Authors: Mark Dunn
IBID (8 page)
11.
Jonathan unfortunately missed his graduation.
There are several theories as to why Jonathan was unable to attend graduation ceremonies at Devanter. His diary is strangely silent, stating only “I did not go.” Some, including Glover and Cyril in his unfinished biographical manuscript
The Story of Jonathan Blashe—
, believe that Great Jane was so distraught over the fact that Jonathan would soon be returning home and thus out of her life, that she made a clumsy attempt at suicide which Jonathan had to foil. Lucianne Flom theorizes that Jane probably chose the then popular arsenic-incremental method—a painful and ultimately harebrained way to kill oneself—which involved taking larger and larger doses of the poison over a period of several hours. Flom imagines that Jonathan’s heroic efforts involved intermittent dashes to the kitchen to restrain Great Jane from stirring arsenic into her freshened tea, followed by an ebb of casual conversation, and then another mad dash for the kitchen, upon Great Jane’s sudden announcement, “I believe I’ll have another spot of tea.” Flom and Furman surmise that this pattern played out for hours and did not end until Jonathan thought to toss the vial of arsenic out the window.
Another theory, this one posited by Odger, is that Jonathan got his third foot caught in a loose floorboard and it took several hours to pry it out.
I find both theories ludicrous. My guess is that Jonathan was making a statement of protest regarding Bloor’s dismissal.
SO BEWARE, SAY A PRAYER
1.
For Jonathan it was a summer of disappointment.
Cyril Furman
, The Story of Jonathan Blash—[ette].
With the family farm back on uncertain financial footing due, in part, to Addicus’s latest accident and Emmaline’s not infrequent participation in a local quilting circle in which morphine was freely dispensed by the wife of local physician R. J. Blanton, it is no wonder that Jonathan sought emotional solace through reconciliation with Mildred. It came as a severe blow, then, for him to learn that his high school sweetheart had been secretly married to her alcoholic cousin Clyde for two years.
The threads of the rich tapestry of personalities and events that draped Jonathan’s early years were tightly interwoven during this period. Within six years, Dr. Blanton would earn national notoriety as perpetrator of a scandalously unsuccessful experimental tran-species organ transplant—one that involved none other than Mildred’s cousin/ husband Clyde. Clyde Haywood became, for three days, the proud owner of the liver of a chimpanzee, introduced by the morphine-careless Dr. Blanton for purposes of reversing many years of alcohol abuse.
In 1919, two years after the death of her husband from massive organ rejection, Mildred, hearing of Jonathan’s own tragic personal loss (see
Chapter 8
, note 5), wrote her former beloved to express her condolences, as well as her desire to see him again and perhaps renew the ties that bound the two in their youth. There is no evidence that Jonathan ever replied, although Mildred’s letter is preserved in Jonathan’s papers, a hint of the fragrance she atomized
upon it still lingering upon the page.
January 24, 1919
Dear Jonny,
Once we were young and gay and life held such wonderful promise for us both. Then you went away to college to learn Latin and history and commerce, and I pined miserably until Clyde rescued me from my pit of self-pity and asked for my hand. Oh, Jonny, HAD I ONLY WAITED FOR YOUR RETURN! But where was the assurance that we would pick up where we left off when you, with diploma in hand and a bit more tuft upon your chest, finally strode back into Pettiville and back into MY LIFE? Especially after you took up with that prostitute and had all the tongues in town wagging from the SCANDAL of it, and it seemed that your reputation would be forever PUSTULED AND SCROFULOUS itself from the association. Do you blame me, Jonny? Had I a choice? With Clyde’s arms opened wide, his warm smile inviting me to share my life with one so kind and gay and morally unimpeachable?
For, yes, Clyde did treat me well. He gave me a beautiful little girl, Clydette. He gave me a spinet piano and a new living room suite with beautiful appointments. He never found need for the arms of other women.
He did, however, drink. Too much. He drank so much that his liver SHRIVELED UP AND DIED and he was forced to submit to an operation that would end his life after three short days, because the odds were too great that his body would ever accept a transplant from a monkey, much less a liver lifted from the body of a chimpanzee named BOPPO which Dr. Blanton
confessed after the deed was done and the brown hepatic slab securely fixed in its new home, was a heavy drinker himself! Yes, my Clyde traded his cirrhotic human liver for an EQUALLY CIRRHOTIC PRIMATE ONE! Or perhaps one even more diseased than his own, for Boppo had a thirst for Brandy Melange that was nearly UNQUENCHABLE!
All this leaving me with a dead monkey-livered husband and murdered hope.
That is, until I read that you too had suffered tragedy and now lay sprawled single upon the marital bed. Until I came to know the hard facts about this bumpy road we call life. Facts acknowledged by us both. Fate has dealt each of us a losing hand, Jonny. But the game doesn’t have to be OVER. We are permitted another deal, count on it. Yet we must move quickly. That quicksilver dealer of second chances will clear the table and depart if we tarry.
