by Becky Cooper
We tried it on his laptop, but the bass wasn’t powerful enough to replicate the experience. “You lose everything without the low note.” So we walked into his office and stood as it played on his speakers. It was an impressive piece—baroque, eerie, powerful—an accomplishment simply to play. For almost eight minutes, we were held, spellbound. I thought I could see Don’s eyes tearing up, but I didn’t know if I just imagined it. I wanted to be able to dissolve into the scene, but I couldn’t picture where Jane was.
“If this is where the minister is, then the organ is up there,” he said, pointing above and behind us.
I turned around as if she were actually behind me. “Oh, so you couldn’t see Jane. No one could see Jane.”
“No one could see Jane unless they turned around to look at her, no. She’s just sitting on top of everyone else.”
“Do you picture her playing it when you hear—” I began to ask.
“I don’t picture anything,” Don said. It was more that he felt her life and death. Listening to it, Don said—especially the descending notes at the end—“That’s when I come closest to screaming: Why the fuck did this happen?”
Erasure and Artifacts
AFTER I LEFT DON MITCHELL, I met a friend in Phoenix so we could drive to Santa Fe, where former Peabody director Stephen Williams now lived. I knew Stephen was suffering from dementia—an erasure of a different kind—but I just wanted to be in the same room as him. As we drove through the rusty, Martian landscape of the American Southwest, it was impossible to ignore that we were surrounded by mountains of red ochre.
From the parking lot outside our hotel at the Grand Canyon, I found enough cell reception to talk to Michael Coe, the Maya scholar who had written Lee Parsons’s obituary. It was the day after his eighty-eighth birthday; he had been out celebrating till 1 a.m. in Chinatown the night before. I told him that I was writing about Jane Britton and—delicately—added that I had heard Lee and Jane were acquaintances. “I knew Lee very well,” he told me. “He was a good friend of mine. And he got sort of accused by some of his contemporaries of having perpetrated that.”
Michael and Lee met as Harvard anthropology graduate students in the late ’50s. Though Lee was already married, Michael said he might have always known that Lee was bisexual. Lee was a “wonderful guy” and a “very good archaeologist” but it always seemed like something was “bothering him or tearing him.”
Michael volunteered that Lee and Jane Britton had dated, but he was certain that Lee had nothing to do with Jane’s death. The dynamics of the department made it all too easy to suspect him. He was awkward, shy, Midwest-earnest in a department defined by the trappings of the New England elite. And though there had been at least one openly gay professor in the department, Harvard’s atmosphere was far from tolerant. (Andrew Tobias, class of ’68, described the experience of being homosexual at Harvard at the time: “We simply repressed it or faked it or lived in terror until some time after graduation.”)
Plus, he was already on rocky footing when Jane died. The position he had been hired for never materialized, largely because Lee and Stephen never got along. It was a “grim time” when Stephen was head of the department, Michael said. “He’s still alive so I don’t want to say anything libelous here. But he was not our favorite person by a long, long, long shot. He was a perfectly awful director.” And since Lee was already out of favor with the leadership of the department when the crime happened, and there were murmurs that he and Jane had been seeing each other, it was easy to scapegoat the lonely, awkward man. “You know he was the number one suspect at one point.” Only toward the end of Lee’s life did Michael ever see Lee somewhat settled in himself. Lee and his partner—“a very smart young Black man” whose name Michael could no longer recall—had come to visit him and his wife. “I think he was happy.”
Michael had to get off the phone to take some medication, and when we reached each other again, my reception was swallowed up by the Grand Canyon. We never talked about the alleged confession. Or what happened to Stephen Edward DeFilippo, Lee’s partner in St. Louis. As with Jane, the more I learned about Lee, the less I felt like I knew him. If Karl was a master storyteller, Lee was a master at disappearing. Despite how well they knew each other, Michael had told me, he had no pictures of Lee.
