American Decameron

by Mark Dunn

  James took two bottles of Pepsi-Cola from his sister’s icebox and poured them into glasses of chipped ice. The two talked for a few minutes before James excused himself to use the bathroom, closing the door between the sitting room and the intervening bedroom behind him. He was gone for several minutes. Leonora felt awkward. Then Leonora felt a little afraid. She questioned why she was there, sitting with a stranger in a strange apartment. She wondered if she should leave. She even started up from the sofa, but then sat back down again.

  And then the door opened and James appeared. He was naked. Completely naked. His body had been perfectly sculpted from years of manual labor. He was Michelangelo’s David, but with greater muscularity (and no Victorian-appended fig leaf). All the colors of James’s body sang out to Leonora: the Copenhagen Blue of his eyes, the Rustic Brown of his lips and Ebony Black of his wiry hair. The French Tan of his sun-kissed forearms, the more muted Cinnamon Heather and Velvet Brown of his upper arms, shoulders, chest, and legs. The Oyster White of his exposed buttocks and groin, the Autumn Brown of his scrotum and shaft, the Blush Pink of his peeking glans. It was all magnificent to Leonora. She didn’t turn away. She got up from the sofa and walked up to the naked man she hardly knew and touched him, ran her hands all over him, absorbing every inch of muscle and sinew and appendage. Memorizing his body with both her eyes and her hands.

  “How did you know?” she asked.

  “Amanda’s a good friend of mine. She knows that I’m a nudist. I’m joining Mr. Barthel’s League for Physical Culture. He’s starting a group in the Hudson Highlands in New York.”

  “Your body is beautiful.”

  “You’re beautiful, too, Leonora.”

  “Amanda told you to say that.”

  “She did. I won’t deny it. So now I’ll say it again, because I want to say it. I find you very attractive. I want to get to know you better. How about I get dressed now and the two of us take a nice walk through Belle Isle Park?”

  Leonora nodded. “Is there a sister and is she really blind?”

  “Yes. We’ll meet her later. Oh, and I really did have to register my new car. Funny how things work out sometimes.”

  Leonora watched as the proudly naked James Touliatos turned and went back into the bedroom. Regardless of what happened between James and her from that point forward, she was enormously grateful to her friend Amanda for having brought the two of them together. And she didn’t know how she could ever thank her.

  But she tried nevertheless. That next week she bought Amanda’s lunch. You know where.

  1930

  WITHOUT APRON STRINGS IN DELAWARE

  The woman lived in an old ramshackle boardinghouse two blocks from the boardwalk in Bethany Beach. Her eyesight was failing and she had to squint up at the balding middle-aged man standing before her. She was sitting with another woman on a bench in front of the weather-beaten clapboard building. At first she doubted what the man had said when he introduced himself, but then she saw something in his eyes that reminded her of a man she’d known when she was young.

  Jerome.

  She had always believed Jerome to be the father of her second child, whom she had given up as an infant. The stranger’s eyes now confirmed it. The eyes spoke. They asked things of the woman. Jerome had been persistent in his bedroom advances. It was easy to see how his son would be persistent in his search for his mother.

  “Would the two of you like some privacy?” asked Mrs. Grosbard. “I can make a pot of tea and take it up to your room.”

  “I think I’d like to stay out here, if the young man doesn’t mind.” Sadie Craddock turned to the man she now knew to be her son. “This is my favorite time of year. The breeze is so cool and the ocean so kind.”

  Mrs. Grosbard smiled at the man and got up. She turned and climbed the stoop and disappeared inside, the click of the screen door’s latch punctuating her departure.

  A seagull landed on a grassy patch of sand nearby. It looked about for some stray morsel to eat. Sadie Craddock patted the wooden bench where she wanted her son to sit.

  It was an old bench and seemed out of place in front of the boardinghouse. Harold wondered if it had once sat bolted to the boardwalk and then been replaced by something newer and shinier. He wondered if it had been brought here to end its days in the company of creatures equally old and only slightly more ambulatory.

