American Decameron

by Mark Dunn

  “I wouldn’t expect you to. Let me get my purse. Can I have your keys? Be a dear, if you would, and carry out my hors d’oeuvres platter.”

  As the two were walking out to the car, Cliff stopped. Adelaide, who was walking next to him, stopped too. “Just going to take a wild guess here, but your boyfriend didn’t die in the Spanish flu epidemic, did he?”

  Adelaide shook her head. “It was a car crash. Late one night in Trenton. I lived in Trenton then. That crash last week just brought it all back to me. Of course, I think of him other times, too. Like when I see you. I can’t help myself. The way your hair recedes slightly at the temples just the way his did. And you have a similar smile. You really should smile more often.”

  “Give me a good reason, Miss Stillwell, and I’ll smile as big as you like.”

  As Adelaide was sliding in behind the steering wheel, she said, “Now I have to warn you—I’m a very slow driver. I’m quite night blind, you see.”

  Cliff Fredericks didn’t drink again that night. He wanted to be teetotaler-sober for later—when the time came to drive Adelaide home. For all Cliff knew, night blindness had played a role in the car crash that had killed Adelaide’s boyfriend; he wasn’t taking any chances.

  1960

  SMILING IN CALIFORNIA

  It was a very simple plan. It should have taken only one sentence to explain. But Forrest was expressive, and he gave it five. This is what he wrote on the piece of paper that he then left on the top of his bedroom chest of drawers:

  Today I plan to walk to the Golden Gate Bridge. If, along the way, I meet anyone who feels compelled to smile at me, I will not jump. I am tired of watching the best men and women of my generation eviscerated by insanity, stripped bare of soul, crawling through dirty, ebon gutters at break of day, ravenous for the needle or the spliff, consumed by cancerous loathing. Will there be a smile to supplant the anger, to dispel all the loathing? If you are reading this, the answer is “no.”

  Forrest Wilton was twenty-four. He lived in his parents’ Edwardian painted lady in the affluent San Francisco neighborhood of Pacific Heights. Only recently had he gotten the idea of jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge, the most popular suicide destination in the country. His life, which had held promise (he had worked for a couple of years on the city desk of the Examiner and had even been engaged for a couple of months to a girl who did, in the beginning, truly love him), had now hit a wall. He wanted to write professionally, but he didn’t feel he was good enough. He stood on the outside of the Beat movement, peering longingly through breath-fogged windows, unworthy, insignificant.

  Two weeks earlier, on May 13, Forrest had watched San Francisco police officers blast heavy jets of water from fire hoses at protesting college students. He had witnessed the officers dragging students bruisingly down the front steps of City Hall, while William Mandel, a left-wing radio broadcaster, sat inside spitting figuratively into the faces of the members of the House Un-American Activities Committee who had gathered to figuratively string him up as a Communist sympathizer in this “Marxist City by the Bay.”

  The country was going down the toilet in one fast flush. Richard Nixon was poised to become the next president come November.

  And in the midst of it all—amidst all the madness and the anger and the hysteria that, unknown to Forrest, was ushering in one of the most turbulent decades in our national biography—there wasn’t, in his pessimistic estimation, even a glimmer of a smile. Not one single smile of hope, or of happiness or joy writ personal, or humanity or compassion writ large. There was only Moloch, who fed on hope and despair and robbed mothers of their children. Hell, thought Forrest, was that place—or that time—in which the child in each of us dies.

  Could it be that Forrest Wilton wanted to end his life because he couldn’t return to the innocence of his childhood? Or was it simpler, even, than this? That all he needed was a smile—one single, redemptive, life-changing, life-saving smile to keep him among the living.

  Her name was Ying. She’d moved to San Francisco ten years earlier from Taiwan. She was the Wiltons’ housekeeper. Mr. and Mrs. Wilton had just been summoned to Boston to be at the side of their daughter—Forrest’s older sister—following a difficult delivery. They’d hardly had time to pack before flying out the door. Ying usually came on Thursdays, but Mrs. Wilton asked in parting if she’d come the next day instead—Tuesday. The house was such a mess, you see, and it would only get messier with the Wiltons’ slovenly son left to his own devices.

