual. It was hard to believe it was the work of a sixteen-year-old girl. But Sarah at work, slight as she was and childlike in an enveloping old paint-smeared shirt of her father’s, had nothing of girlishness about her. Before she saw me I watched her for a moment through the open studio door. The sense of power and focus about her smote through the silence.
She saw me then, and grinned and waved her brush, and I came through the door and flopped down on the rump-sprung sofa against the fireplace wall. She was lightly tanned from the first of the spring sun, and the little crinkles of white that radiated out from her eyes were already etched in faintly. Under the shirt she wore blue jeans and sneakers and a striped T-shirt, and in them she looked more than ever like a taut, golden little boy. But the deep swell of her breasts under the shirt was all Dorothy’s and all woman. Sarah and her mother had the most perfect bodies I have ever seen without, for some reason, ever being in the least overtly sexual. Sarah today has a waist that I could wrap my hands around, and not a hint of blurring under her chin, and a spine as straight as a hollyhock. In the pure, underwater light of the studio she was as clean and light and good to look at as a fish in clear water. Some of the heaviness on my heart lifted.
She looked at me.
“Is it the Princeton thing?” she asked.
I gaped at her. It had been months since we had talked of Princeton.
“Daddy called Mother when he got back from lunch with you and your father,” she said. “He said it was pretty awful for you. He feels really bad about being a part of it. He thinks you’re doing the right thing by going. I don’t think he’d have done it except your father asked him to.”
“I know,” I said, grateful that I did not have to explain the whole thing to her. “He told me when we were leaving the club. I don’t blame him. He and Dad have known each other practically all their lives. And he loves this town. I can understand why he’d think I ought to stay here. I just don’t think he understands why I need to go…or he didn’t, until today. He said some things that make me think he does now.”
“He does,” Sarah said. “And he’s right. Why are you so upset? You’re not changing your mind, are you?”
“I’m not upset,” I said.
“Come on, Shep,” Sarah said quietly.
“It was just that…God, Sarah, I wish you could have seen my father’s face. Or his eyes. He didn’t even hate me. He just didn’t see me anymore. You could feel him washing his hands of me right there at the table. I thought we’d settled the business about Princeton; I thought he’d at least accepted it, even if he didn’t like it. It’s not like he still thought I was going to stay here and go into the business with him. I didn’t know he was still thinking that I might….”
“Something in your voice does sound like you’re changing your mind,” Sarah said.
“Not really,” I said, not wanting to look at her intent cola-brown eyes, but not able to look away, either. They held mine like a cobra’s held a mongoose.
“It’s just that all of a sudden I wondered…what difference it was all going to make, in the long run. I can go to New York from Georgia or Tech or Emory as well as I could from Princeton.”
“You’d never do it,” Sarah said. “Never in this world.”
“Well, I would,” I said, annoyed.
“Even if you did,” Sarah said, “you need Princeton before you do it. You need to meet some people who aren’t like us before you actually get out in the middle of them. You don’t know any people who aren’t like us. You don’t know any artists, or any…Jews, or any milkmen.”
“I know you. I can meet Jews and milkmen here.”
“No,” she said. “It’s not the same.”
“Well, there sure as hell aren’t any milkmen at Princeton,” I said flippantly. I didn’t like the tenor of the conversation. Sarah was supposed to comfort, not challenge, me.
“Oh, don’t be thick,” she said impatiently. “If you back out now you’ll be sorry the rest of your life. Where’s your gumption?”
I blew up at Sarah for the first time in my life. I had come to loathe that word, that uniquely Atlanta epithet, that flattener and oversimplifier and homogenizer of souls, and I absolutely refused to hear it from her soft, sunny mouth.
“Goddamn it, Sarah, if there’s one word in the English language that stinks to me, it’s ‘gumption,’” I shouted. “It’s a word for Babbitts and bullies and bone-heads. It’s synonymous with a total lack of imagination and empathy. It’s simplistic and it’s…sentimental. God, it’s not possible to have gumption and be realistic at the same time! It’s an arrogant word, and it’s a tyrant’s word. Look at my father, or your grandma Millie. She beat people over the head with gumption till the day she died. Hell, I think she actually hated any woman who wasn’t fighting off Indians while she was dropping her baby in a cornfield during a tornado. Don’t use that stupid word on me because it doesn’t mean shit!”
