American Decameron

by Mark Dunn

  “What kind of damage do you mean? Try to make some sense, man.”

  And then in that next instant, the clouds began to clear. Standing before Archie was a pretty little girl of six—pretty in her tight blond curls, pretty in her striking cornflower blue eyes, pretty in her whisper of a smile for the visitor who had just come to her house, but ugly in one terrible, terrifying aspect. Her creamy white cheeks had been deeply carved by some instrument of frightening disfiguring capability. The gashes had widened without stitching, and time had created several fat, hideous scars upon her youthful face.

  “My daughter Angeline,” said Waldo, introducing us. “My angel. My cherub. No man will ever see in her face a reason to hurt her when she grows up. She will remain forever pure. I wish the same for your own daughter, Hawke. And for all the other beautiful little girls of this wicked, wicked world. All should be protected from the evil that is our cursed gender. Come give Daddy a little hug, my angel. He’s going away for a while. But at least no harm will come to you in his absence. You will grow up untouched by the depravity of man.”

  The little girl embraced her father, the expression on her lacerated face quizzical, confused.

  1920

  FILIAL IN TENNESSEE

  He was, at twenty-four, the youngest of all ninety-nine members of the 61st Tennessee General Assembly. He was also among its better-looking gents, his face boyish, smooth-shaven, and really rather beatific. (Although the second of those three attributes was hardly extraordinary in the year 1920; only a handful of the members of that august legislative body still maintained their mustaches, and only four of the Assembly’s most senior representatives, Messrs. Rector, Leath, Skidmore, and Oldham, could be categorized as true bearded relicts—Mr. Oldham, a possible lost twin of the famously whiskered former associate Supreme Court justice Charles Evans Hughes.)

  Harry was winded. He sat himself down upon the mouse-nibbled, moth-munched upholstery of an overly embroidered chair from the Reconstruction Era and attempted to retrieve his lost breath. Although he hadn’t been literally chased from the House of Representatives’ Assembly Hall, there had been movement of a discernibly angry character in Harry’s direction by a number of those upon the floor who sported red roses upon their lapels. Not knowing whether such movement would transform into an overt display of broom-torch and pitchfork-wielding mob vengeance, the young legislator made the snap decision to decamp from the chamber in a great hurry, to climb out of one of the capitol building’s third-floor windows, to inch his way along a ledge, and finally to secure refuge for himself under the rafters of that proud Greek revival building where the representatives of the people of Tennessee gathered to make laws.

  In the attic, Harry found quiet and solace. He also found Rufus Vester Cawthon, one of the Assembly’s two youthful chaplains (Rufus was thirty). R.V., as he was sometimes known, was a minister in the Church of Christ—a gospel preacher still in the spring of a career that would span decades and win him fame far beyond his pulpit at the Mt. Juliet Church of Christ seventeen miles east of Nashville.

  Cawthon was standing behind a tattered, upstanding steamer trunk. He had been rehearsing the delivery of his next sermon. For a brief moment, Harry Burn thought he was seeing a ghost.

  “Why aren’t you downstairs watching history in the making?” asked Harry, coming quickly to realize that his sudden companion wasn’t spectral in the least, and was, in fact, a man he knew quite well and even liked.

  “Because history will be made whether I choose to be witness to it or not,” answered Rufus, stepping out from behind his makeshift pulpit.

  As the two men came together to shake hands, Harry remarked that in the summer-long “War of the Roses,” the good reverend wore neither the yellow rose of the suffragists nor the red rose of the anti-Anthony amendment opposition.

  To which the Church of Christ pastor replied, “The color of one’s lapel flower appears to have little bearing upon how one will ultimately vote on granting the franchise to the fairer sex.” Rufus poked the air in front of Harry’s red-colored sartorial garnishment. “You would not be seeking the sanctuary of this cobwebbed aerie were it not for the fact, Harry, that you have voted against those who also wear the red rose—against your own side. So, I ask you, sir, in my absence and in the presence of our all-seeing God, did you, in fact, just alter the course of history?”

