“From now on we’ll be meeting mainly at funerals,” somebody—Freddie Goodwin, I think—said at the small, quiet gathering at Merrivale House after Charlie’s. By custom we would have gone back to Sarah’s little house in Collier Hills, but of course, with the damage from the explosion, there was no question of that. Besides, in Buckhead we have always gathered after the natural deaths, the conventional ones, if you will, but not usually after the ones that shock and outrage. We had not gathered after Sarah’s brother chose awfulness for himself. We would not now when her husband, however inadvertently, followed him. Not within the walls that still stank with his leaving.
But Merrivale House—ah, that was different. Merrivale, on Muscogee: massive, beautiful, cloistered, dignified. Merrivale House sanctified and sanitized. Here Charlie was and yet was not; here he remained eternally safe and whole and sweet and unscandalous; here we could deal with him with fondness and not recoil. I suppose that I, remembering our last conversation about that seductive éminence grise of his wife’s family, was the only one of us who hated being there. Here Charlie Gentry became, forever, the Cameron he had not wanted to be. They owned him, now, forever.
I hated Freddie’s words, too. They were slick with unwarranted and unearned cynicism—pure Freddie. She spoke as though we had reached the time when our deaths would come faster than the other rituals of our lives. That was not true. What had remained ahead for Charlie, after all the planting and tending years, were the sweet years of harvest. I think of all the deaths I remember, I felt more pure, unadulterated grief at Charlie’s than any other.
It was a dreadful day, unredeemed. Unlike the days immediately following young Ben’s death, Sarah did not cry. She walked around her father’s house devoid of all suppleness and moisture; rigid, dry, robotic. Her cheeks flamed like a circus clown’s, or Lucy’s long-ago plaster elf, and her great eyes glittered like frozen Coca-Cola. Otherwise she was paper-white from her heart-shaped face to her small, arched feet, as cold and white as carved marble in black high-heeled pumps. To touch her hands was to touch death by dry-freezing. Her white lips were stretched in a smile of terrible entreaty. I could not look long into her face. I could not talk to her; the arid glitter precluded words. They bounced off the surface of her like buckshot off glare ice. One after another we came, Old Buckhead, the Pinks and the Jells, to glance despairingly off the shell of Charlie Gentry’s wife.
The two little girls—I say little; they were near Malory’s age, but both so elfin, so small—did not cry either, not afterward in their grandparents’ house, though both had wept, quietly and almost politely, at the funeral and graveside out at Oakland. They had remained pressed to their mother’s sides like small animals then, bewildered and huge-eyed and pathetically still, like exuberant young monkeys gone motionless with grief and enormity. They sat on either side of Dorothy Cameron in the drawing room of Merrivale House later during that hot, gray afternoon, diminutive in short-skirted, severe white cotton—for Sarah would not have permitted mourning’s crushing black on her frail-shouldered young—and shook hands and murmured thank-yous and suffered with Sarah’s old grace the tearful embraces of their father’s friends. But their dark eyes, so like Charlie’s, kept darting to Sarah, moving stiff-spined and smiling through the small crowd, and she would feel the glances and turn and widen the awful smile, and nod her approval.
I am sure that almost every man and woman who came to Merrivale House that day was moved by the graceful, seemly daughters of Sarah and Charlie Gentry, and told them that their father would have been very proud of them. And he would have: I knew that Sarah’s light, firm and loving hand on the heads of her children, so exactly that of her mother, was one of the things he loved best about her. I would have preferred tears, howling, rage, despair, anything but Sarah’s awful glitter and the patrician dignity of the girls and Dorothy’s calm endurance, but I knew I was not going to get them. Not in the house of the Camerons.
There were tears there for Charlie, though, and they were, after all, worse than anything, for they fell from the bewildered gray eyes of Ben Cameron. He had not been at the church or at Oakland. I knew that he was beyond large gatherings now, and I wondered who had remained behind with him while we buried his son-in-law. Leroy Pickens, older by far than he had been the day before, and fairly puckered with grief, like a wind-fallen apple, had driven Sarah and Dorothy and the girls in the Lincoln. But sometime after we had all arrived back at the house on Muscogee Avenue Ben, dressed in a silver-gray summer suit which went wonderfully with his copper-gray thatch of hair and his slender, still-erect figure, came down the beautiful old stairs to the drawing room on the arm of Glenn Pickens. We all fell silent and stared at him, and I know we were all thinking and feeling what I was: the outrage, the sheer impossibility, that the man who still walked so lithely and carried his fine, narrow head so high, and whose charming, mobile face was so nearly the same as that of the primary architect of the new Atlanta, was essentially tenanted by a torn and faded mind.
I knew he had been told about Charlie, because tears rolled down the tanned cheeks, silently and ceaselessly, and the gray eyes were as reddened as a child’s fist-scrubbed eyes, and he turned his head slowly from side to side, as though looking for someone. It was Dorothy. She got up swiftly from the wing chair beside the great fireplace, where she had been stationed, and went to his side, and took his arm. Glenn Pickens stepped back as though relinquishing a flag, and stood silently, not looking at anyone in particular. His face was impassive.
“Come and sit down and say hello to everyone, darling,” Dorothy said. “They’ve come to pay their respects and tell you how much they love you.”
He looked at her, a long, uncomprehending look so full of simple pain that I averted my face.
“Ben is dead,” he said pitifully, in a cracked, thin, old voice. “Did they tell you, Dottie? They keep saying that Ben is dead. I don’t understand. He was just here.”