Shall we play that other hand? Shall I see you again, you successful entrepreneur, you! I have heard of your grand business plan. You will wave your magic wand in the marketplace and men will be wiped clean of the noisome odors of hard labor and sporadic ablutions, and I desire that a wand be waved over me as well. By your hand. Bringing me back THE LIFE I ONCE LIVED. When we were both young and you made me laugh and feel beautiful and much loved.
Am I wrong to write to you in this way? If so, please forgive my effrontery.
Yours,
Mildred
I have no way of knowing if Jonathan ever responded to her offer, even with only a polite decline. Mildred moved to Boston in the mid-twenties and lived there until her death in 1975 when she was struck by a school bus. Ironically, the fatal accident took place at the height of the citywide donnybrook over court-ordered bussing.
2.
Izzy and Moe shot straight with their new employee; he was hired because they thought the extra leg would bring in a few extra customers.
Several years later the Pettiville haberdashers would be famously confused with federal agents Izzy Einstein and Moe Smith who became celebrated during Prohibition for donning elaborate disguises to infiltrate speakeasies and bootlegging operations. As a result, Izzy Feldbaum received a bullet in the spleen courtesy of a Capone caporegime who had mixed up his Izzies. Unaware at the time that the attempt on his life had been a case of mistaken identity, Feldman told a reporter from his hospital bed, “If he wanted the suit, he should take the suit. What I need less is a hole in the kishke! ”
Pettiville Press
, 22 July 1927.
3.
“I feel as if I have stepped into a deep furrow from which I cannot remove myself.”
Working at the haberdashery for twelve hours a day in a struggling attempt to infuse operating capital into his parent’s floundering farm left Jonathan fatigued, depressed, and more estranged than ever from the life that he had hoped to build for himself in the world outside of Pettiville. This low point in Jonathan’s young life is articulated by the following entry from his diary.
August 15, 1909
Hee haw. Hee haw. I’m a work mule. A plow pony. A damned beast of burden, that’s what I am. Mildred is married and Great Jane is a connubial impossibility and
I see nothing on the horizon but nose-to-the-grindstone bachelorhood for me.
The silver lining: I am getting very good at selling. Suits and ties and shoes and spats. These days I can pretty much sell any fellow who walks into the store. In fact, there’s only one person I can’t sell: Father. And I’m not talking about clothes here. When it comes right down to it, Father’s getting far too old to run that farm with so little help and with that fractured pelvis and I am just barely able to keep all of our heads above water, but will he listen to my pitch? If only I could make Mother and Father see that the best thing they should do now is liquidate the acreage and get themselves a nice little place in town. I’ll be happy to help out as needed. Because I’ll have no family of my own to place a drag on my income. Nose-to-the-grindstone bachelorhood for me. If that’s my fate, I will reconcile myself to it.
Dr. Bloor would be sorely disappointed to hear what has become of me.
4.
“Izzie and Moe still won’t give me a raise. I am going to look for work elsewhere.”
Ibid., 15 October, 1909.
5. “
Are you a hairy man?”
Jonathan noted in his diary (19 October1909) that the interview for assembly line relief man at Pettiville’s Sure-Fry Lard Works was one of the strangest encounters he’d ever had. He took pains to transcribe to the best of his recollection nearly the whole exchange.
JENKINS
: Have a seat. Fritter biscuit?
JONATHAN
: No thank you.
JENKINS
: Crunkle cake, fresh from the vat?
JONATHAN
: Thanks, but I’m not all that hungry.
JENKINS
: Deep fried crackle crisp?
JONATHAN
: I’m not sure I know what that is.
JENKINS
: Shall we get down to business?
JONATHAN
: Yes.
JENKINS
: I don’t beat around the proverbial bush. When I want to know something, I simply ask it.
JONATHAN
: Go right ahead.
JENKINS
: Are you a hairy man?
JONATHAN
: Am I what?
JENKINS
: A hairy man.
JONATHAN
: Well, I—
JENKINS
: I note a minimum of carpeting on your forearms. Does this indicate a lack of same upon other regions of your epidermis?
JONATHAN
: I would suppose so.
JENKINS
: That is unfortunate.
JONATHAN
: I beg your pardon?
JENKINS
: The fact that you are effeminately hairless.
JONATHAN
: Perhaps I will grow more hair as I age. I am, after all, only twenty-one.
JENKINS
: Yes. Hmm. There is that possibility. Though I must tell you, Mr. Blashette, that my preference is for the men who join this operation to have sufficient, well-established
body hair.
JONATHAN
: My father is somewhat hairy. Perhaps in time—
JENKINS
: I’m afraid I need this position filled next week. (
A pause
.) There are, of course, ways for one to stimulate the growth of hair.
JONATHAN
: Yes?
JENKINS
: One proven method comes to mind. But there is a downside. On occasion, the hair growth is limited to the palms of the hands. And in some exceptional cases, one goes blind.
JONATHAN
: I wouldn’t want that, no.
