Looking back, I have come to think of the five or so years after John Kennedy’s assassination as the half decade in which nothing happened. Much did happen, of course: In that time America was catapulted by Lee Harvey Oswald’s bullet out of the long, doo-wah span of the fifties and into the psychedelic nervous breakdown that only ended with the resignation of Richard Nixon; and Atlanta left its pretty pool of dreaming, century-old sunlight and leaped into the high, thin, cold sun of space.
Yes, indeed, much happened. But not a great deal happened, at least as such things are measured, to us—to me, and to Jack and Lucy and Malory Venable. I suppose what I really mean was that Lucy was not, at least overtly, mad in those years, not visibly out of control. There was no repeat of the scene on the day Kennedy died. By that time, we were all fairly accustomed to having our lives defined and the weather of them forecast by Lucy’s emotional state.
So of course, I, of all people, should have known better.
Out and abroad in the country, two centuries’ worth of walls were crumbling, few of them peacefully. The Civil Rights Act was at last signed. Martin Luther King won the Nobel Peace Prize. James Meredith was shot in Mississippi. Blacks and whites marched and sang and were beaten and bitten and jailed in Selma, Alabama. Watts and Detroit and Newark burned as angry riots flowered in the dangerous summers. A world away the feverish green jungles of Vietnam burned, too, and at home at least half of the riots and rallies decried that sad and sorry nonwar. The Beatles conquered America, and skirts went thigh-high and teenagers higher as substances most adults had never heard of slammed through their bloodstreams, and beads and bells and strobes and synthesizers supplanted Japanese lanterns and “Moonglow” at the parties of the American young. America in those years was like an automobile with the governor off its motor and its accelerator jammed to the floor.
In Atlanta, we were almost precisely where Ben and the Club thought we should be. The new major league stadium was begun and built in a record fifty-one days, and the Milwaukee Braves became the Atlanta Braves, and the NFL Falcons came to town, and we played ball. Restaurants and bars were desegregated. An area-wide rapid transit system was authorized. We were, in the middle of those years, the second highest city in the country in terms of new construction. Sleek, sunstruck new hotels and office buildings and apartment houses soared into the sky along Peachtree Street downtown, dwarfing the comfortable Edward Hopper jumble of eight-and ten-story businesses there. New amusement and theme parks opened around and even under the city; new bars and restaurants and clubs sprang up like mushrooms after a summer rain. Malls and strip shopping centers burgeoned. Grady Hospital was desegregated, and the city received a HUD grant for a Model Cities program that encompassed four percent of its land and ten percent of its population. A great new government complex and a flamboyant new governor’s mansion went up and the grand old mansions along Peachtree Road began to come down, and in the proper, shabby little Tenth Street section of Peachtree Road historically known as Tight Squeeze, the bearded, beaded, long-haired, perpetually stoned young of the entire Southeast set up camp and renamed themselves hippies. I think that not a few of them swung by there after their sessions with Margaret Bryan, changing into jeans and beads and discarding shoes somewhere along the way.
Atlanta’s momentum did not come cheap. Nearriots simmered in the bright, hot days and the thick nights. Ben Cameron met and talked and met and talked until, at one point, he was put to bed in the house on Muscogee Avenue by Hub Dorsey and a determined Dorothy and forbidden to talk for a week on pain of losing his voice permanently. During one particularly spectacular confrontation he climbed atop a parked car, a surging sea of angry, frustrated black faces at his feet, his coppery head a target for any murderous fool within a mile radius, and pleaded through a borrowed bullhorn for order. He finally got it—and his photograph in the newspapers of an entire nation—before he was toppled from the car and ended up in Piedmont Emergency with a sprained ankle and a hole in the seat of his pants. But Atlanta did not blossom into flames as Detroit and Watts and Pittsburgh and other cities did in those summers, and as Ben himself said, that was worth a considerable chunk of a mayor’s ass.
In Buckhead, Sarah and Charlie had another little girl, called Charlsie, and young Ben and Julia Cameron another small red-haired son, and Ben rapidly became one of the young architects of the hour and the day, mentioned often in almost the same tone of voice as Philip Johnson and I. M. Pei. He was out of town a great deal in those days, and Julia would say, ruefully, that she supposed he had another family somewhere who was doting and fussing over him, because she and the boys certainly never saw him. But her voice was warm with pride. There was no doubt in the mind of anyone who saw them together that Ben was absolutely besotted with his sons.
Little Lady had the first of many discreet blackouts and did a discreet stint at Brawner’s while her own small children were cared for by Atlanta’s only, and cordially hated, English nanny, and Carter grew richer and richer and more remote. Aunt Willa finally gave up any pretense of working as a buyer at Rich’s and became one of Buckhead’s most elegant chatelaines. The Compleat Georgian moved ponderously out of my notes and into my typewriter. And Lucy quit her job at Damascus House and took one with SOUTH, a little foundation-funded, ultraliberal journal which put her, as she said, far more into the thick of things.
It was, from everyone’s standpoint but hers, an appallingly bad move.
From spending her days and nights within the walls of Damascus House, she was soon traveling all over the South in the little Austin the journal provided her, hastily gathered clothes strewn over the backseat and a bearded, cool-eyed, laughably young photographer in the front beside her, covering the movement. It was, by then, surging inexorably out of the deep, calm channel King and his early supporters had dug for it and into the glinting, murderous shoals of radical violence, and we at home feared both the sniper’s bullet and Lucy’s own erratic hands on the Austin’s steering wheel when she was away. She was by then literally intoxicated with the momentum and glamour of the movement, and most of her time was spent in the company of the young heroes and guerrilla fighters whose names and cold, closed faces were familiar on television screens and in newspapers on half a dozen fronts: Little Rock, Selma, Birmingham, Montgomery, Oxford. More than once she went beyond the bounds of her job and the instructions of her editors and ended up in jail herself. Jack and the older children were frightened and resentful, Malory was bewildered, Aunt Willa was predictably outraged and Lucy herself was as exalted as an avenging angel.
Once, after I had wired bail money yet again, I laid into her on her return. She had brought Malory to the summerhouse for a rare visit, and when the little girl ran out to play by the lily pool I said without preamble, “I guess you think it would be really wonderful to be slain on the altar of the goddamned movement.”
“Maybe not slain,” she said around her inevitable cigarette. “But I’d love to be beaten or hosed or bitten by dogs. Maybe even shot, if it didn’t kill me. I need to know how it feels. I need to go through it all with them. They’re my people. It’s my fight. You ought to be in it with us, Gibby.”
“They’re fucking well not your people,” I snarled. “Jack is your people. Malory is your people. Toby and Tommy are your people. What good are you to them if you’re dead on a dirt road in Mississippi? And I am in it with you. I’m financing the damned thing with your bail and fines.”
“You’re just like Jack Venable,” she snapped. “Putting yourselves ahead of the greatest and most…morally important…movement in history. Why can’t you see that I do this for the children? I want Malory to grow up knowing what’s really important.”
“I want Malory to grow up with a real mother, not a fake honky martyr,” I said.
But Lucy was blazing with zeal and exaltation, and did not hear me. She was back on the road the next Monday. She was not eating or sleeping well, and grew thinner and more haggard and incandescent by the day, and drove herself incredibly with her travels and deadlines and the long, passionate talk sessions with the new young black lieutenants now in the movement’s vanguard. I do not think that she loved or respected them any more than she had King and his honor guard, but there is no question but that they excited her more. She ran on stimulation, in those days, like a race car on high-octane gasoline.
I think Jack, and certainly I, might have moved more decisively to curtail her activities if the absences and obsession had been having a markedly adverse effect on the children, but they did not seem to do so. The boys, teenaged now, had been indifferent to her at best, and were no doubt glad to have their father to themselves so much of the time. And Malory, at five, was a sunny and self-possessed child, enchanting to look at and adept at pleasing the adults around her, and she showed no signs of missing her mother. She did not lack for company. Wherever she went, Malory charmed. She had an uncanny sense of just what small action or gesture or phrase would most please whom, and had a habit of making vivid little crayon drawings signed, “I love you, Malory B. Venable,” and giving them to family, friends and new acquaintances alike. A great many refrigerators around Lithonia and one or two in Buckhead, in those days, wore Malory’s drawings. Mine was nearly papered with them. I was not sure I liked or approved of the facility for self-endearment that she displayed; it spoke too loudly of subterranean need. But I was, as was everyone around her, totally captivated by it. Malory Venable midway into her sixth year of life was almost literally too good to be true.
You would often forget, around her, that she was a child. Despite her pointed pixie chin and Lucy’s huge, crystal-blue eyes and the silky child’s hair, cut in ragged points around her heartshaped face, Malory had about her the nurturing manner and outward focus of an adult. When I thought about it, I would realize that she had been cast by Lucy’s absences into the role of caretaker and helper early on. She brought trays and magazines and slippers and drinks and snacks to Jack, and she fetched and carried for the boys when they would allow her to, and when she was visiting with me she frequently pattered around collecting dishes and fluffing sofa cushions and bringing me astounding treats foraged from my refrigerator. I soon learned to accept them without fuss; if you praised Malory for a service, she would wear herself out finding others to perform.
Perhaps she did not seem to suffer from Lucy’s absences because the tenor of her mother’s presence, when she was there, was so intense. The old symbiosis still held; an arc of utter attention still leaped between the two of them when they were together, and the old eerie, voiceless communion still prevailed. I have seen Lucy, in front of visitors, stop and fall silent and somehow compose her face, and soon Malory would appear from wherever she was, trotting straight to her mother and looking up questioningly. It was in the nature of a parlor trick, and I hated it when Lucy did it, but it was admittedly startling to see. When Malory was older, she stopped automatically responding, refusing with a lovely and touching natural dignity to allow herself to be exploited, but she still felt Lucy’s call, and continued to do so, I know, for as long as her mother lived.
