“Inever get over the feeling that I’m going to see Frank Sinatra scrooched up under your steps, screaming for heroin,” Sarah said, pressing closer to me as I fumbled for the key to my apartment. She had never quite gotten over The Man with the Golden Arm when I had taken her to see it at the Playhouse on one of the Princeton weekends, and she never failed to evoke Sinatra’s tortured wraith when we climbed the marble steps to my place on West Twenty-first Street.
I could see her point. That area of lower Manhattan, from about Eighth Avenue over to the Hudson River, is called Chelsea now, and is, I understand, thoroughly gentrified. But in the late fifties, when I moved there, it was a dim and, in places, downright eerie slice of the city, decaying and sullen, with all manner of funny stuff in the air and in the blood, including heroin. I routinely found supine bodies amid the trash cans and more unspeakable jetsam in the basement stairwells of my block, between Eighth and Ninth, and after the first two or three encounters, stopped automatically calling the police. In all but two cases, the bodies turned out to be derelicts sleeping off the night’s load of muscatel out of the wind. Of the other two, one was comatose from heroin, and the other, a livid and terrified-looking old woman, was dead. After nearly a year, I prided myself on being able to distinguish the quick from the dead at a glance.
The bodies did not bother me. My apartment was the entire first floor of a once-grand old brownstone with a rear view into a ruined garden—I literally looked into a low, sturdy ginkgo from my rudimentary kitchen—and it was cheap enough so that I did not have to have a roommate. That it was airless, dark, scurrilously shabby and probably deserving of condemnation hardly even registered with me two days after I had moved in. It was now as clean as a week of scrubbing and chipping and mopping and painting could get it, it was comfortable enough if you did not insist upon aesthetics and it was close via foot, bus and subway to both my job at the New York Public Library and the jazz clubs in the Village. I stepped over the human refuse of the Lower West Side and walked on the lambent air of pure joy.
I heated water for coffee on the stained old gas stove in the tiny kitchen, and Sarah and I took our cups and sat out on the fire escape. It was April, and the ginkgo was lacy with transparent new green. From the dark garden below, the smell of the tough urban honeysuckle rose up, battling the general miasma of the West Side. It had been an early, warm spring, and the night was almost as balmy as an April night in Atlanta. The clash and snarl of traffic on Ninth had tapered off in the small hours of Sunday morning so that we could hear human sounds: footfalls on Twenty-first, and a radio from an apartment down the block, and a dissonant mewling that might have been feline or human, but certainly meant climactic passion, from the unseen garden floor. Sarah giggled at the sound, which told me that she was still tipsy from the gin and tonics we had drunk. Ordinarily, she would have ignored the sounds of love.
“Sounds like fun,” she said, burrowing her curly head into my shoulder in its accustomed niche. I pulled her close against me.
“Want to try it?” I said.
“Uh-uh,” she mumbled. “I’m too comfortable. Another time, thanks.”
I grinned into the night, over the tangled curls. We both knew by now that we weren’t going to make love, not, at least, at present; knew it well enough and were comfortable enough with it to tease each other about it. I think she enjoyed the teasing, and I know I did. It lent a titillating saltiness to what would otherwise have been almost too deep and sweet a relationship. Not now, the teasing said, but soon. Maybe tomorrow. You never can tell. In any case, there wouldn’t have been time tonight. Sarah’s spring break from Agnes Scott College ended on Sunday, and she would have to go back to Atlanta on an afternoon plane. I glanced at my watch. Only hours away now. It was very late.
It had been a weekend as idyllic in its way as the ones at Princeton. As she had there, Sarah slipped without a ripple into the world I had staked out for myself in New York, and if the things we did and the places we went and the way we were with each other did not delight her totally, I never knew it. She merged into the all-consuming fugue I had created as seamlessly as vapor or air, became a part of the wholeness and flow and lilt and pulse of my life in Manhattan as she had in Princeton, as if she were flesh and bone of both me and it. It was such an androgynous thing, this fitting of Sarah to me, that it seemed a part of the larger legerdemain that the city wrought on me, and I often could not—or did not stop to—observe where Sarah left off and New York began. It was wonderful for me; I gloried in all of it, but it struck me later that perhaps Sarah would have welcomed a kingdom of the heart that was all her own. She did not, on those weekends, get that exclusive focus from me, but she did share down to the last cell of her the kingdom wherein I dwelled. It spelled such a total absorption to me that I never once wondered if, for her, it was enough.
On Friday, when she got in, we had dropped her luggage off at the Barbizon Hotel for Women, where Ben and Dorothy insisted that she stay and where indeed she did, and had gone to dinner at Alan Greenfeld’s family’s apartment near Columbus Circle. Alan was there with a fair, straight-haired Bennington graduate named Gerta Neumann who was an intern at The New Republic, where Alan had worked for the past year as a junior political editor. It was the first time Sarah had been with me to Alan’s, and I did not know how she would fare; she was as alien to this world of liberal Eastern Jewish families and activist leftist politics as they were to our cloistered banal Buckhead one. But she did fine; her quirky wit and unaffected openness won them, as did her soft accent and beautiful manners. Ben and Dorothy had left a great many doors open for Sarah.
On Saturday—yesterday, now—we had nearly worn ourselves and the city out. One thing about Sarah that especially endeared her to me was her stamina; her little athlete’s body and shapely steel-muscled legs ate up New York as effortlessly as even my loping attenuation did, and we walked what must have been ten miles before the tender green sunset. By 6:00 P.M. I was waiting in the primly collegiate lounge of the Barbizon while Sarah changed, feeling as though I were back at a mixer at Bryn Mawr or Sarah Lawrence, and then we went to dinner at Mama Leone’s, Sarah glowing beside me in polished peach cotton, and ate garlic-smitten pasta with white beans, the cheapest thing Mama was proffering that night. We drank a great deal of equally cheap Chianti and laughed a lot and held hands under the table, aching pleasantly with the day’s walking, and then I took her down to hear Brubeck at the Village Vanguard.
I was always aware of feeling the most deeply about Sarah when we were listening to jazz together. She soaked it in through every pore and assimilated it in every cell and gave off its delirious fruits from her very skin, like body heat. She knew what it meant to me, and so she would have put all her heart and soul into listening in any event, but her childhood years in the Muscogee Avenue house with young Ben had given her an early start; she had been brought up on the elegant intricacies of Artie Shaw and the arid crystal syncopation of Charlie Parker. Her wonderfully orchestrated body swayed as naturally to the aggressive, hard-driving bop of the forties and early fifties as to the slightly later drifting, pastel atonalities of the so-called “cool” jazz that so spoke to me. Sarah loved and listened to a lot of music—symphonies, opera and even the yowling country ballads that besieged Atlanta from all sides—but I have never seen her so lost in anything as jazz, except her own painting.
