Scarlett

by Alexandra Ripley

  In a surprisingly short time there was calm where there had been chaos. And while they ate and talked, Scarlett tried to “puzzle out” the adults.

  Jamie’s two sons were so much alike that she could hardly believe that Daniel, at twenty-one, was almost three years older than Brian. When she smiled at Brian and said as much, he blushed as only a redhead can. The only other young man began to tease him unmercifully, but he stopped when the pink-cheeked girl next to him put her hand on his and said, “Stop it, Gerald.”

  So that was Gerald. Pa would be so pleased to know that big handsome fellow was named after him. He called the girl Polly, and they’re so shiny with love they must be fresh-married. And Patricia’s being mighty bossy to the one Jamie called Billy, so they must be husband and wife, too.

  But Scarlett had little time to listen for the names of the others. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to talk to her. And everything she said was cause for exclamation, repetition, admiration. She found herself telling Daniel and Jamie all about her store, Polly and Patricia about her dressmaker, Uncle James about the Yankees setting Tara on fire. She talked mostly about her lumber business and how she’d built it from one small mill into two mills, lumberyards, and now a whole village of new houses on the edge of Atlanta. Everyone was loudly approving. At last Scarlett had found people who didn’t think that talking about money was taboo. They were like she was, willing to work hard and determined to make money from it. She had already made hers, and they told her she was wonderful. She couldn’t imagine why she had ever wanted to leave this marvelous party and go back to the deadly quiet at her grandfather’s house.

  “Will you give us some music, then, Daniel, if you’ve finished eating most of your sister’s cake?” said Maureen when Jamie uncorked a bottle of whiskey, and suddenly everyone except Uncle James was up and moving around in what seemed to be a practiced routine. Daniel began playing a rapid, squeaking tune on the fiddle and the others shouted criticism while the women quickly cleared the table and the men moved the furniture back against the walls, leaving Scarlett and her uncle sitting as if on an island. Jamie presented James with a glass of whiskey and waited, half bent, for the old man’s opinion.

  “It’ll do,” was the judgment.

  Jamie laughed. “Indeed I hope so, old man, for we have no other kind.”

  Scarlett tried to catch Jamie’s eye, failed, finally called out to get his attention. She had to go now. Everyone was pulling chairs into a circle around the fire, and the smaller children were taking places on the floor at the adults’ feet. Obviously they were getting ready for the musicale, and once it started, it would be terribly rude to get up and go.

  Jamie stepped over a small boy to get to Scarlett. “Here you are, then,” he said. To her horror he handed her a glass with several fingers of whiskey in it. What kind of person did he think she was? A lady didn’t drink whiskey. She didn’t drink anything stronger than tea, except champagne or a party punch or perhaps a very small glass of sherry. He couldn’t possibly know about the brandy she used to drink. Why, he was insulting her! No, he wouldn’t do that, it must be a joke. She forced a brittle laugh. “It’s time for me to go, Jamie. I’ve had a delightful time, but it’s getting late . . .”

  “You’ll not be leaving just when the party begins, Scarlett?” Jamie turned toward his son. “Daniel, you’re driving your new-found cousin away with that screeching. Play a song for us, boy, not a cat fight.”

  Scarlett tried to speak, but her words were drowned out by the cries of “play decent, Daniel,” and “give us a ballad,” and “a reel, boy, let’s have a reel.”

  Jamie grinned. “I can’t hear you,” he shouted over the din. “I’m deaf as a stone to anyone asking to go.”

  Scarlett felt her temper rising. When Jamie offered her the whiskey again, she stood up in a rage. Then, before she could knock the glass from his hand, she realized what Daniel had begun to play. It was “Peg in a Low Back’d Car.”

  Pa’s favorite. She looked at Jamie’s ruddy Irish face and saw her father’s image. Oh, if only he could be here, he’d love this so. Scarlett sat down. She shook her head at the proffered drink, smiled weakly at Jamie. She was close to tears.

  The music wouldn’t allow sadness. The rhythm was too infectious, too merry, and everyone was singing now, and clapping their hands. Scarlett’s foot began involuntarily to tap the beat under cover of her skirts.

  “Come on, Billy,” said Daniel, singing it, really, to the tune. “Play with me.”

  Billy opened the lid of a window seat and took out a concertina. The pleated leather bellows opened with a wheeze. Then he walked up behind Scarlett, reached over her head, and picked up something shiny from the mantel. “Let’s have some real music. Stephen—” He tossed a thin glinting tube to the dark silent man. “You, too, Brian.” There was another arc of silver through the air. “And, for you, dear mother-in-law—” His hand dropped something in Maureen’s lap.

  A young boy clapped wildly. “The bones! Cousin Maureen’s going to play the bones.”

  Scarlett stared. Daniel had stopped playing, and with the music gone she felt sad again. But she no longer wanted to leave. This party had nothing to do with the Telfairs’ musicale. There was easiness here, warmth, laughter. The parlors that had been so neatly arranged before were all hodge-podge now, furniture moved, chairs from both rooms crowded in a straggling half circle around the fire. Maureen lifted her hand with a clacking noise, and Scarlett saw that the “bones” were really thick pieces of smooth wood.

  Jamie was still pouring and passing whiskey. Why, the women are drinking, too! Not in secret, not ashamed. They’re having as much fun as the men. I’ll have a drink, too. I’ll celebrate the O’Haras. She almost called out to Jamie, then she remembered. I’ll be going to grandfather’s. I can’t drink. Somebody would smell it on my breath. No matter. I feel as warm inside as if I had just had a drink. I don’t need it.

  Daniel pulled the bow over the strings. “The Maid Behind the Bar,” he said. Everyone laughed. Including Scarlett, though she didn’t know why. In an instant the big room rang with the music of an Irish reel. Billy’s concertina whined vigorously, Brian piped the tune on his tin whistle, Stephen played his tin whistle in rippling counterpoint that wove in and out of Brian’s melody. Jamie beat time with his foot, the children clapped, Scarlett clapped, everyone clapped. Except Maureen. She threw up the hand holding the bones and the sharp staccato clacking made an insistent rhythm that held everything together. Faster, the bones demanded, and the others obeyed. The whistles soared higher, the fiddle scraped louder, the concertina puffed to keep up. A half dozen children got up and began to leap and hop across the bare floor in the center of the room. Scarlett’s hands grew hot from clapping, and her feet were moving as if she wanted to leap about with the children. When the reel came to an end, she fell back against the settee, exhausted.

  “Come along, Matt, show the babies how to dance,” cried Maureen with a tempting rattle of the bones. The older man near Scarlett stood up.

  “God save us, wait a bit,” Billy begged. “I need a bit of a rest. Give us a song, instead, Katie.” He squeezed a few notes out of the concertina.

  Scarlett started to protest. She couldn’t sing, not here. She didn’t know any Irish songs except “Peg” and her father’s other favorite, “The Wearing o’ the Green.”

  But, she saw, Billy didn’t mean her. A plain dark woman with big teeth was handing her glass to Jamie and standing. “There was a wild Colonial boy,” she sang in a pure sweet high voice. Before the line was finished, Daniel and Brian and Billy were accompanying her. “Jack Duggan was his name,” sang Katie. “He was born and raised in Ireland.” and Stephen’s whistle entered, an octave higher, with a strange heartbreaking silvery plaintiveness.

  “. . . in a house called Castlemaine . . .” Everyone began to sing, except Scarlett. But she didn’t mind not knowing the words. She was still part of the music. It was all around her. And when the sad, brave song was
over, she saw that everyone else had glistening eyes just like hers.

  There was a happy song next, started by Jamie, then one that made Scarlett laugh and blush at the same time when she understood the double meaning of the words.

  “Now me,” Gerald said. “I’ll sing my sweet Polly the ‘Londonderry air.’ ”

  “Oh, Gerald!” Polly hid her blushing face in her hands. Brian played the first few notes. Then Gerald began to sing and Scarlett caught her breath. She’d heard talk of the Irish tenor, but she wasn’t prepared for the reality. And that voice like an angel’s was coming from her Pa’s namesake. Gerald’s loving young heart was exposed for all to see on his face and for all to hear in the high pure notes from his vibrating strong throat. Scarlett’s own throat felt choked by the beauty of it and the sharp painful longing to know love like that, so fresh and open. Rhett! her heart cried, even as her mind mocked the notion of simple directness from his dark complex nature.

