Savannah Flashback
(photo, thanks to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_eclipse)
Chapter 1: The Zone of Totality:
Eclipse (3/7/1970)
An early spring filled Forsyth Park with azaleas. The dogwoods laced the pink with white. Pigeons puffed their breasts, flashing the sparrows and mocking birds. The chill spray of Forsyth Fountain saturated the morning breeze. It was nearly noon and a gathering of people grew on the long side porch and in front of Twenty-four West Gaston Street. Dr. Landry, owner of the house, stood on the porch, sipping a weak scotch and water and talking to the congregating guests. It was warm for March 7, though increasingly overcast to everyone's disappointment. Most had come to see the celestial event of 1970, a total eclipse, a rare event in Savannah, even rarer on a Saturday.
Dr. Landry lit a cigarette. He was a tall man, and though he was thin, he had an elegance and grace that made his every movement a significant gesture. He dressed well, wearing a deep purple turtleneck shirt and a silver medallion from Mexico. At thirty-five he was already gray with thin hair, almost no eyebrows and a huge forehead. His nose was long and aristocratic. Landry had grown up in Tulsa, and had he been wearing a broad brim hat, jeans and boots, he would have been the picture of a cowboy. As it was, he reminded a number of his colleagues of Don Quixote.
He didn't know quite what to make of this gathering consisting of gay friends, students from Armstrong College, and recent acquaintances both straight and gay, a few who seemed determined to induct him into the hippie movement. He thought of the afternoon two weeks before, a warm February afternoon filled with sunshine. Bill, Eddie, and David were waiting for him, then, when he arrived home from Armstrong. They were sitting butt naked on his porch steps, easily visible from the sidewalk. He had laughed, but the sight of them had been anything but funny.
David and Eddie were there now, wearing bell-bottom jeans and T-shirts, and talking to other friends below in the entrance way.
" Do you think we'll be able to see it?" Eddie asked. "How dark will it get?"
David was the astronomy expert, having taken two courses in college on the subject. "We shall find out soon enough." This was his first total eclipse and he had no idea how dark it would get.
David was infatuated with Eddie, having realized that, after dating Eddie’s sister for over a year, it was Eddie to whom he was really attracted. There was only one problem--Eddie was obsessed with girls. This had not prevented them from becoming college roommates at the University of Georgia in Athens; but it had proved a distressing obstacle to David's sharing Eddie’s bed.
"I thought it was supposed to begin ten minutes ago." Susan was saying to Dr. Landry. At first he didn’t know what she meant.
"I think that’s just the partial eclipse," Landry remembered. "It doesn't get dark until the eclipse is total." He knew this from what David had told him; but he found the whole event disconcerting and like an uneasy dream.
The sun appeared momentarily and everyone's attention turned upward. Several people peered through filters and specially made sunglasses that were supposed to be safe. One student was projecting an image of the sun on paper with a lens. Another had a pinhole cardboard unit that allowed several people to watch a projection of the sun's disk. " Look, you can see the crescent shadow." one girl was yelling. Then, the sun slid behind the canopy of cloud again.
Susan spotted Charlotte Lane arriving. The two young women had recently taken an apartment together on the corner of Bull and Liberty streets, across from the Hilton Hotel. They both played in the Armstrong Players' current production of Uncle Vanya, which would open in a month. Susan waved as Charlotte noticed her on the balcony.
Charlotte was slender, wore large, unflattering glasses, and wore her long, auburn hair loose about her shoulders. Eddie noticed her the minute she arrived and, like Susan, had waved. Eddie was tall and imposing, cornering Charlotte before she reached the steps to the porch. David, standing near, smiled to her, "I didn’t think you'd make it to our event."
"Oh, I wouldn't miss it." Charlotte answered, "Not to see the eclipse, but to watch everyone's crazed reactions."
"How were rehearsals last night?" asked Eddie. He had invited Susan and Charlotte to accompany him to Pinkie Masters’, a gathering place for journalists, a forum for political types, and a friendly neighborhood bar, all in one. They had declined because of the play.
