CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Lucy never knew, after that New Year’s Eve, that she had doomed me with Sarah. At least, I do not think she knew in her mind. Her conscious weapons had always been more direct. The midnight telephone call that drowned the ember of hope between Sarah and me was not even coincidental: Lucy had been calling me at midnight on New Year’s Eve for years.

But what she knew in her blood was another matter. There in that dark Styx of vivid, indestructible life which sustained Lucy Bondurant Chastain Venable through so much horror, something was that met and knew every inch of me, perfectly. It was not the leaping, singing thing that called between her and Malory, but nevertheless, it knew. The fact remained that twenty years after I had first loved and wanted her, Sarah Cameron was still lost to me, now irrevocably, and even given my own fecklessness, Lucy was the author of that.

Dorothy Cameron knew, too, and unlike Lucy, she knew with the full of her honed and prescient mind. Not far into the new year I took her a first draft of The Compleat Georgian, feeling as shy and tongue-tied as if I were calling at Merrivale House to pick up Sarah for a dance when I was fifteen. Ben had had a bad day, roaming and thrashing and falling, and had had to be sedated and moved to the infirmary, so we sat in the downstairs sun-room of Carlton House, drinking tea amid the bamboo furniture and tropical plants and caged birds which had, I suspected, been patterned after the decor of the sun-room at The Cloister on Sea Island, so as to give a dimension of familiar luxury and festivity to this last cloister of privileged old age. In the gray-white light from the window walls, fully half of the population of Carlton House took the winter sun like old turtles.

The light, or more likely the long grief and strain of Ben’s deterioration, had leached the high color out of Dorothy’s face, that last brave ensign of youth. I wondered if Sarah would ever lose it permanently. She already had, in that last glimpse I had had of her.

“So here it is,” she said, hefting the thick folder of manuscript in her thin hands. “The house of Cameron, as seen through the eyes of Bondurant. An unbeatable combination. I’m sorrier than I can say that it’s the only one that will ever be.”

I knew then that Sarah had told her mother about what happened on New Year’s Eve, or at least some of it. What she had not, Dorothy would have filled in for herself. I remembered that long ago, just before I had left on that fatal journey across America after Lucy’s frantic call, Dorothy Cameron had warned me about her.

“She is a danger to herself and a worse one to you,” she had said. To her credit, she did not remind me now of that conversation. She knew, of course, that it was far too late for that.

“I’m sorry, too,” I said. I started to go on, to amplify, justify, explain, offer hope, and then did not. There was nothing further to say, and so I said nothing.

“It would have almost made these last dreadful years worth it,” she said, in her usual rich, level voice, but when I looked into her face I saw an anguish that I had seen there only at young Ben’s death, and the start of Ben Senior’s long decline. Her eyes were closed.

Oh, Lucy, so many lives, I thought wearily. I could not be angry at her. We were beyond that, too.

“But this is wonderful, darling, just wonderful,” she said briskly, and the anguish was gone and only her pleasure in the manuscript remained. I felt foolish elation.

“It is, isn’t it?” I said. “I did it, by God. I really did. And I didn’t even leave Atlanta. Most of the time if you want to be a creative genius—or ugly, or anything outside the playpen—you have to leave.”

“Well, you didn’t,” she said. “You may have hidden out like a possum in a hollow tree, but you didn’t leave.”

“I amend that,” I said. “If you want to be creative or ugly or happy. You can’t stay here and be all of them.”

She smiled softly. “But does anybody have all those things, Shep?” she said. “Doesn’t everybody have to choose some things over others, no matter where they are?”

“Maybe,” I said, feeling an obscure annoyance at her. “But by God, I don’t know many places where your very life has to be one of the choices.”

“If you’re referring to yourself, you’ve had an awful lot of privilege,” she said.

“You pay so goddamn dearly for the privilege of…privilege in this town,” I said stubbornly. I did not know why I could not let it go. “Look at Lucy.”

“Well, if you insist, then let’s do look at Lucy,” Dorothy said crisply. “What so terrible has happened to Lucy that she did not bring down on herself? She’s been loved, protected, taken care of….”

“But it wasn’t enough, and it wasn’t the right kind of love,” I said. “The original covenant was broken—that her father would take care of her when she needed him—and she’s spent her entire life alternately trying to placate and punish him. Privilege didn’t help her there.”

“Many children have that covenant broken.” Her beautiful voice was soft and implacable. The woman who had felt sorrow and pity for little Lucy Bondurant was long vanished.

“But somehow Lucy just couldn’t get past it,” I said. “At the same time she realized he wasn’t going to come and take care of her, she got the message that she herself was essentially worthless and utterly unworthy of care, that nothing she did or ever could do by herself would be enough to keep her whole and safe. That’s where all the anger and dependency and self-sabotage comes from.”

“Who gave her that message?” Dorothy was stirring restlessly on her rattan love seat.

“The old man,” I said. “The South. The South speaking through Willa and all the other women around her. Women, too—women did it to her, too.”

“But she’s seen strong women,” Dorothy said impatiently. “Your mother was a strong woman, in her way. Old Martha Cater was a brick, and loved her dearly. I’m tough in my own way, too.”

“Yes, but you’re all strong in a man’s world, or were,” I insisted. “My mother as an accessory to a powerful man, at least to outward appearances. Martha as a servant in that man’s house. You were a lioness in that hospital, Dorothy, but it was men who owned and ran it. Lucy happened to want it all. Unheard of, for a Southern woman. Not, of course, for any sorry man in shoe leather, but for a woman…”

“And who ever gave her that notion?” Dorothy Cameron said tartly. “Nobody else I know ever had it all, man or woman, past the age of thirteen. Oh, don’t bother to answer, it’s the Bondurant in her, of course. You always were the wantingest tribe I ever saw.”

“Except me,” I said.

“Oh, Shep, you most of all! Don’t you remember all those passions of yours when you were small? Look at you—you’ve been in a twenty-year tantrum because you lost part of what you wanted. You’ve been saying, ‘If I can’t have it all, I’ll reject it all.’ You’ve let an awful lot of good go. You let an entire world go not two weeks ago. It’s not Lucy who’s the victim, it’s you. And God help you, it is quite beyond you to change that now.”

I was silent, feeling the old, dead blackness of New Year’s Eve well up from its headwater deep within me. Her words seemed to me an immutable condemnation.

“Tough words,” I said, finally.

“I wouldn’t waste them on many people left on this earth, my dear,” she said. “I have loved you most of your life. I wanted better for you than you have chosen for yourself.”

“What is this, chopped liver?” I said, attempting lightness. I patted the manuscript in her lap.

“This is marvelous,” she said. “A tour de force. A fine appetizer. Now, what about the next twenty years?”

“I really hadn’t thought about it,” I said, the blackness fleeing like fog before a sharp wind of panic. I had not. The pile of pages mounting in their slowness through the years had seemed sufficient, complete in themselves. What about the next twenty-five years? I saw whirling whiteness ahead, and nothing else.

“Well, you’d better get your ass in gear,” Dorothy Cameron said matter-of-factly. “Because I’m tired and I want to die sometime soon, and I absolutely will not do it until I know you’ve got something to occupy you. On your head be it if I live to be a miserable, mewling, puking centenarian.”