“I know,” Sarah said, grinning. “Wrong word. I’m sorry. You’re right. And you’re right about Granny. You could never have told Granny that it’s courage that’s the real prize, not gumption. The two don’t have a thing to do with each other.”
“I don’t know anybody with courage, either,” I said sulkily.
“I do,” she said. “You have it.”
“Sarah, what on earth are you talking about? You know I never did have any courage,” I said. I was honestly surprised.
“You endure, Shep,” she said, looking down at her little brown, paint-smeared hands. “You carry that family of yours on your back like Atlas did the world, and Lucy too—yes, her too—and you go right on doing what you need to do. You’ve refused to go into your father’s business, you’ve refused to go to Georgia, or Tech, or Emory—Lord, I’d be terrified to do that. What is all that if it isn’t courage?”
I looked at her and smiled, and she smiled back, the full, healing smile that had first made me easy with her.
“I wasn’t really going to back out,” I said. “I just needed to talk to somebody before I went home. I’m sure Mother knows about the famous lunch today, and the whole thing is going to come up again at dinner. Thanks for the ammunition.”
“Anytime,” Sarah said, equably, turning back to her easel. I went out of the studio and back around the house to the Fury, and I could feel rather than see the amber eyes on my back as I walked. Under their weight I strutted just a little.
I was wrong about dinner. Aside from saying mildly, “Shep has decided he’ll be going on to Princeton this fall after all,” my father did not mention our luncheon at the Capital City Club, either during the meal or, essentially, ever again. The handwashing had been complete. My mother did not seem too displeased, either. I came later to see the reason: Many of the best families of the South had sent sons to Princeton over the years. With its classically beautiful campus and its reputation for bestowing with some frequency the gentleman’s C, it was the only Ivy League school deemed proper for an Atlanta boy who intended to come back home and ply the family trade. And it did, admittedly, add a certain cachet.
“They don’t seem to come back changed, somehow,” my mother told Dorothy Cameron one day not long after that, and Sarah reported the comment to me with glee. I laughed with her and let it lie. I intended with all my heart not only not to come back, but to be changed as completely as possible. New York still shone like a grail for me, safely away up there beyond the dreaming spires of Princeton.
But over its pristine, shimmering image now there hung, like some bright scrim in a dream, Lucy’s face, wretched and importuning.
For I had been right in that flash of insight I had had about Lucy directly after the lunch with my father and Ben. She had reacted instantaneously and violently to my father’s dry, small comment at dinner. I had not seen her behave so at a meal since we were both children. Everyone at the table simply looked at her openmouthed.
“You can’t!” she cried, standing up so suddenly that her chair nearly toppled behind her. “Gibby, you can’t! You promised! I won’t let you! Uncle Sheppard, don’t let him! Make him stay here, make him go to Emory and live at home—”
“LUCY!” Aunt Willa’s voice cut Lucy’s anguished tirade short, and she stopped in midsentence. Her blue eyes lost their wild white ring and their mad colt’s light and went abruptly dead, and then tears welled and spilled over. They ran silently down her face, which had gone as white as long-bleached bone. She looked at me silently, the tears running, running.
“Oh, Gibby, how could you?” her lips said, but no sound came out with the words. She turned and knocked the chair the rest of the way over, and ran out of the dining room and up the stairs. No one spoke until the thud of her feet vanished behind the slamming of her door.
“I’ll just see about this,” Aunt Willa said in a tight, high, furious voice, slamming her napkin down beside her plate and then catching herself and folding it elegantly and replacing it. She made as if to rise, but my mother laid a hand on her arm.