"We are far from ready, I'm afraid. Chekhov is too subtle for Armstrong, in my opinion. Langston tries to get at the nuances, but we just don't have the range of experience. The characters are just caricatures so far." Langston was Ben Langston, the black theater professor who was perhaps too ambitious in his choice of plays. He hoped to do a production of A Streetcar Named Desire next.
Dr. Landry approached with Susan. "It doesn't look promising," he said, pointing to the sky and looking primarily at David. "If you like, there's coffee made inside; or, if you prefer, have a drink." He made the last offer with hesitation. The drinking age was eighteen, but giving drinks to students was frowned upon, officially.
"Do you have any beer?" Eddie asked.
"There are several in the fridge," answered Landry. "You are over eighteen, aren't you?"
Being twenty, Eddie saw nothing funny in the question, but David, who was twenty-two, laughed at the joke. To David, Landry was ancient.
"Any chance of making a Bloody Mary?" suggested Susan.
"Help yourself. There isn't any mix, but all the ingredients are there."
As noon passed, the rooms of the Gaston Street house filled. Susan and Charlotte moved to the study. Most others gathered in the large living room, passing through the arched doorway that was mirrored by an arching window which revealed Forsyth park across Gaston Street, and allowed the guests a glimpse of the sky. The living room held many of Landry’s collection of exquisite antiques: Hepplewhite chairs, Louis XVI chairs and sofa, a Louis XV chest with curved, inlaid mahogany drawers, and several Nineteenth Century paintings and drawings. The white, carved mantle over the fireplace held matching blue and white Chinese porcelain vases. A gilded mirror rose above the mantle to just below the fourteen foot high ceiling. Two tall windows to the right of the grand arching window faced Whittaker Street and were covered with light green sheers and valence curtains that filled the room with a diffuse glow. Landry’s jet black Burmese cat, Fergus, eyed the visitors with contempt from beneath the Louis XV commode.
David loved this room. It included everything that was missing from his family's house in Ardsley Park. The rooms in that house were dark and cluttered. The furniture there was cheap and warped. The curtains were thick and ugly, allowing no light to penetrate the gloomy interiors. Both his parents, now divorced, had abandoned the house to his brother Skip when David had been away at the University. The walls inside and out were peeling. Plaster was falling from many of the twenty-three ceilings. David had begun calling the house "Battey House," not so much because it dominated the corner of Forty-ninth and Battey streets, but because of the increasingly weird occurrences there.
David sat in one of the Louis XVI chairs and placed his coffee cup on the marble side table. He felt comfortable in this space, as if he had lived a more elegant life himself in a prior lifetime. He scanned the room, admiring its art . He got up and walked over to the three Hogarth engravings to the left of the mantle. They were labeled "Morning," "Noon," and "Night." Each depicted a scene in London at different times of day. Hogarth’s biting satire revealed the vanity and foolishness of every class of citizen, from a lady with a fan trying to ignore the muck and poverty around her to an old woman emptying a chamber pot onto a crowded street below her window as a black woman kissed and fondled a buxom white woman, and a coach crashed and burned to the distress of the riders hanging out of the carriage. David realized that these scenes were drawn the same year Savannah was founded.
In the study, Charlotte was admiring Landry’s books. She sipped the Bloody Mary Susan had made for her as she scanned the literature and poetry, all neatly arranged on the built-in bookcases by period and author. There were several shelves devoted to Yeats about whom Landry was writing a book of his own.
Susan sat watching Charlotte from a red wing chair. "Did you know that Kahil Gibran used to visit this house?" she asked.
"Did he? Whatever for?" Charlotte replied.
"He was in love with the owner, Mary Haskell. She was a rich widow. When he came to the U.S. from Lebanon, he always came here. In fact, he left her a collection of his drawings which are now in the Telfair Academy." Susan knew she was mixing things up.
"They slept together? Here, in this house?" Charlotte thought of the swirling naked figures in Gibran’s The Prophet. She looked at Susan with skepticism.
