Savannah Scarlett

by Becky Lee Weyrich

  “No way, Frankie!” She whirled out of his reach. “This is me inside this necklace and I won’t be pawed.”

  Everyone laughed but Frankie. He whimpered softly and went to Donny.

  Meanwhile, “the girls,” Missy, Cecelia, and Annabelle had huddled a short distance away from the others.

  “Did you see the notice in the paper?” Annabelle whispered.

  “What notice?” Cecelia asked.

  “The obituary. She’s a widow!”

  Annabelle shrugged elegantly in her off-the-shoulder designer gown. “No details. Maybe she screwed him to death.”

  “Well, she’s not adding my Pryce to her list of conquests,” Cecelia announced. “I’ve a good mind to take him right home before she gets here.”

  “Too late!” Missy said, peering out through the front window. “They’re coming up the walk right now.”

  “Oh, God! And we all have to be nice to her,” Annabelle replied.

  “It won’t be easy,” Missy said.

  “Not after what she did,” Cecelia finished.

  Just then, Mary Scarlett came through the door on Bolton Conrad’s arm. All the girls—Annabelle, Missy, and Cecelia—rushed to Mary Scarlett, each pushing and shoving to be the first to throw herself on their long-lost friend’s neck for “a big ole bear-hug,” as Missy squealed.

  Frankie and Donny were next, both exclaiming over how good Mary Scarlett’s new hair color looked and swearing that they knew who she was all along when she came to them as “Mrs. Miguel.”

  Only Kathleen stood back, gazing at her competition, sizing her up from all angles. With an inner cringe, she realized that even decked out in the fabulous Josephine, she couldn’t hold a candle to the glitter and shimmer of Mary Scarlett Lamar.

  Kathleen transferred her gaze to Bolt. He hovered close to Mary Scarlett, one arm protectively clutched about her ever-so-slender waist. Kathleen would kill to have Bolt look at her with that passionate light in his eyes. She was about to flee the room and the party when Allen slipped his arm around her and urged her forward.

  “They’re here at last, Katie. Come say hello to our honored guest. Mary Scarlett is really, truly back!”

  The two women faced each other. After a moment’s hesitation, Mary Scarlett offered her hand. Another uncomfortable moment passed before Kathleen took it.

  “Good to see you again,” Kathleen managed.

  “What a gorgeous necklace!” Mary Scarlett answered.

  “Maybe Allen will let you wear it sometime.”

  Kathleen turned away then on the pretense of getting champagne for the late arrivals.

  Only Mary Scarlett noticed the brief, intimate glance that passed between Kathleen and Bolt. It cut her to the quick.

  Eight

  Allen had taken great care in arranging the seating for dinner. Kathleen would be on his right and Mary Scarlett on his left. He placed Bolt on the other side of Kathleen, and put dull, harmless, and balding Pryce Jasper at Mary Scarlett’s left. Cecelia Jasper was fuming when she read the placecards until she realized she would be sitting between Lawton Winthrop, who had wooed her all through high school, and the glorious Donny. With a sweet smile, she let Donny hold her chair, the thought crossing her mind that, if she played her cards right, she might lure him away from his present lover.

  The table was set to perfection. Intricately carved English sterling flatware gleamed against the white-on-white damask. The cloth was worn but elegant, freshly starched to give it stiffness and sheen. Twelve perfect white tapers glowed, crowning the graceful twin candelabra on either side of a fragrant, sprawling centerpiece of rubrum lilies, white gladioli, and waxy green magnolia leaves. The Waterford crystal sparkled as brightly as Empress Josephine’s diamonds while the antique china—rimmed in blood-red and edged in eighteen karat gold—shimmered with the reflected aura of candlelight.

  The ladies’ gowns rustled as they seated themselves. Once at the table, that soft sound gave way to murmurs of awe and delight. Allen Overman sat at their head, beaming like an Eastern potentate presiding over a feast for his subjects.

  “You’ve done well for yourself, Allen,” Mary Scarlett said, bestowing a smile of genuine delight on her host. “All this … She gestured toward the table, the room, the whole mansion. “You must be very happy here.”