“Better let her compose herself, Willa,” she murmured, her curved little smile showing nothing but a calm, Madonna-like sweetness, her lashes veiling her eyes. “You know how undone she’s been lately. Sheppie can go talk to her later and fix things right up. We don’t want her doing anything she might…regret later.”
I felt, at that moment, the same hate for my mother that blazed out of Aunt Willa’s eyes before she flattened them back into civility. Lucy’s midnight petting sessions had gone no more unnoticed in our house than they had in the other houses of Buckhead, only unremarked. I knew it was to these that my mother referred.
Lucy was still crying hard when I went up to her room at ten that night, and she would not let me come in.
“Go away,” she sobbed. “I don’t want to see your face. I hate you! You promised, and you broke your promise!”
“Come on, Lucy, let me in,” I called softly, rapping on the door. “What did I promise? Not to stay here and go to school, I didn’t. You knew about Princeton; I told you a long time ago. You saw the letter last year….”
“I didn’t think you’d really do it,” she said, in a voice thick and hopeless with abandonment. “I thought you were just fooling around about it. I never thought you really meant to leave.”
“But you said—”
“I DON’T CARE WHAT I SAID! YOU PROMISED ME YOU WOULD TAKE CARE OF ME FOREVER AND YOU’RE BREAKING YOUR PROMISE!” she shrieked, and there followed a loud thud, where she had thrown something heavy against the door. I was suddenly infinitely weary and sad, and I simply did not think I could cope with Lucy any longer on this night.
“Good night,” I said dully. “I’ll see you in the morning. We’ll talk about it then.”
She did not answer, and I heard the crying start again.
But in the morning she was calm, if red-eyed and pale, and she did not mention my going to Princeton. She left for school early, and I can’t remember if we talked of it again at any length before I left, because it was that very afternoon she came home enveloped smugly in the yellow MG and the goatish golden aura of Red Chastain.
She had met him at one of the Friday night dances the past winter, at the same time we all did, and he had been hanging around her at the various dances and dinners and breakfasts ever since like a randy hound, but she had never shown even the slightest interest in him, and he had never been in the Peachtree Road house. I often wondered why. By any standard I could imagine, Nunnally “Red” Chastain should have been a prize infinitely worthy of Lucy’s steel. There was scarcely a Pink in Atlanta who would not have given up her no-breaks to go steady with him, but though many of them managed to capture his attention long enough for one or two dates, no one but Lucy seemed to hold his interest very long. Small wonder. I honestly think, even in those unformed high school days, Red Chastain could have had any woman over twelve and under thirty he set his sights on.
He was the son of a vastly wealthy fertilizer manufacturer in Southeast Georgia, and had been shipped around the South from one military school to another since he was seven years old, seldom lasting more than a year before being expelled for some flagrant, lazy and mocking infraction of the rules. They usually involved fighting or drinking, or both. He was a tall boy about my age, but because of his predilection for trouble, he was a year behind me at North Fulton, where he had transferred at midyear after his latest ouster, this one from the Georgia Military Academy in College Park to the southeast. He was living temporarily and conditionally with his aunt and uncle on Northside Drive and attending North Fulton as a last resort before his father gave up totally on his education and cut him off without a penny.
Red had not altered his habits one iota, but North Fulton, being a public school, was more lenient than the military fastnesses in which he had previously been held captive, and the aunt and uncle were classically poor relations and frightened to death of Red’s smiling, murderous father. No one reported his indiscretions, and it was not likely that anyone would. They only served to add luster to his legend, except in Lucy’s eyes.
“He thinks he’s God’s gift to women,” she said dryly. “I’ve got news for him.”
Red was silver-blond and had hooded, drowsy blue eyes and his father’s slow, insinuating grin and blind white temper. He was purported to have three or four aborted pregnancies to his credit in small cities and towns around the South, and was a wonderful dancer, a whiplash athlete, and possessed of the kind of quick, spurting rage that many Southern men mask behind affability and slow, sweet smiles. He was called Red because of the lightning flush of fury that flooded his face when he was provoked, which was often. He was not dull-witted; far from it. Red was as quick and cunning as a cobra. Indeed, despite his abysmal academic record (and because of his father’s alumnus status and potential for endowment) he planned confidently to go on to Princeton when he graduated from wherever he finally prevailed. This was the first thing Lucy ever told me about him, smiling sweetly at him as she spoke: “Red, this is my cousin Gibby Bondurant, who looks after me like a big old brother whenever he can. Be nice to him, because he’s going to Princeton just like you. Maybe you-all can room together.”
