“People drank during Prohibition. You should know. You lived through it.”
“You’re right. You’re quite right. Try one of those little mushroom thingies.”
“You made all this just for yourself?”
“I was going to give Judy and Dicky a taste. But most of it is pretty rich, and I didn’t want them to get a tummy ache.”
“Smart. It’s good. The mushroom thing. It’s all very good. I should pay you for this tray and take it to the party. Never much care for the spread that Marilyn Powell sets out.”
A silence passed, Cliff turning desultorily through the pages of the newspaper while taking an occasional bite from the hors d’oeuvres tray, Adelaide puttering around the kitchen. “Do you mind if I turn on the radio?”
“Not at all.”
Adelaide tuned her kitchen radio to big band music. “I usually can’t find anything but rock and roll these days,” she pronounced.
Cliff grunted agreement.
After another couple of minutes, Adelaide turned the music down and said, “Cliff. Is it all right for me to call you Cliff?”
“You can call me whatever you like, Miss Stillwell. Just don’t call me a cab, because you won’t have any luck.” Cliff’s little joke was chased by a glimmer of a smile.
“There’s something I haven’t told you. Something that I should have told you.”
Cliff, whose head had been largely in the paper, now looked up. “What?”
“I can drive. I even have a car. I let my brother borrow it. He wanted to drive down to Atlantic City for the weekend.”
“You can drive? Since when can you drive?”
“Since I finished my lessons last month.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this? You could have driven my car! Why did you put me through all this?”
“You shouldn’t drink and drive. I was trying to make a point that would stick.”
Cliff could feel his face turning red. “You know, Miss Stillwell, this really shouldn’t be any of your business.”
“I disagree. You’re going to kill somebody one of these days — if not me, then your wife or one of your children, or somebody you meet coming around one of those curves on Highway 119. Or yourself.”
“So you’ve been teaching me a lesson.”
“I suppose I have.”
Cliff got up. “So can we go? You know, of course, that I don’t intend to pay you for all the time that we’ve wasted here.”
“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.