American Decameron

by Mark Dunn

  Carthy had lost an eye from a pop gun, so there was a patch over the eye that didn’t have the monocle, and sometimes his leg would fall off in the middle of Johnny’s routine from being so roughly handled by a rambunctious nine-year-old boy. And Johnny, who was usually prepared for just such a possibility, was at the ready with a line like, “Hey, Carthy! Looks like somebody’s been pulling your leg!” One time he said “durn leg” and he got in a little trouble with his mother, who was a Sunday School teacher in the Baptist church and thought that substitution words like “durn” and “dang” were just as bad as saying the real thing because the thought was there, and God knows what is in our thoughts.

  So, like I said, I would have told Johnny that he was setting Carthy McCharlie on that chair in such a haphazard way as to invite disaster, since the chair sat so close to the edge of the stage, but I decided it would probably be best for me to keep my mouth shut. Especially since it was a rule—largely applied to me alone—that when Maryanne and Piddy and I were just offstage getting ready for our number, I was supposed to keep my thoughts to myself and my flapping lips buttoned up tight. And it was a true challenge because of how much of a little chatterbox I was. So anyway, I watched in delicious horror as Carthy slid off that chair and then fell forward right into the orchestra pit, and when Johnny came back to find that his dummy was gone, he started looking all around in a panic, as if Carthy McCharlie had gotten right up and walked off by himself, bad leg and all.

  Right after asking Avis the custodian to go down into the pit with Johnny to rescue Carthy, Mr. Jones, who owned the theatre and emceed the talent show, pointed to Maryanne and Piddy and me, which meant it was our turn now to come out on stage and to position ourselves as close to the microphone as possible so the people listening to their radios could hear the sound of our taps. And nobody thought there was anything odd at all about doing on the radio something that was best beheld by the eyes, the radio being an exclusively sound medium. They just listened to the tattoo of our tap shoes as they struck the wooden floor (more thuddy-thunk than clickety-clack) and tried to picture in their heads what our feet and legs and arms could possibly be doing. After all, tap dancing on the radio made just as much sense as ventriloquism on the radio.

  And while we’re on the subject of talents that don’t translate too well via the radio medium, a listener couldn’t see Geneva’s hula arms and hips either. And they also couldn’t see Nora Gibson’s demonstration of how best to pack a picnic basket, although she got better over time as far as offering a running commentary on what she was doing. “Now I am laying the toasting forks next to the other utensils. Make sure when you do this at home that you keep them all pointed in the same direction so as to avoid injury upon retrieval.” (I know good and well that Nora’s aunt, Miss Gautreau, our librarian, wrote everything out for her to say because Nora’s instructions sounded just like some of the handmade signs that Miss Gautreau had hanging around the library. For example, in the little girl’s room there was a sign that said, “No one is too rushed not to flush. Please read this sign twice.”)

  So anyway, while Avis and Johnny Humphries were bumping around down in the orchestra pit, the three of us who matriculated at Hiram and Helene’s School of Dance and Loveliness were hastily ushered out onto the stage by Mr. Jones’ pretty assistant, Miss Lighthouse. And Mr. Jones introduced us with his peppy, cheerful voice—a voice that always made you think that there was absolutely nothing wrong in the world that couldn’t be fixed by listening to his talent show on the radio. Not war or poverty or hunger or even the dreaded plague of unionization.

  The song that Maryanne and Piddy and I danced to was the one that Shirley Temple and Bill Robinson tapped up and down the stairs to in The Little Colonel. We had learned our steps to the tune of “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” but Mrs. Taliaferro said it was better to be Yankee Doodle Dandies around the Fourth of July and only Kate Smith was permitted to be patriotic all year round. Mrs. Taliaferro gave us the tempo of the new song and said everything would be fine. It would be just like falling off a log.

