Is that thing real?” Lucy whispered loudly to me, over the cicada-buzzing and giggling, in the Camerons’ back garden, of a small group of children.
We were seated on folding bridge chairs in a semicircle in the paved rear courtyard, watching tall, black Leroy Pickens lope in circles holding a tether, on the other end of which trotted a very small, tarted-up Shetland pony with a monkey astride it. The monkey’s owner, a swarthy, gypsyish young man with a full mustache and a rakish red bandanna, watched suspiciously from the edge of the formal boxwood maze. The white sun of August burned into small necks and arms, and wilted starched organdy and dotted swiss; the handful of adults had long since retreated to white wooden lawn chairs under the pergola roof, where small Glenn Pickens, Leroy’s son, his red tongue protruding from between his white teeth, passed a tray of Tom Collinses.
“What do you mean, is it real? Is what real?” I whispered back, in rare annoyance. For the last hour or so, Lucy had been acting as sulky and obdurate as the prim, evil-eyed pony. I did not know what was the matter with her, and was vaguely embarrassed and angry, because I had wanted this small society to be as enchanted with her as I was, and thus envious of me. Before she came, there had never been any cause for that.
“That stupid pony,” she said, not bothering to lower her voice. “And that stupid monkey. They must not be real. All they can do is run around in a circle.”
Heads turned to look at us, including those of my parents and her mother, and Ben and Dorothy Cameron. Ben winked at us, and Dorothy’s smile wrapped us both in warmth and favor. No one from the Peachtree Road house smiled or winked. My father looked blank and formal, and my mother smiled the small, superior smile she kept strictly for Aunt Willa and her children, and Aunt Willa herself, diaphanous and splendid in white voile and a big-brimmed, flower-trimmed hat that had Rich’s Wood Valley Shop written all over it, glared at Lucy out of eyes gone ice-white with anger. Ben Cameron, Junior, my age and as copper-haired and freckled as his father, glared at her too, but Sarah, his sister, whose sixth-birthday party it was, blushed furiously, and her golden-amber eyes filled with tears. Lucy ignored all the looks and began to scratch absorbedly and ostentatiously at a mosquito bite on her elbow.
The monkey did a somersault on the pony’s back, and the children, Lucy excepted, all clapped and cheered.
“Don’t be dumb,” I said furiously between my teeth. “Of course they’re real. Haven’t you ever seen a pony or a monkey before?”
“Just about a million times,” Lucy said boredly, but with red rising smartly in her neck and cheeks, and her blue eyes narrowing. “I had a pony and a monkey both when we lived in Charlotte. My daddy got them for me. Nobody else but me could play with them. They could do lots more stuff than run in circles. That’s why I thought those weren’t real.”
I knew then that she had, in fact, never seen a Shetland pony or a monkey before, and that the wonder of seeing them was, for her, murdered by the fact that it took place in the garden of, and at the party of, another little girl who was a figure of some unknown but real importance in my life. For when we had rounded the sun porch to the back garden where the party was beginning, small Sarah Cameron had run up to me with her wide, incandescent smile and her sherry eyes glowing like candles, and her mother had hugged me with the easy warmth and affection that she lavished on all of us. Lucy, who had been gleaming and chattering all morning in anticipation of the party, began to go quiet then. That the cold wings in her eyes were not those merely of envy, but of a kind of fear, was a precocious insight for a seven-year-old boy to have, but from the beginning there was little about Lucy that I did not ken. My anger faded and I took her hand. I did not have words to comfort her, but I knew that my touch usually had the power to dispel whatever demons were threatening her.
A shadow dropped down over us, and Ben Cameron squatted beside us, rocking on his heels, gray Scot’s eyes and red hair giving back the sun in splendor. He was a tall man, younger than my father, wiry and knotted with an athlete’s muscles, and he wore white duck pants and white shoes and a blue, open-collared shirt with the sleeves rolled up his prodigiously freckled forearms. He had, for some reason, a striped necktie knotted around his waist. I thought he looked wonderful, gay and accessible. He put his arm around Lucy’s shoulders and smiled his magical smile into her face, and after a wavering moment she smiled back.
“Everybody knows Charlotte ponies and monkeys are the best in the world,” he said. “These are just in training to get good enough. When they shape up, we’re going to ship them off to Charlotte. I bet they won’t ever be as good as your pony and monkey, though.”
Lucy looked up at him through her inky lashes and smiled, and was, at that moment, pure Willa.
“No,” she said.
The clouds rolled off her face then, and for the rest of the afternoon she was the center of the group, darting in and out of the shrubbery and woods playing hide-and-seek, pinning the tail on the donkey with sure, swift grace, spilling as much ice cream as anyone else on the elaborately ruffled Rich’s frock Aunt Willa had brought home for this, her daughter’s debut into the small society of junior Buckhead.
