7. There was a lacuna in the Luna. I discovered the full text of the expurgated material from the January 16, 1919, edition of the Boston Luna in the paper’s morgue.
As Promised: Our Annual Boston Beans Recipe
Nobody knows beans like Boston knows beans.
Soak 1 1/2 cups dried beans
Cover the beans with water. Bring them to a boil. Simmer them slowly for thirty minutes or more, until tender.
Prepare your oven.
Drain the beans, setting aside the cooking water.
Add:
1/2 cup chopped onion
2 tablespoons or more of dark molasses (author’s emphasis)
1 tablespoon dry mustard
2 or 3 tablespoons of catsup
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup boiling bean water
Place the ingredients in a greased baker. Attend them with:
1/2 lb. sliced salt pork
and bake them at low heat for 6 to 9 hours. If they become dry, add a little
set aside bean water.
Uncover the beans for the last hour of baking.
Mention of the molasses might have been withdrawn but the recipe would certainly have suffered.
8. Jonathan failed to see the black humor of it. Nor would he permit anyone to speak of the freak accident that took his precious Lucile from him. It was not until Jonathan had reached his seventy-second year that he finally allowed himself to appreciate the cruel yet cosmically humorous irony of it all. Lucile had fought hard for prohibition. Within a year of her death, rum would become illegal. The Purity Distilling Company would no longer be allowed to turn its vats of molasses into the demon potable. And yet, it was a well-recognized ingredient of rum itself that had taken a deadly-aimed preemptive shot at Lucile and her temperance crusade. As he approached the end of his own life Jonathan finally allowed himself a good laugh and a good cry and then drank a toast with his manservant Uriah to the memory of his beautiful Lucile. Appropriately, they drank rum. Maura Hester, Love Interminable, 55–58.
Postcript: I have no record that Beryl renewed her efforts to win Jonathan’s heart, damaged as it was by the loss of Lucile. I note that shortly before Lucile’s death Beryl had begun to see a man named Runstein who manufactured anatomically correct articulated mannequins and wooden darning eggs, and was apparently quite devoted to her.
9. “Our broadcloth patterned dress shirts are over here and thank you for the compliment and no I do not have plans for lunch.” So smitten was Jonathan with the perky little sales clerk in Men’s Furnishings at Rosenwasserberg’s — downtown Pettiville’s very first “full service department store”—that he made daily trips to the store to purchase all manner of men’s clothing and accessories, including at least two gold-filled dress sets which he neither needed nor could afford. It therefore came as a blow to Jonathan to learn of Tulip’s sudden marriage to Ambless dental student Newbold Osbert. The news may have precipitated his hasty move to New York City a short time later. The cold shoulder he received from his forsaken former employers Izzy and Moe didn’t help. Jonathan’s Diary, 3 November1919.
10. “The bad news of the week is that Tulip and I will no longer be dating.” Ibid., December 10, 1919. The good news was that Ford had just coming out with automatic starters for its model T’s.
11. “She left me something to remember her by.” When Jonathan made his permanent move to New York City in early 1920, he carried the poem with him. As it disintegrated with time and wear, he admitted that simply touching the paper-dust remnant at the bottom of his pocket would conjure up memory of “that pretty little pixie” Tulip McTigue. The text of the poem follows.
Yet Roses Bloom Still in Fields of Woe
by
McDonald Bowling
Even in fields of woe,
Bloom roses still!
Joyful scent revive in me
Some soft rememb’r’d thing.
O!
Halcyon days,
Fragrant days of youth —
Fleeting, fading.
Memory rush of garden promenading.
Tears of loss:
Wash and cleanse.
As I gently touch the rim-hem of that sweet
rememb’r’d thing.
Of that moist, supple,
Peach prim,
Pastwastard.
The poem is obviously marred by Bowling’s use of the neologism pastwastard. Bowling himself regretted its employment, noting in chatty letters to his urologist (Byron Blackfoot: Confessions to a Pee Pee Doctor [Portsmouth, New Hampshire: Towler Press, 1989]) that it was never his intention to include it, but “sometimes you just do a thing, knowing it is wrong, inappropriate, senseless or patently moronic. Like when you eat a piece of fish that clearly isn’t fresh or when you admit to a crime you didn’t commit.” On March 16, 1932, the sixty-three-year-old poet was executed for the murder of Libby Morgan, a woman he had clearly never even met.
12. “Come to New York.” After learning that his aged father was barely making ends meet by working part time as a moonshine “still basher” in the Ozarks, Jonathan wrote to his mother (13 May1920, JBP), begging her to move the two of them to New York City where Jonathan was certain that his salary as a waiter at a midtown Childs Restaurant would be sufficient to support the three until Addicus could find work locally. Although the letter was never received, we know that it was sent because it turned up in the mailbox of one Atticus Bouchard in Pettiville, Alabama, a philatelist who kept it for the stamp on the envelope: a rare Benjamin Franklin misprint — one of only eight in existence. The image is familiar to most stamp collectors and is valued even more than the coveted “Inverted Jenny.” Franklin’s mouth is missing and he has apparently been given Thomas Jefferson’s hair. Under “U.S. Postage” are the additional words, “U.S. Pastwastard.”
13. “His name is Rodolfo Alfonzo Raffaelo Pierre Filibert Guglielmi di Valentina d’Antonguolla.” Jonathan’s Diary, 14 July1920. Jonathan and the superfluously named Italian-American taxi cab driver were to spend the next several hours together, drinking Allash Kummel and crème de bananes. Although neither was successful in concocting a perfect screen name for the Hollywood-bound cabby who ultimately became Rudolph Valentino, or an eye-catching alternative name for Jonathan’s forthcoming deodorant venture (Jonathan was waffling over “Dandy-de-odor-o”), their lists of possibilities for both were varied and colorful, and became even more so as the evening wore on and the men became increasingly intoxicated. There is no evidence to confirm the rumor that the sexually ambivalent Valentino asked Jonathan to share his bed for the night, although Jonathan, his heterosexual libido perhaps slightly compromised by excessive alcohol intake, did note in his diary that the young man was “too beautiful to be a man, and certainly too beautiful to be driving livery for a living. I wish him well in his film career, and especially in his efforts to get that meandering birth name of his down to a manageable moniker.” One wonders if Valentino would have enjoyed the same level of popularity and acclaim had his name been drawn from Jonathan and Rudolph’s brain-stormed catalogue of possibilities. Box 17, Ephemera: napkins, JBP.