For the first and last time during that entire awful day, I saw Dorothy Cameron’s face twist with naked, powerful sorrow and anguish, and then it slid back into the old lines of gentle, rather austere repose.
“Not Ben, darling,” she said. “That was a long time ago. We’re all right about that now. This is Charlie. We’ve lost our dear Charlie, darling. You remember, I told you.”
“Charlie?” Ben Cameron said, turning his head to look at all of us, and resting his gaze on Sarah, who had come to stand whitely beside him. “Charlie, that young man who used to hang around here, the one that works for Bob Woodruff? What happened to him?”
“Charlie was my husband, Daddy. He had an accident,” Sarah said gently, still smiling, and I thought that I would die of the pain of that moment, right there in the drawing room of Merrivale House. Around me I heard murmurings of distress, and the rustle of people withdrawing from something too terrible to look upon.
“Shep is your husband,” Ben Cameron said, knitting his iron-gray brows together. “Where’s Shep? Tell him to come here. I want to talk to him about that god-awful slum down in Pumphouse Hill….”
I started forward, heart hammering, not knowing what I would say, only wanting more than anything to stop that beloved, insane voice, but then Glenn Pickens moved forward and took Ben’s arm and guided him silently out of the room and back up the stairs. Ben shuffled as he went.
“I know you’ll forgive him,” Dorothy said into the room. Her voice was modulated and clear. “He seemed quite good before we left for the church, and wanted so to come down and greet all his old friends. But I’m afraid it’s all been a bit too much for him.”
Sarah wheeled and walked on stiff, lamed legs into the kitchen.
Most of us left, then, quietly and with the incomparable and blessedly simpleminded dignity of people who are absolutely sure of the right thing to do, and I knew that the fresh tears on most of the cheeks were as much for Ben Cameron as for his beloved son-in-law.
I followed Sarah into the kitchen, my face stiff with pain. She stood with her own face in her hands, leaning against a counter. I touched her shoulder and she raised her head and looked at me. Her eyes were dry.
“Sarah…” I said.
She moved simply into my arms and I held her. I could not feel her heart, or her breath on my neck, but I could feel the chill of her flesh through the dark cotton dress.
“I keep losing my men, Shep,” she whispered presently. “There must be something bitterly wrong with me, or about me, because I keep losing my men.”
Holding her there in the kitchen of Merrivale House, myself one of those lost men, I thought that she had a point. Little Sarah Cameron, who had had a legion of genuinely adoring men at her side and feet all her life, who had had a bountiful richness of loving brother and father and husband and companions, was now, for all intents and purposes, alone with her mother and daughters in a widow’s world of women. In Atlanta, most men will not come poaching in that chaste preserve.
“You’ve still got me,” I said, and winced at the sheer speciousness of it.
“Oh God.” Her voice was very tired. “I lost you twenty years ago.”
A ponderous, crushing guilt rolled over the grief I felt, as if I had left her, literally, at the church those two decades past.
“I wish it had been me,” I said, and found that I meant the words. Charlie Gentry was simply too valuable, and I would not have left behind me this legacy of wrecked women.
“Don’t be stupid,” Sarah said, and a hint of tartness crept into her voice. “How could Charlie and I have lived with that?”
Soon after, in August, Dorothy moved Ben Cameron into the Carlton House, an imposing, leprous-white retirement condominium on Peachtree Road where the fine old Georgian house of Dr. Thorne Champney had stood from the twenties until recently, and after that the house on Muscogee Avenue stood vacant. Sarah had, to my surprise, set her heels and refused to move out of the house in Collier Hills.
“I just can’t,” she said one evening in the small living room of Dorothy and Ben’s apartment at Carlton House, where I found her when I went to call. Ben slept, and we three sat sipping sherry. “What would we do in that big place, the three of us? We’re such…little people. We’d be like dolls in Versailles.”
“You fit just fine when you were much smaller than you are now,” Dorothy said, smiling.
“I can’t explain it, Mama, but I’ve…shrunk,” Sarah said. “I think all that space would simply scare me now. It needs somebody of Daddy’s stature to cut it down to size, or yours. You dominated it, even when it was just the two of you. You overflow this silly place now. But I’d be swallowed up. Charlie never really wanted to move there, you know. He would have. We planned to. But in his heart he wanted just to stay on Greystone Road. It was his place, his and mine. And it’s still mine. Somehow it wraps around me like a benediction now. Charlie is still there.”
She stopped, and gave a little snort of terrible laughter, and said, “Literally, he’s still there. There are specks of Charlie everywhere in the basement…oh God.” She got up and ran out of the room and into the tiny kitchen of the condominium, and I heard her begin to cry.
I looked at Dorothy helplessly.
“Let her cry,” she said, tears in her own eyes. “She’s only recently begun to. I thought she was going to die of all those unshed tears for a while. She has a lot more to go before she’s done.”
“It breaks my heart to think of the house empty,” Dorothy said later that fall, over coffee in an elegant, discreet little fireside nook in one of the vast lounges that flourished in Carlton House. We sat on facing velvet love seats and ate cookies and little sandwiches; we might have been having one of the legendary teas at the Ritz in Boston, or the Plaza, except that everyone in the lounge was old.
“Martin’s people are keeping it up just fine,” I said. “I run by there almost every evening. There’s not a blade of grass out of place, and they’re raking the leaves right along.”
I did not say that despite the ministrations of the lawn service she had hired to keep the house up—a cost that, with Ben’s special nurses and the asking price of the cramped little apartment and the property taxes on Muscogee Avenue, I was sure they could ill afford—Merrivale House looked just like what it was: a great, yearning, empty house with blind eyes and a cold, dead heart. I turned my face from it whenever I loped past in the falling blue dusk.
