rustic bonking with his secretary, Lucy Mercer. Her bedroom was on one side of the living room and his was on the other. The taped recording made nothing of this, but it did point out that Eleanor's bedroom, tucked away at the back and decidedly inferior to the secretary's, was mostly used as a guest room because Eleanor seldom made the trip south.
From Warm Springs I went some miles out of my way to take the scenic road into Macon, but there didn't seem to be a whole lot scenic about it. It wasn't unscenic particularly, it just wasn't scenic. I was beginning to suspect that the scenic route designations on my maps had been applied somewhat at random. I imagined some guy who had never been south of Jersey City sitting in an office in New York and saying, 'Warm Springs to Macon? Oooh, that sounds nice,' and then carefully drawing in the orange dotted line that signifies a scenic route, his tongue sticking ever so slightly out of the corner of his mouth.
Macon was nice-all the towns in the South seemed to be nice. I stopped at a bank for money and was served by a lady from Great Yarmouth, something that brought a little excitement to both of us, and then continued on my way over the Otis Redding Memorial Bridge. There is a fashion in many parts of America, particularly the South, to name things made out of concrete after some local worthy-the Sylvester C. Grubb Memorial Bridge, the Chester Ovary Levee, that sort of thing. It seems a very odd practice to me. Imagine working all your life, clawing your way to the top, putting in long hours, neglecting-your family, stabbing people in the back and generally being thought a shit by everyone you came in contact with, just to have a highway bridge over the Tallapoosa River named after you. Doesn't seem right somehow. Still, at least this one was named after someone I had heard of.
I headed east for Savannah, down Interstate 16. It was a 173-mile drive of unspeakable tedium across the red-clay plain of Georgia. It took me five hot and unrewarding hours to reach Savannah.
While you, lucky reader, have only to flit your eyes to the next paragraph.
I stood agog in Lafayette Square in Savannah, amid brick paths, trickling fountains and dark trees hung with Spanish moss. Before me rose up a cathedral of exquisite linen-fresh whiteness with twin Gothic spires, and around it stood zoo-year-old houses of weathered brick, with hurricane shutters that clearly were still used. I did not know that such perfection existed in America. There are twenty such squares in Savannah, cool and quiet beneath a canopy of trees, and long straight side streets equally dark and serene. It is only when you stumble out of this urban rain forest, out into the open streets of the modern city, exposed to the glare of the boiling sun, that you realize just how sweltering the South can be. This was October, a time of flannel shirts and hot toddies in Iowa, but here summer was unrelenting. It was only eight in the morning and already businessmen were loosening their ties and mopping their foreheads. What must it be like in August? Every store and restaurant is air-conditioned. You step inside and the sweat is freeze-dried on your arms. Step back outside and the air meets you as something hot and unpleasant, like a dog's breath. It is only in Savannah's squares that the climate achieves a kind of pleasing equilibrium.
Savannah is a seductive city and I found myself wandering almost involuntarily for hours. The city has more than 1,000 historic buildings, many of them still lived in as houses. This was, New York apart, the first American city I had ever been in where people actually lived downtown. What a difference it makes, how much more vibrant and alive it all seems, to see children playing ball in the street or skipping rope on the front stoops. I wandered along the cobbled sidewalk of Oglethorpe Avenue to the Colonial Park Cemetery, full of moldering monuments and densely packed with the gravestones of people famous to the state's history-Archibald Bulloch, the first president of Georgia, James Habersham, 'a leading merchant,' and Button Gwinnett, who is famous in America for being one of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence and for having the silliest first name in Colonial history. The people of Savannah, in a careless moment, appear to have lost old Button. The historical marker said that he might be buried where I was standing now or then again he might be over in the corner or possibly somewhere else altogether. You could walk around all day and never know when you were on the Button, so to speak.
The business district in Savannah was frozen in a perpetual 1959--the Woolworth store didn't appear to have changed its stock since about then. There was a handsome old movie house, Weis's, but it was shut. Downtown movie houses are pretty much a thing of the past in America, alas, alas.
You are always reading how buoyant the movie industry is in America, but all the theaters now are at shopping malls in the suburbs. You go to the movies there and you get a choice of a dozen pictures, but each theater is about the size of a large fridge-freezer and only marginally more comfortable. There are no balconies. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine movie theaters without balconies? To me going to the movies means sitting in the front row of the balcony with your feet up, dropping empty candy boxes onto the people below (or, during the more boring love scenes, dribbling Coke) and throwing Nibs at the screen. Nibs were a licorice-flavored candy, thought to be made from rubber left over from the Korean War, which had a strange popularity in the 1950s. They were practically inedible, but if you sucked on one of them for a minute and then threw it at the screen, it would stick with an interesting pock sound. It was a tradition on Saturdays for everybody to take the bus downtown to the Orpheum, buy a box of Nibs and spend the afternoon bombarding the screen.
You had to be careful when you did this because the theater manager employed vicious usherettes, dropouts from Tech High School whose one regret in life was that they hadn't been born into Hitler's Germany, who patrolled the aisles with highpowered flashlights looking for children who were misbehaving. Two or three times during the film their darting lights would fix on some hapless youngster, half out of his seat, poised in throwing position with a moistened Nib in his hand, and they would rush to subdue him. He would be carried off squealing. This never happened to my friends or me, thank God, but we always assumed that the victims were taken away and tortured with electrical instruments before being turned over to the police for a long period of mental readjustment in a reform school. Those were the days! You cannot tell me that some suburban multiplex with shoebox theaters and screens the size of bath towels can offer anything like the enchantment and community spirit of a cavernous downtown movie house. Nobody seems to have noticed it yet, but ours could well be the last generation for which moviegoing has anything like a sense of magic.
On this sobering thought I strolled down to Water Street, on the Savannah River, where there was a new riverside walk. The river itself was dark and smelly and on the South Carolina side opposite there was nothing to look at but down-at-heel warehouses and, further downriver, factories dispensing billows of smoke. But the old cotton warehouses overlooking the river on the Savannah side were splendid. They had been restored without being overgentrified. They contained boutiques and oyster bars on the ground floor, but the upper floors were left a tad shabby, giving them that requisite raffish air I had been looking for since Hannibal. Some of the shops were just a bit chichi, I must admit. One of them was called The Cutest Little Shop in Town, which made me want to have the quickest little dry heave in the county. A sign on the door said, ABSOTIVELY, POSILUTELY NO FOOD OR DRINK IN SHOP. I sank to my knees and thanked God that I had never had to meet the proprietor. The shop was closed so I wasn't able to go inside and see what was so cute about it.
Towards the end of the street stood a big new Hyatt Regency hotel, an instantly depressing sight.
Massive and made of shaped concrete, it was from the Fuck You school of architecture so favored by the big American hotel chains. There was nothing about it in scale or appearance even remotely sympathetic to the old buildings around it. It just said, 'Fuck you, Savannah.' The city is particularly ill favored in this respect. Every few blocks you come up against some discordant slab-the De Soto Hilton, the Ramada Inn, the Best Western Riverfront, all about as appealing as spittle on a johnnycake, as they say in Georgia. Actually, they don't say anything of the sort in Georgia. I just made it up. But it has a nice Southern ring to it, don't you think? I was just about at the point where I was starting to get personally offended by the hotels, and in serious danger of becoming tiresome here, when my attention was distracted by a workman in front of the city courthouse, a large building with a gold dome.
