Malory ran away so many times during the next decade that when Willie Nelson recorded “On the Road Again” in her adolescence, I gave her a gold charm of the record, and she laughed, and put it on her charm bracelet.
“He should dedicate it to me, shouldn’t he?” she said ruefully. “I guess I’m on the road almost as much as he is. Are you tired of me?”
“Oh, not yet, I guess,” I said lightly. “You add a certain touch of class to this dump.”
For it was to me that she came when the darkening burdens in the farmhouse overwhelmed her small shoulders, first by bus and taxi and then, in the heart-stopping manner of her generation, hitchhiking. In time it became Jack and Lucy’s custom to look first for her in the summerhouse of the Peachtree Road house, and almost always she was there, curled up on the sofa reading or listening to music, played softly, while I limned the ancestry of Sarah Gentry. Sometimes, too, she asked to spend the night at 2500 with her grandmother Willa, who adored her, and I would take her formally by the hand and present her at the back door of the big house, and Shem or Martha would bear her away to the small room next to Aunt Willa’s that was kept for her, smiling broadly in the joy and pride of her presence. Often she stayed two or three days with us, but always there came a phone call from Lucy saying that she needed Malory, and to please have Shem bring her home.
And Malory would go obediently and without protest, for with her the operative word was and always would be “need.” For the first third of her life, whenever her mother’s phone calls speaking of need came, Malory laid aside whatever she was doing and, like the good child she was, went home. The certainty that she would was, I think, one of the few fixed stars in Lucy’s careening firmament.
Lucy was in a kind of free-fall by then, not precipitous and horrifying to see, but a kind of sideslipping drifting, a dreaming, spiraling descent, as a sky-diver will experience riding the thermal currents before he pulls his cord. I have heard that to the diver, that dreamlike free-fall is more dangerous than the moment of his impact, for it is often so hypnotic, so altogether free and rapturous, that the temptation to prolong it until it is too late to pull the cord is very great. I think perhaps that Lucy found in her long descent something of that freedom and rapture, for she often seemed to retreat into it when the world pierced her too hard and frequently, or she bruised herself upon reality. It was not, I have never thought, that she courted madness and deterioration, but rather that she simply did not seek very hard to elude them. Perhaps she did not, by then, even fully realize when she entered that comfortable fugue. Lucy had lived in the cold land of reality as long as she could bear it; by the fourth decade of her life she was largely an occasional visitor there. It was we who watched, not she, who knew, almost to the moment, when she left it.
I knew by her voice on the telephone. When she was in one of her stretches of smooth water, her voice was rich and slow and husky from her eternal cigarettes, and her drawled “Gibby? It’s Lucy, honey” was dark and thick with promised laughter and irony. When she had begun drinking—for it was alcohol now, whatever secret white roots of madness lay still unplowed in her mind, alcohol that began those long, slow spirals, and became the whole of her torment and ours—her voice was as pure and sharp and glittering as broken glass, high and humming with secret glee.
“Gibby, honey?” she would sing out in the crystal voice, followed by a deep, sucking inhalation of smoke. “Are you there, dahlin’? It’s Lucy.”
I hated that voice. I hated those calls. After a while I stopped wondering, even, what had set her off and braced myself for the litany of anger and terror that would inevitably follow. For after the incident with Beau Longshore on that nameless Mississippi coast, her aberration took a different tack from the hysteria followed by near-catatonic depression that had begun to form a pattern with her, and she became obsessed with fear of, and a terrible rage at, Jack.
She seemed to believe, then, when liquor ushered in her glittering madness, that he was plotting to have her committed to the state institution for the insane, and was in collusion with Aunt Willa and the hapless Little Lady to keep her a prisoner there for the rest of her life. She said, too, with a frail child’s terror that would have been heartbreaking if I had not heard it so often, that he was abusing her both mentally and physically, often slapping and hitting and kicking her, and she was afraid that someday he would kill her with a gun. I could not disabuse her of these notions while she was in that state. Nothing, not my insistence that she wake Jack and put him on the phone and let me talk to him, not my pointing out to her, over and over, that she had no marks or bruises upon her, nothing brooked the tide of rage and fear, the nightly recitals of his monstrousness.
“Lucy, he doesn’t even have a gun,” I said to her once, in the early days, when I was still trying to reason with her. “He told me he hated them and that he’d rather be killed by a burglar than keep a gun in the house with the children there.”
“Oh, he has a gun, you’ll just never see it,” she said in the crystalline singsong. “But I see it all the time. It’s the one he took away from his first wife once, before she left. Poor woman, I understand now why she did it. I never did before. I’ve misjudged her terribly, Gibby. Terribly. I’m being punished for that.”
Later in that decade, the calls began to come from other places. Perhaps three or four times a year the phone would ring in the evenings, and something about the silence on the other end of the receiver would alert me even before a laughing, lilting Lucy told me that she was in one or another of the cut-rate businessmen’s motels that ringed the city at the Interstate exits, with a man she had picked up in the adjacent piano bar.
It was as if that first act of illicit sex with Beau Longshore had lifted some essential governor off her dark, glinting mind, and the search for the sheltering father’s arms which she had never found became overt. In her periods of relative health and rationality, Lucy was as faithful to Jack Venable as some nineteenth-century farm bride. When the darkness came, it led her to the scanty sheets and thin mattresses of Holiday Inns and Howard Johnsons all over North Fulton County. In the beginning Jack would go and get her out, silent and grim, but she became so abusive and strident after a while, when he appeared to take her home, that he simply stopped going and, when she called, rolled over and went back to sleep. He knew that she would call me next, and that I would go. Lucy would usually come home with me.
I don’t know, really, why I made those hopeless night pilgrimages, or why I continued to listen when I heard that increasingly frequent, high-pitched “Gibby, honey? It’s Lucy,” followed by the inevitable threnody of madness and abuse and terror and pain. We were like two ghosts, I often thought, unable to rest, doomed to haunt a world we did not even go out into anymore, talking to each other in the consuming nights over spectral telephones. But I listened, with some degree of patience, no matter how often she phoned, or how preposterous her accusations were. Partly it was because she was simply so dependent on me; so totally, in her sickness, devoted to me; seeming to trust me with her pain when she would trust no other. And this devotion, sly and slantwise though it was, warmed and lighted my self-imposed exile.
But mostly, I listened to the wounded litanies of Lucy Venable because I knew that it defused her and kept, for a little while longer, the brunt of her madness from Malory.
For Malory was suffering. By now a serenely beautiful child with Lucy’s straight, black-satin hair and incandescent blue eyes and the pure young hawk’s profile of the Bondurants, she seemed to have skipped her childhood altogether. With the deepening of the darkness around her mother she lost most of her old sense of play and fun; her ridiculous, rich, bawdy laugh, so like Lucy’s, did not ring out often; her mobile, intelligent face did not slip so naturally into mischief or inquisitiveness as it did into lines of worry and sunless earnestness. There was in her, had always been, something of Lucy’s old force and intensity, but without that first lovely leavening of delicious, broad comedy and ridiculousness, it became a thing of fever and insistence, and I worried to see it. She had wit, but she was by then no longer gay or funny. Malory, her whole childhood one of reaction to Lucy, caromed around the spaces of her life like a wildly bounced ball, and I suppose it was natural that she would curtail, insofar as she could, whatever elements of surprise and spontaneity she encountered. I did not blame her. Impulse and eccentricity had cost her dearly all her young life.
At an age when she should have been going to children’s parties and running in noisy, yelping groups after school, and ranging free in the long, sweet springs and golden summers and autumns of the southern Piedmont, she stayed instead inside the crumbling farmhouse in the loving but limited company of the old black woman. She read and watched television and kept her pitiful little vigil over her mother, and waited on her silent, souring father when he slumped in from work and settled himself in front of the television set with the newspaper. She brought him his drinks, and heated and fetched the starchy suppers the old woman had left for them, and sat silently beside him watching the flickering screen until he fell into a scotch-sodden sleep. Only then did she pull the afghan over him, brush her teeth and slip into her own bed and, finally, sleep herself, a thin, used, old woman’s sleep.
Because this minimal little routine was of Malory’s own choosing, I did not really believe that Jack Venable actually neglected the quiet, lovely little specter in his home. But he could not, somehow, seem to reach out to her, to connect with her in any essential, nourishing way. Perhaps there was in her simply too much of the beautiful, flawed wife who was slipping away from him, or perhaps all real passion had been seared out of him in one too many of Lucy’s anonymous motel rooms. Perhaps it had not survived the civil rights movement, which had commanded so much of it. In any case, so far as Malory was concerned, his reasons scarcely mattered. She remained essentially alone in her father’s house.
So far as I knew, Jack did not ever think of leaving Lucy, and was not and never had been any of the monstrous things of which she accused him. Indeed, in the considerable periods when she was whole and clean, Lucy obviously adored and depended on him as much as she ever had. His only failing to mother and daughter that I could ever see was, perhaps fatally, his failure to nurture either.
And so Malory Venable ran away. I never once reprimanded her for that. It was perhaps the strongest and wisest thing she could do, under the circumstances. It was when Lucy called and she ran back home, as straight and as true as a silver dart, that my fear for her became, until I knew that she was safe and Lucy sane again, a living thing.
During those first years of Lucy’s precipitous journey into aberrance, I fretted often about Malory’s presence in the farmhouse. Even in Lucy’s “good” periods, when she was home from whatever hospital her current psychiatrist had placed her in and keeping up some pretense of doing freelance writing, it was a skewed and unhealthy household. At her worst, when she was slipping into still another fen of alcohol and promiscuity and paranoia, it must have been an emotional charnel house. I watched Malory carefully, in the periods when she was with me, for signs of damage, for wounds, but aside from her almost pragmatic running away, I saw few. She seemed to me in her late childhood, on the verge of adolescence, a creature of such miraculous beauty and presence that she might have been gotten by demigods. I literally never, in those days, chided her; I honestly saw nothing to chide. Her emerging habit of simply ghosting away when something displeased or upset her, or of threatening, matter-of-factly and very politely, to run away when Aunt Willa or Jack attempted to make her do something she did not wish to do, seemed to me entirely reasonable and even charming.
It took Dorothy Cameron to open my eyes.
I had taken to visiting her more frequently over the past year, because Ben was slipping slowly into a sly fog of dementia which had seemed to begin with young Ben’s death and deepen when his decade as mayor ended, and would be termed, in another decade, Alzheimer’s disease. Dorothy was nearly homebound by then; she did not often leave him in the sole company of Leroy Pickens or Minnie, their cook. He was not, yet, continually confused or belligerent, and had long periods of relative alertness and well-being, when the teasing specter of the man he had been flirted through.
But he could go suddenly blank, and it frightened him badly, and more than once he had strayed out of the house and even into his beloved Lincoln, and once had set the woods behind the house afire burning trash and simply walked away from the blaze. It hurt me terribly, and angered me, to see the engaging face and vital sinewy body of this man I loved above all others governed by a frail and flickering intelligence, but I knew that it must be unspeakable for Dorothy, and that she welcomed my visits, largely because Ben still responded almost normally to me. So I went often, and sometimes I took Malory with me. She adored Dorothy Cameron and Ben, who often thought she was Lucy but always remembered her, and they lavished on her almost the same largesse of easy affection that they did on diminutive Livvy and Charlsie Gentry. They did not see Ben’s boys much. Julia could not forgive, even those who needed no forgiveness. I knew that the absence of young Ben’s sons must be an unhealed and unhealable wound, but neither Dorothy nor Ben spoke of it. It was another reason I took Malory there.
One afternoon when she was ten, we sat with Dorothy Cameron over tea in the little library while Ben napped upstairs, and Dorothy asked Malory what her plans for the rest of the week were. She was spending it with us; Lucy was at Brawner’s then, fighting out of the fog that had cast her up at the North Druid Hills Howard Johnson in the bed of a computer salesman from Spartanburg, and not due home for another week or two.
