Road to Tara Page 7

  The rest of us were awed by the bulk of her overseas mail and enslaved by her Irish sense of humor which was considerably broader than you’d expect to find in a frail flower of the south. Moreover, we respected her scorn for campus rules and her smoking skill — when to be found with cigarettes was a shortcut to being expelled.

  We were all movie fans, cutting classes to see the latest pictures starring Charlie Ray, Norma Talmadge or Wallace Reid. And one evening every week was put aside for play-going at the local stock company where the dangerously irresistible leading man was one William Powell. We liked him especially in a little dramatic bomb shell known as “Captain Jenks [sic] of the Norse Marines.”

  In the evenings, no one ever thought of studying. Instead there was usually S.R.O. in our room listening to Peggy talk. When topics took more serious turns you could pretty safely depend that Peggy would get around to the Civil War.... She could sling you off a well-rounded little tabloid description of the Second Battle of Bull Run with the same eager sparkle another girl might tell you about last night’s bridge hand. She felt about Robert E. Lee pretty much as if he was the current film idol. Whenever she got mad enough to call me a “Damn Yankee” I knew our home life was threatened!

  Early in October, just when life at Ten Hen (as the girls called the house) had begun to take On some order, an epidemic of Spanish influenza swept over New England, heading west. The disease was mysterious in origin and the medical profession was at a loss as to how to combat it. None of the available drugs for influenza seemed to have an effect on those afflicted by this new strain, and the mortality rate was alarmingly high. Schools across the country were closed by federal order. Smith and many other colleges were placed under quarantine and classes were suspended. The girls were not allowed to leave Northampton, visit other houses, nor gather for group activities or sports, although they were permitted to hike in small numbers in the woods bordering the school.

  “These Yanks,” Margaret wrote in a letter to her parents on October 5, “are strong on cross country ‘Tramps’ and as the fields and woods are beautiful now and in the open it’s far safer, I intend to stay out a good deal.”

  Three weeks later, when the quarantine was lifted and the flu scare over, Clifford’s letters, always a month late, ceased coming. The last one had been dated September 11 and postmarked Saint-Mihiel. It was Ginny who brought Peggy the news. Early on the morning of September 12, blanketed by heavy fog, the American-led army — ten American and three French divisions — had attacked the Germans who held that area. In two days the Germans had been routed, but at the cost of nearly eight thousand lives.

  Margaret telephoned the Henrys, but they had not heard from Clifford either. The vigil began, but was to end quickly. The Henrys received a telegram informing them that their son had been severely injured in the battle at Saint-Mihiel, having bravely taken over for his disabled captain in what amounted to hand-to-hand combat. Fragments from a bomb dropped by a German plane had severed the lieutenant’s leg and penetrated his stomach. He had been awarded the Croix de Guerre as he lay in his hospital bed, but, on the morning of October 16, he had died.

  Margaret was deeply grieved over Clifford Henry’s death. Stephens has claimed that Clifford Henry was the great love of his sister’s life. Margaret did maintain contact with the Henrys for many years, but probably she had been more in love with a romantic fantasy than with Clifford Henry himself. She had admired his intellect, his golden good looks, his poetic nature, and his gentlemanliness, but it is doubtful that Margaret truly understood the young man she thought she loved. Clifford Henry’s friends had recognized and accepted his homosexual tendencies, but Margaret had seemed completely oblivious to this side of her fiance’s nature.

  In this period of her life, Margaret suffered a great confusion as to her own sexuality — certainly not a unique occurrence in girls of seventeen. She enjoyed being desired and playing the vamp, but the idea of having sexual relations with a man terrified her. With Clifford Henry she had not had to concern herself about sex, for their relationship had been, as she liked to think, “on a higher level.” She had never known anyone with such an extensive vocabulary or with a knowledge of the arts. In turn, he had greatly admired her vitality and the way she could tell a story about the past and make it live. Clifford Henry was exciting but safe, and his letters had made her the center of envy of her female friends. She did not, however, share the contents of these letters, for they were not passionate but were filled instead with the disillusions of a young soldier at war.

