American Decameron

by Mark Dunn

  Ralph Morris looked at his wristwatch. “Ten till.”

  Garth Kordel clucked his tongue in wonderment. “Did you have any idea so many people would show up?”

  Ralph shook his head. “Let’s get out of the car. I feel like a federal agent on stakeout.”

  The two men, both in their mid-thirties, stepped out of Ralph’s Ford Deuce coupe. Ralph leaned back, planted a foot on the running board, and lit up. Garth took in the gathering crowd. It was mostly men, a few women, even a kid or two in tow. A man and little boy walked by.

  ”Isn’t it a little past his bedtime?” Garth called after them.

  The man stopped and turned. His look was open and friendly. “Brother, I’ve been waiting thirteen years for the chance to wet my whistle legally. This is a historic moment and I want my boy to remember it.”

  The man and the boy moved on.

  There was an electrical current running through the crowd. A brass band was assembling near the front entrance to the Anheuser-Busch brewery. Word was that they’d begin playing right at the stroke of midnight.

  The new president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, planned to keep his campaign promise to repeal Prohibition. In the meantime he’d gotten Congress to amend the Volstead Act, thus allowing 3.2 percent beer in localities that were happy to have it. St. Louis, home of both Anheuser-Busch and the Falstaff Brewing Company, would most certainly have it. Ralph and Garth were among the hundreds who had gathered to be the first to taste Busch’s “near beer.” Nobody was getting drunk that night, but it was a welcome taste of what was to come. In just four days, Michigan would take the first step toward getting rid of the bane of Prohibition forever. Its state convention would ratify the 21st Amendment (proposed by Congress only six weeks earlier) by a walloping three-to-one margin.

  America wanted desperately to be wet again.

  Ralph and Garth had claimed their spot a couple of blocks from the brewery about an hour earlier. They had invited their wives to join them, but both women preferred to stay home. Ralph’s wife Vivian didn’t like crowds; she had a delicate and retiring nature. Garth’s wife Caddy didn’t like Ralph. She found him arrogant and overbearing.

  The two men had become friends at a young age. Garth was poor. Ralph’s family was in the ice business. When he reached his majority Ralph inherited Morris Ice. Ralph brought Garth on as a deliveryman, then later promoted him to the job of icehouse foreman. The friendship remained intact, but Caddy had always seen the cracks in the ice. It’s hard for one friend to be Gebieter (in the parlance of Garth’s German heritage) over another. Sometimes Ralph had to make decisions that didn’t benefit his employee Garth. Garth tried to be understanding. Caddy didn’t try quite so hard.

  Over the previous hour, the men, both football fans, had discussed the sordid details of the recent death of Dr. Fonsa Lambert, who had won fame for formalizing the rules of the game. He had been shot by his seventeen-year-old son Samuel, after the boy had walked in on Lambert trying to choke his wife (Samuel’s mother) to death.

  The song had said that “happy days” were here again, but there was too much evidence to the contrary. At a time of national economic troubles, the U.S. Navy had come under fire for putting thousands of precious tax dollars into the construction of helium-filled airships. Despite improved building methods, the aircraft were difficult to fly and often perilous to land. Earlier that day there had been a somber press conference held for the national news services. The only three survivors of the crash of the USS Akron, a steel-framed “flying aircraft carrier,” were brought out to give their account of the tragedy. The dirigible had gone down in rough winds off the coast of New Jersey two days earlier. Investigators would later conclude that the crash couldn’t have been helped, although having life jackets on board for use by its seventy-six passengers and crew—most of whom perished by drowning—might have somewhat mitigated the tragic outcome.

  The whole country was talking about the accident, along with the pending legalization of three-two beer, and FDR’s recently declared bank holiday. The Akron disaster was front and center, though. It represented, for Ralph, just another star-crossed attempt by the government of the United States to try to turn the impossible into the possible at great cost. “You take Prohibition, Garth. This idea that you can lead a man to abstinence through constitutional fiat—it was asinine from the very start, and look at all the havoc it’s wrought. And you can’t put balloons up in the air and pretend like they’re gonna do anything but bounce around like balloons. Every one of these dirigibles has been trouble. The Akron’s had one deadly mishap after another. Why, they killed two men just trying to land the Goddamned thing last year.”

