American Decameron

by Mark Dunn

  The day came near summer’s end when Penny was packed up and put on a train back to Boston. There had been not a word spoken on that brief exchange in the garden. It was as if it had never happened. On the train Penny wept for her grandmother whose world she felt was too narrowly circumscribed, but she knew the woman wasn’t unique in this respect. It was the way of things with the upper class, for whom the natural and elemental were made floral and fragrant and gay, and any discussion of pruning and budding and disbudding was forever limited to the literal and never to the analogous, though rose gardens do blaze with all sorts of sanguineous possibilities.

  1912

  TRISKAPHOBIC IN WISCONSIN

  Dr. Remley paced. It was one o’clock in the morning and it wasn’t like him to lose sleep over any one particular patient in his care. But John Schrank was a special case. Since being committed to the Central State Mental Hospital in Waupun (after first having spent time in the Northern Hospital for the Insane in Oshkosh), Schrank, called “Uncle John” by the younger of his fellow inmates, had been a model ward of the state—pleasant and scrupulously well-behaved. During his twenty-eight years of internment he had rarely exhibited any of the symptoms by which he had earlier been assigned the diagnosis of “dementia praecox, paranoid type.”

  Schrank was a quiet, solitary man, obsessed with politics, but interested in little else.

  During all the years of his institutionalization he’d never had a single visitor. The sole love of his life, a young woman named Elsie Ziegler, had died in the General Slocum steamer disaster in 1904. It was through Schrank’s references to Elsie and the tragedy that surrounded her death that Dr. Remley got his most revealing look into the soul of a man whose psychopathic criminality should have suggested nothing but violent depravity without compunction.

  Uncle John was truly an enigma.

  “I remember the day of all the funerals, Doc,” Shrank had once confided to Remley. “June 18, a Saturday. There were over 150 of them, most in Kleindeutschland—that’s the neighborhood in New York where most of us lived in those days. The bells tolled without stopping. Nearly every door and window in our neighborhood was draped in black. I remember wandering the streets with all the other men—weeping men, tortured men, their faces pallid and drawn. Since most of those who died were women and children—the innocent of innocents—it was the husbands, the fathers, the fiancés and boyfriends who were left behind. The church outing took place in the middle of the week, you see. Those of us who hadn’t taken that fateful trip—it was our duty now to carry that heavy burden of grief upon our shoulders to the end of our days.

  “In the midst of all those ambling, listless men, I spied a young girl walking with an older man. She was eleven or twelve years old. She reminded me of Elsie. The girl had Elsie’s hair, Elsie’s eyes, the turn of my Elsie’s cheek. I asked her name. Catherine Gallagher, she said. She told me that she’d been on the boat but had survived—one of only about three hundred who did. She’d lost her mother, her nine-year-old brother, a baby sister. I hugged her in the street before letting her go on with her grandfather to the funeral of the family members she’d watched die.

  “It was hard for me to understand how life could be ripped away so easily. That those who most deserved to live often did not, and those who did not deserve the precious gift of life—such as the man I fired upon in 1912—survived in spite of heavy odds.

  “I don’t know what happened to little Catherine Gallagher. I have always nurtured the wish that she should have a very long and happy life to make up for what happened to all those who were not as lucky as she.”

  That night in 1940, the doctor had tried to get Schrank to talk about what was troubling him. Why was he sitting at the window, unable to speak, or even to eat or sleep? Why was Uncle John, in his mid-sixties now, and usually quite genial in his dealings with the other inmates and the staff—why was he now so refractorily uncommunicative, so completely unreachable? Was he reliving the loss of his beloved Elsie with more intensity than usual? Or was it memory of that other day—the one in 1912—that drew him so deeply inside himself?

