When I turned sixteen and got the red and white Fury, the last rational barrier to full participation in Jellhood fell, and I could think of no good reason to avoid the dinners and dances and breakfasts, and so, borne by the daunting splendor of my wheels and urged on by my mother, I began to attend the bulk of them.
“You simply cannot think of missing another one, Sheppie,” my mother would say, coming out to beard me in my den in the summerhouse when a determined inquisition at dinner unearthed the fact that I had not gone to the last two or three and had no plans for the one upcoming. “These little parties are where the debutante lists are drawn from; you know that as well as I do. Do you want to go through five or six entire seasons without being on a single list? Your future is being built right now. Of course you’re going. Now come on in the house and call one of your pretty girlfriends. Little Sarah Cameron would just love to go with you. Do you want me to call Dorothy for you?”
And, face flaming with the sheer awfulness of my mother calling the mother of a girl, even Sarah, I would stalk into the big house and slink sullenly into the telephone niche under the foyer staircase, and dial the Camerons’ number.
“Sarah,” I would say without identifying myself, “I’ve got to go to that stupid Alpha Nu thing Friday night, and my mother won’t get off my back until I get a date. I don’t guess you want to go, do you?”
“Thanks, Shep,” Sarah would say. “I’d love to go. It sounds like fun.”
Even at fourteen, she had a woman’s full-throated and warming voice, with the rich little hill of laughter under it that always drew people to her, and her simple, glad-hearted acceptance was so much more gracious than my mean, muttered invitation that I blush even now, all these years later, to think of it. It didn’t occur to me then that I was being rude to Sarah. It was many years before I fully stopped taking that bounty of approval and affection for granted.
Those Friday evenings when I departed in the Fury, white orchid in hand, pleased my parents almost more than anything I had ever done, and the fact of that made me obscurely truculent and melancholy. I went to the dances gracelessly and morosely, but I went correctly. My father took me down to John Jarrell’s and had me fitted for a magnificent tuxedo, the only one I have ever owned; it was a lustrous, penguin-black single-breasted suit of fine wool, with a rich satin shawl collar, and with it I wore a blinding white pleat-front shirt with a soft collar and French cuffs. A black satin cummerbund and tie completed the outfit, and my grandfather Redwine’s onyx and gold cuff links and smoked pearl studs were grace notes.
These my mother brought me on the night of the first Friday evening dance of that season, insisting on inserting and fastening them herself. As she bent in front of me, I could smell the smoky, bittersweet breath of Hermès’ Calèche that was her signature that autumn, and the clean, light floral odor of the shampoo that her hairdresser at J. P. Allen’s used. I was not used to being so close to my mother, and felt a powerful, nervous urge to push her away and run. She half turned, and I closed my eyes so as not to see the pearly cleft of her breasts in the keyhole cutout of her neckline. She straightened and pushed me away to arms’ length, her hands hard on my shoulders, and looked up at me with a sheen of tears in her dark sloe eyes.
“My handsome man,” she said. “My little blond boy, all grown up now and going off into the world, leaving his mama behind all alone. It cuts me to the heart to have you leave me, Sheppie.”
Since I wasn’t going anywhere but around the corner to the Camerons’ to pick up Sarah and then perhaps three miles farther away at best, out to the Brookhaven Country Club, I felt that the tears were gratuitous and false, a bit of arcana staged for my benefit, and was embarrassed.
“I’m not going anywhere, Mama,” I said.
“Yes you are, Sheppie,” she said, smiling her closed, odalisque smile at me. “You’re going very, very far in your life. I’ve always known that. Your father can’t see it, but I can. You’re a very special boy, and you’re going to be a very special man. A sensitive, talented, gentle man. And so handsome; well, just look at you. You look as handsome as Leslie Howard tonight, in your new tuxedo. Oh, I am jealous, Sheppie. All the girls are going to be crazy about you. I’ll bet half of them are in love with you now. You’ll make somebody a wonderful husband, and then you’ll forget all about your poor old mother. But one day you’ll see that nobody, not one of them, ever loved you like your mother did.”
She leaned forward to kiss me, and her eyes were half-shut, and she smiled a smile of something I had never seen before, something slow and secret and out-curling like a tentacle, and in pure panic I jerked away and turned to my image in the mirror. A blank-eyed, wavering blond man looked back at me, tall and badly frightened. Both the woman and the image were so totally alien that I felt, for a moment, completely without a context, utterly awry in my own skin. Then my mother laughed, her old, indulgent laugh, and the world came spinning back into focus.
“Don’t worry, I’m not going to embarrass you to death by kissing you,” she said. “Go on now, and pick up little Sarah. I have to tell you, Sheppie, that we’re so glad it’s her you’re taking and not Lucy. Time you had some other little friends besides Lucy. You’re just too old for that cousin business now. People are already talking about it.”
I fled blindly, hot to the roots of my hair, and did not take a deep, easing breath until I gained the seclusion of the Fury, which stood gleaming and ready for me on the circular drive in front of the house, shined to a lacquer polish earlier in the day by Shem Cater. Increasingly, in those latter days of high school, my encounters with my mother left me shying with nerves and near to staggering under an oppressive weight whose name I did not know. It was pure, clear, light relief to walk into the little sitting room at the Camerons’ house where Sarah, Dorothy and Ben waited for me. Ben Junior had already left, to pick up pretty, pug-nosed Julia Randolph over on Arden.
Even in her freshman year, Sarah was already well known and popular at North Fulton, destined to be, as her mother had been before her, the one who ran, with sunny willingness and no vain-glorious aspirations at all, the “serious,” service-oriented organizations and activities of high school. Not that she was a goody-goody or a grind; she was a varsity cheerleader, and known throughout the city for her swimming and painting skills, and she never once in four years, that I know of, sat out a Friday night dance. With her perfect, supple little body and her clear, deep amber eyes and instant dimpling smile and cap of dark, glossy hair—cut short so that she did not have to wear a cap in the water when she dived and swam—she was as appealing and good to the eye as a pet squirrel, and as captivating. It has never been possible to look upon Sarah Cameron without a smile of pure response starting on your mouth. From her birth, she has had Dorothy’s enormous energy and purpose without her austerity, and Ben’s easy charisma without his pure, focused ego. The best—or at least, the most livable—of both.
When Sarah graduated from North Fulton, the list of honors and organizations under her photograph was the longest in the Hi-Ways. It read, “Sarah Tolliver Cameron. We predict, the first Mrs. President. Student Council, Annual Representative, P.T.A. Representative, Y-Teens, Secretary and Treasurer, Junior Class, President, Senior Class, Swimming Team, Gold Medal, All-City Swimming and Diving Competition, Cheerleader, Nominating Committee, Rabun Gap Guild, Home Economics Fashion Show, Le Circle Francaise, R.O.T.C. Sponsor, Honor Roll 10 Quarters, National Honor Society, Who’s Who, Student Court, Senior Superlatives, Senior Play, Southeastern Outstanding Young Artist of the Year, Atlanta Journal-Constitution Best All-Round Cup, Graduation Speaker.”
“Just look at the list of honors little Sarah has under her name,” my mother said at the breakfast table the morning after Lucy brought her senior annual home. My mother never ceased in her campaign to ally the houses of Bondurant and Cameron, and she never managed to refer to Sarah as anything but “little Sarah.” I looked at the Hi-Ways, smelling new leatherette and fresh, sour ink, and saw Sarah’s familiar chipmunk face smiling out at me over a vast sea of type. On the opposite page, Lucy’s face, dimmed to mere piquancy as always by a camera, looked obliquely out over a naked line or two.
