We Keep the Dead Close

by Becky Cooper

  * * *

  We took the coastal highway back to LA, avoiding the back roads and agricultural lands of Ventura County.

  Boyd described the pattern of his romantic life like this: “In my head, there was a bell, which basically was the bullshit alarm, and once it started ringing, you ignored it at your peril, and you couldn’t shut it off. So that spoiled some relationships. And of course the other was the invisible sign, but I’m convinced it was there—flashing on and off like bright neon—it was very visible both to good and bad women. The good were prone to avoid it, the bad were raring to go. Because it says in giant letters, CHUMP. CHUMP. CHUMP.” He could see the situation from the third person and yet was helpless to change it. Maybe part of him didn’t want to. With the wrong women, at least there was always “the escape clause,” as he called it. He could always say it had been doomed from the start.

  And then, Boyd’s facade cracked for a moment: “The one thing I miss, or never got enough of, is a rare and precious quality in a relationship, and that’s tenderness. A trust, a feeling that nothing is a threat. The feeling that no demands are being made. There are no expectations. You like it the way it is.”

  My heart dropped a bit. I knew that quiet feeling of happiness he was describing because I so longed for it. I had felt a version of it with Jay. He had seen all the shards of myself that I usually only let people see a fraction of at any given moment—and he held them. But it made me ache all the more with the desire to be loved by someone whom I loved in turn.

  “And the real heartbreaking part of the story, well I mean it’s all heartbreaking, but the part that just adds an extra edge of horror to it is that she had really found a good guy,” I heard Elisabeth saying to me. Jane had found tenderness. The flowers at 5:30 a.m. in London. Their cots pulled next to each other in the Iranian desert. “She was really happy for the first time.”

  Finally, after more than seven hours together, Boyd voluntarily turned the conversation to Jane’s murder.

  “As I think about it now, my two questions are always the same: Who did it?…And, would she have been happy? Perhaps because my own deal with happiness is that it’s overrated—I find it in little pieces, in little moments, not in the grand plan—I don’t think she would have been…People did not satisfy her expectations very well.”

  He turned on his headlights as we headed into the hills of LA to my cousins’ house. I asked if he would be willing to see me again before I left the city. He was unwilling to pin down a date but also didn’t say no.

  “It’d be nice to look at any family photos or letters you still had, if you wouldn’t mind sharing,” I added.

  “If I can find them,” he said. “I might have been in a to-hell-with-my-past mood and ditched a bunch of it.” All he had now, he said, was probably one letter from Jane in Iran, and his mother’s travel journal from their 1960 European tour.

  He parked in my cousins’ driveway. “We’ll figure something out,” he said, softening a bit. He let me out of the car, and I thanked him for the day. The car door failed to shut tightly behind me.

  “Slam it hard,” Boyd said, and the moment was over.

  Family Silence

  AFTER JANE DIED, BOYD TRIED to settle back into life in Needham. It had always been a quiet, stiff house, but now it was insufferably so. Nobody talked about what had happened. His father went back to work at Radcliffe and fielded parents’ concerns about their daughters’ safety. He would not mention his own daughter in his replies to them. His mother was consumed with grief. “Everything was gloomy. Everything was involved with her pain, and everything was involved with her still feeling that nothing was ever right.” Boyd felt completely suffocated. There was no room to move.

  Though Jane’s parents were high-profile enough to make sure their daughter’s murder was fully investigated, their carefully tended status in that elite society depended on upholding those institutions. Whatever their private beliefs may have been, they let their silence speak for them instead: The police would get it solved; Harvard was innocent.

  Jane’s father, J. Boyd, had gotten the job at Radcliffe in the first place because the Cabots of Cabot Corporation were on the board of Harvard. When they heard that J. Boyd had gotten a hernia shoveling snow, and was going to have to retire from Cabot Corp., they told him not to worry. J. Boyd, who had no experience in academia, was suddenly the vice president of one of the best colleges in the country.

