Mark Dunn - Ibid - A Life

11. Jonathan was no fan of Coolidge, whom he found to be far too “lazy faire.”Winny expressed similar distaste for the new president in letters she exchanged with Jonathan while on holiday in Cuba with her spinster aunts. Winny’s antipathy for Coolidge had formed a few months earlier when, as vice president, he had accused women’s colleges of being hotbeds of Bolshevism. One imagines that the following letter, written on the day after the president’s swearing in (August 3, 1923), was received with a nod and a smile. Jonathan Blashette to Winny Wieseler, Wieseler Estate.

Dear Winny,

The invisible vice president is now the invisible president. I understand he was at his father’s farm in Vermont when he got the news of Harding’s demise. He was supposedly roused from a deep sleep. (Which raises the question: how does one know the difference between Coolidge awake and Coolidge asleep?) Here is how I imagine the conversation went.

SHERIFF : Mr. Coolidge, Senior. I am sorry to disturb you at this hour.

OLD MAN COOLIDGE : What time is it?

SHERIFF (consulting his watch): 7:45.

OLD MAN COOLIDGE : Botheration! Well, we’re all up now. What brings you here, Sheriff?

SHERIFF : Is your son—?

COOLIDGE (coming down the stairs, rubbing his eyes like a groggy toddler): Yes, I’m here, Sheriff. What is it?

SHERIFF : I have some grave news, sir. The President is dead.

COOLIDGE : President Harding dead? It is unthinkable.

(A long pregnant silence passes as all parties contemplate what this means.)

OLD MAN COOLIDGE : I suppose we should make things legal, son. Where’s the family Bible?

(The father administers the oath of office to the son. The father is a notary public. The son is now officially the President of the United States.)

OLD MAN COOLIDGE : Will there be anything else, Sheriff?

SHERIFF : I suppose not.

OLD MAN COOLIDGE (glancing out the window): The secret service men are mashing my pansies.

SHERIFF : Yes, I see them. I will ask them to move. Goodnight, Mr. Coolidge. Goodnight, Mr. President.

COOLIDGE : Good night, Sheriff.

(The sheriff leaves. Father and son sit for a moment in silence.)

OLD MAN COOLIDGE : I forgot to mention: the vet came to see Bessie today.

COOLIDGE : Teat still inflamed?

OLD MAN COOLIDGE : Not so much as before.

(President Coolidge nods. Another silence)

OLD MAN COOLIDGE : Cup of Ovaltine?

(President Coolidge shakes his head.)

COOLIDGE : Best be getting back to bed, Pa.

OLD MAN COOLIDGE : Best you should. Long day tomorrow.

COOLIDGE : Ayah. Good night, Pa.

OLD MAN COOLIDGE : Good night, son.

It should be an interesting eighteen months…if I can stay awake. I miss you.

Love,

Jonathan

12. Jonathan postponed the road trip to follow the Scopes Trial.Incidentally, a second, less publicized “monkey trial” docketed to get under way in Dawes Forge, Tennessee, on August 1 was to have included a brief appearance by William Jennings Bryan dressed in an ape suit. Out of respect for the family of Bryan, who, having concluded his prosecution of the Scopes case, promptly dropped dead of a heart attack, the judge granted both sides a continuance and forbade any references to Bryan or to monkeys at the trial. The case, in fact, never came to trial. Charges were dropped against the town’s young evolution-teaching high school biology teacher Miss Clorinda Pernell who promised to leave all mention of apes out of her classroom lectures in exchange for either a black Alaskan seal fur coat or an ermine with sable collar. The school board called her bluff and delivered her first choice, tied up with a big pink bow. So attached was Miss Pernell to the coat, that she was known to wear it year-round even as it became threadbare and she a sad, heavily perspiring remnant of her former self. Tightly swagged in the thick coat, she died of heatstroke during the heat wave of 1937. Sporting a thick moustache from an untreated hormone imbalance, Miss Clorinda Pernell, in the end, evolved into a life-drained replica of those very apes to which she had linked us all. A family court order prevented the Dawes Forge Anthropological Museum and Arboretum from installing her embalmed body in its new Primate Display (Miss Clorinda Pernell having sold rights to her corpse to the museum in this last year of her life to feed an obsession for rose water parfum).

13. U.S.A.: Union of Simian Anarchy.Jonathan’s West Greenwich Village neighbor Cabe Knudsen errs when he decries “monkey trials all over the country.” I have found evidence of only these two, in addition to a somewhat heated exchange involving two divinity students in Normal, Illinois, which ended when one of the two young men tried to put out the eye of the other with the business end of a roasting fork. An interesting footnote to a footnote: Cabe Knudsen was deported three months after this conversation following another nationwide sweep for potential anarchists. He claimed Tahiti as his country of origin and happily spent the remainder of his life there, serving for a time as curator of the Gauguin Museum of Art. Knudsen may be familiar to some art scholars as the man who dared to answer Gauguin’s haunting “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” His responses respectively: “Stupid Little Monkeys. Stupid Little Monkeys. To the zoo.”

14. “There sat Aimee Semple McPherson, coifed in her signature bob.”If the event were true, it would have constituted one of the most bizarre in Jonathan’s life. I haven’t found evidence that a single contemporary of Jonathan’s assistant Davison believed his story, and Jonathan’s diary, tellingly, is silent on the alleged meeting. Davison was apparently acquainted with a female acolyte of the evangelist who committed suicide when McPherson disappeared and was originally feared drowned, a fact that could very well go to plausible motive for Davison’s concocting the story that clearly paints the popular revivalist as liar and schemer and fully disputes her claim that she had been kidnapped and tortured. (She was allegedly burned with a cigar on her knuckles.) I found the following account among the notes Davison had made for an unfinished memoir he was writing at the time of his death in 1971. HD.

I spied her in a dark corner of the hotel dining room. There she sat, coifed in her signature bob. I nudged Jonny and whispered, “The woman in the corner, do you see?”

Jonny peered and nodded. “It’s Aimee Semple McPherson. Perhaps her kidnappers allow her to come down to the dining room to take her meals.”

“What should we do?”

“Why don’t we go over and ask her what’s what?”

Jonny, like me, had little patience for women who pretend to be kidnapped and get everybody on the West Coast in a lather over it.

McPherson saw us coming and looked a little unnerved. We had her cornered.

“Excuse me,” Jonny says. “Are you the famous, allegedly kidnapped evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson?”

“No, I am not.”

She took out a compact and began to powder her nose, hoping, I would suppose, that we would simply go away.

“I must say that you bear a very strong resemblance to the woman,” Jonny pursued.

“People tell me that. Now if you don’t mind—”

To my surprise, Jonny sat down. Taking his lead, I pulled up a chair and did the same.

“Excuse me, but you are not welcome at this table. I wish to be alone.”