The guide spread her arms around the empty art gallery. Margaret, we learned, ‘did not live here’. Of course. No one did. It was all brand new but we nodded anyway.
‘Margaret lived in a small apartment. Even when she made lots of money she still lived in a small apartment.’
She didn’t, it seems, want a big apartment because then people would come and stay with her. I decided I liked Margaret even better. At the foot of the staircase was a square foot or so of mosaic floor tile in a colour and pattern too dull to recall.
This floor was salvaged from the terrible fire to this house and has been painstakingly reconstructed by experts. Are there any questions?’
I wanted to ask ‘why?’ but I couldn’t bring myself to. Having a bog-standard floor, which Margaret Mitchell may or may not have stood on while fumbling for her front-door key, reassembled by experts with many years of training and huge college loans still outstanding, struck me as a desperation to find history, any history.
We entered the apartment. It was indeed very small. So small, in fact, that the radiator, a fat hot-water affair, was suspended from the ceiling.
‘This was the apartment where Margaret Mitchell wrote Gone With the Wind.’
It was very nice but it was not actually Margaret’s. More like a rather good theatre set.
‘Is any of the furniture actually Margaret’s?’ I asked.
‘It’s very like,’ said the woman. ‘We know she had a blue settee. There …‘ she pointed emphatically ‘… is a blue settee.’
We all dutifully turned to the settee. It was indeed blue. It had never carried the honour of Margaret’s Gone With the Wind buttocks but it was no doubt very like. In the bathroom we were invited to ‘Go in and look behind the door. There you will see a piece of plaster which has been preserved from the apartment before the fire.’
I was bold. I went in and looked. Preserved behind the door, behind a piece of fire-shielding glass, was a section of plaster not unlike the piece of wall which had recently fallen unexpectedly from part of my house. It was a light brown/grey colour. It looked like plaster or, at least, it was very like.
We got to the bedroom and I was becoming desperate. The guide was becoming confidential.
‘When Margaret invited guests she would sometimes show them something which was rather shocking.’
Suddenly I was alert. I love anything from history that might be even mildly shocking. (I remember the thrill in the fifth form when a history teacher inadvertently introduced me to Gargantua by Rabelais and I read that the finest loo roll available to man or woman is a live goose. I’ve never tried it but not a luxury hotel reservation goes by without me living in hope.) Perhaps the guide might break into the celebrated Apache dance which led Margaret to shame with the Junior League, perhaps …
From behind the bedroom door (well, not the actual bedroom door but certainly something very like) the guide brought out a framed print of a naked woman sitting up in bed. It was rather a delicate thing, low on real detail as it was a copy of a pencil drawing. The woman portrayed was not even sufficiently naked to assess her natural hair colour. The poorly framed print was passed round the hands of the tourists with some reverence. This was, after all, Margaret’s measure of pornography in the bedroom. I didn’t have my glasses but I thought the woman looked in need of chiropractic treatment.
‘Is there anything, anywhere in the house which Margaret Mitchell might have seen even just once during her life?’ I was heard to cry amid questions about exactly how the plaster in the bathroom had been preserved. The guide had tired of me by now and became rather smug.
‘On your way out,’ she declared in the manner of an announcer of the sole winner of the lottery jackpot, ‘you will pass a wooden ice box which belonged to Margaret herself and you may … touch it for luck.’ We did pass it and, God help me, I did touch it.
Beyond the walls of the very like apartment was another collection of black and white photos of existing Georgian writers sitting at their places of work. Now that was thrilling. It was real and I loved it. Real writers battling with the endless formation of words, shaping them into something never said before. I think Margaret would have loved it but I don’t know. Truth be told, I don’t know that much about her. What I have gathered about the writing of the book seems less romantic than I first believed. I had always been told that she wrote her great saga of the South while bored on a coast-to-coast train ride from New York to California. I’ve done that trip and it’s very nice if you have something to occupy you. I was ten at the time. The train we went on had a bubble-shaped observation car where you could sit and watch the scenery. My brother and I played there because it was mostly empty. People don’t tend to place train stations in the grandest geographical sites and through great swathes of the Midwest you had to be a real prairie dog aficionado to stay glued to the window.
