Burnt Mountain (2 page)

“Why are you still wearing shoes? It’s the middle of June.”

“You don’t know my mother.”

“Those pigtails are geeky. I wouldn’t wear them if I was dead.”

“You don’t know my mother.”

“You told Sonny Etheridge you didn’t want to go to the prom with him? Are you out of your mind?”

“You don’t know my mother.”

“Sewanee? Nobody even knows where that is! Everybody
else is going to Georgia. You could be a cheerleader without even trying out.”

“You don’t know my mother.”

I stopped there. It was a rhetorical statement, anyway. By that time almost everybody in my world knew my mother. Everyone
except, perhaps, me.

She was the prettiest girl in Lytton. Everybody said so. Even today there are still people who will tell you that there was
never a prettier girl in town than Crystal Thayer, and for all I know she still may be. I don’t go back to Lytton now and
it has been a long time since I have seen my mother, but by the time I came along it was one of those small-town dogmas that
had been repeated so often that it had passed into local mythology, like our toehold on history (“All them rails was twisted
into knots by the Yankees; Sherman’s Neckties, they called ‘em”) and the obligatory haunt in our cemetery. (“Nat Turnipseed.
Folks have seen him skulkin’ around in that graveyard since he passed, and that’s been eighty, ninety years now. Wring your
neck soon as he’d look at you.”)

And so: “Crystal Thayer is the prettiest girl we ever had in Lytton, and everybody thought we’d up and lose her when she married
that schoolteacher from Atlanta. Reckon she kept him on a short rope, though, ‘cause they never left there.”

They were right. Finch Wentworth never took his pretty bride back to Atlanta with him. Everything that came after turned on
that, like a ball bearing.

My grandfather Thayer was a druggist, a kind, absentminded man who would have run a prosperous small-town drugstore if he
had not been so bewildered by his flock of
clamoring daughters and so apt to hand out healing potions free of charge to afflicted neighbors who could not pay for them.
I don’t remember much about him; he died, still kind and still bewildered, when I was four. But I could remember the smell
of the lemon drops he kept in his shirt pocket for my older sister, Lily, and me and feel on my cheek the white stubble of
his chin.

My grandmother Leona I remember not at all. She slid away on the wings of one of her famous vapors before I was born. It was
said around town, I heard later, that many of the women thought the sheer grandeur and excessiveness of my mother’s wedding
to my father simply sank her.

“Don’t know what she expected, Crystal marrying one of those highfalutin Atlanta Wentworths,” was a consensus, if not the
general one. “Ought to have known she couldn’t just put around some flowers and light a few candles.”

But in truth it had been my mother, and not the highfalutin Atlanta Wentworths, who had insisted on the spectacle of her marriage
to Finch Wentworth III.

“Half the Piedmont Driving Club was there,” I heard my mother say silkily more than once. That they were there out of a sort
of wincing allegiance to their Wentworth friends and not because “that’s the way they do it in Buckhead” never occurred to
my mother. My father must have known, but he was oblivious to almost everything but the pretty, rose-gilt creature in his
bed and was nearly as absentminded in his own scholarly way as my grandfather Thayer had been in his. If the thought struck
my father, he never mentioned it.

And my mother’s open-armed welcome into the fabled
Piedmont Driving Club, to which the baroque wedding was the springboard, never happened.

That she never thought to blame my grandmother Wentworth for that came to surprise me, for by the time I was old enough to
speculate on the motivations of the adults in my family I knew that she blamed Grand for everything else that was awry in
her marriage. But her most corrosive disappointment was aimed, always, at my father.

“We could have moved there,” I heard her say to him over and over. “You know your mother wanted you there with her. Everything
in your world is there. All your friends. All your clubs. Your relatives back to Adam. It wasn’t me who wanted to stay in
this one-horse town; I told you that over and over. You think I wanted my daughters to grow up where they could marry dry
cleaners, or…
feed
sellers, for God’s sake? There’s not even a Junior League here.”

“I like Lytton,” my father would say in his mild, slow voice. It was a voice that I loved; many people did. I think it may
have been one of the reasons he was such a good history teacher, and later such an effective school administrator. His voice
promised, somehow, safety and acceptance.

“And,” he would go on, “I need to live where my school is. There’s no question of that. How would it look if I taught at Hamilton
and lived in Atlanta? It would look like I didn’t think Lytton was good enough.”

“It isn’t!” I have heard my mother nearly scream, in exasperation. “Your precious mama would tell you that, if you asked her.”

But in truth my father’s mother had told him just the opposite.

“Your life is in Lytton with your wife and your work and your children,” she told him, even before he and my mother married.
“Believe me when I say this. Crystal is a girl of great strength and purpose, and she would never be able to exercise those
qualities effectively in Atlanta. She can at home; it’s her turf. She’s already a princess there. In the long run she would
be bitterly disappointed here. And I believe you and perhaps your children would suffer for that. You have just the temperament
to fit perfectly into a small town; it’s not as though you’d never see Atlanta again. You’d be plenty close to keep up with
all your friends. And we’ll visit back and forth often.”

“Mom,” my father said, “she wants a big house. She wants nice things. For some reason she thinks we can’t have them in Lytton….”

“She shall have them in Lytton,” my grandmother Caroline said to her son, hugging him. “Your father and I are going to give
you the grandest house we can in Lytton, and see that it’s fittingly furnished. Wouldn’t she like that?”

“
I’d
love it, Ma, but I just don’t know about Crystal….”

“Crystal cannot live with us on Habersham Road,” his mother said crisply and finally. “Nor, I don’t think, anywhere else in
Atlanta.”

“I just don’t see how I can tell her that,” my father said miserably. “She’s practically packed up already.”

“Don’t tell her,” Grand said. “Let her find out when we
tell her about our wedding present. Surely a lovely furnished house of her own right there at home, where everyone can see
how well she’s done, will take her mind off Atlanta.”

“You don’t really like her, do you?” my father said, and his mother hugged him harder.

“No, I really don’t, not much,” she said into his soft hair. “But you love her, and I’ll do anything I can to see that she’s
happy, so that you will be, too.”

“Except have her here,” he whispered.

“Yes. Except that.”

(All this I learned later, in a talk with my grandmother Wentworth before she died.)

“So it was you all along, and not Daddy.” I smiled, picking up her thin hand.

“Oh yes,” she said. “But I really don’t think she suspected; do you?”

“No. Otherwise she’d have been all over you like a duck on a June bug. You were smart not to let her know.”

“It wasn’t because I was afraid of her, Thayer,” Grand said, reaching up to trace my face with her forefinger. “I’ve never
seen the day that I couldn’t handle your mother six ways to Sunday. No, I did it for you. Believe it or not, Lytton is a much…
sweeter
place to grow up than the Northwest of Atlanta; at least as it was in those days.”

“But I wasn’t even born yet. How’d you know there would even be me?”

“I knew,” she said very softly. “I always knew there’d be you.”

Somehow, I always believed that she did know. I didn’t believe that of anyone else, though. I was born nine years after my
older sister, Lily—the afterthought baby, the accidental child. Not that anyone ever called me those things, but I overheard
my mother’s fluting laughter more than once, at this bridge game or that dinner party: “Oh, Thayer, my little wild child.
We’d resigned ourselves to the fact that Lily would be an only, and then, poof! Here she comes, our little redheaded caboose.
Didn’t even look like any of us; Finch used to tease me about the mailman. I was planning Lily’s wedding before Thayer even
needed a bra.”

And she would ruffle my carroty hair and laugh, so that everyone would know it was our little joke. I learned to laugh, too,
a dreadful, false little trill as much like my mother’s lilt as I could manage.

It did not occur to me until much later that being the family joke was not really anything to aspire to. It got you fond laughter
but little else.

My father didn’t think I was a joke. My earliest memories are of him walking around the house or the garden with me in his
arms and later riding piggyback on his shoulders, choking by then in a miasma of makeup and perfume and wet stockings and
slips hanging corpselike on shower and towel rails, his naturally soft voice drowned under dinner-table talk of boys and dates
and clothes and the shalts and shalt-nots of burgeoning genteel womanhood. I knew that he meant it when he said, “Come on,
Red. Let’s get some fresh air and spit tobacco and tell lies.”

