The Body of Jonah Boyd

by David Leavitt

  Some years later, Ernest told me that in his professional opinion Ben was doomed from the start, because insofar as Nancy was concerned, he could never hope to live up to his brother. And it is true that from the July day Mark drove off to Canada, his handsome face, by virtue of its enforced removal, suddenly seemed to be everywhere in that house. From the kitchen countertop next to the television, and Nancy’ bedside table, and the mantel in the dining room, versions of Mark smiled out at us, a constant reminder that he was not where he should have been. Mark had always been an easier child than either of his siblings: wholesomely athletic, even-tempered, a favorite of all his teachers. At Wellspring he had majored in political science, and would have graduated cum laude had the disaster of the draft lottery not interrupted his otherwise effortless ascent. But it had, and now he was living in the most tenuous of exiles, a fugitive who would be jailed if he even dared to come back to his mother’ house for Thanksgiving. As if to craft for himself an identity more in keeping with his new outlaw status, he grew his hair long; sent back snapshots of himself, scrawny and bearded, that made Nancy weep with pride. “He looks almost holy,” she’d tell me. “Like Saint Francis, or Saint Blaise.” For Nancy, draft dodging amounted to a kind of martyrdom.

  Today, when the saga of the draft dodgers is talked about at all, it is usually as a sort of sidebar to the greater drama that was Vietnam itself. In 1969, though, the fate of these young men troubled the American conscience at least as much as that of the soldiers who were starting to return from the war maimed or dead or with pregnant Vietnamese wives in tow. And nowhere was this more the case than on Florizona Avenue: After all, of the twenty-four houses on that street, three had sent sons to Canada, whereas none had sent sons to Vietnam. Their affluence protected Nancy and her neighbors, allowing them the luxury of worrying about children who were safe and well-fed in row houses in Vancouver or Toronto instead of bleeding on the fields of battle. At least this was how I saw it. I never dared voice this opinion to Nancy, who would have considered it treasonous, and thrown me out of the house.

  Ernest, by contrast, understood, and to some degree shared, my skepticism. Although he distrusted Richard Nixon, and loathed Kissinger, he had also inherited from his immigrant father a patriotic belief in America as a land of possibility whose principles it was a citizen’ duty to defend, and therefore he could do no more than tolerate Mark’ flight to Canada. At heart he was a deeply conformist man, his Freudianism of an old-fashioned and narrow variety that inclined him to regard all types of atypical behavior as pathologies for which it was the physician’ duty to seek a therapy. And what was more nonconformist than a son who had not only broken with his country but broken the law? Or a wife who stormed out of dinner parties whenever the host happened to say something with which she was in political disagreement? For in the wake of Mark’ departure, Nancy had taken up the mantle of his radicalism, and now, rather than hosting faculty wives teas, she organized petition drives for a variety of antiwar groups. Ernest would come home to find mobs of hippies parked in the living room, eating brownies and discussing protest strategies. Her outspokenness offended both his natural tactfulness and his abhorrence of what he called “scenes"—and now she was making them all the time. For instance, one afternoon at the faculty club, Bess Dalrymple, the elderly and soft-spoken wife of the retiring history chair, made the mistake of blithely quoting her husband’ opinion that the draft dodgers “were no better than deserters and deserved to be shot.” Nancy, eavesdropping at the next table, leapt up and let the poor thing “have it with both barrels,” as she put it—barraging Mrs. Dalrymple with rhetoric until the foggy old creature burst into weeping and had to take refuge in the ladies’ room. For Ernest this was the last straw, and not only because from that day on Jim Dalrymple—chivalrous to the last—stopped speaking to him; also because the episode confirmed that Nancy was no longer in any way under his control. “Let her send Mark money,” he told me later. “Let her write letters to congressmen, letters to senators. But for God’ sake, let her shut up.”

