Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (3 page)

“That last year Jacqueline Onassis offered to buy the house and everything in it for two million dollars.”

“The guide gets C minus for accuracy,” said Williams. “And now, I’ll tell you what really happened:

“Construction of the house was begun in 1860 by the Confederate general Hugh Mercer, Johnny Mercer’s great-grandfather. It was unfinished when the Civil War broke out, and after the war, General Mercer was imprisoned and tried for the murder of two
army deserters. He was eventually acquitted, largely on the testimony of his son, and released from jail a broken and very angry man. He sold the house, and the new owners completed it. So none of the Mercers ever lived here, including Johnny. Late in his life, though, Johnny used to drop in when he was in town. In fact, he taped a Mike Douglas show in the front yard. He once offered to buy the house, but I told him, ‘Johnny, you don’t need it, you’ll end up playing houseboy to it just as I have.’ And that’s as close as he came to ever living here.”

Williams leaned back and sent a thin stream of cigar smoke ceilingward. “I’ll come to Jacqueline Onassis in a moment,” he said, “but first I want to let you in on another piece of history that the tour guides never mention. It’s an incident I call ‘Flag Day.’ It happened a couple of years ago.”

He stood up and went over to the window. “Monterey Square is lovely,” he said. “In my opinion, it’s the most beautiful of all the squares in Savannah. The architecture, the trees, the monument, the way it all fits together. Moviemakers love it. Something like twenty feature films have been shot in Savannah in the past six years, and Monterey Square is one of their favorite shooting locations.

“Every time filming begins the town goes wild. Everybody wants to be an extra and meet the stars and watch from the sidelines. The mayor and the city councilmen think it’s wonderful because the film companies will spend money here, and Savannah will become famous, and that will help tourism.

“But it really isn’t so wonderful at all. The moviemakers pay local extras the minimum wage, and Savannah doesn’t get publicity after all, because the audiences usually haven’t the vaguest idea where the movies have been shot. In fact, the costs to Savannah turn out to be greater than the return, if you add up the overtime pay for sanitation men and police and the disruption of traffic. And the film crews are invariably rude. They leave piles of litter. They destroy shrubbery. They trample the grass. One crew even cut down a palm tree across the square, because it didn’t happen to suit them.

“Well, the rudest bunch of all came to town a couple of years
ago to film a CBS made-for-TV movie about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. They selected Monterey Square for an important outdoor scene, but naturally we were not consulted. The night before filming was to begin, the police went around and abruptly ordered all of us to move our cars out of the square and not to enter or exit our houses between ten in the morning and five that afternoon. The film crew then dumped eight truck-loads of dirt onto the street and spread it around to make it look like the unpaved streets of 1865. The next morning we awoke to find the square full of horses and wagons and ladies in hoop-skirts and a thick coating of dust all over everything. It was intolerable. The cameras were in the middle of the square aimed directly at this house.

“Several of my neighbors asked me, as a founder and past president of the Downtown Neighborhood Association, to do something about it. I went out and asked the producer to make a thousand-dollar contribution to the Humane Society to show his good intentions. He said he would think it over and get back to me by noon.

“Noon came and went. The producer never responded. Instead, the cameras began to roll. I decided to ruin his shot, and this is how I did it.”

Williams opened a cabinet to the left of the window and took out a bolt of red cloth. He held it up over his head and unfurled it with a snap of his wrist. It was an eight-foot Nazi banner.

“I draped this over the balcony outside the window,” he said. He held the banner up so I could get a good look at the big black swastika against a circle of white on a field of bright red.

“I bet that stopped the shooting,” I said.

“Yes, but only temporarily,” he said. “The cameraman switched to the other side of the house, so I moved the flag to the window in the study. They eventually got the shot they wanted, but at least I made my point.”

Williams rolled up the banner and put it back in the cabinet. “The furor it caused was something I hadn’t expected. The
Savannah Morning News
splashed the story across its front
page, complete with photographs. They wrote vituperative editorials and published angry letters. The wire services picked it up too, and so did the television network evening news.

“I found myself having to explain that, no, I was not a Nazi and that I had used the flag to create a time warp in order to stop some very inconsiderate filmmakers, who were not Jewish as far as I knew. But I did make one terrible oversight. I had forgotten that the Temple Mickve Israel synagogue is located directly across the square. The rabbi wrote me a letter asking how I happened to have a Nazi flag handy. I wrote back saying my uncle Jesse had brought it back as a trophy from the Second World War. I also told him I collected relics of all sorts of fallen empires and that the flag and a few other World War Two items were simply part of that group.”

