February 4, 2005
I can’t help but mention that a year ago today I was arrested, beginning the tortuous journey that has brought me here. I will forgo a gelatinous commemoration, ("The State of the Union is good…"), merely noting I see it now as taking the first step ("We admitted we were powerless over [INSERT SUBSTANCE}—that are lives had become unmanageable")—the hard way. You can’t get any more unmanageable when men in uniform are managing you down to your toenails.
I had a fruitful meeting with my parole officer yesterday, and a serendipitous encounter in the waiting room with a real cutie who I’ve had my eye on in the program for a while now. He has the same P.O. as I do, I just wish her name was Q. Pid, so I could point to her as proof if I can the nerve up to ask him to be my first valentine since 4th grade. Well, I have ten days…
And here, the next installment of Rhett and Belle. We start the story in earnest:
PART I - RHETT
CHAPTER 1 – Before Europe
Rhett Butler was not close to his father, Ambrose Fontveille Butler, just as Ambrose had not been close to his father, "Johnnie" Simms Butler—one of South Carolina’s first and most colorful cotton exporters, who had three times made and twice lost a fortune--luckily having a heart attack at a poker game before he bet the third. Ambrose had rebelled against his father’s licentiousness and contempt for social proprieties, a worldview generally held by the Butler men—at least according to family lore. He was determined to break the mold, starting with making sure that his precariously preserved inheritance would allow him and his new family to take their rightful place at the helm of burgeoning Charlestonian Society. If he craved anything but risk-free prosperity and moral respectability, he had apparently quashed those yearnings upon marriage to Rhett’s mother, Charlotte Legrand Halifax—who like many of Charleston’s coastal aristocracy, was only a generation or so removed from reinvention herself.
But Ambrose could see at an early age that his son Rhett’s personality leaned powerfully in the direction of the more historically typical Butler man. Though he was a quick study, good hunter, and a natural athlete, he seemed bored by all of these wholesome pursuits. At 14, he was expelled from a prestigious boarding academy because of the discovery of his sponsorship of a weekly poker game, wherein the progeny of some of Charleston’s finest families shared a bottle of rum and lost their weekly allowance to the game’s affable arranger-Rhett. At 15, Rhett masqueraded as the 18-year old brother of a friend to gain entry to a ball thrown by a major planter outside Greenville, and waltzed with several of the county’s finest belles before a classmate of the real brother unmasked him. These two escapades alone (how many others had perhaps gone undetected?) were evidence enough to Ambrose that Rhett was indeed prone to the same vices as his grandfather Johnnie; reckless gambling and inveterate womanizing (that broke a wife’s heart—as well as left Ambrose with several half-siblings of questionable coloring.)
If Rhett’s actions were simply youthful indiscretions, Ambrose wanted to ensure they remained the last of a few, not the first of many. He resolved as the best course of action a military career for Rhett, boarding him at a strict military prep school for his senior year. To his relief, the boy acquitted himself well enough during his final year there that Ambrose was actually able to wrangle for him an appointment to West Point itself. Between the masculine camaraderie and the outlet provided by channeling his baser tendencies into the life of soldier and maybe even warrior, he hoped that Rhett could bring honor to the family and still find some satisfaction in his vocation. (Although stern, Ambrose did wish his children something that passed for happiness.) If that path was the wrong one, he certainly hoped that Rhett could be interested in learning to run the family business—but he was wary of putting his son in proximity to the constant temptation of flowing cash.
Ambrose had indeed sensed correctly that the blood of Grandpa Johnnie coursed mightily through his own son. But he assumed appetites in Rhett that, though similar to his grandfather’s, were not nearly as coarse—or equitably spread. Although Rhett Butler rarely said no to a drink, or to a bet that smelled lucky, he already knew when he discovered such vices that they would be never more to him than pleasant pastimes; mere props in a play peripheral to its narrative. One trait far dominated the rest.
He had known what would make life interesting for him since the age of seven, when his thirteen-year old cousin came to spend the summer at his grandmother’s country’s estate outside of Charleston. Becky arrived in late May, a tomboy of sorts, happily joining the group of pre-pubescent cousins who whiled away the day climbing trees and playing in the creek. Sometime in early July she took to bed "with a fever", and though she recovered rapidly, by the end of the month had shed her play clothes, and was trying on hoop skirts and looking at the latest fashions in the illustrated ladies magazines with some of her elder female cousins. And she now insisted on being addressed as Rebecca.
She had arrived that summer on the cusp of a transformation Rhett was only to understand years later. But he was nonetheless fascinated by it when he first witnessed it, a rebirth of sorts as mysterious and exciting to him as birth itself. When he looked at "Rebecca" in August, he experienced a strange stirring that had not been present when looking at "Becky" in May. Whether or not the charms of the fairer sex would have dawned on him at the same time had he not noticed their genesis in so particular a manner one cannot be sure, but certainly it was not based on a biological discharge of chemicals in his own body—he was only seven. His precocity was evidence of something greater.
Like a botanist and his plants, or an entomologist and his insects, Rhett had found the subject of his life’s work. It would be to explore, dissect, and understand the creature that was woman. As he himself was graced by good looks, charm and a genuine respect and curiosity for his subject, he was an excellent candidate for such an endeavor. He never articulated it as such of course, but by the time adulthood loomed he certainly recognized that the most fundamental fact of his life was not even in question.
He would be first and foremost a man who loved women.
MCO 2005
