American Decameron

by Mark Dunn

  Peter Mullavey nodded. He sighed. He leaned back in the stationary rocker and closed his eyes. He saw Mrs. Davies sitting in the front pew of his parish church, smiling supportively through his slightly stammered homilies. He imagined the curves of Mrs. Davies in her house frock, standing with her back to him in the early morning light, frying up his sausage and eggs. Sometimes he pretended that they were married—happily married like his friends Herman and Jelena.

  Peter Mullavey and his oldest friend and fellow altar boy Herman Klar and Herman’s opinionated, longsuffering, long-loving wife Jelena inaugurated a new annual ritual that year. On a particular Saturday every year in early September, the three popped popcorn and poured Schnapps and Scotch whiskey, and watched Miss America together. In fact, it was during the 1976 broadcast that Father Mullavey suffered the stroke that incapacitated him for the next year and a half and resulted ultimately in his retirement from active ministry. The causal arterial embolism occurred while Bert Parks, backed up by three young bobble-headed male dancers in tuxedos, sang the pop hit by Paul McCartney, “Let ’Em In.”

  Mrs. Davies was there at Pete’s bedside at the hospital and then every day at the rectory to assist him in his daily rehabilitation therapy. Every morning she was up early to fry his sausage and eggs. One morning he reached up as she was setting the plate in front of him, reached up and touched her cheek with the fingertips of his right hand—the good hand—touched her soft, warm cheek sweetly, achingly, ever so briefly.

  1969

  PARENTAL IN ARIZONA

  The first year it was a Spartan, and Yellowstone and the Tetons; the next year a Vagabond, and the Badlands and the Four Faces. Last year we bought a used Airway Zephyr and flew like the wind up and down the California and Oregon coastline. This year we went to Bryce and Zion and the Grand Canyon. I don’t know why it took us so long to get to the Grand Canyon. There’s simply no way to describe it—like nothing we’ve seen in all of our four years of vacationing out west. Especially when you’re vacationing in luxury in a brand-new Avion thirty-one-foot, two-and-a-half-ton Imperial. As the name implies, it’s the biggest travel trailer the Avion company makes.

  My husband has, over the last several years, become a master rig hauler. He’s a man of many talents, that’s for certain, and I never doubted that he would get so good at “travelcading.” Although Clint inherited quite a bit of money from his father, he didn’t simply plop himself down upon his family windfall and proceed to a life of self-indulgence. We have taken a good deal of the Dinkman’s Pastries fortune and given it to a number of charities and organizations whose causes we believe in. (Only a small portion of the inheritance actually finances our extensive summer travels through the Great American West.)

  Clint has learned to play the violin and he’s writing a book about General Custer. I am a gourmet chef. You wouldn’t believe the meals I can whip up for my husband and our two hungry road puppies using that Avion butane range with bifold top and broiler. I should have mentioned our road puppies sooner. Robert Joseph—known as R.J. (he’s eleven)—and Lisha (she’s nearing ten) couldn’t wait to get out of school and hit the road for two and a half glorious months of scenic adventure with Mom and Dad. From day one we were like one of those families in the 1950s travelogues, waving and mugging at the camera as they insert their car through the hollowed-out trunk of that Wawona giant sequoia in Yosemite—something that we would have liked someday to do (unhitched, of course) had a heavy snowfall not toppled that majestic Old Man of the Forest just last winter.

  Clint and I have a good life, which is made even better by our annual ten-week road adventures with the kids, who are usually game for anything their nutty trailer-touring parents want to do. No, we have never surmounted Pike’s Peak with any of our various rigs in tow, but we have crossed the Continental Divide several times, rig intact, and never burned out a single automobile engine.

  No one has ever questioned our taking the kids along—even though it removes from them the opportunity to enjoy the kinds of summer activities usually associated with children their age. Well, no one questioned us, that is, until we paid a visit to Clint’s two half-sisters in Flagstaff last August.

  It was inevitable that we would see them after our visit to Grand Canyon National Park. Clint hadn’t been in communication with either of them for almost ten years. Gabby and Gertrude, twelve and fourteen years older than him, respectively, were never close to Clint. In addition to the age difference, there was also the fact that it wasn’t the phenomenally successful prune danish and chocolate bear claw magnate, Overell Dinkman, whom they shared as a parent, but Dinkman’s second wife, Alfreda, who came into the marriage with two daughters in whom stepdad Dinkman could not have been any less interested.

  It also made sense for reason of proximity. Flagstaff is simply too close to the south rim of the Grand Canyon for Clint to have avoided a visit with his spinster sisters. And that was that.

  I really wish we hadn’t gone.

  We’d spent three weeks at the Grand Canyon, making sure to keep the hiking to a minimum for several reasons, not the least of which was the oppressive summer heat. Still, R.J. got enough of a taste of the place to say that he was seriously considering becoming a park ranger when he grew up. Lisha, who loved horses, spent a lot of her time volunteering as a girl-groom at the stables. She worked very hard, and some days she returned to the trailer more tired than others, but overall she amazed us with her stamina and little girl vitality.

  It had probably been our best summer trip, and R.J. and Lisha and I fought back tears as we stood watching Clint turn off the butane tanks, disengage the lines, unblock the wheels, fold the jacks, and then open the backseat door to our red-on-red grin-grilled workhorse of a rig hauler—our 1964 Cadillac Deville convertible 429—so that the kids could climb in and we could hit the road. I could tell from their long faces that they were reluctant to leave the trailer park, which had been their happy home for twenty-one blissful days and nights.

  “What do you say to your father and me for bringing you here, children?” I asked, with a catch in my voice.

  “Thank you, Mom. Thank you, Dad,” said the two in cheerless unison.

  I could not simply leave it at that. I reached into the car and smothered each of my road puppies with maternal hugs and kisses. “You’re most welcome,” I said between snuggling smooches.

  The plan was this: we’d stay in Flagstaff for three days and then begin the final leg of our journey—east on Interstate 40, north on I-25, and then east again on I-80 to get us, one week later, back where we started: South Bend, Indiana, where our lives would once again settle into their customary off-season routines, and the summer, now behind us, would shimmer in the glow of warm recollection. (For the most part.)

  It took Clint no time at all to back the trailer up Gabby and Gertrude’s concrete drive so that we could easily uncouple the car for use around town during our stay. The two sisters had stood with folded arms and expressions that anticipated disaster to the flowerbeds and shrubbery flanking the drive. But Clint, with expert aplomb, harmed not a single bloom or branch. We’d embraced each other a little tentatively in the yard upon arrival and noted how long it had been since we’d last seen one another, but postponed any extended catch-up conversation for later. Both of the women, now in their fifties, had cocked their salt-and-pepper heads at R.J. and Lisha and seemed, from their curious looks, set to ask questions that Clint’s insistence on getting the rig out of the street did not permit answering.

  The car and rig now neatly situated, we were all ushered into the house, which resembled, as did many of the homes of Flagstaff in the sixties, a mountain villa: lots of wood and a steeply pitched roof to discourage accumulation in any appreciable amount of the hundred or so inches of snow the city received each winter. Gabby, as her name implied, was the far more talkative of the two sisters. She was also the energetic one—pouring iced tea and spooning sweetener and plumping throw pillows to make everyone comfortable.
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  It made me tired just to watch her.

  “We didn’t know you had children,” said Gabby, finally sitting down in a chair. All the sitting furniture in the room was grouped around the large stone fireplace, which, this being summer, sat cold and tomblike. The placement of the television at the opposite end of the room made me wonder if the two sisters watched their favorite shows over their shoulders. Or maybe the furniture was grouped this way for the express purpose of allowing us to speak to one another comfortably (though “comfortable” conversation would be in short supply this evening).

