Peachtree Road
by Anne Rivers Siddons
List Price: $6.99
Pages: 832
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0061097233
Publisher: HarperCollins
Lucy came to live with us in the house on Peachtree Road,
when she was five and I was seven, and before that April day was over
I learned two things that altered almost grotesquely the landscape and
weather of my small life. I learned that not all women wept in the nights
after the act of love.
And I learned that we were rich.
That those tidbits of information should literally change a world seems perhaps a bit strange
now, when children of seven digest with equanimity the daily disclosure
of the sexual peccadilloes of politicians and television evangelists and
the felonious traffic in billions by arbitragers and governments. But
the Buckhead and Atlanta of that day were infinitely smaller principalities
than now, and my own cosmos within them was minuscule. I literally had
nothing with which to compare my life, and so assumed, in the manner of
cloistered only children, that everything and everybody else was as we
were.
I knew that my mother cried at night after having intercourse with my father, because I had
slept since my infancy in a small room that had been intended as the dressing
room for my parents' bedroom, and I could hear clearly each muffled grunt
and thrust of that mute and furious coupling, each accelerating squeal
of bedsprings, each of my father's grudging, indrawn breaths. From my
mother I heard nothing during the act, but each time, without fail, that
he finished with a snort and began to snore, her weeping would start,
and I would lie, muscles stiff and breath held with dread and unexamined
fury, waiting for her to stop. I knew precisely how long she would cry,
and when the weeping would cease on a deep, rattling sigh, and when the
traitorous springs would creak once more as she turned over into sleep,
and only then would I unknot my fists and let myself slide into sleep,
following her.
I cannot ever remember wondering what it was that they did in the nights that occasioned the
strange hoarse cries, and the alien weeping--for at all other times my
mother was one of the most self-possessed women I have ever known. I knew
what transpired in their bedroom from the time I could barely walk, though
I had no name for the act until Lucy came, and even then only the shadowiest
notion of its import. My mother never closed the door between our rooms,
and never allowed my father to close it, and for a few weeks and months
when I was about two and had just learned to wriggle over the bars of
my crib and toddle to the threshold of their bedroom, I watched that darkling
coupling.
It must have frightened me to see the two great titans of my existence grappling in murderous
silence on the great canopied tester bed, but I never ran into the room
and never cried out, and I do not know to this day whether they knew I
was there. How they could have avoided at some time or other raising their
heads to see my small, stone-struck figure silhouetted in the sickly glow
from my Mickey Mouse night-light I cannot imagine, but neither of them
ever gave the smallest sign, and I would hang there night after night,
a small Oedipal ghost haunting in despair a chamber where he was not acknowledged.
After a time I stopped going to the door to watch, and soon was no longer afraid, but I never
slept until they were done, and I never lost the feeling of violation
that the sounds gave me, or the resulting bile-flood of guilty rage at
them. Even then, something cool and infinitesimal deep within me knew
that I was being burdened and exploited as no child should be. Oddly,
it was never at my father that the jet of my little fury was directed,
but at my mother. He was a massive, tight, furiously simple, red and white-blond
man who vented his considerable tempers and passions directly, and wherever
they happened to erupt. As useless to feel rage at him as at a volcano,
or a broken water main.
No, it was my mother, the cool, slender, exquisite and infinitely aware vessel for his passions,
at whom my anger steamed. It seemed to me that no one so totally self-defined
and perceived and carefully calibrated as my mother should allow anything
done to her person that would cause weeping, and I was angry at her both
for the tears and for making me listen to them. But since my parents were
all there was, for practical purposes, to my world, and since I loved
my mother and feared my father passionately, I neither admitted the anger
nor shut the door. I simply moved, for the first seven years of my life,
in a dark and decaying stew of unacknowledged sexuality and anger, and
neither cursed the darkness nor thought it out of the ordinary until Lucy
Bondurant blew it away on a gust of her extraordinary laughter. On the
surface, to the rest of the small society in which I moved, I must have
appeared the most unremarkable and ordinary of small boys.
It was for the same reason that I did not know we were rich: There was nothing and no one
who appeared different from us Bondurants in the entire sphere of my existence,
and where there is no concept of poor, neither can there be one of rich.
There were, of course, Shem and Martha Cater, who lived over the old stable-turned-garage
behind the house and worked in the kitchen and pantry and drove the Chrysler
and answered the door and sometimes served meals in the big dining room
when people came to dinner, and there was Amos, who worked in the yard,
and Lottie, who came in to cook, and Princess, who brought the hand laundry,
fragrant, silky, and still warm, in a rush basket.
Excerpted from Peachtree Road © Copyright 2009 by Anne Rivers Siddons. Reprinted with permission by HarperCollins. All rights reserved.
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