  The night after President William McKinley died from an assassin’s bullet, Schrank had had a vivid dream. The deceased president spoke to him. In a room filled with crepe and flowers, McKinley’s lifeless body suddenly became vivified, the murdered president waking from his death slumber to sit straight up and point to a spot in the darkness. “Avenge my death!” he commanded of Schrank. The one in the darkness who was being fingered for the crime wasn’t the man who had actually pulled the trigger, an anarchist named Czolgosz. It was the man whom Schrank would later stalk from city to city until destiny finally brought them together in Milwaukee.

  Luck had been against Schrank when the time came to exact revenge. On one occasion he had stood waiting by a particular door only to have his quarry unknowingly give him the slip and go out another. In a different city there had been far too many people standing between Schrank and his target for him to get off a good shot. In Chattanooga, the potential assassin had a good opportunity to make his kill but he lost his nerve. In Chicago, Schrank had hesitated again. Standing at convenient proximity to his victim outside the Hotel La Salle, Schrank’s desire had been arrested by qualms about bringing notoriety to the city of Chicago—a city he loved.

  Yet he had no such qualms in Milwaukee.

  First he steeled himself with several bottles of beer in a saloon near the Hotel Gilpatrick, where the former U.S. president was having dinner. Then, after the candidate had finished his meal and was waiting to be driven over to the city’s auditorium to deliver a campaign speech, Shrank would make his move.

  John Schrank had always been at home in saloons. He’d been a saloon-keeper himself back in New York City. He presented himself to his fellow bar patrons not as an assassin-in-waiting, but as a newspaper reporter. He became friendly with the bartender, with the bar musicians. He asked them to play something patriotic. They obliged by striking up “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and he bought them all a round. At a few minutes past eight o’clock, Schrank walked over to the hotel to wait with all the others who wanted to cheer the man who was running for president again, who was asking for a third term in the White House beneath the standard of a brand new political party: the Progressives.

  John Schrank wasn’t drunk. He was clear-headed. He was primed and loaded for—not bear—but bull moose. He positioned himself close to the parked car, among those who now surged forward, having gotten word that Colonel Roosevelt was on his way out.

  Schrank watched as TR first sat down in the tonneau of the open vehicle, and then impulsively bounced back up to acknowledge the cheering crowd. He flashed his famous toothy grin, lifted his hat in salute, and then…

  Bang!

  One shot was all that Schrank was permitted to get off before being tackled and pushed down to the ground. The gun was wrenched from his hand. A moment later he was dragged to the ex-president, who enjoined the crowd, now rising up as its own overzealous lynching party, not to harm him. Schrank was to be brought forward so that Theodore Roosevelt could look into the face of the man who had sought to kill him. After studying his assailant for a moment, TR turned to the police officers who had subdued him. “Take charge of him,” TR said. “See that no violence is done to him.”

  Perhaps, thought Schrank, Roosevelt remembered that McKinley had prevented his own assassin from being beaten to death through similar pacifying words. Or perhaps it was simply in Teddy’s nature to be concerned for his attacker’s safety. Schrank didn’t hate Roosevelt. In fact, when TR died six years later and reporters sought a word or two from the hospitalized madman who had previously tried to kill him, Schrank was quoted as saying with absolute sincerity and quite unexpectedly, “A good man is gone. I did personally admire his greatness.”

  What Schrank despised wasn’t TR the man. It was TR the “third termer.” The fact of the former president’s lust for another four years in the White House, which had mot
ivated the creation of a new party to accommodate him, was the sole reason that this sufferer of “dementia praecox, paranoid type” wanted to have him removed permanently from the political stage.

  George Washington had set a precedent that all other presidents had respected. Ulysses S. Grant would have preferred a third term, but delegates at the 1880 Republican convention had other ideas. TR hungered for the chance to step out upon that stage for a rousing third act, and it was up to John Schrank, a nondescript saloon-keeper, originally from Bavaria, to stop him.

  By killing him.

  And he almost did. Were it not for the fact that the bullet had to pass through both a metal eyeglasses case and a fifty-page speech (folded over), the missile would have gone straight into Roosevelt’s lungs rather than into the taut muscle of the ex-president’s barrel chest, where it remained, only a moderate inconvenience, for the rest of his life. Schrank had, to his misfortune, directed his bullet at the most armored spot on TR’s body.

  When examined by Chief of Police Janssen at the Central Police Station of Milwaukee, Schrank answered quite a few questions, a good many going to motive. And yet it couldn’t be any simpler: America had the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution to guide her. But she also had her traditions, and Schrank felt that the most sacred of them all was the unspoken two-term limit for occupants of the White House. It was so sacred to him, in fact, that he would kill to keep it upheld. Was there any other reason Schrank had pulled that trigger? Well, yes. It was because William McKinley had told him to.

  It wasn’t only that one night after McKinley’s passing—this dictate of revenge from beyond the grave. A second spectral injunction was delivered to Schrank over a decade later: on September 15, 1912, to be exact. It manifested itself in the early hours of the morning in the form of a disembodied (though familiar) voice. Speaking to Schrank in a low and melancholy tone, the voice had said, “Let no murderer occupy the presidential chair for a third term. Avenge my death!” This second decree, ambiguous in its earlier incarnation, now had explicit clarity: Theodore Roosevelt deserved to die because he was trying to achieve what no man throughout the course of American history had done before. The monk-habited, famously mustached figure in the dark (was there a doffed Rough Riders’ cavalry hat resting in its lap?), complicit in the death of the man he’d served as vice president, was now culpable of a most grievous additional offense in the sick mind of John Schrank. A week later Schrank was off on a single-minded mission to deliver the White House on November 5 to either President Taft (whose rupture with his friend and mentor TR had contributed to the creation of the Progressive or “Bull Moose” party) or the priggish Presbyterian academic Woodrow Wilson.

  To the shock and consternation of those who formed the ex-president’s entourage in Milwaukee, the Bull Moose chose, in characteristically operatic fashion, to deliver every word of the prepared speech—all eighty minutes of it—to those who had assembled to hear him—this in spite of having just been shot in the chest. Only after completing the address did he consent to be taken to a hospital.

  In the end, the former president made a full recovery. Unfortunately, the delivery of that speech (deemed inspiringly heroic by some and suicidally reckless by others) failed to sway the masses by numbers sufficient to win him the election. The prize went to the priggish Presbyterian academic.

  On November 15, a court-ordered sanity commission was convened to determine if Schrank was sufficiently compos mentis to stand trial for his crime. The committee’s unanimous finding: the lonely, politics-obsessed saloon-keeper wasn’t sane by even the most generous definition of the word, and was therefore not accountable for his actions.

  Which brings us back to 1940, whence this story began. Dr. Remley had lain awake, had walked the halls, had fretted without respite over a patient who had up to that date, July 18, seldom troubled him before. It was all quite mystifying to the doctor, especially since Schrank, generally a rapt observer of events of national political import, had stopped listening to the gavel-to-gavel radio coverage of the Democrats’ National Political Convention—had simply switched off the radio and not switched it back on, retreating silently inside himself.

  Failing to glean the cause of this change in Schrank was the good doctor’s own fault. Had he cudgeled his brains just a little harder, he might have come to realize that the reason for his patient’s debilitating despondence lay in the very day itself. Because July 18, 1940, was a red-letter day in the annals of presidential politics. It was the day that Franklin Delano Roosevelt (fifth cousin to Teddy) formally accepted his party’s nomination for a third term as president of the United States.

  And there wasn’t a thing in the world that Uncle John could do about it.

  1913

  CLAIRVOYANT IN NEW YORK

  It was clear to all three of the siblings that their mother had been swindled. Several important aspects of the confidence game being perpetrated upon her became painfully apparent to Carlotta Cramford’s two sons and one daughter through the course of that revelatory evening in February when Dodge and Porter Cramford and their baby sister, Violet Cramford Gooch, pinned their mother down on the matter of a certain disappeared inheritance. Where had all of the money gone? They knew that Mrs. Cramford wasn’t investing in the stock market or in real estate. They also knew that she wasn’t dropping fat, dimpled bags of coin into the collection plate on Sunday mornings, or sneaking munificent donations to the city’s many settlement houses.

