by John Berendt
“I told you. I think about dyin’ and bein’ dead. What do you think about?”
“I think how peaceful it is. I think what a wonderful place this is to come to and escape from everything, to just cool out and relax and enjoy the serenity. But I never think about dead people. Looking at these old graves makes me think how generation after generation of the same family are all gathered together. And that makes me think about how life goes on, but not about dying. I never think about dying.”
“Well, I do,” said Danny. “I even think about what kind of grave I’m gonna be buried in. Like, see them big ol’ tombstones over there? They belong to rich people. And see them other ones there—the little ones? Those are for poor people. If I die in Mercer House, I’ll get to have one of the big ones.”
“What a creepy thing to say.”
“Jim Williams is rich,” said Danny. “He’d buy me a big tombstone.” There was nothing joking or boastful in Danny’s voice. He was simply speaking his mind.
“But you’re not getting ready to die, are you?”
“Why not? I ain’t got nothin’ to live for.”
“Everybody has something to live for,” she said.
“Not if they’re fucked up like me.”
Corinne sat down on the moss-encrusted pedestal of a tall obelisk. She took Danny’s hand and pulled him toward her. He sat down next to her. “We all have problems,” she said, “but we don’t go around bumming people out talking about dying.”
“I’m different,” said Danny. “I been on the street since I was fifteen. I quit school in the eighth grade. My family hates me. Bonnie, my girlfriend, won’t marry me, ’Cause I ain’t got a fulltime job.”
“So you’d rather be dead, huh?”
Danny looked down at his feet and shrugged. “Maybe.”
“Well, look at it this way. If you had died last night, you wouldn’t have met me this afternoon. Right? And we wouldn’t have fucked on that four-poster bed the way we did. That was something to live for, wasn’t it?”
Danny took a long drag on the joint and handed it to her. She was sitting on the side of him that had the Confederate flag tattoo. He leaned against her and uttered a low growl.
“Well, was it?” she asked.
“Yeah, it was worth living for,” he said, “but only if there’s more where it came from.” He slid his arm around her waist and kissed the back of her neck, growling softly and nibbling at her like a playful lion cub. She felt a tingle of pleasure. In a moment he was stroking her knee, rubbing her thigh, lifting her off the pedestal, and lowering her onto the ground. She squealed as he rolled on top of her. He lay lightly on her, supporting himself by his elbows to keep from pressing her too hard against the ground. Dried leaves crackled beneath them. She began to moan, louder and louder. Suddenly, he clapped his hand over her mouth and froze, motionless. Startled, she looked up and saw that he had lifted his head; he was peering out through the bushes. She could feel his heart pounding. He lay absolutely still, not moving a muscle. She heard voices. People were approaching. She turned her head and saw several pairs of legs walking along a path that would bring them to within a few feet of where they lay. She and Danny were only partly covered by the bushes. If the people looked in their direction as they passed, they would surely see them. She heard a middle-aged woman speaking in a complaining voice.
“Perpetual care means just what it says. It means taking care of things in perpetuity. Like pulling out weeds and sweeping up debris. Forever. I’m going to stop at the guardhouse and have a word with the groundskeeper before we leave.”
They were twenty feet away now and coming closer. A man’s voice replied. “They do a pretty fair job compared to most places. Anyhow, I can’t imagine Granny minds a few weeds or a couple of twigs lying around.”
“Well, I do mind,” the woman persisted. “And I want to know that when I’m laid to rest, someone will tend the plot in perpetuity, as they’ve been paid to do.”
The legs were walking right by them now. Corinne held her breath. “Suit yourself,” said the man. “We’ll wait for you in the car.”
They had passed. They had not noticed. Danny relaxed his grip on Corinne’s mouth and resumed having sex as easily as if he were picking up a conversation dropped in mid-sentence. Co-rinne was swept away by his staying power and by his ability throughout the entire terrifying interruption to maintain a rock-hard erection.