"I'm sure they did." Susan speculated.
People were now passing freely from room to room. Three students found their way into the bedroom where they shared a marijuana joint. Landry himself had tried grass, but had mixed feelings about its benefits. He would have been unhappy to see students smoking in his bedroom, but he was still out on the porch chatting with guests.
David wandered from the living room towards the study. He looked around for Eddie. David walked up to the large mirror in the hallway. He attempted to comb with his hand his shoulder length, brown hair. He looked at his mustache, Fu Man Chu style, and felt pleased with its growth. David was short and a bit overweight, but his features were handsome and he was happy enough with his appearance to wink at himself. Entering the study, he spoke to Susan and Charlotte. "Have you two given up on the eclipse?"
"Isn't it still cloudy out?" Susan replied, quite comfortable in the wing chair.
"Yes, but in a few minutes I think it will get really dark, like nighttime. It'll be interesting to watch. By the way, have either of you seen Eddie?"
"I think he's already gone outside," Charlotte suggested.
David turned to Susan, "You look relaxed."
"I am." Susan smiled.
Susan was relaxed because her mind was adrift. She floated not to another place but to another time. Susan had been in 24 West Gaston only once before, on New Year's Eve. On that night, she had helped put on a surprise party for Landry which he had almost missed. While he dined at Johnny Harris restaurant with colleagues from Armstrong, Eddie and David climbed through one of the study windows and opened the front door to a dozen of their friends. That was at eight. By the time Landry arrived home around ten, most of the party were drunk, stoned on grass, or both. Several of the group had decided to stage a "nude-in," as well and were walking from room to room stark naked.
Landry had invited Larry Kilpatrick, chair of the English Department, and a few other Armstrong professors back for a drink and a quiet, uneventful celebration of the new decade.
"It looks like you have guests," Kilpatrick exclaimed as Landry parked his Volkswagen in front of the house. Larry had arrived just ahead of Landry and was watching the silhouettes moving behind the sheers of the arch window. "How clever of you to have a surprise shindig arranged for us."
"The surprise is on me, I'm afraid," Landry replied, feigning amusement, but actually feeling a blend of anger and alarm. "You'd better let me go ahead and see what's going on."
Landry couldn't persuade Kilpatrick to wait, however, nor two other profs who arrived simultaneously. They had all marched up the side entrance and the porch steps together.
On opening his front door, Landry was mortified. Not only had people broken into his home, they were having an orgy; or so he thought as he walked into the hallway. Fortunately, Kilpatrick saved the situation. He removed his Stetson and laughed a deep, throaty laugh, saying hello to a student he recognized from one of his own classes. Landry was relieved by his taking charge and accepting the embarrassing affair.
His other colleagues showed nothing short of delight, getting an unexpected eyeful. Only Dr. Brown, who arrived several minutes later, was scandalized and shared Landry’s fear that the police would arrive any second and take them all to jail.
Susan smiled to herself as she recalled the looks on the professors’ faces. She had never met Landry before, but recognized him immediately-- the one resembling Don Quixote on losing a battle. She walked up to him, watching as he scanned her naked body, especially her breasts. He seemed fascinated. She reached to put her hand casually on his shoulder, no mean feat considering she was only five foot three. "You must be Dr. Landry, I presume." She had said.
"I don't believe I have had the pleasure of your introduction." Landry answered, charmed in spite of himself.
"Susan Kraft. The pleasure is all mine."
"You should see the smirk on your face," said Charlotte, waking Susan from her daydream. "What are you smiling about?"
"I was thinking of the last time I was in this room."
"New Year's Eve?" Charlotte recalled the party. "You served us all warm cinnamon flavored milk and honey and fed us grapes. It was a pagan spree."
"And the happiest pagan was Dr. Kilpatrick, drooling like a goat over the naked bodies. Do you remember the look on Landry’s face when he got home?"
"All I remember is getting drunk on Landry’s brandy. And I remember how out of it David and Eddie were. It was a wonder we all survived the night."