  Hiram and Helene Odell’s “Dancing Trio” stayed with the music and kept in sync with one another pretty well, I have to say. It helped that this was the tenth or eleventh or twelfth time we’d danced in competition together. Up until this point we’d never won, though. Geneva did a couple of times, but more often it was Corinne Lester who took home the big prize. Corinne liked to deliver dramatic readings in which she would punch the air with her fist at a predetermined climactic moment, and sometimes she would recite inspirational poetry with clear rounded vowels and some degree of urgency. We always thought that Corinne Lester was good enough to go to Hollywood, but I don’t think she ever tried her luck there. The last I heard—and this was years ago—she was a shoe buyer for a department store in Jackson. I heard that she personally sold a pair of snakeskin slingbacks with five-inch heels to Eudora Welty, who brought them back the very next day after the shoes made her fall down in a restaurant . The only time that Corinne didn’t win or at least take second or third place was when she recited “Invictus.” The judges (who were Mr. Jones and Miss Lighthouse) were complimentary of Corinne’s impassioned delivery, but couldn’t in good conscience give her an award, since the poem was generally regarded as atheistic and the Dixie Theatre was a Christian movie house.

  But this was the Saturday that we thought we had a good chance of winning, because there’d be a little something special about our performance that day, which was our teacher Miss Odell’s idea, but which we liked just fine: we each got to wear little tiaras on our heads.

  “You look so much like little princesses,” said Miss Odell, “you make me want to genuflect. You do. Right here. Right now.” This is what Miss Odell had said at our dance lesson the afternoon before. And her bachelor brother Hiram, overhearing her from the front office of their dance studio, shouted his enthusiastic concurrence. Then, for a reason that was not clear to me at the time, Miss Helene Odell began to weep. She spent a long time after that in the powder room while her brother had us doing fondus and pliés while he sang “That Old Black Magic,” and “You Make Me Feel So Young,” and finally, “Chi-Baba, Chi-Baba (Bambino Go to Sleep),” which had been popularized a couple of years earlier by Perry Como.

  “The only thing that will make it official,” said Miss Odell, finally emerging from the powder room while blotting her eyes with a wad of toilet paper, “are sparkly little rhinestone diadems. One for each of you. Let me get you each a tiara and then I defy Mr. Jones not to be enchanted and enchained.”

  “Enchanted and enchained!” repeated Hiram in grinning agreement with his sister, who had never married and whose womb had remained fallow.

  So Miss Odell went back to her storeroom and came out with three glistening tiaras, a perfect fit for our little seven-year-old heads, and we could not have been more pleased with the way they made us look as we crowded around the mirror in the powder room. But as we were gathering to get a good look at ourselves, Piddy’s tiara came loose from her hair and landed in the sink and snapped in two. After an attempt to glue the pieces back together failed (“I told you that Elmer’s was only for paper and cardboard products, Hiram!”), there followed some debate as to whether or not we should wait a week to reveal our new look so that Piddy could get herself a new tiara. But Piddy, who was going through an insistent phase, would have none of this. So she and Maryanne and I ended up dancing with our new tiaras on our heads, and Piddy kept both of her hands fixed to her own head to hold the disjoined tiara in place. I know that we lost points with the judges because of Piddy’s stiff and limited arm movement. But in the end, we were happy that we didn’t have to wait a full week to enchant and enchain Mr. Jones and Miss Lighthouse.

  As Mrs. Taliaferro got the signal to bring our number to a close, we noticed that Johnny Humphries and the movie palace custodian Avis had finally rescued Carthy McCharlie. It was a sad sight, though, because the dummy was broken up into so many different pieces. Even his h
ead had come off. Miss Lighthouse went to Johnny and whispered something to him. She was asking him in her gentle, motherly way if he might like to wait until next week to perform the rest of his ventriloquist routine after Carthy had been put back together again. But Johnny, like Piddy, seemed determined to go on and bring his act to a proper finish.

  We were supposed to all troop down and sit with the rest of the audience when our number was over, but I wanted to see what was going to happen with Johnny and Carthy from a backstage perspective; so I planted myself just offstage next to Mr. Jones, who heaved a heavy sigh and then turned to me and said in a doleful voice, “Just look at that poor dummy—he’s only a shadow of his former self.”

