The police never found the Pumphouse Hill arsonist. In truth, I am not sure how hard they looked. Clem Coffee, the first of an entirely new breed of college-educated cop and as alien to Atlanta’s blue ranks as a ballerina in a split T formation, was Ben Cameron’s man, and though he put his men through the correct motions, he did so quietly, and with virtually nothing leaked to the press. Apprehending the arsonist would have opened an enormous can of worms, a squirming feast for the press, and I can imagine that Clem was as relieved as Ben and the Club and, I suppose, my mother when the one slender lead—the anonymous call to the newspaper at 4:50 that morning—remained anonymous.
There was almost nothing to go on. The reporter who took the call could say only that the voice sounded as if it came through fabric of some kind, and was educated and precise, and gave the location of the fire and suggested that the newspaper contact Sheppard Gibbs Bondurant of Buckhead for further information. Clem Coffee, who came once to the house with Ben to talk with me and look upon me with some small compassion (though he carefully and quite correctly said nothing that was not routine), believed that someone who knew of Pumphouse Hill’s ownership saw Ben and Glenn Pickens and me walking through it that afternoon, or was told about our visit by someone who did, and seized the moment, as it were. I thought that that must surely narrow the field enormously. How many residents of the Southeast could possibly know who held the titles to their purgatories? How many would care?
“You’d be surprised,” Ben said, and Clem laughed sourly. “There’s an information network down there that would put USIA to shame,” he said. “I’d be surprised if it wasn’t common knowledge that the property was…not yours.”
“Then why won’t somebody come forward?” I said.
“Shit, Shep, they don’t care who hangs, as long as one of us does,” Clem said. “But there’s not a lot anybody can do if the arsonist can’t be found, and you can bet your ass nobody down there is going to blow the whistle on a brother. They won’t even talk to my boys.”
“Not even for murder? That’s what it was,” I said.
“Especially not for murder. Better that you carry that load, whether or not you deserve it. Whoever set it was pretty sure there wouldn’t be any reprisals to you or your family or to anybody in the Southeast; at least that’s my theory. It’s not one I’m making public, needless to say. Besides, it worked, didn’t it? Pumphouse Hill is being cleaned up.”
It was, tentatively and excruciatingly slowly. My mother had conveyed to me through Tom Carmichael her belated eagerness to divert some family money toward the rehabilitation of the existing property there, and I had authorized him to hire a general contractor and get started. Ben was looking for some loan money, to see what could be done about rebuilding the burned blocks. He thought there might be some federal assistance available. As Ben had predicted, in the absence of a suspect and no criminal investigation, the uproar over Pumphouse Hill soon died away in that first month of the new year.
It was of no particular comfort to me to find that the world did indeed go on, but, of course, it did. Ben Cameron was inaugurated on January 2, looking like a slender, steel-crowned king in the winter sunlight as he stood on the steps of City Hall afterward, Dorothy and Sarah and Charlie and Ben and Julia, holding tiny Ben Cameron III in her arms, around him. An indefinable something, the sense of gears moving forward and a great, interior motor purring softly into life, permeated the hard crystal air of 1962. Ben immediately rammed through legislation to wipe out all restrictions on duties of black policemen; it was his first act as mayor, and prophetic of the tenor of his entire administration. A new $50 million municipal auditorium was announced, and an urban residential development for blacks opened in Thomasville, down in the Southeast. In Washington, John Kennedy was at the apogee of his trajectory, and Jacqueline Kennedy had quite simply conquered the world. Late in February, Colonel John Glenn rode a ridiculous, flame-farting little comet around the earth and Camelot moved into the heavens. And in the Peachtree Road house, my mother came out of her self-imposed exile and took up again, with scarcely a ripple, the silken tapestry of her life.
I do not really know how she fared during the month in her tower. I still do not know why she immured herself there. If it was to avoid censure and consequence, she must have seen within a week that there would, for her, be none. If it was to avoid me, it must have been apparent almost that quickly that she need not bother. When I went into the summerhouse on the second night after the fire, it was, so far as she was concerned, for good. I doubt very much that she felt shame or remorse about Pumphouse Hill or the fire, though she undoubtedly did suffer honestly and deeply over my withdrawal from her. For the first week or so after the event, she sent almost hourly messages by Shem or Martha importuning me to come out and talk to her, and when they did not prevail, sent Tom Carmichael to see me. I would not open the door to him, either. Finally Hub Dorsey pounded on the door one evening until I let him in, and he pleaded with me to end this foolishness and go and see my mother.
“She’s in terrible shape, Shep,” he said. “She isn’t sleeping, and I don’t think she’s eaten for nearly a week; she must have lost ten pounds. She cries all the time. Look, I know the score on things. Ben talked to me. It’s a heavy load for you; we all know that, even if we can’t talk about it. But I really can’t be responsible for her welfare if you won’t let her try to square things with you, or at least talk to her. It’s punishment enough for her, to have to live with what she’s done. If she loses you on top of your dad, I don’t think she’ll come out of it. This is killing her.”
“No it isn’t, Hub,” I said, and he soon went away, shaking his head. I did not blame him. Two generations of physicians had had very little joy of the Bondurants.
After that, for a day or two, my mother herself came and wept at my door, and rapped on it, and called and called and called, promising all manner of things which I managed to effectively drown out with Beethoven and Brubeck. She sent reams of notes in on the trays that Shem Cater brought me from the kitchen, but I burned them in the fireplace in the living room of the summer-house, and scattered the ashes. I was profoundly thankful that she had never gotten around to having a telephone installed. She tried once to send a message to me by Ben Cameron, who was the only visitor I permitted during that time, but he told me matter-of-factly that he had advised her to back off. Apparently she listened to him. Her sorties and entreaties stopped, and she pulled herself together and bathed and dressed and had her hair and nails done and stepped back into the careening winter social orbit that was her day-to-day life, paler and thinner and more beautiful than ever, and no doubt much admired for her bravery in the face of the disgrace her son had brought on the house of Bondurant. Except for Ben and the Club, I did not think that many of Old Buckhead knew the truth of that.
I quickly learned her schedule, and fashioned a life around it. When she was out of the house, I would go up and bring back books and papers and whatever furnishings I wanted from my father’s library, and a few paintings and trinkets. Shem told me that my mother never went into the library, and that they had not seen her in the kitchen since before Christmas. It was from the Caters that I learned that Aunt Willa had finally moved her belongings up into the newly refurbished attic rooms, and that my mother was bringing my father home, with a full complement of round-the-clock nurses, the second week in February. After he was installed there, they told me, Aunt Willa took to sitting serenely beside him for hours at a time in the evenings, knitting or reading or doing her nails, while the night nurse drank coffee in the kitchen or watched television in her tiny bedroom. My mother, they said, came in to visit him once in the morning and again late in the afternoon, after she returned home from whatever luncheon or committee meeting or shopping trip was on her agenda, and stayed a half hour or so each time. It was Willa Slagle Bondurant who was constant.
I would have loved to know how my mother felt about that, but somehow I could not ask the Caters, and they did not volunteer the information. Mother would have kept her composure in front of them, in any case. It must have been a bad time for them, these two black custodians of whatever family life there had been in the house on Peachtree Road, with my mother and me at such odds and a wire-grass outlander ensconced at the bedside of their fallen employer. But they never betrayed by so much as an eye-blink that they felt grief or unease. Perhaps they did not. Shem fetched trays for me and helped me move furniture and volunteered, occasionally, to drive me somewhere, and Martha cooked and cleaned for me and washed my clothes and grumbled and fussed and muttered just as she always had, and I thought more than once how much we all owed to their constancy, and how excruciatingly little we deserved it.
Once, when Shem had driven my mother away in the Rolls, I went up to the big house and climbed the stairs to where my father lay in the unspeakable seraglio that had been created for him by the triumphant Mr. Ronnie, and sat for an hour in the chair by his bed. He looked at me with the one fierce, membraned old eagle’s eye that was open, and the skewed mouth moved a few times and a sound like a maddened beehive came from it, and the fingers of one wasted hand scrabbled at the bed covers, but he could do or say no more than that, and was so sapped and bleached and twisted that I could recognize literally nothing of the fierce blond Visigoth who had loomed over my childhood except the enraged, blue-white eye, and did not mind when the nurse came and drove me away. It was months before I went back. On the whole I saw little reason, for a long time, to leave the summerhouse.
I could not, now, leave Atlanta for Vermont or New York or anywhere else. I was free enough to go of course, but it was somehow unthinkable. I suppose it was an obscure and savage kind of pride that kept me captive in a small house behind my own great one, in hiding from the woman who had betrayed me before her and my entire world. Or perhaps it was depression; the real, clinical kind, which saps will and freezes limbs and thickens thought and reaction. Lucy told me later that she thought so; she was no stranger, by then, to the deeper malaises of the human spirit.
But I did not feel sad or anxious or even discomfited in those diamond-bright early days of my first winter at home. I felt, in the bowered fastness of the little white Georgian summerhouse, as clear and still and neutral and somehow fitted as mountain water in a pool. Later, I thought, I would decide what course I would set my life upon; later I would make calls, write letters, see people, think of leaving the summerhouse and the city and the South once more, find a direction and a momentum. Later I would explore how I felt about my father, and perhaps even begin to touch, very gently and infinitely slowly, the interior crypt where I had buried the enormity of Pumphouse Hill and the fire and my mother’s words. Later…
I did not even think of seeing my mother.
