American Decameron

by Mark Dunn

  Josephine opened the envelope.

  “Quentin?”

  “Just a minute, hon. Bub’s about to—I still can’t get used to seeing William Frawley without Vivian Vance. It’s like Ethel never existed.”

  “Quentin, get over here. I want you to see this.”

  Quentin pulled himself from his recliner and lumbered into the dining room. “See what?”

  “It’s a check.”

  “Where’d you find it?”

  “In the book, Quentin. Where else would I find it?”

  Josephine handed her husband the slightly yellowed check. He tipped up his glasses so his nearsighted eyes could give it a closer look. “It’s for fifteen hundred dollars.”

  Josephine nodded.

  “Who’s Bette Merkel?”

  “She’s the woman I bought the book from. Merkel’s probably her maiden name. This check was a wedding present. She never cashed it.”

  “Well, she probably didn’t cash it because she never saw it.”

  “Because she never even opened the book. Now here’s what I think. Sit down.”

  Quentin minded his wife; he pulled out one of the dining room chairs and sat down.

  “I think this aunt must have made these—what are they—these Jelly Tots for her niece and now the niece is all grown up and about to get married and the aunt’s passing the recipe down to her. But it’s not some family secret—it’s in The Joy of Cooking. Anyway, the recipe was Aunt Sue’s way of surprising Bette with the fat check.”

  “But how could Bette be surprised if she never saw it?” asked Quentin, scratching his chin.

  “There’s a bigger question than that, honey. Why didn’t the aunt tell her the check was in there? I mean, after she didn’t figure it out on her own. That’s a lot of money.”

  “Of course it’s a lot of money. Too much money to give to a niece who doesn’t appreciate you enough to even look inside a book you gave her, whether she liked to cook or not.”

  “You think that’s it?”

  “That would be my guess.”

  “I really need to know for sure.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “I wonder if Aunt Sue is still alive. I wonder if she lives around here.”

  “Josephine, how are you going to find her? And let’s say you do find her—what are you going to say to her? This isn’t any of your business.”

  Josephine pushed the check back and forth across the table as she thought. “Do you think I should just give it to her? To Bette? It is hers, after all.”

  “I don’t know. It might just stir things up. There’s a reason that the aunt didn’t break down and tell her niece where to find it. Something soured the relationship.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised. She didn’t give me a very good feeling last Saturday. She was very flip, very dismissive. I didn’t like her.”

  “Let it go, Josie. Tear up the check, and let it go. Can I get back to My Three Sons now?”

  “All right.”

  As Quentin was heading back to the TV alcove of the couple’s living room, he said, “Hey, make something fun out of that cookbook for dinner tomorrow night.”

  “All right. I’d already decided to make those infamous Jelly Tots for dessert.”

  “Whatever those are.”

  Josephine didn’t tear up the check. She couldn’t. She had never been the kind of person to let go of something that gnawed away at her. And there was so much that was gnawing at her. There was a story here she was dying to know. Hadn’t the aunt called Bette her “favorite niece”? And then, suddenly, something must have happened to permanently erase that special status. Could it be exactly what Quentin surmised: a niece’s lack of interest in a book her aunt obviously treasured? Josephine had to know. She’d never tell Quentin, but she absolutely had to find out.

  Josephine knocked on the door, even though it was already open. A truck was in the driveway and there were moving men lifting a bedframe into the back of its large, capacious trailer. “Hello?” she called into the house.

  The husband appeared. He was dressed in a soiled sweatshirt and jeans and he looked tired.

  “Is your wife—is Bette here?”

  “She’s around here somewhere. You’re not selling anything, are you?”

  “Oh, no. I came to your yard sale last week.”

  “Well, everything we were going to sell’s already been sold.” The husband disappeared into the house. “BETTE! THERE’S SOMEBODY HERE TO SEE YOU!”

  Josephine waited.

  At last Bette appeared. She wore knockabout clothes like her husband—an old sweater and Capri pants with a patina of dust on them.

  “Hi. I’m Josephine Charles. I was at your yard sale last week.”