She had met one or two of the neighborhood children over the spring and summer she had been with us, but this was the first group she had been in, and it was not a large one. Though we ran with a much larger pack of children at E. Rivers Elementary School, on the corner of Peachtree Road and Peachtree Battle Avenue, during the fall and winter, none of the young of those golden roads and houses saw much of one another in hot weather. Polio stalked the canyons of Buckhead as relentlessly as it did the warrens of Cabbagetown and Vine City in those long, deadly summers, and the fear of it was never out of anyone’s mind. My friend Pres Hubbard, who lived on Chatham Road, had gone white and quiet one afternoon several summers before, and complained of a headache, and the next day he was in Crawford Long Hospital in an iron lung. Pres was lucky. He walked now with a heavy iron brace, but he walked. Alfreda Slaton’s small sister had died two years ago of infantile paralysis.
By the time some of the red anger began to go out of the afternoon and the adults put down their tepid glasses and rose to leave, Lucy had, with her physical daring, her infectious laugh and her light-spilling blue eyes, gathered a crowd around her that would, with some defections, remain there until high school. I had heard her say more than once that afternoon, “Hey, I know a story,” and seen them all—Freddie Slaton, Snake Cheatham, Tom Goodwin, Charlie Gentry, Pres Hubbard, even young Ben Cameron—gather close around her. Only Sarah Cameron did not succumb, pressing close to her mother’s side, her huge eyes shadowed and grave on Lucy. I was as proud of Lucy in that moment as I have ever been. She was a hit, and she was mine. Vindication ran sweetly in my veins.
But that night she had one of her terrible nightmares, and after Martha Cater had soothed her wild crying and sponged the sour sweat of panic off her and settled her back in her bed and gone back to her own room, leaving Mickey glowing staunchly from the baseboard of Lucy’s cubicle, she came and slid into my bed with me.
“Hey, Gibby,” she said—for she had begun to call me that immediately upon finding that my middle name was Gibbs—“are you awake?”
“What do you think, after all that?” I said. I moved over toward the wall to give her room, and she burrowed against my side like a small animal.
“What were you dreaming?” I asked.
“I dreamed…that I went over to the Camerons’ house to play and I went inside and it was dark, and I couldn’t find anybody, and then I heard them in back and I went back there and they were all there, grinning at me and holding out their arms to me…but, Gibby, they were all…dolls.”
“Dolls?” I could not imagine what there was in the image of toys that would set Lucy to shaking and screaming, but the fine tremor still had not completely gone out of her arms and legs against mine, and her tear-thickened voice was not completely steady.
“Yeah. You know, dolls. Big ones, with strings hanging off of ’em, walking all jerky and talking funny. Like that place we went when I first came.”
Puppets. My parents and Aunt Willa had taken me and Lucy to a much-heralded children’s puppet show at the old Erlanger Theater down near the Fox that spring, just at Easter, and I remembered then that Lucy had not liked it. I thought of Ben and Dorothy Cameron, of Sarah and Ben Junior, smiling painted smiles from the darkness of the vast, shadowy sun porch where they lived during the summers, wooden arms stretched out avariciously. The image was terrible.
“Did they chase you?” I said.
“No. They didn’t do anything. But I knew they wanted me.”
“Why would that be so bad?” I asked, to reassure both of us. “They’re real nice people.”
“Because,” she said. “They weren’t real.”
As she often did, Lucy had gotten hold of an essence that had, in her starved and vulnerable heart, been skewed and magnified into something dangerous. The Camerons were such an exemplary, whole and healthful family that it was not hard to see that they might appear, to some few original eyes, simply unreal. They were not that to me, but they were, perhaps, hyperreal. Super-normal. And they were revelatory. Willa Bondurant brought to the Peachtree Road house, already askew, her own poverty of soul, and Lucy’s deep starvation darkened the stew. I would not have known lightness, grace and normalcy if it had not been for the household of Dorothy and Ben Cameron, and their children, Sarah and Ben. I said that to Sarah once, years later, in the paneled drawing room of the house on Muscogee Avenue, after a funeral.
“You all showed me everything I ever knew of lightness and straightness,” I said. “You were my models for how sane, normal, productive people act, for how well privilege can be used. I really think you all—your mother and dad, especially—are the reason I’m just a little funny and not dead myself.”
Sarah’s eyes were red from weeping, but she smiled. It was not a smile of amusement.
“If you can say that after today,” she said, “then you must be worse off than anybody ever thought.”