“Then I wasn’t mistaken,” I said. “That was a Nazi dagger I saw on a table in the rear parlor.”

“I have several,” said Williams, “plus a few sidearms and a hood ornament from a Nazi staff car. That’s about the extent of it, though. Artifacts of Hitler’s regime are not popular, but they do have historic value. Most people understand that point and know there was nothing political about my protest. The firestorm abated after a couple of weeks, but every so often I encounter a smoldering ember in the form of glaring eyes or people crossing the street to avoid me.”

“But I gather you haven’t been ostracized.”

“Not at all. Six months after Flag Day, Jacqueline Onassis came to call.”

Williams crossed the room and lifted the lid of a slant-top desk. “Twice a year,” he said, “Christie’s auction house has Fabergé sales in Geneva. Last year, the star item in the sale was an exquisite little jade box. It had been widely advertised, and there was a lot of excitement about it. The man in charge of those sales was Geza von Habsburg; he’d be archduke of the Austro-Hungarian Empire today if it still existed. Geza’s a friend of mine. I’ve attended those sales for years. Naturally, I flew over for this one, and I said, ‘Geza, I’m here to buy that little box.’
Geza laughed and said, ‘Jim, quite a number of people are here to buy that little box.’ I had visions of having to bid against Malcolm Forbes and his ilk, but I thought at least I’d have fun driving up the price. So I said, ‘Well, Geza, let’s put it this way: If somebody outbids me and buys that box they’re gonna, by God, know they bought a box!’ The bidding started at the highest estimate. I finally bought the box for seventy thousand dollars. Then I flew back over the Atlantic on the Concorde and had a champagne cocktail with the little box sitting on my linen-covered tray.

“The very next morning, I was down in my basement workshop restoring furniture, jet-lagged and unshaven, when the doorbell rang. I sent one of my assistants, Barry Thomas, up to answer it. He came running back downstairs all out of breath and said a tour guide was at the door and wanted to know if I would show Jacqueline Onassis through the house. I thought, ‘This is a bunch of bull,’ but I came up anyway and there was the tour guide, and indeed she had Mrs. Onassis waiting in the car.

“I asked her to drive around the block a few times and give me a chance to shave and get the house pulled together. While she did that, I got myself ready and told the boys to do what we call a tour-of-homes lighting. It’s a set routine that takes a full ten minutes of turning on lamps, opening shutters, emptying ashtrays and clearing away newspapers. Just as we were finishing, the doorbell rang again, and there was Mrs. Onassis and her friend Maurice Tempelsman. ‘I’m awfully sorry I sent you away before,’ I said, ‘but I just got back last night from the Fabergé sale in Geneva.’ With that, Mr. Tempelsman said, ‘Who bought the box?’ I said, ‘Won’t you come in and see?’ Without another word, he took Mrs. Onassis by the arm and said, ‘There it is. I told you we should have bought it.’”

Williams handed me the box. It was a rich deep green, about four inches square. The top was covered with a brilliant latticework of diamonds punctuated with cabochon rubies. In the center, a white oval enamel medallion bore the cipher of Nicholas II in diamonds and gold.

“They were in the house an hour or so,” said Williams. “They looked at everything. We went upstairs, and I played the pipe organ, and then we all played roulette. They were completely charming. Tempelsman had what I call a topside dye job. You take a man and dip him bottom side up in hair dye and stop right at the ears. He was an interesting man, very knowledgeable about antiques. In fact, they both were. They’d been traveling down the coast on his yacht, but Mrs. Onassis was very down-to-earth. She was wearing a white linen suit and didn’t even bother brushing the dust off her chair when we sat down in the garden. She invited me to come visit her in her ‘hovel’ the next time I came to New York. When they left, she asked how to get to the nearest Burger King.”

“What about offering to buy the house for two million dollars?” I asked.

“She did nothing as crass as that, but she apparently told Tempelsman in front of the tour guide—who reported it to the newspapers, of course—that she wished she owned the house and everything in it. ‘But not Jim Williams,’ she said, ‘I couldn’t afford him.’”

