Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

by John Berendt

  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.

  Chapter 5

  THE INVENTOR

  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.

  The man smiled self-consciously. “Steel wool leaves big scratches in the porcelain,” he said. “Those are calcium deposits you’ve got. It’s from the water. You need to scrub them off with a red brick. A brick’s harder than the calcium deposits, but it’s not as hard as the porcelain and it won’t scratch it.”

  I had seen this man several times before, right here in Clary’s drugstore. He was one of the regulars who came in for breakfast every morning. Although we had never spoken before, I knew who he was. That was one of the main things about Clary’s drugstore. It was a clearinghouse of information, a bourse of gossip.

  Despite the permanent smell of burned bacon grease and the likelihood that Ruth or Lillie would get the orders confused, Clary’s had a loyal breakfast and lunch clientele. People sauntered in, sidled in, or stumbled in, and their condition was duly noted over the tops of newspapers. Customers greeted one another from table to table, or from table to soda fountain, and every word was overheard and passed along later. Patrons at any given moment might include a housewife, a real estate broker, a lawyer, an art student, and perhaps a pair of carpenters doing work in a townhouse down the street. One of the carpenters might be heard to say, “All we got to do today is seal up that doorway between her bedroom and his,” and the news that a marital Ice Age had descended on the townhouse in question would be common coin by the end of the day. Overheard remarks were as much a commodity at Clary’s drugstore as Goody’s Powder or Chigarid.

  The man who told me to scrub my toilet bowl with a brick performed a peculiar daily ritual at Clary’s. He always ordered the same breakfast: eggs, bacon, a Bayer aspirin, and a glass of spirits of ammonia and Coca-Cola. But he didn’t always consume it. Sometimes he just looked at it. He’d put both hands flat on the table as if to steady his gaze, and he’d stare at his plate. Then he would either begin to eat or get up without a word and walk out the door. The next day, Ruth would serve him the same breakfast and go back to her perch at the end of the soda fountain to take a drag on her cigarette and see what he would do. I, too, began to watch.

  Whenever he left without touching his food, Ruth would say to no one in particular, “Luther’s not eating.” She’d clear his plate away and put his bill beside the cash register. From the remarks that followed these exits, I learned that the man’s name was Luther Driggers and that some years back he had achieved a certain prominence in Savannah. He had made a discovery—involving a certain pesticide and its ability to pass through plastic—that had led to the invention of the flea collar and the no-pest strip.

  In this respect, it could be said that Luther Driggers was the modern equivalent of Savannah’s other famous inventor, Eli Whitney. As it happened, neither man had made a dime from his invention. Eli Whitney had carefully kept the cotton gin under wraps while he applied for a patent, but he made a tactical error when he allowed women to have a look at it, assuming that they would not understand what they were looking at. A male entrepreneur put on a dress one day and slipped in with a group of women visitors, then went home and made his own cotton gin. Luther Driggers’s case was complicated by his having been a government employee at the time he had made his discovery. Government employees had no monetary claim to their work. The only way Driggers could have profited was by secretly selling the pertinent information to a private manufacturer. While he wrestled with the moral pros and cons of doing just that, one of his colleagues beat him to it.

  Luther Driggers had a mournful expression, but his failure to make any money from the flea collar was not the only reason for it. His life seemed to be marked by a succession of unfortunate misadventures. His early marriage to his high school sweetheart had lasted little more than a year. Her father was the owner of a supermarket, and the girl’s dowry consisted of a house and unlimited free groceries. When the marriage came to an end, the house and the groceries went with it. Luther moved into an old mortuary at the corner of Jones and Bull, where the first thing he did was to convert the tiled embalming room into a shower. Later, he sold some inherited property and bought an old townhouse. He leased the house to tenants and converted the carriage house behind it into living quarters for himself. In the process of renovation, he devoted considerable attention to one small design detail of th
e stairway—the so-called false step. The riser of the false step was one inch higher than the other steps so that it would trip up anybody unfamiliar with it and serve as a primitive burglar alarm. This was a device used in many old houses, but it proved to be a hazard for Driggers, since he generally arrived home in no shape to deal with normal stairs, let alone trick ones. Furthermore, once the stairs were built, he realized he’d overlooked a more important consideration: namely, where to put the stairway in the first place. He’d put it against the one wall that could have had windows and a view of the garden. As a result, the living room looked out onto a back alley and a big brown dumpster.