  In retrospect, I often wonder what it must have been like for Ben, those months after his brother’ departure, watching his parents’ marriage degenerate into a rancorous silence. At least Daphne had her burgeoning love affair with Glenn to retreat into; Ernest had me; Nancy had her various subcommittees and commissions and meetings. But Ben, in a way that at the time, I think, none of us understood or acknowledged, was alone. He had no friends to speak of, most of his coevals on Florizona Avenue having long since dismissed him as a loser or freak. I myself avoided, as much as possible, meeting his eye. That testy encounter at the hairdresser’ had set the tone for our acquaintanceship, which would for years after be marked by unease on my part and on his by a remoteness bordering on hostility. Perhaps he never forgot the clinch in which he had caught his father and me that first Thanksgiving. Perhaps he simply didn’t like me. Nor can I pretend, at this stage, that I much liked him.

  As I saw it, Ben at fifteen had only one salient characteristic, and that was brattiness. It never occurred to me to wonder what might lie behind his more bizarre behavior (for example, his food phobias), for I was young myself then, and heedless of any suffering I could not exploit. Instead I wrote him off as simply a source of interruption. It seemed that he lived to pester, to complain to his mother about her cooking, or interrupt our four-hand to demand that she listen to one of his poems. He was always writing poems. He never did his homework, and his grades suffered accordingly. And Nancy, I am sorry to say, rather than informing him in crisp tones that there was a moment to read poetry and that this was not it, usually buckled under to his insistence, stopping whatever she was doing to listen to him and then responding to his recitations with that brand of offhand, reckless praise that in most cases speaks more to a parent’ desire to get a kid off her back than to any genuine enthusiasm or belief in his talent. She had learned the hard way that offering criticism was a mistake, since with Ben even the mildest complaint invariably provoked a wail of frustration, an enraged “You just don’t understand!” after which he would run off to his room, slamming the door behind him. Much easier to provide the balm of immoderate laudation. Still, I sometimes wondered if she went too far. For instance: “Mark my words,” she told him once, “you’ll be the youngest person to win the Nobel prize for poetry.” A fateful exhortation, as it turned out, for he did mark her words—he forgot nothing—and later, when the youthful success she had forecast failed to materialize, he blamed her.

  As a poet, Ben was both ambitious and lazy. He never revised, appeared oblivious to basic principles of spelling and grammar, took little care to type up clean copies or to follow the rules of poetic form. Thus his sonnets never scanned, while his villanelles were approximate at best. Generally speaking I thought his poems tendentious and humorless, though I never told Nancy this. Even so, starting when he was about twelve (and with her blessing) he began sending them out by the dozen, and not only to contests and publications specifically aimed at teenagers; also to such august publications as Poetry and The New Yorker, which invariably returned them with form rejection slips paper-clipped to each bundle. Then Nancy would rail at what she called the editors’ “lack of vision.” “It’ a matter of who you know,” she’d tell Ben, “an inside job"— evading the tricky question of why, if it was an inside job, she had encouraged him to send the poems out in the first place.

  It was Ernest’ contention (which he shared only with me) that Ben suffered from an underdeveloped sense of reality. In Ernest’ view, Ben’ problem was that he lived half in a world of dreams, the borders of which he could not clearly delineate; much of his bad temper and frustration, his father felt, owed to the refusal of the “real world” (whatever that was) to conform to his wishes. A reasonable diagnosis, I thought at the time—and yet today I cannot help but wonder whether in this regard Ben differed all that much from most other writers. Everything that Ernest said of him, for example, he could just as easily have said of Jo
nah Boyd. Also, I think it would be a mistake to understate the degree to which Nancy encouraged Ben in his delusions, if for no other reason than because they lent ballast to her own: that she had been a perfect mother, and that her children, thanks to everything she had done for them, would go far. So she abandoned him. This is awful but true. The only person who might have gotten through to Ben at this time was Mark, and Mark was long gone, though Ben spoke eagerly of the Easter break when Nancy had promised that he could fly to Vancouver for a visit. (Mark didn’t want his parents to come.) Ben was proud to have a rebel for a brother, and put Mark’ picture above his bed, and made a FREE MARK WRIGHT button out of red and blue construction paper that he wore to school every day for a week, until one of his teachers infuriated him by pointing out the illogic of the message, given that Mark had gone to Canada of his own free will.

