Sarah graduated magna cum laude from Agnes Scott College in June of 1960, and then all the Buckhead Boys and their girls were, to all practical purposes, launched into a wider world. For most of us, that simply meant leaving our nearby Southern college cocoons and moving back into our old rooms in the big houses of Buckhead, or to apartments no more than three miles at most from them, and taking jobs in our fathers’ businesses or in those of their friends, none of which were located more than five miles from the pedimented and porticoed doorways we had grown up behind.
But close to home as these new establishments were, they were important rites of passage, not to be skipped, and gave all of us a heady sense of having left the nest. The few of us who actually had left, in the literal sense of the word, like me and Lucy and Red Chastain, were not spoken of so often as mavericks and loners, now that all of us were, in effect, scattered to the winds of fate. The leaving of home was the thing, whether it meant three blocks away or two thousand miles. We turned, in that year, from the sons and daughters of the big houses to young adults with our own venues.
It was the year that the marriages began, and so those venues of our own tended to be, if not the traditional minuscule brick and cinder-block garden apartments in Colonial Homes and East Wesley Court, or the red-brick tenements behind WSB Broadcasting on its high hill overlooking Peachtree Road, then small, neat Colonial “starter” houses in Collier Hills or the area west of Bobby Jones Golf Course just off Northside Drive. Even in the vastly reduced circumstances that Buckhead’s young marrieds found themselves, it never occurred to any of us to move east of Peachtree Road. On our own, we had precious little money, but everyone knew that we would have, and we had had from birth our territorial imperatives.
Ben Cameron and Julia Randolph were the first of us to marry, and I went home for the ceremony at All Saints, at four o’clock on the Saturday afternoon Sarah graduated, six hours earlier, from Scott. Despite the blazing hot June sun outside, the old red stone church was dim and cool, and so many white tapers glowed at the altar that the sanctuary looked like the Christmas court of Henry II. There must have been five hundred people there that day, the majority of them unknown to the bride and groom.
Ben Cameron was fifty years old and just coming into his legendary power in Atlanta, and for the past few years had been chairman of every successful fund-raising effort from the Community Chest to the March of Dimes. He was, that year, vice president of the Chamber of Commerce, to become its president the next, and was already, Sarah said, formulating a formal plan of growth and progress for the city that he felt would literally transform it into one of the country’s great urban centers. He seemed to know literally everyone who might conceivably wield muscle and influence in that pursuit, and they were all in the church that day, to share the marriage pageant of his first born child and only son. Young Ben had had a full complement of friends at North Fulton and Tech, and Julia and her own prominent family were suitably endowed with friends and relatives, but on that day the sanctuary of All Saints fairly teemed with the dark-suited, unassuming, imperial power brokers of a city poised to make its move. Charlie Gentry would reflect later that the feeling that crackled silently in the air of the hushed and radiant church was just what it had seemed to be—electricity.
I was an attendant, as were the entirety of our set and a spillover of Cameron and Randolph cousins and a couple of fraternity brothers and sorority sisters. There were twenty-four of us in all, a double phalanx of massed black and white and drifted, banked pink organdy at the altar. Sarah was Julia’s maid of honor, and so came down the aisle last of the attendants, on the arm of A.J. Kemp, who looked dapper and almost feral in the flickering dimness, like a clever monkey dressed in a tuxedo. I was at the altar in place when they started down the aisle, and Sarah’s great eyes flew to mine the length of that vast, shadowy oblong, and she winked. I winked back. Ben and young Ben stood at the foot of the altar, facing the back of the church, where Julia would appear, and in the soft candlelight Ben Senior looked almost as young as his son, humorous and slender and seeming somehow to lounge, even though he stood erect and poised. As for young Ben, I thought at first that he had been drinking, such hectic circles of color burned in his cheeks, and such a tinsel glitter filmed his gray Cameron eyes. But I knew that he would not do that on his wedding day, and put it down to nerves. Ben had always been nervy and volatile.
The organ segued into Purcell’s “Trumpet Voluntary” then, and the crowd stirred and murmured softly and turned to watch as Dorothy Cameron came down the aisle alone, on the arm of the young Cameron cousin who was her usher. She was out of place in the traditional Atlanta formal wedding structure; she should have preceded the attendants, after the mother of the bride. But Augusta Randolph had died when Julia was eleven, and Ben had wanted his mother to have this singular place of honor, and Julia agreed. Dorothy Cameron walked the aisle with the same easy grace with which she might have crossed her front lawn.
She smiled as naturally at her son far down at the foot of the great altar as if they had been alone in the Cameron sun-room, and he smiled back, a wide, vivid white smile, and then she moved her eyes and smiled to Sarah, and then to me. I felt a sudden and consuming rush of love for her. She was giving her son to another woman as openhandedly and full-heartedly as she had given everything to him all of his life, and taking joy from the giving. There was nothing in her of my mother’s dark, sucking love. Dorothy Cameron at that moment, in her soft French blue and her little corsage of white lilacs, was all light and warmth.
In the choir loft, partially hidden by the great altar itself, a trumpet quartet stood, brass blazing golden, and tossed the shining, pure notes of the voluntary out into the cathedral air, and the murmur that had started with Dorothy’s appearance swelled as Julia came into view, on the arm of her father. Angular and snubnosed and among the nimblest of the Washington Seminary varsity basketball team, Julia on that day, in a cloud of her grandmother’s candlelight lace, seemed to hover above the aisle like a feather, or a snowdrop, and glided like a young queen. Her plain, freckled face flamed with the day and her adoration for Ben, and I thought it was true, that old saw, that all brides were beautiful on their wedding day. Lucy’s white face leaped unbidden into my mind for a split second, bleached by fatigue and the fluorescent light in the bare little office of a Maryland justice of the peace, the marks of her new husband’s hands on her throat hidden by the heavy fall of hair. I banished her image into air, and turned my eyes to Sarah. Her own eyes welled with tears as Julia reached the foot of the altar and gave Ben a tremulous smile, and she glanced at me, made a tiny, disgusted moue and blushed, but the tears did not stop. They slid silently down her cheeks and into the bouquet of stephanotis she held, as her beloved older brother became a married man and leaned over and lifted his wife’s veil and kissed her gaily.
