The office was the opposite of bustling. None of the detectives were around, and the quiet cast a strange pall over the place. Then the phone rang. Larry Doran, chief of detectives, was on the line. He told Cohen that a local man had gone “berserk on River Road and was shooting people,” which was why every police officer was out of the office. He also told Cohen that Unruh was alive and in custody after his twenty-minute rampage.
Cohen walked over to the police station to interview the mass shooter and found him cooperative. “It was a horrible, revolting narrative,” Cohen recalled in a 1974 interview. “He really gave it cold, cut-and-dry. There was no attempt to conceal or be furtive. He didn’t seem to experience the normal relief of getting it off his chest. There was no remorse, no tears. There was a lack of all emotion.”
Over the two or so hours he spoke with Cohen, Unruh was concealing something. When Cohen realized what it was, he was stunned. “What really convinced me that [Unruh] was terribly insane was when he got up after two hours and his chair was covered with blood…. He had been shot and wasn’t even aware of it.” Unruh was sent to a nearby hospital to recuperate, and Cohen interrogated him further upon his recovery from the bullet wound.
One month after the massacre, Cohen released the psychiatric reports he’d ordered on Unruh to the public. Unruh had been ruled clinically insane, and therefore not competent to stand trial. And so the deaths of thirteen people and the injuries of many more were never properly accounted for in court. Unruh didn’t go free. He would spend the rest of his life in mental institutions in and around Trenton. But for those who survived the massacre, who attended hearing after hearing to ensure Unruh was never released, it did not seem like proper justice. He died in 2009 at the age of eighty-eight, just one month after Charles Cohen, the last survivor of the massacre, died.
Unruh’s “Walk of Death” also seemed to foreshadow Camden’s deeper decline. “It’s something you never really forget…. You take extra precautions to protect your family and your property,” Paul Schopp, a former director of the Camden County Historical Society, said in an interview to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the mass shooting. “He didn’t just rob them of their lives. He robbed them of their essence.” The trauma of a mass shooting, and a collective desire to forget, seems like the true beginning of Camden’s downward slope.
Twelve
Across America by Oldsmobile
Vladimir Nabokov finished the 1948–1949 academic year at Cornell University in a state of irritation. He hadn’t found much time to write. He fumed over cuts and changes made without his permission by the New York Times Book Review to his review of Jean-Paul Sartre’s La Nausée, which he had submitted in March. His finances were depleted: Nabokov hadn’t budgeted for unexpected housing costs and the added expense of Social Security (what he termed “old-age insurance”) taken out of his monthly salary. And he was exhausted from teaching a full load of English and Russian literature undergraduate classes, exacerbated by the extra work he’d inflicted upon himself by translating a pivotal Russian poetic masterpiece, “The Song of Igor’s Campaign,” for one of those classes.
Nabokov had, at least, completed another two chapters of his memoir, Conclusive Evidence, both of which were published later that year in the New Yorker. He did love teaching, and Cornell proved to be more amenable to his idiosyncrasies than Wellesley. But he couldn’t resist complaining: “I have always more to do than I can fit into the most elastic time, even with the most careful packing,” he wrote his friend Mstislav Dobuzhinsky in the spring of 1949. “At the moment I am surrounded by the scaffoldings of several large structures on which I have to work by fits and starts and very slowly.”
Lolita, which he still thought of as The Kingdom by the Sea, was less a work in progress than a seed in Nabokov’s mind, one that wasn’t quite ready to germinate. Perhaps he would make a beautiful work on his summer trip—another cross-country jaunt with Véra and Dmitri. They said goodbye to the Plymouth that had carried them all the way to Palo Alto, California, in 1941, and hello to a used black 1946 Oldsmobile. Dorothy Leuthold, who had shared the driving with Véra eight years earlier, wasn’t available, and neither were two other friends, Andree Bruel and Vladimir Zenzinov. But one of Nabokov’s Russian literature students, Richard Buxbaum, volunteered, and the Nabokovs picked him up at Canandaigua on June 22.
Their first destination was Salt Lake City, where Nabokov was to take part in a ten-day writers’ conference at the University of Utah starting on July 5. But their westward journey almost ended a few miles from Canandaigua, when Véra changed lanes on the highway and narrowly missed plowing into an oncoming truck. Pulling over, she turned to Buxbaum and said: “Perhaps you’d better drive.”
With Buxbaum now behind the wheel, the group traveled south of the Great Lakes and across Iowa and Nebraska. The Nabokovs spoke Russian and encouraged Buxbaum to do the same, chiding him when he lapsed into English. Vladimir was never without his notebook, ready to record all observations, however minuscule, of quotidian American life on the road, be it overheard conversation at a restaurant or vivid impressions of the landscape. They arrived in Salt Lake City on July 3, two days before the conference’s start, and were lodged at a sorority house, Alpha Delta Phi, where the Nabokovs had a room with a private bath—a pivotal part of his participation agreement.
The conference introduced Nabokov to writers he might not have otherwise met, including John Crowe Ransom, the poet and critic who founded and edited the Kenyon Review; and Ted Geisel, a few years away from children’s book superstardom as Dr. Seuss, whom Nabokov recalled as “a charming man, one of the most gifted people on this list.” He also got reacquainted with Wallace Stegner, whom he’d first met at Stanford. Nabokov and Stegner spent the conference debating each other in the novel workshops and in the off-hours playing doubles on the tennis courts, with their sons as partners.
Nabokov did not have much time to idle, though. He taught three workshops on the novel, one on the short story, and another on biography. He took part in a reading with several poets, and repurposed an old lecture on Russian literature under a new title, “The Government, the Critic, and the Reader.” When the conference ended on July 16, he, Véra, Dmitri, and Richard Buxbaum headed north to the Grand Tetons in Wyoming.
Nabokov, once more, was game to hunt more butterflies. But Véra was worried. The Teton Range, she had heard, was a haven for grizzly bears. How would Vladimir protect himself against them carrying a mere butterfly net? Nabokov wrote to the lepidopterist Alexander Klots for advice; Klots assured him that Grand Teton was “just another damned touristed-out National Park.” Any danger would come from clueless visitors, not ravenous bears.
From there the quartet headed to Jackson Hole, where Nabokov wanted to look for a particularly elusive subspecies of butterfly, Lycaeides argyrognomon longinus. On the way the Oldsmobile blew a tire. As Dmitri and Richard started changing it, Nabokov said, “I’m no use to you,” and spent the next hour catching butterflies. They arrived the following day, around July 19. For the next month and a half, the Nabokovs’ home base was the Teton Pass Ranch, at the foot of the mountain range. Nabokov’s hunt for his coveted butterfly subspecies proved successful.