  The busy regime at Smith kept Margaret from dwelling on her unhappiness. Although she continued to mourn for Clifford, she loosened up considerably with the twenty-five girls who shared the house at Ten Hen. Most of them were impressed by her large collection of photographs of U.S. fighting men, given to her by the young soldiers who had visited the Mitchell home during the past two summers.

  Red Baxter, one of Margaret’s closest friends in Ten Hen, remembers that “Peg” loved to recite poetry — a love she had acquired from Clifford Henry. One of the girls’ favorite past-times was to ensconce themselves in the two tubs in the upstairs bathroom and then “try to stump each other with poetic recitations, keeping the hot water dripping and parboiling our skins to lobster red.”

  Another roommate, Doris James, recalls the time Calvin Coolidge, then governor of Massachusetts, came to visit Ten Hen’s proprietors, Mr. and Mrs. Pearson. Northampton was the home of the Coolidge family and they and the Pearsons were old friends.

  One evening Peg and I went to the Pearsons’ living room to ask about the chance of some of us going to the movies.... We found Mr. Pearson and Mr. Coolidge there and after Mr. P had muttered, “Governor this is Miss Mmmmmm, and this is Miss Mmmmmm,” he went to find Mrs. Pearson and we were left alone with the great man.

  “This is a lovely evening,” Peg said. (It was a particularly foul one.)

  Mr. Coolidge thought this over and finally replied, “You wear your rubbers tonight.”

  “How are things in Boston?” Peg asked brazenly.

  After due reflection, from which we thought he would give out with something profound about the Commonwealth, he said, “Yes, if you’re going out tonight, you want your rubbers.”

  We waited then in painful silence for Mrs. Pearson and when at last she appeared, Mr. Coolidge greeted her with, “I told the girls they want their rubbers tonight.”

  Before we were hardly out of earshot, Peg said, “I must remember those deathless words.”

  Margaret was doing well in only one subject, English composition. Yet this single achievement could not compensate for her lackluster performance in her other courses. Too, in her eyes, the English professor lacked Mrs. Paisley’s keen literary sensibility. And when, after reading one of her assignments, he proclaimed her “a youthful genius” on the strength of what she thought was a “rotten theme,” Margaret lost faith in the professor’s evaluation of her work. Her low estimation of her abilities, her opinion that any praise was unwarranted, that for some reason she had not truly earned it, began to manifest itself at this time. From her recounting of the incident later, and the fact that she remembered it and referred to the professor’s good words as fraudulent praise, one cannot help but sense Margaret’s feelings of inferiority. It did not help that she was barely passing in her other classes. The rest of the girls, who seemed better prepared to cope with Smith’s requirements, might not have had to study much to keep up their grades, but Margaret realized that if she intended to remain at the school, she would have to, and she applied herself quite diligently to the task in the months that followed the news of Clifford Henry’s death.

  She was to spend Christmas on the campus, along with many of the other students, because the trip to Atlanta would have been too time-consuming, and because her father was recuperating from a bout of the highly infectious Spanish influenza. At Ten Hen, only Ginny, of her closest friends, was not at Smith for the holidays. There were a great many Chr
istmas activities and most of them involved a squadron of Air Force men who had returned to the States following the November 11 armistice and were now stationed not far from the campus, waiting to be discharged from the service.

  In the days before Christmas, the telephone booth in the downstairs hallway of Ten Hen was the hub of life. A dance was being planned and the men were to come from the Air Force base. Every time the phone rang, there was a general stampede to answer it, then, as Margaret described the scene in a letter to Ginny, some of the girls would stand around the hall “painfully breathless” until the one in the booth came out announcing, “Thank God, it was only the poor fool wanting to know what kind of flowers to send!”

