Mark Dunn - American Decameron

Chicago rolled the dice in the middle of the Depression and had come up a winner.

“What is that?” asked Patsy, removing her official guidebook from her purse as she peered down. “The Hall of Science or the Hall of Social Science? I always confuse the two.”

“Did you hear what I just said?”

“The colors were different last year. Remember? Bolder. I liked it, but I read somewhere that they were giving people headaches — all those gigantic exhibition buildings in brilliant blues and golds and reds. The fair got complaints, so they toned it down. It’s all so muted now. Almost drab in places.”

Norman, who had been looking at the side of Patsy’s face, turned to take in the panorama below. It was still very colorful, he thought. What was Patsy talking about? Why was Patsy trying to change the subject? They had twenty minutes — twenty-five minutes at the most — and then they would meet up again with John and Shirley at the Mayflower Doughnut Restaurant next to the Havoline Thermometer. The Havoline Thermometer, standing at a height of 227 feet, was the largest thermometer in the world. It overlooked Admiral Richard E. Byrd’s South Pole ship moored in the South Lagoon.

“What is there to say?” said Patsy. “We both agreed we would drop the bombshell. I told you to pick the time and place. If you want to talk to them about it over doughnuts, that’s fine with me. Prohibition’s over, though. I thought you might like to get our spouses liquored up first.”

“Shirley is unpredictable when she drinks. I don’t want to take a chance on a dramatic overreaction.”

Norman looked up into the sky. Several others on this side of the Amos and Andy rocket car did the same. Some pointed. “The Goodyear blimp needs a little more lift or it’s going to hit the transport bridge.”

Patsy took a breath. “The pilot knows what he’s doing.”

The next conversation took place among Norman and Patsy and Norman’s wife Shirley and Patsy’s husband John. Both couples were in their early forties and lived not far from one another in Kenosha, Wisconsin, where Norman worked as a mid-level manager for Nash Motors. Nash had one of the more popular attractions at the fair: an eighty-foot-high plate-glass tower with sixteen 1934 model Nash automobiles stacked one on top of the other like compartmentalized slices of pie at the Automat.

John was a podiatrist. He knew Dr. William M. Scholl personally and had spent part of that morning visiting his friend at the Scholl Manufacturing Exhibit in the Hall of Science.

Although John had wanted more than doughnuts and coffee, he consented to the late-morning snack with a promise by the others of a full luncheon in Midget Village a couple of hours later; the guidebook had assured him that the portions served there would be filling for a man of normal stature.

“How was the ride?” asked Shirley of her husband and her best friend. “I still can’t see how you could go up in that thing.”

“The view was spectacular,” answered Patsy, chewing on a cuticle.

“I went to see the Incubator babies,” said Shirley. “I cried. Everyone around me was wiping their eyes with handkerchiefs. The guide said that the survival rate for these itty-bitty babies is very high. It’s a miracle of science. Forget your television and your what-have-you, this is technology that makes a difference. One of the babies weighed less than twenty-four ounces. Can you imagine?”

Norman shook his head. “Patsy and I are having an affair. What’s more, we have no desire to end it.”

John stood up. It was a sudden move, and his chair nearly tipped over backward. “What the hell are you saying, Pomeroy?”

“Sit down, John,” said Patsy. “Don’t make a scene.”

John sat down.

Patsy took her husband’s hand and spoke in a dulcet tone, after detaching a large crumb of glazed doughnut from the corner of her mouth with her blood-red-polished fingernail. “Neither of us wants a divorce. We are both quite happy with our marriages and all of our lovely children.”

The lovely children were promised a visit to the fair in the company of their parents next month. But this particular trip was just for their parents. There was to be dancing and drinking and Sally Rand and her naughty feathers. The two couples were slightly more sophisticated than most of the other couples of Kenosha, Wisconsin. The question, however, was whether this level of sophistication extended to the concept of companionate marriage.

John removed his hand from his wife’s grip. “You’re asking Shirley and me if we will allow the two of you to sleep with one another right under our noses.”

Norman nodded. He dunked his doughnut with a nonchalant flick of the wrist and then took a sloppy bite.

Now Shirley spoke. She was upset. When Shirley got upset, her voice jumped into a high register like that of a beset schoolteacher. “If you don’t love me, Norman, why don’t you simply ask for a divorce? I’ll take the children and we’ll go to Reno.”

“Because I don’t want a divorce. I want to stay married to you. I still love you, Shirley. But there’s someone else I love as well.”

Shirley began to cry. She pulled out the handkerchief that was already damp from seeing the squirming preemie babies.

“You think I’m that evolved , Norman?” she asked between sniffles.

“We’re not evolved at all,” added John. “We’re like those dinosaurs out there. I’m a Sinclair brontosaurus. I’m not a mastodon.”

“I cannot believe you would do this here at the fair,” said Shirley to her husband Norman. “When we were all having so much fun. Why didn’t you wait until we got back home?”

“Because we can’t live the lie another minute,” said Patsy without much animation.

“We’ve been wanting to level with you two for some time,” said Norman.

“Would you like some more coffee?” asked the waitress. She wore a spiffy little felt hat that had the words “Mayflower Doughnut Restaurant” stitched on it.

John did not even wait until the waitress had left with her coffee pot to say that he and Shirley had already suspected the affair. They weren’t born yesterday, or in the Pleistocene epoch, for that matter.

Shirley nodded. Then she tightened her brow and said to her husband and her best friend, “I had hoped that your rocket car would come loose and the two of you would plummet to your deaths.”

The third conversation of the day took place between Shirley and John in the McKaycraft Lounge. The McKay Company of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, made spring-action, chromium-plated metal furniture for porch, lawn, and solarium. Shirley and John sat on a glider and drank from bottles of Coca-Cola. Next to them a woman spoke to her friend in a muted voice about a woman she had met in the Kraft Mayonnaise Kitchen in the Foods Building, who had just the night before dipped her dress in the blood of John Dillinger as he lay dying on the sidewalk in front of the Biograph Theatre. “Everybody was dipping something into that puddle of blood,” said the woman with squeamish delight. “And the G-men were letting them do it. Like the ‘G’ in G-man stood for ‘Go right ahead and get your liquid souvenir.’”

Shirley held her handkerchief to her mouth as if she might throw up a little. Then she turned to John and said, “I didn’t see this coming. I knew all about the affair. I know you did, too. But I thought that it would either run its course or they would come to their senses. At the very worst, I thought they’d come to us asking for divorces. But this .” Shirley shook her head, her hands poised limply in the air.

A smartly dressed woman with fashionably large epaulettes and a disc hat that clung to the side of her head as if it were glued on came up and asked if Shirley and her “husband” would like to know about some of the features of the McKaycraft porch furniture.