Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: A Savannah Story - Couverture souple

Berendt, John

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0679762833 ISBN 13 : 9780679762836

Editeur : Random House Large Print, 1995

Synopsis

Book by Berendt John

A propos du livre

Extrait :

He was tall, about fifty, with darkly handsome, almost sinister features: a neatly trimmed mustache, hair turning sliver
at the temples, and eyes so black they were like the tinted windows of a sleek limousine - he could see out, but you
couldn't see in. We were sitting in the living room of his Victorian house. It was a mansion, really, with fifteen-foot ceilings
and large, well-proportioned rooms. A graceful spiral stairway rose from the center hall toward a domed skylight.
There was a ballroom on the second floor. It was Mercer House, one of the last of Savannah's great houses still in private
hands. Together with the walled garden and the carriage house in back, it occupied an entire city block. If Mercer
House was not quite the biggest private house in Savannah, it was certainly the most grandly furnished. Architectural Digest
had devoted six pages to it. A book on the interiors of the world's great houses featured it alongside Sagamore Hill,
Biltmore, and Chartwell. Mercer House was the envy of house-proud Savannah. Jim Williams lived in it alone.

Williams was smoking a King Edward cigarillo. "What I enjoy most," he said, "is living like an aristocrat without the
burden of having to be one. Blue bloods are so inbred and weak. All those generations of importance and grandeur to
live up to. No wonder they lack ambition. I don't envy them. It's only the trappings of aristocracy that I find
worthwhile - the fine furniture, the paintings, the sliver--the very things they have to sell when the money runs out. And
it always does. Then all they're left with is their lovely manners."

He spoke in a drawl as soft as velvet. The walls of his house were hung with portraits of European and American
aristocrats - by Gainsborough, Hudson, Reynolds, Whistler. The provenance of his possessions traced back to dukes and
duchesses, kings, queens, czars, emperors, and dictators. "Anyhow," he said, "royalty is better."

Williams tapped a cigar ash into a sliver ashtray. A dark gray tiger cat climbed up and settled in his lap. He stroked
it gently. "I know I'm apt to give the wrong impression, living the way I do. But I'm not trying to fool anyone. Years
ago I was showing a group of visitors through the house and I noticed one man giving his wife the high sign. I saw him
mouth the words 'old money!' The man was David Howard, the world's leading expert on armorial Chinese porcelain. I
took him aside afterward and said, 'Mr. Howard, I was born in Gordon, Georgia. That's a little town near Macon. The
biggest thing in Gordon is a chalk mine. My father was a barber, and my mother worked as a secretary for the mine.
My money - what there is of it - is about eleven years old.' Well, the man was completely taken aback. 'Do you know
what made me think you were from an old family,' he said, 'apart from the portraits and the antiques? Those chairs over
there. The needlework on the covers is unraveling. New money would mend it right away. Old money would leave it
just as it is.' 'I know that,' I told him. 'Some of my best customers are old money.'"

* * *

I had heard Jim Williams's name mentioned often during the six months I had lived in Savannah. The house was one reason,
son, but there were others. He was a successful dealer in antiques and restorer of old houses. He had been president of
the Telfair Academy, the local art museum. His by-line had appeared in Antiques magazine, and the magazine's editor,
Wendell Garrett, spoke of him as a genius: "He has an extraordinary eye for finding stuff. He trusts his own judgment,
and he's willing to take chances. He'll hop on a plane and go anywhere to an auction - to New York, to London,
to Geneva. But at heart he's a southern chauvinist, very much a son of the region. I don't think he cares much for
Yankees."

Williams had played an active role in the restoration of Savannah's historic district, starting in the mid-1950s. Georgia
Fawcett, a longtime preservationist, recalled how difficult it had been to get people involved in saving downtown Savannah
in those early days. "The old part of town had become a slum," she said. "The banks had red-lined the whole
area. The great old houses were failing into ruin or being demolished to make way for gas stations and parking lots, and
you couldn't borrow any money from the banks to go in and save them. Prostitutes strolled along the streets. Couples
with children were afraid to live downtown, because it was considered dangerous." Mrs. Fawcett had been a member of
a small group of genteel preservationists who had tried since the 1930s to stave off the gas stations and save the houses.
"One thing we did do," she said. "We got the bachelors interested."

Jim Williams was one of the bachelors. He bought a row of one-story brick tenements on East Congress Street, restored
the whole row, and sold it. Soon he was buying, restoring, and selling dozens of houses all over downtown
Savannah. Stories in the newspapers drew attention to his restorations, and his antiques business grew. He started going
to Europe once a year on buying trips. He was discovered by society hostesses. The improvement in Williams'
fortunes paralleled the renaissance of Savannah's historic district. By the early 1970s, couples with children came back
downtown, and the prostitutes moved over to Montgomery Street.

