by Mark Dunn
At least two of Gail’s fellow nursing-home residents were intimately familiar with the incident. Tillman’s plummeting body had barely missed landing on top of a friend of Pearl Patz’s. Pearl was Gail’s dining room companion. Leonora Touliatos was on her honeymoon in New York on that fateful day in late 1930 when the body struck the sidewalk only a few feet away from her. Not wishing to upset his blind wife, Leonora’s husband James waited several years before telling her the truth of what had occurred that day, perpetuating, instead, the fiction that the thud she heard next to her was a dead horse keeling over from heat exhaustion.
Also familiar with the incident was another member of the Centenarian Club, a woman from Hartford by the name of Frances Hellman. Frances and her husband Hank had come down from Connecticut for a weekend of sightseeing, dining, and dancing with their friends, the Petersons. When the body smacked the concrete, Frances reacted by slapping her cheeks in hard shock, and for hours thereafter looked as if she had over-applied her rouge that morning.
Though one of the occupants of the room next door to Catherine and Gail, Rory Hillard, had no special connection to the suicide, he nonetheless took an interest in Gail’s brother-in-law’s ill-fated invention. “It would have come in mighty handy for my buddy Torkleson and me when the Indianapolis went down and all the neighborhood sharks became ill-mannered.” A retired butcher (previously in the employ of Piggly Wiggly), Rory had moved to Fairfield County, Connecticut, from Houston after the death of his second wife to be closer to his daughter Regina and his five granddaughters.
The other thing casting a shadow over the life of Gail Hoyt (otherwise known as “The Rock-a-bye Girl” of 1900 Galveston hurricane association) was her rocky marriage to a philandering aviator by the name of Leslie Rabbitt (whom Gail decided had only married her because of their mutual love of flying and because he would be giving his wife the comical extended surname of Hopper Rabbitt).
Leslie, who was himself less rabbit and more pig (and once attended a masquerade party dressed as pig—snout and all—after reading about a World War I soldier who wore a pig nose in battle), descended from two fairly tainted bloodlines. In the late teens and early-to-mid-twenties (up until his arrest in 1926), Leslie’s father had performed hundreds of illegal abortions in the town of Winchester, Kentucky, which had resulted in no small number of client deaths. Leslie’s mother, Jettie Livergood Rabbitt, served a year in prison for filing a mischievous false police report in 1906 accusing the Livergood Family Association of Warwick, Rhode Island, of running a clandestine white slavery ring. The charge and the subsequent raid on the association’s 1906 reunion left the organization in a shambles from which it never recovered.
Leslie’s offenses, though comparatively more venial, were ruinous to the marriage: an ongoing affair with a wealthy middle-aged Fall River, Massachusetts lush by the name of Alice Rose Carteret, and an on-again-off-again long-distance relationship with a woman named Patsy Pullen, whom Leslie had met in the lobby of the Blackstone Hotel in Chicago during the city’s 1933-34 World’s Fair. Leslie continued to pilot airplanes after his messy divorce from Gail, and perished, arguably by his own hand, when in a drunken stunt in late 1944, he painted his personal plane in the colors of the Japanese Zero long-range fighter aircraft and ventured too close to Los Alamos, New Mexico, where he was promptly shot out of the sky. The incident was covered up until 1987, when it was brought to light by a radio documentary producer in Madison, Wisconsin, named Byron Reeves, who was doing a piece on the 1947 Roswell UFO incident at the time, based on a book by two young authors with the Tweedledum-and-dee names of Kirk and Dirk.
Dirk Heinze grew up in Anchorage and wrote a best-selling book about the 1964 Alaskan earthquake, which he had experienced as a young boy, before turning to the true crime genre and penning An Encyclopedia of American Criminality, with entries on everyone from Leopold and Loeb to Russell Edeale, an aeronautical engineer who spent his free time putting guns to people’s heads and making them beg for their lives. Shared interest in the criminal mind was the reason that Kirk and Dirk came to their present partnership. Kirk, who was from Vineland, New Jersey, was inspired by Truman Capote’s non-fiction novel, In Cold Blood, to write a book very much in the same vein: Double Take, about Charlie Towers and Bob Fletcher, brothers who murdered each other’s wives. The consultant on Kirk’s book was Towers’ and Fletcher’s triplet brother Henry Kierbaum, who had just recently retired from GHH (Grady-Hawthorne-Hay) Enterprises, where he headed up the Genitalia Accessories division.
