In October of Malory’s freshman year at Wellesley my father died in his rotting emir’s fastness on the second floor of the house on Peachtree Road, a swift, spasmed, gargling death that he should have died almost twenty years before, and once again Old Buckhead gathered at Saint Philip’s and Oakland.
“Are you awfully sad, darling?” Dorothy Cameron said to me in the Rolls on the way through the city, burning in the blue bowl of autumn, toward the old cemetery.
I knew that it was unorthodox that she accompany me in the first family car behind the Spring Hill hearse that bore my father, but she cared little for orthodoxy, and as for me, both my father’s friends and my own would have been rather nonplused if I had, at that late date, observed convention. Shem Cater, wizened and fierce in his new chauffeur’s black, was our lone bow to conformity. He drove the shining old car impeccably, and maintained a dignified silence, but an occasional large, rattling sniff gave him away. I wondered how that desiccated old raptor in the hearse ahead of us could have, after all those years of mute and frozen not-thereness, still commanded grief from his chauffeur, but then I remembered that Shem had come to my father as his first employee, and that despite his old primate’s agility, he was slightly older than the dead man he had served.
Poor Shem, I thought. He’s just plain seen too much change.
I turned to look at Dorothy. In the sunlight streaming through the immaculate window of the Rolls she looked old herself, but still beautiful. Her small body had thinned with advancing age, though she still carried herself as erect as a girl, and her skin had the soft, dull, loose texture of draped silk velvet. The network of wrinkles on her strongly modeled face and throat was cobweb-fine, and her hands were gnarled with arthritis and years of hard work in her garden, but her translucent, golden-sherry eyes glowed with life, and her thick, glorious dark hair, only lightly dusted with gray, shone with the vitality of Sarah’s. She wore it in an old-fashioned and becoming French knot now, and looked in it like a miniature Edwardian duchess. She smiled and put her frail hand over mine, and squeezed.
“Maybe I ought to be, but I’m not,” I said. “I was sad when he had the stroke, terribly, and I felt miserable for him when Mother died—though it might well have been me I was feeling sorry for, because there was no way to tell how he felt about that. But not now. The past twenty years have been nothing but a long dying for him. I know damned well he must have wanted to check on out every day of his life. If he knew that much, even. Aunt Willa was the only one of us he seemed to want around him. I stopped going up there except about once a month a long time ago. It’s like somebody just…moved out a piece of furniture. I guess that sounds callous as hell, doesn’t it?”
“No,” she said, looking at the great city skyline sliding by. “You come to that when the body is still here but the person has gone away. I know how that is. It’s a terrible feeling, worse, in a way, than death.”
We were silent, looking at the preposterous sunstruck towers whose names we did not know. Then she said, “It was a sad little funeral, wasn’t it? Sad not so much for him as for what it represented. So few of us gathered around to see him off. There’ll be even fewer to send off my dear old Ben. Sad to see those…giants…looking like ordinary old men, bewildered and belligerent. I sometimes think the worst thing there is is to live past your time. It’s the final obscenity.”
“I don’t even know whose time it is anymore,” I said. “I’m not exactly old, but all that over there might as well be the back of the moon to me,” I said, jerking a thumb at the skyline. “It doesn’t have anything to do with the Atlanta I know. Knew.”
“It’s a new day all right, no doubt about that,” Dorothy said. She did not sound particularly sad; rather, interested. “A new day, a new world. That’s exciting. When you think about what we’ve seen in the last fifty years…Lord! I’d love to live long enough to see what the next fifty will bring, but I’m afraid that will be the province of the young.”
“I wonder if they’ll even want it,” I said. “All the young I know have left to go east or west or even abroad to school. Nobody seems to go to Tech or Georgia anymore. I imagine a lot of them just won’t come home again.”
She made a slight exasperated sound.
“You sound like the Ancient Mariner sometimes, Shep. I didn’t mean Sarah’s young, or Malory, or that generation. I meant you. You and Sarah, your crowd. There’s still so much time for you, and so much living….”
She trailed off, but I knew what she meant. She meant Sarah and me. Together now in our aloneness, with no barriers between us. Shep and Sarah, Sarah and Shep…The old ache that under-girt the two joined names flared up sharp and fresh, briefly, but then it died back down to its welcome dullness.
I had, of course, thought of it, after Charlie’s death. But I could see nothing clearly in that country, as if it were shrouded in mist, and the effort to penetrate it was more than I could summon. Maybe, I thought, I had simply lived alone too long, shut away from life and its abrasive passions. Most of us simply give up passion eventually because it presupposes, in its core, intimacy, and we simply get too tired and used up to risk that, and the little deaths that hide in it. Even the passion that I felt for Malory, even that fierce and enduring flame, threatened continually to burn me with its breath, so that sometimes I almost flinched from it. Too hard, now, to lose, too hard…
Dorothy picked up my thought in the way her daughter always had.
“Malory didn’t come down for the funeral,” she observed. “Good. That was wise. I was afraid Lucy would use this to get her home.”
I grinned. “Not much gets by you, does it?” I said. “No. Lucy’s behaving herself very well these days, but Jack and I agreed there wasn’t any reason for Malory to leave school in the middle of the quarter and come home for the funeral of an old man she really didn’t know.”
“Do you really not want me to come? I can be on a plane in two hours,” Malory had said two days before, when I had called her and told her I’d prefer that she stay at Wellesley.
