Mark Dunn - Ibid - A Life

Day 2: A peaceful, uneventful night. I was first to rise this morning. I checked on the children for any signs of nuclear contamination. They seem fine. I have a rash but it does not appear to be related to fallout. The children are playing Candy Land. Spirits are fairly good considering what awaits us when we open that door. Elsie continues to believe that what I saw was a test pattern. I asked her, “Where was the Indian head, Elsie? Did you see an Indian head?” It will be a trial to make it through two weeks in the same room with this woman, although she is making a peace offering by preparing scrambled eggs. They are powdered but an egg is an egg. And I love eggs.

Day 5: I’m gagging. I can’t get down another forkful of those powdered scrambled eggs. The children are in their corners after some misbehavior. They are obviously tired of Candy Land and Parcheesi. I don’t blame them but look, I’m not the one who decided to drop bombs on the Tri-State Area, all right? Elsie and I are not speaking. She pushed me off the cot last night. She said that she was going stark-raving mad being cooped up this way and was thinking of taking her chances with the mutants out there.

Day 7: We had a real scare today. I was trying to teach the children how to play Seven Card Stud (Elsie and I have stopped speaking since I refuse to give up the Lucky Strikes and she is making a federal case out of the lack of ventilation. Look, lady, I, if anyone, should know if there isn’t proper ventilation in here! I built this shelter! Built it with my own two hands, while you were lounging around eating Whitmans in your silk Capri pants!) when we hear a knock at the door. I’m thrown into a panic trying to remember how well I secured that door. I move quickly to it and find the crossbar still in place. There is another knock. Elsie’s a basket case and the cards and poker chips are flying all over the place as the children scramble under the card table. “Who is it?” I ask. I hear a muffled voice. It could be human. I am not sure. I can’t tell what is said. I yell, “WHO IS IT?” as loud as I am able, hoping that whatever mutant creature outside that heavy metal door will identify himself and state his purpose. I hear — or think I hear: “Come out. It’s all right. Come out.” Elsie relaxes. She seems to think this is a good thing. “Don’t you see, woman?” I cry. “It’s a trick. Someone out there wants our foodstuffs — or, or our precious medical supplies.” Elsie laughs in that way that always makes me want to smack her: “ Supplies , Sandron? Band-Aids, Rolaids, and Mercurochrome! Yeah, we’re a regular Mayo Clinic in here. Open the Goddamned door.” “Over my dead body, woman,” I say. “We may need them to barter with on the outside. It’s every man for himself in this post-apocalyptic world!”

Day 9: No one is speaking. We spend the whole day not speaking. I read a Mickey Spillane pocketbook. Elsie sews. The children stare at the walls. They all must think I’m the most heartless father on the planet. And yet don’t they see that I do this because I love them? Because I want to protect their young lives?

Day 11: Lucy tried to get out of the shelter last night. I woke up and there she was fumbling with the crossbar. “Oh, no you don’t! Two weeks, young lady! It takes two weeks for the fallout to settle. Go back to bed.” I pull her away from the door and she goes back to her pallet and sits down. She gives me the eye. “ Better sleep lightly, old man, ” her eyes seem to be saying.

Day 12: Everybody hates me. I’ve never seen such animosity in one family. I’m going to open the door tomorrow. A day early. What can it hurt? A few blisters maybe? I’m going to open that door. A desolate, fetid, war-torn landscape is better than these narrow four walls and a family that doesn’t appreciate you. I’ll take the blisters.

20. “The painting held me, riveted.”Jonathan’s Diary, 2 July 1960. In fact, so taken was Jonathan with Wyeth’s haunting Christina’s World that later in the summer on a trip to Brookline, Massachusetts to meet with inventors of a talking toaster, he made a special side trip to Cushing, Maine, to visit the Olson farm where Christina lived with her brother Alvaro.

It was the brother who met Jonathan at the door and who eagerly took him to the very spot behind the house where Wyeth painted the portrait of the backside of the indomitable Christina, disabled by a disease that no doctor could successfully diagnose. To Jonathan’s surprise, a somewhat older Christina greeted him from that very spot, prone and looking much as she did in the painting except that she was now wearing a bikini and her skin was sunburned to the color of clown noses. Jonathan and Christina chatted for a while, Christina eventually becoming so comfortable with her new friend that she asked jokingly for one of his good legs. “I grow so tired of crawling about, as you can imagine.” Although weary of this only form of mobility left to her, Christina Olson confessed to Jonathan a secret desire for world travel. “I want to see all the foreign capitals before I die. I intend to crawl and slide myself with a slow, methodical caterpillar-like inching along the entire length of the Great Wall of China!”

Later the three had tea. Refusing to be carried, Christina took a good thirty minutes to belly- and side-slither her way back up to the house. Jonathan and Alvaro waited on the porch. The three later discussed blast furnaces and various tropical fruits each had yet to taste.

21. It was like taking hose to Hickory.Hickory, North Carolina, has had a strong hosiery industry for years. In 1960, two years before Jonathan’s death, the city inaugurated its hosiery expo, the only exposition and market devoted entirely to the hosiery business in the U.S. Simone Perry, The History of Hickory (Hickory, North Carolina: Hickory Chamber of Commerce Publications, 1999).

22. Yet Jonathan refused to allow the gentleman to retire.Uriah’s nearly total blindness was evident to all but Jonathan, who apparently could not accept the prospect of losing the services of his faithful manservant. Tarara Masdick in her privately published society memoir Feasting with the Famous , comments on one of Jonathan’s last dinner parties:

“It was a lovely evening, marred only by the bumbling of the bat-blind butler Uriah, who took my fox stole and deposited it in a place of oblivion, substituted shoe mitts for dinner napkins, and ladled terrapin soup directly from the tureen and onto my barter salad. I feigned inattention when the old man walked a serving platter of Duck Bourgeois right into the kitchen door jamb.”

23. He enjoyed his coterie of business associates cum friends.Glover, Three Legs, One Heart , 256-59. Among others in the business community with whom Jonathan maintained close ties in his later years was McDonalds Hamburger mogul Ray Kroc. Jonathan had met Kroc several years prior to his formation of the partnership with Richard and Maurice McDonald that would eventually result in majority ownership of the McDonalds fast food enterprise. Over milk shakes whipped up in the five-spindled milkshake “multimixer” which Kroc distributed early in his career, the two discussed Kroc’s dream of corporate success in defiance of a host of medical problems including diabetes, arthritis, and conditions that ultimately resulted in the removal of his gall bladder and most of his thyroid gland. Jonathan, commendatory of Kroc’s pluck and drive, held some sway with his friend, later contending that he was the one who had talked Kroc out of renaming his sandwiches Krocburgers. “I told him,” Jonathan wrote in his diary, “that nobody would buy a hamburger with that name. The entry continues: