American Decameron

by Mark Dunn

  Eugene put on the nose. He did indeed look like a pig—or rather a creature that was half pig and half human in physiognomy.

  The aunt now appeared in the doorway with folded arms. “You will remove the nose when you sleep so that it won’t hinder your breathing, and then again when you take your meals. But at all other times you will wear the nose as a necessary reminder that boys who act like pigs will be regarded thusly.”

  “But must I wear it to school, Aunt?” Eugene’s voice sounded different. It sounded as if he were holding his nose. And why should it not? The papier-mâché nose was tight and it pinched the nostrils nearly shut.

  Aunt Helen nodded. “You may take it off when you eat your lunch. Only then.”

  Eugene was not a boy for whom tears came easily and this night would prove no exception. He reconciled himself to the ignominy of his fate, though he dreaded what his schoolmates would say and do when they saw him looking like a pig.

  And they did not disappoint. There was no small number of snickers and guffaws and puns directed at Eugene that involved pigs and piglets and hogs and shoats and pork and ham and, naturally, all things nasal. Eventually, Eugene’s teacher, Miss London, declared a moratorium on all future raillery, if for no other reason than the simple fact that she was tired of hearing it.

  “You wear me out,” she said to her class with a sigh of exasperation. “And there isn’t an ounce of originality in anything you’ve thrown at poor Eugene today. This classroom is an absolute graveyard for cleverness. It batters my heart.”

  While the children were taking their lunch outside upon the sunny playground (the arrival of emancipative summer being just around the corner), Miss London detained Eugene to ask for the true story of the nose, since he had earlier attributed it to an affinity for oinkers.

  Eugene, who had always been fond of his comely young blond-haired teacher, who was both gentle and wry—a fascinating cross between a nineteenth-century no-nonsense school marm and a twentieth-century pedagogical subversive—told the truth about how he came to receive the nose and related the sad fact of the length of his punitive sentence.

  Miss London shook her head sympathetically, a few strands of her long, carefully gathered blond tresses escaping their confinement upon her head and hanging in free filament. “It’s a small matter to make a boy wear a pig snout around his own home, but it’s something far different to force a child to wear it where others will see it and taunt him over it.”

  “I don’t mind the jests, Miss London. I myself would point and laugh if one of the other boys was made to wear it.”

  “Well, take it off. In my schoolhouse you’re to be a boy and not a pig.”

  Eugene shook his head. “I cannot. I am under strict orders from my aunt to wear it at all times except when I eat and sleep.”

  “How will she know if you’re wearing it here or not?”

  “She said that she’ll send Caleb, our hired man, to come and look in the window from time to time to make sure that I’m in compliance.”

  “What a predicament!” marveled Miss London, leaning back in her chair and drumming her fingers upon her lips. “Perhaps I should have a talk with your aunt tonight.”

  Miss London came that night but Aunt Helen wasn’t home. Aunt Helen was at her missionary society meeting discussing heathen brown babies throughout the world and how best to bring them to Christ. Miss London went instead to talk to Uncle Oswald, who had been working late in the forge, scouring his tools and anvil. Eugene had been assisting his uncle prior to Miss London’s arrival, though at present the two were munching potted meat sandwiches like hungry bachelors. “Eugene, if you will excuse your uncle and me,” said Miss London, “there’s a private matter that I wish to discuss with him.”

  Eugene picked up the remains of his sandwich and the pig nose, which lay next to him, and obediently left the forge. (He had been ingesting his sandwich very slowly to postpone the return of the false snout to his face.)

  “Mr. Ramp, I cannot say that I’m a big fan of humiliation as a means of correcting misbehavior.”

  “Nor I, Miss London,” said Uncle Oswald. “And yet my tacit compact with my wife—the compact which opened the door to Eugene’s coming to live with us—is that within the sphere of discipline, all will be left to her and her alone. She isn’t a heartless woman, Miss London, nor even, may I add, misguided. She simply sees things differently than do you and I.”