“No,” I said. “I’ll see you at Thanksgiving. You aren’t homesick for Atlanta, are you?”
“No. I thought I might be, but except for you and Mama and Jack, I don’t miss it. You know what I do miss, though? I miss Tate. Could we go up there at Thanksgiving? I haven’t been since I was a little girl, and I keep thinking of it, for some reason.”
I thought of that long-ago weekend of the impromptu house party up at Tate, only days before Ben Cameron shot himself, and of small Malory Venable whirling in a transport of delight in the middle of the cottage floor, exclaiming, “Is it ours? Can we come up here and live forever and ever?”
“We’ll go for sure,” I said. “Maybe we’ll spend the whole weekend, if it’s warm enough. Have Thanksgiving dinner up there.”
“I’d love that,” she said. “Listen—how’s Mama, really?”
“She’s fine,” I said.
“I mean really, Shep,” she said, and I heard the old, protective fussiness in her voice.
“So do I,” I said. “Not a whisper of a drink. Loves her job, and is beginning to do some awfully good stuff for it. She’s at AA every Monday night when the doors open, and there’s a new young shrink in Lithonia—can you imagine?—who has her on a different medication. She’s gained a little weight, and let her hair grow out. It looks pretty. I think you’re going to be pleased with her when you see her.”
“I can’t wait,” Malory said. “I hear her calling me all the time. It’s hard not to answer.”
“Try,” I said.
I looked about me during the grave side service at Oakland, at the handful of old people and the smaller scattering of my own friends gathered in the shade of the old oaks and crape myrtles. It seemed to me that I was seeing them for the first time in years, and indeed, in the case of many, I was. “What a long way we’ve all come,” I thought. “We’re like survivors of some kind of captive intergalactic journey. And I guess there’s more truth than poetry to that.”
There were my father’s friends and associates, or the ones who were left, the fabled Club of the sixties: old men now, though many were still erect and slender and fit. Some wore the burden of the years badly, and some, like Ben Cameron, mumbling in his shadowland back at Carlton House, were missing from the ranks. Many others were dead. But no matter how well they had weathered the passage of time, I did not think they had weathered so well the profound changes it had brought. There was something in many of those eyes now, something tentative and puzzled, that was hard to countenance in eyes that had so recently seen a great vision for the city and watched it brought to life under their hands. They had, they would be the first to acknowledge, been dethroned by the very people they sought to attract—and also by those they did not: the businessmen of the world and the concerted Atlanta black community. The Club had foreseen and even courted the outside interests, but they had not foreseen the depth and scope of the black power emergence in the city.
I remembered that a social historian from an Eastern university, perhaps my own, once asked Ben Cameron, while he was mayor, if the blacks would ever have full membership in the Club.
“Well.” Ben had smiled his famous smile. “They’ll always be consulted, of course. But full membership?” and he had spread his hands eloquently, and fallen silent. The national press gave it full play.
But now they themselves were the Club, those blacks who had had to creep in the after-hours darkness of the Commerce Club to a back meeting room in order to help the mayor of their city formulate plans to save it. The inevitable coalition of outside interests and money and sheer physical numbers brought it about. And the mayor of the city now was Glenn Pickens, whose father had driven Ben Cameron’s Lincolns and still did, for his family, but who had never owned a car himself. Glenn had won the will-o’-the-wisp mayorship handily in the last election, and had been in office almost two years, and was proving to be a very good mayor indeed, tough and efficient and coolly visionary, though to older Atlantans far too inclined to advocate the razing of the city’s old homes and businesses to accommodate the inexorable mercenary army of high rises marching north out Peachtree Road. He was an international mayor for an international city, a new kind of man for a new region called, inelegantly, the Sunbelt.
But the bewildered old Club, watching its venerable social clubs and homes and watering holes come tumbling down, seeing the small, graceful familiar city of their reign swallowed up in concrete and steel and exhaust fumes, could not keep themselves from thinking of him and often speaking of him as “Ben Cameron’s chauffeur’s boy.”
“Ben put him through Morehouse, you know,” one would remind another. “Ben virtually raised him. I’m glad he can’t see what’s come of it.”
I thought that, on the contrary, Ben would approve Glenn Pickens’s odyssey. Indeed, he had been the architect and the navigator of it. But I was glad that he could not see the physical changes in his city; did not have to see his beloved Merrivale House growing dim and tattered in its emptiness, did not have to try to cope with the hordes of newcomers. It gave me physical pain to watch when the old members of the Club occasionally met and attempted to deal with the forceful, no-nonsense, almost laughably rich young outlanders who had the city’s reins in their hands now. The old rules, those oblique, graceful, slow rules of order by which they had conducted their business and the city’s, no longer worked. The newcomers did not comprehend the need for the graceful rituals of their glory days, the joviality and nuance and offhand courtesy, the ballet of thrust and parry. They did not comprehend the innate special-ness of Buckhead that the old lions remembered. There were too many new eyes, hard and flat and canny. They formed a different fulcrum for a new and enormously larger city.
I looked around at my own friends, standing in a tight knot, shoulder to shoulder, as they had stood since childhood and tend to do at all gatherings still. Even if I had not been seated across the new grave with Jack and Lucy and Aunt Willa, they still would have stood a little apart from me. They did not mean to wound with the distance; indeed, in the beginning, it had been I who chose it. Now it seemed to me that a slight pall of the smoke of Pumphouse Hill still hung about me. It did not stink so much as simply obscure me slightly from their view. In the main, I had not minded, and did not now.