“I think we might have stayed, Ben and I, despite the cost, if I’d known Sarah wouldn’t change her mind about it,” she said. “And she still might, of course. But I’ll have to sell it if she doesn’t. The taxes are just horrendous, and Ben is probably going to live a long time yet, poor darling. And the damned lawn service is costing me an arm and a leg. Oh Lord, Shep, the sheer excess of that old way of life, the one that let us build those huge old monstrosities, and staff them! I don’t know a single widow in my crowd who isn’t looking for a buyer, or a married woman who doesn’t know in her heart she’ll have to one day.”
“Well, at least you should be able to get a terrific price,” I said. “Somebody told me what land on and just off Peachtree Road was going for. It’s just obscene.”
“Not, unfortunately, in our immediate area,” she replied. “There’s something about the zoning and nobody wants those big old houses to live in. They just want the land for commercial building. I’m stuck with it.”
“It must be awful for you,” I said. “It hurts me to see it. I can imagine what it must be like for you.”
“I hate it, of course, but I’m not a sentimental woman, you know, Shep,” she said. “I’m grateful for this place, awful as it is. I don’t know where else I could put Ben and be with him, too. Between this and a nursing home, I’ll take this any day. And I’d forgotten what a joy it is just to get around easily. For instance, there’s a special little space in the dining room for the ones of us who’re still spry, and another one for all the walkers and wheelchairs and such—we call them the Cane and Able rooms. And a nurse materializes if you lift your hand, only wearing the kind of clothes a good servant would. No, miss it though I do, I don’t pine for Merrivale House. That’s over; that part of my life is gone. I just don’t go by there anymore. It’s Ben who misses it. He doesn’t understand why we’re staying so long in this hotel. He wants to go home.”
“Well, I can see why,” I said.
“Of course you can,” she said. “My poor, sweet old Ben. This tarted-up geriatric ghetto is not his home. This god-awful place they call Buckhead with the silly, glitzy little shops and the chic little restaurants and those ridiculous little German cars running around all over the place isn’t his home. This isn’t even his city anymore, not the one he helped build. I wish he could go home. I wish he’d just go to sleep one night and wake up…home. And I wish, if Sarah doesn’t want it, that somebody would just tear that old place down.”
I thought it was likely that someone would, in time. Buckhead—or the Buckhead that bordered on Peachtree Road, the one that I thought of when I heard the word—was not a place of living families anymore. Back in the luxe green enclaves of the Northwest, in a cloistered and forested wedge stretching from Buckhead to the Chattahoochee River and now beyond, the great homes of Old Atlanta and the startling ones of the wealthy new still rose, serene and velvety and silent, girded around by mammoth trees and vast lawns and money. But along Peachtree Road itself, that richest and most evocative of arteries, the fine old houses of my youth stood empty or were coming down, falling to prissy, ridiculous, and hugely expensive, ersatz Federal “townehomes” or thrusting glass condominium towers; to thirty- and forty-story office towers and hotels and great “mixed-use” developments, with all three butting up to one another out of the abused red earth. To the south of Buckhead proper, only a scant square block of Peachtree Road where my own home stood was still inhabited by the old houses and their original families. Past us toward downtown not another private home stood. To the north, out Peachtree Road into and past Brookhaven—where the unbroken walls of black-green forest, in which huge old houses hid like reclusive royalty, had once rolled north to Chamblee and Doraville—another mini city like the one in midtown was rising, its towers squeezed onto land that went, in some instances, for $3 million an acre.
And Buckhead proper, that laconic, lunar, jumbled little province of the Buckhead Boys on their bicycles and later their souped-up jalopies, the spiritual home of a generation of Pinks and Jells—what of Buckhead? Well, suffice it to say that I had recently heard Buckhead called, in all seriousness, the Beverly Hills of Atlanta. I had laughed helplessly. Buckhead? Where, at the corner of East Paces Ferry and Peachtree Road, Boo Cutler had written his immortality on the wind in his mighty Merc? Home of Minhennet’s and Wender & Roberts and Tidwell’s Barbecue and Burt’s Bottle Shop and the Buckhead Men’s Shop and four additional drugstores, all with lunch counters? Where dogwood and wild honeysuckle and mimosa handily overpowered automobile exhaust? Where, under the great daytime moon of the benevolent Coca-Cola sign, we had streamed in bright shoals across the five empty, sunstruck converging roads on our way to an afternoon movie at the Buckhead Theater to eat popcorn and neck a little if we were lucky and cop a terrified feel if we were luckier still?
Buckhead? Where we were young and golden, and the sweating, jostling body of Atlanta proper lay safely to the south, and all that we could see for green, dreaming miles around us was ours?
What had happened to Buckhead? When had the towers and the cafés and grills and bistros and boîtes and wine bars and parking lots and antique shops and collectibles galleries and Mercedeses and BMWs and Jaguars come surging in from the Southside and Cobb and DeKalb counties? When had the gates sagged open and the walls crashed down? While I was not looking, the city had eaten Buckhead. While I was dreaming in the summerhouse, they had come: the feared Yankees and tackpots—and the Arabs and the Lebanese and the Japanese and Germans and South Americans, and the district managers from New York and Scranton and Pocatello and Mill Valley and St. Paul and the small and medium-sized towns and cities of the nation and the world, and we had fallen without a shot, toppled like the dinosaurs we were by the swift, silent defoliant that was money.
