My Affair with the Trunk Murderess: Kind of a Memoir

By Melvin Marks

In 1939, a few years before the Second World War, a fatherless guilt-ridden teenage Arthur Randall is fighting his own war. His mother, penniless and asthmatic, has ripped him from his orthodox Jewish family in Iowa and brought him to Phoenix to face an uncertain future in a one-room apartment in a terrifying new place.

Living down the hall is Katherine Antonelli, an unbearably sexy mother of his best and only friend, Floyd.

While working as a newspaper delivery boy, Arthur is stalked relentlessly by Frank Girvin a homosexual nurse at the state insane asylum.

Nearby is Westerfield Drugs where Arthur now works as a soda jerk and tries to dodge the abuse of his sadistic workmate, Marvin Hooks.

Plagued by the worst of his fears is Winnie Ruth Judd, the infamous "trunk murderess" who once again has escaped from the insane asylum; and Arthur, displacing all his fears on to her imagines she is hell-bent on dismembering his body as she had those of her two roommates.

And there is Phoenix Union High beauty, Myrna Handmacher, the girl for whom Arthur pines romantically.

MY AFFAIR WITH THE TRUNK MURDRESS is a coming-of-age story with an unforgettable cast of characters and, at the center, a boy coping with sexual awakening and temptation on the perilous road to becoming a man.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Apr 25, 2015
• ISBN: 9781504909204

Melvin Marks

Melvin Marks recently retired as president of a Chicago-based marketing company. He has been a guest lecturer at Northwestern University Graduate School of Management (the Kellogg School) and at John Marshall Law School, Chicago. A newspaperman early in his career, he resumed writing full-time since his retirement. He is the author of two books of nonfiction: Jews among the Indians and Yesterdays Warriors. His essays have appeared in Chicago Magazine, Across the Board, the New York Times Magazine, Texas, and Western States Jewish History. His work is included in the anthology About Men: Reflections on the Male Experience (Poseidon Press, 1987). Melvin Marks is a veteran of the Second World War and the recipient of four bronze battle stars. He and his wife reside in Chicago.

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© 2015 Melvin Marks. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse    04/23/2015

ISBN: 978-1-5049-0919-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5049-0920-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015906404

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Contents

Acknowledgement

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2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

About the Author

Books by the same author

Jews among the Indians

Yesterday’s Warriors

Anthologies

About Men: Reflections on the Male Experience

(Poseidon Press 1987)

To Bill, Tom, Pam, and of course to Mary

Acknowledgement

Big thank you to TMA PERITUS for their all around technical help, and much more.

I’m also indebted to Kurt Huber for his splendid cover design.

1

O N A BLISTERING afternoon in 1937, my mother and I arrived at the railroad station on Jackson Street in Phoenix, Arizona. It was as hot as I can remember, an inferno. As we stepped off the train, grimy and spitting dust, we were hit with a blast of air that made even the stifling air of the train seem cool. We had spent four days and three nights in the coach car, munching on stale sandwiches or else making infrequent trips to the diner for meals my mother couldn’t afford. It was a long, boring trip made to seem even longer because I had no inkling of exactly why we were going to Phoenix except that my mother had hay fever which had turned into asthma.

We had ridden the Rock Island all the way from Des Moines where I was born and had spent most of my life (all thirteen years to this point) and were heading for an unfamiliar place in the desert. I went along without protest, for I had little choice in the matter. And if I was able to protest I would scarcely have known how to form the words. I never even wondered why something like asthma was important enough to drive my mother and me from the home provided us by my great aunt and great uncle and their family, good people who took in homeless relatives like us. On the train, I remember the fear of being so far away from Des Moines and my friends, and of dreading the prospect of living in the unknown world that lay ahead.

The station platform was deserted when we arrived, and I recall having to drag our suitcases out of the depot in order to get a taxicab. My first glimpse of Phoenix wasn’t the barren desert I had imagined. The city was actually beautiful. There were palm trees everywhere, the buildings white or tan, scrubbed clean, reminding me of the scenes of Hollywood I’d seen one Saturday afternoon when my mother took me downtown to the Des Moines Theater to see Dick Powell and Rosemary Lane in Hollywood Hotel. Off to the north were the mountains, Camelback and Mummy by name, casting gigantic shadows over the desert. To me, fresh from the flat cornfields of Iowa, the landscape was so strange that it disconnected and frightened me. For a moment I wasn’t sure of where I was. I held tight to my mother’s arm, but I think she was as terrified as I was, for she was embarking on a journey into a strange land with no job, no friends and very little money.

