When I crossed Peachtree Road on a breathless, flaccid morning that September and entered for the first time the red brick pile of North Fulton High School, I quite literally walked into another world.
I had moved easily in and around Buckhead all my life, of course, and had traveled east across Peachtree Road countless times, but it was always as a voyager on a specific quest: to buy something, to see something, on the way to somewhere else. I always returned home to our side of Peachtree Road like Odysseus, bearing the treasures I had gone questing for, without being touched in any significant way by the natives of that pleasant but lesser continent. The only time I had ever been in a home east of Peachtree was with my mother, when I was quite small and she went to get a home permanent from a gifted and deferential little woman who worked out of the kitchen of her home on Pharr Road.
To me, that visit was official, service-oriented: I felt about my visit to that neat, tree-shaded frame bungalow as I did about the few times I went with Shem Cater in the Chrysler to pick up our laundry from Princess in Capitol Homes, or to fetch Amos from Pittsburgh, or Lottie, our cook, from Mechanicsville. I got no sense, from these visits, that people really lived in those places. They were, instead, destinations that provided the great houses of Buckhead with their provender.
But I went into North Fulton High School, in a sense, to live. And inside those tall, arched doors a world wider and deeper than any I had known before flowered: wider, deeper, denser, more eccentric, far more raffish, many times poorer, a hundred times more exotic, a thousand times more seductive. I first goggled at it in simple disbelief, and then dived into it like a warm and all-nourishing sea. High school came for me, and for many of the Buckhead Boys, I think, just in time.
Lucy would not be entering North Fulton for two more years, and so it must have seemed to her, still held fast in the bowery little prison of Miss Beauchamp’s School, that I was deserting her once again. She never said so; Lucy first learned her lifelong habit of long, veiled silences and closed face during her years in that terrible little dotted swiss ghetto, and she never spoke of them after they were ended except once.
“What was it really like, Luce?” I said on the day her incarceration at Miss Beauchamp’s finally ended.
“I will never in my life let anyone shut me up again. I will kill them first,” she said. And that, for Miss Beauchamp, was that.
So I knew that the school was bad and that she hated it, but I was never to know how bad, and how much. And I knew that my entering high school was abandonment anew, but again, I could only suspect how deep the wound went. In those days, Lucy was letting no one know that what was done to her in my father’s house was ongoing anguish. Already in general disfavor, she sensed, I think, that to roil the waters would be fatal. And there was always in her fierce little heart something that refused to give satisfaction to her tormentors, real or fancied.
It bothered me that she closed a part of herself to me, the saint knight bound so long ago with her protection, but the aftertaste of that night in the summerhouse still scalded my mouth, and for a very long time I found it hard to be totally natural with her. Eventually most of the strangeness simply wore away, and we drifted into our old routine of talking and reading together in the summerhouse or the sun porch or the library after school and in the evenings—for Lucy and I could never be apart for long—and I shared the bounty of high school with her, and once again we spun out the web of ken and dreams that had always bound us close. She still ran to me for comfort and showed her wild heart and its fears and joys and rages to me as she always had, but there was underneath it now a constraint that had never been there before, and I did not know how—or was unwilling—to break it. I know she must have felt my holding back, but she made no effort to move past it. All in all, Lucy had not, in the house on Peachtree Road, gotten very much return on the enormous investment of her hungry spirit and waiting heart.
And so she tightened her hold on the blacks around her. Until I came home in the late afternoons, Lucy’s custodial care was largely in the rough, pink-palmed hands of Martha Cater, and she astonished all of us, Martha included, by loving that old black martinet so deeply and unconditionally that Martha finally capitulated and loved her back. Lucy was, always, the only white child I know whom Martha could truly abide. During that time she would say, whenever one of Little Lady’s newly learned wiles and graces drew special applause at the breakfast or dinner table, “Good thang she learnin’ how to act nice and please folks, ‘cause it gon’ be all she be able to do when she git grown. Ain’t nothin’ but wind behin’ them big ol’ blue eyes.”
She would say it under her breath, coming in or going out with platters and trays, but not so far under that it did not fall upon the ears it was designed to reach, and at such times, Lucy would give her such a smile of whole-souled gratitude that it was as if the sun had come out in the room. Little Lady would pout and Aunt Willa would mottle unbecomingly with bitten-back anger, and my mother would sigh and roll her eyes at my father, but no one reprimanded Martha. To do so was unseemly and drew one down to her level, and besides, I suspect that all of us recognized the unfortunate truth in the remark. Little Lady was so abysmally unintelligent that her reading and spelling were, in fourth grade, barely on a second-grade level, and she was completely incapable of abstract thought. No matter, though. It was clear, even at age eight, that she was soon going to look just like Jane Powell.
As for Lucy, her relationship with Martha Cater was the font of a lifelong love for, and a marrow-deep kinship with, most of the blacks with whom she ever came in contact. ToTo, young Glenn Pickens over at the Camerons’, Shem and Lottie and Princess and Amos, thin, yellow Johnnie Mae at the Gentrys’, Lubie at the Slatons’…by the time she was twelve, Lucy was spending more time with the servants of the big houses around her, and their children, than with anyone else but me, and transferred to whatever new black came within her orbit, instantly and indiscriminately, all the adoration that her small heart held. By the time she was in her teens, her predilection for Negroes was a source of great embarrassment for her mother and mine, and to a lesser extent, my father. Beginning in earnest in that, her eleventh year, they forbade and cajoled and punished, but Lucy would not give up her beloved black companions.
“Yes’m,” she would say to Aunt Willa, when she was taxed yet again with spending an afternoon with Glenn Pickens or an evening with Shem and Martha in their rooms over the garage.
“Yes’m,” I understand.”
And she would smile, the blue eyes melting with contrition. But the next day she would be back with her cherished black companions once more. There was simply no stopping her.
I think it was because she saw so clearly what most of us did not, or chose not to: that the Negroes in our world were underdogs, supplicants, victims. I alone knew that this was the role in which Lucy had clad herself. Underneath her public gaiety, sassiness, charm, intelligence, generosity, what Aunt Willa called her feistiness, I had long known she felt profoundly helpless in the world, uncherished, vulnerable and alone. I knew, too, that she had fair reason to feel so. And because she did, she became, in the end, just that: helpless and vulnerable, though seldom alone, and never uncherished. That helplessness was always her greatest strength.
At any rate, in those last lonely days between childhood and puberty, Lucy at least had her blacks, and I believe that bond saved her. I had high school.
North Fulton High School gave me everything I was to know of heterogeneity until Princeton. It gave me a gleeful taste for, and sanction of, eccentricity; it showed me madness and meanness and goodness and absurdity; it limned for me both the value of particularity and the use of conformity. It showed me goodness, in the person of Miss Reba Marks, a slat-thin, blond-marcelled, much-mimicked old maid who taught passionate chemistry and died instantly at the crosswalk in front of the school, shoving to safety the Garden Hills Elementary child who darted out in front of a yellow Fulton County school bus.
It showed me evil, in the person of the short-lived, hulking, loose-lipped assistant football coach who got retarded and homely Scarlett Mitchum, from the rural wilds of Sandy Springs, pregnant, and then jeered openly at her hard, basketball-round mound of belly as she tagged after him adoringly through the halls and into the locker room.
It showed me danger, in the cool-eyed blond person of the legendary Boo Cutler, he of the lightning Mercury and the thunderous midnight runs out of Cherokee County, loaded with shine; it showed me despair, in the bleached persons of those anonymous students doomed, it seemed from birth, to be library staffers, nutrition aides, infirmary assistants, science clubbers.
