Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (21 page)

“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.

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.