Road to Tara Read online

  A refuge center was set up at the municipal auditorium and Margaret rushed down to help. She was faced with lost children screaming for their parents amid mass confusion. Bits of people’s lives — salvaged furniture and clothing — were heaped along one side of the huge auditorium. Household pets yipped and meowed. Minor injuries were being treated, while people with serious wounds were carried out on stretchers to be moved to the various hospitals outside the fire zone. It was a terrible, unforgettable sight that met the young girl’s eyes. She wanted to help the injured, but someone suggested she tend to the children first. Dressed in her school middy, her hair in pigtails, she jumped up on a desk top and shouted, “Lost children here!” over and over again until a bedraggled, teary-eyed, youthful group formed around her. Then she called out each child’s name as she lifted it onto the desk with her in an attempt to reunite families.

  To her surprise, she herself was “reunited” with Stephens, who arrived with a group of soldiers from Fort McPherson to help in the emergency. It was late that night before the fire was under control. Losses were tremendous. The Mitchell family’s old house was destroyed, along with eleven other houses owned by Grandmother Stephens (their rents having been her livelihood). The family suffered personal financial losses perhaps even more extensive than anyone else in the city; still, since none of their members had been injured, they considered themselves fortunate.

  Fires smoldered in the devastated area for a week as houses that had collapsed into their cellars continued to burn. Hundreds of torches blazed where houses had stood, marking the breaks in gas lines. When the last flame was extinguished, three hundred acres of the city had been laid waste, nearly two thousand homes had been totally destroyed, and ten thousand people were homeless. But, miraculously, although there were numerous and serious injuries, only one person had died. It was many days before the dispossessed could be housed even temporarily, and hundreds slept in the parks and vacant lots.

  Atlanta recovered swiftly from this tragedy, however. The country was at war and the townspeople had more important things to do than cry over what had been lost. Within a short time, there was not only Fort McPherson but Camp Gordon, too, on the outskirts of the city, and thousands of young soldiers who were being prepared for battle were now in their midst. In the summer of 1917, sixteen-year-old Margaret, like her family and the people of Atlanta, was filled with patriotic zeal. Most of the officers in the regiments of the two camps were university students or recent graduates. It did not take much on Margaret’s part to persuade her parents that it was her social duty “to see that the soldiers had as nice a time as they could.”

  The Mitchell house was big enough and their staff large enough to accommodate quite a number of Stephens’s friends on the weekends. Margaret was treated affectionately and was made the confidante in several of the romantic liaisons that grew out of the dances and parties. She returned to school in September with fantasies and yearnings of her own, but with fears for her brother’s welfare and the lives of all the young men she had met that summer. The terrible war stories she had heard in her childhood returned to haunt her, and it was at this time that she began to suffer the nightmares and insomnia that were to plague her for the rest of her life. For the first time, she was aware of how young the old veterans she had once ridden with must have been when war shattered their lives and the lives of the women they had left behind.

  Chapter Five

  IN JUNE OF 1918, Margaret learned how to drive the Mitchells’ black six-passenger Hanson, the only motorcar manufactured in Atlanta. Early on Saturday mornings, she would drive out to one of the camps, pile in as many young officers as the car would hold — that count went as high as nine if the men were slight of build — and bring them back to her house for the weekend. The former tomboy, good friend, and sister had suddenly emerged into one of those most beautiful of all flowers — the Southern belle. Loose hair drawn back with a ribbon replaced the braids; organdy and silk edged out the schoolgirl’s cotton and serge. She was tiny — under five feet — weighed ninety-two pounds, and had a nineteen-inch waist. But her most endearing quality was her lively sense of humor; in addition to her feminine charms, she was extremely spirited, good fun, and knew how to be “one of the gang.” According to Stephens, “There was no girl in Atlanta more popular with the officers.”

