They had not been in the house a week before it became apparent to me, my spongelike pores newly opened to revelation, that my uncle Jim was to loom over Lucy’s life, and therefore mine, like one of those menacing grotesques in Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.
I had not thought of him again since the day they came, and then only abstractly, as the author of Lucy’s appearance in my life, and no one—not my parents, not my aunt Willa, not Lucy herself—had mentioned him. If Little Lady wept for her father, or lisped his name, we did not hear it, for she spent her days in the second-floor bedroom-nursery hastily fashioned by my mother and Martha, attended by Martha’s teenaged daughter ToTo. Little Jamie, a happy child, did not cry at all, for his father or anyone else. For a small space of time it was as if Jim Bondurant had never existed.
Then, around four o’clock in the afternoon of the fifth day they had been with us, Martha Cater put her head into my newly acquired little third-floor cubicle, where I was just yawning my way out of an enforced nap, and asked if I knew where Lucy was. I did not. She had been put to bed in her new room, next to mine, at two o’clock, as had become the custom, and had fallen asleep before I did. I knew that because she had not answered the last of the sleep-silly questions I had called in to her. I had drifted off soon after.
No one downstairs had seen her either, and a quick search of the immediate back garden did not turn her up, and so Martha went muttering upstairs to my mother in her bedroom and my aunt Willa in hers. In those first days, Willa Bondurant spent all the time when she was not bidden into my parents’ presence, such as breakfast, lunch, cocktail time and dinner, in that room, with her children. I don’t know what she did there—her nails and hair and sparse clothing, probably, for each evening’s manicure and hairdo excelled in splendor and intricacy the previous day’s, when she appeared downstairs on the “good” porch for afternoon drinks, and her clothes were as faultlessly pressed as they were startling in cut and pattern. I know she did not read.
Mother and Aunt Willa were sufficiently alarmed at Lucy’s absence to come down in dressing gowns and slippers, Mother only halfway through her careful evening’s makeup, Aunt Willa as fully anointed as a Kabuki dancer. Not wanting to disturb my father in his study, they sent Martha back upstairs to look into all the imaginable hiding places that the house harbored, and me out to the back garden and the summer house to search. They themselves stood on the back veranda calling softly, “Lucy! Lucy Bondurant! Come in the house this minute!” I could hear their voices spiraling up, intertwined, the soft drawl and the metallic kitten’s mewl, as I riffled aside bushes and vines and walked through each room of the summer house.
“You ought to come on out now,” I said aloud, for I felt sure that Lucy was somewhere in the vicinity of the summer house. “You’re really going to be in the soup if my father gets mad at you.”
But there was no answer, and my own voice in my ears frightened me somehow, and I did not call again. I went back to the house in defeat.
Mother called Shem Cater then, and he beat his way through the dense woods, newly greened and swollen with spring, all the way over to Rivers Road, and even asked at the back doors of some of the nearest houses, but there was no trace of Lucy. By the time my father, attracted by the subdued furor and ready for his six o’clock bourbon, came out of the library and around to the porch, the light was seeping out of the afternoon and the shadows were going long and blue. He and Shem took the Chrysler out and canvassed Buckhead, up one winding, green-canopied street and down another, pulling up before the big houses at the end of the long drives. Shem would wait while my father knocked on each door in turn and asked if anyone had seen a thin, dark-haired, blue-eyed five-year-old in corduroy bib overalls and saddle shoes. No one had.
I was in agony, drowned in mute pain. It was my first experience with loss, for I had, somehow, never had the common child’s fantasy that my parents would die and leave me, and there had been no one else in my life whom I had valued, at least not directly and particularly. I had never had a pet, so never had lost one, and had not known a name to put to the uneasiness that the death of my little-known grandfather Redwine had left. But Lucy was the perfect hostage to fortune. She had blown into my life like a radiant whirlwind, bringing liberation and laughter and childhood with her, and I had fallen without a shot being fired. Moreover, I had accepted the new state of joy she had brought as the secret in the house for which I had waited so long, and it had never even crossed my mind that I could lose it. Now I tasted for the first time vulnerability and frailty and the terrible, casual power of the world, and the fear and outrage howled so powerfully in me that I could only crouch behind the striped canvas glider, arms around knees, head down, thinking of all the things that could have happened to Lucy.