  Johnny sat in the chair and held Carthy’s head and all of his detached body parts in his lap, and then, as if stricken with sudden genius, began to pretend to the listeners throughout Yazoo County that Carthy wasn’t in several pieces at all, but fully restored to his old self (this being radio and the listening audience being none the wiser). This ploy upset the in-theatre audience of nine-, ten-, and eleven-year-olds who began to boo and hiss. One boy yelled, “You big bamboozler! You flimflam merchant!” (which the boy had probably heard his father say more than once about President Harry S. Truman). Johnny responded by throwing Carthy’s head at the boy as if it were an angry football. Then he fled the stage in tears.

  They gave third prize (a pity prize, I’m sure) to Johnny. Third prize was a coupon for a free bag of popcorn. And first place—a month’s worth of free tickets to the kiddie matinee—went to a boy who had never competed before named Mitch, who talked his way through the story of “Old Shep,” but was so shy that he never looked up from his shoes, as if he were telling the story to his feet. And believe it or not, we Tiara Girls came in second place! It was all because Piddy had shown courage in the face of adversity by going on with the show wearing her broken tiara, and Mr. Jones, as he was awarding us our coupons for a free Coca-Cola and a free box of Jujubes at the concession stand, said that we were an inspiration to all the young people of America because we had shown the kind of grit and determination that had made this country great! And then he interrupted himself to scold two boys in the audience who were playing catch with poor Carthy McCharlie’s disconnected head.

  1949 was a long time ago and I’m an old woman now and quite amazed that I can recall it all in such detail. But they always say it’s the earliest memories that get retained the longest and maintain the greatest clarity. I’ve lost touch with nearly everyone I knew in those days—with Maryanne and Piddy and Sue Ann and Geneva. The town where we all grew up, having fallen on hard times, is now, to borrow from Mr. Jones, only a shadow of its former self.

  In some ways the world has become a much more sensible place; today we would never accept the isolated sound of little tapping feet on the radio as any conceivable form of entertainment. Yet what has been lost that was with us back then, I think, even with a world war only four years past and the atomic bomb casting its ominous shadow all about, is that longing for childlike simplicity and innocence. We didn’t have it then—not really. But still we yearned for it.

  Today we don’t even seem to yearn anymore.

  1950

  POIKILOTHERMAL IN WEST VIRGINIA

  “For a steel town, Weirton’s got her charm.” Mr. House was standing at the window next to Russell, his daughter’s latest “gentleman friend,” whom she brought home for Thanksgiving weekend. The two men were watching the flakes start to fall. “Has Trudy taken you around?”

  “I’m supposed to get the grand tour tomorrow.”

  Mrs. House stepped out of the kitchen. She wore an apron with a big cartoon turkey on it. “Don’t be so sure about that, Russ. Can I call you Russ? We’re supposed to get a half-foot of snow by tomorrow.”

  “I hope they don’t have to cancel the Ohio-Michigan game on Saturday,” said a suddenly worried Mr. House.

  “Not of snowball’s chance of that happening, Dad,” offered Trudy’s brother, Bud, looking up from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “Even a blizzard ain’t gonna stop that game.”

  “Isn’t, not ain’t,” Mrs. House corrected her college freshman son as she pushed through the swinging door back into the kitchen.

  “Say, Russell—or can we call you Rusty?—who are you putting your money on—Michigan or Ohio State? Or do you care? Trudy says you’re from Pennsylvania.”

  Russell turned from the window to face his teenage inquisitor. “I’d rather see Ohio State go to the Rose Bowl, but they played pretty lousy against Illinois last week. Moving Janowicz to quarterback was a good move, but Fesler’s probably on his way out the door and you just gotta wonder if his heart’s really in it. The Wolverines are looking good. I’d go with Michigan.”

  “How long will you and Trudy be staying with us?” asked Mr. House, patting his pockets for his tobacco pouch.

  “The plan was to finish up the trip in Erie to see my mother,” said Russell, “and then turn around and get back to Cleveland before Monday.”

  “If the weather cooperates,” appended Mr. House.

