Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (6 page)

We walked to the crest of a low bluff overlooking a broad, slow-moving expanse of water, clearly the choicest spot in this
most tranquil of settings. Miss Harty led me into a small enclosure that had a gravestone and a granite bench. She sat down on the bench and gestured for me to sit next to her.

“At last,” she said, “we can have our martinis.” She opened the wicker basket and poured the drinks into the silver goblets. “If you look at the gravestone,” she said, “you’ll see it’s a bit unusual.” It was a double gravestone bearing the names of Dr. William F. Aiken and his wife, Anna. “They were the parents of Conrad Aiken, the poet. Notice the dates.”

Both Dr. and Mrs. Aiken had died on the same day: February 27, 1901.

“This is what happened,” she said. “The Aikens were living on Oglethorpe Avenue in a big brick townhouse. Dr. Aiken had his offices on the ground floor, and the family lived on the two floors above. Conrad was eleven. One morning, Conrad awoke to the sounds of his parents quarreling in their bedroom down the hall. The quarreling subsided for a moment. Then Conrad heard his father counting, ‘One! Two! Three!’ There was a half-stifled scream and then a pistol shot. Then another count of three, another shot, and then a thud. Conrad ran barefoot across Oglethorpe Avenue to the police station where he announced, ‘Papa has just shot Mama and then shot himself.’ He led the officers to the house and up to his parents’ bedroom on the top floor.”

Miss Harty lifted her goblet in a silent toast to Dr. and Mrs. Aiken. Then she poured a few drops onto the ground.

“Believe it or not,” she said, “one of the reasons he killed her was … parties. Aiken hinted at it in ‘Strange Moonlight,’ one of his short stories. In the story, the father complains to the mother that she’s neglecting her family. He says, ‘It’s two parties
every
week, and sometimes three or four, that’s excessive.’ The story was autobiographical, of course. The Aikens were living well beyond their means at the time. Anna Aiken went out to parties practically every other night. She’d given six dinner parties in the month before her husband killed her.

“After the shooting, relatives up north took Conrad in and
raised him. He went to Harvard and had a brilliant career. He won the Pulitzer Prize and was appointed to the poetry chair at the Library of Congress. When he retired, he came back to spend his last years in Savannah. He always knew he would. He’d written a novel called
Great Circle;
it was about ending up where one started. And that’s the way it turned out for Aiken himself. He lived in Savannah his first eleven years and his last eleven years. In those last years, he lived
next door
to the house where he’d lived as a child, separated from his tragic childhood by a single brick wall.

“Of course, when he moved back to Savannah, the poetry society was all aflutter, as you can imagine. But Aiken kept pretty much to himself. He politely declined most invitations. He said he needed the time for his work. Quite often, though, he and his wife would come out here and sit for an hour or so. They’d bring a shaker of martinis and silver goblets and talk to his departed parents and pour libations to them.”

Miss Harty raised her goblet and touched it to mine. A pair of mockingbirds conversed somewhere in the trees. A shrimp boat passed at slow speed.

“Aiken loved to come here and watch the ships go by,” she said. “One afternoon, he saw one with the name
Cosmos Mariner
painted on the bow. That delighted him. The word ‘cosmos’ appears often in his poetry, you know. That evening he went home and looked for mention of the
Cosmos Mariner
in the shipping news. There it was, in tiny type on the list of ships in port. The name was followed by the comment ‘Destination Unknown.’ That pleased him even more.”

“Where is Aiken buried?” I asked. There were no other gravestones in the enclosure.

“Oh, he’s here,” she said. “In fact, we are very much his personal guests at the moment. It was Aiken’s wish that people should come to this beautiful place after he died and drink martinis and watch the ships just as he did. He left a gracious invitation to that effect. He had his gravestone built in the shape of a bench.”

An involuntary reflex propelled me to my feet. Miss Harty laughed, and then she too stood up. Aiken’s name was inscribed on the bench, along with the words
COSMOS MARINER, DESTINATION UNKNOWN.

I was beguiled by Savannah. The next morning, as I checked out of the hotel, I asked the desk clerk how I might go about renting an apartment for a month or so—not right then, but soon perhaps.

“Dial ‘bedroom,’” she said. “On the telephone. B-E-D R-O-O-M. It’s the number of a referral service for guest houses. They have listings.”

I suspected that in Savannah I had stumbled on a rare vestige of the Old South. It seemed to me that Savannah was in some respects as remote as Pitcairn Island, that tiny rock in the middle of the Pacific where the descendants of the mutineers of the H.M.S.
Bounty
had lived in inbred isolation since the eighteenth century. For about the same length of time, seven generations of Savannahians had been marooned in their hushed and secluded bower of a city on the Georgia coast. “We’re a very cousiny people,” Mary Harty told me. “One must tread very lightly here: Everyone is kin to everyone else.”

An idea was beginning to take shape in my mind, a variation of my city-hopping weekends. I would make Savannah my second home. I would spend perhaps a month at a time in Savannah, long enough to become more than a tourist if not quite a full-fledged resident. I would inquire, observe, and poke around wherever my curiosity led me or wherever I was invited. I would presume nothing. I would take notes.

Over a period of eight years I did just that, except that my stays in Savannah became longer and my return trips to New York shorter. At times, I came to think of myself as living in Savannah. I found myself involved in an adventure peopled by an unusual assortment of characters and enlivened by a series of strange events, up to and including murder. But first things first. I went to the telephone and dialed “bedroom.”