My mother was tight-lipped with annoyance and, I suppose, a sort of worry, and my father was openly exasperated. Aunt Willa seemed more embarrassed than upset.
“I’m gon’ tan her hide when I get my hands on her,” she said over and over, looking side wise at my still-faced mother and up under her spiked lashes at my father. “She’s a willful child; takes after her daddy. But she don’t do this kind of thing, usually. Lord, I hope she hasn’t gone off with a man. She loves men, and she ain’t…isn’t…afraid of anything in shoe leather. I’ve told her and told her, but it looks like she just doesn’t hear me…. ”
“There aren’t any men around here who would hurt her,” my mother said icily. “We know everyone in the neighborhood, of course, including the servants. She would be quite safe with anyone she happened across.”
“Well, of course she would,” my aunt Willa said, reddening. “I didn’t mean I thought anybody you all knew would…you know…”
“I do know. You can put your mind at rest about that,” my mother said, and Aunt Willa fell silent.
But I didn’t know, and the unimaginable and unnamed thing iced my heart and lungs so that, behind the glider, I struggled for breath, and the world grew overly bright and buzzing for a moment.
It was full dark and my father was on his way to the telephone to call the police when Lucy came drifting up from the garden, hair wild and caught with bits of leaf trash and eyes smoke-dark and large. Even in the green darkness I could see the white sweetness of her smile.
She did not tell us where she had been, except to say, “Back there.” Even after Willa had taken her by her thin shoulders and shaken her until her head flopped on her neck like a chicken’s, and had spanked her with a ferocity that finally prompted my father to say, “That’s enough. It’s all right,” she did not say any more than “Back there,” and she never did after that. She did not seem to understand why she was being punished.
When Aunt Willa had finished spanking her and let her hands fall, breathing hard, Lucy looked up at her, white-faced and dry-eyed, and said, “Will you hug me now, Mama?”
“Of course I won’t hug you,” Aunt Willa shrilled. “You been an awfully bad girl. Like to scared us all to death, and your uncle Sheppard out in the car looking all over for you, and dinner ruint…. Bad girls like you don’t deserve hugs.”
“Daddy hugged me all the time,” Lucy said, more to me, hovering in the background, than to her furious mother.
“No, he didn’t,” Willa said. “He never did hug you. You always were a bad girl, and he never did hug you one single time. He hit you, that’s what he did. You were so bad he hit you every time you turned around.”
Lucy cried then. Her blue eyes slit shut in anguish, and her hands flew to her mouth.
“Not any more than he hit you!” she cried, whirling away from us. “Hit you lots more’n he did me!”
“LUCY!” Aunt Willa shrieked, but Lucy was gone up the stairs into the dimness of the second floor. We could hear her small feet beating a diminishing tattoo of woe.
I could not look at my aunt Willa’s mottled, dull-red face, so I looked at my father. He grimaced in distaste. I looked at my mother. Incredibly, she was smiling, a full, slow smile. I had not seen that smile in nearly a week. She laid one slim hand on my aunt Willa’s arm.
“Come on up to my room with me, Willa,” she said in her slow “Atlanta” accent. “I have a few things in my closet that I never wear anymore. I think they’d look awfully pretty on you. Martha will see to Lucy.”
Only then did I look full at my aunt Willa. Before the black lashes dropped down, I saw in her eyes a pure and living hate.
“Thank you, Olivia,” she murmured.
A long and terrible symbiosis had begun.
I followed Lucy upstairs and waited until I heard Martha leave the little bedroom, and then I went in and sat down on the side of her bed. She was not crying, but staring straight ahead in the darkness. I could see the fevered blue of her eyes.
“I’ll hug you, Lucy,” I said. “Do you want me to?”
“Please,” Lucy said, in a small, frail voice. “I need for you to so I won’t fly off the floor of the world.”
This did not sound at all strange to me then, or ominous. I crawled into the bed beside her and put my arms awkwardly around her, and there we stayed, her small bones feeling, under my hands, like a bird’s, until the hammering of her heart slowed, and she fell asleep.
Before she did, just before, she murmured to me, “He did too hug me. My daddy hugged me all the time, and he never did the other two, or Mama either. Just me.”