  Boyd knew the rich took care of their own. He also knew that as long as you don’t embarrass them was the unspoken second half of that sentence.

  Jane’s father may have been well connected to the upper crust of Boston, but he wasn’t of that class. He had been invited in. J. Boyd had grown up in St. Louis, Missouri, and for a time he played the banjo in dance bands on the riverboats. He had worked his way up Cabot Corporation, first in sales, then management. He married a woman in Springfield, Illinois, and had two children, Charlie and Susan. Susan was born with cerebral palsy. He had just divorced Charlie and Susan’s mother when he met Ruth Reinert on a business trip to California. She was from a wealthier family in Wisconsin and was teaching at Scripps. They soon married, and she moved with him to Massachusetts.

  The social self-consciousness of the Brittons couldn’t be exaggerated. After Boyd embarrassed them by leaving Princeton for the second time and announced that he was going to head to California to work in radio, they told him to call up a guy in Watertown. The next thing Boyd knew, he was taking a physical exam for the army. While other parents were doing everything they could to keep their children out of Vietnam, the Brittons had cleared all the paperwork for him.

  Boyd’s deployment was scheduled for late November 1968. His parents took him to the airport. J. Boyd shook his hand. “I hope they send you to the peace talks,” he said. His mother burst into tears. Boyd couldn’t remember if Jane came to the airport. The goodbye that made the biggest impression on Boyd was a hug from Jane’s Dana Hall friend Tess Beemer, whom he happened to run into in the Square just before setting off. Tess would remember the hug fifty years later, too. “Oh my goodness, I haven’t had a hug like that…” Tess remembered Boyd had said. She trailed off.

  Boyd stayed with friends in San Francisco waiting for his flight number to come up. The morning he left Oakland for Vietnam, the Byrds’ “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” kept playing on the radio.

  Then, just three months later, Boyd was back in Needham. His family had called in some favors and gotten him compassionate reassignment. But Boyd had had no say in that decision; it was made because sending him back to war would further devastate his mother. Once again, Boyd felt like a puppet.

  Now, not only was their daughter dead, but if they pushed for investigation, there was the indignity of her reputation being besmirched in death and the risk of being thrown out by the elite circles that formed their community. As Elisabeth said, “I had the feeling they would almost have preferred not to know what happened.”

  * * *

  The silence became its own kind of poison.

  Boyd got the “one job I never wanted,” handing out posthumous medals to the families of soldiers killed in Vietnam. One woman lived in a brick basement apartment in Southie. He had to tell her that her only son was gone. She never stopped weeping. Another family up in Andover had so many kids, it seemed like they barely noticed the loss.

  Boyd was so eager to get out of town he even put in some long-distance calls to Saigon to reserve a slot for himself on Armed Forces Network radio. Going back to war was preferable to staying in Needham. One night, the suffocation finally became too much. “Nothing’s ever going to be right,” he screamed. “I have no purpose in being here because I can’t make it right.” Boyd stormed away from the dinner table, and he left for the West Coast as soon as he could. “If anything I regret having done in my life, it was having had no other way to deal with my mother than to get the hell away from her,” Boyd reflected.

  A couple of years after Jane’s deat
h, Ruth developed cancer. “Her end was deeply sad,” Boyd would remember. She had been a lifelong smoker, but Boyd was absolutely certain that heartbreak was to blame. Doctors operated to take out the lung tumor, but they botched the surgery and left her in permanent pain. It was unrelievable except with strong opiates. The cancer came back as a metastasized tumor on her brain, the “size and shape of a small pancake,” which caused dementia.

  “She continued to decline physically, medically, mentally for the next eight years and I stayed away. I didn’t want any part of it. ‘I’m sorry you’re dying. I’m sorry you’re unhappy. But you never were happy that I remember much about. Sorry I disappointed you.’”

