When I came into the Peachtree road house on that Friday afternoon the previous May, for Sarah and Lucy’s senior prom, only my mother had come running downstairs to greet me, and for a moment the strangeness of coming out of Princeton and into this echoing world of my childhood kept me off-balance, so that I was not completely sure who this dark, lissome woman whose arms bound me so tightly might be, and stepped back a fraction.
It was a near-infinitesimal drawing away, but enough to make her tighten her arms and bury her face in my neck, and begin to weep. My mother did not often weep, and her tears appalled me then as they always had. I patted her awkwardly and hugged her as hard as I could will my muscles to do.
“I’ve lost you, just like I knew I would,” she wept into my new Brooks oxford cloth. “I knew if you left you’d never really come back to me. Oh, Sheppie, you pulled away from me!”
“No, I didn’t, Mother,” I said, still patting industriously. I thought she had lost weight; I could feel the ribs under the silk of her blouse, and the hammering of her heart. She had changed her scent; a muskier and more assertive one rose out of her inky hair to assail me.
“It’s just that you looked so young in this light; I thought you were Lucy running down the stairs.”
“Oh…Lucy!” she said in exasperation, but I could tell she was pleased. She pulled away from me and tilted her head as she looked at me, preening. “Lucy doesn’t run down these stairs, she sneaks up them—at four in the morning. She as good as lives with that Chastain creature now; God knows where they go. We never see her.”
I felt the faintest stab of something; the old Lucy-thrust. I don’t know why my mother’s words surprised me. I knew that Lucy was as deeply involved with Red Chastain as ever; my few brief visits home over the past two years and my mother’s letters confirmed that. Lucy herself, during the rare moments we had been together, had been airy and chattering and almost completely withdrawn from me. I thought that she was still angry and hurt with me for going away to Princeton; her behavior was almost exactly as it had been in the last days after my own graduation from North Fulton, when she had let me leave without saying good-bye.
All right, I had thought then, I’ll play it her way. I don’t owe her an apology for going away to school. She can come to me or we can just go on this way forever, I don’t care. I did, of course, but could not admit it. Lucy’s defection into the arms of all those Jells, and finally into Red’s, had gone deep with me.
I had thought, though, that Princeton and my new closeness to Sarah had healed the wound. And they had, or nearly. This stab was just that: a knife flick, tiny and delicate, and then gone.
“Let me look at you,” my mother said, and did. I had not seen her since the previous summer; I had spent holidays with Mac or Alan, and had gone with Haynes Potter and his family to their place in the Berkshires for Christmas.
Her eyes misted again, and there was something in them—a tiny point of light—that looked oddly like triumph.
“There’s nothing left of my boy,” she said. “It’s all man now. All man and all Bondurant. It’s almost uncanny. Your father will be livid.”
“I should think it might please him that I look like him,” I said, surprised at the hurt that her words engendered. My father had lost the power to hurt me while I was safely ensconced in Firestone and Colonial, but pain bit at me now, tiny and snakelike, under his roof.
“Oh no,” she said, smiling silkily. “Wrong Bondurant, you see.”
I did.
“Where is Dad?” I said, too casually. “Where’s Lucy? And Aunt Willa?”
“Your father is playing golf up at Highlands,” she said neutrally, as if we both did not know that my father kept as far away from the house on Peachtree Road as he could when I was in it.
“He’ll be back Sunday before you go. He wants to see you. Lucy is out with Red Chastain, of course, doing whatever it is that they do. And Willa is on a buying trip to New York, believe it or not. They actually made the creature head buyer for the lingerie department, and she’s gone up to load Rich’s up with Yankee underwear. Come have a glass of iced tea with me and tell me all your news.”
“Well, I thought I’d run over and see Sarah a minute…” I said.
“Oh, of course, Sarah,” said my mother. She did not say it as icily as she might. My strengthened alliance with the house of Cameron pleased her mightily, I knew. Besides, she liked Sarah. All the women in her crowd did. Sarah had a manner with older women that was respectful but not deferential, and she was genuinely knowledgeable about the things that mattered to them: porcelains, English antiques, genealogy, who was who in and around Atlanta. “Nothing but refeened ass kissing,” Lucy called it. Sarah herself called it her “biddy routine.”
I moved toward the telephone under the stairwell, and at that moment Lucy burst into the house and threw her arms around me with such force that we both stumbled. My mother sniffed and retreated upstairs. Outside on the circular driveway I heard Red Chastain’s MG burring away, out into the traffic on Peachtree Road.
As remote as she had been before, she was immediate now, hugging me enormously with arms that I remembered and yet did not, laughing and crying at the same time, her face buried in the hollow of my neck where it just fit, smelling of the heart-tuggingly familiar Tabu, feeling marrow-stirringly like…Lucy. I felt the constraint of the past two years drain away as if it had never been, and was instantly and in every way home. I held her away by her shoulders, and looked into her face, and knew that I had Lucy—the Lucy of my childhood, the gay and brave companion, the radiant enabler, the Scheherazade, the magical Elaine to my Lancelot—back again. I kissed her on the cheek and swung her around, and set her down on the tiles of the foyer. I had forgotten how tall she was, and how slim: Her dark blue eyes were almost level with mine, and I could have lifted her with one arm. And I had forgotten the sheer, electric impact of her. The same invisible but palpable implosion that I always felt on seeing her after an absence radiated out in the air around her. At eighteen, Lucy Bondurant was quite simply splendid.