I held her until my arms began to ache and prickle, and then I got out of her bed and into mine, slowly and carefully, so that she would not miss the feeling of my arms, and waken. But I knew even then, though I could not have sculpted the thought, that it was not my arms that Lucy sought. It was those first arms, that vanished phantom’s arms, and whether or not what she had said as she slid into sleep was true, never again in all her careening life did she find them.
Lucy was by no means the first woman to know the promise and pain of my uncle Jim’s arms. He had been pledging and betraying since his birth. Six years younger than my father, Jim Bondurant was, from the moment he slid redly into life in my grandmother Adelaide’s bed in Fayetteville, the favored one. His had been a swift and easy birth; my father’s long and arduous. His fairness was from the first hour smooth and silvery, his eyes a dark, velvet pansy-blue. My father’s blondness was white almost to the point of albinism, his eyes milk-pale and perpetually squinted shut. My uncle Jim’s face was rose satin and his smile pure and focused. My father’s was mottled with fury and woe, and he bellowed his anguish abroad to a world that he must have, from the outset, perceived as unloving. His features, even then, and more so later, were heavy; my uncle Jim’s blade-fine and aristocratic. All his life, my handsome, high-spirited, feckless uncle must have seemed the one for whom my father was the rough, blunt, half-finished model. From his birth, women rushed to grant his wishes and win his magical sweet smile, and wept when he left them. In all his life, James Clay Bondurant found no good reason to stay and confront rough weather. Fair skies always lay, for him, as near as the next valley.
My father, reduced to battering his way through life with ham fists and furious red face, must have hated him, must have welcomed, even as he deplored aloud, each scrape and escapade that brought tears to my grandmother Adelaide’s eyes. But to his credit he did not excoriate his brother, to his parents or anyone else, and it was finally his taciturn loyalty, his rocklike thereness, that won for him the grudging accolade from old Adelaide: “He’s a good boy, a good steady boy. And he’s a money-maker.”
This she said to a group of ladies gathered in the drawing room of her son’s great house, during her short stay with him and my mother just before her death. By this time my father was on his way to real wealth, and she had not heard from her younger son in more than five years. The periodic checks that were dispatched to him to cover the series of disasters and false starts that were his life went now, not from her, but from my father. She did know that he was married, but she died without knowing—for she would, finally, not permit his name to be spoken in her presence—that he had a daughter Lucy who was said to be the image of her as a child. It must have been gall and wormwood to my aunt Willa that the old lady died before the birth of the granddaughter who was her namesake—though by that time Willa Bondurant must have grasped that a veritable platoon of small, white-blond Adelaides would not have melted her mother-in-law. Perhaps she used the name Adelaide because she thought that candy-box Little Lady would cut some future ice with my father, the only Bondurant left by then who might conceivably throw her a lifeline. He was, after all, a money-maker.
In the Atlanta of that day, as in this one, that was perhaps the highest accolade you could pin on a man. I can remember lying on the floor behind the Capehart, my warm winter nest, as my mother talked with a group of her bridge ladies one roaring January afternoon when I was very small. I don’t know who they were talking about, and I don’t know why their words pricked my ears, but one of the women said, “Well, I know he’s sorry in a lot of ways. I was there when he peed in the punch bowl from the Driving Club stairs. I went with Laura in the ambulance when they took him to Brawner’s this last time. He’s a drunk and a rooster. But whatever else you say about him, you can’t say he’s not a money-maker.”
My ears pricked further: Here, then, was another signpost on the way to the baffling country of adulthood. A money-maker. I filed it away, along with Gumption and Respect for Women. I already had a surfeit of the latter, but I thought it highly unlikely that I would ever attain the former two.
I have come to think that the store we set on making money here is not so much a purely materialistic trait as it is a reflexive twitch left over from the poverty and humiliation of defeat and occupation after the Civil War. We had seen that witless gallantry and conviction were not enough to save our land and homes. We had seen that they could be smashed by armies of superior wealth and strength, and bought by carpetbaggers of superior means. The defeat left us with a near-genetic hangover of fear and inferiority and truculence—and yes, guilt—which, it seemed, only the balm of money could soothe. Crass as this trait undoubtedly is, it also built us back a viable city in a very short time. Very few Southerners, no matter how blue their blood or high their ideals, will, in their deepest hearts and souls, truly scorn a money-maker.