“Dorothy, I think I’d just as soon die when you do,” I said, nakedly and honestly. The thought of Atlanta without her was not to be borne.

She was quiet for a long time.

“Please live,” she said at last, in a frail, light, infinitely weary voice. There were tears in the corners of her great, hooded amber eyes. “Please find a way, finally, to live.”

I left her then, thinking as I loped down Peachtree Road toward 2500, cold in the perpetual blueness of shadows from the beetling, blind-eyed buildings on either side, that when she was gone there would be very few people left in my world who might wear the term “fineness.” Only her daughter came to mind.

 

Lucy continued to do so well in her job and at home on the farm that Malory called me just before Christmas of her sophomore year and asked if I thought it would be all right to bring her friend from Boston and Marblehead home.

“I think,” she said, and I could hear the tentative joy in her voice, “that he may be going to ask me to marry him!”

“Oh, Mal—” I said, stricken, and then caught myself. I had been about to shout at her, “No! No! Too young, you’re too young…”

“Does he have a name?” I asked instead.

“John Hunter Westcott the Fourth,” she said, laughing a little over the name. “Is that perfect, or is it perfect? Jinx, of course. He’s tall and blond and cool and beautiful, and he’s so impeccably bred that you’d think he had ‘Groton-Harvard-Wall Street’ stamped on his aristocratic behind. He doesn’t, though. What he has is a severe case of Long Island lockjaw and a place waiting for him in his father’s and grandfather’s impeccable WASP law firm. You’ll probably hate him.”

“I can’t wait for that pleasure,” I said honestly. “I assure you that I will hate him, and as openly and nastily as I can. I’m going to tell him all about your many eccentricities and hideous hidden habits, and send him yelping back to Marblehead, or wherever.”

“Lord, don’t,” she said, only half teasing. “Mother is going to be quite enough. But they have to meet him, and he wants to know them. Do you think she can handle it?”

I thought about it for a bit, and then said, “I think she can, if he doesn’t try to count her teeth. I wouldn’t say anything about marriage, though, Mal. It might just be better to let it be a casual visit.”

“I won’t. But she’s going to know,” Malory said.

“Probably. But she won’t know for sure unless you talk about it.”

“I won’t, then,” she said. “You’re probably right. Okay, I’ll call her right now. Can I bring Jinx by to meet you the day after we get home?”

“Oh, by all means,” I said. “I’ll dig out my old club tie. Would you like me to meet you at the airport and drive you out? Soften the first minutes a little?”

“No,” she said. “I think she’d rather I brought him there to them first.”

And so I did not go to the farmhouse with Malory and her cool, aristocratic and altogether perfect captive Brahmin, and I have regretted that every day of my life since. It was only afterward that I learned what happened that evening, and by that time Malory was back in Massachusetts determined that she would never look upon her mother again.

Jack had met their plane and driven them out to Lithonia in the ancient Ford, and I am sure Jinx Westcott was as gentlemanly about it as he must have been appalled. Lucy had decorated the farmhouse from rafters to hearth with evergreens from the woods and the battered ornaments they had bought when Malory was born, and I think that it probably looked, in its festive dress and the warmth of the leaping fire and candlelight, as well as it could ever look, though by then the old house had sagged past genteel shabbiness and into outright dilapidation. I am certain Jinx was a gentleman about that, too. What, if anything, went on in the elegant brainpan behind the cool blue Nordic eyes, narrowed by the stenosis of centuries of breeding, is another matter. Malory could not tell me that.

What she did tell me was that it was not she, but Jinx Westcott, who said to Lucy, as she and Malory worked in the kitchen and Jack nodded with his drink before the television set, “That looks terrific, Mrs. Venable. I hope Mal got your talent in the kitchen as well as your looks. None of the women in my family can cook worth a damn, and I refuse to go through a lifetime of Stouffer’s.”

Lucy turned her blue, blue eyes to the blond young demigod in her ramshackle kitchen.

“Aren’t you nice?” she drawled. “I can tell your mama raised you right. Will you be a sweetie and go see if Lucy’s father would like another drink?”

When Jinx Westcott strode manfully off into the living room, she turned to Malory.

“Well, darling. Secrets?” she caroled.

“I think maybe he’s going to ask me to marry him, Mama,” Malory said in a subdued voice, her heart hammering.

“Well,” Lucy said. “He has a nice ass.”

It should have tipped Malory off. It would have me. But Malory was blinded by hope, and Jack was drugged with scotch and Dan Rather, and no one saw the level in the scotch bottle that Jack kept on the kitchen counter dropping, dropping, as Lucy cooked. By dinnertime, when Malory and Jinx Westcott came in to lay the table, Lucy had turned abruptly and staggeringly drunk, bestial and hectic and mad-eyed, mumbling and stumbling and laughing and letting herself fall heavily against Jinx.

Malory fled wordlessly to the living room to fetch Jack. It took her some little time to rouse him. When they returned to the kitchen, they found Lucy, skirt pulled up and panties down around her thin white ankles, squirming in the lap of the appalled John Hunter Westcott IV, crying aloud with the shrill mindlessness of a deranged cuckoo clock, “I want to come! I want to come!”

She began to scream then, when Malory and Jack attempted to pull her off Jinx Westcott’s lap, and she screamed long past the time the ambulance came to take her to Central State—for all the other hospitals in the area had by then declared her unwelcome. Lucy in her madness scratched, kicked and bit; her rage was endless. Her screams still rang in the empty air of the farmhouse when the Lithonia taxi came to take a white, punished Malory and a politely arctic John Hunter Westcott IV to the airport. I thought that Malory would hear them always, in her head.

“I will never see her again as long as I live,” she sobbed to me when I called her at school, after the news came from a half-drunk and exhausted Jack Venable that Lucy had been hospitalized again. “I don’t care if she’s sick—I don’t care! I will not see her again!”

And she broke down completely, and hung up the phone.

I replaced the receiver in the summerhouse, swearing in my heart that if I could prevent it, she would not indeed. Lucy might be past my help, but Malory would, must, be saved.

Something happened to Lucy at Central State. To this day we are not sure what it was. The physician on staff swore he found no evidence of a stroke, and Hub Dorsey, when I called him in, verified that.

“Nothing on the EEG,” he said. “Nothing anywhere else to indicate vascular trouble. Whatever it is, it isn’t stroke.”

What it was was a calmness, a lethargy almost, so profound that she did not require the usual tranquilizers and antidepressants but sat dreaming and nodding in the dayroom for hours at a time, often humming a little to herself, and almost always smiling. It was as if something had, at last, truly eased the flame in her, though when I visited I could see in her blue eyes the small, stubborn spark of intelligence which had not yet, through all the horror and pain, been quenched. She could move as well as ever. It simply seemed that she did not often choose to do so. And she did not speak. We did not know for a long time whether she had lost the function or whether she just considered that matters had gone beyond speech entirely. Whatever it was, she seemed tranquil and docile and quite often content.

I thought then that the electroconvulsive therapy they gave her there had simply short-circuited some intricate and vital circuitry in her fevered brain. I still think that is what happened, although an entire phalanx of overworked young doctors assured us it did not and could not.

