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five on Bull Street, five on Barnard, four on Abercorn, and so on. James Oglethorpe, the founder of Georgia, had been responsible for them, she said. He had decided Savannah was going to be laid out with squares, based on the design of a Roman military encampment, even before he set sail fromEngland—before he even knew exactly where on the map he was going to put Savannah. When he arrived in February 1733, he chose a site for the city on top of a forty-foot bluff on the southern bank of the Savannah River, eighteen miles inland from the Atlantic. He had already sketched out the plans. The streets were to be laid out in a grid pattern, crossing at right angles, and there would be squares at regular intervals. In effect, the city would become a giant parterre garden. Oglethorpe built the first four squares himself. “The thing I like best about the squares,” Miss Harty said, “is that cars can’t cut through the middle; they must go
around
them. So traffic is obliged to flow at a very leisurely pace. The squares are our little oases of tranquillity.”
    As she spoke, I recognized in her voice the coastal accent described in
Gone with the Wind
—“soft and slurring, liquid of vowels, kind to consonants.”
    “But actually,” she said, “the whole of Savannah is an oasis. We are isolated. Gloriously isolated! We’re a little enclave on the coast—off by ourselves, surrounded by nothing but marshes and piney woods. We’re not easy to get to at all, as you may have noticed. If you fly here, you usually have to change planes at least once. And trains are not much better. Somebody wrote a novel in the nineteen-fifties that captured it rather well, I thought.
The View from Pompey’s Head.
It’s by Hamilton Basso. Have you read it? The story opens with a young man taking the train from New York to Pompey’s Head and having to get off at the ungodly hour of five in the morning. Pompey’s Head is supposed to be Savannah, and I have no quibble with that. We’re a terribly inconvenient destination!”
    Miss Harty’s laughter was as light as wind chimes. “There used to be a train that ran between here and Atlanta. The
Nancy Hanks.
It shut down altogether twenty years ago, and we don’t miss it at all.”
    “Don’t you feel cut off?” I asked.
    “Cut off from what?” she replied. “No, on the whole I’d say we rather enjoy our separateness. Whether that’s good or bad I haven’t any idea. Manufacturers tell us they like to test-markettheir products in Savannah—toothpastes and detergents and the like—because Savannah is utterly impervious to outside influence. Not that people haven’t
tried
to influence us! Good Lord, they try all the time. People come here from all over the country and fall in love with Savannah. Then they move here and pretty soon they’re telling us how much more lively and prosperous Savannah could be if we only knew what we had and how to take advantage of it. I call these people ‘Gucci carpetbaggers.’ They can be rather insistent, you know. Even rude. We smile pleasantly and we nod, but we don’t budge an inch. Cities all around us are booming urban centers: Charleston, Atlanta, Jacksonville—but not Savannah. The Prudential Insurance people wanted to locate their regional headquarters here in the nineteen-fifties. It would have created thousands of jobs and made Savannah an important center of a nice, profitable, non-polluting industry. But we said no. Too big. They gave it to Jacksonville instead. In the nineteen-seventies, Gian Carlo Menotti considered making Savannah the permanent home for his Spoleto U.S.A. Festival. Again, we were not interested. So Charleston got it. It’s not that we’re trying to be difficult. We just happen to like things exactly the way they are!”
    Miss Harty opened a cupboard and took out two silver goblets. She wrapped each of them in a linen napkin and placed them carefully in the wicker basket beside the martinis.
    “We may be