And she slid the smile from Red over to me in one smooth, rich pour, like molasses.
Red Chastain looked so much like the faded photographs of a young Jim Bondurant Lucy kept in a scrapbook in her room that I started when I met him, as if he had actually been that gilded ghost.
After that first day, there was hardly a moment that spring when Lucy was not in his company. He picked her up in the mornings and drove her to school, and ate his lunch with her, and walked down the halls at school with his long arm about her waist as Boo Cutler used to do, and carried her books to the open MG afterward and tossed them into the back and drove her away, and brought her home in the long green twilights in time to eat dinner, change her clothes and climb again into the MG. The burr of the car was the first thing I heard before leaving the summerhouse for school in the mornings, and the last I heard in the evenings before falling asleep. Lucy still necked and petted long into the nights of that last honeysuckled spring, but the mouth and arms and auto now were those of Red Chastain and Red alone, and the only reason I knew that she was not going all the way with him was, as with all the others before him, that no one was talking about it, and they would have been, instantly, if it had been accomplished. No one talked of anything else that spring but Lucy and Red Chastain.
My parents said nothing about her alliance with him but smiled pleasantly at Red when he ground up the driveway in the MG, and he was always the soul of punctilious courtesy with them. He was charm itself with Aunt Willa, and she was as cordial to him as I ever saw her with any of Lucy’s boyfriends; almost, though not quite, coquettish. Red had that effect on most women. And of course, he was powerfully, spectacularly rich. Aunt Willa was a shade warmer to Lucy that spring, or at least, not so noticeably cool. Her bread was always fresh and ready for buttering.
Even in her near-total absorption with Red, Lucy was behaving oddly with me. She was alternately sharp and contentious and wistful and almost seductive, constantly in an emotional flux, and I put it down to the fact that she still did not want me to go away and leave her alone in that unloving house. But Sarah had her own ideas about Lucy’s mercurial moods.
“She’s so jealous that you take me places she could kill us both,” she said once, and then blushed furiously. But I dismissed that with such unfeigned ridicule that she did not mention it again. And the days spun on toward June and the end of school, and through them all, Lucy burned like a white candle on the arm and in the yellow MG of Red Chastain.
In the last week of May, a scant week before I graduated from North Fulton, we went in a flock of snorting cars on a still, hot afternoon out to the Chattahoochee River, where it ran under the tall old abandoned steel bridge beside Robinson’s Tropical Gardens.
We were all there, my immediate crowd, the small set of Buckhead Boys that predated even the Jells; many of us in the pairs in which we would move into our adult lives. Ben Cameron came with dark, gentle Julia Randolph; Tom Goodwin with tiny, venomous Freddie Slaton; Snake Cheatham with Lelia Blackburn; Pres Hubbard with plain, aristocratic Sarton Foy who had just moved to Atlanta from Savannah with a royal-blue genealogy that left ours in her dust. A.J. Kemp brought Little Lady, who was allowed to tag along even at fourteen because A.J. was poor, polite, and adjudged harmless by Aunt Willa. I was with Sarah Cameron; even Sarah seemed afflicted by the restlessness that rode under the flat surface of the day, and abandoned her studio. Charlie Gentry was alone, but he rode with Sarah and me, in the backseat of the Fury, cracking smart-ass jokes and glancing at Sarah to see how she would respond to them. I saw him in the rearview mirror.
Lucy came with Red Chastain.
We had not planned to come to the river; we had just left Wender & Roberts, bored with the stale chill of the air conditioning and the hanging hiatus in our lives, and drifted in a jostling flock out to the water as if sung there by a water witch. We went there three or four times during the springs and summers; vaguely, as if to check in.