  There seemed to be a formality and a certain exactitude to the way the sisters lived. Gabby worked at the university, in the admissions office. Gertrude was owner and manager of her own gift shop. The town attracted a lot of tourists going to and coming from the Grand Canyon. I’m sure that Gertrude kept that shop immaculate—as cleanly ordered as the large living room in which I found myself sitting stiffly erect, wishing that this visit didn’t have to last three days. Wishing, as well, that I could just sweep up the kids and throw them in the car, which now sat unmoored from our currently stationary mobile home, so that we could go tramping around the huge Ponderosa forest that climbed the hills within view of the sisters’ panoramic living room picture windows. I would do this while Clint “caught up.” While he and his estranged half-siblings said everything that needed to be said between marginal family members. And then we could be relievedly on our way.

  It would not be nearly that easy.

  “The children,” Gabby repeated, pointing at R.J. and Lisha as if they were odd little souvenirs we’d picked up during our travels. “When did you adopt them?”

  Clint shook his head. “We didn’t adopt them.”

  Gabby bunched her lips together and gave my husband a hard, penetrating look. “If these are not your children, then just whose children are they?”

  “They’re our children. But only for the summer,” Clint answered decisively, if not a little elliptically. “This tea is good. Are we eating here tonight or going out? Natalie doesn’t eat red meat, so I don’t ask her to cook it. I wouldn’t mind going out for a steak.”

  “Whatever you’d like, Clint,” answered Gabby. “But I’m still confused. ‘Only for the summer.’ What do you mean by that?”

  “Just what I said,” answered Clint. “I would have explained already what it is that Natalie and I do with the kids each summer, but we haven’t really made much of an effort to stay in touch, now have we?”

  Gertrude, who had been sitting in silence, her brow furrowed, the teeth of her lower dental plate chewing her upper lip lightly but intently, now made a contribution to the conversation. “Am I the only person in this room to notice that these two children are…colored?”

  “They don’t want us to use the word ‘colored’ anymore, Gertrude, darling,” said Gabby to her older sister. “They say ‘black,’ as in ‘black and beautiful.’” Gabby was looking right at Lisha now. “And you are, honey. You are both black and beautiful. But what else are you?”

  “What my husband means to say,” I broke in, “is that we have not formally adopted these children, but they are ours in every other possible respect. I mean during the summer.”

  “Natalie,” said Gabby, without making any attempt to soften her delivery, “you’re making no sense. Where did these two black children come from?”

  Lisha traded a look with Clint and me that said she wanted to be the one to answer. “We come from South Bend, Indiana,” she said without hesitation. “My brother and I live in an orphanage there.”

  “You mean when you’re not living with my brother and sister-in-law?” asked Gabby.

  “That’s right,” I said. “So tell me about that big fluffy dog out in the backyard, Gabby. He looks like Tramp, doesn’t he, kids?”

  R.J. and Lisha agreed that the English sheepdog in the backyard, who was pressing his furry nose against the window and wagging his tail, looked very much like Tramp from the TV sitcom My Three Sons. And they wanted to play with him.

  “Can R.J. and Lisha go out and play with the dog?” I asked Gabby.

  “Of course. He’s very friendly. But don’t leave the backyard.” Almost as an afterthought she added, “It’s getting dark.” As the children were going out, Gabby explained that Flagstaff gets very dark at night because outdoor lighting is kept very low to accommodate night-sky viewing from the city’s two nationally renowned observatories.

  A moment later, Clint said, “Natalie and I tried to have children of our own for years. When we finally gave up, we made other arrangements.”

  “Isn’t the normal course to formally adopt? Why not these children, for example?”

  “Oh, Heavens, no!” exclaimed Gertrude.

  Clint looked to me to answer. “There are reasons that we’ve chosen not to adopt.” I watched through the window as R.J. and Lisha fell instantly in love with the dog, whose name, we soon learned, was Dawser.

  “What reasons?” persisted Gabby. “You’re being awfully mysterious. Why do you come into this house and act so mysterious?”

  “I’m sorry,” was all that Clint said, his head bowed. I noted that his Keds-clad right foot was nervously pawing the deep shag carpet.