Anyway, I could see that such a trip might lead some old schoolmarm to write a piece of romantic slush instead, but it wasn’t true. Margaret married a steady fellow called John Marsh while she was a journalist. Then she hurt her ankle and retired to their small apartment. After that, nothing really. She spent nine years (1926 to 1935) writing Gone With the Wind. Nothing before and nothing after, till she was killed in 1949 by a local driver while crossing the road to see a film version of The Canterbury Tales at the local movie house.
Gone With the Wind won the Pulitzer Prize in 1937, which is great, but (and I don’t want to be picky) nine years in the writing seems an awfully long time to me. How bad could her ankle have been? I suspect Margaret would not have done well in today’s instant success instant access world. Certainly The Learning Annexe would not have been for her.
In the Gone With the Wind Movie Museum across the street there were many posters and little heating. Something had gone wrong with the plumbing and the place had a rather appropriate air of a morgue about it. Hidden in one corner was the story of the driver who achieved notoriety by running over and killing Miss Mitchell. It seems he was famous the moment it happened and when arrested was pursued by the press. While having his fingerprints taken, a photographer told him to look up and smile. It’s what we are all conditioned to do when there is a camera three feet away and he did. It was this quickly released photo which allegedly showed a lack of remorse. It wasn’t true and he said it wasn’t true. He served some months full of remorse and was quietly released back into the community. It says something about the Atlanta police department. First, that nothing has changed in the relationship between press and police where celebrities are concerned and second; perhaps, that taking fingerprints from a driver who freely admits hitting someone suggests an unnecessary degree of diligence.
We finished off in the Margaret Mitchell gift store where I bought a copy of the book and a fridge magnet kitchen clock with Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh embracing on the front. The man who sold it to me was breathtakingly camp. He told me his job was a dream. Where else could he watch Gone With the Wind six times a day, five days a week? In a home for the mentally unstable, I thought, or at least something very like.
The only really useful piece of information we gathered on our tour was that at Margaret Mitchell’s request, the original manuscript for Gone With the Wind was burnt upon her death. Rather prophetic I felt.
Richard’s guidebook reading led us to the Georgian Terrace for some food. We were thrilled when we pulled up to see that there was not only a smart doorman but also valet parking. We had been saved from the land of Bubba. The doorman, however, had other ideas. We might as well have pitched up in a pick-up, playing the banjo and helping the dog look for fleas the way we were greeted.
‘What do you want here?’ he growled.
‘We want to eat,’ replied Richard, the perfect Englishman.
‘Can’t. Restaurant closed. Can’t eat here.’
I suggested that there must be somewhere near by to eat. That it was a big city, but he denied it.
‘Nope. Not here.’
&nb
sp; We set off depressed and went round the block. At the side of the Georgian Terrace, indeed in the basement of the building, we spied an Italian restaurant which was patently open but we lacked the will to go and face General Sherman again. Snobbishness is a curious thing. America is famed as the land without class, where anyone can do anything, where any mother’s son can become president, and yet it is riddled with status issues. Just as we had somehow presumed ourselves above the pick-up people at the flea market, now we too were disdained. I don’t know what the doorman based his opinion on. In England it is easy — it’s done on accent. There is a wonderful line in My Fair Lady where Higgins sings, ‘The minute an Englishman speaks he makes some other man despise him.’
The Georgian Terrace is famous. It’s where Vivien Leigh and all the stars of Gone With the Wind stayed when the movie premiered in Atlanta. But Hattie McDaniel, the brilliant black actress who played Scarlett’s maid, did not attend the opening. The Georgian Terrace was not an integrated hotel, indeed there weren’t any in Atlanta, so she stayed at home. She stayed at home until she went to collect her Oscar for the part. The Georgian Terrace didn’t want her and they didn’t want us. Although I was hungry I felt at least that we were in good company.