“It wasn’t aberration that did this, Sarah,” I said. “It was the times. It was the town. In another place he’d have seen options he could have lived with. In another time, maybe, he could have done it here.”
They were, Ben and Dorothy Cameron, as close, to my mind, as Atlanta can come to producing aristocrats. Benjamin Aird Cameron’s family had come from Scotland to Virginia before the Revolution, to Atlanta the year it was founded and back to Atlanta before the ashes were cooled, to begin rebuilding the city. Dorothy Chase Cameron’s family hailed originally from Dorsetshire, England, and it was a copy of the Chase manor house, which her father had built on Muscogee, into which she and Ben moved at his death. Merrivale House, it was named, after that first one, though only outsiders called it that, never the Cameron family.
I never knew a family so vital and energetic and so devoted to—even infatuated with—each other. They played together endlessly: rode their bicycles around Buckhead and deep into the surrounding country together, played tennis and swam together at the Driving Club, played badminton and croquet on the satiny lawn beyond the box maze behind the house, performed so many family plays and pageants and skits and spoofs and entertainments that their cottage in the old colony up at Tate had a minstrel’s gallery built into it just for that purpose. In the long evenings of winter they read aloud to one another and listened to music on the big Capehart that was a twin to ours and the ones in half the Buckhead houses—popular songs and light classics and show tunes, for they were not intellectuals; I was well established at Princeton before I encountered families who were truly intellectually cultivated—and they even had a sort of family band. Dorothy played an accomplished, if conventional, piano, Sarah was not half bad on the flute, Ben played the saxophone, and Ben Junior the clarinet. It was from noodling around on his instrument in the long afternoons of our later boyhood, and tasting the slick-sweet taste of the bitten reed, that my lifelong passion for the clarinet was born. It was as if I could taste the sweet marrow of music sunk in the long ebony and silver cylinder, though, for a long time, I couldn’t get it out.
They gave off, when together, a kind of soft, clear light, a diffuse energy born of love, mutual admiration, curiosity, endless appetite for the charmed lives they led, and above all, a respect for each other which was, to me, totally seductive. I knew about love; it was, even if canted and lamed, what I felt for my mother. But the Camerons were the first people to show me that respect and love could go hand in hand. So far as I know, so far as the world knows, none of them ever did anything to damage that respect in the others’ eyes. Even after what happened to Ben Junior, there was no betrayal of respect; only bewilderment and grief.
And the light that they gave off fell, as naturally and abundantly and indiscriminately as the light from a star, over the people who came close to them. I always felt, in the presence of the Camerons, more than I was…or possibly, all that I could be. I will never understand why, in all her life, Lucy did not feel it, but she didn’t. She used to say, even after we were grown, that an hour in the company of Ben and Dorothy and, to a lesser extent, Sarah made her want to go home and take a nap.
Looking back, I can see what she meant, even if I do not agree with her. I remember a night late in the summer Lucy came, when she and I had been taken over to the Camerons’ house by our parents for an early supper and badminton in the back garden. After the last game, when the adults had collapsed on lawn chairs with drinks and the first fireflies were winking in the cutting garden, Sarah and Ben broke into one of their impromptu “shows,” presenting, with uncannily synchronized steps and gestures, a pantomime of Gene Kelly and Vivienne Segal in Pal Joey. Dorothy and Ben Senior had taken them to see it in New York at Easter that year, and they had been utterly beguiled with the dark, glinting Rodgers and Hart arcana. My mother, who had not seen the play but had heard of it, had been scandalized by the Camerons’ exposing their children to such steamily suggestive goings-on, and having those exemplary children present them to her flushed face kept her on the telephone to her circle for days afterward. She listened that night in tight-lipped silence as Ben Junior and Sarah wriggled and leered their way through “I Could Write a Book,” “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” and worst of all, “Zip,” and gave Ben and Dorothy a sidewise glare of honest outrage when they laughed and applauded. Aunt Willa kept her dense lashes modestly over her eyes, and my father swallowed his bourbon in silence, but I was enchanted, and even Lucy laughed and clapped her hands.
When at last Ben and Sarah took their bows and made as if to sit down, Dorothy and Ben Senior jumped to their feet and pulled me and Lucy with them, and ran out to the smooth grass of the badminton court.
“‘Hut-Sut Rawlson,’” Dorothy Cameron cried, and she and Ben and the Cameron children swung into a mad, syncopated version of that witless doggerel, which in an eye-blink had me and Lucy shucking and jiving right along with them.