On the way back to the car he walked with a spring in his step. Corinne took his hand in hers. She had rescued him from morbid thoughts, and that pleased her. He was moody, all right, but what did that matter? She had found the perfect sexual playmate. He was aglow, and she was aglow—but for very different reasons, as she discovered when he turned to her in the car and asked, “Will you marry me?”
She was not so much taken aback as surprised at the absurdity of it. “But we just met three hours ago!” she said. She started to laugh, but she realized almost at once, when she saw his expression suddenly turn grim, that his offer had been heartfelt. She had wounded him.
“You’re gonna marry one of them two assholes at the beach, aren’t you?” he said softly.
“No,” she said. “I don’t know them well enough either.”
“Sure you do. They got money. They got an education. What else do you need to know?”
She had hurt him deeply, and she was crushed. She was touched that he was so desperate to be loved. “I had a wonderful time today,” she said gently. “I really did. I—”
“But you won’t marry me. You’ll never marry me.”
She struggled for words. “Well, but I … I certainly want to see you again. I mean, we can get together often and, you know, we can—”
She did not see the back of his hand coming at her until it struck her a glancing blow on the cheek. It would have landed with more force, but Danny had floored the accelerator at the same moment and swung sharply onto Abercorn Street, throwing her against the door and out of reach. They roared south on Abercorn, swerving from lane to lane, passing one car after another. It was getting dark.
Corinne cowered as far away from him as she could get. Her cheek felt numb. “Please take me home,” she pleaded.
“When I’m goddamn good and ready,” he snapped.
They sped south. Two miles, three miles, five miles. They sailed past the Mall, past Armstrong State College. Corinne felt dizzy. She could think only of Danny’s death wish and that now he would kill them both. Surely the vodka, the piña coladas, and the marijuana had taken their toll. He would drive off the road; he would slam into another car. She was frightened just looking at him: He was so utterly changed. His jaw was set. A diabolical fire lit his eyes. He held the wheel in a ferocious grip. It all seemed like a horrible, surreal nightmare. Suddenly, his image began to flicker before her eyes—the back of his head, his shoulders, his arms, his face, his whole body—as if caught in the beam of a stroboscopic light. She was about to lose consciousness when she heard sirens. It was the police.
The rage drained out of Danny as quickly as it had flared up. He lifted his foot off the gas and pulled over onto the shoulder. Three squad cars quickly hemmed him in, blue lights flashing. The crackle of two-way radios filled the air. The policemen shouted at Danny and ordered him out of the car. He turned imploringly to Corinne, his face once again sweet, his voice childlike. “Get me out of this, will you?”
They did not see each other again after that. Corinne was still shaken by their encounter months later when she told me about it in Clary’s drugstore. She had made mistakes before, she said, and she would make them again. But not like this, she hoped. She had watched Danny from afar for months—studied him, worshiped him, stalked him. In all that time, it never entered her mind that he might turn out to be so volatile. She had thought of him only as a walking streak of sex, and about that, at least, she had not been wrong.
Chapter 10
IT AIN’T BRAGGIN’ IF Y’REALLY DONE IT
On the whole, the thirty-odd residents of
Monterey Square regarded their neighbor Jim Williams with a respectful friendliness. Several were on his Christmas-party invitation list. Others were more wary and kept their distance. Virginia Duncan, who lived with her husband in a townhouse on Taylor Street, for example, still remembered the chill she felt when she came out of her house two years ago and saw the swastika hanging from Williams’s window. John C. Lebey, a retired architect, had fought a number of acrimonious battles with Williams, all concerning what Williams described as Lebey’s “destructive incompetence” in matters of architecture and historic preservation. So Mr. Lebey had no use for Jim Williams. But the Lebey-Williams feud was a mere quibble compared with the cold war that raged between Williams and his next-door neighbors, Lee and Emma Adler.