We could not have said why. There was better swimming than the Chattahoochee available to us in a dozen pools, and better necking at Sope Creek and a dozen other spots. Drinking was best done in the parking lots of a handful of drive-ins around town, under cover of darkness and pulsing neon. There was no place on the river in those days to put a boat in; and in any case, river rafting did not become a craze until two decades later. None of us would be caught dead fishing; it was, to us, the social equivalent of bowling. The river was not even a very scenic one, as rivers go. It ran flat and opaque and rusty with the slick mud of the foothills from which it sprang, and there were not, this far south, any appreciable shoals or rapids or waterfalls.
The river was deceptively deep and fast-moving under its sluggish snake’s hide, and was, even on hot days, still cold in its depths in May. But it looked, simply, like a brown, slow, overgrown creek heaving itself along between flat, weedy banks. There were some fine stands of great old willows and hardwoods along its banks, and graceful bamboo forests, and in a few places the land soared high into granite palisades, and the pastures and forests bordering it were still largely innocent of the beetling, overpriced, shabbily built chalets and châteaus and villas that shouldered greedily down to its fringes a decade later. But still, there wasn’t much in the way of natural splendor to lure us there. It was simply that where there is living water, the young near it will—must—eventually come.
“I swear,” Lelia Blackburn said, holding her hair up off her sweating neck. “If it doesn’t go on and rain I’m going to jump out of my skin.”
“How about your clothes?” Snake said, and she slapped him lightly.
We were all about to pop out of our skins like ripe grapes that day. There was thunder in the thick, wet air, and our arms and necks crawled with it. The heat was intense for May, and had gone on too long. The end-of-school social season for the sororities and fraternities was at its fever pitch, and we were all worn and sated and heavy-eyed. Several of the girls were angry with their boyfriends and each other, a normal state that intensified at this time of year, and sniped and jabbed with sweet, sucking accuracy.
“Sarton, I can see smack through that skirt when you stand against the sun,” Freddie Slaton chirped. “Tom would kill me if I showed off my panties to everybody in the world like that.”
“You’re probably the safest girl in America,” patrician Sarton drawled. “The sight of your panties would probably put the world into a coma.”
Undischarged sexual tension hummed like electricity prowling a live wire; most of us had necked and petted ourselves near crazy in the long, hot nights after the dances. Exams loomed. And over us all, especially those of us who were seventeen and eighteen and seniors, there drifted the freighted miasma that overhangs each of the great divisions of life and time. Graduation loomed; could not be held back, no matter how many raw young hearts cried out for it to halt; would, inevitably, come. For most of us, there was the certainty that whatever else it held, life would never again be, for us, so sweet and seamless and golden. It was our first taste of loss and inexorability, and we quivered with that promissory loss like violins tuned to infinity.
Restless Ben Cameron was the only one of us who came close to articulating what we all felt: “We won’t ever come back to this bridge,” he said, his gray eyes far away and somehow drowned.
“Oh, we will too,” Julia chimed. “Of course we will.”
“It won’t be us who comes,” he said.
No one asked him what he meant.
There was no traffic on the old bridge—the new bridge just downriver had siphoned it off—and the smooth, flat water ran silent in the sun toward Apalachicola and the sea, mesmerizing us. Not even cicadas buzzed in the stillness, though there came, cool and rippling, the small splashes far below of snakes or turtles or other water creatures entering the river. It was three-thirty in the afternoon when we got out onto the bridge and stood there, our forearms resting on the pitted old railing, looking down into the dull mirror of the water. Its surface this day was not brown but the rich gray of pewter, and the entire May sky and the great, silver-edged galleons of the thunderheads were caught in it. It was like looking down into the mirror-twin sky of a heretofore unimagined world. There was not even a breeze; the wind had died at noon.