“You look great,” I said ineffectually.
“So do you,” she said. “You’ve changed. I like it. You remind me of somebody, but I can’t put my finger on it…. Tab Hunter, maybe, but with a hawk’s nose…. Oh well, it’ll come to me.”
I was astounded that she could not put a name to the likeness she saw in me, but she could not, not then or ever. I think she was unable to in many more ways than one.
“You’ll stop traffic tomorrow night,” I said. “Are you going with Red, or is that a silly question?”
“Who else?” she said. “I won’t have much more time with him. His dad got him into Princeton, finally, after making him spend this whole last year at North Georgia, and says he can kiss the family loot good-bye unless he toes the line up there. Translated, that means I can’t go up and visit him until at least his junior year, and he can’t come home except at Christmas and for a week in the summers. Mr. Chastain likes me, but he knows me pretty well, and Red too. He’s already talked to Mama about it. She says she’ll jerk me out of Scott the instant I get off the plane if I sneak off and go. They both mean it, I’m afraid.”
“You mean he won’t be here for your debut?” I said.
“I’m not making my debut,” she said, grinning at me.
“The shit you say!” I exclaimed, aghast. “You have to, Lucy!”
It was the reflexive Buckhead Jell talking, through and through. My reversion had been almost instantaneous. For Lucy to miss that gilded autumn rite of passage was as unthinkable as her bowing to Old Atlanta buck naked. It was the beginning of everything for the Buckhead girls and their boys, that one grand November night at the Piedmont Driving Club, the Harvest Ball. From there the girls would move on as inexorably as figures on a Swiss clock through the prescribed stations of the Atlanta social cross: Christmas dance, Bal de Salut, Rabun Gap-Nacoochee Guild, Tallulah Falls Circle, Cotillion, Music Club, Piedmont Ball, and on into the endless pantheon of charities and auxiliaries, each with its crowded and glittering social calendar, and its ceaseless volunteer labor.
It would launch us, too, the brothers and suitors and husbands-to-be of those carefully tended blossoms, into our own fixed trajectories: From the escort lists of half a hundred mothers in and out of the South, we would go on into the Nine O’Clocks and the German Club and the Benedicts and the Racket Club and so on and so forth, ending up in the Driving Club and Capital City and Brookhaven and at the heads of those myriad charities and committees whose balls our wives chaired, and from there on into the service of the city. It was the one true way and the one true path. Nobody of substance did it any other way.
A thought sandbagged me. Would they dare, even to Lucy Bondurant?
“You don’t mean to tell me you didn’t get into the club?” I goggled. Saint Shep the Defender leaped out of his moldy cave, snatched his rusty armor and scrambled to buckle it on. I would have a full complement of carefully waved, blue-rinsed heads for this.
“Oh, don’t be dumb, of course I got into the club,” Lucy said. “They wouldn’t dare not ask me, while I’m living in Uncle Sheppard’s house, anyway. I didn’t join, that’s all. Holy shit, Gibby, you should have seen Mother’s face when I told her. And your father’s, for that matter. You’d have thought I’d said I was going to marry a nigger at Saint Philip’s on Easter Sunday. Mama still isn’t speaking to me, and I don’t think your daddy is, either. I haven’t really seen him since then. The only reason I’m walking around free is that your mother told them to lay off me. She said she thought I’d made the right decision, under the circumstances. Trust Aunt Olivia to do the right thing.”
Her smile had nothing in it of mirth.
“What circumstances?” I said dimly.
“Jesus, Gibby, are they giving you stupid pills along with the saltpeter up there in Boys’ Town? The Red Chastain circumstances, of course. Why should I come out? I’ve been about as out as a girl can get for two years now. Aunt Olivia wasn’t born yesterday.”
“You mean, because you’re…”
“Sleeping with him,” she said sweetly. Her smile burned almost through me to the bone. The radiance in the air around her was, all of a sudden, too bright. Her eyes glittered with more than high spirits and joy at seeing me. I felt, then, the million little knife edges that hedged her in.
“The Dirty Deed, the Black Act. Fucking. You have, I trust, heard of fucking? Though I don’t suppose for a minute that you and the Divine Sarah have—”
“Well, God, you surely aren’t the only girl in Atlanta who ever made her debut as anything less than a virgin,” I said hastily.
“No, but I’m probably the only girl in Atlanta who got caught in the act on the pool table in the men’s grill at Brookhaven by the greens committee,” she said.
“Christ, you don’t mean…”
“Yes, I do. In midhump, as it were. Doing it like a mink. It’s the only time I’ve ever known Red not to be able to finish what he started.”
I knew that she was trying, for some reason, to shock me, but I also knew that she was telling the truth. I had an infallible radar when it came to Lucy’s lying. This was no lie. I was silent.
“Don’t worry, Gibby,” she said. “You don’t have to save me from this one. I would have absolutely hated all that charity and volunteer shit. And I’ve saved your folks a ton of money. Little Lady’s coming right along behind me, you know, and it’s going to take a mint to bring her out. No, tomorrow night is my debut. Wait’ll you see my dress. I’m flat going to scald some eyeballs.”
