His employment terminated only a week before Jonathan’s graduation, Bloor wrote the following letter to his favorite student from a rooming house in Oberlin, Ohio, where he was in the process of applying for a faculty position with the famed liberal arts college there, a paradigm of progressive pedagogy. The letter has been preserved in Jonathan’s papers.
May 27, 1909
My dear Mr. Blashette,
Congratulations on arriving at this special juncture in your promising young life. I am confident that you will take what you have learned from your matriculation at Ol’ Devanter and make of yourself a man most exemplary among men. The loam of your character possesses sprouts of greatness, to be sure, but a species of greatness born of humanitarian compassion. You understand as do I the frailty of man and the ever-present need to repair human inadequacy with the sutures and dressing of tender respect. Man is a flawed creature, to be sure, yet has the potential for great healing, aided by the ministrations of the knowledgeable and well-tooled physician of the soul. I hope that I have taught and supplied you well.
I have observed your thoughtful intercourse with the other students, the friendship you have formed with the pocked erstwhile prostitute they call Great Jane. I have watched you spend one particularly long evening pulling our alcohol-intemperate janitor Charlie Royce from the puddle of his own vomit, cleaning him up, and secreting him within your very own dormitory room to prevent his discovery and removal for serial intoxication. I have watched you rescue the mestizo Jiminy Crutch when he was pursued across the quadrangle by mischievous students holding squirrel puppets with exaggerated teeth. And when the prank caused young Jiminy to lose his breakfast, you cleaned up the resultant puddle of vomit knowing that Charlie Royce was unavailable, as he was himself sleeping off yet another night of heavy binge-drinking, curled upon the rag rug in your room. And surely you must also recall the night that you extended your hand of kindness to me — the night that I spoke at the faculty-student forum on the need to protect the right of Negro men to cast their Constitution-given vote in a climate of strong disenfranchisement sentiment among members of the local community. You’ll remember that I was silenced by a tomato which struck the left side of my face and proceeded to adhere — for the most part — drippingly to my spectacles. And then the second tomato which brushed my chin and left its rotted juices oozing down my neck. And then another and yet another while a sincere effort was launched by my fellow faculty members to do absolutely nothing to stop the assault. You will remember that they sat — each of them — quietly, with arms folded, not willing to move an inch, except for professors Rabdau and Gilbert who shifted and squirmed in most animated fashion as they debated whether the tomato was a vegetable or a fruit. Such a night of debasement and abashment it was to become for me. But such a night of heroism it became for you, as you sprang from your seat and took a tomato or two yourself (to the rump, I do believe) in the course of helping me from the red-plastered podium and off that slippery stage. I shall never forget your concern for me at that moment.
You are poised for great things, my dear young friend. I will stand in the wings and prompt if needed, but will mostly, I daresay, commend your time upon this world stage. It was a joy to have you as student and it will be a joy to have you as lifelong friend.
With sincere affection,
Andrew Bloor
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.
7 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?