I have said that Buckhead circled the wagons and cast me out on the plain, but that is not entirely true. From the beginning Lucy came, almost every night at first, and always with Jack in tow because the Volkswagen had finally died in its tracks and they had, now, only the little Ford station wagon that had been the one thing he brought away from his first marriage, and they rode to and from Damascus House in it. The first night she came, after about a week of trying to reach me on the telephone, she said, “I don’t care what the papers say and I don’t care what you’re not saying. I know that you had nothing to do with that horrible slum or the fire or any of it, and I think somebody is hanging you out to dry. I don’t know for sure, but I suppose it’s Aunt Olivia. It makes me madder than shit that you won’t talk to me about it, but if you won’t, and if you want to bury yourself out here for a million years, that’s okay with me. You can’t stop me from coming by here, and you can’t fire me, and I won’t quit. Now. I’m not going to talk about it anymore until you bring it up yourself. I just want you to know that I love you and you can’t fool me.”
“I know it,” I said. “I love you, too. Tell me what’s happening at Damascus House.”
And she launched into her newest tale of sit-ins and marches and Martin Luther King sightings, while Jack Venable sprawled before my fire, drinking scotch and eating peanuts and smiling at her with his whole good, gray heart.
It seemed outwardly more a badge of Lucy’s newly espoused high-mindedness than of any essential poverty that she wore her pilled and shapeless high school sweaters and skirts, and that her shoes were thin-soled and scuffed and her only winter coat the one Aunt Willa had bought her at the Wood Valley Shop the year of her aborted debut. She wore them all with her usual dash and slouching elegance, so that, on her long, thin-to-bone body, they seemed rakish and perversely attractive. But I knew that between them she and Jack must scarcely make enough at Damascus House to keep food on their table and gas in the Ford. Jack’s Harris Tweed jacket was good, but so old that its cuffs and collar were frayed, and his pants were shiny and stretched taut over his ample rump. I wished, that winter, that I could just go out and charge an entire new wardrobe for Lucy at Rich’s or at Frohsin’s or J. P. Allen’s. And I probably could have done so. I have an idea my mother would have paid, silently and swiftly, any bills I might have incurred. It was part of the enslaving pride that I incurred, that winter and spring, almost no expenses at all.
Sarah and Charlie came, too. The first time, they sat side by Side on the sofa in the summerhouse living room, dressed almost alike in gray flannel slacks and loafers and oxford shirts under crewneck sweaters, and I was struck, as I never had been before, how similar physically they were, now that Sarah’s pregnancy had squared her off and puffed her vivid cheeks slightly. Both were small and dark and solid, there in the low lamp-and firelight, and both wore the same expression of determined cheerfulness. Strain showed itself in every line of their bodies, though, and twice they spoke together and stopped, and began again, and broke off, laughing uncomfortably. They talked of everything except the one thing on all our minds: the charring of children in the glacial predawn of Pumphouse Hill. I don’t think it would have been so bad if they had come alone to see me, but together Sarah and Charlie Gentry had a newly acquired gloss of genteel conventionality that neither had ever worn separately. It was as if the only map they had for marriage was the elaborate and banal one that had circulated for half a century in Buckhead.
Finally, Sarah knit her dark brows together and said, “Listen, Shep, something feels queer to me and I want to get it out in the open,” and I saw Charlie, behind her, shake his head quickly at me, no. So I knew then, if I had not before, that Charlie knew the truth of Pumphouse Hill, but that he and Ben and the Club had deemed that their women not be told, not even Sarah. Of course. The old code would be brought into service now, in the face of unpleasantness and disgrace: Let us protect our impressionable, frail women, even at the cost of trivializing them. To me the cost was much higher; it was dishonor. Sarah Cameron Gentry would have been better able to deal with Pumphouse Hill, as she was with all reality, than any of them.
But I said, lightly, “Everything feels queer to you, probably. It’s called pregnant. You look great, Sarah. How do you feel? You weren’t too pert there for a while.”
She stared at me out of the black-fringed sherry eyes for a moment, and then said, “Oh, all right, Shep. I’ll play this stupid game, whatever it is, that you and Daddy and Charlie have thought up. But you simply have no idea how childish it is. Yes, I feel terrific, thanks. No more morning sickness, no nothing. But ‘great’ is, I think, the wrong term. What I look like is an illustration for a story on unwed teenage mothers in some damn woman’s magazine.”
I laughed aloud and Charlie did, too—more out of relief that the taboo had not been broken, I think, than at the aptness of Sarah’s description of herself. But she was right. With her scrubbed face and huge, clear eyes and glossy red cheeks and tousled cap of curls, the small shelf of pregnancy that showed under the crewneck sweater made her look like a waif on the way to the Florence Crittenton home for wayward girls. Her athlete’s muscles had kept the rest of her slender body taut, and her deep breasts were hidden under the oversized sweater, and she looked entirely as young as she had that long-ago day out at the Chattahoochee River, when I had first become aware of her as a woman. It seemed, all at once, incredible that so much time and change and pain had passed between us.
A week later, on a warm night in February, she came again to the summerhouse. This time she was alone.
“Something is wrong. I want you to tell me what it is,” she said without preamble, sitting down beside me on the sofa and peering into my face.
“Nothing is wrong in the way you mean,” I said, knowing that she knew I was lying. “Plenty is wrong, of course, but you know about that. It’s going to take me a long time to get over the fire.”
“I hate this,” she said, leaning back and jamming her hands into the pockets of her maternity top. “I absolutely hate this stupid…code of silence, or whatever it is. It dishonors all of us, but it dishonors me the worst. For God’s sake, Shep, this is me. Can you possibly think so little of me that you won’t trust me with the truth? Don’t you know by now that I would never tell anyone else, if you asked me not to? Having this between us is…a wall. A wall we can’t get around or over.”
“Please don’t ask me, Sarah,” I said, in a tight, low voice.
“I don’t have to ask you,” she said. “I know. It wasn’t you, was it? It wasn’t you, and everybody is letting you take the blame for it. Oh, Shep, I hate them all, and I almost hate you for letting them do it—”
“Sarah!” My eyes were shut tight with pain and despair. Her words and her rich, low voice were red-hot iron spears in my heart.
“Okay,” she said softly. “All right. I’m sorry. I won’t put you through any more of this. Will you give me some coffee, or a cup of tea? I’d absolutely love a bourbon and water, but that’s out until the baby comes.”
I heated water and poured it into an old Quimper cup with a tea bag and brought it, with one teaspoon of sugar as she took it, and put it on the table beside her.
“Thanks,” she said, but she did not drink the tea. She sat, arms around her knees, staring into the ashes of last week’s dead fire, which I had not yet cleaned out of the fireplace.
Out of nowhere, I heard myself say, “Sarah, are you happy?” and then wished I could bite off my tongue. We had been so careful, both of us, when we met, to steer our conversations extravagantly wide of these rapids.
She looked at me without surprise.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I am happy. Not in the way you mean, I don’t think, but in another and very good way I am happy. How could I not be? Charlie is maybe the best man I’ve ever known, in the real sense of the word, and he’s wonderful to me, and this baby has made me happier than I ever dreamed it would. I really didn’t know I was going to feel this way about having a baby. I’ll probably have seven thousand of them.”
She paused, and then she said, “I won’t ever be happy the way we could have been happy together, but this is another thing entirely, and it was a total surprise to me. I did marry Charlie on the rebound, Shep, and he knew I did, and I don’t deserve what I got in return for that. But you don’t have to worry about me.”
“I won’t, then,” I said, my eyes stinging. “Are you painting now?”
She laughed, uncomfortably, I thought. “Where in the world would I paint in that doll’s house?” she said. “And then Dr. Farmer doesn’t want me to fool around with all that lead until the baby’s here. There’ll be plenty of time for painting.”
“Don’t stop too long,” I said. “You’re too good. It’s too much a part of you.”
“It was a part of something else,” she said. Her voice sounded as though she was talking to herself. “It just doesn’t seem to have anything to do with now. It’s…not real, somehow.”
I was silent, and so was she. She drank off her tea, and looked at me obliquely, and I was aware that there had sprung up in the air between us a strain so intense and uncomfortable that it was almost palpable. We were out of things that could safely be spoken of, and neither of us dared enter that other country.
Finally she rose and I walked to the door with her, and she reached up and kissed me on the cheek and said, “Is this as hard on you as it is on me?”
“Yes,” I said.
“I thought it was,” she said, grinning her old light-up-the-world grin. My heart did its now-accustomed, aching fish flop.
“I don’t think I’ll come again, Shep,” she said. “Maybe sometime with Charlie, but not often. You understand why, I know. And I think you know that we…that I love you. I’ll be here in two seconds flat if you need me. But we can’t be…just friends.”
“No,” I said. It was true. Sarah and I could be perfectly amiable acquaintances, and we had, at least once, been truly glorious lovers, but simple friendship was now forever lost to us.
For the first time since that night so long ago in the same room with Lucy, I drank until the bourbon tide took me completely under and when I awoke it was morning, and the sun was high.
