American Decameron

by Mark Dunn

  There was something very different about Kitty on this visit, which would be the last time that she would ever stay with us. She appeared older, more sophisticated than I remembered her from the previous Christmas, when we had all gathered to spend the holiday in Lexington with my grandmother. She also seemed anxious, noticeably preoccupied. Even so, she gave my brothers and me a big kiss, and she couldn’t wait to give each of us the presents she’d brought: for Mama, a big box of butter cream candy; for the boys, a mechanical train set; and for me, the best gift of all: an absolutely adorable Mayflower Pearl-on-Amber toilet set in the most beautiful sateen-lined gift box. My father (who got a “safety-first” bright red deluxe hunting cap on account of the fact that he had almost been shot during deer season the year before by a nearsighted fellow hunter) wondered aloud how a young woman like Kitty, fresh out of college and living on her own on a meager teacher’s salary, could afford such nice things for us.

  Kitty just laughed. She said that the value of all the gifts hardly equaled how much it cost my father to feed and house her during her lengthy summer stays, and besides, she had made a little extra money helping a friend sell Djer-Kiss beauty products for most of the spring. Daddy remained skeptical, but Mama nodded as if the explanation had put the question to rest.

  I knew that my toilet set had cost at least eight or nine dollars. I knew this because I had priced a similar set in the Sears, Roebuck catalogue.

  That night, as was always the case when Kitty came to stay, I was tucked into the little trundle bed that pulled out from under the shared bed in my brothers’ room. Kitty got my room. Of course, that never stopped me from creeping back down the hall after the house had gotten quiet and right back into my own bed, where my favorite aunt and I would talk and giggle until she started feeling guilty (for denying me my “beauty sleep”). My nocturnal visits were special, and I looked forward to catching up with her that first night. But this year, circumstances wouldn’t permit it; Mama, long aware of my late-night bed-switching, forbade me. Aunt Kitty had been tired out by her trip, said Mama, and needed her rest. “And besides, Margaret, you’re getting much too old for such silliness, and your aunt simply doesn’t have the heart to tell you.”

  Feeling hurt and bewildered by what my mother had said, I lay in the trundle bed and listened to my brothers’ sonorant breathing and to the low, whispered voices of my mother and aunt in the next room. This being the first Friday of the month, Daddy was off at his lodge meeting, where he would be until nearly midnight, so Mama and Aunt Kitty had a long time to talk.

  I thought of going out into the hallway and putting my head up to the door to hear what they were saying, but I was too afraid that I’d be found out. Still, I knew that what was being discussed must have to do with the reason that Kitty had come to us bereft of some of her customary cheerfulness and good nature. There was a seriousness to their voices even if I couldn’t discern the words.

  The next day, a rainy Saturday, my brothers, Willie and Enos, played with their new model train set while I read The Triumph of the Scarlet Pimpernel, a book Mama would never have allowed me to read had she been home that afternoon. (She contended that it was “beyond the comprehension of my young years.”) But Mama was out with Aunt Kitty, and Daddy, not being much of a supervisor in her absence, spent most of the time out in his workshop building a birdhouse. (Not that he would have raised objections to my reading the book anyway, since he probably thought that the Scarlet Pimpernel was some sort of bird and not the daring rescuer of threatened aristocrats during the French Revolution!)

  I didn’t see my mother or my aunt when they returned very late that afternoon. While I had been in the kitchen making peanut butter sandwiches for my brothers and me (Daddy had totally forgotten that growing children required three meals a day), Mama took Kitty directly up to my room. When Mama came down much later, she told us that Kitty wasn’t feeling well and that we were to be very quiet, and that under no circumstances whatsoever were we to go upstairs and disturb her. This last warning was directed especially at me.

  Aunt Kitty didn’t come down for supper, but Mama made her some broth and took it up. I didn’t understand how someone could take so terribly ill so quickly, for she had looked perfectly well on her arrival the day before.

  Later that night, after my brothers had gone to sleep, I heard quarreling in my parents’ room. Determined to know what was going on—for my mother and father seldom exchanged unkind words with one another, even behind closed doors—I crept out to the hallway and put myself beside their door.

