My father did not die, though. All through the cold, gray day and night that followed, I parked the U-Haul at truck stops and drive-ins and called home, and the message, relayed by my aunt Willa, was the same: “There’s been no change. He’s still in intensive care and is unconscious most of the time, and when he’s awake we can’t tell if he knows anybody. There’s been a little movement in one hand and in one side of his face, and maybe just the tiniest bit in one of his toes. But basically there isn’t any change. It’s a miracle he’s still alive. Hub Dorsey doesn’t think he can last another day.”
But he did last, through the gray miles that I hacked out of New Jersey and Pennsylvania and Virginia in the bumping, unwieldy truck, my few belongings rattling and shifting behind me with the vagaries of the monotonous four-lane federal highways. That first day I made North Carolina by full dark, and pulled up to a dingy little cinder-block motel outside Kannapolis when fatigue and a spitting sleetfall made driving any further impossible. I picked up a hamburger and french fries and a carton of coffee at the dirty, white-lit little motel diner and stumbled back to my room with them, and wolfed them down cold while Aunt Willa’s low “Atlanta” voice told me what it had all day: “No change. No, there’s been no change.” I turned on the flickering old Philco television set across from my bed and stared stupidly at Peter Gunn until it melted and slid into blackness behind my stinging eyes, and when I opened them again, it was midmorning and a dispirited maid was rattling my door and an amazonian North Carolina lady was showing an ecstatic, adenoidal morning show host how to make corn bread dressing for turkey. I pulled on last night’s weary clothing and trotted to the diner, and drank coffee as I received Aunt Willa’s morning message, “No change.”
Because of my late start, it was nearly dark when I followed Highway 23 into North Atlanta, through ugly, meager Doraville and Chamblee; past Oglethorpe University, where Lucy had once been apprehended necking with Boo Cutler by the almost forgotten Mr. Bovis Hardin; past Brookhaven Drive, where, out of sight to my right, the Atlanta Pinks and Jells had danced away so many nights at the Brookhaven Country Club, and where, two days earlier, my father had dropped, stricken, to the frozen earth; past the beginning of the big old houses that would line Peachtree Road, now, until they reached the bridge over Peachtree Creek at Peachtree Battle Avenue. On my left, where for many years Mr. John Ottley’s great farm, Joyeuse, had lain along a sweet-curved, deep-wooded sweep of Peachtree Road, a low white jumble of buildings in a sea of automobiles gleamed eerily in the icy mist, and I scrubbed at my reddened eyes with my fist, for a moment utterly lost, until I remembered that a shopping mall called Lenox Square had been built there a year or so before, a worldly Xanadu said to be, at present, the largest such mall in the country.
I could believe it. There seemed to be thousands upon thousands of cars bellied up to the mall like voraciously suckling piglets at the teats of a gleaming, corpulent white sow. White lights danced and twinkled on spindly evergreens fringing the parking lots. Of course: Christmas shopping. I felt, for a moment, such a nostalgia for the old, warm-lit, Evening in Paris—smelling confines of Wender & Roberts on Christmas Eve that my heart flopped in my chest, and then Lenox Square vanished and I was into and through Buckhead, bright-lit and traffic-choked now, and coming into the last great curve of Peachtree Road before I reached 2500.
And then even it was past, dark-bulked and beautiful behind its iron fence, only one light burning upstairs in my parents’ room, no automobiles waiting on the graceful half-moon front drive. I drove on down Peachtree Road past Peachtree Battle shopping center and up the long hill to Piedmont Hospital where my aunt Willa had said she would be waiting. When I had last talked to her, at noon, she said my mother had wakened from the deep, drugged sleep Dr. Dorsey’s needle had given her, and was bathing and dressing to receive visitors. Hub Dorsey had forbidden the hospital to her until tomorrow—if indeed, there was one for my father. Dorothy Cameron had been with Mother most of the time since she heard the news about my father, and was coming back after lunch to see to the flow of traffic in the house. Shem, Aunt Willa said, would drive me down to Piedmont if I wanted to stop by the house first, but I said I would come straight there. I wanted to see for myself how the land lay before I encountered my mother. I wanted to be informed, crisp, authoritative and very, very clear about what must be done and who would do it; I wanted to have a long-range plan of action formulated and ready for presentation. The plan did not include any possibility of my staying at home. My mother must see that from the very beginning.
When I got off the elevator in the scaldingly bright intensive care waiting room at the hospital it seemed for a moment that my entire life lay in ambush for me. The knot of people who sat about on plastic chairs and sofas or stood looking out at the lights of the traffic streaming past on Peachtree Road were all there for my father; old Buckhead had, like great elephants, come to encircle one of their own fallen tribe. Dorothy Cameron sat, small, erect and calm-faced, on a sofa beside Lucy, patting her clenched hands. Jack Venable stood at the windows, back to the room, hands in pockets, looking out into the night. Ben Cameron, almost totally iron-gray now, and looking tired and grim, sat on another sofa beside Aunt Willa, who was pale and still and perfectly turned out in severe black jersey, smoking a filter-tipped cigarette. On a molded plastic chair a little apart from the others Sarah Gentry sat, as straight-spined and composed as her mother in the pink and white stripes of a Piedmont volunteer, her dark, curly head slightly bowed, her small hands clasped in her lap. I saw the modest fire of Charlie’s diamond on her finger. At the sound of the elevator bell she lifted her head and looked straight into my eyes and I saw the smudges of fatigue under her own, and the spark of recognition and then the old joy that leaped in them. Her wide mouth, bare of lipstick, slid into its warm, bone-remembered smile.
“Shep,” she said soundlessly, her lips forming my name. In the merciless light of the waiting room, my own fatigue dragging at my limbs, I felt the renewing joy of the sight of her run into my arms and legs, followed by a near-physical blow to my heart.
Lucy saw Sarah’s smile and turned her head and saw me, and jumped up and ran to me, her face stained with recent tears, her eyes red and swollen. She looked blue-white and terribly thin, and nearly shabby in a wrinkled plaid skirt and sweater I thought I recognized from our North Fulton days, and her glossy hair was tied back in an untidy ponytail. Even in her obvious anxiety and dishevelment she looked beautiful, but suddenly, years older. The hands she thrust into mine were icy cold and chapped nearly raw.