I know that she was not merely attempting to please and impress me, because she played the prized records from her own extensive jazz library almost daily, throughout her life. But I did like to think that I showed her new dimensions and depth to something she already loved. She told me once that if it had not been for those New York nights at the Blue Note or Birdland or the Village Gate or Nick’s or Basin Street East or the venerable old Vanguard she would still be snapping her fingers to Count Basie and Woody Herman. I fed on the remark: Sarah’s gratitude made wonderful nourishment.
When we came up out of the smoky dark onto the street, we were sweating and still dazzled and full to our hairlines with the boundless exuberance of the quartet. Their odd-metered time signatures and skittering improvisations were mesmerizing, but the thing that set the room rocking and clapping and shouting aloud was the sheer joy in the music and the unfeigned and open delight in each other that flashed like heat lightning between Brubeck, Morello, Wright and Desmond. Their eyes were constantly on one another; they could sense when one or the other was going to seize a riff before it happened, and would slide back to accommodate it; their heads nodded and grins widened until finally they were nodding and laughing aloud with the wonder of the never-to-be-repeated flight of sound, which careened around the room like a captured bird. When you heard Brubeck and his group, even then, you heard love as well as artistry in action, love for the sound and for each other, and it was impossible not to drown in it and then burst up dripping and shouting.
We were quite drunk when we reached the sidewalk, and only half the intoxication was from the seemingly endless stream of gin and tonics that I had signaled for. The dent the evening had made in my grandfather’s legacy would have popped his dry old eyes, but I think he could have been persuaded of its necessity if he could have sat in the smoke-blued dark of the Vanguard that night and heard Brubeck take off. Sarah and I both were on our feet with the rest of the crowd at the evening’s end, when the quartet swung out of “Time Out” at a hundred miles an hour and came crashing down the last stretch into “Take the A Train.”
It was the third time Sarah had visited me in New York. I had not been home since the weekend of her and Lucy’s senior prom, except for two or three visits, each lasting hardly more than a day. I did not go home to take Sarah to the Harvest Ball that Thanksgiving, as I had promised; I called and told her—the only lie I have ever told Sarah, and one I am quite sure she did not believe, though she accepted it with her customary cheerful grace—that I thought I was coming down with the flu, and wished she would ask Charlie to step in for me. She did, simply and sweetly, I’m sure, and he accepted, and I think that they both had a wonderful time. Sarah always loved Charlie; loved being with him, loved the ease and staunchness of him, and his wonderful sweetness. Charlie, for his part, loved Sarah, of course, in quite another way, and would, I knew, gladly give up his scholarship to Emory Law to be a part of that ball, one of the great formal rituals of her life.
I did not go home that Christmas or Easter, either, and I did not go between my junior and senior years at Princeton, and I never told Sarah why, hoping she would assume that the tension between me and my father was behind my absences. But I know that she knew of the alienation between Lucy and me, though probably not what had caused it, or how deeply it went. I know because she did not speak of Lucy even when it would have been natural to do so. Sarah and I spent most of my last two years at Princeton and my first in New York speaking of everything in the world but Lucy Bondurant.
A week before I graduated satisfactorily cum laude, in June of 1958, a letter came from Bud Houston in the trust department of the Trust Company of Georgia, telling me that my grandfather Redwine’s trust for me was operable effective the date of my graduation, and what the terms were. They were liberal: a small yearly set amount for the rest of my life, which I could spend any way I chose, without restriction or penalty. I went into New York and opened an account at Manufacturer’s Trust, and asked Bud to transfer the entire sum into it, and to do the same each year on the anniversary of the trust’s becoming active. He did not like that at all, and spoke of investments and instruments and whatever bankers use to keep your money working for them, but in the end he only grumbled mildly and complied. He said nothing about consulting my father; I would have taken his head off if he had.
I had heard nothing from my father for more than a year, except for the careful, neutral mealtime pleasantries we exchanged the very few times I did go home, and I knew that with the activation of my trust fund, he had in fact as well as in spirit at last washed his hands of me, and that I would get no more of the Bondurant largesse from him, either then or, probably, ever.
And though this bothered my mother greatly and caused her to weep on my shirt front for nearly a half-hour the last time I was home, and to sob, “It would all be yours, Sheppie, all of it, if you’d just come home,” the defection of my father and his money lay weightless on my heart. What I had on my own was enough. My ties to him, and consequently, to my mother, were broken with the receipt of my grandfather’s money. The great primary artery connecting me to Atlanta, that of Lucy, was cut. I left Princeton on the Saturday afternoon of my graduation and went straight into Manhattan and slid into it like a liner into the sea.
Through the doubtless annoyed but supremely effective offices of Dub Vanderkellen’s father, who was a major benefactor and president of the New York Friends of the Library, I found almost immediately a job as an assistant to an assistant curator in the rare manuscripts department of the New York Public Library, which consisted mainly, that first year, of pushing carts laden with desiccated seventeenth-century Flemish illuminated sacred parchments, bound in gnawed and stinking, perpetually damp leather, from the dank bowels of the library to the new temperature-controlled manuscript hospital. It was undemanding work and mildly absorbing, as ferrying mummies might be, and ended at two o’clock in the afternoon, and it paid me just slightly above starvation wages. They were sufficient to procure the apartment, and the trust fund bought a small amount of unhealthy food and a larger amount of good liquor, and most important, opened the museum and theater and gallery and concert hall and restaurant and jazz club doors through which I dived like a fox into its earth. I rather liked the job, and had no immediate plans to look for something more challenging, spending most of my free afternoons upstairs in the library’s open stacks reading. I loved the city with every fiber of my being. Princeton had been, I found, the preliminary round; Manhattan was the main event.
