The next Friday night I slept, for the first time in my life, in the big back bedroom that was the guest room of the house on Peachtree Road.
It was a strange night, and largely sleepless; full of sounds and shadows and shiftings that I had heard all my life, but alien to me now because I heard and saw them from a different angle. When I did sleep, it was lightly and poised on the surface of unconsciousness, as a soldier will sleep in a battle zone where ambush is possible.
I was acutely conscious of, could almost feel on my skin, the presence of my aunt Willa in the other back bedroom across the hall, and even more so of the bodies of my mother and father, which presumably lay side by side in the great front bedroom where they had, to the best of my knowledge, slept since before my birth. I lay very still in unaccustomed new pajamas under the thin white linen sheets, listening despite the ridiculousness of it for the joyless noise of their unimaginable coupling, as I had lain listening in the hated small dressing room in my infancy and early childhood. Lucy, who had put an end to that torture, did not sleep tonight under this roof, but in the summerhouse which had for so long been mine. I did not precisely begrudge it to her, but I missed the refuge of it keenly. This cold white bed in this austere dark room did not beget ease.
We had sat late in the summerhouse, she and I, after the sorry little ritual of homecoming between me and my parents and Aunt Willa had been played out. My mother, looking glossier and more sinuous and whiter of skin than ever, had clung to me and fussed and patted and chirred, and Aunt Willa, every spectacular inch the Atlanta society matron now, smiled and smoked quietly in the warm darkness of the side porch where we gathered, looking, looking. My father, somehow redder and more furious of face even as he bared his yellowing teeth in what passed between us for greeting, had a couple of quick bourbons and nodded and grinned ferally and said yes, the Rolls-Royce in the driveway was new; I’d have to take it for a little spin sometime while I was home. I grinned back, feeling my mouth stretch with it, and said I’d sure like to do that, knowing that I would not, and that he would not offer again.
Soon after that he took the bourbon decanter and went back inside to the library, saying that he had a good bit of paper work to get cleaned up if the ladies planned on having a tea party that weekend, and I did not see him again until just before I left for New York on Sunday night. He was not at Lucy’s autograph party at Rich’s the next day, or at the cocktail party Ben and Dorothy gave for her at the Driving Club; my mother told me that he had an out-of-town business appointment, but I do not remember where she said it was, and in any case I did not believe her. I did not know where he went, but I knew why. Lucy and I escaped to the summerhouse as soon as we decently could, with relief that was probably as obvious as it was profound.
“I hope you don’t mind,” she said, snapping on a single lamp beside the deep, sagging old blue sofa and sinking into its cushions. “I moved out here a week or two after I got home, in June. Nobody seemed to know what to say to me, and I could tell that the cast and the bruises bothered everybody, and it just seemed easier all the way around. Martha brought me trays and I slept, mostly, and after I felt better I got the job, and then it was better to be out here because I didn’t wake anybody leaving or coming home. I work pretty late sometimes. And then, I didn’t think you were coming back; but if you mind, I’ll move my things out of here in a second. I didn’t change anything at all….”
She had not. The summerhouse looked almost exactly as it had the day I had left it to enter Princeton. My books and records were in the same untidy rows I had left, and even the Georgia Tech and University of Georgia pennants on the walls were undisturbed. A hanging whatnot that my mother had put up still held my 880 trophies and a lone, blackened junior tennis trophy from the club, and a small glass case of perfect minié balls that Charlie had given me one long-ago Christmas still sat, thick-felted with dust, on my old desk. Only the desk showed evidence of Lucy; it was piled with books and notebooks and yellow legal pads, and a battered old Smith-Corona portable sat squarely in its middle, neatly covered. I’d have known that Lucy Bondurant lived in these rooms, though, if I had been led into them blindfolded. Over everything, over the drying musk of grass and the yellowing September woods out back, and the breath of the dank-scummed lily pool just beyond the veranda, and the cool-sour stucco smell of the summerhouse itself, rode the silky-teasing scent of her Tabu.
“I don’t mind,” I said. “I like to see you out here with your typewriter and your brand-new life; I’ll like thinking of you here when I’m back in New York. It’s a good hideout for an author. And I think it must suit you. You look wonderful.”
She did. Lucy had always looked wonderful, of course, but there was something totally new about her this weekend; Dorothy Cameron had been right. I had noticed it the moment I stepped off the plane, and the sense of it had grown with each passing hour that we spent together. There wasn’t any physical difference; I had looked for that when I hugged her and held her away from me and studied her, because the sense of otherness had smitten me so powerfully the moment I saw her tall figure in the crowd around the airline gate. Her black-satin hair still fell in its blue-sheened pageboy against her slanted white cheekbones, and her rose and cream color was the same, if a bit heightened with excitement. She wore no lipstick and no makeup on her light-drowned eyes, and that was, for Lucy, unusual, but I had seen her without makeup many times before. And if she had been slender before, she was downright thin now, a thinness of sinew and taut-stretched flesh that vein and bone, here and there, gleamed through. But on Lucy, thinness still meant only whippet elegance, and a refining of her extraordinary grace.
No, the difference was born inside her, and it shone out of her blue eyes and in the soft curve of her mouth like mist from morning water. I thought of the trick we used to do with a flashlight when we were small; we would hold it, lit, in our mouths or shine it behind our hands, and were in those moments illumined from the inside out, glowing creatures of light and bone. If Lucy had done the same with a pure white candle, the effect would have been what I saw now. There was a word that fit her but I could not think of it.
We stopped at Rusty’s on the way to the Peachtree Road house, “to shore you up before the onslaught,” she said. “Once the weekend gets into gear, we won’t have any time together at all. Après moi le déluge. I hope you aren’t going to hate all this folderol about the book.”
“Are you kidding?” I said. “I couldn’t be any prouder of you if you’d won the Nobel Prize for literature. I’ll happily go through this with every book you write. Are you working on another one? And when are you going to tell me about this one?”
“Oh…later. Soon. Tonight, maybe,” she said.
She finished her Coke and made a rude childhood noise against the bottom of the glass with the straw. I was drinking beer, and had asked if she wanted one, too, but she had shaken her head and asked for Coke instead.
“No more booze,” she said. “I’m strictly a Cokaholic now.”
“Well, good,” I said. “I was getting a little worried about you there for a while, to tell you the truth.”