They’re what’s left of the old Club, I thought, or what it’s turned into. And they’re doing okay. Some of them are powerful as hell in their own right. Some of them are right up there with the Arabs and the top blacks and the newcomers, moving and shaking with the best of them. Carter Rawson now, he can buy himself a chunk of any city in the world and tear it down and redevelop it if he chooses. Snake Cheatham has enough real estate, in addition to his income from medicine, to start his own city. And Charlie—in his time, old Charlie had more money at his fingertips than most small nations, even if very little of it was his. Charlie had had more power than any of us, and thought less about it. Oh, Charlie…
But we’re not a patch on them, the ones who came before us, I thought. We didn’t pull together. We haven’t worn all that well. Ours was the generation that started to question the rules, maybe. Or maybe the blood just thins out in the second echelon. Young Ben Cameron gone. Tom Goodwin stuck out in limbo with his virulent little Freddie; nowhere, really; not even a part of us anymore. Although maybe he could have been, if he’d ditched that little terrier bitch back while he still could. Now, like most of us, he’s just too tired. Pres and Sarton Hubbard gone back to Savannah, sick of the whole scene here, gone back where things you know stay the same. A.J. and Lana Kemp working a hundred-acre farm now, and maybe better off than any of us. Charlie gone. And of course, me. The Buckhead Boys’ own recluse.
I was not, I knew, a recluse in the strictest sense of the word. I got out now and then to the drug or hardware store or the post office, or to do a small errand. I spent a lot of time in the downtown library and in the archives of the Historical Society, where no one made any fuss over me. I went often out Peachtree Road past Lenox Square to the Carlton House, to see Dorothy Cameron and look at Ben. I jogged five or so miles every morning at dawn over on the empty North Fulton track, and still made my loping rounds of Buckhead in the evenings. I attended the obligatory funerals, though not the weddings, which were, now, beginning to be the weddings of the offspring of the Pinks and the Jells. For those, I called Tiffany’s and ordered another of the little enameled boxes that they stocked, and had it sent. I answered with courtesy and promptness the few dutiful invitations that still came, but only to refuse them. I saw, really, only Dorothy Cameron, Lucy and Jack Venable, Malory whenever I could and once in a great while, either by accident at Wender & Roberts or at a state occasion such as this, Sarah Cameron Gentry. Little Sarah, trim and tanned still, lithe as a girl in her skirts and sweaters and good wool pants, laughing her girl’s rich, gay laugh, only her great amber eyes deeper now with the kind of pain given only to those who must go on alone. Sarah, once mine, lost now and speaking to me out of the mists of another, greener country.
Ben Cameron had told me on the afternoon after the fire on Pumphouse Hill that my time would come, my day in the sun. Had it come and gone, I wondered all at once, while I was in the summerhouse annotating dead Camerons? Could I have lived comfortably…outside? Could I now? No. Not then and not now. Not yet. Maybe someday…But then, what do I have to show for all those years? Enough notes for the world’s longest Southern genealogy? Who needs another one of those? Nobody, probably. But I did. I do. It has not been dishonorable work.
What might I have had? During the concluding prayers for my uncomprehended father, I looked inside myself, deep, deep, into chambers that I usually kept resolutely shut. I saw nothing. I felt blinded, bound, tethered, caged. Behind my closed eyes there was nothing of the present or future, but the past crowded close: all of us, the Pinks and the Jells, the Buckhead Boys and our girls, young and golden and untouched, in the coolness of Wender & Robert’s Drugstore; in the high, hot yellow sun of an April day nearly thirty years ago, beside a great slow, brown river with the blue sky caught in it….
The Pinks and the Jells. My eyes stung behind my closed lids. “We are almost fifty years old,” I thought, “and we are lost in our own country.”
Coming up the long hill just past Peachtree Battle Avenue on the way home from Oakland I lifted my head, as I always did at this spot, for the first glimpse of 2500’s sweet symmetry, and could not see it. Except for the short block of Peachtree Road where the house sat, and the small square of untouched woods behind it, Peachtree Road was lined out of sight with high rises. Not just the four- and five-story apartment buildings and condominiums that prevailed along some parts of it, but twenty- and thirty-story office and residential towers, blocking the October sun off the brow of the house, casting the blazing garden and the summerhouse into deep blue shadow. My house, that miracle of proportion and grace and light, looked now like an embattled old dowager completely surrounded by blind, marching giants. I drew a sharp breath. The house’s extraordinary beauty was eclipsed now by its air of obstinacy, its ludicrous refusal to accept the inevitable and fall to the great blind Goths. People not familiar with it must laugh to see it: “Wonder who the holdout is? Some old geezer out to make a pile off the developers pissing their pants for that land, probably. Go to it, Pops! Stick it to ’em!”
“When in God’s name did all this happen?” I said aloud. It was a rhetorical question, and Dorothy Cameron and Shem both knew it was. Neither answered. I knew when it had happened, of course: I had seen the dozers, had heard the jackhammers. I had seen the bleeding earth where the great trees and the old houses of my youth had been torn living from their roots. I could not have failed to see. It had gone on under my very eyes these past five or ten years.
