American Decameron

by Mark Dunn

  I wish you well, Vanessa, and trust that you and your partner Salvatore are extra careful with those throws. I read just the other day about a girl in Chicago who got flipped on her head. Now she drivels like a dog and speaks only through grunts. I also understand that jitterbugging is very hard on the knees. You’ll regret all the abuse to your fragile patellas when you get old.

  Now I must close. Several of Mom and Pop’s friends are coming over for bridge tonight, and Mrs. Hennigan’s husband is home sick. I will have to be Mrs. Hennigan’s husband for the evening. Paul Whiteman is on the radio tonight. Mom and Pop and all of their friends love Paul Whiteman. He doesn’t play swing, though. I don’t think he likes it.

  Come to think of it, I don’t much care for it either.

  Sincerely,

  Laurence

  1939

  GALACTOPHOROUS IN VIRGINIA

  Paulette leaned into the radio and smiled. “What’s new?”

  Both Paulette’s husband Prentice and the man in the suit said “huh?” in near perfect unison.

  “The song: ‘What’s New?’ So wistful. So subtly elegiac. And doesn’t Kathleen Lane have a sweet voice?”

  “Nice enough,” said the man from MGM—the man who had come all the way from California to sit and talk to Paulette about the movie adaptation of her bestselling novel, “but when it’s over, could you be so good as to…?” The man from MGM, whose name was McCubbin, mimed switching off the radio. Next to him, Paulette’s father sat upright in Prentice’s ample armchair, snoozing away. The fifth occupant of the room, Paulette’s similarly slumbering mother, lay luxuriously draped out among the throw pillows on the sofa.

  Paulette wondered at that moment if the song was permeating her mother’s dream world. Madeleine Gammond sometimes had troubled dreams about the San Francisco earthquake; thirty-three years later, her memories still haunted her.

  When the song was finished, Paulette obligingly turned off the radio. It was the first time it had been off all day. Paulette frowned at McCubbin. “My parents come up to Falls Church every other month. This is their day. They come up to listen to the radio because they can’t get a good broadcast signal where they live in the mountains. You burst in here like gangbusters—like some overstrung G-man—and it’s rude, Mr. McCubbin. It’s really off-putting. And counterproductive. If I were to fashion one of my characters after you—let me tell you—he wouldn’t be very popular.”

  Michael McCubbin, who was bald and smelled to Paulette like an ashtray, didn’t back down. “Be that as it may, I have to catch a train to New York in a few hours. Moreover, I was tasked, while I was in the vicinity, with attending the special midnight premiere screening of The Women at Loew’s in D.C as a favor to Mr. Mayer and to report back on audience reception. It now being 12:40 in the a.m., I could not do that now even if benefited by the world’s fastest autogyro.”

  Paulette’s husband, Prentice, sat up in his seat. He stubbed out his cigar. “Am I to understand, McCubbin, that you’re blaming my wife for your poor time management skills?”

  “Well, of course not.” McCubbin inhaled. Pushing his words through the exhalation that followed, he said wearily, “I’m only saying—what I am saying, Mr. Fedderson, is that this day has been unlike any I’ve ever experienced. I had hoped to come here and sit with you and your wife and have a calm and reasonable discussion about why Mrs. Fedderson should accede to my simple request that—”

  “Mr. McCubbin,” interrupted Paulette Fedderson, her hands firmly on her hips in the traditional stance of female disdain, “you have been neither calm nor reasonable since you got here.”

  “Then I apologize. I have every good excuse. All day long I’ve had to compete with that damned electric squawk box over there—the morning soaps, the Senators and Indians game in the afternoon, then Amos and Andy and Joe E. Brown in the evening. Mr. Brown, who is not in the MGM firmament, could not be of any less interest to me.”

  “Apology accepted. I’m going to make more coffee.” Paulette started out of the room. “Would you gentlemen care to join me in the kitchen?”