“With good reason,” she said. “I’m not the nicest person in the world when I drink. Or when I don’t, for that matter. Listen, Gibby,” and she turned to me quickly, so that the bell of hair swung against her cheek. “I want to say this before you shush me. I’ll be sorry until the day I die for what I did to you and Sarah. You should be up there at Tate with her, not Charlie Gentry, and you would be if it hadn’t been for me, and I know that. No”—for I had started to protest—”let me finish. I can’t undo that, but I can keep from making anybody else unhappy ever again with my selfishness and my neuroses, and I’m going to. My heart will hurt me every time I see Sarah Gentry or you again as long as I live, and if it helps at all, I want you to know that I’ve changed. I really have. That may be small comfort, but it’s all I can give you. That and just to love you always and wish you everything that’s good in the world for the rest of your life.”
It was an extraordinary speech by any standards, and for Lucy it was astounding. I literally did not know what to say, so I said, for a moment, nothing at all. And then: “I liked the old model pretty well. I hope she’s not in mothballs for good.”
Her glorious, throaty laugh rang out, and relief flooded me. Somewhere under this—the word I wanted danced maddeningly just out of reach—this paragon my old adored and enthralling Lucy lay. It was enough, for now, and I switched on the radio of her little VW bug, and leaned my head back against the seat and inhaled deeply, eyes closed. The smell of the dusty honeysuckle foliage that fell over Rusty’s parking lot fence swam into the car on the sharp-cutting strains of “Moonglow,” and the ash from Lucy’s cigarette reddened in the darkness as she dragged deeply on it, and sudden young laughter spilled from the open window of the car next to us, and just for that moment it was 1953 again, and the summer moon shone on us, and I was truly home. It was not until hours later, when we sat in the semidarkness of the summerhouse and Lucy, her face carved pure and cleanly in lamplight and shadow like a young Joan of Orléans, spoke of moving out here to avoid giving bother to the household, that the word I had wanted at the airport flashed into my mind: saintly.
“There’s another reason I’m out here, too,” she said as if reading my thoughts.
“And that is?” I said.
“Mother and your folks don’t want me in the house. In fact, they want me to move all the way out of it and get a place of my own. They’ve given me a month to look around, and I thought it would be better to lie low while I did, so I wouldn’t keep everybody upset. They’re really pretty angry with me. I can’t say that I blame them.”
Here we go, I thought. There is trouble, then; I should have known. Why else would she want me to come home? But I can see why she pulled the wool over Dorothy’s and Sarah’s eyes. This new-Lucy business is so good it’s eerie….
I felt deeply, endlessly tired. Worse, I felt near-sick with disappointment.
Aloud I said, “Let’s have it, Luce.”
She looked at me quickly, and I could swear that the bewilderment in her eyes was genuine. And then she laughed again, the healing, full Lucy-laugh.
“Oh, poor Gibby! No, it’s nothing you have to do anything about. It’s nothing you could do anything about even if I wanted you to. Only I can, and I have.”
“Then what?”
She did not answer at once. It was as hot as a mid-summer night in the room, and she twisted her heavy hair up off her neck and held it atop her head. Her plain white oxford shirt fell away from her thin neck, and I could see clearly the notch where Red Chastain’s gun butt had smashed her fragile collarbone, and the little white tracks in her hairline from the stitches in the scalp laceration his bullet had made. Sweat pearled her neck and upper lip. I wanted to cry, suddenly, she looked so punished and vulnerable and young. The armor her insouciance had given her was gone.
Then she said, “It’s my job. They really hate what I’m doing, and they think I took it to spite them, like I…guess I did those editorials I wrote at Scott, and the marches and sitins and things I went on. You know. I don’t blame them for thinking that; why shouldn’t they? But I can’t give it up, Gibby. I love it with every little shred and scrap of me. I don’t think I ever really knew what it was to love work, or to love people in the way I love these—”
“For God’s sake,” I said, “what are you doing? Nursing lepers? Hooking? What?”
“I’m working with the civil rights movement,” she said, her face literally aflame with a kind of joy. “I’m working downtown at a place called Damascus House, in an old church in the black section down below the capital. Right next to Capitol Homes, you know; where we used to go to get the laundry from Princess? It’s an innercity mission, really, run by Father Claiborne Cantrell. I know you’ve heard of him, or read about him—he’s been in Time and Newsweek both. I guess he’s pretty radical for a Southern Episcopalian. Anyway, he had to give up his ministry at Saint Martin’s after he’d gotten arrested for the fourth time sitting in, so he just went down to Capitol Homes and found this old empty church and outbuildings and set up Damascus House, and it’s been the model for literally dozens of inner-city missions all over the South. I met Clay—Father Cantrell—at a rally in early July, and was just spellbound by him like everybody is, and literally begged him with tears running down my face to let me come and work for him, and he finally did…. Oh, God, I just never knew until now, but this is my real niche, the thing I was meant to do with my life!”
I had to smile, even as the import of her incandescence and the new, uncritical affection for the human race dawned. Lucy and the Negroes again. No wonder her mother and my parents were furious. An amusing little feature about the Defiant Deb taking up the cause of equality in the Atlanta Constitution was one thing; Time and Newsweek were quite another. When would they learn that trying to separate Lucy from her beloved Negroes was as futile as parting the moon from its tides?
But the implications of her passion were, to me, ominous.
“Lucy, what you’re meant to do with your life is write,” I said. I said it as neutrally as possible, so as not to echo the other furious voices in this house. “What is it you do at this Damascus House?”
“I’m registering voters,” she said. “I’m matching government resources to individual needs. I’m working in the soup kitchen and driving the bus and getting bail bond money for the sit-ins, and…oh, Gibby, there’s so much to do.”
Her blue eyes spilled out a light very near that of madness, and I was almost afraid of the otherworldliness about her.
“Can’t you do as much for the movement by writing about it as by dishing up soup?” I said. “You must see what kind of career you could have as a novelist; you told me about your reviews. My God, the whole town is turning out to honor you tomorrow, practically. You have great power; couldn’t you reach more people that way?”
“I love them, Gibby,” she said simply. “I love the black people. I need to be close to them. They’re better friends than any I ever had. I want to be right in this with them; Clay says we have to walk among them and with them to have any credibility.”
“Ah, I see,” I said, thinking that I did. “Clay. The good father. Lucy, don’t you see that you’re doing nothing in the world but chasing off after another man, doing what your latest savior tells you to? Don’t you see that?”
She smiled at me. It was a very sweet smile, and a gentle one. “I don’t blame you for thinking that, but you’re wrong, Gibby,” she said. “I told you I’ve changed, and I meant that. You’ll see what I mean about Clay when you meet him. The sheer goodness of him is just…consuming.”