  Harry nodded. He sank down into a molting armchair and allowed all of the air in his lungs to take temporary leave.

  “And why did you betray those in the cause to which you had already sworn fealty? Are you a traitor to your comrades?”

  “I suppose, Reverend, that that is one way to look at it. On the other hand, let it never be said that I was a traitor to womanhood.” Harry and Rufus each took out handkerchiefs and patted their perspiring foreheads and the moist necks beneath their wilting collars. It was the middle of August, after all, and the attic was but minimally ventilated.

  Rufus pulled up an antique hassock, which was losing its horsehair stuffing in three of its corners. He sat with his legs splaying out, his large ears giving him the appearance of a spindly-legged, floppy-eared creature of the East Tennessee forest.

  “You searched your soul. So much was at stake. If the legislature had voted down the Anthony amendment today, the cause would eventually be won, I have no doubt, but most of the women of America would have to wait until 1924 for the chance to cast their first presidential ballot.”

  “You sincerely believe, then, Reverend, that the amendment would have won its final statehouse ratification whether I switched sides or not?”

  Rufus nodded. “Connecticut’s legislature has yet to vote on it, as you must surely know. Vermont’s is also waiting in the wings. And one of the southern states that has already rejected it could always put the matter up for a vote of reconsideration.”

  Harry laughed. “You sound as if there might be a yellow rose tucked inside your jacket pocket.”

  “And a red rose in the other pocket. I’m chaplain to all ninety-nine of our state representatives, Harry—not just the ones professing allegiance to the cause of universal suffrage. So the margin of victory: was it really only one vote—your vote?”

  “It was my vote.”

  “Boy, you amaze me. That took much courage, I’m sure.”

  “Some, perhaps. Of course, I subsequently fled the hall like a hunted animal.”

  Harry reached into his striped seersucker suit jacket pocket and took out an envelope. He pulled from it several handwritten pages. “It’s from my mother back home in Niota.”

  “And given all the events of this tumultuous day you haven’t had time to read it. Let me leave you, then, to your private letter.”

  Rufus started to rise. Harry stayed him with a fluttering hand. Harry’s eyes browsed the several pages of the folded letter. “She’s unhappy about the rain. And here she’s talking about a visit from Uncle Bill and Mr. Bushnell. They came in the Ford. She asks if I’ll be home for Labor Day. Oh, and here she tells me something that she figures I have forgotten: how very much she dislikes politicians and how very much she doesn’t want her own son to be one. And no, Reverend, I have not completely made up my mind as to whether I will run for re-election this fall, although if I choose to run, I do stand to pick up a few female votes as reward for my male apostasy, don’t you think?”

  Rufus smiled. “How can you not?”

  “And here it is—the part of the letter in which my mother pointedly asks me to vote for women’s suffrage. She tells me not to forget to be a good boy and to help Mrs. Catt with her ‘rats.’ Mama is making a joke, you see.”

  “Yes. Carrie Chapman Catt. Ratification. Your mother is quite the clever one.”

  “College educated. Mama has never understood why an illiterate field hand on our farm has more of a right to vote than she.”

  “So your mother told you to vote for the amendment.”

  Harry nodded.

  “And do you always do what your mo
ther says?”

  “Every good boy obeys his mother, Reverend. Isn’t that one of the commandments?”

  “The Bible tells us to honor our mothers—our mothers and fathers.”

  “I honored her by changing my vote.” Harry swallowed against the nervous lump in his throat. “And now they’re going to tar and feather me.”

  “Cooler heads will prevail, Harry. Try to relax. You made your mother both happy and proud. And Mrs. Catt with her giddy lady rat.”

  Rufus and Harry waited a while before they crept back downstairs. There were no feathers, no cauldron of soupy tar. Only hundreds of celebrants and members of the press who had been searching all over Nashville for the suddenly elusive, history-making boy legislator. Someone procured for Harry a single yellow rose and pinned it prominently to his jacket.