  Boyd’s father, in contrast, rarely left her hospital bedside. He did needlepoint and waited for the end. Ruth’s one request was that he never put her in a nursing home, and J. Boyd had gone through a great deal of trouble to make sure she had hospital care for her final days. But one day, the community hospital where Ruth was being taken care of told J. Boyd that she would have to be moved. They’d lose their Medicare accreditation if they kept taking care of a terminal patient. He reluctantly drove her to the nicest nursing home he could find. It was in Wellesley. He checked her in and then briefly went back to the hospital to get her sweater and other belongings. By the time he returned, she was dead.

  For Boyd R. Britton from JBB

  BOYD CALLED ME THE MORNING of our second scheduled meeting. I thought he was going to cancel, and my heart dropped. But it was just to say that he couldn’t find his mother’s journal.

  I arrived at the café first, and from my table, a few minutes later, I saw Boyd struggling up the sidewalk. He was trying to balance a giant file box, a bursting manila envelope, and a picture frame. I rushed over to him. “I’ve got some goodies,” he said, mischievously, knowing he had dramatically undersold the treasure he was about to show me.

  We sat down, and I noted the manila folder said in big black Sharpie: “Jane Britton Murder Files. Other Family Papers.” He filled the table with the contents of the file box, which was torn and retaped at the seams; “For Boyd R. Britton From JBB,” it read on the spine––J. Boyd Britton. His parents had compiled this archive of Jane: her Radcliffe commencement program, the picture books she used to draw, all the letters she wrote back home from her digs. Childhood photos. Her funeral book.

  I tried multiple ways of asking if it was hard for him to look at this stuff. He deflected by addressing his writing we found in the file. “Some of the things I’d forgotten I’d done.”

  I took pictures of everything as he pulled them out of the file, not wanting to lose these artifacts that only minutes before I thought had long since been erased. He looked at me funny. “I’m turning the box over to you,” Boyd said. I didn’t know if I understood him correctly. “There’s no time like the present, and there’s no time at the present to see all this.” He told me to make a copy and give it back to him one day. The only thing he asked was for me to replace the ratty box that the files had lived in for the last fifty years.

  I wanted to cry at the generosity of his gesture. Nothing could have meant more in that moment. He even opened the picture frame to give me a picture that Jim Humphries had taken of Jane in Iran so I could make a proper scan.

  We walked to the parking lot after lunch, and I thanked him for trusting me with Jane’s story and her letters. “Well, you have impressed people that you’re trustworthy. Mitchell especially. Elisabeth said words to the effect: ‘She’s charming, so I hope she’s trustworthy.’ Well, not quite those words. Her implication was that she enjoyed talking with you. As have I.”

  He emptied a large garbage bag that had been sitting in the back of his car and handed it to me to keep the file box safe, a rare hint of sentimentality. I thanked him again. “That’s okay. I’m not exactly busy first of all. And second of all, this means a lot.”

  Jane Britton Family Files

  I UNDID THE CRUMBLING RUBBER bands holding together the bundles of Jane’s letters as soon as I got back to New York. Many of them were written in ink, double-sided on onionskin. It would take me ages to decipher, but there she was. More of her than I ever dreamed still existed.

  She was bold, witty, warm. “Can’t say I mind contemplating getting married. But then I also don’t mind contemplating the pizza I’m going to have when I get home,” she wrote to her parents from Movius’s excavation. There was so much of her, it overflowed to the back of the envelopes: she’d draw herself as a guinea pig holding the French flag, or she’d complain about licking the letter closed. “Pew! Peppermint-flavored envelopes.” Other times, she’d scrawl: “Greetings to the postman from Gay, Exotic Les Eyzies.”

  There it all was. Jane, the summer after her sophomore year at college, congratulating her father on getting the job at Radcliffe. Report cards dating back to junior high school. A cartoon of Karl Heider, Elisabeth’s section leader, as a bird whose main attribute was “deceptive mating habits.”

  Jane’s caption reads: “The Greater Fuzzy-Thinking Heider. Deceptive + not very benevolent. Peculiar mating habits. Call: uh, uh, well, uh.”