Nights I spent at the small jazz clubs both uptown and in the Village, and once in a while even up in Harlem, listening transported to the cold, wailing or hot, skittering dissonance of a new kind of jazz that seemed to fry the very roots of the hair on my scalp. I heard them all: Ellington, Hines, Krupa, Hampton, Kenton, Rich, Gillespie, Blakey. And best of all, the legendary reed men who followed Bird Parker out into the world: Coleman Hawkins, Paul Desmond, Zoot Sims, John Coltrane, Stan Getz, Gerry Mulligan, Sonny Rollins, Ornette Coleman. I would go home after the last set and noodle far into the clanking dawn on my clarinet and the secondhand saxophone I had bought at a pawnshop my first week in the city. When I was not listening or playing or working, I was talking, endlessly talking, of the immortal profundities and never-ending possibilities that seemed to glitter in the thick air of New York, and bounce sunstruck off the very pavement like the flecks of mica in it. My companions were New York Princeton classmates and the friends of friends I collected in the city; not many, but enough to give me the warm-wrapped feeling of a set to belong to. We were all of similar swathed and privileged backgrounds and education and all bound with the common cord of music and youth and endless promise and the deep, constant kiss of the great city itself. I lived on almost nothing, grew thinner and nervier each day, read and worked and played and explored, and in general stretched and used every fiber and sinew and nerve and drop of blood and vapor of spirit within me.
And always, the music, and always, Sarah.
I could not imagine that I would ever want anything else.
But if I could not, it seemed to me that everyone else could. Throughout that first year, my mother kept up a steady barrage of telephone calls and then, when I simply stopped answering the phone, switched to letters. The gist of them was always the same: “You are throwing away your life. All we have given and could give you will count for nothing if you stay up there playing at that ignominious little job and frittering away your grandpapa’s money on that awful music and liquor. You are an Atlanta Bondurant. People are talking about you. Come home. I don’t care if you don’t want to go into the business; do anything you want, but just come home. I’ll see to it that your father is reasonable about everything.”
By “everything” I knew she meant the Bondurant money, and I thought she probably could make my father see reason, as she put it, simply because at least half of it was hers. After a while I did not answer the letters, either. But she kept them coming. “Come home, Sheppie. Oh, come home, my baby. Come home.”
Letters came from Dorothy Cameron, too, and they said essentially the same thing, though in gentler tones, and for different, loftier reasons: “You are very special to Ben and me, Shep, and you have gifts and talents you have not dreamed of yet. You should put them to work. There’s nothing in the world so satisfying as giving back to the world some of what it has given you. It’s a sacred trust. We flout it at our own risk. And Shep, New York doesn’t need those gifts. But Atlanta…oh, how we need our rare Shep Bondurants.”
Dorothy, the eternal altruist, the inexorable, if gentle, conscience to a generation. I knew she meant what she said about giving back to Atlanta, and I also knew that she and Ben would grieve deeply, if silently, should Sarah leave home and cast her lot with me, a thousand miles away. I did answer Dorothy’s letters, cheerfully and promptly, but I suspect she was not satisfied with the noncommittal tone or content of them. But unlike my mother, she did not plead or chide.
Even Charlie wrote me: “Enough is enough. The big city is all well and good, but Buckhead’s a dump without you. Come on home, boy. There’s a little curly headed Scottie who misses you something awful. And I warn you, I’ve taken her to five dances this year, and I’m taking her to another one Saturday night.”
I called him after that letter, at home where he was still living, resignedly I knew, with his mother. I just wanted to hear his froggy, familiar voice.
“You don’t have to report to me or ask my permission to take Sarah around,” I said. “She’s free to date anybody she wants to, and you’re it, apparently. I’m glad you are.”
“You ought to be,” Charlie said, and I could see the wide grin on his square face. “Nobody else would look after your interests like I do.”
The letters disturbed me, though, and finally I asked Sarah if she felt the same way everyone else seemed to about the way I was leading my life.
“Well,” she said practically, “you’re not ever going to have much money, you know, and you grew up used to a lot of that. But I don’t think that matters much to you, and it certainly doesn’t to me. I’m only glad to see you so happy. You’re like somebody turned a light on inside you. I never saw that at home. I only wonder if it’s always going to be enough for you…if one day you’re not going to want more from life. I don’t mean materially. I mean…oh, I guess I mean experientially. If the way you’re living now ever loses its intensity, it might seem awfully minimal to you, I’m afraid. And by that time, you may have lost the best chances you’ll have to make other moves, and your contacts, and your momentum.”
“It sounds like it wouldn’t be enough for you,” I said, looking at her sharply. “I thought you loved the way I lived, and the city, and the things we do…”
“I do. Right now, I think being here in New York with you is about the most perfect thing I can imagine in the world. But I don’t know that I always will.”
“Would you want more money, or a better place to live?” I asked. This was disturbing.
“No, I thought you understood that. What I’d want more of is achievement. Mine, mainly. There it is, Shep. It’s what I was raised for. It’s all I know. I can’t do all that much, but I need to take what I can do as far as it will go. And I need to give something to the world; I’m my mother’s daughter there. It’s why I want that year in Paris for my painting, and why I don’t just chuck most of that ridiculous Junior League charity stuff.”
“You could certainly achieve almost anything you wanted to in New York,” I said. I was aware that I sounded more than a bit sullen. “You could take your painting further here than you ever could in Atlanta.”
“I know it,” she said, and smiled. “That’s why I don’t get on you about coming home. It’s not me I worry about needing more. It’s you.”
She had said it as she got on a plane to go home after her previous visit, and so I could not pursue it with her. Sarah had a penchant for dropping provocative bones into the conversation just as she was leaving me; I thought perhaps that it was because she so hated confrontation and knew I could best her verbally in most arguments.
She dropped one on this Sunday night, as we were walking through the grubby, dun-colored concourse at La Guardia toward the Delta flight that would take her back for the spring quarter of her junior year at Agnes Scott.
“We have to talk about Lucy sometime, you know,” she said, apropos of nothing at all, and I looked at her in surprise. She smiled at me and continued walking. “I know y’all have had some kind of falling out, and that it must have been a bad one, because you haven’t seen her, and you haven’t said a word about her since you were home for our prom, and that’s three years, Shep.”
“We did have an argument,” I said. “I guess you could say it was a bad one. She doesn’t want to see me, and I can’t say that I mind. I don’t see why we have to talk about her. It really doesn’t amount to anything.”
“You must think about it, though,” she persisted. There was a troubled frown between her level black brows. “You must think about her sometimes.”
“I don’t,” I said slowly, tasting the words and finding them to be essentially true. “I really almost never do. It’s funny.”
Sarah said nothing, but her smile widened.
“What are you grinning at?”