“I thought you’d never get here,” she said, and the tears welled into her eyes afresh, and I hugged her distractedly.
“What’s the news?” I said.
“Still no change,” she said, her voice strangled. “He’s on a lung machine, Gibby, and Dr. Dorsey still says he doesn’t see how he can live…oh, he just looks so awful! White and all twisted and shrunken, and hooked up to about a million tubes…I can’t stand to see him like that!”
I wondered, holding her loosely and getting my bearings, why she was so upset. My father had never been close to Lucy; even she must have acknowledged that years ago. I remembered the morning in childhood after she had run away with Little Lady, after Jamie had died, and been so terribly punished, her coming in her thin nightgown and climbing into his lap and making her little speech about being sorry, and being a good girl if only he would not send her away, and his arms going reluctantly around her, and his voice promising that he would look after her always. Puddin’, he had called her; I remembered it vividly. And afterward, she had said to me, “I have to make sure he takes care of me until you’re old enough to do it.”
But he had not, and I never had been.
That was the key, of course; my father represented to Lucy the only security and Safety she had had in all her childhood, and his stroke must have called up that old black terror, the stuff of her nightmares. But she was grown and married now, and had moreover married, almost literally, a father. I looked across at Jack Venable, still staring out into the December night. His rigid shoulders and back told me that he wanted no part of this insular, privileged group, and was here only for sufferance of Lucy. I wondered if the harbor Lucy had thought to enter with her marriage had been, after all, closed to her.
I started over to speak to Aunt Willa and Dorothy and Ben and Sarah; and then Hubbard Dorsey, my family’s physician since old Dr. Ballentine had died and my father’s occasional golfing partner, came out of the swinging doors from the intensive care unit. He, too, looked tired and rumpled in his white coat, a stethoscope swinging around his neck, but when he saw me he smiled and came toward me, and I knew, somehow, from the set of his shoulders and the quickness of his step that my father had turned some sort of corner and was not going to die.
He put his arm around my shoulder and drew me to the group in the sitting area, and said, “Well, I don’t think we’re going to lose him for a while after all. His vitals are much more stable all of a sudden, and he’s breathing on his own, and his EKG is nearly normal again. He’s still profoundly paralyzed; I don’t think that’s going to change, though I can’t say for sure at this point. He could fool us; he sure has me, tonight. But unless he has another massive stroke—and that’s always possible, of course, especially now—I think he’s going to make it. This time.”
Lucy began to cry in earnest, and I handed her over to Jack, who put his arm around her and drew her over to the window with him, away from the group. Dorothy and Ben Cameron smiled and stood and stretched, and Dorothy kissed me and Ben gave me a small, stiff, wordless hug, and my aunt Willa rose and came over to me and kissed my cheek as if we did that sort of thing routinely, and said, in the candied voice that had long since replaced her wire-grass cat’s squall, “Hello, Shep dear. What good news, isn’t it? You brought him luck. I’ll go call Olivia right now, and then you must go on home and see her. She’s wanted nobody but you since this happened.”
“I’ll go home in a little while, Aunt Willa,” I said. “I want to see Dad first, if I can.” I looked questioningly at Hub Dorsey, and he nodded.
“For a minute. I’ll go back in with you.”
I walked over to Sarah then, and stood before her with absolutely no idea what I was going to say. I had not seen her since her marriage, indeed, not since that terrible night at the beginning of the summer, at the Plaza, and no words formed in my brain or on my lips. I simply looked at her. It seemed to me that she was much thinner than when I had last seen her; a thinness that seemed more an atrophy of her fine, taut swimmer’s muscles than any loss of flesh. Her faint year-round tan had faded to a sallowness I had never seen before, and the circles under her amber eyes were a deep saffron. Her thick, dark brows were untidy. I wondered if she had been ill. She put her hand up, tentatively, and touched my cheek, and I noticed, over the trip hammering of my heart, that it was as cold as Lucy’s, and that for the first time since I had known her, there were no faint half-moons of paint under her nails. I covered her hand with my own and said, “Hello, Sarah. It was good of you to come.”
“Oh, Shep,” she said, and the rich voice was the same, warming my heart even as it smote it, “of course I came. How could I not? This is my day for the mail cart, and I stayed on till you came. I wanted to see you before I went home.”
“I’m glad you did,” I said. “Is Charlie around?”
She laughed, and the laugh was the same, too, simply Sarah’s and no other.
“No, he’s at the office again for the third time this week. Mr. Woodruff has a new project going, and everybody’s hopping to over there. He says to give you his love and he’ll see you tomorrow, and he especially says to get you over to the house for dinner as soon as you can come.”
“Where do you live?” I said. It seemed an insane thing to ask, but I realized that I did not know.
“We have a little house on Greystone, about a block down from Ben and Julia,” she said. “I think Ben hates having his little sister right under his nose, but he can’t say so. They’re having a baby just any minute now—did anybody tell you? Everybody you know lives in Collier Hills, Shep, or nearby. Snake and Lelia are one street over on Meredith, and Pres and Sarton are looking at a house on Walthall, and Tom and Freddie are in Colonial Homes, just a minute away. When Christmas is over and things have calmed down for you a little, I want to get us all together at a little party for you….”
“I’d like that,” I said, knowing that I could not bear it, but secure in the knowledge that I would be two thousand miles away in Vermont before she could possibly put a party together. “You look fine, Sarah….”
“I look like twelve miles of bad road, and you know it,” she said, grinning. “But it’s temporary. Well. Go on in and see your dad. I don’t have to tell you how glad we are that he’s getting better.”
“Me, too,” I said, and kissed her cheek, which was as cold as her hands. The light, lemony Ma Griffe that she loved met and enfolded me. I turned to Hub Dorsey.
“Let’s go,” he said.
We walked through the swinging doors and down the hall toward the nurses’ station, the smell of illness and its electronic heartbeat filling my nose and ears. Mortality winked on overhead screens; death dodged somewhere just out of my sight, starched and antisepticized almost into respectability, but still there, and stinking.
