15 SETTING SUN
1. Beauaeuregard Taylor called the meeting to order. The name of the new director of the Blashette Foundation is spelled correctly. Sybil Rowan notes in her book, ‘Tis Better to Give, that the spelling of Taylor’s first name was a “personal frustration” and he wished on hundreds of occasions that his father hadn’t been “potted on corn squeeze” the day the birth certificate was filled out. After spelling his name aloud for a college registrar, Beauaeuregard Taylor was instantly accused of being a “wiseguy” and slapped across the face by the man’s glove. Why the registrar was in possession of a single, pearl-studded opera glove was never explained.
2. He was also an established author. Rowan, ’Tis Better to Give, 278. This was actually Taylor’s fourth novel. He had previously written Hedgehog’s Ball, Dancing with my Shadow, and No Prayer for Suzie.
3. Jonathan stopped going to Café Ennui, complaining that the service was too slow. Harvey Freeman, “Jonathan Blashette; Inside the Man,” Body Fresh Magazine, 24, No. 7 (1972): 22–38.
4. “They are the pretty twinkle stars of my twilight years.” Jonathan’s Diary, 2 September 1958. Among the female companions who brightened Jonathan’s final years was Venetia House. Not only was the young woman a self-described “jigsaw junkie,” but she also shared Jonathan’s love of dogs. In fact, it was one canine in particular that played an important role in Venetia’s strong religious faith. For many years, including those during which she knew Jonathan, Venetia was an active member of a small Christian sect that believed that Jesus Christ, as lover of both man and beast, had a pet collie, which accompanied Him during His last months on earth. Among Jonathan’s uncatalogued effects I chanced upon a book published by Venetia’s denomination, which includes illustrations of the dog being fed table scraps by Jesus at the Last Supper, dog-paddling behind Jesus as he walked upon the waters of the Sea of Galilee, and howling plaintively at the foot of the cross.
I also came across a letter from Venetia to Jonathan in which she apparently addresses his skepticism. The book referenced below is apparently the one I discovered.
Dear Jonny,
I know you think it foolish for me to believe that Jesus had a collie. I know that collies come from Scotland. But is it really inconceivable that the dog could have made his way down to the Holy Land to be with our Lord and Savior? Collies have covered far greater distances, I assure you. And who is to say that Jesus did not, himself, go to Scotland, and find the dog among the heather? The Mormons believe that Jesus crossed the Atlantic Ocean to spend time in the American west, so to me it is entirely believable that He could easily have found Ruggles in the Scottish highlands and brought him down to the land of milk and honey.
I find the pictures in the book very moving. I agree that there are perhaps a couple that should not have been included. I don’t think that Jesus knew lawn bowling; I think the author and illustrator should have devoted themselves only to known events from the life of Christ. And I still believe that on the day that Jesus performed the miracle of the loaves and fishes, there were no gnaw-bones in that basket. It was not customary in that day for people to take their dogs to public events. But these are minor objections. Our Holy Savior and His Dog is a good book and I would recommend it to anyone.
People who do not understand our faith sometimes laugh. I recall that you could not hold back a chuckle when you saw the picture of Ruggles licking the face of Lazarus to help Jesus wake him from the dead. But let me assure you, that for someone who believes as strongly as I do in Jesus’s canine companion, it is no laughing matter.
It is all a matter of faith, as you can understand.
Yours,
Venetia
5. Other bizarre friendships enlivened his retirement. Author’s interview with Odger Blashette. Among those within that small subset of friends who didn’t happen to be seeking philanthropic or entrepreneurial sponsorship from Jonathan was Roger Tierney, an inmate at Washington State Correctional Center. Tierney had originally written Jonathan in error, thinking he was setting up a long-term pen-pal exchange with a Jacqueline Blasset (Not to confused with the actress Jacqueline Bisset who would have been much too young at the time to be corresponding with an incarcerated felon.) Jonathan courteously redirected the letter, but this kindness only prompted Tierney to begin corresponding with Jonathan as well, especially when he learned that his inadvertent pen pal had overcome a disability to become a leader in the male deodorant industry, and did so without breaking any laws.
Tierney’s notoriety, was, in fact, well known to Jonathan. Twenty years earlier the felon had kidnapped several contract-bridge-playing residents of the Setting Sun Senior Center in Bellingham and removed them all to a remote logging camp in British Columbia. Here the eight women were forced to participate in a grueling birling competition to the delight of Tierney and his logging buddies. The muscle-sore senior citizens were rescued by Canadian Mounties within a couple of days, and returned home safe and sound, but the crime drew Tierney stiff sentences from both the Canadian and American judicial systems, following jurisdictional wrangling that ended in joint penal custody. “It was worth it, though,” Tierney once admitted to Jonathan, “seeing them old ladies spinning those logs like the jacks do. I even noticed a smile on a couple of their rosy faces. ’Bet they never thought they’d be coming up on the end of their lives and get to roll themselves a danged log!”
6. Jonathan began to see more of Helga and less of Venetia. Author’s interview with Helga Houston. Helga was the sister of Maylene Houston Carmichael, who spent much of her adult life trying to discredit the “Refrigerator Mother” theory of autism put forth by psychologist Bruno Bettelheim and embraced by most of the members of the American psychiatric community in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary. Considered by Maylene and her supporters to be yet another misogyny-motivated attack on motherhood, Bettelheim’s belief that autistic children were created by cold and unloving mothers was never recanted by the famous psychologist and was only slowly (and one imagines, mostly reluctantly) surrendered by his colleagues. Maylene’s frustration (she was the mother of an autistic son) and rage against Bettelheim knew no bounds, and resulted in one particularly unpleasant incident in which she mailed mice feces to the him at his office at the University of Chicago’s Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School for Disturbed Children, disguised as a giftpack of gourmet peppercorns. It is not known if Bettelheim ingested them.
7. Davison often turned up in the strangest of places. There isn’t much doubt in my mind as to the identity of the older man hurling the large rock in the foreground of the photograph. The question, though, is what Davison was doing among the Peruvian demonstrators who had taken to pelting Vice President Nixon’s car with stones during his 1958 Good Will Tour gone bad. Davison’s diary is frustratingly silent on the whole episode. None of the correspondence I have examined from the period indicates why he took the side trip from Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he was scheduled to attend a meeting with South American patent officials on Jonathan’s behalf. In fact, there is no indication from any of the sources I have consulted for this period just how Davison felt about the U.S. vice president at that moment, although two years later during the 1960 presidential election he remarked that Nixon reminded him of a druggist he once knew who used to chase teenaged pocket thieves out onto the sidewalk with an extended grocer’s claw and who was also thought to have a lifelong addiction to Carter’s Pills.