But in a larger and deeper way, I had not seen. My very retinas had rejected those images of devastation.
When I got back to the summerhouse I called Carter Rawson.
“How long have I got before somebody yanks my house out from under me and puts up a fifty-story Taco Bell?” I said without preamble.
Carter gave the short hyena’s bark that passes with him for mirth. “Forever, from the looks of things. Everybody with any money in all fifty states and about ten countries has been after your place. The whole block, as a matter of fact. Me included. Hasn’t Marty Fox told you?”
“No,” I said. “After the first three calls five or ten years ago I had the number changed and the phone unlisted and told him the answer was no now and forever more, and not to even tell me about any offers he got.”
“Any offers—Holy Mother of God.” Carter laughed again. “Time was you could have bought yourself an emerging nation with what you could get for that property, with one phone call. And whatever it was, I’d have doubled it. But right now I doubt if you could get MARTA fare for it.”
“What’s the matter with it?”
“It’s the zoning. The word is out that it’s R-one forever; I can’t count the times a change has gotten past the review board and into the city council, and every time it’s rejected. Unanimously. No debate, no argument and no explanation. Nobody’s going to mess with it until it goes commercial or at least mixed-use.”
“Why is that? Who’s blocking it?” I said. The cold fear around my heart which had sprung up that afternoon when I had seen, as if for the first time, the house surrounded by sky-stabbing monstrosities eased a little.
“I have no idea. Nobody does, or I’d know it. Somebody awfully high up, who doesn’t give a shit about money. And in this town, I simply don’t know anybody like that. I’d have said you could buy the entire council for a new BMW, but obviously somebody doesn’t need one. It’s not that people don’t want to sell. Poor old Dorothy Cameron has been trying to unload that old heap of hers for years. So have the Cobbs, and Rhodes Bayliss. Everybody, in fact, but you. You haven’t bought off the council, have you?”
“I didn’t even know there was one,” I said honestly. “So, am I safe, then? Can I count on the house being there for…a long time? My lifetime?” And Malory’s, I did not say.
“I didn’t say that,” he said. “In fact, I’d be willing to bet we’ll get that zoning changed within five or ten years. Maybe before. We’ll get to whoever’s blocking it eventually. We always do. Listen, Shep,” and his voice deepened and smoothed into his notion of the famous Club drawl, “I meant what I said. When the zoning falls—and it will—I’ll go double the best offer you get for it. No matter what it is. Call me first. You won’t be sorry. I’ll find you another house, one that fits you to a T. Hell, I’ll even build it for you and move you in. You won’t have to lift a finger.”
“I’m not selling, Carter, even if the zoning changes tomorrow,” I said. “But just out of curiosity, what would you do with it? Tear it down, I know, but what would you put there?”
“Parking,” he said instantly, and I heard the obsessive single-mindedness of the starving man in his voice. “There’s not a single public parking lot between Brookwood Station and Lenox Square. The place would mint money. Hey, you want a little piece of it? I can do that—”
“I’m not selling, Carter,” I said. “Maybe I didn’t make myself clear.”
“Oh, you’ll sell, when the zoning changes,” he said. “One way or another, you’ll sell. Willingly or unwillingly. Unwillingly is not usually much fun. I’d hope it was willingly. And to me.”
“Carter,” I said, “it would please me very much if you would go fuck an I beam.”
And I hung up.
Without an instant’s hesitation I sat down and dialed City Hall. My index finger knew only milliseconds before my brain who I should be talking to.
“I wondered when you’d be calling,” Glenn Pickens said. “You don’t catch on very fast, do you?”
“No,” I said. “It’s never been my long suit. Tell me about my house. How long am I safe, first. And why, second.”
He laughed. I did not remember ever hearing him do that, but I recalled that Lucy had said once that they laughed together a great deal when they were very young, she and Glenn.
“Perfect timing, anyway,” he said. “There’s another application in front of the board right now, and I happen to know that it has the unanimous approval of the council. Like they all have. Which means that I’m going to have to spend another four or five nights and probably a weekend calling and bargaining and making promises and moving and shaking, of which I am getting extremely tired. If anybody ever calls in all my chips I’ll have to move to Buenos Aires.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
The laughter was gone from his voice, abruptly. “Ben Cameron was able to save your asses out in Buckhead until he got sick,” he said, “but I’m not in the business of saving Buckhead asses. I want you to know, though, that I’m going to make sure that zoning doesn’t go through. I’ve done it about five million times before, and I’ll keep doing it as long as I can. The house is yours for that long. Though it’s probably not going to be so peaceful from now on, because it’s a matter of time before the money boys tumble to me. You may get a bunch of flak—rest assured I’ll get more. But you’re safe as long as I’m where I am. I figure I’m good for several more terms. I’m a good mayor. And there are more of us than there are of you.”
Tears of simple relief and gratitude stung my eyes, and I was afraid that he would hear them in my voice. I kept it even.
“I can’t imagine how I’ll ever thank you, Glenn,” I said.
“Understand this, Shep,” Glenn Pickens said. “This is not sentiment and it sure as hell isn’t friendship. The city owes you. You took a bad beating back then after the fire, and you didn’t have to. You saved a lot of asses with that, black and white. So this is an old debt. But don’t thank me, because it’s Ben Cameron you owe, not me.”
“Ben?”