  “Yes. I think I remember you. You bought some baby clothes, didn’t you?”

  “Um. No. I was looking at the cookbooks.”

  “Oh, okay. I guess you can tell that we’re just a little busy here. Is there something I can do for you?”

  “I’m sorry. Do you want me to come back?”

  “If you like, but I won’t be here. We’re leaving tomorrow morning.”

  “Well, I—” Josephine was interrupted by the muscled passage of two uniformed moving men going through the open door. Both women had to step back to keep from getting body-checked.

  “Come inside,” said Bette. “We’ve still got the couch for a few minutes.”

  The two went to sit down on the tarpaulin-covered couch.

  “Sorry that I don’t have anything to offer you to drink. We just finished up the lemonade. Lyman was supposed to go out for sodas and sandwiches, but I don’t know when that will be.”

  “That’s all right. I won’t keep you. I wanted to tell you something about that book I bought from you—The Joy of Cooking.”

  “Oh, you were The Joy of Cooking!” Bette said with a grin. “My friend Naomi gave me such a hard time about letting that go for six bits. She said it’s got to be worth twenty dollars at least.”

  “At least,” said Josephine, cryptically. “Bette, I came to tell you about something I found inside. It’s—well, here it is. It’s from your Aunt Sue.”

  Bette took the envelope from Josephine. She read what was written on the outside and then looked inside and pulled out the check. She didn’t gasp, but her hand went up to her mouth as if she had. “I can’t believe this,” she finally managed to say.

  “I guess you would have seen it if you’d—well, it was taped to the page that had the recipe for Jelly Tots.”

  Bette smiled at a memory. “Jelly Tots. Oh, that’s funny. That’s rich.”

  “I don’t know if your aunt is still around or even if you want to say anything to her, but I thought you should know that it was in there, in case, you know—”

  Bette’s smile evaporated. “In case what?”

  “I don’t know. If it were me—”

  Bette’s look suddenly turned hard. “If it were you, what? You’d go to her and apologize for never taking the time to look inside the wedding present she’d given you?”

  “Well, the book was only part of the gift. There was also, as you can see, a check for fifteen hundred dollars. So you and your new husband could build a nice kitchen for your new house.”

  “Yes, I read that. I’m fully capable of reading, though I don’t. Lyman and the kids, they’re the readers in the family. You want to know why I didn’t open the book? That’s why you came here, right—to find out why I didn’t know this check was in there? Well, I’m going to tell you, even though you’re a nosy bitch.”

  Josephine shrank back.

  “My aunt had a lot of money. Lyman and I—we weren’t poor, but every cent we were making was going into saving for a house, our very own house. I asked my aunt for a loan to help speed things along. She’d always said I was her favorite niece, and now she had the chance to prove it. But when we asked her, she said no. I couldn’t believe she could be so cruel. Lyman said she was probably waiting to give it to
us at the wedding. I bided my time. We got a lot of wedding checks—everybody knew what it was we really needed going into this marriage. Not Aunt Sue. From Aunt Sue, I got a book. A lousy cookbook. She knew I didn’t like to cook and that I had no intention of learning. I threw it away. It was Lyman who pulled it out of the trash. He said it needed to be on the shelf in the kitchen in case Aunt Sue came to visit. Do you know what I said to that? When am I going to invite that selfish old crone over here? Well, I never got the chance not to invite her, because she died only a few weeks later. She didn’t leave me anything in her will. She never told me about the check and she didn’t leave me a stingy dime.”

  Lyman stepped into the living room. “You need to finish sealing up the boxes in Leiza’s room. The movers are asking for the rest of the boxes.”

  Bette nodded.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Bette’s husband.

  “I’ll tell you later.”

  Lyman walked off.

  “I don’t think you told me your name,” said Bette.

  “I did actually. It’s Josephine.”

  “I’m sorry I lashed out at you like that, Josephine. I’m not mad at you. I’m mad at myself. I don’t blame my aunt for what she did. I probably would have done the same thing in her position. To be perfectly honest, I don’t know why Aunt Sue was ever fond of me. She was always a very quiet woman. I’m, well, not. When things bother me, I speak up. Some people don’t like that. Witness the fact that both my son and daughter live in southern California—just about as far as they can get from their mother without leaving the continental United States.”

