The Sweetest Thing (21 page)

At Perri's insistence, I agreed to attend a Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity party after a Georgia Tech football game, at which I had been duly impressed by Spalding's talent as a quarterback. I followed Perri from the stadium to the SAE house—an attractive redbrick building on the Tech campus, where the boys held meetings and parties. That afternoon, loads of guys and girls were standing on the lawn in front of the house. When Andrew Morrison, the Georgia Tech boy I'd met at the May Fete and at the Fox Theatre, saw me, he approached me, smiling, and said, “Well, my date has finally arrived.”

I drew back, my face hot, my eyes wide. “I . . . I didn't realize . . .” I mashed my lips together and tried again. “I didn't realize we had dates. I have a steady . . .”

He shrugged. “Yes, Hank. In Chicago. I've heard all about him. Don't you worry, Mary Dobbs. Down here, we all date loads of girls—just for fun. I wasn't about to let the Phi Pis' most beautiful rushee go to her first frat party without a date.”

Andrew turned out to be a marvelous dancer. And patient. I didn't know one step, but he walked me through each dance. As I sat out once, watching dozens of couples laughing while they danced the Charleston, I wondered if I was compromising my values. But I'd talked to both Mother and Hank about these very things, and I felt it was important to be part of the gang if I was going to tell them about the Sawdust Trail. My preaching against such activities certainly hadn't won me any friends. Enjoying life while living it for God, I felt, would speak to them more loudly.

But I kept hearing in my mind a quote Father had read me years ago from a woman evangelist: “
Social dancing is the first and easiest step toward hell.”

CHAPTER

19

Perri

The boys had stopped coming to my house, and I tried to tell myself it was because Spalding and I were getting serious. But I knew it was not that. My family had moved outside the respectable limits of our society, and the boys went to other places closer in—notably to the Chandlers'.

I don't think I was jealous of Dobbs. She was just so enigmatic. She did things I didn't expect, like joining the Phi Pis and heading up a committee to help the Alms Houses and starting a Bible study for the girls. And then, she had five to ten boys sitting on her porch in the afternoons.

Oh, I saw them all when I came over after work at Mr. Saxton's to develop photos in the darkroom, the very same boys who had sat on the porch at our real home. The only difference was that Dobbs used those afternoons for her advantage. I don't think she knew much about simply relaxing and having fun. She was much too intense. So, while Andrew Morrison and loads of other boys sipped lemonade and ate tea cakes, Dobbs told them her crazy stories about God providing. She used any and every opportunity to speak about the Sawdust Trail. The boys didn't seem to mind and kept showing up day after day.

I honestly didn't have time for pop-calling between my work after school at Mr. Saxton's store, my own photography shoots, and my dates with Spalding. He took me to the Piedmont Driving Club almost every weekend for Sunday afternoon brunch and seemed pleased to show me off. We met oodles of fascinating people, and little by little, I got caught up in the glamour of dating a football player. College football was just beginning to be very popular, especially in Atlanta, with four colleges in the city. Although Tech was not having a booming football season, Spalding nonetheless got loads of attention and was often in the newspaper. Once a photographer took a picture of us together, and it appeared in the society section of the
Atlanta Journal.

During that football season, I tried not to think of all the ways Spalding and I were different. The attention I gained from dating him filled a void left by Daddy's death and selling our house and everything else. When I was with Spalding, I felt important again, a part of my society. Best of all, Spalding was crazy about me.

On one evening after a dance, Spalding drove me back toward the house on Club Drive but stopped in the Capitol City Country Club's darkened parking lot. “You look as beautiful as ever, my dear Perri,” he said. As he cut the engine, scooted closer to me, and wrapped his arms around me, I saw the desire in his eyes.

Almost as a reflex, in self-defense, I said, “Spalding, Mr. Saxton's asked me to take some photos at a fancy party held at the Brightons' home next week. They'll pay me swell money for it. The only problem is that it interferes with the SAE party.”

His hand tightened against my back, and he pulled me toward him. “Is this going to happen often now, Perri?”

“Oh no. I doubt it, Spalding. Just this once.”

“Just this once, then.”

To appease him, I let him kiss me, and the longer he kissed me, the more I enjoyed it, so I ended up getting home way past my curfew. He walked me to the door, pulled me close to him again, and kissed me soundly. “Don't forget that you're my girl, and I expect you to be by my side.” The lightness in his voice was gone, and I got that sinking feeling again. My photos were becoming popular, and I knew that this would not be the only time I'd have to turn down Spalding for a photo shoot. I wondered what else I might have to do to appease him.