Gail and Ericka sat sipping tea. On the television across the room (its volume turned down and its closed captioning on), Inside Edition was running a story about a dental hygienist in Florida who two years earlier had stabbed one of her clients to death with an air-filled syringe.
“We’ll have to suspend our teatime shortly, Ericka,” said Gail, setting her teacup down. “They’re going to wheel all of us centenarians into the cafeteria and take our picture for the paper tomorrow.”
“Are you looking forward to the celebration?” asked Ericka.
“What’s that, dear?” Gail was momentarily distracted by a passing fellow resident waving at her from the hallway. Lois Gregory, another centenarian, was smiling smugly in the company of three doting men of various ages: her son Les, her grandson, Ari, and Ari’s life-partner, Wayne. Ari, formerly a bookstore owner in Wilmington, Delaware, and Wayne, a building contractor for Holman-Crampo Homes in Dallas, Texas, both of whom had had boyhood crushes on Roy Rogers, had met at a Royandalabilia estate sale six years earlier in Mitchell, South Dakota.
“I was just asking about the celebration tomorrow. Will all of your fellow centenarians be able to attend?”
“Well, dear, we lost Dr. Kleerekoper—the eminent mathematician. He’s been moved to hospice care. But the others are doing quite well for their advanced years. Take Penny Rutland, our resident Mainer; she writes for an outrageously funny newsletter about people who can’t abide flowers. Can you imagine such a thing? I love her spunk and spice, though. She’s the bees’ knees.”
Ericka smiled at the aged flapper. “What about Adelaide—the woman on your floor from Tarrytown?”
“Adelaide’s had a bad cold, but she’s much better now. We’re always holding our breaths around here, since the Grim Reaper often comes with a hacking pneumonic cough. Adelaide’s teacher friend, Carla—I think they met when they did some volunteer work together for the NEA—she’s flying all the way from Pocatello, Idaho, just to be in attendance tomorrow.”
There was a knock on the room’s open door. A pretty woman in her thirties stood in the doorway. “We’re going to take you and Mrs. Connelly down to the cafeteria now for the shoot.”
Gail winked at Ericka and whispered, “She’s new here or she wouldn’t have put it that way. When you get to be Catherine’s and my age, we generally don’t like to hear that we’re about to be shot. It sounds a little like ‘thinning the herd,’ don’t you think?”
Ericka grinned and wagged her finger at her playful friend.
“I don’t need this wheelchair,” said Gail, pointing to her “ride,” “but it seems to make them happy to roll us all around in them. Doesn’t it, Catherine? Oh, she can’t hear me.”
Catherine wouldn’t have heard Gail even if she could hear. At present she was squinting at and quite engrossed in a television program on the History Channel about Typhoid Mary. Catherine winced to see the house where Mary Mallon was quarantined on Brother’s Island, so close to where they had laid out the bodies of Catherine’s mother; her nine-year-old brother, Walter; and her baby sister, Agnes.
As Gail and Ericka were waiting for the assembling of all of the centenarians (in company with their respective retinues), Gail turned to her companion and whispered, “Lucinda—that girl there who wants to have us all ‘shot’—she was telling me the other day about being nearly kidnapped by a pervert in a mall in Waukegan, when she was no more than five. I have come to the conclusion, Ericka, that life is a
perilous journey no matter who you are. There are some, like myself, who walk the tightrope and do aerial loop-the-loops to impress the crowds—those who add a layer of additional risk to their lives—we constitute a special category and sometimes we get lucky. My good Lord, I’m one hundred years old. I’ve looked death in the face more times than I can remember, yet here I am!
“But for everyone else, luck plays its part as well. Catherine was lucky to survive what she went through; so many who boarded that boat with her did not. Dorothy, who lives down the hall, survived the sinking of the Lusitania when she was just a little girl. And Angeline—poor Angeline’s face was slashed by her demented father at nearly the same age, but her marriage to her beloved Jake has lasted sixty years. Although, there are so many others I know who have been dealt equally unfortunate hands who did not survive, did not prevail.