  At the end of the song Polly threw her arms around Gerald’s neck and hid her face in his shoulder. Maureen lifted the bones above her shoulder. “We’ll have a reel now,” she announced firmly. “My toes are fairly twitching.” Daniel laughed and began to play.

  Scarlett had danced the Virginia reel a hundred times or more, but she’d never seen dancing like what happened next at Patricia’s birthday party. Matt O’Hara began it. With his shoulders straight and his arms stiff at his side he looked like a soldier when he stepped away from the circle of chairs. Then his feet began to pound and flash and twist and move so quickly that they blurred in Scarlett’s vision. The floor became a resounding drum under his heels, became like polished ice under his intricate impossible steps forward and back. He must be the best dancer in the whole world, Scarlett thought. And then Katie danced out to face him, her skirts held up in her two hands so that her feet were free to match his steps. Mary Kate was next, then Jamie joined his daughter. And beautiful Helen with a cousin, a little boy who couldn’t be older than eight. I don’t believe it, Scarlett thought. They’re magic, all of them. The music’s magic, too. Her feet moved, faster than they’d ever moved before, trying to mimic what she was seeing, trying to express the excitement of the music. I’ve got to learn to dance like that, I’ve just got to. It’s like . . . like you spin right up to the sun.

  A sleeping child under the settee woke at the sounds of the dancing feet and began to cry. Like a contagion, crying spread to the other smallest children. The dancing and the music stopped.

  “Make some mattresses from folded blankets in the other parlor,” Maureen said placidly, “and give them dry bottoms. Then we’ll close the doors most shut and they’ll sleep right along. Jamie, the bone-woman has a terrible thirst. Mary Kate, hand your Pa my glass.”

  Patricia asked Billy to carry their three-year-old son. “I’ll get Betty,” she said, reaching beneath the settee. “Hush, hush.” She cradled the crying child to her. “Helen, close the curtains in the back, darling. There’ll be a strong moon tonight.”

  Scarlett was still half in a trance from the spell of the music. She looked vaguely at the windows and was jolted back to reality. It was getting dark. The cup of tea she’d come for had stretched into hours. “Oh, Maureen, I’m going to be late for supper,” she gasped. “I’ve got to go home. My grandfather will be furious.”

  “Let him be, the old loo-la. Stay for the party. It’s only beginning.”

  “I wish I could,” said Scarlett fervently. “It’s the best party I’ve ever been to in my life. But I promised I’d be back.”

  “Ah, well, then. A promise is a promise. You’ll come again?”

  “I’d love to. Will you invite me?”

  Maureen laughed comfortably. “Will you listen to the girl?” she said to the room at large. “There’s no inviting done here. We’re all a family, and you’re a part of it. Come anytime you like. My kitchen door has no lock, and there’s always a fire on the hearth. Jamie’s a fine hand with the fiddle himself, too . . . Jamie! Scarlett’s got to go. Put your coat on, man, and give her your arm.”

  Just before they turned the corner Scarlett heard the music begin again. It was faint because of the thick brick walls of the house and the windows closed against the winter night. But she recognized what the O’Haras were singing. It was “The Wearing o’ the Green.”

  I know all the words to that one; oh, I wish I hadn’t had to leave.

  Her feet made little dance steps. Jamie laughed and matched her. “I’ll teach you the reel next time,” he promised.

  36

  Scarlett bore her aunts’ tight-lipped disapproval with easy disregard. Even being called on the carpet by her grandfather failed to upset her. She remembered Maureen O’Hara’s off-handed dismissal of him. Old loo-la, she thought, and giggled internally. It made her brave and impertinent enough to sashay over to his bed and kiss his cheek after he dismissed her. “Good night, Grandfather,” she said cheerfully.

  “Old loo-la,” she whispered when she was safely in the hall. She was laughing when she joined her aunts at table. Her supper was brought promptly. The plate was covered with a brightly shining silver dish cover to keep the food hot. Scarlett was sure it was newly polished. This house could run really properly, she thought, if it just had someone to keep the servants in line. Grandfather lets them get away with murder. Old loo-la.

  “What do you find so amusing, Scarlett?” Pauline’s tone was Icy.