  On the veranda behind the white columns of the Mitchell house, with the scent of verbena clinging in the air, Margaret learned how to flirt. However, she confessed later to friends that she never let anyone kiss her. Maybelle had frequently warned her that the only answer for sexual curiosity was early marriage and Margaret was not ready for such a commitment.

  To let someone kiss her meant, somehow, that she must become engaged. It was all very exciting and romantic. There were always rumors of the men having to leave at once for overseas, and, to help them forget the grim reality they would soon face, parties filled every moment of the weekends. Barbecues and picnics, as well as dances, were held at the Mitchell house, or at the Capital City Club roof garden or the gracious Piedmont Driving Club. Orchestras under the stars, paper lanterns casting dancing lights and shadows, great groups of young people intent on celebrating the last days of their youth — it was a striking scene. Stephens recalls that his mother “insisted that I spend whatever of my cadet’s pay and officer’s pay I had on having a good time, and she wanted Margaret to have a good time because she philosophised, ‘You are seeing the end of an era and are able to see it under very attractive circumstances. Don’t let the chance of seeing this go by you.... Things have a habit of disappearing during war, but what you have seen and what you have done are something that will always be with you.’ ”

  Margaret heeded Maybelle’s advice. At one of these parties she met a young officer, Lieutenant Clifford West Henry from New York, who was stationed at Camp Gordon. He was a Yankee, which made him quite exotic, and he had just graduated from Harvard that June. Clifford Henry was well-read and, to Margaret’s delight, he could quote poetry and passages from Shakespeare. He was slim and fair, rather effete-looking. Some of Margaret’s schoolmates thought he was ineffectual, not as strong a personality as Margaret, slightly effeminate. Margaret, however, was quite taken by the poetic lieutenant, “so sadly handsome in his officer’s uniform.” To his detractors she said he was “most sincere,” and he vowed true affection for her.

  Lieutenant Henry loved to dance as much as Margaret did, and as they floated in each other’s arms across the smooth floors of the Capital City Club to the wispy strains of “Poor Butterfly,” they were the center of attention. Besides being a graceful dancer, the attentive lieutenant was a good listener, and Margaret confided to him her plan to study medicine and specialize in psychiatry. (This last was a new idea, for she had just begun reading Freud.) Clifford Henry was entranced by the soft Southern nights of Atlanta, the drives, the dances, the Mitchell house with its wide romantic terraces, the black guitar players strolling in the deep shadows of the oaks, and by Margaret — a burgeoning beauty with shining blue eyes, a perky urchin face, and a bevy of young officers always crowded around her. Clifford Henry put an end to that. He gave her a heavy, gold crested family ring. She was dazed and dazzled and very, very much in love, and so, it seemed, was the lieutenant.

  In August, Clifford learned he was to be transferred and would soon go overseas. That night, on the veranda, he and Margaret became secretly engaged. By the end of the month, both Stephens and Clifford Henry were on troop ships headed for France.

  Having graduated from Washington Seminary in June, Margaret was to go to Smith College, in Northampton, Massachusetts, in the fall. She had insisted upon an Eastern school as an alternative to the Southern colleges usually attended by Washington Seminary girls. Smith had been her final choice because of its excellent academic reputation, its record in women’s rights — important to Maybelle — and its proximity to her Aunt Edyth. It was also near Clifford Henry’s family in Connecticut. She planned to go from Smith on
to medical school, and had told her few friends at Washington Seminary that her dream was to go to Vienna to study with Freud before taking up her own practice, presumably in Atlanta. Her desire to please Maybelle was apparent.

  As she waited for her college life to begin, Margaret wrote Clifford long letters filled with her dreams for the future. Neither marriage nor their plans for a life together were ever discussed. Once the war was over, Clifford was to work toward his law degree and then go into his father’s Connecticut realestate business. How this was going to be reconciled with Margaret’s intention of returning to Atlanta to become a disciple of Freud was discreetly not mentioned.

