This time our separation was complete. Martha and Shem Cater moved my bed and clothing and books out to the summerhouse and a crew from Moncrief came and installed an oil furnace, and my mother came out silent and red-eyed bringing winter curtains and bedspread and pillows and some Georgia Tech and University of Georgia pennants for the stucco walls, and from that day until this, I have lived in the summerhouse behind the house on Peachtree Road. Although I felt keenly the shame and isolation of my banishment, something under them leaped like a flame at the prospect of this, my own private kingdom in the sheltering garden, and something even under that, dim and shameful, stirred in mean and smug satisfaction that this perfect domain had come only to me, and was now barred to Lucy. I had never before had any power that had not, essentially, been borrowed from her.
Her isolation was almost total. She was forbidden by a furious, screeching Aunt Willa to have anything more to do with me or with any of the boys in her former band, except in unavoidable and supervised public situations like church and, later, school. Meals together with the family were allowed, after the first two or three days of confinement and trays, and we were permitted to ride together in the Chrysler to Sunday lunches at the club, but even then she was made to sit in the backseat with her mother and the pious Little Lady, while I was sandwiched between my parents in the front. We were not allowed to speak to each other, and for a while did not attempt to do so. For a time during that incarceration Lucy spoke virtually to no one, and kept her blue eyes on her lap or fixed on some point in the middle distance.
Never in all that time did I hear her cry or plead for leniency or attempt to justify herself. I think if she had denied culpability I would have backed her up, maybe even claimed blame myself, but I think we both knew that no one would have believed us. What was possible to Lucy was not, even then, possible to me, and our families knew it. Lucy might be, and often was, stricken with terror at the outcome of her actions, but she had a fierce small personal code that forbade begging for mercy—though she would fight savagely against what she perceived as inequities to others.
I think it would have served her better if she had begged. Aunt Willa might then have ceased the grim battle of wills that marked her lifelong relationship with her older daughter, might have been appeased by Lucy’s terrible vulnerability. But Lucy never offered her that, and I don’t think Aunt Willa ever saw it. I truly think that what she saw when she looked at Lucy was merely a profoundly visible embarrassment and a threat to her position in the house and the city, a threat that might at any time banish her back to the chicken farm in South Georgia. Before the incident of the Pink Castle, Lucy had been to her a shackle and a stumbling block, but not without value simply because my father at times looked upon her with something resembling pity and fondness. Now both had gone out of his cold eyes, to be replaced by a remote and inexorable distaste, and Lucy became to her mother simply and forever the enemy. I never knew a woman so without maternal love.
Many years later a psychiatrist, a warm, caring woman who treated and loved and ultimately despaired of Lucy, told me that in any family group there is a natural scapegoat, a sort of tacitly designated bearer of blame and punishment. There is no doubt that Lucy became, after the afternoon at the Pink Castle, the scapegoat in my father’s house, and I think that even if she had not done—and continued to do—things that shocked and outraged my parents and her mother, she still would have worn the wreath of the sacrificial goat. She was simply so visible. A few people, like me, saw the living fire in the air around her, and those who did not sensed the displacement and were troubled by it.
I think in total darkness you could have sensed that Lucy was in the room with you. The force in her was so strong as to threaten to break free, and that kind of vivid, roiling life inevitably disturbs. It is far easier to label it aberrant and punish it than to examine it. And of course, all her life, and with a sort of blinded innocence, Lucy went in harm’s way. The need for rescue and protection lay so deep and burned so strong that it outweighed virtually any lesson she might have learned, any punishment she might receive. I could not have understood that then, but I did understand that punishment of Lucy achieved nothing and harmed her cruelly. What was meant to break her cleanly succeeded only in bending, and that permanently.
For she was almost literally banished from our sight. Even when the incarceration was ended and we were free to go about our routines once more and resume speaking to each other, Lucy was effectively removed from all but minimal contact with her mother and sister and my parents and me. She had none with the children of Buckhead. I am sure that Aunt Willa would have put her into a convent if there had been any such thing in Atlanta and the stench of Rome had not been so taboo, or sent her to a boarding school if there had been money available. As it was, it must have burned her starved and stinging heart like fire to accept my father’s curt offer of tuition to a small, pretentious and patently inferior private day school that purported to “finish” subdebs but was widely known to break high-spirited or problem preadolescent girls with an iron snaffle. And my mother’s tiny, knowing smile as she extended the offer, and the silky fan of lashes that shuttered the contemptuous triumph in her eyes, must have seared equally deep. But Aunt Willa accepted.
I think it was for that triumph, for that humiliation, that Willa Bondurant declared her war on Lucy, not for the vandalizing of the empty house. But she accepted the offer with as much of her carefully cultivated, modest grace as she could salvage. Better to cast out the offending eye than risk having it cause irremediable damage. Aunt Willa was smart enough to know that talk about Lucy would inevitably turn back upon her.
After school Lucy was free for an hour or so to pursue her own interests, but since those had always centered around me and the summerhouse or the band of boys she led, and since she was forbidden absolutely to have anything to do with any neighborhood children except a few girls of her age deemed suitable companions, she was virtually without friends. Lucy simply would not associate with the little girls selected to be her playmates, and they in turn refused to play with her, and so she spent most of her time in the echoing upstairs rooms where we had once slept and whispered and read and dreamed our gaudy and unsuspected dreams.
She must have been hideously lonely and often afraid, for the silence and isolation of that attic warren seemed inviolable and complete if you were alone in it; there was no sense that below you the life of a great house hummed on. I know that it was then, in those cramped, silent little rooms, that she began to write, but I never knew what she wrote. She showed that first work to no one. I would see her dark head sometimes at the third-floor window as I left the summerhouse and started toward Charlie’s house on West Andrews, or Ben Cameron’s on Muscogee.
At the beginning of those days apart, she would be looking out at me, and would sometimes wave, a stiff, formal little salute, and I could see the blue of her eyes burning in her white face even from the driveway. But she never motioned for me to come up to her, or opened the window and called out to me, and she did not attempt to leave her room and steal out to the summerhouse, as she had during the time of our imprisonment after Jamie’s death. I thought she looked wonderfully beautiful and romantic, like a princess held captive in an enchanted tower, and my heart would literally leap in my chest like a gaffed fish with anguish for her. But my father had said after he brought us home from the police station, “If I catch you going anywhere near Lucy again I will send her and her mother and sister away that very day,” and I knew that he meant it.