I thought it far more probable that they simply did not know whereof they spoke than that they wished to circumvent legal trouble from a patient with a professional husband, for it was obvious to even the casual observer by then that Jack Venable was in no shape to pursue a lawsuit, and besides, he had signed an elaborate waiver of responsibility when he had committed Lucy.

So she sat in her silence, smiling and thinking of who knew what, as lost to us without the connecting bridge of words as if she had died. I think both Jack and I, in our hearts, were furtively glad to see her so. I, at least, felt simple relief. We, as well as she, were released from the torment of the fire in Lucy.

In three or four months she began to speak, but she spoke only in erratic bursts, sometimes muttering abrupt words and sentences that made no sense. I knew that the gibberish had meaning for her, for she often smiled in tender delight after completing a string of the heartbreaking nonsense, and looked up at me as if awaiting a reply. I did not know what to say, and could not bear the wounded sentences that spilled from her pretty mouth and tumbled to earth like slain birds, so I resorted to the old anodyne of her early hospitalization.

“Stick it in your ear, Luce!” I would shout gaily, and Lucy would clap her hands and put her finger into her ear, and her blue eyes would spill light like kisses, and she would crow, “Stick it in your ear! Stick it in your ear, Gibby!”

It was the only coherent sentence she made for many, many months.

They could not keep her indefinitely at Central State, and in all ways except for the speech she seemed well—or as well as, now, she would ever be. And so we brought her home. The sweet, Buddhalike docility persisted, and she seemed to find a sort of sensual pleasure and comfort in a simple routine of morning television, afternoon naps, hearty meals and short, meandering strolls in the fields and woods around the farmhouse.

Jack could afford no more home caretakers for her, and indeed, was back teaching nights at the floundering little community college in order to try to meet her staggering and unabating medical bills. But there was no hope that he would ever get ahead of them, and I thought that if his evening drinking did not stop and the lethargy that rode him like a succubus did not abate, he would soon lose one or both of the jobs. The farmhouse was unspeakable—a pigsty. Finally I could stand it no longer, and hired, over Jack’s objections, a round-the-clock nurse for Lucy. When she had been on the job for a couple of weeks, I went out to see how they were faring.

The nurse was a smart, quick, brisk young Trinidadian named Amelia Kincaid, who handled Lucy with firm competence and impersonal, unflinching kindness. To my astonishment, Lucy detested her.

“Damned nigger,” she spit at Amelia Kincaid and glared obliquely up at me with sly blue malice. “I hate niggers. Hate niggers!”

Face flaming, I turned to the nurse.

“She doesn’t mean that,” I said. “She’s always loved black people far more than she did white; she’s worked all her life for the civil rights movement—”

“Stick it in your ear, Gibby!” Lucy sang.

“It’s nothing, Mr. Bondurant,” Amelia Kincaid said in her lovely, lilting voice. “A kind of glitch in the brain, I think. I don’t take it seriously.”

But I could not bear to hear the venom in Lucy’s beautiful, rich, drawling voice, which had told me such wonderments; could not bear the mumbled, “Went to the dance and help me, Gibby. Daddy won’t like the blood, blood, blood.”

I looked in despair at Jack Venable, but Jack had passed out on the sofa in front of a Mary Tyler Moore rerun. It was a house of waste and decay and hopelessness. I would not, I thought, go back to it.

But, incredibly, the phoenix in Lucy’s blood struggled up once again, and pulled her partway out of the bonfire of madness with it, enough so that she fetched up once more on a kind of benevolent plateau, calm and tender and childlike, seemingly pleased to drift in the moment, to receive the few visitors who came and gobble the sweet treats they brought, to watch endless blaring television. She grew quite fat, and Amelia Kincaid cut her dry, lusterless hair short so that it would not trail into her food, and it fell sleekly and becomingly about her fine, narrow head. She spent some time each afternoon, in those long late summer and early autumn days, outside in the sun in a lawn chair, and a faint rose flush stained her thin skin, webbed now like spider’s silk with a network of tiny lines. She looked quite pretty, though never again beautiful with the old eerie light, and seemed pleased with whatever small lagniappe the minimal days dealt her. Jack was able, at last, to dismiss Amelia Kincaid, and with her went the last of Lucy’s strange, isolated rage. And with a sighing and delicately affronted Little Lady Rawson looking in every day or so, Lucy was able once more to stay alone.

I do not think she was unhappy.

 

I have come to think of the next year as the time in which we all came to terms with our lives, as bitter or minimal as they were and as tenuous as those terms were. We did not so much find peace as we simply stopped struggling, we three: Lucy and Jack and I. Or perhaps I mean Lucy and me; Jack Venable had stopped struggling years before. I think it was why he was still alive.

“Middle age is when you do that, or die,” Dorothy Cameron said, when I told her how I felt about that time. “Conventional wisdom has it that you don’t grow up until middle age, but old people know that it isn’t growing up at all—it’s giving up. Just stop fighting and go with the flow, as the hideous saying now goes. Maturity is passivity in fancy dress.”

“It sounds like an awful cop-out, when you put it that way,” I said. “Just to let go the reins, when you’ve had charge of your life for all those years.”

“But you haven’t,” she said. “You’re grown up, finally, when you realize that you never did. Then you stop squirming like a gigged frog and let the current take you. You get there just as fast, and you feel a great deal better on the trip.”

I left her feeling distinctly less noble and more slug-like, but I realized that the free-fall drift we had all found ourselves in was, perhaps, kinder to us than all the desperate, anguished struggles to make ourselves better. We would make no one particularly happy this way, least of all ourselves, but to me and to Jack Venable and certainly to Lucy, her long fires banked at last, the stasis had a certain sweetness, like a safe, if featureless and unlovely, port gained after years of magnificent tempest. I think if there had come for me, at that time, a last great call to life and glory, I would have turned tail and run.

In the course of time the university press that had been interested in The Compleat Georgian accepted it, and sent a brace of ghostly, avid scholars to consult with me on it, and after weeks of polite hemmings and “well, actually”s and “but don’t you think perhaps”s, they left me to begin the satisfyingly long task of revision.

Well, Dorothy, you don’t have to worry about the next year, at least, I thought, sitting down at my desk to begin deciphering the spectral editors’ pale notes. This should last me into next fall, and with luck I can string it out until Christmas.

It was anodyne and anesthetic to go back into that country of dead Camerons. The living ones offered me, now, little but pain. Dorothy Cameron had broken her knee back in the summer, and it was not mending well around the implacable steel pin that held it, and she was growing vague and listless with pain. She could not come down to the lounge at Carlton House anymore, and the times I could go up to the apartment grew further and further apart, for Ben was almost gone from us now, flickering disconnectedly in and out of the raging, blinded body, running on pure will and bitter, empty health. I saw increasingly little of Dorothy, and her voice when I phoned her seemed to have preceded her into another country, one as yet closed to me.

And Sarah I simply did not see. Perhaps she had changed her route when she went about her errands in Buckhead, or perhaps she did them in other parts of the city now. Perhaps she did not wish to encounter me, or perhaps she simply did not care. Whatever the reasons for it, I came, finally, to be grateful for her absence from my life. This new, level country of my heart had sealed its borders against pain.

In the spring of that year Martha Cater had a slight stroke in the night in the Caters’ quarters over the garage, and awoke with no knowledge of where she was or who the distraught Shem might be. The confusion passed by noon, but what I had resolutely refused to admit to myself now came clear: Martha and Shem Cater were past their determined toiling in the house on Peachtree Road—even the curtailed amount of work that one genteel old beauty and a recluse required—and arrangements would have to be made for them.

I offered to let them stay on in the garage apartment which had been their only home for so much of their lives, but Martha could not manage the stairs with safety, and Shem winced when he climbed them, when he thought he was unobserved. And Martha stubbornly refused to stay in a place where she could not work when she wanted to.

“I ain’t gon’ set up there on my bee-hind while you an’ Miss Willa tries to do for yourselves,” she said thunderously. “Ain’t neither of you know how to light no stove, even. You starve in a week.”

It was not true, but I saw that if she stayed, Martha Cater would die as she had lived, in the service of the Bondurants, and I was not going to have that. When they hemmed and hawed and would not tell me what they wished to do—or perhaps could not—I drove with Tom Carmichael and Marty Fox out to Forest Park, where the feckless ToTo lived with her brood of laconic children, and bought a one-year-old, three-bedroom brick ranch house hard by a new full-service shopping center, framed the deed and hung it over the mantel, and moved the reluctant Caters in. Both professed to hate the house, but Shem’s milky old eyes grew liquid with tears when he saw parked in the driveway the immaculate 1972 Buick Marty had found for me. It was as big and heavy a car as we could find, and Shem would look like a gnome peering over a toadstool driving it, but years of the Rolls had left him with a profound contempt for what he called “little old trash cars.” The Buick had a heft worthy of his mighty old heart.

And Martha wept and hugged me when she saw her kitchen. I had decreed that it be similar as possible to the one at 2500, and Marty had searched for more than a week until he found the house that harbored this one. I had then duplicated Martha’s appliances and cookware down to the baker’s rack and the balloon whisks she favored, and added a small kitchen television for good measure, and the oak and rattan rocker from our kitchen, whose seat now cupped Martha’s ample buttocks and no others on earth. It was exactly the right thing to do, and I had loved doing it, and if I live to be a hundred—a thought I do not cherish—I will not do so good a thing again. I still smile when I think of Shem and Martha in their first and long-delayed real nest.

But the emptiness that they left was enormous, profound. The house on Peachtree Road cried with it as it never had after the departures of my mother and my father. I had done a loving duty, and in so doing had cut the heart out of my home. I found that I could not abide the efficient, jumpsuited white maids who spilled like circus clowns out of their Clean-As-A-Whistle van twice a week and swarmed into the house. They looked like aerobically trimmed Dunwoody housewives, and probably were. Their eyes, as they came into my house from their scanty, thin-walled Tudors in the suburbs, were avid; they swept the grounds and the summerhouse and me, when I ventured into their line of vision, like homing bats.

I stayed out of their sight after the first encounter. I liked only slightly more the thin, elegant mulatto personal maid Aunt Willa hired to come at ten and hover boredly about her until five or so, when she poured out sherry and passed cheese straws for Willa Slagle Bondurant and whoever shared her ice-crackings. The woman looked and dressed like Jane Fonda, and I did not care for the huge tote she carried. Besides being, I think, a genuine Gucci, I suspected that it harbored its share of Bondurant Lalique and Tiffany as it disappeared into its owner’s smart little Honda. But Aunt Willa liked the girl and was satisfied with the maid service, and so I let things go with only a dull and enduring ache in my grateful heart for the Caters. Willa satisfied was Willa out of my hair. She had sulked, delicately and with the air of a highborn sixteenth-century martyr, for weeks when I had refused to hire her a driver for the Rolls.

“I would look absurd driving that big old thing, Shep,” she said. “And at my age, I don’t think a heavy car is safe.”

Since she invoked age and infirmity only when she wanted something, and I knew her to be as healthy and indomitable as a T’ang horse, I smiled affably at her.

“Marty says he’ll be happy to drop you wherever you want to go,” I said. “His afternoons are pretty much free since we hired Fred Perry. He’s a good driver.”

She drove the Rolls. I knew she would. Willa would far rather chance ridicule and bodily harm in the old Rolls-Royce than be driven about Buckhead, even the booming, screeching, runaway Buckhead that she would not acknowledge, by a slick Jewish lawyer from Newark. It struck me, watching her slide majestically away down the drive like an aging queen astride a glacier, that I had no idea when in her tenure with us Aunt Willa had learned to drive, or how. She remained into her seventies a creature of infinite surprise. Few of them were as pleasant as that one.

And so, in our stases, we lived. Jack Venable, in the farmhouse, worked and drank and slept. Lucy, in her new tranquility, sat in the moonglow of the television and the sun of the spring and summer and slowly, slowly, slowly, healed herself back to a fragile and infinitely simpler wholeness. By June her speech was normal, if what she said was vastly diminished in its essential Lucy-ness. By August she could read again. By September she could write a little. The first thing she wrote was a letter to Malory. So far as I know, it was the first communication that had passed between them since that terrible Christmas past. Neither Jack nor I knew what she said, or if Malory ever answered.

Malory had meant what she said. She had not been home since Lucy’s last convulsive spasm of madness. She had not called, and she had not written. I knew because Jack told me. Lucy did not speak of her daughter. Jack said that she had said no word to him about Malory since her last illness; it was as if she had simply lost her from her head and heart. She did not seem unhappy about it, or about anything else. Jack, steeping like an old tea bag in weariness and apathy and scotch, did not wish to risk his stale peace by mentioning Malory. It was as if she had never lived there with them.

She wrote me weekly, dutiful letters with all of her activities and none of herself in them, and these I passed on to Jack. She did not phone. When I called her, she was polite and even cordial, but she was no Malory Bondurant Venable I had any ken of, and so I stopped my calls, miserable but resigned to the tepid broth of the letters. I knew she must put herself back together in her own mold after her shattering at Lucy’s hands, not in any image I might create for her. She must come back to me on her own wings, even if I risked her not coming at all. I thought of her constantly, and there was a great, empty, wind-scoured plain within me where she was not, but I answered the dutiful letters with short, chatty notes of my own, saying essentially nothing, and I waited to see what she would do and who she would become.

Because she had not wanted to come home, she had gone to summer school and doubled her course loads, and that, in addition to her accelerated honors program, enabled her to graduate three quarters early, at the end of August. I knew that she was finishing with honors, but she had not said what she planned after her graduation. Some sort of counseling work perhaps, I thought, but only because her temperament and experience seemed to dictate it, not because she had told me. So far as I knew, Malory’s future was as white and featureless as my own.

But in July she called, and her voice was her own, that of the old Malory, or rather, the old Malory but with a new and full dimension I could not name. She wanted more than anything, she said, for me to come and see her graduate. Jack, too, if he liked; she rather thought he wouldn’t. But I must.

“And your mother?” I said.

“No, Shep,” she said. “Please.”

I called Jack Venable that evening and told him of the conversation.

“Can you find a way to tell Lucy?” I asked.

“Oh yes,” he said. “It won’t be a problem. She knows it’s coming up, and she hasn’t asked to go. She’ll be pleased and interested, but that fire’s out, Shep. I think it’s out for good. And I think I won’t go either. It just seems a bad time to leave Lucy alone. Can you make Malory understand?”

