Downtown by Anne Rivers Siddons Read Free Book Online

Mass, did you?” she said, pausing on Our Lady’s front walkway.
    “Well…I guess not,” I said, thinking I could go later that afternoon, or to evening Mass, if I had to. Surely the 35 / DOWNTOWN
    Church would want me to make friends among its flock. “But where else would we go?”
    “To the IHOP and get a decent cup of coffee and a stack of potato pancakes with sour cream,” she said. “My treat, since you’re new. I got a humongous tip yesterday. And after that…who knows? We’ll scare up something. That is, if you want to. And I hope you do. You’re the first inmate of that joint I’ve ever seen that didn’t look like a junior Sister Mary James. Just please don’t tell me you’ve given all your worldly goods to the poor and have come up here to do missions among the heads and freaks. It’s a big thing with the Church.”
    “Not me,” I said. “I don’t have any worldly goods. What’s the IHOP?”
    “The International House of Pancakes. The first reason you’ll be glad you left—wherever you left.”
    “Savannah.”
    We picked our way through the skin-prickling rain down to the corner of Fourteenth Street and turned south onto Peachtree Street.
    I’m walking down Peachtree Street, I said to myself. I’m walking where Scarlett O’Hara walked, where Margaret Mitchell walked. Where, as a matter of fact, she was fatally injured. But I did not know that yet.
    I waited for the frission of exaltation to begin in my stomach, where all my raptures had their genesis, but nothing happened. The rain-slicked street was largely bare of pedes-trian traffic and even the cars that swished by looked dull and furtive, seeming to sneak through the heavy air. As they had been the night before, the tops of the buildings downtown were lost in cloud and mist, and I could not see clearly more than a block ahead of me. There were few lights in the buildings along this section of Peachtree; structures that crouched stolidly, none more than five or six stories high, largely mustardy yellow stone or dark red brick weeping ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 36
    black soot. A movie theater’s marquee advertised, dimly, Ingmar Bergman’s Persona , but there was no line waiting to see it, and in the lighted drugstore across from it I saw no customers among the Hallmark Santas and folding bells and scanty displays of tinsel. At the far corner, nearly lost in mist, a red, black, and white Texaco sign flashed on and off. Far beyond that, an anonymous building glowed yellow and faint. Everything was dingy, indistinct, as if someone had dropped dirty stage scrim down over the whole of midtown Atlanta. There was an astonishing amount of litter in the gutters.
    “Uggh,” Rachel said, skipping over a rich mound of dog excrement at the curb. “Watch your step. Come on, let’s run.
    This is gross.”
    I huddled closer to her under the umbrella and put my head down and we trotted off down the sidewalk. Under the bumping umbrella I could see very little but our feet. The air that crept under my raincoat collar and around my legs was cold, raw; I seldom felt air of this temperature in Savannah.
    Savannah—for a moment the sense of it enveloped me so totally that I was lost in it, drowned; I perceived it, in that instant, more sharply and wholly than I ever had in all the years I had spent there. I saw, through the wet black dome of Rachel Vaughn’s umbrella, the lush canopies of live oaks in its small, beautiful squares; the surging banks of ruffled azaleas and camellias in the long, warm springs; the spectral gray curtains of hanging moss; the lovely woman-curves of wrought iron balconies and stair railings; the grimy, tight-packed, once-beautiful row houses that lined the noisy cobbled streets of Corkie. I heard the hooting of the great ships that wallowed at the docks under the bluff and the liquid spill of mockingbirds in the crape myrtle trees; I smelled the ineffable perfume of the night-blooming Cape Jessamine along the slow

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