  “I really wish you’d talked to me about this,” my father was saying.

  “And if I’d talked to you, you would have stopped her. And it wasn’t your place to do so,” my mother replied.

  “I don’t see how you could possibly have allowed Kitty to take such a gamble.”

  “I took that gamble. Twice. And both times I pulled through.”

  “Both times you nearly died, Cora. The man is a dangerous menace. He should be thrown in jail.”

  “And where does a girl like Kitty go, then?”

  “She shouldn’t have gotten herself in that way in the first place.”

  “The insensitivity of that remark silences me.”

  I returned to my trundle bed but couldn’t sleep. I finally got up and went downstairs to see our cat, Mittens, who always welcomed my wee-hour visits with her in her favorite sleeping chair on the porch. As I was walking past my room, I could hear the sound of soft, muffled crying coming from behind the shut door. I wanted so badly to go in and comfort Aunt Kitty, but I remembered what my mother had said.

  Downstairs, I petted Mittens and listened to her grateful purrs for perhaps fifteen minutes, and then I crept back upstairs. I stood outside the door to my bedroom. It was quiet now. I felt that I should open the door to make sure that Aunt Kitty was all right. I didn’t see how merely taking a look into the room could disturb my aunt, so I turned the knob and slowly pushed the door open. It gave only the slightest squeak from its dry hinges. Aunt Kitty was lying doubled up in the bed. She was awake.

  Perhaps the light from the hall sconce, which now creased the darkness of the room, signaled my presence. She turned immediately and looked up at me, her face half obscured in shadow.

  “Hello, Maggie Girl,” she said in a hushed, tired voice. “I’ve seen so little of you since I got here.”

  “I’m sorry that you aren’t feeling well, Aunt Kitty.”

  “Now don’t you worry. I’ll be back to my old self in no time at all.” Aunt Kitty tipped her head in the direction of the oscillating fan that had been set upon my vanity table. “It’s a hot summer night, yet I’m very cold,” she said.

  “Do you want me to turn it off?”

  “No, sweet angel, I want you to climb into bed, as you always do, and I want you to put your arm around me to warm me up.”

  I couldn’t believe that my Aunt Kitty wanted me with her. I was overjoyed to be needed in such a way. I climbed into bed and pulled the covers tightly around us, placing myself next to her. She purred—not unlike my little cat, Mittens. “You are so good to me,” she said groggily, and in no time at all she was fast asleep. I stayed awake for a while longer attending to my job of keeping my favorite aunt warm and safe and helping her to heal from whatever terrible illness had suddenly befallen her.

  When I woke in the morning, Aunt Kitty was still lying next to me, but her body was cold. And the bed felt very wet and my skin felt sticky. Perhaps it is perspiration, I thought, for it had been a very warm night for me. But there was a smell there that I couldn’t identify—an acrid, metallic smell.

  I blinked. Harsh morning light invaded my room through half-opened curtains. I looked down in the brightness of this light to discover the true reason for the dampness all around me. The sheets were stained dark red. Dirty, scarlet red. I drew back. I said my aunt’s name, and receiving no response, I touched her, then shook her shoulder. She didn’t move.

  I screamed
.

  I screamed as I had never screamed in all of my moments of childhood terror, most of those moments being silly and largely self-inflicted.

  And I couldn’t stop shaking.

  Mama rushed in and swept me up from the bed. As she held me tightly in her arms, she kept saying, “Oh my darling little girl, my poor, poor little girl!” Mama kept me from looking as the doctor came and formally pronounced Aunt Kitty dead. I was sent, along with my brothers, to a neighbor’s house while police officers interviewed my mother and father in our own home.

  Someone had broken the law. Someone had done this to my aunt and it would be several years before either Mama or Daddy would impart the details to me, before my questions received answers. By that time I had already figured most of it out.

  What I didn’t know yet was that there was a man in Harrodsburg who was married, who could not leave his wife, but neither could he stop seeing Kitty. And giving her things. One thing that he gave her she couldn’t keep. And such a thing—and I cannot easily bring myself to call that which was growing inside my aunt a thing—could not be allowed to be. Aunt Kitty would have lost her job if she had chosen to carry the baby to term. Once word of it got out, no one would have hired her to do that which she so loved to do: teach.