  “You know it’s what I’ve always dreamed of. But, ah, Mary Scarlett, no man can be happy with mere possessions, not alone, with no one to share the pleasure.”

  Overhearing his remark, Aurelia said, “It’s too bad you didn’t have all this before our amicable parting, dear boy. I’d never have left you.”

  His other ex-wives nodded their agreement. It was obvious to everyone in the party that they, too, would have ignored Allen’s flings and his black moods in order to enjoy such grandeur and wealth. At the moment, all these ladies could have kicked themselves for suing for divorce. But how could they have known that someday Allen would actually amount to something?

  ’Gator and ’Tator moved silently and efficiently around the table, serving the first course, she-crab bisque, a delicate concoction of cream, sherry, and pure white crabmeat, shredded as fine as angel’s hair.

  “Tell us about your travels, Mary Scarlett,” Annabelle insisted. “You’re a brave one to take off to Europe all alone. I shudder at the thought of leaving Savannah. If it weren’t for the Georgia-Florida game, I doubt Lawton and I would ever set foot out of Chatham County.”

  The other women at the table agreed. The outside world held no wonders for the true Savannahian. Many had never traveled even as far as Charleston, although they would on occasion force themselves to take the short run down the coast to Sea Island for a weekend of being pampered at The Cloister.

  “I think of Spain as always being hot and dusty,” Cecelia commented. “Is it, Mary Scarlett?”

  “Not always,” she answered, nervous at being the focal point of this interrogation, aftaid where it might lead. “Not nearly as hot as Turkey. But then all the countries I visited had their seasons. I found that especially true in Italy.”

  “Really?” Missy said, her silver soup spoon poised, pinky arched elegantly. “How is Italy different?”

  Gaining confidence from this mundane topic, Mary Scarlett answered, “It never rains all summer. Can you imagine? Not a cloud in the sky. Just vast stretches of brilliant, sunny blue. And the dust! You have to wipe the fine powder from your plates before you eat. Then in September, the bottom drops out. Once I was flooded out of my hotel room. Then all winter, you hardly see the sun. Rain, mist, and a cold wind that howls down from the Apennines.” She held her arms and shivered to reinforce her point.

  “I can see why you left Italy for Spain, then,” Annabelle said.

  No, Mary Scarlett thought, still smiling, you can’t see at all. Annabelle and the others had no idea what her “romantic adventures” in Europe had been like. Nor did she plan to tell them. They needn’t know that when she was flooded out in Naples, she lost everything she owned or that her parents flatly refused to send her any assistance, even money for a ticket home. She had her passport and the clothes she was wearing, nothing else. She had to bum her way to Spain with an expatriate from Queens who was ten years her junior but light years her senior in experience. They had met shortly after the flood while standing in a soup kitchen line at a church in downtown Naples, the only two Americans among the hungry. That in itself had made them seem like distant relatives.

  “Stud” he had called himself, and she should have taken that as advance warning. But she was too desperate and alone to be wary. He had told her he had enough money to get them both to Sardinia by tramp steamer. Once there, he said they could work in the artichoke fields until they had enough to buy passage to the Spanish island of Ibiza. He told her fabulously colorful tales of the Gypsies who lived in the caves along the shore and the Americans who flocked there for the history, the beauty, and the ambiance of this one special place on ea
rth.

  She closed the door on thoughts of Stud and Ibiza. Once more she turned to her dinner partners. While she had been lost in reverie, the conversation had moved on to other topics. A vast relief. But she realized she must have missed a comment from Bolt.

  “Is what Bolt says true? You’re really going to move back into that old place on Bull Street?” Again, Annabelle was her inquisitor. “You said when we were in high school that if you ever got away from there you’d never go back.”

  Mary Scarlett forced a small laugh. “We said a lot of things back in high school, didn’t we, Annabelle? But times change and we change with them. If I don’t move back in, I’ll lose the place.”

  “Oh, that’s right. Miss Lucy’s will,” Cecelia chimed in.

  Did everyone know her private business? Mary Scarlett wondered.

  “Actually, I think I’ll enjoy it. Bolt’s going to help me move in and get settled. It will be different now that it’s my house.”

  Allen reached over and squeezed her hand. “I’ll help, too, darlin’.”