“Yeah, isn’t that something?” Lucy said, yawning and scrubbing swollen, smudged eyes with her fists. She had been out with Red Chastain the night before, and I had heard the MG come burring up the driveway at nearly 5:00 A.M. By now, no one even bothered to admonish Lucy about it. She looked like a petal from an exotic flower that had lain out all night in a driving rain, damp and bruised and used up.
“I imagine they charged her the standard ad rate,” Lucy drawled, draining black coffee. I scowled at her, and Aunt Willa frowned, but did not bother to say anything. My mother smiled her secret smile. She knew her point was well taken; the contrast between Sarah’s bountiful accolades and Lucy’s meager two lines hung vibrating in the air of the breakfast room. Lucy’s said, “Lucy James Bondurant. Hold the presses! Men overboard! Scribbler Staff Four Years, Editor in Chief, Senior Year. Rabun Gap, Tallulah Falls, Who’s Who.”
Four years of Lucy Bondurant, and in summary, all one could know of that complex stroke of pure flame was that she belonged to two organizations that were bestowed upon the elect of the Buckhead Pinks as automatically as their smallpox vaccinations and their birth certificates; that she labored only for the student newspaper and only there left a spoor of herself; and that she had as her middle name that of her early-lost and long-adored father. It was Sarah Cameron who shone from the pages of that world.
But at age fourteen, when I first began to squire her to dances and a few other de rigueur social occasions, Sarah was still, to me, endearing little Sarah Cameron, who was comfortable to be with for hours on end, who could swim like a minnow and dive like an otter and keep up with me on any weed-choked battlefield or any dance floor, and toward whom I felt absolutely no compelling obligation. She did not, therefore, weigh heavy on my heart, but sat lightly as thistledown in my mind. It was still, then, for me, Lucy who bore down, who burned, who clung, who shone.
Going into her teens, there was not a girl or woman in Atlanta from twelve to thirty who could touch Lucy Bondurant for sheer impact. She was an absolute, essential flame; everyone who knew her in that time would remember her all their lives. At thirteen, she was as tall and fully developed as she would ever be, her blue eyes unclouded and black-lashed and extraordinary, her waist spannable by two masculine hands, her dark wings of hair, not cut into the flips and later the ducktails of the day, but falling softly against her cheeks in the sleek, loose pageboy of the preceding decade. Until they cut it in the hospital, many years later, Lucy wore her hair that way.
Her impact was not that of classical beauty, but a matter of what she called her engine and I thought of as her aura: a vivacity, a sheen, an electricity that ran at full throttle and, except when she slept, continuously. Even her bad habits had charm, a cachet, which many were, all her life, to imitate unsuccessfully. From somewhere—I suppose her beloved Negroes—she had learned to swear like a sailor, but she did it in such a pure, honeyed drawl and with such a vulnerable innocence in her blue eyes that the effect was entrancing. A whole generation of Atlanta Pinks learned to say “shit” and “fuck” from Lucy Bondurant, but it became none of them but her.
She also adopted smoking two or three years before the other girls in her crowd took it up—for almost everyone in our day smoked, Pall Malls and Viceroys and Parliaments, in blue and white crushproof boxes—and she adored liquor from that first stolen swallow of my father’s Jack Daniel’s. But she did not drink as a matter of course until considerably later. Lucy in her early and middle teens ran largely on spirit. Her galvanic physical presence assured her a constant swarming circle of boys, Jells and otherwise, but it did nothing to endear her to a generation of Atlanta women. I don’t think she even noticed, and I know she never cared. From the moment she walked into North Fulton High School, from the moment she lifted her head and stared across a bleached and blinding athletic field into the hungry, betraying eyes of the 880 relay team, it was men for Lucy, men all the way.
Despite the portent of that day on the athletic field, it began slowly, that consuming, lifelong passion and refuge of Lucy’s. For the entirety of her freshman year, Aunt Willa did not allow her to date, despite the fact that other freshman girls, especially the Pinks, went regularly on double, if not single, dates to the dinners and dances and even breakfasts afterward, and were allowed to go in groups to early movie dates, or for sodas after school. I don’t know why Aunt Willa was so strict with Lucy that year. There had never been any trouble with boys up to then, and I am sure she did not know about the night in the summerhouse. Perhaps she, too, saw in her daughter that naked, hungry, infinitely vulnerable and powerfully sexual creature the relay team had seen on that hot September afternoon. Perhaps she knew that unlike the repressed and biddable Little Lady, Lucy was not going to go sweetly and conventionally through her adolescence to an early and stable marriage. Perhaps she remembered her own sexual abandon, and its consequences—though I doubt that. I don’t believe that concern for Lucy motivated the prohibition. I think, as I thought then, and as Lucy knew absolutely, that forbidding her daughter to date when everyone else did was Willa Bondurant’s way of punishing her, of saying, in effect, you are cheap and trashy and cannot be trusted, so you must be curbed. It must have planted the idea of promiscuity deep. And as any captivity always had, the ban made Lucy furious and desperate. I truly believe that if Aunt Willa had been reasonable about her dating in that first year of high school, Lucy’s life might have taken a different course. But it may be that, even then, the die was too decisively cast for malleability.
She did not rail and storm and protest, as she would have once. She had learned well the consequences of that. She simply set out, efficiently and methodically, to attract every male who came within range, and she did it without lifting a finger. Lucy unaware was as seductive, in those early days, as a prepubescent nymph. Lucy aware and plying all her weapons was in another league altogether. By the end of the school year, there was not a male student at North Fulton High, and not many among the Jells of all Atlanta, who did not know that Lucy Bondurant was hot to trot, and loaded for bear—though it was not generally thought that she would, as yet, put out. The consensus on that was that it was just a matter of time, and the stampede to be first geared up then, and did not cease, so far as I knew, until Red Chastain came along and put the competition on ice.
Lucy made her move rather elegantly, even I had to admit, if not particularly subtly. She left home ahead of me in the mornings, claiming an early homeroom, and promptly upon arrival at North Fulton went into the ground-floor girls’ rest room and made her face up. Since Aunt Willa had also forbidden makeup, Lucy had simply stolen what she needed from Wender & Roberts, and when she emerged from the rest room it was under a vivid, expertly applied frosting of Maybelline and Revlon. She needed no mascara or eyeliner, but I seldom saw her during those days at school without a hectic slash of “Cherries in the Snow” on her soft mouth, and she smelled exotically of a scent called Tabu, which she loved and wore all through high school and beyond, until her bluestocking classmates at Agnes Scott College told her she smelled like a cocotte.
“They meant French whore, of course,” she told me that year, “but God forbid that word should cross a Scottie’s lips. You should see their faces when I say ‘fuck’ and ‘shit.’ They call fuck ‘the F word.’ And they say ‘the Black Act’ or ‘the Dirty Deed’ when they mean fucking. I don’t know what they’re going to tell their children: ‘Daddy and I got you the night we did the Black Act,’ do you think?”
Lucy did not have to steal the Tabu. I bought it for her the Christmas of her freshman year, and gave it to her in the summerhouse, so my parents and Aunt Willa wouldn’t know she had it. She only dabbed it on after she left for school, and solved the problem of its lingering ghost by telling Aunt Willa that her sixth-period teacher sprayed it lavishly on herself just before the final bell rang, and invariably got some on Lucy and those other students who sat in the front rows.
“I’d move, Mama, but Miss Cleckler puts the best students right up front. It’s an honor. I don’t want to hurt her feelings,” she said earnestly.
Silky, facile lying was another social skill she picked up in that supremely formative year at North Fulton. On the main, it served her better than the business with men.