She was right. Traditionally, the girls at North Fulton wore flounced and ruffled pastel hoopskirts to their senior proms, but when she came down the beautiful old staircase the next evening, before Red came to pick her up, Lucy was in white silk, as fluid and sweetly poured over her luminous slenderness as a column of cream, and her shoulders gleamed absolutely naked and pearled with youth and powder. She wore no jewelry, but had brushed her shoulder-length pageboy until it flew like dark thistledown around her narrow head, and in her hair she had fastened three perfect white gardenias from the bush in the garden outside the summerhouse. The dress was slit up to midthigh on one side, and one impossibly long leg, a pale satin-brown from the spring sun, glimmered in and out. She wore white high-heeled sandals and carried a little silver envelope. The only color in all that incandescent black and white was the red of her soft mouth, a translucent scarlet stain, as if she had been eating berries, or drinking blood. She gave off her own light, there in the dim foyer. I turned from adjusting my black tie in the ormolu hall mirror and stared at her. I could not have spoken. There wasn’t, on this night, anything else to be said about Lucy James Bondurant. No other girl at the prom would even be noticed.
She smiled. And then she came a few little running steps down the last of the stairs and into my arms, and I swung her around again, and she was laughing, laughing with a kind of fierce joy.
“Oh, Gibby,” she said. “I thought you never would come home again!”
“I thought you didn’t want me to,” I said, setting her down.
“Well, I was being silly; I thought you’d know that. You always did. But anyway, here you are, and now everything’s going to be all right.”
“What’s going to be all right? What’s wrong?” I said, my ears pricking.
“Nothing, now that you’re here. Absolutely nothing at all. Here, fasten these for me, will you? Aren’t they sweet?”
She handed me a string of pearls, still warm from the cup of her hand, and turned to face the mirror and lifted her heavy dark hair with both hands. I fastened the strand. They were beautiful, small and perfectly matched.
“From your daddy,” she said. “Before, I might add, he knew that I wouldn’t be coming out. I offered to give them back, but he said no, of course to keep them. So I did. I ain’t no fool.”
I heard the deep, powerful purr of a great engine on the driveway, and cocked an eyebrow at her.
“Red’s got his daddy’s Rolls tonight,” she said. “I told him I wasn’t going a step out of this house if he came in that fucking MG.”
She looked into the mirror at our heads, one fair, one ebony, close together.
“Aren’t we a matched pair, though?” she said. “We look like an ad for…oh, I don’t know, something rich and wonderful. Like we couldn’t possibly have anything but the most perfect life in the world. It should be you taking me to this thing tonight, you know, Gibby.”
“I’m no match for Prince Charming Chastain, Luce,” I said. “You’d make me miserable flirting your head off and going outside to neck or worse with everybody under ninety. But he knows how to control you.”
“Yes, he does,” she said, and her smile was gone. “That’s why I hang on to him, you know. He’s a mean bastard, really, but he wrote the book on control.”
Shem brought the Fury, waxed and humming, around to the front of the house and I drove around the corner to Muscogee to pick up Sarah. She was still upstairs dressing, but Amos showed me into the little den at the back of the house, where Dorothy Cameron was watching television alone. It had been a day of thunderstorms and high winds, and another storm was grinding through, peppering the black window glass with driving rain, splitting the lashing trees with lightning.
Dorothy kissed me and indicated the chair where Ben usually sat.
“You’ll have to get up when he comes, because he won’t sit anywhere else, but right now he’s out in the kitchen toasting some cheese sandwiches,” she said. “Would you like a drink?”
“I guess not,” I said. “It’s going to be a long night.”
“Then come and tell me all about Lucy,” she said. There was more than prurient interest in her severe, beautiful face: I knew she had always been genuinely concerned about Lucy.
“Well, it’s just that she didn’t want to make her debut, and I can’t say that I blame her,” I said defensively. “What kind of a life is that for a woman, really, all that volunteering and do-gooding? There’s so much more an intelligent woman could be doing—”
And then I remembered that she had been voted Woman of the Year by the American Red Cross for her volunteer work at Grady Hospital, and I flushed a dull, hot red. “I didn’t mean you….”
She laughed. “I know you didn’t. But tell me. If we volunteers didn’t do the things we do, who do you think would do them?”
“Maybe somebody with fewer talents,” I said. “Somebody who didn’t have so much else to give somewhere else. Look at you. You could have been a great chief operating officer, a chairman of the board, or a doctor, or…whatever you wanted to be. Anything. You didn’t have to give it away.”
“And how many lifetimes would all that have taken?” she said, smiling affectionately at me, as she had when I was an outspoken little boy. “No, Shep, it’s the only decent thing to do with prestige and privilege, with money. People without those things don’t have the resources or the drive to get done what needs doing. It’s poverty that corrupts the will and energy, not wealth.”
“Well,” I said, “but what about all those women who don’t want to do the charity bit? The ones like Lucy, who want to be something else, something more, and have the gifts for it?”
She nodded. “They’re the casualties in this particular time and place,” she said. “Ambition and difference—they’re the two things the rest of us women won’t tolerate. We punish them. Maybe it reminds us of what we didn’t do. Lucy is going to be punished for this free-spirited little decision of hers, if not now, then later. She’s a casualty, whether she knows it or not. Now ambition for a man, for her husband, that’s a different matter.”