  Forrest left for the bridge at eleven. Ying arrived at the house at eleven fifteen. Ying discovered the note on the chest of drawers at around eleven thirty. Her English was good; she’d studied the language for years as a student in Taipei. It was unclear to Ying as to whether this constituted a suicide note or not. If there was truth to the statement, the law of averages dictated that Forrest would meet someone along his long walk to the southern reach of the bridge who would smile at him.

  But then again, what stranger had ever smiled at her in the ten years she had lived in San Francisco? People she knew—they smiled, of course. Ying had many friends in Chinatown. But she could remember no stranger who had ever opened himself or herself up in this way. Was it not this way to a great extent in every big city—the building up of walls to keep ourselves from the harm that may come from those whose hearts we don’t know? Ying remembered how it was when she was a girl in Taiwan. She was taught—indeed, all Chinese children were taught—to be cautious of those they didn’t know. Wariness kept the face set, unrevealing, unsmiling. San Franciscans must be very much like the Chinese, thought Ying.

  Poor Mr. Wilton, thought Ying. Poor, troubled, brooding Mr. Wilton. He will see no smiles this day. He will go to the bridge that beckons him in all of its majestic, International Orange-colored, Art Deco splendor, beckons him to come and climb over its low, four-foot safety railing—a railing that invites thoughts of the seemingly unthinkable. Ying had been on that bridge. She had strolled along its walkway. She had seen its thirty-two-inch-wide beam, where jumpers made their now-or-never decision to let go.

  Ying knew nothing of the many people who had ended their lives by plummeting the 245 feet into the waters of San Francisco Bay below, but Forrest did. He had helped to gather research for a newspaper story about the bridge and why it was such a popular place to kill oneself. It seemed to Forrest at the time that the view from the bridge should have been so breathtakingly beautiful as to give the potential jumper a renewed appreciation of life and all of its glorious promise. And yet, according to one of those whom Forrest had interviewed for the piece—a member of the tiny privileged fraternity of those who had beaten the stiff odds and survived the jump—“There is god-awful poetry in that plunge. As you seek to invisible yourself beneath the water below, you become part of something far greater than yourself.”

  That’s right, Forrest had thought cynically to himself; you become part of the Golden Gate Suicide Club—the sane need not apply.

  The man had described to Forrest the feeling of the seventy-five-mile-per-hour, four-second drop—a drop that seemed to put one into a state of protracted abeyance. Here was the intersection between life and death. The man had made it sound almost romantic. Of course, a majority of jumpers end up thwacking the water like it was hard concrete—the insides of their bodies torn apart with a force of fifteen thousand pounds per square inch. Upon impact, ribs snapped, tearing into internal organs; vertebrae shattered; often the liver ruptured. If the jumper was lucky enough (luck being a relative term here) to survive the fall, he would more than likely drown, sucked under by a powerful current, or else die from hypothermia, his body becoming food for sharks or crabs, the latter of which especially loved the taste of human eyeballs.

  Forrest’s interviewee had hit the water in the only way that allowed for the remote possibility of survival: feet first, with a slightly angled entry. And he was rescued almost immediately thereafter.

  The interview, combined with the facts and figure
s assembled for the newspaper piece, opened Forrest’s eyes to the drawbacks of this popular form of suicide. But none of that mattered to him now.

  Ying had seen him in this state. During her weekly visits, she had watched him as he grew more and more emotionally distant. She had wondered how his parents could be so oblivious to their son’s pain.

  Ying left the house in a great hurry, clutching the note in her tremulous hand. He had said that he would walk. This was to her advantage. She would take the bus.

  It being a beautiful, fogless day, there were clumps of tourists moving up and down the pedestrian walkway. They were snapping pictures of Angel Island, of Alcatraz, of Treasure Island in the distance, and taking panoramic shots of the colorfully cluttered, contoured hills of San Francisco. Ying chose a spot where she would wait. And pace. At one point a bridge worker approached her. She couldn’t believe what he said: “You’re not thinking of—you know.” He made a diving motion with his hand.

