Savannah Scarlett

by Becky Lee Weyrich

  He laughed. “You never had to. I saw you back there. Why do you think I always popped a wheely whenever I came by? Showing off for my girl, of course.”

  “I wasn’t your girl back then.”

  “Maybe not, but I could always hope. I must have been all of eleven years old when I first realized I was in love with you. Of course, I didn’t know it was love at the time. I just figured it was all the green Japanese plums I’d eaten off old lady Butterworth’s tree that gave me that stomachache.”

  “Well, I like that!” she fumed. “How dare you compare loving me to a bellyache?”

  Just then a strong gust of wind swirled past like a miniature tornado. Mary Scarlett’s umbrella flipped inside out, and a heavy shower drenched them both. Lightning cracked so close that the hair on Mary Scarlett’s arms bristled. The following clap of thunder shook the ground as she raced for the veranda, Bolt in pursuit. When they reached the leaf-strewn porch, they were both laughing and shaking themselves like wet dogs.

  They tossed their umbrellas aside and stood looking at each other for several moments. Their laughter faded to silent smiles.

  “It is going to be okay, isn’t it, Bolt?” Her voice sounded like the pleading of a little girl.

  Bolt reached out and drew her into his arms. “Do you remember how we used to hide from the whole world behind this old wisteria vine?”

  “How could I forget?” she murmured. “You were the first boy I ever kissed. Right here on this very spot.” She sighed. “Life would be so simple if we could turn the clock back, wouldn’t it, Bolt?”

  He kissed her damp hair. “Yes, Mary Scarlett. How I’d love to come back here and spend an evening on the porch swing with you, with the radio inside tuned to that station that used to play the old songs.”

  “Elvis, Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper.” Mary Scarlett sighed, then added, “They’re all gone now, Bolt, along with those happy years.”

  He drew her closer and kissed her cheek. “But it can be that way again, Mary Scarlett. You’ll see. Everything will be fine now that you’re home.”

  She slipped her arms up around his neck and clung to him almost desperately. “Oh, Bolt darlin’, I want it to be. I want everything to be like it should have been a long time ago. I made such a damn mess of things.”

  Then she was kissing him. Softly at first, deeper and wilder as moments passed. Bolt held back, cautious with her. But her fervor soon fired his passions. For a long time, they stood together, sheltered from the prying eyes of Savannah by the century-old wisteria vine, luxuriating in their own private world, reliving memories and creating new ones.

  Mary Scarlett broke the embrace. Smoothing her hair, she said, “I’m ready now. Will you unlock the door?”

  Bolt took the big iron key from her trembling hands and slipped it into the lock. The tumbler made a grinding sound as it moved.

  “Put WD-40 on the shopping list,” Mary Scarlett said to herself.

  The moment before Bolt pushed the creaking door open, Mary Scarlett closed her eyes, the way she always had before opening a surprise on her birthday or tearing into a telegram that might contain bad news.

  In that instant, a rush of familiar smells and long-locked-away memories engulfed her. With that first rush of musty air, she could isolate various aspects of family history. Granny Boo’s face powder, her mother’s peach brandy, her father’s expensive Cuban cigars that he literally had smuggled into Savannah. She could even hear his growling voice when his wife objected to the obnoxious contraband in the parlor. “Damned if any government is going to regulate my smoking habits, so you might as well stop your blasted nagging, Lucy. The day I’m expected to take orders from any woman is the last day she’ll see my face.”

  Mary Scarlett shuddered involuntarily at the memory. Bolt slipped his arm around her. “You’re sure you want to go inside, honey?”

  She nodded. “Just a passing anxiety attack. That’s all it was, Bolt. I’ll be fine in a minute.”

  In order to detach herself from all unpleasant memories, she concentrated on the familiar aromas. She could smell the fine old woods, the warmth of lemon wax old black Delsey had always applied lavishly to the furniture. The odors of dust and mildew wafted from the lace curtains and velvet drapes that hung longer than the windows, bunching on the floor to show that this was a household of wealth, a household that did not have to limit window treatment or anything else to prescribed parameters. Overlaying the musky lace odor was the good smell of their washwoman’s homemade starch, carefully prepared in the old manner with flour, water, and scented soap to make the curtains not only board-stiff, but as fresh as a meadow after a spring rain.