I don’t know why I was so shocked. The changes had been coming for a long time, first a trickle and then a flood tide, ever since the decade of Ben and the Club had ended almost ten years before and the political and economic base and mix of the city had changed. Ben had predicted it even before he took office, had said that he and his contemporaries were setting out to build a city that would first depose and then eclipse them. I wondered if he had been aware of much of the change, or if the fog in his mind had spared him that. And then I thought that perhaps, after all, he would not have minded, but would have found the transformation exhilarating. Many people did, even though most Old Atlantans were not among them; in its first groping formative days as a Sunbelt city, Atlanta had enormous energy and a kind of brash, raffish charm. And it still was, and is, one of the most beautiful places on earth; to drive into residential North Atlanta in the springtime, or in the bronze and blue of a good October, is to leave the world and move into pure enchantment.
The city Ben Cameron had left behind him in the mists of his wounded mind was a city of severely curtailed white influence, aristocratic or otherwise. Much of Old Atlanta still had money. Our crowd was, in the main, doing almost ludicrously well for ourselves, adding new luster and dimensions to the estates our fathers and grandfathers had amassed. Many of us were so well-dowered initially that it would have been almost impossible to fail. But we were by no means the only money in town now, or even the most substantial. There were hundreds of larger and newer fortunes in the city that rose on the shoulders of Ben Cameron’s town, and more streaming in every day. And even these, even a coalition of these, did not buy anything like the political power our fathers had had.
These days, political power and governmental influence lay squarely in the black hands that had stretched out to receive it when the Club had passed the torches. Ben had handed over the symbolic keys to the city to Atlanta’s first Jewish mayor and black vice mayor, and since then the South’s first black mayor of any real power had been in City Hall for almost an entire term. Blacks dominated all phases of city and county government, and a younger, newer and more worldly echelon stirred restlessly in the wings behind the old street fighters, waiting their turns. Glenn Pickens was one of them. He had left his storefront law practice in 1972 to join the large, prestigious one whose great mahogany doors Ben Cameron had opened for him, and shortly after had run for, and won, a Fulton County judgeship. Now he was beginning to be spoken of as a serious candidate for mayor when the aging and ailing Horace Short stepped down. He kept his own counsel about that, at least publicly, but I could see him as clearly in that second-floor office in City Hall as I had seen him on the day, more than fifteen years ago, of the crash at Orly. Only this time he sat in the chair he had, then, stood behind.
It would not be a city of unity and purpose and wholeness of ethos that he straddled. Atlanta was too big for that now, too fragmented, too much a city of parts and factions and interests. White money and property and, consequently, much of its power had fled the city proper to suburbs stretching fifty miles to the north and west, encamping in great, gleaming, treeless subdivisions that rolled away to the Blue Ridge foothills like tents on the plain of Ilion, and leaving along the way the stigmata of their passing armies: strip shopping centers, malls, fast-food outlets, office and industrial parks turning shabby in the relentless sun even before they were up to full occupancy, wholesale outlets and Honda dealerships.
Behind, in the city proper, the blacks who were left did not move with one body, mind and voice, as Ben and the Club had done, but snarled and jostled in warring packs. But I thought that cohesion would come for them, as it had for us before them, when they finally and fully comprehended that what was at stake was simply a matter of economics. Atlanta was still, as it had always been, a business town first and foremost, if by now a riotous and overblown one. Glenn Pickens, groomed by Ben Cameron and raised in the very holy of holies of economic power, would know that.
All this I saw, in the dying decade of the seventies, when I raised my head and looked around me. And it seemed to me, when I did, that only I, in the summerhouse behind the house on Peachtree Road, and my father, mute and motionless in his absurd Turkish seraglio upstairs in it, were unchanged, voiceless ghosts in a city that did not know us.
But the changes did not, in the main, concern me, for the cloistered microcosm that was the house on Peachtree Road and the summerhouse behind it was by then, as old Omar put it, Paradise enow. Malory Venable came to live with us when she was fifteen, and from that time on everyone who came into 2500 walked with a lighter step and a higher heart.
She came because, ultimately, it was impossible for her to stay at the farmhouse. Even Lucy, who drove her away while sobbing her devotion, saw that. Even Jack, whose face as he deposited her in our care on a flickering April day was that of a man watching the last ship slide away over the cold sea in which he struggled, brought her with gratitude that she had a haven.
“Take care of her for us,” he said, his voice as gray and slack as his heavy face under the scant white hair. “Her mother can’t keep from wrecking her and I can’t help her. I don’t know what the hell is going to become of us, but I have to know she’s safe.”
Malory was crying, unwilling tears streaking the beautiful, austere young face, so like and yet so unlike Lucy’s. She stood clutching a dreadful, scuffed little aqua Samsonite train case that had been her mother’s and looked from Jack Venable to me, and I have never seen another living creature so torn.
“Tell Mama I love her and I’ll call her every day,” she said in a stricken voice. “Tell her if she needs me I can be there in an hour.”
“I’ll tell her you love her,” Jack Venable said. “But I won’t tell her you’ll call, and I won’t tell her you’ll come. I won’t have either of those things, Malory. We agreed. There’s no point in your coming here if you’re going to stay poised to fly home every time she yells for you. If you do, even once, until she’s a whole lot better than she is now, I’ll put you in boarding school. And don’t think I won’t. You have absolutely got to have some kind of life for yourself, and she’s not going to get better until she stops leaning on you. You know what Faith said.”
Malory did not answer. She turned away so we could not see her tears and I started to put my arm around her, and then stopped. I knew she would lose her battle for composure if I did, and Malory at fifteen was as fierce as a young Amazon about that.
