From the very beginning, Lucy’s bond with her daughter was an extraordinary thing. I did not imagine it; everyone spoke of it. Aunt Willa, every inch the doting Buckhead grandmother, said, “I swear, that child is listening to Lucy. Look at those eyes following her.” And Jack, leaning back exultantly in his chair in the summerhouse living room on the night of Malory’s birth, said, “It’s like looking at two mirror images facing each other. Or twins of some kind. Those identical blue eyes staring at each other with such intensity you can almost see the sparks jumping between them. And the sounds the baby makes when Lucy talks to her. Like she understands, and talks back. Lucy says she does. I swear to God, Shep, I love my boys, of course I do, but I never felt anything quite like the feeling I have for that little girl. It’s almost out of the same piece of what I feel for Lucy. Tell me, really…did you ever see such a beautiful baby?”
“No,” I said. “I never did. Of course, you could count the babies I’ve seen on the fingers of one hand. But she does seem prettier than it’s right for a baby to be.”
“Thank God she takes after Lucy,” he said, swallowing his scotch. His doughy face was flushed, and softer than I had seen it since the first days of his marriage to Lucy; somehow boy like, despite the thinning white hair and fine-etched lines. “I’d hate to pass the Venable puss on to a little girl. But Malory is pure Bondurant.”
I kept my face still over the queer pang in my chest. I would have to get used to that momentary sweet-sick heaviness, I thought, for Malory Venable was indeed pure Bondurant, though it was more the Bondurant-ness that looked out of Lucy’s eyes and the eyes in her treasured old photographs of her father, than mine. I thanked God for that, even though an infinitesimal part of me felt an obscure disappointment. After all, I decided, what did it matter? Malory Venable was blood of my blood, to one degree or another, and I had the license, at least, of doting cousin to excuse my enthrallment. For like everyone else who saw her in her first days of life, I fell to tiny Malory Venable without a shot’s being fired.
I saw her on the afternoon of her birth, before anyone besides Jack and Aunt Willa did. Lucy had left instructions that I was to be admitted as family, and so, when I came into her hospital room on that brilliant afternoon of crystal ice-chaos, she was alone with the baby, banked and bowered in flowers and bathed in the first of the returning sun, Malory sucking sleepily at her blue-veined breast. I felt my face go hot at the sight of her translucent, remembered flesh, but I am sure she did not notice. Lucy, that day, was afire with rapture.
We looked at each other over the baby’s silky dark head for a long moment, and then she said softly, “Oh, Gibby, look. Just look at her.”
I walked over and kissed Lucy on the cheek, and smelled the fresh, milky smell of new baby over her Tabu, and my eyes prickled. I could not, for some reason, look full at the baby.
“She’s gorgeous, Luce,” I said. “She looks just like her mama.”
“More like her granddaddy, don’t you think? Or at least like the male Bondurants. I thought at first she had something of Mama around her mouth, but I don’t think so anymore. And there’s nothing there at all of poor Jack. No, it’s all Bondurant. Look at that little blade of a nose—you all have it.”
There was nothing of portent in her words, nothing but enchantment with her baby. I relaxed and looked fully at Malory Venable for the first time. She turned her head from Lucy’s breast as if she had felt my look, and gave me a wide, fully focused smile. It was such a deep and direct look, and her lambent, light-spilling blue eyes, so like Lucy’s, had in them such a sheer sense of ken, that I felt a physical shock in my stomach. I moved my head and her eyes followed, and the smile widened. She made a soft, liquid little sound very near an adult chuckle of charm and joy. A great, helpless, foolish love flowered thickly in my heart and reached its tendrils out toward her. There was nothing in it of nuance and complexity; it was, and has remained, the purest and simplest emotion I have ever owned, all light and air and certitude.
Lucy was almost vibrating with joy and love that day, talking soft nonsense to the baby, whose eyes followed her face with a focus and concentration that were indeed adult in intensity. Her face as she looked down at tiny Malory was so incandescent that I wanted to turn my own away from it; outside eyes seemed, in the face of that hungry love, intrusive. I felt a kind of superstitious fear for her, an apprehension that had nothing to do with any practical future. That kind of perfect, leaping, shimmering love surely tempted fates and gods. I felt the old, fierce desire to protect, to enfold, to cloister both of them away, and then remembered that that task now lay with Jack Venable.
You’d better do it right, buddy, I said inside my head, and meant the words.
To Lucy, I said, “Is there anything I can get you? Besides flowers? You won’t need any more of those for about ten years.”
“No,” she said. “I have everything I’ll ever want in the world, Gibby. Right here in this room. Oh…but you know what you could bring me? That old copy of Malory. Morte d’Arthur. Is it still around the summerhouse, do you think? And The Jungle Book. I want to read them to her right now, before we go home. I want her to know where she comes from, and what will be important to her.”
“I guess they’re still in the bookcase,” I said. “If they’re not I’ll buy them for her, my first present.”
“Oh, please find them, Gibby,” she cried. “I want her to hear ‘We be of one blood’ from the book we heard it from. I want our books.”
“I’ll look,” I said. “And I’ll bring them tomorrow, if I can. But it isn’t going to make any difference to her for about six years, you know.”
“No,” she said, perfectly seriously, her smile gone, the blue eyes burning, burning. “She’ll know. She knows now. She knows what I say to her, and I know what she says to me. You can think I’m crazy if you like, but it’s true. Malory is me and she is mine, and she will hear me calling her all her life, no matter where she is in the world. And she’ll come.”
I left her then and went in the fast-falling dusk back to the haven of the summerhouse, a kind of dread hammering at my ribs that did not ease with firelight and bourbon and Martha Cater’s hot vegetable soup. I knew what the unchanneled force of Lucy’s love could do, and the fear was as much for her as for the infant on whom it focused. I found the Malory and the Kipling, and sat reading them late into that January night, and my dreams, when I fell asleep on the sofa before the dying fire, were full of kaleidoscopic images of great bears and black panthers and wolves and caparisoned chargers and fire: the endless, unquenchable fire of Pumphouse Hill and Paris.