And so that obedient and industrious money-maker, my father, must have felt at least a small snake-slither of satisfaction at the spectacularly destructive trajectory in which his wasted younger brother launched himself. After flunking out of the University of Georgia and being expelled from Emory at Oxford for drinking, Jim Bondurant had been sent to Georgia Southern College in Statesboro, in Bulloch County, then a minimal little school on Georgia’s sun-punished coastal plain. The nearest city was Savannah, some sixty miles away, and since almost the last act my grandfather Bondurant performed before his death was to take away his youngest son’s automobile, the spoiled young demigod was a captive in this arid wire-grass Lilliput. He had, he felt, only one recourse. He proceeded to fuck his way through the scant female contingent of the student body.
He met Willie Catherine Slagle, a freshman in home economics on a scholarship from her local Optimists’ Club, when he was a senior. She was the improbably lush daughter of a shiftless chicken farmer in a nearby hamlet so small and hookworm-poor that it had no name, and by the time she got to college and secured for herself a job waiting tables in the town’s lone, dingy soda shop, she would have done anything to escape the ramshackle pens and coops and stinking carcasses and burning feathers that were her life—including sleeping with the handsome, said-to-be-rich young man from a fine family near Atlanta who swept her off her tired little feet.
By the time she found that she was pregnant, Jim Bondurant’s graduation was nearing, and his newly widowed mother was showing signs of welcoming him back to her ample bosom and dowering him with funds sufficient to “give him a little start in business.” Knowing full well what the advent of a pregnant, poor white trash daughter-in-law would do to that nest egg, he refused to marry Willie. Well, said Willie Catherine Slagle pragmatically, then she would, of course, have to kill herself, but not before she had gone to see his mother in person and told her about the grandchild soon to be murdered.
“I’ll pay for an abortion,” Jim said hastily.
“You don’t have the money for that,” Willie Slagle said calmly. She kept her spectacular blue eyes cast down on her folded hands. Things were not going, on the main, too badly.
“I’ll get the money,” he said.
“Yes,” she smiled. “You do that.”
She knew what would happen when he asked his mother for money, and it did. Essentially a slow-witted young man who had never needed to employ guile or deceit in his dealings with his mother, he called her and told her what he needed the money for. To his outrage and utter surprise, she hung up on him. Willie Catherine Slagle kept on smiling and pressed her good rayon dress.
They were married by a justice of the peace in Savannah in May, the afternoon of his near-miss graduation. Jim was not displeased with his new wife. She was possessed of a true, if conventional, peasant beauty, and her untutored farm appetites were overwhelming. Furious that his mother had refused to bail him out of this last boyish scrape, and bitterly homesick for the glittering urban arena of Atlanta, he saw in the fecund Willie Slagle a source of both endless sexual delight and just retribution. He kept her rolling happily in the spavined bed of a down-at-heel tourist court all of their honeymoon weekend, bought her two new dresses and a pink rayon negligee at the Sears Roebuck in Macon on their way back north and finally, on a tender night in late May, presented her at the front door of 2500 Peachtree Road, where his brother and dark, languid sister-in-law and, lately, his mother lived.
An uppity, ashy-gray Negro man answered the door and said that no one was at home. Since he could see lights in windows and curtains upstairs stirring, he knew this was not true. He yelled and cursed at the Negro man, and Willie Catherine, shivering in her flowered silk despite the balmy spring evening, began to cry. She held her hands protectively over the hard little mound of her belly. Eventually the Negro man closed the great door in their faces, and before Jim could double his fists to hammer on it, his wife took his arm and jerked him away from there. The old Bondurant place in Fayetteville had been sold, so he could not take her there. For the first time in his life, Jim Bondurant was forced to fend for himself. He never got over the shock of it.
He got a job ineptly pumping gas in a Decatur service station, but lost it almost immediately because he could not conceal his distaste for the oil and grease and customers, and appeared to them to be fully as arrogant as he was. It was mid-Depression, and jobs were scarce for even the most qualified and able of young men. Jim, Willa (as she had taken to calling herself immediately upon becoming a Bondurant) and tiny Lucy, who arrived that murderous red September, drifted from city to small, wasted city around the Southeast, staying in a succession of dismal rooming houses and attic apartments. Kewpie doll Adelaide came along when they were living in Charlotte and Jim was working, when he did work, as a freelance house painter. Two years after that their first son and last child, James Clay Bondurant, Jr., was born in Greensboro, North Carolina.