“Do you see Alma there? Doesn’t she look exotic in that blueberry-colored gypsy peasant dress her granddaughter Connie got her from the vintage clothing store? Connie’s a dear. She’s taking over the kitchen and making us linguine tonight—she uses lots of oregano. Alma’s brother was shot by his lieutenant for not going ‘over the top’ in the first World War. Shot pointblank right there in the trenches. Lily Lanham—see her there in the pretty red hat?—Lily’s nephew Todd was accidentally pushed off a balcony in a Chicago movie theatre when an usher tried to get him to go home; the young man seemed determined to watch every single screening of The Harvey Girls. You know, the one with the song about the Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe? And Amelia Bream’s sister Vanessa—Amelia’s the handsome woman sitting next to Joanna in the big wool sweater—Vanessa broke her neck in a jitterbug competition back in ’39, when she slipped from her partner’s arms in an over-the-head throw and had to spend the rest of her life paralyzed from the neck down.”
“I was almost devoured by hyenas on my trip to Africa last year,” contributed Ericka, almost proudly.
“Yes, I remember you telling me that they invaded your camp one night and tried to get into your tent.”
Ericka cleared her throat. “That’s right.”
Ericka was asked by the photographer to step back. His name was Dack and he wore a deerstalker cap he’d inherited from a favorite great uncle—a Michigan man. Dack was from Wisconsin but had spent most of the last thirty years living in Greenwich in a house he’d bought from an ad man, a Bataan survivor, who’d had the Neocolonial custom-built a few years after the war. The Gold Coast remained very popular with New York “Mad Men.” One of Dack’s neighbors was a Young and Rubicam account executive named Stewart Selman, who made headlines for himself and his agency in 1970 by putting together a midi-skirt ad campaign for New York clothier Bonwit Teller that depicted iconic Americans of the twentieth century (all men!) wearing midi-skirts: Louis Armstrong, the Wright Brothers, Harold Lloyd (hanging from that detaching skyscraper clock wearing a paisley print mid-length), and even Louis B. Mayer, bedecked in a chartreuse calf-length and flanked by a conveniently delighted Mickey and Judy. Several years later, Selman won a Clio for a parody ad in which the gunslinger Shane is persuaded to return to the homesteading Starrett family (in the midst of his ride into the proverbial western sunset) for a bowl of “crispy, crunchy” Golden Grahams breakfast cereal.
After the photo shoot, as most of the centenarians were being returned to their rooms, Gail and Ericka went into one of the home’s intimate sitting rooms to speak in private. Gail said that she had something important she wanted to talk to Ericka about. There was a travel magazine on the sofa. Ericka moved it to the coffee table before sitting down. On its cover was a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge. Someone had prankishly penned in a little stick man taking a dive from it. Ericka set it down on top of another magazine—this one for senior citizens. The cover article was titled “Fifteen Reasons to Visit Flagstaff, Arizona.” Ericka wondered if one of the reasons was souvenirs; her great-aunt had bought her a Grand Canyon pennant at a gift shop in Flagstaff called Gertie’s. Ericka had added it to her growing collection of colorful place-pennants, most of them purchased by friends and relatives at Stuckey’s roadside stores.
Ericka liked the cozy little room. On the wall across from her was a print of Maxfield Parrish’s fantastical Daybreak; on the wall behind her a print of van Gogh’s reticent “Vase with Poppies.” The radio in the room was tuned to a classical station. In honor of Memorial Day weekend, the station was playing works by American composers—at the moment, the first movement of Edward MacDowell’s Second Piano Concerto.
“Dear, there is something I’d like you to do for me. While the longevity of my roommate Catherine is something I might wish to aim for, I don’t believe for a minute that I’ll ever reach the age of 107. When I do die, be it this year or the next, I’d like you to take my cremains—is that the word?—take them down to New York and go to the top of whichever of the World Trade Center towers has the observation deck. I haven’t been there since right after they were built. And I want you to cast my ashes to the wind. You must make certain, dear, that the wind is blowing away from the building. What I’m asking you to do may very well be illegal, but then again, illegality hasn’t stopped me from doing a host of things in my life that I thought had value. I very nearly stowed away on the Akron when I was a much younger woman—in protest over the fact that women weren’t allowed to serve in any capacity on Uncle Sam’s rigid airships. How I envy you, Ericka—all the wonderful opportunities being afforded to women of your generation.”
“I’ll do that for you, Gail. I will.”
