Barely four months after her return, she wrote to her friend Allen Edee that she was now letting three men court her at the same time.
Just at present, my irate Pa is wildly desirous of sending me to a convent or feeding me Paris Green or presenting me a silk-lined padded cell. . . . You see, Al, every time a man comes to our house twice, Dad has spasms if he hasn’t known said victim’s family all his life and the victim’s family tree back to the days when our family hung by their tails (pardon me) to the tree next to them. . . . I had absolutely no matrimonial designs on any of the three, but when Dad and Grandma kept nagging me about “ruining my social career,” I arose and registered an oath in Heaven that if they didn’t let me see my friends in peace, I’d elope with the first man who would have me. . . . Father thought a convent would be just my speed, but Steve (bless him!) remarked that I was such a perverse creature that, once away from the family’s eagle eye, I would elope with a garbage man, just to be annoying. Dad chose the lesser and more certain of two evils, so here I am.27
The “here I am” meant that she was suffocating in a stifling household with her father, the model of conservatism and respectability; her brother, a young lawyer who loved her but did not always understand her; and her grandmother, a strong-willed 75-year-old, known for speaking her mind, particularly when some moral issue conflicted with her principles—which was often. Grandmother Stephens moved into the Mitchells’ home shortly before Peggy returned from Smith because she thought that it was improper for a young unmarried girl to live alone in a house with two men, even though the men were her father and brother.28 This garrulous woman, who lived to be ninety, survived her husband by thirty-eight years and outlived four of their eleven children. The self-appointed head of the Mitchell-Fitzgerald clan, she meddled in everyone’s business and she was, at times, mean. She annoyed many people but none more than Peggy, who, a few years later, told Henry Marsh that the most unhappy period of her life was from 1919 to 1922.29
7
Throughout these years, Peggy’s letters to Allen Edee, her “best gempmum frien’” from Amherst, reveal her frustration and uncertainty. While John’s letters to his family during this same period were full of the excitement of challenge and discovery, Peggy’s letters to Edee frankly describe the difficulties of her life at this time.
For one thing, housekeeping for her father had become anathema to her. Even though the ten-room Mitchell house was always staffed with at least three black servants—Susie, the cook and housekeeper; Charlie, the gardener, who also drove Grandmother Stephens around the city; and Lula Tolbert, who cooked the evening meals and cleaned up afterward—Peggy found overseeing the residence sheer drudgery. “Life is rather full now, for housekeeping is rather strenuous till one gets accustomed to it,” she wrote Edee. “The servants nearly drive me mad as they steal stockings and collars, spill the beans (both literally and figuratively!) when company is here, and if not continually urged on to nobler efforts would ‘draw their breath and their pay!’”30 Later on she complained about the butler, “who thought he was merely for ornamental purposes.”31
Much to her further annoyance, her father insisted on keeping the house much too cold in his attempt to reduce his fuel bill. His business had slacked off dramatically in the early 1920s because of the boll weevil depression. The boll weevil had played economic havoc in destroying cotton crops all over the South, and as a result, hundreds of banks closed. There was little work for a real-estate law firm, and Eugene Mitchell’s income was greatly diminished.32 With inflation, high food costs, and a reduction in household funds during this postwar era, Peggy had to manage all the household accounts carefully, and managing household accounts was not one of her talents.