  “The continental United States would also include Alaska.”

  “I wish I read more often. I wish I read, period. And cooked. My aunt made the most delicious Jelly Tots.”

  “I baked some last night. They’re in the car.”

  1962

  THROWN A CURVE BALL IN NEW YORK

  My stepfather Harvey and I were both enjoying our birthday toys. Our birthdays were only two days apart in early April. My present was a transistor radio that Harvey and Mom let me pick out at Brach’s downtown. I remember going out to my stepfather’s brand new Volkswagen Beetle parked in the driveway, knowing that I’d find him inside, sitting in the driver’s bucket, patiently waiting for the game to start. Harvey was listening to Frank Sinatra on the car radio as I got inside, my new leather-slipcased radio in hand. A thick, sweet cloud of smoke nebulized by his Tiparillo hung in the air.

  “We can listen to the game on my new radio,” I offered, holding up my birthday present. (I think it was the rule in 1962 that eleven-year-old boys were supposed to be given transistor radios for their birthdays—especially in families that had qualms about BB guns.)

  Harvey took a puff from his slender plastic-tipped cigar, which had just come on the market. He shook his head. “Save the juice in your 9-volt, Scoots. We’ll listen to the bug radio.”

  My stepfather knew a thing or two about batteries. He worked for Schenectady’s big General Electric company. He and his fellow scientists and engineers were in the process of inventing the world’s strongest superconducting magnet. Harvey’s team was competing against Bell Telephone Labs for an impressive prize: several cases of top-shelf Scotch—to be sent by the losers to the winners. Harvey probably didn’t tell the Bell folks that he didn’t drink Scotch. His potable of choice was Rheingold, the official beer, as it turned out, of the New York Mets, whose very first game we were about to listen to on station WGY, courtesy of WABC out of New York City.

  Harvey was from St. Louis, and a little conflicted. The Mets were playing the Cardinals in Busch Stadium, and Harvey had always been a big fan of Stan “The Man” Musial. On the other hand, he’d lived in New York for the last twenty years and was just as fixed in his belief that the state deserved a National League team—after the demoralizing departure of the Dodgers and the Giants—as the most adamant of Gotham’s born-and-breds. In fact, it was the tragedy of losing those two powerhouse teams and all the sentimental feelings lingering in their wake that played a big role in the Mets acquiring one of the worst teams in baseball.

  “A real Geritol bunch—all these former Dodger and Giant coots,” my stepfather joked when he found out whom the team had signed. And he made a similar assessment that day in the car, as one of the broadcast’s three announcers, Bob Murphy, presented the lineup for his radio listeners. Each name elicited either a chuckle and a shake of the head or the designation “Gramps” or “Methuselah” or “No Spring Chicken by any Goddamned Metric.” Harvey didn’t watch his language when it was just him and me. He smoked. He drank his multiple bottles of Rheingold (close at hand this day in a little ice chest on the back seat). He gave me a taste every now and then, so long as I didn’t tell Mom. “Gil Hodges has got to be pushing forty!” he exclaimed when the first baseman’s name was announced. “And Richie Ashburn’s not that far behind him. Oh, good Christ, did I ever tell you the story of Richie and that poor Mrs. Roth—the wife of the sports editor down in Philadelphia?”

  I had heard the story before. It’s not a story you forget, but I pretended that I hadn’t and shook my head.

  “It was back in ’57, when Richie was playing for the Phillies—he hits this foul ball right into the stands, and wham! The unlucky bastard breaks the poor woman’s nose. And this equally hapless Mrs. Roth, they’re getting her all laid out on the stretcher and the game picks back up again and—sweet Jesus in a hammock—Ashburn beans her again, right there on the goddamned stretcher! It’s like the gods of misfortune just aren’t gonna be happy until the poor woman gets sent up to that disabled list in the sky.”