“I forget,” she said, smiling at Dorothy and looking quizzically at me. I often planned excursions for her, even if I did not attend them.
“You’ve got the dentist tomorrow afternoon,” I said. “And on Friday your grandmother is going to—”
“No,” Malory said.
I looked at her, and Dorothy lifted a dark eyebrow.
“No, what?” I said.
“No dentist. I’m not going to the dentist.”
“Sure you are,” I said. “You have one more cavity before you’re through. You know that. You made the appointment the last time you were there.”
“No I’m not,” Malory said, her voice soft and agreeable, her blue eyes level on mine. “I’m not going. If you try to make me I’ll run away. You know I will, too, Shep.”
I shrugged, knowing that she well might. On the other hand, she could just as easily forget about the threat when tomorrow came, and go willingly to the dentist in the Rolls with Shem Cater. It did not seem important.
“Malory, Pickles has a new litter out in the garage,” Dorothy said. “Why don’t you go take a look at them? I think their eyes should be open by now.”
“I’ll be glad to, Mrs. Cameron,” Malory said equably, and rose. “Will fifteen minutes be long enough?”
“Quite,” Dorothy said, her mouth quirking with suppressed laughter. But when she looked back at me she was not smiling.
“She’s almost as frightening as she is charming,” she said. “And that’s considerable. Listen, you may think this is none of my business, but there’s nobody else to tell you. It’s time you got tough on her now. She’s going to grow up badly wounded if you don’t.”
“Tough?” I said. The very word tasted hard and queer on my tongue. “What’s there to be tough about? She’s as proper as a little adult now—”
“And just as stubborn and headstrong as most of them,” Dorothy said. “And a good bit more imperious than most. Shep, from what you tell me, literally nobody is raising that child. Her father is either at work or passed out in front of the TV and her mother…well. Malory is more than a match for any poor, uneducated Negro I ever met. So that leaves you. You may not realize it, but you’ve become her primary caretaker. If you’re going to be that, then you’ve got to take care. You can’t just dote. This business of threatening to run away whenever she’s displeased is serious. And it’s the worst kind of manipulation. You need to put a stop to it, and apparently you’re the only one who can.”
“Jesus, Dorothy, I never asked to be a…caretaker,” I said weakly.
“Didn’t you?” she said. “You set yourself up to be her rock and her refuge. The tough comes with the sweet, my dear.”
“How can I get tough with her now?” I said despairingly. “She’s been through so much, she goes through so much—she may look self-possessed, but under it she’s got to be frail, even damaged already. I don’t want to damage her any more….”
“Then you’ll be handing her the same awful power her mother has,” Dorothy said. “And don’t think it’s not awful. The power of the weak over the strong. She’s already learned the drill. Who do you think she learned it from? You’ve got to counter that because there isn’t anybody else to do it. Or do you want that role for Malory?”
“No,” I said, closing my eyes wearily. “No.”
And it was true. Much as I would hate it, I knew that I would take Malory aside and talk to her as I never had before. I did not want Lucy’s best legacy to her daughter to be a talent for flight or manipulation.
It was a bad afternoon, the one when I broached the subject to her. I did it badly, and she took it badly. She wept and stormed and cried in a manner I had never seen before, so reminiscent of Lucy’s early, desperate hysterics that my heart froze within me, and then she ran sobbing out of the summerhouse saying that she would run away and nobody would ever see her again, and only the incorporeal hand of Dorothy Cameron on my shoulder kept me from rushing after her. She did not appear for dinner with her grandmother, and I was on the verge of getting Shem and starting a search through the woods for her—a mirror journey of those her mother had precipitated decades before—when she drifted into the darkening summerhouse, red-eyed and bleared with weeping, and threw her slender arms around me, and said, “I’m sorry. I was being a jerk and you were only trying to take care of me. I won’t do it again, Shep.”
“No more running away?” I said, hugging her, feeling the lovely, frail cage of her ribs, and my own prickling tears, and a wonderful pride in her.
“I don’t think I can promise that,” she said after a long pause, still muffled in my neck. “I might have to run away to here some more. But I promise I won’t threaten to do it unless I really do mean it.”
“Fair enough,” I said, over the pride and a dull rasp of rage at the premature adultness she had had forced upon her. Despite my best efforts, Malory Venable was not going to be accorded much in the way of a childhood.
It was not until she was nearly twelve that the other thing that I feared, a specter much slyer and more dangerous, raised its gaudy cobra’s head. I had been watching her apprehensively for it for some years: How could it not have touched her in some way, given the thrust of her mother’s madness? How not marked or shadowed her? But though I had watched, I had seen nothing.
And then, the week after Christmas, before she turned twelve, she said from the rug in front of the fire, where she was listening to Jimi Hendrix on her headphones while I read Walker Percy, “Why does Mother go to all those motel rooms?” She did not look up at me as she said it, and though her voice was her own, low and sweet, I could see the dull red creeping up the back of her neck.
Dear Jesus, help me now, I thought in pure panic, recognizing in the firelight the old, long-awaited enemy.
Lucy had not had one of her dark times for almost a year. We had high hopes for her new psychiatrist, a wry, warm-voiced woman who had wanted to try her on lithium and a new kind of therapy called cognitive. She thought perhaps the primary trouble might be manic-depressive illness, long concealed under and confused by the alcohol abuse, but thought, too, that Lucy’s great anxiety and consequent rage might spring from a bleakly negative way of looking at life. The lithium, she thought, might help with the manic-depressive part and the resulting craving for the anodyne of alcohol, and the cognitive therapy could well address her essential nihilism.
Lucy liked the doctor and had done well on the treatment, even talking of going back to work for SOUTH in the new year, and we were beginning to hope, tentatively, that she had left the darkness behind her and was at least approaching the light. Jack’s step and voice were lighter than they had been in the past four or five years of doctors and hospitals, and Malory laughed once more, shyly and hesitantly, and had not run away to us since the previous January.
Only I remained skeptical; it seemed to me clear that the darkness in Lucy was a thing of the blood and ran not only in her but through her and back beyond, and was thus out of the reach of drugs and positive thinking. But I did not speak of my doubts to anyone. I was not the clearest of observers when it came to Lucy Bondurant. Enough to let sleeping madness lie. The fact remained that Lucy had not taken a drink or a man for eleven months.
But then she lost it, whatever it was that was bearing her up. As Christmas approached—a time she had, for some reason, come to hate and fear—she grew more and more taut and brittle and crystal-voiced, and though we all tried desperately not to see and hear, none of us was surprised when the telltale call to me came, this time at about midnight of December 17. She had left to go to a nearby suburban mall to do some Christmas shopping and had gone instead to a truckers’ motel and road stop up near Duluth, and when she called me, laughing crazily, I could hear the answering laughter of more than one man. When I got to the motel and found her room and let myself in the unlocked door, one was riding her like a bucking mare, and another was kneeling at her head with his fly open, and a third was watching television from the other bed and preparing for his turn with energetic masturbation. They had melted out of the room like dirty snowmen at the sight of me, still adjusting clothing, and Lucy screeched her laughter and defiance all the way to the hospital—not Brawner’s this time, for by now they were not anxious to have Lucy back—where the doctor practiced. She had been there ever since.
We had told Malory none of the details, of course; had never done that. We said this time, as we had all those others, only that her mother was ill and in the hospital to get better, and would soon be home. But Malory was light-years removed from a fool and was nearing adolescence, and could have found out the precise shape of her mother’s madness in any number of ways. I had, as I said, been waiting for this. I had been watching to see if any taint of that darkness might overshadow Malory—any precocious interest, any prurience, even, God help us, any hint that that same fever might bloom in her own blood. It had appeared in her mother at an age not much past her daughter’s now.
But Malory remained as chaste and sexless as a medieval page or a young saint. She had few close acquaintances and no real friends, and none of the former were boys. Jack’s boys had long since elected the predictable, if tepid, hospitality of the Nashville aunt; they rarely visited at the farmhouse anymore. She was not overtly uncomfortable in the presence of the boys of her age I saw her with: Snake and Lelia’s three, and Freddie and Tom’s handsome, stupid Tommy and more rarely young Ben’s brace of volatile redheads. But she did not stay long in their presence, melting away as swiftly and silently as spring snow after a moment or so. I had often wondered if she was afraid of boys, and rather hoped, given Lucy’s history, that she was. I looked at her on that night in the firelight; she looked, in her tattered, faded blue jeans and fringed vest and boots, like an androgynous Remington sketch. Except for the budding of the sharp, unfettered young breasts and the poreless sheen of her skin, she might have been a young boy.
“I think you ought to ask your daddy about that,” I said finally, trying to keep my voice casual. “He’d probably rather talk to you about it than have me doing it.”
“I’ve already asked Jack,” she said. She still did not look up. “He said it wasn’t anything for me to worry about, and to put it out of my mind. It’s Mother’s problem, he said, not mine. But that’s just crap, Shep. It is something for me to worry about. It is my problem. It’s his problem, too, only he won’t act like it is. So I’m asking you.”
“Well,” I said, on a deep breath, “It’s something that liquor and her sickness make her do. Something that she wouldn’t do when she was well, and doesn’t do then. Something that she won’t, when she gets well for good—”
“Yeah, but what’s she doing there?” Malory asked. I could tell that she was near tears, even though her eyes were veiled by her long lashes.
“Malory, it’s not anything so bad, it’s just…I don’t—”
“Oh, Shep, I know she screws men,” she said angrily, turning finally to look at me. Her eyes were terrible, bottomless pools of pain. “I know she fucks her brains out with men she never saw before. When Jack wouldn’t talk to me I asked the shrink and she told me. What I guess I mean is why? Why does she have to do that? Why isn’t Jack enough? Why aren’t I?”
The tears started, a slow, silent track down her face, but she did not seem to know they were there, and did not move to brush them away. She stared at me as if the whole of her life hung on my answer. I knew that in a way, perhaps, it did, and hated Lucy in that moment with a hatred as pure and bright as fire, and as undiluted.
“She isn’t herself when she does it,” I began in dull despair. “I don’t think she even knows she’s doing it. It may be something to do with brain chemistry, that we don’t know about yet, something she can’t help. Or more likely it’s a way of running away from something that hurts her terribly….”
“You mean like me?” she said, her voice quavering pitifully.
“No, baby, not you, not ever you,” I said. “You know that your mother loves you like nothing else in the world, no matter what. Don’t you know that? No, it probably all started when she was very small, just a little girl, maybe even before she came to live here. And then finally something, maybe that chemical in her brain, just…pulled a kind of trigger….”
“Mama told me once that she had the first…sick spell right after I was born,” she said neutrally, and I could only think, over the red roaring in my ears, I would like to kill you for that, Lucy. I truly would.
“Well, she was wrong,” I said evenly. “She had some small…spells, I guess you’d call them…when she was in college, and right after. Maybe she doesn’t remember them, but I do. So it couldn’t have been you that caused them.”
“Dr. Farr said it was a way of looking for her father. My grandfather,” she said. The tears still ran, but the awful rigidity had gone out of her shoulders, and she slumped against my knees.
“I think she’s right,” I said.
“Well, then…what I really want to know is…does she…did she want to do that with her father? I mean, are you supposed to want to…you know…with your father? Or are you not supposed to and it makes you crazy to want to? Or what?”
“Has she ever said anything about that to you?” I asked, already feeling, with crimson pleasure, Lucy’s slender throat in my hands.
“Oh no. No, I just wondered. I mean, if she was looking for her father with all those men, and that was what she did with them, was that what she wanted to do with him? All along?”
The truth of it was so absurd and shining and whole that I wanted to laugh aloud. I found that I could not frame a comforting lie for her.
“I don’t know,” I said on a long exhalation. “I really don’t. I doubt if she does, either. It could be.”