  “I’ll tell you where it’s gone,” said Mrs. Cramford, with a defiant glare that was betrayed by the tears which moistened her lace handkerchief, “if you tell me, Violet, why you remain married to a man you do not love.”

  Violet, finding the question irrelevant to the matter at hand, would not offer tit for her mother’s tat. Additional prodding and lachrymose cajoling were required before Widow Cramford was finally forced to admit that she had given most of the money left to her by her deceased husband, a successful bridge designer, to the psychics whom she saw sometimes several times a week: local seers and Cassandras, mediums, card readers, crystal ball caressers of both genders—every one professedly clairvoyant, clairaudient, telepathic, and second-sighted, and every one located in the city of New York. Mrs. Carlotta Cramford had been for the past several months, hands down, the easiest mark in town. Everyone had her number (which, by the way, was seven), and each took every opportunity to filch from her bountiful pocketbook until there was nothing left within it to be passed down to her children when she eventually joined her husband in the Hereafter.

  “There oughta be a law,” railed Porter, the second oldest. “Taking advantage of a poor old lady like Ma.”

  “She was a willing party to it,” countered Dodge, who had been to college for almost a year, and though he was a men’s clothier had a head for other things besides haberdashery.

  “I’d like to get them all into a room,” said Porter, who kept his voice low. The two brothers stood smoking on the front porch of their mother’s Forest Hills Tudor, but the windows were open and Porter was afraid that his distraught parent, presently being comforted by her commiserating yet equally appalled daughter, might overhear.

  Porter had made his money in ways that he’d never shared with his family. He had twice been imprisoned in distant states for crimes he chose not to disclose. Porter Cramford had never played by other men’s rules…or laws, for that matter.

  “And what would you do, brother, were you to get them all into that room? Put a knife to their throats and demand the return of all that money? Because I have no doubt that every penny’s been spent. These lowlife charlatans live from pillar to post. They dined well while they had our family fortune to diddle with, but those days are over.”

  “I’d show them up for the humbugs they are. I’d use their chicanery against them.”

  “How?” Cigarette smoke swirled about the brothers’ heads as each pondered the enticing prospect of revenge.

  Porter sat down upon th
e old porch swing where as a boy he had plotted his future in the promising field of criminal mischief (the porch swing having been moved from former family lodgings in the city of Brooklyn). He draped both arms over the top of the slatted swing-back and grinned. “We gather together several of the most egregious offenders under the pretext of finding a certain lost article, with a substantial reward awaiting the one who succeeds. Divination, as we both know, being nothing more than robe-swagged flimflammery, all will fail and the price will be a choice at the point of a gun—so much more efficient than a knife, don’t you think?—and this gun, in particular…” The gun was now conveniently produced; it lived strapped to Porter’s right calf. “…a bullet to the head for having stolen our family’s fortune through cunning lies and deception. Or…”

  Porter inhaled deeply from the stub of his cigarette.

  “Or what?”

  “Or they sign a document that will then be promptly delivered to the New York World for next-day publication admitting to one and all—including all potential future clients—that they are arrant frauds.”

  “I subscribe to every aspect of your scheme, dear brother, except for the part having to do with pointing firearms at people and threatening to use them.”

  “But it will only be just that, brother dear: a threat. Who will agree to have his or her brain matter splattered across a wall, when we are permitting him—or her—to simply sign a piece of paper, pack a suitcase, and move to the safety of some other burgh? All of Gotham will thank us for ridding this city of the worse kind of predator—one who takes full advantage of the most gullible among us.”

  “You mean gullible like Mother Dear?”

  “Sad to say, ’tis true.” This from the baby sister Violet, who had just stepped outside to join her brothers for a smoke. Only a moment before, she had succeeded in getting their mother to stop disparaging her husband of eight years, a huckster in his own right—a trafficker in electrical warming and vibrating devices with dubious therapeutic value.