We drove on past acres of what looked like financial institutions set in a sea of nothingness. When I asked Leslie the next day where the hell the heart of Atlanta was, she replied, ‘It’s like Gertrude Stein said, ‘There is no there there.”’
I could quite lose my heart to anyone who can quote Gertrude Stein and she was right. There is no there there.
The bus for the wedding was due between 5 and 5.15 p.m. It left promptly at 5 although no one on board knew if everyone who should be there was there but the driver said he ‘ain’t waiting for nobody’, which set everybody off in a holiday mood. It was a white student bus carrying about twenty people, none of whom we knew. It was full of old people wearing smart clothes and clutching large packages. They looked uncertain and unchatty. The seats faced into the centre of the vehicle and everyone sat eyeing us suspiciously as though we had chosen the wrong wedding or at least the wrong bus. Richard rested his camera on the floor and started filming our companions. He did it quite subtly but I wished he wouldn’t. I didn’t want anything to draw attention to us whatsoever.
The journey took a long time. It was raining so the windows steamed up. No one spoke. For about forty minutes no one spoke. Outside we passed the National Center for Disease Control, the Center for American Cerebral Palsy and other places of interest, but I kept quiet. Finally the driver came to a halt and made a call on his mobile. He was lost. I had imagined if you got married in Atlanta then it all happened on a glorious day in some piercingly white church beside an ante-bellum mansion. Leslie, it turned out, was getting hitched in an Indian restaurant in a shopping mall.
Through the glass in the door I could see the restaurant in the distance. It was entirely outlined in neon and was difficult to miss.
‘It’s behind you,’ I said out loud to the driver. This caused some shifting in seats because I had spoken. Then even the old people began to see the restaurant. It was obvious they felt the driver should be told but not one of them did. No one said anything and I didn’t want to cause more of a scene. Lori, who had dealt so brilliantly with the shuttle-bus driver who wanted to go to B or E or whatever, had run out of steam. She too was suffering from nerves. By now the driver was through to the restaurant on his mobile.
‘Where are you located?’ he asked.
‘Behind you,’ I said again, feeling like someone at a pantomime, but it was not a popular contribution.
The driver nodded for some time, received much instruction and then turned around having realised the restaurant was behind him.
The Palace Indian restaurant was outlined in light. How anyone could have missed it was a marvel. It sat sandwiched between a Mobil petrol station and a Boston Market fast-food restaurant. The Banquet Hall had a neon sign outside which boldly declared it was OPEN. Neither Lori nor I wanted to go in first. Cars were driving in and out of the rain-swept car park which was emptying for the evening. It had enough spaces to accommodate the whole of Atlanta were they suddenly minded to join us for a bit of brinjal bhajee.
Lori and I and the rain pushed and prodded at each other till we finally went inside. It was not the most glamorous venue I’d ever been to. A high-ceilinged, slightly cold room with seating for about 120 at mainly round tables of ten. Three white men with straggly beards and a poor judgement in head-dress were playing Indian music at the front of the room. None of them was Indian and I suspected the furthest east any had travelled was New Jersey. One played a sitar, one was mad for a bit of bongo, while the other had some sort of floor accordion which wheezed away.
People at weddings should wear hats. Lori and I failed here but the band made up for it, wearing their hat choices with a confidence that bespoke a lack of mirrors in the building. Fez or turban? Always a tricky choice, and on white people always a mistake.
The place was filling up with quite a lot of elderly relatives. There was a bar but it was not doing a roaring trade, probably because most of the guests would be fighting some kind of age-related diabetes. Weddings are curious things. I think older people feel they ought to go and younger people feel it would be nice to go — or is it the other way round? I didn’t feel either. I was just nervous. Each table had rank after rank of empty brown beer bottles in which rested orange-coloured arrangements of a single flower, a few leaves and what looked like some kind of tangerine-coloured salad pepper. It was hard to know if it was a starter or a decoration.