“We’ll keep you posted, and you can call her anytime you want to, or come by,” I said. “The coffeepot’s always on. It’s going to work out just fine, Jack. We’re going to make things really special for her.”
“I hope so,” he said dully. “Nothing has been, so far.”
He got into the old Ford and drove away, and he did not look back at us. I watched him out of sight in the omnipresent traffic on Peachtree Road and then turned to Malory.
“Let’s get your stuff upstairs and let your grandmother do her worst, and then you can come out and have tea with me. Don’t be surprised if she’s draped your entire room in pink organdy. I saw that little chap from Rich’s—the one who put your great-uncle in the harem—floating up the stairs in a veritable cloud of pink the other day.”
She giggled, a weak, watery giggle.
“I know I can’t stay out in the summerhouse with you,” she said. “But I don’t see why I have to stay just down the hall from her. That little place up in the attic that you and Mama had when you were little would be just fine. I don’t know if I can take pink ruffles.”
“Give it a try,” I said. “A few pink ruffles might do you good. And besides, your grandmother is so eager to have things perfect for you that she’ll probably let you redo it all in black and worship Satan if you want to. If you just can’t stand it, we’ll see about the attic. But I warn you, your mother and I thought it was pretty awful a good deal of the time. It’s no place to be under house arrest, I’ll tell you.”
She looked at me gravely, and my heart squeezed afresh at the clean, severe beauty of her purely carved face and long, light dancer’s body.
“Mama was always in trouble, wasn’t she?” she said. “She tells me funny stories about the Great Captivity, as she calls it, and how furious Grandmother always was with her, but some of it must have been her own fault. People don’t just…persecute little children. It must have been going on even then—the sickness, I mean.”
“I think it was, on a much smaller scale,” I said. “Of course, I didn’t think of it like that then. I was right in it with her most of the time. But yes, the seeds were there, I guess. She was a wild little thing, always. But probably the most…entrancing…I’ve ever known.”
“I know,” she said. “She still is, to me. There’s nobody like her. I wish I had her…energy, and her gift for making you feel that the world is a special, magical kind of place, and that you’re the most important person in it. And her humor…she’s just so funny, Shep. I’ll never have half her wit, or her…vivacity. Is that the right word? It’s so much more than that….”
“Thank God you won’t,” I said, wrestling her bags into the foyer of the big house. “It’s wrecked a lot of lives, or nearly. What you’ve got is a thousand times better, but I don’t think you’ll be able to see that till you’ve been away from her for a while.”
“What have I got?” She looked at me with grave, curious eyes.
“Goodness,” I said, surprising myself. “Integrity. Plus a few million other pretty nice things. You’ll be an extraordinary woman, Malory, if you’ll let yourself be a teenager first.”
She blushed, a deep, vivid rose that stained her translucent skin like summer heat, and smiled shyly.
“That’s nice. I hope I will,” she said.
“Count on it,” I said. “Look out, now. I hear your grandmother coming down in full cry.”
Malory herself seemed to realize that she could not live in the house with her mother any longer. It was not a realization that had come easily.
For the first two years after she was home from the last stay in the hospital, it had looked as though Faith Farr had been right, and that Lucy had, this time, really gotten a handle on the illness and drinking. She took her medication faithfully, and continued to see Faith at her office twice a week—much of the time for free, I know, for Faith knew as well as I, by then, what the state of Jack and Lucy’s finances was—and got herself a job three mornings a week in the office of the little country weekly published in Lithonia. At first she simply answered the telephone, and then she graduated to some light civic and business reporting, and when her first byline ran she was as exalted as if she had won a Pulitzer Prize.
“It’s a start, Gibby,” she lilted on one of her evening telephone calls, which had resumed when she came home from the hospital. Her voice was full of hope.
“It’s a dinky little story, and the money won’t even pay for gas and lunches, but it’s a start. And it’s a damned good story, if I do say so myself.”
“It is that,” I said. And it was. Lucy writing county business briefs was like a Lippizaner pulling a plow, but the little job engaged her and kept her mounting restlessness and energy from reaching out to Malory, and there was nothing in the minimal little office, or in that end of the county, for that matter, to either threaten or overstimulate her. For what seemed a very long time, Jack continued to work and sleep, work and sleep, and Lucy spent her afternoons holed up writing something she would neither show nor discuss with anyone, and Malory, poised on the brink of puberty and high school, continued to come home from school and see to the housework and prepare dinner and minister to Jack and Lucy—for black Estelle was simply too old and tired by then to work anymore. I thought that the order and balance of those days were weighted heavily against Malory, but it was a routine she throve upon, and they all three seemed to find a measure of stability and respite in that quiet time.
But then, almost overnight, Malory turned from child into woman, and the stability and respite flew end over end. After her daughter got her first period Lucy bought a bottle of champagne to celebrate and drank the whole thing by herself, and ended up piling the Ford into a stop sign on the way to Wendy’s at three o’clock in the morning “to see who might want to come out and play.” She was so stricken and remorseful when she sobered up, weeping and apologizing to her white-faced daughter and gray-faced husband when they came to get her in the little county hospital emergency room, that they did not call Faith Farr. For an entire weekend, Lucy was violently ill from the liquor—something that had never happened before—so ill that she swore she never wanted even to smell alcohol again, and Malory, trembling with fatigue from two straight days of holding her heaving, retching mother’s bandaged head, believed her. Surely no one would willingly court that awful, gut-tearing nausea again.