“You’ll be sorry when she grows up thinking she’s a boy!” Mother would call after us.

“Not in a million years!” my father would toss back. “This one’s going to leave them all in the shade.”

“Yeah, like that’s going to happen!” I heard Lily call after us once.

“What does she mean?” I asked my father, reaching up from my perch on his shoulders to snatch a chinaberry off the tree in
our garden.

“She means she doesn’t want you to turn out prettier than she is,” Daddy said. “Think she’s scared you will.”

I could not get my mind around this. Nobody could be prettier than my mother and my older sister; everybody knew that. People
called them the Wentworth girls, and indeed, they did seem of a piece, silkily blond and gentian eyed, with incredible complexions.
In those days of “laying out” slathered with a mixture of baby oil and iodine, my mother and sister never let the sun fall
on their faces if they could help it. Their skins were the translucent milkiness of Wedgwood or Crown Derby. My own face was,
almost from the beginning, dusted with freckles. My hair burned in the sun like a supernova. My eyes were not blue but the
amber of sea glass.

“Your grandmother Wentworth’s eyes,” my father would tell me. “Hair, too, before hers got the gray in it. In fact, you look
almost exactly like the photos I’ve seen of her when she was your age.”

“That’s good, isn’t it?” I said. I did not see a lot of my grandmother Wentworth in those days. She spent a great deal of
time traveling abroad, usually alone, to places with
names like songs and poetry to me… Samarkand. Galapagos. Sri Lanka. Dubrovnik.

“Outrageous!” My mother sniffed. “What on earth do people think of her?”

“That she’s rich enough to do what she damn well pleases,” my father replied once, weary of it all. “And I very much doubt
that she is alone, usually.”

“That’s just what I mean,” Mother said, but scarcely loud enough to be heard. My father would brook no complaints about his
mother.

“Oh yes, that’s good,” he said to me that day in the garden. “That’s the best. Your grandmother is a great beauty. Always
has been.”

“I thought that was Mama.”

“Your mama’s very pretty. It’s not the same thing.”

“You think that’s why she doesn’t like me?” I said. “Because I look like Grand? I don’t think she likes Grand very much.”

He swung me down and we sat together on the stone bench that overlooked the fishpond. It flashed with fat orange shapes, some
black speckled. My mother called them koi. My father called them goldfish.

“Your mother loves you,” he said into my hair as I squirmed on his lap. “Don’t ever think she doesn’t. It’s just that she’s
more tied up with Lily right now because Lily’s at an age when it’s really important to get things right. You don’t need that
kind of fussing over. You’re a pretty easy little customer to deal with.”

“What would happen if Lily didn’t get things right?”

“God knows. She might run off and join the circus.”

“Cool! We could all get in free!”

He laughed.

“So we could, my funny valentine, but I don’t think that’s what your mother has in mind for her. Best we just go on our way
rejoicing and leave them to it.”

“Okay.” I shrugged. “But if I look like Grand I don’t think Mama will like that much. She thinks Grand looks like one of those
women Pisossa painted, all neck and eyes. I heard her tell Mrs. Etheridge that.”

He laughed again. “She does, does she? Well, in that case, you’ll be a raving beauty. His women are famous all over the world.
It’s Picasso, by the way.”

After that, none of my mother’s carelessly chirped little darts hurt me. I looked like my grandmother Wentworth, and she looked
like a lady this Picasso painted. We were famous all over the world.

There are maybe ten small towns and communities orbiting Atlanta like dwarf moons. Most of them are close enough to the city
to lie, figuratively, under its canopy, like fruit dropped from a great tree. Since their settling, many of them have had
a love-hate relationship with the city, insisting on their own uniqueness and autonomy but fed by the life force of the mother
tree. If you could have bitten into one of them, like an apple, I think you would have tasted first Atlanta. But few Lytton
dwellers ever admitted to wishing they lived in Atlanta instead.

“Too big, too loud, too smelly,” went the litany of my
acquaintances. “Either Yankee tackpots or too good to piss in the same pot as anybody else. I wouldn’t live there for a million
dollars. Lytton has everything you could ever want, without the traffic.”