  “No, I’m not,” said Ying brusquely, after she had collected herself. “I’m waiting for someone.”

  The bridge worker nodded, though there was skepticism in his look. Recently, there had been a rash of suicides. There was a campaign underway to put up a safety barrier, but it would be expensive, and there were engineering and aesthetic challenges. Most people didn’t want it. “If we stop them here, they’ll just find some other place to do themselves in,” was the general refrain. “After all, there’s always the Bay Bridge. Ugly as sin, but quite serviceable.”

  An hour went by. Ying began to think that Forrest had changed his mind entirely. Now there existed the possibility that he wouldn’t be coming at all. She relaxed. She took in the view. She snapped pictures for those who handed her their cameras: tourists wishing visual records of their visit to one of the best-known bridges in the world.

  Then, after letting her guard down, she noticed him. He walked slowly. He didn’t see her—not from a distance, nor even, finally, up close. Was she invisible to him?

  Having no other recourse, as he came close enough for her to reach out and touch him, she spoke his name. Startled, Forrest stopped and turned.

  “Ying?”

  She nodded. “There was no one?” she asked. “Not a single person who smiled at you?”

  “You read my note?”

  “How could I miss it? Your room—it was very much in need of a cleaning.”

  “I thought that a girl was smiling at me, down there, at the end of the bridge. But I was wrong. She was smiling at her friends and I happened to get in the way. The smiles of the young are frivolous and inconsequential, anyway. Why are you here?”

  “To keep you from jumping off this bridge.”

  “Why do you care?”

  “Life is precious.”

  Forrest didn’t answer. He was looking over the rail. He was looking down at the water far below. Four seconds is a long time to fall, he thought to himself. When he turned his head to look at Ying again, she was smiling. It was a big smile—almost cartoon-like. It was the picture of the woman in the dictionary next to the word “smile.”

  “What are you so happy about?” he asked.

  “I’m not happy. I am smiling to keep you from jumping into this bay. Or does my smile not count either?”

  In a soft voice, almost a whisper: “It counts. Of course it counts.”

  “Then I can stop smiling now? I look foolish.”

  Forrest nodded. The two started down the walkway, heading south, back to San Francisco.

  “I lost my father and brother in the 228 Massacre. In 1947. Do you know of it?”

  “The Tawainese uprising.”

  “Yes. The White Terror. I lost many other family members and friends then. They said we were Communists, but we weren’t. We were proud Tawainese who protested too loudly what the Mainland Chinese were doing to our land and our people.”

  “You came to this country to escape all of that?”

  Ying nodded. The two passed a gaggle of Japanese tourists taking pictures of each other taking pictures. She lowered her voice. “Life was better under the Japanese occupation.” She paused. “But all life is precious. Mr. Forrest Wilton, you put too little value on your own life.”

  They walked on in silence. As they were leaving the bridge Forrest said, “I’m hungry. My feet hurt. I have money for a taxi.”

  Forrest was about to direct the driver to his parents’ house when Ying made a suggestion: her cousin’s restaurant in Chinatown.

  “You’ll like it,” she said to Forrest. “All the waiters smile.”

  1961

  UNLITERATE IN NEW HAMPSHIRE

  “We have a whole house full of books. My husband and our two kids are big readers.” This is what Josephine heard the woman say—the woman whose house this apparently was. And there was no reason to doubt her; half of the items for sale in the driveway or overflowing upon the lawn were either books or magazines. There were full sets of Childcraft and Colliers encyclopedias and the usual stacks of non-sequential National Geographics. Josephine, who was an amateur chef, was most interested in the small cache of cookbooks she discovered in a box that sat appropriately upon a child’s miniature play oven. The woman of the house casually leaned against the oven, almost touching Josephine with her shoulder as she and a female neighbor talked about the yard sale.

  “Lyman said the beginning of May was too early in the season for a yard sale. He was afraid that people wouldn’t come out if the weather was nippy. But we really didn’t have a choice. It was either this or Goodwill. I think this is a good turnout, don’t you?”