“That ought to be us,” I thought. “What’s the matter with me? She’s lovely and whole and strong and good inside and out. I don’t think I can love her any more than I do now. I know she loves me. Why don’t I just marry her? When she comes back from Paris…”
Ben went straight from his Sea Island honeymoon to a job with a promising new firm of rather controversial young architects, two of whom had studied with the radical Bruce Goff at the University of Oklahoma, and he and Julia moved into the obligatory small clapboard salt box on Greystone Road in Collier Hills, which had been John Randolph’s wedding present to his daughter.
Soon after that, Tom Goodwin married small, sharpedged Alfreda Slaton, along with all her hungers and wiles, and they moved into a one-bedroom apartment in Colonial Homes. Tom’s father had lost the agency and the house and most of his savings the year before, and for the first time in his life, Tom faced a future that would be fueled by his earnings alone. A.J. told me that they had taken bets among themselves on whether or not Freddie would go through with the marriage, knowing that the Habersham Road property was beyond her nimble little talons for good and all now, but she had—probably, A.J. said, because she had spent the best years of youth pursuing Tom, and knew that to take the field after new quarry now, her few skimpy bridges long since burned, would be folly amounting to perpetual maidenhood. Another theory was that Colby Slaton had said he would put his daughter out of the house if she did not marry Tom; no one, it seems, was eager to harbor Freddie. It would have been as uneasy a menage as a house with a small cobra in it.
Freddie Slaton Goodwin hated Colonial Homes, and suffered while she lived there. She was bitten raw with ambition for Tom, her jealous resentment of the new houses and cars and parties and vacations and family heirlooms the others were taking for granted only slightly concealed by a saccharine winsomeness. It was generally agreed among the Buckhead Boys that Tom was a good guy, if not overly endowed in the brains department, and would probably do middling well in his job as an account executive for a novelty advertising firm for a while, but that Freddie was going to ruin him in the end.
“Dealing with Freddie Goodwin is like being strangled to death by a climbing rose,” Charlie wrote me later that year. Just out of Atlanta Law, where he had transferred when his father had his breakdown, Charlie had moved out of his mother’s house and into an apartment in Colonial Homes with a friend from Emory, and had an active social life among the young lawyers and bankers and corporate executives who were beginning to flock to the city. Everyone liked Charlie, both in his social circle and in his job as a fledgling corporate attorney with the Coca-Cola Company, whose stock had made his family’s now-dissipated fortune. Of us all, Charlie was the only one who was not seeing anyone in particular—except, of course, Sarah, and everyone, including Charlie, knew that for the sweetly futile exercise it was.
Before that year was out, Snake Cheatham married Lelia Blackburn, Pres Hubbard married Sarton Foy and Little Lady Bondurant made the match of the season and possibly the decade by marrying, in her sophomore year at Brenau, the baroquely wealthy Carter Rawson. We had not really known Carter well; he was a couple of years older than most of us, and had spent most of his time away at Phillips Exeter and then Yale and Wharton. But none-of us doubted that Carter was a genius at business, as his father was and his grandfather before him, and that he would make of his family’s vast land development company a name that shone on other shores than America’s. Nobody questioned, either, what a man of his vision and worldliness saw in the essentially turkey-brained Little Lady. She was so exquisitely beautiful and well and specifically trained for a pivotal position in society that she could have walked into any city in the country and run its foremost charity balls without turning a honey-blond hair.
Adelaide Bondurant Rawson was possibly the most valuable property that Carter Rawson would ever acquire, and her long, arduous cultivation paid off in spades and diamonds for my aunt Willa. On the day she gave over Little Lady into Carter’s pirate-dark hands, she was asked to serve on the hospitality committee of the Piedmont Ball and to join both the Friday Femmes and the Every Thursday Study Club. Not even my mother belonged to the Every Thursday. Mother went to bed for an entire weekend with one of her migraines, and did not get up until Monday. Aunt Willa went, for the first time in twenty years, to lunch at the Driving Club alone with my father. Not a blue-rinsed head turned; she had known they would not. People might talk about Willa Slagle Bondurant, lingerie buyer, lunching alone with her brother-in-law; they would not talk about Willa Slagle Bondurant, mother-in-law of Carter Rawson III.
A.J. Kemp, like Charlie, was unmarried, laughing that he could not afford a wife until he had made his fortune in the large and conservative bank of which Snake Cheatham’s father was president. But he was said to be serious about an agreeable, intelligent, awesomely plain and warmhearted girl of no background at all from Hogansville, Georgia, named Lana Bates. None of us except Freddie Goodwin had met Lana or knew anything about her, except that she was a teller at the bank, and was starting into the bank’s junior executive training program, where A.J. had met her. Freddie knew her only because when she had learned of her existence, she had gone straight downtown and into the bank and up to Lana’s window and introduced herself, and asked her to have coffee at her break, and had spent the entire fifteen minutes sweetly catechizing her.
“Her father is a livestock farmer,” Freddie said afterward, her little eyes glinting with the satisfaction of one who has found, at last, someone impossible to be envious of. “And it ain’t white Angus, either, if you know what I mean. He raises Poland China hogs. Lana had a prize hog herself when she was a 4-H girl. Some of it must have rubbed off. She could definitely lose a tad of lard, and her nose turns right up like a little old pink snout.”
Somebody told her to shut up, causing her to huff and sputter, but when our crowd did meet Lana, no one was impressed, and we treated her with such remote, exquisite courtesy that A.J. didn’t bring her around anymore, and didn’t come himself; he married her that Christmas in the little white frame church in Hogansville with no one from Atlanta in attendance but his mother, Melba, who must have bitterly, if silently, mourned the phantom Buckhead princess bride she had labored so long to make possible for A.J.
“The right wife could have really made something of A.J.” was the common word among the aging Buckhead Boys a few years later, when A.J. and Lana left Atlanta and went back to Hogansville, where A.J., to everyone’s astonishment, ran the farm that Lana’s father had left her.