I was silent, looking at her in the lamplight. She seemed content to sit under my gaze without talking, curled up bonelessly in the depth of the sofa, smoking. At least she had not forsworn that. It struck me that Lucy, who had never been able to assure her safety by finding a trustworthy protector in any of her men, had decided to assure it now by being a very good girl indeed. The bad girl had, after all, come to endless grief. And who was, after all, more assured of society’s approbation and benison than its saints? I knew that this premise was as false as any she had lived by before, and that she would eventually come to fresh grief from adherence to it. I thought, also, that whether she knew it or not, there was a good measure of the child spiting its parents here.
For indeed, from what she had told me, Aunt Willa and my mother and father were, for once, totally united in their disapproval of Lucy’s association with “that crazy radical and the niggers down there.” Quit that awful business, they had said, and get a decent job somewhere on the Northside—like the society section of the newspaper, or perhaps teaching in a little private academy in Buckhead, or even helping out in the gift shop at Piedmont Hospital as so many of the Leaguers do—or move out of the house. I could only marvel at her tranquility in the face of the ultimatum. Heretofore, she would have been stricken to blind white terror at the prospect of being ousted from the only security she had ever known.
“I take it you’re not going to quit, then,” I said. It was not a question.
“Of course not.”
“Well, then, have you got an apartment or something?”
“Or something, I guess. I’ve got better than an apartment, Gibby,” she said. “I’ve got, or I’m going to have, a husband.”
This time I could only stare at her, as dumb as the proverbial ox there in the living room of the summer-house, which had been since childhood shelter and haven to both of us. The air between us seemed to shimmer just as her eyes and face did, and I felt dizzy and disoriented. I remembered that I had had no dinner, and had last eaten a hasty sandwich in the library employees’ cafeteria at noon. It seemed a thousand years ago, and in another country.
She reached over and put her hands over mine, and looked intently into my face. I could see her features with stark, winter-light clarity: the extraordinary blue eyes, on fire; the high, straight-bridged nose; the kid-leather texture of her skin; the tender pink pulp of her mouth. But I could not make them come together into a face.
“Be happy for me, Gibby,” she said, her voice little more than a whisper. “I love him. I respect him. He’s brave and committed and strong, and he adores the ground I walk on. He’s older—he’s thirty-eight—and he’s an accountant who’s been with Damascus House since Clay started it, and he’s solid and quiet and wry and cynical and he has a wonderful smile and the strength of the earth, of the world….”
“An accountant. Lord, Lucy. Does he have a name?” I said.
She laughed. “Jack. Jack Venable. John Creighton Venable, of the Chattanooga Venables. He’s an accountant mainly because his family has money. It’s even older money than your folks’, and his folks won’t speak to him, either; we have an awful lot in common. He moved here about two years ago; he’s had a terrible time in his life, Gibby, and he needs me as much as I do him. His wife—Kitty, they called her—ran off with another woman and left him with two little boys. Toby and Thomas; they’re nine and eleven now. The boys found her note and read it before Jack did…. She was always unstable, but nobody suspected she was a lesbian. Those poor children! Toby, the littlest one, didn’t talk for almost a year after that. I’m going to take such good care of those children, Gibby, you just won’t believe it’s me. And Jack…he’s just the most wonderful father.”
“Yes, but…an accountant? Audits and P and Ls amid the great unwashed masses?” I grinned. I could no more conceive of Lucy married to an accountant than to a Bantu chieftain. Less, as a matter of fact.
“Don’t knock it, Gibby,” she said evenly, and her eyes snapped fire. “Those great unwashed masses, as you so charmingly put it, need a few little minor things like household budgets and help with welfare and social security. Frivolous stuff like that. Jack does it for them twenty hours a day for money you’d drop in five minutes at John Jarrell’s. What are you doing?”
I reddened, and was quiet.
When I met Jack Venable later that night, I saw immediately that this plain, pale man, with his stark white hair and his air of deep stillness that verged on stolidity and his patience and obvious quiet enchantment with the burning, leaping flame that was Lucy was, indeed, just what she had said he was—a wonderful father. For her. The perception was unavoidable. I wondered if he saw it. I did not think that she did.
Well, why not? I thought, around the ghostly old desolation, the old, old Lucy-loss that the news of her impending marriage had resurrected in my heart. Maybe what she needs is somebody older and settled, who’ll take care of her and cherish her. God knows, she’s had little enough of that.
Jack Venable and his motherless children lived in a century-old farmhouse, she said that evening in the summerhouse, outside the little town of Lithonia, twenty miles to the east of the city. The boys attended public school while Jack commuted to his job, and were cared for after school by an old black woman, who also cooked and cleaned and did the family laundry. Lucy was enchanted with the prospect of living in the country, on a real farm.
“Later on we’ll raise chickens and pigs and…stuff,” she bubbled. “And I’ll have vegetables and flowers, and the children will have a pony, and Jack can watch his birds and things…. It’s perfect. And meanwhile he and I can ride to and from Damascus House together. Oh, Gibby, it’s what I always needed and didn’t even know it—this commitment to something really important, and a truly good, quiet man, and simplicity…nature, the seasons, the earth….”
Remembering the firefly who so thrived and shimmered in the insular, urban air of Buckhead, my heart shrank at the thought of Lucy on a farm in rural DeKalb County. But I did not, of course, voice my apprehension.
“Well, Lucy, sweetie,” I said, “it all sounds…as nearly perfect as this earth gets. When is the wedding? Can I come be best man?”
Her face flamed, and she dropped her eyes. “Well, you see, Gibby,” she said, “it’s going to be right soon, maybe like in a couple of weeks, and Glenn—Glenn Pickens, you know, the Camerons’ Glenn—wants to be our best man, and of course Clay will perform the ceremony. It’s going to be at Damascus House, really a tiny affair, and only the…the Negroes who live there, the residents…are going to be guests. Nobody here even knows it yet. I thought with the way my mother and your folks felt about everything, and the way some of the Negroes feel about rich white people…”
“I’m as poor as Job’s turkey, you know that,” I said, stung. Even her discomfort did not compensate for the obvious fact that I would not be welcome at my cousin Lucy’s wedding. “Come on. This is me, Luce.”
“I know, Gibby, and if it were just me and Jack, I wouldn’t think of having a wedding without you. But your daddy—your family—owns an awful lot of land down around Damascus House, and people down there know it. Some of the folks there are tenants of y’all’s. White absentee landlords are not exactly popular down there.”
“I don’t own any of it,” I said stubbornly. “It’s my father’s, not mine. And nobody knows who I am, anyway.”
“Yes,” she said in a subdued voice, “they do.”