  Garth nodded. People had started to form themselves into a line.

  “Should we be lining up, too?”

  “No need. There’s plenty of beer in there for everybody. Besides, I’m tired of watching this country lining itself up: bread lines, unemployment lines. As a nation we’re always queuing ourselves up for one sorry reason or another.”

  Garth licked his lips and winked. “But this is a good reason.”

  “Now you take that accident last year,” said Ralph, who never had much regard for clean conversational transitions, “when the Akron tried to land in San Diego.”

  “They said the sun heated up the helium too much—made the ship too buoyant.”

  Ralph nodded. “You see the newsreel footage? They got this landing crew of inexperienced Navy men trying to hold the thing down with trail ropes. Then all of a sudden she starts to rise up into a nose stand, and they’ve got to free the mooring cable from the mast. In all the confusion most of those boys let go of their lines. But four sorry saps hang on.”

  “One let go pretty quick, though, right?”

  “Yeah. Maybe fifteen feet off the ground—the kid breaks his arm, I think. But the other three—they don’t let go. I mean, Garth, the Akron’s drifting higher and higher and those three boys—they’re still dangling from the ends of their ropes like maybe they’re hoping that ship’s gonna miraculously come right back down again. Jesus!”

  Garth was well versed in the details of the story but pretended not to know too much about it. He knew that Ralph preferred it this way.

  “So at about one hundred, two hundred feet, two of the kids just can’t hold on any longer and guess what happened to them.”

  Garth shook his head, dutifully feigning ignorance.

  “Splat, splat!” Ralph slapped the palm of his hand twice upon the roof of his car. “But the other kid—he ties himself in, and two hours later they’re able to reel him up into the ship. Man was not meant to fly by helium or hydrogen, Garth. Those German zeppelins are powder kegs just waiting for somebody to light a match.”

  The crowd was getting boisterous. Both men, who had hardly been out of their teens when the legal spigot got turned off, edged a little closer to their fellow celebrants.

  Ralph crushed his cigarette under his shoe. “When I heard that the ‘Queen of the Skies’ had gone down for good on Tuesday, I started thinking again about that kid Cowart—couldn’t have been more than eighteen—the way he hung on, the way it takes either a special person or a mighty dimwitted cluck to stick it out when a situation gets desperate like that. The rest of us—and that’s pretty much all of us, Garth—we reach points in our lives when we have to make those same kinds of fish-or-cut-bait decisions. Do we hang on, keep persevering in a bad situation, or do we cut ourselves loose and take a life lesson from the experience? That first boy did the sensible thing: he let go early. Broken arm, sure, but his whole life still ahead of him. Two sailors are dead because they didn’t bail out when they had the chance. That fourth kid, Cowart, is only alive because he was one lucky son of a bitch.”

  “It isn’t because he knew how to tie himself in? That isn’t luck, Ralph. That’s rope smarts.”

  “You’re missing my point.”

  “Just what is your point, Ralph? What’s the story?”

  “I’m shutte
ring the business, getting out of the ice-selling racket. It isn’t profitable anymore. I never got into the coal delivery line. I never diversified. I sell ice. Just like my father sold ice, and just like his father before him. But nobody’s buying ice these days. They’re buying refrigerators. I don’t blame them. Hell, Vivian and I just got a Frigidaire ourselves.”

  “There will be people who won’t want to give up their iceboxes, Ralph.”

  “But not nearly enough of them to keep me in the black.”

  “Do you have a buyer?”

  Ralph shook his head. “Just where would I find such a person? They gave the ice industry last rites two or three years ago. I’m selling buggies, Garth, while the country’s buying Duesenbergs. So I’m walking away while I’ve still a little something left in the family piggy bank. I owe that to Vivian and the kids. She loves the big house. And we both want the boys to go to college. I’m not gonna bleed myself dry just so a handful of Mrs. Broussards can hang onto their iceboxes for old times’ sake.”

