Read Online IBID by Mark Dunn - Free Book Online

parties sometimes degenerated into giggly orgies of lust and “just plain undignified tomfoolery”) would risk expulsion.
    Ironically, it was here in Chucking that Jonathan met one of the enduring loves of his life, a pocked syphilitic former prostitute named Great Jane.
    3. “She is the earth, the moon and the stars.” Though never allowing Jonathan to consummate their relationship, there is no doubt that Great Jane did permit him to hand her his heart. Nor is there any doubt that she felt the same. Such a love many have found inexplicable. Lucianne Flom in her study of love, romance and venereal disease,
A Canker of the Heart
(New York: Koppelman Publishers, 1990), offers the following stab: that Jonathan, being somewhat the social misfit himself, given his disability, identified with others who viewed the world through a slightly skewed lens, and it is entirely plausible that such empathy might in a special circumstance extend itself to romantic attachment. I believethat Jonathan’s feelings for Great Jane went much deeper than simple romantic attachment. To call the two soul mates would not be a far-reaching assessment.
    4. “Jonny, give me paradise!” Ibid., 125. Great Jane was misheard. What she actually said was, “Jonny, give me a pair of dice!” The diseased ex-hooker loved craps almost as much as she loved Jonathan.
    5. Two months passed before Jonathan found the courage to mention Great Jane to his mother. The reference was strategically buried within the letter Jonathan sent home on November 2, 1905, an excerpt of which follows. JBP.
    “I am quite the diligent one when it comes to my studies, and my marks have been very good. Yet, I am not at all the proverbial dull boy and do spend some time in recreation with my mates. I have been learning to swing the tennis racquet upon the grassy patch that serves as makeshift tennis court here. Football is too rough-and-tumble for me, but I have a good arm for playing third base and I am happy that autumn has made a delayed appearance this year. We have a chef who once served a British earl in India and his offerings are quite exotic and flavorful. I am not a glutton but I do so enjoy the food here, as well as the company of a girl named Jane, backgammon, reading Owen Wister novels and lively conversation.
    I hope all is well with you and Father. Has his elbow healed?”
    6. Jonathan displayed a knack for making easy friendships with some of the other students. Jonathan befriended even the terminally friendless among the residents of Orville House. This group included Jiminy Crutch, a mestizo wholived in fear of squirrels, and thus found himself constantly confronted by them in his bed, wardrobe, and dresser—placed there by the more mischievous among his dormitory mates. Young Jiminy won abundant sympathy and support from Jonathan, who encouraged the quaking, stuttering young man, to shake hands with his fear and turn it to positive use. Following Jonathan’s advice, Jiminy went on to become the nation’s foremost expert on squirrel aggression, and in 1941 was awarded the prestigious Van Weems Small Mammal Research Prize for his paper on the infamous 1826 Hamilton County, Indiana, squirrel migration—an aberration of nature that residents of Noblesville still speak of today. Contemporary accounts note that thousands of squirrels one morning decided to move
en masse
across the county. Swimming like otters across the picturesque White River, and foraging voraciously along the way, the squirrels were met by angry club-wielding farmers at every turn. The devastation wreaked by the two-week rampage took months to repair. Cordell Glover,
Three Legs, One Heart
, 45-48; Belva Curry, “On the Move”
Sciuridae; Journal of the American Squirrel,
1952, No. 4, 366-75
    7. Jonathan sold ads for the little literary journal; his friend Finley Sanders offered illustrations. A passionate anti-war socialist, Jonathan’s artistic college chum Finley Sanders was to gain some