Mark Dunn - American Decameron

“I’d like to see you again. I live in Philadelphia. I’m not so far away.”

“And what if I don’t wish to see you again? What if to me you are only a reminder of something I’m ashamed of?”

“Are you ashamed of me ?”

“Only of having given you up.”

Please take me back tonight ,

Where I belong .

Sing a cradle song to me and then

Won’t you tie me to your apron strings again?

There had never been apron strings. Harold knew this.

The final matter to be decided was whether there should be a parting embrace. Sadie put her son’s mind at ease. She wrapped her arms around him and kissed him on the cheek. There were tears in his eyes as he walked away. He wanted to turn and look back but he held himself steady and did not.

Late that night Sadie walked in the moonlight to the ocean’s edge. She stood before the lapping sea and then stepped into it. She moved slowly through the waves and finally disappeared beneath them.

The ocean was kind.

Harold would return. That was certain.

She didn’t want to be there when he came back.

Let’s start with that actor with the big ears. Clark Grable or something like that. He played a gangster in A Free Soul and he slapped Norma Shearer, who played his girlfriend. And then there was that other gangster picture The Public Enemy . And James Cagney is sitting at the breakfast table in his pajamas and he smacks Mae Marsh in the face with a grapefruit, just like it’s the most natural thing in the world to be doing first thing in the morning (although she seems pretty shocked when he gives her the business). And just last spring there was that big dinner at the Metropolitan Club in New York where Theodore Dreiser slapped Sinclair Lewis in the face. Twice . He probably would have done it a third time if somebody hadn’t intervened. And I just read about this thirty-hour face-slapping competition they had in Kiev just a few weeks ago.

Seems like everybody’s slapping everybody else’s face this year. It’s an absolute mania. So the fact that I slapped Hank’s tonight shouldn’t have been any big stop-the-presses kind of surprise. But you couldn’t tell that from the way he looked at me with those “Say it ain’t so, Joe” droopy peepers of his — giving me the kind of hangdog look that can nearly tug a person’s heart right out of her chest.

I stared right back at my husband, my hand still hanging in the air like I just might do it again, just like that talented yet pugnacious American novelist, Theodore Dreiser.

This is when Hank calmly took my hand and brought it down to my side, using his other hand to rub some of the sting out of his cheek.

“Well, why’d you say it?” I asked matter-of-factly, my rage having fled just as quickly as it came.

“You asked me a question and I answered honestly. Why’d you ask it if you didn’t want me to give you a truthful answer?”

Hank walked over to the icebox. He took out a bottle of milk and held it up to his cheek.

“I didn’t hit you that hard. Are you trying to make me feel bad?”

Hank shrugged. He got a glass from the cabinet and poured himself some milk. He returned the bottle to the icebox and sat down at the kitchen table. He stared at the glass of milk and I stared at him. The window was open, and through it we could both hear Eddy Cantor’s crooning voice wafting down from the Petersons’ new Atwater Kent upstairs. It reminded me of our own RCA Radiola 60 Super-Heterodyne tabletop, which my parents bought us for Christmas last year, but which we had to sell through the want ads this past summer when Hank lost his job with Merchants’ All-Risk.

Generally speaking, I like Eddie Cantor’s voice, but now for some reason it grated on my nerves. I closed the window.

I sat down across from my husband. “I suppose I asked you that question because I was expecting you’d answer a different way.”

“And when I didn’t, you slapped me.”

“It wasn’t so much an angry slap as a slap of awe and wonder.”

Hank mumbled the words “awe and wonder,” then took a drink of milk.

“Do you want some of that cake?” I asked.

“Is there any left?”

“One more slice. You can have it. I couldn’t eat anything right now.”

As I was getting the last slice of cake for Hank, he turned to me, droplets of milk clinging to his Warner Baxtery moustache. “I can’t find another job. I don’t know when I’ll find another job. For good or bad, you’re the sole breadwinner right now, Frances. We can’t afford for you to get yourself fired as well.”

I sat back down. The last slice of chocolate cake was larger than I’d remembered. I brought two forks.

“You answered very quickly, Hank. You answered as if there was no need to even think about what this means.”

“It means, honey, that I’m giving you permission to commit adultery with your boss. If I were a better husband, I would put my foot down. I would defend your honor and our marriage. I’m not a better husband. I am a failure as a provider. Ergo, I am a failure as a husband. When it comes right down to it, I’m probably also a failure as a human being. I have been thinking about jumping off the Bulkeley Bridge. I know it isn’t very tall, but if I hit the water just the right way it might slap me so hard I’ll get knocked out and then I’ll drown.”

“Oh, shut up, Hank.”

I took a bite of cake. It was delicious. Rosemary Peterson makes the most delicious cakes in Hartford. And why shouldn’t she? Her husband’s a chef.

The Petersons have a good marriage, by all appearances. Tom works at one of the nicest hotels in town and their little girl Peggy just won the Baby Clara Bow lookalike contest. Hank and I have been trying to have children for five years, and it’s probably for the best that we haven’t succeeded since things have gotten so difficult for us as of late, financially speaking.

This morning I went in to ask my boss at the railroad yard for a raise, and he said, “Well, of course not,” but that he was glad that I came in, and “please sit down” and “I have two letters to dictate, Frances, and then a question I need to put to you.” And he dictated his two letters and then he asked the question, which required a slight preface: there are a lot of out-of-work secretaries out there, Frances, times being tough for everybody these days…

And here he gestured out his window and toward the yard, where, with exquisite timing, one of his yardmen was in the process of chasing off two hobos with obvious hopes of securing free passage and gratis accommodations on one of our empty outgoing boxcars that afternoon…so would I consider continuing to be his secretary between the hours of eight and five, and then after hours and on weekends doing some things for him that his wife was unwilling to do?

“Errands?” I asked naïvely.

“You’re very beautiful, Miss Hellmann.”

“ Mrs . Hellmann, Mr. Gaither. I am married.”

“I like to think of you as un married, Miss Hellmann. Unmarried and willing to do those things for me that my wife, who is not an adventurous woman — who really is not much of a woman at all, but a fleshy cow, a Marie Dressler sort of foghorn-throated, muscle-bound sort of — I will just put it right out there, Miss Hellmann— gorgon . The marriage is all but — well, this is certainly beside the point, I’m sure. The point is that your job now depends on whether or not you will be able to meet my new requirements for keeping the position. I’ll give you until tomorrow to make up your mind. Should you decide against my proposal, I’ll have no choice but to let you go.”