  The Tennessee War of the Roses was over. In a little over a week, the Secretary of State would certify the adoption of the latest amendment to the U.S. Constitution: number nineteen.

  Later that year Harry T. Burn won re-election to the state assembly from his district in rural southeast Tennessee. But he would not run for the seat again, although twenty-eight years later a far more mature Harry did run for and win a seat in the Tennessee State Senate. Over the decades that followed the passage of the amendment, the dozen states that had either rejected it or had postponed voting for it until after Tennessee’s own decisive vote fell in with the majority. The forty-eighth and final straggler, Mississippi, blushingly ratified the amendment named for Susan B. Anthony in the spring of 1984. Four and a half years after that anticlimactic vote, something quite remarkable took place in Harry Burn’s hometown of Niota, Tennessee: six women—four of them running as write-in candidates—won election to the Niota City Board of Commissioners, one of them elected as mayor. The six women won international recognition as the only all-female City Commission in the country.

  This, too, would have made Harry’s mother happy and proud.

  1921

  COMPOSED (?) IN OREGON

  Percy Llewellyn knew Aaron Francis before he became famous. They had met when the two were young musicians playing under the baton of John Philip Sousa. Though Percy’s musical instrument in those days was the cornet and Aaron’s was the trombone, both men, in quitting Sousa’s tutelage, decided to devote the next years of their professional lives to the piano instead—as well as to the fine art of music composition. It should be noted that neither man ever wrote a march. Each was sick to death of marches.

  Yet by the age of forty-four, Aaron Francis had written a great deal withal: five symphonies, three operas, four theatrical overtures, two symphonic suites, and concerti for four different instruments (none of them, it perhaps goes without saying, in the brass family). In the fall of 1921, all of the music above was still extant. What had been lost, however, were several other large works of no small importance, including a symphony (Symphony Number Three, to be exact), a tone poem, and a ballet. Aaron had burned the original manuscripts while in the depths of destructive depression.

  There were no copies.

  Aaron’s friend Percy, far less accomplished in his own efforts at composition, understood depression, for he was similarly afflicted, though his episodes were less frequent and far less intense than those of his friend.

  It took several years for each man, private in his own way, and not given to opening up so easily, to own to the disease of the mind and spirit that had twice prevented Percy from walking down the matrimonial aisle, and kept Aaron from essaying even a single marriage proposal, though both men, being of strong sensitive natures, fell easily in love. The world to each was a beautiful place that was all too often clouded by dark, obsessive, punishing thoughts—like a resplendent orchestral rhapsody marred by the sudden appearance of a roguish Sousaphone.

  For the last several years, the friends had spent one week out of every summer tramping through Crater Lake National Park together. They took long hikes around the caldera, negotiated the “Pinnacles,” and climbed Mount Scott like seasoned alpinists. From the mountain’s summit they could gaze down upon the verdant panorama of peaks and glens that had first called them from their boyhood homes in the Eastern flatlands.

  On their sojourn this year they bared an even greater portion of their souls, feeling cleansed and renewed in the process. Still, each continued to feel imprisoned by his nature. Aaron, in particular, though heralded as his generation’s Edward MacDowell, worried that, like his predecessor in the field of celebrated music composition, he might also come eventually to lose his mind.

  “That’s a rather strong statement to make, chum,” said Percy, having first stopped for a moment to catch his breath, and then to put the distant snowcapped crown of Diamond Peak into the viewfinder of his Number 2C Brownie.

  “You don’t wonder sometimes if your hold on reality might start to slip away?” asked Aaron earnestly.

  Percy shook his head from behind the little box camera. “I do, however, get depressed from time to time. When that happens, I want to lie down and never get up again.”

  Aaron speared the friable soil with the end of his alpenstock. “Then you and I are different in that way.”

  Percy pulled the camera down from his face. “How so?”

  “I have created a different persona for myself. First you have ‘Me,’ who answers as well to ‘I.’ It is I who works twelve hours a day on his Oregon Symphony commission so that it should be ready to premiere in the spring. It is I who may climb a mountain in the company of a good friend and colleague and breathe the fresh air and pronounce life to be very much worth living despite its shortcomings. And then there is ‘Myself.’”

  “‘Myself,’ I take it, is someone entirely different from ‘I’ and ‘Me.’”

  Aaron nodded. “And different in quite a disturbing way. Myself will do things that I would never do. He has, in fact, done things of which ‘I’ and ‘Me’ have been egregiously ashamed.”

  “Is he the one responsible for the destruction of your Third Symphony? Is he the one who put to flame your all-but-completed score for the Little Dorrit ballet?”

  “The very same one. Sad, really, my inability to tell Mr. Denton with the Oregon Symphony that my Concerto for Ukulele and Orchestra is in no danger of immolation when ‘I’ am around. Only when ‘Myself’ comes calling.”

  Percy sat down upon the wind-smoothed top of the prehistorically tumbled boulder behind him. “If I were that nervous maestro, I would have taken the very same precautions. Who has the manuscript at this moment?”

  Aaron sat down as well. He began to unlatch his knapsack, the two companion mountaineers coming to a silent understanding that the time had arrived for a midday collation. “Rafferty. He’s in the employ of the Symphony. The man has a pinched face and pinched demeanor to match. I can’t compose with him sitting there watching me all hours of the day and night—not that he should ever wish to spend the best years of his youth observing me work—so he shares his duties with two other exigently hired collegians from the neighborhood. One is distractingly female. Now it is the daily occupation of each of the three, in some manner of prearranged succession, to come in the morning with the box containing the full score and at day’s end to take it all away, so that I am never left alone with it.”

  “And what if you choose to write at night?”

  “I write at night quite often, Perce. Upon mutual agreement all new pages must be surrendered to Rafferty or to one of his associates and put into the box the very next day. We have it down to a perfect little science, I think.”

  Percy took out his sandwich and began to remove the wax paper that enwrapped it. “Has ‘Myself’ made an appearance during the many months you’ve been working on the new concerto?”

  “Once or twice late at night. I dare say that if the full manuscript had been at hand, he would have tossed it into the hearth fire.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Myself finds my work to be absolute shit, not worth playing or be
ing heard. He also came once on the eve of a visit by the soloist, Mr. Edwards.”

  “Otherwise known as ‘Ukulele Ike,’” Percy offered with a grin.

  Aaron nodded, his mouth filled with ham and cheese sandwich. “He wanted to see how things were coming along. Just prior to his visit, things had not been going well. I was inclined to burn every measure I’d written and start again from scratch. I didn’t do it, as luck would have it—as the thoughtfully provident Music Director Carl Denton would have it—because one of my keepers was there: Miss Julie. Miss Julie was there with her luscious lazuline eyes, which twinkled while seeming to whisper to me, ‘I see it in your face, Mr. Francis: the self-doubt. But I feel compelled to warn you that if you cook even a single page of that manuscript in your new Hughes Electric Range oven, there will be consequences too grim to even imagine.’”

  “And did that snap you out of it, my friend?”

  With a nod: “I was well aware of what one of those consequences would be, and it was grim indeed: that my gainly guardian should go, and then I should die the death of a thousand wistful sighs.”

  Percy took a sip of still-hot coffee from his vacuum flask and asked his friend about his mother, for whose benefit Aaron had purchased the new stove. “How long do you anticipate that she’ll be staying with you?”

  “Perhaps indefinitely. Certain recent episodes of queer behavior on the part of dear Mother have demonstrated the infeasibility of her continuing to live on her own. I’m sure that I inherited my demons from her. Psychological derangement seems to be the family curse.”