I let it go at that. I did not, really, want to give her pain. And she would, as she said, be cared for, be safe…. Atlanta was, after all, nothing to me anymore.
“Well,” I said, as cheerfully as I could, “when do I get to meet this paragon of virtue, this Jack Venable?”
“Later tonight, I hope. He’s been out of town all week,” she said. “But he’s going to meet us down at Paschal’s La Carrousel tonight at ten. One of your high muckety-muck jazz guys is playing down there, and I thought you might like to go with us. Glenn Pickens is going to be there; you know Glenn. You know where it is; we’ve been before, remember? Senior year at North Fulton? Lord, you don’t care that it’s a black club, do you?”
“You know I don’t,” I said. “But isn’t Jack going to be at the autograph party? Or the cocktail thing?”
“No,” she smiled ruefully. “He hates the Driving Club and everything it stands for, though with his family’s background I’m sure he could get in if he wanted to…or had the money. His family has cut him off that, too. And he isn’t very high on my writing, so I’m not going to make him come to the thing at Rich’s. He hates all that publishing stuff.”
“He sure seems to hate a lot of things, for a licensed professional peacemaker,” I said. “Don’t tell me he doesn’t think your writing is any good.”
“Oh, no, it’s just that he thinks I’m so much more valuable to…society, I guess, at Damascus House. And he’s right, Gibby. Writing seems awfully self-indulgent in times like these. Later, when the movement has accomplished what it means to, and I’ve quit work and we’re home in the country…he says he won’t mind me writing some then.”
“Good of him,” I muttered. I did not like the sound of this.
But I did like Jack Venable when I met him later that night, on the weedy sidewalk down in Southwest Atlanta in front of Paschal’s Motor Hotel. It was nearly ten-thirty, and there was no one else on the street in front of the unprepossessing two-story motel and restaurant that was the unofficial epicenter of the fledgling civil rights movement. I felt as if I were in another Atlanta, one I had not really known existed, for this was a street of shadows and banal shabbiness and thin, dreary light from the few streetlights left unbroken, and I was distinctly glad when the stocky figure that stepped out of the doorway proved to be Lucy’s future husband. I had, as Lucy had said, been to La Carrousel before, but it was with a jeering, jostling group of Pinks and Jells, and in another time altogether, and we had gone in the same spirit in which we went to jig shows at the auditorium and to Peacock Alley to laugh at Blind Willie. This lunar street was not a place in which to laugh. I was acutely conscious that an aura of Buckhead and the Driving Club hung about me as powerfully as an actual scent. Lucy seemed untouched by the sense of strangeness and incipient peril; we had left her VW in a parking place a block and a half down the street toward Atlanta University, and she had walked the prickling no-man’s-land beside me with the same slouching ease that she walked the waxed floors of the Driving Club. Once she had glanced at me.
“Relax.” She grinned. “You’d think we were going into the heart of darkness. Got your blowgun on you? The group we’re going to hear, incidentally, is called the Mau Maus.”
“God, really?” I said.
“Christ. No. It’s called the Ramsey Lewis Trio,” she said. “They’re terrific; I’ve got one of their albums. Jack got to know them when he was doing some work in Washington. They’re more civilized than we are.”
“I know who Ramsey Lewis is,” I said shortly. “I have every album he ever made.” It irritated me that she had so quickly scented the slight, sour fear coming off me like heat. Physical bravery has always been hard-won for me, but Lucy was born with an abundance of it.
I knew, in the way that a native will know things about his city without knowing how he became aware of them, that some of the greatest jazz names in the world had for decades come to La Carrousel, the motel’s club, on a regular basis. Basie, Hampton, Don Shirley, Red Norvo, and the entire pantheon before and after them, ducked in and out of town to play their incomparable sets in that elaborately ordinary, even dingy, cinder-block motel and restaurant and club, and very few whites ever heard them, or even knew that they were there. The Paschal brothers did not advertise. They did not have to. People in the large black community who knew jazz, and a few favored whites, always seemed to know who was in town when, and the club was always jammed.
We stood on the sidewalk for a moment, blinking in the light from Paschal’s sign, and when Jack Venable came out to meet us, Lucy’s smile lit her face with an intensity that paled the neon.
“Hi, sweetie,” she said, going to him with both hands out. “Have you been waiting long? Come over here and meet Gibby.”
“Hi,” he said, kissing her on the cheek. “No, I’ve just been walking around softly and carrying a big banjo. Hello, Shep. I damned sure ain’t going to call you Gibby. I don’t think I’ll kiss you, either.”
“God forbid,” I said, grinning in response to his sweet white smile. Except for that, and the white hair, he looked so astoundingly anonymous that he might have been sent from Central Casting to play a middle-aged man in a crowd. He was pale all over, from his thinning hair to his small blue eyes, webbed and pouched in fine wrinkles, to his face and hands and arms. He wore transparent plastic-rimmed glasses and a beige golf shirt and tan gabardine trousers and old desert boots, and his stomach was soft and mounded over the belt of the slacks. His jowls and the underside of his arms were loose. He did not miss being short by far.
But the smile was wonderful, wrapping you in celebration, and his voice was deep and good, and I liked the way he looked at Lucy. I had seen Charlie Gentry look at Sarah that way, and I knew that all of this man, flesh, spirit and sinew, was extended as votive offering to the slender girl-woman whose hands he held.
“You all ready?” he said. “Glenn’s waiting for us inside. He went ahead to get a table. I don’t know who else will be around. The word is that the man himself is coming, a little later.”
Lucy said, softly, “Oh…”
“The man?” I asked.
“King,” he said over his shoulder. “MLK. He’s here a lot. The guy could teach a course in jazz at any university in the country, if he wasn’t otherwise engaged.”
A little frisson played on my backbone, vertebra by vertebra. The night became, suddenly, very real. I was not slumming in a Negro jive joint where I might take my ease and watch the jolly blacks disport themselves for my amusement. I was walking into the nerve center of a movement whose purpose and passion paled with its simple human significance anything my privileged and pallid life had known, and I would be, for a few hours, among the awesome young men and women who had made and were making it happen. I might even be in the presence of one of the great and luminous legends of my time or any other. Nonchalance fled.
Threading my way through the close-crowding small tables, pushing through the near-palpable planes of smoke lying motionless in the air, I was keenly aware of eyes on us. Jack and Lucy walked ahead. I followed them erectly, my head held high, a silly-feeling, unbanishable smile on my mouth. I had never before been one of the few whites in the midst of an all-black crowd, and I was aware that a part of me was searching the room for hostility as a wolf would sniff the wind.
