Mark Dunn - American Decameron

Or unless David and Ericka were rescued. The latter occurred a couple of minutes later. Jack Darrigan and two of the guides, having heard the commotion, showed up and successfully chased the four-legged predators away. There wasn’t time for Ericka and David to dress before the three men stepped into the shower house.

“The same thing happened with a couple of last month’s White Campers,” said Jacob. “I forgot to tell of the spotted hyenas.”

Jacob was staring at Ericka’s pubic jungle. In his defense, it was impossible not to.

Over breakfast that morning there was only one topic under discussion. Ericka and David laughed off their encounter with death and both accepted without complaint the good-natured ribbing of those who knew exactly why the two had found themselves in such a predicament. Ruth, the oldest of the group and the most devout, was the least judgmental: “The Lord protects those who love so deeply.”

Did Ericka and David love each other so deeply? Was their love, like their naked rendezvous with the man-eating spotted hyenas, something that could jolt them from the doldrums of their fairly vacuous, monotonous lives? Africa, in all its glory, had shown Ericka that there was life — wild, unpredictable, impetuous life — outside of the Greenwich high school where she taught, outside the narrow confines of her stultifying daily routine, outside the small circle of somnolent, adventure-deprived family and friends who kept her dully circumscribed.

Was Africa just a temporary flash of light — an isolated, fugitive moment of emancipating sensuality? Or was it a foretaste of all that could be?

Ericka and David dated long-distance for four months after returning to the States — long enough to greet the new millennium (as the consensus of opinion on century beginnings and endings at the time dictated) together, David pistoning on top and Ericka thrashing below, her eyes pinned to the digits of her clock radio, hoping for perfect millennial-coital synchronicity.

They were off by two and four minutes, respectively.

The next week they parted.

The break-up was amicable. David was a good lover, a most generous lover, but he was not any of those other things that Ericka had sought in a mate. But it came down to one thing more important than anything else: Ericka wanted to return to Africa. She wanted to join another Habitat build, either in Botswana or in some other country. And she wanted David to come with her.

But he had done Africa, and that was that.

She couldn’t help thinking, couldn’t help imagining whom she might meet on that next trip. Would he take her as David had? And then would they stay together, grow old together? Ericka Prager desperately wanted someone to grow old with.

She had built houses in Africa. Now she wanted to put mortar between the cement blocks — the “bricks”—of her own life.

“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.”

Catherine Uhlmyer Gallagher Connelly had been about the business of living a very long (although not uniformly happy) life when Ericka Prager first visited her at her Wilton, Connecticut, nursing home in early January. By Catherine’s 107th birthday two months later, the two had become friends. In fact, by early April, Ericka had made friends with several of the other nursing home residents, including a woman named Eunice Ludden — mother of the famed Ludden Sisters singing group — who confessed to Ericka that she wasn’t an official resident of the facility but was working undercover to investigate patient abuse; and Karen Bailey Kelly, the daughter of famed Boston novelist Dennis Bailey. (Karen had her own connection to sororal singing groups, having written a biography of the Brox Sisters in 1953.)

It had been Ericka’s friend and fellow high school teacher Shannon Humphries’ idea for Ericka to accompany Shannon and her advanced history students as they each chose a long-lived occupant of the facility and wrote down his or her oral history. The students had a large group of colorful and interesting senior citizens from which to choose; as testament to the migratory nature of Americans over the last one hundred years, the residents hailed from forty-one different states, including Alaska and Hawaii. There was Mr. Grimm, retired administrator of a Presbyterian boarding school in central Utah; and Mrs. Daltry, the wife of a retired U.S. Air Force colonel who had assisted in the investigation of the accidental dropping of a bomb on a rural South Carolina community in 1958; and Frieda Chapman, whose husband, a U.S. Navy captain, was severely injured during the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Even after the project was completed, Ericka and Shannon continued to visit the nursing home every weekend, each looking forward to attending May 27’s “Celebration of Tri-century Centenarians.” The special ceremony (with punch and cake and a visit by Senator Joe Lieberman, who was believed to be on Al Gore’s short list for vice-presidential running mate that year) would honor fifteen of the home’s residents, who, having been born in the “Gay ’90s” and having been blessed by the “long genes,” were now in the unique position of having lived in three different centuries (if one is to stipulate, of course, to the debatable claim that the twenty-first century owns title to the year 2000).

New Englander Ericka and Mississippi-born Shannon had met at the University of Vermont. Both had been education majors and both had eventually roomed together in a rental house with three other coeds: Tian Gilliam, the adopted daughter of Montana ranchers; Claudia Wilmer, heiress to the Wilmer-HearMore Hearing Aids fortune; and Lindsey Royce from Gainesville, Florida, who was later called “One of America’s Thousand Points of Light” by President George H.W. Bush after she rescued an older woman, Josephine Charles, visiting from Derry, New Hampshire, from her car when it accidentally went into the Winooski River. In an amazing and somewhat disturbing coincidence, Shannon’s own nephew and niece were in the car with their father when it went into Arkabutla Lake in Mississippi that very same year (all three rescued themselves successfully; Shannon’s sister Bianca, alienated from her husband at the time, wasn’t present.) The five University of Vermont education majors, each hoping for a career teaching at the high school level, lived, coincidentally, next door to a retired high school principal named Cornell Rodgers (whom they called, with private mischief, “Mr. Rodgers”).

Shannon’s other sister, Heather, who resided in Hernando, just south of Memphis, suffered a nervous breakdown of unknown origin in 1996 and maintained only tentative ties to her sisters in the years that followed. Shannon and Heather’s parents, Piddy and Billy Humphries, lived for many years in their native Yazoo City, Mississippi, before moving up to Memphis, where Billy got a job as manager of a movie theatre in Whitehaven.

Ericka’s 107-year-old friend Catherine, who was nearly blind with cataracts and very hard of hearing, wasn’t as close to Ericka as was the old woman’s roommate, who had just joined the Centenarian Club in March. Gail Hoyt Hopper Rabbitt, who could not say that her one-hundred-plus years were nearly so tragic as those of her fellow centenarian, Mrs. Connelly (for whom the General Slocum steamboat fire of 1904 cast a cloud of dark remembrance that scarcely subsided during all the many years of her later life), had, nonetheless, enjoyed a far from trouble-free life herself. In early 1926, Gail’s first husband, Tillman Hopper, and his two brothers took all of the money that comprised their large family inheritance and put it into an invention of Tillman’s brother Hezekiah’s ingenuity and design: a life preserver with attached battery-powered propellers, called the “Poseidon-Peller.” The business the three brothers formed was doing well until the Stock Market Crash of 1929, when they lost their shirts, and Tillman, in despair, took a swan dive from his and his wife’s twentieth-story apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. As might be guessed, he didn’t survive.