Mark Dunn - American Decameron

Finally she took a deep breath and said, “It’s a long, sad story. I’ll give you the short version, because it’s already cast a terrible pall over me. I dated your Mr. Rausch in college. You probably know that he had a show on the radio back during the war. I knew when everybody was gravitating to television that he would go too. His variety show was perfect for television. I am a farsighted woman. I knew that with your father’s good voice and fine looks and my fine voice and good looks, we would have beautiful, songfully talented children. I had no idea that I was destined to have only girls, but girls is exactly what the good Lord blessed Felix and me with. It was my dream to put you on Augie’s show and make you famous. There was only one problem: my firstborn was neither beautiful nor talented. Nor was she even normal. What we did in those days, dears, was we put damaged little girls and boys in places where they could receive specialized care.”

“You institutionalized her?” asked Patricia, with unconcealed horror.

“Well, she wouldn’t have been any good for Augie’s show, and what’s more, I didn’t have time to see to the very demanding needs of such a child. It was imperative that I spend my time raising normal, healthy children — beautiful little songbirds who would grow up to make Felix and me proud.”

“And Daddy went along with this?” asked Frances Kay.

“At first he did,” replied Eunice. “But then — well, I must tell you, dears, that when he walked out on us in 1959, it wasn’t for the reason that I told you. There was no floozy waitress. There was only your father’s profound disappointment over the fact that I had chosen to sacrifice little Frances Kay so that the four of you could become famous.”

Frances Kay shook her head, confused.

Eunice explained: “Oh, my firstborn was also named Frances Kay. I so loved the name that I gave it to you , dear. I hated to see it go to waste.”

Brenda stood up. She was the tallest of the four daughters of Eunice Ludden, and now she towered, imposingly, over her mother. “Is she still alive — our sister?”

“I suppose she is, although I’ve lost touch. The last I’d heard she was in Des Moines. I’m sure she’d love to see her sisters on television again. She always enjoyed watching you perform.”

Mrs. Ludden’s daughters got quiet. Something both profound and troubling had just occurred. Although the Ludden sisters didn’t realize it fully at that moment, a song in their repertoire had just changed its key from major to minor — a mother’s lullaby, the oldest song they knew.

The infomercial was a success, though in the end, the idea of singing to babies — any babies, for that matter, with Down syndrome or otherwise — was dismissed as shameful pandering to the sensibilities of viewers whose hearts were already open and receptive. It was the Ludden Sisters, after all! Frances Kay II was able to pay for her daughter’s surgery and move the two of them into a charming little bungalow in West Hollywood within view of the famous Hollywood sign.

That Christmas, rather than join their mother in Cleveland (she was now working undercover at a different nursing home, which had been accused of putting its residents in adult diapers and nothing else), the sisters took their children and spouses to Des Moines to spend the holiday with their oldest sister Frances Kay I, or Frannie as she would later be called. Frannie, as it turned out, had long been deinstitutionalized and was now living in a group home with several other mentally challenged young and middle-aged adults. The Ludden sisters were lucky. The day that they became five sisters was also the day that they met their father for the first time in thirty years. He was one of the house “parents” who watched over Frannie and the other residents.

“I had to make a choice,” he explained, “and this was it. I’ve followed your wonderful careers from a distance, and I couldn’t be prouder — but my place has always been with Frances Kay, and all those others here who need me.”

Patricia and Janet and Frances Kay II and Brenda didn’t know which parent was the bigger disappointment: a mother who had never intended to tell four of her daughters about their discarded sibling, or a father who had been willing to permanently detach himself from the lives of four of his very own children. It was concluded by Patricia, and seconded by each of her songstress sisters, that as parents, both their mother and father were sadly flawed, but in the end, deserving of some semblance of forgiveness.

It being Christmas and all.

Merii Kurisumasu.

Cornell Rodgers was eighty-four. He’d been a widower for almost fifteen years. Cornell had become comfortably inured to all that went along with living alone, had come to accept the fact that he would probably be forever after a “me” and never again a “we.” He came to forget a lot of what it had been like to be married, to be in love — not the kind of love that comes with fireworks or overwhelms every other aspect of life, but that category of love that settles in for the long haul and feels comfortable and secure and just right.

Cornell had forgotten, as well, what it was like to share his life with another person as the norm and not the exception. His daughter Stephanie was the exception. She flew in from Ann Arbor to see her father dutifully once, sometimes twice a year. And sometimes his grown granddaughters — Stephanie’s two girls — dropped in for visits (with or without their husbands), when they could be conveniently appended to New England ski trips. And there were friends and neighbors who came by to see Cornell in his musty Victorian on South Willard, and whom he went to see, including one family in particular — the Ludviks — who lived a few blocks away and had been having him over for Sunday dinner every week for nearly a year.

Cornell liked his life in Burlington. It was cold in the winter, and that was okay. (“As my blood gets thinner, I don’t touch the thermostat; I just throw on a heavier sweater.”) He liked walking along the lake. He even liked the radical politics of the town and happily stuffed envelopes for Bernie Sanders. More recently, he’d marched with the anti-Gulf War protesters, carrying a sign that said “No War for Oil,” when the one first handed to him, the overly prolix “Kuwait: Give Your Women the Vote and Maybe We’ll Feel Better About Saving Your Ass!” didn’t quite seem to hit the mark.

A former high school principal, Cornell had been in retirement mode for almost two decades, the comfortable pace of his life needing very little adjustment as he aged. Retirement suited him. Burlington suited him. What he missed, even as his libido had waned, was sex.

The power and passion of male/female coupling — it had long stopped being a component of his sensual life. Cornell’s sensual life was in his tastebuds now. It manifested in the goose bumps he sometimes got when he listened to Mozart’s symphonies and Bach’s Brandenburg concertos. It beheld the rutilant sky of twilight, set against the shimmering turquoise of Lake Champlain, with feelings of warmth and peace and quiet joy. Everything was sensory and above the waist now, none of it seated in the gonads.

And yet sexual longing in Cornell Rodgers, voiceless now and largely rudderless, still maintained a pulse.

How to channel it, give expression to it? Cornell couldn’t bring himself to buy adult magazines. Nor did he wish to visit one of the city’s adult movie houses. The potential appellation of “dirty old man” unnerved him. He had met women close to his own age — women whom he thought might be open to his advances — but in the end, though companionable, they had not proved all that physically compatible.