Thus, as conditions in the Peachtree mansion became more and more unbearable for her, she turned to using illness as a protective device, a technique that she may have observed her mother using. Her letters to Allen Edee from July 1919 to December 1921 are noticeably full of talk about her sieges with flu, colds, sprains, bone injuries, back pain, an inordinate number of accidents, and emotional depression. Peggy consistently capitalized on her small size and frailty, saying such things as, “It’s hell to be small.”33 Another time she wrote, “I go to pieces under a heavy nervous strain. That, of course, reacts on me physically and I go under.”34
Although she did not say why, she thought Atlanta was “the swiftest, hardest town in the world to stay good in, particularly,” she pointed out, “when one is cursed by a restless, emotional nature and intermittent moods of black depression and reckless diablerie.”35 Her negative emotions manifested themselves in physical problems that allowed her to avoid unpleasant activities. For example, when the body of Clifford Henry, the young soldier with whom she was briefly engaged before she left for Smith, was brought home for burial sometime in the early spring of 1921, Peggy was “too ill” to attend the funeral services in Connecticut. A few weeks later, in May, after she had agreed to visit Smith and Annapolis with Dot Bates, her debutante friend, she again complained of illness, saying, “I’ve been damn sick.” She added, “It will be hell if I’m not strong enough to do all this, won’t it?”36 However, her illnesses did not curtail any of her social activities at home.
Because her medical records are not available, we have no way of knowing whether she was genuinely sick that often or merely indulging herself, using illness as a way of getting attention and avoiding responsibilities. But it does indeed appear that she enjoyed playing the role of a languishing Camille, and it is interesting to note that she was never ill while she was away at Smith. She did not even get the flu, as many of her classmates did, during the flu epidemic in Northampton in 1918.
One thing is clear: her preoccupation with her health did not start until after she came home to Atlanta. Even then, she managed to stay well while she was relatively content and busy doing things she enjoyed. In August 1919, as a result of her complaints about the pains in her side, she had surgery for appendicitis. A year later she had surgery for adhesions. She sprang back quickly from her appendicitis operation because she wanted to participate in Atlanta’s biggest celebration—a week-long commemoration of the War between the States. This fall festival honoring the United Confederate Veterans flooded Atlanta with distinguished visitors, politicians, aged veterans, and their families. It was an exhilarating time for her. The city bustled with picnics, bands, parades, speeches on the courthouse steps, box lunch auctions, and grand balls in the Municipal Auditorium. Fascinated with anything concerning the Civil War, Peggy enjoyed serving as one of the Georgia Maids of Honor and chauffeuring the old veterans around town. She loved talking to old people who had lived through the war.37
After the celebration was over and things quickly settled down, her turmoil about going back to school began. “More than ever is the call for more schooling, more than ever the desire to know if I’m worth anything strong,” she wrote Edee. “It’s heart rending to see the days slip and the girls go back to school.”38 Yet she did not want to return to Smith because her class had moved on, and she did not like the idea of going to Wellesley (Smith’s rival) or to nearby Agnes Scott College, as her father had suggested. “I can’t figure it out, and I’m all at sea. I really want to go to college, yet I believe I could do more good specializing in designing or short stories. Oh! I don’t know.”
As the leaves turned and fell and the weather grew chillier, she grew more melancholy and restless. Writing letters became her favorite pastime because of the favorable and immediate response they brought her. Oftentimes she would answer letters moments after she received them, letting her other work go undone. In one long, rambling reply, she told Edee that she had just received his letter and that she “ought to be seeing to the housecleaning and the garden-planting or even to straightening up this room—but I ain’t; this room is a wreck. It reminds me of Room 23 at 10 Hen [her room at Smith], so complete is the chaos.”39 Indeed, all her life her room was generally a wreck, littered with ashtrays,
clothes, shoes, hose, books, magazines, and paper—lots of paper.40
In writing these early letters to Edee, she did a lot of soul-searching. In this revealing one, written only eleven days after her nineteenth birthday, she confessed:
I am as acutely unhappy as it is humanly possible to be and remain sane.
You ask why, I suppose—and that’s the trouble; I don’t know why. Allen, I’ve got things that many a girl has sold her soul to get—social position, money enough to buy what I want, looks and brains sufficient to get by, a family who loves me, friends who care for me, and a few men who would marry me if I loved them. A girl is a fool, a damn fool, not to be happy with all that, wouldn’t you think? Well, I’m not and I don’t know why. I keep life filled and speeded up so that I can cheat myself into believing that I am happy and contented, but oh! Al, when night comes and I go to bed and turn out the lights, I lie there in the dark, I realize the absolute futility of trying to kid myself. No, my dear, this depression is nothing new! . . . There is something missing in my life. For a year now I have been trying to figure out what it is, for it is vital to happiness—but I can’t find out. . . . If you have any idea what’s wrong with me, for God’s sake tell me!41
8
As time went on, her depression was worsened by her grandmother’s implacable insistence that she defer to her elders. One night in early 1920, she and her grandmother had such a violent quarrel that the old woman called a taxicab and moved her belongings into the Georgian Terrace Hotel, even though it was nearly midnight. Her relationship with her grandmother was never good after that argument, and the unpleasantness between them spread to other members of the family and developed into a bitter argument over property that Peggy’s mother had held as trustee. Although Stephens and Peggy waived the claims that they had inherited from their mother’s estate, some of their mother’s people held such an animosity toward Peggy, because of what her grandmother had told them about her, that they asked her not to claim kin with the Stephens family.42
Indisputable evidence of the seriousness of this estrangement—which lasted until Peggy’s death—is found in a letter that Peggy wrote on June 4, 1947. In answering her cousin, Alix Stephens Gress, who had requested information about their forebears, Peggy wrote: “I realize that the bitter persecution visited on the Atlanta branches of the family by my mother’s people was not your fault, for you were a child at the time. But the memory of it is still so vivid to those of us who went through the lawsuits brought against us, the attempt on my father’s life and on mine, the scandalous and humiliating scenes made at funerals of those we held dear, that I really find it difficult to write to you at all.”43 In this six-page, single-spaced letter, Peggy asked that Alix keep the letter secret between the two of them because she had “promised to never again assert any relationship” with the Stephens family. Nothing in her or her brother’s papers explains her intriguing comments about the attempts that were made on her and her father’s life, or by whom they were made.
9
With all their underlying sadness, those riotously personal letters Peggy wrote to Allen Edee between 1919 and December 1921 are important because they provide the key to understanding the person she was when she met John Marsh in November 1921. Showing that her head was full of girlish romantic nonsense as she struggled to attain authority in her relationships with men, they provide insight into the problems John faced loving a woman who used her sexuality as a weapon.44 Also, they leave no doubt as to where Scarlett O’Hara came from, for the similarities between Peggy and her heroine are too numerous and obvious to ignore. Sometimes it is difficult to distinguish her voice in these letters from Scarlett’s in the novel, as when she boasts to Edee about her ability to make any man feel that he is the only one to whom she can “take every sorrow and joy . . . and be sure of sympathy and understanding.”45 When it came to securing favors, she was just as charming as Scarlett ever was: at one point she implored Edee, “I’ll love you forever and be meek and submissive and won’t pick on you or bawl you out or anything—Please!”46 In giving men compliments, she was skillful: “I appreciated the letter, the advice and the dissertation, even tho I made no comment on them at the time,” she flattered Edee. “It is seldom that a girl gets a man’s opinion of love, marriage, passion, etc., and this girl, for one, appreciates all such information, for insight and knowledge of a man’s feelings on such subjects have helped her in a few tight places.”47
She described her flirting tactics to Edee while at the same time denying that she was a flirt. Telling him about a man who was trying to make a good impression on her and “keep his black past dark,” she wrote, “here’s where I lay low, look wide-eyed innocence and see what happens.”48 In trying to sound worldly, she saucily bragged about having “something of a reputation here for being able to size men up quickly and accurately.”49 However, her brother said the truth was that she “did not have good judgement in men,” and that led her to make some embarrassing mistakes.50
Part of her charm for John was her ambiguity and her immaturity. Like many modern young women, she was confused by social forces that encouraged women to reject the Victorian standards of their mother’s day and to be independent and autonomous, but at the same time also encouraged them to be mere beguiling ornaments attracting men into marriage so that they could fulfill their biological function of maternity. Without her wise mother to guide her and to depend upon, she was confused about her role as a young, single woman.