“I just plain don’t believe you,” she said. “There is some corner of your heart that is forever Lucy Bondurant.” Sarah was reading Rupert Brooke that year.
“Well, you’re wrong,” I said impatiently. “This time you’re wrong.”
We talked no more about it, and in due time Sarah’s flight was called, and I kissed her and she walked away from me toward the gate. And then she turned, and I saw that her eyes were wet.
“Oh, Shep,” she said, “don’t come home! I don’t care what any of them say. You’re right; stay here. If you come home, it will be to her.”
And she was gone out onto the twilit tarmac and up the spidery steps into the DC-7 before I could answer her.
On the way back to West Twenty-first in the cab, I thought how very rarely Sarah was wrong about me, and how strange that she should be this time, and about this. For I was sure of it: I thought of Lucy very rarely, and then only fleetingly, and when I did, I felt, simply, nothing at all. It was as if all those years under the vivid, all-consuming, head-spinning, life-giving spell of my cousin Lucy had never been. Had that last meeting with her in the summerhouse burned me so that I had simply buried it beyond reach? Or could it be that she was so totally and supernormally of that place that she could not be of this one?
Sarah was right about one thing, though. It had been almost a year since I had even heard about Lucy, and that information had come not from her, but from, of all people, her mother. My aunt Willa. She had called me one raw Friday evening and said that she was in New York on a buying trip, and would love to have lunch and a nice catch-up chat the next day. She was, she said, staying at the Royalton on West Forty-fourth Street, and thought we might run over to the Schrafft’s at Forty-third and Broadway. I hated the teahouse fussiness and the appalling food at all the Schrafft’s but she took me by surprise, and besides, I knew we could eat cheaply there and was fairly sure that I would be expected to pay. In Aunt Willa’s world the man, no matter how impecunious, always did. We made a date for noon the next day, and I went to sleep that night with the thought lying full-blown in my mind: There’s something about Lucy that she wants me to do, and I’m going to hate it.
I saw Aunt Willa immediately; she had snared a corner table by the window and sat there looking out into the flow of traffic on Forty-third Street like an incognito queen spying on her subjects. The past few years had deepened her beauty; I knew that she must be about forty now, but all that showed of the passing of time was a sort of sheen that lay on her like the bloom of a grape. She still wore a great deal of pale, opaque foundation and hectic scarlet lip and nail polish, and her eyes were made up into the slanted doe eyes of that period, but she was so slender now that the lush breasts and hips no longer literally leapt out at you, only beckoned, and the clothes she wore were obviously expensive, though plain to the point of severity. Lucy had always had so much of the Bondurants about her, despite the startling Slagle coloring, that I had never seen even a vestige of Aunt Willa in her, but now, in her full and splendid maturity, I saw in Willa Slagle Bondurant’s dark grace and stillness something of what Lucy the woman might one day become. Both women took the eye, Willa with her utter femaleness, Lucy with both that and the exuberant life that literally leaped off her.
I sat down warily, with a sense of walking clear-eyed and of my own volition into a trap. It could not be interest in my welfare that prompted this luncheon; Aunt Willa had never so much as held a conversation with me alone since she had brought her family to the Peachtree Road house. In fact, I had never seen her engaged in a one-on-one conversation with anyone in all my memory. She participated in conversations in whatever group she found herself in, turning from this person to that like a sly, clever child mimicking adult behavior, but she seldom seemed to initiate conversation, and she virtually never talked with the children of the big houses of Buckhead. I think that in her mind we had no power to either hurt or help her in her obsessive quest for Ladyhood, and so did not, for her, exist. Except, of course, her own daughters, the one who was boon, and the other who was bane. I could not imagine simply talking with her as I did with Dorothy Cameron, or even my mother, and I had a moment of panic as I walked across the floor to her table, and wanted to turn and run.
I need not have worried. Aunt Willa did all the talking. From the moment she pecked me on the cheek, engulfing me in a powerful musk of something dark and sophisticated, to the moment she put down her coffee cup and lighted a Parliament, icing its pristine white tip with a virulent berry stain, she did not stop her lilting, witless chatter. I did not need to say anything, and did not, beyond an occasional “umm-hmmm” and “oh yes.” Between the shrimp cocktail and the ladyfinger something-or-other, Aunt Willa talked incessantly about her career as a full-fledged buyer for Rich’s of Atlanta (soon to be head buyer), and what my “little crowd” was about (weddings and engagements popping like firecrackers), and what her set was up to (hitting every tea and fashion show and charitable ball that could possibly have been held in the past year, with herself, as well as my parents, as virtual mainstays of them), and what was happening to Atlanta (growing like a weed; skyscrapers and shopping malls shooting up everywhere, and the town absolutely full of tackpots nobody knew. “Everyone says Ben Cameron will be the next mayor, but why he wants to is beyond me”). It was more than I had heard her say in any given five years at home.
Finally she slowed and stopped, and gave me the full battery of her languid red smile.
“Well, I’ve really let myself run on, haven’t I?” she said archly. “And not a word about you. How are you, Shep? One reason I wanted to see you was that Lucy misses you so much, and I want to tell her all about you.”
“In a pig’s eye you do, Aunt Willa,” I thought, and said, “I’m just fine. How is Lucy?”
This was what she had come for; I had, of course, been right. You could literally see her marshal her weapons and take aim. She dropped her lids so that the impossible lashes feathered on her cheeks, and let her pretty white hands turn palm up, helplessly, on the table, and paused a beat. Her voice, when it came, was low and freighted with a mother’s sorrow.
“I am deeply worried about my daughter, Shep. She is headed for heartache, and I wanted to ask your advice. You always did seem to be able to get through to her when no one else could, and what daughter listens to her mama nowadays?”
She looked up with a rueful little smile. Mischief and forbearance danced in it. “Nice bit of business, Aunt Willa,” I said silently. Aloud I said, with such reluctance that my voice dragged with it, “What’s the matter with Lucy?”
“Lucy is about to get herself kicked out of Agnes Scott,” Aunt Willa said, “and if she does, she can forget all about marrying Nunnally Chastain, because his father will cut him off without a red cent when it comes out why she did. And it will come out, Shep. You know how Lucy always manages to get herself talked about by the very people she ought to be cultivating.”
