Burnt Mountain

by Anne Rivers Siddons

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

From one of our most acclaimed writers comes this dramatic tale of a well-born Southern woman whose life is forever changed by the betrayal of her mother and by the man she loves.

Growing up, the only place tomboy Thayer Wentworth felt at home was at her summer camp—Camp Sherwood Forest in the North Carolina Mountains. It was there that she came alive and where she met Nick Abrams, her first love … and first heartbreak.

Years later, Thayer marries Aengus, an Irish professor, and they move into her deceased grandmother’s house in Atlanta, only miles from Camp Edgewood on Burnt Mountain where her father died years ago in a car accident. There, Aengus and Thayer lead quiet and happy lives until Aengus is invited up to the camp to tell old Irish tales to the campers. As Aengus spends less time at home and becomes more distant, Thayer must confront dark secrets—about her mother, her first love, and, most devastating of all, her husband.

Release date: July 19, 2011

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 336

Sample

You don’t know my mother.”

Once, in my freshman year at Sewanee, I lay in the infirmary shaking with influenza and tried to estimate the number of times I might conceivably have said those words to someone. Within five minutes I realized that even without the burning forehead and the throbbing bones I would have had more luck tallying stars.

“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.”

Fully half of them shopped weekly in Atlanta, though, and sometimes more often. Dressed defiantly in their Sunday best, gloved, hatted, and handbagged, they surged into the city in waves, on Greyhound buses and in newly washed family sedans. A few of the Lytton men who were not merchants or farmers or makers or repairers of objects worked there. A scattering of lawyers, a big-town banker or two, airline personnel, toilers in the huge industries that besmirched the municipal skies with smoke and stink. But my father was the only Atlanta native I ever knew who chose to leave it and live and work in Lytton.

The Alexander Hamilton Academy, a well-endowed and-regarded boys’ preparatory school on Lytton’s northern outskirts, drew students from all over the South. The school was known to have been founded by an eccentric Atlanta millionaire who believed that the bucolic drowsiness of a small town would be the best atmosphere for learning, unfettered as it was by such distracting amenities as movie theaters, soda shops, or gaming establishments. Most students boarded, and undoubtedly would have mutinied and fled in droves except that the educations they received were first-rate.

To a man—or boy—they howled at the lack of recreational amenities, but most went on to colleges of their choice, and so, in turn, they sent their scowling sons there.

Lytton boys did not attend Hamilton Academy. Not that there were none qualified; a few would have done well. But the school was still owned by the family of the founding millionaire, and the curse of Atlanta still hovered over it. Lytton High had been good enough for generations of Lyttoners, and it was good enough, by God, for their sons. Or maybe that nice military school down in Newnan that was said to be stricter than the army itself.

How many Lytton boys might have found their futures smothered and shaped by Hamilton Academy will never be known.

I still wonder if any of the other Atlanta satellite towns could possibly have had the sheer animus toward it that Lytton pumped out. After all these years I still don’t understand. But it did not surprise me that none of Hamilton’s faculty lived in Lytton; no rental opportunities were ever offered them. I imagine most of them figured they were well out of Lytton, anyway.

And then came my father.

It was his great-grandfather, known to his associates to be crazier than batshit, who had founded the academy, and the family down to and including Finch’s mother and father had kept it viable, not as much for fun as for profit. Hamilton added a nice heft to the bag of profitable endeavors that the enterprising Wentworth men had cobbled together. By the time young Finch Wentworth, the only son of his generation, graduated from Princeton, the Wentworth clan was coining money and living at the top of Atlanta’s scanty social heap, on Habersham Road. Finch, who had studied history at Princeton and wanted only to teach it, was a natural for Hamilton, not only for a faculty position but also as incumbent owner of the school.

He had been teaching for scarcely two weeks, living at home on Habersham Road and beginning to think he should be nearer to Hamilton, both in fact and spirit, when he walked into my grandfather Thayer’s drugstore on Lytton’s main street and asked to see the owner. My grandfather Owen sauntered out from behind the drug window and asked what he could do to help him.

My mother, Crystal, sampling colognes behind the gift counter, sauntered out to see who this tall stranger might be.

My father saw my mother and forgot what he had come for.