Lucy’s feverish happiness shimmered on unabated until the day that Jack was to come and take her and Malory home, and on that morning she awoke already in the grip of a full-blown depression that bordered on catatonia. She lay with her white face turned to the window, looking at the bare trees lashing in the wind along Peachtree Road, not moving, not speaking, hardly breathing, and she would respond to nothing and no one. When the nurse laid Malory on her chest she did not put up her arms to cradle her, and the child would have slipped off the bed if the nurse had not snatched her up. They took the baby away to be rocked and given her first bottle in the nursery, and she did not cry until the door closed between her and her mother. But then her screams could be heard all the way down the hall and into the closed and glassed nursery, and the nurses there reported later that they did not stop until she literally fell asleep from fatigue, hours later.
Jack and Aunt Willa came and sat beside Lucy and chafed her hands and talked to her, but she did not answer. Jack, his hair and hands still bearing smudges of the fresh white paint with which he had prepared the farmhouse for Lucy and Malory’s arrival, was near frantic. It was obvious that the old black woman back in Lithonia could not cope with both the baby and Lucy in this condition, and he could not stay away from his job more than a few days. Without Lucy’s salary, tiny as it was, he could ill afford to miss even the few days he had planned to take to bring them home. When, by noon, Lucy had not responded to either of them or her obstetrician, and a psychiatrist had been summoned, Jack called me, and I came and sat down beside her and took her hand and called her name softly.
“Luce,” I said. “Come on, Luce. It’s Gibby. Talk to me.”
This time she turned her head and looked at me, and I almost gasped aloud. The change in her since the day before was profound. Her vivid blue eyes were so devoid of light and life that they looked like a watercolor that had been left out in the rain. Her entire face was flattened and somehow thickened, without planes, and paper-white. Her cracked lips made the shape of my name: Gibby. And then she said, in a dry whisper, “I never saw the trees so pretty. October really is the best month, isn’t it?”
I felt ice form along my spine.
“It’s March 1963, and you have a new little girl, and it’s time now to cut this out and take her home with Jack,” I said, too loudly. She closed her eyes and turned her face back to the window.
“I don’t know any Jack,” she said in a frail, fretful child’s whimper. “I don’t have any stupid little girl. Gibby, take me home. I want my daddy. I want to go home.”
Jack Venable gave a soft grunt of pain, and Aunt Willa snorted in delicate outrage. I shut my eyes in despair. Lucy said no more that day. The psychiatrist closeted himself with her for an hour or so, and the results of the tests her obstetrician had ordered came back, and at dusk both came out to the waiting room and sat down with us amid the magazines and coffee cups and overflowing ashtrays.
“It’s a classic postpartum psychosis,” the psychiatrist said. He had pure silver hair over a face as satin-pink and unlined as an infant’s. A baby-butt face, Lucy would have called it.
“I know it looks bizarre, but it’s not uncommon, and this is by no means the worst case I’ve ever seen. I think she’ll pull out of it fairly quickly with medication and some good nursing care, but both will have to be constant. I understand Mr. Venable can’t manage that at home. Is there somewhere we can take her where she’ll be able to have total rest and quiet, and the baby can be looked after?” He looked at Aunt Willa and me; I knew that there was no other choice, and nodded. Aunt Willa followed my lead, lips compressed.
“We’ll be glad to have her,” I said. “Martha Cater can look after her, and I’m sure she can find us a baby nurse. Maybe her daughter can come. She looked after Lucy when she was little herself. We’re close to the hospital and not all that far from your office, Jack, and you can come by before and after work—or stay over yourself, if you like. We’ve got plenty of room.”
I looked at him questioningly. For some reason, my heart was lifting, and wings beat in my chest.
“I…well, okay. Sure,” Jack said. I knew that he hated the idea of Lucy back in that house of wealth and privilege and coldness. I also knew that he knew he had no choice. “I’ll be much obliged. But just till she can get on her feet again. And I’ll pass on staying over, thanks. I’ll look in when I can.”
“Fine,” the psychiatrist and Lucy’s obstetrician said heartily, in concert, clearly relieved to be rid of the embarrassment of a messily skewed ending to a routine case of seemly Buckhead childbirth.
“Sounds like the best solution,” the psychiatrist said.
“Well.” Aunt Willa got up smartly and smoothed the gray wool sheath that cupped her elegant hips and buttocks. “I’d better go get things changed around so we can fit a baby in. Let’s see…hmmm…no, there’s no other way but for Lucy and the baby to have my room, and the little dressing room, and I’ll move up to the attic. We can’t very well move poor Big Shep, or his nurse. My goodness, so many sick people and nurses…” Her voice trailed away as she clicked down the hall toward the elevator, a path of poisoned honey spreading behind her. I knew, and Jack probably guessed, that beneath the honey and the martyred mother’s words, Willa Slagle was raging anew at this troublesome daughter who would not leave her in peace in the gracious bower where she had, finally, gone to earth.
And so Lucy came home again to 2500 Peachtree Road, with a nurse and Malory, and was installed in the big bedroom upstairs, and old Martha brought ToTo in from Forest Park and found a wet nurse from one of the projects, and Aunt Willa went back to work, and I went back to the summerhouse and the clamoring ancestors of Sarah Gentry. And all the time, as I worked, the knowledge of tiny Malory Bondurant Venable, shimmering there in the little dressing room that had been my own first nursery, lay whole and still and perfect in my heart.
For a week or so Lucy simply lay still, staring out her window into the tops of the trees that had sheltered her summers until she married Red Chastain. She was allowed no visitors, but occasionally I stole in from the summerhouse to stare down at Malory, sleeping in her pearly perfection as ToTo rocked and napped, and then I sat for a while beside Lucy’s bed. I would hold her hand and talk to her of small things and nonsense, and sometimes she would press my hand, and once or twice she smiled. One afternoon, toward the end of the first week, she said, abruptly and weakly, “I get so tired when I think about having to take care of her always, Gibby. I can’t even take good care of myself. I don’t know what’s going to happen to us.”
They were the first words she had said to me since she left the hospital, and I started visibly.
“Jack will take care of both of you, of course, Luce,” I said, but she only shook her head weakly and fretfully on the pillow.
“He’ll try, but in the end he won’t be able to,” she said.