I grinned in spite of myself, hiding it behind a swallow of coffee. I did indeed know how Lucy drew talk as easily as she did eyes, and how little she cared about either, except as they might be used as weapons in the long guerrilla war with her mother. I knew, too, that whatever Lucy was up to at Agnes Scott that might get her expelled was of virtually no import to Aunt Willa, compared to its consequences: the loss of the inestimable social gloss that the name Chastain shed over everything and everyone it brushed. If it weren’t for the jeopardy in which it put that gloss and the money that spawned it, Willa Bondurant wouldn’t care if Lucy was mainlining heroin on the steps of Presser Hall.
“What’s she up to?” I said.
“Well, among other things, among many other things,” Aunt Willa said, drawing a great vermilion mouth with a slim gold lipstick and deftly flicking a glob off a canine tooth, “she has written an editorial in the little campus paper she edits about that horrible Martin Luther King and how he’s a new American saint, and several newspapers around the South have printed it. The Constitution had a headline that said, ‘Deb Defends Sit-Ins: An Atlanta Princess Takes up the Flag of Freedom.’ Can you imagine? The idea! All over the South! And she’s not even a deb, strictly speaking, much less a princess. I tell you, I’ve heard nothing since the story ran but that; everybody’s laughing about it. Well, not everybody. Babs Rawson didn’t think it was a bit funny. She literally cut us dead at the Driving Club last week, and Little Lady was sitting right there with Carter!”
Well, I thought, of course, Lucy and the Negroes again. It was the only thing left that raised Willa’s ire, and the only one likely, in these days, to inflame Buckhead enough to seriously threaten her clawed-out niche in its society. But surely…
“Surely they can’t be serious about expelling her from Scott for that,” I said. “My God, she’s been editor of that paper for both years she’s been there, and that’s unheard of for a freshman and sophomore. They must know what they have in Lucy. I thought her journalism and English grades were right at the top….”
“Oh yes, they are, but they’re the only ones that are,” Aunt Willa said. “She’s so close to flunking everything else she’s taking that I’ve had letters from every one of her teachers. And then of course she’s broken every rule they’ve got in the book, and when they call her up before that what-do-you-call-it, judiciary thing, and punish her she just laughs and goes right on doing whatever she likes. Why, I got a letter only two days ago from the dean of women, and it said that Lucy could be one of the most vital voices—that’s what she said, vital voices—to speak out of the South in her time, she’s got such a gift for writing. But first, she said, she’s got to graduate, and the way she’s going, she’s not going to make it. I know what she means, of course. Lucy never studies. She spends all her time with that Negro boy Ben Cameron is raising over there, that Glenn Pickens person. Now Ben’s sending him to college, no less, down at that Negro school on the Southside, More-something—”
“Morehouse,” I said automatically.
“—Morehouse,” she went on, “and half the time Lucy’s down there with him, in meetings about civil rights and sit-ins and all that vulgar stuff. Why, last week there was some kind of sit-in over in South Carolina, and there was your cousin Lucy right in the middle of it, the only white face in all those black ones. Of course both papers got ahold of it and ran it!”
“Is Agnes Scott upset about that?” I asked doubtfully. I knew Scott to be conservative in the extreme when it came to its educational policies and the rules by which it bound its girls, but I did not think it could afford to take an official stance on such matters as the incendiary new civil rights movement. Scott shunned publicity of any sort. And then Sarah had said nothing about it, and I knew that Ben and Dorothy would have her out of there in a moment if the school spoke out against desegregation.
“They say not. They say it’s her grades, and her attitude about the rules she breaks,” Aunt Willa said. “But of course that’s it. And Farrell Chastain is plenty mad about it, let me tell you, and so are Babs and Bill Rawson.”
“What about Red?” I asked curiously. I knew that Red Chastain was an indolent and merciless bigot, but I also knew that he was about as politically aware as a dung beetle. “Is Red mad at her, too?”
“Oh no, I don’t think so,” Aunt Willa said. “I gave in and let her start going up to visit him at Princeton, hoping it would keep her too busy to run around with the niggers”—her voice had slid up gradually into its wiregrass whine, and several heads turned toward her, but she did not notice. I felt myself redden, and wanted to disappear under the table—“but it doesn’t matter whether he is or not, because if Farrell Chastain lays the law down to him, you can bet he’ll drop Miss Lucy faster than a rattlesnake, rather than lose all that money.”
“Well, and has she stopped?” I asked, genuinely curious. I had never known Lucy to be either intimidated into dropping something she wished to do, or diverted from it.
“Well, she hasn’t been out with that colored boy for the past week, but then he’s over in Mississippi stirring up the niggers over there about registering to vote, so she hasn’t had the opportunity. She’d be over there too, except he told her she couldn’t go. Said it was too dangerous. Listen, Shep, I want you to talk to her. Surely you can see she’s about to ruin her life, much less all our good names. Will you call her and talk to her? She’ll listen to you; she always would.”
“Aunt Willa,” I said as forcefully as I could, “I can’t do that. The last time I really talked to Lucy was two years ago, and at the end of that conversation, she told me she never wanted to see me again. She’d hang up on me before I said hello.”
To my utter horror, she put her face down in her hands and began to cry. I knew she was not faking. The sobs were harsh and ugly and racking. More eyes fastened on us. They seemed to leave smoking craters in my flesh. She did not appear to notice.
“She’s going to ruin everything for me,” she sobbed, and her voice was that of the chicken farmer’s daughter again, fifteen years of careful, relentless cultivation gone from it. “She’s not going to stop until she’s done it. Oh, I wish she’d just died when she was born….”
Anger flooded me, over the embarrassment. “All right, I’ll call her, but I don’t want to hear you say that about her ever again,” I said, the iron and ice in my voice surprising me. Her, too, apparently; she stopped crying and looked up at me. Despite the tears, her mascara had not run.
“Thank you, Shep,” she said meekly. “She’s over at Princeton this weekend, but she’ll be back tomorrow night. Sunday. Could you call her then?”
I agreed to do it, not at all sure that I would, but so eager to get out of the terrible ruffled restaurant and into the cold, bright Saturday sunlight that I would have promised her anything. Restored, she kissed me airily on the cheek and clicked off on her four-inch heels, unable to keep the waggle entirely out of her shapely, taupes-wathed behind. I saw heads turn after her as she sailed down Forty-third Street, heading east toward Fifth. And then she was gone.