“And it’s no bigger now than it was when he met her,” a renewed Freddie murmured. “It’s still just a little old thing with pigs and chickens and cows and not but one or two tenants. A.J. does his own plowing. She helps him in the field.”
But I thought by then that A.J. had known early something we did not, and had precisely the right wife, and that she had, indeed, made something of him. Loyal A.J., his hunger finally fed….
It was, everyone who lived it has said, a particularly good time to be young and hopeful and possessed of limitless bright prospects, and a good city to be all that in. After the smug, uneasy years of the Silent Generation, where archconservative eyes saw a wild-eyed Communist behind every tree (“and a wild-eyed nigger behind every Communist,” Lucy said later), a new decade was blowing in on the freshening salt wind off the coattails of the vivid young presidential candidate from Massachusetts, who spoke of new commitments and unimaginable horizons and selfless service, that old seductress of the young, and who left the graphite-jowled Richard Nixon in his silvery dust on the nation’s television screens. In Atlanta, as in the rest of the South, racial unrest stirred like the great dragon at the base of the Norse earth tree Yggdrasil, but the city’s penultimate pragmatism bid fair to tame the serpent, in the name of good business. After years of stagnation, Ben Cameron and his tough, aristocratic new power structure were training their sights on a six-point program designed to keep the public schools open, build a vast new network of local freeways, implement a new program of urban renewal, erect a world-class auditorium-coliseum and stadium, get a rapid-transit system rolling and tell the country about it in an ambitious, if chauvinistic, public relations effort called Forward Atlanta. An attractive and high-spirited spate of bright young men and women from small towns and cities and universities all over the South were pouring into the city to work and live and play, and were staying to marry and settle down and become themselves Atlantans. Many of them became, in time, our crowd’s friends, and remained so all their lives. Our parents wouldn’t have given them house or club room, though they would, of course, have been courteous, but we would and did; by the end of that decade, about half the memberships in the social and civic clubs around the city were in the names of the out-of-towners, and even the Driving Club had a few on its rosters. These were not the tackpots of whom Old Atlanta still speaks; those tend to be Yankees and Arabs and Texans, or whoever is perceived to have enormous push and money and no commonality at all of ancestry. These new youngsters were, to our astonishment, as presentable as we were. They just hadn’t had the good fortune to have been born in Buckhead. No one but the oldest of the Old Guard held it against them.
What we had, I think, in those first hopeful days of that incredible decade, was a town that was fast becoming a real city, in every sense of the word: a young upland city whose beauty, was still untrivialized by asphalt and concrete, whose youth had not yet become arrogance, whose ambition had not become venality, whose energy had not become uproar. It was beginning to be a city of uncountable intriguing parts, yet it was, then, still small enough to be perceived all at once. If I am sorry for anything about my absence in those years, I am sorry about missing Atlanta as it spun into the orbit of Camelot.
It was about the time of Ben and Julia’s wedding that the calls from Lucy began. When the first one came, the week after I had gotten back to New York from Sarah’s graduation and Ben’s wedding, I thought at first that something calamitous had happened. It was five o’clock in the morning, past the hour when even the most dedicated drinkers of my circle would call to cajole me into going somewhere or providing a last one for the road, and I was fully awake and focused in every fiber when I picked up the receiver.
“Hello?” I said warily.
There was a rushing silence like you get on long distance, and then a deep inhalation of breath, and then Lucy’s voice came, familiar and strange at once, borne out on the little sigh that I knew was exhaled smoke.
“Hey, Gibby,” she said. “It’s Lucy, honey.” From then on until her death, almost every telephone conversation we had began with that deep drag from the cigarette, and her throaty little “Hey, Gibby.”
“Lucy? What’s the matter?”
“Nothing’s the matter,” she said. Her rich, lazy drawl did not sound as though anything was. “What would be the matter?”
“Lucy, it’s five o’clock in the morning!”
“Oh, that’s right. You’re three hours ahead. I never will get used to that. It’s just two here. Did I wake you up?”
“Oh, no,” I said sarcastically, annoyance at her flooding in after the relief of finding that she was all right. “I had to get up to answer the phone anyway.”
She laughed, and that dark silk banner rolled across three thousand miles to me, and brought her into the room. I could see her boneless slouch, and the precariously lengthening ash on her cigarette, and the long legs propped up on whatever was at hand. California seemed as close as the next apartment.
“What’s going on with you, Gibby?” she said. “Tell me your news. Tell me about graduation, and Ben and Julia’s wedding.”
“Lucy, I could tell you all that at eight o’clock at night, or in broad daylight, just as well as dawn. What are you doing still up? I know you didn’t just get up, so you must not have gone to bed yet.”
She laughed again, and I heard the slight edge of unstable brilliance that liquor always gave her laugh.
“I’ve been to a party,” she said, “and everybody else has pooped out, and I’m not sleepy yet. Just bored. And all of a sudden I thought I’d like to hear your voice. It’s been a long time, Gibby.”
“Only eight months, two weeks and four days,” I said. I might have been, on some level, relieved to have Lucy in other hands than mine, but I was still nettled by her long silence.
Word of her and Red had come fairly frequently from my mother, who got it from Aunt Willa, who in turn got it from Red’s meek, woebegone mother. His father had not spoken to him since he had left Princeton and married Lucy. I was exasperated by my mother’s calls, and at the creaminess of the ill-concealed satisfaction in her voice when she related the latest of Red and Lucy’s decidedly unmeteor-like odyssey, but I always listened. I had, I found, a deep and simple need to know where Lucy was.
On the morning after their wedding, after waking in an Ocean City motel room with a monstrous crimson hangover and a ravening thirst, Red had telephoned his father in Atlanta and, with a fine show of bravado, told him about the wedding and announced that he was bringing Lucy home for a visit before returning to Princeton, and that he thought a small celebratory party at the Driving Club might not be amiss.
“The next party you have is apt to be at the V.F.W. in wherever you are,” Farrell Chastain said, “because you aren’t getting one more red cent from me while I’m alive or after that, either. Whether or not you keep on at Princeton depends on how bad you want to wait tables or jerk sodas.”