I have never known him to be so angry with me as he was that day. He did not bellow; he could not even speak, and his face, usually red and knotted with annoyance at me, was absolutely white and still. His small blue eyes were actually pale, as though bleached by the acid of his fury, and his breath came so hard and fast that I thought he would have some sort of attack and die. It was my mother, weeping and hovering and touching me—first my cheeks, and then my shoulders, and then my disheveled hair, until I thought I would literally knock her manicured fingers away—who delivered the terms of my punishment and the outline of my life in the house after it was ended. Mainly, both consisted of an avoidance of Lucy. I would be required to work after school and during the following summer to help pay for the damage to the windows of the Pink Castle, but I had expected that and did not mind. All the other boys would, I knew, be charged with the same task. And I would have to move to the summerhouse, but that was such joy to me that I shut my eyes in order to keep my parents from seeing it and rescinding the order. It was the absence of Lucy that they thought would bring me to my knees, and for a time it nearly did.
I really believe it was at that point that my father, simply and without too much regret, washed his hands of me, for it was then that the constant carping on my activities and interests and inadequacies ceased, and then that my mother’s doting and fussing began in earnest. He stopped planning my college career at Georgia Tech, or, a poor second, the University of Georgia, and abandoned almost completely any talk of bringing me into the family real estate business. She escalated her campaign to make a proper princeling of me. I might have taken refuge in sneaking up the back stairs to Lucy in her tower, or smuggled notes and books to her, or at the very least engaged her in that deep and unspoken communion that we had always been able to carry on with our eyes, as we sat at meals and in church. But she would not look at me, or speak, and in any case, I knew that my father meant what he said about sending them away. The saintly knight still lived in my breast, but his shield was lost and his spear broken. After a while I laid them down and slipped gratefully into boyhood.
My first friend was Ben Cameron, and though the friendship never deepened and smoothed into the mellow, nourishing thing I had with Charlie Gentry, still it showed me the sheer pleasure of a relationship that lay lightly and was fed without pain from shallow roots. I never really got to know Ben. Nobody did, I think, except his family, and as it turned out, they knew him, perhaps, least of all. Certainly Julia Randolph, whom he began to go steady with soon after his sixteenth birthday and married just out of Georgia Tech, never knew Ben, though she thought she did. I like to think the two little boys of that marriage, the sons he adored so openly and fully, and with whom he became again a boy himself, knew him as deeply as he could be known, but it would have been the father they perceived and loved, not the man.
In any case, it did not matter, for with Ben the abundance of his flamboyant charm and his dark, glinting, sardonic wit made up for those depths held back. His enthusiasms were many and mercurial; February’s clicking aggies and taws gave way to March’s exquisite homemade kites, dancing in the spring wind over the Bobby Jones Golf Course, before you could blink your eyes, and you scarcely would have mastered his floating racing dives into the Driving Club pool before he was out and onto the flying roller skates that were the autumn thing we did. He was generous with his skills, and a swift and gracious teacher, but his body was so lithe and stylized in its power and grace, and his movements so liquid and exaggerated and dancerlike, that none of us could follow where he led, and he would be on to another passion before we had become passable in the last one he taught us.
He was a born dancer; Sarah and Dorothy Cameron both used to say that it was a shame ballet dancers were thought to be sissies, because Ben would have been a star and made a million dollars at it. He would shrug that off, flushing up to his coppery hairline, and laugh, but it was true. Ben on a dance floor was a light and a flame that flickered over our high school years. Girls actually shoved and jostled to be asked to partner his jitterbug, and he was such a natural that Margaret Bryan, who flogged ballroom dancing into us in her musty little studio above Spencers, Ltd., downtown, asked him at age fourteen to be a student instructor. She had never asked another of us, boy or girl, and we were all deeply impressed, though of course we teased him unmercifully. But Ben hated ballroom dancing and went to her classes only because small, shy Sarah asked him to be her escort, and as soon as the offer to instruct came, he quit going entirely, and refused to go back. Dorothy urged him, and Sarah’s great eyes filled with blinked-back tears at the prospect of bearding that ersatz little cotillion alone, but in this, as in few other matters, his father overrode his mother.
“For God’s sake, let him be, Dottie,” he said once, when I was over at the Muscogee Avenue house being tutored in math by Ben, and his mother was after him to take Sarah to dancing class that evening. “Dancing should be as much fun as you can have with your clothes on. If he doesn’t like it, there’s no sense in doing it.”
“But every boy needs to know how to dance,” Dorothy Cameron said. “It’s one social skill that’s absolutely indispensable.”
“He knows how, better than anybody in Margaret’s entire gang of little gigolos,” Ben Cameron said, the gray eyes that were also his son’s resting with such open and unabashed love on Ben that quick tears stung my eyes, startling me. “He just doesn’t want to do it. Isn’t football and baseball and tennis and swimming and music and his design work enough? Not to mention his grades. What more does he need?”
Ben reddened and ducked back out of the little den where his mother and father were sitting, and Dorothy Cameron’s eyes lit on me. I did not follow Ben; I was then, as I have always been, as drawn to the Camerons in a group as a cold, starving wild animal is to a fire, and I stood warming myself at their light.
“Shep will take Sarah to dancing class, won’t you, Shep?” Dorothy said, smiling at me. Her warm amber eyes saw me, every inch of me, inside and out, and liked what she saw. It was her gift, as it was always Sarah’s, to see you plain and like, even love, you for just that; to ask nothing of you; instead, to give to you. I could dance, after a fashion, but was shy and did not like the close contact with the girls, and found every excuse that my mother would accept to miss the classes. But for Dorothy Cameron I would have gone down to the Fox Theater and danced alone on the great bare stage before a packed house, and besides, I liked sunny, elfin little Sarah.
“Sure,” I said. “Sarah will be my girl for tonight.”
I grinned at Sarah, and she reddened and smiled her soft, three-cornered, kitten’s smile.
“Thanks, Shep,” she said, and ducked her chin and vanished up the stairs after Ben.
“She’ll be walking on air for weeks,” Dorothy Cameron said. “She’s been in love with you all her life, you know.”
For all his generosity and near-theatrical gregariousness, though, young Ben Cameron was moody, and sometimes he would, quite literally, go away from you, uncurling as softly and quietly as a cat and padding out of the room, leaving whatever you were doing together spread out on the desk or table. At other times he would merely retreat back into his own head; you could still talk to him and get an answer of sorts, but the essential Ben Cameron was contained somewhere behind those clear gray eyes. You could see the essence of him moving there. It was unsettling, and never failed to leave me with a small frisson, as if, we were fond of saying, a rabbit had just run over my grave.
He did not look like a boy then. It was possible, when that happened, to see what Ben Cameron the man would look like, and I did not think that that man was happy, though I could not have said why. “What more does he need?” Ben Cameron, Senior, had said of his son. Could he, if he had been another sort of man, have seen the awful import of those words? Would it have made a difference? I don’t know. But at those times, it seemed very clear to me that there was something more that young Ben Cameron needed, something vital to life. But I had no idea, then, what it was.
In addition to the tutoring in mathematics, Ben gave me one of the great and enduring loves of my life, gave it to me as lightly and openhandedly as he shared with me his expertise at marbles and dancing and the flying of kites. He let me chomp and hoot around on his clarinet, at which he was as effortlessly proficient as he was at everything else he attempted, and though I never quite achieved his technical virtuosity on it, I was smitten with a passion far stronger than his the instant I picked it up and felt the sweet heft of that ebony cylinder in my hands, and tasted the smoky-persimmon taste of the slick, bitten reed. I was hooked before the first mallardlike honks and skirling shrieks came issuing forth from the instrument, and nagged my mother so desperately and tirelessly that within a week I had a shining new clarinet of my own, chosen by me from Rutan’s on one totally glorious spring afternoon, and lessons three times a week from the resigned, fastidious little man who taught Ben. I was quick to learn, if not especially talented, and I practiced so prodigiously that the sheer effort and the pounding force of my passion produced music sufficient to feed my yearning heart before that summer was out.
I will never forget the day the clarinet came alive for me. I was lying on my back in the deep grass of the meadow that ringed the lake up at Tate, totally alone in the day, noodling idly, the reed vibrating smoothly and tinnily against my teeth, watching a red-tailed hawk riding the thermals over Burnt Mountain and thinking of nothing at all, emptied out, still. And then, all of a sudden, the molten honey of “Frenesi” came spilling out of the mouthpiece, abundant and silvery and perfect. I gave a great start, and looked around as if I were being observed, and then I put the clarinet down and laid my head on my arms and wept.
Mathematics and music. Two absolutely true things that I have and would not have except for Ben Cameron. Now, whenever I think of him, over the pain and the outrage, always comes the healing gratitude. Ben; Ben of the gray-lit eyes and the ardent heart. I will not forgive Atlanta for Ben.
The other friend of my boyhood, and indeed, of my life, was Charlie Gentry. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know Charlie. Illness was the first tie that bound us; our mothers took us to the same pediatrician for treatment of his diabetes and my asthma. And as our families knew each other from the club and Saint Philip’s Episcopal Church and shared a hundred other nearly imperceptible ties of the sort that bound the families of Buckhead, it was only natural that we would become regular playmates.
For one thing, our infirmities relegated us to the role of onlookers in the fiercely masculine little society in which we moved. For another, the invisible ties of the “different” child, the one set apart, reached out swiftly and went deeply into us. Charlie and I knew one another in our hearts when we first set toddlers’ eyes on each other in Dr. Forrest Davenport’s office on Ponce de Leon, and that ken lasted, with few breaks, well past boyhood. We did not become close friends until that summer after Lucy and I were separated, but I think we both knew early, somewhere down where such things lie, that we would do so. I know that sometimes in my early childhood, when the asthma that disappeared around my tenth birthday still kept me awkward and withdrawn, a hoverer at edges, I would look across a group of shrieking, milling children and meet the grave brown eyes of Charlie Gentry and feel a kind of obscure peace, an occult comfort, steal through me. “Later,” our glances seemed to say to one another. “Later.”
I think our friendship would have become fact a lot sooner if Lucy had not come to live with me in my house. For, as I have said, from the very beginning, Charlie did not like her, and it was plain that the feeling was mutual.
He was the first one of us to call her a name, a thing so unlike Charlie that the spiteful little incident hung on the air quivering with shock, and was remembered for a long time by all of us who heard it. It was at the Easter egg hunt on the great hill in front of Saint Philip’s, overlooking the bend in Peachtree Road just before it sweeps into Buckhead proper, and we were all standing in a bemused and dazzled knot watching Lucy, her fiercely frilled new organdy skirts over her head, hanging by her knees from the branches of a low-spreading dowager oak, dangling in her hand the gold-painted, beribboned prize egg she had found almost immediately.
The promissory enchantment I had seen early in her had ripened into a full-fledged spell on this fey April day of strange green light and running cloud shadow and warm little winds that doubled back upon themselves. By now the knot of children standing below her was silent in entirely proper respect mingled with superstitious awe…for hadn’t she known exactly where the prize egg was; skipped, in fact, straight to it? And didn’t she look, upside down in the lambent, shivering air, like some elemental spirit newly come among us from a magical place called New Orleans, a creature of light and vapors and quicksilver? I remember that no one spoke for what seemed the longest time, and then Charlie’s gruff, matter-of-fact voice came clearly: “Shoot, that ain’t so hot. Anybody can hang from a stupid tree. Even a woods colt. She ain’t nothing but a woods colt from country-hick New Orleans.”
The effect on Lucy was astounding. In an eye-blink she had skinned down from the tree and charged Charlie, small fists flailing, eyes shut tight with fury, face mottled white and red, tears strangling in her throat. She did not say a word until she had knocked him backward onto the new-green grass and bloodied his nose, and she only stopped then because I grabbed her from behind and pinioned her arms. I was both awed and embarrassed. Awed because I had never seen a girl lick a boy, much less one two years older than she was, and embarrassed because it was strictly against our code to hit Charlie, who both wore glasses and had something so badly wrong with him that he had to take shots for it every day of his life. No one had told Lucy this, of course, but it seemed to me she should have known it anyway. It was an etiquette born of the blood. Besides, I wondered, what was so terrible about being called a woods colt? It sounded lovely to me, fabled and magical, like a unicorn or a griffin. And with her silky black mane of hair and long, gossamer-slender arms and legs, she did look rather like a colt, a crystal one.
She would never tell anyone what had led her to attack Charlie, and she would never again have anything substantial to do with him. He did not seem to care; seemed, rather, to be relieved. I have often thought that the years in which she rode at the head of the Buckhead Boys on their invincible bikes must have been rather bad years for him, but by that time they had come to a sort of elaborately indifferent armed truce, and I suppose that the inclusion in that streaking golden pack was too precious, to a boy used to making his way alone, to forswear for a point of honor no one else even recognized.