  Miss London paced a moment with her fingers interlaced behind her back. “Then Eugene is doomed to be a pig for six days more.”

  Uncle Oswald nodded and wiped a trickle of sweat from his brow. The forge remained forever warm regardless of the season.

  “And what a pity it is,” said Miss London. “He’s a good boy in the main. And not a pig.”

  “No more a pig than you or I,” agreed Uncle Oswald, who was, nonetheless, remembering how Miss London had attacked with hedonistic glee a particularly tasty blueberry pie at the county fair when a more contained and cultivated judge would have simply placed the fork daintily to her lips and withheld her full assessment until the distribution of the prize ribbons.

  The next morning there was more fun to be had by several boys who had thought of new things to say, and there was even a comment on the part of the visiting nurse who came each month to check for head lice and suspicious coughs, and who, in seeking a tally by Miss London of all the children in attendance that day, couldn’t resist appending her request with, “including the pig.”

  The following day, which was a Friday, was quite different from the two days that had preceded it. In the first place, when Eugene came down for breakfast, his uncle was missing. Before Eugene could inquire of his aunt, who stood frying eggs at the stove, as to his whereabouts, Eugene’s uncle made his appearance in quite a dramatic fashion. He dashed into the room, and, snatching up the plate of sausage and bacon from the table, addressed it in the voice of melodramatic tragedian, “Oh, Mother! What has happened to my poor, dear porcine mother?”

  The fretful wail had a logical explanation. Uncle Oswald was wearing a pig nose—a nose with the same look and construction as Eugene’s.

  Nor was this the end of things. When Eugene got to school he was greeted by a pig-snouted teacher and twenty-two pig-nosed classmates. Eugene’s Uncle Oswald, by all evidence, had been up all night in his blacksmith’s shop making pig noses to match the one worn by his nephew. He had taken them quite early to the school, and Miss London had asked her other pupils in confidence to come early to put them on. And all had agreed and had delighted in the frivolity of it, and Eugene’s aunt’s choice of punishment for her nephew became undermined in a way that did not in the least put him at odds with her, for even the aunt had at last come to see the folly of it all.

  Yet ever thereafter Eugene sat up straight in his chair and displayed his very best manners when taking meals with his uncle and aunt. And over the ensuing years Eugene came to be loved by both of his surrogate parents just as deeply as they had loved their own infirm son.

  When as a young man Eugene Ramp left to join the American Expeditionary Force to help deliver the world from German barbarism, he took his papier-mâché nose with him and wore it to coax a laugh from his fellow doughboys and to keep up their spirits when hopes would ebb. When he fell at the bloody Battle of Château-Thierry in France, Eugene was still wearing the nose. At the request of his fellow Yanks, he was laid to his eternal rest with the fabricated pig snout firmly emplaced.

  Back in North Carolina there was a memorial. Punch was served, along with cheese and crackers and a tar-heel honey ham. Most in attendance thought the ham an appropriate touch.

  1911

  EFFLORESCENT IN MAINE

  Penny Rutland was an only child. She was also an only grandchild on her father’s side. The uniqueness of this status placed a heavy burden upon the twelve-year-old. For the last six years, she had been sent to her paternal grandparents’ landed estate on the Western Promenade in Portland to spend the summer
in the constant company of her sixty-year-old forebear who, though under-demonstrative in her affection for the girl, did love her in her own way and sought to instruct her in all those things that a young lady of good breeding and cultivated refinement should know. Penny would have liked to romp and play with the servants’ children, but she couldn’t risk soiling her pinafore. She would have liked to sit upon the vespertine verandah and listen to war stories told by Mrs. Rutland’s butler Jenkins, who had served as a spy for the Union Army during the Civil War, but there were, according to Penny’s grandmother, far more ladylike and much more productive things for the young girl to be doing in her postprandial hours.