  The odor of stale grease from generations of Southern fried dinners tricked Mary Scarlett’s memory into smelling thickly battered chicken and shrimp sizzling in great iron skillets. Turnip and collard greens swimming in pools of bubbling pork fat. Green tomatoes, okra, squash all dancing and popping in bacon drippings.

  “The place needs airing out bad,” Bolt said as Mary Scarlett’s mouth watered with remembered childhood feasts.

  “I’m going to learn to cook,” she announced, seemingly out of nowhere.

  Bolt laughed. “Well, good for you! You ought to check and see if the gourmet class is still in session at the college.”

  “No, no! I mean cook the real way, the old Southern way. Fried chicken every Sunday, pork chops, big juicy hams, and greens and fresh vegetables and butter-smothered grits and coconut cakes a mile high and pecan pies to go with them.”

  “Mary Scarlett, you’re making me fat just listening to you.”

  “But you love Southern cooking, Bolt. I remember when you used to wolf down a whole plate of Delsey’s biscuits with butter and gallberry honey.”

  He laughed. “I also love my present cholesterol level and my nice, unclogged arteries.”

  She turned, her hands on her slender hips, and stared him right in the eye. “If I have to go, Bolton Conrad, and I assume I’m no different from anyone else, I’m going to go well-fed and well-greased!”

  Bolt was glad to see that her grim mood had lightened. They laughed together, then turned to enter the dim, musty foyer.

  The moment she stepped over the threshold, Mary Scarlett gasped, then cried out. “It’s gone! Oh, no!”

  “What, Mary Scarlett? What are you talking about?”

  Silently, she pointed at a dark oval on the wall over the petticoat table to the left of the door. The huge mauve and purple cabbage roses of the wallpaper retained their original brilliance in that one spot. Something had hung there for many years. Bolt suddenly remembered what it was.

  “The mirror,” he said, frowning.

  “Granny Boo’s mirror,” she amplified. “Who could have taken it, Bolt?”

  “Calm down, honey. It’s probably somewhere else in the house. Didn’t you tell me that Miss Beulah used to take it up to the attic sometimes? Maybe that’s where it is.”

  She shook her head. “No! I brought it down from the attic after she died. I remember! I had it in my room.”

  “Then it must still be there. We’ll find it. Don’t you worry, honey.”

  Bolt had called the day before and had the power turned on. In the foyer, the English chandelier of small, delicately-shaped crystals glowed with weak, yellowish light, but only for a few seconds. With another lightning strike, the electricity flickered and failed. The house shook, then they were standing in deep shadows.

  “Damn!” Bolt said. “We can’t do anything without power. Maybe we’d better come back on a better day.”

  “I’m not budging until I locate that mirror. Mama used to keep hurricane lanterns in the pantry. Come on. Let’s find them.”

  Holding Bolt’s hand and moving determinedly ahead of him through the deep shadows, Mary Scarlett headed down the hallway that bisected the house, passing the parlors, the dining room, and the library until she came to the huge kitchen that had been added to the back
of the main building after the detached cook house burned back around 1900. The butler’s pantry was between the kitchen and the dining room. Sure enough, in the glass-doored cabinets they found several kerosene lanterns and a number of candleholders with hurricane shades.

  “The lanterns are empty,” Bolt said. “We’ll have to use candles.”

  Mary Scarlett flicked her cigarette lighter to torch the wicks. “There! That’s much better,” she said.

  “Too bad there aren’t any flashlights around.”

  “Mama wouldn’t allow one in the house. She was afraid of battery acid. Never mind that she could have burned the place down with all these candles and kerosene lanterns. You know how she was.”

  “That was Miss Lucy,” Bolt said with a nod. “Eccentric to the nth degree.”

  “I won’t argue that point. Lord, she was something! I guess she had to be a bit balmy, though, to stay married to Big Dick all those years.”

  It was on the tip of Bolt’s tongue to ask at that moment what it was that had turned Mary Scarlett against her father. He knew when it had happened, but she had never told him exactly what caused the rift between father and daughter. From that day in Mary Scarlett’s thirteenth year she had never again called him “Daddy.” Always “Big Dick” to others, nothing to his face.