  What I also didn’t know was that it was Mama who had talked Aunt Kitty into going to the man—the man who had spared Mama not once but twice from giving birth to a child that she didn’t want. He had not been so lucky with Aunt Kitty. The autopsy revealed that she had died from a rupture in her uterus.

  My mother blamed society for putting herself and her sister between the hammer and the anvil. My father blamed my mother for sending Aunt Kitty to such a dangerous man—one who did what he did without medical training, with callous disregard for the health and well-being of the women who came to him, and only for the money.

  When a death comes between a husband and wife, some things can never be mended. I lost both of my parents the week that my Aunt Kitty died, although two years were to pass before the fissure was formalized by divorce.

  And I lost the beautiful toilet set that Aunt Kitty had given me, which I knew that I could never bring myself to use—the dainty comb and brush, the smart little hand mirror. I gave it all away to a little girl at my school who wept with joy over my unexplained generosity.

  1927

  ASSISIAN IN MASSACHUSETTS

  I met her at the Majestic Restaurant downtown, although I’d seen her earlier that day in the Union Savings Bank. The restaurant isn’t there anymore. Most of this part of town burned down in February of the following year when the crew that had been hired to demolish the recently shuttered Pocasset Mills accidentally turned the job over to a far more efficient agent of destruction.

  The 1928 fire was the most destructive in Fall River’s history. The Union Savings Bank was among the worst casualties. Not even the contents of its safety deposit boxes were spared by the conflagration.

  Union Savings was Andrew Borden’s bank. You know President Borden, I’m sure. He was the poor fellow who was allegedly given forty-one whacks by his daughter Lizzie. Except that it wasn’t forty-one. It was actually eleven, and that very first whack had probably been enough to send him to his Maker. It was Lizzie’s stepmother Abby who, in fact, got the greater number of blows: eighteen or nineteen. They say that Lizzie despised her stepmother, who was bent on directing most of her husband’s fortune to her own family. There was more than sufficient motive for the indictment. But Lizzie, as you probably know, was acquitted.

  Alice Rose Carteret had brought a flask. Two, in fact. It was the sort of thing you’d see in a speakeasy or some low-end dive: a woman brazenly fortifying her Coca-Cola with something puissant from her stocking. However, Alice Rose Carteret wasn’t anything like your typical speakeasy habitué. She was rich and respectable and ridiculously philanthropic, having devoted no small portion of her time and money to the Fall River Animal Rescue League, which she helped to found.

  She’d been stood up.

  A man was to meet Alice Rose at the Majestic that night and he didn’t show, and she reacted not by hanging her head in disgrace over the public snub, but by doing what any other thoroughly modern woman of the thoroughly modern 1920s would do: she repaired her assaulted pride with bootleg hooch. Soon finding herself both potted and pot-valiant she beckoned me, also dining alone, to join her. And I did—not even knowing at the time what a remarkable confession awaited me.

  The encounter began with small talk: mindless banter about the weather, the movies. She took out her compact and recoiled from the image in the little mirror, proclaiming that the room’s harsh lighting made her look like one of the waxworks at Madame Tussaud’s. I contested this observation. I also suggested (with some delicacy) that we might decamp to a little watering hole I knew of a few blocks away: a murky, smoky establishment where I violated the Volstead Act on a regular basis.

  She took to it immediately.

  We settled into a booth. Her flasks now empty, she and I ordered from the menu. My stomach protested the resultant incursion all the next day.

  “Do you know who died last week?” she asked. Alice Rose had not yet begun to garble her words, though her manner was casual, and she touched me often upon the arm with impromptu familiarity and eventually laced her fingers through my hair, this last encroachment upon my person accompanied by an invitation to share her bed that night. I perhaps owe it to you to note our respective ages in that ancient year of 1927. I was twenty-five, a reporter for the Globe (although nothing I was about to hear would she permit to be published—at least not until now, following her recent death). I supposed that Miss Carteret was in her mid-to-late fifties in 1927. She had been twice married. (Her biography served as prologue to the revelations that were to come.) But she so despised her two former husbands that she refused to perpetuate their surnames.

