Rhett Butler's people (63 page)

Rhett's eyes were so sad. "Yes, sugar. I wish she was, too."

The rains that happy week were tropical rains, which cooled the earth and disappeared into mist as they fell.

Rhett forgot his promise to take his daughter on a steamboat ride. He would regret that unkept promise for the rest of his days.

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Chapter

Chapter

Forty-eight

Miss Me

lly Asks for Help

A year and a month after Rhett and Bonnie visited New Orleans, Melanie Wilkes wrote her friend:

Dearest Rosemary,

I trust this finds you in good health and spirits. Do you like teaching at the Female Seminary?

Rosemary, how can two stick-in-the-muds like us have become such dear friends?

Dr. Meade is outside my door issuing instructions to Pittypat. The good doctor leaves me with admonitions and an array of varicolored potions and pills! When men can fix something, they fix it. When the repair is beyond them, they harrumph and dither!

Although Dr. Meade blames me for the fix I'm in

--

I can see reproach in his eyes

--

he cannot decently utter them. Would any man presume to tell a wife she should have refused her husbands embraces?

He is less forbearing with Ashley, and my guilty husband avoids him. When Dr. Meade manages to ambush Ashley, my husband comes to my room so contrite, I must lift his spirits. Falsely cheerful wife and contrite husband: What geese we are!

Dr. Meade blames Ashley for my pregnancy. Ashley is a gentleman and no gentleman could admit that his mousy, sickly wife has been a Salome whose allures the helpless male could not resist.

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Yet, Dear Friend, I confess that unlikely tale is the Truth, that this plain girl can, when needs must, be a Salome of the first order!

A year ago in April, Scarlett and Ashley gave way

--

only for a moment

--

to the impulse that had smoldered in them for so many years. Ashley's sister India, Archie Flytte, and old Mrs. Elsing

--

Atlanta

's prime busybody --

caught them in an embrace. Naturally,

India raced to me with their news --

and on Ashley's birthday, too, with our house prepared to receive guests and Japanese lanterns glowing fetchingly in our garden.

Dear Rosemary, where it comes to my family, I am a mother tiger, and I understood perfectly, as India gleefully delivered her news, that I might undo two marriages, my own and your brother Rhett's.

India's face positively glowed with malicious satisfaction. She has always hated Scarlett.

I thought to myself,

India, you are Ashley's sister. Why can't you see this must destroy the brother you love as thoroughly as the woman you despise?

So I pronounced

India a liar. I said that my husband, Ashley, and my dear friend Scarlett would never betray me. I ordered India from my house. When Archie Flytte corroborated India's tale, I expelled him, too. Subsequently, Archie has uttered the vilest threats --

not against me

--

against Scarlett and Rhett! I fear they have a bad enemy there.

When my guilty Ashley returned home, I never gave the poor man a chance to make excuses, but met him with an embrace which I trust was more ardent and familiar than Scarlett's!

Ashley desperately wanted to confess. His lips trembled with yearning. I stayed his confession with a kiss.

Honesty is a blunt tool: pruning shears when sewing scissors are what's wanted! I could not let my husband confess because I could not grant him absolution!

Scarlett and Rhett arrived after Ashley's party was well under way. (I've no doubt your brother made Scarlett "face the music") At our front door, I took my dear friend's faithless arm and smiled at her for all the world to see.

Our guests that night included prominent men, a few so prominent (and distracted), nobody'd told them about Ashley's fall from grace. Generous

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spirits accepted my faith in my husband and my friend. Cynics thought me a booby and snickered covertly.

But scandal was stopped dead at my reputation.

That night, after our guests went home, Ashley proved in the most primitive, convincing fashion that he was mine and mine alone.

Ashley and Melly Wilkes were like newlyweds. We conversed about books and art and music

--

never a word about politics or commerce

--

but our nights were so voluptuous, I blush to remember them! We never discussed what might come of our concupiscence. Perhaps we dreamed that after Beau's difficult delivery, I could not conceive again.

Since I cannot believe God can be heartless, I must believe He knows best, and so I am come to childbed.

If I survive, it is God's will. If I do not, I pray my baby will live. She is so clever and vigorous, and she so wants to live. I say "she" because I am already close to her, closer than I could be to any male child. I confide in her. I have told her how her father was shaped for a finer world than the rough-and-tumble one we inhabit. I urge my daughter to make her world one where gentle souls like Ashley may live in honor and peace.

Rosemary, it must be possible! We born in the nineteenth century stand at the gates of Paradise, where there will be no more wars and everyone will be happy and good!

What will my daughter know of our world? If life before the War seems remote to me, how will it seem to her?

Will we Confederates become sentimental ghosts? Our passions, confusions, and desires reduced to a distant idyll of faithful darkies, white-columned plantations, handsome Masters and Mistresses whose manners are as impeccable as their clothing?

Oh Rosemary, our lives have been severed into a "before" that grows more remote daily and a "now" that is so modern, the paint hasn't yet dried.