When she was in the city, Lucy was hardly ever away from her daughter. She took Malory into her and Jack’s bed in the morning and evenings, brought her along on interviews and into the office and allowed her to sit up late with the blacks and whites in the movement who came, inevitably, to the farmhouse to eat, rest, talk and often stay for a night or a week or more.
“Be brave like that, Malory,” she would say often. “Always be brave.”
And Malory would nod silently, her whole child’s heart in her eyes.
I detested that chaotic nonchildhood for Malory, but I could understand her fascination with her mother. I would try to see Lucy through her eyes, and the vision was irresistible and overpowering: the beautiful, vivid, shimmering mother, rarely seen but constantly felt, swooping in and out of her small life trailing passion and glory and swarms of intense, exotic people in her wake like the cosmic detritus in the tail of a comet. No wonder her father seemed, by contrast, simply dull. I know that she thought him so. How could she not? Sinking into the passivity that would last his lifetime, uniformly silvery gray and amorphous, slumped into his easy chair, mired in the anodynes of scotch and television; the reluctant disciplinarian, the unshining one, always and endlessly there—Jack Venable never had a chance with Malory. She loved him, I know, but as one might a great, sweet dog, or her familiar bed. By contrast Lucy burned like Venus on a winter night.
“Jack is a lump,” Malory said to me once when she was spending the day with me in the summerhouse. “He sleeps all the time and he smells funny.”
She visited fairly often in those years, when Jack had to work on weekends, or when she had a shopping or movie expedition planned with her grandmother. We both loved those days, I because I loved her, by then, with all the passion I could never spend on Sarah or Lucy or my mother, and she, I suppose, because I interested her. She seemed to see nothing odd about an uncle—or cousin, or however she thought of me—who had shut himself up in a summerhouse behind the great house of his birth and saw almost no one. We had long conversations about a startling variety of things: leaping, veering, shining talk that refreshed and enchanted me. It was I who read her Kipling and Malory, and she loved them as her mother had done before her. Lucy had told her about the two books, those icons of safety and magic which had burned so clearly and steadily through our childhood, and when she cried aloud with Mowgli, “Mark my trai-i-i-1!” and, “We be of one blood, thou and I,” it was nearly impossible for me to distinguish between mother’s and daughter’s voices; both resonated, intertwined, in my heart. The words never failed to bring a thickness to my throat: she was, after all, one way or another, of my blood. I like to think that it was, in part, from me that she learned to assess and reflect and think abstractly, and it was from her that I learned again to dream and suppose and play. There was little that she did not say to me. It was hard indeed to remember that she was only five.
“He’s not a lump,” I said, on the day that she spoke so of Jack Venable. “He works hard all day and he’s tired when he gets home. If he didn’t rest he couldn’t go to work and take care of you.”
“Phooey,” she said. “He doesn’t have to do that. You’ll do that. Mama says you will.”
“Well, I would if he couldn’t for some reason,” I said, cursing Lucy silently for that tacit belittlement of Jack. “But he can. It’s his job. It’s what fathers do. He loves you and your mama.”
“You love my mama, don’t you?” she said.
“Of course I do,” I said, not at all liking where this was going. “But in a different way.”
“Well, I think your way is better than Jack’s,” she said. “He really is a lump. He’s a collection of bumping molecules.”
I recognized Lucy’s voice in that, and said, severely, “I don’t want to hear any more talk about your father, Malory. He’s a good man. You’d really be up the creek without him around to look after you.”
“Maybe,” she said equably. “But I could probably look after myself just fine. I wouldn’t be afraid.”
I knew that she wouldn’t. Malory was afraid of almost nothing. Almost. But there was one thing of which she was afraid, afraid with a terror so deep and consuming that it sent her into the kind of white, blind hysterics that I had not seen since Lucy’s childhood. At first, when she was very small, we could not determine what it was; the fits came at random, once or twice at the Peachtree Road house, more often in the farmhouse. She could only gasp and sob something that sounded like “shoo man, shoo man.”
Finally we isolated what it was that sent her into that awful, mindless shrieking: It was the framed photographs that stood about the farmhouse, all taken on the same day, of her grandfather, James Bondurant, Lucy’s father. In all of them, he was wearing black and white saddle shoes, and it was only when she was old enough to shape words into sentences that we could fathom why she was so terrified of him. She was afraid he was going to come in his strange, striped shoes and take her mother away. Until she was eight or nine, we could not disabuse her of that notion.
“Did you tell her that?” I demanded of Lucy, the first time the root of the fear came to light.
“Of course not,” she said indignantly.
“Well, where the hell else would she get it?”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Gibby, I might have said something about him coming back to get me one day, but nothing that would make her behave like that.”
“Lucy,” I said, “sometimes I think you’re just plain crazy.”
I would remember those words.