“Sure he will. But I’ll help,” I said. “If you and Malory ever need any extra taking care of, I’ll always be here.”
“Will you, Gibby?” she said, turning her thin, white face to me.
“Of course. Always.”
She was silent for a bit, and then she smiled. It was a fuller smile, stronger.
“Yes,” she said. “I think you will, now.”
Soon after that she began to improve, and in another week Aunt Willa took her to Sea Island for ten days in the early spring sun, and when she came home, lightly tanned and with some of the sunken hollows in her face and body filled in, she was gay to near-ferocity again, and seized Malory and hugged her until the baby screamed.
“You didn’t cry for Mommy, did you, precious angel?” she said into Malory’s satiny cheek. “I know you didn’t. I felt you every minute, and I sent you messages a thousand times a day, and I know you were a good girl. She was, wasn’t she, Martha? Wasn’t she, Shep?”
“Yes’m,” Martha Cater growled. “She ain’t cry after you gone. I ain’t never seen no new baby as good as this one.”
I knew that old Martha hated making the admission; she had glowered and stomped around the house when Lucy told her she was going away, and predicted havoc and sleepless nights and the ruin of Malory. But it had not happened. The baby had cried bitterly and inconsolably for an hour or so after Aunt Willa and Lucy had driven away, and then, as if indeed receiving some interior signal, had looked about her, startled, and stopped the crying, and gone promptly to sleep. I know, because I was holding her at the time. Her cries had reached me even in the summerhouse, and I had not been able to let her cry on and on, without solace. She knew me, I thought, and relaxed the tiny, knotted muscles when I picked her up, but the crying did not stop until nearly an hour later. I told Lucy this, and she smiled her thousand-watt smile.
“I know,” she said. “We stopped for breakfast at the New Perry Hotel and I heard her, all of a sudden. Just in midbite. I can’t explain it. And I…just talked to her. I went back in my head and sent her a message, not to cry, that I was with her and it was all right. That you were there and would take care of her. I know she stopped then. I felt it. It’s an enormous relief, Gibby—it means I can go back to work or anywhere else I want to and she’ll be all right, because I can talk to her.”
“All we need around here is a couple of spooks,” I said, disquieted in spite of myself. I did not like the idea of Lucy’s practicing psychic communication on Malory. I wanted nothing murky, shadowed, esoteric, overly passionate, to touch her. When I thought ahead to her growing-up years, I saw sunlight and order and sand-boxes and kittens and ponies; children’s parties and nurses and starched pinafores and pigtails and family suppers around shining, silver-set tables. It was, of course, my own Buckhead childhood that I saw, or rather the furniture of it; even I knew that I was blithely painting out the pain and fear and treachery of that world, and that it was foolish, perhaps even dangerous, to wish it for Malory. But I did. Order and control—those were the things I most wished for the little girl who bore my name and my nose and my heart; order and control, not the careening, erratic, quicksilver world of excess and privation and kisses and absences and surging subterranean tides that would, I knew, be Lucy’s legacy to her. But I knew by then that neither I nor Jack Venable nor anyone else would have much say over the raising of Malory. The symbiosis between her and Lucy was simply too strong.
It crossed my mind not infrequently, in those days before Lucy took the baby home to the farmhouse, that she was most assuredly not the stablest and most responsible mother for this or any other child. I was usually able to bury the notion deep under the knowledge that there would always be other loving caretakers around Malory: Jack, who adored her; the old black woman at the farmhouse, who had a firm and loving way with children; me; even Aunt Willa, who evinced in her granddaughter a sucking, proprietary interest she had never displayed toward Lucy. But once or twice the thought broke free, and the last time it did, it cost me Malory’s presence in the house on Peachtree Road.
Lucy had taken to bringing the baby out to the summerhouse to visit in the afternoons, when my reading and note taking were done and she and Malory had had baths and naps. I would make coffee and set out the cake or cookies that Martha Cater brought and light the fire and put Vivaldi or Palestrina on the record player, and Lucy would put Malory’s small, fragrant weight into my arms and stretch out on the sofa and light a cigarette. Sometimes she drank sherry instead of coffee, and on these afternoons she grew vivid and voluble and talked once again of the escalating civil rights movement and the never-ended work at Damascus House.
With segregation beginning to crumble in the schools and colleges, black activists were focusing on the still-segregated hotels and restaurants, and scarcely a day passed that spring without a demonstration or picket or sit-in. I knew that Ben Cameron met almost daily with black leaders now. Around that time, a “lie-in” had been held at the Henry Grady Hotel downtown on Peachtree Street—that bastion of middle-class white gentility, where even the cloistered young of Buckhead were allowed to go to the Dogwood or Paradise room to watch an occasional second-class magician or comic—and half the population of Damascus House, including the charismatic Claiborne Cantrell, went happily to the Fulton County jail, singing “We Shall Overcome.” Lucy burned with eagerness to be with them.
“I should have been there,” she said over and over, through smoke. “I should have been with them. It’s my fight, too. I’ve been away too long.”
“Terrific,” I said, rocking a sleeping Malory in the old nursery rocker I had had Shem Cater bring from the attic to the summerhouse. “Just what Malory needs. A mother in the Fulton County pokey.”
“She’d be okay,” Lucy said. “I’d talk to her. She’d have you.”
“And Jack,” I said. “If he wasn’t in jail alongside you.”
“And Jack,” she said. “He wouldn’t be in jail. He’s the money man. He’s too important. Clay won’t let him demonstrate anymore. Jack says he hates being out of the action, but I don’t think he does. Besides, Jack would never let himself be arrested. No scotch in jail. No Huntley-Brinkley. No books and records.”
But after the news of the arrests from Damascus House, she grew restless and remote, and I would see a light in her bedroom window burning at all hours in the warming nights.
Late in that week, she brought Malory out to the summerhouse wrapped in one of her own blouses, wearing a lace trimmed blanket of Malory’s draped around her own shoulders.
“We’re switching off, Gibby,” she chortled. “See? She’s the mommy and I’m the baby now. It’s her turn to take care of me.”