But there was no hostility and there was very little curiosity, that I could feel. It was a quiet crowd, with only the sinuous, seminal flow of the music winding through it like a great, joyous heartbeat. I had time to think, stumbling after Lucy and Jack, that Sarah would have loved the sound of the Ramsey Lewis Trio, and would have walked in the prickling darkness of La Carrousel as naturally and fluidly as she walked into, or out of, water. But I could not. I was rigid to my eyebrows with the desire not to appear as if I were slumming. In truth, I had never felt less like Lord Bountiful in my life. I was consumed with a simple desire to let everyone see how grateful I was to be there. I caught myself smiling right and left, and felt my face go hot in the darkness.
“Jesus, will you stop nodding like somebody in a bad play, Gibby?” Lucy whispered over her shoulder, amused. “You look like Lord Mountbatten reviewing the troops.”
They stopped at a table against a far wall and lowered themselves into chairs, and I dropped into one at the end of the table. Glenn Pickens sat across from me, not smiling but not frowning either, and when he had kissed Lucy lightly on her proffered cheek and hit Jack’s shoulder softly with his lightly balled fist, he said pleasantly and neutrally, “Hello, Shep. It’s been a long time.”
“Hello, Glenn,” I said. “It has. How are you? You’re looking good.”
He was. I remembered him as a thin, intense, reedy-necked boy, a jug-eared, caramel colored stripling eternally polishing one or another of Ben Cameron’s succession of black Lincolns or passing a tray with tongue-clamping concentration at some soiree or other of Dorothy’s. But he had filled out since then, and seemed to have grown considerably taller, so that he bulked large in the semidark of the room. His head was long and narrow and well shaped, and either the jug ears had receded or his skull had grown to accommodate them, and the glasses that now sat on his oddly Indian nose were horn-rimmed, giving him a scholarly, prosperous air. I remembered Lucy saying that his grades at Morehouse had been extraordinary, and that he planned to get a law degree at Howard when he felt that he was no longer needed in the movement, but that he had become so valuable to Dr. King, along with a few other young lieutenants like Julian Bond and Andrew Young and John Lewis, that she could not foresee a time when he could do so. I knew, too, that he had served considerable time in exceedingly inhospitable jails around the South, and that those young shoulders had felt the bite of more than one truncheon and fire hose. I was stricken suddenly mute in his presence. I had thought, when I heard those things about him, how odd it was for a figure that had been almost part of the furniture of my childhood to be transmuted, willy-nilly, into a warrior on the ramparts of history. Interesting, I had thought.
Now, in his presence, I could not seem to speak. I caught myself about to say, “Tell me what you’ve been doing,” and reddened again, thinking that saying it to him would be as incongruous as saying it to Martin Luther King himself. The music swelled up then, and I was grateful for the din.
Across the table, Lucy leaned over to talk to the young woman at Glenn Pickens’s side, and Jack held up two fingers for the waitress. The girl with Glenn was very pretty, almost as striking as Lucy in the dark room. She looked smart and finished and composed, and there was about her an air of crisp authority. I thought that she seemed vaguely familiar, but I could not find the association. She wore a simple beige linen skirt and silk shirt, but they were so perfectly cut and so fluidly poured over her small, ripe body that they might have been cut and hand sewn for her. I thought that she was built like Sarah, and she had Sarah’s ease and elegance and presence, except that she was a rich, shining chocolate brown. My own whiteness seemed to wink rottenly in the gloom beside all the rich shades of dark flesh around me.
They’re light-years ahead of me, I thought, lumping Lucy and Jack into the world of the young woman and Glenn Pickens. My world is practically second nature to them, but I can’t be at ease for five minutes in theirs. It was probably a mistake to come here.
Lucy touched my hand. “This is Gwen Caffrey,” she said, her hand laid lightly on the dark girl’s arm. “She’s the new six o’clock anchor at Channel Seven. She’s very, very good at what she does and she’s mean as a snake, so watch your step and your mouth.”
She smiled, and the girl smiled, and held out her hand. I took it. It was warm and surprisingly rough, as if she did hard work with her hands. Perhaps she did. Or had.
“I’m glad to meet you,” I said. “I’ve never met an anchor before, much less a lady anchor.”
“Nor a black one either, I’ll be bound,” she said, and it was so nearly what I had been thinking that I felt the traitorous blood rush up my neck into my face yet again. Shit, I thought, I’ve blushed more tonight than I did in grammar and high school put together. She laughed, but it was a friendly laugh. I smiled uncertainly.
“Relax,” she said. “Nobody else has, either. There haven’t been but a handful of us, and none before me in Atlanta. I’ve never met a Princeton man before, so we’re even.”
“Lucy’s been talking again,” I said, just to have something to say. I was not exactly coming off as a raconteur this evening.
“No, actually it was Glenn who told me about you,” Gwen Caffrey said. “He said he knew you when you were all growing up in Buckhead.”
“That’s right,” I said. “But I’m surprised he remembered me. There were such a lot of us around the Camerons’ all the time—”
“And all little white kids look alike,” Glenn Pickens said from across the table. I could not tell if he was teasing or not; his impassive face did not change, or his eyes behind the thick glasses. Somehow I did not think he was. I remembered that Lucy had said earlier, of the blacks at Damascus House, “They know who you are,” and I felt naked and uneasy. I had not ever considered that I might exist as a person to Glenn Pickens, son of Benjamin Cameron’s chauffeur, any more than he had existed, as a person, to me.
Lucy and Jack Venable laughed, easily and naturally, and I thought that Glenn Pickens was smiling, though it was more a very small grimace and looked as though it might split his carved taffy face. So I grinned too, feeling like a blundering albatross in a flock of lustrous crows. A willowy young waitress came by, and hugged Glenn Pickens briefly, and we ordered a round of drinks. The music, a playful piano weaving in and out around a bass and drums, swarmed through the room like a loosened hive of bees; the very walls throbbed with it, a teasing rhythm now bright as a school of minnows in sundappled shallows, now as glistening-dark as viscera, with a heavy blues beat and a witty, self-mocking counterpoint. I swam into it instinctively, my feet tapping with it, my face turning to it of its own volition. The pianist, a crew-cut young man with glasses who might have been, like Jack, an accountant, raised a cheerful hand to us, and Jack and Glenn Pickens saluted back. Lucy looked young and at ease and very happy; I knew that she was loving the night and the lounge and the sound and the evening. I began to relax, very slightly.
Lucy leaned over and touched my shoulder.
“Okay?” she said. “Do you like it?”