* * *
The road trip continued through the millennia-old great houses and petroglyphs of Chaco Canyon and the ruins of Pecos Pueblo. When my friend and I finally got to Santa Fe, we drove up the gravel roads to Stephen Williams’s house. The Williamses weren’t expecting me. I walked onto his property, looking for a front doorbell. I crossed the driveway, went through their backyard, and passed what seemed like a guesthouse. This felt like much more of an invasion than I had hoped.
Finally, I got to what might be the front door and rang the buzzer. An older woman, dressed in the manner I’d become familiar with at Harvard—elegant, but casual; her hair blond and bobbed––answered the door. It was Stephen’s wife of fifty-five years, Eunice Williams. She invited me in and made an appointment for me to come back and meet him the next day. But in a moment of impromptu generosity, she added that he was eating his supper in the next room, and that I was welcome to say a quick hello. I was tempted, but I didn’t want to disturb him. I told her I would see them both tomorrow.
But she called the next morning. It wasn’t a good time. The next day wasn’t good, either. It was never the right time. My flight to California took off before I got any closer to him than I had been that first day. I would never get the chance. Dan Potts emailed me two weeks later with the news that he had died.
* * *
I got off the train in San Jose where Elisabeth Handler, Jane’s best friend at Radcliffe, tall and thin with perfectly manicured nails, stood waiting for me outside her parked car. I liked to imagine that Jane would have been similarly stubborn about aging.
Elisabeth, who handled public relations for the city, suggested lunch at a downtown crêperie. She said she didn’t know anything about Lee Parsons, but found it plausible that Jane and Lee had dated. “I wouldn’t be surprised at all if Jane had figured out that there were advantages to her to being sexually available, like—who gets into what seminar, who goes on digs? You know? That was currency. It still is. But it was much more understood that that’s part of being a successful woman—using sex to lift you up.”
Elisabeth told me that her section leader, Karl Heider, had made a pass at her during his office hours. He sat next to her on the couch and extended his arm on the back of the seat, leaving it to rest around her shoulders. It wasn’t that Elisabeth didn’t like him. She found him attractive, but acting on it felt too dangerous. She left his office. Over the years, Elisabeth would replay that moment many times. The scene still made her cringe, but sometimes she blamed herself for not knowing how to “carry it off.”
“I think women really had the sense that somehow no matter what the outcome of an advance, that we were at fault. That somehow we either brought it on ourselves or we didn’t handle it right or it was bad of us not to want to accommodate it or bad of us to want to. You know? No matter what the outcome was, there was always the sense that it was kind of a moral failing on the woman’s part.”
She invited me back to her house after lunch and showed me pictures of her family. The middle name of her eldest daughter was Jane. As she stood in the kitchen, and I sat by the counter, we talked about Jane’s secret-keeping, and Elisabeth’s creeping suspicion that Jane was also a storyteller, an embroiderer. Her life had always seemed so much more dramatic than anyone else’s. Jane made it seem like she had fourteen boyfriends at once. Elisabeth never felt like it was her place to question the stories. She got the sense that Jane needed them. Elisabeth told me that Jane would disappear for days on end in college. She would close the blinds, exclude the world. “I have the sense that she was battling demons.”
Before I left, Elisabeth handed me the contact sheet of her wedding photographs where Jane was he
r maid of honor, and the blue aerogram paper of a letter Jane sent her from Iran. “It’s literally the happiest I ever heard her to be,” Elisabeth said. “You can have this.”
I looked at her hesitatingly, unwilling to take the original of the last letter from her best friend.
“It’s the record. You should have the record,” she insisted. “I know what artifacts mean to you, and to this story.”
Jane’s Letter to Elisabeth
Saturday 27 July 1968
Dear [Ensign +] Mrs. Ozawa—you can show it to him if you want
I understand you’re making a splash amongst the social set of gay exotic greater Needham. Fine stuff but isn’t it a bit heady? Don’t parades really grab you? I’m in off the site this afternoon, having strategically blown lunch + been grepsing (belch if you don’t speak Yiddish) all aft. PEW. All the khan’s wives, sisters + aunts are staring in the door of our chic thatch hut because Mrs. H. Arthur Bankoff just fainted. They all think she’s pregnant, ha-ha-ha. (She ain’t.) Did you get my first letter, E? The one with the NEWS—or maybe my parents told you. Essentially, I will repeat; you remember the large Canadian?
HE LOVES ME
Fancy that. That + the night sky are about the only two saving graces about this place. September-December are going to be hell (Jim’s going off to Baluchistan) and I’d stay drunk the entire time if I didn’t have to study for generals. I am getting very skinny since meals around here are a real ratfuck. Also malnourishing. When I think that a month and a half ago I was having tournedos at the Savoy my tum rebels even further. […] Known him well 5 months + he does stuff like, walks to Covent Garden 530AM + wakes me at 7 with an armload of flowers. […] There’s only one fly in the ointment:
James is 26
James’ father is 80
James’ father’s father was 62 when James’ father was born.
Bodes ill—like I told parents, I’ll probably waste my youth on this chap only to have him run off with some sweet young thing because I’ll be too old to have kids. SIGH. Maybe he’ll break precedent, though (hope, hope.) NB—do not ever buy a small camp bed. They are DANGEROUS and bend at a weight of precisely 320 pounds. UGH. I smell onions frying BLEUGHH, 3 others sick, in here + farting up a storm. Pleasant, no.
Nothing else to say except hang loose + have a pastrami sandwich, gingerbread with whipped cream, a Hershey bar, chocolate malt, cheeseburger, steak + baked potato with sour cream, Brigham’s sundae, quart of milk, + a cup of real coffee for me.
Best + cheers,
J
P.S. I should be home about 20 Sept—you be around?
Boyd in Person
THE DOORBELL OF MY COUSINS’ house in Los Angeles rang before I was expecting it to. I ran out of the side gate, and there Boyd was—short and a little heavyset, his gray hair combed back—facing the main entrance.
“Hello!” I said, louder than I normally would, to draw his attention.
He turned toward me, and I was caught off guard by the intensity of seeing Jane’s face in his. I didn’t think I knew Jane’s face that well, but the familiarity of Boyd’s could only be explained by the fact that I knew hers in some fundamental way—the roundness, the button tip of the nose, the impish grin. He was wearing a black button-down and a clerical collar.
“It’s nice to meet you!” he said, more cheerfully than I’d expected. “I got here a little early—can’t trust the 405.”
He climbed into his silver-gray Nissan and reached over to unlock my door. “This is the cheapest car you can buy with air-conditioning,” he said, still a little out of breath from the exertion, “and one of the ways you can keep the cost down is one keyhole.” I took my seat and tried to ignore the mysterious itch on my legs that started the second I got into the car. No-see-ums, I later learned—biting flies so small they’re nearly invisible.
His life was radically different from the comfortable one he had grown up in, where they stayed in the Plaza on every trip to New York. A wooden cross hung from his rearview mirror. “Forgive the costume,” he said. “I would not have dressed this way but for the fact that I have to work tonight.”
The plan was to drive up to Santa Barbara, where he was the vicar for the Anglican Church of Our Savior. It was a midweek service for Ascensiontide, Boyd explained, to mark forty days after Easter—the second of three Christian miracles, when Jesus ascended after his resurrection.
It was a two-hour ride, and we settled into the rhythm I had become familiar with from our phone calls. I would ask a question, and he’d monologue for minutes at a time. It was both of our most natural states. He reminded me of a character in an S. J. Perelman story: formal and wry and belonging to a different time. “Burying the needle,” he’d say about testing how fast his father’s Chrysler would go. The wit, the vocabulary, the references to famous people and plays and books I’d never heard of but felt too ashamed to admit. “Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud hatch out,” he bellowed. I nodded. It kept me off balance. I had the impression that some of it was for my benefit—a kind of performance to impress me with his cleverness—and some of it was just to keep him entertained, since maybe my timid questions weren’t doing the trick. Most of all, though, it left little space for vulnerability and reflection. Boyd was never going to let himself play the role of the grieving brother that was expected of him.
“You’ll find me, if I live long enough, out in Barstow in the state veterans’ home, a cranky old man who can’t feel his feet. Now I wake up every morning, a bit annoyed that God hasn’t done it overnight.”
We talked sometimes about Jane, but mostly about everything else. Trump. LA’s war on homelessness. His childhood. “None of these people were bad. But people can wind up being bad for one another.” His poor track record with women. There was the married stripper, the spokesmodel, and the quart-a-day alcoholic. The “Bipolar Bear.” The one who woke up from a coma and thought she was “Almighty God.” The Mormon. The one with the dog that was half coyote. Maybe the last two were the same. His favorite story was about bringing home his stripper girlfriend to meet his parents. Boyd’s mother took him aside and said, trying to be encouraging, “We think Judith is very nice. Do you want my diamonds?” “No,” Boyd said. “Her husband thinks she’s very nice, too.”
We talked about his addiction history—at the height of his DJ years he drank, did coke and meth—and getting sober. His return to faith. He was forthcoming, but not sentimental. I felt I needed to ask him three questions about anything else to earn myself one question about Jane. And when he did speak about her, there was sometimes a fondness, but little softness. I asked if Jane reminded him of Dorothy Parker, as Elisabeth had said. “There were the out-of-place romances and the out-of-place intellectual, but Dottie Parker had a productive talent. My sister really did not.”
The closest Boyd got to admitting how much her death affected him was when he relayed a dream he’d had after she died. He was with his parents when Jane showed up. “I was trying to say in the dream, ‘Why is she here?’ and everybody said, ‘We don’t talk about that.’ We didn’t talk about what happened between us, and we didn’t talk about why she was back to life.”
We drove toward the ocean and then along it, two hours up the coast to Ventura and beyond.
* * *
“Here we are, La Colina.” We were in the parking lot of a Catholic high school.
He got out of the car and walked around to my side to open the door. Then he grabbed his binder of sermons from the backseat and brushed his hair with a pocket comb. For the past few years, he’d suffered from neuropathy, which made the tips of his fingers and toes tingle, so he walked carefully. He pulled out the key to the chapel, and we entered a room with wall-to-wall mauve carpeting and mauve chairs for pews and mauve kneeling blocks. The altar was made of rose-colored marble. The room smelled vaguely like incense. We walked past the pews to a hallway beyond.
“Am I allowed to come in here?” I asked.
He said yes. It was a sm
all room, about the size of a pantry. He pulled out a loose-fitting white robe from the closet. It’s called a cotta, he said. “Since I was known as The Leakin’ Deacon by the amount I perspire, I talked the bishop into letting me wear this somewhat lighter garment.”
He unwrapped a large gold cup. The chalice. “This is called the purificator,” he said, pointing to a small white linen cloth, which he folded carefully in thirds. “This is the paten”—a shallow plate—“and then we put on top of it, the pall.” He demonstrated by covering the plate with the stiff cover.
It struck me how much Jane would have liked all this. All the vocabulary, the symbols, the hidden meanings. She wasn’t religious, but on the ride up Boyd had told me that Jane loved Roman Catholic mass because it was so full of ritual.
In another world, where Jane was still alive, she would have just gone through her own ritual: her fiftieth reunion for Radcliffe. Instead of the cotta, Jane would have worn her own robe—the crimson-and-black stripes of a doctorate. She would be processing through Harvard Yard with the rest of the class of 1967. The thirtieth reunion students would join behind them, the twenty-fifth reunion behind that, and so on, until finally, the students of the class of 2017 rounded out the line. Then the bells would chime in the distance, and as the procession snaked around, the fiftieth reunion would end up parallel to the 2017 part of the line, and future and past would be standing next to each other. (Or, if we’re being more realistic, Jane would have been in a rented convertible with Elisabeth Handler, blowing off the reunion entirely, heading to Revere Beach.)