Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil Read Online Free PDF Page B

written the lyrics and sometimes also the music for dozens of songs I’d known since childhood, gentle songs that had a mellow eloquence: “Jeepers Creepers,” “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive,”“Blues in the Night,” “One for My Baby,” “Goody Goody,” “Fools Rush In,” “That Old Black Magic,” “Dream,” “Laura,” “Satin Doll,” “In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening,” and “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe.”
    According to his obituary, Mercer had never lost touch with his hometown. Savannah, he said, had been “a sweet, indolent background for a boy to grow up in.” Even after he moved away, he kept a home on the outskirts of town so he could visit whenever he wanted. The back porch of his house looked out on a tidal creek that meandered through a broad expanse of marshland. In his honor, Savannah had renamed the creek after one of the four Academy Award-winning songs for which he’d written the lyrics, “Moon River.”
    These, then, were the images in my mental gazetteer of Savannah: rum-drinking pirates, strong-willed women, courtly manners, eccentric behavior, gentle words, and lovely music. That and the beauty of the name itself: Savannah.
    On Sunday, my traveling companions went back to New York, but I stayed on in Charleston. I had decided to drive down to Savannah, spend the night, and fly back to New York from there.

    There being no direct route to Savannah from Charleston, I followed a zigzagging course that took me through the tidal flat-lands of the South Carolina low country. As I approached Savannah, the road narrowed to a two-lane blacktop shaded by tall trees. There was an occasional produce stand by the side of the road and a few cottages set into the foliage, but nothing resembling urban sprawl. The voice on the car radio informed me that I had entered a zone called the Coastal Empire. “The weather outlook for the Coastal Empire,” it said, “is for highs in the mid-eighties, with moderate seas and a light chop on inland waters.”
    Abruptly, the trees gave way to an open panorama of marsh grass the color of wheat. Straight ahead, a tall bridge rosesteeply out of the plain. From the top of the bridge, I looked down on the Savannah River and, on the far side, a row of old brick buildings fronted by a narrow esplanade. Behind the buildings a mass of trees extended into the distance, punctuated by steeples, cornices, rooftops, and cupolas. As I descended from the bridge, I found myself plunging into a luxuriant green garden.
    Walls of thick vegetation rose up on all sides and arched overhead in a lacy canopy that filtered the light to a soft shade. It had just rained; the air was hot and steamy. I felt enclosed in a semitropical terrarium, sealed off from a world that suddenly seemed a thousand miles away.
    The streets were lined with townhouses of brick and stucco, handsome old buildings with high front stoops and shuttered windows. I entered a square that had flowering shrubs and a monument at the center. A few blocks farther on, there was another square. Up ahead, I could see a third on line with this one, and a fourth beyond that. To the left and right, there were two more squares. There were squares in every direction. I counted eight of them. Ten. Fourteen. Or was it twelve?
    “There are exactly twenty-one squares,” an elderly lady told me later in the afternoon. Her name was Mary Harty. Acquaintances in Charleston had put us in touch; she had been expecting me. She had white hair and arched eyebrows that gave her a look of permanent surprise. We stood in her kitchen while she mixed martinis in a silver shaker. When she was finished, she put the shaker into a wicker basket. She was going to take me on an excursion, she said. It was too nice a day, and I had too little time in Savannah for us to waste it indoors.
    As far as Miss Harty was concerned, the squares were the jewels of Savannah. No other city in the world had anything like them. There were