  “Nothing, Aunt Pauline.” Scarlett looked down at the mountain of food revealed when Jerome ceremoniously lifted the silver cover. She laughed aloud. For once in her life she wasn’t hungry, not after the feast at the O’Haras’. And there was enough food in front of her to feed a half dozen people. She must have put the fear of God into the kitchen.

  The following morning at Ash Wednesday Mass Scarlett took her place beside Eulalie in the pew favored by the aunts. It was genteelly unobtrusive, entered from a side aisle and located well towards the back. Her knees had just begun to hurt from kneeling on the cold floor when she saw her cousins enter the church. They walked—of course, thought Scarlett—straight up the center aisle to almost the front, where they took up two full pews. What very large people they are, and so full of life. And color. Jamie’s sons’ heads look like warm fires in the light from the red stained glass, and not even their hats can hide the bright hair on Maureen and the girls. Scarlett was so engrossed in admiration and memories of the birthday party that she almost missed the arrival of the nuns from the convent. After she’d hurried her aunts to get to church early, too. She wanted to make sure that the Mother Superior from Charleston was still at hand in Savannah.

  Yes, there she was. Scarlett ignored Eulalie’s frantic whispers ordering her to turn back around and face the altar. She studied the nun’s serene expression as she walked past. Today the Mother Superior would see her. Scarlett was determined. She spent her time during Mass daydreaming about the party she’d give after she restored Tara to all its former beauty. There’d be music and dancing, just like last night, and it would go on and on for days and days.

  “Scarlett!” Eulalie his sed. “Stop humming like that.”

  Scarlett smiled into her missal. She hadn’t realized she was humming. She had to admit that “Peg in a Low Back’d Car” wasn’t exactly church music.

  “I don’t believe it!” Scarlett said. Her pale eyes were bewildered and hurt beneath her smudged forehead, and her fingers were closed like claws on the rosary she’d borrowed from Eulalie.

  The elderly nun repeated her message with emotion-free patience. “The Mother Superior will be in retreat all day, in prayer and fasting.” She took pity on Scarlett and added an explanation. “This is Ash Wednesday.”

  “I know it’s Ash Wednesday,” Scarlett almost shouted. Then she curbed her tongue. “Please say that I am very disappointed,” she said softly, “and I’ll come back tomorrow.”

  As soon as she reached the Robillard house she washed her face.

  Eulalie and Pauline were visi
bly shocked when she came downstairs and joined them in the drawing room, but neither of them said anything. Silence was the only weapon they felt it safe to use when Scarlett was in a temper. But when she announced that she was going to order breakfast, Pauline spoke up. “You’ll regret that before the day is out, Scarlett.”

  “I can’t imagine why,” Scarlett answered. Her jaw was set.

  It sagged when Pauline explained. Scarlett’s reintroduction to religion was so recent that she thought fasting meant simply having fish on Fridays instead of meat. She liked fish and had never objected to the rule. But what Pauline told her was objectionable in the extreme.

  Only one meal a day during the forty days of Lent, and no meat at that meal. Sundays were the exception. Still no meat, but three meals were allowed.

  “I don’t believe it!” Scarlett exclaimed for the second time within an hour. “We never did that at home.”

  “You were children,” said Pauline, “but I’m sure your mother fasted as she should. I cannot understand why she didn’t introduce you to Lenten observance when you passed childhood, but then she was isolated out in the country without a priest’s guidance, and there was Mr. O’Hara’s influence to offset . . .” Her voice trailed off.

  Scarlett’s eyes lit for battle. “And just what do you mean by ‘Mr. O’Hara’s influence,’ I’d like to know?”

  Pauline dropped her gaze. “Everyone knows that the Irish take certain freedoms with the laws of the Church. You can’t really blame them, poor illiterate nation that they are.” She crossed herself piously.

  Scarlett stamped her foot. “I’m not going to stand here and listen to such high and mighty French snobbery. My Pa was never anything but a good man, and his ‘influence’ was kindness and generosity, something you don’t know anything about. Furthermore, I’ll have you know, I spent all afternoon yesterday with his kin, and they’re fine people, every one of them. I’d a sight rather be influenced by them than by your whey-faced religious prissiness.”