  There were teas—these attended by her grandmother’s West End friends—and there were gatherings of the distaff members of St. Luke’s Cathedral for the purpose of discussing matters of both a spiritual and morally inculcating nature. Penny was expected to sit politely in white muslin with her hands folded neatly in her lap and to be the perfect little girl. Penny was expected to knit when her grandmother desired a knitting companion and to read to her grandmother when she sought a mellifluous rendering of one of Mrs. Rutland’s favorite books, and each day Penny was required to accompany her grandmother in her daily matutinal promenade through her English rose garden, which was the woman’s pride and joy and one of the finest private rose gardens in the state.

  While Penny didn’t dread her rosaceous catechism at her grandmother’s side, there were fifteen or twenty things she would rather have been doing on these cool, dewy summer mornings. But Penny was a good girl and properly indulgent of her grandmother’s efforts to instill in her a love of the floral, and more specifically to share with her all the many mysteries and particulars of rose horticulture, including the salient aspects of both the hybrid perpetuals and the tea roses (which do quite well in light soil if manure is added and plenty of water is given in the dry season).

  “And what have we here?” asked Mrs. Rutland, suspending her stroll alongside her granddaughter to linger before a peculiar-hued tea rose climbing upon the old stone wall that encompassed the garden. The rose was yellow with streaks of red and gold—a distinct coloration that upon some earlier tutorial session Mrs. Rutland had compared to a J.M.W. Turner sunset.

  “Is that the L’Ideal?” asked Penny.

  Mrs. Rutland nodded and smiled approvingly.

  “And this variety here, sitting low against the wall?”

  Penny thought for a moment and said, “The Gustave Regan?”

  “Not Regan, my dear. Regis.”

  “Regis,” repeated Penny.

  “And those lovely creamy yellow buds—what did I tell you they were often used for?”

  “For button holes?”

  “Precisely, dear girl. They make the most exquisite button holes.”

  “May I sniff them?”

  “Oh, my darling girl, you may sniff any rose in your grandmother’s garden. That is the twofold reward bestowed upon us by the most beneficent family Rosaceae. Its constituents are ravishing to behold with the eye and they are delicious in fragrance—except for the Baroness Rothschild over there, a nearly faultless rose both in its color and aesthetic composition but without any scent whatsoever. A rose without a scent. It’s absolute apostasy! Yet I grow the Baroness for her beauty and overlook her deficiency as best as I am able, for the lovely pale pink of her petals delights and enchants. Look all about you, child. Have you ever seen in one singular spot so many delectable variations of color? All the different whites and yellows and salmons and pinks and reds? Oh, such reds! A near riot! It’s my favorite color, I must confess. Is it your favorite color, Penny?”

  “I like red. I like blue, as well.”

  “And who could not like blue? How blue the sky is this morning! How beautiful the world on a day like this. Now, shall we visit the pillar roses or spend a few minutes with the dwarf teas?”

  “I’d be happy spending time with either one,” said Penny. She took a parting sniff of the Gustave Regis. The sweet scent was strong; all around her the air was infused with its pungent redolence.

  “Grandmother, may I ask you a question?”

  “Of course you may, Penny. There is so much to learn about the World Rosaceae. There is much still for me to know. Should we find the gardener and put our questions to him?”

  Penny shook her head. Then she swallowed and said, “Grandmother, when I woke this morning there was blood on the inside of my panties. It was…” Penny looked about, her eyes settling upon a cluster of blackish-maroon blossoms. “…this color.”

  “That is the Prince Camille de Rohan, my dear. It’s one of the finest dark roses to be had and extremely difficult to grow. Hardman and I, we have been quite astonished by the extent to which it has flourished here. And once the plant is established in full, we shall be amply blessed by a prodigious number of blossoms.”

  “I have blood in my panties, Grandmother. Should I see a doctor?”

  Mrs. Rutland shook her head.

  “What am I to do?”

  “Has your mother not spoken with you about this?”

  “I’ve never bled before.”

