Free Peachtree Road by Anne Rivers Siddons

perfect, firelit bliss, to enter a Trappist monastery, if she had asked it of me.
    I never forgot the drowned young architect of my house.
    I did not think his fate tragic, but romantic and somehow unspeakably noble. Muzzily in my mind for years whenever I thought about the house was the thought, “Someone died for this house.” That dank and ignoble death in Florence gave it a kind of promissory import, as though set apart from its birth for some special fate.
    It is a spare, eloquent American Georgian house of soft rose brick, hip-roofed and stone-quoined, with a row of four gables showcasing the small third-floor Palladian windows, and twin chimneys at each end. The front door is an austere and lovely Federal, with fanlight and sidelights beneath a richly detailed portico supported by thin Ionic columns. A semicircular drive describes a half-moon in front, slicing through a small rectangle of lawn, and a black wrought-iron fence sets it off from the sidewalk along Peachtree Road.
    Most of its three acres lies behind it, where the 54 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS
    long formal garden and lily pool and summerhouse are carved out of a hardwood forest which stretches over to meet the backyards of the houses on Rivers Road. Once behind the house, you would never know, even now, that the traffic of a city of nearly three million pours past virtually at the front door.
    Of course, when my father bought the house, in 1930, Peachtree Road was very nearly country, and the traffic was minimal. That was one reason he chose it. Newly come to Atlanta from tiny, rural Fayetteville to the southeast, he was resigned to the fact that his fortune and his future lay in the city, but he was damned if he would live among its humors and noises and hauteur. As for my mother, only the knowledge that Buckhead was the city’s smartest new address lured her out into the wilds of its northern suburbs. She was one small-town girl who would have lived in the middle of Five Points downtown if she could have. But when my father brought her to see the house and told her that on her left was one of the Coca-Cola Candler daughters and just behind her on Muscogee a former governor, she saw the wisdom of it. Besides, the price the doctor’s newly widowed wife was asking was low, and my mother, though a banal woman, was not a stupid one. And the house was bought, after all, with her money.
    “It’s an investment in your future, Sheppie,” I can remember her saying many times when I was small. And it has indeed been that, if not in the way she envisioned. She meant, I know, for me to marry and raise an exemplary Buckhead family in it after she herself had enjoyed the full fruits of its irreproachable address and proximity. She never envisioned it to shelter my self-imposed exile from the world.
    Inside, it was almost classically Georgian: A round, domed, rotunda-like entrance hall with niches for flowers or statuary gave on the left onto a vast living room, with PEACHTREE ROAD / 55
    a formal columned porch beyond that, and on the right onto a dining room with the pantry and service porch behind it and the kitchen beyond it on the right. Behind the entrance hall lay a soaring two-story stair hall with a beautiful curved Adam stair ascending five flights and six landing levels. When I was small, I used to picture Lucy in her wedding white coming down that stair to meet me in the rotunda of the entrance hall, and indeed I did see her in white, years later, descending it, but it was not to her wedding that she came.
    That was left to Little Lady, and I have to think that my aunt Willa began planning it when she first stepped into the house out of that spring night in 1941.
    Behind the stair hall was the octagonal paneled library, which my father used largely as his study, and though it was a beautiful and air-washed room, lambent with sunlight, as were all the downstairs rooms, from the floor-to-ceiling Palladian windows, I never liked it, and was never allowed to