The Last of the Savages (19 page)

We were driving through rolling countryside now, just off the interstate, past horse farms and broad rolling pastures which sprouted the occasional big, showy house of recent construction, which, for all its stridency and even ugliness, mimicked the antebellum plantation house and reflected the essentially conservative aspirations of new money.

Will’s new house, visible from a great distance across a hay field, was so incongruous it might have dropped out of the sky. It was a fantastic sight, the roofline turreted and crenellated and arched against the horizon, seeming to combine Moorish, Tuscan and Bavarian motifs, like something designed by Antoni Gaudí on assignment for Walt Disney.

“You believe this shit?” said Taleesha, with an air of one long suffering, as we approached the gate and turned into the long drive. They’d been living in a small farmhouse on the property during the construction of this implausible residence, which after a year was nearly complete.
Two workmen were perched on scaffolding, finishing off a section of mosaic which constituted part of the variegated skin of the edifice.

Parked near the house was a cement mixer, which at first glance seemed part of the construction site. But it was painted black, and a second look showed Plexiglas windows set in the sides of the drum. Seeing the target of my gaze, Taleesha walked me over to the machine.

“He has himself driven around town in the thing,” she said, gesturing toward the ladder. I climbed up and opened a hatch in the back to discover a chamber with two couches, carpeted with kilims, hung with dark paisley fabric.

The house was no less bizarre. She took me on the grand tour, a bemused chatelaine attempting to do justice to her husband’s stupendous folly. I recognized Will in every room, or rather, I began to see the elements of what would become his imperial style: a kind of haute-hippie, opium-den look in which Indian, Ottoman, William Morris Arts and Crafts and medieval decor all seemed congruous, held together if nothing else by the sheer force of Will’s enthusiasm. It was a nighttime aesthetic, all heavy velvet drapes, intricate burgundy carpets and dark carved wood, painted mandalas and carved heraldic shields. The sun was not meant to penetrate far into these rooms, not even the huge common rooms—the oval ballroom with its Baccarat chandelier, the dining room with its massive ebony table, and especially not the play room, also known as the drug room, with a Berber nomad’s tent standing in the middle, tent spikes nailed into the wooden floor.

Out in back, beyond the terrace and the black swimming pool, like a rebuke to the whole gigantic enterprise, stood a small, unpainted hut—an exact replica, Taleesha explained, of a teahouse on the grounds of a Zen monastery in Kyoto where Will had once stayed.

“I think I like this little house the best,” she said. The bright, spare interior was indeed a relief after the baroque excesses of the main house: mud-colored stucco walls, crisp yellow tatami mats with black borders, a small copper-lined pit for a fire, an alcove displaying a pen-and-ink landscape scroll. Taleesha knelt down and ran her finger across the textured surface of the tatami. “I like that there’s this part of him, even if I don’t understand it yet.”

Searching for Will that night we went to the Bitter Lemon, a tiny coffeehouse full of hippies where the ancient bluesman Furry Lewis was playing. Will had been there the night before and had made a strong impression.

“He was cooking,” said the doorman.

“Even for Will,” someone chimed in. No one knew where he was now.

As Taleesha’s escort, I oscillated between anxiety and a strange vicarious pride. She was a celebrity in this world.

In the steamy red-carpeted murk of another club, I was accosted by a raging drunk. While Taleesha signed an autograph, a frosty-haired black man rose from his stool like a rocket, lifting off slow, in stages, and stuck his face in mine. “What you think—you special? You better than me?”

“It’s turned ugly these last few months,” Taleesha said, after she’d rescued me.

Returning finally to the two-bedroom farmhouse beside Will’s castle in progress, we found it uninhabited.

That night I was awakened by the threatening phone call intended for Will. Unable to sleep with that parched voice in my ears, I lay in bed and watched the sun come up over the roof of Will’s new palace.

“We get a lot of those calls,” Taleesha said, over breakfast. “Some folks get the welcome wagon, we get the Shelby County chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.”

“Do you think they had anything to do with Elbridge’s death?”

She paused, her coffee cup halfway to her lips. “No, I don’t think so.” She took a sip from her cup and put it down on the table. “But I don’t think Will is crazy, either. I know—sometimes he seems paranoid to you.”

I was willing to accept this characterization of my views.

“But if you were me …” She paused. “White people been telling us for years there ain’t no fire where there’s smoke, even when we’re burning. If you were black, his theories might not seem quite so crazy. You know what I’m saying?”

Actually, despite my essentially empirical cast of mind, I could never dismiss any of Will’s ideas completely. Certainly, it was more interesting
to imagine the Mafia in bed with the CIA than it was to accept the findings of the Warren Commission. I envied him the power of his convictions—the conspiracy theories as well as his messianic belief in music—even if I couldn’t quite suspend my own disbelief.

Taleesha had to stop by her father’s house and asked me if I wanted to come along.

“Dad’s real CME,” she said as we drove into town. Seeing my bewilderment, she discoursed on the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church. The ministers tended to be light skinned, she said, and the parishioners formed the heart of the black middle class, the merchants and business leaders whose churchly comportment was self-consciously more dignified than the highly emotional revival-meeting behavior of the African Methodist Episcopalians. It was at one of the latter churches that I’d heard her sing. Her father, when he found out about it, was furious at her for attending the African service, and especially for singing—behaving, as he put it, like “some crazy field nigger.”

Taleesha’s family lived on Southern Parkway, a broad boulevard lined with substantial, middle-aged, self-important houses in diverse states of repair. “Used to be a white street,” she noted, as we turned into the driveway of an immaculate Tudor.

We entered through the garage, emerging into the kitchen. Taleesha’s sister, Daisy—an older, thicker version of herself—was flattening dough on the counter. After dusting the flour from her hands, she embraced Taleesha. “Fixing chess pie,” she said. “I know you’ll want to stay for a piece.” To me she said, “Hah! She don’t hardly eat enough to keep a hummin’bird alive.”

Taleesha introduced me as Will’s best friend and explained that she had to drop me off at the funeral.

Mr. Johnson marched in, stopping short when he saw his youngest daughter. A tall, stately, light-skinned man with a severe expression and military posture, he was wearing some kind of uniform—a ceremonial outfit with gold buttons and braid, insignia and epaulets. What appeared to be a tricornered hat was pinned under his arm.

“I wasn’t aware that we were expecting company,” he said to Daisy.

“I just came by to corrupt my siblings,” Taleesha said. “This is my friend Patrick Keane.”

“How do you do, sir,” I said. “I’m a friend of Will Savage.” I extended my hand and held it in midair.

“Music business?” he inquired coldly.

“We went to school together.”

“Patrick goes to Yale,” Taleesha noted. Indeed I looked the part in my rep tie, blue blazer and gray flannels.

He finally took my hand, engulfing it in his own large palm.

“I knew Yale would do the trick,” Taleesha said blandly.

“You’ll excuse me, Mr. Keane. I’m on my way to a meeting. A benevolent society which I have been associated with for some years.” He turned and left.

“You two are like to break my heart yet,” Daisy said. “I wish you’d
try
to get along.”

“I wish
he
would,” Taleesha said. “He looks at me and thinks I’m Mama.”

“Hush, now.”

A lanky young man sauntered into the kitchen, as if he had been waiting for the cue of his father’s departure, and opened the refrigerator.

“Ain’t you got nothing for me?” Taleesha said.

He shambled across the floor into her embrace, then stared at the linoleum as he shook my hand.

“Bud’s shy,” Taleesha said.

“Am not,” he said, looking up defiantly.

“I been his mama over ten years now,” she explained in the car. “He’s the only one who comes to visit Will and me. My father—we haven’t gotten along since I was thirteen.”

We crossed Beale Street where a crane assaulted a brick storefront with a wrecking ball—in pursuit of what was then called urban renewal. “
A benevolent society which I have been associated with for some years,
” she mimicked. “That’s how he actually talks. And how about that outfit? Spiffy!”

“Looks like something Will would wear.” We were both briefly diverted by this notion.

She dropped me at the church, making me promise to call immediately if Will showed up. And, in fact, all through the service I expected him to crash through the door at any moment and commandeer the organ that groaned and shrieked above us. Sweating liberally in my blazer and flannels, I kept glancing over my shoulder as the minister and the high school football coach eulogized Elbridge as a team player, a natural leader, a true Christian, a son of the South. The reader of subversive literature and psychic explorer, beloved of his younger brother, was never mentioned.

The service at an end, Cordell Savage nodded at me as he led his wife, hunched and rigid, out of the church. I was riveted by the sight of Cheryl Dobbs in a black dress, struggling down the aisle on the arm of one of the ushers. Grief had only refined her appearance, and I couldn’t help but be dazzled by the thought that she was no longer spoken for. Dizzy and torpid from the humidity, I was looking across the street at a civic building of some sort, its Doric entrance flanked by alabaster figures—fluid feminine
LIBERTY
on the one side and stern patriarchal
JUSTICE
on the other (well,
which
is it going to be?), like the household deities of Savage
fils
and
père
respectively. Was it possible, after all, to have one nation with liberty
and
justice, conflicting ideals that they were? I was pondering this when Joseph, the Savages’ houseman, tapped my shoulder and said Mr. Cordell would be much obliged if I would come on to the cemetery and then along to the house where a few friends were gathering.

By the time we reached the Savage residence it was evening and slightly cooler. I’d driven back from the cemetery with Lollie Baker, who’d come down from Bennington. She’d gained weight—if not quite the proverbial freshman fifteen—and her hair was shorter, à la Twiggy. If anything, her self-possession was greater than ever. “Don’t worry, Will’s always disappearing,” she assured me. “It’s one of his defining characteristics. You go to a party and somebody says, ‘Where’s Will?’ ‘Well, hell, he was here just a minute ago.’ ”

“The mortality rate for Savage sons is running kind of high,” I said.

“He’ll turn up.”

I asked her about Bennington.

“It’s not bad,” she said. “Everything’s elective, except the lesbianism requirement. I could do without that shit. How’s Yale? White bucks and blue balls? I suppose you go to mixers and all that?”

“If I ever hear ‘Whiter Shade of Pale’ again I will be forced to kill myself.”

“I want to hear
all
about it,” she said, in that wonderful tone unique to southern women, attentive and dreamily dismissive at the same time, as we pulled into the driveway. “I might could do about ten minutes here, tops.”

We joined the subdued gathering inside. Nearly concealed behind a thick mask of bright makeup, Mrs. Savage nodded stiffly at my mumbled expression of sympathy. Cordell took my hand in both of his own. He looked haggard, but there was a hard, undefeated resolution in his bearing and expression. “Thank you for coming, Patrick. It means a great deal to us to have you here. Are you staying for any length of time? Of course you’re welcome to lodge with us.”

Without going into my lodging status, I explained that I had to hurry back for exams. A young soldier in uniform came over to express his sympathy, one of several; their shaved heads and Deep South accents made me nervous. And I didn’t like this talk about the enemy, suddenly conscious that my hair was longer than any man’s in the room. Seeing Cheryl Dobbs languishing on a sofa, leaning back on her chignon, I sidled over to express my sympathy.

“I remember you,” she said thickly. “You were the boy who passed out at that party.” She seemed similarly inclined at the moment. “You were really sweet.”

“Thank you,” I said, the heat rising in my cheeks.

“No, I mean it,” she insisted, touching a finger to her lower lip. “You were just so, I don’t know …
sweet.
You know? Some people just aren’t very nice. You get a bad feeling from them. But you … you’re …
sweet.
”