The Body Of Jonah Boyd - By David Leavitt Page 0,2

all around the front door—gorgeous, except that the birds couldn’t tell that it was glass. I’d be practicing Mozart on the piano, when suddenly there’d be this thwacking noise, and a bird body would drop to the ground. Dead. Horrible.

“After we built that house, I hoped we’d stay there the rest of our lives. And why not? You took settlement more for granted in those days. But then Ernest got the offer from Wellspring, and it was that proverbial ‘offer you can’t refuse.’ He asked me if I minded. He said that if I minded, of course he’d turn down the offer. I said that I minded, and he called to accept.

“We put the house in Bradford on the market. The kids were miserable. They didn’t want to leave their friends. And then at the end of the summer, we made what my best pal Anne Armstrong liked to call ‘the great migration’—as if we were crossing the prairie in a covered wagon! In fact, Ernest went first—he drove—and then a couple of weeks later, I flew out with the kids. He didn’t ask my opinion about the house on Florizona Avenue. He just called me up one day and announced that he’d bought it. Case closed. Never even bothered to send me a photograph.

“I remember that when we arrived at the airport, he had a new car waiting for us, a Ford Falcon station wagon with a red interior, which I guess was supposed to make the kids feel better. Even though we were booked to stay at a motel for a couple of nights, I made him drive us straight to the new house. Today it may be hard for you to envision, because of course we’ve done so much redecorating since then, and put in the pool, and landscaped, but the first time I saw it, the house was a total wreck. The window frames were rotting. There were birds’ nests between the screens and the windows, and all the gutters were clogged with pine needles.

“We didn’t go in through the front door. We went up the back staircase—there was a hole in one of the treads—and then Ernest put the key in the door, which wouldn’t budge because the lock was rusty. So we all just stood there in the cold, until finally he got it open and let us inside. ‘Ta-da,’ he said, and I just stared. The kitchen floor was this hideous linoleum, printed to look like terrazzo. There was no refrigerator, just a gaping hole where a refrigerator ought to be. The cabinets were made of this awful old rusty metal, painted red. You see, before he’d signed the papers, Ernest had let the contractor convince him that all the renovation work, or at least most of it, could be finished by the time we arrived. You know how contractors are, they’ll say anything to get a job—and you know how gullible Ernest can be! As if that much work could be done in such a short time! Visionary, but no common sense. And so we stood there in the middle of the wreckage, the kids flying around like moths, and Ernest says, ‘o what do you think?’ And when I don’t answer, he says, ‘It’ll be gorgeous once it’ finished.’ And that’ when I sit down on my suitcase and start to cry.

“Whenever I tell people this story, I know they think I’m exaggerating, because—well, the house turned out to be so wonderful, didn’t it, and now we’ve had so many Thanksgiving dinners here, and beginning-of-semester cocktail parties, and pool parties? I think back to the house in Bradford, and it’ hard to imagine I ever assumed we’d always live there. You know, I really believe that for some of us, there is a house that is a kind of destiny, a place that, once you arrive there, you say, ‘Yes, this is where I belong,’ and you stay. That’ what this house is for me. And yet I was forty-four years old before I even saw it. I’d lived in six houses already, including my parents’ house. All of which just goes to prove that you should never try to second-guess the future.”

Perhaps at this point both the house and Nancy ought to be described. The house dated from the early 1920s and had begun life as a country cottage, back in the days when this part of California was still country. At first it had consisted of a simple shingled