I might not have called Lucy after all, but I met Alan Greenfeld for dinner that night and we went down to hear Horace Silver at Nick’s, and he told me that he had been over to Princeton that day, to pick up some things he had left in his old suite in Holder, and had seen Lucy with Red Chastain on the veranda of Tiger, and that both had been falling-down drunk at high noon, and all over each other. The old Lucy-worry, which had been dormant so long, flooded back over me like cold salt water, and I hardly slept at all that night. I knew then that I would call her, and would probably regret doing it, but that it couldn’t be helped. The old ties had held after all; the old bond still ran deep. “We be of one blood, thou and I…”
Red was a junior at Princeton then, and I had not seen him for two years, and had seen him very little even in the year we had been there together. But I had heard enough about him to know that he was trouble pure and simple, if I had not known it before. He had lived his first two years in a suite with three other Southern boys whom I had not known, Southerners of a certain type that used to turn up at Princeton with some regularity. They were, like Red, cool and smilingly murderous of temper, lazily athletic and prowlingly indolent, and entered Princeton wilder and more jaded than most of us left it. Red and his roommates were the centerpiece of an entire set of these attractive and decadent Southerners, most of whom eventually found their way into Tiger, and all of whom spent their spare time drinking in their rooms and whoring in New York. Red and his roommates had moved all the beds in their suite into one room and fitted the other up as an elegant working bar, and the endless cocktail party and worse that prevailed there was the stuff of legend far beyond the Ivy League. I did not care a whit about Lucy and her involvement with her beloved Negroes, nor, really, if she flunked out of Agnes Scott, but I cared about her association with a whole crowd of Red Chastains. I made the call.
After I said hello, there was a long silence, and then Lucy said neutrally, “Hello, Gibby,” and her rich voice might have been in the very room with me. In my mind I saw her slouched on the Chinese Chippendale chair in the telephone alcove under the front stairs, feet up on the risers, a cigarette dangling from her long fingers. I had seen her that way a hundred times before.
It was not a good call. I stumbled and hemmed and hawed and stopped and started, and through it all she was silent, not helping me at all. Finally, in desperation, I blurted out that I had seen her mother in New York and that everyone was very worried about her, and I wanted to talk to her about it.
“About what?” Lucy said pleasantly.
“About…oh, shit, Lucy, about school, and the poor stupid Negroes, and mostly that bunch of corrupt fools Red runs around with at Tiger,” I said in a rush. “You’ve got no business messing around with that gang. You’re going to get yourself talked about all over the East Coast.”
There was another pause, and then her creamy, winy belly laugh curled out at me over the wire. Despite my annoyance, the corners of my mouth quirked at the sound.
“What else is new?” she said. And then she stopped laughing. “You’ve turned into a real prick, Gibby,” she said coolly, and the words stung me more sharply than I thought was possible. “You’ve got no business telling me who I can and cannot hang around with. You lost that right two years ago. Remember?”
And she slammed down the telephone. A blast of the old desolation in which absence from her had once drowned me swept over me again. For one anguished moment, the empty space between us where once so much had spun and sung back and forth bruised and lacerated me. And then both feelings were gone as if they had never been, and Lucy faded out of my mind like smoke, and what I had told Sarah tonight became again true. I had seldom thought of her since.
So I was as shocked as if I had seen a literal apparition when, at three o’clock on a Sunday morning the following November, I floundered out of sleep to answer a pounding on my door and opened it to find Lucy, distinctly drunk and looking lost and lovely in a man’s filthy London Fog, leaning against the doorsill, smoking and smiling at me.
“Hey, Gibby,” she said. Her voice was loose with liquor, but as rich and warm as I remembered. It seemed as if I had heard it only hours before, instead of months. I felt stupid and thick with sleep and confusion, and could not, for a moment, make my voice work.
“Lucy?” I said finally, hoarsely.
“Can I come in?” she said.
I cleared my throat. “Yeah. Sure. Come on in,” I said, and held the door for her. She turned and waved toward the street, and I saw an idling cab slide away into a fine, opalescent mist that had not been there when I went to bed. There was a chill under the rain, and Lucy’s breath, as she turned back to me, was frosted white. The misting rain was caught in her tangled, silky dark hair and haloed her head like the streetlights below. She came into my apartment and glanced around my tiny living room carelessly, as if she was not registering what she was seeing. She probably was not; her eyes had the flat glitter they got when she had had too much to drink. She sat down on my thrift store sofa and crossed her long legs and stuffed her hands into the coat pockets and looked up at me, still smiling, still glittering. Then she laughed aloud, the deep, plummy laugh that she had had since her earliest childhood, and I grinned in return, a completely involuntary twitch. Few people failed to respond to Lucy’s laugh.
“Aren’t you going to ask me what I’m doing here?” she said gaily, and I thought then that there was something more than alcohol burning inside her. For the first time, it occurred to me that her presence here might mean trouble of some sort. I had not thought to ask her if there was anything wrong, despite the hour and the fact that she had said she did not want to see me again, and that I had not known she was anywhere within a thousand miles of me. She appeared, was here; that was all. Lucy in my apartment at three o’clock on an autumn morning was an absolute, and needed nothing else. She filled it as naturally and totally as she had our childhood nursery, or the summerhouse.
“What are you doing here?” I said. I was suddenly and uncomfortably aware that I wore only the pair of chinos I had pulled on hastily when the knocking had begun. I was not cold; the rattling old radiator kept the apartment almost tropically warm—when it worked—but I felt vulnerably naked.
“I was in the neighborhood,” she said, giggling, “and thought I’d drop in.”
I sat down in a rump-sprung butterfly chair opposite her.
“I assume you’re up for a weekend with Red and the gang at Old Nassau,” I said.
“Right you are,” she said. The hectic laughter bubbled just under her voice and burned in her cheeks. “It’s the Yale game. Red never misses it. Only he did this year. He’s been passed out in his room since eleven o’clock this morning. Well, who gives a shit? There were seventy-four others to party with.”
“Lucy,” I said, stung with annoyance and distaste and something else I could not name, “you’re heading for more trouble than you knew there was in the world.”
I could hear the fussiness in my own voice, and expected her to throw it back at me, but she didn’t. She got up from the sofa and paced around the little room, still wrapped in the raincoat, looking at the few photographs and posters I had tacked up, and the one drawing—a vivid, darkling pastel of Satchmo blowing it out at the Vanguard, done by someone named Pierce I had never heard of before—and picking up and putting down my few bibelots.
“You don’t have to worry about me, Gibby,” she said over her shoulder. “When couldn’t I handle Red?”
“Well, light somewhere,” I said grumpily, “and I’ll make us some coffee. From the looks of things you can use some. It’s a wonder you made it all the way in from Princeton on the train.”