  Harold sat down. The sun, which had been bold, now retreated behind a rack of clouds. Harold took off his hat and brushed his brow with the sleeve of his shirt. His forehead was dry, but it was force of habit. Harold worked out of doors as a railway traffic inspector.

  “How did you track me down?” she asked after he had settled in next to her.

  “Aunt Emily said she’d heard that you’d moved to the Delaware coast a couple of years ago. She thought you’d become a Disciple of Christ. Isn’t this where ocean-loving Disciples of Christ wind up?”

  It was hard for Harold to look at Sadie while sitting so close to her, but he wanted very much to do so. He had wondered for years what she would look like if he ever found her. Instead he looked at the sliver of seascape tightly framed by the two buildings across the street. The boardinghouse was near enough to the ocean that Harold could hear the cadence of its surf—near enough to smell its salty, fishy scent.

  “How is Emily? It’s been years since I’ve seen your aunt.”

  “She’s well. She lives in Plainfield, New Jersey. So you aren’t denying that I’m your son?”

  Sadie took up Harold’s left hand and sandwiched it between her own hands, each age-spotted and osseous. “You have your father’s hands. Strong hands. He’s dead, isn’t he?”

  Harold nodded. “When Aunt Emily told me who I was a few years ago, we talked a lot about you and about my dad—the way he’d come and go when I was young—checking in with me, I suppose, seeing what I was to become. And then he stopped coming. I was fifteen, sixteen by then. I knew what it meant. I knew that the drinking had finally done him in.”

  “All the men I lay with drank. That’s one of the reasons I wouldn’t marry them.” Sadie released her son’s hand. He allowed it to lie limp and unattended upon the wooden slats of the weathered bench.

  “How many children did you have?” he asked.

  “Four. By four different men. Three girls and you. You went to the finest couple I knew: Jerome’s sister Emily and her husband Ennis. They couldn’t have children of their own. They treated you well, I imagine.”

  “Very well,” said Harold. “You’re a Disciple of Christ now. Have you mended your ways?”

  “I have. Most whores do when they reach a certain age. It’s either that or death by drink or injection.” Sadie swept her hand through the air to indicate the tiny sea town around her. “Not so terrible a place to pass the remaining years of one’s life. Quite churchy, but very quiet. Even in the summer. Not like Rehoboth and Ocean City. So, you see, I haven’t come to a tragic end. I’m relatively happy in my final chapter.”

  Harold pulled back. He wanted to take in every crag and wrinkle upon his mother’s face, to see his own reflection in her eyes.

  “Do you want to know anything about me?” he asked.

  Sadie shook her head. She watched the seagull take wing to seek scraps at some other doorstep. “Whatever good has happened to you in your life will only make me regret the fact that I wasn’t there to share it. Whatever bad will only make me feel guilty that I couldn’t offer support in your times of difficulty.”

  “So you feel guilty? I mean, about having given me up?”

  “Some days I feel terribly guilty. But the feeling doesn’t cloud my every hour. I was a selfish woman, Harold. I wouldn’t have made a very good mother. This was for the best. At the same time, I’m not the worst creature that God has ever placed upon this Earth. I’ve had my charitable moments. Some might say that my giving you and your sisters up was a charitable act in its own way.”

  “I didn’t come here to judge you. Only to meet you.”
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  “And what will you take away from our visit, Harold?”

  “This won’t be my only visit. I’d like to see more of you, with your permission.”

  Sadie shook her head. “Let’s limit ourselves to this one time, shall we?”

  “Why?”

  “I brought you into this world. And then I sent you away. That was my choice. I reconciled myself to that choice many years ago.”

  “And do I have no choice in this? It’s my choice that I should see you again. I choose as well to find my sisters and give them the chance to meet their mother while she’s still among the living.”