She wore the same skirts and pullovers and cardigans and Bass Weejuns with a penny in them as the other budding Pinks did, but she tucked her sweaters into the band of her skirts and pulled them tight, and unbuttoned the cardigans one or even two buttons lower than anyone else did. Nothing showed; the North Fulton faculty could find no reason to tell demure little Lucy Bondurant to pull out her sweaters and button up, but they smelled the trouble in the air around her, and watched her with a scrutiny nearly as hawklike as that bent upon her by the boys. Lucy smiled her full, angelic smile and crinkled her Madonna-blue eyes at one and all, and never put a foot wrong. It was a bravura performance, and left to her own devices, she could have sustained the delicate sexual shadow play, I am sure, for as long as she had wished. Once again, it was Aunt Willa who pushed her over the line from covert to overt.
For a long time that year, I had been aware that there was a kind of tension, a high, humming sexual energy, running through any group around Lucy. Several times clustered boys would redden and fall silent when I approached, as they had that day on the athletic field, and I knew at once that it was Lucy they had been talking about. Once or twice I heard her rich, free laugh before I saw her, and there was in it such an alien note of promise and lushness that before I recognized it, I would think, “God, who is that?” I really thought, once, that some new young woman teacher had come to the school and stood, incredibly, in the middle of a crowd of panting, sniffing male students, promising things that most of us only dreamed about with her laugh. And then the group would part and I would see that it was Lucy, and the laughter of the boys would stop at my appearance, but Lucy’s did not.
As she could not date, and had to be at home within thirty minutes of the last class at North Fulton, she took to skipping classes and going off the school premises with one boy or another. I know that nothing happened during these occasional fifty-minute forays, because I would have heard about it instantly. As it was, the whole student body knew when Lucy began to vanish quietly from one class or another. She did not do it often, but she made no secret of these absences, and the boy in question inevitably crowed about it like a bursting little bantam cock, so the Pinks and the Jells knew to nearly the second how long she spent with Floyd Sutton down in Moseley Park, smoking cigarettes, or when she went down to Rusty’s at lunchtime with Snake Cheatham in the Black Booger and drank a hot beer he had brought along in a paper sack. I suppose it was just a matter of time until she connected with Boo Cutler.
In addition to his monstrous, pulsing Merc, Boo had an enormous Harley-Davidson motorcycle that he said he had won in a crap game up in Floyd County one weekend, and though he was forbidden by the school authorities to bring it onto the school grounds, he kept it stashed at Winton Gladney’s Shell station just around the corner on Peachtree Road, and sauntered to and from there and school. Jell or not, there was not a boy at North Fulton who would not have sold a small shard of his soul to the devil to ride with Boo Cutler on the mammoth, growling Harley, but no North Fulton boy but Floyd Sutton ever did. Instead, Boo would ride out during lunch hours, and just about whenever else he chose, with one young Atlanta woman after another, half-terrified and half-proud and near to choking with nonchalance, riding pillion. The girls of his choice were always the bright, hard, thinly pretty ones who belonged to no club or group at all, the sorority of Pinkhood most especially; perhaps they figured they had nothing to lose by a ride with Boo, and much in the way of panache to gain. They were almost invariably apprehended and punished by the faculty, and never rode again behind Boo on the Harley, but the knowledge that they had once done so put real color in their cheeks over the Tangee, and a lift beyond elastic in their shoulders. Boo himself never observed the punishments meted out to him; he simply continued to come and go in classes and on and off the campus as he pleased, and no one ever managed to separate him from the Harley. We learned early on that the rules by which we lived our lives were not the ones Boo Cutler observed. For some reason, the knowledge did not rankle.
Boo broke his moratorium on Pinks when Lucy started at North Fulton, and even though he was a junior to her freshman, he paid his own brand of cool, lounging court to her from the very beginning. He would appear beside her in the cafeteria line, silent and heavy-faced, and the jostling pack of boys who had been bent on sitting at her table at lunch melted away like April snow, and she and Boo would eat alone, talking of who knows what…for no one had ever heard Boo say more than a mumbled word or two.
He would walk down the long central hall between classes with his gold-pelted arm draped heavily around her shoulders, their heads, one dark, one blond and cut in so short a crew cut that the burned pink scalp showed through, close together. He would simply saunter along, a cigarette behind one ear and the pack rolled into the cuff of his white T-shirt, saying nothing, and Lucy would match him stride for stride, looking up at him with those eyes like Caribbean water, laughing her dark, fudgy laugh.
Once, for the space of a week, she wore his letter jacket, and then, as abruptly as she had accepted it, gave it back. No one had ever given Boo’s jacket back to him without being commanded to do so. Lucy’s legend waxed. My whole crowd was waiting for me when I got to homeroom the next morning, pressing me for details, but I had none to give. Lucy would not talk about Boo Cutler with me, or about much else that happened during the day at school. At home with me she was as she had always been: fierce, funny, direct, candid, imaginative and wholeheartedly approving. Lucy the flamboyant little temptress became Lucy the enchanted changeling child again when the walls of Peachtree Road closed around her. I ignored the temptress and welcomed the changeling. I hated her new public role, and the direction in which it was taking her, but she did not speak of it and so I did not, either. That had always been the unspoken contract between us.
On an April afternoon of sudden showers and swelling earth, Lucy left her fifth-period American history class and rode with Boo Cutler on the Harley out Peachtree Road to Brookhaven, where they drank beer and smoked a cigarette or two on the front lawn of Oglethorpe University. She had always had an uncanny sense of timing about her cuts, so that no faculty member had ever seen her leave, and even if she was missed in class, could produce a better-than-good forgery of Aunt Willa’s signature on a brief, typed note of excuse. It was sheer accident that on this day, Mr. Bovis Hardin, the cadaverous and ardently Calvinistic assistant principal, was leaving a lunchtime seminar on distributive education at Oglethorpe, and saw them there together on the grass. Everyone knew Boo Cutler, faculty included, and by this time there was no mistaking Lucy Bondurant, either. Bovis Hardin did not even pause to Brylcreem his hair before he was in the principal’s office with news of the sighting, and they wasted no time calling Aunt Willa in her little assistant buyer’s cubicle in the back of the lingerie department of Rich’s. By the time Lucy got back to the school and was walking nonchalantly into her sixth and last period class, Armageddon was at hand.
“That old letch said that Boo and I were kissing on the grass, and that he had my skirt up around my neck,” Lucy said later.
“Did he?” I asked.
“No. I hiked it up to keep from getting motorcycle grease on it. We weren’t even kissing, he was telling me a dirty joke, whispering in my ear,” she said. “Old man Hardin saw what he wanted to see. Don’t think for a minute he wouldn’t like to get my skirt over my head himself. I’ve seen the way he looks at me in the halls.”
I believed her when I heard the story. It wasn’t that she did not lie, it was just that I always knew when she did. In any case, it did not matter. She was given a staggering number of demerits, and Boo Cutler was suspended for the remainder of the year—which undoubtedly suited him just fine. The dirt track out at Lakewood was just getting ripe for racing, and in any case, he had gone as far with Lucy as she would allow. He promptly transferred his attentions to Caroline Gentry, an alliance that was more fruitful in every way than the one with Lucy had promised to be. Lucy, he told Floyd Sutton and his cadre of cronies at the Peachtree Hills Pub, was a cockteaser. It was an epithet that doomed her with the hood element at North Fulton, but only served to send the Jells into fresh transports of anticipation. Someone, they reasoned, had to be first.
Lucy was taken home in white, crackling silence by Aunt Willa in the taxi in which she had arrived, but the inevitable battle was joined just inside the door, in the foyer, and I walked straight into it when I got home from school. Five different students had rushed to tell me of the showdown in the principal’s office, and I had hurried. I knew that Willa Bondurant would not take this new blot on her escutcheon with grace.
She didn’t. I could hear her screaming from the street, through the heavy, closed front door. By the time I gained the foyer, she had just about spent herself; her voice had a winding-down quality to it, and her breath came so fast and hard that her breasts hove like buoys in a heavy swell under the seemly challis of her little Wood Valley shirtwaist. Lucy stood opposite her, very straight, back against the newel post of the staircase, face white as a new gardenia, but still and expressionless. Her hands were behind her back.
“…common as gully dirt, nothing but white trash!” Aunt Willa yowled, nothing of Old Atlanta in her voice now. Wire grass and chicken wire fairly sang in it. “You’ll be pregnant as a yard dog before you’re sixteen, and then what in God’s name do you think is going to happen to you? Because you pure-and-tee can’t stay in this house if you get yourself knocked up, sister. I won’t have a streetwalker for a daughter!”
There was a ringing silence.
“Like you were, Mama?” Lucy drawled sweetly. She smiled.
Aunt Willa slapped her daughter so hard that Lucy’s head rocked back, revealing a tender and somehow heartbreaking crescent of white neck. Her mother wheeled on her stiletto heels and clattered up the stairs to her room. We heard her door slam. No other sound came from the top of the house. My father must have been out; the Chrysler was gone. I don’t know to this day if my mother was in her room and heard the exchange. She usually was at this time of day, napping or reading. But she never mentioned the scene, and needless to say, I did not either. She did not even inquire, this time, why Lucy was once again confined to her tiny third-floor room and was sent her meals on trays for nearly two weeks before she came back downstairs to join us. During those high school years, my mother was enigmatically silent on the subject of Lucy, though her finely arched eyebrows stayed near her lustrous hairline most of the time. Indeed, she managed so completely to disassociate herself from Willa Bondurant and her errant daughter that she was able to murmur scurrilous and wickedly funny things about them to her friends with perfect composure, as if they were nothing to do, really, with her. I heard her do it quite often. She gained something of a reputation as a wit for these sallies, as well as for being “a saint for putting up with those two under your roof all these years,” as Madge Slaton said to her during bridge in the drawing room toward the end of that year. Mother had a way of turning even the grimmest situations to her own advantage. It was a matter of superb, impenetrable detachment. She became, in time, a past master at it.
I was left alone with Lucy in the foyer for a moment that afternoon, and we stood silent, watching flying cloud shadow dappling the black and white harlequin tiles of the floor.
“But she was a streetwalker, or worse,” Lucy said too gaily to me, the red imprint of her mother’s hand still bloodlike on her cheek. “Anybody who can count knows that. Why on earth would Daddy have married her if she hadn’t been pregnant with me? Poor white trash like she was? At least he was a gentleman.”
And she went upstairs to begin again her exile.
By the time she finally came down, Aunt Willa had retreated into some impregnable inner citadel of imagined Atlanta ladyhood, and had withdrawn, emotionally and actually, as far as possible from her wayward daughter. There had been a wall of cool near-dislike, a kind of critical distance, between Lucy and her mother ever since little Jamie had died and Aunt Willa had begun to lavish her expectations and affection so openly on Little Lady. Now the wall thickened and grew taller, until she barely spoke to Lucy when they met at meals.
By some tacit washing of her fleshy, well-tended little hands, she had withdrawn the ban on dating and Lucy began to go about openly with the boys she had met and teased in secrecy all that year. In a way it seemed to slow her down some. We heard no more talk, for a little while, of openly sexual activities centering around Lucy, though there was always innuendo. At least she made her dates pick her up at the house on Peachtree Road. My parents or her mother were seldom around to meet them, but I made it a point to be somewhere in the vicinity of the front door whenever Lucy was going out. I already knew all the boys who dated her, of course; I simply thought it dishonorable that nobody from the family was about to see to the small, important social ritual of leave-taking. I was, by that time, irredeemably a creature of a thousand immutable, iron tenets and rules, whether I liked it or not. My mother had done her early work well.
I knew there was talk among the Jells about my hovering, and a good bit of avid speculation about the nature of my attachment to my cousin Lucy. I hated the idea of the talk, but I hated even more the lack of interest that the absence of parents and relatives when her dates called implied. It seemed to me tawdry and lax, a disgrace on the family and the house. I knew the neglect and its implication could mark Lucy as “easy” faster than almost anything she might do herself. And so, like Anias, I watched at the gate.
Aunt Willa watched, too, though not openly and publicly. She hovered when Lucy got a telephone call from a boy, and always seemed to be outside the little downstairs sun-room that had become Lucy’s teenaged haunt when boys were in the house. They almost always were that year. She openly forbade her the summerhouse with anyone other than me, and early on in Lucy’s dating career there were hushed, hissing tirades behind the closed door of Lucy’s room when she came home late, which she did increasingly. After a while Aunt Willa stopped sitting up, and the futile tongue-lashings ceased, and no one waited up for Lucy anymore. I knew that the lack of supervision was common knowledge at school, and that the early-morning necking and petting sessions in the shadows of our porte cochere lengthened accordingly, because I heard the cars as they drove in, and I usually heard them much later as they ghosted guiltily away. I would wait until I saw the flush of yellow from the portico light go out, and then, finally, I would sleep. After that first year, I did not lie awake listening for Lucy.
When I was fully grown and well away from there, I came to see that Lucy’s powerful and burgeoning seductiveness was not only a reminder to Aunt Willa of her own teen persona, but a threat to the flimsy respectability and social acceptability she had managed to draw around herself. Willa Bondurant’s presence in the drawing rooms and clubs and at the luncheons and fashion shows and charity balls of Atlanta was too hard won and tenuous for her to allow talk about Lucy to jeopardize it. But not even I could control Lucy, much less her mother, and so Willa simply withdrew, hoping, ostrichlike, that she would draw down upon herself no guilt by association.
For her part, Lucy, who had begun employing her natural seductiveness to keep herself comfortingly surrounded by and, more often, in the arms of the various highborn young men who were copies, albeit pale ones, of her father, began then to use her sexuality as a weapon of defiance against her mother. She dated more and more frequently, often having an engagement with one young man for an afternoon movie, another for a milkshake afterward and a third that evening. She pulled her belts tight and thrust her breasts forward and rolled her hips. She went to every dinner and dance and breakfast given by every high school sorority and fraternity in Atlanta for the next four years, and came in from each of them smeared and crumpled and heavy-eyed and hick-eyed and irrepressible. Her smile grew steadily more brilliant and promissory, and her laugh richer, and her eyes bluer and more intense, and her whole flamelike ethos more glittering. The talk began in earnest in her sophomore year and never ceased, and I heard every bit of it, and suffered. The only thing I did not hear was that she had finally done the Dirty Deed with one of the groaning Jells, and so I knew that technically she was still a virgin, although that technicality hung by the thinnest of filaments imaginable. Lucy in those years left a trail of tumescence behind her as thick as the Great Wall of China.
I don’t think Aunt Willa heard any of the talk. Her preoccupation with Little Lady had deepened into obsession, and by then even my mother had to admit that this little gilt ace in our familial hole had become as malleable and chiming and lovely and essentially brainless a little Atlanta belle as one could wish. Little Lady was a virgin of the highest and most marketable order. She could not remember her father, but she did remember, vividly, her mother’s histrionic descriptions, when they first came to our house, of the times James Bondurant had come home drunk and beat her and little Lucy, and of how he had once threatened to kill all of them with a claw hammer. Consequently, she was so terrified of the men she had been trained to please that she allowed no one to touch her beyond the obligatory dance holds, and those lightly, and so went through her immaculate debut a few years later and her dainty provisional year of Junior League, and finally to her early and brilliant wedding to bull-necked, blue-blooded Carter Rawson a virgin of vestal purity.