“Of course, my preference has always been to have my ashes taken to the top of Mount Everest, but that’s an impossibility, isn’t it? You don’t happen to know anyone who climbs that mountain on a regular basis, do you?”
“I’m afraid I don’t.”
“I never had children—wasn’t able to. I’ve met a lot of women over the years who weren’t able to bear children but were successful in making of their friendships something very much like family. My trouble is that all of my friends are dead. Except for you, Ericka. This is one of the drawbacks to living to be so old. Now, I take that back. I do have a couple of other younger friends besides you of whom I’m relatively fond. My friend Audrey in Austin, for example. And Nona in Marietta, Georgia. Nona’s a preschool teacher. And back in the twenties, so many, many years ago, I was good friends with a couple of Bohemian gals in Greenwich Village, Jenny and M.K., and there were the Cadwaladers—Wilberforce and Rosalinda—an older couple I knew in the thirties. She was a crosspatch but he was a dream. The cat’s meow, as we used to say. Of course, now I’m talking about people who are dead. I suppose I just made my earlier point, didn’t I?”
“Would you like me to take you back to your room now?”
“I am a little sleepy. I’m liable to nod off any minute now. Ginger, who lives across the hall from me, does that sometime. She’s from Iowa. Red Oak. Lost two brothers in the war. Poor unlucky woman, poor unlucky town. And Camilla doesn’t so much fall asleep as go into a kind of temporary catatonia. I think she’s reliving the death of her teenaged son back in Helena, Montana. He and another boy died in a terrible car crash one night.”
Ericka helped Gail to her feet. “Have you traveled much, Gail?”
“Oh good Lord, have I traveled! First Tillman and me, and then me and that cuniculine bastard—we all had the wanderlust, don’t you know, and once I was free of Mr. Rabbitt, that wanderlust got even lustier. I flew prop planes all over South America and skydived in Europe and pretty much wore myself out until I was forced to become almost exclusively terrestrial. Even grounded, I’ve had my share of interesting experiences. I lived with an Indian couple in Old Town Albuquerque, had lunch with Harry and Bess Truman in Independence, Missouri. I even worked as a counselor at a girl’s camp in Wisconsin. I’ve seen so much that is good about this country, Ericka, honey, and so much that wasn’t good at all. I was in Greensboro when they rounded up all those homosexuals in 1957. I was in Nashville, Tennes
see, when the women-haters almost killed the Nineteenth Amendment abornin’. And can you believe I was even in Cincinnati the night they arrested that evangelist couple about fifteen years ago—the Swearingens…accounting fraud or tax evasion or some such thing as that. Sometimes I feel like—oh, what was that retarded man’s name? Tim Hanks played him in the pictures.”
“Tom Hanks, I think you mean. Forrest Gump.”
“That’s right. I feel just like Forrest Gump. Except that I’m allergic to chocolates.”
Ericka took Gail by the arm and led her back to her room. Catherine was in bed, taking her afternoon nap. On the television there was a story about the risks to airlines of unsecured lithium batteries in their cargo holds. “Is there anything I can get you before I go?” asked Ericka.
“No, dear, I’m fine. And you’ve taken such a load off my mind, knowing that you’ll dispose of my ashes in the way that I ask. Oh, goodness! That’s an awful thought: being ‘disposed’ of. Will you be coming back tomorrow for the celebration?”
“Of course I will,” said Ericka, helping Gail into bed.
“I used to soar. Now I’m earthbound. But at least my ashes will take wing.”
Ericka nodded, said goodbye, and stepped from the room. She poked her head into the room of another friend she had made at the home, a spry widow named Jelena from Kansas City, Kansas. Jelena was resting.
On the drive back to her apartment, Ericka gave more serious thought to what Gail had asked her to do. She was touched that she had been asked, but worried over how she would pull it off. It wasn’t all that easy to throw things from the World Trade Center. For one thing, the windows were airtight. And what if the wind on the observation deck was uncooperative? It would be terrible to leave Gail’s “cremains” scattered about the surface of the building’s roof. Ericka wished that Gail wasn’t so particular about it having to be the World Trade Center. As skyscrapers went, the Empire State Building was far more useful when it came to putting things into the air from a great height. Ericka learned this when she was a little girl and accidentally sent her Barbie Doll all the way down to Fifth Avenue the fast way. Or how about the Woolworth Building? Wasn’t it the tallest building in the world for several years in the early part of the twentieth century?