"The last thing I recall," said Susan, "was falling asleep in the bathroom. You, David, Eddie and I were crawling from the hallway to the little half bath. And Bill and Mary were staring at us in disbelief. Landry and the other professors had disappeared by then."
" I do remember midnight," Charlotte added, "I remember kissing David. He seemed so sad and lost. And Eddie was pawing all over you. Then David gave Landry a big kiss that I'm sure he enjoyed."
Susan sank back into the wing chair. She pictured Eddie again that night. How he had loomed over her, huge and insisting on touching her. She remembered his cock, so much larger than David's, or anyone else's. Whenever he had been near her, he had begun getting an erection. The thought of him on top of her, thrusting that shaft into her, was revolting.
Susan preferred David. He needed comforting. The nakedness had destroyed his composure that night, revealing his desire for Eddie just as clearly as it revealed Eddie’s lust for Susan. Charlotte had had the good sense to keep her clothes on, and to steer clear of the fray. Susan gazed at Charlotte's trim figure, stretching to remove a book from one of the higher shelves. How unlike Susan's plump, petite body, Charlotte's was. Susan wondered how differently she might have acted that night had Charlotte stripped as well. Then Susan laughed out loud at the absurdity of the situation.
"What have you found to read?" Landry entered the room, startling both women out of their thoughts.
"I was looking at all of your books on Yeats." Charlotte remarked. "Aren't you teaching a seminar in the fall on him?"
"Yes. I teach Yeats every other year."
"I’d love to sit in on the class, if you'd let me."
"Aren't you graduating this June?"
"Yes. But if I'm still in Savannah next year, I'd still love to audit your class."
Landry wondered if the two women were lovers. Was Charlotte sleeping with David? "Help me choose some music," he suggested, walking to the stereo system. Burt Bacharach had finished singing about raindrops.
"You have an impressive collection." Charlotte scanned the tapes and record albums, mostly classical and jazz, all neatly arranged on shelves to the left of Landry’s Empire desk. "Oh, you have Santana. Would that be O.K.?"
"Whatever you like," Landry replied.
Going from room to room, David began urging everyone outside. "Even if we can't see the sun, it'll still be dark and weird," he coaxed.
The sky turned an ominous gray, as if a storm were gathering. A hundred or so people had gathered in the park across Gaston. The clouds were still thin, however, and the shrinking disk of the sun was almost visible behind the moving veil.
Then the darkness came. A black shadow fell over the city. Street lamps came on. People gasped. Pigeons took flight and all of the birds in the park swarmed into confused arcs above the trees. Dogs howled. Cars stopped in the middle of Whittaker and Gaston streets. A cold wind whipped through the oaks.
David shivered. He suddenly saw his life in eclipse. His love for Eddie, Charlotte's attraction, Susan's empathy, and Dr. Landry, whom he had met only months before, were the celestial objects swirling in wildly elliptical orbits around one another. His college degree, his opportune job at the Carnegie Library, his family, and the places he inhabited became a spinning cluster threatening to collapse into a black hole. "There is something strange happening to me," David whispered , "and this is just the beginning."
Landry descended the steps of his porch. It was mid-day. It was night. How was this possible? Like David, he felt that the reason guiding his life was ruptured. Anything was possible. His life until this day was no longer a guide for what would come. Like the sparrows and pigeons, Landry’s mind was circling in arcs that went nowhere. He needed the sun to return. It had to come back, regardless of what new order it would bring.
Landry fell to his knees on the concrete walkway. He raised his arms toward heaven. "I believe," he yelled. "I believe."
The darkness lasted three minutes. The returning light dazzled the crowd. Cars started up along the two streets. Charlotte and Susan stared at Landry from the porch, considering whether they should attempt to help him up. Before they could act, he had risen and composed himself.
"Is that all there is?" asked Eddie as he and David returned to the house.
"What more did you want?" David replied, annoyed by Eddie’s failure to be impressed.
" I wanted to see the eclipse itself; the corona, the moon and all that." Eddie complained. " Now I suppose we'll have to watch it on t.v."