Red did not think these were viable options. He asked to speak to his mother. He could hear her weeping in the background, and pleading to be allowed to talk to her son, but Farrell Chastain would not permit it. He hung up. When Lucy awoke, as badly incapacitated as her new husband, it was to learn that he had been turned away from his father’s door like her own father before him at his marriage, and that her bridge to the cloistered world of Peachtree Road and its great houses—the only one she had ever known—was blazing away merrily. Whether she met it with fear or panache I do not know, but it must have been a very had moment for her. She was, she must have realized, as neatly trapped as a rat in a cage, and that knowledge had always sent Lucy wild.
Red had then announced that he had always wanted to be a marine and enlisted within the hour at an Ocean City recruiting office, and they left at noon for Parris Island, South Carolina, in the white Jaguar that had been Farrell’s high school graduation present to his son. Between them, they had fifty-five dollars and fourteen cents. When he wired his bank in Princeton for funds, Red discovered that his father had closed his account, and a furtive phone call home at an hour when he knew his father would be at work yielded only the two hundred-odd dollars that his mother had in her household account. She promised, still sobbing, to wire it as soon as they let her know where they would be living, or Lucy would be. Red would live on base in conditions he had not known existed. Given their combined assets, Lucy’s first married home was the Flamingo Motel, located two miles outside the base on a pitted two-lane blacktop road, backed by a savage, mosquito-spawning low-country marsh. The Flamingo did not have a pool. It did not even have air-conditioning. By the time Red’s first paycheck came and she found a tiny cinder block efficiency apartment in nearby Beaufort, she was welted all over with festering bites, and had dropped six pounds from her elegant greyhound’s body.
There had followed, for Red, boot camp, officer candidate school at Quantico, Virginia, an invitation to the elite and dangerous Army Ranger School at Fort Benning, and finally, a tour of duty as a second lieutenant at Camp Pendleton, California. For the spoiled and indolent son of a very rich man, Red took to it all like a pintail to water. Whatever recessive outlaw genes underlay his smiling, sleepy rages and scarlet lapses into brutality came surging to the fore during the grueling hours of basic training and the stylized savagery of ranger training, and Red at last found his level. It was not nearly so refined as the one he had occupied for the first twenty-one years of his life, but the constant adrenaline high of danger and mastery and the small, select society of his murderous peers more than made up for the loss of creature comforts and privilege his father’s money had bought him.
Red found that he was as good at being a golden killing machine as he had been at being a rich boy. And he liked it a great deal more. It gave him a focus and a license that all the civilian years of his life had not. By the time he was twenty-four years old he was as totally assimilated into his new persona and world as if he had been born to it, and Lucy hung there with him, a silver and ebony fly in an elite and lethal amber.
I don’t know precisely how her new life was for her, or what she thought about it. As she had done with the hated little girls’ school when she was small, she refused to talk to me about those first months as a marine bride, traipsing from South Carolina swamp to sun-blasted Georgia plain and finally to that barren Quonset hut on the high ocean plains of southern California, scoured by the merciless sun and punished by the Santa Ana winds. She never did, to my knowledge, tell anyone about them and her silence spoke for itself. To sensitive, imaginative Lucy Bondurant, quivering with life and terror and bravado and vulnerability like a tuning fork, uprooted from the only refuge she had ever known and the few friends and family who were all she had; no longer the devil-may-care, supremely desirable will-o’-the-wisp who tormented and titillated a generation of sweating Jells, but now merely a thin, mosquito-bitten second lieutenant’s wife at the rock bottom of the Marine Corps social pecking order, it must have truly been what her silence proclaimed it to be—unspeakable. But there was nothing of that in her voice during that first telephone call, and it was only much later that I began to think what indeed her first year as Mrs. Nunnally Chastain must have been like.
“Why don’t you wake up Red and party with him?” I said on that June night in 1960, when the first call came. “As I recall, he was always in the forefront of the better parties of our generation.”
“Red’s been out for two weeks slithering through the swamps with a knife between his teeth, garroting rattlesnakes and blowing up yuccas,” she said, giggling, and the liquor flashed in the giggle, too. “He’s in training to overthrow Cleveland.”
“Then who were you partying with?” I asked.
“His C.O.,” she chortled. “Perfectly adorable little old Texas boy named Rafer Hodges. Captain Rafer Hodges, U.S.M.C. Seven feet tall and towheaded as a yard dog, and with a tattoo that says ‘Semper Fi.’ I’m not going to tell you where it is. Only his platoon and his wife and I know that.”
“And where was this wife?” I asked carefully. This sounded like more trouble. I did not know why I was surprised.
“At home polishing his saber, I guess, or sleeping the sleep of the just. Where she said she was going when she stormed out of the officers’ club after old Rafer danced with me for the fourth time straight. She really pulls rank, Gibby. Six other senior wives toddled right out behind her. What the hell, it just left that many more marines to party with. And I out drank them all. Think of it, Gibby, I drank seven marines under the table in one night!”
“Lucy, you are going to absolutely fry yourself with those women if you don’t watch it,” I said despairingly. “You can’t behave in the service like you did at home. You’ll be an outcast and Red’s career will be down the drain. You must know that. Is that what you’re trying to do, wreck him with the marines?”
“Oh, shit, Gibby, you’re still a prick, aren’t you?” she said, sullen now. “Those women were squiffed to the eyeballs themselves. I’ll be good from now on, and charm their pants off them, and they’ll forget it in no time.”
“Tell me something,” I said. “Why are you drinking so much?”
“Because,” she said, “it makes everything special.”
“Luce, you haven’t even been married a year. You shouldn’t have to drink for things to be special. Even if you hate the life out there, there’s Red; you don’t hate Red. My God, you went with him for five years before you married. You must love him.”
“Red’s changed,” she said briefly.
“How?” I asked, not wanting to hear it. Those dark fingerprints…
“Oh…I don’t know. No way and every way, really. He’s…totally absorbed in the rangers; sometimes he doesn’t even come home when he could. He and some of the other guys will go out for days at a time into the desert, with just knives and a couple of matches, and come back stinking and filthy and drunk and happy as larks. And he doesn’t much want to party and dance at the club anymore, and you know how he used to love that…but mainly, Gibby, it’s just that he doesn’t understand me. I know now that he never did.”