———

A few days after that incident with Spalding, I received another postcard from Philip Hendrick. On the front of the card, Luke and Philip were posing beside their kiosk, each leaning on an elbow and blowing a kiss with their free hand. Luke, who often put finishing touches on by hand, had colored their hair red and their suits gray, and they looked like smart young businessmen, carefree amidst the worries of the country. Philip had written on the back of the postcard:

How's my up-and-coming photographer? Loved hearing about the darkroom and the photo shoots of your classmates. Tell my uncle and Mary Dobbs hi! Yours affectionately, Philip.

I found myself smiling as I read the postcard over several times and set it on my desk with the picture of the boys' faces smiling up at me. Then I fetched a postcard onto which I had printed a photograph from the summer and quickly wrote him a note back.

Dear Philip, I'm getting many requests for photo shoots, and your uncle is just swell. He's telling people to hire me to be the photographer at their fancy parties. And one of my photos appeared in the
Atlanta Journal
this week. Can you believe it?

This photo was taken in August when Coobie and Frances were helping us. The little colored girl is Parthenia, the one I was telling you about.

I hesitated. How should I sign the card?
Yours affectionately?
But I wasn't
his
at all.
Sincerely?
No, that lacked all imagination. Then I found it:
Your fellow photographer friend, Perri.

———

Dobbs and I were working in the darkroom when she said, “That's pretty keen that one of your photos made it into the
Atlanta Journal
.”

“It's very exciting. People really go for having their portraits made.”

Dobbs was washing a long roll of film. “That's because people love themselves,” she stated. “We love to think about ourselves, look at ourselves, pick ourselves out of a photo, comment on how we look. Down deep, we're a lot more interested in the trivial details of our lives than anything beautiful or inspiring or profound.”

“Wow, Dobbs! I think you're right. I'd never thought about it that way.”

“But occasionally something moves us deeply—a book we read or a play we see or a gorgeous painting or a passage of Scripture or a true-life story or a photograph, and we reach beyond our pettiness and become truly alive.”

Immediately, I thought of my diaries, the ones I'd kept for the past five years. On no page had I scribbled a deep thought or a kind deed. I had simply recorded my activities: tea dances, fox hunts, movies, parties, and dates. Name after name after name, event after event—an endless list of things that filled up my very superficial life. If someone stumbled on them, what would they learn about me? Nothing about my heart and soul, just mindless social activities that had seemed ever so important at the time.

Back at home later that evening, I got out my diary from 1932, that infamous recording of my one thousand dates, and I flipped through the pages, randomly reading my entries. A few minutes later, I closed the diary, disgusted at my superficiality. Yet I
longed
to have it back. I still participated in many of the same activities, but my heart was often heavy. I longed to recapture that blissful feeling of not having a care in the world. Sometimes I thought I would do anything to retrieve it.

Patches from the Sky
lay on my bedside table. I opened it and turned to the last page, where I knew I would find a photo of the sky with billowing clouds. The photographer had caught the sunbeams at just the right angle so that it truly looked as if almighty God was sending a message down from heaven. On the opposite page was a short passage of Scripture:
“These things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.”

Which thing did I really want—my social life or something mysterious and beyond imagination, something that Dobbs called faith.

“I want peace.”

Dobbs

One Saturday evening in the middle of the fall, the senior Phi Pis decided to go to the opening night of a new movie at the Buckhead Theatre. Clark Gable and Joan Crawford were playing in
The Dancing Lady.
The Bible study was going well, as was the project for the Alms Houses, so I thought the least I could do was attend a movie with everyone. Spalding was with Perri, Mae Pearl was ecstatic, having nabbed a cute boy named Sam Durand, and Macon was with a fellow named Jack Brooks. Andrew Morrison had asked me to be his date, and I'd agreed.

When he picked me up at the Chandlers', he had a huge bouquet of roses for me. Aunt Josie bustled about finding a vase, and all I could say was “These are so beautiful, Andrew. How extremely thoughtful of you.”

“You look lovely, Mary Dobbs,” he said, offering me his arm and walking me out to the car. We drove to the Buckhead Theatre, where we met the rest of the gang—about twenty of us in all. I took a deep breath and could not help grinning as I held on to Andrew Morrison's arm and went inside the theater. I felt almost as buoyant and invigorated as when we had gone to the opera at the Fox.

From the moment the big lion opened his mouth and roared while
Metro-Goldwin-Mayer
played across the screen, I was entranced. And then ashamed. The movie began with a scene in a burlesque theater, where long-legged and scantily dressed dancers were doing a striptease. Poor Father would have fainted if he saw me in a theater watching
this
at my first movie ever.

I decided that night that Hollywood's brand of heaven on earth was a deliberate and enormously successful effort to provide Americans with escape. We paid twenty-five cents a ticket to see gorgeous Joan Crawford dancing all over the place with her perfectly shaped legs—although no more perfectly shaped than Mae Pearl's, in my opinion—and making eyes at Clark Gable.

After my initial shock and embarrassment, I found myself completely absorbed in the story, the dancing, and the songs.

Afterwards, we all walked across the street to Jacobs' Drugstore and sat on the swiveling stools by the soda fountain. I twirled around and around on my chair, until I realized the rest of the crowd was staring at me. “This is the keenest place!” I offered.

Andrew asked, “You mean you've never been to Jacobs' Drugstore?”

“No.”

“Your first movie and your first visit to Jacobs'.”

“Yes.”

“It's an incredibly famous place. This is where the first Coca-Cola was served,” Mae Pearl informed me. She prattled along, giving the history of the soft drink while the man behind the counter fixed each of us a different concoction from the soda fountain—drinks piled high with whipped cream or vanilla ice cream, always with a bright red cherry on top.

For the first time ever, I knew what the girls were talking about when they gushed over Joan Crawford and giggled at the way Clark Gable made their hearts beat faster. I liked being part of the group. For that night, I really did.

Perri

Dobbs liked the parties. They suited her well, with her warm, effervescent personality. The boys flocked to her, and she could have been reciting definitions from Webster's Dictionary, for all they cared. They just wanted to be around this strange and beautiful young woman. So she quoted Scripture to them, and it didn't matter. They were entranced. Especially Andrew Morrison.

But she remained true to her beliefs. After joining us to see
The Dancing Lady,
she proclaimed she would not attend another film without first reading the reviews. And as often as she accepted a date, she turned another one down. She only conformed to society life on her terms.

In late November, I walked into the spacious ballroom of the Georgian Terrace on Spalding's arm for the Senior Cotillion Dance. I looked across the room, expecting to see Dobbs with Andrew, but she was not there. A slight irritation coursed through me, and I wondered if she had stood up poor Andrew, who clearly had fallen under her spell.

The other girls in the ballroom looked marvelous in their long, slinky gowns. I paraded around the room, greeting each girl I knew with a kiss on the cheek, in vogue ever since the French movie
Fanny
had been a big hit.

I spotted a new girl over by the bar, her back to me. She was wearing a bright teal evening gown, low-cut down the back, and it was literally shimmering, clinging to her lovely figure. A crowd of boys were around her, laughing. I saw Andrew there among them and walked over to ask him what in the world had happened to Dobbs.

And then I let out a gasp. It
was
Dobbs standing in front of those boys in her teal gown. Her beautiful black hair was cut in the sassiest, latest style. Her eyes were outlined in black and her mouth painted a very bright pink. Everything about her was glowing, and at that moment she looked like a movie star.

“Mary Dobbs Dillard! What in the world happened to your hair!”

She left the group of boys and slinked over to me and teased, “Well, you look lovely too, Miss Anne Perrin Singleton. And your gown is so becoming on you.”

“I'm sorry for the outburst. I'm just so shocked. Your hair! Your beautiful hair!”

“Well, do you like it? Yes, my long hair is gone, but what do you think about my new hairdo? Say something, Perri.”

“You're breathtakingly gorgeous. You are very, very dangerous, Dobbs Dillard, and you better be careful.”

She laughed. “I've told Hank every last thing, and he isn't worried. He says he can't wait to see how it looks when I go up to Chicago for the Christmas holidays. Anyway, I did it for my family. Mae Pearl had the idea. She said she'd heard that the beauty salon cut long hair off for wigs and paid you handsomely for it. So I went in, and the stylist was ‘intoxicated' by my ‘amazingly perfect locks.' I didn't have to pay a thing for the haircut and style. Instead, they paid me fifteen dollars! Can you imagine that! Fifteen dollars that I sent up to Chicago before it could even get warm in my hands. It'll buy groceries for my family for another two months.”

Dobbs was thrilled with it all, but for some strange reason, I had this horrible feeling of dread. She had joined a sorority, went to the movies almost every week, was at a cotillion dance looking very sensual, and now had cut her hair. I felt like I was the devil incarnate, dragging an innocent soul down a long, dirty lane into sin.