She sat leaning against my knees for a long time, there in the firelight, and then she put her forehead down on them and rolled it slowly from side to side, as if trying to dislodge the knowledge behind it.
“It’s really awful, isn’t it? The whole sex thing?” she said.
“It can be,” I said. “It can be pretty awful indeed. On the other hand, it can be pretty terrific. It all depends on a lot of things. Who you do it with, mainly.”
“Is it awful for you? Is that why you don’t…you know…have a girlfriend or a wife?”
“Me? No,” I said, surprised and profoundly uncomfortable. “It isn’t awful. It never was. It was…pretty great. I just don’t have anybody right now I really want to do it with.”
“Did you ever?”
“Yes. I did.”
“But not now.”
“No. Not now.”
“Did she go away? Did she die?”
“Malory,” I said, “I love you a very great deal, and I will never lie to you, but there are some things that I simply reserve the right not to answer. When it’s your business, there is nothing I won’t tell you. But this is not your business. This is adult business. You are eleven years old. No matter how well-behaved and mature you are, you are still eleven years old.”
“Almost twelve. Twelve in three months and two weeks. How old do I have to be before you tell me?” she said, giggling, and I knew that whatever cliff we had teetered on, we were away from the brink now.
“Thirty-seven,” I said. “Maybe forty. Get up now and I’ll race you over to the Camerons’. Dorothy said she was going to make tea cakes this afternoon.”
“I still think sex is awful,” she said, getting up from the floor in one fluid motion of long legs and arms and hair. “I’m not ever going to do it. Not ever. Ugh.”
“Famous last words,” I said.
“No,” she said, turning her face to me. I could see that the laughter and the eleven-year-old child were gone from the blue eyes, and something much older and almost fierce was there, something implacable. “I mean that. I’d rather be dead than go in a room and…do that with a man. I’d rather die.”
I hope one day you have to account for that too, Lucy, I said to her, silently, as I jogged with her daughter in the tender dark up Peachtree Road. I hope one day you get a chance to heal that wound in Malory, because it’s gone beyond my ability to do it. And sick as you were, and are, you better make it good.
Lucy stayed in the new hospital, with periodic visits its home, for almost a year and a half. At Faith Farr’s emphatic insistence, Malory did not visit her there, but she talked to her mother on the telephone and, I suppose, by way of their old silent communication almost every day. She visited often with me and Aunt Willa on Peachtree Road, short visits, but with the boys gone, she was uncomfortable leaving Jack alone for long, and so her primary role in that time of banked turmoil and tough, wiry, greening hope was that of caretaker to him.
He was still working two jobs, and drinking and dozing when he came home, and his waking time with Malory must have shrunk to a matter of an hour or less a day, but she did not seem to mind the long stretches of time alone. Old Estelle still came at noon and stayed until she had prepared their supper, and Malory had discovered early her mother’s and my refuge in books. I would have found a way to get her out of the farmhouse for good if I had seen any evidence of loneliness or neglect, but I did not. Malory with something or someone to nurture was Malory fulfilled. So for the time being, I let things ride as they were. Faith Farr, who had drifted into the role of family counselor and confidante as well as therapist to Lucy, seemed to think she was doing relatively well as Jack’s housekeeper and companion. But she, as I did, had serious reservations about Malory for the long haul.
“Let’s don’t try to make plans for her future now,” she said more than once, when I cornered her in a new fit of anxiety about Malory. “If we’ve really got a handle on the thing with Lucy this time, everything may sort itself out just fine. The dependency on Malory may just break itself, and that would be the best way, by far. It if ain’t broke, let’s don’t try to fix it.”
“Can you really say it ain’t broke?” I would say.
“It may be right now,” she said, “but that doesn’t mean it always will be. It’s all a part of the total dependency package Lucy lugs around, I think. Break one, or find the cause, and the rest will follow. I think.”
“You think? Jesus, Faith, if you don’t know by now, when will you?” I said.
“Probably never,” she replied, looking narrowly at me through smoke from her Belair. “No therapist knows. What we do is think. I think better than most. And that’s what I think.”
So I had to be content with that. But as the months wore on, I had to concede that it did indeed look as though she had a handle of some sort on the monstrous engine that drove Lucy. Lucy looked almost as well as she ever had, except for a permanent webbing of fine lines around her eyes and mouth and the kind of furrows that pain makes between her delicate brows, and had even gained a softening cloak of flesh, and asked for her makeup and favorite clothes once again. She had not had an episode of violence or hysteria or catatonia for months, and had made what the staff shrink termed several significant breakthroughs in her group, and was so well and fully transferred to Faith Farr that Faith said their sessions together were often pure delight.
“She’s one of the most charismatic people I’ve ever met,” she said to me and Jack. “It’s impossible not to love her. Her charm is immense, and so far as I can see, it’s entirely natural now.”
“It is,” I said. “Everything about her is entirely natural. What you see is what you get, no matter if it’s her best or her craziest.”
She looked at me. “Lucy has more artifice than anybody I have ever known,” she said. “And she’s better at it than anybody I’ve ever seen. That you never saw it is a mark of her skill.”
“I simply can’t believe that,” I said, dumbfounded. “I’d know if she was faking. I’ve always known when she was.”
Jack grinned at me. It was not a pleasant grin.
“Believe it,” he said.
A month or so before Lucy was finally scheduled to be discharged, I caught up with Faith in the snack bar of the hospital and asked for an overview of Lucy’s condition, and a prognosis. She did not want to give it to me, but in the end she did.
“Understand that I’m talking to you strictly for Malory’s sake and no other reason, Shep,” she said, blowing on her steaming coffee. “You’ve really got no business knowing anything about Lucy. It’s her business, and Jack’s, and Malory’s, not yours. I think the interdependency between you and Lucy is as unhealthy as hell, and it’s one of the main things I hope to help her break. It isn’t all that good for you, and it’s dangerous for her. I might even go so far as to say that it’s helped her get and stay sick.”