“She’ll understand,” I said, grateful that I did not have to tell him Malory had forbidden her mother and all but dismissed him.

“I hate being the only one of us there, though,” I said truthfully. “It makes me feel as if I’m usurping your places with her.”

“Not usurping them. Filling them,” he said. “You are. And by rights, you should. You’ve done more to keep her safe and whole and happy than we ever have. Don’t feel bad about it. I’d go if I really wanted to. The truth is, I’m grateful not to have to. I love Mal, of course I do, but I’m just too tired.”

And so, in August; I went to Wellesley. I waited for Malory at the stone bench under a great old lilac tree outside her dormitory, and when she came around the corner of the building and ran toward me with her arms outstretched, it was as if a strange and rather terrible young sun had just flamed out of the mists of millenniums of rain.

Because of her pain and devastation when I had last really talked with her, and the long months of ensuing brittleness and silence, I was not prepared for the radiant and complete woman I held in my arms in the close, gray-green morning. She was so like Lucy at that age as to stop my heart, and yet with an otherness about her that I had only sensed before, which was entirely new, her own: a strength, a well-used integrity touching in one so young, a kind of tender gravity for the world, which she had had, in lesser measure, since she was a child. Out of Lucy’s face, all October-blue eyes and tea rose skin and silken black hair and brow and lash, my own stubborn chin and high-bridged hawk’s nose looked back at me. But of course, she had her own, and legitimate, claim to the Bondurant features through her mother and grandfather.

Over it all sheer, simple happiness shimmered like the flame from a Bunsen burner.

“Oh, Shep,” she said, her face finding Sarah Cameron’s old spot under my chin, though she had to stoop a bit to accomplish it. “I’ve never been so glad to see anyone in my life!”

Only then did I see the tall young man at her side. And on seeing him, knew, instantly and without doubt, that Malory Venable had found her future.

It was there in the way their eyes clung to each other’s and could not pull away; I remembered that pull. It was there in the numerous tiny, hypnotized brushings of fingertips and hands and shoulders; I remembered those bird’s-wing brushings. It was there in the delighted grins that would not let the corners of their mouths rest. My own mouth felt the tremors of that delight. I felt a great stab of pain that was as purely physical as a heart attack, nearly breath-stopping, but over it there crept a great joy, and a warm and boundless relief. Even before I learned his name, even before I took the damp and callused hand, I knew that Malory would be safe with this young man. There was great strength here. And a leavening of humor. And uncannily, out of good brown eyes behind thick, horn-rimmed glasses, Charlie Gentry looked, smiling.

His name was Peter Hopkins Dallett. He was thin, rangy, nutmeg-brown almost all over, hair, eyes and tanned skin, near to being ugly. He had graduated with honors from Yale architecture school in June, after five years spent on full scholarship. He had already had a building erected. He lived in a hamlet on the coast of Penobscot Bay, up in Maine, so small that it did not have a name or a post office; the nearest town of any size was Ellsworth, seventeen miles away. He was the youngest of four brothers, and his father was a lobsterman and ran a small general store during the season. His mother had died when he was twelve. He and Malory had met the previous March, at the wedding of a mutual friend in New Hampshire. They had not spent a weekend apart since. There was no question that they would marry—I had known that before a word was spoken. Only a question of when, and where they would live afterward.

“Will you be taking her away from us?” I said to Peter Dallett over a lunch of champagne and oysters on the half shell. Nobody was hungry, but we drank quite a bit of bad champagne. Peter insisted on buying, and cheerfully ordered what he could afford. It was by no means Taittinger, but it ran in our veins like sweet fire.

“I don’t know yet,” he said. “I’d really like to come down and take a look at Atlanta. Malory hates the idea, and I realize why, but she’d be okay there. I can take care of her. It would be all right. And the best designing in the country is coming out of the Sunbelt, or will….”

I flinched involuntarily, and Malory said, quickly, “I don’t think we really will, though, Shep. Peter has already got such good contacts here.”

She must not come home, my mind shrieked. She must not come.

“Well, good contacts aren’t a thing to just toss aside,” I said, as casually as I could. “I think you might find that the so-called Sunbelt is not all it’s cracked up to be.”

“It’s a whole new frontier,” Peter Dallett said. “There’s nothing else like it—it’s wide open to a whole new kind of design. We haven’t even found a metaphor for it yet. I’d love to be in on that.”

I liked the enthusiasm in his voice, but I feared it more.

“If you like strip shopping centers and tanning salons and no real urban centers and solid traffic from Atlanta to Baltimore and endless, endless suburbs, you’ll love it. But you should have seen it when it was a real city, when I was Malory’s age—”

“That’s over,” he said, with the casual implacability of the young. “The Sunbelt is what we have now. Enormous vitality. Unlimited growth potential. A whole new set of problems and solutions. Nobody ever designed for it before. Nobody ever worked in it before.”

“But could you live in it?” I said. “There is that one little thing, you know.”

He laughed, and the glasses bobbled on his short brown nose. I saw that it was peeling.

“I don’t know,” he said. “But the point is, people won’t be actually living in it. Only near it. The cities of the future, especially in the Sunbelt, will be commuter cities. I don’t care what the urban renewers and planners say—they will. There’s wonderful clear land near Atlanta.”

“Tate…” Malory said softly, as if she was tasting the word.

Tate. Green, silent, sunstruck and alone, dreaming in its Appalachian eternity on the side of Burnt Mountain, by covenant unchanged and unchangeable. Malory, dancing in the sunlight of Tate on the floor of the big old cottage there, utterly enthralled. Tate…

“I could live at Tate,” Malory said into her own green distance. “I’ve been thinking I never wanted to see Atlanta again, but I could live up at Tate….”

She shifted her blue eyes to me, and then dropped them.

“Is Mother all right?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said. “She’s doing fine. She sends her love. She’s very proud of you. You might write and tell her about…things. In your own time, of course. She’d love a letter from you.”

“Does…does she need me?” In a ghost of the old anxious voice.

“No. Really. Just to know that you’re happy and taken care of. That you’re safe. That’s all any of us care about.”

“Well, I am that.” She smiled. “I truly am that. Shep…I thought we’d just have a tiny, quiet wedding, probably up at Peter’s little family church, in the fall. I’m going there with him after today and stay. His father has asked me, and it seems just the best thing to go on and get married when the tourist season is over and he can close the store. Nobody but his immediate family. Unless you think we should come home and get married there. I know…Mama…can’t travel…”

“No,” I said. “You do just that. Come later, after she’s had time to digest things. I’ll tell both of them for you, shall I? And then you write. It’ll be less of a strain for her that way, and for you, too.”

She looked at me there in the August light, her young face serious and very beautiful, and then it crumpled, and tears started from the water-blue eyes that were, and were not, Lucy’s. She flew into my arms. I felt the tears warm on my face.

“Thank you, Shep. Thank you for everything,” she whispered. “Thank you for my whole life.”

“You’re most welcome, Malory,” I said.