“Hut-sut Rawlson on the rillerah and a brawla, brawla soo-it,” we six bellowed into the fast-falling dark of Muscogee Avenue. “Hut-sut Rawlson on the rillerah…”
We were wonderful that night, magnificent. It was as if our twelve hands and feet were synchronized by some unseen master choreographer, and our voices silkened and silvered by a consummate cosmic musician. I could not and cannot sing, and Lucy never could carry a tune in a bucket, but that night it seemed to me that the world should have paid pure gold to see and hear us. We performed “Hut-Sut Rawlson” again, and then “The Music Goes Round and Round,” and finished up with a great flourish with “Three Little Fishes.”
When we were done, sweating and gasping and laughing, Dorothy hugged us and said there was no doubt in her mind we both had an unlimited future on the stage, and we danced on joyful, clumping feet all the way home, where our grimly silent parents banished us immediately to bed.
“I think living at the Camerons’ house must be the most fun there is,” I said as we turned off Mickey and crept into our beds.
“Shoot, I think they are the silliest grown-ups I’ve ever seen,” Lucy said. But I just grinned into the darkness. I had felt the music and joy in her, there on the lawn behind Merrivale House. It was only later, back inside the dark-souled walls of 2500 Peachtree, that the spell of the Camerons left her.
As close as they were, the Camerons encouraged in one another the development of individual gifts. Young Ben, besides being a musician of some skill, was the sort of workmanlike, untemperamental athlete his father had been, a perfect team player and content with that role despite his impetuous nature and flamboyant grace, and knew practically from infancy that he would become the visionary architect he eventually did. Sarah’s talent for drawing and painting was the stronger of their gifts; she was truly talented, and endeared herself to her parents and their friends by painting odd and hauntingly lovely little portraits and landscapes and giving them as gifts. In grammar school, she did a brisk and profitable business drawing naked women and rearing horses on commission, until her mother discovered the thriving cottage industry and put a stop to it. She had the obligatory Saturday afternoon lessons in watercolors and pastels at the High Museum of Art, and more than one teacher called Dorothy Cameron and urged special tutors, serious study and consideration of one of the really good schools of art in the East or abroad for her.
But Dorothy did not like the thought of a self-serving artist’s life for her daughter, and sunny, biddable Sarah, by then in love with her family and her world and her near-amphibian swimming and diving, did not push for the studies. I often wonder what the world lost when Sarah laid aside her brushes and strode to the end of the Club diving board. It is hard for me to mourn the loss totally; the memory of her small, perfectly shaped body suspended at the top of its lovely arc like a swan in flight is one that I will never lose.
If it did not sound so gummily, cloyingly banal, you might say that the Camerons en masse personified the ideal of noblesse oblige. Ben’s grandfather made the family fortune in the manufacture of a popular and virulent patent medicine, and Ben’s father and Ben himself tended it well, and so by the time he had married Dorothy and begun his family, he was free to devote himself to civic and political endeavors that had the very real power and weight of a considerable personal fortune behind them. Soon after Sarah graduated from college, in 1960, he was elected mayor of Atlanta, and held its helm sensitively and sure-footedly through the most explosive decade of growth and upheaval it would ever know. His thatch of hair, rusted iron-gray by then, and his freckled, fine-boned face became almost as familiar in the national media as the chestnut shock and white grin of the young president who admired and lauded him. More than Atlanta would eventually come to mourn his decline and death.
Dorothy Cameron was a small, straight-spined, beautiful woman with the thick, dark hair, warm, sherry-brown eyes and straight black brows that became her daughter’s. She was intelligent, outspoken and carefully, if not deeply, cultivated; a bit prepossessingly high-minded for the far earthier society of Atlanta in which she moved; a fierce, self-proclaimed Jeffersonian democrat. Her caustic humor saved her from the impossibility of utter worthiness, and her energy and awesome concentration were a good foil for Ben’s lazy grace and catlike physical indolence. She was a tireless volunteer worker, and her pioneering program at the city’s massive charity hospital, Grady, became the model for other hospital volunteer programs all over the South. She toiled tirelessly in auxiliaries, leagues, committees, task forces and study clubs.
I can still see Dorothy Cameron, as vivid and commanding as an actress in her Red Cross uniform, looking out from the pages of the Sunday society section of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, seeming beside all the other women in their ball and benefit gowns as intrepid and otherworldly and androgynous as a young Joan of Arc. Unlike the other adult women in my world, she did not like formal social occasions, and though she dutifully attended them, and invariably looked marvelous in her austere, handmade gowns and shoes, she would not have been there if she had not been on some committee that required her presence. The other women must have known it. Looking back, it is clear to me why not many of them liked her, and also why so many of their husbands and all of their children did. For to a youngster, we all adored her.
