The South killed Lucy Bondurant Chastain Venable on the day she was born. It just took her until now to die. It was a textbook murder, classical in concept, faultless in execution; a work of art, really, as such things go. And no wonder. It’s what we do best, kill our women. Or maim them. Or make monsters of them, which may be the worst of all.
I was thinking of that as I stood by Lucy’s grave in the Bondurant plot in Oakland Cemetery this afternoon, in the pale lemon sunlight of a Georgia autumn. Of that, and of many other things, this being the accepted time and place for reflection: a quiet burial in an old cemetery where your family and friends and everybody you know lie, or will. One of the other things I was thinking was how contented and tranquil I always feel here; mindless almost. I have always loved Oakland. Lucy and I played together here as children, forty-odd years ago.
It is not that I am morbid, although there would be plenty of people in our crowd to dispute that. To our collective mind, morbid is synonymous with “funny,” and there was not one of the people gathered here today, me included, who would not agree that Lucy’s cousin Shep Bondurant is “funny.” But morbidity is not the direction my aberration takes. Rather the opposite, I think. I’m pretty cheerful and optimistic, in the main, even if I don’t go out anymore, or hardly. If I were morbid, I expect I would be dead by now.
No, Oakland is not, to me, a place of shadows and stagnation. Not even of death. There is an air of ongoing bustle and life to it, in a silent and unseen way, of course, which is extremely attractive, in the manner of all places where like people dwell close together in harmony of purpose. The people here have their own grand, small mossy mansions, jumbled close together on tiny green, shaded lawns, and a tangle of brick streets threading the high hills, and fine old oaks and magnolias, and a great brick wall to keep out the riffraff, and a splendid view of Atlanta to the northwest, and uniformed servants to tend their lawns and streets and dwellings. That these citizens are all dead has always seemed to me quite beside the point of Oakland. The point is that its denizens are together, as they were in life, and safe, and that they will never, for all eternity, have to deal with the one thing that they detested and feared most in their lifetimes: the increasing intrusion into their ordered world of trash and tackpots. They have left all that to us who only visit them here, and there were not a few of us in the knot of handsome, seemly people gathered to send off Lucy this afternoon who will be relieved to join their sheltered ranks. In the core group of Old Atlanta, of whom I speak, the ecstasy of Heaven is surely incidental to the insularity of Oakland.
Our crowd has always been in and out of Oakland almost as frequently and easily as we enter and leave our homes and clubs. From the time we were small children, Lucy and I were brought here on picnics, and before the city got strict about closing hours and vandalism, it was a prime spot in which to park and catch some monk—a cloying term somebody in my crowd devised for necking, which caught on and became the rage for several years. Lucy always swore that it was here that she and Red Chastain first made love, on top of Margaret Mitchell’s grave, on a spring night after a Phi Chi dance when she was sixteen.
“I swear the earth moved, Gibby,” she said. “Old Red thought it was his incomparable fucking, but I’m sure it was little old Peggy Mitchell applauding.”
I doubt that it really happened, though I know that Lucy was sleeping with Red by then, and Margaret Mitchell’s grave would have been just the sacramental fillip she would have chosen to mark the occasion of their first coupling. For one thing, Lucy was a baroque and gifted liar, and for another, Red was like a cat about his creature comforts, and would never have fucked on any but the levelest of ground, and then only atop the pristine Chatham blanket he kept in the trunk of the MG for such occasions. It’s even unlikely that he would have done it out of doors, having as he did access to any number of bachelor apartments around town, unless Lucy had brought him all the way to the brink before he could assess the alternatives. That is credible. Lucy had half our crowd lifting bumpers by the time she was twelve.
Oakland Cemetery hasn’t changed much in the hundred and thirty-odd years it has sheltered Atlanta’s favored dead. It is the city’s proud claim that all classes of citizens lie here, from poor black and unknown potter’s field inhabitants to Atlanta’s silkiest gentry, the ones who built the ornate Victorian mausoleums, whose names can be found on a great many municipal streets, parks and buildings. Strictly speaking, this is true; for four years, until Westview was built, Oakland was, so to speak, the only game in town, and indeed, a few blacks of some distinction are here, usually at the behest of the white families for whom they or their progenitors toiled. There is, too, a separate Jewish section, an area devoted to the Confederate dead, many of whom fell at the Battle of Atlanta, and an Irish quarter, tactfully dedicated to the Hibernian Rifles of our cherished War. But over the years our crowd has largely usurped Oakland for its own, and now very few tackpots or trash are honored here.