“God Almighty, Faith, there’ve been times that I was literally all she had,” I exploded. “What should I have done, walked away from her? And besides, I’m damned well not dependent on her.”
“The hell you’re not,” she said calmly. “And as for walking away from her, yes, that’s just what you should have done. It isn’t true that you were all she had—she had herself. But she’s never learned to use it. That’s what we’ve been working on, like two mules on a sugarcane plantation, for the past year and a half. She’s coming along with it. She might even make it if you let her walk by herself. You and Jack and yes, even little Malory. I’m going to talk to them about this before she goes home.”
I was silent for so long that she reached over and touched my hand.
“Don’t feel bad about it,” she said. “You thought you were doing the right thing. Everybody who picks her up and shores her up thinks they’re doing the right thing. That’s her gift as well as her sickness, the ability to make you think that. It’s almost impossible to see the artifice. She even fooled me at first. But try not to bail her out anymore. If you have to help somebody, be there for Malory. Much as she loves her and dotes on her, Lucy can’t do that, and Jack…oh, poor Jack. He can’t even help himself. He’s as much a victim of Lucy as she is of herself, and maybe worse. I just don’t have any idea if the burnout is permanent. But I do know he’s not going to be any good to Malory for a long time. I think that will probably remain to you and her grandmother.”
I grimaced, thinking of Malory in the manicured grasp of Willa Slagle Bondurant.
“Do you see any signs of damage?” I said. “I’m worried about her having so few friends and sticking around that house waiting on Jack and Lucy when she’s home. And I’m worried as hell about the way she feels about sex. She’s really afraid of it. She hates the very thought of it.”
“I knew about the waiting on and care taking,” Faith said slowly. “I’m not wild about that, but so far it seems within bounds. I didn’t know about the sex thing, though I’m not surprised. It’s too early to tell if it’s serious, I think. Part of it could be her age—some thirteen-year-olds just haven’t gotten there yet. And then, you can understand why she’d feel that way, with her mother in and out of all those beds.”
“She’s perceptive as hell,” I said. “She’s already hit on the fact that Lucy, in some entirely unconscious way, was trying to screw her father. Literally, I mean. The only thing she didn’t understand was why. I must admit I don’t, either.”
“Well, a well-fucked man is not so quick to hit the road, Shep.” Faith Farr grinned wryly. “That’s what this whole thing with Lucy is about, of course. Loss, and the fear of loss. It feels to her that all losses are a replay of that first awful one, her father. She knows better now, but the gut is not long on intellectual knowledge. Changing her reactions to loss, and her fear of it, is going to be a long, long road.”
“Loss,” I said, old pictures slipping into my mind. “Loss…”
“Think back,” she said. “Whenever she’s lost something valuable to her, or thought she had, she’s gone into one of these things. Alcohol is the ignition switch, but it isn’t the engine. It only gets her to where the loss doesn’t hurt so much. The first one, after Malory was born? She lost her status as a child to be cared for to her own child. Remember her saying, ‘I’m the little girl and she’s the mother now’? And when John Kennedy and Martin Luther King died, she lost two classic father figures. And not long before she went off with that preacher or whatever he was down there in Mississippi she had lost the movement, which gave her life so much focus and stability, and the hero-fathers in it….”
“And all the other times, when there didn’t seem to be anything to trigger it?” I said.
“Loss, as surely as I sit here. Jack for certain, changing before her eyes from the stable, vital, older man, the father figure, to a passive-aggressive child himself, waited on by a child, unwilling even to come to those motels and get her out of the messes she got herself in. You did that. Over and over she tried to get him to take care of her by provoking him with the booze and the men in the motels. And when he wouldn’t, the loss was underscored again. A black circle. I think one reason she does so well in the hospital is that the structure and the authority make her feel protected and safe. It’s one reason I’ve kept her here so long this time—to try to give her time to find the weapons to fend for herself and not go back to leaning when she gets home. And to give Malory time to grow up a little, too.”
“You think there’s going to be trouble for Malory again this time?”
“I think Lucy will try to lean on her again,” she said. “I think that famous, eerie old telepathy thing has to do with great need and the response of a hyperreceptive child to it. The need is still there.”
“Why, of all people, would she need so to lean on and possess her own child, who’s not much more than a baby herself?” I asked. “There was always me. There was Jack….”
She smiled sadly.
“Well,” she said. “Lucy never really had much of a mother, did she? Or any female figure who was hers alone. That’s the why of that, I think. And that’s why it worries me. It’s such a primal thing, it goes so deep with both of them. Look at Malory—she’s the classic little alkie-psychotic’s child. The perfect little caretaker; the little mother. A great many of them never get free of it. And it can be a life wrecker. That’s why I’m talking to you like this. It may never come to that, but watch her closely, and take care of her. If it gets too bizarre, just get her away from there. I may not always be around to watch—I’ll have to terminate with Lucy someday, for both our sakes. But I gather you will be.”
“You bet I will,” I said. “You’re damned right I will.”
“Well, watch out for yourself, too,” she said mildly. “You’re almost as vulnerable as Malory is. And I don’t do traumatized hermits.”
I laughed and kissed her cheek and went back to the summerhouse, but the next evening I called Malory and asked her, casually, if she thought she might like to go away to school somewhere.
“I’d love to send you,” I said, as nonchalantly as I could. “Anywhere you think you’d like. We could go the horse route, or the dance route”—her two great passions so far—“or we could get you up in snow country, or even find some place that specializes in pre-pre-pre-vet training. You call it.”
“I couldn’t do that, Shep,” she said, in a brisk, no-nonsense adult’s voice that rasped in my ears. “Thanks a million. You’re a real angel, but it’s just out of the question. There wouldn’t be anybody to look out for Jack, and then Mother will be home in a couple of weeks. I can’t leave her.”
“Malory,” I said desperately, “You’re only thirteen years old. So far as I can tell, you’ve never in your life had any real fun.”
“My life is perfect for me,” she said in prim surprise. “Mother is better fun than anybody my own age when she’s…you know…well, and I know she’s well this time. And besides, school is not for fun. Is it?”
