Mark Dunn - American Decameron

If your answer is yes, you’ll make me the happiest man on one leg. If your answer is no, Allie, and it’s maybe because you could never imagine yourself living anywhere but Swing Town, U.S.A., then I’ll just give the old man the brush-off (I’ve done it plenty of times before) and figure out some way to pull down a few simoleons of my own in the Big Apple. I don’t want you to have to support the two of us on your stenographer’s paycheck. It’s not that your Icky don’t got a head on his shoulders, right? And who knows just what might turn up?

But I do think you could really like it here. The first night I got up the nerve to take myself up to the colored part of town (I like the chance to get out of the wheelchair and back on the crutches now and then), I could hear the Ballroom jump-jivin’ all the way down 24th Street. I thought I’d just stand out there on the sidewalk and let the music groove ’round my eardrums, but this colored cat, he taps me on the shoulder and asks if I want to come up. (Dreamland’s on the second floor.) So jive on this, baby: the guy carries me all the way up the stairs — just lifts me up like I was a sack of potatoes or something, with some other fella minding my crutches.

I was the only white face in the joint, but that was copacetic. I get set up at a table, baby, and Basie and Goodman and all the rest of them New York cats, why, they got nothing on Omaha. These fellas rode me right out of this world, and Allie, honey, you have never seen such dancing — not at Roseland — maybe, just maybe at the Savoy. The band played hot all night and the jitterbugs were organ-grinding, Susie Q’ing, shagging and truckin’. They were peeling the apple like Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers, and the whole room, it was airborne, baby!

Now, I’m not saying this is the only reason you ought to be here in Omaha, but what I AM saying is we don’t have to give up why it was the two of us whackies got together in the first place. And sooner or later the whole country’s bound to go jitterbuggy, so I figure Omaha’s just as good a place as any to get swing, swang, swung.

I’ll call you at eight o’clock your time.

Your Icky

Dear Icky,

You got off the telephone in such a hurry, I felt like you didn’t give me the chance to fully explain myself. Like I said on the phone, Icky, I’m very fond of you. You brought me out of my shell, and I’m so grateful for that. And I never minded that you were a cripple. These days cripples can do almost anything. They can end up as President of the United States! But there’s one thing that you can’t do, and I can’t help myself, Icky — I want to dance. I just can’t sit still and watch everybody else cutting a rug any longer, knowing I’ve got a couple of perfectly good legs that I’m having a devil of a time keeping still these days. There’s this guy, Salvatore, whose been teaching me the moves. I’m getting pretty good. He nearly broke my neck with an over-the-head throw the other night, but I couldn’t pick a better way to sever my spine! (A little gallows humor, forgive me.) Of course it means I live a double life: oh-so-proper and terribly retiring stenographer by day — daredevil, flittercutting, apple-grinding daughter of Terpsichore by night. And oh, Icky, how I’m loving it!

You want me to do this, right? You wouldn’t want to bring me there and have to wait and wait and wait for all those white cornhusker kids to get wise to the jive. I’d go buggy, Icky, I surely would! And how would you feel having to watch me dancing with all those other guys every night anyway?

Now here’s the thing I didn’t have the heart to tell you on the telephone last night: I’m not sure that I could ever love you the way you need to be loved. Gosh oh git-up, Icky, you know how fond I am of you, just like I said, but it’s more like a brother-sister kind of feeling if I can be perfectly honest with you. Fact is, I just couldn’t give myself 100 % to somebody with one leg, to somebody who could never cut even one inch of that rug, and that’s just the plain truth. You can make me out to be the villainess in your heart if you have to, but I have to be honest. Maybe I’m selfish — well, of course I’m selfish — but don’t you think I’ve got a right to a few things too? And I’m getting to find out what kind of a dancer I’m going to be, and, Icky, I really think I’m going to be one hell of a jitterbug. I can just feel it. Because I feel the music, I’m in the groove, but not just with my soul. I’m swing-happy with my whole body, Whackie-poo!

Take good care of yourself, and if you ever make it back to New York, come see me dance at Roseland. You’ll be very proud of me, I know you will.

Your Allie

Dear Laurence,

I haven’t heard from you in several weeks, so I thought I’d write, since I don’t have the telephone number for your parents. (The long-distance operator says there isn’t a listed telephone number that goes with this address.) I just wanted to make sure you’re okay. I know I threw you for a loop. Write me when you have the chance and tell me how you’re doing.

Vanessa

Dear Vanessa,

I’m sorry it has taken me so long to write. My parents wanted to go down to Florida for the holidays and I decided to join them. I don’t go to the Dreamland Ballroom anymore. It isn’t that I’m not welcome — there are actually more and more white people going there to hear the music — I just don’t feel like doing it anymore. Nowadays I listen to my parents’ favorite music programs on the radio: the NBC Symphony, the Voice of Firestone, and The Carnation Contented Hour. You wanted to know how I’m doing? I’m actually fairly contented myself. I met a swell girl in Florida, and we’ve been corresponding. She may come up to Omaha in the spring to see me, or I might go back to Florida, if the Mutual Benefit Health and Accident Company gives me a few days off.

I wish you well, Vanessa, and trust that you and your partner Salvatore are extra careful with those throws. I read just the other day about a girl in Chicago who got flipped on her head. Now she drivels like a dog and speaks only through grunts. I also understand that jitterbugging is very hard on the knees. You’ll regret all the abuse to your fragile patellas when you get old.

Now I must close. Several of Mom and Pop’s friends are coming over for bridge tonight, and Mrs. Hennigan’s husband is home sick. I will have to be Mrs. Hennigan’s husband for the evening. Paul Whiteman is on the radio tonight. Mom and Pop and all of their friends love Paul Whiteman. He doesn’t play swing, though. I don’t think he likes it.

Come to think of it, I don’t much care for it either.

Sincerely,

Laurence

Paulette leaned into the radio and smiled. “What’s new?”

Both Paulette’s husband Prentice and the man in the suit said “huh?” in near perfect unison.

“The song: ‘What’s New?’ So wistful. So subtly elegiac. And doesn’t Kathleen Lane have a sweet voice?”

“Nice enough,” said the man from MGM — the man who had come all the way from California to sit and talk to Paulette about the movie adaptation of her bestselling novel, “but when it’s over, could you be so good as to…?” The man from MGM, whose name was McCubbin, mimed switching off the radio. Next to him, Paulette’s father sat upright in Prentice’s ample armchair, snoozing away. The fifth occupant of the room, Paulette’s similarly slumbering mother, lay luxuriously draped out among the throw pillows on the sofa.

Paulette wondered at that moment if the song was permeating her mother’s dream world. Madeleine Gammond sometimes had troubled dreams about the San Francisco earthquake; thirty-three years later, her memories still haunted her.