“You said you think he’s going to make it,” I said. “Is that the lowdown, or was that for Lucy and Aunt Willa’s sake?”
“No,” he said. “I think he probably will make it. I also think he’ll probably be sorry he did…if he’s able to think anything at all. There’s no way of telling now what kind of brain damage we’re talking about, and there won’t be, for some time. He could be relatively clear, or simply a vegetable. And as I said, the physical trauma is massive. He can move one hand and the toes of one foot, and he can turn his head from side to side. He can’t, of course, speak, and I very much doubt that he ever will be able to. But as I say, he could fool us all. He must have the constitution of a mastodon.”
My father looked so much like a wax dummy hooked up, for teaching purposes, to an astonishing array of machines and monitors that his plight simply did not seem real to me, and so, standing at the side of his criblike bed and staring down at him, I felt nothing at all except a kind of mild wonder that he looked so small. In the ghastly green half-light from the dials and screens, shrouded in his white hospital gown, wires snaking off and out of him, I thought that he looked like nothing so much as one of the hapless insects who blunder into the webs of the beautiful big autumn writing spiders we have in the South, the Argiope, and are immediately mummified in white silk and sucked to papery husks. He was breathing on his own, a thin, peevish wheezing that moved his chest up and down, and one eye was open, blue and furious, focused on the ceiling. The other was closed, and his half-closed mouth was twisted as if in suppressed laughter, or the beginnings of tears. His arms were pinioned to his sides with straps, and he was strapped into the bed, too.
“Why is he strapped in like that if he can’t move?” I said. “I don’t see how he could get over those side rails even if he could.”
“Another stroke could convulse him so it would pitch him right out of there,” Hub Dorsey said. “I heard the one he had almost doubled him up in a backward somersault on the golf course.”
The image of my father flopping gymnastically on the velvety green at Brookhaven was both terrible and funny, and I swallowed hard to suppress the crazy, forbidden laughter that bubbled in my chest.
“Another stroke…could he have another one?”
“He almost certainly will have another one,” Hub said. “If not now, sooner or later. It’s what will kill him, most likely, if he doesn’t go into pneumonia from this one. It could be tonight or ten years from now, or even twenty. Most likely he’ll have a series of small strokes, so tiny that you may not be aware he’s having them; transient ischemic attacks, we call them. They can go on for a very long time. Or as I say, another big one could come along and that will be it.”
“Ten years,” I said, looking at the intubated corpus of my father but seeing the red and blond giant who bulked over my childhood. “Or twenty…”
“That’s right,” he said. “That’s why I said he’ll probably be sorry if he makes it, and you all will come to be sorry, too. It’s no kind of life, Shep. I vote for the pneumonia, myself. Any doctor would. We don’t call it the old man’s friend for nothing. All things considered, it’s a good way to go out.”
“Christ,” I said under my breath. How could he stand here beside this wrecked man, clinging so hideously and wonderfully to his ruined life, and speak of good ways to go out?
He put his arm around me again. “No doctor is reconciled to death, Shep, but we’re even less reconciled to what can be its alternative. That is not your father and my friend there, strapped in that crib like a deformed old baby. That’s a mutant and an embarrassment. An accident. That was meant to die. The man did die, two days ago on the golf course. You’re going to have no joy in what’s left, I can assure you. Olivia is going to have even less. I ask you now, if pneumonia does set in, to let me leave orders that no life-sustaining measures be taken. And I advise you now that if he does linger on to put him in a nursing home as soon as he leaves the hospital. If he can be rehabilitated, they can do it better than we or anybody else can. If he can’t, at least there will be a chance of a life for Olivia and you.”
“I don’t know what Mother will want to do….” I began.
“She wants to do what you want. She’s already told me that you will make whatever decisions have to be made. I think she just wants to have it over, Shep, and believe me, the best thing is to let him go if he possibly can, and to put him in a home if he can’t.”
An endless white fatigue washed over me, so powerful that I almost buckled under it. My knees shook, and my head began a long, slow spin. He saw it, and took me by the arm and steered me out of the room.
“Let’s go get some coffee and maybe a bite to eat,” he said. “The cafeteria’s open, or the drugstore across the street. Or we can run on up to Biuso’s. I bet you drove straight through. When did you last eat?”
“No, I had a lot of sleep last night, and a good lunch,” I said. The dizziness was ebbing. “I think I’ll go on home now. Is my mother all right? Aunt Willa said she wasn’t able to come to the hospital.”
“She’s all right now, I think,” he said. “She was pretty hysterical when it first happened. I’ve kept her fairly well sedated. But right at first…I don’t know. Crying, and laughing…I’ve never seen her like that. I didn’t think it of her, somehow. It must have been a closer relationship than I thought it was, if you’ll forgive me for saying so….”
I raised my hand. I didn’t blame him for thinking it. I was surprised at my mother’s reaction, too. I would have said that practically nothing but proximity and long habit and the complex family real estate holdings were left of whatever ties had originally bound them. But then, I thought, I was the last person in the world to qualify as an expert on the relationships of others. I did not think that I would ever again be surprised at another man’s love. Or another woman’s.
“I’ll think about the nursing home,” I said. “Meanwhile, if it should come to that, no machines and no respirators, okay?”
“Okay,” he said. “Good boy. Good man. I’m really sorry about this, Shep. It’s tough on an only son when he stands to lose his dad.”
“Thanks, Hub,” I said. “I’ll be okay. It’s Mother I’m worried about.” I turned away so he could not see my face, read there the traitorous absence of grief.
“She’ll be all right now that you’re home,” he said. “She’s asked for you constantly for the past two days. You’re going to be just what she needs to get her through this.”