  She smiled and nodded. “Of course, Allen. We’ll have the old place in shape in no time. Then I’ll throw the party and you’re all invited.”

  Missy giggled and immediately covered her mouth with her snowy napkin, a slave to her debutante training. “Do you all remember when Miss Lucy used to let the tour groups in?”

  Mary Scarlett remembered, all right. Big Dick kept his wife on a strict household budget. When Lucy blew her weekly allowance on clothes—her passion—instead of food, she would open up the Bull Street house and charge admission so she could buy groceries to feed her family until her next payday.

  Annabelle rolled her eyes. “God, how could we forget? Especially that one time when we were still in junior high. We’d all spent the night with you when she decided on the spur of the moment to give a tour. Remember, Mary Scarlett?”

  Mary Scarlett felt a flush creeping into her cheeks. She had always known Annabelle for the viper she was, but how could she bring this up? Mary Scarlett had been so embarrassed that she had refused to go to school for days. She might never have returned if the truant officer hadn’t come to the house to find out what was going on. Then she’d been marched back to school, practically under armed guard, adding insult to injury.

  “I can see your mama now in that hoopskirt and old ruffled gown, with that sausage-curl wig on,” Missy said with another giggle. “Of course, not a word of that scandalous stuff she told the tourists about your ancestors was true.”

  If you only knew, thought Mary Scarlett.

  “Then right in the middle of the tour, Granny Boo came flying down out of the attic, pistol in one hand and battle flag in the other, dressed in that old moth-eaten Confederate uniform, threatening to shoot any damnyankee that didn’t clear out of her house.”

  Now all three women—Cecelia, Annabelle, and Missy— were giggling fit to kill and not even bothering to cover their mouths with their napkins. Mary Scarlett tried to keep smiling, but it wasn’t easy.

  Between gales of laughter, Annabelle managed to say, “But Granny Boo didn’t clear the Yankees out soon enough. Your daddy got home about then. Remember? We were all hiding upstairs on the landing, watching everything that happened.”

  “I think he’d been at the Club with our daddies,” Missy whispered. “He had that likkered-up gleam in his eyes and he smelled a good bit of gin. And when he came in and saw Delsey passing the hat, collecting money from those tourists, and your mama in her Southern belle getup and Granny Boo waving her Confederate flag and her pistol, he blew sky-high.”

  “It was a very embarrassing scene,” Mary Scarlett said loudly, in order to be heard. “But I thought you wanted to hear about Spain.”

  Ignoring her, Missy hurried on. “When Granny Boo yelled, ‘The biggest damnyankee of ’em all is about to meet his Maker’ and leveled that gun at your daddy, I figured it was all over for Big Dick.”

  Mary Scarlett bristled. It was fine for her to call her daddy that, but it rankled deeply to hear it from the lips of one of these prissy, stuck-up socialites.

  Missy was leaning over her empty soup plate, her eyes gleaming in the candlelight. “Well, sir! When I heard that gun fire off, I just knew he was a goner. But she missed.”

  “It wasn’t her aim,” Mary Scarlett said grimly. “It was that old pistol. It hadn’t been fired since the war.”

  “But it sine cleared the Yankees out of the house,” Annabelle said with a very unladylike horselaugh.

  “Then the police came,” Cecelia said, “then my daddy. Then half the town. What a sight that was to see. The battle of Bull Street!”

  Mary Scarlett added nothing to Cecelia’s windup of the story. Their daddies had come all right, to get their precious, innocent daughters out of “that lunatic asylum on Bull Street,” as she had heard Missy’s father describe her childhood home. He might have called it a lot worse if he’d stuck around for the real finish.

  Missy was right. Big Dick had come home likkered up. And there was nothing worse—until Raul—than the combination of Richard Habersham Lamar, gin, and vermouth, with an olive for good measure. Once the smoke from Granny Boo’s pistol cleared, and the tourists, gawkers, and policemen as well, Big Dick was in one of his most towering rages. His foul curses, shouted down on the heads of the womenfolk under his roof, had sent Granny Boo racing back to her attic to bolt her door and read her Bible to calm herself. Then Mary Scarlett’s mother had ordered her to her room, sure that a scene was imminent and not wanting her daughter to witness it. Mary Scarlett had only partially obeyed Miss Lucy. She had gone as far as the landing, where only a short time before she and her friends had hidden themselves to watch the Yankee tourists.