The Adlers lived in an elegant double townhouse that occupied the other of the two trust lots on the west side of Monterey Square. Their side windows looked directly across Wayne Street at Williams’s parlor and the ballroom above. It was the Adlers’ howling dog that had prompted Williams to play his thunderous version of César Franck’s “Pièce Héroïque” on the organ. But the dog’s bark was only one sour note in a whole medley of bitterness that existed between the two households.
Lee Adler, like Jim Williams, had played a central role in the restoration of Savannah’s historic downtown. His approach was entirely different, however. While Williams’s efforts had involved his own restoration of houses, Adler had been an organizer and fund-raiser who left the actual restoration work to others. Adler had helped create a revolving fund for the purpose of buying old houses that were in imminent danger of being razed; the houses were then sold as soon as possible to people who promised to restore them properly. Lee Adler’s accomplishments had been so successful, and his participation so energetic, that he had emerged as a national spokesman for revolving funds and historic preservation. In recent years he had turned his attention to renovating old houses for poor blacks. He toured the country making speeches. He was elected to the board of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. He lunched at the White House. His name appeared frequently in The New York Times and in national magazines. Now in his mid-fifties, Lee Adler was probably the best-known Savannahian outside Savannah.
Lee Adler’s national prominence inspired a fair amount of resentment in Savannah. It was widely felt, in Savannah at least, that Adler’s manner was bombastic and peremptory, that he was an autocrat, and that he stepped on toes needlessly. He was accused, openly and behind his back, of taking more credit than was really due him for the renaissance of Savannah. It was said that he hogged the limelight, that he was insincere, and that his only interest in historic preservation was to use it as a means to gain fame and make money. Jim Williams was among those who felt this way about him.
Adler and Williams were outwardly civil, but just barely. Adler had been a member of the Telfair museum’s board of directors when Jim Williams was president, and from time to time their animosity spilled out into the open at board meetings. On one occasion, Adler accused Williams of stealing furniture from the museum. Williams denied it and countercharged that Adler was trying to blacken the name of anyone who had more power over the museum’s affairs than he did. Eventually, Williams engineered a plot that forced Adler off the board, and Adler never forgave him.
Williams was contemptuous of virtually everything about Lee Adler—his taste in art, his word of honor, even his house. A visitor once rang Williams’s doorbell by mistake and asked if Mr. Adler was at home. Williams told the man, “Mr. Adler doesn’t live here. He lives in half the double house next door.”
Lee Adler was no less disparaging of Williams. He believed him to be fundamentally dishonest and said so. Furthermore, he suspected the Nazi flag episode was more than a lighthearted attempt to foil a crew of moviemakers. He let it be known that a letter addressed to Williams from the John Birch Society had once been delivered to his house. Adler was critical of Jim Williams’s “decadent” life-style, but he was just curious enough about it to get out his binoculars and spy on one of Williams’s all-male Christmas parties. Adler had clumsily forgotten to turn out the light behind himself and was silhouetted in the window. Williams saw him, waved, and drew his shutters.
In spite of all this, there were restraining factors that kept the two men on a civil footing most of the time. Lee Adler was Leopold Adler II, the grandson of the founder of Adler’s department store, Savannah’s answer to Saks Fifth Avenue, and his mother was a niece of Julius Rosenwald of the Sears Roebuck fortune. Emma Adler was the sole heir to the biggest block of stock in the Savannah Bank. She had been president of the Junior League and was an active member of several civic organizations. So, the reality of the situation was that both Jim Williams and the Adlers were prominent, influential, and rich. They lived in such close proximity and moved in so many of the same circles that they felt obliged to remain on cordial terms. Which was why, despite his loathing for them, Jim Williams always invited the Adlers to his Christmas parties. And why, even though they detested Williams in return, the Adlers always accepted.
Early one bright April morning, Lee Adler came toward me with a broad smile on his face and an arm outstretched in greeting. “Shake the hand that’s going to shake the hand of the Prince of Wales!” he said.
Mr. Adler was making a jocular reference to an article in the morning paper announcing that he and his wife would be traveling to Washington at the end of the week to meet Prince Charles of England. The Adlers and the prince were to participate in a discussion of low-income housing. Adler assumed I had read the article, and of course I had. Most of Savannah had read it, and to judge from Mr. Adler’s ebullient mood, he either did not know or did not care what certain people were saying about it.