She held the baby up gaily, and Malory pawed fretfully at the enfolding blouse, trying to free her tiny feet and fists, and mewled fussily. I felt anger and a tiny lick of the dread I had felt on the morning of Lucy’s retreat into depression. I snorted and took Malory out of her arms and jerked the grotesque, trailing blouse off her, and wrapped her in the blanket from Lucy’s shoulders.
“Don’t ever make her ridiculous, Lucy,” I said levelly around the anger.
She stared at me, her eyes burning blue-white.
“Don’t you tell me what to do with my own baby,” she snapped finally. Her voice was sullen.
I continued to look at her, silently, and presently she dropped her eyes and took Malory from me, and went back into the house. The next evening Jack Venable came and took her and the baby home to the farmhouse in Lithonia, and his joy in his daughter and love for Lucy were so palpable that they almost filled my own hollow heart as I watched the pink-swathed baby being driven away, finally, home.
Lucy went back to work soon after that, leaving Malory in the care of the old black woman, and reported in her soon resumed evening telephone calls that Malory was as contented with her new nurse and the grudging company of Toby and Thomas as she had been with her mother’s and mine.
“She’s just one of those rare perfect, unflappable babies, Gibby,” she said, inhaling. “Estelle says she never cries. She’s getting fat as a little butterball, and she’s just as happy to see us when we come in as if we’d been there all day.”
And then she would segue from Malory into the work of Damascus House without missing a beat, and I would think again that she seemed deeply content to be back and submerged in the swimming-pool- and park-desegregation plans there, as if her old bone-deep ease and sureness among the activist blacks was a relief after the intense, consuming emotional pitch of her day-to-day interrelation with Malory. She was soon working longer and longer hours, and in the middle of the summer Jack left Damascus House—with visible relief, I thought—and took a job with a large downtown firm of CPAs for shorter hours and slightly better pay. After that, he had almost sole evening care of the three children.
I went back to my own work in the summerhouse, and it was many months before I went into the big house again. It was not that I was avoiding it, particularly; it was just that, with Lucy and Malory gone and my father as unresponsive as a drugged and chained wild animal, there was no reason to do so. I did not mind. The Peachtree Road house was now as in alterably and indisputably the territory of my aunt Willa as if she, not I, had been born there. I felt, on my rare forays there to pick up clothing or books I wanted, as if I were burgling a stranger’s home. The very air smelled of her bitter, expensive scent, and the few times I went to sit briefly beside my mute, grimacing father, the entire bedroom seemed steeped in it. I knew from that, and from the occasional generic mutters from Martha and Shem Cater, that she was still spending many of her free hours sitting with him, occupying herself God alone knew how—for it surely was not in conversation with him. He remained as silent and blasted as a Toltec idol.
It was odd about Willa Slagle Bondurant in those days: She had, of course, absolutely no more claim to the Peachtree Road house than she had had while my mother lived, and yet it was somehow, nail and roof beam, hers. The visitors who drove up the semicircular drive and left their cards on the old silver card tray were, now, as often hers as my father’s. It was for her that Shem brought the Rolls around to the front, and for her that he held the heavy door. Delivery vans brought her orders, and lawn and linen services arrived at her telephoned command, and the smart, slender women in wools and silks who came to luncheon and for bridge and drinks were her guests. They were not the same ones who had come for my mother, but they were, to all but the fully initiated eye, indistinguishable from them, and they certainly were not tackpots. High second echelon, one might have said; the very first echelon had largely been crisped along with my mother in a ditch at Orly, and in any case, the ones who had not would not have come to Willa Bondurant. But I believe that Aunt Willa was, largely, satisfied with them. They were, as she was now, a long way from the chicken farm.
Her move to establish herself in the house had been as slowly and delicately accomplished as a cat’s tracking of a chipmunk. Preoccupied with the family of Sarah Gentry and the coming of Malory, I had not noticed it, although it was I, with my admonition to her on the day I left for Orly that she move into my mother’s bedroom, who had given her the implicit permission. And, I suppose, she read my failure to curtail or supplant her in the house as tacit permission to colonize it. I can see now, too, that there was another and stronger license granted: that of queen mother. Aunt Willa was no fool. She must have seen from the first day how I felt about Malory, and she had always known of my immutable and twisted ties to Lucy. I believe she moved into my mother’s bedroom and later her house absolutely secure in the knowledge that I would not oust the mother of Lucy and the grandmother of Malory from the house she and Lucy both—and I as well—considered their first home. And she was right.
Shem and Martha Cater hated taking orders from her, I knew, but their sensitive servants’ antennae told them, correctly, that I did not wish to hear about it, and would not do anything about it if I did, and so they kept their grievances mostly to themselves. No one else seemed to notice, except perhaps to say, at one time or another, how fortunate it was that my aunt Willa was willing and able to serve as a housekeeper for me and my father, and to wonder what we would ever do without her.
By this time, few of the handsome, middle-aged women who were her contemporaries remembered that they had once laughed with my mother at Aunt Willa behind her back. If she was not one of them she had taken on their patina perfectly and subtly, and in Atlanta appearances have always soothed and charmed. There is not enough genuinely blue blood here to run warm with outrage at the insinuation into its ranks of a Willa Slagle Bondurant. And too, spinning into the mid-sixties, Atlanta was riding the tail of a comet, and Old Atlanta, like it or not, spun with it, gasping and even giggling dizzily among undreamed-of galaxies and constellations. No one had the time or inclination to snub Aunt Willa as they might have done a decade before.
And so she reigned creamily and snugly in the house to which she had come, teetering and faltering in slipshod high heels, a quarter century before, as beautiful and polished and curried as any of the women who had smirked at her at the Driving Club. I was, in the main, grateful enough to let her run the house, as I let canny, abrasive Marty Fox, whom Tom Carmichael and I had hired the year before to manage my father’s business affairs, run those. I knew her power over Lucy, but I had also seen her tears and her fear, and so her vulnerability, and I did not think that she had any power over Malory. If she attempted to exercise any in that direction, I could always stop it simply by threatening to put her out of the house, and I would not have hesitated to do so.