He laughed again. “Ben. He’s got a long arm. I owe him as much as you do. If I didn’t, Buckhead would be solid high rise right now. You think your tax base is anything like what I could make for this city out of that residential real estate out there? No, Ben took me aside when I was getting ready to graduate from high school and said he’d pay my way through college and law school, and take care of my dad for the rest of his life, and he’d make me mayor one day, if I’d do everything he said to, because we were going to have a black mayor as sure as gun’s iron, and it ought to be somebody like me. He meant somebody in his pocket, of course, but hell, I didn’t care. Every mayor in America is in somebody’s pocket, and there are worse by far than his. And in exchange for all that, I was to spare this little hunk of Buckhead real estate that his and your houses sat on when the developers got after it, and later, after the fire, he was doubly emphatic about yours. And he did all those things on his end. And so have I. And so, like I say, you’re okay as long as I am. But probably not a second longer.”
“Thank you, Glenn,” I said.
“Thank him,” Glenn Pickens said. “And thank Lucy Bondurant. You I owe. Her, I love.” And he hung up the phone.
We did not talk again.
I lay on my back on the sofa in the living room of the summerhouse and stared up into the smoke-blackened old beams. So I’m safe now, I thought. The house is safe—or as safe as anything can be, in this town. But for what, really? Malory will marry; she may not even come home again from Massachusetts. It’s a money-eating hunk of junk, when you think about it. It’s nothing but an arena for those obscene pretensions Aunt Willa puts on. Lucy can’t even come back to it. I don’t go into it for months on end. I could go anywhere. I could get an apartment, I could go up to Tate…Why stay?
The answer came riding into my mind over her vivid face: Malory. If Malory should want to come home to live…
She came home for Christmas. It was the first time she had come since she left us the previous June, for she had not, after all, come at Thanksgiving. At almost the last moment she had called me and said that a new friend had asked her to spend the holiday at the family house in Marblehead.
“I’d really love to go, Shep,” she said. “The New England coast is really special—I fell in love with it the first time I saw it. There’s something about it…the hardness of it, I think. It’s like you can walk right up on the very top of the earth, in all the clean, sharp light and air and wind. At home sometimes your feet seem to just…sink into the surface, right up to your knees…do you know what I mean?”
“I sure do,” I said. I did. The sucking, amorphous surface of the South; the dark, damp pull of old roots…
“Anyway, it’s only a long weekend. I’ll be home for three weeks at Christmas. And they’re really nice people, a big family, and so funny; they laugh all the time…. Do you think you could maybe tell Mama for me? I’m afraid if I call her…”
She let her voice trail off, but I knew what she feared. I feared it for her. Lucy continued to do well at home, but I knew that she missed Malory fiercely. Jack told me that she had called Wellesley so many times during Malory’s first weeks there that he had finally had a long talk with her, and they made a deal that thereafter she would call only once a week. But I thought that the old calls of blood and spirit probably went out almost constantly.
“Unless you think I should come on home,” she said. I heard the old anxiety.
“No. I’ll tell her,” I said. “Don’t worry about it. Have a good time with your friend and her family and we’ll see you at Christmas.”
There was a small silence, and then she said, in a low voice, “Actually, it’s a him. But I don’t think I want Mama to know that yet. There’s absolutely nothing to it—we’ve just met.”
“I got you,” I said. “Good thinking. I’ll just say friend. Are you sure that’s all he is, Mal?”
My voice was teasing, but not my stilled and waiting heart.
“Absolutely,” she said. “Don’t worry about that. These guys up here are too fast-talking and sharp-edged for me. And there’s not a one of them that holds a candle to you. I’m safe.”
“See you Christmas, then,” I said, and hung up to dial Lucy.
“Oh, shit,” she said when I told her that Malory would not be coming home, but then, “Oh well. It’s just as well, maybe. I’ve got a long piece on MARTA due the Monday after Thanksgiving. I was going to have to work all weekend, anyway. But it pisses me off that she calls you instead of me. What did she think I was going to do, have a fit?”
“The thought probably occurred to her,” I said.
Lucy laughed.
“No fits,” she said. “Absolutely no fits.”
So Malory came rushing and glowing back into our lives at Christmas, slender and vital as ever, and with a new layer of Easternness over her that was, I suppose, inevitable, considering how quickly I had acquired my own patina of Princeton at her age. I rather missed the ardent girlishness of her, though. The Malory who returned to Atlanta that winter was all woman, and very lovely indeed.
It was a good Christmas, almost picture-book perfect, at least to me. We had a brief, pretty snow that stuck, and lasted several days. The weather otherwise was clear and blue and sharp: real Christmas weather. With no close friends in the city, Malory spent much of her time with Jack and her mother at the farmhouse, walking in the winter woods and decorating the sagging old house and cooking enormous, elaborate meals that only she and Jack ate. She told me, as we sat before the fire in the summerhouse by the glow of the little tree I had put up just for her, that Lucy only picked at her food, smoking incessantly and staring at her with her uncanny light blue eyes. Malory spent a lot of time with me that Christmas. I loved the long afternoons and evenings.
“Sometimes I feel like she’s trying to memorize my face or something,” she said. “And sometimes she just puts her hand on my arm or knee and leaves it there. Poor Mama—there’s so little in her life that’s fun anymore, with me gone. Jack’s practically an Olympic sleeper now. And all she does is work. Just work. But she’s not drinking. And she really does look better. I’ve been awfully worried about her. Sometimes I feel so guilty up there at school, so interested in my courses, and having such a good time, when I know she misses me so awfully.”
