by Mark Dunn
Abel thought about this for a moment—thought so long, in fact, that his son felt it necessary to put the supposition to him again: “Wouldn’t you have?”
Abel rubbed the tendons running up the back of his neck. “I suppose I would have.”
“And then if I went, I would have been disobeying you. This way, I’m not disobeying you because I never asked you in the first place.”
Abel marveled at his son’s impeccable logic.
“But you know how our church feels about moving pictures. It is our denomination’s studied opinion that most of them are products of the Devil’s handiwork.”
“Do you really believe that, Dad?”
“Well, I—”
“Gee willikins, Dad! They don’t all have Rudolph Valentino or Gloria Swanson in them!” Matthew took another long drink of his phosphate. “Next month they’re playing Clarence—you know, from the Booth Tarkington story. And then Robin Hood with Douglas Fairbanks. Douglas Fairbanks, Dad! I really want to see it. And now I suppose I’ll have to ask you for permission, and I suppose you’ll say no because somebody might find out.”
“If I found out, Matthew, don’t you think the possibility exists that other people from our church might see you going in or out of that theatre? Our congregation isn’t small and our members do venture into Jonesboro on occasion.”
“Robin Hood, Dad! He does good works for the poor just like Jesus did.”
“Yes, I know the story of Robin Hood, son.”
Matthew scowled. “Sometimes you act just like a Baptist.”
“Stay your tongue, boy.” Abel cleared his throat. “On the other hand, I’m not an Episcopalian either—and neither are you. Being, in fact, a careful and deliberating Methodist, I shall think about it. I may even do a little praying on it.”
Father and son grew silent.
Abel finished his orange phosphate and poked the bubbles at the bottom of the glass with his spoon. Then he said, “It’s a clever picture? The one with Harold Lloyd and his grandmother?”
Matthew nodded.
“Would you like to see it again?”
Matthew nodded again, a big grin brightening his previously fretful face.
That Saturday afternoon the Reverend Abel Adamson of Second Methodist Episcopal Church of Blytheville, Arkansas, and his thirteen-year-old son Matthew watched Grandma’s Boy, starring Harold Lloyd and Mildred Davis.
Over the weeks that followed (on those Saturdays for which the pastor had no visitation appointments) the two sat together in close companionship, father and son, in Jonesboro’s Empire Theater, and enjoyed, as well, Tom Mix in Arabia, Brawn of the North starring the German Shepherd Strongheart, Clarence with Wallace Reid, Robin Hood starring Douglas Fairbanks, Oliver Twist featuring Jackie Coogan in the title role, and The Prisoner of Zenda with Lewis Stone and a newcomer to the silver screen named Ramon Navarro. There was sin and bad behavior in every picture, but every transgression was properly punished in the end.
It wasn’t until the next year, with their attendance at a showing of The Covered Wagon (starring J. Walter Kerrigan and Lois Wilson), that the two were finally spotted by a member of Abel’s Blytheville flock. The inadvertent sidewalk interloper was Cleo Summers, a deaconess and head of the church’s women’s Bible study class. She spied her minister and his son going in to view an afternoon screening, and though the movie commanded a higher ticket price than usual due to the fact that it was very long and quite sweeping in its story of transcontinental migration, Miss Summers paid the price and marched with a sense of strong moral purpose into the darkness, where she planned to ambush her pastor as soon as the lights came up.
She did not.
Instead, Deaconess Summers confessed to Abel and Matthew over a cherry phosphate that she simply couldn’t help loving the film. Having grown up in a Nebraska sod house when the American West was still wooly and wild just like in the picture (and “couldn’t you almost hear the whoop of those Indian savages when they launched their attack upon that caravan of pioneer wagons?”), there was little in the picture to criticize and much to applaud.
Deaconess Summers didn’t tell a soul whom she had seen and what she herself had seen (with immeasurable delight), except for members of that secret society of two dozen or so from her Blytheville church who had been making similar surreptitious excursions to the Jonesboro picture shows (just like those morally bankrupt Catholics and Episcopalians!), and who later came to share their enthusiastic assessments with one another in a more organized fashion at the soda fountain counter—a band of the most exuberant Methodist cinephiles, together with their own Reverend Abel Adamson serving as honorary chaplain.