“Yes,” I said, thinking of North Fulton High when the Pinks and the Jells were in full flower, and of my exhilaration at Princeton. “I think it is.”
“Excuse me, but I think I hear Jack’s car,” she said, politely and inexorably, and hung up the receiver softly.
The next day I called Charlie Gentry and asked if I could come over and see him about a financial matter, and ended up accepting his insistent offer of dinner first with him and Sarah. And on Thursday night of that week, I went to the little house of Sarah and Charlie Gentry for the first time in more than a decade.
They had never moved from the first small house in Collier Hills, as most of our crowd long since had. Charlie, by then administrator of one of the country’s mightiest private philanthropic trusts and by his own wry admission a sort of “messenger of the gods” to beseechers all over the country, was not himself a wealthy man. I know that he probably could have made many times over his salary in a private law firm, and any one of the large ones founded and operated by the fathers of our Buckhead friends and now, increasingly, by those friends themselves would have gladly snapped him up. It would not have been that ghastliest of emerging terms, networking, either. Charlie Gentry was awesomely good at what he did. His fierce, good heart had found its home in the genteel, anonymous world of private philanthropy, but his old affinity for the law was still alive and leaping, and I knew he could be employed with full honors and perks within a day, should he choose to leave the foundation, by making at most three phone calls.
No, money had never been the carrot for Charlie that it was for many of us, and he had found the perfect wife in Sarah, in that respect. I knew that she would one day come into the entirety of Ben Cameron’s estate, but I knew, too, that it consisted largely now of the property and house on Muscogee Avenue. Ben’s illness had been long and would be far longer; Dorothy would not be left rich, nor Sarah after her. Sarah would not care. Of all the Buckhead girls I have ever known with access to substantial money, Sarah Cameron Gentry cared least for it.
They had added on to the little Cape Cod over the years, and now it climbed and wandered and tumbled over the steep, wooded lot and down to a small creek at the bottom of a ravine behind it. It could have used a paint job, I saw in the lowering summer dusk, and a few of the shingles were missing from the steeply pitched roof, but the lawn was green and deep, and flowers rioted everywhere in the wavering miasma of the heat. A battered hose sent a lawn sprinkler whirling, and twin bicycles lay on their sides in the driveway. The entire house would have fit into the drawing room of Little Lady and Carter Rawson’s, I thought, and would not have missed it by much in some of the other homes our contemporaries now occupied, or would come into, Merrivale House included.
I wondered if Sarah ever missed the sheer space and magnificence of her first home. I did not, somehow, think so. She had been ready, after all, to live in that Lower West Side apartment with me. And as long as his precious relics and his beloved wife and daughters were there with him, Charlie would have subsisted happily in an igloo. When he and Sarah came out to meet me on the front steps of the little house, in the hot twilight, I was struck with how right and organic they looked there, and how much like one another they had grown. The promise of that night so long ago at the Plaza, before they were married, when they had come seeking me and my blessing, had long since been fulfilled; it would not have been possible for any two people to look more married than Sarah and Charlie Gentry. I felt an old, deep pang that I had not thought to feel again, seeing Sarah there in the circle of Charlie’s arm, looking down at me from such an unassailable unit, and wondered if the night was, after all, going to be a mistake.
But it was not. That dinner, only the second I had ever had in their home, might have been the two hundredth. Sarah, in shorts and an Agnes Scott T-shirt, her beautiful small body as supple and tanned as it had ever been in her first youth, might have been eighteen again, instead of nearly forty. Only the threads of her father’s vigorous iron-gray in her glossy mop told of passing time; the faint webbing of white lines in the tanned skin around her eyes had been there since her late teens. Charlie, on the other hand, looked every day of his years and beyond; he was as padded and settled onto his stocky frame as a good old morris chair, and his glasses were thicker, and the well-creased old chinos strained over his comfortable mound of stomach, and the bald tonsure in his dark, graying hair was larger.
But the eyes behind the glasses were still Charlie’s eyes, the eyes of that sweet, ardent, largehearted boy I had first met and ranged the battlefields of the city with, and his smile was as it had always been: open and delighted and innocent still, Charlie’s and no other’s. We ate good pasta and drank bad wine and laughed at all that had been good and gay between the three of us, and did not speak of the other. I found myself, to my own surprise, loving the night and them—the two of them together, not Sarah and Charlie separately, as I always had before. I determined, as we rose at last from the round maple table, to see them far more often.
Sarah picked up my thought, as she had done so often before.
“This is number one in a series,” she said, crinkling the great golden-amber eyes at me. “You take us somewhere for every three dinners here. You simply have no idea how we’ve missed you, Shep. Charlie has been pining for you for years without knowing it.”
“Next one’s on me,” I said. “Anywhere you say. I don’t think I’ve been out to dinner since Hart’s closed.”
Sarah snorted her contempt for that.
“On that exceedingly sorry note I’m going to clear away and you-all can get on with your business,” she said.
“No need for you to leave,” I said. “I just want to see about setting up some kind of trust for Malory, a school or college fund, or something that will be hers alone, no strings, no chance of anybody else getting hold of it. I’d like your ideas, as a matter of fact.”
Charlie smiled. “I’ve often thought I should tell you how great I think you are with her,” he said. “I wish I had before. You’ve been more a father to her than Jack Venable ever has.”
Into the long silence Sarah said, energetically, “Well. Let me get at those dishes. Go on down to the basement, you-all, and do your business, and I’ll join you when I’m done. Charlie, show Shep that new batch of shells you got from the guy in Louisiana. I’ll bet he’s never seen anything like that big one before.”
Blessing her, I followed Charlie down into the cramped little pine-paneled den he had fashioned for himself in the basement. He switched on the overhead light, and I laughed, entirely spontaneously.
“I know, I know,” he said, grinning. “Sarah says it looks like some kind of Civil War toy store for big kids.”