I could have told you that five years ago, I did not say.
“You’re not the easiest gal in the world to understand,” I said instead.
“You understand me, Gibby,” she said softly. “You always did.”
Presently she hung up, and I lay there in the bleached, clamorous New York dawn, troubled, trying to imagine the truth of Lucy. Later, I put it together: The absences from the meager base housing, more and more frequent, longer and longer, while Red slipped into that literal country of lost boys, the U.S. Rangers. Later, the tours of sea duty, long months on end. Lucy left behind, knowing no one but marine wives, who disliked and distrusted her for her beauty, her high spirits, her Southern exoticism and the dangerous shoals of mischief and more than mischief they sensed just below her vibrant surface. Their husbands and their husbands’ superiors, much taken with her reckless dash and splendid looks, and in some cases downright smitten, but sensing in Lucy Bondurant Chastain the stuff of reprimands and toppled careers. A few disastrous evenings at the officers’ club in which she drank too much, flirted too brazenly, slipped outside with too many crew-cut young officers. A few equally disastrous teas and receptions in which she wore outrageously provocative clothing and said “shit” in the hearing of wives much her senior. And so she found herself a literal pariah, on that hot and unimaginable coast, alone both in her home and away from it. And the phone calls to New York, over the course of that hot summer, began in earnest.
The pattern was always the same: the late-night burr of the telephone, the deep, in drawn breath as the dragged comfortingly on her cigarette, and then her voice spinning across the country to me, rich and low and thick with all our shared history: “Hey, Gibby. It’s Lucy, honey.”
And there would follow the gleeful recounting of her latest escapade, and what she had said to whom in the commissary, and how she had that fool of a captain lifting bumpers out in the officers’ club parking lot, and how she had shocked that old trout, the rear admiral’s wife. She was usually drunk, and always, under the glee and high spirits, there ran a litany, a near frantic dirge, of loneliness and something more, something high and silvery and skewed. The calls came closer and closer together, and by the end of the summer they were coming almost every night.
About the middle of August the tales of Red Chastain’s drunken and abusive behavior toward her began, and she would sometimes sob plaintively over the telephone, frankly drunk herself more often than not, and began to beg me to come out to Pendleton and rescue her.
After each of the first of these calls I had called her back the next morning, when she was clearheaded and sober, and each time she laughed her warm, infectious laugh and told me not to pay any attention to her, she couldn’t hold her liquor worth a damn anymore. So I did not, after a while, worry quite so frantically about her, and listened to the next call with a reasonable amount of skepticism. But the calls continued, and each time she sounded so genuinely frightened, and so desperate, that fear for her and rage at Red would come flooding back, and I would find myself in the same old stew of Lucy-begotten agitation I had simmered in for much of my life.
Sarah visited me several times that summer, and each time she was witness to one of Lucy’s late-night calls. She would fall silent when they came, and her lashes would slip down over her great amber eyes, and her mobile mouth would tighten, but she never said anything about them.
On one such evening, something I said—or did not say—must have alerted Lucy to the fact that Sarah was in the room with me, because she said, “Oh, am I interrupting anything, Gibby? Like coitus interruptus, I mean? I can always call you back. But no, I guess not. Sarah no coito, does she? I swear, Gibby, if you marry that girl, you’re going to have to get you one of those rubber dollies from Japan with the hole that the guys take on sea duty, because you sure aren’t going to get any from little Miss—”
I hung up on her, hot-faced and furious, and Sarah looked at me curiously, but I did not, of course, tell her what Lucy had said. It was insulting and outrageous, and Sarah had already suffered enough from Lucy Bondurant’s capricious tongue. And besides. Lucy was right. Despite the closeness we felt for each other, and the hours and days we spent alone in my apartment, and the real, aching sweetness and passion of our kissing and petting, Saran and I had not made love. We almost had, many times, both of us wet with sweat and fairly shaking with need for each other. But we had not.
I think we were both a little ashamed that we hadn’t. Our times together seemed made for physical love. The grand scope and boundless largesse of the city itself fairly shouted for a grand passion to match it. New York in that last golden time before the sixties began to corrode was made for lovers. All around us, both in Manhattan and in Atlanta, the marriages and beginning pregnancies of our peers spoke of what Sarah’s fierce grandmother, old Milliment, called sanctified joy. I think the bottom line, for Sarah and me, was that our joy was not sanctified. Absurd as it seems now, in my set at that time you did not casually sleep with, and risk impregnation of, the girl you planned to bring into your ordered and strictured world as your wife. And whole and fully passioned adults as Sarah and I were, we were denizens of that world first. Though we had not talked of marriage with any formality, we both assumed that we would take that step only after Sarah had her year at the Sorbonne. In that suspended and time-stopped summer of 1960, marriage seemed far more than a year and an ocean away.
We did try. Once or twice Sarah simply did not pull away from me, and we lay naked and joined but for a last crucial inch or two of scalding space. And once I actually entered her. But her little gasps and moans turned abruptly to cries of real pain, and I withdrew, cursing myself and her and our parents and the South and all the generations of women from out of both our histories who hovered over us on my narrow iron bed, crying “Stop! Shame! Wrong!”
Afterward, Sarah sat up amid the coiled covers and wept in shame and frustration.
“Oh, Shep,” she cried, “who the hell am I? Am I a lady or an artist or a cockteaser, or what? I’m not a complete anything! I’m not even a good wanton!”
After that, I did not let things get so close again. I was often the one to pull away. For us, we agreed, waiting was the right, if not the comfortable, thing. We agreed on everything in those days, shared all that we had. All we seemed to lack was a grand enough passion to get us properly fucked, but I guess that lack was in its way a lethal one. For myself, I despised my status as a virgin, feeling that it made of me both an emotional and an actual neuter. But a deep well of fear stopped me from seriously considering sex with anyone but Sarah. I had not, perhaps, actually had a woman, but I had had that desire and lost it to my cousin Lucy all those years before in the summer-house behind the house on Peachtree Road.