That she began, ever so discreetly, to sip bourbon steadily through the days and evenings soon after that grand affair did not necessarily have anything to do with any trauma from her wedding night; might, indeed, have been Jim Bondurant’s genetic legacy to her. However, as Lucy said after the first time Little Lady fell on her pretty Pekingese face during dinner at the Driving Club, “Oh, bullshit, of course it was fuck-shock. Lady always thought, until her wedding night, that you did it with pistils and stamens. Lord, I can’t abide a fool.”
Only with me was Lucy her old, flickering, will-o’-the-wisp self; me and the Negroes in her orbit. With them, especially with moody, brilliant Glenn Pickens over at the Camerons’ and dumpy, stolid ToTo at our house, who were near her own age, she was, perhaps, even more essentially herself, because she loved to give, to please, to teach, to impart information and watch it sink home, and there was little by then that she could tell me that we had not already shared. ToTo was hopeless; her response to Lucy contained, only and ever, a one-celled, doglike devotion. But Glenn Pickens’s mind leaped and flashed like a rainbow trout in sunstruck spray, and he spent hours listening to Lucy’s free-flowing fancies and odd, glinting insights.
The only times I ever saw Glenn really smile in my life, then or later, was at some notion of Lucy’s, and I think that the only tendrils of humor and whimsy he has in his complex, darkling soul today were planted there in those days by her. With him the seductress simply took herself off and the open, sunny changeling came out of hiding, and the two odd and good young minds, so far apart in the countries of birth and environment, met in a shower of sparks. Even Ben and Dorothy Cameron stopped sometimes to listen to them spar and banter, and though Glenn and Lucy would temper their talk to the adult ears, in the sun of that easy approval they would go on.
“She’s good for him,” Ben said once, walking with me and Dorothy back to their house while Lucy gathered up her books and Glenn got ready for his late-afternoon sessions with the English tutor the Camerons had found for him. “I can’t quite grab hold of it, but she does something for him all the studying we can buy for him doesn’t do.”
“It’s that she shows him a white person’s world with no holds barred and no strings attached,” Dorothy said. “She gives him all of herself and no matter how hard we try, most of us white folks just can’t do that with the Negroes. But how can we expect them to move into our world if we don’t show them what it’s really like? Or what we are? That’s what Lucy does for Glenn. She shows him what is possible.”
“Lord God,” Ben Cameron said, ruffling Dorothy’s dark hair. “Don’t ever let anybody outside us and Shep hear you say that. The Klan will start knocking crosses together before you can say ‘Jim Crow.’ You’re right, though, of course. That’s just what it is. The possible. It could open more doors than any law we could manage to get on the books.”
“Now who’s Klan bait?” Dorothy Cameron said.
“Well, let’s hope she doesn’t get bored with Glenn and stop coming,” Ben said. “I often wonder why she does. Pretty as she is, I wonder that every little thug in Buckhead isn’t camped on your doorstep, Shep.”
“They are,” I said, and though that’s all I did say, Dorothy Cameron shot me a swift look of pure compassion. She knew, of course, what Ben Cameron or any of our fathers would not have: that Lucy Bondurant was the talk of Buckhead, and why. And she knew more; knew, somehow, that the fact was a kind of obscure agony to me. I was grateful for the knowing, but it embarrassed me, and I did not go to the Camerons’ after school again when I knew Lucy was there with Glenn Pickens.
In any case, it did not matter, for Aunt Willa somehow got wind of the afternoons that Lucy spent with Glenn in the Pickenses’ little house behind Merrivale House and forbade her to go there ever again, or even to speak to Glenn, and made it so plain that if she disobeyed she would be sent away to whatever out-of-state boarding school could be found for her—“and with what I can afford you won’t like it, sister”—that Lucy capitulated without a word. She simply drew in a little closer upon herself, and clung more tightly to Martha and ToTo and me, and escalated her sexual warfare against Willa to include open smoking and covert drinking. Nobody knew about the drinking yet but me, for no one else heard her hectic giggle when she came in at night, or the clumsy stumblings at the front door, but I thought it was only a matter of time for that, too, and my silent Lucy-anguish bored deeper.
I do not remember seeing Glenn Pickens smile ever again, though, of course, he must have.
We saw the Negroes in our world, in those last tranquil days before May 17, 1954, when Brown v. Board of Education fissured the dike, in a kind of simplistic pentimento. On the surface, they filled two roles for us: furniture and court jesters. The Pinks and the Jells of Buckhead had grown up in a sea of black faces, but those faces invariably loomed over hands at work in our service: nurses, cooks, maids, chauffeurs, gardeners, washwomen, even wet nurses. They might be infinitely and boundlessly loving and patient with us, and we might revel in their warmth, but it was the warmth and comfort of old, well-padded furniture that we took from them, anonymous and belonging inalterably to our houses. Most of us were aware, on some deep and never-probed level, that we had power over them, even as small children; too many shrieks and tears and complaints from us, and the nurses and tenders would be gone back to the projects before our pink little mouths had closed. I don’t think any of us ever examined the basic horror of that power then, for children—especially the children of that time and place, and even its teenagers and young men and women—do not question the anatomy of their worlds. It is as it is. For most of us, introspection and awareness came much later, if at all, when the fire storms raging over the South could not be ignored even by us out in our Buckhead fastnesses. By then, of course, it was all academic.
When they were not providing us with comfort, the Negroes we knew entertained us. The Pinks and the Jells had a ready stable of Negroes who could be counted on to amuse and charm us endlessly with their antics, antics so redolent, in our blind young eyes, of the only kind of blackness we knew. They were those most prized pieces in our furniture collections, “characters,” and we loved and laughed at all of them, and knew none of them.
There was Blind Willie, who played wildly infectious, raunchy rhythm and blues guitar at Peacock Alley, and Snake-Eyes the carhop, who named several of his countless children after favored Jells, and mincing, transvestite Sister, who wore a Carmen Miranda turban and high heels and dispensed languid curb service at Rusty’s until a committee of indignant Northside mothers descended upon Rusty or whoever his factotum was and demanded Sister’s banishment on moral grounds. There were the incredible carhops at the Varsity, monarch among them the outrageous, androgynous Flossie May, whose singsong litanies and lightning feet provided diversion nearly as enthralling as the celebrated and utterly taboo jig shows down at the Municipal Auditorium on Saturday nights. We attended these latter affairs regularly, lying to our parents, and stationed ourselves in the upstairs balcony, where we danced and drank beer and shouted and laughed, and rained trash and bottles down upon the dancers, and rocked our bodies to the blasting, insinuating rhythm of the Negro music that was unlike any we had ever heard before, pounding and insistently sexual. Why we were not simply set upon and murdered afterward for our insolence is a tribute to both the good nature of those dancers and the smug and muffled tenor of the times. Ten years later, we would have been.
It was one of the real dichotomies of Lucy’s character that she so openly and truly loved many individual Negroes, and yet participated with such obvious relish in the mimicking and debasing of the race itself in those awful balconies, pointing and laughing with the best of us at the dancing Negroes out on the floor. And yet I knew that even while she did, she was the only one of us who would have cheerfully and naturally gone right on home after the show with any one of them who had asked her and danced and talked away the remaining hours of the night, and thought absolutely nothing of it. As Yul Brynner said in The King and I, “is a puzzlement,” and one of the many about her I never solved.