The winter I was ten and Lucy eight, Atlanta had one of the rare, magical snowfalls that come along perhaps once a decade. We have small, spitting snows nearly every winter, but the genuine, deep, creaming big ones come so seldom that when they do the entire city halts with both the breath-held blue sorcery of it and the utter impossibility of getting around. On the evening after this one, Lucy and I were both in our beds with the beginnings of tedious, dripping colds brought on, no doubt, by our stubborn refusal to come in out of the silent, lapping white back garden when our mothers called us.
“I hope you’re both happy,” my mother said, closing the door on us. “You’re going to be stuck in that attic until the last cough is coughed, and you’ll miss days and days of school, and have to make them all up.”
By that time the snow was effectively ruined for us, and we were just drifting into fretful, feverish sleep when the door opened again and my glaring mother came into the room, followed by Dorothy Cameron wrapped in her fur coat and swathed in scarves.
“I’ve told Mrs. Cameron you’re both sick with colds, but she’s talked me into letting you do something I’ll probably regret forever,” my mother said. “I don’t know why I listen to her.”
“I’ll take all the blame,” Dorothy Cameron said. “And we’ll personally pay the doctor bills if they get sick. But I don’t think they will. I think this is the perfect cure for what ails them. Get up, you two, and put on your warmest coats over your pajamas, and your galoshes, and your hats and scarves and mittens, and come on with me. I’m kidnapping you.”
We did, silent and solemn with the weight of doing something my mother so obviously disliked, yet with her approval. We could not imagine what awaited us downstairs.
What did was, wonder of wonders, an old-fashioned sleigh with two chestnut horses in harness before it, stamping and jingling on the semicircular drive in front of the house, a mummy-wrapped Ben Cameron at the reins and swaddled-to-the-eyebrows Ben Junior and Sarah behind him. We gaped in absolute and perfect awe.
“Come on!” Ben cried, gesturing with an elegant black whip. “I borrowed them and the sleigh from George Haynes over at the stable at Chastain Park, and I’ve got to get them back in a couple of hours. Let’s make tracks!”
And we did. Under a high, sailing, white galleon of a moon, which came riding down the star-strewn sky on a vast, skirling night wind, we made magical, enchanted snow-tracks all over a ghostly Buckhead: straight up Peachtree Road where virtually no automobile traffic could pass, out a white, deserted West Paces Ferry, down winding, silent Habersham to West Wesley and Peachtree Battle, and up Peachtree again to our house. We four children were too rapt with exaltation and strangeness to utter a word above a whisper, and the sounds of the horses’ chiming bells and the scrunching clop of their iron-shod feet and the low voices of Ben and Dorothy Cameron talking to each other and occasionally breaking into soft snatches of song were the only ones in all that hushed, bewitched silver and black night.
When we got back to our house, my mother received us grimly and sent us off to bed, and as we pattered up the stairs I heard her say to Dorothy Cameron, “I hope it was worth it. They’re going to absolutely perish of pneumonia.”
“No they’re not,” Dorothy said, laughing. “I guarantee they won’t. But it would be worth it, almost, if they did.”
We did not get pneumonia, of course, and our colds never materialized. And she was right. That magical night sleigh ride was worth…everything. Neither of us ever forgot it. Dorothy Cameron always knew what was important, and she gave well and widely the gift of imagination and acceptance. Sarah is very like her.
Dorothy and Ben were, rather surprisingly for their day and backgrounds, ardent champions of the Negroes and their cause. Dorothy did not have a shred of Lady Bountiful in her makeup, nor Ben of the massa, and so they were permitted the classic dichotomy of both espousing black needs and having in their home black servants. The result was that the black families who served in and lived behind most of the big houses were accustomed to dropping by, during their times off, to pass the time of day with whatever Cameron was around. I think the tendrils that reached out to the sad black ghettos from these taproots in the Northwest were one of the strongest reasons why Ben Cameron was able, almost single-handedly among the whites who labored to do so, to quell the incipient race riots that threatened his city in the sixties, by the simple expedient of going into the hot streets and talking to the furious mobs. During one of them, potentially the worst, he went, alone except for young Glenn Pickens, into the melee, climbed atop a parked automobile and talked for hours to the angry and frustrated crowd, all of whom knew who he was and many of whom knew him personally. Until the very end of that bitter time, Ben Cameron kept Atlanta the city that, as it had always boasted, “was too busy to hate.” On the surface, at any rate. What went on below it, in the dark, roiled waters there, was another matter entirely, and Ben Cameron would have been the first to acknowledge that. In those days, surfaces, if they kept the first match from being lit, were enough at least to serve.
“This kid at school says Mr. and Mrs. Cameron are nigger-lovers,” Lucy said at dinner one night during the early days of her stay with us. She had just entered the first grade at E. Rivers, and was finding the society of other children both a baffling and a stimulating thing.
