by Ed Ifkovic
None of it did any good. I watched a Hearst Metrotone Pathé newsreel in the theater one night, but had to leave—the shots of Anna Hauptmann and her little boy, Manfred, were too heartbreaking.
On the night he died, crowds massed at Trenton, anticipating the death. In his cell, with his writing desk, cot, sink, toilet, and photographs of Anna and Bubi on the wall, he’d been kept apart from the other six inmates waiting for death…He spent days pacing, pacing, pacing. His head was shaved, his khaki pants leg slit. His skin was pale, his eyes sunken, a skinny cadaver now. He prayed on his knees, and told the guard: “I am at peace with my God and I am not sorry to leave a world that does not understand me.” They walked him out, a dead man walking, strapped him into a chair, covered his face with a mask to hide facial distortions, and the executioner turned the wheel. Three electric shocks of 2,000 volts. A sudden snap of straps cracking. A wisp of smoke. He was dead.
The New York Times: “Hauptmann Remains Silent to the End.”
At the Stacey Trent and Hildebredt Hotels nearby, people partied, sang, danced, got drunk.
That night I didn’t sleep.
***
I’d kept in contact with Cora Thomas; the two of us chatting on the phone, a warm regard developing between us. She was always hesitant in our brief telephone talks, and she always thanked me too much. But over time we developed a careful and wonderful liking for each other, and I understood how important our talks were.
In June Cody Lee Thomas went on trial for murdering Annabel, and the young lawyer Amos Blunt stayed with the case, though his calls to me were pessimistic and disheartening. The prosecutor was a rabid firebrand, a hell-and-brimstone yeller. The defense managed to cast some doubt on the two witnesses who insisted Cody Lee was at Annabel’s room that night, but it wasn’t enough. And the old farmer who swore that he saw Cody Lee pulling into the driveway of the farmhouse just before seven was subjected to intense and scattershot cross examination.
“No, I seen him,” the old man said. “With my own two eyes.”
But the prosecutor hammered at him, attempting to blemish his life.
“You were in a mental hospital, right?”
The old man nodded. “Yes, a short time after the war. The Spanish-American. I was with Roosevelt…I…”
‘How many times?”
“A couple.”
“That’s two?”
“Maybe three.”
“Three.”
He became so rattled he blubbered on the stand, and his hesitations doomed his testimony.
When Cora testified about being with her son, the prosecutor was deferential, but managed to convey to the jury that a mother’s love is blind and false and—ruthless. Cora wept on the stand, babbled that Cody Lee had his problems, yes, but he was a good boy. A good boy.
I wanted to testify—to introduce what Marcus Wood had told me, but I realized, especially after talking with Amos, that my words would only make matters worse. The crazy lady from the Hauptmann trial. Folks recalled the incendiary Liberty article that talked of my own hallucinations. Hang her. Hang him.
The jury convicted him.
***
During the first week of December I booked two rooms at the Stacy Trent Hotel in Trenton, one for Cora and one for me. Early Monday morning, despite a swirling snowstorm that shut down the roads, Cora and I took a long walk around the hotel. A cold morning, no one out. A snowplow lumbered through an intersection up ahead. Freezing, silent, we walked. At eight o’clock, chilled, we sat in my room having coffee and biscuits. At ten o’clock, Cora went into the bathroom and changed into a black dress, old-fashioned, with filigreed lace around the bodice, a dress that sagged at the knee on one side, a tear at the hip that revealed her silk slip. She sat opposite me in a chair by the window as we watched the furious snow falling. Wind slammed the windows of the seventh floor. Though the room was overheated, I shook from the cold.
At one point I stared out the window. Drifts swept up the side of the buildings, buried the fenders of parked cars. A cold morning. Dumbly, I thought of that first morning back in Flemington when I walked behind the Union Hotel and spotted Cody Lee and Annabel having their quarrel in the parking lot. A shadow haunted me. Watching, watching. Blake Somerville planning and loving the horrible moment. Well, Bruno was dead.
Now, looking back at Cora, I trembled. When I closed my eyes, I imagined a shock of electricity piercing my head, my soul. I cried out loud.
At twenty minutes after ten o’clock my phone jangled.
Cora Lee watched me closely, her breath short.
I heard Amos Blunt’s sad and dreadful voice.
I hung up the phone as Cora stood, tugged at the ill-fitting black dress, her body spinning like a dervish, her eyes wide with pain and fright, as she fell into my arms.
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