And it gave me heroes, a different kind of romance from that Lucy and I had known in our reading and dreaming: not dead, not unreal. The radiant, careless ranks of the football and basketball and track stars. The editors of the Hi-Ways and the Scribbler. The cheerleaders and the beauties and the senior superlatives and the ROTC officers and their demure and beatific sponsors.
It even gave me, totally unexpectedly, a tantalizing and heady dollop of popularity. Lucy had been right; going into high school I had lengthened and toughened, and my face had grown to fit my features a bit better, and I did have something of the look of that golden, hawk-faced knight she had envisioned for me so long ago; it was my uncle Jim’s face that I saw in my mirror now, though far younger and less defined. A mute shyness underlay and belied the knight, and I was never so naive as to be unaware that my family’s money gave me a cachet I never would have had otherwise, but I was a good enough dancer, and even shone modestly as a miler and relay team member, and so the scanty popularity—or rather, to be exact, recognition—was not entirely unearned. But I never wore it comfortably.
High school did not give most of us from the big houses many new or close friends. I suspect it was already too late for that when we entered; Buckhead simply ran too deep in us. Like the Catholic Church, Buckhead kept for itself those it had for the first seven years of their lives. The boys from the other sections of Atlanta who came to North Fulton—from Sandy Springs and Brookhaven and Morningside and Peachtree Hills and Peachtree Heights and Brookwood Hills and Ansley Park—were suspicious of the smell of money that lingered about us, no matter how hard we tried to conceal or even eradicate it. Of all the boys I met in those teenaged years—literally hundreds—only one, A.J. Kemp, became close. A.J., from far out Cheshire Bridge Road. Thin, agile, clever, smoothly pompadoured, fiercely ambitious and almost feminine in demeanor; or at least, not simply and rudely masculine: always the best dancer, the lone male cheerleader, the “dresser,” the actor, the first smoker of cigarettes, the one with the most sweaters and 45 rpms. A.J., one of the funniest men I have ever known, and in the end, one of the most loyal. He attached himself to us, the moneyed ones, instantly and immovably, and made us accept him with the sheer force and wattage of his personality, and before eighth grade was over, he was one of us to the bone. I suspect he thought he had garnered great advantages for himself in the association, but it was we who got the long end of that stick. A.J. enriched us.
Years later, when I had been literally flattened under the catastrophe that set me outside the company of the Pinks and the Jells, A.J. showed up at the summerhouse at lunchtime bearing sandwiches and éclairs from Henri’s and a six-pack of beer. Few of the others had come, and I was surprised and painfully embarrassed to see him standing in the winter sunlight at the door, blinking in at my dim, musty lair.
I could not speak, and for a long moment he did not; I had the insane fancy that he would toss the food inside and flee, like a keeper at the cage of some wild and desperate animal. And then he grinned, his old, clever wizard’s grin.
“I’ll probably find gnawed bones lying around, and turds piled up in the corner, but I’m coming in whether you like it or not,” he said, doing just that and leaving the door ajar so that the clean, merciless crystal light of noon flooded in.
“And what’s more,” he added, “I’m coming back tomorrow at lunch, and the next day, and every one after that until you quit living in this cave with the wolves and act like a human being again.”
Tears of sheer, weak humility and gratitude filled my eyes, and I turned away, mumbling, “It’s good to see you, A.J.”
He followed me into the summerhouse and put his arms around me and hugged me. It was so unlike A.J. to do such a thing that my faltering composure limped back, and I was able to look curiously into his face.
“Aren’t you afraid I’ll set your pants on fire?” I said.
“Nope,” he said, sweeping litter off my coffee table and setting out the sandwiches and beer. “But I used to wish I could set yours on fire. I just want to say one thing, Shep, and then I won’t say anything more about all this crap. We all know you couldn’t have had anything to do with it; we know that. The others ought to come, but they probably won’t, for a while; you’d know better than me why that is, but I do know it’s true. The reason I can come is I was never really one of you, no matter what you thought, or I did. This Buckhead shit doesn’t bind me. So consider me an emissary from us all, and let me tell you that we think it’s all a load of horse manure and we…we love you.”
He mumbled this last, and his thin monkey’s face flamed, and he ducked his head and bit into his sandwich. I got up and went into the bathroom and wept. Only one other man—not my father, not Ben Cameron—had ever told me that he loved me. No man ever did again.
A.J. came for lunch at least three days a week for a month after that, leaving his job at the bank downtown and taking the 23 Oglethorpe bus to the stop at Peachtree and Lindbergh and walking straight through the front yard to the summerhouse, bypassing the big house and any chance encounter with my mother. We never spoke of the fire again, only of the more distant past—of high school at North Fulton, and what it had given us. I don’t suppose I will ever be able to tell A.J. what he gave me during that dark month. But I believe that he knows.
What high school gave us all, the gift that the Atlanta of that time alone in all the world had to give, was the Pinks and the Jells. I don’t think any high school experience anywhere could have been even remotely like it. I know nothing has ever been precisely like it since.
No one is quite sure what the terms meant. “Pinks” is at least moderately self-explanatory: Pink tulle. Pink angora. Pink Revlon and Tangee lipstick. Pink cashmere twin sets. Pinks, for the girls of that golden elect of an entire generation. “Jells,” or “Jellies,” is almost impossible to etymologize. Jelly beans, I suppose, give birth to the term: bright, sweet, foolish, frivolous, almost entirely without substance or nourishment, but long indeed on pleasure. A confection completely of the moment.
The Jells of Buckhead toiled not, neither did they spin. They did not, on the main, play football or any other team sport, though some of them excelled at the showier and more indolent individual sports, like tennis, swimming and diving. Some even rode horses with considerable flair and style. All could dance, though, and did, endlessly. Dancing, in one sense, is what the Pinks and the Jells were all about.
The high school athletes largely ignored the Jells, and spoke of them, if they did, with contempt, and they were never a part of that elite teenaged brotherhood of drag racers, contact sports players, booze runners, Saturday night brawlers, bar drinkers, tobacco spitters, and legendary cocksmen. The Jells might occasionally hang out where the jocks and the toughs did, at the Peachtree Hills Pub or the Blue Lantern or even, and much worse, the Cameo Lounge down near the Greyhound bus station, but they were never welcome or comfortable there, and did not make a habit of it.
Almost to a Jell they worshiped the draggers, those fleet young gods of speed and smoke, and their rococo souped-up chariots. I remember countless afternoons and Saturdays, hanging over the fence out at the weedy dirt strip near the Bell bomber plant—later Lockheed—in Marietta, watching Boo Cutler and Floyd Sutton and their hard-muscled, greasy-nailed, narrow-eyed ilk throttling their screaming Mercurys and Pontiacs. We wouldn’t have risked our necks and our cashmeres in the cars and couldn’t have driven them if we had dared, but we worshiped, nonetheless. Automobiles were our Baals, our golden calves. Not all of us had them, by any means; Jellhood was bestowed on the poor and the average as well as the rich, and many Jells simply could not afford them. But most of the Buckhead Jells did. I received a vicious-looking two-toned red and white Plymouth Fury trimmed with bronze for my sixteenth birthday, and was as surprised as anyone at the gift. Even I did not think I was the type for such a car. I suppose it might have been my father’s last shot at making me into a fitting rich man’s son, a creature of charisma and dash, and it succeeded, at least for a little while, for it bought me no end of attendant Jells and flocking, fluttering Pinks. In the end, though, I could not sustain the image, and increasingly during the last two years of high school, it was Lucy who drove the Fury. It was always far more suited to her.