We were, most of us, openly and casually racist, and told and laughed at our share of nigger jokes, but I think it was largely a cultural thing and had nothing in it of personal heat, like our laughing rudely at Yankees while knowing virtually none of them, or our parents’ denying stoutly that they were archconservatives, even as their chauffeurs drove them to the polls to vote for Franklin Roosevelt. But a few of the boys I knew at North Fulton were venomously and very personally bigoted, and acted—or were said to act—upon it. Boo Cutler and Floyd Sutton come to mind; both were said to have stalked and shot Negroes from their streaking cars in the black nights on nameless South Georgia farm roads, and I have seen Boo, once at the Blue Lantern and once at Moe’s & Joe’s, knock a weary and smartmouthed Negro carhop to the ground and kick him nearly unconscious.
When Martin Luther King was shot in Memphis, the story was all over Buckhead, in the weeks following, that Boo Cutler was actively and intimately involved in the plot, was perhaps even the finger behind the one on the trigger. There may have been some credence to it; the story still has currency today, though Boo himself is long dead of a brain tumor. I remember that I thought of that story when I heard of his death, lingering and lonely in the dreary VA hospital out on Briarcliff Road, and then thought how strange it was that so many of those eerie loners who alter history in violent and terrible ways turn out to have had blooming in their brains that hideous, silent flower. Perhaps Boo always had it. None of us were surprised when we heard.
But under the smiling, primary-painted facades of child-tenders and tap dancers, the Negroes in Atlanta were, as they were all over that America, bringing themselves to a slow and inexorable boil. Not much of it showed then. In the very early fifties, Atlanta Negroes lived, as they had for decades, along a blighted east-west axis in the southern quadrant of the city, in peeling, rat-infested housing projects and sweltering neighborhoods so wasted by poverty, unemployment, ill health and crime that no Northsider who had not actually driven through them would believe they existed. Many of my crowd never did.
On the east and west fringes of the black belt a few affluent neighborhoods of quite grand homes clustered in cloistered solitude, and on Auburn Avenue downtown, to the south of the central business district, a handful of black-owned office buildings and factories and warehouses stood. But the rest of Sweet Auburn, which served as a Main Street for the black community, was given over to infinitesimal, struggling businesses and services in appalling disrepair. In the downtown proper, and indeed, all over the city and cities like it in and out of the South, “White Only” and “Colored Only” signs flourished like skin cancers on everything from churches to train stations to restaurants to drinking fountains to rest rooms. The Negroes of Atlanta were still, going into the second half of the century, as disenfranchised and disaffected as serfs in a medieval city-state.
A few recognizable black leaders emerged, in those days, to stand for their communities and petition the white power structure for the human solutions so desperately needed, but they approached, when they did, in private and in secret, after hours and with, metaphorically at least, their hats in their hands. No wonder that deep in those black waters a great tide was rising; wonder only that it did not burst free sooner and with far greater force, and that we favored white children by all that black bounty and largesse could not, in that most transparent of pentimenti, see it building. But we did not.
Our fathers saw it, though.
“When do you think your father first realized what Glenn would be to this town?” I asked Sarah Cameron once, at the top of Glenn Pickens’s incredible trajectory.
“Probably the day Glenn was born,” she said.
She didn’t miss it far.
The great golden age of their full potency, when as the celebrated downtown white power structure the fathers of the Buckhead boys and girls would literally alter the face and persona of the city and pull it with sheer, concerted force into the mainstream of America, was still a few years away when Sarah and Lucy and I were teenagers. But the generators were beginning to hum, and the gears to be oiled and readied.
They were still young men then, in their late thirties and early forties, and for the bulk of their adult lives they had been occupied with tending family fortunes and extending personal arenas. But they knew fully, even before the city and the nation perceived them as anything more than an extraordinarily close group of wealthy men living in a northern suburb of Atlanta, that their roles would be those of catalysts, pragmatists and, most of all, alchemists. They would be required to, and would, transmute base metal into gold. I think the only thing they did not know yet, in those days, was the sheer, dizzying scope of their spheres of influence.
Literally since their births they had known each other, and moved as easily in one another’s homes and clubs as they did in their own. It was always that proximity, that mutual pool of kinship, which gave them their unique power. Its basis was always the remarkable psychological similarity of class attitudes that made them comfortable together. They were ready, but they were not yet fully mobilized. In those last quiet days before both civic growth and civil turmoil, they were largely concerned with looking around to see what they could see. Their concerted social antennae were awesome.
They saw a city stagnant since the flurry of building directly after World War II, crying out for office space and air facilities to catch the faltering torch that the railroads had dropped. Atlanta had always been a service city, a mover of goods, a branch office town, but now they saw business and money turning away in impatience, going elsewhere, because the wheels at home were not numerous or sturdy enough to take the weight. They saw business after business come South, sniff around, find little to their liking in the way of facilities or quality of life, and head for New Jersey or Texas. And they saw a formless black population, large and growing, with, as yet, no real political muscle, but with an enormous potential for it.
They were not stupid men, or shortsighted; they knew, even as they espoused it personally, that segregation could not and would not prevail, and that when it crumbled, they could either profit from it or be crushed beneath its fall—but fall it would. Being good businessmen, if indifferent humanitarians, they began to put their feelers out to the simmering black community. Far better to have the Negroes of Atlanta buying from their businesses than burning them. Far better to lure Northeastern business South with the promise of open, peaceful schools than put their burgeoning strength behind a last romantic schoolhouse-door stand doomed to fail before the first federal marshal appeared.
They were well-connected men, even in those early days; they knew what the tenor of the nation’s highest courts was, and knew that bullheaded defiance of a federal ruling on school integration would tip Atlanta squarely back into the somnolent quagmire from which it had so painfully struggled after the war. Mayor Hartsfield had the right idea, but the wrong syntax: It was not so much that Atlanta was a city too busy to hate as that in Atlanta, organized, official hate was bad for business. These twenty or thirty men who were, to us Pinks and Jells, still only our fathers put aside their menus and began, from their tables at the Capital City Club, to reel in the lines all of them had into the blasted streets and housing projects of South Atlanta.
The lines were myriad, and went deep. Many were those of master-servant; every Buckhead family had its own coterie of black familiars among the men and women who came out on the 23 Oglethorpe buses every day to serve them, and they knew, also, families of those people. And then there was the network of blacks in service at the clubs and the restaurants they frequented, and at the labor levels of their businesses and those of their friends. Being leaders themselves, they knew personally the scattering of black leaders who were visible in those days and the still fewer ones who were not, and they were on first-name basis with the administrations of the six black schools in the lustrous, Rockefeller-funded Atlanta University complex in the southwest quadrant of the city. This may have been the most important and the most fortuitous tie of all; it was the educated young blacks who administered, as well as participated in, the civil rights movement when it came, and when it did, our fathers had their contacts, if never their agents, in place.
And they kept the contacts fresh and immediate. Even during the heart of that anguished struggle, when the White Citizens’ Council and the flaming, colorful segregationists were the most vocal and the news out of Birmingham and Little Rock and Selma came smoking in over the wires, and every blinding-hot summer day dawned on another threatened riot in one embattled black community or another, the men of the Club and the black leadership of Atlanta talked. They talked daily and for hours, in black homes as well as white, and even though they met in secret, still they met. When action came—when the public schools were kept open in defiance of the state’s law and in compliance with the country’s; when Ben Cameron, then mayor, stood on top of an automobile in Mechanicsville for hours in the fierce heat of an incipient riot, talking, talking; when one by one the “White Only” signs began to come down, and even that innermost of sanctums, the Commerce Club, seated Negroes for lunch—it was usually because one specific and powerful white man said the necessary words into the necessary ears, and because many of those ears were black.
It wasn’t, despite what the Chamber of Commerce did and does tell everyone who will listen, particularly exemplary handling of the matter of race; often it was not even decent handling. The motives behind it were never pure. Most of it came reluctantly and at least ten years too late. But it came, and it came without clubs and dogs and fire hoses and blood in the streets of the city. I think it came because the men who would soon make up the Club had their ears open in the early 1950s, and heard the soft mutter of the drums almost before they began.
“Remember them all together at somebody’s party, back when we were at North Fulton?” Lucy said once during one of our nightly telephone calls. “God, they were gorgeous. Not physically, so much; but powerful. Lord! Power is just so goddamned sexy!”
She was right. They were an impressive group, sitting all together at one of their luncheons or in one of their bank board meetings, or even gathered at a party in Buckhead. Young, attractive, tanned from golf and tennis, easy with one another, purposeful. They were still cadets, but they knew they would have the power of which she spoke, and they knew where it would come from: Their own fathers and mentors, for many years before them the official Club, would pass the batons on to them at the appointed time in an almost formal transfer of power. Even before they came into their real and final strength, they were formidable. To sit at lunch in the Capital City Club downtown on Peachtree Street, a symmetrical and mellow old cream-brick mansion rimmed about with leaning office buildings, was to see pure power in repose, drinking its ritual two prelunch bourbon and branch waters and eating its London broil. It was almost palpable in the air; you could get physically dizzy from it.
Toward the end of March in my senior year at North Fulton, my father asked me to come downtown and meet him for lunch at the Capital City Club. I was as profoundly surprised as if he had asked me to attend a burlesque show with him. And I was distinctly apprehensive. I had been to the club, of course, many times; it and the Atlanta Athletic Club were my father’s downtown clubs, and he took us all there occasionally, for lunch or dinner after football games at Georgia Tech, or for the New Year’s Day buffet in the Mirador Room. But I had never been there alone with him. I had not been anywhere alone with my father, by that time, in several years. The last time I could remember was to see the Lone Ranger in a one-man show at Grant Field, on his great, shining horse, Silver. I think I was eleven then.
I went down on a Friday noon, parking the Fury in the lot beside the club on Harris Street and tossing the keys to ancient liveried James, who had been fielding keys ever since I could remember. I ran lightly and in earringing dread up the shallow stone steps and into the marble lobby.
“Morning, Mr. Sheppard,” fat Charles, who commanded the door, said to me, smiling as if I were his favorite nephew. With Charles’s memory and what he must have seen of white people’s foibles over the years, he could have been a very powerful and dangerous man, if it had occurred to him. Perhaps it had. Perhaps even then, Charles had, in some dark closet back at his home in Southwest Atlanta, a burgeoning file marked “Indiscretions, White.” I liked the idea then, and I like it even more now.
I went along the short, thick-carpeted corridor under the mural of ecstatic darkies sitting on cotton bales on an idyllic, never-seen riverfront dock, past the glowering bust of some dour, anonymous Confederate general or other and the lined portraits of past presidents, and up the mahogany stairs to the Mirador Room on the second floor. My heart was hammering so hard under my new blue lightweight wool blazer that I thought I would hyperventilate and faint at the feet of Edgar, who opened the door into the holy of holies with the same “Good morning, Mr. Sheppard,” only minus the smile. Dignity was the order of the day in the Mirador Room.
I could not imagine why my father wanted to have lunch with me, but I sensed that there was no hope of its being casual or even pleasant. It had about it the air of an appointment in Samarra. On the way across the gleaming parquet floor, which became, in the evenings, a little dance floor, I imagined that he would tell me that we had lost all our money, and I would have to drop out of Princeton, where I had applied and been accepted, and go to work. Or that he had cancer and was dying, and I would have to do the same. Or that Lucy was being sent away somewhere irrevocable and distant, and I would never see her again, and he was preparing me. Even as I smiled at him, sitting at his accustomed table in the corner of the second tier, his face red under the thinning thatch of blond hair, and registered that the smile he gave me back was as ghastly as a death rictus, I was marshaling my defenses and lining up my arguments. The last weapon in my arsenal, outright refusal, seemed, in his actual presence, simply unimaginable. I did not think I was going to come out of this encounter unchanged.
To my surprise, Ben Cameron unfolded his lean length from the chair opposite my father and rose to greet me, and my thrashing heart gave a mad buck of relief and subsided. Whatever it was, I had an ally. I reached the table and put out my hand like the confident young man I was not and had never been.
“Hello, Mr. Cameron,” I said. “Daddy.”
“Hello, Shep,” Ben Cameron said, giving me his warm grin that had nothing in it but pleasure at seeing me. “Good to see you.”
“Son,” my father said formally. The fierce wolf’s smile never left his red face. He gestured at the chair next to Ben and I slid into it.
“Sorry I’m late,” I said, frowning purposefully, like a man who has set aside important affairs to keep a date. “Traffic on Peachtree was awful all the way in.”
“Get used to it,” Ben Cameron said, smiling ruefully. “It’s not going to get any better in your lifetime. Although it’s a fond, if perhaps premature, hope of mine that one day we’ll have some kind of fast rail system that will bring people right through all that mess and downtown in a few minutes. But I’m afraid you’ll have to muck it out along with the rest of us until we can part the city from enough money to do it.”
I looked at him blankly, and then at my father. I had not made any secret of the fact that I had been accepted at Princeton and then hoped to go to New York to work for a year or two afterward, before I decided what I would do with the history or political science degree I planned to acquire. My father certainly knew all that, though he had long since ceased to comment on my plans when I talked of them. I had thought he had lost interest, and I had been glad of the fact, if left with a surprisingly sharp taste of loss in my mouth.
Ben Cameron knew, too. I had talked about Princeton with him more than once; his father had gone there, and Ben had gone with him to reunions once or twice as a child. Why, then, was he talking as though I would soon be driving down Peachtree Road to the office downtown where my father had recently moved his real estate affairs? Was this something to do with Princeton? Had my acceptance been a mistake, and were they trying to break it to me gently?
Ben lifted a lazy hand and smiled genially at me. All of a sudden I did not know him; it was as if I had never seen him before. My father continued to smile, too.
“I know, I know,” Ben said. His voice was slow and thick and hearty, not his at all. “Princeton and all that. But look here, Shep, I got to talking with your daddy at the Athletic Club last week, me and Tom Rawson and Frank Hubbard, and it just seemed to us, all of a sudden, that your going all the way up there and then on to that overgrown Yankee town is a terrible loss, both to your mama and daddy and to this town of ours. Your dad here told me your mind was made up and there was no use trying to change it, but hell, you know me, I’ll try anything once. So I invited myself to lunch with you and your pa and I’m going to give you my best shot.”
The waiter came and put an amber glass with ice in it down in front of me, and said, “Mr. Shep,” just as he did to my father, and I stared as stupidly at the glass as I had at Ben Cameron. Then I looked at my father. His face was redder than usual, and his small blue eyes were fierce with something I could not name, but he kept on grinning, and gestured at the glass.
“House bourbon,” he said. “Good stuff. Thought you might as well have one with Ben and your old man. You’re old enough now. Practically a man; shot up before I noticed, somehow.”
“They’ll do it, won’t they?” Ben Cameron said, still in a voice that sounded as if he were in a not very good play. “Ben Junior’s practically into Tech now, and taller than I am, and my little old Sarah-puss is a grown woman. Pretty one too, huh, Shep?”
