Burnt Mountain (30 page)

“Oh, yes. The sainted Nick Abrams. He keeps cropping up, doesn’t he?” Aengus said. “I think I’m on this program thing with
him next week. The mayor has asked some of the people from the represented countries down to see what we’ve got in the way
of facilities for families and I’m representing camps for kids and doing some kind of program with some of the boys. Your
guy’s name is on the list; I guess he’s showing off some of his housing.”

“That’s terrific,” I said, smiling at him. “You didn’t tell me.”

“I just forgot. All Big Jim’s doing, of course. It’s next Thursday night at that little amphitheater out at Cantwell Park.
You have to come; it’ll be another chance to catch up with your friend.”

“Of course I’ll come, but not because of him. Because of you and the boys. Do you know what you’re doing yet?”

“Probably something from the book. We’ll decide today, maybe. I think we can make something really special of it.”

His face glowed. I had not seen that light lately.

“I miss you, Aengus.”

“I know. I’ve been away a lot. But it’s ending, and I think this book is going to be important for us. I truly believe it
is, if these kids are any indication. Can you and Carol find something to do tonight? We’ll take next weekend and go somewhere
special. Maybe up to Gatlinburg or over to Cades Cove. I’ve never seen either.”

“Oh, Aengus,” I said, “not more mountains. Not for a while. Could we maybe drive down to the beach?”

“I don’t see why not. Lean in here and give me a kiss. I’ve got to be up there by ten thirty. I’ll call you tonight after
the reading and let you know how it went.”

“Please do. I feel like I don’t even talk to you anymore.”

“Well, after camp is over I can arrange to talk your ears off and you’ll be sorry you ever said that.”

He kissed me softly and fully on the mouth, and I swallowed a huge lump in my throat.

“Of course it’s Aengus,” I said to myself picking my way over grass stubble edging up between the bricks. “My husband. Aengus.
The man I love, the man I chose. The man who chose me. I did nothing at all yesterday but run into an old friend.”

By the time I had showered and dressed it was almost noon and Grand’s bubble was firmly in place again. I would make something
special for tomorrow night, I thought. I’ll ask Carol and maybe the mayor and his nice wife. I ought to ask Big Jim and what’s-her-name,
too, but I’m not going to. Aengus sees enough of him up at camp.

I got into my little Mustang and started the engine, smiling at the obedient, throaty purr. It was six years old but immaculate
and shining with new green paint. It had been Big Jim’s son Markie’s car until his father had bought him a new Porsche on
his eighteenth birthday, and I had been grateful when Big Jim passed it on to Aengus, who passed it on to me.

“I’m not driving Big Jim’s little boy’s cast-off car,” he had said stubbornly. “But we need one for you and this one is in
good shape. It sort of looks like you.”

“How so?”

“Oh… neat. Curvy. Aerodynamic. Sporty. This old Volvo makes you look like the Salvation Army coming to collect cast-off furniture.
It would any woman.”

“And it doesn’t you?”

“I don’t care what I drive, as long as I bought it.”

“Well, I have no scruples about that. I think it’s a great little car.”

And it had been.

The next Thursday night I sat with a crowd of perhaps five hundred people on the uncomfortable old wooden seats of the small
amphitheater at Cantwell Park. It was tucked behind a much larger one, one that seated perhaps five thousand people, where
great occasions of municipal state took place, and traveling road companies of popular musicals, and sometimes even productions
of the Metropolitan Opera. I remembered live elephants and horses and chariots pounding thunderously over the stage; my father
had taken me to see
Aida
when I was small, and I never forgot it. Magical, those great panniered and jeweled beasts, their gray hides somehow gilded,
with people singing ecstatically from their swaying backs. Magical, too, the painted chariots sweeping in behind them drawn
by matched pairs of horses in feathery headdresses, dust rising from their golden hooves, with a dense green canopy of Georgia
oak leaning over them and above them a great moon sailing alone in an indigo sky. And over it all, glorious music swelling
to the stars…

I never forgot that night. This smaller amphitheater just behind the big one was even more deeply sunk into the woods, yet
from it you could hear the faint blatting of automobile horns and see, in the distance, the nimbus of Atlanta. I realized,
sitting there in my VIP seat beside the mayor’s smiling wife, that this was its magic, this very proximity of
our everyday world, encasing this place like a fairy egg but unable to seep into it. Here, the incredible, the unimaginable;
just outside, home and comfortable banality waiting for us.

