Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (2 page)

Now he bought far grander houses. One of them was Armstrong House, a monumental Italian Renaissance palazzo directly across Bull Street from the staid Oglethorpe Club. Armstrong House dwarfed the Oglethorpe Club, and, according to local lore, that was very much its purpose. George Armstrong, a shipping magnate, was said to have built the house in 1919 in response to being blackballed by the club. Although that story was not, in fact, true, Armstrong House was a lion of a house. It gloated and glowered and loomed. It even had a curving colonnade that reached out like a giant paw as if to swat the Oglethorpe Club off its high horse across the street.

The outrageous magnificence of Armstrong House appealed to Williams and to his growing appetite for grandeur. He was not a member of the Oglethorpe Club. Bachelors from middle Georgia who sold antiques were not likely to be asked to join—not that it bothered him. He installed his antiques shop in Armstrong House for a year and then sold the house to the law firm of Bouhan, Williams and Levy and went on about the business of living like, if not being, an aristocrat. He made more frequent buying trips to Europe—in style now, on the
QE2
—and sent back whole container loads of important paintings and fine English furniture. He bought his first pieces of Fabergé. Williams was gaining stature in Savannah, to the irritation of certain blue
bloods. “How does it feel to be
nouveau riche?”
he was asked on one occasion. “It’s the
riche
that counts,” Williams answered. Having said that, he bought Mercer House.

Mercer House had been empty for more than ten years. It stood at the west end of Monterey Square, the most elegant of Savannah’s many tree-shaded squares. It was an Italianate mansion of red brick with tall, arched windows set off by ornate ironwork balconies. It sat back from the street, aloof behind its apron of lawn and its cast-iron fence, not so much looking out on the square as presiding over it. The most recent occupants of the house, the Shriners, had used it as the Alee Temple. They had hung a neon-lit scimitar over the front door and driven around inside on motorcycles. Williams set about restoring the house to something greater than its original elegance. When work was completed in 1970, he gave a black-tie Christmas party and invited the cream of Savannah society. On the night of his party, every window of Mercer House was ablaze with candlelight; every room had sparkling chandeliers. Clusters of onlookers stood outside watching the smart arrivals and staring in amazement at the beautiful house that had been dark for so long. A pianist played cocktail music on the grand piano downstairs; an organist played classical pieces in the ballroom above. Butlers in white jackets circulated with silver trays. Ladies in long gowns moved up and down the spiral stairs in rivers of satin and silk chiffon. Old Savannah was dazzled.

The party soon became a permanent fixture on Savannah’s social calendar. Williams always scheduled it to occur at the climax of the winter season—the night before the Cotillion’s debutante ball. That Friday night became known as the night of Jim Williams’s Christmas party. It was the Party of the Year, and this was no small accomplishment for Williams. “You have to understand,” a sixth-generation Savannahian declared, “Savannah takes its parties very seriously. This is a town where gentlemen own their own white tie and tails. We don’t rent them. So it’s quite a tribute to Jim that he has been able to make so prominent a place for himself on the social scene, in spite of not being a native Savannahian and being a bachelor.”

The food at Williams’s parties was always provided by Savannah’s most sought-after cateress, Lucille Wright. Mrs. Wright was a light-skinned black woman whose services were so well regarded that Savannah’s leading hostesses had been known to change the date of a party if she was not available. Mrs. Wright’s touch was easy to spot. Guests would nibble on a cheese straw or eat a marinated shrimp or take a bite of a tomato finger sandwich and smile knowingly. “Lucille …!” they would say, and nothing more needed to be said. (Lucille Wright’s tomato sandwiches were never soggy. She patted the tomato slices with paper towels first. That was just one of her many secrets.) Her clients held her in high esteem. “She’s a real lady,” they often said, and you could tell from the way they said it that they considered that high praise for a black woman. Mrs. Wright admired her patrons in return, although she did confide that Savannah’s hostesses, even the rich ones, tended to come to her and say, “Now, Lucille, I want a nice party, but I don’t want to spend too much money.” Jim Williams was not like that. “He likes things done in the grand style,” Mrs. Wright said, “and he’s very liberal with his money. Very. Very. He always tells me, ‘Lucille, I’m having two hundred people and I want low-country food and plenty of it. I don’t want to run out. Get what you need. I don’t care what it costs.’”

Jim Williams’s Christmas party was, in the words of the
Georgia Gazette
, the party that Savannah socialites “lived for.” Or lived without, for Williams enjoyed changing his guest list from year to year. He wrote names on file cards and arranged them in two stacks: an In stack and an Out stack. He shunted the cards from one stack to the other and made no secret of it. If a person had displeased him in any way during the year, that person would do penance come Christmas. “My Out stack,” he once told the
Gazette
, “is an inch thick.”

An early-evening mist had turned the view of Monterey Square into a soft-focus stage set with pink azaleas billowing beneath a
tattered valance of live oaks and Spanish moss. The pale marble pedestal of the Pulaski monument glowed hazily in the background. A copy of the book
At Home in Savannah—Great Interiors
lay on Williams’s coffee table. I had seen the same book on several other coffee tables in Savannah, but here the effect was surreal: The cover photograph was of this very room.

For the better part of an hour, Williams had taken me on a tour of Mercer House and his antiques shop, which was quartered in the carriage house. In the ballroom, he played the pipe organ, first a piece by Bach, then “I Got Rhythm.” Finally, to demonstrate the organ’s deafening power, he played a passage from César Franck’s “Pièce Héroïque.” “When my neighbors let their dogs howl all night,” said Williams, “this is what they get in return.” In the dining room, he showed me his royal treasures: Queen Alexandra’s silverware, the Duchess of Richmond’s porcelain, and a silver service for sixty that had belonged to a Russian grand duke. The coat of arms from the door of Napoleon’s coronation carriage hung on the wall in the study. Here and there around the house lay Fabergé objects—cigarette cases, ornaments, jewel boxes—the trappings of aristocracy, nobility, royalty. As we moved from room to room, tiny red lights flickered in electronic recognition of our presence.