  Although I already knew the answer, I asked anyway: “And was Mrs. Roth—did she end up being okay?”

  “Oh, sure—sure. I think she and Richie even became friends after all that.”

  Murphy announced that Don Zimmer would be playing third base for the Mets. “Now you talk about your bad luck. Did I ever tell you about Zimmer’s shit-for-luck magnet head for wild pitches?”

  “He got hit in the head too?”

  “Right in the temple, back in ’53, when he was playing for the minors in St. Paul. Put him in a coma for two weeks and they had to drill a bunch of holes into his head—to relieve the pressure, I guess. I think he wears a steel plate to this day. Anyway, they told him he was finished in baseball, but he proved them all wrong. Came back stronger than ever so he could get himself beaned again in ’56 in Cincinnati—broke his motherloving jaw.”

  As Murphy was announcing the Cardinals’ lineup, Harvey sat up straight. I knew he was listening for Musial’s name and once he heard it, he couldn’t hold back a big grin. “Busch, Sportsman’s Park—whatever the hell it is that we’re supposed to call it now—it’s one of the best parks in the majors for left-handed hitters like Musial. Babe Ruth hit three homers in two different World Series games back in ’26 and ’28.”

  “Harvey, how is it you know so much about baseball?”

  “I know so much about everything. You think your mother married me for my looks?” Harvey grinned even bigger than before and chucked me under the chin. Then we both got quiet and listened to the opening innings of the inaugural game of the New York Mets, which was also the first game of the 1962 major league baseball season. New York City was thrilled to finally have a second team. There was to be a big parade down Broadway in Manhattan the next day. A special ceremony with Mayor Wagner was scheduled for City Hall.

  Today’s game had been postponed from the day before because of rain. The outfield was soggy and the fielders had to wear football shoes to get any traction. The Mets’ pitcher, Roger Craig, struggled against the Cards in the early innings, but for everything that had been said about Gil Hodges and his advanced years (in baseball terms, that is, and only by my stepfather Harvey—Murphy and Ralph Kiner and their broadcast booth colleague Lindsey Nelson being far kinder), the first baseman knocked the ball out of the park in the fourth inning (his 362nd career homer).

&
nbsp; “Gil, you son of a bitch!” my stepfather howled, and then turning to me: “I take back everything I said about that old geezer.” To punctuate his mea culpa, he took a big swig of beer and passed the bottle to me. “Yeah, I’m a bad influence. Sue me.”

  Harvey laughed, his whole face radiating happiness. Then suddenly the joy evaporated. He turned the volume knob of the radio so that Kiner’s voice dropped to a mumble and the crowd noises were reduced to a hum. The spell that had been cast over us by the game was now broken.

  There is something about listening to baseball on the radio, something indefinably gratifying, that has stayed with me well into my later years—past that disastrous first season for the Mets, in which they won only one out of every four games they played (and finished the season 60 ½ games behind the Giants) and even beyond their redemptive Cinderella year, 1969. Even today I can still close my eyes and picture myself at the ballpark, first the Polo Grounds and then the spanking new Shea Stadium. I imbibe the vocal restlessness of the fans—supportive, forgiving, but this being New York, always displaying a kind of ballsy bluntness, a sort of tough love for a team that stumbled just as often as it walked or ran. If I listen close enough, I can even hear the cries of the hotdog and peanut vendors: the perfect ambient embroidery to the drone of that vibrant crowd.

  But there is something related to that experience that isn’t so gratifying. It’s the reminder of what happened next on that first day of the 1962 baseball season, as I sat beside my stepfather in his brand new Volkswagen Beetle.

  “There’s something I need to talk to you about,” said Harvey. “I promised your mom I’d do it today.”

  Harvey put out his Tiparillo. Years later, whenever I saw an ad for the little cigars or heard the company cigarette girl’s catchphrase, “Cigars? Cigarettes? Tiparillos?” I would think back on this conversation with a welter of feelings.

  “Your mother wants a divorce.”

  “Oh.” It took me a few seconds to pull myself out from under this ton of bricks. “How come?”