  It was while nursing a bruised shin suffered from a fall over the false step that Luther went one afternoon to the Wright Square post office to check the weight of a pound of marijuana he was about to buy. He wanted to make sure he was not being cheated. To his amazement, he was stopped at the door, his package was seized, and he was arrested. As the Savannah Evening Press explained in its coverage of the event, the post office had received a bomb threat only minutes before. The story said Luther’s parcel contained “slightly less than a pound of marijuana.” Luther would have been short-changed, just as he’d feared.

  Luther’s misfortunes pained his friends, particularly the headstrong Serena Dawes. Luther and Serena were an unlikely pair. Serena was much older than Luther, and she spent most of her waking hours lounging in her four-poster bed, propped up against an embankment of tiny pillows. From her silken dais, Serena would cajole Luther to fix her a drink, look for her stockings, answer the door, get some ice, hand her a comb, fluff up her pillows, massage her ankles. Alternately, and without a hint of irony, she would exhort him to stand up for his rights. “A lady,” she would say in her most languid, multisyllabic drawl, “expects a gentleman to take what belongs to him!” Whenever Serena took this line, she was usually thinking about the proceeds from the flea collar and the no-pest strip. Serena had calculated what baubles those proceeds could have bought.

  Serena Vaughn Dawes had been a celebrated beauty in her day. She was so alluring that Cecil Beaton had called her “one of the most perfect natural beauties I’ve ever photographed.” The daughter of a socially prominent lawyer from Atlanta, Serena had met the young Simon T. Dawes of Pittsburgh, grandson of a steel tycoon, while on a vacation in Newport before the Second World War. Simon Dawes was smitten by Serena. Gossip columnists across the country breathlessly chronicled their whirlwind romance. But when the New York Daily News reported that the couple had become engaged, Dawes’s mother—the formidable Theodora Cabot Dawes—telegraphed a haughty one-word comment that was blown up into headlines: SON ENGAGED? “ABSURD!” SAYS MRS. DAWES. Mrs. Dawes’s opposition to the engagement was rendered moot by the subsequent elopement of Simon and Serena. After their honeymoon at the old DeSoto Hotel in Savannah, the newlyweds went back to live in Pittsburgh.

  As Mrs. Simon T. Dawes, Serena became an icon of upper-crust glamour in the 1930s and 1940s. Her photograph adorned full-page cigarette ads in Life magazine. The copy always carried a message to the effect that Mrs. Simon T. Dawes of Pittsburgh was a lady of refined taste, that she traveled first class and resided in presidential suites wherever she went. In the ads, Serena would be sitting in quiet splendor, her head tilted back and a wisp of smoke rising from the cigarette held in her fair hand.

  Beneath the serenity, however, there was fire, and Serena’s mother-in-law knew it. The elder Mrs. Dawes did her best to bend Serena to her will. She admonished Serena to donate the fees from her endorsements to charity, and Serena did. But when Serena discovered that her mother-in-law secretly pocketed her own fees from such endorsements, she slapped the woman’s face and called her “a heathen bitch.” The two women loathed each other.

  When Simon Dawes accidentally shot himself in the head and died, his mother took her revenge on Serena. The family affairs had been arranged so that the bulk of Simon’s estate would circumvent Serena and go to their children. But Serena would not be outdone; she announced her intention to sell her mansion in Pittsburgh to a black family. A group of rich neighbors begged her to let them buy it first. She sold it to them for a king’s ransom and moved to Savannah.

  It was in Savannah that Serena plunged headlong into middle age. She gained weight, indulged herself endlessly, and became the soul of pampered self-absorption. She spent most of her day in bed, holding court, drinking martinis and pink ladies, and playing with her white toy poodle, Lulu.

  As much as Serena detested her former in-laws, she reveled in her connection to them. She never tired of telling people that the bed she lay in had once belonged to Algernon Dawes, the steel millionaire. Photographs of Daweses and Cabots stood sentry on the night table. A full-length portrait of her hated mother-in-law hung in the dining room, just as her own Cecil Beaton photographs adorned the walls of her bedroom. Serena thrived in this museum of her former self. She had a wardrobe that consisted mostly of shortie nightgowns and peignoirs. They revealed her still-shapely legs and discreetly swathed her upper half in clouds of feathers and silk chiffon. She dyed her hair flaming red and painted her fingernails and toenails dark green. She bullied and wheedled; she railed and purred. She drawled and cussed and carried on. For emphasis, she threw objects across the room—pillows, drinks, even Lulu the poodle. Every now and then she would sweep the Daweses and Cabots off the night table with an oath and send them crashing to the floor.