The audience was an appreciative one. They clapped and smiled and nodded when the mayor announced that this evening he was
proud to be able to show our international visitors some of the amenities that awaited families from their countries who would
be visiting Atlanta. I don’t know how many nationalities were represented that evening, but it was definitely not an Atlanta
or even a Georgia crowd; besides the flow of conversations in many languages, there were spates of dignified clapping and
laughter and murmurs of “ahhhhhhh” and much nodding and smiling at one another. No one whistled between their teeth, favored
us with Rebel yells, or wriggled and whispered loudly when boredom set in. These people, as the mayor made plain, were here
to find out what was available in this storied southern city for their countrymen to live in, eat, drink, look at, listen
to, and amuse their children with. Most of them knew Atlanta only from
Gone with the Wind
and seemed pleased to encounter no enslaved pickaninnies and booming cannon. They would, said the mayor, see plenty of hoopskirts
and pillared mansions, and that seemed to feed the
GWTW
thirst.

We had seen displays and film clips from the movie people; sampled restaurant fare from every sort of eatery, from barbecue
(“Ah, bobbycoo!”) to the city’s most elegant victuals; watched a panorama of sports vignettes, from the Atlanta Braves, to
the Falcons, to the myriad Little Leagues, tennis, sailing, skating, boating, swimming, amusement
parks, fairs and festivals, and house and garden tours. (“Scatlitt!” a young girl’s voice behind me cried when the hoopskirted
hostess of a palatial local home bared her teeth for the camera.) By this time the crowd was utterly captivated with this
paradise of the Deep South; even I was clapping until my palms stung.

“And when your athletes come to compete, here, in part, is where they’ll live,” the mayor’s voice intoned. “I give you one
of our country’s most renowned young architects, Mr. Nicholas Abrams, himself a Georgia native, and the unparalleled housing
he has designed for them.”

The stage lights fell and a solo spot illuminated a lectern. My heart slid into the icy pit in my stomach. I was appalled.
I’d known he would be here; it hadn’t, by this time, seemed to matter too much. It would just be Nick, showing off the houses
that had been captured on the untidy rolls of paper and crumpled sketches I had seen in his dining room.

Just that.

But this was going to be more. My heart and stomach knew it before my brain did. The lectern was empty, and then Nick walked
onstage from out of the darkness and stood in front of it, hands in his pockets, smiling at us. I felt rather than saw the
smiles all around me. He wore a seersucker suit and a rather rumpled tie, and his shock of dark hair, lit by the overhead
lights, hung as usual a bit over his eyes. His teeth flashed white and his rangy frame seemed to sprawl a little, and for
some reason he was utterly irresistible. You could feel the wave of low laughter move through the crowd; it was affectionate
laughter. I drew in my breath sharply. It was as
if he stood floodlit on a stage for no one but me; the crowd around me faded away and I looked down at the man I had loved
and fancied that he looked up only at me.

“He’s attractive, isn’t he?” the mayor’s wife whispered. “My husband thinks very highly of him. I believe he’s trying to lure
him down here permanently.”

“He’d be a great addition,” I said pleasantly. My face burned in the dark.

From the stage Nick’s microphoned voice said, “When I was a kid, I thought everybody used to live in trees. I was convinced
that Adam and Eve started it in the Garden of Eden, and that we only gave it up about the time we started wearing suits and
ties. I still think the best place to live is in trees, and so I designed the housing for our Olympic competitors so that
everyone would live under and sometimes even up in trees. And because Atlanta is basically a city of trees, I’ve very graciously
been given permission by the city to locate this housing in the woods and around the lake in Piedmont Park. Like this.”

On the screen behind him flashed a module about the size of a freight car. It was made of a soft-weathered copper shimmering
material, with one entire wall of very slightly tinted glass or plastic. Inside, at one end, a lower, curved wall of a dark
gold metallic tile enclosed a sleeping space and a compact brushed-steel bathroom. Outside, in the open living area, deep
burnished built-in leather couches and a small kitchenette fitted jewel-like. The floor was a thick deep shag rug in mixed-metallic
colors that I thought was made of leather, and on the opposite end of the room was a wall of shelving with books, a TV set,
and a pull-down movie screen. Soft ivory shading
could be pulled down to cover the larger window wall, and the top was skylit so that sun-or starlight could flood in. The
module was simple and beautiful. Nick clicked a button on the lectern and a deep curve of forest around the lake in Piedmont
Park, in the city’s heart, bloomed on the screen. It was a night shot, and the glowing modules hung in the trees, were stacked
three and four deep in the open glades, and ran like lanterns along the paths that circled the lake. Above them the woods
were a chiaroscuro of flickering light.

There was a concerted soft gasp, and then applause broke out. It was a fantastic forestscape hung with magic lanterns. My
eyes filled with tears. I would have loved to live in that forest-set city of light even if it had not been Nick’s. It was
magic made entirely from the earth. Practical magic. Around me people began to stand. I stood, too. On the stage Nick grinned
even more widely and bowed from the waist.

“I like ‘em, too,” he said. “The city has agreed to give us a spur rail line that will connect to Peachtree Road and the rapid
transit system there. No competitor will be more than five miles away from every bar, restaurant, and theater from Buckhead
to the airport. When the Olympics are over they can be transported wherever they’re wanted. I know one family that’s putting
one in the backyard for the in-laws. I think another few will make a small apartment complex up in the foothills. I’m putting
one in the country outside Manhattan for my kids. At any rate, they’re all spoken for. Which is not to say I wouldn’t whomp
any of y’all up a few more if you ask.”

He smiled again and walked offstage. The applause went
on for another few minutes. It was hard to say whether it was for Nick or his luminous housing.

“My goodness,” the mayor’s wife said. “That was lovely. Isn’t your husband doing something to represent the camps? He’ll have
to go some to beat that. Big Jim says it’s bound to be spectacular, though. Something to do with mythology, I think?”

“Probably,” I said, trying to keep my voice neutral. “But I have no idea what it is. He says the boys will have the last say
in it.”

“Sweet of him,” Mrs. Mayor murmured. “I believe he’s next after the one about the transit system, isn’t he?”

I looked down at my program. The last line read “Mythologist and Folklorist Professor Aengus O’Neill, representing Camp Forever.”

“Looks like it,” I said.

I was suddenly afraid. I could not have said of what. I wished with all my heart that I could slip out of my seat and run
to my car and go home. I wished that Carol was sitting beside me, ready to pat my hand or puncture the night with her reassuring
laughter, whichever was called for. But the sainted Walter was in town, and she had gone to dinner with him to strike another
blow in the long custody battle. I had seen her before she left; she looked cool and chic and altogether respectable in dark
blue linen with her hair pulled back smoothly and high-heeled spectator pumps.

“You’d get custody of any child in Atlanta tonight,” I’d told her. “Why don’t you bring him to see that thing
the mayor’s doing out at Cantwell Park for the Olympics? Aengus has got some of the camp kids in his presentation for Camp
Forever; I should think even Walter would like that.”

“Are you kidding?” she’d snorted. “Aengus probably has them playing trolls or something. We’re going up Saturday to see the
boys… if Walter’s still speaking to me, that is. You can tell me about it tomorrow.”

I laughed and agreed. But I wasn’t laughing now, waiting as the perfunctory applause for the dust-dry show of street routes
and city vehicles sputtered to a halt.

“Oh, Aengus,” I whispered to myself, “keep it in this world, please. Keep it as real as Nick’s.”

And shocked myself even thinking it.

Instead of Aengus, Big Jim Mabry walked out onstage, smiling and nodding to the scattered applause.

“Before Dr. O’Neill’s presentation, I’d like to tell you all about Camp Forever. I had the honor of purchasing the land, from
a fine gentleman named Nog Tierney…. Nog, come on out here.”

The thin, sandy-haired, snub-faced bus driver I had seen ambled onto the stage, a Camp Forever cap in his hands, wearing blue
jeans and a tee shirt and work boots. He nodded but kept his eyes on his boots. He was a picture of humility, but something
about him was—false. This man was not humble.

“Anyway, to make a long story short, this is his son, and he ‘bout runs that camp for me. He and Dr. O’Neill, who is going
to show us how Camp Forever got its name. Take it away, Aengus!”