Feeling flush, Williams bought Cabbage Island, one of the sea islands that form an archipelago along the Georgia
coast. Cabbage Island was a folly. It covered eighteen hundred acres, all but five of which lay under water at high tide.
He paid $5,000 for it in 1966. Old salts at the marina told him he had been duped: Cabbage Island had been on the
market for half that sum the year before. Five thousand dollars was a lot of money for a soggy piece of real estate you
couldn't even build a house on. But a few months later phosphates were discovered under several coastal islands, including
Cabbage Island. Williams sold out to Kerr-McGee of Oklahoma for $660,000. Several property owners on
neighboring islands laughed at him for jumping at the bait too quickly. They held out for a higher price. Weeks later,
the state of Georgia outlawed drilling along the coast. The phosphate deal was dead, and as it turned out, Williams
was the only one who had sold in time. His after-tax profit was a half million dollars.

Now he bought far grander houses. One of them was Armstrong House, a monumental Italian Renaissance palazzo
directly across Bull Street from the staid Oglethorpe Club. Armstrong House dwarfed the Oglethorpe Club, and,
according to local lore, that was very much its purpose. George Armstrong, a shipping magnate, was said to have
built the house in 1919 in response to being blackballed by the club. Although that story was not, in fact, true, Armstrong
House was a lion of a house. It gloated and glowered and loomed. It even had a curving colonnade that reached
out like a giant paw as if to swat the Oglethorpe Club off its high horse across the street.

The outrageous magnificence of Armstrong House appealed to Williams and to his growing appetite for grandeur.
He was not a member of the Oglethorpe Club. Bachelors from middle Georgia who sold antiques were not likely to be
asked to join - not that it bothered him. He installed his antiques shop in Armstrong House for a year and then sold the
house to the law firm of Bouhan, Williams and Levy and went on about the business of living like, if not being, an
aristocrat. He made more frequent buying trips to Europe--in style now, on the QE2--and sent back whole container
loads of important paintings and fine English furniture. He bought his first pieces of Faberge. Williams was gaining stature
in Savannah, to the irritation of certain blue bloods. "How does it feel to be nouveau riche?" he was asked on one
occasion. "It's the riche that counts," Williams answered. Having said that, he bought Mercer House.

Mercer House had been empty for more than ten years. It stood at the west end of Monterey Square, the most elegant
of Savannah's many tree-shaded squares. It was an Italianate mansion of red brick with tall, arched windows set off by
ornate ironwork balconies. It sat back from the street, aloof behind its apron of lawn and its cast-iron fence, not so much
looking out on the square as presiding over it. The most recent occupants of the house, the Shriners, had used it as the
Alee Temple. They had hung a neon-lit scimitar over the front door and driven around inside on motorcycles. Williams
set about restoring the house to something greater than its original elegance. When work was completed in
1970, he gave a black-tie Christmas party and invited the cream of Savannah society. On the night of his party, every
window of Mercer House was ablaze with candlelight; every room had sparkling chandeliers. Clusters of onlookers stood
outside watching the smart arrivals and staring in amazement at the beautiful house that had been dark for so long.
A pianist played cocktail music on the grand piano downstairs; an organist played classical pieces in the ballroom
above. Butlers in white jackets circulated with silver trays. Ladies in long gowns moved up and down the spiral stairs in
rivers of satin and silk chiffon. Old Savannah was dazzled.

The party soon became a permanent fixture on Savannah's social calendar. Williams always scheduled it to occur at the
climax of the winter season - the night before the Cotillion's debutante ball. That Friday night became known as the
night of Jim Williams' Christmas party. It was the Party of the Year, and this was no small accomplishment for Williams.
"You have to understand," a sixth-generation Savannahian declared, "Savannah takes its parties very seriously.
This is a town where gentlemen own their own white tie and tails. We don't rent them. So it's quite a tribute to Jim that
he has been able to make so prominent a place for himself on the social scene, in spite of not being a native Savannahian
and being a bachelor."

The food at Williams' parties was always provided by Savannah's most sought-after cateress, Lucille Wright. Mrs.
Wright was a light-skinned black woman whose services were so well regarded that Savannah's leading hostesses had
been known to change the date of a party if she was not available. Mrs. Wright's touch was easy to spot. Guests
would nibble on a cheese straw or eat a marinated shrimp or take a bite of a tomato finger sandwich and smile knowingly.
"Lucille . . . !" they would say, and nothing more needed to be said. (Lucille Wright's tomato sandwiches were
never soggy. She patted the tomato slices with paper towels first. That was just one of her many secrets.) Her clients held
her in high esteem. "She's a real lady," they often said, and you could tell from the way they said it that they considered
that high praise for a black woman. Mrs. Wright admired her patrons in return, although she did confide that Savannah's
hostesses, even the rich ones, tended to come to her and say, "Now, Lucille, I want a nice party, but I don't want
to spend too much money." Jim Williams was not like that. "He likes things done in the grand style," Mrs. Wright said,
"and he's very liberal with his money. Very. Very. He always tells me, 'Lucille, I'm having two hundred people and I want
low-country food and plenty of it. I don't want to run out. Get what you need. I don't care what it costs.'"

Jim Williams' Christmas party was, in the words of the Georgia Gazette, the party that Savannah socialites "lived
for." Or lived without, for Williams enjoyed changing his guest list from year to year. He wrote names on file cards
and arranged them in two stacks: an In stack and an Out stack. He shunted the cards from one stack to the other and
made no secret of it. If a person had displeased him in any way during the year, that person would do penance come
Christmas. "My Out stack," he once told the Gazette, "is an inch thick."

* * *
An early-evening mist had turned the view of Monterey Square into a soft-focus stage set with pink azaleas billowing
beneath a tattered valance of live oaks and Spanish moss. The pale marble pedestal of the Pulaski monument glowed
hazily in the background. A copy of the book At Home in Savannah--Great Interiors lay on Williams' coffee table. I
had seen the same book on several other coffee tables in Savannah, but here the effect was surreal: The cover photograph
was of this very room.

For the better part of an hour, Williams had taken me on a tour of Mercer House and his antiques shop, which was quartered in the carriage house. In the ballroom, he played the pipe organ, first a piece by Bach, then "I Got Rhythm." Finally, to demonstrate the organ's deafening power, he played a passage from Cesar Franck's "Piece Heroique." "When my neighbors let their dogs howl all night," said Williams,
"this is what they get in return." In the dining room, he showed me his royal treasures: Queen Alexandra's silverware,
the Duchess of Richmond's porcelain, and a silver service for sixty that had belonged to a Russian grand duke.
The coat of arms from the door of Napoleon's coronation carriage hung on the wall in the study. Here and there
around the house lay Faberge objects--cigarette cases, ornaments, jewel boxes - the trappings of aristocracy, nobility,
royalty. As we moved from room to room, tiny red lights flickered in electronic recognition of our presence.

Williams was wearing gray slacks and a blue cotton shirt turned up at the sleeves. His heavy black shoes and thick
rubber soles were oddly out of place in the elegance of Mercer House, but practical; Williams spent several hours a day
on his feet restoring antique furniture in his basement workshop. His hands were raw and callused, but they had been
scrubbed clean of stains and grease.

"If there's a single trait common to all Savannahians," he was saying, "it's their love of money and their unwillingness
to spend it."

"Then who buys those high-priced antiques I just saw in your shop?" I asked.

"That's exactly my point," he said. "People from out town. Atlanta, New Orleans, New York. That's where I
most of my business. When I find an especially fine piece furniture I send a photograph of it to a New York dealer.
don't waste time trying to sell it here in Savannah. It's not that people in Savannah aren't rich enough. It's just that
they're very cheap. I'll give you an example.

"There's a woman here, a grande dame at the very apex of society and one of the richest people in the Southeast, let
alone Savannah. She owns a copper mine. She built a big house in an exclusive part of town, a replica of a famous
Louisiana plantation house with huge white columns and curved stairs. You can see it from the water. Everybody goes,
'Oooo, look!' when they pass by it. I adore her. She's been like a mother to me. But she's the cheapest woman who ever
lived! Some years ago she ordered a pair of iron gates for her house. They were designed and built especially for her. But
when they were delivered she pitched a fit, said they were horrible, said they were filth. 'Take them away,' she said, 'I
never want to see them again!' Then she tore up the bill, which was for $1,400 - a fair amount of money in those
days.

"The foundry took the gates back, but they didn't know what to do with them. After all, there wasn't much demand
for a pair of ornamental gates exactly that size. The only thing they could do was to sell the iron for its scrap val...

Présentation de l'éditeur :

Shots rang out in Savannah's grandest mansion in the misty,early morning hours of May 2, 1981.  Was it murder or self-defense?  For nearly a decade, the shooting and its aftermath reverberated throughout this hauntingly beautiful city of moss-hung oaks and shaded squares.  John Berendt's sharply observed, suspenseful, and witty narrative reads like a thoroughly engrossing novel, and yet it is a work of nonfiction.  Berendt skillfully interweaves a hugely entertaining first-person account of life in this isolated remnant of the Old South with the unpredictable twists and turns of a landmark murder case.

It is a spellbinding story peopled by a gallery of remarkable characters: the well-bred society ladies of the Married Woman's Card Club; the turbulent young redneck gigolo; the hapless recluse who owns a bottle of poison so powerful it could kill every man, woman, and child in Savannah; the aging and profane Southern belle who is the "soul of pampered self-absorption"; the uproariously funny black drag queen; the acerbic and arrogant antiques dealer; the sweet-talking, piano-playing con artist; young blacks dancing the minuet at the black debutante ball; and Minerva, the voodoo priestess who works her magic in the graveyard at midnight.  These and other Savannahians act as a Greek chorus, with Berendt revealing the alliances, hostilities, and intrigues that thrive in a town where everyone knows everyone else.

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is a sublime and seductive reading experience.  Brilliantly conceived and masterfully written, this enormously engaging portrait of a most beguiling Southern city has become a modern classic.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Random House Large Print
• Date d'édition: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0679762833
• ISBN 13: 9780679762836
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 562