JOHN ALLMAN
The Kidnapping
Grandmother left her youngest child, Alice, with a
neighbor
on the top
floor because she was moving
into another building where she could be the Super. She didn't
want the baby in the middle of all that mess. Her husband, Blackie,
driving up
and down Tenth Avenue,
delivering electrical supplies—plugs, cords,
little relay boxes like
the black
recorders plucked years later
from drowned airliners, a voice behind Blackie already saying,
"We're going down, we're going down!" The neighbor disappeared
with Alice.
No note, no nothing. Just
the empty apartment. Blackie had a few more drinks
near the docks
on Twelfth
Avenue, near the German
freighters, talking about the Lindbergh baby. Burly men grew misty
eyed and cursed Bruno Hauptmann. The newsreel ran on and on.
After mother
grew up and married the ex-
bootleg driver with the melancholy face, maybe she
thought her
sister could
be recovered
if she named her own daughter Alice. The baby growing into a
pigtailed girl inside my sister, who woke nights afraid she couldn't
breathe, who
sleepwalked
toward the kitchen window with the loose pane that
popped out
the next morning
and floated down
into the alley like a transparent soul the neighbors looked through
before it crashed near the Super sweeping up clothespins and bottle caps.
Whose hand
was it in art class drew
the little house with the smoking chimney and three
children
instead of
two, arms and legs spread
out, spinning in the air? Who first bled through bargain cotton
panties? My sister clawing at her face, something pinching her
abdomen, twisting
up an eye. 
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