I thought of the white hills of Vermont, the old pile of brown Gothic bricks waiting for me at Haddonfield, the slow, deep, sweet new measure of time and days that would be mine to slip into. I was more determined than ever not to miss the beginning of the new term. I had already decided what I would do: I would find a good nursing home for my father, instruct Tom Carmichael, my father’s corporate attorney, to find a good business manager as soon as possible, break the news of these decisions to my mother and leave again before the new year dawned on the city. I knew it could all be done, even on the shortest of notice, even at Christmas, simply because I knew what the sort of money my father commanded could do. If necessary, I knew that Ben Cameron would help me. All the newly powerful men of Buckhead would. If my mother objected, I realized that I was quite capable of stealing silently out of the summerhouse with my bags in the dawn before she was awake. I would do what had to be done, and I would do it fast, and then I would be gone. I had known at the first sight of Sarah’s pinched white face that I could not stay here.
I got the U-Haul out of the parking lot and drove back north on Peachtree Road. It was nearly ten o’clock in the evening now, but the river of automobile lights and the glare of neon on the road limned the landscape as clearly as at sunset. I realized, suddenly, that those lights had not been here when I left Atlanta for Princeton. This stretch of Peachtree Road had been dark then, except for streetlights and a few pale smears of neon where an occasional unprepossessing restaurant, Johnny Escoe’s or Rusty’s or Vittorio’s, crouched among the big old houses and dense trees. Now many of the small forests were gone, and raw, square new two-and three-story commercial buildings shouldered in among the offended houses, and many of the houses themselves wore the discreet signage of businesses: insurance companies, law and dentist’s offices, regional or branch or sales offices of national concerns. Filling stations and dry cleaners and liquor stores winked their availability at this holiday season, and a madly improbable Polynesian restaurant with a thatched roof and a listing, enormous outrigger canoe occupied the curve across from the hospital. Its sign proclaimed it the Kon Tiki, and someone had—whimsically, I hoped—set up a manager scene and crèche on its minuscule lawn, beside the outrigger. One great, yawing plastic camel seemed in the act of planting a splayed foot in the canoe. Once again I bit back the madman’s urge to laugh aloud. I thought that once I got started, there was no power on earth that could stop me, and I knew that it would never do to walk into the beautiful house at 2500 Peachtree Road, now a house of sorrow, braying my laughter like an infidel.
Always, as long as I could remember, the great, fan-lighted white front door of 2500 had worn, at Christmas, a simple green boxwood wreath with a red velvet bow, fashioned at my mother’s direction by Weinstock’s Florist over on Roswell Road. Shem Cater put up the spotlight that showcased it the week before each Christmas, and with the austere grace of the Federal door itself and the fan- and sidelights and the slender Ionic columns of the portico, it was as dignified and lovely a Christmas door as there was in Atlanta, far more so than the cheerful, rococo and more approachable excesses of Ansley Park and Garden Hills and the Governor’s Mansion. It suited the simple American Georgian lines of the house and the ornate, symmetrical iron fence surrounding it, as exquisitely as everything else my mother set her hand to. The sight of it now, gleaming out of the cold mist, touched my heart with a jet of warmth and peace, and I instinctively pulled the U-Haul around back to the stable-garages, rather than leave it, blotlike, on the semicircular front drive. Shem Cater must have been looking out for me, because he was at the back door of the little latticed summer porch before I could reach for the knob. For once, Martha was beside him. He pumped my hand and said, “Glad you’s home, Mr. Shep, glad to see you,” and old Martha gave me a fierce, brief hug and said, “It about time, Shep. Git in here out’n the cold fo’ you freezes us out.” Martha never had, in all her life or mine, called me Mr. Shep. The dark, intricate, clean-ash smell of them enfolded me and I was, vividly and inalterably, home.
My mother was waiting for me, not in the little glassed sun porch that was our winter sitting room, or in her and my father’s upstairs bedroom, but in the living room. I could not ever remember my parents’ sitting there when there was not company in the house, and I felt, walking into the vast room with its apricot-washed plaster walls and its distinctive ivory wood moldings, like an intruder, a Vandal or a Visigoth come to sack and plunder. I was very conscious, all of a sudden, of my travel-stained clothing and the fact that I had not had a bath since I left New York. My beard stubble was blond and invisible, but in that cold, beautiful blue, apricot and cream room, it felt as though it brushed my knees, rank and Hasidic.
My mother sat on one of the pair of satin brocade sofas flanking the great gray Italian marble fireplace and mantel. The enormous baroque wood overmantel and chimney piece gave the room its focus, and my mother, in a dark red velvet robe which echoed the darkest of the faded colors in the old Oriental rugs, looked like a medieval duchess, or like Guinevere receiving the prisoners her husband’s knights brought back from their quests for her dispensation. The enormous decorated Fraser fir that shone before the curtained Palladian windows, a twin to the one in the hall rotunda, and the light from the leaping fire were the sole sources of illumination in the room, and she needed only a small Italian greyhound curled at her feet to complete the picture of somber medieval splendor. The smell of the fire’s heat on the drying needles of the tree, and the fragrant pine and smilax garlands on the mantel and the stair in the rotunda, and my mother’s bittersweet perfume seemed somehow heavier and more piercing in the vast, warm, fire-leaping semidarkness.
“Shep, darling,” she said softly, not rising, but holding out both hands to me. I went and sat beside her on the sofa and took them, and she laid her forehead lightly on my shoulder and sat there, still and quiet, so that I finally had no recourse but to put my arm around her shoulders and hold her. For what seemed a very long time, we sat so, not moving, neither of us speaking, I because I could not think of anything to say and her musk and nearness dried my mouth, she because of whatever obscure mother-son game she was playing. On the whole, I did not mind the silence and stillness so much. It was better than the hysterical laughter and tears Hub Dorsey had spoken of.
She raised her head and looked at me, and I saw that her dark sloe eyes were perfectly made up, and had the flat, high glitter of fever in them. Two hectic spots of color burned in her white face, and she had put on lipstick that matched perfectly the supple fall of silk velvet that she wore. Her lightless black hair was pulled back into a severe bun on her neck; she had worn it so since the war, and in a world gone bulbous with Jackie Kennedy bouffants and beehives, she looked sinuous and Art Deco-ish, an elegant thirties blacksnake in a flock of peeping golden biddies. The look suited her; it always had. Creamy freshwater pearl buttons gleamed at her fleshy little ears, but other than those and her wedding rings, she wore no jewelry.
