Dennis the Menace by Patrick Sean Lee (read after TXT) 📕

Miss Marilou Jenkins surveyed the three visitors from the Westside; Pop and Jimmy, impassively, briefly, and then she let her gaze fall on me where it rested as she followed her parents into the foyer where we stood waiting. Whether she was counting the droplets of sweat that had begun to form on my forehead after seeing this creature Jimmy had lit on fire, mentally sneering at the apparent rags I’d thrown on not two hours ago in ignorance of the impending audience, or simply wondering what alien universe I’d escaped from, I could not tell.

“Mr. Morley. Thank you for coming across town with the boys.” Mr. Jenkins spoke in a clear, mellifluous voice as he walked toward my father, his hand extended in greeting.

Pop seemed very comfortable, or at least not particularly ill-at-ease. He shook the gentleman’s hand. “I’m very sorry, Dr. Jenkins, that this visit became necessary. This is my son, Daniel, and his friend Jimmy.” He motioned with a nod of his head for me to say something. But what was I to say in that ambassadorial place, standing before these people who likely had just removed wreaths of laurel from their heads before entering the cavernous room? It’s so lovely to meet you, sir. May I kiss your daughter?

And so I merely said, “Hello, sir.” To my undying horror, my voice cracked mid-sentence. The velvety mid-range C of ‘hello’ suddenly kicked up three octaves at the next short word, ‘sir’. I cursed my vocal cords and would have bolted for the door right then except that Miss Marilou Jenkins’ aquamarine eyes had brightened like twin novas, and she smiled across the room at me. I cleared my throat. My cheeks and forehead bled heat.

“Please,” Dr. Jenkins gestured to us, “Come into the library. Right this way.” He waited until Pop drew alongside him, and then walked with him, trading small asides, grinning at my father’s pithy replies.

The amiable doctor’s wife lingered a step behind the two of them. She smiled at Jimmy and me and then inquired. “Your mother could not make it, Daniel?”

“No, ma’am. Saturday is laundry day.”

“I see. That is a shame. And your mother, James?” she said turning to Jimmy, who turned up his nose at the appellation.

“Umm…she’s emptyin’ bottles.”

I cringed, certain that...

“I see. Baby bottles? You have a younger brother or sister?”

Jimmy nodded, as if he had rehearsed his answer, and then lied. “Yeah, one of each.”

“Ah. How lovely.”

We crossed the expanse of the gallery of naked statues, Miss Marilou Jenkins gliding between her mother and myself as though one of those marble images had come to life and stepped down from its pedestal. I thought I caught the faint scent of lilacs drifting from her.

“The younger ones must keep her very busy, indeed.”

“You can’t imagine,” Jimmy snickered. “Bottles everywhere. And shitty diapers.”

Mrs. Jenkins’ pencil-thin, dark eyebrows soared upward at the remark, and she shot a mildly disdainful look at my best friend. Miss Marilou Jenkins put a hand to her mouth, stifling a giggle. We moved on, me wishing I had at least worn my old suit.

At the end of the gallery of statues and paintings, an ornate archway of stone led into a wide hallway lined with several imposing carved wood doors, their polished brass handlesets set midway up on one edge in the European style. Dr. Jenkins stopped at the second room on the right, opened the door inward, and indicated with a gracious wave of his hand for us to enter. Again, and not for the last time that day, my jaw dropped. This was the library.

Four wingback chairs—that Pop took only casual notice of, but probably would be able to describe down to the last luxurious thread later—were set in a semi-circle in front of a kingly desk of mirror-polished wood. Floor to ceiling bookcases stood, packed with volume after volume, and except for the doorway in, and a single, tall window behind the desk, the books dominated; a dense wallcovering of thousands of lofty, written thoughts.

We took a seat; Pop, Jimmy, me, and to my right, Miss Marilou Jenkins with her faint scent of summer flowers. Dr. Jenkins sat imperiously in his leather chair opposite us behind the desk. A gray-mist shaft of light shined through the window making him appear otherworldly. He leaned back and surveyed the two arsonists, the fingertips of his right hand tapping his chin, and then he let his gaze fall on his daughter.

“That was a very serious and foolish thing you boys did in that theater. You understand that, don’t you,” he said, as though the statement was being directed at her.

“Yes sir,” I concurred, holding onto my vocal chords with all that I possessed.

“Yeah, I guess so,” Jimmy followed.