By late afternoon Dr. Landry succeeded in ridding himself of guests. Tending to the wants of such a diverse crowd tired him. Landry thought of David, of his short, healthy body. What a contrast they were, even in their responses to the eclipse. For David it was all predictable science. "But for me," thought Landry," it is pure mythology. The old gods are still with us, playing their tricks unseen and unacknowledged."
Landry tried to nap, but his mind refused to lie down. He thought of his family, or what was left of it, in Tulsa. His mother lived alone, her second husband having died last year, alone in a huge house with a small fortune remaining from her sale of the tool and dye business that had been run by Landry, Sr. Of course, she parceled out bits of this fortune to Landry, having paid his expenses in New Orleans for graduate school at Tulane, helping him move first to Charleston and then to Savannah. He never could have bought 24 West without some of that money. Landry thought of his lover in New Orleans, Dick St. Claire, with whom he had lived for over a year. Dick had tried so hard to please his mother when she had visited. He had bought her a dozen roses when they first met. But it was all to no avail. She could never reconcile herself to Landry’s homosexuality. For her it was a sin, no worse than the sins of adultery or other forgivable wrongs, but a sin nonetheless. It was a part of her son's life that she simply ignored, and she therefore ignored Dick as much as she could without being downright rude.
Landry asked himself repeatedly whether he had taken the post in Charleston as a way to break off the relationship with Dick. "I'll never leave New Orleans," Dick use to say. But Landry knew that Dick would have given up his job managing the men's department at Maison Blanche had Landry wanted him to come to Charleston. Was it his mother who had subconsciously influenced him not to ask?
Landry looked around his bedroom. A Gabon mask hanging on the wall above the Queen Ann chest of drawers grinned as if mocking his thoughts. He thought of his sister and her early death from alcoholism and depression. Her marriage had been a complete failure. Landry wondered if her life might have been better had she gotten out of Oklahoma as he had. She had managed to have one child, Carrie, who was now grown and married herself. Landry’s mother talked endlessly of her granddaughter and her banker husband. They had adopted two children and lived in a mansion in Miami, Oklahoma. Landry thought of his visit Christmas when they had flown him from Tulsa to Miami in their own twin engine Cessna.
The afternoons gave Landry peace of mind. He always taught morning classes so that he could arrive home early enough to enjoy the remainder of the day. The afternoons were a time to listen to music, to read, to put things in perspective. This afternoon, a Saturday, was no less sacred. He was listening to piano pieces by Faure and Ravel. He tried reading an article from the New York Review of Books on Nixon and Vietnam policy, but he couldn't concentrate. He resisted the urge to light another cigarette. "Why am I so restless?"
Perhaps it was depression. His doctor had diagnosed what he called "a mild case of Grave's disease," a thyroid condition that could bring on fatigue and depression. A few months ago Landry had taken the treatment at Candler Hospital: he had downed a vessel of radioactive iodine that a nurse wearing lead gloves brought to him with forceps. He doubted that the treatment had been nearly as effective as the prescribed anti-depressants.
Landry absent-mindedly picked up the tube of tanning creme from his dresser. He dabbed lotion on his forearms, took more on his fingertips and applied it to his face. He had begun using it after Eddie had said, on seeing a picture of him in last year's Armstrong yearbook, that he looked "carved out of wax." The words haunted him. Landry never knew that what Eddie was criticizing was his stiffness, not the paleness of his skin. Worse, the effect of the lotion was to make Landry’s color more orange than tan. And because he did not distribute it properly, there were hints of streaks on his forehead and neck. " ‘Vanity, vanity. All is vanity.’ " Landry quoted, as he put the tube down.
He walked to the study and shuffled through the mail and other papers on his Empire desk. He smiled at Fergus, curled up warmly on the settee. Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand began playing. Landry sat in the red wing chair, closed his eyes, nodded, and fell asleep. A vein, with a hint of blue through the opaque skin of Landry’s forehead, kept beat with the music.
End, chapter 1. Copyright, Jack Miller.