  It snowed heavily on the Saturday of the dance. During the afternoon, Margaret had to sing in the Glee Club, an onerous duty, for she carried a tune no better than Maybelle, and had been coerced into stepping in for an absent friend. Once back at Ten Hen, she was more an observer than a participant in the general hysteria that was all around her. Dresses from New York or Springfield, ordered weeks before, had not yet arrived. Shoes did not seem to fit. The damp weather was ruinous to the hair of the girls who were giving themselves marcels, and, as Margaret wryly observed, the rage of plucking eyebrows made “the air thick with screams and discarded lashes.” And when the gowns did arrive, in the nick of time, the girls flitted around “trailing evening dresses and calling the world to witness that they looked like ‘Hell on Wheels.’ ”

  Margaret attended the dance with a young man named Al, a date with whom she was obviously displeased, for she wrote Ginny the next day that he was a “wreck” and that his long silences had been a welcome relief. She was arrayed, she added, “like a lily in the field,” and she commented that the next morning she was so exhausted she looked “like the end of a misspent life.”

  Stephens, who had acquitted himself quite nobly and without injury on the battlefield in France, returned to Atlanta shortly after the New Year to find his father recovered, but his mother severely ill with the flu. For nearly two weeks Maybelle stoically fought this illness. The news was kept from Margaret but, on January 22, her father was forced to write her that her mother’s condition was serious. The following day, Maybelle, who had grown still weaker, dictated a letter to Stephens for her daughter, in the belief that she would not see her again.

  January 23, 1919

  Dear Margaret,

  I have been thinking of you all day long. Yesterday you received a letter saying I am sick. I expect your father drew the situation with a strong hand and dark colors and I hope I am not as sick as he thought. I have pneumonia in one lung and were it not for flu complications, I would have more than a fair chance of recovery. But Mrs. Riley had pneumonia in both lungs and is now well and strong. We shall hope for the best but remember, dear, that if I go now it is the best time for me to go.

  I should have liked a few more years of life, but if I had had those it may have been that I should have lived too long. Waste no sympathy on me. However little it seems to you I got out of life, I have held in my hands all that the world can give. I have had a happy childhood and married the man I wanted. I had children who loved me, as I have loved them, I have been able to give what will put them on the high road to mental, moral, and perhaps financial success, were I going to give them nothing else.

  I expect to see you again, but if I do not I must warn you of one mistake a woman of your temperament might fall into. Give of yourself with both hands and overflowing heart, but give only the excess after you have lived your own life. This is badly put. What I mean is that your life and energies belong first to yourself, your husband and your children. Anything left over after you have served these, give and give generously, but be sure there is no stinting of attention at home. Your father loves you dearly, but do not let the thought of being with him keep you from marrying if you wish to do so. He has lived his life; live yours as best you can. Both of my children have loved me so much that there is no need to dwell on it. You have done all you can for me and have given me the greatest love that children can give to parents. Care for your father when he is old, as I cared for my mother. But never let his or anyone else’s life interfere with your real life. Goodbye, darling, and if you see me no more it may be best that you remember me as I was in New York.

  Your Loving Mother

  The same day this letter was mailed, Margaret received a telegram telling her that her mother had fallen into a coma and that she should hurry home. That night, Ginny and Mrs. Pearson saw her to the station in the midst of a terrible snowstorm. During the long journey, she had a prescient feeling that her mother had died, and as she stepped off the train in Atlanta to be reunited with Stephens for the first time since he had gone off to France, his somber expression confirmed her fears that she had arrived too late.

  She was able to cope with this news but, though Stephens warned her that their father was in complete despair, she was not prepared for the sight of the incoherent, grief-stricken man who greeted her in the downstairs hall, his usually kempt self in wild disorder — hair uncombed, beard unshaved, eyes red and glazed from crying, and dressed as though he had been awakened in the middle of the night and had simply put on whatever was near at hand. Worse than his appearance was the fact that he was talking wildly. “Your mother’s not well,” he kept repeating, and it was not until Maybelle’s coffin had been lowered into the earth and he had broken down and wept in his children’s arms that he accepted the reality of her death.