  The neighbor nodded. “I was thinking you might lose some customers from all the foofaraw about yesterday’s flight, but it doesn’t look like it’s kept too many people away.”

  The two women weren’t the only ones talking about what Derry’s native son Alan Shepard had accomplished just the day before. There were two men, standing among boxes of tools and other hardware, who appeared to be discussing the details of Shepard’s historic flight into space. The younger of the two, whom Josephine assumed to be the husband of the first woman (he was drinking coffee from a kitchen cup and wearing bedroom slippers) was making arching gestures with the plane of his hand as if demonstrating the trajectory of the Mercury astronaut’s spacecraft.

  The man’s wife noticed Josephine looking through the box of cookbooks. She pointed to the box and said, “Do you like to cook? I’m a terrible cook. I haven’t even opened half of these.”

  “I do like to cook,” said Josephine. She picked up an early edition of The Joy of Cooking. “This could be a first edition,” she said.

  “I couldn’t possibly care,” said the woman flippantly. “I just want them all out of here. Lyman and I are moving to Portsmouth. I refuse to cart all this stuff with us.”

  Josephine nodded and smiled. “To quote Thoreau, you are ‘driving life into a corner and reducing it to its lowest terms.’”

  “To quote who?”

  Josephine’s guess that her purchase might be a rare first edition was confirmed a couple of days later. The book was actually quite valuable—one of only three thousand copies self-published by Irma S. Rombauer, a St. Louis mother and housewife, back in 1931. Mrs. Rombauer’s husband had committed suicide the year before and left her struggling to make ends meet. The author had taken the unusual publishing route of engaging the printing services of a company that made labels for Listerine mouthwash.

  “I can’t believe that crazy woman would let this go for seventy-five cents,” Josephine said to her husband Quentin. “I know the right thing to do would be to take it back to her.”

  Quentin looked up from the television. He was watching My Three Sons for personal reasons; like Fred MacMurray’s character Steve Douglas, Quentin used to be an aeronautical engineer. He had worked in St. Louis for the McDonnell Aircraft Corporation, and small world that it was (though this fact would never be known to him) he and his wife, during their ten-year sojourn in “the Lou,” had lived n
ot so very far from none other than Irma S. Rombauer herself.

  “For once,” said Quentin over his shoulder, “don’t do the right thing. Didn’t you say the woman didn’t care if it was a first edition or not? Keep it. Do something nice for yourself for a change.”

  “All right. I will. Don’t have a heart attack from the shock.”

  Quentin laughed.

  Josephine sat down at the dining room table where the light was good. She was almost as bad as the woman from whom she’d bought the book; she’d hardly even opened it herself, so busy was she visiting the local library and a couple of book dealers in Manchester and Nashua to try to figure out how much it was worth. Josephine already owned a later edition of the cookbook, published by the commercial printing house Bobbs-Merrill Company. It was the book dealer in Nashua who encouraged her to spend some time with the first edition. “It’s very conversational in tone, really quite quaint. My dear, there are recipes for preparing raccoon and squirrel in there. I kid you not.”

  In looking for the raccoon and squirrel recipes, Josephine happened to open the book to the dessert section, specifically to a recipe for something called “Jelly Tots” (otherwise known as Hussar Balls, Jam Cookies, Thumbprint Cookies, Deep-Well Cookies, and Pits of Love). But she couldn’t give much of her attention to the recipe. Her gaze was drawn to a small envelope taped down upon the page.

  The Scotch tape was old and had lost most of its stick; the envelope came up easily. On the outside was written in a delicate hand, “To my favorite niece: Surprise! And now you can make Jelly Tots just like your Aunt Sue. (Because this is where I got the recipe!) I hope that you’ll enjoy this cookbook in the first year of your marriage just as much as I’ve enjoyed it in the last years of mine. And there’s a little something else, which you’ll find inside the envelope. A wedding gift that should help you and Lyman build yourself a beautiful kitchen in that new dream house of yours. With love, Aunt Sue. March, 1946.”