But when Malory bought her first brassiere, red-faced with embarrassment and pride, out of the money she had saved from the grocery fund, and came home with her narrow chest thrown elaborately out, Lucy brought home scotch and drank it in her bedroom, while Malory was making dinner and before Jack got home from work. Unlike the champagne, the scotch did not make her sick. They did not even realize that she was drunk until they heard the Ford scratch off into the night, well after she had supposedly gone to bed. This time she did not come home until the next morning, and when she did, she had the look they both knew well by now, the hollowness and flaccidity, the spent and sated look that Jack called her overfucked and underfed look.
And so it started again. The third time she did it she lost the job at the little weekly, and the fourth time Faith Farr terminated the therapy.
“It’s the booze by now that’s the main problem,” she said, when I finally got wind of Lucy’s relapse and called her. Jack and Malory had said nothing to me about the freshening of the illness. It was Lucy herself, in one of the late-night telephone calls from a motel outside Athens, who alerted me.
“She won’t go to AA,” Faith went on, “and she won’t take her Antabuse, and I can’t do a goddamned thing for her until she does. Alcohol always gets to be the main problem, sooner or later. I helped her before and maybe I could again, Shep, but I don’t do alcoholics. There’s no percentage in it. And I’m not going to let her play games with me.”
“Then who’ll help her?” I said in angry despair, thinking of Malory’s strained young face and haunted eyes. “Jack can’t handle her. Malory sure as hell can’t, though she tries her best. They don’t have a red cent between them—they owe everybody in east DeKalb County. She’ll have to go to Central State or somewhere if you don’t help her. They can’t afford anything else, and Jack won’t let me pay for her hospitalization.”
“Good for Jack,” she said. “I guess Central State it is, if they can get her there. They’ll have to commit her, though. You know she’s not going to let them take her. And I wish you all joy of that. Sorry, Shep. I know you don’t believe me, but I love Lucy. I really do. Let’s say I love her enough to send her to Central State or wherever it takes. Can you say the same?”
I knew I couldn’t. And I knew that Jack, for all his exhausted disengagement, probably could not, either. As for Malory, the mere mention of the name sent her wild. She threatened to run away for good if we put her mother in Central State, and I did not doubt that this time she would do it. I had asked her why she was so violently opposed to it after the third time I retrieved Lucy from a motel.
“It’s just a hospital, like all the others she’s been in,” I said. “Not as fancy, but basically the same.”
“They’ll give her a lobotomy,” she sobbed. “Not many people know it, but that’s what they do with their alcoholic patients. Mama told me. Can you imagine Mama after a lobotomy, Shep? I’d rather she was dead. I’ll die myself before I let you all take her. I promised her—”
She stopped herself then, but the slip had told me what I needed to know. Lucy’s lurid picture of Central State Hospital had had just the effect on Malory that she had known it would. Lucy was safe from Central State or any other hospital after that. She had known she would be. She knew better than perhaps anyone else that Jack and I would do nothing to cause Malory such pain.
“So what was the loss this time?” I asked Faith.
“Malory, of course. Malory growing up and away from her, starting to date, maybe meeting someone she wanted to marry…the first period, and the brassiere—the whole thing. I could kick myself for not anticipating it and at least warning Jack and Malory.”
“It wouldn’t have changed anything,” I said.
“No,” she said, sadly. “No. It wouldn’t have.”
But a time came, as it had to come, when Lucy overstepped herself and lost her daughter, at least for the time being. Always before, she had bought her liquor and met her men away from the farmhouse. The one time she did not—when she brought the stumbling interstate trucker and his half-gallon of Rebel Yell home to her and Jack’s bedroom at noon and then fell with him into a long, stuporous sleep—was the one time Malory brought a rare new friend, a shy, straitlaced country girl a grade ahead of her at the county high school, home for Cokes and television until the girl’s late bus came.
It was that weekend that Jack brought her to us. Lucy by then was weak and husk-voiced with hysterical weeping and imploring, but this time neither Jack nor I, on the telephone, would relent. And Malory herself, exhausted and desperate, was whitely and silently adamant. It was not until Jack made to drive away and leave her with us that the old, phantom pull began to assert itself and she began to waver. And by that time a team of Clydesdales could not have pried her out of my grasp. Malory was in the house on Peachtree Road at last, and our two lives lifted and deepened and entwined closer than I had ever dared hope they might.
I think she was happy. No, I know she was. As for me, I hummed as I pecked at the old typewriter that was, inch by laborious inch, tracking the spoor of the compleat Georgian, and sang abysmally in the afternoons as I filched snacks and milk and iced tea from a beaming Martha Cater for Malory’s and my daily catch-up meeting in the summerhouse, and for the first and last time in my adult life came, washed and pressed, to sit-down dinners in the beautiful old dining room with Malory and Aunt Willa, cooked by Martha and served with a rusty flourish by Shem. We had seldom had family meals there before, but Aunt Willa, thinking, I suppose, to make up for lost time with her elusive granddaughter, insisted on formal table service with candles and the old Redwine damask and proper courses, and I must admit that it pleased me to see Malory’s pale, chiseled face glowing with candlelight at my table, to watch her fingering the heavy, intricate old Tiffany sterling and the crystal and porcelain with delicate enjoyment, to hear her talking politely about her day.
