Free Peachtree Road by Anne Rivers Siddons Page A

spend much time there. We sat there for an hour or so on winter evenings, all of us, while my father and mother and Aunt Willa sipped whiskeys or sherry before dinner and we children, scrubbed and combed, played the Victrola or listened to the big Capehart with the volume turned down.
    But mostly the family sat, when we were together, in the small morning room behind the living room or, during the long, warm springs and summers and autumns, on the comfortable, slightly shabby lattice-screened porch that ran off to the right of the library.
    Upstairs, to the left of the stair hall, were my parents’
    bedroom and bath with a seldom-used sleeping porch off them and the little dressing room where I slept my furious, captive sleep. To the right were the two bedrooms that became Aunt Willa’s and Little Lady’s, and the small maids’
    room in which little Jamie Bondurant slept so briefly. Behind the stair hall, over the library, was
    56 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS
    a screened porch where Lucy and I sometimes played on warm days, before we appropriated the summerhouse.
    On the third floor, up a narrow stair, was the low-ceilinged, musty warren of rooms where the servants refused to stay, which became Lucy’s and my childhood retreat. They were meanly lit and airless in the extreme, suffocating in the summertime, but to us they were a refuge to be guarded fiercely, and we shared them in a kind of bone-and-skin-deep accord, the only secure burrows we had ever known, until we grew too old for such proximity. Even then, when the wisdom of our separation was apparent even to me, I mourned the loss of those cell-like nests under the roof, and Lucy wept inconsolably for days.
    “What did they think we were going to do that was so bad?” she stormed to me, in my new fastness out in the summerhouse, after the incident that resulted in our separation.
    “Well, you know,” I said, reddening.
    “Oh, shoot, that’s silly. I don’t want to, and you wouldn’t even know what it was if I hadn’t told you. I don’t even think you’ve got your doohickey yet, have you?”
    “Go on, now, Lucy, I hear your mama calling you. I’ve got stuff I need to do,” I said, face flaming.
    “Well, even if you did have one, which I don’t believe you do, I wouldn’t do it with you,” she said, the angry tears beginning again. “I don’t think you’d be a bit of fun. You’d probably cough or vomit.”
    Lucy was ten then, to my going-on-twelve, and knew the frailties of my flesh, as well as the deficiencies of my soul, better than my mother ever had.
    The summerhouse! Always, to me, and then to Lucy, it was sheer enchantment, a place apart both in distance and in spirit, with the utter and endless fascination that all perfect, miniature things have for children. It was a PEACHTREE ROAD / 57
    complete small house, a near-replica of the big one, except that it was done in white frame, with the same hipped roof, black-shuttered Palladian windows to the floor and a pedimented, columned portico. It was buried in a surf of old boxwoods and crape myrtles and backed by dense woods, and a wisteria vine arched over the portico and bathed the two big rooms inside in a wash of lavender light and fragrance each spring. There was one great room for living and dining, floored in Italian quarry tiles and with a small stone fireplace, and a smaller one adjoining it for sleeping and dressing. Behind these rooms were a small bath and a complete, compact kitchen. It had been built for my grandmother Adelaide, who came to live with her son and daughter-in-law when my grandfather died, before I was born, but she lived in it for only two years before she too died, and it was largely unused until Lucy and I claimed it and moved our daytime base of operations there. My parents and her mother did not really mind. The furnishings were too grand for the servants, who in any case had quarters over the garage, and not grand enough for use in entertaining. My mother never liked