The first of her truly bad times came, as we might have foreseen, with the murder of Martin Luther King in Memphis. She was on her way to Pascagoula, Mississippi, in the Austin when the news came over the radio, and the young photographer with her said that she simply dropped her hands from the steering wheel and began to scream, and that if he had not grabbed the wheel they would have gone off the road and been killed. She had screamed until he had gotten her to the emergency room of the nearest little community hospital, where they had had to literally sedate her into unconsciousness, and they kept her that way until Jack and Shem Cater and a trained nurse I had hired arrived in the Rolls to bring her back to Atlanta.
We took her straight to Ridgecrest. It took them two days to get her coherent enough to diagnose her, and even then it was not a unanimous diagnosis. One psychiatrist said flatly that it was schizophrenia and a severe case at that, another opted for manic-depressive psychosis, another favored fatigue and shock and hormonal imbalance and two simply shrugged.
By that time Lucy was talking again, and I gather that what she said had not exactly won friends and influenced people. Between expletives and epithets and the shrill eldritch shrieking, she was obsessed with two separate and bizarre notions: that her father was going to be at King’s funeral looking for her and that Jacqueline Kennedy was in Atlanta for the sole purpose of spiriting MLK’s body away. It was hard to tell which agitated her more. She strained and struggled against her attendants—seeking to rise and go down to Ebenezer Baptist Church to the funeral, both to meet the phantom father and to confront the treacherous Jackie—until they finally had to place her in isolation.
“Can’t you hear them, you assholes?” she would cry over and over. “Can’t you hear them calling? Are you going to sit here and let her take him and dump him in the ocean at Hyannis Port?”
And when they would not let her go, she subsided, finally, into heartbroken sobs, and then into a muteness that resembled, as it had after Malory’s birth, catatonia.
She seemed to surface again in the days following the funeral, but she was dull and lethargic, and grew slovenly and unkempt and had to be bathed and fed by attendants. Jack, exhausted by shuttling between his office and the hospital and home, was forced in the end to send the boys to their aunt back in Nashville, who promptly put them into Castle Heights Military School for the summer, and he gave up and sent Malory to stay with us on Peachtree Road. He was by this time so emotionally and physically depleted that I was relieved to have the children away. I felt, in some obscure and unexamined way, that for the moment they were, at least, safe.
Lucy began to improve slowly with the administration of a powerful tranquilizer and one of the new tri-cyclic antidepressants, and begged so insistently to have Malory visit her that the doctors finally decided it might be therapeutic, and so, on a Saturday afternoon in June, I picked Jack up in the Rolls with Malory and drove them there. I had not seen Lucy since we admitted her, but from the little Jack had told me of her condition and appearance, I was apprehensive in the extreme about letting Malory see her. Malory had been strangely unperturbed by her mother’s illness during her stay with us; she had said, when I broached the subject with her, only, “Mama is all right. She says so.”
But Lucy was not all right, and the sight of her in the hospital’s mercilessly lit, plastic-furnished dayroom smote Malory to white-faced silence. I felt enormous red anger at all of them—the doctors, Jack, Lucy herself—but it was too late to do anything at all. Malory walked up to her mother where she was sitting on a green vinyl sofa, an attendant standing behind her, and sat down beside her silently. For what seemed an eternity, she simply stared at Lucy. I could see the rise and fall, rise and fall, of the breath in her thin little chest, but I could not hear her breathing.
It was one of Lucy’s bad days, they told us later. She sat dull-eyed and obviously drugged under the sucking lights, her hands clenched motionless in her lap. Her slacks and shirt were spotted with food and stippled with pinpoint cigarette burns, and her fall of heavy, silky black hair had been cut brutally short and square around her fine head, so that there were nicks in the white scalp behind her ears. She had obviously been given shock therapy, for the red stigmata of the electrodes still marred her translucent temples. She was bruised and scratched from her struggles against the restraints, and did not smell clean, and at first she did not speak, only looked into our faces with opaque eyes. Then she put out her hand and touched Malory, and said, in her startling old rich, gay voice, “Hey, sweetheart. Give Mommy a kiss.”
Malory put her arms around her mother. She closed her eyes. She whispered into Lucy’s dreadful hair: “Mama, I want you to come home. I’ll be a good girl if you’ll just come home. I won’t ever be bad anymore. I’ll take care of you, Mama. I’ll be the mommy all the time, and you can be the little girl.”
“That’s right,” Lucy said, smiling happily, rocking Malory against her. “You be the mommy and I’ll be the little girl.”
Even through the great, rushing wind of shock and rage in my head, I wondered how many times Malory had heard those words, and how deeply the conviction went that Lucy’s illness and incarceration were her fault. I seemed to hear, miles and years away, a small Lucy Bondurant pleading with my own father to take care of her, and promising to be a good girl if only he would do so. Beside me, Jack Venable cursed in a defeated monotone.
She seemed to see Jack and me then, for the first time, and the smile widened until it threatened to split her dry, splotched face. I winced. Lucy’s fine, fresh porcelain skin seemed to have been tanned like delicate leather, crazing like centuries-old kid gloves at the corners of her eyes and mouth. There were sores at the corners of her lips and the base of her nostrils, where the skin had cracked and bled and healed and cracked all over again. The hands that she clapped in glee were as dry and rough as an old woman’s. She held them out to us, and Jack took them in his, and I sat down on the other side of her and put my arm around her shoulders.