For the first time since I had conceded Aunt Willa the field, I was more than content to sign the checks with which she kept the house running. I was, in fact, eager to do it. The checks bought, now, a safe and privileged haven for Malory, and I thought that I would finance Willa Slagle Bondurant as chatelaine for all eternity and smile as I did so, if it would keep Malory in the house of her great-aunt and her great-uncle and her mother…and me. That that mother was now forbidden the house—for Aunt Willa and I had, for once, agreed that Lucy was not to come here—gave me only slight pause. There had been a time once for Lucy here, and might perhaps again. But for now, it was the time of Malory Bondurant Venable at 2500 Peachtree Road, and that time remains, to me and perhaps to Malory herself, as whole and perfect and complete unto itself as a robin’s azure egg.
To her credit, Aunt Willa managed to give Malory all she would accept of privilege and near-normalcy. Unlike her recalcitrant daughter, her granddaughter was everything she could have asked for: lovely, graceful, biddable, wellborn enough, unaffected, and with the prospect of infinite eligibility. She was Lucy without the devil in her, Little Lady with brains, a beauty already, a belle waiting to bloom. Best of all, she was the glue that would affix Willa Slagle Bondurant to the house on Peachtree Road once and for all. One look at my face when Malory was near would have told a fool that.
Aunt Willa was in her element. She enrolled Malory in Westminster and saw her safely into the creamy ports of Rabun Gap-Nacoochee and the Junior Cotillion. She gave a small tea for her at 2500 when she turned sixteen, and bought her flocks of pretty clothes, which, I think, pleased Malory even though she remained devoted to her blue jeans. She took her to the symphony and the ballet and the theater and the High Museum, and sometimes to dinner and an early movie. Shem Cater grew so accustomed to bringing the Rolls around that I had to spring for another hideous dark suit and chauffeur’s cap. He absolutely refused to drive Malory in the casual clothes that the few remaining chauffeurs of Buckhead had, almost to a man, espoused by now. Shem had his own ironclad notions of propriety, and would no more deviate from them than Aunt Willa would from hers.
When Malory was sixteen Aunt Willa launched a campaign to get her out and about in the social world of what she called her “proper young set,” but here Malory set her heels. She did not care for parties and dating, refused with vague politeness the suggestions about spend-the-night parties and turned down the not inconsiderable invitations she had from the young of her milieu, very few of whom I knew, with a sweet and formal distance that discouraged them from asking again. Like Lucy before her, she would not even discuss a debut or the Junior League.
I knew that she was not really shy. It was just that she had been deprived since birth of the flocking instinct and was comfortable only with the nurturing one. Unlike the teenagers around her, she had never truly been young. I was not surprised when she balked at joining any of the clubs and cliques and groups which held, to my mind, so little luster compared to the glittering excesses of the Pinks and the Jells. I was even less surprised when, after I gave her a small Toyota for her sixteenth birthday, she began to spend much of her free time working with a group of young volunteers in a halfway house for teenage drug and alcohol addicts down in the by-now-infamous Tight Squeeze section at Tenth Street and Peachtree. In that time of the flourishing drug culture, when Atlanta was the mecca for the Southeast’s forlorn crop of dropouts and runaways and seekers of chemical solace, Malory Venable’s tender young face was one of the first many of those wounded pilgrims saw, coming out of their murderous hazes. And it was the last many saw on their way back home or to jobs and schools. Malory had the touch; she healed as well as comforted. She had learned the skill early and indelibly. She loved the work, and it bothered her not at all that she had virtually no social life, even though it drove Aunt Willa wild.
“I don’t need it, Shep,” she said, when finally, at Aunt Willa’s distracted behest, I taxed her with it. “I love this work. It gives me almost everything I need. And I always have you.”
“Yes,” I thought, looking at her with the weight of my whole unspoken heart in the look. “You always have me.”
At the close of that decade, Jack Venable found Lucy in one anonymous rented bed too many, and put her out of the farmhouse. He would not, he said, divorce her, but he would answer neither her hammering on the door nor the frantic phone calls that followed it, and so she came, on a night of bitter, blowing spring rain, to the summerhouse. I knew that she would not have tried the main house. Aunt Willa had been icily adamant about that.
I opened the door to her, of course. In the end I could refuse Lucy almost nothing, and she knew it. So did I.
I sat on the sofa looking at her, my hands dangling despairingly over my crossed knees. She looked dreadful, ill and lamed and old, her glossy good looks thickened and discolored. Her hair was a snarled rat’s nest, and her mouth and neck and shoulders were abraded with hard use. The fire-blue eyes were scummed.
She drew deeply on her cigarette and then threw it into the dead fireplace.
“I suppose it’s no good telling you about my desperate search for the father I never had,” she said, the wounded attempt at cajoling irony curdling in my ears.
“None in the world,” I said. “I guess we’re lucky it’s men you take up with. Women would be more than I could stand.”
“Of course it’s men,” she said, shivering. “Men have all the power. My father taught me that.”
I rose stiffly and brought a towel and tossed it to her.
“He sure as hell did a lot for you with that power, didn’t he?” I said. “Christ, Lucy, he did exactly zero for you. He wasn’t a factor in your growing up at all. That’s power?”
“He left,” she said matter-of-factly. “The power to do that is the biggest one there is.”
She begged me to let her stay for a time in the summerhouse, just until she “got on her feet,” and I did let her sleep that night on the sofa, covered with my own comforter and blanket. But the thought of Malory, sleeping unaware and healing in the small white bed that had once been her mother’s up in the big house, made anything further impossible. Lucy had not mentioned her daughter, but I knew that that was why, in large part, she had come. In the morning, or the next one, they would meet, and Lucy would send the old dark, glinting hound in her mind sniffing inexorably toward Malory, searching, searching, and then the time of Malory Venable in the big house, and possibly in the world of reality and health, would be over.