The voice that spoke to me from “bedroom” led me to my new home in Savannah—the second floor of a carriage house on East Charlton Lane. I had two small rooms that looked out on a garden and the rear of a townhouse. The garden had a fragrant magnolia and a small banana tree.

The apartment’s furnishings included an old navigator’s globe on a stand. On my first night in residence, I put my finger on Savannah and, turning the globe, followed the thirty-second parallel around the world. Marrakesh, Tel Aviv, and Nanking passed beneath my finger. Savannah stood on the westernmost point of the East Coast, due south of Cleveland. It was south of New York by nine degrees of latitude, which should have been enough to make a difference in the angle of the moon in the sky, I figured. The crescent would be turned clockwise slightly tonight, so that it would look more like the letter U than the letter C it had been the night before in New York. Or would it be the other way around? I looked out the window to see, but the moon had slipped behind a cloud.

It was at about that time, as I was attempting to fix my exact location in the universe, that I became aware of laughing voices and the sound of a honky-tonk piano coming over the garden wall. The song was “Sweet Georgia Brown,” and it was sung by
a smooth baritone voice. The next song was “How Come You Do Me Like You Do?” A party was in progress a few houses away, and I took this to be a good sign. The music made an agreeable background sound, if a little corny, and the piano player was very good. Tireless, too. The last song I remember that night before falling asleep was “Lazybones.” It was written, appropriately enough, by Johnny Mercer.

A few hours later, shortly after dawn, the music started in again. “Piano-roll Blues” was the first tune of the morning, as I recall; then came “Darktown Strutters’ Ball.” The music continued in that vein, off and on, throughout the day and late into the evening. It did the same the following day and the day after that. The piano was a permanent part of the atmosphere, apparently, and so was the party—if a party was what it was.

I traced the music to 16 East Jones Street, a yellow stuccoed townhouse four houses away. In most respects, the house was like all the others on the block except for a steady stream of visitors who came and went at all hours of the day and night. There was no common denominator among them—they were young and old, alone and in groups, white and black—but I did notice that none of them rang the bell or knocked. They just pushed the door open and walked in. Unlocked doors were highly unusual, even in Savannah. I assumed that eventually all of this would explain itself, and in the meantime I set about becoming acquainted with my new surroundings.

The garden part of the city with its geometrical arrangement of squares encompassed the three-square-mile historic district, which was built before the Civil War. City fathers abandoned the squares later on when the city expanded southward. Immediately south of the historic district lay a wide swath of Victorian gingerbread houses. These gave way to Ardsley Park, an enclave of early twentieth-century houses with proud façades that featured columns, pediments, porticoes, and terraces. South of Ardsley Park, the scale of the houses diminished. There were bungalows built in the thirties and forties, then ranch houses of the fifties and sixties, and finally the southside, a flat semirural terrain that
could have been anywhere in America except for occasional echoes of Dixie such as the Twelve Oaks Shopping Plaza and the Tara Cinemas.

At the Georgia Historical Society, an obliging librarian clarified a few matters for me. No, she said, there had never been any such woman as Hard-hearted Hannah. The librarian suspected that Hannah had simply been the product of a songwriter needing a rhyme. She added with a sigh that sometimes she wished Hannah had been the vamp of Montana instead. Savannah could lay claim to enough real history, she said, that it had no need of false honors. Did I know, for instance, that Eli Whitney had invented the cotton gin at Mulberry Plantation in Savannah? Or that Juliette Gordon Low had founded the Girl Scouts of America in a carriage house on Drayton Street?

The librarian recited a list of Savannah’s historic highlights: America’s first Sunday school had been founded in Savannah in 1736, America’s first orphanage in 1740, America’s first black Baptist congregation in 1788, America’s first golf course in 1796. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, had been the minister of Christ Church in Savannah in 1736, and during his tenure had written a book of hymns that became the first hymnal used in the Church of England. A Savannah merchant had bankrolled the first steamship ever to cross the Atlantic, the
Savannah
, which made its maiden ocean voyage from Savannah to Liverpool in 1819.

The cumulative weight of all these historic firsts suggested that this sleepy city of 150,000 had once been more important in the general scheme of things than it was now. Sponsoring the world’s first oceangoing steamship in 1819, for instance, would have been the equivalent of launching the first space shuttle today. President James Monroe had made a special trip to Savannah in honor of the maiden voyage—a fair indication of its importance.

I browsed among the books, prints, and maps in the society’s reading room, a spacious hall with a high ceiling and a double tier of bookshelves along the walls. The Civil War loomed large
in this room, and Savannah’s role in it was a story that seemed to say a great deal about the city:

At the outbreak of fighting, Savannah was the world’s leading cotton port. General William Tecumseh Sherman selected it as the climax for his triumphant march to the sea, bringing seventy thousand troops against Savannah’s ten thousand. Unlike their counterparts in Atlanta and Charleston, Savannah’s civic leaders were practical businessmen, and their secessionist passions were tempered by a sobering awareness of the devastation that was about to befall them. When Sherman drew near, the mayor of Savannah led a delegation out to meet him. They offered to surrender the city without a shot if Sherman promised not to burn it. Sherman accepted the offer and sent President Lincoln a famous telegram:
I BEG TO PRESENT TO YOU, AS A CHRISTMAS GIFT, THE CITY OF SAVANNAH WITH ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY GUNS AND PLENTY OF AMMUNITION, ALSO ABOUT TWENTY-FIVE THOUSAND BALES OF COTTON.
Sherman stayed a month and then marched to Columbia, South Carolina, and burned it to the ground.