  Sadie laughed. “A man of purpose. What do you do for a living, Harold? Are you a politician of some sort?”

  Harold shook his head, his cheeks mantling over the precipitancy of his outburst.

  There was music now, coming through the window of Mrs. Grosbard’s second-floor lodgings. It was a song that had been made popular by the Brox Sisters several years earlier. Mrs. Grosbard had put the record on her Victrola. Mrs. Grosbard could not possibly let this momentous encounter between long separated mother and son go without appropriate musical commentary.

  The three songbirds from Tennessee sang in sweet harmony:

  Tie me to your apron strings again.

  I know there’s room for me.

  Upon your knee.

  Bring back all those happy hours when

  You kissed my tears away…

  “Mrs. Grosbard has slightly missed the mark,” said Sadie with gentle amusement. “That song. It’s about a child that leaves its mother but then comes back again. There’s a history there—a history that you and I don’t share.”

  “I’d like to see you again. I live in Philadelphia. I’m not so far away.”

  “And what if I don’t wish to see you again? What if to me you are only a reminder of something I’m ashamed of?”

  “Are you ashamed of me?”

  “Only of having given you up.”

  Please take me back tonight,

  Where I belong.

  Sing a cradle song to me and then

  Won’t you tie me to your apron strings again?

  There had never been apron strings. Harold knew this.

  The final matter to be decided was whether there should be a parting embrace. Sadie put her son’s mind at ease. She wrapped her arms around him and kissed him on the cheek. There were tears in his eyes as he walked away. He wanted to turn and look back but he held himself steady and did not.

  Late that night Sadie walked in the moonlight to the ocean’s edge. She stood before the lapping sea and then stepped into it. She moved slowly through the waves and finally disappeared beneath them.

  The ocean was kind.

  Harold would return. That was certain.

  She didn’t want to be there when he came back.

  1931

  AWED AND WONDERING IN CONNECTICUT

  Let’s start with that actor with the big ears. Clark Grable or something like that. He played a gangster in A Free Soul and he slapped Norma Shearer, who played his girlfriend. And then there was that other gangster picture The Public Enemy. And James Cagney is sitting at the breakfast table in his pajamas and he smacks Mae Marsh in the face with a grapefruit, just like it’s the most natural thing in the world to be doing first thing in the morning (although she seems pretty shocked when he gives her the business). And just last spring there was that big dinner at the Metropolitan Club in New York where Theodore Dreiser slapped Sinclair Lewis in the face. Twice. He probably would have done it a third time if somebody hadn’t intervened. And I just read about this thirty-hour face-slapping competition they had in Kiev just a few weeks ago.

  Seems like everybody’s slapping everybody else’s face this year. It’s an absolute mania. So the fact that I slapped Hank’s tonight shouldn’t have been any big stop-the-presses kind of surprise. But you couldn’t tell that from the way he looked at me with those “Say it ain’t so, Joe” droopy peepers of his—giving me the kind of hangdog look that can nearly tug a person’s heart right out of her chest.

  I stared right back at my husband, my hand still hanging in the air like I just might do it again, just like that talented yet pugnacious American novelist, Theodore Dreiser.

  This is when Hank calmly took my hand and brought it down to my side, using his other hand to rub some of the sting out of his cheek.

  “Well, why’d you say it?” I asked matter-of-factly, my rage having fled just as quickly as it came.

  “You asked me a question and I answered honestly. Why’d you ask it if you didn’t want me to give you a truthful answer?”

  Hank walked over to the icebox. He took out a bottle of milk and held it up to his cheek.

  “I didn’t hit you that hard. Are you trying to make me feel bad?”

  Hank shrugged. He got a glass from the cabinet and poured himself some milk. He returned the bottle to the icebox and sat down at the kitchen table. He stared at the glass of milk and I stared at him. The window was open, and through it we could both hear Eddy Cantor’s crooning voice wafting down from the Petersons’ new Atwater Kent upstairs. It reminded me of our own RCA Radiola 60 Super-Heterodyne tabletop, which my parents bought us for Christmas last year, but which we had to sell through the want ads this past summer when Hank lost his job with Merchants’ All-Risk.