“If you’re so wise, why don’t I feel better about this whole thing?” I said.
“I suspect it’s because you see a truth that’s under the truth I’m talking about. I think you always could do that, Shep. Be careful with it—we’ll probably try to punish you for it, too.”
“Who’s going to punish who for what?” Ben Cameron said, coming into the room with a tray bearing two melted cheese sandwiches and two tall glasses of pale beer. “Hi, stranger. Good to see you.”
“I am you, if you spill that beer,” Dorothy Cameron said, rising to take the tray from him, and he came to me and put his arms around me and hugged me as naturally as if I had been young Ben. I felt a powerful tide of warmth toward him. He was, as Sarah said later of Charlie, constant. He had always been all I had known of fatherly affection.
“It’s a real change to see your ugly face around here,” he said, one arm still around my shoulders. “All we ever see is Charlie Gentry. I asked Dottie the other night if he’d moved in with us.”
I laughed. I knew and Ben knew that Sarah dated Charlie when I was not at home largely because he and Dorothy insisted that she see other boys, feeling that she was far too young for an exclusive relationship. Charlie knew it, too; he had said to me the last time I was home, “She’d drop me in a minute if you’d crook your little finger.” He said it matter-of-factly and without a trace of rancor on his sweet, freckled face. “But hell, I don’t care. You aren’t going to do that, apparently, fool that you are. And a little of Sarah is better than none.”
I believe that Ben and Dorothy always knew where their daughter’s heart lay, long before I did, and they approved, if only tacitly, our relationship. Dorothy as much as said so that night.
“I’m eternally greatful that I’m past all that social folderol and can stay home and watch Gunsmoke,” she said, smiling at me. “It’s a foul night. I’m glad it’s you taking Sarah. I don’t worry about her when she’s with you.”
“That may not be all that flattering to Shep,” Ben said, the gray eyes twinkling. There were new lines etched in the thin skin under them, and the hints of pouches, as if he were very tired, and I thought he looked much older, and somehow extremely formidable. I remember that Sarah had said he was becoming active in Atlanta politics—not a normal thing for a man of his station—and I could see, suddenly, that he would make a leader to be reckoned with, for all his boneless ease and Celtic whimsy.
“Shep knows what I mean,” Dorothy Cameron said. “He isn’t like the others, nice boys that they are. You say the same thing yourself, so don’t leer at me, Ben Cameron.”
“I think I’d better get out of here before you turn my head,” I said, grinning back at her. I was very flattered, and tried not to show it.
“I wish I could,” she said. “I’ll bet nobody has ever really tried. You deserve to have your head turned a little, Shep.”
Sarah came into the room then, vivid as a zinnia in warm coral tulle, and I smiled involuntarily at the goodness of the way she looked. We hugged, stiffly and self-consciously, and said our good nights to Dorothy and Ben, and by eight o’clock we were bowling out Peachtree Road in the last of the evening rain toward Brookhaven and the North Fulton senior prom. I was eager, excited, even. I had seen few of the Pinks and the Jells in two years.
They were all there, drifting and settling and eddying away again like migratory swallows. The old ballroom shimmered with crepe paper and lanterns and a spinning colored spotlight, and the band—a second-echelon but well-regarded rock ‘n’ roll group out of Nashville—was thumping and gyrating into its first number. A few couples were on the floor, and others were detaching themselves from small groups and sliding out into the music. It was steady and insinuating, but not frenzied, as it would be later in the evening, and I swung Sarah into an easy jitterbug, hoping to get in a respectable quota of dancing before the real madness started. I never learned to do the aggressive, sensual, pelvis-snapping rock steps of that time, and was grateful that Sarah’s bursting dance card would keep her on the floor as long as she wanted. I knew that she would be content to sit out most of the howling, insistent numbers—or go outside to the terrace with me. Sarah could do the beach-bop business of the fifties as faultlessly as she could do anything with her elegant little body, but her soul, like mine, shied away from it.
It might have been my own senior prom, not Sarah and Lucy’s, there was, on the surface, so little sense of time passed and change happened. The original core group of us was there in the familiar formations: Sarah and me, Ben and Julia, Snake and Lelia, Pres and Sarton Foy, looking even plainer and more aristocratic than ever, Tom and Freddie Slaton. A.J. had brought a stunningly pretty pink and white-blond senior from Washington Seminary, who looked all evening like a white baroness captured by Amazonian pygmies, and Charlie was, as usual, stag.
On closer examination, there were a few surface transmutations, many of them merely a deepening of the small stigmata already laid down: Ben Cameron was now so brilliantly animated that his old, quick grace seemed flamboyant and theatrical; Charlie’s sweet, shambling pragmatism had deepened almost into phlegm; the anxious discontent in Freddie’s sharp little eyes had atrophied into darting malice. And despite the first-glance sameness of the setting and the dress and the players in this stylized masque, there hung about it, for me, a profound strangeness which lay just below the surface of the night. It was not the old sense of unreality I remembered from my earliest days at the dances of the Pinks and the Jells, but a keen aura of impermanence, so that I almost expected the entire scene to slide away into the wings, like a lavish set from an opera, and some other, utterly unimaginable set to come grinding out. Two years had altered me irrevocably, if not the others.