No you won’t, I thought. No you won’t.
After she slept I went into my bedroom and called Jack Venable and told him she was with me.
There was a long pause, and then he said, “Ah, shit. Okay, Shep. I’ll come get her in the morning. By no means let her near Malory, though.”
“No, don’t come,” I said. “This has got to stop. I’m going to stop it. Don’t worry, she isn’t going to get within fifty miles of Malory. But I don’t want her back with you either, Jack. Not right now. Let me try it my way and see what happens.”
He was silent again, and then he burst out, “Holy Christ, Shep! She’s cost me my boys. She’s cost me my daughter. She has all of me—she always did have. What more does she want?”
“She’s afraid you’ll leave her, so she leaves first,” I said. I found that I only half believed the words, and did not care about them. I sounded, even to myself, like a bad recording.
“I wouldn’t leave her, not really,” he said. He was nearly crying. I had never heard him speak so. Anguish leaped like fresh flame in his bleached voice. “How could I leave her? In her good spells she’s totally enchanting, all I ever wanted on earth. Why, after all this, after everything, does she still think I’ll leave her?”
You already did that, a long time ago, I did not say, thinking of the ardent, burning man I had met that night many years before at Paschal’s La Carrousel.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess it’s the old father thing, and Red. And me. It’s what men do to Lucy. They leave her. It all goes back to the old man….”
“I’d like to kill the sonofabitch,” he said hopelessly.
I thought of that gaudy phantom, sly in his gilded, magical blondness and his striped shoes, who had so devoured and spat out Lucy’s childhood.
“So would she,” I said.
The next morning I had Shem bring the Rolls around and I drove Lucy down to the only apartment complex I knew, Colonial Homes, where so many of our crowd had begun their post-college lives. It looked dingy and banal in the rain-freshened morning, and the flocks of handsome, sleek people leaving it in their handsome, sleek, expensive cars to go to their jobs were of a world that no more knew me than I did it. I averted my face and shut my ears grimly to Lucy’s cries of pain and outrage and entreaty and rented her a studio apartment, paid the deposit and the first three months’ rent by check, drove her back out to the empty farmhouse and waited while she packed the few worn things she had, drove her back to Colonial Homes and moved her into the apartment. I said almost nothing to her as I worked. I would, I said, pay her rent and utilities and send her a living allowance until she could get herself on her feet. But she was under no circumstances to try to see Malory. No visits, no letters, no telephone calls. I would enlist Aunt Willa, I said, and have Shem and Martha monitor the telephone, and she would not be allowed to speak to her daughter.
She wept. The fear and despair were real. She still thought Jack had abandoned her, and now not only was I doing the same, I was shutting her off from the child who so succored and fulfilled her.
“I need her, Gibby,” she sobbed. “I can’t stay in this place alone, you know I can’t! Who’ll look after me? Who’ll talk to me, and…you know…be with me? Malory could have the pullout bed. I don’t mind the chair, or a mattress—”
“No,” I said coldly. “Call me if it gets so bad you can’t stand it. Or get yourself a roommate. Or join the church. I don’t know what you’re going to do, Lucy. But you’re going to back off Malory. You’re going to let her have a shot at growing up straight.”
“I love her, Gibby,” she whispered.
“Then let her go,” I said. She did not answer, and there was not really anything more to say, so I stood to leave.
She came trotting to the door behind me.
“Gibby! I can’t live in this place!” she yelped.
“Why the fuck not?” I shouted. “What’s wrong with it? It beats the hell out of those roach motels you’ve been hitting lately.”
“It’s a singles complex, Gibby,” she said, outraged. “It just now dawned on me.”
“Well, then, it should be right up your alley now, Luce,” I said and grinned mirthlessly, and walked, for the time being, out of her life.
For a few months the telephone calls did not come, and I heard presently from Sarah Gentry, who had run into her at the Colonial Store, that Lucy had started with AA and taken a job with a new Buckhead weekly, and was struggling hard to make a decent life for herself and stay sober. She did both, and so well that in the fall Jack asked her to come home, and she did, with the alacrity of an abandoned dog finding its way home at last. One day not long after that she phoned Malory, and, with hammering heart, I allowed them to speak, and she was so subdued and engaging and remorseful and, above all, loving, that Malory went home that weekend to the farmhouse, and ultimately spent the remainder of her senior year at Westminster there with her mother and Jack, as nearly happy with them as she would ever be again.
I felt, that autumn, like a thin veneer of scourged flesh spread tautly over a howling abyss, but I did not intervene. Malory would be eighteen the next March. Her choices from now on out must be hers alone. I had learned, finally, the value of love held lightly in an open hand.
She graduated second in her class that May, and in the early summer left to begin an accelerated program at Wellesley, where she had won a small tuition scholarship in English literature. I paid with a bursting heart her first year’s room and board and expenses, and sent Jack and Lucy with her to Wellesley in the little Toyota, rocking and sagging with a new wardrobe and a cache of books and tapes, all my graduation presents to her. I did not even think of going myself. If they were ever to be a family, it must be cemented now. When she came home again, changed as all the young are who first leave home to go into the world, it would be too late.
It was a lighthearted and almost ludicrously normal little expedition that set off from Atlanta that flawless morning in June, achingly like the one on which my mother and Ben and Dorothy and Sarah Cameron had seen me off for Princeton so long ago, and my best hope and deepest love, except for that stubborn and toothless old passion that Sarah Cameron Gentry still held, all unknowing, went with the slender, newly radiant girl who might or might not be my daughter.