“He says Mr. Cameron sleeps in the bed with a nigra lady, and Mrs. Cameron hugs and kisses Leroy Pickens all the time. He says his mama said Ben and Sarah are probably Leroy’s children.”
“Lucy!” Aunt Willa hissed, cutting her eyes at my mother. “You know I don’t like that kind of talk.”
“Well, I didn’t say it, this kid did,” Lucy said.
“What little boy was that, Lucy?” my mother said interestedly. There was a glimmer of something amused and avid in her dark eyes, like a fish far down in dark water, and all of a sudden I wanted Lucy just to be quiet. But I knew that she would not be.
She wasn’t.
“I don’t know his name,” she said. “He’s a funny-looking kid with scabs around his nose and a fat fanny. His folks’ nigra driver comes for him in a big old car every day. I beat him up.”
This time the outrage was evident in my mother’s dark, beautiful face.
“We don’t beat people up in this house, Lucy,” she said. “I think that was little Todd Beauchamp. I’m going to have to call his mother and apologize for your behavior.”
“Wasn’t in this house,” Lucy said earnestly. “It was on the playground. I had to beat him up, Aunt Olivia. It wasn’t true. I mean, I know Mr. and Mrs. Cameron love the nigras because they said they do…gee, so do we, don’t we? I mean, Shem and Martha and all…but they don’t sleep in the bed with them, or hug and kiss them. And Ben and Sarah aren’t Leroy’s children. I asked.”
“LUCY!” Aunt Willa out-and-out squalled.
“Oh, for goodness’ sake, Willa,” my mother drawled, her amusement at the thought of Lucy asking the totally exemplary Dorothy Cameron if she hugged and kissed Leroy Pickens apparently outweighing her disapproval of the thrashing of fat Toddy Beauchamp.
“Everybody knows Ben and Dorothy are funny about the Negroes. It’s no wonder the children pick it up.”
Indeed, Ben and Dorothy’s friends paid little heed to their crackpot sentiments, which would have gotten any other Atlantans drummed so rapidly out of the Driving, Capital City, and Commerce clubs that their seersucker coattails would have smoked. The Camerons, particularly Dorothy’s side, had always been “funny.” Old Milliment, Dorothy’s mother, that martinet of eminent respectability, had once ridden a white horse at the head of a column of suffragettes straight down Peachtree Street during a Fourth of July parade, black hair flowing down her ramrod back, in the middle of a difficult menopause. Later, long before it was seemly for ladies to drive themselves into town for shopping, she would take out her huge black Cadillac each Tuesday—the traditional Buckhead chauffeur’s day off—and drive herself, leaving carnage and mayhem in her wake, never looking back. She lived, after her husband’s death, in the Cameron guest house behind the box maze, and for many years had living with her there a younger, unmarried sister who was a dwarf. Neighborhood children swore that Miss Callie, as the tiny woman was called, did not live in the guest house at all, but in a huge doghouse out behind it, fitted out with doll’s furniture and screened and shielded with honeysuckle.
“She has a teeny little bathtub and she uses a baby’s potty chair,” Lucy once told a breath-held group of ladies at one of my mother’s endless committee luncheons. “Her doo-doo is like a little ol’ chicken’s.”
But as Sarah and Ben Cameron had vivid imaginations and Lucy was a liar of no small reputation and it was known that I would parrot whatever Lucy said, this was given little credence. I myself never saw the doghouse, but it might have been true. Any dwarf sister of old Milliment was bound to be eccentric enough to demand one and see that it was obtained. There was and is, in old Atlanta, an eccentricity that is tolerated, even cherished, and an eccentricity that will never be countenanced. Ben and Dorothy were of the former. Lucy came to be of the latter. There are not many people left who know the difference.
In addition to all their closeness, their talents, their kindness, their charm, their worthiness and good works and their infinitely engaging gregariousness, Ben and Dorothy Cameron had traveled almost all over the world, often taking young Ben and Sarah with them. The result was a family that would, in its attractiveness and wholesome worldliness, have been at home and welcome in a far more sophisticated arena than Atlanta. Given their very fullness, I suppose I can see, after all, why Lucy in her emptiness and hunger flinched away from them, shied like a colt at their bounty. But to me, they shone like the sun, and I loved them with an uncritical and grateful heart.
I think it was the dark side of Lucy that shrank from the Camerons’ light. I know that we all have our dark sides; no one is shadowless. But I came to think, in that first year, that there was an actual darkness, a real shadow, that lay over Lucy. You didn’t see it often, because she was almost always in motion, flying in radiance, moving in a wind of light. But it waited for her, off in the edges of the sunlight, and when it swept over her it was unmistakable, like the shadow of wings.