 

The next weekend I took Lucy and Jack up to Tate. It seemed to me somehow that telling them of Malory’s wedding up there, in the cool blue hills, shut away from the lingering heat and fever of the September-worn city, might defuse the volatility of the situation a little—if indeed, there was any volatility. There would be none, I knew, from Jack Venable, and looking at Lucy on the seat beside me in the shifting gold light of late afternoon as I drove, I could not imagine madness and hunger washing that tranquil and emptied face. But still, better somehow at Tate…

We heated the pizzas I had brought from Everybody’s for our dinner that night, and Jack and I drank raw, thin Chianti with it, and Lucy her endless coffee, which had supplanted the liquor and supplemented the cigarettes, and all of us were in our beds by ten. It was as if, when we turned in between the gateposts up on the ridge road and dipped down into the bowl of the colony, some great, spiteful hand which had held us fast relaxed its grip, and ease came flooding in. I lay listening to the night sounds of those worn old mountains—not many in the exhausted air of early fall: a few late-lingering cicadas and crickets, a dog barking over to the west, on some far ridge—and slid into a sleep so profound that when I awoke, with the early sun spilling across my face, I was still in the same position in which I had dropped off.

I was sitting at the scarred old trestle table in the kitchen looking across the meadow to the misted, mirror-still lake and drinking coffee when Jack appeared, sagging and stupefied in a sweatshirt and pants that were far too big for him. Had they ever fit? I wondered. How had he shrunk, withered, diminished so before my very eyes, and I had not noticed?

He looked gray and heavy-faced in the clear, tender light, and shambled across the kitchen to the table with the tiredness that was the same in the morning as it was at night. White stubble dusted his pale jaw. The white hair was utterly devoid of life, the blue eyes dull and half-shut. It struck me with a pang that Jack Venable was tired from the soul out. Tired and perhaps ill, with one of the wasting illnesses despair summons from the very DNA.

“I’d hoped you’d sleep at least till noon,” I said, pouring him coffee out of the old spatterware pot.

“Lucy was having one of her nightmares, thrashing around and crying in her sleep,” he said. “A rock couldn’t sleep through that. It’s funny—there’s no agitation in her when she’s awake. And it’s not that she’s suppressing it, either. I can always tell when she does that. It’s really not there. But then, once or twice a month, when she’s asleep, these things come…. I wonder what she dreams. She says she doesn’t remember.”

“She’s always had them,” I said. “They were really terrible when she was little—awful things about being lost, or abandoned, or in mortal danger, or dying. We’d have an awful time calming her. I thought she’d outgrown them.”

“Poor Luce,” he said gently, gently. “Her demons grew up along with her. She met the enemy and it was her. You know, there was a time, there at the beginning, that I really thought I could help her. Be the rock she needed, somebody to lean on. But after a while I just couldn’t seem to take her weight. I never meant to let her down. I’ve hated myself for it. But I just…wasn’t enough.”

“Nobody could have been, Jack. Nobody mortal could have met all that need,” I said, my heart twisting with pity for this flawed, weary, emptied man whose passion had not withstood the tidal suck of both the civil rights movement and Lucy Bondurant. I did not think that tragedy was too strong a word for him.

“I guess not,” he said. “But God, how I wanted to be the one mortal who did. And now I sit and look at her, one step up from a happy turnip and still just so beautiful to me, and instead of mourning for all that lost light and…sorcery…I thank God for the happy turnip and go back to sleep.”

“Don’t beat up on yourself for that,” I said. “All of us have blessed the turnip at one time or another. And prayed like cowards for it to last.”

“It will,” he said. “That devil’s exorcised for good. I’m sure of that. What you see now is the Lucy we’ll have from here on out. Good luck for us, maybe. Not so good for Luce.”

“I hope you’re right, at least temporarily,” I said. “We’re going to have to tell her something today that scares the bejesus out of me. I want to run it past you first.”

“Malory,” he said, looking up from the coffee. It was not a question.

“Yes. She’s going to get married very soon, to a young architect from Maine she met this spring. They’ll marry there, with just his folks. I think the family is dirt-poor. His mother’s dead. But he’s solid rock. I met him at her graduation. You’ll like him, Jack. So will Lucy, I think. Malory will be safe with him. And she’s crazy about him, and he about her. I…none of us will be going, but she’ll call her mother, or at least write, when I give her the word that we’ve told her.”

His thin face lit briefly.

“Good for her,” he said, smiling. The smile was gray and wounded, like the rest of him. “Good for Mal. I want her happiness very much. I’ve never seemed to be able to show her that, though. Somehow, everything I had went to Lucy.”

“So you think it’s safe to tell her?”

“Oh, sure,” he said. “Like I said, that fire is out. Whatever they did at Central State cooked it right out of her. You can tell her anything. There’s no danger anymore. No matter what I said a minute ago, I almost wish there was….”

“Do you want to be with me when I do?” I said.

“No. Do you mind? I’m not afraid. I’m just”—and he grinned, hearing his own words—“tired. I think I’ll go back to bed for a while.”

He slept for most of the day. Lucy herself slept until noon. When she awoke, she surprised me by wanting to walk around the lake by the sun-dappled dirt road that encircled it. It was our old walk, a smooth and pretty one, but long.

“Can you make it?” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “I can if we take it slow, and stop along the way. Let’s do it, Gibby. Let’s stop by all the old places, and take some sandwiches and have a picnic up in the meadow. Oh, and bring your clarinet—is it up here?”

“The old one is,” I said. “The one I learned to play on. Rusted solid, probably. But I’ll bring it anyway.”

And so we set out, Lucy in blue jeans and a loose old plaid shirt someone had left in her closet, looking, if one did not lean too near, rested and almost young and very close once more to being beautiful. She walked slowly, and she leaned on me, and she did tire, so that we made frequent stops, but when we were seated in the deep shade of a hickory grove, the tawny bowl of the mountains walling us in under the clarion blue of the first autumn sky, she was as delighted as she had been as a child with the old places where so much of our magic and mischief had been wrought, where so much still seemed to hover.

“Tell about the Fourth of July parade, Gibby,” she cried, and I spun it out for her in the sunny silence, that joyous long-ago procession of children and adults and teenagers and babies and dogs and banners and bunting and raucous, braying musical instruments.

“Tell about us swimming,” she said, and all of a sudden there we were, as thin and supple and slippery as young otters, yelping soundlessly in the hot sun and cold water of the little indigo lake, and there was small Sarah Cameron, pinned against a cobalt July sky in the highest arc of a dive, as beautiful as a young gull.

“Tell about the night the deer jumped over me,” she said, and the day darkened into that long-ago magical and terrible night, still and star-struck and moon-dappled, and ahead of me on this very road a will-o’-the-wisp little Lucy Bondurant ran blithely into a pool of utter, soulless blackness, and the spectral shadow of the leaping deer fell down straight upon her like an evil fairy’s curse.

I shivered with that one, and not wanting to invoke any more of the small, lost ghosts of Tate, moved with her out into the sun of the high meadow, and played as well as I could on the squawking clarinet that had, so long ago in this same long grass, spilled out “Frenesi” for me like crystal water. I played “Frenesi” again, and “Amapola,” and “In the Mood,” and several of the other songs we had grown up dancing to, the Pinks and the Jells, on the polished wooden floors of half a dozen clubs, and I finished up, as those vanished dances had, with “Moonglow.”

Lucy lay quiet, stretched out on her back in the last of the slanting sun. It gilded her face and struck fire from her dark hair.