“Of course she misses you,” I said. “We all do. But we all want you to have this experience. You know she wouldn’t want you to give that up. She hasn’t said so, has she?”
“Oh no. Not in words, anyway. But she wants me home. We have that other language, you know. She tells me that way.”
“Turn the receiver off for the next four years,” I said. “She may want you home on that level, but she’d be wrecked with guilt if she thought you left college and came home because of her. I’m sure of that. And I’ve known her a lot longer than you have.”
She stretched, a long, luxurious stretch, and sighed deeply.
“You always say the right thing,” she said. “The one thing that makes everything all right. Sometimes I wish you were my father.”
“Why?” I said, my heart pounding in my throat. “Don’t I make a good friend?”
“The best,” she said, reaching over and squeezing my hand. “It’s just that Jack seems so absent. Like he’s nothing to do with me. Like I’m not really there, or he isn’t. He’s awfully passive, Shep. Sometimes a day or two will go by before he says a complete sentence. I can’t imagine him when he married Mama….”
“He’s a good man, Malory,” I said, not for the first time. “He’s had a tough time. He was a fine man then, full of passion, like she was, and if most of it’s been burned out of him by now…well, you can see how that might be.”
“You didn’t lose yours,” she said.
Oh, my dear, I thought, I did—I lost it all but one. But I cannot tell you about that.
“Well, I didn’t have to live with your mother, either,” I said.
“You lived with her longer than he has,” Malory said stubbornly.
“It was different then,” I said. “What burns now, warmed then.”
“Yes,” she said. “I can see that. Oh, poor Jack. Poor Mama. Poor everybody.”
“Not so poor,” I said. “We’ve all had you.”
“See what I mean, about saying the right thing?” she said, getting up from the sofa to kiss me. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
“You’ll never have to find out,” I said.
She went back to school three days early, to go skiing at Stowe with her friend and his brothers, and after she had kissed me good-bye and run out to the Ford, which was coughing sulkily in the driveway with Jack at the wheel and Lucy in the backseat, for the trip to the airport, I went back into the summerhouse and shut the door on the cold, pearled light of the dying day and put another log on the fire. If I could have, I would have built a bonfire that roared and bellowed up to the diamond chips of the emerging stars, a conflagration to challenge the very solstice, for the coldness and blackness inside me was nearly total.
I don’t know why that twilight was so desperately bleak. Malory was whole and alive and beautiful in her dark-lit youth, and thriving at her school like a colt in deep bluegrass. She was happy; she was as safe as we could make her; she loved me. I would see her again perhaps at Easter and surely for the long summer vacation. Lucy was inching back toward stability and even Jack Venable seemed a little better, for Lucy’s salary at the weekly had allowed him to give up his evening teaching job, and the desperate white exhaustion had loosened its grip somewhat. The Compleat Georgian was nearing completion, and a good small university press had gotten wind of it and written expressing interest. It should have been a good time for me, or at least not a bad one.
But the starless darkness that fell down when Malory ran out of the summerhouse did not lift. I made myself a drink, and put Ella Fitzgerald singing Cole Porter on the stereo, and picked S. J. Perelman off the shelf, and settled with all three before the fire, blackness whirling inside my head like snow. I sat sipping and half listening and staring at meaningless type, a gale of mortality and despair roaring around me, for what seemed hours on end. Old, my mind keened. Old, old, old…
I cannot remember a worse time in my life, except one, and I cannot to this day say precisely why it was so.
Until Sarah Cameron appeared in the door of the summerhouse, I did not even realize that it was New Year’s Eve.
I blinked at her stupidly, feeling as though I were struggling up through thick, stagnant water toward sunlight. She stood in the open doorway, cold wind rushing in behind her, dressed in a short red satin evening dress with spaghetti straps and in high-heeled silver sandals, and a beautiful dark mink almost the color of her hair was thrown around her shoulders. In one hand there was an unopened bottle of champagne. She was smiling, and her face was so white that the color on her high cheekbones looked like badly applied rouge. From where I sat on the sofa, I could see her lips trembling around the smile.
“It’s you,” I said witlessly.
“It is. It surely is,” she said. “Happy New Year, Shep.”
“What are you doing here all dressed up?” My conversation would have seemed dull in a marginal kindergarten.
“I…oh, Snake and Lelia talked me into going to that awful thing the club has every year, and it was a mistake. I realized that if I stayed an hour longer I was going to have to kiss about twenty drunk people I loathe. So I pinched a bottle of champagne from a tray and came over here to wish you Happy New Year. And”—her voice broke into a near-operatic tremolo—“and to seduce you. Do you think one bottle will do it?”
She laughed, and I realized with a remote shock that she was not a little drunk. She came across the room and sat down carefully at the other end of the sofa, and then I could see the liquid glitter, like unshed tears, that her great eyes had always seemed to get when she had had too much to drink, back when we both were young. Back then…
“You look awfully pretty. Is that a new coat?” I said. The dragging blackness weighed so heavily on me that it was an effort to frame the words. I wanted to put my head into her satin lap and howl. But I sensed that if I made a move toward her, she would bolt like a wild thing. She was, I realized, badly frightened. I could not imagine why, and I could not think what to do about it.