I saw it once, darkness visible, lightlessness tangible. It was in the fall of that year, a warm stretch of Indian summer days after an early frost that had left the hardwoods afire, when we all went up to the cottage at Tate for the weekend. We had not taken Willa and her children there before, even though it would have made, in its coolness and isolation, a perfect fortress against polio. My mother never liked the Tate cottage, and I know that she did not want to take Aunt Willa there. I heard her telling my father once, “If you think she’s conspicuous here, wait till you get her up at Tate. A sore thumb doesn’t begin to describe it.”
Even I could understand what she meant. The little colony of summer places up in Pickens County, about an hour’s drive to the northwest, was so unfashionable and simple that most Atlantans who did not have homes there would not know it existed. That is why, of course, it was, and is, thought to be so exclusive. The families who summer there are, for the most part, the descendants of the original owners, the colonists who made up the Tate Mountain Corporation and built the old houses and the golf course and the lake and dam and dock and boathouses. It is extremely hard to buy into Tate if you have not always been grounded there, and we acquired our cottage only because it was part of the package the doctor’s widow offered us. Even then, I wonder if my parents would have been accepted if the other colonists had not known that the old lady needed a quick sale. As it was, though the other residents were cordial to us, they were never really warm, and my mother was not one to either miss that nuance or forgive it. I think my father might have eventually found a haven there, with his knowledge and love of fishing and the outdoors, but after the first two or three visits, my mother refused to go back, until Aunt Willa and her children came to us, and so the house mainly sat idle in its grove of fine hardwoods on the flank of Burnt Mountain, and we went, in the summers, either to Sea Island or to Highlands.
“You couldn’t get a decent game of bridge in Tate if your life depended on it,” my mother would say, “and your name is mud from the word go if you don’t want to dig in the dirt or tromp around after birds and beavers or freeze yourself in that damned little lake.”
And she was right. There was plenty of socializing in Tate, down at the swimming and diving dock, or on the golf course, or walking in the cool mornings and evenings around the lake, or even at the late-afternoon ice-crackings, as they were called, on screened porches and before vast stone fireplaces. But these gatherings centered around a communal life in the mountains that was generations deep, rooted in the original families, rich in anecdotal lore from summers long past. Suppers were family affairs and bedtimes early, and in the daytime, activities ran to supervising children’s play or gardening or ambling, to desultory golf or serious canoeing and swimming. All of it was extremely plain, even austere; there was not a pair of high heels or a tie in the entire colony, and there has never been even one telephone. I think, now, that the Elliots’ cottage has an old black-and-white television set, but they do not use it except for Braves games, which are old Mr. Elliot’s passion, and the Saturday gardening show on the educational channel, which is Mrs. Elliot’s. The Camerons’ log cottage is one of the largest and oldest, and was the center, from June on, of a constant stream of children, eddying and swirling around Ben and Sarah. Tate might have been created with the Camerons in mind.
My aunt Willa, true to my mother’s prediction, did indeed fit into Tate, on that one autumn weekend in 1941, like a peacock in a sparrowcote. She ruined her new Newton Elkin heels in the red mud at the front door, was routed from the rudimentary bathroom by the resident scorpion, nearly froze in the chill night in her flimsy peignoir and ended up sleeping in one of my father’s ripe old flannel shirts, and was badly frightened by the thin, shuffling she-bear who foraged on weekends in the colony garbage cans.
In the glorious blue and gold morning, when the sun broke free over Burnt Mountain and turned the woods to yellow wildfire, she came red-eyed and shivering down to breakfast only to find that my father had taken us children on a hike to see the beavers and my mother had gone back to bed and let the fire die out, and when she tottered desperately out into the rutted little road that encircled the lake in search of another human face, she met none. We were the only family there. Most of the other cottages had been closed before the first frost. Aunt Willa was near tears by the time we came back and built up the fire and my mother arose to set out our hot dog lunch. We went back to Tate a few times during my childhood, but Aunt Willa never again in all her long life set foot on Burnt Mountain.
But from that first day, Lucy adored it, almost as much as she did the summerhouse, and even though she was not taken there with any regularity during her childhood, we did go on occasion, and Lucy never forgot those visits. I let her have the keys whenever she liked after we were grown, and I think she spent quite a bit of time up there. Malory loved it, too, in her turn. After she was born we went fairly often. That is why after my parents died, I never sold the Tate house, and why I probably never will. It is entirely possible that I will never see it again, but it makes me happy to think of Malory’s young-willow height and slenderness, so like Lucy’s, vivid as a live flame against the green of Burnt Mountain.
