IBID (18 page)
Authors: Mark Dunn
You cry for the child at night.
I know.
I hear the whimpers like the warbly whimpers of the whimperwill.
Like the moping murmur of the moany bird.
Custodian of the empty nest—
A nest robbed of chirpy chick
By the clawed swipe of the thievy rascally rat.
A silent nest where no young one sings—
Where stillness settles heavy dulled and dampened by
the leaden ache of a mother’s loss.
A pining and keening among the oaken branches of a family tree
Unnecessarily
Pruned.
A pining keening, wail-warble
For the happy child who once dwelled within this
Nest of love and twining tangly tendertwig.
Where, oh where is that child-chick so fair,
So young, so soft
So loved.
You cry for the child at night.
Tears that do not dry with the break of day.
In company with the flitter-flutter of the
Mourning Dove,
Newly arrived upon your sill.
Coo.
Coo.
Addy Andy, where are you?
2.
“Did Hauptmann have a brother?”
Nydia Blashette to Jonathan Blashette, JBP. The letter, which I include in its entirety below, prompted Jonathan to direct his local postmaster to return all correspondence from Nydia “to sender,” and to temporarily sever ties with a woman who obviously meant well but had a strange way of showing it. Addicus had been estranged from his younger sister for years, and had counseled Jonathan to avoid her as well. It seems that Jonathan finally took his father’s advice.
June 18, 1935
My favorite nephew Jonathan,
Nearly a month has passed and I know that the FBI has given you very little hope of ever seeing your little Addy Andy again. I keep thinking of that Mr. Hauptmann who killed the little Lindbergh baby and I have to wonder, did Hauptmann have a brother? Though the handwriting in the two ransom notes is very different, it is my hope that it is the brother who took your child and I will tell you why. Because I believe that unlike the first Mr. Hauptmann, this Mr. Hauptmann could be a different sort of man entirely—one who will hold little
Addy Andy somewhere safe and warm. Perhaps he conveys his baby captives to some secret nursery where they are suckled and dandled and cared for with a gentle Germanic hand. That would be a wonderful thing to learn, would it not? I believe that if one brother is bad, it does not have to follow that the other will also be bad. I would think that there are many brothers who would want to make up for the bad in the evil, murderous sibling. I know, for example, that after John Wilkes Booth assassinated President Lincoln, his brother Edgar who was also an actor, often played the clown at children’s birthday parties and sometimes pretended to be Rip Van Winkle and would sleep until time for cake when he would rise up like a big ol’ gobble bear, much to the delight of all the little ones. His name could have been Edmund. Or Eduardo.
I have spoken little of myself during these past few weeks. I will say that I am well and except for the mosquitoes here as large as humming birds, the harsh, damp winters, the uncouth behavior of these Paul Bunyan-pretenders (little boys at heart playing at being big burly men) I am happy to be here. Alaska is the last frontier and your aunt is ever the trailblazer.
Perhaps some day I will be able to see you again. It has been many years since we have been together—many years since I was sent away to deliver in anonymity and without scandal that bastard child that grew arrogantly within me.
Your loving aunt,
Nydia
3.