The trio slid into Ellington’s “Come Sunday,” and I smiled at Lucy. “It’s wonderful. They’re terrific. It’s a treat to hear them in person; I never have. Thanks for letting me come, Luce.”
She gave a little wiggle of pure happiness. “If Martin Luther King should come in I think I’d ascend straight to Heaven,” she said.
Jack Venable smiled and tightened his arm around her shoulders and gave her a little squeeze. “I’m not going to let you leave me even for him,” he said.
“King might be here,” Glenn Pickens said. “He’s in here a lot. Some of his crowd are over there at that table by the bandstand; I see a couple of kids from my old neighborhood who are good lieutenants of his now. Want to meet them?” He did not wait for Lucy’s assent, but raised his pale hand and beckoned toward a large table in the opposite corner of the room.
Two very young men materialized out of the gloom at Glenn’s elbow and stood looking down at us. One was round and short, almost fat, with skin lighter than Glenn’s, and startling ghost gray eyes. The other was slender and very handsome, and as dark as Gwen Caffrey. Both were a good bit younger than any of us; I did not think they could be much past their teens. But it’s a young man’s crusade, I reminded myself. Dr. King himself is only in his thirties.
They greeted Glenn cheerfully, and he clapped each on the back and introduced them. The short, pudgy one was Tony Sellers and the taller, blacker one Rosser Willingham; I vaguely recognized their names from news accounts of the student sit-ins last year, and the freedom rides earlier this summer. Both had demonstrated and marched with King, and both had gone quietly and matter-of-factly to Alabama jails with him. Both had been beaten, bitten, kicked, gassed, shot at. Rosser Willingham had, I knew, been hit. Self-consciousness thickened my tongue when Glenn introduced me, which was, I thought, just as well. Lucy smiled her incomparable smile and held up her hand to be shaken. As always, at Lucy’s smile, there were quick and genuine answering smiles.
“It’s good to meet you, Lucy Bondurant Chastain,” Tony Sellers said. “I hear about you. How do you like Ramsey Lewis?”
“I think he’s fantastic,” Lucy said. “I like him better than Don Shirley, even, and Shep here will tell you that for me that’s going some.”
“Ramsey will be pleased to hear that,” Sellers said.
“We missed you in Washington this summer,” Willingham said to Glenn Pickens. “You’d have loved it. If I remember correctly, you always did love a crowd. You’d have been in your element.”
“I was busy this summer,” Glenn said. He was not smiling now. I thought I heard something very near defensiveness in his voice. “I figure we’re going to need a master’s degree or two somewhere in all this horsepower. There’ll be other marches. I’ll be there for those.”
He looked hard at Rosser Willingham, and then he smiled his minimal smile.
“Gwen almost got to go, though,” he said, touching her arm lightly. “Her station was going to send her up there, but at the last minute they decided she was too little, and sent a guy instead. She promised them she’d grow five inches if they’d let her play with the big kids, but nothing doing.”
“Station?” Tony Sellers said, looking across the table at Gwen.
“She’s just been made six o’clock anchor at Seven,” Glenn said. “And she has a talk show on WCAT three nights a week.”
“Terrific, we can use you,” said Rosser Willingham. He was not smiling.
“Not unless I can interest you in coming on the show with a new recipe for three-bean salad or a spray for rose blight, you can’t,” Gwen said.
“Roses. Whooeee!” said Willingham.
“That’s right,” Gwen said. “Roses.”
Eyes held.
What’s going on here? I thought. She’s just told both of them to flake off, in so many words. And Glenn’s acting funny as hell toward them. Aren’t they all in the movement together? Why are they trying to one-up each other? I felt acutely uncomfortable. My earlier awe fled before the discomfort.
“I was with you in the sit-ins when I could get loose,” Jack Venable said suddenly, with such unaccustomed solemnity that I thought he must be speaking satirically, but the moist, messianic gleam behind the plain, serviceable glasses told me that he was not. “I wanted to go on the freedom rides, but my time wasn’t my own then. I have more, now. Is…are you…is there anything coming up that could use some willing bodies?” His soft body, leaning very slightly toward the two young black men, radiated a nearly bizarre middle-aged willingness.
My face burned for him. I was glad of the darkness. I had not dreamed that a romantic boy lived in that phlegmatic CPA’s flesh. Is that what had so called out to Lucy?
“There’s some good action coming up in Mississippi this fall, if you’re really interested,” Tony Sellers drawled. “Real knife-in-the-teeth guerrilla stuff. Might be just up your alley.”
I saw Jack’s face darken, and felt my sympathetic flush mount.
Lucy leaned forward.
“I loved your sit-in at Rich’s,” she said. “I was there. It was wonderful. God!”
The young men looked at her expressionlessly, politely.
“I’m glad you liked it, Miss Bondurant,” Willingham said. “It was strictly an amateur job, of course, but we thought it had a certain energy and freshness.”
I felt the heat spring out at my hairline in drops of perspiration. Glenn looked down into the depths of his drink, and Gwen Caffrey attended brightly and determinedly to the jazz trio, which was swinging into “The In Crowd,” pulling herself almost physically away from the rest of us. I could not look at anyone. They think we’re utter fools, I thought.
Lucy grinned.
“Don’t patronize me, sonny,” she said. “My maiden name is Feldstein. My grandma is a lampshade in some fat burgher’s house in Argentina as we speak. I know your act. I have style. Spurn me at your own loss.”
Rosser Willingham grinned back at her, suddenly. He raised two fingers in salute. The group slipped into ease once more.
“Those were some kind of days,” he said, laughing. “There must have been close to fifteen hundred folks on that picket line downtown at one time. It circled all downtown Atlanta. God, there were shuttle buses to take people down there and back, and we had two-way radios and special signs that rain and spit and worse wouldn’t wash off, and we had special coats for the girls so they wouldn’t get spit on—and worse again. Man, we thought we were big stuff. Hot shit. And we were, we were.”
Glenn Pickens alone did not laugh with them.
“Is the Lord here?” he said.
“The Lord?” said Lucy.
“King. I heard he might be.”
Willingham and Sellers looked narrowly at him.
“He’s in the dining room,” Tony Sellers said.
“God,” Jack said reverently. “It really is headquarters, isn’t it?” He looked as if he might weep with the wonder of it.
“Yeah, well, at least we know we can get served here,” Willingham said. “We can’t say that about every place, you know. It’s like John Lewis said about Nashville. Somebody said, ‘Well, we don’t serve niggers here,’ and somebody else said, ‘Well, that’s okay because we don’t eat’ em.’”