On that day, I remember, I sought him out just before we left the party, and whispered, “What’s a woods colt?”
“It means she doesn’t have any daddy,” he said.
“Well, shoot, sure she does,” I said. “He’s not here, but she sure does have one. He’s in New Orleans or someplace. She’s crazy about him. Talks about him all the time.”
“Well, that’s what I heard my mother tell Mrs. Goodwin,” he said stubbornly. “And I don’t guess she’d say that if it wasn’t so.”
I knew he was wrong, but I did not argue with him. I could understand why he was so sure. Charlie’s mother would rather go naked at noon in Five Points than lie.
Of all the so-called “good” people I have ever known in my life, Ben and Dorothy Cameron included, Charlie’s mother and father were hands down the saintliest. The odor of piety stood so strongly in the air around them that in their presence even dirty bare feet seemed un-Christian. Marianne Gentry taught Sunday school and sang in Saint Philip’s choir and was chairman of Saint Rhoda’s altar guild, and ran the Episcopal thrift shop, where the cast-off garments of the women of Buckhead were dispensed at greatly reduced prices to a singularly unappreciative clientele of indigent women from “down there” in Atlanta proper, and in her spare time she painted flamingo-pink faces of Jesus on china plates. Every newlywed couple in Buckhead had one by the time she abjured portraiture and moved on to sacramental macramè. She was the first face one saw on one’s doorstep when a loved one died, and often, uncannily, seemed to precede the event itself by appearing, casserole in hand, before the death rattle had begun.
I once heard Ben Cameron say to Dorothy, “If you ever open the door and see Marianne Gentry standing there with a chicken pot pie, don’t hesitate. Go straight down to the bank and open the lockbox and get everything out before the IRS seals it. I’ll surely be dead by the time you get home.”
Charlie’s father, Thaddeus Gentry, was a major stockholder in the Coca-Cola Company, and I always heard that he was “in business,” but I don’t think I ever knew precisely what that business was, as close as Charlie and I became and as often as I was in and out of the house on West Andrews. Mr. Gentry went to an office downtown; he was driven by a wizened little blue-black gnome of a Negro man who smelled perpetually of the White Rose snuff that bulged his upper lip like a lipoma. I believe now that Thad Gentry must have had a sort of rudimentary family philanthropic foundation going, for he was widely known to give away money to the poor, and wore the epithet “Christian businessman” with the same pride that he wore his Rotary button. His ferocious cheerfulness smote the very air around him, and he would set upon you and cry, “Smile! God loves you!” whenever his path crossed yours. He was a round, squat little man with the same thick glasses that Charlie wore, and the great fleshy, smacking lips of a fish, and he liked putting moist, avuncular hands on the flesh of young girls almost as much as he liked to give away his sanctified money. When he did, the girls would smile thinly, and Marianne Gentry would smile thinly, and he would merrily quote a snippet from the Song of Solomon, though never going so far as to get to the part about the breasts being like twin roes.
I never knew what he was about, with his scuttling hands and stalklike crab’s eyes, but I feel sure Charlie, with his quick sensitivity, did. I think Charlie’s younger sister, Caroline, did, too. I would see the dull red creep up her neck and into her cheeks when her father laid his hands on the arms and shoulders of one of her playmates. Caroline had her revenge, though. She ran as amok as she could as soon as she was able, starting with the legendary Boo Cutler of Buckhead and working her way up the eastern seaboard to New York, where she had acquired her second husband by the time she was twenty-five. I saw her once, years after our childhood, at the Village Gate, listening to Bird Parker, very drunk and leaning on the shoulder of a still-faced black man wreathed in smoke that was definitely not that of a Pall Mall. She did not see me and I did not cross the room to speak to her. Caroline had left us all behind by then. I think she lives now in Barbados in a villa left to her by who knows what husband. My aunt Willa always clicks her tongue and shakes her head when she speaks of Caroline Gentry, but I think on the whole that Caroline didn’t do so badly for herself. Not at all. Not in comparison to those of us whose venue she fled.
But for a while in my childhood, one of the smarmier little witticisms went, “What’s pink and white and turns into a motel when you say the magic words?”
“Caroline Gentry!”
The Gentrys were quite rich when Charlie and I first became friends, but when Charlie was in his first year at Emory Law, Thad Gentry suddenly went ferociously and ebulliently mad and gave all the family Coca-Cola stock to a black television evangelist called Reverend Buddy, and Charlie and his mother were left in severely straitened circumstances.
“You’d think the sonofabitch would have the sense to give it to Billy Graham, at least,” Charlie said mildly, but I knew that the breakdown was a cataclysm for him.
He transferred to Atlanta Law School at night and went to work for the Coca-Cola Company by day to support his mother and keep the big old Italianate house up, and Marianne Gentry went into a long and gentle decline.
Dorothy Cameron, who was perhaps a bit too enamored of that much-prized quality called gumption and was wont to apply it like a poultice to every ill that the flesh was heir to, snapped, “Marianne Gentry hasn’t got an ounce of gumption. I don’t think faith is worth a plugged nickel if there isn’t a little gumption to back it up.”
I know, though, that it was she and Ben who paid the taxes on the Gentry house while Charlie got on his feet. She and Ben always did like Charlie.
By the time Charlie graduated and married, he was doing so well at Coca-Cola that the upkeep of his mother was no problem, and he was able to bring his father home from Central State and install him properly and permanently at Brawner’s. “And that,” Charlie said resignedly, “considering the number of Buckhead people who end up there, is like coming home.”
It’s a mystery to me how Charlie kept himself so whole, so steeped in the cheerful, pragmatic integrity that was always, to me, the thing about him that set him so apart from the rest of us. Not many people are genuinely good. It may be that the tremendous effort he had to expend to accommodate his diabetes made him early into invincible stuff. Or it may have simply been genetic. Charlie sprang from a good gene pool, his palely loitering mother and exuberantly mad father notwithstanding. His grandfather had a glorious stint as a Mississippi riverboat captain before he came to Atlanta and settled down to buying Coca-Cola stock, and his great-grandfather rode with that glittering rogue, Jubal Early, in northern Virginia. I always thought that Charlie got the best of all of it. He was gentle, and honest to a fault, and fiercely loyal, even as a small boy, and what had been, in Thaddeus and Marianne, cant and fanaticism was smoothed in Charlie into a genuine and appealing decency which shone out of his astigmatic eyes like love, like perennial joy. Not that he was pious; far from it. Charlie was, if anything, wry and taciturn and in repose, his sweet-ugly frog’s face unlit by his mordant black-Celt’s wit, he seemed downright phlegmatic. And he had learned early on to shield his vulnerability with a kind of affable, shambling passivity that sat perfectly on his short, stocky frame. But I knew, and more than a few other people came to know, that under the dun-colored cloak of the artisan beat a great and passionate heart.
I first saw that passion, perhaps saw it born, on an afternoon in March, when Lucy was still under strict house arrest and Charlie and I had just begun to go around together. There had been a peevish late winter ice storm the evening before, and Marianne Gentry had forbidden Charlie, with his penchant for colds and susceptibility to any infection, to go outside. Instead, we ended up on the third floor in the dark warren of rooms so similar to the ones in my own house, poking boredly through old trunks. Like me, Charlie was an inveterate reader—though his own reading ran to popular science and the Hardy Boys and Big Little Books, of which he had stacks and stacks—and a great builder of model airplanes. They hung about his room like clumsy, desiccated insects, and his hands always smelled, in those years, of dope. He was not a great imaginer or a dreamer of dreams, and he was certainly not a rummager in attics. I don’t know why we were at it that day. But we were, probably because it was just slightly more interesting than the Monopoly game that his mother was pressing us to play with restless little Caroline downstairs. Trunk after trunk yielded only fragile, brittle old clothes and hats and scrapbooks and linens; the totems of many lives, I suppose, and things that, as such, would move and involve me deeply now. But then they seemed to us just old. Old and dirty. And they made me cough so badly that I feared that one of the long-dormant asthma attacks was about to shake my throat and chest like a demon terrier.
“Let’s go on downstairs,” I said. “This stuff is making me choke.”
“Just a minute,” Charlie said, and something in his voice made me turn and look at him. His face, in the dirty stipple of ice-light on the attic ceiling, was as luminous and white as a votive candle.
I looked down at what he held in his hands. It was a gray woolen uniform, faded and stained and so stiffened by age that he could hardly unfold it, and even in the darkening afternoon you could tell that the bleached braid and the buttons, and the pitted buckle on the creaking old belt, had once been gilt. Below it in the trunk lay a flat-topped forage cap, and below that, wrapped in a length of yellow fringed silk that might have been a sash, was a dull, pitted saber.
Charlie squatted before the trunk, perfectly still, the saber lying across his two outstretched hands like a sacrificial offering, and I saw in his transformed brown eyes that he had truly and forever lost his soul.
“My great-grandfather’s,” he said in the kind of voice that should be kept for worship, or after love. “He died in the Wilderness. I’ve seen his picture. He didn’t look like any of us. I’m named for him, Charles Beauchamp. I didn’t know these were up here.”
“Hey, let me see,” I said, reaching out to take the saber from him. He jerked it back, away from me.
“Don’t,” he said, and his voice was so queer that I started at him. His face burned wax-white in the attic gloom, and tears shone in his dark eyes. The thick lenses of the glasses magnified them into a manic radiance. I dropped my hands.
“It probably isn’t even your great-whatever’s,” I said perversely, for his refusal had stung me and the strange radiance alarmed me. “If it had been, looks to me like you’d have known it was up here. I bet it’s just some old uniform somebody left in the house before your folks bought it and they just never threw it out. I bet this old geezer died of dysentery or something somewhere like Macon.”
Charlie turned his rapt, gilded face to me again, as if I were a bothersome gnat, his hands caressing the length of the saber, moving to stroke the corroded cloth of the folded coat, lightly tracing the bill of the ruined cap. He moved them as lovingly and delicately as a blind man tracing the face of his beloved.
“They’re his,” he said in the same strange, faraway voice. “I can feel him. I can feel his blood running in there with mine.”
In the fading pearled light I felt the hair prickle on the back of my neck, and the same cold I felt in Boris Karloff movies start on the backs of my shoulders. I was exquisitely conscious of the vast, dark, empty attic behind me. The door to the warm-lit downstairs looked miles away.
“Jesus Christ, Charlie,” I whispered. “That’s not funny.”
He did not answer. I don’t think he heard me. Slowly he pulled the stiff gray coat out of the trunk and laid it open on his knees, and held it up against his small, thin shoulders. Even in the dying light I could see the great, dark, fatal flower that bloomed across the left breast of the coat. A star-shaped tear rent its center. My breath seemed to slow and stop in my chest. Charlie looked down slowly, and touched the spot with a tender forefinger.
“It’s his blood,” he said. “The shot went in here. It was a miniè ball. It must have stayed in him, because there isn’t a hole in the back.”
All of a sudden he lifted the coat and buried his face in it, and his shoulders shook with silent sobs. The unearthly chill fled out of the air and I scuttled across the dusty floor on my buttocks and put my arms around him.
“Hey,” I said. “Don’t. It was a long time ago. Don’t be sad.”
“I’m not sad,” Charlie said, lifting a wet, shining face to me. “I’m happy. This is…this is real glorious.”
From that afternoon on, what Charlie and I did together was search for relics.
There is a small army of them across the country, these relickers, a ridiculous and burning and somehow enormously appealing band of fanatics who spend their lives and often their fortunes walking the battlefields of the Civil War with metal detectors in their hands and shells both live and dead in the trunks of their cars. They are Northerners and Southerners, Easterners and Midwesterners; they are anyone at all, as diverse and fragmented and unlikely a fraternity as can be imagined, held together only—but insolubly—by the grand and unquenchable passion that had leaped to life in Charlie Gentry’s eyes. They will, and do, willingly go to jail for trespassing on national battlefields and digging on government and private land, and they often lose wives and families to their mania. Some have lost limbs and even their lives, when a shell fired one hundred and thirty years ago finally finds its mark. Charlie had just joined them. And though one day he would become the head of one of the country’s great philanthropic foundations, administering literal millions of dollars and doing incalculable good, his first love save one would always be relics and relic hunting, and he would continue to do it until the day of his death.
Many battlefields ring the city of Atlanta, sites of the age-blurred conflicts that most of us native Atlantans know far more thoroughly than our regular school studies, and they would come alive for me in the days of my late childhood, as I followed at Charlie’s muddy heels in the dreaming, sunstruck silence of Kennesaw Mountain or Ezra Church or the old park at Peachtree Battle Avenue. Excitement almost as white and absolute as his would jet up within me when we actually found a miniè ball or a belt buckle.
“This stuff was from the Army of Tennessee,” he would say, reverently laying a filthy canteen or a shell fragment in his sack in a steaming cotton field near Big Shanty. “They were falling back from Dalton to get Sherman away from his base. Joe Johnston could see just what we’re seeing now.”
His gestures took in the silent green back of Kennesaw Mountain behind us. Living fire consumed us then, the fire of battle and youth and glory, and of death in the sunlight.
But in me, the fire of exhilaration would die when we left the battlefield and went home to supper. Charlie, I knew, carried that flame with him always, just under his stolid surface, and if I could not truly share it, still I felt proud that of all the boys coming to adolescence in Buckhead then, he chose to let only me know the warmth of his. Me, and Sarah Cameron.
It was many years before Charlie, shy with the homely outsider’s boil-tender self-consciousness and crippled by his parents’ prudish Christian sanctions, would have anything to do with the diligent coquettes who made up our singular high school crowd, called the Pinks and the Jells. Dalliance and flirtation descended on them at puberty, these unprepossessing small girls we had known all our lives; popularity and conquest became their raisons d’être, and many of them never yielded up that priority all their lives. Consequently, a few of us—me, Pres Hubbard, and most of all, Charlie—had less to do with the fabled Pinks of Buckhead than any of the boys who came of age during that excessive and altogether hedonistic time. But to all of us, the single exception was Sarah Cameron.
She was, from our earliest memory, included as naturally in our group activities, except for the four or so years that we all rode behind Lucy with the Buckhead Boys, as another small boy. Later, when Charlie and I began to go about in our oblivious twosome, it was only Sarah who was allowed to make a third.
“Where’s Sarah?” I would say, as we set out on a morning’s jaunt to Peachtree Creek.
“Oh, wait, Sarah’s not here yet,” Charlie would say, as we started for the woods behind the summerhouse.
I think it was because nothing, not a single tendon, muscle or atom of small Sarah, threatened or puzzled us. She radiated simplicity and a kind of joyous empathy. She was as staunch and greathearted a companion as any boy could wish, and supremely comfortable to be with because there was nothing about her oblique or veiled or obscure. Her white grin was quick and open, her sherry eyes were warm and lit with absolute approval; her taut, supple brown body was even quicker than ours to master the thousand little athletic rituals in the dance of childhood, and her mind leaped along with and ahead of us like a dolphin in a warm sea.
Whatever we wanted to do at any given time, Sarah brimmed with enthusiasm and skill at it. She could keep up with us in any game or activity we might devise, and in some she so far excelled us that, toward anyone else so gifted, we would surely have felt disgruntled and envious. But Sarah had her mother’s quick sensitivity, and never pressed her advantage or showcased her expertise. In the water she was more than half mermaid, beautiful to watch, and on the diving board, at the top of one of her peregrine arcs, she was heartbreaking, fashioned of the air in which she hung. But in all the times Charlie and I swam with her, at the club or in the Camerons’ pool behind the Muscogee house, Sarah never went off the high dive. She did that only when she swam and dived alone or with other children.
“I think the high dive’s show-offy,” she would say, when a jostling seal-brown flock of children urged her and Charlie and me toward the looming tower at the Driving Club pool. “The high dive’s for people who have to prove they’re hot stuff.”
She and Charlie Gentry were the only two people in the world, for a long time, who knew of my total and paralytic terror of heights. They and Lucy. Lucy always knew.
Sarah had a sort of light about her rather like Lucy’s, a warmth that drew people to her all her life, to bask at her flame. All her family had it; still do, those who remain. But it was not a light that burned or devoured. I came to think later that she was, in those early days, much like Lucy, with her grace and dark vividness and her physical agility and quick, quirky mind. Sarah was, perhaps, Lucy without the hungers and shadows, Lucy glowing instead of burning. In those short and sunlit days before high school, Sarah, like Charlie, was an abundance in my life, and I was comfortable and somehow filled when she was about, on our bikes or skates or in the haunted fields of Charlie’s lost, glorious war. I liked Sarah a lot.
Charlie loved her.
I don’t know when I became aware of that, when it dawned upon me with the force of revelation that the light in Charlie’s brown eyes on those afternoon forays into the battlefields around the city was not all for the memento mori that we found there. Once I saw, it was as if I had always known, and that he had always loved her. And I think he had, literally from babyhood, loved her through all the early years when I was lost in Lucy and the ones later when we followed in her wake on our bicycles, leaving Sarah and all the other little girls behind. I remember a day when we had ridden down to the memorial park at Peachtree Battle and sat in the showering greenness of late summer, dangling our bare feet in the exhausted September water of Peachtree Creek. Sarah was talking of her great-great-grandmother, who had been a bride of nineteen when the war broke out, and had stayed alone on her newly acquired plantation down in Bibb County with a hundred slaves, a thousand head of livestock and a baby due in three months while her young husband rode off at the head of the troop he had raised.
“Sarah Tolliver Cameron,” Sarah said, her eyes alight. “I’m named for her. I hope I’ll be as brave when I’m grown up as she was. Her husband—my great-great-grandfather Beau—could have stayed with her till after the baby was born. Everybody wanted him to. She was the one who made him go. She said, ‘What would I tell your son when he asked me why his father had not gone with our brave General Lee, gone when the Confederacy needed the stout hearts of her men more than even their women did?’ Isn’t that beautiful? Don’t you think she was brave? I could never do that. I’d be scared to death.”
“No, you wouldn’t,” Charlie said, and tears of pure exaltation swam behind his glasses. “You’d do the very same thing. You’re a true Southern lady, Sarah. There’s a poem my mother knows that goes, ‘I could not love thee, dear, so much, loved I not honor more.’ That’s what your great-great-grandmama was talking about. You’d say that, too.”
His face was so aflame that I could not look at it, and dropped my head to study my feet, green-white and misshapen in the tepid water. Sarah’s face flamed at the compliment, and she dropped her eyes, too. But before she did, I saw in them that she did not love Charlie, and that the love she could not feel pierced her like an arrow. I felt that I had trespassed on a scene of unbearable intimacy, embarrassed and somehow myself dishonorable.
