American Decameron

by Mark Dunn

  “Are you a barnstormer, as well?” asked Tillman.

  “No, but someday I’d very much like to learn to fly. But that’s enough about me, Tillman. Tell me something about yourself. What is it in a man that makes him want to stand for three hours in the hot summer sun just to gaze up at a crazy woman in a gorilla costume?”

  “It’s not such a strange occupation, I should think. I was almost certain that there was a pretty girl under all that pithecoid pilosity and I’m happy to see, now, that my assumption was correct. What brings you to central Pennsylvania all the way from Texas, Miss Hoyt?”

  “I can never quite say just how it is that I wind up in the places I do. My life, you see, has no purpose other than shrugging off these earthbound traces whenever possible, and taking wing.”

  Tillman smiled. “I like a girl who soars—one who plays by her own rules. You must know, though, how hard it is to set yourself apart from the crowd these days. Everybody’s trying to gain attention for themselves. Ten years ago there was no such thing as an exhibitionist and now the country’s teeming with them.”

  “Is that what I am? An exhibitionist? Is that a bad thing to be, Tillman?”

  “Not when you do what you do with such skill and panache. Now what is it that I can say about myself? I’m in shellac. I hail from Williamsport, where I grew up with two slightly younger brothers, both very odd. Even though they don’t play tennis on the fly or hang from the wings of inverted Jennys, I’m sure you’d find them strange beyond facile description.”

  “Intriguing. And your parents?”

  “Our father died of influenza and our mother presently resides in a sanitarium in Arizona.”

  “Tubercular?”

  “And insane.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. I’m an orphan.”

  “For how long?”

  “Since the Galveston hurricane swept my parents out to sea. I’d like to meet your brothers. I never had siblings.”

  “I must warn you, Gail, they’re a panic. And not necessarily in a fun way.”

  “I’ll gird myself for the occasion.”

  A moment of silence passed. Gail savored her last bite of hamburger. Tillman watched with affectionate eyes as she licked the residual mustard from her fingers. “Are we falling hopelessly in love, Tillman Hopper?” she asked simply.

  “What do you think, my dear cloud-ape?”

  Gail tossed her napkin at Tillman teasingly, and then asked if the two of them might leave. The still-intact trousers portion of her ape suit was really starting to itch.

  Tillman’s youngest brother Palmer was tenting.

  The other brother, Hezzie (short for Hezekiah), noticed upon entering his brother’s bedroom that Palmer had gotten himself into a state that, given the size of his member, could not be so easily ignored. “You’re flagpoling, brother,” said Hezzie. He was wearing the prototype of his latest invention: a life preserver with attached propellers (“When simply floating and waiting for rescue isn’t a viable option”).

  “Of course I know this. You don’t think I know this?”

  “The question then becomes why? Or perhaps, what? What has happened to put you in such a state of arousal, dear brother?”

  “That!” said Palmer, pointing to the film projector set upon a nearby table. “Here I am, brother—the diligent, innocent correspondence-course student—a fully committed matriculant of the National School of Visual Education. Here I am studiously—and did I happen to say, quite innocently—viewing one of the instructional films being projected by my leased De Vry motion picture machine, learning everything I need to know about how to run a radio switchboard and/or electrical substation and/or fully operational, maximum-output power plant, when suddenly without warning, the quite engaging animated step-by-step process for repairing a cracked Alexanderson 200 kilowatt motor alternator is suddenly replaced by the image of a French woman taking off the top of her Chinese pajamas and rubbing lotion on her bare breasts.”

  “How do you know she’s French?”

  “I just assumed she was French. Do American women embrocate their bare supple breasts with skittering, lambent fingertips?”

  “Our mother rubbed motor oil all over herself and then admitted that trying to join that minstrel show was only a convenient afterthought.”

  Palmer released a wistful sigh. He missed his mother.

  “What caused it, brother? The tenting, I mean. Was it the application of the lotion? Was that what did it?”

  Palmer groaned. “It was everything, brother. It was the lotion. It was the glistening nipples. It was the naughty come-hither look on her ooh-la-la face. The way her bee-stung lips contracted themselves into that little dime-sized ‘O’ that you know always seems to get my gonads dancing. And now I’m flagpoling and nothing I can think of is furling me back to flaccidity. What time did you say Tillman was coming by with that new girl of his?”

  “You have until four o’clock to subside. Perhaps you should think about slugging that weisenheimer who thought he’d be clever and put that come-to-life French postcard right into the middle of your instructional film.”

  “I should. I should invite him over and let him have it.”

  “That’s good. Keep thinking those angry thoughts. I’ve got to go straighten up the parlor. Here’s something else you can park your brain on: think of Aunt Melvina without her clothes, trying to confine all that naked avoirdupois to a single chair.”

  Palmer nodded, then shuddered.

  Tillman and Gail arrived at four o’clock on the dot. Hezzie was wearing the best suit he had: his heat-generating electric suit. But because the short circuit still hadn’t been found and fixed, he left it unplugged. It wasn’t necessary to plug it in anyway, it being a warm summer’s day, and so the unplugged electrical cord was left to trail behind him like a limp tail. It wasn’t too much of an inconvenience, except when he turned to acknowledge the entrance of his brother Palmer and the cord got wrapped lasso-like around one leg.

  “How long has it been, Tillman?” Palmer asked his oldest brother, all grins and no flagpole.

  “Too long, little brother,” replied Tillman, grinning back. “Hezzie tells me you’re taking a correspondence course that involves watching instructional films.”

  “Among other things, yes. They say that the day will soon come when we’ll all be learning how to be electricians and plumbers and barbers and whatever you please by watching educational movies in the comfort of our own homes. It’s the way to go. Especially for those of us who don’t wish to ever leave our homes.”

  Tillman nodded. He frowned sympathetically. “You too, Hezzie?”

  “As of October 8—” Hezzie directed this to Gail, who sat next to Tillman on the sofa, “it will have been nine years since either of the two of us has stepped outside the ol’ family manse.”

  “Goodness!” exclaimed Gail. “Who brings your food? What happens when something comes up that demands your presence elsewhere?”

  Palmer and Hezzie both shrugged at the same time. “It hasn’t happened yet,” said Hezzie. “I write my funny pieces for Grit and Palmer helps me with my inventions. He’s a very able assistant. As for foodstuffs, we have longstanding arrangements with the various purveyors in town to deliver all that we require to our front door step.”

  “But it encourages me,” said Tillman, “that you’re learning a trade, Palmer. Something that will eventually take you out into the world.”

  Palmer nodded. “Someday I do hope to find the courage to leave. I’m certain that my brother Hezzie does as well.”

  Hezzie nodded.

  Palmer turned to Gail, whose eyes were now watering from involuntary commiseration with the two brothers’ plight. “Have you ever met anyone like us?”

  “One of the wing-walkers I worked with one day couldn’t find the courage to leave the cockpit of the plane. In her defense, she had just seen a flock of geese knock another daredevil right off the wing and into the arms of Jesus, so I can’t blame her
. But no, I’ve never known two men who together couldn’t find the wherewithal—let’s not use the word ‘courage’—to leave the house they’ve lived in since…I take it you’ve both been here since adolescence, would that be correct?”

  The brothers nodded as one.

  “Now. Hezekiah,” Gail went on, “Tillman tells me that you’ve been an inventor for quite some time now. Would you like to introduce me to some of your little brainchildren?”

  Hezzie was happy to take his brother’s new girlfriend down into his basement laboratory/workroom, where he entertained her with demonstrations of the propeller-affixed life preserver, a cigarette holder with built-in ashtray, a “timesaving” motorized toothbrush, a machine designed to indent dimples into the cheeks, and an umbrella-shaped shield against inconveniently directed grapefruit squirts. Gail found it all delightful and then, in a blink, her smile evaporated. She shivered. “I’m sorry, but I don’t do well this far underground. I don’t even much like the ground, for that matter. Tillman, take me up to your roof. I’d like to sit up on your roof for a while and catch my breath.”

  While Tillman and Gail were climbing up to the rooftop of the old Grampian Hills mansion where all three boys had grown up, Palmer and Hezzie sat downstairs pronouncing Gail Hoyt a gentle, beautiful soul with a pert little Colleen Moore mouth and a funny, engaging disposition, and “brave beyond every known definition.”

  “For not only does she come and go at will from edifices that would hold men like you and me in a form of torturous psychological imprisonment,” said Palmer with both admiration for his houseguest and rancor over his present situation, “she has walked the circus tightrope and played tennis on the wings of aeroplanes. Our future sister-in-law drinks in deep draughts from the elixir of adventure and the fully realized life. Perhaps, brother,” and now Palmer hesitated, “perhaps she can work that miracle of all miracles for us.”

  “And just how would she do that?” asked Hezzie. “Merely opening the front door so as to more efficiently aerate the house will, on occasion, nearly put me into a faint.”

  “What’s wrong with us, brother?” returned Palmer. “There are creatures among us who soar above the clouds and yet we can hardly move upon the ground. We’re plankton, brother, or something to be found among the anchored constituents of the phylum Mollusca.”

  As the two brothers were bemoaning their burden of shared agoraphobia, something unfortunate was taking place up on the roof. A deer hunter on the forested hill behind the house missed his target and sent his projectile with blistering speed right into Tillman Hopper’s left shoulder, knocking him from the pitched roof. Gail, attempting to stay his tumble, did something that had only happened to her once before (and since she was only a baby at the time, she had no recall of it): she lost her balance and fell earthward as well. Both of the lofty lovers landed upon the grassy front lawn, the impact leaving them in a state of temporary unconsciousness.

  Together Tillman’s two younger brothers stood before the front parlor window and absorbed the scene before them: Tillman and his new girl Gail, lying tangle-limbed next to one another on the green lawn. “Someone will surely motor by and see them there and call for an ambulance,” said Palmer.

  Hezzie shook his head. “They’re hidden from the street by that large hedge. Don’t you see?”

  “Then we should telephone the hospital immediately,” said Palmer.

  Hezzie shook his head again. “But we can’t. This morning I borrowed the electromagnet from the telephone receiver for my combination electric hair rejuvenator and radio helmet.”

  “Then remove the components, brother, and put them back into the telephone.”

  “The process would take time—time which we don’t have. One of us will have to go and seek help from a neighbor.”

  “It would be death to me,” said Palmer, his expression transmogrifying itself into a look of abject terror.

  “You think that only you would die were we to leave this house? I believe it to be true of myself as well, Palmer. But could it be—could it be, brother, that our brains are playing a terrible trick on us, the way that Mother’s brain made her go into that delicatessen and fill her purse with scrapple and headcheese when the butcher wasn’t watching?”

  Palmer shook his head, confused, frightened, impotent, and self-loathing.

  Finally Hezzie said the thing that his brother was wholly receptive to hearing: “All logic says that we will not die. It is only mindless illogic that requires us to remain within this house. And yet regardless of the outcome with regard to our own survival, do we not love our brother enough to put our lives on the line for him—for the girl he loves who climbs flagpoles and walks on the wings of aeroplanes? Has he not allowed us to live here in the house of our birth, to draw from the family accounts as needed while he must work in Scranton and demean himself by making buttons to keep himself financially solvent?”

  “Yes to all of your questions,” said Palmer reverently and with an effusion of affection for his oldest brother that knew no bounds.

  “Then we must risk our lives for them. We will do it together. Together we succeed or together we perish in that noble essay. Are we partners in this endeavor, my little brother?”

  Palmer threw up. He took out his handkerchief and wiped away the bits of half-digested bread and pimento loaf that clung to his lips and chin while nodding his consent. “Let’s do this,” he said.

  For the first time in almost nine years the two young men opened the front door and stepped over the threshold and out onto the front porch of their house. With a high-pitched ululation born of their great fear and with hesitant geisha-like patter-steps, they crossed the porch and descended the stairs to the front lawn. The screams of mortal terror subsided. A soft summer breeze caressed their faces. There was the smell of honeysuckle in the air, of something else floral and lovely that their gardener had planted when he wasn’t mowing their grass and trimming their hedges and running the illicit craps game that went on right under the brothers’ noses in the backyard toolshed. Hezzie knelt beside his older brother Tillman. He glanced up at Palmer. He took up Tillman’s wrist to feel for his pulse.

  “He’s dead,” Hezzie said dolefully.

  “I’m not dead,” snapped Tillman, his eyes still closed.

  “He’s not dead,” said Hezzie, exultantly.

  “I’m not dead either,” said Gail. “But I think we’ve both sustained some broken limbs, and someone in the woods who apparently doesn’t like to see people sitting on roofs has shot your brother in the shoulder.”

  Palmer ran for help.

  “The two of you—you did it! You have broken free of your personal Bastille!” said Tillman to Hezzie through various stabs of pain.

  “By jingo we have, brother,” replied Hezzie. “Will you look at that beautiful blue sky? Can you hear the birds?”

  “Is their song any different from what you might have heard through an open window inside the house?” asked Gail, who first thought it was her right leg that was broken but was now convinced that it was both of them.

  “Gloriously different! Thank you, Gail. Thank you, brother.”

  “For what? For falling off the roof?” asked Tillman.

  “For coming here to see us. For believing that we aren’t freaks after all.”

  The oldest of the three brothers kept his eyes closed. In the temporary darkness he had made for himself, he sought Gail’s twisted hand and clasped it tightly. “You know that you’ll never be completely normal, Hezzie,” he said, matter-of-factly. “It’s the family curse.”

  “Yes, I know,” said Hezzie. “I have patents for forty-seven inventions that I’ve never been able to sell.”

  “I’d like to take a closer look at that life preserver with the little propeller attached to it.” Tillman opened his eyes. The world was a blur, indicative of damage, he feared, to the optical nerve. “Now that you are out and about, Hezekiah, you should really sell this house and move away from Williamsport. It�
�s time for you and Palmer to give your lives a fresh start. Perhaps the three of us should go into business together.”

  “Yes, I would like that.”

  “Do you think Palmer would go for it?”

  “Let’s run it up the flagpole and see if he salutes it.”

  “Yes. Let’s.”

  1926

  BETWEEN THE hAMMER AND tHE aNVIL IN kENTUCKY

  My parents divorced in 1928. Divorce was not as commonplace in that year as it would later become, especially in the small town of Winchester where we lived. Looking at my mother and father people have shaken their heads and clucked their tongues and commented in low voices about how much Mama and Daddy must have despised each other to come to this difficult decision. But I know that through the remainder of their lives (my father died in 1946 and my mother in 1962) there was never an ounce of hatred between them—only profound sadness over the fact that tragic circumstances had led inexorably to the end of their union. Each naturally blamed the other for what happened, but they must certainly have come in the end to the conclusion that they were both in part to blame—my mother for what she did and my father for not trying to understand why she did it.

  It has been many years since I’ve been back to Winchester, and though it rips my heart to do so, I’d like to tell the thing that I’ve been carrying around for all these years. My name is Margaret Leach and I am an old woman with a very good memory.

  In 1926 my aunt Kitty lived in Harrodsburg. She was several years younger than my mother. As far back as I could remember (I was twelve that year) Aunt Kitty had come to stay with us for several weeks in the summer. Mama was very close to her baby sister, and Daddy was fond of her as well. Kitty adored my two younger brothers and me, and I looked forward with great eagerness to each of her annual visits.

  My aunt graduated from the Western Kentucky State Normal School and Teacher’s College in 1924 and got a job teaching geometry and algebra at a high school down in Harrodsburg. She would usually come for her visit in July, but in 1926, the second summer after her move, she showed up on our screened-in front porch in early June, right after school let out for summer vacation. She wore an all silk mosaic blue flat crepe dress with chenille hand embroidery, and the hat she had on was geranium red and dramatically wide brimmed (she told me she hated snug-fitting cloches—they gave her a headache). I was almost positive I’d seen Gloria Swanson wearing the very same hat in a picture that had come out just a couple of weeks earlier!