“Hi, sugar,” Jack said.
“What’s happening, Luce?” I said, tasting the ludicrousness of the words as I said them.
“Jack! Gibby!” she cried. “Stick it in your ear!”
We looked at her. She laughed mightily.
“Stick it in your ear, you bastards,” she sang. “Stick it in your ear!” And she disengaged her hand from Jack’s and put her finger into her ear.
“I think she picked it up from one of the other…guests,” the attendant said. “We don’t think it means anything. But she loves it. Sometimes the only way we can get her to take her medication or go to bed is to play stick it in your ear with her. It works every time, so we don’t knock it.”
“No,” Jack said. “If that’s what it takes, I’ll go around with my finger in my ear for the rest of my life.”
His face was bleached, and he had aged years in the days of her hospitalization, but the look he gave Lucy was still heavy with the freight of his first, dazzled love for her.
“Stick it in your ear, Jack!” Lucy chimed.
He put his forefinger into his ear and smiled, and she laughed and clapped her hands. The dull drug haze seemed to lift with her laughter. She shook her head slightly. The mad rictus became her old smile. Malory crept close to her and Lucy hugged her, and reached up and kissed my cheek, and looked into our faces one by one.
“I’ve been away a long time,” she said. “I’d really like to come home now.”
She improved rapidly after that. Her psychiatrist kept her at Ridgecrest until the antidepressant had time to take effect, but the next two weeks there were uneventful. Lucy was obedient to hospital routine and participated dutifully in the group therapy sessions and the crafts and exercise classes. She attended meals in a group with other adult patients, leaving the large, barred area containing the dayroom and patients’ rooms in the company of an attendant three times a day to go down to the sunny, modern cafeteria for meals. Once or twice, she said, they were taken in the Ridgecrest bus to a nearby movie and a bowling alley, and once a day they walked on the paths and sat in the garden, looking, in their slacks and shorts, like vacationers, albeit pale and ill-barbered ones, at some spartan, economy-class resort.
“It’s like a big, bland camp for grown-ups; not as fancy as Camp Greystone, by any means, but a hell of a lot more fun,” she said on one of my visits that summer. We were sitting in the dayroom, and she had introduced me to nearly every adult patient in the hospital; they came up, one by one, as if drawn to some magnetic force field. I thought, remembering the irresistible light and energy that had played around her in her first youth, that they probably had been. She seemed happy in the hospital, oddly so—somehow safe and shielded and free—and Lucy, when she was happy, had always been irresistible.
She was looking better, too; the harsh, terrible haircut was beginning to soften and fall around her face, and her skin had plumped and smoothed under the rich moisturizing cream I had brought her, and she had asked for her makeup and Tabu to be brought from home. Except for the fading saffron bruises and the red indentations in her temples, she did not look so different from the way she had in the months before her hospitalization. She was even gaining a little weight; the dayroom had its own small kitchen attached, and it was kept stocked with food and snacks of all kinds. All of the patients, she told me, were complaining about getting fat.
Lucy was extremely popular. The other women deferred to her as people do to a natural leader, and the men were teasing and protective of her. I saw none of the instinctive distrust and alarm on the faces of the women who clustered around her that I had seen on female faces surrounding Lucy since her childhood; I supposed that here, in this sheltered place of rules and rituals and schedules and regimens, where aberration was the norm and the outside world kept at bay by bars and strident wellness, Lucy’s essential difference did not matter. She was one of them and one with them. Lucy herself bore this out.
“I feel closer to the people in this nuthouse than I ever did to anybody outside but you and Jack and Malory,” she said. “England must have been like this during the blitz.”
The men out and out adored her, and for her part, she catered to them and coddled them as if she had been hired to do so. Each time I visited, Lucy spent a large part of the time fetching snacks and coffee and cigarettes for me and any other men patients and their guests who were around, trotting in and out of the little kitchen like a slender, elegant servant.
“Why do you do that, Lucy?” I asked her once. “You never used to fetch and carry for me like this, or anybody else, for that matter.”
“No, I know it,” she said. “It’s funny. I don’t even believe in it. I don’t know where it came from—it sort of emerged, when I got over the worst of the craziness and started feeling better. All of a sudden there I was, needing to wait on these assholes like a damned maid. I guess it’s just atavistic, Gibby. This is what we know in our bones, we Southern women. To do it makes me feel sort of…mindlessly comfortable and right, in a cell-deep way, like I’m plugged into something old and unquestionable, running by remote control on some absolute track. I don’t know. It’s very comforting. It has nothing to do with what I believe with my mind. Sometimes you need sheer, simple comfort more than anything.”
“No wonder so many of you go nuts,” I said, taking a plastic tray of empty cups away from her and putting it aside. “It’s an awful pull between shagging trays for other people and tending to your own needs.”