On a day in March of booming wind and high sun, when the first of the great spring skies had begun, a man from Southern Bell came in his panel truck with instructions to install a telephone in the summerhouse. When I asked him who had authorized it, he jerked a thumb backward and said, “Lady in the big house yonder.”
“Well, you can tell the lady in the big house yonder that I don’t want a telephone, thanks just the same,” I said. “Wait a minute, let me get you something for your trouble, though.”
“You Mr. Bondurant?” he said.
“Yes.”
“Lady said to tell you not to be an ass, that she was tired of waiting for you to come to her, and she couldn’t very well come to you. Said to call her the minute this thing was in. Said you’d know who she was.”
I did, too. The “ass” had tipped me off. It was not my mother’s style.
When the phone was installed, I sat down and dialed Merrivale House. Dorothy Cameron answered on the second ring.
“Well,” she said. “The corpse that speaks like a man. Can you walk, too, or is it just the voice that works?”
“Dorothy, you ought to know me well enough to know I don’t want this goddamned thing,” I said. “Appreciate the gesture though I do. My mother will be on it fourteen times a day.”
“She won’t if you don’t tell her you have it,” she said. “I told them to bill me for it. It’s not charity. I fully intend you to pay me back. Listen, Shep, I want to see you. Enough of this foolishness is enough. I’d come over there, but somebody would be sure to see me—I’m not about to crawl through the brush with a knife in my teeth like Ben does—and it would get back to Olivia that I was sneaking over there to see you, when I won’t even speak to her, and the fat really would be in the fire. I want to be able to talk to you when I want to, and for starters I want you to come over here.”
“Over there?” I said. “Now?”
“Well, now would be wonderful, but I don’t think I can expect that from Buckhead’s only authentic hermit, can I? No, come after dark, if you don’t want to see anybody, and let yourself in the sun porch door. Ben will be downtown at a meeting tonight.”
“I don’t know, Dorothy,” I began. The thought of leaving the summerhouse suddenly panicked me.
“Get over here, Shep, before you freeze up entirely and really aren’t able to leave that pretty little prison of yours,” she said curtly, and I said I would. I knew that I would have to leave the summerhouse sometime and venture out into the world, and that what she said was true. I was indeed in danger, as each day went by, of never leaving it at all.
I started out after dark that night, thinking to go through the woods, but suddenly the close-pressing undergrowth and trees felt suffocating and fetid, and the night wind was dense and heavy with swelling buds and sweetness and the promise of spring. On impulse I turned toward the big house and began to trot, and jogged past it down the drive to the sidewalk, and soon was loping flat out up Peachtree Road toward Muscogee. I wore tennis shoes and my old high school warm-up sweats, and the sidewalk felt wonderful under my feet, almost springy, and the tight muscles in my calves and things worked and throbbed and loosened. There was no one on the sidewalk, though cars went by steadily on Peachtree Road, and except for the pale pools of the streetlights, I ran in cool, sweet darkness. My heart labored in my chest, and a stitch started, flamelike, under my ribs, but the singing, free-ranging wind ran behind me, propelling me along, and by the time I turned the corner onto Muscogee and began the long pound down its first dark hill, I felt that I was naked as a newborn and swimming, drowning in air and space. It was a wonderful feeling, glorious. When I came crunching up to the side door to the Camerons’s sun porch I was soaked through and blowing like a dolphin, but I felt light as a hollowed reed, and clean.
I hugged Dorothy Cameron in an excess of euphoria, aware all at once how very much I had missed her. In her long cherry velvet robe she looked, in the lamplight, so much like Sarah that I had to laugh. Only the streaks of silver in her coarse curls gave her age away, those and the fine little lines that radiated out from the corners of her eyes. Her strong chin and cheekbones were just as clean and chiseled as Sarah’s, and her step as light. She laughed back at me, and hugged me, and held her nose lightly.
“To quote Leroy,” she said, “you smells tired. Is you been working?”
“No,” I said. “I’s been running.”
She poured me a bourbon without asking if I wanted it, and one for herself, and we sat in the little sun porch that was almost as familiar to me as the one at 2500 Peachtree Road, and talked. On shelves and on the paneling of the fireplace wall the lares and penates of that great house rested: Ben’s civic awards and honorary degrees and diplomas, young Ben’s trophies and plaques, Sarah’s swimming and diving ribbons and medals and her wonderful, incandescent paintings. I felt a keen physical pang looking at the paintings; they were like the left-behind clothing of someone who had died. Ben’s trophies troubled me, too, though the import of the feeling eluded me. I kept my eyes, for the rest of the evening, on Dorothy.
She did not speak of the fire and its aftermath except to say, “It’s time you began to come out of the summerhouse now,” and, when I asked her if she really hadn’t spoken to my mother since, “I really haven’t and I probably won’t. She’s beyond my forgiveness or lack of it, but she shan’t have it, anyway.”
And so I knew that she, unlike her daughter, had been told of my mother’s part in the thing, and was, like the men of the Club, a member of the conspiracy of silence. I did not think she was a willing one. I knew that Ben had always told her everything and would not hold this from her, but I knew, too, that he would swear her to silence, and that she would honor it, even while hating her pledge. I suspected that she was the only woman in Atlanta except my mother and probably a number of black women who knew the entire truth. Something smoothed and eased deep within me, and a vestigial kind of peace breathed itself across my heart.
We talked, instead, of the comings and goings of Buckhead, and of its gossip and eccentricities, and of Ben’s hopeful young term in the fast-changing city, and of the red-haired young president with his fingers in the sky as well as the earth, and of the accelerating civil rights movement and Lucy’s deepening involvement in it. We talked of gardening and music, and the litter of kittens out in the garage, and the greening trees and the newly built beaver dam in the cold, deep little lake up at Tate, and of art and drama and travel. She said, ruefully, that she and Ben had had to give up a long-dreamed-of trip to Europe that May with more than a hundred members of the Atlanta Art Association, because Ben felt that a newly elected mayor shouldn’t spend a month during the first year of his administration away from his city.
“I see his point,” she said. “It would look awful. But Lord, I hate to miss that trip. Practically everybody on it is a lifelong friend of ours. It would be like a monthlong house party. It’s been a long time since Ben and I have just cut loose and done anything silly. This would have been the perfect excuse. I tried to give the trip to Sarah and Charlie, but of course she’s due in early June, and they don’t get back until then. You don’t want to go and take a friend, do you?”
“Not on your life,” I said. “My mother’s going. I don’t think Europe’s big enough for both of us.”
She reached over and squeezed my hand. “If you can joke about it, you’re going to be all right,” she said.
“Of course I am,” I said. “Did you think I wasn’t?”
“I didn’t know. It’s been as bad a thing as you’re likely to have in your life.”
“Well, then,” I said, “maybe it’s good to get it over with early. From here on out will be gravy.”
When I was set to leave, Dorothy Cameron did a wonderful thing for me. She probably did not even know how wonderful, though I think she had some idea that it would be useful. She took me into their library and showed me five large wooden crates sitting there on the old stone floor, and said that they were the diaries and journals her father, grandfather and great-grandfather had kept from childhood on. Three complete, lovingly and faithfully detailed patrician lives, bridging more than two hundred years and reaching from a Dorsetshire manor house to the warm red earth of Virginia, and then down through the Carolinas to, finally, Atlanta. The Chase men of Merrivale House, Dorset, and points far west and south, alive now in fine, spidery writing in volume after volume of yellowed vellum.
“It’s an idea I had,” she said, when I stood staring at the crates, uncomprehending. “I know how you love pure research, and I know what a gifted writer you are. And I know, too, that to save your soul and sanity you need some real work to do, something valuable. So I’m going to give you my family, instead of dumping them on the historical society where nobody will ever even read them, much less really see what’s there. I’m not just being conceited, Shep. It strikes me that my family is almost laughably, prototypically Georgian—the compleat Georgians, sort of—from England via Virginia and the Carolinas and on down into Georgia and here. We didn’t come over with the debtors just out of prison to Savannah, with Oglethorpe; there’s been lots written about them. We were one of the few relatively educated and wellborn families to migrate to the colonies. I don’t recall ever reading anything comprehensive about that sort of settler. But the South’s bones rest on them. You have a huge work of history and sociology here, all bound together by blood ties, and in the words of the men who lived it. I think you ought to write it. I think you could do a splendid job of it. Altogether, it would take you about twenty years, but I suspect you’ve got the time. And it would be an enormously valuable thing to do. Would you like to try? I’d rather you did this with your life than take to drink or buggery or pedophilia.”
The Compleat Georgian was born that night, and Dorothy was right. I fell in love with the gifted, ornery, eccentric men who were clamoring and jostling to get off those crumbling pages, and the liberation of them did indeed, many times over, save my sanity and my soul. Perhaps it may again. I would very much like to see the Georgian go out into the world, fully fleshed and breathing. If it should happen, it will be because Dorothy Cameron knew on that night, as perhaps no one else alive could know then, what it would take to redeem me. And she gave me, that evening, the next quarter century of my life. When I went home it was with Leroy in Ben’s Lincoln, the five crates of Chases shimmering in their life and richness on the backseat and in the trunk.
I unloaded them that very evening, and the next morning, even before I could get a carpenter in to measure for the bookcases that would be needed to house them, I sat down on the floor in a pool of spring sunlight and began.