The week before she was to leave for Paris, in early September, Sarah spent a final weekend with me. Still blamelessly based at the Barbizon, she nevertheless spent all but a scant six hours of sleeping time with me that Friday night and Saturday, and at ten o’clock on Saturday night, after a day of soaking up enough galleries and museums and walking and looking and munching and hand holding and furtive kissing to last us the nine months until she came home again, we were just sitting down to a takeout pizza and a bottle of Chianti when the telephone rang. We both knew, with radars sharpened by impending separation, that it was Lucy. Sarah did not speak.
“I’ll cut this short,” I said, reaching for the telephone. Sarah still said nothing. She nodded.
But I did not cut it short. Lucy was calling from the apartment of one of the other marine wives at Pendleton, and between her incoherent sobs and the other girl’s indignant breaking in, it took me nearly an hour to get from Lucy that Red had blackened her eyes and cut her lip and locked her out of their apartment, and had threatened to split her skull if she came back in.
“Oh, Gibby, what should I do? He’s awfully drunk; he could kill me,” she wept. Her voice was slurred with liquor and the damaged mouth.
“Call the MPs, Lucy,” I said, fear and outrage at Red swamping and drowning my anger at her call. “Don’t mess around with him. Just call the MPs right now.”
“I can’t,” she wailed. “They don’t bother the rangers. Everybody knows that. It’s like a club, or some kind of conspiracy. Nobody bothers the goddamned almighty rangers! They’d put me in jail instead!”
“They don’t have any jurisdiction over you, Luce,” I said. “Listen, are you drunk, too?”
“Maybe a little,” she sniffed. “But that doesn’t give him the right to beat me up. Listen, Gibby, you’ve just got to come. You’ve got to get me out of here….”
At last I soothed her, and extracted a promise from the other wife that she would call me in the morning and tell me how things stood then. I knew that my concern for Lucy was audible; I could feel it thickening my voice like river silt. I put the phone down and turned to Sarah, who had not stirred from her chair. Her face was very white, and the high color in her cheeks burned even brighter, but her expression was mild and questioning.
“She’s in awful trouble,” I said. “He’s beating her regularly. He’s hurt her pretty badly this time. She wants me to come. I really ought to go.”
And Sarah exploded.
“If you go out there, Shep,” she said between clenched teeth, the sherry eyes all pupil and spilling angry tears, “you’ll have her for the rest of your life. It’s what she wants. She always has. You’re a fool if you can’t see that. And maybe it’s what you want, too, no matter what you think or say. But it’s not what I want. And I won’t have it. I’m not going to share you anymore with Lucy Bondurant! I’m not!”
And she frightened herself so throughly with her outburst, and her hurt was so deep, that Sarah, whose mannerly tears I had seen perhaps three times in our entire lives, burst into a storm of weeping. She ducked her chin down and crossed her arms over her chest and rocked back and forth on the spavined sofa, crying the square-mouthed, heartbreaking sobs of a suffering child. I had never in my life seen Sarah so abandoned, or heard her make such sounds.
The sight of her pain burst inside me like a rocket, purging me of Lucy and her three-thousand-mile tendrils of woe, and I moved over and took Sarah into my arms and pressed her so hard against me that I literally stifled the sound of her crying. But the great, racking, silent sobs continued, and a hard, continuous trembling, and I laid her back on the sofa and put my long body over hers, trying with every pound and inch of me to stop the terrible trembling and the cries, to scourge the anguish out of her.
“Don’t, Sarah, don’t, don’t,” I whispered into the drenched and matted hair, into her ear. “Please don’t…”
“Oh, Shep, do it now!” she cried out into my own ear—and I did. Without thought, without qualm, without regret, without consideration for the pain she must feel, or the fear, I shucked her out of her clothes and went into her and plunged there, back and forth, back and forth, and felt her settle around me and find my rhythm and ride with it, and felt her hips rise and fall and quicken and her legs clench my back, and heard her great, hoarse cry as we came together and my own cry escaped me—a cry of gratitude and simple relief and a joy as old and deep as the world.
When my breathing slowed and I moved off her and propped myself up on one elbow and looked down into her face, she smiled a smile of utter luminosity and reached up and traced a track down my cheek. I realized then that the wetness on my face was partly from my own tears.
“We did it,” she said, grinning. I thought that I had never seen anything so beautiful as Sarah Cameron was at that moment, lying stained and red-faced and slack on my sofa, wet curls matted black around her face, crimson flooding her still-tanned skin. She looked to me then like a ripe and perfect plum.
“We did it,” I echoed. “And I’m going out and hire a cannon and give a twenty-one-gun salute. God! I had no idea! You know, I guess, that I never have before…”
“I know,” she said.
“Has that ever bothered you? It’s not exactly normal.”
“What’s normal?” She said, stretching luxuriously. I watched the play of swimming muscles in her elegant little body, and the sheen of sweat on her. “It was the first time for me, too.”
“Well, God, of course it was,” I said. I had never considered that Sarah was not a virgin.
A thought struck me then, and wiped the goatish satisfaction clear out of me.
“Sarah, listen, do you think you could get pregnant? I mean, when’s your next…period?” And I appalled myself by reddening to my hairline.
“In a couple of weeks,” she said, blushing herself. Intercourse did not make the Pinks and the Jells of Atlanta blush, but menstruation did, and so far as I am concerned, still does.
“But it’s okay. I won’t get pregnant.”
“How do you know?” I said. “I didn’t…use anything.”
Sarah’s face flamed even redder, and she dropped her eyes.
“I did,” she said.
I simply stared at her.
“I have a diaphragm,” she went on rapidly in a voice so low that I could hardly hear her words. “I put it on right after we came in. I got it from Snake a year ago, and I’ve worn it since then every night we’ve been together when I came to New York. You may think I’m trashy, but you don’t have to worry about me getting pregnant.”
“Sarah…” I couldn’t think of anything to say. I thought of what it must have cost her to go to Snake and ask for a diaphragm; would he have had to examine and fit her for it? I did not know. The idea was too appalling to entertain. Had she so mistrusted me, then?
“Were you afraid I was going to force you?” I said.