  As both men were rising none too lithely from their chairs, Prentice said, “Your report to Mr. Mayer, McCubbin—it doesn’t have to be entirely dismal. You can, for example, tell him that the orchestra on Joe E. Brown’s show tonight performed a fine version of that song, ‘Something, Something, the Witch is Dead,’ from your new picture The Wizard of Oz.”

  “And wasn’t Judy Garland singing ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ on Arthur Godfrey’s show this morning?” added Paulette, her voice trailing off into the kitchen.

  “And don’t forget that we all heard that adenoidal girl singing it on Major Bowes only a few hours ago,” said Prentice. “The whole country is going nutty for The Wizard of Oz and you have the proof right here in the suburbs of our nation’s capital, McCubbin. Mr. Louis B. Mayer should be very pleased.”

  As the two men were pulling out chairs to sit down at the kitchen table, McCubbin replied, “It isn’t that simple. Now I’ll admit it, Mrs. Fedderson: you aren’t the only reason I was dispatched to the East Coast. I’ve got three days of meetings scheduled with Nick Schenck and the other MGM lever-pullers in Manhattan. Everybody’s nervous about Gone with the Wind—the cost overruns, the whole Cukor mess, and may I say, between you and me and the lamppost, what a terrible decision it was to cast Leslie Howard as Ashley Wilkes? The man is forty-six years old and isn’t even attempting a Southern accent. And now that Britain’s at war, we may have to contend with even more of these English milksops coming over here and limeying up our red-blooded American movies.”

  “Spoken like a true Fenian,” groaned Prentice with a roll of his eyes. McCubbin and his host and hostess for this long day—now coming mercifully to its end—had reached a level of uninhibited appraisal of each other. The sort of appraisal that usually comes after a long period of intensive imposed intimacy. Positions had been staked out early in the day, and through all of the ensuing hours, neither party had budged.

  It had, in fact, been a most remarkable day. That morning, McCubbin had come to the door of Prentice and Paulette Fedderson’s small wood-frame house in their Falls Church, Virginia, neighborhood, just west of Arlington, to discuss Paulette’s wildly popular novel of Old San Francisco, The Milk of Human Kindness and its forthcoming film adaptation View from Potrero Hill. MGM’s 1936 blockbuster San Francisco had led the studio heads to believe that they could repeat their success with Paulette’s book. The story was also set in 1906 ’Frisco, and would be fortified by a scintillating screenplay by the gifted Miss Anita Loos (who had also contributed to San Francisco and, coincidentally, to The Women). The film, which was slated to go before the cameras in the spring, was to be given a budget that would nearly rival that of Gone with the Wind, with the entire picture being shot in glorious and decadently expensive Technicolor.

  Everything was set. There was only one small hitch—a hitch that was visited and revisited repeatedly throughout the day, each visitation fraught with numerous interruptions. These interruptions in various forms related to Paulette’s monthly reunion with her parents, originally from San Francisco and now living on the family’s ancestral farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains of central Virginia, and to the audio wallpaper of WJSV radio’s broadcast signal. WJSV, a CBS affiliate, infiltrated every moment of the day in a sometimes welcome, sometimes intrusive manner, through the speaker of Paulette and Prentice’s tabletop cathedral-styled radio, disrupting, along the way, nearly all thought and conversation through, for example, importunate offerings of Arthur Godfrey and Pretty Kitty Kelly and Life Can Be Beautiful and The Romance of Helen Trent, and the Goldbergs, and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The president, as it so happened, had chosen September 21 of all days to make a joint address to the Congress to urge, in light of the recent invasion of Poland and the beginning of the Second World War, the repeal of the arms embargo provision of the Neutrality Act of 1937.

