Anne Siddons - Fault Lines

I met Pom at a fund-raising party for the new outpatient diagnostic center at Buckhead Hospital, on a spring afternoon in 1978. It was an old-fashioned all-day barbecue on the enormous back lawn of an estate on Cherokee Road in Buckhead that had been built in the early twenties for a former governor of Georgia and had just been renovated by the New Jersey-born administrator of the hospital. There was a gruesome whole hog turning on a spit over a pit of banked coals, hams and pork shoulders on grills, huge iron pots of Brunswick stew, and great bowls of potato salad and coleslaw iced and waiting in the pantry off the cavernous kitchen. Sweating black men and women in starched white and chef’s hats stirred and carried and grinned, looking for all the world like devoted family retainers, but they were, I knew, the cream of the cafeteria staff from the hospital. Others, bearing trays of drinks and hors d’oeuvres across the blue-shadowed green lawn, were waiters and bartenders from the Piedmont Driving Club, imported for the occasion not by the New Jersey administrator, who was not a member, but the silver-haired chief of Internal Medicine, who was. The miniature carousel and the aging clowns and the mulish Shetland pony and crisp young attendants minding the shrieking small children in the blue, oval pool at the far end of the lawn were from the city’s oldest and most favored party-planning establishment. The same sagging clowns had doubtless frightened many of the adults present and the same evil-tempered pony had certainly nipped them on their short, bare legs when its tender was not looking twenty years before.

I knew all this because I had planned the party, or at least had helped. My advertising and public relations agency had long had Buckhead Hospital for a client, and had long done the PR and printed materials for its various fund-raisers without billing anyone’s time. Most agencies had these gratis clients, whose work was handled solely for the prestige and worthiness of their causes. I had been at the agency for four years, long enough to work my way up to copy chief and be in line for associate creative director, and this was my fourth Buckhead Hospital fundraiser. We had had a Parisian Street circus, a Night at the Winter Palace ball, and an Arabian bazaar. This time the board wanted to include families, and so Christine Cross, my art director friend, and I had suggested the barbecue and modeled it partly on the barbecue at Twelve Oaks from Gone With the Wind .

“Hell, it won’t be any work at all,” Crisscross said, dumping the ashes from her Virginia Slim into my tepid coke. “The board’s got ten Twelve Oakses between ’em, and about a thousand slaves. We won’t have to lift a finger.”

And we hadn’t, hardly. When I walked around the side of the big white house and stood looking down from the veranda at the barbecue in progress, it seemed to be surging and swarming along under its own volition, with everyone knowing exactly what part they were to play, and doing it faultlessly. The lawn was a sea of pink linen tablecloths and green tents and seersucker suits and pastel cocktail dresses and butterfly pinafores and sunsuits. The only jarring note was a thick-shouldered, dark-faced young man with his hair in his eyes and a red-splotched white physician’s jacket, crouching on one knee at the bottom of the veranda steps and attempting to mop a veritable bath of red off the furious purple face and arms of a bellowing, struggling small boy. The red looked shockingly like blood but a vinegary tang in the still air told me it was barbecue sauce. Behind the man a slightly older boy was dancing up and down, stark naked and dripping, waving a tiny wet bathing suit in his hand and shrieking, “Dry me off! Dry me off! Jeff peed in the pool and it’s all over me!”

The man raised his face to me, and there was such a look of desperation and entreaty on it, such utter helplessness in eyes of a color I had literally never seen in a human face before, that I ran down the shallow stone steps and reached for the wet, naked child before I even thought.

“If you don’t stop right this minute you’re going to turn to stone, and you’ll have to spend the rest of your life naked in this backyard, and pigeons will crap all over you,” I said, pinning the slick, small arms firmly. The child stopped dancing and looked at me. The smaller child stopped bellowing and looked, too.

“Oh, God, are you married?” the man said. “If not, will you marry me in fifteen minutes?”

“So tell me about his eyes again,” Crisscross said the next day at lunch. She had pleaded cramps and missed the party. Crisscross did not go to parties where no recreational drugs were offered. It was a matter of policy with her; I knew she did not indulge. She had gone to Bennington, and regarded the social doings of old Atlanta society, or what passed for it, as she might the ponderous frolicking of dinosaurs. Once was interesting, more was grotesque.

“I never saw eyes that color,” I said. “Such an intense blue they could burn you—”

“What kind of blue? Be specific.”

“The blue of…of…the blue of those lights on the top of police cars,” I said.

“Jesus,” Crisscross said. “How utterly charming. Is his last name Mengele, by any chance?”

“No. It’s Fowler. Pomeroy Fowler. Dr . Pomeroy Fowler. Pom to his friends.”

“Of which you are now one.”

“I guess I am.”

“So. Two kids, both brats. Cop car-blue eyes, five o’clock shadow, slept-in clothes. Wife at Sea Island, or Brawner’s?”

I glared at her. Sea Island is where much of old Atlanta goes to re-create itself. The Brawner Clinic is where it goes for its breakups, breakdowns, and substance addictions. The latter, Crisscross maintained, ran primarily to booze and Coca-Cola. The sixties never quite got to Atlanta, she said, much less the seventies.

“Why should it be either one?” I said.

“Because no Nawthside Atlanta matron goes anywhere else and leaves her chirrun behind, don’chall know? Especially during the Little Season.”

Crisscross had not been in the South long. Her southern accent, even in parody, was execrable.

“As a matter of fact, she’s on Hilton Head,” I said. “She ran off with the architect down the street when he decided to go live on an island and free himself of conventional restraints. Pom got the children without even going to court.”

“I’d give a lot to know how you free yourself from conventional restraints on Hilton Head,” Crisscross grinned. “What do you do, join the Young Democrats? Violate the landscape code?”

“He wanted to build experimental low-cost housing for the Gullahs,” I said, grinning back at her. “But none of them would move into the prototype. The one family that finally did tacked tin over the cedar shake roof and painted the door blue. That’s to ward off evil spirits. You still see it on the Gullah shacks down there.”

Crisscross folded her arms over her stomach and bent over laughing. I began to laugh, too.

“Maybe they’ll find out it wards off Republicans, too,” I gasped. Despite our seeming lack of anything at all in common, Crisscross and I became instant friends when she joined the agency, and we spent much of our billable time laughing. Of all my old advertising crowd, she is the only one I still see with any regularity. She has her own agency now. We still laugh.

“So after you shut his kids up what happened?” she said on the day after the barbecue.

“I took both of them into the house and bathed them and got clean clothes on them and we left and went back to his house. He made supper for them and I put them to bed and we had a drink. We had several, in fact. And then we ordered in pizza because all he had in the house was hot dogs and stale potato chips and strawberry Jell-O, and the kitchen looked like an army had been camping in it for weeks. The whole house did, for that matter. It’s a nice Cape Cod in Garden Hills, but his baby-sitter doesn’t clean, and he doesn’t get home until late from the clinic most nights, and he thinks it’s more important to spend what time he has with the boys, instead of cleaning. I sort of straightened things up for him; it looked a lot better. I’m going to see if Totsy Freeman’s housekeeper has a free day or two. I think she said she did. It could really be a pretty house.”