“Cannot thank you enough for helping to bring the child home”
Jonathan Blashette to Special Agent Vaughn
Dobbs, June 30, 1935, Correspondence Files, Records of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It took three days to find someone able to decipher the letter that was safety-pinned to Addicus Andrew’s little sailor suit, and then three days more to find someone who could translate it successfully. The language, an obscure Mediterranean dialect spoken by only a handful of natives of the Isle of Fish off the coast of Portugal, posed such linguistic difficulty for Cape May University Mediterranean language scholar Gaffer Hurd that his early attempt at translation into English was roundly dismissed, and the search was renewed to enlist someone more versed in “Piscianeté.” Fortunately, this early effort wasn’t permanently discarded; I found it nestled safely in Blashette’s papers. (Box 71, folder 18), and offer it below in its entirety as curious sidebar:
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Blashette,
Jackle Weebe, my husband (or brother or male cousin or village prelate disguised to look like a beggar-man) got the boy (or baby boy or baby crib mobile or overstuffed box lunch or bucket of mashed fish meal), wrote give-give letter (or ransom note or telegram or thank-you card sent upon receipt of an invitation to an oyster-shucking party) for to give-give us money. I hold the boy (or baby boy, etc.) but Jackle go (or left, or will leave, or is leaving, or will have left—tense unclear here) and me alone with boy (or baby crib mobile, etc.) I wait and wait (or squat and squat, or pace back and forth on one leg like an impatient heron) but take good care of infant (miniature adult, brave little man, wax figurine resembling a weeping Saint Francis of Assisi) and wait so long, I say enough of this! and bring back Avicus Andoo to you with money. I think (I am cognizant, I make a cerebral stab, I choke on the enormity of life’s huge portions) that Jackle got eye-big (scared,
frightened?) and left me holding the bag. (Or left the cake to be eaten alone. Or left the umbrella open in the sunshine. Or left the clock without a horological function.) So here the little one is. I bought him the sailor suit (or seaman’s lucky biscuits, or pipe fitter’s line-axe or sequined codpiece). It isn’t necessary to reimburse me. (Or don’t pay me twice for a deed done once. Or dance, little monkey, dance and I will pay you only with monkey kibble and kindness.)
Best wishes (or sincere regrets, or remembering you always as if the years were pebbles on a vast beach, each stone smooth and distinct and beautiful, yet constituents of the myriad wondrous whole, dear friend)
Rondonia Filette
4.
The kidnapper’s name was Jack McKevitt Weebe.
One theory as to why Weebe escaped suspicion for so long is entirely plausible; with his fingerprints having been abraded from years of working in pumice mines, little Addicus Andrew’s kidnapper left FBI agents only a tracing of sock lint and a single curl of unassigned body hair by which to track him down. The case wasn’t cracked until a bright young investigator not even assigned to the case, Hermes Gasparian, hypothesized that the reason no fingerprints were left at the scene of the crime was not because the culprit had taken special care to wear gloves but because he did not, in fact, possess fingerprints. Weebe was subsequently brought in for questioning along with an old friend of Blashette’s from his circus days, Torso Timmy, (a.k.a. Timmy Briggs), the latter quickly released with apologies.
5.
Winny would always remain Jonathan’s favorite artist.
Winny’s powerful aesthetic influence on Jonathan lived on
long after her death. Because of this now deeply ingrained love of art, Blashette cultivated friendships with artists whenever he could and served as chief patron of the droll and mischievous Fiona Fareed who began her career as a muralist with a penchant for nautical scenes, especially those in which sea vessels take on human characteristics, venture on land, and dance together to happy porcine jug bands. Fareed spent her last years scandalizing the art world by putting flesh and sinew on Georgia Okeeffe’s skeletal bovines and deliberately misspelling Okeeffe’s name in her weakly written, meandering apologies.
6.
“Clara has asked for a divorce.”
Jonathan’s Diary, 15 January1936. The rest of the entry says, simply, “She doesn’t love me anymore.” One suspects, though, that there was much more to it than that. The kidnapping had obviously left Clara wrung out, nerve-jangled, and no longer comfortable with the clutter of her life, a domestic chaos that included a high-profile business executive husband whose colorful coterie of friends and associates had become a daily vexation. (It was also an open secret that Clara detested the profusion of partially completed jigsaw puzzles scattered on surfaces throughout the house.)
The trauma of the kidnapping had apparently transformed Jonathan’s wife from brassy, gregarious, full-bosomed earth mother to a far more subdued and less spirited brand of hausfrau. I wonder, as well, if the presence of so many paintings of Jonathan’s dear departed Winny hanging about the house (not to mention the painting-in-progress of Winny herself staring appraisingly down at Clara on each of her not infrequent visits to the Greenwich Village brownstone) was a factor in the unraveling of her ties of devotion to her husband. It could also be that Clara had come to realize that, for all his professions of affection, Jonathan had never truly loved her with anything even
approaching the intensity with which he worshipped Winny (or even Great Jane or Lucile for that matter). Whereas Jonathan and Clara might have been marginally content to recline among the plush cushions of an easy and respectable domestic union, Clara quickly came to embrace a different scenario, one in which she had the bed all to herself, with all the oddball associates who used to enliven her days and nights, now kept at safe distance.