The Jells existed because the Pinks did. We squired them, admired them, set them off like shadow boxes, and ultimately—the point, I suppose, of it all—many of us married them. To have been a Pink in Atlanta in those dreaming days between Depression and Camelot was to have known, briefly, a kind of lambent perfection that does not—cannot—come again to any given life. How could it? It had nothing whatsoever to do with reality; Pinkhood was a four-year carnival a million miles long and an inch deep. What it lacked in substance it made up for in sheer excessiveness and style. Total adulation was the order of the day, and the girl who knew how to command it led a sort of Grand Waltz so intricate, all-consuming and extravagant that everything else—college, the debut year, the Junior League, sometimes even marriage—tended to pale beside it.
Not all the high school girls of Atlanta knew how to command it, by any means. Those who did not were ciphers, nonentities, miserable; those who did were Pinks. It was that simple, and that brutal. The ones who could not never forgot it. The ones who could never did, either. Many Buckhead women of my acquaintance will tell you, over a fourth or fifth gin and tonic at the club, that being a Pink in Atlanta was the best time of their lives. God help them.
What a Pink had to do to attain and keep the title was to be popular. It meant a kind of sprightly flirtatiousness, a covertly sensual perkiness, which forbade even as it invited. A fresh-faced, ponytailed actress of stunningly professional naiveteé and virginity named Millie Perkins was the role model for my generation of Pinks, who all learned to flip their ponytails and thrust out their Peter-Panned breasts even as they clamped their knees together. Beauty was not a necessity, but pertness was. “Cute” was the best thing you could call a Pink. “Peppy” was next best. Monumental self-assurance underlay everything, or its facsimile; a Pink would rather be caught at a Phi Pi dance without an orchid to her name or an unbooked no-break than be adjudged nervous. Wender & Roberts must have led the nation in sales of Mum and Odor-O-No in those days, for a Buckhead Pink never sweated, did not even mist; and though she might duck her head and blush a hundred times a day, and drop her Maybellined lashes, it was never from social embarrassment.
“She’s a lovely girl; so poised,” was the highest accolade our mothers could bestow on our steadies. It was tantamount to the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, and predated many of the Northwest’s grandest weddings.
Somehow, by the time they reached high school, the small, nondescript girls we had known and tormented and ignored all our lives had flowered overnight into Pinks. I never knew personally a girl from Buckhead who failed, or eschewed, Pinkness. It came with the Cedar 7 telephone exchange. There must have been some, but I think they were sent away to schools where lives and futures did not ride on such fickle, flimsy steeds.
Lucy knew who they were. I put the question to her once, when she had been at North Fulton about a year, and had bloomed into the pinkest Pink of them all.
“The fleebs?” she said carelessly. “They go off somewhere up North and study. They get acne and A’s. They’re gone, poof; you never see ’em again after seventh grade.”
“Don’t people think they got P.G.?” I said. It was what my crowd whispered about girls who suddenly enrolled in out-of-state schools.
“Lord, no.” Lucy laughed. “Nobody would screw a fleeb.”
The Pinks and the Jells grew up within the armature of a high school fraternity and sorority system that for sheer baroqueness would have dimmed the court of Louis XIV. Other cities may have had such organizations, but ours was an arena of such Venetian excess that by the time we graduated and met the real world head-on, many of us were ruined forever for it, and wandered through our lives in a sort of bewildered and petulant fog of loss, like colored Easter chicks peeping away in a coal yard. There were about twenty quasi-Greek organizations all told, perhaps a dozen fraternities and seven or eight sororities. Within their ranks was a gilded subculture of the “best”: Phi Pi, to which Lucy and Sarah and Little Lady and all the girls I knew belonged, and Rho Mu, which was mine simply because it was where the Buckhead Boys invariably landed. Most of the larger Atlanta high schools had chapters; we had brothers and sisters at North Fulton, Boys’ and Girls’ highs, Marist, Druid Hills, Northside, NAPS (North Avenue Presbyterian School) and Washington Seminary.
Well, of course, Washington Seminary. So interwoven in the fabric of Buckhead life was that stately, columned old white mansion on the wooded knoll where a Ramada Inn stands now that practically every young woman of sterling Atlanta lineage since 1878 had been through its massive doors. Of my set, only Sarah Cameron, whose parents did not approve of private secondary schools, and Lucy, whose mother could not afford it and who in any case would have died before she allowed herself to be sent into another girls’ school, did not attend. Both went to North Fulton, and neither suffered for it, for the education dispensed in the white high schools of Atlanta in those days was thorough, workmanlike and broad. In truth, more good, budding minds probably had fires lit under them in these schools than at most of the surrounding private schools favored then by Atlanta families, Washington Seminary included.
It was not, really, for an education that the daughters of the big houses went to Seminary, but for the first-rate polishing and marketing offered there. Traditionally, the sixth and last class period was devoted to the rapt, serious grooming of hair, nails and faces, in preparation for the ritual after-school stroll from front door down the driveway to sidewalk on Peachtree Road, where the assembled ranks of Atlanta’s Jells, gathered like the clans of Scotland from the surrounding high schools, jostled and lolled, watching the sweet-swaying Pinks come nonchalantly out.
I can still see us, laughing in my idling Fury or A.J.’s renegade Chevy, watching the vestal parade switching down the driveway. Known to us since birth, the parading Pinks were as strange and exotic then as Mayan princesses. It was as if we had never seen them before.
“Look at those boobies!” A.J. would squeal in exaltation, his face contorted in ecstasy. “Look at that pair!”
And we would hoot, groan, clutch our heads and fall against the seats in transports of rapture, as if we had never seen that particular pair of cashmere-sweatered breasts before in all our lives.
“Oh, Jesus, look at that can,” Snake would bellow. “Backfield in motion!”
And we would beat upon the sides of the cars, baying excelsior. I do not know why Seminary’s chatelaines did not chase us away with fire hoses, but they did not. The school always lived Louis Sullivan’s great adage, “Form follows function.”
Oh yes, Washington Seminary knew on which side its dainty bread was buttered. It took the combined ranks of the city’s school officials close to two decades to stamp out the sororities and fraternities, and at the height of the campaign, in 1952, Seminary lifted its lovely head, gave an aristocratic sniff and announced that it would ignore the ban. As Washington Seminary went, so went the city. The Pinks and the Jells went dancing on.
Indeed, dancing was what we were about, we wellborn, time-lavished, cashmered and saddle-shod spawn of this small city on the make and on its way up. From December to June, each Friday night, one or another of the sororities or fraternities would hold its great formal dance of the season, to which all the other sororities and fraternities in Atlanta were invited, and in the fall, before the formality set in with the winter rains, we had citywide skirt-and-sweater dances. Thirty-odd glittering, jittering Fridays, stretching in a crackling silver skein from October until late May, and on each one of them, like a gemstone, a dance.
We danced at the Brookhaven Country Club and the Druid Hills Golf Club and the Ansley Golf Club and sometimes, if one of our parents would stand sponsor, at the Driving Club. We danced in high school gymnasiums and out at Robinson’s Tropical Gardens on the Chattahoochee River and in each other’s homes and on each other’s porches and terraces and verandas, and around each other’s pools. We slow-danced, noses buried in fragrant, Halo- and Prell-scented hair, fingers splayed against fiercely boned young waists, bare, dizzying white shoulders and cheeks pressed against us, lost and drowning in “Moonglow” or “Sentimental Journey” or “These Foolish Things,” aching with love and grateful for the bobbling, swaying bells of crinoline that smothered our fierce erections.