Tradition, in her day, held that girls were divided into two major classes: the nice girls who saved sex for marriage; and the trashy girls who did not. This last category actually led to a third class, which included unmarried girls who became pregnant and had to disappear for several months under the pretense of visiting relatives afar. Some of these unfortunates returned empty-handed but with a sad glint in their eyes; others had fatherless babies in their arms. In Peggy’s mind, the unfortunates were truly unfortunate in the worst kind of way, since pregnancy was abhorrent to her under any circumstances. As for the nice girls—well, they were awfully boring. However, at a tender age, she had been too greatly influenced by her parents and by the Catholic Church, which emphasized celibacy and chastity above all else, to throw all caution aside. And she remembered well her grandmother’s description of what happened to “fallen women”—namely, nice men did not marry them. Still, she curled her long, sooty-black eyelashes, rouged her cheeks, kept her hair and body squeaky clean, and wore perfume and sexy little dresses. She did her best to play the dual role: nice and trashy.
In writing to Frances, John’s youngest sister, who was unmarried at the time, Peggy later wrote candidly about her views on premarital sex and virginity.
Virtue for virtue’s sake. Only—well virginity—or what passes as virginity—is as saleable a thing on the marriage market today as it was in Babylon although it doesn’t bring such a good price, people not being so interested in it now. But it is a fairly good thing to have around, for after all, one does get married.
I hope you wont think I’m too brutally frank about the matter of seduction . . . but training is so strong in girls, that a lot of them cant help reverting to the early idea about being “ruined” even though their educated brains say, “Boo” to the idea. But the idea will persist and it does a lot of damage, mentally, particularly, unless the man is a very good sort and an understanding sort, too.
I’m sure I don’t know why women put such a value on the first man, but lots of them do—and the mental affect [sic] of being ruined is some times catastrophic. And then again, the bad affect [sic] is usually heightened by the unfortunate fact that the first time one is seduced, it is all so very disappointing. It isnt at all the glamorous affair that the Michael Arlens of this world are going to be sent to Hell for writing about. All poetry and literature and art seem to be in a conspiracy to make it seem that there was some thing tremendous about the whole affair when there really isn’t, when you get down to brass tacks. It’s pl
easant enough and all of that when you happen to know some thing about it and have experience and the rare luck to strike up with some one whose temperament is like your own. But, it’s my humble opinion that, except in a few cases, the first time and the first dozen times of being “deceived” are disappointing. I am up, on the subject, at present for two of my young friends have but recently parted with their virtue and two others are seriously meditating it. Despite the outward appearance of cynicism and sophistication of the two latter, I’m awfully afraid that they are the kind of girls who would ruin very easily. And after they had wept about their sin it would be useless to argue with them to effect that if they were ruined, it was only their own beastly training that ruined them and not the physical entry of the young gentlemen concerned.51
Despite her cynical view of virginity, Peggy recognized all the social and emotional dangers of premarital sex. However, while she was away at Smith and after, she appears not to have seen too much harm in petting and necking. Like many others, she believed that as long as she did not go “all the way” and, particularly, as long as she—“pretty soft and helpless looking”—put up a good struggle against the young man’s advances, she was chaste. Her compulsion to deny any responsibility for sexual encounters made her relate to Allen Edee several amusing experiences she had with some of her more ardent young admirers. In one of her long accounts of such an evening, she wrote this scenario:
“Please go home,” I pleaded. “Well, kiss me goodnight and I’ll go.” “Kiss you, hell! Go home.” He moved over and perched on the arm of the sofa. “I love to hear you say naughty words,” he grinned. “When you try to be rough, you are so feminine!” Then he put his arm around me. I didn’t want to yell for Steve. I was too weak to fight but I knew I’d go wild if he tried to manhandle me.52
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