Lucy and Red Chastain were nowhere to be seen.
By intermission the evening was in full, sweating cry, and we Buckhead Boys drifted out into the parking lot with our dates and sat on the bumper and fenders of A.J.’s newest vehicle, a 1938 Cadillac hearse so vast and shining and massive that it resembled a lava rock atoll. A.J. had brought grape juice and a bag of ice and Ben Cameron had vodka, and we sat drinking Purple Passion in the still-wet parking lot under a slim silver moon, the piercing fragrance of honeysuckle and mimosa from the lawns of the big houses on West Brookhaven washing across to us on the still air. I hated the thick, cloying taste of the drink, and I think most of us did, but we drank from the thermos top that A.J. passed around as deeply and solemnly as if it had been a communion chalice. I think we all knew, that night, that it was just that, and that this was in all likelihood our last communion.
Out here in the dark, change, endings, little dyings quivered in the air around us like a silent detonation, even more powerfully than in the last few days of my senior year at North Fulton, for now, after this upcoming graduation, the girls—the glue that had held us together since birth—would be dispersing, too. We boys had, two years before, moved out into our own arenas: I to Princeton; Ben into the architectural school at Georgia Tech; Snake into premed at Emory; A.J. downtown to the Atlanta Division of the University of Georgia; Pres Hubbard to the university itself, over at Athens; Tom Goodwin to his father’s school, Sewanee; Charlie into prelaw at Emory. But, except for me, we had stayed close to Atlanta, or at least within a couple of hours’ driving distance.
The girls were different. Only two of them—Sarah and Lucy, who would enter Agnes Scott College in Decatur—would be staying in Atlanta after this summer. Julia Randolph planned to go to Auburn with three of her Washington Seminary classmates, Lelia Blackburn was slated for Sweet Briar, Sarton Foy would follow her female ancestors into Wellesley and Freddie Slaton was being shipped off to Pine Manor Junior College in the dim parental hope that separation from Tom would dull some of her gnawing hungers and proximity to Boston would burnish some of her razor edges. We would come back together again, of course, at holidays and summer vacations, and in the endless formal patterns of the great Atlanta social quadrille that we were entering, but after tonight a flawless surface would be ruptured, a perfect wholeness opened and corrupted, and we knew it. The Purple Passion made several more rounds than it might have ordinarily.
A tootling fusillade of rock music from the old stone clubhouse signaled the band’s return, and we slid down off the hearse and began to move toward it, walking slowly and in pairs, arm in arm. I remember that the moonlight lay so dense and shadowless over the surging hills of the golf course that it looked bathed in some ancient, awful silver sun, and the smell of mimosa was heartbreaking. Just as Sarah and I gained the door, a scream of engine and tires broke the thick night behind us, and we turned to see Red Chastain’s father’s black Rolls careen into the parking lot, rocking viciously on two tires. We all stood still, waiting for Red and Lucy to get out of the car and come toward us, but they did not. Rock music louder than that inside the club blared out of the Rolls’s open windows, and over it we could hear the sound of Red’s voice, and then Lucy’s, raised in a furious quarrel.
“Trouble in paradise,” A.J. said.
“Oh, just a little lovers’ spat, probably.” Snake grinned. “Maybe we ought to go throw cold water on them.”
“Are they fussing, Shep?” Freddie asked, sweetly and avidly. “I heard they’ve been fussing all spring over Lucy running around with Mr. Cameron’s Negro houseboy, or whatever he is. Poor thing. I heard Red told her he’d take his pin back if she didn’t stop. And she didn’t, because I saw them out in the Camerons’ side yard the other day when I drove by there.”
She looked brightly at me, her red head cocked like a malicious little bird’s, and in that moment I truly hated her. Freddie Slaton would always peck delicately at pain and trouble like a vulture in offal.
“I don’t have the slightest idea, Freddie,” I said. “I’ve barely seen her since Christmas.”
“Well, what about it, Sarah? Ben?” Freddie pressed. “You have to admit she’s around your place with that Glenn What’s-his-name an awful lot, whenever she’s not with Red. What’s going on there, anyway? Tell!”
Sarah drew a sharp breath preparatory to answering her, but Ben Cameron cut in with his smooth, dry voice which managed somehow to glitter.
“You probably see a lot more of Glenn Pickens and Lucy than Sarah and me, Freddie,” he said. “As much as you seem to ride by our house. Daddy said at breakfast the other day that if he didn’t know better, he’d think the little Slat on girl was thinking of buying the house.”
Freddie looked affronted, as she always did when one of her intrusions provoked the response it deserved, and huffed herself up like a bantam chicken, but whatever she might have said to Ben was lost in an explosion of sound from the far end of the parking lot. We saw a glass come spinning through the window of the Rolls and shatter on the asphalt, followed by something larger that might have been a bottle, and a shriek from Lucy. Even at this distance I could tell that it was rage and not pain or fear. I was embarrassed and angry with her, and with Red and Freddie, and ready to be angry with whoever spoke, but no one did. After a moment we went back into the club and the dance bowled on.
