Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (9 page)

I understood all that, but I still wondered about certain small details concerning my jogging companions. Why, for instance, did he carry the leash? And when and where did they get close enough for her to give it to him? The whole point, I finally realized, was that I would never know.

If I happened to be walking along Bull Street in the late afternoon, I would invariably see a very old and very dignified black man. He always wore a suit and tie, a starched white shirt, and a fedora. His ties were muted paisleys and regimental stripes, and his suits were fine and well tailored, though apparently made for a slightly larger person.

Every day at the same time, the old man walked through the cast-iron gates of the grandiose Armstrong House at the north end of Forsyth Park. He turned left and proceeded up Bull Street all the way to City Hall and back. He was very much a gentleman. He tipped his hat and bowed in greeting. But I noticed that he and the people he spoke with—usually well-dressed businessmen—played a very odd game. The men would ask him, “Still walking the dog?” It was perfectly clear that the old man was not walking a dog, but he would respond by saying, “Oh, yes. Still walking the dog.” Then he would look over his shoulder and say to the air behind him, “Come on, Patrick!” And off he would go.

One day, as I came through Madison Square, I saw him standing by the monument facing a semicircle of tourists. He was singing. I could not make out the words, but I could hear his reedy tenor voice. The tourists applauded when he was done, and one of the lady tour guides slipped something into his hand. He bowed and left them. We approached the crosswalk at the same time.

“That was very nice,” I said.

“Why, thank you kindly,” he replied in his courtly way. “My name is William Simon Glover.”

I introduced myself and told Mr. Glover that it seemed we often
took the same walk at the same hour. I said nothing about the dog, figuring that the subject would come up on its own.

“Oh, yes,” he said. “I’m eighty-six years old, and I’m downtown at seven o’clock every morning. I’m retired, but I don’t stay still. I work as a porter for the law firm of Bouhan, Williams and Levy.” Mr. Glover’s voice had a bounce to it. He pronounced the name of the law firm as if an exclamation mark followed each of the partners’ names.

“I’m a porter, but everybody knows me as a singer,” he said as we started to cross the street. “I learned to sing in church when I was twelve. I pumped the organ for a quarter while one lady played and another lady sang. I didn’t know nothing about no German, French, or Italian, but by me hearing the lady sing so much, I learned to say the words whether I knew what they was or not. One Sunday morning, the lady didn’t sing, so I sang instead. And I sang in Italian. I sang ‘Hallelujah.’”

“How did it go?” I asked him.

Mr. Glover stopped and faced me. He opened his mouth wide and drew a deep breath. From the back of his throat came a high, croaking sound, “Aaaaa lay
loooo-yah!
A-layyyy-loo yah!” He had abandoned his tenor and was singing in a wavering falsetto. Forever in his mind, apparently, “Hallelujah” would be a soprano piece as sung by the lady in church so many years before. “Allay-
loo
-yah, a-lay-loo yah, a-lay-loo yah, a
-lay
-loo yah, a-lay-loo-yah, a-lay-loo-yah!” Mr. Glover stopped for a breath. “—And then the lady always finished by saying,
‘AAAAAAAAhhh
lay
looooooo
yah!’”

“So that was your debut,” I said.

“That’s right! That’s how I started. That lady learned me to sing in German, French, and Italian! Oh, yes! And I’ve been musical director of the First African Baptist Church since 1916. I directed a chorus of five hundred voices for Franklin D. Roosevelt when he visited Savannah on November 18, 1933. I remember the date, because that was the very day my daughter was born. I named her Eleanor Roosevelt Glover. I can remember the song we sang too: ‘Come By Here.’ The doctor sent word up to
me, ‘Tell Glover he can sing “Come By Here” for the president all he damn pleases, but I just come by his house and left a baby girl and I want him to come by my office and pay me fifteen dollars.’”

When we parted at the corner of Oglethorpe Avenue, I realized I was still in the dark about the imaginary dog, Patrick. A week or so later, when I next fell in step with Mr. Glover, I made a mental note to bring the subject around to it. But Mr. Glover had other things to talk about first.

“You know about psychology,” he said. “You learn that in school. You learn people-ology on the Pullman. I was a porter for the Pullman during the war. You had to keep the passengers well satisfied for ’em to tip you fifty cents or a dollar. You say, ‘Wait a minute, sir. You going up to the club car? Your tie is crooked.’ Now, his tie is really straight as an arrow, but you pull it crooked and then you pull it straight again, and he likes it. That’s people-ology!

“Keep a whisk broom in your pocket, and brush him off! He don’t need no brushing off, but he don’t know it! Brush him off anyhow, and straighten his collar. Pull it crooked and straighten it again. Miss Mamie don’t need a box for her hat, but you be sure and put her hat in a box! If you sit and don’t do nothin’, you won’t get nothin’!

“Another thing I learned: Don’t ever ask a man, ‘How is Mrs. Brown?’ You ask him, ‘How is Miss Julia?
Tell her I ask about her.’
I never did ask Mr. Bouhan about Mrs. Bouhan. I ask him, ‘How is Miss Helen?
Tell Miss Helen I ask about her.’
He liked it and she liked it. Mr. Bouhan gave me his old clothes and shoes. Miss Helen gave me records from her collection, all kinds of records. I got records I don’t even know I got. I even got records of that great opera singer … Henry Coca-ruso!

“I keep busy,” Mr. Glover said. “I don’t sit down and hold my hand. I got five hundred dollars of life insurance, and it’s all paid up. I paid twenty-five cents a week for seventy years! And last week the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company sent me a check for one thousand dollars!”

Mr. Glover’s eyes were sparkling. “No, sir, I don’t sit down and hold my hand.”

“Glover!” came a booming voice from behind us. A tall white-haired man in a gray suit approached. “Still walking the dog?”

“Why, yes, sir, yes I am.” Mr. Glover did his little bow and tipped his hat and gestured to the invisible dog behind him. “I’m still walking Patrick.”

“Glad to hear it, Glover. Keep it up! Take care now.” With that, the man walked away.

“How long have you been walking Patrick?” I asked.

Mr. Glover straightened up. “Oh, for a long time. Patrick was Mr. Bouhan’s dog. Mr. Bouhan used to give him Chivas Regal scotch liquor to drink. I walked the dog, and I was the dog’s bartender too. Mr. Bouhan said that after he died I was to be paid ten dollars a week to take care of Patrick. He put that in his will. I had to walk him and buy his scotch liquor. When Patrick died, I went to see Judge Lawrence. The judge was Mr. Bouhan’s executor. I said, ‘Judge, you can stop paying me the ten dollars now, because Patrick is dead.’ And Judge Lawrence said, ‘What do you mean Patrick is dead? How could he be? I see him right there! Right there on the carpet.’ I looked behind me, and I didn’t see no dog. But then I thought a minute and I said, ‘Oh! I think I see him too, Judge!’ And the judge said, ‘Good. So you just keep walking him and we’ll keep paying you.’ The dog is dead twenty years now, but I still walk him. I walk up and down Bull Street and look over my shoulder and say, ‘Come on, Patrick!’”

As for the mysterious old lady who punched out Joe Odom’s windows with a hammer, I never saw her again. I did learn, however, that there were quite a few people in Savannah who might have felt justified in smashing Joe’s windows as a result of having done business with him. The ranks of such people included any number of old ladies.

At least half a dozen people, for instance, had come to grief in
Joe’s most recent real estate development deal—the conversion of an office building into a luxurious apartment house: the Lafayette. Shortly before completing the renovation, Joe hosted a gala dinner-dance in the building as a preview party for prospective buyers. Sixteen of the guests signed up for apartments then and there, and six plunked down cash. The new owners were just about to move into the building when events took an unexpected turn: A mortgage company swooped down and repossessed their apartments. How could this happen? The people had paid for their apartments in full! The answer was not long in coming. Joe had defaulted on his construction loan and had never bothered to transfer the deeds to the new owners. At the moment of foreclosure, the apartments were still in his name, so they were seized as collateral. The rightful owners were forced to go to court to retrieve their apartments.

Joe never lost his good humor throughout the affair. Like an unflappable master of ceremonies, he cheerfully reassured his clients that things would sort themselves out. Whether they believed him or not, most chose to forgive him. One woman communed with the Lord, who told her not to sue. Another simply refused to believe that so lovely a young man could have done anything improper. “I suppose I should hate him,” said an osteopath, who had lost money in another of Joe’s financial schemes, “but he’s too damned likable.”

There were rumors that Joe had squandered the money from the construction loan for the Lafayette, that he had chartered a private plane and taken a dozen friends to New Orleans to select a chandelier for the lobby and, incidentally, attend the Sugar Bowl game. After the foreclosure, however, it was clear that Joe had in no way enriched himself in the fiasco. In fact, he had lost his car, his boat, his butler, his wife, and title to his house.

In the aftermath of the Lafayette affair, Joe had found it necessary to supplement his income by playing piano at private parties and by opening his house to busloads of tourists several days a week, at three dollars a head, as part of a tour package that included lunch in a historic townhouse. The tour companies
would send caterers to Joe’s house at 11:45
A.M.
with platters and tureens of food; the tour buses would pull up at noon; the tourists would walk through the house, eat a buffet lunch, and listen to Joe play a few songs on the piano. Then at 12:45, the tourists would get back on the bus, and the caterers would pack up and leave.

Laughter and music continued to ring through 16 East Jones Street day and night as it had before, but Joe was merely a rent-paying tenant now. Neither the house nor anything in it belonged to him anymore. Not the portraits, not the carpets, not the silver. Not even the little panes of glass upon which the mysterious old lady, whoever she was, had taken out her fury.

The voice came over my shoulder like a murmuring breeze. “Oh, don’t do that,” it said. “Whatever you do, don’t do that.” I was standing at the sales counter in Clary’s drugstore after breakfast one morning, and when I turned around, I was confronted by a scarecrow of a man. He had a long neck and a protruding Adam’s apple. Lank brown hair hung over his forehead. The man’s face reddened, as if he’d been caught thinking out loud. It struck me that if either of us should have been embarrassed, I was the one. I had just asked the salesgirl what I should do about the crystallized ring of black scum that would not come off my toilet bowl. The girl had told me to use steel wool.