  Generally speaking, I like Eddie Cantor’s voice, but now for some reason it grated on my nerves. I closed the window.

  I sat down across from my husband. “I suppose I asked you that question because I was expecting you’d answer a different way.”

  “And when I didn’t, you slapped me.”

  “It wasn’t so much an angry slap as a slap of awe and wonder.”

  Hank mumbled the words “awe and wonder,” then took a drink of milk.

  “Do you want some of that cake?” I asked.

  “Is there any left?”

  “One more slice. You can have it. I couldn’t eat anything right now.”

  As I was getting the last slice of cake for Hank, he turned to me, droplets of milk clinging to his Warner Baxtery moustache. “I can’t find another job. I don’t know when I’ll find another job. For good or bad, you’re the sole breadwinner right now, Frances. We can’t afford for you to get yourself fired as well.”

  I sat back down. The last slice of chocolate cake was larger than I’d remembered. I brought two forks.

  “You answered very quickly, Hank. You answered as if there was no need to even think about what this means.”

  “It means, honey, that I’m giving you permission to commit adultery with your boss. If I were a better husband, I would put my foot down. I would defend your honor and our marriage. I’m not a better husband. I am a failure as a provider. Ergo, I am a failure as a husband. When it comes right down to it, I’m probably also a failure as a human being. I have been thinking about jumping off the Bulkeley Bridge. I know it isn’t very tall, but if I hit the water just the right way it might slap me so hard I’ll get knocked out and then I’ll drown.”

  “Oh, shut up, Hank.”

  I took a bite of cake. It was delicious. Rosemary Peterson makes the most delicious cakes in Hartford. And why shouldn’t she? Her husband’s a chef.

  The Petersons have a good marriage, by all appearances. Tom works at one of the nicest hotels in town and their little girl Peggy just won the Baby Clara Bow lookalike contest. Hank and I have been trying to have children for five years, and it’s probably for the best that we haven’t succeeded since things have gotten so difficult for us as of late, financially speaking.

  This morning I went in to ask my boss at the railroad yard for a raise, and he said, “Well, of course not,” but that he was glad that I came in, and “please sit down” and “I have two letters to dictate, Frances, and then a question I need to put to you.” And he dictated his two letters and then he asked the question, which required a slight preface: there are a lot of out-of-work secretaries out there, Frances,
times being tough for everybody these days…

  And here he gestured out his window and toward the yard, where, with exquisite timing, one of his yardmen was in the process of chasing off two hobos with obvious hopes of securing free passage and gratis accommodations on one of our empty outgoing boxcars that afternoon…so would I consider continuing to be his secretary between the hours of eight and five, and then after hours and on weekends doing some things for him that his wife was unwilling to do?

  “Errands?” I asked naïvely.

  “You’re very beautiful, Miss Hellmann.”

  “Mrs. Hellmann, Mr. Gaither. I am married.”

  “I like to think of you as unmarried, Miss Hellmann. Unmarried and willing to do those things for me that my wife, who is not an adventurous woman—who really is not much of a woman at all, but a fleshy cow, a Marie Dressler sort of foghorn-throated, muscle-bound sort of—I will just put it right out there, Miss Hellmann—gorgon. The marriage is all but—well, this is certainly beside the point, I’m sure. The point is that your job now depends on whether or not you will be able to meet my new requirements for keeping the position. I’ll give you until tomorrow to make up your mind. Should you decide against my proposal, I’ll have no choice but to let you go.”

  “Oh.” I looked out the window. One of the hobos was being clubbed by the yardman. I turned away. “I’ll have to talk it over with my husband.”

  “Your husband? You’re pulling my leg.”

  I shook my head. “I’d really like to speak with him about this. He may not like it.”