We jitterbugged, skittering and popping at the end of one another’s arms like drops of water on a griddle; our springy, nimble feet flew like gandy dancers’ to the strains of “Pennsylvania 6-5000” and “In the Mood” and “String of Pearls” and “Chattanooga Choo Choo.” Music washed over us and eddied around us as endlessly as the sea: tides of music lapped through our days and surged over our nights. Music poured out of record players and jukeboxes and radios all over Atlanta, connecting us one to another like a surf of blood in our veins; music spilled out of the horns and reeds and drums and pianos of fifty different combos and dance bands, from Bill Haley and the Emory Aces to the legendary likes of Ralph Marterie and Woody Herman, the latter secured through the good offices of a brother or cousin at Georgia Tech and our fathers’ cash money.
We waltzed and tangoed and shagged and lindied; we bunny-hopped and boogied. Some of us even Charlestoned, and A. J. Kemp once drew a cheering, clapping crowd at Brookhaven with a twenty-minute exhibition of the Lambeth Walk, looking for all the world, in his rented tux and his boneless snake’s elegance, like a lank-haired Fred Astaire. Stag lines ran out the doors into the May-sweet nights on half a dozen country club terraces, and we cut in methodically on the Pinks of our choice in a grand, ritualized pattern of advance and retreat. Some exceptional Pinks could not dance three steps before they were cut in on, and one girl—I think it was Little Lady, just after I went away to school—established the amateur record with thirty breaks during one chorus of “Stardust.” That one still stands, I am told. All over Atlanta, on those luminous Fridays, in the velvet dark of winter and the tender new green lace of spring, to the music that beat like a pulse buried deep in the marrow of our youth, we danced. We danced.
“We’ll remember this all our lives,” Sarah Cameron said to me once, at one of the first sorority dances I took her to. She wore a cloud of yellow tulle over a bobbing hoop that belled up in back when I pressed her against me, swaying to the slow, sinuous strains of “Stardust,” and a hypnotic river of honeysuckle poured into the open windows of Brookhaven from the fringes of the dark golf course.
“I’ll remember that I flunked geometry because of this stupid dance,” I said sourly. In the beginning I was distinctly ungracious to Sarah.
“You’re an awful fool, Shep,” little Sarah Cameron said. I remember that she was not smiling.
Dancing would have been enough to make those years memorable: thirty-five dances in as many weeks, and none to be missed, if you were a true Buckhead Pink or Jell. But in addition, there was always a formal, seated dinner beforehand, at one of the city’s scant few “good” restaurants, like Hart’s on Peachtree, or at the Paradise Room of the Henry Grady Hotel, or in some long-suffering parents’ dining room, and a breakfast afterward that might last until 4:00 A.M. Sometimes, after the breakfast, we would skin into blue jeans and pile into whatever cars could be commandeered, and go out and climb the great, black bulk of Stone Mountain to the east of the city, lying winded and lipstick-smeared on the granite brow as the sun came sidling up. Or we would drop off our dates, after some obligatory skirmishing in the front or back seat—for no Pink would catch monk in earnest unless she was seriously pinned, and though some of us did go steady in the early years of high school, most played the field until lust and attrition parted us from our pins in exchange for heavy, expert petting in our later years—and go out and race, ineptly, our cars on the Marietta Highway, old U.S. 41, until dawn. I don’t remember why our parents let us stay out so late weekend after weekend, or how we survived the sheer fatigue of it. I do remember being as tired toward the end of each spring term as if I had mononucleosis. Tired and broke.
Because each event on any given dance evening—dinner, the dance itself and breakfast afterward—meant, for a Pink, a date with a different boy, and each date meant an orchid. Not just any orchid, either; purple was so far beyond the pale that a fat vocational student at Southwest DeKalb High wouldn’t have worn one to a DeMolay formal at the Veterans of Foreign Wars post. Pure, waxen, pristine white, nestled in net and tied with satin: we bought forests of them. I can see them now, on the bosoms and wrists and at the waists of the girls of Buckhead, usually three and as many as six, if the Pink was an officer of the sorority giving the dance.
I remember a dress that Lucy had, in her sixteenth year and my last one at North Fulton; it was the deep, jeweled navy of a Christmas night sky; silk velvet, and scalloped up at the hem to show the clouds of snowy crinolines underneath. Lucy had chosen it as a background for her white orchids; Red Chastain was taking her to the Phi Pi winter formal, and she was the social chairman that year. She had other dates for dinner and breakfast; I don’t remember who—and all in all, eight orchids were pinned and tied and taped about her. There were three on the strapless bodice of the dress, one on each wrist, one at her waist, one at the front scallop of the skirt, and one in her hair, worn loose on her shoulders, as cloudy and drifting as a squid’s ink in a clear sea.
“You look like a florist shop,” I said, as she stood looking at herself in the ormolu mirror in the foyer, waiting for whoever was taking her to the dinner.
“I look wonderful,” she said, smiling dreamily. “Nobody has ever had this many orchids. Seven is as many as there’s been, ever. I’m going to keep them all in my scrapbook, to remember the night I had more orchids than any girl ever in this town.”
“Well, it’s going to smell like a funeral parlor,” I said meanly, stung because I could afford only one orchid for Sarah Cameron, who had asked me to be her escort, and my father would not spring for a second. Stung by that, and by something else that I did not care, then, to examine.
“The only reason you’ve got that many is because Red’s father is stinking rich.”
“Exactly,” Lucy said, the smile deepening. “Red’s daddy likes me. He wants Red to bring me by before we go to the club so he can see me in my dress.” She turned from the mirror to look at me, her face incandescent.
“Oh, Gibby, you know who I wish could see me tonight? With all these flowers?”
“Yes,” I said, smiling back at her, the meanness gone from my heart to be replaced by a great wrench. “I know who. He’d be so proud of you he’d pop his buttons, Luce. You’d knock his eyes out.”
“Would I?” she breathed, looking at me with eyes that saw, not me, but that first long love. “Would I?”
“Yes,” I said. “You bet your fanny you would.”
Orchids, orchestras, satin and velvet and tulle dresses over drifts of crinoline, rented tuxedos; dinners and dances and breakfasts. No wonder we all worked summers and often weekends, even we sons of millionaires and near-millionaires. Wonder only that the Jells who were not rich could afford it at all, even with their jobs. I know that A.J. worked much harder during high school to finance the seasons of the Pinks and the Jells than he did to maintain himself later at the University of Georgia, clerking after school and on Saturdays at Bates Camera on East Paces Ferry, and running the projector weeknights at the Buckhead Theatre. I cannot imagine what the parents of those resourceless Jells felt when another autumn of dancing and spending came wheeling around. Despair, probably. But a kind of fierce unspoken pride, too, I’d be willing to bet. To be the progenitors of an Atlanta Jell, to have sired one of the elect of a generation…it must have made up for a great many skimpinesses and meannesses and omissions. I hope so. I know that Melba Kemp, A.J.’s widowed mother, who saw him through high school on her earnings from the Jolly Tot Shop, told me just before she died, when A.J. and Lana brought her by to see me, that those years when he ran with the Buckhead Jells were, in spite of the privation, the happiest of her life.
“Why?” I said, thinking of her days in the shop on aching feet, and her nights alone in the tiny house at the far end of Cheshire Bridge while A.J. was out at the dances in the country clubs and great houses that she would never enter.
“Because it was something, that crowd you all ran around with,” she said, smiling. “All those dances and parties, and a different pretty girl for every one…You boys were really something. I never saw A.J. have such a good time since.”
A.J. gave Lana and me a little mock shrug of demurral and rolled his brown eyes heavenward behind his mother’s back. But despite the gesture, I knew that she was right. A.J. was born to be an Atlanta Jell, and nobody I ever knew did it better.
Pink-and-Jellhood was not limited to the splendid preenings of the sororities and fraternities, by any means. For its initiates, it reached out to define, consume and finally become the whole of life. After school, after the ritual viewings and pairings on the sidewalk in front of Washington Seminary and the concrete circle in front of North Fulton High, we stuffed ourselves into the available automobiles and fanned out to take the city.
There was, in the full-blown years of Jellhood, my Fury; there was Snake Cheatham’s 1939 Mercury convertible, the Black Booger; there was Ben Cameron’s souped-up Chevy, which he bought with his entire life’s savings on his sixteenth birthday, and A. J. Kemp’s disreputable and fiercely admired 1935 Chevy without top or fenders, which Buckshot Jones at Northside Auto Service on Howell Mill finally gave him, just to keep him from mooning around the premises anymore. We careened all over the city in that naked, shivering wreck. We would stop at the last filling station before we crossed the Atlanta city limits hurtling toward downtown, and A.J. would leap over the door and lie on his back underneath and insert the muffler. Coming home, he would repeat the performance and remove the ineffectual device. Otherwise, around Buckhead, he simply drove it flat out and braying. None of the Buckhead constabulary particularly cared. A.J. was something of a local hero to auto aficionados for getting the Chevy running at all.
Some of the girls had cars, too. Freddie Slaton’s father gave her a little red Triumph for her sixteenth birthday, probably and rightly figuring that hornet-mean little Freddie was going to need all the advantages she could get. Most of the Washington Seminary Pinks had cars. One way or another, after school and on Saturdays, we took to the streets like flocks of migratory birds, and our flyways were fully as stylized and inviolable.
Around Buckhead, we favored Wender & Roberts Drugstore for afternoon milkshakes and Cokes, and afterward the Buckhead and the Garden Hills theaters. Farther afield, we might alight at Rusty’s or the Pig ’n Whistle or Peacock Alley or Harry’s or Moe’s & Joe’s or the fabled Varsity, down at North Avenue and Spring, near Georgia Tech. Dr. Brewer’s Wagon Wheel at the intersection of Piedmont, Roswell and Old Ivy was popular for barbecue, and Tyree’s Pool Hall, where the one-eyed hustler would take on all comers, was forbidden and thus irresistible. In the summers, we steeped in the chlorinesmitten, azure pools in Garden Hills and Moseley Park, or at our parents’ clubs, or in one or another of our backyards.
Bowling alleys with lurid pinball machines and jukeboxes, the covered bridge out at Sope Creek, the fatally alluring Chattahoochee River which was the dividing line between Fulton and Cobb counties, the ball field down behind Peacock Alley, Minor and Carter’s Drugstore downtown—they all knew our imprint, held the ghosts of our restless and bedazzled spirits. Oh, the magic, the eldritch, spindrift glamour of streetlights through the new April green of the trees spilling over Rusty’s or Harry’s parking lot, honeysuckle and mimosa as thick in our nostrils as the Emeraude and Tigress rising steamily from the unimaginable cleavages beneath the Peter Pan collars and sleeveless, V-necked blouses. Blood and Miller High Life pounded so forcefully through our veins then that we sometimes felt that we would simply burst apart with the sheer being of young.
Inevitably, with all those hormones rampaging and all the beer and illicitly bought gin and bourbon flowing and all that forbidden white flesh flashing, there were fist fights. Most occurred during the dances, though usually outside during intermissions. I remember one, in my senior year, at Druid Hills Country Club, when Red Chastain knocked a marauding Jell from Boys’ High clear through the French doors onto the terrace after he tried repeatedly to cut in and capture a shimmering Lucy during a no-break. In those days, it was not unknown for a popular Pink to have her no-breaks booked years in advance, and by that time everyone knew that the third no-break at each formal belonged, on Lucy’s card, to Red. The Boys’ High Jell could not plead ignorance. It was a short fight, and a brutal one, and though no one particularly liked Red, we all thought the mangled Boys’ High Jell got what he deserved. No one, in those days, broke the rules of Pink-and-Jellhood with impunity.
Our fathers tolerated these fights with remarkable humor and resignation, though our mothers usually wept or scolded. We might be dutifully admonished, and sometimes desultorily punished or grounded, but our fathers knew, as we sensed, that it was important for us to learn to do our fighting in a controlled and gentlemanly manner. I am sure that my father suffered keenly because I never ventured to test my antlers in combat. It may have been a time dominated by females, by the pursuit and courting of them, but it was, nonetheless, rankly masculine in tone.
“How’d you get that shiner, kiddo?” Ben Cameron asked me once after Sunday lunch at the Driving Club, pointing to the black eye I had gotten from Snake’s elbow during a particularly exuberant boob-spotting session outside Seminary. “What does the other guy look like?”
“Shep doesn’t fight,” my father said dryly. “He’s a lover. Didn’t you know?”
Since I was sixteen and had never had a formal date except for Sarah, I reddened.
Oh yes, my father suffered.
And so in this way, through our glittering citywide networks and borne on our immortal wheels, we became true princes of the city, ranging all over it, tasting it in all its moods and hours and seasons, stretching in its sunlight, exulting in its warm darkness. It was no wonder that none of us wanted to go away to school, except, perhaps, those, like me, on whom Jellhood always sat askew. It was a ridiculously hedonistic, totally self-absorbed existence. In those cloud-borne, pell-mell days, we were our own first great obsession.
Our second was sex.
When I think of the sexual tenor of those times, what flashes back to me is a cold well of fear in the stomach and a constantly aching crotch, covered with a thin veneer of goatish, biceps-knuckling bravado. From puberty on through graduation, and often beyond and into college, we were so obsessed with sex that I wonder how we hid our perpetual erections, or dragged them through the endless days and nights. We awoke to wet sheets; talked of sex on the way to school; stared and fantasized and discussed the Pinks through six entire periods; nudged as close as we could in the cars and booths and movie seats after school in order to brush, with elaborate casualness, a breast or thigh; necked desperately with whoever would let us in the long evenings after dates, in front of darkened houses and at such designated lovers’ lanes as Sope Creek, Oakland Cemetery, the public parks and the drive-ins (on the last rows, out of the lights); petted to the limits of sanity and Pinkhood if we were pinned or about to be; and then went home and jerked off guiltily and in vast relief before falling asleep, awaking damply and beginning the routine once again. Like an army of Onans, we spilled our seed mightily upon the ground, but almost never in the patch for which it was designed.
In pairs or in groups we lied elaborately about what we did to whom, and how she moaned and begged for more, and where she learned how to do the things she knew, and we tried to appear cool with each other even as we pulled sweaters and magazines over our laps to conceal the craven tents leaping in our blue jeans. We ranged as far away as the infamous Plaza Pharmacy on Ponce de Leon to buy rubbers that soon desiccated in our wallets, and the Jell who did not have on the surface of his Buxton an imprinted circle from a condom was no Jell at all. Even I had one, given to me by Snake Cheatham, who was our official Trojan and Ramses distributor, but needless to say the occasion for it never arose, and I’m not sure I would have known how to put it on if it had. And despite our preening and crowing and posturing, I don’t think many of us did. We all said we fucked. I think I could count on the fingers of one hand the Jells in high school who actually did. If you didn’t, you talked about it. If you did, you didn’t. It was just that simple. The quiet ones of us were the ones that, in our secret hearts, we revered. But we simply could not manage to keep quiet about the Great American Nooky Quest that drove us like a generation of lemmings.
“Did she? Did she?” we would all snigger fiercely in homeroom, to the one of us who had announced, the day before, that scoring that night was all but accomplished.
“Fucking A,” the scorer would say carelessly, making a jaunty circle with thumb and forefinger.
“What was it like?” Breaths held, hearts pounding.
“Like bombs away, man.”
“Jesus!”
The key, of course, was the Pinks. It was a tenet of Pinkhood that a Pink knew how to promise worlds, galaxies, universes with her eyes and smile and voice, but knew, too, how to deliver virtually nothing and still keep the Jells circling. Most of the Pinks I knew could do it. I don’t know how they managed; it must have been more difficult than quantum physics, given the length and frequency of the monk sessions in the automobiles of the Jells.
Even the girls who were pinned were presumed chaste until proven otherwise, and since there was literally no way to do that except by an obvious pregnancy, the presumption held even when the couple’s automobile was seen to be rocking in the last row of the drive-in like a dory in a high gale. Virgins or not, the Pinks of Atlanta twitched through their high school years wearing chastity like armor, and the girl who screwed and liked it, or even worse, told, was out of the pack faster than a spavined yearling in a migratory caribou herd. I never knew a Buckhead Pink who had sex and admitted it except Lucy, and somehow all rules were off when it came to her. The prices she paid were higher, and had been paid earlier, than any we could exact.
It was an era of incredible double standards and witless innuendo, fueled by unrequited lust and made both piquant and terrifying by the absolute taboo of pregnancy. “P.G.” or “preggers” or “knocked up” were punch lines to locker room jokes and also the words a Jell dreaded most to hear from a white-faced, tearful steady. For a Pink, pregnancy was pure and simple social suicide. I’m sure many more Buckhead girls than I knew about made predawn visits to the sinister clinic in Copper Hill, Tennessee, whose address every prudent Jell secreted in his wallet along with the Trojans, and I am equally sure a number of quiet visits to respectable Northside physicians, who just happened to be family friends, ended in more than an invoice. Snake Cheatham, who went through Emory Med and interned at Grady before he snared a residency at Piedmont, told me much later that during our college years some people whose names were most vividly and fondly inscribed in our Hi-Ways came to him asking how to terminate a pregnancy…but that was when we were, mostly, at Tech and Georgia, in the wider and looser days of fraternity parties in earnest and far more open drinking.
I knew of no illicit pregnancies though there was always talk going around. I don’t know how the Jells of my high school days coped when they got caught, if they did. Not one of the Pinks dropped abruptly out of school like one or two anonymous non-Pinks did each year. Maybe some of those summers abroad, or at relatives’ cottages at the more remote resorts, had dual purposes; I wouldn’t have known a pregnancy in those days if the water had burst at my feet. And no matter what lies and half-truths we told each other, no matter what female functions and phenomena we tittered about—breasts, buttocks, menstruation, masturbation, aphrodisiacs, sexual techniques, the dark convolvulus of the female genitalia—we would not have talked about pregnancy and abortion. It was far too terrifying and too near.
But the quest for tail went on unabated through our high school years and into and through college. Some Jells got their first experience with sex from Frances Spurling, a cheerful nymphomaniac of fifteen who lived with her parents behind a seedy white frame grocery store on Roswell Road, who would call up the boy of her choice and say, “Your bananas are ready. You can pick them up at three.” Or four, or whenever her parents were not about. And the boy would go, trembling and swaggering, over to the store and park behind the stock shed out back and steal into the filthy, black, cobwebby interior, and Frances, her underpants down around her meaty ankles, would be awaiting him on a pile of gunnysacks, and would grab him and stuff him inside her with no more ado than if she were manning the grocery cash register, and buck wildly for a moment, until he spilled his nervous seed more in bewilderment and haste than passion, and then dry herself off with the gunnysack and push him, still zipping up, out the door, saying, “Bananas are a dollar a pound this week.”
My own inevitable encounter with Frances came the Halloween I was fourteen, a good year after everyone else I knew claimed to have been ushered through the gates of Heaven by her. For sheer ignominy, little in my life has ever matched it.
The year before that, Snake Cheatham had organized a small and highly elect club, a sort of secret society among the Buckhead Jells, called the Touchdown Club, and membership was based solely upon one’s having scored with a woman. Since there was no conceivable way to prove this with any Pink in her right mind, the initiation rite agreed upon was a visit to Frances Spurling, the successful completion of which she rewarded with an X made with red ballpoint ink on the wrist of the new initiate. It was diabolically clever and simple: Frances proved to be incorruptible in this matter, and would not award the coveted red X unless the deed was, indeed, accomplished. Since she received from each initiate the sum of two dollars cash money for each rite of passage, the temptation to accept the occasional discreet bribe must have been great, but Frances hung tough. Once on the path to the storage shed behind the grocery, one knew one had no recourse but to perform.
Charlie Gentry and I were the last of the Buckhead Boys to join the Touchdown Club, and finally let ourselves be goaded and humiliated into this Allhallows foray simply because there was no other even faintly honorable alternative.
“Tonight or never, Bondurant and Gentry,” Snake jeered that afternoon. “And if it’s never, the whole school’s going to know about it in the morning. Frances awaits you at nine. X marks the spot.”
Charlie and I set out that night with the spirits of the Atlanta dead and the hoots and jeers of the all-too-live Buckhead Boys in our ears, desperation and utter despair stopping our voices.
“I’ll probably get asthma and die,” Charlie said finally, pedaling woefully along beside me out black Roswell Road on his bicycle. “I’ll probably choke to death right there on top of old Frances, or wherever you’re supposed to get. I hope I do.”
“Listen,” I said, shame nearly strangling me. “I’ve got a red ballpoint pen and twenty-five dollars. It’s all I’ve saved for the past two years. I’m going to offer to buy her off, and if she says no, we can just make an X on our wrists and say we did, and she’s lying.”
“No,” said Charlie, who would rather face Torquemada than lie. “We can’t do that, Shep.”
“Well, I can,” I flared. “You and your principles can fuck old Frances Spurling till midnight, if you can’t bear to lie about her. Thank goodness I’m not as pure as you.”
“I’m not pure,” Charlie said miserably. “I’ve got seventeen dollars in my pocket myself. But if she won’t take our money we’re dead, because Snake says she has her own secret way of making the X, and nobody but her knows what it is. It won’t do us any good to lie.”
We pedaled on in silence, doomed.
But the great god Pan was kind to us that night. When we reached the stygian storage shed behind the dark grocery and knocked timidly on the door, and at the muffled “Come in,” pushed it open and went inside, it was to see Frances Spurling, by the light of a khaki plastic Girl Scout flashlight, sprawled out on her gunnysacks looking distinctly unseductive in flannel pajamas, a big, bulky wool bathrobe and huge fleecy slippers. Even Charlie and I could tell it was no costume for deflowering youths. Our hearts leaped up in our racketing breasts.
“You can just forget it for tonight,” Frances said sullenly. “I fell off the roof just before you came.”
“Jesus,” I said, wincing. “You shouldn’t be out here, Frances. Did it…is it real bad?”
“Well, it ain’t a lot of fun, I’ll tell you,” she said. “But there ain’t going to be any bananas tonight, you bet.”