For it was in actuality my house now, and not my father’s. I don’t think Aunt Willa was certain of that, either then or for a long time afterward. I believe she reckoned that it might still be my father’s, and that I, too, might well live there on sufferance, and I think that that was why she spent all those hours keeping vigil beside his bed, perhaps thinking, in some corner of her wire-grass soul, that he might reward her by changing his will and leaving her the house, or perhaps simply his insurance.
It would be interesting to know what he thought about her presence beside his bed; we were never sure if he fully comprehended what had happened to my mother, but he must have missed her and concluded at some point that she was dead. If he was lucid enough to grasp it, the splendid futility of Aunt Willa’s vigil beside him must have given him a great deal of dark glee. For he had known for many years what I learned only in the days after Orly, from Tom Carmichael: that the house, as well as virtually all the rental property and other Bondurant holdings that my father had tended and maneuvered and multiplied, had been in my mother’s name, and that they had passed, at her death, not to him, but to me. I became, in one fiery instant, quite a rich young man and he nominally a paralyzed pauper, and I have always wondered if he did not hate both my mother and me for that knowledge long before it ever became fact. It would explain, at least partly, his cold red distaste for me, and his long retreat from my mother’s presence into his study. After the day Tom Carmichael brought Marty Fox to the house and introduced him to me, I never went into that room again.
I did not feel rich, or even different in any way, and forgot for long stretches of time, until Marty brought his monthly sheaf of bills and checks and papers for me to sign, that the reins of the Bondurant holdings rested now in my own vastly unqualified hands. The only significant advantage all that money had for me was its ability to buy me privacy and freedom from onerous duty and detail. I used it shamelessly. Marty Fox virtually ran the business, and Aunt Willa ran the house; I had enough raw Cameron history at my fingertips to keep me absorbed into senility if I wished, and very little outside the summerhouse walls called insistently enough to me to lure me out of it. The smoldering stigma of the Pump-house Hill fire and the natural preoccupation with young families and fledgling careers kept the Buckhead Boys and their wives at a seemly remove from me now.
If I had truly been one of them, raising a family and pursuing a career and moving with them between the clubs and homes and summer places of our old orbit, I know that I would have been forgiven the fire and taken back into the fold, but I had the mark of the loner on my forehead by that time, and pack animals to their very marrows, they saw and smelled it, and largely let me be. They dutifully, one by one, had me to dinner in their near-identical “starter” houses in the days after my mother’s death, and included me in holiday parties and club dances, and other familiar herd rituals, but by then I was outside their ranks, derailed once and for all from the track that would take them to the forefront of the city’s corridors of power one day, ready to take up the torches when the Club passed on to them. I did not care. In those days all human encounters seemed collisions, and the dead in the summerhouse received me far more gently than the living in Buckhead. My money bought me seclusion; I could afford to become something of a recluse, and so, gratefully, I became one.
Dorothy Cameron alone in those days tried to lure me back out into the world.
“There’s not much excuse that I can see for you to hide out in that summerhouse for weeks on end now,” she said, on an evening in the early autumn of 1963, when I loped over in the dusk to see her. “You ought to be out putting some of that money to good use.”
I knew that Ben was away; the morning newspaper had said he was meeting that evening with representatives of several black organizations to draft recommendations for a public accommodations act and for laws facilitating open-occupancy housing, fair employment machinery and desegregation of public facilities. He was rarely at home, day or night, in those days. I found Dorothy in the little den of the Muscogee Avenue house, tiny Livvy Gentry playing quietly in the playpen at her feet. Sarah was, she said, practicing for the Junior League Follies, and Charlie was closeted again with Mr. Woodruff, as he was two or three nights a week now.
Dorothy put Livvy into my arms. She was a rather simian baby, as slight in stature as Sarah had been as an infant, but with Charlie’s button eyes and long upper lip, and holding her was like cradling a tiny, plucking monkey. After a moment I handed her back to Dorothy; the child might have borne my mother’s name, and might be flesh and bone of my lost love, but aside from gratitude at Sarah for thinking to please me by keeping my mother’s name alive, I felt absolutely nothing for her daughter except mild regret that she so little resembled Sarah. The powerful, knee-loosening love that I felt when Malory was in my arms was obviously her province alone. I was grateful that with Dorothy I did not have to pretend affection I didn’t feel for her granddaughter.
“I’m doing good with all those ancestors of Ben’s,” I said. “It could be a magnificent book, Dorothy, if I can do it right. It needs a lot of time and concentration. I’m feeling my way. What good is money if it can’t buy you the time and privacy to do your work? And besides, what’s wrong with a rich recluse? Poverty stricken recluses get all the good press.”
She snorted, taking a Rose Medallion saucer away from the baby. “I don’t think there’s really any such thing as a poor recluse, not by choice,” she said. “The poor man is rarely reclusive by choice. I’ll bet you anything the classic, pure recluse is that way because he can’t afford to be a rich, corrupt voluptuary.”
I laughed. “Well, that’s the ticket, then. I’ll give up the recluse business and become a rich, corrupt voluptuary, and then everybody will say how money has changed me, and that I’m not the good old plain, down-to-earth hermit I used to be.”
“I don’t think that idea holds any water whatsoever,” Dorothy said. “I’ve seen an awful lot of money in my life, some of it acquired almost overnight, and the popular theory is that it changes people. Like you said. So-and-so is not the old so-and-so we knew in the lean days. But I think just the opposite is true. Poverty dictates what you will think about the world you live in, and so that’s what and who you become. Your poverty defines you. Money lets you choose, lets you buy yourself a persona—indulge your true character, so to speak. People who are most ‘themselves’ are people who can afford to be. Does that make any sense at all?”
“As much as you ever do, which is a lot,” I said. “But if that’s true, why is it so awful for me to be a private person? I mean, if that’s what I am naturally. What does money have to do with that?”
She shook her head impatiently. “It just ought to be put to work. If you don’t want to go out and do it, give it to somebody like Charlie and let him find a use for it. You don’t need it, Shep. It’s immoral to just sit there playing with Ben’s ancestors when some of that money could make such a difference to so many people.”
“I cleaned up Pumphouse Hill, Dorothy,” I said resentfully. “I’m having Tom and Marty renovate every piece of property we own. I’m not going to waste the money. I’ll leave it where it will do good when I die, and right now I’m trying to get some kind of trust set up for Malory.”
