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'Birthright' by Andrew Coburn

Reinventing History

Sunday, January 11, 1998

By Diana Nelson Jones, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

	Birthright By Andrew Coburn Simon & Schuster $23.00

Of the many efforts to perfect in fiction the flawed real world that makes news, Andrew Coburn's novel of the Lindbergh baby grown up is a surprising treat. Without pretense of representing a possibility, it is a fine story, with a scenario that many a lively imagination might have created out of wistful hope for closure.

Accused of the 1932 ``crime of the century,'' Richard Bruno Hauptmann insisted that he did not kidnap or kill the famous aviator's baby boy.

His relentless denial nagged at enough people to make the closing of the case seem like a door that doesn't click shut. Did Hauptmann, a German immigrant sorely lacking in American know-how, take the heat for a slicker operator who was more culpable?

Coburn plays on this rumination without giving it additional credence, inserting Hauptmann where you would expect to find him in a cast of mostly fictional characters.

Rudy Farber and Joseph ``Shell'' Shellenbach, both sons of German immigrants, grew up together in the Bronx. Rudy, a snakey sort, gravitated to the underworld.

Shell, staunch and responsible, had loyalties as dependable as gravity. He went to college and pumped gas to make ends meet.

Rudy, working for the mob, messed up a delivery of liquor and incurred the wrath of the boss. He fled, to resurface several years later working on new houses in Long Island. Hauptmann, a carpenter, was one of his construction buddies.

Meanwhile, Shell married Helen, a fragile beauty he had met in college. At that point she was at least manageably insane.

When their infant son, David, kicked himself free of Helen's grasp and landed head-first in the porcelain bathtub, Shell had only one thing in mind: Get Helen her baby back.

This baby was dead, but Rudy had a plan - kidnap the Lindbergh baby and hold it for ransom. Shell gets the kid, Rudy and Hauptmann split the money.

Hauptmann made the ladder to get into the second-floor of the Lindbergh home and wrote the ransom note that Rudy dictated. Rudy waited in a restaurant with Helen, while Shell, in the darkness, transfered his dead blond son to the

Lindbergh baby's blanket and buried it in the woods.

He wrapped the replacement David, also blond, in his baby's blanket and took it to Helen.

When the infant's body was found, it was accepted without question as the Lindbergh baby. By then, Shell and Helen had driven north to an industrial Massachusetts town and established a nervous, apartment life. He worked at a shoe store and then as a reporter at the local paper. She slid further into lunacy.

This story begins with the kidnapping and then moves back to the boyhoods of Rudy and Shell. It artfully zigzags from past to present.

With his mother in an institution, David grows up into a fair-haired golden boy, like his real father. He goes into the military and finds a woman who is more ambitious politically than her Republican bigwig father.

Her ambitions, of course, focus on David, whose own ambitions are abstruse.

The story comes to a head when Shell, who is racked with cancer, must decide whether to tell David who he really is.

Throughout this story, you never fail to care about Shell, in spite of his trespasses. In the end, this wonderful father's burden becomes a tragedy nearly equal to his crime. He bears it so nobly that, with Coburn's help, you can see him and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, who reappears at the end, uplifted as pieces of the same broken pane.

David is reflected in both pieces, but he is never the thorough character his father, or even his real mother, are to this reader.

This impression is well handled by the author, who keeps David an unfinished soul whose own future is left to the imagination.