On the second evening we were there, that first autumn, there was a meteor shower, and Lucy and I bundled up and took blankets and went down to the dock to watch it. We lay on our backs, utterly silent as the very sky above us arced and bloomed, and when it was over we decided to walk around the lake, so as to prolong the magic. We walked quietly, without speaking. The silver spell of the teeming sky was too recent and close for words. I remember that there was a huge white moon, hanging perfectly full and so low that it seemed to rest on the top of Burnt Mountain, and the whole world was black and silver, like a photographic negative. Where the road and lake and meadow lay in the clear, it was as if the world was flooded in a kind of cold, burning radiance, but in the shadows of trees it was as thick and black as ink. Magic. That night it was just magic. It took your breath; you wanted to whisper. Something old as the world and outside it entirely walked that silver road with us. Lucy, skipping a little ahead of me, was bathed in silver; the radiance seemed to flow off her like phosphorescence does off your skin when you’re in a warm night ocean. I knew that something enormous and awesome was going to happen. How could it not?
There is one point on the road, on the far side of the lake, where the old mountain highway runs right alongside it, but it is higher than the road, about twelve feet; it hangs over the little lake roadway. But you can’t see it, or the bank that leads up to it, for the enshrouding trees. The lake road lies black there, deep in tree shadow. It looks as if you’re approaching a tunnel. All of a sudden I did not like the look of it, that troll’s tunnel, and I said to Lucy, in a small voice, “Let’s go back the other way. I left my flip down on the dock.”
“No you didn’t,” she said, not looking back. “Your flip’s in your pocket. You’re scared to go through that dark place. Scaredy, scaredy, scaredy-cat!” And she ran ahead, trailing silver, and headed straight for the blackness. Suddenly I was so frightened that I could not even get my breath to call out to her. Something was so heavy in the air that it crushed my chest. I began to trot after her, but it was as if my feet were mired in concrete.
And then, just the instant before she plunged into that black tunnel, an enormous, flying…I don’t know, shape, a great, black canopy of shadow…came flying over her, just over her head, like a curse falling down on her out of the sky. And then she was gone into the tree shadow, and I heard a dull little crack and a kind of scream, and then nothing.
My heart literally stopped. I could not move my feet. My legs were ice water. I did not know what it was; it was not like anything from the world. I called out, a thin bleat of fear, but she didn’t answer, and then I heard something crashing down through the underbrush toward the lake, and a deer came leaping out and crossed the road and flew on into the woods at the water’s edge. That’s what it had been—a deer from up on the road above us, frightened by a car. I saw headlights swing over us then, and heard an engine swell and die. The deer had bounded down the bank and jumped right over Lucy and run on into the woods, and the crack I heard had been its hoof, glancing off her cheekbone. It half stunned her for a moment, and laid her cheek open. We had to take her into Jasper and get it sewn up. She was so proud of the scar it left; she had it all her life. She didn’t cry when it happened and she didn’t cry while the doctor was working on it, and she was only five. It was Aunt Willa who cried, loudly and in, I think, vindication. It was the dot over the i of her distaste for Tate.
I have never forgotten that night. It was so mythic, so somehow like an omen. It left Lucy stamped with the mark of otherness.
“How like Lucy, to have her own private omen,” Sarah Cameron said much later, when I told her about it. She was, by then, less than altogether enchanted with Lucy.
But for Lucy and me, the night of the deer remained a part of our private mythology. For though, as I have said, we were, both of us, sad-eyed small realists, still, what child does not make myths of its life? How else could it be borne?
We talked of it so often that fall and winter that our parents finally told us we were being tiresome; that nobody wanted to hear any more about the deer that jumped over Lucy up at Tate. But by that time it did not matter, for there came a Sunday afternoon in December when we were sitting around the Capehart in the library, waiting for Shem to bring the car around and take us to the Driving Club for lunch, and a voice broke into the program of music to tell us that Japanese planes had bombed Pearl Harbor, in the Hawaiian Islands.
I remember clearly that my mother cried, and my aunt Willa gave a little squeal, and my father put his hands into his pockets and walked to the window and stood with his back to us, looking silently out into the leafless back garden.
But Lucy jumped to her feet, red flags snapping in her cheeks, blue eyes blazing up like flung diamonds. She stamped her feet on the old Oriental; she hugged herself and danced around like a marionette. And then she ran to me and flung her arms around me, her silky hair whipping across my face.
“That’s where he is!” she shouted, and her voice caroled like flutes and bells with joy. “That’s where my daddy went! He didn’t leave us! He went to the war!”
And from then on, until the day in August four years later when the church bells and fire sirens of Buckhead called out to tell us of V-J Day, we followed the war, and Lucy was as happy as she would ever be.