JENKINS
: Tripping and bumping into things. I’d have to keep you far away from the rendering room.
JONATHAN
: I do think I would make a good employee, Mr. Jenkins, if only you could see your way to dismissing the fact that I am not an overly hairy man.
JENKINS
: I’m sorry, Mr. Blashette, but that would be difficult. This is a factory of hirsute men and one Mrs. Beebe who joined us following a failed Rutgers pituitary experiment. You would not be happy among these people. You would inevitably be teased, taunted, perhaps even roughed up. And here I’m speaking only of Mrs. Beebe. It simply wouldn’t be safe for you here.
JONATHAN
: Could you not simply forbid your employees to go after me?
JENKINS
: Lard men, Mr. Blashette, are hard men.
JONATHAN
: Then, I assume this interview is over.
JENKINS
: You assume correctly. By the way, would you know of someone with the requisite qualifications who might wish to apply for the position?
Jonathan’s friend Toby “the Monkey Boy” Brancato was hired the very next day.
6.
Halley’s hysteria was widespread.
Jonathan’s exasperation over the paranoia that gripped Wilkinson County residents in the weeks leading up to the May, 1910, fly-over by Halley’s Comet is evident in this letter which Jonathan wrote to Great Jane on “the eve of the Great Apocalypse, May 17.” (JBP.) I include it here in its entirety. It reflects Jonathan’s growing impatience with “those trammeled by their own timidity” but also indicates Jonathan’s growing bitterness and dissatisfaction with his own life.
May 17, 1910
Hawthorne Way
Pettiville
Dear Great Jane,
The citizens of this jerkwater Mongolian hamlet have decided that the world is about to end. It is the most ridiculous thing I have ever seen. In the face of all reason, they gather to make all right with God, to tearfully kiss their babies and hug their grannies good-bye, to sing their favorite hymns and eat up the best preserves from the fruit cellar, and I can’t get anyone to wait on me at the five and dime because selling a tin of shoe polish means nothing compared to the destruction of this planet by poisonous cometic gases—sufficient reason, it would seem, to try to drink as many ice cream sodas as the human digestive tract can hold while
customers in need of shoe polish who
don’t
happen to believe that God is arriving tomorrow morning on the 6:07 must fend totally for themselves like I don’t have better things to do with my time than walk through a store and claim items for myself without clerical assistance! I would be fired for treating my customers at Izzie and Moe’s the way these apocalypse-obsessed imbecilic sales clerks treated me.
My parents are, thankfully, keeping their wits, although I can detect the occasional anxious thought percolating now and then, understandable when you consider that they are surrounded by men and women totally deficient in intelligence and possessed of not even the notochord of an embryonic mouse.
Yesterday I had the displeasure of talking seven men and women out of nailing themselves to crosses in a cotton field just north of town to wait Christ-like for what they believed would be the Second Coming, due to arrive in a cloud of comet dust. My exchange with these people went something like this:
ME
: Hello there! What’s with the crosses?
A LARGE, FURRY AGRICULTURAL SORT WHOM THEY CALL TUB
: Where you been, son? The end is near!
ME
: Right. But what’s the reason for the crosses?
A TOOTHLESS AGRICULTURAL SORT WHOM THEY CALL LESTER
: We will await our Lord and Savior in the manner in which He Himself was spirited to the arms of His Father.
ME
: You’re going to nail yourselves to these things?
AN EARNEST APRON-BEDECKED WOMAN WHOM THEY CALL EITHER BESS OR BETH (SEVERAL HAD CONFUSING LISPS)
: Yes. That is the plan.
ME
: What about these little crosses?
TUB
: They are for the children.
ME
: Where are the children?
TUB
: They require a bit more coaxing.
ME
: And the tiny cross there?
BESS
: I have a cat named Mr. Pink.
ME
: So who goes first?
A GRIZZLED OLD MAN WITH A HUMP WHO I LATER LEARN IS NAMED PAPPY
: We’ve drawn straws to decide.
TUB
: Unfortunately, we can’t tell which is the shortest of these two.
ME
: Let me see. That was easy.
Here’s
your winner.
TUB
: Lester, this three-legged gentleman says you got the shortest straw. Pappy, we best get the hammer and commence to crucifyin’.
ME
: What happens if the comet comes and goes and Jesus doesn’t show up?
LESTER
: If we’re still alive and kickin’, then I reckon we’d need someone to come get us all down. I also reckon the doctor would have to do himself some patchin’ about our hands and feet.
DOC
: Yup, I reckon I would.
ME
: Here’s a thought: maybe Jesus would prefer to find you all sitting quietly and without physical anguish in your parlors when He arrives.
BESS
(nodding her head eagerly): That
is
a thought. Why, you know what? I could make Him lemonade. I couldn’t make Jesus lemonade if I’m hangin’ on that there cross, Lester.
LESTER
: That’s a right good point. Maybe we could study on it a spell.
In the end, even the cat was spared.
Your friend,
Jonathan