  It was around this time that the so-called nosebleed incident occurred. One morning Nancy rose later than usual, went into Ben’ room to make his bed, and found the sheets and walls spattered with blood. In a panic she threw a coat over her nightgown and rushed over to the high school, where she tracked Ben down in his gym class, one of two dozen boys waiting to throw a basketball at a hoop. And there she pounced on him, at once relieved that he was alive and furious that he had given her such a scare. It turned out that during the night he had had a nosebleed (he was prone to them), woken, sneezed blood all over the wall and bedclothes, and fallen back asleep. Then in the morning he had dressed in the dark and left without even realizing what had happened. And now here was his mother, a harridan in pink slippers and a raincoat, a scarf tied over her hair, hurling herself at him in front of a group of boys who would never forget what they had witnessed, or let him forget it.

  Years later, when he was famous and people cared about his life, he described the incident. In a memoir titled The Eucalyptus, he wrote: “My mother’ intrusive arrival at the school that morning merely confirmed what I already suspected: that she was a meddler and an hysteric. At the same time, it opened my eyes to a certain ferocity in her character of which I had so far only caught glimpses. Later she told me that it was my brother as much as me of whom she was thinking, when she switched on the light in my bedroom and saw all that blood: Mark, his body bullet-riddled, or dismembered, in some remote theater of war. And so, as she put on her coat that morning, she made a vow to God that if I were to be spared, she would devote the rest of her life to the protection of her children. And I was spared. And yet it was a fatal pact, because by making it, she was effectively telling us that our safety mattered more to her than our loving her, or feeling that she loved us; that she would rather have us safe at a great remove than at danger near her.

  “I now see that the reason I myself decided never to have children is because I knew I could never be as selfless as my mother.”

  Five

  IT WAS A Saturday morning near the end of October 1969.1 was sitting next to Nancy at the piano when the telephone rang. As was her habit, she jumped up to answer it, in case it was Mark, calling collect from Vancouver. But it was not Mark. It was Anne Boyd. I could tell, because after the initial “Hello,” Nancy’ voice rose into a girlish squeal that meant pleasure greater than anything I could induce. “Annie, Annie!” she cried—and pulled the phone, which had a long cord, into the study.

  I got up from the piano. The realization that for the moment, at least, my services would not be needed filled me with a giddy sense of freedom, as if school had been canceled for the day. So I puttered around the living room, flicking dust off the nesting tables and repositioning the cushion that covered Dora’ pee stain on the leather chair, all the while listening in on Nancy’ half of the conversation. “Oh, but that’ wonderful! What do you mean? Don’t be ridiculous, of course you can stay with us. Now, Anne, I don’t want to hear another word about it. You’ll stay here and that’ final. No, I don’t even want to hear the word ‘hotel’. . . Good. When will you get in? We’ll pick you up at the airport. Okay, if you’d rather . . . But how will you know how to find the house? I’m hopeless with directions, you’d better have Clifford—I mean Jonah—call back when Ernest’ here. Oh, Annie, I’m sorry about that. Will you ever forgive me? I’m just so used to your husband being Clifford! Tell Jonah I’m dying to meet him. We all are. Annie, I can’t wait to see you, it’ been so long . . . Yes, have him call tonight. Ernest should be back by seven. Right. We’ll be waiting. Bye.”

  She hung up. “Denny, you’ll never believe it,” she said, sweeping back into the living room. “That was Anne Armstrong. I mean, Anne Boyd. I haven’t head from her in a year. And now guess what? She and her husband—her new husband—are coming for Thanksgiving.”

  “Really? How wonderful.”

  “Yes, isn’t it?” Nancy’ hands flew to her face. “Oh, but there’ so much to do! I mean, this man she’ married—this Jonah Boyd—he’ a published writer. We’ve got to put him up in the style to which he’ accustomed.”

  I was tempted to ask why she thought that published writers would be accustomed to any particular kind of style, then thought better of it, and followed her into Daphne’ room. It was the first time I’d ever been in there. With a queenly gesture, Nancy flung open the curtains, letting through a slant of late morning light that exposed the moss green carpeting, a double bed with a rumpled floral coverlet. Along one wall were bracketed bookshelves on one of which Ayn Rand’ Atlas Shrugged elbowed an assortment of high school textbooks. On another was Daphne’ collection of frog figurines. Two posters—a psychedelic peace sign and the cover of Bob Dylan’ Blonde on Blonde album—had been thumbtacked to the wall. Below them lay a heap of stuffed animals and dirty clothes. “Oh, well, I suppose it will have to do,” Nancy said, putting her hands on her hips and surveying the wreckage. “Of course, Daph will have to clear away all of her crap.” She tossed a pink elephant onto the pile, then sat down on the bed. “Oh, but this mattress! Feel it!”