7.
“Reno giveth and Reno taketh away.”
Jonathan Blashette to Andrew Bloor, 1 July, 1936AnB.
8.
Jonathan encouraged his best friend to pursue other interests.
In late 1938, Davison, inspired by the success of Carnegie’s
How to Win Friends and Influence People
, Dorothea Brande’s
Wake Up and Live
, and Walter Pitkin’s
Life Begins at Forty
, decided to write his own self-help book. Jonathan agreed to assist him in finding a publisher, should it be an effort that he found worthy of publication. The end result was
How to Pick Up Women and Keep Them…Until Morning.
The manuscript was never published. The following selection gives ample evidence as to the reason.
Four Sure Fire Ways to Grab Her Attention
1. Compliment her on her hat. (No matter how much you dislike it.) Women like to be complimented on their millinery. Keep your comments simple and direct and do not offer an excessively detailed appraisal. To speak too knowledgeably about the hat’s appeal will have her mistaking you for Edward Everett Horton or one of his mincing ilk. She will invite you to afternoon tea but never to her bed.
2. Be topical. Show that you respect her interest in current events and public affairs by commenting casually on some news item that may have come to her attention. Do stay
away from the following conversation killers: Hitler and Mussolini (unless you are to criticize them roundly and impugn their medieval stands on womanhood), electrophotography, coelacanths, or Kate Smith (because you will inevitably make some unkind comment about her size, and this may, in one of many ways, come back to haunt you.)
3. Touch her gently on the shoulder as you speak. Women like to be touched in conversation should the contact be friendly and chaste. It demonstrates that you are warm and winning. Do not venture beyond a light tap, and use such only for punctuation. Do not use the touch to fill a break in the conversation, for it will draw far too much attention to itself. Do not touch her repeatedly or she will think that you are palsied or battling
delirium tremens
. Do not brush her clothing with the hand, or she may think that she has clothed herself in a garment that is attended by lint. In her mind, your effort to remove this phantom bit of fabric fluff will demonstrate that you believe she is unable to keep herself clean and kempt in public. Finally, do not—I repeat DO NOT paw her or allow the fingers to move independently of one another. You will be mistaken for a masher, lothario, or Ed Wynn
.
4. Ask her if she would like to join you for a cup of coffee. Add that you are on your way to have a cup of coffee yourself, so the invitation need only reflect a desire to continue a pleasant chat with no additional expectations incumbent. Should she agree to join you, do not under any circumstances offer to buy her anything beyond the java. Purchase of a doughnut for the young woman will indicate a level of interest that may discomfit her. A doughnut by its shape carries Freudian implications that will only serve to create an atmosphere of subliminal discomfort. The following cautionary tale should serve to
warn you away from all thought of food in this initial encounter: A young man offered a beautiful young woman he had just met a cup of coffee, and once seated at the lunchroom counter, a doughnut as well. She accepted the offer. He placed the order for the doughnut while at the same time ordering for himself a frankfurter with mustard and relish. The man, at one point, found both the doughnut and the frankfurter in his possession, and, exercising a shameful lack of tact, proceeded to insert the processed meat log into the inviting hole of the doughnut with short rapid thrusts, its entry amply lubricated by the slippery mustard and relish paste. The woman, horrified, fled from the lunchroom, and was, in fact, never seen by the man again. The man did not realize his error until much later. By then it was too late to make amends.
9.
However, there is little evidence that the two ever met
. I could find no mention in Jonathan’s diary of his meeting with Lou Gehrig a week before the ballplayer’s poignant farewell address at Yankee stadium. But Davison does note in his own journal:
“Last night Jonathan said he spent a couple of hours at O’Grady’s tossing back brews with none other than Lou Gehrig. He said that Lou ended up asking his help with a speech that wasn’t quite there yet and was grateful that Jonathan had edited out quite a bit of the foam.”
In Jonathan’s papers I did find a yellowed scrap of paper, with the scribbled heading “L.G. Goodbye Speech, July 4, 1939.” A good thirty to forty percent of the text had been lined through. A section follows (with elision noted in brackets).