Lucy squeezed my hand.
“One reason I love you is that you’re the only man I ever knew who understood that,” she said.
She came home at the end of June, and stayed there, content, under the kiss of the tranquilizer and the benison of the new antidepressant, to read and garden and watch television and sleep. SOUTH gave her a leave of absence with half pay, which was hardly a drop in the bucket in light of the staggering debt her illness had incurred, but made her feel as if she was contributing something to the household. Lucy had always been inordinately worried about money, but in those days she did not seem even to think about it—or rather, the lack of it.
Very little penetrated the spell of the drugs and the long, slow summer days on the farm in the company of her beloved Malory. For the first and last time in her life, Malory had her mother completely with her, whole-souled and there, and I think she was about as happy as it is possible for a child to be. When they came to see me in the summerhouse, or more rarely, when I drove the Rolls out in the cool of the afternoons, I would notice playing around Malory the same kind of just-glimpsed, dark incandescence that had lit Lucy’s childhood. It made of her something entirely magical, an enchantment, but I was not completely easy at the seeing of it. That dark fire had burned, not warmed, her mother.
But for the moment, that glow limned a summer out of time and remembrance for both of them, and they would recall it forever after with love and gratitude. It was not, in the summer of 1968, Lucy and Malory Venable who gave me unease, but Jack.
I knew that he was near distraction with worries about money and Lucy’s ongoing emotional state, but he would not talk to me about either, and refused my offer of a loan so tersely that I did not offer again. He took a second job teaching accounting three nights a week at one of our dim, perfunctory local junior colleges, and soon was spending only the few hours after his classes and the weekends, during which he slept most of the time, at the farm. Lucy was strangely blithe about it; more than once I started to pull her up short when she spoke jeeringly of his being away so much she almost thought he had a woman on the side. I could not believe she had forgotten why he took the extra work in the first place. Then I would remember the sheer horsepower of the drugs boiling through her bloodstream, and hold my tongue. Lucy was a long way from being her old self in those days, though she was fey and dreaming and indolent, and seemed happy.
There were other moments in which I thought, again, that some edge had gone from her mind, some cache of clarity and richness erased. She was on Antabuse too, now, because the drugs she was taking were dangerous when combined with alcohol, and I thought that the absence of liquor after so long a time might be taking a temporary toll.
So I was silent, and Lucy moved on in her underwater pas de deux of delight with her daughter, and Jack Venable continued to work himself near to death. It was he, that summer and early fall, who drank steadily through the evenings and into the small hours of the next day, not Lucy.
In October of that year I grew so worried about him that I nagged him into asking his firm for a long weekend, and I took him and Lucy and Malory up to the cottage at Tate. I had lent it to Lucy, who still loved it, on several occasions over the years, but it had been more than a decade since I had been up there, and when the Rolls purred up into the first of the abrupt hills of Pickens County, some long-unnoticed weight lifted from my heart and it seemed to climb straight into the cobalt sky over Burnt Mountain. It was Thursday evening when we got there, and the big old cottages on the hillside overlooking the meadow and the lake were dark. I had called ahead and asked Rafer Spruill, who was the colony caretaker, to get the cottage cleaned and opened for me and lay a fire, and when we walked into the big, vaulted room with its window wall framing the darkening woods beyond the lake, the smell of household cleaner and freshcut logs and the dark, loamy earth of the autumn woods was thick in my nostrils. I lit the lamps, and the shabby, familiar old room came leaping at me and closed its arms around me, and I was home in a boyhood that was, in this beguiled and traitorous remembering, as idyllic as any book Lucy and I had loved as children.
Malory was enchanted.
“Oh, Shep, I love this place,” she squealed. “Is this ours? Is this mine?”
“Of course not,” Jack said impatiently. “You know where your house is, Mal.”
“Of course it is,” Lucy overrode him gaily. “It’s Gibby’s, so it’s as good as ours too, isn’t it, Gibby?”
“It’s yours for as long as ever you want it,” I said. “And I hope you do, because I never come up here anymore. It’s a shame for it to go to waste.”
“Why don’t you like it, Shep?” Malory said, whirling around in the middle of the floor on one foot. “Is it haunted?”
“In a way, I guess it is,” I said, laughing. “Though not by ghosts. This place is haunted by real people. But it’s me they haunt, not you or anybody else,” for she had looked alarmed. “For you it should be just about perfect.”
“Oh, it is, it is!” Malory cried. “I think I want to come live up here forever and ever!”
“Without me?” Lucy said lightly, but her eyes were intent on Malory. Malory felt the look and turned her blue eyes to her mother.
“Well…no. Not without you, Mama. But sometime when you could come, too. And Jack. We could live on berries and acorns and honey, like bears do in the mountains, and nobody would have to worry about money anymore.”
“Nobody’s worried about money now, punkin,” Jack said.
She did not reply, but her eyes were full of the lie, and gave it back to him. He turned away.
