Mark Dunn - American Decameron

So here we are in a strange gym with big pictures of Patti Page and Eddie Fisher and the just-crowned Queen Elizabeth and Lucy Ricardo (holding that bottle of Vitameatavegamin and wrinkling her nose) and Gary Cooper and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg plastered all over the walls among the balloons and the crepe paper, and over the loudspeaker we can hear Frankie Laine and Connie Francis and Tex Ritter and even Walter Brennan singing “Do Not Forsake Me, O My Darlin’.” And suddenly it isn’t 1952 anymore. It’s High Noon and everybody’s feeling a little jumpy.

Right off the bat I start to notice some vaguely familiar faces. I say vaguely because — and I’m being kind — we have, as a class, not done a very good job of aging gracefully. Some of the girls I used to lead cheers with now look like their own grandmothers and half the boys on the newspaper staff I used to work with are cueball bald and a little hunched over and beaten down. (Ours was not a very wealthy neighborhood and there weren’t a hell of a lot of bootstraps to go around.)

I make the rounds with Vern in tow, and compared to most of the men I meet — some of whom I dated, others of whom I wanted to date, and still others of whom I wouldn’t have dated if we were the last man and woman on Earth and had to repopulate the species — Vern makes me proud. He’s a couple of years older than this bunch, but I swear he looks ten years younger . He’s trim and he’s nice looking and he has almost all of his hair. I say my hellos and make as much small talk as I can that doesn’t start with the phrase “Remember when we…?” and then I see somebody who makes this whole excruciating experience halfway worthwhile: it’s Candy Melcori.

Candy was my best friend in the ninth grade and the tenth grade and the twelfth grade, although we hated each other’s guts in the eleventh grade. What I’ve always loved about Candy is her ability to tell you exactly how she feels and not tiptoe around your feelings because, “You know, Yvette, life is too short, and patience and me: we just don’t play on the same team.”

Candy dated Rodney Tomasini during the 1950-51 school year (the year that Candy and I hated each other) and I told her (similar to the way she always told people exactly how she felt about things) that Rodney Tomasini wasn’t good for her because he came from a family of lunatics and was once caught trying to drop a puppy from a tree to see what would happen. Granted, he was six at the time (and he was stopped before he could commit caninocide on a Beagle pup), but there was always something just not quite right about him. Anyway, Candy broke up with him right before the summer vacation between our junior and senior years. And she agreed with me that it was probably a good thing.

But the main thing I can’t wait to talk to Candy about is Arnold Mordaunt, who I heard had just been released from prison only a few months before. In fact, I’m not the only person at the reunion with Arnold on her mind. I can hear quite a few conversations about his recent release being whispered all around the gym, which if nothing else has great acoustics. Arnold had been put in prison for the crime of manslaughter, though it was the opinion of most people who knew anything at all about the facts of the case that it was probably no accident at all; Arnold hated his ex-wife’s new husband, the brakes were in fine working order, and frozen custard trucks don’t just mow people down without some kind of murderous intent behind the wheel. The jury thought differently, though, and believed the expert witness’s testimony that brakes will sometimes malfunction even when everything seems to be in good working order, and even someone with the car-handling aplomb of an Eddie Rickenbacker couldn’t have avoided such an accident.

“So is he coming?” I ask Candy, while taking a sip of the punch that Vern has gotten for me so I won’t have to interrupt Candy’s detailed report on everything that’s happened to the more interesting fraction of our 161-member class, both the terrible things that were undeserved and the terrible things that people clearly had coming.

“Mary Ellen said he RSVP’d yes. She said he paid both for tonight and for the farewell breakfast buffet tomorrow morning.”

“So where is he?” I say, looking around. Almost everyone who’s supposed to be here has already arrived.

“He’ll be here,” says Candy. “But I’m still surprised they even invited him. I mean, he’s lived almost half his life in a jail cell. That has got to mess you up even if you didn’t already possess a criminal brain.”

“Do you think he has a criminal brain, Candy? Vern, honey, go make me a plate with the little chicken legs on it, and get me some broccoli with the garlic dip. The garlic dip, not the French onion dip.”

After Vern leaves, I draw close enough to Candy to smell her Charlie perfume and the faint whiff of Aqua Net she sprayed on her hair like she was Doris Day and it was still 1961. “Did you go to bed with him?”

“When?”

“In high school. When you were going to bed with every guy on the varsity football team and in the Key Club, and somebody said one week you even stooped to the chess club when you got even hornier than usual.”

Candy considers the question for a moment as if weighing whether or not she should dignify it with an answer, when, in fact, she’s only counting up her conquests. “Arnold was number six. I thought I loved him. But he was dangerous. I could see it in his eyes, that cold-blooded killer look. You really could tell — even in the darkness of his truck when he’s all over you with his hot hands. Killer eyes glow in the dark. Did you know that?”

“No, I didn’t know that, Candy.”

“I was sure that he was capable of committing murder one day. It ended up being his ex-wife’s husband, but it could have been anybody who rubbed him the wrong way. Did you know that he used to throw custard cones at people who gave him a hard time when they put in their ice cream orders? What if he’d decided to remove Rodney Tomasini from the picture? To have me all to himself?”

“Did Rodney know you were going to bed with those other boys while the two of you were together?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Ooh. Look at Patricia McCloud, or whatever she goes by now. You could set little tchotchkes on that ass shelf of hers, it’s so—”

But I’m not looking at Patricia Last-Name-That-Probably-Isn’t-McCloud-Anymore. My gaze is directed, instead, at the ex-con himself: Arnold Mordaunt. He’s just walked in and is standing at the registration table. And I’m not the only one looking at him. I’d say the eyes of half of the members of Harry S. Truman High School’s Class of 1952 are throwing looks in that direction, as if no one has ever seen a convicted killer before, and why on earth is he wearing that vertical blue-striped shirt, which only serves as a visual reminder of all the years he’s lived behind bars as a hardened criminal?

What’s he going to do, I wonder. We’re all wondering. Why has he come to the reunion? Does he seek revenge on those of us who ignored him in high school because of his limited wardrobe and the fact that his hair always smelled of unwashed scalp, or because his poor grades and lack of motivation relegated him to 155th place in a class of 161? Or is it because we’re intimidated by his hot-blooded temper — a temper that ignited several altercations with teachers and coaches and got him suspended on at least three different occasions during our senior year alone?

I picture Arnold behind the wheel of that frozen custard truck, trundling over his ex-wife’s brand-new husband — a man who had done him no wrong except that he dared to marry the woman Arnold could no longer possess — and then backing up and running him over again to make sure he was good and pancaked. (That was the story we heard, but it wasn’t the one that the jury got.)