It did, and worse. Every surface in the room was covered with the Civil War artifacts and relics that had so beguiled Charlie from that long-ago day in the attic of the Andrews Drive house when he had found his great-grandfather’s uniform. They marched in precise rows on shelves and tables, hung in shadow boxes, leaned against furniture, banked the damp concrete-block walls. Shells, minié balls, belt buckles, canteens, spurs, small arms, medals, swords, stirrups, eating utensils, shone with polish and love. A smaller collection of perishable artifacts was housed behind glass cases that covered an entire wall: whole uniforms and parts of them, flags, guidons, regimental standards, gloves, hats, caps, holsters, boots, sashes….
“You’ve got everything here but the guys,” I said. “I wouldn’t dare dig in your backyard for fear of who I’d find.”
“You might find somebody at that,” he said. “The battle of Peachtree Creek took place not three blocks from here. It’s one reason I’ve never wanted to move. Did Sarah tell you that we might be moving?”
“No,” I said. “Where to?”
“Her folks’ place. Dorothy’s gotten to the point that she just can’t keep Ben there any longer, even with help. It’s too big and too full of pitfalls for him. And the property taxes are eating them up now. She wants to move to that place up on Peachtree Road, the great big, hideous thing that’s some kind of fancy retirement condominium. It has an infirmary and maid service and therapy and all kinds of things that Ben will need before long, and she says the inside of it is really quite plush. Restaurants and movie theaters and bridge rooms and libraries, and good-sized apartments. She’s trying to give us Merrivale House.”
“Well, God, take it,” I said. “It’s the greatest house in Atlanta. You know it is. Wouldn’t Sarah love to be back home?”
“I guess so,” he said, without enthusiasm. “We’ll probably do that.”
“What’s the matter, Charlie?” I said.
“It’s just that…that house is so Cameron,” he said slowly. “Everything in it is Cameron. You know them, larger than life. Every time I’m in it I feel like little pieces of me are coming loose and just floating away. If I lived there, I’m afraid I’d turn into a Cameron myself inside a year. Sarah can’t understand that, but of course, her Cameronness gets stronger when she’s in it, too. I love the Camerons, and I love her more than my life, of course, but I want something around me that says Gentry.”
“Then stay here and sell the house,” I said, loving him, understanding. “Dorothy wouldn’t care. She’s never been a sentimentalist. And Sarah would be happy wherever you are.”
“I guess she would,” he said. “Or if she wasn’t, she’d never let me know. But I know she loves that house. She just seems to…bloom, somehow, when she goes home. See? I’m doing it. Home is here. Oh, hell. What difference does it make? It’s a great house, and like as not we’ll be neighbors come fall. At least Sarah and I would love that.”
“Me, too,” I said, thinking that I would not love it at all. Too close, too near…“What’s in the box?”
He prodded a large wooden crate in the middle of the floor with a sneakered toe.
“A box of stuff I bought sight unseen from a collector in Louisiana. I know his reputation, though. Shells, mainly, I think. These would be forty-millimeter mortar shells they used in one of the big battles, probably Vicksburg. Did you know that mortars were invented during the Civil War?”
“No,” I said, eyeing the box. “They’re not live, of course.”
“Of course not,” he laughed. “Relickers are fanatics about that. Come on and sit down, it’s not going to explode. We’ll open it after we talk. You said something about a trust for Malory?”
I told him what I wanted, and he listened, nodding thoughtfully, making a note every now and then on a yellow legal pad, chewing his lip.
“That’s feasible,” he said. “But why me? Wouldn’t it be better if Tom Carmichael and your guys down at the bank worked this out?”
“I want it to be separate from all the other Bondurant business,” I said. “I don’t want there to be anything of anyone else’s attached to it. I want there to be no question but that it’s hers, from me to her. Airtight and easily getatable. And I don’t want anybody else to know about it. You can do that, can’t you? I know you can—you pass out millions every day, with more strings on them than a kite contest.”
“I can do that, sure,” he said. “I’ll get on it first thing this weekend. You can sign it Monday, if you like. It will feel sort of good to practice some law. Sometimes I wonder if I haven’t come awfully far afield from what I’d planned.”
“I think you must be the happiest man in America.” I grinned at him. “They pay you to give money away and make people happy. I know you. You couldn’t ask for anything more.”
He smiled in return.
“I’m glad I got my foot in the door of the city when I did,” he said. “It’s mattered to me to be able to give something back, and I don’t think one person starting out today could make much of a difference. The city’s just gotten too big. I’m an awfully lucky man, Shep. I got to do exactly what I wanted to do and what I was meant to do. I got the woman I wanted, and the kids I wanted, and the life I wanted. Don’t you believe I don’t think often about how I got them. Don’t think it doesn’t bother me.”
“Don’t let it,” I said. “I think I’ve ended up doing what I was meant to do, too.”
“And wanted to do?” he said, cocking an eyebrow at me.
“Maybe. Or maybe not. But in the long run, meant to do is always better than wanted to do—provided they’re not the same.”
He closed the legal pad and got up from his desk chair, stretching. “Sarah will be down in a minute with some coffee,” he said. “Or brandy, if you’d rather. Stay and have some and let’s open my new toys.”
I looked at him in the lamplight, stooped a little, solid, rumpled, sweet-faced, his head turned to listen up the stairs for the sound of Sarah, who was his wife and his love and his life. I wanted to hug him, suddenly. I knew that I would not stay.
They saw me off together, arms around each other’s waists, waving and calling out plans for our next meeting, and then snapped off the light over the front door and moved out of my range of vision. It was the last time I ever saw Charlie Gentry. I remembered later wanting to hug him, there in the dreadful little basement-den of his funny little house in Collier Hills, and among all the things in my life I wish I had done and did not, that is the one I wish most that I had done.
Before I reached Peachtree Road in the thick, still summer night, Charlie pried open the package from the careful collector in Louisiana and lifted out the dead mortar shell that was not, after all, dead, and in a blinding white moment all that was Charlie Gentry—glasses and bald spot and paunch and dark, sweet eyes and great and loving heart—was gone into the ringing air of the little house where he had lived with Sarah, and which he had not wanted to leave.