I am so ungrateful! The sun shines outside my window and I hear the shouts of children playing while I indulge these melancholy fantasies.

Dearest Rosemary, I have skirted the true purpose of my letter. You must come to Atlanta.

I am sensible of your responsibilities to your school but beg you to

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think of your brother. When Bonnie Blue was killed, I feared for Rhett's sanity.

It might so easily have been different. Little Bonnie mightn't have urged her reluctant pony to jump those hurdles. The pony might not have stumbled. Children fall from horses every day. Some of brother Charles's falls left Aunt Pittypat gasping. Most children do not die by falling from ponies.

Bonnie's death ripped her parents' hearts

--

as you surely understand.

For four days, Rhett stayed with his poor dead child in a room ablaze with lights. Rhett would not suffer Bonnie to be buried

--

laid forever into the dark she had always feared!

It is still hard to believe she is gone. Sometimes when I hear hoofbeats, I look to the street, expecting to see Bonnie on her fat pony beside her proud father, Rhett reining his great black horse in to accommodate his daughter's pace....

Those who say

Atlanta is heartless should have seen the mourning for this child. So many came to the funeral, a hundred stood outside.

If Bonnie's death dealt your brother a fearful blow, his disintegrating marriage has undone him.

Rosemary, in his heart your brother is a lover. The shrewd businessman, the adventurer, the dandy are but costumes the lover wears.

Bonnie Blue was the last linchpin in Rhett and Scarlett's marriage. Rhett saw Bonnie as Scarlett unspoiled, a Scarlett who loved him without reservation. And Scarlett loved Bonnie as a reborn self as an image of what she might have become if only, if only.... Bonnie knew her needs, as Scarlett does not, and while Scarlett beguiles our admiration, Bonnie commanded it.

Rhett and Scarlett have always been combatative, but they were grandly, triumphantly combative

--

the clash of two unmastered souls. Now it is painful to be with them: such bitter, weary language; so many ancient slights reprised; hurts recollected over and over, as if the hurts were fresh and the wound still tingling.

Rosemary, your brother needs you.

I am not much traveled.

Once, when I was very young, Pittypat,

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Charles, and I traveled to

Charleston. I thought it so much more sophisticated than Atlanta! We stayed in Mr. Mills's hotel (does it still exist?), and in its dining room, I was offered escargots accompanied by the device one holds them with while spearing meat from the shell. I thought the device was a nutcracker and was trying with Atlantan determination to crack a snail shell when our kind waiter rescued me. "Oh no, miss. No, miss! We does things different in Charleston!"

I suspected then, and believe now, there are many things

Charleston does differently --

things busy

Atlanta neglects or doesn't do at all.

I cannot remember my father, and my mother is only a vague shape, a warmth, not unlike the warmth of baking bread. I recollect a mother's touch, so gentle, it might have been a butterfly's. When our parents died, Charles and I went to Aunt Pittypat's: two children whose guardian was little more than a child herself. Uncle Peter was the grown-up in our house! What a happy time we had! Pittypat's silliness (which irritates adults) charmed us, and among children, Pittypat's kind heart and silly airs flowered into something like wisdom. One day, she bet that we couldn't outrun Mr. Bowen's sulky. (Mr. Bowen, our neighbor, had famous trotters.) Charles and I hid in the shrubbery until Mr. Bowen turned into our street, and we darted in front of him, running as fast as our stubby legs could, while Mr. Bowen (forewarned by Aunt Pittypat) restrained his horse so we could win the race. As I recall, our prize was oatmeal cookies, two each, which were easily the best cookies I've ever had. I was a grown woman before I realized their deception

--

that two small children could outrun a fast trotter. Mercy!

Now, when we drive out on a Sunday afternoon, I am toted to the carriage like baggage and swaddled like an infant against the "fierce August cold."

In the country, Ashley sighs at the ruins of every familiar plantation, their gardens as reclaimed by wildness as if the land still belonged to the Cherokees. When I tug his sleeve, Ashley reluctantly returns to the present.

We "do things different" in Atlanta these days, too. Dear Rosemary, we are nearly recovered from the War and prosper stupendously. On market days, farmers' wagons fill Peachtree and Whitehall streets from boardwalk

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to boardwalk. The gaslights have extended almost to Pittypat's and all the central streets are macadamed. They're building a street railway! We are readmitted to the Union, the Federal troops are out west with General Custer, and Atlanta is doing very well, thank you.

When Louis Valentine comes of age, he would have a bright future here. Atlanta has wholeheartedly embraced the Modern Age and there will be opportunities for a young man with his Uncle Rhett's connections.

How practical I'

ve become, when those times I recall most fondly were so impractical: Pittypat, Charles, and Melanie playing at life!

I miss Charles each and every day. In my heart, he is fixed as a young man of twenty-one, recently married to Scarlett O'Hara of Tara Plantation. It must have been War Fever, for certainly if any two human beings were unsuited to each other, it was my sweet Charles Hamilton and Scarlett O'Hara.

I solace myself with the thought that Charles died happily wed. Had he lived, they would have made each other miserable.