For all its homogeneity, it is an eccentric place, and I think that is why I am so fond of it. I can just hear my mother, who lies here, refuting that: “What a thing to say, Shep. These are our own people. The funny people are all at Arlington.” But Oakland has bite and particularity and an air of raffish festivity to it, an orneriness that calls out to me, my mother notwithstanding. Among its ubiquitous angels and lugubrious inscriptions are the graven images of the venality and pragmatism that are the soul of this city, and their robustness bids to far outlive the crumbling cherubim and the soot-weeping eggs and darts. One progenitor of a prominent family has his Ph.D. inscribed on his mausoleum. Another has had replicated on his the facade of his fine Greek Revival earthly mansion, complete with street number, lest anyone confuse it with someone else’s.
My favorite has always been that of the Smith family, one of whose members, a Jasper N., had himself carved life-size and set foursquare atop his mausoleum, hat on knee, gazing to the northeast at the fine view to be had of the city. In life, local legend says, Jasper refused to wear a tie, and in death he has not capitulated. That he gazes now, not at the city’s skyline, but at the Martin Luther King Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Station and the new Piggyback Rail facility of the old Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill, does not seem to disturb him. He can no longer see Cabbagetown, the rank warren of old wooden shanties that grew up around the mill, and for that he may be grateful. I would be, profoundly. I have not seen Cabbagetown since a bitter cold day more than twenty-five years ago, and after today, I will not willingly come this near to it again, not until it is my turn to take up residence at Oakland. Cabbagetown was the catalyst that finished transforming me into what is known, euphemistically, as a recluse, though it by no means precipitated the journey. I suppose you might say I was genetically programmed for that.
The Bondurant mausoleum, my own family’s port of embarkation, lies on the crest of one of Oakland’s many hills, shaded by a giant magnolia and a leaning, fruitless old holly. It is unprepossessing as the mausoleums there go, as spare and chaste and linear as the old scholar, my grandfather, who erected it. But it has a magnificent situation, being adjacent to the site of the long-ago mayor’s house from which General John B. Hood watched the Battle of Atlanta. Why that exercise in ignominy should so please my family I have never understood, but it did, especially my mother. Not herself a native Atlantan, she could and always did manage a tear when we visited the plot, and she would always say, “I can actually see the smoke and flames and hear the cannon. It just smites my heart.”
“Your heart gets itself smitten over some pretty odd things,” my father said on one of those occasions.
“We’d all be better off if yours got smitten over anything at all,” she replied.
I can see in retrospect that both of them were right.
Now, over the hulking carcass of the MARTA station and the dreary jumble of the rail yards, you can see the towers of commerce that have made us the hub of the Sunbelt, the undisputed capital of the Southeast, the crossroads, as it were, of the country: a grinding, jostling, hustling megalopolis of nearly three million people in a vast metropolitan area encompassing eighteen counties, spread out on our high green Piedmont plain under a stinking canopy of dull bronze, cupped between Kennesaw Mountain to the west, Stone Mountain to the east, the foothills of the Blue Ridge to the north, and still seeping south like the yolk of an undercooked egg.
Some of our downtown and midtown structures—the Trust Company of Georgia Tower, the First National Bank Building, the Georgia-Pacific Building, the Westin-Peachtree Plaza, the bone-white spires of Peachtree Center, the IBM Building—are very tall. That, to my eye, is all they are: tall. They scrabble and paw at the sky like pale, thin, unformed adolescent fingers. They are without distinction, except for their much-vaunted height. They are abrupt and nervous. It is a nervous skyline. The jangled skyscrapers do not let the observer forget that it was not the deep, rich arteries of the slow old rivers, but the thin, jackrabbity, stinking, robust veins of the railroads that were, for Atlanta, both nourishment and metaphor. From the very beginning, it was destined—or doomed, depending on your point of view—to be a business town.
And it’s a money town. Oh, very much a money town. Like height, money is the other conspicuous thing that we have. My lifelong friend Charlie Gentry told me once, at a fund-raising luncheon at the Commerce Club before I stopped going out, “Money is the aristocracy in this town, no matter what you hear at the Driving Club. Money and property. It sure as hell isn’t the old families. None of us were here more than a hundred and fifty years ago. There wasn’t even an outhouse to piss in until then. And the few of us who have been here since the beginning came from somewhere else—Savannah or Charleston or Richmond, where they really know about old. No wonder we holler so about gumption and guts. It’s what we have instead of blue blood.”
