More than books saved young Jonathan, however. His grandmother brought him a German Shepherd (police) pup. The child loved it, talked to it, fed it, brushed it, and threw the ball for it in the big backyard. Jonathan insisted on naming the male pup Fenris, after the monstrous wolf in Norse mythology. Fenris was the first of a long line of German Shepherds, Somers’ favorite breed. Today, Fenris IX, a two-year-old, is Somers’ devoted companion.
There is no doubt that Somers modeled his fictional dog, Ralph von Wau Wau, upon his own pet. Or is there no doubt? The Bellener Street Irregulars insist that there is a real von Wau Wau. In fact, Somers is not the real author of the series of tales about this Hamburg police dog who became a private eye. The Irregulars maintain that Somers is only the literary agent for Johann H. Weisstein, Dr. Med., and for Cordwainer Bird, the two main narrators in the Wau Wau series. Weisstein and Bird are the real authors.
When asked about this, Somers only replied, “I am not at liberty to discuss the matter.”
“Are the Irregulars wrong then?”
“I would hesitate to say that they are in error.”
So, perhaps, Somers is really only the agent for Ralph’s colleagues.
There is one objection to this belief. How could Weisstein and Bird have written true stories about their life with Ralph since these stories took place in the future? The dog’s first adventure took place in 1978, yet this appeared in the March 1931 issue of the magazine, Outré Tales. (“A Scarletin Study” was reprinted in the March 1975 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.)
Somers’ answer: “There are such people as seers and science fiction writers. Both are able to look into the future. Besides, to paraphrase Pontius Pilate, ‘What is Time?’”
Another of the bright lights that kept him from becoming overwhelmed by gloom was Edward Hill. This man was the brother of the same Doctor Hill who had pulled Jonathan through his sickness. Edward, however, had chosen the career of artist. Though he managed to sell some of his landscape paintings now and then, he needed extra money. At Doctor Hill’s suggestion, Mrs. Somers hired him to tutor Jonathan in mathematics and chemistry. Later, Edward gave lessons in painting. During the warm months, he would put Jonathan and Fenris in his buggy, and the three would travel to a hillside or the riverbank and spend the day there. Jonathan would paint with Edward’s eye on his progress or lack thereof. But they did much more than work at their pallets. Edward would bring insects and snakes to Jonathan and expound on their place in the ecosystem of Petersburg and environs.
These were some of the happiest days of young Somers’ life. It was a terrible blow when Edward died the following year of typhoid fever.
Jonathan might have slid into the sorrow from which Edward Hill had rescued him if he had not met Henry Hone. Henry was the son of Neville Hone, a chiropractor who had just moved to Petersburg. A year older than Jonathan, he was a big happy-go-lucky boy, though he too suffered from a handicap. He stammered. Perhaps it was this that drew him to Jonathan, since misery is supposed to love company. But Henry, ignoring his verbal disadvantage, was very gregarious. He played long and hard after school with his schoolmates, and he did well in his classes. It was not shyness that made him spend so much time with Jonathan. It must have been a sort of elective affinity, a natural magnetism of the two.
The fact that he was Jonathan’s next-door neighbor helped. He would often drop in after school or come over to spend part of Saturday. And it was he who got young Somers started with physical therapy. He talked Mrs. Somers into building a set of bars and trapezes in the backyard and constructing a little house on the branch of the giant sycamore in the corner of the yard. Every day Jonathan would haul himself out of his wheelchair by going hand over hand up a rope. At its top he would transfer to a horizontal bar and thence up and down and across a maze of iron pipes. In addition, he would pull himself up a rope which was let through a hole in the floor of the treehouse. A seat was built for him inside the treehouse, and in it he would look through a telescope at the neighborhood.
Moreover, the bars and the treehouse attracted other children. Jonathan no longer was forced to be alone; he had more companions than he could handle.
If Henry Hone aided Jonathan Somers much, Jonathan reciprocated. One of the many things that interested Jonathan was the artificial language, Esperanto. By the age of twelve he had taught himself to read fluently in it. But, wishing to be verbally facile, he enlisted Henry. At first, Henry refused because of his stammer. But Jonathan insisted, and, much to Henry’s joy, he found that he could speak Esperanto without stammering. Both boys became adept in the language and for a while a number of their playmates tried to learn Esperanto, too. These dropped out after the initial enthusiasm wore out. But Henry and Jonathan continued.
On entering high school, Henry took German and found that in this language, too, his stammer disappeared. It was this that determined Henry to go into linguistics. Eventually, he got a Ph.D. in Arabic at the University of Chicago. He continued to correspond with his friend, in Esperanto, though he never returned to Petersburg after 1930. His last letter (in English) was from North Africa, sent shortly before he was killed with Patton’s forces.
It was Henry who talked Jonathan into attending high school instead of staying home to be tutored. Arrangements were made to accommodate Jonathan, and in 1928 he graduated. This decision to go to high school kept Jonathan from becoming a deep introvert. He made many friends; he even dated a few times in his senior year.
A photograph of him taken just before his illness hangs on the wall of his study. It shows a smiling ten-year-old with curly blond hair, thick dark and straight eyebrows, large dark blue eyes, and a snub nose. Another picture, shot about six months after his attack of infantile paralysis, shows a thin hollow-cheeked face with dark shadows under the eyes and brooding shadows in the eyes. But his high school graduation photograph reveals a young man who has made an agreement with life. He will not sorrow about his lot; he’ll make the best of it, doing better than most men with two good legs.
After getting his diploma, Jonathan thought about attending college. The University of Chicago attracted him, especially since his good friend Henry Hone was there. But that summer his grandmother broke her hip by falling out of a tree while picking cherries. Not wishing to leave her until she was well, Jonathan embarked on a series of studies designed to give him the equivalent of a university degree in the liberal arts and one in science. A room was fitted with laboratory equipment so he could perform the requisite experiments in chemistry and physics. He also took correspondence courses in electrical and mechanical engineering and in radio. He became a radio ham, and when he had a powerful set installed, he talked to people all over the world.
Jonathan had decided at the age of ten that he would be a writer of fiction. This determination firmed while he was reading Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. He too would pen tales about strong men who voyaged to distant and exotic places. If he could not go himself in electrical submarines or swing through jungle trees or fly dirigibles or journey in spaceships, he would travel by proxy, via his fictional characters.
When he was seventeen he wrote a novel in which the aging Captain Nemo and Robur the Conqueror fought a great battle. This was rejected by twenty publishers. Jonathan put the manuscript in the proverbial trunk. But he has recently rewritten it and found a purchaser with the first submission. The Nautilus Versus the Albatross will appear under the nom de plume of Gideon Spilett. For those who may have forgotten, Spilett was the intrepid reporter for The New York Herald whose adventures are recounted in Verne’s The Mysterious Island.