“I didn’t. I caught a ride with somebody,” she said.
“Who?”
“Oh, God, I don’t know, Gibby, I didn’t get his name. What difference does it make? I don’t want any coffee. Don’t you have anything to drink? And maybe an old abandoned cigarette?”
“There are some cigarettes in the desk drawer,” I said. “They’ve been there since summer, so they’re probably unsmokable. And it’s coffee or nothing. Sit down and take your coat off. You make me nervous pacing around like that.”
She turned to me, smiling a strange, closemouthed smile, and then suddenly threw the coat off and dropped it on the floor, and stood there wearing only a white nylon slip. She was naked underneath it. I could see the dark shadows of her nipples, and the patch of smoky hair at the V of her thighs. I dropped my eyes.
“The rest of my pretties are hanging on the wall in the living room at Tiger,” she said. “I’m their fair lady of choice this weekend, and I gave them my favors. Instead of one knight, I’ve got seventy-four. Not counting Red, of course. See what you could have had, Gibby?”
For some reason, I flushed as if this were not Lucy, whose narrow, white whippet body I had known almost as well as my own since childhood. I turned away and walked back to the kitchen, which lay at the end of the pullmanlike row of rooms that made up the apartment. I could hear her unsteady steps behind me. I filled the kettle and set it on the tiny stove and turned around to face her. I was not going to let a drunk, contentious Lucy throw me. I decided to ignore her nakedness.
“Well, how do you like my place?” I said. “Is it anything like you thought it would be?”
“To tell you the truth, I hadn’t thought about it,” she said. “But I do like it. It’s like a little train. It’s like…oh, Gibby, you know what it’s like? It’s like Dumboozletown, Florida! Do you remember Dumboozletown?”
She began to laugh again, and the laughter spiraled up and up, until I was afraid that it would go off into one of her old fits of hysteria, but it didn’t. It was simply laughter. She threw her head back with it, and laughed and laughed.
I was about to join in, seduced into mirth against my will, when I saw the marks on her throat. They were ugly and unmistakable, the vermilion prints of ten fingers there at the base, where the slender white column joined the elegant, ridged collarbone. An older, purple bruise spread up the side of her neck into her hairline.
“Who choked you, Lucy?” I said. “Was it Red? It was Red, wasn’t it? Did it happen this weekend? Is that why you came?”
She stopped laughing abruptly, and put her hand up to her neck, tentatively, as if the marks still hurt her.
“He didn’t choke me,” she said. Her face closed. “He just kind of shook me a little. He didn’t know he was being so rough. He was awfully sorry. No, it’s not at all why I came. I told you. I just—”
“Lucy, this is me. Cut the shit,” I said. “I know a choke hold when I see one. What was he, drunk, or just mean as hell?”
She didn’t answer. I saw that her eyes had found my lone bottle of bourbon, which I kept mainly for visitors; besides the obligatory drinks at the jazz clubs, to make up the cover, I rarely drank then. I could not afford it, for one thing. She reached out for the bourbon, staring at me defiantly. I shrugged. I knew when I was beaten. She unscrewed the top and took a long pull from the bottle, and then put it down and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.
After a long moment of silence, she said, “He doesn’t mean anything by it, you know. Red doesn’t. I was being sort of loud and silly, and he couldn’t get me to stop, that was all. It’s just his way of showing me that he loves me.”
I just looked at her.
“Daddy used to do it,” she went on, her voice getting louder. “It’s not uncommon. Daddy did it because he loved me, too. I’d be bad, and he’d kind of hit me, and then he’d cry because he’d had to…”
I suddenly remembered a twilight in the foyer of the house on Peachtree Road, long ago, after small Lucy had run away for the first time and had been spanked by Aunt Willa, and had said then, “Will you hug me now, Mama?” and Aunt Willa had snapped at her, and Lucy had retorted that her father had hugged her all the time, and Aunt Willa had said, “No, he didn’t. He never did hug you. You always were a bad girl, and he never did hug you one single time. He hit you, that’s what he did. You were so bad he hit you every time you turned around.”
And Lucy’s great cry of anguish and betrayal, and her sobs diminishing up the great curved stair…
“Your mother was telling the truth,” I said softly.
She knew what I meant; of course she did. She had always known what I meant.
“Well, maybe. A little, I guess,” she said. “But it was only because he loved me, Gibby. That was all it was.”
I was silent under the great surge of pain I felt, and the hopelessness. Of course Red Chastain hit her; of course she allowed it; courted it, even. The smiting father, Red’s quick fist…
After a little space of time she said, matter-of-factly, “I think he’s dead, Gibby. In fact, I’m sure of it. I know now that he died in the war, and they didn’t know how to let us know.”
I did not have to ask who she was talking about. Jim Bondurant stood there in the room with us, whole and living and radiant with remoteness.
“How do you know?”
“Because he would have come for me otherwise,” she said simply.
There was nothing to say to that either, so I didn’t reply. I just leaned against the counter sipping coffee and watching her. She took a couple more sips from the bottle and lit one of the brittle cigarettes I had found for her, and then she looked up at me and smiled. It was her old smile once more, free and light-hearted.
“Do you remember when we cut our wrists and mixed our blood, Gibby?” she said.
“Sure,” I said. “I thought I was going to faint for about five hours afterward.”
“I still have my scar,” she said, holding up her slim wrist. A thin white line crossed the little delta of blue veins beating there, like half a delicate bracelet. “Do you have yours?”
I held my wrist up to the kitchen light. I had not thought of that day for a long time, not since the day in the summerhouse after her senior prom, when she had evoked the promise that we made then. The scar was there, smaller and fainter than hers, a tiny bleached tributary in the faded tan on my wrist. I held my arm out beside hers and we looked at the scars.
“Poor Luce,” I said. “Some knight I made you. I haven’t managed to save you from a single dragon so far, have I?”
She looked at me intently, as though by sheer force of will she could extract something from me. Her pupils were black and huge.
“You could save me from one now,” she said.
“Red?” I said, dread starting cold in my veins.
“No,” she said. Her face looked, abruptly, as if it was starting to crumble, and suddenly she was crying silently, tears sliding down from her light-struck eyes to her chin, dripping off it and pearling down onto her slim, bare shoulders. “No, not Red.”
I put my hands on her shoulders, feeling the fine bird’s bones through the silky, taut skin, and walked her to the bed and sat her down on the side of it. She did not lift her head, and the tears fell, hot and light, on my hands.
