Chapter 2: Chapter 2
As the scion of an old Georgia family, I’d been reared in the very best ‘stiff upper lip’ tradition by a dowager paternal grandmother, my parents having been killed in an automobile accident when I was very young. It was an article of faith in Gran’s world that well-bred people simply must not ever lose their composure—at least not in public. “If you ever have to scream, yell, or cry,” she’d said to me a thousand times while I was growing up, “wait for an appropriate moment, then go into the privacy of your room and do it. Whatever you do, never allow others, particularly servants or subordinates, see you lose control.”
In its own way, it had been good advice—and better training. I would most likely have phrased it “subordinates or peers,” but in Gran’s eyes, anyone descended from the Lewis, Marks, and Barnett families of post-Revolutionary Georgia had few equals and no superiors. I was in her debt for having thus trained me; a childhood and adolescence of rigid self-control spent displaying the proverbial poker face had benefitted me as an adult in more than one pretrial conference, as well as in quite a few trials.
As I retrieved my Jaguar from its reserved parking place, I reflected for the umpteenth time that I could just as easily have walked two blocks to the nearest MARTA station, ridden to the Midtown Station a couple of stops up from downtown, and then walked a few blocks to my home, which was a three-story town house that had been built, along with several others, on one of the cross streets running between Juniper Street and Piedmont Avenue. I lived in a midtown area that had been, during its eighty-year history, alternately grand, deteriorating, merely dilapidated, and finally, downright seedy. It was only a block or two removed from the notorious strip of topless bars and porno establishments that had flourished along Peachtree Street in the sixties and seventies.
During the seventies, the area had become something of a ghetto containing a mix of gays, blacks, and Hispanics. Then, as the strip along Peachtree was cleaned up, the inevitable process of gentrification had begun. Buildings that were too far gone were razed and replaced by high-rises or, in some cases, blocks of town houses like mine. Buildings that were still relatively solid were converted into condominiums and apartments. The area was still heavily gay, but the mix was now about half gay and half yuppie, with a few gay yuppies, sometimes known as guppies, for good measure. The majority of the blacks and Hispanics had been displaced by the workings of a free-market economy—they could no longer afford to live in the area unless they, too, were yuppies. In truth, the area was really totally yuppie, because the gays who occupied the expensive town houses and apartments certainly fit that mold, with most of the older members of Atlanta’s sizeable gay community preferring to live in and around Buckhead.
Actually, it would have taken me less time to go to and from work via the subway, but rising young (I kept telling myself, sometimes even convincingly, that thirty-two was still young) trial attorneys whose names had been appended for the past five years to the firm name of one of Atlanta’s oldest and most prestigious law firms were expected to observe some conventions. Strange, I thought; Andrew—Andrew Chandler, grandson of the founder of Chandler, Todd, Woodward, & Barnett, currently its senior partner and my mentor since forever, as he was an old friend of the family and Gran had turned to him regularly for advice in bringing up her orphaned grandson—hadn’t batted so much as an eyelash when I’d told him in my initial interview that I was gay. He had, in fact, over the years been at least covertly supportive of gay rights and related issues. However, the old boy would have had a fit were I to ride the subway to and from the office every day. Such are the sacrifices we make for the sake of appearances.
The Todd and Woodward of the firm had, as Gran would say, gone to their respective rewards years ago, leaving only Andrew and myself representing the living among the listed names. True, we had six other partners and more than a dozen associates, but it would be years before another name would be appended to the firm’s name, change being the antithesis of old-line law firms everywhere. Somewhere there was an unwritten code that allowed only one name change every decade or so.
AS I PULLED INTO the traffic heading north on Peachtree, those thoughts caused me to reflect for a moment on Andrew, who was the reason for my current annoyance bordering on anger. Andrew Chandler was tall, patrician, slim, silver-haired, in his early seventies, and possessed a razor-sharp intellect. He lived in an area of expensive old homes in Decatur with his wife of fifty-odd years, whom he referred to in the traditional southern manner as ‘Miss Emily’. Their only son had died in Vietnam, and Andrew had long ago more or less adopted me as a surrogate for his lost heir. For my part, having Andrew serve in loco parentishad provided a sort of balance to Gran’s rigidity. He and Gran were old friends, and the relationship between the two families went back decades, as indeed did that of many of the old families in Atlanta.
Gifts
-- Gift
received Weekly Power Status
-- Power
Ranking 
-- Power
stone