“Oh, Shep, no!” She was truly aghast. “I wasn’t afraid you would, I hoped you would! I just couldn’t get myself past the…the point of no return…but I always hoped that one night you’d just go on and…do what I couldn’t…”
I took her back into my arms and held her close, not speaking, rocking with her a little, consumed with love and gratitude.
“It’s a good thing you’re leaving for Paris,” I said finally, “because I don’t think I’d ever let you out of bed if you weren’t across an entire ocean.”
“Am I worth waiting for?” She grinned.
“You bet your ass you are,” I said. “Your little perfect pink and white ass. But, Sarah—no longer than it takes you to get off the boat and get here. And then, just think…all those days and nights and months and years of sack time ahead of us…”
“Yes,” she said. “All the time in the world.”
It wasn’t until she was getting on the plane at La Guardia the next evening that, typically, she turned to me and said, her amber eyes crinkled with mischief, “You know who we have to thank for everything, don’t you?”
“Who?”
“Lucy, of course. You ought to send her a dozen roses. Or I ought. Or on second thought, forget it. It would make her crazy. She’d be back here in three hours, sobbing on your doorstep, and I won’t be here to tell her hands off.”
“Then I’ll tell her myself,” I said, kissing her a last long time.
“Don’t forge,” she said, turning to leave me for Atlanta and then Paris, and taking what felt to be the bulk of my soul with her. “If I ever catch you in Lucy Bondurant’s clutches, it’s going to be curtains for us. I am a woman of few words and strong mind.”
And she was gone into a dazzle of late September sun.
I went back to the apartment on West Twenty-first and sat down to wait for her to come home.
Three weeks after Sarah sailed for France on the United States, Red Chastain went out on his first long tour of sea duty, and Lucy was alone at Camp Pendleton for nearly eight months. She called me the night he left, the familiar liquor slur in her voice, the tears just under it.
“Gibby, can you come out here and see me? I’m going to die of loneliness by myself all that time.”
It was three-thirty in the morning, and it suddenly struck me with the clarity of revelation that there was no earthly reason why Lucy had to call me at that hour to tell me she was lonely for Red Chastain. I took a deep breath.
“Lucy,” I said, “no. I can’t come out there to see you. I can’t and I won’t. You’re a grown, married woman. You’ve got eight months to be safe from Red, if that’s what you want, and nothing you have to do and nobody to be accountable to, and I don’t want you to call me again unless it’s a certifiable, life-threatening emergency, and then it better be in the daylight, my time. If you’re lonesome, make some friends. Take a course. Plant a garden. Plant a tree. Write a book. But don’t tell me about it.”
“What would I write about, Gibby?”
“Anything, Luce,” I said. “Anything at all that comes into your head. I’m sure you’ll think of something.”
And I hung up the phone and turned off the light. The telephone rang twice after that, at thirty-minute intervals, but I ground my teeth and did not answer. It rang again the next night at eleven, and the next at eight, and both times I sat staring at it while it rang, fists clenched, teeth gritted, and after that it did not ring again. Whatever Lucy elected to do to pass the days and weeks and months until her husband came back to catch her up in their dreadful red waltz, I did not hear of it.
Fall passed, Christmas came and went, the spring was born and grew old. Sarah wrote vibrant, brimming letters and I answered with yearning ones. I saw friends or did not, ate or did not, listened to and played jazz or stayed home, buried myself in my underground tunnels and vaults and the cloistered aboveground stacks, slept, awoke, did it all again; and the emptiness where Sarah was not gradually filled, as the days passed and the time of her return approached, with a great, slumbering anticipation that was born in my groin as well as my heart. I did not think I could wait to see and touch and smell and taste her again.
She was due in at midmorning on the fifth of June, 1961. Ben and Dorothy Cameron came up from Atlanta to meet her, and I went up to the Plaza the night before she landed to meet them for dinner in the Oak Room. In all my years in New York, I had never been into the dark, graceful old room, with its air of age and privilege and substance. Ben and Dorothy always stayed at the Plaza; it had been Ben’s father’s accustomed lair when he visited New York, and as Ben said, the Camerons didn’t play around with tradition.
I looked at him closely that night, as if for the first time seeing the man the entire country would know, within a few years, as the aristocratic mayor of the Southern city that somehow managed to keep, in the fire storms of the mid-1960s, a kind of furious peace with its black citizens. Against the mellow old paneling of the Oak Room, I watched him toying with the silver and taking the level gray measure of the moneyed men and women around him, most of whom instinctively lifted their heads to stare at him, and I saw too that much of the laughter had gone out of his light Celt’s eyes, and been replaced with a kind of narrow measuring. His pupils were contracted to pinpoints in the dim light; that, and the web of white weather lines in the thin, tanned skin around his eyes, gave him the look of a man accustomed to gazing great distances. For the first time in my life, I felt just a little uneasy with him, not quite so effortlessly comfortable as I had with the lounging, laughing young father of Ben and Sarah. Dorothy, beside him, did not seem changed. In simple cream silk, which set off her vivid coloring and cameo features and enriched the dark hair and brows that were Sarah’s, she glowed like an Advent candle. I thought she looked very beautiful. Sarah would be a beautiful older woman.
Ben talked a little, after the dessert plates had been taken away and the old five-star cognac that he loved brought, about the six-point program for the city’s growth that Sarah had told me about earlier, and about the public relations effort he hoped would bring Atlanta into national focus.
“It’s called Forward Atlanta,” he said, and I laughed before I thought.
“God,” I said. “Talk about horn blowing and flag waving. It ain’t exactly subtle, is it?”
He grinned. “Nope,” he said. “Downright gauche. But I don’t knock it. In fact, I’m the one who thought of it. Atlanta is gauche, Shep. Always has been. But that gaucherie is going to set us on fire in the next ten years.”
“What about the race business?” I said. “That could literally burn you up.”
“That’s the kicker, of course,” he said, his grin fading. “That could sink us. But I don’t think it will. It’s not good for business. And I’ve got some agents in place who can do a lot to defuse it. But you’re right; it could be bad. We can’t let it happen, that’s all. We need the Negroes with us, not against us. We need their cooperation and we need their money. We can’t do everything that needs doing without them.”
“Can you do it even with them? It’s a radical proposal, Ben, to completely remake a city….”