“Lord, I guess not,” Charlie said vehemently, real horror in his eyes. “You want us to call your folks? They probably ought to take you to the doctor….”
“I don’t need no doctor, I just need to get in bed with a heating pad,” she said. “I been out there in the cold waiting for y’ll since eight. I reckon that’s worth two dollars.”
“Well, sure,” I said, reaching for my wallet, deliverance spinning lightly in my ringing ears.
“No,” Charlie said stubbornly. “I’m sorry about your…accident, Frances, but it’s not our fault. We didn’t know…and we came all the way out here on our bicycles. I don’t see how you can ask for two dollars for that.”
“Charlie…” I began desperately.
“We’ll give it to you if you’ll do the X’s, though,” he said.
She glared at him balkily. Then she said crossly, “Oh, shit, all right, stick your wrists out here.”
We did. She made quick, sharp crisscrosses on them, and then held her fat pink palm out for the money. I got mine out. Charlie did too, and then paused.
“Are they the right X’s?” he said.
“They’re the right X’s, you little sonofabitch,” she said. “Now get on out of here. My daddy would shoot you in the head if he caught you out here.”
We went. We went pedaling back down Roswell Road toward the three-way intersection where Snake and the others were waiting for us with flags flying and hearts high, shouting and singing, “We’re off to see the Wizard” and “I’ve been working on the railroad.”
“I’ve been working on old Frances,” we bellowed.
But as we neared the intersection Charlie began to go quiet, and when we got off our bikes and went up to Snake and held out our anointed wrists, Charlie suddenly blurted, “Wait a minute. It’s all a lie. We didn’t. We couldn’t. I mean, Frances couldn’t. She fell off the top of her house tonight and hurt herself. She really couldn’t. We did try, Snake.”
Snake just stared at us for a moment, and then he began to laugh. He hugged himself and staggered around on the freezing sidewalk; he bent double and yelled and wept and howled with laughter; he beat the wall of Wender & Roberts, and covered his face with his hands, and bayed his hideous mirth to the sky. All the others laughed, too. Ben, and Tom Goodwin, and Pres, and A.J.—they laughed and laughed, and it seemed to me that I would hear the sound of that laughter eternities later, safe at last under the quiet earth of Oakland.
“You silly shits,” Snake roared. “‘She fell off the top of her house and hurt herself’! Oh, Jesus! Don’t you know anything? She fell off the roof! She got the curse! She was riding the rag! She was flying Baker flag! Oh, Jesus!”
He did not, after all, tell the entire school that Charlie and I failed in our attempt to screw Frances Spurling. He simply and for four years after that awful night called us, in front of everyone we knew, the Roofing Brothers. I do not know to this day if anyone outside our crowd knew what it meant. Probably everyone did.
It was a high price to pay for not buying Frances’s bananas.
Others like Frances did a brisk trade in the various neighborhoods adjacent to Buckhead, and I suppose it’s a good thing, or the Jells would have, to a man, gone to their marriage beds virgins. But I can’t think there was a lot of romance in it, and we lived, then, for romance. Other boys—rogue males like Boo Cutler and Floyd Sutton—were commonly known to screw nearly constantly, anyone who caught their fancy, and this proficiency was as much a part of their lustrous legends as their expertise with drag racing and shine running. We admired it enormously, but, like the dragging, few of us sought to emulate it. No Pink would have dated twice a Jell who put a serious move on her, and Jellhood was more to be cherished, in those days, even than nooky.
No. We necked and petted and lied and leered and ached and cursed and jerked off, but fuck we did not, most of us, until the altar was virtually in sight. I am sure that’s why so many of us married on the very day we graduated from college, and a few even before. I am equally sure that the high mortality among my crowd’s marriages was due to that long enforced abstinence. By the time we got out of college, we simply couldn’t wait any longer to get laid. Whatever compatibility and commonality of interest we had with our girls was centered below our waists.
It was a strange time in the world, and in Atlanta too, so far as sex went. Lucy and I talked about it once, late in the sixties when both of us had been burned by passion and its aftermath and knew, at least a bit better, of what we spoke.
“You know,” she said, looking across at me in the gloom of the summerhouse veranda in a spring twilight. “It’s funny when you think about our parents’ lives while we were growing up. There wasn’t any scandal. I can’t remember any great, glamorous sexual scandals like you hear about among the filthy rich in other places, like Palm Beach or Long Island or Los Angeles, places like that. We had some divorces, and lots of nervous breakdowns and alcoholics, and suicides and all that stuff, but do you ever remember a single soul running off with somebody else’s wife or husband, or getting caught in bed, or breaking up marriages, or any of the good stuff? Can you remember even one crime of passion? I can’t. Lord, look at Mama; if ever there was a woman made to stay on her back and fuck her way through the Northside, it was her; still is, the way she looks. And the way she was before she married Daddy. But never since she set foot in this house has she had a date; I can’t even remember her looking sideways at a man, not to mention flirting a little, or wearing something sexy. She might as well be a nun. And Mama is no saint, believe me. It’s this town. What is there in this town?”
I thought about it. She was right. Sexual scandal had no part in the lives of anyone of my parents’ generation; not that I knew of, anyway.
“I guess it’s because most of us haven’t had our money very long,” I said. “And we’re not all that grounded in our status, if we have any. If you’re new rich, you’re not too likely to risk your social status with scandal. Not that kind, anyway. I guess that comes later, in the older places like Charleston and New Orleans and Savannah, or the really big ones like New York, where nobody gives a damn. It was the early fifties then, after all. Now, when anything goes and everybody’s doing everything with everybody, nobody cares anymore. That generation sinned, of course, but it seems like they were more sins of omission than commission. And the wages were the wages of repression. I think maybe everybody was too busy making money.”
Lucy stretched her long legs out in front of her and lit a cigarette. “Mayor Hartsfield had it all wrong,” she said. “We weren’t a city too busy to hate. We were a city too busy to fuck. What a waste. Money is only money, but a good fuck is a fuck.”
I speak of the Pinks and the Jells as “we,” but it is largely an editorial we. I attended the endless dances, but usually as a nonparticipatory member of the stag line, one denizen of the anthill that gave the butterfly Pinks such vivid life. I almost never went to the dinners beforehand, or the breakfasts afterward. When I absolutely had to have a date, I took Sarah Cameron, with whom I had been at ease from the beginning of our lives. I sometimes joined the swooping flocks after school, but only because the Fury was such a powerful seductress, and I usually ended up dropping clunking, iron-weighted Pres Hubbard off at his house and going relicking with Charlie, or going home to study and then slip fathoms back into the old, nourishing, ongoing communion with Lucy.
I liked the aimless, bright wheeling and admired the glorious mating plumage of the flock, and I knew the drill, thanks to family money and the herculean efforts of Margaret Bryan and sheer proximity to my generation of anointed. It was just that it all felt queer and stilted to me; remote and uninvolving, as if I was engaged in some sort of elaborate charade that no one recognized as such but me. I always felt, watching a ballroom full of pretty girls swaying like a bright, precious garden in the soft little wind of music, that they were not, somehow, real, not truly present; and that I alone breathed and moved and spoke.
But at other times, in the cheerful, antiseptic cacophony of Wender & Roberts, or in mindless, pellmell midrush down the last long hill on Peachtree before the city limits of Atlanta loomed up, it seemed as if everything and everyone around me was real, superreal, hyperreal, and only I did not truly exist. Only with Lucy did actuality flow both ways. I had a sliding perception of reality in those days, but I knew absolutely and without knowing how that for me it lay somewhere else than the Buckhead and Atlanta of the Pinks and the Jells.