I learned later that my mother had been trying to get out of Des Moines for a long time. She had visited Dr. Posner, the practitioner to Des Moines’s Jewish community, about her asthma. Having no other answer to give her, he suggested she move to a warm, dry climate. He had planted a notion in her head that legitimized her escape from Des Moines and gave her a reason to say goodbye to our relatives. If there was any illness that was stress-related, hers was it, living as she had been, broke and unhappy, in a household not her own. There was never any speculation about the cause of her asthma because the concept of psychosomatic illness hadn’t yet reached the provincial backwater that was Des Moines in those days; and even if it had, I doubt whether any of my relatives could have accepted such a notion. To them, God had simply handed her a fortune cookie and out had come a slip marked asthma.

What was true about her then, and true up until the day she died in 1982, was her dependence on her brothers and sisters, her aunts and uncles, and on me, her only child. Even if she had been financially independent, she would still have been unable to leave the home of my aunt and uncle unless she had received permission from someone, anyone, even the iceman. With a benediction from someone else, no harm could possibly come to her. But permission from a doctor, a Jewish doctor at that, was like a signed affidavit from God. Now she could go to her relatives and borrow the money she needed to get a new start in a warm, dry climate.

I think I knew what she was up to. I couldn’t put it together at the time, but as I think about it today, her ability to exaggerate her illness was the tip-off to what an accomplished actress she was. Later on I came to realize that her use of illness to gain sympathy, and to control her destiny, had become second nature. On me, her only child, she would orchestrate guilt trips that left me fearful and unhappy. If I had known what a guilt-ridden life lay ahead of me, I would have hit the road before the train got to Phoenix. I can say that today but, of course, I had no power then to make a break from my only parent, nor the courage to ask why I was being yanked out of school, nor the courage to question any of the major decisions that she made, or that others made for her, that were to deeply affect my own life.

My mother as well asked no questions but passively went along with even the worst of circumstances that came her way until such time as she could no longer endure them, and that is why we moved to Phoenix. Her inability to make decisions was not a lack of self-confidence but a deep emotional dependence, amplified I’m sure by her failed marriage. She had defied the advice of her family and married my father, a real sharpie. They were divorced in 1927, four years after they were married. So ended her defiance. No doubt the divorce was a humiliating experience, especially because marrying my father was the only time she took a stand against her family.

She had been warned that no good could come of it. My father, a traveling salesman, would come home from a week on the road with nothing to show for it, having spent his lonely evenings in lunatic poker games. He was one of the good old boys of the highway, everybody’s pal, from Tulsa to Wichita, Kansas City to St. Louis. From his 1919 discharge from the army till his death in 1941, his life consisted of traveling––living from one day to the next in an endless sequence of dreary, third-rate hotels, the hobo jungles of the drummers where, invariably, there were white porcelain pitchers on the dressers along with flimsy hotel hand towels, the whole overly-sanitized place stinking of antiseptic.

My parents and I were living in Wichita at the time. One fateful Friday, my father came home after a week on the road, his pockets empty, the rent unpaid, his insurance having lapsed and no food in the house. My mother screamed that she was going home to Des Moines and taking me with her. While she packed, my father bent over my bed and sang Sonny Boy as he took his leave, the tears streaming down his cheeks. It was his last official act as a father. With age, the memory dims, so I can’t guarantee the truth of certain events. This may have been one of them. I was three when I believe my father last sang to me, and I never saw him again. It is hard to imagine what a screwed-up time my parents had during their few years together, not to mention the even more screwed up life they bestowed upon me.

My curiosity about my father has never let up. What sort of man was he–bastard and bounder, or decent and loving? How was I to know? Just after my discharge from the army in 1945, I went to Wichita and talked with one of my father’s friends, Henry Levitt, who my mother had mentioned to me several times. I remember feeling that I was doing an end-run around her, but so what? How long was I supposed to be kept in the dark? Henry ran a successful retail clothing business, and he was a solid citizen. He was the sponsor of a semi-pro basketball team called the Wichita Henrys. He had donated a lot of money to Wichita State University, and in return the school named its basketball stadium after him. Later on I would reflect with pride on how my old man, whom I never knew, became the good friend of the man who helped make Wichita State University a basketball powerhouse.

The feeling of pride it gave me in my father wasn’t much, but it was all I had to go on. Mr. Levitt, by this time a very old man, still stood erect and wore clothes that were more elegant than was usual in Wichita. He had never seen me before but recalled that my father had a son, me, a kid named Arthur. But he spoke of my father as warmly as if they had been brothers. I saw your father just a few days before he died, he said. He came to the store and borrowed a dollar from me. He didn’t have a dime to his name.

I hung on every word. He talked straight to me, without attempting to extol my father in any way. Your father was a sick man, Henry said. He gambled away every nickel he ever made. I had already heard those stories from my mother, who had been only too happy to tell them to me. But it fell to Henry Levitt to tell me more about him, news much