She looked at me keenly.
“Very generous of you, Shep. I don’t imagine Jack Venable thinks too highly of that, does he? And from what I hear, I don’t imagine Lucy even realizes Malory needs it, or will. I hear she’s harder at it than ever with the movement, and doesn’t get home until the baby is asleep, more often than not. It’s reabsorbed her like a sponge.”
“You hear an awful lot,” I said without rancor.
“I do,” she said, equally mildly. “People tell me an amazing number of things. Am I right about Jack?”
“Yes,” I said. “You are. He flat refused to even discuss a trust for Malory, and said he wouldn’t let her touch a penny of it if I went against his wishes and set it up. He’ll reconsider, though. He and Lucy don’t make enough between them to send her to day camp, much less school and college and…whatever else she needs.”
“A proud man,” she said. “I can see his point, though. She’s his daughter, after all.”
“She’s my family, too,” I said.
“I know she is,” Dorothy Cameron said, and something in her low, rich voice told me that she knew as much as I did or ever would about Malory Venable’s patrimony, and had since her birth. But she said no more, then or ever. Dorothy might never cease in her attempt to force perfectibility upon me, but she knew down to a hair when to let me be. It was not the least of the reasons I loved her.
It was that autumn when I first began to worry seriously about Lucy, and consequently, about Malory. From absorption with her work at Damascus House and the civil rights movement, Lucy seemed to sheer over into obsession; from two or three late nights a week, she began to spend three and four there, and often weekend days, and once or twice she slept over on a cot in the business office. I learned this only because, when she made her nightly telephone calls to me, the background noise was indisputably that of other telephones and mimeograph machines and clipped black voices speaking. I don’t think she would have told me where she was calling from if I had not asked. She knew, by then, how I felt about her time away from Malory.
“Back off, Gibby,” she would say. “Malory is fine; she’s wonderful. I just checked on her. She ate seconds at supper and went right to sleep, and Jack says she hasn’t crièd once tonight. Oh, and he thinks she’s about to walk; she’s maybe a day or two from real steps. How about that? It’s awfully early for walking, you know.”
“I hope you’re there to see it,” I said. “What does this make, Luce, three nights this week? Four? She’s going to think Estelle is her mother.”
“She knows who her mother is, don’t you worry about that,” Lucy said defensively. “There’s not an hour of the day I’m not talking to her by radar. She always answers. Isn’t that good about the walking? I’ll have her marching with us before the year’s out.”
“I’d like to come over there and march you home,” I said, exasperated. “She needs her mother, Lucy. It’s that simple.”
“She needs a world where Negro children aren’t blown up in churches, or bitten by dogs or knocked down by fire hoses and clubs,” Lucy said, in a near-hiss. “It’s that simple. Do you think for one minute I’m not doing this for her?”
“The thought has crossed my mind that you’re doing it for yourself, now that you mention it,” I said. The words were unfair, but sometimes Lucy veered off into glib, liberal cant, and that sent me wild. For some reason I could not bear banality from her.
“Fuck off,” Lucy said, and slammed the telephone down, and did not call again until I telephoned her, two days later, and apologized. After that I left her hours and her deepening obsession alone, but I did not stop thinking uneasily about them. The bombing of the black Baptist church in Birmingham in September had sent her nearly mad; she had wept and raged for days, and, earlier, Jack had been able to prevent her from joining the Washington March, where Martin Luther King made his electrifying “I have a dream” speech, only by threatening to bring Malory to live with me and Aunt Willa if she went. Her emotional pitch had risen steadily since then; I wondered if, now, that threat would deter her. I prayed that Jack did not put it to the test.
In midafternoon of a Friday in November Jack Venable called me.
“Can you do me an enormous favor?” he said. His voice was thick and flat, as with great fatigue.
“Sure,” I said. “What’s up?”
“Could you go down to Damascus House and get Lucy? They called a minute ago and said she’s…in some kind of fit, or collapse, and they can’t get her home with all the turmoil, and I can’t leave the children to go myself. If you could bring her home, I’d be eternally grateful.”
Something did not fit, was badly skewed. “What are you doing at home in the middle of the day?” I said. “Is something the matter with Malory?”
There was a long silence, and then he said, “Don’t you know?”
“Know what?” I said, my heart freezing in my chest.
“Kennedy was shot in Dallas around noon. He’s dead.”
The room swelled and brightened around me, and his voice faded out, and then came sweeping back like a cold storm tide.
“…know how she felt about him,” he was saying, and what I had thought was fatigue turned to grief as he spoke. His voice broke and he cleared his throat and went on.
“He was Jesus Christ to King’s God with her. And she’s been unstable as hell since the baby came. I don’t want to pile all three children in the car and go down and get her, and I’d just as soon they don’t see her in this state anyway, whatever it is. I don’t think they could cope with it, and I’m not sure I could, either. You could always calm her down; I can’t tell you how I’d appreciate it if you’d get her and keep her there or somewhere until she’s in shape to be around the children. Estelle has taken off someplace and there’s nobody but me with them.”
“Where was he shot?” I said, numbly and stupidly.
“In a motorcade somewhere in downtown Dallas. Near some kind of schoolbook thing.”
“No, I mean…where on his…was he disfigured?”
It was a horrid and irrelevant question, and I knew it, but all I could think of was the ruin of that splendidly enabling white grin, and the fine shock of red hair, which he had worn with the offhand grace of a battle panache. I did not think I could bear the knowledge of his disfigurement, though I did not know why.
“Christ, Shep, I don’t know. The back of his head, I think. What goddamned difference does it make? It killed him, wherever it was.”
“I’m on my way,” I said.
“Thanks,” he said heavily. “Thanks.”
But I was not on my way for some moments. My treacherous knees buckled under the loss, even though my overtaxed heart would not acknowledge it, so that I had to sit down on the sofa for a few minutes. I kept shaking my head to clear it. I wondered if I should call Shem Cater to drive me, but I did not want company, and in the end I took the Rolls myself and drove down into the bleak section southeast of Five Points, where Damascus House was, my hands and legs shaking profoundly all the way, as if gripped by an influenza chill.