“Thank you, Gibby,” she said at last. “It was as good as going back.”

“You’re welcome,” I said.

I told her then, told her about Malory, told her with my heart in my mouth and my eyes riveted to her still face and mild blue eyes. But after I was finished, and had fallen silent, all she said was “Oh, Gibby, really? Isn’t that wonderful! Tell me about him.”

I did.

“Will he be good to her?” she asked.

“Most wonderfully good. Good to her always.”

“Then that’s okay. That’s all that matters.”

She was silent, and when I was sure she was not going to speak again, I said, “Lucy…I don’t think any of us should go. I’m not going. It’ll be just his family.”

“Oh no,” she said, looking up at me with her clear, bottomless blue eyes. “I didn’t expect to. I don’t deserve to go.”

My heart hurt, suddenly and simply and powerfully.

“Oh, honey,” I said. “Oh, Luce. It’s not that….”

“Oh yes,” she said matter-of-factly, and there was in her rich, bronzy drawl nothing of pathos but more than a little of the indomitable small girl who had stubbornly abjured self-pity. “It is that. I was awful. I know I was. I drove her away. And I don’t deserve to go to her wedding. But that’s over, that part of me. Maybe after a while she’ll see that, and she’ll bring her…husband…home to us.”

“She will,” I said. “She’s already said she wanted to.”

Lucy grinned at me. It was, suddenly and fully, her old grin, quicksilver and devilish and wonderful to see.

“I promise, when she does, to keep my panties on,” she said.

“I love you, Lucy Bondurant,” I said. I did. I did, in that moment, as much as I ever had in my life.

“I love you, too, Gibby Bondurant,” she said.

We sat in the high meadow and watched the sun drop, red and swollen, over the shoulder of Burnt Mountain. Away to the south the coppery cloud of smutch that was Atlanta belching and simmering in its own effluvia came clearer.

Lucy pointed to it.

“Do you still love it?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “I guess I never did and I don’t even like it anymore now. It’s no kind of city that I know or care about. It’s loud and it stinks. It’s fifty times too big. It has no grace anymore. But I need it, if that makes any sense. You don’t have to love something to need it. Dimension and need can come from lots of other things…hate, or fear, or anger…. I couldn’t tell you how, but I know that’s so. I just…need it.”

“You don’t have to tell me,” she said. “I know. It isn’t my town anymore, either. But it has something, Gibby. It has…oh, resonance. Passion, energy, and a kind of…not noticing quality to it. A carelessness. Impersonality. It doesn’t give a shit what you are or what you do. And power-lots of power. I might have amounted to something in a town like that. But I don’t love it. I guess I didn’t the other one, either, if you get right down to it.”

She lit her last cigarette, and inhaled a long, deep lungful of smoke, and let it out into the lavender air of evening, looking through it down into the sour copper breath of the city to the south.

“But, oh Lord,” she said, smiling faintly, “it was a wonderful town to be young in, wasn’t it?”

 

Three weeks later, on the first Saturday night in October, the shrilling of the telephone brought me out of a deep, still sleep. It had been hot the past week, as hot as August, and I had turned on the window air conditioner in the bedroom, so that struggling up to the surface of wakefulness was like trying to swim up through pounding black surf. The room was totally dark and without context, and I knocked the telephone from the receiver before I managed to get it to my ear. I had no idea what time it was.

“Gibby?” Pause. Great, indrawn inhalation, deep sigh of exhalation. “It’s Lucy, honey.”

“Lucy,” I mumbled. “What time is it?” My eyes found the digital clock on my bedside table then. “Jesus,” I said. “It’s almost four o’clock. Is something wrong?”

I knew that something was. The time, of course. Her nightly calls almost invariably came between ten and eleven, after Jack had drowned in sleep. But a wincing, clinching part of me had known when she spoke. The rich, slow voice sang with the honey of the old madness.

“Gibby, did you know Malory was getting married? She’s getting married next weekend!” Lucy said in a pouting child’s voice.

“Well, yes, I did, Luce,” I said carefully. “So did you. Remember, I told you up at Tate two or three weekends ago? We talked about it a long time.”

“Well, you obviously told somebody else besides Malory’s mother, because it wasn’t me. I didn’t hear a word about it until Jack Venable just happened to mention it tonight, on his forty millionth scotch. I’m real mad at him. You, too, if you knew and wouldn’t tell me.”

A vast, trembling, bottomless fatigue settled slowly down over me, like a great, drifting net of cobwebs. I thought it must be what Jack Venable felt a good bit of the time. Oh God, please not again, I said soundlessly.

“I did tell you, sweetie,” I said. “I wouldn’t not tell you. You said you thought it was wonderful and you agreed that none of us should go because Peter’s family is so poorly off, and that you’d be very happy to see them when they came home after the wedding. We were awfully proud of the way you took it.”

“Took it, shmook it,” Lucy said in fretful annoyance. “You got the wrong lady, toots. I don’t think it’s fucking wonderful at all. That baby isn’t old enough to get married! She hasn’t even talked to me about it—I could tell her a thing or two about marriage. I don’t know any fucking Peter in fucking Maine. I fucking well did not agree we shouldn’t go. Of course I’m going! In fact, that’s why I called you. I want you to come out here and get me and take me to the airport. I’m almost packed. No thanks to Jack Venable, I might add. He absolutely refused to take me. He got awfully abusive about it, Gibby.”

Her voice slid into an injured child’s whine. Something ran lightly up my spine, claws of ice digging into my flesh.

“Put Jack on the phone, Luce,” I said neutrally. “Is he awake?”

There was a long pause and then she laughed. The sound tinkled in my ears like shards of crystal ice.

“No,” she said gaily. “I don’t think you could say he’s awake. In fact, I’m fairly sure the sonofabitch is dead. I just shot him in the head with that old gun of his. Not take me to my own baby’s wedding! Jesus!”

She had, in her madness, told so many lies about Jack’s abuse of her that my first instinct was to hang up on her. But the eerie finger of ice along my spine would not let me do that.

“Are you telling me the truth, Lucy?” I asked. My voice sounded high and silly in my ears.

“Oh yes,” she said. “He’s bleeding like anything. It’s a real mess. That’s another reason I want you to come on out here, Gibby. I can’t clean this up by myself.”

A fine trembling started up deep inside me, and spread from my stomach into my arms and legs, so that I sagged from where I had been standing, naked and perspiring beside the telephone table, down onto my rumpled bed. Even my head shook, and my lips, so that I could not speak for a moment.

“Lucy, I’m going to come on out there as soon as I can,” I said very carefully, around the ridiculous, waffling mouth. “Just let me get some clothes on. Now listen—don’t call anybody else until I get there. Have you called anybody else?”

“Of course not,” she said indignantly. “I don’t have any friends in this one-horse hick town. Nobody out here even bothered to get to know Malory. I wouldn’t let anybody out here take me to the airport to go to my baby’s wedding!”

“Well, don’t make any more calls,” I said. “Tell you what you do. You get dressed, and put on some coffee, and then you sit down and wait for me. Can you do that?”

“Well, of course I can do that, silly,” she sang. Delight had crept into her voice, and gaiety. “I’m not paralyzed! You’ll take me, then?”

“I’ll take you,” I said, around the roaring that had begun in my head.