“Sure is,” I said, sounding as banal as he did, and knowing it. What was wrong with him? He did not sound even marginally intelligent, and yet the far-ranging, high-soaring conversations I sometimes had with Ben and Dorothy Cameron were among the most prized hours in my life.
I took a large swallow of the bourbon, to cover the silence that was worse, even, than Ben Cameron’s false bravado and my father’s fierce, gnarled smile. I choked into the silence, and spit bourbon onto my blazer and the table, and felt the fire run from my collar to the roots of my hair. I had not tasted bourbon since that night with Lucy so long ago in the summerhouse, when trouble had hung thick and deadly around us. I felt it here too, now, in this dim, grand room of mirrors and damask and polished dark wood.
“That’s sippin’ whiskey,” Ben Cameron said. “Fry your eyeballs. Better take it slow. You don’t want to go out of here on your hands and knees…though I’ve seen your pa do just that in his time.”
He poked my father on the arm, and my father gave a great, jolly bray of laughter. I realized that they were talking, or attempting to talk, to me as they did among themselves, in the rough, simplistic, ritualized jargon of the wellborn Atlanta man among his peers. Instead of pleasing me, it made me want to jump up from the table and run.
“Well.” Ben put his hands flat on the table and looked at me, and the amiable, red-faced jester was gone and a taut, contained, commanding stranger looked out of the clear gray eyes. I had never seen this Ben Cameron either, but knew instinctively that I was seeing the man who counted in clubs and boardrooms, who moved matters and men and would one day lead them.
“What do you say to rethinking this Princeton business, Shep?” he said. “The university’s got a good history department if that’s what you want, or Tech’s got a first-rate industrial management or even political science department. Don’t worry about getting in; we can take care of that. Get you into Chi Phi, too, if you want to, or SAE, or God help us, even KA; I think Alex Cheatham was one of those sorry hounds over at Athens. Or track; you ought to do real well in the 880 at either Tech or Georgia. Coach Kress is a good friend of mine. You ought not have any trouble running a little varsity track if you want to.”
I was still silent, and I suppose he mistook my silence for refusal, but in truth, I could not have said anything if I had wanted to. What was going on here? Why was this conversation happening?
“If it’s real estate you’re worried about, I don’t think your daddy would be too heartbroken if you tried your hand at something else for a little while,” Ben went on, cocking a sandy eyebrow at my father, who nodded solemnly, not looking at either one of us. “It’s a rewarding career for a man, Shep, real estate; an honorable way to make a living, and done right, a way to give something back to the community. And your dad’s holdings are considerable indeed. You surely know that. Managed well, they would do a lot both for your family and your town. But if, you know, you just aren’t interested, well, I don’t think your dad would mind if you went into another field, as long as you stayed around home. That right, Shep?”
He looked at my father again, and my father nodded once more, looking now, intently, at the little shaded lamp on the table, as if he had never seen one before. I continued to gape.
“So I took the liberty of calling a few of your daddy’s and my old friends,” Ben Cameron went on. “You know, Snake’s daddy, and Carter’s, and Pres’s. One or two others. Good men, that you’ve known all your life. And all of them said they’d be proud to have a boy like you in their business. What do you think, Shep? Construction? Banking? One of the utilities? Television? The market? Hell, I’d even let you give selling my little old snake oil a shot, if you think you’d like that. Point is”—and he pointed his fork at me, and looked intently into my eyes with an expression in his own that was as oblique, and yet as freighted with import, as any I have ever seen in a man’s—“we need you here. In Atlanta. Not only us, but a whole new generation of people coming on behind us. Your generation, and even the one after you. You have talents—a weight, if you will—that you may not even know you have, and you surely will have substantial family assets one day, and both should be kept in your own city. Do you read me, Shep?”
“Yessir,” I said. “I guess I do.”
“Well? Will you think about it?”
I looked at my father again, and this time he was looking at me, and I saw in his face a kind of enormous, guarded flatness that covered something I could not fathom. And then suddenly, I will never know how, I did know it. It was a great, formless, all-pervading indifference, to me and to this conversation, and beneath even that was a simple dislike that I knew had its genesis not in me—for you do not dislike that which you have put out of your mind—but in Ben Cameron. My father did not want to be here with me and Ben Cameron having this conversation, and he did not want me to stay in Atlanta and manage his real estate holdings one day, and he could barely veil the resentment at the man opposite him, who was trying so hard to persuade me.
It was a moment of perfect, ringing epiphany, and through the shock of it I wondered, mildly and mindlessly, at what precise moment my father had given up on me as the son he had so long intended to inherit his kingdom.
And then I wondered what power Ben Cameron had over him, that he sat here with the skull’s smile on his heavy face, and listened while his oldest acquaintance tried to keep me where he himself no longer wanted me: in the house on Peachtree Road.
I don’t know where I found the clarity or the courage. I have never been noted, in my dealings with my father, for either.
“Thanks, sir, but there’s really no use thinking about it,” I said briskly. “I really do want to go to Princeton and on to New York like I’d planned, and that’s what I’m going to do, if my father will still agree to it.”
My father made a gesture of concurrence and dismissal, and raised his finger for the waiter with the check, and excused himself.
“I’ve got a man waiting in my office about the Summerhill property, Ben,” he said. “By all means have coffee and dessert and put it on my tab. Thanks for coming over. I didn’t think it would do any good, but I wanted you to see that for yourself. Shep.” And he nodded again at me without looking at me, and walked across the shining lake of the floor and out of the Mirador Room.
“Want anything more?” Ben Cameron said to me, and I shook my head, misery falling down over me like a thick, dark curtain. I had made my point and gained for once and all that freedom I had longed for, but the pain in my heart told me that it was at a price I could not yet even calculate. It was one thing to suspect that your father simply did not consider your existence significant. It was another to have it demonstrated to you.
“Let’s get out of here, then,” Ben said. We were silent as we walked down the stairs and out to the parking lot, and then, as we waited for James to bring our cars around, he said, “You’re smarter than I gave you credit for, Shep. Princeton’s the place for you, and after that…well, we’ll see. I had no business putting the arm on you like that. I hope you’ll forgive me for any pain it caused you. Will you shake on it?”
I took his hand, and he grinned his slow, magical grin, which had fired so many of my small childhood darknesses into healing light, and I felt a very small curl of hope and easiness trickling back into my frozen heart. I grinned back.
He got into his big new Lincoln, and shut the door, and then put his red head out the window and squinted up at me in the bright sunlight. The pure, thin light of early spring touched his head with fire.
“You know, I’ve always thought you were pretty special, Shep,” he said. “I’d have been proud to have you as a son; still would, much as I think of that son of mine. I was wrong to pressure you. But one day when you’re back from school and have some time, I want you to come over and talk to me about your family’s business. I promise I won’t try to sell you on it, if by that time you truly believe it’s not for you. But there are some things about it you need to know, and I don’t think your father is ever going to tell you. Will you do that?”
“Sure,” I said, tears of love and gratitude prickling behind my eyes. I squinted as if in the sun, so he would not see. “But can’t you tell me now?”
“Nope. Not the right time for it. But before too long. Don’t let me forget. It’s important.”
“I won’t,” I said, and he eased the car into gear and flipped me a small wave and slid out into the stream of traffic on Harris Street.
I drove back to North Fulton in the Fury, filled, if I had not been before, with the absolute, still certainty that whatever there was for me in the world lay far away from Atlanta and all its sucking resonances. I had forgotten the last thing he said to me before I got as far as Palisades Road, where Peachtree Street becomes Peachtree Road.