Sarah is adamant in her contention that it was Lucy who began it. She is probably right. I was too far away to hear her, but it was in all ways Lucy’s sort of thing, and on this day she was primed for it like a pulsing pump. She fairly glittered there in the still, silent sunlight, with energy and restlessness and the strange, skittering tides that had been driving her since she met Red. I knew when they got out of the MG that they had been drinking, and not just beer. I could smell whiskey sweet and heavy on Red’s breath, and Lucy’s cheeks burned with the two hectic red circles that liquor always painted there. Her eyes stabbed back light from the sun.
“The last one in that river is a—a Bovis Hardin,” Sarah says Lucy cried. And was out of her skirt and sleeveless blouse and black Capezio shoes before the words were out of her mouth.
My head was turned away from the water when I heard Snake’s cry, “Hey, you idiot, you want to kill yourself?” but even as I swiveled to face them I knew that I would see Lucy. And there she was, standing poised on the railing with white-gripping toes, stripped down to her nylon panties and bra, naked on every silvery-white inch of her save a few, giving a strange, long, wordless, jubilant cry and diving like a polished knife out and down into the sky-smitten water, fully twenty feet below. Red Chastain, stripped also to his undershorts, followed her in a lazy, panther’s racing dive. We all stared in absolute, dream-snared silence. For a heart-stoppingly long time there was nothing on the steely water but the concentric stigmata of their dives, and then their sleek, wet heads broke the surface like seals, and their strong, slim arms Brought them to a little sandy beach some yards downstream, fringed with showering willows.
We were wrapped for another long moment in sun and singing air and river silence. And then Snake cupped his mouth with his hands and gave the great, hideous Tarzan cry out of all the Saturday matinees of our childhood and went off the bridge.
“Kowa Bunga!” yelled Ben, and followed him.
“Oh, God, I’m going to get killed for this!” Julia shrieked, but she slid out of her pedal pushers and blouse and squeezed her eyes shut and jumped in feet first, after Ben.
Julia would have leaped into hell after Ben; in a sense, she did.
The long tension of the day was broken then. One by one, shouting, the Pinks and Jells of Buckhead skinned out of their clothes and dived into the river. Before I could even get a strong breath, there were only four of us left on the bridge. Pres could not swim in his heavy metal brace; he grinned and yelped from beside us. Charlie risked a diabetic’s death from cold and infection if he swam in any but summer-warmed water. I still stood there, on the pitted macadam. And Sarah Cameron, by far the best swimmer and diver of us all, stood indolently at the railing, smiling coolly down at them while they shouted at us to strip and dive, dive, dive!
“It’s the worst kind of showing off,” she said to me in a low, urgent voice. “It’s gumption and not courage. Be really brave and don’t do it.”
Of them all, only she and one other person knew that my fear of heights went beyond mere terror into mindlessness.
Lucy had always known.
They thrashed out of the water and stood on the little beach, gasping at the audacity of their own act, wet, laughing. Even the girls laughed. Even Freddie Slaton, looking like a water snake; even Little Lady, looking like a soaked Easter chick. Even Sarton Foy, looking like what she was—a sopping, near-naked aristocrat.
“Dive, y’all! Dive! Dive! Come on!” she shrieked. “You’re chickenshits if you don’t dive!”
Sarton is the only woman I ever knew besides Lucy on whose lips profanity sounded like an Ave Maria.
Everyone was laughing except Lucy. Lucy did not laugh, did not even smile. She stood a little apart, dripping and slender as a water reed, head thrown back, body gleaming through the sucking nylon, blue eyes blazing straight into mine, hands cupping her mouth, and called up, “Come on, Gibby, jump, or we’ll think you’re a North Fulton fruitcake! Come on! Mark my trai-i-i-l!”
And at that shared, blood-and-heart-deep summons out of our childhood, I ripped off my pants and shirt, scrambled desperately up onto the hot steel railing, steadied myself on the struts and poised blindly for a dive. I opened my eyes then, for one despairing moment, and looked down into the water so sickeningly far below, and saw there instead only the endless, wheeling sky. I toppled backward onto the bridge, pulled myself up on my hands and knees, and vomited.