“I want the martini to end all martinis,” he said, “and then I’m going to broil those steaks and eat mine in front of the fire, and then I’m going upstairs and sleep for thirty-six hours. You guys can greet the rosy-fingered dawn over the goddamned beaver dam if you want to. Somebody has to keep ahold of the priorities.”
Lucy laughed and kissed him and made him a murderous martini and brought it to him in the shabby old plaid wing chair by the great stone fireplace, and Malory curled up in the crook of his arm, and he was asleep long before the coals on the grill were ready for the steaks. Lucy led him, mumbling and protesting, upstairs to the big double bedroom that had been my mother and father’s, though seldom used, and it was noon the next day before we saw him again. He looked ten years younger when he came yawning down the stairs, and nearly carefree, and I remember thinking that I really ought to just deed the house over to him and Lucy. Something in the clear blue air had, in the night, restored him. It is just possible that, given free and early access to it, Tate might have healed Jack Venable. It has done so for other Atlanta wounded.
It was, entirely accidentally, a golden, perfect weekend. On Friday Charlie and Sarah and the children and Ben and Julia Cameron and their two little boys came up and opened the big Cameron cottage, and what had been planned as a solitary retreat turned into an impromptu house party. Tate was that kind of place; neighbors who would not dream of dropping in unannounced back in the city ambled in and out of each other’s houses as if they were their own, and shared meals and walks and volleyball games and swims and children, and sometimes even slept over in unused beds if the hour and the number of drinks made scrambling back up dark, steep, rhododendron-shadowed paths problematical.
And so it was on this weekend. On Saturday morning, the four of them, children in tow, appeared at the back door with blankets and baskets and a thermos of Bloody Marys and announced a picnic, Ben Cameron yelling at me to bring my clarinet. By early afternoon we were sprawled in the deep golden grass of the long meadow above the lake, winded from volleyball and chasing dogs and children, the high honey sun warming the earth and our heads and shoulders, drinking Bloody Marys and laughing. Even I, to whom the sight of another human being was ordinarily almost tantamount to an invasion, felt washed and nurtured in old and easy companionship; even Jack, who had never taken to Lucy’s childhood acquaintances and kept himself at a stiff, formal distance from them, was laughing with Ben and Charlie and teasing Julia—who was vastly pregnant again—and unfolding like a flower under the warmth of Sarah’s old unfeigned charm.
I don’t know why all rules seemed suspended that weekend. It is the special place-magic of Tate, I think, but I had never felt it so powerfully and clearly before, perhaps because my parents had taken me there so seldom. All that blue and tawny amplitude of wild, singing space; the high, thin pure sun; the wildfire of the autumn trees on the high shoulder of the mountain above us; the immense bowl of the sky and the smaller, reflecting cup of the lake; the symmetry of the cold blue evening shadows falling on the still-warmed earth—Tate was and is larger than the people who go there, and at the same time intimate and sheltering, so that old tenets and strictures do not seem to apply. It is as if past and future are left at the gatehouse up on the old macadam highway, and only the intense and pure moment prevails inside.
There in that high meadow I could watch the lithe, small beauty of Sarah running in tall grass with her girls and not feel pain; I could walk with Charlie along the sun-dappled dirt road around the lake and over the creaking wooden footbridge and feel nothing in the air between us but old, easy love; I could lie on my back in the deep grass beside Ben Cameron, my rusty clarinet answering his as smoothly as water pouring over stones, and see, not the thin, feverish, somehow haunted man he had become, but the old, golden Pan of our childhoods; I could look at Lucy, filling up with radiance in that enchanted afternoon like a crystal pitcher with water, and see straight into the soul of her as I had done when we were young, and hear in the air between us her unspoken “We be of one blood, thou and I…”
That night, after we had put the children to bed in the bunk bedrooms off the gallery in the Camerons’ cottage and sat long at the old trestle table in the big kitchen over the mortal remains of Sarah and Julia’s lasagna, we moved at last into the living room and Charlie built up the fire. We sprawled around in the old furniture sprung by half a century of Cameron rumps, and Sarah brought cheese and apples and pears and cognac, and without consciously planning to do so, we replayed our childhoods.
There in the firelit room the invincible Buckhead Boys sailed again down Peachtree Road on their wind-borne bicycles, Lucy Bondurant at their head like a dark, slender Valkyrie; we crawled under a monstrous, creeping black train at Brookwood Station; we danced at Margaret Bryan’s and streamed in packs across Peachtree Road to the Buckhead Theatre and yelled ourselves hoarse in the cold Friday night bleachers of North Fulton High stadium; we whirled and dipped and leaped like roseate trouts on the dance floor at Brookhaven and the Capital City Club, mimosa in our nostrils and “Moonglow” in our ears. Once again Charlie and I stood in the punishing flood of a black November wind on the corner of East Paces Ferry, watching Boo Cutler’s Mercury screaming like a devil out of Hell down the middle of Peachtree Road, trailing immortality and a DeKalb County black-and-white. Once again he and I pedaled in perfect despair out night-black Roswell Road toward our appointment in Samarra and a date to screw Frances Spurling. Once again all of us—I and Snake and Ben and Tom and Charlie and A.J. Kemp—suffered a five-year agony of aching testicles and galloping pulses, and called it love.
