Twisted Metal, Altered Perspectives

I recently visited Savannah…again. One of the trip’s purposes was to take pictures of various sites mentioned in my story In the Shadow of Midnight: Daedalus-a tale of Savannah. The pictures will be included as bonus material in an upcoming second edition.

In early October, I drove to Savannah’s beautiful Bonaventure Cemetery to find Robert, Tina and Wahl Stoddard’s graves. Stopping at the administrative building, I entered their names in the automated search kiosk, which then printed a map showing the graves’ location.

I’d been to Bonaventure several times before, but mainly visited the more tourist centric graves. Johnny Mercer is buried next to his wife and mother. Each marker is inscribed with one of his song lyrics.

Pulitzer winning poet, Conrad Aiken’s grave is a bench. During his many trips to his parents’ grave at Bonaventure, he would drink martinis while looking at their markers, each with the same day of death—the day at age nine when he responded to two gunshots in the family living room. His father had shot his mother and then himself. Aiken went to live in Massachusetts with family members. From there he went to Harvard where he and classmate T.S. Eliot compared and clashed over each other’s couplets.

The moss-draped trees filter the sunlight falling on the sand and pebble lanes. Low granite blocks border the six-grave family plots. Following the map, I follow the path toward the Wilmington River. Reading each family name until I find the Wahl plot that belonged to Tina’s family. Bob and Tina’s joint gravestone with Wahl’s marker just in front of it were all decorated. My trip was shortly after both death anniversaries—Bob and Tina in late September and Wahl’s just a few days before in October.

Decorative pebbles anchored the flowers on both stones, but Wahl’s grave also had a rusted piece of curved metal artistically arranged as a border for the flower display. As I speculated on its significance (a symbol of the car he died in or even a piece of it? Did he like metal music?), I began to think that more people than just the Stoddards and their friends may have perspectives on their tragic story.

What about the two friends Wahl picked up that tragic day, Carolyn Alexander and David Womack? Once in the car with Wahl, they were doomed by the love of speed he inherited from his father. As sad as Wahl’s death and the subsequent disintegration of Bob and Tina’s lives were, surely the pain in those families would have been bitter as well.

As I said, I’ve been to Bonaventure before. It is an incredibly beautiful place. The sounds of singing birds, the light, and the salt breeze have always left me with a sense of peace before—not this time. Ultimately, what makes a story is conflict. Conflicts leave winners and losers in their wake. This story had no winners, save the reader who heeds the cautionary tale’s lessons and the writer who learns to look for different perspectives.

The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location. -Flannery O'Connor

More reflections on Midnight

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.

Cell Service, and Bellyaching

Recently, I took a trip to Shade Gap, Pennsylvania, the setting for my upcoming novel Revelation 11, to pick up those little details that give stories their texture. I chose Shade Gap as the novel’s setting because of its overall spookiness. A sign on Route 522 cites 18th Century settlers referring to the area in a narrow gap between two mountains as “The Shadow of Death”. 

Shade Gap’s lone claim to national fame occurred in 1966 when a mental patient and self-styled “mountain man”, William Hollenbaugh kidnapped seventeen-year-old Peggy Ann Bradnick setting off the largest manhunt in Pennsylvania history up to that time. Thus, it has all the necessary trappings of the Southern gothic novel, a curse, grotesques, and I’m tossing in a religious cult and a gruesome murder for good measure. 

At this point, I’ve written about 40% of the novel. In one key scene, the protagonist must use his cell phone to record a conversation and e-mail it. When I tried to reenact this feat, I found that I had no cell service. The mountains not only choke off the light, but phone service as well. Guess that scene needs rewriting. 

Undaunted, I set out to meet some locals. Restaurants are great places to catch slices of life and hear local accents and expressions. Since it was Sunday, all restaurants in Shade Gap were closed so I went up the road to Orbisonia and its conjoined twin of a town, Richmond Furnace. Orbisonia’s dining choices consist of the Pizza Star restaurant, that’s it. 

Inside, I witnessed a multi-generational, bilingual family drama. The shop owner, a balding man in his 50s, moved back and forth between the kitchen where his son and daughter worked, and the dining room where his parents sat. The family outnumbered the three paying guests. When the owner sat with his parents, he held his head in his hands and spoke Italian in hushed tones. His father dosed across the table only to be periodically awakened when the mother barked some command to the kitchen in Italian. One of the children would respond quickly to each summons with her glasses, drink or whatever “Nonna” wanted. 

At one point, the daughter complained about some issue in the kitchen. The owner raised his head from his hands jumped up and yelled, “What are ya bellyachin’ about?” Bingo. “Bellyachin’”, I hadn’t heard that term in ages. Rest assured, someone will be ‘bellyachin’ in this novel.

A Personal Epiphany

Having now, foolishly perhaps, styled myself as a Southern writer, I must grapple with what that means. I furthered my education by watching the American Masters episode on Harper Lee. To Kill a Mockingbird addressed an overwhelming American truth by exposing the ways we deal with, avoid, dance around, and occasionally confront race.

I identify with Southern writers due to stylistic similarities and a fascination with the human and spiritual landscapes writers like Flannery O’Connor and Carson McCullers paint with their words and characters.  Harper Lee painted with a more realistic world compared with O’Connor’s and McCuller’s more impressionistic renderings. So much so that throughout the American Masters episode the words ‘clear’ and ‘clarity’ almost became a refrain.

Twice during the show, speakers referred to the Southern Tribe. My membership in that tribe may be suspect. It is certainly tangential at best, but tied in through two parallel connections. I’ve lived in Central Pennsylvania most of my life. Two primary groups settled the area: German immigrants and the Scotch-Irish. The typical journey, sometimes occurring over generations, consisted of arriving at either Philadelphia or Baltimore, moving westward to the mountains and then, usually drawn by cheaper land prices, following them southward. This migration populated the more elevated portions of Virginia, Maryland, West Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, the Carolinas, Georgia and Alabama splashing out of the mountains like so much alluvial soil upon Gulf Coast’s plain. So Central Pennsylvania culture is simple an early mutation of what evolved in the South. The main difference being that these European settlers used African slaves to farm those fertile fields.

A scan of the Southern Writer’s pantheon reveals a preponderance of Irish surnames and therein lays another connection. My Irish ancestry with its mystery, secrets, isolation and alienation reflects the worlds evoked by Southern writers.

No Southern or Irish story is complete without an epiphany, a moment where a person sees their shortcomings in such stark relief, they can no longer be denied. I experienced such an epiphany during the show.

Although I claim to be a Southern writer in style, my birth twelve miles north of the Mason-Dixon line to decidedly Northern parents at the height of the Civil Rights Movement imbued me with significant anti-Southern prejudices. As the show discussed how differently people reacted to To Kill a Mockingbird, I smugly listened to Diane McWhorter, author of Carry Me Home : Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution, describe her journey from certainty that Tom Robinson would be acquitted to being moved to tears following his conviction and death. She then thought, “What would my father think if he saw me crying for a black man?”

Then a square-faced man with a sculpted mane of silver hair and a voice as smooth as butter wearing a conservative blue suit filled the screen describing his experiences during the Civil Rights era. Based on his appearance, voice, and attire, I felt an instant dislike and fully expected to hear him spew some racist diatribe. The Reverend Thomas Lane Butts both disappointed and shamed me as he reflected on his support for integration and resulting conflicts with the Mobile, Alabama KKK. I, too, had falsely judged a man based on his outward appearance. In a Flannery O’Connor story, this epiphany would be a step toward redemption. I hope it is for me.