Anne Siddons - Fault Lines

He had considered my words, and when the aforementioned Betty Burton, who was that year’s auxiliary president, told him in exasperation that several of last year’s attending wives had told her that they had been accosted by homeless persons on their way into the clinic and they would never go down into that part of town again, he capitulated.

“Okay,” he said. “All right. All those spoiled ex-debs ought to have to work down there, or better yet, spend a week or two in the shelters. But have at it. Just don’t let Betty and her merry band do anything silly. The first Night in the Seraglio or Gone With the Wind hoo haw will be the last.”

And because Pom was popular with his peers and considered something of an urban saint by the Atlanta news media, the clinic dinner parties were a great success. Only a hundred couples came, admittedly, but they were, as Betty burbled, the select hundred couples in the city. I have always thought that the clinic dinners were popular because the gilded hundred were weary in the extreme of Nights in the Seraglio, and grateful to sit down and listen to the music they had been young to, and chat with the friends they had grown up with, and drink good liquor and eat good food and go home early.

I don’t like balls and banquets, but I always enjoyed this one because so many of the doctors and their wives who came were old friends, and this was often the only time in the year that I saw them. There is a kind of emotional shorthand that binds doctor’s wives, and it is a sweet and easy thing to have friends with similar context. Many of the men had been close to Pom ever since internship and residency, and one, Phil Fredericks, had been his roommate at Hopkins. Phil was with him at the clinic now, and Jenny, his funny, volatile wife, was one of my few close friends. I did see Jenny, for tennis and auxiliary work and sometimes for what we called escape days, when we took off and spent afternoons at the movies or antiquing or hiking in the North Georgia hills an hour’s drive away. Or at least, I used to see Jenny.

I saw her now, waving from a round table half full of couples close to one of the tall windows that overlooked the twilight green of the Piedmont Park woods.

“I saved a place for y’ll,” she said. “Hey, Pom. Lord, Merritt, what have you done to yourself? Have you been to Canyon Ranch, or what? You look fabulous.”

“No Canyon Ranch. This is what’s called the last-resort look,” I said, hugging her lightly and smiling around the table. It was largely women now, most of whom I knew, two of whom I did not. The men had sucked Pom into their circle and swept him out onto the terrace, where a small knot of men I did not know stood holding drinks and munching hors d’oeuvres from the tray a waiter was passing. From the rapt attention that Pom’s group of doctors was according them, I knew they were visiting Big Bucks. I saw tall, skeletal Bill Ramsey talking, rocking back and forth with his hands in his pockets, and then there was a burst of laughter and I knew that Bill had told one of his scurrilous jokes in his exaggerated Savannah drawl. One of the Big Bucks said something and everyone laughed again, and Pom slapped him on the back. I stared. I could not remember ever in my life seeing Pom slap anyone on the back.

“ Big bucks,” I muttered to Jenny.

“The biggest. Must be dead ripe, too. I don’t think I ever saw Pom whack anybody on the back before. What’s gotten into him?”

“I really don’t know,” I said. “Sunspots or El Niño or something.”

“Well, anyway, what have you been doing? I’ve missed the tennis and the escape days. Is it Pom’s mother?”

“She’s not doing so well,” I said. “She’s a little addled these days. I’ve been staying pretty close to home.”

“What I hear is that she’s absolutely wacko and ought to be in a nursing home,” Jenny said. “And that you’ve been looking after her full-time. Lordy, wasn’t it enough that you raised those two boys after Lilly took off? And then with Glynn and all…Pom is a darling and a saint, but he’s just like all doctors, blind to what’s ailing his family. You ought to go on strike.”

I sighed. I knew that Phil would have told her; there was practically nothing about Pom that Phil did not know or could not intuit, and he told Jenny everything. And if Jenny knew about Mommee, every other doctor’s wife at the table knew. Miz Talking Fredericks, Pom called her. But perhaps I could head her off before the two women I did not know heard every last detail about the saga of Mommee.

“I don’t mean to say he’s not a saint; we all know he is,” Jenny said hurriedly, seeing that she had made me uncomfortable. “I just happen to think that you’re a saint, too.”

“Not me,” I said. “That’s Pom’s department. One saint to a family.”

“Pommy always was a saint,” one of the strange women said, and Jenny and I looked at her. I smiled inquiringly. Had I met her before? There was something about the dark eyes, and the tiny, pearly teeth. A child’s teeth…

“I’m sorry, I thought you knew Sweetie,” Jenny said. “Sweetie Cokesbury. You know, she’s Leonard’s wife. Or bride, I should say. They’re just back from St. Maarten; they honeymooned on that enormous boat of Leonard’s, or should I say ship?”

“Oh, of course,” I said. “I’m sorry. We have met. I think it was a while ago, though—”

“It was,” said the woman. Her voice fluted like a tiny wind instrument. “It was way back when Pommy was still in private practice. I had just lost my darling husband, and Pommy took pity on me and asked me to a lovely party you all gave at the River Club. I always tell Pommy that he saved my life that night, because that’s where I first met Lennie, and one thing led to another, and…here I am. I don’t wonder you don’t remember. I was considerably slimmer then. I swear, after eating my way through the Caribbean, I’m the one that ought to go to Canyon Ranch. Lennie’s always trying to put meat on my bones, as he calls it. Can’t stand skinny women. I bet you can eat like a hog and not gain an ounce! Back when Pommy and I were growing up I was a little bitty thing, too.”

I remembered then. Sweetie Carroll she had been when we met, tiny and dark and so cloyingly flirtatious that I was amazed that the men at the party did not think her a caricature of a Southern belle as I did, but they had not seemed to. Most of them hung on Sweetie’s every honeyed word. Now she was as solid and round as a butterball and tanned to a deep bronze, and so blond that her pouffed hair seemed spun of gilt. She wore a black dress so low-cut that her ponderous, sun-speckled breasts seemed in danger of bobbing out of it, and her ears and throat and fingers flashed with diamonds and emeralds. Leonard Cokesbury was one of the richest men in the Southeast. He had inherited a fortune in Coca-Cola stock.

“I remember,” I said. “I’m sorry. I forgot my glasses along with everything else, we were running so late. You and Pom are from the same hometown, aren’t you?”

“Childhood sweethearts since we were three,” she said, laughing a tinkling laugh. I thought of crystal shattering. “Our daddies were in the timber business together. I was in and out of Mommee’s house so often she used to say I was her only daughter. I tell you, the trouble Pommy and I got into, you just wouldn’t believe. There wasn’t a day that passed, hardly, that we weren’t together. I could tell you some tales about that husband of yours that would curl that pretty hair of yours! He gave me my first little kiss, and took me to my first prom, and I used to go up to dances at Woodbury Forest. Mommee used to say she already had my weddin’ gown picked out. But then he went on up there to Baltimore and got involved in all that civil rights stuff, and he changed, he surely did. And now look at him. A real entrepreneur, as well as a saint. Who would have thought it? I’m so proud of Pommy, I surely am. And proud of you, too, Merritt. I hear what a saint you are in your own right. It’s so good for Pommy, after that Lilly person. I thought Mommee was going to die when he brought her home the first time.”