“What, then?” I said.
“Oh, Gibby, I’m so afraid,” she whispered, turning into my shoulder, burying her face in the hollow of my neck. I put my arms around her and stroked her back. How many times had I sat like this, holding Lucy while her dreams shook her like a malevolent terrier?
“Tell me what you’re afraid of, Lucy,” I said.
“Of everything in the world,” she sobbed, her voice muffled in my neck. “Of everything that I can’t control.”
I tried to laugh hearteningly, and did not succeed.
“Then you’ll be afraid most of your life, baby,” I said.
She turned her face up to me, and it was fierce, savage, half-blind.
“Then I won’t live, because I can’t stand that—to be afraid for the next sixty or seventy years! I can’t even stand it for one more! I’d rather die!”
“Lucy, nobody can control their lives, not really,” I said, as reasonably as I could. “But it doesn’t mean you have to be afraid all the time. You just…sort of forget about it and go on and live your life. You cope. You hang on. And nothing much happens to you, really, in the long run.”
“Well, other people are stronger than I am, then,” she said, hiccuping. “Or they have something I don’t, something that was left out of me. Because I can’t stand not being…safe. Not knowing what’s going to happen to me next. It’s like waiting to fall off the world. I feel that way all the time, Gibby, all the time!” Her voice rose. “I have to know I’m safe. I have to know somebody’s taking care of me….”
“Lucy…”
The crying became wilder, spiraled up, up.
“Promise!” She sobbed. “Promise me! Promise me you’ll take care of me!”
“I promise,” I said automatically, stroking her back and her hair, feeling the force of the fear and grief out of her deepest childhood under my hands.
She rested there against me for a moment, taking great, deep breaths, and I thought, my own breath held, that perhaps this time one of the terrible spells had, after all, been averted. Then she said, “Do you mean it?”
“Sure I do,” I said.
“Then marry me.”
I was silent, the shock stopping my breath in earnest for a moment, cursing myself for not seeing where she was heading. Then I said, my mouth still against her hair, “Lucy, the surest way I know to wreck both our lives is to marry you. Understand right now that that isn’t going to happen. Not now, not ever. It wouldn’t be right. It would ruin us both. Cousins don’t. Cousins can’t.”
Her movement was almost that of some great snake, one of the constrictors, a boa or an anaconda. She turned in my arms as swiftly and with such a smooth slide of muscle that before I could even flex my own she was all over me, and against me, wrapping her legs around my waist, squirming herself beneath me, wriggling out of the slip. She did not speak; her breath came in short, sharp snorts through her nostrils, and she made little high, keening sounds, like an animal. Her hands were at my fly and then inside, and then I felt her warm nakedness against mine, and a great deep, primal thrust and surge, a monstrous great stiffening, and knew that I was about one beat away from losing this fury inside her. My erection felt as massive and volatile and inexorable as a volcano. She found it frantically and was guiding it into herself at the same moment that I tore myself free of her and rolled off the bed. Under the pounding desire was a white anger, and under that, even more powerful, a blind fear.
I turned to the wall and zipped up my pants, fighting for breath and control. I did not hear her move. I pulled on a T-shirt and stuffed it into my pants, and buckled my belt.
“Get up and put on your coat,” I said levelly around the breath laboring in my chest. “I’m going to take you back to Princeton.”
Incredibly, I heard her laugh, and turned. She was lying naked on her back, hands under her head, legs asprawl. I turned my head away.
“You did want it, didn’t you, Gibby?” she said, and her voice was light and sweet and young. “I know you did. I could feel it. I can see it now, down there in your pants. Lordy, it must be something fantastic by now, because I know you’ve been saving it all this time for Sarah, and we both know she wouldn’t know a hump from a hula hoop, don’t we? So what do you do? Jerk off? Get it down in Times Square? What a waste! You better think again, Gibby. I could give you a hundred times better before breakfast than little Sarahpoo Cameron ever could in her entire life.”
I picked up the raincoat and jerked her up off the bed and pulled it around her. She stared at me, smiling and wild-eyed, and then the subterranean something that had burned deep within her all evening, like a fire in the earth under a peat bog, died abruptly out and her face was empty and tired and slack.
“I’m sorry, Gibby,” she said, and her voice was so nearly normal that I blinked at her. Nearly normal, but not quite. The life had gone from it. “I get really sloppy when I drink too much. Red was right to belt me. Look, I don’t want you to take me back. I’ve made enough mess of your life tonight. Just call me a cab and lend me some money, will you? I’ll send it to you when I get home. I can be back in Princeton before my hero even misses me.”
“You sure?” I said, looking at her intently. She smiled briefly and pulled the belt of the trench coat tight, and raked her long hands through her wild hair.
“I’m sure. I’d apologize, but it’s too late for that. Besides, you know me. Incorrigible. Oh, Gibby, sweetie, I do love you. I do. Don’t look so worried. I’m okay, truly. I’m going back to Tiger and rout Red out and make him buy me breakfast at the Tavern. I’m going to eat until he doesn’t have a red cent left.”
Reassured, if only slightly, I walked her out into the silent, wet predawn street and over to Ninth, where I flagged a late-cruising cab. Ninth looked, in the iridescent mist, like a movie set, neon-slicked and ribboned with the opalescent snail’s track of a few just-vanished tires, empty and yellow and black and white. I half expected to see Gene Kelly dancing his way home through the gutters of Chelsea.
I put all the money I had into Lucy’s hand and closed her fingers over it, and put her into the cab.
“Penn Station,” I said to the driver. I put my head into the window and kissed Lucy’s cheek, feeling the wetness of the mist and of her still-fresh tears there. She looked, in spite of the liquor and the long night and the dirty raincoat, utterly beautiful, and at her answering wide, world-healing smile I wondered, briefly and wildly, what it might be like, after all, being married to Lucy Bondurant and custodian of that slender, lovely body and all its urgent hungers.
“Be good,” I said. “Maybe I’ll see you Christmas. Take care of yourself, Luce.”
She reached up and touched my mouth very lightly with the tips of her fingers.
“That’s just what I’m going to do, Gibby,” she said.
That night, just past nine, when the night rates came into effect, my mother called me and told me that Lucy and Red Chastain had left Princeton early that morning and driven straight through to Elkton, Maryland, and had been married there by a justice of the peace.
A great stillness settled over me then, which might have been emptiness, or might have been peace.