Up Island by Anne Rivers Siddons Page B

lingered only momentarily. It was, I decided, the fatal fetor of vulnerability. No matter who was angry with him, Tee would not be perceived as vulnerable.
    “It’s fear, pure and simple,” Livvy Bowen said, pouring a hefty slug of cognac into the coffee she had made. We were sitting in my kitchen on the third day after All That Stuff, as I thought of it, had happened. I had told no one but my parents and Caroline at the time, but in Atlanta the jungle drums are always out and poised, especially in what is fatuously called the Coca-Cola family, and I knew that almost everyone who mattered to me would know by then. Livvy, however, was the only one who had called, the only one who had come. She was ferociously angry at Tee, and smelled no stench on me. I knew she did not. I could have told if she had.
    “Fear of what?” I said in my flat new voice that was as heavy as my body, my steps, my heart. Heavy and flaccid. I could not seem to shake off an endless, level white fatigue.
    “Fear of it happening to them. Fear that if they get too close to you they’ll catch some kind of virus and their husbands will walk out with some toots from the 52 / Anne Rivers Siddons
    steno pool. Do they still have steno pools? Drink your coffee.
    You look like death.”
    “No, they have legal departments now,” I said, sipping my coffee. The unstirred Hennessy puckered my mouth, but it did warm me a little, going down. In the middle of an unpre-cedented early heat wave, I could not seem to get warm.
    “Listen, I want you to come over and stay with me for a while,” Livvy said. “Caleb’s going out again this weekend, and that way I’ll be around if you want to start talking this out. I won’t push you, I promise. But at least there’ll be somebody around in your corner. You can spend the whole time sleeping if you want to. Just do it at my house, okay?”
    “Oh, Livvy…Teddy’s in my corner. Caroline is. My parents are…”
    “Yeah, I can just hear your mother’s tender words of sympathy and support now,” she said and snorted. Livvy and my mother had disliked each other viscerally and instantly. “And I’ve already heard Teddy’s. ‘Goddamn you all’…It must have been a real Martha Stewart moment.”
    “He was devastated,” I said defensively. “He’s been a love ever since.”
    And so he had, my tall son, still white-faced and mute with misery and anger, but sticking to my side like a burr. Not literally…he did not dog me, or pressure me to talk. We did not talk much at all, in fact; had not, since he ran from the library the night of All That Stuff. But he was always in the house. School was out, and ordinarily Teddy would have vanished like a curl of smoke until September, but he did not go to the club to swim or play tennis, he did not go to band practice, and he spent little time on the telephone.

    UP ISLAND / 53
    The latter was the most alarming of all. Teddy’s crowd, sprawling like puppies in the sun of approval and privilege since birth, checked in with one or another many times a day. The silent phone was ominous to me, and not only because Tee’s call to say he was coming over to talk still had not happened. I hated the thought that my new contagion might spill out over Teddy. It seemed to me, drifting in my silent house, that nothing would or could happen until the telephone rang.
    “Well, I’m sure he has, but you can hardly say what you think about Tee to him; it’s the father-son thing,” Livvy said.
    “You need to be with me. Whatever you want to say about the sonofabitch, I’ll agree with you. Oh, shit, Molly, I’m just so mad at Tee Redwine! What a complete and utter asshole; I truly never thought it of him. And I’m just as mad at Caleb, and that whole little crowd of Coke princelings. They’ll close ranks around him like the bunch of goats they are; see if they don’t. Even while they’re shaking their heads and doing the
    ‘Aw, jeez’ thing, they’ll be covering his butt. I