“Where will you go?” Sarah Cameron asked me once, when I spoke of leaving Atlanta when I was able.
“To New York,” I said, not knowing why I said it, only that it was true.
“How long have you wanted to do that? I never heard you talk about it,” she said, surprised.
“Always,” I said, as surprised as she to find that it was true.
Unlike virtually anyone else in my immediate crowd of Jells except Charlie Gentry, I liked to study, especially history and English literature, and I made impressive grades. The grades were never the point; I could lose myself for hours in the dreaming, sunny flower fields of the school and public libraries, and only after I came blinking and stretching up for air and awareness did I realize how totally happy I had been. It was the beginning of my lifelong passion for pure research, the only love save one that never left or betrayed me. It has been what I have lived with and one of the very few things I have lived for, these many years in the summerhouse.
The resultant grades, though, made my mother smile, and even my father would occasionally nod approval at the pristine string of A’s, though he seldom failed to remark that with my height, I ought to be a first-string guard by now. Lucy, however, applauded them with her whole heart, and Lucy was still, in those days, the sun that warmed me, even though, since that night in the summerhouse, a sun that I knew could also sear me mortally.
It never occurred to me to ask her to any of the dances and parties; I honestly did not, at least consciously, think of her in that way, and she did not seem to consider me romantically. She was still, to my eyes and senses, utterly and powerfully seductive, but she did not yet seem to be conscious of it, and I had, in those few charring moments on that spinning daybed, distanced myself so completely from her as a woman that I could observe her almost as thoroughly and clinically as a sociologist.
And in every other respect, we had not changed for each other; even though I had moved into a world that was far closer to adulthood than hers, we were still safe havens for each other. I think we both sensed that a romantic alliance would have spoiled that, and we still, and always, needed each other in that way more than in any other. So I took Sarah Cameron to the few dances I attended and then came home and spun them out for Lucy’s delectation like a parent bird with a ravenous chick, and she gave me back the great lift and leap of her rich laugh, and her boundless, soaring approval. In those days, as I have said, I was her heart, and she, conversely, was my wings.
I did not see, never saw, really, the look of adoration on Sarah’s small face when she lifted it to me. I can still scarcely credit that it was there. Charlie would tell me occasionally, “Sarah has a crush on you,” and I simply did not believe him. I suppose I thought he was transferring his long, aching, silent love for Sarah onto me, and I hastened, each time he said it, to hand that love back to him.
I could not believe that any girl could look at me with adoration. I had long since, on some tender and carefully submerged level, accepted my mother’s dictum that I was too immature and sensitive for what she termed “that silly teenaged boy-girl business,” and also my father’s that I was simply not the man for it. Neither, now, was true, but I did not know that. The real truth was that I was not, by now, a sissy, and there had never been anything effeminate about me. I had simply, on that night with Lucy, buried desire deep.
And so we went, I wading aimlessly in the shallows of Jellhood, a great waiting for something I could not name filling what crannies of my being were not occupied by Lucy, she stoically doing her time in the sunless prison of the terrible little girls’ school, both of us still caught, and content with the captivity, in the roles of heroine-victim and savior-saint. I don’t know how long it would have gone on thus, but it seems to me now, from the vantage point of the passed years, that it was doomed to end exactly the way it did.
Lucy graduated from Miss Beauchamp’s with just enough credits to secure her freedom and virtually no academic honors the spring when she was twelve, and that fall entered the eighth grade at North Fulton High. Busy with my long hours in the library and the autumn flurry of Jellhood, and still savoring with her the old, celldeep kinship at home after school, I noticed no appreciable change in her. She still looked to me as she had for a long, suspended time: a silvery willow sapling, a fine colt frozen at the apogee of its childhood. I had long stopped wondering why no one but me noticed the air-charging impact of her. She seemed to slip into the stream of North Fulton without so much as a ripple. I scarcely saw her at all during those first days.
In the third week after school started, I went down onto the burning athletic field to meet the three other members of the 880 relay team for the second practice of the season. Ben Cameron and A. J. Kemp were both on the team; oddly, for few Jells participated in high school sports. But the 880 was perfect for Ben’s whiplike speed and grace, and A.J. in motion of any kind was wonderful to watch. The fourth member was Fraser Tilly, a small, rabbity, stone-silent junior from out beyond Sandy Springs, who could lope forever like a timber wolf and sprint like the jackrabbit he resembled, and was better at the 880 than the three of us Buckhead Jells put together.
It was the sixth and last period of the day, and several knots of boys and girls dotted the bleached grass of the field, preparing to stumble with loathing through the last physical education classes of the day. It was so hot that the figures on the far end of the field seemed to shimmer like mirages in a desert, and sweat soaked the hideous blue and white shorts and shirts that North ``egant Ben Cameron, looked awful in them, swaddled and storklike. The girls looked, simply, unspeakable. The Pinks at North Fulton hated being seen in their P.E. uniforms even more than being caught in home-permanent curlers and papers, with Noxzema on their acne.
I was late, and the track coach was a new one, a beetling, clifflike Teuton with a no-color burr of a crew cut and cold, Baltic eyes. He had tongue-lashed A.J. so badly for missing the first practice that A.J., the irrepressible one, the golden-tongued smart mouth, had had tears in his eyes before he was done. I ran silently down the stone steps of the stadium, my cleated shoes in my hand, in dread of the coach’s coiled tongue.
But they were not looking at me. They were standing close together in a huddle, backs to me, heads close together, obviously staring at something across the field that I could not see. They were laughing, and though I could not hear what they said, I knew the tenor of that laughter. I had heard it a hundred times in locker rooms and dark booths, when the talk of fucking and genitalia began; had even tried, clumsily, to join in myself. It was the laughter of the Buckhead Jells for a girl considered to be little better than a whore. I heard the huge coach say something that ended in “…little pussy right out there on a stick. Bet we could all get a lick of that without even asking for it.”
I reached the group and looked beyond it to see who they were talking about, and it was Lucy. She was standing with her sixth period soccer class, doing absolutely nothing but standing stockstill in the sun on the edge of the group of girls, dressed, as they all were, in the hated blue bloomers and white shirt. But all of a blinding sudden I could see what Ben and A.J. and Fraser Tilly and the coach saw: the white flesh of Lucy Bondurant looking so totally naked in the merciless sunlight of September that the shorts and shirt might as well not have been there; small, sharp breasts that appeared absolutely bared even under the starched white; long legs joined in so obvious a cupping of tender genitalia that the blue bloomers could have been made of transparent netting. Lucy’s clothing was not tight, and she did not flaunt her body; did not even move it. She simply stood straight and still, looking back across the field at them, and I could both feel and see the molten blueness of her eyes in an empty sunlit silence that rang like a bell, over and under the sly, fetid laughter of the 880 team.
They turned and saw me then, and fell abruptly silent, and the laughter stopped. Ben reddened, and A.J. looked away. Ben, A.J.…
Fraser Tilly and the Prussian coach busied themselves knocking dried mud off their cleats. The afternoon swung around me; the air swarmed like bees. Lucy stood before my friends and teammates and the hulking, alien betrayer utterly exposed, and now everyone knew what it was that, in the dark center of me, I had always known: Lucy Bondurant went naked in the world. Lucy could be taken. I had, once again and now irrevocably, failed to shield and protect her, and in that moment, the power of my sainthood fled for the last time, and only the hunger for it remained.