I think that all of us, even now, remember that night. Sarah, her head thrown back on the strong, slender brown column of her throat, laughed until she sputtered and choked. Julia, pregnant as she was, did a wicked imitation of a Washington Seminary Pink trying to learn to do the Negro bop. Charlie and I drank an entire fifth of Courvoisier and sang North Fulton fight songs, leaning against each other so that we would not fall. Lucy, wrapped in an old sweater of mine, huddled on the couch, literally aflame with incandescence, and cheered them on: “Oh, sing another one! Tell another story about Freddie Slaton! Tell the one about A.J. and the Sope Creek bridge, tell what Snake said to Flossie May that night at the Varsity, tell…tell…tell…”
It was as if the old stories were a rosary, and each telling brought her closer to deliverance and redemption. It was wonderful to see her flaming face, and hear her old bawdy, lilting laugh.
Of us all, only Ben Cameron and Jack did not join in the litany. Jack smiled and listened, laughing aloud occasionally, and Ben drank cognac steadily and quietly, his clever, haggard face flame-lit into chiaroscuro, looking off into some distance of his own, his thin hands and feet twitching nervously. Toward the end of the evening he remembered a phone call he had to make to a client in Philadelphia, and went out into the still, crystal moonlight to the feral little Jaguar XKE that he had driven up behind Julia and the children in the station wagon. We heard the motor growl into life, and soon he had spurted off down the gravel road toward the gate cottage, where the sole telephone was.
“I wish sometimes that he’d just give it up and be a general contractor,” Julia said, watching the XKE’s lights careen off into the darkness. “He drives himself so that he can’t even rest on weekends and holidays. You wouldn’t believe the calls that come at all hours, and the times he gets called away to go hold some damned fool client’s hand—you’d think he was the only architect in the country. He’s burning himself up. He’s lost I don’t know how much weight this year. And there’s another long trip coming up to Cleveland or somewhere next week.”
“He always was as restless as a flea on a hot griddle,” Charlie said. “I don’t think you’re going to be able to reform him at this late date.”
“And I wouldn’t want to if I could,” Julia said fondly. “At least I know he’s happy doing what he wants to do. He’s an authentic genius—you can’t put a fence around him. I know he’d cut back on some of the work if I asked him to, but he wouldn’t be happy any way but the way he is. You know Ben, he thinks he can have it all. And I guess he can, at that.”
For some reason I looked across at Sarah in the semidarkness, and her face made my breath catch in my throat. There was on it such a still, contained dread that I wondered why the rest of them did not literally feel the force of it. But no one else was looking at her. She turned her head and met my eyes and I read in hers such a naked plea for help that I actually started to rise from my chair and then she dropped her eyes and reached for her glass and the moment was gone, and I wondered if it had ever been. For the rest of the evening she was as easy and bantering as ever, and I soon came to think that the look was a trick of the firelight and my own solitude-sharpened nerves. But the weight of it remained, cold in my chest.
Ben came back presently, red-cheeked from the chill of the night and glittering like broken glass. He was humming like a fine motor, and for the rest of the evening regaled us with such scurrilous and absurd stories that we wiped tears from our faces and begged for mercy.
“I will leave you with something truly wondrous to think about,” he said, standing on the lowest step of the rustic stair, a fresh cognac bottle in his hand. “And I swear it’s the God’s truth. I heard it from a guy in San Francisco who heard it firsthand. You know those little old watchmakers, the ones who make watches so fine that they have to work under microscopes with little tiny, miniature tools? You know what they lubricate those little tiny watchworks with? Mole sperm. Actual sperm from those little blind moles you see in your front yard after rain. Anything else is too heavy and thick—only mole sperm will do it. But here’s the kicker: Where the hell do you think they get that mole sperm? Do you think they have little rooms where they go jerk off the moles one by one? Or do they put ’em in a sleazy motel room and show ’em porn movies and play Ravel’s Bolero to a bunch of ’em all at once? Anyone with a better idea may submit it at breakfast in the morning.”
And he disappeared up into the darkness, leaving us helpless with laughter in the light of the dying fire. From the blackness above us, on the long gallery, his voice drifted down: “As the late, great Harold Ross always said, ‘Jesus, nature is prodigal.’”
We went back to Atlanta the next day in midafternoon, Lucy and Jack and Malory and I, and as we drove by the Cameron cottage, I looked up to see if the cars were still there, but they were gone, and the cottage was dark and shuttered.
A week later, on a night of wild wind and rain, Charlie Gentry called to tell me that they had just had the news that Ben had shot and killed himself in a hotel room in Cleveland and that they knew very little as yet, but they did know that he had left a letter for Julia which indicated that he had killed himself for the love, obviously hopeless, of a much younger man.