Claiborne Cantrell was conducting a service in the sanctuary when I arrived, so that there was almost no one about. I could hear sobbing and a peculiar low, timeless keening that lifted the hair on the back of my neck, and an occasional howl of pure grief, doglike and terrible, and the strains of old hymns, sung in cracked voices: “Abide With Me,” “The Old Rugged Cross,” and that poignant and now heartbreaking anthem of hope and commitment and valor, “We Shall Overcome.”
“I don’t think we shall overcome this,” I whispered to myself, going up the old stone steps and turning right toward the little office where Lucy worked. The music gave searing life to the enormity that lay frozen in my chest, and I felt tears begin to run down my face. I did not wipe them away; it did not seem important to do so.
Lucy was sitting in her desk chair when I entered the tiny, cluttered office, and a vastly fat, middle-aged black woman was sitting beside her, holding both her hands. It did not take me more than a second to realize that she was literally holding Lucy in the chair; Lucy kept struggling to rise, and her head thrashed from side to side, sending the wings of blue-black hair swinging. Her face was the yellow-white of cheap office paper, and there were white rings around her blazing, light blue eyes and deep scarlet patches on her high cheekbones, and she smiled, a terrible, radiant, fixed smile.
“Hey, Gibby,” she sang, smiling, smiling. “Did you come for the march? Flora, this is my cousin Gibby. He always knows the best thing to do. He came for the march—I told you people would start coming, if you’d just be patient. Oh, shit, where in hell is Claiborne with that bus? We’re wasting time. All that singing and yelling can come later. We need to get this show on the road….”
She leaned around the black woman to peer out the door toward the sounds of sobbing and singing. The woman shook her head, her great hands still enfolding Lucy’s. The silver tracks of tears had dried on her cheeks, but her face was impassive.
“She think we gon’ go to Washington and march on the White House,” she said. “She say with the president laying dead an’ the biggest march in history, it be the end of the fight, an’ there ain’t be no more racial injustice. She think he been shot by a bunch of segregationists, and this gon’ end it all—”
“It will, it will!” Lucy caroled. Her voice literally shook with excitement, a high tremolo, like a castrato’s. “We’ve won, don’t you see? After this, nobody on earth will still believe in segregation—he’s the greatest martyr the movement could possibly have! But we have to go now, we have to get there by the time they bring him back. Everybody else will be there already….”
I went and knelt before her and took her hands from the black woman, who touched Lucy’s hair gently and went out of the office toward the sound of the singing.
“Lucy,” I said, “be quiet and listen to me. You aren’t going to Washington. There isn’t going to be any march. It wasn’t any segregationist plot; it didn’t have anything to do with civil rights. I heard on the radio coming down here that they just got the guy, and they think he’s some kind of Communist, and he acted alone.”
She looked at me quite calmly.
“They want you to think that, of course,” she said. “It’s all part of it. You’ll see—you’ll see in the end. Of course they’d want us to think that, but any fool knows it was over civil rights, not some silly little lonesome Communist…. Gibby, will you go get Claiborne out of that stupid service right now? Every other city in the country will have their people there while we’re still sitting on our asses down here, singing!”
“I want you to snap out of this shit right now, Lucy,” I said, angry and frightened. “I told Jack I’d bring you home where you belong, with him and Malory, and that’s what I’m going to do. Get your things and let’s go.”
Her smile widened. She looked beautiful and utterly mad. “I’m going to Washington, Gibby, and I’m going to march for my president. Everybody who’s got any decency and conscience in the country will be there. I’ll bet my father’s there. I’ll bet he is, right now…. Did you ever think how much Jack Kennedy was like Daddy? Don’t you think the resemblance was just uncanny? Wouldn’t that be something, to run into my daddy there in Washington, at the greatest march in the history of the world—”
“Lucy!” I cried.
“Watch out, Gibby, or I’ll really get crazy,” she said, sliding her white-ringed eyes side wise at me, slyly. “You want to see me really crazy? Here we go: DADDY! I WANT MY DADDY! I WANT MY DADDY! MY DADDY’S NOT DEAD! SOMEBODY SHOT THE PRESIDENT!”
Her screams spiraled up and up, so piercing and wild and fierce that they caromed around the little room like mad, trapped birds, and scattered, and flew into the corridors and up to the ceilings of the old building, ringing on and on. She did not seem to need breath for them.
I pulled my arm back as far as it would go and slapped her with all the strength I could muster. I felt the blow into the wing of my shoulder blade. Her head flew sideways, and bounced on her slender neck. She drew in a long, long, sibilant breath, her eyes enormous and unfocused on my face, all pupil, and then she dropped her face into her hands and began to cry. I put my arms around her and drew her against me, and we stayed there, weeping together in that overheated, abysmally cluttered little room, until she literally began to retch from the force of her sobs, and I could no longer feel my knees. I could not see ahead in time; we seemed to have come, at that moment, to the flat, white end of everything.
She was calm after that, a frail, tottering calm, but she could not stop crying. The tears flowed on and on, endlessly, sheeting silently down her ravaged white face and soaking her blouse and sweater. She did not talk on the drive back toward Buckhead, but she smoked through the tears, and listened in her stillness to the somber voices on the car radio until I could bear them no longer and turned it off. Finally, as we passed Brookwood Station, where, worlds and eons ago, two thin, like-hearted children had rolled under a slowly moving train, hearts in mouths, she said, “I can’t go home. I can stay fairly sane with you, but if I have to look at those poor, horrible little boys’ faces and hear them prattle about this I’ll start screaming like a banshee again. I know I will. I can’t even talk to Malory in my head right now. I can’t listen to Jack’s endless analyzing. I’m really afraid to go home, Gibby.”
“We won’t go, then,” I said. “You can stay with me until you feel better. We can go out and have some dinner, or I’ll fix something for us. I told Jack I might not bring you back tonight.”
“Did he mind that?” Her voice was remote.
“It was his idea.”