  Serena did not choose to mingle in Savannah’s society, nor was she invited to do so. But Savannah’s elite never tired of talking about her. “She has no couples as callers,” said a woman who lived a few houses down Gordon Street, “only young men. You never see ladies going into her house at all. She is not, as far as I know, a member of any garden club. She’s not neighborly.” But after a fashion, Serena loved Luther and Luther loved Serena.

  The unassuming, shy, and hapless Luther Driggers had a darker side. He was possessed by inner demons who showed themselves in disturbing ways. Chronic insomnia was one of them. Luther had once gone nine days without falling asleep. Sleep, when it came, was rarely peaceful. Luther usually slept with his teeth and his fists tightly clenched. By morning he would awake with sore jaws and little crescent-shaped cuts in his palms. People worried about Luther’s demons. But they were not so much concerned with the uneaten breakfasts or the lost sleep or the bleeding palms. They were fearful about something much more serious.

  It was rumored that Luther had in his possession a bottle of poison five hundred times more deadly than arsenic, a poison so lethal that if he ever dumped it into the city’s water supply it would kill every man, woman, and child in Savannah. Years back, a delegation of nervous citizens had informed the police, and the police had searched Luther’s house without finding anything. That satisfied no one, of course, and the rumors persisted.

  Luther certainly knew all about poisons and how to use them. He was a technician at the government insectary on the outskirts of Savannah. His job required that he sift through jugs of barn sweepings, sort out the weevils and beetles, and raise them in colonies so that he could test various insecticides on them. The difficult part of the job was the requirement that Luther inject insecticide into the chest cavities of the individual insects. This operation demanded the dexterity of a watchmaker. It was hard enough to do sober; with a hangover and tremors it was nearly impossible. “God, it’s tedious work,” Luther said.

  Sometimes, to relieve the boredom, Luther anesthetized ordinary house flies and glued lengths of thread to their backs. When the flies awoke, they flew around trailing the threads behind them. “It makes them easier to catch,” he said.

  On occasion, Luther walked through downtown Savannah holding a dozen or more threads in his hand, each a different color. Some people walked dogs; Luther walked flies. Now and then, when he visited friends, he took a few of the flies with him and let them loose in the living room.

  At other times, Luther pasted the wings of a wasp on top of a fly’s own wings t
o improve its aerodynamics. Or he made one wing slightly shorter than the other so it would fly in circles the rest of its life.

  It was just this side of Luther, his quirky tinkering, that left people with a lingering uneasiness about whether he might one day pour his bottle of poison into Savannah’s water supply. They worried about this most of all when his well-known demons got the better of him. And whenever Luther walked out of Clary’s without eating breakfast—which he had been doing of late—it was a sign that his demons were stirring.

  This concern was uppermost in my mind, in fact, when Luther was explaining why I should scrub my toilet bowl with a brick. He was telling me about, of all things, Savannah’s water supply. Savannah’s water came from a limestone aquifer, he said. It was rich in calcium bicarbonate, which loses a molecule and turns into crystals of calcium carbonate when it dries. “Hey, listen,” I wanted to say, “what’s this I hear about you and a deadly poison?” But I didn’t. I just thanked him for the advice.

  The next morning when he sat down at the table next to me, I leaned over and gave him the news. “The brick worked,” I said. “Thanks.”

  “Good,” he said. “You could have used a pumice stone instead. That would have done just as well as a brick.”

  Ruth put Luther’s breakfast in front of him, and as usual he began to stare at it. I noticed a bright green thread tied to the buttonhole of his lapel. It hung loosely down the front of his jacket. As Luther stared at his eggs, the green thread became taut; then it swung counterclockwise and came to rest along his left shoulder. It stayed there for a moment, then lifted into the air as if caught in an updraft. It hung aloft, still anchored to his lapel, then floated down and lay across his chest. Luther was oblivious to the movements of the thread and to the antics of the fly at the end of it.

  He saw that I was watching him. “I dunno,” he said with a sigh. “Sometimes I just can’t face going through with breakfast.”