“What happened to your great-great-grandfather?” I asked briskly.
“He died,” she said, still not looking up. “He never did come home.”
“What battle?” Charlie breathed, ready at that moment to ascend into Heaven.
Sarah paused, and then, in a small voice, said, “He didn’t die in any battle. He died of dysentery in some camp outside of Gettysburg.”
I felt a great rush of affection for her. She could so easily have lied. It would have meant the world, the moon and stars and planets, to Charlie. But she did not. Something in me knew at that moment, and filed the knowing away, that with Sarah Cameron there was, as well as easiness, safety.
Sarah would not come to the house on Peachtree Road. She would trot as easily into Charlie’s house as I did, and she would accompany us anywhere around Buckhead that was in walking or bicycling range, but she would, when the suggestion was made to go to my house and read my comics, or play in the summerhouse, simply disappear. I was nearly thirteen before I asked her why. She was then eleven, the same age as Lucy.
“Because,” she said, looking at me levelly out of her great amber eyes, “I am afraid of Lucy.”
I knew that she was not afraid of anything in the world, at least that Charlie and I could discover, so for a moment I simply stared at her, taken aback. Presently she flushed.
“I can’t help it if you think I’m silly. I told you the truth. I really am scared of her.”
“Well, that’s just dumb,” I said finally. “Why on earth would you be scared of Lucy? You never even see her. She can’t hurt you.”
“That’s not the kind of scared I mean,” Sarah said, and she would say no more. It was years before she told me what she meant.
Oddly, Dorothy Cameron said something similar, not long after her daughter had. I was sitting on the sun-warmed ground in the Camerons’ back garden on a deceptively mild day in February, the year before I began high school, watching her put in late daylily bulbs. She wore a big straw hat of Ben’s and dungarees, and sang lustily from under the brim that entirely shadowed her face, “I hate to see that evenin’ sun go down….” Her voice was rich and low, like warmed syrup, like Sarah’s would be one day.
She stopped and pushed the brim of the hat off her face and looked at me.
“I haven’t seen Lucy in months and months,” she said. “Your aunt Willa isn’t still punishing her, is she? I hope not. It’s far too long to keep a child like Lucy penned up. It’ll break something in her.”
“No,” I said. Dorothy Cameron was the only grown woman in my entire experience to whom I did not say, “No, ma’am.”
“That is, she’s not locked in her room or anything. But she goes to Miss Beauchamp’s every day until four, and then she just stays up in her room until dinnertime. She doesn’t talk to any of us, either, not even to me. I haven’t really seen her for any longer than it takes to eat for ages. I think it’s just awful, what Aunt Willa’s done to her.”
Dorothy Cameron did not reply.
“You don’t like her, do you?” I said, seeing it suddenly. The conversation was an extraordinary one for a woman of forty and a boy of twelve to be having, but it was a mark of my curious and nourishing relationship with Dorothy Cameron that it did not seem at all so to me.
“It’s not that,” she said, sitting back cross-legged on the grass and wiping her face on her sleeve. “It’s more…that maybe I’m just a little afraid of her.”
My ears pricked. What was this fear of small, ephemeral Lucy Bondurant that lay over the hearts of the Cameron women?
“What on earth for?” I said.
“Because she needs so much,” Dorothy Cameron said. “The poor child seems to be absolutely ravenous. She’s like…some kind of motor with the governor left off, like a little engine out of control. I think she could be dangerous.”
I laughed aloud. Lucy dangerous? To whom? She was herself the most vulnerable human being I had ever known, or would know.
“Oh, Shep.” She looked at me and there was pity in her eyes. “Listen to you. You’re already in thrall. Dangerous to you, maybe. To anybody she thinks might help her, have something she needs…”
I was suddenly and clearly angry, I who could not even own my own anger at my mother. Though Lucy had pulled away from me and was not a figure of consequence in my life now, except by the sheer force of her absence, I felt the familiar stirrings of the saint-protector in my meager breast.
“Well, she’s out of luck, then, because nobody’s going to help her,” I said sharply. “Nobody can, or will. They’ve got her cut off from everybody on earth but the Negroes. And how are they going to help her?”
It was true. Lucy now spent all the time when she was not at school or in her room or eating her silent meals with ToTo in the kitchen or in the little rooms over the garage or, sometimes, over in the Camerons’ back garden, in the little house that Glenn Pickens shared with his parents. When she was there she never came around to the house or the pool where Sarah and Charlie, and Ben and I played. And she virtually never set foot in the back garden of our house, much less the summerhouse that she had so loved. Except for the lingering aura of Lucyness that lay in the air of all places where she was, I might not have known that she was still alive.
It was an odd time for me, that time swung between the first great Lucy-drunk stretch of my young childhood and high school. I had already had, in Lucy, a strange, chaste love so strong and pure that this absence of it was almost restful. And I had now a friend; had two, really, in Charlie and Sarah. I was grateful for the latter, and largely content to live in the mindless, sensation-drowned nowness of the moment, of simply being young. But there was a prowling unease and a waiting under the peaceful stasis, an emptiness. The hole in my heart was shaped like Lucy. I missed her. I did not know why she would not have anything to do with me. And yet, something in me was, disgracefully and cravenly, grateful for the hiatus.
I am sure that I knew, on some level, that it could not last.
Lucy broke it herself, on a summer night later that year, when my parents and Aunt Willa gave the largest party I could remember in the Peachtree Road house. It was in all ways a night I will not forget. It was a portentous night, and a terrible one. But if it had not happened, I might have lost her forever.
The party was, I heard my mother say, to pay back a number of social obligations that she and my father had incurred during the past season. But I knew that it was to market Little Lady and, grudgingly, Lucy, to the mother-brokers of the Buckhead Boys. Mothers of daughters just coming to flower had one like it every summer. The formal selling of familial flesh would begin much later, with the elaborate machinery of the debut year. This first testing of the waters was much like a match race for year-old fillies. Everyone would be there.
Except me.
“No,” I said. “I’m sorry. I’m not coming. Y’all can lock me up till I’m fifty, if you want to, but I’m not coming.”