I didn’t wait for anything further to erupt out of Jimmy’s mouth. I turned to Miss Marilou Jenkins and melted into an apology worthy of my finest moment inside a confessional.

“Please accept my sincerest forgiveness, miss. If I had it all to do over again I wouldn’t of…well, that is…I would have…”

Miss Marilou Jenkins’ smile broadened in amusement at my comments. She turned full-face to me and said, “I accept your ‘forgiveness’. I was planning to have it cut anyway.”

I heard Jimmy exhale in relief. If we were to be chastised and made to kneel in sackcloth outside their door for one or two weeks; made to survive on moldy black bread, and water from the gutter, it appeared it would not be at the hands of the girl sitting beside me. We both looked imploringly over at Dr. Jenkins, as if to say, “See, sir. No harm done. None at all.”

“What were ya’ doin’ at a theater clear across town?” Jimmy asked Miss Marilou Jenkins in the momentary lull in the conversation. Pop looked over at Jimmy in astonishment. I dropped my gaze and squinted with pain. Still, it was a good question, but I would never have had the courage to ask it. I waited for her answer.

“Our daughter wished to visit her cousins who live near a park on your side of town,” Dr. Jenkins emphasized the phrase, ‘near a park’. Barnum Park, I guessed, as there was nothing as grand as City Park where we lived; just the small, hilly half mile square home of smaller trees, smaller trails, a smaller playground, and the smaller lake with smaller boats and even-smaller people sitiing in them. “Her mother and I were going out of town. Perhaps we should have taken her with us?” he asked in a serious tone, but with a glint in his eye.

Probably so.

In the moments ahead we learned these things: Dr. Jenkins had been in Minneapolis with his lovely wife that weekend attending a convention of Proctologists. The eminent rectal repair specialist did not tell us exactly what one hears at such a convention—perhaps long hissing sounds punctuated by laughter and the pinching of noses?—but he lectured us, punctuated, definitely, with extremely long words neither of us had ever heard before. We sat before him nervously, and I’m certain shook our heads yes once or twice, when in fact we should have shaken them no.

The inferno in Miss Marilou Jenkin’s hair turned out to be not an inferno at all. In fact it was only a minor brush fire of really little consequence. The cousin sitting at her side had had the foresight and prize-fighter reactions to smother it long before it did more than eliminate most of the split ends caused by teasing and hairspray.

“Young gentlemen such as yourselves from good Christian families,” Dr. Jenkins turned his head slightly toward Pop and nodded. Pop nodded obligingly back at him. “…consider their actions very soberly, weighing the consequences…” And we listened to it all again.

An hour later as we left his mansion I couldn’t help but overhear Pop inquiring of Dr. Jenkins whether he knew the little known fact that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart suffered from Tenesmus, brought on by an unwillingness, or forgetfulness, to run to the chamber pot due to his complete immersion in composing. Of course, Pop continued, the physicians of the day diagnosed the discomfort as nothing more than gas.

“Not precisely true,” corrected Dr. Jenkins (who certainly would have known). “Herr Mozart consumed entirely too much beef, and drank cheaper wines far in excess of what would even then have been considered moderate to heavy alcoholic consumption. While he imagined his bowels…”

At the end of which Pop quipped that never in his life had beef, or beer, at least, “…caused any discernible deviation from other than a normal bowel movement in my life. At any rate, I bow to your probable expertise concerning Mr. Mozart’s unfortunate condition. It certainly didn’t affect his fingers.”

With a hearty laugh, the doctor agreed wholeheartedly. I moved down the corridor toward the entry at the side of Miss Marilou Jenkins, lost in a cloud of medical shadows cast by the doctor and the upholsterer. My father, I suddenly realized, inhabited a world far below the one he should have lived in.

“He loves to speak to his guests about stuff like that. My father is so weird,” Miss Marilou Jenkins whispered to me.

“So is mine,” I whispered back, my lips touching the strands of sweet-smelling hair covering her ears.

At the entry, Dr. Jenkins grabbed hold of Pop’s hand once more, clasping over the top of it with the other. For the short moments of our visit they had looked in each other’s eyes on an equal plane, but I knew the moment we left that the invisible barrier separating their worlds would have to be erected again.

We returned to Barnum along the same streets that had taken us to that place of refinement and beauty, relieved, silent.

                                *

Excerpt from "One Year On Meade Street" by Patrick Sean Lee.

Text: Patrick Sean Lee
Publication Date: 04-29-2012

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