“I think I need some Band-Aids,” he said, still looking at Crystal Thayer. In the soft artificial lighting of the gift department, smelling of My Sin, she burned on his retinas like a solar flare.

Recognizing the symptoms of his affliction—for she was by then almost MGM pretty—she smiled at him and faded back behind the counter. But she kept her ears open. Not too many tall, well-dressed strangers walked into her father’s drugstore.

My father jerked his head back around at my grandfather Thayer, waiting politely beside him, and stammered, “… Uh, uh—Oh! And some iodine and Mercurochrome, too, and aspirin, and a whole bunch of first-aid stuff, and soap and things like that, and I guess vitamins and cotton swabs… lots of those…”

My grandfather lifted his eyebrows.

“I’m buying them for the school,” my father said. “For Hamilton Academy. I guess I’ll be buying a good bit of stuff in bulk every month. Maybe I should open an account.…”

“And your relationship to the school would be…?” my grandfather said a trifle coolly. This addled young man could be setting up a field hospital for terrorists, for all he knew.

“Well,” my father said, “I guess I own it. Or at least my family does. And I teach history there. Finch Wentworth,” he added hastily, putting his hand out.

“Owen Thayer,” my grandfather said, taking it.

My mother came out from behind her counter and wafted up beside her father.

“I’m Crystal Thayer,” she said, cocking her head winsomely up at my father. Her silvery hair swung over her cheek like a bell.

“You’re from Atlanta, aren’t you?”

“Ah… yeah,” he said. “But I’m thinking I really ought to find a place here, you know, with the school here and everything.”

“Well.” She dimpled. “That shouldn’t be any problem, should it, Daddy?”

“I don’t know of any places right off, honey,” Dr. Thayer said, “but I suppose I could look around.…”

“Oh, shoot, Daddy, I can think of one place right off. You know our garage apartment’s just been sitting here since Memaw died. You were saying just the other day we ought to do something with it.”

“Well, you know, your mother…”

“I’ll talk to Mama.”

My grandfather went back behind his window to start gathering up my father’s supplies. He knew a done deal when he heard one.



Even now, with all that has passed between and around us, I sometimes think that I am not entirely fair to my mother. Is any daughter, ever? What girl child can ever see the woman who bore her whole? The mask of mother is a totality; there are no fissures in it where the vast complexity of otherness can show through. I think comprehension can come later, on both sides, if both mother and daughter are willing to do the work. I never was. I think I simply grew too comfortable with the role of victim—dependent on it, really. It defined me so early that I never had to search for a legitimate self until much later.

But my mother was never simply a victimizer; she was a wife, a lover, and a mother in the best sense of the words, as well as the worst, a daughter and a dreamer, a yearner. Oh, a great, great yearner. As a larva might, if such things were possible, yearn for the completion of butterfly wings and endless nectar, my mother yearned for the perfect complexion and habitat for her specialness.

No one had ever told her that she was not special; from the time she could understand words, her mother told her of her beauty, her gifts, her talents, her destiny. She was to be, though I doubt if my grandmother ever came right out and said it, all that plain, frail little Leona Brumby was not and never had been. My grandmother Leona was in one respect a very tough cookie. I think she could have bent silver spoons if it had been her will. That will got her a handsome, wellborn druggist husband and one of Lytton’s more substantial homes. And as for all the other things… the looks, the vitality, the promise… she would have them. She knew this. If not for herself, through this last, porcelain daughter.

Like my father, my mother was a late-born child. Her clamorous older sisters were away at school or, in one case, married, so there was no competition for Crystal Thayer’s throne. She had childhood virtually to herself.

Leona Thayer was by then often bedridden with the frightening spells that left her white and gasping and kept Owen Thayer’s worried attention constantly upon her. The son of a physician, he adored medicine and he would have studied it himself if his IQ had matched his father’s. The drugstore was the next best thing, and fussing over Leona came as naturally to him as breathing. No doctor had ever seemed to diagnose her debilitating spells with any degree of certainty, but there could be no doubt that Leona Thayer was chronically and gravely afflicted. Most of Lytton thought she was lucky to have a handsome, attentive husband, a beautiful youngest child, and free medicine all her life. And everyone said how sweet that pretty child was to her mother, not going away to school as her sisters ha. . .