“Oh, Gibby, I could always count on you!”

It was the voice of the delivered changeling, huddled into the corner of a narrow iron bed in a dim attic atop a great, graceful house in a small, beautiful, vanished city, waiting for me to come and vanquish nightmares.

“I’m on my way,” I said.

The night was thick and hot and still. No lights showed in the big house. Up on Peachtree Road, winking through the yellowing leaves of the woods around the summerhouse, the eternal cold white lights of the great, hovering buildings burned, useless sentinels of a long-victorious army. The traffic, as I idled at the foot of the driveway, was steady and brisk, as heavy as it had once been at high noon. I found a break in it and slid the Rolls out into Peachtree Road, marveling at my own expertise with the smooth, heavy old wheel. I drove carefully over to the 1-85 South ramp at Piedmont, and took that into and through the white-lit city, and then bore off left on I-20 East. Out on the Interstate, once the diminishing lights of the suburban fringes of the city dropped away, the parched October country flowed steadily past in blackness. Only an occasional all-night filling station or motel lit my passage. I bowled silently toward a smudge of lightening gray on the horizon; I was driving east to meet the dawn.

I made a little song as I drove. I sang it over and over, just under my breath, feeling my stiff lips making the nonsense words, hearing nothing but the high roaring in my head, as though a hot wind keened there. I sang it to the tune of “Jada”: “Liar, Liar, Liar-Liar-Lie-Lie-Lie. Liar, Liar, Liar-Liar-Lie-Lie-Lie.” I think that I sang it all the way to sleeping Lithonia and through it to the turnoff down which, nearly a mile distant, the farmhouse lay.

It was only when I drove out of the tunnel of thin, scabrous woods into the rutted yard and found the house ablaze with lights that I realized I had hoped and halfway expected to find it dark, and Lucy and Jack safely fast in banal sleep. My heart gave a great, sick lurch and dropped in my chest. The song died on my lips. As I got out of the car and shut the door, precisely and softly, and walked on unfelt feet up the sagging steps, I whispered, desolately, “Liar, liar, pants on fire.” Looking back, I think that in that moment I was no saner than Lucy.

Lucy had not been lying. In the warmly lit, desperately littered living room she waited for me, sitting in her accustomed chair with feet demurely together and hands clasped in her lap, as Margaret Bryan had taught us all, years ago, to sit when we were not dancing. The television flickered wildly, an old black-and-white movie with George Raft, soundless. Lucy wore the good, if too-big, blue wool dress she had for special occasions, a gift from Little Lady, who had probably gotten it at Saint Philip’s thrift store; its sheath skirt and short, collared jacket spoke forlornly of Jacqueline Kennedy and Camelot. She held a little envelope purse on her lap. A battered fiberglass suitcase sat on the floor beside her, closed and tagged. A whining, laboring electric fan was trained on her, but sweat still ran from her hairline and stood in beads on her collarbone. She wore short white cotton gloves, but her black hair was wild, a raven’s nest, and on her feet she wore soiled terry scuffs.

Her legs were bare, and they were dappled with dark dried blood to the knee. More blood had dried in a swooping spatter across her cheek, and on one forearm. Above the rusty blood her blue eyes danced, danced. She dimpled, but did not speak. Her eyes swung from me across the room. My own eyes followed them with a monstrous, dragging effort.

I could not even flinch at what I saw. I could not back away.

Jack Venable lay on the spavined old sofa across the room from Lucy. He lay with his back to me, knees drawn up, facing in toward the stained back cushions of the sofa. I had seen him lie so many times, safely sunk in his long sleeps. He looked safe now, tidy and relaxed in rumpled khaki pants and a white shirt and just his yellowed old crew socks. His scuffed, thin loafers sat neatly side by side with their toes under the edge of the sofa, waiting for their owner to get up and shuffle them to bed.

But Jack was not going to rise from this sleep. He seemed immaculate from where I stood, but the blood that had burst from the ruined temple had soaked through the cushion beneath it, and spilled in a thin stream down the sofa skirt onto the old, liver-colored rug, and puddled there, looking for all the world like black cherry Jell-O only half-congealed.

I did not walk over to the sofa and look more closely at him. The utter whiteness of the skin of his neck and arms, and the pure, hopeless stillness of him, and the color and thickness of the blood told the minuscule part of my mind that stood outside the hot, howling wind what it must finally know: Jack Venable was dead, and had been for some time.

I looked back at Lucy. In her lap, partly covered by the little debutante’s clutch purse, a blunt black gun lay, as ugly and shocking as a snake. She wasn’t lying about the gun, I thought dimly. She was right, all those years ago. He did have one.

Lucy looked up at me archly, head cocked, and smiled.

“Hey, Gibby,” she said.

My knees unlocked then, and I slumped bonelessly to the floor at her dreadful feet, tailor-fashion. My heart was beating so slowly and thinly that I thought it must surely and simply stop. I was cold, cold, bone-cold, marrow-cold, despite the thick, malodorous heat in the room. An icy lump of nausea rose into my throat at the smell: a smell of burning, and liquor, and sweat, and the sour-sweet, sheared metal smell of turning blood. Something under the blood was too terrible even to register.

I looked blindly into the rug for a while, seeing the tiny lunar desert of a cigarette burn, and the stain of some dark, old liquid. Then I said, in a voice that croaked and scrabbled in my throat, “Lucy, what is going to become of you now? What on earth will happen to you? I can’t fix this. This can’t be fixed. Who’s going to take care of you now?”

She leaned down slightly and peered into my face, and smiled again, as if satisfied at what she saw there.

“Why, you will, Gibby,” she said. “You can, too, fix it. You know you can. And Malory. Malory will come. My best boyfriend and our beautiful, beautiful daughter. You knew that, of course, didn’t you? That she was our daughter? Of course you did. We be of one blood, we three. So you both have to take care of me, you see. Call Malory, Gibby. Malory will come.”

I looked up at the sweet, mad smile and realized that I had no idea whether or not she was lying about Malory, and would never know. Malory. Malory…Yes, Malory would come. Like a fierce, beautiful young hawk circling higher and higher in the thin, pure sunlight, only to heed, finally, the falconer’s cry and plummet in beauty and mortal peril straight into the snare, Malory would come.

And me? I thought. Yes. As long as Lucy lives, God help me, I will come too. I will come.

I saw us, far back in my ringing head, going on forever, the three of us, locked in a crazy troika of loss and blood and waste and madness. Forever. Forever…

I rose to my knees as stiffly as an old, ill man, and took the gun from Lucy’s lap and pressed it into her hands. I closed them around it. They were rough and hot, even against the chill of the heavy steel. They trembled tinily, like the throat of a singing bird. I looked back into her face and she smiled at me again. It was a good child’s smile, sweet and simple. Above it her eyes shone, blue, blue, the extraordinary, light-drowned eyes of that doomed child who had stood in the foyer of the house on Peachtree Road, pinning my heart to my ribs with her very presence, and said in a voice like dark honey, “Something stinks.”

“Stick it in your ear, Luce,” I said.

She laughed, the old rich, bawdy, wonderful laugh.

She put the dark gun to her ear, still laughing, her blue eyes spilling the healing light of redemption and benediction over me.

“Pull the trigger,” I said.

Lucy did.