  After a series of disastrous Allied losses in June and July, 1918, it had looked as though the Germans might win the war. Then came the brilliantly executed counterattack at the Second Battle of the Marne and, within three days, the tide of the war had turned. On August 10, General Pershing obtained Allied consent to a plan for an independent American Army; the Allies, meantime, had deeply penetrated German lines and there were rumors that peace negotiations might well be under way, for all chance of a German victory had vanished.

  Their spirits brightened by this hope, Margaret and Maybelle boarded a train for New York two weeks before the start of Smith’s fall term. For once, mother and daughter were in rapport, and the two of them had a grand time sightseeing, window-shopping, and selecting Margaret’s college wardrobe.

  One afternoon they took the train to Greenwich to visit Aunt Edyth and sat opposite a man who looked vaguely familiar to Margaret.

  “I noticed that he was looking at us,” she wrote in a letter to her father and Grandmother Stephens, continuing,

  Our Southern accent marks us anyway. But when I pulled off my glove and changed the heavy ring from one hand to the other, I caught his brown eyes and grinned for I knew who he was. He arose and came over to us —

  “You are Miss Mitchell, aren’t you?” he questioned, smiling. And as if I had been meeting him every day for years, I replied —

  “You are Clifford’s father.” And it was!

  “I recognized the ring,” he laughed. “Cliff was so fond of it.”

  And then we all began to chatter. I liked him immensely and I believe Mother does too. He is a pleasant man, with a quiet sense of humor and he is more forceful than Clifford. He’s no plain New Yorker but very cosmopolitan and well educated. He is intensely proud of his son, though he tries not to show it and he handed me some letters from him that he had in his pocket.

  Mr. Henry invited them to meet Mrs. Henry for lunch at the Waldorf the next Wednesday, and to attend a matinee.

  “Funny meeting, wasn’t it,” Margaret wrote her father. “Of course he had seen some awful snapshots of me but it must have been my accent and the ring that did the trick.” She added, “If you get any letters from Cliff to me, please hustle them up here. P.S. Please save my letters. Just put them away somewhere.”

  Eugene Mitchell was concerned about the seriousness of his daughter’s affection for Clifford Henry. Margaret was only a girl of seventeen, he reminded Maybelle in a letter. Perhaps they should not encourage her friendship with the Henrys, which could draw her deeper into a relationship she might regret and from which she would not know how to free herself.

  Maybelle wrote him a placating letter on September 10:

  Dear, you must have had no youth or forgotten it if you attach so much importance to the affections of seventeen years. The Henrys so far as I have seen are good people, well travelled, educated, how much or how little money I do not know, but respectable. The boy is over in Europe perchance for life. Why worry over what can’t happen for four or five years and 99 to 100 will not happen at all. Can you remember how many girls Stephens has been in love with since he was seventeen? Youth has ways of its own for its own education. I will tell the Henrys when I see them that they must not say anything of Margaret to anyone, so as to leave both their son and Margaret freedom to change their minds if they so desire. Margaret herself is not ignorant of the natural manner of seventeen to change its mind. So put your mind at rest about this affair, as there can come no harm of it.

  Margaret was impressed neither with Connecticut nor her aunt’s circle of friends, and she wrote to her father:

