Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (5 page)

On Sunday, my traveling companions went back to New York, but I stayed on in Charleston. I had decided to drive down to Savannah, spend the night, and fly back to New York from there.

There being no direct route to Savannah from Charleston, I followed a zigzagging course that took me through the tidal flat-lands of the South Carolina low country. As I approached Savannah, the road narrowed to a two-lane blacktop shaded by tall trees. There was an occasional produce stand by the side of the road and a few cottages set into the foliage, but nothing resembling urban sprawl. The voice on the car radio informed me that I had entered a zone called the Coastal Empire. “The weather outlook for the Coastal Empire,” it said, “is for highs in the mid-eighties, with moderate seas and a light chop on inland waters.”

Abruptly, the trees gave way to an open panorama of marsh grass the color of wheat. Straight ahead, a tall bridge rose
steeply out of the plain. From the top of the bridge, I looked down on the Savannah River and, on the far side, a row of old brick buildings fronted by a narrow esplanade. Behind the buildings a mass of trees extended into the distance, punctuated by steeples, cornices, rooftops, and cupolas. As I descended from the bridge, I found myself plunging into a luxuriant green garden.

Walls of thick vegetation rose up on all sides and arched overhead in a lacy canopy that filtered the light to a soft shade. It had just rained; the air was hot and steamy. I felt enclosed in a semitropical terrarium, sealed off from a world that suddenly seemed a thousand miles away.

The streets were lined with townhouses of brick and stucco, handsome old buildings with high front stoops and shuttered windows. I entered a square that had flowering shrubs and a monument at the center. A few blocks farther on, there was another square. Up ahead, I could see a third on line with this one, and a fourth beyond that. To the left and right, there were two more squares. There were squares in every direction. I counted eight of them. Ten. Fourteen. Or was it twelve?

“There are exactly twenty-one squares,” an elderly lady told me later in the afternoon. Her name was Mary Harty. Acquaintances in Charleston had put us in touch; she had been expecting me. She had white hair and arched eyebrows that gave her a look of permanent surprise. We stood in her kitchen while she mixed martinis in a silver shaker. When she was finished, she put the shaker into a wicker basket. She was going to take me on an excursion, she said. It was too nice a day, and I had too little time in Savannah for us to waste it indoors.

As far as Miss Harty was concerned, the squares were the jewels of Savannah. No other city in the world had anything like them. There were five on Bull Street, five on Barnard, four on Abercorn, and so on. James Oglethorpe, the founder of Georgia, had been responsible for them, she said. He had decided Savannah was going to be laid out with squares, based on the design of a Roman military encampment, even before he set sail from
England—before he even knew exactly where on the map he was going to put Savannah. When he arrived in February 1733, he chose a site for the city on top of a forty-foot bluff on the southern bank of the Savannah River, eighteen miles inland from the Atlantic. He had already sketched out the plans. The streets were to be laid out in a grid pattern, crossing at right angles, and there would be squares at regular intervals. In effect, the city would become a giant parterre garden. Oglethorpe built the first four squares himself. “The thing I like best about the squares,” Miss Harty said, “is that cars can’t cut through the middle; they must go
around
them. So traffic is obliged to flow at a very leisurely pace. The squares are our little oases of tranquillity.”

As she spoke, I recognized in her voice the coastal accent described in
Gone with the Wind
—“soft and slurring, liquid of vowels, kind to consonants.”

“But actually,” she said, “the whole of Savannah is an oasis. We are isolated. Gloriously isolated! We’re a little enclave on the coast—off by ourselves, surrounded by nothing but marshes and piney woods. We’re not easy to get to at all, as you may have noticed. If you fly here, you usually have to change planes at least once. And trains are not much better. Somebody wrote a novel in the nineteen-fifties that captured it rather well, I thought.
The View from Pompey’s Head.
It’s by Hamilton Basso. Have you read it? The story opens with a young man taking the train from New York to Pompey’s Head and having to get off at the ungodly hour of five in the morning. Pompey’s Head is supposed to be Savannah, and I have no quibble with that. We’re a terribly inconvenient destination!”

Miss Harty’s laughter was as light as wind chimes. “There used to be a train that ran between here and Atlanta. The
Nancy Hanks.
It shut down altogether twenty years ago, and we don’t miss it at all.”

“Don’t you feel cut off?” I asked.

“Cut off from what?” she replied. “No, on the whole I’d say we rather enjoy our separateness. Whether that’s good or bad I haven’t any idea. Manufacturers tell us they like to test-market
their products in Savannah—toothpastes and detergents and the like—because Savannah is utterly impervious to outside influence. Not that people haven’t
tried
to influence us! Good Lord, they try all the time. People come here from all over the country and fall in love with Savannah. Then they move here and pretty soon they’re telling us how much more lively and prosperous Savannah could be if we only knew what we had and how to take advantage of it. I call these people ‘Gucci carpetbaggers.’ They can be rather insistent, you know. Even rude. We smile pleasantly and we nod, but we don’t budge an inch. Cities all around us are booming urban centers: Charleston, Atlanta, Jacksonville—but not Savannah. The Prudential Insurance people wanted to locate their regional headquarters here in the nineteen-fifties. It would have created thousands of jobs and made Savannah an important center of a nice, profitable, non-polluting industry. But we said no. Too big. They gave it to Jacksonville instead. In the nineteen-seventies, Gian Carlo Menotti considered making Savannah the permanent home for his Spoleto U.S.A. Festival. Again, we were not interested. So Charleston got it. It’s not that we’re trying to be difficult. We just happen to like things exactly the way they are!”

Miss Harty opened a cupboard and took out two silver goblets. She wrapped each of them in a linen napkin and placed them carefully in the wicker basket beside the martinis.

“We may be standoffish,” she said, “but we’re not hostile. We’re famously hospitable, in fact, even by southern standards. Savannah’s called the ‘Hostess City of the South,’ you know. That’s because we’ve always been a party town. We love company. We always have. I suppose that comes from being a port city and having played host to people from faraway places for so long. Life in Savannah was always easier than it was out on the plantations. Savannah was a city of rich cotton traders, who lived in elegant houses within strolling distance of one another. Parties became a way of life, and it’s made a difference. We’re not at all like the rest of Georgia. We have a saying: If you go to Atlanta, the first question people ask you is, ‘What’s your
business?’ In Macon they ask, ‘Where do you go to church?’ In Augusta they ask your grandmother’s maiden name. But in Savannah the first question people ask you is ‘What would you like to drink?’”

She patted the basket of martinis. I could hear the echo of Captain Flint shouting for rum.

“Savannah’s always been wet,” she said, “even when the rest of Georgia was dry. During Prohibition, filling stations on Abercorn Street sold whiskey out of gas pumps! Oh, you could always get a drink in Savannah. That’s never been any secret. I remember when I was a child, Billy Sunday brought his holy-revival crusade to town. He set himself up in Forsyth Park, and everybody went to hear him. There was great excitement! Mr. Sunday got up and declared at the top of his voice that Savannah was
the wickedest city in the world!
Well, of course, we all thought that was perfectly marvelous!”

Miss Harty handed me the basket and led the way through the hall and out the front door to my car. With the basket on the seat between us, she guided me as I drove through the streets.

“I’m going to take you to visit the dead,” she said.

We had just turned onto Victory Drive, a long parkway completely covered by an arch of live oaks dripping with Spanish moss. In the center, a double colonnade of palms marched along the median strip as if lending architectural support to the canopy of oaks and moss.

I glanced at her, not sure I’d heard correctly. “The dead?”

“The dead are very much with us in Savannah,” she said. “Everywhere you look there is a reminder of things that were, people who lived. We are keenly aware of our past. Those palms, for example. They were planted in honor of soldiers from Georgia who died in the First World War.”

After driving three or four miles, we turned off Victory Drive onto a winding road that took us to the gates of Bonaventure Cemetery. A live-oak forest of a primeval dimension loomed before us. We parked the car just inside the gate and continued on foot, coming almost at once to a large white marble mausoleum.

“Now, if you should die during your stay in Savannah,” Miss Harty said with a gentle smile, “this is where we’ll put you. It’s our Stranger’s Tomb. It was built in honor of a man named William Gaston. He was one of Savannah’s greatest hosts and party givers, and he died in the nineteenth century. This tomb is a memorial to his hospitality. It has an empty vault in it that’s reserved for out-of-towners who die while visiting Savannah. It gives them a chance to rest awhile in one of the most beautiful cemeteries in the world, until their families can make arrangements to take them away.”

I remarked that I hoped I would not tax Savannah’s hospitality to that extent. We moved on past the tomb along an avenue bordered by magnificent oaks. On both sides, moss-covered statues stood in an overgrowth of shrubbery like the remnants of an abandoned temple.

“In Colonial times, this was a lovely plantation,” Miss Harty said. “Its centerpiece was a mansion made of bricks brought over from England. There were terraced gardens extending all the way down to the river. The estate was built by Colonel John Mulryne. When Mulryne’s daughter married Josiah Tattnall, the bride’s father commemorated the happy union of the two families by planting great avenues of trees forming the initials M and T intertwined. I’m told enough of the original trees survive that you can still trace the monogram, if you put your mind to it.” Miss Harty paused as we approached a vine-covered mound by the side of the path.

“This is all that’s left of the plantation house,” she said. “It’s a piece of the foundation. The house burned sometime in the late seventeen-hundreds. It was a spectacular fire, by all accounts. A formal dinner party had been in progress, with liveried servants standing behind every chair. In the middle of dinner, the butler came up to the host and whispered that the roof had caught fire and that nothing could be done to stop it. The host rose calmly, clinked his glass, and invited his guests to pick up their dinner plates and follow him into the garden. The servants carried the table and chairs after them, and the dinner continued by the
light of the raging fire. The host made the best of it. He regaled his guests with amusing stories and jests while the flames consumed his house. Then, in turn, each guest rose and offered a toast to the host, the house, and the delicious repast. When the toasts were finished, the host threw his crystal glass against the trunk of an old oak tree, and each of the guests followed suit. Tradition has it that if you listen closely on quiet nights you can still hear the laughter and the shattering of crystal glasses. I like to think of this place as the scene of the Eternal Party. What better place, in Savannah, to rest in peace for all time—where the party goes on and on.”

We resumed our walk and in a few moments came to a small family plot shaded by a large oak tree. Five graves and two small date palms lay inside a low curbstone. One of the graves, a full-length white marble slab, was littered with dried leaves and sand. Miss Harty brushed the debris away, and an inscription emerged:
JOHN HERNDON MERCER (JOHNNY).

“Did you know him?” I asked.

“We all knew him,” she said, “and loved him. We always thought we recognized something of Johnny in each of his songs. They had a buoyancy and a freshness, and that’s the way he was. It was as if he’d never really left Savannah.” She brushed away more of the leaves and uncovered an epitaph:
AND THE ANGELS SING.

“For me,” she said, “Johnny was literally the boy next door. I lived at 222 East Gwinnett Street; he lived at 226. Johnny’s great-grandfather built a huge house on Monterey Square, but Johnny never lived in it. The man who lives there now has restored it superbly and made it into quite a showplace. Jim Williams. My society friends are wild about him. I’m not.”

Miss Harty squared her shoulders and said no more about the Mercers or Jim Williams. We continued along the path toward the river, which was just now visible up ahead under the trees. “And now I have one more thing to show you,” she said.