The Body Of Jonah Boyd - By David Leavitt Page 0,3

rectangle, a dash, but then each successive owner had added a wing, so that over the course of decades, the dash became a sideways T, then a lowercase h, then a capital H—the shape it bore when Ernest Wright bought it.

It had some wonderful, odd features. Just to the left stood an old-fashioned garage, a separate building with a weather vane and its own attic, which Ernest later made over into the office where he saw his patients. In the backyard, near the pool, there was a sloped, grass-lined depression where an earlier pool had been dug in the twenties and then abandoned, victim of the stock market crash. Later, an intermediate owner had tried to make a virtue of this strange declivity by building a turreted barbecue pit at the deep end, and lining the sides with brick benches. Because the chimney smoked, no one used it—yet what a wonderful place it was to run, and turn somersaults, and imagine yourself the protector of a medieval keep in the midst of battle! Dame Carcas throwing the pig over the wall of Carcassone . . . I never played such games, only fantasized about having played them, when I pretended that I had grown up in that house.

What else? The house was shingled, and during most of the years I knew it, painted red. It was one story, but because the lot sloped down, its rear end rose up over the garden. Although the brick path from Florizona Avenue descended to a veranda and a rather grand front door inlaid with stained glass, no one in the family ever entered that way. That door was used only by party guests and delivery men; the Wrights themselves went in through the back, by means of that rickety wooden staircase that led from the garage to the kitchen, which was big, with a Saarinen tulip table, a faux-brick vinyl floor (to replace the old linoleum), and oak cabinets painted robin’ egg blue. The kitchen was really the hub of that house. It was here that the Wrights ate their weekday dinners, and that the children did their homework, and that Nancy fumed and fretted as she polished the copper bottoms of her Revere-ware. In that kitchen, on a little television next to the sink, we watched the kidnapping of Patty Hearst and the impeachment of Nixon, Nancy swearing like a sailor each time Henry Kissinger’ face appeared and turning down the volume because, she said, that man was the devil incarnate, and she could not bear even the sound of his voice.

The kitchen opened up onto the dining room, which was rectangular, with shag carpeting in three shades of gold, and a chair rail of white beadboard that rose to about four and a half feet above the floor and ran the length of the walls. This chair rail supported a shelf that over the fireplace widened into a mantel and then narrowed again as it continued its journey around the room. Nancy used it to display mementos and knickknacks, everything from a taxidermied piranha to a clay impression of Mark’ hand from when he was in kindergarten. On the first day of December, though, all of this decorative rubbish would be cleared away to make room for the onslaught of Christmas cards that the Wrights received annually, as many from psychoanalytic institutes, colleagues, and former patients of Ernest’ as from relatives and friends. In those volatile years, it was fashionable to write a Christmas letter or verse and have it printed on the card along with a photograph of the sender’ family, and sometimes these works had an unintended edge of heartbreak:

Jane and Allen’s twelfth anniversary

Was celebrated with divorce.

The party, though, was only cursory,

The marriage having run its course.

To the right of the fireplace, a curved archway led into the living room, the least used room in the house, with its Danish modern leather chairs, one of which the cat, Dora, had peed on the day it had been delivered; the stain was still there a dozen years later. Here, too, was the piano, a matte black 1920 Knabe with beautifully fluted legs. Nancy had bought it “for a song” (her joke) at an estate sale. And then—the bar connecting the two parts of the H—there was the front hall, with the stained-glass door that nobody used, and off of that a sort of family room that had been Ernest’ study before he’d moved into the attic above the garage, but