  Paulette’s father, Dilby Gammond, had de
manded absolute silence during the speech, and Michael McCubbin had sat obediently, though restlessly, mum. It was an important day in history (the Romanian prime minister Armand Călinescu had just a few hours earlier been assassinated by members of the pro-Nazi Iron Guard, this fact representing just one more inconvenience to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s chargé d’affaires). He had come to Falls Church for one purpose only: to ask that the author’s contract by which The Milk of Human Kindness would be turned into View from Potrero Hill—a contract which had been especially structured to give Paulette nearly unprecedented script approval—be altered to reflect the following: that when it came to the matter of whether a female character, for the first time in the history of the much-strengthened Hays Code of Hollywood self-censorship, could or could not be seen suckling a child at her breast, MGM would have the definitive last word. And that word, obviously, would be “no.” No baby in any American movie was to be fed by anything but a bottle, given that the cinematic guardians of American morality felt that the presentation of the female mammary gland in any form or fashion (including that function for which it was expressly designed) was patently lewd and vulgar.

  “I think,” said Prentice, picking up the topic that had been picked up and then dropped repeatedly throughout this day of false starts and frustrating distractions and an outright presidential coup de théâtre, “that you will have to do a much better job of explaining to my wife and me why she must sign off on an ending that would most assuredly subvert the primary intent of her story, when the whole matter of a woman feeding a child in the way that God intended isn’t even addressed in the Hays Code. I’m looking at it right now.”

  He was, in fact. A typewritten copy of the code, formally titled, “The United States Motion Picture Production Code of 1930,” all one page of it, was laid upon the table so that Prentice could stab it with his forefinger to make his point. “See? Nothing here about a mother nursing her child—”

  Paulette interrupted from the coffee pot: “Not her child, dear—her friend’s child. That’s the point of the climactic scene: a wall has collapsed upon the crib holding her own baby, killing it. Her friend has sustained an injury to the breast that prevents her from nursing her own child, so our heroine volunteers her own milk to feed the other woman’s little girl in the name of sister love and Christian compassion.”

  “It’s a moving story,” said McCubbin. “I wept when I read it. But you can’t show a tit on the screen—or even anything suggestive thereof—however high-minded your purpose. Mr. Mayer would shit a brick. If this entire matter got before the press, can you just imagine the firestorm? All the advance publicity for Gone with the Wind would be drowned with the bath water as this whole country got to arguing the pros and cons of wet-nursing on the silver screen. And I can tell you from experience, Mrs. Fedderson: that Puritanical subset of the film-going American public won’t sit still for it. Besides which, it isn’t even relevant these days. It’s a rarity, is it not, to find the mother of an infant who feeds her own baby in such an outmoded way?”

  “It wasn’t a rarity in 1906, Mr. McCubbin, and that’s when my novel is set. It is also the year in which your movie will be set. And it was a good thing that women did feed their babies in the natural way back then, because otherwise all those nursing babies that survived the quake and the fire would have starved.”

  McCubbin picked up the piece of paper with the Hays Code typed upon it and put it back into his briefcase. He folded his hands on the table before him. “I’m afraid, then, that we have reached an impasse. Because as lofty as our purpose might be in putting this on the screen, we remain forever at the mercy of the puerile imaginations of our audience. And I make this guarantee to you, Mrs. Fedderson: there will be those who will elbow one another and snicker—a few who will guffaw outright. The gravity and sobriety of the scene will be undermined by a schoolboy mentality in this country that is inescapable. The effect will not be what you’d wish. And those Americans who are not crass, my good woman, they are morally parochial. It is our job as purveyors of American culture to uplift them all, to educate and elevate them whenever possible to some higher, loftier sensibility. We simply cannot do this by giving them, ahem…knockers.”

  Paulette Fedderson tutted. “It’s so typical of your male-dominated industry to take something so beautiful and so natural and turn it into something ugly and indecent. My story must suffer because of the prurience of the American male moviemaker. It sickens me. And it saddens me deeply, sir.”

  Paulette sat down and held her head momentarily in her palms.

  “I didn’t make the world the way it is,” responded McCubbin.

  Paulette looked up. “Nor have you any right to rewrite my own life.”

  For a moment Michael McCubbin didn’t speak. He turned to look at Paulette’s husband, who confirmed what his wife had just said with a commiserating nod.

