Chapter 1: The Zone of Totality:
Eclipse
An
early spring brought a profusion of bloom. The azaleas in Forsyth Park
were a spectacle of pink. The dogwoods laced the pink with white blossoms.
Pigeons puffed their breasts among sparrows, robins and singing mocking
birds. The 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 college courses
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.