Free Peachtree Road by Anne Rivers Siddons Page B

my grandmother’s plain, well-used old family pieces. She had thought once of building a swimming pool in the garden where the lily pool has always been, and using the little house as a pool house, but she and my father both were too fair to take the sun, and I was adjudged too frail, especially in the summer polio season; so the house became known as the summerhouse, albeit an empty one that had known, until we opened it for our play, no summers.
    All this, then, had been mine from birth, this overflowing largesse of physical grace and symmetry and seclusion, but it took the clear, light-sparked blue eyes and strange, silverfish imagination of my cousin Lucy Bondurant to open my own eyes and heart to its unique place-magic. I do not know what would have become of
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    me ultimately—a suicide? a stockbroker?—if she had not come to live with us, but she did, and in one revelatory split second when she stepped into the foyer of the house on Peachtree Road and said in her extraordinary, musky voice,
    “Something stinks,” my star was as fixed in its far firmament as Orion: Joy and aloneness were mine, in equal measure, gift of Lucy, out to the distant edges of my life.
    CHAPTER TWO
    T hey had not been in the house a week before it became apparent to me, my spongelike pores newly opened to revelation, that my uncle Jim was to loom over Lucy’s life, and therefore mine, like one of those menacing grotesques in Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.
    I had not thought of him again since the day they came, and then only abstractly, as the author of Lucy’s appearance in my life, and no one—not my parents, not my aunt Willa, not Lucy herself—had mentioned him. If Little Lady wept for her father, or lisped his name, we did not hear it, for she spent her days in the second-floor bedroom-nursery hastily fashioned by my mother and Martha, attended by Martha’s teenaged daughter ToTo. Little Jamie, a happy child, did not cry at all, for his father or anyone else. For a small space of time it was as if Jim Bondurant had never existed.
    Then, around four o’clock in the afternoon of the fifth day they had been with us, Martha Cater put her head into my newly acquired little third-floor cubicle, where I was just yawning my way out of an enforced nap, and asked if I knew where Lucy was. I did not. She had been put to bed in her new room, next to mine, at two o’clock, as had become the custom, and had fallen asleep before I did. I knew that because she had not answered the last of the sleep-silly questions I had called in to her. I had drifted off soon after.
    No one downstairs had seen her either, and a quick search of the immediate back garden did not turn her up, and so Martha went muttering upstairs to my mother in her bedroom and my aunt Willa in hers. In those first days, Willa Bondurant spent all the time when she was not bidden into my parents’ presence, such as breakfast,
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    lunch, cocktail time and dinner, in that room, with her children. I don’t know what she did there—her nails and hair and sparse clothing, probably, for each evening’s manicure and hairdo excelled in splendor and intricacy the previous day’s, when she appeared downstairs on the “good” porch for afternoon drinks, and her clothes were as faultlessly pressed as they were startling in cut and pattern. I know she did not read.
    Mother and Aunt Willa were sufficiently alarmed at Lucy’s absence to come down in dressing gowns and slippers, Mother only halfway through her careful evening’s makeup, Aunt Willa as fully anointed as a Kabuki dancer. Not wanting to disturb my father in his study, they sent Martha back upstairs to look into all the imaginable hiding places that the house harbored, and me out to the back garden and the summer house to search. They themselves stood on the back veranda calling softly, “Lucy! Lucy Bondurant! Come in the house this minute!” I could hear their voices