There was more laughter. I felt an inadequacy that bordered on shame, and a dark fascination. These young men were dangerous; they were total, they were whole. Behind the banter and the cool laughter and the dismissing eyes were marches; beatings in dark, hot country nights and squalling, mean urban noons; terror and imprisonment and bombs and fire hoses and dogs and guns in darkness. In those eyes ambushed black men spun forever in their doorways, frozen; children flew into pieces in the roaring air of churches.
I dropped my own eyes.
“It’s not the only way,” Glenn Pickens said suddenly. Everyone looked at him.
“Malcolm X said just the other day at the militant labor forum that the day of nonviolent resistance will soon be over,” he said evenly, pleasantly.
Still, they looked at him. No one spoke. Gwen rolled her eyes to the ceiling and tossed her sleek head; I thought I had never seen anyone who wished so sincerely not to be present. The silence spun out.
Finally Rosser Willingham said, “Oh, hell, Glenn, Brother Malcolm’s nothing but an uppity nigger who didn’t make the cut.” He laughed, but no one laughed with him.
“He’s a born rabble-rouser,” Tony Sellers said.
“Isn’t that what we’re all trying to do?” Glenn said. “All of us? Rouse the rabble?”
Jack Venable laughed, a rasping, nervous sound. No one else did. The music wove its separate strands around us. The tension held. My skin crawled with it, and I knew Lucy’s did, too. I wondered how soon we might leave, and where the bathroom was, and if I could ever cross the staring room to find it. I could not see Lucy’s face, and I did not really know Jack Venable and Glenn Pickens, and Gwen Caffrey seemed to have gone as far away from us all as was possible without getting up and leaving the table. I felt primally, abysmally alone. It was as bad a moment as I could remember.
Another figure was beside us suddenly.
“Do your mothers know you boys are out?” said a voice that would have a dream, had stirred a nation, preached love and gentleness from a hundred besieged pulpits and a score of jails. My breath seemed to stop. I heard Lucy give a little soft gasp. I looked up. He stood there wearing a cardigan sweater against the chill of the air-conditioning, and a white shirt with an open collar, and slacks, looking as inevitable as a mountain, larger than any of us, preternaturally solid and focused, there.
We were on our feet in an instant. Lucy almost upset her chair as she scrambled out of it, and Jack reached out to steady her. So did Martin Luther King. At his touch she stopped still and looked up at him, her old, special radiance in her face, not speaking, staring at the dark moon of his face, the thick lips smiling, the slanted, faintly Mongolian eyes, the solid set of the shoulders, the good hands. He smiled back. Of course he did.
There were introductions all around. He did not linger. He said a few words to Sellers and Willingham and told Glenn Pickens he was proud of his new master’s degree. He shook Jack Venable’s hand, and gently disengaged it when Jack could not seem to stop pumping it. As he turned to leave, he paused beside Lucy. “I hear you’re going to be married soon, Mrs. Chastain,” he said. “I wish you every joy. It’s a wonderful, hopeful time in your life. A wedding is always a fine thing.”
Lucy looked into his eyes and smiled with her whole being, and he touched her arm, softly, and then he was gone into the crowd, and the trio broke gleefully into “You Been Talkin’ ’Bout Me, Baby,” and Jack Venable pushed back his chair and said, “We’ve got to get going, Lucy. Tomorrow’s a school day.” I could hear the exaltation under the prosaic words.
We all dispersed then, Tony Sellers and Rosser Willingham into the sacrosanct back room of the club after King, Glenn Pickens and Gwen Caffrey to another and presumably more agreeable table, Lucy and Jack and I outside into the just-cooling night air. We were silent for a moment on the pitted pavement under the pallid neon, still caught in the currents of the evening. Lucy stood with her arms linked through mine and Jack’s, her head drooping onto Jack’s shoulder. Still we said nothing. All of us, I think, had a sense of import greater than the evening’s events warranted. Nothing, after all, had transpired in the dimness of La Carrousel that might not have been expected to take place between young Atlanta Negroes and liberal whites on a September night in 1961. But I, for one, had a powerful sense of something ending, and something else beginning, and more: a powerful sense of Lucy’s having stepped away from me and irrevocably into another country, one where I could not follow.
I thought, looking at the two of them there on the sidewalk—Jack and Lucy, one known to me, the other not—that they were initiates into some kind of mystery as exalted and profound as those of Eleusis, and as such were a unit now, a singleness, that I could never penetrate. A sorrow as old and dark as the earth washed me briefly, a kind of September Weltschmerz. I have lost Lucy too now, I said in my heart, and knew it to be true. It had never been, before: not to physical separation, not to anger, not to marriage. I had lost her, now, to a dream and an army of arrogant young martyrs and a pragmatic urban saint who would not live out the decade. I did not think she would return.
Finally she reached up and kissed Jack Venable on the cheek and he kissed her in return, and said, “I hope it’s the first of a million good nights, Shep,” and I said, “I hope so, too. I don’t have to tell you to take good care of her,” and he said, “No, you don’t,” and raised a pale, freckled hand in salute and turned and shambled away toward his car. I wondered, irrelevantly, what sort of car he would have; his retreating figure looked as though it should fold itself into a road-worn Chevrolet with its backseat piled high with sample goods. He looked almost grotesquely, in the warm darkness, like Willy Loman.
Lucy looked up at me.
“Do you see now?” she said.
“See?” I said. I thought I did, but perversely did not want to give her that small gift.
“See what I mean about the Negroes, and Dr. King, and the movement and Jack…oh, the whole thing. Can’t you see how wonderful, how special…it all is? Oh, come on, Gibby, I know you can.”
But I could see only that from this night on I would walk through the world without my cousin Lucy. I do not know why the knowledge gave me such desolation. Until this weekend I had been profoundly angry with her, through with her, done with her; I had not had any thought of letting Lucy Bondurant back into my life.
It was not until we were back on the Northside of Atlanta, bowling along under the yellowing trees that fell over Peachtree Street in front of the old brown stone pile of the High Museum, that I finally was able to give her what I knew she wanted.
“He’s a good guy, Luce, and it was a good night,” I said. “You’re going to be okay now.”
“Thank you, Gibby,” she said in a child’s small, drowsy voice, and put her dark head on my shoulder, and was asleep before we reached the green-hung intersection at Palisades where Peachtree Street becomes Peachtree Road.
Her parties and the tea went off without a hitch, and were just what I had thought they would be: the occasion for a small flutter of congratulations to the author, more for the fact that she had finally and against all considered opinions made something of herself than for the slender little novel which all of them bought and few would read; and for much drinking and considerable eating; and for catching up on news after the hiatus of vacation and before the autumn social season began. Lucy, looking somehow diminished and muted in the unaccustomed public approbation, shook hands and kissed cheeks and smiled her new sweet smile, and signed her dashing black, back-slanted Lucy J. Bondurant on perhaps thirty books, and thanked everyone for coming, and behaved in general so like the biddable and charming debutante and Junior Leaguer she had refused to be that older Buckheaders were mollified and smiling and our own crowd was frankly puzzled. I saw eyes cut toward Lucy all weekend and heads go together, and heard whispers exchanged, and I felt rather than saw the same eyes on me. I knew that I was being scrutinized for evidence of trauma from Sarah and Charlie’s marriage, and so smiled more and wider and kissed more cheeks and clapped more backs than I would have ordinarily. My mother and Aunt Willa were at all the parties, elegant and cool, not showing by so much as a muscle tremor the outrage Lucy’s new preoccupation had engendered. I wondered how they would take the news, and the circumstances, of her new marriage. I thought I could imagine, and grinned involuntarily at the prospect.
My father was not in attendance at any of the parties, and Ben Cameron was not at the cocktail party he and Dorothy gave at the Driving Club. Dorothy, whose welcoming kiss to me was as warm and natural as if great gulfs of pain did not lie between us, whispered in my ear in the receiving line, “Please don’t think Ben’s avoiding you. He’s down at the Walahauga at a rally, but he’s going to try to get back before the party’s over. Lester Maddox is giving us a hard time, and the election is only two months away. Ben absolutely must have the Negro vote to win or he’d be here.”
It was only then that I remembered that Ben Cameron was running for mayor. I could not remember who Lester Maddox was.
“Is he still mad at me, Dorothy?” I said.
“Yes,” she said, “but not in the way he was. He’ll get over it, Shep. And he’s never stopped loving you.”
“He should have,” I said. “He ought to just wash his hands of me.”
“He’ll never do that, and neither will I,” she said and kissed me on the cheek, and passed me on to Lucy, slender and oddly prim in dark blue fall cotton and Ben Cameron’s snowdrift of white orchids.
“Are you the lady who wrote the dirty book?” I said, hugging her. “How about letting me take you away from all this? Your place or mine?”
She giggled, but it was a subdued and mannerly giggle. “I wish we could just go somewhere and talk,” she said. “I know you’re going back tomorrow right after the tea, and I don’t know when in the world we’ll really talk again. But I’m meeting Jack at Camellia Gardens after this, and we’re going to the eleven o’clock service at Damascus House in the morning….”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I think I’ll go out and get some dinner with Snake and Lelia and maybe A.J. and Lana. I’ll see you in the morning. By the way, you look wonderful. I remember when you had eight of those things stuck on you at one time.”
She looked down at the orchids, and her blue eyes filled with tears.
“I was the prettiest girl in town then, wasn’t I?” she said.
“What do you mean, was? You still are,” I said. “You talk like you’re fifty years old.”
“Part of me is,” she said softly. She was not smiling.
“Well, the part I can see is still the girl every Jell in Atlanta had the twenty-year hots for,” I said, squeezing her hands, and was dismayed to see the tears spill over the black fringe of her lower lashes and run silently down her cheeks to her chin. Her mouth trembled and broke. She put her arms around me and fitted her face into the side of my neck, as Sarah had done so often, and whispered something into my ear. I could feel the heat of her tears, but I could not hear what she said, and I raised her chin with one hand and looked questioningly at her.
“I said, ‘I love you, Gibby,’” she said. One of the tears fell from her chin and trembled, crystal and perfect, on, the waxy white petal of her corsage. “And I said, ‘Good-bye and God-speed.’”
“I’m just going back to work,” I said in a too-jolly voice. “I’m not going away forever and ever.”
“Yes, you are,” she said.
After the tea my mother and my aunt Willa gave for Lucy at the Peachtree Road house the next afternoon, I did not see her again, and I did not wait for my father to come back from wherever he had been, to say good-bye to him. I hugged my mother longer and harder than was my custom when I left Atlanta to go back to New York, for the thought was in my mind that I probably would not come back to the house on Peachtree Road, or to the city, for a very long time, if ever. There was no reason, now, to do so. Two of the three women who had claimed my heart were gone from me, and so was the man who should have, and most of the other ties that I had to the city were light and ephemeral. My mother, as if reading my thoughts, began to cry again, and I pulled myself gently out of her grasp and patted her shoulder, and said, “Tell-Dad good-bye for me,” and took a cab to the airport. I got a seven o’clock Delta flight back to La Guardia. By the time I unlocked my door on West Twenty-first Street, the Sunday night traffic was thinning, and only a stream of lights over on Ninth spoke of any life, or the forward momentum of time. The air in my apartment was as old and arid as the breath of tombs.
Sometime in the small hours of the morning I came awake with the heavy, marrow-deep certainty that my time in New York was over. I knew, utterly and passionlessly, as an old man knows, that there was behind me in Atlanta no one who needed me, and there was, now, in New York nothing more that I needed. That afternoon I wrote my Colonial Club friend Corey Appleby, who was teaching French at Haddonfield Academy, in Vermont, asking if there were any faculty positions open, and when his affirmative reply came by return mail I borrowed Alan Greenfeld’s Corvette and drove up the following weekend. Within another two weeks I had been accepted as an instructor in medieval history, with additional classes in freshman English, to start when the new term did, on January 5, 1962. I did not feel any way at all about this change in my life except very tired, and endlessly, stupidly sleepy. For the remainder of that autumn and early winter, when I was not at work, I came home to West Twenty-first Street and slept.
Four days before Christmas, just as the first snowstorm of the season came howling in from New Jersey unfurling its battle banners of blowing snow, my telephone rang at 6:30 P.M., burring over the television newscast to which I had fallen asleep on my sofa. When I picked it up, it was to hear the voice of Lucy Bondurant Venable, which I had not thought to hear then or perhaps at any other time, thick with her familiar long-distanced tears, telling me that my father had had a massive stroke on the golf course at Brookhaven that afternoon and was completely paralyzed and not expected to live the night, and that my mother was prostrated and in seclusion, and could not be comforted until I promised to come home.
And so, I left New York at dawn the next day in a rented U-Haul and drove, instead of to Vermont, back to Atlanta and the house on Peachtree Road. I planned to bury my father, comfort my mother, stash my meager belongings and fly to Vermont as soon as I decently could. With luck I could still make the first day of classes.
If anyone had told me, when I saw the Atlanta city limits sign rise up out of a fast-failing December twilight on the highway in from Gainesville, that I would never leave it again, I would have laughed in his face.