The barman had red or white wine and dark or light beer. tried the wine which was undrinkable and made me long for all I had missed in the pick-up-truck-decorated cellars of Long Island. I laid out Leslie and David’s wedding gifts on the table at the side I‘d had no idea what to buy this woman from my past and her man whom I’d never met. I had settled on a miniature carriage clock from Harrods for her and silver cufflinks for him. I figured these days it’s probably good to get separate gifts in case the couple divorce.
It was a large family gathering and Lori and I knew hardly anyone. We tried to greet Leslie’s mother. I called her by her surname as I had no idea what her first name was. When I was a kid grown-ups didn’t have first names. She was an elegant woman with short grey hair, wearing a grey velvet dress. I expect she was very preoccupied for she had little time for niceties like saying hello.
Lori recognised another grey-haired lady called Nancy and her husband for whom she used to baby-sit. Nancy had worked a reporter for the Journal News, a local paper in Westchester. Then she taught journalism for a year at Lori’s present college. She only did one year because ‘They kept giving me freshmen. You can’t teach freshmen journalism. You are too busy teaching them the basics of English.’
I remembered reading that many first-year American college students take remedial reading as their first course but I decided not to mention it. All I remembered from high school was some testing system called SATs where everyone sat in big halls and did multiple-choice exams that were then checked by machine. I wondered about those results now. Checking things filled in by the general populace didn’t seem to be what the country did best. Perhaps some people failed because their chads had dimpled.
Nancy had an interesting wedding dress sense. She wore black trousers with quite a smart jacket and a nice blue scarf and then a very old pair of boating shoes. They were brown and falling apart. She could have stepped straight off the deck of a small yacht and indeed with all the rain that would have been appropriate.
Just then the service was announced and a few people began to line up in an open V, like geese escaping south for the winter. The upside of all this was that the music stopped for a minute. I had already figured out that the band would play all evening and yet I would never get the tune.
We’d been told that no photos were to be taken during the ceremony. There was to be no flash and n
o noise. This made the room a little tense. Leslie appeared, looking lovely. She had always been beautiful, with sleek brown hair and marble white skin. She was wearing a classic white silk wedding dress with a short veil. It had a fitted bodice, no shoulder straps and corset lacing at the back in gold trim. The skirt was full with a small train and she had those white satin shoes you only ever see at weddings. Damn her eyes, she had kept her figure and looked gorgeous. She also looked older but of course she was. What did I expect? A teenager going up the aisle? Of course, it wasn’t an aisle. She had come from the back of the room out of what appeared to be the kitchen. I’m not sure it would have been my choice to spend my last single moments next to a man preparing chicken tikka masala. I mean, you might get that yellow dye they use all over your nice white shoes. One or two people started to clap as she progressed past the bar but no one else joined in because of the noise ban.
I finally identified David, the groom of the moment. He was a slightly podgy man with longish dark hair. He was wearing a maroon-red Indian suit — long shirt to his knees and silk trousers with a grey waistcoat over the top and very flat brown leather sandals. It was a bizarre combination. He looked like a well-fed extra from the movie Gandhi. Leslie’s two stepdaughters from a previous relationship (I had gathered a few morsels of background information) were also wearing traditional bridesmaid dresses in silk but carried larger versions of the curious beer-bottle flower arrangements. The ceremony was to be conducted by David’s brother.
These days pretty much anyone can marry their friends and family if they want to. I found a website which offers ‘ordination’ for just $29.99 and I was rather sorry I hadn’t sent off for it. David’s brother was said to be a Buddhist monk but he looked more like a Mormon with an insurance salesman’s haircut and a sober dark suit and tie. He had his words written out on index cards. He said a few things about love and then announced that Leslie and David would each read a poem. Behind us the kitchen was hotting up and I thought they had better be quick or the poppadoms would be toast.
Gladys Reunited Page 15