For the rest of the evening I kept an uneasy eye on the door, waiting for them to come in, but by the time the band finished the last throbbing, shouting chorus of “I Got a Woman” and segued into “Goodnight, Sweetheart,” they still had not appeared, and I figured that the quarrel had been serious enough so that he had taken Lucy home—or that they were coupled in furious atonement in the velvety backseat of the Rolls. The thought repelled and disturbed me as the image of Lucy copulating with Red always did, and I pulled Sarah closer to me and buried my face in the springy silk of her hair. She nuzzled her face into my shoulder, and we swayed together wordlessly and dreamily, abandoning ourselves to the myriad endings that were now upon us, drowning, at last, in them. All around us, couples were doing the same thing. As loud and explosive as the entire evening had been, these last few minutes of it were quiet, quiet.
So that when Lucy came pelting into the ballroom and across the floor, her breath sobbing in her throat, her sandals clattering on the waxed old boards, everyone stopped and looked at her. In truth, it was not possible to look anywhere else.
Lucy looked utterly wild, mad, almost dangerous. Her face was nearly as white as the silk dress. Her blue eyes had that eldritch white ring around them that I had rarely seen since the terrible nightmares and fits of hysteria of her childhood. Her dress was pulled askew so that one breast trembled nearly out of it. The gardenias were gone from her hair, and it flew wild around her head; strands of it whipped across her forehead and her mouth. Her lips were reddened and puffed and bare of lipstick.
She stopped at the edge of the dance floor and looked around in intense concentration, seemingly oblivious that nearly three hundred people were staring silently at her. Her eyes scanned and scanned, and then found me, and she smiled. I had never seen such a smile on her face before, and could only stare. If it had not been for the dress and the indefinable Lucyness of her slender body and her lithe, free stride, I would not have known who she was.
She walked straight across the dance floor to where Sarah and I stood, and put her hand on my arm, ignoring Sarah as totally as if she did not stand there beside me. At this distance I could see the magenta prints of fingers on her upper arms and shoulders and throat, and smell a strong gust of bourbon. I did not doubt that she and Red had been drinking all evening. I knew that they did to some extent whenever they were out together now, but I had never seen Lucy drunk in public before. I would have known that she was tonight, though, even if I had not seen the hot, opaque, unfocused glitter in her eyes.
“Hey, Gibby,” she said merrily and clearly. She did not slur. “I came to claim my dance. You know, you promised me the last dance.”
I did not reply for a moment, and Sarah did not either. She stood quietly beside me, her hand still on my shoulder, looking gravely at Lucy. She knew I had not promised Lucy the last dance; this was historically reserved for the girl you came with. All of us knew that; had for years. It was a tacit rule none of us would have thought of breaking.
Lucy seemed to see Sarah for the first time, and smiled again, a great, broad, incandescent smile.
“Sarah won’t mind, Gibby,” she said, and this time she did slur just a little, and rocked on her high heels so that she had to put out one hand to steady herself against my arm. “Sarah’ll wait for us to finish. Good old Sarah. Sarah’ll just sit all quiet like a little old puppy dog and wait for us…”
“Where’s Red, Lucy?” I said, steadying her and trying not to see the avid, embarrassed faces of my friends and classmates around me. I damned her silently. “Let’s go find Red—”
“No! I want you to dance with me!” she said. Her voice rose. “Put your arms around me, Gibby, and dance with me…dance with me…” She locked her arms around my neck and sagged against me, so that I was forced to hold her to prevent her from slipping to the floor. I looked at Sarah desperately over Lucy’s head; her face was scarlet, but it was still and composed.
“Why don’t you take her outside for some air?” she said to me, in a low, even voice. “I’ll be fine; I can get a lift home with Ben and Julia.”
“That’s right,” Lucy said in a singsong voice, her eyes closed, smiling, swaying. “You’re a nice girl, Sarah; go on home with your big brother and let me dance with Shep—”
Rage flooded me coldly and fully then. I took Lucy by her upper arms and thrust her away from me so suddenly and sharply that her head bounced on her neck, and she opened her eyes and looked at me in the old simple, lost, Lucy bewilderment. I felt the traitorous twist begin in my heart, but the rage was stronger.
“Stand up, Lucy,” I said. “I have this dance with Sarah, and I’m going to dance with her, and then I’m going to take her home. If you need some help getting back out to the car, I’m sure somebody will help you”—I looked around and found Charlie’s calm white face, and our eyes met, and he nodded slightly. I thought there was a tiny flicker of triumph behind his thick glasses—“Charlie will help you. But I am going to dance this dance with Sarah.”
Lucy stared back at me, and her face blanched even whiter than I had thought possible, and a quick wash of tears filmed her eyes, and then vanished, to be replaced with a pure and silver glitter of something I could not name.
“You do that, Gibby,” she said. It was a drawl, low and controlled, all drunkenness gone as if it had never been. It rang in the huge room like a bell. “You dance with little Sarah, and then you take her home, and when you get there you roll her over and fuck her brains out, why don’t you? Oh, but of course…you can’t do that. She doesn’t have anything to fuck. Red tried, he told me all about it; tried all one night while you were at Princeton, and you know what? She didn’t have a hole! Got no hole at all, because Sarah isn’t really Sarah, you know; she’s one of those cute little plaster elf things that grin at you in miniature golf courses, and everybody knows elves don’t have holes….”
Sarah turned and walked off the dance floor and I followed her. It was very quiet in the big ballroom; Lucy had stopped talking and no one else spoke. It was a truly terrible moment, and the worst and longest walk I have ever taken, or ever will again. I could not imagine how Sarah could keep her head erect and her shoulders even and her step firm and steady after those killing words, but she did.
It had been a uniquely dreadful thing for Lucy to say, a terrible analogy; it had always been her gift to find the kernel of unalterable truth in everything, and there was, in the analogy of those awful, grotesque, painted elf-parodies, grinning from among the little bridges and white, puffy toadstools of every miniature golf course we had ever seen, a tiny, caricatured core of Sarah. It was there in her carved, miniature body, her generous red mouth nearly always smiling, her high color and her huge sherry eyes under straight black brows. I knew that everyone in that room would, whenever they saw one of those ghastly homunculi, think fleetingly and guiltily of Sarah Cameron, no matter how much they might love her. I knew that I would, and Sarah would. At that moment I could have killed Lucy for that diminishment.
Sarah did not speak when I handed her into the car. I reached out to take her in my arms, but she gave me a look of such desperate control and entreaty that I did not. I knew she was fighting tears, and that any gentleness would break her. It upset Sarah so badly to cry in front of people that it almost made her sick, and so I just said, softly and helplessly, “Sorry”; she nodded, and I nosed the car out onto West Brookhaven, and then onto Peachtree Road. As we came into Buckhead, deserted and lunar, she reached over and switched on the radio, and I knew she had won for the moment her battle with the tears, but I still did not touch her.
“Don’t come in, please, Shep,” she said, when I pulled into the cobbled courtyard of the Muscogee Avenue house. “I know I’m going to go upstairs and cry, and then I’ll feel better and I’ll be okay in the morning. Come talk to me then, and have some lunch. And don’t worry. You aren’t responsible for Lucy. I know that.”
“Sarah,” I said, tasting the words on my tongue in the darkness. “Sarah, I love you.”
“I know that, too,” she said, and let herself out of the car, and vanished into the door to the little sunroom.
I went home determined to wait up for Lucy no matter how late she came in, and confront her with her behavior. I did not know what I would say to her, but I did know that what she had done to Sarah Cameron was beyond any pale I could imagine, and that I must not let her get away with it. It seemed the most important thing I would ever do; it seemed to me, that night, that great, profound things, things of deep and everlasting import, rode on my forcing some accounting from Lucy. But I had no idea what those things might be, and in any case, I did not do it, for she had not come in by full light the next morning, and I finally fell asleep in the hot, ashy dawn of a new spring day.
When I awoke, at eleven o’clock, she was sitting on the end of my bed in the summerhouse wearing black Capri pants and a fresh yellow blouse and smoking a Viceroy. I squinted stupidly at her through the smoke, and then the previous night came sliding back into my mind, and I sat up and took a deep breath and said, “Look, Lucy…”
She smiled. She looked as if she’d had ten hours of sweet, untroubled sleep, and only the faintest ghost fingerprints on her forearms and another set at the base of her throat remained of all the anger and ugliness.
“If it’s about last night, I’m sorry, Gibby, and I know I was horrible, and I’ll go over later and tell Sarah how sorry I am. I had a good reason for acting so awful, though, and I wanted to tell you about it.”
I could not imagine how she could look so untouched and young and somehow clean and whole there in the dimness of the summerhouse, and I simply stared at her for a moment, and then I said, “Lucy, there can’t be any reason in the world good enough to justify how you acted last night, and whatever it is, I don’t want to hear it.”
“Well,” she said equably, blowing smoke out in twin plumes through her nose, “you have to hear it, want to or not. You have to help me fix it. I’m three and a half months pregnant, and we’ve got to make some plans. I thought I better catch you before you went in for breakfast so we can figure out the best way to go about this.”
My ears rang. I simply could not answer her.
“I want to have an abortion,” she said, when I did not speak, “and I don’t have any money. I know a place in Copper Hill, Tennessee, I can go to, a real doctor in a real clinic, and perfectly safe, but it costs six hundred dollars and I can’t get that much. And I know you have that trust money from your granddaddy….”
“It’s Red’s, of course,” I said. My mouth felt stiff and clumsy, numb. My tongue was enormous.
“Of course,” Lucy said. “Whose else would it be? What do you think I am, Gibby?”
“Then get the goddamned money from him!” I shouted. I was surprised at the depth of my anger and shock. Given Lucy’s behavior with Red, this was almost to be expected.
Lucy’s reasonable aplomb vanished.
“I can’t tell him! I could never tell him!” she cried.
“Why the hell not?” I hissed furiously. “He who dances must pay the piper. Or he who fucks must pay the abortionist, to be exact. God almighty, Lucy, he’s got money coming out of his ass! Why can’t he take responsibility for his own baby? Come to that, why can’t he marry you? Wasn’t he going to, anyway? What difference does it make if it’s now rather than later? His old man can support all of you; that’s what you ought to be thinking about, not a damned abortion—”
“He can’t marry me!” She burst into tears. I saw that they were the old, old tears of real pain and fear and desperation, and my heart contracted. This was Lucy, this was still Lucy….
“Why the hell not?” I said again, my voice softening in spite of myself.
“Because his father says he’ll cut him off without a cent if he either knocks anybody up or marries anybody till he’s out of Princeton, and Red knows he’ll do it. He told me if I got pregnant it was the last I’d see of him, and he meant it!”
“Christ, what a bastard,” I exploded. “Then good riddance to him. No, Lucy, I’m not going to pay for any abortionist. You could die….”
“This man is good, Shep; everybody goes to him.”
“What do you mean, everybody?”
“God, do you think I’m the only girl in Atlanta this has ever happened to?” She laughed bitterly. “You don’t see any shotgun weddings or unwed mothers in this crowd, do you? You bet your ass you don’t. This is the guy they go to. The families always pay. He…he’s fashionable, like the hairdresser all the Buckhead girls go to, or the right fitter. Only, can you see your mother or father paying for my abortion? Or Mr. Chastain, for Christ’s sake? And Red’s not going to.”
“Lucy,” I said, “you could have the baby.”
“I WILL NOT HAVE A BABY WITHOUT BEING MARRIED!” Lucy shrieked. “I CAN’T TAKE CARE OF A BABY! I CAN’T EVEN TAKE CARE OF MYSELF!”
She began to cry then, and she cried so hard that I went to her and put my arms around her, as I had first on that day so long ago when she had run away and been punished, and gradually she stopped the terrible sobbing. We sat in silence for a time.
“You said you’d always look after me, Gibby,” she whispered against my bare chest. “You promised, the day we cut our wrists.”
Here it was again, that peculiar litany, the maiden supplicant to the knight, that she reverted to whenever she was pushed to the brink of terror and impotence. Those narrow childhood wounds, that thin young blood that ran so deep…
“Luce, I don’t have any six hundred dollars,” I said. “I don’t have anywhere near that, until I graduate. That’ll be way too late.”
“You could marry me,” my cousin Lucy said. She raised her face to mine, and it was radiant with more than tears. Deliverance shone there, simple and joyous. “You could marry me, Gibby. We could drive to Maryland today, this morning, and I could come live in Princeton and we could get a place somewhere, and I could get a job, and you could go right on studying….”
“I can’t do that,” I said numbly. “You can’t do that. You know you can’t. Lucy, I can’t always take care of you. I’m not able to. You just can’t expect me to do that.”
“That’s just what I do expect,” she exploded again, tears jetting anew from her eyes. “Because you promised me on your blood that you would!”
“Lucy,” I said again desperately, “I wasn’t even nine years old when I said that! You weren’t even seven! You always keep coming back to that day, and you must know that we were just children playing a game….”
My voice dwindled and stopped. I sat still and slumped. She did not speak. She stared intently into my face. Presently, I suppose, she read my answer there, because she stiffened and sat up, and pushed my arms away.
“I have to go back to school this afternoon,” I said. “I tell you what. You go see a doctor and find out for sure, and then call me. I’ll think about it, and we’ll work something out that will maybe let you go away and have the baby, and you can say you’re visiting…oh, somebody….”
She gave me a brilliant and truly terrible smile.
“Never mind, Gibby,” she said. “With any luck, maybe we’ll find out it’s only cancer, and you’ll be off the hook. You can be the one crying the loudest at my funeral, and everybody will say what a devoted cousin you were.”
“Lucy,” I whispered, but she turned and walked out of the summerhouse.
I started after her.
“If you come one step further I’ll tell everybody it’s yours, Gibby,” she said without looking back. “And you’d better believe I mean that. Go on back to your precious Princeton. I don’t ever want to see you again.”
And I did. I did not even go over to see Sarah; just called and said I’d overslept and needed to go on to the airport, and that I’d see her for graduation in a couple of weeks, and took the noon plane to Philadelphia and the dinkey to the PJ&B. All that week I waited for Lucy’s call, sick with misery, worry for her and an anger that I still could not name.
The call from Atlanta came five days later, but it was from my mother, not Lucy. As calmly as if she were discussing my laundry, she told me that Lucy had taken the Fury out in a great afternoon rainstorm and had lost control of it and slammed into a bridge abutment on the new interestate highway up near Gainesville. She was in Piedmont Hospital with a concussion and a deep laceration on her temple, and internal injuries, but she was expected to heal routinely, even though she had lost a great deal of blood. But the Fury was a total wreck. I thought there was a certain measure of satisfaction in my mother’s voice, though whether it was in relation to the damaged niece or the wrecked car, neither of which she had ever liked, I could not tell.
I called Lucy in her private room at Piedmont after supper that night.
“What about the baby?” I said without preamble.
“What baby?” she said, and her voice was gay. “There isn’t any baby, Gibby. Not anymore, there isn’t.”
Lucy graduated with her and Sarah’s class a week later, looking, according to the photographs that Aunt Willa took, like an El Greco angel, in a white cap and gown, with a small white bandage like a beauty spot on her delicately hollowed temple. Aunt Willa and my mother and father were there to see her, and Red Chastain, looking handsome and supercilious in his blue blazer and gray flannels and white bucks, and even Red’s father, grinning enormously and ferally.
But I wasn’t.