  I sat down next to her. I felt.

  “The springs are shot. And these sheets! I’ll have to buy a new bed, that’ all there is to it. And new bed linens. You know the reason they’re coming—he’ supposed to give a lecture up in San Francisco. Someone else was supposed to give it, some very famous poet, but the poet went into a drunk tank, and they asked the husband—Jonah Boyd—to take his place. Now why do you think she wants to visit? Does she miss me? I hope nothing’ wrong. They’ll fly into LAX Thanksgiving morning, drive over, stay two nights, and then on Saturday head up north, stopping for a few days at Big Sur on the way. And the best part is, Anne and I will have plenty of time to play. Finally we can take another crack at the Grand Duo.”

  I pretended both surprise and pleasure. It was obvious that Nancy needed a sounding board for her fretfulness and planning impulses; also an assistant in what was clearly going to be a redecoration project of considerable scope. And so that very afternoon, along with Daphne—whose outrage at being thrown out of her room Nancy had managed to quell, somewhat, by promising to let her to pick out the sheets—I was taken to Macy’, first to the furniture department, where Nancy arranged for immediate delivery of a new Serta Perfect Sleeper, and then to the whites department, where Daphne, after much debate, settled on a set of “Vera” sheets decorated with bright orange sunsets and blue rainbows in the style of Peter Max. Here the trouble began. Nancy didn’t like the sheets. She worried that Boyd—a novelist, after all—would mock them in one of his books, follow a description of their psychedelic gaudiness with some insulting witticism, something like, “I had to wear sunglasses to bed.” For Nancy, in addition to biographies of crowned heads, was an avid consumer of novels in which adulterous men and women parried rude remarks over martinis, and though she had not yet read any of Jonah Boyd’ novels, she took it for granted that they would fit into this category. “Really, honey, couldn’t we get something more subdued?” she asked Daphne, who had inherited her mother’ stubbornness, if not her taste.

  “But you said I could choose!” Dap
hne said. “You promised. After all, these people are only going to sleep on them two nights. But I have to sleep on them practically the rest of my life!”

  In the end, to avoid a public scene, Nancy gave in on the sheets. Bags in tow, we hastened back to Florizona Avenue, where we found Ernest and Glenn in the study, smoking cigars and listening to Mahler’ Fifth Symphony on the HarmonKardon stereo. Glenn and Daphne greeted each other with the studied casualness of people who don’t want anyone to guess they’ve recently been in bed together; I could tell, because that was just how Ernest and I greeted each other.

  As no dinner invitation appeared to be in the offing, I said my good-byes and went home. Back then I still lived in a one-bedroom apartment on Orechusetts Drive. My complex—essentially a stucco rectangle with views of the 420 freeway—was called Eaton Manor. Nearby were Cavendish Hall, Hampton Estates, and Chatsworth Court. Most of my neighbors were fellow secretaries, some of whom were also having affairs with their bosses. On Sunday afternoons, Ford LTDs and Oldsmobile Cutlasses filled the parking lot, taking up the empty spaces between the Chevy Novas and Dodge Darts. At this point, my relationship with Ernest had not yet settled into the durable bond that would later prove so sustaining for us both; it was still an off-and-on thing, fretful and fitful. Some Sunday afternoons he would arrive unannounced at my door, pinion me to the wall or push me onto the bed, where we would make rough love. Afterward I would give him tea or Coca-Cola, and we’d look at the television until dusk fell, when he’d leave with as few words as he had come, and I’d move to the window, to watch his car pull out of the parking lot and imagine what, back on Florizona Avenue, Nancy was up to: feeding the cat, or baking a ham, or knitting. I admit that at those moments I envied Ernest, with Dame Carcas to have to hurry home to.