  “Well, at any rate,” Gabby went on, “I don’t think it’s a healthy game to play with children—taking them three months out of the year and pretending to be their parents and then putting them right back into the orphanage to spend the rest of the year.” The topic had finally been put to bed with this pronouncement. “It’s too late to go out. I’ll start dinner. You said you’d be here by six-thirty and it’s already past eight.”

  Gabby got up and left the room. “I’ll give her a hand in the kitchen,” I said to Clint, and followed. Later that night, Clint related to me the private exchange that then took place between him and Gertrude.

  There was no prelude: “I don’t want them staying in this house.”

  “Them. The children, you mean?”

  “Yes. The nigger children. I don’t want them sleeping in my house.”

  “When did you get to be this way?”

  “What way? You didn’t tell me that you were bringing nigger children with you—the spawn of some heroin whore in the ghetto. Do you know who the father is?”

  “Which father? R.J.’s was killed in Vietnam. And I don’t want you using that word again.”

  “I don’t want them here, Clint. This is my house.”

  Clint didn’t respond to what my sister-in-law had said—at least not right away. These were words that he’d never heard her say before—words that stabbed him, words that diminished her in his eyes. And the relationship between Clint and his half-sisters had been troubled for a long time anyway. He’d given them money—a lot of money—after his father died, to make up for the fact that Overell Dinkman had left his stepdaughters out in the cold. There hadn’t been even a whisper of a thank-you. Clint faulted himself for not doing a better job of maintaining communication, but then again, this was a two-way street—one avoided by both parties in equal measure.

  Finally, after a long period of silence, Clint said, “I have one favor to ask of you. That you let me keep the trailer here until the morning. I’ll take Natalie and the kids to a motel tonight.”

  “If that’s what you want, Clint,” said Gertrude. “But you could just as easily put the children in the trailer and you and Natalie can take the guest room. The bed is very comfortable. It has a new mattress.”

  “We will eat with you. I’m sure that Gabby and Natalie are already well into preparations for the meal by now, but come tomorrow morning we’ll be on our way. What you’ve offered—to state the obvious—isn’t acceptable.”

  “If that’s what you want,” Gertrude repeated. “I must say, though, that even if there isn’t something, I believe, very much the matter with two white adults gallivanting all over the place with a couple of ni—with a couple of Negro children—it’s still very odd, this thing you’re doing. Play
ing house. Is that what it’s called? It’s a children’s game that has no place being played by adults.”

  “It makes Natalie happy.”

  “Pretending to be a mother.”

  “Being a mother. And she’s a very good one. And I happen to think that I’m a good father. Sometimes life deals you certain cards, Gertrude. But you don’t have to take them. You’re allowed to discard them for something better.”

  “Are the two of you—are you molesting those children?”

  We didn’t stay for dinner.

  The kids loved Dawser. They didn’t understand why they couldn’t stay and play with him.

  I hustled them into the car while Clint connected the rig. He didn’t like driving around with the trailer at night. Even with our expertly devised pilot/co-pilot navigation system, it wasn’t an easy thing changing lanes after the sun had gone down with that freight train behind us, and especially in a city that didn’t like to light up its streets at night.

  We reached a trailer park just east of town at about 9:30. I boiled eggs and we all had egg and olive sandwiches. After tucking the kids into bed, Clint and I sat outside in lawn chairs and talked in low voices late into the night. Was it wrong, what we were doing? Was there something wrong with us? Gabby had been right about it being a game, but it was a game that we all bought into, that all four of us enjoyed, and who got hurt? For ten weeks out of the year—weeks that Clint and I looked forward to with enthusiastic, childlike anticipation—we played that game to the hilt. And for those two and a half months the children had something they hadn’t known for a long time, if ever: real, live, loving and giving parents.

  In late November, Clint and I made it official: next summer we’d be going to the Payette National Forest and the spectacularly scenic Salmon River in Idaho. And we’d be trading in our Avion Imperial for an Airstream. I’d always wanted an Airstream. I wasn’t sure, though, if R.J. and Lisha would be strong enough to make the trip. As it turned out, R.J. died in February. Lisha’s own battle with childhood leukemia ended in April.