I had a sense that spring that I was, slowly and imperceptibly, fashioning a life for myself as well as an order for those other lives. Before, in the bowels of the New York Public Library, I had been merely passing through antiquity, biding time in the parchment lives of others. Now I was beginning to map a universe wherein I, as well as those captive Southerners, might honorably live. The thought was deeply satisfying, and fed, in part, the insatiable mouth of the pain that the fire and its aftermath, and my mother’s terrified treachery, had unleashed.
It was a good thing. Almost no one from my previous life in Buckhead came near me that spring. I don’t think it was censure so much as embarrassment, a kind of tribal reticence for which I myself had set the standard with my withdrawal, that kept the Buckhead Boys away from me. A.J. came, of course. And Charlie looked in occasionally, and Ben, and I talked with Dorothy Cameron regularly, but Sarah did not come again, and in mid-spring, even Lucy stopped her nearly nightly visits to the summerhouse with Jack. She called me one night, tears thick in her throaty voice, and told me that Jack had balked at coming by the house that evening, and that they had had a fight about it, and he had ended by refusing to visit anymore and forbidding her to come alone on the rare occasions when she had the Ford to herself.
“It’s not you, Gibby,” she said, around drags from her cigarette. She was drinking, too; I could hear the chink of ice against glass over the wire. “He’s truly fond of you. It’s me. He says I’m a bad example to the children, and that I’m neglecting them and spending all my free time with you. He says from now on we’re coming straight home from work and doing things with the boys, like a normal family. It’s bullshit, of course. We never were a normal family. They’re not normal kids. They never liked me worth a damn, and it’s worse now than it ever was, and they hate every minute I spend with them. These evenings together around the goddamned family hearth are as much an ordeal for them as they are for me. But Jack eats them up. All of a sudden he wants us to be Ozzie and Harriet, or the fucking Cleavers, or somebody. He knew I wasn’t like that when he married me. He knew what I was; he knew where my real commitment was. This is a total switch. I can’t be that kind of stupid, smirking little wife and mother.”
All her saintliness seemed, in that moment, to have fled, and I was vaguely relieved.
“Maybe the kids will come around when they’re a little more used to you,” I said. “Nights at home with them for a while can’t be all that bad.”
“With those two they’re hideous,” she said. “Unless you’re into advanced nose picking. There’s no way they’re ever going to accept me, Gibby. To their little minds now it was I who ran off their sainted mother. And to make it worse, Jack wants us to have a baby of our own. He’s thrown away my diaphragm. We try every night—God, how we try. Wouldn’t that be a fine mess, me pregnant as a yard dog trying to march and drive a bus and register voters?”
“Don’t you want children?” I asked. “Somehow I just took it for granted that you’d have them.”
“Not everybody is as maternal as your precious Sarah,” she said waspishly, and then, “Oh Lord, I’m sorry. It’s the liquor talking. I guess I’m jealous because I suspect that she’ll be a better mother than I could in a million years. And then I have to be honest with you, I hate this business of your rooting around over there in Sarah’s family tree.”
“Why on earth would you hate that?” I said, honestly surprised. She had professed herself overjoyed that I had found significant and absorbing work to do. It would, she had said, make her feel much better to think that I was not withering with loneliness and isolation.
“I don’t really know,” she said. “It’s illogical and totally unworthy. I guess…I just feel like it’s one more tie to Sarah Cameron, and one that will last practically all your life. I don’t know why that bothers me, but it does.”
“Sarah is out of my life now, Luce,” I said. “You know that as well as anybody.”
“No, I don’t,” she said in a low voice. But she dropped the subject, and thereafter, every night, her throaty “Hey, Gibby?” (Pause. Long, indrawn breath of cigarette smoke.) “It’s Lucy, honey,” prefaced my daily dose of life outside the summerhouse walls. I came to depend on it, and miss it keenly when, on rare occasions, it did not come. During those first long months of isolation, Lucy was my window on the world.
In early May my mother left with a hundred-odd members of the Atlanta Art Association for her month long tour of the galleries and museums of Europe, and I felt free to wander, in the late afternoons, into the big house. Sometimes I visited with Shem and Martha Cater in the kitchen, and sometimes I went upstairs and sat for a few silent minutes beside my father, mute and captive still in his warped flesh, and sometimes I simply sat on the little sun porch off the living room, with the afternoon light falling on the black and white tiled floor and the deep green walls and the airy white wicker furniture, deep-cushioned in what my mother always called “Dorothy Draper red.” The cushion in the big armchair that had been my father’s was gradually springing back without the ongoing burden of his heavy frame, and the indentation there now fit my own thinner and lighter body. It was the only place in my mother’s house where I felt that I had some small territorial imperative. By this time, I no longer thought of it as my father’s house. Even an ocean away, my mother dominated it now.
On the first Sunday morning in June, I was hovering between sleep and an elusive wakefulness that promised breakfast in the sun-room of the big house, where I had taken it for the past four Sunday mornings of my mother’s absence, with a pot of coffee and the Sunday papers. She was due home from Paris late that evening, and then my tenure as master of the manor at 2500 Peachtree Road would end. I did not mind, except for the loss of those tranquil Sunday mornings, and was considering abandoning sleep for waffles and sausage when I heard the bedroom door open and a soft voice call, “Shep?”
Even with my eyes closed, even half-submerged in sleep, I knew the voice was Sarah’s, but I was not surprised. In that half-lit world where all ambiguities can be rationalized and all discrepancies justified, I felt only a deep, sweet contentment at the rightness of Sarah’s voice calling me out of sleep, and I felt myself smile even before I opened my eyes. I kept them closed for a moment, knowing that the perfect contentment would flee with the falling of the light upon them.
I felt her weight as she sat down on the edge of my bed, and was reaching out for her, eyes still closed, when she said again, “Shep,” and this time something in her voice snapped my lids up as if they were attached to wires. I sat up in the tumbled bed and blinked against the fierce white June light streaming in from the door through which she had just entered, and looked at her.
At first I thought she had come to tell me of some terrible thing that had happened to Charlie, or her soon-to-be-born baby, for her face was so swollen and distorted from crying that I could scarcely recognize her, and I could hear the sobs caught in her throat and see its strong column trying to work around the strangling brine. Fresh tears ran from her reddened eyes and dripped from her chin onto her maternity smock, and I stared stupidly at the splotches they made against the blue chambray. It was only then that I realized that nothing could be wrong with the baby, because it was still there, a great, elastic mound under the smock. I lifted my eyes in dread from the front of her to her face.
“Has something happened to Charlie?” I said. I could scarcely form the words.
“No. Not Charlie. It’s…Shep, Daddy just got a call from Carter Stephenson at WSB. The…the…your mother’s plane…it crashed, Shep. It crashed on takeoff at Orly, and I’m afraid they’re all gone. It’s just now coming in over the radio, and there aren’t any details yet, but Daddy made sure there’s been no mistake, and…I’m sorry.” She dropped her face into her hands and wept aloud. “I’m sorry. I came over here to tell you because I didn’t want you to hear it by yourself on the radio or when some reporter calls, and now I can’t…”
“All gone,” I said, stupidly. “That’s absurd, Sarah. It has to be a mistake. There were too many of them….”
The pit of my stomach was icy cold, and the coldness was seeping up and out and into my arms and legs, turning them flaccid and useless. I remember thinking very clearly that if I got up out of the bed I would crumple to the floor, or worse, wet my pants. But beyond that I could not seem to think, and I did not feel anything at all. Despite what I had said, I knew, somehow, that Sarah was right. She would never come here to bring me such news unless she was absolutely sure that there could be no possibility of mistake. My ponderous mind, struggling to get into some kind of forward gear, embraced another tidbit of information like a jellyfish settling down over a minnow, and set about assimilating it.
“More than a hundred,” I said. “More than a hundred, and I…you…we knew all of them. That was Buckhead, Sarah. Those were the people we’ve known all our lives.”
“One hundred and six of them,” she said, as if she were reciting sums in school. “One hundred and six members of the Art Association. One hundred and fourteen people from Georgia. A hundred and twenty-nine in all…”
“Survivors,” I said thickly. “Were there any survivors? You can’t be sure about that yet….”
“Two or three people, when part of the plane broke off,” she said.
“Maybe…” I began.
“No. They were all crew. Nobody else. Nobody, Shep. All gone.”
“Jesus,” I said, utterly crazily. “Aunt Willa can move out of the attic.”
“Oh, my poor darling Shep,” Sarah cried, and put her arms around me and buried her face in my shoulder, in the hollow where it had always fit so neatly, and I held her as she cried, thinking only that holding Sarah now was like holding a basketball between us. The glacier that had crept down over my mind was snowy and seamless, perfect.
Presently she lifted her head and wiped her eyes and looked at me.
“I told Charlie I’d be right back,” she said. “He’s over at the house with Mother. Daddy’s gone down to City Hall. He’s going to Paris tonight. Mother is in pretty bad shape; everybody on that plane was her and Daddy’s close friend from babyhood, practically. I wanted to come and tell you, and Charlie said I should…. Shep, I’d like to stay with you today, if you’ll let me. I don’t want you to be by yourself. Or maybe you’d come back with me to Mother and Daddy’s…”
“No. Thank you, Sarah, but I think I’ll go out to Lucy’s,” I said, surprising myself. I could think of little with my rational mind that would be as comfortless as that meager little farmhouse in the company of a taciturn Jack Venable and the two sullen changelings. But something in me, powerful and visceral, wanted my cousin Lucy. We had both lost the great anchor of our childhoods, cold iron though it was, and I did not think that Sarah, with her constant legacy of Ben and Dorothy’s clear, sunlit love, could begin to understand the clutching complexities of that loss. I was perfectly numb now, but I knew that the numbness would not last, and when it lifted, I wanted to be with the one person who would understand my canted grief—if grief, indeed, there was.