She was silent for a while, and then she said, “Somehow I don’t want to go back to the summerhouse, Gibby. I don’t want to have to associate it with this awfulness later on. And I don’t want to run the slightest risk of seeing Mama. She hated him. Or even worse, she only said she did, because all her snotty Republican buddies do. I think I’d kill her, literally strangle her, if she said one word about him right now.”
“I know where let’s go,” I said, as if I had planned it all along. “Let’s go over to the Camerons’. I’ll bet you they’re there. Somebody will be, anyway. Okay with you?”
All of a sudden I wanted to be there, in the little den of Merrivale House, more than I had ever wanted to be anywhere in my life. I did not even want any specific one of the Camerons; I just wanted to be there, in the house that had always seemed so safe and right and beautiful to me. I realized only at that moment that whenever I had thought of John Kennedy’s Camelot, I thought, somehow, of it as existing in and around the house on Muscogee Avenue.
“Okay,” Lucy said dully. “Anywhere. Just not home or the summerhouse.”
Ben and Dorothy were not there after all, but Sarah and Charlie were, and Ben Junior and Julia, and Snake and Lelia, and even Tom and Freddie Goodwin came in just after we did. Others followed. One by one, we came, the Buckhead boys and girls, from wherever we were, as if summoned out of the November night; we came to the nearest place Buckhead had to Camelot.
It was a ghastly homecoming. All of us were crying, I remember, even those of us who had not been particularly smitten with Kennedy. We knew, somehow, that far more than a single visionary life had ended. We knew that we had lost far more than a president. Our youth had died, our collective childhoods were over, now. This day divided time; forever after we would think of our lives as separated into what had gone before this, and what came after. I suppose that at this, our last great personal transition before our deaths began, on this night of the shattering of time, it was natural that we should gather. I thought, looking at the unabashed tears on these faces I had known literally since my infancy, that except for Lucy and Sarah I had never seen any of these people weep before, and probably never would again, not even at the death of one or another of us. Somehow this night was past and beyond the need or the reach of control. There were no rituals for this.
Sarah met us at the door and brought us back to the little den, her face bleached and scourged with desolation. She had a drink in her hand, and she sipped steadily at it all evening. Like all of us, she was crying. We all drank a great deal, and some of us got frankly drunk for perhaps the first time in our lives. I remembered seeing Ben half carrying Julia up the stairs to his old bedroom at some point in the night, and Tom Goodwin kept stumbling and falling on his way to the drinks tray by the fireplace. Charlie said little, but he wept quietly and steadily, even as he went about his hostly chores, mixing and passing drinks, lighting cigarettes, fetching napkins to mop up spills, taking and producing coats as people came and went. All the while the silent river of tears ran ceaselessly from behind his thick glasses down into his collar.
Sarah brought trays of sandwiches and a platter of cake and set out Dorothy’s old Sheffield coffee service, but no one ate. We drank and watched the television set, staring into its flickering maw at images and sounds so unimaginable they did not register, but which were even then being etched in acid in the deepest and smallest folds of our brains: Lyndon Johnson, looming and wolflike, his hand raised in a cramped airplane cabin. Jackie, erect and stained, alone on a loading dock in Virginia. Flags at half-staff, and people around the world crying in our own horror, and the beginning of the awful voices of the drums.
At about ten, Freddie Goodwin cocked her avian little head and said, “I wonder if this means we’ll have to cancel the Junior League Follies? I don’t see how on earth we can; we’ve worked like dogs for months. This would have to happen now—”
“SHUT UP, FREDDIE!” Lucy screamed, coming white-faced out of the chair she had been slumped in all evening, her fingers actually curved into talons before her. I caught her by the back of her sweater before she reached Freddie. She was breathing so hard and rapidly that I thought she was going to faint, or even die. The sound rasped and grated in the room.
“You listen here, Lucy Bondurant,” Freddie began, but Tom overrode her. “Put a lid on it, Freddie,” he said thickly. “Fuck the Junior League Follies. Fuck the entire Junior League, for that matter.”
Freddie huffed off into the kitchen, looking sidewise for sympathy as she went, but finding none. No one noticed her. Most of the others were looking sidewise themselves, at Lucy. The outburst had had about it the intensity and swiftness of murder, or madness.
Sometime after midnight, Glenn Pickens came by looking for Ben. His face was wet too, silver-scummed, but I never saw him cry. He sat down with us for a moment, with the looseness and slackness of deathly fatigue, drinking the coffee that Sarah brought him, but saying nothing. Like us, he stared at the television set. Presently he got up to leave, and Lucy saw him and pushed herself heavily from her chair and followed him to the door. She held out her arms, wordlessly, and he hesitated a moment, and then came into them. They held each other briefly, and from where I was sitting, behind him, I saw his shoulders heave, and saw tears start afresh from Lucy’s tight-shut eyes.
“I know how you felt about him,” Lucy sobbed to him. “I’m so sorry, Glenn. We’ve lost…we’ve lost…God, I don’t know…everything.”
“No, Lucy, you don’t know how I felt about him,” Glenn Pickens said, in a taut, angry voice. Then he smiled. It looked as if it hurt him as much as the tears must have. “But I know you’re sorry. Poor, nice little Lucy. Poor, good little white girl. I wonder if you really know what we’ve lost.”
After he left, Lucy sat back down and quite deliberately and silently drank herself into senselessness. Near dawn Charlie helped me carry her out to the Rolls, and as we slid her long, loose-limbed body, almost birdlike in its lightness, into the backseat, I looked down at her stained face in the light from the Camerons’ black iron carriage lamps. It was emptied and blunted and absolutely devoid of the quicksilver life that animated it when she was awake. She looked, suddenly, middle-aged and very nearly ugly, and as if she might be dead. My heart twisted with pain for her. I thought of Glenn Pickens’s words: “I wonder if you really know what we’ve lost.”
Much later, months after that night, I read somewhere words that Patrick Moynihan had spoken to Mary McGrory, and wept afresh at that terse elegy for so many and so much: “Mary McGrory said to me that we’d never laugh again. And I said, Heavens, Mary, we’ll laugh again. It’s just that we’ll never be young again.”
And it was so. In the rest of her runaway comet’s life Lucy Bondurant Chastain Venable laughed a great deal, but she was never again, after that day in November, truly young.