Charlie, God love him. He was right, of course. He would know. Without any real money himself, he became one of the quintessential money and power brokers in the city. Most of us, plus the tackpots and the Texans and the Arabs we purport to scorn, came courting Charlie Gentry sooner or later. He took it in his stride and did his best for us, understanding precisely from whence we came. Money and business is and always was our ethos. Not creativity or artistic sensibility or even charming, cultivated decadence. Just business. In Atlanta, if it is good for business, it is as good as done.
I have never particularly liked that about Atlanta, but I concede that it has given us an extraordinary vigor, and I have certainly feasted on its fruits. I am not ungrateful, just unengaged. Atlanta has never sung to me. One of the deepest bonds I shared with Lucy was the way we both felt about the city: Neither of us liked it very much, but neither of us wanted to leave it, either. I remember once, late into the cataclysmic sixties, when she asked me why I stayed, I surprised myself with quite a succinct little précis: “It’s passionless, calculating, selfsatisfied, intolerant, insensitive, uncultivated, vulgar, even soulless…but it’s alive! God, Lucy, the energy in this town! And it’s just so beautiful, parts of it. But mostly, it’s mine. It’s what I know. It’s the card I drew; it’s what I’m invested in. I know this place. I’d never know another place or other people like I do this.”
“Is knowing so important?” Lucy asked.
“Yes,” I said. “For some reason, knowing is everything.”
“Hell, Gibby,” Lucy said. “Knowing doesn’t amount to shit. It doesn’t change the way things are.”
Lucy was early, and ever, a realist.
At a party once, again in those days when I was still going out, a smart, thin woman with a deep, leathery tan and the unmistakable smack of that New York-Palm Beach axis in her voice asked me, discontentedly, where you had to go to find Old Atlanta.
“They certainly aren’t at any of the parties I’ve been to, and I’ve been to every decent party this entire winter,” she said.
I looked around the drawing room of the big house, a beetling ersatz Norman in one of those frightening developments out on the river where florists’ and caterers’ trucks are lost by the thousands. The Chattahoochee Triangle, we call it. Everybody there was what the old ladies in my crowd would call tackpots, and every other one seemed to be a lawyer. I didn’t know anybody; I had come with clever, Jewish Marty Fox, whom I had just hired to help me sort out my father’s estate, and whom I liked enormously. The talk of deals and money had bored me, but the hors d’oeuvres were spectacular, and the host had provided a fleet of minivans to shuttle guests from their cars to the house, and there was more décolletage in the room than I had ever seen, except at the strip shows we used to sneak into Manhattan from Princeton to see.
“Funerals,” I said. “Most especially funerals at Saint Philip’s or All Saints or Saint Luke’s. Or Oakland Cemetery.”
“You mean they’re all dead?” she said, staring at me belligerently, to see if I was making fun of her. I was not.
“No. I mean the only time I ever see what I guess you’d call Old Atlanta all together in a group is at a funeral or beside somebody’s grave at Oakland.”
“Or at the Driving Club or the Capital City Club or Brookhaven,” I did not say. The woman would never find out for herself. Those were still the days when new money, no matter how much there was of it, didn’t get into the older clubs. This, like almost everything else, has changed now, of course, and it’s one change of which I heartily approve—or would, if I still went to the clubs. Those pretackpot days at the Piedmont Driving Club were among the most astoundingly boring in the history of the world.
I had spoken the truth to the leathery lady, however facetiously. There we all were this afternoon: Old Atlanta en masse, or what passes for it. The quick of it, as well as the dead. A dwindling handful of men and women, young and old, who had lived within a four-mile radius of each other all their lives; grown up together, gone to school and college together, flirted and danced with and courted and married each other, godparented each other’s children, laughed and wept and partied with each other, loved and sometimes hated each other, mourned and buried each other. Rich, or what the world calls rich, a good many of them. Incomprehensibly rich, a few of them. Once, all-powerful in the smaller arena that was the Atlanta of their prime.