“I understand,” Sarah said in a small voice, and I thought my old radar, once so alive to all of Sarah’s tides and nuances, detected a tiny edge of hurt.
She got up to go, ponderous and bowed under the weight of the low-hanging baby and the grief, and said, “We’re only a few steps away, and we want you to come or call any time of the night or day. Mother said to tell you the guest room is made up and ready, if you’d like to spend the night, and in any case she’ll call in an hour or two.”
“Thank you. Thank you both,” I said. “Tell her for me. And thank you for coming, Sarah. It must have been hard for you….”
“Of course I would come,” she said, beginning to cry again. “Of course I would come. Nothing on earth would have kept me away….”
“I know that,” I said. “Go on home now. Your mother will need you. I’ll be all right. I’ve got to talk to Aunt Willa and see about telling my father.”
“Oh God,” she said, and went out of the summer-house, sobbing.
After she left, I simply sat there in the June morning, trying to keep the cold silence white and perfect in my mind. But the edges of it now were beginning to be licked with flame.
The telephone rang, and I lifted it and laid the receiver on the table, where it burred hopelessly for what seemed an eternity before stopping. I got up and walked on reedy, wavering legs over to the radio, and switched it on.
The reports were fuller now, and clearer. At a little after noon, 6:29 A.M. Atlanta time, the chartered Air France Boeing 707, carrying a full crew and complement of passengers, skidded off a runway on takeoff at Orly Field, Paris, killing all passengers and all but two of its crew in a fireball of yellow JP4 fuel when it exploded in a gully at the end of the strip. Among the victims were 106 members of the Atlanta Art Association returning from a month’s vacation via the chartered jet. It was the worst single-plane disaster in aviation history. Most of the charred bodies, still strapped into their seats, had not yet been recovered, but those that had were being taken to temporary morgues in an old part of Orly Airport. Later they would be taken to the morgues of Paris….
I sat there for a long time, mindless, floating, while the news from France swelled and grew like a monstrous lily. An entire family of six: the Carters…I had known them all. Sister Carter had been one of the prettiest Pinks of my generation. Freddy had run track two years ahead of me at North Fulton. Twenty-seven married couples, many of them with children back in Atlanta. Doctors, lawyers, brokers, businessmen, bankers, ministers, artists, patrons, philanthropists—the civic, cultural and business leadership of a city of a million people, their names familiar to anyone who read the newspapers of that city, in stories concerning the Capital City Club, the Driving Club, business development, hospital aid, opera, symphony, drama, art shows…Thirteen Junior Leaguers. Thirty members of the Driving Club. Twenty-one of the Capital City Club. Old Atlanta. Buckhead. “In the City of Light,” a eulogy later that week read, “all that bright light gone.”
And Olivia Redwine Bondurant. She, too. Gone. Burned up in a radiant mushroom three thousand miles away from Peachtree Road. I was, I thought in dull surprise, in all but name, an orphan. The thought was as alien as if someone had suddenly assigned to me the appellation “assassin” or “revolutionary,” and had as little relevance. I could not rid myself of the image of my mother’s long, lustrous, black hair, loose from its elegant twist and aflame. For a long time it was the only image in all that silent, hissing whiteness in my mind. Around me, the silence hammered and rang, and the light grew very bright, then dimmed.
After a while I picked up the telephone and dialed Lucy and Jack’s number. Jack answered on the second ring, in an angry whisper.
“She’s been trying to get you for an hour,” he said. “She was hysterical; she needed you, and she couldn’t get you.”
“I’ll come now,” I said. I was surprised to hear that my voice was steady.
“No. I’ve given her two tranquilizers and she’s finally asleep. Don’t come. It will only upset her now. Later, maybe, when she’s had some rest—”
I hung up on him.
“What about me, you ass hole?” I said aloud, but without heat. “It’s my mother who was sizzled down to a cinder, not Lucy’s.” I could not seem to stop yawning. I sat for a moment, not knowing what to do with myself, and then got up and walked up to the big house. Aunt Willa would, I knew, be at church at Saint Philip’s, but I did not want a nurse blurting out the news to my father.
Someone had obviously just called Shem and Martha Cater, looking for me, for Shem was on his way out the back door, his dark face actually ashen.
“Mr. Shep…” he began, and I saw that there were tears in his brown eyes, and that the yellowed whites of them were red with veins. I could not imagine that he had in any sense of the word loved my mother, but she and my father had given shape and definition to his and Martha’s lives for the past thirty years or so. The simple shock must have been profound. They would feel as lost and rudderless as I did.
“Has my father heard?” I said.
“No, suh. He asleep. I tol’ the nurse to give him two of them pills, an’ hush up that cryin’ when he wake up. He gon’ sleep for a spell now.”
“Good work, Shem,” I said.
I put my hand on his shoulder, and he covered it with his rough brown one. We stood silent for a moment, and then he said, simply, “What we gon’ do now?”
“Bring the Rolls around,” I said, again enormously surprised at my own words, but knowing instantly that they were the right ones. “I’m going down to City Hall.”
“Yessuh,” he said, straightening his shoulders, and I thought that his step, as he turned away toward the garage, was stronger and more purposeful. When I had changed clothes and come out into the portico, he was standing beside the ridiculous, shining cliff of a car almost at attention, wearing a severe, dark livery that I had never seen.
“What’s with the uniform, Shem?” I said, getting into the backseat.
“You goin’ to see about bringing Miss Olivia home, ain’t you?” he said.
“I guess so,” I said, knowing only then that I was.
“Well, then,” Shem Cater said.
He said nothing else on the drive down the empty, sunny Sunday waste of Peachtree Road, a black man of Buckhead on the first leg of a long, long journey to bring his mistress home again. His silence, and the livery, pierced me like nothing else did the whole of that endless and terrible day.
It felt strange to be out, after the weeks of seclusion in the summerhouse. The very air and space around me pressed on my back and shoulders, as if I were stark naked, and terribly vulnerable. The feeling intensified the overbright queerness of the day.
The street in front of City Hall was deserted, but the flags already hung at half-staff, and when I climbed the curving, shallow marble stairs to Ben Cameron’s office on the second floor, the crowd spilled out into the corridor. I recognized several people I knew, and stared, puzzled, until I remembered that of course, the crash in France was a Buckhead tragedy; almost everyone who had died in that ditch outside Paris had lived within two or three square miles of one another. These familiar faces, white and blank with the same shock that must have been mirrored on mine, were here on the same mission I was: to learn from our elected chieftain what we must do next. We nodded to one another, but did not speak. The tears, the comfortings, the mutual embraces, would come later, with the pain.
Most of the crowd were reporters, though, and I was scarcely on the top step before I saw recognition dawn on the first face, and then two or three of them detached themselves from the rest and began to move toward me. I could read “human interest” all over their pale, avid faces; here was the very fallen princeling slum lord whose mother had so recently condemned him for all the world’s delectation, come to lay claim to her charred flesh. Cameras swung into position and sweat broke out on my forehead. My heart began a sick trip-hammering, and nausea rose into my throat. I turned my head from side to side in panic; there was no retreat from them, and I knew that I could not face them.
I saw them lower the cameras and step back before I felt the hands on my shoulders from behind, and then they parted and made a path for me, and I was steered through them and into the outer office and beyond it, into Ben’s own private office. The door closed firmly, and I turned around to see Glenn Pickens, massive and looming in his dark suit and tie, his long yellow face hard and still and something looking out of his obsidian eyes that would have scattered far more than a band of reporters.
“Thanks, Glenn,” I said weakly.
“I’m sorry, Shep,” he said in his flat voice. “About all of it.”
We looked at each other for a moment, and then he turned and went out of the office without speaking again and closed the door behind him, and I looked through the small knot of silent people to where Ben Cameron leaned against his desk, a telephone to his ear and one in his hand. He looked up and saw me and paused a moment in his conversation, and then lifted the idle receiver and motioned me into a chair and went on talking. I sat down and watched him.
He was dressed in the tennis clothes he had obviously been wearing when the first call came, and there were streaks of red dust on his shoes and shorts. I knew from those that he had been playing at the Rawsons’; they had the only dirt court in Buckhead. His face was bone-white beneath the permanent tan and the scattering of dark freckles across his cheekbones, and the flesh of it looked stretched and flayed, almost hanging from his thin, good bones. He looked older by years than I had ever seen him, and his gray eyes were almost as red and swollen as his daughter’s had been that morning. For the first time I thought what exquisite anguish he must be living. Not only had he lost nearly a hundred of the people who were the mainstays of his life, but he must bury his own grief deep and act with coolness, grace and authority for their families and the city at large; swallow his own pain that theirs might be the more quickly assuaged. Most of us could retreat into the comfort of our substantial caves, dragging our sorrow in behind us like bones, and press close among the pack of our peers for warmth, but he must go now, his own agony deep and silent, to a foreign land and sift those burned bones and see them home again, the eyes of the world upon him, and then come home himself and start his city forward once more. It would be a long time before Ben Cameron could weep, or even sleep. I felt a great rush of pure love for him. I had no doubt at all that he could and would do it, and do it well.