“This is a terrible time, darling,” she said. “Worse than terrible. Tragic. I’ve been so frightened and worried I thought I would die; and there’s been no one close to me to comfort me. Only that eternal Willa, hovering and whispering. But now that you’re home, everything will be all right. I can lean on my strong, brave boy. Oh, I thought the time would never pass until you got here, Sheppie!”
“I went by the hospital before I came,” I said, “and Hub tells me he’s almost positive Dad will pull through. I guess Aunt Willa called you. Ben and Dorothy Cameron are there with her, and Lucy and Jack, and Sarah. You mustn’t worry too much, Mother. He seems to have rallied pretty well.”
I saw no reason to tell her what Hub Dorsey had said about my father’s ultimate chances, and his prospects of having any sort of life. I knew I would never speak of his appearance.
“I should be there with him, but I just wanted you so badly that I couldn’t seem to leave the house until you got here,” she said in a frail, tired little voice. “I’ve kept in touch constantly, though; Hub and Willa have called every half hour, and now that you’re here and Dad’s on the mend, I’m going to spend every waking hour at his side. I’ll go first thing in the morning, and stay all day. But now I want you to sit down here with me and get your breath and tell me your news, and have a real visit. Just like the Christmases when you were a little boy. Remember when you thought the living room was Rich’s, because the tree was so big? You were scared to come into the room. I think you were three then, but maybe it was four or five, and so adorable in your little pajamas with the feet…”
The used, hurt little voice had gained strength and intensity as she spoke, until, incredibly, it was a freshet of glittering, girlish chatter, and I looked at her in simple disbelief. Could she have been drinking? Or was she slipping back into the hysteria Hub had described?
“I don’t have any news that won’t keep,” I said, thinking of the looming haven of Haddonfield. It would be suicidal to speak of it now. “What I’d really like to do is have a bite to eat and a shower and go to bed. I haven’t eaten since noon. And you ought to get some sleep, too; you’re wound up like a clock. Did Hub leave you something to help you sleep?”
“Oh, my poor baby,” she cried, pressing her white hands to her mouth as though she had been given appalling news. “Of course you must have something to eat! We’ll have Shem bring us sandwiches and drinks here in front of the fire, wouldn’t that be festive and Christmasy? Oh, do forgive your selfish old mother; I should have known you’d be hungry! Maybe we’ll open some of the Christmas champagne and have a real little party—”
“Mother,” I said, holding up one hand, “no champagne, really. A sandwich and a glass of milk or a cup of coffee will be fine. Let’s just go raid the kitchen, okay? I don’t want to keep Shem and Martha up when they must have gotten as little sleep as anybody else.”
She looked puzzled for a moment, as if she could not think why Shem and Martha Cater would be missing sleep, and then smiled ruefully.
“My thoughtful boy,” she said. “Of course. They’ve been almost as worried about poor Dad as I have. Come on into the kitchen, then, and I’ll make you a sandwich with my own hands. It will be a pleasure to cook for my boy again.”
Since I could not remember that she ever had, I said nothing. We went out of the dim living room, she preceding me, her slender body fairly dancing along on narrow feet in high-heeled gold pumps. I saw the gleam of sheer stocking on her instep, and also that she had fastened the knot of hair at her nape with a circlet of glittering stones—rhinestones? diamonds? She might have been walking into a charity ball at the Driving Club. She moved as if to music.
The kitchen was warm and bright-lit, and there was a plate of turkey and ham sandwiches on a cloth-covered tray, and fresh coffee in the electric pot. Shem and Martha had apparently gone back to their rooms over the garage. The kitchen radio was turned to WSB, and the score from Camelot swam into the room, that ersatz anthem for an entire generation: “Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot…for one brief, shining moment that was known as Camelot….”
My mother perched herself on a kitchen stool and crossed her elegant legs, and sipped the coffee I poured out for her. I wolfed sandwiches until a restoring satiety bloomed in my stomach, and poured coffee for myself. It was hot and heartening. We might have been an illustration in one of my mother’s glossy women’s magazines, by Norman Rockwell or even worse, Jon Whitcomb: mother and son, smiling over a late-night snack in a warm, bright kitchen in Anywhere, U.S.A., in that most benedictory of times, the opening years of the 1960s. Pain and stenches, death and tubes, frozen snarls on silent lips and deadly flowers blooming in ruined brains—these did not, in our four-color, dot-matrix world, exist. My mother had not just this evening risen from a sleep of drugs and anguish; my father did not lie, wired and spasmed, in a hospital two miles away; Sarah Cameron did not wear the gold ring of Charlie Gentry on her slim finger; my heart was not wizened and gray because of it. I put down my coffee cup and grinned fatuously at my mother, once again aware that I had nothing at all to say to her, no words of wisdom or comfort, none of fealty. I wanted nothing so much as the old, peaceful oblivion of my darkened bedroom out in the summer-house. I could not think how to get there without getting up from the kitchen and bolting out into the cold night, and my mother’s bright, waiting smile said plainly that there was more expected of this night, and of me. The dolorous medieval lady of the sorrows had fled midway in her little speech about Christmas when I was a child, and had not returned. This woman was a creature of wiles and pleasures, waiting and wanting only to ply them for her son.
“Well,” I said, finally. “That really hit the spot. Would you like to go back in by the fire?”
“Oh no, it’s really too stiff and formal in there, isn’t it?” she said. “Let’s sit here for a little while and talk, and then I have a surprise for you upstairs. Tell me, how was Sarah? Was she glad to see you? Is she pregnant yet?”
It was such a completely unexpected turn of conversation that I actually choked on my coffee, and spit a little onto the table in front of me. She laughed, a silvery little giggle.
“You’ve still got a tiny little bit of a crush on her, haven’t you, Sheppie?” she said, almost gaily. “I thought you did. Well, it doesn’t matter. There are a million pretty girls in Atlanta, and we’re going to see that you get reacquainted with every one of them, now that you’re home. There are some of the cutest new girls in town you ever saw, too; I see them all the time at League meetings and at lunch. Career girls, lots of them. Pretty and smart. You don’t need Sarah. You’ll cut such a swath you just won’t believe it. You’re really a handsome boy, Sheppie, I always thought you were, no matter what Daddy said, and now that you’re all grown up—”
“Mother,” I said in a kind of disbelieving desperation, “we probably need to talk some about Dad. We’ll wait until you’ve seen him tomorrow and had a chance to talk to Hub before we settle anything, but I think you ought to be aware that things aren’t…very good with him….”
“Well, of course, I know that,” she said. Her face did not change. “He’s had a bad stroke. How could things be good with him? But Willa and you both said he wasn’t going to die….”
“Not die, maybe, but there’s a very good chance he won’t ever be himself again, and he might not…might not…be able to take care of himself, or maybe even move…. I just don’t want you to think that everything is going to be like it was,” I said. “I don’t want you to think that and be hurt when it isn’t. Mother, he could live for years without ever moving again. We really are going to have to make some plans….”
She gave me a smile of such brilliance that it was nearly feral, and I felt the skin on my neck and the backs of my hands crawl.
“I have already made what plans need to be made,” she said. She might have been discussing a speech school luncheon. “I did that yesterday and today while everybody was at the hospital. Of course nothing is going to be the same. I know it’s likely he’ll be paralyzed. At least he won’t be dead—that’s something. I’ll have a husband; you’ll have a father. There’ll still be a man in the house. Two, now that you’re home.”
“Mother,” I said, “you can’t mean that you’re going to bring him home! Do you know what it means to be totally paralyzed, to have somebody in the house who’s totally paralyzed? Who would look after him? You’d never in the world manage, not even with Shem and Martha and Aunt Willa. When I said make some plans, I meant find a good nursing home, get him into it when he leaves the hospital, find somebody to look after the business—”
Her red-tipped hand dismissed me.
“Oh, pooh on the business. Tom Carmichael can run the silly business until you learn your way around it. He can tell you all you need to know about it, and you can turn your father’s library into your own office, or go downtown a few times a week, if you want to—it’s all he ever did. And of course I’m going to bring him home. I’m moving him into Willa’s room, and making a sitting room out of Little Lady’s bedroom, and turning the little dressing room into a nurse’s bedroom, and we’ll have them around the clock, and later I’ll hire him a live-in companion-nurse. And I’ll help look after him myself. Who else did you think would do it? He’s my husband. In my family, we look after our own….”
This time I simply looked at her. Her face seemed to shine with plans and busyness and a kind of crazy saintliness, and with something else too. Power played there like heat lightning. Of course she would keep him near her, of course she would tend him herself. She would have it all, then: the power of this house, power over him; she would have both the power and the man at her fingertips. And she would have the added luster of this new saintliness: Olivia Bondurant, caring for the helpless husband, sitting patiently by the bedside, laying cool hands on the silent, raging face. The mantle of smalltown selflessness, long laid aside in little Griffin when she left it to marry and come with my father to this worldly city, slipped as easily onto her shoulders as if it had been tailored for her.
“Where will Aunt Willa sleep?” It was all I could think to say.
“Willa is going out to the summerhouse, and if you don’t think she’s furious about that, you can think again,” my mother said in obvious satisfaction. “But what can she say? She can’t dictate where she’ll sleep in her sister-in-law’s house; she’s been lucky all these years even to have a roof over her head. And Little Lady and Carter surely haven’t knocked the doors down setting her up over there. No, the summerhouse is perfectly fine for her, and that way she won’t be underfoot upstairs with a sick man in the house. Though I know she’d love to nurse him herself, thinking she could get him to leave her a little something in his will. Willa! Lord! She’s lucky I don’t put her out in the street altogether!”
My throat and tongue dried to dust, and my heart knocked sickly. The summerhouse—my cool, beautiful haven; the one place where Lucy and I had hidden from the world and felt, at last, perfectly safe. It made me literally sick to think of Aunt Willa in it, her chic, insinuating head buyer’s clothes, her carefully chosen little bric-a-brac, as like the ones in the Peachtree Road house as she could find, the clinging female scent of her…. I swallowed hard, and felt salt bile flooding the back of my throat. Even if I was not going to be here, was not, for all practical purposes, ever coming home again, I could not bear the thought of Willa Slagle Bondurant in the summerhouse.
“When…when is she moving out there?” I said around my thickened tongue. The thought hit me, sudden and terrible, that perhaps she had already moved, and that I would have to spend these necessary Christmas nights in the cold, cheerless guest room, or even worse, in Aunt Willa’s cast-off lair. I was ready to run howling into the night and take hold of her alien possessions with my bare hands and fling them out of the summerhouse into the cold, dead garden.
“She’s moving as soon as I can get that dreadful little fairy from Rich’s in here to redo her room for Daddy, and to make a few other changes,” my mother said. “He’s already brought some sketches and fabric over; he did that the same day I called. Let’s see. Was it day before yesterday? I guess it was. It seems like a million years ago. Oh yes, he was dancing on the doorstep not four hours after I called the decorating service. The name Bondurant still means something at Rich’s, even with all the tackpots in town.”
She smiled in obvious satisfaction at the thought of the poor Rich’s decorator, rushing through the festive debris of Christmas to her doorstep clutching his swatches and samples and sketches, and I thought, She means the same afternoon Dad had his stroke. He was in the hospital and they didn’t know whether he was going to live or die, and she was shut up in her room with everybody thinking she was hysterical and prostrate, and what she was doing was planning to redecorate the house. She’s refeathering the nest and he’s not even out of it yet. I could not speak.
“And now,” she caroled, “the big surprise. The best part of my plan. Come on, Sheppie. It’s for you. And it’s upstairs.”
I got up and followed her out of the kitchen. The two grinding, interminable days on the road in the U-Haul and the meeting at the hospital and the sheer awfulness of my twisted and intubated father and the cold weight of Sarah in my heart washed over me like a great, freezing surf, and I stumbled silently along behind my mother up the beautiful free standing staircase simply because I was too tired to do anything else.
She paused at the door to her and my father’s bedroom, at the left end of the upstairs corridor, and looked back over her shoulder at me, and the smile she gave me was tight-stretched and glittering, like everything else about her on this strangest of nights.
“Are you ready?” she said. Her voice had a child’s lilt.
“I guess so,” I said numbly. I could not think of anything in the world I was less ready for on this night than a Christmas surprise. Sleep was what I wanted, sleep and sleep only.
“Voilà!” cried my mother, and flung open the door.
I had not been in this room a dozen times since I left the hateful little cubbyhole off it, where I had slept my captive voyeur’s sleep from infancy to the coming of Lucy. I frankly hated it, even though it was by far the best bedroom in the house. It seemed to me that the very walls had captured and held the force of my infant rage and fear and disgust. I avoided it even when expressly invited by my mother to enter, which had been seldom. My father had never bade me in. I stood behind my mother in the doorway, as reluctant to enter as if the room were a cobra farm.
It was an enormous room occupying most of the top left wing and running the depth of the house, with great floor-to-ceiling Palladian windows facing Peachtree Road and the back garden and the summerhouse. I remembered that when you looked out the back windows in summer, you could see the deep forests of Buckhead rolling away toward the river, with small, weblike tributaries of streets, and islands that were the rooftops of other great houses thrusting up out of the rolling green. It was like being on the bridge of a great ship, and was the one thing about the room that I had always loved. There was a vast, shining sea of polished oak floor, scattered with thin, glowing old Orientals in the soft pastel tints of Kirman and Bokhara, and in front of the rose marble fireplace, set into another Palladian-arched niche in the ivory paneled walls, two pale rose brocade sofas faced each other across a pretty tea table.
My mother’s little French writing desk sat before the windows looking onto Peachtree Road, and two great mahogany armoires flanked the fireplace. On the wall across from it, floating in luminous ivory space, sat the bed she had shared all the years of her marriage with my father, a chaste, spare Hepplewhite tester with a starched lace canopy and a coverlet of faded, rose-strewn satin. The roses, I remembered her telling Aunt Willa when she first came to the house, had been embroidered by her maternal grandmother for her hope chest. The coverlet was always carefully folded back at night upon the blanket chest that sat at the foot of the bed; I knew that it concealed a dual-control electric blanket. My father might share in silence that white battlefield, but he would do it in comfort. Everything in the room had always been rich, elegant, serene, orderly, conventional. Like, in all respects, my mother.
Off the bedroom proper were, back to back, a glassed sleeping porch, also facing the garden, where my father sometimes read or napped on a sagging daybed, and the villainous little dressing room that had been my earliest Coventry. The doors giving onto them from the bedroom were shut now, and the big room was dim-lit. At first, my tired eyes could not accommodate the dimness.
“Well?” my mother chirped. “What do you think?”
Leaning around her, I nearly gasped aloud. I reached automatically for the doorjamb to steady myself. I was looking into the sanctum of a mad white hunter.
The entire room shimmered and swam, now, in a kind of demented pentimento. Underneath, the skin and bones, the wood and silks and velvets and plaster of the room as it had always been, shone in gracious harmony. But the overpainting, the surface—it was as if Ernest Hemingway at his bloated, monomaniacal worst had battled to the death with Aubrey Beardsley, each determined to leave his imprint on the room. The bed, the chairs, the sofas and tables and chaise, even the floors and the tall windows were draped with samples of fabric, piled with pillows and paint samples and primitive bibelots, feverish with great, virulent, billowing and trailing green plants. The bed had been shrouded in a coarse, gauzy material resembling cheesecloth, and over its delicate coverlet lay a throw fashioned from the hide of some animal that had never set hoof to American soil. The old Orientals were covered with zebra hides, and in front of the fireplace a leopard-skin rug with the snarling head still attached had been laid down. Bedside and end tables had been pushed to the corners of the room, and great standing oblong drums replaced them. On the ivory walls, spears and javelins were crossed and grouped artfully, and over the twin sofas the heads of more great, snarling beasts howled their choler into the dimness. There was a stifling, jumbled impression of bamboo, vines and earth-toned batik. In the corner by the sun porch door, a brilliant macaw sat on a perch in a tall standing cage.
When I still said nothing, my mother took my arm and drew me into the room and over to one of the sofas, where she more or less pushed me down, to sit on a stiff fur pillow. Even as my head whirled and my eyes spun wildly around the room, my fingertips registered the fact that the fur was not real. I looked from my mother’s white, magenta-cheeked face, its crimson lips smiling, smiling, to the leopard’s head at my feet, and saw that it was not real, either. Neither, on closer examination, were the heads on the wall over the sofas. I was grateful for that. I did not know about the fur throw and the plants and the macaw. The javelin and spears looked real enough to gut you if you put them to the test. In the middle of all of it, my smiling, thrumming mother looked as crazily, plastically beautiful as a comic-strip drawing of Sheena, Queen of the Jungle.
“Say something,” she ordered me, standing hip shot in her blood-red velvet, a jungle priestess about to order me staked out for the soldier ants.
“Holy shit,” I breathed, entirely spontaneously. “Are you going to bring Dad home and put him in the middle of all this?”
“Don’t be silly,” she said impatiently, flinging herself down on the sofa opposite me and taking a cigarette from a painted clay bowl I had never seen before. I felt simple gratitude that it was not a skull. “This is for you.”
“Me?” It must have been an outright squeal, because she laughed and reached over and patted my knee, leaving her hand there.
“You. You’re the man of this house now, and you need a man’s room. Time to get you out of that silly summerhouse and up here, in the big house and the big bedroom, where you belong. The little man from Rich’s—Ronnie, and he is good, darling, even if he’s terribly light on the rug—says that the safari look is just everywhere nowadays, what with the good new fur synthetics and all the inexpensive brass and copper imports, and everything. He says practically every important house in the East has at least one safari room. All this is just for effect, of course; these are samples for you to pick from, and you can…tone it down a little, if you like. Or you can even go a totally different way. The nautical look is good, too, he thinks, because of Jack Kennedy, you know, but we thought this was best for the scale of the room, and I knew you’d always liked adventure stories, and animals, and that book about the jungle that Kipling wrote. I told him about that—he wanted to know what you were like, of course, and when he heard it, he said this would be just the thing. It’s not my cup of tea, of course, but I have to admit it’s really very clever. Look, the drapery on the bed is supposed to simulate mosquito netting, and the drums are quite authentic, though I forget where he said they came from. I will say that the parrot may be a bit much….”
She ran down then, and cocked her head to one side, and peered into my face. Her smile, as she waited for my reaction, was the full, creamy half-moon of a woman very sure that she has done a good thing.
“Do you like your Christmas present, darling?” she said.
“Mother,” I said, and my voice cracked in my throat like an adolescent’s. “Where are you going to sleep?”
“Oh, sweetie, don’t worry about me,” she said merrily. “I’ll be in with Daddy a lot of the time. And I thought I’d just have a little nest made in the sleeping porch there, just a bed and a built-in closet and my dressing table. I don’t need much room. Ronnie says we can easily cut a separate entrance in from the hall, so I don’t have to go through your room to get to it. You can keep the little dressing room for your things. Isn’t it all fun, Sheppie?”
I looked at her, there in her red and her power, in this terrible room where the frustrated little decorator from Rich’s had exorcised all his angry, skewed eroticism. Who was she? Medea, Gertrude, Jocasta? I did not know her. Whoever she was, she would, if I moved into this room, truly have it all: money, power, the fallen husband down the hall, the son in her bedroom again. I felt physical nausea, and swallowed hard against it. I rose from the couch on rubbery legs and walked toward the door. Behind me I heard the swish of her legs in their sheer nylon as she jumped up from the other sofa, and the soft pattering of her heels as she followed me.
“Sheppie,” she said. “Sheppie…”
I turned. She was standing by the bed.
“I don’t care who you put in this room,” I said. “You can put H. Rider Haggard and Frank Buck and Mr. Ronnie from Rich’s in here all at once, if you want to. I wouldn’t sleep one night in it if it was the last room in the continental United States. Not like this, and not in a goddamned nautical decor, for Christ’s sake, and not—I repeat not—with you in the little room right under my elbow. Not any way at all. Mother, I’m not going to stay in Atlanta, get used to that idea now; I only came home to see about Dad and get things squared away for you—”
“NOO-O-O-O-O!” It was a long, terrible wail; I thought of wakes and deaths and banshees. She sagged down onto the bed, and sat there, half-sunk in fur, her hands clenched in her lap, her little feet in gold shoes neatly together, her mouth squared off in a child’s rictus of grief and outrage.
“You can’t leave me!” she howled. Tears spurted from her closed eyes and tracked mascara down her white face. “You can’t leave me now! Not after him, not after that—I won’t have anything, if you leave me! I won’t have anything, then….”
I looked at her in silence. On the huge bed she looked very small, no larger than a child, a prim, good and very simple child, bewildered and foundering in a grief she could not comprehend. And I knew that at this moment she was not Jocasta, but only little Olivia Redwine from Griffin, Georgia, invalidated in her soul, like her foremothers and sisters and heirs, without a man. Even with everything around her—the money, the position in the city, the great house and its furnishings, the clothes and cars and clubs and charities and balls and luncheons—even with all this, she was nothing without a man of her own, be he husband or son, paralyzed, emasculated, dead. Everything in her life told her this. She believed it in her shrinking soul. And I knew she was right. I thought of Lucy, and of Little Lady, sold into marriage with Carter Rawson, and of my flayed and driven Aunt Willa, and of the fingernails of Sarah Cameron, innocent now of paint. I suddenly hated the South, hated it fully and redly, this beautiful land of woman-killers, this country of soul-breakers. I would not stay here. I would not.
But I would not press that matter until after Christmas. I could not do that to the sobbing child-woman in the terrible fur bed. Let her think that I would stay; if need be, I would sneak away in a near-distant cold red dawn, as I had thought I might. I had, by now, no compunctions at all about that, or about lying to my mother.
I went to her and sat down beside her, and put my arms around her.
“Hush,” I said, “Hush, now. I didn’t mean it. If you really need me, of course I’ll stay. I just…it’s just that I can’t stay here in this room. This is your room. This is Dad’s room. The summerhouse is my place; I love it out there. I always have. If you want me to stay, you’re going to have to let me have my way about that.”
She gave in without a whimper. I think that the threatened loss of me wiped out any disappointment she might have felt at my reception of Mr. Ronnie’s handiwork. The ghastly bedroom was not mentioned again; I do not know when, in the span of days that followed, Mr. Ronnie of Rich’s and his minions came and took away the unwanted artifacts of the heart of darkness. I held my mother until she stopped her sobbing and nodded in my arms, and I pressed her back gently on the fur pillows and drew Mr. Ronnie’s impossible fur throw up over her, and turned off the lamps, and escaped through the icy-breathed night to the summerhouse. The day seemed, by now, forty-eight hours old.
I was just slipping into sleep myself when I turned over and saw, on the bedside table, a copy of Lucy’s book. I had one in New York, but I had not read it; had meant to start it in the new year at Haddonfield. She had not pressed me for comment. Indeed, oddly, she had scarcely mentioned her novel the entire time I had been home for its publication, and had not talked of it since, either in her letters or her phone calls to me. These latter had been full of Jack and the movement and the day-to-day routine at Damascus House, of her adventures in the bus and the government agencies and the soup kitchen and, less frequently, at La Carrousel; but of this book and any others she might one day write, Lucy said nothing. I wondered who had put it here, beside the bed. Not, I was sure, my mother. I reached out and picked up the little volume. It was the story of a small white girl raised by a black family in New Orleans during the Depression, I knew, and its title was Darkness and Old Trees. I smiled. Lucy had always loved Frost.
I propped myself up on one elbow, shivering in the cold, switched on the bedside lamp and opened the book. On the dedication page, I read, “To my father, James Clay Bondurant. We be of one blood, thou and I.” And on the title page, in Lucy’s slanting backhand, “Dear, darling Gibby: Mark my Trail!”
I laid the book back down on the table and turned the light off again, and rolled over, and scrubbed my face into the crook of my arm, and wept—for the diminished and doomed woman in the mountebank’s bed in the big house, and for the unwritten and unmourned books of Lucy Venable, and for the clean fingernails of Sarah Cameron Gentry.