  “Bolt?” Mary Scarlett said. “Did you take Granny Boo’s pearl-handled dessert forks and put them in the safety deposit box?”

  “No, honey. I haven’t been in the house since your mother’s wake. As far as I know, the place was locked up tight the very next day. No one’s been in here since.”

  Mary Scarlett had pulled out a slender, green felt-lined drawer. It was empty. “Maybe Mama put them somewhere for safekeeping. They were always right here.”

  “Miss Lucy wasn’t too stable after the accident. She did a lot of peculiar things. We’ll probably find the dessert set hidden in her mattress upstairs or in a shoebox in one of the closets.”

  Mary Scarlett noted that Bolt still called Big Dick’s disappearance “the accident.” He probably knew as well as everyone else in Savannah that her mother’s husband, as she always thought of him, had run off with another woman. It was kind of Bolt not to mention that fact.

  “Let’s go up to my room and see if the mirror’s there,” Mary Scarlett insisted. “I won’t feel easy until I have it in my hands again.” She had to find out whose face she would see in it now, after all these years. What if she didn’t see Bolt’s face? She knew it sounded foolish and superstitious, but Granny Boo had believed. And so did she.

  As they climbed the stairs, Mary Scarlett stepped higher out of lifelong habit to avoid the single trick stair, a sort of nineteenth century burglar alarm. Bolt, right behind her, tripped on it.

  Mary Scarlett laughed. “You’d make a terrible thief,” she chided. “You know all these old places have that one higher step to trip up anyone who breaks in and alert the family.”

  “I’ve never been up these stairs before. Remember? Miss Lucy would have had apoplexy if I’d ever dared come up to your bedroom. Any other tricky spots?”

  “No. You managed to find the only one.”

  They came to the landing where the stairs turned to go up the rest of the way. A mummified potted palm in an old Majolica jardiniere had long ago moldered onto the frayed carpeting. The dead plant reminded Mary Scarlett suddenly that her mother had fallen to her death from the railing above. She glanced down to the first floor hall, half-expecting to see a chalk drawing where Lucy Lamar’s body had landed. Still hesitating she looked up into the darkness above, to the spot where her mother had stood before she fell. She shivered.

  “Don’t think about that,” Bolt whispered, tuned in to her every change of mood.

  “Hard not to,” she said. She continued upward, her eyes fixed on the dull brass carpet rods across each stair. “I should have come back for her funeral.”

  “Don’t punish yourself. There was no one left here to console.”

  “I wanted to come. Raul refused to allow it.”

  Bolt could hear tears in her voice. Pained tears, angry tears. What had this Raul done to her? What kind of monster must he have been?

  “The mirror, Mary Scarlett. Just focus on finding the mirror. Don’t think about all the rest.”

  She nodded, not trusting her voice to answer. Bolt was right, of course. There was no need to torture herself over things long past.

  In the wide hallway of the second floor, she paused and glanced about. The door of the master bedroom, which her mother had occupied alone for as long as she could remember, stood open. Down on the far left, the guest room that had been Big Dick’s lair was closed. Her own room, too, was shut up tight. She wondered if her mother had closed the doors as each of them left her life for good, signaling an end to those relationships. And maybe she’d been glad. Neither relationship had been ideal. In fact, both had been stormy for many years before Lucy Lamar’s death.

  Mary Scarlett took some comfort in knowing that she and her mother had made peace with each other through letters while she was in Europe. Writing home was the one concession Raul had allowed, her only link with her past.

  “Which room first?” Bolt asked.

  She nodded toward the one across from the master bedroom. “That’s mine,” she answered. “The mirror should be there.”

  When she made no move toward the door, Bolt walked over and turned the knob. The hinges creaked from years of disuse in Savannah’s high humidity.

  “Mary Scarlett?” Bolt prompted. She seemed to be a million miles away.

  She gripped his hand. “Come with me,” she begged. “I’m scared, Bolt.”

  “No need to be,” he assured her. “The two of us are the only ones here.”

  She gave him a twisted smile. “You’re sure of that?”