By this time little Jamie’s father was not working at all. He was, instead, drinking his way steadily across the Southeast toward the Mississippi River, alternately striking and smothering with caresses his children and his wife. In time, Willa and the two younger children took to cowering away from his fists in a groveling terror that maddened him, so he no longer caressed them, but only smote. But smoky, quicksilver Lucy, his oldest daughter, took his blows with averted dry eyes and a small-smiling silence that was oddly soothing to him, and turned after each beating with slender, bruised white arms held out to him, and his heart would turn over with a raging love for her, and he lavished on her all the caresses that the rest of his fearful family abjured. Pain and love, love and pain…dark twins which were, by then, all that he could give, and all that Lucy could accept.
A few months into 1941, Jim Bondurant left for New Orleans to look for work, said to be more plentiful there, and soon after wired Willa and the children to give him three days to find them a place to live, and then catch the Greyhound and come. When they arrived at the New Orleans station, he was not there, and there was no message, and after waiting for almost nine hours, until it was quite dark, it was apparent to Willa Bondurant that he was not coming at all. And he did not, then or ever, and it was the last that any one of them ever saw of him.
Willa called Sheppard Bondurant in Atlanta with her last nickel, and Travelers Aid bought the midnight tickets that sent them grinding through the flat, humid, mosquito-plagued fields of Louisiana toward the gullied and scrub-pined red hills of the Georgia Piedmont Plateau. Shem Cater met them at the Greyhound station that evening, in Sheppard’s big car, and brought them in the twilight to the house on Peachtree Road. Sheppard and Olivia were not with him; Willa had not thought that they would be. She was, by then, as bereft of worldly goods as an animal, and as unself-pitying. She had four cents and a roll of butterscotch Life Savers in her purse. The children had not eaten since breakfast, in Mobile.
It was a journey measured in immensities. Somewhere during it, in that endless fugue of flying miles, Willa Slagle Bondurant stopped crying and began planning. Driving through the luminous, cloistered northwest quadrant of Atlanta in the backseat of the big car, she marked with a coldly assessing eye the architecture, landscaping and details of each great house they passed. When she walked into 2500 Peachtree Road, she was determined to do whatever it took to ensure that she never left it again.
All this I learned from Lucy years later, during one of the rare times when she spoke of the life she had had before she came to Atlanta. It was the last time we were together up at the mountain house at Tate, and we had talked so easily and about so much of the past, and with such a genuine benison of rancorless remembrance, that I was not at all surprised when she segued into the night of that awful bus ride. Though only a few miles separated them, Lucy did not often speak, in those last years, of her mother.
“You have to hand it to her,” Lucy said that night on the mountain. “Not a cent to her name, no education to speak of, no family, no future…nothing but her and us three children. And she’d been to the house before, remember, and they’d turned her away. She had to be terrified. And she was; when I finally fell asleep, about Biloxi, she was still crying. But when I woke up, at Mobile, she was putting on lipstick and fixing her hair, and she had that little Mona Lisa smile on her face. When I asked her what she was smiling at, she said, ‘The future. We’re going to have a fine future in that big old house.’
“So I said, ‘When we gon’ leave it?’ You know, because we always left every house we stayed in. And she said, ‘We’re not.’”
Willa was as good as her word. She shoe horned herself into the life of the house with a persistence as seemingly effortless as it must have been enormous. She smiled. Endlessly and charmingly, she smiled. She pleased whenever an opportunity arose. She was helpful, modest, grateful, unassuming, dutiful, deferential to my mother, girlish and just short of adoring to my father. And from the outset, as if to make up for my mother’s distance, he seemed to me to be uncharacteristically warm to the beautiful, flat-voiced, lushly built farm girl who was his sister-in-law, and to her children.
I know that his manner was unusual enough for my mother to mark it; I saw in her eyes, before the sooty, feathery lashes came down over them, something as nervous and darting as a small wild animal, when she looked at my father and my aunt Willa in those first long evenings. But the strangeness did not bother me; indeed, I was glad for it. Some of his new benevolence seemed to spill over onto me, and for a long space of time after they came, I was no longer the focus of his discontented stare and probing questions at meals. I was happily engaged, heart, soul and mind, with Lucy.