“No. It’s Mother’s,” she said. “She gave it to me when they moved. She said she never intended to go outside when it was cold again as long as she lived. Wouldn’t that be wonderful, Shep? Not to ever be cold again…”
Tears started down her face, and she turned away and scrubbed at them with her hand.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m not a good drunk. I’m sure you remember that. A crying jag is not what I had in mind here.”
I took the hand that shielded her face and turned it over and looked at it. It seemed to be made of ice. My own did, too. I could not feel her flesh. There were faint half-moons of dark blue—Prussian, I thought inanely—under the short, buffed bare nails.
“You’re painting again,” I said dully. “I’m awfully glad. I hated it when you stopped.”
“Not really painting,” she said, shaking her head as if to clear it, and smiling even more brightly. A lock of her dark, glossy hair fell over her forehead. “I’m teaching. Or rather, taking a few private pupils two or three times a week. I get them on referrals from the school of art at the museum. Some of them are really quite good. And it does feel good to hold a brush again. Awful on my nails, though…”
Her laugh was a stilted social one I had literally never heard before.
“Have you got a studio now?” I said, just as politely. I did not seem to know who she was, this satin-shining, tremulous small woman in my living room, thrumming like a high voltage wire and smelling of Joy and cold fur. I did not seem to know who I was, sitting and looking at her.
“I fixed up one in the basement,” she said, and then grimaced. “I know, it sounds grisly. But it was the only place in the house I could do it.”
“Did you ever think of opening the one on Muscogee?” I said. “Not the house, just the studio. It would be perfect.”
“I can’t go over there. There’s not anybody there that I know,” she said obscurely. Under the despair and strangeness, my heart twisted.
“Well, at least you’re painting,” I said.
“At least that,” she agreed. “It gives me something to do. Oh God, Shep. I don’t need something to do. I’ve got plenty to do. I need the money, that’s why I’m doing it. I hate it when I lie. I’ve been doing a lot of that lately.”
She bit her lip and looked away, and I covered her cold hand with mine.
“I have more money than God,” I said. “I never spend any. Let me give you some money, Sarah. I can’t stand it if you’re giving painting lessons in your basement because you need the money.”
She disengaged her fingers and covered both flaming cheeks with both hands.
“I don’t know what in God’s name is the matter with me tonight,” she said, and her voice trembled again. “I didn’t come over here to beg money from you. Mother and Daddy would give me all the money I needed, or Mother would, if I’d let her. I just didn’t want to take it from her. And I’m sure as hell not going to take any from you. I’m not really poor. It’s just that right now, with both girls in school…the painting lessons are just the ticket. They bring me just enough, and I can stop them when I don’t need the extra anymore. And then, one day the Muscogee house will sell, and that money will be mine—I’m appalled at myself for even mentioning it to you. I thought I was coming over to wish you Happy New Year and escape the club letches. It seemed like a good idea at the time….” Tears were close under the surface of her voice again.
“It was a good idea,” I said. “It was a magnificent idea. I was just sitting here feeling sorry for myself, and about a thousand years old. I didn’t even realize it was New Year’s Eve. I really would have put my head in the oven if I had.”
She laughed, a trembling little laugh, and the tears receded.
“I know,” she said. “Is there anything worse? All that horn blowing, and frantic smiling and dancing and yelling, and kissing all those people you don’t even speak to the rest of the year…Shep?”
“Yes.”
“Do you remember that first New Year’s Eve you were home from Princeton? And we went to Hart’s?”
“And it snowed, and we sat in the bay window looking over Peachtree Street and watched it come down, and drank Taittinger blanc de blanc? Yes,” I said, “I remember.”
“It was the last really, really good New Year’s Eve I can remember,” she said.
“Me, too,” I said.
“Let’s do it again,” she said, and fished the bottle from the sofa beside her and held it up. It was Taittinger. The black ice lock in my heart stirred a little, ponderously and far, far down.
“Let’s do,” I said.
I got a couple of stemmed glasses from the kitchen, and opened the champagne while she watched. It made a wonderful, festive whoosh, and fountained all over the hearth. She laughed, a small, prissy sound, and sat with her hands folded in her lap and her ankles crossed, the old Atlanta Pink posture of genteel repose, watching me pour the fizzing gold into the glasses.
I handed her one and glanced at the clock on the mantel over the fireplace. Twenty of twelve.
“Happy New Year, Sarah,” I said.
“Happy New Year, Shep.”
We drank. We drank again. The clock moved, the fire spat, Ella segued into “Love for Sale,” and we drank again. We finished the bottle of Taittinger in seven minutes flat. We did not speak in all that time. When we both opened our mouths to do so at once, and stopped and laughed, and began again, I suddenly realized that I could not feel my lips, and said, “God, I think I’ve sat here and gotten drunk as a skunk.”
“Oh, I’m so glad,” Sarah said. “I don’t think I could have done it otherwise.”
“Done what?” I said owlishly.
“Seduced you. That really is what I came for,” Sarah Cameron Gentry said.
I closed one eye and peered at her, to see if she would stop the slow spin she had begun. She did: The spin stopped and she became Sarah again, sitting bare-shouldered and beautiful and ripe as a small plum in my firelight, and literally terrified. I stared with both eyes, squinting to focus. She was not teasing.
“Can you bear to do that?” I said. “Can you, after all those years and what I did to you and what I’ve turned into? Can you, Sarah?”