  This is a barbarous country. I wouldn’t live here if Rockerfellow [sic] himself proposed to me. I don’t like the atmosphere or the people, they are cold and they hold on to their ratches in the first moments of your acquaintance. Then its money, money, money that counts and that doesn’t appeal to me, who love[s] roughnecks for their own pennyless selves. I now see why the Yankee soldiers like the Southerners — it’s because these girls are Amazons, huskies who “can take care of themselves” but they lack lightness — lightness of body and of repartee. There are no young men here as this is not an army town and I miss the gold shoulder bars. Darn these people with their patriotism! They screech it from the housetops and condemn you as a spy if you don’t do likewise. The women spend their time racing around in uniforms of useless organizations (except of course the Red Cross) and they don’t seem to do anything but rush without any definite object. I went to lunch at the Smiths’ the other day (their father is Alfred Smith who is in Spain on a diplomatic mission) and they lived in the most beautiful house I have ever seen, set back amid acres of ground and so well kept that 8 men must work on it. At lunch we were served by two white maids and from the looks and size of the house it must have taken quite a number of servants to keep it up. I learned from “snooping around” that even the assistant scullery maid gets $45 a month. There are no older boys in the family, so the war doesn’t touch them. The older girl sold me a 50¢ trinket for the Red Cross — Bah! Patriotism! Why the devil don’t those people give up a servant, a car, a club — something that really counts and quit yelling patriotism and selling 50¢ things when they are supporting a useless retinue? Why the pay they give a useless maid per month would buy a Liberty Bond! It makes me sick but you can’t say anything.

  Perhaps I’ll like the North — I’m going to try for I want to like the place I must live in for nine months, but it will be rather difficult. Perhaps Northampton is different from Greenwich. I hope so any way for I want to get to a place where the individual and not the millions count.

  The luncheon at the Waldorf with the Henrys was a great success, and Margaret liked Mrs. Henry as much as she did Mr. Henry. Afterwards, the four of them took in a musical revue. Clifford was in all of their thoughts, and the families exchanged such comments as, “Cliff would have loved this show,” and, “We’ll do it again when Cliff comes home.”

  Early the following Sunday morning, Maybelle boarded the train with Margaret for Northampton. That fall’s freshman class of 775 students was the largest in Smith’s history, nearly double the enrollment of the other three classes. Due to this, several large, old rooming houses near the campus had been taken over to accommodate the overflow. Margaret was at Ten Henshaw Street under the guidance of a Mrs. Pearson, a proper New England lady upon whom Maybelle felt she could rely. Maybelle left late that afternoon, after helping her daughter get settled, and that night Margaret was without a member of her own immediate family for the first time in her life.

  Smith was not the “crusty old place” Margaret had feared it might be. The girls were more spirited than those at Washington Seminary. Yet Margaret did not feel any more comfortable with her new classmates than she had with her former. Smith attracted the daughters of some of the most socially prominent and well-to-do families in the East. They were sophisticated, well-traveled, and well-read, and they played a game she did not know — bridge. French was used casually and as a sort of punctuation to the tony English the girls spoke, and their clothes were tremendously chic. Margaret’s wardrobe, by comparison, was plain and conservative. She had never been out of the United States, and, though she could read a little French, as a conversational language it defeated her. There were few Southerners in her class, and she was teased about her accent, her
short stature, and her naiveté.

  A small, spartan room on the second floor of Ten Henshaw Street, with a fine view of Smith’s handsome brick buildings and thickly wooded campus, became Margaret’s home. For the first month, several girls in succession shared it with her before finding someone else to room with for the term. Margaret was feeling intensely the outsider until, at last, she made friends with a few of the girls: Ginny Morris, a tall, lively blond girl who was her final roommate; Sophie Henker, who liked horses almost as much as she did; Madeleine Baxter, who was called Red because of her glorious Titian hair (and who was also Margaret’s roommate for a time); and Helen Atkinson, who planned to be a teacher.

  A quick camaraderie developed between Margaret and the other girls in the house as soon as Ginny Morris moved into her room, for Ginny was outgoing, loved by all, and the catalyst in most activities. The girls viewed Margaret as a romantic if enigmatic figure because she was engaged to an officer overseas and received letters from him almost daily. She was known to her Smith friends as Peggy and, except in letters to Clifford and her parents, signed herself as such.

  In discussions of world affairs, music, or art — about which she knew little and in which her housemates were well-versed — Margaret was reticent, but at other times she could be wickedly funny, and on her favorite subject, the Civil War, she could hold any audience. Her roommate, Ginny Morris, writes: