The Dialect of the People

There was little of Flatbush left in the dark-eyed, glamour-bobbed brunette who called herself Yvette Madsen. Only a hint of Canarsie in her consonants, a touch of Gowanus in her vowels remained to mark her as plain Jane Noack, a kid born in Brooklyn 22 years ago. Yvette was glad enough to have left Jane behind.

One evening last October Yvette went to a cocktail party near Frankfurt with her husband, U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Andrew Madsen. They drank bourbon-and-Coke, played "Pass the Kleenex,"*and Yvette twitted her Georgia-born host, another U.S. officer, on his Dixie drawl. "O.K.," responded the airman good-naturedly, "how do you say it in Brook-lynese?" Sensitive Yvette slapped the joker full in the face and demanded that her husband take her home immediately. Andy Madsen, a Californian, was too busy laughing to pay much attention. He tossed her the keys to the family car, and Yvette stormed out alone.

"The Low Creature." Half an hour later, Andy followed his wife home. He was greeted by the blast of a .45, died instantly with a bullet through his heart. When (as she later testified) Yvette "heard his blood" oozing from his chest, she ran to the home of a neighbor, screaming "I shot him!" Soon afterward an Air Force MP found Andy's body in the Madsen living room close by a note written by Yvette: "I know my husband will beat me up. My only defense is to shoot him, the heel, the rat, the low creature."

Last week, before a three-judge U.S. district court in Frankfurt, Yvette stood trial for her husband's murder. Their two children (aged four and one) had been sent back to Brooklyn to stay with Yvette's mother. At Yvette's side stood her father, plain-spoken Alfred Noack, who had given up his carpenter's job to help defend his daughter. From spectators' benches in the packed courtroom, Yvette's neighbors, members like herself of the tight, bored community of Army wives self-marooned in a strange land, looked on. Some brought their knitting. Others came with detective magazines. The trial was a relief from endless bridge lunches and snack-bar gossip fests. Only now & then did they pause to give the proceedings their full attention--on those three climactic moments, for instance, when Yvette, sobbing and hysterical, fainted dead away from the effects of a four-day hunger strike.

"Gee, she don't look the type that would bump off her husband, does she?" asked one of the wives leaving court to cook supper, as Carpenter Noack carried his daughter from the courtroom. "I don't know about that," answered another. "She looks screwy to me."

"Hang Me! Hang Me!" Throughout the trial, Alfred Noack tried his best to promote the same argument in his daughter's defense. "She's absolutely insane," he told newsmen. "She doesn't want to go on living." He brought an affidavit to the same effect from Yvette's mother in Brooklyn. "She was always high-strung when she was a girl," wrote Mrs. Noack. "She had a lot of crying spells. She had tantrums. She acted like a nut." At 15, the girl had run away from home, had lived with a middle-aged merchant on Manhattan's Park Avenue.

A precise, monocled German psychiatrist attempted to convince three U.S. judges--Fred Cohn, John Speight and Herman Elegant--that Yvette was of unsound mind. Immaculate in morning coat and pinstriped trousers, Professor Karl Kleist testified that Mrs. Madsen was reacting to a deep-seated persecution complex when she shot her husband for laughing at her Brooklynese. "As far as I am informed," explained the professor, "this is the dialect of the common people. Since it revealed Mrs. Madsen's common origin, she felt insulted."

"Hang me! Hang me if you want," screamed Yvette at this final insult, "but make him stop!" "Shut up," implored her long-suffering father. After that, Yvette cut him dead. At trial's end, Judges Cohn, Speight and Elegant concluded that Yvette was undoubtedly "a psychopathic personality," but sane enough to know what she was doing. They sentenced her to 15 years in the U.S. reformatory at Alderson, W.Va.

"Well, what could you expect?" asked one of Yvette's neighbors as they flocked from the courthouse. "They should have put her away long ago. See you tonight for cocktails? O.K.?" "That's right," came the answer, "be seein' you."

*A favorite Frankfurt party icebreaker in which a man & woman kneel face to face. One crumples a sheet of Kleenex into a ball and holds it between his (or her) chin and shoulder and attempts to transfer it without the use of hands to a corresponding position on a player of the opposite sex. Only ironical rule in this organized nuzzling: participating couples must not be man & wife.

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