“I can’t bear not to,” she said, her voice very small, borne out on a long, trembling breath. “I can’t bear not to. I’ve missed you for almost twenty years. And I’ve just…been around women too damned long, Shep.”
I stood up, very slowly, my legs unsteady under me, my heart starting a long, dragging, heavy tattoo. I held out my arms to her. I had no idea on earth what I was going to do next.
“Then come here, Sarah Cameron,” I said. “Come here and seduce me for New Year’s Eve.”
She put her glass down and stood herself, looking at me almost defiantly, firelight leaping on her shoulders and face, her eyes glittering with liquor and tears.
“Wait a minute,” she said, slurring just a little. She was swaying very slightly, almost imperceptibly. But I had the sense that beneath the protective rush of the champagne she knew exactly what she was about, and it was that which so frightened her.
“I want you to be sure you know what you’re getting,” she said.
Sarah stepped out of her sandals. She slipped the straps of the red satin dress down off her shoulders, as slowly and delicately as if she were in a pool of blue baby spotlight. She peeled the dress down to her hips and stepped out of it. Underneath she wore a scrap of black satin-and-lace bra, and black panty hose. Her rich, compact little body shone through the black, pale gold like new honey, white only where a recent summer’s bikini had shielded her from the kiss of her beloved sun. Good muscles slid in her stomach and arms and shoulders.
“Can you do it with this?” she said, running her hands down her body. “It’s not young anymore.” I stood staring, blood pounding dully at my temples, ears roaring. I could not speak.
“Can you do it with a middle-aged woman who hasn’t done it for years, and only once before with you? Can you?” Sarah whispered. As she whispered she unhooked the brassiere and let it fall to the floor. Her breasts bobbed free in the firelight, sweet and heavy, the heft and fruit of them remembered in my palms and groin. Remembered from a night two decades before, in an apartment on the Lower West Side of Manhattan, in another time and another world altogether…Still, I could not speak.
“Can you, Shep?” Sarah said, and peeled the panty hose down, and stepped out of them. She wore, now, only black lace bikini panties.
“I don’t know,” I whispered truthfully, strangling on my own voice. I felt paralyzed, drowned in blackness and the heavy weight of time and the sediment of loss. A hunger as old and fierce as the world stirred in me. She was, in the dying firelight, the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, riper and more complete than any young girl. But I had been alone so long, so long…Aloneness ran in my veins and weighed like cold iron in my groin. I did not think I could move.
“I think you can,” Sarah said, and came, near-naked, across the floor to me and moved into the wooden arms I held out. “I think you can….”
She moved against me, pressing her body against mine, moving and moving, moving to the beat of the music and the rhythm of her blood, moving, moving. She arched her back and scrubbed her breasts into my chest. Her face was in its old spot in the hollow of my neck, and I could feel the wetness of tears, and the rush of breath as she murmured words I could not hear, soft, crooning words of loss and yearning and old, old love. My arms went around her automatically, and my hands found the smooth, warm hollow in the small of her back, and pulled her into my groin. As if they had life independent of me, they pulled the panties down on her hips, and, still moving against me, she wriggled them down and stepped out of them.
“Please help me,” she whispered. “Can you? Can you, Shep?”
Could I? I leaned onto and into her, mindless, moving with her. Could I? Could the cooled blood warm again, the banked heart flame, the body find the old, urgent moves, that long-forgotten ballet of thrust, thrust, thrust? Could the hopeless old love, so long starved and banished, find breath and being in her once again? Could I? Did I dare?
Sobbing softly, she pulled me down onto the sofa with her, and the small body squirmed under mine until it found the core of me, and opened in warmth and wetness and urgency to take me, finally, into the secret center of her. Yes. I could. I could, I dared, I could….
The telephone rang across the room. I knew without a shaving of a doubt, without a silvery hair of uncertainty, who it was. Even as I rocked and plunged, rocked and plunged, liberation from the blackness and the aloneness of two decades gathering inexorably in the starved groin, I knew. I knew, muscle and sinew and bone and blood and skin. My pounding heart knew. My ragged breath knew. My penis knew, and wilted in despair at the knowledge. I lay still atop Sarah, eyes closed, flaccid and finished, desolation and ending bitter in my mouth.
Sarah knew, too. She was out from under me with one smooth, violent movement, utterly and icily white, eyes blinded and unfocused. She was back in the satin dress and the silver sandals, with the coat clutched around her, before I could sit up, and she did not speak until she was at the door of the summerhouse. I looked across the room at her. She looked, in that moment, as old as Dorothy Cameron—older. She looked dead, like an animated corpse, come to call on the remorseless living in her mother’s old mink coat.
“I will not bother you again,” she said, in a voice to match the corpse-look of her. “I forgot. I truly forgot. But I won’t again.”
As she turned to go, the bells of Saint Philip’s Church just up Peachtree Road began to peal crazily through the wrecked night. Sarah turned back to me.
“I wish,” she said conversationally, “that Red Chastain had killed her when he had the chance.”
And she was gone into the first pealing moments of a new year.
The phone began ringing again even as the door slammed. I let it ring ten or fifteen times, and then I plodded heavily over and picked up the receiver.
“Hey, Gibby,” she said. Pause. Deep, shuddering draw of cigarette. “It’s Lucy, honey. Happy New Year!”