  To this day, Mary Scarlett wished with all her heart that she had gone to her room when she was told to.

  “Mary Scarlett?” Allen’s voice interrupted the beginnings of her most terrible childhood memory. “Won’t you join us? You’re a million miles away.”

  “Forgive me.” She forced a bright smile, which Allen happily returned.

  “You were going to tell us about Spain.”

  “Do tell us about your bullfighter!” Frankie begged. “I’ve never even met one. He must have been brave, and passionate beyond words.”

  “Frankie, behave yourself,” Allen warned.

  “Do you have any children?” Annabelle cut in. The rumor that Mary Scarlett had gone to Europe to give birth to a bastard baby had run rampant in Savannah after her sudden disappearance.

  “Alas, no,” Mary Scarlett said, her face that of a martyred madonna.

  The salad was served almost unnoticed, even though it shone like a rainbow with its fresh greens, tiny slices of purple-brown figs, wedges of mandarin orange, and slivers of iridescent Vidalia onion.

  “Children tend to bore me,” Allen said. “Tell us more about your life and your marriage.”

  Mary Scarlett steeled herself to lie—fabulously. “What can I say? Bullfighters lead the most romantic lives imaginable. They make our movie stars pale by comparison. And Raul Miguel was indeed a star in his country and all over the Continent. Women threw themselves at his feet and showered him with expensive gifts while the men raised flags and statues to his bravery.” She turned to Frankie and smiled sweetly, shyly. “Was he passionate? Oh, yes, my friend.”.

  The other women at the table went dreamy-eyed. Mary Scarlett saw Missy Carlisle cast a look of distaste toward her overweight husband Roach, who unfortunately deserved his nickname.

  “Where did you live?” Donny asked. He had been quiet all evening, except when Cecelia tried to draw him out.

  “Raul had a house in the country outside Barcelona. He had a villa on the Costa Brava and another on a small Spanish island that he owned off the Costa del Sol.”

  “Which island?” Annabelle demanded to know. “I have some cousins who vacation in that area.”

  Mary Scarlett fluttered her eyelashes dem
urely. “Isla Maria Scarletta, of course. Before we were married, it had been called Isla Raul, but my husband changed the name. We spent a good deal of time on the yacht, too.”

  “God, what a life!” Frankie moaned. “And I think I have it good when me and Donny can close the shop for a weekend and sneak off to Myrtle Beach.”

  The smile remained frozen on Mary Scarlett’s face. If only they knew that Raul had kept his Spanish mistress at the Barcelona house, his French mistress at the Costa Brava villa, an ever-changing selection of women on Isla Raul— she’d lied about the Isla Maria Scarletta part—and kept Mary Scarlett herself a virtual prisoner on that damned yacht.

  Kathleen had remained apart from all this. She much preferred her quiet conversation with Bolt to the adventures of Mary Scarlett, past or present. Ignoring the conversation that so entranced her tablemates, Kathleen said to Bolt, “I’ll gladly help Mary Scarlett get settled in. Just let me know if there’s anything I can do, Bolt.”

  “That’s sweet of you, Katie. I know she’ll appreciate it. It will be nice for her to have another woman’s opinion. You were certainly a great help when I was redecorating. I don’t know what I’d have done without you.”

  Kathleen beamed into Bolt’s dark eyes and touched his hand. “You know I loved doing it.”

  Bolt coughed, an excuse to draw his hand away from hers. Kathleen’s touch was a bit too warm, a bit too intimate with Mary Scarlett sitting so near, yet out of reach. Allen was up to his old tricks. Divide and conquer seemed the strategy for the evening. There was no doubting that Allen had set himself and Mary Scarlett up as the royal couple tonight. All she lacked was the Empress Josephine diamonds around her neck.

  Talli Fitzhugh had entered the general conversation in order to change the subject back to his main point of interest. “I would really like to know how you beat me to that necklace, Overman. I’ve been on its scent for years. I knew its owner would eventually sell. I thought I had her in the palm of my hand.”