  Mary Scarlett could hardly believe her eyes when she walked into the room and raised her candle. She might have stepped back to the night of Granny Boo’s funeral, the night of her parents’ terrible fight, the night she had fled Savannah. The bed was unmade and rumpled, just as she’d left it. Clothes were strewn about from her hasty packing. She had spilled a bottle of perfume on the vanity while she was gathering up her cosmetics that night. A pale oval of wood surrounded the tipped over bottle where its contents had eaten away the finish. Dust lay thick and powdery over everything in the room. Her brass bed gleamed dully from lack of polishing.

  “I think I shoved the mirror under the edge of the bed. I was going to take it with me, but I was afraid it would get broken. Also, it was pretty heavy to be carrying in a backpack.”

  Mary Scarlett scrambled to her knees and searched the darkness under the bed. She stretched her arm as far as it would go. Nothing. Just more dustballs and an old pair of bedroom slippers.

  “Oh, Bolt, it’s not here!” she cried. “What am I going to do?”

  “Come on, honey.” He raised her gently from the floor. “I’ll buy you a new mirror. Any kind you want. It’s not the end of the world, you know.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “I might if you gave me a chance. Why won’t you tell me about the mirror?”

  “You’ll think it’s silly.”

  “Maybe so. But we won’t know that until you tell me, will we?”

  He sat down on the edge of the bed and drew Mary Scarlett down beside him. She sat in silence for several moments, eyes downcast, hands folded in her lap.

  Without preamble, she said, “Mama always said it was nonsense. She fussed at Granny Boo for filling my head with ‘old wives’ tales,’ as she called them.” She turned and stared into Bolt’s eyes, her own wide and shining in the candlelight. “But there’s something to it, Bolt, I know there is. I once saw a face. It scared me.” She paused as if she had said all there was to say.

  “Please, Mary Scarlett,” he urged gently. “Tell me about the mirror.”

  Heaving a great, shuddering sigh, she went on. “Gr
anny Boo first told me the story when I was just a little girl. It was one of her bedtime tales, so I never believed it back then. Not until… but I’m getting ahead of myself. The mirror has been in our family forever, since way back in the seventeen hundreds when a young craftsman from London came to Savannah with General Oglethorpe and the first settlers. He was a poor man, but very skilled. Granny Boo said he could take the sorriest stick of wood and turn it into something beautiful. His name was Will Johnston. He fell in love with a serving girl, Annie, who’d come over with one of the wealthy families—one of the men who planted mulberry trees to raise silkworms. Often, Will would visit the people Annie worked for.”

  Again, Mary Scarlett looked down, her voice quivering when she continued. “Will should never have visited her there. You see, there was a spoiled daughter in the family. The story goes that she wasn’t nearly as sweet or as beautiful as Annie and she was jealous of the serving girl. She told her father that she wanted Will for her husband. Things were different back then, far different from the way they’d been in England. Savannah was raw and new, and none of the old rules applied.

  “The girl’s father went to Will’s shop to look him over and found Will working on a lovely frame for a mirror. His carving was excellent—all flowers and scrolls and angels and hearts. The man tried to buy the mirror, but Will told him it was not for sale. You see, he was making it as a gift for his Annie. He couldn’t afford a ring, but he would give her the mirror as a token of his undying affection.

  Matters progressed quickly. Before Will knew it, he was being wined and dined by the gentleman and his family. Annie served the table with tears in her eyes, knowing what her young mistress was up to. But poor, unsuspecting Will hadn’t a clue. He believed, as he was told, that the gentleman wanted him to carve the mantelpieces for the fine new home he was planning to build.”

  Mary Scarlett paused, thinking about the sad conclusion.

  “Well?” Bolt said. “Tell me what happened.”

  “The spoiled rich girl realized that Will loved Annie and she didn’t have a chance. Used to having her way, she set a trap to snare the man she wanted. She managed to lure Will away from the family one evening, telling him she had a broken writing desk that needed fixing. She took him to her bedroom. When her mother came in, she found her daughter in Will’s arms, the bed rumpled, and the young woman’s bodice tom. There was no way out for him, of course. Even though he was totally innocent, the young woman’s father insisted that they marry. In fact, he sent for the minister that very night.”