Despite the pandemonium in the outside office, which had been set up as a sort of nerve center for the press, the inner one was quiet. Ben’s assistant, Peg Hartley, ample and tearstained and capable, manned another telephone. Two or three aides came in and out with telegrams and lists and statements to be read and signed. A shrunken, silent Air France representative slumped in a chair by a window. Snake Cheatham’s father and Doug Fowler, Mr. Woodruff’s right-hand man at Coca-Cola, stood together at another window, backs to the room, talking in low voices. Carter Stephenson from WSB and Gordy Farr from the Constitution sat facing each other across a small table, writing furiously. On Ben’s desk I saw a yellow telegram, atop a steadily mounting pile, that read, “Mrs. Kennedy and I are terribly distressed to learn of the plane crash in France which cost your community and the country so heavily. Please convey our very deepest sympathy to the families who experienced this tragedy.” A note in Dorothy’s handwriting said, “I’ve sent Leroy over to get Alice and Bax’s children and their clothes until Tully can get herself together. If anyone calls about them, tell them they’re with us, and I don’t think they know anything yet.”
Alice and Baxter Fuller, young Ben’s age, the latter Ben Senior’s godchild, among the youngest of the couples to die in the crash. Married their freshman year at the university, they had had their family immediately, and the two little boys were now five and three. This had been the first time Alice and Bax had ever left them; I remembered that Dorothy had said she and Ben had practically browbeat them into taking the vacation and leaving the children with their grandmother and nurse. I could only imagine how they must feel about that. Besides being personally beloved of them, Bax Fuller was obviously going to be one of the most luminous of the next generation, a prime contender to take up the torch of the Club. A rising young lawyer, church elder, former president of the Legal Aid Society, Atlanta’s Outstanding Young Man a few years earlier, a director of the state YMCA and member of the Driving Club and Commerce Club, a nearly lone young voice lifted against segregation—and a Buckhead Jell without peer. The flames in my white mind, which had engulfed only the hair of my mother, reached out now to frame another known and living face, this one nearly my own age.
Ben put the phone down and came around the desk and hugged me.
“Bad news, partner,” he said. “Bad day. The worst. I’m sorrier than I can say about your mother.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I’m…me, too. It’s just not possible to believe it, is it?”
“Ah, God, no,” he said, and his voice broke. “Christ, Shep, this was…my entire generation. I grew up with most of these folks. Laura Rainey was the first date I ever had; we went to a swimming party at Sibley French’s house, and she had a two piece bathing suit. We all talked about that for weeks. And if I hadn’t met Dorothy I probably would have married Jane Ellen Alexander. And the first time I ever got drunk—and practically the last—was with Tommy Burns, up at Tate one Fourth of July, on sloe gin. Whit Turner and Howard Shelton and Marjorie Callahan…dear God, it’s like a small city was just wiped out, or a little country. And in a way it was….”
He stopped and rubbed his eyes, and looked at me.
“Is there anything special I can do for you?” he said. “You know I’m going over tonight. I promise you I’ll…see that she gets home safely.”
“I want to go with you, Ben,” I said.
He shook his head back and forth quickly, no, and opened his mouth to speak, and then stopped.
“There’s no way it’s going to be anything but grim,” he said. “And there’s nothing you can do—there’s probably not much even I can do. This is the time for official people, the medical and government boys, and they’re not going to take too kindly to me, much less you…”
“I won’t get in the way,” I said. “You won’t even know I’m there. But I’ve got to go, Ben. And I really want it to be with you.”
“All right,” he said finally. “I guess this is one trip you’ve earned. Got a passport?”
“Oh God—no,” I said.
“Doug,” Ben called across the room to Doug Fowler. “Can the Man pull one more string and get us another passport by tonight?”
Doug Fowler looked dubiously at me. “I guess he can, if it’s absolutely necessary,” he said.
“It is,” Ben Cameron said. “See about another seat on the five-fifty-five Delta flight to New York while you’re at it, too.”
To me he said, “You’re calling in an awful lot of chips at one time, Shep.”
“I know,” I said. “There isn’t any way I can thank you.”
“Yes there is, but that can come later,” he said, and went back to the telephone. I went out to the curb, where Shem Cater was idling the Rolls, and he drove me home to change. On the way, I heard Ben’s voice, deep and quiet and measured, begin an official statement over the radio: “Atlanta has suffered her greatest tragedy and loss. Our deepest sympathy is extended…”
“Turn it off, Shem,” I said, and he did. We rode on home in silence.
An hour later, as I walked into the big house with a small bag, dressed for my flight and dreading with all my cold, still heart going up to tell my father, Aunt Willa came tapping down to meet me, still in the white linen suit she had worn to church. Her face was colorless and blank, and her eyes looked somehow bleached, giving her the unfocused, witless look of a trapped rabbit. Her hands shook slightly, and she kept wetting her red lips with her tongue. I stared at her. What I read on her exquisitely enameled face was not grief, but fear, pure and simple. I could have imagined several reactions from my aunt Willa in the face of losing by violence her sister-in-law and captor, but fear was not one of them.
“Is my father awake?” I said.
“He’s just stirring. I came down to see if you wanted me to tell him. I know it isn’t my place, but he sometimes seems to accept things from me that he won’t from the nurse, and I know how terrible this is for you….” Her voice actually cracked, high and crystalline, with the weight of the fear.
All at once I knew what she was afraid of, and a powerful surge of sympathy stirred me. It was gone quickly, but in its aftermath I felt closer to Willa Slagle Bondurant than I ever had, or ever would again. As awful as her servitude to my mother had been, and as odious her position of sufferance in this house must have felt to her, there was still a sort of warped symbiosis between them, a twisted but unbreakable bond which held her secure even as it bound her fast. Now that her smiling jailer was dead, that tie was gone, and I, the presumed successor, had no reason at all to honor or even tolerate her presence here. Both her dependent daughters were in the care of husbands, and she herself, as she well knew, was, in her tricked-up little attic suite, only one step away from the actual street. I knew, in that instant, so completely how she felt that my own mouth went dry. My own tenure here had often felt precisely that fragile.
I set down my bag and put my arm around her shoulders and sat her down on the bottom stair in the foyer.
“I’d be very grateful if you’d tell him,” I said. “He’s been more your responsibility than anybody’s since we brought him home, and nobody has a better right than you. It’s just something I don’t think I can do. I’ll see about him when I get back, but for the time being, I wish you’d take charge of him.”
She simply looked at me, her huge eyes filling, incredibly, with tears. She did not speak.
“And, Aunt Willa, for God’s sake, get your things out of that damned attic and move them down to Mother’s room,” I said. “There’s no sense in it just sitting there empty, and I’m not about to move from where I am. I want to see you settled in there when I get back, okay?”
She only nodded, tears tracking mascara down her satiny cheeks, the red mouth trembling. She leaned forward and gave me a little hug, and I heard her whisper, “Thank you, Shep.” As I closed the great white door behind me and got into the Rolls, I reached up and touched the wetness her tears had left on my face.
I never saw her cry again.
When I got to the Delta gate that afternoon, Lucy Venable was waiting for me. She sat with a small suitcase beside her, feet firmly together, hands folded in her lap like a good child waiting for her train back to school. Her head was bowed and I could see that her eyes and nose were red, but her face was calm and still, and she showed no signs of the hysteria against which Jack had sedated her that morning. She looked surprisingly well, even rather wonderful, considering both her alleged prostration and her recent appearance. Her blue-black hair was back in its old glossy, raven’s-wing pageboy, falling forward against her high cheekbones, and she wore a red linen sheath and a red lacquered straw pillbox hat and low-heeled alligator pumps, none of which I had ever seen before. Several eyes in the crowd at the gate were on her, and coming upon her like this, unexpectedly and without context, I could see why. Lucy looked entirely herself again, awash, somehow, in the invisible fire that used to cling about her.
She lifted her head and saw me, and jumped up and ran to me, throwing her arms around me, and by now all the eyes swung to us. Her face was devoid of makeup and very pale, but her extraordinary eyes danced with the old October flame, and she smelled of her signature Tabu. She kissed me on the cheek, and I felt her heart hammering against my chest, and she whispered into my ear, “We’re not going to talk about Aunt Olivia, not right now, so don’t worry. I’m going to help you, not make things harder for you.”
“You look really wonderful,” I said. “Did you come to see me off? Where’s Jack?”
“Thanks,” she said, smiling her great, affirming old Lucy-smile. “I borrowed it all, lock, stock and barrel, from Little Lady not two hours ago. And no, I didn’t come to see you off. I came to see you on. And Jack’s at home, sulking in his tent.”
“To see me on…”
“I’m going with you. I borrowed the fare from Carter. I have a seat and a passport—it’s all arranged. There’s nothing at all for you to bother about.”
Before I could reply Ben Cameron came up with Hinton Drexel, the city attorney, and Carter Stephenson from WSB.
“Hello, sugar,” he said, kissing Lucy. “Shep. You’ve got the prettiest bon voyage committee in the place, I see. We about ready? They’re holding a block of seats for us.”