  There was her parents’ collection of files on Jane’s murder: The UPI and the New York tabloid articles that I had come to know so well. The telegram that Boyd’s parents had sent him in Vietnam. His orders for emergency leave. The Needham Times funeral announcement. The signatures of the attendees at her funeral. Karl. Martie. Stephen and Eunice Williams. Jim Humphries. The Mitchells.

  There were also the things I didn’t know to expect, like the package of Tepe Yahya articles that Karl had sent to Jane’s father just before Christmas 1979. And his cover letter that read: “Jane would have been pleased to see the importance of the work emerge; the more so as she would have become a major contributor to its success.” There were no hints as to how that exchange came to be. “If there is more I can do please call upon me. Warmest regards in this Christmas season,” Karl ended his letter. He had underlined her name in one of the articles he sent over.

  I saved Jane’s letters for last. I wanted to study them in preparation for the meeting that Karl had promised me when I got back east.

  I typed her letters as I read them. I loved the feeling of her words coming through my fingers. The letters had doubled as her diary entries—she told her parents to save them for her for that reason—and whatever her relationship to her parents may have been, she poured herself onto those pages. Perhaps the hunger for human contact on the digs had grown stronger than her worry about what she was revealing. It took me almost a week to type them all up, and it induced a somewhat hallucinatory state. I laughed out loud at her fifty-year-old jokes. I started writing my own emails like her. It felt a lot like love—a confusing mix of admiring her, devouring her, inhabiting her, emulating her, channeling her, and thinking I was her.

  Dearest Muddah, Dahlink Faddah, here I am at—Verroia animal farm and how the Hell do I stop people calling me “Fangface”?

  I wouldn’t want to do anything if I wasn’t going to do it very close to superbly.

  Did I ever tell you after that amazing dinner Jim carried me across Russell Square…

  Had a letter from Bwad (pre-Cal) who was going stir-crazy + helping me plot revenge on Franquemont (*which whole story may no one ever know, InshAllah) and I guess he has us both pegged, having said, “We may not be famous for running our lives very well, but nobody is gonna F___ WITH THE BRITTONS (wurf-wurf!)” The way I figure it, some people are natural predators + others are natural victims + we fall somewhere in between, not having the guts to be the first nor the humility of the second.

  And then, in the middle of one of her 1965 letters, there was a reference to Jerry Roth, that mystery person whose untraceability had planted the seed for me that Jane might be an unreliable narrator. “In case my last letter missed you,” Jane wrote to her parents, “Jerry Roth is a geology major from Maine, son of Henry Roth who wrote ‘Call it Sleep.’”

  The son of Henry Roth, not Philip Roth
as Elisabeth and Boyd had remembered. Jane hadn’t been lying after all. It was just another detail lost in a game of telephone.

  The feelings hit me in waves. At first, I was relieved that even if I could never know everything about her, some of her mysteries might have ends. I wrote to Boyd and Elisabeth. I knew they wondered, like I did, that if Jane had been lying about this, then what else wasn’t true? This fact put a stop to that erosion for me, and I hoped it might offer them the same peace.

  But then relief turned into tremendous guilt. I had doubted Jane. We had all doubted Jane. We were quicker to blame her than to open ourselves up to the faultiness of our memory, and I realized that this wasn’t the only way that we had shifted the blame onto her. Even in the stories we told about what happened to her that night, in so many of the versions, Jane was the one at fault. She had an affair with Karl. She blackmailed someone. She angered someone.

  Perhaps Jane’s story was a morality tale in more ways than I had realized. Not only did it serve as a narrative check on someone with power, like Karl, who was seen as transgressing, it was also a way of cautioning against promiscuous, assertive behavior from someone in Jane’s position: a female graduate student. Assigning guilt to the victim helped distance us from what happened to her; it wouldn’t happen to us, as long as we stayed in check. But in so doing, we had unconsciously been perpetuating a story whose moral derived from the very patriarchal system we thought we were surmounting by telling the story in the first place.