When, several years later, internecine disharmony in the Baptist community of Jonesboro rose to the level of injury, death, and the calling in of the Arkansas National Guard by the governor to restore order—the events of those tumultuous years dubbed by Arkansas historians “The Jonesboro Church Wars”—the Blytheville Methodists withdrew themselves to the safe confines of their own cohesive Methodist community (founded, in fact, in 1879 by a Methodist minister named Blythe). Concomitantly, the open secret of movie attendance by Abel and Matthew and Abel’s congregants lost its semblance of sin, and Blytheville’s own movie theatres became more commercially fruitful and multiplied.
It was also about this time that the Reverend Abel Adamson and his son Matthew stopped going so often to the movies.
They went fishing instead.
1923
CONSPIRATORIAL IN NORTH CAROLINA
Emory Jones was cold. He stood next to the radiator to warm up. Two other jurors were doing the same—a man named Sykes and another named Fogleman. Albert Sykes was an insurance salesman. Horace Fogleman worked for Vick Chemical. Fogleman was telling Sykes what went into his company’s popular Vaporub. He was rattling off the list of ingredients using his fingers like an abacus.
“Oil of eucalyptus, menthol, oil of juniper tar, camphor.”
Albert Sykes nodded. “You can certainly smell that camphor and eucalyptus.”
“Then you got your oil of nutmeg and your oil of turpentine.”
“You put turpentine in your Vaporub?”
Fogleman nodded.
“Never ever thought to check the ingredients on the label. My sister, she slathers that stuff all over my two little nieces—you know, when they get a mite croupy. Clears that congestion right up. You married, Horace? Got kids?”
“No and no. But it’s probably for the best. I spend sixty, sometimes seventy hours a week down at the Vick laboratory. Why, this courthouse is the first place I’ve spent any time at all outside of that plant and my rented rooms at Mrs. Harvey’s.”
The two jurors who’d been in the washroom now emerged and joined the other men. The man whom the other eleven had designated as foreman, an older gentleman by the name of Dean Tuttle, had been waiting for them to finish up. He now called all of the jurors back to the table.
Tuttle was a district manager for the Southern Life and Trust Company. There were three insurance men in the room, Greensboro being, arguably, the “Insurance Center of the South.” All three knew each other; the insurance community was tightly knit. There were three textile men present as well. White Oak Cotton Mills, which employed both Emory Jones (beamer operator) and another man, Wesley Lowermilk (dolpher), was the largest denim mill in the world. (Inarguably.) In fact, each of the twelve men serving as Superior Court jurors at the Guilford County Courthouse that week came quickly to realize that they were on a first-name basis with at least three and sometimes four or five of their juror brethren. Enoch Voss, who ran the Piedmont Café downtown, actually knew, on sight, every man in the room.
The fact that there were so many threads of acquaintance woven throughout this group of men wasn’t all that unusual for a city the size of Greensboro; at 43,500 residents it still felt more like a big small town than a bustling metropolis. The jurors’ paths crossed in a variety of ways. And there was something else that linked t
hem—something of which only one of them was presently aware. Something fairly important.
Tuttle, who sat at the head of the table nearest the door, cleared his throat. “How would you like to proceed, gentlemen? Shall we discuss the case first or would you care to take a preliminary vote?”
The jurors responded with silence. A couple of the men shifted uncomfortably in their chairs. It wasn’t the kind of case that lent itself to easy discussion. The details surrounding it would never have been bandied about in mixed company, and because of this, each of the twelve men was grateful that the administrators of the court hadn’t yet capitulated to pressure by women’s rights advocates to bring members of the gentler sex into the jury pool. In this particular case, the charge being aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, and the defendant being a woman, it would, of course, have only been fair. Technically speaking, this was not a jury of Lorene Wimbish’s peers. None of the jurors wore a dress.
At least, not in public.
In simplest fact, Mrs. Wimbish had walked in on her husband in the midst of a sexual act with someone who was, obviously, not his wife. She had stormed from the room and then returned with a gun and a retaliatory gleam in her eye. She had fired upon the two, striking Burley Wimbish’s lover in the side. The bullet had missed all the internal organs and spared its target (or was the target Burley? Mrs. Wimbish had testified at one point that it was her husband she wanted to see dead) the deadly complications of peritonitis.
Because Mr. Wimbish’s lover had survived the assault, Lorene Wimbish had the good fortune to escape a murder indictment. Instead, she was being tried for firing a gun at her husband and at the man he was blithely mounting from behind: one Marcellus Teague, an assistant paymaster at the Orange Crush Bottling Company. It was a case of such a scandalously prurient complexion that the Greensboro Daily News and the Greensboro Daily Record and the Greensboro Patriot didn’t know how to cover it without giving offense to sensitive female readers, and Lord help the child who happened to steal a peek at the morning paper before Papa had quarantined it. The North Carolina Christian Advocate, a weekly published in Greensboro, avoided the story as if it were the pox.
Those who did venture an opinion—the prating pickle-barrel crowd down at Richardson Grocery, for example, or the pundits and opinionaters who held forth at the town’s two Arcade barber shops, or the check-jacketed salesmen who sold the Studebakers on East Market (and gawked at French nude photographic cards when business was slow)—were nearly unanimous in their defense of the defendant, a wronged woman if there ever was one. Why, it was bad enough for a wife to discover that her husband was cheating on her with a woman, but it was sin and perversion of Biblical proportion to discover that he was having congress with another man!
An open-and-shut case of marital self-defense, of moral retribution—so decided those who allowed their feelings to be known where such feelings could be safely aired. The woman had married a freak. To think that there were such men as this in their fine town! Were the children safe? How about the farm animals?
Yet in this particular jury room, with this particular set of jurors, it wasn’t open and shut at all.
Foreman Tuttle tried again: “Shall we vote, gentlemen, or shall we talk?”
“I’ll talk,” said Jesse Cates, a young man who took all the baby pictures at Harrell’s Cute Photo Studio. “The law is the law. She shot at both of the men and wounded one of them, and it isn’t our place to consider the moral rectitude, or lack thereof, of her victims.”
“Yet how can we not?” asked Wiley Shube, who worked as an underwriter for the George Washington Fire Insurance Company. “Because—like it or not—there was another crime being committed in that room. Fourteen-dash-one-seventy-seven in the state penal code. A Class ‘I’ felony carrying a presumptive penalty of two years imprisonment. Both gentlemen should be grateful that the district attorney’s hands are tied here; the only witness to this second crime, this ‘crime against nature,’ is the easily impeachable defendant in our case.”
Bob Weaver, who worked as a napper operator for Revolution Cotton Mills, now spoke up: “You’re suggesting, therefore, that we should take the fact of that other crime into consideration when arriving at our verdict?”
“Not necessarily. I’m just laying everything on the table. Each of you is free to do the same.”
The room grew quiet except for the hissing and sphygmoid clanking of the room’s radiator. Emory Jones looked out the window. The dark January sky augured snow.
“May I—may I say something?” he asked, turning back around. There was a catch in his throat. He was nervous. He had every reason to be. Emory Jones, before entering the employ of White Oak Cotton Mills, made his living as a supervisor of telephone operators (both local and toll) at the Southern Bell Telephone Company. He was a man who had never married and who had never even asked a single one of his equally unmarried female operators out on a date. He was generally scrupulous in his behavior, even in his mannerisms and the way that he spoke, lest he be thought to be partial to “crimes against nature” himself. It was not an easy way to live and Emory prided himself on his efforts. Even so, there had been two occasions in which he had surrendered to the inclinations of his true nature, taking no small risk as a result.
The previous summer, Emory Jones, now in his late thirties, had finally given in to a lifelong desire to be with another man. He had found himself in a dangerously frank and flirtatious conversation with a young, strikingly good-looking waiter at the O. Henry Hotel Café. There was an instant affinity between the two men from which Emory would have formerly shrunk away. Yet the young man, whose name was Tracy—Tracy Sprowl—was genial and witty and knew how to put Emory at ease. Tracy was also a dead ringer for a young man Emory had seen in an Interwoven Socks advertisement. The man had taken Emory’s breath away with his square-jawed, collegiate good looks. Emory had torn the ad from the magazine and secreted it away in one of his bureau drawers. It shared space with other choice print advertisements featuring fine-looking young men wearing Knapp-Felt hats, and Arrow collars and shirts, and Kuppenheimer “Good Clothes,” though the athletes in the Kuppenheimer pictures weren’t, in truth, wearing much clothing at all. It seemed as if there were some secret legion of magazine ad men in New York and Chicago who knew that their job was twofold: to sell items of men’s clothing to the male reading public, but also to feed the fantasy appetites of men of Emory’s persuasion.
Emory Jones knew that there must be others like him, men aching with unspeakable desires, men yearning to enlist in that covert society the laws of the land told them was wrong—wrong to the tune of two years of hard labor, or worse. Emory knew this as Tracy led him up to the fifth floor of the O. Henry Hotel and he knew it for certain when, after spending an hour doing things with Emory that seemed both wrong and right at the same time, his new friend complimented him by saying, “You’re the best I’ve had all week.”
“You bring other men up to this room?” asked Emory, lacing his shoes with nervous fingers.
“I do. It’s a hobby of mine. I’m very selective, Jones, so consider yourself quite lucky.” Tracy winked. “Yes, I’m also vain as hell, but wouldn’t you be vain if you looked like me?”
“So you—you have an arrangement with someone here in this hotel?”
“A nice and tidy arrangement, but then I told you that already. Ain’t you been listenin’, honey chile?”
Emory nodded and then he said, “Will you bring me up here again?”
“If you’re good and eat your spinach,” Tracy laughed.
True to his word, Tracy took Emory up to the room again. This visit didn’t go as well as the first. Emory could hear noises coming from the room next door. The noises reminded him that he and Tracy weren’t off on a desert island somewhere frolicking naked in the tropical sun; they were in the middle of a city of over 43,000 other people. These people were always close by, always liable to find out about him and report his illicit behavior to the prope
r authorities.
It took him out of the mood.
“Not to worry, my buddy—” And then Tracy interrupted himself to sing a line à la Al Jolson from “My Buddy,” one of Jolson’s recent hits. “You’re a fine looker and a real trump and although I can’t give you the key to my heart, here’s the key to this room: 505. Someday, if you find your own sheik and want to take him to Araby, you can bed that Bedouin right up here. I’ll give you the nod down in the café to let you know the room’s available.”
Tracy handed Emory the room key. “Gotta fly, Hot Lips. See you in the funny papers.” And with that, Tracy Sprowl, the most handsome man Emory had ever known, and the only man Emory had known in the Old Testament sense, poked his head out into the hallway, and, finding his escape route conveniently unpopulated, flew down the back stairs to the café, where he was already late for his Saturday afternoon shift.
Emory sat dazed in the chair next to the bed, holding a key that had the potential to open up his twilight world in ways that he could never imagine, though he never found the nerve again. A year and a half had passed and opportunity failed to present itself. Emory concluded that there weren’t many like Tracy or himself in this town—men willing to take a chance and taste forbidden fruits. The pun was a dreadful one, he had to admit, but it always made him smile with guilty satisfaction.
In spite of this, Emory never left his rooming house without the key. Just knowing that he had it with him made him feel special and less alone.
“Go ahead. Say whatever you like, Jones,” said Wesley Lowermilk, who knew Emory from the cotton mill. Wesley, a handsome young man whom Emory nicknamed “Zorro” from his resemblance to the hero of the 1920 swashbuckler picture, The Mark of Zorro, was close to Emory’s age, had been married—unhappily, by Wesley’s own confessional account—and was now waiting with great anticipation for the woman’s return from Reno. Not that he ever wanted to see “Xantippe Redux” again, but he was eager for that happy day when he would know for certain that the divorce was finalized and he had at last been set free.