  The funeral was a distressing affair, some of the Fitzgerald family having been so incensed at the disregard Margaret and Stephens paid to “proper Catholic rites” that they stalked out of the cemetery before the eulogy was spoken. Margaret did not concern herself with this family squabble, for she had far too much with which to cope.

  Besides the household tasks, there were times during the next few weeks when her father would fall back into unreality, and she feared he might be losing his mind. It was with much relief that his children finally saw him begin to pull himself together. Even though he continued to wander aimlessly through the house, he made brief visits to his office. However, he spent most of his time at home in bed. One day he called Margaret into his room. “Go back to Smith,” he told her. “I want your brother, now that he is out of the army, to stay with me. I think I will want you to come back, but do not miss the year you have begun.”

  These had been Maybelle’s wishes, and Margaret felt committed to carrying them out. Yet, when she returned to Smith, nothing seemed quite the same. “I am beginning to miss Mother so much now,” she wrote her father on February 17. “I only had her for eighteen years but you loved her for twenty-six years and I know how lonely you must be now. I wish I could make up just a little for her in the place in your heart.”

  Margaret was faced with a serious dilemma. With Maybelle dead, much of her motivation to study was gone. All her life she had fought for her mother’s approval, and her being at Smith and planning to be a doctor was part of that pattern. Quitting school in favor of caring for the two Mitchell men began to have special appeal. For one thing, she would be, for the first time, the only woman in the lives of her father and brother, and, for another, the competition at school was beginning to overwhelm her. Midyear examinations found her just skimming through. She was a C student and had not shone in any area — academic, athletic, literary, or musical. Smith was a college of nearly two thousand young women, and Margaret had found that there were many more clever and talented girls than she. “If I can’t be first, I’d rather be nothing,” she wrote her brother.

  But she did play the Southern belle. Her roommates report that she had replaced the U.S. Army photographs on her bureau with a collection of recently acquired male college students’ pictures, all warmly inscribed. And whenever someone’s date did not show up for a special occasion, Margaret could always be counted upon to produce an attractive substitute, usually from Amherst, Dartmouth, or Harvard. Sophie Henker, the classmate who
shared Margaret’s love of horseback riding, came from nearby Amherst, and Margaret visited at her home several weekends and became friends with some Amherst men. She had always been able to make male friends easily. Young men accepted her as one of the gang, a rare member of the opposite sex in whom they could confide. She was also the one girl at Ten Hen whom a young man dating one of Mrs. Pearson’s other charges could trust as a willing conspirator when a window had to be left open for his date to sneak in through after curfew.

  But her social success did not make up for the inferiority Margaret felt in the classroom, and she made the decision to return to Atlanta. She seems to have had no qualms about leaving Smith, and her final grades were even worse than she had expected — barely passing, except in English. In May Margaret boarded the train for home, fully aware that she was ending her formal education. Maybelle’s lectures to her on the importance of an education had been pushed aside. On her deathbed, Maybelle had said that Margaret should think about herself first, and with this new decision, she felt that she was doing exactly that. It might seem she was being self-sacrificing in returning home to take care of her brother and father, but it was what she wanted to do. Being first did matter to her, desperately, and if she could not succeed at college, then she could at least be first in the hearts of her immediate family.

  During her last week at Smith, Margaret had a date with an Amherst student from the Midwest, Billy Williams. They ended up sitting on the steps of the boathouse at Smith in a driving rain, both feeling a little forlorn, both conscious of their extreme youth. “When I get through here,” she confided, “I’m going to find out if I can really write.” Williams, who also had dreams of being a writer, looked at her with surprise. She had made the statement with unusual vehemence, yet he did not recall either Peggy Mitchell or any of her Smith friends mentioning that writing might be her life’s ambition. He questioned her, but she refused to discuss the subject further. They walked back to Ten Hen in the teeming downpour, in silence.