There beside Lucy’s grave today we had a past and present mayor, a governor, an ex-governor, a United States senator; men who had built family mercantile and service businesses into international concerns, men who had made literally millions from Coca-Cola, either directly or indirectly, men who had dramatically altered the face of the South and in some cases the nation with their monolithic urban and suburban developments; men who had, almost single-handedly or in concert with five or six of their peers, brought to the city, in the firestorm decade of the sixties, a major league sports arena, five professional sports teams, a great, dead-white marble arts center and a world-famous conductor to inhabit it, a world-class international airport, a state-of-the-art rapid transit system, a freeway system to boggle the mind, unparalleled convention facilities and the people to fill them—and the peacefully integrated school system that lured in the industry to fuel it all.
They are a superannuated, largely toothless pride of old lions whose days of glory are past, perhaps, but their turf is still that cloistered world for which they wrought everything, and it is still inviolable, even if it is shrunken now, and teeters sometimes on its foundations. And they still move with grace and ease in it.
And their wives, old now, too, but still chic in the soft, pastel way of their primes, and their widows; equally smart, equally erect and slender and expensively and unobtrusively dressed—all there. And their sons and daughters: us, my crowd, Lucy’s and my contemporaries, our own ranks thinned and wounded, our faces surprised with middle age. And even their grandchildren, a few of them. Our children. I saw Sarah Gentry’s two quicksilver daughters, and Little Lady Rawson’s lone eighteen-year-old Circe, and Lelia Cheatham’s tall, gangling sons. And Lucy’s daughter, Malory, stricken and smeared with grief but still looking so heartstoppingly like her mother in her own first youth and slender, smoky beauty that my eyes stung with it. Malory, standing for the moment with the other women, apart, as they always seem to be in groups, from the closed ranks of their men. Malory…
The women were an attractive lot, I thought, not for the first time. They were all still soft-faced, soft-voiced, poised, and they talked today in low voices with each other, smiling sometimes over at their men. Without being in the least physically similar, they gave an impression of agreeable sameness. I knew, of course, that they were as varied as the women in any comparable peer group; that the sameness was merely protective coloration, a softly buffed armor they acquired along with their charm bracelets and white debut frocks when they came of age in the big old houses off Peachtree Road.
My eye caught a flash of red in all the quiet taupes and navies, and I grinned involuntarily at the openly defiant scarlet chiffon scarf around the strongly modeled brown throat of Sarah Cameron Gentry. None of the girls in our crowd had liked Lucy worth a damn, and Sarah, of all of them, had had good reason. Too well bred to rejoice on this day, Sarah was nevertheless flying all her flags. Small, staunch, perfectly made Sarah, also my friend from infancy, and once, more than friend. In an earlier time, I might have married Sarah, and thus been saved. In an earlier time, and a better one…. Sarah caught my eye and gave me a slow amber wink. Her dark head is threaded now with gray, but it is still the springy, cropped tumble of mahogany curls that she has worn since girlhood. She always kept it short for her swimming and diving. Her body still retains its fine, shapely, flat athlete’s muscles, and I still remember with pleasure the pearly sheen of baby oil and iodine on her golden back, and the music and grace of her racing dives off the board at the Driving Club pool.
I wondered if Sarah still dived and swam. I have not been to the club for a very long time.
Over to the left of the women, us. That most endangered of species, the masculine remnants of Old Atlanta, far outnumbered even in middle age by our widows and daughters. Speaking to each other in that peculiar shorthand of ours that marks and dates and explains us: “How are you, suh?” “Good to see you, suh.” That “suh” is not politesse; it is our crowd’s familiar. We use it among ourselves as the French do their familiar “tu.”
A few rich old men who changed a world. And finally their sons, who to my mind, no matter what our collective accomplishments, never were a patch on them.
The Buckhead Boys.
An intense female journalist, who was not one of us but would have died to be, wrote an article about us once, in Cityscope magazine. It was overheated and romantic in the extreme, and caused no end of scornful amusement in our ranks, but I have always thought that it did manage to capture something about us that was valid, a kind of oversimplified truth. No one I know agrees with me about that.
Back there, the woman wrote, in that dreaming cradle slung between Depression and Camelot, there was, in Atlanta, a golden group of boys and girls called the Pinks and the Jells. They were, most of them, the scions of the great merchant families that had built Atlanta back from the ashes of the Civil War, and if the raw young city could be said to have an aristocracy, these were its heirs and heiresses, its best and brightest…and its natural victims.