  “A little snow doesn’t bother me,” said Russell.

  It snowed all through the Thanksgiving feast. The Fergusons—Arnold and Bet—who broke bread with the House family every postal holiday, got nervous, and even though they lived only a few miles west of Weirton in Steubenville, they didn’t wait around for pumpkin pie. “Arnold doesn’t like to drive in the snow,” explained Bet through buckled, apologetic lips.

  “And Bet doesn’t drive at all,” added Arnold as he inserted his wife into her coat.

  The Houses grilled Trudy about her new “man,” and Trudy, agreeably accommodating, said everything about him that she adored and nothing about him that she didn’t, for there was, in truth, very little that she didn’t like about Russell. He had a good job as an aeronautical engineer at the Lewis Flight Propulsion Laboratory. The two had met at a party and hit it off immediately. Now, without a formal engagement but clearly headed in the direction of marriage, Trudy was bringing Russell “home to meet the folks.”

  Gathered around the fireplace in the Houses’ rustic stone manse (containing such familiar American colonial revival accents as interior wooden shutters, pewter mugs suspended from the mantel, and an early American spinning wheel that had, by all appearances, never been touched) the Houses and Trudy’s “young friend” Russell toasted marshmallows that had been left over from the candied sweet potato casserole and drank cocoa (which went well with the marshmallows) as the snow fell…and fell. The conversation orbited around Trudy and her brother Bud (as children) and Harry S. Truman (as president) and developments in the Korean War (or, rather, “police action”). Mr. House was a union man and his politics leaned more to the haw than to the gee. Mrs. House was a New Dealer in theory, just as her father was, but, unlike her father, had a moralistic streak that led her to say a few unkind things about Ingrid Bergman, who earlier that year had given birth to Italian director Roberto Rossellini’s “love child.”

  “And to think that she had just played Joan of Arc!”

  Russell spoke vaguely of his childhood in Erie and his war service in Italy, and did not happen to mention (as he had never mentioned to his potential future wife Trudy) the fact that often, before he met Trudy and nearly as frequently thereafter, he would go out late at night and put a gun to the heads of a total strangers and make them beg for their lives. Eventually he would let his victims go, and then on the way home he would try to remember exactly what the persons had said in their moments of fear and quiet hysteria, and he would write it all down in a notebook and read it now and then while masturbating.

  The snow didn’t let up all the next day. Russell took Trudy aside that afternoon to say that perhaps they should try to make it back to Cleveland before the weather got any worse, so that they wouldn’t find themselves snowbound either here or in Erie.

  “If you miss a day or two from work, will it be the end of the world?” asked Trudy, pinching
her boyfriend’s nose with playful affection. “You really should see your mother, and aren’t you having a good time here?”

  “I love my mother. I like your family. I don’t, however, enjoy the thought of being trapped. Anywhere. I’m already feeling antsy.”

  Trudy put on her pouty face. “My family has been nothing but open and hospitable since we got here. How can you be antsy?”

  “I just am. I get a little claustrophobic in situations like this.”

  “Daddy would be happy to lend you his snow boots. You can go out and crump around all you like.”

  Russell nodded. He closed his eyes and tried not to imagine the walls closing in on him. That afternoon, under the pretext of checking to see if the local supermarket was still open so he could get Mr. House some Pall Malls—because his possible future father-in-law was almost out of smokes and was in a near-panic of his own over the fact that he hadn’t stocked up before the storm—Russell braved the snowstorm that was increasing in intensity and that had all the makings of a “doozie,” as Mr. House called it. Russell took deep breaths—though the air was arctic-frigid and punishing to his lungs—to calm himself.

  It seemed to work. He felt better that night—at least for a while. But as the family gathered around the fireplace anew, after having just eaten the turkey tetrazzini that Mrs. House had whipped up (with Trudy’s help), Russell became restless again. The feeling that the walls were closing in returned with a vengeance. But there was another feeling too—a longing to take his Colt .32 pocket pistol from its hiding place in his suitcase and go out into the night and find someone who could weep and beg in ways that Russell had not heard before.