  “She will speak with you, I’m certain, when you return home in the fall. Let’s go and see how Madame Plantier and the Marquis of Salisbury are doing.”

  Mrs. Rutland walked in silence to another section of the rose garden and examined the forenamed pillar and her companion tea rose, as well as their floral friends Grace Darling and Marie van Houtte, the latter festooned in soft blossoms of striking pale lemon yellow, each petal tinged with delicate pink along the edges. Mrs. Rutland sighed contentedly. “This could very well be my favorite among all my tea roses. Shall we make a bouquet of these beauties for the front hall?”

  “What if I bleed again?”

  “It is nothing with which to concern yourself. It will all be explained to you in due time.”

  “Will you explain it to me?”

  “I think it best that you discuss this with your mother.”

  “Mother doesn’t discuss things with me. She treats me as if I’m still seven.”

  “That will change, I assure you. This hedge here. Directly behind you. Do you recall the name of this variety?”

  “Something to do with New Orleans,” sighed Penny.

  “You very nearly have it. This is Léopoldine d’Orléans. And there is the Dundee Rambler. Note how luxuriantly it rambles!”

  “Why won’t you tell me the things that really matter to me!” Penny suddenly exclaimed. “What is wrong with me? Am I going to bleed to death?”

  “Your mother has been derelict. It is not my place to discuss such things with you. I am the grandmother. And, Penny, you will refrain from ever raising your voice to me again. My gracious word!”

  With that, Penny’s unwontedly flustered grandmother gathered her skirts in one hand and fled the garden. The gardener, Hardman, who was nearby upon his hands and knees weeding and therefore wasn’t noticed by Mrs. Rutland, now stood up to make himself known to Penny.

  “The garden is nearly perfect,” he said. “I can’t imagine what she saw that has put her in such an agitated state.”

  “She hasn’t a problem with the garden,” was all that Penny said in response.

  There was a tea that afternoon attended by several of Penny’s grandmother’s friends. Penny said that she didn’t feel well so that she would be excused to go up to her room and read a book and write letters to her friends back in Boston, but mostly to sit upon the window seat and look out her bay window at her grandmother’s rampant English rose garden and wonder if she was dying.

  Her dismal reverie was interrupted by a knock upon her door. The visitor was Mrs. Rutland’s downstairs maid Hildy. “Begging your pardon, miss, but I have a question for you, if you could but spare me a moment.”

  “What is it, Hildy?” Penny, who had been sitting with her knees pressed against her chest and her arms wrapped tightly around her knees, now granted freedom to all of her limbs and stretc
hed herself cat-like upon the window seat.

  “I noticed the spot in your panties. Will you be needing a rag or two?”

  “A rag or two?”

  “Now that you’re blossoming into a young lady.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  Hildy stared at Penny for a moment without speaking. Then she said, “You haven’t been told a thing about it?”

  “About what?”

  “Your mother and grandmother—one of them hasn’t…?”

  Penny shook her head slowly, uncomprehendingly.

  Hildy tutted. She shut the door behind her. She crossed to Penny and took her by the hand and led her to the bed, where the two sat down next to one another. “It’s nothing to be afeared. I’ll tell you everything you need to know. Your grandmother knows her roses but she apparently don’t know a thing about the rose that blooms in every young woman.”

  “I’m not dying?”

  Hildy smiled and nearly laughed, but held herself back, for it would have come at Penny’s expense. “No, my dear little girl. You’re just beginning to live.”

  Then Hildy told Penny everything there was to tell, even those things that Penny could scarcely believe.

  At table that evening there was more talk of roses between Penny and her grandmother as her grandfather read his newspaper and nearly nodded off in his soup. After a subdued evening spent reading and listening to Caruso on the gramophone, Penny was sent up to bed with a kiss upon the cheek from her grandmother and a mumbled goodnight from her preoccupied grandfather. After Penny had left the room, Hildy was rung for and a sum of money changed hands and Hildy was made slightly richer, though Mrs. Rutland had asked nothing from her.