Wrapped in Rain(20)
Born to a high-flying duo that worked with the traveling circus, Rex Mason grew up hard, fast, and with a talent for making money. Rex worked everything from the Tilt-a-whirl and the merry-go-round to guessing people's weights. He was good at it too. He could size up anybody, give or take three pounds. In his late teens, Rex put two and two together and discovered how to make real money-the kind that when you had it, it made you better than those who didn't-by selling blackmarket cigarettes and liquor to underage kids.
With a thick wad of Franklins in his pocket, it didn't take him long to figure out that he was finished with both his parents and the circus. He thumbed his nose, pulled up his collar, and never looked back. By the time he was twenty-five, Rex owned seven liquor stores and was looking to buy the distribution rights for Atlanta. At thirty, he owned the rights for all of Georgia and was negotiating on a trucking company that included a fleet of fifty trucks.
By thirty-three, he was transporting liquor through eleven states-from Virginia south to Florida, west to Alabama, north through Louisiana and Tennessee, and everywhere in between. And he didn't care what type. If they would drink it, he would sell it. The more the merrier, and his margins were never conservative. There were few highways his trucks didn't travel. In his midthirties, he was worth ten or so million and headed for what the Atlanta Journal and Constitution called "dizzying heights." They were right, because by the time Rex turned forty, he was worth more than fifty million. For his birthday, he gave himself the architectural plans for a sixty-story downtown Atlanta high-rise. Four years later, he moved his office to the top floor.
Soon thereafter, he paid cash for fifteen hundred acres in Clopton, Alabama, where he dug a rock quarry in an outcropping of oddly displaced granite, sold the stone, and used the proceeds to renovate the property's old plantation-Waverly Hall. He told the paper it was to be his summer home, his retreat from the hustle and bustle of the city, a place to prop up his feet, scratch the dog's head, and enjoy life.
Nothing could have been further from the truth.
Waverly Hall became Rex's twelve thousand square foot monument to himself, and if there was a design scheme, it began and ended in Rex's head. He began his "renovation" by borrowing some dynamite from the masons at the quarry. He wrapped the sticks in a bundle, placed them in the oven, lit the fuse, and ran out the front door laughing. When the pieces settled, he bulldozed what remained and built what he wanted.
Rex used his own granite to build the foundation, basement, and first floor and then brought in Alabama bricks to build the second and third stories. The weeping mortar that glued it all together spoke volumes about the entire process.
Rex prized the fact that his tile, fabrics, and furniture rode the slow boat from Italy, France, and the Orient. The farther away, the better. And that his carpenters and painters came from as far away as California and New York. Truth was, few locals would work for him. The house towered above the landscape. Ceilings on the first floor measured fourteen feet high, shrunk to twelve feet on the second, and a mere ten on the third and in the attic. The floors on the first floor were an odd conglomeration of both Italian tile and Spanish marble, while the second and third floors were hand-cut Honduran mahogany. Scattered throughout the house were eight fireplacesfour of which were big enough to sleep in. I know because I did. He never thought to look there.
Rex stocked his wine cellar with dusty bottles, his liquor cabinet with a dozen different single malts-even though he preferred bourbon-and his gun closet with ten matching sets of gold-inlaid side-by-sides and over-and-unders imported from the same countries that sent the tileGermany, Spain, and Italy. On a gently sloping hill behind the house, he cleared and terraced a pasture, surrounded it with a hand-peeled cedar fence, built a ten-stall, state-ofthe-art barn, and filled it with ten state-of-the-art thoroughbreds. Next door, he bricked a separate servant's cottage and connected it to the house with a covered walk so that he wouldn't get wet when he woke up whatever servant happened to live there at the time.
If Rex wanted to isolate himself and us in the south Alabama woods, he had done a good job of it. We had few neighbors to begin with, but just to make sure none of them ever popped up uninvited offering a fresh-baked pie and ten minutes of kind conversation, he built an entrance to Waverly. A massive brick and wrought iron gate, set several car lengths off the county road, towered over visitors some fourteen feet in the air. Due to its sheer weight and the settling earth beneath, it leaned forward like the Tower of Pisa. Rather than fix the root of the problem, Rex anchored it with cables and long corkscrew spikes that bound it to the earth like a circus tent. With the taut cables set to snap during the next thunderstorm, it stood much like the threat of Rex's fist-ever-present and not something you wanted to mess with.
Once through the gates, the drive led down a winding half mile that snaked to the house like a water moccasin skimming the surface of the water. It wound beneath tentacled oaks and weeping willows, around old camellias, and over fresh winter rye before coming to rest at a circular drive framed by eight Leyland cypress that spiraled upward like the stoic soldiers at Buckingham Palace.
When finished, Waverly Hall, the once stately Southern-plantation turned pseudo-French chateau, looked like a bad marriage between a bricked tobacco warehouse and the Biltmore Estate. It was as out of place in Clopton as a McDonald's in Japan. As I grew older and the photographer in me began bubbling to the surface, I tried to stand back and let the picture fill the viewfinder. No matter what lens I used, I saw it only as a shadow of something dark, where the light was difficult to read.