  Finally finding his voice, Michael said, “I knew that there had to be some autobiographical component to your book, but are you telling me the baby that lived—that was you?”

  “Well, she certainly wasn’t the one crushed by the brick wall,” quipped Prentice.

  “Mr. McCubbin—Michael,” said Paulette, her voice softened by the sudden serious turn in the discussion, “how could you possibly change the story without hiding the truth of what this woman did for me?”

  “In the only way that Hollywood will permit us. That in our story, the mother will die at the same time as her friend’s baby and that the surviving child should then be raised by the woman who took it to her surrogate breast. We won’t see the, um, nursing, obviously, but every bit of maternal feeling will be there in the fade-out: the woman holding the orphaned child in her arms, knowing that she will now become the little girl’s new mother.”

  Paulette shook her head. “In spite of the acceptable sentiment, it doesn’t tell the story the way that I want it told.”

  “And is that a no, Paulette? Because you know that this is the deal-breaker.”

  Before Paulette could answer in the affirmative, thereby delivering the death blow to the multimillion-dollar Technicolor adaptation of her bestselling novel, a project that David O. Selznick had already been champing to get his mitts on, Paulette’s mother Madeleine, who had just stepped into the kitchen, interrupted with, “I thought I smelled coffee brewing,” and then, “Paulette, dear, I’d take the offer if I were you. It’s the best that you’re going to get. Fifty years from now perhaps things will be different, but we live today in a world that doesn’t make a lick of sense—a world that is far from fair. You’ve been hearing what’s happening in Europe right now. And things are only destined to get worse. This movie will be about two women who come together in love and self-sacrifice. Depiction of such a relationship can only help to redeem this sullied world.”

  Paulette was about to reply, but her mother silenced her with a raised hand. “I’m not finished. There’s another reason why your father and I are encouraging you to allow the change that the studio wants. It’s because the story that MGM wants to tell is, ironically, the valid one.”

  “I don’t understand, Mama.”

  “Your actual birth mother died in the quake. My birth child and your birth mother—they both perished in those terrible pre-dawn hours. I was that other woman, and your father and I—we adopted you. We’d always meant to tell you, but after a while it stopped mattering, because you had become such an integral part of our lives. And I could not be any prouder of you and your wonderful book than if I had given birth to you myself. The story you wrote, and the story that Mr. McCubbin would like to bring to the screen—the world needs more stories like these. And now I’ve had my say and I’m going to lie down on a bed. That sofa has lumps, honey. Wake me before nine. Your father and I want to hear one last episode in the thrilling life story of the “Golden-Haired Irish Girl,” Pretty Kitty Kelly, before we head back home. Do you listen to Pretty Kitty Kelly, Mr. McCubbin? Since you’re Irish, I thought you might.”


  Michael McCubbin shook his head. Madeleine Gammond went to her daughter, kissed her on the forehead, and said, “I continue to be enormously proud of you. Your other mother would have been equally proud.” Then turning to McCubbin, she said, “Paulette’s birth mother was more stubborn than this one here. Consider yourself lucky not to be dealing with her.” Madeleine laughed. “Oh, and please let the record show that Paulette was very much correct in one thing I heard her say: if I hadn’t offered my own breast milk to feed this little girl during those horrible first few days before the city could pull itself back up on its feet, she wouldn’t have survived. That part of the story is very much true. Goodnight, all. Or should I say ‘good morning’?”

  Madeleine woke her husband with a gentle hand and led him back to the spare bedroom Paulette had fixed up for them. Lying in bed, Dilby Gammond asked his wife how their daughter had taken the important news of her true parentage.

  “It will take her some time to come to terms with it, I’m sure,” answered Madeleine.

  “Do you think she’ll go along with MGM?”

  “I don’t know. She’s very hard-headed. Very much Ellen’s little girl.” As Madeleine thought about her long-deceased friend, she ran her fingers slowly and affectionately through her husband’s thinning gray hair, his head pillowed snugly upon her large, warm, nourishing breasts.