Williams was wearing gray slacks and a blue cotton shirt turned up at the sleeves. His heavy black shoes and thick rubber soles were oddly out of place in the elegance of Mercer House, but practical; Williams spent several hours a day on his feet restoring antique furniture in his basement workshop. His hands were raw and callused, but they had been scrubbed clean of stains and grease.

“If there’s a single trait common to all Savannahians,” he was saying, “it’s their love of money and their unwillingness to spend it.”

“Then who buys those high-priced antiques I just saw in your shop?” I asked.

“That’s exactly my point,” he said. “People from out of town. Atlanta, New Orleans, New York. That’s where I do most of my
business. When I find an especially fine piece of furniture I send a photograph of it to a New York dealer. I don’t waste time trying to sell it here in Savannah. It’s not that people in Savannah aren’t rich enough. It’s just that they’re very cheap. I’ll give you an example.

“There’s a woman here, a
grande dame
at the very apex of society and one of the richest people in the Southeast, let alone Savannah. She owns a copper mine. She built a big house in an exclusive part of town, a replica of a famous Louisiana plantation house with huge white columns and curved stairs. You can see it from the water. Everybody goes, ‘Oooo, look!’ when they pass by it. I adore her. She’s been like a mother to me. But she’s the cheapest woman who ever lived! Some years ago she ordered a pair of iron gates for her house. They were designed and built especially for her. But when they were delivered she pitched a fit, said they were horrible, said they were filth. ‘Take them away,’ she said, ‘I never want to see them again!’ Then she tore up the bill, which was for $1,400—a fair amount of money in those days.

“The foundry took the gates back, but they didn’t know what to do with them. After all, there wasn’t much demand for a pair of ornamental gates exactly that size. The only thing they could do was to sell the iron for its scrap value. So they cut the price from $1,400 to $190. Naturally, the following day the woman sent a man over to the foundry with $190, and today those gates are hanging on her gateposts where they were originally designed to go. That’s pure Savannah. And that’s what I mean by cheap. You mustn’t be taken in by the moonlight and magnolias. There’s more to Savannah than that. Things can get very murky.” Williams stroked his cat and tapped another ash into the ashtray.

“We had a judge back in the nineteen-thirties, a member of one of the city’s leading families. He lived one square over from here in a big house with tall white columns. His older son was going around town with a gangster’s girlfriend. The gangster warned him to stop, but the judge’s son kept right at it. One
night the doorbell rang and when the judge opened the door, he found his son lying on the porch bleeding to death with his private parts tucked under his lapel. The doctors sewed his genitals back on, but the body rejected them and he died. The next day, the headline in the paper read
FALL FROM PORCH PROVES FATAL.
Most members of that family still deny the murder ever happened, but the victim’s sister tells me it’s true.

“It doesn’t end there. The same judge had another son. This one lived in a house on Whitaker Street. He and his wife used to fight. I mean really go at it, throw each other across rooms and that sort of thing. During one of those fights, their three-year-old daughter came downstairs unnoticed, just when the husband was getting ready to fling his wife into a marble-topped table. When the woman hit the table, it overturned and crushed the little girl. They didn’t find out about it until an hour later when they were picking up the debris from the fight. As far as the family is concerned, that incident never happened either.”

Williams picked up the decanter of Madeira and refilled our glasses. “Drinking Madeira is a great Savannah ritual, you know,” he said. “It’s a celebration of failure, actually. The British sent whole shiploads of grapevines over from Madeira in the eighteenth century in hopes of turning Georgia into a wine-producing colony. Savannah’s on the same latitude as Madeira. Well, the vines died, but Savannah never lost its taste for Madeira. Or any other kind of liquor for that matter. Prohibition didn’t even slow things down here. Everybody had a way of getting liquor, even little old ladies. Especially the old ladies. A bunch of them bought a Cuban rumrunner and ran it back and forth between here and Cuba.”

Williams sipped his Madeira. “One of those ladies died just a few months ago. Old Mrs. Morton. She was a marvel. She did exactly as she pleased all her life, God bless her. Her son came home for Christmas vacation one year and brought his college roommate with him. Mama and the college roommate fell in love; the roommate moved into the master bedroom with her; Daddy moved into the guest bedroom, and the son went back to
college and never came home again. From then on, Mr. and Mrs. Morton and the roommate lived in that house under those circumstances until the old man died. They kept up appearances and pretended nothing at all outrageous had happened. Mama’s young lover served as her chauffeur. Whenever he dropped her off and picked her up at her bridge parties, the other ladies would peer out at them through the venetian blinds. But they never let on that they were interested, because nobody,
nobody
ever mentioned his name in her presence.”

Williams fell silent for a moment, no doubt reflecting upon the recently departed Mrs. Morton. Through the open window, Monterey Square was quiet except for the rasp of a cricket and the passing, now and then, of a car unhurriedly negotiating the turns around the square.

“What do you suppose would happen,” I asked, “if the tour guides told that sort of story to their busloads of tourists?”

“Not possible,” said Williams. “They keep it very prim and proper.”

I told Williams that as I was coming up the walk earlier I had heard the guide on one of the tour buses talking about this house.

“Bless their boring little hearts,” said Williams. “What did the guide say?”

“She said that the house was the birthplace of the famous songwriter Johnny Mercer, the man who wrote ‘Moon River,’ ‘I Wanna Be Around,’ ‘Too Marvelous for Words,’ and other standards.”

“Wrong, but not completely off base,” said Williams. “What else?”