We did not run wild. Aunt Willa tended her children well. She stayed out of the way of the household as she must have sensed quickly my mother wished her to do; accepted with comely murmurs of appreciation the cast-off clothing my mother found for her; smiled and accepted with grace and modest pleasure the weekly “Of course, you’ll be our guest at the club this Sunday for lunch” that Mother proffered, never failing in all the years I heard her extend the invitation to accent the word “guest”; accepted with small, real pleasure the single sherry my father poured out of the bottle he kept on the liquor tray in the library, each evening before Martha stumped in to announce dinner; kept her children out of sight of the adults except when they were washed and brushed and dressed and drilled to come and murmur their polite hellos and thank-yous to my parents…and she learned.
She learned prodigiously and constantly, by rote, through her pores and fingertips, with a wary animal’s untutored cunning, how to become a woman to match the house. Within a year, by the time World War II had taken our minds off slow and graceful rituals and taken many of the men from the great Buckhead houses, she had largely accomplished her mission. My father, whose blood pressure and flat feet kept him out of the army, remarked and applauded the sea change. Even my mother, whose shuttering lashes concealed the eyes of a harpy eagle, could find in Willa by that time little of the awkward, vulgar, overdressed, rankly sexual young woman who had alighted in her foyer a year before. Reluctantly, and at my father’s insistence, she began to introduce my aunt Willa into the sanctity of her garden club, bridge circle and a few selected lesser charities. It was, in retrospect, a stunning achievement. What it cost Willa Slagle Bondurant might never have occurred to me if I had not seen so clearly and with such a palpable shock the living adder of hatred that had stirred in her eyes on the night Lucy first ran away, when my mother had bidden her to come upstairs and be dressed in the first of a long succession of cast-off garments from the closet of her enemy.
Now, even more than ever, tides ran through that house that I sensed had the power to capsize and sink us all, deep-running tides that obeyed some great moon whose name I did not know. I don’t know if the adults in the house were aware of them, though on some level I think they must have been. How could they not be, when all three of them seemed involved in some slow, formal, highly stylized waltz of manners? The oblique looks sent and received, the silences spun out at meals and over cocktails, the conversations that seemed freighted with some import far weightier than their actual words merited, the laughter that rang, to me, utterly false. Sometimes it seemed to me that a kind of crazy power shimmered loose in those rooms like a haze of lightning, seeking a place to come to rest.
I don’t know why my father smiled so benignly on my aunt Willa, especially in the presence of my mother; it was totally alien to him to notice, at least openly, other women. Revenge on the will-o’-the-wisp brother and the wife gone cold? Simple lust? I don’t know why my mother, noticing it, smiled her secret smile and drew the shutters of her lashes down over her eyes. This new arcanum of theirs was as unfathomable to me as the old legerdemain had been. I do know now, and I suppose I sensed then, what my aunt Willa was about. Of them all, she was the simplest, the most direct, the least oblique. It should have made me easier in her company, but it did not then, and it does not now.
Lucy felt the subterranean surges as keenly as I did, but being vastly more at home with nuance, simply shrugged her thin colt’s shoulders and said, “Don’t pay any attention to them. If they think you think they’re actin’ funny they’ll get all over you.”
And so, on the main, I didn’t. That spring was altogether too dazzlingly, burstingly full of Lucy.
The bond that had leaped into life between us that first evening in the foyer deepened steadily. On the surface, I suppose, our temperaments could not have seemed more divergent: I was shy where she was gregarious; cosseted where she was, of necessity, used to fending for herself; physically clumsy and crippled by asthma (and my mother’s fear of those terrible clawing, choking attacks) where she was bird-slender, swift and agile; timid where she was fearless. But our needs and hurts met and knew each other with absolute fidelity. Both of us bore the indelible stigmata of difference. Both of us knew the terrible, unpayable penalty, in our small worlds, of our essential inability to adhere to the rules. This kinship made her, to me, irresistible.
And then, there was her beauty. It was clear from the outset that both my aunt Willa and my mother greatly favored Little Lady and young Jamie, but I could never understand why. To me, my cousin Lucy was by far the most interesting and beautiful creature I had ever encountered.
There was a light, an aura, a sort of halo, like streetlights sometimes wear in mist, that lay at times around Lucy Bondurant. I saw it that first evening, and it did not fade for me until the end of her life. She drew eyes to her, even in the company of rose-gilt Little Lady, who was a much more conventionally pretty child. Lucy’s looks were, I heard my mother say once, her mother’s looks, the Slagle woods-colt looks. Blond Little Lady and Jamie, on the other hand, were obviously Bondurants, icons of the vanished Jim. Perhaps that was the reason my mother was cold to Lucy from the first, as cold as she was to Aunt Willa, while she was warmer, if not affectionate, to Little Lady and Jamie. And maybe it was because Lucy was, from the beginning, too vivid, too alive, too much, for the eminently proper mistress of the house on Peachtree Road.
Lucy was animated, vibrant; life seemed to brim and leap in her so that her transparent skin could scarcely contain it. All her life, the small blue pulses that beat in her throat and temples seemed to me to be the drums of a sort of special vitality, which she possessed in greater measure than most mortals. Her laugh was rich and deep and almost bawdy, and she found things funny that would and did terrify most children of her age, and horrify most adults.
She was ferociously bright, possessed a quirky, silver fish intelligence that soared and looped and doubled back upon itself; her mind described its own windborne ballet, which few people in her life but I ever really followed. She was an accomplished and amusing liar, telling herself and whoever would listen wonderful, towering, complex tales of intrigue and adventure, in which she was perpetually the rescued heroine, the saved damsel in distress. She was a dreamer, a firebrand, a small poet, a great reader. She taught herself to read when she was three, and by the time she came to us had spent a great deal of her life in trees and under back porches in the various mean homes Uncle Jim and Aunt Willa inhabited, lost and safe in books beyond her age but not her ken.
As that spring swam into and through summer and toward the crisper hummock of autumn, I was as nearly totally happy as I have ever been in my life, and perhaps will ever be again.
Who could not love Lucy?
On an autumn evening when it had just turned cool enough to have a fire in the library when we gathered for drinks there, my aunt Willa came into the room a little later than usual, and I saw my mother lift her head and flare her nostrils, as if she smelled on a faraway wind something sharp and alien and dangerous. Aunt Willa looked especially pretty to me that night. Her cheeks were pink with a stain that had not come from her rouge cake, and her jewel-blue eyes were very bright. She had on a dress I had never seen before, a very plain, soft blue wool which fitted her beautiful body like water, but not, as the clothing she had brought with her from New Orleans had, like paint. The difference was enormous. I could see it in my mother’s eyes, and my father’s.
“I have something to tell you all,” she said, her voice lilting out of its flatness with practice and excitement. She did not sound at all like the woman who had first come to our door. We looked at her silently.
“I have gotten myself a job!” she said, and broke into laughter, a small gurgle of pure pleasure. “I am, as of right now, a saleswoman in Better Foundations at Rich’s. I start in the morning, and I’m going to be making twenty dollars a week, with benefits and an employee discount. Now what do you think of that?”
We stared at her, all of us. My mother spoke first.
“You certainly didn’t have to go and get a job selling corsets to God knows who, Willa, not to mention all my friends. You know that it’s been my…our…pleasure to share what we have with you.”
Aunt Willa’s smile wrapped my mother in light and venom.
“I’ll never forget your generosity, Olivia,” she said, in her new, many-leveled voice. “But my mama used to say that sooner or later every tub has to get on its own bottom. And it was time for me to get on mine. I could not impose on your and Sheppard’s generosity any longer.”
I goggled. I had never heard her mention a mother, a life of any kind, before the one she had shared with my uncle Jim.
“I know you mean well, Willa, but you need to consider how it will look, your going to work, when you’re living in your own family’s house….” My mother paused delicately, and smiled. There was no warmth in it.
“What Olivia means is that her friends in the Junior League will think that we made you go to work,” my father said, getting up from his big leather chair with his whiskey and coming across the faded Oriental to kiss Aunt Willa wetly on the cheek. “Don’t pay any attention to her. It shows a lot of grit and gumption, and I’m proud of you. Besides, it’s a mighty pretty bottom that tub of yours is sitting on.”
Lucy and I looked from one to another of them, still mute with surprise and interest and that back-of-the-neck radar with which children are necessarily endowed, which tells them to be silent or risk peril. Aunt Willa smiled, her lashes down over her blue eyes, but she said nothing, and neither did my mother. But her dark eyes blazed up as if kerosene had been dashed upon a fire, and I felt, rather than heard, the great ponderous grinding of a shift in the balance of power.