  “Of course I know who died last week,” I said. “Emma Borden. Older sister of Lizzie. And Lizzie just the week before.”

  “Do you find that odd? Two spinster sisters so estranged—both by distance and by the heart—dying in such quick succession?”

  “I would think it somewhat odd.”

  “And yet I’ll have you know that it isn’t odd at all.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  Alice Rose’s finger beckoned me to come close. We leaned forward across the table and nearly touched foreheads.

  “I killed her.”

  “Emma?”

  Alice Rose nodded. “Right after Lizzie’s demise. She always preferred to be called ‘Lizbeth’ in those years that followed you-know-what, but I never could make the change. Anyway, shortly after Lizzie’s death, I took the train to Newmarket, New Hampshire, where Emma was living. Of course I knew that she would have already heard that her sister had died—from complications arising from that botched gall bladder surgery. Don’t you think that certain doctors ought to be strung up for their incompetence? But that’s a topic for some other night. I went to Newmarket to speak to Emma, to tell her—no, let me be honest—to demand from her a certain thing. Lizzie had toyed with me and it will probably be years before her will is probated, not that I have any doubt what we will find therein. I was not going to let Emma off so easily.”

  “Alice Rose, I have to put you on notice here: I’m getting drunk. You’re going to have to start making some sense very soon or you’re going to lose me entirely.”

  “Young man, I have every intention of telling you with absolute clarity what has been eating away at my very soul for all of these past four—what is it—five days. But I must exact a double promise from you in exchange.”

  I made my face as open and amenable to hearing the proposal as possible.

  “That you should first tell no one what it is that I intend shortly to impart to you, and that you should at a later hour make passionate love to me in the manner of that gorgeous, soft-spoken cowboy Gary Cooper in that new western picture The Winning of Barbara Worth.”
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  “So as I am to understand it, you’ll be Miss Worth and I am to be the cowhand who will ‘win you’?”

  “Oh, you have won me already, dear boy. We must now simply consummate the transaction.”

  In my gin-clouded head this sounded like a fair arrangement. For a woman of a certain age, Alice Rose Carteret was youthful in nearly every aspect.

  Or I was perhaps even more intoxicated than I thought.

  Our drinks refreshed and the Negro chanteuse on the gin-mill’s little stage having switched from bawdy Black Bottom jazz to a quiet, introspective, “he-done-me-wrong” torch song, Alice Rose leaned back in her chair and asked in a playful, not unmelodious voice of her own, “So, Blue Eyes. Do you think she did it?”

  “The jury acquitted her,” I answered matter-of-factly. “It took them scarcely an hour, didn’t it?”

  “How closely have you studied the case? The judge was notoriously biased in her favor. All of that incriminating inquest testimony was disallowed. And, as I recall, no one seemed to care. The whole town wanted her acquitted.”

  “I wasn’t alive then, and I haven’t studied the case very closely.”

  Alice Rose effected stupefaction. “You live in Fall River and don’t even know the details of the double murder trial that made the town world-famous?”

  “I suppose what I’m saying is that I know the case just as well as most, but unlike some of my colleagues at the Globe, I don’t make revisiting the minutiae of it a lifelong obsession. Are there facts that have come to your attention which you’d like to share with me?”

  “I should say so. I maintained a healthy acquaintance with both of the sisters, you know. We had a bond—our love of animals. Both Lizzie and Emma were very supportive of the Animal Rescue League. I sought to make them even more supportive. Here was my thinking, cowboy: neither woman married. They were richer than Croesus from that sizeable inheritance they received from their father. Remember that it was the stepmother who was hacked to pieces first, so her pre-decease put every penny of that miser’s fortune directly into the scrabbling hands of his two surviving daughters. They both died quite wealthy. I have no idea to whom they have left the lion’s share of their many thousands, but I suspect that the Animal Rescue League will get only a fraction. Despite all my best efforts.”