Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (46 page)

Faces were beginning to emerge in the photographs on the sideboard. There was Emma Kelly sitting between Joe Odom and Mandy in the rear parlor. Upon arriving at the party, Emma had told Mrs. Williams that every day for the past eight months, she had played “Whispering” on the piano because she knew it was Jim’s favorite song. Joe Odom remarked with an ironic smile that the way things seemed to be going lately, he and Jim might be trading places before long.

Two people whose faces were just now coming into full color on the sideboard had caused other guests to stare in disbelief when they arrived at the party: Lee and Emma Adler.

“Now I’ve seen everything,” Katherine Gore had said when the Adlers appeared in the entrance hall.

The antagonism between Lee Adler and Jim Williams had gained a new dimension because of Adler’s close association with Spencer Lawton. Lawton had recently announced he was running for reelection, and Adler had cosigned a $10,000 bank loan for his campaign. That check had made Adler responsible for more than two-thirds of all Lawton’s campaign money. Adler made no effort to conceal his closeness to Lawton; on the contrary, he put a large
RE-ELECT SPENCER LAWTON
poster on the fence in front of his house. Lawton’s smiling face could be seen from the windows of Mercer House. If anything, Adler seemed to revel in Williams’s predicament. He hosted a Lawton fund-raising party at which he stood up and read a telegram from “a Lawton supporter” who had been unable to attend. It turned out to be a joke telegram signed “Jim Williams, Chatham County Jail,” and it wished Lawton the very worst of bad luck. Adler’s audience was not amused. “It was tacky,” said one guest. “It made us all uncomfortable, especially Spencer Lawton, who was present.”

Meanwhile, Williams waged war against Lawton’s re-election campaign from his jail cell, quietly channeling money to Lawton’s opponent. A series of full-page anti-Lawton ads appeared in the Savannah newspaper bearing the headline
DISTRICT ATTORNEY LAWTON CHARGED WITH CORRUPTION AND MISCONDUCT.
The ad reminded voters that in reversing the first Williams conviction,
the Georgia Supreme Court had accused Lawton of “corrupting the truth-seeking function of the trial process.” The ads had been written and paid for by Jim Williams.

For their part, the Adlers were as perplexed as everyone else as to why they had been invited to Mrs. Williams’s lunch. After signing their names in the guest book, Emma Adler wrote the word “neighbors” in parentheses, as if to make the point that their connection to the party was purely geographical.

Mrs. Williams slipped the snapshot of the Adlers into the middle of the stack. “James has his reasons, I’m sure,” she said in her quiet way, “but, oh, that Lee Adler made me so mad one day. I would never tell James this. It’s been about three months ago, I guess. One afternoon he came to make a courtesy call, and I thought, Well, the man knows James is in a bind now, and he’s come to have a look around. He thinks there won’t be a thing on the walls and that all the furniture will be sold. So he came in, and he was very polite and everything. But I could see right through him. I knew it wasn’t in him to be nice to James. He told me, ‘Mrs. Williams, I saw Mr. So-and-so from Sotheby’s in New York and this, that, and the other, and if I could do anything for James, or if there’s anything he wants to sell, just let me know.’
Well!
I’m gone tell you, right about that time I was fixin’ to blow up, but I didn’t say a word. I was just as calm as I could be. And I said, ‘I appreciate that very much, Mr. Adler, but even where he is now, James has got connections. He can call New York. He can call London. He can call Geneva.’ I wasn’t ugly to him or anything. But, honey, inside I was boilin’ over, ’Cause I knew he came to have a look around.”

Lee Adler’s attachment to Spencer Lawton was the very reason Jim Williams had told his mother to invite him. In Williams’s view, Lee Adler controlled Spencer Lawton. “Leopold is the power behind the throne,” he said. “He’s like the vizier in the Turkish court, the man who stands behind a silken screen and whispers in the sultan’s ear. Lawton doesn’t dare make a move without instructions from Leopold. That makes Leopold dangerous, particularly to me. I’ve given him plenty of reasons to hate
me. I engineered throwing him off the board of the Telfair museum when I was president, and I’m quite sure he pushed the D.A. into charging me with first-degree murder instead of involuntary manslaughter, though he denies it. He’s dangerous. No question. But I understand him. I can talk his language if I have to. Honor among thieves, you know. It’s never too late to hold out an olive branch. With my new witnesses, my case is going to break wide open. I can feel it. And when that happens, I don’t want Leopold skulking around behind that silken screen making mischief.”

Williams clearly had some irons in the fire—an appeal in progress, possible new witnesses, and a candidate working to unseat Spencer Lawton. None seemed particularly promising, but if Williams was able to take comfort in them, what was the harm? It was unlikely that an invitation to a congenial luncheon party would convert Lee Adler to his cause. Still, Williams had summoned all the influence he could muster in the effort—the guileless charm of his mother, the delectation of Lucille Wright’s cooking, the company of friends in common, and not least of all, the mysterious powers of Minerva. Minerva had come in from Beaufort and was dressed for the occasion in a maid’s costume. For the first hour or so, she stood quietly in the dining room while the guests served themselves from the buffet. Later on, she circulated with a pitcher of iced tea. At one point she poured two tall glasses for the Adlers, while munching on a root and fixing them with a penetrating stare through the purple lenses of her wire-rimmed glasses.

Williams kept informed of the party’s progress through periodic telephone calls during the course of the lunch. He reminded Barry Thomas to turn on the fountain (Thomas had forgotten), and he gave instructions to his mother and Lucille at each stage of the lunch. When the last of the guests had left, Mrs. Williams and Barry Thomas reported to Williams that the lunch had been a success. Mrs. Williams said she would be leaving shortly to bring the snapshots over to the jail so he could see for himself.

After she hung up, she lingered at the desk for a moment. The morning paper lay on the desk in front of her.

“Barry?” she said.

Barry Thomas turned back at the doorway. “Yes, Mrs. Williams?”

Mrs. Williams paused uncertainly. She glanced down at the paper and the story about the new witnesses.

“I … I’ve been wondering,” she said. “All these things they’ve been saying about James … and that Hansford boy … and now these other boys.” Mrs. Williams gestured at the paper. “I try not to pay any mind. But I don’t know. Seems like I remember hearing people say the same thing about King James of England. You know, the King James that had them to write the King James Bible? Do you know if that’s true? Have you ever heard anybody say that about King James?”

“Well, yes, as a matter of fact, I have,” said Thomas. “King James did have favorites among the men at court, if that’s what you mean. He had his special friends. I think he had several.”

The hint of a smile appeared at the corners of Mrs. Williams’s mouth. “Well,” she said softly, “all right then.”

In mid-August, despite the statements made by Jim Williams’s new witnesses, Judge Oliver denied Williams’s motion for a new trial. Sonny Seiler promptly announced he would take the appeal to the next level, the Georgia Supreme Court. A few weeks later, Spencer Lawton won reelection as district attorney, ensuring that he would be in a position to fight the appeal every step of the way.

When the bad news reached Williams, he picked up the telephone and called Christie’s in Geneva to place a bid on a Fabergé cigarette case that had once belonged to Edward VII. “It cost me fifteen thousand dollars, which I can ill afford,” he said, “but it makes me feel better. I’m the only person in the world who’s ever bought Fabergé from a jail cell.”

Increasingly, Williams used little tricks to convince himself and others that he was not really in jail. He continued routing his phone calls through Mercer House and dictating letters that were typed at home on his engraved stationery. He sent several such letters to newspapers and magazines. One was published in
Architectural Digest.
It was a note praising the magazine for having run an article by the New York socialite Brooke Astor. “Delightful!” Williams’s note read. “Brooke Astor has given us
a delicious treat by recounting her early experiences with formal dining. Her recollections will serve as a lasting guide in the art of living well. My best wishes to our hostess.—
James A. Williams, Savannah, Georgia.”

Williams would not submit to the notion that he was in jail. “It’s a matter of survival,” he said. “I hypnotize myself so that, in my own mind at least,
I am not here.”

Wherever Jim Williams’s mind had taken him, it was clear by early fall that his body would still be in jail at Christmastime. Once again, there would be a gap in the social calendar on the night before the Cotillion ball, the night formerly reserved for his Christmas party. I recalled Lila Mayhew’s lament back in May that she would have nothing to do that night. I also remembered what her black seamstress had told her—that the night of Jim Williams’s party was the night the blacks had their debutante ball. The more I thought about it, the more I began to feel the urge, as an observer of the local scene, to know more about the black debutante ball and, if possible, to be invited to it.

Savannah’s blacks had been presenting debutantes at formal balls for nearly forty years. The ball was sponsored by the graduate chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha, a black fraternity at Savannah State College. Nationally, Alpha Phi Alpha was the oldest black college fraternity in the country, having been founded at Cornell at the turn of the century. The fraternity was intended to be more than just an undergraduate social club, as its slogan “Bigger and Better Negro Business” suggested. In fact, the graduate chapter in Savannah, with sixty-five members, was more active than the undergraduate chapter, which had fifteen.

The graduate Alphas were representative of the upper level of Savannah’s black community. Their membership included teachers, school principals, doctors, ministers, owners of small businesses, and lawyers. Notably absent were bankers, partners of the city’s most influential law firms, directors of big corporations, and people with inherited wealth. The Alphas, unlike the
members of the Cotillion, did not belong to the Oglethorpe Club, the golf club, or the yacht club. One of Savannah’s three black city councilmen was an Alpha, but it could not be said that the Alphas—or the black community as a whole—were part of Savannah’s power structure. The annual activities of the Alpha graduate chapter included a voter-registration drive, a dance to raise money for scholarships, and a series of social events leading up to the debutante ball.

The debutante ball had been the brainchild of Dr. Henry Collier, a gynecologist and the first black doctor to perform surgery at Candler Hospital. Dr. Collier got the idea for the ball in the 1940s when he heard that a group of black businessmen in Texas had sponsored a cotillion. He suggested to his fellow Alphas that they sponsor a similar ball in Savannah, and the Alphas agreed.

Dr. Collier lived on Mills B. Lane Boulevard, several miles to the west of downtown. He had built his house in the 1950s when no one would sell him property in the exclusive white enclave of Ardsley Park. It was a rambling brick structure that had been added on to over the years without any apparent plan. A modest front door opened on a double-height entrance foyer with a grand circular stairway and a bubbling, two-tiered fountain in the center. A buoyant man in his late sixties, Dr. Collier greeted me warmly and ushered me into the family room off the kitchen, where we had coffee while with great enthusiasm he told me about his brainchild, the debutante ball.

“Our first ball was in 1945,” he said. “We presented five girls that year, and we set up a system that we’ve used ever since. The members of the fraternity nominate the girls, and then we check them out to make sure they meet our criteria. The girls have to be of good moral character. That’s most important. They have to have finished high school and be matriculated in a school of higher learning. We interview their neighbors, their high school teachers, and people in their church. For a girl to be disqualified, somebody has to have definite knowledge of misconduct—that she has left home, or that she frequents lounges or nightclubs, or
has been in trouble with the police. If a girl has had an abortion, for instance, that would rule her out.