The Body Of Jonah Boyd - By David Leavitt Page 0,1

went to work as his secretary.

They had three children: Mark, Daphne, and Ben. In 1969, Mark was twenty and living in Vancouver. That summer, he had fled over the Canadian border to avoid the military draft. His draft number was four. Daphne was seventeen in 1969, and in the throes of her first real love affair, with Glenn Turner, who was her father’ protege. (This had to be kept secret from Ernest, who wouldn’t have approved.) In those years, she and her mother were waging a constant war the chief purpose of which, or so it seemed to me, was to allow them to collapse, at battle’ end, into a cozy mess of tears, hugs, and chocolate ice cream. To prolong the ordeal of fighting in order to intensify the pleasure of making up—this was classic Wright behavior, and worthy of just the sort of Freudian analysis that Ernest was so skilled at doling out in every context except that of his own family.

Ben was the youngest—fifteen in 1969. He wrote poetry, and was a picky eater. At Thanksgiving dinners, if any one of the foods on his plate touched any other—if the peas touched the turkey or the gravy got onto the marshmallow-crusted sweet potato casserole—he would refuse to eat altogether. His eating habits were a source of great distress for Nancy, who seemed incapable of getting her son’ meals arranged properly, and eventually had to buy him a special plate divided into sections to keep him from starving himself.

My friendship with Nancy was in certain crucial ways remote from my relationship with her husband. Having heard that I could play the piano, she had asked me to be her four-hand partner. And though, as a four-hand partner, I didn’t prove to be very good—I was inclined to play wrong notes or fall out of step with her scrupulous metronome—still, she kept at it with me, and kept inviting me to Thanksgiving dinners, in part, I think, because I could be counted on to make gravy without lumps, as my mother had taught me, and to take on the more onerous of the cooking chores, the ones Daphne disdained, such as chopping the carrots. Our friendship, which lasted almost fifteen years, was fractious and sometimes maudlin. Nancy resented me for not playing the piano as well as Anne Armstrong, her four-hand partner and best friend from Bradford; I resented Nancy for treating me as an unpaid servant, inviting me to the parties and faculty wives teas that she sometimes hosted and then expecting me to wash the dishes or pour the coffee. And yet I also adored her, and craved the maternal solicitude she dispensed, as I had lost my own mother when I was fourteen. And she, if nothing else, seemed to feel that she could talk to me as she could to few others, that I would listen to her complaints and worries without judging her or ignoring her, as Ernest was wont to do. Friendships between women are often like that, made up of blame and neediness in equal portions.

Nineteen sixty-nine was the third Thanksgiving that I spent with the Wrights—an exceptional Thanksgiving, in that Mark, for the first time, was absent (Nancy wept about it), while two honored guests were to be in attendance: the novelist Jonah Boyd and his new wife, the former Anne Armstrong, Nancy’ erstwhile four-hand partner and best friend from Bradford.

It was difficult to imagine Nancy Wright away from her house. It seemed to be a part of her, her very soul bound up with its beams and plaster. Yet the first time she walked into the kitchen, she sat down on her suitcase and wept.

This was a famous story, one she told many times. “Well, you know that before we came to Wellspring, we lived in Bradford,” she’d begin. “We’d already been there a dozen years, Ernest had tenure, Mark and Daphne were in school with kids they’d known their whole lives. Also, we’d just moved into our dream house—I mean that literally, because I saw the house in a dream. I woke up and drew it before the image faded, and gave the drawing to the architect, and that was the house he built, more or less. It was three stories, but you entered on the middle story. One staircase went down, to the family room and the kids’ bedrooms. The other went up, to our bedroom and Ernest’ study. We had a fountain in the front and glass