Their fathers were the power structure of that youngest and least typical Southern city, the movers and shakers, the “club”…the bank presidents, the heads of the great utilities, the newspaper and radio empires, and the family-owned businesses that had grown with the city into mid-century monoliths. These fathers were the men who took the reins of the stagnant city in the dying years of the Depression and flogged it with money, muscle, single-mindedness, and pragmatic guile to the brink of what became known at the end of the incendiary 1960s as “the next great international city.” Their sons, the children of that endless, golden time, became the men who, prepared or not, took up the torches that would light the city and the entire South into an unimaginable new world called the Sunbelt.
Their daughters became the women who ran the great homes and schools and children and charities of that time of transition, and who flourished like roses on its graceful trellis…or who did not, and paid dearly.
James Dickey, who was one of them, called them the Buckhead Boys. Not all of them survived the appellation and all that it implied.
Theirs was a rigidly masculine world of money, privilege, grace, ritual, preening foolishness, high spirits, and low expectations. They were not groomed for their future roles as power brokers because it was taken for granted that they would slide as easily into them as their fathers had into their own earlier and simpler niches. They remained children for a very long time. They were probably genuinely loved and certainly indulged. Most of them would have told you that they had wonderful childhoods and adolescences.
Insular, careless, totally and imperviously self-assured, chauvinistic in the extreme, naive and unsophisticated, arrogant, profoundly physical rather than introspective, largely unburdened by intellect, and almost laughably White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, they were as cohesive as cousins and as stunningly insensitive as young royalty. They were oblivious to anyone and anything outside their charmed circle of prep schools, high school sororities and fraternities, drag racing, endless formal dances, summer camps, drugstores and driveins and hangouts, orchid corsages and staglines and cut-ins, country clubs and Cokes and crinolines, and later, debuts and Junior League and Assemblies and Rabun Gap-Nacoochee and Tallulah Falls and Germans and Nine O’Clocks and Georgia Tech and branch water and bourbon…endless, endless bourbon
It was a beautiful, bountiful, exuberant, frivolous, snobbish, and silkily secure kingdom, and it was then, as it is still, a very small and strictly delineated world, perhaps no more than four miles square, in a green northern suburb of Atlanta called Buckhead. And yet out of it came the men, and indirectly the women, who, rather to their own surprise, would change forever the definition of the word “South.”
But it was a world with hidden reefs and shoals that could, and did, wreck the unwary, the deviate, the maverick, the vulnerable or gentle or complicated or different ones.
The Pinks and the Jells. The Buckhead Boys and their girls. The small, powerful and sometimes doomed group of people who were born into a very dense, rich, small and unassailable world, therein to move for the entirety of their lives, in which their primary artery, metaphor, and pathway of the heart was Peachtree Road.
More than any of us, Lucy hated that article.
“It’s sentimental shit, Gibby,” she snorted. “The worst kind of junk, because it has a little streak of truth to it. That silly woman didn’t dig any further to get down to where all the real truth of us was. Jim Dickey’s the only one who ever did that, and nobody reads poetry in this town. Oh, hell, who would have told it to her, anyhow? But this kind of stuff is kiss-off shit.”
As I have said, Lucy was an utter realist. She had a bone-deep knowledge of how things really are. She had it even as a very small child; learned it early, learned it cruelly and indelibly. It is a terrible burden, this gift of truth, especially for so fragile a child as Lucy Bondurant was, but I suspect it was the source of her great charm. She stood apart with it like wildfire on a mountain of blasted stone.
I suppose you could also say that it finally killed her. Brought her there to lie among all those other Bondurants, next to a stone for an unlikable aunt that reads, “She stood foursquare to all the winds that blew.” Lucy would have laughed at that, her rich, pouring, froggy belly laugh. In all her life, Lucy was not, for one instant, foursquare to anything. She was all dazzle, shimmer, movement, smoke and light.
There were so many Bondurants at Oakland Cemetery this afternoon, most of them, thank God, safely belowground. My grandmother and grandfather, Adelaide and Sheppard Gibbs Bondurant. My great-aunt Lorena. The aforementioned four-square Aunt Eugenie. Olivia Redwine Bondurant and Sheppard Gibbs Bondurant, Jr., my mother and father. A small, sad row of newly born and perished infants, all but one of their stones kin to so many in the old cemetery, dating from the days of typhoid and smallpox and diphtheria. Lucy’s small brother, Jamie. And aboveground, her narrow Ferragamos gleaming in the dust of early October, old Willa Bondurant, standing now like a lacquered chimera with the other women, on the arm of her surviving daughter, Adelaide. Little Lady Bondurant Rawson, Lucy’s younger sister. The “good” one.
Lucy herself.
And me, Sheppard Gibbs Bondurant III. The last Bondurant. Or am I? This is and will likely always be the central mystery of my life.
Lucy’s second husband, Jack, does not lie in the Bondurant plot beside her. He is buried in the Venable family plot outside Nashville. Even if he had not died first, he would not have been there this afternoon, in that most essential of all Bondurant countries. He never had any use at all for the Bondurants—including, I think, me—and there was never any question of his lying here beside his widow. I know that his sons came and took him home for burial, but I am not sure when they did so. I had liked Jack, but the moment he was gone it was as if his life had never rippled the surface of ours, mine or Lucy’s. I did not go to his funeral, and she did not either.
His widow. The widow Venable. I cannot think of Lucy like that, though of course, technically and for a short time, she was. The word sounds so tissue-dry and alone, and Lucy was never, in her entire life, alone. It was what she feared most, aloneness, and what she spent the whole of her life holding at bay. She did it well.
The other thing she feared above all else was death itself, which is why I find it impossible to connect her with what we buried in Oakland Cemetery this afternoon. I saw her after her death, and even though they say that only the viewing of your dead can bring the healing reality of it home to you, that poor spilled and slackened mannequin had absolutely nothing to do with Lucy, and so I felt no grief then, and have not yet. It is a great relief, though I don’t suppose I can expect it to last. Still, it always seemed to me that Lucy and death were such anathema to each other that the sheer force of the aversion might, after all, keep them apart.
Once, when Lucy had first come to the Peachtree Road house, my mother’s altar guild met in our drawing room and one of the women brought slides of the American cemetery in Rome, where a kinsman of hers was buried. Lucy and I had been permitted by old Martha Cater, who took care of us, to creep just inside the room and sit quietly in the hot, mote-dancing August gloom to watch the show. About halfway through, after flash after flash of tombstones and mausoleums and angels and cherubim and classical fragments that far outshone Oakland, Lucy began to cry. Before Martha could whisk her out of the room she was sobbing aloud, and by the time she had been tucked into her bed in the small third-floor bedroom next to mine, she was screaming. It was the first of the terrible, inconsolable fits of hysteria that quaked her childhood. All anyone could get out of her was “I’m so afraid to die! I’m so afraid to die!”
Another time, perhaps two years later, when she was seven and I was nine, I was lying in the hammock on the veranda of the summerhouse, as I so often did, thinking of nothing but being drowned in the dapple of light and shade falling through the latticework, when Lucy appeared silently beside me. I knew she had been swinging alone on the swing set by the goldfish pond. She did that for hours on summer days, humming tonelessly to herself, mesmerized and lost. When I looked up, her face was even whiter than it usually was, and her October-blue eyes were all pupil, almost mad-looking. Her hair was smoke around her head.
“You know what, Gibby?” she said. “I think there isn’t any God.”
I was shocked, force-fed little Christian that I was then.
“Of course there’s a God, stupid. You’ll go to Hell for talking like that.”
“No. If there’s not any God, there’s not any Hell.”
“Well, where do you think you’ll be when you’re dead then, if there’s not any God or Heaven or Hell?” I was beginning to smell trouble, and flinched from it.
“Nowhere. That’s where. I won’t be anywhere, and you won’t either. There’ll just be…nothing. That’s all there is. Close your eyes and think about it, Gibby. Black, black, black nothing always and forever, without any end…”
I did, and gradually, as she chanted, the red weight of the sun on my eyelids cooled and lightened, and the heat went out of the June day, and suddenly I was floating frozen and suspended and paralyzed and utterly, totally alone in a howling black void for which there was no help and to which there was no end. Tears of fright and despair stung my eyes, and when I opened them the world spun sickly, and my heart hammered with the first and still worst real terror I have ever known.
Tears were standing in Lucy’s eyes, too, and her chest was beginning to heave with the onset of one of the dreadful, mindless screaming fits.
“Anything is better than dying,” she said, and there was that familiar knife-edge of panic in her voice. “Anything!”
“Lots of things are worse than dying.” I parroted my mother and some of the women who visited her in the afternoons. “Dishonor, and being poor, and being conquered, and being tacky, and rape are all worse than dying.”
“That’s bullshit,” she said shrilly. It was her favorite word that summer. “Any of those things is ten million thousand times better than being dead and nothing! The one thing I couldn’t stand is for there to be nothing!”
“You wouldn’t know it if there was nothing,” I pointed out, deliberately pedantic, trying to avert the spell with obtuseness. But my own heart still bucked and tore with the terror she had planted there.
It worked, though. “I would too,” she said mulishly, and her chin went up, and the tears receded. Lucy did not like to be contradicted.
I laughed, I remember. But now, deep in those middle-life night horrors that bring me up sweating out of sleep, my mouth already tasting that primal nothingness, my heart old with the burden of its truth, sick and corrupted beyond healing or redemption or resurrection and separated forever from the time that I did not know it, I see that she was right. That that is what death truly is, that awful and unending nothing and the eternal knowledge of nothingness. Not life, but death everlasting.
As we were gathering ourselves this afternoon to leave Lucy to begin her long residence, I felt rather than saw the eyes of the women on me, and I heard old Mrs. Dorsey say to Mrs. Rawls, in the flat nasal shout of Atlanta’s wellborn deaf, “I hear Shep is taking it mighty hard. They always were as close as twins.”
I grinned inwardly.
“Sucks to you, Mrs. Dorsey,” I said under my breath. “You’re going to be one bored old sow now that you don’t have Lucy Bondurant to kick around anymore.”
She was right, though, if not in the way she thinks. But what the hell. Let her keep the thought. I get points for being sensitive and wounded, which may buy me another unmolested chunk of solitude. Lucy and I did have an extraordinary and uncanny closeness, unlike anything else in our lives. It was eerie. I didn’t always like it. Sometimes I out-and-out hated it. But there it was. I could always see into and through Lucy’s mind. When she was young and beautiful and heartless, I was her heart. Later, in the times when she was essentially mindless, I was her mind. I don’t know now what I’m going to do with all this leftover Lucyness.
Sitting here in the old summerhouse behind the Peachtree Road house where I was born and which I have owned for more than a quarter of a century, and which I have entered only a few times in almost as many years, it occurs to me that when this level, pleasant numbness lifts I may find that I can no longer live in a world where Lucy is not…though not, again, for the reason that Mrs. Dorsey and Company will espouse. It simply may not be possible. If not, I think I know how I’ll arrange things. Lucy would applaud the wit, irony and sheer appropriateness of it. It would match in artistry the panache of her own exit. If it comes to that, will it be the end of the Bondurants? As I said earlier, I’m not apt to know that, whether I stick around or let myself out by the back door. In either case, it scarcely matters.
It is seven o’clock, and the shadows of the old oaks and hickories in the back garden are falling across the summerhouse and the veranda. The grass beyond that, around the empty oval of the fish pond, is dry and matted and bleached with the heat of September just past, but the shadows have in them the cold blue of winter coming on. Marty needs to get after the lawn service again. Everything looks used and dusty, as it always does in Atlanta in Indian summer. From the looks of the mounded acorns in the grass, and the continuous pelting of them on the old slate roof of the summerhouse, we’re going to have a cold winter, and a long one. I think the image of Lucy lying faceup to the winter—she who so hated cold that she used to weep with despair at the simple fact of February—would be more than I could bear, except that the scotch is working now, and instead of muddling my head into sentiment, it is sharpening it out of maudlinism. Liquor has always clarified things for me. It’s probably why I drink so seldom.
I should know soon what is going to happen to me.
Old Willa Bondurant was the last of the women to pass by me on her way out of the cemetery. She is almost perfectly preserved, mummified in her beauty, as is Little Lady, who held her mother’s mottled, birdlike arm as carefully as old Dresden. Only, unlike Little Lady, by age instead of alcohol. Willa has always taken exquisite care of herself. She stopped and smiled at me, a Junior Leaguer still with her simple black dress from Rich’s Regency Shops and her pearls and her “little heels,” and the throaty, slow “Old Atlanta” accent which she perfected early in her tenure in the house on Peachtree Road. Of all its occupants, she alone prevails there now. I knew she would go back to it from the cemetery, to a fire in the little sitting room and her endless cigarettes and afternoon sherries and bridge games and charities and the company of imperious old women.
Even before she opened her mouth, I knew she was going to say something so terrible that it would, forever after, divide time.
Oh, yes. We make our own monsters, but they inevitably have their revenge.