“It’s just another of Leopold’s cheap, self-promotional ploys,” Jim Williams said. But the rolling of eyes and clearing of throats was not limited to people who disliked Lee Adler. Katherine Gore, a lifelong friend of the Adlers, also found the news distasteful. “I would like to meet Prince Charles too,” she said, “but I would never stoop so low to do it. Low-income housing, indeed!”
Adler and I were standing in Adler’s office on the ground floor of his townhouse. This was the command post from which he directed his many projects in real estate and historic preservation. A telephone rang in another room. Somewhere a copy machine churned. The walls of his office were decorated with memorabilia of Adler’s role in the remarkable renaissance of Savannah’s historic district. The photographs documented parallel transformations that had taken place over the past twenty-five years: Savannah regaining the splendor of its youth and a youthful Lee Adler progressing by stages into silver-haired middle age.
Adler wore half-moon glasses and a pale, rumpled summer suit. His speech was a soft, cajoling drawl. We had met a week earlier at a garden party given by a local historian, and Adler had offered to take me on a tour of Savannah to show me, stage by stage, how Savannah had been saved from the wrecker’s ball. As we got into his car, he let me know he was aware of all the carping going on behind his back.
“Do you know what the saying for the day is?” he asked. “‘It ain’t braggin’ if y’really done it!’” He gave me a meaningful glance over the top of his glasses, as if to say: Never mind all the backbiting you’ve been hearing. It’s sour grapes.
We pulled away from the curb and began moving through the streets at ten miles an hour. As we did, the visual treasures of Savannah flowed by in slow motion—townhouses, mansions, shadowed gardens, well-tended squares.
“Picture all of this deserted and empty,” said Adler. “Imagine it run-down—windows broken, weatherboards unpainted and rotting, shutters falling off, roofs caving in. Think what the squares would look like if they were nothing but hard-packed dirt instead of grass and azaleas and beautiful landscaping. Because that’s the way it used to be. That’s why Lady Astor called Savannah ‘a beautiful woman with a dirty face’ when she came here after the Second World War. That’s what Savannah had allowed
itself to become. And what’s frightening is that while it was happening, nobody gave one goddamn.”
A truck behind us honked its horn. Adler pulled over to let it pass, then kept moving at a slow pace, continuing the story of Savannah’s decline. Until the 1920s, he said, Savannah had remained basically intact—an architecturally exquisite nineteenth-century town. But the flight to the suburbs was just then beginning. People moved out of the lovely old houses downtown. They cut them into apartments, tore them down, or just boarded them up and left them empty. In those days all the money was being funneled into the development of the suburbs, which was fortunate for Savannah in one respect: It meant there was no clamor to bulldoze massive areas downtown for housing developments. Nor did Savannah have superhighways slicing through the center of it the way other cities did, because Savannah was not on the way to somewhere else. It was geographically the end of the line.
In the mid-1950s, almost a third of the old city was gone. Then in 1954, the owners of a funeral parlor announced plans to knock down a dilapidated tenement so they could use the space for a parking lot, and a number of concerned citizens rose up in protest. The tenement happened to be Davenport House, one of the finest examples of Federal architecture in America. It was a shambles at the time; eleven families were crowded into it. Seven ladies got together, Lee Adler’s mother being one of them, and saved Davenport House and restored it. They then formed the Historic Savannah Foundation, and that was the beginning of Savannah’s salvation.
In the early days, Historic Savannah had a vigilante committee that sounded the alarm when an old house was about to be demolished. But the committee had no power to prevent demolition of houses, or even to gain a stay of execution. All it could do was try to find some sympathetic soul who would buy the endangered building and restore it. Most of the time the house came down before the committee could find anybody to save it. It soon became clear that the only way to save old houses was to buy them. And that was when Lee Adler became involved.