They could not budge me. Try as my mother might, I simply refused to put on my lone, too-short summer suit and pass hors d’oeuvres and trays of drinks to the coiffed and curried and strange-eyed mothers of the boys who were my friends. I did not care if they put an apple in the beautiful and foolish Little Lady’s mouth and plumped her down, naked and buffed, on a silver tray in the center of the dining room table, but I was prepared to be grounded until I was twenty-one before I watched them parade Lucy before the matrons of Buckhead. I knew that she would only be there on sufferance, and that she would know it; that the real prize of this house was Little Lady, and they were only dragging Lucy out to show because people would talk if they did not…and besides, someone might take a fancy to her when the time came to marry off a son; who knew? Stranger things had happened.
“No,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
In the end, my mother gave in. Better an absent son and heir than one made stupid by sullenness.
And so I was alone when Lucy came to me in the summerhouse, lying on my back on the daybed under the lone wall lamp, reading Moby Dick, drowned in the power and sheer, awful truth of it. She stood in the door, against the light from the radiant, reverberating house, without speaking, and when I sensed her presence and raised my head to look at her, I did not know who she was for a moment. In her new yellow princess dress from J. P. Allen’s 219 Shop and her first Cuban heels, with a gardenia from the bush beside the lily pond in her cloudy hair, she was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. Before my eyes fully cleared and some of the old Lucyness settled back around her, I saw a woman, and could not speak with the weight of it on my chest.
I saw also that she held a nearly full bottle of bourbon in one hand, and that she was more than a little drunk. Her mouth was loose and her eyes hilarious with liquor. In an instant she became small Lucy Bondurant again, ten years old, gaudy trouble riding her head like a Cuban dancer’s hat.
“Hey, Gibby,” she said, giggling. “I brought you a surprise.”
I do not know what got into us that night. I had never tasted liquor and so far as I knew, neither had she. My father would be furious, I knew, if he caught us drinking his stolen bourbon in the summerhouse, and my mother would come near to dying; volubly so. I could not even imagine what Aunt Willa would do. I knew only that the consequences would be far more imaginative, far-reaching and terrible than any we had suffered so far. Maybe Lucy and her mother and sister really would have to leave the house. Perhaps I would be sent to McCallie or Gordon or Georgia Military Academy, those last resorts of the unmanageable Buckhead Boy. I did not, looking at her and feeling a great plume of pure joy and lightness rising up from somewhere behind my ribs, care in the least. Lucy was far too drunk for caring.
“Wait’ll I get a glass,” I said. And before another hour was out, we had drunk it all.
It was not late, perhaps ten-thirty. The party was in full spate. We could hear the steady, deep rhythm of it chugging along like a well-tuned engine; it would not start to falter for another two hours. The night was thick and dark and hot; moonless, almost starless. Cicadas droned off in the woods, and bugs committed small, ticking suicides against the yellow light over the summerhouse door. Honeysuckle smelled powerfully all around us. Full summer flowed in the night, but winter crouched off in the distance beyond the house and woods, winter and high school and a profound change, an ending. A deep, sweet sadness like an itch lay just beneath everything we said and did, but riding atop that was laughter, the endless, mindless, unstoppable, drowning laughter of first intoxication. I felt that I could laugh forever with the sheer gladness of having her back with me, flopped on her back on the daybed beside me with her pretty shoes kicked any which way on the floor and her skirts up, showing a ruffle of crinoline and a gleam of smooth white leg. She laughed, too, laughed and laughed, laughed the rich, bawdy, affirming laugh that will forever be in my ears, essence of Lucy.
And then, all of a sudden, she was crying. Crying so fiercely and terribly that I thought they would hear her in the house, over their music and their laughter, and I put my clumsy, bourbon-bumbling fingers over her mouth; but she shook them away. The crying spiraled up and up. I knew that if she did not stop she would go out of control, and one of those great, desperate fits of her childhood would carry her away, and she would be, for a long time, beyond help. She had not had one for years.
I pulled her against me and buried her face in my chest and held her until the crying began to slow and the trembling abate, held her so hard that her ribs hurt my fingers.
Presently she whispered, still sobbing, but less violently, “Gibby, it was so awful! I missed you so much! I finally just couldn’t stand it anymore; I thought I was going to die and they would just let me; they wouldn’t care!”
“But you wouldn’t even talk to me, Lucy,” I said. “I thought maybe you were mad at me or something; I thought you didn’t want me around you. Why didn’t you say something? I would have come….”
“I was waiting for you to come save me! You said you would; you said you always would! Gibby, why didn’t you come?”
“I…” I began, and then fell silent. She was right. I had promised. And I had not come. Why hadn’t I?
“OH, GIBBY, I WAS SO AFRAID!” It was a great, primal howl of pure aloneness, with nothing in it of childhood.
My own boyhood fled as if it had never been. I took her in my arms again and stopped her cries with my own blind mouth, and before I finally pulled myself back from the answering mouth and hands and body of my cousin Lucy, I was on top of her, and she was thrashing wildly beneath me on the daybed, and moaning words I still, to this day, blush to remember, and I was so near to entering her that only catastrophe saved me. Instead of making love to Lucy in the summerhouse in my twelfth year and her tenth, I leaned over her and vomited on the floor, from Jack Daniel’s black label and terror, and the sheer awfulness of it wrenched me sober.
I think it did her, too. I sat up, clothing half off, rubbing the vile taste off my mouth, looking at her with eyes absolutely wild and appalled, and she looked back at me from her huddle of skirts, mouth bruised and bare, silvery young breasts gleaming white, and in that instant she was sober again, and the desperate tears were gone.
In a moment she, too, was straightening her clothes as she left, pattering back toward the house through the summer dark with her new yellow shoes swinging by their straps from her hand. She did not say good night, or wave, or turn to look back when she gained the back door, and I spent the first entirely sleepless night of my life on the hot, tangled daybed, writhing in bottomless shame and misery and short-circuited adolescent tumescence.
In the morning at breakfast Lucy the darting, glinting child was back again, prattling happily to me, eating her cereal matter-of-factly, talking of the party as any excited ten-year-old would. My parents smiled on her for the first time in months, and even Aunt Willa, if she did not smile, at least stopped frowning, and only I seemed to notice the tiny quiver in Lucy’s hands and the red stigmata of what must have been as virulent a hangover as my own in her eyes. She never mentioned that night to me again.
So we were back in that old dance, she and I. Shep and Lucy, Lucy and Shep. But under it, now, a different music surged. That fall I entered the eighth grade at North Fulton High School, and the world widened just as I had thought that it would, to include a great many odd and marvelous things, but so deeply did the scent of danger and taboo cling in my mind to that night in the summerhouse that it was, literally, years before I kissed a girl again.