I ran my hands over the Fabergé box. The lid swung smoothly on its hinges. The gold clasp fastened with a muted click. As I gazed at this dazzling object, I was only half-aware of a key turning in the front door of Mercer House and of footsteps approaching in the entrance hall. Suddenly, a sharp voice cut the air.

“Goddammit! Goddamn
bitch!”

A blond boy stood in the doorway. He appeared to be about nineteen or twenty. He was wearing blue jeans and a sleeveless black T-shirt with the words
FUCK YOU
printed in white across the front. He was trembling with barely controlled fury. His sapphire-blue eyes were blazing.

“What seems to be the problem, Danny?” Williams asked calmly, without rising from his chair.

“Bonnie! Goddamn bitch. She stood me up! She’s runnin’ around at all the southside bars. Dammit! I ain’t takin’ her shit no more!”

The boy grabbed a vodka bottle from the table and filled a crystal glass to the brim. He gulped it down. His arms were tattooed—a Confederate flag on one arm, a marijuana plant on the other.

“Get hold of yourself now, Danny,” Williams said, speaking deliberately. “Just tell me what happened.”

“Maybe I was a few minutes late! I got throwed off in my timing. So what! Shit! Her girlfriend said she left ’Cause I wasn’t there when I said I’d be.” He glared at Williams. “Gimme twenty dollars! I need the money. I’m pissed off!”

“What do you need it for?”

“None of your goddamn business! I need to get fucked up tonight, if you really wanna know. That’s what!”

“I think you’ve already accomplished that, Sport.”

“I ain’t anywhere near fucked up enough yet!”

“Now, Danny, don’t go doing that and driving your car. You’ll get arrested for sure if you do. You’ve already got charges against you from the last time you got, quote, fucked up. They’re really gonna nail you this time.”

“I don’t give a goddamn about you or Bonnie or the goddamn police!”

With that, the boy turned and abruptly left the room. The front door slammed. Outside, a car door opened and closed. A sharp, prolonged squeal of tires pierced the evening stillness. There was another squeal as the car rounded the corner of Monterey Square, then another as it turned again and sped down Bull Street. Then all was quiet.

“I’m sorry,” said Williams. He got up and poured himself a drink, not Madeira this time but straight vodka. Then silently, almost imperceptibly, he released a sigh and allowed his shoulders to relax.

I looked down and saw that I was still holding the Fabergé box. I was clutching it so tightly I was afraid for a moment I might have dislodged a jewel or two from the top. It seemed intact. I handed it back to Williams.

“That was Danny Hansford,” he said. “He works for me parttime refinishing furniture in my workshop.”

Williams studied the end of his cigar. He was calm, controlled.

“This is not the first time something like this has happened,” he said. “I have an idea how it will end up. Later tonight, about three-thirty, the telephone will ring. It’ll be Danny. He’ll be charming and sweet-natured. He’ll say, ‘Hey, Jim! This is Danny. I’m real sorry to wake you up.
Boy
, did I fuck up tonight! Ma-a-a-an, did I make some big mistakes!’ And I’ll say, ‘Well, Danny, what happened this time?’ And he’ll say, ‘I’m callin’ from the jailhouse. Yeah, they put me in here again. But I ain’t done nothin’ wrong. I was goin’ down Abercorn Street, see if I could find Bonnie, and I burned a little rubber and turned left real quick, and there was this goddamn police car! Blue lights, sirens. Man, I’m in trouble. Hey, Jim? Think you could come down and get me out?’ And I’ll say, ‘Danny, it’s late, I’m tired of this. Why don’t you just cool it and relax yourself tonight. In jail.’

“Now, Danny won’t like this one bit, but he won’t lose his cool. Not now. He’ll keep it calm. He’ll say, ‘I know what you mean, and you’re right. I oughta stay in here the rest of my goddamn life. It’s been a messed-up life anyhow.’ He’ll be working on my sympathy now. ‘It’s okay, Jim,’ he’ll say. ‘Just leave me here. Don’t worry about it. Hell, I don’t even care. I hope I didn’t get you upset. Hope you can get back to sleep all right. See you later.’

“Inside, Danny will be seething because I won’t come right down there. He won’t show it, though, because he knows I’m the only one who’ll help him. He knows I’ll call the bondsman and tell them to go get him out, and they will. But I won’t do that until morning, after the drugs have worn off.”