  “When did you make this decision?”

  “I’ve been mulling it over for a few months now. Finally got off the pot and talked to Vivian a couple of nights ago. She agrees that it’s the right thing to do.”

  “What am I supposed to do, Ralph?”

  “Look for a job like everybody else.”

  “You know what that means.”

  “So let me get this straight: I’m supposed to keep losing money every Goddamned day just to keep you and Preston and Jibbs and all the rest of you fellas off the bread lines? And what happens when the company finally goes belly up and my bank account’s totally wiped out? I get to take my place in line with you? My father and grandfather were successful businessmen, Garth. They passed a thriving business down to me. It stopped thriving. But I’m still a Morris man. I don’t know the words to ‘Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?’ and I’ve got no intention of ever learning them.”

  Garth didn’t reply. The band was tuning up. The oompah-oompah of the tuba reminded Garth of Oktoberfest. He glanced at Ralph’s wristwatch. A minute till midnight. He looked at his friend.

  “Caddy thinks you’ve always been this way,” said Garth. “I tell her: ‘No, baby. I can remember a time when we were both kids and we looked out for each other.’”

  “My back’s against the wall. Can’t you see that?”

  “Here’s what I see: You should have gone into fuel delivery. Your competitors did. You didn’t because you aren’t half the businessman your father and grandfather were. Caddy wanted me to get into another line of work, quit Morris Ice ages ago, back when I had a few prospects. I stuck with my friend. This is how I’m being repaid.”

  “Now you wait just a minute there, Garth—”

  “I don’t think I want to, Ralph. I think I want to get me a beer.”

  Garth turned. As he started to walk away, the band began to play. Seconds later the sound of “Happy Days Are Here Again” was drowned out by the blare of steam whistles and the squall of sirens from the brewery. Several people honked their car horns to add to the festive cacophony. Garth took his place in line. It was a much different line from the one he’d be standing in a few days later.

  He closed his eyes. He tried to imagine what that first swallow of beer would taste like. He tried to imagine, as well, what his life would have been like if he’d left Morris Ice when he had the chance. How much better things might be for Caddy and him now.

  Or not. It was the Depression, after all. Who’s to say that he wouldn’t have lost that other job, too?

  Garth glanced back at the car. Ralph was pulling out of his spot. He was going to have trouble getting his coupe through the dense crowd. But he’d come out of it all right; Garth had no doubt. Ralph was a Morris, after all.

  1934

  ADULTEROUS IN ILLINOIS

  The first conversation took place between Norman and Patsy inside the Amos and Andy rocket car of the Century of Progress Exposition’s Sky Ride. Their conversation was low-toned, almost whispered, and went virtually unnoticed by the other thirty-two passengers in the car, some of whom oohed and ahhed and nudged one another with glee and wonder, while others recoiled with a shiver, as still others bravely pressed their noses against the glass in hopes of getting a better view of the fairgrounds decked out in all its Art Deco splendor 215 feet below. The Sky Ride was the signature attraction of the World’s Fair, which had opened the previous year and was now bringing in tens of thousands of new visitors in its second successful season.

  Chicago rolled the dice in the middle of the Depression and had come up a winner.

  “What is that?” asked Patsy, removing her official guidebook from her purse as she peered down. “The Hall of Science or the Hall of Social Science? I always confuse the two.”

  “Did you hear what I just said?”

  “The colors were different last year. Remember? Bolder. I liked it, but I read somewhere that they were giving people headaches—all those gigantic exhibition buildings in brilliant blues and golds and reds. The fair got complaints, so they toned it down. It’s all so muted now. Almost drab in places.”

  Norman, who had been looking at the side of Patsy’s face, turned to take in the panorama below. It was still very colorful, he thought. What was Patsy talking about? Why was Patsy trying to change the subject? They had twenty minutes—twenty-five minutes at the most—and then they would meet up again with John and Shirley at the Mayflower Doughnut Restaurant next to the Havoline Thermometer. The Havoline Thermometer, standing at a height of 227 feet, was the largest thermometer in the world. It overlooked Admiral Richard E. Byrd’s South Pole ship moored in the South Lagoon.

  “What is there to say?” said Patsy. “We both agreed we would drop the bombshell. I told you to pick the time and place. If you want to talk to them about it over doughnuts, that’s fine with me. Prohibition’s over, though. I thought you might like to get our spouses liquored up first.”

  “Shirley is unpredictable when she drinks. I don’t want to take a chance on a dramatic overreaction.”

  Norman looked up into the sky. Several others on this side of the Amos and Andy rocket car did the same. Some pointed. “The Goodyear blimp needs a little more lift or it’s going to hit the transport bridge.”

  Patsy took a breath. “The pilot knows what he’s doing.”

  The next conversation took place among Norman and Patsy and Norman’s wife Shirley and Patsy’s husband John. Both couples were in their early forties and lived not far from one another in Kenosha, Wisconsin, where Norman worked as a mid-level manager for Nash Motors. Nash had one of the more popular attractions at the fair: an eighty-foot-high plate-glass tower with sixteen 1934 model Nash automobiles stacked one on top of the other like compartmentalized slices of pie at the Automat.

  John was a podiatrist. He knew Dr. William M. Scholl personally and had spent part of that morning visiting his friend at the Scholl Manufacturing Exhibit in the Hall of Science.

  Although John had wanted more than doughnuts and coffee, he consented to the late-morning snack with a promise by the others of a full luncheon in Midget Village a couple of hours later; the guidebook had assured him that the portions served there would be filling for a man of normal stature.

  “How was the ride?” asked Shirley of her husband and her best friend. “I still can’t see how you could go up in that thing.”

  “The view was spectacular,” answered Patsy, chewing on a cuticle.

  “I went to see the Incubator babies,” said Shirley. “I cried. Everyone around me was wiping their eyes with handkerchiefs. The guide said that the survival rate for these itty-bitty babies is very high. It’s a miracle of science. Forget your television and your what-have-you, this is technology that makes a difference. One of the babies weighed less than twenty-four ounces. Can you imagine?”

  Norman shook his head. “Patsy and I are having an affair. What’s more, we have no desire to end it.”

  John stood up. It was a sudden move, an
d his chair nearly tipped over backward. “What the hell are you saying, Pomeroy?”

  “Sit down, John,” said Patsy. “Don’t make a scene.”

  John sat down.

  Patsy took her husband’s hand and spoke in a dulcet tone, after detaching a large crumb of glazed doughnut from the corner of her mouth with her blood-red-polished fingernail. “Neither of us wants a divorce. We are both quite happy with our marriages and all of our lovely children.”

  The lovely children were promised a visit to the fair in the company of their parents next month. But this particular trip was just for their parents. There was to be dancing and drinking and Sally Rand and her naughty feathers. The two couples were slightly more sophisticated than most of the other couples of Kenosha, Wisconsin. The question, however, was whether this level of sophistication extended to the concept of companionate marriage.

  John removed his hand from his wife’s grip. “You’re asking Shirley and me if we will allow the two of you to sleep with one another right under our noses.”

  Norman nodded. He dunked his doughnut with a nonchalant flick of the wrist and then took a sloppy bite.

  Now Shirley spoke. She was upset. When Shirley got upset, her voice jumped into a high register like that of a beset schoolteacher. “If you don’t love me, Norman, why don’t you simply ask for a divorce? I’ll take the children and we’ll go to Reno.”

  “Because I don’t want a divorce. I want to stay married to you. I still love you, Shirley. But there’s someone else I love as well.”

  Shirley began to cry. She pulled out the handkerchief that was already damp from seeing the squirming preemie babies.

  “You think I’m that evolved, Norman?” she asked between sniffles.

  “We’re not evolved at all,” added John. “We’re like those dinosaurs out there. I’m a Sinclair brontosaurus. I’m not a mastodon.”