I opened my mouth, not knowing at all what I was going to say, but Lucy spoke before I could.
“I’m coming with you, Mr. Cameron,” she said. “You can put me off this plane if you want to, but I’ll just get on another one if you do. There is no way Shep is going over there to see about his mama without me.”
Ben Cameron looked from her to me in silence, and then shrugged. “It’s a free country,” he said, with a faint grin. “And a free airline. I’m sure Shep will be glad of your company, Lucy.”
And so it was that Lucy Bondurant Venable sat beside me, those long hours into and out of New York, and later, over the limitless black Atlantic, as I flew to Paris, France, to attend to the mortal remains of the mother who had so loved and injured me, and who had never loved her niece at all. It was, I reflected somewhere in midflight over all that wild, heaving blackness, an awesome show of power, even though posthumous.
Ben and Hinton Drexel and Carter Stephenson slept very little. I saw them, heads together in the seats in front of me, talking in low voices, whenever I lurched up out of the thin, sporadic sleep that swirled foglike about me in the darkened plane. Lucy did not talk much. After eating her dinner, during which she told me matter-of-factly that Jack was blackly furious with her for coming and had refused to drive her to the airport, and so she had simply taken a taxi from the farm to Little Lady Rawson’s house on Dellwood and put the arm on Carter for the enormous fare, she said, “I’m going to sleep if I can, and you should, too. Tomorrow is going to be a godawful day,” and huddled up into the corner by the window and slept, her hand in mine. After an hour or so I had the stewardess bring us a couple of blankets and pillows, and tucked Lucy into them and put my own head back, and to my surprise, did sleep a little. The first time I awoke, she had thrashed around in her seat so that her head drooped onto my shoulder, and I laid my cheek on her sleek crown and drifted back under, the clean, warm smell of her hair and her Tabu curling down into sleep with me. Whenever I awoke after that, the soft weight of her, and her scent, told me where I was, and why. When I came fully awake the last time, sweating and struggling up out of dreams of flames and endless running, she was yawning and stretching, and the early sun was touching the blazing silver wings of the big TWA jet, and below us, still blue with darkness, the lights of Paris were going out, one by one.
As we began the long circle for our approach into Orly, Ben came and sat down on the arm of my seat. He had straightened his tie and put his jacket back on and combed the iron-threaded red hair, and looked, incredibly, controlled and immaculate, every inch the mayor of a great city. Only his gray eyes, pouched and dull with fatigue and pain, betrayed the long night’s anguish.
“I want to tell you what I know about the crash,” he said. “There’s probably not going to be time later, and I don’t even know who, if anybody, will be meeting us, and how much English will be spoken. This is everything I have; it’s all the Air France people could give me just before we left New York.”
He took a deep breath, and so did I. Beside me, Lucy shifted in her seat and took my hand. The Air France flight, borne by the chartered Boeing 707 Château de Sully, was about to become alive at last, and I don’t think any of us was sure we could bear the reality.
“They started down the runway on time, at about twelve-thirty,” Ben said. “From what the witnesses say, they never lifted off the ground. The pilot must have realized immediately that something was wrong—apparently he locked the wheels and tried to abort. The tires wore off on the runway, and then the rims; they say you can see the skid marks for about eleven hundred feet. It clipped a couple of telephone poles and jumped an access road and slid another thousand feet on its belly and went into a maintenance shed. That’s what broke it up and probably what caused the explosion—that and all those tons of fuel that flooded through the fuselage. It stopped within a hundred yards of some little town near the airport; they think the pilot was trying to avoid it. It flew apart in several pieces, and they all burned except the tail section. That’s where the crew that survived were. They were thrown clear. Practically the whole village heard and saw it, as well as a crowd at the airport, but nobody has any idea what went wrong, or why the pilot tried to abort. It’s not likely anyone ever will. Fire trucks were there almost immediately, and people from the village, but they couldn’t get close enough to pull anybody out, and in any case it would have been too late. It was…very, very quick.”
Nobody spoke, and then I said, “So they were…blown up.”
“No,” Ben Cameron said. “They were incinerated. The fuel was a fire storm. It burned itself out pretty quickly, but there’s no question of any identification.”
Lucy made a small sound beside me, and her nails dug deep into my palm. I did not feel them; it was only later that I saw the red crescents where they had bitten into the flesh. But she did not cry out.
“I’m sorry, Lucy,” Ben said. “But you need to know what to expect, both of you. I imagine there’ll be some international press there, and we may—you may, Shep—have to try and identify…any personal effects. I don’t want you to be sandbagged in front of reporters and cameras. I’m here to represent the whole city, and you’ll be doing that, too, like it or not, just because you’re with me. If you think you can’t handle it, I’ll get somebody to take you to a private lounge in the airport till we get done there. I surely wouldn’t blame you. I don’t know if I can handle it myself, and I don’t have anybody kin to me down there. Lucy, I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to stay behind when we go…to the morgues. It’s just no place for you.”
“All right, Mr. Cameron,” Lucy said meekly, and I shot a sideways look at her. I knew with my old, infallible Lucy-radar that she had no intention of staying behind while I combed the scene of the sunlit slaughter for evidence of my mother. I knew too, with the same antennae, that she would be all right. I could not say the same for myself. I still felt no emotion, but a fine, delicate trembling had taken possession of my arms and legs, and my veins felt as though they crawled with swarming bees. I did not think I could stand or walk.
After Ben went back to his seat and we began our descent, Lucy took my hand into both of hers and turned it over so that my wrist was exposed. She put her cheek down and pressed it against the thin white bracelet of the scar the kitchen knife had made so long ago, out behind the summerhouse.
“You didn’t faint or get sick or anything that time,” she said. “Remember? You went right ahead and did it, and in the end you were fine. It must have hurt you like hell, because it did me, and I’m not even funny about blood. But you did it. And you can do this. There won’t be any blood, Gibby, and there wasn’t ever any pain. There couldn’t have been time for that. Not even time to be afraid. Just…light. Remember that. Clean, radiant light. That’s all. I know I can do it, and I know you can, too, because we be of one blood, thou and I.”
And even though I knew that she was wrong about the fear, that there would have been time for that, and that one day, sooner or later, the awful speculation about what the last moments before impact must have been like for those hundred of my friends and acquaintances and my mother would come to haunt my days and nights—even though I knew all that as well as I knew that Lucy sat beside me in an airline seat—I knew, too, that I could indeed do what I had come to do. Clean, radiant light…
I could do it.
“I love you, Lucy,” I said.
We stepped out into the hot morning light of Paris and into a controlled frenzy of official sympathy. There must have been thirty or forty people in all, many of them members of the French official family, in frock coats and striped trousers, others representatives of government agencies and private concerns with connections to the airline. The American ambassador, a short, solid man who looked as though he should be walking an I beam high above a city somewhere, was on hand with members of his staff, and behind them all, held at bay by a cordon of blue-coated gendarmes, a couple of hundred reporters waited quietly. I remember virtually nothing of those first minutes except being handed from one pumping hand and working mouth to another, nodding and smiling inanely, with Lucy behind me murmuring softly, over and over, “Merci, monsieur. Merci, bien sûr.”
The only clear thought I carried away with me from that morning was surprise that she knew French—I had not known that she studied it at Scott. Once I looked back and saw that a small throng of the dignified and formidable Frenchmen in their grand, ritual morning costumes were clustered about her, bowing deeply over her outstretched hand and kissing it, and I thought how typical of Lucy that she should come, uninvited and without status, in her sister’s borrowed red, and steal the entire show from the newly prestigious dead of Atlanta. My mother, I thought, would be furious with her. I suppressed a horrifying desire to giggle, and remembered what John Kennedy had said about his wife’s thunderous French conquest: “I am the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris.” In that moment, Ben Cameron and Hinton Drexel and Carter Stephenson and I were the men who had accompanied Lucy Bondurant Venable to Paris. The thought stiffened my spine and legs, and I clung to it as to a buoy in a wild sea.
After the greetings, which seemed to stretch into sunny infinity, we were taken into the airport to an Air France lounge, where the reporters followed us, and Ben held a press conference. The reporters of half a dozen nations were surprisingly deferential and considerate, and Ben fielded their questions with the same dignity and composure with which he had handled the greetings, even though he knew no French, and once even grinned, when a third or fourth reporter inquired politely who the beautiful lady in red was. Lucy was introduced as a niece of one of the victims and I was presented as the bereaved son, and we both nodded and blinked into a hundred exploding flashbulbs, most of which were trained on Lucy, and then, finally, the press conference was ended and we were taken, by limousine, out to the end of runway 26 where the Château de Sully had burrowed into the unforgiving earth like a great, ungainly phoenix missing its appointment with the air, but failing, this time, to rise from its deadly birth flames.
The crash site had not been visible from the air; either we had come in from a different angle, or the dying night had shrouded it. Now, in the clear sun of Monday, June 4, there was no avoiding that blasted moonscape, no leaving that black country of the dead. Desolation spread for hundreds of yards, ashen and silent, and the only thought that ran through my mind as I walked into it behind Ben, Lucy at my side, was a refrain made of her words that morning: “Light. Clean, radiant light…” But there was no light here.
