An earlier posting on the Valhalla Press blog revealed how I came to write "In the Shadow of Midnight, Daedalus: A tale of Savannah". In September 2005, we vacationed in Savannah renting a condo on East Broad Street in the city's Trustees' Garden district. On one brutally hot afternoon, we decided to nap in the comfort of our condo's industrial strength air conditioning. We awoke to the sight of four police cruisers, an ambulance and a hearse pulling two bodies out of the building across the street.
We later learned the deceased were Bob and Tina Stoddard, a couple who lived on the edge of Savannah's elite described in John Berendt's story Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Bob and Tina were opposites in many ways. Bob was the adopted son of a Florida salesman. Tina met Bob just as he was leaving the U.S. Air Force where he had served as pilot. Speed fascinated Bob, after hanging up his wings, he took up running and racing cars.
Tina Wahl Stoddard's Savannah pedigree ran deep-the Wahls listed among the city's most prominent citizens dating back to antebellum times. The family's affluence allowed her to study cooking in France and ballet. Bob, the adopted son, no doubt longed for the sense of identity Tina's extensive family history provided. Tina fell hard for Bob's fast-talking, fast-moving persona.
Bob was always the life of the party while Tina catered it. Bob's signature line was "Have a drink, be somebody." The line, a freudian slip really, was at once both illuminating and pathetic. The rootless man who struggled to understand his own identity, obtain one through marriage, and build an outsize personality tells his guests to "be somebody".
Bob could easily be dismissed as shallow. His need to "be somebody", especially to his son and his wife, led to disastrous consequences. In writing the story, I tried not to judge Bob too harshly because I think fate punished him far harder than he deserved.
The story narrative compares Bob to Ovid's Daedalus to demonstrate the story's timelessness. Had I wished to paint him in an American context, I could have portrayed him as a real life Gatsby. They both attempted to build an identity while struggling to achieve a caricature of American success only to lose themselves in the process. On this Fourth of July, I hold up Bob Stoddard as a facet of the complex American dream, a dark facet that measures a person's worth only by his monetary success or family connections. Bob Stoddard longed for both and fell disastrously short.