From below, Lucy’s laughter soared above a scrambled chorus of hard, bright jubilation. It seemed to go on forever. By the time I had gotten numbly into my clothes and walked back to the Fury where I had parked it on the verge of the bridge, stiff and silent with Sarah in my wake, Lucy had come sleek and dripping and incandescent up the bank, shimmering like a young otter. Red Chastain grinned insolently beside her.
“What’s the matter, Gibby?” she said lightly and merrily. “Eat something that didn’t agree with you?”
Red laughed.
Sarah Cameron drew her slender brown arm back and slapped Lucy so hard that her neck snapped back and her wet hair lashed across her face. Someone is always slapping Lucy, I thought stupidly.
“I will never forgive you for that, Lucy Bondurant,” Sarah said in a voice I did not know and never heard again. “Shep will, because he’s a fool. But I won’t.”
We walked on past them, and were in the airless front seat of the Fury before we heard any of them speak, and I could not tell what it was they said. I turned the key and eased the car onto the sunlit emptiness of Paces Ferry Road. Neither of us looked back.
We drove home without a word, but when I let her out at the bottom of the long Cameron driveway, I leaned over and kissed Sarah briefly on her soft mouth, which tasted, surprisingly, of tears.
“Thank you, Sarah,” I said.
“You’re welcome, Shep,” she replied.
From that day until the summer morning I left for Princeton, I went few places without Sarah at my side.
Lucy’s tears of remorse that evening were fierce and real enough, and she was so wildly and desperately penitent that I forgave her as I always had and would; as Sarah had said I would. But the slight remove between us now was impenetrable. I had found to my great pain and profound surprise that the true legacy she had bestowed upon me was not, as I had thought, the power of savior and near-sainthood, but the open wound of vulnerability. An invisible and invincible shield, one that we had forged together on nearly the first day we had known each other, had been breached, and blood had been let. Neither of us, I know, ever forgot that day, though no one in our crowd spoke of it again, at least in my presence.
Almost immediately after the incident on the river the word got around that Lucy was doing the Black Act with Red Chastain almost every night, sometimes two and three times, and that they had vague plans to get engaged when he finally graduated, if he did. She wore no fraternity pin, for Red had refused to join one, so I had no way of knowing if the latter rumor was true.
I knew the former one was. Lucy walked in ripeness and moved in a new thick, sweet slowness that spelled, even to my wildly untutored eyes, completion. I seemed to feel about it, simply, no way at all.
I never spoke of those speculations to her, and she did not to me. We spoke of little in those last days; I kept away from the house as often and as long as I could, taking refuge at the Camerons’ until they good-naturedly ran me home each evening, and she kept to her room when she was not with Red. She did not even eat her meals with us in that last week. I don’t know where she ate, or if she did. Once she stayed out all night and there was a flaming row with Aunt Willa in the foyer when she came in after sunrise, still adjusting her clothing. But I don’t think she was punished, or abided by it if she was, for she was not around the Peachtree Road house that week, and I felt, mainly, an obscure and guilty gratitude that I would not have to ride out another exile with her. I wanted, then, two things only: I wanted to be near the ease and lightness and safety that was Sarah, and I wanted to get away from Atlanta and into Princeton.
It did not occur to me until much later that both Sarah and Princeton might want something in return.
I left a full quarter earlier than I had planned, on a day in late June when rain and coolness had come back to town, and the air smelled of honeysuckle and newly mown grass and grateful, sucking earth. I took the train from Brookwood station, for cars were not allowed on the Princeton campus until junior year, and my weeping mother and the smiling Camerons and Sarah came in the sweet, cool early morning to see me off. My father was at The Cloister on Sea Island at a realtors’ meeting; he had said his cold red good-byes earlier. Lucy was off somewhere with Red Chastain. We had, somehow, said no good-byes at all.
Sarah came regularly to Princeton for football games and, later, Colonial dances, and my mother and father came, rarely, for formal, constrained, parental visits, but except for brief and obligatory trips South for Christmas and Easter and a few unavoidable vacations, I did not come home again for a long time, and then through no choice of my own.
By that time, Lucy had gone.