Firemen and police had been at work for twenty-four hours, and the wreckage had been raked over and over again after the bodies had been loaded into mortuary vans and taken away; sifted for the burned memento mori that would aid in identification. The huge tail section, towering four stories into the air, stood intact, a great, ungainly space-age stele. Below it, strewn over the burned earth, chunks of twisted and fused metal were the plane’s unidentifiable vitals, molten and bright as viscera in spots where the soot and char had been knocked off. The four engines were recognizable, but they had been blown so far apart that they were without context on that silent, black plain. Beyond the blackness the little town of Villeneuve le Roi, which the pilot had managed to spare, lay dreaming in the sun. Birds chirped and the knots of people behind the guards’ cordons talked in low voices, staring at the first of the clansmen come from America to bear home their dead, but sound seemed to stop and fall to earth at the edge of the blackness. It was as if that great scar was inimical to any offering from the living. Beside me, her feet scrunching in ashes, Lucy whispered over and over, “We be of one blood, thou and I.” Her hand was cold and tight in mine, and I do not think that she knew what she whispered; it was like a child’s mindless and comforting little incantation. Ahead of me, Ben and Hinton Drexel said nothing at all as they walked. Carter Stephenson scribbled in a small notebook.
We were ankle-deep in those hundred-odd lives. Personal objects were as thick in the rubble and ashes as hailstones after a storm. Most were half-burned and so blackened that it was useless to probe them, but many were recognizable, piercing, incongruous, icons not of death, but of stubborn, unquenchable life. Guidebooks, menus, ashtrays, wallets, traveler’s checks, a French doll bought for a child who would never hold it, and incredibly unbroken bottle of fine champagne, an Athens, Georgia, Rotary Club flag, a silver-knobbed cane, a gold evening slipper, scraps of tulle and velvet, an intact brocade shawl. Ben reached over and picked up the cane and the shawl. I could see that tears ran down his face, but it was still.
“This is Wynn Farrell’s cane,” he said, in a thin, old voice. He was not speaking to anyone in particular. “It was his father’s, and his grandfather’s before that, I think. Wynn didn’t need the damned thing, but he took it everywhere with him. Said it made him feel like Maurice Chevalier. And this is Elizabeth Carling’s shawl. I’ve seen her in it a hundred times, on cool nights, at the club or at parties. Dear Jesus, none of us are going to get over this.”
“Light,” I said to myself, half-aloud. “Clean, radiant light…”
After a while the objects stopped making any sense to me and might have been clods of earth, or stones, and I was no more affected by them than I might have been by anonymous outcroppings in some ancient lava field. I had been far more moved by the crumbling manuscripts that I ferried in my cart in the tunnels beneath the New York Public Library. When at last we left that sunstruck, silent charnel field and headed in the limousines into Paris for lunch, I found that I was quite hungry.
Lucy did not go with us to the morgues to look at the dead. In the end, she did not even ask to go. Ben had our driver drop her, along with Carter Stephenson and the obviously smitten young man from the American embassy, at the excellent and anonymous small hotel near the embassy where rooms were held for us, and she said only, getting out of the car on the arm of the young man, “Remember, Gibby. We be of one blood….”
Even when I met her in the dark little hotel bar afterward, and we drank steadily through the dinner hour and into the evening, and there was ample time and opportunity for her to do so, she did not ask about that afternoon, and she never did in her life. By that time, after so many hours in my company and the invisible company of the dead, I am sure that she simply, as she always had, knew. It was, that full and silent knowing, almost her best gift to me.
Ben and Hinton Drexel and their party went to all five morgues that afternoon. After the first one, I waited in the limousine. It was not that I was shocked or sickened or near collapse; it was that after the first one I knew that any more searching of the dead faces was futile. It would not be by sight that they were identified, and it would not be that day or that week, or even, probably, for many weeks. My presence seemed, suddenly, an unbearably boorish and brutal intrusion. If my mother lay in the morgue that I visited, I did not know it, and if she lay in one of the others, no one of us could have told. The bodies, severe and formal in proper white sheeting and chilled into antiseptic stasis in the cold rooms, were hardly defaced. In most cases the hair had not even been burned off. The skin had simply been browned a taut, shellacked yellow-brown, almost the precise shade of centuries-old mummies, so that identification was impossible.
I walked with Ben among the smiling brown dead of Atlanta in that first morgue and saw nothing that had to do with life and living; life had been closer out on that silent, terrible plain, under the new summer sun. Ben stayed behind to look over the personal effects that had been taken from the bodies while I went back out to the limousine and sat down in the backseat. The middle-aged driver asked me something in rapid, nasal French, and when I simply shook my head, handed me a small aluminum glass of brandy, and I drank it, thinking with an insane peevishness that I would have to surrender the now-familiar image that my mind had kept, of my mother with her hair in flames, and in its place try to fix a new one of my mother with the hard ocher face of a millenniums-dead Egyptian princess.
Ben and Hinton Drexel went back to their rooms to begin the long, awful business of telephoning the families back in Atlanta, and Carter Stephenson went to file his stories, and Lucy and I drank through the fabled l’heure bleu of Paris and into its cool, late-falling night. We held hands but we did not talk much. We did not get drunk. Neither of us mentioned dinner, nor did we speak of what we both knew: that there was nothing more for us in Paris, and that we would arrange the next day to go home. I do not think that either of us felt the trip had been useless. I know that I felt, obscurely but deeply, that some unnamed and unknowable but essential thing had been accomplished, and I have been grateful all the years since that I went, and that Lucy went with me.
But I felt just as strongly that we must not linger in Paris. By tacit agreement, we both rose from our table at about nine o’clock and went upstairs in the little scrolled, iron-caged lift to our adjoining rooms. She did not ask me if I wanted to talk for a while, or needed company; she simply kissed me on the cheek and said, “’Night, Gibby,” and unlocked her door and went in, closing it behind her. I undressed and got into bed, tired beyond thought and nearly beyond feeling, and waited for sleep.
But it did not come. Nothing did. For what seemed like an eternity I lay in the dark, aware of everything and nothing, the very air seeming textured and heavy against my naked flesh, as empty and cool as a grape skin.
Around midnight, Ben Cameron rapped softly on the door and then pushed it open, and I realized that I had forgotten to lock it. He came in and sat down on the edge of my bed as Sarah had done, incredibly, only thirty-six hours before.
“Are you asleep?” he said, and when I said no, he reached out and turned on the little bedside lamp. He was so drawn that the skin of his face looked like crumpled tissue paper, but he was smiling.
“I just had a call from home,” he said. “Sarah had a little girl this afternoon at four-seventeen. She and the baby are just fine. She wanted me to tell you. And she wanted me to tell you that they’re naming her Olivia Redwine Gentry…because she wants your mother’s name to go on. She asked me to tell you that.”
“Thank you, Ben,” I said.
“I brought this back for you, too,” he said. “They had it in storage at the third…place we went. I’m pretty sure it’s your mother’s, and I thought you might want to keep it. We know where she is, now, Shep, and we can bring her home for you. She wasn’t…she was unmarked.”
He put a small object onto the bedside table and got up and left the room, closing the door behind him. I reached over to the table. He had put a shoe there, a narrow, stiletto-heeled evening pump of the sort that I had seen a hundred times before, in my mother’s closet or on her narrow feet as she left for a party. She had them custom made in New York and sent to her, and they had her monogram embroidered in gold thread in the inside lining. This one was blackened on the outside, but the satin lined inside was unsullied, and I saw it there, in intricate script: ORB. Olivia Redwine Bondurant.
I turned off the light and sat holding my mother’s shoe in my hand, and then, finally, in the heavy darkness, I wept, aloud and hard and painfully, like an utterly inconsolable child, not for what lay in the third morgue of Paris, but for what had laughed and danced in the beautiful, foolish shoe and for the hopeful best that would live on, now, in the name of Sarah’s first born. I cried until I thought my chest would burst with the anguish; I could not stop; the tears poured and pounded on. I remember thinking, for the first time in my life, that it was possible to simply die of tears.
Sometime that night—I do not know when—Lucy came into the room and slipped into the bed with me. She was naked, and her body was long and light and silken and cool, and she pressed it around and against and under and over me, and her warm, sweet open mouth was against my face and hair and cheeks and eyelids and nose, and finally over my mouth, so that I sobbed directly into the breath of her, and then, simply and with a deep, deep flowering, she took me inside her, and rocked with me to a beat as old and deep and primal as the world, and was Lucy was Sarah was Lucy was Sarah was Lucy was my mother was Sarah was Lucy, was the world, was the universe…and all that I had not felt budded and bloomed and swelled and burst loose and roared through me and she took it into herself, and I was freed.
We flew home to Atlanta the next day, and we did not speak of that night directly, then or ever. When she told me three months later on a day of high honey sun up at Tate, where she and Jack and I had gone for the weekend, that she was pregnant, and I said, “Lucy, is it…?” she only shook her head.
“I don’t know,” she said.” “I honestly and truly don’t know and never will, Gibby. It could just as easily be Jack’s, and if it isn’t he’ll never know it.”
And I had to be content with that, because she seemed so.
But when, in March of 1963, her daughter was born in Piedmont Hospital, in the middle of a three-day ice storm, and I asked the baby’s name, there was something more than pride and love for that tiny, perfect girl child in her luminous blue eyes when she said, “Malory. Her name is Malory Bondurant Venable.”