“Yes. We can do it,” he said. “We can just do it. They call us the power structure, you know; sometimes, the Club. And we are those things, and that’s why we can get it done—we have a lot of money and we can finance the big stuff at home. And we’re in absolute accord on what needs to be done. That’s eighty percent of the battle. We can make the big push alone, by ourselves. But after that, to sustain it, we’ll have to have more than momentum. We’ll have to have outside money. And with that, of course, will come outsiders. And the Club, or we Buckhead guys, if you will, will be doomed. We know that; there it is. There just aren’t enough of you home town Young Turks coming up behind us.”
“Are you still pushing for me to come back to Atlanta?” I asked.
“I guess so,” he said.
“Why? The city you’re talking about doesn’t need another librarian.”
“The city I’m talking about needs another smart, thoughtful young man with money,” Ben Cameron said.
“I don’t have any money, Ben. I’m not apt to have any,” I said honestly. Surely he knew about the estrangement between me and my father.
“You don’t know what you have, Shep,” he said. “Your father never let you know, and never let your mother tell you. Do you even know where your family’s holdings are?”
“Not really,” I said. “Down in the southeast part of town somewhere around the old cotton mill, I think….”
“Well, I’ll show you exactly where when you get home.”
“Ben…”
“Goddamn it, Shep, you’ll have to come home eventually to marry Sarah, even if you leave the next day,” he said crisply. “I’m not going to let you get out of town without taking you by the hand and marching you down to Cabbagetown and showing you just where the Bondurant dough comes from.”
I lifted my hands and let them fall. I did not feel like arguing that my family’s real estate holdings were as unlikely to become mine as the Brooklyn Bridge was. My head was too full of tomorrow and the coming of Sarah.
They arranged to pick me up the next morning on the way over to the West Side docks, and I waved aside Ben’s offer of a cab and walked the forty blocks home. I walked slowly in the soft air, letting the slackening rhythm of the city night suck and swirl around me. I thought of nothing, and was happy. It was nearly midnight when I got back to my apartment, and the shrilling telephone had almost stopped ringing when I got the door unlocked and picked up the receiver.
I was fully expecting to hear Ben’s voice, or Dorothy’s, but the voice that came on the line in the little hollow of air that meant long distance was that of a crisp, businesslike young doctor in the base hospital at Camp Pendleton, California, and for a moment I could not take in what he was saying. And then I could: Lucy was in the hospital, five of her teeth knocked out and her broken jaw wired shut, with an additional broken collarbone and fractured forearm. And there was, in her scalp, a shallow, trench like laceration where the bullet from Red Chastain’s service revolver had grazed her.
I did not say anything, and the voice went on. The Pendleton MPs were looking for Lieutenant Chastain, it said, and Mrs. Chastain would be well enough to be released on the following Monday morning, but since she could not be alone, and since no one at the Atlanta number she had given them would speak with her doctors or her husband’s superiors, all of whom were very concerned for her precarious emotional state as well as her injuries, there seemed to be nowhere for her to go. She had said that her cousin, Mr. Bondurant, would come and take her to her home in Atlanta, and if it was possible, they hoped I would do so immediately. She was so frantic for me to come that they could not restrain her, and had twice had to snip the wires that held her shattered jaw so that she could breathe. They could not, the doctor said, be responsible for her condition if I did not come.
I sat on the edge of my bed for a long time, looking blindly at my feet in their smudged white bucks, sitting squarely together on the floor like good poodles commanded to stay. Then I lifted the receiver and called the Plaza.
I have never known Ben Cameron to be so coldly angry before or since. He said, “I see,” a couple of times while I talked, in a voice that was as flat and arctic as a tundra, and when I was done he said, “Shep, you are a complete and miserable goddamned fool if you go out to California after that poor little piece, and if you do, I can’t imagine how long it’s going to take before I can talk to you reasonably again.” And he left the line and handed the phone to Dorothy.
I really believe she understood. She indicated that she did. But she was greatly hurt and disappointed; I knew that, though she did not say so. Instead, in her lovely, low, patrician voice, she said, “What is it about Lucy, do you suppose, Shep? What do you see there, what do you sense?”
“I…it’s just that she’s so vulnerable, Dorothy,” I said, endlessly and utterly tired. “And she’s totally alone now, and helpless. And in spite of what you think and the way she acts sometimes, there’s something innately good and simple in her….”
“No,” Dorothy Cameron said. “There’s no such thing as innate goodness. Goodness is learned, hard. It presupposes kindness. And Lucy is not kind; she is too afraid and hungry for that. Innocence; that’s another matter. That’s what’s under Lucy, that’s what you sense. A terrible, ruthless, implacable innocence. But kindness is a corrupt angel, and it is learned, and Lucy has not learned it and never will learn it.”
She paused, and I heard her sigh, and heard a world of fatigue and defeat in the sigh.
“Of course you’ll have to go, Shep,” she said. “You can’t live your life, nor Sarah with you, under the shadow of a refusal to do so. I only ask that you be very, very careful with her. She is a danger to herself and a worse one to you. I’ll explain to Sarah. She’ll understand.”
But Sarah did not understand. By the time I came home from California almost a week later, with a pale, shrunken, nearly unrecognizable Lucy and installed her in her old room in the house on Peachtree Road, after having extracted from my mother and hers a reluctant promise of no I-told-you-so, and rushed to the downstairs telephone niche to call Sarah, it was to hear, from a muted and old-voiced Dorothy Cameron, that Sarah had, just two nights before, announced her engagement to Charlie Gentry. The announcement had been sent to both newspapers, Dorothy said, and would appear in the combined edition on Sunday. That was, of course, tomorrow. She hoped that I would come by and speak to Sarah and to Charlie, who would be there with the family for the congratulatory calls that would follow the announcement as inevitably as the morning sun followed the dawn. Both were anxious to talk with me.
“I hope you will, Shep,” she said. “This has been a very, very hard thing for Sarah. It will be a kindness to her if you’ll come. She said to tell you that she’ll wait for you tomorrow afternoon in the studio.”
But I left Atlanta later that day and went back to New York without seeing her.